THE POET: CHAPTER 1 & CHAPTER 2

 THE POET

BY JOHN GROCHALSKI

ONE

 

We were entering dark times and I was drunk. But not drunk enough.

It was suggested by my publisher and editor, one Fidel Pinochet, that I do this poetry reading to promote a book of mine that he had yet to publish. The reading was down in the basement room of the Cornelia Street Café. West Village. Bob Dylan/folk territory. But you wouldn’t know it by all the wealth and tourism slumming around there the last few decades. Other than a few burnt-out looking baby boomers hanging around the café, the place was pretty well filled with lithe people in fashion glasses, obsessed with their cell phones, organic, vegan cuisine and crafted beer. I wasn’t even sure if they knew a poetry reading was taking place. Still if you were looking to drink heavily on the cheap you were in the wrong fucking part of Manhattan. One always needed to be drunk at a poetry reading. That was one of the first things that I learned when I got involved with this madness.

Alcohol tended to be my first lesson in most human interactions.

The reading space was tight. The basement was a narrow room with tables packed down both sides. In back there was a small stage for some starving artist or forgettable bigshot to hang themselves. I’d already fucked up my small set. It didn’t help that the M.C. had announced me as Raintree Wainwright. How he got that from Rand Wyndham is a mystery that will plague me until the day that I die. Now there was some old Boomer on stage playing a guitar that had all kinds of anti-government slogans on it. Drop acid not bombs; that kind of shit. In between songs he was ranting about the coming election, and the orange-faced billionaire/reality TV star who was making the nation great again by running for president on an all-American platform of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, prideful ignorance and abject hate.

“Um, like how long is this old dude going to be up there?” This red-head poetess sitting next to me said. I’d spent part of my set imagining red riding pogo-stick on my rod. But then she read after me and dropped each page on the stage after she read them. I barely paid her a dirty thought after such a display. If there was one thing good old Rand Wyndham didn’t like, regardless of whether or not some poetess had an ass that he could ride home, it was pretense. She also read over her allotted time.

            “I think we have to hang around and wait for the ritual killing, the kumbaya moment to come crashing down upon us, or the great séance to conjure up the ghost of Dave Van Ronk,” I said. I sucked down a bit more of a glass of wine from another bottle of house red I’d talked Killian into buying. I was at a poetry reading on a Friday night. Whom and what had I become?

            “Too bad you weren’t this amusing onstage,” Red said.

            “The few ex-girlfriends I’ve had have suggested I leave people wanting more.”

            “Would you like some unsolicited advice?”

            “That’s my least favorite kind of advice.”

“Don’t be so drunk when you read.”

I had a touch more wine for good measure. “We just met and already you’re trying to change me.”

“You had like one poem I sort of almost liked,” Red said. “Most of the others I could barely understand except that they were about drinking and sex…which I found to be total white male, cis gender, ego-tripping, Hemingway-Bukowski broet bullshit.”

            “I don’t understand half of the words you’re using,” I said.

            “Of course you don’t.”

“You’re set was the bee’s knees by the way. Keep tossing paper like that and you’ll be ready for the javelin tournament in the special Olympics.”

            “Whatever, ableist,” she said. Then she buried her head back in her phone.

            I looked over at the crevice where they put the poetry merch table. Gigi was there talking to this pale emo-looking poetess, Larissa Haven-St. Claire. Boy, I’d been working on a jones for Ms. Haven-St. Claire for some short time. But she always looked at me as if I smelled bad, plus she’d always been with this gangly looking dipshit in a ponytail and pre-stressed leather jacket who always liked to talk about how much poets “bleed” for their art. On that particular night Larissa was clad in a Sonic Youth t-shirt that she wore like a dress and combat boots. I knew little about her save that she wrote poetry and liked to post pictures of herself on Facebook doing yoga in her underwear. On bad writing mornings she was a Godsend to sit and stare at.

I killed the rest of my wine and got up just as Ms. Haven-St. Claire walked away. Skunked again. “Any chance you’re coming back to Brooklyn with me?” I asked Big Red.

            “Not a snowballs chance in hell I’m going anywhere with you, you rando,” she said, without looking up. “And your fly is open.”

            “It’s Rand,” I said. I zipped up. “In that case I’ll see you in hell…or the next poetry reading.”

            “Stay woke, bro.”

            I got away as quickly as I could in the stifled space. I felt a touch queasy. There was a film of sweat on my face and my long hair felt matted. Only another drink would cure the sickness. I made it over to the big merch table with the poet books. Mine should’ve been there. The Asshole at the End of the Bar: my ode to wasting years of my life drinking at the long-gone Rooney’s Pub. But as Fidel liked to say the book would be ready manana, man, manana. Manana had lasted a year longer than Fidel had initially told me. I grabbed the first glass of something cold that I could get. It was a fine New Zealand Blanc. Doing time working in a wine store had finally paid off.

“Hey,” Gigi said. “Jackson bought that for me.”

            I took almost all of it down. “One person’s loss is another’s poetry prompt.”

“I don’t write poetry anymore.” She sniffed the air around me. Her big, black framed glasses drooped. “How drunk are you? I told Killian not to buy you another bottle of wine.”

            “It’s not polite to tell people how to spend their money,” I said. “Where is he anyway?”

            “Hiding from you outside,” she said. Always impeccably clad in some kind of science-fiction movie or cartoon t-shirt, Gigi was the perfect model for the perfect culture that took comic books and superhero movies as seriously as a hunger crisis, but gave a passing glance to genocide, inverted totalitarianism, the budding embers of Fascism and climate change. Although my generation, Generation X, had started it, ultimate commodification as self-expression had become the cross-generational American cure for everything. That and a stunning credo of hear no evil, speak no evil, and see no evil…unless it was on You Tube.

 “Do not bother him for more wine.”

            “He’s an independent business man, and I’m a lowly public servant,” I said. “It’s a simple give and take; an exchange on his tax dollars if you will.”

            “Trust me, you make more in a year than he does.” Gigi started tapping away on her phone. She had these jet-black tresses which she illuminated with Superman-style blue streaks on the fringes. “You just dress like a bum on purpose.”

            “But whose soul has become more rotted?”

            “Like being a librarian is so hard.”

            I had more of Gigi’s wine. “You don’t know the troubles I’ve seen.” She looked up from her cellular master and sighed. “Yesterday some homeless dude took a shower in my men’s room and broke the toilet. And today a six-year-old told me to go and fuck myself because I wouldn’t let him in the video gaming program.”

            “Lucky him,” she said.

            “You seem angry this evening,” I said. “Seeing a Millennial angry is like watching a unicorn die.”           

“Yeah, well, you try getting stuck selling books on a Friday night,” she said. “And some asshole stole my wine.”

“Don’t you hawk books for a living?”

“Killian cut my hours again.”

“There’s always the streets.”

“Rand.”

            “I was talking about becoming a chess master in Union Square. It’s you that has the dirty mind, Ms. Escritoire.”

            Gigi blushed. “I don’t…was there something you wanted?”

            “Yeah,” I said. I looked around for Larissa. “But I think she’s outside having a smoke.”

            “Like you have a chance.”

            “I don’t need dating advice from someone who reads and writes Young Adult literature and considers Kimchi taco trucks the height of couture cuisine,” I said.

            “Slagging YA just makes you out of touch.”

“The teenagers in those books are nothing like they are in real life. Take it from me, Joe Q. Public Librarian. The kids are not all right. They’re not savvy and open and honest and altruistic. They’re the same hateful, violent little masturbatory cockroaches they’ve always been. And they take pictures of you picking your ass when you aren’t looking.”

            “Because Bukowski is so real,” Gigi said, into the belly of her phone.

            “I’m no zealot but at least he’s not involved in a paranormal romance, or goes to school where everyone, including dipshit jocks, is LGBT tolerant.”

“It’s LGBTQIA now.” Gigi looked up from her phone. “You’re a real relic, Rand.”

“I’m as open and tolerant as they come.”

“Watching transgender porn does not make you open and tolerant.”

“I…”

“And speaking of writing…most of your poems just reminded me of the people my dead, racist uncle hung around with at his stupid, roach-infested bar.”

            “Then I’m doing something right for a change.” I looked around impatiently. I’d taken enough of a personal drubbing for one wasted Friday night. “Is this Larissa Haven-St. Claire coming back or what?”

            “Unlikely if you’re still here,” Gigi said. “Like I said don’t even try hooking up with her. Contrary to what you think, listening to you pontificate archaic, pseudo-misogynistic nonsense until you stumble off to vomit isn’t any woman’s dream.”

Pontificate nonsense?  Vomit? What had these people been saying about me? “I haven’t vomited in public in at least six months.”

            “Congrats.” Gigi went back to straightening all of the poetry books. I tried not getting caught up in the game, but my book should’ve been there. Fucking Fidel. Fucking Manana.

            “So, I don’t have a chance with goth girl?”

            “Larissa’s not Goth…she’s emo punk,” Gigi said. She turned from her phone to stare me down. “Look, not to be rude, but I lived through my dad’s mid-life crisis. I don’t deserve to be a party to yours.”

“Screw it I’m leaving then.”

            “You owe me a glass of wine,” she said.

            “I’ll text you an I.O.U.”

            “You don’t even have a phone!”

I started making my way out. Gigi and her mouth. I didn’t need her abuse. I had people waiting in line to abuse yours truly. From angry library patrons all the way to my idiot colleagues, after work commuters and the poetry audience, I was emotionally damaged. And how did she know about the trans porn? A man like me wasn’t inclined to openly announce his proclivities. It must’ve been the vodka talking. All the same I’d worn out my welcome in these parts. Both the poetry scene and maybe even good old Gotham. My motto was never stick around too long. Maybe it was time to get going again, book or no book. But go where in this crumbling, shithole empire?

“Rand Wyndham?” a voice said.

            “Yo no se,” I said, on impulse.

I looked down at a table. And there she was. She was a little bit thinner. The mascara artful and the lipstick barely a register on her lips. The hair was no longer that punky, black spiked mess. Carolina had grown it out into an unruly wave of dirt brown that she had half-hidden under a saggy, gray snowcap. The clothing was kind of hipster posh: mini-leather coat, salmon colored jeans and a t-shirt with the have a nice day face sticking out its tongue. Carolina had those Gigi nerd glasses too. Seeing her, looking at her looking back up at me, her face caught between a smile and possible disgust. It set me reeling. I mean there she was. There she fucking was.

 

 

TWO

 

“Rand Wyndham,” Carolina said, with a touch more solemnity the second time. “Or is it Raintree Wainright now?”

            “Remind me to have that M.C. ritually slaughtered.”

            “Rand Wyndham.”

            “You know what happens once you say it a third time?”

            “I get halitosis and anal warts?”

            “It was hemorrhoids.”

            “My next guess.”

Carolina was the bookend to a large table of men in beards and women in little sweaters and scarves. Most of what they were saying was pseudo-intellectual gibberish; New York City by way of Northern Brooklyn by way of I-was-born-the-fuck-somewhere-else-but-I’ll-act-like-I’m-native slang. That’s when they all weren’t playing on their phones. They were probably all from Gary, Indiana. A couple of those bohos were whining about politics, America was turning into Nazi Germany kind of stuff, because of the orange-faced billionaire. I sat across from Carolina. I poured myself a glass of her wine. I stared at her until she turned away.

“You done giving me the once over?” she said.

            “Have you gone vegan?” I asked. “You have the countenance of someone who’s given up on animal proteins for political and/or ecological reasons, or because it seemed trendy at the time.”

            Carolina turned and glared at me. I held her gaze until she rolled her eyes and looked away again. Christ I always loved it when she rolled her eyes. “Of all the places. A poetry reading, Rand?”

            “I had to take a shit. And the Crate and Barrel was too far of a walk.”

            “You had to pay ten bucks to come down here,” Carolina said.

            “The bathroom should’ve been much cleaner then,” I said. “The wine a better vintage.”

            “You already know I saw you read your poems, Rand. Cunnilingus is a Two Way Street?”

            “It was my grandma’s favorite phrase. I would’ve thought you’d have been more intrigued by Ode to that Little Minx in the Dive Bar who Stole My Soul.”

            “To be honest I couldn’t understand half of the things you were saying,” she said. “It takes real talent to slaughter the English language into a quickly read, unrecognizable jumble of words. You should’ve asked the fine people at Cornelia Street to remove that redhead while you read.”

            “She’s dead weight,” I said. “She hates handicapped people and couldn’t even get my name right.”

            “You’re a writer now?”

            “I’m just dabbling until the Kimchi taco truck takes off.”

            “You told the audience you had a book coming out.”

            “I’m a work horse so that’s dabbling to me,” I said. “I have a whole Henry Darger thing going on in the apartment. Now I’m just waiting to die so that someone can come clean my shithole and declare me a genius.”

            “Piss rings in an unclean toilet don’t really pass for art, Rand,” Carolina said.

            “You know me so well.”

            “I’m just a victim of your cleaning habits.” She had some wine. “When did you become a writer?”

            “Since I stopped drinking and found God,” I said.

            “I just watched you clear a bottle of wine while you hit on Big Red over there.” Carolina pointed over at Gigi. “And I watched you steal that nervous girl’s white wine.”

            “I was saving her the heartbreak of being in debt to Jackson Urban,” I said. “He’s very fickle about who he drops his cheddar on.”

            “You drank it in two gulps.”

            “It’s called social drinking, my dear.” I had a good pull on my wine and topped myself off out of her bottle. It seemed right. The table was littered with bottles. If there was one thing, and probably one thing only, that I liked about the art crowd, it was the fact that they could drink. Or at least they bought a lot of alcohol. “Besides look at you you’re still hitting the hooch.”

            “This is cotes du Rhone and it’s the only glass that I’ve had.”

“Then your temperance insults me.”

            “You insult people you don’t know,” Carolina said. “And besides there’s a world of judgement sitting on you, Rand Wyndham.” She stopped talking. I didn’t have anything else to say that wouldn’t dredge up the past after a comment like that. We drank. I checked her out. Carolina shook her head at me. Her eyes registered a comfortable level of disgust. It was like old times. “How long have you been back?”

            “Minutes,” I said. “A few months…. maybe two years.”

“Two years? Where?”

“I’m back in Bay Ridge.”

“The bastion of liberal thought,” she said.

“Yeah, they’ve got a lot of American flags hanging around down there so…”

The artsy schmucks at the table started paying attention to what I was imbibing. Artists were notoriously stingy capitalists. One chick glared at Carolina’s bottle while pouring some white from her own. Some pseudo-rugged, bearded adjunct professor-type, with a large stick up his ass, was paying particular attention to the two of us. He’d previously been the center of attention. He was the one all of the others had been spitting writer’s names at to see if he’d bite. Peter Handke. Michel Houellebecq. Old Beard Boy looked at my wine too. I took a big pull on the glass. Fuck them all. People like this crowd helped raise the rents on people like me, and left me with nothing but burger bistros and authentic tacos filled with onion and cilantro.

Carolina smirked. “I should break this wine bottle over a table and slice your throat.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m pulling six days at the job this week and the student loan check is due.”

“While you floundered on the stage, I couldn’t help but recall the note you wrote me a few years back,” Carolina said. “Sorry, babe, had to shuffalo off to Buffalo.”

“And I always found it passé to quote Shakespeare.”

             “I still have some of your clothes.” Beard boy started getting up from his seat. I braced myself for a brow-beating full of words that I wouldn’t understand. “I use your t-shirts as dish rags.”

            “Even my New Edition reunion T?”

            “Especially that one.”

            “Your anger knows no bounds.”

            “Well, I am that little minx in the dive bar who stole your soul,” Carolina said.

            “Some people can’t recognize a love poem when they hear one,” I said.

            “Not with the way you fucked it up.”

            “Godfrey,” beard boy said. He shoved a hand in my face.

“Good for you,” I said.

            He pulled his hand away. “I’m heading to the rest room,” he said to Carolina. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay down here.”

            “She’s being passive aggressive,” I said. “She’s hangry and desperate for a cheeseburger. You fucking vegan foodies with your mini-this and mini-that.”

Carolina fake smiled. “This won’t be long.”

            Beard boy left. The ex-hippie had finished his set with a rousing pre-Newport Dylan jam and was hobbling off the stage railing against the orange-face billionaire. Soon the poets would return. I watched to see if Big Red would go and collect her poems. She didn’t.

            “Your boyfriend seems lovely,” I said. “Where’d he buy the beard?”

“At the best-selling author store.”

“I hate the ambitious. As my grandmother’s bookie used to say: never confuse ambition with intelligence.”

            “It’s much easier to shuffalo away from ambition,” Carolina said. She killed her glass. I killed her bottle. Someone came by and asked if we wanted another one. I figured I wouldn’t be around to pay for it, so I said yes.

            “I was doing us both a favor and you know it.”

“Your poems are mean.”

            “I like to think they’re honest.”

            “Right,” she said. “I’ll remember that the next time I shave my punk pussy for the legions of the damned that will come after you.”

            “How do you even know that’s about you,” I said. “I’ve been in tons of dive bars and I’ve met tons of women in dive bars.”

            “If you’re still you I’m willing to bet you go home alone most of the time,” she said. “Plus, I think you actually said that to me one night.”

            “I don’t want to argue,” I said. “I’m too drunk to argue, kid.”

The wine came. Beard boy came back to the table, and gave a queer look at the bottle. I poured for only Carolina and I. I winked at this bearded alpha. He was probably footing the bill. I blew that angry woman who continued to glare a kiss, just in case she was paying too. Carolina took her glass and downed about half.  There was the girl I knew. Someone get his woman a glass of rye, I wanted to shout. Neat.

“You’re so good at spending other people’s money,” Carolina said.

“A common theme this evening,” I said. “I’ll pay for the bottle.”

“You know I still write.”

            “Adjunct at Hunter.” I had some more wine. “Faculty editor of their grad literary magazine. Short stories published. Travel writing on Vienna with pretentious titles such as So much Beethoven so Little Time.”

“I don’t need my resume rattled off to me,” Carolina said. She finally looked hurt. “And tonight, wasn’t such a chance meeting. See, I came here for a reason, Rand. I wrote a novel. It’s done…it’s almost done. It’s basically done. I just have to edit it.”

“Everyone in this shithole tonight has a piece of a novel somewhere,” I said. “All of these assholes sitting here with you probably have novels. Or memoirs. Gigi, over there, she writes a novel a month. It’s all gooey YA shit, but it’s still words on the page.”

Carolina killed her wine. “My book is about Rooney’s.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Remember how I was talking about doing it when we met?”

“I vaguely remember something about you gleefully ruminating over the idea of exploiting the patrons of that establishment for so-called art.”

“Yeah…well…I did it,” she said, quickly. “You’re the main character. A better version of you.  Or a horribly over-idealized version of you. I can’t tell yet.”

“You paid ten dollars to come down and tell me this?”

“It’s called The Drunkard.” Carolina sat back, a little embarrassed. Then a cool confidence rode over her. “It’s definitely The Drunkard.” She poured us both more wine.

“Any chance we go back to your place and read it naked in the lotus position?”

“Um…no.” Carolina sighed and looked away. She had no clue what a dent she’d just put into my budding literary career. A whole novel about Rooney’s? Where’d she get the material? Oh, right. My fucking life. My fucking life had barely garnered me a book of poems, or any tangible happiness. Now the book was hanging in limbo. I’d given up on the happiness long ago.

I got up. “Then I should probably shuffalo on home.”

            “Look, I need to talk about this Rand,” she said. “For legal reasons. That’s what Godfrey said anyway…. because we had a relationship.” Carolina put the word in quotes. “And now that I know you have a poem book coming out about the same thing…. I thought we could talk tonight, but I should’ve known better after two years.”

            “We’ll Skype,” I said, putting the word in quotes. I got up. I needed to get the fuck away.

            “I’ll just email you documents if you have the sa…”

            But I didn’t care. I stopped listening. I tossed down a twenty for the wine and stormed off. When I got far enough away, I looked back and Carolina was up and leaning over beard-boy.  Their intimacy killed me. She talked softly to him but he kept gesturing to the bottle of wine I’d ordered. Sometimes you couldn’t please anyone to save your life. Then I went to the bar.

            “Here,” I said to Gigi, back at the merch table. I set down a fresh glass of New Zealand Blanc. “Give my regards to Jackson.”

            “This glass of wine is just one drop in the bucket of I.O.U.’s,” she shouted after me.

            The night wasn’t cool enough for late October on the East Coast. Some shit called El Nino was duking it out for supremacy over your garden variety climate change. You could almost feel the planet burning up on nights like this. Manhattan was its typical Friday night buzz of annoying electricity. For lack of a better phrase I was getting too old for this shit. Most Fridays I spent at home getting drunk on the couch listening to music, or masturbating to kinky porn.

Killian and Fidel were hanging out in front of the café with a bunch of poet types. Killian’s lanky, bearded shadow shrouded him in the night. There I went being poetic again. Fidel was gesturing wildly. He looked like a shaggy Muppet. Larissa Haven-St. Claire lurked in the shadows sucking on an e-smoke.

            “There he is, man,” Fidel said when I approached. “The bard of Bay Ridge. The poet of the public house, man. The versifier of the vino. The…. the….”

            “When in the hell is my book coming out?”

            “Manana, man.” He could tell I wasn’t buying it this time. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Soon, dude.” The poetesses around him all consented. Fidel always had women around him.

            “Soon, like this year soon? Or soon like you’ll place an advanced copy on my tombstone?”

            “You okay, pal?” Killian asked. “I saw how you stumbled over those poems.”

            “Fucking dye-bottled gingers and cheap wine will be my death.”

“I would’ve gone with bottom shelf liquor and processed meats but...”

            “Hate the game not the player…or whatever it is these kids say,” I said, casting a glance at Larissa. She smirked then turned back to play on her phone. “I ran into the ghost of Christmas past. And guess what? She wrote a novel about the same shit my oft-delayed poem book is about. A whole fucking novel.”

            “Does this ghost have a publisher for that yet?” Fidel asked.

            “She has legal papers apparently…and wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?”

            “With what?” The light suddenly went off in my publisher’s head. “Oh, your book. Could be interesting though.”

            “I was going to write a novel about Rooney’s,” I said. “Maybe. I almost have a first line. I had a sick…”

            Fidel shook his hands like he was grabbing at a big globe of air. “Dueling novels!”

            “I’m out of here,” I said.

            Killian put a hand on my shoulder. “Stop by the store this week,” he said.

            “Let me know when Gigi isn’t working and I will,” I said.

            I left the poets to their poetry, but not without one more little eye exchange with Ms. Haven-St. Claire. A torturous hunger hit me. I walked to the White Horse and let the ghosts of Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac haunt me while the young and beautiful got hammered on another hopeless Friday in America. I took cautious pulls on an over-priced draft. I tried not to think. But that didn’t work. Carolina had stoned me at precisely the right moment. Paybacks were a bitch.

            There was an old man sitting next to me. He was working on a beer and a hot dog. He didn’t have shoes. He had cardboard boxes on his feet and the boxes were wrapped in cellophane. Someone always had it worse. Maybe the boxes were all right for a sweltering New York summer, but we were almost at halftime in the autumn. I knew then and there I’d write a poem about him. I’d hijack his life for the grand toilet of art. Fucking poets. When the waitress came and gave him his check, he looked at it and pushed it away.

            “Excuse me garcon,” I said to the waitress. I nodded over at the old fart. “How much was his damage?”

            She gave me a look. “Fifteen…why?”

            I pulled out a twenty and pointed my head his way. “Yo la tengo.”

            “By the way, dude…garcon means boy.”

            Everyone was a critic. Still the waitress took the money and headed over to the bar. The night had made me humble and benevolent. Despite what some people thought of me, Rand Wyndham was a pretty good guy. He was kind. He was virtuous. He was a lover and not a fighter. I was butterfly droppings. A guy worth writing a whole novel about. I was everything the poet should be.