As we slept in postcoital bliss one evening in the Milpitas foothills, the wide-open sky steamy-strip-club lavender, she screamed out from her sweaty dream, all revelatory and betraying her Haitian mysticism, “You got talent, nigga!”
I looked around the bed for a beheaded rooster, and then back into her manic voodoo eyes and was suddenly fully awake, reaching for my still-attached root.
Minutes later she was rushing me off in her Beemer to Slam Poetry Fest in Oakland, California, an event she hosted in her ex-husband’s absence. She introduced me to friends as “this century’s Walt Whitman,” which of course made her Emerson. She put me in the last slot of the lineup, and though I’d never publicly recited poetry before, I had done my penitence in prison long enough to memorize hours of Shakespeare and a few other Brits, plus my own personal effluvium, so what I did at the mic was plagiarize/ebonicize a little bit of each, apparently without anybody knowing, because by the end of the night I had a $1,000 fellowship called the LeRoi Jones Hookup for Off-the-Hook Artistic Achievement.
The reception was at an Americanized sushi joint called Yoshi’s in Jack London Square. Someone other than my Sponsor Lover threw down some serious cash for a few rounds of Long Island iced teas between bluesy, soulful sets by John Lee Hooker Jr.
“It ain’t fair!” Beatrice was shouting by the end of her second Long Island.
She wanted me, her intellectual stoolie, to graze at her feet. She wanted me to stop chasing the Long Islands with fifty-dollar merlot from Sonoma (“Just sip, fool, sip!”) and ask her highbrow, exclusional, lisping friends about the enclave for artists in Villa Montalvo. She wanted me to weep uncontrollably at her generosity of spirit. But I played indifferent, the ingrate, pounding whatever liquor came my way, howling—boxcars! boxcars! phonies!—at her improprieties. I knew what authors she had on her bedside: She was the personification of a Latin mantra that I remember an English prof hanging over his office door: Laudant illa sed ista legunt—They praise good books but read the bad ones.
Anyway, by morning we’d made an arrangement that, rather than kick down the g she owed me, she’d offer unlimited stay at a Motel 6 parallel to highway 101 and a five-dollar daily per diem I could pick up at the manager’s desk.
“Unlimited?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“No catch?”
“Only one.”
“What’s that?”
“You let me edit your book of love poems.”
I thought I’d push the advantage, see how far I could take it. “No problem. The only trick is I can’t ever see you again. That way I’ll have access to true tragedy.”
She said, “I understand completely, nigga. These be the mysterious ways of the muse.”
“Totalitarian. Fickle trick.”
“You get to work now. No cable TV, no honor bar, baby.”
I just thought, What the hell, something to see, something to do. Who knows what will come of this silly elementary school contract?
But Beatrice kept her word and I tried to keep my end of the deal by earning my fellowship. I found I could write poems to Beatrice when I didn’t think about Beatrice but of other women I’d either bedded or loved or both or neither. Beatrice in verse was a composite of my ex-love Sharon, of the daemon-driven purist Marydawn, of the street-smart stray cat Monina, of the vain and simpleminded Kisa-La, of the good-hearted plump-bootied Morisa, of the long-legged obsidian-skinned Sayo, of the holdover hippie Flower, of Rebecca, Leilani, Shikima, of Anne Sexton to prevent her pain, of Dickinson with honey from her bees, of Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter, of Katie Couric in a bob with banana pancakes in bed watching clips of her shows over the decades, of Madonna the mortal, of several cousins at reunions with furtive glances, of the quirky smile and subtle skills of Reese Witherspoon, of some woman at a bus stop in Santa Cruz weeping into her crusty hands, of Jorie Graham post-fifty reciting Sapphic verse in of course the Greek, of the pleasant, cursed, undoubtedly virginesque university librarian who loved to look up and then hunt down my obscure, dusty, gilt-edged books of poetry on Tuesday nights, of for some reason Hillary Clinton, of specifically the backside of J Lo for a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, of the Bush daughters on the Persian rug of the Lincoln Bedroom with a bottle to be drunk and then spun and then whatever.
I was rotten, am rotten.
What I figured out is that only the women who can find themselves in the poems, whether true or not, actually like the poems, and only poets, true poets or not, think poetry actually matters.
My Uncle Rich, the one guy I can talk to for longer than an hour, is someone who falls into neither category, highly suspicious of verse. I don’t know why, really, but I’ve wanted to persuade my favorite relative otherwise for a long time. Maybe to convince myself that I haven’t been wasting my life.
“I mean, I can’t see it,” he’s always saying. “What is the point exactly in putting all this energy into something you can’t live on?”
After I won the LeRoi Jones, I gave him a holler with the intent of proving the point of poetry’s utility. He told me, slurring his words, to meet him at a bar called the Redi Room on Saratoga and Moorpark and to bring no money, no credit cards, only my relatively healthy liver. With the exception of the credit cards, which I didn’t have, I brought as much cash as La Dulce had given me earlier in the week, which was the five-buck per diem, and headed out.
I got there and waited for an hour. Johnny Cash was busting “Folsom Prison Blues” over the juke and these two Hell’s Angel–looking cats were throwing darts in their sleeveless vests with sewed-on patches of red-winged chariots across their bulging backs. They wore those asshole shades with the slanted lenses and had stormtrooper helmets on the table with lightning bolts and eagle heads on the crest. I could smell the burnt gasoline and dirty oil from the door.
When my uncle showed up, he was sloshed. He grabbed the cocktail napkin I was writing on and read:
“The brain is its own engine,
its own fuel, its own vapor, its own
contaminant
and it finally to its own amusement
and horror
breaks down in its own empty desert,
without its own water,
in the very heat
that it itself has generated.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, sagging onto his stool, the barkeep with a Cherokee ponytail and a dreamcatcher around his neck watching with folded arms at the end of the bar. “Why don’t you just hit me in the face with a baseball bat?”
“I guess you won’t be attending my next poetry reading.”
“Nephew. You gotta stop wasting your time.”
“As in coming down here to meet you at a dive bar?”
“As in do you want a job?”
My mother’s only brother, Richard, whom she hasn’t talked to in eight years, became a multimillionare the right way, if there is such a thing: hard work, frugality, sound investment. But he had a better story before he ever earned a penny: a nineteen-year old army medic who won a Silver Star for valor during two voluntary tours in Vietnam; later, a run with the ACLU as a speechwriter and troubleshooter for potential cases; a baby born during the first year of night classes for a master’s in history. He started at the bottom of a small real estate operation on the Peninsula and within ten years was running the whole deal and within twelve, owning it—Santa Clara Real Estate West—adding eight offices across the Bay. Faithful husband to my lively Aunt Lanell, father to my older cousin, Nina, who’d be twenty-nine next week except she’s been dead for thirteen years, a gun wound to the head, her hand, his pistol.
After Nina died, Uncle Rich would take me out to have a beer, even when I wasn’t yet of age, and talk about any range of topics. I got the sense that he cared about me, if only because he was always dropping little suggestions I might consider about what to do with my life. He’s the one that got me thinking about going to an all-boys Catholic prep school. He’s the one that got me thinking
about West Point. Ironically, he’s the one who thought I had some talent writing poetry, although he was quick to point out that it wouldn’t make me any money and certainly wasn’t something to build a life on. But it would kill time. He was visiting me in San Quentin. I remember I said, “Everyone in here’s a poet.” Our conversations have always been pointed, he gets what I’m saying, and I get him.
“This country is dying,” my uncle mumbled now.
“What about the job?”
“Pause means you don’t want it.”
“Right you are, uncle o’ mine. Were saying?”
“It’s too much, too much. Stuff.”
“Here?”
“It’s more than that, though. I could talk for days. You know what I just saw at a real estate barbecue in the hills of Via Santa Teresa?”
“Golden silverware?”
“Some show called Survivor.”
“Yeah. Been around for a while.”
“You a fan?”
“Hell no,” I said. “I’ll watch that show when they airdrop ten .44 magnums onto the island. See some Lord of the Flies Redux go down.”
“We the people are weak.”
“Suddenly survival has nothing to do with staving off death.”
“No guts. Even me. I’ve gone soft. I was a kid in the bush back in ’sixty-eight who’d whip the man I am now.”
“Come on, Uncle.”
“Listen. That’s the truth. Do you know that I live in the last region in San José with any natural beauty?”
“Of course I do. The Silicon Valley is L.A. minus twenty years.”
“Trees, trails everywhere. They go up the hillside to the silver mines.”
My Uncle Rich has got a pukka estate in New Almaden with a crew of paisas cleaning and trimming it, a vast and vacant guesthouse, an artificial lake stocked with trout and black bass, and three different half-mile driveways to the place, the south, the north, and the northwest entrances.
“And so every morning for twenty years I’ve started the day saying I’d climb one. The end of the day? Haven’t gone out there. Twenty fucking years, Paul. Twelve-hour days.”
“Too busy buying property, selling it. Need to appreciate poetry of the eye.”
“I’d say your generation is even worse. Far worse. The most selfish buncha jerkoffs in the history of mankind.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“The Me Generation. Hah!”
“I feel you, Uncle Rich. I can’t talk to anyone under thirty.”
“I love you ’cause you ain’t like ’em, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m telling you, nephew. Don’t listen to me and my sniveling. You gotta change it and go with the flow. You won’t make it the way you are. You know that?”
“Let me take you home, Uncle.”
“Let me give you a job.”
“Come on.”
“Listen to me! You gotta smash some of your antennae. Break ’em off at the root. You gotta turn off the awareness for a minute.”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
The Beatles came on over the juke, that masterful last jam session of songs at the end of Abbey Road and their togetherness, and my uncle jumped off his stool and started drum-soloing on the air at “Mean Mr. Mustard,” and I began to nod at the rhythm and the sadness of the scene—and yet I also felt compassion for my uncle who was nakedly sharing with me in his most pathetic state of existence, and then I was actually standing and singing at the top of my lungs, perfectly sober, drunk on the nuttiness of life, TVs above us behind us around us in this dark cave of Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap, some random brotha suing Nike and Michael Jordan for eighty million bones because his life as a warehouse foreman has been ruined by mistaken identity (he’s five-ten to the six-foot-six of His Airness), another winner lacing his kid’s dinner soup with prescription drugs to set up a lawsuit against Campbell’s, a far cry from little Max coming back from his dream of where the wild things are to find “his bowl of soup still warm,” the strange weather in one corner of the screen, the elapsing time in the other, a tape-thin line of steady clips running along the base and leaving forever, one in English, the other in Spanish, Sunni and Shia dividing votes, Brangelina giving cash, hugs, and birth, O.J. saying when or if I did it here’s how, Rockabilly Kim Jong Il with the bomb, Coney Island contest of hot-dog eating won by a 150-pound Japanese teen, starving Dinka boys decapitated by white-robed camel-mounted swordsmen called murahaleen, Hugo Chavez hugging Cindy Sheehan, a cell phone’s disco tune in the wall-carpeted corner of the bar clashing with McCartney’s melodic “and in the end, the love you take is e-qual to”, a whore with no pimp or client in the other corner scratching her scratchy legs and playing electric solitaire on the house machine, and then my uncle, in tears over more than his dead daughter, a Suicide Girl gone bad, whose spread-eagle picture of gothic piercings is still plastered on a depraved Web site on the Internet, my uncle, leaning on me, whispering, “The truth is, nephew, I don’t know a thing about this life. Each day it’s less and less. Nina was like you. Always thinking, watching. I had a little more to believe in than she did. That’s all. It’s no good, no fucking good.”
My mind wandered at that moment to the quandary of relativity. I questioned my uncle’s suffering, I actually did. I considered mass suicide at Masada, the Chinese in Nanking, 1942; I pondered a rotting George Chuvalo, the old Croatian boxer who took Ali the distance in ’seventy-two and paid the price for his fifteen minutes of fame by playing a twentieth-century Job, losing son number one to suicide, son number two to suicide, son number three to suicide, and finally wife to suicide, not at once but over the course of ten years, ’85, ’93, ’93, ’96, his entire family, bit by bit, gone; there is worse out there, always, there is worse. Much much worse than my spoiled, confused, bulimic cousin of nineteen years of age who tried to seduce me once at a beach party in a Capitola cove, who thought she knew enough about this life to quit it, who was screaming for tragedy, or love, or something she never found.
Maybe the dead are lucky, for my uncle goes on, as we all do. Is he weak or is he sensitive? Is he in love with his daughter, whom he probably never knew like he wished he had the courage to know, or is he in love with his own story? Is that, in the end, what grief is? Love of thyself, of thyself in connection to the dead?
Clapped into jail by consciousness.
I don’t know now in this goddamned police van and I didn’t know then in that dead-end bar, so I just stood there and nodded when I had to, squinted my eyes when I had to, finally joined him in knocking back coal-filtered vodka without a chaser, wincing at the fire in my heart and my gut and my loins and my lungs, and when he called a taxi to return to the mansion in his idyllic untapped hills, I went back inside the Redi, told the wannabe Indian behind the bar, Fuck you and your fake-ass dreamcatcher for laughing at my uncle, offered the whore half a free bed at the Motel 6 I was “staying in for the night” (I didn’t want her to know I lived there or she might come back the next day), and we left with a good yard of space between us, and nothing else.
6
They’ve Got New Machines Now
THEY’VE GOT NEW MACHINES now that prevent the messy process of having to stain the thumb and index finger with ink, yours and theirs. Now you just lay your hand on a transparent counter of lasers that looks like a Xerox machine without the hood and press it down evenly when the cop says, “Press it down evenly,” and there it is, your epidermal ID. They can hunt you down anywhere in the world by a downloaded map of your palm. A snap of the finger, press of the button.
Eternally.
The American in me can’t accept the suggestion that I’ve no right to an older, alternative method of fingerprinting. When the cop says, “Please place your hand above the machine and relax, sir,” I say, “No. That’s okay.”
“Please, my friend, let us do this civilly like gentlemen.”
That’s a first: a booking cop calling me friend. He has a slight acce
nt which I’ll nail when he talks a little more. His tone has the decorous Victorian ring that a hooked-on-phonics tape evokes: Hello there, boyo. And how are we today, chappie? I’m getting excited in that region—southern, center—where it counts, and I wonder why.
Princess Di on the beach?
No, posthumously disrespectful.
A Spice Girl?
No, musically irrelevant.
I feel like I can test this cop, test the red tape, so what the hell, I’m bored. And though I haven’t seen my face after the mess at Cesar Chavez Park, I can tell by how tough it is to keep my eyes open, the itch and scratch in my nose, and the mealy-mouthed feeling when I talk that I’m blackened and swollen and pulpy. That should give me a little leeway to say whatever I want.
“This thing is a hotbed of invisible cancer-causing lasers, officer, and I’d rather get ink all over my hands and face than get some radical cells going in my system. Already got millions as it is. I mean, I ate your institutional food for a couple years.”
“You are on parole?”
“No, sir.”
“You discharged your number?”
“I never was on parole.” He wants to know how it’s possible. I’m about to tell him. “I did my time straight through. They wanted to kick me out in a year and a half, but I stayed in and finished it out.”
“I have never encountered that before,” he says. “You are unique. Everyone accepts the terms of an early release.”
What We Are Page 5