by Alan Davis
Someone had peppered him with rice and buckshot from a sawed-off shotgun. The aim had been awry, though, and most of the grains of rice didn’t even penetrate the skin. But his eyes were bandaged, and there could be some permanent damage. “I know it’s late, Lydia,” Bruce said, “but I want you here. There’s something weird with my karma. I need you.”
*
Lydia rocked on the porch in early light until Natasha arrived to take her to the airport. “A sawed-off shotgun, Lydia? I thought those creeps used Saturday-night specials.” She squeezed Lydia’s hand. “He sounds fine. A little trauma might do him some good, if you know what I mean. Cool him down, maybe. If you don’t watch color TV, you start to think the grass is black.” Lydia drummed her fingers on the leather seatcover of the BMW. She stared at the blue-white sparks of a rocking commuter train beside the highway. “You’re talking gibberish. Anyway, it’s the flying. All I can think about is that.”
“Well, don’t worry. Thousands of planes fly every day. O’Hare’s the busiest in the world.” An emergency van streaked past, lights flashing, horn bleeping. “Oh, great,” Lydia said. “Planes fly every day, right? So there’s no risk?” She put a cigarette back in its box and chewed her fingernail.
Natasha started talking about EST—Erhard Seminar Training. “Werner asks a really profound question. Suppose you were sent from the planet Mars to Earth to help everyone live better, and suppose you couldn’t go home until you succeeded. What would you do?”
At the airport, she stepped into a dream that didn’t end until she returned to Chicago. She tried to listen to her heartbeat above the roar of the engine. A baby cried behind her. Each pop song on the earphones took her three minutes closer to a safe landing. Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones, Don Ho. Each cigarette was part of a chain she could hold between her fingers. Coffin nails, holding the plane together as it tunneled into the light of morning. Up, down. Three minutes. She tried chanting, a trick Bruce practiced. I love my life, I love my life, I love my life. I love Robin, I love my mother. I love Bruce.
A three-minute country. The stewardess offered her coffee and juice, a chocolate doughnut. She refused with a tight plum of a smile. Reaching over might upset the equilibrium on some invisible level. Everything was going so well. At cruising altitude, there were brief calm moments, but a passage through turbulence forced all passengers to return to their seats and fasten their belts. “I’ve never had it this bad,” someone said. “Oh yeah?” a second passenger answered. “Once, the engine fell off on my way to Phoenix. They’re designed to do that, you know.” Lydia’s blood rushed from her veins to soft tissue where it didn’t belong. The plane was streaking above the clouds like a javelin or rocket that had only so much thrust before it descended, engines kaput. Cling to the music, she thought. Maintain composure. Besides, the other passengers, reading Forbes and Fortune, looked like advertisements for safe travel.
Everything moved in slow-motion, and backwards. The boy she left at the fraternity ball returned to ask her to dinner. She accepted. In the restaurant his face turned shiny like polished metal. “Your place or mine, babe? You owe me one,” he slurred. “More than three days without a piece, I go crazy.” She stalked away, still in slow-motion. On the plane, her face reddened with original anger. “How dare you!” she wanted to scream. Instead she returned to the tape. “Wear my lei to the luau, sweetheart/ While I strum out sweet love in your ears.”
3.
At last the plane found its landing pattern, thumped to the ground, and braked with a huge rush of wind. At the gate, Bruce’s friend Tom was waiting in a red windbreaker. “The Upper East and the Village are full of neurotics,” he said as they drove. “In the West it’s hip and holy.” Lydia locked her smile into place and watched their progress into the city, along the flank of the Hudson River. The one you smack is the one you keep. Memories, bits of music, phrases, the dancing dementos. Decompression, she thought, smoothing her skirt, clutching the shoulder-strap of her purse, her heart pacing the floor of her chest.
“You know, Lyd,” Bruce told her the night before he left, “you never really understand anything you say, do you?” She had stared at him, her eyes beginning to water with anger and hurt. “What do you mean? I’m blurting out my heart and you tell me I don’t mean what I say?” He dismissed her anger with a wave of his hand. “No, you’re not speaking from the heart.” It was his last item in a withering litany of accusations. “You never speak from the heart. You always speak from the nerves.” His remark gave her pause. “The heart isn’t a nerve?” “It’s a muscle. What happened, Lyd, you sleep through Biology 101?”
The heart a muscle! Imagine that. A muscle, beating in my chest.
Bruce was asleep in the hospital bed, so helpless with his eyes bandaged that he made her dizzy. She stroked the dark hairs on his head and bent for a kiss, reaching past the hospital’s antiseptic buzz. His distinctive spiciness tickled her nose like ginger beneath the odor of antiseptic and hospital sheets.
His fingers pressed into the small of her back. “I’m not really asleep!” he said. “In feet, I wrote a poem just now, in my head. ‘The blackbird/ has blue/ bruises’ What you think?” Her fingers trailed down his arm, then touched the tape, the patches of gauze on his eyes. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s like looking into nothing,” he said, fingers drumming the bedsheet. “I feel like I’m in a cage. Nothing is all I see.” He motioned for his glass of water. Lydia reached past the gifts on the bedside table: a nosegay, a pretty pastel card, bright Matisse cutouts, a bottle of soap bubbles. “My karma owed me something. It was out there, waiting. You read the news, watch the tube, sniff the air.” Lydia’s nerves were filling with frantic energy. “Robin says everyone has a three-minute attention span,” she said. “Cigarettes, songs, newspapers, attention spans. We’re in and out of everything.” “A shotgun blast,” he shrugged. “That’s not even three seconds.” He looked towards her as though he could see. “But better than a sucking chest wound in a firefight, huh? How’s Robin, by the way?”
“She’s …”
“The punk appeared out of nowhere. Fucking Dodge City. I screamed my banshee scream and went for the mace.” “That’s terrible,” Lydia said. “No, just different, Lyd. A test. You know, a test? The doors of perception are always open, we’ve just got to be receptive. Receptive, Lyd. Our minds aren’t located, the culture just makes us think so. We have to find etheric webs, power points, the seeds of an emerging world. After all, we create whatever’s around us.”
Her palms were sweating. “What about your graffiti, your murals? I thought that’s why you were here.”
“New York is fast, frantic, full of ancient wisdom. Ancient wisdom, Lyd, older than the sun. The Midwest can stifle our chakras. But here, I’m ageless and I’m also new. The dawn of a new age, great spiritual masters, a world teacher emerging. Can you understand that? I mean, we call him The Christ, here in the West, but he’s all of us, and he’s emerging, manifesting.”
She caressed the plaid folds of her skirt. “What if you had died?”
“Lyd, don’t take it so personal. Can’t you see what I’m saying?”
“I’m trying. Can’t you see I’m trying? What about your book? What about your family?”
Bruce slapped himself, as though waking up to the world’s absurdity. “Hey, babe, we don’t need sarcasm. That’s negative nihilism, which destroys cosmic energy, which is not only bad for the soul, but for the planet. Anyway, it’s the psychic bond that counts. I can’t understand graffiti unless I breathe the place that makes it happen. New York is graffiti.”
“Can’t things just stop?”
“That’s death, Lyd. Don’t feel bad. Put a rock in your shoe.”
“What?”
“Put a rock in your shoe.” He leaned forward, preaching with conviction. “When you’ve got a rock to worry about, that’s all you know. You forget the rest.”
“That’s a wonderful idea. Why don’t I slash my wrists? Why don’t I
put leeches on my back? Why don’t I stick a toothpick in my ear?”
“A toothpick wouldn’t help,” Bruce said. “You’re getting sarcastic again.” Bruce would come to her, unwilled, in other guises, but she knew she would always imagine him with a plank of sunlight laid across the hospital sheets, his head alert as though studying the room through white circles of gauze. He folded his hands together and brought the tips of his fingers to his mouth. “No arguing. Hey. Let’s not argue. Let’s just meditate. No separations, Lyd. No duality. Okay?”
She stayed in his small room uptown, memories stretched around her like a net—keepsakes, scraps of manuscript, snapshots of murals. One, labeled “the goddess Wisdom,” was almost classical, nothing like the geometric social realism of the WPA Depression murals in Chicago. A veiled Beaux-Arts woman with fat fingers held a pale pinkish globe of the world in her hands. Her eyes were heavy and she seemed to be in a trance.
*
“Funny thing,” said Natasha. “I was waiting, you know, I was watching myself waiting. Even here, trying to escape the comfort cycle. It was like, I was fighting to get free of nature and history, make myself over, know what I mean? Should I have a smoke? Yes, no. No, yes.” Lydia, pasty-faced, bloated, pointed to an escalator in the airport lobby. “Let’s get my bag,” she said. The plane had been as hot and stuffy as an oven, the turbulence intolerable.
On the highway, Natasha sat on her horn to force a slow-moving truck into another lane. “Well,” Natasha said. “Long-term commitments are worth the trouble, but not the boredom. That’s it, in a nutshell. Don’t you realize how much boredom a long commitment absorbs? I saw a statistic somewhere, and it was gruesome. The arguments aren’t bad, they give a rush, clean out your system. It’s the dead spots that kill.” She squeezed Lydia’s knee. “Hey, if it don’t work, fix it. If it can’t be fixed, throw it away. Life is too short for grief. Lawyer, shrink, voodoo man, whatever works.” She angled onto the exit ramp. “Go with the flow.”
Whatever works. Go with the flow. Lydia shrugged.
“Let’s have lunch, Lydia. Let’s have lunch at a New Age restaurant I’ve heard about.” Lydia thought: go with the flow. “New Age, huh?” Natasha sounded full of something new, something a little wild. “You know, new age, new experiences. New Age music, New Age crystals, New Age food. All that good stuff. It’s good to try everything these days, even in Chicago where so many people are pigs. So many experiences out there.”
“Why?” Lydia asked, truly curious at last. “Why is it good to try everything?” There’s not really any way home anymore, she thought, but that’s where I’m going. Not the same place, though. She wanted a good cry.
“That’s an odd question,” Natasha finally said. “I mean, I didn’t expect to have to explain. But I guess it’s just nice to rest your being in new experiences. You know, let yourself be taken, um, wherever.”
*
“Lydia,” Robin said, “how do we forget things?”
Lydia rdn her finger along the rough grain of the porch swing. “You mean like raking leaves?”
“Pay attention, Lydia. How do we forget things?” Robin spit on her watercolor brush and rubbed it dry on a sheet of old newspaper.
“All right. Actually, we don’t forget anything. It’s just that lots of things get buried and we can’t remember them.”
“Oh.” She locked the brush in her tin of paints and closed her sketch pad. “Well, I’m going inside to see what Claire figured out to do. She said she’d take me on an adventure today.”
“Why did you ask?”
She crushed the newspaper into a ball. “I knew you’d want to know, Lydia.” She squeezed the ball of paper and tossed it to her mother. “Anyway, now that I’ve figured out how to paint the things I miss, I was wondering how to paint the things I forget.”
“So what did you do? Leave the page blank? Cover it with thick lines?” Robin giggled and wandered inside. There it is, the whole kit and caboodle, Lydia thought. She pushed herself backwards far enough to get the swing going. Upstairs she heard a medley of Beatles songs on Robin’s cassette player. One of the Beatles belted out “Yellow Submarine” in a beer-hall baritone. Lydia was tempted to let herself drift into the past, to those days when she and Bruce sang along to such ditties. Instead, she reeled forward, then back, then forward again, and for a moment stopped thinking, swung without a care in the world. Then she wondered, staring at the trunk of a large oak, how it might feel to live the rest of her life in a forest.
WORLD POETRY SLAM
Jane Jefferson entered The Black Factory, the bar hosting the Slam, in a white cotton turtleneck, white pants, and a pair of white jogging shoes. The drinkers gave her a round of applause.—Listening to you, baby, is better than good sex, someone yelled. Hear, hear, Peter Draper thought, wondering how he might judge the match without letting his emotions come into play. Jefferson could move in a snap from an anti-establishment jazz rap into a slowdance love croon that whispered in the eaves.
Then Kafka walked in and the temperature rose a few degrees. Kafka is a big man who’s lifted his share of weights and lived through a bevy of cold alley fights, who’s cracked a few heads (mostly before he climbed onto the AA twelve-step wagon, before he found that tattered crucial paperback of beat poetry), who’s had his own noggin raked across the sidewalk a few times. Dressed in black T-shirt, black corduroys, and old black sneakers, he made his way to the bar. A pre-fight hush descended on the room. Only the clink of a glass or a muffled conversation survived the babble of a moment before. Wherever he stood, leaning against the bar with a ginger ale or huddling forward, good ear tilted to the speaking voice, he looked ready to stagger his listener with a one-two punch, first a portrait of an alkie, evicted from his room so the owner could rehab, then an elegy to a friend lost in the high mountain sierras or Cleveland, he wasn’t sure which.
They both wanted Draper as a judge. He didn’t know why, maybe because he had that look, like a young Kerouac after a binge. That night, he wore a green eyeshade. He had worked once in a telegraph office, he knew the cost of words. Working with words, working with money, what difference? Waste was easy, either way. Attention must be paid, to the lilt of syllables, the clink of coins, the clock different from the one that told the time of day.
A knockout was possible but unlikely. It happened often enough in the Slam’s early days, but Kafka and Jefferson were pros, the reformed drunk with the will of a successful politician, the challenger with the voice of a songbird who knew the streets like the tattoo of a robin’s egg on her wrist, who chanted an audience into a happiness so complete they floated from their chairs. Love medicine. Draper himself went against her once, when the Slam was new—no cameras, no lights, no coverage on the 10 o’clock news, only a smoky near-empty bar with old Life magazines decoupaged and lacquered to the walls. Waltzing around the stage, Jane put him away in the first, rapping out rage at “whiskey sister heaven/ slowdancing in the nude,” then seducing the drunks with a rhapsody about “sweetbaby bobby.” Draper tried to slink away after the knockout, but she and Kafka sat him down for a beer and taught him the ropes. He had to forget everything before he could stay in the ring for long with a slammer.
The three judges sat in folding chairs at a sawhorse table near the stage. Besides Draper, there was a thick-chested industrial technician with a zigzag scar on his right cheek, and a stubby German woman in training to be a French chef. With felt-tip pens and notepads, they could give a poet anywhere from one to ten. Ten rounds, a winner each round, with 150 people in a space for 50. MTV was there, a kleig light turned The Black Factory into a funhouse of shadows. The director pushed aside chipped wooden tables to make room for Kafka, known for backstepping across the small plyboard stage into the crowd of drunks, drifters, and night poets. They worked the loading docks, assembled steel filing cabinets by day, wrote poems in their heads to the rhyme and meter of the assembly lines. Tuesday nights, they came to the Slam, jabbed, feinted, went for the knockout with
stanzas scrawled on invoices, chants written on bar napkins.
Kafka took the stage first to a silent chorus of raised fists. —Everything is rhythm, he told Draper after the young poet’s first-round knockout, and now he proved it. “Stay away from the goddamn/ neighborhood/ You punk!/ Listen to the gurgle of a carburetor,/ a tailpipe tongued into your ear!” The sweat sluiced from his receding hairline into creases above his eyebrows. He stalked the stage, hands gripping a baseball bat in pantomime. Draper felt like he was pumping a stationary bicycle just to keep up, even though it was over quick, Draper snapping awake as though from a nap on the afternoon bus, the hoots and whistles making clear who had the first round.
Jane took a final toke from the hand-rolled business she was smoking. “I am Jane Jefferson.” Her words pulsated with erotic monkey-shines. “I am Jane Jefferson/ and this is/ the poem/ you don’t read/ aloud/ is the one/ about your dog/ and his exquisite bone/ a bone/ that melts/ in the steam bath/ the soft pelting of steam/ the hair around the bone/ it’s/ guaranteed.” Draper had to doodle with his pen to recover from the way she stoked each syllable, but finally the big man’s dementia carried things, especially with the help of the young chef, who gave him an eight and a half.
Draper had the feeling that Jane was only sparring, though, feeling out her man, getting his number. Sure enough, she hugged Kafka and scatted to the stage. Draper couldn’t make sense of her words, a chant foreign to his ears, he only listened, enraptured, to her seductive fingertip voice. She stopped in the middle of a phrase. The silence was all the more audible. He had trouble coming back to the world. Even the young chef rubbed her eyes. Kafka strode across the spongy plyboard and tried to punch away the trance. “On the comer of/ Colfax and Montaigne/ I see a zero in a coat and tie/ He’s singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’!” Still some zap, still rope-a-dope, still the zingers, but Jane won hands down.