Mike Topp was born in Washington, DC. He is currently living in New York City unless he has died or moved. His recent books include SASQUATCH STORIES from Publishing Genius. http://publishinggenius.com/?p=284
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Mike Topp was born in Washington, DC. He is currently living in New York City unless he has died or moved. His recent books include SASQUATCH STORIES from Publishing Genius. http://publishinggenius.com/?p=284
By Daniel John
Susan Aposhyan was eight months pregnant. The father had demanded an abortion. She had legally released him from all obligation. Her family was cold and distant. She had the Department of Social Services, that was all. And she had me. I’d seen all three of my children born. Susan’s Armenian black hair fell over her shoulders, and her brown eyes were full of weariness. She undressed awkwardly with her belly so large and got on top of the bed, then settled into the child position of yoga.
There was a too-tight fullness between her shoulder blades, at T2 and T3, and a great lack on the right side of her tail, cold and empty. I started to pull on her right hip.
“Mmm,” she said, so I knew I was doing the right thing. I moved my left hand down from between her shoulder blades and just laid it on her emptiness, next to her tail.
“There’s a dead baby here, Susan, in this emptiness. Your real baby is very much alive, don’t worry about him. This dead baby is an unloved self, that’s all.”
All the time I talked, my hands kept on working, pushing her right hip away from her sacrum, then pulling it back. I pressed down on her right sacroiliac joint point by point, sometimes leaning hard on a spot with my whole fist, sometimes just stroking down to it from her heart. I continued right down to her sit bone. She almost screamed with the pain, then broke into hysterical giggles. I’d hardly touched the left side of her body at all.
“That area’s such a mess,” she said, meaning the dead baby space.
“A mess?”
She laughed. “I mean it’s so fucked up.”
“It’s confused, but it’s not a mess.”
“I’m getting confused.”
“That’s a good sign.”
Hold…release…hold…release… She moved so she was mostly on her stomach with the big pillow under. I started bigger movements with her right thigh, compressing her hip joint and then applying traction, pulling her leg out toward me.
“OW! That hurts up here,” she said, pointing to her right low back.
“That’s what has to do the work when your right thigh doesn’t.”
I put a lot of weight on her ribs and hip, bringing them together when she exhaled, pulling them apart when she breathed in. Bound energy released, a lot of it.
“Do you know what the side position is in giving birth?”
“No, I haven’t thought about position yet.”
“It’s like this,” I said and held her right leg up to expand her perineum. “With my third child the nurse held my wife’s leg up like this while she lay partly on her side for twenty minutes straight.”
“It’s not symmetrical.”
“So?”
“So I don’t like it.”
“But it’s relaxing.”
“It’s not supposed to be relaxing. I’m supposed to work hard so I have to be symmetrical.”
“You’re nuts. You work hard in labor, you’ll crack up. Your uterus does the hard work.”
“But symmetrical is better.”
“The way you’re resisting it, the opposite is true.” I climbed over her onto the bed and pulled on her right thigh while I pushed hard on her sacrum. Something changed.
“Do you want to keep going?” It had been one hour. For an ordinary person it would have been plenty, what I’d already done.
“I’m fine,” she replied dreamily. “Could you stroke my sacrum some more?”
Within minutes I was creating a magnet for love to come down from her heart and fill up the dead baby space on the right side of her tail. I let my mind wander to free my hands of oversight. After ten solid minutes, an enormous length of time for any one touch on a body, I stopped and put my hands under her right thigh, my right fingers in her groin, touching her pubic hair, and my left fingers alongside her vagina. I slowly moved them back and forth. Fear entered the room.
“Something scary is about to happen,” I announced.
“…Yeah.”
She didn’t say stop, so I kept on. I moved closer to her vagina with both hands, found the spots with the greatest energy, and slowed down my rhythmic back-and-forth movement to a crawl.
“My hip just moved,” she reported.
Five minutes later she said, “My tail just moved to the right.”
Suddenly the desire pouring off her was so intense I could barely stay awake.
“I feel like I’m nursing your dead baby,” I told her. The release of desire was its breast milk. I used my erection as a guide. When I was erect I was drawing off plugged, unreleased sexual energy. When my erection faded it meant I should move my hands to another spot, one that got me hard. Sleepiness overwhelmed me. Head hanging, eyes shut, guided by a rising, falling erection, I moved my fingers with a sexual intent, finding the sexy places and then gently squeezing the feeling out. The dead baby started to come alive.
I began to collapse. I had to lie down. I crumpled toward her feet. I tucked her right foot in my armpit. I had a clear view of her genitals. I carefully put my right thumb on her perineum and pushed it in about an inch, resting the palm of my hand over her anus. With my left hand I held her pubic bone and oh…so…slowly pushed my two hands toward each other.
This is such delicate work down here. It needs such a large amount of deep, honest
caring.
Energy flooded into my hands, like silver shooting electricity. Something breathtakingly
significant was occurring beneath my fingers.
Vaginas are large. They go almost all the way to the anus. Hers protruded in the fleshy abundance of pregnancy. I gently pushed my hands together, slid my left hand a tiny ways over her pubic bone, getting closer and closer to her clitoris. I could see its little sheath. I was so exhausted, right on the edge of sleep. There was a sense of a great movement, coming to a close. I made my hands memorize their position, and then I deliberately…fell…asleep. A second hour had passed.
I was sleeping in silver. The energy from her perineum and vagina was like a river of liquid mercury that I slept inside of. I woke up and moved my left hand so my fingers were on her clitoris. My right thumb was still on her perineum. Electric energy zapped and twanged my fingers like sails in a solar wind. I fell asleep again, not deep. A great yawning opened up beneath me of intense weariness. I could not fall into it because the energy was too high for deep sleep. I awoke minutes later, very cold, and crawled up next to her and stroked her long, black hair.
“I have a right side!” she said ecstatically, stretching. “I’ve never had one before. Or at least the one I had was all shitty, a real mess. But now I have two sides and they’re both good!” She stood up and walked around. “It’s incredible having two sides.”
I watched a stunningly beautiful naked eight-months-pregnant woman stride around the room like the perfection of a myth.
“Look at your face, Susan! It’s all happy!”
She walked to the mirror and laughed. “I have a right eye too. I feel invincible!” She walked over to the bed and loomed over me with her great breasts and belly, then said, “That massage was simply brilliant. You should get letters after your name.”
“Like QRSTX?”
She laughed. “No, really, Daniel, that was one of the greatest massages of all time.”
Daniel John is a poet, writer, actor, and playwright.. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Apalachee Review, and The Amherst Review, among many others. His plays and monologues have been produced by the University of Alabama at Troy and by TYG Productions at the Boston Playwrights Theater at Boston University.
THE STORYTELLER
1
“Hey, Pichi, what are you doing?”
“Nothing, mama. Just taking a snooze. And doing a little homework for my English class.”
“Dreaming, Pichi, always dreaming. Sueños inútiles.”
It is afternoon and the Imperial Valley pants softly under a late sun. A smoke slick hangs over the fecund fields toward Holtville. In the sky there is a single cloud, like a discharge, moving in the direction of Mexicali. From the Salton Sea come silent wings of scavenger gulls.
I put down a few more sentences in the notebook, and wait—wait for the sounds to come to me, the words.
Meanwhile I can hear mama padding around the kitchen in her bare feet. Her body is a lava flow of flesh under the National Dollar Store print dress. Her hair is knotted into a crooked bun; there are streaks of grey in it. “I never been the same,” she would always say, “since Bertha was born.” That was four years ago, in 1964. Now her body is too tired for more babies, even if she wanted more.
Papa is groaning faintly in his sleep. He lies on the cot in the front room. Great colored drops fall from his face, like drops of blood. Papa has been sick for a long time. Doc Skrye says there is something growing in his liver. Pain comes to Papa in barrages, withering him; mama holds her ear to his body, listening, and is frightenedshe thinks she can hear the last febrile thrust of his heart. His face is yellow and dry, soft as finished fruit in the mark-down bin of El Rancho market.
On the low table next to where papa is sleeping there is a recent photograph of the Gonzaga family. The only one missing is Lidia, my older sister. There is Maruca, two years out of Brownlee High, my brother Carlitos in his soldier suit with Pichi by his side. Then, in stair-steps, Patricia, Lalo, Roberto, Donato and little Bertha. Papa looks well and vigorous; he does not yet carry a cane. Mama is wearing a sack dress covered with yellow orchids and there is a bandanna around her neck. We do not look happy. We look like someone has just died.**
4
The Trash class meets every day at Continuation. The real title of the course is English Fundamentals. A cozy world has been created there for the pupils of Mr. Nathaniel Trash. (“Have your laugh now, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, Anglo-Saxon names often have startling and inappropriate meanings, like the impecunious Mr. Rich or the timid Miss Wilde, or our substitute teacher Miss Prone who, some say, is often supine; but if she were Supine you can bet she would be prone. You laugh at me, Nathaniel Trash, but not at Eloise Escobar next door; but you would howl if I called her my dear Miss Broomfield.”)
It is a small class. There is Maclovia “Mac” Dumas. Elena Parker. “Mueca” González. Skunk O’Leary. We get a chance to talk whenever we want and Mr. Trash reads aloud to us a lot. “Literature,” he calls it, releasing his beatific smile. Whatever it is, we like it, even Mac who moves her lips when she reads and Elena who can absorb only a word at a time. Mueca and Skunk prefer Mad comics but they still sit with their mouths hung open when Mr. Trash gets carried away by the Genius of the Moment.
Mueca and Skunk loll zonked at their desks, their faces smeared with sweat from recess volleyball. Their lips curl serenely as if, below the surface, they were making it. Mac and Elena hold hands. We glance—rotating—at the louvered window, at the blackboard, at the clock, at Mr. Trash, at each other.
Time etches by. Hardly a fragment of air slips through the windows. An odor of creosote and fungus rises from the floor and there is a stench of pencil sharpenings, mingled with the madness of body odor. A fine dust filters from the chalk trough and drifts through sunlight to the linoleum.
Mr. Trash is talking about James Joyce. His finger points to a passage in our paperback Dubliners. He speaks of the Irish, of Catholicism, of Celts. His voice is cultivated, mellow, drunk with sound. Mr. Trash is about thirty, an ageless and pallid thirty; and when he speaks of love or death it gives you a crumbly feeling inside—maybe the effect of his big vague eyes which rest on ours, one by one. Finally, they settle on Maclovia Dumas.
“Maclovia, are you amused by Mr. Joyce?”
“Is he funny, Mr. Trash?”
“Very, Maclovia. You should take him—you should never take him—seriously.”
“Snow,” she murmurs. “Gawd, I never seen snow in my life.”
“What’s snow got to do with it?” Mueca whinnies. His eyes are wet and his gaunt legs yearn apart as he laughs. A chewed Eagle is clutched in his bitten pincers. “What’s snow got to do with it?”
“We’ll soon find out, won’t we, Maclovia, if Mr. González will give us half a chance.”
“Well, is he funny, Mr. Trash?”
Her earnestness—bordering on anxiety—makes Mr. Trash smile.
“I said it and I meant it, Maclovia. Of course James Joyce is funny, but not always—like us. He is not too funny in the snow, Maclovia.” His five foot five frame whisks toward the window, where he stands wrapped in thought for a dramatic moment or so.
“You can know snow and you can know fire,” he says at last, “without having touched them, Maclovia, through the medium of the printed word.”
“Yeah.”
Mr. Trash’s fine arms are covered with long silken hairs, blond, and he raises these arms now.
“You can know anything, Maclovia—In a sense—by reading about it. Literature is a lovely substitute for lots of things. Will you remember that, do you think?”
“If literature is all you got,” Skunk O’Leary says to his ornately carved desk.
“Do I catch an undertone of double meaning?”
Skunk has a white streak down one side of his red hair. Mr. Trash examines this streak at a distance. A marked man: the snigger of the Celtic race. Mr. Trash weighs his words.
“We all must make do with substitutes, Skunk. You’ve got your substitutes and I’ve got my substitutes.”
“Old lady Prone who comes in when you’re sick?”
“This class, for example.”
“What do you mean by that, Mr. Trash? You putting us on?”
“This class, I say, instead of a regular class at Brownlee Union. But this class, this substitute, is better than the real thing, believe you me.”
“You only think it is maybe.”
“Some substitutes end by becoming the real thing, Skunk. That’s something that Henry James learned that you would do well to remember, too.”
“Aw.”
Elena’s eyes are flowing shut under soft brown Indian lids, lids rolling softly over soft brown eyes. Her nose, wide and slightly swollen by a pink pimple, expands.
“Elena was fascinated by Joyce.”
The class titters, and Elena’s eyes focus faintly on the form before her. Her breasts under the flimsy Newberry dress move of their own accord.
Mr. Trash drifts about the room now. He is graceful yet clumsily put together, and his crepe souls shriek on the linoleum.
At the window now, his hand still clutching Dubliners, badly dog-eared, he begins to talk of fatal love and one’s family. At the blackboard he talks of Dublin, Paris and the Lost Generation, mentioning someone called Sylvia Beach. (In my mind a sparkling stretch of hypnotic sands opens up.) A dozen names, a dozen books Mr. Trash has given me, quiver in the unknown—In the confused darkness of the world outside Brownlee. I think of the quiet breathing in the stacks at Brownlee’s Public Library, where you can watch through the screened windows as the sparrows scratch and argue in the Brownlee Public Park.
A far whistle notes the hour.
“The frailty of human perception,” Mr. Trash is saying—and the phrase lingers on in all our minds.
Skunk fumbles with his fly. Maclovia yawns into a Kleenex. The clock jumps spasmodically. We are caught in the Trash class, in a terrible kind of freedom that we have won for ourselves.
“One sentence, one phrase—or one mere touch—Is enough to change your life forever.”
“Amen,” Mueca sniggers, squeezing himself.
Suddenly I think of last night and flush with guilt, because I will never be able to tell anyone about it—least of all a priest—but Cuca no doubt will make up for that.
Once I was pursued by guilt, until I had to let it out, but not in Mary-Margaret to a priest I knew. Across the border, in Mexicali.**
“The sleeting of immense powers pierces us,” he says—obviously still into the chill symbolism of Dubliners. He pauses astounded by his own phrase.
We give an answering shudder of puzzlement. Maclovia cleans a nail. Skunk fashions square knots and undoes them. The very stars, Mr. Trash makes us feel instinctively, are almost perversely meaningful—capable of destroying us or raising us to heights unknown before. He gazes skyward through the faint moss of the ceiling.
“If we only realized. If we only had the ability to see.”
“To see what, Mr. Trash?”
It is Elena Parker, on the point of tears.
Mr. Trash smiles down at her, showing a tiny row of teeth.
“The power of inanimate things! And yet, some fortunate souls are able to feel these powers, and they rise—emerge—to the level of thinking men. They help us to realize our own poor powers, sensitive but second-rate.”
“You mean artists, Mr. Trash? Writers?”
Mr. Trash wheels, his soles a symphonic squeal. There is no need for his lips to form the words. Everyone in the classroom jumps at the jumping of the minute hand.
Then Mr. Trash sinks to his chair beside the desk. He is never behind the desk; there is never anything between him and us. He leans his elbow against a pile of illiteracy.
“You probably think I’m totally off my nut,” he says suddenly.
He stares hard at Elena Parker’s Indian-Mexican face and his gaze makes her—and everyone else—nervous. Her hands with their fat beetle-like fingers twitch. Her eyes are ready, as usual, to overflow.
“Do you think I’m off my nut, Elena?”
“No, Mr. Trash. Oh, no.”
Her smile is so beautiful it gives me a lump in the throat. Her “crime”—In the eyes of the school district—had been an inability to adjust to human time. At Brownlee Union she was always wandering off and not showing up for class or, when she did finally make it to school, spending her time in Make Up. Yet she has never been late for Mr. Trash’s class at Continuation. She opens her mouth and a small pink object inside struggles to get out.
“Well, Elena understands me if none of you others do.” He waves his left arm hopelessly. “Don’t worry about it, though. You don’t have to absorb everything.” A smile, weak. “A single sentence will do, if it slices through that armor; and if it pierces, ladies and gentlemen, you will never be the same again. Thanks to Mr. Trash who is off his nut.”
Mueca blows his laughter into a tight fist.
“Mr. González, it seems, has been pierced.”
“Aren’t you going to read to us today, Mr. Trash?” It is Mac, pleading frankly.
“I’d love to, dear, but it’s too late. And there are even limits to nuts.”
Somewhere, far off—In another world perhaps—a bell is ringing.
“Maybe tomorrow?”
“I liked Flies better than Dubliners.”
“Yeah, Skunk likes them flies.” Mueca grins.
“You will see how much better Joyce is when you settle down to the language, kid. I’ll make you see it—tomorrow; and maybe Pichi here would do us the favor of reading one of his compositions.”
Mac gasps in anticipation.
Mr. Trash is lit by the sun that slants through the blinds of the Continuation classroom. It is broken—vicious—school light, a fluid matter changing places slowly, despairingly unwarm.
While we sit there in our last delirium we are assailed by the increasing rasp of bells: prison alarms. Elena takes Mac’s hand, Mueca glances uneasily from beneath his straight black lashes, Skunk zips and unzips and zips. Pichi Gonzaga is lost in the flower patch of his thoughts. In another life—some weeks from now—he will be free of Continuation and of his past, married to Cuca Ximénez and laboring at the ice plant.
What began when he was fourteen has no importance because no one knows.
William Bryant lived and worked in the Middle East for many years. He has done a stint for the Saudi Navy, worked in the petrochemical industry, and shown the same propensity as his inspiration T.E. Lawrence for “plunging crudely among crude men.” He has written biographies of Alfred Russel Wallace and Roger Casement and several novels. Ross was his first published novel.
**Portions of this piece have been edited for length.
Divine Comedy
Poems by Ron Kolm
Fly By Night Press, 2013
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan
Ron Kolm, whom for the purposes of this review I will think of as Kid Danté, is an artist whose canvas is the kind on which you go down for the count. But not this palooka.
He goes 32 rounds in this match with the poetic form, not counting graphic relief between rounds by ten gifted illustrators. The result is arnica for the soul. He delivers a nice combination of thrusts, jabs, uppercuts and sucker punches in this exhibition of the sweet science of the stanza. The bodily fluids fly but he never loses heart, whether he’s taking down Death, JFK or a can-opener wielding girlfriend. His cauliflower ear for the New York street, bedroom, tap or factory is as true as his bloodshot eye for the absurdity of his place and time. While he holds poetry up by the armpits from time to time, he takes no dive and neither filches nor ducks. The Void gives him the biggest jolt of any bout, and the women often have him on the ropes, but he comes out swinging every time, not with fancy footwork but steady; implacable — despite little birdies floating over his shoulders. I can only conclude that, as below, somebody up there likes him.
by Karen Lillis
From high ground, I watched you surrender to a ladycop
while two young women were pushed to the asphalt
and roughly cuffed, hands behind their backs.
More uniforms were chasing the guitar player across Liberty Ave
while some copper shoved the comedian towards the paddy wagon
and the accordionist was folded into the back of the squad car
with his squeezebox still strapped across his ribcage.
Moments before,
we’d been folk dancing
among the bike punx and the straight edge
and I wondered what was more perfectly Pittsburgh:
shimmying to a Balkan brass band under a midnight bridge
in a full moon glow on May Day
or the VU cover band we’d seen the previous evening
Andy Warhol smirking down from his grave
How does it feeeel
to be loooooved?
Three songs into Balkan gypsy,
bright headlights flashed on, and I knew.
Cops, baby, let’s GO. I thought you were right
behind me, but I was mistaken. Instead,
the cops had cops behind them. Quick on the heels
of the first car, two more cars drove up, then two more, then two
more, then two more, so fast and so many that I could no longer count.
I wondered what terrible crime they thought
they were responding to. I wondered
what actual crime they were missing
by raining down on the music lovers
after park curfew.
It looked like a scene
out of West Side Story or Jungleland—
a cliché decades out of date.
Only, the Sharks were the cops and their K9s
and the Jets weren’t fighting back.
The Sharks said: WALK AWAY. Walk Away Faster.
You’re Coming With Us. Who’s in Charge Here?
You Fucking Idiots Are Going to Jail. I Don’t Have
to Give A Fucking Warning. Everybody Stay Here.
GO. GO NOW. Back Up or Get Pepper Sprayed. Tell
Your Friends I Could Shoot Them All If I Wanted To.
I’m Going to Bash Her Fucking Head In. WALK AWAY,
MISTER. Sit down on the curb and put your hands up.
What the Jets said to land themselves 26 hours in county jail:
Stop, You’re Hitting My Friend Too Rough.
Before I left you for the night
I yelled, “I LOVE YOUUUUUU!”
from up high on the bridge behind the chain link
to you breathless below on the sidewalk
and then I really felt like Maria
or Marlon Brando.
Sirens continued screaming in your direction
as I ran uphill to our house
to sleep alone.
Nine arrests, 31 citations, and a few weeks later
the Zone Commander invited us
for a de-escalating chat at the Precinct.
He told us he grew up in the South Hills, a young thug
turning over cars, finding trouble, trading fisticuffs
with the local police.
Tent said it as we drove away: The cops and the criminals,
they’re just two sides of the same rotten coin. But us freaks,
we’re the ones they really hate—people who still think
for themselves, people who don’t play their games, people
who keep asking the persistent questions.
Karen Lillis is the author of four short novels, most recently Watch the Doors as They Close. She has been a writer-in-residence at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris and is at work on a memoir of her years behind the register at St. Mark’s Bookshop, Bagging the Beats at Midnight. She blogs about the small press and indie bookstores at Karen the Small Press Librarian.
by George Spencer
Who doesn’t like a horse opera about a man and his horse riding into the sunset together, a long shadow behind them?
One of the fastest guns in the West, Billy the Kid had bedded his share of frontier women. Some said he was running from their angry husbands. Truth was, no man wanted to catch up with him. He knew his business; horses, guns, women and banks.
Billy was born in the basement of a crack house in one of the worst neighborhoods in New York City. His parents were from the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe. His father had soft hands. He stole eggs. Most times the hen didn’t notice. Then his soft hands were on the girl next door. That and the missing eggs were too much. The town folks came to get him, so they fled together to Prague. They finally made it to New York, where Billy’s father worked for a ward heeler. When Billy grew up he met the Mayor, Jimmy Walker. Walker was impressed with Billy and made him a minor bagman in Boss Tweed’s Tammany shakedown operation. Five dollars for protection. Ten dollars to keep a salon license current. Billy knew this penny ante stuff was not for him. Anyway most of the money he collected ended up in the ample pockets of Andrew J. Garvey a/k/a The Prince of Plasterers, once having received $133,187 for two days plastering walls.
Jimmy Walker won his second term defeating Republican Fiorello La Guardia and Socialist Norman Thomas by an overwhelming margin. Then the stock market crashed and the Archbishop of New York denounced him for tolerating vice and casinos. With the heat on he fled to Europe with a chorus girl.
Billy thought all this fuss was no way to live. He headed west.
Billy got sent up the river only once. That’s when they started calling him “Billy the Kid.” It was no compliment.
The screws gave him a little booklet that said things like: It’s your responsibility to know and follow all rules and regulations as promulgated by the Prison Director. You are expected to maintain your cell with a high degree of sanitation at all times.
James “Texas Bank Robber” Lucas ruled the inmates. Billy was no man to accept things just because that was the way they were. He did accept banks the way they were but that was the only exception and when he left them they were different anyway, poorer for his visit.
Lucas knew he had to get to Billy before Billy got to him. Lucas swiped a pair of shears from the prison barbershop. He stabbed Billy in the back. Lucas went to solitary, Billy to the prison hospital.
When the local newspapers carried the story about Lucas trying to kill Billy they called Billy an ex-bank robber. They said he played the banjo.
Once the stitches were out of his back, Billy settled his score with Lucas. He cold-cocked Lucas in the laundry, shoved some dirty socks down his throat and then put him in one of those big pots they used to boil laundry to loosen up the dirt. He piled a load of sheets on top of him, poured in some lye, then slammed the lid shut.
While the guards were looking for Lucas, Billy escaped into the Western sunset, slipping through the sage grass and bluebonnets. When they found Lucas he was the same delicate red as some of those wild flowers Billy had ridden through.
Billy never could have any kind of stable relationship with a woman. He was a traveling man. His job kept him on the road looking for banks and avoiding the Feds and husbands foolish enough to follow him. Though, as he got older, (and he never said this to anyone other than Gypsy Blaze Star who never repeated it to anyone other than me) he admitted he’d never shoot a man if there was some way to avoid it. That’s why he only killed twenty-one. Ten were over women, ten were bank business and he never could remember the last one though he tried to his dying day, not liking to leave loose ends. He was cautious. And no bragging man, he never spoke much about his line of work and never said, like those Chicago papers claimed, he knew more about banks than 95% of the bank examiners.
Billy worked his way northeast through Texas straight back to New York City. He hung out in billiard halls and boxing gyms. He even went as far north as a bar near Time Square. And he still had an eye for the ladies. He saw Gypsy Blaze Star walk by on her way to work at the Gaiety Theatre at Broadway and 46th Street, now sadly gone. Elegant, it was designed in Louis XV style with balconies, boxes, and a proscenium arch just grand enough to contain this fulsome ecdysiast.
Billy had never seen a lady like her and the barkeep said, I’ll introduce you to her. Billy fell in love and wanted her to quit burlesque. Her innovation, an almost casual strip style compared to the herky-jerky of most burlesque strippers, made her rich and famous. She liked the money. Billy didn’t want his woman up on that stage and all those traveling salesmen and college boys whistling and carrying on about her pasties and g-string. Finally she threw him out of her Gramercy Park townhouse. Said he was washed up. After that, his drinking got so bad he was in the drunk tank a couple of times a week.
In this inebriated state he often wandered by the Women’s House of Detention, the world’s only art deco prison. Mae West was in there on obscenity charges. She had appeared in a play called “Sex.” He read about it in the Hearst newspaper.
Then he got an idea. Being a careful man he worked out all the details like he used to before robbing a bank. Like a stake-out, he cased Greenwich Village until he found what he was looking for: latex vagina and breasts. Everything. As the ad said: Our special hand-made products are made of latex and are carefully sculpted to look amazingly realistic. For example, all of the hairs around the lips are hand tied to make the vagina even more perfect.
So he got himself dressed up as a woman. Then he got drunk. He went from gutter to paddy wagon to Court House to the House of Detention. When he sobered up, still in drag, he found her cell on the fourth floor and proceeded with his hoped-for-seduction. He was doing a strip tease exclusively for her, slowly revealed to her what he really was. He used the same sophisticated style that had worked so well for Gypsy Blaze Star.
Word spread through the prison that a man was doing a striptease in Mae West’s cell. All the inmates on her floor crowded into her cell, clapping and cheering. The guards threw Billy out to hoots and hollers and worse from the women prisoners.
There he was, flat on his back, in the middle of the sidewalk, breasts around his waist, vagina around his left knee. Newspaper reporters who hung out in the bars on lower Sixth Avenue rushed to interview him. He demanded money from them and drank it all.
Then the same Archbishop who had denounced Jimmy Walker twenty years before, denounced him as a cross dresser citing Deuteronomy 22:5. Now Billy was no scholar but he knew what they would be calling him next.
Some said liquor did to him what no man could. Others contended that he died of a broken heart. Or was it torment and confusion about who he really was? Who knows?
They buried him at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York not far from the remains of Jimmy Walker. Gypsy Blaze Star still had a soft spot in her heart for the old cowboy but she had a job to do and was the first to leave the cemetery. Mae West had just gotten out of the House of Detention and was too busy with interviews and book contracts to attend.
George Spencer has two cable shows; Poetry Thin Air and TheArts(Performing)@Tribes. He publishes the hard copy/internet magazine faroutfurtheroutoutofsight.com. A book of his poems, Unpious Pilgrim, was recently published by Fly By Night Press. He has just finished a feature film about the Marquise de Sade, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
Black Scat Books: January, 2013
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan
I wish I could say that this is one of the most ambivalent titles since Either/Or, but of course that book was Anything/But. Each succeeding story is more diaphanous, with the slippery structures collapsing in mid-thought. Fiction may be the art of making stuff up, but Arias-Misson seems to be making it up right within each sentence, undecided as to which way to jump, doubting whether the last scrap of description was flimsy enough and so tearing it up and starting over. With all the current talk of metadata being acquired by the NSA, but never the content, I found these meta-fictions to be similarly devoid of concrete content; not to say that you wouldn’t care to listen, just that it is maddeningly difficult.
Given the stature and history of this enigmatic, creative polymath, it is unlikely that he would turn out a straightforward, commercially viable novel; he has spent several decades making innovations in art, poetry, performance and experimental fiction.
As with his novel, Theatre of Incest, he adopts a stance that celebrates where other authors – actually, anyone else – would judge if not condemn. He seems a sort of one man erotic post-Dada movement.
One does not turn to Evergreen for the prude’s point of view, but Arias-Misson seems to have resolved his Mind/Body problem by having girls on the brain. In The Lotus With Eight Petals, for instance, he imagines TinTin in a physical condition that would make even Captain Haddock blush, and the title story chronicles a series of sexual conquests that are accompanied by levitation, so it’s not so much ‘walking’ he does on air. There is nothing here that is not somewhat dreamlike, and it is an impressive feat that he sustains this tone through a wide range of situations. I only wish there wasn’t such a high proportion of wet dreams; I mean, the tenor is like an army camp after Bob Hope has brought a lascivious ‘dance troupe’ on tour.
One of the most unusual and engaging stories, The Marazzi Chronicles, puts us in a sort of spirit world in which the only thing physical appears to be gratification, but the flow of language is delightfully intense. We are in another dimension that could be like a Krazy Kat landscape. The Man Who Had No Head is a funny and daring story, only slightly more serious than the 1940’s children’s book, The Man Who Lost His Head, by Claire Huchet Bishop and Robert McCloskey, only this fellow does not attempt to substitute a turnip or pumpkin for his noggin, and instead goes in for some existential soul searching, in lieu of head scratching. I suspect many readers who still possess a head will be scratching them as well.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013
Reviewed by Jim Feast
Perhaps there’s a new academic field – I’m not up on these things – which concentrates on the esthetics of book design: layout of the page, colors on the cover, illustrations chosen, and so on. I mention this because Loren Glass in his new Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde spends a lot of time meticulously analyzing Grove book covers. Even so, the heart of and the real magnificence of this book is Glass’s combination of a detailed history of the press and, the more difficult task, a thoughtful evaluation of this publisher’s impact on American culture.
The most well known of these impacts is how Barney Rosset, with able lieutenants Fred Jordan and Richard Seaver, broke down the censorship rules, which had muzzled publishers. The story has often been told of how Grove in its spirited legal defense of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and other works more or less demolished all the legal barriers that had Puritanically controlled publishing and told adults what they could read. Not mentioned in this story is the fact, which Glass shows is of key explanatory value, that the battering rams Grove used were not books such as Ulysses, an earthy but decidedly high-brow work, but books Glass calls example of “vulgar modernism.” These were novels that honored the stylistic and topical concerns of high modernism, for instance, in Burroughs use of a fragmented, cut-up style of composition or in Henry Miller’s focus on the travails of being a writer, but that, due to their humor, absurdity and high quotient of x-rated scenes, were favorite reads of the general public. Glass puts it like this: “The principal authors Grove brought to the forefront in its battle against censorship – Lawrence, Miller, Burroughs, Genet, Rechy, Selby – received both critical and popular acclaim during the 1960s.” And something Glass doesn’t mention, but which a glance at book sales indicate, is that these authors, not taught in academia to the degree they used to be, still sell widely to the general public.
While Grove brought the avant-garde to a much wider readership – this is one of the major themes of Glass’s study – it did not do this solely through battening on writers who favored salacious material. Grove’s championing of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and other not erotically inclined but equally audacious writers is proof of this. Here a confluence of other factors, along with Grove’s canny marketing, brought this group to the fore in sales and attention. For one, there was a new audience of being-educated, young people. “Subsidized by the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Americans entered college in unprecedented numbers in the postwar years. … undergraduate enrollment increased by almost 500 percent between 1945 and 1975. ” This new audience represents what may have been print’s last stand. Glass quotes Phillip Beidler to the effect that the 1960s, “was truly the last great moment of reading and writing in the West by an identifiable mass-cultural constituency … [being] spiritually, the last great moment of America’s own faith in the Word as its basic article of political and educational reliance.”
Moreover, it was not accidental that all these writers, who each bested the next in terms of nihilism and a pessimistic view of the human future, were Europeans. Glass suggests that there was a latent element of American boosterism in the interest in these books. “Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Genet represent the long twilight of the European male modernist. … [There was] The sense that the [particularly European] West had exhausted its ethical authority … [in contrast to] America’s triumphant emergence from the war.”
So, it stands to reason if the establishment, represented by the European modernist tradition, is defunct, a new generation needs to come forward to take the reins, just as Grove’s young Turks had come forward to rewrite the rules of publishing. However, due not only to historical circumstances but (I think) also to Rosset’s time in China, most of the sources for this new order were looked for either outside the U.S., in Mao’s People’s Republic or Che’s Cuba, or in non-white America, as in the writings of Malcolm X. In a second evolution, following the creation of a mass readership for vulgar modernism, Grove now argued that revolution had to be by the book. Glass explains both how works such as Malcolm X Speaks “promised to provide readers with both empirical evidence of and practical guidelines for the development of revolutionary consciousness,” and how the new political booklist from the publisher combined seamlessly with the earlier cultural one. “Grove sought to merge literary and political understandings of the term ‘avant-garde’ in the belief that reading radical literature could instill both the practical knowledge and psychological transformation necessary to precipitate a revolution.”
Being first on the market with books on topics such as black power, Cuba, China, gay liberation, and Irish nationalism, it seemed there was only one area of revolutionary ferment which Grove overlooked, feminism. We’ll come back to that.
First, let’s return to the opening point about the esthetics of book design. Another interesting feature of Grove is how, at the time when film studies was originally becoming an academic field and when, moreover, there were no DVDs or video players so cinema had to be viewed in the movie theater or not at all, Grove invented a new form: the print film. These were books that contained the script, stills and director’s comments from individual significant films in an artifact that, Glass says, made up a “hybrid and transitional genre that provides a unique insight into the process whereby films were presented texts that needed to be read both closely and repeatedly and whose difficulty requires reading other supplemental material to be fully understood.”Analogously, Glass’s Colophon can be seen as the skillful creation of another hybrid, one that concurrently studies history, literary texts and book design. So, just as Grove invented a new breed of film books so Glass’s work, which is chock full of illustrations of Grove covers, which he penetratingly scrutinizes, invents a new form of cultural study.
But, as noted, Glass ends the book examining how the all-male upper crew of Grove management tended to overlook feminism, a neglect that came to a head when a group of dissident women, led by Robin Morgan, occupied Grove’s offices till they were expelled by the police that Grove staff called. Although there seemed little else the Grove executives could have done but call the cops if they wanted to continue operating, this event tarnished the press’s countercultural credentials and led to further complaints about its male chauvinism. Partially reacting to these events, Grove did begin publishing feminist authors, including Kathy Acker, who, Glass points out, “exemplifies the radical feminist appropriation of sexual idioms and attitudes previously reserved for male modernist authors.” He notes further that she represents an “ambiguous legacy,” in that “though her underground and avant-garde credentials are impeccable, they are also thoroughly integrated into the cultural field as a legitimate market.” In other words, once the censorship battles had been won repeatedly by Grove, and barriers against such books as those about, say, male hustlers or third world revolution had been downed, everything could be said, but, therefore, nothing was challenging. “Grove helped to affect a revolution that vastly expanded the range of voices that can be heard without radically challenging the larger socioeconomic order.”
Here, though, I can register a reservation about this tremendous book. If Glass had gone further in history — though this would have gone beyond the parameters of his examination — and looked at the small publishing company Rosset founded after he sold Grove, it would seem Rosset was still publishing books that came from unacceptable-to-the-mainstream, outlaw traditions that even now resists academic incorporation.
One type of renegade book would be those like Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary, which attack a famed author, here Nabokov, from a feminist position. This rewriting of Lolita rated a savage, undeserved attack in the New York Times, in which the reviewer gave no evidence that he had read beyond the first chapter. (Believe it or not, the gist of the attack was the contention that nobody wanted to read about a main character that tortured guinea pigs!)
A second type of renegade book is a work like Alan Kaufman’s Jew Boy. Again, this is a book Rosset published that violates a principle that still governs academic and mainstream inclusion. Recall Glass’s comments that academics and reviewers were always embarrassed by Henry Miller’s tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve as if good writing could never have too much feeling. But Kaufman combines this type of emotional openness with a penchant for discussing taboo subjects. One such subject is the Holocaust, whose horrors can be revealed in the standard treatment but whose wounds have to be shown slowly healing. Kaufman’s book, in violation of this principle, centers on a Holocaust survivor who did not make peace with her past, and who even passes on neuroses to her children. The wounds in this book never heal. This text, too, was neglected by the mainstream, as is to be expected for such a product of rebel intelligence.
The great contribution Glass makes is to show the heroic, humorous and vigorous fight Grove and Evergreen Review made to break down barriers and create new forms that introduced vulgar modernism, sex and politics into the relatively staid world of bookselling. We can say they won a major skirmish but the fight is not over. The establishment is different now. It doesn’t censor but rather ignores significant outsider voices. It no longer fears things like x-rated sex, but rather studiously avoids books, like Jew Boy, that are in your face for (what it considers) all the wrong reasons.
My Faction
There are so many
factions in poetry!
Personally, I hang with
the Minimalist Marxists.
Lazy Rich Kids
Lazy rich kids, I love you!
Let me sit in your room
as you discuss Flaubert.
I’ll be your math tutor,
or rub your back.
Let’s eat braised
brussels sprouts!
Sparrow lives with his wife, Violet Snow, three roommates and a dog in an 132 year old house in Teaneck, New Jersey. Sparrow is the author of Yes, Your Are a Revolutionary, Republican Like Me and America: A Prophecy: The Sparrow Reader (Soft Skull Press). Appearances magazine published a special issue of his work. Sparrow dabbles in Orthodox Judaism and piano improvisation.
We was going to be late if he didn’t hurry up, he was cutting it really close, and I was almost mad with Rudy if he was going to make us late for the end of the world at Coney. I looked at my Rolex and I said patient, it never does no good to get quick with Rudy, I said, “Old buddy you should wear the shirt I give you to wear,” because he don’t see right, Rudy, his eyes roll up like and wander, he sees blue he says banana, he’s cross-wired since this dermatology intern pulled his brain out of our mom with forceps, so Rudy he can take a long time, see, choosing what to wear.
This is why I don’t usually make a fuss, but it was the end of the world, see, and it was going to be at Coney, right, and we had to be there on the dot and looking sharp. That’s what I figured. If we wanted to get good seats and all. We was going to remember this for the rest of our lives, right? so I wanted us both to be looking fine and right on time. Because you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
So I pull the green shirt with the crocodile over Rudy’s head and I show him how the belt closes and he puts on his own shoes which goes pretty quick now I got him the Velcro close kind and I hang his key around his neck inside his shirt and we walk out the door only ten minutes late. As we go down the stairs I tell the tale, how he don’t talk to anybody he don’t see me shake their hand first, he stay right with me even if there’s a dog on the train he hold onto me, he don’t pick up anything at all off the street, and et cetera like that.
We walk the twelve blocks to Union Square even though was I by myself I’d take the L and transfer but Rudy he gets confused walking underground, he starts talking loud how he can’t see the sky and how come’s that? so we walk to the Q train which is fast to Coney and we need to get there fast. I keep my arm around his shoulder and he walks just as fast as me, he’s playing fish, his lips push in and out and that’s fine so long as his legs keep going like a person, I tell him he’s doing real good and he goes to stop and tell me all about it but I say, “Tell me on the train,” and he keeps walking. He’s being so good. I’m real proud of him.
Getting him through the turnstile is always tricky, this is why we don’t use those entrances that have like revolving cages, if I pulled him out of one of those once I done it a hundred times, no it’s got to be regular turnstiles and that’s what they have at 14th and 4th and that’s what we go through, I swipe the MetroCard and tell him, “Go!” and he goes right through, it’s lucky, there’s a little white dog sticking out of this lady’s bag and Rudy goes right through after the dog but, still lucky, even though I have to swipe three times before it reads my card I catch up to him before he can pet the dog or pet the lady which either one takes up a lot of time which time we don’t have. We have to get to Coney if we want good seats. Rudy nods when I say this and walks away from the dog which is going uptown and we walk fast down the stairs and a Q pulls in and there’s two seats facing backwards, lucky a third time, so Rudy and me sit down and spread out our legs and I show him the sports pages until we come out on the elevated tracks and then he shows me the trees and the birds and names the different kinds of litter. “Plastic bottle.” “Glass bottle.” “Coke can.” He likes to say, “Coke can,” so much that sometimes I don’t tell him the right name because he gets all smile on his face saying “Coke can, Coke can,” and meanwhile I can check how the Yankees are doing which I’m not supposed to do because we’re a Mets family, always been a Mets family, and I’m behind them 200 percent, I mean everybody gets slumps, but if it’s going to be the end of the world I figure I’ll sneak a look at how the Bombers are doing. I shake my head. “Glass southpaw,” I tell Rudy. “Glass pawpaw?” he says. “Never mind, it’s okay,” I tell him, and we go on all the way to Coney like that, me shaking my head and him saying “New paper. Plastic bag. New paper. Coke can, Coke can.” He don’t say it too loud or nothing and nobody’s paying attention anyhow, they’re putting on their makeup or talking in their cellphones, getting ready for the end of the world at Coney, little kids is running around they parents paying them no mind and this one couple is going at it hot and heavy which made me think about Marcella who I’m not going to see before the end of the world, I figure, since she kept wanting us to go out just me and her without Rudy who she said was creepy so I told her goodbye, she was hot, Marcella, but there’s going to be a lot of spilled milk at the end of the world so what’s the use of crying about a few drops of it? I show Rudy this big bird out the other side of the train so he don’t get all upset by this couple making out. “Vulture,” he says.
Finally, finally, we get to Coney and I put my arm around Rudy’s shoulder and we walk to the shooting pond where we’re all supposed to meet, he stays right with me in the crowd and I tell him what a good job he’s doing and he smiles which always cheers me up and all the way there, lucky again, nobody says nothing about how we mixing the races or we weirdos holding hands or nothing, we stop in front of the bumper cars and me and Rudy say, right along with this woman who comes out of the loudspeakers, we say “Bump! Bump your ass off!” and the little kids which we used to be, plus grownups too, zoom around under the disco music bumping each other all they can. “Bump, bump yo rassoff,” Rudy says, and I say, “That’s right,” and we walk as fast as we can which isn’t very fast because everybody and his wife, I swear on my mother’s grave, has come to Coney for the end of the world.
Still, we make good time and in fact we’re early at the meet spot, the place where you shoot at the animals by the pond, the bear and the raccoon and the tin cup. One time I hit the bear and made him stand all up so now every time we go there Rudy’s all like, “Make the bear jump! Make the bear jump!” but no time for that now, we got to meet our people and get good seats and that’s what we got to do. That’s what I tell him. “Okay,” says Rudy.
How lucky is this? All our people are on time, Cassandra, Donnell, Ramona, and Vernon and all, they’re on time. Isn’t that something. I shake all their hands so Rudy knows it’s okay and we all hug each other and Donnell says Bernice grown another inch since I saw her last month and Cassandra got her hair all up and then coming down braids and Vernon got a new job they give him his own separate cellphone, he’s that important, and we talk like that for a while and then I look at my Roylex and I say, “Okay, let’s get this show on the road.”
We get our seats and I buy Rudy a ice cream at highway robbery prices from a guy with a cooler, which if I was in charge guys wouldn’t holler “Ice Cream!” in public places where they put ideas into people’s heads. I wouldn’t let them. We sit there for half an hour and Donnell says he can’t believe they’re holding the curtain for the end of the world, and Ramona says ain’t that just typical, they waiting for more crowd, and Cassandra says they probably nervous doing a one-shot stand like this, and Vernon says that’s right, he says it’s not like they going to get a chance to polish they performance, and all of them laughing but I don’t laugh because sure enough Rudy spilled some ice cream on his seat and I have to wipe it up before he gets down and starts licking that chair, who knows where that chair been? but they all laughing right along.
At last the curtain goes up and this big fat guy on the stage shouts we’re going to see “Got a damn run!” and we all shout back “Got a damn run!” which our mom used to say is only what you can expect with dimestore nylons, she said you get what you pay for. The whole rest of it I couldn’t figure out what kind of language they was talking, all holding onto these big sticks and shouting at them, and neither could Donnell or Vernon or Cassandra. Ramona says they was speaking Yiddish which I ask how would she know? She says it was on account of she works in the garment district. “They got their own whole language?” says Cassandra, and Donnell and Vernon and me say, all at the same time, “Hush up,” and Rudy almost falls off his chair laughing.
The people on the stage they shout at their sticks and carry women around and set one of them on fire except not really and then the other women comb their long hair down around their knees, then there’s more of they hit each other with sticks and stick each other with blades and fall down dead except they wasn’t really dead they was just getting ready to shout some more — I maybe would have understood it more better if Rudy didn’t keep showing me these vultures that was flying around the old Parachute Jump, him and me took turns looking through binoculars at these birds flying and flying. It was more interesting than all these people shouting at their sticks, for sure, plus it kept him quiet.
After a real long time it was over and people clap and up out their seats and crowd away and I look at Rudy and Rudy looks at me and we’re both still here so what happened to the end of the world? I ask Cassandra about this because Ramona’s still going on about she knows what words mean in Yiddish and Cassandra says it was the ringcicle, she says this part of the ringcicle’s the end of the world. I say, “Oh, ringcicle, uh-huh,” and Cassandra nods and gets lipstick out her purse and puts it on without a mirror. I say the end of the world’s just like before the end of the world, I say wasn’t there supposed to be a explosion or something? Donnell says, “Ringcicle, sure, it’s the bomb,” and I know he don’t know what it is either, but we all get ice cream at the good place, which they don’t have ringcicles and never heard of them, so how about that? And we wait for the crowd to thin out and we say thanks and it was great and see you soon to everybody and they go off for the F but we go for the Q. Rudy’s asleep on his feet by the time a Q train pulls in and I’m not much better, tell the truth, and we ride and we ride all the way back to Union Square. I find a paper and read up on the Mets cause the end of the world’s just like before the end of the world and now I got all this catch-up to do but it’s hard to keep my eyes open and I figure the Mets aren’t going to change after the end of the world on account of they don’t change for nothing, I’ll read up on them tomorrow. From Union Square we walk and we walk all the way home. “Last one up the stair’s a rotten egg!” says Rudy, but I beat him to our door even though he’s got the head start on me. I got to hide the laundry quarters before Rudy grabs them, if he gets hold of that money he’ll stop the next ice cream truck to try and buy every kid on our block a ringcicle.
Anna Mockler’s story collection, Burning Salt, was published in 2004. Her fiction has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Exquisite Corpse and Wreckage of Reason: Anthology of XXperimental Prose by Women Writers. She has lived all over the country, where she performed the traditional jobs of a writer: factory worker, office temp, waitress, printer, cabdriver, and restoration ecologist.