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MAKE-8.125x10.875-MCW-MFA_02-01-10.indd 1 2/15/10 3:45:20 PM LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
As a kid, play just is. When you’re older, it’s more complicated, harder to come by, a little more structured, and definitely harder to define.
For our tenth issue, At Play, we called for work about youth, sports, and leisure, as well as work that plays with format, language, and convention. While preparing the issue, we quickly realized the obvious: the seemingly lighthearted sub-themes are all tempered by profound solemnity. In this issue, you will find writing and visual art that plays with the duplicitous reality of what brings us joy: our love for things confronted by our resentment of their eventual death, failure, or disappointment. In these pieces, the nostalgia for youth is checked by the confusion inherent in growing up; games are lost without redemption; and sex can be a contest—or worse, a video in the wrong hands. But there are moments of pure play too—play trance, plays on expectations, and parts played well.
Also, in the spirit of play, we asked past contributors for short pieces considering FIVE. This being our tenth issue and our fifth year, we wanted to celebrate—in print. We’ve had the privilege of publishing scores of outstanding writers and are incredibly grateful for their contributions to MAKE. the perfect gift for writers DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS
FORTHCOMING FEB 2011
“Of the novelists I’ve discovered in translation . . . the three for whom I have the greatest admiration are Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Handke, and Yoram Kaniuk.” —SUSAN SONTAG 9781931520676 · Spiral bound · 6 x 9 · 160 pp · $13.95 also available as a DRM-free ebook · full color “If the prophets of the Old Testament had read Joyce, Kafka, Márquez, Conrad and Gershom Scholem, listened to American class/group discounts available · full of useful info jazz, seen Broadway musicals and heard Lenny Bruce, they Distributed to the trade by Consortium. might have sounded something like Kaniuk.” —NICOLE KRAUSS smallbeerpress.com · facebook.com/smallbeerpress MAKE FALL/WINTER 2010-11 ISSUE #10 AT PLAY
PUBLISHER CREATIVE DIRECTOR MAKE Literary Productions, NFP Johnathan Crawford
MANAGING EDITOR PROOFREADER/COPY EDITOR Sarah Dodson Sarah Kramer
FICTION EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITORS Kamilah Foreman LC Fiore Kate Sommer NONFICTION EDITOR Ellen Placey-Wadey Kathryn Scanlan CONTRIBUTING EDITORS POETRY EDITOR Don De Grazia Joel Craig Steffi Drewes Joseph Drogos REVIEWS EDITOR Katie Geha Mark Molloy Lindsay Hunter Aaron Michael Morales ART PORTFOLIO EDITOR Kathleen Rooney Stacie Johnson INTERNS STORY ART EDITOR Kristin Boyd Caleb Lyons Vicky Lim New from Front Forty Press
Mark McGinnis • Carlo Vinti This volume features the designs/illustrations of artist Mark McGinnis. It includes an interview MAKE is a biannual magazine published by MAKE Literary Productions, NFP, a Chicago-based with the artist and an essay by Carlo Vinti as well 501(c)(3) organization whose purpose is to publish contemporary literary writing, present as a limited edition icon sticker by the artist. readings and integrative arts events, and educate through public forums. Your contributions PaPer $20.00 are appreciated, vital, and tax deductible. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu Visit makemag.com to donate, subscribe, submit, and read online features and updates.
MAKE Literary Productions is funded in part by the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and by the generous donations of individual supporters.
Distributed for trade by Ingram Periodicals and Ubiquity, Inc.
MAKE: A Literary Magazine is indexed in Humanities International Complete.
Writers and artists retain full rights of their material. All other contents copyright 2010 MAKE Literary Productions. Nothing may be reproduced or transmitted in any matter, in whole or in part, without permission.
Proud member of The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
ISBN# 15589315
Printed in Canada
MAKE: At Play 4
INNEW! 2010
Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter
“Lindsay Hunter makes drunk teenagers dry-humping in Cheeto dust compelling literary fare.” — e Boston Phoenix.
“Lindsay’s language is somehow both frightening, gut- bunching, weirdo, home, cover your face, open your mouth, transcendent, and of heaving sound. At times like if Gummo turned into words and date-raped Mary Gaitskill’s language then went to the gas station to buy tissues to clean up the messies and bought you a snack of discount heat lamp chicken.” —Blake Butler, HTMLGiant.com
S , . ----, eBook: ----
Check out our new iPhone App:
an independent publisher of hybrid genres Now FREE on the iTunes store! announces COLOR PLATES Small Fictions by Adam Golaski Color Plates is a museum of stories, curated by a sort-of Mary The Universe Cassatt. Four rooms of Mary’s museum are open to the public, and they are named Éduoard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse- in Miniature Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. Color Plates contains 63 little stories— in Miniature plates—spun from real paintings by these painters. Line upon line, story by Patrick Somerville upon story, the small fictions in Color Plates will engage you, delight you, ““Patrick Somerville is thconsistently inventive and surprising and challenge you to as anyone writing today. I love this book, with its weird art consider the inter- and crazy machines and secret agents and out-of-control love. sections between art It’s as if Optimus Prime has folded himself up into a story and time. collection.” —J. Robert Lennon, author of Castle SEPTEMBER 2010 978-0-9846166-0-2 “ is is a visionary story collection. Somerville inhabits the Paperback, 232 pages minds of his characters so beautifully you can almost picture Fiction him reclining on a couch in their brains.” —Jami Attenberg, $15.95 author of e Melting Season N , . Available at ---- , eBook: ---- www.rosemetalpress.com ABOUT THE COVER Playing is trying. We play for many reasons; to learn, to get stronger, to socialize. Sandra Louise Dyas Caroline Louise Flies!, We play because it’s in our blood, and as life can’t happen without it, nor can art. 2009 Digital Color Print The lines on the cover begin the Lewis Warsh poem CINQ x CINQ, found in the 20” x 20” FIVE! section of this issue. Alone, the line could easily be a shrugged off comment from a kid or a concerned suggestion from one struggling adult to another. Either way, it invites anticipation and the potential for a welcome outcome. By playing, we push our culture, our language, forward—only by trying something new can we find something new, and revel in the mystery in-between.
Nonfiction Fred Sasaki 6 Bball-24 Messages Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch 18 Six Footballs Evelyn Hampton 54 Being Nobody Elizabeth Hildreth 58 These Things Happen Alvilde Falck 84 23 Days of Drinking and Deflowering: A Norwegian High School Tradition dd 98 Lunch Time
Fiction Angela Delarmente 12 Every Moment Is a Chance to Molt Rose Hamilton-Gottlieb 27 Bearing Witness Mabel Yu 44 Our Atrocious Miracle Paul Graham 53 Crazy Season Gina Frangello 64 Vulcan Love Mark Rooke 80 There Are Worse Jobs
Poetry Judith Goldman 20 extension Cord James Tate 38 The New Chatham 39 Our Roles In Life Julia Story 42 Red Town #11 42 Red Town #17 43 Red Town #26 Daniel Khalastchi 50 How I Have Learned To Deal With My Vanity: Tyler Flynn Dorholt 52 Nightmare Directed by Victor Erice Devin King 77 Requiem for Lux Interior/Ducktail for Louis Zukofsky Geoffrey Nutter 91 Dope 92 Martin Heidegger 93 The Tumbleweed Shogunate 94 The Problems of Poetry 95 Beholder Kevin Carollo 110 I Live Near Larry Bittner
Interview Gina Frangello 72 Popular Titles: A Conversation Between Gina Frangello and David Yoo
Reviews Marta Figlerowicz 105 Microscripts by Robert Walser SD Alllison 106 Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno Len Gutkin 107 Ryder by Djuna Barnes Mark Molloy 108 Dear Apocalypse by K.A. Hays / The Smaller Half by Marc Rahe Amelia Klein 109 Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems by Henri Cole
Portfolio Phyllis Bramson 10 Lily van der Stokker 40 John Dilg 62 Liz Nielsen 100
FIVE! Past MAKE Contributors 51-53; 56-57; 88-89; 96-97: Short takes on FIVE in celebration of five years of MAKE
On the Make Joseph Drogos 111 Language at Play: Love, Lust, Savagery
7 MAKE: At Play ======Bball–24 Messages ======by FRED SASAKI ======
Subject: BBALL basketball, though I enjoyed playing in the gym in Date: Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:13 AM college. I do not like basketball plays but I know From: Fred Sasaki
MAKE: At Play 8 From: Fred Sasaki
Date: Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:14 AM Date: Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:38 AM From: Sports Monster Info Desk From: Fred Sasaki
9 MAKE: At Play Bball -24 Messages by Fred Sasaki
Date: Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:01 PM me your credentials. Did your communications master From: Fred Sasaki
What you are doing is pushing me around and that’s Date: Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:34 AM not OK. Here is another example of what you need for From: Fred Sasaki
MAKE: At Play 10 Bball - 24 Messages by Fred Sasaki
cate to you. When I say passing is like magic, I do working together. not only mean Magic Johnson fancy business or techni- F cal moves, but a spirit of sharing, partnership, and teamwork. It takes a village, or in this care a lot ======of passing. When I say cheering is cheering I do not mean only Go Team things, but Go Life things. Like Date: Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 12:13 PM Choose Life in Wang Chung. When I say do not push but From: Sports Monster Info Desk push it I do not mean some kind of ridiculous sex
11 MAKE: At Play PHYLLIS BRAMSON
A Shimmering Ache, 2010 Mixed media and oil on canvas 60” x 60”
MAKE: At Play 12 Loose in the World (but tethered to appearances), 2010 Mixed media and collage on canvas 71” x 72”
Ring Around the Rosies (soon they will all fall down), 2008 Mixed media and oil on canvas 70” x 60”
13 MAKE: At Play Every Moment Is a Chance to Molt by ANGELA DELARMENTE
The Dreamery SFX studio entrance is in a piss-drenched alley- way in downtown LA. Nearby, a transient snacks on McDonald’s French fries, which I suspect he scavenged from the dumpster. He eats, watching me press the studio’s buzzer.
“Yeah?” announces an adolescent voice over the intercom. Behind the static greeting, I hear plucky videogame music, the sounds of successful kills. I look back at the transient and he says I’m making him blush with all my sidelong glances.
I press the intercom again with a little more urgency. “Malcolm Hendrix with Body Farm?”
The lock buzzes and I turn the knob.
The staircase leading up to the Dreamery is lined with movie I consider the smell in the air, the ancient coffeemaker wheezing stills and posters: Bella Lugosi next to The Toxic Avenger beneath in the corner, and decline. a battered poster of I, Zombie. A promo sheet for Surf Nazis Must Die faces the outstretched arms of George Romero zombies claw- “You had a life cast done before?” he says. ing for brains. Held to the wall by a yellowing strip of scotch tape, an autographed photo of Peter Jackson directing a cast of “Once when I was five. An impression of my hand.” I hold my muppets sways with the ceiling vent’s downdraft. The stairs dead- palm up to him. end at reception, where a burning chemical scent, the smell of perms, battles the tang of old coffee. “This process is a little more involved.” He puts a fake rubber ear on the desk between us, along with two ear replicas—one Videogame music descends into a game-over riff, and I hear a in plaster and another in a hard plastic resin. “They came from string of fucks from behind a computer monitor. I look over and these.” He touches three half shells, mother molds as he calls see the Dreamery intern—a thin, pale boy, barely twenty—swap- them, slabs of plaster, alginate, and blue silicone, each with an ping a game controller for a clipboard. “Is it Malcolm Hendricks ear impression. He explains this while popping the ears into the with a C-K?” cavities like plugs into sockets. Then he tells me to sit tight for Bridget, and excuses himself. “With an X.” I can see by looking out the glass window opposite the desk “Like Jimi,” he says and sings a phrase from “Purple Haze.” I had, that the real deal happens in the studio below: the workspace in fact, once been a Hendricks with a C-K, but my fiancé Janna is a grid of injection molding machines, sculpting tables, kilns, had me change it five years ago when I started hitting casting large metal shelving crammed with armatures, buckets and tubs, calls in earnest. head busts of the villainous and the maimed. Monster props and human dummies mingle in the corners. In front of an orbital The kid walks me into an office crowded with an extensive movie sander, a goggled, masked man sands a plastic brain. He grinds collection. I scan the spines of the DVDs and VHS tapes and extrusions from the piece then puts the brain on a table next to a recall having auditioned for some of the worst titles. The kid says collection of internal organs—hearts, livers, stomachs. I scan the Bridget, who’s in charge, will be up in a sec. He offers me coffee. rest of the warehouse and see Terry, the producer of Body Farm,
MAKE: At Play 14 talking with a woman I assume is Bridget. tive opportunities. Impartial third parties like him should hold comment until after the pain of our pasts are exhaustively laid When Terry looks up, I put a hand on the glass and wave. Bridget bare in the shared, safe space before us. I fought the urge to retreat squints at me, her eyes narrowing with recognition. into the false warmth of my inner wounds and meditated on the healing words the counselor suggested I use whenever I felt like I * was losing myself: My ship will come in, the tide will change. I’m the sculptor of my own creation. I’m here because we’re moving into production of Body Farm next week, and Terry wants props ready ASAP. I’ll play Brent * McBent, an incidental character who gets sacked in the first fifteen minutes of the film. You won’t see me again, but you see Downstairs, the Dreamery’s intern has me strip off my shirt and my likeness dressing the set. I’ll be a foot here, a leg there, maybe sit on an old barber’s chair. He pumps his foot on the adjustable a sexy, ravaged torso hanging from a rafter. Parts of my body will bar and I grow in little jerks until I’m eye to eye with Terry. suspend and bob inside huge glass jars of preservative liquid. “Listen here, Mal,” Terry says to me, adjusting the phone piece in My body parts aren’t due for another month, but Terry called his ear. “We’re gonna get you set up, do your life casts so Martin this morning with news that the Dreamery is claiming financial and the FX guys can start designing your head wounds. Don’t difficulty—we need to get my spare parts cast before the studio worry, you’re in good hands with Bridgey.” folds. His call interrupted my relaxation date with Janna. She scheduled pedicures as a punishment for a fight between us that Bridget looks indignant, like I’ve done something to her personally. I’m pretty sure I’m losing. I tug Terry’s fanny pack. “Do you really have to go?” I whisper to “I’m not busy,” I had said to Terry on the phone. Janna tossed him. “She doesn’t look too happy, man. She’s been giving me the me a spiteful glare that quickly dissolved into sadness. She looked frowns ever since I came in.” down at her magazine, then her feet, where the manicurist was painting pink frost on her toes. He smiles at me like I’m five.
She wants me everywhere at once. If I’m working, she wants me “I’m a little claustrophobic,” I say. home; if I’m home, she wants me in character, running through my lines or through some inane acting exercises she found on the “Now he tells me.” Terry’s fanny pack vibrates. He unzips, re- internet. She’s my biggest supporter, agent, friend, workout part- trieves his cell phone, and raises a finger to me. “405’s backed ner, future wife. At our counseling session last week, I admitted up like my colon,” he says into the air. “It’ll take me longer than that sometimes I’m not hungry at night because I grab a snack that.” He disconnects but doesn’t take off his earpiece. on the way home when I stop to gas the car. “Snacks,” Janna said, nearly spitting. Bridget pushes a metal surgical cart across the floor and parks it a foot away from me. I feel like I’m in for a back alley root canal “Look,” I said. “Traffic sucks. Sometimes I’m hungry. Sometimes from Dr. Giggles. The black tarp beneath us seems dramatic and I get something to tide me over.” unnecessary. I glance up at the ceiling, which is so high I can’t bring it into focus. “Like hotdogs?” she said. “Like Lil’ Debbie?” The scar on the corner of her mouth turned pink. Terry moves behind me, massages my shoulders. “Listen Bridge, take care of Mal here. He’s a little claustrophobic.” “No, like salad or some nuts.” Bridget ties the strings of her black rubber apron. “We should be She unclasped her purse, pulled out the Honey Buns wrapper through with him after rush hour, if he’s lucky.” I thought I’d taken out of the car last week. Our counselor sat back, sucking the end of his pen. Janna monologued about how Soon as Terry’s out the side door, Bridget turns to the guy who , 2007, Oil on panel, 0 3/4” x 10 3/4” 0 3/4” on panel, Oil , 2007, it won’t be her fault if my fat ass shows me up on the big screen. was shaving down plastic organs. “Duvall,” she calls him. “Put It isn’t her fault that I have all these secrets. the kidney aside and help me prep.”
I reminded her that I’m not overweight and never have been, and She shakes my headshots from an envelope and different angles of
Ghost of the Burn Patient Burn the of Ghost if she’s looking to be my mother, too bad, job’s taken. I said to me go scattering across the surface of the cart: a mug shot, a three- the counselor, “Help me out here.” He offered a few platitudes quarter, a Dutch angle. My profile flutters to the floor, and when I’m pretty sure he lifted from one of his self-help pamphlets: this Bridget picks it up, her hair parts, revealing a faded tattoo of two
C. J. Mathern, Mathern, C. J. was my and Janna’s time to expunge. We needed to fully seize emo- entwined snakes on the back of her neck. I know those snakes.
15 MAKE: At Play Every Moment Is a Chance to Molt by Angela Delarmente
We met a few years ago at an after party in a producer’s West hands my negative mold to Bridget, and like a nursemaid, she Hollywood condo. I had been an extra in his film,The Defilers—a carries it away. Bridget would make a perfect pod person for Body dumb jock who took the foot end of a large cross in his wicked Farm, a better lead than Ecstasy Jones, who is crossing over from eye. I swayed up to her while she was spreading a pat of stinky porn to B-movie features. Terry says the problem with Ecstasy is Schloss on a cracker, but the cracker crumbled under the weight she doesn’t know how to be creepy-sexy. He’s got her watching The of the knife. She introduced herself as an effects artist on the film. Stepford Wives and The Village of the Damned so she might learn “I usually have a steadier hand than this,” she said, then shoved to tone down the pleasure in her face and the sway in her walk. the cheese and cracker into her mouth. Duvall hands me a towel. “We’re moving onto your front now. It turned into one of those debauched and theatrical evenings, the You’ll need to strip.” Folded in the towel is a pair of speedos, fresh- kind where you find someone lonely and sober enough to listen sealed in plastic. “If you’re wearing boxers, they’ll have to go. ” to your problems. Where you pace the expanse of a studio exec’s patio, saying yes to whatever substance comes your way. And the I change in a toilet stall while the intern hangs out by the sinks someone you meet puts her hand on your shoulder and you make and shares his career trajectory with me. He’s through with the your move with her and end up in a cool, dark guest room, which Dreamery—his last interview at Industrial Light and Magic went is already occupied by someone else—a fellow extra—passed out well, and he’s pretty sure he landed a junior design position. “I’m on the corner chaise. So you undress, trusting the other dude isn’t really excellent at digital fires and explosions,” he says. going to wake up and take cell phone pictures of you. And even if he did, you say out loud, who’s going to care about a couple He’s still talking when I come out of the stall. I pull stray rice pills of B-movie nobodies? You’re immediately sorry for saying this of cured alginate from my sideburns, wash my hands, and ask because you know how much she wants to work in the movies, what he does around here. and you recall all the things you endured just to get your shit jobs. “Coffee, phones, sweeping, fake blood. Just finished about fifty sug- You don’t think of your girlfriend at all. Before the party, she’d ar-glass beer bottles last week.” He breaks an imaginary beer bottle found a phone number in your dress pants. She didn’t believe on the edge of a sink. “I’d rather work on a computer, though.” your explanation, so you went stag for the night and left her at home to pout. Above the sinks, an autographed photo of gore-effects guru Tom Savini looks down on us while gluing latex facial burns on an Bridget’s eyes are on my engagement ring, and I’m afraid to ask if actor. she remembers me. “You’ll have to take that off,” she says. “Amen,” I say. I’d done some unsavory things myself. My first * summer in LA, I sold ecstasy pills at raves for my second cousin Pelón and his wife Guapa. My second summer, I caught the clap Duvall has fixed and prepped a bald cap on my head and has after a humiliating stint in porn. glazed my eyebrows with Vaseline. The last thing I see before I shut my eyes, and Bridget creams my face with a handful of Back in the studio, the barber’s chair has been replaced with a alginate, is the wall of power tools. massage table. Duvall takes my towel and asks me to lie on my back. “We’re gonna do you in pieces,” he says, dipping a paint Amoebas of light play under my closed lids. I feel the soft pres- brush into a bucket of grease. While he glazes me, he makes an sure of hands working over me. “Don’t worry,” Duvall says. offhanded joke about needing a lot of clay if they want to do this “This stuff is safe, quick setting, won’t hurt your skin.” He relays Body Farm project right. the process: They’ll bury my face, neck, shoulders in alginate, then mummify me with plaster bandages for support until the * goop sets. Afterward, they’ll be able to cast my doubles from the mother mold. My face itches. I start twitching, and Duvall tells The pressure of the mold on my torso and hips is oddly comfort- me to fight it. ing, a warm, sleeping body on top of me. Bridget and Duvall remove the mother mold from my front just before I nod off. The Nothing but darkness. I reflexively go over my mantras and try alginate is soft and white—hard-boiled egg whites held firm by a not to imagine the alginate seeping into my nostrils and lungs, crisp, plaster shell. I stretch, clean up with a damp rag, and lie on drowning me like the stuff in the movie The Stuff. my stomach for the next phase.
After my cocoon sets, Duvall says, “Still with us?” I give him a Bridget stands over my impressions drying on the floor, while thumbs-up. He leans me forward and gingerly taps the edges of Duvall greases my cracks, “undercuts” he calls them. He’s got the the mold from my face. The alginate sucks away from my skin relaxed, small-talk skills of a cab driver. He says Body Farm is like one of Janna’s glycerin beauty masks. Once I’m free, Duvall one of the Dreamery’s last projects. The studio’s been operating
MAKE: At Play 16 Every Moment Is a Chance to Molt by Angela Delarmente spottily since 2000, and nine years later, the employees are still what she looked like three years ago—if she was prettier, heavier, without health bennies or full-time work. To make the rest of his or happier, or if she moved as aggressively as she does now, flip- rent and bills, Duvall does makeup and hair on the side. He says ping through a magazine like she’s trying to hurt the pages. I the Dreamery is old school. look at the creature head busts around me; they are beautifully executed circus freaks, grotesque government experiments. For “If you stuck most of us in front of a 3-D program, we wouldn’t all I know they are alive and exceptionally adept at keeping still. know what to do,” he says leaning into me. He’s older than I thought—I can see gray in his hair and laugh lines bracketing Bridget cores an apple with a pocketknife and eyes me like a his mouth. “I used to think that drawing with a mouse was like convict in a prison yard. She slips an apple slice in her mouth. drawing with a pop can, but I’ve been taking classes. I might be late on the digital-effects train, but no problem. I’m an optimist. “I was gonna say, I know you. Three years ago in West Hollywood. Not Bridget though,” he says, glancing back at her. “She’s taking The Defilers, remember?” I shirk a little, as if she might stab me. it hard.” Her cheek bulges where her tongue runs over her teeth.
Maybe she felt her ears burning. She comes back to us and says, She doesn’t tut or roll her eyes like I’m expecting. She nods and “Let’s get Adonis’s back end, then we’ll break for lunch.” says she’s seen me in Knifed! and Exorcist, the Musical. “Was that you on The Learning Channel? You were on that show—Extreme * Disease?”
I go solo to a nearby Japanese restaurant. The others had brown- “Yeah, syphilis in the eyes guy,” I say, then ask how she’s doing. bag lunches and were watching their budgets. I eat sashimi and a California roll, and look out the restaurant window. The morning “The Dreamery’s ditching effects, turning our resources to pros- news was right. Today, a smoggy shade of ochre dusts everything. I’m thetics.” looking through a sepia lens at a moment that has already happened. “Will you stay on?” * “It pays well.” I return to an empty studio. Bridget is in her office, and Duvall is upstairs playing video games with the intern. I walk around the The night we met, we talked mostly of work, only I found myself workspace, my footfalls cutting the silence, and notice a thick telling her things I barely shared with Janna. Like the pornos I’d chain dangling in a corner. All that’s missing from it is a meat done, and how awful it was to be considered strictly in terms of hook. When I step back from the chain, I stumble on the corner stamina, thrust, and angles. I was so distraught after my first go of a wood plank. There’s something on top, hidden by a tarp and that I threw up on my co-star. I was hoping for a courtesy towel a sign that reads, “Don’t fucking touch this.” and a glass of water, but the director said to keep rolling, they might use the footage. There’s a market for that sort of thing. Of course, I look. Bridget had said that when she started at the Dreamery, the A door grunts and shuts. I drop the tarp before I have a chance owner brought his nephew to the studio. The boy was eighteen to see what’s underneath. Bridget marches up to me with a and had just come back from boot camp—he was a marine with half-eaten sandwich in one hand. “What the fuck?” she says deployment orders for Iraq. He wanted a full-body life cast so if and points at the sign. She smells like clay with an undertone of something happened he could have an accurate prosthetic made. onion, probably from the sandwich. His body was the first project under Bridget’s charge. During that time, she’d seen the young boys coming out of the downtown “Sorry. I was curious—” VA hospital in wheel chairs, on crutches, their clothes pinned over missing limbs. After having been so close to the nephew, “It’s a clay body. It needs to stay moist,” she says. considering him in terms of surfaces and undercuts, she began to have nightmares about him. “What about this?” I say, touching the chain. I ask her now if the nephew ever came back. “He’s in Afghanistan,” She looks annoyed. “It’s for drying parts.” she says blankly.
I think of jerky. Human jerky. The following silence makes me panic. I say, “You’re not upset with me, are you? You’re not mad I didn’t call?” She moves over to a small table and continues eating her lunch. It’s quiet and all I hear is her chewing. I don’t remember exactly “Every girl in LA has a Malcolm in her back pocket,” she says,
17 MAKE: At Play Every Moment Is a Chance to Molt by Angela Delarmente needling the tip of her knife on a nick in the table. “I haven’t been zine covers, or starring roles. I went to the bathroom, shredded weeping over it.” and flushed Bridget’s business card. When I came back out, I asked Janna to marry me. “I didn’t mean to suggest that—” I say. * “The Defilers was my first film credit. Seeing you, and with the Dreamery closing, I’m just reminded of the beginning.” “So that’s it,” I say, pulling gummed bits of alginate from my leg hairs. “You guys are really closing shop?” The upstairs door opens, and Duvall and the intern shuffle-step down the staircase. “We’re selling a lot of the older equipment,” Bridget says. She turns away, ties up her henna brown hair, and when her T-shirt “We’ll get to your limbs in fifteen,” Bridget says. She puts away lifts I see the tramp stamp tattoo on the small of her back. A her pocketknife and tosses the apple core into a trash bin. name, Jerome, in cursive. I remember her naked in the dark, seeing the curve of the J, the kick of the E, but not being able * to read it.
We made a pact on the night we met, which was spurred by our “You’re not gunning for blockbusters anymore?” failure to have sex. Once she had taken off her clothes, I started sob- bing. Though I tried to assure her that it wasn’t about her, I couldn’t She shakes her head. “I’m switching to prosthetics. Or dentures. stop crying, and so she started crying. She pulled up her panties, I was offered a job.” and we cocooned ourselves under the silk duvet on the king-sized bed, nipped from a bottle of warm Veuve Clicquot. We shared a I must look disappointed because she says, “It’s all right. It’s mutual, liquored confidence in our pledge: starting tomorrow, we’d good pay.” trek the summit toward our dreams—me, on the screen with a leading role, a clothed role; her, behind it, working on blockbusters. I play with the tender, wrinkled skin on my finger where I wear my engagement band. I didn’t want a ring but Janna bought In the morning, the sun pushed into the guest room like a one, insisted it was only fair. At our last counseling session, after beckoning hand, and I woke with my fingers skating over her throwing the Honey Buns wrapper in my face, she said she was snake tattoo. She told me what it meant—an Egyptian symbol, thinking of home—Sitka, Alaska. if I remember right, of healing and regeneration. I overstated its auspiciousness. The third party who was passed out in the room We’d met through a weekend Improv class my third summer in was gone, replaced by a maid who left two two-liter bottles of LA, but we didn’t hook up until after we bumped into each other water from France on the nightstand. along the Walk of Fame. She was on Hollywood Boulevard stand- ing on Roger Corman’s star. Among a cast of orange tans, she was There was no fanfare when we parted. No kiss, though I said I looking Pacific Northwest pale in pink gortex and Carhartt work would call. boots, a bouquet of casting call fliers and maps to stars’ homes clutched in her hands. I asked if she’d seen Corman’s movie Gas- Back home, I found Janna in bed, slipping in and out of a valium s-s, which led us to post-apocalypses and how everyone in the haze with a stitched and bandaged mouth. She was surrounded movie over twenty-five dies. I said, “So, in that world, we’re safe.” by her restaurant co-workers who turned to me in unison and And she said, “But we better hurry and start living.” looked at me like I was the perp. They said she had decided to attend the after party, but got lost on the way. When she stopped Three months later we were shacked up. She shed the LA newbie for directions her attacker came from behind and demanded her vibe and started using bronzer. She glows now, but not in the way purse. She hit him in the head with the cheap beaded clutch she used to, back when I used to call her Snow White from Sitka. she’d bought on discount in the garment district. The attacker loosened her front teeth, cut a comma into her face at the corner “So you’re married now,” Bridget says. She starts piling plastic of her mouth. She had to bow out of a modeling job she’d just dishes and brushes into the industrial sink. landed—a print and television ad campaign for a conglomerate of Southern California dentists. “Engaged,” I say. I ask after her status.
Once Janna was able to speak without tearing her stitches, she “I have a kid, Jerome. He’s four.” said if I was messing around—if I had plans to continue doing whoever I was with that night—God help her. Guilt clouded me “Like your tattoo.” like a head cold, and I didn’t know what to do about my part in her dashed model plans. No dental ads for her, no Vogue maga- She smoothes down her shirt. “That was his father’s name first.”
MAKE: At Play 18 Every Moment Is a Chance to Molt by Angela Delarmente
I’d thought she was an unattached woman when we first met. in the dark with the exit sign casting sickly green light on our I want to press her for more, for the sake of conversation, but foreheads. I hear him peep a little gasp. either I don’t know how or I don’t really care. I leave it alone. “What’s going on?” Bridget says. “What’s wrong with you?” * The lights are back on. The intern can hardly spit it out. The molds are done. Duvall and the intern filled my bust mold with Plaster of Paris, and now there I am, a disembodied head “I didn’t get the job,” he says. He pushes open the exit door. and shoulders drying on a sculptor’s Lazy Susan. When Terry comes back at the end of the day to check up, he reaches over to “Ah, Christ,” Bridget says. She puts her hand on his shoulder. touch my plaster eyelid, but Bridget swats at his hand and says “Andrew—” no, it’s not ready. She walks him through the rest of the process, talks as if I’m not even there. I imagine my body passing through “My name is Andre,” the intern, Andre, says. “I’ve been working unfamiliar hands. My bone-dry pieces are tooled and gaps along here for four months.” my surface are filled, repaired. Bridget drags out a large fiberglass shell—the torso of the nephew in Afghanistan—as a way to show Once we’re out of the Dreamery and in the alley my phone vi- Terry what’s next. They’ll construct a second mold, bring it to life brates with Janna’s text message. It reads: Don’t wait up, cause I’m with an injection of silicone. If Terry wants it, they’ll build a full, not coming back. I knew this plot point was coming, but the wind rubbery replica of my body. I imagine my double standing in for still leaves me, and the ground doesn’t fail to drop away. I steady me, marrying Janna, landing my roles, washing my car. Bridget myself against the building. Andre says he’ll have to work at says life casting is a back-and-forth, positive-negative process. Kinko’s and supplement his income by selling his ass on Sunset. She tosses out some metaphors: nesting dolls, snow angels, pupas Maybe I’ll join him there. We’ll start a gang of boy whores. Los in cocoons. But really, when the magic’s all over, I’ll be pushed Tristes Vampiros. into the corner with the marine, the monster props, and all the rest of those dummies. “Come on,” Bridget says to him. “I’ll buy you a drink and we’ll trash-talk George Lucas.” * They start down the alley, heads close like the snakes on Bridget’s Janna isn’t picking up, which isn’t like her. Whenever I call she tattoo. “Good luck, Mal,” she says, glancing back. predictably answers between the second and third rings. I look up at the moon, a distant stage light. No stars, only two On his way out Duvall says, “Keep me in mind.” At first I think straight arms—searchlights—crisscrossing a sky that’s never dark he’s flirting, but then he hands me his business card and I know enough. When I hear a scuffle behind the dumpsters, I think of he’s just networking. “Call me when you need face and hair.” Janna reading out loud from my acting books: Don’t be afraid of the smoke or the mirrors. Every moment is a chance to molt. Terry has gone, and the intern is upstairs taking a personal call from Industrial Light and Magic. I take my time gathering my She is bluffing. She won’t go farther than our doorstep, our things, and watch Bridget studying my head bust on the counter. street block. Sitka is too far to return, and she is like a baby bird She hasn’t said a word to me in the past hour. handled by humans, spurned by her mother. They won’t know her. They won’t have her back. “Maybe we can exchange numbers? Get lunch?” I say, just to hear my voice. I could gun down the 405-carpool lane and maybe make it home before she leaves. We wouldn’t miss a beat. We’d be in bed, as She looks from the fake me to the real me. “No, thanks,” she says, usual, by midnight. Or I could go the other way—toward Bridget smiling. “But I’ll be working on your model all week, so we’ll and Andre, who have turned the corner. kind of be having lunch every day.” She looks back at the fake me. Her eyes catch something on the ground: my engagement I hear tin against gravel; subwoofers dropping twenty hertz in a ring. She picks it up and I take it from her, slip it onto my finger. faraway car trunk. I start down the alley and break into a sprint. The ring feels tight. If Janna were here, she’d say I had too much I channel everyone who has ever failed at trying. I channel Brent soy sauce at lunch. McBent. This is how he begins to die: in an alleyway under a fire escape. A nimble figure jumps on his back, he falls to the ground, The intern’s looking like a lonely, defeated vampire—blanched his head is bagged and his arms are bound. He’s half dead when face and pink around the eyes. With his trench coat grazing his he arrives at the warehouse, but he’s still alive when they cut him ankles, he seems to glide toward us. He says he’s ready to close to pieces. M shop, clicks off the main studio lights, and for a second we’re
19 MAKE: At Play Six Footballs from Conversations over Stolen Food by JON COTNER AND ANDY FITCH
We recorded forty-five-minute conversations for thirty straight days around New York City. Half these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store which, for legal reasons, we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park, and a Tribeca parking garage. What follows is a piece recorded in Jon’s then-new room. Weeks of talking in public had worn us out, so we retired to a calm domestic setting for the night.
11:02 p.m. Friday, January 26 A: Really? Jon’s room J: Yeah, I crossed two… J: When you lived on East 16th would you head down to East River Park? A: Does…
A: Yes. J: gigantic astroturf fields.
J: Did you like it? A: Did you pass near a base of the Williamsburg Bridge?
A: Um I’d enter near 14th Street, which is (or was) oppressive. J: Yes. You’d follow fences along FDR Drive... A: I’d always thought those were soccer fields. J: Ooh. J: I found baseball fields and a soccer field. One baseball field A: Fence would sprawl and sag down towards you. Around has yet to be covered. The soccer field’s turf, and one of two barbed-wire I’ll picture eyeballs getting snagged. I don’t know if baseball… you do this. I’d—you do? A: Consistent use could tear them up. On my ride from the J: The thought has crossed my mind. airport (on the bus to Grand Central), I saw a soccer game lit by two very dim, very high park lamps. Grass lay spotted like A: Freud considered it castration anxiety. He associates eyes with a ballroom floor, and the game impressed me more for that penises since both project into the world. reason.
J: Well yeah, that seems a valid interpretation. But soon we J: This… should walk along… A: Seemed more fun. A: And confront our… J: An official game, or pick-up soccer game? J: We’d we’ll see if you still feel the fear; perhaps you’ve tri- umphed over it. Today I cut down to East River Park. I’d gone A: Two teams wore different colors. my first night after moving into this place and noticed big grassy baseball fields. J: Ok.
A: I remember. A: And I salute Ringer Park in Boston…
J: Though in morning sun I saw astroturf. J: Oh…
MAKE: At Play 20 A: for its shabby urban glamour—for making me appreciate J: Yes and one came close to me, which I tried throwing broken glass in parks. back to him.
J: Yeah, to today as I crossed astroturf: staring toward the A: Did it not spiral? Domino Sugar factory and 67 Metropolitan, your old Brooklyn building on Metro… J: It didn’t spiral; I’ve never been good with a football.
A: [Muffled] cup of sugar still lodged in my lungs. A: No, nor nor…
J: You can see the old building… J: My dad…
A: Yeah sure. A: I.
J: from those fields. J: tried teaching me in our driveway. Though the ball never fit my hand properly. My dad was the college quarterback and and A: I’ve seen it from planes. had an impressive gun. He’d fire a ball and I’d hear it whistle through the air. J: It’s prominent. A: I’ve always hated people firing the ball—the football, the A: Have... baseball. I even took it personally.
J: But I listened to a high-school kid punt a football. He went J: Well my dad, yeah, he wouldn’t fire this ball violently. He he’d through four series of punts and...place-kicks? Is that what throw it like any good football player. they’d… A: That’s what I’m saying: the pretense you need to throw a ball A: With a tee? fast or…
J: Correct. J: Though…
A: Kick-off um yeah, place place-kick? Or… A: [Muffled] potential “interference.”
J: Kick-offs? We’ll figure out for the edited version. J: he didn’t throw as fast as he could. He’d wanted to set an ideal for me, so I had something to aim for. A: Oh I think it’s better to to read—I’d much prefer: “Place- kicks? Kick…kick-offs?” A: I re…
J: True. I like how Schuyler includes mistakes in Vermont Dia- J: But… ries. He’ll think he sees a bird moving, then realize it’s the leaf… A: member picking hand… A: Hmm. J: he might also lob the ball. J: blown from a branch. And his poem acquires immediacy by…well since it includes mistakes and revision. A: fuls of grass.
A: It, yeah connotes presence. J: I’d enjoy time spent with my dad on weekends. Still I gave up contact sports for tennis. My mom drove me to tennis courts. J: It does. [Pause] But so the kid had a strong foot. He kept punting into wind. A: Right you’ve…your communal domestic pleasure turned into individual, isolated, specialized practice. A: He would retrieve his ball? Or kicked many… J: And it’s pretty much the same today, though this life’s less J: He’d brought six footballs. expensive. M
A: You counted?
21 MAKE: At Play extension Cord by JUDITH GOLDMAN
& say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry.
Virginia Woolf, diary (Dec. 31, 1932)
All that one can give is what is going to happen, which may have little to do with a present that you can grasp.
Avital Ronell, Finitude’s Score
And why should they bother to help with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it’s nothing but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whisper: “I have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you something, if only I had it.” Nevertheless, in the end, they lie down in a meadow to weep bitterly over their “stupid greenhorn’s existence.”
Giorgio Agamben, “The Assistants”
Because, in the event, if you do not want to, you won’t.
George Oppen, “Route”
(What will I do?) ______S
Mary Kelly, POST PARTUM DOCUMENT
MAKE: At Play 22 In this poem
Let us part
And if I let you go, should it not have something of its own?
You will continue to receive the same as before
We won’t see each other again
To which I held myself
cupboard’s bare, not e- ven a grain of rice well, one,
only one grain of rice
The control text
Choked by undergrowth Int- erior to words/Words torn from sense, then fetch the means from there,
Deleted vicinities, bitch who eats her young
23 MAKE: At Play extension Cord by Judith Goldman
Do your share
Go through with it Do it
I have a single fin and swim in circles
I’m working on it, im- itating work
I went in and did it like a job In a single take
Leaves it open;
What it will come to, or Wondering what has become of it
It falls to you
To those who come looking for it, At the hands of:
When inner speech is silenced, Left out of the explanation
(ivy clings to the Oak,
Just get it over with!)
If it is written Sunset, or Sunset’s Jagged
Make do.
This is not to be looked at closely, not asked to Serve concepts
MAKE: At Play 24 extension Cord by Judith Goldman
Do not give it sustained attention
Snap it off, like the end of a bean
de-fragged and the weight of robes, A blur in language clings
To the bare Outside of this world
Ahead of a fullness, ask- ing it of you,
Shower of meteors on the dirty wall
A Little Chestnut
grape sits sullen, looking sour behind every cave, there is another Deeper cave
Clothes that leave us bare
I lost my cellphone &
I lost my cellphone &
My tongue cries out like a living thing Or A little gilt-edged book
Wresting the lower genre It hatched and set free
My sparrow is go for to keep his cut Unneth, I cast mine
25 MAKE: At Play extension Cord by Judith Goldman swallowing my tail
Or the rental pair
Come what may
A goose spoke with a human voice
The voice laid golden ears
I hid in a pile of leaves and slept
Taken merely for Firmament
this is just to say
I am giving you back the dialectic
From the outset
to cry)(before the prick my Now)(inside yours
I run)(after (something I am not sure)(about it
Yes, come,)(we must pick up speed
MAKE: At Play 26 extension Cord by Judith Goldman
If 6 was 9
Give me scope
The bruce
Rag picker Drawing in the air with a finger
Of this oft-consulted page
Where dost you take your Lodgings
Let me draw up the bill
Closing the door behind (keeping tabs)
Meaning devours,
Grows dissipated and bloat
An ill-gotten gain
Backwardsness can be looked back
Worked out on a piece of paper At
treeline, atremble Trying to get close to the fire
clenched fist or open palm?
Reeling back the string without its kite or, Door, with a slit for the mail Minus truth
27 MAKE: At Play extension Cord by Judith Goldman
The rest missing, too,
Veteran
[untitled]
sea has no score behind the roar
Father on the beach, calling to the referents, stay on the shore
You must
You must no longer wander
Your grave is here ”
“
[YOUR DATA HAS BEEN SENT
[TRACKBACKS CLOSED
MAKE: At Play 28 Bearing Witness by ROSE HAMILTON-GOTTLIEB
Georgia took a rare taxi to Boston’s Westin ing, feeding, changing, and comforting balding head, like pink wings. As she took Hotel, arriving with an hour to spare. She patients—from newborn babies on their his offered hand, she had the fleeting impres- waited in the lobby while the other tour way in to ancient babies on their way out. sion of a plastic angel her mother had once members finished breakfast in the din- From delivering mothers to irascible con- brought home from a fair, won by tossing ing room and emerged from the elevators valescents, to compliant—and not so com- a dime into a saucer. It had rested near the wheeling their luggage. Her own suitcase, a pliant—victims of dementia. But while she soap dispenser at the kitchen sink, to bless relic with hard sides and snap closures, its lacked the usual symptoms suffered by the those who served by doing the dishes, she key stored safely in her purse, was beside elderly, Georgia wanted to be known this always said, and as a reminder that all work her, where her foot kept casual contact. week as just another old lady, someone not is sacred. Georgia wondered where that little to be called on in a medical emergency. guy was now, probably in the box in the attic This fall-color pilgrimage through New where she had stuffed the bulk of her moth- England and Canada was not the vacation She chose a window seat near the front and er’s angel collection. Georgia had adored her Georgia would have chosen for herself, but dumped her purse and sweater on the aisle mother, but she’d had enough of those an- then she would have been at a loss to choose side. If her luck held out, she could enjoy gels, who were not very good at delivering. any vacation. Her benefactor was the grate- the tour in relative solitude, something she ful daughter of a recently deceased patient. craved whenever she was between patients. “Filbert Remington,” her seatmate said, “You’ll be with people your own age,” the She watched out the window to make sure lighting up his well-worn face with a smile woman had gushed as she handed Georgia the bus driver stowed her suitcase in the that usually opened doors, although he the brochure and accompanying vouchers, hold, then turned her attention to the man would not have thought there was a door along with her paycheck. “Who knows what with the clipboard who was checking off here worth opening. It was a habit, just as you might bring back,” she had added, with names and herding the other passengers Georgia’s warm countenance and cordiality that coy smile and arched expression Geor- onto the bus. They didn’t look in too bad were habits, tools as necessary to her profes- gia had long experience in disregarding. It a shape, if you didn’t count the one folding sion as the thermometer and blood-pressure meant, “Don’t you ever dream of romance?” wheelchair and a walker being loaded into sleeve she always carried, in the bag now No, she did not. the luggage compartment beneath the bus. stowed, to her annoyance, overhead.
The Sights for Seniors Tours bus arrived As each passenger made his or her way down Once the bus driver had maneuvered and Georgia was approached by a man with the aisle, Georgia stared vacantly ahead or through city traffic and they were on the a clipboard, a youngster of about fifty, tall out the window. The seat beside her was open road, the tour guide rose from the and lean, with a good head of brown hair. still empty when the driver leapt into his front seat, microphone in hand. “Welcome, On the front of his T-shirt was a picture of seat and the door snapped shut with that leaf peepers,” he beamed, with a practiced, a human brain with the curious lettering, loud hydraulic sound she associated with brittle cheerfulness in keeping with the “TIME = BRAIN CALL 911.” She hoped her usual commute to and from work. At crystalline autumn air. “I hope you have all this wasn’t a comment on the condition of that moment, she felt a tap on her shoulder checked your camera batteries and stocked the other tour members. and looked up into a wizened face. A quick up on film, for this year nature has pre- glance told her there were a few seats avail- pared her color palette well, following am- “Are you joining us today, young lady?” able, and she felt like pointing this out. In- ple spring and summer rains with an early he said. stead, she put on her mask of detachment, frost. I’ll just start with a quick review of our which included what most people took to be tour. Today we’ll travel along the coasts of Indifferent to the condescending compli- a warm smile, and reached for her things. New Hampshire and Maine to Bar Harbor ment, Georgia gave him her name and al- for our two-night stay. On day three, we’ll lowed him to give her suitcase over to the “Allow me,” he said, and before she could get motor through the colorful Maine woods bus driver. She took longer than was needed a firm grip on her belongings, he had hoisted to Quebec City and the fabulous Chateau to board in order to set the tone for how she them into the overhead compartment. He Frontenac. From Quebec City, we’ll take expected to be treated. With deference, the followed it up with his gear, which included two days to meander through the St. Law- special consideration due the elderly, if not a daypack and a camera bag with a folding rence Valley, the Laurentian Mountains, and the infirm. tripod sticking out the top. over the Ottawa River to Montreal, known as ‘The Paris of North America.’ Then, on Georgia was somewhat elderly, but far from He was an odd-looking sort, barely five feet the way home we’ll journey through Ver- infirm, having spent her career lifting, dress- tall, with large ears that stuck out from his mont’s Green Mountains and finally the Photography by Johnathan Crawford by Photography
29 MAKE: At Play Bearing Witness by Rose Hamilton-Gottlieb beautiful Connecticut River Valley.” I’ll pass out some maps for those of you who amiable smiles and strong gentle arms was a want to trace our route as we go along.” woman indifferent to the sufferings she was This brief outline of the trip left Georgia called on to relieve. She had often lamented feeling a trifle stunned. Not that the scope “Margaret and I always enjoy maps,” Filbert to herself that she should have been a sur- of the trip was news to her; she had read said, opening his and spreading it over his geon, which paid more. the brochure and been much taken by the lap and half of Georgia’s. She leaned slightly photo of abandoned crutches at the Shrine toward the window to reinforce her personal Most of that first day was experienced from of Ste Anne outside Quebec City. But she space; at the same time, she couldn’t help the comfort of the bus. When the guide hadn’t really absorbed how far the cord that watching as he traced with a finger the yel- wasn’t illustrating points of interest along bound her to home would be stretched. She low highlighted line that went up, up, and the route, Filbert talked. He told Georgia had hardly been out of Boston her whole up, until it fell off the map somewhere below stories of his travels, abroad and at home, of life, and now, at her age, to travel through Quebec City. She was about to comment on his wife’s recent passing, and his subsequent all those states. Had he listed four? And a the distance when she caught sight of the need to keep busy and be among people. She foreign country, too, where they might not tour guide on the way back to his seat. The was grateful he didn’t linger on the details speak her language. It made her a little fear- back of his T-shirt elaborated on the front. of his wife’s death but found it odd that he ful, an emotion Georgia had arranged her “TIME = BRAIN,” it repeated, then listed spoke of her in the present tense. “Margaret life to avoid. But she was also just a little ex- the major symptoms of a stroke: “1. Arm enjoys traveling by bus. Margaret loves most cited, which may account for what was now numbness, 2. Dizziness, 3. Weakness.” And of all, the road less traveled.” And in praise peeking out through the serenity of her gaze. again, “CALL 911.” Filbert caught her eye of his recent hotel breakfast: “Margaret loves Something that suggested to her seatmate and shook his head. “What do you think? French toast.” Indeed, they were an hour there might after all be a door here worth Does that T-shirt save lives or cause a dan- into the journey before Georgia realized he opening. For she had a handsome face and gerous rise in the collective blood pressure?” was a widower. She had been glancing about was obviously no taller than he. And per- the bus, trying to guess which of the women sonally, he preferred his women with a little “I suppose he means well,” she said. In her could be Margaret, and was about to ask, upholstery. opinion, the shirt was appalling, but she when he mentioned that a certain landscape found it difficult to be anything but diplo- outside the window resembled the place he Georgia was a broad stump of a woman, cut matic. Sometimes she wondered if she had intended to scatter his wife’s ashes. Georgia off at about four feet, eleven inches, but with any strong feelings about anything. Since recoiled at this idea. She had never been able a girth that suggested deep spreading roots. her mother had left her alone, there had to figure out why people clung to remains Her naturally curly hair had been allowed been no one to whom it was safe to express so, having their bodies dressed up as if for a to turn bright silver, which had actually im- them, or who would care if she did. party, or clinging to their relatives’ ashes. She proved her looks, having replaced a mop of had deposited her mother’s in the garden she dull brown curls. Not that she cared. Nor Georgia had never married, although she had loved, with no fanfare. did she take much note of her flawless skin survived a number of marriage propos- and smooth brow and fine bone structure, als, all from grateful patients, who, having “There’s a flat rock on the edge of a small lake which all her life had caused others to sigh, recovered, wished to remain in the safe or- where we picnicked early in our marriage,” in qualified admiration, “A pity, isn’t it? And bit of her skillful embrace. She was always he said. “Margaret was convinced that was such a pretty face.” astonished to learn these would-be lovers where our daughter Janice was conceived.” had believed she cared. For The guide was holding up a bottle of water. Georgia’s singular talent as “Your comfort, of course, is our chief con- a caregiver was not compas- cern,” he said. “We have on board plenty of sion but detachment, which water, energy bars, and juice for those un- was why she was able to see expected low blood sugar moments. And in each and every case through the back of the bus is a bathroom. Of course to the end, winning unsolic- we encourage you to wait until we make one ited perks from grateful fami- of our frequent comfort stops, but it’s there lies. She saw a need, whatever if you need it.” He paused to reinforce his it was, and filled it with skill attitude concerning the use of the on-board and what passed for car- facilities, seemingly unaware that for some ing, while not squandering it included the anticipation of painful re- a bit of emotion. Thus she straint. Then he concluded with, “Today gained a reputation for hav- I’ll be pointing out some stately nineteenth- ing a heart as big as her ex- century homes and I think you’ll enjoy tra large dress size, while her seeing the quaint fishing villages along the secret was the no-trespassing route. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. sign posted there. Behind her
MAKE: At Play 30 Bearing Witness by Rose Hamilton-Gottlieb
Georgia felt her face grow hot, the curse of more embarrassment than protection. her mother’s kitchen sink. She had the sen- having a fair complexion. She was accus- sation of plunging headlong into she knew tomed to witnessing the harshest states of “Nonsense,” he said. “You never forget how not what. A relationship? No, it was just the human vulnerability, but this frank revela- to ride a bicycle.” She’d heard this said be- passing of time. She could do that. That was tion was too much. fore and always wondered if there was any what she did every day in her work, help- supporting evidence. ing others pass out of time. Her mouth had “That would be tomorrow,” he went on. gone dry and she gathered what moisture “It’s the main reason I signed up for this “Nonetheless,” she said firmly, meeting his she could from the lining of her cheeks and tour. You see, I gave up driving last year, so gaze for the split second needed to convey palette and swallowed. Then she took the it wouldn’t have been so easy to get to Bar detachment from his mission. There were plunge. “My mother believed in angels.” Harbor on my own.” boundary issues here, she felt. The intimate history involved in revisiting that rock. The His eyes narrowed with interest. “How fasci- If only she were more adept at small talk, privacy of grief, which can quickly turn to nating. Tell me more.” she could change the subject. While she had vulgarity when shared with a stranger. alternately enjoyed and tolerated Filbert’s “Well, there was the Christmas angel and discourse up to now, she could do without Filbert nodded his understanding and ac- the garden angel and the one that welcomed this morbidity. Wasn’t she here to get away quiesced to her unspoken request for a visitors at the front door.” She launched into from all that? change of subject. No problem for him. He one of the stories perfected over the years, ran on until sometime mid-afternoon when made up partly of her mother’s beliefs and “I can still ride a bicycle,” he said, “so to- he turned to Georgia and said, “Your turn. partly of her own fabrication. The angel morrow I’ll rent a bike, pick up something Tell me about yourself.” who appeared in the attic during a wild for a picnic, and take Margaret on a last ride thunderstorm that rattled the windows and on the carriage road. Hey, maybe you’d like She had had him pegged as a compulsive lifted the roof from the garden shed. Her to come along. It’s not far, as I recall.” talker who would carry on indefinitely, re- mother had gone to the attic in search of quiring nothing of her, and this was com- more candles and the angel appeared and Georgia felt her color deepen. fortable. She had patients like that, people spread calm. While the storm continued to who at the end of their days felt compelled rage without, the house grew quiet and filled “I could use the company,” Filbert persisted. to reveal everything. In her detachment, she with a queer light. could listen to all kinds of confessions and “I’m afraid I’d fall off a bicycle,” she said. “It’s revelations without flinching, and mostly When she told these stories to her patients, been so long. Not since I was a child, really.” it was random memories. I can still taste my she left her mother out of it. Instead, she bor- She flashed on the image of her bicycle, with mother’s meat loaf … Some kind of lily grew rowed her persona, faith, imagination, crazi- the wire sculpture of an angel ingeniously outside the window and it danced its fragrance ness, vision, whatever it was that convinced attached to the rear basket. The bicycle had around us that last night. My one regret … her that every night four angels stationed appeared one Christmas, complete with If only I … I remember … I remember … I themselves at each corner of the house. As a this guardian angel, which at first glance re- remember … She would listen and nod, and child, Georgia had believed this fantasy, and sembled a deranged nun with corkscrew hair sometimes they would insist she tell them a because she did, there were no nightmares trailing straight out behind. It had provided story, like a child at bedtime, so she would or monsters in the closet or under the bed. speak of her mother and her angels. People No bogeymen emerging from the nightly on their last legs liked to hear about angels. newscast to darken her neighborhood. Even now, as she fell asleep, she would smile at Georgia had no stories for this little man the notion that her house was guarded by who had been everywhere and seen so light beings. But it was just a notion, albeit much. She would have liked to excuse her- a comforting one. No, for her patients, she self, say she was tired and lean back against spoke as if she were her mother. But now, the cushion and close her eyes, but it wasn’t she told the truth, or at least a version of it, in her to be rude. “There’s not much to tell,” with a fond ironic tone, conscious that she she said. “I’m a practical nurse. I take care of was betraying her parent by making her out sick people, mostly the dying. And when I’m as a character, a gentle eccentric. not doing that, I take care of my house and garden.” There, that was all. “Angelic sentries surrounding the house,” he mused, his voice filled with wonder. But still he waited, seemingly convinced she had something to say worth listening to. His “Yes,” she smiled, “And I almost expected eager expression reminded her again of that her to invite them in for coffee the next small plastic figure that had watched over morning.”
31 MAKE: At Play Bearing Witness by Rose Hamilton-Gottlieb
“Did she actually see them?” he asked. Not balcony. Beyond was deep blue water with tient’s bed. She’d had “Did she think she saw them?” but “Did she white sails shifting gently on the waves. The her share of lumpy see them?” bathroom door stood ajar, revealing mir- mattresses and hard rored walls, a wide tub with water jets along futons. She stared at him blankly. No one, not even its sides, and a vanity with an assortment of the patient most desperate to believe, had little bottles. Georgia lived where ever asked her that. No, they had waited, she’d been born, in with breath suspended, for her to weave her While the tub filled, she unpacked clean a small wood-frame kind web of deception. underwear and a fresh blouse. Her mop of house with a peaked curls imprisoned in a shower cap, she low- roof. She was so “She claimed she did. We’d be eating break- ered herself into the warm water and turned much in demand fast, and she’d look over my left shoulder on the jets full force. Surely this was a pre- her house could have and say, “Oh sweetheart, your angel is here.” view of heaven. stayed empty as she Her voice broke, but she was rescued from went from one as- Filbert’s empathy by the guide’s voice com- Feeling not quite herself, but nonetheless signment to another, ing over the microphone: “Notice on the willing to see the experience through, she but she always took at least a week off be- left, the hillside of gorgeous sugar maple. poured out some bubble bath. She giggled tween jobs. During that time she cleaned. You can tell by the red leaves with yellow at the explosion of froth, a sound all but Windows, floors, furniture. Nothing es- tips. I’m guessing the darker yellow high- forgotten, buried somewhere deep in child- caped her onslaught. She did this almost as lights are American beeches. And coming up hood. The mirror at the foot of the tub re- a kind of worship. And when the house was on the right shoulder, notice the red sumac. vealed her pampered reflection. On impulse, in order, she tackled the garden with clip- That pale yellow behind it is quaking aspen. she snatched off the shower cap and struck a pers and pruning shears. The weeds must We’ll just pull in here for a quick photo op.” pose. Her heavy body obscured by bubbles, have trembled when they heard her at the her pretty face and shiny hair commanded gate. Her mother’s wrought-iron gate with To Georgia’s relief, Filbert’s intense focus the space. She lifted one shapely foot and the center panel tortured into the shape of shifted from her and her mother’s angels to calf above the bubbles. Pretty, pink, and a praying angel. his camera equipment. pleasingly plump. A drudge turned glamor- ous, an ad for whatever experience one de- Here, where there was nothing to clean and * sired. Whiskey, perhaps, or cigarettes in a nothing to clean with, she was learning an- long holder, or some hair-removing device. other way to scour away weeks of cramped Georgia slid the card down the slot in the Again, she giggled. Something was having space and stale air filled with the smells of direction of the arrow, wondering what had its way with her. medications and bodily wastes poorly dis- happened to keys. Up and down the corri- guised by disinfectant. Of complaints and dor of the Bar Harbor Inn’s fourth floor, she Later, entering the dining room dressed in calculated praise and pitiful, helpless bleats heard doors opening, so down and up she a navy gabardine pantsuit, a touch of pink of appreciation, riding thinly over the un- worked the card in nervous frustration, her remaining in her cheeks, she put on a distant spoken entreaty, Please don’t hurt me. Of bladder shouting in protest. She was about smile for Filbert’s camera as he caught her in the chronic blustering insults of poorly to give up when she felt fingers grazing her his viewfinder. disguised vulnerability. This new and unfa- ample waist. It was Filbert reaching deftly miliar means of rejuvenation was luxurious around her. “Like this,” he said, “very fast. Later, she bought a postcard of Bar Har- pampering, and she opened her arms wide Notice the little green light? Now it will bor, taken from across the water at night, to embrace it without a shred of detach- work, but you have to be quick.” He swung small boats resting on a calm sea, pinpoints ment. open the door to her room. “See, your suit- of light on land, in one corner her hotel, case is safe inside.” And indeed it was, lifted a dollhouse alight. “Do you see any angels The next morning, Georgia was heading onto a luggage rack at the foot of a wide, on guard?” It was Filbert looking over her toward a table for one overlooking the har- four-poster bed. “Don’t forget,” he remind- shoulder. She managed a lighthearted laugh bor when she was ambushed by a couple of ed her, “dinner in an hour.” and escaped to her room. fellow tourists and ushered to a table where five or six other ladies were studying menus. Before she could thank him, Filbert, the Dressed in her new flannel nightgown with Apparently they were all traveling together. gentleman, had slipped into his room across yellow roses, Georgia landed squarely in the She looked around for Filbert. If she couldn’t the hall. She stepped across the threshold middle of the bed and did her best to fill its be alone, she preferred his company, where and was blinded by perfection. The bed king-sized magnificence. Her bed at home mostly she could just listen. was a drift of white, with eyelet spread, dust was fine, but most of the time she slept in ruffle, and pillow shams on a mountain of guest rooms, on pullout sofas, on sickroom As it turned out, Georgia wouldn’t have pillows. White eyelet curtains framed the cots, sometimes in a recliner near her pa- been able to get a word in anyway, as the la-
MAKE: At Play 32 Bearing Witness by Rose Hamilton-Gottlieb
pouring water from an upturned jug. Then she remembered what he said had transpired on that rock, and she retreated a bit further.
She wondered why Filbert had been so de- termined that she come here with him. Did he need someone to bear witness to his grief? She was accustomed to bearing witness. Like a child on a swing, a terminal patient would say, “Watch me.” Not in so many words, but with the eyes, with bodily needs, with sto- ries. She never stayed around to bear witness to the grief of those left behind. In fact, what she mostly observed was a sense of relief. She assumed they simply picked up their lives dies sorted out their day. Shopping in town saw Filbert waving at her from a distance. and moved forward without pause. seemed to head up the list, but that held no Of course. He, too, was on his own. interest for her. There was talk of an excur- Now, Filbert knelt for so long she grew sion to Acadia Park, but those going had As it turned out, Filbert was right; Georgia anxious. She had the ridiculous notion if booked a tour in advance. She felt awkward did remember how to ride a bicycle. Or at she poked him with her finger he’d fall over and embarrassed by their plans. least her body remembered. It took some dead. And then what would she do? Tip him doing to get used to the gears and hand- over into Witch Hole Pond and sprinkle One thing she hadn’t considered about this brakes. At first she kept trying to stop by Margaret on top? She took cover behind trip was that people generally traveled in pedaling backward, but soon she was follow- some bushes to stifle a nervous giggle. When pairs or in clusters, and a lone woman was ing Filbert through the streets of Bar Harbor she returned a few minutes later, Margaret’s at risk of being considered a burden. In her to the carriage road in Acadia National Park, ashes were floating on the pond’s surface. work, Georgia was all too familiar with peo- her knit pants protected from the gears by Like so much duck food, she thought, then ple consumed with guilt, and now she want- elastic bands provided by the bike shop. She felt ashamed for her irreverence. ed none of it directed her way, not even the was out of her element, but it didn’t feel all casual social guilt felt by the entertained to- that bad. Filbert was now seated on the rock, his back ward those left at loose ends. As she was this to the pond. He had spread out a picnic morning. So when questioned, she smiled Closed to automobiles and covered with cloth and was pouring the wine into plastic and said, “I understand the hotel grounds crushed rock, the carriage road followed a glasses. As she approached, she saw in his include eight acres of lawn and gardens. I winding path through trees in full color, eyes, not grief, as she had feared, but un- shall be quite happy to explore them. Then around a lake, and over a granite bridge, into qualified admiration. “Cast thy bread upon perhaps a walk along the water.” a wetlands rich with birdcalls. Georgia felt the waters,” he quoted, raising his glass, “for an unexpected freedom, more remembered thou shalt find it after many days.” Their obvious relief that she was taken care than experienced, as she was worried she’d of allowed her to breathe easier; at the same tire and have to stop before Filbert reached The next morning, Filbert held Georgia time, she felt irritated at having to pretend his destination. Witch Hole Pond, it was back from boarding the bus to pose with she wanted to see the grounds. She would called; an unfortunate name, in her opinion, him for a photo. “To show where we stayed,” have preferred to go help out in the kitchen for Margaret’s final resting place. She also he said. Where we stayed. or make up the rooms. She supposed that questioned the dignity of Margaret having now she’d be thought of as one who loved to share Filbert’s daypack with crab-cake All that day, she was keenly aware of the gardens, and well-meaning ladies would ply sandwiches and a bottle of wine. miles sliding by beneath the wheels of the her with brochures of famous gardens and bus. She felt as if she were in an ark, filled arboretums along the route. She only kept Georgia stood back while Filbert climbed not with the remnants of a world to be re- up her garden to the barest minimum, for onto the flat rock and knelt, holding the built anew but with the cumulative experi- her mother’s sake. It was silly, but she sensed plastic bag containing Margaret’s remains ence of many worlds, moving across a land- she was keeping an eye on things from that out before him, as he would an offering. scape of unspeakable beauty in which nature urn buried near the fountain. She consid- Was he praying? More likely, he was simply had relinquished her summer in a burst of ered claiming an interest in birds, but there explaining to Margaret where they were and pure joy. M might be a genuine birdwatcher or two on what he was doing. That was what she had the tour, and everyone knew they tended to found herself doing, talking to her mother, be fanatics. It was with a strange relief that while she buried her ashes at the base of the a half-hour into her garden excursion, she fountain, to be watched over by an angel
33 MAKE: At Play Nightmare Directed by Victor Erice by TYLER FLYNN DORHOLT
I am uncertain as to what sort of music will be suitable for this. I am dishing out the most celebratory amount of starch possible. Coloring inside the lines, whispering the grape. A lot of the settings in the aperture function of the day might mess up the fact that we came to the plains in a bumpy truck. Now is the excitement time for children; the movie reels have been unloaded, the picture will mainly be there to remind us that performances are strong in that performances are also real lives blowing low from horns the whole commune gathers in the square to allow into their ears. Bringing the chairs in close, we find out about all the mov- ing things within the square. Doing business follows from locality the little fire of global undertones.
Lights move out, they do not fall. This is not a story sought to create living space nor is science particularly impressive in the morning. I have been advised now to move from colors, the bees snag the splendor of nectars and sound similar to the sea. Say sea, say nectar. The constant is not prayer. The survival is not a place for walls. Nostalgia cannot come in the manic assumption of vanishing. Starch everywhere, everything is fat and confusing. I am interested in a woman riding far into the valley on a bike with very little pedaling and one train in what now cannot be called distance. Steam is swelling, the blondness of your capping strands still cannot remove my soldierly outlook on the advance, which is said to be future. The rea- sons for the departure of a match from the pocket is to strike the substance and be more silent while alone. Would you rather the bell or the whistle, the church or the travel? Keeping up the stairs, knee and knee and the stride for another who has a voice that will allow us to sit and never have to search—I prefer again the chair and the light limit of the known.
MAKE: At Play 34 Crazy Season by PAUL GRAHAM
Friday night, and Rick Potts couldn’t afford ritual; or nights in their trailer on Jingleville surely contributed to their end as a couple, to buy dinner at the Thirsty Moose before Road, playing Risk and listening to country but it paid okay and provided good benefits. the Pioneers’ game. Donnie expected dinner radio; or Saturday morning breakfast: Rick They’d never had much to begin with, so out tonight, though, so Rick had to think of was okay if there was sausage, and silver- when she left, Rick thought he could cover something. There was always his mother’s, dollar pancakes, and maple syrup from the the costs alone. He’d managed to put on a if he felt like a lecture, but he didn’t. That trees he tapped every March on his mother’s respectable show until now, his client list as left the weekly All-Welcome Dinner at the property, another ritual. This was not senti- long as ever. He’d die before he asked Cheryl Birchfield Congregational Church. mentality, he knew. It was survival. for help. Outside of some land, his mother didn’t have much to give him. “We don’t even like go to church,” Donnie So when he pulled into the church parking said as he climbed into the truck. He was a lot, snow flurries whirling in the headlights, Otherwise they were fine. Rick liked an- doughy kid, fourteen, in layers of sweatshirts Rick kept Donnie in the cab and told him swering only to Donnie, who eagerly did and a knit cap with a visor. He wore the vi- exactly what had happened with Albert at things Cheryl had punished him for, like sor turned slightly to the side, but instead of the Mohawk Casino. He owed that to Don- rising early to hunt deer in Fred Tuttle’s punkish the result was slightly comical. nie, who listened impassively. The loss of woods, and watching football for ten hours nearly four hundred dollars in that huge on Sunday, and going to the dirt track races “It’s not a church thing,” Rick said, though in Evans Mills. When Donnie slept at a he wasn’t certain of that. Before putting the friend’s house, Rick could lay out a good truck in gear he tried once more the lever bender. There were even joyful discover- that moved the plow, but nothing hap- ies. Cheryl had done all the cooking, badly, pened. Not that he expected miracles any- griping about it. Rick quickly discovered more. “No singing, no prayers. I promise.” a knack for the kitchen, and when he had the money, he and Donnie ate well. He’d “They say those dinners are really a soup never before known a pleasure like putting kitchen.” Donnie’s voice nearly disappeared together a stew before dawn, leaving it in beneath the truck’s grumbling diesel. Rick the crockpot while he mowed lawns, and knew he meant the kids at school, whose coming home to smell the meat and parsley judgments were as brutal now as they’d been and potatoes. In the summer Donnie went two decades ago when he went there. to Vero Beach where Cheryl lived with her IT guy, and there were women at Leo’s II, or “It’s just this once.” noisy room, lit up like a bad part of town, out-of-towners at the hotel bar if he felt like and the uncertainty it meant, bothered Rick trawling. And about the time Donnie came “Well, it’s bullshit,” Donnie said. “We al- less than becoming another North Country back, tan, his hair a shade lighter, Rick was ways go to the Thirsty Moose.” bozo who’d found a way to hurt himself growing tired of the women anyway, and he and his kid. It was only January, though, let them go gladly. Loving had a season too, “I know,” Rick admitted. “I’m a lousy fa- and if the snows came hard and he plowed it turned out, just like ice hockey and lawn ther. That’s twice in one day.” constantly—once he got the plow fixed— mowing and the sap runs in the maples on he might recover. That was life up here in his mother’s property. The boy’s disappointment was worse than the forgotten counties of New York: one hostility. Donnie always got a Moose Breath long battle with the climate and the bank, An elderly woman welcomed them to the Burger—two patties with bacon, Stilton, whether you harvested potatoes or snow or church fellowship hall, which was in the and barbeque sauce. Rick was not the reflec- oil changes. If you couldn’t hack it, you went basement and half-full of people seated at tive type, but he did know that up here in to jail—like a friend who, in a fit of despera- folding tables. Rick felt them staring as they the winter, a person needed something like tion, had actually held up the Birchfield walked in. He recognized more than a few by weekly Moose Breath Burgers to give life Credit Union with his hunting rifle. Or you sight. Someone had taped Christmas lights shape and definition. Otherwise you might left chasing the sun, like Cheryl. to the ceiling to lend a cheerier atmosphere, as well wander into the frozen woods and and the air smelled of overcooked pasta. never come back. Work and school were not More than Cheryl’s body beside him, or Donnie, knowing the drill from school, rituals; they were duties. Television wasn’t, even above him, Rick missed her paycheck. grabbed a tray and walked into the kitchen either. A sustaining ritual involved the body, She’d done data entry for a State Social Ser- for a helping of spaghetti, sauce, salad, and
Illustrations by Dean Rank Dean by Illustrations the senses. Weekend hockey games were a vices division, long, spirit-killing days that dessert. Rick followed, pausing at the dona-
35 MAKE: At Play Crazy Season by Paul Graham tion box to drop some pocket change. near the door, donated by the local dairy for Marty Beesaw, who was already seated store because they’d reached their expiry on the long wooden bleachers. Beesaw, tall “Look,” Donnie said when they were seated. dates. He’d grab one on the way out, if the and overweight, was a case of a sharp mind “A band.” vultures left any. wasted. All his brains went to cruelty. It was Marty who had given the organist, a Native In the far corner, a man, woman, and girl Birchfield’s team was Pioneers, a squad of American guy named Joe who butchered played what might have been Johnny Cash’s sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds playing rink favorites, a name that had stuck like “Walk the Line.” The old man strummed in a Junior A league based in Ontario. The tar: Chief Broken Fingers. College was out on a guitar while the woman, probably hockey was decent, though Cheryl had al- of the question for Beesaw, and although his daughter, mumbled into a dead micro- ways thought the boys were too young to he’d once been a fantastic hockey player, no phone, her own guitar evidently just a prop. receive so much attention and pressure for coach wanted him. His need to have the fi- The girl, who was Donnie’s age, absently sports instead of schoolwork—“It’s wrong nal say every time had cost him friends, a clacked two spoons together. They looked as to bear so many peoples’ hopes,” her exact marriage, and thirty days for assault after he if they were sleepwalkers who had just wan- words, which Rick remembered whenever broke the ACE Hardware store manager’s dered in and set up without waking. One of he saw the kids with their heads in their orbital bone at a pickup game. Like all of them had spelled the name of their ensem- gloves after a tough loss. Birchfield was a the bad ones, though, Beesaw could be fun ble in those adhesive letters for mailboxes on working-class town, though, and few of in small doses. a guitar case: BARNEY’S GANG. these kids actually planned on college. If they wanted to play hockey, Rick didn’t see “Talked to Steve Sanderson?” he greeted Rick leaned in to Donnie and whispered, a reason to stop them. They knew the odds, Rick. “He’s been wondering where the fuck “You know her? The girl on the spoons?” and the adults were all implicated: the town you are. He had me dig him out, Potts. survived winter on these games, living off Twice.” Donnie looked up, squinted. Beads of wa- the lighted arena and the goal siren and the ter shined in the knit of his hat. He said little personal routines around each game, “Plow’s busted.” Rick could already see that through a mouthful of pasta, “Oh yeah, a weekly analgesic for the meager sunlight Beesaw might ruin this game for him, but he Dad, she’s my freakin’ girlfriend.” and freezing madness. Some families went didn’t want to move. This stretch of bench to food pantries and thrift shops so they afforded the best view and had been his for “Got the ‘freak’ part right,” Rick said. could afford the fees and gear. No different as long as he could remember. from kids in the city with their hoop and Donnie laughed, surprised and pleased, and gridiron dreams, Rick thought. He often “Rick, you must be the only independent Rick tried to suppress his own laughter un- wondered how many people lived in towns contractor in this whole miserable county til tears came, making Donnie laugh even spread across the north like this one, hoping who doesn’t know how to fix your own shit.” harder. The day had been humiliating from to skate to glory. A few former Pioneers had the moment Rick yanked Donnie from floated around the pros, and one, Brooks “Good to see you, too, Beesaw. And I know school—the other instance of bad parent- Bigwarfe, played briefly in the NHL. He how to fix it. I just don’t have a garage or the ing—to search out driveways to shovel by died some years back while staring down the right tools. It’s been too goddamned cold.” hand after he discovered the broken plow. CSX freight train. Had more money than Only silent, frozen houses and streets await- almost anyone, but was miserable just the “That’s the truth,” Beesaw conceded. “Ten ed them, the snow long since pushed into same, Rick realized when the story appeared days straight below zero. Not supposed to neat furrows by someone else. Rick had on the news. It was a funny life. get better, either.” thought he owned those driveways until he stood in the middle of the glaring street, The woman selling tickets at the arena box They watched warm-ups, comparing notes numbly accepting the news that, in fact, office claimed nine of Rick’s last ten dollars, about the Stratford goaltender, and then he owned nothing. But now things seemed but once he smelled the ice and the roasted while the Zamboni hummed across the ice, brighter. almonds from the cart in the hallway, and Rick told Marty how he’d driven to Albert heard Springsteen coming distorted through Finnegan’s place this afternoon to use his “This is awful,” Rick said, poking at his the speakers over the playing surface, some- garage and tools to check out the plow. Al- mushy spaghetti. thing deep within him sighed. The burdens bert’s house was a dump, the south-facing back on Jingleville Road, and in the offices end missing siding, the clapboard exposed “Tastes like ass,” Donnie agreed, but he was in town, and attached to his truck, all left and shreds of tarpaper waving in the Janu- eating it. He was just hitting his growth him. For reasons he never completely under- ary breeze. The front door looked expensive spurt and could put away a box of Apple stood or could explain, he felt safer at the with its frosted-glass insert, but there was Jacks in ten hours. rink than anywhere else in the world. no porch, or even a stoop. Albert claimed this kept his tax assessment down, but all “Finish up and let’s get the hell out of here.” Donnie found some friends from school on of his money seemed to go to an ever-ex- Rick eyed the collection of free milk gallons the other side of the rink and Rick settled panding fleet of ATVs and snowmobiles.
MAKE: At Play 36 Crazy Season by Paul Graham
Rick thought his obsession with these ma- about to enroll at the community college, and fans. Perhaps the referee had gotten a chines was stupid and unhealthy, even for and they’d just bought another Polaris. speeding ticket on the way into town or his a guy who drove around in a school bus all hotel room was a mess. Either way, instead day. If Rick had a house, he’d keep it up. “Can’t get blood from a stone, Rick,” Al- of seeing the flow and skill and creativity His dream was to own a little land like his bert said, shrugging his stooped shoulders, that soothed Rick, busying his eyes while mother’s, plant some orchards, and sell the and Rick said, “Don’t I know it.” Then deeper down his mind wandered among fruit at the farmers’ market, and sugar maple he climbed into his truck and gunned the the small victories and defeats and hurts sap on the side. engine out of the garage, running over of the week, sorting and healing, the game Albert’s tools. descended into pettiness. Bad will spread After a few minutes in Albert’s heated ga- across the bleachers like the fast-moving rage, Rick was finally able to remove some The game started hopefully, as they all shadow of an approaching storm cloud. casings from the plow and get a good look: did, but the air in the arena somehow felt People booed and swore, sometimes throw- cracked housing, bent metal, spilled hy- off tonight. At first Rick thought it was ing trash onto the ice, as if the injustice in draulic fluid, big bucks. He was so disap- Marty’s presence, or the residue of the day, the game were a continuation of those in- pointed he didn’t bother putting the thing or the whole week, but he soon figured it justices in their work and home lives. Rick back together. out: the usual public-address announcer always found himself caught up in the may- was not in the scorekeeper’s box. It was a hem, swearing and shaking his fist with “Bring it over tomorrow and Stan’ll look at younger guy whose voice reminded Rick them. Afterward, reliving such evenings in it,” Marty said. His father owned Beesaw of Dustin Hoffman playing Raymond his bed, he marveled at how easily the mob Motors, and Marty managed it. Rick waited Babbitt in Rain Man. He mispronounced mentality consumed him. He blamed the for an offer to do the work for free, which the players’ names as he read the lineups, cold, striated skies, the snow, the dozens of was the only way it would happen, but in- over-emphasizing certain syllables strangely. cars with dead batteries and iced-over locks stead Beesaw stood up and flagged down Then, when everyone rose for the national and useless plows. Terrie Byrne, who was selling fifty-fifty raf- anthems, a barbershop quartet from Milton fle tickets to benefit the girls’ hockey league. performed instead of Melissa O’Leary, the “We’re all nuts,” he said to Beesaw when She was a thin woman with a fake tan and usual girl from the high school. The quartet only a few seconds remained in the period. deep-set eyes. She wore a carpenter’s apron sang well enough, but the Canadian anthem He thumped his fist on his breastbone and full of ticket stubs and dollars tied around especially failed to stir Rick’s heart. Some- burped. The tomato sauce, or something her waist. times, listening to Melissa’s silvery soprano else from the church dinner, insisted on on “O! Canada!” Rick dreamed that he was coming back up. “We’ll take the lengths of our dicks,” Beesaw Canadian and of all the ways his life would announced, and Terrie, not missing a beat, be better. “A shame,” Marty said. “That guy”—he pulled off one ticket and handed it to Marty, pointed to the referee, whose last name, who said, “Funny,” then spread his arms for Once the game started, the players hissed Anderson, was printed on the back of his her to measure. up and down the ice, sticks clacking, for striped jersey—“better get the hell out of only three minutes before the referee called town quick once this is done.” Rick found his last crumpled-up dollar bill a penalty on the Pioneers. Neither Rick nor and held it out. “One will do,” he said. Marty had seen an infraction, and the sharp- By the end of the first period, with the Pio- “Like I said,” Beesaw began, then trailed off, ness of the official’s motions made Rick ner- neers down 4-0, the only suspense seemed his laugh breaking into coughs. But Terrie vous. That was all it took for the Pioneers to to be the fifty-fifty draw, which was won, grinned; she and Rick had had a week or lose their tempo—they chased the puck like inexplicably, by Albert Finnegan. He was so together in August after tying one on at boys on a frozen pond instead of displaying sitting only five rows away; Rick hadn’t Leo’s II. She patted his shoulder before mov- the confidence and skill that Rick enjoyed noticed him until Albert jumped up and ing on, leaving Rick to wonder if that meant watching so much. When the Stratford team high-fived his daughter, Kacee, who was in they were due. quickly scored, the arena sighed in unison. Donnie’s class and was apparently a tomboy and a snob. The folks sitting around them The other thing that had happened out at “Gonna be a long night,” Marty said. “Can cheered and shared congratulations. Albert’s house—which Rick wasn’t going to just feel it coming, can’t you?” tell Beesaw about—was that he had asked “Four hundred bucks falling from the sky,” Albert to lend him some money. It was the In the next few minutes, the referee called Marty sighed as they watched the Zam- first time Rick had ever asked anyone for more Birchfield penalties, and the visitors boni come out of the end-zone door again. money, and it seemed Albert should help scored again, and again. Rick sat with his “Imagine.” him out; he had suggested the trip to the chin on his fists, his anger at a low boil. He’d Mohawk Casino in the first place, and he seen games like this before, when the offi- “You know he won a thousand at the casino had left a few hundred up. But Albert said cials seemed predetermined to punish not last week?” he didn’t have any money to lend; Lisa was only one of the teams but also their coaches
37 MAKE: At Play Crazy Season by Paul Graham
Rick knew he was talking recklessly, the found would be redeemed for a Birchfield buddy, you’re counting lights—an expression disappointing game affecting him like too Pioneer’s T-shirt. The contestant had thirty that even in eighth grade Rick understood many beers, but the increased amount felt seconds to find it, guided only by the cheers to mean that the game, your opponent, life, right somehow. He had the pleasure of see- of the crowd. Rick wasn’t up for this, but something had you by your nuts. ing Beesaw’s face cloud over. “Then, when I he stood in the tunnel anyway as an arena was over there this afternoon, I asked him to worker tied a black cloth over his eyes and “Told ya it’s hard,” he said, hauling Rick to pay me back some money he owes me, and said, “It’s harder than it looks.” The blind- his feet. Rick wanted to punch the man. he refused.” fold, a cheap ladies scarf, smelled of musky perfume. “What can you see?” “How close was I?” Beesaw watched Rick with interest. “How much?” “Not a goddamn thing,” Rick replied. The arena guy looked thoughtfully back out of the tunnel at the ice. “’Bout as close as we “Two-fifty.” The crowd cheered as he was escorted out are to Miami.” and eased down onto his hands and knees. They were silent a while. The players re- He started crawling across the ice, which was Beesaw wanted to leave with a minute re- turned to the ice, bringing the smell of colder and harder than he’d expected, paw- maining, another oddity—Rick always saw moldy equipment and circling the rink mo- ing at skate ruts and puddles, dragging his every game, win or loss, through to the end. rosely, like carp in a tank. It was clear the dampening knees. At first he felt buoyed by By then the Pioneers were down 6-1, the intermission had done little to help them the noise, but it seemed to dissipate into ex- crowd had thinned out, and the night felt recover. One boy skated past the boards, his asperated sighs no matter which direction he thoroughly ruined. He didn’t bother telling stunned eyes visible through the mesh cage turned. He could clearly hear two individu- Donnie; their errand would take only a few protecting his face. He seemed to be won- minutes, and Donnie would wait. Beesaw dering why he’d bothered coming back from seemed to have clicked into a grim and busi- the dressing room. nesslike mode, and as they stepped into the piercing cold, Rick felt lifted by a thrill for Beesaw said, “Bastard’s owed me a hundred the first time that night. It was as if he were for over a month now. We were down at riding shotgun with the mob. They found Cabela’s getting gear, but their credit ma- Albert’s truck easily, parallel parked on the chines were down.” driveway, out of the streetlights. They leaned against the tailgate and killed the time by “So you gave him cash.” silently smoking, eyes on the distant front door where people glumly exited the arena “I admit it, Potts, I’m a fat idiot.” He looked now, pulling their coats tighter and exclaim- down at Albert, his eyes hardening. “We ing at the shock of the cold. should catch him after the game. He’ll have the cash in his hands. Won’t be able to say no.” als: a man with a deep bass—“Left, left!”— “He’s not alone,” Rick said, suddenly re- and a woman with a cry as shrill as bending membering Kacee. Rick nodded, though he hadn’t foreseen this steel—“Behind! Beeeehind yooooouuu!” They plan. “Easy-come, easy-go, right?” contradicted each other, so Rick turned Beesaw shrugged. “Then he’ll be all the right, cutting his hand, he was certain, on a more compliant.” During the last intermission, Rick stood sharp ridge of frost. After a few seconds he to make his usual trip to the concession stopped hearing the voices and forgot that he They waited for ten minutes. The hairs in stand for a coffee, realized he didn’t have was even searching for something, distracted Rick’s nostrils froze every time he inhaled; any money, and sat back down. A minute by an image of how he must look to Donnie: his breath formed ice beads on his beard. later, the PA announcer called his ticket. his old man groping for a booby prize that The strobe lights of an airliner caught his He hadn’t won the fifty-fifty raffle, but he might rest fifteen inches or fifteen feet away, eye, and he traced it across the starry back- had, apparently, won a chance at the Shirt but which would inevitably elude him. For ground to the horizon, where it vanished in Grab. Marty whaled his shoulder in mock Donnie’s sake, Rick needed to thrust his arm a southerly direction. congratulations. victoriously into the air. The crowd counted down from ten in one unified, obnoxious “He ain’t coming,” Beesaw said. “And my For years contestants had shot a puck at voice, and at five seconds he flopped on his nuts are frozen.” a plywood clown’s mouth for a shirt, but back and did a snow angel. He was still su- that game got old, so now they blindfolded pine when the arena worker knelt to remove “He has to. What’s he gonna do, walk the lucky contestant, put him at the cen- the blindfold. Rick stared up at the metal home?” But Rick suddenly knew what Al- ter face-off dot on his hands and knees, girders as a line from an old gym teacher bert had done. “I’ll bet when he went to cash and tossed a puck into the circle which if came back to him—Next thing you know, in his winning ticket at the VFW booth,
MAKE: At Play 38 Crazy Season by Paul Graham someone there offered to drive him up to the darkness their eyes met—Rick felt it— puff that came from stopping safely, undam- the Post to celebrate. They’re salvaging the and then Donnie turned and started toward aged, in a powdery snow bank, but it hadn’t night by drinking away his winnings.” the truck. Rick followed, silently falling into come yet. He just kept sliding and sliding. step beside him. He glanced quickly over his For the rest of the short ride, he expected to “In one hand, out the other,” Beesaw con- shoulder just once and saw that thirty yards see a blur of emergency lights flying by, but curred. Eager to get warm, feeling cheated, back, now, Beesaw still had Anderson. He the night remained empty, inscrutable. they crunched back to the front of the arena was saying something Rick couldn’t make and their trucks. out in the cold. They might have been away from the trailer for not hours but days. For a moment Rick They were cutting behind the arena when Then they were driving through the flatly couldn’t remember what they normally did the back door opened and a man stepped glowing darkness, and as the cab warmed on a Friday night after a game, and then out into the pool of bone-white light—not and Rick calmed down, he mulled a truth Donnie disappeared into his room to listen Albert, but someone who looked vaguely that was difficult to grasp: he had watched to music through his headphones. Rick still familiar. Then Rick recognized the hooked someone get beaten, or start to get beaten, felt electric from the encounter with the nose and the body, compact as an oil drum, had just stood there while it happened, referee. He sat at the kitchen table smok- from the ice: Anderson, the referee. Out of largely because of the desperation he carried ing and watching the frozen milk jug from his striped uniform, he looked strangely in his own heart. He looked over at Don- the church dinner thaw. Sometime past vulnerable. Beesaw had realized who it nie, who was blowing into his hands. Rick midnight he heard noises, little whimpers, was a second sooner—a target of opportu- had thought the boy was upset, but now he coming from Donnie’s room. The boy was nity—and was already on his way over to looked composed. having nightmares. Rick wanted to blame the man. “Anderson! Hey, Anderson! Just whatever lyrics Donnie had been piping a minute!” into his head, but he knew the fault was likely his own. He sat down on the corner of The referee turned sharply at his name, then the bed and rubbed Donnie’s back, his hand quickened his pace toward a cluster of cars making circles until the boy quieted. parked near a chain-link fence. As if com- pelled by some invisible force, Rick followed In the quiet, he looked around the shad- Beesaw, who was following Anderson, each ows in Donnie’s room. There was his son’s of their steps quicker than the last. backpack and schoolbooks, the Pioneers’ schedule taped to the closet door, the dresser “Hey Andy!” Beesaw almost sang the words. spilling the sweatshirt sleeves and pant cuffs. “You fucked up that game, amigo. You ru- The signs of a small, insignificant life. But ined our night.” all of this had to be watched, guarded. All the time. Why he’d been allowed to get this Beesaw was fat but quick, and he caught up far without understanding such things, Rick with Anderson, grabbed him by the collar, “What do you think happened to that guy?” couldn’t say. He wanted to stay on the cor- and shoved him against the side of a parked Donnie asked after a while. He pulled a left- ner of Donnie’s bed, awake, all night. After sedan. Rick hovered a few feet away like a over brownie from his pocket and nibbled at a few minutes, he started thinking about lackey, unsure what to do. The referee and it distractedly, like a squirrel. the morning with anticipation. He pictured Beesaw were backlit by a streetlamp; two the sun breaking over the miles and miles clouds of steam puffed from their heaving “I don’t know. You shouldn’t eat so many of of cold, shining, maddening country, the lungs, mingled between them. For a mo- those things.” Donnie looked at Rick as if to snowdrifts and frozen maples. He closed ment Rick saw the whites of Anderson’s say it was a little too late to start acting like a his eyes, and tried to summon the smell of eyes, and then they squinted closed as Bee- father. A moment later, Rick said, “He’s not breakfast cooking. M saw punched him in the sternum. Rick, too why Marty and I were out there, though. shocked to say or do anything, could only We were waiting for Albert.” watch as Anderson slid down ass-first and against the car’s tire, sucking at the thin air. Donnie shrugged, as if this made no dif- Beesaw reached down, picked him back up ference, which it didn’t. He seemed to not by the collar. want to talk about it. Rick didn’t, either, but he wanted to say something about how he Something told Rick that his role here was had been feeling lately, which was like when to keep an eye out, and when he pivoted on he had the plow down and was making a his heel, he found that someone was observ- good fast run and then he hit a patch of ice ing—Donnie, his sweatshirt hood pulled and went sliding out of control. Only he over his head, obscuring his face. Through kept waiting for the equivalent of that soft
39 MAKE: At Play The New Chatham by JAMES TATE
I said I was looking for Chatham. “There’s no Chatham around here,” he said, “Well, do you know which way I should be going?” I said. “No, I surely don’t,” he said. I thanked him and took off. I had lost my way about an hour ago, and now I didn’t have any idea where I was. I crossed a covered bridge and then the road split again without any directions. I was very frustrated. I flipped a coin and took the right which headed into the mountains. I stopped at some point to enjoy the view. There was a little church down there on the plains and something was going on, a wedding or something. I was wishing that I could be a part of it. I turned the car around and headed back down the mountain. The church turned out to be a gas station. A baseball team was just leaving. I said to the owner, “Do you know how to get to Chatham from here?” “I’ve heard of Chatham,” he said. Then he went and took a map off the wall. A car pulled in and he went to service it. The map was on his desk. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a map of northeast China. On my way out I thanked him. I drove on. This time I took a left. A police car stopped me right away. The officer got out of the car and I rolled down my window. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said. “I’m trying to find my way to Chatham,” I said. “Well, the old Chatham has been replaced,” he said. “By what?” I said. “By the new Chatham. It looks just like the old Chatham,” he said. “My parents are there,” I said. “They’ve been replaced, too, but you’ll hardly notice it. The replacements are very good,” he said. “But I loved my parents,” I said. “Give it a little time. You’ll love these, too,” he said. “But I want my old parents,” I said. “That’s what they all say. Then they adjust,” he said. “How do you get there?” I said. “You can’t get there from here,” he said. “But they’re expecting me,” I said. “They don’t even know you,” he said.
MAKE: At Play 40 Our Roles In Life by JAMES TATE
“Is there nothing you can do for me? I’m stuck in this hole,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do for you. You’re stuck in that hole,” I said. “But can’t you find a shovel or something and dig me out?” he said. “I don’t think there’s a shovel around here, but I could look,” I said. I went and looked for a shovel, but all I found was a spoon. “Here’s a spoon,” I said. “But that will take forever,” he said. “I don’t want a spoon. That will take forever,” he said. “Then I’m afraid you must stay buried,” I said. “This is not something I want to hear,” he said. “Who buried you like this, anyway?” I said. “I did not catch his name. He was a tall man, quick with his hands,” he said. “Well, that is no help,” I said. “I was half- asleep at the time. I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “And you ended up buried in that hole?” I said. “Yes, when I awoke I was buried in this hole,” he said. “Let me remove just one spoon of dirt and see if that feels better,” I said. “One spoon couldn’t possibly make me feel better,” he said. “Okay, then I’m going,” I said. “Oh, please don’t go. I need you,” he said. “I can’t do anything for you so I might as well leave,” I said. “You could put a spoon of dirt on my head. If I’m going to be buried I might as well be buried all the way,” he said. “No, you need a breathing hole,” I said. “I don’t want a breathing hole if I’m going to be buried like this,” he said. “Someone will come along and dig you out eventually,” I said. “I can’t go on like this,” he said. “You’re doing fine,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m next to death in here,” he said. “I’ve never seen a finer head than yours,” I said. “Please put me out of my misery,” he said. “I suppose I could start digging with my hands,” I said. “We could be here forever,” he said. “Such is cast our roles in life,” I said. “Such is cast our roles in life,” he said.
41 MAKE: At Play LILY VAN DER STOKKER Images coutresy of Leo Keonig, inc
Not So Nice, 2010 Acrylic paint on wall and mixed media Installation view at Leo Koenig Inc., 2010 (design 2008)
Whoopy, I am Ugly, 2010 Acrylic paint on wall and mixed media Installation view at Leo Koenig Inc., 2010 (design 2010)
Useless Movement, 2010 Acrylic paint on wall and mixed media Installation view at Leo Koenig Inc., 2010 (design 2010)
MAKE: At Play 42 43 MAKE: At Play Red Town #11 Red Town #17 by JULIA STORY by JULIA STORY
red wing blackbird all he has are the wrecked plane chickadee dachshund rabbit trap and corpse snow squinting the blossoms long pink sky and no road and leaves on my level I watch it wishing for beer for once I try to go on one of the days we decide to the movie end up to stop drinking walk to the town just walking around square to wander forget to eat I hate that I’’m about dinner I used to be better to say the sadness at this at representing humans comes too not I am clean and ready sadness over death a mushroom watcher a steady or loss or something pointer and indicator leave me broken again but alone with your children the one that has always the salad days drawn rather than been here sitting lived carefully shaded can in me like an apple shading be anything but careful or hand but also sky fully representative of sky the same as the sky the supermarket in England or specific hand just like here and glass creating the one I think about a motor to take us there no is close to me nearly all the time is no closer to my throat than yesterday
MAKE: At Play 44 Red Town #26 by JULIA STORY
the goat song begins and there is very little laughing some pretending some being church camp begins and there is a light green ice over everything frozen parachute light dimmish gray shoes hooting pine needles oil soaked tent and sleep light going away of course golden fields become tired children dirty girls and mosquito boys the sleep is where we find it a packed mouth insolent brimming with tree stuff the sleep is where we find it violet underneath picture what is to come now out there in the dark we go up and don’t understand too far from our outcomes too alone in these branches and a good deal of paradise
45 MAKE: At Play Our Atrocious Miracle by MABEL YU
The wind started small, an atmospheric burp. It tousled hair and Our game took place in an afterlife limbo; we’d take turns be- rubbed elbows. Frisbee games were held in backyards. Bubbles ing the interviewer and the newly deceased. What the interview were blown. It was picnic weather, swing-set weather. A slow sun- was supposed to accomplish I still don’t know. Lack of house- set Kansas afternoon. Your green skirt waved to the flags on front hold religion left us shrugging our shoulders at heaven or hell. lawns. Windows were rolled down. We basically saw death as a continuous tea party under a sunny, seventy-degree sky. In the evening, the pork chops were chilled by the time they reached the table. The tablecloth danced a jig, the cupboards “Did you leave anyone behind?” she asked. clapped, the shutters clattered. No closed doors kept the steady whistling breeze from racing down the hallways and nudging the “My cat, Stickers.” I petted the air. “And a new boat I never got picture frames. to row.” Wedged firmly in the corn belt, the rust belt, the old * notched leather belt of America, we joked about water, the coast, the sea. Joking was our way of expressing want. Tess placed the wide rubber disc of her pink stethoscope against my chest. She listened through the pink and purple flowers of Tess lifted her hand and peered at the damp cement wall beside my T-shirt. “Heart attack,” she diagnosed. I nodded glumly and her. “Your boat’s doing okay. It’s floating to Mexico. But Stickers clutched a fist in front of my sternum. She flipped her blond …” she bowed her head. pigtails behind her shoulders. “You were scared to death seeing that flying cow go past your window. Understandable.” Tess pat- * ted my knee. The windbreakers came only in Easter-egg colors. Purples and When we were young, we died at least twice a week. Death was a pastels and neon yellows. We looked like a waterless town of gold mine—our imaginations never tired of generating tragedies. ships. Every back became a sail, every citizen a schooner. We lift-
MAKE: At Play 46 ed our arms, shoulder-height, pitching starboard and port, taking My arm!” Tess squealed once, “You’re going to break it and it’s on too much air. going to rot and I’ll get gangrene!” Neither of us were even sure if that made any sense, but I knew Tess spent her money buying Some people managed to shrink into corners of their houses. But old medical journals from thrift stores, sifting through, discover- you spent most of your time outside in the 40 mph winds. To feel ing new medical terms instead of watching Woody Woodpecker. the community of other storm vagabonds. To keep from sitting at Consequently, she was no Florence Nightingale, and it was no home alone with only moans in the hallway and silverware danc- comfort to me when I’d be waylaid by a cold or a fever and she’d ing in the kitchen drawers. sit at my bedside, touch my cheek, and tell me it was malaria. She * sneaked jelly beans to me and called them quinine.
I put a Petri dish up to my eye like a monocle and adjusted the Mom worked mornings as a cleaning woman in the travel lodge; felt bicorne hat, a memento from my George Washington debut in the evening, she waitressed. I think she loved us, but she was in the fifth-grade play. Tess wore a stringy white wig on her head thirty-five, alone, overweight and tired, and couldn’t deal with and a loose crochet shawl wrapped around her waist. She was two little girls. When she slammed the basement door shut, I’d playing a grandmother who’d choked on her own freshly baked look at her from the corner and she’d tell me to fix my own din- cookies. ner. Then she’d burrow into her sagging bed and mutter Christ Almighty, we were going to kill her. It was the only time I ever “What kind were they?” I asked, pencil nudging my bottom lip. heard her mention God.
“Oatmeal raisin,” she said, cracking her voice so that it was shaky * and small. Before the mailboxes were sealed shut, open slots sent letters fly- “Ah,” I said, eyebrows raised. I poured her imaginary tea from ing. Several showed up in your fireplace, letters from Ohio and our cracked Bakelite set. “The most dangerous of all cookies.” New York, letters to Virginia and California. Before stuffing the chimney with old clothes, you looked through the flue and saw a Our interviews always took place in the basement when our crowd of windmills, shiny, marching over the roof. mother locked us away, unable to deal with the chatter and whine and debate of two daughters in elementary school, our In the first five days, your hair was permanently lifted and teased. dirty clothes and glue-sticky hands. Tess leaned against the crusty Most of the women looked the same way, the bride of Franken- patio furniture on which we held our interviews. Her fake hair stein, early morning muffs in blond, black, brown, and tangerine. dropped forward and shielded her eyes. “Someone should warn Like Halloween in sixth grade, remember? A host of Medusas the children,” she said gravely. saying a friendly hello.
* *
The children began a game in the park. They bent their knees We were strange creatures to each other, Mom and us, like room- and leaned hard against the wind, creating air chairs for them- mates, and we kept our distance, Mom in her bedroom, us in the selves. The winner would be the last one still sitting, unmoved. basement. It was the best solution for peace of mind. We didn’t Can you imagine it, Tess? Can you feel the breeze on your back understand her electric green eye shadow, the way she needed and imagine the town with a belly full of wind? to rub the large blue veins of her calves, her short temper. She couldn’t stand our candy corn–induced pep, the redundant sing- The adults began their own game. We brought out jugs and ing of rhymes we’d heard at school, our carelessness with mud bottles, filled with water at various levels. We sat in the shade of and baths and spaghetti. Mom often came home and retired to the library, constantly moving the jugs up and down the stairs in her room to massage her temples and groan in bed, stopping in different orders, ever-changing sheet music. The wind blew its the kitchen only for a quick meal of fried chicken, and some- lips, played its instruments, allegros or adagios depending on the times, just a few big tablespoons of peanut butter. And ice. She pitches and frequencies we wrought. The night music replaced always reached for ice cubes to keep in her mouth, and it wasn’t the grasshoppers. until much later that any of us understood that strange desire was tied to her anemia and her body acting out in odd cravings. It was * so bad one summer, we were walking past a fish stall at an open market and Mom scooped up a bunch of melting chips right off Most of the time, it was Tess who got sent to the basement, and it the trout and into her mouth. was I who volunteered, softly, secretly, to join her. A year older and wiser than Tess, I managed to lay low and not rock the jangling “No wonder Dad left,” I whispered to Tess, allowing my embar- ship. Mom would lose her patience—“That pigsty you left in the rassment to turn to vindictiveness. He’d taken off shortly after my
Illustration by Carmen Price by Illustration kitchen; do I look like a maid?” —and drag Tess to the door. “Ow! sister was born, to Texas or someplace drier and dustier but closer
47 MAKE: At Play Our Atrocious Miracle by Mabel Yu to water than Kansas. But Tess disagreed. and another. We were walking at night, along a narrow creek half a mile from home, a place I knew, a map that was born in “Brain tumor,” she confided. my head. Mom was asleep and we were too awake and warm to * whisper in the creaking hush of the house. At the bridge Tess asked me to hold her ankles and she pushed herself up against The shelves of the grocery store were ransacked as if baking soda the railing. With me anchoring, she bent her body down so she and bread could bat a storm away. Was it a storm? No rain, no could almost kiss her reflection in the water. When I pulled her snow, no ice amid the now 50 mph gusts. No weather patterns or back up, her hair was wet. cold fronts to explain, no Doppler echoes in our ears. Only walk- ing sideways and piling water bottles and canned beans. Fuzz on “It’s like if you could almost break through, there’d be another the television, static on the radio. world right there.”
The wind made people jointless, paltry puppets. Their feet shuf- I nodded but had no idea what she was talking about. I was just fled forward without will, their hips hoola-hooped without rea- glad she was back, glad to have someone to talk to, someone son. Old backs bent further than ever believed. And we had to let with energy. our bodies go this way, brittle but soft and swaying. The staunch branches cracked, fractured, tore. “Moonie” —she called me Moonie because I had always been the quieter one and she teased me about daydreaming, though I * felt like she was always the bigger dreamer— “what do you think is outside of this?” She gestured, one arm rounding the space in In our early teenage years, Tess started running away. More so front of her. Even with her running, the farthest place she’d got- in the warm summer months when, in addition to crashing at ten was Nebraska. a friend’s room or barn for a couple days, she could set up shop in an open field before she got bored or hungry and returned. I shrugged. “More land, more trees, more cardboard boxed cities.” Mom was rundown and could only work one job, so I worked part-time at the dollar store, peddling goopy lotion and old snack “No,” she shook her head. “I mean when we die.” cakes and thin wrapping paper. I contributed with the milk and apples and electricity and admired Tess’s spirit to run, even if I “Oh.” What had she seen at the bottom of that river? What did couldn’t follow her. She always made getting away sound so glam- she think about those long days and nights leaving and coming orous, but I figured a lot of it was just storytelling, same as she back home? I preferred to leave death as that black thing gather- did when we were little. Otherwise, why come back? ing dust in the corner. Death always scared me, even as a young child. Tess was the one who calmed my nightmares, made me “Stupid, spit-shine small town,” Tess would grumble. “The only believe there was nothing in the closet that would harm me. She interesting thing about Kansas is the tornadoes.” was the one who’d wanted to set up tent in a cemetery, to find a stray cat with which to hunt ghosts. “That’s not true,” I said. “There’s the ball of twine.” I didn’t tell her that some Sundays I stopped into a Mennonite “And the only interesting thing about this town,” she continued, church on the way to work. Just to hear the singing. Just because, “is people leaving it. Someday, everyone will be gone, like a town left alone in the shiny wood gleam of a back pew and the slen- becoming a baby again, until nothing more will be here, like it der elegant arches of a small nave, I felt quiet and still in a way was never born.” that wasn’t lonely. I had no affiliation with the church, but the sound of a choir, voices sweet and high, blended and strong, full The summer she was sixteen, she was gone for a week and re- and rich in praise and joy, captured my attention. I wanted that turned to tell me about her stint as a fortune-teller at a travel- kind of faith and exuberance, if not in God, then someone else ing fair. “Big gold bangles all bunched up and clanging on my or some thing. The only person I’d loved that much was Tess, wrist, huge gold hoops in my ears, a magenta head wrap on, and and nothing I could say or sing would keep her with me. She these billowy clothes snaked with gold thread. And I had this fish wasn’t a still person, she was frantic, and I loved that about her, bowl on a platter, which was my crystal ball.” Everyone’s fortunes but sometimes I needed placidity. Realizing I hadn’t answered her ended up with them dying. But apparently it had gone over well. question, I threw out a shallow answer. “I don’t know. I just hope “They were comparing, ‘oh well you get shot in the eye during a there’s lemonade.” fox hunt, but I died in a cannon ball duel.’ It was fantastic! They begged me to come with them.” She stuck her hip out and put her hands on her waist as if she was angry I wasn’t taking her seriously. Then she smiled and grabbed Come with them where? I didn’t ask. When I saw maps wrecked my arm as we sat on the bridge railing and stared at the leaky with roadways, highways, countries where tiny planes flew to, moon in the water. “And chocolate.” none of it seemed real to me, that one place could lead to another
MAKE: At Play 48 Our Atrocious Miracle by Mabel Yu
“And featherbeds.” The meteorologist thumbed his books, contacted colleagues at the National Weather Service. He scratched his head as he detailed “And James Dean.” barometric pressure, prevailing and synoptic winds, geostrophic and ageostrophic winds, supercell thunderstorms. On the Beau- “He’s been dead.” fort scale, our winds rated a ten out of twelve. He shouted these facts with a megaphone, but his voice could barely be heard. “I know. I hope he’s waiting for me.” I gave Tess a shove, but caught her arm before she slipped off the wood. She gave me a The textbooks you’d always wanted to throw away, Tess, those big kiss on the cheek and raced me home. encyclopedias that sat unread in the public library, finally came of use. We stuffed them into backpacks and laundry bags, toting * bent backs outside to ground ourselves. Old computer monitors, outdated phone books, broken centerpieces. We dug out heavy We attempted to board the windows that were yet to be broken. useless things. But the wood sawed our palms as we tried, in teams of four, to hold them still and nail them. Mothers kept their children * on leashes, stabilizing them with their own bodies. You tried to invite a few friends for tea, but we had to chase pots and scones When Mom came down with diabetes and had to use a wheel- around the house. And the sugar spilled and flew, sweetening our chair to get around, Tess didn’t come. She hadn’t come when I hair and skin. graduated college, didn’t visit for five years. There was always an excuse of being busy, the community play she was acting in, the During the week of continuous battering, everyone became a wedding she was attending. I think the real reason she didn’t ap- refugee with a tattered coat. Jewels had flown out to flower the pear stemmed from worry that home had become a whirlpool, trees and the riverbed. Electronics were playing only a needling and if she set a pedicured toe back here, she would get caught saw of noise, like a dentist’s drill. People drifted in and out of in the spiral and pulled down the drain. Or worse, we’d try to doors and houses and shops, trying to huddle together and afraid convince her to stay. She sent pictures on occasion, with her skin of huddling too long. tan, her hair permed into curls; she looked taller and thinner, her teeth whiter. She now wore trousers and blazers, long black * dresses and tall heels. She worked in advertising and had an office and a secretary, her Dr. Duke took her to weekends away in the After high school, Tess left for good. She hitchhiked to the east country. It didn’t make sense to me that everyone would make coast and wrote to me about thick forests and cities built like such a fuss about needing to be in a hectic city, like New York, Legos, blocks and rectangles stacked beside each other, with glass and then needing constant respite from it, always scrambling out instead red and green plastic. Her blond hair browned a little. to places where they could actually breathe. She met a doctor with whom she talked Gray’s Anatomy and he showed her all the pressure points in her body. I didn’t blame Tess for leaving, but I blamed her for not visit- ing. I was taking care of Mom, and we’d grown to the age where And I stayed at home, working at Perkins serving poached eggs we could appreciate her, but Tess barely even called Mom. She with their runny eyes looking wide at me. I took classes in history probably still blamed her negligence, what we felt was an unfair and English at the community college. In an elementary-educa- childhood. I didn’t know anyone who’d had it fair. Too often, tion elective, I wrote a paper on children’s literature, read Harold moving forward meant running a marathon of progress to keep and the Purple Crayon and Frog and Toad, and I was reminded of the pain of the past at bay. Tess had outgrown her family as the childhood play, how difficult it was as an adult to get lost in an most familiar and most comfortable people in her life. Tess sent imaginary world. letters because I told her I didn’t like the bother of e-mail. And once she sent me a tiny bottle with a note that read, “You’ve made I met a man who threw a mean set of darts, but he was in the it to the Atlantic.” I don’t know why I didn’t visit her. Money army and I wondered why the people closest to me had a habit wasn’t plentiful, but Tess would have helped me out. And she of leaving. Some nights the sky would fall in sheets of stars onto always urged me to fly out. But maybe I was afraid, too, of not fields of wheat, and I’d watch it from the grass in the backyard. coming back. But I kept that bottle beside my bed, and would Other times, I’d just sit in the basement, a small clear glass of dip just the tip of my pinky finger in, or smell the water, sure it vodka and my finger sliding along the dust of the patio furniture. was fresher, saltier, cleaner. The night I became engaged, I drank I’d drink the liquid slowly and tell myself that fire meant healing, down the ocean, in one gulp. imagining Tess there wrapping me in the ripped white shreds of an old sheet until I was a mummy, or a ghost. And I stayed. I firmly dug my heels in and even married a state historian. “Kansas,” Jim told me, “from the name of the Native * American tribe, means ‘people of the wind.’” Tess had ingested the wind, and I blew it back out to settle down. I liked the open
49 MAKE: At Play Our Atrocious Miracle by Mabel Yu space, the ceiling sky. I felt washed and sparkling those times helplessly, who had seen her last and sent her tumbling into the a rainstorm swept over the prairie and clumps and streaks of river. It wasn’t possible that my sister could earn such hate or dis- periwinkle clouds hovered in the aftermath, a blanket from here gust. How was it possible that people walked around with such to heaven, if there was such a place. I relished the sun at those malice? My husband tried to calm the cruelty that battered my times, poking through to create an oddly clear half-light, shining mind, telling me it could have been an accident; she could have on grain more golden than dandelions, adding more tan freckles slipped, knocked her head, and fell in. I took to pacing the house to my cheeks. And I loved Jim, who was stalwart and simple, and ignoring dinner. I turned cold in the warm weather and piled who fixed cars for fun and wanted to play catch with his children, sweaters on my shoulders. Talk talk talking with the police, and whenever we got around to having them. He wore plaid shirts they could find nothing. Somewhere along the way Tess had bro- that smelled like sun and had a trim beard golden as grain. He did ken up with the doctor she loved, and all he sent with a card. his share of the cooking and leaned down to kiss me when I hung up the wash. “This is a man,” I’d told Tess, “who knows loyalty.” The boxes came with her things, packed by her friends. I picked through them, on the floor of Mom’s living room, taking out A librarian who’d studied children’s literature at Kansas State, I each separate item slowly and carefully, as if everything that had set up a children’s hour at the public library, donned funny cos- made up our lives was constructed from glass. Mom watched, tumes, and helped the children make lion ears and paper plate not talking but breathing hard, lying on the couch with wet eyes. puppets, read them Judy Blume and Roald Dahl and strung their I didn’t know these things, these clothes and this jewelry and construction paper cows over the checkout counters. We wrote these artworks. They came from a later Tess, one I’d only known out rhymes in crayon after reading Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and through letters and occasional phone calls. I burned everything I thought about how the world is divided between those who go but the pictures out in the backyard, a smoke signal to no one, a and those who stay. And I couldn’t figure out which ones have pile of rotting black. And then I sat in Mom’s basement, touch- it the hardest, or how it was possible that one could feel the si- ing over and over again those toys we used to bring to life in our multaneous urge to do both. Someone is always left with the games. Sometimes, I’d fall asleep there, cheek pressed against a responsibility to care for others, to keep the home that others string of plastic pearls, and my husband, Jim, would bring me can one day return to, to keep that light on. “We are,” I told the back to our house and put me in bed. I never stayed asleep for children, “a country made of adventurers and settlers, first one long. I’d keep imagining a phone ringing, as if all it would take and then the other.” was a reverse phone call to undo Tess’s death, as if things like pretending were still possible. * If we made death beautiful or fun, it wouldn’t be so scary. Tess bur- Some families hid away in their storm shelters or concrete cellars. ied me when I was eight. We dug a thin ditch, just a few inches in They were safe with silent walls and sane, stale air, and cans of the ground with plastic shovels, and she poured potting soil over pink tuna. And we didn’t bother to think much about those who my body and covered that with the huge severed heads of sun- stayed secluded, not sharing in our camaraderie, our adventure, flowers. After singing a solemn rendition of “Blue Blue Blue Like our trials outside in the open air. the Ocean,” she watered the plants and my body. Mom screamed when I walked back in the house, her dirt-clump daughter. The track coaches decided to have fun by distributing their run- ning parachutes. Some of the townspeople stood in long lines At Tess’s funeral, my mother kept her handkerchief close to her in the gym to use them, others grounded themselves outside, damp cheeks. I stayed behind. I stayed at the grave all night and clinging to lampposts to watch the spectacle. The really athletic leaned my head on Tess’s gravestone as if it were a pillow. “It’s like steered their bodies, made wild spins, performed air ballets. You you wanted, when you were younger,” I told her, “to camp out in fastened the belt around your waist and were instantly lifted, a the cemetery.” But I had always been too afraid. Now, I talked to whirling helicopter, aware of the nothingness of your body. her until the night air made my voice scratchy. And I told her a story, a better one about her death, to replace the ugliness of real- * ity, a story I imagined for her like the ones we created as children. I began, “The wind started small, an atmospheric burp.” The call was the shrill buzz-cut kind, too early in the morning and vanquishing dreams. It was some nasal-sounding friend in * tears, and then the newspaper clippings sent, and then Tess’s body. Her body had bumped up against some Hudson River Shingles dropped on our heads. An occasional flying copper or dock, her death a muggy vagueness, and only a coroner to say it brown rectangle ripped out by the 70 mph winds that blew in on was blunt-force trauma, her friends muttering apologies and jus- the second week. It would have been useful to have some under- tification for not being there, but Tess was an adult and had gone ground tunneling system, but who would have known? But you home on her own after a weekend bar crawl. The people who couldn’t stay inside and go stir crazy, even as the winds grew fiercer. should have watched out for her and taken care of her had lost sight of her, and I hated wondering who had found her walking The clinic was full of patients with scrapes and lacerations, a
MAKE: At Play 50 Our Atrocious Miracle by Mabel Yu few cases of broken bones. Luckily, the old brick building stood Those of us who finally grew tired of the wind parachuted out to staunchly and stubbornly, squat and low to the ground, windows an open field. There we lay ourselves down. The wind grew stron- improbably storm-proof. But the patients still warily eyed the ger until it finally lifted our bodies upward, rocking us. Though needles and scalpels, lest the tools should jump and scatter from our skin was dry and blistering, our lips chapped and bloody, we the light breezes sneaking in under the doors. had gotten used to the wind. It no longer cut as it once did. So we slept peacefully in the sky. * * A month after the funeral, I found out I was pregnant. Jim was so excited he put me in the blue Chevy and we took off without The shoulder pads winged out, making Tess resemble a nine- any destination in particular and ended up in Greensburg, at the year-old offensive lineman. Her tweed blazer buttoned, she shift- site of the Big Well, the world’s largest hand-dug well, Jim told ed the purple pearls at her neck. “So you dropped to your death?” me proudly. We walked down the steps toward the bottom and She spread her arms far apart as if posing in the midst of a deep Jim was sure to hold my hand tight so I wouldn’t slip. The lights plummeting fall. shown clear through the water and we could see the things people had tossed—coins and crosses and buttons. I wish I’d known a “Yep. A group of ducks flew right into my hot air balloon and prayer to say. Somehow, it felt holy down there in that narrow popped it with their beaks.” shaft where farmers and cowboys had wet their hands and dug the land. The world felt very dim, thin, and far away from inside “Can you describe the ducks?” the earth, and I wondered if that was how Tess felt, or if she was eating chocolate with James Dean. There was nothing in my “Fat and white, with orange beaks. Maybe they were blind.” pockets to discard, though Jim left a kiss on my temple, and as we climbed back to the surface, I wish I’d kept that vial of Atlantic “I’m so sorry, it must have been very painful.” She shook her head Ocean. I would have poured it in. a lot when she said “sorry” and “very.”
The visitor’s center was gone, torn up in an EF5 tornado a few “I tried to grab the ducks, but they wiggled away.” months ago. The town itself was still loud with hammers and crowded with planks, a place rebuilding itself. The tornado even “Saving themselves. Just selfish.” shifted a half-ton meteorite that had been found in the area and stationed there. “It’s at the Sternberg Museum right now,” Jim “You’re telling me.” And I began pretending to cry. said. “So we’ll have to take another trip another time.” I nodded. I wanted to touch it. Even if it was roped off or behind glass, how “There, there,” she said patting me with a white-gloved hand and easy could it be for them to cordon off a half-ton rock? I wanted pouring more imaginary tea. “You’ll be fine.” She picked up a to put my palms on the pallasite, which had traveled through twinkie and bit off the end. Then she leaned close and whispered, space but still could be moved here on earth. I did not think “It’s not real.” about the people who’d died in the tornado, lifted and up and suddenly disappeared from their families. I didn’t think of them * until the drive home when Jim mentioned rural exodus. “Some of that research I’ve got cluttering up the kitchen table? All about You’d tried to browse one of those dusty encyclopedias and figure the emptiness. Six thousand ghost towns in Kansas. A trail of out the storm. You read about wind, how its name changed with breadcrumbs.” From then on, the thin lines of telephone wires each geographical location. Beautiful sounds on the tongue. Si- crossing stark plains made me sad. With every rotted barn or moom in the Arabian desert. Etesian in Greece. Alizé in the Carib- empty window-shattered house we passed, I thought about those bean. And the Atlantic and Pacific storms had individual names ghost towns, dusty, empty, open-doored buildings and all their each year. Felix. Paloma. Claudette. Otto. Wilma. But as long as inhabitants suddenly lost and carried away. all communication was blacked out, you heard of no name for our atrocious miracle. And we couldn’t come up with our own. * After two weeks the wind died down, and nobody noticed be- After ten days, sound crumpled. There was only so much that cause everyone had been at altitude for so long, storm-rubbed could be screamed over the howling, and then our voices were and sleeping. Now your body is cold and frozen and laid back lost, but the wind rang interminably. Cotton ball wedges and to the earth by the departing storm. Nothing feels sharp or sad. scoops of wax, foam plugs and smushed pillows, all pressed onto It’s warm on the ground and still and quiet in the gardens that ears. We grabbed chalkboards and hoarded whatever paper and became plots, and yours is lined with gentians. M pencils we could find to scribble messages for fear of being ut- terly silenced. It was hardest on you, Tess, you who could never stop talking.
51 MAKE: At Play How I Have Learned To Deal With My Vanity: by DANIEL KHALASTCHI
You make a new scarf and give it to me after one of our meetings with the therapist. It is brown, and black, and as I try it on for you and the camera, you admit the bulk of its body is made from my thinning hair. Tied around my neck, I smell the dry cucumber and hard burnt plastic of my shaping product. Once I recognize the density and heft of its weight against my skin, I move to the mirror in the bathroom where I play around with positioning and elemental style. Many times throughout the next few hours, you remind me that the scarf is fragile— that the more I pull and loosen, the more I’ll begin to recognize the fallout. I tell you I think that’s a bad metaphor, but I also ask you not to move from your position in the doorway. You’re blocking the right amount of light, I say. That’s flattering, you say. You know what I mean, I say. Do I, you say. Come on, I say. I’m almost thirty—I don’t have a job and I still have very bad skin. There have been days when you aren’t here that I reuse your q-tips. I am afraid, I continue, that this is full catastrophe living. You take the scarf and, not surprisingly, look unstable with the brunette leak draped across your withering frame. Is that what we look like at parties? I say. Me buried in your shoulders, your blonde hair staggering down your back like a sad relief worker praying for disaster? You don’t answer. Is it? I say. Shut up, you say. Okay, I say, and we take turns slapping our thighs with my curling iron. The next morning, we are shadowed with bruises and the possibility of having lost the baby. You have never felt, you say from the laundry room, ever more alive.
MAKE: At Play 52 M5
IN CELEBRATION OF FIVE YEARS OF MAKE Suicide Fish and this being the tenth issue, we asked past contributors for short Fiction by Aaron Michael Morales takes on FIVE. In these pieces, FIVE is poked and prodded, dissected and reconfigured, as well as personified, villfied, and glorified. FIVE Five fish committed suicide, the text message read, and the next, was a time, is keeping time, and now, we’re making time for FIVE; and eerily warning, WATCH YOUR STEP, made Samuel’s stomach cower hopefully, making another FIVE. Visit makemag.com for more writing as it occurred to him that he had wondered, occasionally, where and information about the authors. all the fish had gone because he’d drunk-stumbled past the faux- rock fishpond numerous times and they had been there, near the surface, staring at him as though entreating him to join them, but The Book of the Dead Man he hadn’t seen them lately, partly because it wasn’t his apart- (The Five Elements) ment where they’d flung themselves to their deaths, nor his pond Poem by Marvin Bell that’d soured amid the recent heat wave, but still he felt unsettled Live as if you were already dead. because he recalled the time he’d arrived actually sober at his Zen admonition girlfriend’s place and one goldfish the size of a rubber coin purse lay on the doormat, fifteen feet from water, and when he’d leaned 1. About the Dead Man and the Five Elements in to peer at the dried-out fish, it opened its gill, faintly, terrifying Samuel, who fell back toward the pond wall, nearly toppling over, The Five Elements were Chinese wood, Chinese fire, Chinese where, he was sure, if he’d fallen in he’d never reemerge, instead water, Chinese metal, and Chinese earth. flitting through souring water as the fish abandoned him one by one, gazing up through putrid water too cloudy to see through, liv- ing his remaining days in solitude while the world continued on. 2. More About the Dead Man and Five
We have only up and down, left and right, ahead and behind. Superdome Fiction by Ira Brooker
3. More About the Dead Man and Five People say I smell of bleach. Me, I can’t smell it. I’ve been working with cleaners for so long I can’t smell much of anything anymore. Being alive and dead at the same time means fivefold everything Chemicals burnt all the little hairs in my nose down to nothing long and spare parts for later. ago. But I still smell this place every day.
It’s hard to describe. Not quite a smell of sickness or filth or even 4. More About the Dead Man and Five death. Just a smell of … people. Humans. For five years I’ve been doing everything I know how to do to wipe it out. Poured gallons of All theory is reductive. bleach, sprayed whole cases of Lysol, wore a dozen mops down to the stick. Nothing kills it.
5. More About the Dead Man and Five People say they can’t smell it. They say it’s in my head, that five years is long enough to kill off any lingering odor. They even say We used to count to ten, but not now. the place smells fresh and new ever since they hung that fancy new banner last winter. They can say what they want. I still smell it. Some days it’s barely detectable, and I imagine it’s finally going Who’s Counting away for good. Other days it’s the only thing I can smell. Nonfiction by Bill Hillmann People say I smell of bleach. Me, I can’t smell it, but sometimes I There were five of them, three bulls and two steers. Someone be- wish like hell I could. hind me with a fist full of my long-sleeved, blue-striped rugby shirt wrenching me backwards and I’m digging sneakers into the dry gray-green bricks of the Callejon, swinging elbows back to break homage to new york* their grip. Suddenly I’m free, coasting in a large bubble of space (notes for a job interview) where fearful won’t tread. The tall Basco with the green plaid shirt Poem by Della Watson beside me, shouting in Basque ahead of us (I can only assume) “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!” I didn’t look back, I coasted, when they ask you where you’ll be in five years, the only correct the horrific crackle of hooves at my back, the deep panging bells answer is to tell them where you were five years ago. and five years swaying from the steers’ necks, the searing roar of the hundreds before that, and so on, until they can almost hear the screams of of spectators atop the fencing and outer balcony of the arena, the children on the playground, acting out the worst scenarios of war camera flashes that would tell me it was five, a dark brown bull and torture, preparing their little routines for any scenario: doctor, directly behind me, out front, hooking his wide white horns inward fireman, ballerina, teacher, president. yes, you have been all of before the others, his torso swung sideways like a car fishtail- these things before. and now, you are interviewing for a job you ing. The mound of muscle behind his head black, off-white rings once held for an hour at age four. your resume indicates only that around eyes and snout and we led them like that through the tun- you are an innovator in experiential labeling: post-retro-apocalyptic nel into the arena, the Basco at my side, five beasts at our backs. waitress, may 2004—january 2005. fashion-forward tour guru,
53 MAKE: At Play M5
september 2006—april 2007. it is not possible to relive any specific Fleetwood Mac, Rumours: “Go Your Own Way” joy, no matter how mass-marketed, and this saddens you. today Bob Marley & the Wailers, Exodus: “Exodus” you feel more adult than child, and this also saddens you. breathe U2, The Joshua Tree: “Running to Stand Still” deeply. remember, this is new york! you are creative! you are part R.E.M., Document: “Strange” of the same “going-places” motion that keeps a flock of geese Nirvana, Nevermind: “Lithium” flapping in the sky and a flock of stockbrokers shuffling on the Pearl Jam, Ten: “Black” sidewalk. it is still possible that this desk is only the beginning of Grant Lee Buffalo, Mighty Joe Moon: “Mighty Joe Moon” a sculpture that you will someday create using billions of post-it Death Vessel, Nothing Is Precious Enough for Us: “Obadiah in notes and paperclips. and you have to believe you still have time to Oblivion” weld these rough scraps of a life together. you have to believe that The Spares, Everything Is Easy: “Deconstruction and Re-Use” you’ll be able to build a tower that won’t collapse, even if you saw off its legs. There are obvious exceptions: “Stop Whispering” is Track 4 on Radiohead’s Pablo Honey; “Ripple” is Track 6 on the Dead’s Ameri- *homage to new york was a failed mechanical sculpture by jean can Beauty. Track 5 on the Beatles’ Abbey Road is “Octopus’s tinguely, installed in 1960 at the museum of modern art and Garden”…so clearly, the rule isn’t universal. But it does seem to designed to self-destruct after 30 minutes. the machine was un- happen an awful lot. able to destroy itself, however, and after an hour and a half, the flaming, still-intact machine was doused with water and hacked apart by firefighters. 5 x 5 x 5 POR AVIÓN Poem by Steffi Drewes
MADDIE’S MANTRAS: An Empowering Five-Minute Chant What If I Told You: Fiction by K. B. Dixon The wrecking crew is finished I’m pudding for breakfast. I’m a breath mint at the garlic festival Building rope ladders for nightcrawlers. of your day. I’m a ten-dollar bill in the wallet of love. I’m the palm Having tied starfish to weathervanes, of reason on Malarkey Island. I’m a rare moo goo in a world of gai Written love letters in quicksand. pan. I’m a glittering scrunchie in the hairdo of hatred. I’m that little Welcome to our interior jungle. plastic thingamajig on the end that keeps the shoelace of romance from fraying. I’m a slice of cheese on the boring burger of being. I Ready To Go All In: put the bop in the bop-she bop-she bop. I’m a little can of Sterno in the igloo of a cold man’s heart. I’m a polished bone in the primitive Three cigars for your stilts? nose of negativism. I’m the meringue on the lemon pie of life. I’m Two roulette wheels for spokes? the tuxedo on the penguin of pleasure. I’m the “Color” in Colorado Full house of misplaced longing. and the “Ten” in Tennessee. (Never mind about Virginia.) I’m the Better not think of losing. dazzling doodad that hangs from the rearview mirror of history. Give the bluebird some suet. I’m the cashmere collar on a barbed wire sweater. I’m loose change under the sofa cushions of poverty. I’m the gooey center What Is Your Theory On: of redemption in a bonbon for Beelzebub. I’m a feather in the cap of freedom. I’m chili powder on the cornflakes of conformity. I’m a Lightning bugs versus Lite Brite. silver bullet in the bandoleer of desperate appeals. I’m the fuzz on The wishbone is always right. the tennis ball of happiness. I’m a flowerbed in the quagmire of the Men who mistake their wives. quotidian. I’m that extra gallon when the gas gauge reads “empty.” Hats, helium and howler monkeys. I’m a room-service vodka at The Heartbreak Hotel. I’m the brassy My neverending craving for honey. shine on the tuba of tomorrow. I’m a lava lamp in the mineshaft of mediocrity. I’m a soft spot on the armadillo of intolerance. I’m a Left With Those Dog-Eared Pages: jagged shard of truth caught in the throat of blatant dissimulation. I’m super. My nerves a strung pitch. Humming just to stay afloat. Still good at laundry. Yahtzee. TRACK 5 Navigating bazaars and minor crosswords. By LC Fiore You write the fifth forest.
I’ve noticed that oftentimes, the soul of an album lies in its fifth In Case You Need Me: track. If it’s the right album, the fifth track can even contain the soul of the band. I don’t mean a band’s most popular song, neces- Go ahead, touch the art. sarily, but the song that defines them—maybe even to themselves. String a kaleidoscope of landscapes. Scanning my music library, examples abound: Take the messenger pigeon, too. Find the motionless little lake. The Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed: “The Afternoon” These ragged occasions with snow. Van Morrison, Astral Weeks: “The Way Young Lovers Do” Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon: “Money”
MAKE: At Play 54 M5 Ray Clay on the Public Address de period tween 4th & 6th Nonfiction by Fred Sasaki Poem by avery r. young
It’s warm. That’s how you know that the man who runs the spotlight fo brooklyn has found you in he darkness. You can feel the heat. It’s a welcoming who loses poems feel.–Horace Grant sittin in front of ace & angel (her 3 yr old twins) [6/5/1991] Good evening ladies and gentlemen. The Chicago Bulls welcome the world’s greatest fans to the Chicago Stadium, the noisi- fall 2002 est arena in the NBA. I’m Ray Clay and tonight’s NBA Finals game two is between the Los Angeles Lakers and your Chicago Bulls. Now for we on de fourth floor dedummy room wif six other 16 18 19 tonight’s lineups. First for the visiting Los Angeles Lakers, at forward, yr old brilliant folk who sit facin circle de little drawings dat begin from North Carolina, six-foot-nine, Sam Perkins. At the other forward, wif de kah sound handouts i be standin next to brooklyn when from North Carolina, six-foot-nine, James Worthy. At center, from Yugo- her circles de circle in de fourth row her look go mr young dis de slavia, six-foot-eleven, Vlade Divac. From Michigan State, at guard, wrong mornin to correck me & my look go brooklyn i aint scared six-foot-nine, Earvin Magic Johnson. At the other guard, from Arizona of u dis or any mornin (sah) & (kah) two different situations handle State, Byron Scott. The Los Angeles Lakes are coached by Mike Dun- dat bidness leavy. And now, the starting lineup for your Chicago Bulls. At forward, from Clemson, six-ten, Horace Grant. A six-seven forward, from her etches -1 on de top Central Arkansas, Scottie Pippin. The man in the middle, from San Francisco, seven-one, Bill Cartwright. A six-two guard from Notre Dame, John Paxon. From North Carolina, at guard, six-six, Michael Useful Knowledge Jordan. The head coach of the Bulls is Phil Jackson. Poem by Adam Wiedmann
No smoking. Do not lean on the doors. Vita Brevis Floss your arteries. Daily. Make it better. Poem by Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney In case of emergency force side windows out to exit.Wet is ban- It’s hot outside and I’m getting old. ished. Routine suffers the same fate.
Let’s state the obvious: I’m making a list, Won’t you please give this seat to the elderly or disabled. May your commute be this smooth. Savor every detail. but I have a short attention span. To alert train crew open door and press strip. If art is long, You could just be standing in your kitchen, then suddenly, sausage.
what to make of this blade of grass? Please: No Eating or Drinking. Caution: Watch the Gap. Get the high speed. What he doesn’t know, can hurt you.
Untitled Nonfiction by Shailja Patel Five, fahve, foive, fave... Poem by Reginald Gibbons Our annual week in Mombasa. The three of us, my sisters and I, would be up at 5 a.m., electric with excitement, desperate to get Curl the five fingers in and make a fist, and you have rejoined, after on the road. By 6 a.m., in the slowly dissolving dark, Dad would thousands of years, the two words with each other and thus with maneuver our Peugeot 504 out of the driveway. Mum, next to him, their origin--a word perhaps 6,000 years or so old that is thought presided over the flask of hot coffee and basket of provisions for to have been penkwe. Because “fist” comes ultimately from that the trip. We three, in the back seat, wrapped in blankets, cat’s word, too, which means “five”; more recently it comes from Old cradle string looping our wrists, waited for the first roadside mark- English fyst (we get Old English finger from the same root, too), and er—500 kilometers from Nairobi to the coast. Five days of madafu, even our word “foist” comes from it, by way of the Dutch for “fist,” high tide bodysurfing, morning rambles on the beach to collect vuist. And both the Old English and the Dutch come from an earlier seashells, expeditions to the Old Town for halwa and kahawa. word thought to have existed in Germanic, namely funhstiz. The whole crowd of them come slowly out of penkwe: the Irish word is I thought families came in fives. Wasn’t that why saloon cars had cúig, the Old Norse was fimm, the Latin was quinque, the Greek space for three in the back? was pente, the Sanskrit was pañca, and the Hindi is pāc, there’s at least five damn dictionaries running around in the back yard right now, how in the hell did they get in, go shake a fist or avuyst or a faust at ‘em (you heard me: a faust), give ‘em a good pust and see how much good that will do you! Show ‘em your best fiver! (And I don’t mean good money.)
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55 MAKE: At Play Being Nobody by EVELYN HAMPTON
the eye. The image of the window was still printed on the retina like a burning afterimage.”) These early landscapes, painted in yellowish light, looked sick in the luminescent white of gallery lighting—they were images peeled from the eyes of rabbits that once inhabited them.
We went upstairs to Modern Art. I remember being pushed to- ward it, coming at it feet-first, maybe falling though I would have been able to walk: Study for Portrait VI by Francis Bacon. What had separated me from what was not got very small and quiet. I was terrified of this painting. Was it panting?
What’s so scary about “Study for Portrait VI”? The lines, what’s inside. Sometimes lines explain but these lines are cries. I was 1. Here is the realest terror I’ve felt: that the site of my three, four, five. I could remember my crib—sleeping crying sur- perception is not in me but somewhere else. It is a mobile some- rounded by lines, mobile night, shadows move sometimes. I was where else—having all the qualities of elusiveness, it easily takes such a frightened man in this painting. I knew the hole you only on qualities of anything else. It is a room in my house, a tree in a know when you’re alone. It had become my throne. I was some park, a package someone else is holding. A painting. A TV. kind of pope, my father telling me it was time to go.
This is the realest terror because, while the site of my perception Seeing “Little Girl” by Otto Dix was terrifying too because, a is not myself but somewhere else, I feel what it is like to have a little girl, I, suspected this was me on the wall, my naked con- body but no identity. To be what an object is to an object, one tainer, a little girl but with everything inside her taken out. There shape in the way of another shape, space and brief interruption she was, this curtain-colored girl, while I was the inside that had of space. been taken out, given a father and a world.
If this feeling of being nobody has a beginning—does any feeling My world twirled. Hers had hung itself. really have a beginning? —then here is the beginning: I kept seeing that little girl. In “Dance Training” by Ernst Kirch- When I was a child I lived downtown in a city with my mother ner she’s surrounded by awfully green walls held in position by and father. There weren’t many outdoor places to play, so on free a strong, erotic woman who stretches a leg of the girl away from days, my father would take me to a large art museum not far the girl’s body, the messy colors of the rug intestinal and tied from our narrow house. We would walk through wide white gal- to the woman, wrapping her waist with red, coming out of her leries of early landscapes, and though some of these paintings shoes, about to engulf the girl. The painting rising like a burp still had something alive inside them, most were lifeless—images from the wall of the world. inside dead eyes. (Laurie Anderson, in her essay “Some Notes On Seeing: The Water Reglitterized,” mentions an experiment “in which the researchers held a rabbit’s head pointed toward a bright window. Then they killed the rabbit and removed the retina from
MAKE: At Play 56 Giorgio Morandi (Other Page) Still Life, 1942 Oil on canvas 10 1/2” x 13 3/4”
Francis Bacon Study for Portrait VI, 1953 Oil on canvas 59 5/8” x 45 3/4”
Otto Dix Little Girl, 1922 Oil on canvas 31 3/4” x 20”
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Dance Training, 1910-1911 Oil on canvas 47” x 35 1/4”
2. As a “little girl,” one way I would play was with dolls, and extent. Both obscure what is behind them. If you can see positioning them in ways I knew to position myself, trying to these uncertainties, you are on the way to losing your identity. make them act real without my help. How nice and how scary it Morandi, more than probably any painter I know of, was paint- would be if they would walk around like me! Maybe they would ing for nobody. He was painting for himself. be real enough to know me. I was afraid one would try to say my name, my fear a consequence of having a name. Being nobody, I think, is what I was coming to know as a little girl looking at “Little Girl.” Soon after dolls, still wanting to be afraid, I watched Poltergeist, and the little girl was still me—how I felt when I was by myself. I But now I’ll try to explain my situation by way of someone else: watched Carol Anne enter her TV on my TV, and though I had Robert Irwin is an American artist who went into the California never felt about the TV that it was thinking for me, I had felt about desert looking for a way to see seeing. When he found a place people on TV that they were thinking for me, and this made me, where everything stopped except seeing, and he could see seeing, like Carol Anne, an abductee of the Beast, a paranormal. how empty it was of ideas, how empty it was of “Robert Irwin” or any other body, he decided to mark the place where seeing What’s paranormal has been deprived of reality, Hello and Good- happened to him so it could happen to anybody in this desert. bye and ordinary appearance and disappearance. Having no real- ity, the paranormal has no identity and is invisible, or if visible, But then, searching for a marker, he knew he couldn’t find one, he is only as a flicker of an edge. Deprived of reality, I was also de- couldn’t mark the place where he had seen his own seeing, which prived of causality, a deprivation that is less like becoming dead had been so empty of “Robert Irwin,” because other people had than it is becoming unlimited. Unlimited, one experiences the to find their own way to see seeing. So he left the place unmarked present just as it is, without memory. in the desert and drove back to Los Angeles, where sometimes, among the light and freeways, he would glimpse seeing, and in Becoming unlimited can be terrifying because in this situation the midst of a city obsessed with identity and celebrity, he learned it is impossible to think. Space, once full of names and places— to extend further into being nobody. M differences—becomes undifferentiated. A lack of difference be- ______tween one’s self and one’s possessions is to me what it means to be Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A life of contemporary haunted. Most children are haunted. They talk to objects, which artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler have different thicknesses of silence. They lose themselves inside The Language of Inquiry by Lyn Hejinian, which contains the essay plastic eyelids. Those thicknesses are senses, and to be acknowl- “A Common Sense” edged by an object is terrifying and desired. “Some Notes On Seeing: The Water Reglitterized” by Laurie Anderson ______Artists, I think, are interested in making objects that can ac- Giorgio Morandi - C 2010, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome knowledge their observers. If there is a continuum between hu- Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Bequest of Putnam Dana McMillan man and object, not a boundary, art is making visible that con- Otto Dix - C 2010, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Winston tinuum. Creating a feeling of uncertainty in a viewer is one way Francis Bacon - C 2010, Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. ARS, New York / DACS, London to make the continuum visible. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Miscellaneous Works of Art Purchase Fund Ernest Ludwig Kirchner - Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of Mrs. Charles Meech Morandi - In “Still Life,” a painting by Giorgio Morandi, it is uncertain which is more real, an object or its shadow. Both have thickness
57 MAKE: At Play M5
Five game trying to imagine works of art being signified by a number. Poem by Arda Collins I asked my friend, “What about five?” He said, “Five is easy! A pen- The best friend of Five is Seven. Five is red and Seven is yellow. tagram, a five-sided star.” He explained that if a pentagram is di- 2 and Five have never been friends because Five is hurtful to 2. vided into equal parts it can be arranged in any variety of ways and It isn’t personal, but Five knows it’s necessary. 2 can deal with never create the same combination. Five is an ad-infinite number. it. 2 is green. 2 knows they have to work together because they It occurred to me that five must present the most compelling works all know the importance of 2 + 3 = 5. 3 is a jerk, but 2 and 3 are of art—the works that never add up to a whole, that never present a couple. 3 is orange-brown. 3 identifies with 5, but 3 is actually just one meaning. Instead, it’s nice to think that five is completed better at other things. 2 loves 3, but 2 and 4 are soul mates and only by viewer in all her various, changing ways. can never be together. They meet privately, not often, but enough to count. Four is soft purple. 2 needs 4. Five knows about 2 and 4. 2 is afraid that 5 will tell 3, or 9, though 3 has probably figured it out already. They never talk about it. 5 thinks 2 is stupid for from Remedies being so wrapped up in 4. Five has dark space inside and a white Poem by Catherine Theis background. 2 and 4 lay together, and 2 imagines vast 2s and 4s forever and eventually nothing but 4s. Five is accountable to 9, * which is why 4 can never be with 2, but 2 doesn’t accept it. 9 is The habitat is a tree branch propped up by a wet moccasin. dark blue. Occasionally, 2 talks about it with 7. 4 calls 8. 8 is dark green. At sunset, Five goes to the ocean to think about the last * time Five saw 10. 10 is black and has a white background. Five is For gray hair: eat two bowls of fire-hot chili, seeing 9 tomorrow. No one has seen 6 for a long time. 6 is orange. standing up, and then have intercourse. Do not sit down.
* Untitled Working trains look lovely in the snow. Fiction by Lindsay Hunter Headlights of ice.
Five nights that week, Swan drove to the man’s house and had * dinner. Each night, the man made a dinner from things he’d pur- At restaurants, always ask for the secret menu. chased at the farmer’s market. A salad with radishes, fresh pasta with sage, a cheese plate with figs. On the fifth night, the man * made tea and wheat toast and showed Swan a movie from his Two songs appeared in a wood. childhood in which his father played a clown. I’ve been looking for At the wishbone’s arc, I found myself astray. my father, the man said, for years. Today I found him and he was older and I was afraid. Swan did what she felt the man wanted, she held his head to her heart and then she went to his bed. In the Highway to Heaven morning the man served Danishes and coffee and then she drove Fiction by Alissa Nutting home, thinking of her own father, thinking how the man reminded her of her father, his veined, soft hands and his wet black eyes, I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven once, or something how the man called her Swanny, as had her father, how the man like it, one of those shows that balanced mainstream appeal had whispered this name into her neck, and with the taste of cher- with overt Christian undertones in a very palatable way, where ries on her tongue and the sun flashing over the windshield Swan one homeless man gave another homeless man some money he wondered how it was that you could want your father in so many panhandled and said, “Here you go Charlie, it’s a fiver.” He had different ways. to say that out loud because Charlie is blind. “Promise me you’ll get some food?” Charlie gave false consent. One got the idea that Charlie often did. The generous and sober protagonist bum walks The Number 5 for a minute then looks back and sees Charlie toddling into a Nonfiction by Katie Geha liquor store. “Charlie,” the good bum says, shaking his head. When I watched this I was somewhere around the age of five and did not Odd numbers are always the best numbers. Each year I’ve lived as comprehend alcohol’s lure. Five dollars to a child in the 80s is like an odd-numbered age has somehow felt more fortunate than the an iPod touch to a child in 2010. I shook my head too and said even-numbered years. An early lesson I learned as a curator: when “Charlie.” Not because I was worried for Charlie’s cirrhosis or that hanging art on a wall, even numbers of pieces will never work. his body wasn’t receiving/absorbing proper nutrients, but because Four feels funny. Five feels right. I felt the good bum should have given the five dollars to me, even though I had a house and he didn’t. The other night I was discussing with an artist friend a class he’s developing called Art by Numbers. For each class my friend pres- ents a number, discusses various meanings attached to that num- ber, and then considers what works of art connote that number. So “zero” might be Donald Judd’s single square box and maybe “one” is Barnett Newman’s zip down the canvas. It’s a fun and open
MAKE: At Play 58 M5
Hand for Hand Eighty-sixing Caramel Praline Cheesecake or Campfire S’Mores I Poem by Rae Gouirand can understand, but French Vanilla? Are these ice cream execs for real? It’s vanilla, people. Hand for hand. The time it takes: that early point. The catch that tells us When I was a kid, diagrams of the human tongue illustrated four flavor receptors: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Now scientists have what: we want the song in five named a fifth taste and we don’t even have a word for it in English. that cancels out. We came: to take Umami can be isolated in seaweed. Umami is why the nori wrapping your maki is so yummy. But these party-in-your-mouth molecules a hold, that hold. A name also form when certain animal and vegetable proteins break down. a thumb: something wanting. Fingers Does a sliver of Parmigiano Reggiano make your tongue cheer? Umami. Prosciutto? Mushrooms? Pepperoni? U-M-A-M-I. curl on their own (I thought.) I give you space & you give what I have conceived five times: two miscarriages, one baby with five fingers on each perfect hand but only half a heart, and two—I have takes in us: a sound a hand learned to say this—two living children. Two for five, and when I kiss all five the word. A storm gets born: my children on their salty heads, I thank my lucky stars, whatever number shines on me. that last note the one to find. What then comes: it sounds so cold Color Light & Eye to say aloud there’s nothing Fiction by Blake Butler left to hold but time. In a church Shushed & sitting in my own lap, I watched the children eat. Our that’s made of just our names: children, numbered 5 now, where 5 = 1 + 1 + 1 + n, where n is what other end would we ever find equal to or lesser than the number of cells divided by and for our home, a home bent at the edges by the pummel of the light. De- pending on where among the room I stood and which way I slung my head, I could count a wide disparity of bodies, sometimes so Almost Six many limbs there wasn’t room to talk. My wife in her own body had Nonfiction by Jana Brubaker lost herself among the scab—a sandpapered pustule which began buried in her nostrils and slowly spread to hem her up. By prying One is narcissism. One plays all by himself. Two is dualism. Two in- in the right spot with white pliers I could find the part of her where troduces an other and competition. Three is possibility, not either/ food went in, though I am not sure how she breathed still. I am or, his/hers, yours/mine, but something/place/else in that liminal not sure from out of what the other babies came. Some hours she space between. Four is multiplicity. The fourth dimension opens made words grow up in color on the sickly moss, though they were possibilities beyond the point, outside linear narrative, tilting the not words I knew. plane, opening the cube, into multiple ways of being. Five counts one beyond those multipliers, indicating infinity. Spark, recogni- tion, connectivity, relativity, gestalt is five, more than the sum of its Two Lists parts. Five adds the self and other plus three, all of those spaces Nonfiction by Bryan Furuness in between. Five is indivisible except by itself and one, a prime number. Primal, being born, quintuplets, coming of age, quincea- Excerpts from Poor Richard’s Sex Almanack: ñera, a celebration, the quintessence of being, a composition of 1. No One wants to be the first One to bring up a Threesome. heavenly bodies, five is the penultimate, the almost-ultimate, the 2. Puritan in Public, Hellcat in the Sack. Thou canst trust Poor last but for one in a series counting a half-dozen, five leads to, Richard on that one. well... 3 . U s e n o w a n d t h e n a l i t t l e E x e r c i s e a q u a r t e r o f a n H o u r b e f o r e going to the Beach, as to swing a Weight, or swing your Arms about with a small Weight in each Hand; to leap, or the like, for that stirs Five Fives the Muscles of the Breast, which drives the Females crazy. Nonfiction by Jill Christman 4. If my carriage be rocking, prithee don’t come knocking. 5. Chicks dig wigs. I like fives: high fives, taking five, the five-second rule, and certainly five-star hotels. I don’t mind five-o’clock shadow, Hawaii Five-O, or Rejected Nicknames for my Penis the five cosmic figures, and I can even find the right time and place 1. Geraldo for the occasional five-paragraph essay. 2. The Pocket Fisherman 3. Cheney This morning, I read the New York Times archives five ways: Five 4. Sad Banana Ways to Keep Online Criminals at Bay, Five Easy Ways to Go 5. Mom Organic, Five Possible Ways to War, Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools, and finally, Five Ways to Cook Chickpeas. Last summer Baskin Robbins retired five flavors in one fell scoop. continue on page 88
59 MAKE: At Play These Things Happen by ELIZABETH HILDRETH
Whenever my dad would buy a double pack of Slim Jim’s at K-mart, I’d think of Jenny’s legs.
“Jenny’s all legs and a little pin head. Like you,” my dad said. About the head, not the legs.
It was true. It was like she had two shoestrings tied to the bottom of her chin. If you were picked to run against Jenny on Field Day, the best thing to do was show some dignity and get a stomachache pronto and ask to be sent to the nurse.
Jenny wanted to be a fashion model. But she was only twelve, so while she was waiting, she figured she’d post pictures of that Polish model who married the ugly lead singer of The Cars all over her wall for inspiration. While she was waiting, she figured she’’d try to get a little fatter, too. Models were curvy back then. Jenny would stay the night at my house, eat breakfast, sprint out the door, and my mom would do up the dishes, muttering to herself in disbelief.
“She ate her cereal out of a mixing bowl.”
My mom was never too keen on Jenny staying over because she ran all over the house and played the piano at midnight and popped a tent in the back yard and set up a hair salon in there and cut up all of our magazines to make dirty cartoon books about a lonely wolf named Ralph. She was loud as hell and fun and funny, and my mom was anti -all of that, so it was a hard sell, getting Jenny to stay the night. My mom only liked my boring friends, like Diana or Sara, to come over.
MAKE: At Play 60 Jenny looked like a female Howdy Doody but with more freck- was at my grandma’s friend’s house. It was in the back room. les. She was also the first person I knew who was white who had I was young, five or six maybe, and I sat down in front of it. black cousins: Naomi and Donna from Washington, D.C. Her Maybe I played “The Entertainer.” Maybe I played “Hello Dol- dad was the first person I knew to have a handlebar mustache, ly.” I probably played whatever I could remember from the fake the ends waxed and curled up toward his eyebrows. He was also piano. My parents came in from the other room. “Who taught the first person I knew to drive a half truck/half car called an El you that song?” I shrugged. “How’d you know how to play that?” Camino, which I thought was a terrific idea. The rare times he I shrugged again. came home, he’d get out of the car, and when he came in, he’d rub Jenny’s head. “How’s my Squeak?” When my grandmother’s friend died, she willed my grandmother the piano so she could give it to me. My piano teacher told my He also had another fancy car that he parked in the garage; mother she’d give her “eye teeth for my musical ear.” I didn’t sometimes we’d go in and touch it. But after a while we weren’’t know what that meant, other than she was probably on to the allowed to go in there. “I accidentally scratched it.” I covered fact that I didn’t know how to read music and had no intention of my mouth, and Jenny nodded. “He beat my ass.” Later, her dad ever learning. Why would I? I was good enough to go to recitals would leave her mom for a twenty-six-year-old chink and move in South Bend, Indiana, and totally sweep them—Outstandings from Indiana to California. across the board, in every category.
“What’s a chink?” I asked. Whenever my piano teacher would teach me a new song, I would say, “I love this song. Can you play it one more time for me?” “She’s Chinese,” Jenny said. “That’s what they’re called.” But this Then I would close my eyes and listen like a tape recorder. I’m was before Jenny’s dad left. sure she knew what I was doing, that I was memorizing the song so I wouldn’t have to read the music off the sheet. But she was Truthfully, I couldn’t see how anyone could leave Jenny’s mom flattered to be asked to play the piano. She was a piano teacher, Anne. She had a husky voice and wore snug off-white dress pants after all. And after that, I would go home, and pick the song out and worked at Sullair with my Aunt Annette making air com- on the keys, until I got it right. pressors. She packed Jenny incredible lunches, with soup, instead of just sandwiches like everybody else, and every day, she’d put Of course, my lead over Jenny only lasted so long. In a short a different note in Jenny’s lunchbox, like, “Have a great day!” time, Jenny was better than I was. It’s not like I was Beethoven When she came home at night, Jenny would say, “You gonna or something. Endless practice and drive gets you further than have a glass of your envelope lick, Anne?” Jenny pointed at the being naturally kind of good at something. jug of Gallo wine and rolled her eyes. Jenny mouthed to me: “Every night.” And Anne would say, “You know, that’s a good Another strange thing about Jenny? Her obsession with science. idea. I just love my one glass of wine at night.” Then she’d have She ended up being a kind of scientist, in fact. For a while she her wine and we’d have our milkshakes, and we’d go downstairs was a respiratory therapist. She wore a mask and goggles and to play pool, and she’d clean the kitchen. beat on people’s backs, and they spit green slime into buckets. She came to visit me when I was in college and told me all about Jenny was a strange one, at least to me, because she was com- it. “I love my job,” she said. She also bought me a pack of ciga- petitive. I’m not saying I never wanted things that other people rettes later that night and told the clerk at White Hen Pantry, had. I did. But I didn’t want other people to not have the stuff I “Job security!” Then she quit respiratory therapy and went back didn’t want. That was Jenny. She loved pointing out how Benet to school, so she could go around collecting water samples and thinks she’s so good at tennis but she’s not. Or Kara thinks she testing them to protect the environment. But Jenny always loved looks so cute in her new sweatpants but she doesn’t. Nevermind that Jenny played volleyball, not tennis, and she didn’t even own a pair of sweatpants.
She was so competitive, in fact, that I felt bad being better at some things than Jenny was, but I was. People are sometimes. Like when we first started out in piano. I’m sure Jenny wanted to crack me. I’m sure she was thinking, “It’s not fair!” What could I say? It wasn’t fair. I was good for no good reason. I had no interest in music whatsoever. I didn’t even like playing piano.
The first piano I ever saw was one of those pianos that plays itself. My Aunt Joan and Uncle Joe had one in their basement and the keys moved on their own, and it played “Hello Dolly”
Photography by Johnathan Crawford by Photography and “The Entertainer.” The second piano I ever saw, a real one,
61 MAKE: At Play These Things Happen by Elizabeth Hildreth gruesome things. She always loved experiments that could blow I take that back about nobody eating there. When our foreign ex- up in your face or set your hair on fire or leave you crying because change student Hugues turned eighteen, my dad said, “I’m gon- you had no fingertips anymore, just charred smoking stumps. na take you somewhere good for your eighteenth birthday, Oogie Boy. The classiest place in America.” He pulled into Sumarita. Our first experiment was to grow and smoke opium. Jenny said Hugues told the waitress, “Zeez is my eigtheenth birthday today, opium comes from poppies, and what do you know? Anne had so…I have a beer.” The waitress shrugged. I don’t know if she poppies in her garden, so we dried them out all summer, and we thought maybe eighteen was a different age if you were French, waited. One night when Anne was out late, Jenny and I rolled the but she brought him out a beer. He didn’t even have to use his poppies up in newspaper. Then we sat on her back porch, lit the fake ID that he’d gotten in Chicago. The one that said he was biggest spliffs you’ve ever seen in your life, as big as cobs of corn, twenty-one and named Terry Johnson. My dad looked at his beer and sucked on them. Sparks flew off the end like firecrackers. and said, “Hugues, you gotta be kidding me. You gonna drink We looked over at Diana’s house, all lit up inside. We waited for that?” Hugues took a long drink. He said that my dad was right. ecstasy to overcome us. That Sumarita was the best restaurant in America.
“Do you feel anything?” I finally said. ***
“No,” Jenny said gravely. “It’s a different kind of poppy, I bet.” When we played softball, there were always the usual suspects hanging around. There were Dennis and David, the seventeen- “Oh.” year-old identical twins with some developmental disorder. Their brother Tom was in my class. Dennis and David knew everything “Goddamnit,” she said. about everybody on every team. They were always calling out ad- vice, –who should play what positions and why they knew that. Then Jenny started talking about Diana, but she called her Di- Dennis would yell out, “Switch Stacy to short stop, she always ane. For a minute I thought maybe Jenny was stoned, the way loses it for you guys!” Then David would add, “And Shelly’s only she was rambling on. Like Diane is just so perfect. Diane and her good for two innings. She’s wore down! Let Tracy pitch!” They’d perfect piano playing. Diane and her perfect blonde hair. Diane keep going and going until someone would inevitably shout out, and her perfect blue eyes. “Shut up, you retards.” But that didn’t seem to bother Dennis or David. Nor did it make them any less right about how the In fact, I didn’t think Diana was perfect at all. She barely had any coaches should play us if they wanted to win the game. eyelashes. She never said dirty things. She was one of the ones my mom wanted me to have stay the night. I couldn’t see what All the girls who were too old to play softball would come and Jenny thought she was seeing, but she definitely thought she was prance around at our games, too. Like Dana and Sandi. Dana seeing something. would stand up next to the fence throughout the whole game. She did this instead of sitting so everybody could see how sweet She looked over at Diana’s house wistfully, the end of her poppy her ass looked in her jeans. Dennis and David would tease Dana cigar burned out. for being a slut, yelling out to her like they did to our coaches. “Where’d you get those black suede shoes, Dana?” Dennis would “I just wish I could be like that. Like Diane.” ask. And David would follow up, “Yeah, Dana, nice eyeliner!” Sometimes Dana would get upset, almost to tears, and I remem- *** ber thinking, “Why is she so upset? It’s Dennis and David, for Jenny was the one who told me about Brian. It figures. She had God’s sakes.” But still, everybody kind of despised Dennis and a steel stomach for stories like that. We knew Brian from our David and loved them at the same time. They seemed almost as softball games. Jenny and I played softball. In fact, everyone in essential to the park as the baseball field itself. Trail Creek played softball in the summer, unless your parents were some kind of loser alcoholics, and even then, you did. Jenny Dana’s friend Sandi was slutty too, but in a downplayed, dirtier wasn’t on my team. Our team had green T-shirts and was spon- way. She looked really old for her age. She was friends with my sored by Pawolski’s Short Stop, so that was the name of our team. cousin Missy. Missy told me once, “Guess what. Sometimes San- I’m not sure what the name of Jenny’s team was, but they had red di’s brother takes his pants down and she sucks him. She told me.” shirts. I actually think their name was Sumarita, a restaurant in town that the owner had named after his daughters Sue, Marie, I knew nothing but the crudest mechanics about sex at that point, and Rita. Nobody really went to Sumarita for the food. They just but I reeled back, making some ewwww noise. My cousin got all went there for the rubbers in the rubber machine in the bath- confrontational then. She put her hands on her hips. “What? She room. In fact, when I lost my virginity, the guy said, “Wait a likes it. So does he.” She put on her devil’s advocate horns. “You second. I’m gonna run to Sumarita.” just think it’s wrong because that’s what everybody says. But what if nobody said that? What if nobody told you it was wrong? Then
MAKE: At Play 62 These Things Happen by Elizabeth Hildreth
what would you think?” Jenny looked at me one afternoon. “You know Brian?” Her eyes were alight. When I took an Anthropol- ogy class later in college, my “Who Brian?” I asked. professor explained that in- cest is a universal taboo. It is “Brian, Brian. Brian from our games. The weird one.” equally gross to people of all cultures. I thought of Sandi Jenny proceeded to tell me how Brian got snagged on a train and then. I thought of her brother dragged for at least a mile. The train probably dragged him right and the woods behind the park by The Sand Trap, which was the bar Jenny’s dad liked to go to, that they did it in. I thought which is maybe why he was never home, which was maybe why of my cousin defending Sandi he ended up leaving for California. “Can you imagine? What he and her brother, and what my looked like? After that?” cousin climbing up on her in- cest soapbox might possibly say I couldn’t. She could. She was; I could see her imagining it, in about me. fact. Turning it over and over in her mind. Full of wonder. A hu- man body, torn into several pieces. It didn’t matter whose. This is Sandi had been on my softball why she was good at science. This is why I liked to write stories, team a couple years earlier. I so I could edit out these things. still had the group picture with her in it. If I could have, after hearing that story, I would have “They said maybe he killed himself. Maybe he did it on pur- cut her out of it, like cutting out the piece of my mind that could pose,” Jenny said. I didn’t think it mattered, but I suppose it did now tell me: These things happen, they happened right here, right matter to someone. I thought of Brian’s parents. I thought of behind where this picture was taken. losing your kid in the summer. How much harder that would be because they’re around all the time and you’re always yelling Along with Dana and Sandi, Dennis and David, every week, there at them to get lost because you’re used to them being in school. were two lesbian girls—except nobody came out and called them How even when they do get lost for a long time, when they come lesbians. They dressed like boys and looked like boys and gave off back, you say, like my mom used to, “I thought you found some- boy vibes and did everything together. When they walked down thing to do. Why are you back here again?” the street, you could imagine them holding hands, even though they weren’t little girls, they were sixteen. But when you looked, I didn’t think of Brian all mangled up like hamburger. I just they weren’t holding hands. They were just walking next to each thought of how long the summer seemed, because the day after other, swaggering down the street with their baseball caps on. Brian died, he wasn’t at our game. And then every game after that, he wasn’t there either. I thought about how I never really “Do you think Tonya’s sister is gay? Are those girls gay?” I asked noticed Brian watching us play before. I only noticed him now my dad. that he was removed, like Sandi would have been, had I had the guts to cut her out of our group picture. “What do you think?” he said. I didn’t live near enough the tracks to hear the train from my I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what gay looked like, but it did seem like house. But Jenny did. When I stayed the night at her place that I could be looking at something at least a little gay. summer, I could hear it. After we finished our milkshakes, after we’d taken a nip off her mom’s wine, we’d put ourselves to bed, “Walks like a bird. Talks like a bird,” my dad said, shrugging. and I could hear its far whistle. “Probably a bird.” I could picture the train coming up behind the woods where Then there was Brian. And truthfully, I remember less of him Jenny and I sometimes went to pick up cigarette butts. The idea than anyone. He was a geek. He was the kind of boy that even was to smoke them, but I couldn’t stand the taste. if he didn’t have tape on his glasses, he did. If he had been a kid now, he would have just stayed inside on a computer. But that “I can’t. It’s too gross,” I would say to Jenny. was then, and computers didn’t exist in Indiana, so he went to see Trail Creek girls’ softball instead. When I think back, I remember “You have to keep trying,” she would tell me. “It’ll get better.” M him with a friend. A girl. A real nerdy one. But I’m not sure if she existed. Because sometimes when I think about him, I see him, and he’s all alone. Looking out onto the field from over the fence. I’m not sure when I’m looking back that I’m not just placing my- self in there so Brian could have someone next to him.
63 MAKE: At Play JOHN DILG Images courtesy of Luise Ross Gallery, New York
Shadow-Tail, 2008 Oil on canvas 11” x 14”
Voicecast, 2006 Oil on canvas 8” x 10”
MAKE: At Play 64 Swing Set with Fort, 2008 Oil on canvas 11” x 14”
65 MAKE: At Play Vulcan Love by GINA FRANGELLO
The Lawyer’s back was killing him so instead room, carrying The Lawyer’s laptop in of going back to the office he went straight one hand. In the other was a gun. He ap- home from court. As soon as he entered his proached so hastily that it did not occur to apartment, he saw his daughter’s boyfriend The Lawyer to feel fear until it rushed up stealing handfuls of CDs, mostly, absurdly, his throat too late to choke him because the classical. His first thought was, Hasn’t the blackness had already hit. punk ever heard of Napster? His second was, I’m surprised he even remembered to lock the Rachel was still upset about the videotape. door behind him. Justin whirled around with She had found it two months ago, and since a theatrically menacing look on his face; it then everything was different. Before the was apparent he was high. He had been load- tape, The Lawyer’s daughter had not seemed ing the CDs into a pillowcase as though he overly interested in boys. She had been a had seen a B-movie about robbers the night young fifteen, not the way he remembered before and thought he might want to try it high school girls from his own youth, but out. Had The Lawyer’s back not been throb- that had been during Vietnam, when the bing so even the slightest movement was weight of war and change had clung to peo- uncomfortable, he would have cracked up. ple like quicksand, making them want to emptied herself out of whatever resin clung This had been happening lately, laughing at throw off their clothes, float away on drugs. to her of what was not mighty enough to things not meant to be amusing. Just yes- Now it seemed things had gone backward; be worthwhile. Maybe this post-9/11 world, terday one of the junior partners had asked even baby boomers had become reverent, the eradication of ambiguities, this Right earnestly whether the murder of Daniel well-behaved children, toting out their flags vs. Wrong, where good children held bake Pearl had changed his mind about the War and pressing their lips tight against any criti- sales for the families of the World Trade on Terror, and The Lawyer started chortling cism of the status quo. His teenage daugh- Center victims and, in the next breath, for like when he was a kid at Queen of Angels ter was almost like a child of the 1950s—it the troops invading Iraq, would have made and the principal would ask if he wanted a never seemed to occur to these kids that the sense to her. That Leigh was the one who paddling: a self-defeating laughter at what way they’d been raised, all the emphasis on should be here to see it instead of him was then seemed—with the little he knew of the “protecting the children” and “children first” so obvious that he had stopped thinking it world outside of Boston Catholic schools— was just a way to train them to behave like consciously long ago. The fact of her death the most ludicrous thing he had ever heard. pedigreed dogs fresh from obedience school. continued to feel like a heel jabbed purpose- They were so full of their own preciousness, fully in his ribs—a slight against him. He sat down on his couch, not without their own supremacy, that they seemed to some difficulty. Justin was still gaping at feel no need to rebel. The Lawyer could not move his arms. His him but hadn’t dropped the pillowcase. It left eye felt sticky as if with fever; when he seemed evident by the silence that Justin The Lawyer suspected that if Rachel’s finally forced his lids apart he saw himself: was looking for a way out of the situation, mother were alive, she would have greatly tied to his dining room end chair with an which struck The Lawyer as fortuitous. He approved of this turn of events, and this, ir- assortment of his suit ties, each triple- or said, trying not to sound smug, “Look, how rationally, irritated him. Despite never hav- quadruple-knotted—Justin must not have about you never call my daughter again, and ing been particularly rule-abiding herself, trusted the silk’s ability to hold. He tried to just get the fuck out of here and keep what- Leigh had nursed faith in odd things—had, stand, but no, they had gotten his feet too. ever’s in that pillowcase. Though I’d suggest for example, once spent six months in voice His eyes were open now but still unfocused. a grocery bag if you don’t want the doorman lessons to remove the traces of her Brook- Across from him they watched him, staring to call the cops. They’re in the pantry.” lyn accent in an attempt to better fit into like he was a bomb that might spontane- Justin muttered, “No way, man. No way I’d Chicago Gold Coast society. At first he had ously explode. The taller, not-Justin one ditch Rachel like that.” told himself Leigh was being ironic—that waved his gun, gesturing in The Lawyer’s she was a born actress always adopting a face, “Fucker’s awake.” That did him in. He almost snorted in new role—but he eventually had to ac- laughter. cept that she believed in a certain cultural The Lawyer said, “You have got to be kid- hierarchy … believed, in an almost pure ding.” Then the second guy came out of the bed- sense, that might made right. She habitually
MAKE: At Play 66 with half a brain.” ties. He had thought of Rachel not at all while reading the book. The daughter in The gun came down on the side of his the book was a lesbian, and if anything he head again. had been reminded of a young woman he had not seen in years, the sanctimonious Rachel notices that Margaret is squirming in and overprotective sister of a former lover her chair. From the way Margaret is holding of his, since he had heard through the mu- the pages, though, Rachel can’t tell where tual grapevine that once bound his family to she is in the story. The videotape? The gun? theirs that this sanctimonious sister was now The introduction of the other Margaret? gay (or, more likely, had been all along). She It occurs to Rachel that she should have e- despised him for what she believed he had mailed the story in before her session, so she done to her sister who had been his lover, wouldn’t have to sit here and watch. But she and though he vastly disagreed with her as- wanted to watch, really. If for no other reason sessment of things, he had never fully made than for the minutes it is eating up, so that peace with her hatred of him. This had been by the time Margaret finishes, there won’t be a complicated, almost torrid episode of his much time left on the clock until Rachel’s life, his entanglement with these two beau- fifty-minute hour runs up. This way, Marga- tiful, much-younger sisters, but because it ret won’t have much time to interrogate her. had happened very shortly before Leigh’s She thinks of something she heard her father fatal car crash and Rachel coming to live say once, Love is a constant interrogation. It with him full-time, it remained largely un- is not something he would make up—her processed and therefore raw and mythical, “You better shut up, asshole,” Justin said. father is not poetic—but though Rachel has also sad and embarrassing at the same time, flipped through all the books on their book- so he didn’t care to dwell on it, though he “For Chrissakes!” The Lawyer was surprised shelves, she has never found that quote. Not had greatly enjoyed the book that reminded at the volume of his own voice, louder than that Margaret, who is paid to interrogate Ra- him of the sisters just the same. his sense of vision. “You don’t want to break chel, loves her or anything. up with my daughter—you wouldn’t take What time was it? The Lawyer was having a your loot and run because you want to see She forces herself to keep flipping through hard time remembering the day of the week, her again—and now, what, I’m supposed to the pages of a New Yorker, like somebody which would help him pin down Rachel’s believe you’re going to shoot me in the head? who knows anything about New York. Like schedule and whether she might bound Get out of here!” somebody without a care in the world. through the door at any moment to find him bleeding from the head, tied to a dining “What the fuck’s he talking about?” Not- Why hadn’t it occurred to The Lawyer that chair, and feigning unconsciousness because Justin asked. his daughter might come home? Christ, he had determined not to carry on speaking, what kind of person was he, mouthing off but realized he would be unable to keep his “Nah, man, he started telling me, like, just to these stoned kids like he had something mouth shut unless the other two believed he don’t call Rachel no more and if you leave to prove, not even thinking of what would could not hear them. Otherwise they would right now I won’t call the cops and that shit. happen if Rachel walked in the door? His incite him, and he was annoyed at himself Like I was gonna believe him.” daughter could be high strung, and if she for it, for how he could be incited by two lost it, started yelling, or tried to leave, who sixteen-year-olds with a combined IQ prob- The Lawyer sighed. “This isn’t a movie, you knew what would happen? ably not surpassing 150, putting himself stupid little prick. People don’t want to deal and possibly his daughter at risk. with the police in real life. What, do you The Lawyer had read a novel recently, a think they’re really interested that you stole Booker Prize winner, where a man and his They were talking about how to get Rachel some of my toys? Now this—tying me up daughter were trapped in their home in to run away with them: whether they would and holding me at gunpoint …” South Africa with criminals who raped the have to force her, or whether she would go daughter right in front of the man. It had by choice. Justin had acknowledged that her “This guy’s a bastard,” Not-Justin said. not been hard to read; for better or worse coming of her own free will necessitated not The Lawyer was not that kind of man, the killing their captive, and Not-Justin grudg- “He’s a lawyer,” Justin explained. kind to worry about things abstractly, to ingly agreed. They postured for each other. take things personally. He liked disturbing The Lawyer suspected strongly that nei- “Man, we shoulda got out of here.” books, though he rarely had time to read ther of them had ever killed anything more fiction and mostly kept it to major prize than an insect and that if they thought they
Illustrations By Aya Yamasaki Aya By Illustrations “Finally,” The Lawyer said. “Somebody winners people brought up at dinner par- might have to they would bolt out the door,
67 MAKE: At Play Vulcan Love by Gina Frangello and this almost roused him to open his eyes rived to untie him, whether Rachel after tal. You could have died, but you’ll be fine.” and declare himself awake and tell them the the boys had gone or maybe even the po- He looked like his mother. Couldn’t see only way to escape prison would be to kill lice, would no doubt cut the telephone wire himself, really, just the hazy tubes and his him, so that they would get out of his apart- with his kitchen scissors, and it would be own shadowy arms, but it didn’t matter—he ment and he could get to the bathroom to impossible to explain to anyone, least of all remembered what she looked like near the down two or three Vicodin and go to sleep, himself, why the thought of his telephone end, so weak in the hospital bed and hooked confident that his head injury would stave wire being cut to shreds made him feel dan- up to everything the doctors could find. She off, for once, his habitual insomnia. But gerously closer to tears of frustration than hadn’t even been forty—he’d outlived her he knew that sometime in any scenario he he had thus far, made him raise his head to already by six years. It was inevitable, the imagined, there would be the point in the scream at these assholes, goaded on by the body’s decline, whether accelerated or grad- story where he had to explain to Rachel darkness he saw faintly out a window that ual: this was what you came to, these tubes what had happened, and so he kept his eyes indicated Rachel might be home soon and and somebody murmuring endearments at shut now, thinking, trying to imagine how so he had to push this thing to its conclusion your bedside if you were lucky, somebody to best do this, willing her not to enter the quickly, before she arrived, even if what she who generally called you by your given name apartment but, because of the videotape and arrived to was his brains splattered all over in the civilian life where you stood on your how she’d been toward him since, somewhat the wall. He heard his voice say, “This is own legs, no IVs, no bullet holes in your secure that she would not as the sun was still bullshit. Go ahead, shoot.” flesh, who never called you honey or baby out; to return now would be much too early even when she climaxed, who was more of a to provoke him or make him worry, which, “Oh God.” It was Margaret’s voice. Had friend than a lover because that was all you these days, was what their relationship was she come over—his arm jerked, and he felt could handle now and maybe all she could all about. it move—the telephone wire wasn’t tight too for reasons of her own. His mother had enough, not a good job at all—no, no, pain died at thirty-nine, her body declaring war Hence, Justin. blinding in his side like a bright light. on itself with the cancer, but the three of them—him, his kid brother, and their fa- Though he hadn’t moved in at least twenty “Hey, hey, it’s all right, they’re gone. You’re ther—had lurked around the hospital the minutes, the blood dripping from his head in the hospital. Can you see me? Look.” entire time, almost slipping away with her became more of a steady trickle. All the when the time came. His father started knots his captors had made in his various He obeyed; it seemed the simplest thing to drinking after that and never stopped, and Armani ties began to blur together un- do. She was there, Margaret, in a chair next The Future Lawyer had wrapped his car til they became wavy masses of gray, blue, to a bed his body was stretched out in. The around a tree with booze once too, but red. Panic rose in The Lawyer’s chest in a wires were tubes—IVs, protruding from his walked away with nothing but a scar on his tachycardic rhythm; he felt his body jerk up- veins. His arms could move relatively freely knee. He liked Margaret a lot; if nothing else right and the two boys turned toward him, now, but his torso felt glued to the bed like a he felt a disproportionate gratitude that she the gun moving in synchronicity with their leaden mass. His eyes blinked rapidly trying was not emotionally messy, was smart and youthful, feline bodies. It looked beautiful to clear the fog. caustic and easily annoyed by men, and pre- for just a moment, and The Lawyer flashed ferred her solitude like a cat, only wanting to on a phantom image of his daughter’s tall, “I don’t feel right.” be petted on her own terms—his affection somewhat ungainly but young and lovely for her was genuine if not deep—but how body writhing under Justin’s and possibly “Honey. You’re on a morphine drip. Enjoy the hell had he come to this, to her body be- the other boy’s, as the barrel of the gun met it.” ing the only one next to his on a hospital bed? the eye less obscured by blood and blocked His wife was dead; it didn’t matter if they had out the vision of anything else except that “What happened?” divorced five years prior; from the moment clearly he was going to— Rachel, their first child, was born, Leigh had “I don’t know exactly. You were robbed I become his wife forever. Where was Rachel? Wires protruded from his arms. At first The guess—they said—” Had Margaret and the doctors been unable Lawyer thought Justin and Not-Justin had to track her down, or was this her message to found the stash of telephone wire he still “No. Know that. Why—here.” him, this absence? A form of payback more occasionally used to tie up his lovers, in a successful than skipping curfew? kitchen drawer where it always appeared “God. Baby.” She never spoke this way to organic, not contrived like pulling fur-lined him. “You were shot.” Under the threadbare sheet, his body was handcuffs out of a bedside table (though he wrapped in one of those hospital gowns. He had handcuffs too, old ones from when he “Oh. Right.” had not been in the hospital since he was used to do magic in high school, but since seventeen, after the car crash. He avoided the videotape, they were well-hidden). This “The bullet went through your ribcage. It’s a doctors—his health, other than the bum enraged him—now whoever eventually ar- miracle it didn’t hit your lung or anything vi- back, had been impeccable, always. You
MAKE: At Play 68 Vulcan Love by Gina Frangello were supposed to go, supposed to don your him in the eye, like a kaleidoscope through able—if you sat in the waiting room,” and gown and have the doctor ram a finger up which he would see the last prisms of his life, Rachel stands up and walks out. your ass, especially at his age, but The Law- he felt a frightening absence of fear. The mo- yer always counted that as akin to the way ment was brief—too brief to linger on Ra- The videotape was simple. The Lawyer you were supposed to hang a yellow ribbon chel or anyone—but his sense of impatience could see it as if he had filmed it yesterday. on a tree or go to church on Sundays: his that this drama needed to end before his His young lover, the lesbian’s sister, her body mother had done those things, but it hadn’t daughter got home did not recede or ampli- nearly emaciated, no longer the body of the helped. He had taken it for granted, despite fy. Though he realized his actions might be professional dancer she’d once been, but of the early deaths of both his parents, that he construed as being willing to die for her, he a junkie. Bent over his dining room table. would thrive physically until at least his late had not thought in terms of missing her, or Throughout the whipping, the camera re- sixties or seventies, and then—it had never even so much of the fallout his death might mained focused on her face, not the more been so much a plan but just a gut knowl- cause her. Yet neither had the prospect of his pornographic back view (there would be edge—he would just decide when enough imminent death offered any relief—he had, plenty of that later on). The telephone wire was enough. Maybe by then there would other than that reactionary drug-and-alco- he’d bound her with was invisible, because be grandchildren or some other incentive hol-induced bout with the tree, never been he usually tied her hands under her body so to make a reasonable amount of discomfort suicidal, never found life unbearably pain- that she couldn’t start waving them around and indignity worth the price, but you had ful or longed to flee it, though he often felt in an effort to cover her back, buttocks, and to know when to cut your losses—he had al- blank, indifferent, in need of some stimula- legs when the pain became too intense for ways known that. Almost always. He’d never tion to jolt him, yet generally too cynical, her to control herself any longer and play planned to wrack up hours in a hospital too practical to actively seek out anything along. He stood behind her with the belt bed. He thought now, with a self-important chaotic enough to actually do the trick. He she had delivered to him from his closet, the shame that seemed adolescent to him, that had believed, often with a certain self-satis- leather doubled over, about half his body in he would never want to fuck Margaret again faction, that he’d spent his raging emotions view as he delivered the blows to her ass. The since she’d seen him like this. as a young man on a mother he adored to videocam chronicled her slow descent: the Oedipal proportions, that by the time he way she first tried to hold her face regal and He sat up hard, this time enough so to tug at reached adulthood, he was done with those impassive—how she succeeded, no doubt what he’d imagined, in his morphine haze, childish notions of love—not incapable of due to her years of classical dance training, were his old telephone wires. enjoying life’s pleasures, certainly, but per- almost amazingly through the first series of haps a bit inured to its sentimental pains. loud snaps on skin. Then began the twitches “I’ve got to get out of here.” of her lips; the sweat breaking out on her Urbane, his young lover, the not-lesbian sis- brow; her efforts to look away from the cam- “Forget it!” Margaret almost swatted him ter used to call him. Mockingly in part, but era’s eye as she eventually broke, struggling, back down against his pillows. “Jesus, you with another part also needy. She had admit- screaming even before she would succumb can’t even walk. Leaving isn’t an option.” ted near the end, I can’t trust myself anymore, to the weeping, but then bawled, snotty and Then, her litigator-voice evaporating: “Hey. but I can trust you because you’ll never lose spitty as a child, as he went on and on. The Are you okay? You had a rough time, huh? It your head completely. And before her, Leigh camera did not capture the blood—not un- really shook you up.” Her tone held a glint, whispering into his ear at night, My little til later when he untied her and there was a amid the concern, of bemusement, and he Vulcan, sweetly, without malice, because he glimpse as her body lowered to the carpet. remembered abruptly why he liked her, why never wept, rarely raised his voice—but then The Lawyer had not filmed his lover in order he trusted her. “You sound,” she told him, after they lost their second baby to SIDS, to watch the scene alone later, to jerk off to “… kind of hysterical.” she had left, screamed, You don’t know how the memory of it—though at times over the to grieve! Still, all of that was meant to disap- past four years he had done just that. No, he “I feel pretty hysterical,” he said quietly, pear the moment you stared down the barrel had done it to show her. It took some time closing his eyes again. of a gun. It was supposed to melt away, the to set the camera up right, and he’d almost reserves, the defenses, all your neurons firing given up, afraid of ruining the mood before She was silent, accepting this. He didn’t say at once: I want to live! the whole production even began. But the the part about how, the moment Not-Justin impulse to play it back for her later, to wit- had pointed the gun at his bleeding head, How does the story end? What do you do ness within her the constant intense battle he knew it wasn’t bullshit, that a bullet was with the protagonist when his epiphany has between shame and arousal as she watched about to gush into his brain. The kid must happened without him? what he had seen—it was that desire that have panicked, lowered the gun just enough spurred him on: to have her know he could to save his life at the last instant—The Law- Margaret looks up. She is not finished yet, see her that way at any time; to have her yer didn’t remember the pain of impact, Rachel sees that much. She says only, “I see her own transformation from beauty to any knowledge of where he’d been hit. He think it would make more sense—I think something ugly and broken down, in hopes knew only that when the gun’s barrel poked you and I would both be more comfort- that she would understand the power that
69 MAKE: At Play Vulcan Love by Gina Frangello held for him—maybe even that she could an equal. Never a possession to be trivialized, her skirted behind makes contact with her explain it to him. At least he knew she would protected from truths, bossed around. But expensive but worn-down chair. “I don’t share his fascination. They were the oldest soon after the videotape, she started coming know,” she says like a defeated medical stu- story in the book—yet The Lawyer had felt home with boys, coming home late. Before dent staring at the brain scan of a fatal tu- powerless before it at the time, had suc- Justin there had been another. The Lawyer mor, “what I am supposed to do with this.” cumbed to the belief that what was between hadn’t taken it overly seriously. A boy that them was utterly unique, not the usual older age wanted to get laid, sure—but he wor- “What do you mean?” Rachel asks, purpose- man on a power trip, the usual young wom- ried about AIDS. He’d even debated with fully obtuse. “It’s not like you can grade me an with punitive Daddy fantasies. He had let himself as to whether he should leave Rachel or anything. This isn’t school.” himself believe that they were transcending condoms in her room but hadn’t gone so far … something. With her, there had been no as to do it. But the rest, no. Not these kids. “No,” Margaret consents. “My dilemma distance, not so much between the two of Even if they were trying to play-act at what is whether I should show this to your fa- them (there had always been that, no matter Rachel had seen on the tape, The Lawyer ther. Since you’ve made no effort to hide what game they played to eradicate it), but had felt reasonably certain the appeal of it his identity, and even used my name in the between him and himself. would be lost on some horny sixteen-year- story—though I need to say for the record old boy. Too much work for an only vaguely that this woman isn’t me, that I’ve never had She had found the videotape. Rachel, sexual payoff. If there was one thing having any relationship with your father other than snooping in a box high in his closet, not . . . perverse—his young lover had liked that a professional one…” She seems to lose her curious about his life but about her moth- word—bedroom tastes assured you of, it was train of thought, says abruptly, “Were you er’s, hoping for some relic of Leigh. Instead that most others did not share your world- under the impression that your father and I there was her father beating a ninety-five view. were having an affair?” pound woman. He’d had the bloodstains professionally removed from his carpet the And, indeed, he’d been right, but not in the Rachel shrugs. “Not particularly.” next day (Rachel being twelve at the time way he expected. In her haste to emulate his of the filming, not yet living with him). perversions, to punish him with them, Ra- “Then you used my name to get a rise out The truth was, he hadn’t even watched the chel had topped them. What had been for of me? Maybe to encourage me to show your damn tape in two years, maybe more. Why him a powerful, transcendent violence be- story to your father? Is that what you want?” hadn’t he just thrown it away? He imagined came, in the hands of an angry boy with one Rachel staring at it, rewinding over and foot dropped out of school already, a plot to “Not particularly.” over like some CNN junkie after the Twin kidnap a fifteen-year-old girl after shooting Towers fell; he imagined how a young girl’s her father with a gun. “Hmm.” Margaret at last puts down the life changed in an instant like that. Still, he stack of papers, on the end table. “I’m not hadn’t been able to act contrite in the way The office door opens. Instead of leaving she needed him to. He wasn’t sorry. Christ, them on her chair, Margaret still holds the that wasn’t what it was about. All that blame stack of papers in her hands. Staring into came later, from his lover’s now-lesbian sis- the waiting room, Margaret looks as though ter. He’d tried to explain to Rachel, just as she expected to find it empty, as though she he’d tried to explain to that sanctimonious has never seen the girl in it before. Rachel young woman who hated him, but just like thinks Margaret is probably not aware she is the lesbian sister, so sure in her righteous- waving the papers back and forth nervously ness, so sure of the blacks and whites of the but gently, like a fan. The laser-jet letters on world, his daughter had turned away from the white paper flash like an old-fashioned him. Had screamed, “How would you like it cartoon strip in the low office light. Rachel if somebody did that to me? Would you say watches them, the way they form together to we were just consenting adults then?” And construct her life and not-her-life. he should have said a zillion other things whether he meant them or not, but what “Come in,” Margaret tells her, her voice he’d said was, “You aren’t. When you are, we a bit unnaturally loud and cheerful in the can talk about this. For now, you’re the child quiet. Rachel resumes her position in her and you play by my rules.” usual chair. She feels buoyed by Margaret’s artificial tone, suddenly confident that they When had he started sounding this way— will be artificial together now, that this is some member of the cult of childhood in- something she knows how to do. Then she nocence? He had always tried to treat his will get to go home. daughter as a thinking person, if not exactly Margaret’s tone, though, changes as soon as
MAKE: At Play 70 Vulcan Love by Gina Frangello sure. I think maybe you do. I think you room feels stagnant. “For lack of a better knew not named Mary was Margaret, and hope to manipulate me into embarrassing way of putting it. Yes.” perhaps because it was one of the only times your father by showing him this and asking he remembered Margaret was Korean, since him if it’s true, and doing, in a sense, your Rachel throws her long legs over the side of in every regard she practiced the same bland dirty work—but I don’t want to do that, Ra- the chair. “Of course not.” Americanism—albeit a secular, humanist, chel, at least not yet. Not until you tell me northern, urban, blue state Americanism, if it is true.” “Why, of course not? You seem to know an which was becoming its own ethnic minor- awful lot about it.” ity—as most women he knew did, regard- “What do you mean if it’s true? My dad hasn’t less of their origin. But he only said, “No, I been shot in the head recently by any of my “I know my dad, don’t I?” think she’s Irish,” at which point Margaret boyfriends!” A high, tinkly giggle. “You said, “Does she have an accent?” The Law- know my mother died, you know my baby Silence. The vaguely New Age music on the yer laughed mildly and said, “Irish people sister died when I was six. Yes, my father’s office soundtrack has run out, signifying only have accents in Dublin and Shirley mother really got a brain tumor and died that her time is up. Margaret doesn’t move. Temple films,” and then Margaret laughed before she was forty—he had that accident and affected an Irish accent, badly, which too, with his car, you can ask him. Yeah, I “There are numerous things I want to say made The Lawyer grateful for her presence have an uncle who lives in Oregon—he’s an when you say that, Rachel. The first is that and her efforts to put him at ease, and at orthodontist or a chiropractor or something. you seem to know your father rather too the same time regretful he had brought her, I haven’t seen him since I was a baby. He and well, if what I’ve just read is factual on any for she intruded upon a situation that was my dad aren’t … close …” level. The second is that you say it isn’t true, irrevocably his. yet you use your knowledge of your father “Do you see, Rachel, that your response here as justification for the story’s plot. How can But in the lounge, the Irish-American psy- tells me that you’re playing games? I don’t both things exist at once—if the story isn’t chiatrist told them that Rachel had refused mean to gloss over your pain, especially about true, then how can your knowledge of your his visit. They had not driven overlong to your mother’s death, but you know full well father be the impetus for your writing it?” reach her—only to the North Shore sub- that I was asking about the videotape.” urbs—and the day was still young; they Rachel snorts. “Yep, you’ve got me there.” could go out and do something on their own “You want to know if I found a videotape now, like newlyweds, like a childless couple. of my dad torturing some twenty-year-old “All right. All right, Rachel. I guess we’re Yet it would be a month before The Lawyer girl?” going to have to have a session with your had another opportunity to see his daughter, father then and ask him what he makes of and anxiety rose in him sharp as bile. He had But Margaret doesn’t flinch. The air in the this. Is that what you’d like? I’m not trying not been in the same room with her since to break with your confidentiality—I’m try- they took her from the courtroom like a ing to give you what you need. You don’t stranger, a stranger who had killed a man— have to lie to me or manipulate me … I’m a boy really—to avenge him, yet now would here to help you. Tell me what you want and not speak to him still. There was so much I’ll do it.” he had wanted to ask. Even the story of how she’d shot Justin precisely. The prosecuting “Then wait,” Rachel says, “don’t call him in counsel had argued that he’d given her the yet. The story isn’t finished. I got stuck—I gun freely, that she’d tricked him by pre- couldn’t figure out how to end it.” tending to be thrilled he had tried to kill her father for her, and that she wanted to be like His bandages were gone by the time his Bonnie and Clyde and said he would have daughter was allowed visitors, but due to the to teach her to shoot a gun. This was not rain, The Lawyer found he moved slowly a young girl afraid for her life, the prosecu- up the walk, the ache in his side more acute tor had specified.This is a calculating young today than in recent weeks. He said to his woman who used her sexual charms to lie and new wife, “Her psychiatrist is named Mar- manipulate her way into a revenge killing— garet too,” and his wife said, “Oh, is she who stood, once Justin Wildgoose had given her Korean?” His wife believed that because the gun and maybe still laughing, spun around of Margaret Cho and herself, all women and fired point blank into his head, killing named Margaret were Korean, which The him instantly. Had his friend Alex Fox not run Lawyer found inexplicably endearing, per- from the scene in time, it is probable that the haps because when he was growing up in defendant would have killed him too. But no: Irish-Catholic Boston, almost every girl he it seemed improbable—something out of a
71 MAKE: At Play Vulcan Love by Gina Frangello
Quentin Tarantino film to The Lawyer—yet on his lap. It had reminded The Lawyer all and that was why it was all so destined to go all the defense counsel had managed in re- at once of riding a train with his mother. He awry, to swing so out of control. sponse was that this was a girl who had al- was not sure where they’d been going, since ready lost her mother and infant sister, that in the childhood of his memory they rarely His daughter, that long-ago evening, was the loss of her father, too, had caused her to left their small apartment cluttered with his still living part-time with her not-yet-dead “snap.” Her father did not die, the prosecutor mother’s piano and his father’s books, he and mother, yes. Safely removed from every- reminded the judge. He is right here in this his brother venturing only as far as the street thing. As his lover had nothing in common courtroom, none the worse for wear. The defen- outside for games of Kick the Can and, later, with his gentle mother, so his daughter dant knew that, or could have known it if she Mean Teacher, in which he and his brother seemed to him to have nothing in com- had gone to see him in the hospital instead of played nuns and coerced the neighborhood mon with this doomed bird stretched out going out like a vigilante to enact her own jus- girls to pull down their underwear for a pad- over his legs who needed him to hurt her so tice. Her father could identify his shooters and dling, since girls were rarely hit at school and she would not have to hurt herself. (It was would live to do so, and even as we speak Alex didn’t know the boys, when sent to the prin- not victimization, whatever her lesbian sis- Fox has been incarcerated—but Justin Wild- cipal’s office, kept their pants on. While his ter later claimed: it had been collaboration, goose paid with his life. The Lawyer had felt lover slept, The Lawyer had sat on the blood- collusion, a taboo bond, perhaps, but a real lightheaded then; he was, despite the prose- stained carpet, leaning against the wall, with and voluntary bond just the same.) Only cution’s arguments, a bit the worse for wear. the Chicago Reader open on his other leg, the later, after Rachel came to live with him, If not for that, Rachel might have been tried one not hot and moist from her pale, feverish would he wonder obsessively whether he’d as an adult—he might be walking through face. He sat, his mind playing with memories been wrong: whether what he had done to a metal detector at a prison instead of wait- of his own small head on his mother’s leg— his by-then-gone lover and a smattering of ing in a mauve “visiting day” chair here at hers not bare as his was but covered in one other women over two decades would come a private hospital. There were still so many of her stiff floral dresses—and playing, too, back to haunt him through Rachel. Wheth- questions he had for Rachel, and now she with things not yet happened that already er she would become a woman who craved would not see him, and it would be a month bore the quality of memory: the way he pain simply by her proximity to a man who before he had the chance to try again. would eventually throw caution (let’s face it, had made a minor career of doling it out. good sense) aside and ask this sleeping girl to He had worried about this sometimes to Yet if he truly wanted to ask the questions, move in with him; the way they would both, the point of regretting everything, even and why had he brought Margaret here? Wasn’t at first, pretend that this could save her, as especially the night of the videotape itself— she the buffer? Could Rachel know Mar- though he were qualified to save anyone; the berating himself and watching his daughter garet had come, the same way she knew— way it would not work in some colossal man- cautiously, year after year, careful to, like somehow—where Justin and Alex had been ner that would burn everything out between the man his ex-wife chided him for being, hiding? them and make a civilized slip back toward a never display any strong emotion in Rachel’s casual if kinky affair impossible; the way she presence: to seldom raise his voice, to always It felt increasingly and increasingly like would disappear in some way—suicide or remain calm. something out of Kafka. His daughter had Europe or marrying some safe man she did become a psychic anticipating his next not love or disappearing into a youth drug And look—look!—he had succeeded. His move, a queen never letting her pawns culture where he could not follow—and daughter had not become a victim of some move far enough on the board for him to how he would remain here, on the floor of predatory man like himself! reach her. Was she protecting him, or pro- his apartment, aging while she remained fro- tecting herself from him, or merely punish- zen in memory. He would believe afterward His daughter had become a killer. ing him still? that, with her, he had lived so utterly in the moment—but in truth he had spent many of Margaret’s eyes turn now to the clock. It Margaret put her hand on his shoulder the nights they shared thinking of what had faces only her chair so that Rachel can never and said, “She’s been through so much. been with his mother and what was to come tell what time it is when she is in this office, It’s shame, you know—she’s humiliated to with this self-destructive girl nothing like his this room she has visited so frequently she face you after what she’s done. She’ll come mother. When his lover woke amid weak can barely remember any period in her life around. You have to let her go at her own sunlight, the Reader was turned to exactly the when it was not so. Margaret has been the pace. It’s the only way to help her now.” same page as four hours earlier, “News of the only woman in her life for years now, since Weird,” and she had smiled at him through her mother died when she was twelve; her Which Margaret said this, though? It’s all the pain of her scabbing welts because she baby sister and grandmother are dead; her right: take your pick. needed to think of him as a man who would father, though she suspects he has mistresses read the paper impassively after beating a (fuck-buddies, her friends would say), never woman bloody in his living room, and while brings anyone home. Her psychiatrist is the After the camcorder stopped filming, his at times he was that kind of man, he was not only woman Rachel ever even sees her fa- young lover had fallen asleep with her head where this particular woman was concerned, ther talking to. Margaret is attractive in a
MAKE: At Play 72 Vulcan Love by Gina Frangello middle-aged way, not stunning like Rachel’s “No,” Rachel admits, “that’s not it.” lowed to hug their shrinks again. mother in a way that transcends age. Ra- chel herself is not beautiful like her parents, “Why that year, two years ago, when you As Rachel turns to leave, Margaret calls out, though she has the lovely power of youth were fifteen?” “I know the videotape is real, Rach. I know and knows, when she chooses, how to use it. you found it—I know that part of the story She will grow into a Margaret, not a Leigh, Rachel chews a strand of dark brown hair, is true. Believe me, hon, I know better than not a Mary like her maternal grandmother. watching it turn black. anyone what a sharp cookie you are, but She hopes to grow into a Margaret because you’re only seventeen. There are things you it is among her superstitions that Leighs and Margaret says, more loudly, “What are you just couldn’t … I won’t tell your father. I re- Marys are rarely permitted to grow old at all. going to miss when you get to Stanford, alize you don’t want him to know.” Rach? Is there anything here, or are you glad “Why Daniel Pearl?” Margaret asks now, and to leave it all behind?” Rachel stands, frozen in the moment. In Rachel is surprised. She had forgotten about the narrow, shadowy opening of Margaret’s Pearl, no longer understands the rationale “It’s not gladness,” Rachel tells her. “I’ll miss doorway, she sees so many things at once. behind her own reference. She blinks. my dad. You know he won’t really come visit The way her mother’s red curls fell over me much. He’ll think I need my freedom, her face like a curtain that never lifted long “You must have been …” Margaret counts blah blah blah. I won’t come home either enough, then fell permanently: dark. Her on her fingers—therapists are no good at because I won’t want to bother him.” She father sitting monk-like on the floor with math—“yes, fifteen when he was killed, just looks urgently at Margaret, narrows her a stack of legal briefs, the apartment silent like in this story. Why that year—why are eyes. “You’ve known me for five years,” she because she is no longer there to urge him politics a backdrop in this story anyway? prods. “It’s just a story—you’re the one who to a chair, remind him of his bad back. The What do they have to do with the video?” told me to write a story about my family. women who will fuck him on their couch in You do realize, right, that I”—she sputters— her absence, until he is too old for that to “There is no videotape,” Rachel reminds “I didn’t kill anyone!” happen much or at all, but Rachel will still her. be gone. The Pacific, not far from Stanford: “Of course,” Margaret says quietly now. the first ocean she will see without her father “Yes, all right then,” Margaret concurs. “Yes, honey, I know.” beside her, its vast expanse rendering her “Still, what does—um—secular human- life for the first time comfortingly small. A ism in the blue states have to do with any “I was reading that book—that novel, Dis- tidal wave of hair, pale yellow, roaring across of this?” grace—my dad hasn’t read it. He doesn’t her father’s lover’s skinny back as she turned read novels. The lesbian girl, from my story her head sharply back and forth—one long, Rachel doesn’t know the answer—maybe I mean, she used to be my babysitter when solitary strand dragging along wet skin so doesn’t even know the this. Lately she has I was little. My dad went out with her sis- that when it returned to the camera’s fo- been feigning Republicanism in order to ter for a while. I had a crush on the lesbian cus, falling over the girl’s face, the edge was tease her father, who thinks today’s youth sister in my pseudo bi phase when lesbian- tinged bright red with blood. Rachel’s heart is derivatively conservative in a facile way ism was all the rage.” She laughs. “She was pounds: an ocean of blood inside her, trying because they have been handed every excess the only lesbian I knew! And you remember to get out. She closes her eyes in a momen- and freedom too easily. She explains, “My Justin. From my stupid-boys-were-all-the- tary magical panic: maybe she can disappear, dad’s been bitching and moaning about rage phase.” too, like the girl from the video. Then thinks Bush’s re-election … I guess—he talks poli- about what she should say, how she should tics a lot, even though he isn’t very political. “Oh.” Margaret brightens a bit. “I see.” deny it, and what it will mean about her life Most of the attorneys he works with are total Talking almost to herself. if the videotape is real. What choices will be conservatives, but he still likes to think of left her: to be another woman in her father’s himself as a hippie. It’s kind of quaint and Rachel stands. She is too tall for this office body count, or to become a predator some- retro—the way he really seems to believe it, now. She will have to avoid coming home how, too. How it will mean she cannot come you know, matters. You can tell he’s from a at winter break and summer—she won’t fit home over college breaks, because he is bad pre-Nixon era, like no matter how cynical into this room anymore. and will hurt her, even though she loves him he acts, he hasn’t figured out they’re really and he never has. How her feet feel bolted to all just crooks.” They hug. That sort of thing is permitted, the earth fighting this tide even as her head now that the sexual-abuse scares of the early screams Run! “So you’re mocking him?” Margaret asks. 1990s have mainly passed and instead peo- ple are afraid of bigger things: of terrorism She manages to open her eyes, but she says “With Daniel Pearl? I’m not sure I under- and the Patriot Act and the death of Irony nothing. She does not even close the door. stand.” and small pox and Donald Rumsfeld. What M comes around goes around. People are al-
73 MAKE: At Play A Conversation between Gina Frangello & David Yoo
When MAKE invited me to dialogue with Young Adult novelist David Yoo, whose second novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before (2008) has gotten quite a bit of acclaim, I admit that I was unsure what a writer with a nipple on the cover of her book (that would be me—the writer, I mean, not the actual nip- ple) would have to talk about with someone writing for young adults. However, as soon as I read David’s sharp and hilarious novel, which grapples with issues from beauty to race to virginity to cancer, all in fresh ways that eschew simple political correctness, I quickly realized we were going to have all the fodder we could possibly need for discussion. As it turns out, we both got so into our con- versation that we only managed to ask each other a couple of questions apiece before we’d already exceeded the MAKE word limit, and I’m pretty sure we could have kept on going for days. Here is our dialogue, and I guess we’ll just have to continue it sometime on our own. Meanwhile, buy a copy of David’s novel for a young person in your life—or just anyone who remembers the indignities of high school and could use a good laugh.
Gina Frangello, 9/17/10
GF: Your novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard the novel’s narrative seems to view her as an type of face have anything to do with whether This One Before, chronicles the ill-fated re- exception to this rule. I’d like to explore and someone is a good person or not? Why is it so lationship of an “intentional loser,” Albert, unpack this mythology and why it holds such incredibly compelling for people of all ages to and a pretty, popular girl, Mia. While one of multigenerational power in its appeal to youth believe that the geeks are Good and the jocks the points of the novel is Al’s own judgmental culture. I should stipulate here that I was closer are Bad? nature, which can be brutal, I was still struck to a Goth than a cheerleader in high school by his observation at one point that pretty girls and that when I was junior high–aged, I was DY: The polarization is unfair in the grand are generally “mean” or “not good people.” In overweight with teeth like Laura Ingalls and scheme of things, and Albert’s perception of fact, I’m struck by this general sentiment in YA hair like a Brillo pad. Still, this polarization his peers does seem to (for the most part) lit and film, going back to the John Hughes strikes me as unfair or facile, and I’ve written align with the now cliché characterizations films of my youth, in which being good-look- a bit about its adult manifestations in my own of teens we’ve seen since the dropping of the ing or popular (much less, having money!) fiction in an effort to get to the bottom of it. I Hughes oeuvre in the 80s, but I think there’s are often automatically signs of a character’s mean, isn’t it possible that a lot of kids become a slight difference between those teen mov- moral inferiority or villainous role. Although “popular” precisely because they’re nice or gen- ies, which I’m a fervent fan of, but which Mia is extremely kind—perhaps to a fault— erous? Why would being born with a certain I readily admit tend to cozily rely on well-
MAKE: At Play 74 worn stereotypes that in effect offer sweep- a possible explanation as to why he puts his …sigh. The funny thing is, while Albert’s ing assumptions about teens, and Stop Me peers in very specific drawers of categoriza- perspective conforms to many of the typical If You’ve Heard This One Before in that it’s a tion. Albert’s narrow-minded first-person stereotypes, the genesis or root of this story novel told in the first person, which means views don’t necessarily deny the truth that, was an example of the polar opposite of a it’s not so much attempting to serve as a uni- in real life (perhaps it’s fitting I write a lot facile stereotype—specifically, that no mat- versal, authoritative portrait or indictment of YA given that as an adult I still use the ter who they were prior, any teen character of the various castes in high school but is phrase “real life” in everyday conversation), who gets Cancer is always thereafter consid- instead merely one teenager’s honest per- there are nice popular people, just as there ered a victim, an utterly innocent martyr, spective—in this case, Albert Kim’s, a six- are mean losers. Albert does consider pop- whereas in Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One teen-year-old misanthrope [clarification: a ular-yet-nice Mia an exception to the rule, Before, Ryan Stackhouse, Mia’s ex-boyfriend socially awkward if somewhat genial young as you rightly note, not only because he’s so who gets sick midway through the book, is man as opposed to the creepier silent misan- judgmental but also because she’s the only undeniably the villain of the story. thrope who sits behind girls in class drawing popular girl he’s gotten to actually know really realistic pictures of guns]. personally. The story in part deals with how As for why people of all ages, particularly one’s predetermined placement on the high- adults, find it compelling to see the geek That’s important to clarify because if it were school social totem pole affects one’s per- = good vs. jocks = bad typecasting, I don’t told from the POV of an adult looking sona, if that makes any sense. know. Maybe we like looking back on our back, even in first person, it could very eas- youth in such simplistic black-and-white ily come off as authoritative in such broad That being said, there are truths to those terms because life made more sense back strokes, like in those teen movies. But this tired conventions about the typical teen then precisely because of it and that as is just a clueless boy telling his story, and social hierarchy. While not always the case, adults we now struggle to define ourselves? teens tend to stereotype, no? (E.g., you get the especially insecure, crappy jocks in high My lord, that sounds cheesy, but to run with bullied by just one varsity wrestler, and you school are often quite meatheaded and bully it, say a former popular basketball star at then blanketedly despise the entire wrestling the weaker lot, while the insecure, especially age thirty has to grapple with the fact that team.) For that matter, teens even tend to vain popular pretty girls, are often mean strangers can’t identify him as such at first prefer to identify as a “type,” it seems. You (or at least naively dismissive) to unpopular glance standing in line at the grocery store. labeled yourself as something of a Goth back people. Emily in the title story of your col- Instead, the only category they see him fit- in high school, for example, whereas I kind lection, Slut Lullabies (2010), acknowledges ting into is the “prematurely receding hair- of straddled several lines: I was a jock soccer the universal high-school rules, like when line” group, or any other subcategory that player but overall a more gentle jock given she notes that after you hook up with a guy just makes him feel incredibly old and de- that my main sport was tennis (hardly the in high school, you either become an item nuded. [A sidebar: Why is it that former mean jock’s sport of choice). At the same or “you carefully ignored each other for the bullies at their ten-year reunions never seem time I was the guy who listened to Echo and remainder of your teenage life.” We grew up to remember being bullies back when they the Bunnymen and XTC and wrote obscure in different parts of the country, but I im- were in high school? That’s always mystified (in small town New England circa the late mediately recognized that rule! Generation me.] And so by that (admittedly cornball) 80s/early 90s) band names in bubble let- after generation, there are these unspoken rationale, the former “winners” per se back ters on the outside of my Trapper Keeper rules that tend to not change as much as in high school are today drawn to these “old folders to the utter befuddlement of my we’d hope (even Emily’s mom wants her to school” notions of social politics because teammates. Anyway, because of this chame- dump her best friend for fear of being cast as they get to relive their glory years or some- leonic, ever-shifting identity, decades later, “nerdy by association”). So while I agree that thing, whereas for former geeks to see the I saw Albert as a kid who doesn’t quite fit it’s unfair and too easy to make the same old meek inherit the Earth in a teen story serves in with any particular group, and when kids obvious connections (wealth + looks = evil, as a form of belated revenge? Or maybe it’s feel like that, they tend to use the thicker poor + nerdy = decent), the rules that pro- that at some point in adulthood, we cease to paintbrushes when painting their peers. But mote this in high-school society do exist just be jocks and cheerleaders and eventually all he finds the nerds just as elitist as he consid- about everywhere. become geeks, every last one of us? At least ers the popular, pretty girls mean, which is teenagers would think so . . . to say that he’s an equal opportunity hater! This isn’t particularly relevant, but I want to On top of this, Albert’s the token Asian guy add that lately it seems as if there has been So I’m going to swing it back in your direction. in school—which isn’t something that is ex- something of a renaissance for geeks. Today, Your question intrigued me regarding your plored in-depth in this novel as it is in my more than ever, it seems being a geek or nerd own mindset when you write stories, specifical- first novel,Girls For Breakfast (2005), which is considered cooler than it was back when ly those dealing with teen characters. When you is about the correlation between the protag- we were teenagers—making your comment deal with teen protagonists, or even adult char- onist’s ambivalence toward his ethnicity and all the more insightful. Actually, I had no acters looking back on their high-school years, his desire to date a popular white girl, but idea that making the hero of my story a loser do you consider these thoughts (that you’ve it’s another layer of outsiderness that offers when I wrote it was going to be so en vogue brought up here) prior to writing—that is, the Illustrations by Rachel Mason by Illustrations
75 MAKE: At Play A Conversation between Gina Frangello & David Yoo stereotypes or tropes of teenagerdom—and do I have a story, “Saving Crystal,” about a fif- overseas so she can live with her new lover, you actively try to subvert them in your work? teen-year-old girl who has an affair with— a Dutch, wheelchair-bound poet. Cam- Do you worry about sounding too familiar or and subsequently blackmails—her high- den isn’t in school during the course of the pat in your characterizations? Do you consider school English teacher in order to make story, but he’s very haunted by the role he different angles as you write your coming-of- the money for her pregnant stepmother once played in pressuring a naive freshman age stories—not just presenting the truth, or at to escape their abusive home. Some of the girl to basically start having group sex with least emotional truth, but also striving to pres- scenes take place within the walls of the high him and his friends, back home. Camden is ent a perspective that’s, I d’no, fresh, for lack of school, but my protagonist, Jenna, doesn’t highly aware of the fact that his good looks a better word? talk much about her social life or the cliques have virtually guaranteed him a level of of jocks vs. nerds. She mentions friends, social desirability despite the fact that he’s GF: I’d certainly agree that—as you say— but her concerns have a lot more to do jumped from school to school. He’s wres- the characters have a tendency to write with what’s going on inside her home and tling with how that plays against the fact themselves when it comes to their own bi- also with the class issues in her rural New that his mother is a lesbian and assumptions ases and perceptions. This is true at any age, England town, where women like her step- he fears kids at school may make about his not just for teen characters, of course. When mother have little freedom or financial op- sexuality because of that. His overcompen- I’m first writing a draft of something, I’m tions, whereas just a four minute drive away sation or concern about his social status and not likely to feel very aware of any philo- is Hanover, New Hampshire, populated by fitting in essentially led him to participate sophical or political agenda in terms of why wealthy Dartmouth alums or professors, in what he believes was a rape, although the my characters think as they do, or make the whose kids seem to have all the opportuni- other guys, and even the girl in question, classifications or stereotypes they may make. ties no one in her world possesses. So these wouldn’t call it that. So yes, in that story Like a lot of writers, my characters feel so are factors—they’re part of Jenna’s con- perhaps more than any of my other stories, real to me that…well, my friend Robin An- sciousness, and of mine when I was writing the role that “beauty” or popularity plays talek had this fabulous line in an interview the story—but these dynamics between the in high school impacts my main character, recently where she described a good writing teens themselves are not on the page. Jenna leading him to have done things he’ll have day as being “like taking dictation.” And is the only teenage character who is actu- to live with for the rest of his life. that’s essentially how I feel. When the writ- ally in the story. The reader is probably able ing is really grooving, the writer is not aware to discern that she is pretty and reasonably What I mean to say most of all is that I don’t of herself or himself as a puppet master popular, if merely because of the absence of tie whether or not someone is born good- pulling strings, or of having any “agenda.” her ever worrying about these things, and looking, or even whether they have the so- Everything feels completely organic and es- also based on her English teacher’s response cial skills (or particular cachet that’s valued sential to the character. to her. For her part, even though she has an among whatever group of people they hap- ulterior motive in trying to seduce him, she’s pen to live among) that make them “popu- At other stages of writing, of course, the also genuinely very drawn to him because of lar” with their peers, as having anything to writer’s perception may change. Working on the worldliness and opportunities he repre- do with either their morality or with the ease a revision isn’t the same as working on a first sents—things that feel so inaccessible to her. of their lives. This doesn’t mean that people draft, for example. In first thinking about a This story ends badly on a number of levels, don’t hold many stereotypes about one an- story—or especially later when revising it— but one of the saddest aspects of it, to me, is other and what type someone may belong it becomes much more clear to the writer how Jenna’s determination to draw out the to. I have a story called “What You See” that whether a character’s beliefs and perspectives ugly, base side of her teacher—in order to engages those themes much more explicitly are synonymous with the story’s beliefs and then be able to extract money from him— than any of my other work. The story fol- perspectives, or whether in fact the story destroys her innocent ability to believe in a lows two women, The Beautiful Woman may work in part to subvert the character’s “better” life or more noble world outside her and The Intelligent Woman, as they essen- worldview. town. By showing that her teacher has more tially misunderstand, envy, and misconstrue than feet of clay, in a way she also loses the each other over a period from college into I don’t write a great deal about high school dream—of “getting out” and being around their thirties. The story also very much or its social conventions in particular, but people she believed were so much better grapples with the fact that neither woman three of the ten stories in Slut Lullabies are than those in her own milieu—that had bears only the identity or label the other about teenagers. I think these stories focus a kept her going. has assigned her but has a different identity lot more intensely on the family dynamics depending on who is perceiving her. The of young people than they do on the stereo- The way Beauty or popularity might inform Intelligent Woman may be The Beautiful types or tropes of teen culture specifically. identity also plays a role in my story “Attila Woman in someone else’s narrative, which But the ways teens conceptualize themselves the There,” which takes place in Amster- is one of the ironies of beauty, right? No in terms of their “roles” or place in society dam and centers on a sixteen-year-old boy, matter who you are, there is always some- is a major impetus in those pieces, and that Camden, whose mother uproots him from one better looking and someone uglier than can be related. his high school in the States to move him you. So these identities are permeable and
MAKE: At Play 76 A Conversation between Gina Frangello & David Yoo shifting, though the stories we tell ourselves Clearly, a book about love, cancer, or race, in a YA novel, though I’ll readily admit that about who we are can be pretty damaging. could be written for adults or younger readers. my YA novels so far would hardly qualify as But, at the end of the day, many people How did you specifically position Stop Me If concise! Another book that has found both have a lot of baggage, a lot of demons, and You’ve Heard This One Before as fitting into an adult and teen audience is The Book Thief I don’t correlate those things much, if at all, the YA genre, and how might you have tackled by Marcus Zusak, but I couldn’t tell you with looks or labels or stereotypes. There this (or a future book) differently if you were precisely why it straddles the genres. It just are people across all levels of good looks, aiming at an older readership? resonates with everyone because it’s simply money, popularity, social skills, and moral- ridiculously good, in my opinion. ity who have pretty low-drama, contented DY: Defining what constitutes a story as YA lives, and there are people across all levels of vs. adult is cloudy, at best. In many cases it’s Anyway, if I’d written Stop Me If You’ve Heard these characteristics who lead lives that are simply a marketing decision, really. My first This One Before as an adult title, I don’t often tormented and turbulent. Being shy or novel initially went out as an adult title, and think my approach would have been all that geeky or not having a good-looking face is midway through the submission process, my different, though I would have given myself perhaps of more interest to teens than adults agent (who, it turned out, was primarily a freer reign with word choice. It’s not that YA because it’s one of the most basic and simple children’s agent) asked if he could show it uses a dumbed-down vocabulary, but it’s a problems a person can have—it’s almost like to some YA editors. I’m one of many YA bad thing when you can hear the author’s the way fiction is more interesting if the authors who kind of fell into the genre, adult perspective trickle through the voice of struggle comes from inside the character having written primarily adult fiction up to a sixteen-year-old protagonist, and I’d likely rather than being imposed from the outside. selling my first novel. Interesting probably feel compelled to tell the story from a bit How pretty or handsome someone is, is one only to me is the fact that when I’d list my more distance, age-wise. That said, lately of the least interesting things about them favorite adult novels back before I got into I’ve been working on my first collection of because it’s something they can’t control, or YA, it turned out many of them are about essays for adults, tentatively titled The Choke control all that much. It doesn’t necessarily teenagers—Larry McMurtry’s The Last Pic- Artist (Grand Central, 2012), and I’ve come reveal much. ture Show, Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, to realize that maybe the reason I gravitate a collection of stories by Dylan Thomas toward YA is because, even though I’m in About keeping things fresh, well, I think called Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog, to my mid-thirties, I seem to have the internal that’s related to avoiding stereotypes, or ex- name a few. So my interest in writing about voice and opinions of a sixteen-year-old. I ploding them, or focusing very intensely on teens had always been there, even before I suppose it was less glaring ten years ago. who someone is as an individual rather than discovered YA. Back to trying to define the a type. I think all writers try to keep things genre, other than having a teen protagonist The one other aspect that I’d have to con- fresh, but it may be the most difficult task and refraining from cursing like a sailor on sider if writing Stop Me If You’ve Heard This we have before us. every single page, the reasons that deem a One Before as an adult novel would be my book a young-adult novel vary, and there handling of the “edgier” bits—sex, race, the I also wonder if freshness, like other concerns, doesn’t seem to be a clear definition, as far at times misogynistic way teen boys think, might vary across genres. I’m particularly in- as I know. I’ve heard publishing people say not so much because they’re misogynistic terested in the YA genre because of the fact that that if Catcher in the Rye were written today, but because they’re clueless. I don’t censor it’s not just the age of the protagonist that deter- it would probably be released as a YA title. myself when I write YA, but I do handle the mines whether a book is primarily for an adult Then again, a novel like Prep by Curtis Sit- topics in a bit more, I don’t know, suggestive or teen audience. Obviously, many great works tenfeld was published as an adult title, and rather than explicit manner, I suppose? of literature have had child protagonists and, I can also see it published as a YA novel, likewise, a lot of YA books—Harry Potter or too. (I read in a magazine somewhere that Anyway, as I was reading Slut Lullabies, I Twilight being just some obvious examples— her agent had considered selling it as YA found myself wondering how you feel about have gained immense popularity among adult at one point.) I do think if Prep were pub- writing about sex, and heavier topics, in such a readers. And some books aimed at adults— lished as YA, it would have to be condensed deeply personal way. To make up for my weak- I’m thinking of Memoirs of a Geisha here, significantly, and one reason why it works nesses as a writer, one thing I try to do is em- among many others—seem as though, really, as an adult title is because it’s undeniably brace bravery, being able to look with open eyes they are YA stories that, perhaps because of ex- told from the perspective of an adult look- at the ugly warts and all of my characters. With otic themes, have been primarily marketed at ing back, and with young-adult fiction, the the adult stuff I’ve been working on, I’ve been adults instead. This can be puzzling, because, story’s usually cast through a much younger feeling less brave, at least to start. I think it in the case of that book, for example, I actually lens. What I like about strong YA is that was easier for me to write with a bit of distance think it would have been a beautiful and com- there’s an immediacy to the voice and less (at least mentally) about these topics through plex YA novel but that it fell short in some ways patience for flowery writing that stifles bad the lens of someone half my age, perhaps. Do as an adult literary work, despite its commer- adult fiction (in the way that preachy or sim- you feel no inhibitions or blushiness in general cial popularity. As a YA writer, what are your plistic stories stifle bad YA). You don’t have tackling such edgy, naked, often bleak topics in impressions of the conventions of the genre? much room to flex your authorial muscles your work? I thought “How To Marry a Wasp”
77 MAKE: At Play A Conversation between Gina Frangello & David Yoo was really funny (though still painful) for the ever find publication—and in this current In the moment I first feel compelled to write record…but otherwise the other stories I’ve literary climate, most writers are not able to a new story or start a novel, I’m overtaken by read feel like ripping open a Band-Aid prema- make a real living on our craft and have day a character, by that person’s voice and situa- turely. I guess what I’m asking is do you do so jobs like teaching or editing. So why does tion, rather than by some wide-angled social gleefully, or not? Oh, and I’ll note that your anyone do it, if not because there is some- or philosophical agenda. It would be fair to work reminds me of a great collection of stories, thing they want to explore very deeply and say that the people who come to me—the City of Boys, by Beth Nugent. She, too, is a passionately and intensely? What that par- characters who speak to me most loudly— brave writer. ticular writer wants to discuss varies enor- tend to occupy a space that holds these mously, of course. For some, it might be complications. They tend to lead lives that GF: I really like Beth’s work, so thanks! This the corruption of government or something feel like ripping a Band-Aid off an unhealed is a question I’ve been getting a lot since Slut like that. I’m not an expert on soldiers or wound. They are sometimes self-sabotaging Lullabies came out. I’m not sure I’ve done politicians or greedy heads of major corpo- or self-destructive, even if they are also smart any interview that didn’t address this, which rations, so that’s not what I try to illuminate or funny. I’m very interested in the juxtapo- is something I have mixed feelings about. in my fiction. I’m an ordinary American sition between the demons of the past and On the one hand, I’m really flattered and woman who has spent the bulk of my work- the choices people need to make in their glad that people think my work is brave ing life either in the helping professions or present lives, and I explore that collision a or open-eyed about dark things. On the in the writing world. I don’t have the same lot in my fiction. other hand, I sometimes greet this observa- scope as a Tim O’Brien or Arundhati Roy tion with a little bit of confusion, because or Milan Kundera, but that doesn’t mean On a less lofty level, I also just plain think most of the books I’ve loved in my life, from there aren’t things I understand that are also that sexual situations provide a really awe- Lithium for Medea to The Book of Daniel to quite important in people’s lives. I grew up some vehicle for character development. Bad Behavior to The Unbearable Lightness in an inner-city neighborhood where vio- People are—quite literally—naked in bed, of Being to The God of Small Things to Be- lence (against women but also other forms and there is less artifice, or what artifice loved to The Adderall Diaries to The Things of violence) was quite common, and then I there is reveals more about them, than per- They Carried to The Handmaid’s Tale to The worked as a counselor for a number of years haps at other times in their lives. To me, this White Hotel—very diverse and not obscure in rural New Hampshire and Vermont, is just kind of going for the jugular in terms books—do exactly what reviewers, bloggers, where my “population” was battered women of getting to understand my characters. or interviewers seem so surprised to find me and foster girls who had been taken out of Though ironically, there are very few actual doing in terms of dealing very bluntly with their homes for extreme abuse. Actually, I “sex scenes” in my writing. I deal a lot with sex, violence, or self-destruction. I find it just almost erased that previous sentence, sexual dynamics but very little with what surprising when people are surprised to find because one does not have to have been a body part goes where. This is not to say me doing what I do, if that makes sense. I therapist or to have grown up in a poor, ur- that I am squeamish about writing that, but have always been under the impression that ban neighborhood to understand the kinds more just that I don’t think people stroking this is exactly the writer’s task and obliga- of things I write about. Complicated sexual each other’s asses, or whatever, is actually tion, because the writers who matter to me politics and certain forms of violence exist what tells us most about them, so to speak. certainly have not shied away from such across all parts of society, and there is no The physicality of sex is less individual and things, and that’s exactly what made such shortage of people out there who are “ex- specific than the psychology of sex. an impact on me and informed me about perts” in this type of terrain. This is not a the larger goals of literary fiction—beyond specialized kind of authority. You don’t have So I think you should go for it, David! I’m just being “entertaining.” Literary fiction, to to have fought in Vietnam, be a global ac- not sure if writing more explicitly helps me, automatically entails taking some kind tivist, or have lived through a Communist compensate for any of our individual writer- of risk. takeover of your home country. You just ly weaknesses, but you’ll at least have a good need to be willing to take a risk on the page time trying, right? For any kind of artist to bother to create at and go to places in your head that it may not all—to spend years in a room alone, driven, be pleasant to visit. DY: For the record, I’d like to officially re- probably without much in the way of con- tract my usage of the word “gleefully” with crete financial incentive, at least initially— So I don’t write about the darker aspects of my previous question and replace it with he or she must be extremely motivated to sex or about violence “gleefully” at all, but something else, say, “bearably comfortable?” illuminate or explore some kind of issue likewise I don’t write about these things that doesn’t seem to be getting addressed with trepidation or blushiness, because these GF: Yes, I’m comfortable…I guess even with enough complexity by the dominant things are precisely what motivate me to when it’s a little unbearable… discourse, right? Why else do it? The life write in the first place. Those complexities of a writer isn’t a terribly secure one. Even exist under the surface of everyday, ordinary DY: As for your advice, well, it’s never a the most successful writers at one point had lives but are still somewhat taboo to discuss “good” time writing, but that’s a different to toil in obscurity, unsure whether they’d explicitly, or our culture is squeamish about. can of worms for another day (… sigh). M
MAKE: At Play 78 Requiem for Lux Interior/Ducktail for Louis Zukofsky by DEVIN KING
you don’t sho ’nuff yes I do the men yell on the radio a thick radio broadcast signal slurs myth Lux Interior dead, just like you, hollers “radioactive” you said it! a haht rodda’s dream, parking with C & P 19 months old, your kid plays violin ferchrissakes who said it! much faster than I could ever say it the engineer’s slapback on your voice elides and pops cracking gum rolling your filterless up in your shirtsleeve go billy go billy go billy go billy go billy go billy go ba rock a billy you ain’t never caught a rabbit vs. you, ain’t never, caught a rabbit
Upped young men comb grease their hair rewrite A/10: “Poor songster so weak Stopped singing to curse A mess sucked out No substance [ ] tunes in the [ ] broadcast People people people But you record it There is no whisper but vibrates Your body
79 MAKE: At Play Requiem for Lux Interior/Ducktail for Louis Zukofsky by Devin King
People people people The [ ] radio calls to you in [ ] to help [ ]” People people people
Rock me bae-bay Alana wants all night to talk about laminae I don’t know what to do Next time bae-bay but chooses darling, darling, mica, darling, hatred, darling exoteric, and pure gest rhythm darling Skeet- er Davis 1958 broken arms and legs—car crash.
Her sister Betty Jack dead. Her sister Georgia takes her place along- side Skeeter in the first harmonic girl group to hit N° 1 with
You think You know the smile on his lip the thrill at the touch of his fingertips but I forgot more than you’ll ever know about him
MAKE: At Play 80 Requiem for Lux Interior/Ducktail for Louis Zukofsky by Devin King
Jeff’s fainting Believe me buddy I ain’t no fool naked in a western neighborhood, I made the money working after school we get in a car and find him in twenty bent over a trash can puking, Jeff’s fainting in a western neighborhood
Jeff’s fainting naked in a commuter neighborhood— his frantic texts illumine the table’s plates. Alana tells Micah, who’s reading the journal about the Russian artists who create sports, and you borrow the keys between sips. Our hands decoct Skeeter’s 1958 car crash gest on the radio; we see Jeff bald, exoteric, puking against those passive houses AJ stole from Europe to build here (he showed us how little heat escapes— superinsulation, lack of thermal bridges, airtightness, space- heating, earth warming tubes, with no radiators, there’s more space on the rooms’ walls— and saw Blixa picking apples in the market. lord crank and hoist and hoist and crank lord crank and hoist and hoist and crank). Micah’s reading aloud as the door opens, “The metropolitan reader’s flattery of the exotic,” and when he hands a cup to Jeff Jeff opens his fist and drinks.
81 MAKE: At Play There Are Worse Jobs by Mark Rooke
When Jason suggested building a cardboard maze out of the dis- pull another box off of the enormous stack. This task is endless. carded server boxes, I assumed he was joking. Jason is the office clown, and known for making bizarre, offhanded comments like that. But when Matt measured the boxes and Phil sketched blue- prints, it was clear that they were serious.
“They’re four by three by one foot. We’d only need a hundred and forty of these to build what I’ve drawn here,” Phil said with a this-is-a-fantastic-idea look on his face. “There’s more than enough. If we hurry it up, we’ll be done before Brad gets back.”
Matt immediately began to pile the boxes in the basement stor- age, and Jason and Phil set to work arranging them according to the blueprints. They’ve been down there since noon, goofing around and constructing their ridiculous maze while I’ve been upstairs doing my job. If sighs were physical objects, the one I just made would be vis- ible from space. I can hear them giggling now. My phone rings. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket. I’m not one of those office killjoys who actively goes around telling people to get back to “Hello?” work, or tattles on his coworkers just because he got picked last for dodgeball one too many times as a kid. That’s Brad’s job. But “Trivia night at Berkley’s!” Eric yells on the other end. “You com- that said, this is the eighty-seventh time I’ve run this razor down ing or not?” I can hear the rest of the gang talking in the back- the tape of a cardboard box, and nobody has offered to help me. ground. I’ll cut open another one hundred and forty-six boxes before I’m done, then install and set up a total of two hundred and thirty- Of all the people on this planet, the only two that know me bet- three computers before I can leave today. ter than Eric are my brother and my mom. He and I grew up together, sharing the same elementary, middle, and high schools, I’m on autopilot at this point—have been for the past couple of and we currently share the same college town. Eric is the kind of hours—and my hands reach into another box, pull out the com- friend who’d drive to pick me up at three in the morning after puter, and slide it into its place on the racks. Screw it in. Grab my car engine died, then cheer me up by having a conversation another box. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. entirely in Tim Burton movie quotes during the ride home.
“We’re out of boxes,” Matt says, poking his head into the server “I can’t make it,” I say. “I have to stay late and set up a bunch of room where I’m setting up the computers. “Got any more? We’ve new computers.” finished about half of the walls, and Phil wants to get started on the inside before Brad gets back.” “Knock knock.”
I point to the stack of three empty boxes in the corner. “Who’s there?”
“Thanks, man.” Matt grabs them and leaves. “Trivia,” he says.
My job description (and Brad, our boss) call this “entry-level “Trivia who?” information-technology management,” which today translates to “unboxing computer parts.” In the past, that phrase has also “You should leave work and come to trivia.” meant “picking up pizzas for the office meeting,” and “moving the CEO’s car every thirty minutes so he doesn’t get a ticket.” I “Can’t.” look out the storage-room window into the afternoon sun, then
MAKE: At Play 82 “I have an idea,” Eric says. “How about instead of setting up “You’re not going to get fired for finishing it tomorrow, and computers, you just come to trivia with us.” you’re also not going to get a medal for finishing it tonight, ei- ther. Just find a place to stop and come join us.” Someone in the “Can’t.” background calls my name. “Mollie says hey, by the way.”
“So I know an old lady who swallowed a spider,” he says. “Hey Mollie!” I say.
I laugh. “Did it wiggle and jiggle and tickle inside her?” “The emcee’s getting started and you’re not allowed to have phones out while the game is going. Gotta go. We’ll save you a “No. She got over it and came to trivia with her friends.” seat, okay?”
“I wish I could, buddy.” “I’ll see what I can do. Bye, Eric.”
“Aw, come on! Why do you even work there?” “See ya.”
“Because they pay me.” I hang up. Zoning out, I mindlessly shuck through more boxes, sliding computers into their racks and screwing them in. My “All you ever say about that place is how poorly they treat you or hands ache from performing the same gesture over and over how late they make you stay.” again. I’m irritated that no one else is helping me do it and dou- bly irritated that I’ll have to miss another night out with people “Yeah, I know, but…hold on one sec.” I close the server-room I actually care about. door. “It’s the only place I applied to that actually called me back for an interview. If I could find another job that paid for my Matt pokes his head in again. “The maze needs about thirty more apartment, I’d drop this in a heartbeat. I just don’t want to go before it’s finished. How long do you think that’ll take?” back to slinging pizza.” “I dunno,” I say, annoyed. “Twenty minutes? Less if someone “And what’s wrong with working at a pizza place?” Eric asks, unpacks with me.” sounding indignant. “Cool, I’ll be back in twenty.” Matt leaves me to my unpacking. I Then I remember that’s what he’s been doing for the past three try to block out the laughter coming from the basement. years. “Aw, come on man. That’s not what I meant.” “What would you say is your best quality?” they asked during the There’s a silence. interview for this job, now almost four months ago. “What is it that you can bring to this position?” “You know that’s not what I meant.” “I get things done,” I remember telling them. “When I’m given “How many times have you been threatened with termination a task, it doesn’t get filed away in some to-do list or written on a at your job?” sticky note and tacked to my monitor. I just do it. It’s not in my nature to waste any time or put off responsibilities.” “What?” I ask. His question catches me off guard; I’m not sure how to answer it. I wasn’t lying when I told my interviewer that—that’s actually how I operate. It’s the reason I’m still upstairs shoveling boxes “How many times have they handed you a task, then looked you while the other guys are building mazes in the basement. Blame in the face and said that you’ll be fired if you don’t complete it?” it on my wacky Puritan upbringing if you want to—Eric loves to joke about that—but there’s nothing explicitly Christian about I think about it. “Never?” I say. “They’ve never told me that.” wanting to get something done and out of the way.
“Nobody explicitly told you that your job hinges on having all of I’m about to cut into another box when I hear the office’s front those computers installed before you go home tonight.” door slam. In my four months of working here, I know only one employee who does that. “They told me to set them up as soon as possible.” “Hi Brad,” I say, projecting my voice into the basement stair- “But nobody told you it had to be done tonight?” well across from the server room, hoping that Matt, Jason, and Phil hear me. “No,” I say. “It was implied.” IIllustration by Andrew Rohde Andrew by IIllustration
83 MAKE: At Play There Are Worse Jobs by Mark Rooke
Small, silent, and impossibly fast, Brad is the kind of manager Brad notices the open basement door. “What’s going on down- who can be on one side of the building one second, then hover- stairs?” He gestures toward the stairway. ing over your shoulder in the next. The man is a stealth jet. Phil once suggested that his undetectable walking comes from felt “I’m storing the server boxes in case we have to return any.” pads glued to his shoes, and Matt lovingly refers to him as “the Ninja Jew.” Brad’s presence at the office means people should be “Good idea.” Brad makes a face like an idea just hit him. “You at their desks, working. sure you haven’t seen those guys around?”
I’m concerned for the guys in the basement. Brad’s not the kind of “Not for awhile.” manager who’d appreciate a well-designed cardboard-box maze. “So Brad,” I say, emphasizing his name again. “What’s new?” “You’re sure they’re not in the basement?” Before I can answer, He mumbles a greeting to me as he speeds past the server room, Brad starts down the stairs. “Holy shit,” he says from the landing marching in his trademark power walk toward the back offices. below. I stop unpacking and look into the hallway. In the distance I see his shiny bald head disappear around a distant corner. I run down after him. Dramatically lit by the stark halogen lights, an enormous Jericho-sized wall of cardboard boxes stretches the Matt pops up from the basement. “Does the Ninja Jew know length of the large basement storage room. Placed according to we’re not working?” he says in a whisper. Phil’s plan, each box in the pile follows an elaborate stacking pattern—a bizarre mix between a Lego brick construction and “He’s about to. I just saw him head back to your office.” an M. C. Escher drawing. It stands out from the rest of the un- organized piles of office equipment and, were it not in our office “Oh man,” Matt smiles. “We’re supposed to be showing him all basement, looks like something you’d find in an art museum. that stuff from last week.” He laughs, bending over and slapping his knee like someone just told the most hilarious joke. “You built this?” Brad smiles, impressed. “What, are you OCD or something?” I don’t think it’s very funny. I shrug as if to say, “Yeah, sure did. No big deal.” “Matt? Jason?” I hear Brad call in the distance. Brad looks back at his watch. “Look, I gotta go meet up with a “He’s coming back,” I say. client. When you see either Matt or Jason, would you tell them I’m looking for them? And that they should answer their phones Matt jumps like a frightened rabbit from the hallway and into when their boss calls?” He says the last part under his breath, the server room with me, pulling the door all the way open and more as an expression of annoyance than an actual request. hiding behind it. “Don’t tell him I’m here,” he whispers. “Sure thing.” Brad appears a moment later in the hallway outside the door. I go back to unboxing in the server room as Brad leaves the office, “Have you seen Matt around? Or Jason?” He’s visibly irritated, slamming the front door again on his way out. like a child who’s just been told to share. Matt does a somersault out from his hiding place behind the I contemplate whether to point Brad into the basement or be- door, flopping spread-eagle on the floor. “We’re rewiring the hind the door. “Not for awhile,” I say, taking a moment to an- building?” He says through laughter. “Where’d you come up with swer. “Last I saw they were discussing a piece of paper with Phil. that one? Hey Jason, did you hear this guy?” It was a map or something.” “Sure did!” Jason calls from the basement. “You, sir, are a gentle- “A map?” man and a scholar.”
“Well they’ve been talking about rewiring this section of the “I’m an associate I.T. administrator,” I say. building for awhile.” I point to the tangled web of CAT-5 cables hanging out from the back of my server rack. “Nicely done.” Matt stands up, taking another armful of card- board into the basement. The loud smack of their high-five can Brad nods, pretending to understand. “Did you see them leave be heard from below. the building?” “Nah, but I’ve been opening boxes in here since eleven. I prob- I go back down to inspect the maze more closely. “Where’d you ably just didn’t see them leave.” guys hide when we came down?”
MAKE: At Play 84 There Are Worse Jobs by Mark Rooke
“Behind the boxes,” Jason says. “Brad would’ve found us if he’d desk before Brad comes back again.” just walked to the back.” “Ditto,” Matt says. “Is it a maze yet? Can I walk through?” I say. “If Brad asks, we just say we were at the cafe across the street “Be my guest.” Phil points around to a small opening in the back discussing network plans or something.” Phil held up his map of where a box has been left out of the grid. “That’s the entrance. the maze. “This kind of looks like our building, right? Or at least You’re going to want to use your phone for light. It’s pitch black it’s close enough to back up my story.” inside.” Jason, Matt, and Phil head up the basement stairs and off to their “Well before you go in, did you fill out the right paperwork?” Ja- respective offices. I step back upstairs into the server room, sur- son says, imitating Brad. “You’ll need to complete a maze request veying the remaining unopened boxes. If I’m lucky, I’ll be home form and have it approved through Business Affairs.” by midnight.
We all have a good laugh, and I crawl inside. Insulated by layers I try to remind myself that there are worse jobs. At least I’m not of packing material, all the outside office sounds stop as I pass the mining diamonds or handling human waste, right? entrance. The maze feels eerie and tomblike. I continue forward, and the combination of damp basement, fresh cardboard, and I grab another box. Cut its tape. Take out the server. Screw it in. nerd sweat blend together. Think about how much fun my friends are going to have tonight. Grab another box. Cut its tape. Take out the server. Screw it in. “It smells like a comic-book store in here,” I yell. The acoustics Think about all the moments I’ve missed while working overtime in the maze are oddly rigid, like I’m shouting into a milk carton. at this place. Grab another box. Cut its tape. Take out the server. Jason’s laughter is blocked by the boxes and sounds far away. Screw it in. Think about where my life is going. Grab another box. Cut its tape. Take out the server. Screw it in. Picture myself I hold out my phone in the darkness, navigating the narrow in thirty years, balding and fat and unloved, working away at my cardboard tunnels with the light from its screen. The passageway office desk after everyone else has gone home. Grab another box. turns several times in ways I don’t expect, and for a moment I Cut its tape. Take out the server. Screw it in. think I’ve turned around. The darkness feels more expansive than I expected. A pile of cardboard boxes shouldn’t contain this much “What would you say is your biggest weakness?” That was the space: it’s weird to think that I’m still in the office basement. I last thing they asked when I interviewed. I know it’s a typical turn another corner and the passage stops abruptly. question, but I can’t stand how loaded it is. Do they actually care about personal flaws, like my fear of spiders or my tendency “I’m at a dead end,” I say. to neglect personal relationships? I don’t remember my answer, but I know I didn’t mention how my last girlfriend dumped me “Look around! Are you sure?” Phil says. His voice is muffled and because I’m “more concerned about a paycheck than people.” In- distant, but his tone implies I’ve come to a part he’s proud of. terviewers don’t want personal baggage like that; they just want The passageway definitely ends right in front of me, and the only you to beg for the job and self-deprecate at the same time. clear path is back the way I came. I hold my phone closely to the walls and notice that one of the boxes doesn’t look right. It’s lean- I put down the razor blade. The pile of boxes I’m pulling from ing awkwardly against the rest of the architecture, like it doesn’t looks just as large as it was three hours ago, and I haven’t even fit completely. I push up against it, sliding it forward to reveal the started the monotonous task of installing the software yet. My dim light of an unfinished exit. hands ache; they’re red and blistered from an afternoon of rapidly handling so much cardboard. And I can’t stop thinking about “Pretty cool, huh?” Phil says. that maze.
I want to be mad at these three for leaving me to work while they The front door slams behind me. Walking out into the evening had fun in the basement, or for making me to lie to our boss and heat of the office parking lot, I pull out my cell phone and head cover for them while they built a maze, but I’m too impressed toward my car. to be upset. My irritation gets replaced with a mix of respect, amusement, and the realization that I’m working with profes- “Save me that seat,” I text to Eric. M sional slackers.
“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty cool.”
“I’m done with this for now,” Jason says. “Time to get back to my
85 MAKE: At Play 23 Days of Drinking and Deflowering A Norwegian High School Tradition by ALVILDE FALCK
“Are you ready to be DEVIRGINIZED?»”
“No,” I say, horrified.
“Slutt ’a” (Knock it off). The girl glares at her friends. “You’re scaring her.”
“Sorry, sorry. Do you want my Russ card, sweetheart?”
“OK.” He walks over to me and I take the card, characteristically red with a passport- sized picture and the boy’s name. Beneath his phone number it says “24/7 Amateur Gynecologist.”
I am intimidated and in awe, and the thought of one day being one of them as- phyxiates me, makes my heart twist in dis- belief. Yet of course, less than a decade later the impossible notion is fact. I am Norwe- gian and nineteen. I am drunk (but have not yet fucked a Pakistani behind a garage). I am “Russ.”
I am in a constant state of disorientation (only fingertips lucid), recovering from multiple plastic cups of medicinally sweet liquor. It all feels like a surreal video game— one I am bad at. A few nights ago, I watched Hearts of smoke bloom from the door in wispy helixes. A girl a circle of guys cheering on a girl couple as they did skin shots stumbles out from the neon light, the moon silvering her hair with a bottle of vodka and each other’s breasts. I watched a boy (bona fide Norwegian blonde). Two boys follow, inebriated and have a feverish, furious cell phone conversation in which it was tripping in each other’s laces. Vaguely mellifluous music vibrates revealed his girlfriend, passed out in the woods, was nearly as- in the air, booming from their party bus, painted pink with yonic saulted after someone spiked her drink with Rohypnol (date rape imagery. Fascinated, I hope: a lovely (intentional?) tribute to coladas are internationally ubiquitous). I watched a classmate Georgia O’Keefe. The blonde girl is beautiful, with a necklace break up with her boyfriend when he got mad (she was kiss- of wildflowers around her neck. She speaks in italics when she ing his best friend). I, too, kissed. A pretty redhead. And a boy, speaks to the boys: “Yesterday, I fucked a guy behind a garage. It because he wore a shirt that said SAVE MARLA SINGER, and was so dark, I didn’t notice until afterward that he was Pakistani.” I thought the Fight Club reference was nifty. My dearest friend She laughs a low laugh, and then they see me. At a tram stop, laughingly lost her virginity to a brazen boy who said he was waiting, thirteen. One of the boys raises his beer bottle in victory. homosexual but “wanted to try vanilla ice cream, just once.” (I later heard him giving one of the vodka girls the same line.) Ev-
MAKE: At Play 86 Vanesa Zendejas Plain Flags, 2009 (other page) Cut paper and gouache on paper 15” x 11”
To Weave a Globe, 2008 Cut paper on paper 15” x 11”
Mound Faker, 2009 Cut paper and acrylic ink on paper 30” x 22” ery night is wild with stars. Everyone’s senses seem heightened, Have sex with a virgin. The latter act must be voluntary accord- ready for anything and everything. The way people stare, darkly ing to the official rules, something I suppose is nice of them to drinking each other in, in the twilight, is at once frightening and specify. My favorite knot is sex with a teacher, a feat, which, almost intoxicatingly beautiful. if pulled off without an ensuing scandal, earns you the right to attach your high school’s logo to your hat—enameled with The word Russ is believed to come from the final syllable ofcor - gold. Alchemy. nua depositurus: to set aside one’s horns. In the 1700s, students awaiting the results of their university entrance exams had horns The teen-run boards organizing Russ activities are known to fastened to their foreheads as a marker—they were to be mocked take advantage of the odd prestige a hat full of knots signifies. by the older university students. If they passed their tests, the A large number of the knots directly benefit the libidos of this horns were removed as a sign that the wild animal in them had select group in a kind of parody of political power. You may at- gone, and that they had gained wisdom. This modest beginning tach a pair of candy lips if willing to kiss any board member. A has expanded into what is today a multimillion-kroner industry champagne cork, if the kiss leads to coitus. The regional Russ focused on making the nineteen-year-olds of Norway purchase presidents hold the most power, politically, and therefore sexu- various Russ accessories. In terms of income level per capita, ally. A candy breast may be added if you manage to make one Norway is the second richest country in the world. Due largely to sign your cleavage. A gilded pinecone if you have sex with one. this wealth, Norwegian teenagers (or more precisely: our parents) If a single champagne cork was not enough for you, you may get quite casually spend substantial sums of money on everything a new white one courtesy of their willingness to offer you a bit from the standard color-coded hats and pants indicating our line of their time (not surprisingly, the price is, again, a night in their of study, to lavish sound systems and—most notably—buses. beds or bushes). Oddly enough, this deed, too, is specified as one Groups of teens get together to buy large party buses, equipped that must be voluntary, leading me to wonder whether the Russ with a professional driver. In lieu of studying for upcoming ex- presidents fear rape. It would be a highly interesting legal case, if ams, teens traditionally drive these buses around their towns only for the fact that the criminal motive would be the quest for a starting late April, playing bass-heavy techno songs at night. cork. If the list of knots sends any message, it is that promiscuity is integral to a good party. Having a girlfriend or boyfriend dur- Small symbols of our craziness level are proudly displayed with ing Russ celebrations earns your hat a padlock. little knots fastened to our Russ hats. Reading the list of this year’s knots gives me the slightly adrenalized feeling I used to Drizzling rain has washed away most of the winter, and new light get in childhood games of Truth or Dare. According to the 2010 is making halos around our heads. Everywhere I look or listen, knot list, walking into class in nothing but underwear entitles me girls and boys are deflowered or deflowering (the defloweree to attach a pair of panties to my hat. The knot for teaching sex males grateful for a tradition that essentially encourages slutti- ed. to first graders (explanatory movements included), is a flower. ness). The virgins are in the minority, but their sex stories are Tying a teacher to a flagpole and dancing a warrior dance around always more scandalized when retold. More interesting yet, are him gives me the chance to add a piece of pirate paraphernalia. the devirginizing stories of Christian Russ (Which Knots Would Due to the non-litigious nature of Norwegians, no one gets sued Jesus Do? Well, Not Many), and—about as rare as unicorn sight- over any of the antics. But principals, parents, and politicians ings—stories of Muslim girls removing their hijabs and Russ continually worry about the health-hazardous binge drinking pants for a male classmates. and pranks, which end up going too far. The only person I wanted to lose my virginity to moved to a The vast majority of the knots are sexual in nature. Want a piece war zone after breaking up with me in Sartre quotes (“hell is of a baking sheet for your hat? Have anal sex. Protein bar wrap- other people, love”). Because of this, my partying is laced with per? Swallow. Picture of a bear? Have sex with a Russ weighing bittersweetness and a secret wish that stray shrapnel will pierce more than 100 kilos. Another picture, this time of Virgin Mary? his heart, or at least some pages of existentialist literature. “The
87 MAKE: At Play 23 Days of Drinking and Deflowering by Eirill Alvilde Falck cure is wine,” an old friend I meet says, in an accent that makes me laugh. He proceeds to confess he used to be in love with me, and I watch him extinguish a cigarette on his wrist (logical in a way I can’t remember: either proving his resistance to pain or the validity of his dream to become an F-16 pilot). I feel I should be wilder, more reckless, have a higher percentage of Absinthe in my veins. But when the aspiring aviator leans in to kiss me, my heart is marble. Merely observing is infinitely fascinating. All the boys and girls falling over each other, and the laughter trickling from their throats. The languid grace of flirting between a girl named Aurora and her admirer. Waves of different perfumes blend in the air, one with an unmistakable scent of poplar trees. My eyes and ears and nostrils are aflame, conquered entirely when the boy tells Aurora she looks “angelic. An ice angel.” While I condone the rampant sex going on all around me (whether it be with plus- sized teens, Humbert Humbertesque teachers, or future leaders of the Norwegian conservative party), I myself have a pitiful hat. I blame it on the fact that I still see ice crystals sparkling in the light, tangles of wilted lilies, and freezing ocean water. I blame (I’m a female driver!) it on hypnotic, heartstoppingly frightening dreams of forget- ting how my calculator functions. I have only two knots so far. Truth be told, I do not have a driver’s license, and I’d like to think The first is a faux-diamond cross, for (timidly, along with three I am a feminist. Truth be told, I am not funny, and my lack of friends) saying “Hallelujah” after every sentence uttered by my candor is leaving me with a base taste in my mouth. French teacher. The second is an unopened condom—for not having had sex at all. I just heard a story of how a girl in middle school was tied naked to a tree some years ago. She was on a black list, a list some Russ “I don’t really want to lose my virginity to someone who hasn’t compile with names of non-Russ they don’t like. I think back on been sober for the past month,” I impulsively offer as an expla- my first year of secondary education at a school, which, in spite nation to a girl sitting next to me in the cafeteria when she asks of being Oslo’s most academically competitive, allowed Russ ter- why, awed. The subject came up while I helped her look up the ror days. While terror days are forbidden at most schools, Oslo’s cost of an abortion. “Should have worn this,” she smiles bitterly, (arguably) most intelligent litter of Russ ran around the hallways fiddling with one of the free Red Cross condoms handed out by kidnapping younger students (a terrified me included), carrying the truck loads to mitigate the mass outbreaks of venereal diseases us into the schoolyard to be the subjects of their terrorizing. I was common after every May. somehow left unharmed, managing to run inside, lock myself in a classroom with two other girls. Our teachers had lunch, and This strange liminal period essentially boils down to the follow- well, this was common practice. From the window, we could see ing ideal: celebrating an accomplishment (imminent graduation) the only guy in our grade with a Jewfro being pushed around in a at an elusive level one will never be allowed to linger in so lav- shopping cart, smothered with eggs and ketchup. A few girls were ishly and for so long in adult life. The once-in-a-lifetime nature tied to the volleyball net with thick tape saying CLEARANCE of the partying might explain why many of us feel as if we are SALE 70% OFF. And we all laughed about it, even those girls. downright entitled to it. Our lawmakers, parents, and teachers But the reason why we were so lighthearted about it was because had their Russ celebrations. Now it is our turn, and we seem one day it would be us, free to be that wild and violent. Now that determined to take advantage of every moment. In effect, this notion makes me sick, as if the fun is trapped in a nightmarish hall means a sleepless month of sex, alcohol, and pranks. In effect, of mirrors, resilvered and distorted. The dizziness reached a zenith this means a mind-blowing amount of money spent in the space when I learned a group of this year’s Russ decided their bus décor of three weeks. In effect, this explains why a group of girls report- theme would be Josef Fritzl. I have seen their Josef Fritzl–inspired edly turned to the porn industry to finance their 2004 bus costs. logo, song lyrics, and slogan (approximate, non-rhyming transla- tion: “Unless you fuck me, you’re staying in the house”). I feel out of place. My Russ cards have arrived from the printer; I am not sure I like any of it anymore, and I feel lame and weak- three hundred small, snarky business cards we keep in our pock- hearted. ets to hand out to excited elementary schoolers (a collectible, to them). Mine, loosely translated, says: And the strangest things are happening along with my disillu- sionment. Although everything is now blooming into a green I am one of the few girls who make boys climb in the trees and beauty, it just snowed. Spring snowflakes. And how cinematic shake in the knees. and surreal it was made me dizzy. I stood still a few seconds in
MAKE: At Play 88 23 Days of Drinking and Deflowering by Eirill Alvilde Falck the hallway, staring out at the flakes, wild and hallucinatory and the way they do. Maybe when winter hits and I start university achingly beautiful. On May 1, in which all Oslo Russ usually in Chicago, halfway across the world from Norway, I will gain a gather in a park to party together, rain streamed from the sky. clearer perspective on the enigma. It would be lovely to simply I was relieved, that at least nature, in an imagined Old Testa- fast forward, hold the sense of wonder crystallized alongside fu- ment sense, agreed with the discomfort I was beginning to feel. ture wisdom, mind alight. But that is dreamlike, and the dream- If true to tradition, the partying will only continue to escalate, like chapter of my life is closing. What is left is a ghostly memory growing more and more intense, almost desperate, up until the of inebriated girls with lacy hair, lips pale like lilies disappearing seventeenth of May. On that day, the Norwegian National Day, in the night. The least haunting memories are all growing dis- Russ from all over Norway will gather in the streets of Oslo for tant already, latent delenda. The future seems sparkling. a long march to the royal palace. It is the climax of our celebra- tion. We are supposed to smile and blow our party whistles, and Well, it lost a fraction of its sheen a moment ago. Interested in catch a glimpse of the crown prince and princess waving from hearing an outsider’s perspective, I e-mailed an Illinois friend, their balcony. And then? describing in detail the alcohol-fueled madness of Russ. His re- sponse chilled me to the bone: Nothing. Deep sleep (as if we died). We won’t go to any heaven. We will go to our exams. I will have a biology exam the next day. Oh, darling. In America we call that college. M Dark-eyed and barely sober, I will sit in an auditorium answer- ing questions about neurotransmitters, heart valve functions, and the ethical implications of in vitro fertilization. According to the Russ rules, one is only allowed to throw away one’s (un- washable) Russ pants if one passes the exams. Vanesa Zendejas, Untitled, 2008 (other page) Cut paper on paper I have decided not to go the parade. It is not a protest. Just a 30” x 22” precaution for an intact future, intact biology grade, intact san- ity. But I will go to a party tonight. I will play Lay Lady Lay on Untitled, 2008 Gouache on paper Aurora’s iPod, because even forest fucking can become beautiful 30” x 22” when you play Bob Dylan (I long to see you in the morning light / I long to reach for you in the night). I will smile.
In the end, there is no denying Russ has harrowing, ugly aspects. But I can’t help but admit that it is also hauntingly beautiful. Because it’s liminal. Because it offers a once-in-a-lifetime freedom to do idiotic things, things you might regret long after, yet won’t, no matter how blush-inducing, eclipse the memory of a time in which you were young and at your most attractive and could afford to be absolutely reckless (what is more luxurious than that?). The Norwegian poet and Nobel laureate, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, al- legedly immortalized the spirit of the Russ experience in literature centuries ago, in his poem “I Choose April”:
(...) because it storms, sweeps,
because it smiles, melts, because it keeps capabilities
(...) it topples forces
in it summer blooms!
I do not know why these words, or the almost ethe- real evanescence of Russ celebrations, strike my heart
89 MAKE: At Play M5
CINQ x CINQ Untitled Poem by Lewis Warsh Nonfiction by Steven Gillis
Tell someone what Five times. Count back. Mother first, then brother. Early loves. First you need and see what wife, then second. Children. Unconditional that. Final love. Five happens. “Nothing,” and out. Take Five, Brubeck, great song, sticks in my head, years I said (instead), “I don’t removed. All things great settled into memory. Distance giving need anything.” perspective. Five steps. Five paces. Five and Dime. What they used to call Convenience Stores. Went with friends. Five finger dis- That was last year—even count. Years ago. Lessons learned. Five times ten. Now fifty. Five the syntax is different now. lifetimes. So much to recount. Five o’clock news. All things there Pigs with nose-rings. that once seemed important, no longer so. All heard before. Five Haven’t we met people arrested. Five people gone. Five minutes, that’s all it takes before? sometimes. Heat of the moment, hard head. I have that. Five will get you ten I will lose it again. Good bet. Five For Fighting. Another Once I was a chauffeur great band. One dude, really. Dave Clark Five. Easy to forget. That’s with jelly for brains. me. All these things that have happened and still in the end what Now I stand on the tip of an obelisk adds up? Top five? Who knows. Five loves, four now distant. Kids with all of Paris remain. Five goals my son scores in lacrosse, five songs my daugh- at my feet. ter writes and records. Five is prime. Life isn’t. Five o’clock shadow. Shadows on the wall. Counting down. Five, four, three ... The truth is to say something once and then say it again Why I Like the Number 5 in a different way Thoughts by Dorothea Lasky until it means something else. I am so glad you asked me about the number 5, which has fol- A circle inside lowed me throughout my life. Well, when I say the number 5 has a square revolves followed me, it is more the numbers 8 and 6. My Social Security in air. The deer and number contains an abundance of these numbers, random pin the llama on the banks numbers at the bank often contain these numbers, and my ad- of the Loire. dresses and phone numbers often contain them. Being always one to think of a purposeful universe, I used to seek out the meaning of 8 and 6 following me. Of course, at first I found out that there The Donkey, the Five, and the Humans is the connotation that to 86 someone means to kill them. Then I Fiction by Caru Cadoc used think I might die at 86. One time a friend suggested that the power within the two was to see what their essence number was “Five!” brayed the donkey from the field. “Come and play with me. in numerology. So I added them together. 8 + 6 is 14. And 1 + 4 We’ll pretend I am Sophie Germain in the 1790s. We’ll imagine her equals 5. It was then that I discovered that 5 was the number fol- father’s there, telling me I’m not allowed to study mathematics be- lowing me all along. O Holy 5! cause I’m a girl. I’ll act out how stubborn she was, and you act out how you, famous five, loved her obstinacy in the face of his wishes I don’t know too many actual facts about the number 5. I heard and rewarded her by unveiling your safe-prime divisibility to beget once it is the sign of man, which makes me believe my course her namesake numbers until she died at 55!” of action should always be humanistic (which I’ve tried to make The five ignored the donkey, who asked a second time. sure it has been in this life). I like to make necklaces and felt wall The five replied, “I’m not going to play with you, donkey. hangings that contain some elements of the number 5, like a felt I’m helping a literary magazine celebrate its fifth anniversary with bug pin with 5 eyes or a necklace of 5 large green beads. And humans. And aren’t these humans wonderful? I love their ethereal what could be better than a 5-fingered turkey? If you are a teacher, values and the corners and curves in the glyphs of their bodies.” you know what I mean. And if you are not, then I must ask you: “Why are you being so weird?” asked the donkey. “I Have you ever walked into an elementary school classroom during thought you only liked people because of their stubbornness.” Thanksgiving and seen the glorious display of 5-fingered-feathered “Stop donko-morphizing me,” said the five. turkeys? The abundance is magical (in a 5 way, of course). The donkey considered whether to be offended at the five’s standoffishness. But after some contemplation, he decided Maybe in honor of 5, we should all spend some time today making the standoffishness was, essentially, the same hardheadedness a 5-fingered animal and hanging it up. By all, I mean everyone of that he valued so much about the five, and his focus returned to us reading this magazine. Let’s all rejoice in 5, a perfect half to the the grass of his field. 10 system. A 20th of a century-system. A sign of the human within all of its parts—that sound little 5.
MAKE: At Play 90 M5 excerpt from The Memory Station David, Sean, and Me. I dug my fingernail under the flap and tore: Fiction by Caroline Picard “Ted, “Because you’re my lawyer, you should know that I’ve shot our I know an artist and her specialty is painting on bits of sand. She mother, your sister-in-law, your nephews and niece. Don’t be upset: uses a microscope and a very tiny brush. She makes her brushes they’ll start anew with Jesus, as I’ll start anew elsewhere. I left by hand also—they’re so specific they can’t be bought. In order money in the secretary desk to settle last bills, and arranged for to make her brushes she travels once a year to a remote part of utilities to be shut off next month. Tell the Steindorf brothers they China where a peculiar breed of trout spawn. She catches a trout needn’t mow our lawn anymore. and takes a whisker—which is precisely why these trout are so “Sincerely, Joseph.” unique, because they have mustaches, or actually they’re like cat I passed the letter to Willow, let my hands fall to my lap, and fish whiskers, but I prefer to think of them as mustaches because tried to work out how I felt. Five sentences. Five bullets. Twice, Dad I like thinking about fish with British Bobby facial hair—In any case, thought five was enough. she spends any where from one week to one month collecting While Willow pored over Dad’s missive, muttering her contempt, these trout whiskers and then when she comes home she wraps I wrote on the envelope’s back: “Dad: the Steindorf twins are a single one to a toothpick with a dollop of Elmer’s glue. She uses fired.” the contraption as a kind of brush with which to paint the sand. I’ve never seen her work in person—only pictures. She says every year, as a kind of meditative offering, she lets one of those single I Think Not Understand, Five bits of sand go, lets it loose in the air, to be forgotten. She only Poem by Ish Klein makes five bits of sand a year, so they are absolutely precious. If I were her I wouldn’t give any of them away. because judge, judge, judge, judge. High time has come. So! See here: BLUE Sky. Two Pentagrams Yet, five, sends jive? Poem by Greg Purcell And eyes! Red and round!
Let us keep the figure of the Five-pointed Star always upright, Red, get a sound: snuff with the topmost triangle pointing to heaven, for it is the seat of or a new number or better liver wisdom, and if the figure is reversed, perversion and evil will be or a line that bends. the result. —Eliphas Levi Cross sense; plus more, More!
1 Whatever 5 am Spent our weekend shopping at the mall and hell, hell, cinque, sank. Spent it hiking through the woods at night Come jazz sans jive, right. Spent our weekend bathing one to one It’s the judge fuzz fer. Spent our weekend cooking for our friends Fighter. Snap Dragon And the air cooled with the coming rain Strength minus mercy 2 is to kill like judge And the air blew with the present rain meant with no mercy And the food burnt acrid on the tongue is hell bent and in We sweat with new exertions through our shirts tissue deep. Like a The Earth unchanging pressed beneath our feet And we spent our weekend shopping at the mall face in the sun burst. Close to be new, blood. 3 Losing is true, too. Let’s make an evil poem, she said. What else? Honey, iron, hive She said we’ll do exactly what we please. five, inside the fire. Tucked within the base mechanics of the world, we are now among its oranger demons, and I am big and glad with this last ritual. Brandy Of The Damned Fiction by Aaron Francis
Dad, Claudius A man walks into a bar. He holds up his trombone and says to Fiction by Jim Snowden the bouncer, ‘I’m with the band.’ ‘We don’t have anyone playing tonight,’ the bouncer responds. The trombonist contorts his face Three hours after we’d tossed earth on my Uncle Ted’s casket, his and says to the bouncer, ‘But you’ve got our band on a poster out former secretary stopped by my house to bring me an envelope Ted front. We’re playing here tonight. The Joe Capgras Quintet.’ The had kept containing, she said, my father’s last known note. Willow, bouncer looks at him and asks can he see anyone here looks like my partner, sitting beside me on my piano bench, spat the words they’re getting ready to play a set. The trombonist doesn’t see any “Burn it.” The cream-colored envelope fluttered in my trembling of the other players. ‘But what about—’ ‘Listen, buddy, I’m gonna hand. To steady myself, I silently counted to five: Mom, Grandma, continue on page 96
91 MAKE: At Play Drawing by Geoffrey Hamerlinck Dope by GEOFFREY NUTTER
I don’t mean to be pugnacious, but your bones are made of dope— you’ve been X-rayed in your brindled afghan, in your brindled cow, in your burnoose green and fiery as a celebrant and friend, the verdict is in: your bones are made of dope, your blood is dope, when you were swimming in the reservoir down at the granite quarry, late, in summertime, in your cruciform asymmetry, your quince, the dense round ball, your quince is made of dope, your sovereign is made of dope, two pink caryatids holding carven wheat sheaves were made of dope, and the wheat sheaves were wheat sheaves of freshest vilest, dope. You live in a mansion, El Dorado, and your mansion with its five bay windows turned toward the bay is builded of dope and the bay is dope, and the bodies underneath your house turn goldener as gold doth dopeth. Your family hath turned to dope, and as the green piñata on your peach tree in the courtyard spins above the children, who hitteth it with staves, dope spills out, the hard candy of dope, and leaves of dope all on the ground to be gathered.
93 MAKE: At Play Martin Heidegger by GEOFFREY NUTTER
They come to us suddenly and are not yet ours. They come fully formed. As the gray steel cables of the bridges appear threadlike from a distance, the new green leaves are uselessly alive. Behind the angular blue-gray buildings the cloud-like mountains rise into the sunset. And that is the other metropolis. Life enters there, like children’s hair, suddenly changing, from light to dark and back again. And that makes us adroit, and wanting to be human—that is, something somehow other than ourselves. The absinthe handlers and the water lobsters in the brine, the foyer painted black with golden leaves of rococo design; the lilies and the seawaves; they come, they come, they come to us, and we have met them with the mystery of what we are. Look: a form rising up above the tops of trees in April blossom: Martin Heidegger has fallen asleep in a pinkish cloud of rain and dew.
MAKE: At Play 94 The Tumbleweed Shogunate by GEOFFREY NUTTER
Saint Pancras of the Willows is now Saint Pancras in the Limes. It seems they removed the willows and replaced them, yes, with limes. Where did they put the willows? The men of the parade are on the street, and wearing their green top hats with green and purple satin bands of angular design; and they are drunk on night’s blue apple wine. These are the clever young men, Zacharias of the Owlish, svelte volts of witticism beading on the oilcloth. The jewels of the earth and the gems of the sea are edible jewels, and drinkable gems, and semaphores conducting us into the cool, dark shade of those irretrievable willows. Let us rest there in their grove, and wait out the reign of the Tumbleweed Shogunate.
95 MAKE: At Play The Problems of Poetry by GEOFFREY NUTTER
I love to see how other people have solved the problems of poetry. Sometimes it blinds me like rock gloves landing on my hat. Other times it seems both still and ever spreading, as the tendrils of a grayish potted aloe in the window of a dry cleaner’s on a narrow hilly street. Still other times it is like the vacant lot behind the hill beneath the trestles of an elevated building— in the leafless brown undergrowth behind the chain link fencing lie the rusting hubcaps, spackle cans, broken kitchen cabinets, an engine covered with a blue plastic tarp, broken umbrellas, propane tanks, cinder blocks, upended fireplugs, dead brown vines and balls of aluminum foil, a rotting log crawling with millennial centipedes and centennial millipedes among the man-made hats of paraphernalia. They are chaste as berries and mortality, sand runes in an eclogue, the stoic wolves of absolute winter. It is but a short walk to the shining gray-tiled pillars of the housing project.
MAKE: At Play 96 Beholder by GEOFFREY NUTTER
The big yellow cauliflower of the fungus split open at the bottom of the culvert. The cold water is flowing over it and into the waterlogged bales of hay that circumscribe the cinderblock catch basin at the bottom of the culvert. The big yellow fungus, roughly the size and shape of a human head, has little, if anything, to tell us. It just lets the cold water flow over it. The yellow fungus is in the eye of the beholder. The yellow fungus is the beholder. The leaves are green as crystals of the sea in the mind of the beholder, in whose intractable mental arrangements are formed, cloud-like, not only the present, and past, but even an alternative past, wherein ball clover thrives, velocipedes are moving gracefully, an antique locomotive is puffing far beneath a fleet of humming airships, passing through the clouds above this fair isle, where the Martello Towers are mushrooming serenely, and where these ruined pavilions in the cliff sides are once again agleam with silver, and fragrant with coffee and spices. The mandarin pears outweigh the Brahmin apples in their sweetness. And in those green-tiled domes, how the shadows of the lilies fall among the candles, the vitality and strangeness of that contrast ever obscuring their slide into diminishment. It has taken you through corridors of light and shadow, and halls of blue mosaic tile, and from there has taken you into its counsel, where, beside the waterfall, you can hear the rain drumming on the burdock leaves.
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have to ask you to leave,’ the bouncer says as he gets up off his Five stool, three hundred pounds of meat and fury. The trombonist Poem by Dara Wier relents and walks back out the door, past a stream of faces : the wet cardboard masks of the heavysmoking centenarians who daily It has taken me a long time to like 5. piss in Death’s eye, the loudly rouged and gussied masks of the 5, I hope you’ll forgive me. pitiful seductresses who fuck to feel pretty, the bright young masks of those with unbroken boozehymens, the wilted and jilted and For a very long time I’ve thought and felt as if 5 were not the 5 lilted lovers. And somewhere in that city beside the blinkablue lake I should think of. mythagain, a quintet becomes a quartet and maybe even someone I was wrong. I was dead wrong. I was stupid. I was wasn’t. hears a bird sing. FIVE. Ahhhhhh 5. I am starting to like you. And now at 5:55 in the morning I am almost starting to love you. Five Quotes Nonfiction by Tyler B. Myers Afterall 5 is an uneven number and uneven numbers I love without equivocation. When St. Augustine says, “I know very well what time is as long as And now it’s as if I’d never known you ever before. I’m sorry. no one asks me to define it,” I want to give him a high five. Maybe an around-the-world high five, like one where you strike hands up What if I wake up in the morning and think, high, then follow through in order to also strike hands down low. Oh, five, 5, you were always uneven, I always missed that about you. When Pascal says, “Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In short it is the great- I didn’t even notice how uneven you are. est perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination Five, five, I’ve suspected you are an even number in disguise. should lose itself in that thought,” I want to become a man with a gun tucked in his waistband, wandering the halls of history, a What was I thinking? sweaty search for him. Of an expression that breaks my heart.
When Robert Smithson says, “The tools of technology become And you know I care if my heart is broken.. a part of the Earth’s geology as they sink back into their original And also it is so I also know that means nothing. state. Machines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust,” I want to stare at my hand or my coffee and try to see time passing. Little or nothing is another expression. Expression? When Hal Foster says, “The artist’s ‘free expression’ implies our un-free inhibition, which is also to say that his freedom is mostly a My expression is mysterious to me. franchise on which he represents freedom more than he enacts it,” It is equivocal. I want to make Mac and Cheese with molasses in it, and then tell everyone how much I liked Mac and Cheese with molasses in it. Words with letters in them, some with 5 Have provided me with everything there is in the world. When Samuel Beckett says of Cezanne, “he has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but—on the evidence of his self-portraits—with the life … operative in himself,” The Three In Front The Two In Back I want to make a pot of tea and start a fire in the fireplace and Poem by Anthony Madrid lay on the floor in my underwear, seeing what I can feel of the life operative in myself. FIVE control the weather in a teevee. Bathe it, you. In scalding water.
Untitled Yer too little to hear it, Pocahontas. Fiction by Travis Nichols Quinientos cincuenta y cinco’ll sink ya.
Fievel recalled the kissing storm of Kimberly with the curly hair. Trip back always shorter, little Four-and-one. Humidity, cotton shorts, recess. Kimberly chased Fievel and Jay Go live in a row of Pincoln Park palaces. Dugan around the playground, threatening them both with smooch- ing and sucking sounds, running the fat little strawberry tongue Rose and rose of palaces, the Great Figure presiding. around her lips. Jay had long dark eyelashes, a high voice for a boy, Figure that one out, friend of fever. and a wispy little rat tail. “I don’t mind,” Jay said to Fievel in his high voice. They stopped running in front of a large metal cage in a Destructor de cerebros, aliado de la fiebre . . . gravel pit. A cloud of gravel dust arose from their ’Roos, and Fievel FIVE, son. That ’billy. Take a number. felt the dust on his teeth as Kimberly’s round face and tan arms emerged from the cloud. She kissed them both with wide open eyes and then ran away. Later, in high school, Jay and Fievel acted like they didn’t know each other at all.
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Five: A Personal & Mostly Reverse I asked my father about the whistle once, when I was older, think- Chronology with Occasional Moments ing it had been a dream. He remembered how he had cut his of Hyperbole finger. I didn’t. I remembered how my father could do anything. Poem by Michael Robins To the boy I was, at five, Germany seemed a land of fairy godmoth- 5. ers, homey yet foreign. Korea (my return), and the wars with my father, was still a long ways off. Anniversary of wood, fibers of industry poured in the recycling. The month of May? Harbormaster, like one who does away with starfish by cutting each in half. Our oceans minus one… Category to flood Untitled a levee or The Jacksons from every summer stereo. Your running Poem by Brandon Downing shoes treaded with feeling, the first of five wives served for being glum. 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 . 4. 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 Or say a pentagon… Too obvious? What of those baptized in fuel? 5 5 5 5 5 , 5 5 5 5 5 5 . 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 Numbers & numerals, the risen glyphs of Phoenix to the statehood of Connecticut. Fujita Scale & Bill Paxton, the Olympic rings rung-in 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5–– like continents. One-twentieth a dollar, heads or tails or sunlight 5 5 5 5 . 5 5 5 5 ‘s 5 5 5 5 5 in your eyes. Sentences end-to-end. Confessions like books of Psalms. Stick-shift overdrive. 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 ‘s 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 . . . 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 . 3. 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 . 5 5 5 5 5 Iambs dialed after midnight, J, K & L. You are 165 centimeters, 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 . briefly, average air across the melodic staff. Club Boron! Vonnegut & Billy Pilgrim! Swapping loaves for William Carlos & the figure— largest of the solar system—rumbling through the dark city. Stal- Pentaptych lone wins in Rocky V, “The Duke” Morrison tests positive & retires… Poem by Nate Zoba Act I, Scene ii, The Tempest.
2.
Swans a-swimming & parachute pants. Number 43 flipped over & over at Daytona, though we are chopsticks—no perfect fifths. Times some & twenty, wishing he hadn’t shot as many birds that spring. You are dos veces cinco, geese a-laying & golden rings. A teacher, like yours, becomes an astronaut: land, air & water, you learn a new word for fire.
1.
Third prime of the bunch, fifth kiss on the lips & plans like mar- riage. Sue & Johnny Storm, Reed Richards, Ben Grimm & me! George Brett & the third baseman’s position doubled over, conve- nience stores & five-finger discounts. Thumb & fingers traced for a turkey of your own… Sundays and the “Holy Wounds,” so we spoke. On the fifth day the fish & the birds.
5 Nonfiction by Matthew Salesses
When I was five, I went to Germany with my father—my adopted father. This is my first memory. As a child, I thought of it as my first time outside America, though of course, there was Korea.
I remember: sitting on a rock with a green visor, the most amazing hat (no top!); my father whittling a whistle out of a reed; the friend we were staying with eating jam and toast each morning, strange jams I had never encountered.
99 MAKE: At Play Lunch Time by dd
They had a bottle, the boys. Maybe a big brother or, no! Jim took it from his parents’ shelf. So we were all gonna go to Mark’s and take a drink and smoke cigs for lunch. We had forty-five minutes, more than enough time. Giggles and friendly punches on the way. It was the core eight. We walked the block and a half downhill almost skipping.
Ok, we go down into Mark’s laundry-roomish basement and we start to share the bot- tle. It’s hot, all the way down to an already fluttering stomach, and just stays warm. A room of eight flashy wits with five of them on fire, and the other three more quietly in heaven, heaven for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in 1968.
There’s a dare in the air. Who is gonna kiss who? We know who has dibs on whom, but half of us have NEVER given or received that kind of kiss. Another swig.
We match up in our corners. We kiss—that’s another story. Then, “Holy Shit, it’s 12:17!” We’re already late. But we can’t waste the bottle, so we finish it, and then it starts.
At first the playing is the fist to the upper arm that we usually do. Then Mark notices the sink full of dishwater as we run up the stairs and through the kitchen, chasing each other and screaming. The top has come off.
He picks up a baster and fills it. Everyone scrambles for a weapon. There’s a broom, and a little pan, and even two water pistols on the counter. Mark is squirting us with the baster and going back and forth for refills. Then he sees it. A towel. He gets it wet and he has a whip. He is very good at almost getting each of us with it. It evolves into he and I feverishly chasing each other with the others following and cheering. We end up in the bathroom. I open the medicine chest. There it is, a squeeze bottle with red liquid. This’ll do it. So I fire back. We all shift, running and screaming, back and forth, out of the bathroom, up and down the hall, through the dining room, into the kitchen, back into the dining room. “FUCK!” someone says. “Look what that shit is doing!”
The iodine—now we get that it’s fucking staining iodine. It’s everywhere! The carpet, the fucking wallpaper, us. We try to wipe it off. Mark says, “Never mind, we better go.” Rumor had it that his big brother beat the shit out of him. We had been in a play trance. It wasn’t the alcohol.
We all learned a valuable lesson; if you’re gonna play like that, do it outside. So we did. We roamed the streets and parks by our houses all that year, souls exposed. Thanks guys.
I love them. I love each and every one of them, now. They can come into any one of my next lives. They’re all welcome. M
MAKE: At Play 100 Illustration by Lauren Haldeman Lauren by Illustration
101 MAKE: At Play LIZ NIELSEN
Star Crystal, 2010 Ink-jet print 10” x 10”
Space Ice, 2010 Ink-jet print 10” x 10”
MAKE: At Play 102 Aurora Borealis, 2010 Ink-jet print 28” x 23 1/2”
103 MAKE: At Play CONTRIBUTORS
SD ALLISON was born in Nebraska. He is JOHN DILG received a BFA in Painting and editor of the literary magazine, Other Voices, the descendant of farmers, teachers, and men Filmmaking from the Rhode Island School of she co-founded its book imprint, Other Voices with bad lungs. He is the father of a little boy Design. He has been the recipient of a Ful- Books in 2005, and is now the Executive Edi- with autism. His first novel, Beneath the Plas- bright Grant to India, a National Endowment tor of the press. She is also the Fiction Editor tic, was published in 2006. He is currently a for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, and of the popular online literary collective The senior copy writer for a marketing/ad agency. Residency Fellowships at the Yaddo Founda- Nervous Breakdown. Gina’s short fiction has tion. Solo exhibitions include Luise Ross Gal- appeared or is forthcoming in a wide array of PHYLLIS BRAMSON received an MFA lery, New York and Schmidt Contemporary publications including Prairie Schooner, Fence, from the School of the Art Institute in 1973. Art, St. Louis. Dilg’s work has been reviewed StoryQuarterly, Swink, A Stranger Among Us: She is the recipient of three National Endow- in Art in America, the New York Times, and the Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Con- ments, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, Guggenhe- New Art Examiner. nection, ACM, F Magazine, and the Chicago im Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Grant, Reader. Her journalism, book reviews and Artadia: the Fund for Art and Dialog Jury TYLER FLYNN DORHOLT works and essays have been published in the Huffington Award and Anonymous Was a Woman Award lives in Manhattan. His writing has recently Post, the Chicago Tribune and many other 2009. She has had more than thirty solo ex- appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior print and online publications. Gina has been hibitions and is represented by Claire Oliver Review, Court Green, Sidebrow, Slope, DIA- the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Indi- Gallery, New York; Carrie Secrist Gallery, GRAM, Corduroy Mtn., and others. You can vidual Fellowship for Prose, an Illinois Arts Chicago and Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis. follow his other writing, films, and photogra- Council Literary Award, and recently won phy: dorholtt.wordpress.com the Summer Literary Seminars fiction contest KEVIN CAROLLO teaches world literature judged by Mary Gaitskill. She teaches in Co- and writing at Minnesota State University JOSEPH DROGOS teaches the humanities lumbia College’s Fiction Writing Department Moorhead. He has poems in Cream City Re- at Malcolm X College in Chicago and is the and her novel, London Calling, will be pub- view, Conduit, Court Green, and elsewhere. contributing editor of The Silver-Colored Yes- lished in 2012. Gina can be found online at He writes for Rain Taxi Review of Books, rocks terday, a blog on Chicago culture real, remem- ginafrangello.com. with The New Instructions, and lives in Fargo. bered and imagined. You can find many of Joe’s essays on MAKE’s website, at makemag. JUDITH GOLDMAN is the author of Voco- JON COTNER and ANDY FITCH are the com/the-silver-colored-yesterday. der (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling 2006), “the dispossessions” (atticus/finch 2009), Presse, 2010). They completed another collabo- MARTA FIGLEROWICZ is a graduate and l.b.; or, catenaries (forthcoming, Krupskaya rative manuscript called Conversations over Stolen student in English at the University of Cali- 2011). She co-edited the annual journal War Food. Fitch’s Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethink- fornia, Berkeley. Her criticism and creative and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005 ing Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey writing have appeared in, among others, New to 2009. Currently, she is a Harper Schmidt Archive. Cotner lives in Brooklyn, NY; Fitch, in Literary History, Dix-huitieme siecle, Proof- Fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the Laramie, WY, where he’s an assistant professor texts, the Harvard Advocate, and the Harvard University of Chicago, teaching in the arts hu- in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program. Book Review. manities core and in creative writing. dd is an old philosopher from Omaha, Ne- ALVILDE FALCK is a nineteen-year-old PAUL GRAHAM lives in Canton, New York. braska. She has been writing for years and she Norwegian girl currently studying in Chicago. His short fiction and essays have appeared in thinks that if she is going to let others read In Norway, her poetry has been published in a numerous literary magazines. In 2005 he won what she’s written she better start. This is the collection of poems by teenage writers, as well the Dana Award for the Novel. “Crazy Season” first thing she has let anyone read. as in a nonfiction book on female youth cul- is from a collection in progress called On the ture. In America, her creative nonfiction has Funeral Trail. He teaches writing and litera- ANGELA DELARMENTE is a recent gradu- been published in Orion Magazine. ture at St. Lawrence University. ate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program. Her work appears in New Ma- GINA FRANGELLO is the author of two LEN GUTKIN lives in New Haven, drid and F Magazine. critically acclaimed books of fiction,Slut Lull- Connecticut, where he is studying for his PhD abies (Emergency Press 2010) and My Sister’s at Yale. Continent (Chiasmus 2006). The longtime
MAKE: At Play 104 LAUREN HALDEMAN works as the editor AMELIA KLEIN recently completed a dis- CARMEN PRICE’s work creates new rela- for the Writing University website at the Uni- sertation, “Makings of the Sun: Romantic Na- tionships between familiar visual elements to versity of Iowa. After receiving her BA from the ture Lyric and its Legacies,” and received her express joy in contemporary culture. His cel- University of Iowa and her MFAfrom the Iowa PhD from Harvard University. Her poetry and ebratory drawings use personal symbolism and Writers’ Workshop, she has worked as a pup- criticism have appeared in the Boston Review, a strong faith in the accidental to form occa- peteer, a graphic designer and webmaster. Her Twentieth Century Literature, and Colorado Re- sionally narrative and often confusing scenes. poetry has been published in Fence, jubilat, and view, among others. She lives in South Boston. Originally from Kansas City, Price currently Shampoo Magazine, and she has been a finalist lives and works in Chicago. for the Walt Whitman Award and the Colo- RACHEL MASON is a sculptor and musi- rado Prize for Poetry. cian. She received her BFA from UCLA and DEAN RANK is an illustrator and filmmaker MFA in Sculpture at Yale in 2004. Mason’s living in Chicago. Last season, his fantasy foot- GEOFFREY HAMERLINCK was born in St. sculptures and music have been featured in the ball team won it all. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1983. He is currently New York Times and Artforum, among other working on Geoff Hamerlinck’s Famous Comic, publications. Mason’s work has been shown at ANDREW ROHDE is a full-time student and a full-color publication that he prints by hand galleries and museums nationwide. a practicing artist-for-hire living in Chicago. at his Chicago studio. His work is influenced by comics and graphic C. J. MATHERNE is a Chicago-based artist. media and seeks to create unique compositions ROSE HAMILTON-GOTTLIEB was a run- His work explores the grotesque, un-hip, and through the use of mixed media. Find him at ner-up in the Chicago Tribune’s 2006 Nelson awkward elements that imbue one’s anxiety – [email protected]. Algren Award. She has completed three novels, while adding dark humor and his own brand a novella, and a short story collection. of cartoonish awkwardness. He is currently Buenos Aires–based MARK ROOKE has been pursuing an MFA in Painting at Bard College. writing short stories and humor pieces since he EVELYN HAMPTON lives in Providence. Her In 2006, Matherne received his BFA from the was old enough to stick foil in electrical outlets. chapbook, WE WERE ETERNAL AND GI- School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He runs a blog at saltedground.com. GANTIC, was published in 2010 by Magic Hel- icopter Press. Her website is Lispservice.com. MARK MOLLOY is the Reviews Editor for FRED SASAKI’s work in this issue is from a MAKE. He was born, raised, and currently lives manuscript called “Letters of Interest,” parts of ELIZABETH HILDRETH lives in Chicago in New York. He studied English and philoso- which have appeared or are forthcoming in the and works as an instructional designer and a phy at the College of the Holy Cross. Iowa Review, Pax Americana, ACM, Artifice, regular interviewer for the online literary mag- Proximity, Rocktober, and other places. azine Bookslut. This is her first piece of nonfic- LIZ NIELSEN is a Chicago-based independ- tion. She blogs at The Effect of Small Animals, ent curator as well as a photographic installation ART SHAY grew up in the Bronx and has theeffectofsmallanimals.blogspot.com artist. She photographs constructed universes, lived and worked around Chicago since 1948. mysticism, love, and failure. She teaches photog- Among Shay’s numerous publications are: Nel- DANIEL KHALASTCHI’s poems have re- raphy at the School of the Art Institute of Chi- son Algren’s Chicago (University of Illinois, cently appeared in The Kenyon Review; jubilat; cago and is the director of a small gallery in Chi- 1988), Album for an Age (Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 1913; and Forklift, Ohio. A former fellow at cago called the Swimming Pool Project Space. In Animals (University of Illinois, 2002) and Cou- the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, 2004, Nielsen received her MFA in Photography ples (University of Illinois, 2003). Shay resides he is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of from UIC; in 2002, her BFA from School of the in Deerfield, Illinos with his wife Florence. English at Marquette University. His first col- Art Institute Chicago; and in 1995, her BA in lection of poetry, Manoleria, will be published Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University. LILY VAN DER STOKKER has an upcom- this spring by Tupelo Press. He is also a co- ing catalogue entitled It Doesn’t Mean Anything, founder and editor of Rescue Press. GEOFFREY NUTTER has published three But It Looks Good, detailing her exhibition No books: A Summer Evening, Water’s Leaves & Big Deal Thing at the Tate St. Ives, in Corn- DEVIN KING lives and works in Chicago. Other Poems, and Christopher Sunset. He teach- wall. She has exhibited extensively in both His first book, Clops, is available from The es at NYU and lives in New York. In Spring Europe and the U.S. Some of her most recent Green Lantern Press. 2011 he will be teaching as a guest at the Uni- exhibitions have been Terrible at the Museum versity of Iowa. Boijmans, Rotterdam, Netherlands, To The
105 MAKE: At Play Wall, with David Shrigley at the Aspen Art Mu- Literary seum, and Plug In#52 with Jim Isermann at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindoven, NL. Pleasures She lives and works in New York and Amsterdam.
from ChiCago JULIA STORY, a native of Indiana, is the author of Post Moxie (Sarabande 2010), which won Sarabande Books’ 2009 Kathryn A. Mor- Slow Trains Overhead ton Prize and Ploughshares’ 2010 Zacharis Chicago Poems and Stories Prize. Her recent work has appeared in The Paris Reginald Gibbons Review, Octopus, and Indiana Review. She is “[Gibbons] chronicles currently working on her next collection, ten- the beautiful chaos of his adopted hometown, its furi- tatively titled Red Town, and lives in Somerville, ous pace and its powerful Massachusetts. history, a history tucked into the creases between the JAMES TATE’s new Selected Later: The great buildings like a love Eternal Ones of the Dream is in the works. It’ll note left in a school locker.” Julia Keller, be coming out soon. Chicago Tribune ClOTh $20.00 AYA YAMASAKI is a Chicago-based graphic designer and illustrator. She has worked with local clients like Golden Age and Kavi Gupta Gallery as well as international clients, Untoco, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City Tokyo, and Jbros, Seoul. She also designs as Martin Preib Paperstore with Carson Fisk-Vittori, using sal- “For [Preib], ‘there is a kind vaged objects to produce simple and playful of faith that lingers in real- products. paperstore.tumblr.com ism, a belief that knowing the city will lead somewhere DAVID YOO is the author of the YA novels beyond the city.’ He has justified and realized that Girls For Breakfast and Stop Me If You’ve Heard faith in The Wagon, a quite This One Before. Forthcoming are his novel The remarkable book that is Detention Club (Balzer+Bray) and his first col- much larger than its slender lection of essays for adults, Honorable Mention dimensions.” (Grand Central). Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post ClOTh $20.00 MABEL YU’s work has been published in RHINO, Quick Fiction, and The Summerset Re- view, and is forthcoming in Passages North, Crab Creek Review, and Tampa Review. She was born The light Club in raised near Washington, D.C. On Paul Scheerbart’s “The Light Club of Batavia” Josiah McElheny VANESA ZENDEJAS’ work deals with re- “An exciting hybrid— constructed Modernism present in standardized beautifully clear, yet com- knowledge of art history. It also looks to more plex; a meditation on meta- obscure American Modernists and their direct narratives by a leading artist and writer of his generation; influences. Zendejas lives and works in Chicago, a work of art.” where she received her BFA from the School of Michelle Kuo, the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. She is cur- Editor in Chief, Artforum rently attending Bard College working toward ClOTh $25.00 an MFA in Sculpture.
The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu REVIEWS
Microscripts pulp fiction covers. Carefully chosen and over the years, Walser had preserved dozens lovingly presented, the microscripts are a of strips of paper covered with tiny, seem- A collection of moving introduction to Walser’s work at its ingly incoherent markings. Earlier scholars miniature prose pieces by most miniature and most beautiful. had discarded them as a madman’s scribbles. Robert Walser Coming back to his work half a century Translated from the German Born in Switzerland around the turn of the later, the next generation of researchers dis- by Susan Bernofsky century, Walser worked odd jobs—among covered them to be first versions of Walser’s New Directions, 2010 others, as a servant and an inventor’s assist- short sketches written in a miniscule version 160 pages ant—while pursuing an increasingly suc- of an archaic German script. Many of these cessful writer’s career. He published some drafts had been published with virtually no REVIEWED BY poems and novels; the main bulk of his writ- corrections; others, especially later ones, had MARTA FIGLEROWICZ ing, however, consisted of short stories and never before appeared in print. sketches. It is for these stories and sketches Walter Benjamin called Robert Walser an that he became most widely recognized. His The aim of the Microscripts is to return to “extraordinar[il]y” styleless writer. By this he writing achieved its first peak of popularity these drafts as both products of Walser’s did not mean that Walser’s language is in- in the 1920s, influencing writers such as writing and sites at which this writing took ept but that it is reticent; that this reticence Herman Hesse and Franz Kafka. Controver- place. The volume sets German transcripts is, moreover, not a drawback but a creative sially diagnosed with schizophrenia thirteen of these drafts, and their English transla- force. The aim of Microscripts, a recent trans- years later, he spent the rest of his life at a tions, against facsimile images that present lation of Walser’s selected writing, is to bring mental institution and was virtually forgot- these texts to us in their original size and out this shyly whimsical, nervous quality of ten for fifty years. shape. Illegible without a magnifying glass, his prose in texts where it takes what might these facsimiles offer a touching bird’s eye be its most extreme form. The volume col- In the 1970s, when Walser’s star again began view of the multiple directions Walser’s lects twenty-five short sketches Walser pen- to rise, an overlooked portion of his manu- mind seems to veer in. ciled in microscopic script on loose strips of scripts began to attract attention. In addi- paper: business cards, envelopes, duodecimo tion to the final drafts he sent his publishers To read the Microscripts is, first, to experi-
107 MAKE: At Play ence the physical fragility and whimsicality at not following them, and, finally, even them and for them, but you are not sad. You of Walser’s writing. He pencils rather than by our own awareness of their fragility—an smile with them and at them, but you are pens his pieces. This is to help them remain awareness that, the longer we keep read- not happy. They seem supernatural but have sketches, to reassure him they need be noth- ing, comes to feel at once more tender and no powers. There is magic in the type of ing else. Each draft is a small visual poem. more intrusively voyeuristic. If it is indeed melancholy that Meno dishes out. The qualities of his medium, a quotidian a social game we witness and participate in, printed page, inspire the rhythm and shape its stakes are far higher and more troubling In “The Boy Who Was a Chirping Oriole,” of the story with which it is soon densely, than we initially want to believe. As a result, a child’s love for fireworks results in his dis- obsessively filled. Walser obviously delights we are made to empathize with these per- appearance. He literally vanishes before our in fusing verbal play with visual play: jux- sons but also to feel that, in being allowed eyes. The boy’s father narrates the story, taposing his tiny sticklike script against to observe their lives, we are given a power describing his son’s favorite individual fire- the sturdier inked font of a letterhead or a over them we should not wield, a power works, those that contributed to his dema- book title; mingling vertical and horizontal that—now we have been made to name it— terialization. He lists the different fireworks lines, solid blocks of text, and loose words we would like to be able to relinquish (this out consecutively, throwing a sentence or or phrases. Some drafts come together, sen- description owes much to Sianne Ngai’s ac- two about his boy in, here and there. Ridic- tence by sentence, out of small archipelagoes count of cuteness). Suspended in this state ulous, certainly. Still, each mention of the of writing; others are framed and illuminat- of constant awareness of and anxiety about boy brings with it progressively stronger and ed into mock-medieval manuscripts. society’s power over the individual, the indi- stronger quivers of the chin. vidual’s inability to be stably beautiful, we In their outward appearance the micro- are given a lesson in aesthetics that is also a In “The Architecture of the Moon,” Meno scripts give an impression of simultaneous lesson in morality. shuffles, transposes, and leaves the laws of whimsicality and intense concentration, of, Newton, Einstein, and Hawking out in the at once, a precariously intense focus, a need Demons in the Spring rain. The moon has vanished and each onset for order, and a wandering imagination that of night causes the city to dismember. Build- constantly reinvents its bounds. This im- A collection of short stories ings stretch their legs and whole city blocks pression is echoed, and heightened, in the by Joe Meno and parks re-root, taking the people who content of Walser’s writing. The aim of each Akashic Books occupy them along. In the midst of this, phrase Walser pencils is not to twine but to Hardcover first published 2008; Meno’s focus is on the relationship between fray its precedent. His is a mind impatient paperback published 2010 a man and his grown son. Every evening the with itself, always jumping to qualify or dif- 280 pages man gets off work and calls his son to help fuse its prior observations. him find his bearings, to locate that which REVIEWED BY SD ALLISON is his own in the metamorphosing world Most of the microscripts gathered in the around him. It is touching; it is tender; and volume are ambiguous, simultaneously Joe Meno’s brain is a big dark attic full of it is out there. comic and troubling portraits of Walser’s chests built in sad cities and salvaged from contemporaries. The aesthetic of these the bellies of vessels from the past and fu- In “It is Romance,” a teacher falls in love descriptions is far removed from classical ture, from this planet and others. His work with the students in his Model United Na- standards of beauty. If we are moved by is known for its conflation of the absurd tions club—all of them. He is not a pervert. Walser’s characters, it is because they are with the everyday but also for its simple, au- He is not a predator. And yet, he is at odds vulnerable, because of the awkward, endear- thentic dialogue and its intense empathy for with himself. He is uncomfortable with dat- ing roughness of their contours. Nestled in its characters. His seventh book and second ing and uninspired by the sad, desperate inoffensive, often eccentrically expressed collection of short fiction, Demons in the men who seem to be the only ones available anxieties—a fear of being complimented, Spring, finds him further cultivating these to him. The illogical, youthful exchanges an awe of telephones—the characters attract stylistic gardens. between his Model UN students are what us through blemishes and imbalances rather give him joy. His heart sings when the South than through successes and harmonies. This Composed of twenty short stories with il- Korean ambassador warns the Chinese am- mode of presentation gives Walser’s prose lustrations by twenty artists from the fine bassador that the U.S. has “like a hundred its playful, shy quality but also undergirds art, graphic art, and comic book worlds, thousand” military bases in South Korea it with a barely restrained violence—a vio- Demons should not be missed. Emptiness and that they invented taekwondo to attack lence that seems to be both society’s aggres- and isolation haunt the characters that roam Chinese soldiers on horse back—those be- sive pressure on his characters and the char- these stories. Loss and the sense of being lost ing the reasons that China is not invincible. acters’ own frustration with their unheroic, are the coordinating themes that hang thick In what may be the most down-to-earth barely coherent lives. The fragile unity, the over them. An absurdity, too, burrows deep story of the collection, Meno shows that he momentary joys of these characters’ psyches in the heart of Demons. Characters act an does not need the surreal to showcase the seem threatened on all sides: by their soci- inch beyond human, a chemical apart from frailty of his characters. They stand up and ety’s conventions, by their own self-hatred stable, a degree above normal. You ache with crumble just fine on their own.
MAKE: At Play 108 In this collection nothing is ever resolved. generis 1928 comic novel Ryder? It is, to earth, and red, green, yellow, brown, russet, No one knows what to do. No one can begin with, a family history, covering four sweet, big bitter ripe pomilated apples and explain anything. No one can make any- generations of the hilariously troubled Ry- strawberries fit for princes and raspberries thing better. And, yet, somehow that’s okay. der clan. Particularly emphasized is Wendell from their canes.” Every page of Ryder de- Meno’s sentences, like Vonnegut’s, are sim- Ryder (modeled on Barnes’s father, Wald lights in this joyous Joycean list-making. ple, poignant, and playful. So are his ideas. Barnes), a procreation-obsessed narcissist Through them, the beauty of the characters whose troubled relationships with his two In Ryder, such paragraph-, page-, even chap- balances the sense of emptiness that pervades wives, Amelia and Kate, and their eight chil- ter-long enumerations often involve themes their world. Meno is no nihilist. The worlds dren constitute much of the book’s action. of parentage and generation, those Biblical he creates, though damaged, are not broken. The bigamous Ryder family is drawn direct- “begats” ever hovering in the background. There is always beauty amid the emptiness, ly from Barnes’s own; she would return to Consider, for example, one of Wendell’s and it is precisely this diversity of mood and the havoc wrought by her egomaniacal, and many obsessive orations on fatherhood, here tone that makes the work succeed. possibly abusive, father in her 1954 play The given a metaphysical turn: Antiphon. The Antiphon stages Barnes’s fam- The final lines of the last story in the book, ily history as psychosexual tragedy; Ryder, on I, my love, am to be Father of All “Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush,” the other hand, as bawdy farce. Things. For this I was created, and to encapsulate the mood and feeling of the col- this will I cleave. Now this is the Race lection quite well. The book leaves off with Djuna Barnes is best known today for her that shall be Ryder—those who can a boy and girl just after they have taken a 1936 novel Nightwood, which might be sing like the lark, coo like the dove, sick stray kitten to the vet to be euthanized: described as a gothic lesbian romance. No- moo like the cow, buzz like the bee, table for its taboo-breaking themes and cheep like the cricket, bark like the Jill Thirby was still crying, and then we dense, highly wrought language, Nightwood dog, mew like the cat, neigh like the were waiting at the bus stop, and then was loudly praised on its publication by T. stallion, roar like the bull, crow like the we were getting on the bus, and the S. Eliot, who, in his capacity as editor at cock, bray like the ass, sob like the owl, whole time we were sitting there she Faber and Faber, got the book published. bleat like the lamb, growl like the lion, was still holding the empty cardboard Eliot contributed a memorable introduction whine like the seal.… box, and we sat beside each other, to the American edition of Nightwood in watching the buildings go by in a blur, which he favorably compares the “musical Much of Ryder—the bulk, even—consists riding past my stop, past the stop for pattern” of Barnes’s prose to that of “most of lists like this, by turns exhilarating and her school, past the part of the city we contemporary novels, [which] obtain what exhausting, “as if,” notes Paul West in his knew, at that moment wondering who reality they have largely from an accurate afterword, “[Barnes] were intent on produc- we were, what was going to happen rendering of the noises that human beings ing La Brea tar pits of blather, just to get us to us, waiting, like everybody else, for currently make in their daily simple needs of in a primitive mood, amazed that humans someone to tell us what to do. communication.” could come to the Word.” Barnes’s authority may have been Joyce, but her primary model Reading Demons in the Spring makes you No one could mistake the prose of Ryder for is surely Robert Burton, the 17th-century feel like you are sitting there beside them. such quotidian chitchat. Ryder is written in a divine whose Anatomy of Melancholy estab- mock Elizabethan and Jacobean idiom simi- lished the art of the list in English prose. Like its original hardcover release in 2008 lar to, though more extreme than, the ram- from Akashic Books, the 2010 paperback bling sentences of Dr. Matthew O’Connor Burton, by the way, recognized that “such as edition of Demons in the Spring will see a in Nightwood. Much of Ryder’s faux-archaic lie in child-bed” are subject to melancholy portion of the proceeds donated to 826 Chi- prose recalls the syntax of the King James (hardly a surprise, since everyone, for Bur- cago, a nonprofit tutoring center. Bible—say, those familiar, endlessly aggre- ton, is subject to melancholy), and Barnes gated “begats” with which the Old Testa- makes it clear that Wendell’s ambitious pro- Ryder ment records genealogical succession: “And creating has its downside—for the woman, unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat who has the business of bearing all the brats. A novel by Djuna Barnes Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: As Amelia, in the painful throes of child- Afterword by Paul West and Methusael begat Lamech.” Barnes was birth, says to one of her not-yet-born: “Out Dalkey Archive Press a great devotee of Joyce and surely felt au- then, mole! Who taught you a woman’s First published in 1928; thorized by his example to experiment with body had a way for you? Why, now I’ll be republished 2010 the long, litany-like, word-drunk line. In a afraid of you forever, for this road makes me 240 pages 1936 article, she writes that she first “sensed most aware of you.” Ryder, in its depictions the singer” in Joyce reading lines like Ulysses’ of pregnancy, participates in an important REVIEWED BY LEN GUTKIN “Thither the extremely large wains bring modernist trend: increasingly frank literary foison of the fields, spherical potatoes and treatments of childbearing. One thinks not How to describe Djuna Barnes’s utterly sui iridescent kale and onions, pearls of the only of the maternity ward episode in Ul-
109 MAKE: At Play ysses and Katherine’s death in A Farewell to Hays is, first and foremost, a poet of nature. The Smaller Half—also a first book—is a Arms but also of Mina Loy’s deliberately gro- In her poems we encounter cane begonia, brief collection of short poems. Some are tesque lines on childbirth in her long poem pitch pines, turtles, brush wolves, juncos, perceptive, heartfelt, and sincere; a few Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, published sev- thrushes, wrens, etc. These are often lushly are mischievously surreal and enchanting; eral years before Ryder: “They pull / A clotty described: “the seedlings / curtsy, shy un- many are errant and inaccessible. A labored bulk of bifurcate fat / out of her loins.” der their garlands.” Hays’s nature is not work, highly crafted and full of great delib- the maternal and transcendental Nature erateness, The Smaller Half is also an awk- Barnes’s sentences, like Burton’s, like Joyce’s, that one associates with Wordsworth and ward one, at times defiantly inarticulate. are rhythmically precise rivers of language, classical Romanticism, however, but the rollickingly pointless litanies sweeping the materialist one of modern science. “I have These are elusive poems. Rahe is a gradu- reader along on a tide of lexical self-infat- no fantasies,” she writes of swans, “they are ate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, at uation. Ryder is a tissue of digressions. As plump and unholy, loaded up / with bone times, writes with the tentativeness and im- Burton knew, such obsessive digressiveness and blood and pipes.” prudence of one who frets the critical eye will not appeal to everyone: “Which man- of his peers. The speaker’s mind can be said ner of digression howsoever some dislike, Here is the central theme of the work: the to constitute the subject, here; the contem- as frivolous and impertinent, yet I am of otherness of that nature—the incompre- porary American suburban landscape, the Beroaldus his opinion, ‘Such digressions do hensibility of the perspective of tundra setting. Beyond that, things get hazy. That mightily delight and refresh a weary reader, swans, of the fierce determination of mol- Rahe can compose that haze into poems as they are like sauce to a bad stomach, and lusks and hyacinths to live, of the absurd- fine as the best of this volume is a testa- I do therefore most willingly use them.’” ity of flea-like insects who live and suffer ment to his significant skill as a writer. But the reader weary of the dry, responsible only long enough to reproduce so that their prose of so much contemporary fiction will spawn can do the same. Hays’s poems are Rahe has described his style as “lyrical nar- not lack for sauce in Ryder. This attractive the record of her attempts to conceptual- rative,” although it is rarely strongly lyrical new edition of Ryder, which restores some of ize, and poeticize, that reality. For the most or narrative. Instead it is frayed, of a sen- Barnes’s hitherto unpublished illustrations, part, they are pessimistic and resigned af- sibility too delicate for the inundations or is a treat. fairs. She notes more nature’s propensity to vacancies (as you prefer) of contemporary take life than its (equal) tendency to give it. American life. Rahe suffers. His poems Dear Apocalypse speak of painful arthritis and hospital stays, Hays keeps her lines bound loosely to an and his emotions often verge on anger: “I A collection of poems observant though flexible meter. Her com- feel a meanness / in me.” Hostility often by K. A. Hays mand of language makes possible complex, disrupts otherwise sincere thoughts: “I Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009 varied, and often quite playful and beau- would have responded sooner,” he writes in 82 pages tiful orchestrations of sound and imagery. a poem to a friend whose wife has been in Here she uses her line and stanza breaks as an accident, “but they didn’t allow smoking The Smaller Half pivots with which she stirs her verse into a on the train.” This book is rife with such whorl: “My bulbs appall me. Two of them, passive aggressions. A collection of poems though brief on top, / are thrusting hun- by Marc Rahe grily, angrily downwards, // flinging dense Spun off of the powerful currents of emo- Rescue Press, 2010 tangles of growth / into the water, as if tion that drive these poems, the language 72 pages they want to bury themselves // in that still often twirls into eddies of frustration and nether-region where sounds are muted.” isolation. Repeatedly, Rahe utilizes a sort of REVIEWED BY MARK MOLLOY Elsewhere she uses enjambment to help de- deer-in-the-headlights parataxis: “I’ve done pict the steep face of a ravine in words: “on this for love’s sake. / My own too, if it is. Dear Apocalypse, K. A. Hays’s first published the curling grin of water teethed / through / My doctor says it is. / She isn’t really my book, stands firmly in the Romantic tradi- rock, gnawing this canyon.” Impressive doctor; / she’s more of a maid. / She does her tion: observations of nature, spoken in an el- stuff. hair in the tower.” Words are used that are evated diction, are plumbed and drawn into not quite right (“you wait / pacing in your expansive cosmic ruminations on life and Dear Apocalypse is not a work of full matu- pants”), and lines and entire poems wander death. Stylistically, Hays embraces her pre- rity nor is it of a consistently high quality off never to be heard from again. decessors’ grandiosities wholeheartedly, and throughout. But, in its best passages and so it’s no surprise these poems are at times poems, words and rhythms do push up and Rahe can achieve real gravity when working eclipsed by the reach of their own rhetoric. out of themselves as leaves do, budding in a more traditional vein. In the work’s pe- Yet they show a genuine fluency with the into nature’s gorgeous if accidental reverie. nultimate poem, “Stray,” the speaker, visited things of this world, a strong moral engage- by a stray cat while smoking on his porch, ment, and a firm command of prosody; at * finds in the scene around him the gravity their best they hum with the activity of life. and mystery of life and nature bound to-
MAKE: At Play 110 gether and illuminated from within: “These meaning of things must be built from the terror of existence (“Seagulls had eaten his black streets / are like wet binding / on frost ground up. eyes. His throat was bleeding.”), so that the bitten hands. // Smoke and breath rise with- poet may say, both with and without allego- out separate identity.” “Remains” and “Four Bringing together poems from Cole’s six rizing, that “The dark embryo bares its teeth in the Morning,” exquisite exercises in for- previously published books of poetry, Pierce and we move on.” mal surrealism, likewise display real mastery the Skin charts this painstaking labor across and power. several decades. Aparthood in all its forms “I want nothing / to reveal feeling but feel- is Cole’s constant theme, and this collection ing,” Cole writes in “Gravity and Center,” At times Rahe permits himself the indul- shows Cole working it with increasing hon- and many of the later poems come astonish- gence of a sumptuous rhetoric, and every esty and depth, gradually finding the music ingly close to this ideal. Middle Earth (2003) so often allows himself a poetic flourish for that allows him to say the unsayable more and Blackbird and Wolf (2007) are, to my the finale. But mostly the speaking voice be- fully and provocatively. Likewise, as Pierce mind, unquestionably Cole’s best books, hind these poems is a damaged one—with the Skin unfolds, Cole’s prosody seems to and it makes sense that almost half the anxiety, fear, and loneliness its dominant discover its native rhythms, shedding the space of Pierce the Skin is composed of po- themes. The poems themselves come across elaborate and sometimes strained arrange- ems taken from them. In Middle Earth Cole as damaged. Their speaker struggles with his ments of the earlier poems and moving first discovers what has become his signature life and environment, and we find in The toward a spareness in which the relations form, a modified sonnet of variably stressed Smaller Half a wilderness of averted glances between sound and sense grow ever stran- lines (though with the classic pentameter as and an extremity of tunnel vision: “Because ger and more luminous. For all this auster- skeleton), each line separated from the oth- I don’t have a license, / I always look to oth- ity, however, Cole remains an exceptionally ers by a single space, almost as though each ers / when I need a license.” Wise to the ways playful poet, both in his exploration of the were its own delicately suspended strophe. of their hostile worlds, these unsettling po- intersection of sound with sense and in his The form, full of the air that is either breath ems spend much of their time scurrying for willingness to try out new forms, voices, and or blankness, is in itself a meditation on sin- (often quite beautiful) cover. perspectives—whether asking questions of gularity, on what Cole has called the self’s a praying mantis (“Pillowcase with Praying “aparthood,” and on the possibility that Pierce the Skin: Mantis”) or picturing himself as a Japanese such aparthood might nonetheless permit, Selected Poems woman (“Self-portrait as the Red Princess”). or even constitute, points of connection. In a world in which “there are no more ele- A collection of poems gant redemptive plots,” playfulness becomes In “The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge,” Cole by Henri Cole a matter of survival and is perhaps all that prays: “Oh, Lord, make us sure as the beasts Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 stands between us and abject despair. / who drink from the pond.” Though the 160 pages recent poems retain the sense of a distinctly The earlier, less certain works are more human tragedy (“no one animal his own, / REVIEWED BY AMELIA KLEIN sparsely showcased than the later ones, as I am my own,” he mourns in “Landscape with Cole’s first two books, The Marble with Deer and Figure”), age seems to have Every biographical sketch of Henri Cole be- Queen (1986) and The Zoo Wheel of Knowl- drawn Cole closer to the earth, toward what gins, inevitably, with the same spare facts. edge (1989), represented by just five poems might be called an ecological vision of hu- Born in 1956 in Fukuoka, Japan, to an apiece. The effect is crystallizing: each entry man suffering—and of poetry itself—as American army man and a French mother, manifests another facet of the sensibility that part of nature. Asked in an interview with he was raised in Virginia and went on to is, by book’s end, intimately known. Like Christopher Lydon to name the keynote of study at the College of William and Mary, Robert Lowell, to whom one commentator his poetic personality, Cole’s response was the University of Wisconsin at Milwau- on the dust jacket compares him, Cole uses “empathy,” perhaps surprising from a poet kee, and Columbia University. A gay man poetry to formalize the personal, probing the so attuned to isolation. Yet, for Cole as for brought up in the Roman Catholic Church, life remembered for meaning incompletely Wallace Stevens, the interior paramour of Cole understood only one of three languages grasped in the event. In fact, Cole is closer lyric draws us into proximity with the vul- (English, French, and Armenian) spoken in to Merrill’s urbane self-restraint than he is to nerability of all living things: the self in exile his childhood home—a home badly shak- Lowell’s tortured soul-baring; although, as becomes inclusive. The poems in Pierce the en, if not shattered, by what he has called his work matures, the increasing limpidity of Skin make compelling claims for the power “predictable patterns of violence.” It is not his syntax and his steadfast eschewal of orna- and depth of poetic understanding, claims so surprising then that he had greater need ment distinguishes him from both poets. So of a kind rarely encountered in the contem- than most to build himself a dwelling-place often in these poems feeling is conveyed not porary landscape of American letters. Cole in words. Cole’s poetry precisely and para- discursively but by the sheer acuity of Cole’s reminds us that the theory of poetry may yet doxically embodies a particularly modern renderings of sensory experience: in “Fa- be, as Stevens said it was, the theory of life. and American version of exile. Where little ther’s Jewelry Box,” a scent is grief itself; in One looks ahead eagerly to the poems he has or no part of oneself is a given—where one’s “Beach Walk,” from Cole’s most recent vol- yet to write. M history, culture, and fate are all unclear—the ume, a dead baby shark embodies the whole
111 MAKE: At Play I Live Near Larry Bittner by KEVIN CAROLLO
I smell money, I smell tar. I’m melting away my single digits dreaming of dumb fucking ice cream. I’m dreaming so small in between so-so no man’s lands, and it always hurts to not find the secret hideout. Eyes like baseball diamonds, and I smell money, I smell tar. I am always at war with the future. I am dreaming small small about who I will be mirror-wise. There is something dull about the dim condominiums we called home that outlived us, a still seeping fake-rock memory, though since then, I admit it, I tend to intake the crusty bake of leaves in the Arkansas of Grandma. We were the way station left by the wayside. My imaginary friend and I are always raking our utter insignificance away away away. I have Doritos and Coke by the curb with my best friend Mark. I have chalky Now and Laters in my dirty pocket. My appetite for destruction never not comes up null result. I think about some retired military mules who went twenty or so days without water, and I write my fictional memoirs, in pencil. This is where I plan to die, I write, this is where they will bury my children’s children’s remains. I was not meant for this world, I write, even some adults had determined, but I felt indelible. I was the decibel getting lost inside the mini-speakers, the one tiny iota of light flickering on the bus to the suburbs. A sequel without original, I had to compensate for my second-handedness, and Dad said that’s normal. Then I write about how the wild horses got lost from the spaceship, but even my imaginary friend demands something a tad more plausible. I’m in a kind of bind with this, because I want to go on and on and on about it. I want to convince an impromptu crowd of my sincerity, but a proverbial little bird tells me that that never works. That’s what I’d predicted as a child as well, I write, and that’s actual blood on my conscience. That’s but a fraction of what I couldn’t put into words, and, Gog & Magog go flog and kill me, I still can’t.
MAKE: At Play 112 Read more from the blog A Silver-Colored Yesterday, one of many new online features THE SILVER-COLORED YESTERDAY: at makemag.com. Look for interviews with past contributors, LANGUAGE AT PLAY: LOVE, LUST, SAVAGERY new work expanding on the theme of the current issue, book reviews, and AN EXCERPT BY JOSEPH DROGOS commentary, as well as audio recordings and up-to-date event information. , 1954, Gelatin silver print Gelatin silver , 1954, Backyard Olympics Backyard Art Shay,
Long before this edition of MAKE had its The image depicts sheer play—an unadulter- ourselves were on the banister, toes curled theme, an image of pure play had fixed itself ated ecstasy that comes from simply leap- over the two by four, peering at the pile, with- in my mind. It’s a picture by the Chicago pho- ing—but it also demonstrates a crucial aspect out any friends or fellow leapers. We likely tographer Art Shay that I first saw when I was of being at play. Imagine isolating the three wouldn’t feel joy, but apprehension, terror for a child. Though I can’t remember where or groups in this scene. First, picture the kid in a few floating moments, then relief, -accom when I saw it first, I never forgot it and redis- the act itself, the boy in mid-flight. If the image plishment, confidence that we’d keep proudly covered it years later in a collection of Shay’s were only of him, our reading would change inside. We’d be focusing on the act and our Chicago photographs. The scene is an open significantly. We’d judge the distance to the own participation in it. Now, lastly, consider area between two or three tenements, tradi- mattress, consider metaphors about being the kid who has completed the jump, the one tional Chicago back porches girding this din- suspended between helpless and hopeful. in the foreground. There’s no doubting his gy lot. A couple overflowing garbage drums We’d consider time—the second before and delight. And what delirium does this taste of spill debris beneath barred windows. Piled after—and wonder what motivated the jump neat joy provoke? The boy is running toward in the middle of this empty space are seven and how softly he’d land. Or, what if we saw the camera, toward Art Shay—in his happiness or eight ratty mattress, and a group of ten- only the boy poised on the edge of the porch he wants the photographer (and the viewer, year-olds are taking turns leaping from one banister, the one who peers uncertainly from too) to participate. The picture demonstrates of the back porches onto the mattress pile. under his arms at the photographer, the one the point: play is not self-absorbed; inherent to One boy is in mid-flight, wholly horizontal, so conscious of our judgment and expecta- the act is the urge to include. Being at play is arms outstretched, Converse kicked back. A tion? Through that boy’s consideration of us a state only attained in commune with others. trio watch from the porch, in different stages viewers, we consequently project hesitancy of take-off preparation. In the foreground, a onto him. He’s seems untrusting of his own I’m certain there are those who’d contend boy who has just landed bounds at the cam- ability, afraid to leap, looking for assurance that acts of imagination—drawing, writing, era. He’s out-of-focus and so his triumphant or a way out. We might—despite ourselves— video games, daydreaming—constitute acts laugh appears kinetic, limbs and lips twitch consider a metaphor for the fears of a young, of play, but the real playful spirit is absent with an electric joy. poor black male on the precipice of manhood from these solitary pursuits. Play brings with it in treacherous Chicago. Consider even if we the joy of collaboration—it’s an activity whose
113 MAKE: At Play pleasure is shared—in a surreptitious wink Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requi- language game with others. If the poems’ or contagious giggle, in the mirrored step ris? meter and syntax weren’t so precisely ren- or the improvised melody, in team strategy dered, one could imagine Catullus singing and collective joy. A joke has to be told. Pure Nescio, sed fieri sentio excrucior. these songs with friends or shouting them at abandonment in lonely activity tends either to sometime enemies. concentration or catatonia. As Shakespeare Which translates to: might have said, to play with yourself is the (Woe betide those who truly pissed Catullus expense of spirit in a waste of shame. It’s par- I hate and love. You wonder, perhaps, why off—Carmina 16 holds the distinction of being ticipation in games, songs, dances—or just do I do this? perhaps the most censored poem in history. jumping—that lead to real joy. Spend some v In response to two critics who called his vers- time watching the jumping jack (or “moon I have no idea. I just feel it. I am crucified. es “too soft”—Catullus begins, “I will sodom- jump” or “bounce house”) at your next block ize and face-fuck the both of you ...”) party: it will invariably be packed to capacity Who at the same time delivers playful ribbing or empty. A lone kid in a jumping jack is one of to a friend such as this: Among its many gifts, Catullus’s work brings the most bewildering scenes you’ll ever see. with it the joy of repartee. Even his most vi- To [your] cleanliness add an even cleaner cious and personal poems are often pointed, So what, then, does it mean for the writer to asshole, than any saltcellar more polished, intensely clever, built around tropes and be “at play?” An author can tell her readers a and you shit less than ten times in a year, puns. They’re both so precisely and honestly joke, but there is little chance she will hear a and what comes out is as hard as beans written that we feel in only one hundred six- comeback. Nabokov once explained to Play- or pebbles—if you rubbed it in your hands teen poems that we know not only the people boy how he thought bliss was born the reader- it wouldn’t leave the least mess, even on Catullus flatters and insults, but their friends, writer relationship. He called the play of litera- one finger. relatives, and their society in full. Can you not ture, “the bliss, the felicity of phrase [that is] imagine conducting a conversation like this shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied When reading Catullus, his overwhelming skill about a fraying friendship? writer and the grateful reader.” Nabokov, and is immediately evident: aside from headache- most writers in our contemporary conversa- inducing choriambic hendacasyllabic me- Life is really a bitch for your Catullus tion, never really hand over the dice and ask ter, the poems are riddled with alliteration, Cornificius, and (my god!) so boring, the reader to roll. In this schema, the reader is assonance, and tropes like chiasmus and and it keeps getting worse now, daily, hour- simply grateful to be able to linger behind the anitmetabole. But what becomes apparent ly—yet have you—it would take the slightest, table and watch the author wager. And since when reading all of Catullus’s work at once, simplest effort—offered him any consola- those readers, ninety-nine times out of one is Catullus’s zeal for engaging his compatriots tion? I’m pissed off with you. That much for hundred1, are reading in some other time or directly. Almost all of his one hundred sixteen- my love, then? space, the Nabokovian author has to imag- poems employ the vocative case. These po- ine even their gratitude. For the most part, ems are epistolary and epigrammatic, both It’s through the record of Catullus’s playful the writer simply satisfies himself and hopes calling directly on his friends, enemies, rivals, activity that we come to understand what it he’s satisfied a reader, too. Those poets and lovers, whores, politicians, and fellow poets— was like to live in the center of Roman empire authors in need of real play with other writ- and calling them names, too. as it was nearing its height: expanding into ers can imagine themselves in conversation, England and about to crown its first emperor. creating pastiches and picking arguments His subjects are his everyday interactions Rome was just about to burst; Catullus speaks with poets from the past and the future, trad- with those same contemporaries. Sometimes of gifts he received from Spain, about trips ing barbs on the vicissitudes of the heart. But these people are famous—Caesar spent win- across Italy to visit friends, about witnessing what of actual play—of actually sharing the ters in his parent’s villa, Cicero sent him a his acquaintances argue in court, about the bliss of words with readers both immediate book of verse—sometimes they are only most popular girls in the brothels, about the and definite? known to history as friends of Catullus. What- book stalls in the Forum and the orations in ever their fame, Catullus humanizes all of the Senate. The city is bustling with life, and When the subject of fun arises, the poet that them, often directing his brilliant talents to by simply toying with his fellow citizens in this leaps immediately to mind is Catullus. From mundane communiques: asking time to pay ripe empire, Catullus secures that scene for the time of his writing in the 50s B.C.E.—the off a debt, shooing an old flame to a whore- all of us, for the next twenty centuries, in all same time as Julius Caesar was civilizing the house, demanding the return of his note- its native raucousness. darkest regions of woad-dyed Britian and books from some strumpet. He composes a Cicero was becoming the world’s foremost poem to Thallus, for example, after his asso- orator and lawyer—through the rediscovery ciate stole a coat and some napkins from a of his poems in a single volume under a bar- dinner party. In three lines he calls Thallus a rel in Verona in 1290, up to today; Catullus “queen, softer than a fuzzy bunny, than goose Thanks for remains one of the liveliest and most playful fat, than the bottom of an earlobe, or even reading! poets in our human history. It’s difficult to the languid penis of an old man, covered in think of another poet who so fully and eas- cobwebs.” To emphasize the metaphor, Catul- ily combines Catullus’s taste for elegant al- lus employs words filled with soft, liquid “l”s: Want more? lusion, his talent for metrical precision, and cuniculi, capillo, medullula, imula, oricilla. his absolutely zestful foul-mouthedness. In There’s real joy—the writer’s joy Orwell called makemag.com Catullus, you have a poet nuanced enough to “aesthetic enthusiasm”— in Catullus’s com- write an elegy for a love affair as deeply mov- positions. It’s a joy that really only comes ing and enduring as this: from being engaged in an intense, hilarious
MAKE: At Play 114
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