The World Doesn't Require You
Page 26
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Cultural Studies
Freedman’s University
x3725
Better a failed
Poet than a poet
—Roland Hudson“The Metamorphoses,” from The Firewater of Love
• • •
To: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Sent: April 3, 2017, 2:33 p.m.
From: Professor Akinsanya Samson, Lecturer—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Cc: Angela B. Watson,
Bcc:
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Class visit?
Reggie,
I have no idea what you’re going on about. You and I have a difference of opinion about the relative value of Roland Hudson’s work. (Un)fortunately, I don’t have time to debate you. I had indicated to you my reluctance to lecture on Hudson and sent Angela in my stead because she has a perspective that is much sharper than my own and, in addition, she is one of the most capable grad students I’ve ever worked with. If your perspective were so strong, you’d be much more tolerant of dissent.
And I will add that Angela is my teaching assistant and student, not a battlefield for us to wage war upon.
I would leave you with some words from Hudson, but his poems are too dumb even for this dumb conversation.
Kin Samson
Lecturer in Cross River Poetics
Department of English and Cultural Studies
Freedman’s University
x4427
• • •
To: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Sent: April 3, 2018, 4:44 p.m.
From: Angela B. Watson,
Cc: Professor Akinsanya Samson, Lecturer—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Bcc:
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Class visit?
Dear Dr. Chambers,
You didn’t introduce me to Hudson, but you helped me see him as you do, eyes aflame—you’re a great teacher! And yes, this caused me to read and read, and to disappear, and to search, and the more I looked for Hudson, the more I found Gertrude. You should see her, she’s beautiful. But I doubt you’ve ever seen her. Forgive me for responding to a message that wasn’t addressed to me, but Gertrude was silenced, so I will not allow myself to be silenced as well.
I’m surprised my lecture proved so traumatic to you. I’ve spoken to many of your students and your male students said it opened their ears, the women say it “gave them life.” I felt a oneness when I was up in front of your class. My body disappeared and I became a conduit, a node for some other world to speak through me. You ever felt that in front of a class? I know you have because you’ve told me about it. I believe all teachers have at one time or another. It’s rare. I hardly ever felt like that in front of my classes when I was adjuncting, sadly—it’s been years—but I felt it in front of yours and I can only thank you for that.
I didn’t close my eyes when I was in that zone up there before your students, but if I did I would have also seen a woman, not Mama Hudson, though I respect her challenges, which were likely considerable, but instead I’d have seen the poet Gertrude toiling away on poems that would later be buried in the river with Roland Hudson and his fantastical (I meant fanatical, but I’ll leave it) obsession. No pictures of her remain, so my Gertrude looks like me. All we have of Gertrude is a single published poem showing great promise (greater than Hudson, in my opinion), letters from contemporaries—prominent poets—offering praise, and we have Hudson’s delusional-ass book.
I too wanted to be a Hudson scholar, but I gave it up when I realized I’d rather be a Gertrude scholar. So when Ms. Montana emails to ask me questions, I answer with the same honesty I brought to your class.
Roland Hudson was essentially a misogynist with myth on his side and a tongue loosed by mental illness. Gertrude wasn’t a water-woman any more than I am, any more than you or Prof. Samson are elves or ghosts or werewolves. And therein, my friend, lies my lack of excitement for Hudson’s poetry. I, of course, maintain my love for our town and all things in it, and my lack of interest in Roland Hudson’s poetry can’t be construed—as you imply—as a repudiation of the genius found every day in the land of Riverbeat.
After all, I’m so Cross River it feels as if I’ve made it all up. Every inch of it. From the cracks on the sidewalks of Angela Street to the feet walking over those cracks to the stray dogs in the Wildlands being confused for wolves to every single ripple bobbing across the Cross River. I even created the sunlight sprinkled across those ripples when the sun sinks into the waters in the early evening. And the sun, I created that too.
As for you, our Professor of Loneliness. Madness is overtaking you. I can’t help, so please send me no more messages, notes, words, characters, or symbols. The wild-eye has embedded itself in your face.
Shut it.
Don’t dare look through it and
Breathe easy.
Angela Watson
Doctoral Student/Teaching Assistant/Adjunct Lecturer
10.
I had never seen such personal disarray in a human as I did in Dr. Chambers in the weeks following the Adjunct’s visit to his class; his clothes sat lopsidedly on him, wrinkled as if to say, Putting these clothes on my back is effort enough; ironing is a line I’ll never cross! And today he wore his shirt mostly untucked until I saw him before lunch and urged him to get himself together. We sat to eat in the cafeteria; this was some weeks after Chambers had read the Adjunct’s message. He was still rubbed raw from the sting of her lashes. He pointed a fork at me and said with a mouth full of rice, that bitch called me crazy! That’s what she said. She called me crazy. Students glanced over at us. I felt myself redden. He looked down to his plate and we settled into a silence both great and wonderful. I became torn between appreciating the quiet and wanting to take the edge off it a bit. All silences, even comfortable silences, are awkward. We are part of nature, so abhorring vacuums is our thing. I said to him the only thing I said to him these days: You publish that essay, they can’t laugh at you. Chambers sipped at his water. They’ll find a way, he said. You should see my classes now. The students are fucking animated. They’re talking to that bitch behind my back; I know they are. They’re asking questions and commenting about the book and shit. Writing about the damn book in their journals, bringing in outside sources. It’s fucking unnatural. He stopped to sip his water. I said: Isn’t this what you wanted? He watched me, incredulous. Yes, he said. But not like this. He whispered: Not like this. We settled back into our silences. I realized now that we were in separate floating bubbles and this was fine. In his, he taught and he brooded. His toxic air made the walls of the bubble grow thin, though. It would pop soon and I’d watch him free fall. In mine I floated, I meditated—cross-legged and deep-breathed—and I plotted.
11.
Dr. Reginald Chambers
Freedman’s University
English 101
Special Topics: Loneliness
Journal #4
PROMPT: Write about a time you looked in another’s eyes and saw your own loneliness reflected back.
Dr. Chambers Journal #4:
Vanessa Oya-Edmonds wasn’t unknown to me, I just knew her as Starburst. Starburst. Call me dim, but I never conceived that her name could be anything but Starburst.
This was during my time in the cold womb of upstate New York. What brought me to the doorstep of Sugar Daddy’s on Montgomery Street? Sitting alone in the dark of the club’s antiseptic air. Eyes searching the naked female flesh that swung about the stage and passed all around me. You don’t look into eyes here; inside every eye is an abyss.
I’d sit in the back and Starburst in her short-short, silvery thin
outfit would come by between stage and private dances, and talk to me as if I were something other than a customer, a john. We laughed about other patrons, about the rock music the DJ played while she took the stage and how she had a hard time finding her rhythm inside of it. We were one and the same, me and Starburst, the only persons in our respective workplaces with darker flesh. And she said she never felt more alone than the times she stood naked on that stage looking down upon a drunk patron as he tossed dollars at her feet crying something like, Do a nigger dance, nigger. That happens a lot? I asked. All the time, she replied matter-of-factly, blinking her big red eyes. We both chuckled, though I doubt either of us were sure what we were chuckling about. How different was I, dancing for the peanuts my employer tossed at my feet? My bosses held me up to their bosses as evidence, proof of the newspaper’s cosmopolitanism. How I danced for the opportunity to live paycheck to paycheck.
Before the night ended we’d disappear into the black guts of the club, where for twenty dollars she’d climb onto my lap and do a naked grind for two songs while my hands searched her skin.
I remember little of those dances for the most part—I often paid with a credit card, so Experian, TransUnion, all those guys, all these years later, they haven’t forgotten. I recall only that there was a warmth to her movements uncommon in other dancers; her moves were handcrafted rather than mass-produced; mom-and-pop store rather than Walmart.
Starburst wasn’t unknown to me outside the walls of Sugar Daddy’s either, no, we spoke on the phone sometimes. Our relationship was chaste, chaste, chaste, unalterably chaste. We smoked together and at times she’d smuggle small bags of marijuana into the club in the long neck of her thigh-high boots. Once we smoked in her car before a shift and into the silence I could see tears passing down her cheeks. I said nothing. I smoked and patted her back.
It wasn’t easy avoiding her eyes, they were big and bulbous, the whites tinged in maroon. She smoked far more than I did and slept far less, driving the hour from Syracuse to Binghamton late at night and in the early morning for this job.
Once, as we smoked, I asked Starburst what she thought about during lap dances: Nothing, she said. People think you’re thinking all these sexy thoughts, but most time I’m thinking nothing. Nothingness.
She straddled my lap now in the dark of the private dance stall. Her skin was smooth excepting the dusting of goose pimples strewn about her flesh. Excepting the C-section scar passing over her belly like a meteoroid streaking the sky. I made the mistake of looking into her eyes. I saw the nothingness and it looked emerald, much different than I imagined.
My breath quickened. My heart quickened. I no longer had a body, all I had, all I was, was breath and beating heart. The music sounded like one repetitive rhythmic vibration, as if a disc were caught on a skip: I- I- I- I-
I smelled the perfume of her. Heard her voice. She moaned. She said: Actually, this feels pretty good, actually. She moaned softly again.
There was then a banging on the walls. Mocking voices. Laughter. People invading our shared aloneness. I wanted them gone. I heard Starburst’s voice again, floating through the abyss: Stop, guys! The banging ceased and the laughter faded.
I buried my face in her stomach. I kissed her skin softly and wanted to put her breasts in my mouth one by one as if she had birthed me.
I was in the womb of space where the galaxy birthed itself and here it was happening all again—me, a galaxy of one all unto myself—the most important person who ever existed. Everyone else, I realized, they are also the most important person who ever existed. I floated, trying to locate myself in this dislocation. This is why we do anything, anything at all, read books, tell jokes, meditate, have sex—to get closer to this dislocation, to find a way to inhabit it, to be in this galaxy—
Starburst stopped moving and I was suddenly back in my own body. She leaned from me. That’s two songs. You want to keep it going? I said nothing, trying to get my bearings, what we commonly think of as reality suddenly invading the moment. Huh? she said, now irritated.
I thought about my budget, the credit card which was paying for this dance, my rent, my measly paycheck, and my shitty apartment. Sadly, I shook my head.
Starburst climbed from my lap and slipped her thong back on, slid her silvery dress over her head. She shook my hand and thanked me. I couldn’t move for a bit, thinking about life in that galaxy—that place of solitude—and how far from it I now was and always would be.
When I made it to the bar, I didn’t drink, instead I sat and ignored the nude and nearly nude saleswomen floating by me. I tried to cling to the feeling from several minutes ago, but time was already making it fade. I could go back to that galaxy with Starburst’s help, but there was no telling if she could conjure that one more time and, even if she could, for how long could it be sustained?
She did her rounds again, and I thought it best that I leave. Starburst, I called. Starburst! She didn’t turn. Again I called her name.
Oh, she said. I’m sorry. I’ve been doing this how long and I’m still waiting to hear Vanessa.
Vanessa?
Yeah, Vanessa Oya-Edmonds. The only thing my mama gave me that I won’t shake.
Huh? I said. I thought your name—
What? You thought my name was Starburst? Weird, Reggie.
What do you think that says about me, you know, in the larger picture?
You don’t want to know.
When I returned the following weekend, she wasn’t there. I got a dance from another woman, but it was robotic, lifeless—nothing like the star-stuff of Starburst. In fact, Starburst never came back to Sugar Daddy’s. Never returned my calls. The DJ, the other girls, if they knew where she was, they weren’t saying. She blew away, faded, exploded into a ball of light. Perhaps they have water-women in the Susquehanna River, the one that cuts through Binghamton, a mere trail of saliva in comparison to the Cross River. If they are in that river, their power is weak. I felt little sadness. I felt no desire to enter the Susquehanna and swim to the bottom looking for Vanessaburst. No, I felt a mild happiness that she had escaped. I imagined she was on to the better things she sometimes told me she would one day be on to.
But what if that wasn’t it at all? What if she had died, perhaps? What if she couldn’t keep those big maroon eyes open on a late-night drive up Interstate 81? Who would inform a stripper’s patrons, huh? I searched the newspapers for an obit, but I never found one. At some point I realized, and it hit me hard, that the galaxy of solitude I floated in during a Starburst dance was really just a galaxy of loneliness and I was permanently in the abyss.
I decided soon after that I would leave the cold prison of my Binghamtonian hell and return to Cross River.
Rebecca Montana
English 101.15
Freedman’s University
Special Topics: Loneliness
Dr. Chambers
Journal #4
Maybe I should put this in an email but it’s on my mind now and it fits the prompt so I’ll put it in the journal. I’ve been talking to a few of my classmates and they all agree, the vibe of the class has changed. You’ve changed.
You pace, you curse, you are short-tempered with us now. You speak at us all day long. There is not much room for dialogue, for alternative points of view. You’ve become a tyrant. This is not how u were previously. Don’t get me wrong, you’re still a good teacher and I’m still learning a lot, dr. Chambers, but it feels like the intensity of the class has been dialed up a notch. Even ur writings are becoming more unhinged. Again, Dr. Chambers, don’t get me wrong, the intensity and the boundary-pushing is a huge part of this course but perhaps its too much heat for some of us. I mean, solving the problem of loneliness? In 16 weeks? I didn’t think u meant it literally at the start of the semester. Now I’m sure (almost sure) that you do. Millions of years of evolutionary work has gone into making us, Dr. chambers. I’m afraid of what hour immenit failure will do to you. The loneliness, the isolation, the horror. None of us
want to be the cause of that in you.
This is almost the ten-minute mark, but I must go on. You say specificity is the essence of good writing so I must provide for you an example of what I’m talking about.
There was the thing with Eddie, the linebacker, the other day. I know Eddie looks like a mack truck, but he’s soft like the raspberry yogurt he’s always eating in class. No one ever gave a fuck about his mind. Most of his life its been, Hey Eddie, tackle that other large mammal. He was quiet all semester and then Angela blessed him the power to speak. I thought u said you don’t care about our opinions, just that we can express them intelligently? Wasn’t that what Eddie was doing when he raised his hand and said: “I feel like Roland Hudson use a lot of words to hide cruelty . . . I mean, he drowned himself under the Cross River and he drowned Gertrude under a bunch of words. Didn’t you say poetry was supposed to clarify? This book, like, obscures.”
You froze, death-stared him. “I’ve been writing poetry,” he said. “From Gertrude’s perspective like Angela suggested.”
Eddie read one and before he was finished you broke up into laughter. I watched the giant shrink.
“What have you ever done with your life besides crack the heads of your fellow large human beings and eat yogurt in my class?” you said. “Roland Hudson studied for years and years and years. Who told you it was your place to challenge him, huh?”
I couldn’t believe your question, Dr Chambers.
Who told Eddie it was his place to challenge Roland Hudson? YOU DID!!!! It’s implicit in the course. And when he does, you turn your mouth into a machine gun and cut him down!?!?
You didnt see Eddie’s tears after class. I watched his eyes in private, and yes, I saw my loneliness reflected back. It was human. We all looked in your eyes that day and saw something different, icier than the warmth I saw in Eddie’s eyes. It was isolation. Walls closing in on you. I hope you can see your way to apologizing. The Dr. chambers we met in January would never act this way. You told us about solitude and loneliness, but didn’t tell us about the third way of isolation you are walking Dr. Chambers, I hope you can come back because neither I, nor any of your students, want to walk that path with u.