The First Year I Forgot [poem]

They like it when they look like the TV

When everybody is smilin' at me

When everybody is smilin' back at me

Seems like nobody is smilin'
anymore

Seems like nobody is smilin'
anymore

Seems like nobody is smilin'
anymore

Late night talk shows are not funny

They are ads laced with honey

So lets start the party at 10

And start our new song

fuck it, everybody, sing along

and don't mind if you can't smile at the same time


because not all poems have to rhyme

Nor is every cloud a curse

The Wild Alternatives

The Wild Alternatives

 

Most mornings are a variation of this one, stumbling out into the blue dawn of our house, jabbing my big toe into the neck of some sleeping girl with no hair, wearing a tie-dyed wedding dress, and who chose to end the night on that particular spot of carpet in the very center of the hall in front of my door. She curses herself back to sleep. Her face is motley with drool and runaway coloring. As I pass, I wonder why she’d want to sleep there when the living room holds no less than five mismatched couches, each swollen cushion’s infested guts tinged with tobacco smoke and spilt wine. I think there’s something satisfying about their dilapidation, like a popped zit. Puss and toxicity giving way under pressure. Relief by destruction. Might, not sight, may be the true source of beauty.

Our staircase is wrapped in wild English Ivy. Spiky green hearts the size of my palm climb up along the wall and out the bathroom window, trickling down the crumbling red brick, patched brown and green with moss or mold, I can’t tell. Somehow through the broken window pane above the sink, the vine weaves back inside, crisscrossing the poetry which wallpapers our kitchen. Those pages were torn from old attic anthologies – This Is Just To Say appears four times. None of this was here before. The walls were bare. The couches less by four and sealed in sticky plastic. The books left to collect dust upstairs, safely unseen. The ivy outside where it belongs. Grandpa would have a conniption, but this is our world now.

Our sun dries out our clothes on our porch where my friends are laying flat, watching our sunrise with Tom (who is much older than us but has no one) and who we tolerate because every morning he brings us weed and packs a free bong, lighting it up as the first rays of orange and red stretch over our horizon. Dense swirls of smoke first occupy the glass, then roll up and out into the all too crisp, too clean, too good air of another brand new day on Planet – uhm - I’ll have to ask them what we should call it.

Understand, this is the only place that ever felt like home. Even when I lived here before with my Grandpa, it wasn’t home to me. Then, it was where I’d stare at empty walls, at the space where the corners met, and I’d cry as a hollow helplessness burrowed down my spine. Cried like it would make a difference, bring back the lost, the dead. But that was long ago and here, now, we – my friends and I - will sit stoned out of our minds, hypnotized by our own good feelings, drenched in young, living, bright, beautiful, things. Surrounded by miles of nowhere, this was where we belong.  

Soon, the boys are hungry. Olivia and Kia will go down the foot-worn path into the surrounding woods to pick berries, they say, but really they go to kiss and hold each other close and play pretend together, so I make extra eggs in case anyone still has the rumbles, stealing shots of Z’s vodka to feed my high instead of my hunger. Tom will watch Amber tease Saheed about his hair, a Mohawk which stuck up in purple Liberty spikes when we first met, but now hangs in long gnarled ropes along the center of his head, the sides shaved bare, brown as a coffee bean. Zvezden, who we call Z, will try to tell us about his parents fleeing Bosnia way-back-when again, but Saheed will hush him, turning the subject to Existential Libertarianism. We all understand we’re only here for the good, that unmuddled kind of happiness, but sometimes we need reminding. No one likes a buzzkill. The girls won’t return long after Tom’s first hit has worn off, and already we will be all too sober to take the beat of noon’s heat or Z’s hand-me-down histories and so we will retreat back into our now empty home.

We have a deal. They work. Make Money. Keep us fed and inebriated.

I collect knowledge. I keep us sharp. I study.  I know, talk about a good deal.

Saheed’s a clerk, selling truckers and lonely old men porno mags and cigarettes at 3am most weekdays, and then booze as a bartender on weekends – he gets us what we need. Olivia paints nails and plucks eyebrows for her cousin, who raped her when she was young, but pretends like nothing happened. Olivia isn’t licensed and the pay is good, so she works hard to pretend too, and every week comes home with fresh fruit and whatever vegetable we couldn’t grow ourselves. Z was fired from his third fast-food job last month and has sworn them off indefinitely, he says. Saheed’s been meaner than usual to him lately, as though glaring at him and stealing his dates will increase Z’s credentials, or improve the market, or lift the economy, or in any way make it more likely the kid who was raised on wartime stories and bloodbaths will find new, better paying employment. Amber, who by comparison was raised on bedtime stories and bubble baths, even despite her scars and hallucinations, loves to play with my hair and I tell her she should be a stylist even though neither of us follows that kind of thing. She was going to strip but Olivia talked her out of it, even if she has the body and doesn’t mind people asking about her scars, even if she enjoys it immensely. Kia devoted her life to the capital ‘E’ Earth when she was 17, and so she pushes around a shopping cart piled high by day’s end with wrongly discarded bottles. Popping them into the machines at the supermarket, extending her hands chalky with dirt and stale sweat and sticky brown syrup, she cashes in for her supper the most honest day’s work I’ve ever seen.

For my keep, I teach myself and then teach them. The one thing I’ve got is a good head on my shoulders, Grandpa used to say.  No reason to lie: I love this kind of thing. I love reading. I love making lists, charts, graphs. I love organizing information. Most of all, I love teaching: teaching poetry at breakfast, psychology and world cultures after lunch, science over dinner, history before bed. I have plans, and lessons, and games, and dirty acronyms. I have illustrated, personalized, Sparknotes. I have relatable pop culture references. But they never seem to have the time or the energy or the will, though. They encourage me to continue while they take another hit, and as the months have passed since our agreement I’ve started to sense their resentment. I shouldn’t have stayed here. I should have let them have the place. It doesn’t really belong to anyone now, anyway. Attachments are foolish. I should have known better.

Since my return - my arrival to a house once so dark and dank and dead, now broken into by light, and vagabonds, and wild English Ivy – every night and day I imagine this as our Eden, our Utopia, our Bohemia.  Lately though, the dream has started to fuzz and transform in my mind, like mold on a peach. They don’t ask my opinion anymore. They don’t include me. They cut me off. Saheed will change the subject so sharply that it’s more uncomfortable not to just go with it; pretend nothing is wrong. I have too many words, he says. If I want to get anywhere, I need to learn to say the most with the least words possible. Take up the least amount of anyone’s time. Always make the most with the least. I ask him, what does he know? He’s just a clerk who sells perversions of the heart to lonely old men at 3am when they should be home hugging someone who gives a damn about them, if only for the practice. I stared directly into his eyes then, as though I could will him to the power of telekinesis. He walked away then, and hasn’t spoken to me since. Not even in the mornings when we pass Tom’s bong.

Today though, he wants to talk. We sit at the edge of the woods in hammocks Kia made from plastic shopping bags last summer. Saheed and I wrap ourselves in blankets despite the heat or else the plastic will leave odd bumps on our legs. This summer Kia promised to make softer ones.  Was it only a year ago? A year ago they moved in. A year ago I started living. He doesn’t start to talk right away. I hate these kinds of things. Talks. They make me nervous. It never ends well.

He doesn’t look at me when he speaks. We’re moving, he says.

We are we going?

No, listen. Me. Olivia. Z, Kia, and Amber. We’re leaving. Putting our money together and going west. Portland. Seattle. SFO maybe.

I can’t go with you?

He grimaces and I can see the honesty in his regret. He puts up his hands, palms open: Hey if you had money, sure! But we each got to be able to hold our own, pitch in. It’s the only way this can work. You understand that, don’t you?

So I’ll drop out. I’ll do what you all did. What? What’s that face for?

It’s your life. You know that. But I’ve got to say this. Don’t.

Don’t. Seriously? That’s all you got?

You’re smarter than we ever were. You’re going to be more than okay. You could go to college. Get out of this shithole.

Shithole?! This is no shithole! I huffed to my feet, unsteadying the hammock, knocking Saheed on his ass. I would’ve laughed if I weren’t so angry, or if it weren’t for the expression on his face. How dare he insult such a welcoming place to lay down his bones? How dare he be so thankless?

There’s nothing here! He dug into the ground, tearing clumps of grass up by the roots.

You’re here! I yelled back. I’m here! Why isn’t that enough?

He says I need to learn how to be alone. What kind of answer is that? Forget it, he has no real answer. The rest of the day, I can’t stop ruminating, like a hunger pain, like an itch, a constant stab between the ribs: Why isn’t that enough?

*

            Laying on the floor, I don’t remember how I got here. Stiffly, like I’ve been sleeping for eternity until now, I sit up, sore. Sweat trickles behind my ear and down my neck, and that’s strange, because it’s a cool night. My head is pounding and when I see the wine bottle, all glass and emptiness, I realize I must have passed out on the bathroom floor. Wouldn’t be the first time.

            Standing spins me with nausea, and more sweat drizzles down the back of my neck. I sit on the covered toilet seat, holding my head in my hands, breathing heavy. They’re gone. I’m totally fucked. Heat creeps into my face and I know I’m about to cry. Maybe I should let it come. Let it break. I wish I hadn’t been so angry when they left. It’s not their fault I’m 18 and on my own. That now I must get my own food. Steal my own cable. They were kinder to me than I ever deserved. I’ve been so happy, by which I mean I’ve been so wasted, since I met them that I don’t remember why I was miserable anymore. Then again, that was the point, wasn’t it? Sitting, deciding whether or not to cry, staring at the rotting bathroom tile, with those horrid little red polka dots, I realize there’d never been horrid red polka dots on this tile before. I touch my hair, and it feels wet. My hands are red. My head is bleeding, and there’s nobody home.

            I search the bathroom for an extra mirror, but there’s just the one above the toilet. Tears keep running down my face, as blood slips down my back, across my shoulders. Great dried clumps of red ooze streaking my arms and I can’t decide if I look more like a suicide victim or an escaped tribal sacrifice. Of course this sort of thing would happen tonight. Of course they would be gone when I needed them most.

            Even if we – I - had an outside line, I can’t call an ambulance. What do they do with runaways? They’d definitely ask too many questions. People like me: the smokers, the extremists, the chasers, the vagabonds, the damn rapscallions, we know which questions to ask when it counts.

            It was the night we made our deal. The night I let them stay. We were up late in the living room, talking, intoxicated. I told them, You know, my grandfather, a hermit and a drunk, built this house with his bare hands? And they said, Oh really? And why? To which I replied, because it was important to him. Then Saheed asked what was important to me, and no one ever asks me about myself, so I blushed hard before I answered: poetry. They liked that answer and laughed. Z said peace was most important to him, and Saheed threw a pillow at him. Olivia thought it was a nice idea, and told Saheed to stop picking on people for having dreams just because he didn’t have any himself. He got sassy then, which was always fun to watch, because something within him puffed up and his eyes went from black to caramel.

I happen to have a dream, thank you very much, he said.

Let’s hear it, then, said Olivia.

I’m starting a band.

There was a pause before Z laughed, choking hard on an inhale of smoke.

Okay, what’ll you name it, Saheed? asked Kia, who hadn’t bothered answering that the Earth was most important to her since we all already knew.

The Lost Causes.

Z laughed again, but I couldn’t tell you why this time. And what the hell kind of band is that?

Punk and Alt and some art stuff, like Lou Reed. Please, act like you could do better Z, go ahead.

Z stood and straightened out his suspenders, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. If I had a band, I’d name them The White Lighters. We’d be reggae and stadium rock, he said.

Peaches! screeched Amber nonsensically, suddenly mad with giggles after her turn to smoke.

What about God and the Philosophers? said Olivia

How about The Alternatives? I said, and thought no one heard me when Saheed pointed at me suddenly, saying Yes, Yes, Yes! That’s it! The Wild Alternatives! Love it! Just why he liked the name so much or what he saw in it, I don’t know, but from then on I had something to contribute. It was then I decided they had to stay – we would be a family.

            A towel wrapped around my head is soaking up the blood now. I can feel a giant bump, and upon investigation, I found where my head had hit the tile, where a crack down the center of the ceramic matched what I could see of the gash behind my head. Grandpa had fallen once and the doctors were worried about complications, but he was old and had lived his life. I’ve never been anything like my family, why should it start now? They’re what people call dysfunctional. Mom overdosed before I could know her, and Grandpa hadn’t wanted to be a father, especially to a girl, the first time around. We lived in silence mostly. One thing he did tell me was to be sure to take care of myself. Not to get hurt. Every injury comes back, he told me. You’ll feel it all again, you’ll see.

            Tomorrow I could walk to the edge of the woods, to the bus stop, and find Tom. He’ll take me to the hospital if I need to go. What if it’s serious? How would I know?  I bite down on my lip, knowing there’s no use in tears, they’ll just get me worked up, just make my stomach turn and my head hurt worse. Maybe this is what I needed to learn how to be alone.

            I know there’s supposed to be more to life than this. What are my options? Something better than numbing out, than running away. Right? But the past takes so much energy to mend.  To mend it you must touch it, and memories like these burn with mixed feelings and unsettled scores. Better to look only to the future, but that must wait, because I am tired now. My hair is dry, matted with blood. Tomorrow there will be no more drugs, or strangers, or music. Tomorrow there will be no more friends, or family. With a heavy rush, I fell back to sleep.

            Tom didn’t come back for a week. I lived off stale cookies, a block of cheese, and the last of Z’s vodka which he must’ve forgotten on purpose, his way of saying goodbye. I wasn’t so fearful that I couldn’t leave – more so I just didn’t want to. If the world had changed, I wanted as little evidence as possible. I wanted to suspend my childhood, if just a little longer. No one has ever blamed me for it, and I have not missed those odd, lost days.

            He found me in the hallway. Strange how comfortable that spot is, just in the center, right in front of my bedroom door. Tom picked me up and I realized he wasn’t quite as old as I had thought, or at least strong for 60. Plopping me down on one of the couches, he pushed a bowl of plain oatmeal and honey under my nose and said, Eat and then, I’ll patch up that numbskull of yours. As I spooned the breakfast into my astonished mouth, Tom dragged in a suitcase and four bags heaping with groceries. A plastic tub of fresh water – one which he threw to me and another he cracked open for himself. It’s only until you get yourself together kid, he said. Nobody should be alone if they don’t want to be. Plus, you need somebody to teach you how to get a job. Unless you’ve read a book on that, already?

            Tom waited for my reply, some sign of approval or intense horror, but I couldn’t muster either. My head ached and the food sat heavy and not yet digested in my stomach. All I could manage to say was: I hit my head. He said, What? but honestly the oats had turned into a black hole, one which sucked in my voice. Certainly, the hole would spin, gaining power, until it drained my very brain. I couldn’t think and my ears began to ring. At least this was better – better than dying alone. That’s when he poured the water over my head.

            Wake up, child! He said. We’ve got to get you together, understand? He was a business man after all. Somewhere behind all the drugs and loneliness, Tom was a fierce salesman. He’d make an excellent employee, if he cared about that sort of thing. A Dad too, for that matter.

            Tom and I made a new deal. Together, we both sold weed and other mild substances to the college kids and single moms and veterans and misfits that littered the suburbs beyond the valley, and the city North West of that, and the woods where we lived in what was once my Grandfather’s house, and was once a bohemian paradise, and is now a wild alternative I never expected.

My Mild Concussion [Fall]

So, um, last Saturday I passed out for the first time in my life and fell down. I woke up on the floor, yelling involuntarily. I must've only been out for a moment, because I started to feel the blood run behind my ear as I lay there wondering why in the hell I had gone to sleep on the floor, and why my head suddenly hurt so fucking much. That's when I saw the blood. And realized I had been standing. 

That weird indent? We're thinking it's from my head hitting the floor.

So I knew I needed someone to look at the back of my head - I don't have any small mirrors I could hold up or anything - the shit you wish you had in an emergency, geeze. Anyway, I called all my friends, and no one answered. I thought I was going to die, right then. Fucking alone and bleeding from the head because of my own idiocy. I freaked out. I cried. I kept calling people. 

I called Allie 18 times, which she kept reminding me when she arrived at my house a little bit later with a friend who had some first-aid training. Whatever was back there had stopped bleeding and I was holding my head in a towel. She gave me some gauze and said it didn't look like I needed to go to the hospital, and they'd stay with me a while and keep me awake.

all messy and matted with hair - after the bleeding stopped

I went to the health center at IC on Monday and they said if I'd come in earlier they would have stapled the laceration shut. I saw a Dr. Lorenzo who said she couldn't separate whether I was having symptoms of a concussion, depression, or withdrawal and gave me the impression that Dr. Selin (my new usual) would sort it out. However, when I returned Wednesday to see Dr. Selin, she hadn't spoken to Dr. Lorenzo and I think she was frustrated by me. She had wanted to talk about my medication, and the head wound seemed to be less important. I just wanted her to look at the damn thing but she did all the neurological tests again. I'm fine, I just feel a bit sick and generally tired, but less so as the week as progressed. I really don't want to be around a lot of noise and people though - it gives me a headache. I think that usually is the case though, or at least it used to be when I was paying attention.

So, long story short, Dr. Selin says I "probably very likely" have a concussion, and to avoid stressing myself out while my brain heals. I've been having some trouble sleeping, but that's not necessarily related. Otherwise, I'm gonna be alright, and we're gonna talk about my meds again on Friday. Oh, and I'll have this nice scar for fucking ever now:

ouch.

A Poem for 'The Hell Of It'

It's not that life is short or long,
it's that it's not for ever.

And if we all must die some day
the least we can do is try
not to go out in a stupid way.

It's not that life is short or long,
it's that it's not for ever.

Reality by Majority: Arguments about New Journalism

Senior Seminar

Rough Draft

"...the center of reality is wherever one happens to be, 
and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of."

Northrop Frye

Reality by Majority: Arguments about New Journalism

New Journalism is a style of writing that sparked a lot of controversy among journalists in the 1960s and 70s. It’s commonly marked by a keen, insightful voice, which acts as a filter for the piece and is a stand-in, an alter-ego or hyper-ego of sorts, for the writer. Two major New Journalists were Thomas Wolfe (The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!), who coined the term, and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing). Thomas Wolfe is quoted in True Stories by Norman Sims as having four devices that characterized New Journalism:

            1)”Scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative”

2) “Witnessing as many of these scenes as possible through extraordinary ‘saturation reporting’, and ‘recording the dialogue in full’. Dialogue powerfully establishes character, Wolfe said.”

3)”Use of third-person point of view, “the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.”

4)”Recording details that might be symbolic ‘of people’s status life’ meaning ‘the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they things it is or what they hope to be’. Wolfe said these details – including gestures, habits, manners, customs, and styles – were ‘as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.” (Sims 236).

           

            So in The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Thomas Wolfe, the reader is amused by the narrator/writer’s repeated exclamation of “Mother dog!” and various other odd words  and phrases followed by the usually excluded exclamation point. In Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, Hunter S. Thompson introduces a political article with “People still fish in Lake Michigan, but you don’t want to eat what you catch. Fish that feed on garbage, human shit, and raw industrial poisons tend to taste a little strange” (Thompson 136). The writers aren’t seeking to only relay the reality of the facts, they believe in a larger reality – the context of our perception. The constant “!”s by Wolfe make the energetic atmosphere of the car race palpable, and the digressions of Thompson convey not only the conditions of Milwaukee but the political climate as well. The stuff where you “just had to be there” is now communicable.            

These devices may categorize the style, but they also are what make it so controversial as well. The heart of the issue is subjectivity. In Journalism, too much bias discredits the writer as well as the publisher. Without policing for bias, articles that would have been read as “news” become untrustworthy – they’re just the personal insight of the writer, or the editor, or the lobbyist who is best friends with the CEO of the company publishing the work. One wouldn’t be able to know whom to trust for information. Those against New Journalism argue that it is too literary minded and dependant on the filter device, the writer’s insight and ability, rather than focusing on the information and facts of the story.

A hypothetical: a piece of writing is published. The author is an unknown, and the work has captured the attention of readers. Fiction or not, people tend to ask the same questions: how much of this is real or based on real life? Where did you get your information? Who or what are your sources (anecdotes, experience, imagination, interviews, Wikipedia)? Why did you write this? What is your point/intent/anticipated result or influence? In essence, readers hold the writer accountable. Just as with politics and love affairs – we want you to make sense, we want to know your intentions, we want you to follow through, and we want to be told the truth.  Even if you’re bad news (ehem…Thompson), we might still take the bait. Trust can be very powerful. Why? Because we are beings of perception, and no matter how you slice it, our personal “reality” is the only Reality or Truth we can possibly Know. Readers hold writers accountable to maintain the current understanding of Reality.

It’s through this personal philosophy that I have come to understand the New Journalism Argument, and in a kind of looped fashion, it is this perspective which further leads me to the conclusion that New Journalism is indeed truly Journalism in that it conveys real people, real events, and so on as they are experienced to the fullest honesty of the writer (and in his way, Thompson’s dishonesty is his own form of honesty). The perception of the individual cannot be separated from the work. Even in the more subtle ways, there are inevitable marks of “bias”. One writer is going to pick a word or structure a sentence differently than another. In an interview, one journalist will ask different questions than her collogue, and the even the subject being interviewed will answer differently based on who is asking – even down to whether they’re attracted to the interviewer or not. It’s possibly shallow, and silly, and unprofessional, but it is human regardless.

Perception, however, gives way to intention. Comparable to Impressionism in art, is Starry Night any less a painting than The Mona Lisa? Did they both not seek to capture their subjects as they were seen? On the other hand, the intent to be honest can’t guarantee an outcome of “honesty” - but again – whether or not one felt a work is “honest” depends an awful lot on their perception. And their perception is going to be influenced, not only by what they empirically witness, but also by the perceptions of others.

There is a deep alienation in the idea that we are our own little planets of senses just spinning past or colliding with one another, but that’s where trust is most effective. We trust that what is True to most others is Reality – the larger Reality or collective Reality. We obsess over norms and forms and styles, means and measurements and averages. It is why Ronald Weber calls New Journalism a “menace” in Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. The very existence of work like Wolfe and Thompson’s threatens the larger accepted Reality because it is providing us with an alternative and calling it just as True.           

Weber is determined to separate Journalism from New Journalism – to cast one as fact and the other as art. Then, to degrade from art to worse, he points to egotism calling New Journalism “‘I’ writing for an ‘I’ time, personal writing for an age of personalism” (21).  In the end, if New Journalism must cohabitate the definitions of both fiction and non-fiction, then Weber can redeem New Journalism for one reason, an ability to “function in something of the same way for an educated middle class as the early novel did for an emerging economic middle class – it’s bringing the news in engaging fashion.” For me, Weber’s arguments combined with his focus on not only discrediting New Journalism but also slighting Wolfe points to – may I say – a personal problem.

Strangely Weber does not argue that the biggest danger of Wolfe and Thompson is not the reliability of their work, but the connotations within it. When Thompson puts the image of nasty, inedible fish and pollution in your brain, then talks about a political race, you make an association. Even if Thompson was screaming on the page that Nixon was an evil lunatic, it’s nothing compared to “sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine” (Thompson 159) or calling him a “bloodthirsty thug”. It’s not a matter of truth in the events, but in perpetuating a valid perception of an event on impressionable minds. Easily overcome, of course, so long as we’re exposed to a variety of perfectly valid perceptions, I think.

Another hypothetical: if a work influences thought, which influences one’s Reality or a group of people’s Realities, then it is assumed that a writer would want to spread more knowledge and awareness – seeking to define the majority Reality further. They should be deliberate then in whatever they write because –if published- they will be held accountable for influencing people one way or another. More people read Wolfe, enjoy his writing, agree with his perspective, trust his craft, understand or even relate to his Reality – well that would change the majority or collective Reality as well – even for those who disagree, the possibility of seeing the world as Wolfe does cannot be erased from their minds but instead must be incorporated into that perception. That’s the potential power of these works, both the creative and the critiques.

Therefore, Weber is utterly entombed by his own reality – which as an academic would be represented by his education and status – and wants to shoot down and discredit this style just because he doesn’t want to do the work to incorporate it. Just as he is not a presence in my Reality (mainly because he doesn’t have accessible biographical information online), I am not part of his because his focus (perhaps demographic) is not me. Weber quotes Seymour Krim, calling New Journalism “literature for the majority”. Again, Weber clearly subscribes to majority determined Reality – fixated on tradition and definition. Weber is trying to explain something and so he must pull what he knows - just like Wolfe - just like all the other writers we’ve talked about in class. The difference is that Wolfe uses his Reality to open up the world and Weber’s Reality closes the world down.

Citations

Sims, Norman. True Stories. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 235-236. Print.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

Weber, Ronald. Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. Print.

Wolfe, Thomas. The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes! .

QTNOEK - First Draft - Now with explanation!

L. Gamari

First Draft

Fiction II

February 21, 2012

The Quiet Things No One Ever Knows

by Magali Roze Herrera

Franklin Forrest Foster: I

Las Vegas, Nevada is no place for children. Less than ten miles off Flamingo Road, you’ll find the same meth-lab-trailers and discarded-black-rubber-tires which litter the rest of the state: nothing different here. The exception, of course, being Vegas; sitting like the Hope Diamond on a pillow of orange dust. Either way, they’re just damn rocks, cut and made pretty.  Naivety is easier to come by and more dangerous than any drug or itch you might pick up on the Strip. You’ve got to be careful or you might as well live with your heart outside your chest; running around just waiting to get tripped up. Let the ruby organs of you go splattering across some inconsequential sidewalk – another mess for others to avoid. If you want to survive, whatever you do: don’t be a fool and don’t fall in love with strangers.

Bright lights striking the black night. Spinning wheels of fortune. Warm, heady clubs packed with sweating men and scattered rhinestones. Vegas is a promise it can’t keep and has no intention of keeping. Vegas is a lie told to save face at any cost. Vegas is where my father raised his son.

We could have moved after my mother left. Gone East to Philly, or North to Seattle. Packing then would have been lightest as I had no memories yet to take with us. But he stayed and drove his unlicensed cab, selling narcotics out of the trunk while I sat on benches watching the parades of feathers and jewelry and heels and furs and wigs and jelly breasts like chicken cutlets, and once a pair of false teeth, inspected quickly by their owner before being popped back into place just in time to lay a wet kiss on some unwitting dope. Here, everyone is a whore. Anything can be bought.

So I grew hard and prickly as a cactus, surviving where flowery fragility has failed in the dry, eternal sunshine of the Mojave. That is the secret of the city, the mirage: beauty found where it shouldn’t be, where it doesn’t belong; it’s enough to delude the freaks, the escapees, the idiots, the vagabonds, the romantics who flock to a glammed up dump like this, but I know better.

Magali Roze Herrera: I

The most interesting person I’ve ever met? On a bare wooden table in Herrera’s Bar, Magali crushes out the end of an unlit cigarette, not watching the white paper snap and scatter the tobacco as she reaches for her drink. Franklin Forrest Foster. Taking a sip, she sets down the glass with an uneven thud-clang. What a stupid name.

She yawns and her lips part, red with wine. Under the buzzing of yellow and blue neon, she’s been drawing all morning, all through the previous night. Sketches fill three notebooks, grey with graphite, and one that’s warped with spilt booze. Eyes clear. The lashes long. And his hair, shaggy no matter what; golden even in low light. Oh and shoulders, arms - slim but strong. And that damn flannel.  Magali opens a new pack of Menthols, letting the plastic film fall into the dark expanse beneath the table. Smoke twirls up into ceiling fans, up into the rafters, weaving and crossing in two snakes of white, like the shadow of a double helix. Balls, something’s not right.

Magali! Her name comes pouncing over the bar.

It’s probably just Ted. Yeah? She calls back.

He’s howling: Mah-Gull-Eee-Get-Ohver-Herr-Nahow-Pleece.

In the kitchen, Ted is snorting cocaine with his usual rolled up hundred dollar bill, perhaps the only one he can hold onto, bleached white from daily use. Next to him is a woman wearing too much make up and too little clothes; the strap of her dress falling over her shoulder mirrors the smear of mascara arching down the side of her face. No other details are necessary for Magali to register - a whore’s a whore. First thing she learned working for Ted: don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.

Ted stands, dusting off his nose with the back of his hand. Without looking at them he says, Magali, Sandra, Sandra, Magali. Play nice now.

Franklin Forrest Foster: II

Scared of the cockroaches, I could lay awake for hours – parched – my breath turned to dust – rather than flip on the kitchen light and watch them scatter. Instead of dreaming, I look away from the naked window’s street lit glow and watch squiggles play tricks in my eyes, my own personal kaleidoscope. I also listen, can’t help but listen, to the nocturnal cantata of my neighbors. Their buzzing fridges and blowing fans; voices low and high, back and forth; fucking, fighting, sometimes both. Just before the world turns blue, my father comes home; always keys first, then a thud, and then the bolt returning to its locked position with a brassy ka-clunk.  He will knock on my door in a few hours to wake me for school, and to the closed door I will say I’m sick, and he will let me stay home and sleep or read until noon. Then we’ll go to the Strip.

The money he makes as a cabbie is enough for rent. The money he makes selling drugs from the trunk of his cab is enough for everything else, which is enough for me. Cushioned in crushed velvet, not a burn or a stain in sight, the Oldsmobile is my father’s life and everyday of it, he drives. On the East Coast, towns blur into one another, overstepping their boundaries and crowding each other like desperate teenagers on a dance floor. Here there are miles and miles of nothing and then, suddenly, you’re somewhere.

Shots of music fire from passing cars while giant palms scatter sunshine across wide avenues. Surrounded by deliberate towers of glass, structures and idols and solid stretches of concrete, I am already feeling claustrophobic. Pulling into Herrera’s, I can feel my hands sweat and I grip my wrists, tugging on the cuffs of my flannel. My father calls the owner his friend, which means he sells him coke. If you think it’s stupid to bring your son along on a deal, imagine how stupid it’d be to bring one who doesn’t know jack shit; one who would get all bored and curious. You can handle anything if you know what you’re dealing with, and you can get out of anything so long as the other guy doesn’t.  

My father returns, as he always returns from every business in town, with a Styrofoam box. Herrera’s always gives us the holy grail of sandwiches – layers of roast beef, sourdough, melted cheese, and a pickle. Things have their benefits.

Magali Roze Herrera: II

Magali wipes down the tables in three quick motions. Sandra watches, her dress returned to its proper position, an apron now tied around her tiny waist and neck.

Whenever you’d like to start would be great, Magali snaps.

Sandra looks sleepily at the spread of cups and chairs askew throughout the bar room, as though they might warm up to her and plea to be petted if only she stood there quiet enough for long enough. Magali was ready to snap again when Sandra let out a little squeal of delight.

Oh drawings! I love art! Sandra says.

 Magali picks up eight sticky beer glasses, four in each hand, clamoring them down on the bar as a means of reply, but Sandra clearly does not take hints easily. Bubbling, she asks, Did someone leave these here? Are they yours? What were you drawing?

People I see around the bar, mostly, says Magali.

Oh they all have titles! Sandra points to the top of each page. Right? That’s what these are?

She hadn’t seen the girl pick up them up, and now she was out of reach to snatch the drawings away. Something about the girl’s fingertips near Franklin’s unfinished chest made Magali’s stomach turn over.

Sandra chanted them aloud: The saddest. The most beautiful. The smartest. You know all these people personally?

No, of course not.

Then how do you know if they’re, like, the smartest?

I’m intuitive. Can’t you just look at somebody and pretty much tell – I mean give or take…?

            I don’t know, not really, I always learned making assumptions is a bad idea. You know what they say – an ass out of you and me, right?

            Give them back to me, please, Magali whispers. She hadn’t meant to whisper, but she didn’t want to scream. She mustn’t lose her temper, not over something like this.

            Sandra did not hear her, or pretended not to. Instead, she gaggled on, absorbed.

            Magali looked her over. She couldn’t be older than 18; probably dropped out at 16, just like Franklin. Did she put on an act, like him? Could she be anything like him? You’re from Vegas? She asked her.

Naw, Utah. Mormons. Hell of a place. She’s bubbling again. You from here? You like it here?

She says Hell like she doesn’t say it often enough. Sweetheart, you’ve got a big streak of make-up on your face, Magali says, lifting a tray of silver cutlery and clinking shot glasses, You should go take care of that.

Franklin Forrest Foster: III

My father isn’t home and I can’t sleep. I find the box in the back of his closet, under a stack of old dirty magazines. It might have been their hair, pushing the limits of gravity, or their cartoonish appendages that produced more amusement than deep, groinal yearnings, but I lost interest in that years ago. From the box, I put on the glasses first. I wiggle my head to make them fall forward and then press them back as she might have done; first up the middle, then from the side. Next, a big, blue hat woven with straw or grass; it covers my ears and I feel like Dumbo. Slippery and cool to the touch, silk, and light red, I wrap the scarf around my neck and for a moment imagine there is something mysterious about me – something I don’t even know. There are gloves, the Cinderella kind, pure white and all the way to the elbow.  A dress, a wedding dress, my mother’s wedding dress; it fits me as if my own mother had stood at the hem with water in her eyes, so happy that I was so happy, and proud –

            Keys. Thud. Ka-clunk.

            Stitches split as the dress rips from my body pulling down with it the hat and scarf and glasses and I stuff all of it violently under my bed. My heart pounds in my ribs, my chest; like a fat, round lemming that’d be damned if they didn’t jump out and off the cliff. Moments pass, and I am still standing in the window-light, pale and bare, except for my boxers and those damn long, white gloves.

Magali Roze Herrera: III

            Herrera’s is brimming over with patrons by five o’clock most Friday nights, but tonight isn’t one of them. It’s seven-thirty, and no one has bothered to turn on the jukebox; the TV set only shows closed captions. The few old men around, each alone on stool or chair, don’t speak. Magali sits near the door, sketching. She hasn’t seen Sandra in over a half an hour, and Ted is never around unless he feels like it. She crosses her legs and lights a fresh cigarette.

            Hi! Sorry! I’m back! At Sandra’s appearance, Magali kills the smoke, but too fast, burning the tips of her fingers. She bites down hard on the soft inner flesh of her bottom lip, unwilling to let this girl see her at anything but her best.

            Sandra is oblivious. She’s wearing different clothes, but somehow the same amount of fabric. You’ve got a hot date tonight? Magali asks.

            Yeah, actually – it’s okay if I leave early? I mean, it’s pretty dead, right?

            No problem. Just go when you need to.

            Sandra squishes up her face in false embarrassment and says, Uh, that would be now –

            Magali turns to find herself nose to nose with a familiar young man. Almost every afternoon, he and his father come to Herrera’s. Magali is sure to take out the trash every day at that time, so she can watch him sit in the Oldsmobile and wait. Hey, she says, backing into a chair and sitting down though she hadn’t deliberately meant to, but still graceful enough to pass.

            He nods to her, his blond hair – even in the low light –

            You know each other? Sandra asks, still full of nervous energy.

            No. I just see him – you – here a lot. With your dad? You’re usually out in the car.

            His voice is gruff, more so than she ever imagined it would be. Yeah, he says, my Dad’s friend’s with yours.  

            Ted? Well. Anyway, you know - I make those sandwiches.

            What? His eyes aren’t clear, they’re puzzled.

            The Styrofoam box?

            Oh, yeah, sure. I’m a vegetarian, so Dad usually eats them, but thanks, I guess.

            Anytime, Magali replies, but no one hears her. Imperceptibly inching toward the door, Sandra has him by the sleeve and sings out, Thanks again, Magali!   before pulling the young man with her into the night. 

****

This is meant to be a story within a story. My original intent was to portray the disconnect between perception and reality - how reality is a manifestation of perceptions (as in: we all exist in our own heads/writing itself is a reconstruction of reality/"it's real to me" kind of ideology - hence the lack of quotation marks). That concept lead to using the artist and her work as a vehicle for this kind of philosophy I was trying to illustrate - which sounds a little like a parable, but still, it's unclear. Then my failed attempt at acute tension (between Magali and "Franklin") was mean to further illustrate the space of one's mind/reality. It's really a silly, common thing for a girl to have a crush and it's not returned, but that's what I liked so much about it. Magali speaks like her life is an epic, but really it's just all she has to hold onto.

For instance, in "real life" Magali's "normal" is routine, not just anywhere, but in a fantastical place. She longs for her mother and resents her father. She's smart, but alienating, skeptical, and judgmental. Magali works for her father, Ted, who owns the bar and buys coke from a guy who brings his son and leaves him in the car. Magali's amusements and hopes in life are drawn solely from the little stories in her head, and the only way she can connect to her true problems is by making up these stories. So she gets a simple crush, but in her mind it explodes. She feels closer to him - this stranger - because she forces her own circumstances on him, her own issues, as she's too preoccupied with being "tough" to deal with them directly.  

Comments? Let me know what you think. Be cruel to be kind.

Thanks for reading! 
 - L.

 

Can I Graduate? [dream]

I just woke up from this very intense dream:

Gumby, Jane, Foster, and I were graduating. From what, I'm not sure, since the people around were just a mix of everyone I've ever known. The ceremony was separated into two groups: H&S and another I can't remember the name of. On the programs that were handed out, each of the two had subtitles - H&S's was Go! but again I can't remember the other.

Throughout the dream, I was full of anxiety - at first because I had to register late for graduation (it was possible I wouldn't graduate at all) and then because I wasn't able to be with my friends. There was a party before we went into the giant graduation hall, and my three high school friends were nowhere to be found. At one point, a group of kids I used to know started laughing at me and I was so angry that my friends were not there. They were only being cruel because I was alone.

Gifts were handed out, and I saw this stack of CDs (some burned, but one was The Beatles "Black" - some mash-up cover album. I was excited and so sure that it must be for me (who else there would've wanted that?) But I was handed a burned CD instead. Feeling down about being laughed at and the lame, impersonal gift, I went to go find my friends.

I found the three in a back room chillin and laughing. I felt intrusive, but happy to be safe again. It's not that they were unhappy I finally arrived, but the mood and tone of the room had an obvious shift. It was then that I discovered Foster was given The Beatles "Black" album (this was not the same as the real one, fyi). I was about to tell him how awesome that was when he leaned in and whispered that he didn't actually have any interest in it. I recoiled from him, disgusted by his lack of appreciation and jealous that he would be chosen for something I wanted even though he himself didn't even want it.

Then we were called into the giant graduation hall. Dark hardwood floors and (for some reason) cushy chairs were all that occupied that hall before we flooded it with people. This was when the trouble really started.

Even though my three friends were in a different category than me, I tried desperately to be on stage with them - to graduate with them - but I got caught. These older people who I felt I knew in the dream but can't picture their faces now, well they sent me away from the whole ceremony. At one point, a bus dropped me off somewhere without any way to get back. I was forced to sit down with someone who acted like a shrink but didn't seem qualified and I had to explain my erratic behavior. I grew increasingly angry as I realized he didn't care, he was just distracting me from graduation - he was keeping me from my friends. It was as though they all decided I didn't belong and it was better if I wasn't there.

My last thought was being angry at myself. I should have just waited and graduated in my own section. I didn't realize it until that moment, but I would have rather been able to watch them walk across the stage - even if I couldn't be with them - than not be there at all.