Peacocks

When it’s done right, the third movement
of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3 rocks harder
than nearly anything else in music, except
perhaps Raw Power by the Stooges.

You can’t look this up anywhere, and no one will tell you this
but me.

Now listen.

We know the empire is corrupt and we’re pretty sure
they put a man on the moon, and I know
that these days of distrust give me pause
and give me gas, that less-than-exquisite feeling
of regret,
in which case why should I bother describing these sounds?

Hearing music is sometimes like dancing
out of one’s tight pants and into someone else’s tight pants.

A woman in her evening gown who pulls a bow across taught
strings belongs with a half-dressed man rolling around on broken glass.

When they first got together they just went
ahead and did things.

One of them didn’t like to dance, but that’s how you grow.

It’s like when a peacock flashes its feathers and you look right there,
like you’re looking at someone’s ass.

With your lips slightly apart, your index finger moves like a snake charmed
to meet
your chin, which you point downward as if
to say, “Thanks,
I know.”

-Jose Padua

America: a Pornographic Film by Glenn Beck

White people have won the world
for everyone. The dog wags its tail
on the clean lawn under the American sun.
White culture has won the world

for everyone. A truck moves down
the highway at 80 miles per hour. Christianity
has won the world and everyone else is
dead. We converted those we could and

those we couldn’t were pumped full of lead.
Their bodies rot in the sun as we smile, plant
a flower, and eat the world’s biggest
hamburgers under American power.

Five years ago, in New York City, there was
a dark place called Harlem. Out west in California
there was a yellow place called Chinatown. In
Washington DC there was another dark place

across the river called Anacostia. All across
America the colors were drifting from town to town.
In Asia there was a place called India where
it was too hot, and next to that a place called China

that was too Chinese, and a place called
the Philippines where they were obscenely
philippine and Africa which was always
too African when we were obviously not.

We worked hard and we prayed, bonding
brick to mortar, we were not in Asia, we
were not in Africa, we were in America
in North America. We mowed our lawns

to a uniform green shine, we mowed our
healthy minds, we played our games the right
way then we sealed our borders. We sat
on our decks, fell asleep with beers in our

hands, and we were proud and when
we spoke we were loud, and we shunned
the dark views that lay in the terrible shade
of the cities, and we listened to the right news

because we were Americans in America not
in Africa. When beggars came asking
for money we asked them for their papers
and when they showed us no papers we kicked

them between the thighs, we beat them
with bats until they started bleeding
from the eyes, until they learned that without
hard work they were being left behind.

And the sun shone on our white power
and on our beautiful flowers, and we
laughed as the sun shined hour after
glorious hour and we held our heads

high for our battle with the government
state, and we grabbed our guns and
declared God is great, God is great.
We shot people who knocked

on our doors—they were slain, put
to rest. Then we travelled over oceans
to their homes and strapped bombs
to our chests. They didn’t believe in Christ

so they couldn’t be saved, they deserved
to die. It was time for them to go, say farewell
to their evil ways. Goodbye, devil, goodbye.
We were butterflies become death bombers

like pale, weightless saints, and we rose
to the sky where angels were our pilots,
to the glittering heavens above. We are
like he machines that make what the world

wants to take, but we keep everything human
through our violent acts of love. And now it’s
time to spread the heavens to taste the succulent
virgin taste. Baby, I’ve drained the color

from your cheeks, I’m onto you like glue.
Baby, baby, what you wanted to do to me
I’m now doing to you. Baby, baby, this is my plane
and I’m doing it because America is great.

-Jose Padua

This Is What Happens

Why should I feel guilty
about the pile of semicolons

on the concrete floor? Yes,
I summarily deleted all the

tedious acronyms, mixed
in several instances of the

so-called passive voice,
added the word fuck just

for you to see and what’s
more changed it all from

third to second person.
Yeah, how do you feel about

that? Does it make you want
to give everything the fuck

up? This message is being
given to you by me. If I were

putting it in an envelope
I would seal it with a drop

of melted red wax. This is
what happens when poets

attack.

-Jose Padua

What’s Going On?

Why does the world seem to slow

down whenever I hear “What’s Going On”?
How can I describe the bass line?

How can I express what Marvin Gaye’s voice does in this song?
I can’t—and if I were to try

I’d be an asshole.
That, however, hasn’t stopped

a lot of you from trying.
What, indeed, is the deal with that?

Do you really think you’re going to add anything
to the appreciation of this great song? Finally,

does my not trying make me
less of an asshole than

you? Probably
not.

-Jose Padua

Rush Limbaugh

When I’m in need of a dinosaur my tendency
is to turn on the TV and flip the stations until
I find one where an episode of The Flintstones
is playing, then I wait until a scene with Dino
comes on and I laugh and I feel all right again.
Sometimes I get what I want, and sometimes
I don’t, and I think that’s a good thing except
when there’s something I really want that I can’t
get by turning on the TV and waiting. Usually
it’s not a thing that I want or an object but
a situation, a thought that I’m missing or an
idea that won’t go away no matter where I go
or how often I say the words I’m OK or these
trees are pretty or go shove it up your ass.
I think the world is a beautiful place sometimes
but I also like to think about it not being there
or me not being here and wonder what existence
would be like if the world was not solipsistic but
its opposite, and the only things that exist are the
things other people think of. How awful that would
be, and why did my mind create such a horrible
place, where someone else has to tell you that you’re
alive, that these trees are green, and that your ass is
a repository for solid objects? Dino, you are a dinosaur in a
cartoon, but would you be offended if I told you
that you are more dog than dinosaur, that your behavior
is more like that of those modern domesticated animals
we call our pets or, if you’re strange, our companion
animals? You know, someone once told me that in
German the words Rush Limbaugh mean either
open my anal cavity, Leonard or stretch my nipples
to infinity or I love these drugs more than I love America.
He wasn’t quite sure, but I believed him. I had no reason not to.

-Jose Padua

Complete Failure

I wonder how different

things would have been,

if instead of calling the first

track on Electric Ladyland,

“And the Gods Made Love,”

Jimi Hendrix had called it,

“And the Dogs Made Love.”

Would I have dropped out

of school and washed cars

for the rest of my life?

Would man never have

set foot on the moon?

It makes me worry, some-

times, about the names

I give to things, and the

titles I give my poems.

If only I’d called that poem

from twenty years ago

“The Complete Failure

of Your Ass,” maybe

I’d be famous by now.

Maybe you’d be famous, too.

-Jose Padua

Ode to the Confederate Flag

Let it fly freely over all the white pimp motherfuckers
in Alabama and all the NASCAR
dads in Tennessee

who smile their big ugly smiles whenever I get screwed
over or fucked over or lost
or just fall to the floor

on my face. Let its pale noise flutter in the background
behind the skinhead bombast
that lurks in the shadows

of the vacant stares of the asshole frat boys with their
rebel hats and pickup trucks
with gun racks and

their nose hairs full of Texas beer foam and their balls full
of evil half-wit sperm. Let it shelter
the shirtless men who

walk down the street with their heads full of meth and their
minds full of the glory of
American made cars.

Let it soak up the rain on a bitter grey Sunday in Virginia
when the fundamentalist
megachurch lets out with

the leaden chatter of everyday lives and heads held up high
in service to a spoiled brat
vision of a tyrant

god and let me shine. Let me let you shine, as you burn.
Let me shine, let me shine
as you burn.

-Jose Padua

Part 1: NYDC BLUES: How I Tried To Escape The Sick World Of Poetry

The rules were that you had to give your name and occupation before reciting your first poem. Naturally, I tried to evade this unnecessary formality which to me seemed akin to a rooftop sniper announcing his name and address before firing upon the crowd below. But before I could begin they started yelling, “What’s your name?”

I looked around the room. It was jammed full of people.

“José,” I answered with some difficulty.

“What do you do?” they shouted.

That was a even tougher question. I didn’t have a job, and for me to declare that I was a writer at this point would be presumptuous on my part. I thought about it for a second, then said, “I’m an alcoholic. What the hell are you?”

I hadn’t had a drink in weeks, but here I was—shitfaced and hostile, staring out into a crowd of poetry addicts at some place in Washington called The 15 Minutes Club. I’d fallen off the wagon in a horrible way, but it wasn’t because I was drinking. It was because I was reading poetry.

“This first poem is called ‘A Short History Of Everyone In The World,’” I said, and then began to read:

         “On the train going
         back to my home town
         people are laughing at the
         drunk who’s making fun
         of the bald spot on a guy
         a few rows up.
         Across the aisle from me
         a deaf man is making garbled passes
         at all the women walking by
         on the way to the club car.
         Next to me a girl
         with a silly haircut
         is drinking a beer and
         talking to everyone in sight
         between drags of her cigarette.
         It’s one of those
         holiday weekend party trains
         where everyone’s celebrating
         and ready to tell their life story...”

The poem was about a train ride I’d taken from New York to Washington, my hometown. I’d left Washington about three years earlier, when George Bush was still president, to explore the possibilities in New York. But now—with the Democrats back in charge—I was living in Washington again, and to my chagrin things didn’t seem all that different from what I remembered of the days of the Republican occupation. In this state of disillusionment, my only recourse was to drink heavily like the guy in my poem.

         “The drunk guy is going
         to Richmond where he’ll find a bar
         and drink some more.
         The haircut girl is going
         to Philadelphia—she plans
         on becoming a hairdresser.
         The guy with the bald spot
         has just gotten out of prison
         and he’s trying to stay
         calm and out of trouble.
         The deaf guy is just horny
         and doesn’t bother to read
         the lips of the women
         who tell him to fuck off...”

I looked up from my poem and out into the crowd again. They were silent, hanging onto to my every word. I had them, as they say, in the palm of my hand—which meant that I hadn’t lost my touch for winning over a crowd. I looked back down to my poem and continued reading, feeling like some desperate junkie rolling drunks on the downtown A-Train.

         “When the haircut girl
         asks me for my story
         I tell her,
         ‘I saved up my money
         to buy this train ticket
         so I could visit home
         and get there comfortably.
         I cut my spending in half
         by eating my own shit.
         Why I’ve been living off
         the same macaroni and cheese
         dinner for two months now.’

         ‘Oh,’ she says, startled, grimacing.

         `Excuse me,’ I say, `I have
         to go to the bathroom now.’

         When I stand up
         everyone’s quiet,
         and I know that when
         I get back to my seat
         I’ll be able to just relax
         and sleep.
         No stories, no loud laughter,
         no more rude comments,
         snide remarks, or subtle innuendos.
         I’d put an end to that
         because I’d just said all
         there was in the world
         to be said.”

When the crowd began to cheer I immediately walked off the stage.

“You have to stay up there,” the emcee told me, pointing to a chair at the back of the stage. “You’re supposed to read three poems in each round.”

“I’m just getting my drink,” I said.

I reached to the bar and grabbed my glass of Jack Daniel’s, then walked back to the stage while the poet I was up against began reading his first poem. I sat down and stared at my drink before taking an endless sip... And then another until nothing was left but the barely melted ice cubes. I’d need quite a few more drinks before the night was through, because I was doing a poetry slam, and because from the way things were going it seemed more than likely that I was going to win. I leaned back and nervously chewed on an ice cube, knowing that in my wretched heart I was a long way from Mayberry.


The Wonder Years

Ever since I can remember I wanted to be a poet, and in the early 80s I began sending my poems out to magazines in the hopes of making the transition from being a simple poet to being a published poet. As is the case with most writers of any sort, I had no luck at first. I’d send out batches of poems and then receive a little note two, three, sometimes six months later, saying “Thanks for allowing us to read your poems. We are sorry to report, however, that they didn’t quite work for us.” I’d been warned about this in college where a teacher advised me that I had better be prepared to plaster my walls with rejection slips, because the process of becoming a published writer could take years and years, and that I might even be dead before anyone saw my work as being fit to publish.

Fortunately it didn’t take quite that long, and in 1985 I had my first poem accepted for publication in a literary magazine all the way across the country in Berkeley, California. Finally, one year later, the magazine came out. By then, of course, I didn’t much care for the poem, and seeing it again was something akin to seeing your worst enemy from high school bagging groceries at the supermarket. Which is to say that although it was a triumph of sorts, it was also, because of the amount of time it took, a rather pathetic triumph. I needed a way to get my work out there quickly while it was still fresh in my mind. I needed a way to see my poems into print immediately so that I could move on to newer work and not have to worry about the fate of my past work. The best way to do this, it seemed, was to start a magazine.

In the fall of 1986 I—along with two of my friends from Catholic University in Washington, Michael Randall and Stephen Ciacciarelli—began working on the first issue of Big Cigars. What we wanted was to publish a magazine that was anti-academic, something that would disgust our old professors and make them think that they had wasted all the effort they put into providing us with a classical education. We liked people like Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, writers the academic establishment tended to sneer at. And in our magazine, Big Cigars, we wanted to publish our own work as well as work by other writers with a similar outlook on literature. As Michael and Stephen had moved to New York after college, while I was still in Washington, it seemed that we would have two different cities from which to attract writers for the magazine. But that wasn’t the case.

Here in Washington it was impossible to get anyone interested in contributing. One writer I met at a reading, on my asking if he would like to contribute some poems, replied, “Why do you want to publish me?” as if I’d just asked him if I could punch his creepy little face in.

“Well, your stuff is pretty good,” I answered. I had just heard him read, and unlike most of the other poets at this event—he didn’t name all the different kinds of plants he knew or go on about the youthful summers he spent vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard.

“Well, I’ll have to think about it,” he said, before walking off like Captain Kirk after having just destroyed a Klingon warship.

That was as close as I got to getting any Washington writers in the magazine.

Since we weren’t able to attract any of the local crowd for the magazine, we ended up featuring a good number of people from New York. Still, as I was publishing the magazine here in Washington, and as the address for submissions was also here, Big Cigars was for all practical purposes a Washington magazine. But despite this, local bookstores and newsstands declined to carry it. A typical response—as from the manager of Idle Times bookstore in Adams Morgan—was, “We don’t carry that esoteric kind of stuff.” So I’d send the bulk of the copies of Big Cigars to New York. Up there places like St. Marks Books, Spring Street Books, and Coliseum Books would accept huge batches of them which would sell out in a matter of weeks. For a small literary magazine that was very good business, and it soon became apparent that the atmosphere in New York was much better for the sort of things we were doing with Big Cigars.

I began going up to New York several times a year for readings Michael or Stephen had set up. These were always well attended and unpretentious events. I was surprised that few of the writers I met in New York displayed the kind of attitude I found in Washington, where even the most obscure poet would come on with all the neuroses of an Edgar Allan Poe while displaying none of the talent. But in addition to this I also found that, overall, New York was a much more pleasant place to be than Washington, and that, oddly enough, life was much easier there.

So it was with a sense of relief, rather than trepidation, that in the fall of 1990 I made the big move from Washington to New York City. In New York I got more involved in the poetry scene and actually began to make money from my writing. New York was where I first got the idea that I might even make a living from my writing. It was where I did my first poetry slam. It was where I began to get my work published regularly. It was where I first appeared on national television. It was where I fell truly in love for the first time. It was where for the first time in my life I felt I was in a city where I belonged. It was also where, after having cast off the last vestiges of my youthful insanity, I vowed to give up poetry completely.

Part 2: Drunk and Disorderly—The Birth of the Spoken Word Demon

I’d been back in Washington for a month when, standing by the magazine racks at Tower Records, I spotted someone I knew on the cover of High Times. It was Maggie Estep, a writer in New York who didn’t drink, smoke pot, or take acid, and whose only remaining connection to drugs, however tenuous, was her passion for poppy seed bagels. Well, that and caffeine, which was hardly enough reason for High Times to put her on the cover of their magazine. I stared at Maggie’s picture and, for one brief moment, considered dropping her a line to find out how she was doing and, specifically, if she’d fallen off the wagon and was now boozing it up and smoking gigantic spliffs like a rebellious suburban teenager. But, as I was suffering from writer’s block at the time, even the crafting of a simple letter of inquiry was beyond me. So instead I picked High Times off the rack and browsed through it in an attempt to discover just why she was on the cover.

As it turned out there was a story inside on the poetry scene in New York. Maggie was one of the big names in that scene and had been one of the featured readers when MTV presented a poetry reading as part of their Unplugged series. I had thought the article would be about what Maggie and other New York writers did to get high, and whether or not they wrote while they were high. But after scanning the article I saw nothing at all about drugs. It soon became apparent that the reason Maggie was on the cover of this particular magazine was that poetry, after having disappeared from the public eye when the beatnik era ended, was now considered “cool” again.

But while Maggie was still writing poetry I had given it up—as had a lot of other writers I knew—because along with its new found popularity came a lot of ugliness. Though at first it was nice to have a larger audience for our work, it was soon clear that most of that audience was there for all the wrong reasons.

Before the media attention one of the truly “cool” things about the poetry scene—when I was gainfully employed, anyway—was that it was far removed from the world of commerce, and as such contrasted very well with the art world where the big news was never how good a painting was but how much it sold for. And what turned poetry into something that could sell was the birth of a horrible beast called The Poetry Slam, which transformed poetry readings from a presentation of an art form and into a gruesome competition among fragile egos.

At first the Slam was a joke. The winner was paid six dollars, which made it something of an offshoot of the $1.98 Beauty Pageant; it was something for drunken writers to do on a boring Friday night after spending the rest of the week alone at the typewriter. I did one myself soon after I’d arrived in New York, going up against Carl Watson, a friend of mine who—and I’m trying to be objective here—is probably the most talented writer in New York. What we remember most about the evening is not who won, but that afterwards we went out and drank to even greater excesses than we had in the hours leading up to the Slam. That and walking out on a ridiculously steep bar tab. (In New York it’s become something of a tradition to walk away when the damage done at a bar is just too much to deal with in a drunken state of mind. Bartenders don’t mind up there; they know that if you’re a real drinker—and if you run a bar tab up over the two hundred dollar mark, you obviously are a real drinker—then you’ll be back when the next paycheck comes in to settle your accounts. Whereas in Washington they’ll chase you all the way out to P.G. County. No one seems to trust anyone else here.)

Carl and I being for the most part—and despite our drinking habits—fairly sane people, starting avoiding the poetry slam scene, the major venue of which was a place in the East Village called The Nuyorican Poets’ Café. The Café, though at first a pleasant and unpretentious place to go to on a Friday night, had become unbearably “hip.” People began going there not because “cool” things were going on but because it was a “cool” place to be. It had become to poetry what CBGB’s was to music: a place where some good things had happened early on, but which gave way to the simple fostering of an image—an image, however empty, of innovation and sophistication which, most importantly, could be sold to the media. It was a classic example of the triumph of style over substance.

Needless to say, a good number of people ate it up, including a lot of people who saw themselves as writers. They began to see the poetry slam as serious business and went about rehearsing, trying to improve their delivery and developing strategies on the best way to win. It wasn’t long before the thing that was most important to these people was not the poem itself, but its performance, thus bringing about an obnoxious proliferation of people who would either scream and yell their way through their horribly written poems, or else attempt to act them out like first year drama students.

To them the slam was a way of becoming a star in the growing poetry scene. To me, however, this was just about the most pathetic ambition imaginable for anyone who considered himself a writer, and after that first slam I never ventured to do another. I took to heart the advice of Max Blagg, the poet who did a commercial for The Gap which got heavy airplay for several months. He told me at a reading, for which we were getting well paid, “Don’t bother with this bloody nonsense unless there’s decent money involved.” He was echoing Samuel Johnson’s statement, made some two hundred years ago, that “no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” So I stopped doing readings unless it was for an event arranged by friends of mine—in which case I knew it would be an enjoyable evening. Or if I was getting paid.


The Washington Bodysnatchers v. the Unbearable Beatniks of New York

I had been going back to visit Washington regularly while I was living in New York. It didn’t seem at all like the same place where I grew up, a place where people would fuck with you for reasons out of some pulp western—reasons like “this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, pilgrim,” or “you crossed my line of vision, motherfucker.” In New York people accept it that there just isn’t enough space; they’re used to being crowded in like fish in a tin can. Washington, however, still has some of the frontier mentality that there’s territory to be had—and that you’ve got to fight to get your share. It’s like “Barter Town” from the Mad Max movies—that horrible hellhole where people are simple commodities and a person’s “soul” was merely a bizarre expression introduced by some peace loving cult leader—the sort of mild mannered svengali who would bid you to “turn the other cheek” and who, while nailed to the crucifixion tree, would lament, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Although I’m not at all a religious person, I’d always looked at Washington, my hometown, as being a kind of “pagan place,” where the supreme being was a golden calf: a place which, to bring us up to more recent times, was bypassed by the idealism of the sixties. Because while sixties era Washingtonians did deck themselves in love beads, then smoke pot or drop acid before heading down to Georgetown, their major concern was still making it big with the almighty dollar. Washington’s hippies, save for a few sincere misfits, were weekend hippies, and as such were seduced not by the substance of these radical times, but by the style. As for the substance Washingtonians went for—well again, that was something from out of the wild west. Which is to say that the only thing Washingtonians believed in then—as well as now—was that two headed dog of money and sex. And with this in mind one would have to consider it a kind of pre-twelve step denial to try to refute, as did some residents a few years ago, that the initials “D.C.” could appropriately be said to stand for “Dodge City.”

But Washington, during my periodic escapes from New York, didn’t seem at all like a “Dodge City” or a “Barter Town.” I suppose my being here on what were essentially vacations had a lot to do with this false impression—that and dumb luck as my visits never coincided with things like the riot in Mt. Pleasant or the situation in Adams Morgan when that disgruntled security guard was shooting people from his car. Furthermore, it was during my trips to Washington when things would go crazy in New York: I missed the last of the Tompkins Square riots, the subway crash caused by a drunken train operator, and then, just this past fall, the mass murder on the Long Island Railroad where the killer left behind that ominous note detailing his “reasons for this.” Finally, I was never in Washington long enough to get a real taste of the city, since all I did on these trips was meet my friends for drinks at our old hangouts or go to parties where a strange mix of people seemed to take to one another like New York art scene denizens to black clothes and pony tails. And so with a little bit of wishful thinking, and poor research that consisted solely of going to bars and parties, I rashly came to the conclusion that Washington was now a place where people knew how to get along.

What was perhaps most responsible for this specious conclusion was the party in Washington my friend Neal had, the driving purpose of which was to unveil a painting of an obscure character from Moby Dick. The concept of this party might have seemed, at first, like the sort of fanciful notion that would come out of the head of a fictional character—a character created by an author who’d spent way too many of his daylight hours in writers’ workshops, and who’d spent an even more absurd amount of time watching PBS literary profiles. But that wasn’t the case here as Neal had come up with this idea after watching, of all things, an episode of Baywatch.

Neal, who had something of an obsession for the work of Herman Melville, had commissioned a painting from Dave Ellis, an up and coming artist from Richmond. While the image of a bikini clad woman faded into the credits at the end of Baywatch, Neal decided that the best way to bring this work of art into the world was to have a huge party with an abundance of food, drink, and beautiful women. When I spoke to him over the phone from New York I suggested that he hire some dancing girls—some sort of entertainment that would keep the proceedings from going too far in the direction of high culture, something that would keep things honest. I knew that in Washington any event with even the slightest measure of “culture” would inevitably make a turn towards the pretentious. But he declined to implement my suggestion.

“Listen, we don’t need strippers,” he said, then added, “I know what you’re trying to do...but believe me, I can pull this off. This party will be both classy and unpretentious.” And what he decided was to have a fiddle band provide music and me a poetry reading.

I was skeptical. I’d seen people have a good time at a cultural event, but only in New York, where I had hooked up with a group of writers who called themselves “The Unbearables.” This loosely knit group—though perhaps “knit” is too strong a word for the connection within the group, as “unraveled” is the word that best describes them—was the antithesis of the New York slam crowd.

The Unbearables had no patience for the careerism of the slam people, and given the choice of going to some book party where we might network with publishers and editors or going out to the Homestead bar to drink beer and play pool, we would inevitably choose the latter. And where other literary groups were organizing events that would pay homage to our elders in the poetry scene, we were organizing events the sole purpose of which was to trash our elders. Among the events we organized were “The Crimes Of The Beats,” in which we attempted to undo the deification of Jack Kerouac and the whole Beatnik movement. Another event was a mock poetry slam in which we presented “translations” of poems from the New Yorker into plain, everyday English.

Indeed, the events put together by The Unbearables were more like punk rock shows than anything else. I remember one of our readings at a gallery in Soho where the audience, and many of the readers, ended up throwing rolls of toilet paper, chocolate éclairs (my girlfriend had brought dessert), cigarette butts, and paper airplanes at each other. Then we started dousing one another with beer or wine, falling from our chairs, and shouting obscenities to whoever was reading at the time—all out of our active appreciation of culture. No one took the least bit umbrage at the unruliness of the event, not the audience, not the readers, not even the gallery owner. But I thought that it was only in New York where an event with this kind of spirit could happen. And although not all our readings there were like this, I believed that New York was the only place with an environment where there was always the possibility that things could happen this way.

Part 3: The Bartertown Ball

When I got into Washington my friend Eddie met me at the train station and took me directly to Neal’s. Neal had drafted Eddie to be the master of ceremonies, a role Neal didn’t wish to play so he could concentrate on simply being the host. Eddie and I were the first guests to arrive and immediately opened up a bottle of Bushmill’s while Neal fixed his bow tie—he was wearing a tuxedo.

Very soon people began to arrive. They came alone, in couples, in groups of ten. They came wearing suits, tuxedos, ripped blue jeans, evening gowns, halter tops, tee shirts. There were lawyers, doctors, students, postal workers, grocery store clerks, as well as people who had no jobs. Somehow word had gotten out that this was the place to be. When the fiddle band arrived they set up in the living room and began playing. Soon the whole room was shaking with people dancing, drinking, eating; and despite the great differences among them, these people were getting along.

But then it was time for the poetry reading and the unveiling. This was the real test, because it meant stopping the music, which had been going on for two hours, and getting the crowd, which had been drinking heavily in this time, to stop dancing and talking and instead just stand still and listen. I didn’t think it was possible but Neal did it, and without so much as a single protest from the crowd. And it wasn’t because everyone knew him that they paid attention; Neal had told me and Eddie moments earlier that he hardly knew any of these people, and that among those he did know were a number of “acquaintances”—namely, people he or one of his colleagues had saved from lengthy jail terms for offenses such as assault with a deadly weapon or manslaughter. “No,” he had said, “the really bad criminal element isn’t represented here at all. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.” And so with the crowd gathered round, Eddie walked into the middle of the room and, with some trepidation, took on his role as master of ceremonies.

“Okay,” he announced, “we got this guy here who’s gonna read you some poems.” He quickly walked away.

I wished I were back in New York, walking down Avenue B at four in the morning past the crackheads and heroin dealers—at least I knew what those people were about; but here, who knows what could happen, and how these people would react to a goddamn poetry reading. They’d probably expect some sort of poetry slam, as news of that beast had recently hit Washington in the form of a cover story in the Post Style section on the burgeoning local slam scene. On seeing that this was a simple poetry reading, with me being the unopposed poet, they’d make themselves the opposition and employ not words but a more physical means of beating me into submission. I took a deep breath and walked into the fray.

“Okay,” I said, “this first poem is about getting drunk.”

To my relief the crowd cheered. I’d found their common ground. I began to read:

         “Drunk at four in the morning
         my friend Eddie and I
         are sitting in this girl’s apartment
         watching a Depeche Mode video...”

It seemed like a good poem to start out with. It was the same poem Good Morning America had decided to show me reading after they’d filmed some event up in New York. If the producers of that show thought it was a proper poem to present to sleepy, cranky people waking up and getting ready for work, then maybe it would work with this crowd as well. I went on with the poem, where I talk about both of us leaving the girl’s apartment rather than competing with each other for her affections, then going to the 711 where we get the fixings for a drunkard’s meal from hell; I talk about eating that meal then feeling sick—then getting sick—and how after all that we went ahead and drank some more:

         “So we have a toast:
         to canned meatballs with gravy,
         to all night parties,
         to amateur drunks,
         to England and its fancy haircuts,
         to all the pretty young girls in the world,
         and to the sun
         which rises high in the sky
         over us all.”

The crowd ate it up—they applauded, they cheered, they raised their beer bottles and cocktail glasses. I read more and more poems to the same response. Finally, when I was done, Eddie came back. He was much more confident now in introducing Jim, who was going to be reading the passage from Moby Dick in which the character represented in the soon to be unveiled painting appears.

“God bless ye, and have ye in his holy keeping, men,” Jim read. And onwards until closing with the words, “Don’t keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil...” at which point Neal walked over and, pulling away the linen cloth that had been covering the painting, revealed a portrait of Bildad, the retired captain whose ceaseless words of advice before the launching of the Pequod seem to be coming not from an experienced seafarer but from an escapee from an insane asylum. At first the people in the room were silent, pondering the creases on Bildad’s wind blanched skin, then gazing into the eyes of a man too caught up in the absurdity of it all to realize that he was, for all practical purposes, already dead. Then came the applause, the cheers, followed by the raising of champagne glasses and the sound of a lone fiddle starting up the band.


Risque Business

During my first year in New York I had a job keeping track of sales statistics for a direct mail marketing firm—"Well, Charlie, the Jennifer O’Neill faux pearl earrings are moving like cheetahs to wild boar meat in the African grasslands, but the Arlene Dahl cubic zirconium pendants are just sitting there like shit in a Penn Station toilet bowl. I guess people just don’t give a fuck about Arlene Dahl anymore.” It was a steady work and not very difficult at all, but when they realized I wasn’t the sort of person who should make a career of this business they laid me off, giving me two months of severance pay and enabling me to collect unemployment benefits. This freed me to spend more time writing, and what I wanted to write was fiction, nonfiction, reviews—anything but poetry. A poem I could knock off in an hour or two—which, while I was working, was about all the time I had at night for writing. I started working on a novel and doing freelance work for a downtown weekly. With my unemployment benefits, plus the money I made from occasional articles for the paper, I was able to live comfortably.

When my benefits ran out I found temp work at a Wall Street brokerage, inputting data for their annual personnel review. It was a great job for me because I could work whenever I wanted to, listen to music on my walkman while I worked, and get a cab ride home when my shift was over. I always worked the lobster shift. Going home at the hour when everyone else is just getting to work felt good to me. It was something like the feeling of accomplishment that goes along with staying out all night, except instead of having spent a lot of money I was making money. I thought that this was the best possible job for me, leaving me plenty of time in the evenings, before heading down to Wall Street, to do my freelance work. But then something even better came along, a job where I would be able to make a living on my writing alone—a job writing a porno novel.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a porno novel; it was what is euphemistically referred to as erotica, the difference being that while a porno novel would pay about three hundred dollars a shot and be sold in dirty book stores on Times Square, an erotic novel would get an advance of up to five thousand dollars—after which you’d collect royalties—and would be sold simultaneously in respectable bookstores and through book clubs such as The Literary Guild. All it took for me to get this job was to take a walk up to 14th St. and Third Avenue, a block away from the offices of one of the major publishing houses in New York. It was at this corner where I ran into a man who was with this publisher and who had seen me, at various events, reading excerpts from my novel in progress. My novel was rife with explicit sex scenes, and although this caught his attention he was unable to speak to me about his plans on restarting a line of “Victorian Novels”—all because of my habit of leaving the scene of a reading immediately after getting paid. But then, on the day after my job on Wall Street was finished, while taking a peaceful afternoon stroll, I just happened to run into him.

Soon after this meeting I began work on Three Men And A Lady, the story of a young woman who, after having studied in London, returns to live in the country inn where she grew up. In London she was but one of many beautiful young ladies, whereas away from the city she was now, what with her education and sophistication, the most desirable woman the country squires could imagine. “This novel is basically going to be a stroke book for women,” the guy from the publisher said, “but a stroke book with class and elegance, which is why we’re able to sell this shit in respectable places.”

It was while I was working on Three Men And A Lady that I took a break to go to Washington for Neal’s party—the party which made me think that Washington was an easy place to live. When I went back to New York after the party I began to miss Washington, its slow pace, and its wide open skyline. Since working on this erotic novel was not going to tie me down to a particular place I decided to leave New York. I left in a couple of weeks, planning on finishing the novel in Washington, but when I got there I found myself unable to write a single word. And not only that, I couldn’t even come up with any dirty ideas for the novel. And although some people find that a sense of danger—which was the pervasive feeling I had after returning to Washington—acts as an aphrodisiac and leads them to sexual fantasies they normally couldn’t imagine, I was not among them. I began to miss New York, where I felt safe and where, as long as I kept my eyes open, opportunities seemed to just fall in my lap. And above all I missed the inspiration New York provided.