blueprints

16 | patricia smith
a bottle of bargain red vino made its way stealthily down one of the theater’s
fancy aisles. Nervous competitors mumbled their lines like mantras,
repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. Downtown and uptown were both sitting
in the fancy seats—and though no one was gearing up for an inspiring rendition
of “The Impossible Dream,” no punches had been thrown. But it was
Chicago, and it was still early.
Darting about the theater, his eyes meaningfully manic, Marc Kelly
Smith did what he’s always done so masterfully—he dropped like fuel on a
fire that, up until then, everyone thought had been contained. The exconstruction
worker had passed up a lucrative job with the city (all Chicago
construction workers eventually wind up working for the city, and in
Chicago, if you work for the city—just sayin’—you can pretty much count
on lucrative) and surrendered a steady paycheck, choosing instead to wallow
in the heady come-on of a very small limelight. Anyone who knows
Marc knows that if it hadn’t been for the slam, he would have crafted
another outlet that would’ve allowed him to be both ringleader and ringmaster,
the lion tamer and the droop-eyed clown. He’d need to conjure a
safe haven for a heart that cracked all too often and easily, a rubber-walled
room to store his rampaging ego when he wasn’t using it, and a place—
with a reliable mic, a jukebox, and snazzy lighting—where he could trade
rhythmic war stories with other flawed, fallible, and occasionally narcissistic
human beings.
Marc was just enough of all of us—a heartbroken souse, madly in love
with lyric and leaving shards of his self-esteem on beer-slick floors. We
appreciated his litany of failures and trusted him with our collective voice,
trusted him to wail the stories we were afraid of. Punch-drunk, he took the
falls for us and then scrambled to his feet, facing off the next flurry of fists.
We lived vicariously through the sexy riveting mess of him. Behind the
mic, he wore our fears proudly. The stifled halls of academia wouldn’t have
had a clue about how to handle him. His words flowed like barroom light
through a crack in a wooden door; he needed fools like us to cheer him on,
and we needed him to trumpet the syllables we wouldn’t dare. No one—no
one—could have done this but him. He would be vilified, underestimated,
misunderstood, and attacked. He would be blamed for both his successes
and his failures. His fiery poetics would be dismissed as mere snippets of
theater, and the kingdom he had crafted would be pointed to as an example
of what poetry can be if the unwashed, untrained, and underfunded get
ahold of it.