The Poet : Chapters 17 & 18

 

SEVENTEEN

 

I was walking in a daze down Bogart Street, passed converted warehouses with shitty murals painted by trust fund babies on their sides. Bushwick was New York’s fourth-ranked most gentrified neighborhood in the city, a playground full of bearded jack-offs dressed ironically for the yuletide in garish Christmas sweaters. They loitered outside of clubs and organic vegan restaurants with their retro choker and retro baby-doll dress wearing girlfriends, living in lofts that used to house manufacturing plants or homes of the Puerto Rican and Dominican people who worked them. Everybody seemed to have some yappy little dog too….and Santa hats. I fucking hated hipsters in Santa hats.

            Larissa had rooked me into doing a reading with that bigshot she’d gone on about our first fateful night together. I’d exchanged a few emails with the man, Henry Winkler of all names. If he was nothing else, Winkler was very good at promoting and boasting. I received a chain email for his writing seminar daily. I knew that two hundred people had been to one of Winkler’s readings in Queens. One hundred had been to his last in Brooklyn. Why just last month in Manhattan he had to turn people away. For a fucking poetry reading. Modest and honest people, poets were not. You had to be somewhat foolish, mendacious, boastful and egocentric to get up in a room full of people and read them goddamned poetry. Or you had to be drunk like I preferred to be.

The reading was at this French café that had a speakeasy bar in the back called Demon Phone. You entered it through a fake-looking payphone, like some sneaky jackass from the old Prohibition days. What would Al Capone think? Good Christ if being at a poetry reading wasn’t bad enough. Why anyone would want to celebrate an era when it was illegal to drink was beyond me. But I never understood America. And places like Demon Phone were all over New York. One wondered where the gentrified liquor store was located because I was as sober as a horny nun on a Sunday morning before church.

            “You must be Ron,” a squat man with bug-eyes and gray buzz cut said to me. “Glad you could make it,” Winkler got up and we shook.

            Sometimes I go by Rand,” I said.

            “That’s odd.”

“Quite…but, hey, you must’ve taken a drubbing for your name in school.”

            Winkler blinked at me slack-jawed. “Why?”

            “Henry Winkler.”

            “But that’s my name.”

            “Right…but Henry Winkler…the Fonz…Fonzie…Happy Days. I leaned back and went double thumbs up. “Ayyy!”

Winkler shook his head. “I’m not sure I’m following you, Ron.”

“Par for the course,” I said. “Anyway, thanks for the invite. This little opportunity got me out of that dreadful non-conformist club meeting that I’m usually saddled with. Boy, those guys can never get it together.”

“Uh,” was all Winkler had to say about that.

There was a sparse smattering of poet types milling about outside on another unseasonably warm night: one lanky, doofus poet with a beard and his hat on backwards; one black women poet reciting her words like rap; two ubiquitous female poets with thick glasses and tattooed arms; a couple of aging poets who’d hung around the Brooklyn scene for so long that a goddamned night of verse simply could not happen unless those swine were present. The M.F.A. crowd hung in a tight pack playing on their cell phones and policing their use of the word like. I scanned the Sahara-like landscape. Ms. Larissa Haven-St. Claire was nowhere to be found amongst it. Perhaps I’d been suckered.

“We’ve got a problem, Ron,” Winkler said to me. I’d forgotten he was still standing there.

            “Of course we do, man,” I said. “We’re a bunch of adults loitering around a fake speakeasy on a weeknight waiting to drink over-priced booze and read shitty poems to each other. If Freud were here even he’d throw up his hands and head for the hills.”

            “I just meant that the café overbooked us. There’s a bachelorette party in the bar. They were supposed to be out an hour ago, but they’re still in there.”

            “Holy shit. Any chance we can get into the bar?” I asked.

“Not until the bachelorette party is done,” Winkler said.

“I’ll be in the middle of the DTs by then, man. Maybe they’re poetry fans. Have you asked around? I can’t speak for the rest of the bohos here but I’m not above mixing a little verse and taking a spin doing the Locomotion with some frightened, betrothed blonde if it means I can at least get a drink.”

“This is very unprofessional. The last time we were here I had like one-hundred people for this place. I had to turn people away.” I turned to look at the bored and sparse crowd. “At this one poetry reading in Queens we had like four hundred people turn-out. The poet laureate of Queens actually showed up.”

“Maybe you should’ve rented an ocean liner,” I said.

“I wanted to do a poetry reading on a boat,” Winkler said. “But there were legal issues.”

“Well…you know…the Titanic and all of that business.”

“I was thinking of doing a reading on a beach too. Make a semi-circle in the sand for the stage, you know. Would you ever read on a beach?”

“No,” I said. “Beaches have three things that I don’t like: sand, sun and people.”

“Hmmm.” Henry Winkler got quiet. Doing the anti-social bit usually got them. I checked my watch it was long past vodka o’clock. “Do you like seminars, Ron?”

“My employer can’t even get me to go to a staff meeting, so I’d call that a big no, Fonzie.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Drunkard. But I moonlight as a librarian,” I said.

“I wanted to do a reading in a library,” Winkler said. “Is poetry still popular in the library?”

“It is in mine. Why they’re practically printing it up and leaving it all over the place.”

“Anyway,” Winkler said. “I mention the seminar for writers because as you know a lot of writers can write but they don’t know how to network or promote themselves or even how to pla…”

“Look, Winkler,” I said. “Where’s the nearest functioning bar or liquor store? I’ve worked all day in hell and I’m starting to shake. I mean it could just be the hunger talking, or some PTSD from the train ride over…but something sinister is going on inside of me, and I have to remedy it the only way that I know how if I’m going to go up on some stage and pull off this bullshit tonight.”

“There’s a liquor store like down the block,” some tattooed, bespectacled Poetess said without looking up from her phone. I knew her from the nude “art” photos she posted of herself on Twitter.

“But be back quickly,” Winkler added.

I took off without another word. I got myself a pint of vodka and found myself a bench about half a block away from Winkler and his band of poets, across from a hipster couple dressed in straw hats, overalls and thick wooly coats. Hurry? Fuck hurry. They were all still milling about outside the cafe, ruing the very existence of bachelorettes and updating their Instagram accounts. What was that charlatan on? Poet laureate of Queens? Four hundred people? For Poetry? Oceans liners. Readings on the beach. A fucking poetry seminar? Seventy-five dollars to listen to that hack tell you how to be as anonymous as he’s been his whole life? And damn if I wasn’t dating someone who was interested in taking the thing.

Winkler had been drinking some strong Kool-Aid, and I had delusions of grandeur if I thought I was being paid one red cent for this gig. Ah, what another wasted night in Poet-land. If it wasn’t for Larissa, I’d be back on the L train quicker than Henry Winkler could jump a shark. And where in the hell was she? And why did I continue to put myself through this? Indignity after indignity. As with everything else in my life I’d gotten little out of reading poetry. I only liked the writing of it. When it would come. To be honest I liked me much better when all I did was hang out in bars and wait to die.

“There you are.”

Larissa was coming at me from down by where the French Café was, impeccably clad in that faux fur/pleather coat of hers and nothing but the blackness of the night save the long strides of her pale, shapely, tattooed legs. I might still jones for Carolina, but damned if I wasn’t floored each and every time Larissa addressed me. How I had managed to keep her around me beyond that first night of fumbled making out was beyond my capacity for rational thought. But hell, she had practically a mob walking with her down the block. Poets, all of them. The despicable bastards. Where were the pitchforks and torches when you needed them?

“Evenin’ pardner,” I said. I tipped the vodka back and took a good gulp.

“How much have you been drinking?”

“Not nearly enough.” I had the last of the vodka. “I’m thinking of starting a poetry commune or maybe asking Fidel Pinochet to drop millions of copies of my book from a charted plane right before I read….one can only hope we have enough copies for all of Winkler’s zealots.”

“He’s not that bad,” Larissa said. She looked around her crew self-consciously. She’d obviously come across the members of one of Winkler’s writing seminars. “He’s actually quite kind.”

“How do you know for sure? The man would do a poetry reading in front of a functioning gallows if given the opportunity.”

“I don’t think they still hang people.”

“Tell that to Sadaam Hussein,” I said. I looked at Larissa. She had a touch of the impatience about her. “And how did you even get hooked up with a blank slate like Henry Winkler? For all you know he’s stalking scantily clad poets on Facebook and Instagram, and trying to formulate his own harem in verse!”

“I think that might be sexist,” some random poet woman said.

“And gender biased,” another poet said.

“Who’s labeling here?” I asked. “I’m simply speculating based on evidence that I’ve compiled during the run of this tragically Shakespearian evening under the blazing December moon.”

“It’s going to get colder,” some rando said.

“I told you he found me on Twitter,” Larissa said.

“Do you know that he has no clue whom Arthur Fonzarelli is?” I said.

“We didn’t all spend our childhoods in front of the television, Rand.”

“But still…how did he miss that one? Henry Winkler. He’s Henry fucking Winkler.”

“Is this Fonzarelli like a poet?” another of Larissa’s youthful sycophants asked. This one was a challenging nose ring poetess with her very own eyebrow piercing that made her left eye droop. I kid you not. Fucking white people. “Cause I’m always looking for new poets.”

“Sit on it, kid,” I said.

“Henry says it’s time to start,” Larissa said. She held up her phone for all to see. I killed the pint and she pulled me off my bench. What the fuck? Well, I was tired of tete et tetes with the poetry crowd anyway. Our mob made our way back toward the slaughter.

 

                                                            EIGHTEEN

 

The inside of Demon Phone wasn’t big enough to hold two goldfish let alone the huddled masses that Henry Winkler claimed clamored to attend his readings. It was actually one of the smaller poetry venues that I’d ever been in. It was an all-brick wall rectangle of a room with one long black table and chairs along the left-hand side, and a small bar with maybe three stools to the right. The backdrop to the stage was a red curtain and was to the left of the red fake ass phone booth that you had to walk into to get to the place. There might’ve been fifteen people in the room by my estimate…and nine of them were reading poems that night. Henry Winkler looked none too pleased at his predicament.

“People left,” he said to me at the bar, as if to explain the biblical exodus of poetry lovers that night. “They just split on me. We were looking at a good two hundred people tonight.”

“Fucking bachelorettes,” I said. “A plague upon that marriage.”

“Ron, would you ever consider doing a poetry reading for prisoners?”

“The ones locked up in jails or the poor souls I see riding home from their shitty jobs on the evening bus?”

“We could do a reading on a bus…or maybe a subway,” Winkler said. “I thought about getting a big caravan bus, like the Merry Pranksters and taking it all over the…”

I patted Winkler’s shoulder. “You keep dreaming the big dreams, while the rest of us get the shits and wait on death.”

My drinks came and I left. I got myself a watered-down vodka, from a bartender named Kip, and some cranberry concoction for Larissa. I’d handed this Kip a twenty and saw no change in return. It was to be that kind of night in Brooklyn. I thought about getting myself a seat far away from all of the poets, as I had the pick of the litter. But that would’ve looked bad. And Larissa and I were still courting. Well, there’d be plenty of time for alienation. Best to just roll with the punches and poetry readings for now.

The M.C. took the stage. He was the lanky, bearded doofus that I’d seen outside. “Yo what up, what up?” He shouted. “How about this turnout, yo?” He’d also drunk deep from Henry Winkler’s Kool-Aid pitcher of self-delusion. “My name is Todd. But I usually go by my rap name, which is Todd with three D’s. Todd-de-de-de.” The sparse room laughed. Even the Black people laughed. Cultural appropriation was obviously not a hot button issue in these parts. I was willing to hedge my bets that Todd with three D’s told that joke at every single reading. “Yo, I’d like to thank the bach-e-lorettes for bein’ some fiiiinnnneee and classy uh-ladies, and splittin’ so we could do…our…thang. We goin’ get this shiznit started on point, but first me, myself and I, that is, Todd-de-de-de would like to read you one of my poems…ah, just to show ya’ll what I’m all ‘bout.”

It went a little something like this:

Poker with The Joker

and charades with Madonna

Spanish Inquisition with Alex Trebeck

and drunken howls

with the Dali Llama…

 

            “What in the fuck is this?” I whispered to Larissa. I killed the watered-down vodka.

            “It’s spoken word,” she whispered.

            “I know that. I just meant what in the hell is this moron’s take on spoken word?”

            “Shhhh…have some respect for the art,” a green haired poet hissed.

Todd-de-de-de kept on:

 

            A light comedy, a pugilist’s poesy, and cold roses

            served up breakfast or lunch

            here’s what we have to endure

            super-size me, buffet my filet, all you can surrender

 

I couldn’t endure much more of Todd-de-de-de…or any of this really. But I seemed to be in the minority. People were laughing along with Todd-de-de-de’s celebrity-soaked spoken word poems. People were nodding their heads as if this nonsense made some kind of sense. Larissa was snapping her fingers and nodding along as well. What in the actual fuck had I gotten myself into? Not only was I stranded in the bastion of some pseudo-Svengalis’ Brooklyn, hipster sideshow, but I was also trapped in some neo-Beatnik nightmare. Jack Kerouac had to be rolling over in his lonely Lowell grave.

            “I’m going to get another fucking drink,” I said to Larissa, as Todd-de-de-de continued his assault on hundreds of years of the written word.

            But it wasn’t just him. When Todd-de-de-de was done he brought up the night’s first poet. Another spoken word jack-off. Some midget b-boy with his hat cocked to the side. He did that swaggering thing and talked game. I thought about making a love connection between him and Jackson Urban on Facebook, but even he wouldn’t suffer the kid’s bullshit. Sapphire T was his name. But maybe he wasn’t so bad. He gave it to the white man for his five hundred years of globally treachery. I was always glad when the white man got it. Sure, I was a whitey myself, but I hated the man as much as anyone, even if certain co-workers placed me right next him in that pantheon of suppressors.

            “Yo…yo…yo,” Todd-de-de-de started again. I shut my brain off and waited for his gibberish to cease. When he was done, he brought this young, tattooed, gray hair-dyed, thickly bespectacled woman up to read spoken word rants.

            “Okay,” she said. “You know…like poetry…like, right?” I quoted her almost verbatim. The crowd went wild. “So like I’m going to totally read you a poem that’s like about me.”

            And that went something a touch like this:

            Platitudes

            and latitudes

            I’m trying to find the real me?

            Stuck in this genocide

            This slick patricide

            Twenty-three and my gums a bleeding

            Two dollars in my account

            But I’m smoking twenty-dollar cloves

            I got a jonesin ya’ll

            For a corporate bonin ya’ll

            But the system I’m dissin’

            ain’t kissin’ my ass so…

I was done. Honestly? A poem about how hard it was being twenty-three years old, and buying twenty-dollar packs of smokes when you only had six bucks in your savings account? I almost choked on my fucking drink on that one. I honestly couldn’t even fathom the math, let alone the artistry. But the crowd dug it. They nodded and snapped along. Larissa snapped her fingers in my face. Somewhere in the small, sparse room Henry Winkler strolled around taking photos on the scene. I hoped he had a working knowledge of Photoshop the next time he told someone how huge he drew.

            “Yo, this is def, this is def,” Todd-de-de-de continually said, as he prowled the stage in between poets.

I felt as though I’d been there forever. But we’d only been through a few poets. Todd-de-de-de brought some Black chick to the stage. She read off of her iPhone. I don’t want to sound racist, but I honestly had no clue what she was talking about. B-boys and fuck-boys, and boy-toys and toy-boys. Racist cops and hip-hop. Shit, I was starting to think in rhyme. I looked at that hell-red phone booth doorway. Could I escape? Not a chance. Henry Winkler was guarding the thing like a fucking Buckingham Palace Queen’s guard. But I had to do something.

“I’m going to get another fucking drink,” I said.

“Take it easy, Rand,” Larissa said. “You still have to read.”

But then Todd-de-de-de was back on stage clutching the mic. “All right, all right, let’s give it up for Chilly-Thought. Seriously, baby, you gots to send me a text of that poem.” Todd-de-de-de peered strangely at a cheat sheet of paper as he prowled the stage. “So, like yo, I knows y’all need to wrap yo mind ‘round all the verses we been hearin’ t-night.” He looked at his watch. “What ya’ll say we take a little chill, and then come back and get things get goin’ once a get-gain?”

“I can’t tell if this moron is calling a break, or if he’s trying to reach out to people in regards to his speech impediment.”

“He means break, Rand,” Larissa said quite coldly.

We went out into the night air. Despite the streamers of colored lights and the occasional hipster jackass walking by in a Santa hat it felt nothing like December. I looked around at all of the poets and poetry aficionados smoking their e-cigarettes and playing on their phones. Todd-de-de-de was actually doing the robot while people filmed him. This wasn’t my crowd. Hell, I had no crowd. I was in a world of confusion.

“I guess I know how you feel about the night,” Larissa said.

“You know the way he pronounces it,” I said. “He’s actually Todd with five D’s”

“Ah, no. It’s Todd-de-de-de.”

“Yeah, there’s the two initial D’s at the end of his name, and then the three gratuitous ones that he stutters.”

“He still gave a good reading.”

“This isn’t a reading,” I said. “This is a rap concert disguised as a reading. I thought spoken word poetry went out with the Clinton administration.”

Larissa took a hit on her e-ciggy and blew violet-colored smoke into the air. It smelled like lavender. Even cigarettes had gone the way of this consumerist-designed, self-flagellating culture. “It’s gaining some new ground in the poetry community.”

“Poetry community. If I knew that you needed a goddamned community to write poetry I would’ve stayed in the bars.”

“Bars are like communities.”

“Communities of what? There were days that I walked into Rooney’s and not a single one of those drunks had any clue whom I was or what we talked about the day before. Community? If re-inventing the wheel is your idea of community then you might be onto something. And what community do I have now amongst these poets? Doofuses like Todd-de-de-de writing poems about aging pop stars, or Gigi going over my list of transgressions each and every single time that I see her?”

“Gee doesn’t write poetry anymore,” Larissa said. “And Killian said you had a bitter side. I was wondering when it was going to show.”

“It showed the minute I got an invite to read poems at Rikers.”

“I’m enjoying the reading in case you care to know,” Larissa said. She took another drag on her lavender-scented, electronic cancer stick. “I like doing readings and having the crowd respond to what I’m doing. I like getting feedback on my work from other writers. I like hearing what they have to say.”

“What other people have to say about my writing is irrelevant,” I said. Larissa looked like she had something snarky to say, but she held it in. Good. I would’ve hated to have to have feigned being insulted and miss out on a night of nude wrestling in her bed. “Look, it hasn’t all been bad thus far. I liked that one dude’s writing. Sapphire T.”

 “That was a girl,” Larissa said.

“A what?”

“Honestly, Rand, her name is Sapphire.”
            “But…”

“She’s a butch lesbian…are you seriously that clueless about gender?”

“I am when it comes packaged in a high-top fade with big shinny Nike kicks on,” I said.

“Oh good God,” was all Larissa had to add to that.

I knew that I had to say something quick to recover, like say it was an honest mistake. Or maybe I could pull back and point and laugh, and say gotcha! I wondered if pretending that I was just testing you was a good thing to say to Larissa. Such schoolyard tactics for a warm, December night. But I had nothing. I had mistaken a girl for a boy and thus committed the cardinal sin of being seemingly gender intolerant in this day and age. Good thing Bushwick didn’t have a posse. I’d be run out of town quicker than Todd-de-de-de could come up with a poem about co-ops and binge-watching Netflix.

But I needed to say something. “Hey,” I said, brightening. “About your Christmas party.”

“It’s a holiday party,” Larissa said. She still sounded wounded. “Calling it a Christmas party wasn’t inclusive enough.”

“All the same I think I can work it out and be ther…”

“We thought about having a holiday reading.” Just as quickly Henry Winkler was upon us.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You couldn’t book the Roman Coliseum on such short notice?”

Larissa rolled her eyes at me, but Winkler was as thick as a McDonald’s milkshake. “Exactly the kind of thinking that I like! You know you’d be really good at this promotion stuff, Ronald.” He looked at Larissa. “This guy is an ideas man!”

“Call me Ron,” I said to Winkler. “Ronald is a bit too formal; don’t you think?” I slapped him on the shoulder. “Hell, call me Ronny!”

“I will!” Winkler said.

We went back into Demon Phone. There were less people than before. Even the opening poets had left. There were maybe eight people by my estimate and seven people left to read. In Henry Winkler’s world there was at least three dozen. A slow night on this warm Brooklyn winter evening. The money was on that man cursing bachelorette parties to his dying breaths. Kip wasn’t even behind the bar. There was a sign posted on it that read closed. What in hell kind of speakeasy was this place? I thought. One pint of vodka and two measly watered-down drinks. I was in no shape to read on that. Would it look depraved if I hopped behind the bar and upturned a bottle of Grey Goose? What in the hell else could go wrong?

“Yo yo,” Todd-de-de-de said. “Our next poet once hailed from the great city of Pizz-a-burgh, but now he’s down with Brooklyn-town. He currently works as a pizz-ublic lie- barian…dag, yo, I thought all the lie-baries be a’closin. Anyway, ya’ll, let’s give it up for Ra….” Todd-de-de-de gave an odd look at his phone then gave a shrug. “Y’all let’s give it up for the greatest nom de plume I done evah heard…ah, Mister Rat Windbag!”

Applause rang out. I got up. Winkler started snapping away. In my mind I started thinking back just a few hours to that L train ride that I’d taken over to Bushwick. See, there was this Latina girl sitting across from me. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty tops. Just goddamned beautiful. If one were to believe in a God, I believe he existed just to create that girl. Her lips actually looked wet.

She was wearing a maroon halter top and white jeans, and she had her leather coat draped across her lap. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and I thanked the Gods for climate change. What was really odd though was that the girl was putting deodorant on, like right there in front of everyone on the train. No shame. She was just slapping that container of Dove baby-powder scented deodorant back and forth along her pits for an oddly long time. I’d never been more attracted to such a mundane act in my entire life. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t give a shit about anything else in the entire world, not the climate, not war, not famine, and certainly not reading poetry that night. I cared for nothing else in the universe other than that Latina girl putting on deodorant. That evening train ride had been a watershed moment for me. The next bout of writer’s block and I’d be Googling deodorant porn for sure. If I wanted to get more specific, I’d narrow the search to Latina deodorant porn and…

“Rand,” Larissa broke me out of me thoughts. “Why are you just standing there?”

I checked my pockets. Nothing. I checked the table. There were no papers in front of me. No folder. In fact, I couldn’t recall papers or a folder this whole long night. The applause had stopped and people were staring at me. Todd-de-de-de was just standing there on stage holding the mic out to me like an expectant parent trying to lure in an unwieldy child. “You’re not going to believe this,” I finally said.

“What?” Larissa said. “What is it Rand?”

I laughed. I had to laugh because it was so funny. Cursed Latina girls and their deodorant.  “I think I…I think I might’ve left my goddamned poems in a folder on the L Train.”

“Oh Rand.”

Someone let out a large cackle. The other poets wouldn’t even look at me. Winkler was just standing there with his mouth agape and his camera dangling from his neck. I looked up at the stage and Todd-de-de-de was just standing there staring at me now with his hands on his hips.

“Weak dude…yo…just weak,” he said.

Who was the doofus now? I thought. The night just didn’t belong to Rat Windbag.