AROUND THE WORLD, by Brian Warfield
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“Around the World” is after the Daft Punk song of the same name. Brian Warfield lives in Philadelphia and makes small books with Turtleneck Press.
He packed his bag, he packed it. From his drawers he took his clothes. He folded his underwear. He packed his bag. His bag was brown, his bag was packed.
He stood in line. He stood up tall. He stood in line behind a family of three. He looked at the family. They stood in front of him, not in a line but in some other formation. A formation of three, like a triangle.
He packed his bag, he said when they asked him if he packed his bag. The family packed the family’s bag.
He walked in a straight line between two points. He had walked from his house to where he was going. He bought a ticket. He stood in line and bought the ticket. There were windows all around.
His first stop was France. He was going to France. He was going to Paris. He had been to Paris, France. He was going to Paris, France, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, croissants. Paris. He would eat a croissant. He would not visit the Louvre or see any towers. In France, when he was in France. He had his bag in France. Underwear, pants, shirt, cologne, tooth paste, tooth brush, in France, socks, shoes, books, some wire, a bomb, a magazine, a tennis racket, France. Bacon was made out of pig. French, he knew some words. Une chienne avec croissant. He went to France and blew it up by twisting a wire to its undercarriage. He got his shoes dirty. Second pair in bag. Take out shoes and switch them. In the French airport he said “oui” when the airport asked if he had packed his bag. “Oui” was French for “yes.” He’d packed his bag. In France. In French.
He went on another airplane. The plane went up and then down. He sat in his seat with the tray up. He went up and came down. The plane hit the ground. It rode along on the runway in Belgium. It was Belgium. He was in Belgium. The plane was in Belgium. His bag was in Belgium. With its wires and his underwear and dirty shoes and dirty secrets and magazines he’d packed. Belgium invented French fries. Belgium invented Belgian waffles. Belgium invented brussels sprouts. He ate a brussels sprout. It looked like a miniature cabbage. He killed many people, Belgians. He killed them with pipe packed with C4. Belgian Belgium. He had sex with a stranger. Bag, underwear, cologne, money. In the morning he left the stranger and walked to the airport. The airport was made of cotton. He wore the airport like kid gloves. The gloves were made out of children. He put the airport on his hands and packed his bag himself. In the airport, waiting for the airplane, there were televisions. They had the news playing with news of his actions. They didn’t know that it was him or who it was. The news, the television, the Belgians or non-Belgians in the airport waiting to go somewhere else. They looked at him like he was one of them.
He’d eaten an eyeball before. The stranger would wake up, naked, handcuffed, a long incision along the inside of a thigh.
Bag packed. Stowed in the overhead compartment. The Twilight Zone episode with the gremlin on the wing. Tornadoes eating towns. Swedish meatballs. Sweden. A cool, immaculate clearness to the air, he’d expected. A Swedish flag. He got off the airplane, walked across the tarmac. Tether. He tied the prime minister up and cut the thumbs of the prime minister off. The 1st and 3rd and 5th and 7th fingers. The prime minister could not play the piano. Eating the meatball of Sweden and a roast with potatoes marinated in the blood of the lamb and carrots. Trailing the wires, twisting a fuse. The people who said hello to him in Swedish. The muppet. Was it Sweden that was neutral, or Switzerland, he always forgot. He’d have to sow the burned-down Sweden with salt. Black lichen scorched to oblivion. He struck a match. The flicker of a flame. He twisted the arm of a sailor. He made a wish when the bone broke.
He ate a slice of chicken. He ate a slice of chicken and a slice of chicken. He ate a slice of chicken. He ate a slice of chicken. He ate a kernel of corn.
In the morning, he looked at a mirror. He checked out of his Swedish hotel. Switzerland Swedish. He checked his itinerary. Could he make a detour to Switzerland and shave the mustaches off famous paintings? Could he buy sixteen Swiss army knives and plunge them into the soft bellies of sixteen-year-olds? Could he sew the eyelids shut of anyone? He looked at his watch and he didn’t have time.
He stepped through the doors of the airport. The airport doors opened themselves up for him. He flew to Latvia and to Turkey where he ate Turkish delight and slaughtered 5000 nuns and to Yemen and to India. The red dot on the center of the forehead was a laser.
In China he read Mao’s little red book on a train and the train took him to different parts of the country where his shoes were untied and his underwear taken off and slung over the radiator and naked bodies writhed over him like snakes. Half-eaten dumplings gathering insects in a corner.
The bag sat like an open mouth at the foot of the bed. He picked it up and packed the things he needed into it. He walked to the airport. He had been inside 1,000 airports. He took the Xiang Fu airport apart screw by screw. It collapsed upon the black-haired heads of 10,000 Chinese. The airplane lifted him out of the destructed airport and into the pristine sky cluttered only by clouds.
His bag insisted on being carried to Guam, where he slathered a balm of napalm all along the cracks and crevices of the foundations of museums and libraries. In Hawaii, he ate a pineapple and he gutted a pig and a Hawaiian and roasted them over a fire and he thrust his fists into the hot meat and he walked inside of a volcano where he bathed himself in lava. He stood up and he sat down and he moved his legs as he walked a mile and he lifted his bag by its handle over the rotating metal of the turnstiles and he put his bag through metal detectors where no metal was detected.
In Mexico, a mariachi band was strangulated and he stretched the skin of their bodies end to end covering the floor of his hovel. He raped Venezuela in the navel and swam across the ocean to Morocco where they filmed Casablanca and he was cast as an extra. He ordered drinks at the bar and opened his bag and took out his ax and split the skull of Peter Lorre. He walked through Spain and took the spear out of the hide of a slain bull and breathed into its nostrils.
And then, back home, he unpacked his bag in his home, where he lived. Took his shirt and shoes and pants and underwear and the bits and pieces and ears out of the bag for one night or one week or one whatever. He closed his eyes and fell asleep. He dreamt a dream and he dreamt that he was flying in an airplane that never came down. He dreamt that he was flying without his bag toward France.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE BIRDS, by Ryan Mattern
Mattern, of San Bernardino, Calif. (where he lives with his dog, Wrigley, and still calls Chicago home), has been published in Burning Word, Criminal Class Review, The Toucan, This Paper City and Pacific Review. He is an active member in POETRIE, a reading series dedicated to showcasing the literary voices of California’s Inland Empire.
This is where we come, you and I, neighbors and friends as we are known by your husband and everyone else. On top of the hill that hangs over our quiet desert town, we sit like how we are told Indians sit on a giant boulder that has been painted to look like a skull. We come here at night and wait for all the porch lights below to flicker out. It is then, in the safety of night and assurances of townspeople’s dreams, that we tell each other our secrets.
You tell me when you were a little girl you stole a candy bar from a convenient store. You tell me in your shy, secretive voice that you were too scared to eat it and that you hid it in your neighbor’s mailbox.
I close my eyes and imagine you as a child, in a bright yellow raincoat, sprinting from the store with the candy bar in your hand like a baton, your little hummingbird lungs firing fast as you turn down your cul-de-sac.
The thought of you scared makes me brave, so I tell you the things we could do if you had not married the wrong man. You sigh and rest your head on my shoulder. Our lips are inches away and they want to be closer, we know this. But the air is thick between them, polluted with microscopic spirits whispering, If only. We sit here on the edge, not talking, until it is time to leave.
***
Our town has many problems. But mainly our town’s problem is this: Lately, birds have been falling from the sky without reason. Their wings just give out. Their hollow bones lose heft and they fall like feathery meteors. Scientists have made our town a destination. They flock here to collect data on air pollution, to take blood samples from rodents, to find some hidden chemical in our soil with hopes of explaining the mystery to the community.
We are watching them from the hill. A research team in white lab coats, all holding up binoculars to the sky and lowering them as a brownish-red hawk in a tailspin smashes into a parked car with a thudding puff of blood and feathers. Some rush to the scene. The others mark the time and trajectory of the fall in their tiny notepads. You look away as they lift the broken bird by its talons and slip it into a plastic evidence bag.
***
My secret is one I do not tell. When we sit up on the skull boulder and you remind me that it is my turn to tell you something personal by playfully elbowing me in the side, I do not tell you what I do most nights when I am alone. Instead, I tell you that when I was seven I wanted to marry my cousin and that we even kissed once up in the crooked arm of a Joshua tree behind my Aunt’s house. You are not sickened by this, and it makes me think I love you. But I do not tell you this, or even what I wish I could. I do not tell you that after we leave the hill every night, I sit with my back to the wooden fence that separates our houses and listen until I am too tired or too cold to try. I do not tell you that I listen to every sound loud enough to leave your house. I do not tell you that I know exactly how you sound in the arms of another man.
***
The problem with the birds has gotten worse, so our Mayor has begun recruiting citizens for the cleanup effort. At a town hall meeting, held in a cramped portable classroom at the high school, you and I sit and listen in the back row of desks. The Mayor, a feeble man with tan liver spots on his head and large glasses that make him look like a turtle, stands at the front of the room with some of the scientists at his sides. He is drawing names out of a shoebox. While he unfolds each slip of paper, the townspeople quietly hold their breath and exhale with relief when their name is not called.
You look beautiful this afternoon. I write these same words on a scrap of paper and pass it over to you like a student would. You smile as you read it. You look back at me and blink twice and I think this might be a secret message to me saying thank you, that I am handsome, that tonight on the hill you might finally tell me a secret I’ve been waiting to hear. I quickly scribble another note that says this:
Do you like me?
[ ] YES
[ ] NO
[ ] MAYBE
You prop open a faceless child’s clam-shell desk and rifle for a pen. Thinking for a moment, you look up at the particleboard ceiling and tap the pen against your lips. You pass the paper back to me with the MAYBE box checked with red ink. I gently fold up the note and place it in my shirt pocket. In my head I am thinking of places in my house to tack it up.
The Mayor opens the final slip of paper and reads my name aloud. Maybe the classroom is getting to you because you scrunch your face and point at me like a schoolgirl, as if saying, Ha ha you have clean up the bi-irds. Suddenly I feel stupid for feeling proud to be selected for the task force. I try not to think about it. Instead, I focus on your black hair and how you don’t realize a strand of it is stuck to your lips. I think about what it might mean for me to reach over and tuck it behind your ear.
***
The first time we kiss is less than magical. There are no bursts of color or throngs of music, as I’d had fantasized while lying in bed at night. It is dark and secretive like the rest of our nights on the hill. It happens like this:
I ask you if you are ever going to leave your husband. You tell me that your relationship with Tom is not easy to explain. You use his name, Tom, hard and fast like how I imagine he makes love to you and it makes my heart grow cold. You take my hand.
“It’s complicated,” you say, like a math problem or an inoperable tumor.
Upset about the birds or Tom and desperate to show you that love is not complicated, I grab you by the shoulders and kiss you like a man who has something to prove. But you push me away. You look at me with terrified eyes and blink twice and I wonder what the message is this time.
“I can’t,” you tell me. But you do. You fall into me and kiss me so hard I think we might slip off the boulder and go tumbling down the hill. It is not a romantic kiss but a ravenous one. It is meat and we are starving. “I can’t be that woman,” you mumble onto my lips. But we don’t stop, even though I know you are crying. I can feel warm tears dribble down our cheeks and into our mouths. I can taste the salt and bitter of running mascara as we push black streams back and forth between our tongues. I try to pull away but you just yank me in closer. I try to speak, but my words get lost in your whimpering.
***
This morning there are two dead sparrows like balled-up paper napkins in my driveway. While I stand there and stare at them, your husband comes out of your house and stands behind me. I think for sure you have told him about our secrets, about our kiss. He is a short, overweight man, so I think I can outrun him if I need to.
“I don’t think it’ll ever quit,” he tells me. I look over my shoulder at him and then up to the sky. “Shoot, just yesterday a crow fell right into my damned windshield while I was driving. Cracked it up good.” He comes up next to me and looks down at the two birds. “Poor bastards.”
We stand there silently for a few moments, both staring at the mess on my driveway.
“Kinda makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Just that, I don’t know, maybe things were never meant to fly. Like, you can’t cheat gravity, you know?” With that he turns and makes towards your front door.
“Hey Tom,” I call.
“Yeah?”
I think about telling him everything. About how I cheated him. How we cheated him. But I don’t.
“Nothing. Never mind.” He nods and disappears into your house. I go around to the side of my house to get a shovel. With your husband’s words swimming in my head, I scrape up the remains and flip them into the trashcan. I grab the hose and wash away the tiny heart the adjoining pools of blood have formed, feeling terrible as the brown water rushes to the gutter.
***
We look like convicts on the side of the highway in our orange vests and hardhats. There are two jobs: picking and sorting. The pickers are given black garbage bags and trash claws to pick up the birds. When they fill their bags, they bring them to the sorters. The sorters, assisted by a team of scientists, separate the carcasses by species and place them accordingly into plastic bins.
I am a picker. I have spent all afternoon hefting dead birds, crows with stale wings and hawks with broken legs and crooked beaks, from off the asphalt and into bags. There are eight pickers out here on this four-mile stretch of road, but it is nowhere near enough. One of the pickers, a young guy with a head too small for a hardhat and a midsection too bony for a vest says it best:
“It’s like the bird holocaust.”
A local news team is covering the cleanup effort. The guy smiles with pride when the reporter refers to the incident as “The Bird Holocaust,” giving the phrase he coined a place in history.
It has been three days since we kissed and I have yet to hear from you. For the past three nights the skull boulder has been empty and your house has been silent. I am usually too cautious to call you on the phone but there is something about the sour stench of rotting birds that gives a man guts.
On my break, I sit on a red ice chest and dial your number. It is then, as the sound of your phone ringing vibrates in my ear, that a stray pigeon comes careening down from the sky and smashes right into my face. The blow knocks me off the cooler and onto my back. It sends my hardhat rolling off into the desert and my phone spinning, splayed open in the middle of the road. I lay there holding my face with both hands, feeling the hot rush of blood flow through them and down my arms as the crew panics and forms a circle around me. They offer me towels and water, all pulling at my arms to assess the damage. The news reporter breaks through the chain of pickers and sorters and shoves a microphone into my face, hoping to get a statement from the first potential casualty of the “Holocaust.” The crew’s voices and the reporter’s questions all blur into a low hum, almost silent. Through it all I can hear you crying. With my vision blurry and equilibrium nonexistent, I stand and push my way through the crowd. I follow your voice, staggering. Your cries are louder now as I crawl around on the cracked blacktop. By the time I reach the phone, your sobs are desperate and guttural. I stand up and say your name into the phone, but you do not respond. Holding it to my ear, I realize the sound is coming from somewhere else.
On the ground near my feet lies the pigeon who let me have it. Despite a broken neck, it has hopped to the center of the highway. It looks up at me, its head right-side-up but body upside down. It is blinking slowly and cooing like a sad woman. I sit down beside it and wait for it to go completely silent, then carefully carry it back to the scientists.
***
My face is a rotten plum. My left eye is purple and completely closed. My nose has a dent in the bridge and my upper lip is swollen. If headaches were tornadoes, mine would turn the earth into a cloud of dust. Though none of this hurts as much as your car being gone for five straight days. After getting hit by the pigeon and the news story that followed, the Mayor relieves me of duty. So I have had plenty of time to steep in your absence.
But today, after a week passes, you call.
“Hi,” you say.
“Hello,” I say.
“I saw your face in the paper. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Listen, where are you?” I ask.
“At my Mom’s.”
“Oh,” I say. “Are you coming back?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever?”
“No,” you say.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Does Tom know?” I ask. “I mean, that you’re not coming back.”
“Yeah.”
“And what about us?”
“I’m sorry,” you say.
“I don’t understand.” I can hear someone in the background with you, perhaps your Mom. You begin to whisper.
“I said I can’t be that woman. Not to Tom. Not to you either. I’m sorry,” you say again.
***
Tonight I hike up the hill to be alone. Next to the boulder, there is a small bird skeleton that has been picked clean by scavengers. I pick up its tiny skull and roll it between my fingertips.
After a few moments of waiting for the town to get dark, I hear footsteps crunching sand behind me. I know it’s you and my heart begins to flutter. I hop off the rock to greet you only to find Tom, looking broken and empty.
“What are you doing up here?” he asks.
I can’t tell him the truth, so I say, “I come here to think sometimes.”
“Ah. You know I’ve been looking up at this skull for years and not once have I ever come to see it up close.” I sit back down on the boulder and he follows. “Quite a shiner you got,” he says, pointing at my eye.
“Yeah,” I say, showing him the bird skull and then tossing it off the side of the hill.
“Yeah I read about it. You won’t have to worry about that again, though.”
“Why?”
“You didn’t hear?”
I shake my head.
“The birds have quit falling. Scientists said it was some freak thing like the Bermuda Triangle or something.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. Then, he says, “She’s gone, you know. She left me.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
He just nods.
Neither of us say anything for a while. I just stare out at the remaining porch lights and Tom looks down at his folded hands. Sitting here with Tom has made me realize what you mean by being that woman. The type of woman who leaves two grown men sulking and wondering where they went wrong. I understand how much harder this is for you. “I’m sorry,” I say again — not to Tom, but to you.
I wait for the last light in town to burn out before I ask Tom if I can tell him a secret.
Nerves Tuesday, Feb. 7, at Hungry Brain to feature Paul Lask, Amanda Faraone…
Join us for this last of our regular first-Tuesday-of-the-month installments at the Hungry Brain in Chicago. This one brings house band Good Evening and our inveterate redneck crooner of a host, Harold Ray, together with several quite recent THE2NDHAND contributors. Y’all, we couldn’t be no prouder.
So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?
Feb. 7, 8:30 p.m. @ Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, Chicago
Featuring, with tales of misery and intrigue, T2Hers all:
The intersection of rock and lit: Paul Lask
Experimentation personified: Amanda Faraone
And the beast himself: Untoward editor Matt Rowan
Click through the text links on their names for recent work from the three. And don’t miss it… (A-and keep an eye out for a late-March blowout at the Brain to thank the kind staff there for the great year-and-a-half-or-so we’ve resided there.)
SEX BLUE, by Doug Milam
Milam’s poem “Chicago,” featured in our All Hands ON: THE2NDHAND After 10 collection, is likewise now available in a special-edition letterpress/digital print chapbook. You can pick it up here. Milam lives and writes in Bellingham, Wash.
She put her sex blue eyes high on me. Are you lost? her driver called out as they rolled up in their all terrain golf cart, with two spaniels riding in the jumper. He saw that I was carrying a book; perhaps he took it for a guide, took it for a ride. I strolled to, foul weather or fair, certainly strange. The cart puttered to a stop and are you lost? seeing a book in my hands and damn well not now, walking to and greeting in the western way, to.
They stay in the cart parked and I bend down or bow to bend to, going east, young. First thing his oil rigged hair; he could have been a session man for Jerry Lee and her hair hung up in my eyes, she turned her sex blue eyes a cool bit to the back my way and I smiled and shook, shook hands.
I’m a friend of the property, I explain. Tucked on my belt out of just sight or sign is my silver saddled in .357 should things get natural that way. He gave me his full name, alpha and omega, and I heard hers a sweet word, not quite double my years, her head back against the rest and the shade there shadowed the blue down, down from the sky and she thought of summers ago never shared with her driver now.
He and I talked of forest fires and resources and gates open or closed, tire marks and cabins burning in the winter distance. Wishing well we took care to sun-pleased smiles and her sex blue eyes had set on me beyond the ridge where I would not be staying long, except.
Nerves of Steel Feb. 1 at the Empty Bottle
Harold Ray may get his record contract yet. A new month brings a new venue for THE2NDHAND’s So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel? performance series — Chicago’s Empty Bottle is the destination, and here are the details:
*Nerves alumnus Bob Rok brings the ruckus
Also featuring:
*Past T2Her Ling Ma
*Daniel Shapiro + friends
*The irreplaceable Chris Bower
Hosted by the one and only Harold Ray w/ deliciously beautiful house band Good Evening
Here’s a little taste of what’s in store, with vid of Ray’s monologue and Good Evening’s opening number, shot at our October edition at the Hungry Brain. Enjoy.
THE2NDHAND no. 37.1 — Mickey Hess’ ‘Nostalgia Echo’ excerpted
A new half-issue comes with a new format, with page sizes optimized to easy reading on tablets and the various eReaders that are out there — access the 11-page issue (pdf) by clicking through the image of page 1 or 2 below, or scan the QR on page 2 to pull it up.
In any case, great to have an excerpt from one of the 2011′s best books, hands down. I had the opportunity to read what amounts to an homage to Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions after its author, Mickey Hess, and I toured briefly in November. The Nostalgia Echo is the story of Princeton prof and lesser-known “nostalgia theorist” Everett Barnes’ late-life brush with whatever fleeting version of stardom is possible for his ilk in our time, complete with his image stenciled on freeway overpasses — a History Channel TV show having sparked it all, of course. Perhaps more importantly, the book is also the last, most appropriate chance for its narrator to tell his own story. A brush with Barnes in his youth, documented in an old photograph that is his only personal vestige of his birth mother’s existence, provides the impetus for the working narrator’s growing present-tense obsession with the nostalgia theorist, likewise the graffiti artist who is the origin point for the Barnes stencils.
In short, in classic Hess fashion, it’s a wild, hilarious ride of a book. No. 37.1 consists of Chapter 3, with included shorts by T2H coeditor Jacob Knabb (“Pig Sweatin’”) and a poem by Nashville writer Brad King (“Long Lost Pals,” see how they roll).
Find more from Hess in his section of our All Hands On 10th-anniversary anthology, available now for order via this page (print, $15) or via this link in pdf at Scribd ($6).
Order Hess’ novel from C&R Press here.
WAKING, by Paul Lask
Lask lives and writes in Chicago.
We’d kept the windows open to fall asleep to the waves splashing the rocks. Late in the night, Jean got up to go lay next to her daughter. I’d tossed for a while, feeling for grooves in the hotel bed and papery pillowcase, and after 20 minutes or so I was about back asleep when this fishing boat started.
It sounded like a big pickup truck, with guys laughing and cracking cans like tailgaters outside a stadium. It wasn’t even 4:30. I moved the stiff blankets over and got up and went outside.
They were down on the concrete pier. Their boat had two lights mounted to a crossbar in the middle, rocking on the dark water. A man wearing a pullover sweatshirt, ballcap on, walked a cooler down the pier, and I understood that this was a guided fishing tour, an outfit. This was why the laminated sign in our room said not to clean fish in the sink. Jean’s father, I thought for the second time that night, would have called us suckers.
I stood there barefoot pretending the floor of dry pine needles felt good. I watched one of the outfitters untie the rope at the front, another the back. I remembered fishing a much smaller lake with Jean’s father, his aluminum boat’s concrete-filled coffee can anchor, him tying a leader onto my line because I was too impatient to learn the knot. Him calling my fingers ladylike. I told him they were guitarist’s fingers, and he handed me a set of pliers and told me to crimp the barbs on the end of my hook. That I’d get squirmy if I had to rip an uncrimped hook out of a fish’s belly.
Watching the boat take off, the lights getting smaller as they disappeared into the oceanic lake, I thought about the old man in his last days, thanking me. I’d asked for what.
For filling in for the boy that knocked his daughter up and ran off, he said.
I told him I loved his daughter and granddaughter, and he nodded and went back to watching the market reports on the hospital room’s hanging TV.
Now that the outfit was gone I thought about waking Jean and Carissa to show them the moon. It was low and round, with a sliver of dark orange in it. Around it were the last of the night’s constellations, unseen back home.
When I came in Carissa was alone next to Jean’s bed indentation. A rush of water from the room above ours travelled through the pipe attached to the ceiling. The pipe was painted white like the cinderblock walls, the low-ceilinged room itself connected to an Ace Hardware store. But from the kitchen table you could see the lake. So they’d called it a “waterfront suite,” and it wasn’t long after I whispered in bed last night that her father would have called us suckers that Jean went into the other room.
I was unsurprised, though a little frustrated, not to see her in our bed either. Since her father passed in June she’s taken to going to her mother’s apartment at night. To check on her, she says, her mom having gotten the three flat in the divorce years earlier. It’s a well lit and busy enough street we live on, but when she leaves I don’t sleep. Carissa has more than once gotten up to say she heard the door shut. And last weekend I canceled playing an out of town show, telling Jean I didn’t really want to play it. She said I was being overprotective.
I grabbed the room key off the table. After locking the door I went down to the little iron table where the three of us had dinner in the grass by the shore. I hopped up the low rock wall and stood looking up the sand, thinking we’d come here for Carissa’s fourth birthday. Would she remember having to look for her mom? We’d first gone to the small lake her grandpa and I fished on two summers ago. A huge new fake log cabin was there, and the water was cluttered with slick boats pulling tubes and skiers. So we shot over to this peninsula, and after not finding a campsite we got the hotel. I figured, walking back to the room to wake her up, that if she remembered anything it would be the more general blur of trees and water that was upper Wisconsin.
When I came in she’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, feet hanging off. “Is mama out again?” she said.
“She just went for a walk,” I said. “Probably to find us some donuts. Why don’t you grab your blanket and we’ll go find her.”
As we walked out the sun was showing just above an arm of pines across the bay. A breeze off the lake rustled Carissa’s light hair. We got in the car.
“Seatbelt,” I’d said, putting on mine.
“Mama slept in my bed last night,” she said.
“She did.”
“Was she mad at you?”
“She just wanted to be next to you. Are you having a fun birthday?”
The hardware store’s parking lot fed into the boat landing. The car weighed on its rear wheels as we backed to the steep incline, and I stepped on the brake hard before shifting into drive.
“It’s pretty good,” she said. “But I wish grandpa could be here for it.”
“You still have the Snoopy pole he gave you, right?”
“You’d said his fishing spot was changed yesterday,” she said.
I thought about those slick boats again. One of them was carrying a kid on a wakeboard doing acrobatics, a girl with a handheld camera filming from the back. They had people on shore waiting their turn.
“We might find somewhere today,” I said.
We pulled onto the main street, quiet with floating mist the sun had yet to burn off. We turned south. We drove past the restaurant whose fish boil we skipped because of the price. The big pot, the cauldron, was still sitting on the wood pallet in the side lot. The concrete around it was a different shade of grey, changed from a summer of contact with boiled-over water. We passed a house converted into an antique store, an ancient tractor on its well-clipped lawn, its seat holding a hand-painted sign that said ANTIQUES. We passed the bar where we’d gotten our takeout dinner. We were soon at the end of town, the speed limit sign changing to 45 and the trees starting to tunnel.
“We’ll have to turn around,” I said. “And keep a better eye out for donut shops this time.”
“There she is,” Carissa said, pointing. She was pointing at a clearing in the trees, turning her head to look as we passed it. I eased the car onto the shoulder. Its gravel was still dewy, the tires making slurp sounds as we reversed.
“Yeah, there she is,” I said. The clearing was a small orchard, maybe ten rows, running up a hill. The spindly branches looked to be holding peaches. Jean was walking in the dark dirt, her shoes in one hand, wearing the leather coat that no longer fit her mother.
“How did you see her?” I asked.
“I was looking,” Carissa said, opening the door. A gust of air blew in and she left the door open to walk into the shallow road ditch before starting up the hill.
“Right,” I said to myself.
I got out too. I set my elbows on top of the car and watched. Jean had turned around when I shut my door. She waved, and I nodded. She and her daughter had the same light hair and dark brows, and as the little version scrambled up the other side of the ditch I for some reason thought about where I’d have been at this hour last week had we played the show. Probably awake on a futon in another strange apartment.
“What do you say?” Jean shouted down the hill. “Should we find some birthday donuts?”
I shook my head no. Carissa had by now taken off up the hill and her mom dropped her shoes and crouched a little to receive her.
“That sounds about right,” I shouted.
She caught her and raised her up and let her wrap her arms around her neck. She grabbed her shoes and started toward the car. I got back in. I watched her pale muddy feet and rolled jeans coming down the row, the sound of their voices getting less drifty as they got closer. I leaned over and pushed open the passenger door, inhaling the wet gravel smell, not even hungry.
THURS. LIVE IN NASHVILLE AT DINO’s; plus: A book that belonged on everybody’s best-of list | Wing & Fly
Join me at the smallest, oldest, dirtiest and yet definitely most kick-ass bar in East Nashville this Thursday for the 3rd edition of the Poetry Sucks reading series. Organized by fellow East Nashvillian Chet Weise, this edition of the series will feature a host of characters from the neighborhood. I’ll be reading some new stuff (if only I can get through that sermon in the finale) and, more importantly, also featured will be all the fine folks noted on the flyer pictured here. Click through it for more from the artist, Rachel Briggs. Of particular note for connections to T2H is past Pitchfork Battalion teamer John Minichillo, whose novel The Snow Whale from Atticus we saw on some of those indies’ best-of lists for the year just past.
I just finished a novel by a more longtime and frequent T2Her, Floridian (former Flint, Michigander) Paul A. Toth, that I’ve been just floored by, given by the general lack of ink it’s gotten, far as I can tell (though I do see where USA Today of all places named it one of the best indies of 2011). The book, Airplane Novel
It’s not an exactly simple task Toth has pulled off, given that the book is told from the point of view of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, a building — and one that, it is acknowledged quite early on by the narrator itself (or “himself,” given that the South Tower prefers to call itself “Cary Grant,” and the North Tower “Gary Cooper”), no longer exists in any physical sense, but of course. But even in death, the tower filters the consciousnesses that made its history, those of the humans — “spider monkeys,” from its perspective — having populated its floors, having operated the Radio Row shops uprooted by the its construction, having created the information that soars through its fiberoptics and still flits in jagged form through its own post-mortem version of consciousness (which Toth expertly re-creates in the end of the book, after the “big event,” the “you know what”…).
I won’t go farther into specifics here, but I’ll say that I think I can definitely recommend it as one of the three or four best books of 2011 (with particular segments of DFW’s The Pale King
Toth also had a fair amount of work in a special section of All Hands On, our 10th anniversary book out in the fall. You can order it here.
THEY WERE GODS — redux, by Kate Duva
Kate Duva (pictured, with chinchilla) performed this piece, with considerable laughter as part, alongside Jonathan Messinger, Jill Summers and THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills‘ own “They Were Gods” riffs, published as a unit here. The performance was on the occasion of release of All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10, where you can find more of Duva’s work.
They were gods. King Tut. Genghis Khan. Crazy Horse. Erik the Red. Bootsy Collins, Elvis Presley, the Backstreet Boys. And I slept with them all.
It all opened up for me shortly after my 969th birthday. I was still active in my local singles’ adventure club, where a swing dance or a mystery dinner theater or haunted hay ride inevitably ended in a love marathon — but — I just burned out on the physical demands of it all, not to mention the danger of modern day cooties.
And then the perfect solution to the hassles of dating hit me — virtual sex. No technology involved — I’m talking séances. Ethical séances! — lest you think I raped Genghis Khan. I’m not a succubus. If anything, Mr. Khan had his way with me, but I can’t say I didn’t have fun. I always ask for permission, and I always get it.
Seances aren’t limited to the dead, I call in the spirit of my neighbor, the guy with a wife and newborn triplets and a dog that squirts its way around the block four times a day, and believe me, he’s always ready for a little action.
On September 3, 1988, Little Richard made an announcement that he had seen the light of the Lord and could proclaim himself a proud ex-gay — and you’d best believe I was in his bedroom the night of September 2.
My man-journeys do go beyond the strictly erotic. I don’t do it just to get my rocks off anymore. I had big plans when I seduced Donald Rumsfeld, for example, or when I appeared in Karl Rove’s secret chamber — those were genuine missions to dig up the dirt we need exposed to set America back on track, but I have to admit I found myself getting a little sidetracked by the humanity I found lurking under the surface both in Karlitos and Donny Boy.
I’m a bleedin’ heart. I’ll give a demon my breast. In fact, when I lived in Kathmandu I had a volunteer job doing just that. That is one culture in which they’ve recognized that it’s more cost-effective to suckle demons than to lock them up.
I did — get — a temporary case of gonorrhea when I slept with (God, I have selective amnesia when it comes to certain tortured souls) the vice president who shot someone and had the lesbian romance novelist wife — Cheney! Dick Cheney gave me the clap, a full-blown case of it, then POOF! It disappeared. No antibiotics. Just prayer, and a little shamanic healing from my meerkat guides. Clearly that was a psychic illness that manifested, ever so briefly, on a physical level.
It taught me that I can use that physical level wisely for erotic multi-tasking. I call in the spirits of men to help me open jars, or show me how to use tools — take a peek at my engine, check my oil — and one thing leads to another. Just think about who you could call in to check your oil. Ramses. Sun Ra. Alexander the Great. Homer. Rumi. Poseidon. Jesus. Vlad the Impaler.
So — moving along! What I’d like to do this evening is share some of my techniques in seductive séance with all of you so that you too can benefit from this sustainable technology of safe and pleasurable lovem– did you hear that? Whoa, did you feel that? Hahaha. Yeah, I actually need to get going now. It’s Genghis paging me. Ladies and gentlemen — I think I have a booty call.
A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT AT SO YOU THINK YOU HAVE NERVES OF STEEL? BY KATE DUVA
LONG LOST PALS, by Brad King
King lives and writes in Nashville.
long lost pals:
here’s how they roll.
they will call you up right
out of the blue, on a Tuesday
morning at 5 a.m., and
before you can breathe,
they’ll have
oodles of exciting
developments to report.
all they required was a little
time and distance away
from you, and their lives
transformed from uneventful,
at best, into
underwear parties with
fine young girls and in-ground
pools and 10-lb. bass in
sprawling new reservoirs of
crystalline supremacy on
acres of land.
although you’re terribly skeptical, a
trip will be arranged as to
witness for yourself the
newfound paradise of
long lost pals, these
grandiose lives assembled
like swing sets or timeless
sculptures while
no one is looking, and
here’s the reality:
one overweight girlfriend, one
rug rat from wedlock;
an above-ground pool inflated with
air –
it’s rubber and intriguing since
you never really knew
such pools existed; one
doublewide trailer, and a catfish
mudhole drying in the
yard with frogs and turtles and
billions of neurotic and soon-to-be
homeless water skimmers.