Chronicles Caught Somewhere Between GUY and GAY

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ys The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #1 oundgarden Hair • Rock Star Eyes • Wussy Bo oundgarden Hair • Rock Star Eyes Wussy God is a Mean Drunk • Kick-Ass S

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

The photos in the National Poetry Slam article were taken by David Huang and borrowed from www.poeticdream.com.

Graphics for the “Is a Wussy Boy / Is Not a Wussy Boy” were borrowed from various places around the Internet.

Everything else is the fault of R. Eirik Ott, unless otherwise indicated. INTRO

So, hereʼs my new zine, The Wussy Boy Chronicles. Iʼm in Reno as I type this on my Macintosh Quadra 630, listening to Tuataraʼs first album and the sound of my kitties playing just outside my window. Itʼs early in the morning for me, like 10:14, and a nice breeze is floating around my room. My summer internship at the daily newspaper is almost over (thank god). I always wonder if anyone is going to give a shit about these zines, but Iʼm going to give it another try anyway. Iʼve been doing zines for quite a while now, since at least ʼ93 when I started Fencepost with some friends in Bakersfield. I went on to Thrust Magazine, then a series of one-shots called Rants, Screeds, Diatribes and Other Ephemera (featuring titles like Big Daddyʼs Makinʼ Biscuits and Tongue Ballet in my Bunghole). Then I did something called Eirik Goes to Jail, which was followed by a series of zines called Eirik Goes To Therapy. But, that was then, this is now. Iʼve abandoned the subject matter of the “Eirik” zines. Everything that could be said had been said, so it was time to move on to something different. Here it is, then, The Wussy Boy Chronicles: a personalzine that prowls around my thoughts via snippets of journal entries, letters to friends and e-mail. Itʼs more or less in chronological order, although sometimes itʼs more and sometimes itʼs less. It roughly covers the time between Halloween of ʻ98 to the end of summer of ʻ99. I plan on doing a letters section next issue, so please write in and share some thoughts about life and love and death and all the stuff in between. Oh, wait, before I go, hereʼs a little about how I ended up in Reno for the summer. Iʼm actually a journalism student in my last year at Chico State University (in northern California), but I landed this internship at the daily Reno newspaper. Itʼs not really an internship, though, but whatever you call it, I got it through zines. My favorite zine in the world (after Cometbus) is Happy, Not Stu- pid. Itʼs this personalzine written by a journalist named John Johnson who works as the entertainment editor at the newspaper in Reno. We started corresponding because we liked each otherʼs zines, then, after about six months, I popped the question: “Dude, can you hook me up with an internship?” The answer, unfortunately, was “maybe,” which turned into “well, no, not really,” which then turned into a stint as a freelancer. Cool. Well, a year or so went by and this summer came and Johnʼs assistant got a summer position with USA Today (which is owned by the same company as the Reno Gazette-Journal.) The newspaper needed someone who could jump in and take over the position without a whole bunch of training, so John suggested they ask me since I had been working as both a graphic designer at a print shop and a freelance writer for several years. Boom, after a flurry of paperwork and hand- wringing with the head of the journalism department at Chico State, I moved to reno for the summer. Itʼs July 29, so Iʼm still here. I think they want to offer me a job. Iʼve been thinking a lot about it. It would mean the first real job Iʼve ever had, plus those things... what do you call those things... benefits? Lord, I could get my teeth fixed. Itʼs a hard decision, though. Iʼm not sure I want to give up my dreams of being a travelling performance poet, but some of my poet friends have been telling me that I can do both. Itʼs going to be a tough decision, because I want to go on a book tour, not be stuck in front of a computer all day.

THE WUSSY BOY MANIFESTO

my name is eirik ott and i am a wussy boy.

itʼs taken me a long time to admit it...

i remember shouting in high school, “no, dad, iʼm not gay! iʼm just... sensitive. i tried to like hot rods and jet planes and football and budweiser poster girls, but i never got the hang of it! i donʼt know whatʼs wrong with me...”

then, i saw him, there on the silver screen, bigger than life and unafraid of earrings and hair dye and rejoicing in the music of the cure and morrissey and siouxsie and the banshees, talking loud and walking proud my wussy boy icon: duckie in “pretty in pink.” and i realized i wasnʼt alone. and i looked around and saw other wussy boys living large and proud of who they were: anthony michael hall, wussy boy; michael j. fox, wussy boy; and lord god king of the wussy boy movement, matthew broderick, unafraid to prove to the world that sensitive guys much kick ass. now i am no longer ashamed of my wussiness, no, iʼm empowered by it. when iʼm at a stoplight and some testosterone redneck methamphetamine jock fratboy asshole dumb fuck pulls up beside me blasting his trans amʼs stereo with power chord anthems to big tits and date rape, i no longer avoid his eyesight, hell no, i just crank all 12 watts of my car stereo and i rock out right into his face: (devil sign and morrisseyʼs voice) “i am human and i need to be loved just like everybody else does!” i am wussy boy, hear me roar (meow). bar fight? pshaw! you think you can take me, huh? just because i like poetry better than sports illustrated? well, allow me to caution you, iʼm not the average every day run-of-the-mill wussy boy you beat up in high school, punk, i am wuss core! (flash “wc” gang sign) donʼt make me get renaissance on your ass because i will write a poem about you, a poem that tears your psyche limb from limb, that exposes your selfish insecurities, that will wound you deeper and more severely than knives and chains and gats and baseball bats could ever hope to do..

you may see 65 inches of wussy boy standing in front of you, but my steel-toed soul is ten foot tall and bullet proof!

bring the pain, punk, beat the shit out of me, show all the people in this bar what a real man can do to a shit-talking wussy boy like me

WHAT IS A WUSSY BOY?

Iʼve thought long and hard on this question, because itʼs been kinda hard for me to define for so long. I went to this gender conference at Chico State University a few semesters back and was surprised to see that I was one of only four boys out of maybe 120 girls who attended. (But, then again, I wasnʼt all that surprised because Chico is filled with a bunch of shit-headed frat boy assholes who do fucked up things like mock the Take Back the Night March as they sit on their front porches with their equally shit-headed sorority girlfriends sucking lager from red plastic cups and pointing at the passing “lesbians and faggots” marching for a womanʼs right to walk the streets at night without fear.) One of the events was a presentation by Kate Bornstein, a gender warrior who began life as a heterosexual man, then became a gay man, then through the miracle of modern medicine became a trans-gendered heterosexual woman. Now she considers herself a trans-gendered lesbian woman. Anyway, so there was this question and answer session afterwards, and one of the young women in the audience asked what she could do to help women on campus. After she got her answer, I asked the same question, only for men who are down with feminism. This one young woman kinda got in my face and said that women didnʼt need my help, that they could do it for themselves, and wasnʼt it just a bit too convenient for me to fight someone elseʼs fight when I could drop it at any time and go right back to benefitting from the hetero-sexist patriarchal system we live in. I totally understood where she was coming from and agreed, to a point. I have the same feelings about men who say they are down with feminism... Iʼm always skeptical. But, then again, I was a bit shocked because she was saying this not about THEM, the enemy, the cock man oppressors who make all of our lives hell, no, she was talking about me. I told the audience that yes, I do have a penis, but I am certainly not a card-carrying member of the masculine club. My whole life has been filled with guys making fun of me for being less than their impression of what a man is supposed to be: when I wasnʼt being called “faggot” because I wore earrings and listened to “faggot” music and didnʼt like sports or drinking, I was called “pussy” or “wussy” and some other such nonsense because Iʼd rather hang out with girls than neanderthal dickheads. I have never fit in with the frat guy good old buddy network of dickheads across the country, so to have someone at a gender conference saying that feminism is “not my fight” sounded so ridiculous to me. Seems to me itʼs everybodyʼs fight. I mean really, do I necessarily fit into the narrow category of “heterosexual male”? I feel no sense of kinship with 95% of the men I come in contact with; thatʼs why all my friends have always been women or gay men. So, where does that leave me? Thatʼs when it dawned on me that it was time to recognize a new gender category: Wussy Boy. Itʼs all about taking that derogatory word we were hounded with during grade school and making it a term of empowerment, just like gay people did with “queer” and black people did with “niggga.” It was only after seeing “Pretty In Pink” for the first time in about five years that it finally dawned on me exactly what a Wussy Boy is: Duckie. Duckie (played expertly by patron saint Jon Cryer) was the epitome of the Wussy Boy aesthetic. He was a sensitive guy who didnʼt fit in with the jocks and frat boys and rich dickheads because of the way he dressed and the music he listened to and the way he looked at things. Lots of people thought Duckie was gay, but he wasnʼt; Duckie was totally in love with Andie (Molly Ringwald), but he was just such a Wussy Boy that he did dorky things around her and always said the absolutely wrong things. The thing that distinguished Duckie from being a complete wet rag loser was that he was not ashamed of who he was, and he wasnʼt afraid to kick a little punk ass. Sure, when he attacked the richie asshole guy played by James Spader, he was doomed to get his own ass kicked, but that didnʼt matter. Wussy Boys arenʼt these milqetoast wet rags - theyʼll fuck some shit up if you push them too far. When I first saw Duckie in “Pretty in Pink,” it made me feel like it was okay to be a Wussy Boy, caught somewhere between GUY and GAY, and not ashamed of it. We are like that flier that used to get faxed around until it was a barely recognizable blur, that little poster showing a mouse flipping off the swooping eagle thatʼs about to snatch it up with its outstretched talons. John Cusack played another excellent Wussy Boy character in “Say Anything,” where he waxed poetic about the girl he liked and would devote an entire summer just to hanging out with her, but he was also a kick boxer, so watch out punk. Oh, and the kid from “Rushmore!” Wussy Boy with an attitude all the way! Thereʼs a difference between being a Wussy Boy and just being so lame that you suck. For example, Barry Manilow is just too weak... heʼs all about these mushy, lame love songs that are all about giving the world for the girl who dicks you over and somehow being cool with it. How much bullshit is that? No self-respecting Wussy Boy would ever write a song like that (unless he was trying to be sarcastic). But a Wussy Boy like Mark Eitzel (formerly of American Music Club) can bust out with a choice lyric like “I broke my promise / that I wouldnʼt write another song about you / I guess I lied / after 12 years I still love you” because he follows it up with some bitter self-hatred at feeling that way: “the blue blue sky is filled with butcher knives / and everyone you meet is wearing some stupid disguise.” Wussy Boys fall in love all the time, but they arenʼt with bubble- headed Budweiser models like, say, for instance, Pamela Anderson Lee, people who buy into this patriarchal image of women as lingerie models. No, Wussies prefer articulate girls who are creative and passionate. Examples: Fiona Apple; Tori Amos; Sarah McLachlin; Winona Ryder; Molly Ringwald; Ione Skye; Rosie OʼDonnell. (Hell yeah, I said Rosie OʼDonnell! Sheʼs the bomb-ass diva... did you see her performance in “Beautiful Girls” and the rant against lame, cock man oppressors she gave to Timothy Hutton in the drug store? Excellent... Rosie should be on posters in every teen-aged Wussy Boyʼs bedroom wall.) The difference, I think, between a Wussy Boy and some weak, spineless fucker is a sense of awareness: if you suck, but you realize that you suck and you make fun of yourself for sucking, then perhaps you are a Wussy Boy. Kurt Cobain was a classic example of a Wussy Boy. He was always fucked with by the jocks, but heʼd fuck with them right back. Yeah, he always got his ass kicked, and yeah he always got called a “fag,” but he swallowed that hurt and he turned it into songs that articu- lated the pain and rage. He was that little mouse flipping off the eagle about to snatch it up. Wussy Boys are sensitive guys who are not about to let you fuck with them forever; theyʼll eventually get you back. Not by kicking your ass, although some might be foolish enough to try, but by writing a kick-ass poem or song or book about you that exposes you for the shithead you are. And Wussy Boys are creative as fuck. (I mean, theyʼre not getting laid, so they have to channel that excess energy somewhere.) Wussy Boys are responsible for all kinds of innovations in music. In the late ʻ60s, the Wussy Boys saw that music needed to get back to its roots of self-expression and passion, so singers like James Taylor and Neil Young stripped it down and made it real again. In the ʻ70s, there were groups of Wussy Boys watching these cock rocker bands being lame and getting paid lots of money for it, so they resolved to get up there and do it right... only they couldnʼt play any instruments. So, they invented punk rock. In the late ʻ70s and early ʻ80s, these high school band geek Wussy Boys were inspired by all the fun the punkers were having, but all they could play were these Wussy instruments like trumpet and trombone. BOOM, Ska was born. Wussy Boys make music that is all about expressing the sadness and hurt of existence, but then in the next breath mocking themselves for feeling that way. Iʼm talking about classic Wussy bands like The Cure, The Smiths and Depeche Mode, but Iʼm also talking about the modern day Wussies like Wilco, Semisonic, New Radicals, Pulp, Radiohead, XTC... these literate boys who articulate the hurt, but who arenʼt afraid to rock out. Superchunk is there, and so are Modest Mouse and Pavement and Sebadoh and even Sonic Youth. I can not think of a more perfect collection of Wussy Boy music than “Songs From the Big Chair” by Tears For Fears. Oh yes, song after song of Wussy Boy anthems. I think the absolute perfect Wussy Boy anthem, though, is The Verveʼs “Bittersweet Symphony.” What a perfect video: this social outcast freak walking down a crowded street as he sings about his inner anguish, but heʼs not slinking in the shadows and bawling his fool head off, no, heʼs checking folks with his shoulders like a hockey player. Heʼs not about to let anyone but himself push him around. I am Wussy Boy, hear me roar (meow).

THE ULTIMATE SURVEY

I got the following long-assed survey via e-mail from Kelli, the publisher of 20 Bus. It took forever to ﬁll out, but was kinda fun, so I ended up getting all my e-friends to ﬁll out a version of their own. I guess itʼs a good way to get a quick, pop culture snapshot of someone, so Iʼm starting off my new zine with it. Donʼt choke.

• The Ultimate Survey For: The New Millennium • Full name: R. Eirik Ott • Nicknames: The Reverend, Big Poppa E • Other screen names: thrust • Hometown: Bakersfield, Calif., the city where red-blooded men eat red meat and display their names on their Tandy leather belts. Lots of big hair and oil wells in that there town. • School: Chico State University in Northern Calif., home to a gaggle of “Greek” idiots who choke on their own vomit and die need- lessly during their 21st birthday bar hops. Itʼs like fucking “Loganʼs Run” here, only the age has been reduced. • Croutons or bacon bits: Chow mein noodles • Favorite salad dressing: Balsamic and Olive oil • Crunchy or smooth: Crunchy, definitely crunchy. • Favorite shampoo or conditioner: That stuff by that guy, Doctor Bronner or something or another, with all the weird diatribes all over it about the second coming of Christ and prophecies. You know, that stuff that you can supposedly use as toothpaste and window cleaner. I can never remember the name. Iʼll have to look in my shower... • Have you ever gone skinny dipping: Yes. Hotel pools are good for that, but the ocean is way, way better. • Do you make fun of people: Uhm... I make up stories about people and sometimes they are funny and sometimes I laugh, but... you know, you sit in a cafe or something and just make up stuff about people based on the way they look and... uhm, well, kinda, sometimes, I guess I laugh a lot at things. • Favorite color(s): Deep forest green and cobalt blue. I love looking through those dark blue plates they sell at WalMart for a couple of bucks a piece. • Have you ever been convicted of a crime/ if yes, what?: err... This is a yucky question. I reserve the right to not answer any question that I feel is yucky. • Best on-line friends: Cas McGee, Ethan (from Jackhammer zine), Kyria (from Forbidden Panda e-zine), Charles Ellik, Ariana Waynes, SeeKing, Eitan Kadosh, Vandy, KittyBiskt. • One pillow or two? Two small ones and two big ones. • Pets: None. I want a dog really bad. Iʼve pretty much realized that my search for “god” was all backwards. But, I would settle for kitties. • Favorite movies: Cinema Paradiso, Galipoli, The Godfather, Rushmore. • Favorite type of music: Right now (and itʼs different every week) Iʼm big into Wussy Boy pop music, like New Radicals and Semisonic and The Verve. Last week it was trip-hop and drum-and-bass. Next week, who knows? • Hobbies: Zines, poetry slams, roadtripping, e-mail. • Type of car you drive now: Toyota 4WD with king cab and camper shell. Itʼs great for roadtrips. I just throw my single mattress in the back and Iʼm gone. • Words or phrases you overuse: “right on” • Soon to be boyfriend/girlfriend: Winona Ryder. She wants me bad. She leaves messages on my machine that I hardly ever return. Helen Hunt and Gweneth Paltrow get hella jealous. • Boyfriend/Girlfriend: Kimberly... kinda, sorta... off and on... • Piercing or tattoos?: Two piercings in both ears, ankh tattoo on my left ankle. • Most romantic thing that ever happened to you: I did a poem at the San Francisco poetry slam finals in front of 300+ people about my then-girlfriend Kimberly and by the end of it we were both crying and the audience cheered as I waded into the crowd and we hugged. It was just like “Fame.” • How do you characterize yourself? Ubiquitous. I just like all the uʼs and iʼs. Either that or “self-conscious as fuck.” • Do you get along with your parents?: Most of my immediate family was killed in a plane crash in the late 70s. They were on their way to a family reunion in Kansas. The only reason I wasnʼt on the plane was because I came down with some kind of ear infection that wouldʼve been painful on the flight. The next door neighbors were taking care of me for a while, but then I went from foster home to foster home until I was 16 and I sued for emancipation from the system. They didnʼt give it to me, so I ran away with a traveling circus troupe called “Dr. Beattyʼs Dingbat Extravaganza.” They were the only family I really knew. • Do you ever lie: See the answer to the above question. • Favorite town to chill in: San Francisco. Easily the best weather for me, plus hella good Thai and Indian food. Good people in the poetry scene, too. They are my friends. • Favorite food: Massamon Curry from Chada Thai in Chico. Great! • Favorite drink: Hot chai tea from Cafe Max in Chico. • Favorite ice cream: Chunky Monkey from B&J. • Favorite fruit: Right now, baby kiwis. They are these small kiwis about the size of grapes without all the fuzz that you pop right into your mouth. • Whatʼs your bed time: About 1 a.m. • Adidas, Nike or Reebok: Payless Shoe Source • Ougz or Tommy: Thrift Queen • Favorite song at the moment: “Your Emergencyʼs About to End” by Possum Dixon. • Favorite musical group(s): Morcheeba, Stereolab, Hooverphonic, Tortoise, Trans Am, Cowboy, Fang of Gore, Meeyow. • Favorite Solo Artist(s): Jane Siberry, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Prince, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple. • Favorite Subject in school: Journalism • Favorite Website: brandon.guggenheim.org (This is the only legitimate work of art on-line that I have seen. It is an amazing experience. I cannot recommend it highly enough. • Least Favorite Subject: Math. Yucca! • Favorite Alcoholic Drink: Something called a “Day Off.” I have no idea what it is but the bartender at Duffyʼs tavern in Chico makes them for me for free every time I put on a poetry event there. Itʼs sweet and I only have to drink 3 of them before I feel like I can talk to just about anyone. • Favorite Sport to watch: Poetry slams, these awesome displays of poetic hubris with randomly selected judges from the audience rating each performance on a 1-10 scale. Itʼs meant to be done in front of a HUGE audience, the bigger the better, and is yet another Wussy Boy innovation that allows poets to be rock stars. • Most Humiliating moment: When I asked Spike Lee why he did the taco Bell commercials and he got mad and cussed at me and stormed out of the press conference and pictures of me getting yelled at by Spike Lee were on the front pages of newspapers all over town. • Loudest person you know: Me. • Craziest person or silliest you know: Vandy Ham. Sheʼs the bomb-ass Diva. • Sweetest person(s) you know: Lady Miss K. • Favorite Holiday: Arbor Day. • What do you look for in the opposite sex or same sex: An easy- going sense of humor. Creativity. Passion. • Personal Quote: Poets muddy their shallow waters to make them appear deep.

A LITTLE SOMETHING

A weird thing happened... I was doing a reading at the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco the other night. It was a pretty decent reading and afterwards, this guy comes up to me and shakes my hand and says he really liked my stuff. I could feel a folded up piece of paper in his palm, like he was palming me a note or something. He kept shaking my hand and said something like, “And hereʼs a little something to help you with gas money,” so Iʼm thinking, cool, right on, dude just slipped me a fiver or something, so I put it in my pocket without looking and tell him thanks a whole lot and tell him that if he comes to the slam bout on Sunday at Cafe Du Nord, Iʼll hook him up with a couple of chapbooks. And we say goodbye and I walk down the stairs and my friend asked me what that was all about and I say that some dude just slipped me some gas money and I pull it out of my pocket... and I find myself looking at a crisp $100 bill. I couldnʼt believe it was real. I checked it for those little red squigglies and they were there... I held it up to the light and saw the little strip embedded in the fibers... it was there. I couldnʼt believe. I can actually pay my phone bill now. Some- times, life is good. SEXY WITCHES AND SEXY PIRATES

Iʼm sitting here in the newsroom of Chico Stateʼs student paper, The Orion, trying to finish my stuff and Iʼm listening to my headphones and I decide to pop my thumb knuckle and when I do the CD player on the computer suddenly shuts off. So, what do I do? I pop my other thumb knuckle to see if I can get the CD player to turn back on. I do that all the time, like Iʼll be in my room writing or something and Iʼll clear my throat and way off in the distance a car alarm will go off and for a few seconds Iʼll wonder if clearing my throat triggered the car alarm way off in the distance and Iʼll try to clear my throat again to see if I can get something else to happen. Einstein said that creative minds play with themselves all the time and that talking to yourself out-loud is a sign of an intelligent mind taking care of itself. I can only hope... Halloween was fun, but... there seemed to be this weird negative vibe to the whole shebang. Chico is a town of kids who will party for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Itʼs got a well-deserved reputation as the party school town, and the student population is heavy with frats and sororities. Since there really is not much more to Chico than the university and the downtown area, the students come out in full force on holidays worthy of drinking and carousing. The big ones are Saint Patrickʼs Day and Halloween. Kids get up hella early and line up in front of the pubs wearing their green hair and green clothes and they drink green beer and eat green eggs and ham and by 10 a.m. everyone in the entire downtown area is drunk as a skunk, or they dress up, like last night, and roam the streets of Chico in a downtown freak show that stuffs the sidewalks to way beyond capacity. So much pushing and shoving... my killer rad suit made of old Rolling Stone issues was styling, but within five minutes the shit was in tatters from drunken oaf fuckers pushing and shoving and full-on ripping into it. Literally, some drunk fucker came up behind me within five minutes of hitting the strip and yanked my Rolling Stone magazine pages shirt from my body, just tanked that shit right off. Fucker. And there were all these out of town Guido types sporting full-on ʼ70s Kojak mustaches who were harassing all the Sexy Witches and Sexy Pirates and Sexy Flight Attendants and Sexy Old Bag Ladies with all kinds of rank ʼ70s come ons like “Hey Sexy Nursie, howʼs about prescribing me a big kiss” or “Hey Sexy Wonder Woman, howʼs about roping my heart with your invisible rope and giving me a big kiss.” I swear to God there mustʼve been a shuttle bus running from Oroville (the nearby hick town) to downtown Chico last night. And what is up with big lout frat guys dressing up as girls? I mean, these are the most misogynist, homophobic assholes, but on this one night a year, the most popular costume by far is a guy dressed up as a girl. Itʼs so weird... Anyway, I was lit like a firefly after 20 minutes on Fuzzy Navels, so it was all good. Fuck it, I became Tattered Homeless Guy. Right on. I kicked major ass and took out at least three out-of-towners with a quick kick to the adamʼs apple. YAH! Fuckers! I am so avoiding work.

FEAR OF A BLACK HAT

So, check this out ... Iʼm in this lower-level communications class that I sorta forgot to take, see, and weʼre studying non-verbal communication and how the visual cues we as a society take for granted are very often misleading ... so the instructor picks ﬁve guys from the audience for a demonstration: 1) Blond-haired Hottie Boy Snowboarder Dude; 2) Straight Society Republican Suit Boy With Glasses; 3) Big Long- Haired Bearded Biker Dude; 4) Random College Kid Guy; and 5) me. He tells this audience of 200 that they will “cast” a cowboy movie by cheering for the person they want to see in each of ﬁve parts: the hero, the villain, the sheriff, the banker, and the town drunk. So ... we start with the hero. The professor puts his hand over Biker Guyʼs head and only a few people clap, but still others kinda laugh at the notion of Biker Guy being the good guy. He moves on to Republi- can Guy, but hardly anyone claps because heʼs so very obviously going to be cast as the banker. They get to me and thereʼs complete silence, followed by laughter at how no one picked me at all. We get to Snow- boarder Guy and the crowd goes wild. Hottie Boy is declared the hero. Next up is the villain. He starts with Biker Guy and a few people clap. Random College Kid gets no claps, as does Republican Guy. When they get to me, the audience roars even louder than they did for the Hero Guy. Overwhelmingly, I am chosen as the bad guy. Biker Guy, by the way, ended up being the town drunk. So, I was a little cynical about the whole affair ... I mean, of course, Little Mister Hottie Boy gets to be the hero because we are naturally attracted to lightness for our heroes: i.e., blond hair, blue eyes, clean shaven, bright snowboarder clothing. We want villains to be dark, as in dark hair, dark eyes, dark facial hair, which is me. Itʼs the whole black-hat/white-hat thing. And yeah, while it is very often true that the villains are the most interesting people in the movie, way more than the silly little, mushy, love-interest hero guy, it still sucks to be pidgeon- holed. Thatʼs all good ... I could tell that if you gave Hottie Boy a mike and set him up in front of an audience and told him to rock the house, all his genetic good luck would fail him. I, on the other hand, with my villainous looks, would tear the roof off the sucker. So, he can have his Hottie-Boy looks ...... jerk ... My friend Cale and I used to say that we were not the type of people who would turn heads upon entering a party, but we were the ones youʼd be talking to by the end of the night, and in the end, that is the kind of Cutie Boy Iʼd rather be ...... but, still ... I donʼt know if Iʼm doomed or blessed by societyʼs fear of a black hat and its inability to see me as anything other than the villain or, even worse (or better), the sidekick. I e-mailed the story about that day in my comm class to my poet friend Cas in Berkeley the other day, and what he e-mailed back gave me pause. He said, “If you think walking around all day with a ʻblack hatʼ leads people to think bad things about you that hurt your feelings, you should try walking around all day with black skin.”

GOD IS A MEAN DRUNK

I just got through taking a test on things I know nothing about. I full-on was whispering “Obi-wan, please help me” under my breath, closing my eyes and shoving crystals in my ass for good luck. I totally fudged this test... What the hell was I thinking? Divine intervention doesnʼt come along often enough. If Mary can have a baby without actually doing it, then why canʼt I pass a measly Comm 202 test without actually studying? Fuck, my Boy can turn water into wine, but He canʼt turn my F into at least a C? What kinda God is that? I think the guy who came up with the line “God helps those who help themselves” didnʼt have the balls to say “Youʼre on your own, kid. Godʼs got Caller ID and youʼre not on His list.” Actually, one time I called Godʼs home phone and someone with a high voice answered and said God wasnʼt taking calls. I paused a moment, then said, “God, come off it with the fake voice and just answer my damn call, Jeez.” He hung up. Bastard. Sometimes when God is drunk, heʼll leave fucked up messages on my answering machine. Shit like, “Hee hee, this is God. You know that pony you were asking for in the ﬁfth grade? (Snort) Hee hee. Remem- ber how you said youʼd do anything for it, even be a priest when you grow up, if only youʼd get a real pony? Well... (Snort) hee hee, remember how good those hamburgers tasted at your birthday party? Hee hee... They wasnʼt made of ham, Iʼll tell you that. HAAA!” Or heʼll say, “Remember that red-haired girl with green eyes who played the cello and wore thick sweaters? Remember how you begged and pleaded with me to make her love you? How long has it been now? Ten, eleven years, and you have no idea where she is? Well, she used to pray to me like that about you, too. She still wonders what happened.” God is a mean drunk. Heʼll piss on humanity, but he always feels bad the next day, so heʼll do shit like send John Glenn into space to make us feel better.

SHARING THE MAGIC

Santa Claus just bugs me. I really truly believe that once your childhood belief system starts falling apart like the brown needles of a dead Christmas tree, faith in anything is hard to ﬁnd. I have told my parents that Santa will be strictly verboten in whatever little household I might someday be a part of... that whole rampant commercialization thing has so very little to do with love and respect and family camaraderie and everything to do with the fucked up Westernization of the entire world. Urgh... However, my parents have made it perfectly clear that if their little darling grandchildren come to their house in Wichita, Kansas, that they will infect their little minds with the myth of Santa Claus and make me look like a bad parent for not “sharing the magic” with them. I think this attitude is emblematic of their total lack of respect for me or anything that I feel passionate about.

ENSLAVEMENT OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY

Iʼve been sorta holed up inside my little soul and working through the days by going to work at the print shop and coming home and scaring up creative projects to tide me over until school starts again. The month and a half off between Christmas and the new year always de- flates me a bit and makes me feel like Iʼm in-between times. As soon as the new semester starts, I can start my new poetry slam series. As soon as the new semester starts, I can begin my long crawl toward graduation again. As soon as the new semester starts, I can be in a town full of people again (potential new friends). As soon as the new semester starts... Thanksgiving and Christmas were unique joys. God, I dislike this time of year. For “Enslavement of Indigenous Peoples Day,” I went six hours south to my hick hometown Bakersfield to see my parents and my extended family (my parents had flown in from Wichita). It was weird, seeing these people I barely knew but was somehow related to. I tried, really I did, to talk to each and every one of them and try to put on my brave my brave my brave face, but they all acted like I was some pizza delivery guy who was schmoozing with someone elseʼs family. Itʼs so odd... how can these people who are forever 12 years old in those old yellow photographs be these overweight mommies and daddies with kids and jobs and divorces and child custody lawsuits and all the trappings of adulthood in a fucked up town like Bakersfield? I would slide up next to some half-remembered cousin and say something like, “So, youʼre a nurse, huh? Wow, a nurse. Isnʼt that something...” And they would say a little something like, “Yup, a nurse.” I would just kinda be standing there, kinda hoping they would say something else, go into detail, but they would look away, or at their drink, or just start up a conversation with the person standing next to them as if I had walked away. I kept hoping that someone would bother to say something even remotely resembling, “So, Eirik, I hear you do poetry. Whatʼs that like?” But, it was not to be. I asked all the questions, and all I got in return were mono-syllabic answers followed by the cold shoulder. Oy, I ended up spending most of my time avoiding eye contact, sitting on the couch pretending to watch football with some strangers I was told were relatives. My Grandma Ott was really cool, though. Sheʼs the only one who seems to give a shit, who seems to see through all the bullshit. Sheʼs the only one in Bakersfield Iʼd actually come to visit on a non-holiday. Sheʼs old school, but sheʼs bright and witty and funny in a redneck grandma sort of way. She used to leave messages on my machine like, “Hey there, you little asshole! Instead of living in sin with all your poetry hussies, you ought to give your grandma a call!” Sheʼs cool. She was the only bright light in the entire thing, but she didnʼt have the stomach for it and left early. I shouldʼve gone with her. For “Capitalistic Orgy Day,” I spent the week with Kimberly in San Jose and glommed on to her family, which was nice in that it gave me a place to be and presents to buy and open, but which was also a magnifying glass on the fact that my family is a million miles away even when theyʼre in the same room. Ugh, as nice as it was, I was drained by the time it was over... I felt like I was making nice and performing for the benefit of Kimberlyʼs family... And now, here I am, waiting for the new school year to start, wanting to buy kitties because I have no friends. God, that sounds depressing... Iʼm actually not all that bummed, really, kinda, sorta, I keep telling myself, Iʼm actually enjoying the time to myself, huh, yeah, huh?

THE MYSTERIES OF PEACH COBBLER

1. 12 years old turning tricks in Okie truckstops my grandma 1932

sheʼd do anything to get out of town anything to fade into that Western sunset to pick peaches penny a pound in the Golden State in Lamont in Arvin in Wasco in Shafter

sheʼd lie tell them she was 16 sheʼd lie tell them she loved them lie on her back in the dirty rags and boxes of their pickup trucks

this pale slip of a blue-eyed farm girl

easy money from a lonely man 600 miles from his home. his wife. his 12-year-old daughter. and their hot breath stank of bathtub gin and hand-rolled cigarettes and their rough stubble tore at her skin like a fatherʼs belt and she held them all tightly and dreamed of palm trees and ﬁelds and ﬁelds of peach trees ripe for the plucking.

2. i watch my grandmotherʼs hands blurred by constant motion and the gravity of age. she slips the just sharpened knife into the soft flesh of her backyard peaches and guides the edge along the unseen stone, cracks open the fruit with a soft, wet ripping of ripe flesh then peels the thin skin with flicks of her thumb against the blade. she does this for an hour, her hands pink and sticky with juice, while i stir cinnamon and nutmeg into boiling sugar syrup and roll flour and salt and ice water into dough. later we spoon the warm golden crisp and golden bulbs of sweetness — pure childhood — into bowls of cold milk and she nods her head as i smile the same grateful grandkid smile iʼve had for 32 years.

i do most of the work when my grandmother makes peach cobbler these days, but she insists on cutting the peaches.

Note: Just for the record, this poem was partially inspired by my Grandma Ott, but she didnʼt go through that experience of sleeping her way to California. I can just imagine my grandma getting a hold of this and leaving a message on my machine: “Look, you little shit! You cainʼt be telling your fancy poetry friends that your grandmaʼs a hussy! Itʼs all lies! I never picked peaches! I donʼt even like peach cobbler!” Again, for the record, let me say that the peach cobbler grandma is Grandma Atchley, not Grandma Ott, only she makes them by dump- ing a can of Del Monte peaches into a Sara Lee ready-made pie crust. I made up the whole poem, but used certain elements of my two grandmas to give it ﬂavor and emotion. Okay, Grandma?

ONE LESS CONNECTION IN THIS WORLD

Iʼm in Barnes & Noble looking for some books to buy with a gift certificate I got as a present and I bump into this guy I sorta know but not really and we both just stare at each other and smile and nod and say, “Hey, howʼs it going?” but then we hit that pause... I mean, what the hell else are you supposed to say? Our only connection at all, our only reason for knowing of the otherʼs existence, is from some poetry readings we did about a year ago and thatʼs it, nothing else between then and now, and the only things I know about him are that he did some poetry things a year ago and that he used to date that hottie chick and thatʼs it. What do you say? “So, you still writing?” Itʼs stupid. We kinda nod our heads and shuffle our feet and say yeah, weʼre still writing, just not reading much around Chico anymore because thereʼs nowhere to read in Chico anymore. I ask him, “So, you still seeing that hottie chick?” and we talk about our chicks for a bit, then itʼs like...well...gosh... “Well, I guess Iʼd better get back to shopping... got a gift certificate and all...” and I show it to him like itʼs proof that Iʼm not really blowing him off because I have nothing to say, but because, see, see here, I gotta gift certificate just like I said and itʼs burning a hole in my hand. Then we walk away and Iʼm sure weʼre both thinking, “Iʼm glad thatʼs over.” You gotta stop and chat, though, otherwise it seems like youʼre shining the person, but then you have such a slender connection that thereʼs really nothing much to say beyond the initial platitudes. Maybe we should just smile and nod the next time we see each other, but then that means the next time after that we might only smile and not nod and keep on walking, then maybe the next time after that we wonʼt even smile, then heʼs just like anybody else on the street and Iʼll have one less connection in this world. I donʼt know, maybe thatʼs why you should keep on talking even though thereʼs not really much to say. Anyway, I just woke up about five minutes ago — just BOOM, two oʼclock in the morning, I was awake — and I went to the bathroom, rubbed some yuck from my left eye that had collected there since I fell asleep two hours ago and so I thought Iʼd write about this.

THE CUTEST GODDAMNED KITTIES IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

Being a long-term senior in a college town like Chico sure can grate on a person after a while. Case in point: My two best friends graduated last semester and moved on to jobs in the Real World far away, leaving me to head into the new semester without the two most important people in my life. Sure, Iʼve got school friends and work friends and poetry friends and other periphery friends that will come to be just as important as the ones who left — true to that old saying about old friends being silver and new friends being gold... or something... anyway — but man, I sure do miss my best friends. So, to get me through the lean times, I did what any self-respecting Wussy Boy would do when suddenly presented with a whole big bunch of extra free time on his hands: I bought a buttload of new CDs from Tower Records and a fat wad of new clothes at the factory outlet mall, then I went to the Butte Humane Society and adopted some new best friends. As of three weeks ago, my latest companions are Aretha and The- lonious, ten-week-old littermates named after the Queen of Soul and one of the masters of piano jazz, Thelonious Monk. They are, without a doubt, the cutest kitties in the whole wide world. Theyʼre black with white chests and little white paws, little green eyes, little pink noses, and so much spunk that I just canʼt help making cutesy-cutesy sounds every time I see them. They are so goddamned cute I just want to bite ʻem. Theyʼre so goddamned cute I could just walk up to Meg Ryan and slap her. God, theyʼre so cute I just want to kick somebodyʼs ass. As soon as I had signed the paperwork and gotten my kitties into my truck in their brand new cardboard kitty carrier, I went straight to Petco and went on a kitty gear buying frenzy of checking account splitting proportions. I bought an automatic kitty waterer and an automatic kitty feeder, then bought eight pounds of the top of the line kitty chow. I bought a kitty potty box with a domed cover and a charcoal filter to devour the kitty smells, then bought a big-ass bucket of clumping kitty litter and a slotted kitty poo scooper. I piled all this on the counter in front of the Petco helper person — who smiled and said, “New cat?” — then ran back to the kitty toys section and bought handfuls of hollow kitty balls with bells inside and kitty rope mice and kitty fishing poles with feathers on the end. I dumped these on the counter and tried to figure out what else I needed. The counter person pointed to the display behind me and said, “Do have one of those?” I turned and gazed into kitty scratching post Nirvana, this huge display of wooden contraptions covered in brightly colored heavy-duty carpeting. There were kitty houses and kitty cars and kitty jungle gyms and all manner of posty looking things meant for kitties to scratch to their hearts delight. I picked out this killer kitty condo covered in two different colors of carpet. I bought so much stuff that the counter person had to help me carry it all out to my truck. Of course, I showed off my kitties once I got everything loaded, goading the counter person by saying, “Arenʼt they just the most precious kitties in the whole wide world?” The counter person was a trooper, never once explaining how many thousands of kitties sheʼs undoubtedly seen in her time, and declared that my kitties were indeed among the cutest goddamned kitties in the whole wide world. Now I rush home from work at every lunch break, ready to play with my new furry roommates. As soon as I enter my room, I squeal, “Kitties!” and they come galumphing out from whatever nook or cranny in which theyʼve been hiding and scramble up my pants with their little kitty claws and perch on my shoulders like little furry chickens. The latest cutest thing in the whole wide world that Aretha and Thelonious do is something Iʼve dubbed WKW, World Kitty Wrestling. While I provide color commentary, my kitty combatants battle it out on the rooftop of the kitty condo, doling out bites and squeaks and kitty bear hugs. Theloniousʼ signature move is the deadly Upside-Down Kit- ty Headlock with Rear Paw Face Kicks, while Aretha likes to scramble to the tip top of my computer chair and take impossibly long flying leaps across the room and onto Theoʼs head. My other roommates, the human ones, must think Iʼve lost it because I giggle uncontrollably every time they pull a good kitty move or fall in a fluffy clot off the kitty condo. They just crack me up. I was talking to one of the two recently-graduated best friends on the phone the other night while Aretha and Thelonious nestled in a clump on my chest under the covers of my bed. She said she was excited and challenged by her new job, but that she had been kinda lonely ever since she left Chico. In fact, she said, she went out to the Humane Society where she lives and bought another kitty, bringing her kitty total to two, just like me. She said she had felt a little less lonely with her kitties playing in her new apartment. We laughed, even though we were a little sad, joking that it took two kitties for each of us to replace the other. Too true, too true...

KINDA WEIRD AND OBSESSIVE

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and he told me that he posted an Internet personal advertisement. So far, he said, heʼs met three girls, two of which were kinda weird and yucky and one who heʼs been spending a lot of time with. Hmmm... I havenʼt met all that many people through the Internet. In fact, I try to spend as little time on a computer as I can, which is kinda hard since my job consists of sitting in front of a computer all day. Well, okay, actually I check my e-mail obsessively, but I do it in ﬁve minute spurts. I donʼt, like, sit there for hours on end. At least I try not to. Basically, I think a lot of the “chat room” type stuff is a big fat waste of time, and so are computer games. Unless Iʼm creating something on my computer, whether itʼs art or poetry, I really want the thing turned off, you know? Some people get addicted to that thing, just like television. Iʼd rather take a walk in the park... Anyway, I do e-mail a lot of people around the country, mostly people I have met through poetry and want to keep in contact with. Itʼs quick and easy and I can reach a bunch of people in a very short time. Plus itʼs cheap. But, e-mailʼs got nothing on real live conversation with ﬂesh and blood people. I only have so much tolerance for this medium before I have to turn it off and have real experiences. The problem Iʼve seen in the people I have met at random on the Internet is that... well, you tend to learn more about who they THINK they are than who they REALLY are, you know? The few times Iʼve met some brand new person after e-mailing them a while, theyʼve turned out to be kinda weird and obsessive and not at all like the person they projected through their e-mails. This anonymity is such a shield, both from the outside and the inside. Itʼs too safe. Meeting someone in person involves a social risk and I think that risk is very important. I donʼt mean risk like “physical danger,” but, like... you know, a person is made up of much more than their carefully crafted and censored e-mails... they are smells and clothes and hair and teeth and speech and lisps and hand gestures and eyes and all the other things... people tend to romanticize the Internet, I think, for its power to allow everyone to be who they want to be, but really... who a person wants to be and who a person is are very often two different people. So, there you go, thatʼs basically why I donʼt go around meeting people at random over the Internet. Got no patience for it. Iʼd rather have real experiences.

REALLY, REALLY SHY, PAINFULLY SHY

I havenʼt really chatted much, but the e-mail system at my university used to have this thing where you could, like, break into someoneʼs e-mail session and something would appear on their computer screen, like, “Hey, wanna chat?” Then you could go to this separate screen and talk. It was kinda cool, and I did it a couple of times. I ended up chatting with this one girl about all kinds of things, so we decided to meet, but this girl who came off as so with it and cool and neat-o over the chat thingie was really, really shy, painfully shy, so shy that she sorta hunched over in an effort to kinda hide from peopleʼs view... she mumbled and twitched and smelled kinda bad and talked all the time about how she was going to make a lot of money writing screenplays for The Simpsons... I totally donʼt mean to make this seem like Iʼm making fun of her or anything, itʼs just that she seemed to completely neglect the social aspects of her personality in favor of her inner self, you know, and sometimes thatʼs a bit... uhm... off-putting? We didnʼt end up hanging out long, which was a shame because we got along great on-line.

KICK-ASS SOUNDGARDEN HAIR

There was a time several years ago when the absolute male model of attractiveness in my mind was the guy from Soundgarden, Chris Cornell. You know, that long shag of hair and little Joseph Fiennes goatee? And, for a while, I tried to achieve that goal. I grew my hair really long, the longest it had ever been, all the way down to the middle of my back. I grew the goatee just before “Nevermind” hit in ʼ91, so I can safely say that I had a goatee before anyone else did, plus I was the first to pierce both ears (I was in Bakersfield, mind you, so this was a statement). I even had a hair wrap in my hair that I now keep in my desk at home. Itʼs long... I show it to people to exhibit how long my hair was... Itʼs about two feet long, Iʼd think. My cats use it as a chew toy. And you know what? In that entire three year period of not cutting my hair and letting it get all long and natural and as Soundgarden-esque as I could, not a single one of my friends told me that it looked like complete shit, which it did. No, they withheld that info until I moved to Chico and decided to shave my head. Then everyone I had ever known came to me and said something along the lines of “Oh thank God you finally cut your hair! Itʼs looked like shit for three years!” Ainʼt that the way it works? Anyway, Iʼve shaved my head on a regular basis for five years now and everyone who knows me is surprised by the idea of me with hair down to the middle of my back. Iʼm kinda letting it grow out, though, for the first time since I left my dreams of kick-ass Soundgarden hair behind. Kimberly has been begging me to try out a “George Clooney” look, and Iʼve finally decided to give it a try. Iʼve got a little sideburn action going, and my hair kinda gets all wavy and messy when I get up in the morning. That used to be the sign I should get out my razor, the fact that my hair was long enough to give my sleeping habits away. Now, Iʼm resisting the urge to cut it all off... I had my first hair cut in five years just about two weeks ago. I paid $17 for a trim. It was nice to get my head shampooed... that was always my favorite part.

FUCK A BUNCH OF GEORGE CLOONEY

Yesterday, I shaved my head with my clippers, then Bicʼed what was left. I fucking hate my hair. Fuck a bunch of George Clooney. I like my head shaved. Kimberly will just have to deal.

I LOVE MY MAC!

Oh , that headline, that beautiful headline: “Apple is back in black for year.” Right there on the front page of the Sacramento Bee, with the kicker: “Makes $309 million thanks partly to iMac.” My hands shook as my eyes turned skyward, toward heaven, and thanked almighty God for letting Apple Computer get back on its feet and making money for the first time since 1995. You have no idea how important Apple computers have been to me. My school system in Bakersfield didnʼt have computers until I was in 8th grade, but they wouldnʼt let any kids use them except for the eggheads in the advanced math classes. I wasnʼt one of those lucky kids, but I was friends with them, so I managed a contact learning high as soon as they unveiled those very first rustic Apple II computers. I would sneak into the math lab after school with my egghead friend Pete Pacini, the same egghead friend who got seven Rubikʼs Cubes for his 13th birthday, and we would play the latest computer games. This wasnʼt Mario Brothers we were playing, either, this wasnʼt even Atari 2600 stylie, this was like... thereʼd be this little blip running across the top of the screen, and we would all agree that, yes, that was our bomber plane. Then weʼd hit the space bar and another little blip would fall, and we would all agree that it was a bomb. If the “bomb” hit the square block at the bottom of the screen, known as the “enemy headquarters,” we were rewarded with a two-tone “beep-boop” to signal our victory. We would line up for days to get a chance to play that game. It was so old school that we had a tape drive — a cassette tape drive! — as a storage device. I remember waiting FOREVER trying to find that damn computer game on that slow-assed tape drive. But, we thought we were styling; especially me, since I wasnʼt even supposed to be in there. The next year, in high school, we got our first Apple IIeʼs with floppy disc drives, and Iʼm talking full-on floppy floppies, too, like they were actually floppy. I was so excited, but again, the only kids allowed access were in the highest level math classes. I didnʼt care; I was hooked. Iʼd sneak in and look over my friendsʼ shoulders and copy parts of their BASIC computer programs and figure out what made them work. Surreptitious access to these new computers unleashed a new creativity in me. We all played Dungeons & Dragons (of course), and I was the first to make a text-based D&D game that was like those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. We would have contests to see who could make the grossest, most obscene BASIC games. For some reason, having a computer flash cuss words across its screen was held in very high regard. And then came 1984, the year I will always remember as long as I live. This was the year Apple Computer unveiled the Macintosh, the simple, elegant computer that changed the world of personal comput- ing. Our school bought a room full of Macs and started up its very first BASIC computer class. By this time, I was a junior with several years of experience with writing my own programs, so, even though I had never been allowed to take a computer class, I was our schoolʼs first BASIC computer class teacherʼs aid. I loved those Macs, and still do. My Macintosh Quadra 630 sits on my desk at home, positioned in front of my second story window so I can look out at the sky and the clouds as I type. I donʼt really play games anymore (except for Myst and Riven, but those are, like, absolutely necessary). Iʼm on my Mac almost every day, though, typing another entry into my journal or assembling my latest chapbook of poetry or designing yet another poster for yet another poetry reading. My Mac is a steady friend, always ready to give me some creative outlet just when I need it most. Over the years, Iʼve watched as Appleʼs market share has dwindled to single digit percentages, pushed out by those odd birds known as IBM-compatible PCs. Oh God, I wince at the slightest the mention of IBM... donʼt even dare say Microsoft around me, either, because Iʼd like to kick Bill Gates in the teeth for doing so well while my precious Apple shivers in the corner half dead. Have you ever gone to a computer store and tried to buy Mac-compatible software or books or anything at all for that matter? Itʼs impossible! I have to order everything out of catalogs! Itʼs horrible! But now, finally, Apple seems to be back on its feet again, thanks to the return of co-founder Steve Jobs (also known to Mac freaks like me as “Saint Jobs.”) Maybe, just maybe, thereʼll be a time in the not- too-distant future when I can just walk right up to the counter of some computer store named “Sheckyʼs Wacky World of Macintosh” and be surrounded by the latest computer geek paraphernalia again. It would be just like the old days. God, I love my Mac. THE SECRET ENTRANCE TUMBLEWEED

I was thinking about my shitty little hometown, Bakersfield. Itʼs a dusty California town that straddles the central and southern parts of the state, crouched at the bottom end of the big central valley. Los An- geles is over the hills and about 110 miles south. Itʼs the biggest shitty little town Iʼve ever seen, crammed with 220,000 shitheads with not a whole lot to do. For a kid growing up there — and, mind you, there are so many kids that Bakersfield has, like, 15 high schools — there is really nothing much to do but get drunk and fuck or get in a gang and fight. Or do what I did and wait it out until youʼre old enough to leave and never come back. Bakersfield brings out strange shit in a kid, I think. Itʼs a dry and desolate little burg. My family always lived at the outskirts of town, where developers would chop down what few trees there were, then name streets after them. We lived on Appletree Lane, and I donʼt remember a single apple tree on the entire block. We had tumbleweeds, though. Thatʼs what my friends and I used to build forts. There was this big brick wall in the middle of the dirt field across the street from our housing tract that just stood there like it was waiting to be surrounded by houses. Weʼd dig a hole at the base of the wall, then cover it with a huge pile of dried-up tumbleweeds that had been gathered by the wind. From the outside, it looked like just another pile of tumbleweeds upside a wall. But if you knew which tumbleweed was the “Secret Entrance Tumbleweed,” you could gain access to our little hideaway decked out with all the lawn chairs, card tables and milk crates we could liberate. It was cool hanging out in our thorny fort, watching people walk by completely unaware of the pack of little kids, and their baseball cards and comic books, hiding in the pile of dried-up sticker bushes. I got suspended from school one year for getting beaten up by some mean kid (the school had a “zero tolerance” rule against fighting that included, I guess, being dragged into the boysʼ bathroom and kicked in the face for telling someone, “No, you canʼt steal my Walk- man.”) I spent the entire day in my tumbleweed fort with my German Shepherd named Chinook, listening to the “Grease” soundtrack and leafing through the latest issue of The Amazing Spiderman. My parents never knew I had been suspended, and I told them my fat lip was caused in a BMX crash in the field across from my house. At the time, Iʼm sure I had no idea that Iʼd always remember that moment, sitting under the tumbleweeds with my dog and my Walkman that Iʼd gotten beaten up and suspended for defending. But, thatʼs what I ended up thinking about the other night. And it made me laugh and shake my head to picture it. Itʼs weird how the passage of time makes just about anything funny, even growing up in a godforsaken town like Bakersfield.

THE HOME FRONT

To die brilliantly was always the goal, to tear at our schoolclothes upon impact of a well-aimed dirtclod and tumble screaming and gurgling from freshly erected mountains of dark, moist earth in a tangle of scuffed Keds and bowl cut hair, to crumble in a heap with a weak “medic...” spilling from our lips, to heave a trembling sigh and die with our eyes half open and our hands clutching an invisible smoking carbine.

We were a motley crew of redneck kids battling hordes of The Enemy in the shadow of skeleton houses at the outskirts of town, crawling on our bellies in the water pipe trenches of soon-to-be strip malls and convenience stores and rows upon rows of cloned tract houses. Every saturday we met while our parents watched family shows on the teevee, met in the ﬁeld cleared of trees and paved with streets named “oak” and “birch,” met by the scuffed yellow tractors and earth movers and dumptrucks (tanks & jeeps & troop transports) left by workmen over the weekend.

We peppered our speech with grizzled epithets worthy of combat and bristling with battle-hardened authenticity:

“stop crying and ﬁght like a man you little faggot!”

“get off your cunt and ﬁght like a man you little pussy!”

“shut your faggot mouth before I give you a reason to cry, recruit!”

I remember the last time we played war.

John P. crouched behind a thick tangle of tumbleweeds and hefted a ﬁst-sized clod embedded with concrete and weeds — I heard it sizzle as it missed my ear by inches — and nailed Bo right between the eyes. Bo, who was always the point man leading us into the thickest of battles, who always died the most magniﬁcent deaths, who spewed paint-stripping obscenities strange and venomous and wondrous to our ears, whose body arced like a dying gull through the air to collapse with a huff onto the trampled earth clutching severed limbs and sucking chest wounds and convulsing with the most convincing of death throes.

Bo just stood there, stunned by the chunk of rock embedded in his forehead, and let a slender thread of red carve a trail through the dirt of his nose.

We tensed, waiting for the inevitable torrent of curses that would become catchphrases in the battles to come. We watched one bulbous drop of real live blood dangle from the curve of his nostril and splash on the laces of his dirty white tennies.

He glared at John P., then Gary, then Mookie, then me, then tore the concrete from his head and threw it with all his might into the ground. He mounted his bmx bike and peddled away away away.

The next Saturday it was just me and Garyʼs dirty-faced kid sister swinging our legs from the attic of our favorite skeleton house and talking in hushed tones about the end of all things.

WHY DO POETRY?

So, I went to a party last night, the birthday party of a girl named Jen that I kinda like and who kinda likes me... and at one point during the night, with everyone drunk on beer and conversation, I kinda looked over at her and she kinda looked over at me and we kinda smiled at each other and lifted a beer in salute and it occurred to me that this is just about right... When I think about why I write poetry, itʼs this: to not allow simple moments like that connection across a party room fade away. I donʼt think Iʼll ever be capable of writing poetry or creating art that will revolutionize the world and change reality... rather, Iʼd like to think that what I do documents the simple little moments that make life really kinda cool. Why do poetry? What are we trying to say? Why do we need to do it in such a way that displays our inner workings on a page in front of people? Do you ever wonder if your life is worthy of such scrutiny? (This is, of course, working on the assumption that most work is at least semi-autobiographical.) Iʼd like to think that anyoneʼs life is worthy of art. Everyoneʼs life deserves a movie, if not a week-long mini-series. (I think I ripped that out of the mouth of Jim Morrison, but I canʼt quite be sure.)

CHUCKING IT ALL AND FOLLOWING MY BLISS

Why poetry? Itʼs kinda like that Marilyn Manson song... “I donʼt like the Poetry (but the Poetry likes me).” I canʼt really help it. Iʼve tried to kick the habit and ﬁnd something better to do with my time, something more constructive, something like, oh, I donʼt know, getting a real job with a future, like... an insurance agent? My father would like that. He would like if I traded in all my roadtrips and chapbooks and poetry readings and became an upright member of his straight, white, patriarchal, homophobic, redneck, asshole, misogynist, mainstream, fucked up, materialistic society, but you know what? I donʼt buy into the notion that a person should live their life chained to a time clock on top of an endless stream of bills — bills for the satellite dish, bills for the new car every two years, bills for business trips to Branson, Mis- souri, bills for every fucking thing except for FREEDOM and HAPPI- NESS and LOVE. And fun, goddamn it, fun is a word that is still very important... I think the moment you lose your hold on the simple truth of FUN is the moment you shed your childhood magic and became grey and dismal and, dare I say it, ADULT. Listen: friends donʼt let friends grow up. I invented that phrase. You are not allowed to use it unless you tell people that you got it from me. It is copyrighted and protected by law. I do poetry because I canʼt help it. It oozes out of me like sweat on a hot day. I stink with poetry. It stains everything I touch. I think that if a person writes poetry for any other reason, they are faking it and need very desperately to stop. I need to eat, though, and while selling chapbooks at poetry readings is fun and allows me to meet people and may even buy me a meal or two now and then, it certainly wonʼt pay my rent (yet). My day job through college is as a graphic designer for a print company. My day job after graduation will be as a journalist. But, if ever the time comes when I can hit the road and make enough money to get to the next stop and do another poetry reading... Iʼm chucking it all and following my bliss.

THOSE ROCK STAR EYES

I am so fucked up right now. I mean, not in a Heineken and tortilla chip sort of way, but in a what the fuck am I doing with my life sorta way. Iʼm not in a good space right now and I am having trouble putting my thoughts into words. Itʼs like trying to reduce a raging hurricane to a gentle whisper. God, where to start? Kimberly is a good place to start. I want to marry her someday. I am so in love with her. We are great together. Just... not right now, apparently. Weʼve broken up every six months for two and a half years, all for the same reason... sheʼs scared. Oh, donʼt get me wrong, everything is awesome... in every way the relationship seems wonderful, but to her that is scary... weʼd have to go back to the whole two divorces thing to find the reason why long-term relationships scare Kimberly, but suffice to say that she doesnʼt want to wake up at 30 and decide that she made a mistake and missed out. So, every six months Iʼve gotta hear that I may not be the right person for her and that maybe staying with me is keeping her away from Mister Right and that maybe I should just warm her bed while she looks for this Certain Someone she has yet to meet. Ugh, itʼs frustrating and Iʼm finally sick of it and I decided to call her bluff and actually date other people. She freaked out and accused me of betraying her. Ugh. She knows not who she is or what she does. So, Iʼm am so torn. I feel like Iʼm tired of being a patsy, tired of making up and breaking up every six months. Tired of being told out of one side of her mouth that she loves me to the core and out of the other side of her mouth that she doesnʼt think Iʼm “The One,” and itʼs all so very tiring because I donʼt think I expect anything from her other than day-to-day, you know, if this relationship is mutual and mature and feels good and allows growth and feels safe and warm, well then, why not see where it takes us? Thatʼs it, thatʼs my only thing. Letʼs see what happens. Why try so hard to bend and shape and mold it... why not let it be what it is and be satisfied with that? So, Iʼm sorta kinda seeing someone now. Backpack girl. Jen. Cool feminist mentor studying to be an environmental lawyer. Sweet girl. Cute girl. Good poet. Great kisser. Iʼm afraid of those rock star eyes she gets sometimes, though. I met her at a poetry reading I was hosting and found out later that she kinda sorta stalked me for a while trying to find out where my classes were and plotting a way to talk to me. It wasnʼt creepy or anything because sheʼs hella cool, and I was totally flattered, but... I just donʼt want her to think that Iʼm like that all the time, you know, like that guy who gets up there all gregarious-like. I mean, Iʼm the first person to say that Iʼd love to be around that person who gets up on stage and does fun stuff, but really... Iʼm just an insecure little guy who does that stuff to keep alive. Every other day of the week Iʼm just me. And then thereʼs the ever-present rumor mill, and yearning for freedom of movement and lifestyle but chained by the need to finish school and graduate into a “real job,” and the desire to hurry up and hit the road with my poetry and my kitties, and the realization that my god what the fuck have I accomplished in my life, and why wasnʼt I the one to write “Reality Bites” because I coulda, I shoulda, I woulda had I the chance... And my parents wonʼt talk to me and my roomies are dicks and Iʼm going to move to Reno for the summer (RENO?!) to work on their newspaper, then Iʼm going to come back to Chico for my second to the last semester (Iʼve been telling myself although I have no idea) and get a new job and find a new apartment and start that sickening process called Find New Friends To Replace The Ones Who Graduated that I have to go through every fucking Fall... Fuck. It makes me wanna holler.

CRUSHWORTHY

I want someone to have a crush on me for a change

to notice when I donʼt come to class and wonder if Iʼm okay

to get nervous when I enter the cafe, to fumble with her papers and books, to pick at her clothing and check her reﬂection in salt shakers and napkin holders

to catch her breath when she sees me from across campus, tug on her best friendʼs collar and point with her eyes and whisper loudly, “There he is!”

to run around the block as quickly and nonchalantly as she can just to walk past me make eye contact and smile to look into my big brown eyes (such long lashes!) from across the room and think, “Yes...” to look at my full kissing lips and think, “Oh yes...” to hear my voice and imagine how her name would sound if I said it if I whispered it if I...

“Oh yes...”

I want someone to make up nicknames for me to talk about me in code “I saw Backpack Boy today in the library in the Romantic Lit. secion... I saw Steel-Toed Boots Boy talking to some girl (some girl!) in the bookstore today...”

I want someone to go straight home every night and check her answering machine just in case just in case and check the phone cord and check the battery and check the tape and make sure the goddamned blinking light isnʼt burned out just in case

I want someone to say, “Youʼre wrong about him because you donʼt know him the way I know him,” because she can just tell that Iʼm a good person must be a good person gotta be a good person because I write poetry about my mom and my cats and because she likes me so much for some reason some unexplainable psychic supernatural reaction to me me.

I want someone to mark her calendar “He talked to me today” to wonder what I would smell like after a long warm sleep under a down comforter to close her eyes and picture what our kids would look like to write silly wretched wonderful poetry about me for a change I HAVE NO IDEA WHO SHE IS

Iʼm at a huge Dave Matthews Band concert at Shoreline Amphi- theater somewhere near San Jose, but Iʼm not exactly sure where. There are people everywhere, packed shoulder to shoulder, milling about and standing in lines for t-shirts and garlic fries and over-21 wristbands, thousands upon thousands of people, and theyʼre all young and theyʼre all fresh and theyʼre all so very pink and alive. One thing about the Dave Matthews Band that is indisputable by even the most stalwart indie rocker is this: the fans of DMB are fine. Iʼm here with this girl Iʼm seeing, Jen — I guess weʼre kinda se- ing each other now. She is a huge fan of the DMB and is also, true to the rule, fine indeed. To spend any amount of time with Jen is to know every song by Dave Matthews by heart. She bought her pair of tickets to this show for her and her then-boyfriend Steve, the high school sweetheart who just couldnʼt handle the changes Jen has been going through in the past year and a half, but since Iʼm currently playing the role of boy toy, I inherited his ticket. Itʼs weird... I sometimes really like being in a big, crowded place, especially when Iʼm on a stage rocking a microphone in front of a couple hundred people or if Iʼm in the mood to be completely anonymous and alone in a big shopping mall food court with a journal and a cherry lemonade from Hot Dog on a Stick... [Okay, tangent... who the fuck decided to inflict those poor pimply teenagers with those hideous uniforms at Hot Dog on a Stick, those red, blue and yellow striped horror-show tank tops and that poofy JiffyPop hat? God, I feel so embarrassed for them, especially when they have to whip out that lemon crusher device and use it to smash lemons in this big bucket with this ridiculous pumping up and down flopping movement that sends tendrils of hair and elbows and breasts flying... itʼs like a vision of hell, like thatʼs what theyʼre gonna make me do in hell, be this teenaged Hot Dog on a Stick worker in the Mall of Hell and I have to crush lemons in that hideous costume for eternity and listen to Mu- zak version of U2ʼs “One” and The Rolling Stonesʼ “Wild Horses” over and over again. God, the thought...] ...but, other times, such as right now, large crowds bug the shit out of me. They make me feel kinda paranoid. Iʼm wavering between fascination and repulsion with this crowd, which is why Iʼm huddled in the chilly late afternoon wind on a picnic table instead of huddled on my square foot of designated space on Jenʼs afghan with her friends and friends of friends. Iʼm in an odd mood, a writing mood. So, Iʼm wafting through the crowd of bustling young people a few minutes ago and looking at everyone, trying to tell their lifeʼs story with a glance, and thinking to myself and feeling detached from it all, as if I sorta snuck in and didnʼt really belong and wondering what it would feel like to be somewhere with a lot of people and truly feel like I belonged when all of a sudden someone is clutching my shoulders and shouting my name. “Eirik Ott! Oh my God!” [Garlic fries are so nasty, by the way. I just stopped writing and stared off into space and found my hand grabbing for a garlic fry and plopping it absent-mindedly in my mouth. Yuck, all greasy and flaccid and hella expensive. For a medium soda in a plastic “Souvenir Cup” and an order of soggy garlic fries, I was bilked of $8. But, you know, sometimes you just have to do it, you have to knuckle down and buy those garlic fries.] So, my eyes focus as my mind snaps back to reality and there standing in front of me is some young woman, about 24, with long black hair and sheʼs looking at me with this open-eyed look of stunned amusement. “Oh my God!” she says again. “Eirik Ott!” I have no idea who she is. My mind is spinning... Who? What? Where? When? Then it hits me... sex. Iʼve had sex with this person sometime in my life and I canʼt remember for the life of me who she is or where we might have done it... Chico? Bakersfield? San Francisco? On the road somewhere? Wait, holy shit... “Jovannah? What the hell are you doing here? I thought you moved to L.A.!” I hadnʼt seen her since I moved from Bakersfield to Chico in ʼ94, back in the coffeehouse days of funky downtown Bakersfield before the yuppy sports bars replaced the cool bookstores and thrift stores and indie label record stores, back before the city council noticed that something cool was going on in its neglected downtown area and decided to raise rents through the roof and kick out all the young dreamers who opened quirky shoestring businesses like comics stores and performance spaces and made the downtown area cool again for the first time in 50 years, back before Sex Artʼs lead singer quit and bailed to L.A. to join the band L.A.P.D., which then changed their name to Korn and got famous, back before Cradle of Thorns got signed to Triple X records in L.A. and bailed and changed their name to Videodrone, back before Spike 1000 bailed and hit San Francisco and was never heard from again, back before heroin hit town and broke up every other band that was left, back when living in Bakersfield wasnʼt that bad at all, back when all you had to do was plaster fliers all over town and you could have a show with 700 kids moshing. Yeah, that Jovannah. She was one of the open-mikers at Chaos Coffeehouse, the cool place with the thrift store couches and student artwork bolted to the walls and clouds painted on the ceiling. That Jovannah. Three weeks of spending the night and fucking and playing with candle wax and Morrissey and taking baths with her gay roomie Jason and heading out to the canyon at midnight dressed in Goth black to take artsy photos by the hot springs... that Jovannah. I canʼt remember the last time we got together... [The crowd just let out a deafening roar, so I guess Dave just hit the stage. Sounds like heʼs starting off with “What Would You Say.” All the pink and lovelies both male and female are fleeing the picnic area with war whoops of excitement.] Jovannah moved to L.A. right after I escaped Bakersfield. Every- thing comes rushing back to me in a second of WHOOSH, and we just kinda stand there staring at each other, both of us no doubt searching our minds frantically for evidence of a good or bad parting... “Did I do something to make her/him hate me? God, I canʼt remember...” We talked very briefly about how chance meetings in random places like this are so very odd, but then there wasnʼt a whole lot to say after that besides, “Wow... Jeez... Eirik Ott...” “Yup, thatʼs me... Jovan- nah... what a trip... imagine that...” I reached into my backpack and gave her a copy of my latest chapbook and asked her to write me at the address on the back cover when she had the chance so that we could catch up with each other. It was so odd. To think that we were so intimate at one time that we shared the same physical space, that we had been naked with each other, that I gently placed a part of my body into a space within her body, and now, five years later, all there is to say is some kinda awk- ward non-sequitur like, “Well, Iʼm off to get some garlic fries before the show starts. Enjoy the concert. See you later.” So odd... It makes me feel adrift... I knew a girl once named Kati Goldfarb. She wrote me a “Dear Sailor” letter back when she was a college freshman at Ithaca College in New York and I was a Navy shithead sitting on an aircraft carrier doing donuts in the middle of the Red Sea during the Gulf War in ʼ91. When I got out of the Navy in May of that year, I went to Katiʼs home in New Jersey to meet her, and we hooked up. It was her very first time, and she thought the whole thing was very romantic, this whole “we met through the mail” sorta thing. I kinda did, too. Then, I moved to California, and that was that. A few years later, she came to San Francisco on a family trip, so I drove up from Bakersfield to meet her. We did not get along for some reason. I donʼt remember why, but we seemed to argue a lot. That was the last time I saw her. No word from her since. She vanished. I got this random e-mail out of the blue the other day from Kati, just two days before this concert. It contained seven words: “Oh my God, Eirik, is that you?”

NEGATIVE, RUDE, MEAN-SPIRITED CRACK DEALER LADY

Iʼve worked at this one print shop in Chico three times: I was fired twice and I quit once. The first time I was fired, it was because I had to visit my parents in Wichita for a month and the boss didnʼt want to keep the job for me. But, they needed help just six months later, so they hired me back. I was fired the second time because I published a column in the university newspaper where Iʼm, like, answering phones at a business and somebody asks me how Iʼm doing and I totally go off on them about my bad day. Anyway, I mentioned JiffyPrint somewhere in the column and my boss thought people would be afraid to call the print shop anymore. Sheesh, so I was fired. Well, as usual, six months later I was hired back again, only this time I demanded a $1.50 raise and a brand new computer chair, plus I wanted to be in charge of the entire graphic design department. My boss took the bait, only sheʼs just such a negative, rude, mean-spirited crack dealer lady that everyone there was fed up with her and suspicious that she was about the sell the shop out from under us without a word of warning, so right before I left for Reno I quit in a huff. What really set me off was this ordeal about my Grandma Ottʼs picture that I had pinned to my cubicle wall. One picture, man, thatʼs all I had, and it was of me and my grandma. But, I came in one morning (my last morning) to find that the picture of my grandma was gone. When I asked her about it, she launched into this long tirade about how unprofessional it was to have personal items in plain view of customers and warned me that Iʼd better start acting more professional or Iʼd be out of a job. I just looked at her like she was speaking Croatian. Iʼm like, “Itʼs a picture of my grandma... How can you say thatʼs a distraction, especially since no one every goes back there? What in the world kind of harm does it do you to see a picture of me and my grandma on my cubicle wall?” She wouldnʼt budge and got all in my face about professionalism, screaming at me at the top of her lungs as the customers at the front counter rolled their eyes and pretended not to notice. I didnʼt wait for her to finish. I went into the back, got an empty paper box, and filled it with the few personal belonging I had around my computer (not including the picture of my grandma, by the way, because she had conveniently misplaced it, the witch). My last words to my boss as I walked calmly out the front door for the last time were, “One of these days youʼre going to figure out that the reason youʼve lost all your best employees is that youʼre a selfish, ungrateful bitch. Fuck you. Go to hell.” It was so liberating! Of course, I was about to head to Reno for my summer internship, so, it wasnʼt all that brave, but still... Iʼll have to find a new job in the fall. Fuck, I hate looking for jobs.

ITʼS EITHER REALLY SAD OR REALLY BEAUTIFUL

I think Iʼm pretty good at writing and stuff, but itʼs hard to really know... writing is one of those things that people can be very passionate about, yet have absolutely no talent for, kinda like painting or acting or something else creative. I always marvel at people who devote their lives to the pursuit of something they have no talent for... I donʼt know whether they are too stubborn to admit defeat, or if theyʼre just ridiculously unaware, or if they just donʼt care whether anyone else likes what they do or not. Itʼs either really sad or really beautiful... Iʼm not sure which. Anyway, what I meant to say is that I donʼt know whether or not Iʼm really good at this and thatʼs why I choose to pursue it, or if, in actuality, I just suck so bad at everything else that writing is about the only choice I have. I mean, I do graphic design stuff, but not nearly good enough to make a career out of it... If I concentrated on that, I would never get beyond schlepping for print shops. At least with writing, I have the chance to work for newspapers all over the country without feeling embarrassed for what Iʼm doing, whereas doing customer service beyond some counter at some retail store makes me feel like a loser and gives me a stomach ache.

OVERWEIGHT, PIMPLY-SKINNED LOSER PEOPLE

I met my new landlady person in Reno today. Iʼll be renting a room in the townhouse in which she lives. My spidey sense was tingling the whole time I spoke with her, She mentioned several times during our brief conversation that she is “in sales.” Iʼm not sure this is significant, but Iʼm noting it anyway. She also made several references to my “girlfriend” before I realized that I had never mentioned any sort of relationship. It dawned on me that maybe she was focusing on my earrings and these girlfriend hints could be her way of fishing around for my sexuality. I reassured her potentially homophobic mind with a very quick reference to an unnamed girlfriend and she seemed to be satisfied with my apparent heterosexuality. The whole time it felt like trouble was just around the corner, that I was setting myself up for a summer of trouble with this lady, but I signed the lease anyway. This was the very first place I had seen, and I was tired of looking for a place to stay already. Iʼm in a McDeath right now, in Nevada City, CA, about an hour or so away from Reno on my way back to Chico (three hour trip in all). Iʼm looking at the Middle Americans strewn about the place. Every time I walk into a fast food place, I always look at the overweight, pimply-skinned loser people populating the dining area and think to myself, “My god, what am I doing here? Iʼm not like these people... Am I so lazy as this? Have I no self-control?” Yet, I order my Chicken McHeartAttacks and large Death Soda and sit among them and eat, plucking years from my heart with each french fry I consume. I eat like Iʼm angry at my body, like Iʼm trying to punish it for something. “Here, eat this you piece of shit! Choke on this hunk of bacon double cheese burger, you fuck! Thatʼs what you get!” If I am what I eat, then right now I am an L-shaped Chicken Mc- Nugget. My life seems very complicated right now... I think Iʼve been saying that for the last ten years.

SOMETHING IS WEIRD ABOUT MY LANDLADY

The landlady mentioned my “girlfriend” another two times, bringing the grand total to something like seven so far, and Iʼve only been in the same room with her twice. Something is weird about my landlady. Iʼm expecting her to ask me if I mind if she walks around naked in the townhouse... ewww, the thought. Today was my ﬁrst day at work in Reno. Itʼs after 2 a.m. Iʼm very tired. Not starting work until 3 p.m. is kinda cool because I get to sleep in, but working until the wee hours is starting to grind on me. RESIST THE URGE

Trying to ﬁnd cool people in this big-assed dirty little town is going to be a daunting task. Iʼve done it in other shitty towns before - Wichita, Bakersﬁeld, Red Bluff, Chico - but I donʼt know if I have the energy to do it right now. I have to resist the urge to withdraw and become a hermit, spending my free time reading and sleeping and watching teevee. Iʼm tired all the time... maybe I need to veg for a while, get small, let the world shrink and coalesce into a manageable size. I need to buy a great big kitty jungle gym for my kitties so they donʼt get as bored as I feel. Maybe I need a big Eirik jungle gym.

LIVING OUT OF VENDING MACHINES

Iʼm in a daze, caught in a cycle of wake up, go to work, come home, got to sleep... blather, wince, repeat. Iʼve meant to get up by 9 a.m. each morning even though Iʼve been working until 3 a.m., but Iʼve overslept each time, rolling over and gasping when I ﬁnd I have an hour to get to work. My kitties are failing in their duties as fuzzy alarm clocks. Iʼve been eating out of cups... Cup Oʼ Soup, Cup Oʼ Noodles, Cup Oʼ Oatmeal, Cup Oʼ Pasta... quick convenient meals cooked in cups in the company microwave with company water fountain water and eaten at my desk in front of the computer screen. Iʼve been living out of vending machines, trading quarters for the most processed food imaginable. I ﬁnally went to a market, though, this big Trader Joeʼs near my landladyʼs townhouse, and bought some of natureʼs own pre-packaged food - bananas. Thank god for the weekend.

DUCK AND COVER

Even though it sounds kinda trite and embarrassing to admit it for some reason, I was in awe of “Generation X” by Douglas Coupland when it first came out. I remember passing around this dog-eared copy to every one I knew and we were just speechless. I couldnʼt believe how much I identified with the characters and how the book painted such an accurate picture of life after college. Plus, it was as if someone had raided my journal and used my words, my phrases, my references... it was the first time I had ever read a book and thought the person who wrote it was a peer. Itʼs just a fucking shame, though, that the book proved to be so popular that corporate America decided to steal the title and apply it to any gripy kid with cash to spend on stupid shit... the phrase became this marketing tool, this demographic tag, and it lead to a backlash against the term and, ultimately, the book. I just re-read Couplandʼs short story collection, “Life After God.” Itʼs just so brilliant. I love that book. I love the piece about “The Dead Speak” where all the people describe what it was like to die in a nuclear bomb explosion. It reminds me of how completely frightened I was of dying in a nuclear explosion when I was a kid growing up in the shadow of Ronald Reagan. The people I know now, mostly college kids between 20-25, have no concept of what it was like to fear The Bomb. Shit, I remember watching that television movie “The Day After” that showed what a nuclear war would be like... It totally freaked me out and gave me nightmares for years and years after. When I went to school the next morning, the teacher lead a discussion about the movie and everyone looked all wide-eyed and rumpled as if they hadnʼt slept in weeks. Kids were so freaked out that they had to bring in extra counselors to handle the heavy load of questions and fears. Man, it wasnʼt until the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed that my nightmares finally subsided. Jen, the girl Iʼm kinda sorta seeing right now, just looked at me with this odd look on her face when I told her about my childhood fears of The Bomb. She giggled and said, “Yeah, they made my dad duck and cover under his desk when he was a kid. Youʼre old.”

BLASPHEMY!

I just finished re-reading “Catʼs Cradle.” Ahhh, Vonnegut. I love Kurt Vonnegut. Picture me, 19 years old, and all Iʼve really read was the crap they made me read in high school and Stephen King. Thatʼs it. So, Iʼm reading like my 19th Stephen King book in a row and itʼs “Tommyknockers” and it kinda sucks and I kinda start thinking that I want a little more meat on my literary bone, but I donʼt want this dry, boring shit they force-fed me in high school... so whatʼs a boy to do? I have no idea how I picked up my first book by Kurt Vonnegut, I just know that once I did, everything changed. His subtle way of poking fun at the world with a dry wit and an archerʼs accuracy was liberating... he was like a New School Mark Twain out to fuck with the established ways of expressing yourself. I heard something about Bruce Willis being involved in a movie version of “Breakfast of Champions.” Man, I donʼt know... How do you translate Vonnegutʼs shaky little drawing of an asshole into a movie? I think that filming “Breakfast of Champions” will be a tricky under- taking. Every book Iʼve loved that has been turned into a book has been fucked up beyond all recognition because the books I love rely less heavily on WHAT HAPPENS and more on HOW THE WRITER WRITES ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS. Look what they did to “Bon- fire of the Vanities”! Look what they did to “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”! Egad, I canʼt think about how they can do it... God bless ʻem, I hope they do it right. I was bored after finishing “Catʼs Cradle,” so I rented one of my favorite foreign films, “Cinema Paradiso.” I love that little boy... he has got to be the cutest little kid in all the movies. Toto! Oh, I love how he says, “Alfredo!” I do a great impression of Toto shouting, “Alfredo!” I love the part where Alfredo is trying to coax Toto into giving him answers on the test, and Toto gives him the “arm” thing, then forces Al- fredo into letting him into the movie booth. God, I love that flick. Once, I rented it and popped it into the VCR and - EGAD! - it was the over- dubbed version! BLASPHEMY! It was horrible what they did to Totoʼs voice, like some little kid cartoon characterʼs voice done by some adult voice over actor. YIKES! I have to admit to using “Cinema Paradiso” as a method of weeding out potential friends and love interests. Really, if you arenʼt completely moved by the magic of this film, I donʼt think I want your energy fucking with my energy.

A FUCKING ENDLESS MASS OF COMMERCE

my summer internship at the reno newspaper has quickly become an exercise in sleep deprivation. iʼve been working this funky-assed shift from, like, 3 p.m. until nearly 3 a.m. i get so fucking wired on caffeine that it takes me until 4 or 5 in the morning to sleep, then I wake up (GASP!) with moments to spare before jumping into the shower and blazing a path to work in time to make another shift. Everything is a fucking blur... iʼve been eating like shit, so, to top it all off, not only am i beyond tired, but my body feels like itʼs been kicked in the gut all the time from the burgers and fries and cup oʼsoups iʼve been feeding it. i swear to god that iʼve been living out of vending machines for the past month. speaking of living, i live in a forest of chain stores and pavement, surrounded by kmarts and walmarts and boston markets and mcdon- aldʼs and safeways and shopping centers and at least two huge malls... itʼs one big retail hell, like a fucking endless mass of commerce and not a damn record store or coffee house among them all. and reno... god, this has got to be one of the most soulless burgs iʼve ever been a part of. everything is all based on these carnal desires, itʼs all money and skin and sex and sin and drinking and over-eating and prime rib specials and towering parking lots and fat people EV- ERYWHERE. fuck... iʼm lonely, and i havenʼt written shit since iʼve been here.

MY OWN PRIVATE RENO

I exist in a forest of chain stores and pavement of billboard whores and sacraments of plastic coins and dice meant to distract the masses from their dreary daily routines as wobbly cogs in the great white machine.

I exist in an x-rated cacophony of pre-packaged destiny, of come-hither eyes from a thousand blinding signs, of cocktail waitresses bound in tight poly plumage and gagged by patriarchy gone mad mad mad, of sex-store dollar booths satiating masturbating sociopaths with eye candy debutantes and gaily colored tissue boxes and minimum wage jizz moppers waiting to sop up their discarded sickness, of oxygen mask octogenarians chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and shufﬂing ʻcross casino carpets clutching change cups like drowning men in life preservers, of shipwrecked showgirls and their silicon come-ons shaking their money maker for drooling fools and their Viagra-choked tools who think this must surely be the American Dream...

I exist

but I do not live for this life is not for me not this quagmire of consumerism not this miasma of materialism not this bloated corpse of sexism this wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I see with my naked eye ﬁelds of hunched shoulders pressed against huge banks of slots, rocking unconsciously back and forth and mumbling, stufﬁng quarters into slots and coaxing their dreams to life at the amazing Technicolor Wailing Wall.

I exist as a shadow cast on a casino wall watching sick to my soul and yearning to leave this shopping mall town and its chopping block people and escape... but where? to a corporate culture that trades billions of pink Chinese lungs for trillions of nicotine tainted cofﬁn-nails and the bright, white image of the Marlboro man called “Progress” to a soft drink youth movement of mass marketed rebellion that teaches them to pay for their advertising and display their logos proudly across their pubescent chests and deﬁne themselves not by their actions but by their fashions to a sound-bite government of photo op polemics smiling for the camera and regurgitating the latest cross-referenced trends and poll statistics as they kiss white babies and bomb brown babies over there... somewhere...

to a society where the term “work ethic” means working your life away for ethics-free companies and “religion” means youʼll be rewarded for your shitty life after you die bitter burnt heartbroken and alone...

there is no escape...

there is no leaving Reno...

every town in America is Reno and we are all hopeless gamblers on an extended losing streak rolling those dice as the house burns down around us...

JUST SPLENDID

You know that ﬁlm “Pleasantville” where these people get sucked into a black-and-white television world and the people who feel emotion and live life to the fullest become full color? Well... Sometimes I feel like the color of my world is seeping away into black and white. The color is running in the streets like rainwater. I am overcome by emotional numbness and spiritual paralysis. But, besides that, things are just splendid.

EEEKK! BACK! BACK!

Iʼve been taking lunch breaks, though, at night, and searching this town for some sign of life besides nekkid lady bars and casinos... Iʼve been to a couple of cool, funky, alternativey bar/hang-outs that have been kinda nice... Iʼve done poetry stuff at Planet Nine, which has walls painted red and black and, like, mannequins hanging from the ceiling and cool kids with dyed hair and piercings hoping for some sudden spontaneous combustion of SOMETHING to occur. The readings there have been fun... in fact, the next one is TO- NIGHT. Iʼve also gone to some similar place called The Zephyr, but itʼs a full-on open mic, which means you have to wade through these burn- outs doing 35-minutes versions of their favorite Neil Young songs... Donʼt get me wrong, Iʼm a fan of Mr. Young, but Jesus... you can only hear somebodyʼs uncle yelping through “Hey hey, my my” for so long. And then when you go up on stage to do a piece of your own, they surround you like little rabid vermin and “accompany” you on their out-of- tune guitars and bongos and shit... EEEKK! BACK! BACK! (Imagine me kicking at them and rolling up a newspaper to swat their little moist noses...)

CʼMON, I KNOW ITʼS EMO, BUT...

I was doing some kinda poetry reading thingie at Planet 9 and the host, some cat who calls himself “The Reverend,” introduced me and said, “Get on up here with your little Emo backpack.” You know, itʼs funny about that “emo” thing... I remember this guy from San Francisco I knew named Thaddeus who said something about Emo-core bands... something like, “I used to like going to see Emo bands, but after a while, I just kept thinking that it was pretty hard to believe they could cry each and every time they sang that song, you know, like even after singing it 500 times they still cry... cʼmon, I know itʼs Emo, but thatʼs really hard to believe.”

A FLURRY OF GLEEKING

Iʼve been to three poetry readings in Reno so far, all within 4 days. I hung out with a threesome of friends at two of the readings and now weʼre planning a dinner party for next weekend. Thereʼs Ann Marie, the self-described “bitter ex-stripper,” and a couple named Tamera and Geoff. They seem cool... when I brought up my favorite conversation starter subject “useless talents,” they quickly responded with flaring nostrils, wiggling ears, and a flurry of “gleeking” that was wonderfully enthusiastic. These are my people. Itʼs funny... the last poetry reading we all went to ended up being some class project for a high school sophomore English class. They let us do some of our stuff at the end. I did “Jesus Moshpit” with all the curse words taken out. When I got to the spot near the end of the poem where I make a reference to Depeche Mode, I figured they might not get it, so I changed it on the fly to Brit- ney Spears. Seemed to work like a charm.

JESUS MOSHPIT

I am the biggest asshole in ALL the moshpit. I donʼt give a DAMN and if you donʼt like it, Iʼll pull a stage dive and take your greasy punk ass out. I wade through the arching, twisting, gnashing whirlpool of elbows and knuckles and fuck up ANY droog foolish enough to meet my gaze for I am a lumbering behemoth with a six-foot tall spiked mohawk and a pierced uvula. I got arms like I-beams, ﬁsts like anvils, neck like a sewer pipe, head like a Volkswagon. I shrug my mighty shoulders and sweaty punks go ﬂying through the air like gnats off a yakʼs back. Yea, as I mosh through the valley in the shadow of punk rock music, I shall fear NO punk, for I am the biggest, the baddest, the meanest, the no-pain-feelinʼest, jack-booted-thugginʼest, steel-toe-havinʼest, no- toof-grinninʼest, Boba Fett-walkinʼest, Wookiee-scalp-stalkinʼest punk rock mother fucker in ALL the valley. As a matter of fact, I MADE the valley, with one mighty drag of my pinkie toe. DAMN! SHAZAAM! SLAM! GREEN EGGS & HAM! And just because you see me in the corner by myself watching the moshpit mayhem from afar, skinny, in a black Depeche Mode t-shirt... it donʼt mean nothing ʻcuz I donʼt have to prove myself to nobody!

PICK UP THAT HUNK OF BONE

Dear Elokin, Okay, in honor of Stanley Kubrick dying and you wondering what the hell “2001, A Space Odyssey” is about, I will clue you in to what it all means: You see, way back in the day when humans were a dying species of plant eaters, the few remaining humans were struggling through a hella harsh drought. People were dropping like flies. The sad thing was that food was all around them in the form of animals, they just didnʼt realize that they could eat them. And besides, how could they when their only weapons were tiny little teeth and tiny little fingernails? They were doomed to wander from diminishing water hole to diminishing water hole in the hopeless search for nuts and berries. On this path, they would be extinct in a matter of decades. That was until the Beings came to Earth. You see, the Beings were an ancient race who had long ago left their fleshy bodies and had their souls melded with machines. They wandered the universe searching for life and giving it a boost just to keep themselves occupied. Then they would check back millions of years later to see what had happened. So the Beings, who look like these tall black monoliths, sent one of their homies to earth to check the scene and what they found was a dying race of man-apes who had no idea that food was all around them. So, the monoliths did this mind-meld thing and told the coolest of all the apes, “Hey, dude, pick up that hunk of bone and beat the fuck out of some of those gazelle over there and snack out.” And the monkey-man said, “Well, shit, why hadnʼt I thought of that before?” So, began the rebirth of the human race and the first steps toward conquering the planet. Okay, so the Beings wanted to come back once the human race had reached a sufficiently interesting level of technological sophistication, which would take millions of years, so they planted an alarm on the moon that would tell them when it was time. So, they buried a monolith on the moon that had this super high level of magnetism, see. They figured that, eventually, the humans would be advanced enough to detect that it was there and that they would send a space ship to investigate. So, the humans finally reached a level where they could fly to the moon and dig this thing up and when the light of the sun hit the surface of the monolith (which hadnʼt seen the sun in millions of years), a signal was released telling the Beings that humans had finally (after millions of years) advanced to a level of interesting sophistication. So, the Beings decided to make contact with the humans again. The first encounter was with the people in the spaceship that had Hal the computer. Hal was this super-intelligent computer that was almost human. Somehow, he was given instructions that fucked his head all up because they were contradictory. So, Hal flipped out and killed the crewmen who were in sleep suspension. Then a bunch of stuff happened and then there was only one guy left, Dave. Dave got in his pod when he saw the monolith floating there in space. Then the monolith turned into a STAR GATE, which is how the Beings navigate though the endless universe. And then they sucked Dave into it to show him the wonders of the universe. Once he gained this knowledge, he was reborn as a Being, signified by the Star Baby at the end. So, there, itʼs pretty fucking simple and Iʼm surprised you couldnʼt pick all that shit up yourself. Jesus, what are they teaching kids in school these days? (I had to read the book, too.) I got your latest Tastes Like Chicken zine. Once again, good stuff. My shit, while delayed, is almost on its way. Ta ta, Kind Heart. Eirik

WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, YOU LITTLE JAIL-BREAKING SHIT?!

Iʼve had a horrible start to this week. First off, besides being hella tired from a weekend of far too little sleep... THELONIOUS ESCAPED! The little fucker was in my truck with Aretha, chilling under a shade tree with the windows cracked and food and water on the floorboard, hanging out in the parking lot of my newspaper, just long enough for me to get some quick things done before I drove them home... you see, I came directly from Chico to the newspaper without going home first, and I still had my kitties with me. Anyway... So, Iʼd been there like an hour or so, and I decided to go check on my kitties, and when I got out there, Aretha was full-on freaking out, just meowing like sheʼd been set on fire, meowing like a machine gun shoots bullets (meowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeow) in a high-pitched screechy voice, and she practically leaped into my arms when I opened the door to my truck. Looking back on it, I can tell she was like, “Heʼs gone, Dad, he fucking just took off and I told him not to leave me here all by myself, but he did it anyway and now I donʼt know where he is and Iʼm so worried... just hold me.”) And there was no Thelonious in sight. I called him, and he didnʼt come. I looked in the back under the blankets where he usually sleeps, and he wasnʼt there. I tore the whole fucking truck apart trying to find his hiding place and he wasnʼt there. So, it finally dawned on me that the little fucker mustʼve wriggled his little punk ass out of the tiny crack of air I left at the window. Picture the parking lot... jam-packed with cars, always moving and honking and skidding and screeching... two major roads on either side of the newspaper offices... I just saw a dead kitty not more than five days before in the middle of the street... Needless to say, I freaked. I started running all over the parking lot screaming “KITTIES!” in a high pitched voice because neither Thelonious nor Aretha know their names, they just know what I call them collectively, so Iʼm running all over the parking lot yelling “KIT- TIES!” like an upset little girl, checking every bush and shrub and tree and looking underneath every car, truck or van for signs of my kitty. I looked all the way around the building for him, calling for him in a progressively irritated and worried voice, alternately calling “Cʼmere, my little sweet pea, itʼs okay” and “Where the fuck are you, you jail- breaking little shit?!” After thirty minutes of frantically checking and re-checking every nook and cranny around the building, I had to give up. I walked back inside figuring that I would make calls to the local SPCA to let them know I lost my kitty. I was so sad... I just knew Aretha would be scarred by this for her whole kitty life... I got to the receptionist and was about to pass her when I thought that maybe someone had seen Thelonious in the parking lot, so I asked if anyone had seen a kitten. She said, “Oh, that little black and white kitten thatʼs been hanging around here all morning? Oh yeah, weʼve been wondering who he belonged to... I think Joe at the city desk has him...” YEAH! So I ran to this Joe at the city desk, but Joe at the city desk said something like, “Oh, yeah, I think we gave him to somebody, or maybe they took him back outside... I donʼt know... I think Julie in sports might have him...” So, I run over to Julie in sports and she says, “Oh, was that your cat? I gave him to the girls in advertising and I think one of them is going to take it home...” So, I ran over to advertising and asked if they had seen a kitty, and like five people go, “Oh, was that your cat? Itʼs been hanging around the office all morning and we were trying to figure out what to do with it. We donʼt know where he is right now... why donʼt you check over in the photo department?” I went to every single department in the whole building and EV- ERYONE had seen and played with my cat in the last hour EXCEPT ME, only no one knew where he was. Finally, someone suggested that somebody from the copy desk might be feeding him in the break room... So, I run to the break room and see a crowd of people on the outside patio crouched down and making goo-goo faces, so I burst out...... and thereʼs fucking Thelonious, eating from someoneʼs can of tuna and looking all pissed off at me, like heʼs thinking, “Thatʼs right, Iʼm the star of this show, Mother Fucker... leave us in the goddamned car, go off and do whatever and expect us to just sit there all bored and wait, so I go out to look for you, but youʼre fucking nowhere to be found, almost get run over three times, run into this fucking building, mother fucker... youʼre lucky I donʼt turn you into the authorities for cruelty to animals... piss off.” He also looked like he had thoroughly enjoyed all the attention during his Big Adventure... everyone kept telling me how cute he was and how well-behaved he was and how awful a cat-daddy I must be for leaving my kitties in the blistering hot sun in a cramped little car with no water and no food and no potty box and no air... (“but, but, but,” Iʼd tell them, “they had EVERYTHING they needed and I parked in the shade and theyʼre road kitties and they LIKE being in the car... really!”) So, I trucked their cat asses back to my apartment and resolved to get them collars and name tags as soon as I get off work, if not sooner.

CURSING SOFTLY IN SPANISH

I saw the funniest thing the other day. I was lounging in a park in Sacramento with Jen under a tree when this couple of parents hooked up this big-assed piñata to the net of the basketball hoop in the blacktop. I guess they were having a birthday party for a little girl of about 8 or 9 because as soon as they finished hooking up the piñata, this gaggle of little girls formed an impatient line with the littlest little girl in front... I assume she was the birthday girl because they all gave her first whack. The dad person then gave her this big old rod of steel, like a tire iron or something, only longer. It was so heavy that the little girl could hardly lift the thing. They blind-folded her, spun her around, then pushed her toward the piñata. Sheʼd heft the tire iron up over her head in trembling slow motion, then let it fall with a dull CLUNK onto the black asphalt. I guess dad couldnʼt find a proper baseball bat or stick, so he mustʼve dug around in the back of his car for something and ended up with this hunk of steel. Anyway, the little girl got so tuckered out after only three tries that she couldnʼt even lift the tire iron, so the next little girl in line took it from her and approached the piñata. This little girl wasnʼt so little, however, and towered over the other little girls. She snatched up the tire iron, allowed herself to be blind-folded and spun around, then wielded that tire iron with all her little girl strength and smacked the piss out of that piñata on the very first try. She full-on decapitated it and sent candy guts flying in a multi-colored arc. She hefted that tire iron so hard that she couldnʼt stop it before letting it crash down on the tip of dadʼs cowboy boot. As the horde of little girls squealed like seagulls and tore into what was left of the piñataʼs torso, the dad collapsed to the pavement and rolled around, clutching his foot and cursing softly in Spanish. THEY TOUCHED NOSES

the highlight of my trip to see jen in sacramento was watching my 6-month old kitties played in her momʼs backyard. they so love being jungle kitties. they frolicked and play and chased bugs and each other. then they discovered a tree and climbed high into its branches. thelonious figured out how to climb back down by going backwards, but aretha got stuck and kept trying to go head first, which would make her butt want to flip over her head and toss her into a heap onto the backyard floor below. she tried and tried, while thelonious called up to her, as if trying to tell her, “aretha, turn around and go backwards!” finally, thelonious uttered this frustrated little meow and dashed up the tree to aretha... they touched noses, then thelonious scrambled back down... it was so weird... aretha then turned around and started to climb down the branch backward, as if thelonious had said, “look, aretha, watch me...” but, aretha was scared by this time and just kept looking at me and meowing, so i climbed up and got her. they spent the rest of the evening chasing bugs and lolling on the warm cement, panting like little tigers on the discovery channel. most of the rest of the time, me and jen just kinda hung out... we read a little... talked a lot... made fat steak-um sandwiches and watched “natural born killers”...

YOU MODERN PRIMITIVE, YOU!

Big shopping malls sorta fascinate me. I am equally repulsed and drawn to them. Thereʼs no better place to see full-on capitalism in action, along with the inherent materialism, than in a shopping mall packed with people. Itʼs all so very bizarre, all this pushing and pulling of cheesy consumer goods. But, at the same time, itʼs kinda interesting and fun to watch. Thereʼs no better place to be alone than in a big food court in the middle of some mall surrounded by bustling people and their shopping bags and purses. Itʼs so easy to be anonymous in this whirlwind of commerce, so easy to go unnoticed. For better or worse, shopping malls represent everything about America that makes it the most successful country in the world. (Well, except for the destructive power of the military and all the dirty double-crossing politics and assassinations and stuff, but you get my meaning.) I have such mixed feelings about malls. I mean, I donʼt go to the mall to shop... no way. Too expensive, too stupid. I donʼt want to join the herds of sheep in their three-piece suits and their trendy baggy clothes and their t-shirts shouting their pop culture alliances with the latest MTV pop bands, all being manipulated to buy useless things manufactured in third world countries by under-paid, over-worked slaves of our wasteful Western lifestyle. No, I just like to float through the crowds of fashion mannequins and simply observe. Sometimes Iʼll go into a store just to get really disgusted with consumerism, like, say, Hot Topic. Now that store really cracks me up. Itʼs this chain store of “Alternative Culture” thatʼs in malls all over America that peddles t-shirts of corporate rock “indie bands” and clothing that copies thrift store chic at 10 times the price. Itʼs all about this corporate idea of what kids need in order to feel like theyʼre rebelling against society, yet itʼs this safe, pre-packaged and controlled rebellion via Marilyn Manson rubber backpacks ($75) and faux leather bondage pants ($49.99). Itʼs as if the corporations that make this shit are saying, “No, donʼt do anything truly radical and rebellious like, say, boycott shitty companies like Hot Topic that target youth markets with their crappy, over-priced merchandise. Donʼt do something useful with your time, like form a punk band that exposes the political machine or publish a zine that seeks to find the truth behind all the lies. No, donʼt try to change this wasteful, selfish society by avoiding its capitalistic trap. Just remain blissfully unaware and continue spending your parentʼs hard-earned cash here at our Alternative Super Store, and weʼll provide the rebellion for you. Ooooh, eyebrow piercings... you modern primitive, you! Ooooh, little black Goth lunch boxes... you rebel, you!” Itʼs not about DOING something that allows you to stand out among the hordes of fucking losers, no, itʼs all about buying some shit to provide you with a corporate identity. Hot Topic is like the Hallmark shop of spoiled alt.rock suburban kids... you provide the money, and the corporations will provide an exceptably rebellious sentiment on the t-shirt of your choice. The powers that be keep the kids controlled by making them think this shit is rebellious, so that the kids wonʼt do anything truly alternative that might threaten consumerismʼs strangle hold on this planet. And Iʼm looking at all the black cases of skull earrings and claw bracelets and silver dragon incense burners and racks crammed with t-shirts that say rebellious things like “Just Say No To Corporate Rock” and “Friends Donʼt Let Friends Watch MTV” that are right next to the CD bins featuring the latest collections of songs by Smash Mouth and Korn and Limp Biskt. Iʼm just staring at all this shit, this useless, stupid shit, and Iʼm shaking my head and laughing at the ignorance of it all, when all of a sudden I spy this wicked black bowling shirt with this cool olive green panel down one side and brown racing stripes down the sleeves for only $49.99... man, it looks so cool that before I realize what Iʼm doing, I reach up and grab it and put it on right over the Superchunk t-shirt I bought the week before and look in the mirror near the trench coat display and check myself out... it fits perfectly and itʼs way, way cool, so I take it over to the counter and buy it on my credit card. Okay, I know how this looks, but Iʼm really not one of “them” because I see through all this shit. Iʼm not buying into an artificially manufactured lifestyle, Iʼm just buying a cool shirt, thatʼs all. And as I walk out of Hot Topic and back into the mainstream traffic of the mall with my new shirt folded neatly inside my black plastic Hot Topic bag with built-in handle and scary red skull logo, I turn the corner and head to the Body Shop to buy some exfoliating soaps that smell like fruit (three for $6 on sale). The Body Shop is a corporation I can support... they do all kinds of environmental stuff... I think.

AM I WASTING MY TIME?

Iʼm struggling right now with big decisions about my direction in life, whether or not to commit to a “legit” profession like journalism, for which I have gone to school for five years, or take that leap into the unknown and attempting to follow my literary and performance dreams... Fuck, if the decision was being made at 22, it would be easy... I would choose to print up a bunch of chapbooks and hit the road without looking back. But, Iʼm not 22 anymore... I just turned 32, and decisions like that are not as easy to make. I feel like Iʼm approaching a deadline, that I need to pick a career and follow through on it, that I need to shit or get off the pot. I got into this long conversation about life with Harad, one of the other summer interns at the Reno paper where Iʼm working, that really got me thinking. I donʼt know how we got into it, but we were talking about high school reunions. I have no interest in going back to my shitty hometown of Bakersfield and explaining/justifying what Iʼve been doing for the past 15 years to people I never really knew or never really liked in the first place. I mean, I imagine them all married with kids and cars and houses and good jobs and two weeks of vacation every year and cell phones and digital satellite dishes, and Iʼd be like, “Well, Iʼm still in school and my big thing right now is to make photocopied books of my writing and sell them to people.” I can close my eyes and see the skeptical looks on their faces as they roll their eyes to their guests and say, “Uhmm... well, isnʼt that... quaint.” But, you know, every time I get this sheepish feeling about whether or not I am wasting my life, I have to step back and really question who is the one doing the wasting. The people I imagine at these class reunions have spent their lives chasing the American Dream, sure, but what experiences do they have to show for it? Can they say that they can walk into a room full of 400 people theyʼve never met armed with nothing more than a microphone and a notebook and have that room of strangers laughing their asses off within moments, then gasping and struggling to hold back tears the next? I mean, yeah, itʼs obvious that my career path has been lazily charted at best and that I have few of the trappings of the American Dream, but I can rock a microphone in any college town in America and sell enough chapbooks to get to the next town and make enough friends along the way to have couches reserved for my next trip across the country. How many people can say that they drive a big car and live in a big house and have a whole bunch of expensive shit like big screen teevees and boats and shit? Millions... But how many can open minds with simple words and engage the emotions and imaginations of people just by sharing their thoughts? Not many... Therefore, I ask again, who is wasting their time? If Iʼm offered a job at the end of the summer, which is becoming a strong possibility, do I take it and give up on my dreams of being a touring performance poet? If I donʼt take the job, will all the money and effort Iʼve put into graduating have been wasted? Fuck, I want to tell the newspaper, “Thanks, but no thanks,” so that Iʼll be free to tour next summer as planned, but is that a chickenshit decision on my part, some new means of delaying maturity in favor of dreams that may never come to fruition?

GIGGLING FOR SILLY LITTLE REASONS

To just be happy, I think, seems such a simple goal for life, but it sure gets complicated sometimes. The way Western life is structured, you know, where you have to work and save money your whole life while youʼd rather be doing something else, then you retire and die. Fuck... seems like this life is engineered to prevent true happiness. But, thereʼs so many little things that make me happy, little things like the feel of the sun on a nice day, the smell of fresh clean skin when itʼs warm, the way my kitties will come when I call them, taking a nice hot bath with oils from the Body Shop, writing a kick-ass poem at 3 a.m. that I know will just slay ʻem at the next reading... If I concentrate on little happinesses, I think I can make it to the big ones. A major goal for me would be to make my living by writing, only not hunched in front of a computer screen 12 hours a day like Iʼm doing now. This shit is for the birds. I want to go on book tours and make movies and meet lots and lots of people and sleep on their couches and look at their photos albums and do lots of giggling for silly little reasons.

MY VALENTINE

Chico is one of those towns where you end up knowing everyone after a while. Thereʼs not much to it, really. The university is the spiritual center of town, and it spills right into the cool part of downtown. All the stuff any student would want is right there, and the sidewalks and streets are populated with all kinds of fresh-faced and well-scrubbed college kids smiling and shopping and hanging around and meeting people. Even the people you donʼt really know are still familiar somehow after a while because chances are you stood near them once as someone was tapping a keg or you laughed with them once on someoneʼs ratty porch couch or you dated someone that used to be roommates with their next door neighbor. After a while, you just tend to recognize everyone. There was this girl once. She worked in one of the coffeehouses in Chico. I never knew her last name until two days ago, and I always thought her name was Joey, but she spelled it like this: Joie. Anyway, I didnʼt know her very well or anything. She was just this cute Greatful Dead kinda chick who would serve me hot chocolate and chai when I needed it most, then smile really big when I tipped her. Everyone seemed to know her. She seemed a nice person, someone you could have a funny conversation with. I went into her coffeeshop once on Valentineʼs Day, and I was feeling really down. I ordered chai like always, she made it up in a paper cup with a little heat-resistant holder thing like always, then she handed me my chai. But, before I could tip her, she looked at me all concerned and said, “Hey, man, whatʼs wrong? You donʼt look so happy today.” I told her that I was a little bummed because it was Valentineʼs Day, and for the ﬁrst time in as long as I could remember, I didnʼt have a Valentine. She smiled really big, took my hand, and said, “Thatʼs okay, Iʼll be your Valentine. Deal?” It was such a sweet gesture. I walked out with a bit of a bounce in my step. She was cool. Every time weʼd bump into each other after that, she would smile really big and shout, “Hey, Valentine!” If someone was with her, sheʼd point to me and say, “That guyʼs my Valen- tine!” She mustʼve left town a while after that, because I didnʼt see her for a long while. A few years later, I was walking down the street and there she was, Joey, my Valentine. I recognized her in a second and called out to her. It took her a bit, but then she smiled a slow smile and said, “Hey, yeah, my Valentine. I remember... Whassup, man?” She was just visiting, I think, and she said she was living up north somewhere in the woods doing some kind of nature girl stuff... I think that had been her major, some kind of nature girl stuff. And that was it. I never saw her again. Until two days ago. My friend Jason Cassidy and I were walking with his wife Con- nie to the Wafﬂe House in downtown Chico. We passed the newspaper stand and froze. The headline said something about a former Chico State student being found dead in Yosemite. The story said this young naturalist was found beheaded at the side of a mountain stream. The picture accompa- nying the story was of Joey, only she spelled her name like this: Joie. Jason knew her, too, because he worked at the same coffeehouse where she had worked a few years before. Joie. I just couldnʼt believe it. I didnʼt even know her, but I was crushed. Some serial killer mother fucker had killed my Valentine. OUTRO

Well, thatʼs about it for now. Iʼm still in Reno, itʼs still July 29, Iʼm still sitting in front of my computer, only now Iʼm listening to a CD mix by a DJ named Kimball Collins. The next issue should be out around Christmas of ʻ99, I should think, and with any luck itʼll have interviews with famous Wussy Boys like Jon Cryer, Matthew Broderick and that traitor to the Wussy Boy movement — Anthony Michael Hall, who began his career as a ﬁne example of Wussiness, but allowed his career to descend into the very depths of jock fratboy asshole COCK MAN OPPRESSOR hell. Where is he now? Probably beating up some poor kid who looks just like he did when he was a 15-year-old Wussy Boy. Blurbs

FEATURED ON “60 MINUTES!”

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

“All bluster and bombast ... call it revenge of the Wussy Boys.” THE WASHINGTON POST

“Humorous reﬂections on growing up as a Wussy Boy.” CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“R. Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the poetry slams.” AUSTIN CHRONICLE

“Ottʼs writing is over-the-top, taking simple circumstances to an extreme. But for all the humor, an inconsolable sense of longing runs just below the surface of every poem, and it is this meloncholic subtext that hits home in his work. Great reading for people who think they hate poetry (and for those who already know they like it.)” THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN

“Check out San Francisco Poetry Slam Team member Big Poppa Eʼs poem ʻCrushworthyʼ on the National Poetry Association web site at www. nationalpoetry.org. So f-ing sweet, I cried.” THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN

“Fantastic reading, the kind of stuff that inspires you to do your own personalzine ... He transforms his experiences into poetic stories that capture the magic and mystery.” FACTSHEET 5 (San Francisco)

“Some of the most engrossing personal writing Iʼve ever read! Absolutely engrossing!” AMUSING YOURSELF TO DEATH (Santa Barbara)

“A sharp sense of humor and a great eye for the details and absurdities of young life today ... A natural born storyteller who takes everyday events and elevates them to near-mythic, side-splitting proportions.” NEXT MAGAZINE (Los Angeles)

“Eirik has a wonderful, charming writing style.” ZINE WORLD (San Francisco) The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #2 • Is a Wussy Boy / Is Not a Wussy Boy • Wuss Core Music Boy • Wuss Boy / Is Not a Wussy • Is a Wussy FEATURING: The National Poetry Slam a personalzine by r. eirik ott The Wussy Boy Chronicles #2 by R. Eirik Ott © February 2000

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

The photos in the National Poetry Slam article were taken by David Huang and borrowed from www.poeticdream.com.

Graphics for the “Is a Wussy Boy / Is Not a Wussy Boy” were borrowed from various places around the Internet.

Everything else is the fault of R. Eirik Ott, unless otherwise indicated. Intro Iʼm sitting in my little apartment in Chico, the Northern California college town in which I live, and Iʼm typing on my brand new Christmas present i-Mac computer while listening to the greatest hits of Rush through headphones. Oh yeah, baby, I still have a thing for that power trio from Canada, and every once in a great while Iʼll develop that old urge to pop in “Moving Pictures” or “2112” and rock out high school stylie. Yes, truth be told, I was that flavor of Wussy in my early high school days: a Dungeons & Dragons playing, Rush listening, computer game hacking, parachute pants wearing, mullet sporting pre-Wussy Boy straight out of “Detroit Rock City.” Then, in Junior year, a friend of mine gave me a battered cassette tape with “Duty Now For the Future” by Devo on one side and “Only a Lad” by Oingo Boingo on the other. And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was all she wrote. From then on my life changed. My hair got chopped and re-shaped and dyed into something John Hughes-worthy, I got a girlfriend, and I suddenly had more gay friends than I could shake a stick at. Yup, popular culture made me the Wussy Boy I am today. And so I am honoring that idea starting with this issue. While I dislike the thought of so many people defining themselves merely by the products they purchase — something thatʼs obviously wide-spread throughout this consumer culture — I have to admit that I learned how to be a Wussy Boy through my pop culture icons. If it werenʼt for John Hughes movies and U2, I wouldʼve ended up touring Star Trek conventions for the rest of my life with a line of Mullet Heads in tow. Ewww, the thought. To clear up some of the confusion that Iʼve been witnessing concerning the definition of “Wussy Boy,” Iʼve compiled a list of who is and who is not a Wussy Boy. With any luck, folks will be able to distinguish a true Wussy Boy (ie. Timothy Hutton in “Ordinary People”) from a poser (ie. Corey Feldman in anything post-“Stand By Me”) and a Cock Man Oppressor (ie. Andrew “Dice” Clay, although he was pretty cool in “Pretty in Pink” as the doorman who smoked ciggs with Ducky.) It hasnʼt been all that long since Issue #1, which came out in August of ʻ99, but it seems like I havenʼt written in forever. My summer was absolutely fabulous, with me working as an intern at the Reno newspaper alongside my zine friend John Johnson from Happy Not Stupid and a cool cat named Mark Earnest who was working as the magazine editor. I discovered that both were dyed-in-the-wool Wussy Boys from way back, and I even convinced Mark to write a regular Wuss Core Music Review column for my zine. In future issues, Mark will explore Wussies in Indie Rock and review some seminal Wuss Core discs. For this issue, I dig up some Wussy Boy favorites of mine. I had one of the most amazing experiences of my life in the summer of ʻ99: I performed at The National Poetry Slam as a member of the San Francisco Poetry Slam Team. Youʼll read all about that experience in this issue; in fact, most of this issue relates in some way to that event. Unfortunately, that wonderful summer of affirmation came to a halt shortly after 11 a.m. on September 11, 1999, less than 20 miles south of Chico: My friend Jen, the Backpack Girl I dated over the summer, was killed in a head-on car accident. I couldnʼt process the experience and found myself staring blank into my computer screen trying to think of something to say all Fall semester. You can read all about that in the next issue, which will feature Wuss Core poetry and fiction from myself and other Wussies in my life. For now, I will concentrate on happy stuff. I spent the summer kicking much ass as the assistant entertainment editor for the Reno newspaper, then was offered the job working full- time. Not a bad position to move into one semester before graduation with a journalism degree, eh? But, after the outrageous happenings at the National Poetry Slam, I had to rethink my knee-jerk impulse to accept the newspaperʼs offer. I pictured myself hunched in front of a computer all day writing about shows that Iʼd never have time to see, interviewing people who were living their lives having fun while I toiled 50 hours a week putting together the Entertainment section. Ugh... after five years of doing that, what in the world would I have to write about? I met with the editors of the paper and they said the job was mine if I wanted it, which was hella flattering, but I ended up passing on their offer. I had been dreaming of going on a poetry tour of the country for years, and I was finally in sight of actually being able to do it, so to drop it all in exchange for $26K and two weeks of vacation per year seemed perfectly dreadful. Now, I work in a coffeehouse and run weekly poetry slams just down the street from the university. Oh, and I do zines. Iʼm living in poverty just so I can pursue my “art.” Tell me Iʼm not Wuss Core... Speaking of Wussies, Iʼve got letters from Wussy Boys and Girls from across the country starting in this issue. Iʼve always wanted to run a letters section in a zine, and this is my first attempt. Oh, and I almost forgot... Iʼve put together some “Wussy Boy Chronicles” comics in the back of this issue that zinesters are welcome to use as space filler in their own mags. Just clip and save, baby, and help spread the word of the Wuss Core Revolution. Word. Eirik Dear Wussy Boy

So, Eirik, I got your “Wussy Boy Chronicles #1” zine and am thoroughly enjoying it so far. So much so that I almost got on the wrong train somewhere during “Fuck a Bunch of George Clooney,” but thankfully I did not so I wasnʼt cursing your name and showing up to work very very late. But, I do have a perplexing issue with your zine. Are gay guys automatically disqualiﬁed from Wussy-dom simply because they are not “stuck in the middle?”

Nat (Film Bitch) P.O. Box 2128 NY, NY 10009

Thereʼs a very strong connection between Wussy Boys and Gay Boys. A lot of the reason why Wussy Boys were called “wussy” and “pussy” and “faggot” by the high school Cock Men Oppressors was that we had a lot of characteristics in common with Gay Boys: we were skinny goofy kids who had bizarre hairstyles and clothing; we listening to “fag music” like The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, and Morrissey; we didnʼt know the first thing about “guy stuff” like cars and Budweiser and sports and spent our time being pale and “indoorsy” with our computers and books and records. Plus, all the cool, sexy, popular girls didnʼt seem to know we even existed. As far as mainstream guys and girls went, we Wussy Boys just didnʼt fit in at all, so we were demeaned for it and called “fags” or simply ignored. Iʼve always had more in common with gay boys than straight boys, and Iʼve been setting off gay-dars for as long as I can remember. I mean really, can you imagine a 6ʼ5” jock frat boy asshole dumb fuck hanging out with lilʼ old 5ʼ5” me in some coffeehouse going on and on about “Oh my God, Toriʼs last album was so fucking brilliant! Iʼve seen her in concert four times, and Iʼve met her at the backstage door each time! Oh my God!” Or, like, can you see some primped Ambercrombie and Fitch sorority girl straight outta “The Real World” chilling with a Wussy Boy at some poetry reading talking about “Oh yeah, I totally cried, too, when Billy Crystal finally told Meg Ryan that he loved her at the New Yearʼs Eve party! God, ʻWhen Harry Met Sallyʼ was so the bomb! And didnʼt you just love ʻPrincess Bride?ʼ” Wussy Boys and Gay Boys will always be connected, always friends and comrades. As long as homophobia exists in this world, both Wussy Boys and Gay Boys will get the same kinda shit from the same assholes, so theyʼve got to band together for strength. But, I canʼt really say that Gay Boys can be called Wussy Boys. The whole reason why I came up with the idea of Wussy Boy as a term of empowerment is because I didnʼt feel like I fit in anywhere. I couldnʼt hang out with “guys” in frats and stuff because those people are so alien to me, but I have always been the token Effiminate Straight Boy when Iʼm with my gay friends. So, coining Wussy Boy was a way of making some sense out of existing in the middle. This brings up a good question, too: Is there such a thing as a Wussy Girl? I mean, I guess there could, you know, be a female counterpart to Wussy Boys, but Iʼm kinda uncomfortable using the term to describe a girl. The word “wussy” is merely a euphemism for “pussy,” which is an emasculating term when applied to a boy who is less than some assholeʼs version of masculine. To take that term and reapply it to a woman who has the same attributes as a Wussy Boy seems offensive to me... Also, I donʼt want to use the term “Wussy Girl” to describe girls who are attracted to Wussy Boys because that would be defining someone by the type of person they associate with rather who they are as people. Hmm... maybe weʼll need to come up with another term. I guess any girl who doesnʼt fit into societyʼs narrow view of what a woman should be could qualify as a Wussy Girl. What do you think? Dear Wussy Boy Thanks so much for your great “Wussy Boy Chronicles #1.” I read the entire issue in one sitting. What a great read: A true and dear personal zine! Thanks!

Kez Panel (Prozac and Cornﬂakes) P.O. Box 589 Moon, PA 15108-0589 Dear Wussy Boy Thanks for “Wussy Boy #1.” I was down with the “Wussy Boy Manifesto,” then I looked at the back page and... is that you with a Burt Reynolds moustache? Race traitor! Uncle Bert!

Joe Maynard (The Randy Chap) P.O. Box 879 New York, NY 10021-0002

Okay, wait... the facial hair in question was an attempt to do something different with the standard issue Gen X-er goattee that Iʼve had since before Nirvana broke. For about two weeks, I tried out this sort of... well, it was like... you had the moustache, right, and it curved down a bit at each end, almost like a Fu Manchu, but then you had the “soul patch” chilling just beneath that. Kinda like Trent Reznor in the “Perfect Drug” video. Anyway, that picture in “Wussy Boy Chronicles #1” was taken during that brief period. It looked stupid, so I shaved it. Now, you just back off, Mister! Uncle Bert indeed... Dear Wussy Boy I dug “Wussy Boy #1!” I thought it was totally great. My favorite pieces were: “Sexy Witches” (every year I try and look scary, but I always wind up being pretty and scary because I always cling desperately to gender identity that night... Once I was a male chef with a beard, and I was so miserable!); and “One Less Connection” (Iʼve developed the annoying San Francisco quality of looking past people I recognize. Itʼs terribly rude and ghastly, but this city is so tiny that itʼs unavoidable.) I love when you write about your cats! Iʼm so envious! “Kick Ass Soundgarden Hair” was rad. I swear I read “Crushworthy” somewhere before, but I totally dig that poem. It strikes a deﬁnite chord with me, as I am a crush ﬁend!

Kelli Wms. (That Girl, 20 Bus, Kurt Cobain Was Lactose Intolerant Conspiracy Zine) P.O. Box 170612 San Francisco, CA 94117

Kelli is always trying to get up on me about re-printing old material in my latest zines. She and her boyfriend found one thing that was a repeat and proceeded to tell everyone in zinedom that I was a big fat cheater head and needed to write new stuff rather than recycling. Fuck, it was one piece, yo! Anyway, itʼs nice to know that sheʼs checking up on me. Dear Wussy Boy Iʼm loving your “Wussy Boy Chronicles #1!” You already know youʼre a great, interesting writer — why would you need me to say it again? By the way, Macintosh Computers are the love of my life, too. I do graphic design, and they are all Iʼve ever used. By reading your “What is a Wussy Boy” piece, I have come to realize that I am a serial Wussy Boy dater. From Boyfriend #1 up until now: All Wussy! Number 1 was a lover of Depeche Mode and New Order, plus he also wrote poetry. The current boyfriend owns “Ferris Buellerʼs Day Off,” which heʼs watched 37 times (he counts!), plus he writes a lot of poetry, too. Iʼve never been nor ever will be attracted to Cock Man Oppressors! You make perfect sense to me, so you can count me as one of your non-lingerie model, creative girl fans! Although, Iʼm dropping in my cutesy beach photo just because I feel like it. Heh heh.

Delaine (My Small Diary and Not My Small Diary) 1248 22nd St. S. C-2 Birmingham, AL 35205 Dear Wussy Boy I have to say that I was very impressed with “Wussy Boy Chronicles #1.” Very good writing, plus I think I ﬁt the category of Wussy Boy. At work today, someone even called me a Wuss.

Tad Giraffe (Go Read A Book) 124 South Military Fond Du Lac, WI 54935

Are you a Wussy Boy or Girl with something you want to dig out of your little black backpack and share with Wussies everywhere? Well, simply put your thoughts into words and send them via e-mail them directly to Wussy Boy Headquarters at [email protected]. IS A WUSSY BOY, IS NOT A WUSSY BOY

There seems to be some confusion about the true definition of “Wussy Boy.” No, a Wussy Boy is not necessarily an effiminate male who sets off gay-dars, although he could be. No, a Wussy Boy is not a weak Chess Clubber with a pocket protector and horn-rimmed glasses, although he could be. No, a Wussy Boy is not a dork or a dweeb or a geek or a neo- maxi zoom dweebie, although, again, he could be all of these things. The difference between somebody who is truly Wuss Core and someone who just sucks is the attitude. Itʼs a matter of pride. If a jock frat boy asshole dumb fuck walked up to the dorky kid in school and called him a “fag” and pushed him in the mud and laughed at him, the response by said dorky kid would determine his Wuss Core Factor: 1] If the kid just covers his eyes and cries and runs away ashamed of himself as the popular kids laugh at him, well... the poor kid rates hella low on the Wussy Boy scale; 2] However, heʼd top the scale if the kid leaps up and gets in the jockʼs face and says something like, “Yeah, youʼre bigger than me, you fucking ape! Everyone here knows you can kick my ass, big fucking deal! But who are you gonna come to when youʼve got to write that term paper on ʻA Feminist Response to Hemingway,ʼ huh? Me! Thatʼs right, you over-grown piece of shit, you NEED me! So go ahead, beat my ass in front of all these people and prove how much of a Cock Man Oppressor you really are, but donʼt come crawling to me at the end of the semester when you need that paper written!” You see, although Wussy Boys may resemble dorks and geeks and Gay Boys on the outside, they carry their true strength on the inside where it counts. Louis Lamour once wrote a book called something like “The Fastest Quick Draw in the West.” In it, he said something to this effect: a boy lives his life trying to prove to everyone what a man he is, but a real man knows what he is capable of and is satisfied with that. You see, a Wussy Boy doesnʼt have to go around trying to live up to someone elseʼs expectations where masculinity is concerned; no, a true Wussy Boy knows where he stands in the scheme of the universe and is okay with that. To really get a feel of what a Wussy Boy is, you need only examine the archetypes in the Wussy Boy classic “The Breakfast Club.” Now, none of the characters in the movie are strictly Wussies, but you can achieve Wuss Core status by combining some of the characters: If you were to take equal parts Anthony Michael Hall (“The Geek”) and Ally Sheedy (“The Artsy Outcast Freak”) and mixed them up, youʼd be close to having the right ingredients for a Wussy Boy. But until you added a nice dose of John Bender, the misunderstood rebel troublemaker played by Judd Nelson, you wouldnʼt quite get there. You see, all Wussy Boys have an inner John Bender. Another example can be found in “Fight Club.” Now, Edward Norton is the classic Wussy Boy character in this movie: heʼs a small man who is articulate about his angst, but heʼs got this inner John Bender played by Brad Pitt who drives him to great heights and makes him aspire to great things. Although troubled, Ed Nortonʼs split personality is a classic Wuss Core character, this dichotomous melding of Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson, the meek sensitive boy who wants no trouble blended with the misunderstood trouble maker tortured artist who yearns to fuck shit up and make an impact on his world. And so, to help you figure out just what exactly is a true Wussy Boy, hereʼs a handy guide to who is and who is not a Wussy Boy. Enjoy! IS A WUSSY BOY Matthew Broderick My boy has been at the vanguard of Wuss Cinema ever since he hacked into the military computer system at NORAD in “WarGames.” Dude has never swayed from the Wussy Boy character, and God bless him for it! Sometimes he picks some shitty movies for reasons that are beyond me (such as “Godzilla” and “Inspector Gadget,” but I imagine he did them for the money and, in the end, even Wussy Boy icons need to eat), and sometimes he gets a little too Wussy for his own good (see “Project X”), but you gotta give the man a hand for maintaining a strong sense of Wussiness in each of his major roles. Who can forget every Wussy Boyʼs wet dream of Wuss Core existence, “Fer- ris Buellerʼs Day Off?” Oh yeah, thatʼs what Iʼm talking about, the godhead of every Wussy from Kinnebunk to Burbank, baby, Ferris was Wuss Core to the bone, had a kick ass girlfriend, and got to sing “Twist and Shout” at the parade in downtown Chicago while wearing a faux leopard skin vest. That one role is good enough to secure Matthew in the Wussy Boy Hall of Fame, and every self-respecting Wussy Boy has aspired to the heights reached by Ferris ever since. When you add to that the fucking brilliant “Election,” “The Torch Song Trilogy,” and “Biloxi Blues,” what you have is a wealth of characters that will serve as Wussy Boy role models well into the new millenium. Matthew Broderick may not be God, but heʼs on Godʼs speed dial. John Cusack The king, baby, nobody is more Wuss Core than John Cusack (except for maybe Matthew Broderick, only John Cusack is more of a bad ass than Matthew could ever be.) Heʼs so well-meaning, this boy, and heʼs kind of a sad sack, which is necessary to acheive true Wuss Core nirvana. Check him out in “Say Anything.” That was classic Wuss cinema, with working class Johnny Boy devoting his whole summer to wooing the cute brainy girl played by Ione Skye. He was so sensitive, holding up the boombox with “In Your Eyes” blasting to show his devotion to his girl, but then he took kick boxing and could unleash on your punk ass if he needed to. Outer sensitive guy, inner kick boxer: that is the true Wussy Boy way. Youʼve got to yearn like Johnny Boy in “Being John Malkovich,” but youʼve also gotta be able to stick a Bic pen in someoneʼs neck when the need arises, like in “Grosse Point Blank.” James Dean Wuss Boy extreme! Donʼt get in my face about this because James Dean was Wuss Core to the bone. Remember when he was in the police station with his parents in “Rebel With- out a Cause,” and his parents were bickering back and forth, and Dean suddenly screamed, “Youʼre tearing me apart!” Oh yeah, Daddy, thatʼs what Iʼm talking about — Wussy Boy! The bad guys slashed his tires and he turned the other cheek and still ended up with the girl. (Well, he only got the girl after her dumb old Cock Man Oppressor boyfriend ran his car over a cliff and died in a fiery crash, but, you know, Wussy Boys are known for their resoursefullness.) The fact that James Dean died young and in a tragic car accident makes him all the more Wuss Core, an icon for generations of Wussy Boys who were the sensitive, tragic types who wrote poetry and yearned act and drink cappaccino in French cafes in black berets. Jason Schwartzman, The Kid from “Rushmore” Speaking of Wuss Core resourcefullness, this cat was the bomb in this ode to Wussy Boys. This tragically misunderstood boy genius gets a crush on the cute English teacher, then proceeds to impress her with his student plays and aquarium projects. When met with competition from Bill Mur- ray, dude fought back the only way he could: blackmail and bees, baby, thatʼs what Iʼm talking about. This kid was kinda the dark side of Wussy Boys, I have to admit, because Wussy Boys are not stalkers at heart; no, they are poets who pine for their unrequited love via heart-wrenching indie rock songs. But, still, this kid from “Rushmore” is a good example of a Wussy Boy gone bad. Anthony Michael Hall (young) This boy started out with such a sterling record of Wussy Boy classics: the geek in “Sixteen Candles;” the geek in “The Breakfast Club;” the geek in “Wierd Science.” I know he was typecast and all that, and I feel for him and his eventual need to bust out of the stereotypical geek character, but Jesus did he have to fall from grace so hard? I still have warm feelings for the Wuss that he was, but Iʼm kinda bitter about how he turned out IS NOT A WUSSY BOY Anthony Michael Hall (post-teen) Race Traitor! This former poster boy for Wussy Boys across the nation turned his back on his roots when he took the jock role of “Johnny Be Good,” then further slid from his true calling when he metamorphosed into the Cock Man Oppressor in “Edward Scissorhands.” Fucker, I feel so abused by this guyʼs choices in film roles! I used to think seeing him on screen gave me hope, now it just makes me nauseated. I just saw him in that HBO thing where he was Bill Gates, and that was pretty good, plus I just saw him be a Gay Boy in “Six Degrees of Separation,” but he still has a lot of bad karma to work through before he can ever be considered a Wussy Boy again. Oh Rusty, where are you? John Wayne This is the image all our dadʼs wanted us to be, this strong man of few words, the bulky meat-eating American hero on a horse or a tank, spouting out lines like “Iʼm not gonna hit ya... like hell Iʼm not! *POW*” He smoked, he drank, he loved hard and he lived hard, mister, and he voted Republican in every election and heʼd kick your punk ass if you didnʼt eat all your gristle. I cried when John Wayne died... not because I actually knew anything about the former Marion Morrison or felt any sincere connection, but because I thought thatʼs what real men did when John Wayne died. James Brown This one should be truly obvious. I mean, the man is the Godfather of Soul. How can you be a Wussy Boy and sing lines like “I donʼt know karate, but I know ca-razy?” Heʼs the man behind “Itʼs a Manʼs World,” “Funky President,” “The Big Payback,” “Hot Pants,” “Sex Machine,” and “Pappa Donʼt Take No Mess.” James Brown is a Super Bad bad ass. If you give this man some mess, James Brown will kick that punk ass, shoot up some PCP and run over some cops, and still be considered one of the greatest soul singers who ever lived, the originator of funk, the “gotta gotta get up to get down-est” James Brown-est bad ass who ever cried “Hit me!” I mean really, if youʼre bad ass enough to sing a song that has the words “Gotta jump back and kiss myself” in it, chances are you are not a Wussy Boy. If someone can refer to you as “Soul Brother Number One” without a trace of irony, then chances are you are not a Wussy Boy. But, I have to say, though, that a truely kick Wussy Boy has a bit of James Brown in him; they just keep it hidden until the apartment is all empty and the stereo is playing “Poppaʼs Gotta Brand New Bag;” then watch out, ʻcuz Wussy Boys can channel the strength of James Brown and kick much ass. But only at home, alone, with the stereo on, when no oneʼs looking. Charlie Sheen Dude is all about hookers and cocaine and making silly-assed movies like “Hot Shots” and making cameo appearances in movies like “Being John Malkovich” that make fun of his so-called “bad boy” persona. Bad boy my ass, Charlie Sheen is just another Cock Man Oppressor out to make Wussy Boys hate mainstream American movies. Heʼs so fucking pompous and Hollywood that I want to totally take his punk ass out, but, you know, he would probably be all cranked up and could, you know, take me out instead. So, Iʼll just hate him and his ilk from afar. Humphrey Bogart Okay, I love Bogie, let me just put that out there right now. Dude is suave as fuck. Heʼd be all quiet and calm and cool, then kick some punk ass when the need arose. He has some Wussy Boy qualities (getting all sappy in “Casablanca” over the girl who broke his heart), but, in the end, Bogie is just too much of a bad-ass to be considered a Wussy Boy. My favorite scene in “The Maltese Falcon” is when he slaps slimy little Peter Lorre, who then sneers, “Oooh, you shouldnʼt oughtta slap me like that, oooh.” And what does Bogie do? He snatches Peter Lorre up by his collar and slaps him three or four times and yells, “Youʼll take your slaps and youʼll like it!” I mean, come on, if you ever utter a line like, “Youʼll take your slaps and youʼll like it,” you instantly get kicked out of the Wussy Boy club, unless, of course, youʼre saying it as an homage to Bogie in an effort to be sardonic or something, then, you know, itʼs okay, but if you say it like you mean it, then you get the boot. Urkel I donʼt mean to knock on a brother, but my man Jaleel Whiteʼs character Urkel is very definitely NOT a Wussy Boy. You have to be more than just a fucking dork to be Wuss Core, you know, there has to be some pride there... some dignity. Urkel was just a big fat weenie, so weenie that self-respecting Wussy Boys everywhere cringe at the thought of being lumped into the same vat as this little, irritating weasel. Are Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater Wussy Boys? These are tough calls. I kinda want to say yes, based on some of the roles that theyʼve done (Downey has had memorable turns in “Chaplin,” “Two Girls and a Guy and “Less Than Zero” and Slater has shined in “Pump Up The Volume” and “Heathers”) but I kinda wanna say no, based on their shit-headed public personas thatʼre always getting their sad asses dragged in front of some judge in order to plead for yet another drug treatment program.So, Iʼll leave it up to you.

Vote Yes or No at [email protected]. Results will appear in the issue #4 of Wussy Boy Chronicles. Wussy Boy Music Reviews One night I was in this maudlin mood (you know the one, where you sort through boxes of ex-girlfriend photos and wonder if they remember you?), so I made a Wussy Boy mix tape of all my favorite Wuss Core songs that remind me of ex-girlfriends. Good Lord, itʼs shamelessly cheesy but you know... sometimes you just have to do that, you have to wallow in it, you know? Here are some of my favorite Wuss Core tracks. “Boys Don’t Cry,” by The Cure This is an ode to Wussiness from way back, back when my favorite Halloween costume consisted of me teasing up my dyed black hair into a snarl of Gothness, dressing head-to-toe in black, and whispering Robert Smith lyrics under my breath. Oh yeah, this oneʼs got some good self-pity, baby, like: “I would tell you / That I loved you / If I thought that you would stay / But I know that itʼs no use / That youʼve already / Gone away.” Fat Bob goes on to moan: “Now I would do most anything / To get you back by my side / But I just / Keep on laughing / Hiding the tears in my eyes / ʻcause boys donʼt cry / Boys donʼt cry.” Oh, Bob, itʼs okay: We all know Wussy Boys cry! “How Soon is Now,” by The Smiths Okay, right off the bat, I want everyone to know that I hate and despise Stephen Patrick Morrissey. I think heʼs crossed the line from Wussy Boy to Sucky Boy, but thatʼs my issue. Anyway, this song is the bomb and remains one of the few Morrissey songs I can actually listen to. You canʼt beat this line: “Thereʼs a club, if youʼd like to go / you could meet somebody who really loves you / so you go, and you stand on your own / and you leave on your own / and you go home, and you cry / and you want to die.” How many times have I found myself in this position, standing at the edge of some crowd in some club wishing Winona Ryder would come walking up to me and say something like, “Say, letʼs blow this joint and make out. Cool?” But it NEVER happens. Oh the trials of the Wussy Boy life! “Somebody,” by Depeche Mode When I caught Depeche Mode touring for their most recent greatest hits compilations, the high point of the show was seeing Wussy Boy Martin Gore begin the ﬁrst words of this song: “I want somebody to share / share the rest of my life...” The crowd, as they say, went wild. This is such a sweet little song and so very Wuss Core. My favorite lines are these yearning ones, with self-loathing tacked on to the end: “But when Iʼm asleep / I want somebody / Who will put their arms around me / And kiss me tenderly / Though things like this / Make me sick / In a case like this / Iʼll get away with it.” Oh, Martin knows my pain! “Everybody Hurts,” by R.E.M. Michael Stipe knows the pain, too, he knows the hurt and heʼs not afraid to share it. When I saw this drop-dead beautiful video, I just knew that Michael was singing this to me, looking at me through the video screen and telling me to hold on: “When the day is long and the night / the night is yours alone / when youʼre sure youʼve had enough of this life / well hang on / Donʼt let yourself go, everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes.” “Bittersweet Symphony,” by The Verve My boyʼs in that video with his leather jacket singing about his angst, and heʼs checking folks with that bony shoulder of his as heʼs doing it. When I listen to Wussy Boy music to make myself miserable, I think of these lines as justiﬁcation: “I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah / I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now.” “Waiting in Vain,” by Bob Marley Now, I donʼt think anyone would call Bob Marley a Wussy Boy, but this song sure comes close to a Wussy Boy anthem as far as Iʼm concerned. I mean, look at Bob singing to his unrequited love: “Ya see, in life I know thereʼs lots of grief / But your love is my relief / Tears in my eyes burn / Tears in my eyes burn while Iʼm waiting / While Iʼm waiting for my turn.” Bob is hurting here, and heʼs pining for his love Wuss Core stylie! (Iʼll have you know that Bob Marley died on my birthday, May 11, which is Bob Marley day in Jamaica. Peace.) THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES TAKES ON THE NATIONAL POETRY SLAM IN CHICAGO!!!

I am Wussy Boy — Hear me roar! One of the most amazing things about the hind end of 1999 was getting the opportunity to perform in the National Poetry Slam in Chicago. This was without a doubt the most fantastic event I have ever been a part of in my entire life. It ranks right up there with all those wonderful late night conversation firsts a life can give you, like first kiss, first masturbation experience, first sex. Listen: I performed my “Wussy Boy Manifesto” poem in front of an audience of 3,200 people in the grand old Chicago Theatre and ended up in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, San Francisco Bay Guardian and 60 Minutes. The roar of the crowd was so loud and so exuberant at the end of the piece that I just stood there looking into the spotlight thinking to myself, “Fuck sitting in front of a computer all day as a journalist, man, Iʼm a rock star!” ANOTHER WUSSY BOY INVENTION Leave it to Wussy Boys and Wussy Girls to come up with a sport that allows them to get all sweaty and competitive without the possibility of getting their asses kicked, especially one that has something to do with poetry. In my experience, most Wussies shunned sports when they were kids, or were ignored by the schoolyard machos-in-training. But, they always wondered what it would be like to go out there and kick some righteous ass if they could only find a sport in which they could excel without getting beaten up or, even worse, looking goofy. Competition without bloody noses! Combat without sprained ankles! Sparring without tripping over your own big feet and looking stupid! Behold — Poetry Slams! Verbal warriors battling it out on the microphone, donning lyric proof vests and slamming clips of performance poetry into their 9 mm notebooks and peppering the audience with molten metaphors and similes. Yeah baby, thatʼs what Iʼm talking about: a Wussy Boy wet dream of rock star glory! Poetry slams are like poetic boxing matches. Hereʼs how it works: five judges are randomly chosen from the audience and tasked with rating each performance on an Olympic scale of 1-10 (the top and the bottom scores are dropped, and the three in the middle are added together, so a perfect score is a 30). Readers sign up open mike style and are called to the stage one at a time to perform one original poem within three minutes. Each poet gets scored, and the one at the end of the slam who has the highest score is declared the winner. You can imagine the kind of criticism this sort of thing gets. “Oh,” the English lit. majors shout, “how can you rate a work of art on a scale of 1-10?” “Itʼs blasphemy,” the creative writing professors scream, “to rank one poet as better than another fellow poet!” But, in the end, a poetry slam has one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to convince a skeptical audience that spoken word and performance poetry can be jam-packed with all the excitement and fun of a rock and roll show. Really, the roars of approval during a heated poetry slam match can rival that of any rock show, and the most common response by a newcomer to slams is this: “I had no idea that this sort of thing could be so much fun.” Itʼs all a matter of creating this call and response between the poets and the audience, plus poetry slams show that regular average people have just as much right to say what they like and dislike about poetry as any tenured professor at some ivy league school. The competition aspect of the poetry slam is just a game, really, itʼs just a means of engaging the audience. The point should never be the points; it should always be the poetry. So, if the poets go into this situation understanding that their reason for being there on a stage in front of an audience is to be a part of an exuberant show and not to rank themselves from best to worst poet, then the evening can be one hell of a roller coaster ride of fun with the spoken word. WHY SLAM? BECAUSE OPEN MIKES SUCK! A poetry slam is nothing more or less than an open mike poetry reading thatʼs been streamlined for maximum audience enjoyment. Anyone who has ever been to a local open mike poetry reading in some cafe or bookstore can tell you why they can drag ass: inarticulate poets who are too self- important to realize they suck eggs ramble on and on about things no one really cares about, then they shove their poetry notebooks into their little black backpacks and leave. In the standard format of open mike readings, the poet expects the audience to sit there and shut up and pay attention no matter how much they suck. “I am here,” they say, “and I am a poet,” they assert, “and you must sit there and listen to me read and show me respect until I am finished listening to the sound of my own voice, then I will leave because I am not here to listen to anyone elseʼs poetry!” God, I hate most open mikes! They are so boring and so filled with the most pretentious, self-deluded assholes! What poetry slams do is put the focus on the audience. The audience is not there to serve the ego of the poet; hell, no, they are there to be entertained and engaged and enlightened by the poet. They are paying the most precious thing they can give a poet — their time and attention — and they deserve to be compensated by readers who have something other than their own selfish, onanistic interests in mind. No one wants to watch some black bereted dickhead verbally masturbate for two hours, you know? Poetry slams limit the shitty aspects of an open mike and pump up the good ones. They are still open forums for expression, but the audience is empowered to choose what it likes and dislikes. If someone comes to the stage and they are giving that extra bit to engage the audience — incorporating elements of stand-up comedy, performance poetry, and dramatic monologue — then they are rewarded with phat applause and good scores. If the poet just wants to moan and groan about the same old boring shit that every high school poet has been moaning and groaning about for ages, then they are given their three minutes just like everyone else, then politely clapped to their seats. Usually, there are two rounds in a poetry slam, with the top few poets returning for more poetry, so this judging thing allows the audience to pick which poets theyʼd like to hear from again. Another reason I like poetry slams is that they take poetry appreciation out of the realm of classrooms and dusty textbooks and tenured professors and put it in the bars and coffeehouses and nightclubs in which the common person spends time. It shows that poetry is something that is open and available to everyone; it shows that poetry applies to the lives of each and every person, not just the ones who can stomach an MFA degree. POETRY SLAM, THE EARLY YEARS Poetry slams first started more than ten years ago in a Chicago bar called the Green Mill. A former construction worker named Marc Smith wanted to inject some life into the same old dull poetry readings, and so he developed this mock competition to spice up the performances and energize the audiences. It caught on, and pretty soon venues all across the country started organizing their own slams. It wasnʼt long before some friendly shit-talking started, and in 1989 the San Francisco scene challenged the Chicago scene to a team match for poetry slam glory. The National Poetry Slam was born! Each year after that, more and more venues across the country staged their own poetry slams, and every May or so each scene would hold a big poetry slam to determine which four poets would get the chance to represent their city at the National Poetry Slam. The focus was on friendly competition and the advancement of spoken word and performance poetry. Along the way rivalries popped up and scenes started to distinguish themselves from each other — the NY style was hard-edged and honed with social and political criticism; the Chicago style relied more on “pure” poetry and less on theatrics; the West Coast and Texas crews specialized in stand-up comedy and high energy rants. Naturally, certain personalities shined within the slam community, and some well-known slammers broke out and went nationwide: the most well- known being Saul Williams, a member of the 1996 Nuyorican Slam Team from New York City who was featured in the Cannes Film Festival hit “Slam” and the acclaimed documentary “SlamNation.” Another well- known slammer named Beau Sia from New York got his 15 minutes of fame extended a bit by penning a parody of Jewelʼs book of poetry called “A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge.” And do you remember those Burger King commercials where the cartoon logo of the company gets two big bites taken out of it? Well, the voice-over guy on that commercial was none other than Taylor Mali, a longtime slammer who was a part of the 1996 Champion Team from Providence, R.I. Each year the National Poetry Slam has gotten bigger and bigger until finally, in 1999, the host city of Chicago welcomed 48 four-person teams from across the country and garnered even more national attention than ever before. BIG POPPA E, THE EARLY YEARS Iʼve been performing poetry on a regular basis since about 1992 or so, but had never heard of poetry slamming until I read a 1995 L.A. Times article on the Heavyweight Championship of Poetry held every year at the Taos Poetry Circus. In this event, two nationally known performance poets go head to head for ten rounds. I was intrigued by this idea, this high energy poetic boxing match in front of a screaming and shouting audience, so I roadtripped to Taos the next summer and slammed poetry for the very first time in a side event. I got third out of 30 poets in the open slam and was hooked. I came back to my little college town of Chico in Northern California inspired by what I saw and started organizing poetry slams with a few friends. Since Chico is only about three hours away from San Francisco, I started hitting the SF Slam on a regular basis and became a part of that scene. MAKING THE SF POETRY SLAM TEAM Okay, flash forward, itʼs May of 1999 and the SF Poetry Slam is having its finals to determine which four poets will represent SF at the 10th Annual National Poetry Slam in Chicago. The winners get a round-trip ticket to Chicago, a hotel room for the four-night stay, and a chance to make it into the finals and compete for the $2,000 first prize. Plus, and even more importantly, they would get a chance to schmooze and party with over 200 performance poets and slam junkies from around the country during four days of poetic bacchanalia! Something like 32 poets from the Bay Area competed in the SF Slam semifinal round, then the top 16 went on to the finals. After two front of 500+ screaming, shouting, hooting audience members, the four finalists were announced: Ariana Waynes, a 19-year-old English student at UC Berkeley; Mark Bamuthi Joseph, aka SeeKing, a 23-year-old High School English teacher from Oakland; Eitan Kadosh, a 24-year-old English teacher who graduated from Berkeley and was teaching in Los Angeles; and me, R. Eirik Ott, aka Big Poppa E, a student journalist and zine publisher. Once the team was formed, we hit poetry festivals all over the West Coast in preparation for the National Poetry Slam held in August. We trav- eled to the Pacific Northwest and hit the three-day Salmon Slam festival with teams from Se- attle, Portland and Vancouver, Canada. We dipped down to Big Sur in California and performed at the West Coast Regionals with teams from Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Oak- land, and, yes, Chico (some friends of mine had formed a four-person team, too.) We honed our poems to perfection through constant practice and performance, and flew to Chicago in August filled with expectations for a kick-ass good time. We were not disappointed in the slightest. WUSSY BOY HEDONISM IN CHICAGO Now, performing on a stage in front of a rowdy bunch of people who are totally digging your shit is one hell of a mindtrip, especially for a Wussy Boy who has grown used to having absolutely no game whatsoever. Suddenly, boom, youʼre up there and you are captivating that audience with your words and you are a bonified rock star. People youʼve never met (and who have no idea how much of a dork you really are) line up to buy your chapbook and ask sheepishly if youʼll sign it for them. Girls and boys who would never give you the time of day are now buying you drinks just to get a chance to hear your voice some more. The biggest thrills and spills, however, go on behind the scenes after the poetry slams are over and the slam family goes back to the hotel. has a group of poetry dorks ever had so much fun than back at the hotel after a heated evening of verbal conquest! Wussy Boys and Girls who have lived their entire lives saddled with overloaded bags of self-esteem problems suddenly have poetry groupies flocking around them, fluttering eyelashes and praising their lyrical gifts. Mix that with mass amounts of alcohol and pot and what you have are 200 poets partying in the same hotel doing their damnedest to hook up! Poets from Austin, Texas, hooking up with poets from Detroit, Michigan, who just hooked up with poets from Worcester, Massachusetts, and Birmingham, Alabama. Shameless hooking up, multiple hook- ups, rumors of threesomes and foursomes and nekkid poets in hotel pools! Youʼve got 200 poets who have never been given the chance to act out in a seriously shameless rock star manner, and they take to it like theyʼre living out every bedroom wall poster fantasy theyʼve ever had. Of course, weʼre all there for the poetry (we keep repeating to ourselves), but boy oh boy are there scandalous liaisons being concocted, planned and carried out from the moment the first plane touches down from the first slam scene! Oh, the stories I could tell... My teammate Ariana and I even made a pact to kiss as many people as we could while we had the chance, and Iʼm happy to say that she barely beat me. (Anyone who knows Ariana knows that saying she “barely” beat me at this contest knows that it is truly saying something.) Anyway, thatʼs the “dark side” of the National Slam that the organizers would rather sweep under the rug, but, still, condoms and lube are included with every “Welcome to the Slam” packet. ʻNuff said. SLAM, BAM, THANK YOU MA’AM Team slams are great fun. Three teams are randomly selected for every bout (say, Portland vs. Fargo vs. Albuquerque) and a poet from each team performs one piece in a rotation until all the poets have had a chance to perform. The team with the highest combined score at the end of the bout is declared the winner and receives a “1.” Second place gets a “2,” and third gets a “3.” Basically, what you want are those “1ʼs” because only four teams out of 48 get into the finals and usually youʼve got to have nothing but 1ʼs to make it in. There are two preliminary bouts in which every team gets a chance to perform. The semis take the top 18 teams, then the finals narrow the field to just four. The winning team gets the trophy and $2,000. Strategy really comes into play during a team slam. Itʼs all about choosing the right poem from the right poet at the right time, which means nothing more or less than providing the best show for the audience. For instance, each poet on the SF Team had basically chosen their best three or four poems to hold in the ready, with maybe two or three extras just in case. You want to be sure to show a wide range with your pieces rather than bringing poems that are all the same in tone and scope: for instance, I had a serious piece about abusing your poetic gifts (“Poetry Widow”), an exuberant punk rock attitude piece that was good at rousing audiences early in the night (“Jesus Moshpit”), and my signature piece “The Wussy Boy Manifesto,” which was genetically engineered to make people laugh all the way through it. If you want to do your hard core political piece that tears into global consumerism, but the poet before you does a piece that covers the same territory, youʼd probably choose to flip the energy and do something different, like maybe that funny, sexy rant that the audience always loves. Or, say, someone right before you busts out with a funny, lightweight rant that drops pop culture names left and right, then maybe youʼd follow that up with a powerful piece about tragedy that brings the house to complete silence. Or, maybe youʼd bring out your own funny, lightweight rant to show the audience that you rant funnier and can drop even more pop culture references than the other guy. BOUT ONE - SF VS. SEATTLE VS. MONTREAL Our first preliminary bout of the Nationals was such a great experience. The SF Team performed with teams from Seattle and Montreal, which were both filled with really cool, really nice people. The vibe was totally West Coast, which means the pieces were phat with comedy and pop culture references. The mood was giddy the whole night, with members of each team congratulating every performer on a job well done. The competition aspect only served to push each performer to higher points, and the show was flawless. By the end of the evening, every single poet was raw-throated and loopy from being a part of such a wondrous event, and the audience really gave up their support. (By the way, one of the Seattle poets was a zinester named Gregory Hischak whose zine Farm Pulp has gotten a lot of great reviews in the last couple of years. When we introduced ourselves, we were both like, “Say, I recognize your name! Are you...? You are? Whoa!” We had exchanged zines a couple of times in the past, so it was sweet to finally meet.) We were determined to start strong and stay strong, so when we discovered that SF had to provide the first poet in the first rotation, I jumped at the chance to warm up the crowd. I whipped out my “Jesus Moshpit” piece and unleashed it, jumping off the stage and wading into the audience, stepping on the backs of chairs as I ranted and raved and sprayed spittle onto the sea of upturned heads. While Tim Sanders from the Seattle Team minded the mike cord for me, I finished my poem on the back of a chair in the middle of the audience and was rewarded with the second highest score of the evening. My own teammate SeeKing was the only one to outscore me. The early SF lead increased with every SF performance, so we took the bout with ease. Meanwhile, other teams were meeting all over Chicago and bouting against each other in three-team competition. After every team had performed and the team rankings were tallied, the SF team was rated Number One out of 48 teams. America — It’s Gotta Be the Cheese by Eitan Kadosh Everybody writes about America and everybody paints America because from Jasper Johns to Allen Ginsburg they are all looking for the same thing: Searching for the real America, the one that lies under the costumes and the war paints that lies under the Seinfeld and Springer under the bad porn and good basketball.

And I am no exception, except that one night late last week I actually found it, this elusive America — in the diary case at Andronicoʼs Market. Lurking beside the jacks and cheddars, the goudas, Swisses, stiltons, jarlesbergs, gorgonzolas, whole parmesans, ricottas, and myriad other imported and domestic cheeses. There — it beckoned suddenly, an immaculately wrapped unbelievably orange package of American Pasteurized Processed Cheese Food glory. God bless this country.

We pasteurized. We processed. We manipulated this cheese until it suited our purposes. This was engineered cheese. This was the scientiﬁc method at work — Jonas Salk, Copernicus. This was smooth, no-lumps-when-melted technology — the light bulb, phonograph, Model T, radio, television, Nike Air all rolled into one, and all for $1.99.

I was so moved I broke into the pledge of allegiance right then and there. I bought Charleton Hestonʼs autobiography and became a Daughter of the American Revolution.

Oh God, how I long to be wrapped in golden singles of American Cheese, drizzled in its salty goodness.

Oh God, strip me naked and cover me head to toe in golden pre-sliced singles of this food of the gods, cover me and put me in a sauna so that the cheese will melt and melt smoothly and when it does it will melt over every inch of my body rivulets of warm cheese will run down my face like tropical rain caress my body with the lasting wetness of a mouth. Oh God, take me, take me and dip me like fondue into your vat of silken American cheese food products, scoop it onto me like a nacho and let it cool like a second skin. Oh God, cheese food, I will use it for everything.

For breakfast melted on an English mufﬁn, for lunch in a sandwich with processed lunch meat and processed salad spread on processed white bread, for dinner obliterating my broccoli, at bed on my toothbrush so my breath will be cheesy American fresh in the morning. I will gargle with it and wash my face with a congealed vat of the stuff I keep on the sink and smear it on like Noxzema.

I will cook my girlfriend romantic dinners in which every course will consciously and creatively utilize and emphasize our most holy of sacraments, and when dinner is over and we hit the sack, I will have a new lubricant — fuck K.Y.! — Iʼll have a tube of Velveeta for when the going gets rough!

Because itʼs gotta be the cheese!

America, land of the free — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Home of the brave — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Land of possibility, opportunity and the certain unalienable rights of man.

Manifest destiny — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Who killed Emmet Till — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Who trained and armed Latin American torture squads — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Who shot J.F.K., J.R. Ewing, JC Penney — itʼs gotta be the cheese.

Internment camps — itʼs gotta be the cheese. The WWF — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Kurt Cobain — itʼs gotta be the cheese. Jerry Fucking Lewis — itʼs gotta be the cheese.

The hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb, engineered death and pantyhose.

Mom,

the ﬂag,

and apple pie.

Itʼs gotta be the cheese. Itʼs gotta be the cheese. Itʼs gotta be the cheese. BOUT TWO - SF VS. L.A. VS. SANTA CRUZ The second night was a tougher one, a much more competitive bout with our West Coast rivals from Los Angeles and our Bay Area homies from Santa Cruz. The L.A. Team was a strong group full of National Slam veterans; in fact, the 1998 L.A. Slam Team had made it into the finals at the 1998 National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas, and had taken Third Place out of 45 teams. We had gone up against L.A. at an earlier regional bout in Cali and had kicked some poetry ass, so L.A. was gunning for us with their best poems at the ready. Right from the beginning, they resisted our friendly handshakes and words of encouragement and support and, instead, spent the entire slam glaring at us all mean-like. Fine, we said, weʼll just do what we need to do and kick some more poetry ass. The crowd was hostile, though, and bad scores were the rule. The bout was the total opposite of the night before and was held in this tiny, smoky bar with bad lighting and sound. Ugh, you had to jump through hoops of fire to get the crowd to react, and still the scores would suck. Youʼd pour your heart into the most wrenching piece about the agony of human experience, or paint a verbal picture of the heights of joy and passion, and youʼd be hoping for “9ʼs” and “10ʼs,” but the judges would look you blank in the eye and give you “6ʼs” and “7ʼs,” which are really not that good at all. Our energy lagged a bit through the show because we didnʼt have that necessary audience support, but we still ended up kicking L.A.ʼs ass. It was draining, and not nearly as much fun as it couldʼve been had the L.A. Team simply been a bit more friendly about it. I performed a piece called “Poetry Widow,” which was written about my ex-girlfriend Kimberly. (Jesus, theyʼre all about Kimberly when you come right down to it.) I really wanted to give an honest and powerful performance of this piece, so I kinda dredged up the emotional baggage that went into the writing of the poem. And it was tough because once I reconnected with those feelings, I was kinda overwhelmed. I was on the edge of crying the whole performance and croaked the last couple of lines with tears welling up in my eyes. And what does the L.A. Team do? They called a “prop foul” because I threw my chapbook down on the ground during my piece. Youʼre not supposed to use props during a performance, and the L.A. Team claimed the act of throwing down the book from which I was reading could be construed as a prop. It was so stupid: we had to have this silly meeting with the venue manager and listen to their beef, then offer a response, and, in the end, it was thrown out. Had the prop foul been honored, L.A. still wouldʼve been in third place, so the whole thing really smacked of spite, you know? Ugh, the downside of combining slam rules and performance poetry... Anyway, after two nights of preliminary competition, the SF Team was still ranked Number One out of 48 teams in the nation. All we had to do was maintain our drive and motivation, and weʼd make the finals with no problems. To the Patriots and the Activist Poets by Ariana Waynes i sit in the classroom reeling from the words of the soft-spoken revolutionaries wondering if i should hate my country. as i am strangled by my stars and stripes, mexican, armenian, cuban, puerto rican, yugoslavian, bosnian children cry for inclusion. would you have me forget the blessed first amendment of these united states, that i can raise my voice to shake the world or at least the termite-infested foundation of this atrocious, ferocious land that i love but have never been exactly proud of? would you have me forget that when i come upon the box “check if you are black-but-not-hispanic,” would you have me forget that i am african and cuban and native american and jamaican and irish and chinese? would you have me forget that i am all of these, that i am none of these, that i am more than the sum of the census bureauʼs statistics or the stereotypes held against me, that i am proud of my everything? that my ancestors butchered my ancestors who enslaved my ancestors who raped my ancestors who drove my ancestors out of their land? would you have me forget that i am not my ancestors, and i am proud to be an american where at least i know iʼm free. that is, if i donʼt exercise my freedom too loudly or act too naturally me. that is, as long as i donʼt offend my country men, donʼt color outside the lines of good girl. would you have me forget that there are millions literally dying to be included in that “we the people who hold these truths to be self-evident that all straight white upper-middle class conservative christian men will be treated equal...” would that make my friends non people? oh beautiful for bright blue eyes for amber golden hair as long as youʼre a barbie doll theyʼll have to treat you fair. please pick up your apple pie at the door and leave quietly — bʼbye! would you have me forget those children who say “amerika” softly at night like a prayer before nightmares, and the monolingual anglosaxon men in their tailored business suits shaking their heads and readings their texts “youʼll have to go through the right channels. iʼm sorry. NEXT!”

Oh say can you see by the white fluorescent right — the king of clubs is painting the roses white — and deporting immigrant children in the middle of the night because they cannot write in english. god bless america, that racist, sexist, classist, ageist, ableist, heightist, imageist, heterosexist capitalistic community that i call home, which, would you have me forget, is nevertheless one of the few on earth in which i can speak my mind and pray or not pray to whatever god or goddess i choose or choose to refuse without being mutilated or murdered for it. would you have me forget that in a small country in southeast asia the lips of my labia would have been sewn together with a white-hot needle when i was twelve? would you have me forget that in a mid-sized nation in central africa i would be the property of my husband, lord and master? would you have me forget that in a modern industrialized nation in western europe i would have to flee the country to have an abortion or a divorce? would you have me forget that i could be shot as a matter of course for raising my voice there? and i pray to a god that i gave up with santa claus to thank her for birthing me here where the sidewalks, at least, are paved with potholes of potential and where else would you rather be? i sit here in the classroom reeling from the weight of my internal contradictions and hysterical afflictions of patriotic asphyxiation for loving a broken nation that itʼs up to us to fix — power of the people, remember? at least it doesnʼt take a military coup. ask not what your nation can do for you ʻcuz iʼm tired through and through of waiting of hating my home.

i still love my country. i guess itʼs like my mama says — i yell because i care.

BOUT THREE - SF VS. DETROIT VS. MINNEAPOLIS The top 18 teams went into the next nightʼs semifinals round and SF made the cut, as did our friends from San Jose and Oakland. The SF Team was matched with teams from Detroit and Minneapolis. We hadnʼt really heard much about either team, but we had heard the Detroit team was a dead on favorite to win. Thankfully, we had saved our best, strongest, most hard-hitting pieces for this bout (you arenʼt allowed to repeat poems until the finals, so youʼve got to have no fewer than three kick-ass poems to make it through both prelims and the semis without repeating, dig?) This would be our toughest bout.. We were not even expecting the precision with which they presented their poetry, the passion with which they performed, the brutal honesty of their words. These were profes- sionals, and we had to give up every bit of poetry we had in our bodies just to maintain an even tie. Every kick-ass exuberant response conjured by one of our poets was echoed by yet another equally kick-ass response by one of their poets. Their funny pieces were just as funny as ours, their political poems hit just as hard as ours, and their love poems rocked the Barry White beat just as effectively as ours. Detroit was tight, and, in the end, ended up out-scoring us by .3 points. They essentially had won the bout, but because one of their poets had gone over the three minute time limit, they nabbed a time penalty resulting in a .5 deduction. Do the math: The SF Slam Team beat the Detroit Team by exactly .2 points because of a stinking time penalty. That was a hard one... they had outperformed us, but the three minute time rule awarded us the bout. Detroit had performed so well... When we all gathered to give hugs of encouragement and support, we also acknowledged their strong performances. After the two nights of prelims and one night of semifinals, the SF Team was still the top-ranked team in the nation, and one of only two to be undefeated going into the finals. Are You Listening? by SeeKing

are you listening words whistling random thoughts brought to you by merril lynch in still moments i pray for independence but canʼt even dream free slavery in degrees is it my skin or nikeʼs protecting my heart from tear-causing sights who owns the copyright to my mind to my life find refuge in rhyme murmured sounds to mend whatʼs missing but is anybody listening to at&t poet on leviʼs dockers stage even maya played pulse of politricks camera flicks distilled images freeze moment make it vintage as we cut to commercial in 3... 2... 1... newer bigger better faster newer bigger better faster knew a nigga killed the bastard fool the niggas tell them after faster better bigger newer screw the niggas iʼm the master hoover killed the niggas better threw the niggas in the sewer new world order coming faster news and figures truth to niggas hide the truth tell lies to niggas bigger better newer faster brought to you by your federal government... and weʼre back that was the black & decker mid-poem report i be standing on langstonʼs shoulders holdinʼ down forts for shoulders wield six inch bic like six foot bamboo stick sic soft my soliloquies on urban jungle enemies who shut ears and open eyes nodding head their device fisher price games to feign interest in just another negro wit a vocabulary and a journal should be writinʼ jingles for the colonel or on the corner wit yo babyʼs mama usinʼ ghetto drama for lyrical inspiration recitation while your boy kicks beatbox beats and that should be it but noooooo weʼre too wrapped in tradition the life mission of this artist is to speak truth states spend more loot devising means of putting brothersʼ bodies in lock than settinʼ they minds free it be amazing raising budgets to incarcerate the margined but iʼm suspicious of big brother posin as madame defarge inconspicuously knitting websites to wind pavlovian responding to miller time and genocide in kind just speaking truth fuck conspiracy theories and bleary eyed pundits hallucinating over their own anxiety and guilt the structure that ended the world done been built around the same time that cultureʼs history defined by war manʼs power based on ability to disintegrate another motherʼs desecrated with ease create pseudoscience to justify and appease put penis and these at center of reality earthʼs finality been in effect go get a late pass it used to take a nation of millions to hold me back now my pen and pad got me shacked up like a craftsmen ho i commodify concentrated consonants kinda dense now common sense makes common cents and bucks rhymes intense as fuck incensed invent new identities like transformers by matell i got words linguistic reflections of my soul to sell will i burn in hell for prostituting godʼs gift? swiftly i dodge explore and metro retro back to ʻ92 when heads was burninʼ america down cuz king was crowned with coppers clubs of justice why canʼt we just get along i be the angelic agony of the caged birdʼs song are you listening or does ibm have to sponsor my evolution are you listening or does cnn have to televise my revolution are you listening or will you be dripped in confusion when heads take to the streets in pain and frustration i bet you wish you could change the station are you listening? are you listening? are you listening? THE BIG SHOW We made it to the Finals in the Chicago Theatre (sold out at 3,200 seats) and would be performing with three others for the top prize of $2,000: Team Union Square from New York City; Team San Jose; and Team Oakland. This was thrilling news because the San Jose and Oakland Teams were our homies, fully Bay Area comrades in poetry, and we had all been performing with each other for the past six months in preparation for the Nationals. We had organized joint fund-raisers together, roadtripped to regional competitions with each other, critiqued each other, and had formed a strong Bay Area bond. During the Nationals, every available Bay Area team member would flock to any other bout featuring a Bay Area team to show support for our friends, so we had forged a strong alliance. In fact, we had shown so much support for our friends that some of the more seasoned (and, dare I say, jaded?) teams actually complained that we were turning audiences against opposing teams. While we were busy yelling and hooting and hollering for every poet who performed (and a little bit extra for our friends), some teams lodged protests with the organizers alleging “Bay Area Intimidation Tactics” that goaded audiences into applauding louder for Bay Teams than for others. I mean, really, weʼre talking poetry here, not World Wide Wrestling, but some people take it upon themselves to get so defensive and competitive. I mean, how can you regulate enthusiasm? What, are we supposed to sit there quietly on our hands and NOT cheer for our friends? Eh, again, the National Poetry Slam is, unfortunately, a place where talented and creative Wussy Boys and Girls sometimes transform themselves into shameless Cock Men Oppressors under the pressure of stretching for that $2,000 first prize. Thankfully, that kind of behavior is very much in the minority. Anyway, before 1999 the only West Coast team to ever make it into the finals was L.A., and no Bay Area team had even come close. This mad finish from the Bay Area Teams was unprecedented: never had a single region of the U.S. so dominated a National Poetry Slam. We felt so elated, like our strong friendship had carried us through to the end. This totally took off the majority of the pressure of being in the finals, the Big Show, the gold medallion of the pearl necklace of the whole Nationals, because we were there with our friends just kicking it backstage and throwing a big exposition of Bay Area Poetry. Plus, the people from the New York Union Square Team who also made the finals were staying in the hotel room right next to us, so we had been hanging out as friends the whole time. It was a perfect lineup, and the energy backstage was completely positive. There was a totally supportive feeling that surrounded us the moment we entered this gorgeous venue through the backstage door: We had already won, now all we needed to do was perform. We had a big group prayer circle, thanked our friends, family, teammates and fellow poets, and got to work. THE CHICAGO THEATRE The Chicago Theatre was packed to the rafters with people, fully 3,200 people in this gorgeous performance space with gilded ceilings and velvet curtains and gold lights everywhere. It was like something on the cover of Styxʼs “Paradise Theatre,” one of those places you walk into and stifle a gasp and imagine rich famous people with mink stoles and ivory cigarette holders filing into for operas and such. Plus, the backstage walls had been covered with the signatures of actors and rock stars who had performed there: I signed my name in big, bold, red letters right next to Liza Minelli, Smokey Robinson and Gene Simmons of Kiss! Tell me Iʼm not a rock star! THE FINAL BOUT - SF VS. SAN JOSE VS. OAKLAND VS. NEW YORK The running order of the evening was randomly determined, and San Francisco got to perform last in the first rotation. This is a good spot because weʼd have three people going before us in the first round before we had to debut an SF Teammate, so it gave us a chance to see what the audience was reacting to before we chose who would go up and what they would perform. A teammate from New York went first in the first rotation, which is a scary place to have to perform because the judges in the audience have yet to warm to the idea of scoring. They usually take a while to get the hang of it, and so the first couple of scores tend to be low. Then, as the night wears on, the scores tend to creep ever higher, a phenomenon known as “Score Creep.” Going first pretty much guarantees that youʼll be getting one of the lowest scores of the evening. So, New York goes up there in the first rotation and their teammate does this really intense, personal poem involving, I think, abortion or some other heavy duty topic. It was one of those intense pieces where the audience spends the entire time clenching their fists and tensing their stomachs, until finally the poem ends and you let out a sigh of relief. It was a moving piece, and the audience awarded her with applause and good scores. Next up in the first rotation was San Jose, whose team member offered another heavy duty poem, this one dealing with the politics of was another tough poem, brutally honest and angry, that left the audience silent for the whole of the poem until the very end. She was awarded with more applause and more good scores. Third in the first rotation was Oakland, and their teammate offered another really deep poem: a moving, painful portrait of gender and racial politics and drama. Again, the audience was moved to complete silence as she presented her piece. She was given applause, but this time it was slightly less enthusiastic than for the other wrenching poems before it, and the scores reflected the same. Now, there are few things more moving than a poet on a stage with nothing more then words and a microphone and watching as they silence a huge crowd of people sitting on the edge of their seats. But, if the audience sees too many poets with the same energy in a row, it starts to get restless for a change of pace. As the SF Team huddled back stage and prepared to send out the last performer of the first rotation, we decided it was time to flip the vibe of the event and give the audience a chance to release their pent up energy with a storm of laughter and raging applause. ENTER WUSSY BOY! Yes, It was decided that I would be the first SF Team poet of the evening, and I marched out there as soon as the announcer shouted, “And now, from San Francisco, please welcome Big Poppa E!” And ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let it be known that I performed “The Wussy Boy Manifesto” to the very best of my ability and was awarded with the loudest, most sustained, most frequent chorus of hoots, hollers, whistles and shouts of approval that I have ever witnessed. Yes, as I stood there ablaze in the spotlight and shared my tale of Wuss Core Empowerment, I was as close to being a rock star as I will ever be. The audience let loose with frantic, jubilant applause and the judges awarded me the highest score of the first rotation. The SF Team marched into the second rotation with a commanding lead. I had accomplished what I had set out to do: I rocked the mike Wuss Core stylie! The Wussy Boy Manifesto! by Big Poppa E my name is big poppa e and i am a wussy boy.

itʼs taken me a long time to admit it...

and i realized i wasnʼt alone.

and i looked around and saw other wussy boys living large and proud of who they were: anthony michael hall, wussy boy; michael j. fox, wussy boy; and lord god king of the wussy boy movement, matthew broderick, unafraid to prove to the world that sensitive guys much kick ass. now i am no longer ashamed of my wussiness, hell no, iʼm empowered by it. when iʼm at a stoplight and some testosterone redneck methamphetamine jock fratboy asshole dumb fuck pulls up beside me blasting his trans amʼs stereo with power chord anthems to big tits and date rape, i no longer avoid his eyesight, hell no, i just crank all 12 watts of my car stereo and i rock out right into his face: (devil sign and morrisseyʼs voice) “i am human and i need to be loved just like everybody else does!” i am wussy boy, hear me roar (meow). bar fight? pshaw! you think you can take me, huh? just because i like poetry better than sports illustrated? well, allow me to caution you, for i am not the average every day run-of-the-mill wussy boy you beat up in high school, punk, i am wuss core! (flash “wc” gang sign) donʼt make me get renaissance on your ass because i will write a poem about you! a poem that tears your psyche limb from limb, that exposes your selfish insecurities, that will wound you deeper and more severely than knives and chains and gats and baseball bats could ever hope to do..

you may see 65 inches of wussy boy standing in front of you, but my steel-toed soul is ten foot tall and bullet proof!

bring the pain, punk, beat the shit out of me, show all the people in this bar what a real man can do to a shit-talking wussy boy like me

but youʼd better remember my bruises will fade my cuts will heal, my scars will shrink and disappear, but my poem about the pitiful, small, helpless cock-man oppressor you really are will last forever. ON WITH THE BIG SHOW But it was hard to relax, man... at this level, every single performer is a total pro and has their pieces down like a science. There was not a single flaw in the entire evening of raw, engaging, pure expression: The laughs were huge! The gasps were enormous! The rapt silences were vast! The applause was deafening! After the second rotation, the SF Team was still in the lead, but after a commanding performance from New Yorkʼs Roger Bonair-Agard, the lead had shrunk considerably. This Roger cat, man, he was something else. All dreadlocked and sculpted from dark obsidian, the words flowed from his Trinidadian mouth like the richest honey. Roger is like the Barry White of poetry slamming, man, Iʼll tell you... pure sex. He could be reading from the goddamned phone book and bring every man, woman and child within 50 miles to their knees with the orgasmic lilt of his voice. Fucker... Anyway, yeah, it seemed as though the big competition was going to be between SF and New York, even though San Jose and Oakland were just baby steps behind. After the third rotation, New York was in the lead, but a time penalty brought them less than a point away from SF and not too much more than that from San Jose. The fourth and final round was the clincher. It literally couldʼve been any teamʼs game. Then, our man SeeKing hit the boards and delivered a powerful piece that slammed us into the lead again, but he scored a time penalty! YIKES! We were still in the lead, but New York was next and only needed something like a 27.7 to win the whole thing. New York went. New York scored a 27.5. The SF Team just stared at each other trying to fathom what this meant, but then, before we had a chance to figure it out, we had one more team to go: our friends from San Jose. And get this: In all the focus on the battle between New York and San Francisco, no one seemed to noticed that San Jose had been keeping pace with the both of us by a tiny little margin. When San Joseʼs Robert Karimi went on stage and performed his very best piece, he nailed it and was awarded the highest score of the entire evening. This changed everything, because suddenly it was not just SF out in the lead, no, because San Jose passed New Yorkʼs score and TIED SF with that kick ass last piece! A tie had NEVER happened before in the history of the National Poetry Slam, so the host of the event started calling for a “Sudden Death Round” that would decide it all. All the members of the San Jose and SF Teams were gathered backstage jumping up and down and rejoicing when we heard the call for a tie breaker, and we all stopped simultaneously and shouted, “NO!” We looked back and forth at each other and three or four people shouted at once, “Letʼs share it!” Again, never in the history of the National Poetry Slam had two teams shared a title, and one of the organizers backstage just shook his head and laughed and said, “You guys are fucking everything up! Go for it!” And then SeeKing from the SF Team and San Joseʼs Robert Karimi marched on stage to tell the host that we had decided to share the top prize. When Marc Smith, the host and inventor of the whole concept of poetry slamming, announced to the capacity crowd that we wanted to share the top honors, the whole place erupted into this huge, emotional frenzy. I remember running as fast as I could with everyone else to the front of the stage and jumping into the arms of one of the Oakland Team members and pumping my fists and shouting myself hoarse. People from the audience ran into the aisles and stormed the stage, jumping up and down and pumping their fists and screaming. Someone shouted, “Tear the trophy in half!” and suddenly we all had the trophy over our heads and were pulling on it with all our might as the audience roared. The trophy had been handed down year after year for a decade and was nothing more than a stack of books glued together and painted gold with a boxing glove stuck on top. We tore into it and y a n k e d a n d pulled until the w h o l e t h i n g split down the middle. ABSOLUTE MAYHEM God! Jesus! Mother Mary! Pure, unadulter- ated chaos and anarchy! People were running around clawing at their eyes and weeping and moaning and gnashing their teeth. Then, it was all over, and I remember SeeKing and I collapsing onto the massive stage and dangling our feet over the edge and leaning all sweaty and spent on each other. We smiled big tired smiles and shook hands and just breathed very deeply for a while as the audience continued to press towards us. And I looked into the clot of people crowded against the stage and saw this skinny little Goth looking guy with dyed black hair and black eyeliner, toting a little black backpack with patches of Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus and The Cult sewn into it. He walked up to me and extended a pale hand and said, “I just wanted to thank you. I totally identified with your piece. You have no idea how important that was.” When he walked away, another Wussy Boy took his place, extending another pale hand in thanks, and behind him a long line of Wussy Boys stretched into the seats of the theatre, wearing their Cure shirts and Smiths sweatshirts and Lilith Faire hoodies. I was so proud! That night was one of the most phenomenal moments of my entire life, and any thought of hunching in front of a computer screen as a journalist for the rest of my young life evaporated completely. No, this is what life is all about, baby. Peace out. As I left Chicago and made my way back to Chico on a flight home, I grabbed a piece of the trophy for myself: I have the tattered remains of one of the golden books on my wall as a momento, right next to my POETRY SLAM WEB RESOURCES There are all kinds of web sites on the Internet that can give you lots of background and history on poetry slams across the country. Here are a few I have visited numerous times for info.

1] www.slampapi.com This is the ofﬁcial home page of Marc Smith, the inventor of the poetry slam as we know it today. There is a lot of info here on Marc and the things he has done in the past decade and a brief history of the slam, plus there is a decent links page to other sites covering slam. This is a good page to start just to see whatʼs out there.

2] www.poetryslam.com The ofﬁcial website covering the 1999 National Poetry Slam in Chicago was set up here during the week-long series of events. The site has now metamorphosed into the ofﬁcial site of Poetry Slam Inc., the organization behind the Nats. Thereʼs a lot of information covering the Chicago shows, plus lists of poetry slams around the country, contact information, and a slew of helpful links.

3] www.poeticdream.com David Huang is a Bay Area photographer who has become a leading chronicler of poetry in Northern California in the past few years. His photos capture the drama and emotion of live poetry performance and are posted in various photo albums here, plus there are audio and video snippets of Bay Area performers to sample. There are quite a few photos of the SF Team members spread throughout the photo section, plus Iʼve got an audio bit and a video bit online there as well.

4] www.poetrysuperhighway.com Rick Lupert is a Southern California homie of mine who runs this massive web resource for performance poets from across the country. The big feature is the long lists of web sites covering poets, performances, and e-zines featuring poetry. Not necessarily a slam poetry speciﬁc site, this is still a great place to connect with poets and performers all over the U.S. and beyond.

5] www.slamnews.com This is a newsletter covering the poetry slam scene that is run by a longtime slammer out of Boston named Michael Brown. Lots of venue information and up-to-date gossip and news, plus links. In addition to these websites, there is also a well-run list serve covering slams that is chock-full of slammers from all over the world spreading the latest gossip, rumors, tour information and such. The organizers of the Nationals use this list serve to connect with the players within the scene, so many of the big issues that must be dealt with are first hashed out here. To subscribe, you just send an e-mail to [email protected] and put the word “subscribe” in the subject line. Once you get hooked up, youʼll receive e-mail from slammers from coast to coast. I would also recommend renting copies of the movies “SlamNation” and “Slam” from your local video store. Both of these movies star NYC slammer Saul Williams and show slammers in action rocking the mike with poetry. LOOK MA, I’M ON 60 MINUTES! Okay, really, honestly, just to be able to perform at a level where you can make a poetry slam team at all is a great honor and pleasure. Period. There doesnʼt really need to be anything else added to the mix to make the experience worthwhile. But, being on a poetry slam team that kicks enough ass to make it into the finals of the National Poetry Slam is even better. And yes, to actually be a member of the team that takes it all is a rare place to find yourself, especially when you get to share the honor with such close friends. As the poets paced backstage before the Big Show, shouting silently at the back wall while memorizing their pieces and psyching themselves out, reporters from all over the country were covering the National Poetry Slam from all angles. The Washington Post was there, tagging along with performance poets from across the country. The New York Times was in the audience, as were the Chicago-Sun Times, The Chicago Tribune, and television news crews from all the area stations. This is a really cool side benefit from appearing at the finals of the National Poetry Slam: if you make it to the Big Show, you get hella ink, brothers and sisters, believe you me. The big BIG news, though, was that Morley Safer from 60 Minutes had been following the National Poetry Slam all week and that his camera crews were stationed in the audience as we hit the boards. There had been Morley sightings throughout the festival, and I even spotted him at one of the preliminary bouts and slid him a copy of “The Wussy Boy Chronicles #1.” So, anyway, SF and San Jose win the big joy and then everybody goes back to their real lives in and waits eagerly for 60 Minutes to air the segment on the Slam. We checked the 60 Minutes web site on a weekly basis for the next three months looking for some sign of the pending segment, but nothing came. Rumors abounded on the Internet about what the delay was all about, and so-called “insiders” gave up-to-the-minute scuttlebutt on the latest developments. Finally, in late November, the 60 Minutes web site gave up the info and declared that the segment on the National Poetry Slam was FINALLY going to air. I sent out the word to my whole family and every one of my friends across the country: “Watch 60 Minutes,” I told them, “because thereʼs this feature on slam poetry, and I really want you to see what this vibrant movement is all about.” Sub-text: “Watch 60 Minutes because thereʼs a chance, however slim, that I might be on it. Set the VCR, baby!” I was bound and determined not to be disappointed if I didnʼt get some national airtime on 60 Minutes. After all, this was for the good of all slam kind (and for Wussy Boys and Girls in general), and it was more important that the movement as a whole be well represented than to have individuals singled out. But still... I really, really wanted to call up my slam resume on my computer and add “Featured on 60 Minutes” to my list of blurbs. And besides, my mom and dad were watching in Wichita, Kansas, and theyʼve always wanted me to justify my choices as far as a career is concerned, you know, like, how in the world can I choose to be a... “Excuse me, what do you call yourself again, son? A ʻperformance poet?ʼ Oh, thatʼs rather quaint... how can you waste your time selling crack rock and poetry on street corners when you know you can make good money in the insurance business like your father?” With this 60 Minutes feature, I could point to the screen, then point to my dad, and say, “Did hustling insurance ever get you on 60 Minutes, Dad? Huh? Huh? Did insurance ever get you game?” So, my friends and I are gathered in front of the teevee in Chico waiting for the damned 60 Minutes timer thing to start ticking, and there it is, right there, and of course the slam story on 60 Minutes is the very last one, after a story on some soldier guy who got stabbed 67 times only the army said it was a suicide and a story on...hell, I donʼt even remember what the other story was on. We waded through the two stories to get to the real meat of the experience — The Slam Poetry 60 Minutes Moment, otherwise known as “See, Dad, I Told You This Poetry Thing Would Make Me Famous, Now Kiss My Ass!” And we waited — I swore that if I so much as saw the curve of my bald head in the background of some crowd, my resume would be updated — and we waited... And it finally started and I called out the names of people I recognized, mentally cataloging poets I knew across the nation whoʼs resumes would be updated by the time the segment was finished. There was New Yorkʼs Roger Bonair-Agard (of course... that fucker gets on every goddamned thing, the smooth talking bastard!), and there was his teammate Staceyann Chin and... oh, of course, Manhattanʼs Tay- lor Mali got his close-up right off the bat, although, hee hee, his name wasnʼt mentioned (HA!)... then I started seeing members of my Bay Area Crew: Oooh, there was Oaklandʼs Jaimie Kennedy getting all spitty on the camera, and ooh, right there, that was his teammate Shawn Taylor, and oooh oooh wasnʼt that Roxanne jumping up and down and hugging SFʼs Charles Ellik? My friends and I scanned every crowd shot, scrutinized every background of every performance, searching for even a brief mention- able glimpse of Big Poppa E... and nothing. Not a thing. We saw lots of Poetry Slam Inventor Marc Smith articulating his need to make poetry accessible to the masses. We saw lots of the wonderful D.C. poet Gayle Danley telling Morley what time it was (that woman is something else!). We even saw 14-year-old poet Dan Houston from Connecticut talking up the therapeutic strengths of performing live. And we cheered them all on for they are our brothers and sisters and they were doing a great job at representing this wondrous thing called slam poetry to a nation of people who had no idea what it was. But, still, we asked in vain: “Where was Big Poppa E?” We saw Austinʼs Phil West in a crowd shot, and we saw Albuquerqueʼs Danny Solis, too. Lisa Martinovic from the Ozarkʼs looked pensive in another crowd shot. Johnny Cheesecake from Montreal got phat camera time, and so did that one bald guy who was in the “SlamNation” movie and who did that spontaneous poem “Ode to a Hot Dog.” I was calling out name after name, pointing out the people as they appeared: “Oh, thatʼs Cass King from Vancouver, and Oooh, thatʼs that one girl, what was her name, from Montreal, Skidmore something, ohh and thereʼs Ms. Spelt, and OOOH thereʼs Brenda Moossy...” But still, no Big Poppa E. And finally, Morley Safer asked Marc Smith if he remembered the very first poem he ever slammed, and Marc, of course, said that he did, and he started performing it just for Morley, and I was so happy for Marc and all the hard work that heʼd put into making slam what it is, and this was a shiny moment in his career, BUT THE FUCKING CLOCK SAID GODDAMN ANDY ROONEY WAS DUE IN ABOUT A MINUTE AND A HALF AND MY FUCKING PARENTS WERE WATCHING!!! And this touching poem was obviously the big closing moment of the whole shebang and the fucking credits were practically on the screen as Marc Smith talked...... but wait. In the middle of Marcʼs poem they flashed to the stage at the finals of the Nationals... there was a crowd of poets jumping up and down and grabbing at the trophy... there were all my Bay homies... Charles Ellik, Eitan Kadosh, Ariana Waynes, SeeKing, Shawn Taylor, Robert Karimi, Cas McGee... We stood up and leaned toward the screen... Where? Where? Is that me? Is that... Is that my pant leg? Could that be my shirt sleeve? Fuck it, if that was my shirt sleeve, Iʼm updating the resume anyway... And then they cut back to Marc and we all shouted, “NOOO!!! FUCK!!!! GO BACK GO BACK!!!” And then they cut back ever so quickly to the crowd on stage at the finals again. And there I was, for a brief shining moment, my bald head, my requisite Gen X-er goatee, wearing my girlfriendʼs t-shirt for good luck, there I was... Big Poppa E, standing in the crowd of rejoicing poets, holding up a chunk of trophy and shouting what looks like, “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!” And then it was over. The segment had ended. My shot at fame only lasted two-three seconds, tops, and there was no audio except for Marc Smithʼs poem, but I was there, man, I was featured on 60 Goddamned Minutes and you see, Dad, you see? I told you I wasnʼt wasting my time with this poetry shit! My poetry resume will have big bold letters from now on that trumpet FEATURED ON 60 MINUTES and thereʼs no way Iʼm turning back!

ASS FAME Hereʼs an e-mail my poetry friend Cristin sent me after she read my piece on 60 Minutes. Itʼs a “crack” up, as you shall see.

To add my story to the 60 Minutes anecdotes, me and my mom and my dad were all propped up in front of the TV. I was the coach for Team Manhattan and didnʼt compete, so while I was having fun name dropping (“Oh, thereʼs Ms. Spelt! Oh, thereʼs Roger!”) I also was searching through the audience shots for a little bit of me to show the parents. The camera panned the audience at the one of the bouts, and there I was! But it was so dark, and my face was obscured by me filming the film crew that my parents couldnʼt really see me. I thought that was that, but then it happened. The camera panned the finals night audience, and there I was, standing on my seat, applauding so wildly that my dinosaur T-shirt had ridden half way up my back and my pants, which were huge to begin with, were sliding down my hips. The shot was from the back, and though I was in a sea of people, my family recognized me at once. My dad shouted out gleefully: “Thereʼs Crissyʼs butt! Thereʼs Crissyʼs butt!” Ahhh, my life as a slam poet is finally validated. Thanks 60 Minutes!

Cristin OʼKeefe Aptowicz Slam Mistress Team Manhattan COPS SPRAY CAPITOL HILL

I have a poet friend named Paula who lives in Seattle, and she was in the middle of the whole World Trade Organization mayhem in December ʻ99 where the protestors against the spread of consumerism across the globe were harassed and beaten by police ofﬁcers. The cops didnʼt stop there, no, they goose-stepped right into the artsy, cool community called Capitol Hill. She sent out the following e-mail to her poetry slam compa- triots across the country. Check it out, then ask how free we really are.

For whatever itʼs worth - hereʼs my experience tonight. As Iʼm typing this, helicopters are swirling around my building and tear gas or concussion bombs are exploding everywhere. Tonight I was chased down my own street with my neighbors by police in riot gear with tear gas and concussion grenade guns. This was after standing on the street and staring at armored cars and lines of black- armored “stormtroopers” on Broadway & John, wondering what the hell they were doing there. We couldnʼt figure out what the riot cops were doing out of the curfew zone, which is downtown. This is Capitol Hill! We were yelling “Go home!” and “Our streets!” and “Get off our hill!” but nobody did anything you could call violent, or a violent provocation. there were occasional scattered comments about the WTO or Clinton. Some people started singing “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles” while the national guard troops did their little marching thing. The guy next to me called 9-1-1 on his cell phone and said, “Hey we have a problem here. You see, people are shooting off tear gas all over Capitol Hill.” 9-1-1 hung up on him. One person asked an officer, “Why are you here?” The cop just shrugged her shoulders. Then we noticed that the police were dragging some people down the sidewalk and arresting them. The tactic of the police was to charge the crowd very quickly with their guns and sticks raised. Then everyone would run like hell. People were trying to say “Walk, walk!” but that went against every instinct in my body. When that big ass fucker came after me with his grenade launcher I ran! I dodged into a bookstore, and a small crowd of us watched as people fled past the windows with tears streaming down their faces from pepper spray, yelling, “Fffffffffuck you! Fuck you!” They were ripping the scarves off their faces and coughing. (Gas masks have been outlawed since this morning.) Then we got a big whiff of it ourselves. It was kind of like the air was filled with tons of invisible jalapeno flakes. My eyes and tongue are still swollen, and I didnʼt even get a direct dose. But maybe that was the tear gas, I donʼt know. Then they chased some people up the steps of their apartment building, not content until the residents were behind closed doors. This woman yelled, “Youʼre breaking into our homes and our houses!” The police had taken the street, and I started to wonder if I was going to spend the night in the bookstore. After a while the police retreated and decided on another direction. There was no way we could not follow! It was like a vandal had stolen into our house, and he expected us to go to bed while he trashed the living room. People started joking about how the police didnʼt have to shut all of Broadway down just to eat at Dickʼs (hamburgers). Then someone else said, “Hey, they are Dicks!” People were picking up rubber bullets off the sidewalks (like rabbit shit) for souvenirs as armored cars rolled by. Some of the pellets were shiny, red enamel, the size of marbles. The whole thing turned into this odd dance between the crowd and the police, where the crowd became less and less afraid of the gas, and more and more angry at the giant intruder ants. It was really like wild animals or monsters that could strike at any minute. The police pushed everyone toward Broadway and Pine, where they tried to contain the crowd in the intersection. Then the big arrest bus pulled up, and a lot of us left. I have no idea whatʼs happening now...... or why the helicopters and bombs are back in this area. Iʼm hungry but too frightened to leave my place and too tweaked to sleep. It all felt strangely fake in that most of the officers did not have “real” guns, but very real in that the neighborhood was outraged, all of us realizing that the media would probably peg us as unruly rabble, when they fucking stormed into our neighborhood with no apparent reason for being there! They literally drew people out of their homes and down the street or caught people unaware! People who were going to the grocery store were tear gassed, as well as people returning from work. One old lady was shaking and too terrified to even get a cab! We had no right to be on our streets. No right to say or sing anything. Nobody was breaking windows. Nobody was sitting in the street, or blocking the police. With that, my friends, I will say, while I know there are worse situations around the globe and in this nation on a daily basis, I am feeling a deeper appreciation of a community that performs their work, their opinions, their lives - freely, like maniacs, stupidly, greatly or otherwise, everywhere ...... because right now, I feel particularly aware of the fact that free speech and freedom itself is a privilege. Love to the family, *Cough*

Paula Friedrich, Slam Master, Seattle, WA The Wussy Boy Chronicles

My staple gun kicks so much ass. I love my staple gun. I almost hate to admit it, but I feel like such a he-man when I wield it, like some kind of gunslinger protecting the First Amendment with every ﬂier and poster that I hang with a butch “CLACK!” My nemesis is the dreaded Campus Flier Nazi who tears down ﬂiers for mysterious reasons. Grrr! Do not mess with me, Flier Nazi, when I am toting my kick ass staple gun! I am invincible, and I will jack you up!

[email protected] www.brokenword.org The Wussy Boy Chronicles

I bought a really old record player at the thrift store down the street where I live. Itʼs green and plastic and has a crusty old needle and a built in speaker. Every record I play on this old turntable sounds 60 years old, all full of pops and crackles, so that even groups like The Cure and Depeche Mode sound ancient. Sad music sounds even sadder and angry music sound blistering. I like my new old record player... It makes everything sound like memories.

[email protected] www.brokenword.org The Wussy Boy Chronicles

Me and my friend Jason come up with band names all the time, names like “Skrotum Traktor” and “Danny Motherfucker & The Albino Bastards From Hell.” The way you can tell if the name of a band is good is by acting like an announcer and shouting the name, like, “And now wonʼt you please welcome... The Meat Bees!” See, it works!

[email protected] www.brokenword.org Blurbs

FEATURED ON “60 MINUTES!”

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

“All bluster and bombast ... call it revenge of the Wussy Boys.” THE WASHINGTON POST

“Humorous reﬂections on growing up as a Wussy Boy.” CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“R. Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the poetry slams.” AUSTIN CHRONICLE

“Some of the most engrossing personal writing Iʼve ever read! Absolutely engrossing!” AMUSING YOURSELF TO DEATH (Santa Barbara)

“Eirik has a wonderful, charming writing style.” ZINE WORLD (San Francisco) The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #3 Wuss Core Music and Video Reviews • Wussy Boy Fiction • Crushed Letters Comics Reviews • Wussy Core Music and Video Wuss

FEATURING: a personalzine by r. eirik ott The Wussy Boy Chronicles #3 by R. Eirik Ott © February 2000

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Graphics for the Wussy Boy Movie Reviews were borrowed from www.imdb.com.

The photos in “Mosaic” were taken by R. Eirik Ott, except for the last one, which was taken by Jenʼs friend Wendy.

Everything else is the fault of R. Eirik Ott, unless otherwise indicated. Intro Hello and welcome to another exciting issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles. Iʼm strapped into some old school drum and bass mixed by Goldie, Iʼve got Aretha on my lap purring and Thelonious draped around my shoulders like a mink stole, and the girl I have a crush on just left my apartment and went home. There are rules about crushes. Rule Number One is that you never ever tell the object of your crush about the crush unless you are absolutely sure the crushee also has a crush on you. Otherwise you are burdening them with something that quite probably will ruin your friendship. Better to bite the Wuss Core bullet and pine away in silence than to bust out with some kind of embarassing admission that brings everything to a halt. This is a rule that is set in stone; Wussy Boys, however, are suckers for breaking this rule and break it every fucking time they get a chance, only to watch as the object of their crush becomes uncomfortable at the admission since itʼs very definitely not mutual and now you canʼt be friends anymore because itʼs just too fucking weird. Yeah, donʼt break that first rule of crushes, brothers and sisters, because itʼll only lead to misery. Tonight, I broke that rule and invited my crush over to watch “Rushmore” on my computerʼs DVD and to hang with the kitties, and stupid silly old me spent the entire time thinking to myself, “Donʼt tell her! Donʼt tell her!” But, of course, as a hard core Wuss from way back, I had to break my own stupid rule and tell her about it when the movie was over. It went okay. She kinda knew it was coming, I think, and took it well and allowed me my gentle admission without getting all uncomfortable and weird about it. Weʼll see what happens. Iʼll keep you updated. I had a crush on this girl named Jen in early ʻ99, and followed the rules. She ended up having a mad crush on me, too, so it was okay to tell each other about our little crushes. We even wrote poems about them. I wrote about Jen in the first issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles. She makes an unexpected reappearance in this issue. Read about it in “Crushed,” then check out “Mosaic,” which is also dedicated to Jen. Also in this issue are some short stories Iʼve written and a few borrowed from fellow Wussies, including one written by a dear friend of mine who had a crush on me once back in the day. Enjoy. Plus, Iʼve got some more Wuss Core music favorites to share in this issue left over from last issue, so kick back and dig on the unrequited love groove. Keep the faith, Wussies. Eirik Dear Wussy Boy Thanks for the zine. Usually a zine composed of journal entries doesnʼt do much for me, but, unlike a lot of personal zines, “The Wussy Boy Chronicles #1” was well-written and cohesive. Each entry ran smoothly into the next, thus making it a very enjoyable read. I, too, am battling the concept of maturity. I started a new job on Monday. It sucks, and thatʼs a terrible feeling to have only a week into it. I work in a greenhouse at the very Wussy sounding Garyʼs Flowerland. Before I got the job, I thought Iʼd be planting flowers and watching them grow. I thought my job would have some sort of meaning, like Iʼm God for all of the plants. Without me, they wouldnʼt exist. To me, thatʼs a job with meaning; you plant them and watch them flourish. Theyʼre like your children. It would be great if my greenhouse job was like that. Iʼd get to learn the different names for the plants and flowers. Not only would it be a job with meaning, but also a job that keeps the mind gears turning, preventing them from rusting out. A job where I actually learn new and intresting things. But no, my job isnʼt like that at all. Today I painted a pole, and the paint wasnʼt even an exciting color. No, I painted this pole “Wood Royal,” which is just a fancy name for dull, flat brown. The color of a nice, healthy turd. The few times I ever touch plants is when Iʼm throwing them out. Iʼm like the lowly peon who, after a deadly viral epidemic, has to discard the dead bodies into a giant pit. The flies buzz around just to remind me that this is possibly as low as Iʼll get. To top things off, I work with this 14-year-old kid. We sorted pots and flats for a few hours one day. Itʼs very degrading to receive instructions from a high school freshman. At work, all I ever think about is the fact that I have a fucking college degree and here I am doing work that even this toddler can do. I think this while Iʼm pulling weeds out of gravel beds. I think this while I lug wheelbarrows full of dirt around like a clueless idiot. I think this while painting poles “Wood Royal.” Itʼs jobs like this that make me question my maturity. I plan on being at Garyʼs no longer than a few months. Itʼs not very mature to hop from job to job, is it? Yet, I hear people talk about working there for 10+ years. The guy who held my job before me, this cat named Mike, did the same shit over and over again for 12 long years. 12 years!?! I canʼt believe it. The sad thing is this: one fear that I have is that Iʼll run into somebody from high school and theyʼll see me pulling weeds and theyʼll approach me and weʼll talk. “So, yeah, now Iʼm doing some civil engineering for Bigley and Smits,” theyʼll say. And Iʼll try to convince them, futilely, that Iʼm not a total loser by saying, “Yeah, I work at Garyʼs Flowerland, but I have a college degree if that means anything.” And to him it doesnʼt mean anything if Iʼve received a degree in some useless thing because I was idealistic and majored in something that I was fascinated by yet left me utterly unemployable for any “high status” kind of job. Mr. Engineer will leave. Iʼll hear the staccato beep of his car alarm disarming and Iʼll hear him race off in his “new set of wheels.” Off to his lovely wife. Laughing al the way home. Laughing at me. So, I never thought that the status competition would get to me, but it has, and thatʼs sad. It shows that even a person with seemingly iconoclastic ideas is still at the mercy of societyʼs brainwashing. This sucks. Right now, for me, the so-caled “Real World” is one downer after another. The bills pile high like heavy slabs of ice. Piling so much that another Greenland could be made. But Greenland is far more hospitable than a pile of bills. And Greenland is a lot less harsh than the “Real World.” Itʼs certainly a lot less harsh than Garyʼs Flowerland. Sorry. Just had to vent.

Cullen Carter (My Moon or More) P.O. Box 773 Appleton, WI 54912-0773

Dude, I totally feel your pain. I am working at a coffeehouse in a college town just down the street from the university. Iʼve been a senior for three years, interned at four newspapers, published more than 20 zines/ chapbooks, performed in front of packed housed all over the country, and yet, here I am, behind the counter at some coffeehouse in a college town wearing a little black apron and making lattes and mochas as the college kids study and converse among their friends and classmates. I mean, they are all my friends and classmates, too, my peers, but still... I hustle fucking blueberry scones to college kids while wondering if Iʼve got what it takes to make my living traveling and performing and writing. Iʼve been told I make a mean latte, too, and I suppose I take a bit of pride in that, but I will never know the joy of my own lattes and their perfect layers of steamed milk and espresso, no, because I canʼt stand coffee. Yuck, coffee in any form is disgusting and bitter and gross to me, even things like crappaccinos and mocha latte ice cream and those little coffee nip candies that my grandma used to eat... it all tastes like shit to me. Plus, the smell of freshly ground coffee gives me a headache, the same way the smell of workmen tarring a roof makes me woozy. So, I go through my work day conjuring these perfect mochaccinos and cafe au laits and americanos like the Beethoven of barristas, unable to experience the genius of my work. Iʼm glad I aspire to more in my life than serving lattes to college kids. My mind plays games with me as I work behind the counter in my little black apron and my T-shirt that shouts Moxieʼs Coffeehouse (talk about a Wussy name for a business!) The other day as I was coming around the counter to deliver some kind of whipped cream festooned mocha or something , I suddenly started singing the lyrics to Kissʼ “Dr. Love.” I donʼt know why, it was suddenly there as I weaved between the little round tables: “They call me Dr. Love!” It was like... like a John Hughes movie soundtrack or something, like when the Geek character — played by Anthony Michael Hall, of course — is getting all ready for some kind of big date in front of the mirror and after putting on the finishing touches to his little hairdo, he flashes a thumbs up and suddenly the scene cuts to him sauntering across the mall to the girl heʼs about to ask out and the soundtrack is busting out with “They call me... Dr. Love! They call me Dr. Love! Iʼm the one youʼre thinking of!” As soon as I delivered the drink and got back behind the counter, the song went away and I forgot about it. But, without fail, Iʼd deliver another drink and round the corner of the counter and the song would start in my head again. It was weird, like my own little episode of “Ally McBeal” or something. I think my association with “Dr. Love” and the geek from John Hughesʼ movies is my brainʼs way of telling me that Iʼm a little bit embarrassed at being so close to graduating college and still having to work at a coffeehouse. I can just picture my dad smiling in that way he does, you know, that way that means heʼs thinking about how right he was when he told me that poetry would keep me poor for the rest of my life. Dear Wussy Boy Thanks for the copy of “Wussy Boy Chronicles #1.” When I saw the title, I knew I would love it! Iʼve been a big fat fan of Wussy Boys my whole life. Loved your poem “Crushworthy.” It perfectly articulates the desire to have someone go ga-ga over you. I also identified heavily with your tales of working nights — I do, too. I donʼt mind it so much anymore, except when Iʼm trying to sleep and the world goes on noisily around me. I hope Aretha and Thelonious are doing well. I was so glad you found Theo! I was scared for you and your little ones!

Kathy (SemiBold) 1573 North Milwaukee Avenue, PMB #403 Chicago, IL 60622

My kitties are doing great. They are almost 11 months old now. We just celebrated Xmas together by watching my Xmas Season favorite on DVD: “Pink Floyd the Wall.” Just perfect for wallowing in the fact that nothing is open all day Christmas and you have to eat Lucky Charms all by yourself with your cats in a new apartment all by yourself and your girlfriend of three years is now your ex-girlfriend of three months and the girl you dated all last semester and over the summer died in a car accident and you havenʼt written anything good in 10 months and meeting new people sucks and thereʼs no one on the entire planet who understands except for Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. I love my kitties. I hate Xmas. You know, every time I see Christmas written as “Xmas,” I think of this one lady who came into the print shop I used to work at as a graphic designer. She was offended that I shortened Christmas to Xmas in her little church newsletter, and pointed out that writing Xmas was Satanʼs way of “X-ing out Christ.” Since “Jesus is the reason for the season,” she said, I should spell out Christmas in its entirety out of respect. I wanted very badly to point to the Santas she had dancing merrily across the front of her church newsletter and demand an explanation for supporting such blatant consumerism on such a holy day, but I didnʼt. I wanted to point out that Santa is merely an anagram of Satan, but I didnʼt. I just smiled and nodded and promised to change it at no charge. Xmas! Xmas! Xmas! Mua-ha-ha-ha! Dear Wussy Boy Okay, this is driving me crazy. I was talking to my mom on the phone the other day, and she mentioned that sheʼd forwarded “a packet” to me here at school — sheʼd put it in a new envelope to avoid writing on the cover. I said, “Whoʼs it from?” She spelled out “E-I-R-I-K.” Immediately in my mind I thought “R. Eirik Ott.” But I couldnʼt figure out where I knew that name. Oh well, Iʼd figure it out when the letter came. Today I got the letter and the packaging was quite cool — I had to use an Xacto blade to open it so I wouldnʼt ruin it. There was your full name, like I remembered, but I still couldnʼt place it. First, I read your zine, thinking maybe Iʼd sent away for something else youʼd done with a different title, but I didnʼt recognize any of the other ones on the inside front cover. Then, I saw your address. I checked this other zine I have where one of the contributors is from Chico — the zine was “Grundig,” from Portland, OR, a kid named Jesse Mills. I flipped through it but there was no mention of your name. So, where do I know you from? Did you contribute an article to another zine? Did you get reviewed in some other zine? Where? When? ARGH! Itʼs driving me nuts. I canʼt figure it out! I probably read it in passing in a quick review in some obscure zine (I have hundreds, and it would be impossible to track down which one), and remembered your name for its odd spelling. Oh well... I really dug your zine “33 Jobs and Several Nekkid Ladies.” I like the way you write. Iʼll bet you have a million stories just saved up from events in your life. Youʼve turned each of these crappy jobs (even the week-long shit ones) into a cool self-contained little tale. Itʼs weird about jobs. You start and in, like, a week you know the whole groove, the whole atmosphere of work with its pecking order and the group dynamic of the co-workers. Itʼs an entire world in itself, and one day you just sort of drop yourself into the middle of it. Then, one day, you drop out. Iʼve had about ten shitty jobs since high school and through college so far, and remembering each one is like... such a big part of that chunk of time in your own personal history, but youʼd rather forget.

Sarah Oleksyk (Roadside) 66 Carlyle Road Portland, OR 04103

Iʼve had this letter forever, and Iʼve always wanted to have a letters section in a zine so that I could run it. Anyway, here it is. I think itʼs cool that Sarah recognized my name... Iʼve been doing zines for about eight years, and Iʼve had them reviewed in zines all over the place, so sheʼs probably right when she said that she saw my weird-spelled name someplace and just remembered it. You never know where some letter or e-mail will come from next, you know... this zine thing is so neat in that respect. The other day I got an e-mail from some kid in Washington or somewhere who had gone to Ashland, Oregon, recently to see this Shakespeare Festival thing, and he happened into this little comic shop and bought one of my zines called “Tongue Ballet in my Bunghole.” He liked it, so he e-mailed me telling me all about it and how he got it and how his friends had all read it and liked it and wanted copies of my other stuff. I have only ever been to Ashland once: I went a year and a half ago with my then girlfriend Kimberly, the one I dated for three years and who was the inspiration for 95% of the poems Iʼve written ever since. The trip to the Shakespeare Festival was a gift for her 23rd birthday. We didnʼt have enough money for a proper hotel room, so we slept in the back of my pickup truck while parked in some lot near the Festival. It rained all night long, and big fat drops of water dripped on our heads from the camper shell. Sometime during the night, she had to go pee, but she didnʼt want to get out of the truck and ﬁnd a bush or something, so we grabbed up this soft-sided beverage cooler thing built for keeping a six-pack of sodas cold... It was so funny... We were attacked by giggle spasms as she squatted in the back of my pickup and peed into this little cooler thing, but then disaster struck and pee leaked out from a rip in the side of the cooler thing. And she canʼt stop peeing because sheʼs in mid-stream and sheʼs laughing her head off and the pressure from laughing is making her pee shoot out of her with amazing strength and Iʼm all holding the cooler thing trying frantically to capture all the pee and looking helplessly for something to stem the tide of pee leaking out of the rip... It was a hoot, an embarassing hoot, and we ended up ditching the cooler thing out the window and onto the parking lot outside my truck. We had to roll up the wet blanket and wrap it up so we wouldnʼt have to deal with it, then snuggled really tightly and weathered the rest of the rain storm. The next day, we walked over to this little breakfast place on the main drag and ate, then we went over to this little comic shop we had just discovered the day before. I had zines in my backpack and sold a few to the comic shop guy. And thatʼs it. I was in Ashland exactly one time, and I have never been back, but this kid picked up a copy of my zine and liked it enough to write me about it almost two years later. Zines are cool. I miss Kimberly being my girlfriend like the whole wide world.

Speak up, Wussy! Blurbs Simply put your thoughts into words and send them via e-mail to Wussy Boy Central at [email protected]. Wuss Core Movie Hall of Fame Dead Poet’s Society When you combine a schoolroom full of Wussies, lead by a young Ethan Hawke, with rebel English teacher Robin Williams then mix liberally with poetry and problems with fathers who “just donʼt understand,” what you have is Wuss Cinema at its finest. Who can forget that scene where Williams has the boys stand in front of the old black and white photo of past students and whispers, “Carpe Diem, boys.” And the boys do attempt to seize the day, and how? Not by rioting in the streets, not by scoring with the chicks, but by meeting in a secret cave and reading poetry! Rebels! I loved this flick and had the poster on my bedroom wall for years. I almost became an English teacher because of it, too, but switched my major to journalism when I couldnʼt keep up with all the damned reading. Stand By Me This is just a great damned flick, man, you canʼt beat it for its portrayal of Wussy Boys bonding through adventure, plus it features River Phoenix standing his ground in front of the local gang of Cock Men Oppressors lead by Kiefer Sutherland. This is a common theme in true Wuss Core movies, where the Wussy Boy gets pestered throughout the film by the bully and finally has to confront the dickhead and stand his ground. Of course, said dickhead always has to either back down and scamper away defeated or must get his punk ass kicked by a righteous Wussy Boy who suddenly channels James Brown and John Bender and becomes just he-man enough to get the job done. Itʼs a shame River died so young. He mustʼve had some good roles in his future, and now weʼll never know. Lucas Another great Wussy Boy-Against-The-World flick starring a role call of mid-ʼ80s brat packers like Corey Haim, Winona Ryder, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and even Charlie “cocaine and hookers” Sheen. The basic premise is classic: Wussy Boy meets popular girl; Wussy Boy is befriended by popular girl, then gets mad crush on said girl; Wussy Boy gets picked on by jock frat boy asshole dumb fucks throughout the movie; Wussy Boy joins the football team to impress the girl and get the jocks off his back; Wussy Boy proves himself in the Big Game and gets his ass kicked; Wussy Boy doesnʼt get the girl because the girl likes stupid Charlie Sheen instead, but ends up impressing the jocks and becoming a hero. What a great Wuss Core fantasy, except for the part about the girl... man, Wussies hardly ever get the girl they have a mad crush on, but, inevitably, they hook up with the semi-dorky-but-cute girl whoʼs harbored a mad crush for the Wussy forever (in this case, my girlfriend Winona Ryder.) The Outsiders Who was NOT in this movie? Francis Ford Coppola gathered a phat crew of Wussy Boys and others for this S.E. Hinton classic, including: C. Thomas Howell; Ralph Macchio; Tom Cruise; Emilio Estevez; Matt Dillon; Rob Lowe; and Patrick Swayze. And get this: even Leif Garrett was in it! Itʼs all about the Greasers being pitted against the popular Socs (pronounced “Sew-shez,” like from the word “social?”) Of course, folks get they asses kicked in the end and weepy Wussy Boys and Girls pine away as one of our boys gets ganked, but that tragedy just adds to the appeal of this killer teen flick. Oh, C. Thomas, whereʼd you disappear to? After “Soul Man,” you vanished! The Karate Kid Yup, the apex of Wussies Against the Bullies movies, this bad boy elevated Ralph Macchio into Wuss Core legend. Once again, mean old bullies pester our boy hero, but then mysterious Mr. Miaggi shows Ralphie the joys of “wax on, wax off.” The movie builds the tension “Rocky” style until the big showdown between Ralph and the cock man oppressor kung fu kid being taught the ways of the Dark Side. As you can expect, the forces of Wuss defeat the evil dickhead army, and Ralph even gets the cute girl in the end. Rock on! Harold and Maude Oh yes, one of the best Wussy Boy movies ever made, this early ʻ70s gem featured Bud Cort as a teen who vies for the attention of his emotionally-distant mother by faking gruesome suicides. Mom just ignores it, so Bud mopes around a lot as Cat Stevens sings on the soundtrack. Oh, but wait! Things get real fun when Bud meets and falls in love with Maude, played by octogenarian Ruth Gordon. The two meet while attending a funeral for someone they donʼt know (a hobby for both of them), then grow close. My favorite scene is when Bud is in Ruthʼs little apartment and thereʼs this big sculpture thatʼs all provocative: As soon as Ruth leaves the room, our boy Bud goes down on the sculpture and gets all sloppy. Yikes! Ultimately tragic, this flick is a must for every black-clad Wussy Boy who curses the world for not understanding him. And poor Bud Cort... he promptly disappeared after this movie and was rarely heard from again.

My Bodyguard One of my old school favorites from the early ʻ80s, this one stars some blue-eyed Wuss named Chris Makepeace (could you really ask for a more Wussy name?) as a skinny new kid at the school who raises the ire of schoolyard bully Matt Dillon. Along the way, our hero gets his ass kicked, but then things get better when he befriends the mysterious loner kid who works on motocycles and is about 15 feet tall. Well, when Matt Dillon gets his own bodyguard in the form of some ex-con looking dude, the stage is set for the big conflict: Thatʼs right, baby, first bodyguard against bodyguard, then Wussy Boy against bully. And yes, the wussies kick ass once again, and all is good in the world. This flick has a great connection with Wuss classic “Harold and Maude” because our hero is also befriended along the way by an eccentric lady played by Ruth Gordon. In fact, I think this may have been one of her last movies. (Footnote: Chris Makepeace didnʼt end up doing a whole lot after this film, but he did star in the teevee movie “Mazes and Monsters,” a cheesy Dungeons & Dragons exploitation flick. Cool!) 3 O’Clock High Okay, by now you know the theme: Wussy Boy moves to new school and gets picked on by the beefy asshole bully guy, who then challenges him to a fight “after school;” Wussy Boy faces the bully in a triumphant fight behind the school in front of hundreds of classmates and emerges victorious. Standard issue, but this film rises above the stereotypical Wussy Boy Overcomes storyline by throwing in some truly kick ass camera work. This one stars Casey Siemesko... Simeskios... Sim... whetever, but he had small roles in a bunch of Wussy Boy moves in the ʻ80s, such as “Back to the Future,” “Biloxi Blues,” “Young Guns,” “Stand by Me,” and “Secret Admirer.” Got any favorite Wuss Core movies? Send ʻem in to Wussy Boy Central and let the world know! Send your Wuss Core Movie Reviews to [email protected] Wussy Boy Music Reviews In the last issue, I shared some of my all-time Wuss Core favorite songs from a recently minted mix tape of ex-girlfriend songs. Like I said in Issue #2, you just have to wallow sometimes, you know, you just have to pull out the old yearbooks and burn some insense and light some candles and put on some of those old school Wussy Boy songs that take you back to those first kisses, those first hand-holding moments that you will never experience again because youʼve been dumped, sucker. Sometimes youʼve just got to wallow, and these tracks are just right for an evening of woe. “Secret Smile,” by Semisonic Oh, these boys are sensitive, all right, and I had no idea how much I liked them until I realized I had two of their CDs in my player several times a week. This song is from “Feeling Strangely Fine,” their latest collection of sensitive Wussy Boy power pop. It reminds me of my ex Kimberly because she has such a beautiful smile... at one time, she had a special secret smile that she reserved just for me, but those times are gone. Now, sheʼs probably sharing a smile that resembles my secret smile with someone new. Oh, the pain... I wish her the best. Semisonic knows my pain when they sing about Kimberlyʼs smile: “So use it and prove it / remove this whirling sadness / iʼm losing iʼm bluesing / but you can save me from madness.” Near the end of the song they reprise this bit, singing: “so save me Iʼm waiting / iʼm needing hear me pleading / and soothe me, improve me / Iʼm greiving, iʼm barely believing now.” Oh the agony of knowing such things as a secret smile about a person, of amassing a wealth of knowledge that you can no longer use. I was attending the School of Loving Kimberly for three years but got kicked out before I got my degree. “Someday We’ll Know,” by New Radicals Hereʼs another Kimberly song from the enormous collection of Kim- berly Songs. I could put out a 10 CD box set called “Song That Make Me Think of Kimberly and Feel Like Shit.” Anyway, this kid from the New Radicals busted out with this song from his first and only album, and it became my most-listened-to Wussy Boy song as Kimberly and I were finally breaking up. God, this song kills me. Check it out the chorus: weʼll know / If love can move a mountain / Someday weʼll know / Why the sky is blue / Someday weʼll know / Why I wasnʼt meant for you.” Canʼt you just picture me weeping as I listen to this song while hugging cats? In the last chorus before the end of the song, my boy switches things a bit: “Someday weʼll know / Why Samson loved Delilah / One day Iʼll go / Dancing on the moon / Someday youʼll know / That I was the one for you.” Oh, but thatʼs not all! You thought this was cheezy enough, but our Wuss Core hero finishes the song with this ditty: “If I could ask God just one question / Why arenʼt you here with me?” Fuck, man, if youʼre gonna wallow in it, you might as well WALLOW. “Your Dictionary,” by XTC Inevitably, in the midst of wallowing in self-pity with thoughts of relationships gone south, a Wussy Boy finds himself getting a little, oh... bitter. Yes, it happens to the best of us. Itʼs much easier to handle the death of a realtionship by snarling a few “You did me wrong!” songs. My boy Andy Partridge from XTC knows the pain of bitterness, and he writes fucked up bitter songs like no other Wuss Core brother. This song should be required listening for all Wussy Boys with broken hearts: “S-L-A-P / Is that how you spell ʻkissʼ in your dictionary / C-O-L-D / Pronounced as ʻcareʼ / S-H-I-T / Is that how you spelled “me” in your dictionary / Four-eyed fool / You led ʻround everywhere.” Oooh, bitter! “Holding Back the Years,” by Simply Red I have a soft spot in my heart for this CheezWhiz. The first few chords used to be enough to send me back to Kelly-Land, the place of tears and woe and long-distance phone calls. We dated for six long years, and most of it was spent 3,000 miles apart (Wussie are suckers for long distance relationships.) God, this song had power over me for a long time. Look at Mick Hucknal getting all sappy: “Iʼve wasted all my tears / Wasted all those years / And nothing had the chance to be good / Nothing ever could / Iʼll keep holding on.” I have since come to the realization that this song is perfectly dreadful and sappy as all fuck, so it no longer makes me tear up, but it is a must-hear when Iʼm in that mood to moan about lost love. CRUSHED Jen is dead. I have no idea what to say next. Iʼve been staring at my computer screen for months wondering what comes after those three words. I still havenʼt a clue. *** I donʼt remember the first time I met Jen, but she did: I drove down to an open mike poetry reading in Sacramento (about 90 minutes south of Chico), and she was in the audience when I performed. She later told me that she and I talked briefly then, but I donʼt remember it. I barely remember the next time she and I met: She had moved to Chico to attend the university here and had come to a showing of “Slam- Nation” that I had organized at the local art house movie theatre. The movie is a documentary on poetry slamming, and when I was about to introduce the film to the audience, Jen recognized me as the Wussy Boy she had seen a year and a half before in Sacramento. We ended up talking very briefly, but I donʼt really recall much of it. The third time I met Jen is something I can picture just by closing my eyes and smiling: I walked out of my advanced poetry class at Chico State and was suddenly face to face with a beautiful young woman with a bright smile, hair pulled back with barrettes, and a backpack covered with feminist buttons. It was Jen. She asked me if I was me, I said yes, and she asked when the next poetry slam was. I told her. She smiled, said she would be there for sure, and turned and walked away. I remember watching her disappear down the hall... I remember thinking the buttons on her backpack kicked ass. I remember thinking she was really, really cute. I remember hoping that I would see her again. I found out later that she had asked a friend of hers if he knew me, then discovered the friend and I were in the same poetry class together. She had waited outside the door of the classroom for me, hoping to get a chance to say hello. She was there at the next poetry slam, front row center. We talked during the breaks in the show, then ended up exchanging phone numbers. Oh, and I borrowed her calculator for the show, then kept it as an excuse to see her again, but found out later that she had purposely not asked for it back just to give me a reason to call her. Two days after that poetry slam, I wrote my poem “Crushworthy” for her. Little did I know, but two days after the poetry slam she also wrote nearly the same poem about me. I remember the first time we got together, just the two of us: She invited me over to her house for beers and proceeded to liquor me up with Heinekin after Heinekin, until finally, after about five beers and a few hours of discussing poetry and feminist theory, I was giddy enough to consider kissing her. It was a righteous first kiss, one of the very best first kisses that I have ever experienced. We dated for the rest of the semester, roadtripping to poetry events in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Sacramento. She became a fixture on the poetry slam scenes, and was always right there in the front row when poetry friends of mine visited from out of town. Everyone ended up knowing Jen, all of my poetry friends, and they were all inspired by this wonderful glowing energy that she radiated. Her friends became my friends, and plans were hatched, parties were had, adventures were experienced. By the end of the summer, our crushes had pretty much run their course, and we reached a point where we were thinking a lot about our exes. So, she got back together with her boy Steve and I got back together with my girl Kimberly, but we remained friends into the new school year. Flash forward: September 11, 1999. The poetry slam teams from SF, San Jose and Oakland had returned victorious from the National Poetry Slam in Chicago, and friends of the teams had organized a huge celebration bash to honor the unprecedented achievement of Bay Area domination. Several hundred people paid $7 a head to see us perform our signature pieces for a night of carousing, and the mood was beyond giddy. Jen was supposed to come along for the ride, but changed her plans and decided to drive down to Sacramento to catch a flight to visit her father in Arizona. The night before, I gave her a friendly kiss and asked her to have a safe trip. She said sheʼd see me when she got back and asked me to tell all the people in the SF scene who knew her that she was with them in spirit. Just about ten minutes before the show was to begin, I slipped outside to give Kimberly a call. I just wanted to say that I loved her before hitting the stage. When I got her on the line, she was silent. I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Jen had been in a car accident earlier that morning. She told me that Jen was dead. I hung up the phone and looked at the lines of people waiting to get into the show. Tons of people. I walked through them and found myself staring into SeeKingʼs face. I told him that Jen was dead. He just closed his eyes and gave me a warm hug. We went through the crowds of people and gathered the whole Bay Area crew and brought them backstage to share the horrible news. We all cried and held hands and joined in a big prayer circle to send Jen our love and good vibes, then we shared funny stories about her until the host of the event came backstage and told us we were on in five minutes. I remember looking up and seeing everyone looking back at me ex- pectantly, as if they needed me to say something. I just coughed, looked at my feet, and said something like, “Well, Jen wouldʼve liked us to kick as much ass as we could, you know, because she wouldʼve been right there in the front row waiting for a kick ass show, so... letʼs go give her that show. Fuck a bunch of sadness, letʼs show all these people why we dominated the fucking National Poetry Slam.” Something like that... we all wanted to cancel the show and go home and cry, but took deep breaths and gathered ourselves up to do what we truly needed to do. And one after another, we dedicated our poetry to Jen. The audience had no idea who she was, but each and every member of the three Bay Area Teams knew and they performed their hearts out for her. A few days later, a memorial was held in Jenʼs hometown, bringing together a few hundred people who had been touched by Jenʼs life: classmates from the Womenʼs Studies program at Chico State; professors; poets; family members; friends. And we held onto each other and cried in her memory, then one by one people got up to the microphone that had been set up and shared their stories of Jen. When it was my turn, I read her poem “Crushworthy.” I barely made it to the end. Itʼs been a real challenge to process this event. The crash was so horrible that her body was cremated immediately. I suppose if we couldʼve had some sort of funeral where we could look at her for one last time and confirm the finality of her death, that we could at least get some closure. But thatʼs not the case. The last time we saw her, she was pink and alive with energy. Weʼve all had to just... agree, I guess, that she left on a roadtrip and will never come back. Even when we all visited the crash site and touched the scarred pavement ourselves, it didnʼt seem real. We spent a lot of time gathering pennies that had been scattered from her change jar she kept in the back seat of her Honda: We only picked up the lucky ones, the ones turned face up. We constructed a little memorial for her right there at the side of the road. I keep thinking sheʼs going to be right back. Every time I wade into the sea of spaghetti straps and tan shoulders on campus, I expect to see her, somewhere, out of the corner of my eye. At every poetry reading, I expect to see her there sitting front row center, drinking a Heinekin and cheering us on with that bright smile of hers, her and her backpack covered in feminist buttons and rainbows. I have no idea how to process this. So, I wrote a story. Here, read it. MOSAIC

“Okay, weʼre doing sad today,” Ethan said, pulling the Polaroid instant camera from his backpack. “Sad?” she said. She was a college student — young, pretty, little round glasses — who just two minutes before had been sitting at a cafe table with some friends, sipping iced coffee and neglecting homework. Now she stood with her back against a brick wall in the alley behind the cafe, tilting her head slightly and smiling. Ethan dropped his backpack to the ground, put the camera to his eye, and walked a few paces toward the girl. “Yeah... sad. Yesterday was lonely, but today we are doing sad.” She dropped her gaze, her hands coming up to hold her elbows. She tapped the tip of her sandaled foot to the ground, then kicked it back and placed the flat of her foot against the brick wall as she leaned. The sun glinted off the silver ring coiled around her pinkie toe. The ring was shaped like a snake swallowing its own tail. Ethan stared a moment at the ring, tracing the intricate scales with his gaze. She had dirt under the nail of her pinkie toe. “You like my toe ring?” she asked. Ethan shook his head slightly and mumbled, “Hmmm? Oh, uhm, yeah, the ring. Itʼs nice. I used to... I used to have a friend who had one just like it. She bought it in the Lower Haight in San Francisco.” “Oh, I got mine on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley... maybe itʼs the same type. Does it have little red eyes like mine?” Jesus, Ethan thought, I canʼt remember. Itʼs only been three months and I canʼt remember. Ethan lowered the camera and sighed, then rubbed his eyes with his free hand. Without looking up he said, “Anyway, Iʼm... Iʼm doing this art project, see? I ask people to portray an emotion, whether it be sad or mad or happy, then I take their picture. Would you like to see the others Iʼve taken today?” He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a small stack of photos. They were smaller than the average instant photo, longer and less square, rather like large Band-Aids with photos stuck in the center. He handed them over to the girl who took them with slender fingers and flipped through them, reaching up to twirl a tendril of hair that had fallen over her glasses. She pulled one photo from the stack and said, “I like this one. He looks so sad, but kinda silly, too.” “Yeah,” Ethan said, “I had to coach him a bit. He wasnʼt getting it, but I asked him to kinda pooch out his lip, like he was pouting. I think it worked. Itʼs cute.” “He looks like a little kid,” she said, then handed him the stack of photos. She flipped her hair back from her face, shook her head, then smiled again. Her eyes were very blue, as blue as the sky above their heads at that very moment, and her long hair matched the honeyed glow of the sun. She crossed her arms and bit her lower lip lightly. “So... sad, huh? Itʼs gonna to be kinda hard pretending Iʼm sad on such a beautiful day. You shouldʼve waited until it rained... I think itʼs going to rain the day after tomorrow. Canʼt you do happy today? I could give you a really good happy today.” Ethan brought the camera to his eye and moved one step closer. “Nope, today is sad. Just think about something that makes you sad.” She looked back down, put her hands deep in the pockets of her baggy corduroy pants, and bounced a few times against the brick wall. Her smile was bright and full of straight, white teeth. The harder she tried, the wider she smiled. “I donʼt know... this is kinda weird,” she said. She tried again, pressing her lips together and turning her head to the side and down, toward her shoulder. “Yeah,” Ethan said, “kinda like that, only not grinning like The Cheshire Cat.” She laughed. “Think of something really sad. Think about... I donʼt know... disease... famine... think about all the starving refugee children in Kosovo.” She crossed her arms and stomped her foot lightly on the ground, then pooched out her lower lip a bit. “Iʼm trying,” she said. “Give me a second.” Ethan moved another step closer. Her head and the curve of her spaghetti straps were centered in the viewfinder with the rough red stone of the brick juxtaposed against the soft smoothness of her shoulders. He could almost make out her blue eyes, but not quite. He moved another step closer. “Just think about something that makes you sad,” he said. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Weʼre doing sad today. Iʼll be sad.” “Think about... think about that cat you had when you were growing up, that cat who was always there for you waiting on the comforter of your big four-poster bed, that cat that always understood what you were going through and exactly when you needed warm, furry kitty love. Think about how important that cat was to you, how many times you relied on it to get through the hard times of growing up. Did you have a cat like that when you were growing up?” She smiled, but her teeth were hidden behind her lips. Her hands reached up again to gently cup her elbows. “No, but I had a dog who was kinda like that. She was my best friend. Sasha.” “Sasha,” Ethan said. “Right... a poodle?” “Cocker spaniel,” she said. “Right... a cocker spaniel. Sasha.” He stepped closer. Her face filled the frame. “Remember how it felt when Sasha died?” She looked at him through the camera lens, and her smile slowly faded. She stared for just a moment, then dropped her gaze. Her head tilted to the side, then turned toward her shoulder as it rose to meet her chin. She closed her eyes. The corners of her mouth tilted downward ever so slightly, ever so slowly. Ethan snapped the picture. *** Ethan walked down the street from the cafe with his backpack slung over one shoulder and headphones pumping hard core techno into his ears. His soundtrack was the frenzied squall of electronically-mangled guitars and high-pitched feedback fueled by dueling drum machines. Androgynous voices lazily burbled French in the deep background. Cars passed noiselessly in the street, and people walked by him on the sidewalk without a sound. Ethan scanned the faces in the crowd of passing college students, looking for the next photo. Not just anyone would do. There had to be a certain look in the eyes, a certain set to the mouth... That was kinda fucked up, Ethan thought. Itʼs not her fault she looks just like her. Ethan passed a shop window and caught a brief glimpse of his reflec- tion. He hadnʼt shaved in a long time. His eyes looked tired. Then the image was gone. Fuck it. Better them than me. As he passed the record store, Ethan saw a tall, skinny skater kid exit and walk in his direction. He recognized the kid and his ratty green combat pants, his scrappy high top sneakers, his green choppy hair, his thrashed wooden skateboard. When their eyes met, the kid smiled big and raised his hand in greeting. His lips moved silently as he talked. Ethan reached backward into the side pocket of his backpack and slid his middle finger along the edge of his CD playerʼs volume control. The world around him faded back in. “...fucking guy,” the kid said. “I told him to kiss my fucking ass, and he could keep the fucking CD for all I fucking care, mother fucker. It wasnʼt fucking scratched. Whatʼre you doing, just walking around and shit?” “Uhm, no, Iʼm just, you know, doing my project,” Ethan said, bringing up his camera and pointing to it. The kid snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, yeah, howʼd you like my picture, huh? That was pretty fucking good, man, I was cracking my shit up. What day was that again? Scream, some shit like that?” Ethan cleared his throat, and said, “No, that day was anger. All of last week was anger. Today is sad.” “Sad?” the kid said. “Sad, huh? Fucking take my picture, man. I be sad. Watch...” The skater kid rubbed his hands against his face, then dropped his hands by his side to reveal a distorted grimace — his mouth cracked open and his tongue lolling to the side, his eyes pinched shut and the veins in his neck bulging into sharp relief. And the skater kid stood there, his face frozen. Ethan covered his mouth with his hand and coughed. The skater kid opened one eye just a crack, then, without moving the gaping hole of his mouth, said, “Cʼmon man, take my picture.” His tongue flopped as he spoke. Ethan looked down at his camera and shook his head. “Look, I appreciate your help and all, but Iʼve got all the pictures I need for today. Iʼm just going home and putting them together with the other ones.” “Oh dude, let me check ʻem out, dude,” the skater kid said. He reached out one grabby hand and opened and closed his fingers rapidly. Ethan reached into his breast pocket and handed him the stack of Polaroids. The skater kid flipped through them, laughing out loud and shaking his head as he looked at the faces of the people in the photos. “Damn, Sam,” the skater kid said. “These folks is sad, alright. I know this guy, this guy here with his lip all stuck out. I think heʼs gay. He goes to my school.” Ethan fiddled with the headphones slung around his neck and looked into the traffic passing in the street. Downtown by the college was busy at this time of day, and the noise was grating. The sun was too bright. The back of his shirt was sticky against his backpack. “Dude, check it out, this chick here is hella cute. Who is this chick?” The skater kid held out the picture of the girl in the cafe that Ethan had just taken. Ethan shrugged and said, “I donʼt know. Some girl sitting in the cafe by the campus. I never got her name.” “Dude, you know who she looks like, donʼt you? She looks just like Lynn, Dude, like she could be her sister. Isnʼt that weird, man, like...” Ethan snatched the photo from the skater kidʼs hand, then grabbed the other photos from his other hand. He put them together, smoothed them out, then stuck them back into his breast pocket. “Look, Iʼve got to go.” Ethan moved to the side of the skater kid and put his headphones back on. He reached backward to turn the volume up as the skater kid said, “Whoa, hey, shit dude. Iʼm sorry. Hey... I didnʼt mean anything by that, man. Hey...” Ethan walked past the skater kid and turned the volume back up until the sounds of the street and the sound of the skater kidʼs voice faded into electronic cacophony. Goddamn it. Goddamn it. He walked all the way home without stopping, without looking up. *** Ethan let himself in the back door of the house he shared with three college students and three cats. Two of the cats — his, Louie and Ella — curled around his ankles and mewed as he stumbled his way over them through the kitchen and into the living room. He sat on the dusty thrift store couch with a huff and a puff of gray dust then turned toward the answering machine on the end table. The light signaling unheard messages was blinking. It blinked five times, then paused, then blinked five times again. Ethan pushed the playback button and laid his head on the sofa and closed his eyes. He listened to the whir and click of the machine. The first message was for his roommate Chloe, something about the Womenʼs Center on campus. He leaned over without looking and ran his fingertips across the face of the answering machine, searching lightly, then pressed the Save button, then the Skip button. The next message was for him. “This is a message for Ethan. This is Shawna. Hey, we havenʼt heard from you in a while, and weʼre starting to get a little worried about you. We miss you. Give us a call.” Ethanʼs eyes were still closed as he reached his hand over to the answering machine, ran his fingertips across the face of the control panel, then pressed the Delete button. The next message was for him. “Ethan, you fuck! Whatʼs up, man? Doug and Barry are in town for an acoustic set at the Clockwork Orange. Come by, man, letʼs have some beer. We can...” Ethan hit the delete button. “Hi, this is Melinda. Give me call when you get...” He pressed delete again. “Ethan, this is...” Delete. Ethan opened his eyes and looked at the acoustic gravel on the ceiling. He stared. He breathed deeply. He tapped his fingers on his leg, then reached into his backpack for his headphones. The music was still going, very loudly in the stillness of the empty house, and was just on the verge of painful as he placed the headphones on his head and over hard-edged electronica full of distortion and chaos and pounding beats. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the dayʼs photos. Each person looked back at him from the Band-Aid shaped photos with a look of sadness, some with squint eyes and frowns, some with downcast gaze, one with her arm pulled across her eyes and hiding. Ethan reached over to the phone and dialed. After four rings, an answering machine picked up. A womanʼs voice was on the recording. “This is Shawna and Lynn. Weʼre not here right now, but if you leave a message weʼll call you back.” The machine beeped. Ethan placed the phone back on the cradle. Her voice is still on the recorder... after three months, itʼs still on the fucking recorder. Shawna... she needs to take her voice off the machine. Itʼs too fucking hard... He raised himself from the dirty couch and walked across the empty living room and opened his bedroom door. He walked across a mat of dirty laundry, newspapers, magazines, school books, plastic bags and boxes, and stepped onto the mattress he used for a bed. The covers and blankets were pushed into a jumble. Ethan reached for the Zippo on his pillow and snapped his fingers against the flint to spark a flame, then lit the cheap candles he bought from the Espiritualista last month — they were encased in glass with color pictures of the Blessed Virgin on the face. He reached for his package of incense and lit a stick on the candle flame. He looked at his wall, the one along his bed. Every available space on the white surface was covered with little, Band-Aid shaped photos, hundreds of them, tiling the wall from ceiling to floor with faces. Each chronological order. There was a line of anger along the top, with random people biting their lips and baring their teeth and narrowing their eyes into slits. There was a colony of fear in the corner, and patches of loneliness spread throughout like blotches. Mostly, though, there was sad, long and wide streams of sad flowing into oceans of frowning mouths and downturned heads and hands rising to cradle faces. Ethan looked for an empty spot, found one in the bottom corner, and knelt in front of the photo wall. He reached into his breast pocket and brought out the photos, flipped though them until he found the girl at the cafe. He stared at her face, her hair, her shoulders. Ethan closed his eyes. The incense was curling warm tendrils of sweet smoke under his chin; he could feel it float along his cheek and nose, tickle past the tiny hairs of his shaved head. It burned his eyes. He reached up to wipe them. His eyes were dry. He reached for a stick pin in the box on his bed and began sticking the photos on the wall. One by one, the last empty space filled, until finally all the photos were in place and the wall was completely filled in. He looked up at the wall, then reached for a framed photo on the floor near his pillow and slumped into his bed. He stared at the photo in the flickering candlelight. It was a couple; he was one of them, the other was a girl with long sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and little round glasses. They were both smiling very broadly. The sky was blue behind them. Ethan closed his eyes and held the framed photo against his forehead and felt the cool glass. He imagined what it must have been like, vault ing face-first over the steering wheel and into the windshield of Lynnʼs car. It must have been quick. Thatʼs what they all said: It was over before she knew it happened. Ethan pinched his eyes shut and pressed the face of the photo frame against his forehead until the krink of breaking glass cut into his skin. He dropped the frame onto the carpet and bled slowly, shaking his head at the three remaining blank walls in his room. The Butt Triplets

Okay, before I start, I have to issue this disclaimer: The story you are about to consider was published in an earlier, unfinished form in another zine of mine called “Eirik Goes To Therapy.” Iʼve finally finished it, so I am sharing it here, but I just know that Kelli Wms. (20 Bus, That Girl, Kurt Cobain Was Lactose Intolerant Conspiracy Zine) is going to pitch a fit when she reads this and recognizes it. Sheʼs always catching me when I re-run some piece from older zines Iʼve done, and sheʼs always telling people about them and trying to regulate on my punk ass. So, Kelli... just know that this story is finally finished, and thatʼs why Iʼm running it here. Nyahh.

The ceremony began the same way at every apartment in every seaside town that my family moved to when I was a kid. The night after the first day of unpacking would be reserved for me and my kid sister Nelly and our new rooms. After all the sweaters and pants had been unpacked, and all the books and dishes and pots and pans had been put into new cupboards and cases, and all of my fatherʼs crisp navy uniforms had been lined up in single file in the hall closet, there would a point where my mother and father would pause and exhale deeply. They would look around the living room with their arms akimbo, surveying the empty boxes turned upside down in a pile in the corner and the stacks of bulging boxes yet to be emptied, and one or the other would look at Nelly and me and say something like, “Well, I guess itʼs time for you two to start work on your rooms.” This was our cue to grab our toy boxes and run into our own rooms and begin the process of reassembling a space that roughly resembled the last space, a place we would call home until the next time we moved to follow our fatherʼs ship. I had exactly three boxes with my name on them — Ethan (clothes); Ethan (books); and Ethan (Star Wars + 4 SQ). This last box was the most important box of them all, holding within its weary cardboard sides the keys to my schoolyard identity. I was a freak for anything remotely connected with George Lucas and had every imaginable action figure and ship associated with Star Wars, plus I was the very best four square player any schoolyard on the west coast had ever seen, perhaps even the east coast and beyond. Floating atop piles of Boba Fetts and Jabba the Hutts and Luke Skywalkers was the crusty pair of driving gloves my dad gave me that were used solely for schoolyard four square. I hefted this most important box and made my way down the hallway when my sister Nelly shouldered past me with her box labelled “Nelly (Barbies).” “Move, Stupid!” she yelled, then added, “Mom, he pushed me into the wall!” I turned into my room and closed my door before my mother had a chance to yell at me. I knelt beside my bed, already covered in my Star Wars blanket and pillowcase set, and gently opened my box. And right on top, like always, were my four square gloves. I lifted them out of the box and held them, looking at all the creases and folds caused by countless battles on the blacktop. I had no idea then, as I slipped on my gloves and unpacked my precious toys, that I would meet my most dreaded enemies the very next day. *** Bertha, Buelah and Bathsheba Butt were the biggest, meanest, most foul-spirited little wicked third-graders in all of my elementary school career. They were ruthless evil incarnate, and those little girls ruled the four- square court like a mini mob syndicate. Only they werenʼt so little. From a 8-year-old vantage point, they were a living, breathing three-headed Mount Rushmore of a pain delivery system. Colossal. Gargantuan. Cyclopean. Rogetʼs Thesaurus doesnʼt have enough synonyms for “way bigger than you” to describe these beasts. They weighed in at 80 pounds each, easily, with fists the size of fishbowls and arms that rippled with brute strength. Iʼm sure they couldʼve easily bench-pressed 100 pounds, a feat that still eludes me today, and their butts... oh, never has a trio of thugs ever been so aptly named. I was sure you could land jet planes on their backsides, their magnificent, frightening backsides. I was the new kid again at this, my latest school, after having just moved from Someplace Else for the fourth or fifth time in two years. I was really shy, painfully shy, but I had two strengths going for me that allowed me to insinuate myself into schoolyard societies from Bremerton, Washington, to San Diego, California: I could read four grades ahead of everybody else, and I kicked ass in four square. I couldʼve lettered in four square if they had held official competitions, and my momʼs mantelpiece would have been strewn with statues of little golden boys holding pebbled four-square balls over their heads in triumph. I had mastered all the tricks of the trade: baby bouncies, corner shots, backstops, double troubles, fakies, spins and my signature move — the mighty Behind-the-Back Schlebotnick. Oh man, if I whipped out the Schlebotnick just forget it... pick your jaw off the floor and put your eyeballs back in their sockets and march to the hind end of the line, Buster Brown, because youʼre outta there. The first thing I did on the first day of some new school was check out my favorite book from the library: “My Side of the Mountain,” by Jean George, a great book about a kid who runs away from home to live in the forest with his pet peregrine falcon. The next would be to size up the schoolyard competition at the four square courts. Iʼd stand at a respectful distance from the line of kids waiting to hop in the first square, rubbing my jaw in deep thought. Iʼd gauge second and third square strategies and watch the moves of the servers. Iʼd listen to variations in the blacktop lingo and check out the local procedure for calling “rules.” Then, Iʼd hop in line and wait my turn. The servers would always think they were hot stuff, especially the ones who had held the position for consecutive recesses, but Iʼd knock out the second square like nothing with a quick cornershot. When Iʼd advance to second square and the next person in line filled the first square space, the server would inevitably announce, “Rules! No corner shots!” and smirk at me as if they had defused my only bomb. Yeah, right. Iʼd take out square three with a deft fakie with a backspin for sugar and occupy it, smiling like a mercenary when the server shouted, “Rules! No corners and no fakies and no spins!” Theyʼd try to look smug, but theyʼd be worried by this point. I remember this one server who tried to ban everything, but I demanded he call them out by name, so he shouted, “No corners, no fakies, no spins, no backstops, no bumpers, no over-heads, no toe-peggers, no double-bouncies, no baby-bouncies and no punchers!” You shouldʼve seen the look of triumph in his eyes, thinking he had plucked all the fruit from my cherry tree and was about to chop me down, but I still had my secret weapon whose name only I knew: the dreaded Behind-the-Back Schlebotnick. Once I unleashed the Schlebotnick, the server was mine. Then, I would cement my reputation as King of the Four Square Court by reigning supreme all recess. I was a kind king, however, and took days off to let the other kids play while I sat under a tree at the far end of the playground reading “White Fang” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Blubber” and “The Cat Ate My Gymsuit” and “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” It added an air of mystery, I figured, and a little mystery is almost always a good thing. Well, on the first day of this latest of new schools, I had already claimed the crown and was holding court before an admiring crowd when the evilness made its first appearance. I was playing an easy game, not really paying attention and thinking more about adventures in the forests with pet peregrine falcons, when I heard one of the kids in line whisper, “Uh oh, the Butts.” I looked up and saw several kids get out of line and walk hurriedly to the swingsets. Even the kids in the squares eyed each other nervously and shuffled their feet, finally removing themselves one by one by one until only I was left, holding the four square ball and asking, “Whatʼs wrong? Donʼt you guys wanna play anymore? Where are you guys going? Guys?” I managed to grab some kid by the shirt sleeve as he was headed for the tetherballs and asked him what was up, and he nodded his head behind me and said, “The Butts, man, the Butts are coming.” I looked and saw them for the first time from across the playground, stalking toward me with faces sour as vinegar and fists clenched with purpose. The kid yanked free from my grasp and ran to the bathrooms as the Butt Triplets took the first, second and third squares. They were massive chunks of third-grader, each with shaggy pig-tails held together with rubberbands and tight corduroy pants and t-shirts stretched against their bulky midsections. They had tiny, piggy eyes shadowed by Neanderthal brow ridges and no necks whatsoever... their heads just popped out of their massive shoulders like boulders on a hill. And I was dumbfounded, holding the ball against my skinny chest like a lifevest. After tense moments just staring me down, Bathsheba, the loudest and most ornery of the bunch, spat on the ground and snarled, “Ya gonna play?” I cleared my throat, shuffled a bit in my Kangaroos, and bounced the ball a couple of times, my eyes darting from Buelah to Bertha to Bath- sheba, then back again. I finally licked my lips and said, “Uhmmm... no rules. Everything goes.” A collective gasp rose from the kids watching from behind the jungle gym and the monkey bars and the rings and the swingsets. This was the schoolyard equivalent of looking someone in the eye and telling them to give you their best game — a no holds barred, toe-to-toe, knock down, drag out fight to the finish for four square glory — and was usually reserved for die-hard rivalries that brewed to boiling points and demanded resolution. This, though, this immediate calling out was like going to full-scale nuclear war the second the enemyʼs troops massed on the border. And the Butt Triplets didnʼt even flinch. They just crouched down, like linebackers, ham hands on burly knees, and waited. As a hundred sets of eyes peered on, the battle began. I served Buelah a purposely easy lob just to see what she would do with it. One second she was frozen there like a hunk of granite with the red four square ball arcing in slow motion toward her, and the next instant the ball was rocket- ing back in my face. Dear Lord, I didnʼt even have time to blink and only through sheer force of will did I manage to stop the ball from sailing into the troposphere with a graceless fling of my flailing left hand. And that was the last time I saw that ball. For the next 45 seconds, I only felt it as one after another — Buelah, Bertha and Bathsheba Butt — pummeled me with jackhammer blows from all three squares at once with what seemed like 257 four square balls. I abandoned every trick I had ever used and threw every ounce of energy into just moving as fast as I could. This was no time for finesse, this was survival! They pelted me with a monsoon of red blurs, and I was there for each one, man, using Jedi superpowers to arch my body and stretch my limbs in never before seen angles to return the ball. It was brutal. Every hit was immediately returned with lightening speed. If it hadnʼt been for the recess bell, Iʼm sure I would have spontaneously combusted, but, suddenly, the lumbering behemoth that was Buelah snapped into sharp focus and held the four square ball and growled, “You just wait ʻtill tomorrow.” With that, the Butt Triplets walked away without so much as a parting glance, and I stood there, gasping, wheezing, t-shirt soaked with sweat, hair matted to my forehead, one shoe kicked off, arms hanging limply at my sides, and thought to myself that Christmas vacation was a million miles away. That night, I glared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling — this latest set purchased at the navy base hobby store just two days before — and tried in vain to think of anything other than the evil Butt Triplets. I frowned at the green galaxies of plastic Saturns and Jupiters and crescent moons and the plastic Tie Fighters and X-Wing Fighters dangling by fishing line from the light fixture. My arms were crossed tightly across my chest, and I visualized ghastly public floggings, gruesome sessions of torture and maiming, and clouds of black crows and locusts that chased the horrible sisters down the playground and plucked the beady eyes from their sockets. A soft knock at my door made me jump, and, for a moment, I considered not answering, but then I crawled from under my Luke Skywalker comforter and padded to the door and opened it. It was my sister Nelly, a full foot shorter than me and in her Barbie Underoos. I had the old urge to yell at her and tell her to go away and stop bothering me, to yell it really loud so the whole house would wake up, but I stifled it. Things had been really tense lately, and these late night meetings had been happening more often than usual. I let her in and closed the door behind her, watching as she clomped across my room in the dirty pink elephant slippers Aunt Ruby had given her last Christmas. When my father was home, we just avoided each other until dinner, which we then ate in silence by ourselves at the kitchen table while our parents ate in front of the television in the living room. But, when my father was out to sea, we vied for my motherʼs attention by constantly bickering and pointing out the flaws of the other. This behavior would continue until I graduated from high school, to be replaced by an icy distance bridged by brief phone calls during holidays and tragedies. “Sometimes I hate Dad,” she said, looking down at her feet as she dangled them over the side of my bed. The ears of her slippers flopped back and forth. I sat down next to her and looked down at my bare feet, at the dirt wedged in the nail of my big toe. I told her that I felt the same way sometimes, especially when mom and dad argued. “Yeah,” she said. The wind blew softly outside my bedroom window, brushing the azalea bushes in the flower beds against my ratty screen. That sound wasnʼt scary anymore; mostly it was annoying. The ʻfridge kicked on in the kitchen and my Obi-Wan night light flickered. “Mom cried again today,” she said, still looking down at her feet, fingers clutching little handfuls of my blanket. “Yeah?” “Yeah, I was playing Barbie in your room and ...” “My room? Nelly...” She stopped kicking her feet and raised her hand. “... and mom was putting away towels and I was playing Barbie and then it got all quiet and then I heard her crying and I donʼt think she knew I could hear her, but I did.” The fridge buzzed. The wind blew. Something somewhere inside the house creaked. “Did you cry, too?” I asked. “No.” She bit the corner of her lower lip and reached down and pulled off one of her elephant slippers, scratched between her toes, flicked a bit of fuzz onto my floor, then put her slipper back on. We sat there for a while, kicking our feet and listening to the night sounds of the house and the world outside my window. After a while, Nelly plopped off my bed and walked to my door, her pointy heel bones clomping through the bottoms of her slippers. She opened the door just a crack, just wide enough for her thin body to slip through. She disappeared except for her hand, curled around the edge of the door and still grasping the knob. “Nelly?” Her hand paused, then a whisper floated from behind the door, “What?” The wind blew again, raking the bush across my screen and fluttering the curtains. “Stay out of my room when Iʼm not home.” I stared at her hand for a few more moments, then she closed the door between us and clomped back down the hall. The next day was a rainy one, full of storm clouds as bruised and swollen as my mood. I woke up stiff and sore and achy, then used up all the hot water taking a long “Hollywood” shower, as my father would say. I ate cinnamon toast in the kitchen with Nelly and tried to ignore the strained mood between my mother and father in the living room. They were talking about moving again, this time to base housing, even though we still had boxes lining the walls of our latest apartment. My mom was upset because she had just enrolled us in yet another school. I didnʼt care; I was used to this moving stuff. In fact, if we couldʼve moved right at that very second, I wouldʼve applauded the idea. I dreaded going to school. I knew Iʼd have to get right back into that pit of vipers known as the four square court and defend my servership, and I felt drained just thinking about it. If I couldʼve thought of a good excuse — toothache, brain cancer, arthritis of the eyeball — I might have used it, but I felt I couldnʼt back down. I couldnʼt lose my spot. So, I trudged off to school in my old red raincoat and prepared to meet my destiny. It rained the whole way, all eight blocks, and by the time I made it to the cafeteria to eat hot oatmeal with raisins and a carton of 2% milk, my cowboy boots were soaked. The ink from my free breakfast punch card got all over my jeans and stained the tips of my fingers mimeograph purple. I ate alone at the corner of a long, white table heavy on one end with gabbing, giggling, soaking wet schoolkids I didnʼt know. I usually enjoyed sitting by myself when I ate in the morning, but this time I felt a little paranoid, as if people were sneaking glances at me over their shoulders and muttering hidden things from behind cupped palms. I only looked up once in the brief time I ate my meal, and when I did I saw the Butt Triplets across the cafeteria, huddled in a soppy clot at the end of another long table. They sat by themselves and ate in silence without looking up. They werenʼt wearing jackets or coats, just limp hooded sweatshirts that dripped into the Styrofoam containers of their oatmeal and raisins. I looked through the foggy wall of windows along one side of the cafeteria and saw the four-square courts in the playground. The grey sky was reflected on the surface of a huge black puddle, and circles radiated crazily as rain drops hit. My head hurt. I was already starting to sniffle. When the first recess bell finally let us out of class two hours later, the kids all lined up at the edge of the school buildings, just under the lip of roof that caught the rain and directed it to overflowing gutters. The playground asphalt was covered by a greasy sea of blackened rain water and the tetherballs hung limply from their poles and swayed in the wet breeze. All the kids were huddled together in a long mass, their hands thrust deep inside the pockets of their jackets and raincoats, hunching their shoulders to keep the wetness from creeping down their necks. It was weird… on most rainy days at most of the schools Iʼd gone to, the kids tended to stay in the cafeteria, playing chess and checkers and Monopoly or just talking in flocks that moved from one side of the room to the other. But here, everyone seemed to be staring out at the soggy swamp of a playground … … oh God. Just then, a hubbub erupted twenty people down the line and several kids scattered as Bertha, Buelah and Bathsheba Butt burst from the crowd and stomped through the curtain of rain falling from the roof and marched in the direction of the four square courts. Bathsheba was in the lead, kicking the rainwater into a huge spray with her dirty white tennies and headlocking a red four square ball under one arm. I looked down at my cowboy boots, soaking in a puddle inches deep, then looked down the line of dripping schoolkids. They were all staring at me, every single one of them, and they didnʼt look away when I met their gazes one by one by one. … oh God. I looked back down at my soggy, wrinkly hands, then back up at the Butt Triplets who were standing in the first, second and third squares of a water-logged four square court, then back down at my hands again. I sighed a big shivering sigh, held it, then took my Luke Skywalker backpack from my shoulders and handed it to the red-haired kid standing next to me. “Can you hold this for me?” “Yeah,” the kid said, and he held it by the straps with both hands. I took one last deep breath and stepped through the curtain of rain toward the four square courts. Bathsheba glared at me as I took my spot in the server position, spitting venom through tiny eye slits, then held out the four square ball. When I tried to take it, she snatched it from my grasp and sneered, “I double dog dare you to let us call rules.” What kind of trick was this? This wasnʼt… you werenʼt supposed to be able to do this! The server was supposed to be the one who called rules, they knew that, so… so… what was this? What kinda… Bertha, Buelah and Bathsheba Butt said nothing, they just stared me down like gargoyles, and I tried my best to stare right back at them. “Unless youʼre scared,” Bertha barked. “ʼCuz if youʼre scared, we can just play regular.” Fine. Fine. Let them call rules. I told Bertha that she could do whatever she wanted; it wasnʼt like other people hadnʼt tried nonsense before. The crowd behind me began to mutter, blending with the wind that slanted the rainfall. The Butts looked at each other, nodded their heads as one, then began rattling off a huge list of styles and power moves that they intended to ban from this game: basic tricks that every kid who had ever played four square knew by heart; advanced tricks that only the most veteran players could use; obscure tricks that I hadnʼt seen in three or four schools; plus a slew of esoteric moves I had never even heard of with names like “googlies” and “bone crushers” and “bloody Marys.” They went on and one, rattling off move after move, trick after trick, with each Butt contributing every bit of four square lore they seemed to know. I just stood there with my arms crossed, resisting the urge to roll my eyes at this last minute act of desperation. When they finally stopped, I reached out for the four square ball and snapped, “Okay, fine, you done now? You satisfied now? Can I have the dumb ball now?” Bathsheba stepped toward me, but as I reached for the ball she again yanked it from my grasp and held it up over her head and away from me. “Nuh uh, weʼre not done yet, no sir.” She spat, wiped her mouth, then moved closer to me. She curled her finger and beckoned as if she wanted to whisper something in my ear. I looked over my shoulder at the crowd of people behind me — it seemed like the whole school was watching, including a few teachers — then craned my ear closer to Bathshebaʼs mouth. She screamed, “AND NO BEHIND-THE-BACK SCHLA-BOT- NICKS!” Oh the pain! Oh the agony! Oh the humanity! My eyes opened wide, my mouth froze into the shape of a capital O, my hands clawed at my face… I became a third grade dramatic interpretation of Edward Munchʼs “The Scream.” Before I could even mouth the word “how,” Bertha answered my question by jumping up and down and pointing and shouting, “It was on your PeeChee! We saw it written on your PeeChee! Ha Ha, you wrote it all over your PeeChee!” The Butt Triplets then did something I had never seen them do in the brief history of our rivalry: they laughed — big bellowing evil belly laughs like pregnant hippos choking themselves on some cruel joke. In between laughs, they gasped for air to power even more laughs. I was horrified. Of course, they were right. On the yellow PeeChee folder in my backpack I had doodled all over the basketball player guy, changing him into a championship four square player with my name scrawled on the back of his jersey. Over his head was a bubble that said, “No one can stop the Behind-the-Back Schlebotnick! Die! Die! Die!” How the Butts had seen it, Iʼll never know, but there I was stripped of my secret weapon, and it was all my fault because I fell for the oldest, most devious trick in the book. In front of the whole, entire school, too. I was so embarrassed… had this happened the year before, I wouldʼve run from the playground with my face covered, but I fought against that urge and stood my ground. As her sisters continued to laugh and mock me, Bathsheba reached over and handed me the four square ball. There was nothing left to do now but serve the ball and play the best game I could, given the wind and the rain and the cold and the fact that every single bit of support had been snatched from me. I bounced the ball twice, wincing at the spray of dirty water that weighed down my jeans, and crouched down in my server position. I reached around and pulled up the rear end of my pants, rubbed the rainwater from my eyes, then I hit the ball to Buelah in square two and readied myself for the firestorm to follow. And Buelah hit the ball gently to Bertha in square one, who then hit the ball gently to Bathsheba in square three, who then returned the ball gently to Buelah once again. I kicked up water in tiny tidal waves each time the ball exchanged sisters, realigning myself to receive the ball, but each time the ball avoided me and made a graceful arc to one of the three sisters. This continued, back and forth, back and forth, and I found myself muttering, “Cʼmon… cʼmon… gimme the ball…” But they kept it up, lobbing the ball to each other in a gross mockery of four square, the kind of four square you play with little kids, not with each other, and they acted as if I wasnʼt even there, like they were just hanging out, just wasting time, as if the whole school wasnʼt watching our every move. I straightened up a bit, with my hands on my waist, and said, “Cʼmon, guys, stop messing around, and letʼs play four square.” Then Bathsheba started chanting, “La la la, la la la, la la la,” in rhythm with the movement of the ball. Buelah joined her, then Bertha, playing little kid four square with that stupid, irritating, sing-song nonsense. “La la la, la la la,” like little kids playing four square on the sidewalk outside of their grandmaʼs house, as if everything in the whole stupid world didnʼt depend on this very game. I couldnʼt believe the insolence, the… the… why, they were disrespecting me and… and… MOCKING me in front of the whole school. They were afraid, dammit, they were afraid of giving me their best game because they had already tried that, yeah, and I had beaten them at their own game, yeah, and now… now they were trying to keep me from exercising my right to be server by messing around with the stupid ball like a bunch of stupid… … and then I saw it, the “tell,” the giveaway move, and my Jedi mindpowers turned the entire scene into slow-mo. Buelahʼs eyes twitched toward me — PINK! — and her shoulder nearest me dipped ever so slightly. Her knees flexed, the muscles in her calves bulged, and she took in a deep breath and held it. The ball sailed through the tattered veil of rain — PINKPINKPINKPINK — from the soppy hands of Bathsheba, whose mouth was caught in mid-”la” but whose eyes had also twitched toward me — PINK! In that split second it was finally obvious to me what they were trying to do, and I had almost fallen for it! My muscles tensed and snapped my body automatically to the proper ready position: my legs spread wide, my body low to the ground, my arms bent like capitol Lʼs and my hands open and flexed for impact. And then Buelahʼs body relaxed and gently returned the ball to Bath- sheba , who then gave it gently to Bertha, who then gave it gently back to Buelah once again. They knew I was onto them and knew I wasnʼt going down without a fight. It gave me no small amount of pride to know that they had to resort to blatant trickery to beat me. This game could go all recess for all I cared, I wasnʼt about to let them win. And thatʼs when I sneezed. It seemed like such a simple thing, such an innocent little sneeze. The wind had blown spray from a splash of the four square ball into my face, much as it had been doing the whole game, only this time a few molecules of grit had gone up my nose. My eyes never wavered from the job of protecting my square, but my left hand jumped up to scratch my nose and left behind the rubbery smell of the four square ball. Some passage somewhere behind my eyeballs tingled. I breathed in deeply. I snorted. I sneezed. It couldnʼt have been more than a millisecond, maybe even a trilli- second, but when my sneeze was over and I opened my eyes again, I saw Bertha, Buelah and Bathsheba Butt angled towards me with their bodies frozen in the ready position. I twitched, my eyes ping-ponging through the scene, from Buelahʼs hands to Berthaʼs eyes to Bathshebaʼs teeth, and I couldnʼt find the ball. I stood up and looked back over my shoulder and saw the four square ball way in the distance, way over by the tetherballs, still bouncing and skit- tering along the wet asphalt playground on its way for the back fence. I looked back into the faces of the kids crowded by the school building. The utter silence told me I didnʼt need to ask if the ball was fairly played. I looked back at the three sisters. The recess bell rang. The Butt Triplets relaxed and straightened, and they turned and walked back to the classrooms without a word. It was all over. I had lost. After all those years at the top of my game, I had finally lost. I shoved my hands back in my pockets with a grunt and watched my cowboy boots as they sloshed through the water on their way back to the school buildings. When I crossed the wall of water spewing from the rain gutter and into the shelter of the overhanging roof, I saw my backpack lying face down in a puddle. I reached down and felt the weight of water inside. I unzipped the main pouch and poured ink-stained water onto the sidewalk, then zipped it back up, placed my arms through the straps, and turned away from the school buildings to start my eight-block walk home three hours early. When I got home and let my self in the apartment with the key that hung from a chain around my neck, my mom was bustling around with her arms full of boxes. She took one quick look at me as she walked into the hallway, then shouted over her shoulder, “I was just about to come get you. Get off the carpet, youʼre getting everything all wet.” Nelly was sitting on the love seat in the living room watching cartoons with her Barbie backpack at her side. She was supposed to be at school, too. “Are we leaving?” I asked her. “Yeah,” she said, never taking her eyes off the teevee screen. “Mom! Heʼs gettinʼ water all over the carpet!” My momʼs muffled voice rattled down the hallway in response, “Honey, I told you not to get the carpet all wet! If you ruin the carpet and we donʼt get our cleaning deposit back, your Dadʼll kick your narrow ass!” I sighed. I couldnʼt wait to get this school behind me and move on to the next one. I dropped my backpack onto the floor and started extracting myself from my liquid clothing. Half an hour later, my mom drove my sister and I back to the school to go through the procedure of checking out. There were papers to sign, I imagine, and forms to fill out and medical files to be returned so that we could give it all to the next school. Nelly and I waited in the Pinto and listened to oldies on the radio. She sat in front and played with her Barbies, and I sat in back and read an old Encyclopedia Brown book from the year before. After about an hour, my mom came back and got in the car, then pulled out of the parking lot for home. The rain had stopped by this time, and the playground was filled with kids on recess. Through the schoolʼs chain link fence I could see The Butt Triplets in one of the four square courts quietly lobbing their red four square ball to each other. The other four square courts all had quartets of chatty schoolkids, but the Butts just played with each other in silence. We stopped at the corner for a red light, and Bertha, Buelah and Bathsheba Butt looked up at the same time and stared directly into our car. It was the last time I would ever see them or this school. When the light turned green and my mom made a wide left turn toward our apartment, I couldʼve sworn that Buelah waved. POEM FOR A FRIEND i imagine myself with you, my friend, on childhood streetcorners sweating in the summertime sun sucking on frozen kool aid in a dixie cup in the curbside shade of a broken down pickup truck. i imagine us locking and popping to old school hip hop like boogaloo shrimp trying to pimp the candystore hotties with our portable cardboard dancefloors. weʼd spin our gangly bodies into b-boy oblivion boombox blastinʼ staccato breakbeats while grandmaster flash bellowed, “donʼt push me ʼcuz iʼm close to the edge...” and iʼd be right there with you cas frontinʼ with some white kid cabbage patch running man mime shit waiting for the inevitable bidding war for our music.

“sucker mcʼs couldnʼt fade us ʼcuz we was lyrical assassinators cold cut commentators gesticulating wildly over plates of your great auntʼs red beans and green tomatoes collards greens and mashed potatoes...” and iʼm telling him about this dope poem iʼm writing about him and me when we were kids and i look to him for that glowing smile of recognition expecting stories to fall from his tongue like ripe plums with characters named skillet head and june bug prefacing everything with, “man, you remember that one time?” and iʼd say, “man, that shit was off the hook!” but he doesnʼt smile he just clucks his tongue and says, “i appreciate the enthusiasm with which you embrace what you think is my culture but i have news for you — my mother wasnʼt weezie jefferson and my father wasnʼt fred sanford and I didnʼt spend my childhood on streetcorners with fucking fat albert and the cosby kids. i donʼt appreciate you re-writing my childhood so you can pretend you had a black friend. iʼve lost track of the white friends who think negro is an esoteric culture with secret handshakes and code words you can just pick up through osmosis through the beastie boys and blaxpoitation ﬂicks. itʼs cool you know so much about langston hughes and etheridge knight and amiri baraka and itʼs cool you know so much about miles davis and john coltrane and thelonious monk... but you donʼt know shit about me FEAR OF MATH

I hate calculators. Calculators make me think about death. It starts out innocently enough. Iʼll be in some class that involves some kind of calculation, and, inevitably, Iʼll absentmindedly tap in the year of my birth then tap in “+1” and hit the equal sign repeatedly, watching as the year advances one by one. Iʼll do this and think about where I was and who I was as the date gets larger. Iʼll imagine my school pictures from each year, each house we lived in, childhood friends I had in each grade. And before I know it, itʼll be the present year and Iʼll just sit there and stare at it, then Iʼll slowly hit it again and watch as the calculator goes into the future. This is where things get ugly. Inevitably, Iʼll start wondering how much longer I have to live. Iʼll think about my dadʼs dad and how he died at 57. Iʼll think about my momʼs dad and how he died at 61. Iʼll figure that maybe Iʼve got at least 60 years, at least that, right? So, Iʼll punch in the year I was born and punch “+60” and look at the year that comes up. I did this just the other day in my Geo-Sciences lab and just stared at the result. The number was, like, not nearly high enough... I did it again and found the same number staring me at the screen. If Iʼve got 60 years in this body, Iʼm already middle-aged according to this damned calculator. And I didnʼt stop there. I had to make all kinds of morbid calcula- tions. Like, for instance, pens... I just bought a pen a month ago and itʼs already dead. So I bought another one just like it. At this rate, Iʼve got about 336 pens to go before I go to the stationery shop in the sky. That kinda seems like a lot, but really, the way I go through pens, it doesnʼt seem nearly enough. If I measured the time I have left in sunglasses, Iʼd have something like 1,226 pairs to go. The same goes for portable CD players. Toothbrushes... shoot, Iʼve got at least a couple of thousand to go. I bought my first computer about five years ago, and Iʼm about to replace it with a new Macintosh i-Mac. If I get a new computer every five years, that means Iʼll go through at least another 5 computers before I log off. Ewww. Thatʼs not very nice to think about. Maybe I need to buy new computers more often... And what about cars? Iʼve only had 2 cars in my whole life. If Iʼm at the very midpoint of my life, does that mean Iʼve only got... gulp... two more cars to go? Even if I pad it a bit and say three or four, God... thatʼs pretty damned grim. No wonder my dad buys a new car every two years. And speaking of my dad, Iʼve been cheering him on in the last couple of years as he gets closer and closer to the deadline set by my grandfathers. Heʼs 53 this year. That means heʼs getting closer all the time. He could have, like, what, seven years left? How many more cars is that? How many computers? How many pens? I find myself nearly shouting, “Go Dad, raise that mark! Beat 60! Go for 70, Dad! Hell, go for 80!” If I tap in my birth date and then “+80,” I come up with something a little easier to handle. At least then Iʼm not middle-aged. Damn, Iʼm too young to be middle-aged. Stupid calculator. Go Dad, go! Hair Clip By Gabriel Helman

There was a womanʼs1,2 hair clip3 attached to4 the televisionʼs5 power6 cable8.

______

1. Well, technically it could have been a manʼs9 hair clip - there was nothing inherently special about it that made it so that only women could use it. 2. It was owned7 by a woman named Samantha Peterson. 3. It was one of those claw-style clips, and black11. 4. Or hanging from, depending on your semantic point of view. 5. The television was hanging in the upper left corner of a room in the communications department building. 6. Or maybe the Cable TV cable, I donʼt really remember8. 7. Well, Samanthaʼs sister bought it and gave it to her as a present, and Samantha obviously wasnʼt using it much while it was hanging in a classroom in the university, so one could get into a fairly tangled legal argument as to the strict ownership of the hair clip, but suffice it to say that the clip was essentially Samanthaʼs for most of itʼs functional life span. 8. Whichever it was, it was thick and black. 9. In fact, one could say that21 a man10 was the reason it was hanging there in the first place. 10. Ricardo12 Smith24. 11. Samanthaʼs favorite color. 12. Known to his friends as “Ricky13.” 13. Some of his friends14 thought “Ricky Smith” sounded like a rock20 star15. 14. Samantha was19 his girlfriend, so she definitely fits into this category. 15. Or a porn16 star. 16. Samantha14 was more fond18 of this15 interpretation. 17. Carl McConnell. 18. Use your imagination. 19. As in past-tense. Things changed25 once the semester ended. 20. Actually, Ricardo was a geology major, so the nickname22 was kind of appropriate. 21. In fact, I17 just did. And I would know - I knew19 both parties intimately18,23. 22. Rock-Star Rick, among others18. 23. Not that much imagination. 24. Yeah, his last name was really Smith. 25. Well, to make a long story28 short26, they broke up29. 26. Really short, it you take my meaning18. 27. Samantha. 28. Samantha and Ricky had been dating for two years30. They had been a pretty happy couple for most31 of it, and the rest of us were joking about where32 the wedding would be. They never33 seemed to have any problems. But, things started to go bad. Little things at first, arguments and the like31. Things slowly got worse, until one day34, Samantha thought37 she found out35 that Ricky had cheated on her. 29. Well, itʼs more like they failed39 to get back40 together. 30. Since they were sophomores. 31. The Noodle Incident18 was pretty bad. 32. My money was on the rose garden in downtown. 33. What, never? Well, hardly ever. 34. September 14th, last year. 35. One of her27 friends thought37 she36 saw Ricky and another girl at a party making out and then going home together38. 36. This is the friend. I think her name was Kori. 37. One of the morals of this story is not to jump to conclusions. 38. Actually. Ricky did drive her41 home. She was an old friend of Rickyʼs and Ricky was giving her a lift. Sadly, Samantha didnʼt wait around for the explanation and overreacted43. 39. Ricky seemed to think that Samantha was just a little too much work44 if she27 was going to flip out about him10 helping old friends41, so he didnʼt take his opening when he got it40. 40. After she27 dumped45 him10, Samantha decided to try and give Ricky another chance. She used a hair clip3 to attach a note to the televi- sion5 in one of Rickyʼs classrooms. Ricky actually got46 the note47, and spent a good thirty seconds considering his choices. Then it seemed obvious44 what to do48. 41. This is Rickyʼs old friend. I never did catch her name, but she had great legs. 42. Meanwhile, in a lonely corner of the North Atlantic, there were two Buddhist Monks in a rubber raft. They had been floating in silence for several minutes. The second monk watched the first monk with an expectant look on his face. The first monk was staring off over the water, and was fidgeting with something in his lap The second monk couldnʼt tell what, it looked like it was either the sleeves of his robe, or the ends of his scarf8. Finally, the first one straightens his robe, turns to the second one and says, “You raise a good question, but I think the Niners are going to go all the way next year.” 43. She27 flipped out and started yelling and throwing dishes, and ended up throwing Ricky out of her apartment, made her feelings plain45, and ignored what he had to say49. 44. This seems like an odd opinion after two years of dating, but the evidence31 had been piling up that the relationship was over 45. “Get the hell out of my house, and I never want to see your ugly, impotent50 face again, you jerk!” 46. This was actually a small miracle. There are a lot of “Ricks” in geology. 47. “Ricky - Iʼm sorry about the other night, I think we need to talk. I think weʼre even now, so if you still want to give us a chance, take this hair clip and attach it to the fence post where we just met. Iʼll call you.” 48. Well, in case you couldnʼt figure it out, Iʼll give you a hint. The hair clip is still there. 49. “Baby, no! You donʼt understand…” and a whole lot of stutter- ing. Ricky isnʼt the worlds most verbose individual. 50. Ricky says that this was just angry hyperbole. Iʼm not so sure18. Ethan in His Orbit by Melinda Parker

A few years ago, I was living in Bakersfield, my shitty hometown in Southern California. While I was working at a print shop as a graphic designer, I met my friend Melinda Parker. Cool cat, Melinda, and a great designer and even better writer. We started hanging out almost immediately, and become close friends. When I got a job at another print shop, we would fax each other rude messages using outdated clip art and make plans to get together for dinner. She was cool... I ended up moving six hours north to Chico, then Melinda moved to Oregon, but weʼve still kept in touch over the years. Itʼs been tough, though: I havenʼt been the best of snail mail friends ever since I discovered e-mail, and Melinda thrives on the written word, so thereʼs a great distance between us. In the last couple of years, the letters have become infrequent, dwindling down to yearly overviews of life as we see it. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote my annual Big Long Letter to Melinda, but then couldnʼt find her address in Oregon, so I called and left a message asking for it. She left a message on my machine the next day, so I sent the letter off. A few weeks later, I received the following story in the mail. It was more than a little uncomfortable to read, to be honest, because Melinda really nailed the character of me in Bakersfield circa 1993. I was playing the role of Mister Rock Star in the local creative scene, doing my poetry readings and my zines and my rock shows and my weekly column in the local newspaper, and, apparently, I was a bit of a shit when I came to my friendship with Melinda. Here it is: a fat truth sandwich with my name all over it from Melinda Parker. A protrait of a Wussy Boy gone bad.

“Hey, babe. This is Ethan, as if you didnʼt know. Iʼve lost your address and got a package I want to send you - a big, old, long letter and a copy of my newest chapbook. So, do the right thing and call me back with the info. I know you want it.” Laurel listened to the message twice, then watched the light on her machine blink like a caution sign. She tried to decide if this was the best thing to happen to her that day, or the worst. It was just like Ethan to drop into her life after months of silence, months she had spent wondering if their difficult friendship was over for good. And the message, well, that was vintage Ethan, too. He always sounded like theyʼd just spent the night before together, not having sex, but doing all the crazy things theyʼd once substituted for it. Laurel hesitated a moment, took a deep breath, cleared the message from her machine, and picked up the phone. The number rang twice before it was picked up on the other end. “Hello?” It was a woman, or knowing Ethanʼs predilections, a young college student. Her voice rose at the end of the word. A young woman whose every utterance was a doe-like question. She had big, blue eyes and blonde hair. “Is Ethan there?” “No? Can I take a message?” she said in her best receptionist voice. Part time receptionist, Laurel thought. Days, she went to school. She was a communications major, learning how to read the TelePrompter without moving her eyes. “This is Laurel, and Iʼm returning his call. Do you have a piece of paper handy?” “Yes?” So, Laurel gave the girl her address and hung up, feeling sheʼd discharged her responsibility. Making contact with Ethan was a tricky proposition, and Laurel never knew quite what to expect. When he wasnʼt in her life, she frequently felt swamped by nostalgia remembering the good times, passing generously over the bad. But when he called or wrote after months of silence, Laurel wondered why they were both dragging the relationship on, and if there was enough left between them - leading very different lives in two different states - to pin a prayer on. Ethan had the singular ability to raise her hopes and dash her expectations simultaneously. It had always been that way, from the very beginning. When she thought about it, it had always been Ethanʼs paradoxes that intrigued her and, to some extent, contributed to his considerable charm. He liked Mexican food, but didnʼt like rice or beans. He hung out in coffeehouses, but didnʼt drink coffee. He admired strong, independent women, but dated silly girls barely out of high school. They had met six years earlier when Laurel had been working for the State Attorneyʼs office, going to school at nights to get her Masterʼs in Education, and Ethan had been a bike messenger, spending his nights hanging out with the writers from the school paper. He attended classes sporadically, and was three years into his schooling with an undeclared major. Heʼd spent six years in the Navy, enlisting early to escape the tyranny of his father. When they met, he was still riding the waves of his civilian life freedom. He was fun and wild, and the only thing he took seriously was his writing. A friend from work had introduced them. Gail had persuaded Laurel to go to a poetry slam at a pub downtown, a dark, noisy, yeasty-smelling place appropriately called The Rusty Bucket. Laurel had squeezed into a table in the comer, her hands protectively around her bottle of Mich- elob, where she quickly found herself surrounded by Gailʼs friends from school - chatty girls in short skirts and dark lipstick. Laurel was trying to remember exactly why sheʼd agreed to come at all when the meager lights dimmed further and a wobbly spot came on over the plywood platform that served as a stage at the front of the room. A short, wiry guy with a shaved head, a goatee and a gold earring took the stage, dancing with the microphone stand like a Vegas crooner. The room erupted into wolf whistles and shouts and a wave of rowdy applause. Ethan took a deep breath, waiting for the ruckus to quiet, then launched into a rapid-fire delivery of what everyone there took to be poetry, what Laurel realized was pure, perfected performance art. Or maybe just a performance. But she had to hand it to him; he knew what the audience wanted and he delivered, his words gliding, soaring, spurning, spinning into the expectant darkness. He was a master of all he surveyed when he became someone else. Another puzzling paradox Laurel later discovered. When Ethan finished and relinquished the spotlight to the next poet, Gail jumped up and pressed her way through the crowd. Laurel looked at her watch, finished her beer, and pushed her chair back from the table. One beer, not even a buzz on, and she was ready to go home. God, when had she gotten so old? She stood up, then saw Gail moving towards her, her arm protectively linked through the Goatee Guyʼs. “Hey, where are you going? We just got here!” Gailʼs voice carried a note of weary petulance. She was, after all, doing her best to give Laurel a social life. Laurel picked up her bag. “Iʼve got a headache. Think Iʼll call it a night. But, thanks for asking me along.” “I know you,” the Goatee Guy said, giving her a grin. Laurel nodded. “Iʼve seen you around. The bike messenger guy - and poet, as it turns out.” “Yeah, right.” He extended a hand, and Laurel was surprised at the warm strength of his handshake, like something perfected for upscale interviews. “Nameʼs Ethan Cane. Glad you could make the reading.” “Laurel Hirshon.” Ethanʼs eyebrows slid up. “Not the Laurel Hirshon? The Laurel Hirshon that wrote the poem in The Courier last spring?” Laurel flushed. It had been an old poem, something sheʼd done as an undergraduate, and sheʼd only submitted it because a friend on the paper had talked her into it. It embarrassed her, really, because she was no longer writing. Sheʼd felt, at the time, like a hypocrite, pretending at being something she wasnʼt, trading off on old glory. “Now, that was a cool piece,” Ethan was saying, leaning forward. “I have to tell you that I have a friend who left her asshole husband because of that poem. That poem changed her life.” Surely, he was exaggerating. Still Lauren felt as if sheʼd been stroked, and all the old heat and promise sheʼd once experienced when sheʼd been writing came surging back to her. Sheʼd felt good about it then, though sheʼd received little praise or notice. The process itself had been therapeutic, as intimate and personal as making bread. Why had she stopped? Why had work and graduate school assumed the place in her life sheʼd once reserved for the self-pleasure writing had given her? She bowed her head, aware of Ethanʼs searing gaze. “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. But, thanks. I mean, I guess thatʼs a compliment.” “Damn right. So, what are you doing now? Iʼm putting together a chapbook. Iʼd really like to see some of your work.” And thatʼs the way Ethan had cast his net. It had been so easy, really. Pay a homely girl a compliment, and she was yours for the taking. Remind a slothful writer that sheʼd once had the fire, and you rekindled the spark. Sometime later that evening, Gail had gone off with the friends gathered around the table. Ethan and Laurel had sat talking until the lights came up in The Rusty Bucket, she drinking more than she intended, and he nursing a watered-down Coke that left a ring on the table. When they were forced out by a surly bouncer with a 2 a.m. shadow, Ethan and Laurel walked into the light rain that had begun to fall outside, still talking. She had been giddy, from the beer and the attention, and somewhere down the block, Ethan had slipped his arm into hers. He was as sober as a judge, but before she returned to her apartment, heʼd persuaded her to ramble through the town singing show tunes, starting with the obvious “Singing in the Rain,” and progressing through to “Climb Every Mountain.” Ethan was delighted with her Ethel Merman imitation, an easy trick anyone could do, and she was surprised at his delight. Somewhere, wheels clicked and spun along a well-oiled track. Their meeting had been that easy, that perfect. Laurel had arrived at The Rusty Bucket with her heart clenched tight as a fist. When she opened the door of her apartment, her legs wobbly and her throat hoarse, she was a changed person. Looking back, it had been so simple. Sheʼd fallen into her relationship with Ethan as though it were a feather bed, something she could neither anticipate nor explain. It was the very good thing she, as a good person, had always felt she deserved, yet couldnʼt imagine receiving. She slept alone, floating in the round, warm bubble of her luck. She began to see more of Ethan. Sometimes, theyʼd meet at a poetry reading where he tried to induce her to the open mic, but she wasnʼt ready for that - didnʼt know if sheʼd ever be ready to write or share the kind of poems that drew crowds on Thursday nights to The Rusty Bucket. Most often, they met at her apartment where she cooked pasta or tossed a salad. Laurel had never been one much for entertaining, but Ethan made that easy, too. Later, he would remind her, heedless of long-distance charges, about their evenings together. “Remember, Laur? It was the whole she-bang. Weʼd go to Safeway, no idea what was on the menu, and wander the aisles. Picking up the weird stuff in the meat freezers - pig snouts, chicken feet, cow tongues. God, who ate that shit? How did they eat it? Remember the night we filled the cart with Wesson oil and Saran Wrap? The look on the face of the cashier! It slew me.” “Yes,” Lauren would say. “I remember.” Great memories, but if they were so great, why did they make her feel raked by some ineluctable sadness? Because, perhaps, something had been lost - or maybe it had never been there to begin with. Her throat closed up and she almost hated Ethan then. She wished she could. The evenings at her apartment started with a trip to Safeway, then came the preparations in the kitchen, the two of them side by side at the counter tearing lettuce or slicing zucchini for the pasta sauce, while Mile Davis played on the stereo. Laurel had rediscovered Ella Fitzgerald - was smitten by her warm, miraculous voice - and Ethan had given up his heavy industrial music, for a short time anyway, to sample classic jazz. He was the one who gave Laurel “Kind of Blue”; it came in a scratched jewel case and Laurel suspected heʼd nicked it from the public library. Her favorite song, early in the relationship, had been Billie Holidayʼs version of “Now, Baby, Or Never.” She knew the lyrics by heart, and often sang along with the cassette in the car when she and Ethan were together. Hoping heʼd notice, even then, hoping heʼd know where she thought they were both going. The dinners were followed by evenings spent cross-legged on the floor, listening to music, talking, Laurel tentatively sharing the poems she was writing. And she was writing again, new stuff, better than anything sheʼd done before. The sun of Ethanʼs attention made her grow, gave her talent root in appreciative ground. His praise was constant, insistent. “God! What are you doing with your talent? I mean, you should be submitting this stuff, giving readings. You are such a better writer than I am, Laur. Honestly. I am your slave; you are my poet idol. I worship you.” Heʼd salaam again and again until Laurel laughed and pushed him over, telling him what a nut he was, burnished by his silly praise. And Ethan wrote, wrote prodigiously, turning out chapbook after chapbook, photocopied collections of his loosely-knit, mostly angry poetry and his self-indulgent essays. He frequently asked Laurelʼs opinion, seeming to be seriously interested in what she thought of his work. She commented judiciously, and he took it silently, never altering his true course. She was genuinely amazed at his industry. For Ethan, everything was material. Nothing was wasted. If heʼd lived through it, someone, somewhere would want to read about it. He could have packaged the phone book and persuaded people to buy it. Rants, screeds and diatribes were his specialty, and Laurel often wondered if the explosive feelings were his own, or ones merely manufactured to support his stage persona. More paradoxes. Ethan confessed his feelings of loneliness, but rarely spent a night alone. (As if sharing a bed with someone meant being intimate.) He described his feelings of low self-esteem, yet commanded the spotlight with total mastery. He said he didnʼt sleep well - actually, he had a fear of dying in his sleep that kept him up, counting heartbeats - but frequently missed work because he was too fatigued to get out of bed. Heʼd call her in the late afternoon, wrapped in a blanket on the futon in his rented room, his voice all husky, as if he were reluctantly leaving the safe cocoon of sleep that had finally come. Ethan told her about his stormy relationship with his father, but he talked about it so often, Laurel could scarcely believe he hated the man as much as he claimed. “You know what he said the last time I was home? Guess? He said, ʻHowʼd me and your mother end up with an ugly runt like you.ʼ Bastard. He never forgave me for getting out of the Navy. One of many disappoint- ments Iʼve served up to him in my life.” “Ethan,” sheʼd say, the phone pressed hard against her ear, “youʼve got to deal with this. You canʼt move on until you do.” “Yeah. Like a case of bad heartburn. This is one meal that keeps coming back on me.” “So, youʼll be a better father to your kids. At least heʼs given you that. You know what not to do.” Ethan sighed and it sounded like many waters rushing over a dam. “Yeah, well, it ainʼt so easy, is it? All I ever really wanted was for the jerk to love me. When he saw my earring he called me a faggot, real proof I was queer - as if thatʼs why Iʼd left the Navy, as if I couldnʼt stick it out like a real man. I wish I was queer, Laur. I mean, maybe Iʼd get the love of a good man, something I never got from him.” “Hardly a chance of that,” Laurel had said quietly, and theyʼd laughed. Another paradox. For all Ethanʼs overt promiscuity, he was a prude when it came to doing something as innocuous as watching an R-rated movie with a sex scene in it. Heʼd walked out of a theater once because of that, leaving Laurel sitting there with an empty Junior Mints box and half a Coke. “Doing the nasty,” “making the beast with two backs,” “doing the horizontal limbo” were all a part of Ethanʼs vocabulary, but he avoided talking about his actual experiences, as if euphemisms were enough - or all that he was capable of. Some nights at Laurelʼs apartment, theyʼd end up butt to butt on her sofa watching a video. Nudity or a sex scene made Ethan squirm. Heʼd get up to get a soda or to use the john while Laurel lay there, entranced, watching the real life of imaginary people. Once, on his way back into the room, Ethan had commented on how beautiful an actressʼs breasts were. His voice had been soft and innocent, as if he were allowing something to show Laurel had never seen before. Those nights on the sofa were the first - and, as it turned out, the final - course of intimacy between them. Laurel felt desire for something she knew was, ultimately, bad for her, like a little kid at the window of a candy store. She wanted Ethan - wanted him to want her - but knew, instinctively, he was incapable of the kind of intimacy that went beyond spooning on the sofa. The three-year difference in their ages seemed a vast difference in terms of maturity and the ability to commit. One evening, Laurel had broken down. She sat on the edge of her bed sobbing, trying to tell him about how she felt, the way he made her feel, the terrible ambivalence that lay between the two. Ethan had come over and sat down beside her, his hand gently rubbing her back. She flinched. Didnʼt he realize that the physical touch then, when she was most vulnerable, only made things worse? She knew the scene wasnʼt going to play out like a movie. Thereʼd be no happy ending. “Oh, Laur. You know I donʼt feel that way about you. I mean, look at us. If we were to sleep together, it would ruin everything. Weʼd destroy each other.” He paused, his hand still. “Look around this room. Everything in place, excellent taste, you could be another frigging Martha Stewart. Youʼve seen how I live. My room looks like a ratʼs nest. I slide my underwear off and kick it off my foot, trying to loop the doorknob. I got food in there from last Christmas, for Gods sake. I donʼt even know what it is anymore. You want me to mess up your life like that?” As if it had been a matter of housekeeping. But, Laurel knew he was right. Years later, heʼd call her up and, somewhere in the conversation, tell her she was the only close female friend that he hadnʼt slept with. As if that had made their relationship all the more special, as if it had been a matter of sacrifice on his part, rather than lack of desire. When they were together, the situation was made all the more difficult by the phone calls. Theyʼd have dinner and just as Laurel was stacking the dishes, maybe even before, Ethan would ask if he could use the phone to make a quick call. It was always to some girl, whoever he was seeing at the time. Laurel turned away, biting the hard nut of bitterness, plunging her hands into water as hot as she could stand, overhearing Ethanʼs plans for later in the evening. He knew it made her mad. He could tell by her posture. Bra-less under her T-shirt, sheʼd go all straight and rigid, her back as stiff as an ironing board. But, what could she say about it? When she confronted him, she stood on quicksand. “Come on, Laur. You know I canʼt go to sleep before four a.m. Iʼm going to leave in an hour and let you get your beauty sleep. You want to hear me watching infomercials out here on the sofa? You canʼt imagine that my life just ceases to exist when weʼre not together.” “No, I know that. I just wish you wouldnʼt make the calls here, when youʼre with me.” Sometimes, she had to remind him of basic courtesies, things most people just did without thinking about them. “Why canʼt you make arrangements before you get here?” “Aw, you know itʼs not like that. People come and go. Sometimes, I do call from home, but no one answers. Why are you making such a big deal about this?” And he really didnʼt understand. That blew her away. She began to wipe the counter with a sponge, making huge, concentric soapy circles. “I know, Ethan. Youʼre like a planet in your own little orbit, all these stars happily in your thrall. And what am I? A rock, a cold, dark lump sailing through space that now and then passes through your magnetic field.” Laurel stopped. “I know I donʼt have a life, not really, but I forget that when weʼre hanging out together. The phone calls shatter my illusions.” Ethan laughed. “Youʼre being ridiculous. Very poetic, though. I think you should write a poem about that.” And she had, only it had been too sad and angry and pathetic for her to ever read to anyone. She wrote it after he left for whatever assignation heʼd arranged. Laurel sat down at her desk, drank until she was weepy and too drunk to stand up, and wrote the damn poem. When she looked at it the next day, she saw how the lines were warped across the page, the way they all pointed down. Sheʼd ripped it from her binder and thrown it in the trash, forbidding herself from reading it again. The spring after they met, Laurel got a couple of free tickets to a performance of “Merchant of Venice” at the local community theater. She asked Ethan if he wanted to go, and arranged to meet him after his journalism class at the university. Laurel had taken off from work early that day, and arrived at the quad still wearing her “dress uniform” - a conservative dark skirt, white blouse and heels. She stood in the watery sunshine and scanned the crowd in the square. What she remembered about the experience was the disparity of who she was versus where she was. When she attended night classes, the campus was sparsely populated, and all the students in her classes were either her age or older - most of them married with families. As she looked around now, however, she felt the years peel back. All the students in T-shirts and shorts, wearing Birkenstocks and carrying backpacks, the air above them filled with talk, chatter, laughter and calls of recognition. For the first time since returning to school, Laurel realized she was on the outside looking in. This was a country sheʼd long since passed through. Then, Ethanʼs hand went up from the middle of a crowd, and he called her over. He was wearing his khaki cargo shorts, an old concert T-shirt, and black Doc Martens. He looked about seventeen, and there was no indication that he was actually years older than the group of undergraduates standing in his charmed circle. When Laurel walked up, Ethan introduced her to his friends, then they headed off, arm in arm, back to the parking lot. “So, how was your day, babe?” “Okay. Yours?” “Canʼt complain, Turned out pretty good, actually, because I slept late and missed an anthropology lecture. Sleeping in Steadman Hall, or sleeping at home, doesnʼt make much difference. The old codger that teaches the class is seven shades of boring.” They had reached the parking lot by that time, and Laurel bent forward to unlock the door on her side, Ethan across from her beating a rapid tattoo on the roof. “Oh, get this. Youʼll never guess what Gloria said when she saw you walking across the quad.” Laurel opened her door and looked up. “Whatʼs that?” “She asked me if you were my professor. Like maybe we were going to do a little one-on-one tutoring.” He laughed, shaking his head, the gold stud flashing in his left ear. “And what did you say?” “I said, ʻHell, no! Sheʼs my downtown geisha coming to fetch me for a night of forbidden pleasure.”ʼ “Good one, Ethan,” Laurel said, getting into the car, thinking if she looked old enough to be his professor, then how did his friends see him? Ethan had an innate sense of protective coloration, and for most of the time Laurel had known him, heʼd hung out with people younger than himself. Maybe it kept him young — a good thing, or bad thing, depending on how you looked at it. And, as Laurel remembered it now, that had been the night heʼd called their relationship “high-maintenance.” Theyʼd gone to the play, and right after the final act, Ethan had struck up a conversation with the girl sitting on the other side of him. Laurel waited patiently, moving off a few yards as a signal she was ready to go. By the time theyʼd exchanged phone numbers, Laurel was waiting outside the theater. He found her standing under the marquee, her arms crossed over her breasts. Ethan talked on the ride back to her apartment, but Laurel was silent. When he reached over to give her neck a squeeze, she pulled away, the car veering over the white fog line. “So, whatʼs up?” heʼd asked once they were inside. Laurel went to the fridge and took out a beer. “Whatʼs with the silent treatment?” “You just donʼt get it. Did it ever occur to you that flirting with someone when weʼre out together might not be a good idea, that it might make me feel like dirt?” Ethan scratched his head. “First off, it wasnʼt flirting. I was just talking to the girl. Turns out, weʼd had a class together last semester. She wants to submit some stuff for the new book.” Laurel twisted off the cap of her beer and tossed it into the sink. “You got her phone number, didnʼt you?” “Second of all,” Ethan continued, ignoring her. “I donʼt get why youʼre so damn territorial. Weʼre friends, Laur. You know what you mean to me. I tell everyone I know what a terrific writer you are; I worship the ground you walk on. You know that. Weʼve got something special, something Iʼve never had with a woman in my life before.” “Maybe because youʼve never taken the time to cultivate a relationship before you play musical beds,” Laurel retorted. She took a long pull from the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of a hand. Ethan sat down on a barstool and began drawing intricate, invisible patterns on the Formica. “Do I detect a note of envy?” “You wouldnʼt recognize it if it was there.” Laurel sat down the bottle and leaned forward, both hands on the counter. Her breathing was harsh and ragged. A little voice in the back of her head told her to shut-up, to just leave the thing alone. She hated the fact that her relationship with Ethan often put her just this side of sounding like a nagging fishwife. “Didnʼt it ever occur to you that your behavior might hurt my feelings? We might be friends, Ethan, but I do have feelings.” “Sorry,” he muttered, then gave a sigh and stood up. “I guess youʼre worth it, Laur, but this is definitely one high-maintenance relationship. Hanging out with you is never just hanging out. Itʼs like Iʼm walking on a minefield the whole time.” “And you donʼt like that.” “Who the hell would?” Laurel took another swallow the bottle. “Well, you could think of it this way. Iʼm trying to teach you something about having a genuine relationship with a woman outside of the sack, while youʼre trying to teach me what it means to ʻhang out,ʼ live in the moment, and leave my feelings at the door. Seems to me that weʼre at an impasse.” “Shit, I donʼt know what you want anymore.” “I just want you to be with me when youʼre with me.” “Iʼm here now.” Laurel pushed her beer aside and walked out of the kitchen. “You know, it really doesnʼt matter. In fact, you can leave. Use the phone if you want, and lock the door on your way out.” He didnʼt use the phone, but he left. Laurel finished her beer and opened another. If Ethan never drank in her presence, she was doing enough for both of them. She stood there in the silent apartment and struggled to hold herself together. Because when it came right down to it, sheʼd never had a relationship with a man like the one she had with Ethan, and for all the times she felt pissed off at him, there were good times that made her scared of letting go. Good times: tubing down the river with a six-pack of IBC root beer, dressing up for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Regal (theyʼd both gone as Janet), playing pool one night with leather-chapped Harley hogs at The Rusty Bucket, a weekend trip to Las Vegas where theyʼd thrown bikini panties at Wayne Newton and toured the Liberace Museum. There were lots of good times, times when the space between them became inhabitable, comfortable, real. Ethan was fun, the life of the party, even when the party consisted of only the two of them. Ethan took her back, returned to her a part of her life she thought was gone for good. With him, she was brighter, funnier, more confident. He encouraged her to enter a poetry contest at the university, and she won. He asked her to read her stuff on a local late-night radio show, and she did. He published her poems in his chapbooks, and his friends knew who she was. Ethan brought a lot to her life. Surely, that was enough. But Laurel worried the odd discrepancies like a dog with a knotted rag. Theyʼd make plans to do something, and Ethan would fail to show up. Or theyʼd go out to dinner, and Ethan would drift off to the bank of pay phones by the toilet before dessert arrived. Sheʼd call and get his answering machine for days on end. Or heʼd call up at midnight and want to come over, just as she was getting to bed to get up early for work the next day. She was always afraid of saying “no,” especially when he called in one of his moods. Laurel equated her mood swings to her monthly cycle, but Ethanʼs sudden, inexplicable plunges into depression were frightening and intense. Sometimes, they were prompted by one of his many moves. In the three years they both lived in the same town, Laurel helped Ethan move five times. Always to a rented room near campus, a bleak, square box with sheet rocked walls and matted shag carpeting. Ethan didnʼt have a car at the time, so Laurel would help him pack boxes - cassette tapes, balled up clothing, chapbooks in progress - into her Toyota hatchback and haul him to his next rented room. Always, they were rooms in big, old houses with more than one roommate - college kids and young married couples living together to cut the cost of rent. Besides the boxes, Ethan possessed little else. His bike, his Apple computer, his futon mattress. And whenever he arrived where he was going, all his possessions exploded to fill the space. For months after a particular move, Laurel had been forbidden to enter his room. When she finally did - the door was cracked and Ethan was on the phone in the hallway - sheʼd been shocked. It looked like an animalʼs burrow. There was even an old Mexican serape on the futon curled into a nest, where he slept when he could sleep and he was home. Laurel thought then of the homeless people living under the Gladstone Bridge, their makeshift “homes” of refrigerator boxes and plastic milk crates. When Ethan got off the phone and saw her standing in the doorway of his room, he quickly pulled the door shut. Not ashamed, so much as incapable of explaining why he lived the way he did. But he tried. One night, over a cup of Top Ramen in the kitchen of the house where he was living, Ethan told her about his restlessness, his feelings that no place would ever be home for long. “You know my dad was in the Navy. I moved three times in the fifth grade. Try making friends when youʼre the weird-looking new kid on the block - then imagine it multiplied to frigging infinity. One time, I showed up after school at the wrong house. Swear to God. It was in some boring little suburb of San Diego, and all the houses looked the same. I was actually walking in the kitchen door when I realized the woman in the apron was not my mother. Of course, being the kind-hearted soul she was, she had to walk me home. My asshole father never let me hear the end of it.” And, of course, there were the six years Ethan spent in the Navy. He didnʼt talk much about what he did - Laurel understood it had something to do with fixing radios - but he did talk about the close confines of boot camp. “Picture this: thirty guys with bad breath and sweaty feet in one metal hanger that heated up like a sauna in the summer. You got your bunkie snoring, the guy across the way swearing in his sleep, another guy giving the old trouser snake a workout. All your stuff in a metal footlocker at the end of your bunk. Anything you donʼt want stolen, you lock up. And no privacy - none. You eat, work, sleep and shit with these guys. I used to mouth off to the company commander just so heʼd ask me to give him 50 out in the yard. It was almost like being alone -just me and him counting pushups through gritted teeth. You have no idea, Laur. It was hell, shitsville.” So, no longer in the Navy, Ethan continued to travel light, hauling his stuff from one room to another. Even now, all these years later, his phone number was only as good as the last time theyʼd talked. There was often a stranger at the other end, someone who remembered Ethan, but couldnʼt say where he was living now. His existence was a cipher. Ethan himself the code Laurel never could crack. The last time theyʼd been together, just before Laurel had accepted a teaching job up north and moved away, their conversation had folded over into a frequent topic. Ethan had just broken up with a girl heʼd dated, pretty seriously, for months. In the days since, heʼd wandered around town looking lost and miserable. He wasnʼt sleeping - the late night phone calls told Laurel that much - and heʼd lost some weight. His hair was growing in, though she could still see the soft, white vulnerability of his scalp. They were sitting on the Albert Overpass, on the concrete steps that led down to the river, and every time a car passed, the thin, hunched wings of Ethanʼs shoulders were illuminated by speeding headlights. Laurel wasnʼt dating anyone - she hadnʼt seriously dated a guy in years, telling herself that work and school and writing kept her too busy - but she listened to Ethanʼs stories. That night, like so many others, the stories rolled over each other, unfurled memories of one romantic disappointment after another. “God, Laur,” Ethan finally said, his hands hanging loosely between his knees, “I reek of desperation. Women can smell me coming. All I want is to be loved, is that too much to ask?” He grinned and looked up. He was serious, but biting it like a bullet. “Your problem is youʼre a relationship junkie.” “Yeah? I like that. Expound.” Laurel sat back against the concrete embankment, hiding spray- painted gang graffitti. “Youʼre not happy when youʼre in a relationship. Youʼre not happy when youʼre not. Itʼs like the process of getting there is the whole thing with you, Ethan. In fact, even though youʼre miserable right now, I think you kind of like what youʼre going through. Being alone is the only time you take soundings.” Laurelʼs voice trailed off. She was so capable of giving the lecture, but she was sick of actually doing it. Her own desperation boiled just beneath the surface, and when she lectured, there was no chance of Ethan seeing or sharing it. He was the focus. Sometimes, she thought that if she could just get his life in order, then heʼd have time to help her with hers. Her pomposity made her cringe. It was this way with men who were your friends, she realized. She was a buddy, a confidant, a shoulder to cry on. She was either too close or not close enough for Ethan to see who she really was. And thatʼs the way he broke her heart. “I gotta fix you up with some nookie before you leave,” Ethan said, breaking into her silence, reaching over and wagging her knee with a hand. “Youʼre too fine to hide yourself away.” “Not interested.” “Really?” He wagged her knee again, then withdrew his hand. “That, I find hard to believe. All those years of stroking the cat put you off the real thing for good?” He was teasing, and Laurel swallowed, hard, and smiled. “My time will come. Wait and see. Iʼll be a sixty-year-old virago. Iʼll be hitting my prime while youʼre creeping around the old folks home, lifting the skirts of the nurses with your cane. Good things come to those who wait.” Ethan nodded. “Yeah, right.” “More likely, though, Iʼll fall in love with some guy named Bubba who drives a truck and takes me home to his trailer, a double-wide with fake pine paneling and a ʻDonʼt Blame Me, I Voted for Bushʼ bumper sticker in the window.” They were both laughing now, their howls echo- ing down the embankment. “Tell me how it will be.” “Bubba will come home from driving the truck, crack open an Old Milwaukee, turn on the TV. Iʼll sashay out into the living room - maybe weʼll have an original velvet Elvis on the wall, really fine decor - and Bubba will grab me around the waist and pull me onto his lap, saying, ʻWoman, did you miss me?”ʼ “And youʼll say?” “Iʼll say, ʻOh, yeah, Big Daddy. Give me some sugar.ʼ Then, weʼll put up the sign on the door. You know the one.” “I do. ʻWhen the trailer starts rockinʼ, donʼt come knocking!”ʼ Laurel nodded, taking a deep breath and lifting her head to look at the stars above, the bright spaces where the darkness was punctured, the hope in that. “You see how it is,” she said softly. It was late, or early, and she had to finish packing in the morning. “And youʼll love him?” “Yes,” Laurel said, “but not as much as he loves me.” A week after Laurel returned Ethanʼs phone call, his package arrived. There was the long letter heʼd promised, six-point type printed on both sides, and a copy of his new chapbook, a thick sheaf of folded over photocopies with a red cover. She sat down and read the letter first, then the book. Vintage Ethan, both - witty and profane, brilliant and imbecilic. Two hours later, she put the book aside and went to the kitchen. She opened a bottle of beer, fired up her computer, and sat down before the empty screen. Laurel waited for something to come, some sense to shape the words, some perspective to tie off the loose ends. A letter would pick up in a life Ethan couldnʼt fathom, had no access to. A letter would be polite, tightly composed, well-written, and less than truthful. Laurelʼs fingers hovered over the keyboard, her beer sweated onto a coaster, the light at the windows dimmed. She waited, and when it came, she delivered it into the silent places between Ethan and herself. A true story. It fit perfectly. The Wussy Boy Chronicles

Mr. Lampertʼs mean old dog “Booger” would chase us down the street and snap at our pant legs when we walked past his house on our way to school. Booger wasnʼt very big, but he was really mean, like he had ﬂashbacks of Vietnam or something, and he had this mouth that was dense with sharp little piranha teeth. If he ever caught your pant leg, he would allow himself to be dragged down the street while weʼd scream, “Boogerʼs got me!”

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org The Wussy Boy Chronicles

SNIP SNIP!

My cat Thelonious got neutered the other day. He was chasing his twin sister Aretha around the apartment and trying to get up on her in a very inappropriate manner. He was acting like a drunk frat boy in a sports bar, to be honest, which leads me to think... What would happen if we made it public policy to neuter frat boys? Sports bars would suddenly be ﬁlled with cushy papasan chairs and fattening frat boys looking all solumn and moody, like Thelonious is doing right now. Maybe thereʼd be less ﬁghts. There certainly would be a lot less spraying.

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org The Wussy Boy Chronicles

ZINGER!

My mom and dad used to get this horrible babysitter named Story. My sister and I hated her because she always ate all the raspberry Zingers and made us go to bed hella early. She never let us watch teevee and always talked to her dumb old boyfriend on the phone and ate all our Zingers. And she never once told us a story, either.

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org Blurbs

FEATURED ON “60 MINUTES!”

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

“All bluster and bombast ... call it revenge of the Wussy Boys.” THE WASHINGTON POST

“Humorous reﬂections on growing up as a Wussy Boy.” CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“R. Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the poetry slams.” AUSTIN CHRONICLE

“Some of the most engrossing personal writing Iʼve ever read! Absolutely engrossing!” AMUSING YOURSELF TO DEATH (Santa Barbara)

“Eirik has a wonderful, charming writing style.” ZINE WORLD (San Francisco) The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #4 The Couches Across America Performance Poetry Tour • What is a Wussy Grrl? • Dear Wussy Boy Wussy • Dear Grrl? Wussy What is a • Tour Poetry Performance America Across Couches The FEATURING: a personalzine by r. eirik ott The Wussy Boy Chronicles #4 Copyright 10.1.00, by R. Eirik Ott

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Everything is the fault of R. Eirik Ott, unless otherwise noted.

(And I mean everything, like, even the bad stuff that happens in your life that you canʼt ﬁgure out, like when your girlfriend or boyfriend suddenly becomes a mean asshole or your boss is evil to you for no apparent reason other than to show he has the ability to fuck with you or that guy with the mullet cuts you off in trafﬁc... All of that is the fault of R. Eirik Ott. Remember, in the words of Neil Peart, blame is better to give than receive, so you should blame everything bad that happens in your life on R. Eirik Ott. In fact, if I were you, I would totally sue him.)

(By the way, the cover Wussy for this issue is Timothy Hutton in his military school get-up from “Taps.” This was Timothyʼs follow-up movie after “Ordinary People” and co-starred Sean Pean and Tom Cruise. Very good movie. Very good Wuss.) INTRO

Wow. I finally did it. I finally went on tour. I have been threatening to put all my shit into storage and hit the spoken word highway for a summer tour since ʻ96, but Iʼve always found some way to delay it. Some summers were filled with internships, some with drama, some with laziness. By the time I hit May of 2000, though, I was primed and ready to hit it, man. I had no job, no girlfriend, no school to worry about, nothing holding me back, so I finally got busy and booked myself a tour. The first step is to get to a point where you want to do it, where you can actually picture yourself hitting the road with a bag full of poetry, performing in cafes and coffeehouses and art spaces and bars for gas money. The next step is making sure you have somewhere to go, somewhere to sleep, somewhere to perform that poetry. I had no idea how to do it, you know, book a tour all by myself, so I just sat down at my computer and started e-mailing people. I am a part of this sprawling community of performance poets all over the country, passionate people who have built this network of venues and organizers and couches for people to use while on tour. All I really had to do was log on the Internet and contact people along the route I hoped to take, you know, e-mail the one guy I knew in Phoenix, Arizona, and say, “Hey, can I come by your spot and do a featured reading?” Then Iʼd ask him if he knew anyone in the next college town on down the line. I must have sent out 100 of these kinds of e-mails to people hosting poetry readings and poetry slams and poetry festivals all over the country, and within two weeks I had booked myself a four-month, 70- gig tour. I did it all via e-mail and didnʼt make a single phone call. My job was made easier because I have been an active part of this community of poets for a couple of years and have managed to make a bit of a name for myself. Most of these people are poetry slammers affiliated with the National Poetry Slam, and a lot of them knew who I was because my poetry slam team from SF had won the 1999 National Poetry Slam in Chicago (see Issue #2 for all the sordid details). I think a person new to this scene might find it a bit harder to get gigs without a solid reputation, but for me, it was a lot easier than I couldʼve imagined. (If you want to know more about poetry slamming and the network of people involved in it, surf immediately to: www.poetryslam.com.) Anyway, that was that. On May 17, I began my tour. As I write this intro, I am in a Kinkoʼs in Wichita, Kansas, the town where my parents now live, and my tour ended just about a week ago in Kalama- zoo, MI. Get this — the date is now Sept. 28. Holy shit… I have been on tour since May 17 and now itʼs Sept. 28. My stuff is still in storage in Chico, CA, my little college town, and I am still not home quite yet. When I started this trip, I had no earthly idea how long four months was going to be. Imagine toting your shit from place to place, bus station to bus station, couch to couch, for four months, and imagine that the only way you can afford to eat is by selling enough self-published, Kinkoʼs copied books of poetry to feed yourself and get you to the next gig. What a fucking adventure. So, here it is. The next three issues will be devoted to this trip, which Iʼve dubbed Couches Across America. I was in my truck for the first month and three weeks, which was really cool because I got to bring EVERYTHING I wanted without having to tote it anywhere. I brought my i-Mac computer and it rode shotgun up front, plus I had a bed in the camper so I could sleep along the way. I even brought my kitties Aretha and Thelonious for the first two weeks (Iʼll get to that drama later.) The next section I hopped aboard this big travelling show called the SlamAmerica Bus, which featured a rotating crew of performance poets from around the country. We had a corporate sponsor who shelled out the bucks for a tour bus and a driver, and we performed at 36 gigs in 32 days, just boom boom boom, one after the other. Most people would get on the bus for a few days, maybe a week, then theyʼd be replaced with the next set of poets. All in all, there were close to 100 poets who spent time aboard the bus, and I managed to stay on the bus from the very first gig in Seattle to the second to the last day in Boston, for a grand total of 30 straight days, which was more Bus time than any other person on the whole trip, including the organizer. The SlamAmerica Tour ended at the National Poetry Slam in Providence, R.I., where nearly 400 poets hooped and hollered their way through four days of competition with 56 poetry slam teams from across the country. Man, it was like Woodstock, simply amazing. The finals had about 2,000 people in the audience. I was a member of the Chico Poetry Slam Team, and we came in 12th out of 56 teams. Once Nationals were over, I hit the Greyhound Bus trail, humping my gear from station to station with my AmeriPass in my hand. That Pass allows a person to get on and off the bus anytime and anywhere for two months for $500, and it proved to be the most economical way on a Greyhound is pure torture at times. I hated every minute of it. And here I am in Wichita, chilling in my parentsʼ basement and recuperating from one of the most amazing things Iʼve ever done. Listen: Performance poets are the punks of the new millennium. Serious, man, you can get a van and put your homemade CDs and chapbooks and stickers and t-shirts in the back, and you can hit the road just like a punk band, performing in crowded little dives for gas money enough to get you to the next gig in the next town 500 miles away. I sold over 800 chapbooks on this tour at $5 each. You do the math. When you add that to the $50-$100 I got up front for doing each gig, plus the “pass the hat” gas money I gathered at most shows, you can see that a person can tour and make enough money to not only finance the entire operation but also have enough left over to put in the bank. Itʼs one hell of an exciting time to be alive. Oh, and before I forget, thereʼs an essay in here to start things off that was written by this cool poet goddess I met along the way. Her name is Walidah Imarisha, and she and I had a long talk on the SlamA- merica Bus about the concept of Wussy Grrls. This has been the most popular topic of debate here at Wussy Boy Central, and weʼre still trying to figure it out. Her essay tackles some of the issues, plus there are a few letters in the Dear Wussy Boy section that try as well. Let me know what you think. Issues #4 and #5 are being released at the very same time, since I had too much writing to fit into one issue. They were conjured and assembled with the help of the following drugs: The Beastie Boys; Air; Stereolab; Cat Powers; Beth Orton; Yo La Tengo; Bjork; PJ Harvey; The Get Up Kids; Beth Orton; Morphine; Bauhaus; Ninja Tunes; Magnetic Fields; Nine Inch Nails; Travis; Supreme Beings of Leisure; Groove Armada; Radiohead; Fiona Apple; Tom Waits; Holst; Beth Orton; Everything But The Girl; Carole King; James Brown; Devo; Dar Williams; Aimee Mann; and, most importantly of all, Beth Orton. Issue #6 will be filled with the SlamAmerica tour journal and stuff about the Nationals. It should be out by the end of 2000, and will be packed with all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you know you want. E-mail me for more info at [email protected]. Oh, and one more thing. I know the photos in these next few issues suck. Yeah, I know. But, you can check out the website and see the color versions that look a lot nicer: http://www.wussyboy.org. Peace.

Eirik (aka Big Poppa E) Dear Wussy Boy I am having a Pretty in Pink party this Saturday as the movie is showing on the telly (yes I am so poor and inept that I donʼt even own a VCR). I am so inspired by the Wussy-Boy zines, especially the ones with Duckie on the front, so I am having my Aussie queirdo friends over for a Pink pajama party where the guests have to wear pink clothing and bring pink food to eat. Tonight I went to the local Queer/Punk/Goth club and ﬁnally spoke to a really Kooky-Girl who I have been eyeing off at the local supermarket. She has this weird way of dressing, kind of Annie Hall goes Feral, and she looks just like (get this, get this), PJ Harvey! (Squeak!) I am soooo hoping that something might happen between us, I usually have no luck with the ladies at all, but since reading the Wussy Boy stuff I feel it is my duty on behalf of all the Wussy Boys (whom I sympathise with whole heartedly) to woo this likely lass in the name of True Romance. So wishing you could come, your picture will be displayed on my computer screen for all and sundrey, the Patron Saint of Wussies everywhere. Smooches, Virginia Woolf-Whistle [email protected]

I would LOVE to come to Australia and do a full on Wussy Boy Down Under Tour, and I just might do that once this Couches Across America Tour finally comes to an end in October 2000. Sorry I couldnʼt make it to the ʻPretty in Pinkʼ party. Lord knows Iʼve had a few. Dear Wussy Boy On the night of June 22, 2000, I was siting in cafe Roma coffeehouse in Las Vegas trying to figure out what the rest of the evening would hold. A friend of mine happened to wander into the coffee shop and asked, “Are you here for Big Poppa E?” My reply, “Who the fuck is Big Poppa E?”(sorry) He then went into a 5 minute dissertation about the mythical BPE. So, being a lover of poetry, in all forms, I decided to stay and check it out. I FUCKING loved it. It was awesome. I was absolutely blown away. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire evening. After the poetry night concluded, I went to my house, pulled out my Barnes & Noble journal and wrote this: Tonight I am different. Tonight I am changed. Tonight I was exposed to a different level. A level I previously thought was unattainable. I was moved. I was inspired. After the nuclear bomb that is BIG POPPA E exploded, I have had this insatiable urge to write and express. This man is like me. Itʼs almost like we have talked before. He is definitely one of my favorite poets. WOW! Amazing! BPE, thank you. I am not the type of person to ever run out of words but, right now, the only thing I can say is...thank you. P.S. The chapbook was great. Oddly enough, I bought a chapbook for my girlfriend as well. She was as blown away as I was. But get this, I participated in a poetry reading last night. I decided to read a rant that I wrote two months ago (not thinking that I wrote it during a rocky point in our relationship). I never mentioned her name but she took the whole poem as an attack on her. Which, upon dissection, it was and is about her. She hit me with a barrage of tears, screams and “Fuck youʼs!” Then she said, “Andy, you are just like Big Poppa Eʼs poem, Poetry Widow, you rape our relationship of meaning!” It is just all sorts of fucked up. Getting to my question. Did poetry widow spawn from a similar situation OR was it just an idea for a poem? Later... Andrew Kaempfer [email protected]

Thank you so much for the poem and the props!. As for ʻPoetry Widow,ʼ it wasnʼt really inspired by an actual incident where a girlfriend got all in my face and checked me for abusing the poetic gift. It was actually ME checking my own abuses, me noticing that I was writing these convenient little poems for my then-girlfriend every time we had a ﬁght or a misunderstanding. Eventually, she would narrow her eyes at me every time I gave her a poem inspired by her, as if she were waiting to hear how I had fucked up this time. So, yeah, that whole poem is about me trying to stop what I felt was a disrespect to a wonderful person I loved, yet who was being hurt by the very poetry that was supposed to show how much I loved and respected her. You know what Iʼm saying? We ended up breaking up, but weʼre still the best of friends (thank goodness.) Dear Wussy Boy Hey man, whatʼs going on? I didnʼt write you before, not quite sure why...but I suddenly felt the urge to. I donʼt think I got to tell you HOW MUCH I enjoyed your show at the Magic Beane. If you donʼt know yet, this is Ben, the black kid. Anyway, Iʼm really not sure what prompted me to write this, but I guess I wanted to say a couple of things. Your poetry was great, inspiring. And it was powerful and moving. And funny as well. I published my own chapbook, and a CD too, weʼre selling them (my parents and I) for fundraisers to go to Providence to the National Poetry Slam. Eirik, I just wanted to say, that what youʼre doing is just awesome. Travelling around the country, bringing people your words, a minstrel. Iʼm sure youʼve got other mails to attend to, so Iʼll leave you now. Much thanks, Benjamin Hall [email protected]

This kid was so cool, so instantly cool that I dubbed him ʻSpider- man.ʼ I donʼt know exactly why, but I hope heʼs using it as his sign-up name for poetry readings. I saw him again at the National Poetry Slam, and he looked so happy to be there. I wish more people still had that innocent exhuberance attached to their performance. So many people in the poetry slam community seem to have lost it. Dear Wussy Boy My God, Iʼve been waiting to use the word “Wussy” all day. I saw ya in Atlanta, and Iʼd just like to say that you give Black Wussy Boys like me much courage. Of course, as a Black Wussy poet, I, unlike you, must uplift a whole race with my verse, extolling the virtues of Melanin (Hey, skin cancerʼs low, but the Malt Liquor will get you), and stomping on White folks any chance I get, due to their heritage and lineage (That Iʼm not privy to, but, as a person of African decent, allowed to assume. Hey, we built the White House). So, although I admire you Big Poppa E, I must, at the ﬁrst chance, shit on you. (Only because the cosmic laws of Black Artistry forces me to be political, even though you are a journalist and not a politican, yet. So *in a low whisper* Keep doing whatcha doing Big Poppa, keep hope alive with your Bad Bad Performance Poetry Wussy Loving Self. P.S. Been passing the Wussy Boy Manifesto round to some friends on the lo lo. Big Thumbs up from the Peanut Gallery. Yours Truly... Charles L. Judson [email protected]

My friends and I have wracked out heads to ﬁnd pop culture Wussy Boys who were anything other than white guys, and the only Black Wussy Boys we could come up with after an evening of debating the topic were Carlton from “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and Jordy from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Itʼs good to know there are Wussies out there who are doing their best to spread the word to all Wussies regardless of race, even if itʼs on the “lo lo.” Dear Wussy Boy You never bit it and pulled as hard as you could. Maybe thatʼs a good thing. You never said goodbye to me...and closure is necessary, so I would like to proclaim my undying devotion to your huge-ass boots and funny-fuckinʼ stickers. I have a feeling you donʼt even know my name or my age or my parentsʼ sexual preference or the extent of my feminazi powers. Iʼm sorry I never gave you the Kinder Egg I had. I wanted to warm your heart and your big sad eyes with the delicious two layers of chocolate —one brown, one white— and inside, the tiny pieces of plastic that...if you follow the directions carefully...will bring you endless hours of pleasure. Maybe it would have been a tiny train or a carousel or a horse with a little Indian on it. Iʼm sorry you missed out. I could save it until the Taos Poetry Circus next year, but it will be moldy moldy by then. I think Iʼll just eat it and tell you about it. I thoroughly enjoyed your web page....especially the nudie photo, which I will print and hang on the wall of my dorm room this fall. Ha. Iʼm totally serious. Goodbye, Anna (Lip Ring Grrl) [email protected]

Lord, I wanted to pull on this girlʼs lip ring, believe me. She was working the counter at the Taos Poetry Circus this summer in New Mexico, and I was kinda sorta flirting with her every time I passed her. I kept saying that I was fighting the urge to pull her lip ring, and finally she let me, gently, give it a playful tug. Have mercy... Dear Wussy Boy Hope this is the correct e-mail as I turned the radio off halfway through the address. (Triple J Radio here in Australia.) What I want to know is: 1] Is there a female equivilant to the Wussy Boy? 2] If we are female and donʼt care about ʻsizeʼ — car, job, bank account, house, or anything else that may fall into that category — does that make us the female equivalent? Whatever that may be? 3] Canʼt say Iʼm into poetry but I would imagine thatʼs not a pre- requisite? Isnʼt it more about saying Iʼm not going to be something society says I should be - Iʼm going to be me and happy with that whatever that may be? What if what society tells you to be and what you want to be are one and the same? What if you arenʼt conscious that what you want to be is determined by what society tells you so you think youʼre being you! And if the essential element to being a Wussy Boy is being yourself and saying I donʼt care and Iʼm happy doing what I want (and Iʼm male!) then couldnʼt anyone - if they meet these criteria - be a Wussy Boy? Even your capatilist with his big car and big bank account? I guess it comes down to intent...? You sound like an okay kind of guy. Terri (as in a female) [email protected]

The two most popular questions I get here at Wussy Boy Central are: 1] What would a Wussy Grrl be like?; and 2] Can gay people be Wussies? Good questions, both of them, and Iʼm still trying to figure out the answers to both. Check out what the next guy says about Wussy Grrls, then check out the essay on Sho-Nuff Grrls that begins the journal section. The truth is out there, somewhere, and I may not know what it is, but I can damn sure tell you that the truth about Wussy Grrls isnʼt found in the anorexic pages of a glossy fashion magazine nor is it on the television screen or the movie theatre. Something tells me Wussy Grrls are on college campuses everywhere, kicking some ass feminist stylie and rejecting the patriarchal version of what they should be. Dear Wussy Boy Iʼm finally replying, sorry it has taken so long to do so! I am currently in rehearsal for an amateur production of West Side Story here in Australia and am very busy with that, as well as university etc. etc. Anyway, howʼs your tour going? Successfully I hope? In response to the question posed on a ʻWussy Grrlʼ, I think there is the possibility of this species ʻoccurring in the wild.ʼ But I donʼt know whether would be butch lesbian stereotypes, which already exist outside of mainstream feminine culture, or whether they would instead exist outside of the popular stereotype of the ʻblonde bimbo.ʼ I find it interesting that we immdiately jump to the conclusion that a woman existing outside the typical femine archetype is a butch, lesbian sort of gal. This isnʼt a criticism at all, merely an observation. Personally, I prefer the latter suggestion of a ʻWussy Grrlʼ existing outside the feminine stereotype, that is, a girl with black or bru- nette hair, not afraid to show her intelligence, to TALK about things with someone, engaging the individual, rather than acting in a tradti- tional, male-imposed stereotype. Anyway, I have another question/problem for you. Being a relatively typical Wussy Boy, I am pretty quiet, not prone to showing what little extraverted personality I have. I find then, that if I meet a nice girl, am attacted to her etc. etc. I canʼt show it really, because I am ʻshyʼ as it were. It also sounds, I realise, that I am hiding a little behind this slowly emerging stereotype of the ʻWussy Boyʼ, yet I have no problem expressing myself, if I am comfortable doing so. I am perhaps, afraid of showing ʻmeʼ to the surrounding environment of the typical male character. I live on campus, in a building with a fair few guys, most of whom are excellent specimens of male chauvinism and crudity. I can handle this, I just think I become shouted down, personality wise, in comparison to these guys. My question then becomes, how does the Wussy Boy make himself more noticable, and yet stay true to who HE is.....? I am aware of how inane this question sounds, as well as how ʻadvice columnʼ it sounds, but I think it can lead to interesting issues to discuss anyway. Look forward to your reply at any rate!, Sam. [email protected]

Again, about the Wussy Grrl thing... I still donʼt know what to make of the idea of using the term ʻWussyʼ to describe a grrl, because this society already wants women to assume a lower, quieter, non-ag- gressive stereotype. That is, unless they are overtly sexy, in which case they could be considered ʻwhores.ʼ Or maybe if they are driven and motivated and opinionated, they could be ʻbitches.ʼ Thatʼs just about all our society will let women be: saints, whores and bitches. (Oh, that and mothers, which is a whole different essay.) As I see it, a Wussy Grrl would seek to be none of these things, yet all of these things, seeking to exist outside of patriarchal expectations and pressure to be something easily accepted by men. So, like, grrls who grew up as ʻtom boysʼ could be considered Wussy Grrls. And maybe so could grrls who donʼt give a shit about makeup and big hair and surgically-enhanced breast, grrls who speak their minds and pursue their passions without worrying whether or not some dickheaded guy thinks theyʼre less than feminine because of it. But, I just donʼt know about using the term “Wussy” to describe this kind of grrl. Itʼs offensive to me, offensive in a different way than when used on an effeminate guy. Hell, I donʼt know... Check out Walidahʼs essay on the subject. Oh, and another thing... About being a Wussy Boy in front of people who would beat you down for expressing your Wussiness... Man, youʼve got to choose your battles and make sure you can sleep with yourself at the end of every day. I worked in a print shop filled with these sexist dickheads who always gathered around my desk to tell their offensive jokes about women, figuring that I would appreciate them simply because Iʼve got a penis, too. Well, I had to make a choice: 1] Join in with their joking so that I could fit in; 2] Try to ignore them but say nothing so as to not rock the boat; or 3] Tell them I didnʼt appreciate their shit, even though it would alienate me from the other guys in the office. I ended up telling them to shut the fuck up, and then they proceeded to dog me for being a ʻfag,ʼ as if this show of feminism was all the evidence they needed to brand me gay. Fuck- ers... Anyway, youʼve got to make that choice every day of your life. Allʼs I can say is try to fight the good fight, but donʼt do anything thatʼs going to get your ass kicked. Dear Wussy Boy just wanted to say i had a great time meeting/performing with you on Friday night. love the MANIFESTO! since i live in hollywood, iʼve decided to start promoting you to all my “connections”. i canʼt wait! iʼll sell you to the highest bidder, youʼll be HUGE, then become a sell-out, then decay and ruin...... but then weʼll do a movie about the whole ordeal (or maybe just a vh-1 behind the slam), and then a new generation will want you all over again! sound fun? i think so!!!! thoughts? tips? commissions? let me know!!! xoxo tad...... Four Star Mary..... lead singer...... Wussy Boy, II...... dancer..... romancer... [email protected]

This guy was cool. He was the lead singer of a band that played at one of my gigs, and I was later told that his band is the one featured regularly on the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” television show. Iʼve never seen it, but the lead singer was a pretty cool guy, looking all like Ed Norton in “American History X” and shit, but really cool and not, like, a raging Nazi dickhead guy. No, this guy was a Wussy Boy at heart.

Dear Wussy Boy well, i am banking on this being your email address and not some organizationʼs box which will be read by a group of folks who will find me a boring writer, a freak etc. saw you in alb tonight, read your book tonight. wondered if you would be offended that i read some of it while taking a piss. was embarrassed that an ʻeducatedʼ girl like myself had to look up the word “aphorism” to be sure what it meant. read the poems and missed the vocals, but could at least have a voice reading them in my head, wished for more? pushing buttons perhaps hit a particular place in my heart now in my life. i was stunned with your last reading prior to your encore your words for jennifer the one which is tangled in your heart and makes it hard to breathe. the up and down and up again motion to your readings. The flipflopstomachrush. whereʼs your fish? fiche? vish? fishwich? whereʼs my slip and slide? thinking about reading for the first time during open mike coming up. havenʼt written in a long time, just learning to draw, learning to fly, learning to ask for what i want, learning to be, take risks, fuck and kick ass. peace, caitlin [email protected]

The poem Caitlin is talking about was a poem I wrote for my friend Jen OʼHare, who died in a car crash on September 10, 1999. It was one hell of a hard poem to write, and one that I avoided for a long time. During my tour, I made it a point to read the poem often as a means of keeping Jenʼs name out there, as if just saying her name would somehow keep her memory alive. A lot of people were affected by the poem, and many came up to me and shared their stories of losing important people. I will be printing the poem about Jenʼs death in Issue #5, plus thereʼs a lot of stuff about her in Issues #1 (how we met and dated and stuff) and #3 (how she died and how fucked up it was.) Peace. Dear Wussy Boy I ﬁnished reading your book: So, so good!! I met you in OKC. I was sitting at the table next to your motherʼs, and I was the fellow Ani fan. you make it seem so easy to write poetry. It seems like it just falls off your tongue, like thatʼs how you would recall a story aloud to a friend. I bet that is how you would tell a story. so, do you think you will be coming back through OK sometime? I would love to see you read again. Maybe next time I would be able to join afterwards at the local Dennyʼs. Hereʼs the funny thing I am thinking. You are probably scanning your brain, trying to remember who i was... well maybe not. Good luck to you. I look forward to reading more of your writings. Oh and what do your cats look like? I have two big ol boys of my own, big like 10 and 16 lbs. baccione, rachel mccown [email protected]

My kitties Aretha and Thelonious are about a year and eight months old, but they are really small for their age, maybe even runts, but they have hella attitude, which makes them Wussy Cats. They are littermates and have the same coloring, which is black on their backs and white on their tummies, with pink noses and a triangle of white on their black faces starting with a point at the center of their foreheads and spreading wide once it gets to their chests. Aretha is really sleek and shiny and short-haired, while Theo is kinda bushy. Hereʼs a coupla picture of my kitties:

Aretha, space alien. Thelonious, vengeful devil. Dear Wussy Boy Hi. My names is Todd, and Iʼm Wuss Core. I have lamented and gnashed at my fate but have come to accept it as a central part of myself. Your poems/rants/stories echo with an all-too-familiar ring; I wish I could have expressed those thoughts as well as you have. As it is, my Wuss Core superpower is playing horrifically sad cover-tunes on my guitar and wailing the lyrics with that practiced and soulful angst that is sure to show off my sensitive and vulnerable side. While you have more than accurately described our brethren, I wanted to point out that you forgot some sure-fire “wuss core” identifiers... • Have you ever helped someone move because you hoped it would make them see you as reliable and caring? • Have you said to your self, “This is the last time she ever uses me like this again. I mean, fool me once - shame on me. But Iʼm not gonna fall for this for the sixth time. This is the last straw...” • How many times do you swear youʼre gonna change because you know youʼd be so much happier as a Moron Jock Asshole Fratboy Dickhead and youʼre sick of being lonely, depressed and rejected? • Does the song “Creep” by Radiohead seem to be written for the singular purpose of making you feel like ass? • Do you have more Grrl CDʼs (Ani DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant, kd lang etc.) than your peers ʻcause you canʼt listen to whatever shit they are currently exulting? • Have you ever heard the phrase, “All my boyfriends treat me like shit and make me feel like a loser. Why canʼt I meet a guy like you?” spoken tearfully while resting her head on your shoulder? See ya, [email protected]

You and I are soul mates, pure and simple, ya big Wuss. Say it loud, “I’m a Wuss, and I’m proud!” If you’ve got something to say, there’s a nation of Wussy Boys and Wussy Grrls waiting to read your words and respond. Simply ﬂoat an e-mail to Wussy Boy Headquarters at [email protected]. SHO’ NUFF GRRLS UNITE! by Walidah Imarisha

Yes, I am Walidah, and I will kick your ass!

my name is walidah and i am a shoʼ nuff girl itʼs taken me a long time to admit it... i remember shouting in high school, “no, mom iʼm not a lesbian! iʼm just... hard core. i tried to like barbies and make-up and slumber parties and the backstreet boys but i never got the hang of it! i donʼt know whatʼs wrong with me...”

Big Poppa Eʼs “Wussy Boy Manifesto” is a rallying cry for sensitive boys across the nation who want to reject gender stereotypes and fucked up ideas of masculinity in Amerika, but what about a female counterpart to the Wussy Boy? Aye, therein lies the rub that has vexed poor Poppa Eʼs brain, but thankfully, he stumbled across me on the Slam America Tour, and I was there to solve all his problems. You see, I have always held in my head a vision: a vision of a white tank top wearing, baggy ass dirty jeans sporting, short hair or long but not giving a fuck either way, no make-up, loud mouth, in your face, kick ass Shoʼ Nuff girl. And she, my friends, can be the ally to the Wussy Boy. Why, you might ask, can we not just have a Wussy Grrl, and leave it at that? Life is rarely that simple. If it were, weʼd all be running Microsoft and getting fat and bloated off the oppression and monopo- lization of wealth until a race of superdolphins arose from the shining seas to eradicate us from the face of the earth like roaches in a restaurant kitchen. See, there can be no Wussy Grrl, at least not as an empowering term. For one, the word itself is an insult to women, as Wussy derives from pussy. It is used expressly on men as an attack on their manhood, their machismo bravado. No, no, that just wonʼt do. Secondly, women are already considered wussies. We are seen as weak and helpless and easily pushed around. It wouldnʼt be challenging any gender stereotypes or pre-conceived notions to say Wussy Grrl. In fact, youʼd have all of redneck Amerika nodding their heads in unison. Therefore, I present to you a manifesto for the Shoʼ Nuff girl. Now, I donʼt have all the nuances worked out (but what the fuck, I just got this assignment from Big Poppa like a week ago, and he had a whole year to figure out all this Wussy Boy shit, so I donʼt want to hear it okay?), but the Sho ʻNuff Grrl will regulate on your ass in a second. Sheʼs not all about “Oh excuse me” or “When you have a moment” or “Could I perhaps...” Hell no! Sheʼs up in your face, like, “Listen here, muthafucka!” Now, the Sho ʻNuff Grrl doesnʼt just check folks for the art and beauty of checking itself. She doesnʼt use her verbal pyrotechnics entirely for personal self-interest. Hell naw, if she did, she wouldnʼt be right on and Sho ʻNuff, sheʼd be a bully without a penis, sheʼd be Anthony Michael Hall in “Edward Scissorhands” (I shiver at the thought). No, the Sho ʻNuff Grrl checks folks so that she and other Sho ʻNuff Grrl and Wussy Boys can have their space to be themselves, without having to crush beer cans on their skulls or fill out love surveys in Cosmo. She stands up, like a Wussy Boy, for what is right and good: freedom, justice, the un-Amerikan way and unrequited love, but unlike the Wussy Boy, when she brings the pain, you best to back the fuck up! But while sheʼs definitely considerate of other folksʼ feelings (cʼmon, I want a strong powerful kick ass woman as a model, not a heartless Medusa), her theme song is definitely “Itʼs all about me me me me me me, for a change! Itʼs not about you you you you you, punk!” Because women have been putting other folks ahead of themselves for too long, and the Sho ʻNuff Grrl is here to collect on some unpaid bills. Okay, so I havenʼt quite figured out who the ideal Sho ʻNuff Grrl is yet. Iʼve been mining my brain and scanning movies, desperate for someone. Big Poppa E suggested a couple of kick ass Shoʼ Nuff girls, so let me run them your way: Lili Taylor, the chick from I Shot Andy Warhol; Jeneane Garofolo; Sarah Polley. (Notice, theyʼre all WHITE girls, Big Poppa E! And donʼt you even tell me that Winona Ryder is a Shoʼ Nuff Grrl; sheʼs too damned skinny and... sheʼs just so... Winona Ryder!) For me, I would have to say the original Shoʼ Nuff Grrl would have to be Foxy Brown. Sister had a sweet way about her, you know, but she also kept a gun in her afro. Hell yeah! Anyway, Iʼll keep percolating on the quintessential Sho ʻNuff Grrl poster child, and maybe if I come up with anything, Big Poppa E will let me come back atcha. In the meantime, if you got an idea, mail it in, and we can have a vote on the Sho ʻNuff Grrl of the century.

Iʼm not just pissed enough to give a fuck Iʼm pissed enough to blow something up. Iʼm tired of menʼs perceptions of me identifying all of we and Iʼm about to break out and have my say so get the fuck out of my way! I am a Shoʼ Nuff girl!

Oh my, did I just kick you in the adamʼs apple? Well, maybe you shouldnʼt have been talking so much shit! WUSSY BOY MUSIC REVIEWS The Couches Across America Edition

I couldnʼt have survived four months of travelling cross-country on this never-ending tour without the help of my portable CD player, my big-assed cushy headphones, and my collection of Wuss Core music. As soon as I hit the Greyhound bus, man, Iʼd whip out my headphones and bury my nose in some raggedy zine, putting out much vibe for people to leave me the fuck alone and let me get through my bus ride hell all by myself. Here are some important people in my life during the Couches Across America Tour. (Note: I made two mix tapes of music that I acquired during this tour. They kick so much ass — because I am the mix tape God [seriously, I am!] — and if youʼd like a free copy, just send me a 110-minute tape, and I will make a dub for you. Peace.) Beth Orton I am so amazed by this womanʼs gentle voice. Such an instrument! She mixes acoustic guitar beauty with atmospheric, almost trip-hop beats, and her voice ﬂoats over this tapestry like incense smoke. She is my latest favorite female vocalist, right up there with Jane Siberry and Kate Bush. Her ﬁrst two album, Trailer Park and Central Reservation, are as beautiful as clouds and rain, pure yearning and passion.

Beth Orton wants me so bad... She is so my girlfriend. Bjork Another amazing voice. Bjorkʼs ﬁrst three albums were fucking brilliant, showcasing her deft mix of sonic experimentation and her exuberantly quirky voice. But my new favorite album is her latest, Selmasongs, the soundtrack to the her movie debut Dancer in the Dark. Bjork takes every-day rhythms — trains over tracks, the clank of machinery — and blends them with beats for her songs. Bjork is my girlfriend, too, only Her duet with Radioheadʼs Thom like... Iʼm kinda afraid of her. Donʼt Yorke just slays me, and is well you think that Bjork could totally worth the price of admission. kick a personʼs ass? Oh yes... Fiona Apple Say what you want about the media-driven perceptions of Fiona Apple, but you canʼt deny that her ﬁrst two albums were works of sheer beauty and attitude with kick ass production work by Jon Brion. So she freaks out sometimes and often when sheʼs in the glare of the spotlight, but fuck, man, who wouldnʼt after debuting on the national scene at the tender age of 19? The absolute perfection of her second CD is all the rebuttal this talented Wussy Grrl needs to provide, so fuck the critics!

Okay, Fiona Apple wants me bad, too. She is my girlfriend on the side. Cat Powers I became acquainted with Cat Powers, aka Chan Marshall, around the same time as Beth Orton. The two have a lot in common, mixing trip-hoppy beats with acoustic guitar and soaring vocals, but Cat is more stripped down and urgent. I can picture her on a stage, just her and a guitar, and I can see her effortlessly mesmerizing crowds Chan Marshall digs me and leaves with her simple and passionate messages on my phone all the time. songs. Great rainy midnight on a I usually call her back. bus music, with headphones. Radiohead Before this trip, I always thought of Radiohead as “the band who did Creep.” I mean, I had read a lot of hoopla about how OK Computer was supposed to be heaven-sent, but I was never really into them until I bought The Bends, their stellar second album. Itʼs got such killer songs on it, like Fake Plastic Trees and High and Dry, and it ﬂows from song to song like a proper album should, like they used to back in the day, back when Pink Floyd was alive and well. After I started digging The Bends, I got back into OK Computer with a vengeance. These guys are bewilderingly talented, and use the studio like the instrument it is.

Radiohead are not my girlfriend, but they are Wuss Core. Morphine Two-stringed bass, fat-bottomed sax, and dead-on drumming provide layers of dark wonder for singer Mark Sandman to deliver tales of back alley people and their wee hours dirty work of some inner city night. Such mood, such atmosphere, such a great soundtrack for brooding about dark and twisted things. Staring at the ceiling music. Music designed for 3 a.m.

Richard Ashcroft He sang bittersweet symphonies with Englandʼs The Verve, but now the full-lipped boyo is on his own. His music is still all about yearning, though, and he seems to have beneﬁtted from his new found independence. I feel like such a wounded rebel when I listen to this guyʼs music, like some misunderstood poet kid in The Whoʼs Quadrophenia. Dick is a Wussy with attitude.

Tom Waits Tom Waits just seems to get more and more quirky and fucked up, only fucked up in a twisted carnival barker sort of way, brewing clanking melodies with his diabolical rasp and his junk shop orchestras of chain-saws and broken furniture. His narra- tives are populated with one-eyed sideshow freaks and bleary-eyed drunks with God in their pockets. Tom kicks so much ass. Heʼs a genius. COUCHES ACROSS AMERICA TOUR DIARY MAY 20 (DENVER, CO) Slept in the Kinko’s parking lot

You know, thereʼs something about being on a roadtrip, especially a long one, that makes me want beef jerky. I donʼt know why. I donʼt usually eat the stuff, I mean really, itʼs kinda nasty when you think about it. You donʼt really even have to think too hard about it, either, you just look at the shrivelled up hunks of meat and it is not appetizing at all. Beef jerky is really kinda gross. And yet, every time I step into a Zippy Mart to pay for gas along the roadtrip highway, Iʼll see those plastic containers of beef jerky on the counter and my mouth will start watering, and suddenly those shrivelled hunks of meat seem relevant. I always end up reaching into the container and snagging one or two pieces — studded with dried red peppers — and gnawing on them for the next 200 miles, sipping on a cold Mountain Dew and humming along to the music on my stereo. Music has been hard to come by on this trip, at least using the radio in my truck. I spent most of my time between Chico and Wichita on Highway 50, proclaimed “The Loneliest Road in America,” and its nickname is very well-deserved. Miles and miles of nothing but scrub brush and dirt and that long, narrow vein of pavement that fades into the horizon. You know that phrase “Where Angels Fear To Tread?” Well, Highway 50 is a place where radio signals fear to tread. You can hit “seek” and the radio will search all day long for a viable radio signal, stopping only occasionally to spit This sign does not lie. and hiss in contempt. The FM signals never come up for air, and the only AM signals that exist out there either feature crackly country and western or talk shows. I can safely say that I have had enough of both Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura on this trip, thank you. No more, please. I did get some good radio action one time, though, when I pulled into some tiny little town in northern Utah. The station, which barely came in through a storm of fuzz and crackles, featured some show called The Big Hair Bash. It played the very ﬁnest in cheesy ʼ80s butt rock, featuring hits by Bon Jovi and Skid Row and The Scorpions and AC/DC and Warrant and Winger and Enuff ZʼNuff and Poison and Ratt and all these terrible overly-produced cock rockers from way back in my high school years. That music is the aural equivalent of beef jerky, I think: Itʼs not something I would normally listen to, because, really, itʼs pretty gross to even contemplate, but for roadtrips it just ﬁts perfectly with the vibration of the road and the feel of the wind along the tiny hairs on the back of your neck. There just something amazing and moving about being young and free and driving at 95 miles an hour down some empty desert highway and singing at the top of your lungs, “Shot down in a BLAAAAAZE of GLOREEEEE!” Yup, me and the kitties pulled into this little town in Utah and found a shade tree at the side of the road next to a gas station and took a nap in the back of the truck as we listened to Lita Ford and Ozzy Ozbourne and Def Leppard and Damn Yankees and Night Ranger. It was perfect. When I woke up, we drove another 500 miles and slept in the parking lot of a Kinkoʼs in Denver. You gotta love Kinkoʼs... a nice, clean bathroom and Internet access 24/7. Some- times, thatʼs all a boy needs.

The world is my oyster, and I can go anywhere. Roadtrippin’ by R. Eirik Ott

Thereʼs something magical and healing about a solo roadtrip. Itʼs about forward motion, something about going somewhere and leaving something behind. Itʼs about yearning to blow off your job, quit your girlfriend, sell off all your stuff and pack whatʼs left into the back of your pickup truck. Itʼs about whittling your existence down to its necessary parts - just you, a backpack full of CDs, a Walkman, a single bed in the back - and throwing the map out the window and getting the hell outta Dodge. Itʼs about raising your head from the keyboard attached to a computer on a desk in a cubicle in a work center in a business that makes things for other businesses that sell things to other businesses and realizing that your paragraph in the Great American Novel is due for yet another rewrite. Itʼs about yearning to tattoo the sticky black ink of your tires across the belly of this land, to become another steel corpuscle in the freeway bloodstream and flow into towns youʼve never seen and turning them over to find whatʼs wriggling underneath. Itʼs about blazing down the highway, just you and Patsy Cline, just you and Johnny Cash, just you and Soft Cell and singing at the top of your lungs, “Donʼt touch me please I cannot stand the way you TEASE!” at 95 miles per hour. Itʼs about streaking past marching lines of giant steel robot electrical towers connected with wires by their ears. Itʼs about playing “ski-rack or cop car” and “red splotch of paint or blood” for 600 miles at a time. Itʼs about pulling over recklessly, immediately, across four lanes of traffic to stop under an overpass to scribble a phrase or two that falls in your path like a safe from the sky. Itʼs about leaving everything behind and cleansing yourself in a gritty, sweaty, unwashed catharsis of road dirt and sunburnt forearms and parking in a field infested with crickets in some town somewhere and drifting off to sleep in the same cut-offs and R.E.M. T-shirt youʼve been wearing since diving into the Colorado River in Needles, Calif., three days before. Itʼs about the random encounters in coffee shops and Wal-Marts, in gas stations and at the side of canyon roads. Itʼs about being embraced by serendipity and spirited away from the real deal angst machine of modern day existence. Itʼs about smiling that healing smile that only days and days on the road can bring. I love a good roadtrip, man, that shakes your head and clears out the cobwebs and allows you to think clearly for the first time in months. MAY 21 (WICHITA, KANSAS) Ethan’s Wedding

I went to a wedding today, the first wedding Iʼve ever been to for someone I know and care about. Iʼve been to weddings before, but Iʼve always been, like, the boyfriend of someone who knows the best friend of the bride or something. Iʼve never actually been invited to a wedding as a special guest until now. Heʼs my friend Ethan from Wichita. Sheʼs his gal pal of three years named Erin. I hadnʼt met Erin until last night, the night before the wedding, but she is such a doll. They are hella cute. I met Ethan when I visited Wichita for the first time in the summer of ʼ95. My parents had moved there from Bakersfield, our dirty hometown in Central California, and this was the first time I had ever visited since they had moved there in ʻ91. On the very first day of work I met Ethan, this muscular punker dude rife with tattoos who could freestyle his BMX bike like Xtreme Sports on methamphetamines. Ethan was the only guy in all of Wichita who published his own zine, a ragged lit mag called Jackhammer, and probably was the only person in the whole city who had even heard of zines. We shared a knack for abusing our Kinkoʼs connection to serve our underground publishing empires, and that coupled with our love of spoken word and Henry Rollins bonded us instantly. We started putting together poetry events immediately, and the summer ended up being way more fun that I couldʼve imagined. Weʼve kept in contact ever since, but I hadnʼt seen Ethan since Xmas of ʼ96, so itʼs largely been an e-mail friendship. But heʼs one of the few guy friends I have, and that bond over the summer of ʼ95 was strong enough to keep a friendship between us even though we rarely saw each other and the e-mails became fewer and farther between. When I met him, Ethan was this tattooed disciple of Henry Rollins who screamed his poetry into a microphone clenched in his white- knuckled fist. Soft-spoken and polite when not on a stage, but a raging ball of angst at an open mike. Our poetry events here in Wichita are STILL talked about... seriously. Thereʼs never been anything like them ever since. And there havenʼt been zines in Wichita since those glory days in the summer of ʻ95. The jackasses who run Kinkoʼs probably have no idea theyʼve funded so many underground publications. Or maybe they do know... Walk into any Kinkoʼs, and youʼll notice that all the security cameras are pointed at the co-workers, not the customers. But now... Ethan is no longer this 21-year-old rebel poet working at Kinkoʼs. Heʼs all 26 and married and heʼs moving to Kansas City with his new wife Erin to be a personal trainer at a fitness club. He hasnʼt written poetry in four years, and hasnʼt published a book of stuff in at least that long. His tattoo artist friend Jason, who was the singer for an industrial death band called Black Lung Card and who did all the ink on Ethanʼs body, is also married, and heʼs moving to Memphis with his new wife so she can go to optometry school. Heʼs still the same sweet Ethan, but heʼs all growing up now. Mov- ing into a new phase of his life. And here I am. Still a journalism student. Still doing poetry readings in a small college town. Still having fun and feeling fulfilled and magical, but... I think I am starting to feel a little like... I think I am starting to feel a bit restless. All these things were going through my head at this wedding, which was a really nice affair in this botanical garden with some intimate friends and family. I got to read a poem for Ethan and Erin, a nice little ode to a girl who is the object of a boyʼs love. The bride cried. I felt really weird. I canʼt really explain it. Ethan has changed so much in the five years that I have known him, yet I am pretty much in the exact same place I was when I met him. In fact, I am pretty much in the same place I was 9 years ago. I mean, itʼs a good place to be, really, and I am still having fun, and I am still inspired by the things I do and the people I meet, but I am starting to feel a bit restless. Having your friends get married does this to a person, I suppose. Iʼve always said this: Friends donʼt let friends grow up. Maybe what I shouldʼve said was, “Friends donʼt let friends grow up and leave their youthful passions behind, trading them in on the numbing bullshit that passes for responsible adulthood, things that make publishingchapbooks and doing poetry readings seem childish.” Maybe I just donʼt want to grow up. Maybe thatʼs why I still live in Chico, a little college town where everyone is between the ages of 18-23, where everyone is fresh-faced and wide-eyed and ready to try anything new and different. Maybe thatʼs why I keep dating those very people, those college girls who are eager to talk to the local poetry guy and see what makes him tick. Maybe Iʼm too afraid to meet people closer to my own age. Jesus, what in the world would we talk about? I have no idea what 30- somethings are like. I wouldnʼt have a clue about what to do... Iʼve never had a friend get married, so it made me think of all kinds of things. Like, Ethan and Erin only wanted 50 people to come to keep the whole event small, but it was really hard because their first list of people who absolutely needed to be there had 150 people on it. It just makes me roll my eyes, because I donʼt think that I could think of 15 people who Iʼd want to come to a wedding. Jeez... I am not ready to get married, though, so whatever sadness I felt at the wedding was not really about that. It wasnʼt even really sadness, it was just this sense of... oh hell, I donʼt now. Maybe gentle meloncholy. Thinking of old girlfriends. Wondering what happened to them, where theyʼre at, what theyʼre doing, if they remember me. Have you seen “High Fidelity?” Itʼs about my life. I definitely donʼt want to be a “grown up.” Imagining me in a white house with a picket fence and a dog and a wife and a mini-van and a steady 50-hour-a-week job is something I am so not ready for. I donʼt even know if I want to participate in this American Dream where you work your whole life for someone else, then retire and quietly die surrounded by all the shit youʼve purchased over your lifetime. No way... I aspire to something much more than that. I was sad that Ethan stopped writing, had stopped publishing other peopleʼs stuff, had stopped being inspired to create things. I think that is such a shame. I donʼt think you necessarily need to drop those things once you become an “adult.” I think you absolutely NEED those things in order to maintain your inspiration and creative motivation throughout your life. But, Ethan and Erin looked so happy together, in love in a way Iʼve never known. I feel like Iʼve wasted my time on bright-eyed college girls, doing my damndest to ignore the white hairs in my goatee. Listen: A man asked a Hopi Indian why so many of his songs were about rain. The Hopi man said he sings about rain because it is a rare thing in his culture. The Hopi man then asked if thatʼs why Ameri- cans sings so much about love. Ethan and Erin, the happy newlyweds. Note: Why does Ethan look like he has no teeth? MAY 23 (TULSA, OK) Club One

I am in a Kinkoʼs somewhere in the middle of Tulsa, plugged into my trusty i-Mac and listening to the soundtrack to “Next Stop Won- derland,” all this wonderful samba music from Brazil. My steel-toed boots are kicked off, I have a Pepsi at my elbow, and my cell phone is recharging as I type this. (316-253-6187... call anytime.) I love Kinkoʼs. It is my home away from home on this trip. It almost makes me feel a tad bit guilty when I print 50 copies of my chapbook and only pay for 5. I left Wichita on Tuesday armed with 50 free copies of my chapbook (courtesy of a friend of mine at the local Kinkoʼs), and I headed for Tulsa with every stitch of clothing I could carry, plus my kitties Aretha and Thelonious and all their stuff (scratching post, waterer, feeder, toys, leashes, harnesses, etc.) I was only 15 minutes into it when I realized that travelling with my kitties through record-breaking heat in Oklahoma (the hottest May 23 on record) was probably not a very good idea, especially since my air-conditioning hadnʼt been charged with freon in about four years. My poor kitties... even with the windows down and the moon roof cracked and the side vents wide-open, they were little pissed off matts of fur, panting like lions in Africa on the Discovery Channel and glaring at me like, “Fuck you! Fuck you! You suck! You are a bad cat daddy! Donʼt touch me...” By the time I hit Tulsa, I knew this wasnʼt going to be fun for them at all. They love the road, my kitties, and they are perfectly suited for long journeys in my truck — weʼve been roadtripping since they were 8 weeks old — but this heat thing was really getting to them. I kept thinking about this e-mail my poetry friend Phil West in Austin, TX, sent me saying that I was a brave man for taking my kitties on this trip. Well, I started feeling more like a stupid, short-sighted man for putting my kitties through this awful sticky heat, so I made the call... Yup, I called my mom in Wichita and asked her to drive the 3 hours to OKC for Wednesdayʼs show to pick up my kitties for me. (sigh) But, that didnʼt happen until Wednesday night in OKC. On Tues- day, Aretha and Thelonious were still with me and were hella pissed off as we pulled into the parking lot for the Tulsa venue, a place called Club One. I was extremely skeptical at first. The venue is actually the clubhouse of an apartment complex, so I was really shaking my head and wondering what the hell this show was going to be like. The cats were rapid-fire meowing like car alarms in an earthquake, and I had no place to stash them while I did the show except in the hot-assed truck, then I meet the venue host Bill Z. and he looks a little like Michael Bolton on acid. Iʼm thinking, “Great, just great. Iʼm going to be kicking it next to some soda machine in the apartment complex clubhouse and performing for four of this Michael Bolton guyʼs friends. Great.” But then I actually talked to Bill Z. and he ended up being a really mellow cat with a passion for poetry, and he introduced me to his helper, a great person named Susan who has acted as a motivator for the Tulsa scene for quite some time. They were great, and Susan offered to put up my kitties in her air-conditioned house while I performed and ended up letting them sleep there the whole night. The venue wasnʼt at all what I thought it would be; instead, it was a proper bar with a stage and lighting and a p.a. and a passle of booze hounds clicking quarters into the classic rock jukebox and hitting cue balls into corner pockets with Marlboro Reds dangling from their lips. Tight pulse jeans. Feathered hair. Blue eye-liner. Gold jewelry. Drawls. Foreigner singing “Standing in the rain, in a heavy downpour, couldnʼt get a ticket, it was a sold-out show...” Awww... just like back home in Bakersfield. The place got packed with folks, really nice folks with a lot of enthusiasm, and the show was tight and well-received. This was my first chance to wade through two 20-minute sets and check the flow of each piece into the other. I decided to hit them with the hard stuff first, bar style, with lots of yelling and screaming and ranting and cussing the noisy bar crowd into submission and getting even the most ornery anti-poet hoisting his longneck to the poetry. In situations like this, with folks in the back of the bar actively not listening, stand- up comedy type pieces work best, and things with You! Turn on the damned air conditioner! lots of sex and drugs and rock and roll references. Lots of fun pop culture references. It seemed to work like a charm, and the barflies even kicked it with us poets for the quieter second half where I got to show off my more poetic side. Great folks there. The Tulsa scene had just put together its very first slam team, so they eagerly busted out their best for the visiting poet on the road. I especially liked this one dude stage-named Luke Warmwater, a Lakota with a German last name and a helluva good sense of humor, especially after a six-pack of Bud. He did this one piece that cracked me up about his uncle ordering a Pizza Hut pie topped with extra cheese and “little white people.” When the stunned white counter kid balked, they settled for Italian sausage. Luke was cracking jokes all night, shouting “Hoka Hey” at every poetic high point. (“Hoka Hey,” I was told, means “It is a good day to die!”) He told the audience that one of his favorite poets in the national slam scene was this guy from Albuquerque named “Danny Sanchez” who was the only Mexican dude he had ever met with dreadlocks. He also mentioned that Danny kinda looked like a Klingon warrior... I have no doubt who he meant. (Danny Solis is a poet from Albuquerque, NM, who is a big shot in the national poetry slam scene. Iʼll tell you all kinds of stuff about him later. For now, just know that he is well-known for looking like a Klingon warrior). I ended up kicking it with some of the poetry folks after the show, eating greasy spoon food in some dive named Kellyʼs until 4 a.m. One of the folks was Nancy Harris, who had just toured through the South with a big fat crush of mine from L.A. named Deborah Edler Brown. We name-checked all our favorite poetry folks as we choked down burnt hash browns and runny eggs and bitter orange juice with ice. Afterwards, she let me kick it in her spare bedroom, the very same bedroom that Deborah Elder Brown slept in when they were And the crowd goes wild! in Tulsa together. (yes!) Deborah is a goddess, and I have this weird crush on her. I mean, Iʼm a crush junkie, but something about Deborah is different. Sheʼs older than most of the people I know in the poetry slam community, about 36 or 38, I think, and sheʼs kinda dorky, but in a sweet way. I donʼt know, maybe itʼs because talking to her is unlike talking to the people I usually find myself talking to, these wide-eyed college kids, mostly girls, who are full of exuberance but lack life experience. Maybe the thing I like about Deborah is the fact that sheʼs still cool and still does things that sheʼs passionate about, yet sheʼs been able to mature and grow up along the way. Maybe itʼs because cute dorky poetry girls who freelance for Time Magazine rock my world. I donʼt know... Anyway, the crew at the greasy spoon Tulsa diner talked a lot about the drama within their scene, drama that threatened to tear their scene apart. I have such little interest in shit like that, all the talk of psycho-drama and maneuvering to control the local scene, people shit-talking and back-stabbing their way into a control position so they can say they “run” the local scene. Iʼve seen that kinda shit in my college town of Chico and have unfortunately been a participant at times, but now that shit bores me. I didnʼt want to even know about it, but I politely listened and nodded my head and said, “Mmmm...” The next day I drove to the nearest service station, had my A/C recharged, and made my way to OKC for my next gig, basking in the chill wind belching through my vents. The kitties liked that much better than melting into carpet.

The gang at the greasiest of greasy spoons. MAY 24 (OKLAHOMA CITY, OK) Galileo’s Bar and Grill

Oklahoma has some mighty big weather. Thereʼs a saying here: “If you donʼt like the weather, just wait a few minutes and itʼll change.” Itʼs so true; since Iʼve been here, itʼs been hot and muggy and overcast during the day and windy and rainy and lightening spiked under cover of night. Someone even told me that it was “tornado weather,” this coming from someone who survived the only F6 tornado on record. The tornado scale only goes to F5, as anyone whoʼs seen “Twister” can tell you, with an F1 being a tame dust devil knocking over trash cans and an F5 being Satanʼs Tongue come to lap up everything it its path. The big olʼ twister at the end of the movie was an F5, the one that sucked up cows and semi-trucks. The tornado that ripped through OKC a few years ago was so big they extended the scale. Thankfully, I havenʼt seen any funnel clouds forming yet. I have to say that I was completely surprised by Oklahoma City. I donʼt know what I was expecting, but this ainʼt it. My relatives come from Oklahoma; they all migrated to southern California during the Dust Bowl and lived in tents at the outskirts of towns where they picked fruit for pennies a pound. I kinda had that image in my mind when thinking about Oklahoma, like it was all these toothless methamphetamine cousins of mine living in trailer parks and spitting words like “nigger” and “pinko commie faggot” and reading dog-eared copies of the “Turner Diaries.” Iʼm sure there are some of those people here — theyʼre everywhere, after all, even in San Francisco — but the people Iʼve met here are so cool that I am actually sad to leave. Really, I am making plans and changing itineraries just so I can come back and hang out for a couple more days before I leave this area. I stayed with several people while in OKC, surfing from couch to couch for a few days and spending time with these amazing new people as they gave me the grand tour of their lives. One of the best things about hanging out in someoneʼs apartment, especially someone you know absolutely nothing about, is looking through their CDs and books when their not home. I mean, I donʼt rum- mage through peopleʼs stuff, you know, opening and closing medicine cabinets and digging through desk drawers, but I do comb through their collection of music and books to gain insight into who they are. I know itʼs not a good thing to judge someone based on their consumer purchases, and I rant about it all the time, but sometimes I canʼt help it. In the movie High Fidelity, John Cusack looks into the camera and says something about, “Itʼs not what youʼre like thatʼs important, itʼs what you like.” He means that you can find out more about a person by analyzing their musical and cinematic tastes than you can by having a long conversation with them. Or, at least, you can use their likes and dislikes as some kind of cultural shorthand to figure them out and pidgeonhole them faster than by sharing a conversation. I donʼt like this kind of thing, but I have to admit that I do if often enough. I mean, which one of these people would you rather hang out with and have a deep conversation with over coffee: PERSON ONE — Favorite movies are Die Harder, Barb Wire (Starring Pamela Anderson Lee), Rambo 3, Police Academy 4, and Howard Sternʼs Private Parts; favorite musical artists are Garth Brooks, Winger, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard and AC/DC. PERSON TWO — Favorite movies are Rushmore, Resevoir Dogs, Slacker, Run Lola Run, Go, and American Beauty. Favorite musical artists are Radiohead, Fiona Apple, XTC, Tori Amos, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Kate Bush. I mean, come on. If you were to place a personal ad in the newspaper, you could save so much time and explanation about who you are as a person by simply mentioning that your favorite bands in high school were U2 and The Police, but then you moved on to Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, but now youʼve ended up getting hooked on Roni Size and LTJ Bukem. Anyway, probing into new peopleʼs pop culture indentity and coming up with snide little judgements about them is a guilty addiction of mine, as much as I canʼt stand when people do it to me. I was staying on the couch of this one girl named Angel, and I woke up to find that she had gone to work, so I rummaged through her boyfriendʼs CDs. Lots of Pink Floyd, only not the cool stuff from early Floyd with Roger Waters, no albums like Obscured by Clouds or More, not even a copy of Dark Side of the Moon, no, dude had only the post-Waters period stuff where David Gilmour pretended he was still in Pink Floyd but was actually just making more solo albums with the other two guys from old Floyd who couldnʼt get jobs at the local laundromat. Yeah, I have to admit that I clucked my tongue at the guyʼs collection, and smacked my lips derisively at his John Cougar Melloncamp CDs and his tasty post-Rumors selection of Fleetwood Mac and his lame filing system that made no sense at all. Bleck! Something about this touring thing that I hadnʼt expected... Itʼs a bit more emotionally draining than I thought it would be. Itʼs like youʼre given this opportunity to meet really cool people, but you can never really experience them in anything other than small bits and pieces. Not enough to actually get to know them and hang out with them and do things with them and become life-long friends... Just single-serving sizes, like Ed Norton says in “Fight Club.” Then itʼs on to the next town and the next group of cool people, all summer long, combing through CD collections and bookshelves hoping to catch some glimpse into each of these peopleʼs lives. I want to have all these cool people in my life after the tour is over, as if I can call any one of them on the phone and say, “Hey, letʼs go rent a movie tonight and pop some popcorn, eh?” Only I canʼt since all these people are scattered from one end of the country to the other. I guess the real task will be keeping in touch with all these kick-ass people once I leave. Great people in OKC, all of them. The gig was PACKED, with every seat taken, every table filled, every bit of wall space covered by a standing person craning their neck to get a good view. The local daily paper had done a really big article about the show, so a lot of new people mingled with the regulars and filled the sign up list with new blood. (You can read the article online at my website if you want. Just go to the “Blurbs” section.) Great audience, suprisingly diverse, really vocal and exuberant and ready to give it up at the top of their lungs, plus the room stayed packed throughout most of the long show, which was easily 3 or 4 hours long (I was the opening act for the slam.) Afterwards, about 20 of us made our way to the nearest Dennyʼs and took over, making it our space, and before you knew it a spontaneous poetry reading was being held in the corner at 2 a.m. while bleary-eyed This is about how much chance I have of voting diners swabbed Republican this year. Iʼm all about Ralph Nader! their over-easies with soggy toast. Lots of conversations were had, little pockets of flittering hands conducting late night stories. This one little punker chick with a shaved head and a multi-colored fringe at the front of her head ska-girl stylie was all about taking me home and fucking me, going so far as to actually say it, you know, “I want to take you home and fuck you. Wanna come?” Iʼm all like... uhm... Girlfriend had this really needy feel about her, and she seemed wide-eyed and desperate for attention. I politely declined, and she got all pissed off and called me names and proceeded to e-mail shitty poetry about me to all of her friends. Wow... poets with groupies. What a concept. The next night after the show, I kicked it at the Red Cup Cafe with these cool kids named Jessie and Lydia. I was hella impressed with Lydia... She is this amazingly creative person who paints and writes and publishes her work in little chapbooks. The three of us drank soup and coffee and French sodas, then headed to a small college town called Norman for a book opening for Jesseʼs boyfriend, a cat who slams as The Lord of the Vibes. After that we kicked it at Lydiaʼs place, ate Pizza Hut pies and orange juice, read poetry and massaged each otherʼs feet in a circle with lavender oil and hemp cream as candles burned and Portishead filled the atmosphere, sat on the porch at 4 a.m. and watched the lightening bounce off a million swollen drops of rain the size of fists. This is why Iʼm on tour. The electric thrill I get when kicking ass on a stage in front of an audience that hangs on every word is amazing, but getting the chance to spend time with folks like Jessie and Lydia and being allowed to share their space for even a short time is the real experience that counts. I will visit OKC again very soon.

The crowd goes wild! Note: Luke Warmwater is the dude in the front row on the left, just in front of the tattooed guy yelling. MAY 27 (TULSA, OK) The Delaware Playhouse

Serendipity — n., the gift of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for. Serendipity has always been one of my favorite words. It looks cool, is fun to say, plus has a profound meaning that excites me. A major part of this trip across America is embracing the spirit of serendipity and allowing it to carry me where I need to be rather than just where I think I ought to be. What a giddy concept. Case in point. I had a gig scheduled for Tulsa with a different person than who organized the first Tulsa reading I did. This one was to be at a funky performance space called the Delaware Playhouse, opening up for a local band named Degage (say Day-GAH-Jhay, like itʼs French). I wasnʼt quite sure how I felt about being Special Guest for a local band, especially one that plays funky white-guy party music, but I went into the gig ready for anything. Including the magician who was also part of the show. Yup, also opening for Degage were Dudley the Magician and his lovely assistants Gretchen and Beatrice of the Damned. Poor Dudley... He was so... well, he tried hard, you know, doing that cutting a lady in half thing and all... But, the poor tubby bastard didnʼt move nearly as fast as he needed to cover his “magic,” so he was kinda sad. Like, there was this trick where he “locked” one of his assistants into a box with handcuffs, then he stood on top of the box and raised a gold lame curtain and SUDDENLY when the curtain came down it was his ASSISTANT and not him standing on the box! Wow! In Vegas, the magician raises the curtain and INSTANTLY pulls it back down to reveal the assistant, so itʼs like BOOM heʼs gone and sheʼs there. Pretty impressive. But poor Dudley... He raised the curtain and... well, we waited while his tubby ass got down off the box and let his assistant get up on the box and then BOOM, okay, wow, thereʼs his lovely Goth assistant Beatrice of the Damned. Then the two assistants lowered the curtain and kinda stood there smiling, waiting, I guess, for some indication from Dudley that he was in the box with the cuffs on. Again, when done instantly Vegas style, this is really impressive, but poor Dudley... his fat ass took about 30 seconds to get ready, which is a LONG time while your lovely Goth assistants are standing there smiling really hard and just... standing there, waiting for your punk ass to hurry up and get in the cuffs, doing that arm thing that the girls on Price is Right do when presenting A BRAND NEW CAR!!!... Finally, Dudley showed his head, and we all cheered ourselves hoarse because he had the sweat saddle-bags chilling on his billowy ruffled blue tux proving he had been going as fast as he could. Hey, man, what more can you ask? I played the host for Dudley and his Death Rock Princesses, then busted out two sets of poetry for the crowd. They were into it, gave up the applause, yelled and screamed in all the right places, then bought books and donated gas money to the cause of Big Poppa E. Nice gig. But then the scene drama started again, with two sets of people who were vying for top dog status in the Tulsa scene trying to get me to stay the night with them, as if whoever was allowed to host the visiting poet would be given more of a boost in the eyes of the local scene and get that much closer to being the main mover and shaker. Oh God, it was dumb. One of the people took me over to the side and told me all kinds of filthy awful things about the other group of organizers, who she asserted were only pretenders to the throne of Tulsa poetry. Then I got dragged over to another corner and given the other side of the story, complete with claims of mental illness raging in the mind of the other person and various crimes against humanity that they had certainly been party to. I mean, there couldnʼt be more than 35 poetry people in Tulsa, and these people were doing everything they could to win the right to guide those few people to the promised land of their poetic devising. Ugh, it was enough to make me sick. I didnʼt want something as simple as picking a couch to sleep on to have so much political baggage attached. Then, Serendipity hit in the form of two locals who came up to me and said they were putting me up for the night in their spare bedroom, but first, they said, they were taking me to the coolest coffeehouse in all of Tulsa, The Gypsy, which, they pointed out, was the ONLY coffeehouse in all of Tulsa. And away Checking the old package in Tulsa. we went, leaving the factions to argue over whoʼs fault it was I left so quickly. We get to the downtown Tulsa area and hit the coffeehouse parking lot and we walk in to find the place PACKED with kids, just PACKED from wall to wall with all the tattooed Goths and pierced Alterna-kids and Ambercrombie & Fitch clad college kids and high school kids and poets and artists and musicians in all of Tulsa, like, EVERYONE who was ANYONE was in this coffeehouse at the same time, filling every chair, table, and bit of wall space. There were three separate sections: one with a teevee and a video game crowd playing some kid of Evil Dead thing; another with a conversation circle in mid-yawp; and still another with an acoustic guitar and a mandolin providing grooves for the whirls of smoke and incense. I took one look and stopped in my tracks, thought, “My people!” then ran back to the car to get my chapbooks and stickers and camera because I couldnʼt pass up a chance to rock the house with some spontaneous poetry. I came back and just went from person to person in the coffeehouse, handing out stickers and telling them “the show” would start in five minutes. Then I jumped up on a table and introduced myself and busted out with a 25-minute set of performance poetry. And they DUG it, brothers and sisters, they were so into it, just yelling and screaming and digging the groove. It was so righteous, this sudden display of energy, and when I finished I sold every single book I brought with me, plus gathered about $100 in gas money donations. Without a mike in a BIG smoky room, I shouted myself hoarse, but it was all good, and then I was spirited away from the coffeehouse by a small clot of Goths who demanded I see The Center of the Universe, which, apparently, was just down the street in downtown Tulsa. The Center of the Universe is this circle of cement plant- ers in the middle of this circle of skyscrapers in the business district of Tulsa, marked by a brick circle on the ground, and Serendipity is on the left, in front, yelling. Seattle, WA Couches Across America

Portland, OR

Chico, CA

San Francisco, CA Oakland, CA San Jose, CA

Salinas, CA Denver, CO Big Sur, CA

W ichita, KS Las Vegas, NV Taos, NM

Santa Fe, NM Los Angeles, CA Albuquerque, NM San Diego, CA Phoenix, AZ Oklahoma City, OK Leg One - My Truck ʻRoxanneʼ Dallas, TX 1] May 17 (Chico, CA) 2] May 20 (Denver, CO) 3] May 21 (Wichita, KS) 4] May 23 (Tulsa, OK) Leg Two - SlamAmerica Bus 5] May 24 (OKC, OK) Austin, TX 6] May 27 (Tulsa, OK) 1] July 9 (Seattle, WA) 7] May 28 (Springﬁeld, MO) 2] July 10 (Portland, OR) 8] May 30 (San Antonio, TX) 3] July 11 (Chico, CA) 9] June 1 (Austin, TX) 4] July 12 (SF + Oakland, CA) San Antonio, TX 10] June 2 (Dallas, TX) 5] July 13 (Salinas, CA) 11] June 3 (Texarkana, AR) 6] July 14 (San Jose, CA) 22] Aug 1 (Detroit, MI) 12] June 4 (Joplin, MO) 7] July 15-16 (Big Sur, CA) 23] Aug 2 (Cleveland, OH) 13] June 5-7 (OKC, OK) 8] July 16 (Hollywood, CA) 24] Aug 3 (Washington, D.C.) 14] June 9 (Phoenix, AZ) 9] July 17 (Tempe, AZ) 25] Aug 4 (Baltimore, MD) 15] June 10 (Albuquerque, NM) 10] July 18 (Santa Fe, NM) 26] Aug 5 (New York City, NY) 16] June 12-16 (Taos, NM) 11] July 20 (OKC, OK) 27] Aug 6 (Worcester, MA) 17] June 18 (San Francisco, CA) 12] July 21 (Dallas, TX) 28] Aug 6 (Boston, MA) 18] June 19 (Los Angeles, CA) 13] July 22 (Austin, TX) 19] June 22-23 (Las Vegas, NV) 14] July 23 (New Orleans, LA) 20] June 24-25 (San Diego, CA) 15] July 24 (Americus, GA) 21] June 26 (Santa Ana, CA) 16] July 25 (Atlanta, GA) 22] June 27 (Los Feliz, CA) 17] July 26 (Winston-Salem, NC) 23] June 28 (Costa Mesa, CA) 18] July 27 (Knoxville, KY) 24] June 29 (L.A., CA) 19] July 28 (St. Louis, MO) 25] June 30 (Redding, CA) 20] July 29-30 (Chicago, IL) 26] July 4-8 (Seattle, WA) 21] July 31 (Ann Arbor, MI) Couches Across America

Portland, ME

Burlington, VT

Worcester, MA

Boston, MA Danbury, CT

Hyannis, MA Providence, RI

Kalamazoo, MI Ann Arbor, MI Cleveland, OH New York City, NY Chicago, IL

Detroit, MI Bridgeton, NJ

Baltimore, MD Washington, D.C.

St. Louis, MO

Wichita, KS Joplin, MO Springﬁeld, MO Knoxville, TN Winston-Salem, NC

Tulsa, OK

Atlanta, GA

Texarkana, AR

Dallas, TX Americus, GA

Austin, TX

New Orleans, LA

Leg Three - Greyhound AmeriPass

1] Aug 9-14 (Providence, R.I.) 2] Aug 16 (New York City, NY) 3] Aug 17 (Hyannis, MA) 4] Aug 18-20 (New York, NY) 5] Aug 21-23 (Boston, MA) 6] Aug 24-27 (Washington, D.C.) 7] Aug 28-29 (New York City, NY) 8] Aug 30-31 (Danbury, CT) 9] Sept 1-3 (Burlington, VT) 10] Sept 4-6 (Portland, ME) P.S. Iʼm in Portland, ME, as I make this map, in a 11] Sept 9 (Bridgeton, NJ) very cold Kinkoʼs listening to James Brown. Peace. 11] Sept 10-13 (Washington, DC) 12] Sept 14-15 (Ann Arbor, MI) 13] Sept 16-18 (Chicago, IL) 14] Sept 19 (Kalamazoo, MI) if you stand in the middle of the circle and speak, you get this really wierd echo effect right in your ears as you talk. I was digging on it hard core and found myself beat boxing as the Goths did their best bounce to the beat, these kids in Cure shirts and Christian Death shirts with their hands in the air like they was true playahs, and it was so cool to be there, in a place I had no chance whatsoever to be in had I not been scooped up at the Delaware Playhouse by the two locals. I wish I could remember their names... I have such a bad memory, but they were so cool, these locals, a husband and wife team who had opened an alternative theatre space in Tulsa to provide original works for the local scene. Of course, they were struggling with their non-profit, (it wouldnʼt be alternative theatre is they didnʼt have massive ﬁnan- cial difﬁculties, you know, and who wants to go to an alternative theatre that isnʼt struggling?), but they had so much passion for what they were called to do that they did so without regret. They totally opened up their house to me, let me sleep in their spare bedroom and pet their ornery cat and check my e-mail on their computer, even bought me breakfast the next morning... Great folks, these bringers of serendipity. Great folks...

The crowd at the Gypsy goes wild! MAY 28 (SPRINGFIELD, MO) The Magic Bean

A lot of poetry slammers use stage names. Itʼs probably a reflec- tion of hip-hopʼs influence on the form, but I think itʼs also sometimes a necessary distancing device between the audience and the poet. Like, well, take me for instance. Reagardless of what it may seem on stage, I really am pretty damned shy and itʼs hard to get in the right frame of mind to get up on a stage and work the crowd, you know, itʼs a big responsibility for one small person to take on. And if your stuff doesnʼt work the way you want it to, the way you need it to in order to gather the crowdʼs energy and echo it back to them, well... for a shy person who wants desperately to be liked and accepted, a silent audience at a critical point in a poem can just slay you... I think thatʼs why I started doing Big Poppa E, to have sort of separation between who I am and what I do on stage. I canʼt even remember how it started, but someone yelled “Big Poppa E” at me once time when I hit a stage in SF, and the crowd all laughed and applauded. I thought it was cool, and itʼs fun to say, especially when referring to a little white kid, so I kinda picked it up. Now, itʼs kinda like Iʼve invented this cartoon character who is 10-foot tall and bullet-proof and ready to stare any audience in the eye no matter how unruly or disinterested it may be and bust a move on their punk asses with a molten microphone spouting flames and spitting raw chunks of... well, you know. Kicking it Big Poppa E stylie. Itʼs hard to do that shit, and I canʼt always get that groove, and if the shit that ALWAYS works suddenly DOESNʼT work, well... Itʼs good to be Big Poppa E and keep on keeping on rather than slinking away in mid-poem and driving away before anyone can stop you. My gig in Springfield, MO, ended up being a good one, even a pretty damned great one, but it started out kinda rocky. It was in a small coffeehouse named The Magic Bean in some kind of strip mall thing across the street from the university. Show time was 8 p.m., but by 8:45 there were still only about 20 people in the audience. I wanted to wait longer before going on, realizing that International Poetʼs Time dictates that all shows begin at least an hour after they are supposed to, but the host E-Go was like, “Dude, get this shit going!” So, I hit the stage, and gave it all I could, and man... my shit fell flat. Just hovered for a moment, then fell to the floor with a thud. You know where you come to that spot in the poem that ALWAYS slays them, right, that point where you always have to pause because the audience is applauding so loudly for it, the point where you breath deeply of the audienceʼs energy and prepare to shoot it back at the them ten- fold? Well, that didnʼt happen at all... I hit the first big line that usually slays the audience, but was met with crickets rather than applause. Just nothing, man, no response at all, and me standing up there with nothing but my dick in my hand. And Iʼm not even done with the first poem yet, and Iʼm already thinking in my head that Iʼm going to cut my two 20-minute sets down into one 15 minute set just so I can slink out of there early and mope in the parking lot. The applause at the end of the poem was mediocre at best, hardly the roar of approval I need to keep going all night long. But I kept it up, kept going through the silence, kept up my Big Poppa E voice and puffed out my chest and kept ranting and raving and doing my thang. Once I finished, I thanked the audience and we went into a break before the slam that was scheduled. I was asked by E-Go, the host, to MC the slam, but I was wanted to leave. I felt like I had sucked lemons. But then, a line of people formed and folks were pulling out money for chapbooks and getting ready to donate gas money. I was like, “What? I thought yʼall hated my shit, whatʼs going on?” But they were giving it up and saying they dug it, saying they hadnʼt seen something like that in a long time, and they bought every book I brought with me. So weird. I guess some audiences are just that way, you know, they have different personalities than others. This one seemed loathe to give up the applause, even after being poked and prodded, but they just had a different way of showing they dug it, I guess. It kinda threw me off. Iʼm really glad Big Poppa E was there to the do the set. Had it been me on the stage, I wouldʼve finished the first poem and said good night. The slam was great, and I got to do my thang host stylie, with stand- up comedy and poking fun at audience members and kicking back and relaxing. Someone even loaned me a leather riding crop Punk rock stylie in Springfield. and I gave each poet a little spankinʼ on their bum-bum as they hit the stage. By this time, the place was packed and the audience was warmed up and giving up mad applause for all the poets who performed, even the shy, quiet ones, and we all hit a local greasy spoon after the show, just put four tables together and took over while the waitresses eyes us with hella suspicion. I slept that night in my truck in front of E-Goʼs place and had pleasant thoughts about not sucking nearly as bad as I thought I had. Thatʼs always a nice realization at the end of a long day: “I donʼt suck nearly as bad as I thought I did.” What more can a boy ask for?

Naughty Big Poppa E!

Spiderman is in the front row, far right, yelling. MAY 30 (SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS) El Toro

Why do we slam? Why turn a poetry reading into an Olympic event, assigning scores to someoneʼs art and expression? Why not just offer the poetry up without judgement so that everyone can feel comfortable without being judged by people they donʼt even know? The competition aspect of slamming is supposed to be for fun, for the amusement of the audience, and it isnʼt supposed to be a means of ranking poets as better or worse than others. But, there are plenty of people willing to let slam become too focused on the scores and not the community-building aspect of it all. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to continue doing this, as shitty as some people get about it... Such navel-gazing, but I found myself once again digging into this topic with the San Antonio slam master, Ben Ortiz, while eating graveyard shift I-Hop food with a crowd of about 10 poetry people from the El Toro show last night. After debating and talking and discussing, I think it all comes down to community. Thatʼs what slam is supposed to be all about, creating a community of passionate poets and writers and performers and emcess and audience members across the country. Thatʼs it, thatʼs why we slam. Itʼs certainly not to rank one poet as better or worse than another, no, itʼs to create a creative performing space wherein everyone can deliver their poetry to the best of their ability in front of an energetic, supportive rock and roll crowd. Hereʼs a fact: The contest brings in the audience, and it enlivens that audience with an intense energy. Slamming brings the art form of poetry reading to another level, bringing with it rock show levels of audience excitement. Thatʼs why we still bother with slamming. Five years ago I really doubt that I couldʼve launched this national tour. There just wasnʼt enough audience for it, I think, especially for an unknown poet wannabe living out of his pickup truck, but through slams and other high energy readings across the country, a network has developed connecting poets all over the country. Now, because of the spread and popularity of slam — with something like 70 venues across the country hosting slams on a regular basis — just about any poet with a fire in his belly can hit the road like a one- man punk band, throwing chapbooks and stickers and CDs and tapes into the back of the van and hitting the road. And anyone who denies that we are part of a FAMILY of poets and performers has never couch- surfed across America, meeting all these awesome people who open their lives for a travelling poet and offer anything they need, from food to couch space to warm hugs, and they offer it without hesitation. That is why we slam, I think, to create this community of people outside of the mainstream, to create a circuit of creative people who support and welcome each other in the spirit of free expression. The whole poetry slam thing is merely a tool to get the word out, a tool to convert an audienceʼs sweet tooth rotted from years of crap television and crap movies and crap music, a tool to promote this idea of spoken word as rock and roll show. People who get too bogged down in the competition between fellow poets are completely missing the point: We are creating something more important than points here, something more important than that quick ego boost one gets from scoring as close to a 30 as they can. Last nightʼs slam at the El Toro in San Antonio was a great example of a slam with its heart and spirit in the right place. First off, it was a HUGE crowd for a weekly slam, especially for a scene who had just last week picked its slam team. Usually, the slam scenes Iʼve been a part of go into sleep mode after the team has been picked, but this scene was hopping last night. Benʼs a great host, too, one of the most energetic and spontaneous ones Iʼve witnessed on this trip so far. He really kept the energy going, and even though the show was hella long (with a 40-minute feature and a three-round slam), he kept things moving at a brisk pace. Lots of energy here, really great vibe with folks cheering their hearts out for every one of the readers, from the tyro poet afraid of the mike to the most bombastic poetaster bastard hopping around and cussing, they gave up the energy so that each performer could draw from their applause. The judges were hella ruthless, though. Tough. (Hereʼs a random thought... If a mean-spirited vengeful person is “ruthless,” does that mean they have no “ruth?” Again with the screaming. Would a kind and giving person have a lot of “ruth,” therefore being “ruthful?” Whereʼd that word come from? There was a Ruth in the Bible... maybe she was really kind, so if a person isnʼt, then they are “ruthless.” Hmmm....) Anyway. After we finished our diner food, I was milling about with this one girl who I had been talking with during the show at the El Toro. She was cool and cute and kinda neato, so we decided to kinda drive around late night San Antonio and listen to music and talk. As weʼre driving, sheʼs all like, “Well, I guess I could take you up to The Point. Itʼs pretty up there. You can see the whole city.” And Iʼm all thinking, “Wow, The Point... She wants take me up to The Point... Like, Make-Out Point, like... in Happy Days. Cool.” Sheʼs all shy and stuff and looking down at her hands, and she says, “Well, we donʼt have to, but itʼs kinda nice up there.” Iʼm all, “No, really, it sounds dreamy. Letʼs go.” When I was a kid in Bakersfield, The Point was a dry river bed in the fields outside town, this wide expanse of nothing that was a perfect hide-out for kids with illicit beer and Sammy Hagar tapes and a raging hormone fest brewing in their loins. We called it The Couch. Well, they called it that, the popular kids, but I never knew about The Couch until it was too late for me to hang out there. While I was stuck in the trenches of high school, I was all about locking myself in my room and listening to records and reading Conan books by myself. Make-Out Point. Wow. Iʼve never been taken to Make-Out Point before. Yeah, so... We went to The Point and parked amongst 10 or 12 other cars full of people “listening to music,” and this poetry girl and I climbed into the back of my truck and we listened to Oingo Boingo and looked down at the city lights and... well, we kinda made out a bit. It was nice. Being on tour is kinda cool. Before the El Toro gig, I did a little stint in a San Antonio Barnes I kissed someone in this crowd. Guess who? and Noble with a dude named Rod Stryker. Just an open mike & feature in a book store and a little crowd happy to see something a little different. There was this cat there who was the ANTITHESIS of what slam is all about, this older guy about 50 with a big Whitman beard and pot belly and a big chip on his meaty shoulder. Said shithead was very vocal in his negative criticism of slamming. In fact, this blowhard tubby bastard was critical of everything anyone did and seemed there for the sole purpose of pontificating on the sad state of poetry these days. His poetry was, supposedly, a shining example of how “real” poetry can be such a joy in the face of all this “poetry slam dreck.” Dude had no “ruth” whatsoever. God, I love these characters. You should have seen him ignoring the poets one by one by one, rustling his newspaper in the front row to show his contempt as he ignored everyone and read the headlines. Of course, when he hit the stage, Mr. Man expected everyone else to pipe down and genuflect to his sermon on the mount. He began by quoting a local newspaper that said poetry was not about rules, it was about expression. He made a face like heʼd just smelled a turd, then spat his poetry confirming that yes, we do need rules, and yes, poetry slams donʼt follow the rules, and yes, if you slam you suck because it is NOT about expression, itʼs about... well, fuck if I know, I guess itʼs about whatever he happened to be doing at the time, which was end-rhyming cowboy poetry stylie while spraying phlegm on the front row. I signed up for the open mike just so I could read my poem “Ode To Poet X” that contains the line “I am so tired of watching you stick your own finger up your ass and rub it under your nose as if it were Vickʼs Vap-O-Rub.” Itʼs basically a tirade against asses like Chump Boy who come to readings for no other purpose than to bask in the glow of their own glory. Iʼm glad this guy hates slams. Iʼm glad he refuses to even go to one. Iʼm glad he has found a comfortable place in Barnes & Nobel to hold forth in front of people who are too polite to tell him to shut the fuck up. We need people like this, for comparison sake. I tried to shake his hand after the show and thank him for coming and sharing his work, but he scoffed at me and refused. I just smiled and turned away, giggling to myself. Ass. I wish I had a picture of him. Iʼd post his silly mug on the web in a second. Sometimes, the best revenge in having a website. JUNE 1 (AUSTIN, TEXAS) Gaby and Moe’s

I just might be big in Australia someday. I pulled into the parking lot of Gaby and Moeʼs in Austin for that eveningʼs show and just as I set the parking brake, my cell phone rang. (Aside: My mom got me the cell phone for my birthday, which was May 11. I had never ever considered getting one of these electonic leashes before this, but she wanted to keep tabs on my whereabouts as I wandered through America. Now, I am so glad I have this little hum- mer... It makes touring a lot easier when you can just pick up the phone and call someone at any time rather than trying to find a pay phone in some strange city in the dark in the rain... I was hella tired driving into Austin and afraid that I wouldnʼt make it in before falling asleep and ending up in some ditch, so I called my SF poetry friend Ariana Waynes and she talked me into town the whole way so I wouldnʼt fall asleep and die. Itʼs always nice when friends talk to you on the phone so you wonʼt die.) So, my phone rings and itʼs this reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, which, I am told by the reporter, is the Australian equivalent to the New York Times. She had read the review of my first issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles in the Utne Reader, and she wanted to interview me about the state of masculinity in new millenial America. She went on about how patriarchal a society Australia is and how views on masculinity there are very strict and not very forgiving to males who exist outside the bulked up and bronzed he-man who tells sexist pig jokes with glee and who sneers at such things as earrings and hairdye for men, girlie men who surely want to be girls since they adorn themselves like girls, Wussy Boys like me. Anyway, sheʼs all hurling these big 25-dollar words at me like You! Yes, you! Buy my fucking chapbook! “patriarchy” and “misogyny” and “hegemony” and asking for my in- depth interpretation of post-feminist thought and...... and Iʼm like, “Uhmmm.... I really liked Duckie in ʻPretty in Pink.ʼ He was neato.” I had expected to simply list my favorite John Hughes movies and laugh at all my favorite Wussy Boy icons like John Cusack and Timothy Hutton, but we ended up discussing all the socio-political implications of being a Wussy in this Über-Macho Western Society that pretends to put women on a pedestal then uses their bodies to sell products. It was a bit scary to have my views challenged, you know, and have to articulate these gut feelings for someone who was looking at these pop culture images and disecting them, but, in the end, I think I failed to make a complete fool of myself. In fact, I think I did okay. Sometimes, thatʼs all you can hope for in a day. “I didnʼt make a complete fool of myself today. I did okay.” (Both the Utne Reader review and the Syndey Morning Herald story are online at my website, www.Wussyboy.org.) Two days later, I did a live interview for some radio chat show in Australia where I could just rattle off my pop culture icons... The host had read the article in the Sydney Morning Herald and I guess they did call-ins after I got off the phone with him. Maybe Iʼll do an Australian leg of this tour in October. Hmmm.... Maybe one day Iʼll be able to say, “Oh, yeah, America is pretty cool and all, but man... Iʼm fucking HUGE in Australia!” The show at Gaby and Moʼs was really nice. Itʼs like, after being surrounded by people I didnʼt know for two weeks, I walked into this little cafe filled with all these people I know — Phil West and Mark Maslow and Susan B. and Stazsa and that one guy whoʼs name I never remember but he won the slam that night — anyway, yeah, it was great to see friends. Especially Mark Maslow... heʼs just a sweetie pie. Mark is this little Wussy Boy who writes soft-spoken poetry, is addicted to multi- player Internet games, and has a kick ass job with some technology company that allows him to travel a lot. We get together whenever weʼre in the same area (which is not often enough), and we talk about girls and crushes and heartaches and all that sappy wonderful stuff that Iʼm addicted to, and we listen to sappy music and we read each other our sappy love poetry and share tales of making out with Wussy Grrls who never really like us nearly as much as we like them. I donʼt know why we live in a society where people like Mark Maslow donʼt have flocks of people totally digging him like he was ice cream. If there was any justice in this world, Mark Maslow would be the most popular hunk in all of Austin. Not to say that heʼs not, you know, but man... society has no respect for Wussy Boys. He should be on the cover of Playgirl in a red Speedo licking an ice cream and reading a dog-eared copy of “The Bell Jar.” Itʼs easy to praise Mark Maslow... he looks just like me when we stand next to each other, only a bit smaller and a bit cuter. I made some crack that if Mark and me ever decided to shag, it would be like lying naked on a mirror and fucking myself. Anyway. Good show, good energy. Phil West is such a natural host, just kinda silly and making comments through the show that keep the crowd moving. Phil is a major player in the poetry slam scene, and has been a strong voice for action since heʼs been involved with it. Heʼs cool, kinda weird and quirky and odd, but hella funny with a mean memory for pop culture that infects his work with high comedy. Philʼs a shortie, too, and if he grew a little goatee and shaved his head bald, he would get confused with me, too, just like Mark. In fact, Iʼm thinking the three of us ought to shave our heads, grow goatees and head out on a tour billed as “Attack of the 50-Foot Wussy Boys!” I shouldʼve stayed longer in Austin, but I got suckered by some cute poet girls from San Antonio who wanted to spirit me away and talk to me all night long. God, how could I resist? Iʼm a sucker for cute poet girls who want to talk to me. Nothing happened, I mean, we didnʼt go up to Make-Out Point, but it was cool to sit cross-legged with these new people and dig around in each otherʼs brains for an evening. But, looking back on it, I think I missed a really good opportunity to chill with some good people in Austin that Iʼve been meaning to get to know better for quite some time.

The crowd goes wild! Note: Mark Maslow is in the front row, on the right, screaming. JUNE 2 (DALLAS, TEXAS) Club Clearview

Iʼve had so many good gigs, great gigs, and Iʼve met so many awesome people so far, and Iʼve only just started this tour. But, as good as a great gig can make me feel, all it takes is one bad show to knock me down and make me feel like Iʼm a fool for even trying this. Case in point: The gig in Dallas, TX. Everything started out okay. I pulled into Dallas and parked in front of Clebo and Neomi Raineyʼs two-story house about an hour before my gig, and was quickly surrounded by this wriggling, panting, hairy flurry of dog tails and dog tongues and wet dog noses as their managerie of pets greeted me with instant affection. I had already met the bichon frise they have, the spunky white bastard with a poodle mohawk who rules the house, and the German shepherds were familiar, too, I think, from the last time I crashed on Cleboʼs couch in ʼ98 right before the National Poetry Slam in Austin. Clebo is this big burly poet guy, about 50, but more like an aging punker than, like, someoneʼs dad. He looks kinda like someone who used to run with the Hellʼs Angels back in the ʻ60s, all rough and burly, but heʼs got a quick grin and a huge belly laugh, plus heʼs really free and easy with his house and lets poets from all over the country crash on his couch and floor. His wife Neomi is a lawyer who must be an angel sent to take care of Clebo. A lessor woman would have dumped that rascal Clebo a long time ago, I think, but they seem to make a great pair. There was a new little wet nose at Cleboʼs house on this latest visit, a little hairy potato named Belly with little bitty legs and eyes somewhere in that little shag of hair, this little crit- ter no bigger than a Guinea Pig who had no idea he was merely a handfull of dogness. This Clebo is the one on the left. Belly is on the right. little rascal was so cool, just darting around and damanding attention like he had a D-Cell battery up his little butthole, and all the other dogs were so gentle around him, so playful, that they lowered their huge dog selves to this guyʼs level and allowed him to dominate them in his little munchkin puppy dog way. It was so cute, I just about died, watching this little fucker yank on the floppy ears of the biggest German Shepherd like he was all full of piss and vinegar, then giggling as the shepherd rolled on his back and kicked up his legs and let the little guy jump on him, as if the bigger dog were laughing and saying, “Aieee, help! No no, please, aieee!!!” And then the little guy was all checking me out, tilting his head, and he boldly marched over to me and growled like a little Ewok, just like, “Cʼmon, bitch, bring the pain, letʼs rock and roll!” Then he dove for my foot and commenced to putting the sleeper hold on my big toe. Again, so cute I almost died. He is Wussy Dog, hear him yelp! The gig at Club Clearview was not so cool. (In fact, it was the worse show of the entire tour.) I donʼt know what happened, but something like seven people showed up, and I swear not a single one of them was listening as I did my poetry. It made for an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach. Iʼm up there on the stage, and Iʼm doing my poetry, and Iʼm trying to get into it and deliver it honestly and effectively, but Iʼm looking out at the people in the slender audience, and no one, not a single person, is paying attention. It was like a movie, like everyone starts walking in slow motion and the sound of my voice fades into the deep background, and this voice-over starts a narrative inside my head as atmospheric music plays, something by Mazzy Star or The Cocteau Twins. No one is watching. Iʼm somehow delivering the poems, but Iʼm not even paying attention to what Iʼm saying, just complete auto-pilot. No one is listening. They just applaud out of reflex when the sound of my voice stops. Look at them over there, having a conversation as Iʼm up here trying to move them emotionally, trying to reach them. No one is listening. Hell, Iʼm not even listening, Iʼm up here looking at them not looking at me, and Iʼm barely aware of the words Iʼm saying. Thereʼs nothing more dispiriting for someone performing than to be greeted with a room full of noise, evidence that you very definitely do not have the roomʼs attention. I tried to scream louder than usual, emote harder than normal, even jump around and flail my arms and legs in a vain effort to make someone listen, but in the end it was all lame and obvious and sad. I got off the stage and sold a couple of books, but for the most part nobody seemed to give a shit that I was even there. The only fun part came after the gig, when Tara announced that my money was no good in Dallas and that she was going to be my official Dallas Poetry Slam Team Tour Guide and Hospitality Delivery Unit for the evening. She took me and a small crew of poets around the area upside Club Clearview called Deep Ellum, a bustling district packed with tons of clubs and bars and restaurants and all kinds of tattooed and pierced and sweaty Alterna-folks milling about in the sticky heat. Deep Ellum is like Disneyland for a post-modern, techno-primitive cast and crew sporting cell phones and tribal ink etched on their skin, laptops and pierced labias, steel-toed boots and beepers. It reminded me of Austin during the SXSW Festival in March, tons of bars full of young people wired together with microwaves and Internet connections. We hit a jazz club where I was told to tuck in my “Whitey Will Pay” t-shirt before taking a seat, then we bailed to some laid back grill with chili fries, cold beer, and big screen teevees. Tara is cool, such a cigarette smoking in one hand and a shot of tequila in the other hand kinda gal... She reminded me of that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where Indyʼs gal pal was drinking the Mongols under the table, staring them down and clacking the down-turned shotglass on the wooden table in defiance as her drinking partner rolled his eyes and passed out on the hay-covered floor... Put that spunky gal in a bar in Deep Ellum with a chapbook sticking out of her back pocket and thatʼs Tara. She regaled us with stories about her adventures on the road, dish- ing on slammers and the touring experiences she had on the road. Tara saved this time from being really depressing. It was really nice to be given the royal carpet treatment by Tara, but man, that lame reading at Club Clearview had me all kinds of bummed out. It happens.

Okay, maybe more than seven people showed up. (That one girl in the middle so wanted me...) JUNE 3 (TEXARKANA, AR) Common Grounds

Kinkoʼs! Kinkoʼs! My kingdom for a Kinkoʼs! Thatʼs been my plea for the past few days: Lord, please let there be a Kinkoʼs in this town. Please let me be able to check my e-mail and use a clean bathroom and make copies, high quality copies, and let it be easy to foil their methods of detecting theft of said high quality copies. And the Lord spake unto me: NO! Foul poet, thou shalt be stricken from the land of copy machines built after the Vietnam War, and thou shalt like it! This whole tour has depended on technology from the beginning, and would be impossible without it. And the hub of that technology is the 24-hour temple of the First Amendment known as Kinkoʼs. I set up the entire tour via e-mail using only three things: 1] A list of every poetry slam venue in the country and the e-mail address of every host; 2] A list of every poet in the country who appeared at the 1999 Na- tional Poetry Slam in Chicago in the form of a “Poet Locator” booklet handed out to everyone at the event; 3] Access to the Internet via Kinkoʼs. As much as I bitch and complain about how evil Kinkoʼs is, I could not have done this tour without the convenient access to technology that Kinkoʼs provides me. I have a little booklet listing every Kinkoʼs from coast to coast, and my directions take me from one Kinkoʼs in one town to another Kinkoʼs in another town. As Iʼm nearing a certain town, Iʼll just look up the name of the town in the Kinkoʼs booklet and give the store a call for directions. Once Iʼm in Kinkoʼs, I log onto the Internet and hit up this website called MapQuest that will give me detailed instructions on how to get from that particular Kinkoʼs to the gig that night. Then I scam copies of chapbooks, and Iʼm on my way. Without Kinkoʼs, I am lost and blind in a huge land of gas stations and WalMarts. There are certain milestones in a little townʼs life, I think, little mountains they must climb and little peaks they must reach on their journey from a little burg at the side of the road to a city of some consequence. I suppose the first big leap is that first stop light in the center of town. From there, the first McDonaldʼs looms large as a milestone, and from there a movie theatre, a college, a coffehouse near the college, and finally, a Kinkoʼs near the coffeehouse near the college down the street from the very first McDonaldʼs. I kinda figured that if each town I would be visiting had at least a community college and a coffeehouse in which I could perform, theyʼd surely have a Kinkoʼs, too. I was wrong! Imagine my horror as I pulled into Texarkana, Arkansas, and parked in the street across from Common Grounds coffeehouse, and walked into the place only to be told there were no Kinkoʼs in this town. Imagine my horror as the owner and I flipped though the pages of the thin yellow phone book only to discover that the three copy centers in town were all closed over the weekend. Imagine my horror when she said she couldnʼt think of a single place in town with Internet access, not even the Super WalMart down the road past the post office. No chapbooks for Eirik. I had already sold 157 chapbooks in the past week and a half, and I was out of stuff to sell for gas money, but I just figured that Iʼd pull into Kinkoʼs like always and print more copies before the show. No chapbooks for Eirik. No gas money. No Kinkoʼs. It was enough to make me stifle a scream, stick my fist in my mouth and run blind into traffic as I yowled the pained yowl that only an e-mail junky can understand. Hello, my name is R. Eirik Ott, and I am addicted to e-mail. Being in Texarkana was like going cold turkey for a whole night. God, it was a long night. The copy center thing was a big issue, too, because I couldnʼt just bum money off folks without having chapbooks to trade for crumpled dollar bills. So I drove until I found an Albertsonʼs supermarket, and I took over their 10¢-per-copy-copy machine and shovelled dimes into the machine for an hour and a half making the first side of the copies then putting them back into the machine to make the second side of the copies, then I took over an unused checkstand and assembly-lined the copies into chapbooks while drinking Dr. Pepper and listening to Muzak piped in over the supermarket loudspeakers. (Speaking of Dr. Pepper... I totally hate the taste of the stuff, but the phrase Dr. Pepper brings with it all kinds of images for me. I used to date this girl in my hometown named Kristen, and all she ever drank was Dr. Pepper, and since we spent a lot of time at her house, I found myself drinking a lot more Dr. Pepper than I normally would. Nor- mally, I avoid that prune juice tasting crap like the plague, but when Kristen and I would get together at her place and make mad monkey love, inevitably Iʼd end up reaching over to her nightstand all sweaty and spent and taking a much-hated sip of her omnipresent can of Dr. Pepper. It even became a secret code between the two of. Sheʼd call me up late at night and seductively whisper, “Wanna come over and drink some Dr. Pepper with me?”) Anyway, back at the supermarket making copies and drinking Dr. Pepper and thinking about Kristen and wondering where she was at that very moment, I kept imagining people stealing glances at me, whispering, “Say, check out the bald guy with earrings over there with the copy machine... Ya think heʼs printing up some kind of faggot bomb instruc- tion or something, the little commie pinko faggot...” The South is kinda wierd like that, like there seems to be this un- derlying sneer at a bald kid with steel-toed boots and earrings, like Iʼve got some kinda devious secret and the residents in the local WalMarts and laundromats are loathe to find out what it is. Anyway, I made my copies and jetted over the venue and discovered the place to be PACKED with kids, just packed to the gills with the same kinda alterna-kids Iʼve seen in every town so far, and they all seemed so grateful to have a little coffeehouse to hang out in and sip coffee in and read their poetry in, a little place in which they could plot to take over their worlds. I am finding the scenes that are the most innnocent are the best venues for my poetry, the ones with the least amount of connection to the National Poetry Slam Incorporated scene. These kids are hungry for new ideas and are not jaded in the slightest. They are truly happy to have someone come to their little scene and light a little fire so they can warm their hands and get inspired on someone elseʼs energy. Not to say that shows in places like Austin and Dallas are bad or anything, itʼs just that they seem to have gotten so used to the idea that something may have been lost, some appreciation for just how special this is, how cool, to be able to grab a micro- And the crowd in Texarkana goes wild! phone and express Note: Jenna is in the second row yourself. I have to all the way to the left, the one say, there seems doing the gross hand signal. to be something missing, some bit of novelty that these other smaller younger scenes seem to have. Maybe itʼs just that I like being little Mister Big Shot Poetry Guy, big fish in a little pond boy. Hmmm... The Texarkana show was a great show, great applause and response, and I ended up kicking it with someone from the Hot Springs Team named Ginna Wallace who had come all the way from her home two hours away so that she could see the show. We had first met at Nationals last year... I was in the audience when she did this kick-ass poem about a first kiss that just knocked me out. I went up to her and complimented her work. She was shy. I was shy. We walked away grinning awkwardly. She was in the audience at the Finals when I busted out with my Wussy Boy Manifesto, and she ended up coming over to me and complimenting my work. She was shy. I was shy. We walked away grinning awkwardly. Anyway, boom, there she was in Common Grounds in Texarkana and we talked and joked and giggled all night, practically taking over the open mike section of the evening by each signing up four times so we could just keep delivering more stuff, then Ginna and her friends Sheila and Lea and Gabby hijacked me and took me to someplace called Arkadelphia and we all jabbered into the wee hours in a huge creepy wood-panelled house. I saw the sun come up the next morning, then drove sleepless to the next gig in Joplin, another stop in this long trip...... (deep breath)...... WITHOUT A KINKOʼS! AIEEEEE!

Oh, and hereʼs another picture of my kitty Aretha. Isnʼt she just so damned cute? JUNE 4 (JOPLIN, MO) Crabby’s Seafood Grill and Lounge

I love gay people. For me, a town is not a town worthy of my interest or presence unless there is a sizeable community of gay people. Thereʼs something about gay people that makes me happy. Iʼm not really sure what it is or why it is, but gay people kick ass. Maybe itʼs something in the way they express themselves, especially young gay men. They can be so saucy, so fearless, so shameless in their identity that it just causes me to smile and want to chat with them and hear their take of life and all its weirdness. Being a Wussy Boy, a lot of my friends have been gay, mostly during college while involved with theatre or poetry, places where gay people seem to be drawn.. I guess thereʼs something about a gay person, some process theyʼve gone through to reach a sort of determined sense of self in the face of so much negative energy in this society that would much rather see them go away. Thereʼs a certain amount of brav- ery that goes along with being gay, a certain amount of devotion to self and expression of self even if it gets your ass kicked. I can identify with that. I mean, thatʼs not to say that there are no gay people who are mean and cruel and lame-assed wastes of my time. Sure there are. Gay people are either portrayed in the media as these fun-loving leprechauns who flit into the scene, crack a joke or two and flap about all flamboyant like, then flit back to their apartment next door, or they are painted as some kind of deviant worthy of all the contempt this society can heap upon their heads. The gay community is so much more diverse than that, just as diverse as any other aspect of this society, and harboring kinder gentler stereotypes about gay people I love this sign! is just as harmful as having hateful ideas about them — either way, these positive and negative stereotypes limit what gay people can be and puts them into convenient little boxes that are easily identifiable. Anyway. I drove into Joplin knowing only one thing: No Kinkoʼs. This would be my second show in a row with no Kinkoʼs, no e-mail, and I was starting to itch thinking about all those unanswered e-mails piling up and waiting for me to answer them. And, well, I was thinking that if there were no Kinkoʼs, there probably wouldnʼt be any cool gay people either. I mean, Kinkoʼs and gay people go together for some reason... At the edge of town, I saw this huge sign at the side of the road leading to a huge compound, some huge business surrounded by trees with a little private road leading to security gates. The sign said “FAG” in large capitol letters. I put my pinkie to my lips Austin Powers stylie and was like, “Whatʼs this?” I pulled over and walked to the sign and looked up and saw it announced the entrance to “FAG Bearings.” I just had to laugh and take a picture, wondering what kind of hell this company must receive because of their name, like their workers must totally be defensive about even saying the name in front of people in this Southern land where Iʼm sure gay people are sneered at. How could I resist calling this company on my cell phone and seeing if I could get a T-shirt with the name of the company on it? I just had to give it a try because it was just too good to be true that a big industrial he-man company making bearings in the middle of Joplin, Missouri, had a name like “FAG.” The guy who answered the phone answered it like this: “F-A-G Bearings, may I help you?” Like, EFF - AYE - GEE... I just had to giggle when he said it... As if he was going to proudly answer the phone, “Fag Bearings, may I help you, Sweetie?” I asked him if his company sold T-shirt with their logo on them, and he paused as if looking into the phone, then said, “No, sir, no we do not sell T-shirts. We sell bearings.” And then he hung up. They must get crank calls all the time from pimply skinned teenagers, saying things like, “Well, you see, my fag has started to squeek a bit, and I was wondering if I could buy some replacement fag bearings.” Or maybe someone would call and ask for the directions to all the best gay clubs in the Southern states... get it? “Fag bearings...” Anyway, when I hit the venue and found out that Joplin has a large population of lesbians, it made me love the idea of the FAG Bearings T- shirt even more, like it could become the hip shirt to wear for the local lesbian crowd as a means of identifying each other. The show was nice and packed, full of cool people who were eager to give up the loud enthusiasm that I needed to perform a good show. Seriously, the norm for this trip has been over-the-top enthusiasm... the very few negative points are so small as to warrant barely a mention. The owner of the venue kicked ass, and he came over to me and thanked me for performing at his place. He then said, “Hey man, you hungry? Anything you want, man, Iʼll have the chef whip it up for you.” He had his chef cook up some creamy seafood alfredo with lots of garlic and boxed it up for me so that I could take it with me. Ainʼt that cool? I got to sleep on the couch of the MC, a dude named Marc Sweet, who opened his whole house to me with a “Hereʼs the key, use whatever you like, stay as long as you like, just lock up when you leave.” As Marc slept, I ate the seafood alfredo pasta and checked my e-mail on Marcʼs computer. Ahhh... warm pasta, friendly lesbians, and a veritable cornicopia of new e-mails... What more could I ask for?

And the kick ass lesbians go wild! JUNE 5-8 (OKLAHOMA CITY, OK) Relaxing with new friends

You never know how the most basic simple human contact can completely change your life, whether it be a person you are standing next to in the express line at the supermarket, or the person you pull in front of on the freeway who then flips you off, or the coffeehouse girl who serves hot chocolate to you with little chocolate sprinkles without even having to be asked. You never know when some person you had no idea existed can come along and change your life just by being there, suddenly, standing or sitting or driving next to you. PING — everything is different now, and you wonʼt even know it for several years, yet you can trace all that happened over those years to that very moment where SHE entered the room and sat next to you on the first day of class. It was a girl, of course, who started all this for me, all this writing and touring stuff. I mean, the stuff was already inside me, it was just waiting for the right catalyst, waiting 24 years for something to come along and stir it up and get things moving, and for this particular story the spark that began it all was Laura Hodgson. I met Laura on the first day of my first class in my first semester of college after being discharged from the Navy. The class was English Composition, and I got there early because I was so excited at being a real live college kid, finally, after six years of holding my breath and dreaming of this moment. And in walked Laura Hodgson. Five-foot-two, eyes of blue, blush of lips and oh those slender little fingers... And she sat right next to me. She had this short blonde bob, glasses, backpack. She looked like Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful, only shorter. And she was smart. And spunky. And cool. I gathered this after talking with her in the few moments before the instructor arrived, and I kept stealing glances at her throughout class. Of course, Iʼm making most of this stuff up, because I donʼt really remember anything about that first day, but Iʼm sure thatʼs pretty close to it. I was smitten. Like Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather when he first laid eyes on his Sicilian bride-to-be, I was hit smack-dab in my forehead by The Thunderbolt. But I was shy, hella shy, jitteringly shy and horrified of actually speaking to Laura Hodgson in anything other than a classroom setting. The thought of asking her to something harmless like coffee (which, really, isnʼt all that harmless...) entered my mind every time I saw her, but the actual action of asking her was WAY beyond my abilities at the time. She was far too cool, far too intelligent, far too cute to ever give me anthing other than the time of day. By the end of the quarter, we had become class buddies, talking in the hallway before the instructor arrived and walking across campus to other classes, but I could never bring myself to ask her out. The last week of class there was this essay contest, see, and I ended up winning it by writing a standard issue five-paragraph humorous rant about consumerism in America, something that has come to be written and re-written by me and disguised endlessly as various poems and essays every since. It won, and Laura said something like this: (cue violins) “You know, Eirik, you really ought to think about writing for the university newspaper. Youʼre really good. Iʼm on the staff, too, and I think youʼd fit right in.” (freeze frame on Lauraʼs face - cue the sound of hundreds of dominos falling one by one by one) And that is why I got into journalism, which led to covering local bands, which led to organizing gigs for local bands, which led to my first local music zine Fencepost, which led to freelancing for the local newspaper, which led one of the band guys to take me to my first open mike poetry reading, which led to my second zine Thrust Magazine, which led to connecting with poets and writers in the Los Angeles scene, which led me to performing at open mikes all over California, which led me to take a road trip to the Taos Poetry Circus in New Mex- ico and perform at my very first poetry slam, which led me to the San Francisco poetry scene, which led me to the San Francisco Poetry Slam Team, which led me to the National Poetry Slam in Chicago, which led to me being featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post and 60 Minutes and National Public Radio, which led me right here and right now listening to Disc Four of the John Coltrane box set as I contemplate touring the country with only a backpack of poetry and a list of every poetry slam venue in America. That simple, innocent phrase of Lauraʼs - you really ought to think about writing for the university newspaper - was the spark that started me on this path that will now take me from one end of the country to the other as a travelling performance poet. It was December of ʼ91. I was 24 years old. Curt Cobain still had three years to live. The calendar now says itʼs June 20, 2000, and I am 33 years old, the same age as Jesus when he was crucified on the cross. I have only the vaguest notion of how my life would be had Laura Hodgson not spoken those words to me almost a decade ago. I shiver to think. At the time, though, her invitation hardly seemed like the first step on a long road to Wussy Boy poetry rock star glory. No, the only thing that ran through my mind was this: “Being on the staff of the school newspaper would be an excellent way to get to know Laura.” And that was it, suddenly, I was the Arts and Entertainment Editor of the student newspaper, even though I had no experience whatsoever with journalism of any kind, had never even taken a writing class in my life, had never been on the staff of anything other than a movie theatre in high school. I had a knack for it and continued to do all kinds of things during the semester. I became Mr. Local Music, and I wallowed in all the fringe benefits that title brings along with it, from backstage passes to bright-eyed wonders at lots and lots of parties. As for Laura, I kinda accepted my role as “just a friend” and she dated people and I dated people and I kinda figured that would be it. I tried to be satisfied with my limited place in her life, and I did a pretty good job of it, I think. Until the journalism conference in San Diego. Everyone was supposed to go, the whole staff, but one by one by one they all backed out until finally it was only Laura and me going to San Diego for the journalism conference. I was beyond looking forward to this trip, brothers and sisters, I was practically overjoyed at getting a chance to really get to know Laura and maybe... even... who knows? We get down there and we totally blow off the first day of seminars, choosing instead to buy vodka and o.j. and get drunk in our flea- bag hotel room, having pillow fights and telling stories about what we were like as kids until the wee hours, listening to Nirvanaʼs first album on the boom box we brought to keep us awake during the long drive. At one point, we were laying side-by-side on one of the beds, on our tummies with legs kicked up playing footsie behind us, hugging pillows and touching elbows as we shared stories, but I swear to God I couldnʼt tell you a single one of her stories because my entire being was focused on that little oval of warmth we shared at the tips of our shoulders, focused on the smell of her hair... And then the moment came where she hadnʼt been talking for a few moments and I hadnʼt even noticed and we were just staring at each other, our noses inches from each other... My trembling guts were screaming for me to kiss her, like this huge chanting Greek chorus: “Gimme a K — KAY!!!!! Gimme an I — EYE!!!!! Gimme two Sʼs — ESS ESS!!! Whatʼs that spell? KISS HER, YOU WUSS!” But... I couldnʼt, I was too shy, I just kept thinking that it would be some kind of violation of some sort, to suddenly, with no warning, break some kind of “just friends” trust that would lead to embarassment on my part and discomfort on her part and then we wouldnʼt be able to talk to each other all weekend... And so, I muttered some non-sequitor, told her goodnight and went to bed. The rest of the conference was uneventful, and our drive back to Bakersfield was done mostly in silence as we listened to Nirvanaʼs “Bleach” over and over again. Once we got back to school, Laura seemed to avoid me for the next two weeks or so, never returning my phone calls and always being too busy to talk in the newsroom. It wasnʼt until a month or so later that we finally started hanging out again, getting coffee between classes and doing homework and stuff. Flash forward a few semesters later and we are sitting on the steps of Lauraʼs dorms, having just emptied the contents of her small room and transferred them to her Suburu for the trip to her new school in San Francisco. She was leaving with her boyfriend the next day, and this was the last time I would ever see Laura, although, at the time, I figured weʼd be friends for a long time to come. Sheʼs all sweaty and so am I, and weʼre drinking ice cold canned Cokes, and she wipes the sweat from her forehead and says, “You remember that journalism conference a couple of semesters ago, the one in San Diego where we blew the whole first day off?” I smiled and told her I did. She took a deep breath, and said, “Eirik, I liked you so much going into that journalism conference, so much that I couldnʼt even take it. I was so excited that we were finally getting a chance to hang out just the two of us, and there was this one time that night where we had just finished beating the shit out of each other with pillows, and we were laying on the bed and I was telling some kinda story about my childhood but I have no idea what I was saying because all I could really think about was the fact that our elbows were touching and I could smell the fabric softener of your shirt...” (I am about to faint at this point... really, just moments from blacking out, fully hyperventilating, dizzy...) “...and then you didnʼt kiss me. I really thought you were about to, and I almost did it myself, but then you got up and got into your bed and went to sleep. I almost started crying. I couldnʼt figure out what was wrong with me, like, was I too ugly or too stupid or maybe you were really gay like everyone said, God, I couldnʼt figure out why you didnʼt like me. Once we got back, I couldnʼt even bear to look at myself in the mirror, and had to avoid you when we were in the newsroom.” And I am full-on giggling at this point, this high-pitched nervous titter that I couldnʼt stop, and I told her my side of the thing, how I had liked her from the very moment I saw her walk into that classroom door almost three years before, how everything I had done over the past few years, all the cool stuff, had somehow been linked to my desire to be something more than just friends with her... And we both laughed, and shook our heads slowly. I wanted to put my arms around her and kiss her, finally, and ask her to give it a try, to get together with me and see where it would take us, but we both knew it was too late. She was moving up to San Francisco with her boyfriend and that was that, and to do anything else but leave it at that would be silly at this point. I donʼt mean to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think your Godʼs got a sick sense of humor, and Iʼll bet anyone money He was laughing his cruel ass off as I gave Laura a final hug in the dorm parking lot and she drove off to her boyfriendʼs apartment. I havenʼt seen her since. I have no idea if she is even still alive. Once she left, I transfered from Cal State Bakersfield to Chico State University in Northern California, a school with a newspaper that caught my eye at, you guessed it, the journalism conference in San

Old photocopy of an old photo of Laura and Eirik at the journalism conference. Our hotel was across the street from a strip joint. Diego with Laura. Had I not gone down there with her, I would never have heard of Chico and never wouldʼve experienced some of the best and worst moments of my life. All for the love of Laura. (How cheesy does that sound?) It did one very important thing for me, though: I will never NEVER ﬁnd myself in that position again, never will I allow that gut- wrenching “if only” feeling to twist my belly into knots as someone politely informs me that they liked me back when I was too shy to let them know I liked them back. I donʼt know many things about life just yet, but I do know it is so much better to be gently denied the pleasure of someoneʼs company that to be informed the time had come and gone while I was pining away with unrequited love, unrequited only because I was too much of a scaredy-cat to express it. With that experience in mind, I donʼt mind talking to everyone I meet now, and if I feel in the least bit glowy in my stomach for someone, even someone I donʼt know, I am not shy at all about hinting that itʼs there. They donʼt necessarily need to feel compelled to do anything about it, but at least they know itʼs there. So what does all this have to do with my lay- over time between Joplin, MO, and Tempe, AZ, having a whole week between gigs and returning to OKC and spending three days of down time with people who were strangers just a few weeks before? It has EV- ERYTHING to do with it. Had I not Lydia in the Blair Witch House. experienced the Unrequited Love With Laura Incident, I might have simply gone back to my parentsʼ house in Wichita and spent four days watching MTV in their basement. Instead, I went back to OKC to hang out with Lydia, this really cool person I met the ﬁrst time I hit OKC. On the morning of my departure for the second time, Lydia and I went to an abandoned house at the edge of town and painted the walls with our words and took photos of the results, marvelling at our ability to turn this run-down Blair Witch House into a place of quiet beauty. I couldʼve sworn I heard the distant sounds of dominoes falling, one by one by one, as we painted the walls. I think thatʼs why I gave her all my CDs to take care of while I travelled the country doing poetry. To give me another reason to come back. Just in case... JUNE 9 (PHOENIX, AZ) Billy Gordon’s

I have a map of the United States on the desktop of my i-Mac. I downloaded it from the Internet and placed it on my computer so I can easily see where things are in this big-assed country, like, where Tempe, Arizona, is in relation to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On the map, itʼs just a little ways, maybe an inch or two. I figured I could make it to Tempe in two easy days of driving, then turn around and make it back to Albuquerque for the next gig with no sweat. No problem. Fuck, man, that two inches took me FOREVER to get through. Before I left, I bought audio books to help me with my journey. I used $120 in tour money and bought audio version of: 1] Portnoyʼs Com- plaint, by Philip Roth, one of the funniest books I had ever read, a book that makes me think of Eitan Kadosh from San Francisco every time I think about it.; 2] Little Altarʼs Everywhere, the sequel to The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which I had listened to from Chico to Wichita earlier in the tour, which always makes me think of Saul Williams, as if the real name of the book should be The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sha-Klac Klac Sisterhood; 3] Angelaʼs Ashes, by Frank McCourt, the prequel to ʼTis, which I had also listened to from Chico to Wichita; and 4] The Hobbit, an old favorite dramatized by the folks at the BBC. Hereʼs another thing: I had met Lydia, this amazing person in OKC who did some kind of Jedi mindtrick on me and talked me into lending her my entire collection of CDs I had brought along for my trip. (“Wow,” she said, her fingers lightly touching my CD collection, her smile bright like the roses in her motherʼs garden, “you sure do have some great CDs here. I sure do wish I could spend some time with your CDs. A girl sure could learn a lot about a boy by spending some quality time with his CDs...”) EEEK! Within two hours of hitting the road CD-free from OKC to Tempe, I was screaming, “AIEEEE!! No techno? No soul? No drum and bass? No hard rock, soft rock, punk rock or ska? You mean to tell me Iʼve got to drive for two straight days with nothing to help me pass the time except (gulp) people reading books? AIEEEEEEEE!!” Lesson learned. No matter how cool the girl might be, never leave her your CD collection. Unless, like, sheʼs really REALLY cool... Anyway. When I got to the gig two days and eight bzillion miles later, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was some kind of multi-media showcase of all kinds of art and poetry and music and video, something the organizers called Better Living Through Amplification. Eirean Bradley was the big cheese for this event, and he ended up being a really cool dude. Weʼd heard of each other and bumped into each other a few times along the way, but weʼd never really had a chance to hang out until this show. Plus, as an added bonus, Eireanʼs friend Kenn Rodrigues had flown in from Albuquerque to co-feature with me. Kennʼs another person Iʼve been meaning to have a long conversation with, ever since I met him at the 1996 Taos Poetry Circus. The show was great, with an opening set by a band named Four Star Mary, the band that appears on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer show on teevee. The lead singer looked like Ed Norton in American History X, but he was cool and even bought a chapbook from me. The high point, though, was the band after the poetry, a local roots outfit called The Ramblers. Man oh man, if there was any justice in this world, this band would be on the cover of Rolling Stone so often it would make Britney Spears cry little crocodile tears. They smoked! The lead guitarist had this big olʼ solid body guitar from the ʼ50s, kinda like the dude from the Stray Cats, and he laid down this phat echoey driving layer of guitar work, kinda like rockabilly and blues with some Johnny Cash mixed in with lots of low twang. Fucking spicy! Plus the tall skinny dude standing there in front smoked on the blues harp and the stand-up bass player rocked out and the traps kid was tearing it up... Man, they were great, especially the lead guitarist, this little Mexican dude with slicked back black hair and one of those shirts Mexican barbers wear, like, with the six big pockets down the front, three on each side? Dude was a bad-ass. At one point, some lady came up to me and twanged, “Listen, yʼall, Iʼll buy one of yer books, see, but you gotta do two things: give us a little hug, then dance with me.” Now, Poppa donʼt dance unless heʼs got two fists of This guy should be a rock star. Southern Comfort in him, and even then itʼs a rare thing these days. But the band was so good that I couldnʼt resist, and just as we hit the empty dance floor, the band kicks in with some vicious “Hot Rod Lincoln” sounding riff and suddenly, I was a dancing machine, just shaking my ass and bobbing my head and wriggling my legs around like rubberbands. I was tight and locked into a solid groove and spanking my own ass to the beat, then people started screaming and clapping and jumping up from their stools to crowd onto the dance floor. As The Ramblers rocked out, the audience boogied Jack Rabbit Slimʼs stylie and all the adult decisions looming in my horizon about what Iʼm supposed to do after this tour faded away. Jump-starting the dancefloor does that to a person, makes them forget all those decision that need to be made, if only for a while. Later, Eirean and Kenn and I crashed on the floor of Eireanʼs pad and talked into the wee hours about slamming and poetry and girls and politics, pausing now and then to bust out a poem... Even after Eirean went to bed, Kenn and I continued to talk until dawn, staring at the shadows on the acoustic tile ceiling. It was amazing how many things we had in common... Nearly the same age (31 and 33), free-lancing entertainment stories for the local newspaper, not quite done with school, good sense of comedy, great ear for music... Good guy. I have a feeling weʼre going to make plans.

Thelonious knows where you live. JUNE 10 (ALBUQUERQUE, NM) RB Winning

So, Iʼm sitting there in Esther Griegoʼs house working on my i- Mac. (Actually, I was sitting in the house Esther was housesitting, a house filled with the wiggly ass of a dog whose sole purpose in life seemed to be pissing all over the sticky kitchen tile every few minutes so Esther could mop it up.) (By the way, Esther is a kick-ass poet on the Albuquerque Poetry Slam Team whose work just blows me away. She is also dating another equally kick-ass poet whose work just blows me away, too: Kenn Rodrigues.) Anyway, Kenn Rodrigues comes up behind me and says, “So, dude, you wanna go see Steely Dan with me? Iʼve gotta write a review for the local paper, and Iʼve got an extra ticket.” And Iʼm thinking, “Steely Dan, only the greatest band the ʼ70s ever spawned, (next to, like, Rush) the band I assert was one of the very best bands EVER (right up there with, like, Styx)? Me, do I want to see them, me, the guy with every single one of their albums?” But I donʼt say that, no, I just shrug my shoulders and go, “Ehh... sure. Why not?” Let me just say this in front of the whole world: Kenn Rodrigues is a wise man and a gentleman, and he and I saw Steely Fucking Dan from the 8th row in Albuquerque. I could actually see the sweat dangling from the lip of Donald Fagen as he played the piano. I could smell the hair care products used by Walter Becker as he played guitar. I was so close that the cute back-up singer with the gold lame halter top, the one in the middle, the one who was checking me out all night long, she kept puckering up her lips and winking at me and making sign language remarks to me like, “Meet me at my hotel room after the show, Big Poppa. Room 222... Be there.” Being on tour can be hella fun, especially when you hook up with one of the Steely Dan backup singers and shag all night long in her ritzy hotel room because some cool dude you just met slid you an 8th row ticket. (Iʼll write more about that later...) Before that, though, before Steely Dan rocked the mike ʼ70s stylie, I had a performance with Gary Glazner and the crew from Albuquerque at a coffeehouse called RB Winning. It was a totally laid back affair, a silly little reading with Gary playing the part of ring leader and host. Gary is this cool cat whoʼs been a part of the National Poetry Slam scene since the very early beginnings. In fact, Gary is the one who organized the very first National Poetry Slam back in ʻ90, bringing together a team from Chicago with a team from SF. Gary is also the person behind the huge SlamAmerice Bus Tour that is taking a rotating crew of 100+ poets across the country. Anyway, Gary is such a joker, such a kook. The slam portion of the show was Garyʼs chance to poke fun at the whole notion of slamming, with its sometimes unhealthy focus on so many niggling little rules and strategies. Gary declared that National rules would be respected during the slam, but then every single reader who came up had all their points reduced to zero for breaking a rule of his own devising. This dude named Murph did a great piece about all the disappointed people who wanted the Apocolypse to come with Y2K, but he got all his points taken away for daring to wear a hat, a grevious error greeted with boos by the audience who agreed that his hat-wearing had surely been a prop foul. Murphʼs girlfriend Tamera did a passionate piece full of gentle lyricism and moving emotion, but I would have none of that, and I immediately called a protest once she was finished, evoking the time-honored “No Literature Rule.” Her points were reduced to zero, tying her for last place (and first place) with Murph. And Esther brought up all kinds of props and had music accom- panying her, but that was okay, it was just the barrettes in her hair that caused a protest call from another poet in the audience, a slam poet who figured those barrettes were surely adding to her performance. And I went up there and began reading from a Readerʼs Digest Condensed Book, determined not to stop until I was dragged from the stage, and sure enough Gary snuck up behind me after five minutes and grabbed me up and dragged me kicking and screaming from the stage. My points were reduced to zero, of course, but not for the time penalty, no, for the fact that I dared bring a cell phone in my pocket to the stage, a clear violation of the “No Cell Phone” rule. And so it went with each poet getting a protest call of some sort, and folks just threw themselves on the ground and laughed out loud each time. It was such a relief to just mess around and be silly and not have to worry about anything but having a good time with poetry. That Gary... he just cracks me up. I wish he were my older brother. He told me a story about when he was doing singing telegrams for a living, and one time he was wearing a gorilla suit for a party of 12- year-olds. After punch and pie were served, the kids coaxed Gary into coming with them out back to the treehouse, but as soon as he got out the screen door, one of them shouted, “Get him!” and they proceeded to tackle Gary in his gorilla suit, yelling encouragements like, “Kick him in the balls!” I can totally picture this Dog Pile thing with all the kids giggling as they playfully kicked his ass, Garyʼs face all puffy and red and grimac- ing under his hairy fake head. I also got a chance to witness an Albuquerque Poetry Slam Team practice, something that was kinda thrilling since Iʼve never really been a part of a team who had such things. For the last two years, the SF Team has been so busy with side projects and so separated by distance that most of our practicing has been done by performing on stages at regionals and fundraisers. To see a team get together and perform for each other and critique each otherʼs work was a refreshing change of pace for me. TO BE CONTINUED...

For more journal entries from the Couches Across America Tour, check out issue #5.

For copies of Issues #1 - #5, simply check out www.brokenword.org for more info. BLURBS

“R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” Doug Holland, editor A Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” The New York Times

“Big Poppa E steps to the mike ...energy is cranked so high ... drunk on adrenaline ... all bluster and bombast ... The audience leaps up, clapping hands, snapping ﬁngers and stomping feet ... Call it revenge of the Wussy Boys.” The Washington Post

“Eirik Ott is the leader of the new Wussy Boy movement ... spreading not just through the esoteric realm of slam poets but edging across the globe.” The Los Angeles Times

“Championed by a hip-hop poet and catching ﬁre across North America, a new male ideal has risen up and is demanding respect: Wussy Boy.” The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

“Inspiring men from across the country.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“I love this magazine (The Wussy Boy Chronicles)!” The Utne Reader

“A spoken word maestro.” San Jose Mercury News

“A hell of a performer, running on boundless energy and near-perfect comic timing.” OC Weekly (Orange County, CA)

“One of the leaders in the hottest thing to hit poetry since Beat poet Allen Ginsburgʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” The Daily Oklahoman The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #5

FEATURING: Couches Across America Performance Poetry Tour • Wussy Boy Music Reviews • Dear Wussy Boy a personalzine by r. eirik ott The Wussy Boy Chronicles #5 Copyright 10.1.00 by R. Eirik Ott

[email protected] http://www.brokenword.org http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Everything is the fault of R. Eirik Ott, unless otherwise noted.

(Our cover Wussy for this issue is the one and only C. Thomas Howell, as Pony Boy from Francis Ford Coppolaʼs “The Outsiders.”Or maybe itʼs Soda Pop, Iʼm not sure. Anyway, C. Thomas was a great Wussy Boy for most of the ʻ80s, but then he just kinda... disappeared. Where are you C. Thomas when we need you most?) INTRO (For this issueʼs intro, Iʼd like to reprint a piece that I was asked to write for Bust Magazineʼs issue devoted to feminism. Bust is a kick ass glossy zine written by young women for young women. You can check it out at www.bust.com, or get a copy at your local chain bookstore. I am really down with this mag because it speaks to young women without talking down to them and without reducing their entire being to stupid shit like makeup and the latest shows on the WB. If youʼve never seen it, you should deﬁnitely check it out.)

I am a straight white male. I am also a feminist, straight up, with buttons on my little black backpack that say “Another man against violence against women” and “Stop the war on women” and “Keep your fucking laws off my body,” which are right along side my Lilith Fair patch and my Ani Difranco buttons and my “Corporate rock sucks” keychain. I have a tattoo on my right ankle of the female symbol with a fist in the middle, which I call the “femi-fist,” that represents to me the fight for a womanʼs right to be a women in this society without being raped or objectified or cheated out of living life to its fullest potential simply because she doesnʼt have a penis. Now, picture me sitting at a gender conference at my little university in Northern California, and picture that I am one of only four young men in a room full of 120 young women at this particular semi- nar led by Kate Bornstein, the original gender warrior, and picture me asking Kate what she recommends I do as a straight white male who is down with feminism to help the cause of womenʼs rights. Picture the red-faced young feminist in the third row standing up and saying to me in a very loud voice, “But this is not your fight! You are a part of the very society that is causing all of our problems! You are a card-carrying member of the ruling class, and you can conveniently pull out your support of feminism the moment it becomes inconve- nient to you! You canʼt just ride in here on your white horse and save us women! We have to do it ourselves! This is not your fight.” Now, picture me, earrings in both ears, black nail polish on my fingertips, shaved head, steel-toed boots, and looking every bit the part of a Wussy Boy college student. This is not my fight? Sister, I beg to differ. I am a feminist not only because I support the rights of women to live their lives without harassment and the contempt of a male-driven consumer society that churns out unhealthy images of women and profits from the resulting self-esteem problems, although that is part of it. I am not a feminist just because the most important people in my life are women—my mom, my sister, my girlfriends, my best friends, my classmates, my writing partners, my confidantes, my teammates—and whatever affects them also affects me, although thatʼs part of it. Most of all, I am a feminist because as long as this society hates and abuses women, it also hates and abuses me. Seriously. I have been harassed for being a Wussy Boy for as long as I can remember, being called a “fag” for walking down the street with earrings and hair dye in full effect and thrift store polyester shirts flapping in the breeze. I have been chased down and beaten up for being a “pussy” simply because I grew up playing Double-Dutch jump rope and street corner hopscotch instead of knocking heads with the jocks at football and getting greasy under the hoods of tricked-out Cameros. Everything Iʼve ever been passionate about has caused the “card- carrying He-Men” of this world to wanna kick my ass for not being man enough, for being too girly, and thereby worthy of their contempt. In high school, when the He-Men were listening to Van Halen and Skid Row and Warrant and Ozzy Osbourne, I was quietly headphoning my way through music that would brand me a “fag”—like The Cure and Morrissey and Siouxsie and The Banshees and Depeche Mode and the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club. When the He-Men saw role models on the big screen in machos like Tom Cruise in Top Gun and Bruce Willis in Die Hard and pasted posters of surgically enhanced fashion models all over their rooms, I was a hard core fan of Duckie Dale in Pretty in Pink and thought it would be really cool to befriend Winona Ryder in Beatlejuice. I mean, just because I like poetry more than Sports Illustrated doesnʼt mean I should be treated like shit. Just because I donʼt go out drinking at Hooters with a bunch of buffed-out testosterone junkies doesnʼt mean that Iʼm less of a man. Just because I donʼt attach my masculinity to assinine crap like big cars and big gold watches and big blonde fashion mannequins with big fake breasts doesnʼt mean Iʼm gay. Just because my girlfriend doesnʼt wear makeup and would rather wear steel-toed combat boots instead of high-heeled stilletos and can kick my ass doesnʼt mean sheʼs a dyke, and it doesnʼt mean Iʼm pussy-whipped. All of which is why I see feminism as being not only a fight for womenʼs rights, but also for the rights of any human being who wants to live his or her life outside of the narrow-minded patriarchal gender norms foisted upon them by this jacked up society. Same thing goes for gay rights: I march every chance I get for a gay personʼs right to be who they are without threat of physical violence, not only because gay people are some of my very closest and best friends, but also because a lot of people see me and assume Iʼm gay and treat me the same way they would a gay person—which isnʼt very well. Feminism is my fight. In fact, until more men get involved in this fight and march in Take Back the Night marches and participate in gender studies programs and help create masculine identities for our male children that allow them to express themselves in a tender and passionate manner rather than by resorting to hyper-masculinity and misogyny and homophobia to prove themselves “real men,” then nothing will change at all. You might have a nation of enlightened women ready to kick some ass and change the world, but the very people who run this world will just be standing there with their arms crossed. I am Wussy Boy, hear me roar!

(Yeah, so thatʼs what I wanted to say about that. The rest of this issue is ﬁlled with road trip diary entries from the Couches Across America Tour I ﬁnished this summer of 2000. Issue Six will have still more.)

(Thereʼs also a poem I wrote for Jen OʼHare, my friend who died in a car accident on September 10, 1999. It was a hard, fucked up poem to write, but I want to share it here.)

(Peace.)

Eirik (aka Big Poppa E) DEAR WUSSY BOY Hi, itʼs Abby Spencer here. I was the actress who is on All My Children, green jacket, big brown curly hair? You really inspired me tonight. Your passion and acknowledgment of the truth of the moment is refreshing and funny. The way you can make fun of everything adds a sense of life or death to the sensation and also makes it true. I enjoy you. If I donʼt catch you Thursday night, Iʼll come to the Bar 13 gig. Thanks again, and I hope we stay in touch and keep track of what the other is doing. You are blessed with gift of awareness and word ﬂoods that create heavy pictures. We all were wrapped up in your moment, crying and laughing for our own. It was great. Keep it up. Love, Abby

I have to say this: meeting painfully cute soap opera actresses in smoky New York City bars is just one of many cool things about being on tour across the country. Even if they only talk to you for a few minutes, thereʼs still something a little cool about it. (Lord, Iʼm such a sucker for someone on the teevee... Famous people are instantly more interesting that regular people simply because they are so much more than human. Donʼt you think? Yeah, right, whatever... Anyway, Abby seemed cool.) Dear Wussy Boy ahem ahem ahem.... this is hannah. silly gal perched on a broken stool in the backgroundʼoʼthe cantab in boston? ringah bell? just wanted to give you a LARGE highfive on your performance. anyone that can elicit goosebumps, flared temper, moist eyes AND a throat parched from laughter, within an hours times, with only their words, can be nothing less than talented. iʼve already spread the word of you to many-a-folk on my university campus, website and all. youʼve got more than one hartford, ct, follower as of now.... good luck on the rest of your tour. youve inspired nick (kid perched next to me, also on broken stool) to hit the cantab weekly. 2 1/2 hours away from “home”, but worth every stopʼnʼgo traffic headache. much obliged. H [email protected] Thanks a bzillion, That show in Boston was one of the best on the whole tour, and I left that bar feeling rejuvenated. High fives. Dear Wussy Boy Yo, Eirik. Two words: THANK YOU! I saw a piece about you and your writing in the L.A. Times “Liv- ing” section yesterday, and suddenly I felt far less alone. Iʼve been a “Wuss” for longer than I care to remember, all these 40 years. How much of a “Wuss” am I? • Throughout my grade school and high school years, I had just two nicknames. One was my last name: (“Hey, Pierce!”) The other was whatever homosexual slur the bully of choice could stumble upon: (“Faggot!”) • Throughout the same time, I couldnʼt muster better than a B- in Physical Education. In pick-up games during PE, guys would fight to pick me — LAST: (“No, YOU take him!”) Shower time was a humiliating experience; a family inheritance left me with obtuse ribs on my left side, making the more “macho” dorks ask stupid questions or blurt out snide comments. To this day I could be minding my own business walking down the street only to have some testosterone-poisoned pinhead bark out to me as he drove by in a typically studly car, “Hey faggot!” Never mind that Iʼm hopelessly hetero, never mind that I donʼt (and wouldnʼt want to) know the dork from Adam. Macho? Thatʼs for losers! Consider your website eternally bookmarked on my officeʼs PowerMac! John Byron Pierce (even my name is Wussy) [email protected]

Yeah, P.E., brother I feel your pain. I never once took a shower in the locker room after P.E., that is, when I even bothered to show up for P.E. As for the Los Angeles Times Article, it was a big surprise that seemed to come out of nowhere. (You can check out the article and the hoola that went into it in this very issue, so check it out.) Dear Wussy Boy Itʼs about time! Iʼm 52, female and up to ʻhereʼ with American macho masculinity. I read the piece about you in the Los Angeles Times a coupla days ago and found myself barking “Yessss!” repeatedly. Traditional Ameri- can machismo is NOT a good idea; itʼs pain in the guzunkus, and itʼs time somebody found the pluck to say so in so many unminced words. Best of luck with your ʻChronicles.ʼ Kay [email protected]

I love this lady, especially for her use of the word ʻguzunkus.ʼ She totally sounds like an old high school P.E. teacher, doesnʼt she, like she would look just like Alice in “The Brady Bunch” with short grey hair and a clip board yelling at the girlʼs track team to get off their ʻgu- zunkusʼ and start pounding the pavement? Dear Wussy Boy Iʼve read about yr zine and then heard you on the radio. I know I shouldnʼt listen to Tom Leykis, but he fascinates me like a view to a car wreck. You did great: kept your cool, defended your point of view so Tom didnʼt even try to abuse you verbally like he does most of his callers. I think he thought that heʼd make you into a freakshow but he couldnʼt! Youʼre just too secure and smart for that. This was a true moment where cultures that I never thought would be in contact clashed. A real victory for cross-pollination. Itʼs good to know you just donʼt preach to the converted. Keep up the good work!! k80 [email protected]

Getting interviewed on the Tom Leykis Show was another surreal event of this already bizarre tour. You can read all about it in this issue. Dear Wussy Boy Greetings from the bowels of Ohio, Kent State University to be exact. My name is Nina and Iʼm your biggest fan! Iʼve only been into you for three days now, because I just heard you on the radio (Tom Leykis) for the ﬁrst time, but I was so moved I had to thank you for being able to articulate and come out about Wussy Boys. I myself only date Wussy Boys. I have refered to them as Fancy Ladds also, but generally there is a great shortage of them here in the midwest. Although many of my friends are, it seems to be a small population. My question is that I was wondering if you would ever come speak at Kent State university???? I have to go to class now so back at ya babe! P.S. I like your website. I tried to do my own but I have not worked on it in three years. I plan to work on it in the future while in school. P.S. Are you an athiest? Peace, Love and Spam, Nina “Mary Tyler” Amore [email protected] http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/5556/

Athiest? Hmmm... I think Iʼm too chicken shit to admit a disbelief in God, because, you know, if I were God and the very people I had created out of the love in my celestial heart had the nerve to doubt my existence, it would kinda piss me off. But, I have to say that I have a profound mistrust in organized religions, especially Western religions, and especially those claiming to be ʻChristian.ʼ People have been using the Bible to justify their fucked up beliefs for centuries, using it to manipulate anyone who stood in their way of total control of the human mind and spirit. Plus, religion is the gnawed bone this fucked up, materialistic society has thrown us as a means of keeping us in our places and keeping our feet moving on the treadmill for corporations who are more than happy to tell us it is noble and honorable to work our whole lives away then die quietly and ʻgo to heaven.ʼ Yeah, they want us to believe weʼll get rewarded for this shitty life AFTER we die, just as long as we donʼt notice how fucked out lives are as we live them and get up the nerve to do something to change things. Dear Wussy Boy Hi. I was listening to Tom Leykis the other day and heard you on his program. I was very fascinated by the information, and though I didnʼt get to hear all of it, or even most of it, I felt like I had heard something that I had been wanting to hear for a long time. Iʼm not sure what you call a Wussy, as i didnʼt hear your definition, but I must say that, in reality, I am a wus and have always been one. Growing up as a teen I was never a good fighter, often cried when I was picked on, and I enjoyed wearing girls clothes and playing with girls. As a grown man, I much prefer the company of women (am attracted to dominant women), I do not particularly enjoy being around macho men, and I wear womenʼs clothes whenever possible. I wear panties every day under my slacks, shave my body, and perform all household duties for my dominant wife. My idea of an erotic moment is lying in a warm, vanilla-scented bubble bath, while shaving my legs. I absolutely love seeing my bare, shaven legs rise out of the bubbles! Pulling on a pair of sheer, black nylons over my smooth legs is, for me, breathtaking. I keep my entire body shaved, arms, legs, chest, armpits, everything. Zing! went the strings of my heart hearing you speak so eloquently about the virtues of Wussydom. It was just such a wonderful thing to hear. And to hear of others who feel the same way! Well, it was just so wonderful. I only wish I had been able to hear the entire hour, but I was only able to hear about 20 minutes (including commercials) and even that was broken up with other things. Though my wife knows about the real me (how could she not), she doesnʼt seem to understand it, and other than taking advantage of certain aspects, such as doing the housework,etc, she doesnʼt ever mention it. My first wife was well aware of my condition. She often referred to me as a sissy, sometimes in front of other people, and on two occasions was able to best me in a physical confrontation. Though I was humiliated to be wrestled to the floor and pinned by her, I did find a strange enjoyment of it. Not sure why. Most people donʼt know about me, as I keep my private self private. I try very hard not to primp and prance when I walk, but I feel the urge. I love playing with make-up and wearing a slip around the house. I only wish I could explode onto the world with my sissified self, but Iʼm not sure that will ever happen. How can I get more involved with other people like myself? I like to call myself ... Susan [email protected]

Wow. Iʼm not really sure how to respond to this one. I think my idea of being a Wussy Boy might differ a bit from ʻSusanʼs,ʼ but itʼs all good. In the end, the important thing is to not feel shame for simply being who we truly are. We can only hope to have as understanding a partner in life as this person has. Keep kicking ass, Susan. Dear Wussy Boy I heard your discussion of Homo vs. Hetero on the Tom Leykis Talk FM show. I just wanted to say that I havenʼt heard a decent human being speak on that show until I heard you. It was really comforting to hear someone speak truthfully without buckling under the pressure of those homophobic buffoons. It was great listening to you and I wish you the best in your career. Sincerely, Diana Gossard [email protected] Dear Wussy Boy I recently saw you perform in NYC at bar 13. Iʼve always loved poetry, from the classics to the modern and unconventional, and I have only seen it performed a few times. It wasnʼt that great, though, but when I heard you... Oh my God, oh... my... God... You were fucking awsome. You might remember my friend Meredith, or, as you liked to call her, The Girl With The Leather Pants! We all thought that was so cool. Weʼll always remember that. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you how much I loved your work. Since Monday night Iʼve been reading your chapbook of poetry. Iʼve read it over and over again. I love Wussy Boys: John Cusack in Better Off Dead, best movie ever; Duckie; all of them. In fact, Iʼm in love with a Wussy Boy right now, but Iʼm sure you donʼt give a ﬂying fuck about my crush. I love all the poems in the book. My English class this year is deﬁnitely going to know who you are. I have to say my fave poem is Crushworthy. I can really relate. Well, keep up the crazy awsome work. melissa, from new york [email protected] Dear Wussy Boy hey there.. i just saw you in nyc this monday. you gave me a book for free so i thought it would be a nice gesture to let you know that iʼm enjoying it completely. iʼm actually from boston and if youʼre ever out here i would love to know because iʼve been showing your poetry around and i know some people who would love to see you read. anyway, i need to sleep now. but great show, keep up with the good stuff and if youʼre ever in boston iʼll be at the show! the girl with the leather pants (meredith) [email protected]

Okay, so Iʼm a little bit of a ﬂirt on stage. I admit it. I try to keep it in check, but every once in a while, someone in the audience will catch your eyes and youʼre kinda hopeless against the urge to single them out in someway, whether itʼs a simple wink or dedicating a poem to “the girl in the leather pants in the corner.” Dear Wussy Boy Just had to comment on your short story of when you played four square. It was great. I didnʼt know that anybody else was into that game. I remember that I used to be pretty good at it, too. In fact, once I played two square with this girl named Sabrina Moorhead. She beat me in the last game and then the bell rang. I remember getting so frustrated that I punched her in the stomach. I was in 4th grade, and I think she was either in 5th or 6th grade. I think she secretly had a crush on me because she kept telling her friends not to tell on me. Of course, they all did. That story reminded me a lot about my school time. Be- ing shy, being picked on for this and that. The only advantage I had was that we never moved around much. Neil [email protected]

If yʼall havenʼt read this story (ʻThe Butt Tripletsʼ), itʼs the best thing Iʼve ever written. You realy should check it out for yourself, and you can do that by either ordering Issue #3 for $5, or you can check it out on line at the wesbite, www.wussyboy.org. Dear Wussy Boy Heard you on the radio with Tom Lykis. More power to you dude. Iʼve been making the same arguments for years, though, perhaps not as eloquently. Iʼm not sure that I would wear a skirt (I know… sarong), but I wouldnʼt hold it against anyone who wanted to. (I tend to rally against the whole concept of fashion as much as I do gender specific presumptions of behaviors and attitudes. So, I wear what is comfortable and I would feel a little… unsupported in a sarong, I think.) One of my issues is that ascribing to the requirements of being a macho man cheats you out of so much of what we are here for. When one shuts off their emotions, as is required of “men,” they lose out on a great deal of the richness life has to offer. Each time we awaken to these aspects of our ʻself,ʼ we become more fully human (loving, integrated, whole-healed, and we are therefore more likely to leave a better legacy to the world, in a small or big way.) These are aspects of humanity that I think have no rival in engendering an appreciation, and experience, of Beauty. And they are sorely missed in too much human interactions. Men, and the world, miss out when we deny those aspects of our humanity, and I find it hard to respect anyone who would ask me to cheat myself of that experience, or cheat the world, ultimately, of having one more citizen who cares, and feels, and lives as deeply he can muster. Take care, and keep on fighting the good fight! We (Human Beings, male and female) are rooting for you! David Wollpert [email protected] About the sarong thing... The big fashion statement at this yearʼs National Poetry Slam was the sarong for men. It seemed like every other person was sporting a wrap of fabric printed with African or Na- tive designs. When my Chico Poetry Slam Team partner Leabua and I saw them, we instantly went out and bought ourselves sarongs. The key to comfortable sarong wearage is good underwear. Otherwise, the boys tend to flap in the breeze a bit much, although the temptation to go free- balling is huge. I donʼt recommend it, though. Too much chafing. Dear Wussy Boy I was the “balls of titanium” guy that was on the air with you last wednesday. I got cut off before I could finish what I was saying. I wanted to thank you personally for championing the cause of Wusses everywhere. My life was a living hell up to the age of 18, because of these low-brow cretins you see everywhere. I swear, they are all educated with a banana and inner-tube, they thnk beer is an entree, and enlightenment is a good night at the tractor pull. Well enough ranting. Thanks again and keep up the good fight! I know I will. Chris Ostrom [email protected]

Thanks for getting my back on national talk radio, my brother Wuss. And keep on keeping on with the Wuss Core pride!

“WHAT’S A MATTER, WUSSY? YOU GONNA CRY?”

Well, then by all means let the rest of the Wussy Nation hear your cries. There are Wussy Grrls and Boys all over the country ready to hear your voice. Simply ﬂoat an e- mail to Wussy Boy Central at [email protected] WUSSY BOY MUSIC REVIEWS The Couches Across America Edition, Part Two

Listen: Wussies have a genetic need to chill on occasion, just strap on those headphones and pump some mellow jams into their ears as they writes in their diary about the girl who just dumped him or the boy who doesnʼt even know sheʼs alive or that crush from way back a long time ago who they arenʼt sure is still alive. Itʼs all about Sarah McLach- lin and Tori Amos and Fiona Apple and sensitive Wussy Boy bands like Travis and Radiohead and The Get Up Kids, but sometimes even a Wussy needs to set that backfield in motion, you know, just back that ass up and get a groove on while strapped into headphones and getting some really personal writing into the old word processor. While I was on the Couches Across America Tour in the summer of ʻ00, these CDs were crucial to my mental health as well as my need to shake my ass on occasion. I could not have finished a single creative thing without their help. Check them out. Next Stop, Wonderland. This kick ass movie proves you can make a intelligent romantic comedy without resorting to sappiness, and my girlfriend Hope Davis spends the entire movie looking deeply into the camera and wondering where she can find me so we can fall madly in love. The soundtrack is perfect for the movie, with gentle Brazilian bossa nova and samba rhythms supporting whispy Portuguese vocals. Excellent.

Hope Davis is so my girlfriend, especially in this movie. The Beastie Boys I love the Beastie Boys, from Paulʼs Boutique on, but my favorite album of theirs is The In Sound From Way Out, a collection of their instrumental jams. As you would expect, this is bad ass and funky fresh, full of stanky funk percussion, fat bass bottom and that trademark ʻ70s whaka-chicka-whaka-chicka guitar that youʼd ﬁnd on the Shaft soundtrack. Good shit, man, funktiﬁed and fresh, just how you like.

Aphrodite Electronica seems to be divided into two camps: one that delivers dance- ﬂoor body rocking with candy-coat- ed beats and icy divas cooing and hollering; and another that makes more intelligent and rhythmically engaging music meant for high-end headphones. Aphrodite aims for the middle, crafting infec- tious drum and bass tunes that are as danceable and fun as they are dynamic and challenging.

The Herbalizer This bad-assed collective puts the “hip-hop” back into “trip-hop” and uses a diverse arsenal of samples, turntablist manuevers and tight MC ﬂow to assemble this ghetto noir masterpiece. Man, this CD is so damned cool, equal parts soundtrack for a ʻ60s spy movie and showcase for cutting edge atmospheric hip-hop. The rhymes are delivered with cool ﬂow, precision and wit, and the beats are just sick. LTJ Bukem Smooth is the key word for this manʼs brand of drum and bass, and Bukem conjures some of the smoothest blends of trip-hammer drum and bass and atmospheric swirls of electronica and turntable samples. His is a music meant for chill time, sipping cold drinks from tall glasses in a smoky room full of wide-eyed conversation and side-wise glances. This dudeʼs the fucking master.

Air The ﬁrst CD from this French duo just slayed me, man, this frothy tonic of Euro cool and ʻ60s space age bachelor pad music. Great headphone music that gently grooves your bottom while closing your eyes and bobbing your head. This soundtrack is more of the same, and it is a ﬁtting way to get some crucial Air time until their next studio album hits. Intoxicating.

Stereolab Speaking of French, the dreamy lead singer of this electronic band burbles lazy streams of it as her bandmates string bloops and blips and rhythmic distortions into a velvet curtain behind her. Real ʻ60s Euro hipster vibe with an experimental edge that drives the listener. Challenging, but a beauty when itʼs dark outside and candles are burning inside. COUCHES ACROSS AMERICA TOUR DAIRY JUNE 12-16 (TAOS, NM) Taos Poetry Circus

Iʼm here in a little artsy town called Taos thatʼs upside Native American land, chilling with poets from across the country at a week- long festival known as the Taos Poetry Circus. Itʼs a weekʼs worth of poetry workshops and performances and slams that gets wrapped up with the mighty Heavyweight Poetry Bout pitting two big-league performance poets against each other in a ten-round match judged by audience members. The energy here is much more relaxed than at the National Poetry Slam, which tends to be intense and manic and really competitive, almost to the point of distaste, but the Circus is a smoother, quieter, leaner, and much more kicked back version. The sky here in New Mexico is just so huge, just so vast, so blue with a little biscuit of a wild white cloud tooling by with no hurries and no worries in the world. Iʼve been told by several New Mexicans that this state is known for its beautiful sky, and I can see why. It makes me feel like the wind can blow right through me and tickle my spine and catch leaves in my ribcage in a swirl. (Speaking of that, I saw American Beauty again the other night with some friends. Great flick. I love the scene with the white plastic bag floating in front of the brick wall.) Iʼve had a wonderful time in Taos, kicking it with people in the National scene Iʼve known for some time but have yet to really get to know. These aquaintances who Iʼve run into at slams all over the country but have never had a really long deep conversation with. Iʼve seen their work, theyʼve seen mine, but weʼve never really kicked it and bonded. We are all so widespread that it takes a big festival to bring us together, and each one of these big events like the Taos Poetry Circus or the National Poetry Slam or even South By Southwest in Austin, TX, ends up being a family reunion. One of the high points of Taos was climbing naked into a hot jacuzzi with seven or eight other naked slam poets in the backyard of someone we had just met and drinking wine straight from the bottle under the clear night sky and singing songs about Slam Duck, some odd character we had made up to be the official unofficial mascot of the National Poetry Slam, this greasy guy in a duck suit who smokes cigars and talks in a raspy New York voice who jumps on the stage in the middle of poetry slams to yell obscenities into the microphone, and every time someone gets scored a 10, Slam Duck would bend over and shoot a wad of feathers out of his ass with a big explosion. We sang loads of cheesy songs and replaced the choruses with Slam Duck references, such as, “Like a Slam Duck, kissed for the very first time, like a Slam Duck, feel your heartbeat next to mine...” Silly shit, but it was so funny for some reason, you know, that special reason that is so hard to explain to anyone who wasnʼt there, like all you have to do to crack us up is mention the word “Slam Duck,” and we would instantly fall on the floor and start wiggling around hysterically, but trying to explain that to someone who wasnʼt there just wouldnʼt do it... It was one of those most wonderful secrets that only people who were there can share, kinda like a look from an extremely close friend just as someone says something that has some kind of resonance that only you two know about, that one secret look that can slay the both of you and make you collapse into giggles but would be impossible to explain. The open slam was tight, a really amazing display of poetry and performance, and I kicked a bit of ass, too. I felt great and strong and vital and vibrant. I was really feeling like I was fine-tuned and lubed mentally and delivered my vibe smooth, just finessed that crowd with the soft skin on the back of my hand. There was this crowd of young poets from the local teen scene who I had bonded with in SF during the Teen Nationals, and they were so giving up the cheers for Big Poppa. (Every year, there is a National Teen Poetry Slam with 4-person teams of kids under 19. They were held in San Francisco in 2000, and I hosted some of the events and met some great kids in the process). These young poets would scream and jump and hoot and pump their fists in the air every time I was called to the stage. My homies, they had my back. They just erupted when I did Wussy Boy, just went nuts. It was almost embarassing, but hella cool. Even though I didnʼt win, I was within .6 of the top spot, and a lot of people came up to me and said that I had been robbed, that I had outperformed everyone on that stage. Whether itʼs true or not, or whether I believe it or not, it still was a caffeine injection of affirmation, you know, for folks to be crowding around me and asking to buy my book and telling me that I had been robbed. And Sonia, the poet from Austin who took the top spot, man, she just rocked, so itʼs all good that she won. She kicked ass. Itʼs easy to feel good about losing out by such a slim margin when the poet just .6 ahead of you kicks so much ass. Makes it easy to feel that no one lost at all. I came up with a plan, too, and I am so excited about it. I want to form a travelling circus of spoken word that relies on powerful performances and audience interaction without the competition and scoring and timing crap that can be so distracting to the art form. It would be sort of like Lollapallozza, only with poets instead of bands, and we would tour the campuses of this country doing our thang and giving workshops along the way. I was thinking I could use the name I used to use for my open mike reading from several years ago: Word Core. Oh, and I have been getting e-mails like crazy from people who listened to that radio show I did for that Australian radio station, remember the one where I was on my cell phone in my car? What a cool thing to think about, these cool kids in some country Iʼve never been getting all jazzed up about Wussy Boys. JUNE 18 (SAN FRANCISCO, CA) The San Francisco Poetry Slam Finals

I couldnʼt stay for the whole Taos Poetry Circus because I had to blaze across three states with a jet pack strapped to my ass to make the San Francisco Poetry Slam finals. This would be the big one, the poetry slam that gathered the top 16 performance poets in the Bay Area to battle it out toe-to-toe and determine the official San Francisco Poetry Slam Team that would hit the National Poetry Slam in Providence, R.I. I was on the SF Team in ʻ99 when we hit the National Slam in Chi- cago, and we ended up being the only undefeated team out of 48 teams. We tied for first place with the San Jose Team, and let me tell you, it was one of the high points of my whole life. (Check out Issue #2 for the whole scoop on the 1999 Nationals experience.) This SF Finals this year ended up being the toughest I had ever seen. The scene in the Bay Area has always been full of amazing poets, but the SF scene has experienced some kind of freak burst of growth in the past two years, and the scene has been flooded with incredible new talent. I hoped to do good enough to make the team again, but it would be tough. There were at least three in the running who had outscored me before, and I was gunning for them with my very best pieces. There were three rounds of poetry. After each round, the lowest few poets were dropped from the running, and the top poets went on to the next round. I had the second highest score out of 16 poets in the first round, so I was looking good. That is, until the second round when I was out-performed by these two new poets named Aya De Leon and Rene Van. They had been kicking much ass all year, and they pulled out all the stops in the second round. By the time we entered the third round, I was trailing by too far a margin to be a sure thing. In the third and final round, I was the last poet and was so far behind the top four spots that I knew I couldnʼt make the team. So, I just went with the poem I was feeling rather than the one that couldʼve scored highest: I busted out with my poem about Jen, my friend who died. It was tough... I wasnʼt ready to perform it yet, and I had tears streaming down my face by the time it was over. I ended up getting the second highest combined score of the night, but get this: There was a four-way tie for first place. How can you fuck with that magic, eh? The 2000 San Francsco Poetry Slam Team had two folks from last year (SeeKing and Ariana Waynes) and two new people who had been slamming for about a year (Aya DeLeon and Rene.) And me? I have my tour. Peace. Thereʼs always next year. JUNE 19 (LOS ANGELES, CA) Luna Sol Cafe

I hate L.A. I fucking hate it — I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! — and I would never in a hundred million years live there. If I had an opportunity to get a kick-ass job doing something that was purely fun and cool and fulfilling and paid me millions of dollars, but it was in L.A., I would reject it in favor of a job at a popsicle stand in Alaska in a heartbeat. A fucking heartbeat. Fuck L.A., and fuck the fucking Lakers, too. I hate them all. That is not to say that the people in L.A. are bad, no, because the folks I know there are good people with strong passions for poetry and performance. Itʼs just... fuck, I canʼt stand L.A. My pulse started to quicken the MOMENT I entered L.A. and tried to use my cell phone to call the venue for directions. Well, apparently cell phone fraud is so rampant in L.A. that travelling cell phone users arenʼt allowed to use their own goddamned phones until they leap through fiery rings of voice-activated hell in order to get a pass code first, confirming their identity by all kinds of probing, assinine questions as they blaze down I-5 at a blinding 2 mph bumper-to-bumper from Ventura to Hollywood, a trip that should only take 20 minutes but which took me nearly three fucking hours to complete, all the while trying to get this dim fucker on the end of the cell phone line to allow me to use my own fucking cell phone. You know what Iʼm talking about here, that place you go when your attitude gets so bad that the whole world is obviously out to fuck with you for no reason other than you are in Los Angeles and Los An- geles fucking hates you just as much as you fucking hate Los Angeles, all the spread out shopping center, strip mall, traffic jam, billboard infested, no cell phone having, mother fucking bumper to bumper inch of the place is genetically unable to prevent itself from fucking with you. Little old blue-haired ladies in Dirty Harry cars the size of naval Destroyers are all linked by infrared beams, whispering into digital walkie-talkies, “Here he comes, Iʼll pull in front of him and slam on my brakes for no apparent reason, then when he pulls out from behind me, you cut him off so he canʼt make his exit! Move, ladies, move!” People in front of you at Fatburger gaze open-mouthed and gap- toothed at the menu, going, “Uhhh... uhhh.... uhhhh....” and they are doing it on PURPOSE just to fuck with you and they do it for days and weeks and months as you stand there knowing exactly what you fucking want, yes, you want the fuck OUT OF LOS ANGELES!” And every fucking one of the self-serve machines at Kinkoʼs is a piece of shit that crumples your originals and spits out grey flecks of bullshit instead of crisp clear copies and then, and then, AND THEN some kind of something just happened and all kinds of fucking hooli- gans from Hollywood to Orange County are blazing down the street at a bzillion miles a fucking hour hooting and hollering and sticking their bodies outside their cars and pumping their arms and waving what look like Laker jerseys and Iʼm not knowing what the fuck this is all about — DAMN THAT FUCKER ALMOST HIT ME, THAT FUCKER WITH THE 40 IN ONE HAND AND THE STEERING WHEEL IN THE OTHER WITH THE GIRL WITH NOTHING COVERING HER NEKKID TORSO EXCEPT FOR RED PAINT LETTERS SHOUT- ING “GO LAKERS!” ACROSS HER SURGICALLY ENHANCED BOOBIES AND WAS THAT A GUNSHOT HOLY SHIT ARE THEY SHOOTING GUNS IN THE AIR? — and I donʼt know if this is some kind of bullshit L.A. gang riot Iʼm in the middle of or what, and Iʼm all pissed off and I hate L.A. and everyone of those fucking Los Angelenos is networking with every other Los Angeleno to make sure my life in LA is hell! By the time I got to the venue for a gig with this cool cat named Jerry Quickly, I was all pissed off and my stomach hurt and I was just about ready to cancel my hole tour and go home, and I was not surprised in the slightest when I told the guy who looked like the main guy that I was the feature for the evening and he said, and I quote, “Nope, sorry, we donʼt do features here, you gotta sign up on the list, and the list is already full so youʼre out luck. Get here earlier next time.” I put my throbbing head in my hands and cried. And the dude who told me this, he just looks at me, clucks his tongue, and says, “You ainʼt from around here, huh?” and he walks away laughing to himself. I FUCKING HATE L.A., EVERY SMOG-INFESTED INCH OF ITS ROTTEN FUCKING FUCKINʼ FUCK FUCKITY FUCK!!!! Once Jerry Quickly got there things got better, once I heard his huge, rolling laugh and saw his toothy smile, and heard him tell someone, “Fuck the motherfucking Lakers — punk ass bitches! — itʼs all about the Knicks and fuck motherfuckers who say any different!” Jerry is a legend in the poetry slam community. He was one of several performance poets paid $2000 each by Nike a few years ago to write original poetry for an ad campaign. The only rules were that it had to mention Nike, and it couldnʼt have obscenities. Well, Jerry, militant motherfucker that he is, wrote this anti-consumerism screed that busted Nikeʼs chops about Asian sweatshops and spreading unhealthy materialism among urban populations. It was relentless, and Nike, of course, was beyond pissed. They tried to yank the $2000 from Jerry, but Jerry sued them and forced the fuckers to pay him since he had followed their rules to the letter. Ha! He took The Manʼs money and fucked him at the same time. Jerryʼs cool, dude has hella flow, and when he hit the mike to get the reading started, he freestyled lyrical logic over flowing bass and DJ- fueled turntablist beats like nobodyʼs business. Dude is tight... You look up “Tight” in the dictionary, and there is Jerry Quicklyʼs photo, along with “See also entries for Bigger Than You, Cooler Than You, and Able to Leap Phat Rhythms With a Single Rhyme.” He jump-started what became a great open mike, then graciously hooked up me and my friend Eitan Kadosh with a co-feature for his crowd. Thank God Jerry Quickly is in Los Angeles, because really, without Jerry Quickly the whole fucking place can just kiss my ass. And Eitanʼs ass, too. Heʼs my boy. He was on the ʻ99 SF Poetry Slam Team with me last year, and we have all kinds of plans for world domination. We are going to be touring across the country with another Wussy poet friend of ours in Spring of ʻ01, hitting colleges and universities and spreading the word on Wussy Boys. Eitan is a high school teacher during the day, but a raving lunatic Jewish poet at gigs all over L.A. by night. He went out on tour just before I did with Couches Across America, and I got all kinds of advice from him before I hit the road. Good guy, Eitan. You should see us perform together. Itʼs a riot.

Eitan Kadosh, madman of poetry. JUNE 22 (LAS VEGAS, NV) Espresso Roma

Before I begin the twisted tale of “The Tropicana Orange Juice Bottle Debacle,” let me just say this: Dayvid Figler is Shaft incarnate, the pimp-stroll-walkinʼest, shmoove-move-talkinʼest, Huggy-Bear- stylinʼest, gettinʼ-the-job-doneʼest motherfu... “Hush yoʼ mouth!” Iʼm just talkinʼ ʻbout Dayvid Figler. Dayvid runs the poetry slam in Vegas by night and by day he is a kick ass defense attorney who knows everybody in the whole town and is constantly in the middle of some high profile trial, getting his picture in the local paper pointing angrily at the jury during some fiery speech. I knew Dayvid was cool and all, but little did I know that Dayvid Figler would the Pimp Daddy Supreme with Las Vegas shining on his pinkie finger like a diamond ring, with the rippling neon lights of the Las Vegas strip arranged to spell “Sweet Daddy D.” Dayvid walked into the Espresso Roma — no, he STALKED in — wearing foot-high platform boots with plexiglass heels filled with neon pink water and sporting rare Japanese albino goldfish, wearing glittery gold leopard skin stretch pants brazenly displaying the quick pulse of his throbbing “camel toe,” wearing nothing over his pumped-up hairy chest except for seven thick cords of gold chain each with a Mercedes medallion dangling on the tip just above his belly tattoo of a quill pen across his six-pack and the words “Poet Life” scrolled beneath, and wearing an impressive Filthy McNasty red velvet sombrero with tiny disco mirror dingleballs dangling from the rim that swayed to the beat of his AfroSheened head as he scanned the crowd for a slice of sweet potato pie on a stick. With a snap of his fingers, Dayvid Figler can make shit happen in Vegas, baby, he fucking OWNS Vegas! Even Wayne Newton canʼt get shit done in Vegas without Figlersʼ pinkie ring getting a light, quick kiss. You want some hookers and blow in Vegas, talk to Figler. You want some asshole Barnes and Noble manager taken for a ride in the lonely desert, talk to Figler. You need anything at all — a helicopter ride to Bolivia, a case of the finest aged Irish Whiskey, a red-line phone call straight to the fucking presidentʼs beeper — you need only talk to Dayvid Figler. Okay, actually, Dayvid is this scrawny Wussy Boy with a bald spot who kicks out the jams stand-up comedy stylie, but inside, deep inside, he is every bit the pimp I just described. Good guy. He hooked me up. And now, the The Tropicana Orange Juice Bottle Debacle. I was trying in vain to escape L.A. — fucking stagnant stupid L.A. — so I left two hours early to hit my Vegas gig. But, as you can guess, Los Angeles wasnʼt quite done FUCKING with me yet, so I sat mired in traffic for two long hours without moving an inch. By the time I finally hit Hwy 15 going north to Las Vegas, I was no longer two hours ahead of schedule but a full 45 minutes behind. I blazed down the highway going as fast as my Toyota could carry me, listening to Bjork on my headphones and drinking warm Tropicana orange juice. And so, yeah, two hours goes by, and I am still blazing down the highway, and I have to pitch a whizz, but there is no way Iʼm stopping to do this, no, because I am already hella late and have already called Dayvid on the cell phone to tell him that Iʼm late (and he was not happy... you do not want to piss Dayvid Figler off because he can revoke your Vegas privileges with a snap of his finger, baby). I decide itʼs time to refill that warm, sticky Tropicana orange juice bottle with a new warmer version of what had once filled it. Iʼve done this before, no worries, no problem, Iʼve had plenty of roadtrips to perfect the Truckerʼs Piss Cup Routine, only this time the Tropicana orange juice bottle was a little on the small side, certainly not the roomie wide mouth that Gatorade bottles offer that seem especially made for this sort of trick. As I kicked it down the highway listening to Bjork, I kinda had to stuff Little Poppa E into the hot, sticky hole of the Tropi- cana orange juice bottle, just kinda poke him in there with the tip of my thumb while trying to drive at the same time. And, okay, it was looking good, homeboy was crammed in there and heʼs doing his business and Iʼm listening to Bjork — and God, can anyone NOT get a little aroused at her voice, I mean really, can anyone listen to Army of Me without getting a little tingly? So, yeah, my weiner is in the Tropicana orange juice bottle and Iʼm listening to Bjork and things start to get a bit crowded inside the bottle, you know, itʼs all hot and moist in there, and before you know it, I have a real problem because Little Poppa E is rapidly becoming Medium Poppa E and is fast on his way to becoming Super Size with Fries Poppa E, and I am officially stuck in the Tropicana orange juice bottle, which is also now full of warm piss, and Iʼm driving down Hwy 15 at 90 mph with the wind blowing so hard that I am swerving a bit as I yank and pull and try with all my might to remove this Tropicana orange juice bottle from my dick...... and who should pull up behind me with lights flashing but a cop. (An eerily similar scenario has happened to me before, with a McDonaldʼs cup and a Texas State Trooper some years ago.) And I am full-on panicking as I pull over and watch this cop stalk toward me in my rearview mirror, frantically tugging in vain and trying to free my imprisoned manhood like a genie is a piss bottle. And itʼs not working because itʼs too goddamned sticky in there, and the piss is all sloshing around and getting everything yucky, and Iʼm pulling and pulling and yanking and yanking AND DEAR LORD THERE HE IS THE COP RIGHT AT THE TAIL GATE OF MY TRUCK! So, I grab my back pack and put in on my lap just as the cop taps on the passenger side window with his leather-gloved hand. I roll down the window and meekly ask the officer if I can help him with anything. Heʼs a young guy, this cop, young and relatively cool looking, not at all the evil hick sheriff character from movies, but heʼs looking at me kinda skeptical. He takes off his mirrored cop specs and says, “You were swerving quite a bit back there. Have you been drinking?” I say no, in fact, I donʼt drink at all. Nope, not me, nothing but orange juice for me. He looks at me, purses his lips, and says, “Whatcha listening to on the headphones there? You know youʼre not supposed to listen to headphones and drive in the state of Nevada, right?” I say no, I didnʼt know that, and tell him I was listening to Bjork. “Oh, Bjork, right on! I love Bjork! My girlfriend and I saw her just a few years ago during the Homogenic tour. Which album are you listening to?” I tell him Post. (Remember, as we have this seemingly innocuous conversation at the side of the road, my dick is stuck in a Tropicana orange juice bottle being hidden by my backpack in my lap, and I am practically crying with shame and grief.) “Oh, Post, thatʼs a fucking amazing album! I love Army of Me, fucking excellent song, man.” I tell him I feel the same. About this time, he seems to notice two things: 1] I am very uncomfortable talking to him; and 2] I have a backpack in my lap. He looks down at my backpack, looks Checking the ʻPackage of Love and Devotionʼ for at me staring back any traces of Tropicana orange juice. at him wide-eyed and sweating, and he steps back just a bit from the window, puts his hand on the grip of his gun, and says, “Whatcha got in the backpack?” I freeze. He steps back another step from my window and flicks the leather guard snap thingie that holds his revolver in place. He says it again, more forcefully this time, “What is in your backpack?ʼ And I cave in, I tell him everything, I tell him that I am a travelling poet driving from coffeehouse to coffeehouse performing my poetry and I hate L.A. and I am late for my gig in Vegas and I had to pee and, and... and officer, my dick is stuck in a Tropicana orange juice bottle, which is hidden by the backpack to which you are referring, sir. And you should see the cop, he is just laughing his ass off, just leaning his head on the frame of the passenger side door and rolling his forehead back and forth and giggling like he canʼt wait to share this story with the guys back at headquarters, and he raises his head and says, “A poet, huh? You got books? Let me check one out.” I reach into my backpack, still on my lap hiding the Tropicana orange juice bottle on my dick, and I hand him a copy my chapbook. And the cop takes one look at it and says, and I quote, “Holy shit! Youʼre Big Poppa E! My girlfriend and I just saw you a week ago in Tempe, Arizona, at some place near the college! I was visiting my girlfriend over the weekend and, holy shit, you kicked ass man! I canʼt believe this, I pulled over Big Poppa E and heʼs got his dick stuck in a Tropicana orange juice bottle! Wow! Can I buy a book off you, man? I meant to get one the other day, but we didnʼt have any cash.” I just swallow really hard and tell the cop he can have a copy for free. No charge. Enjoy. And then he let me go, laughing and cautioning me against throwing the Tropi- cana orange juice bottle out the window and onto the Nevada desert floor once I freed myself. I got into Vegas about five minutes late, and Dayvid Figler introduced me, and I dished out a 45 minute set of poetry and stories, including the one about the Tropicana Orange Juice Bottle Debacle. Figler hooked me up with two nights in the Stardust hotel. I saw the amazing Blue Man Group at the Luxor. I took long hot baths in the hotel tub. And then I bailed for San Diego. JUNE 25 (SAN DIEGO, CA) Thee Word Rave

Thereʼs this cat I know named Lob. Heʼs told me his given name in the years since I first met him, but Iʼve forgotten it. He is just Lob, and Lob has been organizing some of the best poetry readings in Southern California forever. I first met Lob at a reading I did in Hollywood in late ʻ95, this big reading in the Bova Art Gallery featuring poets affiliated with a spoken word zine called Next. It ended up being my big introduction to many of the movers and shakers in the L.A. scene, and I have been friends with many of them ever since. Lob was in the audience that night, hiding his waist-length hair by twisting it into yard-long pony tail and covering his head with a tweed English driving cap. He and I have been in contact on a regular basis over the years, and every once in a while he convinces me to drive back to L.A. for a special gig or two. His very best gigs are his Word Rave shows, which are exactly like they sound, raves with words rather than techno. He puts out the word underground stylie via handbills and e-mails, just like a rave, then fills someoneʼs living room with the loudest, drunkest, smokingest poetry hounds in all of SoCal. One of my most laid back gigs this whole tour was Thee Word Rave that Lob organized in San Diego during my tour. Yet another family reunion in a long series of reunions for me, kicking it with folks who have been sharing poetry with me since I started way back in ʻ92.

Word Ravers go, “BOOM!” (Lob is in the back, beside the biggest devil sign, which is being thrown by Charles Ardinger.) JUNE 28 (COSTA MESA, CA) Club Mesa

I walk into this club, see, this ratty club in a scary part of a town called Costa Mesa, and the place is empty, just devoid of anyone and anything except for the gangster looking dudes in the El Caminos in the parking lot, angry looking dudes in baggy pants with bandanas in their pockets and around their heads, dudes hanging outside the liquor store in the same strip mall as the club Iʼm scheduled to perform in this dark, dismal, sticky night. The last time I performed here at Club Mesa, exactly four people showed up for the gig I had driven nine and a half hours for. I swore walking into this empty bar that I would kick the ass of the guy who promoted it, this cat named Lob Iʼve known ever since I started doing poetry, I swore under my breath that I would kick his punk ass this time if only four people showed up, and here it is, no one in the bar, and the show is about to start in about 15 minutes. Fuck. I hate that shit. I was in a burnt out attitude already and was already blaming L.A. for it, and even though Costa Mesa is not L.A., I was still blaming Costa Mesaʼs proximity to L.A. for the lack of asses in the seats, not to mention Lobʼs non-promotinʼ ass. Even when the chairs started being filled and the band started kicking ass and energy started being created by the rubbing of elbows and it became obvious that Lob has done a great job promoting this gig, I was still determined to be in a grouchy bad mood because...... well, fuck, this whole tour thing is exhausting, to be honest, and itʼs making me yearn for some kind of permanence in my life, permanence or... at least some kind of stability. I have been feeling that this whole trip is some kind of lesson for me, that this tourʼs moving from place to place and couch to couch and crush to crush is just some distilled and concentrated version of my life in the last ten years, like this trip is lifeʼs way of showing me right in my face how Iʼve been living my life like some kind of fucking emotional nomad ever since I was 24, moving all the time and never sticking in one spot long enough to put down roots... “...and I ainʼt in the mood for fucking lessons right now, man, this whole trip has just been one painful fucking lesson after another, spending all my fucking time with myself musing about “what it all means” and Iʼm fucking tired of this shit and I thought this tour was going to be footloose and fancy free fun rock star routine stuff and...” So, thatʼs my frame of mind, see, when I hit the stage at Club Mesa, which, at this point, is packed with all kinds of people, mostly people I know, people who have been following my stuff since I first stepped into Los Angeles for my first open mike all those years ago, people like G. Murray Thomas and Victor Infante and Mindi Nettifee. (I started hitting the L.A. venues while I was still living in my shitty hometown of Bakersfield, around ʻ93, getting a truckload of local poets together and showing up at readings to check out the vibe.) Anyway, I hit the stage in a bad mood feeling like this whole trip was some kind of wierd series of lessons that I didnʼt want to learn, and I hit the stage in the mood to fuck with the audience by not doing any poetry whatsover, because fuck poetry, I ainʼt in the mood for fucking poetry any more, fuck it... I hit the stage and say quietly, “This is a piece called ʻHiding in Plain Sight.ʼ” Then I hid my face with my hands and stood there silently for three minutes as the audience members wriggled in their seats and looked at each other for confirmation that I was just standing there covering my face in my hands. I wanted them all to hate me and think I was some pretentious asshole fucking with them, but, true to Or- ange County audiences, they heckled proudly, saying silly things like, “Whereʼs Big Poppa? Whereʼs Big Poppa? Is a-Big Poppa a-hiding? Where didʼums go?” Thereʼs this cat here named Charles Ardinger, a fedora and bow tie kinda guy whoʼs always down with heckling, the good kind of heckling that adds to the performance and is given as a reward rather than a degrading attack on the performer. He led the audience in a series of heckles that made my chest quiver with the stress of trying not to laugh, trying to hold onto this bad mood no matter what. I uncovered my face and said thank you and the audience applauded heartily. I then said, “And now Iʼd like to do a piece called ʻLying on the Ground Pretending to be Asleep for Exactly Nine Minutes and 37 Seconds.ʼ” And when I pulled out my stopwatch from my pocket and clicked it, then laid down on the ground, the audience roared with laughter and started throwing things at me, tossing rolled up napkins and plastic cups and shouting Monty Python epithets. Ardinger then led the crowd into campfire songs, touching upon “Kumbaya” and “Little Bunny Foofoo,” as I laid there and checked the stopwatch every few moments. After about four minutes, I stood up and said, “Well, Iʼm not quite finished with that poem yet, so Iʼll come back to it later.” Again, hoots and howls of laughter. I went into the next piece: “All the Zʼs in the Orange County Phone Book.” And yes, thatʼs what I read, all the Zʼs in the white pages. And what started as a misguided “Fuck You!” to the crowd ended up being a helluva good time, testing the audienceʼs endurance and being greeted with a rollicking good example of heckling at its best, a show where the audience was every bit as much a part of the show as the so-called performer. I then read a long short story I had written called “The Butt Trip- lets,” again with this testing of the audienceʼs endurance, but by this time I was taken in by the audienceʼs good vibe, this showing of love for a good friend whether he wanted it or not, and the reading was full of spontaneous catch phrases and heckles that floored the audience, such as when I meant to say I was “King of the Four Square Court” when I was a kid, but instead I said “Queen of the Four Square Court,” and everyone hooted and hollered and Oooooh-ed that one, as if it were some Freudian slip, then I encouraged it by describing myself as an 8-year-old four square champ wearing a pink dress and a tiara with high healed Chuck Taylors with little pink bows. And when I showed the audience my classic four square stance, someone made a sound like a Sumo Wrestler, and that was it, every time I made some mention in the story about playing four square, someone made the Sumo wrestler noise. A hoot, just a hoot, and when it was over and someone named Hope Alvarado demanded “real poetry,” I marched over to her and immediately gave her a lap dance, rubbing my sweaty hairy chest and pinching my nipples and humping her leg like a dog in heat, and she was just SCREAMING with laughter, trying to swat at me like a fly. It was all just so silly and somehow freeing. The show ended and the crowd began to thin, and two guys came up to me and told me they had seen me perform in SF during the SF Poetry Slam Finals, and they had come back to Los Angeles right afterwards to return home. A friend of theirs had told them I was performing in Costa Mesa, so they drove all the way from where they lived just to see me tonight. They thanked me for what they said was, “The most fun weʼve had in a long time.” As they walked away, I suppose I smiled a bit, thinking about my bad attitude at the beginning of the show, and I thought of something Deborah Edler Brown told me just a few days before. She said whenever she comes to a show with a tiny amount of people, she always psyches herself out by thinking that if she can reach only one person and touch that one person and have that one person leave the reading a slightly better person for having heard her words, then the reading was a complete success. Well, despite my worst intentions, this reading was another in a series of successes on this tour. Thereʼs a lesson in there, Iʼm sure. JUNE 29 (LOS ANGELES, CA) (Hanging with Eitan Kadosh)

Devo saved my life. Those red domed hats, those yellow hazmat suits, those guitars and synths, those canned beats and skewed views on society, those fucked up weird videos, kick ass Dork Core songs like “Weʼre Through Being Cool” and “Girl U Want” and “Swelling Itching Brain.” These boyos from Akron, Ohio, were my first glimpse at life outside the lines surrounding me in Bakersfield, CA, a crummy little redneck town full of tumbleweeds and The Scorpions, dirt fields and Def Leppard, strip malls and Rush. When a high school friend of mine handed me a dubbed cassette with Devoʼs “Duty Now For the Future” on one side and “Only a Lad” by Oingo Boingo on the other, everything changed. I cut my hair into something called a “crop top” — a style favored by the cooler-than- thou skater punks at the time given to me by the charming barbers at Chop Mop Shop — and I stopped listening to Rush and Triumph and Styx and started listening to Depeche Mode and The Smiths and Tears For Fears. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, I even stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons and started dating (gulp) girls. Devo saved me from a life of shame and frustration. Their Dork Core music taught me that you didnʼt have to be “cool” to be cool, you could be a misfit outcast dweeb and still get your groove on if you only embraced yourself and were proud of what you found. Devo proved you could wear thick black glasses and have dorky hair and have girls think you were lame and still find strength in yourself and rock out, which in turn made the girls think you really werenʼt all that lame after all, no, you were actually kinda cool in your own dorky way. The boys in Devo didnʼt let their dorkiness get in the way of hitting the stage and rocking out, and they ended up paving the way for every fey synth band in England (a dubious honor, but a necessary boon for the spawning of Wussy Boys) and every industrial band from Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson. To this day, even though Iʼve moved on in my musical tastes, I worship the hallowed ground Devo rocked on, never hitting the roadtrip highway without my precious and worn Eirikʼs Favorite Devo Hits mix tape. That tape is so ate up it barely works anymore, but the songs are as strong as they ever were, rocking tracks like Red Eye Express and Jerking Back and Forth and Whip It, and perhaps the tightest, best, most kick-ass song of the entire Devo catalogue — Going Under, from their magnum opus fourth album New Traditionalists. Why do I mention this? Why go into way too much detail about my high school fixation with Devo, a band at the back of pop cultureʼs collective mind since the mid-ʼ80s, a band whose music has been rel- egated to scattered cuts on Greatest New Wave Hits of the ʼ80s compilations? Well... the guys from Devo never stopped working, you see, they just went into other areas, like soundtracks and multimedia and videos. You know the kidʼs show Rugrats? Devoʼs Mark Mothersbaugh did that, plus he did the soundtracks for Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. Gerry Casale never stopped directing videos (he did all 20 of Devoʼs), he just started doing them for other people, like The Foo Fighters and The Cars and my favorite Canadian singer in the whole wide world Jane Siberry. Peace. I get this e-mail, see, from some guy in San Francisco who says he saw me perform at the San Francisco Poetry Slam Finals, the show where I came in fifth behind four of the finest performances I had ever seen. This guy says heʼs working with Devo, and he says heʼs talked to Devo about my Wussy Boy Manifesto poem, and he says that Devo is interested in putting a Shockwave-animated version of my poem on their Club Devo website. I almost passed out when I read that e-mail, then I re-read it and read it again for clarity, then I replied with this simple affirmation: “Sure. Sounds good. Letʼs do it.” A couple of days go by, and Iʼm hanging out with Eitan Kadosh down in Los Angeles, having done a weekʼs worth great gigs in SoCal, and I get this phone call on my cell from someone named Gerry. I say, “Oh, Gerry who?” And the guy on the other end says, “Gerry Casale, from Devo.” Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let it be know that most people would recognize the lead singer of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, in about a fraction of a second. Heʼs the guy with the thick-framed black glasses who sang “Whip It.” The guy they would recognize a second after that would be Gerald V. Casale, the bass player and second lead singer, the guy who wrote a lot of their very best songs. I just gulped and said, “Oh, hi Gerry, how are you?” (And thought to myself, “Oh my God, I just said ʻHi!ʼ to Devo! Oh my God, I just called Gerald V. Casale ʻGerry!ʼ”) We talked for a bit about the concept begind the Shockwave version of Wussy Boy, then we made plans to meet near the Hollywood offices of Mutato Muzika, the company created by Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale that scores movies and creates computer games and acts as homebase for all things Devo in the new millenium. He tells me to meet him at this place that sells wine called The Wine House. I ask him how I can tell who he is. He say, and I quote, “Iʼll be the one in the orange suit.” How fucking Devo is that? Iʼll be the one in the orange suit! Holy shit, after all these years heʼs still so fucking Devo it hurts! And we met, and I gave Gerald V. Casale (“Gerry to his friends”) a copy of my chapbook, made small talk as he bought a big-assed case of wine, and shook his hand as we said goodbye... (...”oh my GAWD, I just shook Devoʼs hand!”) The whole thing didnʼt last more than a few minutes, but my God... I met Devo! Devo wants to animate “Wussy Boy” and put it on their Club Devo site on the Internet!

This shit is getting hella sureal...

Thatʼs Gerald V. Casale, ʻGerryʼ to his friends.

Are we not men? We are WUSSY! JULY 4 (SEATTLE, WA) Gabrielle Boulliane’s Apartment

I had a horrible dream yesterday. I was in some Nazi prison camp, some horrid place in a bombed- out part of Poland that stunk of ovens and mud, some evil craggy landscape of darkness and dispair. I was in the sterile office of some Nazi commander who was talking with his cronies about a new idea he had come up with for a torture device that was portable, a motorized horror chamber on wheels that could be moved from place to place to inflict the most damage possible on whatever population the Nazis felt needed it. It would be a long box on wheels, rather like a box car only with individual torture devices to hold each of the victims on board. Each torture chair would be narrow and painful to sit on, and leg room would be reduced to a knee-crunching minimum. The cool thing about these torture chairs was that they would at first feel kinda comfortable and not that bad at all, which would lull the victims into a false state of re- laxation, but after 12 long hours of being carted around in the moveable torture chamber, the back of each victim would ache, their necks would throb, their knees would scream, the veins in their foreheads would bulge and quiver, they would beg for mercy yet the torture device would continue on. In the very rear of the travelling torture device would be a small room that would serve as “the hole” for any victim needing extra pain and suffering, a tiny room with an open cesspool of human waste sloshing around and spewing filth all over the victim as the torture chamber picked up and dropped off victims on its road of degradation and humiliation. The Nazi with the big idea smiled and said, “I shall call it a Greyhound Bus, and I plan on dispatching these modern horrors across America. And the best part of this whole plan is this: people will actually PAY us money to get on board.” And with that I woke up to the sound of grunting, some kind of inhuman snuffling, honking sound, and I opened my eyes and looked into the fat shoulder of the person sitting next to me, this enormous bulk of a man in a sweaty polyester skin-tight shirt with scenes of famous cities across Europe, little postcard shots of the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the clock tower of Big Ben. I looked up just in time to see my cellmate honk another great green wog into his yellow Wendyʼs napkin, after which he spread open

the napkin to inspect the loaf of throat yolk he had just shot from his nose. If he had looked at me then offered me a view of the greasy loo- gie in his napkin with a friendly smile, I would not have been surprised in the slightest. Welcome to hell, otherwise known as 12 long hours on a Grey- hound bus packed with people youʼd normally not see unless you were standing in line at the DMV or at the office of some parole agent. I had just dropped off my truck to my best friendʼs house in Redding, CA, and was three hours into this trip to Seattle, and already I had a fat headache from breathing Funk Boyʼs nasty armpit stank fumes and being pressed hard into the window of the bus by his bulky chunk of moist shoulder meat. The first leg of my trip is over, the leg where I packed all the important stuff into my pickup truck and travelled across the South-West- ern USA performing poetry. From now on, I will be getting from point A to point B via bus, so I had to distill my entire life for the next three months and pack it into what I could carry on my back and in my arms. This is what I brought with me to get me through three months on the road: 1] A BACKPACK Contents: Master copies of my last four chapbooks; my press kit; 80 head shots; my journal; five Uni-Ball Gel Impact pens, which, really, are the ONLY pens I EVER use because they kick so much ass; a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris; a copy of A Heartbreak- ing Work of Staggering Genius, by David Eggers, a copy of Born of a Woman, by Etheridge Knight; my kick ass stapler with the swing- around arm that makes everyone say, “Ooh, kick ass stapler!”; my Col- gate toothbrush and my Tomʼs of Maine toothpaste and my deodorant made of a solid chunk of mineral salts; my electronic phone book; my cell phone; $2.57 in change strewn across the bottom of the backpack. Attached to the outside of the backpack is my favorite feather pillow with the soft flannel pillow case. 2] A DUFFLEBAG Contents: ten T-shirts, mostly black, mostly swag from the SXSW Festival; my favorite pair of baggy jeans; two pairs of baggy shorts that are almost long enough to be pants; my brand new pair of orange “raver” pants with lots of pockets all over the place (Eitan Kadosh has a pair just like them); six pairs of socks; one pair of flannel jammies; my little stuffed panda named “Poetri” that I got at the 1999 Western Regionals in Big Sur and named after one of my favorite poets from Los Angeles. 3] A SXSW TOTE BAG Contents: Walkman cassette player with AM/FM stereo; headphones; portable CD player; Poloroid JoyCam instant camera; portable alarm clock with Indiglo nitelite; stopwatch; a two-CD compilation from Ninja Tunes; the audiobook version of “Little Altars Everywhere,” by Rebecca Wells; my atlas of the USA. Note: My CD collection wouldʼve been with me, too, had I not been bewitched by Lydia in OKC into loaning my entire collection to her over the summer. What a maroon... 4] A KINKOʼS BOX Contents: 100 copies of my latest chapbook, “The Wussy Boy Manifesto;” 20 copies each of the first three issues of “The Wussy Boy Chronicles;” 1,257 stickers with my website on them and provocative statements like “Pretend youʼre happy so no one gets uncomfortable” and “Boys are yucky” and “Your parents are disapponted” on them. This should get me through the next three months. This should get me through the next three months. God, let this get me through the next three months. As for Seattle, I am loving it so far. I went to a party at Gabrielle Boullianeʼs pad and hung out with cool folks like Paula Friedrich and Allison Durazzi and Coy King and Nancy Depper and a bunch of other equally cool people, then we all went and watched fireworks. I will be getting on board the Slam America Bus on the morning of July 10 and heading down to Portland, but until then I will chill in Jet City, baby, checking out the place I almost surely will be calling home once this tour ends...... unless, of course, Eitan and I decide to tour Australia.

Australia is... that-a-way. JULY 5 (SEATTLE, WA) Dutch Ned’s Bar

I just read somewhere that... (Well, okay, I didnʼt read this, really, but I heard someone telling someone else that they had read this.) Anyway, I read that Barnes and Noble claims that poetry accounts for less than 1% of its total sales. This, apparently, is why the poetry section is so very small in most major chain bookstores across America: Thereʼs no money it it since people donʼt buy poetry, so thereʼs no point in wasting good shelf space on something that people wonʼt buy, unless, of course, itʼs National Poetry Month, then theyʼll dust off the Beats and place them in window shelves, just they like they do for Afri- can-American authors during Black History Month, etc. You know, I see that “Poetry = Less Than 1%” thing, and I look at it as an opportunity, to be honest. It is obvious that mainstream publishing houses are NOT going to help us get our poetry out. We can sit around all day sending out poetry and sending out poetry and sending out poetry hoping to get published, hoping to get into enough legit lit mags, hoping after 25 years of sending stuff out that some kind publisher will recognize our greatness and publish a retrospective of our lifeʼs work. Fuck that. Poetry = Less Than 1% motivates me to realize that it ainʼt going to happen, that we have to strike out on our own and make our own fan base, take our poetry directly to the people punk rock style, make our own CDs and T-shirts and stickers and books and such, take them in the back of the van and get mobile. My goal is to sell so many fucking books on my own that some publishing company comes to ME, rather than me bowing and scraping and begging them for recognition. They will come to US if we create a fan base large enough to change that percentage. Thatʼs what I see as the point behind Slam, taking it upon ourselves to change the tastes of the American public so much that ﬁnally the less than 1% will rise to something high enough to compete with mysteries and romance novels... I want to see young college students going to the beach with a slam poetry collection under their arm! Teachers throwing out their dusty textbooks and teaching with the latest R. Eirik Ott collection! Wussies everywhere reading the Wussy Boy Chronicles! Let major mainstream bookstores register their pitiful Poetry = Less than 1%, baby, let them ignore poetry. Meanwhile, I sell 100% of the books I print and can barely keep up with the demand. Fuck Barnes and Noble. Long live Kinkoʼs! JULY 9 (SEATTLE, WA) SlamAmerica Bus Tour Begins

I am moving to Seattle. Itʼs official. The people kick ass. The public transportation system rocks. The apartments are WAY more afford- able than SF or NYC. Good music, great weather (and yes I LOVE the rain, although now itʼs beautiful and clear)... Yup, after the tour is over, Seattle will be my new home base. Last nightʼs show was terrific, a little open mike in some little coffeehouse called Four Angels, and then we all went to some cafe on Broadway called Minnieʼs afterwards and talked into the wee hours. The slam the night before was good, too, but I was out of sorts for some reason and didnʼt feel like I nailed it. Still a good show, but I had lots of internal dialogue about how I couldʼve been more centered and given more of myself. So much drama in the back of mind... Oh gosh, if yʼall only knew... Thank God the other Seattle poets rocked. Buddy Wakefield is a Goddess, as is Sean and Max and Gabrielle and all the rest. Their team is fucking tight. Watch out, yaʼll! Anyway, yeah, rather than go on and on about how much I am loving Seattle, I want to tell a story that I left out of my coverage of the 1999 National Poetry Slam (in Issue #2.) Listen: Last yearʼs San Francisco Poetry Slam Team almost couldnʼt make their first nightʼs preliminary bout because two of its members had been thrown into jail the night before. Take a wild guess who one of those SF Team members was? The SF Team had just arrived in Chicago on Tuesday, and we dumped off our gear at the Heart of Chicago Hotel and took a taxi to pick up our teammate Eitan Kadosh so we could all hit a Cubʼs game at Wrigley Field. Part of our team fund was used to buy everyone Cub- bieʼs tickets, and we were all excited that weʼd have a chance to nosh a foot-long and wash it down with cold light beer in a plastic cup while watching a real live Chicago Cubs baseball game. (I had never ever been to a major league game. Yeah, Iʼm a Wuss.) So, picture us walking down the sidewalk toward the stadium, me and Ariana Waynes and SeeKing and Charles Ellik just enjoying the sunshine and the fact that we were safe in Chicago and about to watch the cubbies. We had been in Chicago exactly 15 minutes. As we walked across the sidewalk, we came upon something that put the seed of an idea in our heads, although at the time we didnʼt even know it. We passed by a stretch of sidewalk with the impressions of leaves pressed into the surface of the cement, and I clearly remember both SeeKing and I marvelling at how pretty they looked, especially with the shadows of the tree limbs overhead swaying across the face of the sidewalk. Well, we turn the corner and suddenly, there in front of us, is a stretch of the sweetest fresh cement sidewalk you could ever hope to see, and without a word SeeKing and I look at each other, smile big, and race over to the cement, looking along the way for something to write our names with. And we did it, we knealed down and took pieces of broken popsicle sticks in hand and began writing our names. SeeKing managed to get all the way to “SEEK” when suddenly... “Hey, what the fuck are you guys doing, huh?” Someone is yelling at us. We turn to see some guy, some knucklehead sticking his head out of a white car, and heʼs yelling at us to stop fucking around and stop writing our names in the cement. SeeKing and I look at each other, shrug our shoulders, and resume work on our names in the cement. Big mistake. The guy screams, “Son of a BITCH!” and climbs out of his car and marches toward us just as we notice two things: 1] The guy who we assumed was just some asshole with an attitude is wearing a bullet proof vest with a big-assed holster on his hip filled to the brim with a big-assed gun; 2] The building across the street proudly proclaims itself to be none other than “The 12th Precinct of the Chicago Police Department.” Of all the stretches of wet cement we couldʼve chosen to decorate with our names, we had to pick one across the street from the fucking Chicago Police Deparment, and of all the people we couldʼve shrugged off as we committed vandalism, we had to pick a pissed off Chicago cop with a bullet-proof vest and a big-assed gun on his hip. I think itʼs safe to say that both SeeKing and I just about shit our pants when these realizations hit home. Just to recap: SeeKing is black, I am white. And the cop is just beside himself with anger at our arrogance, and he marches over to us... and snatches SeeKing up and throws him up against the hood of the white car. Meanwhile, I am staring at SeeKing getting cuffed behind his back and watching as two cop cars screeeech to a halt beside the white car and several other cops storm out of the big glass doors of the police station across the street. And Iʼm standing there, watching as SeeKing is getting yelled at by this cop. And Iʼm standing there, wondering, “Why am I still standing here while SeeKing gets cuffed and dragged away?” And it hits me that maybe the cop hadnʼt even seen me, that maybe he had only seen SeeKing there by the cement writing his name in the sidewalk, maybe he wasnʼt even going to come over to me and yell at me, too... And I couldnʼt let that happen, I couldnʼt let SeeKing be hauled away while I just stood there with a popsicle stick in my hand covered in cement, so I walked over to the cop and offered him my wrists. “Oh, you want some, too, huh? Well, fine!” He cuffed me to SeeKing and led us off into the police station across the street as Charles and Ariana just stood there with their mouths open, like, “Holy shit, Eirik and SeeKing just got arrested... What do we do now? Holy shit! Holy shit!” And BOOM the doors closed behind us and we were led to a hot, stuffy waiting room packed with people hand-cuffed to a rail bolted to the wall. We were never read our rights, we were never told what we were being charged with, we were just tossed into this room and shackled to a rail on the wall and left to wonder what would happen. We waited there for four hours, just sitting there as the room filled with more and more people. Apparently, this was the worst day in recent memory to be arrested because this particular precinct was doing some kind of sting operation on Cubsʼ ticket scalpers, and they had nabbed an awful lot of people who then had to watch the game from the little color teevee bolted into the wall overhead. After about two hours, I finally got the nerve to ask one of the cops what was going to happen to us. The cop lifted his head from his paperwork, looked at me, then tilted his head toward SeeKing and said, and I quote, “Why donʼt you ask your friend there what happens next. Iʼm sure he can tell you.” I am not kidding, he actually said this, and SeeKing and I looked at each other and didnʼt say a word, just gazed into each otherʼs eyes and felt the gravity of this situation. After about an hour more, SeeKing pokes me in the ribs with his elbow and motions over to a wall across the room with his head. There on the wall in a frame is a newspaper column with a title that goes something like, “Yes, I am the cop who arrests so many black people and this is why.” The writer of the piece was mocking assertions that police in Chicago or anywhere else for that matter arrest more black people than any other kind of people. The argument basically was that if black people didnʼt commit so many crimes, then maybe not so many black people would be arrested. It was like an HBO special or something, man, I had never witnessed this kind of thing before. And the cops, they were cool with this, they FRAMED that shit and put it on the wall. And when some cop looked at the female newscaster on the teevee and said something like, “Man, Iʼd fuck her in a second,” it was like I was back in the navy all over again, only this time I was shackled to a rail on the wall waiting to be booked by racist sexist asshole cops who held our lives in their hands. (Yeah, Iʼm being dramatic, but it was scary to think that these cops who were supposed to protect society were racist assholes who could do to us ANYTHING they wanted.) When our paperwork finally is handed to us, the cop gives me mine without saying a word, but before he gives SeeKing his paperwork, he says, “How many times have you been arrested before?” Not HAVE you been arrested before, but HOW MANY TIMES. SeeKing just softly said, “I am a high school teacher. I have never been arrested. I teach.” The cop was unimpressed and said that he was going to check our records on the computer so he could tell if we had been arrested before, so weʼd better not lie. Fuckers. Once we were processed and fingerprinted and booked, we were finally led downstairs to a dank cell with no light and only two slabs of metal bolted to the wall... no pillows, no mattresses, nothing but a slab of metal with big holes drilled out of it. One of the slabs was taken by some greasy scary looking guy who kept yelling prison lingo epithets to other yelling people in the lock up area, and he kept telling us that he was HIV-positive and would spit in the eyes of any fucking fucker motherfucking asshole fucking bitch fucker who crossed him, the motherfucking mother fucker, and that piece of shit mother fucker would deserve to die for fucking with him. Picture me and Seeking sitting cross-legged on the slab of metal looking at each other with big eyes and totally on the edge of freaking out. The asshole cop who arrested us said that we might have to see the judge in the morning, and he stressed that we had a good chance of getting thrown back in jail with bail on our heads until we got arraigned a few days later. That would mean no Nationals for us. Our places would have to be filled with Charles Ellik, our roadie/manager, and...who? Someone else who was in our crew... Again, we were never given our rights, never offered a phone call, never told what we were being charged with, only that we were going to see a judge the next morning who would probably throw us back in jail. It was looking grim, and fucker boy was yelling and screaching like a cat in water about all the fucking motherfuckers who had eyes worthy of spitting in. SeeKing and I played 20 questions, and waited. We got up and practiced our poetry, performing every poem we knew in voices as loud as we could make them, and we waited. We ate bologna sandwiches on white bread, and we waited. We tried to sleep, each of us lying at opposite end of the metal slab and curling our bodies into complimentary shapes, faced in opposite direction so our legs would be at each otherʼs backs, our butts almost touching, like yin-yangs curled up fetus-style. We sat there for 12 hours, and we waited. Finally, at about 10 p.m. or so, a cop came and led SeeKing away, followed by a cop about 15 minutes later who led me away. We were processed again, asked more questions, told more things, and handed our official paperwork with our court dates and an admonition that if we didnʼt show up to court in a month, we would be fined $1,000. And finally, 12 hours and 15 minutes after we had arrived in Chicago, SeeKing and I walked out of the 12th Precinct of the Chicago Police Department and breathed the sticky night air as Eitan and Ariana and Charles and Darcy and Maslow and a bunch of well wishers ran from the diner across the street and cheered for us. I stood on the back step of the police station and shouted, “Free at last, free at last!” We took exactly one photo there, standing in front of the police station, one of me and SeeKing showing off the black numbers that had been magic markered to the back of our hands, then we told everyone present that NO ONE was to know about this until AFTER the Nation- als. Period. By the way, while we were locked up in the police station sweating ourselves to death, our team mates went to Wrigley Field and ate hot dogs and drank beer and cheered for the Cubs. What else could they do? I keep thinking it wouldʼve been funny as hell if SeeKing and I had looked up to the color teevee in the police station and seen a close up shot of a foul ball being caught by Ariana in the crowd as Eitan and Lauren and Charles and the rest smiled and cheered and waved their arms to the camera. We wouldʼve just shook our head and smiled as Ariana jumped up and down and brandished her newly-caught ball. As for the court date, well, we fucked it off and forgot about it, although I have to say that we ALMOST snuck back to the scene of the crime and put the “ING” and the end of “SEEK” just to finish the cement job. Almost... but not quite. And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as far as I can remember. JULY 9 - AUGUST 13 SlamAmerica Bus Tour AUGUST 9 - 13 National Poetry Slam in Providence, R.I.

I consider this the “lost” portion of the Couches Across America road trip diaries, not because theyʼve actually been lost, but because I just havenʼt had the time to write them yet. The pace was hella hectic, just getting on the bus in one town and getting off the bus in another and performing poetry in a blur of constant motion. The tour hit 36 gigs in 32 days with a rotating crew of over 100 performance poets from around the country, with anywhere from 10-20 poets on board at any one time. The tour was grueling, and we never had time to get anything done. Simple things like laundry or e-mail were things you snuck in when you could find a spare hour or so, which was not very often, and I didnʼt keep a running journal the whole time because I simply couldnʼt find the time. I kept note, though, and I plan on filling in this blank space for Issue #6, which should be out in late fall of 2000. Keep in touch, and I will let you know when itʼs done. There are 100 little stories in there, and some of them are mighty juicy. AUGUST 18 (NEW YORK CITY, NY) Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe

Itʼs an absolutely beautiful day in New York City, all blue skies and fluffy little clouds peeking over the shoulders of too-tall buildings stretched overhead, lots of cabs, cabs everywhere, cabs and people walking about and doing their thing. Hardly anyone seems to be cussing and honking and pushing and shoving and shooting and stabbing or any of those things New Yorkers seem to do just for fun in the movies. No, all that is on hold, apparently, and the world is happy. New York is a huge mega-city, like ten different cities posing as one, with hundreds of unique little communities stacked shoulder to shoulder and disappearing into the horizon. As you might expect, NYC has one of the most vibrant poetry communities in the whole country, and the slam scene here is one of the longest running and well known and well respected in the scene. One venue — The Nuyorican Poetʼs Cafe — is a legend among poetry slammers and has launched the ca- reers of some of the brightest lights in the scene. One of the original hosts of the Nuyorican Poetry Slam was a cat named Bob Holman, this pork pie hat wearing boho with a talent for promotion and an over-the-top style of engaging the audience. He was one of the main producers of the acclaimed PBS series The United States of Poetry a few years back, plus he helped compile a crucial collection of early slam poetry from the Nuyo scene called Aloud. He and I have been corresponding via e-mail over the years, and heʼs really given me some great advice and support over the years. The biggest name to break away from the Nuyorican scene is Saul Williams, who went on to star in the Cannes Film Festival hit Slam. He now tours the country giving performances and lectures at universities all over, and is now finishing his first CD with producer Rick Ruben, the cat who jump-started The Beastie Boysʼ career among others. Saul is the bomb, and Iʼve had the pleasure of performing with him on three separate occasions. Good guy. And then thereʼs also Beau Sia, one of my favorite comedic slammers ever. He was the Asian dude on the bus in Slam, the one who kept screaming “Oh look here, weʼve got another black rapper going to jail!” He extended his 15 minutes of fame by penning a parody of Jewelʼs collection of poetry, calling his version “A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge.” All these kick ass people came out of the Nuyorican scene, so I had been looking forward to my feature there this whole trip. And it was phat, just packed with people, and I gave them my very best in a thick 30-minute set. I felt like I was playing Carnegie Hall. Earlier in that same day, I did a gig in a basement of this performance space called Tonic as part of a festival called FringeInk. Bob Holman had hooked me up with the connection, and the whole gig was packed with people from the indie publishing scene. In fact, I seemed to be the only one on the bill who didnʼt already have a bright shiny book with a perfect spine chilling in Barnes and Nobles across America. Be- ing that no one knew me from Adam, I went first out of the four readers of the evening, which is pretty much where you put the guy no one knows, so I kicked out the most intensely engaging and entertaining set of poetry I could, just slamming the packed audience with everything I had. I was slinging sweat by the end of it, and the readers following me either had to match my energy or pale in comparison. And they were up to it, too, they ended up nodding their heads and saying, “Okay, new guy, you wanna play with the big kids, fine, sit down and check this out.” The show was off the hook, and a palpable magic was running through the crowd the whole night. At the end of it, the publisher of one of the indie presses came up to me and congratulated me on a job well done, then he gave me his card and said we should talk about doing a book together. Dudeʼs card was for Soft Skull Press, one of the most admired indie presses I know of, named Indie Press of the Year in ʻ99 and putting out a wide range of great underground work. Right on. Iʼll tell you how that goes. A few days later, I did a gig in the basement of CBGB. Yes, that CBGB, the home of late ʻ70s punk rock ala Talking Heads and Blondie and early ʻ80s bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth. Itʼs a place covered in graffiti and mohawked kids with Operation Ivy flags stappled to their cracked leather jackets with a thousand safety pins. They do poetry in the basement every week, and my feature there was another in a series of rocking NYC gigs. Man, check me out... CBGB. Fucking amazing. Anyway, none of that poetry shite really matters, in the end, because the very best thing about NYC was tooling through the city streets on the back of my brand new scooter. Yes, I bought one, one of those cool little silver scooters, one of those Razors that the kids seem to be so into these days, one of those techy little numbers made out of aircraft grade aluminum that folds up into just the right size for carrying with a shoulder strap on the bus or subway train, one of those sleek little babies with see-through Roller- blade wheels and handlebars. I bought one, and I am shamelessly, hopelessly, wondrously happy and proud to have it. I was kinda sorta thinking to myself that having one of those would be cool, if for no other reason than to say, “Yeah, Iʼve got one, theyʼre cool.” But they are kinda expensive, you know, and Iʼm on tour and money is tight, plus lugging one around would seem to suck, and thatʼs not to even mentioning how lame it is to identify coolness with a product, as if all you had to do to be cool was purchase the right thing at the right time (oh, THEY would like us to think thatʼs all it took, but really, cool is something that doesnʼt come with a price tag or a marketing campaing, cool just... is...) Still, it remained in the back of my mind along with other things I eventually planned to do, like finding a place to live after this never- ending tour and maybe even figuring out a way to earn a living doing what I love... (I mean, I am earning a living, sorta, but it would be nice to have a living that didnʼt require me to sleep on couches five months out of the year. Not that it isnʼt cool to do this, itʼs just... God, can you imagine doing this all the time? I canʼt.) So, yeah, I put the thought of buying a scooter in the back of my mind... That is, until I saw a poet I know named Juliette Torrez tooling around on one during Nationals in Providence, scooting along the blacktop with this smile — Lord, you shouldʼve seen the smile, a smile unlike any I had ever seen Juliette Torrez possess (I mean, not that Juliette Torrez doesnʼt smile, but man... you shouldʼve seen THIS smile) — and it looked like she was having so much fun that I just had to admit... I was filled with envy. Not a mean evil green sort of envy, but I just felt that Juliette was so cool, so neat-o, scooting down the road on her scooter with that big scooter-induced smile, so cool that I, too, wanted to be THAT cool. I wanted little kids to point me out as I passed on the sidewalk and say, “Mom, look, that guyʼs gotta scooter!” I just had to have one. So, Iʼm in the Providence Place Mall with my friend Alex and my Chico Poetry Slam Team partner-in-crime Leabua, and BOOM, right there in Deliaʼs as my friend Alex browsed through the little t-shirts with monkeys on them, there was a little kid who had just bought a brand spanking new scooter, and he was taking it out of the box (OUT OF THE BOX!) and about to try it out right there on the floor of Deliaʼs (IN THE MIDDLE OF DELIAʼS!), and he had that smile — YES! — that same smile Juliette had as he whipped between the carousels of babydoll shirts and baggy pants and neon bras... And I grabbed him up, man, because I couldnʼt help it, man, I just had to try it out for myself. I said, “Hey kid, can I try out your new scooter? It sure looks cool!” And heʼs like, “Sure, I just got it! Ainʼt it cool?” And I said, “Yes, itʼs so fucking cool that I can hardly fucking stand it!” And I did it, I glided across that slick floor at Deliaʼs, and I weaved in and out and through and around all the bright white customers, and I imagined them all thinking to themselves, “Wow, whoʼs the cool guy with the scooter in Deliaʼs?” And as I whizzed past a mirror, just behind a teenie-bopper with braces who was modelling a potential neon purchase, I saw my reflec- tion in the mirror — and I had THAT smile, that SPECIAL smile that only a scooter can bring. Within 12 minutes, I had run down three flights of stairs to the nearest Sharper Image, and I was the proud owner of a brand spanking new JDRazor2000 scooter with green wheels and green grips and a green shoulder strap and shock absorbers on the front wheel and even (AND EVEN!) a sporty wheelie bar. $129.99, plus tax. Cha-ching, best money Iʼve ever spent. I just spent the entire afternoon today tooling around New York City streets, bouncing off curbs (“Look, Ma, that guyʼs got a scooter!”), jetting between people in business suits (“Wow, did you see that guy on that scooter? Iʼll be the girl he dates is hella cool!”), and blowing past pedestrians not cool enough to have wheels embedded in their feet (“Wow, look at the smile on that guy on the scooter! Pangs of envy are forming in my belly! I MUST have a scooter!”) This will hopefully make up for the time I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me a Green Machine for Christmas way back in 1977 and ended up getting a stupid typewriter instead. (They have no idea how scarred I still am about that. All the cool kids had Green Machines and allʼs I had was my sisterʼs stupid pink Big Wheel and a dumb old typewriter under my bed. Sheesh. ) AUGUST 28 (NEW YORK CITY, NY) 13 Bar Lounge

Like I said, shit has been getting hella surreal. Case in point: The Los Angeles Times had done a story on my little zine, but it has expanded what actually is ﬁve issues of journal entries into what itʼs calling “The Wussy Boy Movement.” It was so much fun blowing this whole thing way out of propor- tion, but I would like to say that as much fun as it has been making this seem larger than it really is, there are some issues here that are really important, issues about masculinity in this culture and where a person like me ﬁts into it. The article brings up some good points, and I think itʼs important that we talk about these things as a culture. I understand the need to make this seem like “Eirik scams the media by making up a big old story and making them look foolish for covering it,” but I think itʼs quite a bit bigger than that. The comedy comes from the reporterʼs urgency to make this into a movement no matter what I told him. I was really clear about how this is just me, three zines, and a poem that started it all. But he had pretty much already written the article by the time he got to me, and he was very much into making this out to be a movement in order to serve his story. I mean, both me and my ex-girlfriend were clear on how I had forwarded my mail to her and how she kept it in a shoebox under her desk, but in the article, she is suddenly “head of the mail department.” Odd stuff like that just makes me giggle. Now, this also serves me, and I am aware that an article about me starting a “movement” is much better than an article saying “Yeah, this guy puts out a funny zine.” But, the behind the scenes stuff was just too rich not to document, you know? Much respect to the reporter who wrote the story. I really appreciate the energy he put into writing the article. Much respect to Wussy Boys everywhere. Fuck an A, why not start up a movement that empowers men to just chill out on their preconceptions about what it means to be a man? Iʼm game! I just donʼt want to make it seem like I invented all this stuff about masulinity just to get into the newspaper and pull some kind of scam. I mean, I actually do believe this stuff, and I actually do believe it is worthy of a story. Itʼs just... well, the way it worked out cracked me up. Here, read all about it... WORKING THE MEDIA MACHINE The Wussy Boy Chronicles vs. The Los Angeles Times

I am really giddy and excited about an article that will run in this Sundayʼs Los Angeles Times. This will be the first Stateside newspaper to cover the Wussy Boy thing, and should be up on their website this weekend. I canʼt help but feeling a little guilty, too... or, maybe guilt is not the right word, but I feel a little like a scammer with this article, because... Okay, four months ago, before I started this never-ending tour, I sent out a standard-issue press release that basically said some hyperbole nonsense about “Wussy Boys Take Over the World!” You know, I just made a big hooptie-hoo about my tour and my magazine and stuff, you know, standard issue stuff to announce what I was doing. And then I went on tour. Well, four months go by, and Iʼm at the National Poetry Slam in Providence with 350 other poets, and I get this call on my cell phone from the Los Angeles Times, and thereʼs this reporter on the other end, and he askes me if Iʼd be interested in being interviewed about “this new movement in masculine identity.” Iʼm like, “Uhm... movement? Hmmm... Yeah, movement, yeah... the Wussy Boy Movement. Sure, yeah, letʼs do it. Cool.” In my head, though, Iʼm thinking that this is kinda silly, you know, calling this thing a movement. Itʼs basically one poem that I wrote a year and a half ago, and three issues of a zine that I printed at Kinkoʼs. I mean, Iʼve gotten some good response from it, and thatʼs gratifying, but calling it a “movement” is stretching it quite a bit. Itʼs just some kid with a backpack full of chapbooks and a website and a couple of press releases. But I donʼt tell the reporter from the Los Angeles Times this, no, I say, “Yeah, the Wussy Boy Movement. Letʼs do it.” So he asks me a question about being a Wuss, but he doesnʼt just ask the question, he prefaces the question with something like, “So, as leader of the Wussy Boy Movement...” And I canʼt help but smirk at that as he asks me whatever he asks me, like Iʼm at the forefront of this pale, skinny, black backpack army of Wussys who have been picked on too much and who are ready to stand up to assholes everywhere, marching on Washington with their yellow flags flying high (yellow, the color of cowardice turned to empowerment tool), cranking their Mor- rissey and Radiohead and XTC at super high “fuck you!” volume, with me yelling into a bullhorn, “Are we not Men?”, and having the hordes chant back, “WE ARE WUSSY!” And the reporter leads me through this scholarly talk on the status of young men in this country and how the Wussy Boy Movement offers an alternative to the beer swilling, strip club hopping, sports fanatic, sexist, homophobic asshole image of men proferred in the mass media. We touch on the fact that modern rock radio is a wasteland of my- soginist frat boy white guys shouting epithets into microphones over a wash of guitar feedback and canned beats bullshit disguised as “alternative” (ie. Limp Bizkit, The Bloodhound Gang, Eminem). We discuss how the only women on the radio or videos are unhealthy images represented by tarted up teenagers dancing on their producersʼ strings and engineered to make men twice their age drool and yearn for their barely pubescent bodies, all in and effort to push product, product, product... women used by the media as shiny tokens to get a nation of crows to notice what shite their selling. Anyway, it goes well, and heʼs like, “Can you put me in contact with other leaders within the Wussy Boy Movement? Iʼd love to hear how theyʼre organizing and changing things in their communites...” And again, Iʼm thinking, “What? Like this is Fight Club, and there are all these cells spread across the United States, these pale kids gathered in dark basements burning incense and listening to old Smiths records and Depeche Mode 12-inches and watching John Hughes films and making plans to take over the world with CD burners and websites and embarassingly honest zines. But I donʼt tell him how ridiculous and beautiful that sounds to me, no, I say, “Sure, let me get you some numbers of our most active leaders within the Wussy Boy community.” And I look across the room at the poetry venue I was in at the time, I think AS220 in Providence, and I see Phil West from Texas, so I shout, “Hey, Phil, you know that Wussy Boy poem I do?” and he says, “Yeah, why?” and I say, “Do you consider yourself a Wussy Boy?” and he says, “Sure,” then I say, “Wanna talk to the Los Angeles Times?” I give the reporter the cell phone number for Phil West and hang up, then one minute later Philʼs phone lights up and rings, and we are kinda looking at each other and giggling because this is just so silly, and he answers, “Yeah, this is Phil West. Yes... Yes... Well, the Wussy Boy Movement in Austin...” And he talks to the guy for, like, 45 minutes, telling him all about his outreach work within the Austin Wussy community, then heʼs like, “Well, yeah, there are more Wussys you can talk to. Here, this is Mike Henryʼs number,” and Phil is looking right at Mike as he says this, and Mike is jumping up and down and covering his mouth and laughing because he canʼt believe this either, and Phil hangs up, and a minute later Mike Henryʼs cell phone lights up and rings. He answers the phone, “Mike Henry, Wussy Boy?” and heʼs all sticking out his tongue and goofing as he talks to the guy. And the guy talks to my friend Eitan Kadosh from Los Angeles. And he talks to Leabua from the Chico, CA, Team. He even talks to my ex-girlfriend Kimberly (still my very best friend in the world) about what itʼs like to date a Wussy Boy. (And get this, the reporter actually asked Kimberly if Wussy Boys were more “giving” in the “romantic department,” which we both took to mean “Do Wussy Boys give good oral pleasure,” and Kimberly, God bless her, replied something along the lines of, “Well, in my experience with Wussy Boys, they are the Masters of that Domain,” meaning, “Hell yes, they go downtown! Woo Hoo!” I thanked Kimberly from the bottom of my heart for telling the world that I am the “Master.” I mean, how cool is that?) So, the article in the Los Angeles Times is supposed to run this Sunday, August 27, and you, too, can see how much fun Mike Henry and Phil West and Eitan Kadosh and me and Kimberly had trying to convince this reporter that sensitive guys are making a comeback. Imagine that...

*****

Okay, itʼs up, the Wussy Boy article in the Los Angeles Times is up, and itʼs every bit as silly as I had hoped, and more so, really. I was just rolling my eyes and gooﬁng on it the whole time I read it. Check out how the reporter uses this overblown match metaphor, like Iʼm the match and the seething world of oppressed Wussys is the tinder and my poem “The Wussy Boy Manifesto” was the toss that lit the world on ﬁre, or something like that. Check out how Mike Henry was a directionless jock kid until he moved to Austin to become a “Wuss Poet.” Check out how Eitan Kadosh gave up a teaching position to be beside his mentor, the Wussy Boy himself. Check out how Kimberly Bolander, my ex-girlfriend and best friend, runs the “mail department” of my magazine, which, in reality, means that Iʼve forwarded all my mail to her apartment and she keeps it in a box under her desk. This is just so silly. POETʼS MANTRA: ʻI AM WUSSY BOY, HEAR ME ROAR (MEOW!)ʼ

Eirik Ott has ʻoutedʼ himself as sensitive and made it cool to eschew all things macho.

By JOSEPH HANANIA Special to The Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles -- Initially, Eirik Ott set out only to save himself. But now, just over a year later, the Bakersfield native is ground zero of a budding movement spreading not just through the esoteric realm of American slam poets, but edging across the globe. Visualize a match tossed on the dry tinder of American masculinity, with Ott as the match, his win at last yearʼs National Poetry Slam the toss and hundreds of men resonating to Ottʼs words the tinder. His poetry has been called “exuberantly defiant” by New York critics and the Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press declared “R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” So, who is this buzz-cut Californian and what does he want? The 33-year-old, 5-foot-5, 160-pound Ott wants to be a Wuss. No, more; he wants to proclaim Wussy pride. What exactly is a Wuss? He is a man “unafraid of earrings and hair dye. A Wuss is a sensitive man who embraces feminism and alternative cultures, and is proud of standing apart from American masculine norms,” says Ott. “As soon as you mention ʻSixteen Candlesʼ and ʻFerris Buellerʼs Day Off,ʼ people are like, ʻWe are brothers and just have this unspoken sense of connection,ʼ “ says Ott of the film heroes, who win through guile and charm rather than fists. A Wuss, he says, doesnʼt like “girls who fit into the patriarchal mode of femininity: tiny bikini, big plastic boobs, fake tans.” Instead, a Wuss would prefer to hang around with a Winona Ryder, “someone with whom you could have an intelligent conversation.” “So many Wusses in America are just a beaten-down populace,” he explains. When performing the “Wussy Boy Manifesto,” “youʼll just see this glow of empowerment in the audience.” The Wuss once taunted in high school for not being “man enough” has launched his own magazine, the 60-odd page Wussy Boy Chronicles, and has a Web site, http://www.Wussyboy.org. “Itʼs taken me a long time to admit it,” wrote Ott in his premiere issue, the first of three thus far. “I remember shouting in high school, ʻNo, Dad, Iʼm not gay!ʼ I tried to like cars and jet planes and football and Budweiser poster girls, but I never got the hang of it. “Now I am no longer ashamed of my Wussiness. No, Iʼm empowered by it. I am Wussy Boy, hear me roar (meow).” Itʼs a “meow” being heard far and wide. Mike Henry, who grew up in an Oklahoma town playing football and drag racing “between the Sonic Drive-In and Hardeeʼs” felt a “huge affinity” when he first heard Ott. “He put a name to feelings I had,” he says. So, rather than “driving around in circles, going nowhere,” Henry, 32, moved to Austin, Texas, and became a Wuss poet. Oakland psychiatrist Terry Kupers, author of “Revisioning Menʼs Lives” (Guilford Press, 1993), says Ott has hit on the same formula used by American colonists, who transformed the derisive English term “Yankee” into a source of pride, as in “Yankee Doodle,” poking fun at British arrogance. The “black is beautiful” and gay pride movements followed similar strategies. Ott is giving nontraditional men their turn. Moreover, says Kupers, the Wuss movement is helping men set positive goals. “When men first supported womenʼs liberation, they wanted to end domestic violence, to stop date rape. But what did they want for themselves?” The movement is helping provide answers. Many straight men long for meaningful peer friendships, but “the unspoken rule still is, itʼs better to keep feelings locked in than give others the impression they are gay,” says Kupers. “Men invariably view themselves at the top or bottom of some hierarchy—and if at the top, needing to remain vigilant lest they fall, or be thrown, to the bottom.” Fenced in by emotional land mines, he says, many straight men reassure themselves through “sexism, toxic hyper-masculinity and homophobia.” Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at USC, agrees that modern social stresses have “increasingly caused boys to put themselves at great risk to demonstrate masculinity. Macho displays like drunken driving are particularly prevalent among those who donʼt have a clear avenue of success, such as education.” Unlike women, who accept their femininity as a given, “Men see their masculinity as more fragile, tenuous, something that needs to be constantly proven rather than assumed,” she says. Ott sensed this in his own life. He grew up on the straight and narrow, “joining the Navy to impress my dad, show him the kind of man I was,” After six years, however, he realized, “I had gone to escape my father, and was surrounded by my father.” Leaving the Navy, Ott earned a bachelorʼs degree at Cal State Chico, with a specialty in journalism. He then set out to prove himself in the only way he knew how—as a poet proclaiming his truth to a skeptical world. The first time Ott performed his “Wussy Boy Manifesto”—in which he essentially proclaims, ʻarise, Wuss, and be proud!ʼ—he had butterflies in his belly. But then, a thin, gawky guy—a fellow Wuss—”came up and said, ʻThank you so much,ʼ “ and Ott knew he had connected. Acclaim followed soon afterward when Ott and three teammates won last yearʼs 10th annual National Poetry Slam in front of nearly 3,000 spectators in Chicago. Suddenly Ott, the Wuss outsider, was also performing for middle America, as “60 Minutes” did a segment on the competition. Still, having had his 15 minutes of fame, Ott might have faded back into the shadows—except for his other labor of love. These were diary entries he put together as “The Wussy Boy Chronicles” and sent in to the Readers Guide to the Underground Press, a San Francisco Bay Area-based sort of Yellow Pages of underground magazines, through which writers network. Following the guideʼs review, he got letters from Australia and calls from the BBC. Ott has never “felt at home with the term straight white male, because straight implies an inflexibility with gender, as if anyone else is bent.” Instead, he identifies with the “queer movement” which, he says, has grown to include not only gays, but their straight allies. Thus, said Ott, who is straight, “If a gay man said he wanted to go out with me, I would be flattered. I would say, ʻThank you, man, letʼs have a drink. Itʼs nice to be invited to the party.ʼ “ Eitan Kadosh, 25, who gave up a full-time teaching position at a Woodland Hills high school to perform alongside Ott, sees the Wuss poet as protector of the underdog. “Gay men are the original Wussy Boys. They are free thinking, unafraid of what others might think for following their own muse,” says Kadosh, who is straight. Then, too, he says, “Silicon Valley has many Wusses who started companies employing people who once made fun of them.” So, he asks, instead of poking fun at Wusses, why not join the party? Kimberly Bolander, 25, a reporter in Redding, Calif., and Ottʼs former girlfriend, is encouraged that women are writing in to the Chron- icles, whose mail department she runs. “Weʼre tired of the Marlboro Man,” she says. “Women are ready to hear the good news too.” AUGUST 30 (DANBURY, CT) Radio interview with Tom Leykis

After the Los Angeles Times article ran, I got a load of e-mails from people wanting to interview me about being a Wussy Boy and publishing the very zine you are holding in your hand. The most fun of any of them was by far the live radio interview I did with some dude named Tom Leykis who hosts a nationally-syndicated talk show supposedly popular with men. Iʼve never heard of the guy, but apparently he is somewhere between a Rush Limbaugh and a Howard Stern. In other words, much more Cock Man Oppressor than Wussy Boy. Had I known this, I might not have accepted his producerʼs invitation to be interviewed live with call-ins from people all over the country, but I was all excited and quickly took him up on his offer. His only words of advice were these: “Be prepared for a lively discussion.” Lively apparently meant be prepared for every fucking yahoo in America to call in and yell the words “gay” and “faggot” at me while Tom sorta sat there smirking and coaxing me with, “So, Eirik, Bubbah here thinks youʼre a closet homosexual who wants to chop off his own penis with a hatchet and wear frilly dresses and prance around like a little faggot. What do you think of that?” His listeners just attacked me, and I had to listen as caller after caller screamed at me for being gay and not having the balls to admit it, saying that I was either so pussy-whipped that I couldnʼt see how gay I was or that I was so gay that I couldnʼt see how pussy-whipped I was. On and on, but I held my ground with a vengeance. This one guy from Texas told me I needed to get out of my dress (where they got the idea I wear dresses is beyond me) and sit down and watch some teevee and “stick my hand down my pants” like a real man, maybe even go down to the gym and work out a bit, be a real man. I was like, “Mister, youʼre the one talking about going down to the gym and watching a bunch of naked, sweaty men working out while youʼve got your hands down your pants, maybe youʼre the one in the closet. Next caller!” I got into a sparring match with this one asshole who kept argu- ing that “a little healthy objectification never hurt any woman” when I claimed that mass media looked at women as nothing more than sexual vessels for man to lust after. He said something like, “I think women are beautiful creatures, and I think putting them on a pedestal is a tribute to their beauty.” But Iʼm all like, “You see, you see what you called women? Creatures. Thatʼs what Iʼm talking about, this society sees women as less than human, as sexual beasts, as CREATURES, and when you justify it by saying itʼs a tribute to their beauty, you are robbing them of their intellect, their passions, their emotions, and their rights to be looked at as equal human beings. When you say you put women on a pedestal, itʼs only as long as they are willing to be sex objects. As soon as they try to be anything differnt, you just knock them off the pedestal and replace them with someone newer and easier on the eye. Mass media canʼt just dismember a women and cut off her arms and legs and head and wiggle whats left in front of societyʼs men to make them purchase the products associated with them because itʼs wrong! Itʼs dehumanizing, but it happens every single day in almost every single newspaper, magazine, television show and movie.” Something like that... I canʼt remember exactly what I said, but it was some righteously militant fire along those lines. That sad fucker stepped right into my argument and ended up giving me fuel to add to my ire. Then I cut his silly ass off with another, “Next caller!” What a trip, but I met each insult with every intellectual argument I could muster, calling on every feminist theory and sociological premise that I could invent on the fly, and in the end I held my own, man, I went toe-to-toe with the most ragingly misogynist assholes in the country, and I managed to get in what I thought were some deft blows. Tom ended up saying very little the whole time and just let me joust with these limp-dicked fuckers, realizing, I think, that his listeners were coming off as the most blunt rednecks imaginable. Eh, let me at ʻem! I had flesh dangling from my teeth by the end of it, and there were some sexist fuckers in America that night with gash marks from my teeth on their lilly white asses. WUSS CORE! (I canʼt wait to listen to the cassette tape recording of the show the producer sent me. Iʼll probably put snippets on my answering machine.) SEPTEMBER 2-3 (BURLINGTON, VT) Kim Jordan’s pad

When I was growing up, I always told people that I would live in Vermont. Iʼm not really sure why... Something about the trees, I imagine. Rather, something I had heard about the trees, because I had never been to Vermont nor had I ever known anyone from Vermont. I grew up in Bakersfield, a dirty little California town thatʼs so far south that Central California calls it the tip of Southern California, but so far from cool that L.A. calls it the ass-end of Central California. Itʼs a dirty little town that no one wants to claim, and I hated it growing up. I wanted to live in Vermont, a fabled place where they had... what? Apples, I guess, apples and maple syrup and snow and all those trees, trees everywhere you looked, if there wasnʼt a house there would be a tree, which was completly different from Bakersfield, a place surrounded by dirt and oil wells and miles and miles of tumbleweeds and tractors. Vermont was a place so far away that it just had to be better than Bakersfield, a place so different, a place with hills and... fuck, I donʼt know, it was just this oddly-shaped state in the upper right hand corner of the U.S. map, but for whatever reason, I got it into my little head that Vermont was the place where I would end up living the rest of my life once I escaped the dusty horror of Bakersfield. Now, Iʼm actually here, in Burlington, the largest town in all of Vermont, a college town with 40,000 people, and I am so familiar with this place... Itʼs just like Chico, the little college town in Northern Cali- fornia I escaped to once I finally got up the nerve to leave Bakersfield for good. When I hit the stage to perform the first of two 20-minute sets for the Burlington Slam, I was immediately stricken by the familiarity of the faces I saw, a packed room of sweaty young people equally sporting thrift store chic and Ambercrombie and Fitch. I actually squinted my eyes at one point and looked around the room amazed at how very Chico it all looked, a Disneyland of well-scrubbed middle class high school kids and slightly older college kids, some in flowy Phish skirts and some in Tommy jeans, all wide-eyed and liminous and ready for the visiting poet to kick down the jams. Very odd... I mean, the crowd was great, really giving up the energy and tremendous good vibe that is absolutely crucial to delivering a good, honest, engaging set of poetry. Even the heckles were good natured and playful, and the crowd cheered for the brazen replies. The host was amazing. Kim Jordan is a goddess among goddesses, and her goals of using poetry to reach out to young people and empower them through releasing their own gifts for self-expression is my bread and butter. She really has something here, something very similar to what I had in Chico for five years. It made me more than a little homesick... To be honest, it has left me with this heavy meloncholy, a blue- hued funk that matches the swollen sky overhead. I canʼt quite explain it. I think itʼs all about this journey Iʼm taking, this search for a place to be, and a search for self. The instant familiarity of Burlington makes me homesick, but, to quote an old Soul Asylum song, itʼs “homesick for a home Iʼve never had.” Itʼs something about finally reaching Vermont, the place where I always wanted to escape to, a place that was going to be so much better than the pit of despair I grew up in, and finding that itʼs exactly like the last place I left, itʼs just like Chico, only with more trees and maple syrup sold in jugs at the farmerʼs market. And it occurs to me that I donʼt know what the fuck Iʼm looking for. I only know that I havenʼt quite found it, and that makes me sad. How in the world can I find what Iʼm looking for if I donʼt have the faintest idea what it is? I love that I am meeting so many people all over the country, so glad that I have an extended family of passionate people willing to be that smiling face at the bus station at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night at the edge of town, so glad that I feel a part of something so much bigger than myself, so glad that I can occasionally have those flashes of awareness that maybe, just maybe, this writing/performing thing is something I might be good at. But I am really lonely right now, even when Iʼm surrounded by amazing people who share the same passions I claim to have, even when Iʼm in the arms of amazing warmth, even when Iʼm kicking the ass of every person in an audience of familiar strangers... I donʼt have a place. I donʼt know where it is. I just have a backpack and a heavy duty need for something I canʼt quite define. Thank God for my scooter. SEPTEMBER 4-6 (PORTLAND, ME) Hanging out with Sarah

Iʼve been on the road for almost four months now. Iʼve done nearly 70 gigs since I hit the road on May 17, and Iʼve sold more than 750 copies of my chapbook, plus Iʼve handed out untold thousands of my little “Aphorisms” stickers. My website has gotten over 5,000 hits since it was posted in March, and my tour has been covered in newspapers all over the country, plus a few outside this country. Iʼve met more intelligent, engaging, passionate, amazing people than I could possibly count, plus a few shitheads. (The shitheads are there, I am discovering, to help one appreciate the truly cool people. They suck, but they do serve a purpose.) I am tired, but content, and feel that Iʼve accomplished something pretty damned cool with this tour. It has far exceeded my highest expectations, and it has given me the courage and motivation to continue searching for ʻThe Next Level.ʼ (... or forge ahead and build the fucking ʻNext Levelʼ myself.) When I first scheduled this tour, I was frantically trying to fill in all the gaps between performances, trying to eliminate all downtime and do as many gigs in as short a time as possible. But, after the 36 straight gigs in 32 days aboard the SlamAmerica Bus, followed by the intensity of the National Poetry Slam, I believe I have changed my mind about filling in all that “dead” time. Now, I am relishing the days I donʼt have to perform and relishing the conversations I am having with people who have the ability to talk about anything OTHER than performance poetry and, most of all, poetry slamming. One of the best things I did while in Burlington, VT, wasnʼt meeting amazing people and performing kick ass poetry and hearing some amazing people talk about amazing things. I mean, those were great things, but the BEST thing about Burlington, VT, was the Satsuma Bath Fizzy I bought from the Body Shop. Oh yes, heavenly fizzy pops in a little tangerine-smelling ball of pure bathwater pleasure! I am taking time to smell the bath products, and I am getting a lot of work done in the process. Right now, Iʼm in Portland, Maine, and itʼs not because I have a gig here, no, and itʼs not because I know any slammers, either. Itʼs because Sarah is here. You see, thereʼs another underground community that Iʼm a part of, and thatʼs the zine community, creative kids all over the country putting their thoughts into magazine form at the nearest Kinkoʼs and sending them to each other. Iʼve been publishing zines for nearly a decade, and one of my favorite zines in the world right now is Sarah series of personal comix. So, yeah, I was in Vermont looking at my road atlas and my next gig wasnʼt until Sept. 9 in New Jersey, and I noticed that Portland, ME, is kinda sorta on the way, and Iʼm like, “Oh yeah, that comix chick Sarah lives there, huh?” and even though Iʼve never met her other than through the mail... What the hell. I looked up her number and hit the Greyhound to Portland, ME, and Iʼve been chilling here ever since, getting all jazzed on Sarahʼs creative energy and making plans to do all kinds of creative things. Oh, and Sarah knows NOTHING about poetry slamming, nothing about the drama and the scandals and the politics. And I am telling you, brothers and sisters, that is sweet as a Satsuma Bath Fizzy. Imagine talking about something OTHER than poetry! As if! Plus, Portland has all kinds of hills to conquer with my scooter, and it is my pleasure to kick the asses of each and every one. Sarah is every bit as cool as she portrays herself in her zine, and we hit it off from the get. We ended up having all kinds of fun hanging out together, and she showed me all her favorite spots in her hometown. We hit a graveyard at midnight and talked in whispered tones among the headstones as Sarah told me of late night high school cemetary escapades soaked in clove cigarettes and sex and candlewax. We sat on the edge of a dock and watched seals swim by like dogs with flippers. We watched movies and ate good food, and I didnʼt have to even think about poetry the whole time. (I love it, you know, this poetry thing, but shit, man, sometimes you just need a break from so much navel-gazing and soul searching. Sometimes you just need to spark up a bowl and pass it along and rock out in the dark to 3 a.m. music with someone warm and cool.) Maine is really beautiful, a mix of greenery and ocean, Sarah with her kitty Shmee. with lots of hicks and lots of small towns with nothing to do for young people raised on MTV and the Internet. Portland is just about the only cool town in all of Maine, according to Sarah, but she has grown well past its confines and yearns to hit the big city, whether it be NYC or even someplace far away and new like Portland, Oregon. Aimee Mann has a great song on her Bachelor #2 CD with a lyric that reminds me of Sarah and where she is in her life: And Iʼm bailing this town or tearing it down or probably more like hanging around. And what I need now is somebody with the brains and the know-how to tell me what I want... Sarah took me to this greasy little tourist town about 20 miles away that was just rife with strip mall t-shirt shops and sunglass huts and a delightfully rickety excuse for an amusement park. We went at night, after midnight, and the streets were deserted. We just kinda hung out and talked about the great big world outside this guido of a town. We were walking past a motel with our hands stuck deep into our jacket pockets with our collars turned up against the chill wind, and we noticed a phat jacuzzi burbling under a gazebo behind a locked wrought- iron gate with speakers installed somewhere nearby cranking out the very best hard rock, but not, like, cheesy butt rock from the ʻ80s that can only be enjoyed for its kitsch value, no, this was prime cut ʻ70 moustache rock in colors of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult. We took one look at each other, smiled, then ran across the street and practically vaulted over the locked gate, throwing off our clothes in a flurry of underwear and socks and dirty bluejeans. It was so perfect, just two naked people jazzing on their newfound vibe in an off-limits hotel jacuzzi and digging on Rush and old Van Halen. And we found ourselves looking at each other in that way, you know, that way that says, “Hell, yeah, letʼs make this perfect,” because the only way to possibly make this situation any better would be to snuggle up close to each other and kiss. So, we did. It was so nice, all warm and wet and dangerous because we could clearly be seen by anyone driving by on the street, and we were sure the motel manager would arrive pissed off and beligerant at any moment to kick us out or call the cops, but that hint of trouble just made the kisses even sweeter. And yes, the manager finally came and kicked us out, bitching about “damned kids naked in my godamned jacuzzi,” but we kinda had the feeling that maybe she knew she was part of the perfection of that night, like the story just HAD to end with us getting kicked out or it wouldnʼt have been ABSOLUTELY perfect. I ended up staying four days with Sarah, just kicking back and talking and vibing off our creative energy, making all kinds of plans to put out zines together and cause all kinds of ruckus in the process, snuggling under her comforter on her futon bed and listening to Morphine and Beth Orton and playing with her cat Shmee. At the end of it, I didnʼt want to leave, but the road was calling, and my next gig in Washington, D.C., was five or six states away via Greyhound. We said our goodbyes, promised to keep in touch, then went our separate ways. Sarah was cool... But the four days with her just made me feel homesick, I think, homesick for a town where I have my own futon couch and my own bookshelf and my own cats, a town where everyone I met would be there from one day to the next. The little college town Iʼve lived in for six years gave me a place for my stuff, but it never gave me that feeling of stability that I think Iʼve been yearning for. I would make kick ass friends and do kick ass things, but, like clockwork, I would lose most of my best friends every May when they graduated and moved away. Summers in Chico suck because everyone is gone, so I usually spent summers in internships away from Chico. And then Iʼd hit town again in September with new classes and new people in a new cycle of building the poetry scene back up to the level it was the semester before summer...... only to go through the same cycle again, year after year, building it and watching it being dismantled... Iʼm hoping Seattle is a place where creative people go once they get out of college, a place where cool people stay for a while, where my circle of friends doesnʼt have to completely change every time graduation day comes and goes. Where I can meet someone as cool as Sarah and not have to leave just as itʼs getting interesting. SEPTEMBER 10-13 (WASHINGTON, D.C.) Sick at Nicki Miller’s pad

Iʼve spent the days since Portland sick as a dog, sick like I want to lie my head in someoneʼs lap and have them gently drag their fingernails over my head and whisper, “Pobrecito,” as we listen to Mazzy Star and sip hot lemon tea with kitties curled around our ankles. I hate being sick. I want my mommy. I want my mommy to go to the store and buy some 7-Up and Jell-O and chicken noodle soup and rub Vickʼs Vap-O-Rub on my chest. I want to flip through 13 channels of nothing all day while sitting on the couch wrapped in blankets, skipping from The Price is Right to Days of Our Lives and back again, feeling like shit but glad for the day off school. (When I was in the Navy and out to sea on some long deployment, such as when I spent 8 months in the Red Sea on an aircraft carrier during the Gulf War, I would do something secret when I was homesick. I would dab just a little smudge of Vicks Vap-O-Rub under my nose as I hit my rack to sleep for the night, and it would remind me of what it was like to be taken care of.) I started sniffling in Portland, and it turns out that Sarah got sick, too. Iʼm sure itʼs because Greyhound buses are thick with the most sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, bitching, moaning motherfuckers in the whole damned country. By the time I got to the D.C. and was picked up by the venue host Nicki Miller and her mini-van, my head was swimming in a stew of flu and my face was bright red with fever. My throat was parched and my joints were achy. I had survived the onslaught of the “Providence Plague” that made everyone at the National Poetry Slam sick only to be infected with some Portland strain that threatened to steal my voice. I probably shouldnʼt have performed, but I didnʼt want to miss this one because some friends of mine from the national scene were sure to be there. So I did it, sweating and shaking and feeling light-headed and dizzy, voice thinned by soreness, but I did it. It was definitely “Big Poppa E Unplugged,” but it was worth the effort. After the show, Nicki took me back to her pad and has been treating me like a sick son ever since, baking cookies, making Jell-O, brewing hot lemon tea... Her eldest son just left for college, now Iʼm playing the role, and Iʼm trying my best to get better and get prepared for my 17-hour bus trip to my next gig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Thank God this Slam Family is full of mommies and daddies ready to take on that role of caregiver. As Iʼve said before, anyone who says this isnʼt a family of poets hasnʼt couch surfed across the USA, and SEPTEMBER 10, 2000 The one year anniversary of Jen O’Hare’s death.

I canʼt believe itʼs already been a whole year since Jen died. I wrote a poem about her the very first time I met her, called Crushworthy, and once we started dating she was always asking me, “When are you going to write another poem about me?” I would hem and haw and say something about poetry not being fast food you could just order up hot and fresh at the drive-thru, but I always told her that more poetry would come in its own sweet time. I never in a million years wouldʼve guessed that the next poem I would write about Jen would be this one. I spent the months following Jenʼs death in a fit of writerʼs block, not being able to write shit, but then, just a week before my national tour, I finally was able to write this poem. Itʼs the only one Iʼve written all year. The only one in 2000. ______There’s a hole in my heart in the shape of her smile that will never be filled

I will never forget the last sentence of the article in the newspaper the next day: “The terrible crash pancaked the tiny Honda Civic.” It rattled our minds as we ran our fingers across the gouges in the pavement, our eyes squinting through a thousand glaring pinpricks from windshield fragments, searching for lucky pennies scattered (hundreds of them) from her broken penny jar. “The terrible crash pancaked the tiny Honda Civic.” That sentence robbed us of closure. We werenʼt allowed to marvel at the morticianʼs handiwork (she looks like sheʼs asleep). We couldnʼt cup her lifeless hand — powdered and colored with an artistʼs touch — and confirm that it was true that it actually really had happened. No, the terrible crash pancaked the tiny Honda Civic, and they wouldnʼt even run photos because itʼs a family newpaper and you canʼt run photos like that in a family newspaper. We had to just agree nod our heads in unison and agree that she was gone and would never be back this precious flower plucked in mid-blossom. And we held each other and remembered her as we had last seen her pink and alive and smiling that big thumbs up smile And we were warmed by the knowledge that if anyone couldʼve changed the world she couldʼve. She wouldʼve had she only been given the chance. But now... Weʼll always feel like sheʼs out there somewhere always at the corner of our eyes in the summer sea of spaghetti straps and backpacks tan lines and smiles sheʼll be there at the corner of our eyes and weʼll catch our breath turn and see nothing. I think about that last sentence every time I drive, it echoes in my brain as I near the spot on the four-lane highway where she crossed the median and died. I picture the time of day: around 11 a.m. The sun was out. The sky was blue. There was no rain. She was driving alone. She was probably smoking. She was listening to James Taylorʼs Greatest Hits; we know this because the tow crew pried that CD from what was left of her stereo. And I grip my wheel white-knuckled as I near the spot. And I canʼt help counting down the time she had left. (and she didnʼt even know it was coming.) It was a bright sunny day and she was singing... “Iʼve seen fire and Iʼve seen rain” 20 seconds “Iʼve seen sunny days that I thought would have no end” 10 seconds “Iʼve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend” 5 seconds “But I always thought Iʼd see you baby one more time again...” And JUST LIKE THAT we are past it and the scars in the pavement are left behind. And JUST LIKE THAT we are past it and the white cross we left in the grass on the embankment is left behind. And JUST LIKE THAT we are past it and the lucky pennies and the photos and the little good luck tokens and the letters and the constella- tions of shattered windshield are left behind. just like that she was left behind. The headline should not have read “Chico State Student Killed in Car Crash.” No, the headline shouldʼve shouted in capitol letters across the front page: JENNIFER LYNN OʼHARE KICKED SO MUCH ASS!

She was a poetess, a priestess, a goddess, a feminist, a fighter, a lover, a laugher, a teller of truths, a spinner of midnight balcony tales shrouded in Heinekin and Camels... (she could break down Brian Johnsonʼs male chauvinest arguments with the precision of a surgeon, hurling words like “patriarchal” and “misogyny” and “hegemony” in a rapid fire distillation of everything she had learned in Womenʼs Studies classes, we almost felt sorry for Brian as she leaned towards him on the edge of her stool pointing with the glowing cherry of a lit cigarette...) She was a God-awful drummer but a very enthusiastic drummer, a deep and passionate kisser, a liver of life, a lover of all things, not the best of students but the best of teachers, a mentor, a sister, a daughter, a confidant, a friend. These words should have been displayed on the pages of every newspaper in the world. But they werenʼt. Most people in this world probably didnʼt even realize their loss. And I feel sorriest of all for those people -- you -- those of you who never had the chance to meet her. She was that cool. The last sentence in this poem is how I will remember Jennifer Lynn OʼHare: This world is a better place BLURBS

“R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” Doug Holland, editor A Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” The New York Times

“Eirik Ott is the leader of the new Wussy Boy movement ... spreading not just through the esoteric realm of slam poets but edging across the globe.” The Los Angeles Times

“Championed by a hip-hop poet and catching ﬁre across North America, a new male ideal has risen up and is demanding respect: Wussy Boy.” The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

“Inspiring men from across the country.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“I love this magazine (The Wussy Boy Chronicles)!” The Utne Reader

“A spoken word maestro.” San Jose Mercury News

“A hell of a performer, running on boundless energy and near-perfect comic timing.” OC Weekly (Orange County, CA)

“One of the leaders in the hottest thing to hit poetry since Beat poet Allen Ginsburgʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” The Daily Oklahoman The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #6

FEATURING: Dear Wussy Boy • EI-EI-OH The Humanity Tour Diaries • Temp Job Hell in Seattle a personalzine by r. eirik ott The Wussy Boy Chronicles #6 Copyright February 2002 R. Eirik Ott aka Big Poppa E

voice mail: 512.296.7080 e-mail: [email protected] website: http://www.wussyboy.org online journal: http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Cover Wuss — Noah Taylor Although he is largely unknown here in the United States, Noah is a righteous Wussy Boy from Down Under who is just as important to Aussie Wussies as John Cusack is to their American counterparts, although he has a much darker feel to him having hung out with Nick Cave, who he resembles quite a bit. He is best known on this side of the water for his work in “Shine” as the teenaged David Helfgott, the middle incarnation with long, stringy hair who collapses on stage during a Rachmaninoff recital. He has also been in the last two Cameron Crowe movies, as the English roadie in “Almost Famous” and as the creepy guy in the bar who follows Tom Cruise around in “Vanilla Sky.” (Apparently, he was also in “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” but I wonʼt admit to seeing such crap.) He is best known in Australia, however, for the bittersweet coming-of-age flick “The Year My Voice Broke,” which is one of my all time favorite Wussy Boy movies. You can find it in the foreign film section in most decent video stores, and I highly recommend it. INTRO

Sorry this has taken so long. Iʼm not sure to whom in the world I am apologizing since hardly anyone couldʼve possibly noticed that more than a year has passed since my last issues of The Wussy Boy Chronicles was released. I am so terrible at circulating them once I have them all put together that no one ever really gets to read them. Mostly, this is an apology to me. Sorry Eirik, it wasnʼt supposed to take this long, but I got all distracted by a thoroughly depressing move to Seattle that was supposed to re-invigorate me, but which actually did the opposite and sucked the creative energy from me for eight months. I moved there in October of 2000 to help with the National Poetry Slam that was to be held in August of 2001, so I relocated to Jet City once my summer tour was over. I expected to ﬁnd a vibrant poetry slam scene, but it ended being the exact opposite and stiﬂed my poetry almost completely. For eight long months, I wrote only a handfull of passable poems, and they were only marginally passable, believe me. The rest of the time I temped spradically, drove back to my college town of Chico to escape the dreariness of Seattle, went on tour across the country to escape the dreariness of Seattle, and watched an altogether unhealthy amount of movies and DVDs to numb myself fromthe dreariness of Seattle. I moved back to Chico once the Nationals were done. I mean, it was a great town, really. I liked the town a lot: great food, even better bookstores. But the poetry slam scene I found there was so profoundly disappointing and run by people who seemed to have no concept of the word “community.” (When they tried to say that word, it came out sounding suspiciously like the word “clique.”) And the Nationals were very nearly a disaster. Ugh. So much potential... Yeah, not a whole hell of a lot of good poetry came out of it, and even fewer good experiences, but I managed to keep my online journal going the entire time. And now I have enough material to put together FOUR issues of this zine at once. To get the complete story of my time in Seattle, youʼll have to read Issues #6 - #9, which are all available now. Or you can just cheat and read all about them on my online journal, the link for which is on the inside front cover of this here zine. I decided to return to the format of Issue #1, which means thereʼs no pop culture Wussy shite like CD reviews and movie reviews, etc. That stuff is fun, but by the time the zines come out, everything is dated and lame. So, for the next four issues, itʼs all about the journal entries and the Dear Wussy Boy letters. I hope thatʼs okay. DEAR WUSSY BOY

Youʼll be receiving a couple of my ʻzines shortly. Also, Iʼve put a link to your website on mine, www.angryyoungwoman.com. I enjoyed the Wussy Boy Chronicles. A friend of mine (whoʼs wussy) let me read them with explicit instructions that he wanted them back. I enjoy your writing. Itʼs a lot better than several perzines Iʼve seen. Later, Gloria

Iʼve checked out her site, and itʼs pretty cool. You might want to check it out and ﬁnd out exactly what she means by Angry Young Woman.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Man, I saw your article in Poets & Writers, and thought Iʼd check your site. Clip #3 was T-I-G-H-T! I started getting into this after seeing Spoebox Bartley at a show I was also reading at, and I said, “Damn, THIS is where I need to be!” Seeing stuff like this doesnʼt make me feel so much like a freak anymore... Thank for the encouragement.

Tsani Jones Author, Poet, Philanthropist, and Thorn in the Side

Is there anything better than having someone tell you that something you did made them feel a little less like a freak? I mean, suppose that means that Tsani saw what I was doing and thought, “Wow, look at that guy! Heʼs just as much of a freak as me, only heʼs getting away with it!” Thatʼs cool. Thatʼs exactly the way I felt the ﬁrst time I saw Ducky Dale in “Pretty in Pink,” like someone out there knows my pain.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Can I order the wussy boy manifesto? I lost my copy, and I really need to get another one. I saw you in Colorado Springs, I drove all the way from denver. I was so glad to hear the wussy boy manifesto straight from you. I think you are the lord god king of the wussy boy movement. WC. Will Sartain Iʼm not only the president of the The Wussy Boy Chronicles, I am also a member. Actually, Will, I have to correct you on the title of Lord God King of the Wussy Boy Movement. That highest of Wuss Core honors belongs solely to John Cusack, the über Wuss who is equally parts cool and dorky, a lovable Wuss with a heart of gold but a mischievous gleam in his eye.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

hi. I never really asked if you had a personal email address seperate from this stuff but.. iʼm emailing you all the same. hi!! how are ya? how are your kitties? oh... yeah.. dʼyou remember me? i better get that cleared up before i go on. ahem. iʼm that one girl with the fuzzy hair (you liked petting it). lena and I were the callibra- tion poets at the nationals.. you give good hugs.. etc. yeah. if you donʼt know me by now.. well, too bad iʼll keep on talking. lifeʼs been good to me except the past couple days but overall iʼve been happy. howʼs yourʼs been. done any more tours or stayed at home with the cats? write back and weʼll have a chat. ando

I meet the best people on tour. I mustʼve met Ando when I went to the Teen National Poetry Slam in Ann Arbor, MI, in spring of 2001. My poetry friend and fellow WordCore poet Eitan Kadosh and I have been a part of the Teen Nationals for the past two years, and we plan on hitting the one this year in April in Burlington, VT. Anyway, yeah, I have both toured and hung out with my cats, since I bring them along with me when I tour. I recently traded in my Toyota 4WD pick-up for a nifty black Ford Windstar mini-van, and my kitties like it much better than the truck. More room, better insulation, better gas mileage, plus itʼs easier for them to drive it by themselves when I am sleeping, although I am constantly waking up and ﬁnding them in the drive-thru of some fast food joint trying to order ﬁsh sandwiches, the little fuckers.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

hello hello, badly drawn boy is downright dandy, i say. i saw him may 6 here in chicago...it was the best show iʼve ever seen. donʼt know why...i didnʼt even really know his music yet. but afterwards i bought the cd and bam! there you have it. iʼm hooooooked. travis kick ass in a major way, iʼve seen them live a few times too and theyʼre absolutely great. iʼm seeing them again in july, which iʼm excited about, and coldplay next week. should be a blast and a half. being in a band is gorgeous, and i play a lovely little telecaster. itʼs off- white and used, but i just donʼt give a damn. weʼre playing a show june 12. catch a plane and come out to see us. we rock steady. i have a dog. his name is fred. iʼm allergic to cats, and i wear a huge-sized shoe. but i do love shoes, in all shapes and sizes and colors, believe you me. iʼm a sophomore in high school, but we get out on monday for the summer, which means iʼll be a junior in less than a week. but i am absolutely done with school and would gladly drop out...but i guess that wouldnʼt be the brightest idea. what about you? do you smoke? what do you do for work and that? talk soon jen-o

This letter totally cracks me up. It starts out all talking about my favorite Wuss Core bands, then rambles right into “i have a dog. his name is fred.” And the last sentences get me giggling, like, whatʼs up with all of a sudden asking if I smoke? Read this as if you were standing at the bus stop and some crazy lady with a wild look in her eye and an enormous hat full of fake ﬂowers comes up to you speaking like sheʼs Rainman. “I have a dog. His name is Fred. Iʼm allergic to cats. What about you? Do you smoke?” Itʼs just sounds so random to me that I crack up every time. And yes, Jen-O, I think it would be a little silly to drop out of high school and be an out off work musician. There are so many of them already... As for me, I just do poetry for work, which is not really lke working at all, although the writing part can be pretty fucking work-like. I avoid it a lot, just ignore it until it forces me to write, usually while I am driving down the highway at 80 mph and scribbling on napkins and McDonaldʼs sacks. Thatʼs it, thatʼs all I do. I havenʼt had a job since I temped in Seattle, and that was only from May to September. Other than that, I havenʼt had a real job since December of 1999. Yay me!

DEAR WUSSY BOY

My nameʼs Ocean, and I saw you perform @ the MadBar in Chi- cago during your last tour. I performed the week after, and have been gigging steadily since. Have you any advice to spearheading a slam in a town where Poets read like theyʼre attending catholic mass? I like the site, as well as the article in Poets & Writers. Itʼs not too easy to ﬁnd people with either in the poetry arena. Have you ﬁnally found an apartment in Seattle? Per your permission, I have set a link to your site on my page at: http://www.oceanax.20m.com Regards, Ocean

Advice on spearheading a slam in a town with slightly less than engaging poets, huh? Well, I would just do it, man, just get some fliers and post them up in every coffeehouse and record store in town, every bulletin board on every campus in town, and then I would talk to some members of the local media about helping you publicize this thing called a poetry slam, which, you would tell them, is the hottest thing since Ginsburgʼs ʻHowl,ʼ according to the Daily Oklahoman, a “bonified cultural force” according to the New York Times. Then you make the first show a food fundraiser, see, where you charge two cans of food at the door then donate them to a local AIDS hospice or battered wom- ensʼ shelter or food bank. Then, you go and visit as many creative writing classes in the area to stir up interest, see, then when all the people come, even if only 25 come, you make sure you are a dynamic host with lots of energy and make sure they have fun. Lead by example, and get as many visiting poets into your venue as possible to provide energy and inspiration. And get as many local people involved as you can so that theyʼll have a sense of emotional attachement to the success of the slam. Now do this for a year. You should have a banging scene by then.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Saw your listing in Poets & Writerʼs Magazine. Youʼre very funny. The fact you like to be photographed yelling is the best! I learned a lot from your site and I will log on more frequently for future updates. If youʼd like, check out mine: www.geocities.com/thechocolateman1899 www.geocities.com/waideriddle Let me know what you think. Waide Aaron Riddle

Yeah, the yelling thing. I guess I have a lot of pieces where I speak very loudly. I try not to, you know, I try to modulate my performance so that I donʼt scream at the top of my lungs for every poem, but sometimes I do anyway and blow out my voice, especially if itʼs in a smoky room, which is not a problem in California since youʼre not allowed to smoke anywhere in California, but when I travel, boy, itʼs a big deal, all that fucking smoke. I thought I did a pretty good job with the Poets and Writers article, which was about how to tour across the country with poetry. If you want to read it, you can... itʼs in Issue #9 of The Wussy Boy Chronicles. Or you can check through my online journal and ﬁnd it if you want. The URL is on the inside front cover of this issue.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

So, Iʼm at my ridiculous temp job, transcribing hours of interviews, and flipping through LiveJournal cuz Iʼm an addict like that. And what do I know, I run across your journal and Iʼm like, “Wait, I think I have this guyʼs zine.” And as I am at home that evening packing up my junk to move to NY for grad school, what do I find but said zine, buried in a large pile of papers Iʼm only going through because I either have to recycle them or pack them into a box. (Moving sucks.) Anyway, what really inspired me to write you was your brief comment on Coffee Messiah, where I spent the better part of two days when I was in Seattle last fall, and where the “gothed-out barristas” amicably served me chai lattes and caramel something-or-others and and blueberry muffins while I camped out with my laptop and wrote a violent scene in my novel that Iʼd been putting off for the past two years. So I have much nostalgic affection for this place, and it was a nice jolt in the midst of my day to be reminded of it again. Rachel

They had a pretty decent poetry reading there every Monday, I think, but I hardly ever went since I kinda disliked Seattle an awful lot. I went there to help with the National Poetry Slam, which happened in August of 2001, but the poetry scene I found there was profoundly disappointing. The people who ran the slam were such shitheads about it, and, in my opinion, their almost complete lack of teamwork nearly ruined the Nationals that year. I couldnʼt wait to leave. Of course, you can read all about my trials and tribulations in Seattle in Issues #6 - #9, although I think I may have edited out a bunch of stuff about the slam. It was just too depressing to have to read through all over again, plus most people wouldʼve been bored by all the complaining, and also the people from the extended poetry slam scene wouldʼve been all irate at the shit I said. DEAR WUSSY BOY

Just saw your friends last night from the ignition tour... They did a great job, but... I still think Poetry is too high brow for American Mass Consumption, but I pray u prove me wrong. If you get a little shnackered with the whole poet thing, then heck, maybe stand up comedy would be a sucessful venue? Certainly an avenue to TV Shows, movies... Plays. If it worked for Denis Leary? Eric Bogosian? Probably heard that before. But What the hey! I am getting two cats too in August... One named Chip Mosher, after a trouble making friend of mine, and a nother named Madonna. P.S. Music of Choice: Radiohead, Amnesiac; Elliot Smith, XO, Macy Gray, Talking Heads, Moby, Play. Harry Chapin. Andy Hall Flagstaff/Vegas

My boy Andy Hall is a good guy. Heʼs always showing up at my gigs when Iʼm tour at the most random times, and Iʼll be like, “Whoa, what the hell?” He always seems to find out when I am anywhere within 200 miles of him and just shows up. Good guy, and, as you can tell by his music selection, a dyed-in-the-wool Wussy Boy. And yeah, the comedy thing... I have often thought about trying out the alternative comedy scene, like this thing in Los Angeles called the Un-Caberet where people get on stage a just tell poignant stories that use comedy as a means of relating the human adventures and heartbreaks. I would love to have a career like David Sederis (who writes the funniest creative non-fiction ever, like “Naked” and “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” but who also tours colleges giving these hilarious readings of his work) or Spaulding Grey (who writes and performs these phenomenally engaging monologues like “Swimming to Cambodia.”) Yeah, Iʼm trying to figure out how to live a creative life with lots of performance and lots of connection with audiences both live and at home. I kinda wanna put a bunch of my stuff together and call it a one-man show, do something with slides and props and music, kinda like Cirque de Soleil, only, like, without all the acrobats and stuff.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

You may remember me: I am the tall big-mouthed redhead from the slam masterʼs meeting that opposed the slam sisters. Iʼm also the Delray Beach (Florida) slampimp. (Iʼm growing weary of the slammis- tress title). I read your article in Poets & Writers and promptly pirated a bunch of copies at work and distributed them amongst my poets. You really did a fabulous job on the article. Some good solid advice for initiates. See you in Seattle. Marya Summers

Awww, well, thanks. I think a lot of people who are new to slam got a lot out of that article, but I seemed to have been met with a rousing chorus of ennui from the extended poetry slam scene concerning the thing, like this huge collective yawn or something, like who am I to write such a thing, like, why of all people should I be the one with an article in Poets and Writers. Fuckers. Such an intensely bickering crowd of control freaks... I love them, though, even when I want to bury them and their bullshit in the backyard.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Okay, maybe Urkel was not as cool as you, but donʼt slam that guy. He NEVER gave up. No, I agree, he wasnʼt a wussy boy, but donʼt make fun of him for being a dork. He was a stereotypical dork because it was neccessary for all the cheesy sitcom plots to work, but he was not a real dork. I watched almost every episode of Family Matters, and I know, as annoying as he was, that guy never backed down on Laura. He HAND-BUILT A MACHINE so he could change himself into the man she wanted him to be. Thatʼs devotion. God knows how long he spent on that thing, and how many times he tried to ﬁx it so he would be perfect for her. Which, I think itʼs a little cold of her to be so shallow, but nevertheless, he believed in himself, and everytime someone beat him up, he always stood up for himself. Urkel never backed down, and he was just about as sensitive as they come. Iʼm a big fan of yours E, but that was a bad call. Sincerely, Leslie Moniot

Well, allow me to retort. I say that Urkel was nowhere near a true Wussy Boy, and your letter illustrates that fact perfectly. You said yourself that Urkel “hand-built a machine so he could change himself into the man she wanted him to be.” Sister, thatʼs not devotion, thatʼs sickness. Being a Wussy Boy is NOT about changing yourself to fit into someone elseʼs idea of what a man is, no, I counter, being a Wussy Boy is about accepting yourself as you are and gaining strength from that. If Urkel was a true Wuss, he wouldʼve made some embarassingly honest plea for her love, been rebuked, then retreated to his lonely room to listen to hours and hours of Morrissey and Dashboard Confessional as he wrote painfully bitter poetry in his notebook that he would end up burning in the fireplace while sucking down his fatherʼs gin and contemplating a very showy suicide that would “show them all,” then he would get a grip and realize he needed to move on because she was just a manipulative and shallow human being, so heʼd dye his hair and buy some really cool shoes at the thrift store and start a zine all about the experience. You know, the real gripe about the character of Urkel is that he was so intensely unbelieveable, and the thin plots they had were so stupid and insulting. The whole thing smacked of unreality, which made it perfect for television since most of what passes for entertainment on teevee is terribly insulting to anyone with even a mild case of intelligence. I mean, itʼs okay for you to like Urkel, by all means, but he was very definitely not a Wussy Boy. He was just a big fat dork character that was completely unbelievable, and, to be honest, totally embarassing for the actor who had to portray him WAY past the time it was funny. So there.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

beautiful r eirik ott! just like that crazy wacky subject line reads, australia needs you and we need you badly. very rarely is it that someone of your genius and general hot-diggity coolness crosses our shores. see, australia has no poetry slam culture. at least not one in brisbane. at least not one that i know of...and iʼve pretty much looked around this fair town o mine. no matter how many times i look, it still sucks. but oh! your riffs! delightful! iʼve been refʼing everyone i know to journey to your site in the last year, during which iʼve been making frequent frequent stops to read and re-read and re-re-read everything on it. and it still always makes me smile and laugh and have the good feelings. we like that. so...um...yeah; general wacky fan-mail saying look at ME look at ME and that we love you down here. damn true. kieran.

I canʼt wait to meet this kid. He hooked me up with all kinds of contact information for Australia so that we could book a tour sometime, and if I get there, I want Kieran to come along as the ofﬁcial roadie for the whole tour. Thereʼs this government sponsored radio station called Triple J Radio that broadcasts all kinds of youth programming, and they sponsor tours of American punk and alternative bands all the time. Hopefully, with Kieranʼs help, my performance troupe WordCore can be HUGE in Australia.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

hey, itʼs george, the guy sitting on the far right of the all star cafe in seattle last week. i was inspired by your your stories, and once i get a car i plan to sleep in it and sell chap books out of it. thanks again, i have your chap book, my ex-girlfriend gave it to me before she left me, before I tried to drink myself to death. i read the poem ʻfuck poetry.ʼ somehow it helped. peace. George

I love sleeping in my car, especially when on the road. Itʼs like camping, only behind the Kinkoʼs in Denver since itʼs open 24-hours, has e-mail access and clean bathrooms, and has all the toys I could ever want to play with. Yeah, drinking yourself to death is hardly ever a good idea, although look at Bukowski... he made a living out of it. I think I would rather masturbate myself to death instead. It would still hurt, but shoot, at least you wouldnʼt have to throw up so much.

NEED TO GET SOMETHING OFF YOUR CHEST, WUSSY?

Simply put your thoughts into words and send them to Wussy Boy Central via e-mail to: [email protected] 10.21.00 resettling in seattle

I am in Seattle, and my ribs hurt. Iʼm in Seattle to find my fortune, or my creativity, or some means of using my creativity to build a life I can be proud of and happy with. My ribs hurt because some dumb bastard in my former college town Chico gave me a bear-hug as a goodbye and ended up doing something horribly wrenching inside my body, something punishing and hurtful to my ribcage and back, and now, a week and a half later, I am still stiff and sore. (fucker... a pox upon his loins... a curse upon both his houses...) When I did my last gig in Chico, promoted in the local papers as “Big Poppa E Says Goodbye,” I was in exquisite pain as I performed, and each deep breath used to power each line was accompanied by intense pain in my chest. I hope it wasnʼt noticable, but then again it might have added a certain tragic beauty to it. Maybe. (I just saw “Romeo + Juliet” the other night, and Iʼm all about tragic beauty. Claire Danes is so my girlfriend.) Just as the show ended, this beautiful girl in a blue wrap skirt comes up to me and buys a book, says that she appreciated the reading, says sheʼd like to keep in contact via e-mail, says her name is Alyssa. We only talk for a moment, but something about makes me think, “Hmmm...” I bookmark her name and promise myself to e-mail here when I get the chance. Ever since then, we have exchanged e-mail, and have made plans to hang out together once I get back to Chico. Cool... Iʼm in a Kinkoʼs in this hep section of Seattle called Capitol Hill, a pseudo-hipster clutter of record stores and book stores and vintage clothing stores crawling with gutter punks and people who look fright- fully tired due to their constant pursuit of ever-elusive “cool.” God, itʼs seems such a commitment to be cool. Iʼve never really felt I had the time or energy to be cool. Iʼd rather just be a big fat dork and hope against hope that someday big fat dorks will come into vogue and be cool for at least one rainy winter. Who am I? Who am I? I picture Anthony Michael Hall in “The Breakfast Club,” sitting at the table in the library, sucking on the tip of his pen as he tried to think of something to write along the lines of the topic theyʼd been assigned: Who do you think you are? A lot of times when you submit poems to places who maybe might want to publish them, you have to submit a bio along with the poem so they can tell readers who the writers are. Well, the next time I send something in, by bio will read, “R. Eirik Ott is just this guy.” Really, what more need be said? Well, I could say a bit more, I suppose. Iʼm a journalism major / creative writing minor who isnʼt quite finished with his degree at Chico State University. I will probably take classes here in Seattle once I get established, then have them transferred back to Chico State in order to get my degree, finally. I used to be terribly afraid of that question and more than a little guilty and embarassed by any potential answers I could give to that question, but now I am pretty satisfied with being able to say, “I am a spoken word artist and performance poet who is currently working on a book for New York City publisher Soft Skull Press.” Sounds okay. Of course, the rest of the story is that I am homeless and jobless and living out of the back of my pickup truck and have maybe $100 in my pocket until I find a job. All my stuff is still in storage in Chico, and they wonʼt let me at it until I pay the $150 I owe them for past due rent. Since that ainʼt happening for a while, I have no possessions other than those stuffed in my truck. I love the freedom I have, but the complete lack of structure is a bit intimidating. I love that I am determing my every moment of every day. Here are some other things I love: I love that first time you reach out in a darkened movie theatre and touch the hand of the person sitting next to you who you kinda like only you donʼt know if they like you and so your pinkie finger kinda touches their pinkie finger and instead of moving away they take their ring finger and overlap your pinkie finger and give it a little tiny squeeze and that warm glow in the pit of your tummy is just about the most intoxicating thing I have ever felt. (Next to, like, heroin.) (Just kidding about the heroin...) I love how my kitties come to me when I click my tongue in that special way that means I want them to come to me, and I love it when I lift the covers of my bed and they know it means they should climb inside and snuggle up against me and go to sleep for the night. I love my new address book, which is made of recycled rubber reclaimed from old truck tires and inner tubes rivetted together and sewn by hand by people at this company in San Francisco called Used Rubber USA. It is the most kick-ass address book I have ever seen, and is worth every penny I paid for it. I love listening to headphone music in the back of my pickup and looking at the traffic outside the rain-stained window, just snuggled up with Radiohead and pillows and blankets and stars and cold and comfort. I love when I feel like I have a purpose, a goal, a destination, but right now, I donʼt have much of any of those things. I have a book I need to write, but no motivation or energy whatsoever. I am exhausted and lost after this long tour... I thought I would find something along the way, but I may have lost my way instead.

10.26.00 a little bit addicted

I got a temp job. I am on my lunch break, which, really, is actually my “run home and check my e-mail break.” I think Iʼm getting just a little bit addicted to this e-mail thing.

10.27.00 photo id badges

Day Two of my working stiff life in Seattle, and I have taken a two-hour break instead the standard one-hour because I am so bored and have nothing to do except sit there and earn $10 an hour. I still live in my truck, but at least I am earning money now, although I am down to my last $20 until I get paid in two weeks. This should be interesting. Iʼve been getting a lot of work done on my book by using the computers at Kinkoʼs at night. (I tell them I am a co-worker visiting from out of town, and they let me have free computer time.) I have the whole thing pretty much outlined already. Itʼs a book on poetry slamming and how to organize a tour across the country performing poetry. Seems I have a bit of knowledge about that subject. Oh, the temp job? Making photo ID badges in the security department of a hospital, only the machine that prints the badges is broken, so Iʼve been reading the New York Times all day.

10.29.00 ugh, i’ve been here before

My ass is all wet. I am sitting here in a puddle of my own wet ass. Thatʼs because I spilled a soda between my legs while driving back from Texaco just a few minutes ago, and the cold, wet soda formed a puddle around my ass, and now the back of my pants looks like I had a big olʼ juicy accident in my drawers. Itʼs not that bad, though. At least it was Coke and not Dr. Pepper, because, really, Dr. Pepper is really nasty whether you drink it or spill it all over your ass. I wasnʼt at Texaco for gas, though: I was there for the food. I have spent the very last bit of my tour money, and now I am completely broke, and all I have left to eat with is my dadʼs Texaco card that he lent me over the summer to help pay for my tour gas. Now, Iʼm using it for food. Well, Iʼm not sure you can really call a bag of chips, a Butterfin- ger, and a bottle of ice cold Coke a meal, but that sort of thing is all the mini-mart at Texaco down the street had to choose from. Maybe theyʼll have sandwiches in the morning when I walk past the Texaco on my way to my jobby job. Iʼve spent a lot of time by myself in Seattle so far, choosing to fritter away the evening hours by walking places rather then hanging out with the few people I know from the poetry slam scene. Iʼve been waking up, taking a sink shower at the Texaco bathroom, brushing my teeth, then going for these long walks through the city, just finding cafes on main drags and sitting in cafe windows and sipping on chai and flipping through the newspaper headlines, watching people as they pass. I donʼt speak all day unless itʼs briefly to order another bagel or to ask for the bathroom key, but thatʼs all good. After this long-assed summer tour, I could use a bit of personal silence. I was walking last night throught a light drizzle on my way to a movie theatre downtown, and I started riffing on a poem in my head, fully talking to myself and making hand motions to punctuate the poem as it took shape before me. I donʼt know what I will do with it, yet, or if I can even begin to make sense of it, but here it is so far:

I contemplate angels dancing on the heads of pens and pencils pressed to notebook pads of paper suffering through labor to give birth to beauty

as a poet it is my duty but as a human it is my folly to fail and ﬂail away on stage tearing words from the page like rabbits from hats and hoping they ﬂy overhead like bats swooping then plucking hearts from chests eyes from sockets hands from pockets

but watching in horror as they fall ﬂat and fade some sad magician with top hat full of lack no rabbits to pluck no words to speak only desire to articulate beauty

Oh fuck, I donʼt know, I just made up the last couple of lines just now as I typed them, trying to be freestyling, but failing. I donʼt know why I think I can be a writer sometimes, and I certainly donʼt know why I continue to bother with poetry. I mean, I know that I am pretty damned good at performing, but the poetry part... Well, I have no conﬁdence that I am any good at that part at all. I think I have a knack for getting the most out of my 15 pound bag of shit, but I donʼt know that my words translate on page well enough to move people when Iʼm not there to lead them through it. Ugh. Iʼve been here before. I guess itʼs just cold and rainy outside, weather for self-doubt. Itʼs all good. A little self-doubt on a rainy day keeps a boy humble.

10.30.00 dark black clouds disguised as “cool”

I feel so naughty... Iʼm writing this at work while the rest of the office is at some kind of meeting that doesnʼt require the attendance of naughty little temp workers like myself. Iʼve got a cold soda at my side — my morning coffee substitute — and National Public Radio on the boombox beside my head. I am making $10 an hour to sit here and sip soda and type e-mail to myself. Iʼve been bumming since I got here to Jet City, not seriously, just a little blue and a little overwhelmed at all the freedom I have in this life. I mean, Iʼve only been here a week and a half or so, and Iʼve already got two major poetry reading series in the works, Iʼve got a job, Iʼve got a friend who is about to move out of his apartment and let me move in his place Dec. 1, and I won the very first Seattle Slam Iʼve attended (plus I sold $60 worth of books that night, which I really needed.) So, really, I donʼt have all that much to complain about, but, you know, being that I am a poet boy and being that Iʼm in a city known for being cold and rainy, well... itʼs nice to wander the streets at night in the drizzle thinking back alley thoughts and think about how small we are in this great big universe. I am usually a very positive person, because I have seen some of the amazing things a person can accomplish in this world by simply getting off their ass and doing it. Thatʼs one of the reasons I rarely get too blue and depressed... I mean, the whole world is out there, and all you need to do to change your life is turn a different corner, take a different route to work, drink coffee in a different cafe, quit your job and move to Duluth for the summer and wash dishes for a living, start up an e-mail conversation with an amazing person who you just met and who you strongly suspect might be one of the coolest people youʼve met in a long time... So many options, like an amazingly complex video game with an infinite amount of levels and secret doors and special places and goals and things. Wow, it just makes me giddy to think about all the things a person can do, so many books to reads, so many trees to climb, so many hands to hold, so many connections to make... I just wish I had the energy to take advantage of it all... I wish that about high school, too. I suppose I could have had a much better experience back then, but I had little support from family and school, and I was a bitter little guy, and that kept me from experiencing life to its fullest. It really took me a while to figure things out, but now that I have, I am trying not wasting too much time being bitter. So many people think itʼs so damned cool to be bitter about everything and everyone... I mean, some things piss me off, you know, just like everyone else, but some people walk around their lives trailing dark black clouds disguised as cool... Bitterness passes for cool for so many people, these little black clad hipsters gathering in bitter little black-painted bars listening to their music that is so cool you canʼt even buy it in stores, you have to just KNOW where to get it and the only way you can KNOW where to get it is to be COOL and if you donʼt know where to get it then you obviously arenʼt cool enough... Bleck. Iʼd rather go for a walk in Bidwell Park back in Chico, climb a tree and look at Big Chico Creek float on by for a while, chill with a friend and not say anything, just hold hands and look up at the sky and breath...... and when thatʼs over thereʼs a million other things Iʼd rather be doing than sitting around all dark and moody and chatting with my dark and moody friends about dark and moody things, smoking cigarettes and drinking heavily and feeling so goddamned cool that I can almost forget that I am fucking miserable. But, I have to admit, itʼs fun to mope sometimes, especially when itʼs dark and rainy and youʼve just finished listening to Radiohead on your headphones in a town where you basically know no one. It just feels...... poetic. “So, Eirik, Whatʼya do today?” “Oh, me? Well, you know, same olʼ same olʼ, just walked around and felt poetic.”

10.31.00 sexy nurses and sexy pirates

I am the Mix Tape God, king of the ultimate flow, purveyor of the sacred mix of just the right songs for just the right moment. A friend of mine and I used to trade mix tapes on themes, like, I would challenge him to make the ultimate rainy day mix tape and we would dive into our CD collections and gather armloads of music and sit cross-legged in front of our glowing stereos and make our version of the perfect mix. That would take hours, just hours fitting together the exactly perfectly right songs to conjure the right mix of emotions, then weʼd spend another hour decorating the cassette along the chosen theme. Oh yes, I know from mix tapes. I made two amazingly excellent roadtrip mixtapes using the CDs I bought this summer, and they are both just about perfect. I love a good mix tape. Itʼs Halloween, and I imagine Chico is hopping like always, frat boys dressed up as girls and sorority girls dressed up as sexy witches and sexy nurses and sexy pirates and such, with a few cool pregnant nuns wandering through the mix. They close off the downtown area to car traffic and the students fill the streets, dressed in their costumes and gawking, drinking, partying all night long. My favorite costume I ever saw in Chico was this guy dressed as a tree in a planter. Like, he wore a planter as a skirt, sorta, and his upper body was a tree, and when heʼd crouch down into the planter, he looked just like a tree. And heʼd stay that way for a while, then suddenly this tree would get up and walk down the street... So cool... Another cool costumed group I saw was this guy dressed in white with OJʼS BLAZER printed on his back weaving through the crowds and a bunch of guys dressed in black with LAPD POLICE HELICOP- TER on their backs following him everywhere he went. That was hella funny. This is the first year since ʻ94 that Iʼm not in Chico during Hal- loween. Tonight, I am typing on a self-serve computer in Kinkoʼs in Seattle. Once I leave here, I will drive my truck to some street-lighted residential corner and fall asleep in the back.

11.02.00 wiggle the pooh

I have been trying to make this extremely boring temp job more fun by just being wacky and kooky in the my daily duties, which seems to irritate the dour folks Iʼm working with, and which also makes them think Iʼm gay, apparently, judging from the constant slew of “closet” reference they barrage me with. Anyway, I make photo IDʼs, see, and I make the people stand there on the red line facing the video camera, and I capture their image and download it to the computer to make a badge. Well, you are supposed to just sourly say, “Please look at the camera.” Thatʼs it, boom boom boom, theyʼre out of there whether or not they like the photo. But me, you know, Iʼve got to jazz it up a bit to make it fun, and I am constantly in search of the perfect smile from these doctors and nurses and interns and pharmacists and stuff, which is a mean task. They try to deny me smiles, but then I whip out Pooh and they are mine. Yes, I snagged a little stuffed Pooh Bear from someone here, and I use it to conjure smiles from the frown-faced people who come in. I say, “Okay, look at the Pooh Bear and smile! Cʼmon, you can smile better than that...” and Iʼm, like, jiggling the Pooh Bear at them like Iʼm some portrait guy in Sears whoʼs photographing kids, and the people, all professional and learned as they are, they just look at me like Iʼm some kind of freak. “Look at the Pooh Bear! Lookit, lookit, lookit!” And even the most irritatingly numb professional eventually lets up and allows a faint amused smile to escape, and then I capture it, like a butterﬂy, before it disappears. I ﬁgure itʼs my little way of being a revolutionary, making the hospital subtly brighter with smiles projected from ID badges even if their recipients are frowning all day long. Thatʼs what I do all day, I wiggle the Pooh and provoke smiles from people who, try as they might, are powerless to resist me. I am drunk with this power, and I really must be stopped!

11.03.00 nazi death camp guy

I have spent my morning imagining the sounds of unimaginable horror, yes, the bloody screams of the dying and the horrible sounds of their splintering bones and tearing skin and the final POP of their skulls as they crack and spew their grey mushy contents like fleshy pinatas. I imagine I am the Nazi commander in charge of a new human shredding machine, and I gaze through a thick glass window as the skeletal humans are brought in kicking and screaming with pincher- hooks on the end of cranes and then dropped into the steely teeth of whirring shredders that whine like hungry dogs as they devour the bodies and disgorge the tendrils of wrecked humans into waste containers to be carted off and disposed of. Iʼm actually in the hospital where Iʼm temping as the Photo ID Badge Guy, but there arenʼt any appointments scheduled for today, so Iʼve been given busy work, which consists of feeding old documents into a shredder machine that turns the paper into long strips of refuse. I am so bored, and the only radio station that comes clear in this massive concrete brick building is an oldies station, so I am fright- fully bored. Yeah, so Iʼm shredding the papers, and within seconds Iʼm adding screams to the paper as it gets sucked into the jaws of the shredder machine, and when the paper crunches this way and that as itʼs sucked down, I imagine that itʼs struggling to free itself, so I add little screams, and the next thing you know I am Nazi Death Camp Guy and the wrinkled paper becomes people clawing the air as their bodies are churned into a fine spray of blood and flying chunks of bone and flesh. I know, itʼs yucky, and Iʼm all having fun with the gruesome description, but I was doing it nevertheless and making these little screams of pain as the paper was going down and my back was to the door, see, and Iʼm giggling every time a piece of paper really puts up a fuss going down, fighting the inevitable, and I suddenly hear snickering behind my back, so I whip around and there are two doctors covering their mouths and looking at me like Iʼm some kind of freak. Ugh... I go from Nazi Death Camp Guy to Embarassed Dorky Temp Guy in a flash. When Iʼm not shredding papers and giggling as they struggle, I watch the screen saver on my computer. Itʼs such a cool one, too, these water pipes that spring out of nowhere and form these mindlessly complex patterns no plumber could ever dream of, and I find I can watch the pipes weave in and out of each other for 15 minute stretches and not really mind all that much. I try to imagine myself in some psychotic basement with this crazy-ass plumbing, and Iʼm climbing over and through the pipes just to see where it leads like a kid on a jungle gym. And then the phone rings and I have a purpose again, albeit a brief one. I am so bored, but I am being paid $10 an hour to do it, so I try to keep myself occupied. At least I can eat.

11.08.00 some old bullshit

big fat laughing buddhas have been rolling down my face of late. sufﬁce to say that if you saw me walking down the street, you would ask me why i looked as if iʼd just lost my best friend, and then i would tell you that you were right. kimberly, my girlfriend of four years and my ex-girlfriend for about six months, is just about past-tense at this point, and it is bumming me out. we have dropped communication over some old bullshit that keeps happening, and i have ﬁnally said that i am sick of it and i am ready to end this friendship unless she is ready to deal with it, but she has decided to stand there with her arms crossed, ready to make the decision that it is better to hold on to her self-destructive behavior than it is to keep our friendship. and it is raining.... mope mope mope mope

11.12.00 apex cleaners

I am here in cold, overcast Seattle, hanging out at my friend Lizʼs house and being nice and warm and toasty. I plan on spending this Sunday getting work done, especially finishing the first two chapters and the outline to my book, which shouldʼve been sent to my publisher last week. Eeek. Something happened to me last night. One of the most annoying things about being me is having the WORST memory, especially for short-term things like whereʼd I put my keys or whereʼs my wallet or, in the case of last night, whereʼd I park my car. I treated myself to dinner and a movie because I felt like I deserved it after a week that varied from kinda sucky to completely miserable, so I drove to an indie bookstore and sold enough zines to them to cover my evening. Boom, sold ʻem 7 books, and got $21 in my pocket ready to be spent. So, I go to the area where the movie and the restaurant are, right, and I park up one block and just around the corner, plenty close, and lucky, too, since parking is a real pain in this part of town. I figured I had my evening made. I went to this Thai place down the street from the theatre I wanted to visit, and the food was... oh yes, I am all about some Thai! I got this kick ass appetizer plate with spring rolls and chicken on a stick and these little puffy pastry things with cream cheese and crab, oh yes, and the main dish was a spicy lemon salad with squid that was just right. Okay, then I go see the movie, right? Itʼs this great flick from Eng- land called “Billy Elliot” thatʼs about this kid who lives in a burnt-out coal mining town who doesnʼt want to do manly things like boxing, which his burly coal miner dad wants him to do, no, our hero wants to be a ballet dancer, which, really, is just about the last thing his homophobic dad wants him to be. Anyway, great flick, exhuberant, joyful, amazing, and Iʼm walking out of the movie theatre to go to my car...... and I have no idea where I parked my car. None, not a clue. Itʼs cold outside, really cold, itʼs almost 10 p.m. so itʼs all dark, and I have no frigging clue were my car is parked. I vaguely remembered that I had parked somewhere close by, but had no idea, so I just kinda figured it must be close, so no worries, Iʼll just walk around the block until I find it. An hour and a half later, I am still looking for it, just wandering the streets at night and feeling completely miserable and stupid for not being able to find my car. This happened all the time in Chico, at least twice a month, and I would be walking all around the downtown area and down all the side streets trying to find my car, but see, in Chico, itʼs so small that if I ever gave up, I could just walk home. No worries, I could always come back the next day when it was light and continue my search. But here in Seattle, man... it is a big olʼ city, and I couldnʼt walk all the way to my friend Lizʼs couch if you gave me two days. So, yeah, I was just miserable and crying like a little lost kid in the mall, feeling like I didnʼt have a friend in the world to come and get me and feeling like God must surely be angry with me and was doing this specifically to get me back for something I did. I ended up thinking that maybe it had been towed and that was the reason I couldnʼt find it, so I called the police from the movie theatre, but nope, it hadnʼt been towed, which was good on one hand because I wouldnʼt have to pay to get it back, but was bad on another because it really meant that I was just a knucklehead who forgot where heʼd parked. (And the lady cop who I was talking to asked me if I wanted to file a stolen vehicle report, and I told her that wouldnʼt be necessary since I probably just couldnʼt find my truck because I had forgotten where Iʼd parked it, and she all pauses, then says, “Sir, have you been drinking?” I just looked at the phone all offended and said, ʻNo, I donʼt drink!” then hung up on her.) So, there I am, standing in front of the movie theatre, itʼs almost midnight and I still havenʼt found my car, and Iʼm standing there with my hands deep in my pockets looking all miserable, and my eye spies this sign down some street I hadnʼt gone down yet, this sign that says “Apex Cleaners.” I had seen it several times during my search, but it was down a street that I surely had not driven down because it was on the opposite side of the street that I knew I had parked, so I hadnʼt even bothered to go down that street, but every time I saw the sign I would pause and look at it: “Apex Cleaners.” Apex, by the way, means the highest point of something, like the highest point of a mountain or building. Itʼs one of my favorite words, so seeing this sign several times had this sort of mystical movie effect on me, like it was not just a sign, but a “sign.” But I just knew my car wasnʼt that way because I was sure I had parked on the side of the street with the movie theatre on it, you know, why would I have parked on the other side of the movie theatre when there were so many parking spaces available over here, why would I have parked over there? So Iʼm looking at the Apex Cleaners sign and I finally go, “Okay, fine, Iʼll go down that street, fine, but I know I didnʼt park there.” I cross the street and start walking toward the Apex Cleaners sign and I pass this coffeehouse with a sign for tea in the window, and the sign is somehow familiar even though I donʼt remember ever being on this street, and I keep walking and the stone steps to that house over there look hella familiar and I turn the corner...... and there is my truck! I was so happy, I made this little schmoopy schmoopy sound and reached out and touched my truckʼs tailgate like it was a lost puppy who had finally come home. After that, I just went my friend Lizʼs place and went to sleep on her couch. What a night.

11.14.00 cancer of the eyeball

You know how you sort of prepare yourself to call in sick even though youʼre not really sick, like you get all worked up in the sick mood and the sick mode and you prepare to sound all sleepy and grumpy and groggy on the phone, sorta convincing yourself that you actually are sick and actually do deserve to have a day off because you sorta kinda actually maybe donʼt feel all that hot maybe kinda sorta? Well, it seems that every time I do that, I sucker my body into actually thinking it really IS sick, and I end up getting just as sick as I pretended to be on the phone to call in sick for fakes, only this time itʼs for real. I am sniffling in advance to build up my upcoming performance as Sick Boy Who Needs To Call In Sick. I plan to get steadily sicker as Friday approaches until finally, on Thursday, I will be so sick that I have to leave early so that I can get better over the weekend, but, you see, I will not quite be ready for work on Monday, so I will call in sick again and promise to be there on Tuesday no matter how sick I am (or pretend to be.) Hereʼs my fear... in my quest to set this situation up, I might actually start to feel sick for reals. Case in point: I am starting to sniffle and my throat is sore. Ugh... Okay, just let it be known that only cancer of the eyeball could keep me from the lovely arms of Alyssa this weekend, the girl I met in Chico on the night of my final Chico performance, the girl who Iʼve been corresponding with ever since. I am starting to hate Seattle, and I really need some warmth even if I have to drive 12 hours south to get it, and I will, oh yes, I will. Alyssa is cool. I wish she lived in Seattle... 11.15.00 passersby

i always take the stairs. the security office in which i work is on the fourth floor of the hospital, and whenever i decide to get up out of my seat in front of this computer and roam, which is often, i always use the stairs instead of the elevator. there are three reasons for this: 1] the stairs take longer than the elevator, which is nice when youʼre trying to do something, anything, with the time you have in the hospital other than what you are being paid to do; 2] the exercise is nice (i walk to and from work and to and from lunch, too) 3] but, most importantly, when you sing in the echoey stairwell, it reverberates and makes you sound extra special cool like celine dion. so, iʼm taking my morning walk to the cafeteria to get bagels and soda, and iʼm in the stairway, and i launch into this rousing rendition of the theme from “i dream of jeannie” using my world famous, patented, much copied but never duplicated “old man whistle.” yeah, iʼm giving it up ethel merman stylie, just belting it out, and boom, i almost bang smack dab into some nurse whoʼs grinning herself silly at my “i dream of jeannie,” like sheʼs caught me in the act of doing something embarassing, and i totally stop and look down at my feet and keep on going, right? well, just as i am leaving the stairway, i hear way up in the distance several floors up... the whistled theme of “i dream of jeannie.” yeah, like a virus, my song leapt from me to infect that nurse who then kept the song going. so cool... i go to the cafeteria, get my bagels and cream cheese and butter and jelly (yes, i put them all on my bagel... first the butter, then the cream cheese, then a good schmear of jelly to crown it), and iʼm going back up the stairs...... and i hear it, the theme from “i dream of jeannie” being whistled by someone up the stairs from me, and iʼm thinking, “wow, that nurse is STILL in the stairwell whistling, what a trip,” and the whistle is getting closer and closer and iʼm fully planning to smile big at the nurse to catch her in the act of stealing my whistle, when suddenly, around the corner, itʼs not the the nurse but some guy intern coming down the stairs whistling the theme from “i dream of jeannie,” and he looks guiltily at me and stops and continues down the stairs, and i am just flabbergasted because that means my whistle passed from me to the nurse and then to this intern guy and who knows how many people in between and then it was delivered back to me in the very same staircase where it started... so i belted it out again, just whistling this old man whistle to the tune of “i dream of jeannie” and as i hit the fourth floor to go back to work, way down at the bottom of the stairs, near the basement, i could hear the faint strains of “i dream of jeannie.” i love life. life kicks ass. people, as fucked up and lame and flawed as they are, can be so much fun sometimes. i wonder how long the “i dream of jeannie” virus will stay in that stairwell to infect passersby. iʼll have to check later to see if itʼs still there. p.s. i love that words “passersby,” because the singular is “pass- erby” and you would think the plural would by “passerbys” but itʼs not. same for the plural for “attorney general:” itʼs “attorneys general” and not “attorney generals.” i just love that.

11.16.00 little boonkie choo-choo

so, yeah, iʼm eating like crap because iʼve been basically living on my parentʼs texaco card, see, and my diet has consisted of trucker sandwiches wrapped in celephane and bags of chips and bottles of soda, and itʼs just awful and i feel like crap, so i sorta “liberated” some vitamins and a fiber supplement from the local qfc grocery store the other night (i know, i should feel terribly guilty, but a boy sometimes has to do what a boy has to do). anyway, last night iʼm walking downtown to the poetry slam and i get hit with this huge foghorn blast of a gas attack, just voluminous, like when you blow up some huge balloon and just let go of it, whoosh, like i should be lifted off the ground and ricochetted off the corners of rooftops and lightposts and mailboxes while making this high-pitched whistle sound. man, it was so... well, impressive, really, in a third grader watching cartoons with dad sort of way, like, “damn, son, whatchoo been eatinʼ? hand me them pork rinds, you big sewer ass, before i beat you with this stick.” to use a phrase my grandma favors, i was “tootinʼ to beat the band.” to use a phrase my mom favors, i was “windy as all get out.” to use a phrase my sister uses, “damn, stink biscuit, you funky!” i kept thinking that since it was so cold outside, maybe plumes of methane fog could be seen putt-putting out of my backside like a little boonkie choo-choo, and i even checked in mid-poot, but the results were inconclusive. okay, so i get into work this morning, and iʼm about to take my morning vitamin and fiber suppliment, and i notice this warning on the fiber suppliment bottle: “may cause slight bloating or gas.” iʼll say. what an understatement. the warning should say: “this product may transform your ass into a smokestack methane factory, which may or may not cause stinky plumes of fart gas fog to gather around you on cold evenings and trail you like a bloodhound after an escaped convict. caution should be used with this product during first dates or job interviews.” you know, the only advice my dad ever gave me about dating concerned gas. he said, “son, just remember to hold your farts during the whole date. donʼt dare fart in the presence of your date. hold it until you drop her off, and when youʼre sitting in your car and you wave goodbye and start driving, then you can cut loose.” he added, “iʼll tell you son, thereʼs nothing like that first big fart after a big, hot date. when i first dated your mother, i used to hold it so long, my belly would just swell up. yup, i sure did love that girl, and when sheʼd get out of my car, man oh man, iʼd just fog them damned windows.” me and my dad... bonding the old fashioned way, through farts. my sister, whew, she can fart. sheʼs a big girl, 300+ pounds, 5ʼ4”, eats lots of meat. homegirl is a veritable gas factory. we used to play this game growing up, the “ha, i farted in your face game.” i would be watching scooby doo or something and sheʼd come launching into the living room and stand with her aircraft carrier ass in my face and let off a fat juicy ripper right in my face, bonus points if my mouth was hanging open at the time. that should tell you all you need to know about my family.

12.01.00 not much to look forward to

Hereʼs my typical daily routine in Seattle. I wake up with my hand on fire, painfully asleep and prickly with numbness and cold as a marble headstone. Every part of me is huddled under the covers except for my hand, which is thrust under my pillow and up and around my pillow and dangling limply over my head. The windows of my truck camper are covered in ice... on the inside, where the fog of exhalations has patterned the window with crystaline spiderwebs. The first order of business is to piss, so I use my other hand, the one thatʼs not dead, to search around for the piss bottle I keep in the corner reserved for such things. (The other corner is reserved for my wallet and keys and various other amenities not to be besmirched by spending time with the piss bottle.) And I use it, the piss bottle, while still under the covers in the back of my pick up, and I can see flumes of piss fog shooting from the end of me even though the light from outside is filtered through three layers of covers and the iced over window. Itʼs fucking cold. I cap it, the piss bottle, and put it back where it goes, then climb through the little window into the cab of my car, sit down in the driverʼs seat, put on my boots (theyʼre by the pedals in the floorboard), find my jacket, grab my backpack, and strap on my headphones. This morning it is all about Nine Inch Nails as I walk sleepily toward Capitol Hill, the trendy downcast gutter punk and starbucks blend of a place where the food is cheap and expensive and the people are fucking assholes and sweet at the same time, kids in clothes I could never afford shuffling up to me sweetly to ask for change and I can smell the hair conditioner in their dreadlocks. And so I walk to the bookstore, headphone full of Trent Reznor moaning and wailing and gnashing his teeth as people pass me by in slow motion silence, the whole world is my very own dream sequence, my video, my backdrop of extras and facades. I like glossy magazines. I donʼt know why, but something about “People Magazine” and “Entertainment Weekly” really works for me, so I pick up a handful and pay for them at the front counter (handing my money to the young tough hipster who would no more smile at me than sneer at me for I am nothing and no one). Today, I camp out at the Vietnamese Noodle Joint down the way, and I flip through my glossy magazine filled with snapshots of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt and Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys and all these young and pink superstars. The noodle soup is hella good, as is the cream puff that comes with every meal here. I look out the foggy window at the people passing by, still plugged into NIN so theyʼre all moving silently and in slow motion like a Scorcese movie, all of the unsmiling and searching. I could see a movie, but thereʼs nothing on that I havenʼt already seen. I could go to a friendʼs house, but, oh yeah, Iʼm in Seattle, and I donʼt know anyone well enough to just pop over. I could fucking shoot up heroin and pass out in a puddle of my own vomit and piss, but Iʼve never really wanted to fit in that bad. I could check my e-mail, but since I donʼt have a place to set up my computer I have to go to the internet cafe down the block which charges $5 an hour for access, which Iʼve already done twice today even though itʼs only 2 p.m. So I just watch the people passing in the window, drink my soup, and read glossy magazines for two hours as the waiters and busboys ignore me and hope that I go away sometime soon and allow someone else to sit at this table and buy more than just a $5 bowl of soup. Is there a slam tonight? No, slams are only on Wednesdays, and it wouldnʼt matter anyway since they wonʼt let me slam because Iʼve already won the slam this season and they wonʼt let you slam again in a season once you win one, so I am not allowed to slam until next year. Fuck, I wouldʼve held back if Iʼd known that. I would have held back. So, thereʼs not much to look forward to. I donʼt have a job anymore. They were hella pissed off that I took off for a whole 5-day weekend to see Alyssa, so when I called in sick for the third time, they told me they had replaced me. Cool, so I just spent all of Thanksgiving with Alyssa and her family down in Southern California. I still have $500 in my pocket, so thereʼs not much hurry right now to find a job. As long as I eat frugally, I can go on like this for months. At least until my next poetry tour starts on Dec. 10. Iʼm hitting the road with three friends of mine: Eitan Kadosh, Eirean Bradley, and Daphne Gottleib. Since all of our names have an “ei” in them, we are billing our tour as the “EI-EI-OH The Humanity Tour.” Weʼre renting a mini-van and tooling all over Arizona and Texas for 12 days, until just after Christmas. Then I will get dropped off in Southern California to spent post-Christmas and New Years with Alyssa and her family. Oh, and the really cool news about the tour is that we will pass through Oklahoma City, which is just a few hours from my parentsʼ house in Wichita, KS, and my parents will meet us there with my kitties Aretha and Thelonious, who have been in Kansas since the start of my summer 2000 tour in May. Jesus Christ I miss them a lot... Until then, Iʼll just hang around and read magazines and every once in a while crash on a couch, but I am kinda self-conscious about it, so Iʼd rather sleep in the back of my pickup. It eventually gets dark. I go back to the back of my pickup and turn on the radio and listen to National Public Radio news for a few hours, then maybe I read by the light of the overhead lamp, then maybe I sit there snuggly in my blankets and listen to my headphones and day- dream at night. Then I sleep. And that is my typical day in Seattle.

*****

Iʼm holed up in my friend Gabrielleʼs pad again, playing on her computer while sheʼs out romping with friends at a goth club. I ﬁnally showered tonight... ﬁrst time in a couple of days. I totally want to secure this studio apartment that my friend Buddy is about to vacate, then Iʼll drive all the way to Chico and chill with Alyssa for several days until I leave for my tour, but Iʼm trying hard to keep it real and focused on being here in Seattle. Iʼve been walking the streets of Seattle watching helicopters circle silently overhead as my headphone morphine mainlines slow-motion soundtracks into my ears. The helicopters are searching for WTO pro- testers, riots, vandalism... I want to shoot them down with my wicked stare, just POW POW POW motherfuckers. Cops chafe me, rub me red and raw, fuckers. I miss Alyssa. I am looking forward to rolling in the pleasure of her warm company like a cat making love to a sunbeam on the carpet, just stretch my long torso across her lap, spread my toes wide and crack my mouth in a yawning mixture of lazy pleasure and passion and purr loud to the rafters, loud like a earthquake rumble whisper in her ear. Yeah.

*****

Alyssa asked me to e-mail her some “Eirik Ott Poetry,” something not so performance oriented like the Big Poppa E stuff I perform on stage. Jeez, itʼs been a while since I just wrote poetry for the sake of writing it, you know, without the thought of what it would be like to perform it in front of a live audience. Most of the stuff pre-Big Poppa E is girlfriend poetry, you know, dog-eared notebook poetry written in coffeehouses. Hereʼs an old one. I was thinking about this girl I used to date in high school, Kelly, the big one, the first love I dated for six years, and I was thinking how much she and I had changed over the years, to the point where I didnʼt even know her anymore, and I could be looking at her and thinking that I could barely see her anymore, like I could just look and see right through her to the wall behind her. It was so sad... Made me miss the girl she was when we first met, back when she was 16 and I was 17. So, anyway, this is about me thinking about when we first met back in high school and wondering whatever happened to that girl.

Coffeehouse Girl

sixteen years old sweet as a rose every petal of her paper-thin i could see her veins showing right through her powder-perfect skin pond-green eyes bright-eyed wide how sheʼd smile when sheʼd see me now i donʼt know where she is

Our relationship was sad and cold and lonely for both of us, especially for her, and I wrote this one about the end of our relationship, when we were living together and there was no more love left, no more warmth, and the cat wouldnʼt even sleep between us anymore. The title comes from an ancient Scandanavian symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Itʼs supposed to stand for eternity, but it also seems a good symbol for self-destruction. Anyway, here it is:

Ourobouros

he masturbates with her body instead of his hand they touch then turn away side-by-side the luke-warm space between their dry backs measured in years a misty reminder of the love behind her drips from between her legs and fades into the tightly knit ﬁbers of their crisp white sheets

We had nicknames in high school. I was Peter Pan and she was Wendy. She was always asking me to “let her in,” but I never knew how. I felt so empty and lost and didnʼt know how to get back to her...

Wendy

empty as a pane of glass cold to the touch of your pressed-ﬂat ﬁngertips you whisper let me in let me in but your voice only fogs the window

Anyway, that was a long time ago, and Iʼve thankfully learned a lot about relationships since then. Hereʼs one I wrote about beauty... Itʼs about Jen, the girl who died in a car accident in 1999.

Moonlight

Whenever I need proof of Godʼs existence I need only run my open palm along your spine, trace the small of your back, and cradle the half moons of your behind. God must be an artist to have crafted such exquisite angles, such curves, such warm, smooth, ﬁne hairs.

Soft, like rain.

12.03.00 ﬁnally

i am so happy today! callouh callay! my tour has finally come to an end, after all this time, finally, “couches across america” has ended after almost 7 months. last night i snuggled in my bed, not someone elseʼs couch, and i nestled in my blankets, not someone elseʼs, and i watched dvdʼs on my computer, not someone elseʼs tv, and i was in my own apartment, my very own apartment, and it is the first time that i have lived alone in my very own space without roommates in my whole life, well, except for the summer of ʼ96 when i did that internship in red bluff, but that was temporary so it hardly counts, anyway, i have a home! today was all about exploring my new area, which is either called fremont or wallingford depending on who you ask. i live right around the corner from “the troll,” which is this cement sculpture under a bridge of a giant troll eating a volkswagon, and i apparently live just down the street from “the center of the universe,” which is an area of fremont with weird shit like a big rocket and a statue of lenin. thereʼs a right nice bread shop just down the way with heavenly smells wafting out of its little windows, and just down from that is a little bookstore with a cafe and a performance space called “witʼs end” that looks delightful, oh, and get this, they have poetry readings every sunday, and oh, get this, tonight is sunday, so i am going to a poetry reading tonight. cool, cool, in my own little neighborhood. around the corner from that is a little indie record store and a little indie bookstore that sells zines, there are several thai places, a noodle place, all kinds of little nickety nack stores, and it all slides right past the ocean, or bay, or inlet, or whatever that big expanse of water is called. oh, and you step out of my house and look down the street and you can see the entire skyline of seattle, boom, just right there. and all this for only $400 a month, which, really, is next to impossible to find in seattle, i mean, youʼve got to inherit a place like this. even in chico, a studio apartment is more than $300, i would think. here, i live in a house thatʼs been split into five piece, with on little person in each piece. ahhh... no bathtub, though. that kinda sucks. lots of hot water, so maybe i can just sit there in the bottom of my shower and think happy thoughts and itʼll almost be like a bath, only looser, more space between the water. yeah. i feel good. finally.

*****

some friends of mine and I decided to hit the road together and go on tour through the southwestern u.s. (the characters for this drama will be eitan kadosh, eirean bradley, eirik ott and daphne gottleib. notice how we each have an “ei” in our names? thatʼs how we came up with the bright idea to call our tour “the ei-ei-oh the humanity tour.”) we were all itching for poetry roadtrip action, plus we were all eager for each otherʼs company, so we booked a series of gigs over a 12 day period and hit the road in a mini-van. for some reason, i didnʼt keep a journal the entire time we were out and about, but my tourmate daphne gottlieb did, thank goodness. it provides the taste and smells of the roadtrip highway, plus gives a view of me that i couldnʼt necessarily give. so, hereʼs daphne...

12.15.00 Day One, Los Angeles

Eirik picks me up and we rocket down to L.A., talking and laughing. Itʼs so so good to see him. All of a sudden, Iʼm overwhelmingly excited to be on the road with these guys, to be part of the tour. We hit rotten traffic but still get to Eitanʼs in decent time; figure thereʼs about an hour until we have to hit the road again. Weʼre greeted by Claudia, Eitanʼs girlfriend, who lets us in and is lovely and gracious. Eitan is stuck in traffic at the airport after picking up Eirean at rush hour, so Ei- rik and I hit the jacuzzi. Itʼs heaven. Truly. This is the tour life, sitting in a jacuzzi, drinking wine, with all possibilities of the road wide open. By the time weʼre dressed, Eitan and Eirean have arrived. We have to drive down three hours to Yucca Valley, in Joshua Tree, tonight, in order to do a full day of workshops and performances. We grab dinner at the Chicken & Waffle House and hit the road. Itʼs the first day of the tour, which means the van is clean, everyoneʼs awake, and weʼre all a little like 8th graders at a dance — a little nervous, a little giggly, and excited. We arrive at the Wellerʼs house after midnight. Mr. Weller is the school principal, and Mrs. Weller is an English teacher at the school. Weʼre punchy when we get there, sneaking in with our pillowcases slung over our shoulders, all of us in black with watch caps. We joke about stealing the vcr and taking off. It takes us about fifteen minutes to stop giggling and get inside. The Wellerʼs son has forfeited his room to us, and we bed down. Everyone sleeps except me. Too much Red Bull on the way, I think. I watch the dark until it fades, notice how every dark is different — this isnʼt the darkness of my bedroom; itʼs not mine. Iʼm far from home. Iʼm the only one awake in the world and I listen to Eirean breathe in his sleep, unaware that Iʼm there. He throws his leg over me in his sleep. I wait until itʼs time to get up and am thrilled to find they have coffee for us. I feel like shit from not sleeping. The Wellersʼ house is beautiful, and theyʼre unbelievably kind. Over coffee, I ask about standards for the reading, about how conservative the community is; whether there are any hot-button topics we should avoid. Having gotten in trouble for reading about “controver- sial” topics, such as homophobia. Mr. Weller tells us that thereʼs currently a trial going on — senior football players raped two freshmen boys as part of a hazing using wooden dildos. CNN and Dateline are on campus doing stories. I scratch out the possibility of doing any work about sexual assault or homophobia, in addition to having already scratched out poems that are completely inappropriate because of language or content. There are about three poems Iʼll be able to read. Iʼm tired and a little frightened about whatʼs going to happen. We pile into the van and get to the school, where weʼre given maps to the classrooms. Eitan and I pair up for the first two periods, then weʼll switch. Iʼm a little put off, since Mr. Weller has told us about the teacher weʼre being sent to by saying, “Sheʼs Jewish. Youʼll like her. Sheʼs a feminist.” Is this largesse or discrimination? The first couple of classrooms go pretty well. Eitanʼs far more comfortable than I am, since heʼs a high school teacher. He relates to the kids easily, talking to them about spoken word and slams and poetry and history. We put their preconceptions about poetry on the board and then do a mock slam, to show them what poetry can also be. It goes well, but I feel like Iʼm coasting on Eitanʼs prowess. All that changes when Eirik and I team up for the next two periods. We jump right in with poems, get the energy in the room up, get the kids and the teachers writing haikus and performing them. We get excited and so do they. A weightlifter boy reads a haiku about what it really feels like to push weights to the point of straining and failure. A class clown writes a poem on the board about weed which — with some serious editing that Eirik facilitates — becomes a pretty moving love poem. I get a hug from a teenage girl who is herself a writer and a musician, who is producing her own spoken word tracks. I fall in love. When we break for lunch, none of us want to switch partners as planned — it turns out that Eirean and Eitan make a great team, too — theyʼre going for the head, with a more academic approach, and weʼre going for the heart — if not sometimes lower. Eirik says the word “vagina” repeatedly, and makes disparaging comments about President- Elect Bush. This is probably not good. Having been burned by the wrath of high school parents before, Iʼm extremely wary. Others arenʼt — Eirean has been doing a piece about homphobia for the classes. I feel like a chicken, ashamed to approach dangerous terrain even though I believe down to my toes that itʼs lifesaving work that we do when we give kids a rope, show them theyʼre not alone. Still, I donʼt want to be the least wanted guest at yet another high school. I hold my tongue and feel like a hypocrite. Even so, we drive back to L.A. pleased with the way things have gone. Apparently, students have been running into the office all day, reporting that they want to be poets! Weʼre extended an invitation to come back, and we even get paid for this. Unbelievable.

Day One, Part Two

We fight L.A. traffic and get back to Eitanʼs. Everyone is pretty wiped out, and showers, naps and food are in order. Eirean is out of chapbooks, and it seems like a bad idea to let the one person without a cell phone go with our van to Kinkoʼs by himself. I volunteer. We get to Kinkoʼs, and itʼs a sideshow. Weʼre second in line, but weʼre behind a man editing his resumes with enough scratchmarks to make the documents look like the work of spiders on acid. Eirean and I read over his shoulder. For the rest of the tour, heʼs dubbed the “PornoRussian,” since weʼre surprised to see XXX movies are the meat of his resume. The clock ticks. We wait in line. And wait in line. And wait in line. We begin to hate the PornoRussian. A lot. It takes forever, but Eireanʼs chapbooks get finished, and we only get moderately lost going back to Eitanʼs. We change and eat — itʼs a pink wig night for me, and itʼs time to go to Beyond Baroque. Itʼs a little daunting reading there — Iʼve read at the Nuyorican and the Green Mill, and Beyond Baroque is the last of the places on my “legend” list where I havenʼt yet read. Eitan put the show together, and so itʼs largely his friends and family who comprise the crowd. Everyone else mingles easily before the show, but I feel scared and shy, smoking cigarettes by myself outside. Itʼs a small crowd, but receptive, and itʼs fun reading in a black box theater instead of a bar or a coffee house. Poetri, who has come to see the show, emcees, and Rachel Kann and Derrick Brown are in the crowd. Still, the crowd likes funny, and Iʼm not. By intermission, all the boys have sold books, but Iʼve sold none. Iʼm wondering what Iʼm doing on this tour, why Iʼm here, why they asked me when I totally suck. Eireanʼs feeling subpar, too. We com- misserate, telling each other that we donʼt suck, and help prop each othersʼ chins up. Iʼm determined to hit my second set, and to make light of the situation. Luckily, I do both, thanking the crowd for buying so many of the BOYSʼ books. It helps. They laugh. I feel better. Beyond Baroque buys two copies of my book, one for the archive and one for the store. They also give us more than our share of the door. It turns out to be a good night after all. We head back to Eitanʼs, ready for sleep, since we have to get up extra-early again, this time to perform for four assemblys at his school. When we get back, Claudiaʼs upset. Somethingʼs wrong with her pet hedgehog, Percy. Dislodged from his regular venue, the bathtub, heʼs gotten cold and gone into what may be hibernation — very, very dangerous for a domestic hedgehog, since they can die. Eitan grabs a hot water bottle and he and Claudia attempt to warm Percy up. Iʼm too tired not to sleep, but I feel guilty sleeping when Percy is potentially seriously ill. We have four hours to sleep until we need to get up. I burrow into my sleeping bag until the alarm goes off, hoping things are better in the morning.

12.16.00 Day Two, L.A./Phoenix

When we wake up, groggy and disoriented, the hedgehog is better, shows signs of being back to normal. We, however, are already showing road damage, groaning and pulling the sleeping bags back over our heads, stumbling into the shower one by one, fumbling through our bags in search of something to wear. Itʼs too early. We get to the van and Eirean is begging for coffee. Eitan is cold hearted and passes by the 7-11 mercilessly. I convince Eirean that he doesnʼt really NEED the brown stuff that passes for coffee. Eitan mentions that thereʼs a coffee/bagel shop right by the school. We close our eyes until we get there, except for Eitan, who is driving. Coffee procured, weʼre slowly, slowly coming to life in front of an assembly crowd of teenagers, the four of us side-by-side like a game show panel in what looks like a cafeteria. When the kids see Eitan, they begin chanting “CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE!” after his signature piece. He attempts to demur, but we pick up the chant, and — until he glares at us — Eirik and Eirean initiate it from then on. We have four periods to go. Weʼd been told that El Camino High was far less conservative than where weʼd been — the only request was that we not use the word “Fuck”. Given such free reign, Eirik proceeds to perform a piece about sadistic toilet paper, which includes the unfor- tunate phrase “my chicken eye swollen up like a bagel.” Eirean censors himself, and is about to change the word “ejaculate” to “busting a nut”, but fortunately opts for “getting busy” instead. Iʼm playing it really safe, but am fighting with myself — there are pieces that I want to read, that I believe they might have some use for — about abuse and rape — but I barely have the energy to sit up, much less stir up controversy. The kids however, are fueled by being on the verge of vacation and sugar. They pull us up, up, up. Out of nowhere, thereʼs magic in the room. Eireanʼs putting it out there to the point that heʼs losing his voice. Eitan is flailing like the hummingbirds on crack he writes about. I spot a kid in the back with a triple-mohawk and an Exploited T-shirt. I yell out, “Hey — I played pool with Watty a long time ago!” He yells back “SHIT!” and I launch into a poem about punk rock, just for him. Eirikʼs jumping on tables, delivering his signature piece, “Wussy Boy.” And in the middle, he drops it — goes blank. A kid sitting at his feet shouts out the next line — “but I have no fear!” Weʼre stunned. Eirik bends over, asks him if and how he knows the piece. The kid says he did it as a dramatic monologue for a class. Eirik grabs his hand and pulls him up on to the table, saying “finish it!” and jumps down. The kid goes to town, holds the room spellbound as he delivers Eirikʼs piece. We canʼt believe it, are standing up and cheering, when all of a sudden, the kid goes blank. Eirik tags him out and finishes the piece and the two receive a standing ovation. Itʼs an incredible moment. Riding on this, I decide to stop being a chicken and do the piece Iʼve wanted to do all morning, about being raped. You can hear a pin drop in the room. Itʼs tense and dangerous to look at anyone. When I finish, thereʼs a huge yell. I send the piece out, with love, to all the rape survivors in the room. Girls come up to me afterwards, ask me if itʼs true, if it really happened, nudge each other shyly and rush off to tell secrets to each other, testify, confess. Itʼs an amazing morning. I canʼt believe theyʼre paying me to do this. We herd back to the van and over to Zankou, for amazing chicken shwarma. Weʼre starting to fade. Itʼs already one and we need to be in Phoenix by eight. We stop at Eitanʼs, pack up the van, and hit the road, upset at how late it already is, plan to make time on the road. The road has other plans. We get stuck in traffic like flies on a fly strip. We eye the time nervously, call Ian, our host for the gig in Phoe- nix, and tell him whatʼs going on. I doze off, sure that when I open my eyes again, weʼll be out of traffic. Weʼre not. Weʼre still trapped in a stop-and-go logjam 60 miles out of the city. We canʼt get off the freeway to pee. Eirik relieves himself in a bottle. By the time we break free, weʼre four hours away from Phoenix and itʼs six p.m., meaning we wonʼt get there until ten. If we haul ass, we can still make it. Eirik takes the wheel and weʼre driving 95 m.p.h. I change my clothes in the back of the van, putting on a ponyfall, leopard-skin bra, leather pants and eyeliner in the dark. Eirean keeps in touch with Ian on cell phone. Itʼs a nightmare. Only a few people have shown up, the woman who weʼre supposed to stay with has broken her foot, and the DJ has been spinning ambient. Weʼre an hour away, still on target to be there at ten, and feeling triumphant. Ian says the DJ is about to put on breakbeat. Things are looking up, until Ian mentions that heʼs about to put on the first poet. Itʼs only eight — heʼs starting an hour early! At this point, it becomes clear that weʼve forgotten about the time zone/daylight savings time problem. Thereʼs nothing to do now. We wonʼt be there before eleven, even with Mario Andretti at the wheel. When we get there, Ian is pushing it, doing imitations of Yoda and Sean Connery having phone sex. We rush into the bathroom before we take the stage, keeping whatʼs left of the drunk, surly crowd waiting. We donʼt suck, they donʼt suck, but itʼs far from triumphant. We grab drinks and go back to Crystalʼs, our hostʼs, who — forti- fied by vicodin — is still allowing us to crash on her floor. We talk and drink for a while — Phoenix folks are very cool — but the fatigue is unbeatable. Eirean is at his girlfriendʼs house for the night, Eirik has disappeared and Eitan is slowly sinking into the couch. I say goodnight to the party people in the kitchen and spread out my sleeping back on the living room floor. Theyʼre loud. Itʼs impossible to sleep. Some girl is stroking Eitanʼs head, asking “Is this bothering you?” “No,” I hear him say. “Iʼm like a cat.” I burrow farther into my sleeping bag, pull the pillow over my head. At 5:30 a.m., Crystalʼs roommate comes in. It turns out Crystal is in Rachelʼs bed because Eirik is in Crystalʼs bed. They talk about Crystalʼs broken foot. I miss my girlfriend, my cats, my bed. Itʼs too soon to be so homesick. I try to sleep. I fail.

12.17.00 Day Three, Phoenix/Flagstaff

I donʼt really wake up because I never was asleep. The day starts with the thump of crutches being thrown down the stairs, and a very unhappy, uncomfortable Crystal hopping after them. Itʼs a mark of her true generosity that she still allowed us to stay at her house after a night at the ER, and itʼs upsetting to see her in this much pain. Sheʼs followed down the stairs by her roommate, Rachel, who is going out to fill Crystalʼs vicodin prescription. She agrees to get coffee for us, too. Life is looking up. Eitan slowly comes to life, and we sit in the kitchen, talking with Crystal about her work — sheʼs an iron sculptor and makes those ornate fences you see. We look at books of her work, which are just incredible — giant leaves fan houses; copper screens partition off bedrooms from the rest of a loft; end tables scroll happily into themselves. Weʼre awed. And weʼre even more awed when Rachel returns, with not only coffee in hand but a dozen bagels. Itʼs sunny out. Thereʼs bagel, coffee, and showers. Things are good. We wait for Eirik to wake up and Eirean to show up from his girlfriendʼs. Eirik toddles out, well-rested, and Eitan and I try to hide our envy. Iʼve been going out on the patio to smoke, and neglected to notice a low-hanging metal canopy over the sliding glass doors. When I put on my platform boots, which make me an inch taller, I whack my head on the metal every time I go outside. This is not a good omen. We all wait for Eirean, and begin to de-ass the van, which is stinky from cigarettes and already is showing signs of being worse for wear, littered with empty bags of pork rinds and Doritos (dinner en route to Phoenix — there was no time to stop for food), and empty cans of Red Bull and water. Somehow, Eireanʼs stuff has begun to decorate the van — a shirt here, a pair of boxers there, toothpaste here, disposable razors there. We wrangle his stuff into a bag and load our stuff back into the van. And weʼre exhausted again. An hour after saying he was on his way, Eirean shows up with his girlfriend. We are too polite to speculate on the delay. I am curled up on a couch, resting; Eitan and Eirik are upstairs, chatting with Crystal, who is going to try and come to the Flagstaff show. Sheʼs lovely. We say goodbye to Rachel and Hayden, who are madly cleaning the house, and stutter towards the van. It takes us a long time to leave Phoenix. Eirik needs to make copies of his chapbook — despite slow sales for the rest of us, Eirik is sold out. We get pizza and check email while he xeroxes. Eirean and I go pick up Scott, a poet who has opened for us in Phoenix who will be joining us again in Flagstaff. Weʼre glad for the chance to see him read, and heʼs got a great smile. We pick him up, grab Eitan and Eirik and hit the road. With an extra person in the van, thereʼs not really any way to sleep. Iʼm in the shotgun seat. We hit Flagstaff in good time, and trudge into the coffee house, with clothes and make-up in my bag. Itʼs cold in Flagstaff. Iʼm so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. I pop a trucker speed pill and have a big cup of coffee. Weʼre a little worried about this show — Flagstaff is a college town, and itʼs the holidays. Also, the regular slammaster is on the road, so we donʼt know what kind of advance word weʼve been getting. There are a few people in the room, but not many. Thereʼs no PA — Eirik is delighted. See, somehow, Eirik forgot to return a PA system he rented for $10 in Chico, CA, so weʼve been driving along with it in the back of the van — Eirik figured it was safer in there, and we might have the chance to use it. He was right. There are only half-a-dozen people in the venue, and our host, a friend of Eireanʼs, Ben, still hasnʼt shown up, and itʼs a half hour until the show. Eirean calls him to find a dire outgoing message — Benʼs father has died, and heʼs had to leave town. Weʼre all upset for Benʼs awful news, and are all a little concerned since now we have nowhere to stay. Scott and his friend, Amy, come to the rescue. Scott with emcee for us and Amy, who lives in Flagstaff, has volunteered to let us stay with her. Weʼre more than grateful. Eitan and Eirik start working the room for pass-the-hat to try and get us gas money. Scott starts the show with powerful, rapid-fire poetry, ending with the line “BANG! Youʼre Alive!” The ephedra is kicking in. Iʼm awake. We do a set of two pieces each and are surprised by the crowd — even though itʼs a small crowd, theyʼre hugely attentive; good listeners. Crystal and Eireanʼs girlfriend, Megan, have driven up from Phoenix to come to the show. Thereʼs a table of baby dykes in the middle of the coffeehouse, who perk up at the mention of my touring with Sister Spit. I pull out girl poems, just for them. At the break, we all sell books — we all knew that you canʼt judge a room by its size, but weʼre selling more books than any of us have so far — people are buying extras, for friends. The room holds more surprises, too — three people in the room have flown in from Las Vegas, just to see us. The crowd is no longer tiny — itʼs an intimate evening, something weʼre all sharing. Afterwards, we stop at Safeway and all go to Amyʼs to have drinks and talk. Itʼs an adorable little bungalow, and you can see signs of love and attention all over the house — itʼs well cared for. Snow is on the ground in patches outside, and trains go by, singing a low moan, every few minutes. I feel like Iʼve stepped back in time. I drink champagne and compare notes on Masterʼs programs with Karen, the slammaster from Vegas, and share confidences with Scott in the kitchen. Eitan and Eirik talk music with Amy. Megan, Crystal and Eirean chat on the couch. Miraculously, everyone clears out at a reasonable hour, and we settle down to sleep. Eirean and I share Amyʼs roomateʼs bed, and Eitan stakes out the living room couch. Eirik stays up, talking with Amy, until very early. The train pulls away in the night and we follow it to sleep.

On Kindness, Lies and Forgetting

Itʼs easy to lose track of things on the road — days of the week, for example. By Albuquerque, I have no idea what day it is. Also, the van seems to swallow things — important pieces of paper, directions, CD cases. Once youʼre home, too, everything seems like a dream. Thatʼs one reason for writing this — to try and keep some relief in the memories before theyʼre gone, too. And in writing this, Iʼve already forgotten to put in some really important things — the kindness of Beyond Baroque, who donated more than our share of the door money to us; Claudia, who offered me her bathing suit in L.A., so I wouldnʼt have to jacuzzi in my underwear. Iʼve also told a lie here, too, and I want to set the record straight — I never played pool with Watty. A friend of mine did, and I stood next to the game as it was going on. Anyone who knows me will recognize the obvious lie, since Iʼm a shitty pool player, but in the moment, it seemed too much to explain — “I stood next to Watty as a pal of mine beat him at pool” seemed too much to say. So, Harris Legome, that victory is yours. So far, thatʼs the only lie here, and I wanted to set the record straight. Back to the road and time — Iʼve already lost the ability to remember where and when some things happened, so Iʼm going to list them here. Iʼm not sure when the level of humor regressed to second-grade potty talk (hours, perhaps — this happened before we even left L.A.). I donʼt know when we realized the phrase “Letʼs go,” was something Eirik translated to mean “Go use the bathroom.” That, too, happened early on. I donʼt know which show it was where instead of doing two poems a piece in each rotation we began doing one poem each — this made a huge difference in energy and pacing, and made the show more fun for everyone, but I donʼt know which show this happened at. Iʼm also not sure when — not even knowing how out-of-place and incompetent I was feeling at the moment — the boys started talking about what a great synergy we presented as a group. I held my tongue and listened. We have a great synergy as a group onstage; we each do things the others canʼt. I remember suddently feeling shiny and important, a real member of a team. I believed them and it changed the way I approached the stage every night, but I donʼt remember when or where it was. I also donʼt remember when we got our theme song. I know that I was asleep in the middle van seat when someone changed the CD. When this song came on, suddenly everyone in the van was sitting up, bobbing their heads. As soon as it was over, I said, “Who is this?!?! Play that again!” It was Possum Dixon, “Your Emergency,” off the “Star Maps” LP. We played it again, and somehow, before almost every gig, it found its way to the CD player, became our theme song. The rotten thing about this was this CD skips on that track — but never in the same place. Still, we played it over and over, singing along louder and louder as we learned the words. Which is probably as good a symbol as any for the tour itself.

12.18.00 Day Four, Flagstaff/Albuquerque

When we wake up, Amy made us real, honest-to-god coffee. Yum. Our hero. I have a Scooby Doo mugfull of it, sitting outside, looking at the beautiful view. Scooby Doo is especially appropriate this morning, since Iʼm feeling like Danger-prone Daphne — in the dark, I skinned my knee as I ran through the wire fence around her house, trying to get to the van in a hurry. I also, apparently, tried to smother Eirean in our sleep. He woke up with my torso on top of him, unable to breathe. I suppose there are worse ways to die, but Iʼm still embarrassed. We leave for a cafe and order breakfast. Eirean leaves to call his four-year-old son and comes back nonplussed. Heʼs called during TV time, and Canaan has told him that heʼs on commercial from Digimon and canʼt talk long. And, saying, “You and your friends be safe on the street, Daddy,” he hangs up. We get to the van and drive. I should qualify this, since I havenʼt before — the BOYS drive. My car insurance only covers liability, and $100-plus for extra insurance seemed a silly expense with three drivers. Still, I often feel guilty as they haul me around in the van. Weʼre off to Albuquerque. This is where my memory starts drawing blanks, for reasons Iʼll detail in Day Five. I canʼt recall much of the drive between Flag and Albuquerque, but maybe it was just unmemo- rable. Itʼs possible. We get to ABQ, check into a hotel on Central and change clothes. Itʼs a night for the black wig and red clothes. I love Albuquerque, and am excited to be back. Everytime Iʼve been here, from the ABQ poetry festival (where I arguably met Eirean for the first time) to on tour, Iʼve had a great time. Iʼm excited. We head to a brew house to eat and meet up with Kenn Rodriguez, ABQ poet extrordinaire, and leave for the venue, R.B. Winning, a coffee house. Matthew John Conley, our host for the evening and kick-ass poet, is also waiting for us. Heʼs in ABQ for the holidays, a stopover of a few months before he moves to Austin. Itʼs good to see him. Part of touring always feels like a family reunion — seeing people youʼve not seen in way too long. Iʼm sad not to see Danny Solis — Iʼd been looking forward to seeing him. I hope heʼll show up later. The crowd is decent-sized and lively. The opening poet, Manuel, is terrific — he was a member of the ABQ 00 team. His mom is sitting next to him, and is a great audience member, laughing and clapping. Weʼre introduced as four of the singles from “Temptation Island,” the new TV show bent on breaking up four newlyweds. The show goes well. We sell books. Iʼm feeling brave and decide to do a new poem. Iʼm only ever in love with one of my pieces at a time, and right now, itʼs a piece about women who kill, called “Death Drive.” Itʼs scary to bring out something new on the road, but I tell the crowd that until ABQ, Iʼve been reading poems I thought the audience wanted to hear. This time, I tell them, Iʼm going to read something I want them to hear. They cheer. Itʼs good. Both sets go well. Eitan is charming, making the crowd swoon. Eirean is moving, touching something deep in the audience. Eirik is a powerhouse, rousing them to laughter, indignation, and cheering. We try something new with book sales — selling all of our books together as a package deal, for $20. This goes over like gangbusters, and we sell a lot of books — together. This is thrilling — concrete evidence that we succeed the most by working together. Cheesy, but true. After the reading, someone hands us each a package. It turns out that Danny couldnʼt make the reading because his beloved Dallas Cowboys were playing, but heʼs left holiday gifts for each of us. Inside each package is an action figure for us — a mutuant avatar, if you will, which in some ways represents our qualities. Mine is a telepathic elf who kicks ass. Everyone handling her checks to see if sheʼs wearing underwear. My package is also full of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” candies — Dannyʼs remembered that Iʼm a fan from the sig file of my email. Each of our packages are customized like this. Iʼm shocked — who knew he saw each of us so clearly?!? We call him on Eirikʼs cell phone and demand that he attend the after-party at Esther Griegoʼs (yes, another kick-ass ABQ poet. The cityʼs full of ʻem.). He does. Itʼs good to see him. Itʼs a great party. Conversations run from the blithe to the deep, from spoken word to politics to football to love. Itʼs a moving, im- promptu reunion of the formerly estranged ABQ 98 team, with Eirean, Kenn, Danny and Matthew all in the same room at the same time. We hear a killer track that Tamara Nichol has laid down with friends on CD. Weʼre all tired and have a long drive the next day to Oklahoma City, but none of us want to leave. In fact, Eirik decides to stay on Estherʼs couch, since hotels make him lonely. Iʼve learned my lesson about drinking at altitude the hard way, but Iʼm unaccountably, and obnoxiously, giddy as we get to the hotel. (Eitan, Iʼm sorry for making fun of your boxers.) We go to sleep too, too late, dreading how early weʼre going to get up, trading party gossip and secrets before the lights go out. We are completely, utterly satisfied.

12.19.00 Day Five, ABQ/OKC

We wake up feeling a little ragged, thanks to such little sleep and the prior nightʼs carousing. It takes me a few minutes to figure out how to work the motel shower — Iʼm that kind of groggy. We pile into the van and retrieve Eirik from Estherʼs, where itʼs unclear whether anyone actually went to bed — Esther and Mimi and Ken are sitting around, and Matthew John Conley is on the floor of the living room, frozen in a frighteningly unnatural pose in a sleeping bag. We threaten to teabag him. The van needs gas, so we go to a gas station that conveniently has an Einsteinʼs Bagels next door. This is when things go blurry for me. Iʼm coming out of the side of the minivan when Eitan slams the front minivan door. Thereʼs a flash of blinding pain, and I roll backwards, back into the van. The door has connected square on with my skull. Eirik is holding me by the shoulders, and Iʼm crying, even though Iʼm trying not to. Eirean gives me a “daddy kiss” to make it better. I wipe my eyes and try to be brave. My head hurts like a motherfucker. We get bagels and coffee and hit the road. Iʼm not feeling so good. I lie down in the wayback. The boys are playing a game called “camper van”, in which someone names a category and everyone contributes a member until you run out. Iʼm having trouble thinking of anything — I canʼt think right — so I lie down. I wake up at some gas station and realize my eyes arenʼt tracking right. Iʼm dizzy. I take some advil and ask Eirik to see if my pupils are the same size, if they can follow his finger right. He says they do fine. Iʼm still dizzy. I start worrying. Eitan feels terrible. I try and console him, tell him itʼs just a bump on a head, that accidents happen. They do. Iʼm not angry; Iʼm just beginning to get a little frightened. Eirean, it turns out, has a past as a really bad skateboarder, and is a veteran of five concussions. The problem is, they gave him the care advice while he had a concussion, so he doesnʼt remember any of it. He suggests Heʼs checking my memory. I had a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast. Clinton is still president. He says Iʼm fine. I go back to sleep. Itʼs too much work to keep my eyes focused anyway. Itʼs hard to talk — takes too much effort to move my mouth to make the words. The next time I wake up, weʼre at a gas station. Iʼve been asleep for hours, apparently. The boys were worried, and are glad to see Iʼm awake. Iʼm still dizzy, but less frightened. Eirean is telling me that they were really worried this morning, when he was driving. “You mean yesterday, right?” I say. “I mean, you didnʼt drive this morning. It was Eirik.” I can tell by his face that Iʼve made a big boo-boo. Iʼve lost memory. Iʼm scared and Iʼm dizzy and I start bawling on his shoulder. “Itʼs okay,” he tells me, over and over. I feel ashamed. I feel bad for Eitan. My head hurts. Iʼm scared. Somethingʼs wrong with my brain. I want to be a trooper, but I feel like a big baby. I try to pull myself together. I donʼt want this to be happening. He suggests again that they take me to an ER after the show. I say no. Iʼm not vomiting, which he says is a strong sign of head injury. Besides, what are they going to do? Charge an exhorbitant amount of money and take a huge amount of time to tell me I may have a concussion, and I should sleep and rest. Someone keeps track of what time I take advil so I know when I can have more. I go back to sleep in the middle seat of the van so they can keep an eye on me while they drive the rest of the way to OKC, to meet Eirikʼs parents and his cats, who will be joining us for the rest of the tour. I have a stutter of memories of Oklahoma City: itʼs prettier than I thought — brick houses with manicured yards full of christmas-light reindeers. Iʼm daunted by the lights left on in an office building to resemble a 50-story cross, as well as billboards that say, “Please donʼt go to hell! Love, Jesus.” When we pull up, Eirikʼs parents are waiting for us outside the venue, which isnʼt open yet. They have generously offered to take us to dinner, so we go to a nearby Pizza Hut. Eirikʼs parents are really, really nice, generous people. Itʼs also clear that they probably do not agree with our politics. In the car, weʼve asked Eirik if we should censor ourselves, and heʼs told us not to. Dinner feels a little bit dangerous to me, as we skirt around topics that might cause conflict. They tease Eirik, and begin — gently — sassing us. Things are going to be okay. While Eirean goes to Kinkoʼs, we stop at Eirikʼs parentsʼ hotel room to change and see the tuxedo kitties, Thelonius and Aretha, who are adorable. Iʼm having doubts about how well theyʼll travel, but theyʼre beyond cute. I miss my cats. Iʼm still having trouble standing well and seeing. I change my clothes and slap makeup on my face. I decide that looking better will make me feel better. Iʼm sure of it. Itʼs a pink wig night. Eirean is very nervous about this show — it turns out, he had a terrible show in OKC when he was on tour with SlamAmerica last summer. Crowd or no crowd, heʼs out for retribution. Eirik is sitting by himself, reading through material. Eitan is having a beer. I notice the Otts have a video camera. Iʼm about to be videotaped performing with a head injury. Swell. Although weʼve been told that the OKC scene is fierce, drawing 200+ people, the cold and the impending holidays are keeping people away. Still, the room is filling up. We wait. Eirikʼs dad generously has set up a bar tab for us. I have a whisky and water and advil, hoping it will help. Miraculously, it seems to, just a little. Hereʼs the first odd thing I notice about OKC — none of the poets use their real names, it seems. Lord of the Vibes, Lydia, Tapestry, Spontaneous Bob, Cheetah — everyone, it seems, has a stage name. Eitan and I spend time talking to a pretty boy named Boston, who is a zoologist. Weʼre rapt, asking him all the different animals he cares for, the most exotic animals heʼs been bitten by. This man touches lemurs on a regular basis. Weʼre in awe. I think the show goes okay — the boys are great, and I struggle through it. By all accounts, Spontaneous Bob is a terrific host. I canʼt remember; nor can I recall any of my pieces well, so I rely more heavily on the page than usual, lose my place. Later, Iʼm told I wasnʼt as “off” as I thought I was. Iʼm glad, though Iʼm proud to just have made it through the reading. Eirik reads a lot of work about his family, in honor of their attendance. One piece is a fictitious piece about his grandmother and peach cobbler, and how she turned tricks in rough times. Eirikʼs mom later tells a story about his maternal grandmotherʼs reaction after hearing the piece. She said, “I donʼt know about this poetry slam stuff, but I think heʼs saying that Sandyʼs [Eirikʼs momʼs] motherʼs a whore.” Thereʼs also something difficult and tender going on. Eirik reads a piece with a line thatʼs something like, “I want my dad to call me and just say, ʻSon, Iʼm proud of you.ʼ I want that last line not to make me cry every time I read it.” Eirik chokes up when he reads that line. I canʼt look at his dad. Families are so hard, all of them. From the outside, it seems like Eirikʼs dad is hugely proud of him. From the inside, Eirikʼs experience is apparently very different. Our set is mixed in with local poets readings. Nixon, who weʼll be staying with, introduces a poem he wrote by saying, “I went to this bar the other night and there were all these young, happy, attractive women there and so I wanted to firebomb it.” Thatʼs kind of a scary thing to say anywhere — especially in Oklahoma City. I think weʼre all a little concerned about staying with him, suddenly. (This feeling doesnʼt abate when we find out he works at the front desk of a jail, and the first things we see in his house are a billy club and two large hunting knives.) The show ends with the strangest reading we see on tour. Thereʼs usually one bizarre poet in every crowd, but the poet who ends the show in OKC is in a class of his own. A young guy insists on reading, says he signed up 3 weeks ago even though thereʼs no sign-up list. Cheetah takes the mike in full white hip-hop regalia, and proceeds to do an incomprehensible rant at top volume through a tongue-piercing lisp, with a tiny notebook in hand. He forgets his piece, flips through the notebook, mutters that he canʼt read his handwriting, says, “ohfuckit, iʼm just gonna stop here.” And then launches back into his piece, pedal to the metal, top volume, until he forgets his piece again, says “ohfuckit, iʼm just gonna stop here.” He does this two or three times, for about six minutes. Itʼs the funniest thing Iʼve seen on tour, except heʼs not joking. We sit in stunned horror until heʼs done, then we adjourn to Nixonʼs, for beer and sleep, having agreed to meet the Otts for breakfast. Iʼm ready for more advil. Nixonʼs house is neat and hospitable. We chat for awhile with some of the local poets, including Charlie, a young woman with piercings and skin fringe. I give her a copy of my book, since she says she really wants one, but sheʼs homeless and doesnʼt have any money. She reminds me of some of the couch-surfer punks I used to know. Then, itʼs time for sleep. I hope my head feels better soon.

12.20.00 Day Six, OKC/San Antonio

We wake up to Nixon stripping his bed. Apparently, his cat, who resembles nothing so much as he resembles a small, white Ewok, doesnʼt like houseguests, and has peed on Nixonʼs bed. In yet another act of largesse, Eirikʼs parents take us to breakfast at Dennyʼs. Theyʼve already eaten, but they sit with us while we eat. My head still hurts, but my eyesight isnʼt skipping quite so much, and Iʼm less dizzy. Iʼm glad Iʼm starting to feel a little bit better — this isnʼt a permanent state of things. However, I order eggs at Dennyʼs, which is inexplicable, since I donʼt like eggs. And they even taste good. Itʼs time for the cats to join us. Space in the van is at a premium — itʼs already all we can do to fit the four of us and all our stuff — but things are shuffled around to make room for the catsʼ food, water, and covered litter box. Eirik is confident that these cats are seasoned road veterans, but the rest of us remain to be convinced — and weʼre none too sure about the pleasures of riding with an active litter box. As it is, the van smells — to get rid of the icky van smell — a mix of cigarettes, dirty laundry and old food — weʼve purchased an industrial-size air freshener — VanillaRoma scent. Itʼs overly powerful. Although it does change the van odor from plain old ass to vanilla-scented ass, itʼs not clear that this is an improvement. The tree goes into the glove compart- ment, which means that whenever the heat vents are on, whoever sits shotgun is assaulted by blasts of VanillaRoma. Eirik gets into the van, two cats in his arms, and weʼre off. As the van starts to move, Thelonius and Aretha scamper into the litter box, sit side by side, and stare at us. Itʼs a little cute and a little creepy, but weʼre all pleased that theyʼre sitting quietly. We drive. This is the last of the long driving days, which is a relief. The distances between shows are starting to be a drag. Suddenly, the van smells foul. One of the cats has used the litter box. “Sharif donʼt like it/ when you rock the cat box,” deadpans Eitan. Windows are quickly opened to dispell the smell of VanillaRoma cat shit, but itʼs freezing out. We pull over at the first gas station available and huddle far away while Eirik cleans the litter out. This gives someone in the van an idea — during the day, the innocent cats take the blame for a number of gastrointestinal sins of unknown origin. Weʼre tight on time, thanks to the nightmare that is traffic around Austin, so I get ready as we speed along, adjusting my ponyfall in the dark, blindly putting on eyeliner. We get to the venue on time, and weʼre relieved to find out that the show usually starts late. Thereʼs time for food. A disembodied voice welcomes us as we come into the room — itʼs the man, the legend — Phil West, setting up the PA. I meet our host Shaggy, SlamAmerica bus veteran, for the first time. Iʼm a little dazed, and itʼs hard to stay aware and not drift off into some head- injury fugue. We all need food — we try to go across the street to a Mexican restaurant, but itʼs closed. Eitan accidentally sets the burgu- lar alarm off when he pulls on the door handle. We make a quick trip to Jack in the Box, which is a terrible idea. Even a mild concussion doesnʼt make that stuff appetizing. When we get back, the police are outside the restaurant where we set off the alarm, investigating. We go into the venue and try not to appear suspicious. Every crowd has its own personality. The San Antonio crowd is known for being tough, especially during the slam; merciless hecklers and rude. Ben Ortiz, who has run the slam, has relocated to Chicago, and the host is new. The room is fairly full, but the audience seems to be there as much to talk to each other and get drunk as to hear poetry. I walk over to a bunch of barflies during Eireanʼs reading and explain that weʼve driven a long way to come and read; I ask them to please be a little bit quieter. They quiet down until Iʼm about three steps away. We donʼt sell many books. These people arenʼt big readers, it seems. Thanks to the concussion, most of the night is a blur; I donʼt mind not remembering it so well. Some old guy comes up to me after I read, starts talking to me about how slam brings out the worst in poetry, pushes people into pandering. I tell him I agree with a lot of what heʼs saying, and heʼs surprised. He goes away to write down his email for me, unsolicited. Heʼs a little strange. Shaggy comes up and warns me that this guyʼs a little odd. It turns out, heʼs written a poem called, “Amalia is a Cunt, Amalia is a Whore,” and is verbally abusive to poets. It also turns out that Iʼve missed the gist of what he was saying completely — when he was talking about poets who pander, he was apparently talking about me. I think this is hilarious. Itʼs the first time Iʼve ever been accused of selling out, thatʼs for sure, and shows me how little attention he was paying. The boys enter the slam. The sacrificial poet reads a piece about having sex with his grandmother, and details her yeast infection. He wins the Cheetah award for the night, although first runner-up is a guy who has a poem about knocking his girlfriend unconscious and, unsure whether sheʼs dead or not, decides to “get his fuck on” anyway. “YOU MAKE ME WANT TO KILL MYSELF,” yells Eirean from the back. I second that emotion. Eirik wins the slam, Eirean comes in second. Weʼre about to go to Shaggy and Amaliaʼs to hang out and sleep. Some guy approaches me with the winning pick-up line, “I just got out of basic training and I havenʼt seen a woman in eighteen weeks.” Love, San Antonio-style. He asks me what Iʼm doing after the slam. I explain that weʼre all very tired and want to sleep, at which point his friend comes over and asks if he wants to go to the party for us. Iʼm busted. I donʼt care. I wander around the party, avoiding the army boy, who proceeds to use the same line on every woman at the party. I meet Amalia, our hostess, for the first time. Sheʼs lovely. I only know her by reputation — everyone who has mentioned her name has said such wonderful things about her, and they all seem to be true. Shaggy and Amaliaʼs house is very cool — toys everywhere, a futon for us to sleep on, musical instruments in the living room. I talk to Oliver, a local poet for a while — Shaggy says his work is amazing. Still, Iʼm tired, in pain, and ready to go to bed. Eirean and I are both almost out of cigarettes, so Oliver agrees to take him to go buy a pack. I excuse myself from the party and go to bed down. Eirik brings the cats in. We begin to settle down, snuggling, talking quietly, waiting for Eirean to come back. Weʼre starting to get concerned. Itʼs an hour later, and Eirean hasnʼt come back yet. At 4 a.m., thereʼs a knock on the door. Eirean comes in, frustrated, saying, “If someone takes you for cigarettes, make sure they know where they are and where theyʼre going.” Having gotten lost, they tried to call the house after getting the number through information. Oliver has written the number down wrong, and so they woke up some old man. With the last of their change, they called information again — fortunately, the address is listed, and after much trial-and-error, they find the house again. He throws his pillow down. Thereʼs nothing to do but sleep. This dayʼs gone on too long as it is. 12.21.00 Day Seven, SA to Houston

[CORRECTION: Eitan has informed me that the “Get My Fuck On” guy was in Houston, not San Antonio. Heʼs right. Mea Maxima Culpa. Blame it on the head injury. Thanks, Eitan.] The alarm goes off on Eirikʼs cell phone at some ungodly hour. Itʼs all I can do to moan, “When do we get to sleep in?!?!” No one moves. The alarm gets turned off. We all go gratefully back to sleep. We come back to life around 11, slowly. I stumble out to the kitchen and see two garbage bags full of bread — it seems that Oliver delivers bread to charities, and has graciously given us more bread than we can eat in an entire year. I chomp into a croissant, gratefully. We kick around the house for a while, shower and change. Eirik was supposed to have brunch with a couple of people he met, but must have copied their phone number down wrong. Eitan had been invited to drop by the studio of a candlemaker he met, but itʼs already later than we thought, and so he doesnʼt go. Eirean is checking his email when he comes across a message from a student at Yucca Valley High. Apparently, the kid saw his piece on homophobia, since he wrote something to the effect that he hoped that Eirean and his “butt buddy” Eitan were “brutally ass-raped” so that they could understand that “fags are NOT harmless.” All of us gather around the monitor, staring. Eirean hits reply, and writes “The world is a beautiful place, and Iʼm sorry you canʼt see that right now.” He hits “send”. Amalia comes home for lunch as weʼre packing up the van. She finds a snakeskin wallet on the living room table, and offers it to us, thinking its ours. Itʼs not. It belongs to Army Boy. She decides to drop it into a mailbox, since thereʼs no easy way of getting in touch with him, even if we wanted to. We pack up the van, and chat with Amalia and Shaggy — their long-term plan is to move to the Bay Area, which I heartily encourage. It would be great to have them as neighbors — not to mention co-con- spirators. Amalia is working on a show called “Women of Ill-Repute”, and it sounds like a lot of our work mines similar terrain, which is really, really exciting to me. We promise to keep in touch. Weʼre hungry and ask Shaggy for directions to somewhere for breakfast. Itʼs a little late for breakfast so he sends us to Chris Ma- dridʼs, for what are apparently the best burgers in San Antonio. Weʼre on our way. Weʼre still shaking off the discomfort that was the prior nightʼs show, distressed by the small sales and the rude crowd. Food seems like a good antidote, a way to leave the night behind. We puruse the menu at Chris Madridʼs — burgers, burgers and burgers, although they come in two sizes — regular and “The Macho.” Their free bumper stickers proclaim, “I ATE THE MACHO.” Weʼre up for it. Eirean orders the Macho Porkyʼs Revenge, which is a burger topped with bacon and cheese. Eitan orders the Macho Cheeseburger. Eirik orders the Macho Ladiesʼ Special, and I opt for the Macho Jalap- eno Burger, which says itʼs “Not for Sissies.” Eireanʼs food arrives first. We stare in shock. Itʼs about the size of a frisbee, and is covered in so much cheese you canʼt see the burger, and can barely see the plate. The bun is sitting saucily on top, and someone says it looks like Jabba the Hut wearing a beret. The rest of our burgers arrive and we attack. I take about half a pound of cheese off my burger before digging in. Itʼs hard to know whether to use silverware or not, these things are so big. Eirean finishes his Macho, cheese orgy and all. Weʼre impressed, and also a little worried that heʼll have a heart attack on route to the next show. We sit in the sun, slowly digesting, feeling like anacondas who have swallowed elephants. We waddle back to the van, where Eirean promptly climbs into the wayback and passes out. Weʼre on the freeway about five minutes when Eirik realizes he doesnʼt have his wallet. He left it in the bathroom, on top of the toilet paper. Eirik calls the restaurant, and the guy at the counter who answers goes to check the bathroom after Eirik details which stall and where he left his wallet. Itʼs a tense few minutes until the counterman returns to tell us — he has the wallet, and everythingʼs still in it. We loop around and go back to Chris Madridʼs, pick up Eirikʼs wallet, and hit the road again. Weʼre off to Houston. House music blares and Eitan and Eirik quasi-freestyle each otherʼs poems to the beat, an experiment that more often than not, ends in laughter. “Unnnh — itʼs gotta be gotta be the Cheese the CHEESE — Unnnh,” goes Eirik. “Naaaw, Dad — Iʼm not Gaaay — Iʼm just SEN-si-Tiiiive,” counters Eitan. The cats have left their litter box seats for now — Aretha sits on Eirikʼs lap and Thelonius is wrapped around his neck like a cat stole. We make good time to Houston, Eirean sleeping off the Macho in the back. No one weʼve talked to knows anything about the Mausoleum in Houston, except that this isnʼt a slam — itʼs an open mic. Mike Henry gave Eitan the name of someone who referred him to someone else, Kim Cotton, who got us the booking. Thatʼs all we know. Our theme song blaring, we pull up to the Mausoleum, which is as goth-perfect as its name. Out front, a wrought iron gate surrounds the property. Giant, eye-like orbs hang from the trees, and a metal spiral is covered in distorted masks. Iʼm in love. Again. Weʼre early, so Eirik and Eitan decide to go for a walk around the area. I need to change my clothes and put on make-up and Eirean wants to read the paper. I change my clothes in the bathroom, but the lights are dim blue, so theyʼre useless to put on make-up by. I go back to the van to finish dressing and put on my black wig. Weʼre sitting outside, smoking, when weʼre approached by an older man, a professor. Heʼs never been to the Mausoleum before, and has been told by some of his students that he should check out the open mic. He asks us what we write about. Eirean says he writes about necrophilia. I say I write about killing men. We ask him what he writes about. Looking very nervous, he says, “My workʼs more... philosophical, I guess.” He starts to walk away, and we tell him weʼre joking. We talk a little longer, but he looks nervous the whole time. We meet Mike, our host for the feature. Heʼs a big guy, and warm. He knows as little about us and what we do as we do about him. Weʼre offered a half-an-hour together and an additional 3 poems apiece in the open mic. Sounds great — itʼs a chance to read more work than we usually do. Weʼre delighted. Eirik, back from the walk, asks if we can pass the hat after the feature. Mike says, “I donʼt know — no oneʼs ever done that before.” We check with the owner to make sure itʼs okay. This is another pleasant surprise — Mariana, the owner, is enthusiastic and gracious, as well as beautiful. We make excuses to talk with her over the rest of the night just as weʼre told everyone who meets her does. Small wonder. By showtime, the room has filled up. Eitan and I toast each other, sip whisky and Shiner Bock. Over the past few days, our shows have gotten better and better. Our reading order is fairly set, with either Eitan or Eirik opening and closing, and Eirean and I filling out the middle. With a little more knowledge of each othersʼ work, weʼve gotten adept at building the energy in the room off each other, using our work to comment on the pieces before us, or setting the room off by flipping the mood suddenly. By this point, we really sound — and feel — like a collective. Weʼre introduced and weʼre off. The room is packed to capacity and weʼre all bouncing off the walls. Itʼs great. They follow us everywhere we go. Eirean introduces me by telling the minivan story, explaining to the crowd that there are days I donʼt remember, and urging them to make this night memorable. They do. Before we start, we meet Toddicus, our host for the open mic of the evening. Heʼs a god — blonde and beautiful and as sardonic as they come, teasing the regulars from the mic, keeping the energy in the room high. Later, he does a unexpectedly touching piece about coming out, and I realize that there are a lot of queers in the room. (It seems like every time Iʼm in Texas, I see family, and it always surprises me — thereʼs a school for queer kids in Dallas; the bar we performed at in San Antonio was about to become a gay club, and a man was there promoting the gay weekly paper. Texas still has its sodomy laws intact, and Iʼm always really, truly surprised to see the out queers there, since my image of the state is far from queer-friendly.) The only downer of the whole night is that the woman who has set us up with this gig, Kim Cotton, hasnʼt shown up — and sheʼs supposed to be our place to stay. From the mic, someone announces our situation, and minutes later Eirik whispers to me, “Weʼve got a place!” Itʼs a good thing, since two drunk mullet women in front of the stage have yelled, “Weʼll take her!” No, they wonʼt. Even so, there have been at least three offers from people to open their homes to us — we even have an offer from Mariana to sleep at the Mausoleum. Iʼm awed. My image of Texas is changing. Everyoneʼs readings are on. Eitanʼs love poems set the crowd swooning, and Eireanʼs “Oh Yeah, But Youʼve Got Disco” alternately rouses and enrages. Eirik pulls out “Worm Boy,” and dedicates it to Toddicus, and Eirik uses his name throughout. The brutally funny piece begins, “So Iʼm finger fucking Todd...” and progresses through Eirikʼs musing about devotion — heʼd still love Todd even if he was a quadruple amputee! Heʼd carry him around in a backpack! Todd is laughing so hard heʼs doubled over. Itʼs a hit. The open mic goes on for a very, very long time, since everyoneʼs allowed 3 pieces — and in some cases, thatʼs 3 more than we want to hear. Apparently, over the break, a lot more people have signed up — having heard our work, they want us to hear theirs. We hear a real, live sonnet. Men read love poems to men. The professor we met earlier steps to the mic and reads, and leaves immediately afterwards. Itʼs one a.m. when itʼs over — the reading has gone on for about four hours, and almost no one left. Unbelievable. Iʼm introduced to Elaine — the woman who has offered her home to us. Sheʼs smiley and immaculately put together and the only person Iʼve ever met who I could use the word “perky” about and it wouldnʼt be an insult. She announces “I make a the best breakfast in Houston!” I donʼt doubt her for a second. She and her fiance, Chip, her brother, Armando, and his friend, Sam, are waiting outside — theyʼve ordered a pizza for us next door. Heaven. We follow them back to Elaine and Chipʼs house, along with a girl Eirikʼs been talking to who lives in her van with her beautiful Husky. Itʼs not surprising to find out that Martha Stewart is Elaineʼs idol — the house is immaculate and gorgeous. Mistletoe hangs from the ceiling at varying heights. Homemade wreaths tastefully decorate the walls. A pot of spices and oranges simmers on the stove. Weʼre led into a bedroom and thereʼs a flurry of activity as Armando and Chip bring in a queen-size matress and put it on the floor, next to the bed that looks fit for royalty, with matching duvet and throw pillows. In a flash, thereʼs a second, beautiful bed on the floor. A stack of snow-white, perfectly folded towels appears for us. There are tiny miracles. Eitan, who has inadvertently become the tour accountant, peels off money for each of us. Itʼs quite a bit tonight, thanks to strong sales. Despite not planning to become the money man, Eitan done an amazing job all tour long. He can somehow keep all the money straight, who has sold what and how many. I slip behind the armoire and change my clothes, come out in sweatpants and a tee shirt, wigless. “How do you DO that?” Eirean asks. Elaine appears with a pitcher of water and plastic cups for us, saying, “Sleep as late as you want. When you wake up, weʼll have breakfast.” Itʼs almost hard to take all this niceness. Iʼm not sure that theyʼre not going to come in with axes in the middle of the night, or beat us with bibles in the morning. Iʼm ashamed of myself for even thinking this, for being so cynical in the face of so much kindness. Itʼs not until the next morning that I find out that Chip and Elaine have slept on the living room floor, giving Armando and Sam the pull-out bed. Thatʼs an off-the-scale kind of nice. Theyʼve even locked their cat, Dollar, into the front of the house so that Eirikʼs kitties can sleep with us. I sip some water and blink. This is all too much. Itʼs been such a wonderful day. And this is somewhere I could never have imagined being, not in a million years. I look around the room at the boys, and they all have the same expression I do — a little abashed at so much care for us, a little trepedacious that weʼve put someone out, and absolutely amazed to be somewhere and treated so well by complete strangers. The lights go out. The cats purr. We all hug without touching. Itʼs some kind of magic, this night. We are nudged awake by the music of soft talk and pots and pans in the kitchen; a gentle symphony of cabinets closing, plates being put down, glasses being set down on a counter. When I open my eyes, we are in an absolutely beautiful bedroom; the sun is streaming in through the curtains. It smells like holiday spice and eucalyptus, with an under- lying current of fresh coffee and meat browning. I push the sliding doors open and go outside for a cigarette. Eirean follows me. We both sit out there, shaking our heads. This is too much. We emerge into the kitchen where Chip is browning a heaping pan of ground beef, and Elaine is tending to homemade guacamole and salsa, whipping two dozen eggs in a metal bowl, warming tortillas and putting out mugs for coffee. “Good morning!” she says, smiling. Thereʼs a pitcher of orange juice, a pitcher of milk, a pitcher of cream, a full pot of coffee. There are stacks of plates, and napkins, and silverware. Weʼre awed. “Breakfast will be ready soon,” she says. “Have some coffee.” We do. Itʼs delicious. We perch on kitchen stools and talk to Chip and Elaine about spoken word, the tour, as well as where theyʼre from and what they do, while they cook. Chip is a financial advisor, and Elaine is a flight attendant. Weʼre not surprised to find out that she loves her job. Elaine tells us about flight attending — catering to our macabre ap- petites, she regales us with tales of a dead person on a flight. “What do you do?” we ask, wide-eyed. She tells us that they slip an oxygen mask over the dead personʼs face and pretend theyʼre just sick/unconscious until all the passengers have disembarked the plane — otherwise, the entire plane is quaratined. I want to ask (but forget to) what they do if the person has died with his or her eyes open — do they close them? Wouldnʼt the passengers next to them notice? I never get to ask this, since Eitan emerges from the bedroom, clean and shiny. Heʼs definitely the best-smelling of us, and probably the best-groomed. I feel very close to him at this moment; it could be pure sweetness, or it could be the fact that weʼve been sharing his deodorant and my towel along this trip. The lure of a free shower is stronger than the dead people question. The bathroom is immaculate. Itʼs heavenly. When I get out, Nina Simone is on the stereo, Eirik is checking his email, and Eitan and Eirean are talking about spoken word with Elaine and Chip. Armando is up, although Sam is still asleep. Appar- ently, Sam could sleep through almost anything. The food is ready, and we all fill our plates with delicious breakfast taquitos. We talk about Elaineʼs great Christmas tree ornaments, ranging from a bagel to a snowman being fellated by a snowwoman. Sheʼd had a party, and everyone was charged with bringing a homemade ornament. Theyʼre hilarious, all of them. Armando is wearing an “A&M Elephant Walk” tee shirt, so we talk about Texas A&M — all of them had gone there, and itʼs a school I know nothing about, one with apparently a deep sense of ritual and tradition. At the elephant walk, all the seniors hold hands and walk around the campus, ritualizing the end of their time there. It sounds touching; a rite of passage for a group. They explain to us what happened at the A&M bonfire last year, when 19 people were killed; how plans for the bonfire are passed down from year to year, and how, inevitably, parts of the plans are wrong or altered. Elaine isnʼt the only artist in the house — Armando shows us a plaque he made to memorialize those killed in the fire, incorporating ash from the inferno. Obviously, a sense of kinship runs deep with these people. Itʼs a good thing. None of us are in a hurry to leave. Chipʼs the first to go, dressed in a suit for the office. We exchange addresses, numbers. Sam is finally awake, and we chat with him for a while. When we can no longer ignore the spectre of Austinʼs traffic that haunts all of us, we dawdle towards the van with our stuff. The girl in the van emerges, goes into Elaineʼs kitchen to eat. Elaine offers me a coke, which I accept, and she stuffs two handfulls of chocolate kisses and two more cokes into Eireanʼs backpack. She helps bring Eirikʼs cats to the car, and has cat toys sheʼs given them in hand. We urge all of them to come visit, promise to treat them as well as theyʼve treated us. We drive away, awed. We take the smaller highways to Austin, and seem to avoid most of the rotten traffic. Weʼre almost there when Eitan realizes that heʼs misplaced Mike Henryʼs number, as well as the directions to his house. He uses his cell phone to call information — there are something like six listings for Mike Henry. Eitan calls one of them, but itʼs the wrong one. Bad news. We discuss stopping at a Kinkoʼs so Eitan can retrieve the instructions, but I have an idea. I pull out my cell, and ask for the number for Sonya Feher, Mikeʼs partner. The address sounds familiar — I was trapped there for an obscenely long time waiting for a cab after hours at South by Southwest. I repeat the number out loud and Ei- tan dials it. Success! We get directions and pull up to his house within minutes, our theme song blaring. Itʼs good good good to see Mikey. This day just gets better and better. We drag our stuff into the house, exchange hugs, do happy dances in his living room, regale him with road tales. Sonyaʼs out of town again — Iʼve never met her, and it looks like I wonʼt get to this time, either. The phone rings. Bizarrely, unaccountably, itʼs for me — itʼs Jason Edwards! He and his partner, Thom (as well as their chihuahua, Bill), made Dallas a favorite stop for both Thea and I on our cross-country tour, and have recently moved to Austin. Heʼs on his way over. Iʼm elated. He looks great. Heʼs got a new lip ring and a new, gorgeous tattoo of Medusa on his forearm. Weʼre wondering aloud about food, and he offers to stop and get us some chicken fried steak on his way to the venue. Weʼre so thrilled we donʼt even notice that Eirik isnʼt with us, and neglect to give Jason money for a meal for him. Weʼre so used to doing things in concert at this point, we donʼt count. In fact, we donʼt notice until weʼre at the venue, and the food arrives and weʼre one meal short. We offer to split all our meals with Eirik — each of these meals is big enough for two — but heʼs hurt enough to not want any. We feel bad. Thereʼs not anything we can say to make it better, and talking about it just seems to make things worse. The venue is cool. Itʼs a lesbian coffee house by the name of Gaby & Moʼs. There are many friends in the room — Stazja, Thom, Jason, Ernie. The boys know more people than I do, since they were all on the SlamAmerica bus when it passed through Austin. This is a hard show for me, since Iʼm feeling superstitious about Austin. The prior year, I had a really hard time at SXSW — my girlfriend called me ten minutes before my showcase spot to tell me that my diabetic cat was vomiting blood. I screwed the pooch on my performance that night, forgot pieces I had memorized, left the stage miserable and demoralized. Itʼs hard to get on the stage in Austin. Eitan and I buy Shiner Bocks from the bar and I try to shake off what happened a year ago. The show goes well — everyone steps up and performs well. I hit my pieces exactly the way I want to — sometimes thereʼs a gap between what I intend to do and what actually comes out of my mouth onstage — not tonight. I redeem myself. We all know each otherʼs work pretty well by this point, and can mouth each othersʼ pieces along as we do them. Eitan: “back when they used to have real mermaids.” Eirean: “pretty pretty pretty pretty please — whatever.” Eirik: “now shut up and fuck me!” He does his Worm Boy piece again, to the chagrin of Mike Henry and the delight of the crowd. All of us almost sell out of our books — I have one left; Eirik is almost out despite his frequent Kinkoʼs sojourns; Eitan has more left than the rest of us, but that makes sense, since he had 100 with him. The slam goes quickly; Eitan and Eirean are two of the judges, and Eirik is scorekeeper. Itʼs time to adjourn to Mikeyʼs for beer. Ernie uses his slam winnings to order pizza for all of us. We drink beer and talk; Mikeyʼs house is full — itʼs hard to find a place to sit comfortably. I chat with Susan B.A.S.W., for a while — sheʼs one of my favorite people in Austin — talk theory and graduate work — sheʼs finishing up her Ph.D., smarty pants. I also talk with Craig, a poet whose work I liked a lot — it turns out heʼs another Ph.D., as well as a former Yale Younger Poet. No wonder his work was so good. I love the Austin people, love their sense of camaraderie, of fellowship, of fun. Theyʼre great folks. Itʼs nice to be here. But even on good nights, fatigue sets in. Itʼs some late hour. I grab my sleeping bag and excuse myself. Eireanʼs tired too, so we clear space on Mikeyʼs floor and go to sleep, the soft murmur of Eitan and Eirik and Mikey talking rising from below us.

12.22.00 Day 9, Austin/Dallas

When we wake up, the air in the house is hazy with cigarettes and downstairs, everything smells like beer. Itʼs Austin, all right. I go outside to smoke and leave the door open so the house can air out. We take turns showering. Mikey says the shower is kick ass, and heʼs right — this shower WILL kick your ass. The water comes out of it hard enough to take the top layer of your skin off — itʼs kind of like the high-pressure jets municipal departments use to wash graffiti off buildings. Itʼs truly invigorating. Eirean dubs it the “Silkwood” shower. While weʼre clearing the house of party detritus and waiting for the showers to finish, Austin clinches its title as land of the cameo appearance. Wammo and his girlfriend, Valerie, burst in, hug all of us, and, making a complete circle, leave. Itʼs short but sweet. We head out to Tamale House #3, immortalized on the cover of the Austin Slam spoken word CD, “Tinaʼs Fine Ass Lingerie” (which Iʼm thoughtfully given a copy of by Mikey). The food is great, and apparently, the place is something of a legend — itʼs where all the flot- sam ends up during their walks of shame after a good night out. This morning, weʼre blessed with two more poet cameos, with Genevieve Van Cleve (in town from Ireland) and Phil West (up from San Antonio) digging into huge, yummy plates of migas. Happily full, we grab our stuff at Mikeyʼs and head for Dallas, though itʼs hard to leave. Not only do we love the Austin crowd, but weʼve heard some mixed things about the Dallas show — that attendance has been really sketchy. Also, Clebo Rainey, our host there, hasnʼt gotten back to any of us, confirming that we can stay with him. We grit our teeth and drive, clenching them through yet another bout with Austin traffic. The traffic really is the worst of any we see in the Southwest. If any of us were confident in Dubyaʼs ability to lead the country, Austinʼs traffic would certainly shoot that theory full of holes. We donʼt have directions to the Red Room in Dallas, but we donʼt need them — somehow Eirean remembers where the venue is, with only a couple doublebacks. Impressive. We pull into the Red Roomʼs parking lot and are immediately harassed by the parking lot attendant, who refuses to allow us to park there. In fact, we have our doubts that heʼs a parking lot attendant at all — it seems likely that heʼs just trying to shake us down for $5. We try not to take this as an omen. Itʼs freezing, the venue isnʼt open, and we all have to pee. We head to the Insomnia coffee house, down the street, where Iʼve performed before. Thereʼs a huge sign on the door — no restrooms without purchase. Fine. Eirik and I have Chai and we all use the bathroom. I switch into my clothes for the show and do my makeup, unaware that poor Eirean is crossing his legs outside, too polite to knock. We head for food, and then to the venue. Itʼs easy to bring all our stuff in, since we all have so few books left. It doesnʼt look like not having enough books will be a problem — there are only two people in the venue. Clebo welcomes us warmly, tells us that attendance has been up and down, and you know, itʼs the holidays and all. Right. “Look! Here come more people now!” he says, but itʼs just clubgoers, crossing over into the attached Club Clearview. There are so few poets, weʼre put in the slam. I donʼt slam anymore, but who cares. At 9, we begin to get worried — with only five people in the room, Clebo has started to perform, backed by techno music. He says from the mic, “I donʼt know where everyone is — GNO said heʼd be here and so did Carney (Dallas poets).” It looks like this is going to be the crowd. Thereʼs also been some misunderstanding about what weʼre getting paid, and how long weʼre going to perform for. This seems to get ironed out; weʼll each do one piece at the start of the show, and two pieces later. Eirik does his first piece. The boys are feeling blue about the turnout, about this being the last show. This is the last reading of the tour, and I should probably feel worse about the low turn out than I do. However, weʼve made it total request night. Weʼve asked each other to read the pieces WE want to hear — and as it turns out, weʼre entitled, since we almost make up half the crowd. Iʼve asked Eirik to read his “Garanimals” piece — a sweet piece about finding a perfect match, asked Eirean for his piece about a child in chemotherapy, and asked Ei- tan for his “real mermaids” piece. Eirean asks me to do “Death Drive,” a piece about female killers. The piece pours out of me, urgent and furious. Iʼm not sure quite what happens up there on the stage — it comes through me in a torrent and then Iʼm done. Itʼs like I speak in tongues, some exquisite magic. Of course it happens on a night when there are only a few people in the room. Oh well. The slam starts; Eitan and I visit the bar. Repeatedly. We slam. A band starts in the room next door, so loud you canʼt really hear the readers. The night is like that. We take the stage for our second set, before the second round of the slam. For some unknown reason, Clebo says that thereʼs no time for Eirik to read his second piece, cuts him off on his way to the stage. Iʼm shocked and appalled — with only 7 people in the slam, how can there not be time for Eirik to read a 3- minute piece? This seems personal, and rude, and itʼs hard to shrug off. We sit through an abysmal second slam set. Eirik takes first, a poet by the name of “Rock Baby” takes second, and I take third. The Cheetah award for the night goes to a poet by the name of “Militant X. Ameri- can,” who may be the meekest militant the world has seen. Weʼre getting our stuff together when Eirean asks me what I said to Rock Baby after the slam. “He looked scared,” he says. I laugh. Rock Baby had begun his piece by doing shout outs — “All the pretty ladies in the house go WOOOOOO” — the room had been silent — “All the guys in the house who like booty go WOOOOO”. He then proceeded to do a piece about “booty”. I asked him what the ugly girls in the room were supposed to do during his piece — after all, the pretty girls and all the guys were shouting. He was nonplussed, saying that he had a whole piece about ugly girls. “Does it make them feel good when you read it?” I ask him. He looks uncomfortable and I walk away. We stop at Safeway for perfunctory beers; everyoneʼs been invited back to Cleboʼs, but it feels like lip service. Militant is the only poet who shows up, and he doesnʼt stay long. Clebo and his wife make themselves ham and bacon and feed us poundcake. Cleboʼs four dogs are a high point (especially Belly, the Silky Terrier) — they romp around us while we sit on Cleboʼs leather couches, watching cable tv, drinking beer, feeling a little empty and sad, sorry we didnʼt just drive out of Dallas while we had the chance, sorry we didnʼt end the tour in Austin. All this disappointment probably has to go somewhere. When Eirean and I go outside for a cigarette, we spar, not meaning to hurt each other at all; just letting out some of the blue thatʼs infected the mood. We catch ourselves, decide to drop it, and itʼs only a little too late. We go back upstairs to the tv, licking small wounds until theyʼre almost gone. Almost. Eitan and Eirik are channel-surfing. Suddenly, weʼre all awake — thereʼs an infomercial for “Funniest Uncensored Home Videos” on the tv. Somehow, it seems whenever Eitan and Eirik and I are together in Texas and thereʼs a tv on, some ridiculous show with footage of men being hit in the balls ends up on the tv, and leaves us all in hyster- ics. These videos include an old ladyʼs hair getting set on fire in a church, a bridesmaid running into the side of the house trying to catch the bouquet, a guy pretending to get electrocuted while fixing a light switch, and many, many more lowbrow moments. Weʼre laughing so hard we scare Clebo, who comes running in to find out whatʼs going on and almost catches Eirik with a bowl of Apple Jacks heʼs stolen from the kitchen. We just point to the tv. Thereʼs no explaining why this stupidity is so satisfying right now. Itʼs release, and itʼs good, itʼs raw. It feels good to laugh on this day, finally. We go to sleep. Thatʼs the only place left at this point.

12.23.00 Day 10 and Beyond, Dallas to Home

We all wake up at the same time, more or less; me first, then Eitan, then Eirean and Eirik. We pass Naomi in the hall with Belly; she takes a phone call and then goes back to bed; she and Clebo are asleep with the tv on. Weʼre not sure what Miss Manners would say about saying goodbye to sleeping hosts; we stand in their bedroom door and say goodbye, quietly, and go to the van. The kitties are very glad to see us after a night in there. Fortunately, it wasnʼt too cold. We have no directions, and no idea where a good place for breakfast is. We manage to find both a gas station and a freeway, and over breakfast at Dennyʼs, debate the best route of getting to Phoenix — whether itʼs the 40 or the 10. One is faster, but may take us through nasty weather. We vote for the faster route, and decide to try to get to Albuquerque by night. We call Kenn Rodriguez, and leave a message asking if we can sleep on his floor. We undo pieces of our route from the past few days, flashing through Oklahoma City, waving to Nixon out the windows. Weʼre starting to close things up, laughing about Dallas, deciding that the REAL end of the tour was Austin; Dallas was just a stopover on the way home. The music level goes up and down, from house to hip hop to new school punk. From the front seat, Eitan and I rock the bells with Run DMC. Weʼre looking back and looking forward, talking about whatʼs next. Everyone wants to try and make it to South by Southwest in Austin this year, though I donʼt think itʼs likely for me. Everyone wants to do a sequel to this tour: E-I-E-I-O 2: Electric Boogaloo, as Eirik calls it. We plan compulsively — it helps stem the panic and loss that all this is ending. No one wants to believe this is the end of our working together. We talk about our holiday plans, and this makes going home a little easier for all of us. Eireanʼs face lights up as he talks about spending Christmas with Canaan, his son. He tells us about the presents heʼs gotten for him, and in a matter of seconds, heʼs metamorphosed from Road Poet to Super Dad. Itʼs pretty cool. Eirik and Eitan will spend Christ- mas with Claudia, then Eirik will go to Joshua Tree, to go camping with Alyssa for New Yearʼs. Iʼm going home, to my wonderful girlfriend and holiday celebrations and seafood. On tour, itʼs hard to handle homesickness. It pulls everything out from underneath you, turns your stomach into a black hole of longing, makes whereever you are wherever you least want to be, and makes home something unattainable. Itʼs the kind of longing that can kill, like an extension of the moments before a first kiss with someone you really really want to kiss — and you never get there. It takes a lot of work for me to fight the homesickness, shove it down, swallow it down, ignore it, move through it; to not spend flashes of my day wondering what my lover, Miriam, is doing, if sheʼs having a good day, if sheʼs asleep, what sheʼs dreaming of. This longing is so potent, itʼs hard to even write about. So I havenʼt. But I will say this — only one day away from home, thoughts of her start to flood back and make me smile. Itʼs safe to think of her, of home, of the cats again, and I welcome them, though sheʼs never been far from my thoughts. I have road prizes for her that Iʼve bought along the way, appeasements to the God(ess?) of homesickness — a small mermaid knife because she loves knives; a Burger King RugRats watch in bright orange — a color she loves, and a hat identical to one she lost and still grieves. Thereʼs someone important at home, and thereʼs nowhere with no one else I want to be when I get there. Thereʼs more to tell, of course — the late-night giggles in Albu- querque, when we get there; the horrible tv show, Cheaters, we watch with Kenn, Esther and Mimi; how Eirik decides to sleep in the van, because heʼll be more comfortable there; how we go back to the scene of the head injury for bagels and no one gets hurt; how I fall asleep through the desert with two cats snuggling me in the middle of the van; how we say goodbye when they get me to the airport on time; how it takes everything I have not to cry; how I almost miss my flight in the fucking airport because they change the gate on me at the last minute after delaying my flight; how Eirean leaves half his stuff in the van (foreshadowed by the early sprawl of his things); how Eitan and Eirik lock themselves out of the van just outside of Phoenix; how Eitan gets harrassed at the car rental place for the state of the vanʼs interior; how we all get home, safely, with eleven days of memories and hopes and plans. For now, the van goes 85 miles an hour from city to city, interstate to interstate, landscape to landscape. Itʼs desert cold outside, but itʼs warm inside the van. At the gas station we stop at before making our final descent into Albuquerque, we reach Kenn; weʼll all stay at Es- therʼs. Eitan and I find a CD — the Best of 80s Metal — and we canʼt resist. Back in the van, the stereo goes up to 11. Everyone bangs their heads, music blaring. We go over the top of a hill and suddenly, out of nowhere, thereʼs Albuquerque, twinkling like secret stars. We drive too fast into the city, Eirik at the wheel, fake lighters afire, screaming at the tops of our voices on the chorus, “HERE I AM — ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE.”

“HERE I AM — ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE.”

“here i am...

*****

so, that was daphne. back to me.

*****

12.25.00 Back to Seattle for Eirik

i spent christmas with my poetry friend eitan kadosh and his family, then headed to yucca valley to be with alyssa and her family for new years, then i spent the next two weeks hanging out with alyssa in chico. eventually, i made my way back to seattle.

For more of Eirik’s adventures in Seattle and on the poetry highway, tune in to issues #7-#9, which are available now! THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #1 The debut issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles is completely stuffed with personal stories and essays from the journals and e-mails of Wuss Commando Big Poppa E. Rather than offer up the definitive definition of “Wussy Boy,” this issue offers the introspections of a certified Wuss as he trains his eye on life in America at the beginning of the new Millenium. BPE touches on chain store madness, the love of warm kitties, the bliss of the first kiss of a crush gone wild, poetry slamming for fun and profit, memories of yearning for “Sound- garden hair,” and a wealth of random observation that build into a pleasing whole. A must for all fans of Wussy Boys!

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #2 The second in the series exploring the wide world of Wussy Boys, this issue focuses on the wacky hijinks surrounding the 1999 National Poetry Slam in Chicago, IL. Every year, teams of poets from across the country gather for the Olympics of poetry slamming, and mayhem ensues as over 200 performance poets get together for four days of lyrical bachanalia! Big Poppa E was a member of the San Francisco Poetry Slam Team, which tied for ﬁrst place with San Jose out of 48 teams to win the championship. Full of photos, poetry, and tales of strategy and tragedy, this issue serves as an introduction to the world of poetry slamming, a truly Wuss Core sport if there ever was one. Also in this issue: Wussy Boy gets on 60 Minutes; how-to guide for distinguishing Wussy Boys from Cock Man Oppressors; Wussy Boy music reviews; a live report from the WTO mayhem in Seattle; and letters to the editor from Wussies everywhere.

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #3 This collection of Wussy Boy writings centers around crushes, both hopeful and hopeless. Featured are stories about losing the object of a crush to a car accident, a story about someone with a crush on Big Poppa E, and the tortured tale of a third grade four square master who meets his match when he meets The Butt Triplets. Also in this issue: Wussy Boy movie and music reviews; letters to the editor; poetry; ﬁction submisisons.

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #4 This collection is a companion piece with Issue #5 and contains Part One of the Couches Across America Tour Diaries. Youʼll read all about the adventures that ensue when Big Poppa E throws his chapbooks and zines in the back of the pickup truck (along with his kitties Aretha and Thelonious) and hits the road for 60+ gigs across 27 states in four months. It reads like a modern day On The Road and features all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you crave. (Well, okay, maybe not the sex and drugs part, but it was a helluva great time to be alive.) Accompanied by Poloroids taken from the road, this issue follows BPE from his home in Chico, CA, and drops him off in Albuquerque, NM. In between youʼll read about sweaty gigs in tiny bars, making out in the back of the pickup truck, and all kinds of adventures. Also in this issue: Wussy Boy music reviews; letters to the editor.

Nominated to the The Utne Reader “Best of the Alternative Press Awards 2000” for The Wussy Boy Chronicles.

“R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” Doug Holland, Editor A Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” The New York Times

“Big Poppa E steps to the mike ... energy is cranked so high ... drunk on adrenaline ... all bluster and bombast .. The audience leaps up, clapping hand, snapping ﬁngers, and stomping feet ... Call it revenge of the Wussy Boys.” The Washington Post

“Eirik Ott is the leader of the new Wussy Boy movement ... spreading not just through the esoteric realm of slam poets, but edging across the globe.” The Los Angeles Times

“Eirik Ott is a guy who has turned one of his artistic personas, Wussy Boy, into an icon for effeminate males.” Ms. Magazine

“Championed by a hip-hop poet and catching ﬁre across North America, a new male ideal has risen up and is demanding respect: Wussy Boy.” The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

“Wussy Boys [are] a growing breed who never felt a part of the testosterone- fuelled, hard-drinking concept of manhood. Eirik Ott is their outspoken leader, a 33-year-old poet who has “outed” himself as a Wuss, and discovered a nation of men joining his ﬁght for Wussy Pride.” London Daily Express (UK)

“Inspiring men from across the country.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“A spoken word maestro.” The San Jose Mercury News

“Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the slam.” Austin Chronicle (TX)

“A hell of a performer, running on boundless energy and near-perfect comic timing.” OC Weekly (Orange Country, CA)

“One of the leaders in the hottest thing to hit poetry since Beat poet Allen Ginsbergʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” The Daily Oklahoman (OKC, OK)

“Big Poppa Eʼs words are so eloquent, so modern, so witty, funny, honest, angry, legitimate, motivating, sensual, wrenching, wise, naive ... just so very, very right on -- heʼs amazing.” The Colorado Springs Independent

“Big Poppa E is like a tongue-twisting Napoleon of open-aired emotion, sexual libido and in-your-face self-consciousness -- a suburban Woody Allen hopped up at the mall..” The Chico (CA) News & Review The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY

Issue #7

voice mail: 512.296.7080 e-mail: [email protected] website: http://www.brokenword.org online journal: http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Cover Wuss — John Cusack Here is something rare in Wussdom, a Wussy actor who got his start in the Glory Days of the ʻ80s yet is still a popular actor today. For this reason, John Cusack is the Lord God King Wussy Boy, the one who broke away from the Brat Pack and has maintained a strong career ever since. Along the way, Cusack has been in some of the most iconic Wussy Boy ﬁlms ever, most notably “Better Off Dead,” “Say Anything,” “Being John Malcovich,”and “High Fidelity,” and even when he played a hitman in “Grosse Point Blank,” he put his own Wussy spin on it. Although he has shown a profoundly disturbing knack at being the “nice guy” in vapid romantic comedies lately — anyone see “Serendipity?” — Johnny Boy is sure to keep up his work in edgy indie fare. He is Wuss Core to the bone. INTRO

I am such a dork. Yeah, I know, hard to believe, but I still have the dork gene even though I try to deny it, try to tell myself that I left that part of my life behind when I quit playing Dungeons and Dragons in my junior year and started dating, try to tell myself that I am doing cool things that no dork could dream of, otherwise they wouldnʼt be a dork, see, because dorks who do cool things are not just dorks, they are Dork Core, like... well, like Weezer. If they werenʼt so cool, they would be big fat dorks, but they are cool big fat dorks, which is their saving grace. Dork Core. Wuss Core. Thatʼs what Iʼm talking about. But I digress. I am a big fat dork because I surf the internet way too much, watch way too many movies, and rent far too many DVDs. I make lists my favorite movies that I constantly update and compare with my other movie dork friends. I check www.tolkienonline.com several times a week to see what the gross for my favorite movie of the year is, plus I check out Ainʼt-It-Cool News and the Internet Movie Database even more than that. In fact, a really good way to tell how I am doing mentally and emotionally is by tallying how many movies I have seen and how many DVDs I have rented in the past month or so and how many times a day I check my e-mail. When I am doing well, have lots to do creatively, have cool places to go and cool people to hang out with, I have less and less time to waste on movies and shit. But, when the opposite is true... I figure I mustʼve rented 200 DVDs while I was in Seattle, and Iʼm sure I mustʼve seen 100 movies in the theatre, and I am deadly sure that I checked my e-mail no less than 27 times a day while at my temp job as a “data entry specialist” since I had constant high speed internet access the whole work day. It was sad. Seattle fucking sucked for me, and I was an reality- avoiding mofo the whole eight months I was there, and it seems like I met exactly no one cool while I was there. And the worse thing about it all was the unavoidable fact that I really didnʼt put much effort into making it a home for myself, made no effort to fit in. I just got there, decided I didnʼt like the city or the poetry slam scene I found or any of the people who ran the scene, and then I spent the rest of my eight months there with my arms folded across my chest refusing to have a good time. And that was when I was even there. I spent most of my Seattle time figuring out ways to get away for long periods of time. Instead of taking the time to make the city MY city, I just left as often as I could. I had met someone named Alyssa in my college town Chico in Northern California and would drive the 12 hours to see her every month or so and stay for a week and a half or two, preferring to do this rather than take the time to meet cool people who actually live in the same state as me. Then I got so frustrated by the lack of progress with the organization of the National Poetry Slam scheduled for Seattle in August of 2001 that I said “Fuck it!” and left for a solo tour for two months that took me all the way down to Baton Rouge, LA, and all the way up Ann Arbor, MI, and then all the way back again. And when I got back again to Seattle, I kinda tried to settle in, tried to pretend that I had put forth some kind of effort into fitting into the scene, but, alas, it was not to be. I think by that time, I had already made it clear to those in the poetry slam scene that I was extremely unhappy with the whole thing, and that was that. I spent the rest of my time there waiting for the National Poetry Slam to hurry and get there and gone so I could move back to Chico. Ugh, and now that I am back in Chico, I find myself wanting to move again, wanting to keep up this seemingly endless search for a place to call home. So thatʼs the theme for this issue, a theme that has run through my life for as long as I care to remember, the endless and fruitless search for home. Along the way there is warmth and adventure and quite a lot of weeping and moaning and gnashing of teeth. Okay, boom, top ten favorite movies off the top of my head in no specific order: Fight Club; American Beauty; Rushmore; 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould; A Clockwork Orange; The Year My Voice Broke; The Godfather; Galipoli; Cinema Paradiso; and Run Lola Run. Sorry, that was my dork shoving his way to the surface. What I was supposed to say was this issue continues with the journal entries generated while in Seattle that were started with Issue #6 and will continue through Issues #8 and #9. All of these issues are being published at the same time, and so are available now for just $5 each. Or you can simply cheat and check out my online journal, the URL for which is on the inside front cover of this zine. Read it and weep. DEAR WUSSY BOY

This is Emily Kagan from team SF. Is the article youʼre writing about SlamSisters, speciﬁcally or women in slam in general? Karen Ladson (team Berkeley), Cheryl Madalena and I were on the SlamSisters listserve but found that the SlamSisters organization was still too unorganized to address the pressing concerns we had for the Bay Area: no women were slamming. We decided to join forces, salling ourselves “SheSlam” in order to address the concerns within our community. Our tactics were different from SlamSisters in that we felt it important to make women comfortable in any and all performance situations, not just by creating safe spaces for them to read at. We have had tremendous sucess in promoting women performers throughout the Bay Area and in encouraging new writers, both male and female, to become involved in slam. If any of this is of interest/help for the article youʼre writing SheSlam would love to help you in any way we can. Our website is: www.sheslam.com Take care, Emily

I think one of the biggest problems facing the extended poetry slam scene — and there are many — is the treatment of women in slam. The poetry slam has become this huge boyʼs club for masculine expression, with male readers outnumbering women by far. It didnʼt used to be that way, I think. In fact, the top Indie finisher at nine of the last twelve Nationals has been a woman. Something is happening in the national slam scene, though, something bad and limiting. I think poetry slamming started as a means for poets to get together and have a good time with their poetry. As it got more popular, however, and drew more and more people, a certain slam style emerged that was extremely popular for audiences all over the country, a sort of high-energy ranting style of narrative poetry steeped in pop culture and oppression politics that tends to be very masculine in its approach to performance. But if your poetry tends toward a more soft-spoken, introspective, poetic form, then your chances of scoring high are dimmed. This has created a sort of homogenization among the perfornance styles in the slam community, something that was painfully evident at the 2001 National Poetry Slam in Seattle where it was very hard to distunguish one poet from another since they all sounded the same. ANYWAY, there seems to be fewer and fewer young women getting into slam, see, and this is something I have witnessed in my own scene in Chico, see, so there was this group of women in slam who formed SlamSisters as a means of gathering and dispensing information on women in slam and providing a resource for women who may have experienced sexism in their scene. I thought this was a GREAT idea, so I approached an alternative magazine called Bitch that bills itself as a feminist approach to pop culture, and I pitched this idea of doing a story on SlamSisters. They were cool with it, so I started making inquiries about setting up interviews with women in the slam scene. Almost instantly, I got a ton of flack from people saying that a man had no right penning an article about women in slam, that, in fact, what I should do is stop any work on the article immediately and get Bitch to have one of the SlamSisters write their own story. Well, you know, thatʼs not how journalism works, see, you would never have the National Rifle Association approach the New York Times about writing a story about themselves, you know? It got to be such a heated discussion that long-time slammer Patricia Smith wrote a column about the hoopla in Ms. Magazine. I ended up having to cancel the article when the whole discussion descended into an angry disorganized brou- haha. If you want to read Patricia Smithʼs article, check out the Ms. Magazine from August/September 2001. The cover has a viking women singing opera on it. Patriciaʼs column is on page 94, I think.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

i saw u in colorado springs and thought u were awesome so i wanted to share a poem that i wrote....i write a lot but i picked this one....i donʼt know why i just felt compelled to. love, torifrk1

Proffesional Leather Girl

Lyrics of verilimitude under her control. Her LEATHER whip cracks. The windows of my soul vitrify. She touches the gunwale of my inner self. She is my tarpaulin skin, when I am in the hectic waters of every day life. She sings of PRECIOUS THINGS, HERE. IN MY HEAD. HORSES and BEAUTY QUEENs battle for the crown. Gonna go WAY DOWN go meet MARRIANE in her artiﬁcial world that others mock. When all she wants is peace...... love.....and a....hard.....COCK

Welly welly welly, someone truly HAS been listening to quite a lot of Tori Amos, havenʼt they?

DEAR WUSSY BOY

what do you make of this URL?!?! http://www.dirtyrottenbastards.com/members/mb_wussyboy.html daphne gottlieb

This comes in from my poetry friend from San Francisco. She made an extended appearance in Issue #6 by writing the journals for the “EI- EI-OH The Humanity Tour.” Anyway, she apparently did a search on Google for the term “Wussy Boy” and found this link, which appears to be some kind of personal ad by some tattooed freaky boy who looks NOTHING like a Wussy Boy. For a good time (and a good laugh), you should surf immediately to the above site.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

sorry that i didnʼt talk to you. you were great yesterday, and i was not tainted by the “crush,” as i already knew all about it. i of course missed another chance, by stupidly palpitating in front of you and your probable girlfriend, but i had to write and let you know your poetry is wonderful, you are VERY magnetic, and i would like to see you again, even if just as an audience member. Aurora blushing red head in green dress

Seattle has this yearly music and arts festival called Bumber- shoot at the base of the Space Needle that draws acts from all over the country and crowds of thousands. I was lucky enough to be chosen as a performer on their literary stage in August of 2001, and I ended up doing a double-feature with a writer/performer named Inga Muscio, the author of the feminist manifesto “Cunt.” It was a fabulous crowd, due mostly, I think, to Ingaʼs popularity among young, literate, feminist college women, hundreds of which ﬁlled the auditorium during our sets. I gave it my all and ended up getting massive amounts of love. In fact, some of the best tracks on my performance poetry CD come from this set in front of about 300 people. Great show. Sold tons of books. Alyssa, the Chico girl I was kinda sorta dating long-distance, even came up. Little did I know, it would be our last hurrah. By the time September 11th hit, our relationship had run its course.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

You were fan-fucking-tastic in Seattle on Saturday. It was a pleasure to hear your work. Iʼd like to get the book you were reading from/selling there, the paper one with the orange cover. Went back on Sunday to get it and (lucky you) they were sold out. It often never pays to think about things and do them later, yes? Could you let me know if this is available from you and how much? Living in Vancouver, BC so maybe postage is slighty more as well? Are you planning any readings in Vancouver any time soon? I would love to introduce my friends to your stuff as well. Soft, like rain, Adele

The one time I performed in Canada, I was shocked and impressed by how many painfully beautiful women there were at the poetry venue. God, I was breathless all night long, and swore to my friends that I was moving to Vancouver as soon as I could. I canʼt wait to get back up there. I need to visit my friend Cass King... Sheʼs lovely, like Lady Galadriel in “The Lord of the Rings.” Another thing that impressed me about Canada was the variety of languages represented on the radio waves. Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, English... wow, such a smorgasbord, toally unlink dear old homogenous America. As for that chapbook with the orange cover, I kept adding poetry to it until it got way too thick to fold and staple comfortably, so I split it into three different books along themes — love, anger, laughter — and fattened them up with even more poetry, short stories, and journal entries. They are only $5 each if you ever want to check them out. DEAR WUSSY BOY

hello. my name is Michelle and i am a silly college student at Seattle University... iʼm originally from vegas and over the summer i met up with a friend that goes to school in reno that i hadnʼt seen in a long time... she told me about seeing you read and bought a couple copies of one of your books... she told me to check you out if i ever got the chance, so i was delighted to see your name on the roster at bumbershoot this past weekend... so yeah, basically i just wanted to say i dig your stuff... am planning to buy a copy of one of your books soon-ish, but also wanted to ask you if the haikus in that little book were anywhere online... i was too far away to catch one at the reading, but a friend of mine managed to snag one and let me read it while waiting in line for something else... he wouldnʼt let me keep it though (pout), so yeah... do you have those on some website somewhere? or if youʼd be willing to send me one (or more) by real mail that would be delightful too... iʼd even be willing to pay a couple bucks if you wish... okay, thatʼs enough. good work sir, keep that shit up. Michelle Molina

I swear that “silly college students” will be the death of me. As for haiku, I have a bunch online at my journal, the URL for which is on the inside front cover of this zine. I also just published a collection of haiku that features one haiku for each woman with whom I have been, erm, “intimately involved.” Yeah, I know, this seems the heighth of poor taste, like some kind of poetic version of notching the old bed post, but the haiku chronicle some of the funny, sad, painful, wistful memories generated by these relationships. Itʼs actually kind of cool and sweet and funny and more than a little meloncholy. You can have a copy for $3.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

I loved your reading at Bumbershoot! Thanks for being the highlight of that extravagant, art-ﬁlled day. I hope you had a great time, too. You gave me a book at the end, when you came upstairs to sell, because I had no cash on me. I want to send you some dough. Where to? And tell me a little more about the CD. Might wanna get one oʼ them, too. I work with teenagers in an awesome freedom independent study journey school of mind soul body spirit and funny bone. Many of my students are poets. I think theyʼd love your work. Weʼve had slams at the youth center that some of my students run. Theyʼve been awesome. Anyway, gotta go. Let me know where to send the money. Yve

One can always send me money, but itʼs best to confirm my current address by first e-mailing me at [email protected]. I am currently housing my stuff at 600 pomona in chico, ca, 95928, but that wonʼt be for much longer since my performance poetry troupe Word- Core will be on tour for four months in the spring of 2002. After that, itʼs anybodyʼs guess where Iʼll be. Maybe Austin, TX. Maybe Australia. Certainly not Chico, though. Itʼs was a lovely college town for five years, but now itʼs just a great big step backward. Oh, and the CD is really good, IMHO, and it has a lot of great stuff on it. Itʼs called “Wussy Boy,” naturally, and has 19 tracks recorded in front of live audiences all over the country. I cuss an awful lot on it, though, so I might not recommend playing it all in a high school class.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

you are so fucking adorable. i will be happy to write a blurb for you, but send me some of your work. i remember you as a performer, but i am not versed on the content of your work. so let me read some of your stuff and then i will write you a blurb. it was a pleasure to read with you as well. i felt kinda weird going on after you because you were so fucken hilarious and everyone was so keyed up and i knew i could never maintain that energy level for the folks. maybe you can teach me how to be more of a spaz on stage in return for the blurb. i am such an introvert, really, (though no one believes me when i tell them this, except my mom and my girlfriend) and i was just kinda thrust in this position of reading in public, so i am winging it really hard. but the demand to be a good performer as well as a good writer is increasing dramatically. i speak @ schools a lot and i really want to be able to PREACH to the people if you know what i mean. i already know how to do all the breathing/speaking from the diaphragm bit. what i need is soul work, big poppa. with love and respect, inga muscio

She is the author of “Cunt” that I was read with during Bumber- shoot, and boy is she cool. You should totally check out her book at the local indie bookstore, and you very deﬁnitely should check out her website, which is, I think, www.kalikunti.com. But you might want to just do a search on Google for her name. Do not, however, search for the word “cunt” or youʼll dash yourself into a pit of pop-up porn webpages that you will never be able to get rid of. Ingaʼs book, by the way, is an empowering book for feminists and other amazing people that explores the various incarnation of the word for a womanʼs nu-nu.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Just wanted to tell you that I think that you rock. In english class last year we had to pick a piece to perform for the class and I picked “Wussy Boy Manifesto” (Um...yeah I know Iʼm a girl but the poem was to cool not to do); it was in a poetry slam book I bought. Everyone thought it was awesome and I just want to thank you for being really spiffy and a good writer and all. So thanks for helping me get an “A” and thanks for being an inspiration to a 14 year old girl who likes to be different. Arielle

The book Arielle is talking about is “Poetry Slam: The Competi- tive Art of Performance Poetry,” published by Manic D Press in San Francisco. It was written by one of my favorite people in the slam family, a cat named Gary Mex Glazner from Santa Fe, New Mexico. It features work from a host of poetry slammers plus some non-ﬁction pieces about the history and culture of slamming. You can get it at any indie bookstore, or, if you are so inclined, even at a chain bookstore. I have a poem in it called, oddly enough, “The Wussy Boy Manifesto!” I think itʼs totally cool that a grrl performed that poem in her high school class. I think the more young people who speak out against any kind of gender-based oppression or assumptions, the better.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

I saw you at the National Youth Slam in Ann Arbor, you were fabulous! I would like to use your poem “Wussy Boy Manifesto” in my high school English classes. I have freshman and seniors. There is language in your poem that Iʼm not sure I can get away with presenting. I donʼt really like the idea of editing your work, it reeks of censorship. Do you have any suggestions of how I could use your poem in class, either with or without the language? Thanks!!! Gen Rowley I get people from all over the country e-mailing me to use “The Wussy Boy Manifesto!” for classes of one kind or another, mostly from speech and debate kids. I think that is so cool. I wish that I had had something presented to me when I was a kid... The very notion of using performance poetry to ﬁght back at the forces that would beat you down couldʼve saved me 10 years of struggle. If even one high school kid reads about Wussy Boys and ﬁnds strength in knowing they are not alone, then I have done something right with my time.

WHAT ARE YOU WHINING ABOUT NOW, WUSSY?

Simply put your thoughts into words and send them to Wussy Boy via e-mail to: [email protected]. 01.18.01 it’s only a means to an end

So, yeah, Iʼm a meatie cog in the temp agency machine again, getting paid $8.50 to sit and listen to my headphones and take a pile of printed stickers on a page and poke them at the perforation so that I can seperate them from the sheet. I did this a thousand times today, probably more, just picking up sheets of laminated paper and poking the stickers at the perforation, then stacking them up 250 high, then shrink wrapping them, then labelling them. I was actually tested at the temp agency to see if I qualified for this job. Can you believe that? Any hunk of meat can do this job, yet I was actually given a test on a computer to make sure I could handle it. I felt my brain cells tighten with each minute, and the day dragged on all day long. Itʼs so demeaning to look for a job, to have to sort of beg for the opportunity to be a drone for someone, to do the grunt work they donʼt want to do, and beg for it with a smile on your face. “Of course I donʼt mind working by myself! Yes, I am a team player, too. No, I donʼt mind at all if a job is tedious and repititious, just as long as I am making a positive contribution to the business. I am a people person. I have excellent references. People like me. I am nice. Hire me, and I will give up all my free time for you. I am good at what I do. I will make you happy you hired me.” God, I feel like such a stooge. Not having a real job for as long as I have certainly takes the fun out of finally getting one. To be honest, even having to pay rent is a real drag, and thatʼs pretty much the only reason I am working right now, to pay the rent, which keeps me here in Seattle, which makes money hard to grasp since I have to use all of it to pay rent, which makes touring hard, which keeps me from doing what I want to do. This job thing sucks. I canʼt wait to quit and go on tour again. Just put everything back into storage and put my kitties in the truck and hit the road. No rent, no bills, just adventure and book sales. No hours of staring at the clock waiting for the next break time. No exchanging an entire day of my life for a measly $80 minus taxes. Can you imagine that? I just gave a company I care nothing about 8 hours of my life, and in exchange I got less than $80. Shit, I can make that just by selling 16 books, and thatʼs not counting the money at the door and passing the hat. Shoot, I can make more in one three hour poetry event than I can in four whole days of working for some fucked up company that sees me merely as a piece of meat with thumbs that can follow orders. Iʼm telling you, as soon as I get the school gigs set up, I am never going back to temping. Fuck temping. I hate it. Itʼs dehumanizing. Iʼve only worked one day at this thing, but I am already about to quit. Tomorrow will be my last day, and I will leave at noon and scurry over to a data entry temp job through another agency for $11 an hour, a full $2.50 more than poking stickers. This one will be boring, yes, filled with hours of inputting data into a computer in the back room of some office with no one to talk with, but with headphones and a pack of CDs to listen to, it is a whole lot better than packing stickers. At least thereʼs some tiny bit of skill involved, I mean, like, not every fucking piece of meat walking down the street can bust out with some Microsoft Word or Excel action, you know? At least thereʼs that. Itʼs only a means to an end, itʼs only a means to an end, itʼs only a means to an end, itʼs only a means to an end... My life is not defined by my jobs, I define my life in creative ways. (blather, wince, repeat.) I am so glad that I have my kitties here with me. I mean, itʼs nice to see my slam friends every Wednesday, but I just donʼt want to hang out with them all the time, you know? I am so glad my kitties are here with me at night. Theolonious and I watched “Fight Club” on DVD the other night, and we ended up fucking each other up afterwards. The little bastard thought he was Mr. Badass, so I had to take his punk ass down a coupla notches. You should see my hand... Itʼs all hamburgered, but I bested that little punk. (I love my kitties!) Anyway, Iʼm outtie for now.

01.19.01 poppa don’t take no mess

I was supposed to start my new temp job today, working in the back room of some office downtown typing information into a computer, but instead, I had to work one last day at the print business. Turns out the other job doesnʼt need me until Monday, so, since I needed the money, I performed the role of trained monkey for one more day. It was a very long day, but, thank God, I had James Brown to get me through it. I got into work at 7:00 a.m., and by 7:13 I was just dying to get out of there. The people working there have all been working there forever, like years and years, and they have lapsed into this dead-eye state during work time that keeps them going through their dull day. The radio is perpetually tuned to some radio station that bills itself as “soft rock all day long” and prides itself on being “the one radio station you can listen to at work all day long.” I swear I heard the term “all day long” seventeen times an hour, and listening to such schmaltzy, non-offensive music made me want to drool. I was a clock-watching fool from the beginning, calculating the money I was making in exchange for the life spent in this warehouse. One hour equals $8.50. Half an hour equals $4.24. Every fifteen minutes I earned $2.12. Before taxes. My job all day long never changed. I was taking these sheets of vinyl stickers for Boeing, 12-up to a page, and I was stacking 25 or so up then poking the perforated stickers through and stacking them in piles of 250, listening to the whir of the air system and a steady stream of Kenny Rogers and Helen Reddy and Tony Orlando and Dawn and Air Supply. By 7:23 a.m., I had had enough, and I asked the manager if it would be okay for me to listen to a Walkman on headphones. She said yes. (thank god.) I ran out to my car and grabbed up my Walkman and my huge over-the-ears headphones, the big cushy ones that blocked out all sound, and I popped in my Greatest Hits of James Brown tape, and I started rocking out. From then on, I was a counting machine, bobbing my head up and down and punctuating my work with an occasional “Uh!” and “Hit me!” and “Take me to the bridge!” They didnʼt think I noticed, but I did, I saw all the co-workers eyeing me suspiciously as I did my work, and it was so odd, they all seemed to move in slow motion, way off in the distance as me and James did our work. After about three hours of listening to the same tape, one of the co-workers tapped me on the shoulder, and I whipped out of my daze and tore off my headphones and was like, “Wha?” Apparently, I was kicking the metal leg of the table we were all using, thwacking it with the tip of my steel-toed boot to the rhythm of James Brown, just kicking the hell out it to the tune of “Hot Pants” and “Popcorn” and “Poppa Donʼt Take No Mess,” and the sound was booming in the echoey warehouse filled with nothing but soft rock hits of the ʼ70s. That kinda pleased me, actually. I made it to 3 p.m. I kept doing this countdown, like, “Okay, if I leave now, I will be losing 3 hours multiplied by $8.50 an hour equals $25.50. I can eat for a week on that, so, no, I canʼt leave yet.” By the time I got the figure down to $12.75, I was like, “Eh, I can take the loss. I am so out of here.” I told them I had to go. I was only supposed to work until 11 a.m., and they had been happy to have me on for the extra hours, so leaving was no big deal. They wanted me to stay until 4:30, but I wasnʼt having any of that. I went home and took a nap. On Monday, I will begin exchanging the hours of my life $11 each, a whole $2.50 more an hour, and I wonʼt have to poke anything. I just spent my last $6.99 on two boxes of cereal and a gallon of milk. I love cereal. I have not a single dime, not even a nickel, until I get paid for my two days at the print company next Friday. I think I will be fine. My kitties and I watched a great Chinese movie tonight called “Shower” about this old man who runs a bathhouse in China and his estranged son comes home to visit after many years and they rebuild their relationship. It was great, all these glimpses into Chinese cutlure, and the setting of this bathhouse with all these old chatty Chinese men and their Mah Jong and cricket wrestling matches. It was great, and my kitties snuggled with me warm and soft through the whole thing. Ahh, kitty love. We are going to watch “The Virgin Suicides” later on tonight, that and eat cereal. Peace.

01.23.01 shackles on our minds

Iʼve been listening to the soundtrack from “American Graffitti” all morning, these oldies from the late ʼ50s and early ʼ60s, all these boys singing to their girls and proclaiming their love by being pushy, posses- sive, stalker boys who wonʼt take no for an answer. Itʼs like all the early pop rock songs prepared young women for this kept life and made them accustomed to this wierd masculine display of ownership as a means of declaring love. Check these sentiments: “if you leave me, thatʼll be the day i die” “ainʼt no mountain high enough to keep me away from you” Sounds like a stalker to me. And whatʼs up with young men being able to proclaim their love for numerous girls in numerous ports across the world (ie “iʼm a travel- linʼ man / made a lotta stops / all over the world” where he dscribes all these women waiting for him; and “california girls” where he describes his exploits with all these women), but if a women does this, sheʼs all about a bitch and gets told on, like “Runaround Sue” and shit. These pop songs were like stealth brainwashing, hardwiring young brains into misogynist, patrarchal modes of “love” and preparing women for their roles as docile baby ovens. I swear, romantic comedies and love songs are the opiates of the masses. Stifling, yet so hummable! Another thing I was thinking about was that I am so numbing myself as a means of simply getting through the boredom and drudgery of this job, using music to kill the pain of feeling lame and thinking, “My God, Iʼve wasted a whole day — a WHOLE day — sitting here trading my life for scraps of paper and what for?” So much of this society exists to numb the pain of being a fleshy cog in the capitalistic machine, because, really, if people started to really realize what shite their lives are working for some company who cares not a whit for them then our whole system would fall apart. People would be quitting their jobs and travelling the country trying to find truth, not collecting their sad paychecks week after week until they died quietly without a struggle, all in the name of commerce. So, we get thrown these drugs to keep us numb and from noticing, all these movies and music and drugs and sex, all these things like shiny new cars and vacations and shit, just to keep us from noticing what drones we are. Empty glossy entertainment is nothing more than a shackle on our brains. That is what slam seeks to destroy, I think, seeks to eliminate this passive entertainment model where we succumb to the numb stupidity broadcast at us where we just accept it all. Slam seeks to create a truly interactive form of engagement, one where community is the focus and growing numb is the antithesis of what we are doing, no, we feel the numb tingle of dead flesh and slam seeks to rid us of the deadening... Something like that... Anyway, itʼs anything but passive entertainment, it actually challenges the listener to be an active participant in the process of sharing the human experience rather than just mindlessly experiencng some 2D version concocted to sell tickets and make tons of money and keep us confined in our little cubicles. God, I just reread this and it seems like Iʼm on a soapbox from hell. Just thought Iʼd share some thoughts. 01.26.01 she has a degree in women’s studies

so, i bought a copy of the yucky so-called menʼs magazine “max- im” just because it sucks so bad and i felt like making fun of it over lunch, right? just in case you donʼt know, itʼs this frat boy mag with tiny little articles about after shave and cars and lots and lots of girls in bikinis biting their thumbs, with each tiny article the perfect length for a frat boy poop session. so, inside thereʼs this game, see, like you roll the dice and move your penny through this maze, and if you get to the end of the maze, you get to jump in the sack with the girl. itʼs called “first date” or something. anyway, there are certain things that make you jump forward three spaces, speeding your way toward getting laid, right? things like “she tells a dirty joke” or “she says sheʼd love to see your apartment” or even better “she tells an amusing anecdote about a threesome she had in college.” oh wait then thereʼs this one: “she tells you sheʼs in therapy for sex addiction.” ahh, well... there are also squares you can land on that make you go back three spaces, representing a hindrance to your getting laid and making you think twice about your date. these make you go back: “she talks about her friendʼs deplorable slutty behavior;” “she says sheʼs in a ʻwierd spaceʼ right now;” “when you take out your wallet to pay for the meal, she insists on paying for half;” and my very favorite “she reveals she has a degree in womenʼs studies.” so, apparently, a self-assertive, confident, moral person who is honest about her emotional availability who also has studied the concept of women as empowered human beings is the furthest thing from a datable gal, at least one for getting laid the first night. and apparantly someone who is emotionally insecure and needy and expresses her low self-esteem by sexualizing her relationships inappropriately is the perfect catch. no fucking wonder frat guys are such shit heads! this magazine is such crap!

01.30.01 what’s all that pain I feel?

I just put a baked potato into the oven for dinner, and since it takes an hour to finish (as opposed to eight minutes in the microwave, which is what I usually do), Iʼm kicking it here in front of my computer writing and listening to music. Anyway... Iʼm chilling with my babies. They totally love their new kitty condo I got them the other day, and I always get Theo all riled up about protecting his hold on the entire thing. He thinks heʼs such a bad-ass kitty, playing like heʼs all king of the condo and stuff, but then I put my socks on my hand and I teach him a thing or two. Itʼs our favorite game. I play it with him almost every day when I get home. I stacked the little kitty condo on top of the bigger one to form a sort of kitty apartment building, and I positioned it so they can jump from the roof of the condo to the lower shelf of my closet. So far, they absolutely love it up there, all hiding amongst my folded black T-shirts and stuff. When Theo gets done being a bad-ass on the condo, heʼll think he can have that badness translate to something that can whup up on Aretha, but she ainʼt having none of that. Even though sheʼs a full pound lighter than he is, sheʼs still way faster and can swat him five or six times before silly Theo knows whassup. Heʼs all dopey and dull and going, “Duh, whatʼs all that pain I feel? Whereʼs it coming from?” Meanwhile, Aretha has hit him in the ass 17 times with her claws out, just boomboomboomboom. Sheʼs a bad-ass; unlike Theo, she just doesnʼt feel the constant need to prove it. We should all aspire to Aretha-ness, donʼt you think? A lot of times, I feel like Theo, filled with the need to prove that Iʼm a bad-ass, but I can see that the best way to be is like Aretha, to be satisfied with your abilities and not feel the need to prove anything to anyone other than yourself. If other people donʼt know you are a bad ass, then thatʼs okay, because you know and thatʼs enough. Kitty Philosophy 101, with your host, Eirik Ott.

02.01.01 ambiguous sexuality boy

Another day, another temp job assignment. I am sitting in my cruel little desk in the building downtown in which I work, the big 28-story building filled with a hive of cubicles and workers buzzing through their little days. I am a temp in a company. I have no idea what the company does, nor do I know what the numbers I type incessantly into this computer mean, but for this job I get $11 an hour. I am liked by my co-workers, and I suspect that they donʼt really know what this company does or what impact their work has on the company either, which is somehow comforting. My focus tends to be light, and, thus, I end up surfing the Internet for hours and hours and hours, writing e-mail and booking gigs and reading the latest at www.nyttimes.com. I walk to the downtown branch of the city library every lunch break and pick up five CDs for the next day. (On the playlist for today are: The Complete Ella in Berlin; The Jazz Age, New York in the ʼ20s; Bob Marley and the Wailers, Natty Dread; The Music of Spike Jones; and Classic Queen. Yesterday I had Rachmaninovʼs Symphony No. 2; the Greatest Hits of Louie Prima; Carole King, Tapestry; Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain; and Heavy Metal Overload, Vol. 12.) They tell me they are very happy with my work, yet I slack off a good 65% of the time Iʼm here. Iʼm either very fast when I do work or their expectations for excellence are extremely low. Either way, there is little stress beyond the “Oh my God I should be living life not being a drone” variety. Theyʼve already offered me a raise. I have photos of my kitties, Aretha and Thelonious, all over my cubicle, along with a nice one of my current long-distance sweetie, Alyssa. I also have really cushy headphones and my entire CD collection. I am wired all day long, sipping Mountain Dews from the soda machine in the break area and bouncing along to James Brown and The Beastie Boys. Today was Waitangi Day. Well, in New Zealand, anyway. One of the gay men in the office noticed that the calendar proclaimed today as Waitangi Day, so weʼve been joking about making it a festive little shindig where all the men have to come to work in sarongs with fruit on their heads like Carmen Maranda and sing along to the greatest hits of Julie London. Everyone promised to have Maori face tattoos installed by this morning (just like in “The Piano”). When it came down to it, Waitangi Day festivities were limited to me handing out Almond Her- sheys Kisses, but the idea was there. I mean, we were talking karaoke and highballs, but it just didnʼt pan out. They like my saucy attitude here. The only other men working here are gay. I think they all think of me as “Ambiguous Sexuality Boy,” which, you know, has always been fine with me. They drop little hints and questions designed to fingure out my sexuality, like, “So, whatʼs your favorite Broadway musical?” and “So, donʼt you just die knowing Barbaraʼs not performing live anymore?” Oh, and I am figuring out what it is that I do, and what it is that this company does. Apparently, this is some sort of travel company that works with big corporations to arrange their flight plans and hotel stays for their clients and employees. Just today I was working on the account for EMI, the music company, and I processed a plane ticket for someone named “Melanie Chisolm.” And Iʼm all like, “Melanie Chi- solm... Melanie Chisolm... that sounds so familiar...” Then it hits me: Mel C! As in Sporty Spice of the Spice Girls! I just processed a plane ticket for one of the Spice Girls! Thatʼs kinda cool. (And also kinda sad that I got all excited.) I do poetry once a week at the local poetry slam. Nice, that, gives me a mic and an audience. Mostly, they let me host, but then I like to kick down some poetry on occasion, too. I am starting a women-friendly venue with a friend of mine named Karen to give balance to a very white male scene. We are thinking of calling it “Yawp: An evening of performance poetry.” Has a ring to it, eh? I work. I go home. I play with my kitties. I sleep. Occasionally, I do poetry at one of two or three venues I frequent. I tour when I have the chance (just got back from a SW U.S. tour in Dec. and a national tour during the four months of summer.) I am trying to write a book on poetry slamming. Just finished a freelance article for Poets and Writers. I keep busy. In general, I am happy. For the most part. (thank god for my kitties. i shouldʼve gotten them a long time ago.)

02.14.01 money-makin,’ money-makin’

iʼve been wearing memories of my friend cas like a fuzzy coat lately. itʼs all been about the beastie boys, to be honest. i just got “the sounds of science,” their 2-cd greatest hits joint, and iʼve been listening to it almost every day at this stank temp job i have punching numbers into a computer for some company in some building in downtown seattle. and i canʼt help thinking of cas as i listen to them. image #1: all of us in my truck, all of us on the ʼ98 sf slam team, crammed into my 4-wheel drive toyota made exclusively for midgets, which means itʼs just fine for my punk ass, but itʼs real mean for cas and charles ellik and tarin towers and russell gonzaga and omolara and whoever the fuck else we had crammed in that truck for 10 hours from sf to portland for the salmon slam. i think of cas and me in the front seat listening to the beastie boysʼ latest cd, and cas is just thrilled at the old school vibe, that still-phat ringing boomp from the 808, the retro electro stylie, and that last bit from the second song, from “the move,” that part that does this rapid pulse “joompjoompjoompjoompjoomp- joomp” that has cas spilling smiles all over the dashboard as he rocks an invisible turntable with his right hand in time to the beat. now, every time i put that cd into my player, i wait for that moment, then i crank it just as the “joompjoompjoompjoomp” hits the speakers, and i cut an invisible record with glee just like cas did that day, and i remember the smile, the huge smile, the joy, on his face. image #2: the only cd iʼve never owned by the beastie boys is, iʼve been told repeatedly, their very best: “paulʼs boutique.” for some reason, iʼve just never gotten around to buying it. iʼm not familar with any song on it except for “hey ladies,” which, really, never phased me. but damn, on this 2-cd greatest hits, all the songs from “paulʼs boutique” are fucking booming, from “shake your rump” to “shadrach.” fuck, i canʼt get enough of the dense mix of dust brothers samples and cuts, tight-assed team style rapping, and those doodoo rhymes, damn... picture me listening on too-fat padded dj headphones in a completely silent work center, and picture my head bobbing as i whisper “shadrach, meshach and abednego” over and over to the rhythm of the music, rocking back and forth, squeeking my chair, dinging the metal table leg with the tip of my steel-toed boot, and not giving a fuck if the sound of me rocking out is bothering anyone. i think of cas when i do this because it was cas who told me i was foolish and very definitely unhip for never having owned “paulʼs boutique.” image #3: iʼm booking a sw tour to coincide with my trip to austin for sxsw, and one of the best moments of the entire trip last year featured cas. cas was sorta stranded in the huge crowds of the music festival, chewing on the point of his shirt collar like a lost puppy and looking for his friends who had disappeared, standing like a rock in the stream of pedestrians and talking in vain into his cell phone as he left another unaswered message on someone elseʼs cell phone. this was all part of the mass community diss offered to anyone remotely affiliated with the san jose slam team post-chicago, and it was pushing cas and everyone else into telling slam poetry to kiss every inch of their asses. i offered cas floor space on the floor i was sleeping on, and he tagged along for the ride. and then there we were, hours later, me on the couch and cas on the floor huddling on a papasan pad, listening to the drum and bass of the rain on the roof of mark maslowʼs house. the lightning was huge and fierce, like flashpots and strobe lights, and weʼd count 1-2-3 ʻtil we heard the rumble in the distance. our conversation was getting sparce and the silences were stretching themselves longer and longer, and our blinks were turning into long periods of whispering with our eyes closed, when this bright sustained pulse arced across the austin night sky. we both said, “ooohh” in unison, like singers in harmony, then giggled at the fact that we both had our eyes open at the same time. cas mumbled something about, “this one ought to be good,” as i counted 1-2-3 only i donʼt say “1-2-3,” i say “money-ma- kinʼ, money-makin,ʼ money-makinʼ” and then the thunder clap boomed this rabid bass line that shook the windows and rattled the blinds in the living room, and we started giggling this goofy, awe-inspired little kid giggle, like, “ho ho ho oh my gawd...” the sound was huge and tumbled all over us for several long seconds, maybe even ten or 12 or 15, and we were both sharing these conspiratorial giggles, like we were the only ones in the whole world who had just witnessed that kick ass 4 a.m. thunder and we were feeling privilaged and grateful for it. image #4: i have performed “poem for castadera antoine mcgee” exactly one time in seattle, one time, and then i retired it, just like i have retired every poem i perform at the seattle slam. this is to force me to write new things, to break free from the old stuff, the big poppa e stuff. and yet every single time i go to the slam, someone inevitably comes up to me and asks me to do “that white guy rapper poem.” last week, i was asked by three different people to do it, but i told each one that i had retired it from the venue. when i did it during a feature late last year, there was a whole table of young filipino poet kids at this round table, and they just went off when i did the piece, just fucking wild, and gave me a standing ovation and mass dap and much props. it was the highest score of the night, and ever since folks have been after me to do it again. in fact, “the last poets” are performing with this filipino collective in seattle, and the host wants me to open the show with the “cas” piece. i still donʼt know what i think about that poem... itʼs odd how some people really dig it, yet... and yet, something about it still makes me hesitate. when i did it at the bar 13 in nyc, i got a standing ovation from the mixed crowd. and yet... and yet... yeah, so iʼve been thinking a lot about cas lately.

02.17.01 i kinda feel elated in a way, and a little... nervous

Today is a big day already, and itʼs only 7:51 a.m., and the reason itʼs such a monumental moment in my Seattle time is this: I rode the bus to work today. Yes, I braved the scary world of mass transit and made it here to my work in a mere 15 minutes, which is a hell of a lot better than an hour, which is what it usually takes since I have to navigate bumper-to- bumper traffic on the Interstate then park 25 blocks up and down huge steep hills from my work because thatʼs the nearest you can legally park to the downtown area without paying money or getting a ticket. I felt so... gosh, so efficient, so on time and online and a part of the Seattle community. I was in the library exchanging some CDs I had checked out for new ones to listen to at work, and I snagged a bus schedule for the line that would take me from my house to the downtown area. And check this out... the bus picks me up exactly 103 steps from my front door, like, right around the corner, and then it drops me off just two blocks from my work. Tell me that ainʼt snazzy. $1.25, baby, and now I am really living in Seattle. I mean, not only do I have my very own apartment (see, I LIVE there), and a job in a building (thatʼs MY building) in which I have a cubicle (excuse me, thatʼs MY cubicle), but now, I also have a bus route (yeah, thatʼs right, I take the 26 Express downtown. Thatʼs MY bus.) I kinda feel elated in a way, and a little... nervous, I mean, I have no way of getting home now, no way at all, except the bus. I donʼt have my car, which has been my tortoise shell on my back for the past eight months or more. I feel like my car is my space station, and I have only ventured outside its safety using an umbilical cord, you know? But now, I have ventured out alone into the inky darkness, untethered, self- propelled... I am a satellite floating in the universe that is Seattle.

02.27.01 ﬂuttering all over the room

my kitties are hella into that heroin chic look. itty bitty skinny kitties with big black velvet painting eyes, side of the road tijuana eyes, big old waifish eyes that look up at you and say “i wuv you” like a 75- cent gas station postcard. i am in seattle. it is big here, very big, and everyone has carved a huge personal space around themselves, perhaps in an effort to create their own sense of self in the face of beehives buzzing all around, big tall skyskraper beehives with spigots on the side dripping human honey... you can walk right up to any big building here and put your hand on its cold face, and you can feel the buzzing of the worker bees inside. people are not as friendly here as in chico, my little college town where you can actually wave and smile at someone and they will wave and smile back and you can get all the way down the block and around the corner before you realize that you have no idea who that person was. here, though, here you are just “guy at the bus stop” or “guy in line at the mall” or “guy in the elevator,” like bit players in the movie in which they are the star and you are the extra who doesnʼt deserve a name of your own other than “girl in flower shop.” no one knows you, so no one speaks, no one smiles, no one offers a wave acknowledging that, yes, this is indeed a beautiful clear blue day, and yes, the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the smell of the puget sound is wafting in the breeze, and yes, we happen to be passing each other on the sidewalk on this fine, motherfucking day. i miss chico for that reason, the ease of meeting and speaking with other people. here, i am too easily drawn to my room and my books and cds, too easily able to lock my door and close my blinds and chill with my kitties and curl up in my blankets with the heater on that makes little booming sounds every now and then that hardly even make the cats jump anymore. i started a reading. thatʼs cool, a little reading across the street from the university of washington campus in a coffeehouse with lots of wood and a long bar and a stage in the middle of the long room. itʼs called “yawp,” the reading, i mean, and the coffeehouse is called “the pearl.” we meet every tuesday with music and poetry and a guy who paints live right there on stage as people read their work. tonight is only our second night, me and the co-host karen, and we already are being told that our series is a hit. karen will be doing it solo for the month and a half i am on tour, during which she will be putting on our first themed reading, an all women reading called “womenʼs work.” all the proceeds go to a local womenʼs charity called “home alive.” we plan on doing a special benefit reading once a month to highlight organizations and members of the poetry community that we feel should get some play. next month, weʼll do an all queer reading. thatʼs exciting. i go to the seattle slam, although i like it less and less. now i mostly go out of some faint philanthropic need to support my “community,” although i have little passion for slamming right now. i love to perform, i love to listen to other kick ass performers, but the seattle slam is lame, so i stay until the end, but my mind is flighty during the time i spend there, fluttering all over the room, peeking over peopleʼs shoulders, crawling through cracks in the ceiling, making lists... i am so ready to tour again. i have to get out of here and hit the road. i have booked a solo southwest tour that will swing up and take me through mid-america to chicago and ann arbor, michigan, then back home. should take a month and a half. 03.04.01 we both cried

i was on the cell phone with alyssa when it happened, the seattle earthquake, and she thought i was playing a joke on her. wow, when i ran outside (yelling, “get under the doorway, kitties, iʼll be right back!”) i saw all the telephone poles bobbing back and forth, playing doubledutch jumprope with all the wires and such, and all the people on the block were running outside and standing in the middle of the street wondering what to make of it all. i have a great view of the skyline of downtown, and i really half expected the whole thing to collapse in front of me, like that final scene from “fight club.” yikes. my first gig in reno was a university gig, a kick-off for womenʼs history month with other performers. i was the host, and i performed poetry between sets. it was phat. i sold 24 books and got paid $500 for the gig, and it was just awesome, lots of young women and men charged on the idea of kick-ass women doing kick ass things. one of the people in the audience was a friend of jenʼs from chico, jen the one who died. (jesus, i hate that she will be forever known as that, as “the girl i dated who died in a car accident in ʼ99. she deserves so much better than that.) we both cried and held each other after i performed the poem about jen dying and all. that was really hard, but cathartic. (deep sigh) next stop... flagstaff, az.

03.05.01 i sleep on a lot of couches

i was thinking about people who actually put their degree to good use, something which has pretty much been missing from my life since leaving chico. iʼve freelanced a bit, though. i just had an article come out in a young feminist magazine called “bust” that was cool, plus i have something coming out in may in a magazine called “poets and writers” thatʼs kinda cool. i might be writing something for the utne reader, but i have to come up with some kind of idea ﬁrst. i still do my zine, the wussy boy chronicles. iʼm putting out #6 soon, and the utne reader nominated the zine to itʼs “best of the alternative press awards 2000” recently, so thatʼs cool. iʼm on tour doing poetry stuff for a month or so, but not poetry slamming. basically, i get to do 20-30 minute sets of my stuff, then i sell books. i just had a gig in reno at the university there, a kick-off to their womenʼs history month. that was a cool gig. i got paid $500, plus sold 23 books. most of the gigs i am doing this tour are smaller ones, but i have a few that are big. one in ann arbor, michigan, is paying me $600, plus a school in missouri is ﬂying me out there and back for a gig. nice, that. most, though, are like $25-$50 for featuring, then i get to sell as many books for $5 a piece as i can. i sleep on a lot of couches. but, i often scratch my head and wonder, and smile, at the idea that someone would pay me to do this. i mean, itʼs not making me tons of money, but it sure is better than being chained to a desk in a cubicle. i might end up returning to journalism for a “real job,” but, for now, i am happy doing this. my goal is to tour colleges in the fall and make up to $1,000 a gig. that would be cool. i could concentrate on writing and just do a couple of gigs a month. i know a bunch of people who are doing that, so iʼm going to give it a try.

03.08.01 hookers and blow

I am in a Kinkoʼs somewhere in Tempe, Arizona, which, I am told, is somewhere near Phoenix. The university here is one of the largest in the country, I am told, with a student body of more than 50,000. Jesus, thatʼs a big school. I have a gig tonight in some Chinese restaurant called something like Lucky Dragon Panda Garden Golden Buddha Happy Land, or some such thing. The thought of doing poetry on a stage in a Chinese restaurant sounds so “Spinal Tap,” but, from what I am told, the gig draws 120+ every week, so it should be a phat show. Iʼm getting $100 up front, and Iʼll probably get another $100 in booksales, so itʼll set me up for the next few days until I get to Albuquerque and San Antonio later this week. My tour started with an earthquake in Seattle, then gale force winds in Chico that brought not one but two big-assed trees down onto the roof of the apartment in which I was sleeping, and now I am told that Iʼll be in an area known as “Tornado Alley” during a time of the year they call “Tornado Season.” Jesus, if I see locusts and frogs falling from the sky, Iʼm gonna take up a different profession. I am not sleeping at all on this tour... I think Iʼm trying too hard to play the rock star roll, you know, all about hookers and blow and limos and shit. Iʼm all Puff Daddy on this tour, with an entourage and body- guards. It saps my energy staying up all night in discos with the party people, so I need to sleep more. Well, okay, thereʼs no hookers and blow, but Iʼve been sleeping very little just the same. I need to sleep for a day already, and Iʼm only three days into it. Yikes.

03.11.01 maybe barbed wire.

iʼm in san antonio at the home of phil and michelle west. the smell of cooking bacon is wafting in, and really, i have not smelled a better smell in quite some time. i mean, i donʼt even really like bacon, but the smell of someone making bacon for you is really intense. i am so tired. the bus trip from albuquerque to san antonio lasted more than 17 hours, and i didnʼt sleep a wink the entire time. i just got here about an hour ago. i am going to eat bacon and pancakes, then go to sleep, which is probably not the healthiest thing iʼve ever done, but i am so tired... anyways, the shows have been phenomenal so far. poets, you have to do this yourself sometime, like, after nationals, just go, just pack your chapbooks and some clean underwear and go on a poetry tour. i canʼt believe that i am allowed to do this. it seems slightly immoral and even illegal to do this, like if iʼm caught iʼll have to pay a ﬁne. i have written two new pieces on the road and have mapped out ﬁve more. hopefully iʼll have some new stuff when i get back to seattle. i think it might be because i want to come out with a cool handmade chapbook like my friend karenʼs, but i donʼt want to just repackage what i already have. creative competition... i want nuts and bolts as binding on mine, maybe a hunk of recycled wood for a cover. maybe barbed wire. bacon is ready. gotta get jetty. peace out.

03.14.01 you’re a pussy

i think that i feel a little deﬂated. iʼm feeling a bit sad and homesick, like i want to go home, but really there is no “home.” thereʼs a line in a soul asylum song, something about being “homesick for a home iʼve never had.” something like that... tonightʼs show sucked. fucking drunk hecklers. i have poems that help me deal with this shit, that help me lash out and mock people who dare to pull that shit, but tonight i just didnʼt have it in me. i felt like doing an attack poem would only make the person who was heckling me with “youʼre a pussy!” a star with his friends, plus i wasnʼt about to do a serious poem while they were shouting at me over their longnecks, so i just mumbled an apology to the audience and cut my set short. i only did two poems, then i sat down. sometimes, i feel like i am really connecting with the audience, really making a difference, really doing something that i am meant to do. and other times, it just melts away right beneath my feet and i feel like a fool. mesa made me feel like a fool. i went in there thinking i was all mister bad ass, but the audience just wasnʼt feeling it. tempe made me feel like a rock star. big crowd, big applause, sold a lot of books, got lots of props. tonight? man... it just made me feel like i am wasting my time.

03.17.01 fuzzy around the edges

the whole austin south by southwest festival thing has been pretty cool, especially the part about walking to the head of this long line of people waiting to pay $10 to get into a show, then flashing my “all access pass” to the guy at the head of the line, then walking right on in. That is really cool. See, we as performers donʼt get paid anything, but we do get to see all the shows we want for free. Nice, that. So far, Iʼve seen only a few shows, though, because everyone here is sick and I caught whatever is going around, and sister, I am just sick like a dog. iʼm all sniffly and achy and moody. besides that, everything is pretty cool. i get to host the official spoken word show tonight, which i am hella honored to do. some of the best performance poets in the country will be on stage tonight, so i will sharing that space with some great people. i just need to make sure iʼm lit like a firefly on dayquil, you know? one good thing about being sick and sneezing the huge powerful sneezes that i sneeze is that it pretty much wrecks my voice in a way that leaves me sounding all deep and gravelly, like iʼm an overnight dj on a funky ʼ70s soul radio station. i keep saying things like, “yo, this one goes out for the ladies, yeah,” and it sounds so cool, like iʼm this old grizzly blues singer or something. iʼm trying to finish at least one new piece for tonight, but damn if it isnʼt hard to get motivated and creative under the influence of dayquil. that stuff is like medicated jagermeister or something. iʼm all numb and hang-overish, everything is fuzzy around the edges. we had an all-star slam last night that was pretty cool. most everyone was busting out their most audience-pleasing stand-up comedy rants, but i just wasnʼt feeling up to prancing around and goofing, so i did two poems that were, like, poems, and they went over pretty damned well, i have to say. made me feel good. sometimes i fear that i am doomed to be this quaint little stand-up comedy kid goofing on poetry, you know, just spilling out these convenient pop culture references and cracking people up with my knowledge of ʼ70s teevee shows, so iʼve been trying to challenge myself by not relying too heavily on that kind of schtick. i am trying really hard to motivate myself into writing something serious about the recent school shootings. something about that really moves me in so many different ways, because, really, i was a prime candidate for some crazy shit like that when i was a kid in high school. i donʼt really think i would have actually done that, you know, stuffed a gun into my backpack and brought it to school, but if school shootings were as common then as they are now, iʼll bet i wouldʼve been one of the kids whispered about in the hallways as someone who had the potential to pull something like that. high school was hella hard, and i want to write something about this phenomenon from a first person perspective. weʼll see. i will be at the teen national poetry slam in the beginning of april, and i want to debut the piece then. weʼll see what happens. ugh, my head feels like itʼs full of warm oatmeal. i want to take a hot shower, so iʼm outtie.

03.19.01 the capitol of costa rica

i was sick all day today, sick and stuffy and muddled. i managed to get up sometime around noon and eat with some friends. iʼm all like looking out the window from the backseat, looking half-lidded through the rain and the snot, and iʼm just dizzy with fade and tattered ʻround the edges. fuck, i felt ghostly dazed all day long, moving in slow-mo through the motions of life. at one point, i got up from the table where i was seated with my friends phil and michelle with the dim purpose of asking the waitress what the vegetable of the day was since iʼd ordered the seared salmon, but then, standing there in the middle of the dining area, i realized that i had not ordered the seared salmon, no, i had ordered the baked muffaletta, which came with seasoned fries, but... i couldnʼt quite... figure out what i was supposed to do... i just stood there in the middle of the dining area trying to figure out what i should ask the waitress, who, by this time, was standing there in front of me with a plate full of fetuccini just staring at me like, “Uh, what?” so, i just kinda got flustered and feverish and finally said, “do you... uhm, do you know the capitol of costa rica?” she just looked at me like i was crazy, then said she didnʼt know, but could find out. turns out, the capitol of costa rica is san jose. she actually found that out for me. ainʼt that cool? i tipped her an extra buck for that one. the rest of the day i spent asleep on the couch doped out on nyquil. i woke up to find it was almost midnight. here i am, itʼs 2:30 a.m., and i have a strong nyquil hangover, just this cotton buzz in my forehead, like i get blurry when i turn my head, like some smeary special effect, i feel indistinct... fuck, i hate being sick, especially on the road. i want my kitties. if they were here, they would know exactly what to do. aretha would smear vickʼs vap-o-rub on my chest and place a steaming hot wash- cloth over it, then dab a bit of vickʼs under my nose for good measure. thelonious, meanwhile, would be fixing me 7-up and jell-o and chicken noodle soup and saltines in the kitchen. the showcase poetry reading thing here at south by southwest was so very surreal and odd, especially under the green light of nyquil goggled eyes. some drunk lady was in the front row and she was just gloriously unabashedly amazingly drunk, like so drunk you could hardly believe she was still conscious, she was boneless and floppy like a muppet without a hand, and she was this sorta sad 40-year-old lady trying desperately hard to appear 29, all fishnets and fake-leopard skin stretch pants and torn mesh blouse, so very ʼ85, and she jumped on stage as i was introducing the next poet. she pressed herself into me and started rubbing up all on me like a stripper on a brass pole, and she was yelling, “I am from Capitol Records and I can sign you and make you a star!” Of course, the mic picked this up so the entire crowd was roaring as she dry-humped me and i just kinda tried to pry her off me. the bouncer finally 86ʼed her. so sad. there was more drama. one of the poets read a scathing piece criticizing the mixture of comedy and poetry that is so prevalent here, and he ended up offending, like, almost everyone, especially this sorta famous cat named beau sia. beau got up there and did this 20-minute monologue expressing his horror and hurt and disgust, then launched into an amazing set of poetry. hella cathartic. i am so ready to leave, though. i want to go home, but i still have almost $2,000 worth of gigs left, and i really need the cash and expo- sure, so i tread ever-onward, leaving a trail of snot rags behind me.

03.20.01 school shootings in the past few years

March 5, 2001, Santana High School, Santee, California. Charles Andrew “Andy” Williams, 15, enters the boys bathroom and shoots 2 people, then walks into the hallway and shoots randomly. He ends up killing 2 and wounding 13 before surrendering to police. March 1, 2000, Mount Morris Township, Michigan. A first-grader shot and killed a fellow 6-year-old one day after the two argued in the schoolyard December 6, 1999, Fort Gibson Middle School, Fort Gibson. Okla- homa. Seth Trickey, 13, walked up to a crowd of students waiting for the morning bell and opened fire with a gun, injuring four students. November 19, 1999, Deming Middle School, Deming, New Mexico. Victor Cordova Jr., 13, dressed in camoflage and walked up behind a 13-year-old girl student in the back of her head. She died in the hospital of her injuries. May 20, 1999, Heritage High School, Conyers, Georgia. Thomas “T.J.” Solomon, 15, walked into the student commons area and shot and injured 6 students. April 20, 1999, Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado. Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, kill 13 and wound 24, then kill themselves. Explosive devices they planted are found throughout the school. June 15, 1998, Armstrong High School, Richmond, VA. Quin- shawn Booker, 14, wounds 2 teachers who stepped in to break up a fight between himself and another student. May 21, 1998, Thurston High School, Springfield, Oregon. Kipland “Kip” Kinkel, 15, walks into the school cafeteria and fires at random, killing 2 students and wounding 20 others. Both of his parents were found murdered in his home. May 19, 1998, Fayetteville, Tennessee. Jacob Davis, 18, shoots and kills a classmate who was dating he ex-girlfriend April 24, 1998, Parker Middle School, Edinboro, Pennsylvania. Andrew Wurst, 14, kills one teacher and wounds 3 students at graduation dance. March 24, 1998, Jonesboro, Arkansas. Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, kill 4 students and a teacher after setting off the fire alarm to draw the students out of their classrooms. December 1, 1997, Heath High School, Paducah, Kentucky. Michael Carneal, 14, kills 3 students, wounds 5, at informal prayer meeting. October 1, 1997, Pearl High School, Pearl, Mississippi. Luke Woodham, 16, kills 2 students, including his ex-girlfriend, and wounds 6 others after stabbing his mother to death. February 19, 1997, Bethel High School, Bethel, Alaska. Evan Ramsey, 16, kills principal and 1 student, wounds 2 others. February 2, 1996, Moses Lake High School, Moses Lake, Wash- ington. Barry Loukaitis, 14, kills a teacher and 2 students, wounds 1 other student.

03.22.01 cue angels singing

iʼm in baton rouge now, the capitol of louisiana. on the way, the greyhound passed through rayne, which, i am told, is the “frog capitol” of the world. all the signs in rayne trumpeted this fact, and every sign had pictures of cartoon frogs happily giving up their legs for your enjoyment. things like that always crack me up, like the pictures on the meat packing trucks with smiling dancing pigs and cows, like theyʼre all so jolly about this whole slaughter thing, like their proud and happy to do their job. anyway... houston could have been a complete bust, but, thanks to serendipity, it turned out to be the best gig so far on this tour. i was in austin, tx, getting mauled by that drunk lady promising me record deals and shit, when in walks my friends murph and tamara from albuquerque, only they live in houston now. they immediately come up to me and ask if i need a place to stay while in houston. i hadnʼt even thought that far into my future, so i accepted in a second. i was just going to go to my show in houston and ask the crowd for couch time, so this was even better. well... we get to houston and get to the gig that i have set up with the owner of this goth coffeehouse called the mausoleum. weʼve been in contact via phone and e-mail, and i have sent her my press kit and press release info, and she has promised to put up fliers and pass out handbills and do the local promotion, see... so we get there and the place is absolutely empty. i go up to the owner, this sleepy-eyed lady from ar- gentina, and sheʼs all like, “oh... yeah... you came... iʼve, uh... well, i... iʼve been so busy lately... gosh, iʼm really sorry, but i havenʼt done any promotion at all... is your show tonight? i was kinda waiting for you to send me the press kit.” i say, “i sent you the press kit three weeks ago. you already con- firmed that you received it over e-mail.” sheʼs like, “ohh... well, actually, what i really needed was a press release so that i...” i say, “it was the first piece of paper in the press kit.” sheʼs like, “ohh... are you sure? oh... well, gosh, iʼve been so busy lately... i guess i should have let you know, huh, and saved you the long fucking stinky nasty stupid bus ride all the fucking way from austin fucking texas for nothing, huh?” (okay, i embellished that last response.) so, weʼre standing there with nothing to do, when suddenly, tamara goes, “you know, i think this artist co-op called southmore house is having a slam tonight. in fact, i think the first prize is $100. if we hurry, we can make the sign up list.” (cue angels singing.) we blaze a path to the southmore house, and it is packed. itʼs like an artistʼs fraternity sort of thing, with musicians and poets and paint- ers all living under one roof and sharing the chores and organizing all kinds of artistic happenings. the living room is packed with people, and murph and i sign-up for the slam. great slam, everyone kicks ass, but big poppa e kicks just a little more ass than everyone else, scoring a 29.7 and a 29.9, which snags me the $100 first prize, then i sold another 12 books on top of that, so i was totally taken care of for my trip to baton rouge. the people there are great, and they want to bring in travelling slam poets on tour, let them sleep on their couches, and theyʼll even promote shows for them. damn... complete serendipity. one of the southmore house people even offered to drive me to the bus station the next day, and he even bought me lunch. damn... baton rouge is okay so far, although it started shitty. i walked into the venue and asked the host what kind of set he wanted me to do, and heʼs all like, “set?” iʼm like, “yeah, like how long of a set do you want me to do, like 20-30 minutes?” heʼs like, “well, actually, we are kinda tight on time tonight, so we wanted you to do one poem before the slam as the goat poet.” iʼm like, “goat poet? you mean, like, calibration poet? like, i do one poem and thatʼs it?” and heʼs like, “well, yeah.” iʼm like, “uhmm... do you pass the hat for that?” and heʼs like, “pass the hat?” so, i calmly explain to knucklehead joe how things work, how you invite a poet to come several hundred miles to perform a complete set of poetry, which most certainly does not mean allowing that poet to read only one poem. i told him hereʼs how it was going to work. i would do a 20 minute set before the slam, then we would take a break so that i can sell chapbooks, then he would pass around a hat asking for donations to help him pay for my featured reading. that, i said, that is how things work. you dig? heʼs all like, “gulp.” i was not even in the mood to be getting off fucking greyhound to be the fucking “goat poet” for a half-empty room at a pizza joint, you know? i had to give my boy some 411. turned out, things were cool. i did my “poetic set,” which means the set where i donʼt yell and scream and curse and toss pop culture references around like juggling knives. i sold, like, another 15 books, then the host meekly came up to me and put $50 in my hand and apologized for the confusion. then he asked me to sign a copy of my chapbook for him. thatʼs right. you donʼt even wanna fuck with the big poppa. (hee hee)

03.29.01 pie’s three for dollar down at the corner store

i woke up my first morning in baton rouge snuggled in the arms of leslieʼs couch, which, while not being the prettiest couch iʼve ever slept on — it was actually pretty fucking ugly, to be honest, and it kinda smelled like ass — was certainly one of the most comfortable. i slept like a rock, and woke up to an empty house fully refreshed. leslie is the girlfriend of jeremy garland, my tour angel for baton rouge, meaning that heʼs the one who picked me up at the bus station, drove me to the first nightʼs gig at a “rival” venue, arranged couch time for me at his girlfriendʼs house, and basically helped to make my stay as comfortable as possible. leslie is cool in her own right, having appeared in the pages of newsweek for her role in organizing a gay-les-bi student organization in her high school a couple of years back. when fellow students rallied to protest “fags” in her school and tried to ban her student organization, she fought back and won the right to keep it going. this led to a cover story in newsweek on young gay people in america. fuckinʼ a. anyway, when i woke up on my second day but first morning in baton rouge, the house was deserted, so i showered, shaved, strapped on my backpack, and took a walk. jeremy had given me directions to a kinkoʼs about two miles away, so that was my basic destination, but ambling around baton rouge was my goal, just seeing what kind of different trees they had here, what kind of smells the wind carried, how the sun felt on the back of my neck as i walked and whistled to some half-forgotten tune. leslie doesnʼt shrink from calling her neighborhood “the ghetto,” or, as jeremy calls it, “the hood.” in reality, it was a mostly lower middle class community with lots of hospitals and buildings that just kinda stood there empty like rotten teeth. nice, though, and the sunny blue day made me happy. someone called out from behind me, “hey!” i ignored it, then the voice shouted louder and closer, “yo! hey!” i turned, and a block behind me was a man shambling toward me. i waited, he caught up to me, then he said, “my brother, why donʼt you give me a dollar so i can get me some pie. they selling pieʼs three for dollar down at the corner store.” i told him i didnʼt have any money for him to buy a pie (a lie), then said something like, “say, man, i gotta go.” he clucked his tongue, then shouted after me as i walked down the street, “all a brother need is a dollar for some goddamn pie! motherfucker canʼt gimme a dollar for no goddamn pie! what the fuck is that?” he started cussing and kicking and swearing, then crossed the street, stopping traffic as he did it, then i heard him in the distance say to someone, “yo, man, gimme a dollar so i can get me some pie. they selling pie three for a dollar down at the corner store.” i kept walking. a few moments later, way off in the distance, i heard more cussing and swearing. i donʼt think he got his pie. i kept walking, and walking, and fuck if it didnʼt take me an hour to get to the kinkoʼs. i walked to the front counter and said something like, “i went online to get direction for this place, and there was some kind of body of water nearby. is there some kind of body of water nearby, like a lake or a river or something?” the counter kid looked at me, blinked, then said, “uhm, you mean the mississippi river?” iʼm like, “oh... yeah. how far is that from here?” he points to his left, “just two blocks that way. you canʼt miss it. itʼs the mississippi river.” i heard whispers behind me as i left the kinkoʼs. and he was right, just two blocks away, boom, the mississippi river. i canʼt say that iʼve never seen it up close, but i had never been on its banks, had never reached out and touched itʼs muddy water. i did just that. the bank was covered in cement, and huge concrete letters spelled out “B-A-T-O- N-R-O-U-G-E” for the passing boats and barges using the mississippi for a wide watery highway. i nestled myself on the middle arm of the enormous “E” and fell asleep to the sound of slapping waves against cement shores and the warm beat of the lousiana sun. on the way back from kinkoʼs, loaded down with 50 warm copies of my poetry chapbook, i passed by this old broken down gas station called “bubbaʼs place” with cracked windows and faded paint and something that looked like an old rusty dishwasher in the front against the door. something about it made me want to take a picture, so i stopped long enough to get my camera out of my backpack, when behind me i hear, “so, we meet again. you got any goddamn money for a pie, now? all a brother need is a dollar for some pie, they got pies three for a dollar down at the corner store.” i gave him a dollar. he said, “now thatʼs what iʼm talking about. you wanna gimme one more dollar and iʼll get you some pie, too?” i said no, i had just eaten my very first catfish po-boy sandwich a few minutes before, so i was all good. he went away. he did not cuss. the show that night was great, just awesome. jeremy had printed up fliers and little handbills to promote the show, then had enlisted several friends to pass them out around the college campus and elsewhere. the place was packed with a much larger crowd than normal, jeremy said, and everyone was loud and boisterous and free with their support and applause. i did two sets: the first was big and bulbous and full of ranting raging energy and lots of laughs, then the second was more sedate and sublime, more poetic and soft and relaxed. jeremy let me do whatever i felt, so i peppered the sets with stories from the road and tales of romantic heartbreak and revival. i sold a ton of books, then about 15 of us took off for an all-night diner for food and conversation. i took the recommendation of this beautifully passionate poet named crissy and ordered the shrimp louie omelet while she and her boyfriend shared tales of poetry and such. (lord, i have been crushing lately, just vibrating every time i smell someoneʼs hair conditioner as they pass, getting giddy when someone smiles at me, savoring the lingering warmth left behind when some- oneʼs hand brushes mine...) the next morning a bunch of us went to lunch at someplace in downtown baton rouge near the school, and i ate blackened alligator on a stick for the first time. it was kinda gross, but kinda tasty all at the same time, like sucking on a hunk of blubbery fat oozing cajun seasonings and hot horseradish sauce. itʼs one of those experiences that you have to do at least once just so you can tell your friends, “oh yeah, iʼve eaten alligator.” but, really, honestly, the texture is kinda yucky and doesnʼt warrent a second try. while everyone chatted, i made a quick cell phone call to my contact in st. louis about my next gig three days hence. he kinda muttered something about giving the promotional material to a friend of his two weeks before, then muttered something about his friend flaking on said promotion, and then muttered something weak about how he was hoping some people would show up for the gig. urgh. (donʼt get me started.) i turned to jeremy and leslie and the gang slurping down red beans and rice and what was left of the alligator, and i asked them if i could crash on their couch for a few more days. (note: they had been telling me all kinds of juicy smack about this travelling poet they had hosted recently who ended up being a complete lop and was supposed to stay for only a day but ended up crashing for a week and practically eating them out of house and home, then demanding to be reimbursed for the mountain dew he had left in the fridge that had suddenly disappeared. i didnʼt want to be like that guy. they mocked him incessently.) they all laughed and said that they had already planned on asking me to stay a few extra days, so it must have been meant to be. on my third and last morning in baton rouge, i woke up in the arms of leslieʼs couch with the legs of adrienne entwined around mine. she this cool activist grrl who talked with me into the night, then shared a blanket with me on the smelly couch. we slept butt-to-butt on opposite ends of the couch with our legs behind each otherʼs backs, kinda like a yin-yang symble. it was nice to be warm and cozy that last night, even if leslieʼs couch did smell like ass. adrienne drove me to the greyhound station and gave me a hug goodbye.

03.30.01 snuggling without consent

The trip from Baton Rouge to St. Louis was a 17-hour exercize in sleep deprevation. I swear to God these Greyhounds were the result of some kind of twisted Nazi experiment. I mean, I am blessed with this 65-inch body, which means I am compact and easily packed into the smallest of seats with the slimmest of leg space. Shoot, put me in a plane with an empty seat to one side, and I can stretch out and sleep. Greyhound busses, however, are so fucking cramped and so fucking tiny that no matter how I stretch and squirm and fold myself, I canʼt get comfortable enough to sleep. I tried everything: I laid my back and head down across two seats with my head facing the aisle and the legs folded up into pretzels against the window; I curled up into a tight fetus; I sat up and leaned against my pillow propped up against the window; I laid on my back with my head toward the window and my legs sprawled into the aisle. Nothing worked. I was forced to just sit there and glare out the window and hate every single moment of it. Thank god for my CD player and Vanity Fair magazine. By the time I finally pulled into St. Louis at 5:15 a.m., I was a beat(en) poet. The dude who picked me up was this big kid with a leather jacket festooned with Mardi Gras beads and a swagger in his walk like he was Mr. Bad Ass. This is the same guy who told me over the phone that he had neglected to tell anyone about my coming there for a gig, so I was already ready for Fucker Boy to piss me off, and wow... He did not disappoint. I mean, he seemed nice enough, but within five minutes he was launching into this snickering story about snuggling someone against her will the night before, like, “Heh heh heh, sorry Iʼm a bit tired, but I didnʼt sleep alone last night, heh heh heh, seems I did a little bit of snuggling without consent, heh heh heh, and let me tell you, heh heh heh, it was great.” I actually found myself counting the times my boy said the word “bitch,” a word used like salt to spice up his bland monologues, the kind of diatribes that find you nodding your head and grunting noncommitally while you stare out the window and think about how homesick you feel. (writing poems to the passing traffic)... I mean, he ended up being an alright guy and all, if you just over- looked, like, every offensive thing that came out of his mouth. He took care of me, bought me breakfast, set me up in a bed in his apartment, got me to the gig on time, and, wonder of wonders, people were actually there for the gig, in fact, the place was packed. I sold tons of books, at least one to each cluster of people in the bar, and people were buying two and three at a time. Yeah, that was cool... I think I cleared $200 with that one show. But leather jacket dude was just kinda grating on my last nerve with all his talk about how his ex-girlfriend fucked him over (he talked about this non-stop, and all his friends would ask me if had told me about his ex-girlfriend yet, and when I told them yes, he had, they just rolled their eyes)... Enough of that. I was sitting at the bar waiting for the slam to start, and this quiet mannered guy walks up to me like he knows me and says, “Big Poppa E... it is certainly good to see you again.” I asked him if we had met, and he smiled and reached into his backpack and pulled out a dog-eared copy of one of my zines from five years ago. The thing was all tattered and torn and worn, with huge stains across the cover and pages that were scalloped on the edges. Looking at it was like seeing some kind of artifact from my past, some half-forgotten relic, and it was so odd. I hadnʼt printed and distributed this particular collection in at least four and a half years, and when I did, it was only in northern california and only of a very limited basis. I sold maybe 50 copies of the thing before I decided to stop publishing it and move on to the next thing. I was like, “Where in the world did you get this?” He told me that he was in San Francisco and saw me do a five- round bout with Hank Hyena at the San Franicsco Poetry Slam at the Cafe DuNord. He said that he was absolutely inspired to write after the show and considers that show to be the impetus for the writing and performing he has done ever since. I was dumfounded. That five-round bout with Hank Hyena in late ʼ97 was before everything, before making the SF Slam Team in ʼ98 and all the horrible things that happened, before the SF Slam Team in ʼ99 when we took the championship at the National Poetry Slam, before the whole Wussy Boy thing, even before I took on the name Big Poppa E. No, that bout with Hank Hyena was back when I was still just this kid from Chico, some dinky college town three hours away from SF, and I was just beginning to begin to make a name for myself in the SF scene. In fact, my bout with Hank was a put-up or shut-up time for me, either get in the sandbox and play with the big boys or go home to Chico and stop with this dream of performance poetry. Everyone thought I would get my ass kicked by Hank because he was one of the best known, best loved comedic performers in town. Even the fact that I was bouting with him was a fluke. You see, whoever won the poetry slam the week before got to come back the next week and challenge the reigning champ in a five-round bout. The bouts were like features before the slam. Anyway, I had come in second place at the very first slam in SF that I had attended, but the guy in first place was a vistor from out of town, so he couldnʼt come back the following week. I appeared in his place and bouted with the reigning champion, which was this amazing poet named Thea Hillman. At our bout, she kicked my ass mercilessly and took the bout with ease, but she couldnʼt come the next week, so, again, I filled in and bouted with Hank Hyena, who had won the slam the week before. And there I was, feeling like President Gerald Ford. (Obscure reference to some, perhaps... Gerald Ford was the Speaker of the House when the Vice President under Nixon resigned, so he rose to the Vice Presidency without being elected. And then when Nixon resigned, he rose to the Presidency, again, without being elected.) And everyone just knew this kid from Chico was going to get his ass kicked, even me. (Look what happened to Ford the first time he actually ran for president in ʼ76, getting his ass kicked by practically unknown peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter). Hank is a wonderfully comedic performer, which is not only his strength but, I figured, his weakness. In a five-round bout, I would get my ass kicked if I did comedy toe-to-toe with him, so I resolved to follow his comedic lead in the first two rounds, then switch the energy to serious, a place I didnʼt think he could go. Hank took the first two rounds solidly, but then I went serious in the third and edged him out. The fourth round was tight, and Hank tried to go serious, but couldnʼt get enough momentum going, and I whipped out my most dramatic piece. Boom, I took the fourth round, tying the score 2-2. The fifth and final round was the Haiku Death Match, and I was toting my very best haiku in the whole wide world, and Hank, poor Hank, he hadnʼt even bothered to bring a haiku because he didnʼt think heʼd have to, believing with everyone else that heʼd take me in the first three rounds. He improvised in the haiku round, counting off 17 syllables with his fingers as he free-styled, then I came to the mike and brought the house down with this haiku:

if you put your ear to my chest right now, you would hear my heart breaking.

That was it, I took that round, and then the bout was mine with a narrow 3-2. It was an upset, a complete Cinderella story, and marked my official entrance into the SF scene. From then on, I was no longer just some kid who drove three hours from Chico to read poetry in SF, no, because I had taken out Hank Hyena. Everything that was to come started at that point. And this guy in St. Louis was there to witness it, and here we both were, five years later and thousands of miles away. I just reached out and gave the man a big hug and thanked him for making my day. Then I commenced to lighting the room on fire with words, and I have to admit that I did a pretty damned fine job of it. I even accepted the lunch invitation of the prettiest girl in the room, some artsy poet person named Mallary, who, it turned out, was the much maligned ex-girlfriend of my leather-clad host. Jesus, I thought the boyʼs head was going to swell and explode when I told him about it, not knowing, of course, about their history. Wow... the boyʼs got it bad, and that ainʼt good. I also got to share time with a powerful women poet named Julie who ended up being the National Representative for NARAL in Mis- souri. She hooked me up with all kinds of pro-choice buttons for my backpack, like “Another man for choice” and “If you canʼt trust us with a choice, how can you trust us with a child?” and “Feminists are everywhere” and “Against abortion? Have a vasectomy!” I asked her why in the world she stayed here in Missouri of all places, a state that hated everything about her and her cause, and she simply stated that this is where she is needed most. Wow, you have to applaud that strength and determination. I totally dug talking with her. The next day, I was driven to the metro link that would take me to the airport by another cool poet grrl I had met the night before, this neato hip-hop white grrl who gave me the bestest, warmest hug as she said goodbye. Yeah...

03.31.01 surreal

One of the very oddest and most surreal things that can happen while doing this performance poetry thing is having someone youʼve never met come up to you and tell you they were inspired by your stuff. I mean, itʼs a wonderful, amazing, humbling, mutually inspiring thing, and so few people seem to be able to ever get the chance of creating something that has an effect on someone outside of your little reality, but it is so odd when it happens. You know, you get inspired to write something and you are all alone, in your room, in the middle of the night, and you are working through some emotional turmoil thatʼs picking your inner scabs and wonʼt let you sleep. Writing is an absolutely private thing, something akin to masturbation in that you just donʼt do it in front of anyone, or, if you do, you become too self-conscious to really enjoy it and get the most out of it. (Okay, I may be stretching the metaphor a bit here, but anyway.) The surreal experience comes when you walk into a room youʼve never visited in a town youʼve never seen in a state youʼve never crossed and you suddenly find yourself facing someone youʼve never met and they know you, they know your work, they have been touched by something you did, and there they are standing in front of you telling you about it. I always feel so odd, like, “How in the world did something I created in the middle of the night alone in my room end up in the head of someone Iʼve never met?” Case in point: The Wussy Boy thing. That poem was written in the margins of my notebook for a communications course I took in spring of ʼ99. I remember doing a web search of the term “wussy boy” back then, and there were very few references to the term. Now when I do that web search in April of ʼ01, there are scads of references to that word, and many of them quote my poem or even print it in full. How did they get it? Where did they get it? How in the world can something Iʼve written in my school notebook end up all the way across the country on someoneʼs computer, on someoneʼs website? I mean, I know how, you know, duh, I have a website with that poem. Iʼve been performing that poem all over the country for the past few years, and Iʼve sold a bunch of chapbooks with that poem in it, and I have been featured in articles about the Wussy Boy thing, but still... Itʼs so very fucking odd to me. For some reason, the Wussy Boy poem has been embraced by Speech and Debate students from all over the country. I donʼt know how it entered into the “canon,” but I must get two or three requests a week from Speech and Debate kids wanting to either interview me or request permission to use that piece in competition. I did a series of assemblies in a high school in Los Angeles last winter, and I was doing “Wussy Boy” in front of the fifth gathering of kids of the day, and I suddenly, in the middle of the poem, flaked on what the next line was. Well, before I could find my place, some kid in the audience shouted out the next line. I asked him how in the world he knew the line, and he said that he had performed the poem in some drama competition and had won first place. I was like, “Well, fine, get on up here and finish the poem!” And he did, he jumped up on stage, started doing his theatrical gesticulation thing, and did the rest of the poem from memory. How the fuck is one supposed to react to something like that? I mean, I felt joy and glee at writing something that this kid reacted to, and I felt honored and humbled to have something I wrote used by this kid, but it also was so odd, like some kind of movie, like, “What? How the hell did that happen?” A few days before I started this tour, I got a phone call from a Speech and Debate coach in a small college in Maryville, Missouri. The professor wanted to ask permission for one her students to use my Wussy Boy poem in a tournament. In fact, he had taken several pieces of Wussy related writing that are on my website and strung them together to make a 10-minute performance piece on the subject of Wussy Boys. I was blown away, and I agreed immediately. In fact, I even asked if she could arrange to have me come to her school and perform the poem along with others in the same vein. I mean, since I was going to be performing in St. Louis, MO, anyway, it would be a quick side trip. She was elated, and said she would try to get the permission and the funding. A week later, she had gotten her department to not only pay me $450 to perform a set of poetry and give a workshop, but had also gotten them to pay for a plane flight from the gig right before it in St. Louis and a plane flight to my next gig in Chicago. Boom, just like that. And it was such a joy to come to this little college town in north- western Missouri (population 11,000) and bust out some poetry for the kids, who, really, had probably never seen poetry performed live before. The weirdest thing, though, was meeting the kid who had put together the Wussy Boy performance. He was acting like I was some famous guy rather than just some kid barely out of journalism school trying desperately to make poetry my career. He told me about how he had searched the Internet for something new and different to perform in competition, and he somehow came upon my website with the help of his professor. I asked him to perform his piece for me, and he was like, “What?” He was totally embarassed by the idea, as if he were being asked to perform “Stairway to Heaven” on guitar as Jimmy Page sat there watching. I finally convinced him, and there, right there in front of me in his instructorʼs office, this kid delivered the words that I had written in the margins of my communications notebook more than a thousand miles away. He even had some of the same methods of delivery for the lines, learned, he said, by listening to the MP3 files on my website. So odd... Such a weird mixture of joy and honor and dread all at the same time, such a strange way to witness proof that something I have written has had an effect on someone who Iʼve never met. He even told me later that he had changed some of his ways of thinking about women since taking up this Wussy Boy thing, that he didnʼt refer to them as “chicks” anymore because he was finally learning that it was disrespectful. I couldʼve cried, I was so happy, but it was also so odd, so weird, so surreal, like some kind of movie. I mean, how fucking awesome is that, to be afforded the opportunity to do something that inpsires someone whom youʼve never met? How sobering a responsibility...

04.01.01 lit likeA FUCKINg ﬁreﬂy

so, yeah, let this be known as the night i couldnʼt get drunk. i tried, i really tried, i tried to get drunk so that i could dance. i wanted to dance so much, but i just couldnʼt get past the self-conscious me, the one who thinks i look silly dancing, so i set out to drink that portion of self into a nice, numb state wherein i could set big poppa e free, the self that can dance circles around most fools. and there was a girl who wanted to dance with me, a really cute girl, and she was all out there, you know, dancing up a storm and waiting for me, motioning for me to hurry up and join her, and i wanted to so bad, but... but i couldnʼt get drunk. i am a lightweight, i swear to god. i never drink, and usually all it takes to get me into a space safe for dancing is a few pints, a very few, and then watch out, i am a dancing machine. but, tonight, i downed what was probably five pints of beer, which, really, is way more than i could normally stomach. but i couldnʼt get drunk. i waited for the feeling to come, the one that tells me that i can dance with abandon, but it never came. i peed like a racehorse, and it never came. i drank that nasty shit boomboomboom downing pints like... like... like something you do a lot of, i donʼt know, anyway, i drank more that i normally drink in a year, and i could not get a buzz. and the girl, she finally got tired of waiting, and she left. and now, and now i am back at my friendʼs house, and oh yeah, now that the music is over and the crowds have dispersed and iʼve paid for a cab and i am safe in my friendʼs place, now that i am all alone, now the shit finally kicks in, and i am lit likeA FUCKINg firefly. fuck. i have to pee so bad. hold on.... okay, i am back. shit. what else to say... i wanted to dance so bad, but i never got my groove on. sheesh... iʼm goin g to takea hotbath.

04.02.01 45% better

I couldnʼt stop staring at the sign. “Jerryʼs Pizza,” in blue neon, flashing first “Jerryʼs” then “Pizza,” “Jerryʼs” then “Pizza.” It wasnʼt that part of the sign that caught my attention, though, it was the painted part of the sign just beneath the neon, the part that proclaimed that Jerryʼs Pizza was “home of the world famous Pound of Pepperoni Pizza.” The idea of eating a pizza with a full pound of spiced pork wasnʼt the part that caught my attention about that part of the sign, either, although I have to admit that the idea of eating that much pepperoni on a pizza is a pretty nasty idea to contemplate. No, it was the “world famous” part. How does one qualify their pizza, even if it truly is made with a full pound of pepperoni, as “world famous?” Moreover, how would one go about proving that their pizza is indeed world famous? Is there a committee that decides these things, like does one have to submit proof that what you are claiming is world famous is actually world famous? And what does that mean anyway, “world famous?” Someone like Madonna is easily called world famous, because everyone knows something about Madonna. But, Jerryʼs Pizza? Like, does that mean that I could find myself in Italy and walk up to someone on the street and ask them if they had ever heard of Jerryʼs Pizza in Chicago, would they be able to say, “Oh yeah, and theyʼve got this great Pound of Pep- peroni Pizza that is just superb?” Does “world famous” mean that there are newspaper clippings from around the world singing the praises of Jerryʼs Pizza, or does it simply mean that Jerry has had customer from other countries in his establishment, as if having a Belgian or a Paki- stani buy a slice of pizza suddenly makes the joint “world famous?” Is it against the law for a business owner to refer to their business as “world famous” if it is not, indeed, world famous, or can any person simply add those words to the name of their business, like Joeyʼs Espresso, Home of the World Famous Never-Ending Hot Pot of Coffee in Lubbock, Texas, or Melindaʼs World Famous Pancakes and Waffle Shoppe in Americus, Georgia? Can someone get in trouble for this, or be challenged to prove it? And so what if something is world famous...that doesnʼt necessarily mean itʼs any good. Adolph Hitler was world famous, and so is AIDS. And Iʼm standing there looking up at the sign, head cocked, for several minutes, mouth open, wondering... Like, what about the word “best,” as in the sign just down the block and around the corner that trumpets the fact that Java Jungle is the place where one can buy the “worldʼs best latte?” Are there elec- tions for this, I mean, do people actually get a chance to vote on this, or can anyone proclaim such a thing? And look at all the products that claim to be “45% better!” What does that mean? Better than what? And how does one quantify the betterness, like how do you really measure the betterness of something, like, exactly how much better is 45% better if you are talking about shampoo or a cookie or a slice of pizza? People just use words without thinking about them, and it saps the meaning of them. Like, if I say that I “love” Jerryʼs Pizza, what word would I then use to describe the feeling I have for my girlfriend or wife or child? Would you just say, “Well, I love them, too, just in a different way?” If thatʼs the case, shouldʼt you simply use a different word? If I use the word “awesome” to describe the feeling I get when I find out I got a good grade on a paper, then what word would I save for the first time I see the Grand Canyon or the feeling of holding my newly birthed first child? What, “truly awesome,” as if all other kinds of awesome pale in comparison to this new kind of awesome? You donʼt really need an intensifier for the word “awesome;” it is meant to describe something that makes you feel “awe,” which is, like, the feeling you get when hearing Godʼs voice or something. I donʼt know that a simple slice of pizza, no matter how fucking good it is or how much pepperoni you stack on it, could be described as capable of delivering “awe” to someone, and yet... Weʼve robbed the words in this language of their inherant power, and so we have to put needless intensifiers next to them to drive home the meaning. How many times have you heard someone describe something as “completely destroyed?” I mean, destroyed is destroyed, you canʼt really get much more destroyed than that, and even if you needed to, you could always use “obliterated” or “vaporized,” but the thereʼd always be someone there to up the ante by saying something was “completely, totally, really, really obliterated, like, from the face of the earth and stuff.” You would never describe someone as “kinda dead” or say you “sorta totalled the car a little bit.” It makes me a little sad. In my press kit, I have clips from newspapers not only in America, but also in Canada, England, and Australia, plus I was in a Voice of America video segment that was aired across Eastern Europe and Asia. Does that mean I can put the words “World Famous” across the cover of my next collection of poetry? And what about the word “best?” Since there doesnʼt seem to be anyway to qualify the word “best” or any authority monitoring the use of such a word, could I, then, as a “world famous” poet proclaim that my collection of poetry contains “the best performance poetry in the world?” Could I push it further and say that I am known as the “worldʼs funniest poet?” How could anyone prove that I wasnʼt? And even if someone were to come along that was generally acknowledged to be funnier that me, could I still proclaim myself as “one of the funniest poets in the world,” or “one of the most passionate performers in the world?” I think maybe I will demand to be introduced not simply as “Big Poppa E,” but, from now on, I will be referred to as “The Amazing Big Poppa E, the Worldʼs Funniest, Most Passionate, and Very Very Best Performance Poet the World Has Ever Known, and I Really, Really Mean It (I Swear To God).” Could you prove it wasnʼt true? And if you could, who would you complain to? Anyway, after standing there looking at the sign blink “Jerryʼs” then “Pizza” then “Jerryʼs” then “Pizza” for at least 15 minutes, I decided the only thing to do would be to step into Jerryʼs Pizza and buy a slice of their world famous Pound of Pepperoni Pizza. And I have no way of knowing if that slice of pizza was the best slice of pizze in the world or even the best known and most famous slice of pizza in the world, but I can tell you that it was a pretty fucking good slice of pizza. It made me feel good that Jerryʼs was at least in the running for the best slice of pizza, and now that I said so on the Internet, maybe they are one step closer to being truly world famous.

04.20.01 strawberry ﬁelds forever

my tour is over, finally, after two and a half months. my last paid gig was in ann arbor, michigan, at the big teen national poetry slam, three days of amazing and talented and inspiring folks from all over the country who just so happen to be under the age of 20. amazing. exhausting. i am spent. i havenʼt written in my journal for about two weeks because i have just been feeling like shit, down, out, depressed, weak, lame, spent... i wanna go home, but i donʼt wuite know where that home is... right now, i am in chico, my former college town, hanging out with alyssa and my cats. alyssa is great... sheʼs taken care of aretha and thelonious for the entire time i was on this tour, plus my truck. alyssa and i have decided that itʼs kinda silly to be dating each other at this point in time, you know, with me in seattle and her in chico, with me travelling all the time and her still in college. itʼs not like we were really dating, you know, boyfriend and girlfriend, so weʼre not really breaking up, but we do agree that itʼs time to move on. weʼll be friends, keep in contact, and visit when we can. i kinda think one of the reasons iʼve had such a hard time making things work for me in seattle is that i was all to willing to say “fuck it” and drive down to see alyssa in chico, or just really saying “fuck it” and going on another tour. now, maybe iʼll stick to seattle and start meeting some people and doing things here. maybe... still, it makes me a little sad, and itʼs raining in chico, raining hard. i am exhausted. mentally, morally, socially, creatively. i need to take a mental health month and just relax and get my shit together. i feel so thinly spread, like cellophane, you can see right through me... iʼve let my hair grow out a bit, as well as the nails, and iʼm a little shaggy feeling, a little poofy. i so wanted long hair for the longest time, but it just was not to be, but i kinda feel like being shaggy for a while, kinda like when lennon got all hairy and bushy toward the end of the beatles. the beatles... iʼve been listening to them constantly, reliving all the joy their music has given me since i was 19. you know, i was 19 before i tasted alcohol, and i was 19 before i had ever heard “strawberry fields forever.” i remember it precisely because that song scared the shit out of me. i was still superstitious back then about ancient long-bearded boogie men floating in the sky and casting judgements our way for the slightest things, and i thought for sure that the beatles were from the devil, it was so good it had to have been the devilʼs music, and in youth group when i was 15 we used to play songs backwards to hear the devil talk and weʼd nod and hmmm and cluck our tongues in unison as we condemned it, but then my hoodlum friends and i made a point to go out and purchase every song we studied and every album looking for more “backwards masking.” i remember that i earned a swiss army knife for memorizing all the books of the old testament in order, something that i can still do today. (my hoodlum youth group friends and i were always getting in trouble at youth group camping trips for doing silly ass things like putting firecrackers in the fire and playing poker and smoking in our tents and doing things to scare the littler kids, acting like monsters in the night and knocking into their tents. i can still hear the voice of the youth group leader screaming into the night: “eirik and mike and dave! i know thatʼs you! get back in your tent NOW!”) anyway, when i first heard “strawberry fields,” i was falling asleep in my bunk in a dorm-style barracks room on some navy base in mil- lington, tennessee, and i was in that state where youʼre not really quire asleep but youʼre not really quite awake, that place where thoughts of kicking a soccer ball can actually make your foot leap out on its own and kick the side of the wall next to your bed, yeah, there i was in that most open to suggestion state and iʼm listening to the radio and here comes “strawberry fields forever,” and itʼs a nice pleasant song, a little weird, but cool, and then it fades out and iʼm thinking, “well, for devil music, that wasnʼt all that bad,” but then the song fades back in and gets all weird and that flute is tootling over this weird backwards beat, then at the end, you can hear somebodyʼs voice whisper “i buried paul.” holy shit, i sprang from my bunk as if shocked, i turned off the radio and stared at it like it should be smoking, like tongues of evil should be lapping at its maw or something. i thought for sure god was looking down at me and shaking his head in disapointment, like he was opening a huge book wiht countless names and putting check marks next to my name and maybe circling it and underlining it so he wouldnʼt forget me. and then the next week, i went out and bought three beatles albums on vinyl: the white album; abbey road; and magical mystery tour. yeah, talk about buying devilʼs music... the one-two punch of “i am the walrus” and “revolution #9” made me convinced that this was indeed a product of some pact with satan, but for some reason that made it oddly irresistable. iʼve been listening to the beatles a lot lately and letting my hair get a little bushy and my nails get a bit pointy. i am ready to come home. i am SO ready to come back home to seattle, although i feel like itʼs not quite my home just yet. i know thatʼs my bad, you know, i am not blaming anyone but myself for that, but still, it will be a bit odd. i have a job waiting for me because the last temp job that i had is taking me back, plus i have a bus route (#26), a building in which to work, a poetry slam scene in which to perform, a venue in which to host with a kick ass co-host, a studio apartment... i have all the elements of “home,” it seems, now allʼs i have to do is put them all together and get quiet and satisfied and content. stop moving about so much. make a home. build a life. decorate. write. a lot.

04.24.01 hypnophobia — the fear of sleep

iʼve been thinking about sleep, something that doensʼt come easy for me... seems like an odd thing to fear, doesnʼt it, to fear the act of falling asleep? sometimes thereʼs nothing better than collapsing in your soft, warm bed at the end of the day, just burying your head in the flannel comfort of your down pillow, grabbing a kitty for warmth, and fading off to sleep. and yet, sometimes, lots of times, falling asleep is one of the most frightening things i experience, and i experience it on a daily basis, so, yeah, hypnophobia is some fucked up shit. i suppose itʼs directly related to an intense fear of death, which, really, can stop me in my tracks any time of the day or night — oh jesus, i am going to die someday and thereʼs nothing i can do about it, oh jesus, oh jesus — and i have actually gotten faint at the thought of it, had to pull over to the side of the road and put my head between my legs until the gathering blackness at the corner of my eyes has receded, until the dizziness and intense instinct to run screaming into traffic has passed. yeah, fear of death has a lot to do with it, i imagine, as if the act of losing conscienceness is simply a daily exercise in what itʼs like to die. (even peter murphy called sleep “a close cousin to death.”) it first hit me in the darkest of dark hours during my sophomore year in high school, when i had no friends and my dad was a raging asshole and i had been kicked down to dumb-level english for getting bad grades in college prep english (the shame!). i had a dream that my heart stopped, and in the dream i ran home crying and beating on my chest trying to kick-start my heart. in the end, i collapsed on the floor of the kitchen and felt faint and blacked out, and BOOM, suddenly, i am awake, SNAP, like that, breathing hard and sweaty with fear. two weeks or so later, i was in the grips of a mighty bad case of pneumonia, and i was sweaty with a 104-degree tempeature, and i was lying there in bed listening to my wrist heartbeat through the tip of my fingers, just this pleasing little engine purr thump thump thump thump...... then it stopped. i FELT my heart stop, right there, and i sprang from the bed trying desperately to find a heartbeat, and there was none, nothing, my heart had stopped, just like in the dream, and i totally freaked out and ran down the hallway toward the kitchen where my father was, stumbled and held to the wall with one hand and hit my chest with the other to restart my heart, yelling in a rasp, “dad! my heart stopped! help me, my heart stopped!” my dad was on the phone at the time, and here i come running into the kitchen pale as a ghost in my sweat-drenched tighty whitey underwears, screaming that my heart had stopped. as he stood there and laughed at me (LAUGHED!), i fell to my knees and was about to pass out from hyper-ventilation, my breathing trip-hammer fast and shallow, hands quaking, and my dad, heʼs standing there laughing at me and telling me to calm down, obviously my heart hadnʼt stopped, just calm down and breath before i pass out and shit all over myself. he pushed me to the ground and told me to breath, all the while talking to someone on the phone and laughing at his hallucinating son with a 104-degree pnemonia-induced fever. i just laid there twitching and grabbing at my chest, and the pain, god, it was horrible, like this squeezing tightness, this punch in the chest. of course, i didnʼt have a heart attack, it was just the fever making me freak out, but ever since then — and this was when i was 15, which was... jesus... nearly 20 years ago — ever since then i have had this painful fear of sleeping, as if relaxing enough to sleep would make my heart stop. for weeks after my fever dream heart attack, i couldnʼt go to sleep without a struggle. i would twitch and flick my foot, roll and twist in the covers, leap out of bed light-headed and sure that my heart was stopping because i had stopped moving long enough for it to wind down. i would get up and pace around the living room couch, go outside and pace in circles around the backyard... my dad was an asshole and said that i was just trying to get attention — he even accused me of being on drugs — but my mom was worried by my constant twitching and the blackened raccoon eyes i was cultivating. she eventually took me to a psychologist and, with tears in her eyes, begged him to figure out what was wrong with me. i remember that he found that i was a fairly normal kid, but said that i was a “40-year-old trapped in a 15-year-oldʼs body.” he made a phone call and got me taken out of dumb-head english and put me into gifted english, which was one step above college prep, then told my dad that a lot of my problems stemmed from my relationship with him. my father was pissed, and never took me back to the psychologist. my problems sleeping have continued ever since, ebbing and flowing depending on the stress in my life. i seem to have a much easier time sleeping if iʼm in bed with someone, and i have chosen to extend failing relationships before simply so that i wouldnʼt have to sleep alone. when iʼm all by myself, falling asleep sucks. i hate it, the feeling of losing conscienceness, of feeling awareness bleed off like a severed vein. sometimes i can control it and just get down to the business of falling asleep, but other times i have to wait, wait until i get so tired that i basically lose the fight and finally fall asleep. i imagine death will be like that, this struggle against the gathering darkness, then a final deep breath where you say “fuck it” and you finally let it take you because you are too tired to fight it anymore. (the only difference between being dead and being asleep is waking up... only then do you know whether or not you have been sleeping instead of dead, only then do you realize that you have had dreams, only then do you know you have made it through another night. death is like sleeping without ever waking up to realize it.) i still twitch, although i try to control it. i still get freaked out about my heartbeat, and canʼt listen to it for more than a few seconds without getting scared and light-headed. sometimes, i wake up violently in the middle of the night, leaping out of bed and grabbing at my chest and wheezing for breath, wild-eyed and sure that i have been snapped out of sleep by a heart attack. this has happened many times while i was sleeping next to someone, and it was always scared the fuck out of them... and me... itʼs perfectly horrible when it happens when iʼm alone. i never know if i will survive it... i donʼt know if itʼs some kind of sleep apnea, where i stop breathing during sleep and my body has to jolt itself awake in order to start breathing again, or if itʼs intensely bad dreams that i can never remember, or what... all i know is that is sucks and it happens a couple times a month, especially if i sleep alone. itʼs easier with the kitties... sometimes... try to look up the word “hypnophobia” or the phrase “fear of sleep” on the internet, and you can never find anything other than the definition. no support groups, no information, nothing. it makes me feel like iʼm the only one in the whole world who deals with it. yeah, hypnophobia sucks. i am dreadfully afraid of going to the dentist to get my teeth fixed, not for the pain, no, i fear the dentist because i donʼt ever want to be knocked out with sleeping gas. i fear the not waking up part.

inspirations...

the first poet i ever got really charged about was a poet i had never heard of, and who most people have still never heard of, which, really, i think is a crime. his name was etheridge knight, and he first gained recognition in the late ʼ60s while writing in prison. i believe he was championed by gwendolyn brooks, and she helped him put together a collection of works from prison. once he was released, he became part of the black arts movement in the early ʼ70s, and i believed he was married to sonya sanchez at one time. knight was a life-long addict, heroin i think, and he died an addictʼs death in ʼ91, i think. he was big on studying “the dozens” and “signifying,” and was putting together a space for their study at the time of his death, i think. itʼs hard to find any bio info on him at all, so most of what i know is pieced together. anyway, the first poem i ever read from knight was something like “when hard rock got released from the hospital for the criminally insane.” damn... his use of language and rhythm and slang was so completely different from the dead white rich guys we were forced to read in school. i mean, right in the middle of “to his coy mistress” and “the flea” and “ode to a grecian urn,” and suddenly, BOOM, youʼve got this man delivering something so different... it lit me up, especially his use of slang and rhythm, like this stumbling jazz cat in a back alley mumbling beauty. and his haiku! damn, that man could write some haiku:

makinʼ jazz swing in seventeen syllables ainʼt no square poetʼs job.

awww yeah. i highly recommend his collection of work called “the essential etheridge knight,” published by the univerisy of pittsburg press, i believe. itʼs deﬁnitely a special order type of thing. one more note... the ﬁrst time i heard dj renegade read, he was biting etheridge knight hard in more than one of his pieces, and when i called him on it, his eyes lit up with surprise, and we ended up talking animatedly about knight for a half hour.

biting heads off bats and inputting data

iʼm back in my cubicle in the building downtown, back off tour for two days and already i am itchy with this desire to vomit. i hate jobs. jobs suck. when iʼm on tour, all i can think about is coming home. now that i am home, i am already thinking about my next tour in the fall. sheesh... i wonder if ozzy osbourne feels like this.

04.26.01 tahiti 80 rocks

i have been listening to this wussy pop band from france all morning called tahiti 80, this shimmering blend of harmonies, melodies, and late ʼ60s kinks/beatles vibe. i saw them play live at south by southwest this year in austin, texas, and they just thrilled me. live they were great, but they are even better on cd, just bubbly and bright and mellow and happy, and the accent is so cute. for instance, one of their best songs is called “heartbeat,” and it contains the line “listen to my hearbeat,” but with their cute accents, it come out sounding like “leesson to my heart-bett.” i mean, come on, how can you reeseest that? my mood today has been in juxtaposition to the music iʼve been listening to. jesus, i have been pissed off and frustrated all day long, just brooding and angry, stomping rather than walking, as if i want to pound my footprint into the earth in revenge for my anger, leaving big black oily streaks on the walls as i pass, black boiling clouds and bitterness... and the worse thing about it, i suppose, is the realization and knowledge that it is all my decision to get angry and frustrated, so i am intrinsically tied into this helplessly jagged mood. fuck. tahiti 80, though, is brilliant.

04.27.01 “memento” kicked my ass.

just saw a great indie movie last night called “memento.” wow, i have not had my ass kicked by a movie like this in a long while, nor have i uttered aloud the phrase “this movie kicks so much ass” during the viewing of said movie in a long, long time, not since... well, maybe since “rushmore.” great flick. after the movie, i went to the bathroom and was in the stall when i heard the two people who had been sitting behind me talking about the ending, which, wow, just unfurled during the course of the movie and left you with that feeling like at the end of “the usual suspects,” where you go, “holy shit, did you see? does that mean? wait... does...” anyway, they were talking about their interpretation of the ending, which i was contemplating at that very momento, and i raised my voice from the toilet stall, “but wait, if he [deleted for your enjoyment of the film], then that would mean [deleted], and if that was the case, then [deleted].” and they stopped talking, paused, and laughed uproariously at this disembodied voice coming from one of the toilet stalls and adding to their comments about the movie. we ended up talking for five minutes that way, the two of them standing by the sinks and me in the stall, then continuing the conversation in the lobby. “memento” is that kind of movie. it kicks ass and i can wait to see it again with a friend who haas never seen it and a friend who has, so that we can all compare notes in the end. challenging film-making like this takes talent and courage, and i am so glad it exists in this day and age.

05.02.01 i just ﬂew in from colorado, and boy are my arms tired...

all it took was a phone call. “blair, dude, this is eirik. say, why donʼt we put on a show at your college?” two months later, and there i was, in colorado college in colorado springs, staring into a sweaty-thick audience of 500 stuffed shoulder to shoulder in a little dining hall on the campus of my friend blairʼs college. blair did a great job of organizing and promoting the show, and he and i were so amazed that it all came together, all these people turned on by poetry — not $200 million special effects budgets, not 40,000 watts of sound, not anyone famous — and the place was packed on a school night, just packed with people unafraid to shout their barbaric yawp across the rooftops of their worlds. i sold 100 books, sold them all, all the books i had printed at kinkoʼs the night before, and still there were more people who wanted to buy books. i paid my rent in that one shot, boom, just by selling books. wow. i had to fly in, though, and i swear to god i hated it, hated every moment of the flying. the turbulance coming into colorado springs was phenomenal, just wondrous in its intensity, i got trapped in the toilet when it hit, and i was just holding on for dear life, knuckles white with the effort, and i whispered to myself, “itʼs okay, itʼll be okay, everything will be okay, lord jesus god mother mary buddha krishna l.ron hubbard, please, let everything be okay...” the flight attendants kept banging on the door to the toilet asking me if i was okay, and i kept quiet, couldnʼt do anything but breath and hold on tight, my pants down around my ankles and my fingers tight around the “oh shit bar” on one side and the sink on the other. for more on my fear of flying, surf immediately to the following link, for which you do not need the “www:” orion.csuchico.edu/Pages/vol41issue2/opinion/1.biblebelt.html peace out.

05.07.01 games i play to keep my mind occupied

1] the “someone is following me” game this is when i am driving down the street and i look in the rearview mirror and notice that someone driving behind is setting off my spidey sense, meaning that suddenly i think, “say, is that person following me?” i canʼt really think of any reason why someone would follow me, but still, the idea that someone COULD be following me is enough to set me off into this game. iʼll change lanes and see if the person “following” me does the same. if they do, then maybe i will change lanes very quickly and slow down so that they pass me. if they donʼt pass me, then i will head off into a residential street. this usually throws them off my tail (which probably means that it leaves the hapless person behind me scratching their head and wondering what the fuck is the problem with the person in front of them.) one time, though, this game revealed a person who was actually following me. i had just pulled out of my work for a break (i was working at a record store at the time), and i noticed this tricked out el camino slide in behind me. suddenly my spidey sense was tingling and the game was on, so i crossed the street and went into another parking lot. the el camino followed. i went through the entire parking lot, then crossed another street and went into another parking lot. the el camino followed. by this time, i am getting a little creeped out becuase the guy in the el camino is not playing the game right. heʼs supposed to peel off and prove to me that he is not following me, but instead he is actually tail- ing me. i stop in the middle of the parking lot, and the el camino stops. some guy who iʼve never seen in my life gets out and walks over to my truck. the guy is a typical post-high school bakersfield roughneck, complete with tight black acid-washed jeans, cowboy boots, a faded motley crue t-shirt, and a fabulous mullet with wind-swept wings like farrah from the ʼ70s and a little braided tail in the back tied with a black rubber band. everyone who had ever beaten my ass in high school looked exactly like this guy. i keep one foot on the gas and the other on the clutch ready to pop that sucker and peel out in case something weird happens. i roll down my window and say, “whatʼs up, man? whyʼre you following me?” he leans over and puts his elbows on my window, then says, “you know robyn?” i search my head... nope, no robynʼs in there. i tell him, “dude, i donʼt know anyone named robyn.” he is unconvinced. he screams, “well, robyn is my girlfriend, you motherfucker, and youʼd better stay the fuck away from her.” then, this mullet guy iʼve never met leaps through my window and starts beating his fist against the side of my head. thatʼs it: i pop the clutch and within seconds i am speeding through the parking lot at 45 mph with this guy trying to throttle me through the window, his legs dangling out the window. he finally lets go and falls to the dirty asphault; heʼs a tumbling bundle of torn elbows and scuffed knees in my rearview mirror. i am freaked at this point and high-tail it out of there, but before i know it, thereʼs the el camino with mullet guy at the wheel looming large in my rearview, and heʼs making gun motions at his head — BANG! BANG! BANG! — and pointing at me and honking his horn and vigorously flipping me the bird. and i have no idea who he is or who this robyn chick is or why this dolt thinks i have anything at all to do with her, so i just head straight for the police department. i figure if this knucklehead wants to follow me, he can follow me to the po-po. and he follows me all the way to the parking area of the police department in downtown bakersfield, but then finally peels off when he realizes — duh — that iʼve taken him to the police department. i stayed in my car and shook for about 15 minutes, then drove back through side streets and alleys to my work. i never saw him again, nor did i ever figure out who he was or who this robyn was. since then, the “is that car following game” has taken on a different feel... like, the thought at the back of my head is that somebody actually COULD be following me... 2] the “what if the nazis came?” game this is such a dumb game, but i still find that i play it in my head every few months. it goes something like this: okay, suddenly, nazis storm the city in which i live and they take over, and everyone is snatched up from their homes and places of business and taken to some huge pen, like a place where herds of cattle are stored and sorted through. the men and women are separated, and we are all put into these enormous lines with tables at the head and angry nazi guards barking orders at people and demanding paperwork. once you get up to the head of the line, you are asked if you are with anyone, meaning, like, are you emotionally attached to anyone. you can only pick one person. that personʼs name is noted, then you are lead away to some sort of detention center. hereʼs the thing: you have to pick someone who also picks you, otherwise you are shot in the head and buried in a mass grave at the edge of town. if you happen to be in a relationship of merit, then the choice is easy. you, of course, pick your partner, and then you are pretty much assured that your partner will pick you, too, then you both are reunited and set free. the problem comes when you are not in a relationship, or maybe when you are only kinda sorta seeing someone (or maybe two some- oneʼs), and then you have no idea if they are going to pick you or not. you could end up picking someone who you just started seeing, but then they might end up picking their most recent ex-boyfriend who they still love. or, you could decide to pick your most recent ex, only they end up picking their new boyfriend instead of you. in either case, you get shot in the head and die. if you donʼt have anyone to pick when the nazis come, you could always try for the girl in the office who you kinda have a crush on in hopes that she will have a crush on you, too, or maybe you could pick a friend of yours who has always had a crush on you but who you have never really been interested in, you know, just as a means of picking someone who would definitely pick you just so you could keep from being shot in the head. but there are no guarantees. and what if your girlfriend or wife or lover ends up picking someone else besides you? like, you get snatched up by the relationship nazis and they demand to know who your partner is, and you tell them with confidence the name of your significant other, yet when it comes down to the shot in the head part, they grab you up and lead you away because you didnʼt get picked... and they wonʼt tell you who your partner picked, and you are yelling at them, “but wait! weʼre together! of course she would pick me! wait! wait! who...?” so yeah, thatʼs the game. if iʼm in a solid relationship, i sometimes tell myself, “if the nazis came right now, i would pick her and she would pick me, and everything would be alright.” but, in the times when i am only in a casual relationship (or maybe a couple of casual relationships), or in the times when i am not involved at all, then it becomes a real task: who would i pick if the nazis came? would she pick me? would we slowly smile and hug each other with gentle surprise when we found out we had picked each other, or would i get hauled away by an eager nazi guard with a luger pressed to my forehead? i imagine this game is rooted in that old fear, the one that tells you that you are nothing unless you are loved, or at least less of a person. i have too often based my personal self-esteem on whether or not someone was around to appreciate me. if i was all alone by myself and no one knew me or liked me or loved me, would i still exist? i think if the nazis came right now, i would probably choose alyssa. (but would she choose me?) and what about that other person i have a crush on who has admitted that she has a crush on me, too? certainly, she wouldnʼt pick me if the nazis came... or would she? would i be missing out on a wonderful thing by not picking her, or would i doom myself to a shot in the head if i did? like, what if i decided to take a chance and picked her, but she didnʼt pick me, and alyssa ended up picking me, so all i had to do to survive was pick alyssa, but then i fucked it all up and now we both have to get shot in the head? i wonder how many people in this world play variations of the same game... hmm... 3] the “snipers watching the crosswalk” game iʼve played this game since i was little, and i still to this day play it on a daily basis, especially when i walk around the downtown seattle area. hereʼs how it works: i am standing at the corner waiting for the light to tell me that i can walk to the other side, and when the light changes from DONʼT WALK to WALK, and as i step off the curb and into the street, i picture these platoons of snipers stationed on the rooftops overhead cocking their rifles and machine guns in a flurry of clacking metal and aiming their barrels at the heads of the pedestrians walking across the street. as long as no one steps over the white line of the crosswalk, then no one gets hurt. but the moment someoneʼs foot strays from the path laid out before them, then a buzzing storm of lead rips that person to bloody ribbons of muscle and bone like a swarm of angry flesh-eating hornets. i often find myself fucking with the snipers. iʼll step off the curb into the street and head right for the white line of the crosswalk. iʼll imagine the crackling call going out on a hundred walkie-talkies — “watch that guy! heʼs going over the line!” — and iʼll pretend to hear the clatter of rifle bolts sliding into place as a hundred squinty eyes draw a bead on my forehead, hair-trigger fingers bent and ready to flex and send bullets flying through the air over the tops of taxicabs and delivery trucks and straight into my melon head. but i just tightrope my way along the crosswalk line, making sure to never quite make that step-too-far, and when i make it to the curb on the other side, i imagine the walkie-talkies transmitting, “okay, false alarm, stand down until the next signal.” i picture a hundred hidden soldiers lifting their eyes from their long range site and glaring down on me, clucking their tongues and sneering to themselves that iʼd better not try that shit next time. so odd how many of my games can end up with me shot in the head if something goes wrong. when i sit down in darkened movie theatres, i am always worried about the person sitting behind me, always wondering if theyʼve got a pistol in their pocket with my name on it, like theyʼll pull it out when iʼm unawares in the middle of the movie and splatter my brains all over the person sitting in front of me. i wouldnʼt even know it, either, i would just be sitting there enjoying the movie, then suddenly... i get worried walking downtown, too, wondering if some piece of concrete or some workmanʼs hammer or screwdriver will fall 25 stories and drill a bloody tunnel through my head. i wouldnʼt even know it was coming, i would just be walking, humming to myself or whistling, thinking of all the things i want to do with my life, when all of a sudden... 4] the “getting all twisted up in the shower” game” i hardly ever play this one anymore. if you stand in the shower facing the faucet, that is considered 0-degrees. if you should make a half-turn to your right, then you are at 90-degrees, but then you return to 0-degrees when you face back at the shower head. the trouble comes if you turn 180-degrees to get the soap or something, then continue to turn in the same direction to reach the shower head again. you might think you are have returned to 0-degrees, but actually you are at 360-degrees, in which case, you are twisted up and you need to turn all the way back around to get back to 0-degrees. as long as you keep track of where you are, you can always un- tangle yourself, but if you forget and suddenly realize that you have not been paying attention, then you get hopelessly twisted and have no way to make thing right again. 5] the “rolling stone interview” game iʼve been playing this for years and years, and itʼs pretty self-ex- planatory. i am sitting at a table across from a reporter from “rolling stone” magazine, and the person is interviewing me about my life. sometimes they ask questions about my career and where itʼs going and where itʼs been, and i go on at length, giving them juicy quotes and tasty anecdotes. sometimes they ask me questions about my personal life, and i get all offended and tell them itʼs none of their business, that just because i make my living in the public eye doesnʼt mean they can pry into my personal life, jesus, havenʼt i given enough already? i sometime imagine myself in “people magazine,” walking up the red carpet to the emmys or tonys or oscars with hope davis on my arm, and i am smiling that difficult smile that says i donʼt really like this sort of thing, but i know itʼs part of the job.

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Davis,+Hope

weʼll stay for a while, maybe catch a party or three, then go home early since we donʼt really like this sort of thing, this hollywood thing. if people only knew how boring it is, they wouldnʼt lust after it, weʼd tell ourselves. i can play this game for hours on a solo roadtrip, just imagining all the questions the “rolling stone” reporter would ask and how i would cagily answer them: “well, tori and i are just really close friends. i donʼt want to say anymore than that.” “yeah, touring is hell sometimes, but i love it and hate it at the same time. when iʼm on tour, i yearn for home and a sense of permanence, but when the tour ends, i canʼt wait for the next one. ozzy says the same thing.” “no, gwyneth and i are no longer seeing each other. sheʼs a great gal, you know, and weʼll remain friends, iʼm sure.” “no, iʼm not going to tell you how much money i make in a year. does it really matter? i mean, why do so many people obsess over that? i am comfortable, but i work really hard for it. thatʼs no different than anyone else, i imagine.” i love this game. maybe thatʼs a little sad...

05.08.01 Fake Rolling Stone Interview with Big Poppa E

“Wussy Boy Poet Rock Star” by Jancee Dunn Rolling Stone, Issue 870 (May 20, 2001)

***

“Big Poppa E! Big Poppa E! Big Poppa!” The Colorado College dining hall is packed tightly with under- classmen, a small ocean of leather sandals and patchoulli, dreadlocks and ponytails, spaghetti straps and backpacks and tanlines and smiles. The room legally seats 350, but all the folding chairs were filled 20 minutes before showtime, and so students line the walls, using window ledges for seats, and still more sit cross-legged in the aisles, in the space in front of the stage — on the stage itself — and the overflow of latecomers spills into the hallway beyond the entry doors, easily another 150 who couldnʼt get a seat. “Big Poppa E! Big Poppa E! Big Poppa E!” The lights dim, and the crowd roars in unison as the DJ spins down his drum and bass. The spotlight hits a small wooden stage empty save for a microphone in a stand. A small man leaps onto the stage, a shave- headed manboy in a black T-shirt, long skater shorts, and steel-toed boots, and he wraps the mic cord around his hand as he waits for the applause to die down. And then, with a quick intake of breath, he launches into what will be an hour and a half of what he calls performance poetry — cut with lethal doses of stand-up comedy and dramatic monologue — that has Big Poppa E delivering spoken word with the exuberance of a Baptist preacher high on revival, an hour and a half hoarse with laughter, rage, indignation, pregnant silences, and near-deafening applause that fills the small dining hall with more sound than it has probably witnessed in the 75 years since it was first built as a church. Five hundred students or more in this dining hall to see poetry, 500 students from a small liberal arts college of only 2,000 to see... poetry. Yes, poetry — not $200 million dollar special effects movies or 50,000 watts of sound, not even someone famous — just poetry, a short bald kid with a notebook and a microphone before an audience that eats from the palm of his hand like a herd of hungry feral cats. Poetry? As his set winds to an end, Big Poppa E sits at the edge of the stage, slick balls of sweat rolling down his brow and coloring the armpits and back of his T-shirt, and he smilingly chats with the head of a long line of students waiting to buy his collection of poetry. The 100 copies of his “Wussy Boy Manifesto” he photocopied at Kinkoʼs just before the show are all gone in less than fifteen minutes. Poetry? The students file out, and a young woman in an Amercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt slides up to a gaggle of friends and says, “I canʼt believe you dragged me to a poetry reading, but Jesus Christ that shit rocked my world!” Poetry? Rocking the world of a girl in Ambercrombie & Fitch?

*** The Capitol Hill Cafe is typical of this part of Seattle, a pseudo- hipster clutter of record stores and book stores and vintage clothing stores crawling with gutter punks and post-collegiates who look fright- fully tired due to their constant pursuit of ever-elusive “cool,” kids in expensive thrift store chic shuffling sweetly up to passing tourists and asking for change. All the dreadlocks smell like hair conditioner. A small, shave-headed manboy stalks slowly into the café, backpack in tow, headphones ablaze with trip-hop ala Goldfrappe and Portishead, and he sits slowly in front of me and extends his hand in greeting. He has a very soft touch, and his voice is almost too low to hear above the muddle of the crowded café. On stage, Big Poppa E looks at least 6-foot tall, easily... well, maybe 5ʼ9”... or, well... just much taller than the 5ʼ5” person sitting there, itʼs almost as if he had shrunk. He fiddles with napkins and silverware as he talks, rarely making eye contact, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes give away his years on the road while his clothing and manner make him a seamless fit with the University of Washington students milling around him. This is Big Poppa E in his off time, when heʼs away from stages and torn pages from his notebook, when heʼs just R. Eirik Ott. Itʼs hard to believe that this quiet insecure person at the little round café table is at the head of a revolution in spoken word and performance poetry that is kicking life back into the stiff world of verse left to gentrify after the Beats were done with it. Behold – Poet as rock star. THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #1 The debut issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles is completely stuffed with personal stories and essays from the journals and e-mails of Wuss Commando Big Poppa E. Rather than offer up the definitive definition of “Wussy Boy,” this issue offers the introspections of a certified Wuss as he trains his eye on life in America at the beginning of the new Millenium. BPE touches on chain store madness, the love of warm kitties, the bliss of the first kiss of a crush gone wild, poetry slamming for fun and profit, memories of yearning for “Sound- garden hair,” and a wealth of random observation that build into a pleasing whole. A must for all fans of Wussy Boys!

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #5 The roadtrip shenanigans continue as Issue #5 presents Part Two of the Couches Across America Tour Diaries. Follow BPE from the Taos Poetry Circus in New Mexico all the way across country to Washington, D.C. In between are adventures galore, steeped in poetry and a wide-eyed exuberance for life. Read all about the infamous Los Angeles Times article on the wide-spread phenem that the Wussy Boy “movement” has become, and see how odd it is to find oneself in the pages of newspapers and magazines all over the world because of one little poem. Very odd and surreal, and it even features Devo, and really, what more can you ask for? Well, for one you can ask for still more Poloroids from the road, which this one has in spades, plus you can read about the infamous “Tropicana Orange Juice Bottle Debacle.” Also in this issue: Wussy Boy music reviews; letters to the editor. THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #6 This is the beginning of the Seattle journals spread over Issues #6-#9, the backlog of a little over over eight months of writing. This issues begins with my summer 2000 tour ending and me relocating to Seattle to help out with the organization of the 2001 National Poetry Slam scheduled for Seattle in August of 2001. It features tales of temp job hell, living in the back of my pickup truck on Capitol Hill and couch-surfing for weeks at a time, then finally bailing the Pacific Northwest altogether to go on a Southwest tour with three poet friends of mine. The journal kept by one of the members of the “EI-EI-Oh The Humanity Tour” make up most of this issue, and they capture all the thrills, disapointments, adventures and heartbreak of being a performance poet on the endless highway.

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #7 The second part of the Seattle journals, this issue focuses on trying to adjust to the lackluster poetry scene in Seattle and my dip into temp job hell, moving from the back of my pickup and into my own apartment in Wallingford right across the street from Gas Works park, and getting so frustrated again with the poetry slam and the lack of organization of the National Poetry Slam that I hit the roadtrip highway again. I dubbed this second national solo tour Couches Across America II, Electric Boogaloo and hit gigs all the way down to Baton Rouge, LA, up to Ann Arbor, MI, and back over to Seattle again. Along the way, I watched a hell of a lot of DVDs.

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #8 The third installment of the Seattle journals shares step-by-step rules for dancing like a Wussy Boy, ﬁve weird mind games I play to keep myself occupied, and an extended autobiography of my life up to this point. By this time, my temp job is really getting me down, so I retreat into storytelling and reminiscing rather than talking about how much I hate everything in Seattle. Oh, and I get a roommate in the form of poet Morris Stegosaurus, a guy who sleeps on my ﬂoor and is a total slob. Still the company helps get through the dull times in Seattle, and our DVD viewing habits get way out of control. There are dead people and lots of technology being purchased thanks to the $15 an hour Iʼm making temping.

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #9 And finally, the big wrap-up of the Seattle journals.The Nationals finally come and go, freeing me to leave Seattle finally and tell the whole crap poetry scene there to kiss my ass. But before I go, I hit the Bumbershoot festival, have my best poetry friend flown out to New York City to film a special for HBO (while I get cold denied, the fuckers), raid my motherʼs shoebox full of childhood photos, and talk in long loving terms about my favorite singer in the whole wide world, Jane Siberry.

NOW THAT YOU’VE READ THIS ISSUE, AIN’T YOU JUST DYING TO READ MORE?

Float me an e-mail ﬁrst: [email protected]. BLURBS

Nominated to the The Utne Reader “Best of the Alternative Press Awards 2000” for The Wussy Boy Chronicles.

“R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” Doug Holland, Editor A Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” The New York Times

“Eirik Ott is the leader of the new Wussy Boy movement ... spreading not just through the esoteric realm of slam poets, but edging across the globe.” The Los Angeles Times

“Eirik Ott is a guy who has turned one of his artistic personas, Wussy Boy, into an icon for effeminate males.” Ms. Magazine

“Championed by a hip-hop poet and catching ﬁre across North America, a new male ideal has risen up and is demanding respect: Wussy Boy.” The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

“Inspiring men from across the country.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“A spoken word maestro.” The San Jose Mercury News

“Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the slam.” Austin Chronicle (TX)

“A hell of a performer, running on boundless energy and near-perfect comic timing.” OC Weekly (Orange Country, CA)

“One of the leaders in the hottest thing to hit poetry since Beat poet Allen Ginsbergʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” The Daily Oklahoman (OKC, OK)

Issue #8 Dear Wussy Boy • Rules For Crushes • How to Dance Like a Wussy Boy • Eirikʼs Autobio Boy • Eirikʼs Boy • Rules For Crushes How to Dance Like a Wussy Dear Wussy

voice mail: 512.296.7080 e-mail: [email protected] website: http://www.brokenword.org online journal: http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Cover Wuss — Henry Thomas No one can forget our boy Henry as the very best good friend of E.T., but can you name any other ﬁlm the poor boy has done in the last twenty years? I mean, sure, he did “Cloak and Dagger” right after “E.T.,” but his charm as a kid actor seemed to vanish after that, along with his movie roles. I am happy to tell you that the little bugger never gave up, though. He just kicked back on his horse farm and waited for Hollywood to catch up with him. Heʼs come back recently and made some pretty damned good movies, such as “Legends of the Fall” and “All the Pretty Horses,” plus he has a role in the upcoming Martin Scorcese movie “Gangs of New York City.” Right on, Henry! Thatʼs what separates the Wussy Boys icons from the Wussy Boy wannabes and ﬂashes in the pan, the ability to hold on tight until the time is right, to keep on keeping on despite the odds, whether youʼre talking movie roles or hopeless crushes. INTRO

Life is so random, so wonderfully random. Just turn a different corner one day, drive down a backstreet, go on a roadtrip, break down at the side of the road, eat dinner in a cafe, do something different and suddenly, there it is, staring into your face with an outstretched hand: Serendipity. I had a gig scheduled with my performance poetry troupe Word- Core at a small private college in Colorado Springs in late November of 2001, and when the gig was over, I drove home the southern route to avoid any snow. So, Iʼm on my way to Albuquerque, NM, which is only about six hours south of Colorado Springs, and I was planning on stopping for gas and a bite to eat before getting back on Interstate 40 bound for Phoenix. Then I was thinking about my poetry friend Kenn Rodriguez who lives in Albu, and I was thinking maybe we could hang out and chill, get some dinner and chill before I headed West. And I called around trying to find his number, but to no avail. I called information and asked for five or six of my poetry friends who live in Albu, but none of them were listed. After 15 minutes of trying, I gave up, thinking that I was simply not destined to spend any time in Albu this trip. Thirty minutes went by, and I decided to give it one more try. (This is where everything changes. One phone call that I almost didnʼt make.) I called information for Santa Fe, which is about an hour north of Albu, and I got a hold of my poetry friend Gary Mex Glazner, who said that he was having a featured reading in Albu that very night with another poetry friend of mine named Michael Cirelli. He invited me to come to the featured reading and sign up for the slam afterwards. I figured what the hell, maybe Kenn would be there and then I could spend the night on his couch. I got directions and showed up at the reading in time to see Gary and Michael do their thangs, then I kicked ass in the slam and took first place. Kenn even showed up, so we were all hanging out and chilling and talking and stuff. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spy this really attractive grrl standing next to me. I turn and smile, and we start talking, see, because she was Blue Judge that night (and have given me the lowest scores of all the judges, by the way.) After, like, two sentences, I asked her if I could spend the night on her couch, and she gave me this sly look, like I was just some random guy asking to sleep on her couch after speaking no more than two lines of dialogue with her, and she should totally tell me to get lost, but, then, for some reason, she was like, “Yeah, that sounds cool.” I told my friend Kenn what was up, then I went home with Mandy. We talked and chatted and hung out all night long, and she even let the kitties chill in her apartment. The next morning, I woke up and bailed for Phoenix. Okay, so, flash forward a month, and I am chilling in Wichita, Kan- sas, with my parents for Xmas, see, and I find Mandyʼs e-mail scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper in the floor of my mini-van (hereafter known as “The Black Widow.”) I floated her a message just to say hey, and it turns out that she was back home for Xmas, too, in Stillwater, OK, which is only about two hours from Wichita. So we made plans to chill in Oklahoma City together with some of her friends, and we ended up having a grand old time. And when I found out she was planning on spending New Yearʼs Eve all by herself in Stillwater while her parents were away, I invited her to spend the evening with my parents and my sister in Wichita. And we had so much fun. When I left Wichita to take the long way home to Chico, I stopped in Albu and hung out with Mandy for three days, just kicking it and watching movies and hanging out and being silly. So cool. And so random. I mean, had I been content with NOT making that last phone call, had I simply gassed in Albu and kept going toward Phoenix, I never wouldʼve met this person. One phone call. I mean, I donʼt know if we are destined to be very best good friends our whole lives or anything, but making that one phone call certainly did change the adventure a lot. Such a trip. I am in Colorado Springs now chilling with my friend Kat, a student at Colorado College I met when I came through here with my performance poetry troupe WordCore in late November of 2001. Itʼs January 13 as I type this. I drove here from Albuquerque after chilling with Mandy, and Iʼve been hanging out with Kat in her dorm room for four days. If I were to write a haiku for Kat, it would go something like this:

Kat, Kat, sheʼs so phat, gender-fuckingʼs where itʼs at! Is she boy, or girl?

I love how Kat and her friends fuck with gender. Anyway, thatʼs the scene, thatʼs where Iʼm at. Katʼs sleeping with the kitties, and weʼre listening to Morphine. Life is good... and so wonderfully random. DEAR WUSSY BOY

My name is A. H. McCormick and Iʼm in college right now, some moderately suckie school in southwestern Colorado, but Iʼm trying to get into The Juiliard School in NY, NY. I know this probably means nothing to you but Iʼm getting to the point I swear. To get into Juiliard I have to prepare two monologues (one of classic literature and one of modern literature) and I was hoping you could give me permission to use your poem, “Wussy Boy Manifesto” as my prepared monologue from modern literature in my audition (it might exceed the time limit, but Iʼm not sure yet). If this is at all possible I was wondering if you could send me a non-censored text version of it? I tried to get it from the Orion website but thatʼs not up right now, or so I assume (there was a link on your website, but it didnʼt work). If you can allow me to do that (I donʼt see why you wouldnʼt but Iʼm prepared for you to tell me Iʼm dumb and to go away if you so please). Thanks, McCormick

I really hope this guy made it into Julliard, because if he didnʼt, man... that would suck. I mean, how could I NOT feel like it was all my fault is the guy totally bombs? I picture this scene out of “Fame” with this row of stern-faced professors sitting behind a long wooden table, and standing in the spotlight on a bare stage is this guy McCormick, and all heʼs got to convince these profs he should get into Julliard — fucking Julliard! — is a big fat handful of my poem “The Wussy Boy Chronicles.” And picture him going through the piece, and picture the profs stilﬁng yawns, and one prof leans over to another and whisper a bit too loudly, “Oh, I guess heʼs one of those... what do they call themselves? Slam Poets? Thank god we only have to listen to this shit for three minutes.” And picture McCormick crumpling up the paper on which my poem was printed and throwing it down and storming off the stage with tears streaming from his heart-broken eyes, cursing under his breath, “Fucking Big Poppa E, Iʼll show him!” Yeah, I really hope this guy made it in. I donʼt need the guilt.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Very nice and unquiet show you guys put on. I severely enjoyed everyoneʼs performance, so if you can pass that on to the crew, let them know that SLO town has a few open ears for them. I hope that if you either as WordCore or as individuals come back to do another show, you will send emails to let us know when and where youʼll do it. Directly to you, BPE, I laughed out loud when I read your last haiku about The Lord of the Rings — I know exactly what you mean. Love, peace, and napkins, mladen

This cat mustʼve been in the audience during the Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo show that my performance poetry troupe WordCore did in late 2001. That was such a great tour. We hit eight colleges scattered across a month or so, and we actually managed to get paid enough to take care of the four of us and then some. It gave us the push to send out 70 press kits to universities all over the U.S. for a national tour in the spring of 2002. As I write this, it is January 12, 2002, and we still have about a mnth to go before we are going to be heading out. Oh, and the haiku was this: Please God, donʼt let ʻThe / Lord of the Ringsʼ suck. Iʼve been / waiting a long time. I have since amended that haiku to this: Thank you God! ʻThe Lord / of the Rings kicked much ass. I / waited a long time.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Hey, this is Blaise from Mrs. Hollanders English class, if that means anything to you. Anyways, this isnʼt about poetry but i know youʼre looking forward to “The Lord of the Rings” coming out as a ﬁlm. Arenʼt you a little worried it might ruin the book for you, especially if they donʼt do a good job? Blaise

Well, brother Wuss, I had some initial hesitations about two years ago when I ﬁrst started visiting the fan website www.tolkienonline.com, especially when they told us that little people werenʼt being used as the hobbits and digitally shrunk normal people would be used instead. That shit pissed me off, but the vibe on the online community was strong and good, so I went into the movie with high hopes that were not dashed one bit. In fact, I was surprised at how good it was, how engaging. I cried every time Liv Tyler was on the screen for some reason that I canʼt quite ﬁgure out. She was perfect and beautiful and made me into a blubbering idiot every time I saw her. I am going to have to reassess her entire movie career now, because that was some powerful shit. DEAR WUSSY BOY

I thought I would just drop a few words of appreciation to you. Your visit to my high- school, Woodland High, was soooo rad! Your guysʼ poetry plastered a smile on my face through the whole presentation and gave me some more inspiration. Also you revealed to me another type of prose that I had never thought of possibly doing. Thank you for visiting us... and I would really like to know if you ever plan to come down to this area again. If you would like to keep in touch.. that would be nifty...!!! Oh, and checking out the rest of yer stuff on your website.. Souixie.. the Smiths...the Cure... ROCK ONNN!!!! Toodles and have fun with year future tours. Natalie Delﬁn or the denim matrix girl

Here was a good bit of serendipity in action. WordCore hit the University of California at Davis during our college tour, and a high school teacher from nearby Woodland loved what we did and invited us to do a series of workshops and an assembly at her school. So much fun, and the kids were absolutely inspiring to work with. It was interesting to pull together the basis of a workshop basically out of thin air, but we did it with ﬂair and gusto, I am happy to say. If I ever get cynical about having chosen this life as a tragically poor performance poet, allʼs I need to do is book a couple high school gigs to remind me about the magic of what it is we do.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

How did you start writing as a career? When did it become a career choice for you...or did it? Iʼm just wondering what I could do with an english degree if I couldnʼt publish my work...or it sucked...or something! Another passion of mine is horses, and human/horse communication. I also have been thinking, recently, about something in anthropology. Maybe I could somehow combine english and anthropology, or even spanish. AAHH! So many wonderful choices. Thanks for emailing me back!! Ciao, K-Ba (Iʼm trying out the whole J-Lo thing...ha ha)

God, I donʼt even know if what I do can be consider a career quite yet. I mean, by calling a job a “career,” you are sort of implying that you can feed and clothe yourself and pay your bills and have some sort of stable future in it, you know, and while Iʼm being able to feed and clothe myself so far, it is by no means a sure thing. And as far as a future goes, wow... itʼs like focusing on a life of art or acting or music, like, how many self-deceiving saps are there in this country who are foolish enough to devote their lives to something so foolishly beautiful as art? And how few actually make it? And many fewer poetic fools actually make it? So, I donʼt know... With a whole lot of luck and a whole lot of talent, I hope that I can at least spend the next ﬁve years doing this without starving. I came to this decision after getting my dream journalism job right out of journalism school as an assistant entertainment editor and ﬁnding that it was not only absolutely perfect for me but also absolutely wrong at the same time. Picturing myself at a steady job for the next 20 years sitting in a cubicle behind a computer just sapped my will to live, so I quit after three months to be a practically homeless, practically penniless performance poet. Yeah, be careful what you ask for, you just might get. (God, I hope I get it.)

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Hey there Eirik...I was in Michael Messnerʼs Men and Masculin- ity class at USC that you came and spoke to yesterday...wow man, that was some great stuff... being into studying that gender stuff...I would say as a poet somthing cool for you to look at would be Mary Dalyʼs” Wickedary”...she wrote it to replace the (as she emphatically says it) DICtionary...itʼs got some cool wordplay and deﬁnitions and what not... I mean, Mary Dalyʼs kind of psycho, and she would be that woman who would stand up and tell you youʼre not part of the movement (In case you didnʼt know she got ﬁred from Boston College for refusing to teach men in her classes) but the book is really helpful and itʼs got some cool stuff in it. I would also suggest, since it has to do with the destruction of the earth by man, and that seems to be something youʼd jive with, Carolyn Merchantʼs “Earthcare”...itʼs rad. Enjoy the reading! If you have any questions or youʼd ever like to get together and talk about this stuff, Iʼm open to it man! ... Nicole Buckley

I was contacted by this professor from the University of Southern California named Michael Messner about a year ago about my zine, which he had read about in either the Utne Reader or in Bust Maga- zine. He happened to be an alum of Chico State University, my college, so he contacted me and we exchanged e-mail about masculinity and feminism and how the concept of Wussy Boys ﬁt in with all that. He ended up ordering 30 copies of Issue #5 and using it to teach a segment of his Men and Masculinity class, then invited me to come on the last day of the semester to give a talk. It was so much fun, and even though I made up everything right off the top of my head, it was a really engaging, energetic exchange of ideas. It kinda cracked me up, too, to think that my grades in high school and college were so poor that there would be absolutely no way USC would ever allow me to take classes, yet my zine was being used to teach one of their classes. Such a trip. The prof was great, too. He practically helped invent his area of study in the early ʻ70s, and now he is considered a leader in his ﬁeld. He even said he might use excerpts of The Wussy Boy Chronicles in the next edition of his textbook on masculinity. What a fucking trip.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

i just wanted to say how much i enjoyed your...talk? performance? rant?... whatever you did today in our class. it was great. let me know the next time you have a few extra minutes in l.a. maybe we can get together for lunch/coffee and exchange fashion tips. leather + metal = badass wuss. anyway, you seem like a cool guy, and anything youʼd like to know from my somewhat educated queer phreak perspective, let me know. iʼve got a little experience with the beat down. take care and enjoy being home (when you ﬁnally get there). kevin, a.k.a. the boy with the boots

This boy was so ﬂamboyantly gay in his platform combat boots and furry green vest, and I was so glad he was sitting in the front row of the masculinity class. I instantly felt a bond with him and used him as a creative foil during my off the cuff presentation. Weʼve been ﬂoating e-mails to each other ever since. I love gay people.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

My name is Griselda and Iʼm a student in Michael Messnerʼs “Men and Masculinity” course. I just wanted to thank you for your insights yesterday. Your talk allowed me to reﬂect upon a lot of different aspects within our society. Two of my friends (who are also in the class) and I were talking about the issues you spoke about after class. Interestingly, one of my friends is that “macho dick headed frat boy” kind of guy and you sort of helped me in opening his eyes. For the past two years Iʼve been trying to have him open up and now I think that youʼve been able to help me. Thanks! His girlfriend and I thank you. Let us know about any of your upcoming events. Griselda

God, to think that I may have helped open the eyes of even one, erm, “macho dick-headed frat boy” thrills me to the core. I mean, thatʼs what itʼs all about, right? I ﬁgure you either need to convert them into free-thinking young men who respect women and respect their own masculinity enough to not let it limit their lives, or, you know, youʼve just got to kill them en masse.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

since i saw you in messnerʼs ʻmen and masculinityʼ class last week iʼve been to your wussyboy website about 50 times and have played the clips for a couple of my friends, not to mention reading every single poem, article, line of writing, etc... on there. yea i guess i kinda like you. :) either that or iʼm desperatly ﬁnding new ways of procrastinating right before ﬁnals week. but, anyways. i guess iʼm already hooked enough on you that iʼd email you and tell you iʼm interested in that thing you were talking about, starting a dialouge about men or whatever. i chose that class for one of my general ed requirments to try and get over my issues of just completely hating all men. i thought maybe it could help me understand them better. itʼs helped a little. i can explain them a little better but that doesnʼt mean they donʼt make me angry. but i guess i donʼt mean that i hate ALL men when i say that, just all of the not you type men... wussyboy dudes are great it just doesnʼt seem like thereʼs enough of you guys out there, or that they donʼt make themselves known or something. also. keep me posted on when/where you perform and stuff. ʻcause even though i go to college here in socal, my home is in napa so i am in the bay area a lot too. cool. i think iʼll get back to, oh, i donʼt know, “studying” now. so i hope to talk to you later. teresa kilang silvagni

I am so good at procrastinating. Seems my whole life is spent either avoiding life or living it in ways that most people donʼt ever get a chance. Man, I am so tired right now... I have been putting Issues $6-#9 together for the past three days, and now itʼs hella late, like 2 in the morning, and I am ﬁnding it hard to ﬁnd the words to say. DEAR WUSSY BOY

Someone left one of your zines lying about the place, and I found it, thank goddess! I had no idea there were so many of us wussy boys out there. I went to school mostly in a small town in michigan where such as I were in the minority (one?) I know you hate L.A., but thatʼs where Iʼm stuck at the moment—any advice on branching out into this new world of out of the closet wussy-ness would be greatly appreciated! Iʼm too shy to share my own poetry, but would deﬁnitely like to hear some by others like me. Cheers! Thomas B. Pierce

My advice is to just start doing it, and doing fearlessly, in your workplace, in school, at home, with your friends, with your enemies, just living your life consciously and passionately and lovingly with creativity and understanding. Be the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a hurricane in Hong Kong. Iʼve been flapping for years, and I am just starting to get calls from people in Thailand asking me to be careful because Iʼm knocking shit over. You are Wussy Boy, let them hear you roar!

THINK YOU’VE GOT WORRY, WUSSY?

Simply put your thoughts into words and send them to Wussy Boy via e-mail to: [email protected]. 05.08.01 strange evidence that i exist

if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it fall, does it make a sound? if a poet boy moves to the big city and spends all of his time in his little studio apartment with his cats, does he still exist, or does he disappear from this planet and take all evidence of his existence with him? (will people forget about me?) (if i disappeared with no trace would anyone miss me? would they even notice i was gone?) every morning i visit the little espresso cart outside the building in which i work, and every morning i order the very same thing: a 20 oz. soy chai, extra hot; and an all-seed bagel with cream cheese. every morning i pay the same price: $5.50, with the $.50 change from $6.00 going into the tip jar. and every morning the people at the espresso cart greet me with the same greeting: “large soy chai, extra hot?” they, like... KNOW. i am a loyal customer of their espresso cart, a regular. i am known as Large Soy Chai Extra Hot. this morning i accepted their order, then as they were steaming my chai, i dug into my pants for my money. but no, nothing... i had forgotten to empty my pants from the day before, and i had no money. i told them to hold on, wait a minute, because i couldnʼt find my money, and i began to futily pat down my pockets hoping for some change to suddenly materialize on the fourth or fifth try, but they said donʼt worry about it, i could pay tomorrow. i am a regular. they know me. i am Large Soy Chai Extra Hot. of course i would be back the next morning, i am there every morning. they even offered to let me have a bus pass since iʼd need $1.25 for the ride home. proof that i exist. i went to a poetry reading last night at a delightfully demonic cafe called “cafe messiah.” i had never been there, but i had heard lots about it, all the crucifixes and skeleton wallpaper and gothed out barristas, the red velvet toilet, the tattoo shop next door. i walked in and ordered a large soy chai extra hot, and the girl standing next to me said, “hey eirik.” i turned and looked and didnʼt recognize her at all. i hate when that happens. i never recognize anyone. iʼm like the guy in “memento.” i say, “hey, where do i know you from?” and she tells me that she featured at my venue just two weeks before. oh. duh. so she tells me this story as we are waiting for our hot beverages. she tells me that she just moved here recently from boston, and while she was in boston she read the “feminist” issue of bust magazine, which featured an article i wrote about being a wussy boy feminist. in the article, i describe myself as having earrings, shaved head, painted fingernails, and a tattoo of the female symbol with a fist in the middle on the inside of my right ankle. she said that she liked the article so much that she went out and got that same tattoo on the inside of her right ankle. she showed it to me. there it was, and it was an exact duplicate of the “femi-fist” tattoo that bust magazine used as an illustration with the article i wrote. she said she had no idea that i was the guy who wrote the article until a mutual friend told her, then she was like, “yo, i got this here tattoo because of that guy!” proof that i exist, right there on her ankle, a testimony of black ink and skin. so odd... as i stare at the ceiling and try to fall asleep at night, i often find myself wondering... if i died in my sleep, how much time would pass before anyone noticed that i was gone? how long would it be before my body was discovered? the first people to notice would be my work, but all they would do is call my cell phone. if they got no response after a couple of days, i imagine they would assume i had quit and gone on tour again without telling them, and that would be that. my parents wouldnʼt notice at all. iʼm always the one who has to call them, they never call me unless itʼs an emergency. one time, i wanted to see how long i could go without calling them and checking in before they finally called me. four months passed without a single phone call or e-mail. when i finally called them and told them about the experiment, they claimed to have talked to me just a few weeks before. i told them no, that was january. now itʼs may. they didnʼt believe me. the people at the poetry slam wouldnʼt notice my absence becuase i hardly go anymore anyway, plus iʼm always talking shit about it. they would just assume that i was tired of slamming and was taking a break for a while. it would be weeks before anyone said, “say, has anyone seen eirik? he hasnʼt been here in weeks. is he on tour again?” my friend liz here in seattle might notice after a while, but then she doesnʼt know where i live or where i work, so all she could do was leave messages on my cell phone, then she would assume i was blowing her off and get all mad at me. alyssa would notice that i wasnʼt calling, but she would probably feel all hurt and would assume that i was blowing her off, too. who else... iʼve blown just about everyone else off. i donʼt get together with anyone on a regular basis, so no one would even know i was gone. the only thing that would alert anyone to my death would be the smell, and maybe they wouldnʼt even detect that for quite some time. i imagine my landlord would finaly get pissed at the rent not being paid and would barge into my apartment to clear it out, and then he would find me there on my matress. my poor kitties would be able to eat with their automative feeder and waterer for about two weeks, but then theyʼd have to fend for themselves until someone came by. i wonder if they would snuggle up next to me once i started to smell. i wonder if they would nibble on me. once the article in the newspaper appeared, then everyone in the local scene would know that i was dead. then i guess someone would post something on the internet and let everyone in the extended community know. and that would be that. sometimes i feel like disappearing and not telling anyone, just abandoning everything and leaving without a trace, just getting a bus ticket under a fake name and heading for someplace far away, getting a job washing dishes that pays under the table. iʼd tell everyone that my name was kevin. iʼd grow my hair really long and my beard, too, and whenever someone asked me about my past, i would just mumble something about it being complicated. i wonder how long it would take before anyone noticed that i was gone?

05.09.01 a staggering work of heartbbreaking genius (a boy and his dog)

hereʼs the story about my best friend in the whole wide world, the very best friend i ever had in the my whole life: a german shepherd named chinook. i first met chinook when i was 10 and living in bremerton, washington (which, oddly enough, is just across the puget sound from where i am typing this journal entry — i can see it outside the 14th story window of the my building.) my father came home angry as usual. he yelled at me to get downstairs to my room. i had no idea what he was angry about, as usual, so i just went to my room to await my fate...... and there, sitting on my bed in a pile of blankets and pillows, was a german shepherd puppy. i can not even begin to think of a better pet for a lonely 10-year-old boy than a puppy. as i cooed and played with him, my parents watched quietly over my shoulder from the doorway. we named him sasquatch because he had such big feet. he was a good puppy, but as he grew, his hips started getting all messed up. german shepherds, apparently, have a high incidence of something called ʻhip dysplasia,ʼ or something like that, and whatever it was, sasquatch had it bad. so my parents bought a brand new puppy and named him chinook, and for a while we had two growing puppies. iʼm telling you, little kid bliss is having not just one but two puppies. but sasquatch got worse and worse, and finally my parents put the poor thing to sleep. i remember my father taking me for a walk on hol- loween of that year, his arms crooked around my skinny shoulders, and explaining to me why we had to put sasquatch to sleep. that left chinook. i am telling you this because itʼs true: never have a boy and his dog been closer than me and chinook. i had no friends then because we moved around every six months, sometimes more frequently than that. i went to three different elementary schools in two different states just to complete fourth grade, and i was really shy, painfully shy. chinook became my very best and closest friend, my only confidante, and we played from the time i got off school until it was time for bed and all day on weekends. chinook was hella cool. heʼd pull me down the road on my skateboard. weʼd wrestle, and he would sometimes grab me up with his mouth, but he would never bite me. one time, he accidently clamped down on me hard enough to make me squeak, but he was so sorry about it, just hanging his head and looking at me with those deep brown eyes, like, “dude, i am SO sorry about that. cʼmere and put me in a headlock and letʼs play some more.” heʼd go out and get the newspaper on cold, foggy mornings, but then heʼd run past you and into the kitchen to where we kept the milkbone dog biscuits on the dryer. if you tried to grab the newspaper before rewarding him with a dog bone, he would turn his head and not let you take it. if you said, “get that fly!” he would start looking around for bugs and whining like, “fly? what fly? where? iʼm gonna FUCK that fly UP?” one of our favorite games to play was hide and go seek, where i would tell him to “stay!” on the couch and then i would hide somewhere in the house with a milk bone dog biscuit in my hand. once i was hidden, i would call his name — “chinook! chinook! chinook! — and i would hear the dangle of his dogtags as he ran into the hallway to find me. iʼd always position myself in such a way that i could watch chinook trying to find me, and this would always crack me up. he had such an expressive face, and heʼd be standing there cocking his eyebrows with intense concentration, trying to listen or smell me out. iʼd always end up giving myself away by giggling, then heʼd be all like, “so! there you are!” and come and get me and nuzzle up on me and knock me over and weʼd wrestle until i gave him his milk bone. weʼd also play “race to get the ball” where iʼd have him “sit!” and “stay!” and i would cross the backyard and put two tennis balls in the far corner of the lawn, then i would slowly walk back into position beside him, whispering, “stay... stay...” then boom, i would haul ass to the balls and chinook would be in hot pursuit. heʼd always swoop past me to get one of the balls, but then i would grab the other and flaunt the fact that i had a ball, “nyahh nyahh, you can HAVE that other dumb old tennis ball because this one is SO much better, la la la, la la la,” and this would get chinookʼs goat, man, he hated that i was having so much fun with my ball, so heʼd drop his ball and tackle me and weʼd wrestle while he tried to get the other ball. sometimes heʼd end up with two or even three balls in his mouth, and he looked so ridiculous trying to bogart all the tennis balls in his mouth at the same time. whenever i got together with kids in the open fields near my home to play war in the water-pipe trenches where they were building new houses, chinook was always on my team, and all the kids wanted chinook to be on their team, too, because he was so good and finding little hiding kids on the prowl and ratting them out so that the rest of our team could swoop down with our stick/machine guns for the kill. chinook was the best dog in the whole world. (you can probably tell that something horribly heart-breaking is about to happen. such are stories about boys and their dogs.) fast forward five years, and chinook is five and i am a high school sophomore. it is 1983. i am not actually dating girls at this point, girls are way too scary, and besides, itʼs hard to keep a girlfriend and a raging dungeons and dragons habit at the same time. chinook is still my very best friend, and he sleeps with me every night in my waterbed. and chinook is still fit and healthy and spry, although he doesnʼt run nearly as fast as he used to. itʼs those damned german shepherd hips, but heʼs not bad off, just a little stiff after a run. heʼs got a little grey in his beard. my dad decides out of nowhere that chinook deserves to get laid at least once in his life, so he buys a female german shepherd puppy named brandi, and before she turns a year old, she has puppies. i am now a junior in high school, and brandi has a litter of puppies who are given very quickly to good homes, but my parents decide to keep one of the males, who they name teddy bear. well, another year goes by, and i am a senior and chinook is 7 and brandi is 2 and teddy bear is 1, and for the first time in his life, chinook has to deal with another male dog being in the house. he does not take well to this, and he and teddy bear butt heads quite a few times. rather than finding teddy bear a good home, my father forces me to keep chinook — an 80-pound german shepherd — locked in my room all day to keep him separated from teddy bear, only to be let out under strict supervision when teddy bear is locked away somewhere else. looking back at this, it seems so fucking ridiculous, keeping such a big dog locked in a small room all day, then escorting him to the backyard like some convict who needs exercise. but it made sense to my dad. looking back at it, it was totally unfare to make it my responsibility to keep the two dogs apart, and totally unfare to chinook to have to be cooped up all day, but at the time... what could i do? inevitably, the day came when chinook got out. he mustʼve been waiting at my bedroom door, just waiting until i opened it, and when i did he dashed out between my legs and lunged into the living room to attack teddy bear. they launched into this horrific fight, and they tore into each other. it was ferocious, and they bounced off furniture and walls and skittered into the kitchen. by the time my dad jumped into the middle of it, there was blood everywhere and their coats were matted with saliva. i was too hysterical to do anything, but my dad separated them, but not before one of them took a big chunk out of his arm. we finally pried them apart and my dad got rushed to the hospital, but not before he yelled at me and berated me for allowing chinook to get out, and he swore that i would pay because now he was going to put my dog to sleep and it was all my fault. why couldnʼt he just have found teddy bear a new home? but no, he had to retaliate at me and do something specifically to get back at me, which was to take away my best and only friend. i remember the day my dad took chinook away very clearly. i was crying and my dad was pissed off and yelling at me, and chinook ws reacting to the yelling like he always did, by lowering his head and his eyes and his ears as if he just knew the yelling had something to do with him or something he had done. the last thing my father said before he took my dog away was this, and i quote, verbatum: “give your goddamned dog a hug because this is the last time youʼll ever see him.” he actually said that to me... no, he screamed it at me. and i was drooling with tears... i gave chinook a hug and told him it was okay (i lied) and then i slipped his dog tags over his head and put them in my pocket. that was it... my father lead him away and slammed the door behind him. i never saw him again. (deep breath) and it doesnʼt stop there. no, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it gets worse. (deep breath) so, for those of you who are keeping score at home, we are now down one german shepherd dog, but we still have brandi and teddy bear and one black cat named gato, who hated everyone except me, so it was always my duty to take care of him. i signed up to join the navy when i was 17, then as soon as i turned 18 and graduated, i left home for a six-year stint as an electronics technician. shortly after i left, my parents and my younger sister sabrina moved to another house, whereupon gato “ran away.” i always felt that gato had disappeared under suspicious circumstances and had suspected foul play, and a few years later i got my sister to admit that gato had indeed “been put to sleep.” two down, two to go. ah, but wait! in the meantime, a pregnant momma cat had taken up residence under the back decking and had given birth to a bunch of kitties. so the new total is: 2 german shepherds; and 5 cats. my parents promptly moved to wichita, kansas, and take the whole brood with them. but there are problems from the beginning with the cats. it seems that the momma cat and one of her brood are very close, but the remaining three cats hate them, so, once again, they have to keep everyone separated, and yes, rather than finding good homes for some of the cats, my parents decide to put three of the cats to sleep. new total: 2 dogs, 2 cats. the dogs have, by this time, become permanent outside dogs, and they are kept locked up in the dog run all day long. although they get lots of exercise running back and forth along the fence and wrestling with each other, they never get taken on walks, are never invited into the house, and are generally ignored by my parents. the thing about kansas is that they have big weather there, and the lightening is huge and fearce, and so every time there is a lightening storm, the dogs get so freaked out that they tear a hole in the fence in an effort to get into the house where itʼs safe. after fixing the fence several times and even installing an electric fence to keep them penned up, my parents come to the same conclusion they have become so good at: they put these two dogs, two full-grown healthy young dogs in the prime of life, they put them down, put them to sleep. that leaves two cats, who, by this time, are probably like, “i donʼt know about you, but i ainʼt scratching SHIT. i ainʼt doing nothing but sitting here and purring and being scarce. they want me to purr, fuck it, i am a purring mother fucker. itʼs like fucking auschwitz around here...” (and now comes the insult to injury part of our story.) a few years go by, and i am out of the navy and in college and doing my poetry thang. i get a phone call from my mom. she tells me, “guess what? your dad just brought home a brand new german shepherd puppy? he just LOVES him so much, and guess, just GUESS, what heʼs going to call him?” i close my eyes and grit my teeth and think, please, no, donʼt... “heʼs going to call him chinook! isnʼt that cute?” i just stare slack-jawed into the receiver of the phone, then i say, “well, i hope the dog has a better fate in store than my chinook.” my mom clucked her tongue at the notion, and said, “now, donʼt be like that. you know it practically KILLED your father to put that poor dog to sleep. you remember how bad his hips hurt!” “no mom,” i said, “his hips didnʼt hurt like that. you didnʼt know him like i did. if you knew him like i did, you wouldnʼt say such a thing.” now they have two german shepherds, one male named chinook and one female named nikki, plus they still have the two cats, named baby and princess. apparently, they all get along great, and they are all inside pets. they get to sleep anywhere they want, and my father lav- ishes affection on the dogs in a way that makes my stomach hurt...... that hurt feels like jealousy on one hand, but it also feels like an old anger that i think i might always have. how someone could treat a family dog — a fucking member of the family — like an old piece of furniture that you donʼt fancy anymore, like some kind of refuse to be taken to the dump, is something i will never understand. FINAL NOTE: i always kept chinookʼs dog tags in my truck for good luck, and i can safely say that i have never had a major accident since then. about two years ago, i was doing a gig in san francisco with a group of kick ass lesbian poets called sister spit, and someone broke into my truck during the show. i got in my car and noticed right away that everything was all fucked up... the window had been broken, the papers and shit had been over-turned, the glovebox was hanging ajar... and i didnʼt think about all the cds i had in cases under my seat... nope. i didnʼt think about anything other than chinookʼs dog tags. i opened the center console where i had kept them since the last day we looked into each otherʼs eyes, and the tags and the collar were gone. losing all my cds was bad enough... over 600 disappeared in one snatch, but i can always buy more. it was my own damn fault that they were in the car in the first place. but the dog tags? man... i tell you, if even half the curses i cast upon the motherfucker who took my dogʼs tags came true, there is at least one extremely sad bastard in this world who has been hurtinʼ for certain ever since. i sometimes miss chinook a lot, even now. if there ever was a better dog in this entire world, iʼve yet to meet him. i sometimes wonder if the same dynamic that existed between chinook and teddy bear was in effect with me and my father as i grew up...

05.11.01 happy birthday to me

i was born at 11:57 p.m. — three minutes before midnight — in memorial hospital in bakersﬁeld, california. my mother was 18. my father was 20. langston hughes would be dead in 11 days. today is my birthday.

05.15.01 the ‘rents are in town for a visit...

so, my parents have finally taken a vacation, a real live vacation that does not include my dadʼs insurance company, an honest to goodness vacation, their first in ten years. my dad... he works hard, but i am at a lost as to what he is working for. we grew up on the lower end of middle class and very often were dipping toward the poor side, especially when my dad was in the navy. ever since my dad got into the insurance racket, his income has steadily increased, until finally he is making some decent money. but he spends it on the most obvious tokens, almost as if he has something to prove, like he has to dangle these golden medallions across his hairy chest to show the world that he is no longer the poor redneck kid from bakersfield. take, for instance, his new car. can you say, “false penis?” i mean, itʼs a nice car and all, but the man seems to work exclusively for these little materialistic tokens of his income. heʼs got a nice house, a nice car, a nice truck, my mom drives a pt cruiser, my sister has a nice truck, they have a huge big screen teevee... but why? is this why he works so hard, not having a vacation for a ten-year stretch, getting ulcers and working his ass off 80 hours a week, just so he can dangle shiny tokens around his neck? he and my mom are on a roadtrip in the new car, driving across country with the top down, and they have arrived here in seattle on the tail-end of their trip. after staying here a week, theyʼll head back to wichita. i never know how to take visits from the ʻrents. we are not all that close, but i get nice gifts twice a year — once on my birthday, once at christmas. the rest of the year, they tend to ignore me. whenever they visit, my dad likes to take me out to dinner every night. i always feel like heʼs trying to show me how successful he is, like he can whip out the platinum american express card and buy whatever he wants. so, i always bring a friend. last night, i brought my friend morris, a poet from new york who moved here about a month ago. since my parents have such mainstream, mid-west tastes in everything, i always try to take them to something different... they never wouldʼve tried thai or indian food without my prodding. last night, we went to a japanese/korean place. my mom tried kimchee for the first time. my dad wouldnʼt touch the miso soup. i donʼt know... maybe iʼm just bitter. i mean, iʼm sure my parents love me... they took one look at my fucked up broken tooth and offered to take me to a dentist to have it fixed while theyʼre here. i try to give them newspaper clippings that show i am not wasting my time with this poetry thing — “look mom, thereʼs me in the los angeles times! look dad, thereʼs me in the washington post! make sure you watch ʼ60 minutesʼ tonight because iʼll be on it for 1.3 seconds!” — but i always feel like they are disappointed in me. i think they might love me out of habit, but i really donʼt think they like me all that much. we are so different. i told morris about my dadʼs penchant for telling me the most wretchedly sexist jokes, and i offered him one as we drove to my parentsʼ hotel to give him an example: “so, eirik,” my dad tells me, “what do the 40,000 women battered in america all have in common?” (pause for effect) “the bitches donʼt know when to shut the fuck up!” thatʼs my dad. sometimes i think i make this shit up as a means of justifying my feelings about the guy, but, sure enough, within ten minutes of arriving at the hotel room, my dad told that exact joke to morris. and what did morris do? he flashed me a devious smile and told my dad this joke: “what do you tell your wife when she has two black eyes?” (pause for effect) “nothing; youʼve already told her twice!” fucking morris is such a kook. my dad loved it and bookmarked it in his little brain so that he could tell one of his insurance cronies back home, iʼm sure. morris is a really nice person, and definitely not into such jokes, but he is such a devious little bastard, making fun of my dad right in front of his nose by telling him this joke to egg him on. anyway... i want my parents to like me, but i honestly donʼt know how to do it. thereʼs this gulf between me as a little boy who loved his father unconditionally and the me with years of angst built up from the time i was in sixth grade and my dad became a raging asshole. what do you do to mend the rift, especially when the very person who caused that rift has a very american-revisionist way of looking at the whole situation that shrieves himself of any guilt or fault? tonight theyʼll take me to dinner again, and i imagine theyʼll do the same all week. and iʼll sit across from my parents and listen to them tell me about their work. and iʼll try not to get disappointed when they donʼt ask me anything about how my life is going. and iʼll try to figure out a way to reach out to them, but then iʼll end up staring into my plate of food and not saying anything at all. this is the way it works.

05.18.01 ﬁngering those emotional triggers...

so, on their last night here in seattle, my parents took me and my friend morris stegosaurus to the space needle for dinner. nice, that. so, weʼre deciding on what we should eat, looking at this way expensive menu thatʼs attached with wires to a slab of aluminum, and there in the soups/appetizers section is the following: “crab bisque.” (cue sound of emotional trigger ﬁnger ﬂexing, pulling the hammer back, cocking the memory gun...) and suddenly, in the middle of ordering my dinner with morris and my parents in the rotating restaurant on top of the space needle, i start thinking about jen. jen died in a car accident on sept. 10, 1999.

(http://www.livejournal.com/users/poetryslam/day/1999/09/11)

when we were dating in the summer of 1999, which was during my internship at the reno gazette-journal, we often visited her mom in sacramento. her momʼs name was linda, and she was a high-paid executive with intel who made hella money and lived in a really big house in a really nice part of town. linda used to take jen and me to a nice restaurant when weʼd visit, and iʼd always order the crab bisque as a first course before the entree. god, i can not emphasize enough how powerfully good this crab bisque was. itʼs like a creamy soup, with fresh tomatoes and crab and all kinds of seasonings blended together for a frothy concoction that... god, just thinking about it makes my mouth water. i would be rendered incapable of conversation every time i ate that crab bisque, and i would have to resist the temptation to order another round of it. after jen died, i stopped seeing our mutual friends, and i avoided seeing linda or jenʼs sister lindsay for a long time. it was too hard. i guess i didnʼt want to be reminded about it, i just wanted it to go away... finally, linda e-mailed me and asked me to come to sacramento and have lunch with her. she had met with all of jenʼs friends over lunch in the recent weeks, and i was the last one left. i think she was trying to sort of live vicariously through the stories that jenʼs friends could tell, sort of getting a rounder, fuller picture of this amazing 20-year-old woman who had been her daughter, patching together stories and inside jokes and anecdotes... we met at the same restaurant that she had always taken jen and me to, and, as usual, i ordered the crab bisque. it was so odd... i had never been in that restaurant without jen sitting next to me, holding my hand under the table, our hips touching in warm little ovals. it seemed so wrong to be there without her... (the last time i was here, i was with jen. she was still alive.) her mom couldnʼt handle it, and broke down as soon as we ordered our food. her mascara was running down her face as she asked me to share stories about jen and me. we had only dated for about six months, and it was a situation where we had enormous and immediate crushes on each other... my most powerful memories about jen were not exactly the sort you can share with a mother, but i tried to give her a feel for how it was with the two of us. i told stories about how we met at a poetry slam, how jen had liquored me up with heinekens so that i wouldnʼt be too nervous to kiss her for the first time, told her how instantly perfect that first kiss was, talked about her blossoming feminism, our roadtrips, her laughter and smile... linda then said that she was going to ask me something and that she wanted me to give her a straight-forward, truthful answer, even if it was hard. she asked me if jen had loved her. she was afraid that jen hadnʼt loved her at all, that she had hated her, and she wanted me to tell the truth: had jen loved her? god... how do you answer such a question? we both started crying, and before i answered, the waiter brought lindaʼs appetizer and my crab bisque. and i wiped my eyes, and dipped my spoon into the crab bisque, then lifted a hot sip to my mouth. and i told linda that, of course, jen loved her, of course she did, she was her daughter, and she loved her very much. in fact, i said, i knew very little about her dad at all because jen almost never talked about her dad, but about her mother i knew a lot. i knew how hard she had worked right out of high school, how she had worked her way up through the company, how she was an inspiration to jen, how she showed that a talented, motivated women could accomplish anything she set her mind to. and linda just smiled and cried and buried her face in her hands...... and i just didnʼt know what to do or say, i just felt like such shit, because here is this women who has lost her brightest shining light of a daughter, and what in the world can i say? so, i took another sip of the crab bisque. and iʼm sitting there across the table as linda is crying and talking about how hard it has been since her daughterʼs funeral, and iʼm listening intently, but inside my head...... all i can think about is how absolutely wonderful this crab bisque tastes. i mean, it is so good, like, not just GOOD, but so FUCKING good, you know, like itʼs the very best soup i have ever tasted in my whole entire life, and it was so overwhelming to deal with the duality of that moment, of feeling the horrible weight of loss from jenʼs death and all that entailed to me, of imagining how it must feel for her mother to contemplate the loss of her eldest child, and on top of that dealing with being really hungry and not being able to keep myself from digging in to this crab bisque like a starving animal. i would be like, “linda, you know she loved you very much,” (sip... goddamn this is good soup), “and you know, she wasnʼt afraid to share it with anyone. i mean, jen was an amazing and inspiring person, and she credited much of what she knew and loved with you,” (sip... fuck, man, this soup is just kicking my ass... sip, sip). we talked for at least an hour about jen, and eventually, we got up and walked to our cars and hugged each other warmly, leaving tear stains on each others shoulders. and i cried so hard as i drove away, thinking about how the last time i left this place, i was in jenʼs car, and we were going back to her momʼs place to have sex in her bedroom...... and as i drove away, i distinctly remember trying to get the name of the restaurant so that i could come back and get their recipe for the crab bisque. i havenʼt seen her mom since then, and itʼs been more than a year. so hard... and so, last night, i am in the rotating restaurant on the very tip top of the space needle with morris and my parents, and there on the menu in the appetizers section is “crab bisque.” i looked at it... (heavy pause) (the world rotates slowly around us as the restaurant turns and turns...) and i ordered the salmon cakes with mustard sauce. and they were delicious. and i dreamed of jen that night for the first time in a long, long time.

how to dance like a wussy boy (ﬁrst in a series)

this is my funky dance. i have others, but this is the one i use when dancing to ʼ80s music or disco. 1] move one — the “open/close” make your arms into capitol Lʼs, with your hands pointing to the ceiling and your upper arms parallel with the floor. hold your arms out in front of you as if fending off an attack. this is the “closed” position. holding your arms in the capitol Lʼs, move them wider so that they are positioned to either side of your head. this is the “open” position. now, bounce up and down slightly to the rhythm of the beat, flexing your knees but not moving your feet, and shake your rump just a little bit, not too much, and go “open... close... open... close... open... close...” to the rhythm of the music. you have to kinda hunch your shoulders as you do this, and donʼt over-exaggerate the “open/close” movement... you have to kinda be cool about it, just little opens and closes, and you have to kinda nod your head up and down with your eyes closed and a slow smile on your face, like, “awwww yeah, iʼm doing the open/close.” 2] move two — the “raise the roof” put your hands above your head with the palms open to the ceiling, as if you were actually holding up the roof. pump your hands up and down in this position. now, bounce up and down slightly to the rhythm of the beat, flexing your knees but not moving your feet, and shake your rump just a little bit, not too much, and go “raise the roof... raise the roof...” to the rhythm of the music. you have to kinda hunch your shoulders as you do this, and donʼt over-exaggerate the “raise the roof” movement... you have to kinda be cool about it, just little ups and downs, and you have to kinda nod your head up and down with your eyes closed and a slow smile on your face, like, “awwww yeah, iʼm raising the roof.” 3] move three — “the combo” now, the goal is to offer up a combination of these moves set in time to the beat, alternating between the “open/close” and the “raise the roof,” often punctuating the beat by rhythmically shouting “oooowah- oooowah,” hereafter known as “the disco call.” 4] move four — “the ally sheedy” this is an especially good way of ending a song, especially an ʼ80s song. you simply hold cover your head with your arms and shiver and flail, tossing your head back and forth, and you slowly, rhythmically, fall to the floor. this is not to be confused with the “molly ringwald,” which is more of a prancing, flailing thing. NOTE: it is very important to remember not to move your feet at all during any of these moves. just kinda bounce in place.

my autobiography

(this is something i dug up from my hard drive. i wrote it for a class i was taking in ʼ98. iʼve updated some of the info, but mostly it was all written back then. gives a glimpse at what has preceeded all this. iʼve been thinking about the subjects covered in it a lot lately, what with the parentals in town to visit and all...)

I was born at 11:57 p.m. on May 11, 1967, in Bakersfield, CA. Eleven days later, Langston Hughes died. My mother Sandi was 18 and had been married to my father Richard since November of the previous year. (That would make me an “oops.”) My 20-year-old father was floating off the coast of Vietnam in an aircraft carrier when I was born. He didnʼt see me until I was six months old. My mother and I lived at my grandmotherʼs house until my father was discharged from the navy a year later. From what I understand, my motherʼs pregnancy was the cause of a lot of tension in her family. Sheʼs mentioned getting yelled at by her mother, who accused her of bringing disgrace to her family. My mother has told me more than once that she stopped going to church once she got pregnant because it was such an emotional situation. She never went back, nor did my father. The oldest memory I have is this: I remember standing in the doorway of my fatherʼs parentsʼ house as he went to the hospital to pick up my mother. She had just had a baby girl, my sister Sabrina. I turned 3-years-old a month later. My mother said I was a happy child and very well-behaved. I never cried without a good reason. I rarely fussed. I usually ate everything that was given to me. My sister was another story. She was born sick, with asthma and twisted legs that were in braces for several years. She was very fussy and always had to be taken to the doctor. My second oldest memory is of my father coming home from his job as an electrician for Southern Pacific Railroad. I remember him putting his big, plastic safety hat on my head as he got home and letting me carry his lunchbox. He would always leave bits of his lunch in his lunchbox for me. I donʼt know if I actually remember this or if I just remember watching home movies of it. I also remember the sound of my mother making oatmeal in the morning, hearing the scrape of the spoon against the pot as she stirred. She would get my sister and I up early so we could ride in the back of the car as she took my father to work. I cried my first day of Kindergarten, but got the hang of it rather quickly. I remember playing games in the sandbox, marching around in a circle singing the “New Shoes” song and showing off my new cowboy boots. I remember making the following sentence for the class and watching the teacher write it on the chalkboard: My dog had to go to the dog pound. I donʼt remember the dog, but I remember the sentence for some reason. I was a pretty smart kid and started reading early, but I was shy... but, then again, I remember going from door to door on our street and announcing “My name is Richard Eirik Ott. Oh-Tee-Tee. Ott.” Maybe in retrospect I seemed shy... Regardless, I became very shy once we started moving around a lot. But, Iʼll get to that. After being out of the navy for a number of years, my father quit his railroad job and went back into the navy. This would be about 1974, so I was seven and my sister was four. Iʼve always wondered why he went back in because it seemed to be such a selfish thing to do. Why would he subject his young wife and two small kids to the hard life of the navy, with all of its separation and constant moving, especially when he knew from prior experience what it would mean? When I asked him years ago why he went back in, he said he figured he had missed out on something the first time because he was so young and wanted to give it another try. Iʼve always thought it as a very poor choice and the cause of most of the problems between my father and me in the following years. But, during a cross-country roadtrip in the middle ʻ80s, my mother clued me in to some things I didnʼt know about the time. I guess they were having a lot of problems and very close to wanting a divorce. I think this was mostly because my father was a very selfish young man who was not well-equipped to deal with this new family life. He would leave and visit ex-girlfriends while my mother stayed home and took care of the kids. He would demand a list of everywhere my mother would go during the day, but would scream that his affairs were none of her business. Typical... he was way too young for a family. My mother finally grew out her hair, started listening to Cher and got caught up in the feminist feelings of the early ʻ70s: she finally put her foot down and wouldnʼt stand for it. She started doing things with her friends again and telling my father heʼd have to deal with it. I think thatʼs where the problems came to a head. According to my mother, they decided another stint in the navy would provide the trial separation they needed and give them the time to see if they wanted to continue their relationship. This November, my parents will celebrated their 35th anniversary with each other. I donʼt know anyone with parents that have stayed together longer. Just about everyone I know has two sets of parents due to divorce, so this is a major accomplishment. They are now attached at the hip. I guess their decision to go back into the navy was a good one. I donʼt remember it as a good time, though. For the next four years, we moved a lot. This is the time I remember being very shy. I was always the new kid. We moved from Bakersfield to Alameda in ʻ74, then to San Diego in ʻ75 and ʻ76, then to Bremerton, Washington, in ʻ77, then back down to San Diego in ʻ78, then back to Bakersfield when my father was discharged. Thatʼs not how I remember it, though. I remember it this way: second grade started in Bakersfield and ended in Alameda; third grade was in San Diego, and so was part of fourth grade, which continued in Washington at two more schools; fifth grade started at a new school in Washington, then finished up in San Diego; we moved back to Bakers- field for sixth grade and thatʼs where I remained until graduating high school in ʻ85. Before sixth grade, I was usually the smartest kid in the class (and also the shortest). My mother said I was lonely a lot. I donʼt remember any of the friends I had back then. Iʼm sure I mustʼve had some, but they were for such brief amounts of time. I had two things going for me that always allowed me to insinuate myself into schoolyard societies all up and down the Pacific Coast: I could read four grades ahead of everybody else and I kicked butt in four square. (for the very best short story i have ever written in my entire life, which deals with my love of star wars and four square, surf to http:// www.wussyboy.org/WebSitePages/Butts.htm and enjoy.) The first thing I did on the first day of some new school was check out my favorite book from the library: “My Side of the Mountain,” by Jean George. I loved that book. Itʼs about a kid who runs away from home and lives in the Catskills with his pet falcon and his pet weasel and has all kinds of adventures. I identified with the main character, Iʼm sure, and yearned for adventures. And escape. The second thing Iʼd do would be to size up the schoolyard competition at the four-square courts. Somewhere during that time, my father got addicted to painkillers, then went cold turkey when my mother confronted him about it. He quit smoking, too, and has never gone back to either. He drinks, though. Not to sloppy excess, but he likes his large glass of wine with dinner every evening. Iʼve rarely seen my father drunk. Iʼve only seen my mom tipsy once. Drugs were never a presence in our house, although the extended family in Bakersfield is rife with pot smokers, cocaine addicts and methamphetamine dealers. We didnʼt associate much with the extended family. In fact, I could stand in a room next to some of my relatives and not even know I was related to them. Hereʼs a random memory while Iʼm on the subject of my extended family: My parents got re-married for their 20th wedding anniversary and had a big ceremony in their backyard. This was 1991 and I had just returned from doing six very long years in the navy. The backyard was full of people I didnʼt know or recognize. My father was furious with me because I refused to take out my earring during the ceremony, nor would I wear the painful dress shoes he demanded I wear. So, I sat down next to some man who was drinking wine and stared off into space, but the man got up from the table and said, “I ainʼt sittinʼ next to no goddamned hippie.” I found later that he was my uncle Ernie, my fatherʼs older brother. I hadnʼt seen him in years and years, nor have I seen him since. Anyway, I remember missing my father very much while he was gone in the navy. I remember my mother crying a lot. I did well in school and was usually the teacherʼs pet and never got in trouble. I became aware of girls in the third grade, I think. I had a crush on a girl named Debbie Corruthers and we would chase each other around in a circle in the rain. The next year, though, she wouldnʼt pay any attention to me, even after I put mud on her knee. That was that. I was too shy to think about dating girls. I liked making forts and things, climbing trees and hanging out with my dog, Chinook, a big German Shepherd who was my best friend. I remember liking the idea of secret clubs and secret codes and walkie-talkies, but Chinook was never very good at it. So, Iʼd just pretend. I pretended a lot. My father spent most of his navy time out to sea, so I rarely saw him. My mom raised my sister and me the best she could and, by the time my father was discharged, had gotten used to running things around the house. When my father came back, he tried to run things like he ran them in the navy when he was a supervisor. Needless to say, this caused problems. I donʼt know exactly when it happened, but my father distanced himself from me sometime around this time and our relationship has never been the same. In high school, he was cold and distant and mean. The only time he ever spoke to me was when he yelled at me or hit me. I donʼt consider myself a beaten child, but I do know he spanked me with a belt until I was old enough to punch in the face. That only happened once... my mother gave him another ultimatum. After that, he just ignored me. Hereʼs a memory from that time: I had just gotten back from a camping trip with my Christian youth group and my father was drinking wine with his brother Roger on the front porch and they mocked me and laughed at me, saying something like, “Did you see Jesus up on that mountain?” I didnʼt think it was funny. I had no religion handed down to me from my family and was getting to the age where I was questioning life and death, so I was going to youth group with some of my friends. Hereʼs another memory: I asked my father if I could use his tennis racquet to hit balls against the garage and he said I could as long as I put it back after I was done. So I played for a while, then had to go to the bathroom, so I came inside and dropped the racket on my bed and went to the bathroom. After that I went to get a drink in the kitchen and my father yelled at me from the living room to bring him his tennis racquet. I went to my bedroom and... it was gone. I though it was a joke, but my father said he would spank me with his belt if I didnʼt find it because he told me to put it up after I finished. I told him I wasnʼt finished, but he said that didnʼt matter and Iʼd better get looking fast. After tearing my room apart for 15 minutes, I found the racquet stashed behind my dresser. I showed it to him and he spanked me anyway to teach me a lesson. I was 14. When I reminded him about this incident years later and he laughed and said he didnʼt spank me very hard. Hereʼs one more memory: Iʼm in my room on my bed and my father yanks open the door and yells, “Honey! Tell YOUR son itʼs time for dinner!”, then he slams the door. He would do that, just decide to not speak to me for a week at a time. I guess this was after he hit me and my mom gave him the ultimatum. I have often thought that maybe my father didnʼt like me because I reminded him of all the things he wanted to do when he was young, but couldnʼt because he got his 18-year-old girlfriend pregnant and had to marry her. I think I frustrated him because he wanted one thing for me and I wanted something completely different. I think he just threw his hands up in the air and decided it was easier to ignore me than be disappointed in me for not accomplishing what he wanted me to accomplish. When I got out of the navy, I remember him practically demanding that I start business classes at the local college so that I could go into the insurance business. He had it all planned out and would sell me his Bakersfield policies when he moved to Wichita... he never once asked me what I wanted to do with my life now that I was finally out of the navy. When I told him I wanted to write, he mocked me and said Iʼd end up peddling my photocopied books in alleys for food money. When I said I wanted to teach, he compared me to my “drug uncle” who had always said he would go to school to be a teacher as soon as he could kick methamphetamines. Of course, I didnʼt like this at all, but I was no longer the timid 17- year-old from high school; I told him this was my life and this is what I wanted to do and that was the end of it. Sometimes I think my father is jealous of the freedoms Iʼve had. Sometimes I think heʼs disappointed in me for not using my talents for more tangible, monetary gain. After all, Iʼm 34 years old and what do I have to show for my time on this planet? When he was 34, he had a wife, a 14-year-old son, an 11-year-old daughter, two cars, a house... Me, Iʼve got a handful of photocopied poetry books and some newspaper clippings. We have a very different opinion of the word “success.” My mother and I were close, though, while growing up. A lot of the time it seemed like we were the only ones we had. We would play cards and play tennis and talk and go shopping... but then she started working when my father got out of the navy and my sister and I became “Latchkey” kids. My mom was still always on my side, but she just wasnʼt able to be there as much as she had been. I started having problems in school. When I was the “new kid” in school all the time, I had a certain amount of popularity, I think. Once I got back to Bakersfield, I was suddenly a big, fat dork. I donʼt know how that happened. I was immature, I imagine, and not into what the other kids were into. By the time I got to my sophomore year in high school, my grades had dropped to Dʼs and Fʼs and I regularly cut all my classes except for English. I didnʼt have many friends; certainly no close friends. My self- esteem was very low. I cut classes to play video games and spent my lunch money on records and books, things I could do by myself. I was interested in girls, but was way too shy to talk to them. I mostly just stayed in my room and listened to music and read. When I was 15, I started getting fixated on death and my sleeping habits were greatly affected. I started to fear sleep. It was too much like death and death terrified me. It got my mother worried so she took me to a psychologist, who then told my parents I was a 40-year-old in a 15-year-oldʼs body. He also tested my I.Q., then called the principal and demanded I be put in GATE English, which was the highest level. My Cʼs in English went to Aʼs after that, but my other classes still suffered. I only saw the psychologist for three sessions, I think. He was expensive. I remember my mom telling me that my father was offended when the psychologist suggested a lot of my problems stemmed from my relationship with him, but father said he didnʼt need to pay somebody $60 an hour to tell him something he already knew. My mother, however, says she doesnʼt remember telling me that. Iʼve never asked my father. Iʼve tried to get a hold of the psychologist, whose name was Ter- rance Brown, and ask if he had any records of my sessions. I remember his name only because the producer of my favorite music group at the time was Terry Brown. Anyway, there was no listing for him in the Bakersfield directory when I checked a few weeks ago. At one point, my father accused me of being on drugs and blamed my fall in grades and my attendance problems and my growing family problems on some kind of abuse. I had never even seen drugs, nor did I know anyone who did them, nor was I even remotely interested in them. I didnʼt even taste alcohol until I was 19 and have never liked it much. Anyway, looking back, itʼs obvious the problem was abuse, just not drug abuse. I suppose itʼs much easier to blame the break-down of a family on drugs than to accept responsibility. I finally got up the courage to talk to a girl in my junior year in high school and it really changed my life. She was a freshman named Patty and she was my first girlfriend ever. I got obsessed with my smell and took three or four showers a day and brushed and flossed my teeth after every meal, plus before every date. When weʼd be at her house and just about ready to make out, Iʼd excuse myself to her bathroom and eat fingerfulls of her toothpaste so my mouth would be fresh. It must have been so obvious… “So, Patty, Iʼm just gonna go mosey on over to your bathroom right quick, then we can, you know, move on to better things (wink wink),” and sheʼs thinking, “Jesus, heʼs gonna eat my toothpaste again,” then Iʼd come out all suave and reeking of Close- Up. (for more on patty terrell and how very important she was for my teenaged years, please feel free to surf to http://www.wussyboy.org/ WebSitePages/Patty.htm and prepare to giggle your ass off.) That attention was such a shot in the arm for my self-esteem. I felt that I couldnʼt be all that bad — at least not nearly as bad as I thought I was — if someone actually liked me. Even though we only dated for five months, my grades started improving. My moods improved. I had less trouble sleeping. Everything seemed so much better. The world was a place full of possibilities again. Shortly after Patty and I broke up, I met a girl named Michelle. We had sex a week later in the back of my pickup in the middle of a field at the outskirts of town. I remember telling her it was my first time and she said, “Jeez, why do I always get the virgins?” She was one of those girls my mother would have said had a “reputation.” My mother now refers to Michelle as “the little hussy,” but she laughs when she says it. I liked her, I think, but mostly I think I just liked the sex part. I feel like I didnʼt “lose” my virginity; I just tossed it to the first person who would accept it. “Here, do something with this! Iʼm tired of carrying this thing around my neck!” Michelle and I spent time together for most of the summer between my junior and senior year, but broke up just as school started. I canʼt remember why we broke up... we just didnʼt have a whole lot in common. When I was 17, I signed up to join the navy in the delayed-enlistment program. I wanted to escape Bakersfield. The thought of working for my father (he had gotten into the insurance business by this time) and taking business classes at the local community college made my stomach turn. As soon as I signed my paperwork, I met a girl named Kelly. This was the beginning of my senior year and the first time I ever fell in love. We spent the whole school year together and it was as if a veil had been lifted from my life. I actually got good enough grades to be on the honor roll again, something I hadnʼt done since the first semester of my freshman year. We were sad, though, because we always knew that our time together would be limited because Iʼd have to leave for the navy once I graduated. I was 17, she was 15. When I left for the navy, my father drove me to the recruiting center in Fresno and dropped me off and left me there crying. He thought it was a good decision for me. He thought it would make a man out of me. In talking to my parents, Iʼve discovered that their “good times” only started after I left for the navy. My mom quit her supervisor job at the telephone company to help my dad in his growing insurance business. They got progressively bigger cars and nicer houses and went on trips, did things they never did before. I was stationed in Virginia and so only saw them on three-day weekends and holidays, but most of my time home was spent with Kelly. My parents and I grew apart and now they donʼt seem to know what to make of their son, with his earrings and goatee and dreams of becoming a journalist and a writer and a poet. My father has mellowed quite a bit, but heʼs still distant. My mother seems to try to keep some kind of closeness, but itʼs a weird flavor of closeness... I sometimes feel that the only reason Iʼm welcome in their house is because I happen to share their last name. Really, I sometimes fell that if I wasnʼt directly related to them, they would never speak to me again. My sister and I have never been very close... we never really had much to say to each other. Instead of sticking up for each other while we grew up, we just tattled on each other and fought and argued. By the time I hit high school, I rarely spoke to her. Now, we exchange pleasantries on the phone a few times a year, but thatʼs about it. This makes me sad... I wish I could connect with her, but we just seem to be such different people. We donʼt seem to have any common ground. Sometimes I still feel close to my mom... she was one of my best friends growing up. Iʼm just strange to her, I think... or maybe sheʼs strange to me. I donʼt know... itʼs been a long time since we were able to spend time together. When I returned home in ʻ91, they moved to Kansas to pursue a job promotion for my dad. Since then, itʼs been the occasional holiday... oh yeah, and court date. They were there for most of them, which was very nice. But theyʼve always been more willing to send a check than to send a 5-page letter telling me how their life is going and what their hopes and dreams are. The phone calls are very short and very far apart. Anyway, back to my navy time. My mother wrote me a lot, my father never wrote me once. My sister would sometimes include letters with my momʼs letters. Kelly and I tried living together after four years of a long-distance relationship, but we were so different by that time that things didnʼt work out. We were no longer 15 and 17, we were 20 and 22, and we were going in different directions: she wanted to be a cop, I wanted to be a poet. We lived together for 11 months, then she went back to Bakersfield for Thanksgiving and never came back. I dated a few people in the navy, but not many. Once Kelly left, I was out to sea a lot. Then the Gulf War started and I spent eight months in the Red Sea. Mostly, I just held my breath and waited to get out. I hated it. I had, by this time, discovered my creative side and was very bored with the electronics Iʼd been doing in the navy. I couldnʼt wait to get out and take college classes. And thatʼs what I did. I got out, moved back to Bakersfield and started classes. My parents left for Kansas almost immediately and I was left alone once again. But, this time, I was ready to live life and have some fun and do some things. I started meeting people almost immediately and started writing for the school newspaper. I started doing poetry readings in local coffeehouses. I put together a magazine about local bands. I was offered a job writing for the local newspaper. I organized shows for local bands... one of them drew 2,500 people. I was free and I was everywhere at once for a while, it seemed, and had a lots of fun. At least, it seemed fun at the time. I dated a lot. When you do creative, fun things like I did and enough people notice them, it seems that everyone wants to get to know you. For the first time in my life, I was cool. I was popular. I dated everybody. It was a giddy time, but it didnʼt last long before I realized it was only an effort to cover up my depression and low self-esteem. All the things I did, all the creative stuff, I did not because I wanted to express myself, but because I wanted people to like me and think that I was cool. The problem was that I was having way too many problems to be “cool,” and this was not something I could hide for long. Time after time, Iʼd get into a relationship with someone who thought I was cool because of the things I did, but time after time theyʼd discover I was just hiding behind it all. I had many short-term sexual relationships. They each had names, likes, dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, hopes and dreams and all the things all people have, but I donʼt think I recognized that at the time. They were all part of my “fun” times, my endless stream of affirmation. It took some time before I realized I was only making myself feel worse about myself by using people as self-esteem boosters. The physical closeness I would share with these people only ended up making the spiritual and emotional emptiness all the more apparent. It became so obvious that something was missing. So, finally, I decided to change my life and leave Bakersfield and that way of life behind. I moved to Chico with a new resolution to get serious about my school work and serious about my personal relationships. For the most part, I was successful. I only dated four people during my time in Chico, from ʻ94 to ʼ00 (along with a few flings.) I have done the best writing of my life and have a file full of news stories Iʼve written for real newspapers over the last several years.

05.23.01 on working out

so, i joined a health club. (cue the sounds of snickers provided by everyone who has ever heard me say this before, only to give up within a week. if you listen with your eyes closed, it sounds just like a field of crickets at night...) actually, i joined a health “room,” since the little work-out space in my building is kinda small, just a few stationary bikes, a treadmill, and a work-out machine thing with all kinds of stations on it. for only $20 a month, i can work out here to my heartʼs content. at the work-out joint down the street, the one i was this close ][ to joining, you have to pay a $130 initial payment, then $50 a month after that. zoinks. yeah, iʼm tired of feeling like shit all the time, and iʼm tired of being tired all the time, so iʼm going to give it a try one more time. i would love to say that i am working “to get back into shape,” but that would imply that i was in some kind of shape at one time, which, wow, that is stretching it quite a bit. i havenʼt been in any kind of good physical shape since i was 18 years old, specifically the day i got out of boot camp. i have a photo of me on my last day of boot camp, all dressed up in my little dixie cup hat, and i have to say that i look good. i might even go so far as to say that i look pretty fucking svelte. i was little poppa e back then, back in the summer of 1985. playing the role of “mr. push-up” for nine weeks will do that for you. thatʼs what they used to call me in boot camp — mr. push up — because i was getting in trouble every time i turned around. i swear, all iʼd have to do was sneeze to get my company commander to bellow “OTT! grab some pavement and gimme 60, NOW!” of course, i was always doing much more than that. picture the camera as itʼs panning down a line of young buzz- cut recruits standing at attention, and they are all straight-backed and eagle-eyed, their brows slightly furrowed with the fear of our company commanderʼs screams, and suddenly, the camera comes to an empty space between two strapping young boys... all you see is this empty space with the broad shoulders of each recruit on either side. picture the camera dipping down to find me standing there, all 65 inches of me, and i am be-bopping to some silent hip-hop beat in my head, holding me crotch and bouncing rhythmically, looking at passing airplanes. “OTT!,” screams the company commander, “what in the HELL are you DOING, boy?” “looking at passing airplanes, company commander!” i shout, still beat boxing. “looking at passing AIRPLANES? did you just tell me that you were looking at passing AIRPLANES, ott?” my company commander is in my face now, and his face is vi- brantly red, glowingly red, and the cords of his neck stick out like high tension electrical wires. they are stretched so tight they hum. “yes, company commander, i was looking at the passing airplanes.” “and just what the HELL else are you doing, OTT, with your HAND on your DICK? you DANCING, ott?” “beat boxing, company commander, i was beat boxing.” “BEAT BOXING?! and watching passing AIRPLANES?” my company commander is apoplectic. “god-DAMN it, ott, grab some motherFUCKING pavement and gimme 60, NOW!” and i would, i would drop down and give that red-faced man 60 push-ups. this happened so often that my company commander invented a special form of push-up just for me: the dreaded “airplane push-up.” the base on which i was stationed for boot camp in san diego, ca, was slapped up next to an airport, hence the planes constantly flying overhead, and so my cc would sentence me to five airplane push-ups: when the plane goes over, i go down and hold it, then when another plane goes over, i push myself back up again. that counts as one airplane push-up and would usually take five minutes to accomplish. doing five airplane push-ups would take anywhere from 20-30 minutes depending on the airport traffic, and the company commander would have the whole 80-man company stand at parade rest and watch as i did them, my arms quivering, drooling with sweat, my face all bug-eyed and ripe. i was on the boot camp flag team, which meant that i did flag routines for half-time ceremonies at football games and boot camp gradu- ations while the other boot camp companies got to sling rifles all day. since i was the shortest, the state flag i held was at the very end, alaska. during daily practices, weʼd often have to stand at parade rest for an hour waiting for something to happen, and i developed this supernatural ability to fall asleep while standing up. iʼd just lock my hand into my belt, and my head would nod to the side and my mouth would hang open, and boom, i was asleep. and EVERY time i would get caught. imagine looking down the line of recruits standing straight and tall with their erect flags flying, and there, at the end, poor little alaska is drooping to the side, flaccid and limp, and my mouth is all hanging open. i can just imagine the company commanders pointing me out and shaking their heads, then asking each other, “you mind if i get ott this time, or do you want a crack at him?” they did not call me mr. push-up for naught, let me tell you, and by the time i finally finished boot camp, i was SO fucking fit, more healthy and fit than i ever had been or have been ever since. and now, i have access to a work-out room, and i have these goals: 1] lose 20 pounds; 2] strengthen my back and neck, which are both shot due to the fact that i canʼt seem to keep a job that doesnʼt consists of me sitting in front of a computer all day; 3] get some energy and stamina, which i have been trying to get by drinking mass amounts of mountain dew, which is actually doing nothing but increasing my tolerance to caffeine and rotting my guts. i bought stuff from target yesterday to help me with this new work-out dealie. i bought little tennis shoes (do they call them that anymore?), and some thick socks, and a little tote bag for my gear. wish me luck. maybe by the national poetry slam in august, i will be a lean, mean, poetry machine.

05.24.01 behold — boxer briefs

i am just a terrible consumer. no one wants me for a target market because i have no buyer loyalty whatsoever. except for my underwear. i am an unabashed fan of boxer briefs. i used to wear tighty-whiteys, but you just get to a point where theyʼre embarassing, you know? when youʼre in high school and a big fat dungeons and dragons dork and the only girl youʼre ever alone with is either your mother or your sister, well, tighty whiteys are just fine. but the moment you get into a situation where you might drop trou — behold, the mighty tighty whiteys. it just ainʼt happening. so you move on to boxers because all the big boys wear boxers, boxers are cool, boxers are sexy, boxers are roomie and hardly embarassing. but you sacrifice... oh yes, you do, you sacrifice, because although you have all this new found freedom, you have to start dealing with stuff you didnʼt have to in tighty whitey land, like chafing and free-balling injuries. plus you canʼt buy boxers in a three pack for $7 at target, no, theyʼre like $25 a piece... for UNDERWEAR! like kramer said, my boys need a home, and while boxers might look cooler, they certainly donʼt provide the loving home that tighty whiteys do. and now, ladies and gentleman, behold, the perfect solutions — boxer briefs! awwwww yeah, all the comfort and support of tighty whiteys without the binding elastic straps digging into your crotch, plus the casual flare of boxers. whoever invented boxer briefs, i want to kiss you! all your base are belong to us! there are underwears that you will never catch me in, though, and i will never go there, never never never... i can just imagine getting into some nasty car wreck and being pulled from the wreckage, only my pants get caught on some twisted piece of metal, and so they have to remove my pants with shears, and when they pull me out — behold, the dreaded “package” underwears: (the horror)

(the horror)

little kitty car alarm

cat piss, everywhere! aiieeeeee! aretha is totally flipping out, man, sheʼs got her kitty car alarm crackling 24-7, begging, pleading, imploring me to let her out so she can find some sexy tom cat to rid her of the burning unquenchable desire to get hot sloppy kitty sex. sheʼs more than in heat, sheʼs about to spontaneously combust. poor baby is broken... she needs to get fixed. i donʼt know why iʼve waited this long. sheʼs two and a half, and sheʼs still not spayed. i neutered her brother thelonious a long time ago, but i just havenʼt gotten around to fixing aretha. theyʼre both inside kitties, so iʼve been lazy. oh, but now, shit, i canʼt WAIT to get aretha hollowed out. she is pissing on everything, and sheʼs a vindictive little fucker about it, too. i caught her yesterday red-pawed. i was sitting on my bed reading the last issue of “bust magazine,” and here comes aretha. she climbs on top of morrisʼ sleeping bag, squats, and takes a piss right where his head would lay. and sheʼs looking at me right in the eye as she does it, too, like she wants to make really sure that i am watching her as she does it, likes itʼs some kind of feline “fuck you” display. i couldnʼt believe it, and i clapped my hands really loud and told her “no! no! no!” and she ran off and hid in the kitty condo. damn... i donʼt know quite what to do, so morris and i have this daily routine of crawling around the studio on all fours smelling everything when we get home, sniffing through clothes, pillows, blankets, newspapers... itʼs so gross. until aretha gets fixed, she and theo are on lock down. i have a hallway in my studio with doors on both ends, and i keep all the kitty supplies in there — litter box, kitty condos, food, toys etc. this is “the kitty room,” and this is where my kitties will stay until aretha is fixed. i hate to do that to them, but my god, what am i supposed to do? i kinda wish i could yell at them and give them a little spanking on their little cat bottoms and yell, “bad kitty, donʼt piss on morrisʼ head!” but they wouldnʼt know what the hell i was talking about, all they would know is that i am yelling at them and scaring them and they wouldnʼt connect it with something theyʼve done wrong. so... on tonightʼs episode of hboʼs “oz,” itʼs kitty lock down.

05.29.01 surviving the recent onslaught of parentals...

i spent the last few days with my nyc friend morris, who is sleeping on my floor until he finds his own place — and neither one of us is in any hurry for him to find his own place (in fact, we have each started to refer to each other as ʻroommatesʼ) — and his parents who had flown in unexpectedly from chicago for a visit. the parents were wonderful people — witty, urbane, liberal, open- minded, intelligent, funny — basically everything my parents are very definitely not. we actually had CONVERSATIONS over dinner, imagine, where someone would bring up a subject or ask a leading question, and we would be off on a dialogue about some current event or about some subject held dearly to one or other participants. seems so simple, yet my parents are incapable of anything but monologue. the idea of actually asking someone about their life and allowing that gentle probing to spiral into a full-blown conversation is something so foreign to my parents, yet it came so easily with morrisʼ parents. they asked me where iʼd like to take my writing — something which my parents have never asked me — and when i said that iʼd love to be a mixture of david sedaris and spaulding grey, not only did they know exactly who i was talking about, but they had seen them both live in the recent past. when morris told them my last chapbook had been reviewed in the utne reader, not only did they know exactly what he was talking about, but they had been subscribers for years. we talked musical theatre, movies, politics (we all toasted jeffers and blessed his little heart, and we all laughed at the fact that my father had used the phrase “turn-coat commie pinko bastard” to describe him recently), feminism, food, travel, poetry. when morris and i talked about the upcoming national poetry slam, his parents knew exactly what we were talking about. when i had broached the subject with my parents, they had no idea what i was talking about... i had to go, “you know, remember that big poetry festival thingie i went to in chicago in ʼ99, the one where my team won, you know, when i was on the cover of the new york times, the washington post... 60 minutes... remember?” oy. anyway, it was marvelous to hang out with such cool older people who still had so much in common with me and my life, who had some interest in their sonʼs life, who welcomed discussion on things that could possibly lead to a potential disagreement (gasp!) but which were always seen as a chance to gain insight into each otherʼs thinking. refreshing, and totally depressing at the same time. i asked morrisʼ parents to adopt me. i could file for emancipation and change my last name to “kurzman.” the thought... between my parentsʼ visit and morrisʼ parentsʼ visit within a week of each other, i think that i am in great need of a break from all this... i need to just chill and put all thoughts of parental wrong-doing out of my mind, put on the latest whiskeytown cd and pet my kitties, go to bed early... oy.

06.05.01 what’s that smell?

so, iʼm sitting here in my... err... in THE cubicle in which i work and iʼm listening to the latest cd by idlewild and iʼm doing my data entry thing and iʼm drinking my morning mountain dew and iʼm chewing my extra gum and everything is moving along all hunky-dory, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, here comes this smell... (sniff) ...what the hell is that smell? and right away, i recognize that smell, because i have been smelling that smell all too frequently lately. yes, i am talking about cat piss. what with aretha in heat every other day and squealing like a four- alarm kitty siren and begging moaning pleading to get out and get some hot cat-on-cat action, i have been smelling that smell all the damn time. in the last two weeks, iʼve had to emergency wash my quilt, pillow, and pillow case no less than three times. in fact, the kitties are under kitty quarantine until aretha gets fixed (i lock them in the large walk-through hallway/closet/bathroom area of my studio when i am at work.) but, thatʼs at home. here in the cubicle in which i work, the smell of cat piss has been, until now, a rarity. but there it was, unmistakable, the smell of cat piss. i immediately started sniffing all my clothes for evidence, my shirt, my pants... nothing, no cat piss, just the sweet smell of dryer sheets. i smelled my shoes, even my little duffel bag work-out holder thingie... nothing, no cat piss. so i tried to ignore it, thinking it was all in my mind, but man, it was so obviously there. cat piss doesnʼt fuck around, you know, itʼs not coy, it doesnʼt flirt, itʼs in your face like a drunk frat boy in a sports bar and it wonʼt go away. so i called my co-worker over and asked her to sit in my chair in my cubicle and take a whiff to see if she noticed anything odd. and she noticed nothing. NOTHING. weird voodoo cat piss smell. so, my boss comes over to me a little later and whispers one of my top ten scariest phrases: “hey, you gotta minute?” (others in my top ten list of scariest phrases: “we have to talk;” “letʼs go for a walk;” “the results of your tests have come back.”) anyway, we walk into a meeting room, she turns on the lights, she closes the door (i am sure at this point that i am about to be fired for too much surfing on the internet), and we begin to talk about increasing my job responsibilities (whew... iʼm not being fired.) ... and there it is again, the smell of cat piss, right there in the meeting room, and this means one of the following statements must be true: 1] either i am imagining the smell of cat piss; 2] or i am carrying around the smell of cat piss on my person. so i stop my boss in the middle of her speech about how she is pleased with my work and wants to give me another raise, and i say, “cynthia, can you do me a favor? can you smell me and tell me if i smell like... uhm... cat pee?” she smirks (sheʼs a mom, so sheʼs used to having to perform various sniff tests), then starts sampling my odor, first my shirt (nothing), then my pants (nothing), then she looks at me... pauses... and says, “eirik, itʼs your beanie.” (pause) dear lord. (pause) i take my yellow and black striped beanie off my head and raise it to my nose...... and yes, there it is, issuing forth in plumes, the unmistakable stench of cat piss... on my BEANIE, which has been ON MY HEAD all night long while i was sleeping and all morning long while iʼve been entering data. that means that the cute girl who i sat next to on the bus, the cute one, the one who was reading “a heartbreaking work of staggering genius,” the one who actually got up at one of the stops and moved to another seat and made me think, “hmmm, i wonder why she moved? maybe she saw me reading over her shoulder...” well, this means the girl on the bus probably told all her friends that some schmuck who smelled like cat piss sat next to her on the bus today. great. now iʼm Cat Piss Guy. even worse, iʼm Cat Piss On The Bus Guy Who Was Reading My Book Over My Shoulder Guy. thatʼs just great. and i just shaved my head again — bicʼed it this time right to the bone — and now i canʼt wear my beanie because my babies marked it, and now my headʼs cold. but, at least idlewild rocks. 06.14.01 the sniffle nazi

i have bad hay fever, and i woke up this morning to a world of sniffles. so, iʼm on the bus to work, and i am reading a book — one featuring hobbits and such... god, so embarassing to re-live the inner geek — and suddenly i am tapped on the shoulder, and not just tapped on the shoulder, but rather vigorously poked. i turn and see a tissue fluttering and inch from my face clenched between two outstretched fingers, and i focus on the face of the owner of the fingers, this dour business-lady, who then says, “tissue?” i pause a moment, move back a bit from the dangling tissue, then say, “actually, i have my own. thank you very much.” then, the business-lady says, and i quote, “then why donʼt you USE it?” i couldnʼt believe it, i just stared at her slack-jawed, then i said, and i quote, “oh my goodness, how very rude of you! you shove tissue in my face and demand i use it immediately? i donʼt know who elected you chief of the sniffle police, lady, but youʼd better hope i donʼt blow my nose on your shirt sleeve.” then i hurrumphed — i actually hurrumphed — and i returned to my book, and the whole section of the bus erupted in poorly-stifled titters and giggles and even one or two blatant guffaws and chortles. and i have to admit, i was just about to take care of my sniffling business with my own tissue moments before the business-lady rudely shoved her tissue in my face, but from then on, as a protest, i gleefully and rather exuberantly sniffled the entire bus ride, and each time i did it, two or three people would giggle. i never looked back, but i could just imagine the business-lady clinching her teeth and glaring at the back of my head, the veins at her temples pulsing off-time. hee hee. i was “sniffles guy” on the bus today. much better than being “cat piss beanie guy” like i was the other day, which, really, is another story for another time.

06.14.01 gooey ducks

just outside the window on the 14th floor of the building in which i work, in fact the window just over my shoulder, i can see all the way to bremerton. bremerton was just one of many places my dad was stationed in his four-year stint in the navy. we lived in bremerton in ʼ77, the year “star wars” came out. i was 10. my parents wouldnʼt let me see it until my 11th birthday the next year, by which time we were living in san diego for the second time in two years. i have very good memories of bremerton, all snow and frozen rain puddles and endless fields of wild blackberry bushes with huge furry bumblebees. if you snuck up to the bumblebess all quiet like, you could “thump” them, which meant you bumped them gently from above with your hand and ran away as fast as you could. we never got stung once, not even once, and we ate blackberry jam and jelly and pie and all sorts of blackberry things all summer long. we even dug for “gooey ducks,” which were these long clams as big as both of your little kid hands, then fried them in strips like french fries. you waited until a spurt of water shot up from the sand, then you knew a gooey-duck was just underneath, and you dug and dug until you unearthed it. i think i want to take a ferry and visit it, see if i can find the house we lived in back then, see if the g.i. joe i threw in the sticker bushes is still there after all this time.

06.14.01 silver and gold

when i went to elementary school, we had these things to do called SRAʼs. from what i remember, they were these laminated cards with some sort of story or passage on them, and you had to read them, then answer a bunch of questions based on what you had just read. there were all kinds of levels of difficulty, ranging from red and aqua at the very bottom to silver and gold all the way at the top. apparantly, they were supposed to take students several grades to finish, but i was a precocious little reader, and i finished them all in a couple of months, which, i guess, we werenʼt really supposed to do. i remember learning what an “adjective” was long before i ever heard the word pronounced, so i thought of them as “ad-JECT-ives.” okay, wait, background... when i was in third grade, i was reading the fifth grade book and taking sixth grade spelling tests... all i ever did was read... favorite thing ever... my favorite book of all time when i was in third grade was “my side of the mountain,” about a boy who runs away to live in the forest with a pet falcon and a pet weasel and... anyway, i was the undisputed KING of the SRAʼs, the wonder and pride of the school for having finished them all so quickly. then my fatherʼs navy ship moved from bremerton to san diego and we had to go with it. at the new school, i was tested for the SRAʼs to see which level i was to be placed in, and even though i told them i had finished them all — all the way up to silver and gold — they forced me to take the test anyway. i was so offended, but i took the test... what else can an 8-year-old do? and they snatched the test from me before i finished, telling me my time was up. (“timeʼs up? thereʼs a time limit? they didnʼt have a time limit at my other school? you never told me there was a time limit!”) since i didnʼt finish the test, they made me start all over again on the SRAʼs, kicked me all the way back to aqua and stripped me of my silver and gold accomplishments. i was horrified. i mean, i was already reading at a college level, but i just kinda... well, i was a slow reader, and i tended to mouth the words as i read, which slowed me down even further. anyway, now i had to learn about nouns and verbs again, and... god, it was so lame. i crossed my little arms and refused to do them, told them that i had already finished the whole thing — all the way up to SILVER and GOLD! — and i demanded that they call my former school and verify my accomplishments, but to no avail. i had to start all over again. so, i did them all in two weeks, just plowed through all the colors, all the way up to silver and gold. this was a self-taught sort of thing, and you had to do the work and keep track yourself, doing maybe one or two a day, but i was doing 15 or 20 at a time. i wouldnʼt even read the passages since i already knew all the answers, so iʼd just fill out one worksheet and move on to the next one. when i proudly told the teacher that i had finished them all, she didnʼt believe me and thought i was lying. i showed her my work, but she wouldnʼt accept it and accused me of cheating. i got sent to the principalʼs office and was reprimanded for my insolence. and i never did another SRA after that. i refused. it was my little protest, and my parents were eventually called in for a special meeting. i was described as “difficult,” but my parents backed me and told the teacher to her face that i had finished all the SRAʼs not just once but now twice and they supported my refusal to be forced to do them a third time. the teacher was apoplectic, and she promptly changed her job title to “thorn in eirikʼs side” for the rest of the school year. when it came to SRA time, i got to read while the other students did their work. it was a huge victory, and i still glow at the thought to this day. i read things like “blubber” (which had cuss words!) and “the cat ate my gymsuit” and the entire “chronicles of narnia” series. awww yeah. i think my favorite book arount that time, besides “my side of the mountain,” was “the cay.” oooh, and i read “jaws,” too, which was really scary since we lived across the street from the beach. oooh, and “close encounters of the third kind” was a big favorite for me as well. i havenʼt thought about SRAʼs in about a million years. iʼm surprised i even remember what they were called.

06.14.01 crushes

i have ﬁrm rules about crushes. 1] thereʼs a big difference between a crush and falling in like with someone. this is a very important factor to consider when enjoying a nice crush. when you genuinely like someone, it is based on a number of real life things, like shared experiences and interests, late night conversations wide-eyed over candlelight while listening to nick drake. falling in like includes a certain sense of mutual affection, where little baby steps of appreciation are matched by the other person and built upon slowly and surely. hence, falling in like with someone is based on a little thing called “reality.” a crush, however, doesnʼt need reality at all to exist. all you need to crush on someone is for them to smile at you as they hand you a latte from across the counter, or touch their hair in a certain way as they bag your groceries, or touch your hand gently as they ask you to borrow a pencil. awww yeah, and then itʼs on, you can crush all you want, and it doesnʼt matter what music they like or what politics they have or what kind of poetry they write or read, no, because a crush has very little basis in reality. thatʼs what makes them so fun: there are no restrictions. you can simply bask in your private little glow for someone and no one in the whole world needs to know some little thing about them rocks your world. 2] never admit your crush to the recipient of said crush. a truly good crush is ALWAYS unrequited, and that is what makes a truly good crush so good. it is a secret little warmth inside your tummy that no one knows about — less a crush, really, and more a gentle squeeze when someone special smiles at you, or when you catch the faint scent of hair conditioner in the wind as they pass. a good crush is a cooling drizzle on a hot day, not a downpour that soaks you to the bone. it is the soft breeze on the back of your neck, not an unstoppable hurricane. it is special, it is simple, and it is very private and should only be shared with the closest of friends, but NEVER with the recipient of your crush. admitting your crush to the crushee destroys the sanctity of the crush. it is no longer innnocent. what you might be able to rationalize as a “gentle admission” is actually more often an unwelcome burden with a tangle of emotional strings attached. in actually involving your crush, you are saying, “here, deal with this, handle this thing that iʼve allowed to grow that has absolutely nothing to do with you as a person and everything to do with something i completely invented one day based on the way you smiled.” nope, party foul. the best crushes are the secret ones, the gentle ones, the ones only you and your best friend know about (unless of course you have a crush on your best friend, which is a whole other can of beans.) 3] rule #2 can ONLY be broken if the crush is mutual. exercising this rule is, of course, fraught with danger. of course, youʼll WANT to believe that the other person has a crush on you, too, and your little crusher brain will be whispering in your ear, “you KNOW that girl who works at the counter of the cookie shop digs you, too, so why donʼt you just ask her out?” sounds convincing, but no... if you have a crush on the cute girl who works at the counter of the cookie shop, chances are EVERYONE has a crush on the cute girl who works at the counter of the cookie shop, and imagine how gross it would be to have every tom, dick, and hairy bastard come up to you unannounced and uninvited, pledging their hopeless crushes to you on a daily basis. itʼs okay to chat with a crush, but really, donʼt allow yourself to be that creepy person who lurks around the coffeeshop near closing time hoping for a conversation with a crush. ugh, ask anyone, that is not endearing at all, that is creepy. if you have no idea whether your admission of a crush would be welcome, then it probably is NOT welcome, therefore you should keep it to yourself. besides, this crush has more to do with your need to have a crush than it does on that particular person anyway, so why bother including them in it and ruining it all? theyʼll end up feeling uncomfortable (“oh look, here comes that guy who said he had a crush on me... so creepy.”), youʼll feel embarassed (and never enter the cookie shop again), and then what will you have? nothing. crush in silence. that is the true wussy way. 4] if you do decide to break rule #2...... and your crushee isnʼt interested, then just move on with your life and whisper to yourself that itʼs much better to regret something youʼve done than to regret something that you didnʼt have the courage to even try. for heart-rending evidence of this, simply read the story behind my last big crush:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/poetryslam/day/2000/06/08

so, there are my rules. i crush on everyone i meet for at least a few minutes, sometimes longer, but rarely to a point that i would ever actually tell them. when i actually LIKE someone, well, thatʼs a different story... that actually has something to do with, eh, reality. crushes are for just for funsies. for more reading on crushes, click on this poem i wrote about a crush i had on a painfully cute girl at a poetry reading:

http://www.wussyboy.org/WebSitePages/Crushworthy.htm

we ended up crushing on each other and launching into six months of really good times, a rare example when admitting your crush to the crushee was the right decision at just the right time.

06.20.01 ﬁnding wonka

iʼve heard rumors that a new version of “willy wonka” is about to be filmed, and i am filled with both wonder and annoyance at the thought. i mean, why remake something that was absolutely perfect in every way the first time around? you donʼt see people lining up to re-do “the godfather,” do you? no, because how in the world could you top the best movie ever ever ever? why would you even want to try? why remake “casablanca?” anyway, my roomie morris and i were on the bus this morning trying our hands at casting a new version of “willy wonka” that wouldnʼt suck. we decided the new version would just be called “wonka,” and the choice for director is so obvious that it barely requires mentioning, but i will anyway: tim burton. i mean, come on, duh, thatʼs such a given. if anyone could do justice to a new version of wonka, it would be tim burton. can you imagine how cool the inside of the chocolate factory would be? awww yeah, it would be hell cool, just the right mixture of wonder and scariness. okay, the next question would be the casting of wonka... who? who in their right mind would DARE try to inhabit a role that was PERFECTLY inhabited by gene wilder... i mean, there was no separation between wonka and wilder, they were the same person. never has there been an better example of perfect casting than gene wilder as wonka, so who in the world could pull it off? a few years ago, i wouldʼve thought robin williams would be a good wonka, but did you see “toys,” the half-assed rip-off of wonka a few years back? ugh... if robin williams was wonka, you just know christopher columbus would be the director, and, oh... my... god... hello, “mrs. doubtfire?” hello, “bicentenial man?” no, robin is sitting this one out. besides, heʼs getting too old. morris said he could imagine johnny depp as wonka, but after a swift kick in the shin for having the audacity to even give breath to such a heathen thought, he backed down. i think the role would eventually go to jim carrey, which, really, makes me cringe at first, because i just havenʼt seen the kind of subtlety in carrey that would be so very necessary for wonka. heʼd be too willing to vamp it up and ham it up and make it some silly in your face bullshit. tim burton would have to really reign him in. but... when i think about it... he might be a good choice. i mean, who else is there? christopher lloyd might have made a good wonka around the time of “back to the future,” but heʼs too old now. oh, and morris and i decided that the most inspired bit of casting for the new wonka would be to have gene wilder play the role of grandpa joe, sort of as a tip of the hat to original wonka. that would be choice. can you imagine... 1] wonka as directed by quentin tarantino and starring samuel l. jackson as wonka? it would rated r, and the oompah loompahʼs would be bad-ass sawed-off-shotgun motherfuckers, and wonka would be making more than chocolate in his secret plant (can you say “colum- bian gold?”) sample dialogue: “augustus gloop, hand me my cane!” “yes sir, mr. wonka. which one is it?” “itʼs the one with... oh, just hand me my goddamn cane before i shoot you in the face, boy!” 2] wonka directed by david fincher and starring ed norton as wonka... wait... ed norton as willy wonka? say... that just might work... i mean, getting back to the original tim burton “real” wonka re-make, you could have ed norton as, like, willy wonka, and at the end, it would be revealed that ed was ACTUALLY a grown up charlie bucket who had assumed the role of willy wonka, and at the very end, you would see gene wilder as the elder willy wonka in a cameo. awww yeah, now THATʼs what iʼm talking about! but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, i ask to consider the person i would most certainly choose, who i think would be perfect in the role of willy wonka, the man-child with a twisted sense of humor and a fragility he hides by surrounding himself in a never-never land of childhood fantasies. yes, ladies and gentlemen, i offer to you the perfect wonka as directed by tim burton: paul reubens, aka peewee herman. think about it. it would fucking perfect. (think about it.)

06.25.01 cat-sitting satan spawn

alyssa is leaving chico for parts south (to be with her parents over summer break) and parts much further south (to costa rica with her family for vacation), so i drove down to chico last weekend to pick up some stuff from storage (desk, phone with answering machine, record collection [hells yeah!]) and, most important of all (at least for alyssa) her cat lucy, which is short for “lucy furr,” which is a play on the word “lucifer,” from whom lucy is obviously spawned since she is by far the most ill-manner, foul-tempered, mean-spirited little kitty i have ever had the displeasure of meeting in my long life. for those keeping score, this brings the grand total of beings living in my little studio apartment to five: me, morris, aretha, thelonious, and now lucy. the first night was wretched, a real trial of kakfa-esque proportions, with lucy transmogrifying from a sweet little kitty less than year old to a demonic tasmanian devil making these horrid burbling sounds in the back of her throat like linda blair in “the exorcist,” this hissing, spitting, clawing, scratching, biting menace to society. she was so very uncomfortable at the thought of being in this foreign space without her proper human that she just went ballistic and proceeded to fuck shit up out of spite, pure spite. this kitty was mean... lord, lord, morris and i thought weʼd never get to sleep that first night, with lucy lying in wait for a few moments then launching into another attack several times an hour to show her hatred for the entire human race. what a little beast. thankfully, she has calmed down and can almost sometimes be confused with a sweetheart little kitty, although, and i STRESS this, not NEARLY as sweet and kind and gentle and loving and intelligent and cool and kick ass as MY kitties, but, nevertheless, she has calmed down and actually allows morris and i to pet her on occasion, although not for very long at all, which is better than nothing, really. so much poop. how that much poop can come out of such tiny kitty heinies is beyond me. three kitties using one kitty box... aww yeah, youʼd better believe iʼm a cat box cleaning son-of-a-gun. every morning. without fail.

06.26.01 i will die someday

i have come to certain times in my life where my surroundings held nothing for me, like i was not even there, like i could look right through people and things as if they were cellophane, and anything anyone said to me rang hollow and distant, and all my plans associated with that time and place meant nothing to me, held no meaning, were only holding me by the narrowest thread, the slenderest of connections. for instance, the last day of working at a job where you have already given your two weeks notice, and everyone knows you are leaving, and the little bits of work that you are doing on your last day donʼt really amount too much because you donʼt really care if they get done because you are so out of there that you donʼt even care, and all the people... whatever it is they are saying or doing and all their little dramas and all the ofﬁce politics, it all means nothing to you now because you have removed yourself from it all in preparation for your leaving. and you look around and think, “this is the last time i will see that potted plant with the little brown tips.” and you look around and think, “tomorrow, this will no longer be my cubicle. it will remain empty until someone else claims it.” and all your stuff is already home, all your photos and witty newspaper clippings and stickers and cds and such, all the things you bring to work to help you through your day. and so you just go through the motions, waiting for the end, waiting for 5 p.m., and then you leave and you never see any of this ever again, nor do they see you. i was on the bus the other day, looking out the window at the buildings and the trees and the people and overcast sky, all the people going about their business, dogs, cats, homeless people, jet planes, taxicabs, teevees, movies. and i wondered if maybe people who are in the ﬁnal stages of dying look around the world and feel the same way about it that i have on my last day of a job. it made me wonder if i will ever get to that place where i can close my eyes, take a deep breath, hold it... then exhale and nod my head and say, “okay, i am ready.” and then let go. and the really fucked up thing about dying is that i can get all scared and freaked out and fucking wound up about and let it prevent me from living this life, or i can take a deep breath and realize that life is for living not contemplating death, but, either way, there is no avoiding it. i will die someday. all the wondering about what itʼs like to die will be over because i will know, wondering whether a peace overtakes you as you fade away or if youʼll kick and scratch and claw as you are pulled under the surface... whether or not i am ready or have a healthy mindset about death, whether or not i have accepted it, whether or not i am ready, it will happen, someday. which could be 40 years from now. i would be 74. or 15. i would be 49. or 2. i would be 36. or tomorrow. 34. or right now, as i type this, aneurism... POP! thinking about death fucks me up. i wish that i was one of those blindly religious people. even though i think they are sheep and doomed to never collect on their holy insurance policies theyʼll pay into their whole lives, i still think that at the very end, at their last gasping breath, their last shredding bout of consciousness, they will be at more peace than i will, because they will be thinking they are going to a better place and i will just winking out of existence. fuck. i want my kitties.

06.26.01 rough seas

i have never witnessed death. my two grandpas died: my fatherʼs father was only 57, and he died of cancer after a life of smoking and drinking too much, and i remember that he got so desperate toward the end that he and my grandma flew to the philippines to have a “psychic healer” work on his lung cancer; my motherʼs father died at 61 from a heart attack after a life of smoking and drinking too much. someone i once dated died in a horrific car accident. she was only 20. the crash was so bad no one, not even the family, was allowed to view the body completely. her mother had to identify her by the tattoo on her foot. my dad put my dog chinook to sleep. some kid i kinda sort knew in high school died in a drunk driving accident. i think. itʼs hard to remember. iʼve seen two dead people. they were both when i was in the navy. it was christmas eve ʼ90, just a few weeks before the gulf war officially started on jan. 17, which is my motherʼs birthday. i was on an aircraft carrier called the uss saratoga, which was parked about a mile from the coast outside haifa, israel. the aircraft carrier carried 5,000 people, and it was so big that it couldnʼt park anywhere close to the shipyards in haifa, so little ferries holding 200 people at a time would run back and forth between the ship and the shore, ferrying sailors to visit the shops and such in haifa and back again once they were drunk and loaded down with trinkets. the week before, we had been in antalya, turkey, and rough seas had canceled the running of the ferries, which meant a lot of sailors got stuck on the ship, which sucked for them, but it was cool for those lucky fools caught on shore, like me, who got a few extra days on shore while the wind and rain whipped the ocean into meringue. anyway... the following week in haifa, the captain vowed that nothing would keep the sailors who were due vacation time from leaving the ship via ferries no matter how rough the seas got, which was cheered by everyone. on christmas eve, the winds were furious and the waves were extremely choppy. at about 11 p.m., a ferry boat carrying 200 sailors drunk with sleep and alcohol was on its way from the shore to the ship, and a wave turned it upside-down and dragged it under, taking the 200 people with it. most got out, either by breaking through windows and swimming free or from simply jumping over the side as it went down, but then they had to swim the remaining 300 yards to the ship fully clothed in freezing water in the middle of the night. more than 20 were not so lucky; they rode it all the way down in the icy cold water, 60 feet to the bottom, and they never came back up. the first dead guy i saw that night was in the hangar bay on the aircraft carrier. the call had gone out for anyone who knew cpr to come and help drag people from the cold water and carry them to the medical facilities below decks. after the initial flurry of activity began to ebb, the focus of everyone in the hangar bay, hundreds of people soaking wet and crying and breathing hard and trying to quiet their panic, everyone was looking at these three medics pumping the chest of a young man and breathing into his mouth, trying to get him to come back to life, to reboot, to jumpstart. all the hubbub quieted down and then the only sounds you could hear were the vibrating hum of the ship itself — the lights overhead, the air, the distant engines — and the rhythmic pumping of the arms of the medic on the dying manʼs chest. they pumped it a long time, and all of us, hundreds, standing there, shuffling our feet, hands deep in pockets, heads held low but eyes watching, we just stared and strained, trying to give the medics an extra psychic boost, thinking and breathing “cʼmon, man... cʼmon... come back...” after forever, days, weeks, months, years... the medic finally started crying and yelling at the guy, telling him to fucking come out of it, and his partner held on to him and said thatʼs it, itʼs over, and he shook his head, and we all knew. the guy was dead, had been dead the whole time. the next day i saw the other dead person. a bunch of us were on the flight deck the next morning as navy div- ers swam the 60 yards to the bottom of the ocean and recovered dead bodies. i remember one guy they pulled out... i will never forget it... his body had stiffened and was frozen in a crouched fetal position, with his arms covering his head, like a little kid stifling tears. some sailor next to me said something like, “well, at least that guy didnʼt feel anything... look at him... he was probably sleeping when the ferry went down... didnʼt even know what happened... just kept on sleeping.” and i turned to this sailor and i told him he was full of shit for thinking that. imagine the ferry boat is full of drunk sailor, some sleeping, some passed out, some bleary-eyed but awake, and suddenly the boat sinks. that guy was below decks, in the dark, with water gushing through the broken windows, a huge flurry of legs kicking and fists pumping as a hundred sailors fought the water and tried to get out. and it was cold, and dark, and the ferry sank so quick that the windows exploded outward from the building pressure. there was no way that guy couldʼve remained asleep, and even if he never woke up, his body wouldʼve been relaxed, not curled up like that. no, what happened was this guy couldnʼt get out, and he knew it, and his final act on this earth was to pull himself of in a tight little ball and cover his eyes with his arms, just like a little kid, and thatʼs how he drowned.” the other sailor just looked at the scuffed black polish of his boots, and i just looked at the metal side of the ship. then i went back inside. i knew one guy who rode the ship all the way down the bottom and lived to tell about it. he was an asshole, and i never liked the guy. he was one of those career navy guys who probably couldnʼt hold a real job in the outside world, yet held power over you because he outranked you. complete dick. he was in the ferry the whole time as it sank, and he held his breath the whole way down, crawling in circles in the dark trying to find a window, a door, anyway out. he felt the ferry hit the bottom, and still he couldnʼt find a way out. finally, on what he said was his third and final try, he along something that felt like glass. he jammed his fist through it, then pulled himself through it, then suddenly he was out of the ferry and in the open ocean. he pushed off the bottom of the boat and swam the 60 feet to the surface. on the way up, one of his lungs collapsed. once he reached the air, he could barely breath it, then he had to somehow paddle the 300 yards to the ship. once he got there, he waved off help and climbed up rope ladders to the side of the floating dock at the tail end of the carrier. he was coughing blood. when several people tried to get their arms around him and carry him to the medical facilities, he angrily brushed them aside and told them to help the other people in the water... he told them he would walk himself down to the medical department. damn... after that, he was never as big an asshole as i had thought before. i still didnʼt like him all that much, but damn... he was a survivor. i think his last name was vickry. i think my biggest fear is dying alone. i donʼt want to die at all, but it appears that i have to, so i do not want to die unless i am surrounded by friends and family in a warm safe place. i want them to all touch me and hold me as i go. i am afraid i will die before i feel what love is really like. that makes me terribly sad.

06.28.01 notes from the past

i got an e-mail out of the blue from jovanah, someone i knew a long time ago in bakersﬁeld. the last time i saw her was in a crowd of thousands at a dave matthews concert. that was in ʼ99, now all of a sudden i get an e-mail. we have been catching up with each other, and sharing our memories of the past. she said some things about the me she remembers that struck me:

To me you always seemed like a little boy caught in an adult life with the promise that your talent would take you on many adventures. I also liked watching you from afar and seeing how once you left the stage or spot light you would turn from this larger than life persona, back into a shy giggly boy.

itʼs interesting to see how little iʼve changed since ʼ93 when we hung out. odd, too, because i like to think that iʼve changed a lot.

Iʼve never known such a nice person to have such a knack for pissing people off.

same as it ever was, same as it ever was...

06.30.01 listen: AVOID A.I. AT ALL COSTS!!!

way back a long time ago, i heard a rumor about one of my favorite directors, stanley kubrick. i heard that he was developing a movie called “a.i.” i knew nothing about the story, just the title, but i was so excited, and just knew that kubrick could take on the concept of artifi- cial intelligence in a way that no other director could. i was filled with visions of “2001” and “a clockwork orange,” and i just couldnʼt wait... this might be even ten, fifteen years ago. but then several years later, i heard rumors that kubrick was putting this project aside to allow the special effects industry time to catch up with what he needed it to do, so, in the meantime, he took on a project called “eyes wide shut.” and then he died. shit. but then spielberg picked it up, and suddenly i hear that it is this story about a boy robot, and instantly, iʼm wrinkling my nose, going, “a robot boy who wants to be a real boy? good god...” i mean, i was thinking HAL taken to the next level, thinking some kind of new take on “2001,” but this new-fangled pinocchio... and in the hands of spielberg, who you know was drooling at the idea of taking ET to the next level rather than 2001... but, i was still a bit excited; after all, i had waited for this thing for over a decade. well, i have seen it. and let me tell you, i have now made it my mission in life to tell people to avoid seeing the shite called “a.i.” at all costs. i am serious, what value there is in the movie is totally destroyed by the horribly nauseating ending. i mean, it is bad, so “mystery science theatre 3000” bad that morris and i were laughing out loud at parts that were overwhelmingly absurd, mocking the screen defiantly, then we actively booed the screen as it finally, thankfully, ended. good god, what was spielberg thinking? the end is so tacked on... you have this perfect kubrickian ending, then, mysteriously, the movie goes on, and i swear to god thereʼs a little subtitle that says, “2000 years later,” and morris and i just looked at each other and were like, “que?” and it just kept going, and we were like, “no... no, please, no... just... just stop... somebody make him stop... CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE STOP THIS THING?!” spielberg sets up this ridiculous ending in a blatant attempt to wring more tears out of the completely dry rag of an audience, and it is just... oh god, itʼs just shameless and vulgar, and it robs whatever enjoyment was offered in the movie. not that it was a great movie to begin with, but had it just ended when it shouldʼve, then it wouldʼve been an 8 on a 1-10 scale, which is not half bad at all. but god, with the ending, it drops — nay, plummets — to a 3 or a 4 in the space of 15 or so minutes. i tell you this: if we give shite like this our money, then it will only give the assholes running hollywood more incentive to shovel more of this shite down our throats. defy the man, dislodge yourself from the matrix and boycott this sentimental bullshit. ugh, the ending... itʼs so amazingly laughingly horrible, just unintentionally hilarious and terribly offensive, like who the fuck told spielberg this was a good way to end this movie? like, is he surrounded by yes men who are afraid to look him in the eye and say, “uhmm... mr. spielberg? uhm... i donʼt mean to be rude or anything, but... my god, what were you thinking about that ending?” and the kicker is that there seems to be this enormous conspiracy to proclaim this movie is a revelation... i mean, just TRY to find a negative review of it anywhere on the internet... the new york times, ebert, time magazine, cnn... jesus, they all claim to love it and NONE of them mention the perfectly wretched ending. itʼs as if spielberg has paid them all off. i looked and looked and found ONE review that echoed my feelings on this crap, and it was on a fan site, not a mainstream media site: http://www.ifmagazine.com they liked the movie overall, a bit more overall than i did, but they hated the ending as much as i did:

“Then to cap it off, the film ends with a totally tacked on Spielber- gian finale that elicits more chuckles than anything else when the film comes exploding apart at its seams for its grand finale.”

iʼll say. ugh, you should probably see the fucking thing just so you can bitch with me. it is THAT bad. haley joel is great in it, though, and jude is really good as well. that kid is something else. i hope he just keeps getting better and better. but god, that ending...

07.02.01 the joys of technology

i love and hate my imac. i love that it is one of only four appliances that i own, and that it performs so many functions. it is my cd player, my dvd movie player, my tool for connecting with the world via e-mail and websites. i use it to design posters and fliers for my shows, write poetry and journal entries, post my website and press kit for the world to see, play the occasional (and rare) computer game. my big project now is to record and burn a cd of my own work, with me performing poetry in front of (hopefully) cheering crowds all over the country. so, i bought a cd burner and a mini-disc recorder with a nice mic, see, so that i can record directly into the mini-disc then download the tracks to the computer, then burn a cd which can then be sold at shows for $10 a pop. and along the way to this goal, a great big negative has made itself perfectly clear to me: it is unhealthy and wrong to allow any one thing to become a hub of all your activities. my imac, my lovely fucking crashing all the motherfucking time imac. and all my plans. i swear to god, i take one tiny step forward, then get pushed 12 steps back. take, for instance, the mini-disc recorder. i figured buying this tiny mini-disc would be a great way to capture my shows live, using this digital disc format so that i could get quality sound while carrying the mic and the recorder on my person during the show. i have heard of other slam poets doing it this way and have heard decent results, so i thought iʼd give it a try. so i shell out $220 for one of these portable babies and a connector to attach it to my imac (and the thing is supposed to be green like in the photo, but it turns out that itʼs more like a mountain dew color, sorta like the neon piss you make when you are taking multi-vitamins.) then i get a boss cd burner for another $300. and i get it all home, unwrap it all, attach the mic, go out and record a few pieces in front of audiences, get all excited about the quality over headphones, run home to plug it into my computer... and there is no “line out” to connect the thing to the computer. the connector is specifically for connecting the imac to the mini-disc so that i can download files FROM the computer TO the mini-disc, but there is no way of getting whatʼs on the mini-disc TO the computer, no OUTPUT jack of any kind. what the fuck? why didnʼt anyone tell me about this? why didnʼt i think to look before i bought the damned thing? and i bought this fancy cool cd burner, see, so that once i get the tracks onto the computer, i can burn cds, but... if i canʼt even get the tracks ONTO the computer in the first place, i am foiled, and there the cd burner sits, winking at me like iʼm some dorm rat and whispering, “but think of all the mp3ʼs you can burn from the ʻnet!” bollocks! so, i look online and find that i can buy this program called “adaptec toast titanium” that comes with special cables, see, that will attach any audio source — be it mini-disc or record player or cd player — to the imac and burn cds, which is hella cool since i have a bunch of records i would LOVE to have on cd. so i order the thing, right, from this computer store, and time goes by, i get all excited, and they finally call me and tell me itʼs in... i go in, all excited, picturing myself turning records into cds... and they keep me waiting for an hour trying to find the software, which, in the end, they never had, and now i have to wait another two weeks. urgh. so i went and bought these cool computer speakers so that i can actually hear the music that is playing on my computer rather than just sorta kinda hear it through the little built-in speakers. in the meantime, i canʼt plug the mini-cd into the stupid computer anyway, but i read online that i can pug it in via the headphone output, which will not give digital quality sounds, and would add a bit of hiss to the mix, but iʼm thinking it will be okay... do-able, especially with this new software which supposedly takes out the ticks and hiss of recording records, so, hey, it should be able to clean up the hiss on this mini-disc rig. then i go and do something stupid... i decided in this frenzy of buying stuff for my computer that i should update my operating system to the latest os-x, and now NOTHING on my fucking computer works right, and i canʼt even burn a simple old music cd anymore because something... fucking... changed, man, and i donʼt know what happened, now it just wonʼt work, and all my software that was on my harddrive is fucking tweaking out and the stupid imac crashes every fucking time i sneeze and i canʼt even fucking play myst III anymore... oooh, but i can turn all my cds into mp3ʼs, ooooh, whooptie fucking do. urgh, now even if i get the goddamned software, the computer thatʼs at the center of the equation has decided to take a shit, and now i have all this computer stuff and iʼve spent all this money and... and... and now iʼm just standing there with my, errr, poetry in my hand. now i have to cart the whole shebang to the computer store like a muggle and say, wounded, “can you make all this... work? please? just... fucking... make it work again.” and theyʼll look at me like some chump yuppie who just bought a computer and doesnʼt know how to use it, and theyʼll smirk their pimply 20-year-old working their way through college smiles... grrr, iʼve tried everything else, and now i have to spend even more money just to get everything back to the way it was before i got this bright idea. here is wisdom: allow anything to become the center of your little universe, especially an inanimate object, and you are doomed to see the folly of it all. take out the hub, and the spokes fall like matchsticks. all is vanity. avoid seeing “a.i.” at all costs.

07.05.01 ﬁreworks and other ephemera

i saw fireworks last night for the first time in a long time. just a pleasant walk from my front door. my sorta kinda roomie morris and i got to gas works park early and claimed a spot with an old blanket that smelled suspiciously of kitty. it was fun to be a part of such a huge bustling crowd. being a speck in the midst of a horde of people sometimes freaks me out a bit, but i was all chill, reading, listening to music, basking in the sun, using sunscreen for the first time in i donʼt know how long. we ate pad thai from lotus thai and drank root beer from qvc, then when the fireworks finally came, wow, it was pretty cool. we were perfectly positioned on the side of the hill just under the inflated statue of liberty head and got a wide- open view of the entire lake and the skyline and the barge shooting off the fireworks in time with the music piped over loadspeakers. my favorite was this sparkling willow tree looking one that traced the path of the shell with sparkles that stayed there floating, it was like a waterfall of stars that floated there for several seconds, like ten seconds or more... made me think of how ephemeral everything is, just like fireworks. take for instance a kiss. a good kiss is just... god, it can buckle my knees and made me giddy, make me dizzy, especially when their lips and your lips lock just right, click, like puzzle pieces meant to fit together, and your tummies are pressed together and you can feel their heartbeat through their sweatshirt... lord, lord. but, just like fireworks, itʼs suddenly over and itʼs like... you need more. one firework exploding in the sky is beautiful and amazing, but it only lasts a second, then youʼre like, “more. more.” kissing is like that, and hugging, too, like you have this intimacy battery that needs recharging on a regular basis, otherwise you get all sad. itʼs like when you press your hand into a soft plastic padded seat... your handprint will be there for a while, but then it fades, and soon itʼs as if it were never touched at all. a body needs to be held on a some kind of regular basis, otherwise we kinda disappear, i think. at least thatʼs the way i feel. having my kitties has been the best thing for dealing with that sort of thing... my kitties are always eager for some intimacy, especially theo, who is just a little lover kitty. if he were a soft plastic padded chair, he would have my handprints all over him. i think there should be a group of people who just walk up to lonely people and give them hugs so that they know they still exist. sometimes itʼs so easy to forget. but then itʼs so easy to want more, more, more... itʼs almost as if having only one firework only makes you yearn for more, like one lays potato chip, you canʼt have just one. (a white man asked a native american man why so many of his tribeʼs songs were about rain, and the indian man said that rain is a rare thing in his culture, therefore they sing about it, to conjure it. the indian man then asked the white man if that is why so many songs in his culture are about love.) (i got that from a readerʼs digest that was on the back of my grandmotherʼs toilet.) (i feel kinda dorky for quoting readerʼs digest... perhaps i shouldʼve said it was in the utne reader instead.) i think if more political meetings between nations began with hugging, then maybe we would get more done. once you realize that we are all humans and that we all need to feel loved and needed and have fleshy bodies that need to be held on occasion, then maybe it would be harder to invent secret weapons meant to tear those fleshy bodies apart. anyway, i enjoyed the fireworks a lot, although it did give me all kinds of reasons to get all philosophical in the process. like i need a reason.

07.06.01 more notes from the past

i got another e-mail today from someone who exists only in my past, someone i hooked up with once while in chico around ʼ95 or so. so odd... there seems to be this theme running through me of late, all these thoughts about the past and lessons i have either learned or ignored, and just when i am about to move on in my thoughts along comes an e-mail from some long lost shred of memory to remind me of something dim, half-remembered. no big epiphonies with this one, just a smirky hello, i have seen you in the newspaper, wondered how you were, looked you up, found you, here we are now, entertain us. odd. everything feels like a dream lately, wavering in and out of reality. last night i had tea in wallingford with c-2. pleasant, nice, comfortable, relaxed, talking about the fluttering fireflies hovering about her head in thrall (read: boys). giggly stories about this and that and the other thing. i decided to show c-2 a trick i learned where you make someone say the word “carrot” by implanting the number 14 in their head over and over. you write the word “carrot,” and itʼs always “carrot,” onto a piece of paper, see, then you hide it from their sight, then you ask the person a series of questions, to which the answers will always be 14. you say, “whatʼs 7+7?” they say, “14.” you say, “whatʼs 8+6?” they say, “14.” and so forth. you do this five or six times to firmly implant the number 14 in their head, then you ask, “name a vegetable.” inevitably, they will say, “carrot.” c-2 said, “carrot.” i always assumed that carrot followed 14 because of subconscious connection to the phrase “14-karat gold.” c-2 suggested we try it with different numbers, so we went up to the counter person and implanted the number 15 instead of 14. counter person said, “carrot.” c-2 and i were amazed, then went up to another counter person who had been out of earshot and implanted the number 16. counter person #2 said, “carrot.” amazing, this! i have never heard of 15-karat gold or 16-karat gold, no, i have only heard of 10-karat, 14-karat, and 24-karat, although i am sure 15- and 16-karat gold probably exist and are possible to make. still, who has ever heard of 15- or 16-karat gold? why “carrot?” so, we thought maybe it was the “teen” part that was leading people to “carrot” for some reason, so we went over to a random tea house person and implanted the number 10 into their head. random tea person said, “zucchini.” we tried it again, this time with the number 7. random tea person #2 said, “tomato.” (we neglected to inform random tea person #2 that a tomato is actually a fruit). so, what does this all mean? why do “teen” numbers seem to conjure the word “carrot?” it felt like some kind of dream to me, as if the word “teen” were imbued with some special meaning to me, as if... hmmm... maybe “teen” is being held out in front of me, as if it were some sort of — dare i say it? — “carrot.” hmmm... maybe what this dream is telling me is that i need to stop living the life of a teenager and move on with my life, stop chasing the same things i have been chasing my whole life and move on to more adult pursuits, more serious things, start really pushing myself to grow. i think that i want the number 34 to make people say “carrot.” yeah... once that happens, then i know this dream has taken a turn for the better. anyway, it was fun to hang out with c-2. made me think that it might be quite nice to flutter about her little head like a firefly in thrall for a while, but my goodness, it looked so crowded up there. i think iʼll just keep my glowing ass in a jar where it belongs. this page left intionally blank, so donʼt freak out. THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #1 The debut issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles is completely stuffed with personal stories and essays from the journals and e-mails of Wuss Commando Big Poppa E. Rather than offer up the definitive definition of “Wussy Boy,” this issue offers the introspections of a certified Wuss as he trains his eye on life in America at the beginning of the new Millenium. BPE touches on chain store madness, the love of warm kitties, the bliss of the first kiss of a crush gone wild, poetry slamming for fun and profit, memories of yearning for “Sound- garden hair,” and a wealth of random observation that build into a pleasing whole. A must for all fans of Wussy Boys!

NOW THAT YOU’VE READ THIS ISSUE, AIN’T YOU JUST DYING TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Float me an e-mail at [email protected]. BLURBS

Nominated to the The Utne Reader “Best of the Alternative Press Awards 2000” for The Wussy Boy Chronicles.

“R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” Doug Holland, Editor A Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” The New York Times

“Eirik Ott is the leader of the new Wussy Boy movement ... spreading not just through the esoteric realm of slam poets, but edging across the globe.” The Los Angeles Times

“Eirik Ott is a guy who has turned one of his artistic personas, Wussy Boy, into an icon for effeminate males.” Ms. Magazine

“Championed by a hip-hop poet and catching ﬁre across North America, a new male ideal has risen up and is demanding respect: Wussy Boy.” The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

“Inspiring men from across the country.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“A spoken word maestro.” The San Jose Mercury News

“Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the slam.” Austin Chronicle (TX)

“A hell of a performer, running on boundless energy and near-perfect comic timing.” OC Weekly (Orange Country, CA)

“One of the leaders in the hottest thing to hit poetry since Beat poet Allen Ginsbergʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” The Daily Oklahoman (OKC, OK)

Issue #9

voice mail: 512.296.7080 e-mail: [email protected] website: http://www.brokenword.org online journal: http://poetryslam.livejournal.com

Cover Wuss — Ralph Macchio What the fuck happened to Ralphie Boy, huh? He had that mean run of hit movies in the ʻ80s that were certified Wuss Core classics, like “The Outsiders,” “Teachers,” and the classic first “Karate Kid” film. But he slipped into quite a rut after the wretched “Karate Kid III” in 1989. I mean, his last big budget movie was “My Cousin Vinnie” in ʻ92, but the the following decade has been hella spotty. One of his most recent out- tings was as Cop #2 in a film called “Popcorn Shrimp.” (Yeah, Iʼve never heard of it, either.) Poor guy, he got trapped in the Danielsan roles and could never get out of them, falling into what can be called the “Anthony Michael Hall Trap of Typecasting Doom.” While other Wussies have been able to crawl out of the abyss to which they assigned after the ʻ80s — even Mr. Hall — it seems our boy Ralph just couldnʼt keep up. I still remember him from his glory days, though, and for that, he gets the cover for this issue. Consider it a reminder and a firm warning... DEAR WUSSY BOY

Thank you for all that you did for Southern Colorado AIDS Project on Friday night. I canʼt say it strongly enough or often enough, but I meant it wholeheartedly. It was an incredible experience for me to witness a group of amazing people take on a cause like it was their own. The experience is forever burned in my memory. DawnAnn

When my performance poetry troupe WordCore had a gig at a small private college in Colorado Springs, we found that our show was the day before World AIDS Day, so we got together with some local activists and made the cover charge for the show two cans of food to be donated to a local AIDS charity. It was so cool. We handed out literature and condoms, plus I even demonstrated how to use a female condom, which, really, was too funny. Have you ever seen one of these things? How anyone could use one of these with a straight face is beyond me. Anyway, by the end of the night, the table set up by the AIDS charity was packed with these huge towers of canned foods. The organizers told us they had gathered more canned food that single night than in any other night in recent memory. Thatʼs so cool.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

Just wanted to thank you for your awesome performances this weekend! Truly inspiring. This world is deﬁnitely small for I, too, hail from Northern Cali, I actually grew up in Chico during a porting of my life. Anyhow, I didnʼt get a chance to sign up for e-mail list, so please add me to it. Again thanks for busting out here. It made me remember that there are more ways to write than just for papers due in class. Grace

Our show at Colorado College was so phat, by far the biggest, best, and most successful gig of entire college tour. It was packed, like 450 people, the energy was just huge and fearless and... yeah, and sexy. Before the show even started, someone had thrown a bra onstage, and three grrls had bum-rushed the stage and kissed me, one wrapping her body around me and shoving her tongue down my throat. If you want, you can read all about the Colorado College experience in my online journal, the URL for which is on the inside front cover of this zine. Or you can just wait for Issue #10 to come out in the next year or so. DEAR WUSSY BOY

Anyway, last night was awesome, so many things were happening all at once. The energy in the room was amazing. I went around to chill with you all and then I came back here, it was 5am and I had such a high from the whole experience it never really wore off. I spent an hour writing and then some time reading, there were so many ideas and things swirling through my head it was hard to pick one to write down. Last year I left shaking and swirling much like last night. This one was an incredible experience still, it always amazes me the talent and truth that come from people I see everyday without consequence. I really enjoyed getting to talk to you, and that you would sit in a hall and just talk to a group of students rather than going inside for booze and pot. Since I donʼt drink or smoke or anything, I often have to explain myself everywhere I go and avoid parties because everyone will just be drunk. Teague

Yeah, I donʼt drink or smoke either. Itʼs not really a moral issue, itʼs more like a taste issue, like, itʼs taste like complete shit, so why bother? I mean, I kinda like the feeling of being drunk a little sometimes, rarely, but it just doesnʼt make up for the nasty taste or the jacked up feeling the next morning. Plus itʼs hella expensive and bad for you and people get really, really pathetic and stupid when they drink and always want to beat the shit out of me. I just try to avoid it, mostly. After the show in Colorado Springs, a bunch of us ended up at someoneʼs dorm room, but inside everyone was packing bowls and smoking bongs and getting all rowdy and drunk, so I went out in the hallway with two people to chill and get away from the hoopla. Soon we were joined by a few others, then a few others, until there were easily 15 people who came and stayed for a while during the night. We just sat cross-legged and talked, listed our top ﬁve favorite movies, favorite foods, stuff like that. As fun and amazing as the shows are with all the audience really getting into it, the stuff that happens afterwards — the conversations, the get-to- gethers, the spontaneous poetry readings — thatʼs the best stuff.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

I would have to strong heartedly agree that last night was in fact not only the best poetry reading night I have heard, but also I felt some of the strongest energy in that room than I have felt in ages. I canʼt even describe how strong the energy was. it was so great. I just wanted to thanks you all for making that happen. Nick

It was some strong energy, this huge sweaty crowd shoulder to shoulder for two hours of poetry, and not famous people doing poetry, just regular people with dreams about making poetry a major force in their lives, wow, and the audience was wide-eyed and raucous the whole time. Much better than working a job in some cubicle.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

I have never thought so much in one night in my entire life. I had never been to anything like that, I had never even heard poetry read before. It was absolutely amazing. When I go to the one in April, I am deﬁnitely bringing my journal with me. So many thoughts ran through my head about everything going on in my life, friends, that special guy, family, everything. I have never experienced anything so moving. Thank you so much and thanks to all the other poets. All of you made a huge impact in my life. ellen euser

I love these kinds of comments, where you have someone who never thought much of poetry and never really felt poetry could have any impact on their life at all, then they see that ﬁrst kick ass spoken word event that lights their creative soul on ﬁre with the possibilities of poetic expression. Wow, to be given the chance to be a part of that energy is amazing and surreal, to be at the center of all that positive energy is the most thrilling thing I have ever done. I mean, look, this person said this: “All of you made a huge impact in my life.” How many people have done something that has inspired that?

DEAR WUSSY BOY

last night was my ﬁrst ever attendance to a poetry type function, my beautiful new friend caprice edwards invited me to come to this event and im ever so happy that i did. i dont belong to cc...i attend CTU, and through the years have forgotten what it is like to be in an atmosphere of expression and freedom, creativity and thoughtful speaking. it was incredibly refreshing and just an all over lovely experience for me last night. the whole wordcore group amazed me, the beautiful diva, the hilarious cheese poem guy, the passionate ween tshirt wearinʼ guy, you and the little ʻi have your manualʼ guy all made me laugh, all said something that made me think, all made the world a nicer place to be for the moment. i just want to say thank you so much to you, and word core. for reintroducing poetry into my life. last night was the ﬁrst time i have laughed until i cried and cried until i laughed in a long long time. thank you big poppa e and word core. safe journeys, big hug to you all, and i hope to catch wordcore again for future events. yves

Wow, what can a person say about a letter like this? We had so much fun that night, so much fun that we all sold our shit and quit our jobs and are devoting the next several years to making this poetry thing our lives. Thatʼs some serious shit. Allʼs I can say is thank YOU, Yves, thanks for making it happen for us, too.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

My name is Lindsay Edwards and until last night I have never been to a poetry reading. I have never been shown the world of poetry, never been given the gift of poetry, or let alone, heard that much poetry in my whole entire life. It moved me. I loved all the poems, your 4 part love poem and Jen Poem almost made me cry. Thank you very much for the opportunity to experience poetry. I am not from CC, I am from CU at Boulder. If you could please Email me if you will ever be there because I will be there for sure!! Lindsay Edwards

The Jen poem makes me cry, too. On the CD of the Colorado Show, you can hear this cool chick named Ellie squeel from the audience as I introduce the Jen poem. Itʼs a hard one to do, but I think itʼs important to do it, especially at large college crowds where nearly everyone in the audience has lost someone special along the way. Jen has been a part of The Wussy Boy Chronicles since Issue #1, only she wasnʼt “The Girl I Dated Who Died in a Car Crash” back then, she was just this amazing young woman who I really liked, who was cool, who I really had a lot of fun with. I miss her.

DEAR WUSSY BOY

i didnʼt ever want to leave bemis hall last night cause i didnʼt want to walk further away and have the energy start evaporating into the night...i wanted to stay bundled up in that room that had been painted with poetry...and i love it when everything i think comes out more than words, it comes out poetic and true, you know when hamlet somehow enters a common conversation something has clicked in your head... words and images and deﬁnitions and life all working hand in hand, clicking, meshing...itʼs crazy powerful... audre lorde has a line “how hard it is to sleep in the middle of life”...i never want to sleep, i didnʼt want to shut my eyes last night...thank you big poppa e and all of your friends...hangin out last night with yaʼll at 1208 weber was fun and real...i wish you could all just stay around here cause this place is better with you and we are all better people because of nights like last night and hopefully tonight...iʼll see you there, emily

We had a hard time leaving, too. Such a great show. I canʼt wait to come back. We all feel like we have a huge circle of friends at Colorado College now. So many conversations to have, so many couches to sleep on, so many poems to write...

DEAR WUSSY BOY

HELLO! just wanted to say thank you so much for coming to CC... the show was amazing, iʼm hoping maybe you all will perform again tonight or perhaps in the spring, that would be so sweet. but anyways, your list of things that you like and donʼt like was deﬁnitely not in the book and i would really like it because i sort of feel the same way about a lot of it and donʼt think i could remember it all to make my own list!! so if thereʼs anyway you could email it to me or something that would be awesome... hope to see you again sometime kelly britton

I am tired now. I am going to bed. Goodnight, and thank you.

YOU GOTTA PROBLEM, WUSSY?

Simply put your thoughts into words and send them to Wussy Boy at [email protected]. 07.07.01 have you seen this child? he’s been missing a long time.

i had my mom send me some photos to include in my next collection of poetry. the theme will be lost childhood, a sort of “have you seen this child” sort of thing, and the poetry and journal entries will be provided as “evidence” in the search for this lost child. i think i will call it “missing.” anyway, here are some of the photos. it makes me feel so weird to look at them. i look into the eyes of this kid, and i am not quite sure i recognize him. something i noticed... when i was a kid, i gave big toothy camera grins. as i grew older, i smiled less and less, until finally that grin from high school, sophomore year i think, which was a really tough year, had been replaced with some kind of fake thing meant to get the photo thing done. my parents used to take all kinds of photos of me and my sister sabrina when we were young, and theyʼd arrange them into photo books with the year on the cover to document our family. once we reached sixth grade, however, the photos stopped completely, and now the only things i can find from that time are school photos and snapshots taken by my girlfriend in senior year of high school. i wonder why the pictures dried up... this photo cracks me up on so many levels, starting with the drool sliding down my lip and ending with that god-awful sailor suit. my dad was 20 when i was born and stationed on an aircraft carrier called the bon homme richard off the coast of vietnam. (it was the very same aircraft carrier, iʼll have you know, that was captained by jim morrisonʼs father in the mid-ʼ60s.) my father didnʼt see me until i was six months old, so i imagine this photo of his little boy dressed as a sailor was a special treat he received through the mail on the aircraft carrier. when i was in the middle of my very own navy experience, i would think of this photo and just shake my head. how fucking prophetic... or pathetic. this is one of my great grandmas who died shortly after i was born, so i never really knew her. i love the stunned look on my little face, like, “huh? who is this lady? what the hell is going on here?” the only great-grandparent i never knew was my momʼs momʼs mother, who we called “big grandma.” i donʼt really rememer much about her other than she had this ceramic dog with a spring for a body that she used to hold her bills. and her house had a certain smell to it, an old person smell, and i seem to remember that she had peacocks in her backyard, but my mom said that memory is from something else. this is the backyard of my momʼs mom. my mom is in the sailor suit thing in the background. i love this photo, little dynamo boy with a ball. my mom was only 18 when she had me (my dad was 20), so she must be around 19 or maybe even 20 in this photo. iʼve dated 20-year-olds... so odd that any one of them was as old as my mother in this photo. i canʼt imagine what that must have been like. my sister sabrina was born when i was three, so i must be somewhere near four in this photo. sabrina was born sick with twisted legs that had be stuffed into braces, and she had asthma growing up, then developed all kinds of weight problems as she grew older. she now is about 5ʼ4” and weighs nearly 300 pounds. she was never really bright and always had hard times in school. she got easily frustrated. we fought like cats and rats growing up, and we still rarely talk. itʼs hard to look at that picture of her and me as a kids. i was five when i started kindergarten, so this must be 1972. i was the wagon gather- upper and had to go around the playground area and gather up all the wagons that had been used during the day. i cried the first day of kindergarten. i wore cowboy boots. i think i ended up liking it okay, though. i went to this school until second grade, and my mom used to let me walk to school by myself since it was so close to our house. sometimes she would let me walk all the way to the 7-11 by myself to buy comic books for 25¢ and candy bars for 25¢ and sodas for 25¢... shoot, for a buck you had a whole afternoon of fun back then. now, shoot, they donʼt even call them cmic books anymore, theyʼre “graphic novels” or some shit like that and cost $5 a piece. shoot, back then, they had penny candy that actually cost a penny. they kept it in the lowest bins in the 7-11 and you could just grab a handful and it would only cost you 15¢. we used to have two christmas celebrations, one at each set of grandparentsʼ place. my dadʼs family always celebrated christmas on christmas eve, so we would open our presents then at our home, then drive to his momʼs house for a second helping with the extended family. the next morning, we would go to my momʼs parentʼs house and eat a christmas dinner with that branch of the extended family, then open presents there, too. it was like a double-wammy. the extended family used to get together for all kinds of things, like easter at the park and camping at the lake, but once my dad got out of the navy when i was in sixth grade, some kind of rift happened, and the family never gathered again... at least, my father never took us to another gathering... for all i know, they couldʼve been meeting the whole time like always, but my dad just refused to take us. this is from san diego the first time around, so it must be 1976. we lived right across the street from the beach, and i used to go there all the time with my g.i. joe and his vehicles. my father was in the navy for the second time at this time, so my mom and sister and me didnʼt see much of him that year because he spent so much time out to sea. i was 9, my sister was 6, and my mom was around 27. she was my den mother in cub scouts, and we used to make crafts and stuff in our living room with the other cubbies, like christmas ornaments made out of pine cones decorated with sequines and elmers glue. i remember we played this game of charades one cubscout meeting, and this one kid was trying to act out someone famous, and he was all frantically trying to twist this valves and stuff, and mimicking gushing water. it ended up no one could guess his famous person, and he said it was richard nixon, and the valves were his impression of “watergate.” we didnʼt know what the fuck he was talking about. we were only 8 or 9. he mustʼve been a pretty bright kid. hereʼs a sudden memory... look at the photo in the background and you will see a little girl in a big sun hat with her back to the camera... that was suzie, the next door neighbor kid, and she was my very first kiss. i canʼt remember how we got to that point, but i remember we used to play “house,” only it was this kind of liberated version of “house” where she was the working housewife and i was the stay at home husband. our house was a box on its side in the backyard, and i would stay in it as she went to “work.” she would kiss me goodbye, go to work, then turn around and come back and kiss me hello, then sheʼd kiss me goodbye and go back to work, then turn around and come back and kiss me again, over and over. there would be a long gap between my first kiss — at 9 in 1976 — and my next kiss at just before my 16th birthday in 1984. eight years seems a hell of a long time to wait for a second kiss. dreamy fake smile at my dadʼs parentsʼ house one christmas. i think i was probably around ten or eleven in this photo. my dadʼs parent had special names — we called grandma ott “mimi” and we called grandpa ott “popi,” which was pronounced as if it rhymed with “mopey.” i remember my popi worked at some kind of ironworks place, and in his spare time he made these ornamen- tal iron fences, one of which surrounded his front lawn. he smoked and drank his whole life and ended up dying of lung cancer when he was 57. he fought it for at least three years, from what i remember, because he went to the philippines when i was in sixth grade to try a psychic healer to cure his cancer since nothing else was working, then he died on the very same day as my 8th grade graduation. that must mean he was di- agnosed with it around 54 or so, which is how old my dad is. i wonder how that must make him feel, to have reached the age where his father got cancer. as kids, we knew nothing about my grandpa getting cancer or what was going on. all i knew was that he went to the philippines in sixth grade, then in 8th grade he died. we werenʼt allowed to visit him in the hospital, and we werenʼt allowed to go to the funeral. this looks like it was in bremerton, washington, so it must have been christmas of 1977, the year “star wars” came out. man, i wanted to see it so bad, but i had to wait a whole year before my parents would allow me to see it. they finally relented for my 11th birthday, by which time we were living back in san diego in 1978 and “star wars” had been in the movie theater for a whole year. i loved star wars, and i had a star wars metal lunch box with an x-wing fighter on its face. i remember thinking the tip of the x-wing looked just like a penis, which, now, seems really odd for a ten-year-old to think about. doesnʼt it? we went to universal studios one year, so this must have been... i donʼt know... around sixth grade i would think. sixth grade was hard because i had always been the bright kid in class until then, and up until then that was enough, i was cool because i was smart and kinda cute, but then when the hormones kicked in and all the boys started being assholes and all the girls started liking them for it, wow... i was totally left behind. suddenly, out of nowhere and with no advance warning, i was a big fat dork. sixth grade sucked. in fact, it just got worse from there, cul- minating in a perfectly wretched sophomore and junior year in high school filled with a hateful father, dungeons and dragons, and trips to the psychologist. i got really bad grades then, all cʼs and dʼs and fʼs, and my attendence was wretched. i skipped school to play video games and spent all my lunch money on records and conan books. this is a picture i donʼt think i had ever seen until my mother sent it to me. it must be from 8th grade graduation, so it mustʼve been spring of 1981. i mustʼve just turned 14 since my birthday is may 11 and graduation is usually in june. my fatherʼs father died on this day. check out the way my hair is parted in the middle. i definitely donʼt remember that. and those pants... whoo boy, i was deep in dork- dom. i started playing dungeons and dragons that same year with my best friend at the time named jason urner. we had epic battles and so many sleepovers that went into the wee hours playing d&d just the two of us. we both had woodshop in school and made these kick ass dice tumblers for our d&d dice. once i got to high school, all my friends went to the cool high school near my house, but i had to get bused to another school downtown because we lived ten houses from the border of the school line or something, so i would see the cool high school out the bus window on my way to the crappy school downtown. i had to make a new best friend, and that ended up being a kid named david pletcher. we played us some hella d&d, awww yeah, and we even took david camping with us one year. but david got all popular and i remained a geek, so david dumped me for his popular friends in my sophomore year. david pletcher was the last guy friend i ever had. to this day, i have not been close to another guy friend like i was with my best friend david. that was almost 19 years ago... jesus, thatʼs kinda scary to type... my graduated class had its 15-year reunion in the summer of 2000. i didnʼt go. i didnʼt like many of those people then, and i donʼt think i would like many of them now. and this is the kid they would remember if they remember me at all after all these years. i suppose this was sophomore year in high school, so it must have been 1982 or 1983. tough year... no friends, almost two full years before my first girlfriend patty, visits to the psychologist, intense fear of death, lots of dungeons and dragons and reading and re- reading “the lord of the rings.” the geek in me is very excited about the upcoming movie version of my favorite childhood fantasy trilogy. i wasted so much time working on “lord of the rings” trivia and perfecting my dungeon and dragons characters with my d&d friends james moody and james raven and jay gee and jeff duerr instead of doing my homework. i looked up jeff duerr the other day on the internet... he has his phd and is teaching at some college, has been for several years. me, iʼve got a cd collection that is purpetually unalphabetized and two kitties named aretha and thelonious. good god... i feel like a loser sometimes... how do you explain the performance poetry thing? i supposed i could just show people my clips from newspapers and say, “here, this is what iʼve been doing, this gives me legitimacy. now leave me the fuck alone.” and this is me now, in seattle, just a few weeks ago, taken with an electronic camera in front of a brick wall across the street from my studion apartment near the corner of wallingford avenue and 35th street. my fellow poets in WORDCORE and i took these photos for our press kit, which we sent out to colleges to convince them they should book us. i ripped off the striped beanie from a friend of mine in austin, texas, named mark mazlow. i was sleeping on the couch of mike henry, a mutual friend of ours, when i was hosting the poetry portion of south by southwest in march, and mark had left his beanie there next to the couch where i slept. i saw it and wore it while i was sleeping to keep my bald head warm, and then... well, it just ended up leaving with me. i suppose i will give it back to him when i see him next, which will probably be during the national poetry slam here in seattle in a few weeks.

07.17.01 last meal

i happened into a morbidly interesting web site which not only documents the details behind texas death-row inmates who are executed but also their last meals. http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/finalmeals.htm you can click on the executed personʼs name and read their stats, kinda like a trading card complete with a photo and the details of their crime. had me riveted and sick to my stomach at the same time. the only thing the site didnʼt have were the final statements of each inmate, which i think is fucked. i read a book once detailing the same info from texas death row inmates who were executed, and the last statements were the most fascinating... especially the ones who claimed their innocence. (oops, found the final statement info at a different url. again, this is the most fascinating stuff: http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm) some of the last meals requested are very precise and voluminous, as if the about-to-be executed have a competition to see how much stuff they can order and how complicated they can make things: Gibbs David, executed 08/23/2000: Chef salad (any dressing except oil and vinegar), 2 bacon cheeseburgers all the way (cut the onions), deep fried home fries (with chili powder on top), pitcher of fruit flavored milkshake, 2 scotch eggs (boiled and packed in a sausage roll, battered and deep-fried and served with syrup), slice of pie. some others are painfully simple: Lawton Stacey, executed 11/14/2000: 1 jar of dill pickles. thatʼs it, thatʼs all he ordered... a jar of dill pickles, like the whole time he was in jail waiting to be executed he was thinking, “man, i sure could use a dill pickle.” and then there was this one, which really... wow, it made me shake my head and wonder: Odell Barnes Jr., executed 03/01/2000: Justice, Equality, World Peace. that last meal request was such a final statement... i looked up his last words, and here is what odell barnes jr. said when asked what his last statement was just moments before being put to death: “Iʼd like to send great love to all my family members, my support- ers, my attorneys. They have all supported me throughout this. I thank you for proving my innocence, although it has not been acknowledged by the courts. May you continue in the struggle and may you change all thatʼs being done here today and in the past. Life has not been that good to me, but I believe that now, after meeting so many people who support me in this, that all things will come to an end, and may this be fruit of better judgements for the future. Thatʼs all I have to say.” wow. imagine if any of the people who have claimed their innocence on death row were innocent... can you imagine the agony of being executed for something you did not do, and you are screaming to everyone who will listen that you are innocent, that you didnʼt do it, but no one will listen, and you get strapped in and destroyed like a abandoned dog. i donʼt know... even if only one innocent person has died at the hands of the justice system, then the death penalty is bullshit. read this final statement: http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/grahamgarylast.htm 07.17.01 pain and anguish upon the soul of the vermin who stole my cds

i used to have a huge cd collection. i am talking big, bigger than any personal cd collection of anyone i knew or have since met (except for the editor of the entertainment section in reno, but he hardly counts since he gets all his cds free practically). nearly 2,000 cds, and they were all alphabetized and arranged just so according to my very strict system that only made sense to me. groups were alphabetized by the first letter of their band name — the rolling stones were right next to rush — and solo artists were alphabetized by their first names — billy joel and billy idol and billy squier and billy holliday all right up shoulder to shoulder. if i had more than one cd by an artist or a group, then those cds were arranged in chronological order. there were exceptions. oh yes, there were exceptions. if there was an artist who was once a member of a group but who quit and went solo, his/her cds were arranged chronologically AFTER the original group. so, peter gabriel was right up against genesis. solo stuff from sting, stewart copeland, and andy summers were right after the police. there were exceptions to this: phil collins was allowed nowhere near genesis since he sucked and fuck him anyway, he didnʼt even go under “p” because the “pʼs” were full of kick ass stuff like the police and pink floyd, so his punk ass got filed in the “cʼs” next to creedence clearwater revival, which made him one of the few solo artists to be filed by his last name. (the wee bald fucker) you might ask why i had phil collins in my collection at all if i held such animosity toward his brand of pablum (which was later picked up by sting, the pompous tantric sex having prig). well, i have to confess to liking his first album a lot... hey, sue me. i never claimed to be hard core, so fuck you. anyway... i had me some cds, yo, i really did, and they were my prized possessions. i fucking LOVED that cd collection, and i could whip up a mix tape like you wouldnʼt believe, just give me a subject and BOOM, youʼd have yourself a fucking kick ass mix tape. i was the fucking KING of the mix tape. until two things happened that stole the crown from my head: 1] some rat bastard stole 600 of my cds; 2] another rat bastard stole the rest. thereʼs nothing like having $10,000 worth of cds stolen to really put things in perspective. to keep from going insane and marching right into the nearest mcdonaldʼs and taking out some innocent folks with a machine gun, i had to get really zen about it, whisper to myself about how they were only material things after all, whisper how maybe this was a lesson that one should not allow oneʼs world to rotate around material things... it was hard. the soul-free fuckers who took my cds took not just compact discs, no, they took a whole library of emotions and feelings and events, fuck... they plundered the most cherished skeletons from my closet and left nothing but dust, they erased the soundtrack from the film of my life, the bastards... one of the best things about being a music geek was collecting every 12” single, every 45, every remix, every soundtrack, EVERY- THING featuring a song from one of your god bands. my god bands were, in no particular order: the police, u2, skinny puppy, ministry, nine inch nails, peter gabriel, and a one-man industrial band called foetus. each of these folks put out b-side songs that you could devote many hours to finding by scouring the local record racks, the used record stores, and the occasional record convention. i would drive hours just to flip through the record collections at some dive record store hoping for that sacred 45 from the police with “roxanne” on one side and “dead end job” on the other. i paid $30 for a copy of the very first police single, the one with “fallout” on one side and “nothing acheiving” on the other, the one with some guitarist named henry padovani instead of andy summers, back when they thought they were a punk rock band and actually kinda sorta sounded like a proper punk rock band, before sting became a nauseating cunt and shed all self-respect and followed in the m.o.r. footsteps of phil fucking collins. what bollocks! oh yes, it was a fever, and the best god bands gave you shit to look for, rare shit, hard to find shit... u2 was always good for that early on, with b-sides on the backside of every single and 12” they released. i knew lots of people who worshipped depeche mode, not just because they were awesome, but because they had so much to collect... b-sides galore! my favorite obsession, however, was for foetus, a one-man industrial band pre-dating nine inch nails by almost a decade. the man behind foetus was an australian named j.g. thirlwell who had relocated to new york and put out underground records every time he could raise enough money to get something together. oh man, foetus was the shit, and fucking loony as all get out, making songs with titles like “youʼve got foetus on your breath” and “the only good christian is a dead christian” and “di-1-9026,” which was the last phone number held by charles manson. since foetus was SO underground, working at one time in the virgin megastore in london during the day to pay his bills for recording at night, it was a real task to find his stuff. plus, the fucker kept changing the name of his bad, using such monikers as “philip and the foetus vibrations,” “scraping foetus off the wheel,” “foetus uber frisco,” and “foetus interruptus.” he put out so many 12-inches and did so many collaborations and appeared on so many anthologies that you could be searching for foetus stuff forever and still not find it all. well, i found just about EVERYTHING this guy ever did, and it took me forever, and it was a constant motivator... looking... searching... i mean, this was way before you could just type the word “foetus” into a search engine and find 20 indie record stores that had stuff by him, you know, you had to go out there and search, get the dust of a thousand records caked on your fingertips as you flipped endlessly through stacks of wax. and all that time-consuming labor paid off because i was a fucking library of foetus work, i had all kinds of shit, shit that you just canʼt find anywhere. and i put the very best of everything on a series of mix tapes called “scraps of foetus” that had four volumes. oh yes, foetus was my god band. i even met him once. i got to a rare foetus concert early, way before opening band ethyl meatplow even had their equipment on stage at this little dive in los angeles called helter skelter back in ʼ92 or ʼ93. i saw him standing there, heroin skinny and chicken-headed with his puff of curly red hair, and i walked up to him and held out my hand and said, “say, are you foetus?” and he took the cigarette from his mouth, shook my hand, and said in a growl, “watch yer back, kid.” i turned around and narrowly missed getting squashed by some roady with a huge speaker. when i turned to say something else, foetus was gone. i saw him a few minutes later outside the venue, and i came back to him and asked him to sign a copy of a cd he had just released, a now- rare ep with him and his then-flame lydia lunch that featured a redux of “donʼt fear the reaper.” i asked him to sign it, and asked that he write something, and i quote, “satanic.” (yeah, i actually asked him that.) (oy.) and foetus wrote this across the photo of his face in the center of the cd book: “someone down there likes me.” can you say, “prized possession?” and then some craven scoundrel stole my cd collection, taking with it almost all of my foetus shit, including my signed copy of “donʼt fear the reaper,” most of which was released by tiny record labels that no longer exist, meaning that the chance of me finding new copies of my very best and rarest foetus shit is next to nil. grrr. to think that i will never get another chance to hear “free james brown so he can run me down” again until i somehow find the cd single for “butterfly potion.” good god. thank goodness, however, that the sticky-fingered fucker didnʼt take my records, because i still have a bunch of foetus stuff on vinyl. and now iʼve figured out how to attach a record player to my imac and burn cds from my record collection, so i bought a record player the other day (my first in years and years... my records have just been collecting dust since about ʼ95 and have not been played since.) and now i am rediscovering my love for the sociopathic lunacy of foetus all over again, almost 15 years after i first heard his stuff. and itʼs good, too. oh yes, it is still good. and now i feel the old urge coming back, the push to find the old stuff, the rare stuff, all those singles and 12” remixes that some rude bastard stole from me, and this time iʼve got the internet on my side, oh yes, i got fucking e-bay, motherfucker, and i am going to replace every one of my rare foetus music one by one by one. oh yes, i will. hereʼs a quote from foetus: “they say that which does not kill you makes you stronger. in that case, you can call me hercules.” hereʼs another quote: “supercalifragilisticsadomasochism.”

07.27.01 booking a college tour this fall

so, you try telling some 21-year-old college kid youʼve never met in some university youʼve never seen that poetry isnʼt boring — that the kind of poetry you are peddling is big, big like rock and roll, loud and abrasive like punk rock, rhythmic and intense and politically aware like the best hip-hop, belly-swelling funny as the finest stand-up comedy. go ahead, try it, try to use the word “poetry” in the same sentence as “800-seat venue” and “massive promotion” and “$2000 guaranteed fee up front.” lord have mercy, my last month has been filled with academy award winning performance delivered via phone, pulitzer prize winning e-mails, and the press kits — oh the full color press kits! i am booking a tour with my friends, and the four of us are convinced that we can take this performance poetry thing to the next level and have it respected on the same level as a great rock band, capable of drawing standing-room-only crowds and feature articles in every newspaper in the area. well, okay, IʼM convinced of this, and i have convinced my friends that i can do this for us, that i can book a fall tour of college and university venues that will pay us enough to not only pay for the trip, but to pay for all our personal bills as well. in short, i am saying that this is for reals, not a little juant — la la la, going on a little poetry tour, la la la, gettinʼ paid $25 to feature at a coffeehouse and sleeping on couches, la la la — no, what i am saying is this is the closest thing to being in a real live touring band as poets can get. (deep breath) so, yeah, iʼm busting my ass trying to convince schools all over california that they should pay us $2000 to come and read poetry. you try it. go ahead, i dare you. itʼs been a real challenge. their first response no matter how passionate my spiel is one of skepticism. “poetry?” they say. and their first response is to hand the phone NOT to the person in charge of big rock concerts with lots of audience in a big venue with lots of promotion, no, their first response is to hand the phone to the person who does “special events and celebrations.” this is the person who handles things like vetriloquists, fire eaters, jugglers, and apparently (gulp) poets. this means a little coffeehouse on campus with people trying to do homework, a little crowd of 30 or so. this is so very NOT what i am talking about. so i have to convince them to give the phone to the big events person, the one who books real live shows with dynamic lighting and sound. the one whoʼs going to shell out not $200 for a little coffeehouse gig but $2000 for a big venue gig. try it, go ahead. and iʼm doing it, by god, iʼm making headway, and so far iʼve got nearly 10 universities in the midst of negotiations. i would have more, but itʼs summer, and the students with the most say in such matters are largely gone until the middle of august. still, i am making some good contacts, and we are hammering out a schedule. once we get the big gigs down, weʼll fill in the tour with smaller gigs, little opportunities to deliver our poetry directly to crowds and sell books and cds. along the way, we want to gather as many newspaper articles and glowing recomendations from universityʼs as we can, which will propel us into the next leg of our tour next spring. we can do this. we can do this. we can do this. (i can do this.) in other news, i have figured my cd burner out, and now i have a cd of my work recorded live in concert using my mini-disc recorder, and it sounds pretty fucking sharp. (i can do this.)

07.30.01 kitty cat ninja assassin

my baby killed her first bird yesterday. iʼve been letting aretha and thelonious out in the evenings while iʼm home working on the computer, and they have really been enjoying it, just frolicking and chasing butterflies and eating grass and such. theyʼll be gone for thirty or forty minutes, then thelonious will pop his little head into the studio and be like, “hey daddy, i was just checking in.” iʼll pet his little head, then heʼll run back outside to play. then aretha will come be-bopping in, say, “hey daddy, weʼre just playing...”, then sheʼll tear back outside. well... yesterday i was working on my computer and it was a beautiful day in seattle, and i hadnʼt seen either of them in a while, so i put on my flip-flps and went around back to the garden to see if i could find aretha. i did the little clicking sound that tells my kitties that they should come to me, and all of a sudden, here comes aretha from the garden, and she has this big dead bird in her mouth. and she marches right up to me and drops it at my feet and proceeds to lick the fresh blood thatʼs been splattered all over the front of her coat and her paws. and i couldnʼt help but swell with pride, like, “oh look, my baby killed her first bird! such a good little hunter, i always knew youʼd be a good little hunter, you little ninja kitty assassin.” and aretha was all rubbing against me, like, “thatʼs right, daddy, i fucked that bird ALL up.” and then i picked her up and we went inside and she spent the next hour cleaning herself while thelonious smelled her and watched. the poor bird... i feel sad that he met his fate at the hands (and teeth) of my baby, but still... i kinda feel like my baby is not a kitty anymore, that she has suddenly come of age and has become a cat. wow... i love my cats so much i donʼt hardly know what to do.

07.30.01 i gave notice at work

so, i finally told my boss that i plan on leaving seattle and moving back to california soon. iʼve been avoiding it because she has been really good to me and has been very tolerant of my quirks, but she has been giving me more and more responsibilities, and i just canʼt leave her hanging with just a two weeks notice. so i gave a month and a half notice. since she has been doing a lot of work out of the office lately, i had to e-mail her. hereʼs what i sent her on friday. c, i have been having some really serious issues lately with work, and i need to talk to you about them. they have nothing to do with the people — the people are great — nor is it about how iʼve been treated, which has been great, too. i just... i am just having a hell of a time dealing with this job, cynthia, and i am becoming really bitter towards it. in fact, i can safely say that i hate this job, i really do... itʼs just really hard for me to sit here and concentrate all day on just typing in this endless string of numbers all day long all day long over and over week after week... god, it is really getting me down. i hate to say this to you because you have really been good to me and tolerant of my shit, but i am very close to not being able to take it any more. i just am so negative about this job, and it is affecting my feelings toward even being here in seattle in general. i thought taking a break and visiting chico this last weekend would give me a chance to relax and recharge, but it ended up just depressing me even more because it made me realize how miserable i have been ever since i moved here. my friends in chico were asking me how i liked it up here, and i was going on and on about how much i hated the job and in fact disliked seattle, and they were like, “well, why donʼt you quit and move back? and i was like, “i canʼt quit, cynthia needs me.” but upon thinking about it, i just donʼt know how long i can take this. i am getting really bitter, and i am finding it very hard to even want to get up and go to work in the morning, and i sit there all day gritting my teeth waiting to go home. ugh, i hate being in this space, and i donʼt know if thereʼs anything i can do about it. i thought i would be able to hang with this, because the money and the benefits and the freedom has been really cool, but the job itself — just sitting at a desk typing numbers all day every day — god, itʼs so boring and i hate it. i am sorry to unload this all on you, but every time i get another new responsibility, i just... shrink. i keep thinking that it is unfair for me to not tell you where iʼm at with this. i donʼt want to just up and quit one day and leave you hanging. so... i think i have to come to a decision. i want to go home. i want to give you a monthʼs notice, even more than that, like a month and two weeks. that way we i can keep doing the job as you figure out what the hell youʼre supposed to do. i am so sorry about this. i really feel like i have let you down. if it werenʼt for me not wanting to hurt your feelings or put you in a bad position, i wouldʼve quit two months ago and just gone home. but iʼve stuck it out and tried to make it work. i just canʼt do this much longer. i hate it. i know, i suck... iʼve been wanting to tell you about this all week, but i only saw you one day, and suddenly, boom, it was time for you to leave, and i didnʼt want to be cussing all the way home and kicking things and taking the lordʼs name in vain on the bus. but i didnʼt want to leave for this weekend without telling you so that you can start making plans now. i am sorry about this, but i can stay until even the second week in september if you want, but then i just want to go home. eirik p.s. i know, i suck. you can cuss me out when i see you next, and i will just lower my head and let you because i deserve it.

i feel all bad. i totally knew i was going to leave to go on tour in the fall, but i took this job and said that i was going to stay just so i could get the $15 an hour and the beneﬁts. now i feel like i mislead my boss. grrr... like my therapist once said, if you donʼt have integrity, you have nothing. i know this is just some punk ass job that makes me unhappy and gives me ample opportunity to ponder my own mortality all day long as i enter an endless stream of numbers into a computer, but still... and i also wonder how these people can work at this job so long, 15 years some of them, just spending the majority of their day, the best part of the day, sitting in front of a computer and typing in numbers all day long. god, i couldnʼt take it. i canʼt wait to hit the poetry highway, cleanse myself of this dreaded day job.

08.08.01 alyssa

so, i think itʼs time for me to tell the story about alyssa. hereʼs my favorite photo of her, taken in the parking lot of walmart in chico, california: i went on tour last year, see, a long four month tour through 27 states performing at more than 60 gigs. i left in may just after my birthday, and by the time i finished and ended up back in my little college town of chico, it was october. i had been organizing poetry shows in chico since ʼ94, so there was no way i was going to end my tour without a last hurrah, especially since i was going to move 12 hours north to seattle, so i threw one more big poetry bash as a way to say goodbye to the community i loved so much. and it was a rocking gig, just smoking, packed to the rafters with all kinds of folks, and i rocked it, man, i really did. it was a good way to end it, you know, to put a final touch to a six-year history in chico. the newspapers had all covered it like “big poppa e says goodbye to chico,” so everyone who had ever come to a reading mustʼve been there, stuffed shoulder to shoulder. as the show ended and people crowded up to the table where i was sitting and selling chapbooks, this grrl with long dark hair in a long flowy sarong came up to me and thanked me for the reading. i was instantly taken with this person... something about her eyes. i invited her to come with a small group of us to the diner down the street, but she demured, bought a chapbook, had me sign it, and waved as she left. i thought i would never see her again. but a few days later, i got the following e-mail:

Eirik, Hi, I donʼt know if youʼll remember me, but I was at your last show in Chico. I was wearing the turtle sarong...ring a bell? Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I enjoyed that night and your poetry. Iʼm really bummed that I didnʼt go see you until your last night! I also regret not going to Jackʼs afterwards because I would have liked to get to know you. You seem like a really cool guy. Anyway, Iʼm sure you get a ton of emails, and youʼre probably crazy busy with moving and everything, but Iʼd love to hear from you! :) Alyssa

i wrote her back and we started an e-mail conversation, talking back and forth about our our writing, our views on feminism and consumerism and politics and passions. she told me all about her life in chico as a college student who worked at a day care with kids, and i told her all about my new life in seattle, going from big fish in a little pond to a tiny microbe in a huge sea. we couldnʼt have had different childhoods. i grew up all bitter and depressed with a dad who hated me and a mom who didnʼt seem to know what to do with me. i had few friends, was generally ignored by the entire student body, and promptly joined the navy upon graduation. alyssaʼs dad was the principal of her high school and her mom was an english teacher, so she had a way different life than me. she was prom queen, student body president, first runner up in the miss yucca valley pageant, a peer leader in the local d.a.r.e. program. she was one of the most popular girls in her entire school, but somehow, we also had a ton of things in common. and iʼm not even about this internet romance business, you know, i donʼt believe in it, i donʼt aspire to it, and when i hear other people talk about it, i can barely hide a smirk. but something about this girl and the way she expressed herself was so intriguing. before i knew it, i was looking forward to her e-mails and sending her longer and longer tales from seattle. one day about a month into it, she e-mailed me a note about the rain in chico and the wonder and beauty of this world, then ended with this brief line: I feel like saying “I miss you” but Iʼve never really met you...thatʼs kind of strange... i couldnʼt even remember what this person looked like, nor did i know the sound of her voice, but man... i was all digging on her by this point. i had already scheduled a trip back down to chico to pick some stuff out of storage, so i asked her if she wanted to get together and hang out. she said, “hell yeah,” so we made plans. it was a long 12-hour drive to get there, and i didnʼt arrive at her apartment door until 4 a.m., but as she opened the door a crack and peered out and smiled at me for only the second time, i just kinda knew... you know? i was already digging on her based on nothing more than her words, and when she was standing there in her robe blinking in the porch light, man... she had originally offered to let me sleep on her futon, but we quickly forgot that and laid down next to each other on her bed and cuddled, then fell asleep that way. that was it, i was hooked. iʼve visited chico to “get things out of storage” at least once a month ever since. since we live so far away from each other, we havenʼt considered ourselves “dating,” really, so she has seen other people and i have seen other people, but weʼve always had this lovely yearning, and this peaceful energy when weʼve visited. and now, after almost a year, iʼve decided to move back to chico from seattle to start my next tour in the fall, and alyssa and i have been, uhm, “talking about stuff.” and i think weʼve decided to give a full on boyfriend/girlfriend relationship a try. iʼll be gone for most of the fall, but in between gigs, i will be crashing in a small apartment in chico with my kitties. in between tours, iʼll huddle in front of my computer and write the two books iʼve been meaning to write. and me and alyssa, well, i guess weʼll finally have a chance to do simple things like... well, like i could actually walk over to her apartment and knock on the door and have her answer it and it wonʼt be this huge deal, it will just be her boy coming over for a visit since her was in the neighborhood. we can do videos and dinner, and not have to spend the night if we donʼt feel like it, or do if we like. i can call her and say, “hey, letʼs spend the night together tonight,” and she can say, “well, i kinda want to hang out by myself tonight. why donʼt we get together on friday night and see a move and stuff.” and it will be all good. i wonʼt have to drive 12 hours throught the night and make special plans to miss five days of work and spend all my time just kinda kicking it around alyssaʼs place. it will be like... normal.

08.13.01 when hbo calls...

so, iʼm sitting here at my data entry job in seattle listening to my latest cd purchase — depeche modeʼs singles 86-98 — and my cell phone rings. i answer it. itʼs hbo. as in home box office, as in the cable company, the same pay network that delivers “the sopranos” to the world. and they want me to send them a tape and a cd ASAP since they are taking such things from poetry slammers all over the country in an effort to find talent for some kind of “def poetry jam” show. as a community, we poetry slammers get this kind of thing all the time, some big time company thinking they can cash in using our work and our community as “the next new thing,” but nothing has ever come of it. in fact, many of us have been approached by people with business cards in hand claiming to be part of def jamʼs hbo connection, especially when performing in nyc, but nothing has ever come of it. so, yeah, when i got the call, i was skeptical, but i told them that i would send them my stuff as soon as possible. then EVERYONE and their sister was calling me on my cell phone, friends from the extended scene asking me if i had been approached by hbo, people e-mailing me asking me if this was the real thing, all kinds of buzz going on, rumors of lots of people i know getting the call. and suddenly, it felt like this time might be the real thing because everyone in the scene seemed to be itchy with curiousity. i was close to blowing it off, but i just knew i would regret missing the gravy train if it finally came this time, so i headed to office depot and bought a bunch of blank cds and cases, spent an hour designing a quickie cd cover and booklet, spent another hour in kinkoʼs making color copies and cutting and folding, and boom, suddenly, i had my very first cd collection of works. PLUS it was a DOUBLE CD, since the first cd had audio recordings of pieces and the second cd had video versions you could play on your computer. pretty snazzy for pulling it out of my ass in a couple of hours, i think. i overnighted it to new york city along with my kick ass press kit, and now... well, i am not sure what happens next. i think i have an excellent chance at being chosen to do whatever it is they need me to do, but i am also very aware that i donʼt want to get my hopes up. as i said, this shit happens all the time and nothing EVER comes of it. remember the whole devo thing? that was SO exciting, but nothing ever came of it. the company that wanted very much to animate my poetry ended up folding in the dot com bust, and so my dreams of appearing as a cartoon character on devoʼs website folded as well. anyway... i have to admit... (i am a little excited.) itʼs not every day you get a call from fucking hbo on your cell phone. oh, and another thing.... i finished the next chapter in my oft-delayed book on poetry slamming, and my editor at soft skull press said it wasnʼt half bad. i think i can get the next chapter done in no time at all. yeah. 08.15.01 when hbo calls... your best friend!

okay, so iʼm at my data entry job and my cell phone rings and itʼs eitan kadosh, my bestest poetry slam friend and roadtrip partner on the upcoming “wordcore” poetry tour this fall. he got the call from hbo, too. and he got a call back. and just a few moments ago, he got THE call, the one that says they are ﬂying him to new york city for the taping of a show featuring performance poets that will be shown on hbo. good god, eitan is going to be on hbo. (please god, please let me be on hbo, too.) this is going to look SO good on our press kits for the wordcore tour. with all my stuff from the los angeles times and washington post and shit and eitanʼs being on fucking hbo, we will be SO styling and getting the phat gigs. (i hope hbo gives me THE call.) i am so proud and happy for eitan. this is a good thing for the entire scene, and will expand our performance opportunites no matter who gets on. rock on for us. (please god... jesus, buddha, allah, vishnu, thor, gaia, mother mary, L. RON HUBBARD, please, please, please make hbo give me a call!) i just want to be famous and loved the world over, is that so wrong? is it so wrong? of course, i am making fun of myself for daring to want this opportunity so badly, so... yeah... i just need to chill... (and wait for the motherfucking cell phone to ring.)

08.16.01 oh jane, sweet jane...

i am rediscovering my love for jane siberry. she is my favorite female vocalist of all time, and i can not think of any other voice that can make me cry so quickly and completely as janeʼs, nor can i think of anything that can fill me with the rush of memories and ghosts of emotions than janeʼs words and music. you can read all about her at her website — http://www.sheeba.ca — but this is what i know. sheʼs from canada, and she studied microbiology in toronto (i think) and pursued her music. her first album of songs was recorded with money made from tips and paychecks as a waitress. it was just her and a guitar at the beginning, and that beautiful voice. she took on a band, had a canadian hit called “mimi on the beach,” and pushed her music across bounderies from folk to complex storysongs. by the time she got to my favorite album, 1987ʼs “the walking,” she was channeling the souls of laurie anderson and kate bush and peter gabriel, making lyrical movies with her songs and layering them dense with meaning. little subtle phrases, snatches of conversation, pure poetry in musical form. i first got this album from melinda, a friend i had in bakersfield. she had never heard of jane nor had i, but she saw “the walking” in the cheap bin at the music store and picked it up since the cover looked interesting and the price was, like, $9.99. Melinda ended up not liking it, labelling it “weird,” so she gave it to me since she knew how much “weird” music i liked. i was instantly taken with jane and became a lifelong fan the first time i heard her voice. the song that just kills me on “the walking” is one called “goodbye,” about the end of a relationship and the aftermath, the loneliness, the loss. the line that slays goes like this: i went to say i love you but instead i said goodbye. when she sings that last word — goodbye — she lifts her voice and throws it to the wind, and all the loss and all the pain and all the sadness flows from her and drags with it everything that has ever hurt me, all the loneliness and pain. the word trails and goes and goes, her voice cracks and it keeps going... she stretches the word goodbye forever. then thereʼs a scene from the aftermath: i want a table no just for one but i know you do i can see some from here ok then say for two no thereʼs only one donʼt you want my business i will never come back here i love this in that she doesnʼt really explain what is going on here, itʼs not obvious, but she is asking a greeter at a restaurant for a table for one, and the greeter is telling her there are none, and jane can see several tables that are open, but still they wonʼt seat her as only one, and this just drives home the fact that she is alone now. she ends the song with this little haiku: oh my love faithless dove all the love in the world... god this songs kills me. i am choking up just typing the words and imagining the song in my head. the album is all about relationships falling apart. on the nine- minute opening song, “the white raft the tent,” jane at one point sings “what do you mean i love you / stop saying i love you / i donʼt know what you mean anyway / i donʼt know what love is and... / you donʼt know what love is and... / it doesnʼt change anything anyway.” damn. makes me think of so many relationships iʼve had. (kimberly) her next album was recorded loose-limbed and country-tinged in an apple orchard over the course of three days. my happy song is on this one, the song that i go to when i am stressed and angry and frustrated, the one that calms me down and gets me thinking good thoughts again, “everything reminds me of my dog.” i love these lines: except when we go for a walk to get the Sunday paper I stand there and read the headlines he reads the wind sometimes he hits a funny smell and laughs I hate it when he does that- I feel so dumb what? what? I say so many good songs. when i saw jane live in san francisco a couple of years ago, i was sick with fever and nausea from the flu, but i stuck with it. she was touring with her album “maria,” full of jazz-infused songs and off-the-cuff improvisations. i listened to the whole concert with my eyes closed and my head on mary ellenʼs shoulder, and i cried when she got to “goodbye sweet pumpkinhead” and the lines: “would you believe me if I said that youʼre the one/ that Iʼve been waiting for for so long? / and Iʼve sailed my ship ʻcross some stormy seas / looking for my love / looking for my love / while my love waits for me.” at one point during a quiet part of her set, i sneezed huge and cavernous, and the echoes rang off the walls. and jane sang a very soft “bless you” in the middle of her song, just for me, and the crowd giggled softly and you could hear their smiles as she continued. how can i not love her music? she blessed me. i think the whole world of this personʼs music, and for some reason it is touching me deeply today. iʼm at work, in my cubicle, in front of my computer, listening to jane through headphones, and i can barely keep from bawling like a little kid lost in the mall, inconsolable... we are not allowed to cry passionately and inconsolably in this society. people seem to feel the need to stop you at any cost, put their hand on your shoulder, tell you everything will be alright even when you know and they know and everyone knows that nothing will ever be alright, anything to make you stop crying and get yourself together, stop making a spectical of yourself, stop reminding them of their own sadness. i feel like standing on the street corner downtown and just weeping as people walk past me, let all my tears flow down the front of my shirt and into the gutters, listening to janeʼs voice on my headphones and thinking of everything and everyone and everything, everything in the world. i wonder if anyone would notice...

08.17.01 even better than the real thing

a] i went to the candy machine in the break room just a moment ago, and there it was, amongst the plastic packages of cookies and chips and gum and poptarts, for only 65 cents -- true love -- nestled at E4 between the reeseʼs peanut butter cups on the left and the hersheyʼs chocolate with almonds on the right. imagine, the thing iʼve been searching for my whole life, and there it is, in bright yellow plastic wrap in the candy machine at work, and for only 65 cents. i know iʼve spent way more than that looking for it up to this point, so 65 cents was one hell of a bargain. i reached into my pocket, and found that i had exactly 65 cents... two quarters, a dime and five pennies. since the machine only took silver, i was out of luck. a nickel short. i went to the receptionist and asked if i could borrow a nickel, even offered to give her the five pennies for a nickel, but she didnʼt have it. she had no change. i went to all the people who work near my cubicle and asked if they could trade my five pennies for a nickel, and none of them, not a single one, could do it. they had no change. i finally dug around in the very bottom of my backpack and found one dirty dime, more than enough to make my 65 cents, so i marched to the break room with change in hand...... only to find that the true love in bin E4 was gone. there had been only one left, and someone mustʼve gotten it as i was looking for the money to pay for it. i looked at the machine... i looked at the money in my hand... i looked back up at the machine... then i put my 70 cents into the machine and pressed E5: hersheyʼs chocolate with almonds. got a nickel back for change.

b] after work, i walked to my bus stop. on the way i passed the brightly lit windows of a gift shop, and right there in front of the biggest display was a box marked “deluxe true love.” there was a photo on the box of a man and a woman staring into each otherʼs eyes and smiling slow, dreamy smiles. the ﬂashing sign next to the box said, “only $29.99! going fast!” i walked in and went to the front counter and asked the cashier what about this brand of true love made it “deluxe.” he said that this particular true love was especially long-lasting, yet it encouraged indi- viduality, which many other cheaper brands of love often neglect. i took out my wallet and told him that i would take one, but the cashier said that he was all out because of the christmas rush. he said he could put me on the rain check list, but he cautioned that the wait would be several months, if not longer. i asked if he could sell me the one in the window, but he said it was an empty box. i asked if he had anymore in the back, and he said he didnʼt think so, but he would look just in case. when he came back out, he held a much smaller box that was wrapped in bright paper with neon ink and colorful photos of people smiling very large and beaming and driving sports cars and talking on cell phones and playing computer games and watching big screen teevees.. i asked him if that was it, was that “deluxe true love,” but he shook his head slowly and said, “no, we are all out of ʻdeluxe true love,ʼ but we do have several boxes left of ʻinstant gratiﬁcationʼ for only $9.99.” i told him that i already had enough of that, and thanked him for his time.

c] when i got home, i turned on the teevee and flipped around the cable channels and stopped for a moment on one of those home shopping channels. and there on the screen was a big colorful box of “deluxe true love,” only this was a special version of “deluxe true love” they called the “limited edition deluxe true love.” the salesman said these versions were hand-crafted in very small batches by experts in the art of making love, and that his company was allowed to sell only 100 boxes, and the time was running short, he said, since 67 had already been sold in the last five minutes. the price, he said, was three low monthly payments of $59.99 each. what made this version of deluxe true love so special, he said, was its easy application, its long lasting strength, and its durability. it wasnʼt like those shabby versions of love you could buy for less elsewhere, he said, that were fine for the first few months or even years, but then began to fade. this version of deluxe true love was specially made to last the lifetime of its owner; in fact, it even came with a guarantee. fourteen more boxes of the “limited edition deluxe true love” were sold as i watched it, so i grabbed up my phone and called the 1-800 number, and was greeted my a friendly receptionist named molly. she asked me what product i was interested in, and i said i wanted a box of “limited edition deluxe true love.” she asked me what credit card i used, and i said that i didnʼt have a credit card. she asked me if i wanted to use a check car, and i said i didnʼt have a check card. she said she could only accept one or the other, but i asked her if i could just arrange to send cash. she put me on hold. and i waited. and i watched as 5 more boxes were sold. and 7 more boxes were sold. and then 6 more boxes were sold. and the announcer on the teevee said, “and we only have one more box of ʻspecial edition deluxe true love left,ʼ and our lucky next caller will have the first crack at it!” and then the receptionist came back on the line, and i said, “iʼll take it, please, iʼll take that last box of ʻspecial edition deluxe true love,ʼ” but she replied, “iʼm sorry sir, we can only accept credit cards or check cards with the visa logo. we do not accept cash. iʼm very sorry sir.” then she hung up. and on the teevee screen, the salesman announced that a lady from americus, georgia, was the proud owner of the last box of “limited edition deluxe true love.” i turned off the teevee. then i reached into my pocket, and pulled out my hersheyʼs chocolate bar with almonds, and proceeded to unwrap it. 08.23.01 how did “singles” get so dated?

i rented the dvd for “singles” the other night, that and “requiem for a dream.” these two movies could not have been on more opposite ends of the spectrum, but thatʼs not what iʼm talking about... how did “singles” get so dated? i remember when the movie came out, back when i was working in the record store in bakersfield in ʼ92, back when grunge was on the cover of every magazine and newspaper in the country, back when you couldnʼt turn on mtv without seeing “smells like teen spirit” within five or ten minutes, tops. i remember getting a nirvana sticker in the fall of ʼ91, this free- bie from the record company, and i had never heard of them, in fact, thought they were a rap group for some reason. a few months later, i was ALL about grunge, especially nirvanaʼs “bleach,” which still to this day is a fucking classic. anyway... “singles” came out and i loved that movie. it hit me at 24, which is the age of the main characters, that post-college age where you are still pulling espresso at the cafe by the college and wondering what the hell happens next. and the soundtrack, awww yeah, chock full of grungey stuff like early pearl jam, soundgarden, alice in chains, smash- ing pumpkins. we used to play the SHIT out of that soundtrack in the record store, not a bad track on it, and it became the soundtrack to that entire time. now flash forward ten years later — oh jesus, TEN YEARS have already gone by??? — and i rent the movie and watch it with my sorta- roomie morris, and iʼm all telling him how good this movie was and how great the soundtrack was and how much of a HUGE crush i had on kyra sedgwick when i first saw it and how it was going to be cool to actually recognize some of the places in the movies now that we actually live in seattle. (and come on, we all DREAMED of moving to seattle when this movie was made, and anyone who actually did move to seattle was like... “ooooh, did you hear that so-and-so moved to SEATTLE? ooooh....”) and we did, we pointed at the screen during all the parts where we knew places — thereʼs my building! thatʼs our bridge! whoa, thatʼs where they used to have the slam! — and the soundtrack still smacks of memories from that time. but... wow. the movie itself is so dated, so silly and self-conscious and generation x-ey, it played like a precursor to “friends” or something. bleck! i remember swooning when kyra sedgwick finally comes back to the boyʼs house and he smiles and she smiles and he says, “what took you so long?” but now, gawd, i was just rolling my eyes and gagging at the whole thing. it was so... eww, just so very... very. either i was a chump when i first watched it, or so many movies and television shows have copied it so profusely that everything about it has become hackneyed and cliched. very disconcerting, that. “requiem for a dream,” however, was a real mind-fuck of a movie. really cleansed the palate after that sickly-sweet confection of a movie.

08.24.01 my sexy kitty

iʼve been letting my kitties outside once i get home from work, and they absolutely love it. thelonious roams far and wide and disappears for an hour at a time, but aretha tends to stay close to home, which is weird because i expected the exact opposite. theo tends to be very clingy and co-dependent while aretha is very independent and sometimes a tad aloof. one time about a week ago, i decided to take a walk around the block, and i was all the way down the street before i realized my kitties were following me. they were so cute, just jumping in trees and running across the neighborsʼ yards and chasing butterﬂies and hopping into bushes. they ended up walking with me all around the block, taking their own sweet time but always keeping me in sight. since then, iʼve made a habit of walking around the block with my kitties. on our route, thereʼs a little kitten who looks just like my babies did when they were little. his name is felipe, and he hides in the bushes as we walk past, then he jumps out and arches his back and hops from his back legs to his front legs and back again, little pogo kitty being an intimidating bad-ass, and my kitties always chase after him and play. heʼs followed us down the street more than once... imagine me walking down the street, hands in my pockets, beautiful blue sky above me, barefooted, and trailing behind are three little tuxedo kitties playing in the bushes and eating bugs and climbing trees. yeah, my kitties rock. i keep having this fantasy that i will wake up one day to ﬁnd that aretha has turned into a beautiful woman. i am not quite sure how i feel about that. sheʼd be so cute, though. 08.30.01 the surreal mcdonald’s of my tortured soul

every morning for the past few weeks, i stop at this mcdonaldʼs down the street from the building in which i work, and i get the same thing every morning: an egg mcmuffin; a hash brown; a medium coke with extra ice. and every morning, i am struck by how very odd this particular mcdonaldʼs is, how surreal. something about the various qualities of it make it seem like a mc- donaldʼs in a david lynch movie, like a place where tension hangs thick and the soundtrack music is the slow, steady pulse of a cello, making you think something big is just about to happen but never does. iʼm not exactly sure why this place sorta freaks me out. it seems to be owned and operated by a family of filipinos, and every worker behind the counter — from the manager running the show down to the little old lady who sweeps the sidewalk — appears to be filipino. this isnʼt odd by itself. the clientele seems to be largely street people who hang around the downtown area, lots of people with backpacks and interesting smells who look like theyʼve just gotten off some bus. and lots of black people here, too, although the downtown area in seattle doesnʼt really strike me as a gathering place for black folks. but here, in this mcdonaldʼs, yeah... maybe the only place in seattle with more black folks than white folks. so, filipino people behind the counter, street people and black people the clientele, but neither of these things is really all that odd or intriguing. but add to this mix: the music. piped in over the loudspeakers in the mcdonaldʼs is an endless mix of old country songs, like country swing songs from the ʼ40s and classic country twangers from the early ʼ60s, songs by patsy cline and johnnny cash and hank williams sr. mixed with bob wills and the texas playboys. if the music were what every other establishment in downtown seattle played — an eye-glazingly trendy mixture of techno, hip-hop, pop rock and soul — this particular mcdonaldʼs would only be one of millions of mcdonaldʼs, but the music... why? itʼs just seems so odd to me. incongruous. maybe itʼs like... one time, i met this young women of chinese descent, and her ethnicity was as obvious as the clothes she wore or the hairstyle she had. the thing was, she was born and raised in oklahoma by parents who had been born and raised in oklahoma by parents who had moved to oklahoma a long, long time ago. her accent was pure american heartland country twang, which just seemed... odd. like, on the bus the other day, there was this guy who looked like he was japanese, and he received a cell phone call and answered it and began talking to whoever it was in an unmistakably thick australian accent, complete with the slang that goes along with being from down under. it just was odd... unexpected. and so is this mcdonaldʼs. the street people and their torn jackets and stuffed backpacks, the young black kids in their hip-hop attire, the crew of filipino folks behind the counter taking orders, and binding them all together is this high lonesome sound of scratchy country and western music, tales of lost wives and vengeful children and drowning sorrows and love and death. it all just seems odd to me in a way that i canʼt quit put a finger on. and yet, it makes sense. it works for me. in fact, i think itʼs fucking brilliant, that music in that mcdonaldʼs, i think itʼs absolutely perfect.

08.31.01 alyssa and bumbershoot all weekend long

alyssa is coming today. iʼll meet her at the sea/tac airport around 4:30 p.m. (alaskan air- lines flight 349), and then weʼll go back to my place, unpack, and head out to bumbershoot. weʼre both hoping itʼs going the be a weekend full of music (meeshell ndegochello, old 97s, cat power), spoken word (my boy spalding grey, me and daphne gottlieb doing poetry), and movies, plus all the hand holding, neck kissing, love making and snuggling that we can fit in before, during, and after. i am so looking forward to this. my time in seattle has been charac- terized by long periods of being completely alone, even and especially in a crowded room, periods broken up by irregular spasms of closeness with people i barely knew. i am so ready to hang out with alyssa on a regular basis. sheʼs cool. once i get down to chico (in just 9 days), it will nice to be in a real live relationship again. itʼs been a while. kimberly and i dated on and off for around four years, but she lived 75 miles north of chico in redding for the last year and a half of our... our... whatever youʼd call it. i dated jen for about three months in the beginning of ʼ99, then i went to reno over the summer for an internship, and we saw each other once a week, maybe once every two weeks during that time. that fall, after jen died, kimberly and i sorta hooked up now and then, and i was seeing a couple of people over the spring semester of 2000, but nothing steady. then i went on tour in may of 2000. this time last year, i was still on that tour, chilling somewhere on the east coast, somewhere between new york city and burlington, vermont, and portland, maine. hmmm... i donʼt have a whole lot to say. iʼm at work, i have only about 9 days left in seattle before returning to chico, thereʼs no work to be done today, so i am looking at a morning and early afternoon of farting around on the internet, listening to music, drumming my fingers against the countertop, and waiting for 3 p.m. to arrive so i can leave this place and ride the bus back home, jump in my truck, and head for the airport. i cleaned the toilet this morning. i made my bed. i wore my coolest t-shirt, my lucky short pants. i shaved. i flossed. i deodorized. my purpetually messy and often completely inconsider- ate to the point of infuriation roomie/boarder named morris is finally finally FINALLY out of my hair for the first time in the four months since he took up residence on my floor. tonight, iʼll be making love to my girlfriend and sleeping soundly curled up next to her with a cat shoving his ass on my head and trying to push me off my own pillow and another kitty curled in the crook of my knees. we will sleep in tomorrow, and then wake up, naked, make some more love, take a shower, then hit bumbershoot. awww, yeah... iʼve been waiting for this for quite some time. itʼs 9:23 a.m. dum de dum...

09.02.01 bumbershoot and everything else

i had an excellent good time with alyssa this past weekend. it was nice to be able to finally hang out with her and show her some of the seattle stuff iʼve been telling her about since last october. wow. weʼve known each other for almost a year. anyone reading this wonʼt know it, but almost all the journal entries from oct. of ʼ00 to the beginning of ʼ01 started out as an e-mail to alyssa. i just removed the personal stuff and made them into journal entries. knowing this, you can look back at them and read them knowing that i was talking to alyssa. anyway. bumbershoot was the centerpiece of our weekend, and we spent a lot of time there. time well spent, even though we only really saw four shows. we had plans for so much more — old 97ʼs, rufus wainwright, bahamadia — but we ended up having so much fun that schedules were abandoned in favor of just spending time with each other and walking around the booths and such. the first night we checked out spalding grey. awww yeah. i donʼt think alyssa had ever heard of him, but heʼs my man, my dude, one of my main... well... i donʼt know that i can say he is an influence, really, since i am unfamiliar with most of his work, but i would say just knowing that someone like spalding grey is out there travelling from college to college and venue to venue giving these shows in front of large crowds where he essentially sits in front of an audience and tells them stories is very inspiring. i should like to follow in his footsteps. his show was big fun, and moving and thought-provoking and inspiring all at once. it made me want to run home and write, and really, what more can you say? his show consisted of interviews he conducted with people chosen from the audience. he would lead them forward, poke them in that direction, prod them in this directions, and pull stories out of them about their lives. i kept thinking of the oral histories of studs terkel done live and in the flesh. one of the themes that he wove through the dialogue was death and the way we handle the inevitability of it. he was in an horrific car crash a few months ago, and heʼs still suffering and walking with the aid of crutches, so i guess itʼs been on his mind much more that usual, which, apparently, is really saying something since he thinks about death a lot. (something we very definitely have in common.) something he said about his car wreck has stuck with me ever since. he mentioned that had he simply gone back into the house and gotten his wallet, causing a minor five-minute delay, then the accident wouldnʼt have happened and his life would be totally different. he wouldnʼt have the dimmest awareness that he had been on a collision course with an irish farmer in a truck, no, he wouldʼve simply driven past that truck and never even noticed it, would never have thought to himself that had he simply passed that truck five minutes earlier — just five minutes — he wouldʼve been in a bone-crunching wreck with it. this made him think of all the tragic accidents heʼs avoided in his life by simply turning a corner unexpectedly midway through a well- worn route, stopping and waiting on a corner to cross the street a little extra time rather than proceeding with the crowd, taking an extra five minutes to finish that newspaper article at the cafe before finishing his coffee and returning home. we have no idea how many close shaves weʼve avoided... who knows? in some alternate reality, we are all brain dead on respirators sealed head-to-toe in a body cast with our families surrounding us wringing their hands and sighing. in another reality, stephen hawking plays football with his kids and works in the garden while talking to himself about the ticking universe. the only other big show we saw was meshell ndegeocello, which was good but hampered by shitty sound for the vocals. we ended up crashing on the astroturf floor of the amphitheater and sleeping, my head on alyssaʼs tummy and her head on her backpack. the poetry showcase was p-h-a-t. we had popped our heads in the day before and saw a room full of empty chairs and maybe 20 people listening to some academic looking chap with a white beard and a tenure-sized belly droning on about something. alyssa and i looked at each other, grimaced, and kept on walking. this made me lower my expectations considerably for my own showcase, and i ended up bringing maybe 10 chapbooks and maybe 6 or 7 cds with me for my reading. i walked in to my reading, and LO! — the place was PACKED with people. many had obviously come to hear inga muscio, author of the feminist manifesto “cunt,” a book that has really developed a rabid following among young college-aged women. inga rocks, and that books rocks, and it was such a kick ass bit of good fortune to be able to read with her. alyssa and i met her and her girlfriend backstage in the “green room,” which was actually a hallway with curtains on either end to keep away prying eyes. packed, i tell you, packed, easily 350+ people, as filled with people as the starbucks literary stage had been the entire festival, and full of young, energetic, activist kids of all shapes and sizes and colors and flavors... yes, my crowd, my people. (thanks inga!) and i ripped out a really solid 30-minute set of stuff with haiku in between for good measure, funny stuff up front and at the end, more serious and personal stuff in the middle. i threw out something like 350 little books of haiku near the end and caused a mini-riot as people stumbled over themselves to get copies, calling out “throw some here, wussy boy!” it was kick ass, lots of audience response, and i got an EXCELLENT recording on it on my mini-cd recorder. there was lots of chatter in between poems, lots of laughs, big applause, man... that crowd really gave me lots of energy, and i was able to echo it back to them. thank god they were there to have fun. (thanks inga!) (check out her website, by the way — http://www.kalikunti.com) and inga was kick ass, too, hugging me backstage as my set ended and the roar of applause was dying down, whispering in my ear, “wow, thatʼs a hard act to follow! what am i going to do now?” and she did just what she needed to do, whipped out the real deal and held the crowd in the palm of her hand. such a good double bill! we have corresponded a couple of times since then via e-mail, and i am about to send her my books and magazines so that she can write a blurb for the back cover of my chapbook. now that, sisters and brothers, would be p-h-a-t. after the joint set, i sat at a table near the elliot bay book companyʼs table and sold out of every chapbook and every cd that iʼd brought, much to the chagrin of the kind folks at the elliot bay table, who had the nerve to demand a 40% cut of all sales during the showcase. i looked them straight in the eye and told them the following: “now, let me get this straight, your bookstore refuses to stock my chapbook and will not even return my calls concerning setting up a featured reading in your store, yet you want me to pay you 40-percent of my sales today? look, to be honest, unless you fork over 40-percent of what it cost me to print these, you will get exactly what you have given me, and thatʼs nothing. please excuse me, i have books to sell.” (fuckers.) okay, i didnʼt really say that and they didnʼt even come up to me and tell me this, but i imagined this in my head as i talked to the growing line of people buying books from me. the sponsoring bookstore actually had made it very clear they wanted a 40-percent cut, but i just ignored them and kept 100%. when i sold out, i told the crowd that i had to run home and get more, so theyʼd have to meet me a few hours later at a book signing at the book fair next door. boom, alyssa and i dashed to my apartment, tore each otherʼs clothing off and had passionate sex, got dressed again, barely caught the bus, and barely got back to the venue in time for the book signing. and there was already a crowd of people asking for me. the book signing gigs were a new thing brought in by the organizors, and the response had been tepid at best, but my book signing was packed and i sold out of the cds and books i had brought again. total sales: $400+. aww yeah, and i kept 100% of it. (fuckers.) the next day, alyssa and i saw two of my favorite poets to come from the slam poetry scene, daphne gottlieb and jeffrey mcdaniel. always a treat. daphneʼs hands shook as she read, which means it was really real and not fake. she was nervous, but she kicked out the jams and even gave a shout out to me before she read a poem i had requested. and jeffrey was great, too, easy-going and solid as usual. he is the master of lines, man, heʼs got the best “one-liners” within his poems. like, heʼs got this one where he says something like “my tongue is a red carpet i only roll out for you.” damn! and another one that goes something like “you bed is a soft calculator wherein my problems multiply.” double damn! and oh man, he said this one that was really good, where he asked the subject of the poem where she kept the breath she stole from him, in a box, in the sock drawer... double goddamn and a carton of hells! that boy good! and then i drove down to chico with alyssa, put some of my shit into storage, and then i drove back, or attempted to drive back rather, as my truckʼs clutch finally gave up the ghost as i was driving through portland, and i had to spend $1200 of my daddyʼs credit card money to fix it, had to stay in a hotel a night for $75, had to wait around the next day for, like, all day, while the clutch was replaced, and i ended up seeing “the others,” which wasnʼt half bad even though morris swore up and down that it sucked. (for those keeping score, my truck has over 260,000 miles on it. not bad for a 1990 toyota pickup, and most of it has been poetry roadtrip miles.) (i hate asking my dad to help me out with fixing my truck. i always feel so embarrassed. i swear i treat my dad like heʼs god... like, i ignore him most of the time, but when something goes wrong, heʼs the first person i call.) and now here i am, my last day at the temp job that turned into a perm job but was always a temp job in my head since i always knew iʼd be leaving as soon as the national poetry abortion was over. i have to take home all my cds today, clean off the hard drive of my computer, take home all my little toys adorning my computer, the george harrison doll from “yellow submarine” and the snapping turk that katy gave me, the photos of my kitties, of alyssa, the empty cans of whoop ass energy drink... (no one got me a cake. the last several people who have moved on from this company have gotten a cake. i didnʼt get a cake. i got a card.) (fuckers.) i already have a show planned in chico for sept. 21. iʼll be living with alyssa until i find a place of my own, which shouldnʼt take more than a week or so. then, weʼll see what happens. g-bye seattle. i hardly knew you.

09.07.01 revisiting the navy for just a moment

when i was stuck in portland with nothing to do for seven hours except wait around and mope while the mechanic fixed my truckʼs clutch, i went first to the barnes and noble to look at magazines for free. then i walked around the mall. then i went back to barnes and noble. then i went back to the mall to get something to eat at the food court. than i just stood there at the street corner, fully aware that i still had six and a half hours to wait there. and as i stood with my hands on my hips, squinting in the sun, looking left then right then all around, my eyes spied something that, at first, sent chills running like cold fintertips up and down the wee hairs of my neck: a navy recruiting center. dear lord, the memories the sight of that place, that unholy place, gave me in the pit of my stomach. me at 17 with no friends, a fucked relationship with my father, no interests in anything other than reading pulp fantasy books and a vague notion that i wanted to do something with computers. if you had asked me a week before i made the decision about joining the navy, i wouldʼve spit in your eye. but the navy recruiter mustʼve called me just as the intensity of aching to escape bakersfield and my dysfunctional family and never come back was squeezing my chest and making it hard to breath. the navy came at the just right time, like a great white shark sens- ing the shock waves of a drowning swimmer and swooping in for the kill. had they called a week before or a week after, i wouldʼve told them to fuck themselves. but they didnʼt, and so my answer was this: “sure, iʼll come in and talk to you.” six years. thatʼs how long i spent in the clutches of the navy, six extremely long years. i spent every moment of every day between july 16, 1985, to july 16, 1991, in the navy, and most of those moments were spent waiting with growing impatience to get out, to escape, and on the day i finally finally FINALLY did get out, i piled all my navy uniforms into a big mountain and doused them with lighter fluid and burned them and danced around their flames like a firefly. really, thatʼs what i did. itʼs hard for me to not believe in the pit of my stomach that joining the navy was the worse thing in the world that i couldʼve possibly done. i hated every moment of every day while i was there, and i truly believe that it robbed me of the opportunity to be a young adult — while other kids were filling their journies between 18 and 24 with college experiences, first drug experiences, first or second or third sex experiences, being silly drinking partying college kids, me... i sat there gritting my teeth and waited for 2,190 days to pass. by the time i got out and actually started living the life of a college student and living it fully and with great exuberance, i was 24 while the rest of my classmates were 18. i hung out with and dated and learned with those around me, so that made me six years older than everyone else. somehow, iʼve been stuck ever since in this weird limbo... living the life of that same college student, but ever so slowly aging, until finally, i am 34 and ten years has gone by, and i am still living that ir- responsible life full of dreams and expectations. iʼve never been in the right time. even when i was in high school, i was incapable of enjoying my youth. by the time i began figuring it out and coming out of my shell, i was six years behind everyone else, a 24- year-old dating the 18-year-olds in my english composition classes. all this hits me as i stand there looking at the navy recruiting center. and i find myself walking over to it with this half-smile. for the fuck of it, i decided to see what would happen if i re-joined the navy. i have had nightmares about this sort of thing, where i wake up and i have rejoined the navy for four years, and i am back on the ship in a uniform reporting for my first day of work, and even though itʼs a nightmare, itʼs a quiet one, where i look all around me in a wide-eyed fit of rising panic, but then i just heave a deep trembling sigh and nod my head and get down to the business of waiting for 1,460 days to pass. god, such a fucking heinous dream. so there i am, sitting in the navy recruiterʼs office, and i say, “so, iʼm thinking about rejoining the navy. can you tell me how that would work?” and the recruiters get down to business, looking up things on the computer, digging up facts from thick dog-eared manuals and three- ringed binders and surfing the internet. after 30 minutes of looking, this is what they find: 1] the navy base where i went to boot camp in san diego is closed down and no longer processing new navy recruits; 2] the job i used to have (aviation fire control technician, which meant that i worked on the radar equipment for jet planes) has been discontinued and all people who used to do that job are now called aviation electronics technicians; 3] the jet plane i used to work on (the a-6 intruder bomber) has been retired from service and is no longer used, which means all the computer test equipment i used for four of my six years is also no longer used; 4] the aircraft carrier i was stationed on (the uss saratoga, cv-60) has been decomissioned and but into mothballs in case there is a future war where it might be needed again. after listing all these changes, the recruiter said, “looks like theyʼve done everything they can to erase your time in the navy, havenʼt they?” theyʼre not the only ones, brother. it turns out that since i am no longer a disgruntled high school student with no future and a propensity for being lead around by the nose by anyone bigger than me, since i have allowed a whole decade to pass between the time i got out and the time i supposedly wanted back in, since i am now 34 and not 18, since the navy would have to retrain me on everything since itʼs been so long and everything i was involved with in the navy is gone... “well,” the navy recruiter says, “it seems like the navy isnʼt going to let you rejoin.” silence. “iʼm very sorry,” he says, then closes the three-ringed binder with a slow slap and gentle poof of dust. whew. i thanked him for his time, then went back to the barnes and noble and read newsweek magazine. i still had five hours to wait. i am good at waiting. i have had a lot of experience with it. five hours is nothing...

kitty poo hell

oh, so the real untold story of the weekend, though, had to do with me leaving my kitties in the apartment all by themselves whilst i gala- vanted to chico with alyssa. i usually take them EVERYWHERE, even on tour, but this quick trip was only supposed to be for a day, see, i would drive the 12 hours down to chico, sleep, then get back in my truck to drive to seattle again. the kitties shouldʼve only been alone for a day, right? wrong. i was too tired to drive all the way the hell back to seattle the very next day, so i chilled an extra day in chico with alyssa. no problem, the kitties have been alone for more than a day before, they have their automatic waterer and their automatic feeder, so everythingʼs cool, right? (wrong.) i broke down in portland, so i had to spend the night in a hotel, then i had to wait all day as the mechanic ﬁxed it, which meant i didnʼt get home again until 10 p.m. on thursday, when i SHOULDʼVE been home on tuesday. my cats were not in the least bit amused, and they registered their feelings by shitting and pissing all over my bed. and donʼt even try to tell me that my kitties were not being vindictive little beasts as they shat ﬁve or six times each all over my pillow and soaked my sheets and mattress with repeated pissings. they couldʼve done their poo anywhere, but they chose the bed, which is where i sleep, which makes me think they were like, “okay, dad, what happened to us being your road kitties, huh, mother fucker? well, take that! and THAT! and THAT and THAT and howʼs about some of THIS!” iʼm going to have to ditch my mattress... itʼs gnarly now, like a urine-soaked sponge. blarg.

08.10.01 home? i am in chico again.

i am sitting at the kitchen table in alyssaʼs pad, the one she shares with leeane, who actually is the one who created the situation wherein alyssa and i could meet by bringing her to the poetry reading where we first met around this time last year. four cats in this place, my babies aretha and thelonious and their two babies, lucy (short for lucifer) and indy (short for indiana jones). lots of hissing and spitting. none so far between us humans. i am sick, got some sort of flu on the way down here, and now i am planning on spending the next few days recuperating in alyssaʼs luxuri- ous bed. i need to find a place of my own to rent, but i am officially sick, so fuck it. i need to relax for a day or so. then iʼll look. yeah.

chico.

back in chico.

not quite sure what to think about that. HOW TO PACK YOUR CHAPBOOKS IN THE VAN AND TOUR THE COUNTRY LIKE A ROCK STAR (SORT OF) Orginally printed in Poets and Writers (May/June 2001)

In the heyday of punk rock, little garage bands armed with duct- taped guitars and as much passion as raw talent skirted the mainstream rock world by setting up their own network of true believers. They slapped together shoestring tours with the help of friends of friends theyʼd never met, blew their last wad of cash on used vans and pawn- shop amps and hit the road, playing house parties for 20 kids at a time and hoping for just enough gas money to get to the next town, the next gig, the next series of couches theyʼd be crashing on. The same energy is in full effect in the underground performance poetry scene. More and more poets are getting fed up with the standard routine of sending their poems to the literary magazines listed in Poetʼs Market only to reap a pile of rejection letters months later. Theyʼre photocopying their own chapbooks of poetry, burning their own CD recordings, and hitting the spoken word highway just like their punk rock brethren. Thanks largely to the widespread popularity of competitive poetry slamming — the full contact sport of spoken word —a loose network has spread its way through America one college town at a time. Clus- ters of performance poets, slam organizers, hosts, and venue owners trade missives via e-mail and Web site postings to keep each other informed and in check, and they meet regularly to figure out what the next step forward should be. In case youʼve never experienced what was called “a bona fide cultural force” by The New York Times, a poetry slam is like a lyrical boxing match. Five judges are randomly chosen from the audience and tasked with rating each performance on an Olympic scale of 1 to 10. Readers sign up open-mike style and are called to the stage one at a time to perform one original poem within three minutes. Each poet is scored, and the one at the end of the slam who has the highest score is declared the winner. You can imagine the kind of criticism this sort of thing gets. Liter- ary critic Harold Bloom dismissed slam poets as poetasters “declaiming rant and nonsense at each other” and the burgeoning poetry slam scene as “the death of art” in the Paris Review (Spring 2000). Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky pooh-poohed poetry slamming during a Novem- ber 1999 segment of 60 Minutes, claiming performance-based slam poetry didnʼt hold up to the classic works in the literary canon. The elitist sniping hasnʼt stopped the spread of poetry slamming and the steep rise in popularity of the form, however, nor has it stopped it from becoming what the Daily Oklahoman called “the hottest thing to hit poetry since Ginsburgʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” Embued with a punk rock “do-it-yourself” attitude, the network of slammers has spread from coast to coast, linking and organizing an impressive circuit of more than 70 venues in the U.S. The central organization is a non-profit corporation called Poetry Slam, Inc., which runs a popular Web site at www.poetryslam.com and organizes a yearly gathering of more than 500 poets and thousands of fans from around the country called the National Poetry Slam. After 12 years of hard work, PSI and its nationwide poetry slam community has become the best route for a relatively new and unknown poet to organize a performance poetry tour. Thatʼs exactly what I did in the summer of 2000. I had just graduated with a degree in journalism I was eager to ignore and had nothing holding me back from hitting the road. So, I logged onto the Internet and started e-mailing everyone I knew in the poetry slam scene, and within two weeks I had booked over 60 gigs across 27 states in four months. I dubbed my tour Couches Across America, threw my belong- ings into storage, and hit the road for an endless summer of couch surfing, poetry slamming, Greyhound riding, groupie shagging, spoken word madness. (Okay, maybe not the groupie shagging part, but I was ever-hopeful.) I sold nearly 1,000 self-published poetry chapbooks at $5 each, plus got paid between $25 and $100 per feature, which not only funded the entire tour but left me with enough in the bank to relocate to Seattle afterwards. Along the way, I was able to scare up enough publicity about my tour to fatten my clip file—articles from The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Utne Reader, The Dallas Morning News, The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), The Ottowa Citizen (Canada), The Daily Oklahoman, and countless tiny little papers scattered allover the U.S. Obviously, someone who is completely unknown and unconnected to the poetry slam community canʼt just send out e-mails and expect a tour to miraculously form. Most organizers of poetry slams wonʼt give you the time of day if they donʼt know you or at last know someone who knows you or, at the very least, know something about the scene that spawned you. What made the task of booking a tour easy for me was the fact that I had been performing poetry and organizing spoken word events for nearly ten years, plus I had made a name for myself within the poetry slam community by being a part of the 1999 San Francisco Poetry Slam Team, co-champions (with Team San Jose) of the 1999 National Poetry Slam in Chicago. You donʼt have to be a part of a national championship poetry slam team before you can mount a moderately successful tour, but there are definitely steps you need to take before hitting the performance poetry highway. 1] FIRST, YOU HAVE TO BE REALLY GOOD. No book or magazine article can help you with this, although there are plenty out there that would love for you to believe they can. The last thing in the world I want to do is unleash a Shatneresque horde of third-rate street poets upon an unsuspecting world, so make sure you are really good at what you do. (Be honest: If you suck, your tour will suck and no one will invite you back for more, plus you will give every other performance poet following in your footsteps a bad name.) 2] PUT TOGETHER A CHAPBOOK OF YOUR BEST WORK. Anyone with access to a photocopier and a typewriter can put together a little book of poetry at the nearest Kinkoʼs. Add access to a computer and a design program like Adobe PageMaker, and you can have a snazzy little collection that people will actually line up to buy. Having a decent chapbook is crucial because its sales can fund your entire tour, plus it works as a calling card, networking tool, and show souvenir all at the same time. 3] MAKE A NAME FOR YOURSELF IN YOUR LOCAL SCENE. Even a punk band as world famous Green Day was an unknown local band at one time, so youʼve got to build a fan base in your own hometown. Hit every open-mike poetry reading in town, from staid Barnes and Noble readings to poetry slams in smoky college bars. Your mission at this level is to score featured readings in the most popular spots in town and heavily promote them just as a band would promote a show, with a flurry of fliers, handbills and, most importantly, stories in the local paper. Getting media coverage will take some convincing on your part, otherwise your only mention in the newspaper will be a sentence in the back of the calendar section (doom to any performer, especially a poet.) Sell the idea of performance poetry as the new punk rock, something as vital and new as it is ancient, and connect what you are doing locally with the growing poetry slam scene nationally. Concentrate on developing a relationship with the people who can help you out the most, ie. the writers and editors on the entertainment staff of local newspapers. (Do not forget college and university papers! Student reporters are always hungry for a good entertainment story that involves something other than movie reviews and the same old bands.) Once you have been rewarded with ink, you will have ammunition for the next step. 4] CREATE A PRESS KIT. This is your extended resumé telling the world (especially reporters and the organizers of poetry readings) who you are and what you can do. Every press kit has essential elements: clips from newspapers, especially reviews and interviews featuring you and your work; an audio recording of your poetry in action, hopefully on a CD but at least on a good quality audio tape; a copy of your latest chapbook; a performance resumé telling of your featured gigs and publishing experience; a press release with the essentials—dates, times, places, for the tour you are promoting, as well as contact information; and a dynamic color photograph of you performing in front of a crowd of cheering fans. This last one is especially important. Do not under any circumstances supply a photo of you in a cardigan resting your elbow on your knee and your chin on your fist. Such a photo only cements the widely- held belief that poetry is boring. Make sure your photo displays all the energy and emotion of a great rock and roll shot in Rolling Stone. Including a compelling photo increases the chance that an editor will be interested in publishing an article, so make sure it emphasizes that you are not just a poet, but a performance poet. Even better, provide more than one photo to give the publication more design flexibility. If you really want to get professional, you can put together a Web site with all this information, featuring scanned photos, MP3 recordings of your work, text versions of your best pieces, your bio, links to online stories covering your work, and ordering information for your chapbooks. (If you want to see the Web site I used to promote my summer 2000 tour as an example, surf immediately to www.wussyboy.org and check it out. It only took me a weekend to develop, and itʼs already gotten over ten thousand hits.) The easier you make it to get information about your work, the easier it is to write a story about you that will spread the word. 5] GET OUT OF YOUR HOME TOWN And bring your press kit with you! Youʼll never know how good you are until you take your act on the road, so visit nearby readings and strut your stuff for new audiences. Finding a reading is as easy as finding a college with a nearby coffeehouse, but you can get an idea of where poetry slams are held by visiting www.poetryslam.com, the official site of Poetry Slam, Inc. You can find information on all the regularly scheduled slams across the country, plus the friendly folks running the Web site will gladly direct you to additional people running readings in your area. Donʼt be afraid of roadtripping several hours just to read for a crowd of 50 people. Again, this is how you develop a reputation outside your little hometown, so do a bang up job, leave a copy of your press kit with the host of the reading, and ask to be considered for a featured reading sometime in the future. If you blow away a new audience, chances are the host will be very eager to book a gig with you. Once you get that gig, start promoting the hell out of it. Draft up a press release with all the information about your gig and send it along with a copy of your press kit to every newspaper in the new town, then follow it up a few days later with a phone call. You can get contact information for just about any newspaper in the country by visiting the newspaperʼs Web site (which you can find by typing the name of the town and the word “newspaper” into any search engine—I use www. ask.com.) If you score a featured article, you can add it to your press kit, and believe me, the more clips you have, the better, because it shows that you mean business. At the gig, be sure to kick up a sweat and sell a lot of chapbooks. Make sure every single person in that reading goes away with either a copy of your book or something else with your contact information on it. When I toured, I printed up stickers with my Web site and some punk rock graphics and handed them out for free. If someone didnʼt have the money to buy my chapbook that night, they could always go to my Web site and order one online. Ask the host to spread the word about your abilities. Poetry slammers are a tight-knit bunch, and they connect on the Internet regularly. As you perform featured readings in more places, your performance resumé will grow more and more respectable, as will the list of hosts you can use as references. 6] QUALIFY FOR A POETRY SLAM TEAM. This is one of the most fun things you can do as a member of the extended performance poetry community. Going through the process of making a poetry slam team is a thrilling adventure, especially in a big scene with kick ass poets who are also trying their best to get a place on the same team you are going for. The yearly National Poetry Slam is the Woodstock of spoken word — the premiere showcase of the performance poetry form — and it is a must for any wannabe poet interested in rock star status. Itʼs a five-day festival of spoken word events and competitions mixing 56 four-person poetry slam teams and their entourages with standing-room-only crowds of poetry fans. Bring a big box of chapbooks along with you because hundreds of poets exchange them like trading cards. Youʼll come away with a suitcase full of independently produced chapbooks by people from all over the country, which then expands your list of contacts for touring. And be prepared for some of the most amazing performances of poetry you have ever seen. When I was in the finals of the 1999 National Poetry Slam in Chicago, the audience numbered more than 3,000, and the roar of applause for every poem was deafening, just this whooping mass of screams. A word of caution: Donʼt get into this for the money. Remember, some of the best punk rockers who ever lived never made enough money to quit their day jobs, but you can guarantee they did more in a summer of roadtripping in the back of a van than most people can imagine in a lifetime. Punk rockers hit the road with nothing but three chords and the truth, and hard on their heals are performance poets who are eagerly stripping away the numbing barrage of stimuli and laying bare the essential ingredients for an engaging evening of expression: a mouth, a microphone, and a cheering audience. Who needs a poem in The New Yorker when you can be a bonified rock star? THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #1 The debut issue of The Wussy Boy Chronicles is completely stuffed with personal stories and essays from the journals and e-mails of Wuss Commando Big Poppa E. Rather than offer up the definitive definition of “Wussy Boy,” this issue offers the introspections of a certified Wuss as he trains his eye on life in America at the beginning of the new Millenium. BPE touches on chain store madness, the love of warm kitties, the bliss of the first kiss of a crush gone wild, poetry slamming for fun and profit, memories of yearning for “Sound- garden hair,” and a wealth of random observation that build into a pleasing whole. A must for all fans of Wussy Boys!

THE WUSSY BOY CHRONICLES #9 And finally, the big wrap-up of the Seattle journals.The Nationals finally come and go, freeing me to leave Seattle finally and tell the whole crap poetry scene there to kiss my ass. But before I go, I hit the Bumbershoot festival, have my best poetry friend flown out to New York City to film a special for HBO (while I get cold denied, the fuckers), raid my motherʼs shoebox full of childhood photos, and talk in long loving terms about my favorite singer in the whole wide world, Jane Siberry. Also is a re-printing of the Poets and Writers article detailing how a kick ass performance poet can book a successful tour across America.

NOW THAT YOU’VE READ THIS ISSUE, AIN’T YOU JUST DYING TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Float me an e-mail at [email protected]. BLURBS

Nominated to the The Utne Reader “Best of the Alternative Press Awards 2000” for The Wussy Boy Chronicles.

“R. Eirik Ott is, without hype or exaggeration, one of todayʼs best creators of underground literature.” Doug Holland, Editor A Readerʼs Guide to the Underground Press

“Exuberantly deﬁant.” The New York Times

“Eirik Ott is the leader of the new Wussy Boy movement ... spreading not just through the esoteric realm of slam poets, but edging across the globe.” The Los Angeles Times

“Eirik Ott is a guy who has turned one of his artistic personas, Wussy Boy, into an icon for effeminate males.” Ms. Magazine

“Championed by a hip-hop poet and catching ﬁre across North America, a new male ideal has risen up and is demanding respect: Wussy Boy.” The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

“Inspiring men from across the country.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“A spoken word maestro.” The San Jose Mercury News

“Eirik Ott is pound for pound the funniest poet in the slam.” Austin Chronicle (TX)

“A hell of a performer, running on boundless energy and near-perfect comic timing.” OC Weekly (Orange Country, CA)

“One of the leaders in the hottest thing to hit poetry since Beat poet Allen Ginsbergʼs ʻHowl.ʼ” The Daily Oklahoman (OKC, OK)

Issue #10 • Vitamin J • Seymour The Stinky Guy Christer Boy • Vitamin The Tale of the Wax Nu-Nu of the Wax The Tale

everything in this book was originally published online at http://poetryslam.livejournal.com.

you may contact the author directly by cell phone at (512) 296-7080 or by e-mail at [email protected].

for more information,please check out his website at http://www.brokenword.org.

this collection is dedicated,as are all things written by r. eirik ott, to aretha and thelonious,the two best friends a touring poet can have.

for the ﬁrst nine issues of the wussy boy chronicles, please contact the author. they are really good and are only $7 each.

issue #10 is being published simultaneously with issue #11. itʼs really good and can be had for $7 as well.

e-mail the author for details, or just ﬂoat him an e-mail to say hello, or check out his online journal to see what the latest happenings are.

our lovely cover wussy for this issue is none other than daniel radcliffe, who, as any self- resepecting wussy can tell you, is the british actor who portrays wuss core legend harry potter. harry is such a great wussy boy: heʼs got a good heart, but heʼs a bit troubled; he has the urge to do the right thing, but sometimes he breaks rules to get there; he is capable of greatness, but his flaws and shortcomings get him into trouble; he often gets bullied and made fun of, but he fights back in creative ways; heʼs all sensitive and shit and feels really sad about his dead parents; and heʼs really clumsy around girls, but heʼs also a bad ass who has taken on voldemort not once, not twice, not three times, but four whole times and has lived to tell about it. yeah, harry potter is definitely wuss core. plus heʼs an orphan, just like batman was an orphan, and superman was an orphan, and peter pan was an orphan... what are we teaching kids? “if we could only get rid of these parents, we could fly!” Table of Contents intro ...... 5 the thunderbolt ...... 7 the tale of the wax nu-nu ...... 12 the blind leading the blind ...... 15 love the life you live ...... 17 a black jeep cherokee ...... 19 the standing station ...... 21 this is eirik, may i help you? ...... 24 vitamin j ...... 27 christer boy ...... 30 mix tape genius ...... 33 thrift eye for the straight guy ...... 36 super-duper caller ID from hell ...... 39 the stinky guy ...... 42 nothinʼ but a two-bit whore ...... 44 six minutes, six minutes...... 46 nerd fight ...... 48 rocking the man thing ...... 52 seymour ...... 54 moseying like he owns the joint ...... 57 and jesus retched ...... 59 slather it with butter and honey ...... 61 she used the same hair conditioner ...... 66 so, a slam poet walks into a bar... way back before i had ever heard about poetry slamming, way back before i had even been to an open mic poetry reading, back in the early ʻ90s when kurt cobain was still making some of the most vital music of my generation, i was part of a vast underground community of passionate people who published zines. our whole scene revolved around a review mag called factsheet 5, which printed thousands of zine reviews several times a year. it was published by seth friedman and was our entry point into a ragged nation of creative people ripping off kinkoʼs coast to coast in the name of artistic expression. there were all kinds of zines: music zines of every flavour, covering punk and ska and goth and every genre in between and stuffed with scene reports and cd reviews and interviews with bands no one ever heard of; comix zines stuffed with doodles and full-on bravura performances from some of the best unknown artists ever; and personal zines packed with the journals and diaries of people chronicling their lives. the last ones were my favorites. a really bad personal zine could be the most boring tripe ever, little more than daily listings of meaningless tasks and trite bitches and complaints and goofy lists and quizzes, but the best ones were fascinating glimpses into everyday life that were absolutely addicting. i used to trade my zines with the best ones -- zines like happy not stupid and doris and dishwasher and, my absolute favorite, cometbus. i was in my little college town of chico, california, at the time, and i wrote a weekly column called naked and bleeding in the university newspaper. every few semesters, i would collect all my musings into a zine and release it with the subtitle rants, screeds, Intro diatribes, and other ephemera. the main title for each would change, and they were almost always stupid as 07.15.04 hell: iʼm just a torso; tongue ballet in my bunghole; booty jungle; big daddyʼs makinʼ biscuits... they gave me a chance to vent and wax poetic, and i traded them with anyone who did the same. the zine scene was my first chance to be a part of something bigger than myself, my first opportunity to be an active member in an extended creative community. and then... something happened. i went and discovered poetry slamming, another vast creative community stretched from one ocean to the other. and then factsheet 5 folded. and then the internet exploded and anyone with a computer could suddenly harness the power of the first amendment without having to rip off kinkoʼs

5 or spend endless hours copying and collating and folding and stapling and trimming or waste precious cash on envelopes and postage. my last proper zine came out in late 2000. i published issues #4 and #5 of the wussy boy chronicles after my four-month spoken word tour of slam venues. about a year later, i found myself putting together issues #6 - #9 all at the same time since i had so much stuff, and i actually got them all designed and everything... but i never actually published more than the initial test copies. i had discovered livejournal.com by this time, and it seemed silly to put together a print version for $5 a pop when you could read everything in it for free online. and that was that... until now. i miss zines. i miss using the mail. i miss spending an entire afternoon cutting up glossy magazine pages to use as envelopes and licking stamps until my tongueʼs gone pasty. i miss rushing to my postbox and ﬁnding a package there ﬁlled with the musings of yet another best friend iʼve never met. i miss all of it, and i think itʼs about time i got back into it. and, with that, hereʼs the long-delayed issue #10 of the wussy boy chronicles. sorry it took so long. i got distracted. if you like this issue, then know iʼm putting together issue #11 at the very same time, so you should get in touch with me about it. itʼs really good. i promise.

peace.

eirik.

6 You never know how the most basic simple human contact can completely change your life...... whether it be a person you are standing next to in the line at the supermarket or the person you pull in front of on the expressway who then flips you off or the girl who sits next to you on the first day of class. You never know when some person you had no idea existed can come along and change your life just by being there, suddenly, standing or sitting or driving next to you. PING — everything is different now, and you wonʼt even know it for several years, yet you can trace all that happened over those years to that very moment where SHE entered the room and sat next to you on the first day of class. It was a girl, of course, who started all this for me, all this writing and touring stuff. I mean, the stuff was already inside me, it was just waiting for the right catalyst, waiting 24 years for something to come along and stir it up and get things moving, and for this particular story the spark that began it all was Laura Hodgson. I met Laura on the first day of my first class in my first semester of college after being discharged from the Navy. The class was English Composition, and I got there early because I was so excited at being a real live college kid, finally, after six years of holding The Thunderbolt my breath and dreaming 06.05.00 of this moment. And in walked Laura Hodgson. Five-foot-two, eyes of blue, blush of lips and oh those slender little fingers... And she sat right next to me. She had this short blonde bob, glasses, backpack. She looked like Mary Stuart Masterson in “Some Kind of Wonderful,” only shorter. And she was smart. And spunky. And cool. I gathered this after talking with her in the few moments before the instructor arrived, and I kept stealing glances at her throughout class. Of course, Iʼm making most of this stuff up, because I donʼt really remember anything about that first day, but Iʼm sure thatʼs pretty close to it. I was smitten. Like Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” when he first laid eyes on his Sicilian bride-to-be, I was hit smack-dab in my forehead by The Thunderbolt. But I was shy, hella shy, jitteringly shy and horrified of actually speaking to Laura Hodgson in anything other than a classroom setting. 7 The thought of asking her to something harmless like coffee (which, really, isnʼt all that harmless...) entered my mind every time I saw her, but the actual action of asking her was WAY beyond my abilities at the time. She was far too cool, far too intelligent, far too cute to ever give me anthing other than the time of day. By the end of the quarter, we had become class buddies, talking in the hallway before the instructor arrived and walking across campus to other classes, but I could never bring myself to ask her out. The last week of class there was this essay contest, see, and I ended up winning it by writing a standard issue five-paragraph humorous rant about consumerism in America, something that has come to be written and re-written by me and disguised endlessly as various poems and essays every since. It won, and Laura said something like this: (cue violins) “You know, Eirik, you really ought to think about writing for the university newspaper. Youʼre really good. Iʼm on the staff, too, and I think youʼd fit right in.” (freeze frame on Lauraʼs face - cue the sound of hundreds of dominos falling one by one by one) And that is why I got into journalism, which led to covering local bands, which led to organizing gigs for local bands, which led to my first local music zine “Fencepost,” which led to freelancing for the local newspaper, which led one of the band guys to take me to my first open mike poetry reading, which led to my second zine “Thrust Magazine,” which led to connecting with poets and writers in the Los Angeles scene, which led me to performing at open mikes all over California, which led me to take a road trip to the Taos Poetry Circus in New Mexico and perform at my very first poetry slam, which led me to the San Francisco poetry scene, which led me to the San Francisco Poetry Slam Team, which led me to the National Poetry Slam in Chicago, which led to me being featured in The New York Times and the Washington Post and 60 Minutes and National Public Radio, which led me right here and right now listening to Disc Four of the John Coltrane box set as I contemplate touring the country with only a backpack of poetry and a list of every poetry slam venue in America. That simple, innocent phrase of Lauraʼs - you really ought to think about writing for the university newspaper - was the spark that started me on this path that will now take me from one end of the country to the other as a travelling performance poet. It was December of ʼ91. I was 24 years old. Curt Cobain still had three years to live. 8 The calendar now says itʼs June 20, 2000, and I am 33 years old, the same age as Jesus when he was crucified on the cross. I have only the vaguest notion of how my life would be had Laura Hodgson not spoken those words to me almost a decade ago. I shiver to think. At the time, though, her invitation hardly seemed like the first step on a long road to Wussy Boy poetry rock star glory. No, the only thing that ran through my mind was this: “Being on the staff of the school newspaper would be an excellent way to get to know Laura.” And that was it, suddenly, I was the Arts and Entertainment Editor of the student newspaper, even though I had no experience whatsoever with journalism of any kind, had never even taken a writing class in my life, had never been on the staff of anything other than a movie theatre in high school. I had a knack for it and continued to do all kinds of things during the semester. I became Mr. Local Music, and I wallowed in all the fringe benefits that title brings along with it, from backstage passes to bright- eyed wonders at lots and lots of parties. As for Laura, I kinda accepted my role as “just a friend” and she dated people and I dated people and I kinda figured that would be it. I tried to be satisfied with my limited place in her life, and I did a pretty good job of it, I think. Until the journalism conference in San Diego. Everyone was supposed to go, the whole staff, but one by one by one they all backed out until finally it was only Laura and me going to San Diego for the journalism conference. I was beyond looking forward to this trip, brothers and sisters, I was practically overjoyed at getting a chance to really get to know Laura and maybe... even... who knows? We get down there and we totally blew off the first day of seminars, choosing instead to buy vodka and orange juice and get drunk in our flea- bag hotel room, having pillow fights and telling stories about what we were like as kids until the wee hours, listening to Nirvanaʼs first album on the boom box we brought to keep us awake during the long drive. At one point, we were laying side-by-side on one of the beds, on our tummies with legs kicked up playing footsie behind us, hugging pillows and touching elbows as we shared stories, but I swear to God I couldnʼt tell you a single one of her stories because my entire being was focused on that little oval of warmth we shared at the tips of our shoulders, focused on the smell of her hair... And then the moment came where she hadnʼt been talking for a few moments and I hadnʼt even noticed and we were just staring at each other, our noses inches from each other... My trembling guts were screaming for me to kiss her, like this huge 9 chanting Greek chorus: “Gimme a K — KAY!!!!! Gimme an I — EYE!!!!! Gimme two Sʼs – ESS ESS!!! Whatʼs that spell? KISS HER, YOU WUSS!” But... I couldnʼt, I was too shy, I just kept thinking that it would be some kind of violation of some sort, to suddenly, with no warning, break some kind of “just friends” trust that would lead to embarassment on my part and discomfort on her part and then we wouldnʼt be able to talk to each other all weekend... And so, I muttered some non-sequitor, told her goodnight and went to bed. The rest of the conference was uneventful, and our drive back to Bakersfield was done mostly in silence as we listened to Nirvanaʼs “Bleach” over and over again. Once we got back to school, Laura seemed to avoid me for the next two weeks or so, never returning my phone calls and always being too busy to talk in the newsroom. It wasnʼt until a month or so later that we finally started hanging out again, getting coffee between classes and doing homework and stuff. Flash forward a few semesters later and we are sitting on the steps of Lauraʼs dorms, having just emptied the contents of her small room and transferred them to her Suburu for the trip to her new school in San Francisco. She was leaving with her boyfriend the next day, and this was the last time I would ever see Laura, although, at the time, I figured weʼd be friends for a long time to come. Sheʼs all sweaty and so am I, and weʼre drinking ice cold canned Cokes, and she wipes the sweat from her forehead and says, “You remember that journalism conference a couple of semesters ago, the one in San Diego where we blew the whole first day off?” I smiled and told her I did. She took a deep breath, and said, “Eirik, I liked you so much going into that journalism conference, so much that I couldnʼt even take it. I was so excited that we were finally getting a chance to hang out just the two of us, and there was this one time that night where we had just finished beating the shit out of each other with pillows, and we were laying on the bed and I was telling some kinda story about my childhood but I have no idea what I was saying because all I could really think about was the fact that our elbows were touching and I could smell the fabric softener of your shirt...” (I am about to faint at this point... really, just moments from blacking out, fully hyperventilating, dizzy...) “...and then you didnʼt kiss me. I really thought you were about to, and I almost did it myself, but then you got up and got into your bed and 10 went to sleep. I almost started crying. I couldnʼt figure out what was wrong with me, like, was I too ugly or too stupid or maybe you were really gay like everyone said, God, I couldnʼt figure out why you didnʼt like me. Once we got back, I couldnʼt even bear to look at myself in the mirror, and had to avoid you when we were in the newsroom.” And I am full-on giggling at this point, this high-pitched nervous titter that I couldnʼt stop, and I told her my side of the thing, how I had liked her from the very moment I saw her walk into that classroom door almost three years before, how everything I had done over the past few years, all the cool stuff, had somehow been linked to my desire to be something more than just friends with her... And we both laughed, and shook our heads slowly. I wanted to put my arms around her and kiss her, finally, and ask her to give it a try, to get together with me and see where it would take us, but we both knew it was too late. She was moving up to San Francisco with her boyfriend and that was that, and to do anything else but leave it at that would be silly at this point. God, I tell you, God is a cruel mother fucker with a sick sense of humor, and Iʼll bet anyone money that He was giggling his cruel ass off as I gave Laura a final hug in the dorm parking lot and she drove off to her boyfriendʼs apartment. I havenʼt seen her since. I have no idea if she is still alive. Once she left, I transfered from Cal State Bakersfield to Chico State University in Northern California, a school with a newspaper that caught my eye at, you guessed it, the journalism conference in San Diego with Laura. Had I not gone down there with her, I would never have heard of Chico and never wouldʼve experienced some of the best and worst moments of my life. All for the love of Laura. (How cheesy does that sound?) It did one very important thing for me, though: I will never NEVER find myself in that position again, never will I allow that gut-wrenching “if only” feeling to twist my belly into knots as someone politely informs me that they liked me back when I was too shy to let them know I liked them back. I donʼt know many things about life just yet, but I do know it is so much better to be gently denied the pleasure of someoneʼs company that to be informed the time had come and gone while I was pining away with unrequited love, unrequited only because I was too much of a scaredy-cat to express it. With that experience in mind, I donʼt mind talking to everyone I meet now, and if I feel in the least bit glowy in my stomach for someone, even someone I donʼt know, I am not shy at all about hinting that itʼs there. They donʼt necessarily need to feel compelled to do anything about it, but at least they know itʼs there. 11 so, there we were, surrounded by nekkid ladies...... surrounded by nude women shimmying and shaking and shoving their winkies into the faces of drowsy-faced young men drinking BYOB coors and flasks of gin and shiner bocks. iʼve got mike henry on one side of me and matthew john conley on the other side of me, and weʼre giggling and smiling at this kid named steven watching slack-jawed as a completely nekkid woman spreads her legs high up over her head like a circus acrobat and another completely nekkid woman drips wax onto her nu-nu and the vision of everyone in this room has become the invisible spokes of a giant wheel and at its hub is steven and the wax nu-nu...... and then, the dj dropped his bomb, turning the already surreal situation into a scene from an as-yet-unfilmed paul thomas anderson film with these words blasting over the p.a. system:

blinded by the light revved up like a deuce another runner in the night blinded by the light...

and i look over at mikey and he looks at me and our mouths form “manfred mannʼs earth band!” and “fuck yeah!” at the same time, and i turn to matthew john conley and heʼs open-mouthed guffawing and hoisting his bottle so enthusiastically that beer is spewing all over the brass rail behind his head and heʼs shouting the lyrics The Tale of the along with us. Wax Nu-Nu and we bring our heads together for the high point of 03.10.02 the song, hollering ourselves hoarse as the booties are bumping and the boobies are billowing and the wax nu-nu mold is cooling, and the whole thing is suddenly slow motion scorcese style:

momma always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun but momma thatʼs where the fun is... welcome to austin, texas. 12 earlier that evening, i had walked for the first time into egoʼs bar, the new home of the austin poetry slam. i had just driven north from san antonio and parked the van in the lot with my kitties and all my possessions not still in storage in chico. the first person i saw was matthew john conley, nursing a drink in the corner. he held out his arms in a big cross-bar hug when he saw me, then we sat down and talked until the room filled with people. the slam was great, three rounds of high energy and fun and lots of laughs and shouts of encouragment and whole-hearted BOOOS and “go back to france!” at the evil judges relishing their roles of the Bad Wrestler. the whole thing became a bachelor party for this long-haired cat steven who was getting ready to marry someone named sarah, the girl who performed “in the back” with ragan fox at the national poetry slam in seattle last year. he was not allowed to buy a drink the whole night, and severe penalties were threatened should the host mikey ever see steven sans booze. after juicing him up all evening, mikey finally invited steven up to the mike to deliver a bleary version of a poem about his love of horseradish that had the audience rolling in the aisles, and rolling their eyes as the piece pushed 6 then 7 then 8 minutes long. mikey finally booted him off, cheering his “bohemian rhapsody” length remix. it was fun. i whipped out an oldie (“jesus moshpit”) and the new one (“wallflower”), then dedicated “wussy boy” to this virgin poet named tony jackson who had offered his maidenhead to the crowd for the first time since coming into the slam six weeks before. he had done a piece so similar to “wussy boy” that i just had to dedicate it to him, and he stormed the stage once it was over and gave me a huge bear hug in thanks. and i won. it was cool. to qualify for the finals that pick the austin poetry slam team, you have to win a slam, then appear in three more (or get to the third round five times). with the hardest part out of the way, i can now concentrate on having fun and workshopping new pieces instead of bringing out the moldy-oldie slam pieces that iʼve grown tired of in an effort to win a slam and qualify. and once the slam was over, a bunch of us caravanned to some all nude place called the show palace or something like that. i almost didnʼt go because i really find strip clubs wretched and revolting and sad (their poor little surgically-enhanced breasts looks so swollen and pained... it makes me sad for them...) but i figured it might be interesting to write about in this journal, so i went. (have you ever done that? just done something so that you would have something to write about? i went to a sex club with morris stegosaurus once in seattle for that very reason.) 13 there was fun to be had between the lines, as long as i didnʼt concentrate too hard on how gross a spectical it all was. being that it was an all nude strip club, the dancers were free to remove all their clothes and all pretense of mystery and display they most private of privates over and over and over again all night long, winkies and nu-nus everywhere, shoved into half-lidded boy faces in exchange for dollar bills in garters. the only other strip club iʼve ever been to was sugarʼs, also in austin. that is another story iʼd love to tell sometime, especially how daphne gottleib, eitan kadosh, mark maslow, and i paid a leather-clad stripper $40 to beat the shit out of jamie kennedy during a lap dance. anyway, at that place the dancers could only go topless, and the dances focused on the tease of it all, almost but not nearly showing what everyone in the place seemed to want to see. there seemed to be something more sensual about it all, even though it was still hella gross. at this place, though, the show palace, it was all nude, so there was no tease, it was all just shoved into your face quite literally and wiggled there inches from your nose. bleck. strip clubs are nasty. you know what would be cool? instead of strip clubs, you could go to conversation clubs where you watch people on three stages telling stories, then if you liked someone, you could pay for a dialogue instead of a lap dance. the talkers would flaunt their educationally-enhanced vocabularies and acrobatic use of metaphor, stripping away all unnecessary words to reveal the naked core of truth and expose their most private thoughts. the clubs would be BYOJ - bring your own journal - and when the talkers offered to give you “multiples,” they would mean multisyllabic words. “you want six, baby?” said the vixen with catʼs eye glasses. “oh yeah, gimme six,” said the poet guy with the emo hoodie and the black backpack. “onomatopoeia,” she said, biting her finger and winking. “oh shit, give it all to me, i want it all!” “supracalifragil...” “no baby, donʼt fake it, i donʼt want you to fake it, give it to me real.” “antidisestablishmentarianism.” “YES! YES! YES!”

14 a month ago, everything was so different, very much more... unsure. the performance poetry quartet i formed with three friends decided to meet in los angeles to plan our fall semester. we figured weʼd get a lot of work done in that two weeks, but we ended up making some really tough decisions that we all had been thinking about but hadnʼt had a chance to discuss. in the end, we decided to finish our wordcore shows for may, then move on as individuals from there. too much pressure, to be honest, and too much work for the pay. itʼs been a great time, a great experience, and a golden opportunity to learn a lot in a very short time, but it was so much work for what ended up being anywhere from $300-$500 a show. going solo would mean doubling, even tripling, our incomes overnight, so we made the hard decision to move on. i remember feeling kinda bowled over after we made this decision. we had all been thinking about it for some time, i think. i know i had. i had put so much work into making wordcore a reality that each successful show was a real triumph, but i was starting to feel held back by the inherent limitations of being in a group, especially a group of four people who didnʼt live in the same place, two of whom actually lived in their vehicles and roamed the country The Blind Leading following their bliss. (there is no such the Blind thing as a finished 04.09.02 p o e m , o n l y a n abadoned one.) i remember walking listlessly down the street in los feliz near eitanʼs house, and i was feeling kinda overwhelmed at how rudderless i felt, how rootless, how scene-less... everything before this two-week gathering of wordcore seemed a vertiable cornucopia of experiences, and now it was all gone and i was left to figure out what to do next, and, more importantly, where to go. i didnʼt want to go back to chico... i had already left twice. seattle was never a choice once i left. whither shall i wander? wither as i wander... and suddenly, there he was. the blind guy. the blind guy methodically tapping his white cane on the scarred surface of the hot black asphault road, the blind guy IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET, the blind guy surrounded by honking hollywood traffic trying 15 in vain to regain his bearings, the blind guy tapping along the yellow dashed line in the middle of the street with one arm outstretched, fingers reaching like quivering antennae, fondling the empty air like a conjurer coaxing a rabbit from a hat. i was transfixed. the poor guy had this look of solid determination on his face, but there was desperation there, too, because he had no idea where he was, and i am sure he could tell he was inches away from the bug-spattered grills of taxicabs and metro buses and cars filled with sticky pants and sweaty backs and clenched fists. you could hear the tink tink TONK of his white cane against the hubcaps and headlights. and i just stood there. watching. had i simply thought for just a moment, i wouldʼve realized he needed help, and i wouldʼve provided that help, just slipped my hand into the crook of his arm and guided him to safety, but i was glued to the spot, spellbound and slack-jawed. finally, the blind man tapped his cane against the cement curb of the median between lanes of traffic, and he stepped into the bushes and stopped there long enough to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the same hand that held his cane. he seemed to raise his head and sniff the wind, turned his head this way, then that way, then started walking through the middle of the bushes hoping to find some end, some cross walk, somebody. by the time i snapped out of it, i was already walking toward him to help, but before i could reach the curb across the street from him, someone else had waded into the bushes of the median to fish the poor man out and set him back on the right course. i sat down on the cement block wall in front of the bank across the street from starbucks at the corner of hollywood and vermont, and i thought about all this. i felt just like that blind man, lost in the traffic and waving his hand in the darkness before his face, hoping to find some curb, some helping hand, some clue as to where he was supposed to go next. but iʼm not blind. and not all who wander are lost. and i suddenly felt this rush of possibility. i just needed to get back in the van and hit the road, find someplace, any place — ANYPLACE BUT HERE — and figure my shit out, find the edge of the next curb i was to follow. and that path lead me here to austin, texas. and now everything is so much clearer. i found the curb all by myself, took a deep breath, and was surprised when a warm hand slipped into the crook of my arm and a soft voice whispered, “i am here.” i am not sure about what happens next or where iʼll end up, but i finally feel like i am no longer wandering lost in the middle of traffic. yeah... 16 we get one life -- thatʼs it, one life -- and we have no idea how long it will last. we could get hit by a bus this very afternoon, head full of ideas for our next week, next month, next year, next decade, then boom, suddenly, itʼs all over and you didnʼt even bother to wear clean underwear that morning. and so many people choose to live that life in a cubicle, behind a counter, in front of a computer, in the back of some storeroom, on the phone in some office... working their lives away in 40-hour work weeks for their whole lives, then they retire, sit around, watch teevee, and die. is this the point of life? to work your whole life away? and for what? stuff? i mean, really... we work for stuff our whole lives... yes, we have to eat and have a roof over our heads, but why else do we work? mostly, to accumulate a bunch of shit. we all have to die someday. think about that. i mean, really... think... about it. do you think anyone is going to care how much shit you have accumulated when you die? do you think anyone gives a fuck how much debt you leave behind? do you think you get extra credit for having a sterling credit rating and lots of cars and cell phones and big screen teevees? if that is all your life has to show for your time on Love the Life this planet... whew... iʼm thinking have missed the point. You Live i want to have shit credit when i die. i want to die owing 04.18.02 EVERYBODY, and i wonʼt give a shit when they all get ass. if i won the lottery right now, i would travel the country and leave any thoughts of ever having some fucking mind-numbing, soul-stealing job behind me. but why wait to win the lottery before making this life change? there is SO much to see in this world... so much to do... why waste the precious time we have sitting in a cubicle leasing our life to corporations for paychecks and two weeks of vacation a year? fuck that... i want to see the world NOW! i only get one life, and iʼll be damned if iʼll waste it on bullshit like a fucking job and maintaining a good credit rating. iʼve been told i must have a lot of courage to turn my back on this fucked up american dream that chains you to a desk and sucks the life out of you... to become a poet... for me... itʼs got nothing to do with courage and everything to with 17 survival. i choose this life with no reservations. i will make this life work so that i never need another jobby job again. yeah. i was just sitting on hilaryʼs toilet thinking about this, and i just had to write it down while the fire was still in my belly. yeah.

18 and suddenly a black jeep cherokee is bounding toward me on the sidewalk...... bouncing shocks as it vaults over the lip of the driveway and screeching my way. underline the part about me being on the sidewalk. yes, itʼs a sort of driveway part of the sidewalk where people can come into the parking area from the traffic of the street, but still... i am walking on a sidewalk, and here comes this black jeep cherokee right for me, and the driver stops... inches from me, his bumper nearly touching the hairs on my knee. and i stop. and i slowly turn toward the driver, and i stare hard into his face as if by staring i could somehow make his brains fly out the back of his head, this fucking black-clad businessman who is actually tapping his fingers on his steering wheel, tapping on his steering wheel as if heʼs totally put out by the fact that i am standing on the sidewalk in his way. and i just stand there, glaring at the guy, and heʼs glaring back at me, like, “you are making me late. move. now.” and for some reason, every little thing in the whole wide world that is making me uncomfortable on this hot austin day is this assholeʼs fault, everything... he is the reason i donʼt A Black Jeep have a close relationship with my parents, he is the reason i have to Cherokee get a temp job to get me through the summer, he is the reason i feel 06.11.02 so fucking BLAH lately, he is the reason i eat like shit which makes me feel like shit which makes it hard for me to figure out what the fuck i should do next. itʼs all this motherfuckerʼs fault — did i mention i am on the fucking sidewalk and he is in a black jeep cherokee inches from the hair on my knees? — and iʼll be goddamned if iʼm not going to let this asshole know about it. so i ball up my fist and raise it high above my head and as i look directly into this assholeʼs face, i bring that fist down hard onto the hood of his black jeep cherokee, hard, hard enough to rock the entire jeep as if it hit a pothole, hard enough to let this asshole measure the contempt i feel for him, and then i point the barrel of my finger in his face and yell, “FUCK YOU, MOTHER FUCKER!” and then i slowly turn and continue with my walk. and homeboy, as you can expect, is fit to be tied, what with him being 19 late and all, what with me taking up space ON THE SIDEWALK and all, so he flips a bitch and parks with a screech, leaps from his jeep, and begins to scream at me, “whatʼs your problem, motherfucker?!? come back here and say that shit in my face, you fucking asshole!” and i donʼt even know why i do this because it is so not worth the effort, but i do, i turn around and i shout back, “i am a pedestrian, you fucking moron, and you are a big black jeep cherokee, and you almost hit me! i was on the sidewalk, dumbass, what more do you want me to say?!?” and heʼs all, “itʼs not my fault you were in my way! i was already in the turn lane, i was already coming, you should have seen me and moved out of the way instead of just standing there! itʼs your fault you almost got hit and it doesnʼt give you the right to hit my car!” and i say again, “dude, i am a pedestrian and you are driving a big jeep cherokee. you are bigger than me, and you almost hit me on the sidewalk. iʼm sorry this doesnʼt make sense to you, mr. poopy pants, but i am done talking to you.” and i turn and walk away as mr. businessman takes the name of the lord in vain and swears every plague he can upon my loins and those of my childrenʼs children. in fact, he keeps screaming at me until his voice fades and all i can hear again is the whistle of the warm austin wind and the passing traffic. for some reason, i felt better after that, all the static buzzing in my head was forgotten and all i wanted to do was curl up on the couch with my sweetie and smell the back of her neck. i am so in love, i could shoot sparks out of my fingertips...

20 a job! a job! my freedom for a job! the lady at the Adecco temp agency told me to report to the marketing firm at the edge of austin at 6 p.m., so i got there 30 minutes early. it was some big building with an attached warehouse and a huge parking lot, and when i stepped through the door to the front desk, i was greeted by a smiling man who welcomed me to the business for which he works. i told him i was one of the temps sent by Adecco to work for the evening, and his smile snapped to a frown — boom, just like that, as if the smile were a mirage — and he croaks, “sign in.” he points to a clipboard. i sign my name, my social security number, and “Adecco” where iʼm supposed to, then the once-smiling man points to a door. “go to the break room. itʼs down the hall to your left.” i pause — half-expecting dude to frisk me and shove a metal detector in my crotch and get me to sign a waver stating “I understand under no circumstances will this organization negotiate my release with inmates should I be captured and held hostage” — then walk through the door and find the break room filled with some of the saddest looking people since i last went to the DMV. i had this moment of frantic panic eye- The Standing balling these sad people, looking Station like this one-day job was their last hope, the last stop before checking 06.21.02 themselves into the homeless shelter... and realizing that i was right there with them, no money in my packet, not a cent in the bank, taking on this shitty temp job just long enough to trade eight hours for $50 so i can buy some groceries. fucking depressing. we were eventually led to a stifling warehouse space with only a few clattering fans scattered unevenly on tabletops stirring the dense air like a mixer through bread dough. within a few steps, the back of my shirt was soaked. a sweaty man with poor posture and thick black-rimmed glasses and a comb-over announced that our job for this evening was to stuff 52,000 envelopes for Yahoo.com, and we had until 2 a.m. to accomplish this task. he had each of us call out either “1” or “2” in order, then the 1ʼs had to go to this table and the 2ʼs had to go to that table. when it was my turn, i had to stifle the urge to say, “iʼm a one, warden jones!” 21 i was placed in front of a table with a tall stack of folded letters, a tall stack of fliers, a tall stack of envelopes, and a tall stack of DVDs in cases. i was informed that i was to put these things together and put them 30 at a time onto a tray, which would then be taken over to a “gluer” who would then use a glue stick to seal the envelopes and hand them all to a “shipper” who would then prepare them for shipping. i was called a “stuffer,” and i was told this was a “standing station,” meaning we had to stand the whole time. the gluers were at “sitting stations,” and they got to sit as they did their job. and the sweaty man asked us if we had any questions before we started. of course, i did... i raised my hand and asked it it was okay to use headphones while we worked, and he pinched his little piggy nose into a wrinkled bulb of black-heads and nostril hair, and snorted, “as long as your hands keep moving, i donʼt care if you whistle ʻdixie.ʼ” (note: the urge to actually spend the entire evening whistling “dixie” was huge and fierce, but i resisted.) so, boom, within seconds i was stuffing envelopes with dave brubeck, hands a-blur and brow a-sweat, rocking to the bebop beat and bobbing to the rhythm as everyone else worked in the roar of fans and and hated me for being the only one with the presence of mind to bring not only a cd player and headphones but also something cold to drink (provided by hilary, by the way, who answered my distress call by hand-delivering a quart-sized Coke. thanks, babe!) after about 30 minutes, my back was tweaking from the uncomfortable angle the table put us in, sorta bent at the waist and reaching, and there was no way i was going to make it in one piece to 2 a.m., so i walked over to another section of the warehouse and got myself a chair, and iʼm sitting there rocking out to dave brubeck and stuffing envelopes like a madman, easily lapping the “stuffer” across the table from me, when all of a sudden mr. comb-over taps on my shoulder. i take off my headphones, and say, “hmmm?” and heʼs like, “the station you are working is a standing station. you have to stand.” and i was like, “uhmm... well, the way you have us standing hurts my back, so iʼve decided to sit, which is more comfortable for this particular... uhm... station.” and he makes that face again, where he wrinkles the center of his face, like his face is soft balloon flesh and someone is poking a finger really hard right at his nose. he snorts and says, “this... is... a... standing... station. you have to stand.” and i take my headphones off, slam them onto the table with a CLACK, then say, “sir, there are only three things i need to work all night long 22 stuffing envelopes for you: this walkman, this soda, and this chair. if you take any of these things away, i will leave, and you can stuff these fucking envelopes up your fat ass, dig?” okay, in my alternate reality i said that, but for reals, i said, “sir, i am not going to stand.” we stared at each other for a few tense moments, then i turned and resumed stuffing envelopes without further comment. he snorted and left, but about thirty minutes later he returned to poke me in the shoulder again. i look over and he has some sad temp girl behind him, waiting... he snorts, “youʼre moving over to the glue station. itʼs a sitting station. this is a standing station.” now, you have to understand that he had picked all guys to work at the “stuffing” station, and all the girls were picked for the “gluing” stations, so he went over and snatched one of the glue girls up and brought her over to replace me, thus “demoting” me since i was acting like a little girl. thatʼs totally the feeling i got from this guy, like i was some kind of lazy troublemaker simply because i thought exchanged eight hours of my life for a measly $50 was enough without having to sacrifice the comfort of my fucking back on top of that. fucking dick. i so wanted to laugh in this assholeʼs face, this fucking weed who was picked on so much during high school that now the only joy in life is telling sad sack temps to stand in a greasy puddle of their own sweat all fucking night long bent over a table even though sitting is more effecient and comfortable. i had this extreme urge to jump up on the table and kick all the envelopes into a spray in the guyʼs face and start pacino-ing, “Adecco! Adecco! Adecco! Remember Adecco!” but i donʼt, i just smile, gather up my stuff, and walk over to the glue station, where i sit all... night... long... gluing... 52,000 envelopes... sweating... the whole time... we worked until 1:30 a.m., then got time off for good behavior. and to think i made exactly $50 for this, after taxes, and missed my girlfriendʼs sisterʼs birthday party to boot. the only thing worse than looking for work is actually working. bleck. i need a fucking patron.

23 you only call me when thereʼs a problem, and when you do call me, chances are you are not in the best of moods. chances are you are angry and frustrated and pissed off, and you need to use me as a sounding board for all the problems you are having. chances are you will even blame me for your problems even though i am the very person who can help you with them. but i am good at this, and i can talk you down if you only let me; if you let me, we can figure out whatʼs bothering you and work out a solution together. but if you donʼt open yourself to finding a solution with me, you are doomed to disappointment. my name is eirik ott, and i am your xbox customer care representative. after searching for a temp job for a couple of weeks and working a few one-day gigs stuffing envelopes and chasing down bad check writers, i have been placed into a position that will last me through this summer and into my fall tour. it doesnʼt pay much, but it pays better than retail, better than a barrista at a coffeehouse, and it takes at least a smidgen of skill, so i am satisfied. for now. the funny thing about this is that i have absolutely no interest in video games. i havenʼt been around a home gaming system since my atari 2600 way back in junior high and high school, and the This is Eirik, most recent gaming system May I Help You? i have even seen at all was the nintendo, and that was 07.08.02 way back in the hella early ʼ90s. (hella early is defined, by the way, as, like, ʼ90.) i also have not owned a teevee or a vcr in the last decade, which means that people from all over the country call me and ask me questions about their xbox gaming system — an item i have never played and have only ever seen once... from a distance — and i am tasked with walking them through the hook-up procedures, answering general questions about the xbox related gear, and troubleshooting problems they are having. i am the expert they call when they are in trouble. this expert has only seen the xbox once... from a distance. 24 get it? i am in a position to fake it so real i get results, which, really, is just about the same position i have been in my life for the last, oh, decade, where i dive into something with the vague notion that i might be over my head yet filled with the sense that i will figure it out along the way. same as it ever was, same as it ever was. i figure if i waited for a situation where i knew exactly how to proceed on every level, i would be stuck waiting for an awful long time and have precious little fun along the way. at least this holding your nose and leaping with your eyes wide open affords me some adventure. back to xbox. by the time these people get to a point where they call someone to help them, they are frustrated, and more often than not, they are not the... erm... shall we say brightest bulbs in the econo pack? i had one guy call in who said he was having trouble with his xbox, and when i asked him where he purchased it, he told me, and i quote, “offa the back of a truck off some guy in the parking lot of the walmart.” and he even had a receipt, which, after some prodding, he admitted was actually a piece of notebook paper with pencil notes and a signature. i had to explain until i was blue in the face that the $50 he spent on the xbox was probably gone unless he could find the guy from the pickup truck. and no, i said, our warranty does not cover your system, sir, thank you for calling xbox customer care. i love it when the little kids call in trying to get me to tell them how to get around the parental control codes, which would then allow them to play the bloody games and watch the dirty dvds. all they have to tell me is that they are 18, and whether or not i believe them, i can give them the code. i asked, they told (or lied), and i am covered. sometimes they start out telling me they are 11, but thenwhen i tell them i need an adult, they pause, tell me to hold on, them someone comes back on the line with a (slightly) lower voice claiming to be a parent. this... yeah... this cracks my shit up. the kids who do this are kids i wouldʼve hung out with when i was a kid, kids who figure that shit out and work it like they know it. and when they do this, even when their 11-year-old voices crack with falsetto, i have to give them the code. i love doing this. itʼs like we are conspiring to fuck this system that would hold them down, that would keep them from fully plucking the ripe fruit of knowledge. i have to really curtail my militant stance against video games. you know, the whole pay thing... there are many times when i just want to whisper into the customerʼs ear and say, “sir, maybe itʼs a good thing that your xbox is not working, because now you are free to GET A FUCKING 25 LIFE AND LIVE IT! donʼt accept this passive entertainment that keeps you indoors and docile, man, get up and stand up and get out of your house and live, man, LIVE!” but i canʼt do that, of course, although i might... push me, motherfuckers, and i just might. *grinning evil learing grin* and so, i am, as they say, bonified. i am back on the radar of the american government since now i am getting paychecks sent to an address. they can find me now. i exist in their databanks. i can also buy things like, oh, food, clothing, futon rental (because iʼm sleeping at a friendʼs house for $100 a month through the summer.) yeah, this job means i donʼt have to feel like such a lop, which is always good. not only can i actually pay for myself and my own needs. shoot... i can treat every now and then.

26 i remember this one guy i knew very briefly while i was in the navy. he was african, i think, a very dark-skinned man with very bright, white teeth, who spoke with this lilting accent that made him always seem happy, and he was excrutiatingly happy, and he would tell me about it... constantly... he was so very happy, and do you know why he was happy? do you? iʼll bet you do! he was happy, he would tell me — every time he saw me — because he had taken his daily dose of... erm... “vitamin j.” “what is vitamin j?” you might ask. i asked him this very same question once and only once and lived to regret it every time he would accost me in the passageways of the ship, in the mess hall, in the library, in the toilet, every fucking where, always telling me he was happy because he had just taken his “vitamin j,” which, of course, could only possibly stand for “vitamin JESUS.” he thought this was so very FUCKing witty, this guy, this happy motherfucker, and he would ask me... CONSTANTLY... if i, too, would give vitamin j a try. he had set himself up as a vitamin j dealer, and he was eager to spread his sickness to everyone he could. he would hound me, always shoving his bible in my face, asking me if i had taken my vitamin j that morning, because he had, and boy was he happy about it! one time, for some reason, some strange fucking supernatural reason that cannot be explained, i agreed to go with this guy to his church. i mustʼve had my guard down, mustʼve been in one of my rare “i wonder if thereʼs a god” moods, but then there i was, going Vitamin J with mr. vitamin j to his church off the base where our ship was parked. 07.09.02 the first clue that shouldʼve tipped me off that something was amiss was the fact that the church was actually in a strip mall, with a payless shoe source on one side and a frozen yogurt shop on the other. i had never seen before nor have i seen since a church in a strip mall, but, for some reason, i went along with it anyway. he had the car... i was along for the ride. so we get there, and itʼs all folding chairs for the people and card tables for the stuff, and thereʼs precious little decoration, really stripped down and slapped together sort of thing, like you could easily be in an election office for some small-time politician running for office just as easily as a place of worship... really rinky-dink. and the guy whoʼs preaching, brother jim, is up there and heʼs all 27 “brothers and sister, i am here today to talk about the parable of jesus and the budding fig tree!” and the congregation says, “amen!” and mr. vitamin j stand up and puts up his hand and shouts an extra, “amen, brother jim!” because, you know, heʼs taken his fucking vitamin j today, obviously. and brother jim says, “look at the fig tree, and all the trees; as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near.” and the congregations shouts, “amen!” and brother jim says, “and what he meant by this was that ALL WOMEN WHO WEAR PANTS ARE SLUTS!” and the congregations shreaks, “SLUTS! SLUTS!” and mr. vitamin j leaps to his feet again, pumping his fist and shouting, “yes, brother jim! yes! SLUTS!” (i am totally serious. you think i am making this up, but i am not.) and brother jim goes on to another parable, this one of the mustard seed, and heʼs all. “the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches and ALL WOMEN WHO WEAR PANTS ARE SLUTS AND WHORES OF BABYLON!” and the congregation leaps to its feet and shouts, “SLUTS AND WHORES OF BABYLON!” and i notice then and only then that all the women in the congregation are wearing skirts and dresses, and they are all of them shouting “SLUTS! SLUTS! SLUTS!” and every parable brother jim brought up — whether it was “the birds of heaven” or “the flowers of the field” — they all ended with him glowing red and apoplectic and shouting that women who wore pants were harlots and whore and prostitutes and filthy, nasty trollops. and then we took a break for snacks. it was the weirdest fucking thing i have ever witnessed, and again, you think i am kidding, you think i am making this up, that i am exaggerating for comic effect, but i look you all in the eye and tell you this: i am not making this up. after that, shit, mr. fucking vitamin j was up my ass like a Fleet enema, smiling this huge smile and asking me if i had taken my vitamin j today, asking me to come back, they were all asking for me, would i come back, could i come back, when can i come back? all the time, hounding me with his fucking strip mall lord and the skirt nazis. gack. when i think about it... that may have been the last time i stepped foot 28 in a church, except for that one time i went to easter service with a woman i was seeing because her mom wanted to really bad and it was a family tradition and all.

29 * thatʼs when i knew this was going to be a long night. picture the scene: a cavernous warehouse with no air conditioning, huge greasy balls of sweat snailing trails from the nape of my neck to the crack of my ass, down the inside of my leg and puddling into my steel- toed boots; the blast of fans big as airplane propellors distributing soupy air and surrounding every nook and cranny with a dusty swirl of stifling heat; people in pairs and triplets and quartets huddled round rickety tables stuffing paperwork into envelopes, fingers ringed with ragged band-aids and hands etched with such a riot of fine papercuts they look like venetian blinds open wide in greeting. across from me is this... guy, some sullen random roundback fresh from his motherʼs basement, pallid skin with pink cheeks, mussed hair with salty amber crystals of dandruff dusting the shoulders of his stretched out “wwf - raw is war” t-shirt and the tops of his ears like fresh snowfall, a 28-year-old manchild with itchy video game trigger fingers and retroactive virginity. and iʼm bouncing to the music and stuffing envelopes, shaking my ass to Jamminʼ Oldies 105.9 FM, pumping booties and having me a ball, yʼall, and this dude, this guy, he says to me, he says, “so... what kind of music do you like?” and iʼm not really in the mood for conversation. i fucking hate this temp job bullshit, and this one-day gig is only going to net me $50 at the end of the day, which is a sucker deal in exchange for eight hours of my life. but, fuck it, i got kc and the motherfucking sunshine band talkinʼ ʻbout “play that funky music ʻtill you Christer Boy die,” so i indulge him, i say, “all kinds of stuff: indie rock; punk 07.09.02 rock; industrial; techno; trance; folk; classical; jazz; world music... just about anything except for country, which i fucking hate, and christian, which i really fucking hate. if jesus knew how fucking boring his followers were going to be, i think he wouldʼve thought twice about saving them all and let ʻem go to hell where they belong. white people should never be allowed to sing gospel.” then i go, “what about you?” and iʼm stuffing envelopes. and iʼm shaking my ass in my voluminously baggy jeans. and iʼm waiting for an answer. and when none comes, i look up to the guy across the table from me, and he is just... statued, mouth 30 agape, eyes a-bug, fists a-clinched, and heʼs staring at me. iʼm like, “what?” * heʼs like, “my favorite music is country and christian. whatʼs so wrong with country and christian music?” and he stares at me... with that... look. and everyone in the warehouse stops stuffing envelopes and the huge fans rattle to a halt and the radio goes silent and everyone is looking at me and rubbing their pointer fingers at me and chanting, “for shame, for shame, for shame,” like iʼm the biggest dick on the planet for insulting mr. roundbackʼs favorite brand of comfort music. okay, not really, but you would think that happened based on the stink eye dude was shovelling in my direction. i was like, “errr... my bad,” and went back to stuffing envelopes. we didnʼt speak for the rest of the first shift. by the second shift, we had been switched to a packing station with Big Hairy Goattee Pony Tail Bass Player Guy and Red-Faced Former Assistant Manager At Starbucks Guy. within moments we are playing my favorite time wasting game made exclusively for roadtrips and such occasions as this, the game called Camper Van. (Camper Van started on a roadtrip long ago with my friend cale and i. we were looking for the camper van beethoven tape in the floorboard, and when we couldnʼt find the disc, i asked him, “say dude, can you find that camper van beethoven disc?” and cale is like, “oh, do you mean camper van chopin?” and iʼm like, “no, camper van liszt?” and heʼd be like, “no, camper van tchaikovsky.” anyway, it became this kind of list game where we would think of a topic — say fast food restaurants or sodas or baseball teams — and go back and forth saying “camper van this” and “camper van that” until one of us would come up blank.) so, we are all packing shit and talking and playing camper van fast food restaurants or something, when all of a sudden Hairy Bass Player Guy suggests we play Camper Van Euphemisms For Male Masturbation, which cause me and Former Starbucks Guy to guffaw loudly and say, “yeah, yeah, letʼs play that,” and we launch with “camper van choking the chicken” and “camper van polishing the knob” and “camper van slapping the purple-headed stepchild,” but when it gets to Christer Boy, he just blanches, holds up his papercut hands in protest, shakes his head, and says, “no way, iʼm not playing that. thatʼs just wrong.” so we pause, look at each other, then i say, “okay, benʼs out. camper van plowing the fields of love with the scrotum tractor. next?” and we just laugh our asses off as we list one after another all these ways of saying jerking off, and the time passes, the work gets done, and finally i come out with “camper van buffing the bishop,” and Christer Boy 31 huffs, slams down his boxes and shit, and storms off. we all look at each and giggle guiltily, then see Christer Boy talking to a supervisor, who then leads him to another table to work. afterwhich we talk mad shit on Christer Boy, who obviously has some real problems with humans taking their own sexuality into their hands, which leads us to believe that Christer Boy is probably roundbacked for a reason, that reason being that Christer Boy is probably addicted to floggin the dolphin and has hella issues about it. so weʼre all laughing and joking and moving on to Camper Van Euphemisms For Breasts and Camper Van Dead Rock Stars Whose Names Began With J, when out of nowhere comes the floor supervisor. she take me and Hairy Bass Guy to the side and says we have mortally offended Christer Boy with our potty talk and that he is threatening to complain to OSHA about unsafe workplaces and unhealthy environment and sexual harrassment charges, so she winces, asks us to please cool it down, and we giggle to ourselves as we go back to the table. and so we end our cursing and begin laughing really hard and loud as we work, just belting our these voluminous gales of laughter as we work, and even though Christer Boy is way over on the other side of the warehouse, you can see his six-pack of hot dogs neck glowing purple with guilty masturbator rage at the horrible fact of our happiness. this went on all night long, uss telling funny stories sans cusswords or blasphemy and laughing our asses off in Christer Boyʼs general direction as a means of letting him know we werenʼt going to let him or his god get in the way of us having a good time as we earned our $50. fucker.

32 so, there i was in the parking lot of the HEB supermarket, the driverʼs seat of my black mini- van pulled all the way back...... the chair laid nearly flat, my fingers laced behind my head, my steel- toed boots propped on the dashboard, and the voices of john, paul, george and ringo filling the spaces with pure unfiltered joy. my dreamy smile could not have been bigger if i tried... fines should be levied on that big shameless grin because it just felt so subversive to be sitting there in the parking lot of the super market with my feet kicked up in full view of everyone lugging their groceries to their cars. tonight, i made what just might be the very best beatles mix tape in the whole wide world. and letʼs put a time frame on that... EVER! it was so good that i just drove around austin while listening to it for the first time, driving on lamar way past the capitol building, then all the way back to ben white, then all the way back again at 35 miles an hour, not giving a good goddamn that people were honking and shaking fists as they passed me because i was too busy following the flow of one song into the other, each song setting up the next in a slow seemless sine wave of mood and atmosphere. at the end of it, i just parked for 30 minutes at the HEB and smiled as i listened to every drum beat, every bass buzz, every harmony and melody... such fucking magic these guys had. i mean, what are the chances that you could form a band as kids and have paul mccartney, john lennon, AND george harrison all in the same band? Mix Tape add to that the luckiest motherfucker on the planet on the drums, and youʼve got such a Genius pool of talent, jesus, how can you ever have that again? 07.14.02 just like ozzy said, saying you hate the beatles is like saying you hate air. when putting together this mix cd, i focused on songs outside of the big hits you hear ad nauseum on the radio and on greatest hits packages. i hit the songs that i like best, the ones in between the hits, the ones that showcase what i love the most about the beatles without caring a ratʼs ass about anybody elseʼs criteria. my set is filled with noise and shreaks that crescendo then cascade into subtle harmonies and strings and lots and lots of empty space between instruments. itʼs equal parts primal scream and studio polish.

33 this cd makes me very happy. crafting the perfect mix cd is such an art, and itʼs all about the flow. when hilary and i first got together, we made mix cds for each other, and this... really... this is a really big deal. you canʼt just slap together any old random grouping of hits onto a cd and expect it to flow, and you certainly canʼt perform the perfect mix tape seduction that way, either. hell no, this takes time, brothers and sister, this takes strategy, this takes spreading out every cds you own onto the carpet and endlessly arranging and rearranging them into some sort of logical, emotional order that makes sense, that rises and falls, that says everything you long to say but canʼt or wonʼt. you want to let the other person know how much you like them and how warm they make you feel without getting treacly and obvious. the goal is to make them attach their hearts to each and every song in such a way as to make them think of you every time they hear your mix. itʼs a subtle thing... they can be listening to it and not even realize itʼs a mixtape seduction, and theyʼre just listening to it as theyʼre cleaning their apartment or reading a good mystery book while eating rainer cherries, and then it starts... a grain at first, then growing, until finally they are wearing thoughts of you like a warm thrift store sweater on a cold rainy night, and they let their eyes drift to the ceiling as they smile and think... of you. hilary had me the moment she gave me that first mix tape, boom, from song one: ewan mcgregor singing “your song” from the “moulin rouge” soundtrack. holy fucking shit, i could see our grandchildrenʼs eyes just by closing mine when ewen hit those high notes, and it only got deeper from that. and my answer mix tape started with “picture in a frame” from tom waitsʼ “mule variations” cd. (i wasnʼt fucking around, not even a little bit.) yeah... thatʼs how we started, with “six feet under” and a flurry of mixtapes back and forth. and now... well, things are different for me and hilary. we made some big changes in our relationship, ones that were uncomfortable at first, but that now seem to make so much sense. it all seems so obvious now... and i donʼt know whatʼs going to happen, where weʼre going to go, or how weʼre going to get there, but itʼs all good because weʼve stopped seeing our grandchildrenʼs eyes and have started to just see each otherʼs again. and even though we are giving each other space and time to figure shit out and even though we have stopped referring to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend and even though we donʼt quite know what to make of it and even though we are all cool with this and know that this is the best thing we can do for whatever this is supposed to be — friends or lovers or something in between — man... when i listen to those mix tapes we 34 made for each other, i still fucking melt. thatʼs the power of a good mix tape. this beatles cd? yeah, itʼs THAT kind of mixtape. itʼs so fucking good i am almost afraid to share it, like i am afraid of unleashing this kind of power... it almost doesnʼt seem right. a person could be reduced to a lump under the covers for weeks after receiving this cd. yeah... iʼm listening to it right now... and i have to get up to run tomorrow at 6 a.m. sharp, and itʼs now nearly 1 a.m., and i canʼt seem to keep myself from listening to this cd over and over and over again. yeah... this cd is fucking me up. iʼm not going to be able to write for days...

35 so, i was in the xbox call center the other day, listening to some customer drone on and on...... about how he couldnʼt figure out why “grand theft auto 3” wasnʼt going to be available for the xbox — and let me tell you, this phone call went on for days with me telling the guy repeatedly that there were no plans for this game being released for the xbox and thatʼs all the information i have, sir, and yes i think it would be cool, sir, but there are no... sir? sir? yes, i understand that it is available on playstation, but... sir? sir? — when all of a sudden i feel a tap on my shoulder. i hit “mute” on my phone and turn to find my boss, a nice but stern frat boy gone to seed who is probably only making $2 or $3 more than me, and he mouths the following: “our company dress code is (rabbit ears with fingers signifying quotes) business casual, but what you are currently wearing is simply (rabbit ears) casual. the next time you come in not properly dressed, i am afraid you will be sent home. capice?” (yes, he actually said, “capice.”) and the guy on the phone is still going on about how bill gates must be, and i quote, “fucking insane” for not getting the game designer of “grand theft auto 3” to release a version for xbox — and this guy? heʼs, like, 30, and heʼs berating some hapless call center guy about fucking video games for fifteen fucking minutes... loser? so i smile, nod my head at my boss, motion toward the phone, and whisper (rabbit ears), “i have a call.” and i smile. and i nod. and the boss walks away. this is the third time iʼve been told my baggy phat farm jeans are not in compliance with the “business casual” attire Thrift Eye for required for speaking the Straight Guy with people over the phone, so i made plans 07.22.02 for one of my favorite pastimes: THRIFTING, BABY! aww yeah, it was time. i had my first real check burning in my pocket, and i was ready to get some new old clothes. hilary and i hit the huge goodwill around the corner from my work, knocked our knuckles together, said, “wonder twin powers activate!” and hilary said, “form of kick ass shirts!” and i said, “form of bad ass pants!” and we hit the racks. there is an art to thrifting. 36 it takes time, patience, and a trained eye to pick the treasures from the trash, and unless you commit a solid hour and a half to fingering every dog-eared collar and tattered hem, youʼll come up with nothing but “thrift store itch,” that mysterious tingle on the tips of your fingers from contact with lots and lots of unwashed clothing from lots and lots of different people with lots and lots of varying perceptions on personal hygiene. you canʼt just breeze through the aisles, hands flipping through the tightly hangered lines of knit shirts and button down shirts and dress shirts and jeans and dress slacks and dockers and shorts and hope something wicked will leap from the rack and drape itself on your arm, no. ...that is, of course, unless you are hilary. she has some kind of supernatural gift for thrifting, and always seems to come out of even the most dismally bland second-hand store with at least one genuine thrift score. i could run my fingers over EVERYTHING and not find anything that i wanted, and iʼll be all frustrated and ready to go, and iʼll be like, “yeah, this place blows, letʼs bail,” and she will slowly turn around with this intoxicated grin on her face and display the perfect pale blue and tan plaid western shirt with pointy collar, pearly snaps down the middle, and pearly snaps on the pointy pocket flaps and cuffs. and everything she finds fits perfectly. i donʼt know how she does it, but i am glad she does, because she has impeccible thrift store taste... her closet? it looks like my closet. every time she scores something choice? yeah, itʼs exactly what i was looking for and couldnʼt find. sheʼs fucking scary. so we spread out, and iʼm combing through the racks, and i am finding a few things here and there that are passible but not quite... right... and i am starting to get a bit frustrated, so i take my shit over to hilary, who has already found the perfect pair of worn jeans, and i go, “okay, so what do you think about this stuff?” and she gives it the once over, and sheʼs shaking her head back and forth, tsk-tsking my taste, pooching out her lip at my sad choices — and i really liked the boy scout shirt with all the patches! — and she reaches her fingertips to my temple, caressing me softly, and whispers, “keep looking, sweetie, youʼll find them.” and this weird tingle hits me, spreads from the point where she touched me to the back of my neck, then down my spine, and i turn to the shirt racks for the third try, and there it is...... sitting amongst the endless row of shirts packed tightly in single file that iʼve already picked clean... a sleeve poking out of the riot of colors... and itʼs... itʼs glowing, almost beckoning me. so i go over to it, and it is PHAT, yo, this wicked western shirt with those kick ass pearly snaps down the front, earth tone plaid, pointy collars... 37 the whole nine, and it is choice, and it fits perfectly, so i drape it over my arm in triumph... and i look down the aisle of shirts to see three or four more shirts shining more brightly than the rest. and they are each just perfectly suited for me, nice enough to be called “business casual” but cool enough to wear at any poetry slam any time and look styling... and it occurs to me that hilary has imparted some of her supernatural thrift score magick to me. i look back at her and she is smiling at me, at the look of little kid wonder on my face, and she blows me a kiss and turns toward the stack of cover-alls behind her. she is so good, itʼs scary. by the end of it, i had scored three pairs of pants — one dark olive green, one dark brown, and one khaki — and four kick ass shirts, and they all mixed and matched perfectly. total cost: $60. aww yeah. i will be the most styling customer care representative on the entire call center floor. customers will instinctly know that i am well-dressed in my new old clothes just by the lilt of my voice... when i tell them how to hook up their xboxes to their big screen teevees, theyʼll suddenly pause, take in a breath, and say, “hey, nice shirt! those pearly snaps are the bomb, yo.” and i will smile, and i will silently thank hilary for her kick ass thrift eye.

38 i spend my day talking to people. thatʼs my job, to interact with the electronic interpretations of human voices piped into this call center from all over north america, people needing problems solved, concerns calmed, questions asked and answered. and i enjoy it for the most part because i am really good at it. i am certainly not paid what my abilities are worth, but the $9.25 an hour i am paid to do this is better than what iʼd get working retail, and i am having more fun with it. lots of freedom. no one standing there making sure you clock in and clock out by a certain time. no one to hover over me (although all our conversations are recorded and reviewed randomly by supervisors who grade our work.) just this call center filled with people surrounded by other people talking to other people who arenʼt there. it can be frustrating sometimes. i donʼt have a high opinion of video games, to be honest, nor have i ever held hard core gamers in high regard, but most of the folks who buy an xbox never have to call in because they are bright enough to figure things out on their own. the folks who canʼt figure shit out on their own call me and Super-Duper Caller ID have me figure From Hell out their shit for them. 07.31.02 and this can be frustrating, especially when the person is not, one could say, the pointiest crayon in the 64-pack. no, some of these poor folks are dull little crayola nubs begging for help from the mystical voice of someone who is payed to listen to them, and i just get really sad sometimes when contemplating the state of our education system as i explain to someone that the reason their xbox keeps turning off is because they are trying to eject the game disc by hitting the power button rather than the eject button. (“yes, sir, the one marked O-F-F. that one is not the ʻejectʼ button. that is the ʻoffʼ button.”) i get a lot of people who are frustratingly dense and easily irritated by not having the vocabulary to describe the problem or understand the solution, so you have to really be patient with them, calm their fears of inadequacy, realize that if they are getting this much frustration out of hooking up a video game, they are getting much worse from the life swirling around them. 39 sometimes i get crank calls from little kids — always boys — and they instantly brighten my day! most will shout a giggly “fuck you” before immediately hanging up, and i totally remember how taboo and exciting it was to talk potty talk as a kid. they must get such a rush out of talking that trash talk, and i say bring it on! it cracks me the fuck up, but they are such cowards about it. half the time, i canʼt even understand what they are saying, itʼs just this frantic giggling rush of words then a slammed phone. the other day, i got some kid... wow, he was fearless. he pretended he had some kind of problem, and i could tell he was, like, nine years old, and you could hear muffled giggles on the other line as he talked, as if four nine-year-olds where all listening on one extension. i go, “well, sir, can i get your name?” and he pauses, giggles, and says, “yeah... my name is... dick.” and i go, “oh, so your name is (pause for effect)... dick?” and he and his little friends erupt into naughty little kid giggles, and then he goes, “you know what?” and iʼm like, “what?”and heʼs all, “youʼre a STUPIDMOTHERFUCKINGGAYASSBITCH!” (at this point, most little kid crank calls end abruptly with them hanging up, but he stayed on the line... he stayed on the line!) and iʼm like, “oh really? is that the best you can do? because come on, if youʼre going to crank call me, youʼve got to give me more than that! cʼmon, make this worth my time!” and he pauses, surprise that i am confronting him and asking for more and not getting all huffy and horrible offended, then he snorts, says, “fag!” and hangs up. the cool thing about this phone system, see, is that we have Super-Duper Caller ID From Hell that displays everyoneʼs phone number no matter how much they think theyʼve got some kind of caller id block. i was SO tempted to call this little fucker back and be like, “hello, this is eirik from xbox customer care! i just wanted to clarify... who exactly is a motherfucking gay ass bitch? and can i talk to your mom and ask her?” oh yes... i WILL abuse my Super-Duper Caller ID to do this someday. and there are other calls that are just plain weird. like this morning... i got a lady from new jersey who told me she heard “strange voices” coming from her xbox, and not from her teevee speakers or stereo speakers, mind you, but strange voices coming from her xbox, strange voices that “were not of this earth,” she said. i could picture her wide-eyed in a housecoat and curlers, dirty pink bunny slippers on her feet, curled into a fetal position and wedged between the gas stove and the dirty kitchen wall, and sheʼs cupping the handset of the phone and staring down the hall and into the living room at this xbox on the floor, and she hears them... the voices. 40 i asked her if she could put the phone up to the xbox so i could hear them, too, and all i could hear for a full minute was the gentle hum of phone silence. when she got back on the phone, she said, “did you hear ʻem? theyʼre freaking me out. are they a-posed to do that?” i made up something on the spot, something about that being a normal sound when the xbox is accessing its hard disc, but you could tell she was skeptical. i can picture her eyeing that xbox suspiciously until finally she snatched it up from the teevee tray in front of her ratty couch and threw it in the very bottom of her closet and covered it with old clothes to smother the voices. some people just want to talk, and not just about xbox, about anything — the weather, the news, politics — their voices staining my ears with long distance loneliness and isolation, poor sad people whose only option for human interaction seems to be calling someone whoʼs paid to listen. and we are instructed to listen, but eventually we need to gently suggest they let us go unless they have an xbox-specific question, which then always inspires a flood of random questions about the xbox meant to lengthen the call — “uhh, when is halo 2 coming out? when is xbox live going up? what is the capitol of costa rica?” — after which we have to gently answer a few then remind the customer that other customers are waiting. there is a “release” button on the phone that hangs up, and we can use that after a certain point has been reached and crossed, but i rarely use it. sometimes i just let them ramble on... they need someone to talk to, and i need to write in my online journal while getting paid $9.25 an hour. this way, we both benefit, me typing frantically and offering “right, right...” and “really?” and “is that a fact?” as the customer tells me EVERYTHING thatʼs on his mind. and there is the rare genuine triumph after figuring out a personʼs problem with their help, an epiphony that comes 20 minutes into a call about connecting the xbx to someoneʼs vcr, which also has digital cable, which are both connected to the hdtv and 5.1 dolby digital surround sound stereo system, and they canʼt seem to GET IT, and you canʼt seem to MAKE THEM GET IT, and youʼll tell them to “press that one button again,” and suddenly youʼll hear this quick intake of breath — a nearly-silent, “oh!” followed by a pause — and then you know they are finally staring at the xbox logo on their big screen teevee for the first time. and they are SO greatful! and they thank you! and they offer to speak to your supervisor and sing your praises! but you just say, “hey, no worries, it was my job. thank you for calling xbox customer care.” yeah... this is an okay way to earn my $9.25 an hour. shit, iʼm typing this right now as i have some guy from cleveland on hold. aww yeah. 41 whatʼs up with b.o.? how can you, like, NOT know that you stink like a mineral hot springs? how can you NOT notice the huge amber flakes of salty scalp snow piled in huge drifts on your shoulders and ears and glinting playfully in your hair like easter eggs? every time i come in contact with some funky individual who spews offensive odor, who wafts an invisible flag of stench behind them as they gallumph past me, this is the first thing that passes through my mind: how can they NOT know? i mean, obviously there are differing standards for cleanliness based on all kinds of factors: social, economic, cultural, etc. but really, when you come down to it, some people fucking stink, and it just... wow. i just shake my head. how can they NOT know? the second thing that occurs to me is more silent, deeper, and thatʼs the one i think about longer: what if I stink like that, and i just donʼt know? case in point... i went over to this dude who works here, who has way more experience dealing with the xbox, and i asked him a question, and as i watched him ruminate and listened to him pontificate on all things xbox, the only thing i could think of was, “oh my god, this guy fucking smells like butthole!” i mean, his b.o. was a powerful beast with its own agenda, watering my eyes and wrinkling my nose and forcing my pupils to fly from my sockets in search of the nearest fire exit. and iʼm like, wheezing and choking, and iʼm thinking, “jesus, how does he not KNOW that he stinks?” i think itʼs common knowledge that if you donʼt shower, you will stink. and i think most people know that if you wear the same clothing day after sweaty day, you will stink. so... whatʼs up? how can this The Stinky Guy guy not know he stinks? and as i was walking back, 08.01.02 yeah, that thought hit me... how would i know if i stunk? i mean, obviously, if dude KNEW he stunk, he would take steps to do something about it, right? i mean, no one wants to be The Stinky Guy... right? i mean, he could just not give a shit, but really... the more probable answer is that he just doesnʼt know it, just canʼt tell that he smells like a steaming bag of wet grass clippings fermenting on a hot summer sidewalk. 42 and IʼM not going to tell him... how would that feel, to have some random person in your work center come up and say, “yo, dude, i donʼt want to hurt your feelings or nothinʼ, but you know how, like, they say a dead rotten body in the heat of summer time is the worst smell youʼve ever smelled? well, listen... right now? iʼd rather rub an old nasty dead body under my nose than smell your ass-smelling ass one more second... maybe you should look into adjusting your concepts of proper hygiene. no biggie... iʼm just saying.” so... come on... he obviously doesnʼt know, and itʼs a good bet that he WONʼT know unless someone tells him... what if i stink like that, too, and i just donʼt know it, and no one will tell me because they are afraid of offending me? i take a shower every morning, use deodorant, wear clean clothes, brush my teeth... i probably donʼt stink... but what if thatʼs exactly what Senor Shitty Pants thinks, too? i guess i have this on my mind lately because i just got a new scent, and hilary and i seem to be really, really happy with it. she uses this scented oil called “majmua” that just drives me wild, this warm subtle smell of exotic places, hot sand, wind, spices... and i have come to identify that smell with her... that is hilaryʼs smell... that is what she smells like... and i wanted that, too. i mean, hilary says that she has never known someone to sweat as much as me on a hot day and still come out of it smelling clean, but i wanted more than that... i wanted my own smell. so we looked, we went to whole foods and sniffed every one until we both agreed on this combo oil with amber and sandlewood. i like it... itʼs subtle, not overpowering, and it smells very warm and natural. so, yeah, i think iʼm okay... but still... that dude... his smell is Swollen Dead Body, and i donʼt think you can buy that shit at the Whole Foods store. maybe i should spill some of my amber sandlewood oil on him as i walk past his cubicle.

43 so, iʼm sitting nekkid on hilaryʼs couch this morning. actually, iʼm curled up on her couch in a fetal ball, naked save for the blanket i have draped over me, one arm folded against my chest, the other outstretched and slung away from me toward the coffeetable with the teevee remote loosely in my hand. and i am watching “maury povich.” i hate these shows, these pseudo talk shows that are merely excuses to get the saddest people on a sound stage and humiliate them in front of millions of people for our titillation so that we can look at our own lives and think, “well, at least my life isnʼt nearly as bad as that one nazi guy ranting about how he wants to kill all the jews and kill all the blacks and kill all the queers and how there is no way in hell that baby is his no matter what the paternity test tells him because his sister is a liar and a whore, and besides, she ainʼt even a real women, sheʼs actually his brother who went to sweden for that operation and now theyʼre in love and fuck anybody who thinks they shouldnʼt get married and raise that baby as their own even though they snatched it from the neighborʼs house in the dead of night.” the only reason i was watching it was because “the peopleʼs court” was over. now THAT show is quality entertainment, but this? ugh... i was merely gazing slack-jawed at the ﬂickering images on the idiot box and thinking about anything other than what was on the Nothin’ but a screen and the prurient little Two-Bit Whore dramas displayed for our sick entertainment. 08.09.02 itʼs my day off. and i feel lazy. and i donʼt want to do anything or accomplish anything or go anywhere... i donʼt want to read or write or eat or go to the store... i donʼt want to call colleges to set up more shows for my fall tour... i donʼt want to burn more cds... i donʼt want to practice fucking poetry anymore... i donʼt want to do ANYTHING but i am bored as fuck... so, yeah... “the maury povich show.” and the theme is one of their most successful: “paternity tests EXPOSED!” at least, it MUST be one of their most successful themse because every fucking time i see one of them, thatʼs the theme: youʼve got some heavily mascaraed girl who just had a baby and three roughneck boys on stage calling her a whore and swearing it ainʼt their baby and then thereʼs the

44 one shy boy in the corner who swears if itʼs his kid, heʼll take care of it and of the mother with all of his heart... and you KNOW itʼs never the sweet kid, they just add him there for the drama, and you KNOW itʼs always the fucking dolt with the backwards ballcap and the limp biskit t-shirt talking about, “that fucking whore fucking fucked every-fucking-body and there ainʼt no fucking way in hell thatʼs my motherfucking baby, hell the fuck no, and shit! i only fucked her for a week without a condom, how the hell that be my baby? bitch lies like a rug!” so, itʼs one of those episodes, one with the poor high school girl and the two 18-year-old sex partners, and, of course, the two boys used to be best friends, and, of course, now they hate each other, and yeah, one of them is sweet and wants very much to start a family with the girl, who also wants the same, and then thereʼs the knucklehead in the baggy jeans and the crooked swagger, talking to the audience more than he is to either one of the kids on stage, and heʼs all standing up, talking about “that bitch ainʼt nothing but a two-bit whore!” and you just KNOW heʼs the father. and, of course, he is. the sweet boy runs off stage in a rage, trailing hurt and accusations, while the girl wails on stage, flinging her arms as if warding off a cloud of locusts, and maury — the smug motherfucker — heʼs acting as if heʼs trying to comfort her, as if cradling her for the close-ups is going to help her more than just stopping this whole bullshit display and getting this poor kid as far away from that soundstage as possible... and suddenly, i am just bawling... iʼve got big fat tears rolling down my face... the poor girl is being tortured on stage with cameras shoved at her face, sheʼs just howling, clawing at the carpet and giving birth to these strangled roars of agony, like a dog thatʼs been hit by a car, and the studio audience is shouting encouragement to the stupid boy who is marching back and forth across the stage with arms raised high over his head like heʼs conducting an orchestra, chanting, “youʼre a fucking whore! that ainʼt my baby! youʼre a fucking whore!” jesus... i hate teevee. i wish hilary had animal planet. i love “the worldʼs funniest animal home videos.” that is quality entertainment. but this? this is just brutal and fucked... i donʼt need that to make myself feel like iʼm okay simply because my life isnʼt as fucked up as that poor girlʼs. what i need is a video of a german shepherd who gets his head stuck in a bucket and backs into the christmas tree which then falls and knocks dad in the balls while the kids laugh and laugh and laugh. damn. i feel shitty. i think iʼll crank call xbox. 45 the scene: the mumbled hubbub of xbox customer care representatives speaking to people through headsets. the time: 9:30 p.m. on a thursday night. all the other employees doing customer service for all the other accounts are gone. xbox is the only section that stays open until midnight. xbox employees are scattered all over the call center in clusters, although most cubicles are now empty. at the most, 15 people are in a work center that holds 200. suddenly, the woman to the right of my cubicle — a vivacious black woman with dyed blonde hair and blue contact lenses — puts her customer on hold and begins to softly beat box, a slow, sensual rhythm mimicking a bass drum and a snare... BOOM-pshhh...... BOOM-BOOMA pshhh... BOOM-pshhh... and i am on hold, too, so i turn to her and add the sound of a scratching turntable and a hi-hat: WICKAH WICKAH tss tss WICKAH WICKAH tss tss... and she looks to me, smiles, and nods her head to our locking beats as she picks up my rhythm and fills it in with phatter beats and denser rhythms, adding to mine and taking the energy up a notch: BOOM-BOOM-shhhBOOM shhhBOOM-BOOMA-BAP... BOOM-BOOM-shhhBOOM shhhBOOM-BOOMA-BAP... and someone from way across the room suddenly says, “awww yeah,” and starts beat boxing with us, adding his own tricked out rhythmic Fat Boys style beat boxing, heavy on the Biz Markie sloppy-lipped inhaling and exhaling, throwing his arms Six Minutes, in the air and waving them like he just donʼt care. Six Minutes... and over in another corner, someone else shouts, “awww 08.10.02 shit!” and he adds his own beats to the growing rhythmic cacophony, and now everyone on the whole call center floor can hear us, and they are all either adding to it or bobbing their heads to the sick beats weʼre weaving. and then i stand up with one hand on an invisible microphone and the other on my jock, and i bust out with, “six minutes... six minutes... six minutes doug e. fresh youʼre on!” 46 (HISTORICAL NOTE: this is a reference to the seminal hip-hop hit “The Show” by Doug E. Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew, which, by the way, also featured Slick Rick.) and the entire call center is lit on fire with laughter and shouts of “OHHHH!” and “AWWW YEAH!” and “TRUE DAT!” and “AWWW SHIT!” and the rhythm collapses and dissipates into titters and stifled giggles and several outright guffaws as a powerful shower of fingertips hit MUTE buttons as quickly as they can so customers canʼt catch the old school energy that just erupted spontaneously out of nowhere. and then we quieted down, released the MUTE buttons, went back to our customers on hold, and went back to work. the whole thing lasted maybe 20 seconds, but we were all energized by the glory of it for the rest of the evening. humans can sometimes be mean and cruel to each other, but man, sometimes? us humans can be pretty damned cool. you can be going through an otherwise listless day, and all of a sudden some human interaction makes everything seem better, even if itʼs only for a little while.

47 i have only ever been in two fights in my whole life. fight n. an ugly confrontation where someone hits you and you hit them back. note: if one punch is followed immediately with flight for dear life, that is not technically a fight. thatʼs not to say that i have never been punched by someone before, it just means that there have been only two times where i have punched back. i have been punched before, although not many times. the most memorable was that one time in bakersfield when the bass player for a popular local band punched me in the face because he was mad that i had given his bandʼs latest cd three stars out of five in my zine (three because the cd didnʼt capture the amazing sound and energy they produced live.) i had walked up to him in the alley behind the popular coffeehouse and asked him if he would talk to me about the review, but when i offered a hand as a truce, he slapped the hand out of his way and socked me in the mouth. so, i turned and walked away as he shouted after me, threatening to kick my ass if i ever dared to “talked shit” on his band again. (mental note: sometimes there is a price to pay for exercising the first amendment.) another time, i was sitting on a swing in a park near my house, and this girl was swinging a few swings down from me, and she suddenly flipped over and fell in the sand. some kids nearby laughed at her. she got pissed, started crying, and ran away. a few minutes later, some huge bully of a kid in coveralls came stalking over a grassy knoll and pointed to the swingsets and screamed, “iʼm going to kick your ass!” and iʼm all looking around, and thereʼs no one else around me, and there he is, coming closer, closer, his face pulled into a rictus of hate, and it slowly occurs to me that he means to kick my ass for some Nerd Fight reason. i had just stood up with my arms outstretched, mumbling something like 08.21.02 “wha?” when he comes up and socks me in the mouth. well, thatʼs all i needed to know... i bolted like a gazelle and made straight for the chain link fence of the elementary school next door, this bully kid in hot pursuit huffing like a brahma bull. i never did find out exactly why he was chasing me — i guess he thought i was one of the kids who laughed at his sister — but in situations like those, itʼs usually best to run first, ask questions later. and when i was a kid? no one could catch me because i could climb a chain link fence faster that anyone ever. iʼd be doing the fosberry flop

48 and shit, too, arching over the toothy prongs of that fence in a flutter of flipped birds and “yo momma” digs as the pursuing kid grudgingly gave me props for my supernatural ability to get over that chain link fence faster than god. and then there was that kid leonard in high school gym class. no idea what happened there. i barely remember it, but i do remember him getting all huffy and shit. and then there was that one kid who rode that bmx bike around everywhere who had it out for me... for a good period of my pre-teenaged life, the mere glimpse of a bmx bike out of the corner of my eye was enough to send me fleeing over the nearest chain link fence. for the most part, when cornered by a “fight or flight” impulse, i have used every inch of my 65-inch frame to choose the latter. i never had much use for that kind of masculine pride that tells you running is for cowards. fuck that, i was outta there, talking about yo momma from the safety of the other side of a fence, but outta there unscathed nonetheless. there have only been two times where i felt no choice but to fight back. the first was in high school. i was kinda sorta school friends with this one kid in one of my classes, the kinda sorta friend you only ever talk to at school, and then only once in a while, like you know each other, you are friendly toward each other, but you never actually get together and hang out with each other kinda friends. one day he started fucking around and i found myself with my arm twisted behind my back and this guy holding it and playfully talking shit. shoulda ended there, but the thing was... he wouldnʼt let go. we were in a classroom and class had not quite started, so people are all milling about, waiting for class, and watching us fuck around, only it suddenly gets a little serious. it started to hurt, and i told him to stop, but he only tightened his grip and started talking more shit, less playful, and more angry. we struggled a bit, i told him again to let me go, the teacher is asking us to stop, desks are being knocked over, and he still wonʼt let go. so i told him one more time to stop. he tightened his grip. then POW! i was suddenly staring at him after clocking him solid in the mouth, somehow having performed some kind of slippery voodoo and twisted out of his grip long enough to smack him in the kisser with a loud crack. the whole world got silent, and this kidʼs face slowly twisted into hatred, and he lunged at me with his arms flailing. i instinctively grabbed his wrists and held them with a death grip to keep him from using them against me, and more chairs are being thrown as we struggle, and kids are jumping 49 up out of their desks, the teacher is hyper-ventilating... yeah... nerd fight. we calmed down once we got sent to the deanʼs office, and by the time we got down there, we were talking and joking around again, shaking our heads at how quickly the horseplay turned sour. he even complimented me on my right hook. we both got suspended for a day. we were both 15 years old, wet-nosed kids in the throes of pubescent warfare waged against us by hormones we hardly understood, wracked by bad skin and cracking voices and girls who both frightened and delighted us. twenty years would pass before my next fight... it happened during this 2002 national poetry slam in minneapolis, on the second night of preliminary competition. the venue was packed with people, packed, and it was a shitty venue with crappy sight lines and muddy sound and no barrier between the poetry slam and the roar of barstool conversation in the adjacent room. apparently, there was so sound tech for the evening, and the sound had been wretched the night before, so the bout manager of the evening called for help to the audience. and this guy from the extended slam family came up to help. he apparently worked on it for some time trying to get the sound just right, but then marc smith, the person who INVENTED poetry slamming as we know it, happened into the venue and basically took over the sound. after some tense interaction, marc reportedly called the guy working on the sound an “asshole.” i didnʼt see any of this, however. i came moseying into the venue with the crew from austin and proceeded to get my game face on. i heard the folks up on stage fucking with the sound, and i remembered how bad the sound was the night before, so i went over the sound guy and said, “hey, listen, you might want to punch up the treble to cut through all this noise.” he nodded and went about his business. the gig goes off without a hitch. the sound is as good as itʼs going to get, which is actually pretty damned good, especially in this awful space with all the background noise. the austin team hangs out, performs, cheers for everyone, and ends up narrowly outscoring the excellent team from boston to get the top spot for the bout. and then itʼs over, and we are all standing up and stretching, and i start milling about and talking to people... and POW! suddenly someone has pushed me with both hands and knocked me back into the people behind me. i look up and itʼs the guy who was asked to help with the sound. and iʼm like, “what?!?” and he curses at me and pushes me again, and iʼm again like, 50 “what?!? what is your problem?” and he yells at me something like, “how dare you complain to fucking marc smith about the sound! fuck you!” and then he pushes me again. and iʼm no longer a 15-year-old kid in high school with rampaging hormones, no, iʼm this 35-year-old man who stands 65” tall who is looking up at this 300-pound man glaring down at me from a full foot above my head whose face is purple with inexplicable rage, and he is pushing me, and pushing me, and he is screaming at me, and he wonʼt let me move away from him... so... yeah, for only the second time in my whole life, i balled up my fist and punched someone back, right in the face as hard as i could. and suddenly all hell has broken loose, with onlookers either rushing away to avoid contact with the hurling bodies or friends dashing between us and prying us apart before any more punches can be thrown. it happened so quickly and was over in a flash — 10 seconds, tops, then the mayhem to follow, the “what the fuck are you doing?” from my teammate matthew who was hugging me tight to his chest and pulling me away, the “step the fuck back right now!” from seattleʼs karen finneyfrock to the guy angry man and forcing him through the power of her pointed finger to back the fuck down, the room full of people turning us into the hub of a giant invisible wheel with astonished gazes piercing us like spokes. it was so stupid. and so rash. and, still, so unexplainable. and, of course, the news that “the wussy boy punched out the sound guy” spread like chlamydia in a college town. and within 15 minutes, i couldnʼt walk down the street without slammers from the extended community calling me “slugger” and chanting “big poppa boombaye!” or just theatrically flinching away from me as if i was about to go off. from what i was told by my friend kenn rodriquez from albuquerque, the rumor had morphed into “big poppa e knifed the sound guy” by the time he heard it, which really tickled me. and now? i am just tired of it, and sad that i was a part of it, sad that a room full of people who had perhaps seen their very first poetry slam ever walked away NOT with the memory of an evening of fun with poetry, but with the image of this little wussy boy in steel-toed boots being pushed into a situation where he felt he had to defend himself. at least in high school, we ended up laughing about it. i really donʼt see that happening for this situation, and thatʼs a shame.

51 there are not many situations where i get to do “manly” things. i mean, iʼm a man, obviously, and i have absolutely no issues with my version of masculinity or anybody elseʼs interpretations of my masculinity or apparent lack thereof. i simply donʼt give a shit about mainstream societyʼs opinions about what it takes to be a man. most of those bullshit gender norms are manufactured by corporations who profit from forcing us into itty-bitty boxes that are easy to define and label as a demographic so they can sell you something, so i make it a point not to limit myself by trying to fit in with their image of what a man is or is not. still... itʼs nice to be a “guy” sometimes, you know, the guy who opens the door, the guy who fixes shit, the guy who can take care of himself in a pinch, the guy who can open the jelly jar, who can kill the menacing spider, who can build that campfire, who can bar-b-cue that steak, who can call that crazy trick pool shot where the cue ball is supposed to jump through the air over all the other balls and knock their ball into the corner pocket AND they actually MAKE IT, who can jump into the middle of a fight and calm each party down to the point where they are talking again... today? i got to be a “guy” guy. Rocking the i was driving to work this afternoon Man Thing on the freeway, and my van started acting all weird, kinda tugging to the 08.22.02 right, and there was a loud whirring noise coming from the back of the van, plus it seemed like i couldnʼt accelerate past 40 mph. so i pulled over to the side of the freeway to discover that my right back tire was flat as flat can be. shit. i called work, told them i would be late, then called my insurance company to see if i could arrange a tow. unfortunately, they told me it would be over an hour before they could get a tow truck out to me, so i told them... well, i told them i would call them back. shit. i had the dumb luck of breaking down across the median from a car place — like right across the street — so i hiked over the weedy ditch separating the freeway from the feeder road and asked the folks in the place if they could help me out. 52 i crossed the median again with a guy carrying an air compressor who then told me, “yup... yer tireʼs done gone flat. needs to be plugged. cainʼt do it here. you gots to get it back over there. looks like you need a tow.” shit. so there i was. at the side of the road. with a flat tire. and suddenly, i felt it, this strange yearning in my belly, this warm spreading of energy from my tummy to my scalp, this overwhelming urge that whispered in my ear: “i can fix this myself!” i have never changed a tire at the side of the road in my entire life — i mean, iʼve rotated my tires before, but that was in a driveway... once... and i usually have a handy can of Fix-A-Flat in my vehicle for cases like these — but, anyway, right then and there, i was going to fuck that flat tire all kinds of up! did i even have a spare tire? i had no idea! so i looked under the van, and sure enough, there it was, a spare tire. did i even have a car-lifter thingie? i looked around the van, found some kind of hidden panel, and LO! a car-lifter thingie! so i pulled all that shit out and got to work on my knees, brow sweating, hands dirty, knees grinding into the grimy asphault, cars whizzing inches from me on the freeway, the van rocking as semi-trucks roared past me. and you know what? i changed the fuck outta that flat tire! and as i walked around the van perusing my hard work, i noticed that a small crowd had been watching me from the repair shop across the median, the guy who had tried to help me and two others... apparently they had been watching me the whole time. i pointed at the van tire, then flexed my muscles in triumph, holding my fists above my head like a body builder, and they all shouted out, “yeah!” and clapped for me, and i could almost hear them over the traffic. i got to work only an hour late, and i even cut my finger on the pavement as i tightened the last bolt on the spare tire... a reminder of my rising up and being a “guy” when i needed it. iʼve walked with a swagger ever since. you gotta jelly jar you need opened? give me a call, i can open that shit up! you gotta spider looking up at you from the shower stall? iʼll be over there in a flash ready to wield a broom and scoop him up into a dustpan to be deposited safely outside! fuck yeah! fucking flat tire! i am wussy man, hear me roar! 53 “how do i hook my xbox to my tv?” “when is xbox live coming out?” “whatʼs this blinking light mean?” i work at the xbox call center here in austin, texas, and i take calls from people all over the country about every little thing associated with the xbox gaming system. but every once in a while, you have some poor soul who calls just because he wants someone to talk to, someone who is not allowed to hang up on him or be rude to him, someone who is paid to talk to him and whose job it is to ask him questions and calm their concerns. (and itʼs always a man.) at xbox, we have several of these callers, sad people who are lonely and simply want to talk, but this one cat named seymour is a force of nature among these lonely people. the first hundred times seymour called, he didnʼt even have an xbox, he just wanted to talk about the xbox, and he would, too, to every single customer care representative on the call center floor, one by one, hitting each one with the same series of questions all night long. listen: you are NOT allowed to hang up on anyone unless they have used foul language and have been warned against using foul language... at that time, you can “release” a call, but unless that happens, you have to find a way of letting the caller know you need Seymour to go, then allow them end the call. when you are ready to end a nuisance call, you 08.27.02 have to say something like, “well, sir, is there anything else i can help you with?” there is a certain tone you use when saying this to imply that you will take one more question at the very most, and most callers take the hint and let you go. if they ignore the hint and persist, then you answer one more question, then you gently remind them you have several other callers waiting to be serviced and then thank them for their call. but you canʼt hang up... they have to take the hint and end the call themselves, otherwise you get in trouble. seymour? yeah... he never ends the call. he will ask question after question, making them up as quickly as he can, and now that he has actually purchased an xbox — a tactic construed by all as a strategy for demanding even more calls — he fires these questions off one after another as soon as you can answer them: 54 “i accidentally bumped my xbox when it was turned off... will this hurt my xbox?” “thereʼs a little white substance in one of the grooves on the outside of the xbox, and i stuck my fingernail in there to clean it out... will this hurt my xbox?” “last night as i was in my bed trying to sleep, i had a fan on me and it seemed to slow down just a little bit. i didnʼt have my xbox plugged in, but i think this was a power surge. will this hurt my xbox?” (yes, these are actual questions seymour has asked me.) and he always sounds polite and well-meaning, but he is ruthless, and the call center crew here knows his phone number by heart and can recognize it when it pops up on our super-duper caller I.D. from hell, and they are often rude or dismissive of seymour. if any customer care representative gets him more than three times in one night (and there are about 20 working here at a time, so if you get seymour three times in one night, you know he has called about 50 times), they will just end the call right at the beginning... BOOM... itʼs just seymour... CLICK. seymour has a fixation on one of the call center crew, a college girl named tara. sheʼs one of the few people who is civil to seymour, and when we suddenly get an onslaught of seymour calls, she will put out the word to forward them to her. youʼll hear it, off in the corner of the call center: “i got seymour! you want him tara?” from over by the fax machine: “i just had him two seconds ago, he was looking for you, tara!” from the cubicle by the break room: “heʼs hung up on me twice so far... he doesnʼt want to talk to me, tara, he wants you.” and so it goes, all night long, every night. i am one of the few who speaks with seymour for longer than two minutes at a time, but i am always very clear about my bounderies, and i will let him know i have other customers after about five minutes. mostly, i just let him talk while i update my journal, AIM hilary, check my e- mail... i never even log the calls anymore in our database. the seymour file is the biggest one in there with several hundreds calls logged, ten and twenty each day. sometimes when he is a little too persistant, i will put seymour on hold until he finally hangs up, especially if he starts asking specifically for cara. he is just lonely. you can tell it in his voice, it reeks of isolation. its weary with it. he sounds middle-aged, at least 50, and says he lives with his mother 55 and has panic attacks. he often says things like, “i canʼt take this anymore, eirik” and “i donʼt know how much more of this i can take, eirik.” “my xbox cable looks kinda like itʼs twisty, like it wants to be rolled back up. should i roll it back up, or would that hurt my xbox?” “thereʼs a soft little hum inside the xbox when the fan turns on. is this normal?” “is tara there?” “is tara there?” “can i speak to tara?” “can you tell tara that seymour is looking for her?” “hello?” “hello?”

“hello?”

56 theo ran away, the wee little fucker. i have been letting my kitties out during the day when i am home, letting them frolic and play outside and get their kitty grooves on, but when i am about to leave, i go outside and collect them, calling out “kitties!” in a high-pitched voice until i hear their bells jingling off in the distance. aretha is always the first to hit the porch when i call them. sheʼs a good kitty, and bolts through the bushes and onto the weathered boards in front of the door to curl around my ankles and stand up on her hind legs so i can reach down and rub her neck and ears. but theo... little fucker, you have to call him for about five minutes, then finally here he comes, moseying through the weeds and grasses like heʼs got not a worry in the world, including hurrying his punk kitty ass up and getting back in the house so i can go to work. but heʼs my boy, so itʼs all good. i pick his punk ass up, give him love, then put him and his sister back in the house so i can get to work and not worry about them while iʼm helping xboxers. well... yesterday? theo never came back. aretha came right to me as soon as i called her like she always does, but theo never came back. i clucked my tongue in the way that tells my kitties they should come to me, but heard no bells off in the distance. i called out in the high-pitched voice, Moseying like he “kitties!” nothing but the wind Owns the Joint and the sound of passing traffic... 08.27.02 (traffic!) i looked around the house for a good five minutes, but then i had to give up because i was running late for work, so i just shrugged my shoulders, mumbled, “fucking kitty,” and went off to work. i figured it wouldnʼt hurt him to spend the day outside with no water or food, the little fucker. and then i went over to hilaryʼs after i got off work at 10:45 p.m., so i never got a chance to come home to let theo in, but i figured he would be okay, and again, it would serve his punk ass right to be left out in the dark all night long for the first time in his kitty life. i expected him to be lounging on the porch when i got home the next

57 morning, but he wasnʼt there. i called out... nothing. i did the little clicking noise... nothing. when i opened the door to the house, aretha pretty much leapt into my arms meowing like a rapid ﬁre car alarm, which is what she does when she has been away from theo for too long. itʼs like her way of letting me know that she has been alone and theo has made like houdini and bailed. so aretha is all freaked out, and i am getting all tense, with images of lumps of matted black and white fur curled up in the gutter down the street with a clouded look of accusation burning holes in my eyes... “you left me outside all night long, and now look at me! just LOOK at me!!” i got on my roomieʼs bike and peddled slowly up and down the street, calling out for theo and clicking my tongue. after about 15 minutes, i really started to get worried, and was about to run back home and start designing some HELP ME FIND THELONIOUS ﬂiers and posting them on every lightpost, power pole, outhouse, mailbox... when all of a sudden... out of the bushes in a neighborʼs yard... moseying like he fucking owns the joint... here comes theo. and let me stress that he is the most unstressed kitty in the whole wide world who is absolutely uninterested in actually coming the fuck over to me right this very fucking second. so i have to get off the bike and pick his punk ass up and carry him back to the house, and his kitty ass is all full of burrs and branches and his whiskers are all full of cobwebs and leaves and his black fur is dusty and warmed from the summer heat. little fucker. almost gave me a heart attack. i love my kitties so much, i just donʼt know what i would do if i found one of them dead on the side of the road. that would just... yeah... suck.

58 so, iʼm working at the xbox call center the other day, and i get this phone call from some kid...... sounds like maybe heʼs 17, tough kid, latino kid infused with hip hop swagger, punctuating his words with “yo” and “word” and “naʼmean?” and he tells me his name is jesus — he pronounces it like HAY-suess but you just know his friends call him chuy — and he tells me he has a problem with his xbox. and i apologize for the problem, whatever it is, because thatʼs what iʼm supposed to do, offer a sense of understanding and responsibility so the customer knows iʼm going to take care of them, and then i ask him what kind of problem he is getting. and he pauses, the only sound the crackle of static from the cordless phone heʼs using, and he stumbles for words, “uh... well, you see... itʼs halo.” and then he pauses again. (for those who donʼt know, halo is one of the most popular games available for the xbox. it is whatʼs called a “first person shooter” with lots of violence and gore. the screen shows the And Jesus actual view of the character you portray.) and iʼm like, “so, jesus... what kind of Retched problem are you having with your halo?” and he pauses again, the crackly silence 09.03.02 full of discomfort. i picture this tough kid struggling to find the right words and not knowing how to say it, or if he even should. finally, he just sighs really loud, and breaks it down, he says, “dude... itʼs like this, see... halo? it makes me sick.” and iʼm like, “halo makes you sick?” and heʼs like, “yeah, halo makes me sick.” and iʼm like, “well... how does it make you feel?” and at this point, i donʼt know whether or not iʼm getting a crank call, because this could very easily go there, you know, go to a spot where jesus is telling me his xbox is hovering several feet above the ground and little scary devil voices are streaming from his xbox and telling him to kill the family dog, but something about this kidʼs voice, the hesitation, tells me he is not bullshitting me for kicks, that he is actually this tough kid who is embarassed to admit this. 59 so jesus tells me, “i get sick. iʼll start to sweat, i get a headache, and i start feeling sick to my stomach. my hands sometimes even shake. this doesnʼt happen to my friends, it only happens to me, and i donʼt know whatʼs up with that.” and iʼm trying to figure this out because i really think heʼs telling the truth, that jesus is embarassed to talk to his friends, so heʼs calling me to make sense of it, and finally i get it, i ask him if he has a big screen teevee, and jesus tells me he does, and i ask him if he sits really close to the screen when he plays, and he tells me he does, and i ask him if he and his friends eat a lot of junk food before they play, and he tells me that he does, and his answers are full of question marks as i get closer to the truth... finally, i tell him about my experience with “the blair witch project.” when that movie came out, the big story in the news was that people were getting sick at the theatres — some people were actually vomiting, not from the fright of the movie, but from all the handheld camera movements. when i went to see the movie with a couple of friends, we were all joking that we were going to throw up all over everyone around us, and — like a bunch of stupid idiots — we loaded up on all kinds of vomit launch foods like hot dogs and nachos and soda and popcorn and chocolate bars. and within five minutes of that movie starting... lord have mercy, i was holding my belly and glowing green with nausea. the damned movie wiggled and twitched and swayed all over the place, and since we were sitting so close to the screen, my brain was drowning with too much conflicting information... the difference between what my eyes were telling it and my ass was telling it was causing my stomach to lurch. i didnʼt vomit, but i tell you, i was sweaty, dizzy and headachy the whole time, and had i not closed my eyes for 75% of it, i wouldʼve spewed concessions all down the back of the person in front of me. and jesus breaths a sigh of relief at being told this, grateful for having someone to confide in who was not going to dog him for admitting it. i told him to play the game as far away from the screen as he could so his brain wouldnʼt be fooled into thinking the “camera movements” of halo were real. i told him if this was not enough, maybe he could just take some dramamine about an hour before he played it, and he would be just fine. and he paused again... we listened to the crackle for a moment longer... then he said, “hey, man, thanks.” and iʼm like, “itʼs all good. take care, jesus.” imagine... jesus nauseated by his halo.

60 when i was a kid, i was a very ﬁnicky eater. the basic rule for me was this: meat = good; veggies = bad. if it was green and warm, chances are i would not like it... that is, if i even bothered to try it, because chances are i wouldʼve looked at something green and warm and assume it would be mushy and gross and i would hate it, so i wouldnʼt even try it. there were very few exceptions to this green veggie ban: green beans, iceburg lettuce, and celery. just about anything else was subject to massive amounts of skepticism on my part. here is only a partial list of things i hated as a kid, whether or not i had actually tried them: broccoli, ocra, spinach, brussel sprouts, asparagus, peas, squash, zucchini, artichokes, avocado... you get the pattern. if it was green and mushy and cooked in any way, chances were very strong that i would not eat it. (to be perfectly honest, there was a general ban on all vegetables regardless of color, but the ban was most strictly enforced on green veggies that were cooked.) as i said, green beans were an exception, but only canned del monte brand blue lake green breans and only when my mother cooked them with a bit of bacon and onions. frozen green beans or any other brand of Slather it with canned green beans were suspect and, thus, avoided. Butter and when i was a kid, however, this had Honey very little impact on my diet or on family harmony since a “salad” was deﬁned as 09.06.02 “iceburg lettuce with thousand island dressing” and “vegetables” meant adding pickles and iceburg lettuce to your hamburger. in fact, hamburger was included in nearly every meal, whether it was spaghetti or tacos or stuffed monkey heads (which is what i called “stuffed bell peppers,” which were hollowed out green peppers stuffed with a mixture of hamburger and rice, which i always scooped out and ate seperately while the whithered, mushy, gross bell pepper went in the trash.) occasionally we would have corn, but unless it was corn on the cob and smothered in butter and pepper and unless i was in a very good mood, i would have nothing to do with it. you put corn on a plate in a pile? no freakinʼ way, jay! you put some kind of creamed corn nonsense on my plate? that only happened when i was at my grandmaʼs house, and she

61 mustʼve been smoking crack, jack! and tomatoes? like, raw? bleck! i loved all thing tomatoey — like ketchup or spaghetti sauce or pizza sauce or even v-8 juice — but tomatoes, like, all by themselves? or on something like a sandwich? get outta here! my diet was simple and to the point: meat, potatoes, rice, ice cream, meat, soda, potatoes, green beans, iceburg lettuce, pasta, meat, bread, fruit, cream of wheat, potatoes, pie, oatmeal, meat... lots of starches, lots of meat, precious little experimentation, and very little veggies. dude, i was on the anti-atkins diet. my family would occasionally make a meal that consisted of a huge vat of chili beans and some of my momʼs world famous cornbread. chili beans? no fucking way, i hated all beans, and i would refuse to eat them, so on these days, i would load up on cornbread. (by the way, by mom makes the best cornbread on the planet, using this old, black cast iron skillet... her cornbread was golden and crunchy on the outside, and when you cracked open a piece to slather it with butter and honey, the soft inside would spew torrents of hot steam that just made you dizzy with anticipation, feeling the smoky tendrils curl around the curves of your face as you smelled the cornbread... awww yeah, i ainʼt fucking around, my mommaʼs cornbread kicks ass and fuck you for doubting it!) my dad was a skilled bbq technician, and he would often lay his magic hands on meat and conduct grand operas of seared flesh and glowing charcoal briquettes, lifting symphonies of flame from his hand-made backyard barbecue made of cement blocks — a visual horror bereft of aesthetics but efficient beyond reproach. he had his secret sauce with a recipe he jealously guarded and shared with no one. (nothing more than chris and pitts brand bbq sauce with extra brown sugar, onions, green peppers, and pineapple added. since my parents moved to kansas and chris and pitts brand bbq sauce is nowhere to be found, my dad has switched brands to kc masterpiece brand bbq sauce.) (oops, sorry dad... iʼve outed your secret bbq sauce.) mexican food for us consisted of tacos with hamburger meat, laureyʼs taco mix, iceburg lettuce, black olives, cheddar cheese, la victoria brand hot sauce (the kind with the little thermometer showing red all the way to the top, the “salsa brava”), and soft-fried la bonita brand corn tortillas (made only in my home town of bakersfield, ca.) the only other remotely ethnic food we ever delved into was “chinese food” from a local restaurant called the rice bowl, which featured the usual mix of battered and fried chunks of pork or chicken covered in some sort of supernaturally-glowing sauce over fried rice or fried noodles. (puffy fried shrimp smothered in a thick crusty coating of fried dough was 62 considered a delicacy worth fighting for by my sister and me. blood was drawn grabbing for the last one on more than one meal.) it has taken me a long, long time and a lot of work to open up my food horizons. i remember the first time i tasted a real tomato. not that mealy bullshit you can buy in the store, those tasteless beefsteak tomatoes bred more for the american fixation with size than for taste, no... i mean a real tomato, like a fresh off the vine this morning tomato, the kind you have to either grow yourself or buy at a farmerʼs market type of tomato. i was at an open-air market in chico, ca, with a friend of mine, and she started making moaning sounds at this stand of tomatoes that had been picked fresh that morning, and iʼm all, “hurrumph... i hate tomatoes.” and she looked at me with these piercing eyes full of wisdom, and she said these words that changed my life forever: “you only think you hate tomatoes because you have never tasted a rrrreal tomato.” and i opened my mouth to protest, but the look on her face told me there was nothing more to say. she would not let me leave that farmerʼs market without trying her... (scoff)... rrreal (dripping in sarcasm) tomato, so i did, i tried it. she cut me a sliver from a dark red tomato she had just purchased, this little bitty thing the shape of a fat teardrop, and she held it under my nose and demanded i take in the heady scent, then she sprinkled a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper on it and plopped it into my mouth.

oh...

my...

god.

(cue angels singing from on high.) it was obvious at that very moment that i had been a FOOL all those years, that i had allowed myself to be BAMBOOZLED into hating tomatoes even though i knew i loved all things made with tomatoes... it was like waking up in a vat of pink goo with thick electrical cords jammed into your cerebral cortex and opening your unused eyes to the matrix for the very first time and realizing everything you had ever known was false. since i left home upon graduation, i have tried SO many things i never wouldʼve tried when i was in high school, and i now love trying new things. i have been enamored with thai food and indian food and vietnamese and korean food. i have tried ethiopian food, tex-mex, french, and real chinese food. iʼve done dim-sum, greek, persian and morroccan. iʼve sampled veggie, vegan and macrobiotic. 63 this fondness of experimentation with food has led me to love things i had always assumed i would hate, even though some things have taken me longer than others to finally try. i had always assumed i would HATE asparagus, but i had the opportunity to try it just about two months ago. my friend jeff made some asparagus with some tangy blue cheese sauce... i NEVER would have tried it when i was a kid — shoot, i wouldnʼt have tried it ten years ago — but i gave it a try, and it... was... marvelous. i even asked for seconds. and avocados? my sweetie pie hilary turned me on to the buttery love of avocados just a couple of weeks ago, and now i canʼt get enough of them. weʼve had them on just about everything, and i still have not found a single thing with which avocados donʼt taste GREAT. the other day, my friend matthew john conley and i brought some fresh guacamole to a party in hilaryʼs honor, and we sat there and ate the whole freaking thing... it was so goooood, and no one got to have any because we scarfed it down in five minutes. hilary just rolled her eyes at us, like, “tsk, tsk, tsk... boys!” i am now in the throes of passion for sushi, something for which i have recently discovered undying love and something that my family can not even fathom. i canʼt get enough of sushi! i dream about it, think about it when i am walking down the street, surf the internet for sushi sites just so i can look at jpegs of sushi. and hilary loves it, too... we are sushi freaks and want to try it all, even the weird stuff that is supposed to exist outside of our western taste budsʼ ability to appreciate it, things like sea urchin and salmon skin. weʼve tried and loved just about every form of sushi we can get our mouths on: salmon, smoked salmon, fatty salmon, tuna, fatty tuna, sea clam, scallop, sweet egg, shrimp, octopus, squid, and our current favorite — luscious fresh water eel. and all of it is so fresh, so tasty, so tender... sushi gives the cleanest food high i have ever gotten, and a good sushi chef has more in common with an artist than a mere cook. we have plans for challenging our favorite sushi chef (ted at kyoto 2, across the street from hilary in north austin) to create a special sushi roll specifically for us that has no limitations and no bounderies... we just want him to take us somewhere weʼve never been, want him to express himself with sushi like the artist he is... we wouldnʼt just be ordering this special sushi roll, no, we would commission ted to create an edible work of art just for us. we plan to call it the “we love ted roll.” now, donʼt let me get you thinking that i have gotten over all my latent food prejudices. i love so many things now that make my family bug out their eyes with wonder — my veggie burritos, by the way, kick 64 much ass — but there are still some things i have not revisited since my heyday of food hatred. hilary, it seems, has made it her mission to get me over some of these last remaining food peeves. and i have tried everything she has challenged me on, even the things i just knew i would hate, and, for the most part, i have been pleasantly surprised each time (except for the creamed corn, which i tried at her request but really didnʼt like, and broccoli, which i will never ever try again ever ever as long as i live because i have tried it several times and each time it makes me wanna puke.) her latest focus: ocra. okay, can i just say this? i fucking HATE ocra! my family would make it every once in a while and the mere sight of fried ocra would cause my gorge to rise. hilary has a major task at hand, and, god bless her, i really donʼt see what in the world she can do to get me to like it. to be honest, the only things she has in her favor are my willingness to please her and the fact that i have never actually tasted ocra in my whole entire life. and something tells me she wonʼt stop until i at least try it. (and that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the many reasons i love about her so much.)

65 co-habitation: changing from her apartment to our apartment. hilary and i have decided to live together. and i am really fucking happy about that. and itʼs going to take a lot of work, but nothing worth having comes for free, and i am so ready to do this with her, and she seems to be ready as well. we have talked about all kinds of things, from finances to communication to space and time away from each other, and we have talked about all kinds of plans for doing stuff together, and we seem to be in the same space at the same time, which is magic. last night? we sat together on her bed — on our bed — and painted each otherʼs nails. how fucking rocking is that? we had been talking about looking for a place when her lease is up in february, a two-bedroom rental house, maybe, with a backyard and hammock-worthy trees in south austin, room enough in the back for a veggie garden, plenty of room for my kitties aretha and thelonious and her kitty callie to live in harmony. this relationship feels really strong and so full of possibility, and weʼd love for it to progress naturally to whatever the next stage is, which seems to be bringing “our fortunes together,” to paraphrase paul simon, and the thoughts of this and the late night conversations shared about this have She Used the filled us both with excitement. up to this point, i have been living Same Hair on my friend markʼs futon, but i Conditioner have been spending most nights at hilaryʼs, so it just kinda made sense 09.07.02 to make it official and start the process of living together sooner than later. her place is small, but all my stuff is in storage back in my college town of chico, ca, so i really donʼt have much at all. just some clothes, my computer, my kitties, and some boxes. so, yeah... weʼve done it. after five months of dating, we now live together. wow. this situation is so much healthier, so much more mature, so much more natural than the only other time i lived with someone. that was a 66 long time ago, and i fucked it up so bad that i pretty much swore i would never do it again until i was mature enough to handle it. that was back in ʼ88, when i was... uhmm... 21 and the person i was living with was... uhm... 19? wow. yeah... we were so young, and i was so selfish with my space, with my love, with my friendship, that the eleven months we spent living together were pretty miserable for both of us, especially her. there was never any yelling or violence or horrible vindictive behavior, but there was a lot of silence and distance, this huge gulf between us in which nothing existed... no warmth, no understanding, no conversation, no discussion, and, in the end, no love. right before she left, our cat wouldnʼt even sleep between us anymore. her name was kelly, and we had been dating since the beginning of my senior year. she was a 15-year-old sophomore when we met, and i was a 17-year-old senior, and we fell instantly, madly, grandly in love and dated the rest of the school year. the sad thing was that i had already signed up to join the navy on the delayed-enlistment program, which meant once i graduated, i was leaving for boot camp and six very long years in the navy. this lent a feeling of angst and tragedy to our high school love, like we had a limited time to spend together, then EVERYTHING was going to change forever. on july 16, my father dropped me off at the bus station, confident that i would finally be made into a man. kelly and i held each other, tears puddling the front of our shirts, and we promised to always love each other no matter what. (only the very young can make such foolish promises...) when it came time to request a duty station, i asked for san diego, which was only about five hours south of our hometown of bakersfield. in typical navy style, i was stationed over 3,000 miles away in virginia beach, va. but we stuck it out, living on 30-page letters, nightly phone calls, 3-day weekend flights home, and christmas holiday leave. we did that for four years, and we did it, by the way, without having sex since we wanted to “wait until we were married.” this meant, of course, that we did everything BUT penetration, which, really, come on... is sex, but it seemed to fit within our version of “waiting until we got married.” *blush* when we decided kelly should move out to virginia so we could live together, we also decided we had had enough of this waiting stuff, so kelly went on the pill. we figured we were going to get married anyway, so we might as well start enjoying sex now. 67 (you may feel free to translate all the “we” in that last paragraph into “i,” and you would be just as accurate, i am sure, if not more.) *shaking head* the first few months were really cool. kelly and i shared the master bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment about 5 blocks from the beach in a complex called Ocean Pebbles. we had two other roomies, scott and john, and a cat named ivan. kelly got a job down on the boardwalk in one of those old-timey photo places where people dress up as cowboys and wild west showgirls and bandits and such, and i worked nights on the navy base as an electronics technician. there was fun to be had, tinged by giddiness at finally being together and finally talking about dates for our certain marriage. i remember the first snow that covered the wooden stairs outside our door... we got this big cardboard box and sat in it like bobsledders and tried to ski down the snowy steps and ended up tumbling into a pile at the bottom, covered head to toe in snow and laughter. we would stage professional wrestling matches in my king-sized water bed, pulling moves with names like “the steam roller” and “the parachute” that were nothing more than excuses to rub up on each other and sweat. we bought bikes together and rode them on the boardwalk. we went to pound and bought us a cat and named him ivan. i remember ivan the cat used to climb into the rafters of the water bed canopy frame and stalk my wiener, which iʼd be flexing under the covers — boink... boink... boink — then he would leap down to attack my mid- section, and kelly and i would squeal. but the good times didnʼt last long. i was miserable in the navy, and you would think having her around would help us both get through that time, but no... i only seemed to take it out on her, distancing myself from her and being all moody and mopey all the time. that shit mustʼve been so tiring for her, so depressing and frustrating, especially when it became obvious that i was cheating on her with other people. shame is a rare emotion for me, but thinking about this makes me feel ashamed. i mean, she had no one but me, and i wouldnʼt share myself with her, and yet i cheated on her just about every chance i got. what a fucking moron boys can be... even though i have grown up a lot since then, and even though i have learned a lot, and even though i know i am a better person, a better lover, and a better partner than i was then... even though i ended up learning a lot from it... i still... fuck... i am so sorry for the way i treated my life and her life and our relationship back then. after 11 months, she had had enough and flew back to california. her dad flew back to get her car and the rest of her stuff, and that was pretty 68 much that. we kept in touch for the next year or so as i went off to the gulf war and did figure-eights in the red sea on an aircraft carrier for eight months, but by the time i got back and was discharged, any hope of having even a friendship was gone. and ivan the cat? i had to take him back to the pound when i left for the gulf war. poor kitty... and yeah... it takes two people to ruin a relationship, and yeah, circumstances were lined up against us from the beginning, but still, i have to shoulder the blame for that relationship ending with such hard feelings. thankfully, i learned a lot from that, and i am sure she did, too. years later, i had a chance to talk with kelly. we met for one last time over drinks at a bar in the neighborhood near my house at the time. i had moved back to bakersfield after my time in the navy and was taking classes at the local college. we talked about the whole shebang for the first time since she left virginia. i think i was probably 26 or so when we had this talk, so she must have been about 24. i had been out of the navy for two or three years, and that means we had not lived together for about four or five years. and i apologized. i shared with her the lessons i had learned by taking a long hard look at who i was back then and why i did the things i did and the impact my decisions had on her. and she listened. and she shared what it was like for her, and where she had gone emotionally since then. and i listened. and in the end i think we felt a little bit better about it and even laughed a couple of times. (and even from across the table, i could tell that she used the same hair conditioner.) i suggested that it might be nice for us to get to know each other all over again as new people. i wanted a chance to show her the person i had become, to find out who she had become, to somehow... i donʼt know... make it up to her, but she said she couldnʼt see the point. it was very obvious to both of us that we were very different people from the kids we were when we had met back in high school. i wanted to be a poet and a journalist. she wanted to be a cop. we finished our drinks, and we walked each other out the door of the bar. and that was the last time i saw her. that was about ten years ago. *sigh* right after that, i moved north to chico, ca, and started a new life in a new town. i continued studying journalism, got deeper into poetry, and had a few really decent relationships, one of which lasted for four years, but iʼd never lived with anyone since kelly. so... this brings me back to now. *whew* 69 and we come to this situation with our eyes and our hearts wide open, each of us informed by previous experience... hilary from earlier this year... me from 14 years ago. and we have proven to ourselves that we communicate very well, even when situations are tense and difficult, so we feel we are ready and capable of doing this right. yeah... hilary and i are living together. and all the lessons we learned from our last experiences will help us get the most out of this new situation. and i am so happy about that.

70 BIG POPPA E is the tongue-in-cheek stage name for R. Eirik Ott, a performance poet involved in the National Poetry Slam scene since 1996 when he placed third in his ﬁrst slam at the Taos Poetry Circus. Since then, BPE has taken his dynamic blend of performance poetry, stand-up comedy, and dramatic monologue to countless audiences in smoky bars, quirky coffeehouses, funky art spaces, and university auditoriums across the nation. The themes in BPEʼs work shine brightest in his poem The Wussy Boy Manifesto, a playful examination of modern masculinity and gender roles in our society that lead Ms. Magazine to call him “an icon for effeminate males” and The Austin Chronicle to call him “the funniest poet in slam.” His zine series The Wussy Boy Chronicles was nominated to The Utne Readerʼs “Best of the Underground Press Awards 2000” and has lead to worldwide coverage in such places as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), The Daily Express (London), and The Ottowa Citizen (Canada). BPE has been featured on HBOʼs Def Poetry showcase and BETʼs The Way We Do It comedy/variety series. He was also a member of the ʻ99 San Francisco Poetry Slam Team, co-champions of the ʻ99 National Poetry Slam in Chicago and the only undefeated team out of 48 that year. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his bad-ass road kitties Aretha & Thelonious, his trusty grey i-Mac, and his black Ford The Wussy Boy Chronicles Caught somewhere between GUY and GAY itter Girl Fiasco • Boobies!

Issue #11 Disillusion Curry • The Lord of the Breakfast Club Gl

everything in this book was originally published online at http://poetryslam.livejournal.com.

you may contact the author directly by cell phone at (512) 296-7080 or by e-mail at [email protected].

for more information,please check out his website at http://www.brokenword.org.

this collection is dedicated,as are all things written by r. eirik ott, to aretha and thelonious,the two best friends a touring poet can have.

for the ﬁrst nine issues of the wussy boy chronicles, please contact the author. they are really good and are only $7 each.

issue #11 is being published simultaneously with issue #10. itʼs really good and can be had for $7 as well.

e-mail the author for details, or just ﬂoat him an e-mail to say hello, or check out his online journal to see what the latest happenings are.

yes, ladies and gentlemen, our cover wuss for this issue is the man, the myth, the legend elijah wood, who, as frodo baggins in “the lord of the rings,” showed all of middle earth that two wussy hobbits affecting a variety of homo-erotic poses can indeed take the dark lord down. frodo is such a classic wussy hero who appears small and weak and easily squashed, but who shows time and time again an inner strength and resiliance that defies his obstacles. lest we forget, frodo would never have made it past his front doorstep without samwise gamgee, the true hero of the trilogy, but, youʼve got to admit that elijah is so much cuter than sean aston. i mean, come on... Table of Contents intro ...... 5 sweat-slinging frenzy ...... 7 i feel like this all the time ...... 10 the day after ...... 11 squeezing bitter whine from sour grapes ...... 14 us ...... 17 dammit, hermione! ...... 18 e-mails iʼve recieved of late ...... 19 disillusion curry ...... 21 back in the day ...... 22 back in the saddle (stitcher) again ...... 23 lord of the breakfast club, part one ...... 26 lord of the breakfast club, part two ...... 28 magic ...... 32 the last time i saw her ...... 33 tok tok tok ...... 34 e.m.p...... 35 that lonely distant trumpet ...... 36 cast away ...... 38 opening and closing like a goldfish mouth ...... 40 hurray for boobies! ...... 43 the better maker-outer ...... 44 like cold coffee ...... 46 the glitter girl fiasco ...... 47 whatʼs in a name? ...... 49 turbulence ...... 51 sucking the corporate cock ...... 54 airports ...... 56 go greyhound ...... 57 harry potter emo love song ...... 60 20 reasons why you should shut the fuck up ...... 62 so, i just up and quit, just like that... i looked the assistant manager of kinkoʼs in the eye, and i said, “fuck you, then, i quit!” and i did, i quit, and i stormed home in a fury, and i threw myself onto my inflatable mattress in the little garage apartment i had been renting for five months with my kitties aretha and thelonious, and i crossed my arms, and i huffed, and i puffed, and i decided, “fuck it, iʼm going on tour.” and so, here i am, a month and a half and several thousand miles later in a kinkoʼs in berkeley, california, posing as a kinkoʼs co-worker to get free computer time so i can put together the latest two issues of the wussy boy chronicles. as soon as i quit my horrible job as the weekend overnights guy at kinkoʼs, i got on the internet and on the phone, and within a week or so, i had booked a month and a half of gigs all over the u.s. i left austin with a greyhound bus pass and $6 in my pocket and i havenʼt looked back since. motherfuckers. man, fuck kinkoʼs! the last straw was when i brought my camera into the store. you see, i pulled up in my van for work on evening, and i noticed that my $900 nikon digital camera was sitting innocently on my passenger side seat. i had been taking photos that day, and i guess i had forgotten to put it back in my pad, so i snatched it up and brought it into kinkoʼs with me for safekeeping. since i worked 10 p.m. - 8 a.m., there was no way i was going to leave it for someone to steal. i came into work, put it on the counter nearest my work station, and went about the business of working all night long. the next day around noon, i realized that i had Intro forgotten my camera at work, so i gave them a call and asked the person on the line if there was a camera on 07.16.04 the counter. the person who answered the phone was this asshole named chris. you will meet chris in this issue in a story called “turbulence,” which was written before the dreaded camera incident. anyway, when i asked her about my camera, she paused, then said, “i donʼt believe i can talk with you about that.” and iʼm like, “what? what do you mean? i accidentally brought my camera to work last night in my van, so i brought inside with me for safekeeping. the thing is, i forgot it this morning when i left. is it there or not?” and sheʼs like, “i canʼt answer that question, eirik. i am not allowed to speak with you about this.”

5 and iʼm like, “what? why? whatʼs going on? and sheʼs like, “eirik, i canʼt tell you.” so iʼm like, “okay, ﬁne, give me the manager on duty.” she gives me michelle, who was the one who gave me permission a few months before to bring my kitties into work, a decision that was ridiculously stupid since we both ended up getting in trouble for it. i thought it was so unfair that i got written up for bringing my cats to work after my boss told me it was okay. ever since, i had had very little to say to her since i was pissed she didnʼt stick up for me and admit that she gave me permission. anyway, michelle gets on the line and tells me that not only has my camera been conﬁscated, but iʼve also been put on administrative leave pending an investigation. and i was like, “an investigation? into what?” and sheʼs like, “i canʼt tell you.” and iʼm like, “do you think i took some sort of corporate espionage photos or something ridiculous like that? or do you actually think i spent my entire night snapping pictures rather than working? look, just look at the security video tape, and you can see for yourself that my camera stayed put all night long on the counter. i can even tell you how to turn it on and view all the photos saved in its memory if you like. why are you launching some stupid investigation for no good reason?” and sheʼs like, “this conversation is over. you will be contacted about the outcome next week.” and iʼm like, “give me the phone number of the main manager. this is ridiculous.” and she wouldnʼt. it was on a poster right over her shoulder against the wall for the whole wide world to see, but she refused. so, i just up and quit, just like that, i looked the phone in the eye, and i said, “fuck you then, i quit, and i am coming over there right now and picking up my camera.” end of story. i hated that fucking soul-sucking job, anyway. it was keeping me from doing what i really want to do, which is this... sitting in a kinkoʼs in berkeley, california, robbing kinkoʼs fucking blind of thousands of copies and hundreds of hours of computer time. and you know what? i donʼt feel even a slight twinge of guilt. in fact, if you e-mail me, i might even tell you how i do it. hereʼs the latest issue. enjoy!

6 when i was a teenager, i suddenly woke up at 14 and decided i wanted to explore the whole god thing. my family is essentially godless, they just donʼt have the courage to admit theyʼre athiests, so i was on my own. i started going to this youth group with some friends of mine, and we had a blast. i can still say all the books of the old testiment in order because we had a contest to see who could do it, and i did, and i won a pocket knife. at church. we would go on these trips that were too much fun, and my friends and i would always be the ones playing poker in our tents, stuffing firecrackers into shafts of bamboo and tossing them innocently into the campfire, running around at 3 a.m. and taking out the stakes of the cute girlsʼ tent. there was never an outing lacking our names shouted red-faced by some church leader: “mike! david! eirik! pull tommy out of the creek and get over here right this very minute!” back when i was going to youth group, the big thing was uncovering the evils of “backwards masking,” which were supposed to be hidden messages on records that you could only hear by playing the records backwards. this was supposed to fill us with fear and dread and make us avoid satanʼs music, but for me and mike and david it simply Sweat-Slinging provided a buying guide for Frenzy the good stuff. we ended up buying every album they 01.13.03 showed us, and we would show our friends the “satanic” backwards messages, and be like, “ooooh... satan.” but some of that stuff sunk in. the first band i was ever crazy for was rush, this three-piece canadian band with songs about dragons and dark princes and totalitarian regimes. we were told that rush actually stood for “Rush Up to Satanʼs House,” and i remember one day decided that their music was indeed bad for your soul, so i put the three cassettes i had at the time — “caress of steel,” “2112,” and “farewell to kings” — into the fireplace and burned them. i actually thought for a moment that i could see satanʼs horns in the flames, and it made cold fingers run up and down 7 the back of my neck. and then a week later i felt like a dumbass and went out and bought every rush album on vinyl from “licorice pizza.” did you know that if you play “another one bites the dust” by queen, it kinda sounds like heʼs saying “start to smoke marijuana?” did you know that if you play “the wall” by pink floyd, thereʼs a part that says, “congratulations, you have found the secret message?” did you know that if you play “stairway to heaven” by led zeppelin, it clearly says, “oh my sweet satan,” then later says, “he will give you give you 666?” but none of these was nearly as scary as the beatles. i mean, yeah, sure, when you played the beginning of “revolution #9” backwards, it said “turn me on, dead man,” but even forewards their shit sounded evil. and what the hell was up with “i am the walrus?” if that shit wasnʼt some kind of prayer to satan, i didnʼt know what it was! i was sure at one time that the beatles were the devil, and i never actually listened to them until i was 19. i remember falling asleep to classic rock radio, and “strawberry fields” came on just as i was fading. that song is nice and all, but then it fades out and fades back in and itʼs all scary and shit, like evil carnaval nightmare music, and in the very background you can hear somebody say, “i buried paul.” when i heard that, i snapped awake and turned the radio off, sure that the devil was now under my bed and would snatch me by the ankles and drag me to hell for even listening to it. and, of couse, a week later i bought “the white album.” and bands like black sabbath? they werenʼt just burned out stoners trying to find a schtick with all this bullshit about wizards and faeries, no... they were eeeville. i tried all kinds of churches once i got out of high school, and none of them seemed to fit. i tried methodist. i tried mormon. i tried catholic, baptist, and non-denomenational. i even went one time to a church in a strip mall that seemed to have the central belief that women who wore pants were harlots. but nothing really clicked. i was actually “saved” a couple of time, but i never really felt like people were being straight with me. they just seemed like they wanted to recruit me, as if they got brownie points for bringing into the army of their god. and whenever i would ask them about their faith and how difficult it was for me, their eyes would glaze over and they would give me this spiel they mustʼve read in some pamphlet somewhere, like robots with no real ideas of their own. i donʼt know, i found it all so depressing. the only church i really felt good at was an african-methodist church where the preacher was this 8 man in a mustard yellow suit who played the guitar in front of a choir with drums, bass, and sax accompaniment. now that was awesome. the little cold fingers scurrying up the back of my neck. how can you NOT believe in a higher power in a room packed with people singing gospel blues while the preacher man wails himself into a sweat-slinging frenzy? in my opinion, white people should not be allowed to sing gospel. just my opinion. i have since missed the kinship and comraderie of a church situation, uniting for the expression of common belief, but poetry slamming has sorta become that for me. matthew is just as much that sweat-slinging preacher as anyone ever could be. i can safely say that i would give just about anything for a strong belief in god... i can think of no other thing i would rather have... but i think itʼs mostly because i am petrified of dying.

9 and then, seemingly at the last slim second... he reaches out and grabs the edge of the bar with his ﬁngertips and saves himself and the stool from plummeting to the ﬂoor. he straightens himself up, casually looks around the crowded bar, sees that no one has noticed he almost fell on his ass, then slowly takes a sip of his frosty cold beverage. inside his head, the crowd roars.

I Feel Like This All the Time 02.18.03

10 ”If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss.” this is a quote from some egghead on the internet who feels thereʼs no reason to warn humanity about a huge asteroid or some other such incoming space object scheduled to crash into the earth and wipe out life as we know it and erase from the planet the fact that we ever existed. his reasoning being this: there isnʼt anything we can do about it, so why tell anyone itʼs coming? great... thatʼs just great, my worst fears as a kid come to life, only instead of a nuclear strike, it could be with a big ass extinction-inducing rock from outer space. when i was a kid, i was terrified of nuclear war. i think kids have not really had reason for mortal fears about nuclear war for quite some time, at least since the break-up of the soviet union, but when i was a kid and ronald reagan was president and the soviet union was called “the evil empire,” there was a profound fear of life being snuffed out by a nuclear strike. it infected my dreams, and a spate of timely teevee specials exploring what would happen during a nuclear blast only made things worse. does anyone remember “the day after?” it was this teevee movie that aired in 1983, which was end of my sophomore year and beginning of my junior year in high school, which was a bad time for me. i had no friends, no hope of girls on my life, terrible grades, a weekly date with a psychologist... it was dim. and here comes “the day after.” it was a movie about the The Day After small college town of lawrence, kansas. it introduces all these 02.28.03 characters, tells you a bit about their lives, then snuffs most of them out after a nuclear warhead from russia vaporizes the city and the surrounding area, then is shows you in stark detail how each once of them dies from radiation poisoning over the next few days and weeks. it scared the shit out of me... that image of people being swallowed by screaming white light... the slimmest instant before they disappeared, you could see their skeletons illuminated through their flesh... *shiver* and it fucked with everyone in my school. in fact, there were counselors on hand the next day and announcements and discussions throughout 11 the day. you could tell who had watched it the night before because those kids were raccoon-eyed zombies shuffling through school all day long. and “the day after” was followed closely by a bunch of similarly-themed shows, like “testament” and this other one that was like a fake newscast covering these workers who were trying to disarm a nuclear warhead placed by terrorists in some ship down by the docks of this large city... i remember the “live” remote of the workers sweating through the disarming process, then they start freaking out and running away, and the camera man says, “oh my god”... then the screen goes to static. fucking scary. and the question that always occured to me was this: if a soviet missile armed with nuclear warheads were indeed on its way to america, would they tell us it was coming? i mean, in those “duck and cover” instructional movies from the ʼ50s, there were always these scenes of people walking in the streets of Small Town USA, then all of a sudden there would be air raid sirens blaring, and people would look to the sky in horror and scream into the back of their hand, then everyone would run for the nearest fall-out shelter or crawl into their very own bomb shelter in the backyard to wait it out. yeah right. do they even have air raid sirens anymore? whenʼs the last time you heard an air raid siren? and do you know where the nearest bomb shelter is? do they even have those anymore? is there someone in charge of stocking those things with fresh water and renewing the canned goods every few years? if there are bomb shelters, would there be enough to hold, like... everybody? or would groups of people close the mighty metal doors on scrambling hordes of people who then had to pound in vain on the mighty metal doors until their hands were bloody pulp? of course, none of that exists anymore... thereʼs no fucking bomb shelters anymore, no air raid sirens, and even if there were, that missile is gonna be hitting us in 15 minutes. can you imagine the mass hysteria immediately following the announcement that nuclear missiles are inbound and due in less than 15 minutes? you think traffic is bad now, just wait until some fool announces that warheads will be raining from the sky in less time than it takes phish to finish a guitar solo. thereʼd be mayhem and madness, office buildings belching streams of fright-eyed people and spewing them into the streets in wailing and moaning and gnashing torrents of fear, people running out of their houses naked and fucking each other on front lawns and furiously masturbating in courthouse fountains, law-abiding citizens gone feral and lunatic and raping others in the middle of car-choked streets and busting out store 12 windows to hold that kick ass stereo theyʼve always wanted even if itʼs only for 15 minutes, office drones nodding to themselves and shutting off their radios and walking patiently to their bossʼs office and stabbing them in the throat with letter openers. the final 15 minutes of life as we know it would be like the prison riot scene in “natural born killers” played on city streets all over the country, with heads on sticks and blood filling the gutters. the final 15 minutes would be totally cool if it they were part of a movie, but as real life? things would not only suck, but suck profoundly, then thereʼd be a flash of light and all humanity not hiding deep in mountain bunkers would cease to exist. ugh... hereʼs a thought... can you imagine a word re-populated by the spawn of dick cheney and his pool of secretaries? *shiver* or... imagine this... youʼre standing in front of the kitchen sink, absent-mindedly washing dishes and looking out the window as the mail carrier walks by. you feel the cat curling around your heels, which brings you back from your thoughts of the bills you expect with the morning mail, so you flick off your flip-flop and rub the kittyʼs back with the bottom of your foot while reaching into that soapy water for another dish. then the stereo you were listening to goes dead, and all the lights in the house go out, then screaming white light smashes through the window and vaporizes you before you can even utter a vowel. meanwhile, dick cheney has been locked away in the cement tombs under the white house, waiting for the bombs to fall and licking his lips and rubbing his palms as he looks over his secretaries one by one by one. which do you think would happen? which would you rather happen? personally, i think iʼm a fucking on the front lawn for the last 15 minutes kinda guy. i think iʼd turn off the teevee, grab hilary with one hand and the bottle of lube with the other, then run outside to spend the last 15 minutes of my life in the fuck-fest to end all fuck fests. i mean, iʼd rather do that as the bombs hit than be sitting there on the couch watching Oprah and thinking about what i was going to have for lunch. *sigh* great... like i need to think of this shit again, staring at the ceiling and wondering if my government would tell us when the armageddon light starts flashing red, whether itʼs a nuclear warhead or a huge asteroid or an outbreak of fucking ebola... would they tell us?

13 i didnʼt make the austin poetry slam team this year. and i think iʼm okay with it, at least mostly okay with it. i mean, you canʼt win all the slams all the time, and itʼs all so random, and if you changed any of the many variables the whole thing wouldʼve turned out differently, so yeah, iʼm okay with the fact that i came in sixth place in a field of amazing poets in front of a terrifically hot crowd... and... yeah... the people who did make it did great that night and deserved it and iʼm happy for them and all their plans to make a reality teevee show based on their adventures this summer... yeah... i guess iʼm cool with it. mostly. iʼve been reading my poetry in front of audiences for just over ten years now. the first reading i ever did was in a little cafe in bakersfield, california, called matches coffeehouse around january of ʼ92. it was after hours, i think, and the regulars were hanging out while the owners cleaned up, and someone got up on the little stage they had in the corner and read a poem. after that, another someone read a poem. and we kept this up for a while, not really doing a poetry reading, really, but maybe doing a mock version of the idea of Squeezing Bitter a poetry reading. i had never been to one, so i Whine from had no idea what they were supposed to be like, Sour Grapes but this was cool and fun 05.11.03 and spontaneous. pretty soon, they happened on a regular basis, and although i was never the one who put them together, i always showed up with new stuff. i had never studied poetry nor had i ever been to any other reading, so my stuff had less to do with actual poetry and more to do with comedic story-telling like henry rollinsʼ stuff and george carlinʼs stuff and richard pryorʼs stuff, which i had been listening to for quite some time. i remember this one time i performed a poem by screaming into the busted pick-up of an old bass guitar hooked up to a practice amp. my voice came screaching out of the amp in a raspy howl of feedback, and i punctuated line breaks by bashing the bass guitar onto the concrete floor — BRRANNGGG! — that made people cover their ears with their palms. 14 another time, i talked about this insatiable urge to buy these little single- serve packets of cheese from the super market, and as the piece wound up and got more intense, i started pulling these little melty single-serve cheeses out of my pockets and pelting people in the audience with them, most of which tore open the packets and ate the melty cheese and through the empty plastic back at me. and yet another time, i had a friend of mine screach on a violin as i took off my shirt and had another friend beat me with a leather belt as i scrawled C-H-O-I-C-E on my chest in black permanent marker. with each belt slap, the audience would shout each letter. and still another time, i distributed empty water bottles to members of the audience to bang on the ground as percussion instruments as the drummer for local band cradle of thorns (who is not the drummer for ozz-festers adema) did drum rolls on an old shopping cart we stole from the supermarket down the street. we didnʼt know any better, we just wanted to fuck some shit up and make fun of the pretentious idea we had of poetry readings (even though none of us had ever actually been to one.) everybody was obsessed with screaming the word FUCK! and telling stories and having fun and staying up all night with friends and playing pool then climbing the fire escape of the haberfelde building and sleeping in clusters at the top of the stairs on the roof. we had never heard of slam, had never been to any other readings, and didnʼt give a shit about what anyone but ourselves thought. it was a good time to be alive. i ended up making trips to los angeles (110 miles south), but the readings i found there were exactly what we had feared they would be, these pretentious exercises in boring the audience to tears. weʼd grab a copy of NEXT Magazine that had all the readings in L.A. listed on its calendar, and weʼd stage these ramshackle runs to open mikes and come in and fuck shit up, yell and scream and cuss and throw shit, then jump back in our cars and leave whole rooms scratching their heads and wondering what the fuck. (at least thatʼs the image we had in our heads.) anyway, back to the fact that i didnʼt make the austin poetry slam team. i guess iʼve been running this dialogue in my head ever since in an effort to feel a little better about it and put it all into perspective. after all the thinking, this is what iʼve come up with: 1] slams are not about rating one poet as better or worse than another; they are a fun way to enliven a poetry reading by enfusing it with energy and a bunch of audience-pleasing gimmicks. just because one poet scores higher in a slam than another doesnʼt make that winning poet a better 15 poet and the other a loser poet. the score are not the point, and anyone focusing on them is missing the point. 2] i think a more accurate way of ranking poets would be to take away the training wheels — the high-energy host, the scores, the judges, the other poets — and give a poet a microphone, a stage, and an audience and tell them to fill an hour with nothing more than their words. it takes a whole lot more than the same three slam poems over and over and over every slam to fill a whole hour by yourself and still leave them wanting more. i can think of plenty of slam poets who could beat me at a single slam, but letʼs see what they do with a 20-minute set, a 30-minute set, an hour set, letʼs see how many books they sell at the end of that set. 3] as a matter of fact, letʼs put any of those poets in a room with nothing but a computer with internet access and a cell phone and letʼs see if they can come up with some way of convincing universities to pay them $2000 to perform poetry. letʼs see them convince the entertainment editor at some newspaper four states away to do a cover story with a color photo to promote their reading. 4] and while weʼre at it, letʼs see any one of those poets stand in front of a high school classroom full of kids who are convinced they hate poetry and who can think of 1,000 things theyʼd rather be doing than listening to poets talk about poetry, and then letʼs see those poets rock the worlds of those high school kids in such a way that they are begging to read just one more haiku theyʼve written about their lives. 5] letʼs see anyone of those poets who have three slam poems that score well quit their day jobs and devote their lives to their poetry even though all their friends and all their family and this whole society tells them doing so is the heighth of folly and foolishness. yeah, slam rankings donʼt mean shit in the end, itʼs just a gimmick for drawing an audience that would never come to a reading otherwise, so itʼs all good in the neighborhood that i didnʼt make the austin poetry slam team this year. it doesnʼt mean iʼve lost my skills because iʼm still going to be touring colleges this fall even though i didnʼt make the team, and each one of those poets who did make it will be returning to their day jobs the moment they get back from Nationals, so itʼs okay, O.J., i can do this on my own, i can have fun with slam and get a lot out of it without having to be on a team. yeah. (pause) i shoulda gone funny in the final round. dang.

16 you might not know them, but youʼve seen them.

standing stiﬂy beside each other in the line behind you at the supermarket checkout stand in the video store in the dmv

the bitter couple

ﬁngers curled into ballpeen hammers held rigidly at their hips the rictus of frustration on their lips

the silence measured in sighs

Us 07.14.03

17 imagine: “the harry potter picture show.” ron weasley as brad and hermione granger as janet are newlyweds who break down on a rainy night in the middle of nowhere. they see a light up ahead, and burst into the song, “thereʼs a light at number 12 grimold place.” they knock on the door. lucious malfoy as riff raff answers and invites them in, introduces them to dolores umbridge as magenta, then leads them to the dark mark ball, where the gathered evil witches and wizards launch into a rollicking rendition of “letʼs do the avada kedavra again!” after the song, an excitement runs through the crowd. an elevator descends, revealing lord voldemort as dr. franken furter, only a whispy, shadowy version made of smoke and ether. he says, “How dʼyou do I / see youʼve met my / faithful death eater,” then launches into his number “i am sweet ʻyou know whoʼ from ʻyou know whereʼ and i am coming back to power.” he goes on to reveal his plan to regain his body and shows the terriﬁed ron and hermione a worn grave and headstone upon which lies the still body of harry potter as rocky horror. imagine dumbledore as the wheelchair-bound dr. everett von scott! imagine hagrid riding in on his motorcycle as eddie! imagine the sweaty love duet between hermione and the house elf, “kreature of the night.” this what happens when i eat too much crappy drive-thru roadfood...

Dammit, Hermione! 10.21.03

18 mr. ott, thank you very much for your interest in “queer eye for the straight guy.” we appreciate all fans of the show, and we are delighted that you are so eager to share your enthusiasm. we considered your request for being the subject of a future show, but, unfortunately, we will have to pass for now. you live on a mattress on the ﬂoor behind your friendsʼ couch, you work at kinkoʼs, and your poetry is not nearly as good as you seem to think it is. before we can improve your life, dear man, you must ﬁrst get one. regards, the producers of “queer eye for the straight guy”

dear eirik, just wanted to let you know that i will be hanging around for a while. no idea when i will leave. hope you donʼt mind. sincerely, your unexplainable frustration and discomfort at the world

hey eirik, fuck you. the pimple on the inside of your nose E-Mails I’ve Received of Late 12.05.03

dear eirik, i am leaving you. i was hoping things would get better if i just stuck around long enough, but i think itʼs obvious to both of us that this hasnʼt worked in quite some time. i wish you the best of luck. sincerely, your motivation to go to work today

19 eirik, fuck you. love, that nasty texas chili you ate the other night

dearest eirik, i miss you! why did you leave me? i know you have to go to work today, but please please hurry home and snuggle with me. iʼm still warm from your touch, and i long for you to linger. letʼs spend all day saturday curled up together. love, your sleeping bag

20 i knew a girl once. i donʼt remember her name. i may never have known her name, to be honest, but she was “the cute girl at the thai place” for a long time, my favorite waitress in my favorite restaurant in my favorite little college town. she always made me smile. one day, she was wearing a sheer white shirt, and you could see right through her sleeve to see the large tattoo on her forearm. i asked her about it, and she rolled up her sleeve and showed it to me, this huge colorful tattoo of a pepsi can. i was... well... sort of taken aback. i asked her about it, and she said, “yeah, i used to love pepsi. drank it all the time, so much that all my friends used to call me ʻpepsi.ʼ” we paused for a moment, then i asked her about the use of the past tense, and she said, “yeah, the real shame of it is that i donʼt even drink pepsi anymore. i drink coke.” at that very moment, precisely as she ﬁnished that sentence, i fell deeply out of love with the cute girl at the thai place.

Disillusion Curry 12.07.03

21 when i was 7, comic books and candy bars cost exactly the same: one quarter. now? candy bars cost three times as much and look half as big. and comic books? you canʼt even buy comic books anymore, theyʼre “graphic novels,” and while they look a helluva lot fancier, they cost $6. back in the day? the whole world cost two dimes and a nickel. i could walk down the street five blocks — by myself — to the 7-11 on the corner, and with a single crumpled one dollar bill, i could get a candy bar, a comic book, and a soda, and still have one shiny silver quarter left over. back then, i was a baby ruth man, and iʼd take my baby ruth (or an abba zabba), and iʼd take my spiderman comic book, and iʼd take my nesbittʼs cream soda in a glass bottle — a glass bottle! — and iʼd sit cross-legged on the sidewalk outside 7-11 with my back against the glass window, and iʼd have myself a 75-cent summer afternoon unlike any iʼve had ever since. my favorite things about comic book werenʼt the superhero adventures, no, it was the ads. full-page ads in primary colors promising battalions of green plastic soldiers for $4.99 a pop, variations on the standing rifleman, the machine gunner, the crouching rifle guy, the lying down and shooting rifle guy. i think there might have been a radio guy with a backpack, too. and the sea monkeys with the shell bikinis and antenna sticking out of their foreheads. and there was always this ad looking for saleskids to hawk grit, the nationʼs family newspaper, and even though i had never seen a copy of grit or heard of anyone Back in who had seen a copy of grit, you could apparently the Day get points for selling subscriptions of grit that could be traded for prizes like telescopic fishing 12.09.03 poles and spyglasses and sleeping bags and even a real go-cart made from a lawn mower engine. and yeah, there were serial killers back then, and there were rapists and murderers and child molesters, and there was a war being fought somewhere far away by kids only 11 years older than i was, but as i sat there reading my comics and eating my candy bars and drinking my sodas and listening to the voice of 12-year-old michael jackson sing “rockinʼ robin” through the 7-11ʼs loudspeakers, i didnʼt know from any of that. i was seven years old, and all the days were beautiful, and summer lasted forever, and i still had a quarter that was burning a hole in my pocket, and i could turn in the glass bottle for a whole dime at the supermarket. aww yeah. 22 could you be could you be could you be loved? i think i am settling into a role here at kinkoʼs, my latest employer. other roles were already established before I got here. thereʼs the bossy know-it-all who likes to play teacher and show everyone how to do their jobs, then takes customer instructions no one can decipher and misfiles orders and talks all day about nothing and complains way too much about everything. i checked with my boss just to see if it was maybe me, that maybe it was me who needed to chill the fuck out, but he assured me that most everyone rolls their eyes at her, so this made me feel a little better. that is her role... she is the anti-hermione. now i can have compassion for her and not think i am just being mean. thereʼs the workhorse guy who is always staying late to get just a bit more work done. heʼs cool. i like him and joke with him, and if i ever have a question, heʼs the one i go to. in fact, if anyone has a question, he is the one to go to because you know heʼs going to either know the right answer or know how to get it. other people? not as much confidence in them. he is good people. his role is the shell answer man. i think my role is establishing: i am unflappable customer service guy.

un-ﬂap-pa-ble (adj) - persistently calm, whether when facing difﬁculties or experiencing success; not easily upset or excited.

hereʼs the scene: we are talking kinkoʼs in an area of austin called rollingwood that iʼm told fancies itself “upscale.” you can tell this not only by the conservative Back in the Saddle clothing and well- groomed boomers (Stitcher) Again who frequent the place, but also 10.11.03 by the extremely obvious attitude of entitlement. everyone wants everything now, and they have every right to not only demand but also expect everything right this very goddamn minute goddamn it because they are on a goddamn deadline and if we donʼt get them their goddamn 800 color double-sided goddamn color copies tri- folded and coil-bound in 7 minutes flat with a volume discount, there 23 will be goddamn hell to pay. add to this the fact that it is two weeks before christmas. add to this the fact that most of the people working here are poorly-trained, poorly-paid, over-worked and over-stressed. add to this the fact that the machines here run 24/7 and break down constantly. the result of this math is a backlog that resembles the rock of gibralter and unrealistic deadlines that are not just bent but completely air-balled by days. now take the self-serve area and place inside it four black-and-white copiers and three color copiers trying to be used or waiting to be used by 30 ruffled, irritated people, most of whom have no earthly idea how to use a copy machine. now pack the front counter with 15 customers who feel they are entitled to everything right now, people with deluxe color calendars to make, personalized greeting cards to get out, color photo mugs to ship. now make the parking lot in the shopping center outside packed tightly with haphazardly-parked mini-vans and SUVs. now make the roads packed with 5:30 p.m. rush hour traffic, which, in austin, really sucks. now make everyoneʼs orders either late or wrong or completely lost or forgotten. into this scene enter me, stage right, clad not in a bomb-proof kevlar body suit from head to foot but in a blue kinkoʼs apron, walking in super slo-mo as george thorogoodʼs “bad to the bone” plays over the kinkozak speakers overhead. flashback... i worked at a record store in my home town of bakersfield, that stifling piece of shit central california town with summer temperatures of 115+. some days it would seem as if everyone in the whole record store was pissed off. people would yell. throw shit. pitch tantrums. bitch out teenaged counter people. storm out. co-workers would be red-faced and full-on hollering at angry customers who hollered right back, pointing fingers like daggers. on days like that, i would reach under the counter and open the cd player and pop in the album that served the audio equivalent of aloe vera: “legend: the greatest hits of bob marley.” and no matter how pissed people were, no matter how hot it was outside, now matter how bad the traffic or the crowds, by the time the cd hit track three — “could you be loved” — the atmosphere in that shitty mall record store changed. heads were bobbing. lips were silently syncing. knees were flexing. people were smiling. it worked every time. sometimes weʼd play “legend” all freaking day long. that is my role here at kinkoʼs: i am bob marleyʼs greatest hits. i calm people the fuck down and get them out the door one by one by one with my hydra heads rubbernecking and my kali arms a-flailing from 3-11 p.m., and for this i am paid $9.25 an hour. i actually had to tell my boss — my boss! — to basically back the 24 fuck up and let me handle this one hot situation, because i had spent 30 minutes calming said crimson-faced lady down, and with two swift sentences, boss man was well on his way to dismantling the whole fragile thing. he gave me this pop-eyed look of almost “yo, iʼm the boss here!” but i pushed him away and handled it, and she actually calmed down enough to pay for half her job even though it was all fucked up and late and she really wanted to have the whole thing for free. later, the boss thanked me. i find myself playing this same role in relationships, trying to be the soothing voice when shit hits the fan, calming the situation down so thoughts are not muddled with anger and defensiveness, guiding the venting process and playing the role of sounding board until the catharsis begins... the irritation subsides... shoulders unclench... sometimes it works. a lot of times it works.

no woman no cry, no woman no cry...

when weʼre on tour, matthew and i are pretty good at rolling with the myriad shitty situations that never quite live up to our ever-lowering expectations, but sometimes even matthew loses his shit. you can tell by the way his face turns pale and his neck glows red and his eyes start sketching the quickest route to the nearest table to overturn. at times like that, i can calm him down, get him focused again, get him to chill out and ﬁnd a way to handle shit, get him laughing again. and he does the same for me.

get up stand up, stand up for your rights...

but, sometimes? sometimes it doesnʼt work very well at all.

i donʼt want to wait in vain for your love...

25 SCENE 39. RIVENDELL - DAY Gimli and Legolas kiss, Legolas rips a patch off Gimliʼs cloak and climbs upon his horse to ride away. We see Frodo take off a diamond earring and put it into Samʼs hand. They kiss and Frodo climbs aboard the sleek white swan ship, which sails into the sunset. We see Sam put the diamond earring in his ear.

CUT TO:

40. INT. MORDOR - DAY

We see Sauron pick up a scroll and begin to read.

FRODO (VO) Dear Sauron, we accept the fact that we had to sacriﬁce thirteen months of our lives marching across Middle Earth to defeat you. But we think youʼre crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient deﬁnitions.

CUT TO:

41. EXT. RIVENDELL - DAY

We see Sam walking towards us as Frodoʼs monologue continues.

Lord of the Breakfast Club, part one 12.27.03

FRODO (VO) (CONTʼD) But what we found out is that each one of us is a hobbit...

ARAGORN (VO) ...and a ranger... 26 GIMLI (VO) ...and a dwarf...

LEGOLAS (VO) ...and an elf...

GANDALF (VO) ...and a wizard...

FRODO (VO) Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Fellowship of the Ring.

We see Sam walking across an open ﬁeld outside Rivendell as he thrusts his ﬁst into the air in a silent cheer and freezes there.

The strains of “Donʼt You Forget About Me (Elvish Remix)” swell as Enyaʼs voice is joined by a childrenʼs choir and lots of pipes and ﬂutes and ﬁddles and drum loops provided by Moby.

27 SCENE 36 EXT. - a meadow in RIVENDELL MERRY, PIPPIN, and ARWEN huddle around a raging fire, rubbing their hands against the heat and staring deeply into the flames. Several moments pass in silence with nothing but the crackling of the flames.

ARWEN You know what I wish I was doing?

MERRY Oops, watch what you say, Pippin here is a cherry.

PIPPIN A cherry?

ARWEN I wish I was on a swan-shaped ship sailing into the western sunset.

PIPPIN (whispering to MERRY) Iʼm not a cherry.

MERRY (whispering back to PIPPIN) When have you ever gotten laid? Lord of the Breakfast Club, part two 12.27.03

PIPPIN Iʼve laid... lotsa times!

MERRY Name one!

PIPPIN She lives in Bree, met her at the Brandywine Falls. You wouldnʼt know her. 28 MERRY Ever laid anyone in the Shire, or around here?

PIPPIN shushes MERRY and points at ARWEN whose back is still turned.

PIPPIN Oh, you and Arwen... did it!

ARWEN (spinning around to face PIPPIN) What are you talking about?

PIPPIN (to ARWEN) Nothinʼ, nothin!

(to MERRY) Letʼs just drop it, weʼll talk about it later!

ARWEN No! Drop what, whatʼre you talking about?

MERRY Well, Pippinʼs trying to tell me that in addition to the number of hobbit girls in the Brandywine Falls area, that presently you and he are riding the Green Pony of love!

ARWEN (to PIPPIN) Little furry-footed pig!

PIPPIN No, Iʼm not! Iʼm not! Merry said I was a cherry, and I said I wasnʼt! Thatʼs it, thatʼs all that was said!

MERRY Well then what were you motioning to Arwen for?

ARWEN You know I donʼt appreciate this very much, Pippin.

PIPPIN He is lying!

29 MERRY Oh you werenʼt motioning to Arwen?

PIPPIN You know heʼs lying, right?

MERRY Were you or were you not motioning to Arwen?

PIPPIN Yeah, but it was only...was only because... I didnʼt want her to know that I was a virgin, okay?

MERRY just stares at him.

PIPPIN Excuse me for being a virgin, Iʼm sorry...

ARWEN laughs.

ARWEN Silly little halﬂing... Why didnʼt you want me to know you were a virgin?

PIPPIN Because itʼs personal business, itʼs my personal, private business.

MERRY Well Pippin, it doesnʼt sound like youʼre doing any business...

ARWEN I think itʼs okay for a hobbit to be a virgin...

MERRY looks surprised.

PIPPIN You do?

ARWEN smiles and nods.

MERRY looks disappointed and amused at the same time. He gathers up his backpack and walks away from the ﬁre into darkness. 30 MERRY Iʼm tired of hanging around here with you dildos. Iʼm having ﬁfth breakfast by myself.

FADE TO BLACK

31 so, i just did this thing. i was just sitting here at my desk typing, and i reached out for something, i donʼt know, my tea or something, and i knocked my elbow hard against the corner of the desk, and at that precise moment, just as my elbow hit the corner and made a loud bang, somewhere way off in the distance a dog barked exactly one time. so, you know... i waited... then i knocked my elbow against the side of the desk to see if i could get that distant neighbor dog to bark again. but it didnʼt work. i guess we do that, us humans... hope just for once to stumble upon our true magic, our gift, even if itʼs something as inane as being able to make neighborhood dogs bark by knocking our elbows against the corners of desks. such is my life, full of magic that is so often at the corner of my eyes... blink, and the golden dragon is gone.

Magic 12.30.03

32 i remember it like iʼm right there, right now... and my shoulderʼs wet, and my back hurts, and the hard plastic chair is making my shirt stick to the small of my back, and the train station is packed with people waiting on their own hard, sweaty plastic chairs, and my shoulderʼs wet, and i am miserable, and i canʼt hold her tighter without hurting her, and her head is on my shoulder, and we are waiting for her train to come and take her away, and we both know she will never come back, even if she does physically come back, she will be different, it will all be different, and my shoulder is wet, and i am miserable, and i know itʼs the right thing to do, and she knows itʼs the right thing to do, but we are dreading the moment when her train is announced, and then it is, and she stands, wipes her nose, and i pick the sweaty shirt out of the small of my back, and i adjust my shoulders, and i pick up her bags, and we walk to the gate, and we just look at each other, red-rimmed eyes, puffy cheeks, miserable, knowing we have to do this, knowing thereʼs no way around it but through it, and we hug, and my shoulder is wet, and i am miserable, and she walks away from me without ever once looking back, and i watch her the whole way until she gets on the train and disappears.

The Last Time I Saw Her 01.03.04

33 there is something intrinsically dramatic about seeing someone running down the street. and i donʼt mean someone in jogging shorts and athletic shoes with headphones, iʼm talking someone in a suit and tie and a briefcase running in their best shiny shoes down the sidewalk as fast as their cubicle-atrophied legs can carry them, someone in a tight dress that keeps creeping up their thighs as they clutch their handbag and stilletto heel TOK-TOK-TOK their way across a crowded parking lot, a trio of black-hoodied teenagers in huge baggy jeans sprinting down a rain-soaked midnight alleyway. last night as i drove home from seeing “city of god” with andres, i saw a man running from one far corner of a downtown block all the way diagonal to the other far corner at a full gallumphing clip in a ﬂurry of backpack havok and comb-over ﬂyaway waving his arms and yelling “hey! hey!” to a bus that was just starting to pull away from the stop. he caught his bus. i was riveted.

Tok Tok Tok 02.10.04

34 you know when you are driving down the road with the windows rolled down and youʼre listening to the radio or you are sitting on the couch in the dark watching cable teevee? and then suddenly the music stops and the radio station goes dead and all you can hear is empty space through the speakers or all of a sudden the cable picture cuts off and all there is is static flickering against the walls and the ceiling and your face? all these years later, even though everything is different now and i am no longer a paranoid high school kid and there is no such thing as russia or reagan or cold war, i still catch my breath when this happens, and for a fleeting moment i think: “e.m.p.” “electromagnetic pulse.” “the shock wave of electrical energy that pulses through the area surrounding a nuclear blast that knocks out radio stations and television stations and all things relying on electricity, the first thing that hits you before the intense heat and fire and explosive wind, the last thing you notice in your whole life before vaporizing, the initial thing that makes you go, ʻhuh?ʼ before you die with no warning other than the radio or the teevee going out for no apparent reason.” today, as i was driving down the crowded university drag, kgsr went dead and broadcast only silence, and for a few seconds i held my breath and waited for the flash of light, for the heat, for the resulting darkness and silence, but, as always, it never came. this marks me as a child of the late ʼ70s / early ʼ80s, E.M.P. before reagan went mad, before the wall was torn down, before russia collapsed upon itself. it is the shared scar 03.08.04 of the last generation to fear The Bomb. kids nowadays? yeah, they have all kinds of things to fear, all kinds of things to keep them up at night, but nuclear war? somehow, i donʼt think they think of e.m.p. when the radio goes dead. and thatʼs a good thing. speaking of nuclear war and things that would survive one, thelonious appears to have caught himself a nice, ripe cockroach, and he is now arched backwards on the floor in a sunbeam playing with it like it was stuffed with catnip. my little killer.

35 i heard one of my favorite pop songs of all time on the radio the other day... “good vibrations” by the beach boys... and i have to say that i think that song is the most fabulous pop song ever recorded, better than anything by the beatles even, better than anything ever done by anyone before or since, every note of it, every harmony, every glistening bit of production profoundly perfect and heavenly. its only sin is in its length... i wish it was three times as long so i could savour it. still, itʼs just fucking brilliant, a true pop symphony. sonic bliss! i love listening to that song on headphones with my eyes closed, taking in all the deep space in between the instruments, hearing the perfectly positioned tamberine hits, the odd buzzing organ chords, the harmonica, and the eerie quaver of the theremin. and those harmonies!

ba-ba-ba-ba-BAHH ba-ba-BAH (toot toot) ba-ba-ba-ba-BAHH ba-ba-BAH (toot toot) oooooWEEEEEOOOOOHoooooohOOOOOOH

from what i understand, brian wilson holed himself in the studio for months endlessly tweaking every note and every nuance at such an expense that “good vibrations” became the most expensively recorded single of all time, and you would think this kind of crazed devotion to one thing for such a long time would end up one of rockʼs classic trainwrecks (“chinese democracy” anyone?), but thankfully That Lonely it paid off, and brian wilson may end up a serial killer who offs dozens of Distant lives in a tri-state crime spree, but his headstone will have this legend in bold Trumpet letters: “he made good vibrations, the 03.18.04 best pop song of all time.” i think the only song that comes close is the full 12-minute cut of “papa was a rolling stone” by the temptations. the wide-open spaces of that song are breathtaking, the dark deep funk swirling around the simple bass line and the hi-hat for a good minute or two, with orchestra stings puncuating the drama of the words to come:

it was the third of september... a date i will always remember... ʻcause that was the day my daddy died. 36 and this group known for its harmonies breaks it down voice by voice, each singer wrapped in the psychedelic soulful swirl of the funk brothers, and itʼs like everythingʼs different. that song gives me phenomenal joy, and i love it played very loud with the bass turned way up, so you can hear every throb, every pulse, every hand clap, and that lonely distant trumpet. fuck, man, i love that song.

37 it was such an amazing colour, sort of like... spicy mustard? only creamy, not chunky and coarse. and it smelled really bad, like the smell you get when you trim your long toes and smell the underside of the half-moon nails. woof. it all started when i decided to grow out my nails. i always do that when there is a big competition coming up, a big performance: i grow my nails long and paint them dark midnight blue. i do this for two reasons: 1] i like the way it looks on stage and how it distiguishes me from other guy poets; 2] i like the way my nails feel when dragged along my forearms and my scalp (when iʼm nervous, like before a big performance, this has a very calming effect on me.) but this time out, i got a small cut under the nail of my ring finger, some small separation between the nail and the skin, and whenever i would take a shower, it would sting for an hour until it dried. finally, it was stinging so much in the one nail and had started to sting in another, so i decided to tear off all my nails at once. in the dark. in the movie theatre as i watched “effervescent spotless sunshine of the eternal refreshing presence of tranquility,” and... yeah... i got a wee bit too close on the ring finger and tore up some skin. fast forward three days later. the swollen tip of my poor ring finger is pulsating with an evil throb that accents the violently purple colour, and thereʼs this neon green scab right at the part where i separated skin and nail thatʼs surrounded by a pasty whiteness Cast Away thatʼs very unsettling. and it hurts. bad. i mean, really fucking bad, like i canʼt 03.23.04 type, and getting it wet really fucking hurts, and i keep putting neosporin on it and keep refreshing the band aids, but it doesnʼt seem to be getting any better. and by this time i am thinking about blood infection, about bone infection, about reading in the paper about people who neglect infected cuts just like this until they have to get the whole right side of their head amputated. and iʼm thinking about money, because the quickie med place wants to charge $125 just to walk in the door, and thatʼs if the doctor looks at it, curls his lip, then prescribes antibiotics. the lady on the phone says it will be more expensive if they have to lance it. “lance?” yes, she says, lance and drain it. and the emergency room is no better, only they give me no

38 information on how much it will cost or how long the wait will be, only that they can set up payments for me. and finally, iʼm like, fuck that. i can lance this bad boy myself. just watch me. the only sharp object i found was the pin on the back of my kinkoʼs name tag, so i ran that over a candle flame to sterilize it, then i jabbed i right into the neon green meat of my wound, and wow... it was so cool... i mean, it really fucking hurt, but the goo that squooshed out was this weird colour iʼve never seen come out of my body before, sort of lime green creamsicle goo, very thick, like a smoothie with no lumps, and whooo did it stink. and i took and pinched the tip of my poor swollen finger and more of the good oozed out, until finally, just blood. and that was it. i put more neosporin on it, put another fresh band aid, and now it seems to be doing just fine. i mean, itʼs still red, and it still is a bit sensitive, but it is nowhere near the balloon poodle it was before i lanced it. man, that was really gross, but i felt so self-sufficient, like when tom hanks gave himself a root canal with that big rock on “cast away.”

39 i needed some air. the atmosphere in my shuttered room was stuffy when i woke up at 6 p.m. even though the window was wide open and both fans were on. i sat up, rubbed my eyes, and saw that i had once again fallen asleep fully clothed. so, i rolled onto the floor, slipped on my sneakers, and headed out the door to get some fresh air. the kitties were out in the cloverscape of the backyard stalking pookahs, wiggling their asses with their heads low to the ground, eyes poking just over the green, so i let them be and headed out front, down the street, planning on a quick jaunt to the 7-11 for a paper on my way to the pho place down the street. five minutes. tops. thatʼs how long i had been awake, and i was still groggy, and my eyesight hadnʼt quite unclouded from sleep, and my equilibrium hadnʼt quite balanced so i was walking down the sidewalk kinda leaning to one side like a ship taking on water, and everything was still kinda dreamy, kinda unreal. and thatʼs when i heard it, from behind me, directly behind me, the slow-motion crunch of metal on metal, plastic on glass, and i turned to find a car leaping into the air, up and over the car in front of it, dragging itself along the roof and scraping down the front again and into the ass end of the car in front of that one, like a bunch of kids playing leap frog and leaving rearview mirrors and curlie-cues of steel and rubber gaskets and shards of broken plastic in their wake. i just stood there and watched, agape, and i was so not awake yet that it all seemed unreal, slow motion, distant even though it was right there, right in front of me, i coulda tossed an apple to the drivers and they wouldʼve caught it, too, had they not been in the middle of a three-way car wreck. Opening and and i just stood there. i couldnʼt quite figure out the Closing like a math. it was too confusing. the people in the front two Goldfish Mouth cars — the leaper and the 03.27.04 leader — bolted from their cars and were in each otherʼs faces in seconds, the smoking guns of their pointed fingers inches from the otherʼs nose. i am sure the word “fuck” was uttered at least three times, and the two dove back into their cars and began tearing through glove boxes. i walked out into the middle of the street to the first driver, a young college student who was virulently pissed off, and when i asked her if she was okay, she said, and i quote, “leave me the fuck alone, motherfucker, i gotta get my cell phone.” i figured if she was well enough to be pissed 40 off, then she was okay, so i moved to the leaper, and i asked her if she was okay, and she said, “yeah, yeah, iʼm getting my goddamned insurance, bitch, get the fuck away from me.” apparently, she thought i was the other driver. i figured she was pissed, she was okay, so i moved to the last lady, the lady in the back, the one over whom the leaper had leaped. and she was absolutely stricken, just wide-eyed, her mouth opening and closing and opening again as if she were trying to speak yet couldnʼt find the words, like a goldfish trying to breath. next to her was a small dog who was absolutely still and staring at her. i leaned toward her open window and asked if she was okay, and she slowly turned to me, her eyes rising to mine, and she paused... i looked at her... she looked at me... she nodded. i asked her if her dog was okay, and she paused... looked over at her dog... looked back at me... then she nodded. her breath hitched a bit, her eyes got teary... she looked down at her hands folded in her lap... i reached into her window and put my hand on her shoulder and gave her a little squeeze, then i said, “everything is going to be alright. itʼs over now. the police will be here in a second. okay?” she looked up... her eyes met mine... tears were coming now... she touched my hand... she said thank you. she said she would be alright. her face started flashing blue and red, blue and red, and i looked back to see a cop pulling up behind her, so i told her goodbye, and i made it to the other side of the street, to the 7-11 on the corner where my roomie josh happened to be gassing up and saw the whole thing. josh said, “goddamn, man, did you see that? iʼve never seen a car jump over another car like that before. that was fucking cool.” i agreed with him that it was pretty cool, then i walked into the 7-11. and i bought my usa today, walked out of the 7-11, and made for the pho place down the street, and i didnʼt know why at the time, but i was so intensely sad all of a sudden, felt full of tears that stung my eyes, felt miserable. no one bothered to talk to the lady in the back, the one whose car the leaper scraped over. no one cared. the other two were so busy being furious with each other, so ready to point fingers and chuck insurance cards and id cards at each other that no one seemed to care that maybe they should check and see if everyone was okay. that poor lady in the back was in shock, and these idiots were thinking of rising insurance rates and fines and who was going to get the ticket, whose fault it was, who was going to take the blame. that makes me sad. it also makes me once again realize that shit can fall out of the sky at any moment with no warning and take you out so quickly, cancel all your 41 plans, make all your petty unhappinesses meaningless and trite. like a hammer slipping the grip of a workman 20 stories above your forehead. like a persistant cough that finally makes you decide to endure the high cost of a doctorʼs office visit even though you know all heʼs going to do is tell you to take some over-the-counter shit and charge you $100 you donʼt have, only itʼs cancer, and itʼs spread everywhere, and itʼs inoperable, and you have a few months left, and you arenʼt married yet, you donʼt have kids yet, you havenʼt even finished your degree yet... opening and closing, opening and closing, like a goldfish mouth... i ate my pho in complete silence, and i never even opened the usa today.

42 so, this lady comes into kinkoʼs... and sheʼs kinda this short blonde southern lady with a really saucy attitude, kinda cute, like, “dang dude, your moms is fine” kinda cute, and sheʼs wearing this sorta tight, revealing halter top looking shirt that really... uh... shows off her... uh... her quite ample endowments, and she comes up to me and she coyly asks me if i can help her with some copies, and i say, “sure, but itʼll cost you,” and iʼm just saying this to be saucy, too, you know, but she smiles this sly smile and she says, “whatʼll i have to do to get some help?” and sheʼs all saucy about it, and iʼm all, “uh...” and then she goes, “watch this” and she begins doing some kinda weird things with her breasts, like, flexing them or something, like they begin bobbing up and down like there are two poodles in her top leaping about, leaping up and over each other and fighting for control of a rubber mouse chew toy, only sheʼs doing this without touching them or moving any other part of her body, and i am just... flabbergasted, and then sheʼs like, “you wanna see ʻem?” and iʼm like, “uh...” and then she lifts up her shirt before i can say anything but “uhh... uhh...” and suddenly there they are, these enormous surgically-enhanced breasts just staring at me right there at work in the lobby across the counter, and then she puts her shirt back down and says, “bought and paid for, baby, bought and paid for,” and i donʼt know if she means she has paid for me to help her in self-serve or that her enormous breasts have been paid for, then she says, “so, whatcha think?” and i say, “uhh, well... there you go,” and she smiles and says, and i quote, “hustler magazine, 1994,” and walks away with a flounce of her blonde hair. this brings the amount of women who have flashed me at work to a grand total of two. something about being in a place of business at 2 a.m. brings this kind of thing out of people, at least it does Hurray for when i work. Boobies! 04.16.04

43 i have only ever known one nicole. and it could be that i am wrong, that i have known many nicoles in my time, but one nicole stands out among them all — nicole, the twin sister of misty, the extremely cute girl i worked with in the record store. i remember i had such a crush on misty — we all did — but she was so aware of her power over us foolish mortal record store boys that she rarely gave us the time of the day, preferring to reserve her affections for the occasional rufﬂed rocker boys who drifted in from what must have surely been sweaty band practices in dank garages. and then, her twin sister nicole got a job there, too, and nicole was a hottie just like misty was, only nicole was cool and approachable, and we ended up going out on a date once or twice or three times, long enough to make out, and she was really cool and really sweet, much cooler and sweeter than her sister. and this was the topic of conversation for several weeks amongst the boys at work who yearned for mistyʼs affections... questions were asked, stories were shared, and the u2 song “even better than the real thing” played in everyoneʼs minds. and then nicole started dating another guy from work, and this changed everything. misty suddenly seemed to realize that people were digging on her sister more than her, so she became nicer, more approachable, only, like... agressively so. misty and i ended up making out at a party once, and while it was nice, i couldnʼt help but think she was doing it for no other reason than to show me she was a better kisser than her sister. after it became widely known that i had made it with not just one of the sexy twins, but both, well... i can say that any doubts about my game were erased. along with a newfound respect from my peers came the The Better questions about who was the better Maker-Outer maker outer, but i never told: i merely said, “youʼll just have to ﬁnd 04.23.04 out for yourself.” (for the record, nicole was the much better kisser of the two, plus nicole would let you touch her boobs.) after that, it was like this competition between the twins at work to see who could make out with more record store boys than the other. it was a rare boy at that record store who had not made out with both nicole and

44 misty, and most agreed that nicole was the better maker outer of the two. we would share whispered war stories and compare how far we had been allowed into the sacred jungles of their loins. i was the first to make out with both twins, plus i was the first to break the boob barrier with nicole, so i had a sort of aura about me initially, like a record store chuck yeager, but then the underwear barrier was shattered in both the twins nearly simultaneously, and my exploits were over-shadowed as the duel for the twinsʼ golden temple of the buddha heated up. by this time, doug was dating nicole and had made out once with misty at a party (the same party, i think, where she made out with me), and tim was dating misty and had made out with nicole and touched her left boob once after a party. us guys who were, by this time, left out in the cold, gathered every monday to hear of the weekendʼs conquests. tim would end up claiming victory as the first of us record store boys to succesfully have sex with one of the twins, although he and misty broke up almost immediately after. the rumor was that doug and misty 69ʼed, but she wouldnʼt go any further; still, he got honors for being the only record store boy to venture down that path with either of the twins, so the quest was considered a draw in the end. itʼs hard to remember now, but it seems that within two or three weeks of these momentous occasions, both the twins quit their jobs. misty met some navy guy and fell instantly in love and moved in with him. we heard months later that they got married and moved out of town. as for nicole, she broke up with doug and got a job at a bank. i would see her every once in a while because her bank was the same bank i used to cash my paychecks from the record store. we would chat... she would ask me to say hello to everyone for her... i hardly ever did. and then one day nicole didnʼt work there any more. and that was that. and now any nicoles i meet bear the burden of this memory, like a big backpack i put on their shoulders the moment i hear their name, a tattoo they have no idea iʼve etched into their skin: the memory of nicole, the better maker outer.

45 no one in the whole wide world hates the internet more than sydney mossman... the last door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in america. as door after door is shut politely in his face, he can hear the laughter, the snorts of derision, the mockery, and his gravely voice trails behind him as he trundles down the street with his thick, leather bound samples, whispering, “goddamned internet... goddamned internet...” sydneyʼs hatred for computers and the world wide web is matched only by that of his dear friend simon maxell, inventor of the high-end blank “metal” audio cassette. together, they are the bitterest men in america.

Like Cold Coffee 04.26.04

46 i was dating someone at the time... kinda... from what i remember. i think it was kimberly, the person i consider my college girlfriend, the one i dated off and on for about two years, then had break up sex with for another, oh, two years after that. the glitter girl fiasco -- as it came to be known -- happened sometime during that “weʼre not going out right now, but we are currently having sex on a regular basis” period in between official break ups and make ups, a time where the idea of “other people” was a subject filed under “donʼt ask, donʼt tell.” so, weʼre at a party in our little college town, and kimberly spies some girl in the corner of the party dressed for maximum magnetism — tight red skirt, tight black scoop-neck top, glitter sprinkled all over her bosom — and kimberly huffs, “oh jesus christ, look at her.” i feign like i havenʼt already scoped cleavage girl, and iʼm like, “who?” and sheʼs like, “that floozy over there. the one with the glitter all over her tits. jesus, what a slut.” and iʼm like, “sheesh, yeah, gosh, what a slut. iʼm sure glad you donʼt dress like that.” she smiles at me, and she squeezes my arm, then she makes for the table in the corner by the drinks and the snacks. kimberly dressed conservatively. she never had cleavage exposed to open air unless the lights were off or she was ready to take a shower. her favorite color was lavender. every piece The Glitter of her favorite clothing was lavender. she Girl Fiasco was a soft lavender sweater type of gal, definitely not a tight black scoop-neck 04.26.04 glitter girl type of gal. and the night goes on, and the drinks are drunk, and snacks are snacked upon, and before you know it, kimberly is over in the corner chatting up some people she recognizes from class, and i find myself in the opposite corner chatting up glitter girl, who actually happens to be really cool. and... you know... one thing lead to another... and... and... suddenly i am in some back bedroom totally romping with glitter girl. (hangs head in shame) yes, please, feel free to think i am a cad. i accept that. i was a cad, a 47 cad who had been drinking an exceptional amount of baileyʼs on the rocks and pretending not to stare at glitter girlʼs boobs all night long. anyway, something had to give, and give it did. so i walk back into the living room with the rest of the crowd, and i waltz over to kimberly, ready to show her some guilt lovinʼ, and she takes one look at me and just about chokes on her drink. she spits whatʼs left into her red plastic cup, and she goes, “you are such an asshole!” and iʼm like, “what?” and iʼm thinking, thereʼs no fucking way she can know! how can she know?” and sheʼs like, “oh, i canʼt believe you, thatʼs it. iʼm going home right this very minute.” and she slams her drinks onto the table and bolts for the door, with me following after her going, “whatʼs wrong? what the hell happened? whatʼs going on?” she was silent the whole way to my place, then skidded to a halt at my curb without stopping the motor. i just looked at her... she looked away... so i got out of the car and she floored it before i could close the door. i went up stairs wondering how in the world i was going to smooth this over, and when i got to the bathroom to brush my teeth before climbing into bed, i looked at my self in the mirror. my face sparkled and shined with a fine coating of glitter, my guilt broadcast for the whole world to see in flashes of rainbow hues. i just put my head in my hands and laughed. what else could i do? i was cold-busted.

48 thereʼre a lot of names that are hard to live with. my last name, for example: ott. itʼs little, which is convenient, so filling out forms is a breeze, plus black markering the elastic band for your tighty- whitey underwear is cinch at camp. but the convenience is far outweighted by the ways in which the name can be turned into something else by simply adding a letter or two. nothing really rhymes with eirik, but you donʼt need that when all you need to turn eirik ott into eirik snott is an sn. eirik snott. eirik pott. eirik twott. eirik kumquott. eirik otterpop. du-nuh-nuh- nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh OTTMAN! you ott to do this. 30-ott-6. ott literally means “nothing.” ott is a hard name to live with. you either rise above a name like ott, or you let it drag you under. because of this, i have become an officianado of odd names. i love them, and i love commisserating with people who had the displeasure of growing up with fucked up names. i met a girl once while i was working retail. her name was on her check. i asked her how to pronounce it. she said GRAWK-ick. she took pains to pronounce it firmly. she was a lovely girl, truly lovely, but you just know when she hit sixth grade, having the name GROCOCK was a motherfucker. i asked her about it, and she sighed, said, “brother, you donʼt even know...” my father said he went to school with a cat named richard glasscock. they called him crystal dick. my exʼs mom told the story about teaching two kids whoʼs names were pronounced le-MON-jallo and or-ON-jallo. no lie, their names were spelled lemonjello and orangejello. i want to What’s in believe she is lying. i want to believe that no parent is so cruel, yet i know for a fact that a Name? david bowie named is daughter zoie and frank zappa has a son and daughter named dweezil 05.02.04 and moon unit, so it could very well happen. some names are fucked up, but can be transcended by a cool person who takes it an runs with it: i mean, how cool would it be for a little kid to be called thelonious nowadays? iʼll be it sucked back in the day, though. iʼm at work, and i just took a check by a dude named, and i am not shitting you, “gaylord.” (pause) how do you rise above “gaylord?” imagine the horror.

49 and dude had a look about him, too, behind his smile and eye crinkles, and i totally wanted to ask him how hard it must have been to get to 45 or whatever he was with that name, but i couldnʼt, i just couldnʼt. that fact that he kept that horrible name all those years without changing it is a challenge and a victory over adversity in my book that warrents giving the man some space. he couldʼve easily changed his name to gary or duke or john when he turned 18, but no, he kept fucking “gaylord” and, from the looks of his pressed siut, he ran with it. so, gaylord? this oneʼs for you, brother.

50 the thing is, i donʼt even really like chris that much. i kinda donʼt like her at all. sheʼs this 30-something austin-via-minnesota mom type who reminds me of the newly-divorced returning students in community college who were always raising their hands in the middle of discussions to make the most inane comments, causing a tidal wave of rolling eyeballs from the students ten or more years their junior (and oceans of stern silence from us stealth returning students who cringed every time they made the term “returning student” seem something embarassing and worthy of denial). she talks on and on about nothing at all to anyone within earshot whether they contribute to her monologues or not. sheʼs gossipy to the nth degree. she spreads rumors like typhoid mary. sheʼs a bossy know-it-all who very clearly does not know it all, which wonʼt stall her a second in her quest to offer unwelcome advice to anyone within snooping reach. plus, in a fit of overzealous sub-assistant manager call to duty, she once spread the rumor that i was tampering with the vcr that records the security cameras in an effort to hide the fact that i do nothing all night long on my shift (a suspicion of hers that was totally unwarranted, yet she continued to spread even after she was told to stop by my boss since he knew it to be completely untrue.) iʼve got no love for chris. i not only donʼt like her, but sometimes i actively dislike her. chris comes in around 7-ish in the morning, about an hour before my 10-hour overnight shift is about to end, and sheʼs the one i give the pass down to about the work that was done and the work that still needs to be done. my pass-downs are professional and concise, and i avoid any hint of casual conversation. to do otherwise would be to once again witness chrisʼ transformation from bossy midwestern Turbulence mom lady into rambling monotonous garrison keillor of the undead. 05.05.04 anyway... chris comes into work the other morning, and i am tired, and i am grumpy, and i want to avoid talking with her as long as i can until finally i tell her what i need to say and leave. and as iʼm finishing up on a massive hand-folding job, the phone rings. i answer. itʼs someone asking for chris, i say, “may i ask whoʼs calling,” and the caller says sheʼs chrisʼ mother and that itʼs important. so i call out, “chris, itʼs your mom, line one.” and i go back to work. and chris gets on the phone, pauses, says, “what?” then covers her

51 mouth in what looks like horror, cheeks instantly pink and doused with tears, and sheʼs whispering into the receiver, “no... no...” what does one do in situations like that? probably what i did, which was put my head down and focus on my hand-folding job as if godʼs booming voice has promised iʼll turn into a pillar of salt if i dare to look up. and i could hear her sobbing, whispering, “itʼs not fair... itʼs not fair...” and i snuck peeks, no different from a teenaged boy staring through a window at a naked lady, filled with shame and curiousity and grief, yet unable to keep from looking out of the corner of my eye as my hands made crooked folds iʼd later have to redo. chris looked crushed, white-knuckling the phone, the corners of her mouth dragged down by the weight of the words she was hearing and the words she couldnʼt express. i tried to think of what kind of phone call i could get that would instantly dissolve me into tears and stricken silence, and i really couldnʼt think of one. not my fatherʼs sudden death, nor my motherʼs or sisterʼs, at least not right then, not at work, not in front of people. i would be professional, asking questions stripped of fat and lean with purpose, bloodless, efficient. maybe my cats... if i was told my cats were hit by a car, i would cry... maybe... that realization made me feel so lonely. the sound of chris in the throes of torment crawled down my own throat and tightened it, stung my eyes, made it hard to focus. whatever it was... it must be horrible. somebody had died. somebody she cared about deeply had died. thatʼs the only thing it could be. one of her kids? her father? when she finally hung up the phone, she just stood there, her face a grimace, the front of her blue workshirt stained darker blue with tears, her arms limp and dangling open hands, and i felt myself standing up and walking over to her and putting my arms around her and telling her i was there, it was going to be okay. and she hesitated at first — there is no love coming from her in my direction either, i am sure — but then she gave in and put her arms around me and buried her face in my chest and bawled, openly and loudly. and we just stood there for a bit. and you have to know that i donʼt like this person at all. if i came into work and found out she had been been fired or had up and quit, it would be hard to stifle a grin, but at that moment, none of that mattered. she was hurting and needed comfort, and i could provide at least a bit of comfort, because i am human, and so is she, and we are both warm and alive and 52 have arms meant to wrap around each other when we need it. it wouldʼve been selfish and crude to deny her that. inhuman. after a while, she gave me a squeeze, let go of me as i let go of her, wiped her nose on the cuff of her shirt, and croaked, “thanks, eirik.” i told her it was okay, no worries, iʼll take the front, go ahead and go into the back office for a bit. take care of business. iʼll take care of things up here. iʼve got it from here. go ahead and go. and she did. it made me think about this one time when i was on an airplane. i hate flying, fear it, and i especially hate turbulence. never have i felt so helpless as on an airplane rocked by air pockets and balled up fists of wind. this trip started as all plane trips do for me, with silent prayers to god, jesus, mohammad, buddha, krishna, confucious, and l. ron hubbard, and i barely acknowledged the business lady who sat down next to me and strapped in. within seconds of take-off, the plane plunged downward into a hollow pocket of nothing, lunged like an animal, and the business lady and i screamed out loud and grabbed at each other and wrapped our arms around each other and buried our faces into each otherʼs necks and held tightly as if we were about to die right then and there at that very moment, which seemed certain, the wings being plucked from the fucilage like a child-god tormenting a fly. and then...... slowly...... after what seemed a very, very long time — especially when you are holding on for dear life to someone with whom youʼve never even made eye contact — the turbulence slowed to an infrequent bucking and stomping, more “space mountain” at disneyland than “superman the escape” at magic mountain. and we finally let go of each other, straightened up, smoothed out sudden creases in our shirts, composed ourselves, and then went right back into the roles that had already been established: i was just some nameless, faceless person on the plane next to her, and she was just some business lady. i never got her name. i never noticed what colour her eyes were. we never exchanged addresses or said thank you. we never spoke. but, if turbulence wouldʼve hit us again, i know we wouldʼve been right back there holding each other as tightly as we could, refusing to go down in flames without being held in someoneʼs arms, even if it was the nameless, faceless person sitting next to us on the airplane. i still donʼt like chris, i really donʼt, but i think maybe weʼll cut each other a bit more slack from now on. something tells me itʼs not really all that important to dislike each other. not any more. 53 i think iʼve rendered myself unemployable. and i didnʼt set out to do this to myself, but i think that my choices have created in me the nearly complete inability to tolerate being tied down to a place of business and forced to trade my precious life hour by hour for dollar bills, especially when doing so surrounds me with people who, through ignorence or outright guile, try to strip me of my humanity by treating me with disrespect and denying me simple basic human courtesy. perhaps iʼm being dramatic, but all i think about all day while at stupid jobby jobs is my impending death, somewhere, sometime, in the future, but always emerging from the mists and becoming more and more solid, leering, grinning, beckoning, as i sit there, wishing i was anywhere but there, wishing i was on the road, meeting people, doing things, fun things, living life and being alive, not here, not earning $10 an hour, or $15, or $30, or whatever, trading my ever-dwindling time on this planet for cash so some fat motherfucker iʼll never be privaleged enough to meet rakes in the dough for my hard work. jobs, to me, have been something you do in between grand adventures, something you do to fuel grand adventures, something you wear while you need them then discard when you donʼt, like socks or sandals or underwear. i never cast off a pair of socks and think what kind of socks will i be able to get in the future based on how long i wore this pair of socks, and i donʼt for the endless parade of lame, meaningless forays into employment in between tours or other creative pursuits. fuck hobbies. they want you to believe in the concept of hobbies, but i want my life to be full of hobbies and just enough job to empower the hobbies. i want my life to be defined not by the job i do to earn cash — so, eirik, what do you do? define yourself based on what Sucking the horribly dehumanizing job Corporate Cock you force yourself to tolerate in exchange for rent money 05.16.04 — but what i do otherwise. i want something on my headstone more passionate than “he showed up for work on time, he never caused a fuss, he still had three weeks of sick leave left when he was squashed by that truck.” i want the entire text of my livejournal to be carved on the door to my tomb, and i want interactive exhibits highlighting my exploits inside, and i want no mention of money anywhere.

54 i have $475 in my pocket, and my final check will be around $250, and thatʼs it... thatʼs all the money i have in the world, and i have to use that to figure out... what happens next? another crappy temp job that robs me of motivation to tour? or another tour, and, if so, how can i get there? bus tickets take money. photocopies require cash. how will i eat if i chose to not get another job? i will shark it... keep moving... sell enough books and cds to make do all over the country... i am 37 years old, and i am unemployed, and my resume has very little on it that would convince anyone to hire me; in fact, if it were not a complete pack of lies and invented jobs (most conveniently out of business), it would serve as wd-40 for the hinges of the doors slammed in my face. i am more than my ability to hold a job, to be satisfied with simply showing up to work on time and doing my job. when someone asks me what i do, i can go on for hours and never mention money. blather, wince, repeat.

55 i think one of the worst things about the fall-out from september 11th is this: you can no longer deplane into an airport after a long flight and be greeted by the familiar face of someone waiting there for you, someone who is looking, looking, looking, then, upon seeing, smiling and walking toward you as you walk toward them, their hands rising to meet yours, toe to toe, eyes glistening, and you drop the shoulder strap of your carry-on bag and wrap your arms around them as they do the same for you, and you just stand there in the middle of the airport holding each other as people walk past you hand in hand and smiling like waves crashing around a big couple-shaped rock that hardly notices. and no more sitting there at the gate with that person waiting for the very last moment to get on the plane, soaking up as much of them as you can to get you through the trip so you can smell their hair conditioner on your clothes six hours later when you finally land and call them to say you got there safely, i miss you, baby, iʼll see you soon. there are few things as lonely as getting off a plane and having no one there waiting for you. i donʼt think anyone should be allowed to get off a plane without being greeted, even if itʼs by an employee of the airline who was only told their name moments before their arrival. i think it should be part of the ticket price... you get off and no matter what you get hugged and someone takes your bag for you and holds your hand all the Airports way until you get into a taxi that looks just like someoneʼs station wagon and is driven my an 05.20.04 actress who looks like your mother. if i ran an airline, that would be the way iʼd run it. no one would get off a plane alone. i had to drop someone off at the airport today, and i made it clear that as long as i am around, they would never have to go hugless in an airport. i hate flying. i think maybe thatʼs one of the reasons i appreciate hugs beforehand so much. i also make sure to bring music i wouldnʼt mind listening to while i died after a horrible minutes-long plumment to the earth. you have to ask yourself... would i mind dying as i listen to britney spears? hmmm... maybe i should go for the patti griffin instead.... and whereʼs that kate bush? “automatic for the people?”

56 i fucking hate going greyhound. itʼs dirty, nasty, filthy, hot, stinky, sweaty, uncomfortable, exhausting, depressing, frustrating, and gross. the toilet seats are uniformly spattered with a sticky neon rorschach of misplaced piss and splashed soda pop. the employees are the bitterest with whom i have ever had the displeasure of dealing — even moreso than kinkoʼs employees, which is really saying something since those motherfuckers are bitter like old nasty coffeegrounds licked from a rusty back alley restaraunt garbage can bottom — and the people going greyhound are the saddest most soiled most rumpled most hacking coughing belly-aching soda drinking mcdonaldʼs eating belching farting scratching drooling snoring elbow poking fat ass touching me members of the great unwashed that you can ever hope to walk amongst, as if every department of motor vehicles and mall and drunk tank and homeless shelter and inner city liquor store and third-rate reno casino had been tipped on its side and emptied of its blabbering contents right onto my fucking head in a great big sticky GLOOP! being in a greyhound station at 3 a.m. having just been dumped from one reaking vessel and forced to wait two hours for another to come scoop you up is like being in a camp full of misplaced refugees fleeing a war called the failed american dream who had time to pack what they could in brown paper sacks and seventh-hand dumpster-dived luggage and get the fuck out of dodge just moments before the cops stormed through Go Greyhound, their aluminum-foiled bedroom and Leave the windows in a flurry of unpaid bills and parking tickets and Driving to Us! hastily discarded crack viles swirling in shit-stained toilets. 06.20.04 dirty-footed people in flip-flops and cut-offs and t-shirts with not only the sleeves shorn away but nearly the whole side panels as well in some kind of trailer park masculine fashion statement that allows free access to their voluminously fetid and deodorant-deprived armpits. pale blubbery american bellies everywhere! stretch pants like sausage casings squeezing curdled sloth in heaving, sweaty, distorted fluorescent glory everywhere! caterwauling kids! babbling inanity! discomfort like a pollock action painting splattering castaways in a filthy rainbow of knotted muscles and clenched jaws and pretzelled spines, in bullshit and cigarettes, in crackling packs of vending machine snacks and caffeinated

57 soft drinks and cell phones! everybodyʼs gotta cell phone! and theyʼre all yelling into them, “hello?! hello?! can you hear me?! hello?!” everyone needs a shower! everyone needs a time out! everyone needs to wash their ass and brush their teeth! in fact, everyone needs to go to the dentist, like, NOW! and boil their clothing! and wipe their goddamned noses! and cover their mouths when they cough! and hack their nicotine- tainted lung biscuits somewhere besides the back of my fucking neck! (deep breath) but now, i am safely surrounding by the gentle hush of a kinkoʼs in downtown denver, and i am freshly showered, and my socks and underwear are clean, and my nalgene bottle is filled with ice and tea and lemon, and i am still tingly from a sweet nightʼs sleep on a torn leather couch owned by the girlfriend of eirean bradley, my host here in the mile-high city. and there is no bus in sight. my god... i just read through my greyhound rant, and i come off as one elitist, classist, snobby, bitchy motherfucker, but the greyhound bus system takes me there, man, and i get my straight, white, middle-class american male panties in a bind every time. and i admit this. i admit that i am a child of extreme privilege who sees the greyhound bus station through lenses rose-tinted by a life made easy by doors flung wide open at my merest approach... but goddamn... i fucking hate greyhound. i got picked up at the bus station by denver cats eirean bradley and paulie lipman, two people i have known for a coupla years. good guys. part of a really awesome denver poetry slam team this year. great team pieces. we hit the apartment where eirean co-habitates with his galpal bethany and were instantly treated to this sweat-slinging dance routine performed by three extremely lithe girls who writhed and posed and jazz-handed their way through songs by prince and madonna. yes, “pour some sugar on me” was played at very high volume, and mid-riffs were exposed, and back fields were set in vigorous motion, and the whole while paulie and eirean and i are just sitting there like the living embodiment of every 14-year-oldʼs wet dream with big toothy embarassed smiles on our faces. at one point, eirean leans over to me and whispers, “goddamn, i love denver.” one of the dancers was eireanʼs girl bethany, and the otherʼs were apparently friends of hers who had spent quality time together in dance studios in their youth, and now, suddenly, boom, they were going through their old routines as we sat on the cracked leather couch and self-consciously pet the two housecats in our laps over and over and over again. it was fucking surreal, to go from the bustling humanity of the 58 bus station to this little capitol hill apartment with three scantily-clad college girls wriggling like snakes in the clenched fist of some southern baptist preacher out to prove his faith in the good lord, undulating and speaking in tongues and rolling his eyes white, lovely snakes snapping inches from his gin blossomed nose. i slept hard. the show is tonight at the mercury cafe. i have two dollars in my pocket and a nalgene bottle full of ice tea. i am happy.

59 i see you sitting there in the library with your nose pressed into a book, and iʼm sitting across from you crossing my fingers hoping youʼll stop and give me a look. the sound of your voice makes my face go full-flush, as red as ron weasleyʼs hair, and i want with all of my being to reach out and take your hand but i do not dare. i used to think that cho chang was the one who was the object of my desire, but now i know my dear youʼre the witch who turns my heart into a goblet of fire.

(chorus) ohhh ohhh, hermione granger i love you i canʼt get you off of my mind climb on the back of my nimbus 2000 weʼll leave hogwartʼs far behind far behind oooooh oooooh oooooh oooooooooooh Harry Potter Emo Love Song sometimes i hide under my invisibility cloak just so i can watch you from afar, and i donʼt care if your parents are muggles, the lights in your eyes shine like stars. if i had the chance to go back to ﬁrst year, iʼll tell you just what i would do... i wouldnʼt take that sorting hat from my head ʻtill it said i belonged to you. and yeah i know “you know who” is out there somewhere trying to kill me with his evil dark arts, but the mark he left of my forehead is nothing compared to the lightening bolt shaped scar on my heart 60 (chorus) ohhh ohhh, hermione granger i love you i canʼt get you off of my mind climb on the back of my nimbus 2000 weʼll leave hogwartʼs far behind far behind oooooh oooooh oooooh oooooooooooh iʼve written you a note on a scroll my dear and tied it to my owl headwigʼs leg, and iʼm hoping my words will convince you to love me, so i donʼt have to fall to my knees and beg. it says if you love me half as much as i love you, meet me at midnight behind hagridʼs shack, and if youʼre not there, iʼll know that you donʼt, and iʼll have to ﬁnd my way back... to being your... best... friend.

(chorus) ohhh ohhh, hermione granger i love you i canʼt get you off of my mind climb on the back of my nimbus 2000 weʼll leave hogwartʼs far behind far behind oooooh oooooh oooooh oooooooooooh

61 open letter to the straight, white, middle-class, american, male poetry slammer who complained with a straight face that he is, in fact, one of the most oppressed persons in the scene.

letʼs start with something small, yes, letʼs start with something easy. you can walk into any drug store and find flesh-coloured band-aids that actually match your flesh colour. you can walk into any bookstore in america and see racks of magazine covers featuring faces that look just like yours. you can walk into any movie theatre or turn on any teevee and know that most of the people on the screen will look just like you and speak your language. you can be stopped by a police officer and be reasonably sure your skin color had nothing to do with it. you can be a student at just about any university in america and not be told the only reason you are there is to fill some kind of quota. you can be fairly certain that the neighborhood where most of the people who look like you live will not be given a cute nickname like “little montana” or “oklahoma town” or “the ghetto.” you can do well in a challenging situation and not be called “a credit to your race.” no one is ever going to preface a question with a phrase like, “as a straight, white, middle-class american male, what do you think about blah blah blah blah” no one will ever say, 20 Reasons Why “you are so well-spoken... for a straight, white, You Should Shut the middle-class american male.” Fuck Up! no one will ever claim to have friends who look like you in order to prove they are open-minded. no one will ever try to gain your trust and approval by saying, “i love straight, white, middle-class american male food! i eat it all the time!” no one will ever try to date you simply because they think you are “exotic.” no one will ever pluck the creative fruits of your artistic labour and 62 those of your culture then take credit for their creation and make more money from them than those who created them. no one will ever claim you deserved to be sexually harassed or raped because of the clothes you wear or how many people you have had sex with. no one is going to leap from a pickup truck and beat you within an inch of your life based on their assumption of who you regularly have sex with. you can be sure that your children will be taught about the existence of their race and gender and their contributions to this society. being a straight, white, middle-class american male ensures that you have probably had access to a higher quality of education, better housing, better health care, better police protection, better fire protection, less air pollution, less water pollution, less crime, and more political representation than any other group in the history of america. if you refuse to admit your overwhelming privilege and how that privilege has helped you in this country, then how in the world can you use that privilege to change this country, and if you are not using your privilege, motherfucker, if you canʼt even admit to that privilege, motherfucker, then you are not just part of the problem, motherfucker, you ARE the problem, and until you are ready to do something about it, then you can shut the fuck up.

63 BIG POPPA E is the tongue-in-cheek stage name for R. Eirik Ott, a performance poet involved in the National Poetry Slam scene since 1996 when he placed third in his ﬁrst slam at the Taos Poetry Circus. Since then, BPE has taken his dynamic blend of performance poetry, stand-up comedy, and dramatic monologue to countless audiences in smoky bars, quirky coffeehouses, funky art spaces, and university auditoriums across the nation. The themes in BPEʼs work shine brightest in his poem The Wussy Boy Manifesto, a playful examination of modern masculinity and gender roles in our society that lead Ms. Magazine to call him “an icon for effeminate males” and The Austin Chronicle to call him “the funniest poet in slam.” His zine series The Wussy Boy Chronicles was nominated to The Utne Readerʼs “Best of the Underground Press Awards 2000” and has lead to worldwide coverage in such places as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), The Daily Express (London), and The Ottowa Citizen (Canada). BPE has been featured on HBOʼs Def Poetry showcase and BETʼs The Way We Do It comedy/variety series. He was also a member of the ʻ99 San Francisco Poetry Slam Team, co-champions of the ʻ99 National Poetry Slam in Chicago and the only undefeated team out of 48 that year. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his bad-ass road kitties Aretha & Thelonious, his trusty grey i-Mac, and his black Ford