If you are a necrophiliac, you know exactly what I mean.
They are irresistible. They shimmer with energy. In the chill air, they seem to form clouds of breath that take the shape of the possibility of true connection.
Children of the Corn
AFTER A DAY of travel—taxi to train, train to airport, two flights—I arrive at a small midwestern airport to spend a week at a small midwestern college as a Visiting Writer. It’s another three and a half hours from the airport to the town, late at night, in a howling, full-on blizzard. We creep along in a big boat of a car with no proper tires or chains. The snow is horizontal, blowing across the empty cornfields with nothing to get in its way. Sometimes it changes direction and aims straight at the windshield. My hostess slowly navigates over patches of deepening snow and ice.
I imagine us slaloming into a ditch, trapped upside down in the middle of nowhere, quickly buried by snow, our bodies turning to frozen tuna steaks. In the spring we will thaw and smell bad. Someone will throw us away. I wonder if my obituary will make the Times. If my friends will have found the homemade porn movies I made with a long-ago boyfriend and burned them, as I requested, before my daughter discovered them. If it’s too late to beg my hostess to turn around so I can make the long journey home and wake up tomorrow safe in my own bed, honorarium be damned. I would pray, if that was something I did; instead, I stare into the storm, willing my mind to stop saying, Fuck, fuck, oh fuck.
“Fuck, oh fuck,” my hostess says aloud, sounding more bemused than afraid, and my mind freezes over.
• • •
IN OUR ONE-ON-ONE consultations, to which each undergraduate student has brought two poems for critique, I tell all the girls—most of them are girls, except for one gay boy and another of indeterminate sexuality—that they will find their power through writing. One girl’s eyes fill with tears. Another goes ahead and starts weeping; it has all been too much, this talk of imagery and dangling modifiers, the difference between lay and lie and the suggestion that the boy and girl dancing like fairies at the sea’s edge, where the stars are smiling and dancing on the water, might not be her true material. I end our session by giving her a long hug. Pat, pat, pat. These are fucked-up, damaged little girls. They have built their shrines of pain, and I am saying, in the gentlest way possible, under the guise of discussing their poems: Smash those false gods! Open your wings and fly, my tender, trembling little birds—fly like fairies, like rainbowed butterflies! You are free! They blink at me with their sad, tormented eyes. I can’t move, you idiot, they seem to say. Don’t you see how overwhelming it all is?
And I want to tell them that, yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. I’ve had a chance to look around. You are stuck in this nowhere, economically depressed town, where the stench of pig factory farms wafts over rotted porches and caved-in barns. The roadsides are littered with smashed cats, with the corpses of skunks and deer. You’ve had a shitty public education, and you are completely unprepared to make your way in the world. After you graduate, the Walmart up the highway will likely swallow you after masticating you slowly. And you think you may want to be poets. God help you, my children.
• • •
AT A POTLUCK dinner at the dean’s house, one guest, clearly desperate to maneuver the conversation away from the usual turgid departmental shoptalk, launches into a story about a couple she used to know. The man, whose name was Jellybean, rode a Harley and had skull beads woven into his beard. The girlfriend had PROPERTY OF JELLYBEAN tattooed on her ass. The guest talks engagingly about the night she sat in the front seat of a car between the two of them, holding a frozen Butterball turkey on her lap, as Jellybean’s property proposed a three-way. You can tell she is a fiction writer and that these people and the turkey will end up in a story one day. Already I’ve made use of them, because I am also a writer, because this is what writers do. We are alert to the possibilities life sets before us. What potential in a man named Jellybean! When my hostess says, “Fuck my life!” in response to the fiction writer’s story, I am elated by her turn of phrase, scribbling notes on the inside of my brain for later use. “When we had our sexy time,” she says of an ex-boyfriend, and “He was such a cuckoopants.” I swoon with bliss.
My good humor is increasing by the minute. I was dreading this gig, as I dread most unknowns, especially if they involve a rural area of the country. And here I am having a wonderful time. Is there something wrong with me that I am enjoying this experience, so alien to my usual sophisticated city pleasures? For here there is no theater, no open café after sunset, and not a single decent restaurant. In the town square is a store that sells bridal dresses, the mannequin couple posed with a mannequin toddler, a blond, blue-eyed Aryan in a white tuxedo, holding a box displaying a diamond ring. In another store are rows of hideous prom dresses of a size that can only have been made for giant drag queens. There is a knitting store and a gift store with gaudy scarves and handbags and jewelry, and a store that sells only lightbulbs. They fill the entire display window. In the summers, my hostess tells me, there are also jars of honey.
• • •
I’M BEING PUT up for the week in a bed-and-breakfast, a lovely old Victorian. These places, despite their surface charm, are a horror to me. No privacy, no pay-per-view movies on TV. In the morning, around the communal table, there are strangers whom you must confront before dispelling the miasma of dreams with quantities of coffee. The B&B owner is a sixtyish German woman I’ll call Helga. One night, when I come in from dinner—the evening’s festivities here end around 8:00 p.m.—I find Helga in her beautifully appointed parlor with the leaded stained-glass windows, doing shots with her neighbors. She takes a long time to bring up the tea I ask for. Tonight, swacked out of her mind, she is charming, swaying barefoot before me with a tray of tea and cookies. Usually I am a little afraid of her. She has a harsh German voice and runs everything with the efficiency I associate with other, earlier Germans of an anti-Semitic bent. Usually I creep around, trying to escape her notice. Helga makes delicious breakfasts of quiche or eggs Benedict or eggs and bacon, always with a little dessert cup of yogurt with fresh blueberries, strawberries, and tiny pieces of pineapple atop toasted muesli. She serves muffins, and pastries with delicious icing. Out of fear, I eat everything she brings me.
• • •
FOR OTHER MEALS, in town or at someone’s house, I eat homemade chocolate cake, sweet potato and hominy tacos, guacamole, tamales, beans, a huge portion of fish and risotto, overdressed salad, chicken tortilla soup gooey with cheese. I wash down meals with margaritas, with ice water and Diet Pepsi, gallons of coffee and wine. Within a month of living here, I realize, I would double my hundred and ten pounds and embrace my inner obese, diabetic, alcoholic, middle-aged midwestern gal. She’s in her natural environment. I hear her voice, a soft whisper in my ear. Go forth and eat until you want to puke, she says, in a faintly German accent. And don’t you dare leave anything on your plate, you skinny little bitch.
• • •
WHEN I’M ON the road, I take pictures to text to my friends: a river view from a hotel room, a sculpture in a museum garden, a doe and her fawn nosing the wet grass of a field. I’m nearing the end of my visit and haven’t taken a single photo. Out walking in the bitter cold, I pass some folk art created out of the recent snowfall. A snowman stands in the bare yard of a small, weathered wood house, a red bucket set upside down on his head at a jaunty angle, a big Jack Daniels bottle jammed into his snow piehole. His rubber hose of an arm wraps around a snowwoman. Her rubber hose of a right arm reaches for his wooden chair leg of a penis; the other grabs her snow hoo-hah. She is missing a breast. Their eyes are marbles, and they are very blue. Click.
• • •
AT NIGHT THE TRAIN whistle sounds. The train will take you all the way to Chicago if you stay on it long enough. Some of the kids from here will end up there, but not many. The gay student I met is headed there as soon as he graduates. Get out! Run away! the whistle shrieks
. A bit after 2:00 a.m. it wakes me, in my second-floor bedroom with the red-striped curtain fringes and the view of some denuded, hopeless-looking trees. They do not look as though they have ever bloomed, or will again. This is the hour the kids stumble out from the bars in town, my hostess from the college has told me, crossing the train tracks to get home or back to the dorms. Every year, a couple of them don’t make it.
• • •
WHAT KIND OF life is this? What do people do way the hell out here, in an unincorporated community for which there is no Wikipedia entry, surrounded by limited cable, by country music and Christian talk radio and abandoned farmhouses? They eat and drink too much. They fall in love and marry. They fill empty storefronts with possible light, and with sweetness, and build snow people when they have a mind of winter. When young, they struggle to express themselves through poetry: self-expression, the awful thing whose name we dare not speak, what we who are writers have been taught, and teach, that poetry is not. “Art! Art!” cries the dog of poetry in its doggie bed of plush toys and Tugga-Wubba chews. But here, somewhere in the heart of the cornfields, is a chained dog in a yard of dirty snow, howling like a train whistle, full of longing for it knows not what. And for a brief time, while I’m in residence here, I am privileged to call its name.
Are You Insane?
I WAS TEACHING a day-long poetry workshop in my living room in Oakland. I think it was about metaphor. It would have been the usual stuff: Aristotle, Shelley’s apprehension of the relations of things, controlling conceit, metonymy versus synecdoche. Here’s a mnemonic: Call someone a douche bag and you’re using metonymy. Tell him he’s an asshole; that’s synecdoche.
Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in, Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with a single good brick.
One of my students was a twenty-something guy named Svend, whom I’d met briefly at a writers conference. He was in town from somewhere else and signed up while he was visiting. After the workshop, he wanted to know if I would join him and his friend for a drink.
“Ummm . . . sure,” I said. Ummm . . . to make it appear that I might have other plans on a Saturday night and was deciding whether to break them, but I didn’t have any plans except seeing what was on HBO and Showtime and drinking wine alone and crying, which were pretty much my usual plans whenever I didn’t have a boyfriend.
We went to Quinn’s Lighthouse Restaurant—Svend, his friend Zach, and I. Quinn’s is a laid-back spot on the waterfront in Alameda with an outdoor deck coated with peanut shells. Svend told me he had gone to the University of Montana, after which he’d moved to northern Idaho and then Alaska.
“Wow,” I said. “You were really looking for the frontier.”
We shelled peanuts from a red plastic basket and sat together through the late afternoon as the sun lowered itself gradually over the docks and the boats like a shining woman lowering herself into a very large, sparkling bathtub. Or maybe like a shooting star on heroin. Or maybe the sun was more of a golden quaalude, slipping down the darkening blue throat of the day.
At dusk Svend tired of whiskey and Cokes and ordered a bottle of champagne. In the way of poets everywhere, we earnestly discussed art and politics. The Herzog documentary Grizzly Man. The idiocy of our then-president, George Dubya Bush. Our favorite disaster scenarios involving oil, global warming, and nuclear annihilation. In the way of poets everywhere, we drank heavily. Then I suggested a bar I knew downtown, figuring I would leave Svend and Zach there to get further into their night.
The bar in question was closed, an iron gate across it. This was a clear sign, but having been drinking all afternoon, I had stopped being able to read the signs sometime before. The signs looked fuzzy as caterpillars or fake eyebrows. Immediately we headed down the street to Luka’s.
I had sworn off Luka’s one night shortly after my last breakup. I’d fallen on the slippery floor trying to dance with some guy who had insisted on walking me to my car, then tried to grab my breasts. I looked around for him now, though I had forgotten what he looked like. We passed through into a back room, music thudding beneath a mirror ball, spermy light motes traveling along the wall. The room was empty except for a couple snuggling on a banquette. I immediately hated them, as I hated all couples for having each other when I had no one. Beyond them was a room with a pool table, where I watched Zach and Svend play against two other guys.
“Hey, she’s famous,” Svend told them several times.
Writing students are sometimes given to such projections. Being a poet, I am famous, I guess, in the way that a dentist who invented a new method of cementing crowns might be—that is, I am known in my profession. Several other dentists might have heard of me. At a dental convention, they might come up to me and say, “Hey, I really like your work. Sealants, wow. I read your article in the American Dental Review.” Or maybe, honestly, I’m not all that respected in my profession. Maybe my fame is more like that of the junior high slut. Lots of people know my name and want to screw me, but nobody understands my beautiful, sensitive soul.
“How is she famous?” one of the pool players asked.
I ducked my head and said, “I’m not, really.” Then I told them that the three of us tracked grizzlies for a living.
“Oh yeah?” the guy said skeptically.
Trying to make it more plausible, I shrugged. “Well, we don’t really track them,” I said, revising on the fly. “We’re just the ones that tag them.”
It was not only bullshit, it was lame bullshit, and we all knew it. We were just a bunch of bored strangers getting drunk around a pool table, our imaginations as impoverished as our love lives. Eventually, Svend, Zach, and I walked out into a deserted Telegraph Avenue and crossed to our respective cars.
“So, goodnight,” I said to the boys.
“We need to find a motel,” Zach said.
“You’re not going back to the city?”
“Nope,” Zach said. “I think there was a Motel 6 down the Embarcadero.”
I remembered then that Zach had said he was staying in his truck in San Francisco. Maybe he was angling for a place to stay, but I needed to go home and sleep off all the champagne and peanuts so I could be ready to start the next day freshly alone and miserable about it.
At home I took a long shower and then crawled into bed. Pretty soon the phone rang.
“Hey,” Svend said, “we can’t find a hotel.”
I started feeling bad that I hadn’t invited them to spend the night at my place. They were young, they didn’t have any money, and Svend had picked up the tab for most of the evening. I was famous and had half a duplex to myself. I even had a sofa bed. “Want to crash here?” I said.
“We’re right outside,” Svend said.
“I’ll let you in.” I put my clothes back on to go unlock the gate for them.
I got them blankets and sheets and was about to open the sofa bed, but they wanted to sleep on the floor. That’s how young they were. Boys. They weren’t old enough to care where they slept. Once I had been like them, a girl pitching forward into the nearest place to sleep, often beside someone I would look at in the morning trying to remember his name. The boys were spreading out the blankets on my living room rug. I got a pillow, gave it to them, and went back to bed.
A few minutes later, Svend came in and lay down on top of the covers, next to me.
“Um,” I said.
He reached out an arm and slung it over my waist. I lay there for a minute, knowing I was going to tell him to get out of my bed. He was young—okay, too young. Was he even within shouting distance of thirty yet? His friend couldn’t have been much older than my daughter. It was perverted even to think of doing anything with him. He was kind of cute, too. He probably
didn’t know how old I was. Or didn’t care. How many whiskey and Cokes had he drunk? Still, I thought I deserved this much—a long moment with a man in my bed, even if he was a very young, very loaded man who had likely staggered into my bedroom from blind instinct, a starved grizzly wandering into a campsite. I could feel the youngness of him, the maleness, wash over me, and I bodysurfed the small wave that quickly flattened, taking me into shallow water, into the familiar, tar-fouled sand of celibacy.
“You need to get out of my bed,” I said to Svend.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to. And you’re drunk.”
“You’re drunk, too. You want to.”
“Nope. Go back to Zach.”
“Okay,” he said, and left.
A minute later he was back. Lying beside me again. Probably thinking, Do-over. Writing is rewriting.
“Svend,” I said.
“Are you offended?”
“No.” A boy his age had no idea. To get an idea, you had to be a woman who would go out with a couple of kids and spend the evening drinking with them as though she did this all the time, hanging out shooting pool and lying to strangers, spreading her blankets on the rug. Was I offended? No. I was just sorry. Sorry I was no longer interested in sharing a drunken fuck with someone I’d known for an evening. What had happened to my inner slut? Sometime in the last few years, she had shrunk down to nothing. Had I simply passed her through my urine like a kidney stone?
It appeared I was now too mature to get laid.
“Go get some sleep,” I said, and he obediently went away again.
Sometime in the early morning I heard him in my bathroom, puking.
When I woke up again, they were gone, the blankets neatly folded. They hadn’t even used the sheets. My answering machine light was blinking; I went over and listened to the message.
Bukowski in a Sundress Page 3