“Did you have to say that to him?”
I don’t answer La Dulce because, like a blessing, I’m offered a dog. No ketchup, no mustard, no relish, but it’s cool. The server puts the paper plate down and stands before us both. He’s in a tie-dye shirt that reads THE AVATAR OF AQUARIUS. I immediately feel a little bad for him, not only because his long handlebar sideburns have hairless patches that look like a mountain cat took a few paw swipes, but because his eyes exude a need for both pity and praise, the formula of the failed poet.
I say, “Thanks, bro.”
Before I get or give a name he’s telling me that the incoming poets are actually eating frozen leftovers from last year’s reception, “Thus,” he says, “saving us upward of a hundred dollars.”
“That’s pretty impressive,” I say, chewing into my year-old dog. “You got one over on ’em. You came up.”
La Dulce grabs my hand. “This Gabriel von Morley. He the dean here, baby.”
Von Morley lets the fact settle into my system. I nod with appreciation and wonderment, he reaches out for my hand, the one interlaced in La Dulce’s, and forces into my grip a thin, stapled, Xeroxed copy of a pamphlet. He nods, awaiting our perusal. La Dulce flips the words upright and holds the cover page in front of us like we were sharing a hymnal.
“Impotent Yet Proud, Unknown Yet Grateful,” she reads aloud. “Twenty Poems on Pain. A chapbook by Gabriel von Morley and Colonel Robert Jameson. Deadhead Press.”
I add/read, “Thirty-nine dollars.”
“It’s a signed limited edition,” he says.
“Cool,” I say.
He’s waiting for something. I don’t think I’m going to give him this one, whatever it is. He puts his tiny hand out, palm up, and I smile, look over at my sponsor, the lucky lady with all the cash. “You gonna pay the man, baby?”
He takes the two twenties as if we’re the ones getting the good end of a deal, looks over at the colonel, whose regal back is turned to us, pockets the cash without bothering to finger around for a buck change, says, “Somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, Jack Kerouac told me, ‘Gabe, you gotta get some life into your stuff.’ Forty-eight years later, I have done just that: an utter explosion of voice. Now there is an undeniable connection, I admit, to Ezra Pound, in that one starts at the base of formality and then, like Adrienne Rich—who is a dear friend—gracefully leaves it.”
I nod. “Cool.”
I can feel pressure on my elbow. La Dulce, fine woman, is trying to shove me along. I take her cue and step out, but he grabs my other elbow with his unctuous hand, pushes me back to my original place, and says, “I have tried to meet my writerly devoir, weaving blank verse with the chaos of language poetry, sometimes borrowing from the surrealism of the New York School of Poets, many of whom I knew very well, including John Ashbery. We studied together at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. Iambic pentameter between terrifying runs down the snowy slopes....”
I start to fade out from the soliloquy and I’m lucky, I guess, in one way: The guy can’t see it. He doesn’t need eye contact from me, nods, or gestures, he’s content to go right on talking as long as I’m standing before him. What a trip: He’s like a badly scaled-down version of modern American literary history through sycophancy. I reassure La Dulce with a hand squeeze that I’m not going to say anything rude (“Were you in the bombing of Dresden with Vonnegut?”) and she kisses my cheek and promptly abandons me.
I used to believe in the sanctity of poetry—before I met anyone associated with it. I can remember what I felt poring over the lovely letters Keats wrote to his brother in the throes of consumption; I used to recite his poems to myself in the yard in Quentin. Who but the poet, I’d thought, stands on the doorstop of death and dares to ring the bell and not run? I may have been at the wrong hotbed of creativity, but the spirit of the greats appeared to be lost on these future Pulitzers, more interested in playacting and sipping wine spritzers than getting down in the pit with their demons.
But maybe it’s good to enroll for an MFA so as to be daily reminded of what you don’t like about people, what you don’t like about yourself. After all, for every John Keats, there is someone like me, an intruder of sorts.
“... wolfing down shrooms with Kenny and Hunter S. and a Hell’s Angel named Scooter in the garden of death as midnight struck like....”
Something ice-cold and wet is pushed into my hand. I notice that von Morley’s students have put a ten-yard radius around us. Each of them, even the suicidal Swartie, knows that being anywhere in von Morley’s vicinity means playing the prey for his big-name game hunting, and yet they stay at the barbecue, I guess, because they’ve bought what he’s sold: the future, a $39 pamphlet copied at Kinko’s, is in his hand.
I pop the can of beer, press it to my lips, the piss-water contents of Keystone Light tasting good for once, a matter of context, true relief.
“... encouraged by an itemized note from Tennessee Williams which read, ‘Yes, baby, I get a little lavish at times under the nipping influence of a warm brandy,’ and thinking, My God, heroin must do wonders....”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” someone says.
This one’s broken the radius. He’s got on a white T-shirt that reads, in red letters, UKRANIAN POET, and his golden locks are styled into the hair-sprayed tsunami of a rockabilly. He hands me another beer, and I see a handsome tattoo of Johnny Cash on his forearm. The dean keeps the pace of the evening sermon, now commemorizing Thoreau and a woolen sweater hand knit on the shores of Walden Pond.
“No wonder they call you Gabby,” says the Ukranian poet. He tugs on my sleeve. “You wanna get the fuck out of here, my bro?”
La Dulce is back, eyes closed, hands in the air, listening to the colonel read his poems. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
“Follow me.”
I leave Gabby von Morley there talking, and though with a new location and victim, I bet he’ll still be talking into the early morning.
We make our way to Fourth and San Salvador without a word said between us. It’s rather nice, I must say, after the glimpse of MFA nonsense at the party. We end up walking through a deli on First and San Carlos amid stares from the patrons and Mexican cooks, and then we step over several Vietnamese children playing hide-and-seek by a counter sagging with frozen fish, climb over sacks of white rice that look like stacked sandbags at a flood, and at last come to a door with a sign posted on it that reads, LUBIC’S DELICATES.
“My undercover bike shop,” he says.
There’s nothing in the room except six bicycles, a Ouija board, two candles in golden candelabra on either side of the board, and three books, The Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Giving Tree. The bikes are flipped over so that each rests on its seat and handlebars, the tires in the air: five fifties-style Schwinn cruisers and a Bridgestone Trailblazer mountain bike. I can hear the noise from the deli, the walls thinner than the see-through wrap of a spring roll.
He says, nodding toward the door, “I hate those fucking people.”
I crack open another Keystone I’d snagged from Dean Gabby von Morley, hand it to the Ukrainian poet, say nothing.
“They are very lecherous. I am only twenty-one”—here he crosses himself—“but I know about people. Especially rotten fucking people. You cannot be from Ukraine and not know what rotten is. We are stuck between two rotten fucking countries, one on the west, one on the east. Back and forth they are coming. Fuck it. First we are fighting Nazis, next we are fighting Soviets.”
I say, “Well, then. You’re kinda like the Vietnamese of Europe.” He does not smile. “First the Japanese in the thirties and forties, then the French in the fifties, us in the sixties, Chinese in the seventies, the Cambodians and Pol Pot in the eighties. Now all of those nations gone, forgotten. Millions dead.”
“And now!” he shouts. “Look at me. I am surrounded by jerkoff who think they are poets because they like to talk in the trees with birdies. And they like to m
ake fuck like rabbits. Everyone there is fucking everyone else.”
“Even von Morley?”
“I don’t know the man.”
“He’s your dean.”
“Nobody knows that fucking man.”
“Never met anyone so heavy into nomenclature.”
“What is that?”
“Names, man. The dean’s a big name-dropper.”
“My friend, the only thing he drop is fucking acid. Lots and lots of that, bro, trust me.”
I say, “For someone who lives in the fifties, you sure have a dirty mouth, dog.”
He raises his beer. “Nastrovia.”
I nod, pop the other Keystone I’d lifted, sip the bubbles, toast, “Nastrovia.”
Our cans crash together and after the first chug he lifts the beer high again and says, “Fuck it.”
“Okay,” I say, mimicking his actions. “Fuck it.”
I sit there in the fuck-it-ness of his toast and look around at the nearly empty room with for some reason no despondence at all, wondering how someone who speaks such bad English can be working toward an MFA in Creative Writing. I don’t say anything, of course, but find a picture behind a shattered frame of a slender Vietnamese girl arm-in-arm with—guess who?—the Ukrainian poet. She has stars in her eyes and, in the possessive apathy of a primadonna, she’s looking at the camera, though he isn’t. He’s turned toward the girl, looking meekly at the top of her head, as if it’s intrusive to have his arms around her in the first place. Before I can ask him what happened to the frame or the girl or his apparent fondness for a member of “the lecherous fucking Vietnamese people,” he stands up and walks over to the frame, throws it against the door, and says again, “Fuck it.”
Incoherent shouts in Vietnamese rise up from the kitchen, and several times I catch in a piercing voice, “Du ma mai!” which I know means fuck you in Vietnamese, and since we seem to be stuck on the crudest term in every world language, I decide to ask him if he’s ever seen The Deer Hunter. I want to talk at once to show him that his temper tantrum doesn’t scare me, which it doesn’t, though it annoys me. He lives in an elevated range of the quietudes, which is to say his cynical head, and while I’m not sure I like what I’m hearing, I’m also not sure, from my own little island of cynicism, if I have that right at all.
He looks at me as if I’ve insulted him. “Why do you ask me about that movie? Only because I am Ukrainian? They are dumb Polacks.”
“No,” I say. “Because the Green Beret toasts De Niro exactly the way you did. They’re at that big wedding and he lifts his glass to De Niro and says, ‘Fuck it.’”
“Who is De Niro.”
He’s not looking for an answer. “Who is De Niro,” is a statement in the way you’d say, “De Niro is a nobody,” or “De Niro means squat to me,” and so I gladly say nothing and return to my Keystone. He starts setting up this giant bong the size of an elephant trunk, and when he has the purple weed that looks like Russian cabbage packed tight into the bulb and lit, he offers me the first official hit. I like that. Under advisement from Mr. Shel Silverstein, he’s gonna give me the green from his tree.
I say, “No, thanks, I’ve enough vices as it is, bro,” and slam the Keystone.
We don’t say a word to each other for almost an hour. He keeps blowing his bubbles like an eager bugler in the high school band, repacking and relighting, and I just keep finding more and more Keystones in my pocket. Finally he says, “You want a fucking bike?”
“How much?”
“No, my bro. Come on, man. It’s free, of course.”
I shrug. “All right. Sure.”
He shrugs back—“Pick one”—and, leaving him the five identical gray Schwinn cruisers, I ride back to Silver Creek Estates on the Trailblazer, swerving through the streets of San Jo and shouting, “Mea culpa! Mea culpa!” I realize I forgot to give him my name, and that it’s at bare minimum both our faults, though probably as a native speaker mostly mine, but because I won’t ever return to his under-cover bike shop—or Silicon University of the Valley, for that matter—it hardly fucking concerns fucking me.
15
I Somehow Keep My Balance
I SOMEHOW KEEP my balance swerving up the driveway. Gotta be three or four in the morning. The garage is wide open. The Silver Creek Estates Socialist Council of Wellness charges $20 for this infraction if it occurs longer than five minutes; $50 for the misdemeanor of parking your car in the driveway; $100 for the felony of breathing too loud. I can see La Dulce in the shadows next to her parked car, spread out on a lawn chair reading a book.
I jump off, say, “Like my new ride?”
She doesn’t look up. “Why’d you leave like that?”
“Let me see that thing,” I say.
She hands me Impotent Yet Proud, Unknown Yet Grateful, and I walk over to the garbage can, listen to it tickle the plastic on the way down. “At least recycle it,” she says.
“Some things are irredeemable.”
She looks me up and down. “Tell me about it.”
“You gonna owe these Silver Creek people a lot of dough if you don’t close down shop.”
“Shut your mouth and listen.”
“At least you got some clothes on. That’s a start.”
“You didn’t like the artistes, did you?”
“True.”
“You could just as well do without ’em.”
“As can you.”
“You hate ’em.”
“I’m like Bukowski beating back doom on his bar stool: I hate them all the same.”
“You ain’t beating back shit. You feeding it.”
“Equal opportunity, baby.”
“Your hate-crimeing ass don’t like nobody!”
“Keep it down,” I say. “I like a few people. Just that they’re mostly dead.”
“You crazy.”
“They’ve been cleansed by the long grains beyond age, the dark veins of their mother.”
“Why you talking that limey bullshit? In that stupid deep voice of yours.”
“The oracular of my boy Dylan Thomas.”
“Just answer the question, nigga: are you saying I gotta die before you take a shine to me?”
“Shine? Let’s not use words like that. You from Haiti or Mississippi?”
“Just answer the damned question.”
“I mean, what’s next? Hoss? Gumption?”
“You don’t even like me.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Do you?”
“Let’s not do this, lucky one. We’ll destroy the fuckship in six seconds’ time.”
She snaps her fingers across her face. “Fuckship?”
“What else is it?”
“And what about Beatrice?”
I can’t tell her the truth, that she is nowhere near the book. That thinking about her would destroy it, and maybe destroy more than just the book. And that it doesn’t matter at all in the end, since the book is just a game. The image of a teenage Mishima clutching his novel manuscript on the tracks of the oncoming train does not here work. I’m just flossing my teeth, Q-tipping my ears, the creative impetus as thoughtless and abysmal as the wipe.
Instead I say, “I won’t desecrate the terms of love—if it still exists—just to get into your panties.”
“Oh, you one noble nigga, ain’tcha?”
“And if love dies with my generation, just like everything else, I’m not gonna make it worse by calling this thing we got exactly what it’ll never be. That’s like telling everyone you just won the Lotto when you ain’t even bought a ticket.”
“Well hell, nigga, how’s this? I never liked you none, anyway.”
“That’s fine. We may have consensus for the first time. I’m not so sure I like myself, either.” I slap her hard on the ass and say, “This is good-bye, La Dulce. Don’t trip. You’ll make out like a bandit.”
She says, a little paranoid, “Well. Shit. Just one more for the road, home skillet?”
Vows of pointless purity out the window, out the garage, or whatever. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
She pushes a fifty spot into my hands, says, “You can get a couple motel nights outta this.”
This means no more fellowship. “Thank you,” I say.
“You all right.”
“Just turn around, if you’ll be so kind, ma’am, and put your hands on the hood. Don’t take it personally, but I don’t want to see your face in the arrest.”
“Likewise. Ditto. All that mess.” The garage door is going down on us. “Hurry your ass up and get in there.”
16
I Troop Up the Steps
I TROOP UP the steps of the County Transit Line 22, say, “What’s happening?” to the morbid-eyed driver in her long-sleeved sweater with a brand new red-white-and-blue county authority patch sewed to the side of the shoulder, drop sixteen quarters into the slot, and after they’re all in the box the lady says, “That wasn’t necessary.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s called a gratuitous pleasantry.”
“No,” she says, giving the bus some gas so I have to catch myself on the handrail. “The money.”
“You people want more already?”
“Never heard of Spare the Air Day? All rides within Santa Clara County are free.”
I could ask for my quarters back or get her name to complain later to some phantom bureaucrat on a 1-800 number, but instead I let off a dismissive stream of air that sounds like a deflating tire—pssshhhh—and head down the middle aisle past paisas, Punjabis, Nigerians, Laotians, Guatemalans, Tongans; preachers, derelicts, dealers; cheap, just-starting-out or environmentally conscious businesspersons; septua- and octogenarians with disapproval grooved into their dead faces; pungent transients clutching black plastic bags packed with clothes and blankets and all kinds of recyclable material; signs that say STAND BACK FROM THE DOOR and NO SE PARE JUNTO A LA PUERTA and DING DUNG GAN CUA. I take it right to the rear corner, farthest from the carbon dioxide of my fellow public transportees. It’s hot outside, cool in the back of the bus.
Up Alum Rock we go in red-light green-light convulsions, the bus groaning past well-lit strip malls and 24-hour porn houses, over the concrete bridges and out the graffiti-war territory aka a city tunnel. At every intersection we’re being officially recorded, the cameras perched atop the swaying streetlights like solitary ravens looking down on a million burrowing earthworms. No one in this city dare pull a fast one on Big Daddy, or Big Brother, or Big Mama Earth, or whoever.
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