Scratching Mother Earth's Fleas Jason Nemec

Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2005 Scratching Mother Earth's Fleas Jason Nemec

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

SCRATCHING MOTHER EARTH’S FLEAS

JASON NEMEC

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Jason Nemec defended on April 11, 2005.

______David Kirby Professor Directing Thesis

______Barbara Hamby Committee Member

______James Kimbrell Committee Member

Approved:

______Hunt Hawkins Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the many readers of my work, primarily the poets David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, and Jimmy Kimbrell for their patience and diligence with me during the composition and revision of this thesis. Never before have I been given such insight and guidance when working on that which I love. I would also like to thank my parents for listening to me summarize entire Hardy Boys books on car trips to Florida when I was a little kid.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... v

1. Every Drunk Has a Passport ...... 1 2. I Will Be Famous ...... 3 3. Phone Sex Confession ...... 4 4. Vision of Pain Storming In Like an Ass-Kicked Cowboy ...... 5 5. Discordant Epithalamion in Reverse ...... 6 6. What It Is to Laugh ...... 8 7. Some Kids ...... 10 8. How It Should Be With Sunflower Seeds ...... 11 9. Letter to Jimmy, Written After Learning That He’s a Republican ...... 12 10. Basement, 48 Pinehurst ...... 15 11. The Kid Who Makes Mazes ...... 17 12. Through the Sugarcane Smoke ...... 19 13. What Part of “Thou Shall Not” Don’t You Understand? ...... 20 14. Instructions for Closing the Door on a Life or Lives ...... 23 15. The Lifesong of Gabriel A...... 25 16. Brady Lake, August ...... 26 17. I Wish I Could Smoke More Marijuana ...... 27 18. Two Stewardess’s Tales: Airplane vs. Groundhog, Airplane vs. Deer ...... 28 19. Balsa Wood Smile ...... 29 20. Behind the Fear of Flying ...... 31 21. Response to Dr. Williams ...... 32 22. Twelve Lines About the Love in Our Sex ...... 33 23. Grocery Store Pilgrimage in Snow-Laden Cambridge, Massachusetts ...... 34 24. Mars ...... 36 25. Niagara Falls Survivor to a Fellow Barfly ...... 38 26. Three Running Routes ...... 42 27. Cocaine Offering #2 ...... 45 28. The Poet, the Pope, and the Dishwasher ...... 47 29. Rhythm of the Loiterer ...... 50

Biographical Sketch ...... 53

iv ABSTRACT

The following is a collection of poems written between 2003 and 2005. Many of the longer poems leap from place to place and image to image very quickly, much like the mind itself. Oftentimes a casual, conversational voice is utilized to narrate this motion. Other poems are more compressed, both in length and in language. Ideally, regardless of shape, size, and color, all of the work here is meant to connect author to reader via a shared love of words and the lives we make with them.

v Every Drunk Has a Passport

Here they come, stumbling down the sidewalk two by two, masses of hammered college kids puked out of the bars on the Tennessee Street strip after last call. And it’s not the sight of them that gets to me as I stand in my boxer shorts watching their bumbling migration from the balcony of my apartment; it’s the sound as I’m itching to sleep off the iron-legged stress of a hard-fought double at the restaurant, the fuck yous yelled at the top of smoked-through lungs, the punches itching to be thrown, revving up in the glamour boys’ well-exercised beer muscles, the shrill come-ons screaming from deep in the exposed chests of scores of girls who received their breasts as high school graduation presents, Whoo! and Yeah-uh! cutting through the night air overtop the off-tempo rhythm of high heels on asphalt. If I had to pick a mascot from the entire mad cacophony to represent this species born unto me at 2 A.M. and set to die off by 2:30 every Thursday through Saturday, it would have to be this beanpole of a kid scarecrowed between his two buddies, his spiky, standard-issue-fraternity-brother hair pointing straight ahead, his feet fumbling out of order, but his mouth still working just fine – he’s shouting I’m drunk! over and over as though the entire planet not only cared, but also failed to hear him those first twelve times. I wince, not just because of how obnoxious I’m Drunk is being, but because his un-tucked, pale blue oxford is just like one of my favorite shirts from back when I was in college, and I realize that I’ve been I’m Drunk, I’ve been the guy who’s so plowed he needs to be carried out of the bar. My 21st birthday saw me, in that shirt, beneath the high ceiling of Panini’s in Coventry Village, or rather, a version of me who actually thought that trying to ingest 21 drinks in one evening was, if not the smartest idea, just something that had to be done, so even though my heart back then had recently been wrung out like a sponge by Lindsay, who I used to refer to as Lucy in poems, I offered myself up to the ritual, I picked a bar, ordered up some songs on the jukebox – probably some crazy mix of whatever bad rap song was popular at the time and a little vintage Billy Joel – and then put back shot after crystalline shot with names I can’t

1 remember, save for a Redheaded Slut bought by Jen, who was a redhead but was not a slut, and a Buttery Nipple from Heather, who really did have buttery – no, just kidding. I think I was about two hours and thirteen drinks in when the floor gave out, the lights behind the bar fell apart, and the spins kicked in, at which point I was beyond lucky to still have my good friend, my brother-man Goo there, all 105 lbs. of him, to lean my suddenly Gumby-like 185 on, a weight he absorbed and shouldered like a pack mule, pushing me past the bouncer and down the xylophone steps to the street, every sound ringing wrong: the amused eyes of strangers tinkling against my head, car horns with their volume cranked,

Goo telling me just a little bit farther to his car, and me unable to hold on to myself, vomiting into the storefront alcove of Passport to Peru, a specialty shop where, years later, I would buy a tapestry and feel ashamed inside for shattering my kaleidoscope of liquor drinks across their threshold, trying to expel a bellyful of demons brought on by a girl who said she left me to deal with her own alcoholism, and I can’t go there anymore, not Passport to Peru, but to Lindsay’s long departure, because the going results in pages and pages of untranslatable manuscript in my head, worse than this, longer than this – this, which is just to say that the asylum silence there in my moment of greatest intoxication, while I was hunched over in that worldly store’s doorway, staring deep into the world of myself as my rough reflection winced and stared back, has whispered across the years for me to look hard at the caved-in shells of the screaming kids outside my apartment, and listen even harder to the longing that lines declarations like I’m drunk! And while it hurts to watch I’m Drunk’s friends drag him like a massive sack down the street, maybe the reason any of us – me, you, or I’m – are driven to render our extremities so useless, to float our insides with such a magnificent amount of booze in the first place, is because on any given day, our fattening hearts weigh at least 1000 pounds, and our bodies get tired of having to carry them around from minute to minute, and person to person, all by themselves.

2 I Will Be Famous

Though these days my bass guitar does not sink notes like depth charges through flesh, into rib cages cluttered against each other on seas of Marlboro smoke and feedback, beer-soaked, concrete-floored dives like South Euclid’s now-dead Rhythm Room, a bi-level venue where we were quarantined to the pit, punk-funk animals screaming into ungrounded mikes, drinking shocks when our lips jarred the woven wire mesh of those tiny clenched fists designed to make a loud thing louder, always louder, noise and thump enough to give the building an upset stomach, pop blood vessel cracks in its cinder-block walls, reverberating all the way from the sunken non-stage to the exposed pipe dressing room come storage space, where our empty guitar cases leaned with strong postures like critics against the brick, where Pearl Jam 01.20.91 was written in small, faded black lettering, then crossed through and overshadowed by our friend Alex’s sharpie-marker statement that our then-band, The Engine, was the Future of Rock, a bold-faced prediction now hanging mute on a cold brick wall, scratches from which my guitar case still holds onto, which in turn still holds onto the instrument that first lit this lifelong string of napalm inside me; so standby amps and broken-up bands aside, I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up and let that piece of wood sit in the closet, because I’ve got a prediction in a vacant building to prove right, ears and minds left to blow, lives yet to change, stereo speakers and undreamt dreams still to sneak into.

3 Phone Sex Confession

I used to think it was something I’d have to pay at least $1.95 a minute for, something reserved for the lonely Rogainer watching late night cable shows, someone with decent enough credit to just cough up a card number and charge away into the static hum of deep breathing and eager eighteen-year-old coeds.

But now it’s me on my back in bed at 2 a.m., fingering my Sam’s Club calling card, dialing your number at the proper prompt, and sinking my half of the distance dance into the receiver, words never to be repeated in the company of others, the act of digging a hole in the ground and whispering to the earth.

Vision of Pain Storming In Like an Ass-Kicked Cowboy after Dalí

This is going to happen when I’m drunk or tired: I’ll reach for my toothbrush and pick up my razor instead.

I’ll catch the mistake too late (the Mach 3 balances a slug of toothpaste better than one might think). I’ll open up just wide enough to break the blade on my teeth. I’ll drag a crow foot incision across my instrument for kissing. I’ll snag that same lip in the coolly minted scales of the razor and pull a piece of flesh away from my face taut like a violin string before snapping it back. The sick part of me will want to laugh at the madness of this fumble, but upon seeing my bloody smile in the mirror, my freshly oxidized red sap sliding down pale yellow tartar, I’ll realize that it’s really not so funny after all, and I’ll reach for a hand towel to shove in my mouth. But the hand towel will be somewhat ironic for the first time in its obedient life, and will smell and taste vaguely of shaving cream, since I dry my face with it on those occasions when I use my razor for its intended purpose.

Wanting nothing to do with shaving of any sort by this point, I’ll pitch the towel, put some pants on, and walk downtown, my mouth’s tantrum of bleeding showing no signs of stopping, because people need to see this kind of thing; it cuts down on self-absorption, even if only for a second.

5 Discordant Epithalamion in Reverse To my ex-sister-in-law

Let’s get right down to this, Deanne; when I saw you last winter at Marhofer Chevrolet, what I really wanted to say was what the fuck were you thinking, falling out of love with my brother, what, after making him love you, after having that beautiful child of yours, after about a million things forced to evaporate on my tooth-marked tongue since I was on the clock, supervising a group of high functioning, mentally handicapped workers at the service shop’s car wash, and it was my job to drive your S.U.V. up the hill and into the garage where, though I wasn’t required to assist my diligent crew as they hosed and shined your Buick Rendezvous, I did.

I helped out with the high spots, watching the soap cascade into the vehicle’s seams while Barbara, her glasses sliding down her nose, told me again and again how cute I was, which I chuckled at and remembered to say thanks for each time, until my mind ditched my body and went off to your wedding day some nine years back, when Brad did something older brothers weren’t supposed to do; he cried, and in public no less. It was an unwritten rule, but there he was, damn near weeping as he repeated the vows mouthed by our massive pastor, the quiver in his voice shaking loose a few tears which ripped lines down his cheek, and though I was only sixteen, after I cussed Brad on the inside for making me cry too, I knew that was love there in front of the altar at Holy Family Church, the expansive place so quiet save for God’s soft whistle from the air conditioning vent.

Scotty brought me back to Marhofer when his stutter got stuck on his favorite topic, his girlfriend and him shooting pool; his continual tugging at the brim of his Browns cap signaled that this job was finished. Your car was clean. I’ve helped wash it, and you’ve divorced my brother. And for no apparent reason. As he said to me at Disney World, of all places, over a few late night drinks, talking as though to you, “I didn’t beat you, I didn’t sleep around on you, I was a good husband, and I loved you. What more do you want?” You tell me, Deanne. That’s what I wanted to say as I readied myself to return your car to you: you tell me what happened, because none of us

6 really know, not even the man you pledged your life to.

I used to tell my friends that I liked you better than my real sister, because unlike her, you always asked me about myself, about the girls I was pining after and the music I was playing and all that, and you pulled the same shit down there at the dealership, pounded me with so many questions about my life that I couldn’t ever swing the camera back to you and thus ended up only able to wedge in some cheap small talk about your new haircut. It happens to the best and worst of us – a variable distance creeps in between what we want to say and what we end up saying. Maybe in your case, Deanne, instead of I do, you should have said I think so. Maybe then, I wouldn’t have been there in your car, my hand twitching on the ignition, my eyes frozen on the passenger seat, on a single utility bill of yours, my last name still holding court in the address line.

7 What It Is to Laugh For Joey

Route 91 takes me back through the last days of August, home to my parents’ house, back from Joey’s newest place in Goodyear Heights,

the other side of Akron, where the trademark stench of dead rubber factories still hangs in a thin film behind the air. Earlier, giving directions, he

had said “Take Britain past all the strip clubs; you know – Dreamers, XTC…” and I said “Oh I know – I’m just not used to going past them,”

and we laughed like the dirtballs we think we are, me laughing louder than him as usual. When we were younger, around the end of high school,

Joey had told me that he wished he could laugh like I did, from deep down, “genuine,” I think he said. I can’t remember

what I said to him, I probably laughed, but that, coming from the same kid who gave me my first Playboy – a 1970s relic he probably

snatched from his dad – and consequently my first look at the female genitalia (back then, the models didn’t do a lot of trimming downstairs,

and so the locked-door viewing proved to be alluring, mysterious, and terrifying all at once), the same kid who taught me how to shave (my face, of course – there’s a great picture of me set-jaw-serious in his downstairs bathroom with shaving cream all over my mug – forehead, nose, everywhere – because Joey said that it helped get rid of acne), the same kid who made a mantra of the fact that he got his first kiss and lost his virginity all in the same year – his fourteenth – this friend of mine, a year older than me but basically a stand-in-father of sorts, showing me what

amounted to a flip-flop display of deference in his longing for my laugh, of all things; that has my head humming now with who we used to be as I listen to Joey’s newest band, Goodmorning Valentine, their recently recorded album coating the interior of my dad’s SUV, who, by the way, was a good father, but simply distant back then unless we were talking about baseball or a report card. Now the songs are all reverb, heartbreak, and hope – the holy trinity of independent music. Wanting to breathe the night air sliding off the Cuyahoga, I dial down the passenger-side window a few inches, as if I’m afraid that track two might slide off the disc and escape out into this town where we grew up, the melody of Joey’s voice sneaking into the company of moths, falling into broken orbit beneath one of the streetlights on 59 that used to watch us break curfew back on high school weekend nights, back when the easiest laugh from either one of us was enough to overpower anything.

9 Some Kids

Some kids will fuck with a caged beast until it leaps up and splits its tsunami roar on the iron bars. Then they’ll turn and run, scared of nothing within reach.

The lion at Jungle Larry’s whips out his teeth and makes a beeline for the boys, but regardless, some kids will fuck with a caged beast until it leaps

at them – Big Man, Gangster, Michael Perez – all free from the you better not! of their mothers, and small yards where they turn and run, scared of nothing within reach.

Their summer camp counselor, I suppose this will teach a small shred of humility via soiled drawers, but some kids will fuck with a caged beast until it leaps out at them like a cracked belt, a brand of bitch slap which they’re all too used to thanks to sometimes fathers, men who turn and run, scared of nothing within reach.

So I just stand back a ways and let the boys be; a loud game like this one can’t go on forever. Some kids will fuck with a caged beast until it leaps. Then they’ll turn and run, scared of nothing within reach.

10 How It Should Be With Sunflower Seeds

You swallow the seeds and the flowers grow in the soil of your guts. Just picture it – any Little Leaguer chomping and chucking and spitting in any dugout across the planet could saunter to the plate, windmill his bat, strike out looking, get soft-core-cussed by the cigar-smoking third base coach, then grab his oiled-down mitt and take the field, completely unscarred for once because of the plot of stamen supernovas exploding inside him, overtaking fears and stats and Gatorade, things he’s managed to ingest over the years, junkyard scraps that should have been smashed open and discarded like the gray salted shells; instead, it’s so often the seeds that get crushed on the crooked shelves of a boy’s back teeth, where they sit hidden like second place trophies for ages, as an inning drags on with no outs and the patch of outfield he digs at with his cleats continues to look nothing like a garden.

11 Letter to Jimmy, Written After Learning That He’s a Republican

Hey man, sorry I couldn’t say this to your face back in Ohio, but when I saw you at Greg’s place in your camo pants and W t-shirt, the latter glaring in its starched white support of our current President, a guy who seems – and I will say seems –

to have as much trouble telling the truth as he does pronouncing words like nuclear, well, that shock was a close second to seeing the “We Want Dubya” magnet tacked to your fridge at your and Joanie’s new two-bedroom house in the Falls, but there he was, laminated, monkey-faced, and smiling at my momentary silence while your wife baked cookies and you cracked a beer at high noon, smiling yourself as you offered me a cold one, which I declined since we had just gone for a run.

That was always your thing: work out, drink a beer. So I could understand that, just like I could understand the way we used to lock in together when we played in that handful of different bands back in college – you like a damn metronome on the kit, me gettin’ funky overtop on the bass – remember that dude at The Avenue in Kent, how he came up to you after a show and said that we two were so tight it was like we were sleeping together or something – what a goofball. Crazy-ass Kent people, you know? I guess what I’m saying, brother, is that I don’t get this – not you being a Republican; that’s fine, it’s your world, it’s a free country, etc. etc., but c’mon J.D. – the propaganda?

You’re advertising for a man who I personally would not want to be stuck with on a cross-country car trip; would you? – or even on a trip across town to his big-business gem Wal-Mart, where he probably buys all his Camp David dress-down duds, and call me picky, but what he does to the English language on National Television is simply unforgivable – it’s like watching Steve, the super-slacker in a high school speech class, take the mike and try to debate on a topic he knows absolutely nothing about. Hell, maybe I’m just bitter because I’m down here in Florida trying to teach mostly rich kids that it’s okay to think something other than what daddy thinks, but how can that happen when they’re driving shiny new cars

12 compliments of daddy’s stock portfolio? Why, just the other day, I’m walking past the 24-hour McDonald’s when I see a kid who can’t possibly be much older than nineteen simultaneously stuff his maw with a gut-bomb Big Mac and pull out in a jet-black Ford Explorer complete with not only a W sticker on the rear windshield but also one that says “Sportsmen for Bush,” and as I’m squinting through the tinted glass, looking for a fully-stocked gun rack,

I size up the pimpled driver with his crooked John Deere mesh cap, thinking that a lamb shank would be more fitting than the Mickey D’s he’s fisting, or even a Brontosaur burger, a la The Flintstones, but no, Fred would have been a blue-blooded, working class-to-the-bone Democrat, hence the Water Buffalo union meetings where he and Barney would steam at the ears – hey, cartoons are infused with passions too, especially when it comes to their rights, or politics – but then again, my SUV-wielding lad at the stop light might back the Pres because Lil’ John Deere’s got an older brother fighting in the war in Iraq, and since Lil’ J.D. is young enough that he wants to support big bro no matter what, then consequently he’s for the war and for its #1 puppeteer as well, but that could change, especially if his brother turns out to be Petty Officer Jeffery Braun, whose picture and blurbed story I saw today on CNN.com, which has a scroll-down death toll counter – some casualties don’t even have photos – only helmeted soldier silhouettes, but Jeffery’s nineteen-year-old face was there, grin as big as a machete, and the boy was all ears, the image staring forth from my laptop as if proud of itself for being the final record of a life cut short, dead of a “non-hostile gunshot wound” in Baghdad – just how shooting a gun at anything can be a non-hostile act is beyond me. What do you think, Jimmy? I did see the “Support Our Troops” sticker on your car; is that what’s behind this whole thing? Is it because of your buddy Paul Starr? He’s a lifelong military man, and he’s over there in Iraq too, right? He was long gone by the time I joined the toilet-cleaning crew at Holy Family,

13 but I remember you talking about him with such reverence – how he was a hard worker, a hard drinker, a big eater, just like all of us there. I met Starr a couple times when he came back to visit; built like a brick shithouse, that guy was.

I bet he was an animal during the annual bottle rocket war on the 4th, the type of guy who’d run out into the open in front of the trailers, take five or six Black Cat whistlers in the chest, and then laugh as he lit his fuse, asking for more, but I’m drifting, man; look, I hope I didn’t come on too strong with all this, like some sort of neo-hippie bleeding liberal, bringing up Starr and the war and all that. I know that, to a degree, war is the way the world works; I just don’t know if all these kids need to clock out so soon. Regardless, I hope you’re doing all right, and your wife and all the fellas as well, and as for Starr, I hope he never has to learn first hand the difference in pain between the ashy little bruise left by a cheap firework and the door to the next life ripped open by a .60 caliber slug. I hope to see both of you guys having beers at Scorcher’s one night, talking about anything other than war and politics, both of your faces radiant and loose under the hum of the bar’s neon.

14 Basement, 48 Pinehurst Rd.

Four boys spend the bulk of their high school Saturdays down in a basement wringing original music out of themselves, out of single-coil Yamahas and a $200 drum set, all their instruments black because you can’t argue with that, and no, they are not a death metal band; notice the galaxy of Christmas lights woven into the carpet on the ceiling, the strands overflowing down the walls, strewn through a growing collection of garage sale trinkets: framed paintings of bridges, skylines, and a juggling clown, fake flowers in bell-shaped plastic cases, a miniature totem pole whose eyes are perfect for holding incense sticks, and don’t forget the crown jewel: the sweet, sonorous electric organ they picked up over on Oakhurst one weekend – a ridiculous steal at twenty bucks. Thank God the thing had wheels; picture them rolling it down the sidewalk in the September sun, slowing a bit here and there to lift it over the uneven slabs of pavement, neighbors in passing cars smiling at the sight.

Picture them like this: their cocksure strides, their faces shining like beacons, and like them, you’ll never believe it could ever come to an end. You’ll never believe that Joey’s parents eventually sell the dark green house and that the four members of Lost are left to divvy up its sacred basement – that one takes the clown painting, another the bridge, another the incensed totem pole.

You might believe that none of them want the artificial flowers. But you’ll never believe that one of them actually makes off with the organ. You’ll picture them

15 sawing it into fourths, keys and all, and calling it even.

16 The Kid Who Makes Mazes

In the third grade at Holy Family, Tony Corley showed me a maze he had No. 2’d onto a piece of notebook paper, covering the whole page with twists, loops, corners, and countless dead ends, though as always, I knew I could do it too, and of course, do it better, so I rescued my handwriting notebook from the perpetual explosion of my flip-top desk, took out one of those thin manila sheets – the ones that punctured and tore if you applied a fraction too much pressure with your graphite scepter – turned it over to avoid the blue and red runways set to encourage straight script, lowered my nose to the paper and started making mazes, pencil balanced, cradled in the callused groove of my middle finger – a writer’s indentation already present at that single-digit age despite all the Nintendo I played – driving parallel lines no more than a quarter-inch wide across the grainy surface, racing them like twin rollercoaster tracks, like the Gemini at Cedar Point – some of them branching off, blooming into an anarchy of detours, and over the course of a few days’ Phonics lessons, the mess of smudged lines grew to be an organism, and the organism grew to fill the page, like Tony’s, but tighter, more difficult, and most importantly, more often resulting in a slew of That’s cool! from my uniformed classmates, so I came to be known as more than just the kid who won the most Book-It! Personal Pan Pizzas, or the kid who draws really good,

17 and added the kid who makes mazes to my budding resume, making mazes almost every day for that entire year, while the fascination lasted, and each scrawled labyrinth outdid the one that came before it, which is all you can ever really ask for, that continual outdoing, well, that, and this – none of my fellow students ever completed one of my creations, ever made it from Start to Finish, no one ever even tried, and that fact, the fact that none of them had the nerve to send their pencil through those spaghetti bouquets I had crammed my papers with, still makes me smile on days when I’ve put the pen down after making some new brand of maze, and I’m lost in thought, picking at the rough callus on my finger that has traveled with me through all of them, through every twist, every smudged hairpin turn.

18 Through the Sugarcane Smoke

Gammie told me about this time ten or so years ago when she and Papa had been driving across Florida in their bone-white Mercury Grand Marquis; they had been on 78 near the lake when they came upon a sugarcane field on fire, the leaves burning, the stalks surviving into the harvest – Papa was driving of course, and apparently the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see the road, so he thought it would be a good idea to roll down the window – maybe he wanted to lean his head out to steer;

Gammie wasn’t quite sure – but as soon as he did, the cabin of the car filled right up with that hazy fabric, so much so that they could barely breathe, and Gammie, mind you, was laughing her best Wurlitzer of a laugh as she told me this, and I wished Papa could have been there to lean back in his Lay-Z-Boy and wear his simple grin while we conjured up that distant image of them coughing like crazy, sweet tendrils from the crackling cane diving down their worn throats, the Mercury slowly drifting through the sea of smoke, its filtered hazard lights softly flashing.

19 What Part of “Thou Shall Not” Don’t You Understand? – God

reads the billboard off 1-75 north of Tampa, and well, God, to be honest, the one that really stumps me, especially in this instance, is Thou Shall Not Worship False Idols, like say, the guy who had enough hubris to slap this big, white lettered message in Your name between the highway and the sky; if I follow his (note the lowercase ‘h’) broadcast, wouldn’t that make me just as bad as one of those pre-Commandment heathens from back in Moses’s day, caught

red-lipped with his mouth on the teat of the golden calf? And speaking of nipples, Café Risque sits coyly in the weeds on the other side of the four-lane, not even a tenth of a mile down from “Your” billboard, so if You’re going to give me the line about having to work through the hands of the faithful as a response to my false-idol question, then I’ll put mine together and applaud You for assembling such a fine marketing team. Though I’d wager that the average road-weary trucker

with a flesh-ready wad of singles who catches the billboard out of the corner of his eye just laughs and rumbles his chassis into the café for a quick lap dance or three; for every few of those, there has to be one who sees it and thinks twice, fingers the cash in the glove box and takes a swig from his 32 oz. Big Gulp, pondering the wife at home and service on Sunday, then reversing his downshift altogether and barreling the whole rest of the way down the peninsula to Alligator Alley. Me, I roll on as well,

motoring back to a strip joint in po-dunk Adrian, Michigan some eight or so years ago, where calm and cool Pete Bishop, the engineer who recorded the CDs for my old band Lost, had his bachelor party; all four of us band members were there in front of the stage, drinking colored lights and Cokes on musty leather stools – we all wore the token shit-eating grin, but I was the wide-eyed private school kid chosen to sit in for Pete during the ritualistic “bachelor’s last lap dance” –

20 we hit him with all the c’mons we could, but he was too bashful, too nervous, too something, and refused. So I sucked it up, took one for the team, and sat on stage in a stiff-backed chair while five or six naked women danced serpentine and beautiful all over me, whispering in my ear that I better really love my bride-to-be, rubbing their smooth breasts on the porcelain of my chin as some rock song – I think it was “Smoke On The Water” –

bellowed from the DJ booth, the crunchy riff competing with cheers from my friends and liquid nothings flowing forth from the strippers’ parted, played-out lips, enough to fill my head full as an untapped keg of ice-cold beer. And I was lush-drunk on the sex of it all; after that, I got myself another lap dance for twenty bucks, even convinced myself for weeks afterward that I had fallen in love with a stripper, because “Silver” kept telling me how sweet I was all throughout our transaction,

plus she wrote in bubbly cursive “Your (sic) too sweet! – Silver” on the Polaroid of her straddling my right leg, her soft labia spread wide for the camera, my smile reaching all the way up into my eyes, almost off my face, and though it took me awhile to notice that her slight smile went nowhere near her eyes, I carried that picture around in the front pocket of my bookbag for years. Back then, God, there weren’t any direct addresses from You to compete with “Your too sweet! – Silver” –

if there had been one outside of the Crazy Horse or High Horse or (insert adjective here) Horse there in the sticks of Adrian, I still had enough church left in me then that I might have listened to “You” and opted to stay outside in the station wagon. But You and Your team were using just the standard media in those days – Motel-room Bibles, Baptist Church marquees, etc. – maybe one of those conscience-shots sunk below the surface on Pete; hence his refusal to be made honey to the buzz of those strippers.

What’s funny – not in a ha-ha way, but kind of – is that now Pete’s got Jesus oozing out of almost every pore; he leads the “rock” band at his new-agey church, his long hair and heavy metal days as bygone as the original, literal smoke on the water that Deep Purple power-chorded into history; he owns a studio now where there’s no smoking or drinking allowed; he even gave my buddy Joey a Bible. And so it goes, God – I hope You understand that You’re a product, and one that is

21 capable of changing people in a big way, my capital “A” Amigo. This might make You feel a little uneasy, but the good news is that Your Product Life Cycle (PLC) has been in the peak stage for centuries now, and shows no signs of declining. Still, the market can be a turbulent little fishbowl, and You should know that there’s another crude cycle at work down here, which is as follows: the Saved itch to save the Damned from burning in hell, who in turn itch to set fire to overly preachy billboards that disrupt

peaceful drives. You’re quick enough to see where I’m putting myself in all this, and You probably think I’m all talk. But I don’t think I can imagine a better feeling than flinging a blue-tip match lit off my chipped front tooth against a kerosene-drenched version of that billboard off Highway 75, and knowing in the pit of my heart, as the white words shrivel and smoke, that I understand no part of the command “Thou Shall Not,” its once-striking letters slinking into oblivion like wrinkled strippers pushed past their prime.

22 Instructions for Closing the Door on a Life or Lives October 2003

The Yankees are in The Series again, so I want to hate New Yorkers, but then there’s the business of this

Staten Island Ferry crash, the ten casualties, the 40-some injuries, the eyewitness reports of a decapitated man, a legless woman, another passenger bleeding from his eyes, and the claims that the 310-foot behemoth appeared to speed up as it approached the bracing dock,

so of course we itch to know about the man with his hand on the throttle, because tragedies beg questions of blame first and foremost – even natural disasters result in an upward hail of Why, God? from all around the globe – but here in New York, we have the case of a man at the helm who crew members say fell asleep, a man who, having set the obituaries into motion, fled the scene, slit his wrists, and shot himself in the chest with a pellet gun.

The poor bastard must have missed the glaring fact that just as it takes more than a 187 million dollar budget to win the World Series, if you want to close the door on a life, or lives,

23 it takes more than a toy rifle a kid might use to shoot squirrels; it takes something big, something serious, perhaps an implement with an iron gut full of horsepower in order to push it shut.

24 The Lifesong of Gabriel A.

Gabriel tells me about it at the Cleveland airport: his crossing to the States – how he had to jump off a hillside onto a moving train, how he looked on as one of his teenage friends made the leap but timed it wrong – gravity sucked his body through a gap between the stampeding cars, and Gabriel had to watch him disappear.

Then he had to jump himself; he had to connect where his friend had missed, live where he had died. Needless to say, he did all of these things. But I want to say it again: he did all of these things, and as planes peel themselves from the earth all around us, as we wait to return to our volunteer agencies – his in Chicago, mine in Immokalee – Gabriel adjusts his glasses and asserts to me, in near-perfect English, that he had to leave Mexico, that it was that bad, that I couldn’t imagine the work, the poverty – how the worst-off families in the states would be borderline royalty back there, and he’s right. I can’t imagine.

Still, he keeps talking, and I keep listening. And his lifesong, bootlegged from Mexico by that devouring train, soars almost out of earshot.

But I lean back, drift a bit, and somehow manage to pick it up there in the terminal. Plucking it from the Spanish fringes of his voice, I begin to piece together the shape of its music, the sad, steadfast rumble of its charge.

25 Brady Lake, August

Joey’s across from me in the canoe yelling at the top of his lungs about music – how nobody’s listening anymore, how he’s through after this next album, completely sick of that steady diet of shit people call radio, how he’s going to record these last songs and then bury his beaten guitar all the way out in the middle of the desert, past the empty breath of Clear Channel broadcast towers, past the flavor-fading bubble gum of boy bands, someplace quiet and unaffected by the powers that be. After his rant, Joey stands to piss and nearly pitches us into the moonlit lake. I drunkenly hold on to my art for art’s sake.

26 I Wish I Could Smoke More Marijuana

Anymore, it’s not the paranoia, which dogged me when I was younger, or the Newsweek-induced fear of some brain cell genocide – now, it’s more that the slow-down of the Ultimate Constant, Time, is too good for me. It’s too soothing. And so it was at Alligator Point last Saturday when Q and I staggered around stoned out of our minds on the eternal beach, completely all right with the sting of wind flung off the ocean, the way it tapped out rhythms on our eyelashes, the way we raised them like rifles to sing to the sky. 4 A.M. was long gone. The fingers of the drug were all up in my head, prying my thoughts apart one by one. Somebody had added more pitch to pitch black. We’re on Mars! Q kept saying, and each time, he was more right than he had ever been before in his whole entire life. Damp sand crunched under our tennis shoes and the gray Gulf of Mexico sshhed us, omnipotent because it was allowed to go all the way to the horizon. Distant water lights blinked, blowing long, soft breaths into my dilated eyes. I told Q to listen up. You hear that? I said. That’s the rest of the world, lapping at our faces.

And we danced over that one, Q telling me how completely right on I was, which I knew in the pipe of my spine anyway, so I jumped up and shouted at the sky, a man on fire, smiling in the dark, arching my back and taking a great pull from my beer, its beard of sand grainy against my palm.

I can tell you now, though it might not mean much to you, that my shout on that empty beach was really a whisper.

27 Two Stewardess’s Tales: Airplane vs. Groundhog, Airplane vs. Deer

It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving and I’ve got a full day of airport hopscotch to play on what still feels like a full belly of turkey and stuffing and green beans and awkward silences, compliments of my straightforward Midwestern family, who, though I love, if we were a sitcom, I would probably change the channel. A bad passenger, I drift off with these thoughts during the safety speech, sleeping

until we touch down in Pittsburgh, after which the pilot hits the brakes pretty hard, and the stewardess, who is – you guessed it – quite attractive, buckled up diagonal from me, notices my eyebrows lift after the lurch and says “it was probably a gopher, or a groundhog.” At this my eyebrows climb even higher. “Really?” I say. “Yeah,” she says. “We have whole families

of them here who manage to get through the fence and out onto the runway. That’s usually what it is when we get a little brake check like that.” I imagine Punxsutawney Phil’s cousin Eddie doh-diddy-dohing his way back home from a picked-through dumpster buffet, looking up to see a 727 bearing down on him, thinking “That sure is a funny looking groundhog,”

then skittering off across the concrete to the wife and kids, to share what’s left of the half-eaten Hostess cake he snagged from the trash. The stewardess goes on. “Well, in Akron, we don’t have groundhogs – we have deer.” (And here’s the 90 mph curveball) “We hit one once during takeoff.” “No way!” I say. I’m really quite shocked at this. Though, in a world that’s home to both deer and airplanes, I guess it makes sense that the two might meet at some (very messy) point. She continues: “Yeah, we had to turn around and land because the landing gear wouldn’t go up. The head of the decapitated deer was stuck in it. Our pilot didn’t even feel the impact. We must have hit it right as we were getting off the ground.” At this point I stop making sure that I’m inserting my nods in all the right conversational gaps, I stop trying to catch a glimpse of her ring finger, I stop smiling with teeth and just hang on that image of the barely aloft prop plane clipping the terrified deer, knocking its head clean off, the landing gear attempting at first to stomach the talisman, to drag it into the sky like a god-offering. But the body lingered on the ground, and the firefly swarm of life left hovering in the steam that fissured from the wrenched open tin can of the neck – the nerves of that beautiful animal – radioed the shattered antlers and called them back to earth. The body, blind and dying, waited for the plane to scream once more overtop the runway. It would not allow the head to breach the heavens alone.

28 Balsa Wood Smile

Waiting on the cusp of shade and sunshine in a tiny diner parking lot in Tallahassee, waiting for my quiet father to pay the bill, my mom smiled at me for no good reason - though I guess, really, moms don’t need good reasons to smile at their sons. But her teeth flickered forth more crooked and coffee-stained than I could ever remember them being, almost as if they were made from the same balsa wood as one of those 75¢ airplanes she used to reward me with for being some version of good on trips to K-mart as a kid – a project that came chopsticked inside a smooth plastic wrapper, diligently assembled at the kitchen table only to meet the air above green lawns with a kiss that broke its back. And then I saw what she was really saying, hammocked right there between her lips: my invincible mother, the one with an answer for every piss and moan I could throw at her,

29 the woman who wasn’t allowed to die, revealed to me, on a Friday in March, in the asphalt lot of Jenny’s Lunchbox, that she was going to do just that. Of course

I wasn’t ready for it, the sheer challenge of her life’s trajectory as it issued forth from the gaps in her smile to hang in the air between us, her balsa wood smile jagged as it cut across her mouth, an EKG reading.

30 Behind the Fear of Flying

What’s not to love about the gut-punch at the top of the runway, the mechanical pain rising in the engine whine, the reverse plunge into this wispy blue that’s so much more than just a backdrop for a change? When the earth secedes the wheels and the sheer tonnage of the steel machine gives gravity the stomping it deserves, I slip the clouds a smug little smile. Finally allowed to relax, I do it almost unwillingly, already missing the grip of elevation, that feeling of launched smallness that forces out my real fears: long farewells, love, descent – any old brand of slow-dying sensation.

31 Response to Dr. Williams

I will tell you about the things that are dead. Muscle cars, jitterbugs, and some part of me on Saturday mornings, hungover in the head after dart games, draft beer, and chivalry spent on a girl who grows a lisp when she drinks – her mouth microwaves each word and she lets me cut them off mid-spin with a kiss that shatters the room. Yeah, I’ve heard your talk about the death of the sonnet and I say, if you’re going to hush something, own the fucker first: drive it, shake it, tongue it until its throat is forced to sing. But if you’re going to shroud something, check the cloth for holes, because death likes it thick.

32 Twelve Lines about the Love in Our Sex

If the moment of orgasm is a little death that we race panting and thrusting toward, then what does that say about us, that we love our murder-suicide as long as it’s simultaneous?

That our respective restaurant jobs, grad schools, and caffeine addictions can and will disappear, along with the rest of the spun world, against the epicenter of your cluttered city bedroom?

Baby, even this backdrop will evaporate, and all we’ll be left with is my hand on your breast, your body above mine, your voice, faraway now, like wind.

33 Grocery Store Pilgrimage in Snow-Laden Cambridge, Massachusetts

Last night, the streetlight stormed your window and found me out, washed me in a pale yellow as I cried hard into your neck, grieving over the end of our long distance relationship. 1100 miles we ran nightly, poured our voices into sagging phone lines and prayed

that we’d still recognize each other when the next baggage claim sang in motorized monotone behind a kiss we’d been three months in the process of saving up for. Last night, I stopped holding my breath, and said that it wasn’t going to work, despite love,

despite you knowing me like you know your own laugh. Now, tonight, at ten below and with a near whiteout draping the streets, all I could think to do was to make my trademark black bean chili. You used to joke that the only thing we had in common was food and sex.

And maybe you were right. If so, I wondered what was so wrong with that as I stomped through the city field of foot-high drifts, going after garlic, onion, and chipotle peppers, my blood even thinner than my tennis shoes as a result of being spoiled on Florida sunshine.

But I had to throw myself into something I could understand: the weather – great constant of change, universal spark plug of stalled conversations – there on Mass Ave in the seven o’clock dark, while the snow got busy with its rapid-fire brushstrokes, trying to make everything monochrome,

I argued with myself, pitching syllogisms about how I loved food and sex, and you loved food and sex, and so therefore I loved you, but right then, I just wanted to succumb to my ignorance urge which tells me to shut off my head and just watch the inertia-chocked world spin. Cars topped out

at fifteen miles per hour, stuck in front-wheel-drive twitches, unabashed, their headlights licking at the cascade of flakes. Bums shivered and withdrew into doorways, hands in pockets for a change, their mumbled pleas dropped unheard, overtaken by the trudge and crunch of hustling feet. Shop windows

sketched reflections of the scene, their insides black and dead asleep on a Sunday night. Traffic lights blinked yellow against the glass panes; I cocked my head and tried to recognize myself, stared hard into an Irish pub where couples sat sharing pints and dinner plates –

everything about the place seemed to harbor a soft glow, a warmth. But I pushed myself through the wind chill; I had my own steaming meal to get to, and once I breached the heated fluorescent lobby of the grocery store, I could feel my mind click back on and start its whirring. Behind me,

the rubber lips of the sliding glass doors re-met, pressed shut again like they’re made to do. My coat of snow melted away. I looked back into the street through those doors, listening to the echo of their automatic kiss. They will always return dutifully to one another, barring a total loss of electricity.

35 Mars

is closer than it’s ever been to Earth and maybe it’s that fact coupled with Hollywood’s former fascination with the Red Planet that has me looking over my shoulder a bit more than usual this week,

staring deeper into what I hope are people’s eyes during casual conversations about college football, actively listening to the dissonant symphony of engines out on Tennessee Street – you know, just sensing more, kind of like you do on LSD, and if you’ve never tripped on that pushpin amusement park hiding in a half-centimeter hit, then good for you – you don’t have to worry about whether or not the rumors that the acid collects in your spine are true – all I’m saying is that every motion, every surface, every cuss word, every kiss, every chorus to every classic rock song vomited from the backlit dashboard of a passing car, all of it just shines. It registers. Then punches you hard in the gut. And as long as you don’t look in the mirror, you’re fine. Do that and you’ll get the devil looking back while another tripper yells through the dormitory walls that JFK is at the door, alive and well. And that’s more or less where I’ve been this week, walking out of Leon Pub every night under the buckshot ceiling of stars, casting my glance into the filmy windows of a yellow short bus parked in a backyard across from the American Homepatient building. I’ve been driving a vinyl groove into Tennessee Street, the stretch in front of the Greyhound station where a man has a perpetual cigarette there on the curb; he can’t even spare a flinch when my side-view mirror misses carving out his kidney by less than a foot. I’ve been sighing myself home to my apartment a stone’s throw from the 24-hour McDonald’s, where I park around back and stare into the cold little crematory of my empty mailbox, then close the door, and climb the teal-painted steps overlooking the pool, its blue-eyed gaze staring down cinder block walls. Shafts of light scissored by the unsettled water cut into me, forcing me to tighten my grip on the rain-warped railing. And while my witness, the devil-red speck pulsing in the rectangle of night sky, framed by the apartment’s bent gutters, doesn’t come right out and call my name, it does pinball my eyes to the deep end of the pool, to the square-shaped drain which now looks somewhat like a hit of acid. I must consider this, though it will do nothing

36 to remedy my wide-eyed days as of late: all the oily grit that drain has sucked through its gums, all the different versions of pitch black heaven it has inhaled from the concrete floor, all the beautiful, swimming skin.

37 Niagara Falls Survivor to a Fellow Barfly

Excuse me, one second.

Bartender, another round for me and my friend here.

Okay. Go ahead. Ask me why I did it. I told the media it was depression, but c’mon, you’re smarter than that. We all know depression, that son-of-a-bitch – it’s like a giant piece of Saran-Wrap; you can cover any old problem with it and keep the pain lukewarm for days, months, years even. You’ve been there. I can read it on the devil strips of your eyebrows, the way they just dipped down as if hit by a wind that – what’s that? You want to know how it felt? You don’t care about why. You want to know what it felt like. Typical.

Fine. At the top, before I injected myself into the river’s headlong drift, before I shed the sun for what I thought would be the last time, it felt like something almost mattered, what, I don’t know, but I couldn’t help but want one final whiff of cherry pipe tobacco – a cataract ghost of my dad in his office at the auto parts store: any given day, the film of five o’clock already glossy on his eyes at three in the afternoon, perched on that thrift-store bar stool

38 with the red leather trim, his back tic-tac-toed by the cardboard boxes he leaned on, stacks of unsold inventory bracing the slight slump in his shoulders, a headlong sense of failure tearing a vibrant course through his veins as though the failure itself had been dyed sky blue, the color of my favorite t-shirt, which, come to think of it, I happened to be wearing on the day dad told me we were closing our doors for good, blaming the economy. It became the color of conclusion, that blue, nothing at all like the hungry midnight of the Niagara.

Yeah, I’ll take another. You?

You still with me? No, I’m not sorry for the digression. This is the part you wanted to hear: the acceleration as I approached the lip, the sudden downshift of the tremendous engine beneath me, the flow cutting from smooth to chaotic in a half-breath, my arms and legs as good as gone, the water like a straight-jacket, a fist clenching tighter and tighter around every last inch of me until the shelf fell off, it squeezed me out, and I disappeared into the mist, windmilling down through what I would later refer to as “a boiling cauldron of hell that I advise upon no human being

39 on the face of the earth.”

What? You didn’t actually buy that “cauldron of hell” line, did you? Listen. You know those action movies where someone cuts the elevator cable and the metal box just drops, sucked like a breath into gravity’s lungs? The people in those freefalls are paid to scream their pretty little heads off. They do it for you, as you lounge in between cup-holder armrests on the other side of the silver screen, ticket stub in your back pocket having stripped you of seven or eight bucks – you pay them to belt out terror so that it might rap against your chest, crawl inside you, and shake you to life for a few seconds, minutes, hours even. You want them to live. And they usually do.

Okay. One more. Then that’s it.

You see? I want the same thing Hollywood does: your money. People don’t pay for stories about family business failures or overweight fathers with nations of pit-stains sunken into short-sleeved, collared shirts – they don’t care about oil-black coffees in styrofoam cups at break time, or the sweet mingling aroma of pipe tobacco and axle grease.

40 They want a thrill, the unbelievable, a barrel-less man swimming away unscathed from the largest waterfall on the planet. They want to know that every once in a while, death loses.

I knew I would live. Just like I knew I would get to the bottom of this pint. Now pay up.

41 Three Running Routes

1. University Heights, OH – 3 mi.

Stretched in my compressed college dorm room, slipped the building key between ankle and sock, donned skull cap, thermal, and Adidas pants since more often than not it’s freezing in Cleveland, took Belvoir to Fairmount, then a straight shot to Richmond road, the sheer motion of the run shivering into me through pores and eyes as I pounded out the 1.5 miles up and back, past elementary school, mosque, and middle school, then again in reverse – an incline became a decline, the upper-middle-class trophy homes shrank and then built back up – a simple flip of stimuli; sketching, erasing, re-sketching images with my feet; a boring route for some, but necessary for me during those years when the purpose was more or less defeated anyway by all the Winstons I smoked between runs; the civil war in my lungs raging worse and worse every time I slowed to a walk.

2. Immokalee, FL – 3.9 mi.

Hamstrings still tight as rusted piston rods, loosened them in the driveway on New Market while my body tried to make nice with the humidity, then lit out down Lee, every step amplified like club bass between my ears, mixing with the salsa music blooming in front yards, the occasional car horns honking at me – I was one of about ten white kids in the entire town – the Spanish songs fading as I approached the Winn Dixie and its sad litter of strip mall stores, glanced at my reflection in the storefront glass; looking stronger than I felt, I carried my heat-taxed breath off down Lake Trafford road, where I’d sometimes see resigned winos hanging out by the ravine, hefting brown bags like swollen cardiac muscles to their lips, then hooked a right on Carson drive, looked left at the Fire Station; right around this point, the world started to burn – I had quit smoking, so even though my masochism was now a bit more sensible, it still hurt like hell – took a final turn to put me back on New Market, on the last line of my crude rectangle, affording the setting sun a nice balcony seat from which

42 it could snipe at, or rather napalm, my shirtless back – I always managed a greeting for the cows on my right, kicking back in the tall grass behind the barbed wire, my mood improving since I just had to cross 29 and last about another eighth of a mile, but sometimes I got held up by the traffic, and stood panting by the stop sign while cars rushed by oblivious to me, oblivious to their own phenomena of speed and endurance.

3. Munroe Falls, OH – 3 mi.

Hinge my Achilles on the front porch railroad tie, coaxing my calves into this shakedown of sorts back in my hometown where everything bursts with remember-whens, where Pinehurst becomes Hiwood becomes Gaylord becomes the Kimpton parking lot, where my dad taught me to drive stick on the since-deceased Honda Accord over the span of a month when either one of us would have been justified in the act of familial homicide, where North River dumps me into River Park Estates, a switchback descent between Chem-Lawn yards ending with a cleared-out path to the bike trail, paved snake screened by the trees along the Cuyahoga; I dodge other runners, bikers, and baby pushers on its back, stomping it gently, heel to toe, everything moving, the world a lung, moving – then it’s through the pike and hard right to stare darkly at Jean Avenue and its near 45 degree hill – I redline new levels of internal combustion every time; never walked it, God willing never will, my turbine breath gradually returns to a steady pulse as I cross back over North River, cut through the Riverview playground and ball field, and wind my way back home, my skin slowly toning now, muscles and heart shrugging with the realization that I won’t be giving these routines up anytime soon, that I’m just hopelessly in love with the go – but when I do finally slow to a stop back in my driveway, the sting of cut speed rakes across me; I plant my palms on my knees and listen to my ragged pant like it’s the last sound in the entire world – and for those ten, maybe twenty seconds, I’ve never cheated on my girlfriend, I’ve never cussed out my dad, and I’ve never made anyone, I mean anyone, feel stupid or small – right then,

43 it’s all sweat: drop after drop of sweat rolling off my nose and somersaulting down through the air, crystallized trophies of all the miles I’ve ever run returning, at long last, to the ground.

44 Cocaine Offering #2

The second time my restaurant coworkers asked was at W’s house, which was packaged with some wood grain tenements under a canopy of trees back off of Brevard Street. They had to do it quickly, before B’s ex-girlfriend got there. He didn’t want her to know he was using again; if she did, he explained, then a residual fuck was out of the question. You in? A asked, though he knew what my answer would be. No, I’m cool, I said, and as cool escaped the dropped garage door of my mouth,

I smiled as ignorance washed over me, warmed my forehead like a sick child’s damp washcloth; granted, maybe that was just the aftershock of the cavalry of shots we had marched down our throats back at the pool hall, but either way, my sometimes fascination with drugs kicked itself up a few notches, and though I was tempted to brave the back room, I stayed in the kitchen and smoked some of L’s weed instead – kind of like having the chance to take a shotgun to your senses and opting for the tear gas instead.

Leaning on the Formica counter, I could feel my smile inflate. Then the back room emptied out. A and B and some guys I didn’t know swarmed into our midst like nothing had happened. And that’s what it looked like; I was subtly (probably obviously) trying to scan their faces, checking for any sign of the drug that I thought had to be quivering in the depths of their wide-open eyes. Nothing. They accelerated, I decelerated, and we met in the middle of nothing. B’s ex arrived and had to use the bathroom. W didn’t have

any toilet paper. A went to the store to buy some; he wouldn’t take W’s money. L went into the living room to play video games. I stepped out on the front porch, nodded at a bunch of people I would never know and listened to the tapering off of what had been a steady rain. The tree above me brought to mind a camping trip I had taken a few years ago in Southern Ohio, when Goo and Char and I sat for hours in silence and pride around our well-made bonfire, which we had built just a few paces from the base of a huge oak.

The fire withstood the rain then, and its ghost withstood memories and years to strike me there at W’s house, where the tremendous oak tree and its sheltering fingers were the very same, so I focused every speck of myself I could gather from both of those moments on the way the drops hung on the branches for what seemed like ages, the way they lost themselves under their own weight and fell into the city of dead leaves scattered across the ground, the way they splashed like madness does into the folds of the brain:

45 softly, with a faint crackle.

46 The Poet, the Pope, and the Dishwasher*

I don’t even know Frank’s last name, but I do know that his six-year tenure as night dishwasher at Kool Beanz, a tour of duty the likes of which I had never seen before becoming a manager there, is only amplified in my mind

by the fact that he’s deaf as well. Thus it’s both amazing and annoying that I’ve been able to find ways to communicate with him despite the laziness-laden fact that I’ve learned so little sign language; I use the thumbs-up

quite a bit, but aside from that, I’m having a hard time thinking of any other symbols in our language, and as these thoughts spin off, evading the grasp of my conscious mind, I blink and return to a conversation about the unconscious mind

(I think) in a seminar class entitled “Writing the Unknown.” Our desks are in a crude circle, and yes! We’ve got this ‘unknown-y’ poem by Milosz surrounded, our mental pickaxes sharp and glinting under the university’s fluorescence. When it tries to fend us off with Truth

and Justice, someone points out a paraphrased Psalm, raising the eyebrows in the room right along with the stakes, prompting local poetry sage, Dr. David Kirby, to speak up, who, after he chews on the poem with his eyes for a bit, questions

the exact translation, saying “The Bible doesn’t really talk about Human Reason; it’s not its business.” The girl next to me, who has managed to stay out of the foray until this point, wields her pen and un-throats a laugh at this, causing me to spit out

“Reason? That’s its direct competitor.” I throw in an “Oh!” to accentuate my dig, an effect I picked up from raunchy 80s comedians like Andrew Dice Clay, a some-say dirtbag who never won the Nobel Prize for Literature like Milosz, but rather, managed to contribute to society mostly by grabbing his crotch as much as humanly possible. And I doubt that the Dice Man ever felt bad about it, but I do – I feel bad about my smart-ass jab against The Good Book. Damn, Catholic Guilt is a tough monkey to shake; that little fuzzball still has a claw or two lodged in the skin of my back. Because, really, what I’ve dissed is Faith, a concept with more fans and funding than the New York Yankees, and that’s not fair –

even acts of faith have their reasons. Case in point, for my First Communion back in second grade, I suited up, put on my powder blue clip-on tie, windexed my glasses, pigeon-toed my way up the aisle to Fr. Szabo, went through

the paddy-cake-like motions of getting the host from his right hand to my left hand to my right hand to my mouth, and once the Body of Christ was safely dissolving on the skillet of my tongue, I went back

to the pew, kneeled down next to my beaming parents, and prayed my heart out to ol’ J.C. just like I had been instructed to do, except that after I got done thanking Him for the essentials (family, food, shelter, dog), I Santa-Claused

the newly-melted wafer/Son of God with my wish for a nice gold chain, because that’s what everyone else at Holy Family Elementary had been getting out of this First Communion deal: crucifixes. I had been scanning

the Best™ department store catalogue for a good month by then, my fingers oiling up its glossy pages with an unhealthy All-American kid yearning for a snazzy $80 cross which, to me, shouted from the mountaintops that I, Jason David Nemec,

had passed the sacrament test with the flyingest of flying colors, & Jesus had my back in a big way, etc. etc., though I knew deep down that I would get the $25 one, a flimsy crap-job as simplistic as a lowercase t in Handwriting class.

And I did; I got the crappy cross, so maybe that’s not the best example of persevering through faith to a big wholesome payoff, but you know what is, or who is, a perseverer, is Mister Rickety himself, Pope John Paul II, who’s in the news now because he came down with what sounds like that same flu bug I’m getting over – he apparently got it from releasing a pair of doves symbolizing peace into Saint Peter’s Square and afterward hanging out the window for twenty minutes while the cameras snapped through the blistering cold – I saw one of the photos on the Internet, his face tired and stretched: the look of a man who’s had enough, a man

48 who was shot in the gut in ’81, weathered a colon tumor in ’92 – he let the surgeons have that relic – later, in ’96, let ‘em have his appendix too. Imagine the fragility that must have danced in the hands of the surgeon, if only for a split second, before he pulled that bun from the oven. The reports say it was inflamed, but with what? Infection? Or the very fire of God, ignited when John-boy slipped and dropped His name in vain (away from the video cameras of course)? And John only did it because of all these Goddamn illnesses, but try telling that to the Creator when you’ve got the rest of the world on the other line pining over your prayers, bitching about their own illnesses and catastrophes and car crashes and neighbors with pets who piss all over the subdivision – phew! As they say here in the South, shitfire! You’ve got to give it to the guy; El Papa just keeps going. He’s like Nolan Ryan, the all-time strikeout king; at eighty-four years old, he’s the Energizer Bunny of Popes.

I myself would like to catch his floppy ear for a bit, but I fear we wouldn’t be able to understand each other – my various sins enough to fill a minefield, his supposed graces enough to walk through one unscathed. Maybe in person then; I don’t want to glorify the man, or bribe him in hopes that he might whip out that bulletproof cell phone with a direct line to the Man Upstairs and put in a good word for me; I guess I’d just want to say “Well done, John, especially considering the pressure. Now relax.” But I don’t know if I could find the words. It’d have to be like it is with Frank at the restaurant, when, most nights, the best I can manage when I’m rifling through the sales at the end of a busy shift, and that tree of a man, on his way out the door after emerging from the compressed grease and grime of the dish pit, shrieks to get my attention, then salutes and waves goodbye, is to wave back and sign to him

“thank you, good work.” That’s right. My hand unfolds downward off the cliff of my chin. My thumb antennaes the air; my forearms click into a cross. Then Frank smiles, gives me a thumbs up, and just like that, he’s gone.

*I composed this prior to Pope John Paul II’s passing on April 2, 2005; that (and this poem) being said, may he rest in peace.

49 Rhythm of the Loiterer

Here at Cool Grindz Lounge, my three-dollar cup of coffee says give me pretty girls in trendy black hats smirking and punching away at espresso machines, give me fresh New York City underground radio – smooth drum n’ bass/jazz electronica, a din piped into Tallahassee via distant satellite to flow from Rubik’s-cube-sized speakers over my steaming concentration of caffeine – give me all this, plus a sturdy, iron-wrought table on which I can pound out canned responses to my students’ canned attempts at poetry, and then my clean, well-lit place will be quite complete, well-worth the price. So understand the offense I take when a wannabe Thug-Life white kid walks in and plops down at the table across from me, opens up his plastic bag from the nearby Publix, pulls out what looks like a TV dinner (minus the need to microwave?) plus a bottle of O.J., and, paying no fee whatsoever, proceeds to go to town with his plastic silverware, shoveling away beneath his cockeyed blue ball cap with a focus and a ferocity which I myself can only remember exhibiting during the occasional 2 a.m. drunken kitchen raid. But this guy isn’t drunk or anything that I can see, and besides, I can’t get too mad at him since I once took a Burger King value meal into dear old Brady’s Café back in Kent, Ohio on a summer night when our band was scheduled to play – I sat down cross-legged in front of my bass amp and was just about to show my chicken sandwich who was boss, when Bonnie, the owner – thereafter referred to as Crazy Bonnie, came flying out of the kitchen so fast that her Pigpen-like cloud of patchouli stench didn’t even have time to catch up, and boy, was she ever hot, saying “How would you like it if you invited me over to your house for some big home-cooked meal and I showed up with Burger King?” and even though I thought “Well, Bonnie, I really wouldn’t give a shit,” and “I would never invite you over anyway, let alone for some big home-cooked meal,” I took my medicine, did as she commanded, and dined on my fast food out on the sidewalk, pissed-off, greasy-fingered, and fifteen. So as Thug-Life takes a long swig of his juice and stares at me, I return to trying to read another ripe-and-ready for Hallmark poem about a dead grandpa and try not to judge Mister Shameless Loiterer here, but fail at this

50 because I’ve been working in the business for years now, and if some punk kid walked into my restaurant with a bag of Burger King and a bad attitude, I’d show him the door, and fast. I sigh deeply as Thug-Life gets to his heavy, high-topped feet, but instead of leaving, he saunters up to the counter, where the pretty girls are kept, and says to one that she’s got it going on, comments on her tattoo, asks her where she got the ink done, says it’s tight, tells them what a nice place they’ve got here. The girls are trying to keep the nervousness out of their laughs, and as I’m cycling through all the hero scenarios I can come up with, thinking of interjections with the most minimal big-scene potential, he struts back toward the door and catches my eye again – by now I’m pretending to read Zagajewski – some poem about a train, when Thug-Life addresses me: “Whatchu readin’, man? Looks like a good book.” “Yeah, it is,” I say. “It’s a book of world poetry – all sorts of different languages.” “Yeah?” he says, interested. “Well, they’re all translated into English,” I say, “but they were written in different languages.” And we go on like this for a few minutes; he tells me how he knows four other languages: Spanish, Italian, Hawaiian, and Chinese, counts them off on his fingers, says he learned them “from dating different females – you know, I had to learn their language so I could talk to them,” which makes sense to me, but he goes on talking about females like they really are another species altogether, saying how he could “go up to that female up there,” beckoning to the tattooed darling behind the counter, “and say Alua ka nani la,” which, according to him, means “You are very pretty” in Hawaiian. “See, it’s so smooth,” he says to me, and at this he makes a little wave motion with his hand, so that I’m drifting a bit to twilit beaches and tiki torches far from the glare of the touch-screen lap top belonging to the caffeinated patron on my right, but Thug-Life, now a Renaissance man to me, is on his way out, until he hits the door and turns back to ask me what I’m majoring in, and I tell him creative writing, to which he instantly replies “That sounds like it’s gonna be a lazy job that pays well – me, I majored in roofing – ever since I was fourteen,” and the faint scowl of judgment in his brown eyes idles dangerously there like a backhoe on a job site,

51 causing me to feel, all the way down to the calluses on my feet, an urge to tell this guy about my history in construction, how I spent the good part of a year hunched over on the angry slants of rooftops down in the impoverished Florida town of Immokalee, coaxing gravity, running tar paper and chalk lines across plywood, hefting 80 lb bundles of shingles – I know, to a small degree, what his life feels like on the muscles in the small of the back. But I stop myself, I stop the pissing contest I’ve started in my head, because when he says “Have a good one,” I see, as though through a hole in the sky, the two of us, me and my stagger-step loitering friend here, on the peak of an A-frame in Carson Lakes at break time – he’s playing with the air hammer, firing off cap nails into the sun-caked water, triggering them one-at-a-time into high, shining arcs, and as they’re swallowed by tiny, wind-born waves, a smooth rhythm develops: sing, disappear, sing.

52 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jason Nemec was born in Akron, Ohio on September 26, 1979. He received his trusty BSBA degree in Marketing from John Carroll University in 2001; since then, his poetry has appeared in various magazines, including Meridian, Nimrod, and Rattle, as well as on the web at storySouth and VerseDaily.