Inspiration
Thomas Michael McDade
It's February, ’75,
I'm a sailor in Venice.
Gypsies are parked
in vans on the pier.
The Doge's Palace is closed.
Miss Universe is rumored
to be in town and some
lucky ship will get a visit.
An incessant net
of rain traps all
but the pigeons.
Paying my respects
outside the Gritti,
Hemingway’s hotel choice
I sense Inspiration
shadowing me.
Rain dripping off her
wide-brimmed hat,
she snickers while
I translate the plaque
on John Ruskin's house.
The downpour seals
the lips of my dictionary.
Suddenly, I must have a Venetian
haircut and lickety-split a barber
is toweling my sopped head
so vigorously
my imagination rattles.
Later, I dine on artichoke
pizza in a restaurant
where Germans list
celebrities they’ve met.
Gusty rain jerks me
down the pier to the beat
of a Gypsy accordion
as I plot to ambush
smirking Inspiration
with a sharpened
pencil and legal pad,
twist her fickle arm until
she cherishes my words
as greedily as tourists
do autographs.
I Never Wanted to be a Coke Dealer I Never Wanted to be a Coke Dealer
By B.D. Fischer
That’s never what I wanted to be at all. If you had come to me when I was a child I might have agreed, but only because I thought you were talking about the soda my anxious mother forbade except on the first weekend of the month. This rendered it an object of desire as reliably as the moon draws in the tides of Lake Michigan, and the prospect of swimming in its effervescence would have appealed to my childish mind, sucking on a blankie wrapped around my thumb, considering options. If this is how it went down. I kept that blankie into my second grade.
If you had come to me when I was a teenager I would have been frightened, and disbelieving, and perhaps laughed in your face, depending on my mood. How does one even get into the business? I might have asked. Is there a course you can take, a certificate you can earn, replete with elaborately seriffed fonts and faux wood framing? In the shakiness of my adolescence it was hard to understand a business with credentials, a formal entrance, and in their absence I would have blown my bored bangs out of my eyes and left the room. It was impossible then to imagine people, let alone me, snorting a fine white dust, and not for the reasons—corrosion of the striated muscles of the heart, addiction, whatever that is, a frightful paranoia—they gave us in health class. The reasons are far more primal and boil down to a single question: Who first had the idea to subject the leaves of Erythroxylum coca to a brutal refinement, and then suspire in the results through their nostrils? Our days are after all in the main spent guarding the access points to our innards, and we aren’t in the habit of seeking out anything besides food, drink, and air for ingestion. Logically, snorting ought to be an impassable barrier to use, but I knew nothing then of cocaine’s miracle anesthetic properties, the ones that make the dollar-bill slide across a shard of mirror bearable, and delightful, when the coke is good. They just don’t tell you that in health class.
Of course I was still a teenager, just nineteen, when Dara’s brother passed off his operation, making of me a weed-variety businessman. I made up this joke myself. I don’t know what I expected to be—defense attorney, second baseman for the Tigers, pirate-astronaut, the records are lost to history, and even my memories, if I had them, would not be reliable—but never this. It was startling and delightful as the morning sun in early spring, melting the leftover snow. If you had come to me in those early days, when I operated at the pinnacle of my profession and traded in the finest weed in the world, Chocolate Thai, the supreme Maui Wowie, Odin’s Beard, the great purple monster Amethyst’s Delight, I would have scoffed, and looked down my nose, in the manner of a landscape architect at a Mexican. Coke then was still frightening, baffling, mysterious, and nothing at all like weed. For a time, the fact of how I made my living was itself a hallucination to me, and the notion that I might one day deal in coke past laughable, beyond the pale. What lands lie on the far side of the verdant plains and fragrant swamps of hallucination? The flora are unfathomable, the fauna impossible, and I still can’t believe it even now, even now that I live here, for the difference between dealing coke and dealing weed is the difference between a nuclear bomb and the nuclear family. I guess it’s different if you’ve grown up in the ghetto, or the barrio—not a single one of these bloodless Mexicans betrays a hint of a second though, or even a dollop of worry, or any feelings at all—the faded patch on Ramón’s forearm is a tattoo scrubbed into the skin by the eraser of a pencil—but if you had told me I would one day be sitting in this van ... well, I would have responded as you respond to a child who tells you that he’ll grow up to be Spiderman, or a point-forward in the NBA, running the triangle offense: better come up with another plan. Because now we’re talking about trafficking, and this is what disaster does to you. It thinks you knew thoughts, traces new empty landscapes to be sketched in by the palette of your desperation. This is what it did to me.
But weed, my precious weed ... you are not like that, no, you are not at all like the coke. You shall never be like that, and in fact the opposite. There’s not a high school in America without a weed dealer, or at least a narc, and so he is in the popular memory as familiar a figure as the school nurse or a crossing guard. Come on there with the bikes! Were we an honest people the weed dealer’s statue would be erected in the town square. Everyone’s life has a weed dealer, even if it doesn’t need one, and even if it doesn’t know it. This is one of the ultimate truths that only we know, me and my people, the high clergy of a brood forced by the law into shadows we have come to like, crave, need. As a priest gives absolution for tithing so we trade in smokeable saving grace, at prices that ranged up to $1250 an ounce ($50 per gram, my scale toggled from avoirdupois to metric with the press of a button) at my peak. The highest end sold mainly to rich girls, for only they could really afford it; price it out and the result more than doubles the price of gold, which as a currency of last resort fluctuates wildly (Basic Principles of Economics, B). There is only one reason my product line—which consisted after all only of plants, I was merely a greenhouse salesman, a mystifying fact to consider—came so dear, and not even my All-Americans could afford the top of the line except for such special occasions, like draft weekend in New York. Weed is there for us in these good times as well as bad, as a loving mother or child’s blankie is there for the birthday celebrations and the skinned knees. Such is its virtuosic versatility.
All these things in combination—my developing command of the language, habits, and power of weed, the growth of my bottom line, my close relations to dozens of rich girls and superstar athletes—provided me a comfort and protection that was like a crackling fire or down jacket in winter. In Michigan it always seems to be winter, the night falls with the soundless snow and as darkness overtakes twilight the streets grow quiet except for the rushing away of distant cars that might just be the whispering of ghosts. The strange acoustics of the snow in the dark make everything seem far away, inducing a pleasant loneliness. Despite all that has happened, this will always be Ann Arbor to me, and the good times as I remember them, looking out the window of my luxury condo and sipping a Scotch, counting my money and turning back to my chandelier bong. I was called to take a seat and found it more comfortable than I imagined, with a good view of the blackboard and the windows overlooking the athletic fields, where the cheerl
eaders practiced during study hall, showing off their panties in the sun. There was nothing to complain about, and I never did.
The novelty of those early days, the sheer intoxication of surprise and control, can hardly be overestimated. Dara’s brother (Joe? Bill? Some street name like Blades?) left town less than a week after announcing that I was the heir apparent. He stood by me for those first few deals but then I was alone, alone. He told me to call him if I had any problems, but he never gave me his number and it was mostly things he couldn’t help with anyway. I remember still the fright of being abandoned, as though I were a child in national park staring over the edge of a cliff, and contemplating stepping over. It was mostly a struggle to find a rhythm. What even to say when I got a call, the words to use. None of this is as natural as it came to seem. There’s always an argot to learn, and then to make up. The idiosyncrasies are everything. Mistakes were made and money lost, but still in that heady time I felt as though I were surfing through the clouds, unable to see where I was but nevertheless thrilled by the wind in my face. I know that this happened to me, but it is so easy to forget.
Of course, I learned quickly enough. After all, I was and remain a smart guy, accepted with financial aid into the four-year program of an elite university, even if I never reached the upper division. The newness of my profession wore eventually off, but between mastery and routine lies a soft spot, common but oft-missed, and it was in this place that I came to understand myself as a participant in a grand tradition, a cog in a machine that has been grinding humanity forward since the dawn of consciousness, memory, and imagination. Without the University of Michigan I have no doubt that the complexity and truth of this understanding would have escaped me. For this and everything else I still revere the maize and blue. Where I to have children I would insist that they wear these colors, and if in the end they proved unable to gain admittance, well, I hope that the boy would still sit with me on Saturday afternoons in the fall, and the girl allow rice dyed yellow and blue to be thrown at her wedding.
And yet I don’t regret dropping out. The business climate demanded my full attentions, and I would have been a fool to ignore my once-in-a-lifetime shot. I paid a price for my ambitions, in lost opportunities to link together the disparate strands of thought and experience into the tapestry of history, but I’ve never looked back. I am less for having been forced by circumstance to leave the University, and it is even possible, I have come to believe, that what happened might not have had there been some way to stay in school and continue to work, to broaden my horizon to encompass first Lake Superior and then the Oceans. It is possible, I am saying, that further Michigan education may have increased focus, reduced mistakes, and helped me see the connections necessary to stave off declension. I can’t be certain, but I believe it to be so. The University of Michigan Wolverines would have saved me if they could.
But it wasn’t possible. The hours were crazy and late-night intoxication with morning hangovers a cost of doing business ... and yet I cannot help but think about what might have been. I don’t see how it could have gone the other way, but still I wonder, a dangerous rabbit hole. It’s the kind of thing a man can’t let himself think about lest the world become too much, including and especially these Mexicans. I’m surrounded by them.
I cough, hoping it will clear my head, and the sound echoes in the van but there is nothing they can do to me.
The money was the deciding factor, it was the only thing that could have got me to drop out of school. Dara’s brother dropped a gold mine in my lap and what was I supposed to do? I came from a middle-class family, my father worked at the engine plant in Romeo, and here was all this money, all these rich girls. I couldn’t have known that they would never reveal themselves to me. I have nothing to apologize for, not to anyone, least of all myself.
And yet it was always more than money. I found what the self-help gurus agree is the key, a meaningful job that you love, that completes you, where you feel like you make a difference. Selling weed was all these things and more: The links we make, between ourselves and the ones we love (although I have never been in love), between nature and philosophy (British Romantic Poetry, D+), between apparitions and the wet black bough, are products of the central human act, aided at all the crucial moments by the consumption of smoked weed, or at least the consumption of something. Even coffee is something: Do not underestimate the effects of caffeine, particularly on a Mormon. It is like a mushroom. And is alteration not our central endeavor. Leave the world a little better than you found it, or at least different, so someone knows you were there. Civilization begins with distillation, or at least with fermentation, and the stoned apes ventured onto the steppes of Africa and developed in that open space in response to the novelty of the horizon the audacity to walk upright and shed their tails, all in pursuit of richer, more complex sugars to feed their strangely ravenous appetites. From the cosmic perspective this is how it happened, and like everything else it happened for a reason. I won’t pretend to know specifics, but the story is impossible not to believe, and not necessarily because it is true. The medicine man recites tales of himself and his elders and ancestors and in so doing effects a becoming so vital, so natural, that our stories could not survive its absence. I hate to assign myself the role of American shaman or griot, but, well, there you go. At least this is how I felt, even though I am now confined to the bumpy silent company of Ramón and his friends, most of whom are probably also his cousins, by marriage or inbreeding, and locked inside a cave-dark van. I couldn’t get out if I wanted to, not without some violence. I have in my pocket four crinkled twenties and the change from a fifth, used to purchase a Three Musketeers, an advance against my share in case of emergency, but where would these get me from the side of the road? I haven’t had a cell phone in more than year and money’s not worth anything without somebody to take it, to exchange it for goods and services. We are somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee, I figure, and no one in here looks at me ever, or pretends to any conversation, and it’s the silence more than anything—more than the descent into dealing cocaine, more than the loss of all that I was and believed, more than the fifteen to life I’m looking at if things go sour—that makes me feel helpless, and want to throw up my hands. My unbidden face wrinkles in the manner that is a prelude to tears, I know event though I can’t see it in the blacked-out windows. But I can feel it, and the feeling is all too familiar. I would sigh, if I thought that it might help, and that it might not be noticed.
In the end the equation is simple enough: Like a dervish setting himself ablaze (Religions of the World, D+) or a Japanese hari-kari I subsumed to something greater than myself, which is the recommended course. Even our presidential candidates came to talk in these terms and when they did a thrill coursed through me, for I knew exactly what they meant. In fact I had lived it. Nothing has prepared me for good citizenship like weed. I attempted at all times conscious imitation of Dara’s brother (his name, his name) and perceived to hang from my shoulders the same mantle of civic responsibility. It was strange to feel this at first, not weighty just strange, but the role came to seem familiar until it was natural, integral, and finally necessary. Dara’s brother was a standup guy, a real mensch, and the opposite of these Mexicans. He was a man who did not want to leave anybody hanging, who wanted to provide for his people, his friends, and I wanted badly to do as he did. I still miss him. So concerned was he with the public good that in leaving me his business he also advanced me a substantial sum to make it through that first shaky year, at 0% interest. We’re talking close to six figures, a duffel bag of cash that left me speechless with emotion when he unzipped it to show me the stacked contents. His generosity was the sinequanon of my success, and remembering this now brings me again to the brink of tears, of gratitude as well as of regret. Imagine these Mexicans making such a gesture. They’d sooner knife you for a dollar or to prove their manhood, but for Dara’s brother it was ne
ither the drugs nor the power nor the money. I repaid him inside of six months, but that cushion was the difference between temporary success and immediate failure. If I had heeded his lessons and example the success might not have been so temporary. If only I could remember his name I might not now be in this van. Because he could help. It would kill him to know how things turned out. My blithe indifference to his example was no doubt the prime cause of the bad luck that finds me here now, deaf to everything except the shitty suspension of this blacked-out van and the silence of my reluctant companions.
Not that I didn’t try. For example, I never sold to minors, despite the financial opportunity they presented. There were plenty of Ann Arbor professors’ kids looking to get high, but I wouldn’t take their money. I remember in particular the sister of a rich girl visiting over the Presidents’ Day weekend and damn near begging me for a sack to take back to Grosse Pointe. It was a sight to see a rich girl begging like that, and I would be lying if I said that it was unattractive. The girl herself was no more than fifteen, and wore a pair of $300 jeans so tight that I could make out the folds in a flower only beginning its bloom. Just a gram, she said, or even a half-gram, if my scale could make such fine distinctions. Of course it could, but I wouldn’t dignify her with a response. And yet she continued, shrugging off the hand of her older sister, “Do you know who we are?” and then with the contention that I would be “ruined.” But I stood my ground, I had my standards, my community standing and professional pride. I have no regrets about this whatsoever.
No regrets ... and yet by the time the story of me and my people is told—if it is told and not left on the cutting room floor (“History is a fickle mistress, inconstant as the breeze but as lovely and refreshing and as necessary to the refinement of a man.” -Gibbon, Introduction to Historiography for a writing credit, B+)—we will be long gone, the generosity and philanthropy of men like me and Dara’s brother but a memory of a memory in the coming monsoon of legalization. Our society is morphing, and while I may be out of the game I’m not so far gone that I can’t feel the catastrophe coming. It is still in my blood and there is an elephant in the corner of every room bedecked with a bong. It will change who we are and how think of ourselves, but no one has any idea how, and no one is even talking about it. We are the children of a loathéd prohibition, we, the stoners, my people. Every decision carries metaphysical hazards and none of our choices are neutral, as I’ve been unfortunate enough to learn down through the years.
In our religion as in all others it is the rituals which anchor, and ground the beliefs in a shared past, a shared present. When we pull into the parking lot of a movie theater and fill our cars with smoke, when we sweeten our tongues with the gummy strip of a zigzag, when we enforce the timeless discipline of puff puff give, we are getting high, yes, but we are also partaking of rites so ancient that they achieve the nature of the sacred. And, for us, the rules of our worship are steeped in the forbidden, soaked in a culminating illegality. Remove this foundation and our liturgy is deformed, little different than the Catholic Church forced to conduct its mass in Pig Latin and to use Wheat Thins for the transubstantiation. Religions of the World again. What will happen to the eye drops and the chewing gum, the quickened sidelong glances before application of flame to plant? I would lying if I said that I were not terrified. These separate strands, these tributaries to the sacrament, have never been separated, but they are about to be. Like a French braid undone, they are about to be, and soon. Within in the next generation. Before I’m dead. No one denies this now. The type of man that Dara’s brother was and I aspired to be will be soon enough consigned to the curbside of history. This fact is so scary that we avoid not only its mention but even the bare thought. And yet now, this moment, is a time for honesty, if ever there was one. Perhaps the move into coke is the right one. It is always impossible to see from the vantage point of the future past.
And what then? I feel as an Ottoman, or a Visigoth, or a Hapsburg (mandatory pass/fail semester of Western Civ, which I passed by the skin of my teeth thank you very much), and it turns out that being the last of a dying breed is only for tubercular Romantics and von Sacher-Masoch. Who knew? But history has not yet overtaken me, and I still have sufficient fight to endure the claustrophobia of this blacked-out van, a lightless conveyance, a box on wheels, state unknown, and focus my attentions on the score that might get me back in the game. The beating of my heart. The endless craggy road. Even at the height of my success there was always admixed to the smoke a faint tragic whiff, as if of coming in at the end, of arriving to the double feature as the final scene of the second movie fades to black, the house lights coming up. I think that many Americans feel this way. As the hooks on which we hang our hats come unmoored from their studs all of us stand in danger of falling, falling, and each step could be our last. The savvy among us have always been aware that the rules that apply today may not apply tomorrow. The options we thought we had disappear with the passage of time, without a single choice being made. I will never have a son to whom I could pass the family business. I suppose in the end this is a good thing.
Gah, I hate myself. I’m sorry, I think all this travel has gone to my head. The immobility of it leaves me queasy, grandiose, uncertain. My seatbelt pulls tight across my hips, and the Mexicans I cannot help but notice take no such precautions. I want you to concentrate on the blankness of their faces. Surely their blankness points to confidence and thus our success, or else to oblivion and our failure. Surely they would bear the brunt of an investigation, the unsuspecting gringo a victim of Mexican manipulation. God only knows what Wellover has in store for us, the town where we will wait for word that it is time to cross. Four brown Mexicans and a gringo white with the Michigan winter. They tell me I won’t stand out to the uniformed guards but I have no idea whether to believe them. Everything is on faith, they’ve turned the facts into a mystery. I’ve put my trust in Ramón and hold my breath and try not to make a cold assessment, like a man at a craps table riding a hot streak. You don’t want to think about it. I’ve put ten years’ rent money on come. Even the atheists among us believe in things they can’t verify, not even in theory, a faith, a baptism, a cross around the neck. There’s no other way. A cross and a crucifix, I only recently learned, aren’t the same thing, for I wasn’t raised religious. Not like these Mexicans with their crazy cult of Mary and the kissing of icons, the echoing reality of felt emotions. All this is familiar, at least to them, and I try to retain my cool, to breathe in and then out, and to imagine the passing landscape. The sun must be well up by now. It will get warmer as we go farther south. I’d love to get some fresh air, to clear my head, but I don’t dare ask the driver to stop. I don’t even know his name. I don’t know anyone except Ramón, with whom in the past I have done some minor business, and out of nowhere this fact seems like the thinnest thread with which to stitch a connection, as though I am attempting to swing from one skyscraper to another on a spiderline of dental floss. Ramón Ramón ...
Even when I was going under there was a nobility to what I did and how I conducted myself. I know how that sounds, but this blacked-out van has no nobility. These Mexicans have no nobility. Trucking coke across the border has no nobility, and doing fifteen years even less. I don’t mean to mythologize, except that maybe I do, and this feels completely justified in my present circumstances, speeding south in a lightless ferry to cross the Stygian Rio Grande, my white face making of me a ghost, invisible. At least that is everyone’s hope.
Good Girl
By Matthew Wilson
Literary Lunes Magazine, January 2012 Issue Page 6