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COLUMBIA
A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART

Editors-in-Chief
MAX FIERST AND DONALD J. MODICA
Poetry Editor
AUDRA EPSTEIN
Managing Editor
HILARY HOUSTON BACHELDER
Executive Editor
TREENA THIBODEAU
Poetry Assistant
MONICA FERRELL
Prose Assistant Non-Fiction
NELL MCCARTHY
Prose Editor
LILLIAN WELCH
Editorial Coordinator
SUZANNE DOTTINO
Production Manager
REBECCA POLITZER
Prose Assistant Fiction
KELLY ZAVOTKA
Assistant Executive Editor
ELIZABETH PAYNE
Poetry Board
GABY CALVOCORESSI, PAUL HEINER, PATRICK T. MASTERSON, RICHARD
MATTHEWS, RANGI MCNEIL, RYAN MURPHY
Prose Board
RIVKA BERNSTEIN, DENISE DELGADO, AARON HAWN, TOM JOHNSON,
BRUCE KRIEGEL, MARGO ORLANDO, JEREMY SIMON, CYNTHIA THOMPSON,
KAMY WICOFF
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART is a not-for-profit literary journal
committed to publishing fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art by new and
established writers and artists. COLUMBIA is edited and produced semiannually by
students of the Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University's School of the
Arts and is published at 2960 Broadway, Room 415 Dodge Hall, Columbia
University, New York, NY, 10027-6902. Contact the editors at (212) 854-4216,
or e-mail us at arts-litjournal@columbia.edu. Visit our web site at:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/writing/columbiajournal/columbiafr.html
Annual subscriptions (two issues) are available for $15. Biannual subscriptions
(four issues) are available for $25. International subscriptions add $5 per year.
COLUMBIA welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. We read
manuscripts from September 1 through May 1 and generally respond within two to
three months. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed,
stamped envelope. No e-mail submissions, please. Contact the editors for further
submission guidelines and information on upcoming theme sections.
) 1999 COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LrTERATURE AND ART
She could be a duchess or a goose person.
-JOHN ASHBERY

The Editors would like to thank those who made this issue possible.
For Financial Support:
JOSEPH AND LOUISE BACHELDER
THE MARSTRAND FOUNDATION
NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS
For Advisement and Creative Support:
JAY BRIDGERS
COUNCIL OF LITERARY MAGAZINES AND PRESSES
THE FOUNDATION CENTER
ERIC IVERSON
DAVE KING
MARLENE LIPSON
RICHARD LOCKE
ERICA MARKS
AL SPULER
NOVA REN SUMA
ALICE OUINN
For Benefit Readings:
MARY CARLIN
BARBARA DAVIDSON
GERALD FIERST
CHAN HARRIS
PAGEANT BAR 6. GRILL
RON SOPYLA
CHRISTINA ZORICH
For Cover Design:
AARON MCDANNELL
Cover art: Front: "Count Espresso"(1998), mixed-media sculpture
Back: "Down the Drain"(1997), oil on canvas
by JOHN HODANY
Table of Contents
Poetry
REBECCA WOLFF
DAVID GRUBER
BRIAN TEARE
MARIE PONSOT
SOPHIE CABOT BLACK
CAROL TUFTS
ALLISON EIR JENKS
WILLIAM LOGAN
JOHN O'CONNOR
STEPHEN FITZPATRICK
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
NICKY BEER
JOHN ASHBERY
Motion Picture Adaptation 3 2
The Sun in Winter 34
Bildungsroman 35
Rules for the Telling 36
Crude Cabin, Exquisite Stillicide 38
End of Days 74
In Case of Rapture 75
And Morning Star 76
Omega 77
Therefore Sarah Laughed 78
Leda on the Edge of the Millenium 80
The Prisoner 82
Nature 148
Weather H9
Jews 150
My Drink With a Cow 151
Lullaby 153
Resurrecting the Fly 154
Pluranova 223
Vessel 225
My Stolen Macintosh 227
Shore Leavings 228
A Lot of Catching Up to Do 229
The Lyricist 230

Fiction
KATHERINE CHARRIOTT HOU
DONALD ANDERSON
JON GOLDMAN
HEATHER WON TESORIERO
JOANN TRACY
DAN LIBMAN
ALAN ELYSHEVITZ
GABRIEL NERUDA
Interviews
PROFESSOR TRICIA ROSE
MEREDITH DANLUCK
DANNY HOCH
Nonfiction
Learning Chinese
The Peacock Throne
Night in Athens
Valley
Birthday
Lemons
Father Figure
Head
14
57
86
126
155
182
208
231
Art, Technology and Race 40
at the Millennium
Fashion, Art and the Pleasure 104
of an Imagined World
The Possession of Danny Hoch 198
ANDY GERSICK Fantastic Planet 100
Art
SUE HAVENS Screen (1999), felt pen on paper
Times Squared (1999), pencil and photocopy
Eyes (1999), pencil and photocopy
Tree People and Wall (1999), pencil and gouache on paper
JOHN HODANY Squirrel (1998), oil on wood
HEE JIN KANG Mer Danluck (1999), color photograph
Face (1999), color photograph
Stroll (1999), color photograph
Dancer (1999), color photograph
Double (1999), color photograph
MER DANLUCK Biodynamic (\999), plaster, paint and lambswool 109
The Mothership (1997), satin, foam, vinyl, bakelite buttons H3
124
254
83
84
4
105
107
ill
117
123
SOS (Spoony) (1998), foam, satin, Vel-cro 115
SOS (Spoony) (in sack) (1998), foam, satin Vel-cro "9
Sal's Uncle's (1997), foam, satin, Vel-cro 121
(all work courtesy of Mer Danluck and Andrew Kreps Gallery)
KIM JONES Lincoln Center (1990), b/'wphotograph 134
303 Gallery "Water Bar" "Dry Bud Balls" (1992), b/wphoto 136
JULIAN LAVERDIERE Sign (1994), vacuum-formed 138
logo illuminated with grow-lights
Point of Purchase (1994), floating plastic shroud with illuminated 140
sign and bottle
Product/Icon (1994), antiquated bottle with shimmering light 141
Staking Claim (1994), New York State D.B.A. form for the Renulife Hi
Co., notarised January, 1994
Trinitite Exhibit (1998), trinitie specimen in the collection of the H 2
National Museum of Mineralogy in Lisbon, Portugal

12
Hourglass Nitrogen Fountain (1998), wind-tunnel configured into
an hourglass with upward flow of nitrogen fog on the quarter-hour
Hourglass {detail view, nitrogen gas fountain exhaust and intake ports)
Patent Model of Somnabulist's Chair (1991), articulated 1 /12th
scale model of examination chair, brass and mahogony
Armillary Sphere (1991), vacuum tube antiquator applying the
Ptolemy system
BRIAN BELLOT Cartoons (1996-1999), ballpoint pen
and magic marker on ruled paper
144
145
146
H7
172

14
—KATHERINE CHARRIOTT HOU
Learning Chinese
I was thirteen when I became half Chinese. It began on a Friday
in March, the day I came home from school and found my
mother on our loveseat instead of at work. It was raining that afternoon,
and the house was dark with the outside gloom. I remember:
I ran in from the cold, switched on the lights in the kitchen, and
then reached for the overhead in the family room. That was when I
saw my mother. She sat in front of the television, holding the
remote control, but watching nothing. She stared at the screen as if
she were confused.
"Mom?" I said. "What are you doing home?"
When she didn't answer, or even turn toward the sound of my
voice, I went and stood in front of her; repeated myself. Eyebrows
raised, I dripped our yellow-green shag carpet a darker green, and
waited for her response.
"Hey," I said at last. "Are you okay?"
She watched me for a moment, turned her head to one side and
then the other, and then she stood and walked away.
I followed her to the dining room, and the living room, and the
kitchen. She ignored me, but I repeated her name, asked her questions
the whole time, anyway. When she locked herself in the bathroom,
though, I gave up, and went to my room.
I sat on my bed and emptied my backpack, but I couldn't start
my homework, because I was too worried about my mother. I
thought about going back downstairs and trying to talk to her again,
but decided to wait until my dad came home before I did anything
else. By five-thirty, I had almost convinced myself that everything
was fine. Still, when I heard my father's car pull into the garage, I
jumped out of bed.
My parents were in the kitchen when I got downstairs. Mom
stood at the stove with her back turned to Dad; he was at the table,
just a few feet behind her, talking about his day. I sat next to him
and watched my mother. She took pots and pans from the stove,
emptied them onto platters and into large bowls, which she placed,
one by one, in front of my father.
"Look at all this food," Dad said. "And dumplings!"
Dumplings were his favorite, but a rare treat usually reserved
for birthdays or New Years. My father surveyed the steaming pile
of pork-filled dough and then smiled at my mother.
"What's the occasion?" he said.
Mom didn't answer, or smile back, or even sigh and tell us how
long it had taken her to make them, but her lack of a response was
lost on my father, as his hands fumbled around the table. He picked
up a set of chopsticks.
"Where are the forks?"
"Yeah," I said. "Where are they?"
The two of us turned expectant faces to my mother. She ate
quietly, oblivious, it seemed; her eyes were focused on her plate.
"Oh well," my father said.
Dad speared a dumpling with one chopstick, and I fought the
impulse to laugh as he brought it to his mouth; swallowed it almost
whole. He repeated this motion again and again (and each time it
was a little less funny, and a little more pathetic), until the
dumplings were gone. Then he lifted the bowl of pork and tofu and
spooned a huge red mound onto his rice. That done, he poked
around with his one chopstick for a while, but accomplished very
little: the pieces were too small; there was too much sauce; there
was nothing to spear. Dad looked a bit confused, but it only took
him a second to brighten up.
"Chinese food," he said. "What a great idea! Reminds me of
when I was in Taiwan." He nodded at the ma po do fu on his plate.
"What's this called again, Honey?" he said.
Mom was silent.
"Honey," he said.
And still she was silent.

16
Dad turned to me at last. "Is something wrong?"
I looked at my mother, chewing delicate bites of pork, her
chopsticks graceful in her hand, and I looked at my father, holding
his one useless piece of wood, and then I looked down.
"I don't think she's talking to us."
My father did not press the situation. Instead, he got himself a
fork; spent the rest of the meal praising my mother's cooking; and,
as if to prove that he meant what he said, ate more than I had ever
seen him eat in one sitting. After my mother cleared the dishes, he
stayed where he was and kept talking. Watching him, I couldn't
decide if he was talking to her or not. At any rate, he asked all the
questions, and answered them too. When Mom dried the last dish
and went upstairs, Dad finally got quiet. I tried to arrange my face
into a worldly and sympathetic expression, thoughtfully smoothed
the corduroy of my hip huggers, and waited for him to ask me what
to do. But he didn't; instead, I asked him.
"Do," he said. "About what?"
"Mom isn't talking to us anymore."
"Don't say that," he said. "That isn't true."
"Yes it is," I said. "She didn't say anything at dinner. And she
was here when I got home from school today, and she wasn't talking
then, either. Something's wrong."
"I'm sure it's nothing."
"Nothing?" I looked at my father accusingly, imagining an
office romance, or a forgotten anniversary, some TV slight that
would provoke this silent treatment. "It's got to be something."
"Look," he said. "Maybe Mom just doesn't feel like talking. I'm
sure everything will be better by tomorrow."
But the next day things were not better. I got out of bed at
seven, even though it was a Saturday, to see how my mother was
before she left for work. I waited outside the bathroom while she
took a shower; then followed her to the kitchen and watched her
make rice soup, scrambled eggs with soy sauce and green onions.
She sat down to eat and I sat with her, hoping she would start a
conversation, but she didn't. We sat together in silence until nine
o'clock; until nine-thirty; until ten. Finally, I spoke.
"Mom," I said. "Do you know what time it is? You're supposed
to be at the store right now. Aren't you going today?"
She didn't answer me, just sat like she had been. That was when
I went upstairs to confront my father. I found him in their room,
sitting on the bed, and reading one of his stupid Westerns.
"Mom still isn't better," I said. "And I don't know what you
think you're doing up here reading Louis L'Amour when she's
downstairs and won't talk."
He closed his book.
"I'm not reading," he said. "I'm thinking."
"Thinking," I said. "Thinking what?"
"Well, that maybe we should take your mother to the doctor.
Maybe it isn't that she doesn't want to talk, maybe it's that she can't."
"Of course she can talk," I said. "If she couldn't, then don't
you think she'd have found some way to let us know by now?
Maybe instead of thinking about dragging her to the doctor like
she's sick, you should think about whatever it is that you did to
make her not want to talk to us."
"Me," he said. "Me? How do you know it wasn't you?"
"Yes you," I said. "Because I already thought about it, and I
know it wasn't me."
This conversation didn't get us anywhere: not that morning, or
that night, when we had it again, or the next night, when we had it
for the last time. That Monday, I didn't go to school, and my father
didn't go to work: we stayed home to watch my mother, and hope
that she started talking to us again. But she didn't, and she didn't
make any sign to acknowledge us when we were talking to her,
either. What she did do was get dressed and get ready to go out. As
she was drawing on her eyebrows, I went to my father. I spoke in a
whisper, just in case, even though I myself was beginning to wonder
if she really could hear or understand us.
"Come on," I said. "Now's our chance. She's obviously going
to work. We can follow her there and see if it's just us she's not talking
to."
My father and I got ready, and as soon as my mother's car
reached the end of our street, we got into my dad's car and followed
her. But Mom didn't go to work. Instead, she drove, and we drove,
all over town. After a while, it became clear that my mother was

18
leading us in circles.
"Do you think she knows we're following her and is trying to
lose us?" I said.
"I don't know," my father said.
We continued to trail my mother in her loop around town;
about five minutes later, she surprised us by pulling into the parking
lot of the local high school. She stopped her car at the edge of
the lot and just sat there. Me and Dad parked several cars away and
waited with her.
"What do you think is going on?" I said.
"Actually," my father said. "I think she's lost."
"Lost? But how can she be? We've lived here forever, and there
are signs all over the place that lead to the mall, how could she not
figure out how to get there?"
My father didn't answer me: there wasn't time. My mother had
pulled out of the parking lot. She took us down the street and then
u-turned and took us back in the direction we had just come from.
Then turned us right and went that way for a while before making
another u-turn.
"Oh my god, you're right," I said. "She is lost."
"Yeah," my dad said. "So I guess we are too."
After another half-dozen false starts and u-turns, forwards and
backwards that didn't lead anywhere, my mother pulled her car to
the side of the road and stopped again. Dad and I pulled up right
behind her: at that point we didn't care if she knew we were following
or not. I could see into her car, and her head was shaking a
little, as if she were listening to music, or telling herself no. But then
the shaking stopped, and she started the car again.
"I guess she remembers the way now," my father said.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess so."
My mother drove with more purpose, without the u-turns, and
not a single more stop, but she didn't go to the department store
where she had worked for seven years. She drove to the Chinese
grocery that was five minutes past it, parked her car, and went
inside.
My father and I sat outside Maxim's Oriental Grocery, glad to
have come to our destination at last, and we waited for my mother.
"Well," he said. "I guess she's doing some shopping."
"I guess so," I said.
But an hour passed, and then two, and still she didn't come out.
"One of us has to go in there," I said.
"And one of us should wait out here in case she leaves before
the other one finds her."
My father looked at me and I got out of the car. I was prepared
to search the aisles of Maxim's forever, if need be. As I walked to
the store, I imagined myself peeking out from behind tanks of
sluggish lobsters; crouching by the long low refrigerators that held
bloody innards in open bins; playing some sort of elaborate hide
and seek with my mother. I saw myself stepping fearlessly into the
tiny jewelry store in back, where they sold light green jade and shiny
yellow 24K gold, and asking in my broken Chinese if anyone had
seen a quiet (well, for now at least, very quiet), pretty, middle-aged
lady. But I didn't have to do any of this. I saw my mother as soon
as I walked into the store, and she wasn't shopping. She was standing
behind the counter; ringing up customers. And she was talking
to them: in Chinese.
I ran outside to tell my father what was going on in the store,
and he got out of the car and followed me back in to see for himself.
"She can talk!" he said. "You were right, she just doesn't want
to talk to us."
But that was when I realized that maybe in a really weird way I
had been wrong all along, and it was my father who had been right.
"Let me try something," I said.
I picked up a few groceries: a jar of preserved mustard, a box
of rice candies, a stiff dried fish, and I went to my mother's register.
"Hello," I said. "Hey, Mom, it's me."
She stared at me blankly and I took a deep breath.
"Ma, do you know me?" I said, in my slow sad version of Chinese.
Her face became normal again, like I remembered it had been

20
back when she talked to us.
"Of course I know you," my mother said in Chinese. "Why
wouldn't I know you? My own daughter." She paused, thinking.
"It's the first day of the week, isn't it? Why aren't you at school?"
"There isn't school today," I said.
"Really," she said, eyeing me the way she always did when we
both knew I was lying.
"Really," I said. "Is this your job now?"
"Yes."
"Oh," I said. "That's good."
She handed me my groceries, and I started to leave, but she
stopped me.
"Daughter," she said. "The way you speak, really, so strange, I
can barely understand you."
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry."
I went back to my father and started to tell him what had happened
with my mother, but he shook his head.
"She doesn't speak English anymore. What am I going to do?
I can't speak Chinese!"
We went home and I tried to comfort him.
"Maybe she just doesn't feel like speaking English now," I said.
"But she must remember how. She's been speaking it a long time,
and you can't just forget, you know."
"Maybe you can," he said. "Maybe it's some special kind of
amnesia."
"Don't think that," I said. "We're going to be okay."
I put my hand on his arm, but he shook it off.
"Don't try to make me feel better," he said. "You don't know
what it's like. At least you can speak Chinese. At least you can talk
to her."
"No I can't," I said. "My Chinese is terrible, she told me so
today."
"Well, she can't even tell me that," he said. "If she did, I wouldn't
understand her."
He turned away and I moved so he'd have to look at my face.
"Come on, Dad," I said.
"No."
I sighed. "Well, isn't this really your own fault?"
"What? My own fault?"
My father's eyes opened wide; and he looked like he had been
shocked out of his self-pity, almost into anger.
"Well," I went on carefully. "You have been married for sixteen
years. And she is from Taiwan. Why didn't you learn to speak Chinese
before this?"
"I tried," he said, deflated and moping again. "When I met your
mom, I actually spoke more Chinese than she spoke English. But
somehow I stopped learning Chinese, and before we knew it, Mom
could speak like an American. And now I can't even remember the
little I did learn."
My father looked so sad, hunched over at our kitchen table, and
I really did want to help him, but I didn't know what to do. I
stopped trying to comfort him because it just seemed to make
things worse, and left him alone to feel bad. But when my mother
got home from Maxim's, I was waiting for her in the garage.
"Ma," I said.
"Hnnnh."
"Ma, why won't you speak English anymore? You know Dad is
really sad about this."
"English," she said. "I don't speak English."
"Yes, you do," I said. '"You've spoken English all my life."
"Don't be silly," she said. "I've never spoken English."
"Yes, you have. How do you think you talked to me? And
Dad?"
"In Chinese, of course."
"Chinese, I don't speak Chinese. And neither does Dad."
"Of course you speak Chinese," she said. "You're speaking it
now. And Father does too, how else would I have married him?"
"Dad's American," I said. "He speaks English."
"I know that," she said. "I'm not stupid, but he speaks Chinese
too."
"No he doesn't."
"Aiyah," she said, and she went into the house.
"Old man," she called. "My old man."
"Dad," I said. "That's you."

22
"Oh," my father said excitedly. "Hello, Honey."
"Chinese," I said. "She only speaks Chinese."
"He—llo Ho—ney," my father repeated, slowing down the syllables,
as if that would translate them.
My mother stared at my father in confusion, and then she
turned to me.
"What has happened to you two?" she said. "First you. Your
Chinese is so bad, really, I'm ashamed for other people to hear it.
Auntie Lin at the next register asked me after you left today, 'Didn't
you teach her anything?' And now your father. That wasn't Chinese.
I don't know what that was. Is he joking?"
"No," I said. "I told you, he can't speak your language."
My mother looked scared, and then started talking really fast,
to my father, to me, but neither one of us could understand her.
She went on and on, pausing sometimes, asking questions that
would remain forever unanswered, and then she stopped.
Slowly, carefully, she said to me:
"The two of you really can't understand me, can you?"
"No," I said. "Even when you speak slow like now, it's hard."
My mother's face crumbled even more than it already had, and
she ran upstairs. Dad and I heard her on the phone for hours, ranting
on in Chinese, and crying a lot, but we didn't know what she
was saying, and couldn't even imagine who she was saying it to.
The next morning, Mom's eyes were red and puffy. I asked her
how she was; how she had slept, but she would not answer.
"The bus will be here soon," she told me quietly, handing me a
brown paper bag.
I thought about her swollen eyes and soft voice all day, but
especially during lunch, when I took out that paper bag and found
(to my embarrassment) rice balls, and a small container of sicklysweet
asparagus juice.
"What's that?" my classmates said, and they laughed at me as I
ate.
But, even then, humiliated before the eighth grade second
lunch shift, the only person I could feel sorry for was my mother.
After all, wasn't she the one they were really laughing at: she had
packed the lunch, not me.
When my mother came home from work that night, I was
expecting more red eyes, perhaps even actual tears, but she surprised
me. She strode beaming into the house, calling out my Chinese
name.
"Spring Scenery," she said. "Spring Scenery! Come here."
She unpacked her groceries, so many—she must have been
getting some discount at Maxim's—and talked to me excitedly. She
didn't seem to mind that I couldn't understand much of what she
was saying, or that I questioned her constandy about the food she
was putting in our refrigerator. She made animal noises and pointed
at her own body parts to make herself clear. There were chicken
feet and pork intestines and salt fat back; a whole range of foods
I had never eaten before, though I had naively believed the Beef
and Broccoli and Sweet and Sour Pork we ate in my house was
authentic Chinese food, because my mother was an authentic Chinese.
"Such strange things," I said. "What are we having for dinner?"
She said something about chicken, but what part of the chicken
it was, I couldn't figure out.
"Show me on you," I said.
"I can't," she said. "I don't have any of these."
I flapped my arms like wings and she shook her head.
"No," she said. "I don't have any because I'm a woman, not
because I'm a person. It's something that men have."
She opened a red cellophane bag: inside were dozens of slippery,
tan globes. Horrified, I understood.
"Rooster testicles?" I said in English.
"You know I don't understand you."
I crowed like a rooster and then took two tangerines and put
them between my legs.
She laughed and nodded. Then she looked at me seriously.
"We have a problem in this house," she said slowly.
"Yes," I said.
"But I talked to Auntie Lin at the store and she said she knows
a school for you and Father to go to until you remember Chinese
again."

I did not argue with her. I did not tell her that there was no
Chinese to remember; that when I talked to her now I was using
every little bit I had ever learned; or that, surely, she must know that
my father had never really spoken Chinese, either. I just nodded.
"I talked to the teacher already," she said. "Actually, he's Auntie
Lin's husband. He's very smart. Went to a lot of school."
My mother nodded happiiy and set to cleaning the rooster testicles.
She turned to my father, who sat watching us, and waiting to
use the three phrases of Chinese I had taught him while Mom was
at work. She smiled at him and then turned back to me.
"Tell Father."
I told him, and he nodded. Then he said, so slowly and badly
that it was painful to hear:
"Hello, my old lady. How was work? I missed you."
"Hello, my old man," my mother said. "Work was good. I
missed you too."
Then she looked at me again. "Father will have to study very
hard."
That Sunday, after three hours of Gene Autry (there was a
singing cowboy special on the Western movie block me and Dad
watched every weekend), my father and I went to the local high
school for our first day of Chinese school. Mr. Lin, or Teacher Lin,
as we were to call him, met us a few minutes before class began.
"I have heard of your emergency," Teacher Lin said in slow,
heavily accented English. "The school is in the mid-session, but we
have decided to take you in a very special case. I teach beginner's
class, and you two will go there today so we can test your level."
Teacher Lin shook my father's hand in a stiff, dignified manner,
and looked a little confused when Dad tried to bow to him. Then
he turned to me; stared for what seemed like forever.
"Spring Scenery," he said. "Your skin is very white, and your
hair is brown."
"I know," I said, but he had already looked away.
The beginner's class, as it turned out, was made up of a dozen
Taiwanese-American children, ages eight to eleven; my dad, and me.
If it wasn't for my dad being so old and so, well, white, I might have
died from embarrassment that day. As it was, though, even thirteen
and mixed race, nobody bothered to look at me with Dad there.
The fourteen of us, headed by Teacher Lin, spent two hours practicing
the Mandarin phonetic alphabet, which I thankfully already
knew, and going over basic conversational skills and vocabulary. We
spent the last half-hour practicing a handful of characters. In the
beginning, I would glance at my father every few minutes to see
how he was doing, but, really, it was awful to watch him stumbling
along, so I stopped.
When class was over, Teacher Lin met with me and my father
again.
"You," he said to me. "Will be in intermediate class. Your
accent is very bad, and you do not know characters, but you will be
able to catch up if you work hard."
Then he turned to Dad. "But you must stay in beginner's."
My father's face fell, the thought of being alone with all those
children, stuck with a Chinese name—U Cba—which he couldn't
really pronounce, must have been terrible to him, but he did not try
to argue with Teacher Lin, just shook his hand once more; this time,
without bowing.
The next week my father and I returned to the high school, and
the week after, and the week after that, until it seemed like we had
been going to Chinese Sunday school all our lives. At least it
seemed like that to me, but in a good way. Actually, I liked Chinese
school. The intermediate class wasn't bad at all, just a room full of
teenagers like me who were struggling with their parents' language.
But my father had a much tougher time across the hall in beginner's.
Apparently, my dad, forty-one and balding, was the slowest student
of them all and, respect for elders notwithstanding, his classmates
had no problems pointing this out to him, and calling him, when
Teacher Lin went to the bathroom or wrote on the blackboard, a
"Stupid Egg" in Mandarin.
Those Sundays were probably the most humiliating days of my
father's life. He feared them all week long, and every night I would
help him practice his Chinese. The two of us struggled over the
four tones more than anything else.
"Ba, ba, ba, ba," I would say, pronouncing each syllable with a
different tone: first a high even one, then a rising one, then a low

26
one, and, finally, a falling tone.
"Ba, ba, ba, ba," my father would say, but not the way he was
supposed to.
"No," I would tell him, and we would begin again. We did this
every night, over and over, until my father, by some lucky stroke,
managed to get all four tones right in a row, or until he exploded.
Many times, he accused "you guys"—who you guys were, I still do
not know—of "making them up."
"Four tones, right!" he would say. "They all sound the same to
me!"
But then he would calm down and we'd move on to something
else.
My mother watched our nightly sessions with curiosity. Every
now and then she would help us with the pronunciation of a particularly
difficult word, but, otherwise, we were on our own. Afterwards,
she would draw me aside; talk about our progress.
"You speak much better now," she said. "It isn't so hard to
understand you. But why can't Father speak Chinese anymore? Why
does he have to practice every day and still can't say things the way
you're supposed to?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know."
And I kept practicing with my father. In addition to Sunday
school and our study sessions, he bought books (Teach Yourself Mandarin;
Speak Chinese Today!), and audiocassettes ("...three native
speakers teach you the Beijing dialect in the comfort of your own
home..."). Inevitably, but slowly, his Chinese improved. By the
beginning of the summer session of Chinese school, he could say
very basic things to my mother. Anything beyond basic, though, I
had to translate for him. This obviously limited their conversations.
"Why do you learn so fast?" he asked me. "Why do I learn so
slow?"
"You're doing good too," I said. "You are."
But he would watch me talk to my mother with such an eager
expression, a hungry look that told me he was searching out the few
words he did know, and then turn away with a disappointment so
strong that I didn't just see it on his face, I felt it inside myself.
"I can't understand you two when you talk," he said. "You talk
too fast. What do you say to each other? How is your mother? Is
she the same as she was before? Is she all right? Does she miss
me?"
I didn't know how to tell him that Mom seemed happier now
than she had back when she spoke English. Or that she had told me
so many things about her childhood; about our family in Taiwan;
about her life before she married him, that I had never known
before. I did not know how to tell him that she had friends now,
other Taiwanese ladies from Maxim's, and that every day she came
home from work with stories so funny, they made me laugh and
laugh. And so I was silent.
I must have been silent a long time, because as I sat looking at
my father, and wondering what to say, I saw his face change from
expectancy to confusion to fear.
"You too?" he said. "Can you not understand me?"
And then he asked me in Chinese, "Do you understand English?"
"I understand," I said in Chinese.
Then, "I understand," I said in English.
But it was too late: he had already walked away.
For the rest of that week, Dad skipped our Chinese lessons.
And then, on Sunday, he skipped Chinese school. Every day after
dinner he would go to his study and close himself in until it was
time for bed. My mother said to let him be, that he would come to
us when he wanted to talk, but I couldn't wait. On Monday night, I
went to his study to find out what was going on.
I knocked on the door and when my father didn't answer I just
opened it and went in. He had moved a TV and VCR into die
room, and he sat at his desk watching a black and white Western.
His bookshelves were empty, and the floor and the desk were scattered
with books about the Old West, and the Wild West, about
gunslingers, and sheriffs. On the wall next to the poster of High
Noon that had always been mere were two new posters: both of
John Wayne.
The condition of the room; the sight of my father still
engrossed in his movie, confused me. I had imagined him sitting in

28
his study with the lights out, depressed and lonely; it had never
occurred to me that he had been in there having a good time.
"Dad," I said at last. "Why haven't you been studying Chinese
anymore?"
"I've been busy," he said.
"But you'll fall behind in class. Teacher Lin asked about you."
"Don't worry about Chinese school."
My father stopped the video so the TV was locked in the still
image of a lone lawman, stepping out into a dangerously quiet and
empty street. He stood up.
"Listen," he said. "I'm glad you're here. I need you to do me a
favor. I need you to tell your mother something."
My father smiled.
"What is it?" I said.
"Well," he said. "I put in for a transfer at work, and I got it. So
we're moving."
"Moving," I said. "But where?"
"Texas!"
"Texas?"
I closed my eyes on my father's grinning face and saw frame
after frame of die movies we two had watched together. Those
long dusty roads that went on forever; cowboys, and ranches, and
saloons. Nowhere in all of this could I see me, or my mother.
"But I don't want to move," I said at last. "And I bet Mom
doesn't either."
"Of course you want to move," my father said. "And so does
your mother. Texas is great! We've always wanted to move out
there."
My father reached out to pat my arm, but I pushed him away.
The wideness of his smile, the tone of his voice, die brightness of
them both—at the time, I could not know they were false—were
too much for me to bear.
"Maybe you have," I said. "But we haven't!"
My father sighed, and, thankfully, stopped smiling.
"I don't know why you're getting so upset," he said gently.
"We'll buy a big new house, and Mom won't have to work. Maybe
once we're out there, she can start learning English again."
And that was when I understood what all of this was about, or
at least I thought I did. It was more than just going west because
Dad wanted to live out the movies: he was trying to take me and
Mom out there so we would become more American again. Unfortunately
for my father, though, that was the last thing I wanted just
then. As miserable as Dad must have been those last few months, I
had been happy. I liked this new path my life had taken; as far as I
could see, things were just fine, for everyone. At that moment, I
couldn't have cared less if my mother never spoke English again.
And that's the only way I can explain it now: how I faced my father
that night, how I listened to the quiet hope in his voice; watched
him stare at the boring green carpet after he finished speaking, and,
still, I had no pity for him.
"I'm not going," I said.
My father sighed, and he slouched a bit, die way he always did
when he was defeated, and I thought that I had won. I saw the
future, and it wasn't in Texas, it was right where we were: that night,
we would study Chinese again, and, on Sunday, we would go to Chinese
school.
But then Dad pulled himself back up.
"We're going to Texas."
I stared at my father in disbelief. The man I had grown up
with—the one who caved at a word, a smile, from me or my mother—was
gone. In his place, standing tall next to posters of High
Noon and the Duke, I saw a man who was willing to ride roughshod
over anything and anyone in his way. I turned to the TV, still caught
in that silent moment before the shootout, and the man on the
screen was my father, just waiting for someone to step out and fire.
I was ready to fight; I wanted to fight, but even I understood it: I
didn't have a gun. If there was going to be a battle, it wouldn't be
between the two of us: everything was up to my mother. And if
everything was up to her, like it or not, she'd have to speak the language
my father understood.
"We'll see about Texas," I said, and I ran out of the room.
I found my mother upstairs folding laundry, laying it in huge
soft piles on her bed. The stereo was blasting Chinese music, a tape

of songs that had been popular when she was a teenager, and she
sang along happily. I turned the music down, and she stopped folding
to look up at me.
I rushed to her side.
"Ma," I said. "You have to speak English again!"
"English?" she said. "What are you talking about? You know
I can't speak English."
"Yes, you can," I said. "Listen to me: Dad's moving us to Texas!
Don't you want to stop him?"
"Texas?" she said. "We're not moving to Texas."
"Yes, we are. Dad just told me. He's going to sell the house and
make us move there!"
"Sell my house?"
My mother sighed, and took my hand.
"Don't worry about this," she said. "There must be some mistake.
I'll go downstairs and talk to Father right now."
She turned to leave the room, but I stopped her.
"In English, right? You're going to talk to him in English, aren't
you?"
"Daughter," she said. "I can't."
"What do you mean, you can't? It won't work if you speak Chi-
nese!"
My mother was silent, and suddenly I felt desperate. I wanted
to shake her; to shake back the English I knew she used to speak;
or I wanted to throw myself flat on her bed, destroy her neat piles
of laundry; burst into tears; kick and scream and cry until everything
was okay again. But of course I did none of those things.
"Couldn't you just try?"
My mother looked at me then as if she felt sorry for me. She
30 looked at me as if she couldn't understand me; as if she were
understanding for the first time that I couldn't understand her.
"I can't," she said at last. "Don't you think I wish I could? Do
you think I like living in this country all these years and not knowing
the language? I can't speak it. I just can't."
We stood there for a long time, and my mother seemed little,
and sad. And that was when I really knew it: she would never speak
English again, and what that meant, not just for me, but for her, and
for my father.
Mom shook her head and walked out of the room. I followed
her into the hall, to the edge of the top step, afraid of the fight that
would start when she got downstairs. I stayed on that top step for
a long time, and for a long time everything was quiet. Finally, I got
tired of waiting, and I went to see what was going on with my parents.
Mom and Dad were at the kitchen table; there was no showdown.
I crept to the end of the hall, and stood off to the side a little,
watching them. They sat next to each other without speaking,
but I knew from my father's face that, somehow, it had already been
decided, and we weren't moving to Texas. I felt sorry for him, then.
I was about to go back upstairs, to leave them to each other,
when my father started talking. He went on for a while, making mistakes,
and stumbling along as usual, but speaking more Chinese
than I had ever heard him speak before. He went on for a while,
trying desperately to find the words to tell my mother something—
I'll never know what—and then, in the middle of a sentence, he
stopped. He just stopped.
After a few minutes, my father sighed and pushed his chair
away from the table. He went to stand at the window; look out at
the dark. My mother let him go. And the two of them were silent
for such a very long time, I wondered how they could ever speak
again.
Then my mother stood and went to his side, reached out to
him.
They stared wordless into the black, and she took his hand,
held it so gently, as if there were some part of her that could
remember: how it felt, all those years, when she lived in a language
that did not live in her.

—REBECCA WOLFF
Motion Picture Adaptation
It is moonlight. We have a body full
of engagement, en route to the Kingdom
Hall for a country evening's primal
distraction. "Some of us"—whispers my sister, cloaked
bonnet-to-slipper in modest muslin—"have no such need
for mollification: I, for one, would
remain intent on plying the handiwork
that recommends me—see?"
But the lamp gutters, under duress, casts little
light on such misgivings, our undoing inside
the vehicle. This oil that burns up blackness, vehicular,
betrays any trust we might put in it, gives into motion's slick
demands: it sloshes, spatters; what coinage.
The attachments we have forming within
us presendy may be the last we ever
glimpse under such light as this deranged
moonglow. Soon, they have whispered, the century
will bring us constant clamor for our efforts, the
illuminated banging of luxury. "I, for one,
know when to hold my tongue, to distract ardor
with the blindness of my craft."
Transported through the night from one great gaping
hole in the fabric
of our knowledge to another, we are reduced
by candlelight to girlish things, to witticism
drawn from a small store of such
phrases as serve the day's purpose. We must be guided
by the spirit of departed precedent. My sister
is rich in catechism; her response,
purely felt: "You'll never catch me feelingly
proclaiming false distinctions; a lover is a lover
and a prospect is prospective. If I set
my cap on conquest, then a lion's
what I'll snare."
A lion in England? I am unmoved.
"Oh to be sure. I can already hear his roar
when I unveil him in the lair."

34
—REBECCA WOLFF
The Sun in Winter
Late afternoon the starving light
denudes a neighbor's tree, transfers
dear property to flame, casts
gold all in his painterly face.
Simple description accomplishing
devotion; a call for motives
interior, dynastic.
One seat offers one vantage.
The window is adored for its demented
optimism—and with unguarded premonition
tells the patron
how much dark will cloud
an issue, and how the shortened span
makes certain curses come like blessings
on the head of days alluded to as "dying."
A less occluded view might queer this open
invitation to the static atmosphere: come
and stay.
Oh stay the sun,
and make some meager homily
fixed on ginger-red wood siding
to reflect into the eye
a burnished spasm of glad
tiding: antidote to venom of our imagery's
declining.
-DAVID GRUBER
Bildungsroman
Light plays over the things collected in the room
Errata of a childhood in disarray:
Lions made from lakes, their shadows poised
In readiness to spill forward in attack, or lie to sleep. In insubstance
A crossing—some figure comes to the window,
Frames, by making to forget, the view, blue hills as little important
As the dozen variants, green and green and green,
Inside which manifests the faraway dismay of a maturity:
Nowhere near complete or begun, shades inside a shade.

—BRIAN TEARE
Rules for the Telling
(after Randall Jamil)
For the child, stories happen forever
just outside the wide skirt of light.
Far into that far-away, thorns clamber
the walls' rot, nine crows fuss, shake down
their nests in die closet's hats, nails wait
in their loose skeins of rust beneath the milky surface
of the bath, and, hear? Faintly now, an undercurrent—
other characters wait
as late inside the story a mother reads
her son fairy tales once read to her in German. Her voice draws
the limits of the late-night room, her voice a wick burning
inside a cut-glass chimney filmed with oil and smoke,
channeling ash to the ceiling.
Her telling has rules, the child knows, parts,
as in a play: one who is voice, one who is ear.
In every telling, a house neither voice nor ear must enter,
a house in which men who are not kings live.
The size and shape of that house is the size and shape of not telling,
not hearing: wood floors brittle, spark-prone as flint,
and the facade sweet to look at and light as cheap cake.
Everything depends upon upkeep: the shape of that house,
the poverty of telling, an ill-framed door that sticks, the hardness
of hearing that peels the walls' ruined flowered paper. Everything
depends on what waits just outside the light, where the child
thinks all stories happen. Yes, there's tangible black, like asphalt,
like a hundred roads out of rooms so precious they are held
in the hand, there, where her telling stops.
But out past the closets
riffled with feathers, beyond the bath in which nails bleed
the water red, there, in the house whose walls are not yet veined,
trained to ruin as the vines in their frail, failing arbors, there
The men, who are consequence and reason
for each story, wait heavy with the habits
of their names told—husband, brother—
and untold—drunk, lover. These are die rules.
The child knows it's not the mother who judges.
She must tell each story as if it were otherwise:
it's not they, husband and brother, who wait
for the mother and child, but their unsaid names.
the men dream of them.
The walls fold into sepia rolls, the mother's voice
dims, the telling losing hold.. .the child knows
that when the book and voice and light give up
nine crows will hatch, spilling from hats
as if from brown felt eggs, nails will spin
in their red watery beds, and the hundred roads
will fill with the sound of walking. The name of a man
who is not a king will pick the lock of the story with a thorn,
and, bed undone like a zipper, the child will fall
all night, and it will go unheard, unpunished in the untold dark.

—MARIE PONSOT
Crude Cabin, Exquisite Stillicide
An hour after the reminder
of a late September rain,
the cascade of water from the gutter
under the rippled tin roof
into the water barrel
is over. Slackening to dripping
it has arrived at stillicide
Planctus. Punctus.
Silences
from drop to next
drop lengthen—
very gradually slowing
like the pulse of the blood
between amorous play and dressing
like the pulse of pain
from sharp to sore during healing
like the breath of falling through
thought toward sleep.
Each drop's a signal event,
punctual, rendering
a declining curve as it turns
into silence that turns
into sound that, spent,
turns into silence again.

—COLUMBIA INTERVIEW
Art, Technology and Race at the
Millennium: an Interview with
Professor Tricia Rose
When 'Topics in American Studies: Hip-Hop" convened at New York
University in the fall of 1995, it was a watershed moment for most everyone
crammed into the lecture hall. Finally, a class at a major university was devot-
ed entirely to hip-hop culture. Finally, the music a generation of Americans
grew up with was being treated as a profound if problematic cultural trope wor-
thy of debate and capable of shouldering intelligent criticism. Finally, hip-hop
was loading its own analytic canon, challenging academia to realise that urban
America's most vital organic discourse on race, class and gender was being spo-
ken in rhyme and swathed in booming grimy drumsounds.
And finally, we had a bad mamajama like Tricia Rose, Associate Pro-
fessor of Africana Studies and History and celebrated author of Black
Noise, to slap hip-hop onto the critical conveyor belt, past Theodore Adorno
and Stuart Hall and LeRoi Jones, someone brilliant and down for the cause,
unafraid to tear the culture apart and challenge our most basic assertions about
its limits and possibilities.
I'd been waiting my whole life to take a class like this, and I wasn't alone.
People came from all over New York City to sit in. There were future maga-
zine moguls like Alan Ket from Stress, underground MCs like Fondle Tim
Records' Siah, a sprinkling of future journalists and record industry move-
makers, plenty of regular hip-hop heads, and a fair share of folks who just
thought the course description sounded interesting. All of us were deeply excit-
ed, although more than a few were skeptical about the idea of the music we con-
sidered ours being caged in a classroom.
The course, like hip-hop itself, was a fascinating blend of inspiration and
confrontation, and what made it work was Tricia: not only because she was flu-
ent in the lore and semiotics of hip-hop, but also because she understood so much
of what lay outside. Tricia threw gender theory, history, musicology and even
architecture into the mix and fused hip-hop to scholarship in a way that made
everybody who stayed in the class—and a lot of cats broke out when they saw
it wasn't going to be some kind of easy-A hip-hop hooray thing—reexamine
their definitions of both.
In the five years since, Tricia has remained one of the sharpest minds in
cultural criticism, a rare combination of compassion, insight and knowledge. As
she wound up a hectic semester as the chair of NYU's American Studies
Department, Tricia sat down with me to discuss the increasingly complex inter-
section of art, technology and community at the turn of the millennium.
COLUMBIA: It seems to me that Y2K tension and millennial angst
are likely to ramify differently for black artists than for other folks,
given that black artists in this country have always had good reason
to indulge in a certain kind of paranoia. The questions of how to
fight marginalization and stake out community, questions that tech-

42
nology is forcing artists and people everywhere to confront, are by
no means new issues for black and other minority artists.
ROSE: The ways technology is beginning to encroach on us—the
expansion of technological surveillance and the control of
resource—have so many ramifications in general on art. Probably
the most significant, which doesn't relate only to black and Hispanic
and other minority artists but which is relevant to them in general,
is the loss of what you'd call a tactile or aural experience. With
art, and even with music, the electronic context—while it has been
enormously valuable in expanding accessibility—also produces
comfort with mediation in the creative process. The experience of
the artist himself or herself becomes less relevant and more distant
as time goes by. And the level of mediation will have a huge impact
on how artists will have to present themselves in this huge electronic
environment.
In terms of controlling the resources to present themselves,
however, I'm really ambivalent. All of the media reports, from
super-pop media like Entertainment Tonight and Dateline all the way
down to more grassroots media accounts, seem to suggest that
there's an awful lot of domination of technology by corporations.
Data control—information surveillance on the Internet, for example—is
rather extraordinary. They can track you coming and going,
and information about you can be gathered and sold for a great deal
of money, and that doesn't go over well for anybody's creative freedom,
or freedom in general.
There are companies that download every single piece of information
that you write, in a chat group or elsewhere, and file it. So if
you write that you have syphilis or you're dying of AIDS or you
want to shoot the president or you hate the white man, even with
an alias your identity is found. And thus everything you've said is
public record although you didn't know it when you said it, and it
can be used against you if you choose to enter the public sphere
later. That's very scary, not only for artistic freedom but also for
freedom of speech. Those things are closely linked. Surveillance of
speech and action is even more dangerous for artists, because
they're the ones who are pushing the envelope of what's acceptable.
So that is very, very frightening.
On the other hand, this kind of surveillance has always existed
for people in the public sphere, meaning if you get up on a soapbox
in Harlem and start lecturing about killing whitey or killing the
president, a policeman might pull you over or arrest you or find out
who you are. But you know that's not always going to happen.
There's a kind of hide-and-seek that goes on for guerilla artists,
meaning you say things in a certain way, under certain conditions, to
a group that's ready to look at you in a good way. You have a kind
of secret code and that helps you stay afloat.
COLUMBIA: And you gain credibility from being able to evade
authority and still deliver your message, whether you're a graffiti
artist or a soapbox politician.
ROSE: Right, absolutely. The problem is that surveillance is going
to get so sophisticated that minority communities that don't have
access to high-level knowledge about these technologies will not be
able to remain savvy in that way. So the main question, it seems to
me, has to do with the democratization of access to knowledge
about technology, not just access to technology itself. I'm sitting
here in front of a several thousand dollar computer, and it doesn't
mean a thing if I'm trying to avoid surveillance on the Internet. I
don't know thing the first.
And the very small number of people who have access to that
level of information tend, unfortunately, to be another generation
of white men. Whatever comes out, they seem to be on it first and
they're always really good at it. I'm sure theydre always the ones
who invent it. It's the same thing with industrialization. It's the same
thing with every major technological transformation. It didn't used
to be eggheads, but it's always been primarily white males who have
both cultural and, then, other kinds of access to it. So that's the fundamental
problem to me for black and Hispanic artists gaining
access to really sophisticated knowledge about the technology, both
as an artistic medium, meaning as a way to produce and create artistically,
and also as a way to avoid surveillance for the purposes of
unpopular artistic expression.

44
Now, aesthetically I think there's an awful lot of possibility.
Aesthetically there's more possibility than problem. There's the possibility,
for example, of relying on techniques that are frequently
associated with what I call diasporic black cultural tradition: drawing
on multiple sources, using certain kinds of accessible modernist
narratives but transforming them in ways that are complicated and
interesting and nonlinear. Obviously, technology makes that easier
to do—you can take a medium that already has visual and musical
and narrative pieces built in and make it three dimensional, make it
move. The problem is that most people would never have access to
all that. But I think aesthetically there's more promise than drama.
COLUMBIA: Is there a danger that technology may wind up limiting
artistry, or circumscribe the desire to create by providing too
much scaffolding? If I'm an aspiring musician, and before I can be
fully indoctrinated into the culture I discover there's a make-rapmusic
program I can download on my computer where all I have to
do is punch a few buttons...
ROSE: I would say that technology won't automatically produce an
overall decline, but it will shift where the creativity has to manifest
itself. Just like the calculator means that we can't really do long division
anymore, a particular kind of talent for artistic construction
will be homogenized. In a sense, it will be like the way painters had
to react when photographic technology developed. What happens
is the terms of artistry have to shift. Those rap beats which used to
take, I don't know, two weeks to make using samples from four
thousand old records, now they're fully accessible. And once that
happens, we will know it because those beats will be repeated so
profoundly. The innovators will find something else to do, because
the last thing they want is to look like everybody else. The question
is, is everyone else going to have enough knowledge to appreciate
that innovation? And there will always be a timeline in that.
The other trend I'm not too happy about, in terms of both studio-based
musical technology and computer-based technology, is
that I always understood black diasporic traditions to be a really
wonderful combination of form and practice in motion at the same
time. As it's performed, the form takes shape and transforms itself
as well as the audience. Most black diasporic musical practices, even
many literary practices, are really dependent on a very immediate,
visceral and tactile exchange with the audience. And that is impossible
through the mediation of this new technology, so that could
have some pretty extraordinary effects on how forms evolve. The
eight bar blues comes out of a call-and-response conversation
between musicians and people, and oratory traditions like the black
preacher tradition also come out of the exchange between performer
and audience; success and failure in the performance of all
these forms comes partially from the mistakes you make in the
moment and how the audience responds to you and how you
respond back, which is something you can't really produce through
collective computer use. It's not a collective experience, and you
can't pretend that it is just because everyone is online at once. That's
not the same.
The question comes when you get to the point where a live performance
is totally irrelevant, and everything is composition-based,
which to me is a literary gesture already. The notation system and
composition as primary sources for music is a very Western form
of creativity. Music is about a certain kind of openness and a nonlinear
progression, at least to me. Not all music does that, but I
think that's what a lot of the best music does, and that open freewheeling
space is just hard for me to see in this medium. I can see
reproducing it, and the distribution could be incredible and potentially
disempowering to the record industry, but the creative part
and the visual part are not looking good. I think it's great in terms
of all the color and the graphics, but visual art is not the same thing
as graphics.
COLUMBIA: You mean the power of actually seeing. That reminds
me of something [Columbia's Zora Neale Hurston Professor of
English Robert] O'Meally was saying when I spoke to him a while
ago. He said the power of seeing ten MCs on stage handing off the
microphone and flowing together seamlessly was actually more
powerful than anything that came out of their mouths, and I think
that's what we stand to lose in these new mediums.

ROSE: Right, absolutely, and you stand to lose not only what happens
in that electric moment, but what happens the next night when
it happens differently and what happens the next night. I mean it's
all about those open possibilities, and those open possibilities are
nowhere near as open in that collective, spontaneous, innovative
sense when they're mediated.
COLUMBIA: A risk is that people growing up in this era won't even
know to bemoan the loss of venues, or of spontaneous performances.
ROSE: That's true, but that's what was said to you and me about
hip-hop. Not that I don't think you were partially right, and they
may also have been right when they told us that. Young people, hiphoppers,
don't bemoan not learning the trombone, but that doesn't
mean there isn't a loss. And of course there are gains; the question
is always what you're gaining and what you're losing: what, ultimately,
is most important to you about artistic expression and about
human exchange?
This is where I grow most anxious about world and global
transformation as we have this discussion and develop this language
about globalization. What it really is is a language about corporate
domination of the nation-state. It's international global capitalism
that amounts to a larger world community. I have no more access
to people in Nepal than I did fifty years ago. I mean personally. But
it seems to me what technology really does produce is such profound
normalization of mediated intimacy that I get concerned
about the notion of compassion and the ways in which human
community gets fostered. Human community is a fiction, but it's a
fiction that is created by action and possibility and a tactile environment
to some degree. Some of it is imagined, at the largest level,
but it acts itself out on the ground by activities.
The institutions that forge day to day contact with people are
definitely becoming less and less valuable in sustaining communities,
and forms of mediation—TV, computers—are becoming
more and more valuable as means of gathering information.
Before, you'd go to a library, you'd go to school, and you'd run into
people. Now you can go to college on the Internet. You would do
things and see people and you would have exchanges and thereby
social intimacy, which is something that not only has an impact on
you but shapes your notion of what you need to do in the world.
When you hide certain kinds of information from people, it's very
easy to not only be incredibly brutal, but to be unintentionally hegemonic
and violent and dominant—it's much easier. For example, if
every time you had to leave your house you had to go walk through
a slaughterhouse, you'd probably stop eating meat. I have no idea
what happens to these poor cows, but if I had to pass through that
everyday, had to look at the repercussions of that, not even see
them getting slaughtered but maybe see blood running through the
streets, it would transform things. It forces you to at least develop a
language of justification, and then there invariably develops a language
of opposition, and then you have a conversation.
That's a dramatic example but I think on the ground that's quite
relevant, in terms of what we understand where everybody is and
what we are really experiencing. I don't just mean that in terms of
economic pain and suffering, or a racial agenda, or a kinetic end. I
also mean it in terms of emotional and psychological trauma,
because my sense is that all of the world changes that have happened
within the last 150 years have produced an enormous level of
alienation, which we deal with the best we can, as creatively as we
can. But that alienation's not going to be abated by this; it will be
exacerbated by it. Humans are fundamentally social animals, and if
that social space isn't preserved in some way and taken seriously, I
think that is going to be the most significant downside of all this
fabulous technology.
COLUMBIA: Where are the major sites of contestation? Where can
we look for or how can we create spaces in which to discuss things
like patriarchy and race, and really grapple with them, as you say, on
the ground?
ROSE: If you look at the earliest years of hip-hop, what made it
work, what made it so powerful in the first four or five years—not

to be overly romantic—was the way in which it took over the street.
It was a public space, a semi-spontaneous party of people on the
block. This is very important. It wasn't a private experience that you
listened to in your headphones. It was 'we're gonna go outside, in
an abandoned lot or in the middle of the boulevard, and have a
party'. It was about seizing public space for the purposes of community
experience.
And hip-hop used technologies in ways that were interesting
and new; it took the materials that were available and used them to
make community. That effort to make community is what underwrote
the practice. I would say the way to get around this alienation
now is to make public community, however we can.
For someone not terribly innovative, that might mean simply
preserving existing institutions. Someone who is a preservationist
has to figure out how to get people out of their houses and into
public spaces that they feel good about, and they can't just be expos
at the goddarn civic center looking at cars and whatnot. It has to be
non-commodity based. You can't just be buying shit. That is not
going to do it. There have to be places for large numbers of people,
hundreds at least, to feel free to gather and feel that they can
enjoy the process of gathering and exchanging.
COLUMBIA: It's interesting that you bring up hip-hop, because the
other thing that underwrites hip-hop is the subversion of existing
technologies and notions. DJs in the park were plugging into lamposts
and stealing electricity from the city, rerigging turntables and
electronic equipment in order to amplify their voices literally and
figuratively. And we're not even gonna get into the genius involved
in creating moving art galleries by spray-painting murals on subway
trains. I wonder if there's some parallel way to take the technology
we're talking about and twist it in on itself to forge some sense of
community.
ROSE: I think the question is how do you do both simultaneously,
because doing one or the other is quite easy. But how do you
mess with technology and build community in the messing with?
The first thing that comes to mind is something like—this is going
to sound really hokey—but something like mass-karaoke, where
everybody has their own mic and they collectively sing songs, or
collectively make beats, and everybody gets to keep a tape of what
happened to listen to later. But you have to preserve the idea of
interaction—doing it at the same time and in the same space.
COLUMBIA: For reasons of accountability as well as community.
The karaoke idea reminds me of all these sites on the web where
MCs batde each other. But there's not that feeling of spontaneity,
and the concept of responsibility for your words, your identity,
doesn't exist. In real life, battling is one of the cornerstones of hiphop
culture, but internet rhyme battles are the most pathetic shit
you'll ever read, really.
ROSE: Right, I'm sure, because it's not in the physical domain. The
technology has to be brought out of people's houses; we can't succumb
to the individuation that it produces. I recently got a Palm V,
one of these electronic date books. It has a Hot Sync base, which is
a module that you stick your Palm V into. You can write things and
do things on your computer and then download it into your Palm
Pilot by pressing one button, which is called Hot Sync-ing. Now, I
think Hot Sync-ing is an enormously important concept, because
what it means first of all is that it's immediate, that's the 'hot' part,
and it updates both mechanisms, meaning your Palm V and your
computer both have identical information. But I can also beam
information from my Palm V to yours. I can send you whatever I
want.
That might be a way to take these individuated technologies
and create collectivity, because the 'sync' is the notion that these
things are matched up, they're in the same space, in real time, and
always moving. If I get into a conversation then everybody's updated;
we move forward, we're all Hot Sync-ed, and it keeps moving.
Then we Hot Sync again. I like the notion of using these new technologies
in those kinds of ways, but the most important thing to me
is to sustain the notion of both intimacy and public sphere simultaneously.
Intimacy and public sphere as concepts may have to be
revised, but what's fundamental about them should remain.

COLUMBIA: And the way in which the technology is best used is
often distant from the way it was intended. That almost goes without
saying.
ROSE: Of course. The only point of using a Palm V at a concert
would be to use it in a way that it wasn't intended to be used. But
we have to find ways that don't just use the technology to do things
that are lucrative like stealing someone's credit card information,
but things that create pleasure, possibility, intimacy, power, vulnerability,
or vent anger if it's helpful, offer ways to deal with the world
that encourage development and growth for all of us. If it can't be
used for that, then what are we moving towards? I don't see the
point.
Performers say, 'can I get a witness, can I get a ho from the left
side'; that's about making people feel included, that's about having
a good time. That's hip-hop's most powerful historical aspect for
me, its desire to take circumstances that were fundamentally
unpleasant, fundamentally dehumanizing, and to make people feel
good about themselves and about communicating and articulating
their experiences and appreciating other people in the midst of a
dehumanizing circumstance. And that's why it took off. It didn't
take off just because it was technology, or because it was funky. It
was a way of saying you know what, this is about pleasure not in the
hedonistic sense, but about expression and freedom and possibility
under enormous strictures of duress, so that's what I would want to
see new technology be able to facilitate.
COLUMBIA: Do you think hip-hop is up to the challenge?
ROSE: I think it could be, but just like hip-hop took disco, took
R&B, and said I like it, I grew up with it, and I'm going to do something
different with it, my sense is that it won't be hip-hop when it
happens. It'll be based on hip-hop. But it'll be something else.
Looking at the history of cultural production, I don't see how it
could still be hip-hop and do what we're saying, because new generations
just don't hear the same way.
Some people are very good at seeing what's not yet here and
really anticipating it. I'm not sure I'm all that good at that, but I definitely
think that these forms of technology will be part of it. And
I also think there'll be a retro move, a totally anti-technology move,
which will be something that technology will try to take up. Just like
in the midst of hip-hop, what emerges is the spoken-word movement.
How much more basic can you get? And how much less
mediated can you get? I'm going to stand up here and tell you some
things in a language we happen to share. I don't need anything but
a non-windy corner. I don't need any paper, I don't need any technology.
That move in the mid-Nineties seems to me to be the kind
of thing that will likely happen at the same time as more technologically-mediated
expressions emerge.
COLUMBIA: You and I have been talking for years about hip-hop's
political potential: what the culture's contributions to political and
social struggle have been, could be, will be, can't be. As hip-hop
nears thirty and 1999 gives way to Two Grand, where does that discussion
stand? Has the real moment of transformative potential
come and gone?
ROSE: Hip-hop was incredibly useful for creating a venue that was
enjoyable and fun and playful and valuable for offering what I'd call
alternative political narratives. But it didn't necessarily deliver on
galvanizing a generation for what I would consider to be more
intensive political actions. Even in a disorganized way I don't really
see a lot of activism. I do see what I'd call underground resistance
on a disorganized level—work stoppages, mess-ups, sabotage,
there's certainly a lot of that, but that was going on anyway. I don't
think hip-hop increased that, per se. But it did create a collective
base for a certain kind of political narrative. It's a social and cultural
and political narrative, a narrative that is counter-dominant; that,
I think, is very productive. And it celebrates some of the things I'd
want to celebrate. Not all of them.
But hip-hop unfortunately is not informed enough by things
going on outside of it. The thing that I found most disturbing
about the evolution of hip-hop is its insularity. The very form that

ases itself fundamentally on pastiche, borrowing and exchange, is
one of the most self-referential and completely closed discursive
bases in black culture. It's like it eats itself, so that if you come up
with an idea that doesn't follow a basic range of musical narratives
you're not even in hip-hop. That's not too enlightened. I'm not too
happy about that. Because thinking beyond historical categories
which confine the form is what both energizes it and gives it real
political possibilities.
COLUMBIA: But that kind of closed-mindedness, that defense of
the culture at the expense of expansion, is nothing new, is it? I think
it's something that's been a consistent tension in black music,
whether it's the older generation refusing to accept bebop or boppers
refusing to accept Cecil Taylor.
ROSE: Well, that's among the musicians but not necessarily among
the fans. If you listen to R&B, if you listen to soul music, you realize
it was connected to a larger, generational, social movement.
There was a larger cultural context of okay, these narratives can be
used because of the way they're constructed, they speak to a larger
Zeitgeist, they can be connected to political activism. Even early
Motown—"Dancing in the Streets" was considered a radical political
statement, especially in Europe. Which was an amazing thing for
Martha Vandrell—she was like, what are you talking about? But it's
an important idea that the music could be, if nothing else, a soundtrack
for other parts of the community's already existing activisms.
There just appears to be a bigger gap right now, both generational
and political: the people who are doing a lot of political activism—
that we hear about at least—are not really tied to hip-hop narratives.
And then there are young people doing the hip-hop activism thing.
I'm not saying they're not doing that, but I can't say it's galvanizing
a whole generation. It's not galvanizing the whole generation the
way hip-hop is, to be politically active. Even to fight local things;
forget protesting Reebok, I'm just saying, you know, jobs in my
neighborhood or better clothes in my stores. Even if it's just commodities—get
the supermarket to get better pork rinds. But there's
not even self-serving commodity-oriented activism.
Maybe people know something that I don't—that ultimately it's not
going to make a difference soon enough for them to waste their
time doing it. Maybe they'll do it some other way if the value of
some other way emerges. Part of it comes down to whether you
want to assume that people know better, or that people don't know
better.
COLUMBIA: In other words, are people passive because they've
given up on activism, or are they passive "just because?"
ROSE: It's because they're looking for another way to be active,
and thus they're not really passive. So do you start with what people
are doing and then figure out what's useful about it, or do you
start with what you think would really help and what everybody
ought to be doing?
COLUMBIA: The last time we spoke, I was telling you about the
work I'm doing with Upski and the Active Element Foundation
around hip-hop activism. In his new book, No More Prisons, he discusses
something he calls the "Cool Rich Kids Movement." The
idea is that there's a generation of hip-hop-influenced people who
are going to come into all this money, and we can talk to them
through the common language of hip-hop and hip-hop-based resistance
and convince them to give us some dough to go do something
philanthropic or resistant. I think taking a wide angle on hiphop
makes a lot of sense; if nothing else, whoever is president in
thirty years is gonna have owned "Straight Out of Compton."
ROSE: Yeah, it's the same thing with soul music and R&B. Clinton
certainly has an enormous appreciation for black culture, probably
the most of any American president in history, and certainly the
most explicit appreciation. And his generation—the R&B, soul,
rock'n'roll generation—and its cross-racial experiences is reflected
a lot in his approach to speaking to the nation. But I'm not necessarily
sure how that benefits us any more than say Bill Bradley, who
probably doesn't listen to R&B or soul or hip-hop and is not likely
to, and whose policies may help people just as much. So I'm not as

54
convinced with that argument. The question becomes, how are
these cross cultural experiences really being understood?
COLUMBIA: And is there any real depth to them?
ROSE: Yeah. Is experiencing culture the same thing as knowing all
kinds of things about its political implications? If you have a 35year-old
who loves July Fourth and has a big barbecue is it because
he's a Colonial pig or is it because it's a holiday he likes in the summertime?
And maybe if you break down what it stands for he'll say,
yeah, well, it's a bad day but that's not why I'm celebrating.
When white kids loved soul and funk and, you know, Jimi Hendrix,
twenty years ago, were they thinking about the legacy of
exploitation of black artists, or the suffering and pain of black people
that the music is expressing? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they'll
be more comfortable around black people because of it, but maybe
not. You know, I don't see Michael Jordan helping us out with that.
Everybody loves Michael Jordan, but that don't mean they want his
cousin living next door. That's still a reality. Housing segregation is
still as significant as it was twenty-five years ago.
That's why I stress this notion of the public sphere. This is
where technology has to be pressed into political service for the
production of public-space intimacy, because people are not sharing
public space in a way that fosters cross-racial, cross-class, crossgender
community on terms of equality, and if that doesn't get
addressed all the new technologies in the world aren't going to
change that. All the artistic expressions in the world, although they
might make us feel good along the way and offer some valuable cultural
critique, and that's important, believe me, just so you don't kill
yourself, but that other matter has to be addressed. There needs to
be a kind of permanent spatial reorientation. So I don't see hip-hop
doing more to address these things than any other cross-racial
music of the past.
At the same time, I'd say that younger whites are a whole different
ball game. My 18- and 19-year-old students are very different
now than they were twenty years ago. They're much more influenced
by everyday black popular culture in their speech. Even the
non-hip-hop heads, the regular white kids. I've never seen anything
like their level of cultural symbolic integration. Some of them know
that it's black and some of them don't. But they're signifying black
and they'll eventually find that out when someone tells them.
COLUMBIA: And when someone does tell them, ninety percent of
them will probably retreat from it.
ROSE: That's true, if they see themselves as taking up something
black. But if it just came to them, if it's something that their generation
just picked up, then they'll continue to use it. Until it gets in
the way.
COLUMBIA: Which it will, unless they figure out a way to make it
work to their advantage, to lend them some kind of cultural cache.
But when they're pushed on it, most white people retreat before you
can say Vanilla Ice. They're out of there.
ROSE: Right. It's amazing how much race remains at the center.
Bill Bradley's really quite right, it's the pink elephant in the middle
of the room that nobody looks at. They just move around it, like a
pillar, just go right around it.
COLUMBIA: And I think we've been robbed of the language to talk
about it, because racism has only become more well hidden and
more insidious, to the point where white people actually believe that
they're not racist in a way that they never have before.
ROSE: Yeah, they're post-racists, which is actually even worse. The
post-racist is really amazing. Even well-meaning people, who've got
more than one black friend, you know, don't even begin to grasp the
fundamental racialization that goes on in addition to racism. There
isn't even a good, critical language that is accessible to explain how
racialization is operating, and the other thing is that people just
don't want to know. And explicit, dehumanizing forms of racism
are just not happening in the same way. Not to the same degree at
least. It's rough. I don't know what's gonna go down on that front.

I don't. I think a lot of black folks really feel like 'you know what,
this isn't worth it anymore'. This level of protest isn't worth it,
because we done tried this for a hundred and fifty years. I think a
lot of people feel like, 'y ou know, whites just don't want to do this.'
I don't think they'll say that necessarily and I'm sure that we'd all like
it to be different, but I feel like you know what, white people are
not gonna do it. Even when they mean well they're gonna keep
doing what suits them, and there's definitely a feeling amongst black
folks of 'well what's the point, why not live the good life the best I
can, why not be ghetto fabulous?'.
COLUMBIA: That goes back to the kind of insularity we were talking
about in terms of the Internet.
ROSE: Right. I can make my own website, make my own friends,
deal with my own idiosyncrasies, watch TV. There's enough black
culture out here now to not even deal with anybody white if you
don't really want to. I'm sure all the money I send out each month
goes out to a white person, but I don't see him so what difference
does it make? I don't even know who it is. And if I write a letter to
complain or send an e-mail to complain about something, it will be
read by somebody who I don't know, who I can't see, who could be
anything. I think you can live in an enormously racially segregated
world, and I think technological mediation has enabled a lot of this
racism.
—ADAM MANSBACH
—DONALD ANDERSON
The Peacock Throne
Shah Muhammad Re^a Pahlavi's father, Re%a Khan, is an iron man.
Re%a Khan—King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, Light of the
Aryans, God's Vicar, Center of the Universe, and Commander-in-
Chief—builds roads, railways, airports, factories, schools, banks. His army
herds nomads to the cities, levels mosques, imprisons or murders priests (the mul-
lahs), strips women in the streets. Crowds are thinned and dispersed with bul-
lets. The army is well-fed. People disappear.
Shah Muhammad Re%a Pahlavi inherits his father's generals, but not his
father's height. Re^a Pahlavi, early, sports elevator shoes, orders slaughters from
the palace. The generals kneel before the son, kiss the shoes. In a land of flow-
ing oil, Pahlavi's subjects collect cow dung to dry for fuel. Pahlavi's first wife,
Faw^ia, bathes daily in sweetened milk.
Re%a Pahlavi, new Lord of Energy to the West, erects monuments of
himself, vows creation of a second America founded on petroleum, poly-religion,
concrete, plastic. Re%a Pahlavi stands for photo ops for reporters. In public, he
models European suits. On some level, based on these photos and selected
quotes, the West forwards enthusiastic bribes, advisors, guns. A King's vanity,
we learn, is different from our own. He has, among his king things, an armed
army at hand.
In his turn, Re%a Pahlavi releases his army into the streets. The army is
well-fed. Hooded students, in European airports, pass pamphlets to hurried
crowds. In Paris, at Orly Airport, a group of students remove their shirts, their
shoes. They display flayed backs, charred toes. One has no eyelids. (Wereyou to
ask, he might explain he'd clamped his eyes against the torture of friends and
that his closed lids had been burned away with lighted cigarettes.) At night, the

students hobble to gather pamphlets from Orly's floors.
In Persia, death is followed by forty days of mourning. It is believed that
on the fortieth day mourners can pronounce the names of killers, and that at
that moment of pronouncement murderers will shudder in their shoes. "Death
to the Shah" becomes the rhythm of Iran at intervals of forty days.
Shah Muhammad Re^a Pahlavi weeps when he flees Teheran. He
explains to the Western press he has less money than people think. From the
Shah's residence in St. Morit^ a courtier points, for French TV, to a photo in
an old copy of Paris-Match. The photo is a close-up of the Shah's second infer-
tile queen, Soraya Esfandiari, who in a lift line with others waits, democrati-
cally, to ski.
The expelled Re%a Pahlavi roams, searches for a home. In disbelief, he dies
barefoot in an unowned bed. For the news, the thin-boned Farah, the last of
Pahlavi's wives, stands in Egypt, regally facing East, the whirring cameras. Her
eyes crouch.
The state funeral in Cairo is almost private. Uon-heartedly, Sadat wel-
comes two haggard kings, Nixon and Constantine of Greece. The three of
them bury the Shah. Shortly, it is noted, rich Persians pop up in France and
Beverly Hills.
Meantime, Islamic holy men squabble in medieval Persian streets eyeing
house-si^ed portraits of The Awaited One—-Khomeini—he who disap-
peared in the ninth century to now return to deliver his faithful from misery and
the trod of kings. Afterward comes the End of the World. In evidence, royal
tanks park in streets, untended. Crowds gather and part at will. Loudspeak-
ers sprout like plants. Women dress from head to foot. But then: in Qpm,
Teheran, Tabriz Meshed, Isfahan—under the hand of the Charitable and
Merciful One—people begin to disappear.
Before Maryam, I judged Pahlavi and Khomeini on the denominator
of tyranny and murder alone. When factions permit themselves
excess do you compare immediately the visions and end
intentions of the regimes? Or do you, like me, first stack and count
the bodies? I start with bodies because counting feels concrete, and
because it takes me time to think the unthinkable. Like anyone, I'd
hoped the Islamic revival would have ended the corruptions and
deaths attending the Shah's wish to purchase a modern civilization,
but under the Khomeini, secret trials and murders increased. I next
hoped for some virtuous differences in the killings, but it was no go.
If as a child I wished hard for the ability to know, at will, people's
thoughts, as an adult, I've not harbored the wish for years.
My attention to world affairs is, I suppose, both as serious and
fitful as yours, but the affairs in Iran were impossible to ignore: the
bodies, the bodies. I avoided as best I could thinking about the reasons.
Maryam bought me time. I could think of Iran as Maryam.
You might have guessed she possessed the kind of beauty that, if
allowed, would make you gasp. And she announced she was the
daughter of the dead Shah. She called Shah Muhammad Reza
Pahlavi her illegitimate sire.
I corrected the idiom of her English. "You are the illegitimate
child."
"He was my illegitimate sire. He gave my mother me. If he had
produced a son, he would have married her, owned me. He married
Farah for sons. He sent my mother, my sisters, and me to Paris, then
here." Her hand swept west. "He sent us to live in Kentucky."
Do I know if Muhammad Reza Pahlavi fathered Maryam?
I know, for two days in 1983, I came to believe I was with a
princess. Of course, I wanted to believe. What would you have
done if a pretty woman told you her dead father was a king?
Two weeks before Christmas, I'm visiting Washington D.C. A
wet raw day, storm brewing. Even now, I breathe in the day's smell
of unfired clay. By contrast, the East Building of the National
Gallery of Art appeared bathed in drier light. White rising stone,
white sharpened stone. I thought, at that moment, of sand. Beaches
in Algiers. I thought of Camus' Stranger, the sad Meursault, who
murders the Arab, firing and firing the unowned gun. Questioned
why he'd done it, Meursault comments on the weather: "The sun
was hot." Are we to believe the murder Meursault commits is an act
brought on only by the blurring of the conscience by something as
unsought as summer weather? Afraid we were, and thinking of

6o
worldwide torture and murder committed in the name of God and
might, I backed into the street, peered up again at I. M. Pei's uncowardly
construction—a higher church than the city's Pentagon or
National Cathedral, stone havens, both, of fear and control and the
harvesting force to back it. Cold beaded the air. The trees on the
grounds looked bony. A four o'clock sun. The sky, dim, seemed
backlit by sullen technicians. Ieoh Ming Pei's milled granite shone.
I shoved the museum's revolving door. The flaps on the door
scraped hard. The guards at the door both frowned. I asked directions
to a restroom. One of the guards pointed the way. The other,
with his thumb, mashed me into his hand-held counter.
I washed my face, then my hands, then drank from them
cupped. The restroom smelled dry. I skipped the escalator, hiked
the stairs. My shoes sounded on the marble. Calder's overfed mobile
twisted, bloody red, stirring air. At the top of the stairs and in the
open, I was the lone tourist. I looked down at the guards. Outside,
I could see snow falling.
I moved towards noise. In the first gallery an old woman shouted
at an older man in a foreign tongue. The man settled his palm on
her sternum, pushed away, an old skiff from a dock. The woman
began to weep.
In the next gallery, Maryam was alone. Cross-legged on the
floor, she propped a sketching pad against herself, beneath her
breasts. She copied a street scene by Manet, though the museum
caption protectively complained: attributed inconclusively.
Maryam adjusted her pose. Twin bracelets spun on a wrist.
Maryam wore army pants with the pant legs rolled above dark
socks. Her teeth were straight. She wore rough-out, soft-soled
boots. The sweater nubby.
The sketch was of an execution: a half-dozen French or Prussian
soldiers, arms awry—musket ball and flesh—common men forever
dying, in Manet's oil, and, now, in Maryam's lead.
Maryam rose, frowned at the finished work. In retrospect, she
seems a rouseable Persian from, say, fifty, seventy years before,
complete but for horse and carbine. Reza Khan's Palace Guard. She
opened her mouth to her teeth, strode to me: "To see not the power
of another culture is to prepare to perish from ignorance—as
democracies will."
"Whoa, what's that?" I put up my hands.
Maryam pronounced her name, then threaded her arms into an
embroidered vest, shrugged up her sweatered shoulders, shook her
head. Her breasts rolled beneath the wool. A David Lean production:
horses and rifles. Sand. Fruited palms. Outcroppings. In the
midst of the crowd, the camera selects, zooms. Dark marble eyes,
lightless and alert.
Maryam was sleeping, she said, in Georgetown.
When we stepped outside to night, I buttoned my coat, hailed
a cab. On leave from the University of Kentucky, Maryam had traveled
first to New York to see friends, then to DC. to sketch federal
buildings. She found, she said, she disliked most of the city's
structures. From the cab, she pointed at a columned building. "This
work is little risk. I trust but Saarinen." Because I knew, I asked if
he were the architect famous for designing airports. Disappointed,
Maryam ticked off a list of Eero Saarinen jewels: the Hockey Rink
at Yale; the chapel at MIT; CBS in New York; yes, the Dulles airport
twenty miles away, and TWA in New York; but the St. Louis
Arch too; and chairs. "You know the chairs?"
"I don't know."
"You can tell his mother was a sculptor." She seemed sad. For
Maryam, the deceased emigre, Saarinen, was her United States. In
this way—the national embrace of a foreign artist—she had managed
to forgive, as deeply as she could, U.S. betrayal of her Iran.
"Betrayal?" I said, though I knew, in detail, of the U.S.-backed
ousting of Mussadegh, the Iranian Premier who, for a couple of
years in the fifties, had managed to nationalize Iranian oil. The U.S.
had bolstered a gluttonous monarchy against a nation's masses, and
stood fast for SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, whose primary
methods of torture involved electricity and flame, with some
reliance on simple beatings. But which betrayal did Maryam mean?
Given the alleged parentage, had she expected more—or less?—
support for the Shah from the U.S.? Maryam stared at me. I didn't
press. I accepted that a dead Finn's lyrical anchorless forms, dotting
the East Coast and Midwest, allowed me room in a cab with a
princess. Maryam quizzed me about my airport. She wanted me to

62
have arrived at Dulles. She wanted, she said, to talk about Saarinen's
use of cables to support large roofs while providing surprising column-less
space. I told her I'd arrived at National, which was true.
I paid for the taxi. Maryam didn't seem to have a cent. In the
short ride in the cab, she scolded me for my ignorance of her Saarinen:
He is Joy! He is Joy! She spoke, too, of the Shah, her own accused
dead father, her own accused dead king.
What is needed for revolution, I paused to instruct myself, is an
awareness of poverty and oppression. And, beyond that, an awareness
that these conditions are not the natural order of this world. It
is unrighteous authority that provokes revolution, but as in the case
of the Khomeini, a revolution can demolish so fully that it annihilates
the very ideals which served as germ. Then again, I thought,
the principle of revenge is simple, long-lived, and older than mind.
I stopped the thinking, turned back to the bloom of my queen.
We found a bar. Maryam designated a Dr. Pepper. Considering
the weather, I considered bourbon, then ordered gin.
I asked Maryam what she thought of Pei's building, the museum.
She said the triangular motif was obsessive. "It's everywhere—
partout" she said in French—"columns, ceilings, tiles, stairs, even
door frames." Then: "Building tools are constructed for rectangles.
Pei's building is ego, ego, ego. It was, I think, for builders, chaos."
Then: "A building sliced to shape by a knife for bread."
"A sharp knife," I suggested.
It was after Maryam's murder, that I learned that of the two dissenting
votes by the six-member Washington Commission of Fine
Arts for Pei's building, one had been cast by Saarinen's widow,
Aline.
plastic explosive, noun
A versatile explosive substance in the form of a moldable
doughlike solid, used in bombs detonated by fuse or electrical
impulse (e.g., doorbell, auto ignition). Also termedplastique.
I circled the gallery twice. She sat before, as I've said, a street
scene by Manet; that is, a scene "attributed" to Manet. Still, the
painting had been painted and would have pulled despite its questioned
stock. I paused beside Maryam's right shoulder.
Her blackberry hair, massed to one side, struck as clean, loose
goods, splendid cargo which she masked with a Basque beret. Her
pants, army green, were baggy—a fit woman in fat pants—and
rolled above socks and rough-out boots. Her sketching hand was
clean, but the thumb of the left, pressing the pad beneath her
breasts, was smudged. A heavy knit, her sweater hung creamy, in
folds and piracy, lapping its high collar about her neck. Twin
bracelets chimed on her wrist.
When she looked at me, I felt measured.
The paintings on the walls excused us to walk, and we walked,
and had soon agreed on a drink in Georgetown. It was where she
was, she said, residing at present. On leave from architectural studies
in Kentucky, she complained about her professors, whose talents
she suspected. "Even as a child in Teheran, I read books I bring
myself to school. I hold them on my legs while the mistress speaks.
Later I hold them high. When I am very young, I read your country's
books."
"In English?"
"Sometimes English."
There would have been conversation.
Maryam: "I spent time in New York—at Columbia—with
friends."
I knew the Shah had been admitted to the 17th floor (the entire
floor) of the Cornell Medical School in New York. "Did you see
him?"
"I was seen by agents. I fled with my friend on her motorbike."
"Agents?—your father's? Khomeini's?"
"My father is my father, and he was ill."

"The Shah's presence here wasn't medical—it was political."
"You told this to his tumors?"
"Henry Kissinger, Frank Sinatra, Tricia Cox Nixon visited him.
You couldn't get in?"
Had this conversation occurred, we would have been talking
about three-year old history.
"I'd come to stay with a friend—I wanted to at least see the
hospital. The street was filled with protesters calling for the Shah's
death. They might not recognize Frank Sinatra, but there are certain
who know me, who had been waiting their day."
"Being king is a supremely privileged human condition. Anger
against the Shah had some ground in fact and repression—enlightened
anger."
"More enlightened than—what?—We're going to ship you back, and
you're not going to like it. No more boo^e. No more Big Macs. No more rock
music. No more television. No more sex. You're going to get on that plane at
Kennedy, and when you get off in Teheran, you're going to be back in the 13 th
century. How you gonna like that!"
"Where was this?"
"Columbia." Then: "After the embassy seizure, I made a point
of walking with friends. Women. I felt safer. American men have
always been willing to fight foreign men."
I made a point of the irony that Khomeini sought and received
political asylum in the West. "For him to have instigated the invasion
of an embassy violates a principle of diplomatic immunity that
even the most rogue governments have professed to respect."
"Fancy talk from a citizen of a country whose educated come
up with giant posters of John Wayne and American flags and We're
going to kickyour butts''Most Iranians in the U.S. had a father or brother
or mother killed by the Shah, but not all of them are satisfied
with Khomeini's revolution."
I said, "I suppose you could no more vicariously live wealth
than you can poverty or subservience. But you're sounding fair
about it—I'll say that."
"All Iranians here are harassed in some way or other by outriders
of the SAVAK or outriders for the mullahs, and, now, outriders
for the U.S. Most Iranians of any mind have said something that
would incense some side and put themselves at risk."
"On whose side do you vote—of course, the Shah's."
"I have many reasons to be unhappy with my father Shah Reza.
But I am alive—so. We are born to our lives. We cannot avoid our
lives. And grandfather loved me," Maryam said. "He held me when
I was small. In his large arms, he possessed me."
Then: "Think otherwise if you must, but most loyalties are
instinctive, an accident of circumstance, or both. Loyalties are not
so easily a matter of choice." Maryam launched into French—
"There must be, of course, capacity for doubt and regret, but my
family held me in their arms."
Then, English: "For your country I worry for this impression
of helplessness. Perception of impotence may provoke other
probes of your nation's will. Wild as the mullahs might be, they
would never touch the Soviet Embassy or, ever, the Israelis. See?"
I said: "The National Iranian Oil Company is selling 700,000
barrels of oil a day to the U.S. During the Shah's heyday it was only
900,000."
"The same week my father died, the Khomeini ended whatever
pretense there might have been about Islamic tolerance. We want
Islam alone! Nothing but Islam! he shouted. Twenty prisoners were
marched out of the Evin Jail. The guards fired enough to kill these
men many times, but they continued. Prison officials chanted
Allahu Akbar! God is Great! People are executed in Teheran,"
Maryam said. "For civil crime."
Maryam produced a series of photographs of four prisoners.
Heads hooded, they were buried chest-deep in sand. The presiding
judge cast the first stone, then five others joined in selecting and
throwing from a pile of apple-size rocks. The hooded men and
women had been accused of promiscuous sex. "It takes 15 minutes
of stoning to kill people."
"You make it sound like biology class or something—an experiment."
"Experiment? When the sentence of death is pronounced in
Iran, it is carried out." Then: "When Carter sends his 80,000-ton
Kitty Hawk toward Iran, he should understand martyrdom is an
honor."

68
"When my father was asked if he knew of SAVAK torture, he
said, "We don't need to torture anymore.' An odd admission, no?"
"Is it a surprise people hate corruption and police terror?"
Maryam said she had at least one hundred blood relatives in the
U.S. She pointed to the ailing matriarch of the House of Pahlavi,
Queen Mother Tajomolouk. "Iranian students stoned her estate in
Beverly Hills, but I believe she was in Paris. She does her serious
shopping in Paris." Then: "If I am common Iranian, then what I
think is this: If I oppose before the government, I am told I oppose
the Shah. Now I am told I oppose God. It is not the same? It is all
the same."
There would have been conversation.
In the Georgetown bar, the jazz drives willfully, and Maryam is
nearly impossible to hear, but as if in compensation, the lights dim,
and the table candles reflect flame off skin. I feel honest and accurate
and drink my fifth gin. Maryam works on her second Dr. Pepper.
When the trio completes its set and takes a break, Maryam lays
colored pencils in a row, selects four, then five, then clears a space.
Two women are brought and seated beside us. Maryam and I
are asked to shift our chairs. The youngest of the two new women
is pregnant.
"You may move your face," Maryam says to me, "but you must
look at my direction."
I order another drink. Hadn't harems been renewed in the
retracting Iran? Maryam's breasts tremble with the quick movements
of her hand. Ancient wars for soil. Loam. I stare into the
agate of her eyes. Maryam resets my right hand on my left arm.
The pregnant woman removes her fur. She's drinking beer.
"You're drinking?" The women have been conversing, but hear
me and stop. I grin enough to show my teeth: we share a common
language. I return to Maryam. She is working, but drawing mostly
watching me, not the pad. The two women resume their conversation.
I turn back. They stop. The pregnant woman taps her chest.
"Me?"
"Should you be drinking?"
"A little. Sure."
"If it's a girl, what will you name it?"
"It?"
"Her." She scrapes her chair closer to Maryam, who raises the
pad for her to see.
"Yes?" says Maryam.
The woman nods.
Maryam displays a blunted pencil. "I have much love for gray."
The pregnant woman takes the pencil to the bar, has it sharpened.
She returns with a beer.
My women.
As she draws, Maryam keeps licking her thumb. "The skin
falls," she says, shows me, then rubs the thumb on the pad, where
color and line are blooming. I detect ears, a neck.
The women rise to leave. "Hold it," I say, then ask Maryam to
sign her name. Maryam selects a sharp black pencil, signs her name
in Farsi: two vertical, looping lines. Two lines. A spare beauty,
which, without exaggeration, at that moment, induces for me the
tenderness of temporary immunity from the danger of life.
"Here," I pronounce to the coming mother, "name her this."
She stands in place, elbows propped on her stomach.
"It's Maryam." I touch the paper, then the side of Maryam's
face. I feel bilingual. The woman puts the paper in her purse and
her mother helps her with the fur.
"You drink beer when you carried her?"
"Some," the older woman admits. "Sure."
The waitress cleans the women's table, asks if I want a drink. I
look at Maryam. "What does it mean?"
"It is a flower in Iran. Me as flower."
"Draw it?"
Instead, Maryam turns her pad for me to see. The drawing had
looked more like me to me from upside down and across the table.
Still, it is me. In line and blot. Wounds of navy, lavender, black, red,
gray. Maryam had begun the rendering of the left lens of my prescription
glasses, but had abandoned the full fact of my fixed vision.

66
"Jimmy sends warships and Bibles to the Gulf and, you're right,
he believes he's armed, but it's not just the U.S. and Iran—it's the
Crusades turned round. Arabs versus Infidels. But maybe better
Carter than Nixon? Nixon wrote to your father he envied the way
he dealt with dissidents."
"A series of presidents, going back to Roosevelt—especially
Nixon—armed my father to his teeth, encouraged him, sucked at
cheap oil, sold him planes."
It was hard not to hear Reagan, as I had on TV, criticizing
Carter. The Shah might still be in power had Carter followed a consistent pol-
icy that we should have for a country that has been a strong ally and friend.
Maryam: "When people believe their destination is preordained—you
should listen now, I'm going to lecture—they will not
have much faith in temporal arrangements or their ability to manipulate
events. Islam teaches all is transitory—nothing is permanent—the
only reality being death and the hereafter. The future can be neither
known nor trusted. For an intensely religious Muslim, safety is a
dangerous illusion. The odd upshot of all this is that Iranians are
exaggeratedly preoccupied with self-preservation and self-interest.
Except for soccer there are no team sports in Iran. There is a glorification
of the individual in Iran that Americans are unaware of.
They'll be a long and dangerous enemy. Put another way, underlying
Iran is a strong sense of self-preservation and a bias toward
anarchy. Hardly a stable combination in times of war or peace.
America should learn to deal with nations and peoples as they are,
not as they wish them to be. In the great game of world politics, you
should abide by the ancient rule of having no permanent friends or
enemies, only permanent interests. And this too: revolution and
change through revolution seem more permanent and lasting features
of the human condition than many others." Then: "It was taking
the Shah in that goaded the mob to storm the embassy and take
hostages."
"The Shah died in a Cairo hospital."
"It may have been why Sadat was murdered."
"Islamic purity? The whole atmosphere is blood. Murder politics."
"Three years ago, right after my father's death, Tabatabai, a
spokesman for the Shah at the Iranian Embassy had been bold in
his opposing the Revolution. He was called to the door in his home
here—in Bethesda. A man wearing a postal uniform, asked him to
sign for a special delivery, then pumped bullets after bullets into
Tabatabai's stomach, then drove away in a U.S. Postal jeep."
"There are more university students from Iran than from any
other foreign country. And they're lucky to be students in the U.S.
where they can take advantage of their visas to picket against the
U.S.—O.K.? Where else can you march—unarmed—with banners
like DEATH TO AMERICA IS A BEAUTIFUL THING"?
"Remember what they wrote in France of the rescue disaster.
Really, what can you think of the effectiveness of a military on
which a good half of the planet depends which is not capable of
safely putting down two planes in the desert? In a night desert area,
the planners forgot about dark and sand?"
Surely Maryam would have guessed I knew of the ground collision
in which eight U.S. soldiers died outside Teheran. The fueled
plane and helicopter nearly melted in the fire. "It was a plane and a
helicopter, Maryam." Then: "Was your father so blind to the needs
and values of his people that he resorted to enough repression that
they finally turned? The consequences of his blindness threaten to
be more terrible than the worst excesses of his regime. He's dead,
but he's managed to be wrong twice."
"My father wrote of his father—the Reza Khan—'Strong men
trembled just to look at him.'" Then: "My father wore elevator
shoes." Then: "There is much falseness. Teheran, with its Tokyo
traffic, has no sewer system. I know all these." Then: "He formed a
toothless parliament. He ran the country for profit. Even the middle
class, grown by industrialization and education, revolted because
of lack of political rights, the centralizing of power, and a system
in which top jobs were awarded based on only loyalty. I know all
these." Then: "You would have me what—be born a boy?"
I would have told Maryam I was sorry for the baiting.
"I too. Of course, I follow my father's life. I know he set up
SAVAK."
I would have admitted what I knew too: "With the cordial assis-
tance of the CIA."

70
I point and raise my brows.
"I draw the part for as long as I find interest."
Past midnight, I'm walking Maryam to a house in Georgetown,
a wide row brownstone, three floors and steps scraped of ice and
salted. We'd walked blocks in the wrong direction until I asked and
we faced about. Before we retraced, Maryam tightened the scarf at
my neck. "I know it is wrong direction, but I am happy."
I fingered her face again.
"Yes?" she said.
Maryam had a key, yet it felt unclear to me why she was staying
here—how she was staying here—in this neighborhood. She seemed
penniless. I expected to see Henry Kissinger's dog or something.
Bob Woodward. J. Edgar's replacement. Someone. I thought of
Maryam's claimed, dead father, and looked about for guards. It registered
I was in no condition to fight or run.
"I do not invite you in. This is not a terrible thing? Yes?"
I grip her elbow. "May I kiss you? May we kiss?"
"For sure," she says, her English leaping forward.
I kiss her, then step away, the dark morning wet and chill, halos
smoky about the street lamps. A groomed and collared cat crouches
in the corner of the steps of the residence of Henri Poussin,
M.D. Maryam waits for me to pull away further before she tries her
key.
SAVAK, a contraction of Farsi words for security and information
organization. Following the ascension of the Islamic republic,
a SAVAK official appears on Western TV. On screen, the official's
face is distorted, voice warped: "Many of us will have problems
making ends meet."
Or I could say that on the following day, I returned to the
Georgetown jazz pub, that Maryam was sitting at our table, that
she'd brought vials of colored ink. When the waitress took my
order, Maryam asked for a glass of water for her pens.
Did I buy her dinner and fruit juice? Did I walk her to her
house again to say goodbye? Had she forgotten her key and have to
shout, "Louie! Louie!" from the sidewalk, pressing the bell?
Or do I say—all praise be to Allah!—on my final night in DC.
I took Maryam to my hotel where, with neither appeal nor constraint,
this woman-child-woman transported me with Islamic soldiery
and grace, her tongue trilling in derision, possession, pleasure?
Rifles and shouts. Uneroded Euphratean soil. "Five times a day I
used to pray," says Maryam, astride me, facing East. "You have slept
with many men?" I ask, falling into her syntax and inflection. Her
answer is no and some place between innocence and conviction.
Or, that arriving at the brownstone, late for a second night, that
her sleeping bag and pack are propped against the doorframe. Does
she say, "Louie took my key. He was displeased with my late hours"?
I invite Maryam to my hotel, but is it she or I who arranges the
couch into a second bed?
Think of it this way: We move from Georgetown toward the
city.
Maryam: "Do you know the tale of the boy and the root?"
I adjust my scarf, rehitch her pack to my right shoulder.
"A boy comes upon a root held deep in the ground. He tugs,
but the earth will not release. He is hungry, so he yanks. He yanks
and yanks, then walks away. 'It matters hardly,' he shouts." Maryam
clasps her sleeping bag and wicker box of crayons.
"That's it? The story's over? Seems to me it matters. The boy
was hungry. Christ."
"You make sense of it, if you can shout, 'It doesn't matter.'"
Maryam turns to face the night, talks to it.
We hike from Georgetown to Constitution, a good haul. The
White House Christmas Tree is lighted, circled by more than fifty
smaller pines, one for each of the voted-in states and all other possessions.
Cars pass, whining in icy streets, and dark men squat on
steel-grated heat ducts near the curbs of government buildings.

Overhead, as black as the black sky, an unseen flock of geese
pass, their cries those of bafflement or hunger. Maryam scans blank
air. "Poor, poor birds."
In time, we gaze upon the Washington Monument, all 555 feet
and 5 1/8 lighted inches of it. A razor moon emerges from cloud.
Maryam: "This monument is unkind."
Because what I see makes me think about it, I bring up Mount
Saint Helens, the active volcano in Washington State. Dormant for
more than one hundred years, it had two months before Reza
Pahlavi's death erupted to kill sixty people and to jet a plume sixty
thousand feet into the sky, to trigger fire and mudslide, to savage with
ash. "Thirteen hundred feet of mountaintop disappear."
Maryam: "To reappear elsewhere."
"Just you wait, they'll turn a topped mountain into a national
pearl. Two Washington monuments."
Maryam: "You are drunk." Then: "You rename what you're
afraid of." She juts her chin at the memento before us. "So unkind."
At my hotel, Maryam asks for toothpaste, but enters the bathroom
with only it. She emerges, face and teeth scrubbed? In the
bathroom, the towel she's used lies folded on the sink, the small bar
of hotel soap still wrapped but broken into.
I change my clothes for bed in the bathroom with the door
shut. Before entering the bedroom I feel very nearly ashamed. But
of what? the presence of royalty traveling light? A princess without
a toothbrush?
Maryam is in her constructed bed. Beneath her blanket, I sense
she is fully clothed. I crawl into my bed. All night I hear her tossing,
bracelets chiming.
Within the year, twelve-year-old Iranians fling themselves against barbed
wire or march, unarmed, into Iraqi minefields in the face of machine-gun fire.
The weaponless boys' ticket to paradise is a blood-red headband and a small
metal key they wear into battle. The headbands are stenciled in Farsi: "Sar
Allah." So identified as divinely designated martyrs, the male children intend
to use their keys to enter directly into heaven if killed in the holy war against
Iraq. Rounded up by the clergy, indoctrinated in the Shiite tradition of mar-
tyrdom, and bowing to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's will, the backs of
their khaki-colored shirts declare: "I have the special permission of the Imam
to enter heaven." As members of human-wave assaults, tens of thousands of
such children have died. Few pass puberty. An officer explains: "We have so
few tanks."

74
—SOPHIE CABOT BLACK
End of Days
The stranger you saw in the garden that night
Is one who in time finds you. He wants
To give news, the great thing you wait for
And tries each gate with a message but you
Cannot say you are ready. Also: he is weary
And does not know where to call home so he leans back
Into the dark and you play the music louder,
Certain you heard a noise and you too are tired
Of holding what you want even as you hear it leave
But dare not move. And only at the last
Will you remember where it was
You saw him. You at the window watching,
Being watched. The delayed light of stars, your arms
Outspread and all the keys pressed down at once.
—SOPHIE CABOT BLACK
In Case of Rapture
As if it were an ordinary day with light
And the car just broke and I cannot figure how
To move it toward where I want to go,
As if I didn't care, as if I could be ruthless
And just walk back up that hill, the one with nothing
On it but a fence, a barn and two old cows
Who won't even look up, as if I could walk right in
The big doors and find you, your face no longer dark
As a church but striped with the late angling sun,
Your strong arms swinging bales ever higher, one
On top of another like steps, while below the donkey
And goat sing of how I've come home, they cannot wait
To eat, as if for one night I could let them cry, our house
Growing cold in the dusk, the cows suddenly lifting
Their heads while I hold you long enough to believe.

76
—SOPHIE CABOT BLACK
And Morning Star
When I looked, when I finally allowed
Looking, there was nothing but my voice,
Noise of my own much too loud for a room
Where the music suddenly stopped. Then a shape
Not unlike myself only I watched it approach
Like a stranger, as if s/he carried instructions
I had not yet heard but have been ready
To practice at home with those I am familiar
Or at least sleep near; I could never have come
This far without some kind of help, the counselor
Who speaks each week on our behalf, keeps us
Until we no longer remember to leave
Which then becomes something to love, I guess the real
Stuff, never what you imagined, wondering what
Exacdy happened and how much further you will go.
—SOPHIE CABOT BLACK
Omega
To walk back to the first place
As if nothing ever happened
(I save myself however I can);
Here on this beach where I was once certain,
Perhaps you will make me out;
Perhaps this is not the best time to ask;
Perhaps you don't know yet
How you will choose, perhaps you wander
And look in every face learning
The words you might use, the ones you have
To give while your finger points
In a special direction, only I never thought
You would be like this, you who were so good
At bringing me here, who left
While I got better at staying
(In case you might be watching)
And never giving up, which includes the idea
Even as I am saved, I must also be leaving.

—CAROL TUFTS
Therefore Sarah Laughed
And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear
thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call
his name Isaac..,
Genesis 17:19
Therefore Sarah laughed within herself
saying, After I am waxed old shall I
have pleasure, my lord being old also?
Genesis 18:12
Your flesh a wasteland
famished for the harvest
of your own deliverance,
each day withering
in the desert landscape
you wandered, past freshening.
And always the comforters,
smooth as the light
young men who swore you'd soon renew
and bloom, grow ripe
with child, till even you began
to laugh where you stood
across the reach of bitterness
beyond balm, shaping the provision
of your husband's hospitality.
There the story takes its turn,
leaving you to bear
in chastened awe, abstracted
that morning your son sets out
glistening like a miracle
across the distance to Moriah,
the sticks of kindling tied
upright on his young back, the knife
bound tight at his father's side.

8o
TUFTS
Leda on the Edge of the Millennium
"And now, how much would she try
to see, to take,
of what was not hers, of what
was not going to be offered?"
Mona Van Duyn
Suppose her reborn a scrupulous teller
in an ordinary bank,
released from the caging glass
of her station for a late lunch
after the grabbling crowds have gone,
preening on a bench
by the swan boat pond
in a city's common park.
Perhaps she has been caught
by the tremulous perfection
of her reflected face
the way the swans are held in season
by reliable feed,
their webbed plodding eased
beneath the water that slips
around their sleek, deceiving glide.
Now imagine when she looks up at last
how the frivolous print of her summer
dress lifts in a commotion of breeze
and mortal birds, and he is
upon her, the insinuating feathers
bending into the channels of her
flesh as something yields
in that illumination
of wings, their cries
of pleasure, or despair,
ringing across the radiant shards
of the whole broken world.

82
—ALLISON EIR JENKS
The Prisoner
What do I make of you kneeling there
without a name and without a whole breast,
unwilling to feed and forever in prayer,
as if you'd known the painted women in the window
all along, and how to open them without a sound?
The more we bury ourselves, the more the earth
grows back, willing to let us out.
These doors weren't meant to open,
unless you believe the mountains are overgrown animals,
or black and white sketches.
If a woman is as close to her dream
as to her death, then she is always part prisoner,
part gavel. Not even a bird will touch her
as she grows old. Anything that outlives her will last
only an hour.

86
—JON GOLDMAN
Night in Athens
Ameer looked at the bird and cooed. The halogen was turned
low. He ruffled its neck with his finger. There was a futon and a
stereo. Then he put it in his mouth. This was Athens, Georgia. And
I was hungry.
It clawed his cheek looking for its head. But its head was locked
inside.
More friends came and we divvied drugs on the toolbox. We
laughed at Ameer's eyes. They looked starded. We used his Gold
MasterCard to cut. My friend did a quarter of X. I don't do drugs
with some people.
And then Danny came in grinning with his guitar. He and
Ameer ran through their song once. My friend and I sprawled on
the Moroccan rug. He'd bought five. That was when he was locked
in my friend's trunk. It needed a string.
Ameer was my friend's friend.
Danny's hand blurred. He howled quiedy. It was strange. He
expressed pain but we couldn't tell what kind. Ameer drummed
tables. He turned his head to the left and pattered fiercely with his
right hand. He tapped the rim with a steel mallet from underneath,
tuning. He stared at Danny.
—Why aren't you singing? he said.
—I am, Danny said opening his eyes.
Ameer told us it sounded better without him. This was when
we were standing in the kitchen. After Danny snapped a string. We
listened to Danny strumming by himself. My friend listened, rolling
his neck.
It was ten so we drove to Danny's. Ameer's pants were in the
dryer there. Danny lived in a house that smelled like dog. The fridge
had only one beer and soft cheese. The pit of my stomach hurt.
Danny was shirtless and rubbed his buzzed head. He darted from
room to room and sang along with loud guitar music. He asked me
and my friend if we liked it. I looked at the dryer. Did I say how I
was hungry? Ameer played with the drawstrings on his green
scrubs. The dog it smelled like came galloping in.
—Tell me I don't sound exacdy like him, Danny said. Tell me
I've got my own thing going on, though, right?
Danny threw his head back and howled more. My friend looked
at me. Danny went into the other room howling.
The dryer tumbled and Ameer played with the mutt. I asked
him if he could put that in his mouth.
Some roommate of Danny's sparked a bowl and passed it. The
singer's voice was high and hard to make out. It was just like
Danny's. I swung a cupboard door right off its hinges. I was in
Danny's kitchen scrounging.
Ameer took off his shoes to change and men the house
smelled worse than dog. Some roommate of Danny's complained
about how Indians smell. Ameer socked him in the arm and lit up.
—No thanks, I said.
—We gotta get up early, my friend said.
So we got flak.
—We gotta get up early, Ameer aped. His eyes were starded, so
we laughed. We'll drink alcohol, destroy our livers with toxins.
Slaughter brain cells with booze. But no herb. No buddha. Hey
guys. God smoked pot.
Danny lugged his reel-to-reel to the trunk. He showed it to me
and grinned. He had me try to lift it. Heavier than hell. For recording
his set. Ameer's tables were in there too.
—Jesus drank, my friend countered.
We drove to DTs. They were still arguing. Big John let us in to
set up. He smiled down at us. I asked my friend if the bar was short
for delirium tremens. We hadn't eaten so we left Danny setting up
the gear. My friend, Ameer and I. I can't tell you my friend's name.

Danny lugged his reel-to-reel to a ledge in back. Big John at the bar
wiped tumblers. We left.
On the way there were protesters. A cluster of them on the
other side of the street. UGA campus. Ameer was a fifth-year.
Danny was a drop-out. They looked like actors playing protesters. I
said:
—Gay rights now? It's fucking ten o'clock.
Ameer broke off what he was saying to my friend. He studied
me without laughing or smiling. His face calculating.
—That's funny, he said.
We crossed the street.
—I'm going to keep that on file, Ameer said. That's one worth
keeping. Can I use that one?
I didn't mind. He watched me out of the corner of his eye and
said to my friend:
—Smart guy, your friend.
The place was closed so we went to another place. In the taco
joint some girl called out Ameer's name. Her name was Louise and
Ameer screwed her best friend since kindergarten once seven years
ago. They caught up. The girl at the counter asked me if I wanted
my enchilada mild, hot or very hot.
—How hot is hot? I said.
—Hot, she said after a pause.
I looked up at her face. Her sweaty hair stuck to it.
—And very hot is very hot, I imagine.
She nodded without interest. My friend frowned and said it
wasn't that hot. I said loudly so Ameer could hear:
—I'll go mild. Gotta get up early tomorrow.
Ameer turned. Louise left to sit with her friends.
—That's funny, Ameer said again.
We drank Sweetwater like the night before. We sat at a booth.
Ameer and my friend told me the story of Sonya who they'd double
teamed. She had a tattoo in the small of her back. A butterfly,
wings outspread with the word SALVATION. One of them
watched the butterfly fly upside down. I'd heard this one before.
She had passed out in Ameer's arms. They'd led her upstairs like a
virgin. It felt sacrificial. My friend beckoned them into his parents'
room where it all happened. His parents were in the hospital with
three broken legs, many smashed ribs and a hematoma from
hydroplaning into a tractor-trailer on a road near Suwanee the night
of the Super Bowl. That's why. If only Atlanta hadn't lost. Now his
dad had a metal plate in his knee.
—Salvation! Yes! Oh!
They slapped each other high fives over her arched back.
—I told her to get a chess board as her next tattoo, Ameer
joked. Man, satori right there. With a magnetic plate under her skin
so the pieces stick.
My friend groaned with pleasure. I laughed. It hurt.
—Bishop to C-5!
—Check! Check!
—Queen me baby!
—Mate you bitch! Mate!
—Turn her around, that's game.
Trey met us there. I ordered some tacos.
—I need a girlfriend who does less drugs than me, Ameer
remarked.
—He tries to save them, explained my friend. He shook his
head admiringly.
Trey used to live with Ameer but then he stole from him.
—As the great Hunter S. Thompson said, you can trust your
friends, but you can't trust your friends with drugs.
That was Ameer saying that. Trey had a nose ring and a lisp. He
had wavy big hair and looked down a lot at his white Airwalks.
Ameer introduced us.
—And this is the first time we've seen each other since he
snatched my property three months ago. Isn't it, Trey?
—That was fucked up, Trey stuttered. That shit was very
fucked up.
Trey's friend whose name I didn't get asked us to swing by and
pick him up later. But we forgot. Ameer and I went pee together
with the door cracked open. The light was out. We drank another
pitcher and left.
—So, said Trey keeping pace. My friend and I lagged behind.
His face was nervous and watched Ameer's.

90
—So what, Trey.
—So how's your shit been?
—Nice, Trey, nice. I got a parakeet. It's really nice having a
roommate who doesn't steal from you while you sleep.
They kept walking. Trey watched Ameer stride on.
—But no, Trey, things are all right. Thanks for asking.
Ameer explained to me. Trey was apologizing tonight in his
own way. He bought us a round of Newcastle at DTs that was
watery and darker than Newcastle is usually. Trey bought it. Trey
was behind us going in. The bouncer was blond and pretty and Big
John's. She let us in for free when Ameer signaled us but not Trey.
Ameer only showed three fingers.
Danny was playing now. His eyes were closed and he was grinning.
His next song, he said, he hadn't played since he was fifteen.
It was called "I Love To Smoke Pot."
—The spirit just moved me, he sang into the mic.
We got closer. His face gleamed with sweat. People drank and
hollered. One girl was watching Danny with what Ameer called "sex
in her eyes." He pointed her out. Danny saw me. He unpinched his
eyes and looked right at me. He looked overjoyed that I'd come and
then shut them again howling. People would listen if he opened his
eyes more, Ameer said to me. If he actually looked at people.
—I keep my eyes when I perform, Ameer said. You'll see how
this place shuts up when I'm here. I'm playing tomorrow. You'll
come.
—It's like he's in his own world, my friend laughed fascinated.
It's like he doesn't even want to be here. He should really open his
eyes.
Danny couldn't. They looked locked.
—I'd tell him, Ameer sighed. But he's sensitive.
The reel-to-reel ran out in the middle of his new song. The one
they'd practiced earlier. His hand was a soft emotional blur. Ameer
wasn't playing with him. He'd decided not to. It didn't feel right.
—It sounds best unamplified. With just him alone, not me.
Look at him.
That's when we were up against the other wall. The speaker was
in my left ear. We were waiting for the girl's bathroom watching
Danny. It had a lock. The men's didn't. That's where Big John wanted
us to smoke, in the girl's. Which is why. If we had to smoke.
My friend, like he was dancing, carried me a gin and tonic. And
one for him. Trey was standing in front of people rapt.
—Get outta their fucking way, Trey!
He was blocking the girl's view. The one with sex in her eyes.
Ameer yanked him by the sleeve.
—Don't be such an idiot or this is over, I'm done hanging out
with you. Jesus, Trey!
Trey said he would like to buy us all a pitcher. But then the door
opened and three sleepy-eyed girls stumbled out. Ameer slid the pin
in the lock once we were in. Danny came in to. His set was done. I
peed first while Ameer hopped and yelled hurry. He made my
friend and Danny cry laughing. Hopping like a monkey.
—You're making me piss, I said.
The mirror was smudged with white streaks. The girls took it
off and laid it flat on the sink and snorted lines, someone said.
Everyone did that. My friend was in the mirror watching Danny
pack a bowl. He was singing "Sweet Home Alabama." My friend.
The band was playing that outside. They sounded pro. Suddenly I
loved him. I asked if they called themselves Athenians here.
Ameer got Trey high. It felt sacrificial. Trey drew in.
—You're smoking all my weed, thief.
Ameer withdrew the pipe pettishly. My friend and I smoked
dope. It jigged our spines. That was nice.
Ameer was urinating. There was a knock on the door.
—Can't a lady take a piss in peace? he shouted.
Trey slid open the lock. Ameer called him an idiot.
Trey opened the door to two short girls. I invited them in. They
wanted the light on. My friend flickered his lighter but that wasn't
enough for them. The pin slid in, locked. One of them got scared.
—Would you turn on the goddamn light, Trey?
One of the girls didn't want our weed. The other did. She was
blonde. The first one, I don't know. Ameer invited them home with
us. The blonde one held Danny's head and kissed him hungrily. She
had him pinned to the wall. Then she held him there and studied
his sweaty forehead. Then she kissed his mouth more.

The bathroom was disgusting. The band got loud and professional.
The crowd was stiff and hard to pry though. Big John
arranged five shots in plastic cups the size of salsa cups from the
taco joint. I passed out four while Ameer told me about Athens.
The shot was yellow-green. He laughed that it was an undeniable
shithole with his arms around my shoulder. And my friend's shoulder.
But a sitar guru had chosen him. Ameer could do things it took
swamis decades striving to perfect. He'd only played two, two and a
half years. It was the acid. But he couldn't tell the guru that. Or the
Athens papers that profiled him after he was invited to Bombay to
apprentice. That part of the tradition was lost, Ameer said. Mystical
visions, sound of jewels. He hadn't been back since birth. The
ragas became clear to him tripping, suddenly and brightly.
I asked what the ragas were.
Big John lifted the fifth shot and we all drank. Except my
friend, who was empty-handed. Ameer saw Trey wiping his lips.
—You made a mistake, Trey.
He slapped the salsa cup out of his hand. My friend disclaimed,
laughing. I gave him the half shot I hadn't drank. My friend. Ameer
stopped me.
—Pour us another, John, Ameer said facing the bar.
Trey looked at my friend and then at Ameer's back.
—Hey sorry, man. I thought there were five.
My friend protested. The drink was poured.
Ameer went on and on about Finnegan's Wake.
—It's fucking brilliant, he told me. I don't understand a word.
The cover was torn in two. I saw it on his hope chest between
books on Einstein and Oppenheimer set out behind his sitar in his
apartment. Joyce catches my eye. Ameer asked me what I was reading.
Danny was behind us baiting Trey. I heard him challenge him
to a wrestling match later. You could see how much he hated him.
Trey. Danny. Both of them.
The two short girls were further down sipping gins on stools.
They watched Danny grab Trey in the head and push.
This is all they do, Ameer explained confidentially. This was it.
Now I'd seen Athens. Did I say how I was visiting? These were my
friend's friends. Or his friends, really.
—My friends are great, Ameer whispered to me and my friend.
I love my friends. Don't get me wrong.
He looked specifically at me.
—You're smart. You know what I mean. You're smart guys.
My friend shrugged and drew another gin and tonic from the
counter. There was something about a tab worked out with Big
John. Bombay Sapphire. My friend was only living at home until his
parents got better. He fielded calls at a crisis hotline. He couldn't
tell his callers where he was. That was so they'd think he was close
by. That's what people need to think. Isn't that funny? Mostly old
ladies having panic attacks. Once, the mother of a seven-year-old
who raped his baby sister, so she said. The mother. My friend graduated
a year ago. His parents lived in Dacula. Their house was like
every house, anywhere.
Ameer looked melancholy. He said to me:
—My friends just aren't so bright, that's all.
He bared his white teeth nodding. Danny tweaked Trey's nose
ring and Trey yelped and swatted Danny and called him fucker.
Hey Ameer! Trey and I are gonna wrestle. What do you think?
Ameer was still talking to me.
—like Danny here, he said with pity.
Danny pulled on Ameer's arm, asking him to ref. Ameer turned
to face him and shook him by the shoulders.
—I love you, Danny. But you're a dummy!
Danny was smiling. Ameer shook him hard.
—You're a dummy! He's a fucking good guitarist, Ameer
added, turning back to me and my friend. He held up six fingers to
Big John who then nodded. You've seen him play. You know. You
know how hard Danny works? The guy's a workhorse. Danny's got
a seventy hour job pulping wood.
Trey was trying to say something about a seven footer who'd
just walked in. Bigger than Big John. Danny just stood there and
looked confused. Trey tried to tell Ameer again but his lips couldn't
keep up. Ameer flipped.
—Claustro-fucking-p^ofoa, Trey!
Ameer shoved him away with both hands.

94
—It's too much! I can't fucking breathe with you inside of my
goddamn mouth like that. I won't hang out with you ever again, at
this rate.
We admired the big man. He ran another bar in town. We
gauged the number of beers it would take even to get him started.
Ameer slugged him in the gut. They discussed college football. He
used to play for UGA. The big man. The two short girls were a
third his height, we guessed. My friend and I. Ameer asked them to
come home with us again. He bought them snotgreen shots.
A really drunk guy fell all over Ameer asking for drugs. In the
entryway we smoked him out. He had on a leather jacket with metal
studs and chains. He was flopping all over the place. He crashed
into his girlfriend's breasts, then rolled off onto the pavement. Big
John stormed out all angry at us. Only in the girl's bathroom, not
out in the open, he exploded. Ameer denied everything. The tab
was no longer worked out. Twenty bucks each. Then we left.
—You wanna crash at my place? Ameer asked Trey outside.
Trey kicked a cement planter with his hands in his pockets.
—I'd love that. Yeah. If I can.
—Of course you can, Trey.
That was on the way to the car. I had the keys somehow. Ameer
walked along the median strip like it was a tightrope to show he was
okay to drive. He fell off left and right.
—Dude, what are you doing?
My friend pulled him off the road. I tossed my friend the keys.
My friend popped the trunk because Ameer asked him to.
—Get in, Trey.
Trey looked into the trunk. Then at Ameer.
—You can crash at my place, Trey, but only if you ride in the
trunk. I'm sorry, but fair's fair. There's plenty of room.
—It's a short drive, my friend said.
Trey laughed.
—Oh man, you bastard, he laughed.
—Come on. It's the least you can do.
—All's fair in love and hate, I offered.
—Get in the fucking trunk, thief, will you please?
Trey climbed in.
—Whatever, he said. This is some fucked up shit, yo.
He tried to close it himself but he couldn't. My friend revved
the engine. I clicked the trunk shut gently.
—Get in!
My friend drove slow for my sake. I sat shotgun. We waited at
a red light for a long time. Ameer talked about metaphysics and
thumped the cushion behind him with his fist for emphasis. He
asked if Trey had enough air. We drove up a hill then forked right.
My friend said how close we were to home. About four times.
The moon blinked between trees. Then he k-turned and
parked. We just missed the neighbor's scaredy cat.
—Who's got my keys? Ameer asked me.
My friend launched them over the car.
—I want out of this bitch, Trey laughed.
You could hear him like he was right there. Ameer hammered
the trunk twice with his palm.
—Say something good, Trey. You're the smartest guy I know in
Athens.
Ameer crouched and spoke into the keyhole like a mic.
—Give us something fucking brilliant.
—What do you mean? Trey asked.
—Dazzle us, Trey. Come on. Then we'll let you out of the
trunk.
The trunk didn't say anything. I felt it with my hand.
—Don't be a pricktease, Trey. We know you can do it. Give us
something fucking good, you goddamn fucking pricktease!
Ameer's face was purple and he sort of spat.
—Talk to us, Trey, my friend reasoned.
I said Trey's name into the trunk crack.
—Christ, okay! Do you know what the shortest line in the Bible
is? It's two words long. Jesus wept.
Ameer stood and blew up.
•—What? You think you're gonna impress me with your goddamn
Bible bullshit? Do you even know what day it is, Trey? God
is dead, you heathen. The shortest line in the Bible is God is dead.
I wept. I'm weeping right now. Can you hear me, Trey? Have you
even read Nietzsche?

Ameer danced around the car shouting. He pulled a fiddle out
of the back seat and threatened to play it. It was missing a string.
—Nietzsche thought it was okay to steal. But you, you're just a
fucking shmuck like every other prick in this town. Thus spoke
motherfucking Zarathustra. And here's what he said.
Ameer yanked the bow across the strings. He also did a jig. The
notes went up and down. Doo da dee da doo da dee da. My friend
and I had seizures on the street laughing. He spun like a dervish. I
had a good view of the rear tire's treads.
—Can I say something? Trey asked.
—Shut the fuck up, Trey, I'm not finished. I'm not finished and
you haven't earned your way out of my trunk.
—I'll piss in here, Trey said. I swear to God I will.
—If you piss in there, Trey, I will let you out. I will let you out
and throttle you and feed you your motherfucking balls one by one,
which you will enjoy, Trey. Which you will love. You will wish you
had more but I won't give you mine, Trey, because you stole
Demerol out of my own goddamn bathroom, my own goddamn
apartment. Our apartment. You stink up my fucking trunk you'll
have to smell it yourself, Trey, all night. Because you'll be in there,
Trey, all night.
—I can't breathe.
—You're lying, Trey. You're a thief and a liar. But you're smart
and I know you can get out of this trunk if you want to. You have
to want to, Trey. You can do it. Tell these guys something they don't
already know, Trey. Tell them.
—Knock my socks off, Trey, I said.
—Einstein's relativity, Trey. Tell us why Einstein's relativity is
totally incompatible with quantum fucking mechanics. Why?
We kneeled on either side of Ameer. We rose up and down like
we were questioning the oracle. Ameer sighed into the keyhole and
we echoed like witches.
—Why?
—Why?
—Why?
—Shut up, Trey said.
—Don't let us down, Trey, you're one of the most brilliant
fucking assholes I know and I mean it, Trey, from the cockles of my
fucking cock. I wouldn't hesitate to leave you in this trunk all night.
—Why? I asked.
—Why? my friend asked.
—Why? Ameer asked.
The trunk got wet where we breathed.
—Quantum mechanics, Trey. Answer the question. What did
Neils Bohr say to Albert fucking Einstein in 1923 when they met
for a couple beers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin? What
did he say? Einstein believed in God, Trey, but that is not the
answer. God is not the answer. Dammit, Trey, answer the fucking
question!
My friend started coughing in mid-why. Trey started beating the
trunk's insides.
—What the hell is that, Trey?
Silence. Headlights. I stood up. A truck with a rifle rack. Ameer
looked as if he was never in his life more bored.
—General or special? Trey said.
—What?
—Which relativity? Which one?
—Don't be a pricktease, Trey! You know which fucking one!
There was spit all over the trunk. Some hit me just then.
—I have a saliva problem, Ameer confided. Sorry about that.
—He really does, my friend nodded.
—Feel free to wipe. I honestly have no control.
—It's all right, I said wiping.
I didn't say how my dad was a physicist. That's why I was in
Georgia. But I did ask if anybody else was getting cold.
—Einstein said nothing could get out of a black hole, Trey
said.
Ameer frowned.
—Keep going, Trey.
—But with quantum mechanics you can.
—More, Trey, this is great. You're doing great.
It didn't sound right. But I wasn't sure.
—The universe is fucking small, man!
Trey was hysterical in there. Ameer pounded the trunk.

—How small, Trey?
Ameer waited a very, very long time. Then he turned the key
and walked off disgusted. Trey climbed out.
—Thank you, he said.
He looked pretty okay.
—We're wrestling, Ameer said walking off.
My friend and I refereed. There was a soft mound of grass.
They clutched each other on the ground, rolling. But they didn't
make any noise.
—I need to tell Danny... hnnh... what to look... hnnnnh... for
when he takes you, Ameer said.
Trey was lying on his back on top of Ameer's stomach.
—You've gotten stronger, Trey, Ameer panted. I'll tell him.
Ameer's face turned purple with effort. Nothing moved. Then
Ameer started to invert him slowly. He fell back on his back.
—Ow, he said.
Trey let go of Ameer's neck and asked if he was all right.
Ameer tried to reverse him.
—Oh ow, Ameer said.
Trey lay there not moving.
—My back. Think I landed on a rock.
So they disentangled. Trey asked where and Ameer pressed his
lower back and cringed.
—I can fix it, Trey said.
The apartment was how we left it. Dimmed halogen, toolbox.
Sitar on the hope chest. Ameer fell prone on the Moroccan rug,
groaning. Trey walked on his back. My friend was out cold on the
futon with his mouth open. I kicked out the footrest on the rippedup
La-Z-Boy. No one talked. Trey worked Ameer's lumbago like
dough. He kneaded and folded it. I watched Ameer drool on the
rug. He yelled at Danny for walking all over his friend's rug with
shoes on. My friend's. I don't know when this was. Trey rolled out
knots.
There was a peaceful crack. Trey and Ameer drank ice water in
the kitchen and murmured as if we were asleep. I think I left the
trunk open.
Danny sent the sliding door shuddering and marched in with a
grin.
—Hey thanks for hanging out, Danny hollered.
Some guy was with him. Some big new guy.
—And thanks for waiting for me, Danny said.
Danny walked straight across the rug toward Ameer.
—Thanks for leaving me there. Thanks!
Danny walked straight through the apartment shouting thanks.
He went out by the front door slamming it hard. Ameer followed
him out sighing about damage control. He turned the lock behind
him.
Trey spent a long time in the bathroom.
I woke up and Ameer was sitting in front of me in a lotus position.
He was winding strings on his sitar.
—Fuck, he said.
He gazed around his apartment. Trey was asleep, curled on the
rug. The stereo was off.
—I left my tablas at DTs.
That was to no one really.
He screwed the wooden pegs more. The sitar stuck up like a
weapon in the dark. Then he setded its gourd in his bare sole. Right
by Trey's face.
I asked if he played those strings underneath the main strings.
He stroked them with his fingers, with a kind of steel ring. It
sounded like gold raining on my face. And I knew then. He really
was a master.
My friend scratched his throat asleep. His mouth was shut and
happy.
—Sympathetic strings, he murmured to me.
In the low gold light Ameer played.

IOO
-ANDY GERSICK
Fantastic Planet
Visual art and fashion design ought to be compatible. Materials
and modes of presentation are similar, as are the talents of the
practitioners. The pursuit of beauty inspires artists and designers
alike. But their motives can clash. Artists encourage self-reflection,
or reflection on the world around us, as they seek to communicate
ideas through their work. Fashion designers create glamour—the
aloof, enviable beauty that leads consumers to buy clothes in hopes
of becoming glamorous themselves. Art seeks to engage. Fashion,
often, seeks to embarrass.
So although the parallels are obvious, it is not so easy to bring
visual art and fashion design together. "Fantastic Planet," curated
by Meredith Danluck, was the most successful of a number of
recent efforts to harmonize the two. The group show featured nine
designer/artists and included elements of sculpture, dance,
film/video, installation art and photography. And clothes.
When the power goes out, Ingrit Vien and Tamara Gruber's
free-standing silver-and-black-mesh outfits slump to the floor—the
six hairdryers that were keeping them puffed and erect have
stopped blowing. Then the lights flicker on and the outfits rise
again, with only one lazy vest-and-pants ensemble refusing to heave
itself up off the ground. More outages follow at 30-second intervals—lights
flash on and off and frisky outfits pop up and down
until a harried-looking technical director pulls the plug. Later in the
evening, Ms. Gruber sits against a wall, grimly surveying her installation,
now comprised mostly of outfits laid flat on the floor. She
graciously accepts a compliment on the still-impressive display, but
comments, "It's only twenty percent of what it could have been."
Near the center of the space, four young women circle slowly
on a snowy, gauze-covered pedestal. This is fashion designer Liz
Collins's display. The models are wrapped in layers and soft bunches
of white and off-white fabric, like sexy Inuits or anorexic Star
Wars rebels on the Ice Planet of Hoth. Their faces smolder with
ennui. One girl clearly likes being in front: her studied indifference
is the gloomiest, her surly pouting is the poutiest. When she stretches
languidly across the fleecy platform, every inch of her cries out,
"Go ahead, hate me because I'm beautiful. I hate you first." Delicious.
The four draw the largest consistent crowd of the night—the
undeniable beauty of both the women and their clothes, the intensity
of their apathy, and the pleasant voyeurism of watching them
stretch and arch and slowly shift position (fidgeting in slow-motion)
is endlessly appealing, though their expressions of fatigue grow less
stylized and more genuinely tired-looking as the night goes on.
Meredith Danluck's own piece, "Seriate Fiction," deals with clothing
so abstract it's really sculpture. Tonight Ms. Danluck is wearing
independent gown sleeves—futuristic Renaissance-wear. The
sleeves are called "Punk Wanderer," which is also the name of the
main character in her video. Other clothes on display include a sort
of cummerbund/pouch called "Sister Dimension" and a padded
collar titled "Time Traveler." The clothing also stars in a film by Ms.
Danluck's collaborator, Stain. This is something like a music video,
with clothes replacing song as the guiding theme: a vest appears in
sketch form, then later, on the twisting body of an Asian woman
with frost-encrusted eyebrows (it's cold). Rapidly shifting images of

102
men and women twitch and double like a Rorschach test, evoking
pain, confusion, and a certain amount of fabulousness as well.
Most of the show's other contributors choose humor to bind
fashion and art together. Olivia Eaton approaches polemic with her
video infomercial for a conservative capelet called "The Equalizer:"
a shoulder-to-midriff garment that helps home professionals dress
up for teleconferencing without actually having to get dressed at all.
George Skelcher's change purse looks like a NYC-deli coffee cup; a
functional sculpture and a steal at $40. A slide show and accompanying
brochure by The Stand (an independent couture house)
details a day in the life of a young working-class mother, Susan. The
fashionable twist? Susan has her shirt on backwards. Show sponsor,
shagpad.com, claims to be selling a young man's hipster lifestyle.
Their installation—a remarkable facsimile of "Jeff Hatfield's"
messy room—provokes a vague urge to tidy up.
Elisa Jiminez's dancers wind out of a side door and into a spiral
in the street outside the gallery, forming a twining, capering circle
of elaborately-costumed maenads, fairies and centaurs who are
also aspiring young models. In contrast to the sweaty awe Collins's
installation demands, this mythologically-themed performance
piece inspires laughter and applause from the crowd gathered in a
tight circle around the performers. Jiminez, in full but still skimpy
costume as a mustang, steals her own show. When the boisterous
audience reduces a very young horse-girl to tears, Jiminez grabs the
preschooler's hands and somehow manages to stay in character
while comforting her, delivering a tutorial on horsiness—with plenty
of prancing, snorting and spirited mane-shaking that eventually
draws smiles and tentative whinnies from the reassured little pony.
Other young women admirably pull off their nymphly roles,
twirling and undulating with serene sensuality, slipping in and out of
their earth-toned dresses. The piece places a heavy emphasis on
breasts—breasts covered with mud, breasts hardly covered with
fabric. No one complains. Beyond the pleasing anatomy, Jiminez's
dance and accompanying live music admirably invoke classical
mythology or a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is the
most fun and easy segment of the night, and the most purely artistic,
leading viewers to think about the power of beauty and of costume,
and the potential pleasure to be had in the free enjoyment of
physicality.
"Fashion has become...a playing field for contemporary ideas.
Boundaries and rules have all but disappeared." So says Fantastic
Planet's promotional website. The last event of the night, SVO's
fashion micro-show, illustrates the partial truth of this statement.
With a treadmill standing in for a runway, two models alternate
striding in place, their images simultaneously broadcast to a videoprojection
screen with a scrolling background of remote beaches
and rocky cliffs. live music by Gus Gus completes the big show in
a small space. Particularly striking are a white, high-collared Nehrujacket-esque
coat and a summer dress made of vinyl? plastic? wax
paper?—SVO's website reveals only that the clothes are fashioned
from "innovative textiles."
There's a bit of welcome self-parody in all of this. The repeating
background is straight out of The Ylintstones. The models repeatedly
change their outfits in front of the audience, pulling from a
nearby rack—it's a move that strips away some of fashion's characteristic
mystery. Yet, whereas the crowd is friendly and cheerful,
these women exude the studied detachment of the iciest Versace ad.
While one stalks dourly on the treadmill, the other stands waiting in
her underwear. Out of clothes, she is lifeless: hands clasped behind
her back, eyes downcast, looking very much like a girl about to be
punished. When the show is over, the two women disappear behind
a wooden screen, from which emerge sounds of easy, relieved
laughter and clapping—an unselfconscious expressiveness wholly
absent from their performance. The requirement of haughtiness,
that fashion stand above the spectator to elicit envy and desire, is a
boundary that has not yet been crossed.
10

104
—COLUMBIA INTERVIEW
Fashion, Art, and the Pleasure of an
Imagined World—
An Interview with Artist
Meredith Danluck
COLUMBIA: What's the music in your video?
MEREDITH DANLUCK: It'sJ—, techno superstar.
COLUMBIA: Really?
DANLUCK: Yes.
COLUMBIA: And did you get his permission to use it?
DANLUCK: No. Whatever. We just made him a video. If he wants
to come after us, we'd be more than happy to share. He can play it
for his friends and we can play it for ours.

106
DANLUCK: There's something sad about this last portion of the
video—maybe it's longing. Just after the Punk Wanderer blows the
dust on that sleeping man and there's a close-up on her face in the
red wig, with a look of innocence and worry. There's something
extremely resonant about it. It's like a paradise about to be lost.
There's something about that particular take, image. There's something
youthful and untouched about it that everyone responds to. A
lot of people pick it out as their favorite moment; it's not of this
world, not of the world of taxes. It's a beautiful thing to make you
happy that has an inner sadness because it won't last.

108
DANLUCK: Stain and my video, "Seriate Fiction," is very stylized
and technically controlled, everything from the lights to shooting it
on all white was carefully thought out. We made a lot of decisions
ahead of time, the kind of decisions that would give it its distinct
look like overexposing it, and the stop-frame animation. Things that
make it more dreamy and ethereal. Every object in that video is
something that was made by hand or sewing machine to be a part
of it. It is an entirely fabricated world.

no
COLUMBIA: Is the video an advertisement for your clothing line?
DANLUCK: No, it's just the reverse. The clothes always start with
an idea for a character. All the clothes that I've ever made have been
my way of developing my characters' personas. "Seriate Fiction" is
about the Punk Wanderer. She's a character I imagine as an impenetrable
girl. She's a nomad. She's innocent. She doesn't answer to
consequences. My way of imagining her, of representing her, of
making her real is through the clothing. Clothing makes people,
describes people. It's how people describe themselves. Like in that
Matthew Barney thing [Cremaster 5]. I like the way he used costume
to make character and atmosphere. And in that case, it was really
over the top costuming, like baroque opera. But you don't have to
look to something that hyper-stylized to see what I mean. Even on
the street you can learn so much about people just by what they
wear and how they wear it. If you can construct the proper ingredients,
mix the proper clothes, then you have the character.

112
DAN LUCK: I like to make my pieces look like they were plucked
from another place, another world. I want the viewer to feel like
they've found something by accident, that you've slipped into this
place and suddenly "Oh my God, there's this sleeping girl who
seems to have appeared from nowhere and to always have existed
just the way she is."
The Punk Wanderer uses time travel equipment. Taking the red
pill makes her travel in time. The most obvious reference is drug
use, but that's just one idea, one way of looking at it. It's true there
is a lot of drug use in the world, everyone uses some kind of drug
for one reason or another whether it's people using sleeping aids or
even pain killers like aspirin, or alcohol or nicotine—or, you know,
real hard drugs. Everybody uses drugs. But in this case it's more the
idea of being able to transmute yourself through travel without the
limits of the physical world. There are so many people on the planet
and space is being taken up to such a degree that traveling has
taken on supra-geographical complications. The capacity of our
imaginations to be able to be shared is an exciting thing. I had just
finished reading this Jeff Noon book, Vert, and his idea of sharing
realities through eating a feather and sharing dreams with people are
in the same spirit. The Matrix came out around that time. There
were all these ideas in the air about the ability of our minds with the
aid of technology to get to the point where we could share our
imagination and what form that would take. And that's what I was
thinking about: something less inward than drugs and more about
communication between minds. And I thought the easiest route to
show that and the funniest route to me and the most comprehensive
was like making this giant pill and a case to go with it.

DANLUCK: I had someone for a studio visit who said that looking
at my stuff was like taking a vacation. I think the materials I use and
the imagery and the shapes are super seductive, like the space that
travel or drugs put you in—a mixture of freedom and surprise and
pleasure. But there's a difference between taking a vacation from
your everyday life and being a nomad, a perpetual traveler. If you
have a standard life, you take a vacation from it and for a time you
are someone else but then you go back to what you were. A nomad,
at least a nomad like the Punk Wanderer, never takes a vacation
because they're always on vacation and they're always changing but
never changing back, and that's sort of like self-sufficiency. The
materiality of the work is itself nomadic—it's all super light and
everything has a case. These new ones, the paintings of Iceland, I'm
not sure if I'll make cases for them. I have to make more of them
and see if I want them to have that relationship to something else,
or if I just want them to be what they are on the wall alone; I don't
know yet.

116
DAN LUCK: The art world is always one to talk about pop culture as
this "fruitful area of study" or whatever, but people don't always
see, I mean really see, how interesting the commercial and popular
culture that surrounds us is. It's our time. You know, I remember in
school a teacher saying it's pointless to make work about pop culture
because it changes so quickly and it's just all topical anyway.
You have to dig deeper and know your theory and know history and
make work about history. But then you look at Cezanne and Degas
and you're like, wait a second. And Toulouse-Lautrec. You mean
those people weren't making art about pop culture? It's not about
what you use to make your art, but with what eyes you're looking at
what you use. People could talk about a lot of stuff in my work in
an historical context, in the traditions of painting and sculpture, etc.
But I'm not that interested in that. My work isn't about commenting
on an old world but about making a new one. I think the work
is strongest when it's seen together, when you see this with that,
because then you get this sense of this whole world of imagination,
of escape.

COLUMBIA: Most of your work has the feel of a prototype for a
marketable product—but a product that is only available in the
world of Mer's imagination. The products that you want that you
can't get any way but by inventing them.
DANLUCK: Like what, for example?
COLUMBIA: Like a time travel kit with big red pills in it, or a queen
size silver sleeping bag, or that bean bag chair over there which is
both a beautiful minimalist sculpture and a bean bag chair. I guess
I'm leading into asking you about how your skills as a designer fit
with your sense of yourself as a fine artist. How do your furnishings,
your clothing, your installations and your painting coexist?
There doesn't seem to be any difference between them. It all seems
to be part of one body of work, and they all fall more into the high
art category than they do into the Better Homes and Gardens category.
But how do you see yourself? How do you think about your identity?
DANLUCK: I totally think of it as one thing, and I think that the
video has really enabled those things to come together in one place.
In video you control a moving environment a simulacrum of reality,
and you produce a moment in time that's like sculpture. It has
taken me awhile to reconcile if there were any real differences of
genre between my different projects. When I see the fashion stuff
separately from the art stuff, I realize I don't really have one without
the other. Every piece of clothing I make goes with something
else or comes out of a body of work. It is fashion, the clothes,
those are fashion. It would just be pretentious for me to call that
stuff art. If my clothes are art, then what's Ray Calcubo, what's
Oliver Theyskens, what are all these great designers, like Costume
National? What is that? Is that art or is that fashion? It's fashion.
That's its category. And fashion's pretty strict, but fashion is a lot
wider than people give it credit for sometimes. There are different
categories in fashion. You can't just say fashion, but people do. I
guess I would place myself in like a category of fashion that's pret-
ty small. But I do want things from this world to be available.
COLUMBIA: This world meaning the world of your imagination?
DANLUCK: Yes. Yeah, I do want them to be available, and for a lot
of people. I don't want to treat each individual garment as a piece
of art, you know, it's a design, it can be reproduced. That bean bag
can be reproduced.

120
DAN LUCK: The next video is going to be shot in Iceland. It has a
lot to do with the actual time that we're going to be there, which is
New Year's. New Year's is a huge celebration in Iceland. Everyone
shoots off firecrackers wrapped in wishes. It's a huge three-day celebration
that only comes to a close on the 7th—I think they have
another party—so it's a really big deal. The whole video is kind of
based around the notion of wishing, and good luck and benevolence,
and I want it to be just super positive. The paintings I'm
working on are based on what I think Iceland will look like. They
are where imagination fills in the gaps for fact. I know a little about
it. I've heard things described and seen a few pictures, but these
paintings are mosdy about my expectation. Then the video will
show what it's really like but still through my eyes. It's based on the
Icelandic sagas, and myths. There's something very elemental in the
way that I conceive of Icelandic folklore. Vikings and capes and
men on horses and heroines holding down the fort while their men
are at sea. I think it's a land of super strong women. So mere's a lot
of information that I already have in my head even before I
research. There's a character in this video that is based on what I
think Iceland will look like. This character is a kind of heroine. She
is a mythical, semi-spiritual character. She is robed and hooded and
emerges out of the water. It's basically about her pilgrimage to
Reykjavik for midnight New Year's Eve. Upon getting there, she
passes out these cronas which are like these firecrackers that the
Icelandic people write their wishes on and send off into the sky at
midnight. So it's all about her bringing these wishes, making wishes,
enabling wishes. Then mere's this mountain, I'm not sure what
the sequence is yet or what's going to make sense or whatever. But
there's this mountain that if you climb up, and the whole time
you're climbing you don't look back and when you get up to the top
you face east and make three wishes, then they'll all come true. But
you can't tell anybody what they are. So not only is this character
making this pilgrimage to Reykjavik to be this wish-giver but she's
also going to make her wishes. I haven't totally worked out the
kinks. When she gets to the top of the mountain she buries these
three special rocks which will be things that I've made out of some
insane material, some super fantastic looking thing. We will be
shooting at midnight because that's the only time when we can see;
it's only light four hours a day. I imagine people in the streets and
the lights, a combination of laughter and tears and all this hope in
people's eyes and everyone making wishes.

122
COLUMBIA: So for you, the primary emotion of the millennium is
hopefulness, optimism?
DANLUCK: Yes.
COLUMBIA: And is that true of your work in general?
DANLUCK: That it's optimistic? Yeah. There's enough crap that you
see just walking around on Eighth Avenue. I do suffer from lapses
into darkness where everything seems really grim and everything
sucks. But then, Beauty, it's this weird salvation where you see something
and just seeing it can turn your whole mood around. I was
thinking about the deli guy on the corner. Sometimes I'll go there
in the middle of the.night and he's always outside looking at the
flowers because no one's around. He'll just be out there smoking a
cigarette, looking at the flowers. That's how he entertains himself
when he's working.
There's more going on in my work than just decoration. But
there is concept in decoration—how it affects people, what you put
around you and why you need certain things: why people buy flowers.
You have one thing and then you have another thing, and you
put them together it makes some kind of meaning. I don't know
whether I can say exactly what, you know, meaning means, because
meaning I think is really pretty wide open. But you're talking about
visual language, and the heart of that is putting one thing up against
the other and seeing how they work together. And it just makes
sense to explore all the options. To be an artist—there's ego
involved, for sure, to believe that you have this vision that should
be in the world is a little egomaniacal. Maybe that's just what you've
got to be to get your vision across. But I don't feel like my stuff is
necessarily about me, I don't think it's reflexive in that way. I think
it's about whoever is standing with it and experiencing it. I like how
that bean bag is right in front of that wall piece, that's for you to
just lay down and look at the iceberg painting. It's a kind of Zen
garden, rock garden. I made one sculpture that came with litde sea
anemones, aloe-type-looking plant miniatures that came in this box
with the big sculpture and the viewer could accessorize the land-
scape with this foliage, so that's kind of how I'd like my work to be
looked at. I always imagine people just chilling out and partaking in
this fantasy that I've provided.

(/.:•

126
—HEATHER WON TESORIERO
Valley
I gotta get out of here this summer. I've always wanted to leave,
and I've made plans before, but this summer I really want out.
There isn't a lot my sister Jane says that I should repeat, but there's
one thing she says about where we live that makes sense. So, don't
get offended or think I'm a dirty-mouthed, rotten, ungrateful
eleven-year-old punk. We live in Flushing. Now, before you say anything,
close your eyes and what's the one thing you think of when
you hear the word "flushing"? I mean, it's a horrible place, but what
else could it be with a name like Flushing? If you wanted to make
a nice neighborhood where the cars had no dents from kids who
play ball and laugh when they accidentally hit your hood, or Mister
Softee actually sold rocket pops instead of little pink capsules
wrapped in tin foil, you wouldn't name the place Flushing. You just
wouldn't. Oh, and about what Jane says. She's lived here all of her
fifteen years and so at night when she slips out of her wide jeans
she mumbles, "lily, it's flushing all right, and the shit ain't never going
down."
You probably don't know what it means to live in Flushing. It
means your parents, like everyone they know, own a store they
worked so hard to get that they never stop working. It means you
make that shift with your tongue every day that you walk home
from school speaking English and then some Korean woman, old
as a tree, asks you a question and you must answer respectfully in
your bad Korean which makes you disrespectful anyway. It means
your brother Henry who never moved to the U.S. comes from Seoul
once a year and brings you silk-covered books and han bok dresses
that you squeeze into in July. Henry smiles as you and your han bok
whirl around the living room in the way you're only allowed to when
he's there and you try to feel unsick as the dress smells of moth
balls and the underneath of your bed. All the while Henry talks
business with your parents, and you keep whirling, watching the han
bok fly from your sides and you wonder if Seoul is a magical place.
It means you stare for about thirteen seconds a day, just enough to
keep from seeming like a spy, into the drycleaners to study the
glossy posters of the Korean brides widi cakes of make-up and stiff
lace dresses. You wonder if that is what Helen will look like, your
twenty-seven-year-old sister who's marrying Larry, the air-conditioner
repairman, on the day of her wedding. It means you live in a
two-bedroom apartment three blocks from your parents' shop, 764
steps, and you can never go home without first stopping in. It
means you think polishing stacks of fruit is fun until you figure out
it's really work and dull and it babysits you because your parents
don't like you to be in the apartment alone and God knows where
Jane is.
Jane has had a particularly bad week, and it also happens to be
her birthday in two days. Fifteen wasn't such a great year for Jane.
Maybe sixteen will be better. She's come in at 5:00 in the morning
the past four days, whereas usually she spreads out this stunt. Our
room is the size of two twin beds and one dresser, so she can't
come in without waking me up. In the books we read in school, the
mothers always cry when their kids leave; mine starts the minute she
hears Jane's keys rattle in the door and doesn't stop through my
Dad's yelling. Lots of bad daughter talk, Dad's anger happening in
our two tongues, saving the worst insults for Korean. I've never
dared leave our room during one of the episodes, but I can picture
Jane standing there, chomping on her gum and knocking over a few
pictures on the coffee table on her way to our room.
This morning I wake up to her slamming our door. I guess I
missed the first scene. I rub out whatever sleep was in my eyes with
my fist and watch Jane go through her process. She snaps her Walkman
off, mutters "Shit" and empties out her black leather knapsack
onto her bed. She sorts through and re-organizes the following: two
12

128
half packs of Big Red, a pack of Marlboro Lights, a mini tube of
Dippity Doo which she uses to keep a wall of bangs standing
scared-like off the top of her head, a silk covered book from Henry,
four big hoop earrings and a Gold Coin. I picked it up once when
she was in the bathroom and it was quite rubbery. I don't think
there's a coin inside.
Hi, Jane.
'Sup, Lily?
You're late. You came in at 5:00 yesterday. It's now 5:34.
No time for shit, Lily.
She has a quick, mechanical way of dressing, sprucing and
heading out again. I wear lots of Helen's hand-me-downs. Jane buys
her own clothes. She wears those big wide jeans that look like she's
forming her own country inside and tight striped shirts. She walks
in brown platform shoes and has an assortment of colorful bras.
Jane, I gotta ask you something.
Ask.
Well, do you think you could write a letter saying that I have a
history of asthma and other lung problems?
What the fuck for? You're fucking fine.
I think quickly how to get her to do this without any hassle. I
decide to try one of her lines.
Don't fucking ask questions, Jane. Just fucking do it.
She whirls around, looking at me in shock.
I want to be a Fresh Air Kid, a kid who gets to live in the country
for the summer and if I had breathing problems, it would help
my chances.
You're not gonna be a fucking Fresh Air kid, Lily. You're not
pathetic enough. That's for kids with problems.
I panic thinking maybe she'll get to be a Fresh Air kid, a kid
who gets to live in the country for the summer and if I had breathing
problems, it would help my chances.
Plus, then you'll go live in some snotty, poshy area of Long
Island with white, rich assholes and become a fucking snob.
Gloomy, I plop my head back on the pillow and watch her reload
her knapsack.
Jane, are you going to school today? She hasn't gone in months,
but every now and then I ask to remind her that most fifteen-yearolds
do not get into loud, thumping cars every day and come in at
this hour. Jane's not going to school gives me that feeling in my
stomach, like the one I get during thunderstorms or a nightmare,
the feeling that there is a bowling alley in my insides and strikes
keep coming up.
Yes. Lily. I'm going.
You are?
To make sure they take my name off the register. Gotta split.
Ciao.
Jane leaves and walks quietly out the front door. My parents are
getting ready to go to the store. I have to get ready for school. Jane
and I used to be real close. She always wanted a dog and I think I
was as close as she got. She used to comb my hair and show me off
to her friends. It was never like that with Helen. She was fifteen
when my parents moved to Flushing and when you meet Helen,
you think she's somewhere between Korea and America. She wears
sneakers but makes a lot of mistakes when she speaks English.
She's real shy and has always worked for my parents in the store.
Until she met Larry, I thought she'd never spoken to a boy before.
But, one day, after fixing our air conditioner, Larry asked to take her
out and then a few months later came over in a gray suit and asked
my father if he could marry Helen. I remember thinking, No way,
buddy, no one we know marries non-Koreans. You gotta be kidding.
So, I nearly fell over when my parents started crying and hugging
Larry, shaking his hand and acting like they were on a game
show. That's what it looked like, especially since Larry was in that
suit. I'd never seen him in anything but a blue shirt with a patch that
said, "Muller's Air Conditioning."
So, now Helen lives with Larry's sister and her husband. I'm not
sure why, maybe so they can all get used to each other or something.
I miss Helen. She used to sleep in the living room and when she
moved out, I noticed something was missing. It was her snore. It
rumbled through the walls into our room and had a nice even pace.
It made my heart calm when it felt tight from counting in my head
until Jane came home.
So, Helen's gone, Henry comes from Seoul once a year and

130
Jane, well, she may as well be gone. I know I'm not ready to leave
for good, and I wouldn't want to. There are the things I'd miss. Slicing
green onions with Mom, and singing "You Ain't Nothing But a
Hound Dog" with Dad. But, this summer I really want to get out
of Flushing. I saw a flyer in the post office for Fresh Air, this program
that sends city kids to the country parts of Long Island. The
poster had four squares, each with a different kid doing something
fun. One was playing on the beach and it looked so clean and fresh,
it could've been a detergent commercial. One little girl was playing
Ring Around the Rosy with some kids on a playground with no
graffiti or chain fences. I wanted to be in that scene so bad I could
taste the sweet watermelon I know Fresh Air kids must eat. Our
shop sells watermelon and I can eat it when I want in the summertime,
but it just must taste sweeter in the country, sitting with your
back against an oak tree, the juice making exclamation points in the
air as you bite into it with your front teeth. I bet you can take your
time when you eat sweet melon in the country. On the back step of
the shop, you eat fast because the garbage dumpster flies give you
more company than you want.
The other day I went to the library and looked at a map of
Long Island. The names of the towns outside of Queens sounded
so clean. Oceanside, Bayville, Greenport. But there were two that
caught my attention. Locust Valley and Valley Stream. I've never
been to a valley, and I don't think I could draw one, but it sounds
like a good place to go, someplace with clean water and green hills
with lots of grass. Someplace with real silence, or nature noises, like
the kind at the underwater exhibit at the museum.
The Fresh Air poster says, "Summer with all that a summer
should be. Help city kids have four weeks in the country. If you're
interested, call 1-800-GOOD-AIR." I was interested, but when I
called I got nervous and said, "I'm Lilly Park and I live in Flushing.
Can you send me to a valley?" The lady paused and said, "Funny,
kid. Don't try this again." So, I wrote a letter instead. It took me
twelve tries. I worked on it at night at the same time I worked on
Jane's birthday present. Her gift has been a lot of work, I hope she
likes it. I rummaged around the apartment, finding old pictures of
the two of us in front of the shop and I managed to find one from
every year since I was born. I am using a big piece of orange cardboard
and drawing little frames around each one. I left one blank
for this year, because we haven't taken our picture yet. For my letter,
I decided to photocopy a few of the pictures of Jane and I and
send them along as proof that I've never been to the country. The
letter is long, explaining the pictures, which ends up explaining the
store and my parents and Henry and Helen. I told them I want to
like Flushing, but it's really hard. I told them I have no criminal
record and when I accidentally bent Mrs. Won's fence during my
rollerskating accident, I confessed right away. In the end, I am
pleased with my letter. I wanted Jane to write saying that four weeks
would mean the world to my health, but I guess she doesn't think I
should go. I won't be a snob, I just want to go to the beach and
swim. I've never had a non-Y swimming experience, and now the
smell of chlorine just about knocks the enjoyment out of it.
I leave the apartment and head to school, my mother and father
silent after the batde with Jane. The day passes with no fun. In the
store after school, I select a ripe pear and sit on the stoop watching
the cars whiz past. I wonder if Jane is in one of them, one of the
ones with the black windows and deep pumping sound coming
from inside. My parents are busy and encourage me to go home,
where Helen will be waiting for me, probably having cooked my
dinner of kimchee and mandu. But when I get to the apartment,
Helen isn't there. I pick up the mail off the floor and stop at a
notice from Jane's school. We've been getdng notices about her
absences for months, but this one is different. It's thick and in a
sealed envelope. I stick it in my knapsack and go to my room.
Helen comes later and we watch "Wheel of Fortune" before I
head to bed.
When Jane comes in, I can tell she hasn't woken my parents
because there is no sound of punishment in my ears. I snap the light
on and see Jane shivering, although our room is warm and rubbing
her arms as if she's sore.
Lily, go back to sleep.
I have something for you.
What is it?
A letter from the school.

132
lily, what the fuck are you doing with that? Hand it over.
Jane, I want you to go to school. I hate it when you come in like
this.
Tommorow's my birthday and then I can legally quit. So, it's
over lily, no point asking now. Give me the letter.
I take it out from under my pillow and hand it to her, as if I'm
the guilty one.
She tears it open and reads, "Your daughter, Jane Park has
requested legal...blah blah blah upon her sixteenth birthday.
Please sign "
Jane, Mom and Dad will never sign that for you.
She doesn't respond, but takes a pen off the dresser and quickly
signs our father's name in Korean and English. I suck in my
breath, stunned.
Jane—
Lily, you don't understand. Don't worry. Go to sleep.
I roll over and face the wall, listening to her change.
Jane changes, all right. She officially left school and almost
never sleeps here. She smells like the street after a rainstorm and has
dark circles under her eyes. My mother and father never talk about
her, they act as if she's not here. Her birthday gift is still under my
bed because she wasn't here on her birthday and it's never the right
time to give it to her. I miss her because it feels like she's a dead person.
Today, I heard my mother on the phone with Henry, crying.
I'm sure it's about the way our apartment seems smaller, even with
just the three of us. I go straight home, without stopping in at the
store. My parents don't seem to care as much. You'd think they'd
care more but they just mope about, concentrating real hard on
keeping the mounds of fruit balanced. I pick the mail off the floor
and nearly faint when I see the Fresh Air envelope. I drop everything
and tear it open.
Dear Uly,
Though we cannot offeryou placement with a Fresh Airfamily, we are givingyou
a scholarship to Scuttlefield Camp for Girls in Vermont.
I look at the pamphlet and there are a bunch of girls flying a
kite. In another picture, they are riding horses. And in the last,
there are five girls at a picnic table eating watermelon. This time I
can't imagine it being that sweet.
13:

mm.

148
—WILLIAM LOGAN
Nature
You, multiple feral lover of my address,
female, of course, by nature and domain,
how does love divide its proper spoils? I hardly dare
look you in the eye, since you if anyone know
how readily the lie trespasses the tongue,
how simple to suffer in silence
what is more convenient to praise. Time
is condemned to go in circles on the watch,
but does not punish so much as refuse to answer.
Pity the future, black canvas stretched taut,
awaiting the unknown subject. Much easier
to look back, as if the past were familiar,
though often as not we have lost its address,
the storefronts stand vacant where we knew
a few minutes of happiness or self-love.
Friends who have caught the late train
to whatever destination lies below the horizon
still inhabit our predicate, unlovely city,
perhaps a little aside their old apartments.
We hear their familiar greetings with the consolation
of what Nature offers, if only struck dumb in error.
—WILLIAM LOGAN
The Weather
Under the weather, meaning the flesh
no longer tolerates the possibility of loss
even in loss, like Hector when he knew
his bronze armor would be dragged through the dust.
Even at spear-point he did not want to be Achilles,
twice-drowned, under sentence and waiting to die.
Our forties are the rehearsal of the deathwatch,
parents withering like overripe plums,
old lovers succumbing to blank application,
a compound death no different from a stranger's,
except they were flesh in our flesh.
We wandered through the vandalized graveyard,
stones snapped to the base, names rubbed raw by weather
(a few decades and we are unwritten), old tombs
clawed open and black loam betraying the marble,
tilted like sinking rafts. Gaping holes tore the river gravel.
In the Keys they buried the dead above ground,
giving the corpse an even chance against high water,
the hurricane tide of...palimpsest, erasure,
the future that couldn't pronounce our names
if it knew them, and it will not know them.

150
—WILLIAM LOGAN
Jews
Jews founded their banks with a taste for conspiracy,
the world ever since run by Rothschilds.
Even the papers keep kosher in discontent,
or so the brutal chose to believe, those summers
of bombs, judicial murder, Kristallnacht every night.
How efficient the Germans, the death-factories,
as if death too were catchy merchandise, its corporations
listed on the Bourse or Wall Street. (How many
by-products—how many trays of soap,
gold teeth addressed to safe-deposit boxes?)
How long can memory steel itself to new murder,
Stalin galloping down the peasants, Mao's
common graves, Pol Pot's killing fields,
East Timor, Rwanda, the memory-dark Balkans?
The names blur, minor holocausts drifting away.
A monument raised by night is scoured
to fair weather. Death dines with a reservation,
never too hungry, knowing his next meal will come:
the ashes of Jew-communist, homosexual-gypsy,
stir the willing dust. Ten years after, my town
had no synagogue. No one remembered what one was.
—JOHN O'CONNOR
My Drink With A Cow
On the soft asphalt road
I stop my car on a steamy night
where grass is high and dew-heavy
and the moon hides in the mist
over a drowsy cow loitering at a fence.
In my glove compartment
is the bourbon
from my father's failures.
I offer the cow a drink,
but she bellows
as I gesture the bottle her way,
as if to say,
no thanks, my two-legged lover,
there's enough here in this sky
carbonated with stars.
She winks and drags her tongue
over her big foamy lips.
The manure is sweet and heady,
and her work comes early
when milkers are cold and waiting.
I walk down the road with my bottle
and the night darkens,

152
the stars fall like dominoes
and my car behind me is swallowed
by a beautiful blackness.
I'm as warm as blood.
I throw the bottle in the river,
lay down in the soft muddy ditch
and drink from the night's jar.
-STEPHEN FITZPATRICK
Lullaby
The lakefront stills, assembling itself.
Ghosts I abandoned, and by abandoning believed
Had left me, return to convene again by the shore.
Their music begins, and more than anything,
The single wish to merge it with my own.
More than anything, the one desire to remain here,
Watching the wind-bent tiger lilies on the bluff
Mirror the strange, orange flesh of carp
Descending and resurfacing below
Watching the hammock, its rope worn to threads,
Rise up in the wind, flagging from a single tree.
More than anything, to know at last a beauty that sublimes
Beyond what we can only call beauty,
An order that through order defers to the one sound:
These waves breaking tidelessly against the shore.
These voices, melancholy and remote.
My own voice, carried back to me by a wind
That takes only what it needs, and that needs only
The slightest beckoning to bring us here again,
A chord within a song, rising up from
And returning again to nothing.

154
—STEPHEN FITZPATRICK
Resurrecting the Fly
The man held a fly in the palm of his hand
As though it were an earring his daughter had lost
And cried over losing, an heirloom whose meaning
He couldn't understand, but had tried to. A crowd
Gathered around him. They'd seen him swat it dead
Moments before, had watched the street magician
Stoop to pick it up and place it there, almost daintily.
I saw this on TV, and had seen the magician before—
Card tricks, levitations—always on television.
Already that night he'd swallowed a foot of string
And pulled it inch by inch out of his side.
Ashes he'd rubbed together in his palms disappeared,
Then reappeared on the hands of a thuggish volunteer.
When a woman picked the Four of Hearts from the deck,
Four red hearts appeared in ink across his chest.
But when he held his hand over the fly, and the fly shook
And flew away, I nodded to myself, without thought,
And laughed, without choosing to laugh.
—Jo ANN TRACY
Birthday
The mattress stood on the porch of a tan house. A double
sized mattress. No stains or tears in the shiny blue flowered fabric.
"Look at that mattress," I said to Frank. "It's so blue and clean
looking."
Frank tucked a Henry's under a flap of the ripped plastic bag
in our cart. His pink brown lips moved but no sound came out.
Silent Spanish. The only time he really speaks Spanish is with an
amigo.
Giant silver blue roses and vines on the mattress. The paler
blue binding around the top edge of the mattress, frayed. But beautiful.
I stretched my arms out, floating on the mattress.
"I need a new sack," Frank said. He stretched the plastic bag in
the cart to cover another loose bottle. "Find one, okay, Cat?"
I lifted the neck of a Miller Light from an ivy bush. "The bottles
are wet already, Frank." Tiny raindrops scattered over the slick
glass.
Frank turned the bottle upside down, shook it and wiped it on
the side of his black jeans. "Store people like the bottles dry."
"They don't give a shit. There's a sack right there." I pointed at
a mushy black sack in the street.
"Never mind." Frank pushed the cart down the sidewalk, black
coat cuffs over his hands.
The metal cart shook itself, shook the glass and tin inside. Cymbals
but no music.

i56
The mattress, a patch of blue flowers through the budding
trees.
I stood with my hands in my too small coat pockets. "It's funny
how that mattress is just standing there," I said.
Frank put one foot under a hard black rubber wheel of the cart.
"We don't need a bed."
"No, I know, but they don't want it either. People always put
trash on the porch."
An upside down sofa, pieces of wood, and a chewed up dog
house sat on the porch of a green house across the street.
Frank waved his hand across the street. "But the bed is not
trash."
The mattress didn't have a dent in the middle or fold into itself.
"No, it looks new," I said.
Frank lifted the wet plastic in the cart, his fingers trembling
over the bottles and cans, counting. "Two fifty. You still have three
fifty?"
"Three twenty. Let's cash in." I was jonesing for a drink myself.
Frank pushed the cart off the curb. Metal crashing, wheels
splashing into a backed up sewer drain, brown water hitting me in
the face. Botdes and cans rolled out of die plastic sack.
I wiped my face with my sleeve. "Jee2us, Frank,"
Frank's round brown face turned wooden, carved ruts in his
cheeks, stiff chin, not minding the rain on the empties now, already
at the Sunshine Market, looking through the wide white cooler door
at the beer, 100 kinds.
"Sorry," he said in the middle of the next block.
"They better have Big Bear today," I said, the cold forty ouncer
already in my hands, grizzly bear eyes on the label meeting mine.
"Magnum's just as good," Frank said, his arms straight out,
pushing the cart up the steep hill to the Sunshine.
The rain roared over us. March rain. Like the sdff spray that
comes from a garden hose. The rain turned my thin blonde hair
brown, curling it over my cold cheeks. A stocking cap from the shelter
was in my pocket. I pulled out the stretchy bright orange knit,
and then stuffed it back in my pocket.
The cool eyes of a woman in a shiny white station wagon met
mine.
I smoothed my hair behind my ears, the scar on my cheek
showing.
"I'm real," I said.
"What?" Frank looked in the woman's direction, and then up
ahead at the Sunshine Market's yellow neon sign.
"It's nothing," I said. The shoulder pads in my navy blue businesswoman's
raincoat sat like sand bags on my shoulders. I shivered
shoulder to toe.
"It's sunny in Mexico," Frank said, his face smoother, younger
when he talks about Mexico. "Margaritas at siesta, no rain, no botde
and can."
"I'm not going back there, Frank."
The heat was horrible in Mexico, the air stank of pee and hot
oil, and Frank's brothers wouldn't leave me alone. I left for California
after a month. Said goodbye to Frank in a note. He showed up
in a soup line here in Portiand a year later, right behind me. His
small hands hooked around my waist and he laughed into my ear,
that crazy bird laugh of his.
Frank parked our cart under the leaky awning of the Sunshine
Market. He picked up the wet plastic bag with the empties and held
the bag against his chest into the store.
I stood under the awning against the painted gray cinderblock,
the only dry spot. Daffodils grew above the stone wall of the cemetery
across the street. Bright yellow cups.
Frank came out of the market with a clinking brown sack.
"Big Bear?" I tipped back the edge of the paper sack.
"One of em is," Frank said. He straightened the edge of the
sack, his mustache crooked in a smile.
I wrapped my hands over the red handle of our cart, Shop the
Safe-way it said, and steered the cart quick to the cemetery, closing
my ears to the cart's crash. "I hope no one's in the alcove today," I
said.
Frank's coat sleeve touched mine, keeping time with me. "No
one's been there lately. Carlos said there was a bust."
Two brick buildings that looked like miniature churches stood
in the center of the cemetery. One of the buildings had an alcove

158
that fit three people. Junkies loved that spot. They had pressed their
needle caps, orange, blue, and clear, into the soft dirt in front of the
alcove.
Sweat dripped to my waist under my men's Blazer basketball tshirt,
halfway to the alcove, empty metal cart shaking the gravel on
the road, my tits shaking under the Blazer basketball, teeth tight
together, the salty taste of beer already in my mouth.
I pushed the cart under the fir tree, where we always park it, dry
under the fir tree's skirt of deep green. Frank walked ahead to the
alcove, no one there.
A heart-shaped spray of pink roses and ribbon had fallen over
a new grave, the thin green metal stand bent back. Grave dirt had
sunk along the edges of the rough rectangle, clods of mud everywhere.
I tried to bend the metal stand back into shape, mud rising up
the sides of my cracked white Adidas. "Come here, Frank, help me
with this."
Frank straightened the metal, his hands smaller than mine but
thick, strong. He stuck the stand back in the ground and wiped the
muddy ends of the ribbon on his pants.
Strange gold writing on the ribbon.
"Russian girl," Frank said. He ran his thumb over the writing.
"We need to put flowers on Rosie's . ..." I said, my throat
blocked. Mud, tears, pink ribbons.
"Si, si," Frank said, talking through his mustache, head down.
In the brick alcove, twist and snap, our beautiful beer.
"To you, baby," Frank said, holding up his Magnum 40.
"Grrr," I growled, what I always do, holding up my Big Bear.
Everything became as soft, warm, and sweet as a baby's blanket.
I like to pretend Rosie lived.
She's in my lap sleeping, wrapped in pink, her wispy black hair
lifting in the breeze, pink brown skin smoother than any liquor,
round brown eyes under her shell blue eyelids.
I close my eyes and hum.
In a month it will be a year.
April 26. Rosie's birthday. She came out too early, twenty-eight
weeks. They put her in an incubator and she lived for a day and a
half. Frank saw her before she died. He came into the preemie
room as straight and clean as any father, thick black hair combed
back and his mustache shaved off. I sat in a white rocking chair, one
hand on the plastic wall of the incubator. He placed his hand over
mine, his chest heaving against my shoulder. "I'm sorry," I said
from a hole inside myself. "No," Frank said, and that's all we spoke.
He said a prayer over Rosie before he left, moving the tiny white
beads on his rosary, his face red, caved in.
I prayed and pleaded with God, my hand on the wall of the
incubator until the end.
I promised Rosie I'd get clean.
I promised her.
The gritty gray sky matched the gravestones in front of us.
I got to my knees, slow, gray whirling through my head. Steady
now. I grabbed Frank's arm, still damp from the downpour. "Frank.
We've got to go."
"Si." Frank opened his eyes, brown, filmy, and closed them
again.
"Come on, Frank, wake up." I tapped the brown bottom of his
Magnum bottle on a cobblestone. A high heart beat sound, painful.
"Okay, okay," he said, reaching for the bottle and missing.
I set the bottle in his lap and stood up, my hands on the bricks,
rough red, real.
"I want a decent bed tonight. Last night I got a bed with a broken
leg. All night I was falling into a hole."
"Hole?" Frank said. He patted the cobblestones. "You fell?"
"No, no. Never mind."
Someone was mopping the hallway in the Westside Women's
shelter. The bitter smell of disinfectant gave me a sneezing fit. Two
women sleeping closest to me rolled over in their cots but didn't

i6o
stop their blubbery snoring. I counted the beige specks on the
linoleum floor.
Then the blue double-sized mattress was on the floor, Frank
and I naked on top, roses and vines, making love like we used to.
Frank wanted all my clothes off the first time. I'd never let a
trick do that. He loved every fold and crack of me, and he did it
slow, black brown eyes a tunnel into my cornflower blue.
I lay back in my narrow cot, water stains above me, pale brown
and spreading.
Frank and I haven't made love since Rosie died.
Muffins and coffee were set out as we women shuffled out of
the shelter. I snatched the last chocolate muffin, shoving a woman
wearing a bunch of dresses to get it.
One more week here. I can't go to another shelter unless I get
religion or get clean. I told them I wanted to get clean.
Frank doesn't want to get clean. He says he's too old for that
shit.
Frank came out of his shelter and stood in a huddle with his
amigos. One of them whisded and pointed to a gray cloud in the
sky, shaped like a cock. They all laughed and hollered in Spanish.
I sat on the curb across from them, my head on my bony knees.
I needed a drink.
I needed sleep.
I needed a bathroom.
Eight men stood in line in front of the portable toilet. I got up
and joined the line, crossing my legs and tightening my ass.
I'm so sick of this.
I'm so sick of this.
I'm so sick of this.
"Cat. Cat!" Frank shouted when I was through. He had two
botdes already. "They were in the street," he said, his eyes wide,
sparkly. "Damn kids buy my brand."
"Yeah, they didn't like it." I kicked an empty carton of chocolate
milk under a truck.
We sat on a loading dock and drank, back and forth, seesaw, the
smell of rotting fruit a cloud around us.
"Let's go to the library," I said.
Frank nodded and zipped the other 40 inside his coat.
He spotted some empties up the block and whistled. "Lucky
day," he said.
I picked up the plastic sack full of empty Budweisers and carried
the bag over my shoulder like Santa. Kids leave empties around
all the time.
"We need our cart," Frank said, pointing in the opposite direction.
Metal, rubber wheels, glass, crashed in my head.
"Not yet," I said, leading the way.
My heart fluttered under my skin, Rosie swimming inside me,
fast, faster, to the house with the mattress. The sidewalk, street,
empties, and Frank's swigs from the botde in his coat half a block
away, some other world.
"Hey, Frank, the mattress is still there." I rested my sack on the
sidewalk and took a deep breath, silver blue roses and vines growing
on the mattress in front of me. "See, on the porch of that tan
house."
Frank caught up to me and pulled the brim of his baseball cap
down. He cradled the 40, ready to cross the street.
"No, let's look at it," I said, my throat blocked again, tears, beer
salt.
"Oh, no," Frank said, his feet perched on the curb.
A piece of paper was taped to the mattress. ARC, it said. Paper
bags and a folded stroller were in front of the mattress.
I bit the dry skin off my lip. "I hope they're not picking it up
today."
"Who picks up?" Frank asked, spitting into the street.
"The retarded people. They get all the good shit."
Frank's eyes and flat nose were shaded from under his cap, his
lips pink brown and wet.
I bumped my hip against Frank's hip. "We could have some fun
on that."
"Ouch," Frank said. He brushed the side of his pants. "You've
161

162
gone crazy, Cat."
"We can get some money together and go to The Flame
tonight. Then we'll come here and lay the mattress on the porch real
quiet so we can. . . ."
"No." Frank tromped up the sidewalk, the sole of his boot
flapping.
I stamped my foot. "They don't even want the fucking thing."
Frank stamped his foot and checked the sole of his boot.
"What's it going to hurt?" I said, my arm out to the mattress.
"Just one night."
"Cat." Frank adjusted the bottle in his coat and shivered. "It's
too risky," he said.
"I'm not afraid," I said. Tears fell down the flat slopes of my
cheeks.
Frank lay his hand on the small of my back, his favorite part of
a person, leading me forward. "Okay, Catty," he said, probably
thinking nothing would come of my idea anyway. I've had big ideas
before. So has he. We always end up the same.
Frank slowed down after two blocks, taking little drinks from
his botde. I searched for more empties to put in my sack, money for
The Flame, hardly any time, waiting for Frank to catch up.
"Slow down," Frank said. He patted the botde, its head under
his chin. "Want some?"
"Okay, but we need more money for The Flame." The beer was
flat.
Frank put his hand over his brow like the sun shone in his eyes.
"I see Mexico," he whispered.
"I see a nut," I said, handing him the botde.
The wet air smelled like roses.
"If Gizmo's at the library we'll go to the cemetery. You're
already twitchy," Frank said.
I buy speed from Gizmo sometimes. Frank says speed makes
me mean. I do get mean when I come down but speed makes me
into a giant, walking over all pain and shit around me.
Gizmo owed me money. I hoped he'd show up.
We drank under a large willow tree near an old stone building
that used to be a library.
Somebody had left a flannel sleeping bag beside the trunk of
the willow. We spread the sleeping bag over our legs and feet, Ninja
turtles on the flannel, our hips touching.
Frank shut his eyes, the botde two thirds gone in his lap.
I got up and swished the branches of the willow to one side.
Stucco apartments across the street, somebody's full cart with
blue plastic and a weedy long lawn in front of me. No people I
knew. I sat back down for one last swallow of beer. I'd been leaving
an inch of beer in the botde lately. Just to see if I could.
The raindrops made a fluttering noise on the new leaves of the
willow. I lay my head on Frank's thigh. He moaned in Spanish and
rolled over.
"Cat." Gizmo walked towards me, willow branches shaking
behind him. Bandy legs, stringy arms, scooped chest and a sharp
handsome face. "Here, gimme a drink," he said, his arm a snake.
"What for?" I cupped my hand over the head of the botde.
"Come on, to be neighborly."
"Leave some for Frank," I said, a hand over my eyes. Gizmo's
red Nikes burned.
Gizmo took a swallow of beer and wrinkled his bumpy nose.
He only drank to come down from speed.
I stood the botde near Frank's spine. "You got my money?"
"What money?" Gizmo crouched down, knees cracking, to roll
a cigarette.
"I gave you money to score."
"I know, and you got a hit." He flicked his lighter over and over
to light his dumpy cigarette.
Then I remembered the hit that kept me up for two days. "Well,
I need money."
"And I need a hand job." Gizmo shot a glance at Frank, his
white blue eyes like a coyote's.
"Ten," I said.
"Six." He held out six fingers and unzipped his fly, another
snake, its slim pink head ready to bite.

164
Sour beer came up my throat, into the back of my mouth.
Pink eraser, pink eraser. A thing I made up a long time ago.
I closed my hand over the sticky head of his cock. "Eight
bucks," I said, looking past Gizmo's face and into the tiny veins of
the willow leaves.
"Yeah, yeah, go on." He leaned back on his elbows, brown goatee
pointed to heaven.
I took my hand away. "Gimme the eight first."
"Fuck!" He stuffed his hand in his tight pants pocket and
dropped a five, three dollar bills and some change on the dirt
between us.
I put the money in my jeans pocket.
Frank's back breathed up and down.
My hand slid up and down Gizmo's cock. Erasing.
Frank knew I did small jobs, another reason he doesn't like
Gizmo.
"Ah, that was fucking nice," Gizmo drawled.
I wiped my hand on the wet grass. White cum on the new
blades of green, white cum on my jagged fingernails.
I retched like a dog, my throat dry and empty.
Gizmo laughed, his stubby brown teeth showing, "You ought
to be used to a little cream by now." He retied the ponytail in his
straight brown hair.
I wiped my hand on a new patch of grass. Frank's back still.
"Is this Wednesday?" I asked Gizmo, the tree, all of us.
"I think so," Gizmo said, his shoes farting as he walked off.
Frank sat up and vomited. "Motherfuck, motherfuck."
I reached under his coat to rub his warm satin back.
Frank turned to me, his breath sick in my face. "Any booze?"
"Not much. You knocked it over."
Frank drained the beer from the bottle and stretched his legs,
hard muscles under the black denim.
• "It's Wednesday. Let's cash in the empties and go to the Army
for a shower."
"Ohhh," he said, his lips pinched together.
I moved closer, my knees touching the torn knees of his jeans.
"Baby, I want us to get cleaned up and go out like we used to."
"Why do you do this, Cat?"
He shook his head, his eyes reflecting sunlight and me, the
young pink me, no knife scar on my cheek, all my teeth. "Aw right,
Cat, help me up."
The orange sun sank into low deep pink clouds. I waited in
front of the Army for Frank, Ivory soap smell, wearing the prettiest
top from the free box, a silky blue pullover with a bow in the
front. The top kept rising above my waist. Powerful tits. Some trick
said that to me once. I wished I had some blush.
Frank walked out of the Army, his face shiny and his jet hair
combed back. He wore black dress pants, a rip in one of the seams.
"Hola, Senorita," Frank bowed, blinking his red, saggy eyes. He
was drinking off somebody's bottle before I went into the Army.
"Nice pants," I said. The black fabric stretched tight over, his
round ass.
The Flame stunk of beer and sweat but it was comfortable and
cheap, like a bar version of a second hand store.
Frank and I sat at the bar, ordered whiskey, and waited for a
booth. Brown bowls of saltine crackers were on the bar and I ate a
stack of them. The owner of The Flame, Louie, put out whatever
snack food was the cheapest. Once the bowls were full of tiny
marshmallows.
Louie used to be a drunk. He'd help anybody who wanted to go
straight, said God wanted him working on the inside. The last bottle
of booze he drank he kept next to the cash register. Potters
Vodka. Taped to the label was a piece of paper with a date written
on it—September 4, 1992. He closed the bar on September 4th
every year. Some people bought Pall Mall cigarettes, Louie's brand,
and dropped them through the mail slot on that day.
We drank slow, paying for each drink before we drank it, Louie's
rule. Frank downed my free beer chasers. Ladies' Night.

166
Past my blurry face in the long wide bar mirror sat the drunks
in the room, their heads drooping above glasses of booze, no one
leaving their seats. Slow country music crackled through the brown
speakers.
"C'mon, Frank, let's show these drunks some dancin'," I said.
Frank pointed to his empty shot glass. "Okay, baby," he said,
"after I fill up." The ends of his mustache almost touched the rim
of the shot glass.
I slipped off my bar stool and rocked my hips. Dirty jeans, but
tight in the right places.
Frank laughed. That crazy bird laugh. Some of the drunks
looked up and snorted.
I grabbed Frank's hands and led him to the center of the floor,
the floor wooden and wet.
We stood close together, the air between us thick, another layer
of skin, the smell of soap and sweat. I circled my arms around
Frank's neck. He did the same, twittering over my shoulder.
I lay my head on his chest and he got quiet.
"Look at the lovers," somebody said.
Frank's heart beat through his shirt and onto my chest and I
imagined his bare chest on top of me, the blue mattress under us
like a float.
At the end of the song Frank steered me to the bar. Some people
clapped and Frank bowed, almost falling over. One of Frank's
amigos bought us drinks.
The clock with the polar bear and the mountain stream read
12:35.
Outside it rained drippy fat drops. Heavy splats fell on my scalp
and tapped onto Frank's baseball cap. A jumbo sized Plax bottle lay
on the sidewalk and I kicked it into a bristly hedge.
"Red Gut," Frank laughed, kicking out his leg.
"Fucking drunks will drink anything," I said. "Remember the
vanilla?" I laughed loud, scaring some teenagers waiting for the bus.
Frank sang a Mexican song most of the way to the mattress.
Not that he knew where we were going.
The mattress stood in the same place on the porch of the tan
house. Icy blue in the darkness.
I squeezed Frank's hand, cold fingertips. "We're here."
Frank's eyelids wrinkled. "Catty."
My finger shook on my lips. "Don't talk. Wait."
Frank spoke silent Spanish.
A downpour started and I tiptoed up the wooden steps to the
porch, my heart pounding in time with the rain. The window in the
front door had no curtain. I saw a coat rack standing inside the
house like a man and I jumped. Steady now.
I moved the stroller and paper bags in front of the mattress to
the far end of the porch.
Frank had one foot on the porch steps, his face small.
"Come on," I whispered, flicking my hand.
Frank came up the steps, shoes made of cloth.
We lowered the mattress to the floor and hunched over it,
frozen, listening for sounds of people and looking up and down the
street.
"Let's go," Frank said.
I moved my hand over the slick blue roses, looking at Frank
through my hair. "Okay, but let's lay down, just for a minute."
We rolled onto the bed, arms at our sides. The mattress smelled
musty.
A rumbly car went by and Frank whispered, warm breath on
my face, "Let's go."
"Wait." I put my hands on his neck and brought his face close
to mine, our breath breathing into each other.
"Cat." He kissed me, his tongue poking mine, whiskey gentle.
I unbuttoned my coat and flipped my silky shirt up, no bra.
Frank held my tits in his cold hands and then mashed his face
between them. Teeth, tongue, my nipples wet and popped up.
"Fuck me," I said into his ear.
I shoved my pants past my knees, the mattress cool and spongy
under my bare skin.
"Cat, c'mon," Frank said, his eyes full of my pale belly. He
looked around him. "People will see." He held his hand over my

i68
belly.
"The railing hides us," I said. The street black and empty
through the wooden rails.
Frank lowered his hand, his fingers in the mound of my hair.
He glided his fingers between my legs, breathing fast, eyes shiny.
A warm sticky pool formed between my legs.
Frank unzipped the zipper in his pants. Quick and clean.
"No," I said, my head up. "More, baby."
Frank jiggled his fingers faster between my legs. "Quick, Cat."
I came like an ocean, and floated on die skin of our blue bed.
Frank's boner stuck out like a short limb on a tree. He took off
his coat and draped it over his ass.
He fit his cock into me.
Perfect.
His eyes blazed like the Mexican sun and his body became an
arrow, diving into my center. The center that made Rosie.
Frank's coat slipped off and I held it in place.
"Aahh, Chiquita." He stayed in one spot, muscles tight, breathing
deep.
I slid my hands under his coat and over his ass.
"like solid chocolate," I told him when we first met.
Tears came out my eyes, in a trail down my neck. "Chocolate,"
I said.
Frank smiled, his big square teeth white.
I sat up and pulled clothing from one of the paper bags.
What I thought was a towel, wasn't.
An infant's terry cloth sleeper shook in my hands. Light yellow
with an embroidered rose on the chest.
"Cat." Frank took the sleeper from my hands and buried it in
the bottom of a bag, his face trembling.
My body ratded like glass and I couldn't breathe, everything
cracking, falling apart.
Frank's arms twisted around me tight, wrapping me in his skin.
"It's okay," he said.
I pushed on his arms, faced him. "I can't do this anymore,
Frank."
His eyes, tears under the lashes.
Tears all over my face, brick words. "I mean it this time."
"I know, Cat," Frank said. He pet my back until my breathing
slowed.
"Let's go," he said. He found a torn undershirt in one of the
paper bags and I cleaned up.
Frank stood the mattress back up with the stroller and the
paper bags in front.
I leaned on a porch column, my backbone on the wood.
"A drink," I said from the hole inside me.
Frank opened his coat. In the soft pile lining was a bottie.
"The library," Frank said, zipping up.
I took a last look at our bed, a small darker blue spot in the middle
of the roses.
"Damn rain." Frank said, "It's warm like a sugar bun in Mexico.
Juan has nice big beds to sleep in."
I kept my head down, smashed white cherry blossoms on the
sidewalk.
Frank stopped for drinks from die botde, each time swinging
die botde at me. Fruit Brandy. Frank goes for the flavored shit, not
that he even bought it.
The willow tree's branches swayed in the night wind like a
woman's long hair. Frank pushed the branches aside and I walked
into them. The flannel sleeping bag lay wadded to one side of the
tree trunk. Frank bent down to unzip the sleeping bag. I held die
botde, half full, my back against the pebbly trunk of the tree.
"Damn zipper. Fucking zipper," Frank said, his hands yanking
on the zipper pull, spitting into die grass between yanks.
I unscrewed the top of die flat botde in my hand. Sharp sweet
peach smell under my nose, into my mouth, down my diroat. Burning,
softening.
Frank's hand closed over mine for the botde, his face fuzzy in
die darkness, moss mustache, eyes disappearing into the night. He
tipped the botde back. Three gulps.
He spread the sleeping bag over us, the bottom of the bag still

170
zipped.
Back and forth, seesaw, until the last drops fell on Frank's
tongue. He dropped the bottle on the dirt and balled himself up,
front to my front. He touched my cheek, my smell on his fingers.
Smiling white teeth, saggy eyes closing.
I smiled, lips and chin crumbling, hidden in the darkness.
Frank slept sound. Like a child.
I cried, arms around myself.
I cried until the willow tree branches hung quiet.
I cried until the sky had turned a bright silvery gray.
The brandy bottle lay in the grass, a sweating pink peach on the
white label, last drops of peach inside Frank. I reached for the bottle,
one hand on Frank's chest, his heart beating into my fingers, the
flat glass bottle strong in my other hand.
Maybe Frank would find me in a soup line like he did before.
Maybe Frank had planted a trail inside me.
The wet copper colored beams of the Burnside bridge sparkled
in the morning light. I waved die brandy bottle at a man fishing in
the Willamette river. He tipped his wide straw hat at me. A cool
wind tossed the strands of my hair.
I'm real.
The blue double doors at Hooper detox were locked. I pressed
the door bell, short vibrating buzzes. A woman's voice came over an
intercom beside the door.
"Can I help you?" the woman asked in a low clear voice.
I looked behind me. Just to check.
"You got room for one more?"
"Yes. Wait there," she said.
A buzzing noise sounded, and the door opened.
The woman rubbed her lined freckled face. "Hello," she said.
I smoothed my hair behind my ears. "Hi."
The woman tapped the bottom of the brandy bottle in my
hand. "Can I take this?"
"No." I brought the botde to my chest.
The woman's faded green eyes waited.
My mouth shook. "I mean, can I keep it if I rinse it out?"
"No problem." The woman pressed her hand on the small of
my back, leading me inside.

^ST\\'^^ iJ jP^ f ^ ~^*'J&f-^J^y~~\

dUOW&0.
/Ot/Ct/ THS STd(/B . 7 ^^

182
—DAN LIBMAN
Lemons
The desk called and said a Vickie LaFaye was coming up to his
room. Miller was expecting someone, not a Vickie LaFaye, although
she was as good a choice as anyone, just odd for being female. And
since she was a Hot Lobster management trainee, this Vickie
LaFaye would be young and bubbly and have an outgoing personality.
Miller knew for a fact that the corporation didn't hire any other
kind—it was in the job description. He unwrapped a plastic cup so
he could take a drink of tap water from the bathroom sink.
Normally he audited in the restaurants themselves, usually in
tiny break rooms, sitting on a folding chair, highlighting numbers
next to waiters hastily smoking between orders. But they hadn't
been ready for him at the Columbus oudet on High Street so he
agreed to wait at the hotel. He had been worried about killing time
anyway—nothing good on TV tonight and he'd seen all the cable
movies this month—before getting on the road to make the next
day's audit, and then the one after that.
He wasn't crazy about auditing, but the numbers themselves he
liked. He learned secrets from the numbers. He knew which cities
ate more chicken than seafood, which cities had big drinkers; he
could even tell you which city consumed the most desserts and
which ones ate more salads. Miller loved secrets. As a kid he read
and reread a book that he found in the library. It was full of all sorts
of secrets like how credit card numbers were assigned, and what the
symbols on currency were all about, and what the initiation rituals
were for private organizations like the Shriners and Freemasons.
Miller inspected the water through the smoked plastic. Little
flecks of white and brown spun harmlessly in invisible eddies. All
she'd be doing is delivering the box of documents and waiting for
him to crunch the numbers and a woman could surely do it as well
as a man. But the thought of one of these young women up here
made him nervous. He had let the tap run but the water was still
only tepid. The bucket of ice was a few feet from him on the
counter, but Miller continued sipping. He wished he'd thought
ahead of time to order a beer. Now it was too late. To a man he
might have been able to say, I'll get us a few cold ones, or Let's go
to the lounge so we can do this over a pitcher. But to suggest this
to someone named Vickie LaFaye...
There was a knock at the door and Miller caught himself wishing
he wasn't wearing a tee-shirt; something button-down would
have looked more professional. At least his tan slacks still looked
pressed.
He saw the box first; it was open at the top, and the flaps were
folded down to make handles. A strip of brown packing tape ran
vertically across the front for no apparent reason. Vickie LaFaye
was small, the box obscured most of her body, and even though she
was hunched over it, she kept her head up and smiled at him.
"Hey," she said. Her teeth were crooked but her nose had that
small pointed look of recent cosmetic surgery. Her hair was black
and long, and she had large hoop earrings that swung against her
cheeks as she swayed to keep her balance. She grunted, and the box
seemed to teeter and sink; but a knee appeared out from under her
dress and she righted the box against her leg. Miller put his hands
out to steady the box and was looking into the top of her dress and
at her small breasts before he could stop himself.
"I got it," he said. It weighed a good 15 pounds and the folders
were loose inside and slid back and forth. Vickie stood and
fussed with her outfit, a wrinkled yellow sun dress, alternately tugging
at the waist and realigning the straps on her shoulders. He was
relieved to see that she was not dressed professionally either.
"So you're the famous Miller?" she said. Her voice was low. "I
saw your presentation at The Future Feeders Leaders Conference in
Orlando last month. Do you remember? The thing with the new

184
restaurant design?"
Hot Lobster often tapped Miller to give humorous presentations
to the store managers; or "the troops," as the bigwigs called
them. Last time Miller had presented a fictitious new design for Hot
Lobster restaurants. He had told the gathering that the corporation
was doing away with the decades-old "on the dock" motif with its
upside down boat kegs for tables and rusted blubber pikes on the
walls. Instead, he'd suggested a "contemporary coast guard look."
All the walkways were going to be narrowed and ceilings lowered so
that even the tiniest patrons would have to stoop deeply to get to
their tables. And best of all, Miller had described to howls of laughter,
each new store would be built on a motorized platform so the
restaurants would tip back and forth—sometimes rocking quite violently—to
replicate sea travel.
"We're still talking about it on the news group. Do you ever
check it out? Alt dot hotlob dot trainee?"
"Eh..." Miller did check it almost religiously, and even though it
happened less and less, he felt a little ping of pride whenever someone
made a reference to it."No," he told her. "But I should look
sometime. Come in."
He led her through his small business suite, past the bed and
the TV, and over to the table. He had already set up his laptop. He
put the box of folders at the foot of his chair, as Vickie dropped
inelegandy into hers. She let out a big breath of air. She seemed
completely relaxed somehow—just the sort of person Hot Lobster
loved hiring for management. Maybe he could feel her out about
getting some beer after all.
Miller too had possessed that bouncy Hot Lobster personality
when he was Vickie's age, although he had planned for a career in
dentistry. He'd just worked evenings and weekends at a Hot Lobster
restaurant at Inner Harbor. First he had been a prep chef, mixing
giant vats of crab stuffing and baking the cheddar biscuits from the
bloated mixer sacks that corporate sent. He eventually got on to the
floor and hosted, welcoming guests, setting up booster chairs,
pointing out the daily specials on the menu; got on to the wait staff
when he turned 19 which was the minimum age you could serve
alcohol. He did fine as a waiter but his sense of responsibility—
always arriving on time and never missing a shift—got him promoted
soon to bartender. He had met a girl at Hot Lobster, a
brown-haired smart-alecky girl from Hampden. She'd been a hostess
and he'd pursued her relentlessly, even coercing her to dump a
current boyfriend. The other guy hadn't been in the restaurant business
and so had a different schedule than the two of them and
eventually Miller got her alone and got her drinking. He'd gotten
her pregnant the same week he learned of his acceptance into dental
school.
The manager was a middle-aged man with soft skin and a huge
stomach from decades of eating buttery dinner rolls and big bowls
of chowder from the kitchen. He smelled of drawn butter and
grease. Even though Miller himself often smelled like that, there
was something about being in such a confined space with this man
that made him uneasy. The manager told Miller that it was time to
for him reevaluate. Miller couldn't support a child, the manager
pointed out, let alone a wife, on the earnings of a dental school student.
The manager fished a thermofaxed notice from his desk that
featured a lobster dressed like Uncle Sam, pointing with one claw.
If you're an aggressive go-getter, Hot Lobster wants you.
"Funny dentists are a dime a dozen, Miller," the manager had
told him, resting a hand on his shoulder. "Mine's got pictures of the
Three Stooges up in his waiting room and a giant rusty drill that he
pretends he's going to use on you." Dentistry had always been more
his mother's dream anyway, Miller had told himself.
Vickie pulled the fabric of her dress away from her stomach to
fan herself. The yellow reminded Miller of the chemically-ripened
lemons he used to slice when he tended bar. He was constantly
nicking his flesh with the paring knife and the citric juices burned
his cuticles. He spent more time on that chore—more even then
cleaning the glasses or mixing drinks—because customers loved
seeing a bright lemon wedge perched atop a glass of free ice water.
It was a way of getting something for nothing, a cheapness of the
general public that grated Miller's sense of righteousness. If you
wanted a drink with flavor in it, order a soda. And if you do only
want water, fine, but when you asked for a lemon—it was like complaining
about a gift someone had given you.

186
Vickie took handfuls of her dress with both hands and flapped
the fabric like a pair of wings. She looked directly at him. Miller
knew he was being challenged to notice—to make a comment, or
ask what she was doing.
"When's take-off?" Miller asked, obligingly.
"Hot out there," she answered him. She stuck her tongue out
and panted like a dog and when Miller knitted his brow in confusion,
she curled her fingers like paws and gave a little, "Yip!"
"Can I get you a bowl of water?" Miller asked.
"Yeah right," she said, dropping her hands. "Something tepid
with dog spit please. Kidding. Actually, I wouldn't mind a drink."
Mention the beer, Miller thought. "If you want water or something,
there are some cups and ice in the bathroom. Or, tell you
what, if you'd rather—
"Water's fine," she said, standing. He watched her walk to the
bathroom. He thought for a second that if his wife could see her,
Vickie LaFaye, a girl this young dressed like that, in Miller's room
alone with him, she would divorce him in a second. But, he reminded
himself, that was only a phantom fear. Their divorce had been
final now for three months.
He opened his laptop and tilted the screen so he could see it
better. The sun was just beginning to set and he needed to adjust
the angle several times before the glare disappeared. Reaching into
the box, he removed the first random folder he found: Chicken. He
wanted to look busy when she returned, not too eager to talk to her.
He kept his head down and brushed his highlighter lightly over
the totals. Chicken Fingers, Chicken Tenders, Chicken Wings both
Wild and Mild. He entered a few numbers into his spreadsheet
while she settled back into her seat.
When he allowed himself a look at her, she gave a quick, "how
ya doing over there" wave; and Miller nodded back, hoping his grin
didn't look too dopey.
"Nice view," she said looking out the window and gesturing
towards the shopping mall across the street with her chin. "What
were they thinking when they designed these hotels....These," and
she put her fingers up to quote, "Business Suites. What sort of a
sadist would put a conference table next to a bed?"
"Yeah," Miller said. "Right. And cable TV."
"The hardest part about any business meeting is staying awake,"
she told him. "They expect you to just talk numbers and not—you
know? It's like, 'I'll get those figures for you right after I take a little
nap'?"
"Or a swim, right?" Miller said. "How about we finish the
meeting in the hot tub?"
"Sounds good," Vickie said laughing.
Miller felt a jolt of embarrassment. But she couldn't think him
that crude. After all, they had just met. She must have known he was
kidding.
He looked down at the spreadsheet and saw rows of numbers
on the page. How long had it been since he had a conversation with
anyone, let alone someone who gave him a litde ping—a sexual
charge that he knew would amount to nothing—but a feeling he
liked anyway.
When she shifted in her chair he allowed himself a surreptitious
glance. Just a quick flick of the eyes, and he got a flash of her
in an unprepared moment. Vickie was facing the window and so in
profile, head back a little, neck elongated and throat rippling. Miller
guessed she was fingering the ice cubes with her tongue, maybe separating
them or selecting a small one to keep in her mouth. Her
sleeveless dress was puckered and he saw a glint of side-breast
cushioned in light yellow cotton, and maybe a peek of an areolae
but he wasn't sure and he looked down very quickly before he could
verify. For sure though, she wasn't wearing a bra. He suddenly was
aware of the utter absurdity of his situation. She was at least 15
years younger than he, and she was pretty and had a body; and even
though he was funny and he'd be nice to her if something started
up, he always treated everyone nicely, and even though they were
alone and enjoying each other's company, and for chrissakes there
was even a god damned bed just a few feet away from them—nothing
would happen. Even so, he couldn't make himself work on the
numbers anymore.
"LaFaye," he said looking up from the page.
"Here," she said, like roll-call in grammar school.
Miller liked the fact that she could handle a non sequitur with

188
such aplomb. "Is that French," he asked. '"Your name?"
"No," she said. "I don't think so. Vickie," she said, as if trying
her name for the first time. "I think LaFaye may be French."
"Well that's what I mean," Miller said. "Your last name."
"I'm kidding. I suppose it might be French, I don't know. Probably
at some point on my family tree? I have a grandfather from
Versailles, Ohio, but that's on my mother's side and his last name is
Berman."
Miller was feeling that litde ping at regular intervals now, like
the sonar of a submarine. He remembered now a secret he had
recendy heard on the radio: that the famous French reputation for
snootiness was a trumped-up myth, perpetuated by Americans who
just didn't know how to interact with locals when traveling in
Europe. Americans walk around grinning and being overly friendly,
and the French take that as a sign of mental slowness. The French
respond more positively to a somber tone and something the radio
called, "eye flirting." Miller wasn't quite sure what eye flirting was,
but this was just the sort of litde secret he liked, something to tuck
away in his pocket to use at a later date—should he ever find himself
in France.
"Tell me how you got stuck here tonight. You low man on die
totem pole over there or what?" Miller asked her. "Some job, take
the files over to old man Miller—what, do they hate you over
there?"
"Old man, right." She rolled her eyes.
Oh my God! Miller's mind raced. He had no idea what to do so
he quickly furled his brow seductively. This is eye flirting, he
thought.
"Anyway," Vickie said swallowing loud enough for Miller to
hear. It gave him a machine gun volley of pings in his chest. "Anyway,
I'm honored to be in die presence of such a famous man."
"Who me?"
"Everyone talks about you. Miller's the guy who makes you
laugh even during an audit. The guy who wrote the infamous
dessert list. It's hi-larious!"
He stared at her as hard as he could, and threw a litde squint in
for good measure. "That thing?" He said. "People still remember
that thing?"
Miller knew people still remembered the dessert list. He saw
copies tacked to bulletin boards all over the country, on yellowed
facsimile paper, peeking out from behind new uniform regulations
or the latest edict from corporate. Inspired by Hot Lobster's everchanging
dessert menu, updated by an outside consultant every
three months to be "dynamic," Miller wrote his own list, a sophomoric
parody, one afternoon on the road. He invented items like:
Apple Underside a delicious gooey caramel concoction, sinfully delicious, and
served piping hot directly into your ass. It had cracked up his boss when
he showed it to him, made the gang at the water cooler laugh, and
was faxed to store managers all over the country, who universally
clucked their tongues and said, bet Miller wrote this. One manager
told Miller he was so funny he could even make a root canal fun..
Miller was surprised at the stab of pain he felt to be reminded of
his aborted dental career.
"Stick die cake right in your ass," Vickie told him, pumping her
small fist in the air. "Right on, bro."
And it occurred to him with a jolt, that she liked him. He had
power here. Vickie LaFaye, young Vickie LaFaye, was impressed
with him, with Miller. He sent a blast of intense eye flirt across the
table.
"I'm only kidding, man," Vickie said suddenly.
Miller's expression dropped. "What? What's wrong?"
"About sticking it—"
"No, no," Miller said talking over her. "I know you were quoting
the list. My dessert list," he couldn't help reminding her.
"I thought you were...got offended," she waved away the rest of
her sentence and then covered her eyes with her hand.
Miller's pinging stopped and was replaced by a wave of embarrassment,
a feeling he was much more familiar with. Her hand
looked tiny and Miller shook his head in embarrassment.
"I'm an idiot," he said, shaking his head.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
He decided to just come clean. He knew he could say anything—even
the truth—so long as he made it funny.
"I was flirting with you," Miller told her.

190
And he was ready to continue, to tell her it was just something
he knew, that the French responded to eye-flirting, that he made
some insane connection because her last name was French. And
then he was going to go for the laughs by playing up how pathetic
he was—separated from his wife and isolated because of the traveling
and lonely—but he stopped short. Vickie had turned away
slighdy and lowered her eyes.
Miller felt a surge of power and confidence. She liked him. He
could do whatever he wanted. He stood up abrupdy and stretched
casually, as if he had been sitting for hours. His tee-shirt came
untucked and he didn't bother tucking it back or hiding his navel
when it popped out. "I'm going to use the rest room," he told her,
rolling his shoulders back and forth. "When I come back, I don't
expect you to be wearing any clothes."
The building lurched but Miller managed to land his foot with
a loud clomp. Even though his feet felt like they were in oversized
clown shoes, he managed to walk clumsily past the bed and shut the
door without falling.
He looked at his own face in the mirror and tried to decide
what he had done. What had been her reaction? He couldn't
remember a change of expression. He guessed that, despite his best
efforts, he had looked away while making the lewd suggestion and
so hadn't seen any betrayed emotion, surprise or offense or abject
horror....She hadn't made any noise or at least nothing he could hear
over his sudden gasping shortness of breath. He was careful not to
speak out loud since she was so close and could hear, but in the mirror
he mouthed to himself, I can't believe you did that.
He tried to pee but couldn't get the urine through his hard
penis....That's okay, he ran the tap to cold—hadn't done this since
high school—and then brushed both his wrists under the pillar of
water, a litde secret he had learned in adolescence, until his erection
dissipated....It never did go away completely, but flagged enough for
him to piss dirough. He felt much better having the noise of the tap
and so kept it running. He gave a litde cough now, mosdy because
he knew he could and she wouldn't be able to hear him. It gave him
a feeling of control, and so he coughed again. He took a deep
breath and smelled her perfume—or was it deodorant—still linger-
ing from when she had come in for water. Miller looked at his own
cup, the one he had been drinking from when she knocked, and he
felt an almost nostalgic feeling of warmth for that old cup. He
wished he could just be drinking warm water from it again and not
have to deal with whatever was happening right now outside the
bathroom door.
He nodced a few drops on his tan slacks. It was probably splatter
from the sink, but it looked suspicious; sloppy. Now he'd have
to wait at least until those evaporated....Back when he had been
serving, all the waiters and bartenders wore an apron that tied
around the waist. Miller had always liked the fact that it hid pee
stains too, because when you were waiting tables or tending bar you
were always in a rush and so had to use the bathroom on the run
and things got messy. He remembered thinking that half the time
he had been working on his wife, trying to get her to go out with
him, he had pee stains on his pants hidden only by his apron. How
different his life might have been if that repulsive fact had ever
become known.
Miller slapped the faucet with the palm of his hand and when
the silence washed back, he wondered again how he had gotten into
such a ridiculously absurd predicament. She would be dressed when
he came out, he knew that. The state of her dress was the least of
his problems. Should he ignore that he made the suggestion or
make some joke....what could that joke be? My jour skin looks awfully
yellow, like your sun dress—my god, how cornball. Maybe the best
way to end this was to just admit that he had been rude. To say that
he had been attracted to her but he was over it now, and he was very
sorry, very sorry—got to stress that. He knew that the secret to
speaking sincerely was to do it with your palms out, fingers splayed
apart slighdy—he shouldn't be flirting with a girl this young, could
react any number of ways, scream, hit him, call the police. For all
he knew—hopefully even—she had already walked out.
He gained control of his thoughts. He decided that she had to
understand that it was all a joke. Miller had himself convinced of
this—he had only been kidding when he asked her to take her
clothing off. He mouthed his excuse, palms forward, to the mirror.
Who could possibly be serious about such an hilariously unusual suggestion?

192
Miller's a clown, ask anyone at Hot Lobster. The funny dessert list guy. That
wasn't a pass, it was a punch line: take your clothes off?
It suddenly felt like ages since he had hidden in the bathroom.
He checked quickly that the urine stains were satisfactorily faded.
His heart pounded. Hand on the doorknob, he began a silent laugh,
so that when he opened the door and turned left to face her, she
would think he was in the middle of an enormous guffaw. And he
threw open the door and took a big quick step, like an actor walking
on to a stage from the wings.
He was confused at first by what he saw. It was dark in the
room now, which didn't seem possible since it had been fairly light
before, too bright even—had he been in the bathroom that long?
But then he realized: the curtains. She had drawn the curtains across
the window. And she was still there in the same chair with her back
to him, in the giant oversized vinyl chair, her bare shoulders and
neck coming out over the top.
Miller paused on that sight. He cast his eyes around the room
furiously for a clue as to what was going on. And there it was, at the
base of the chair, the dress—hurriedly discarded—with a cone of
fabric billowing up like meringue. It looked as if she had dropped
it, then changed her mind and picked it up, before finally deciding
to leave it on the floor.
Miller continued to walk and looked down at her body in the
chair. Her legs were crossed and her hands were folded discreedy in
her lap. He stepped over the box of documents, still at the foot of
his chair, and sat. Vickie's breasts pointed at him, capped with
brown nipples like children's band aids.
She stared at him now, a slight grin, her eyes were black and
fixed on him; was that a challenge or eye flirting? Miller had no idea.
She leaned back, and exhaled lightiy, slowly. It was the loudest
sound Miller had ever heard in his life.
He cast his eyes down at the paperwork and then back up. He
noticed now the two hoops still dangling from her lobes. He could
make a joke about that, and that could be his opening line. And what
about those earring? I toldyou to take everything off. But had he? What was
the language he used—how in the hell had he gotten into this
predicament? He put his hand on the file and drummed his fingers.
He could grab her—but that would mean standing up again and he
had just sat down. Why had he sat down? This was ridiculous. He
reached down for another file.
"Let's see....Beverages." He told her, looking up from the file as
he set it carefully in front of him.
Her smirk dropped away for just a second and her eyes shifted
left. He knew he had surprised her.
She leaned forward, brought her elbow to the table, and rested
her face on her hand. Her breasts hung down with just a hint of
space between the rounded under sides and the table. She lowered
her eyelids but kept her gaze fixed on him. Whatever the game was,
she was still playing.
"Okay," he mumbled like before. He streaked his highlighter
across the page. "Lobster Lager, Lobster Lite, Ice Lobster..." She
shifted in her chair, but Miller pretended not to notice. The ping
was gone, replaced by fear pecking like a little bird at the lining of
his stomach. This was another feeling he was comfortable with.
When he first decided to drop dental school and make a career
out of Hot Lobster, he concentrated on the orderliness of his job
to stave off that pecking. He took everything seriously. He learned
all the litde secrets of the restaurant trade. He learned food presentation
techniques and restaurant atmospherics.
He had done well and was now Deputy Chief Auditor in the
field. When he was told of his promotion, his director, a toned
young man in a suit who loved to talk about his exercise regimens,
took him out for a steak lunch. "We're giving you this position
because the jobbers love you already, Miller. We don't want them
intimidated, and you make them laugh"
"People laugh at Mr. Duncan," Miller pointed out. And he was
Hot Lobster's CEO.
"Naw," his boss told him with a wave. "People laugh at those
cornball jokes because they're nervous. Like when the president
makes some glib remark and the reporters start slapping each
other's knees. It's different for you Miller. You're actually funny. No
one's afraid of you."
It was now his job to monitor the big-picture numbers, to make
sure the side salads weren't going out with too much dressing or too

194
many shavings of carrots. Even when they brought in the shallower
bowls, the servers had a tendency to heap on the greens. "We
aren't Ponderosa," Miller would say to the managers whose lettuce
numbers were out of whack with corporate goals. Everyone listened
to him and no one got mad. The managers knew Miller
thought what he was suggesting was absurd, after all, you were only
talking about a penny's worth of lettuce; but at the same time they
understood his advice needed heeding. He very rarely encountered
the same problem twice. And as for the customers, he never felt
guilty for nickel diming them in that manner. He had spent too long
waiting on tables to not know that they did it back to the restaurant
whenever possible, asking for the free bread rolls as an appetizer, or
wanting ice water as their beverage—with a lemon. Miller knew
what that lemon was—a little something for nothing, a poke in your
eye, an aggressive act of pleasure in the face of tight corporate cost
controls.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah..." he murmured, streaking the pages yellow.
As he reached the end of the page he realized he would have to say
something to her soon. He had been rather chatty before this, flirty
even, and now he couldn't just ignore her, and he allowed himself
a peek.
Her eyes were on him but seemed distant, like she was daydreaming—her
lower lip now curled slightly under her teeth. She
breathed and a row of knots in her sternum rippled under her skin.
Her breasts—now that he was looking—pointed away from each
other slightly.
He reached for his shirt sleeves to roll them, just so he had
something to do while looking at her, but he came up with his bare
arms. He forgot he was only wearing the tee-shirt. He pulled his
shirt away from his chest and then let it fall back as if he were nonchalantly
fanning himself.
Poor Vickie, she had none of the sartorial crutches for nervous
energy, she couldn't even fan herself with her clothes. She was totally
vulnerable and Miller felt miserable for having put her in such an
awkward situation. Maybe he could just lunge across the table and
they could do it in her chair. If he wanted her, he needed to act now.
He had to transition away from the paperwork and towards Vickie's
body. He decided to do it, and ignoring the flurry of pecking in his
stomach, he slid the paperwork awkwardly aside.
"You know," he said. "You don't need to take these....I, eh, I
could just drop them off tomorrow on my way out of town..."
"Fine," she said standing quickly, her bare stomach scraped the
table, and Miller blinked and saw for just a second her pudenda and
the small tuft of blonde hair.
"We could—" he began, but stopped short.
She was dressing. She pulled her dress up from the ground and
slid the shoulder straps into place with her thumbs. Miller watched
her, watched her arms and legs and the flurry of lemon yellow fabric
and was more aroused than he had been all evening. He ran
through his options; apologize, stand up and make a joke, grab her,
tell her he loved her....She turned and slipped her shoes on.
More than anything, more than even sleeping with her; he
wanted Vickie to ask what was wrong. He wanted to tell her about
his divorce, and how he had wanted to be a dentist, and about how
his kids were good kids even though he had been such a nervous
father; that he so doggedly wooed his wife, and even now, years
later, he wasn't sure if she really loved him or just got trapped. He
wanted to tell her how hard he had worked to get where he was, to
be in his stupid job making sure people didn't get too much dressing
on their side salads, and how hard he had worked at home to
raise his children, and that there were no free lunches for him; no
lemon wedges on water glasses for Miller. He could do any of those
things so long as she said something first. He could still pull this off,
but he needed Vickie to give some set-up so he could deliver the
punch line. If she would just accuse him of something, insult his
libido, his sexuality, anything; just something so that he could hit
himself in the face with the pie. He was choking on the joke, whatever
joke it would end up being, as she walked out and closed the
door without ever saying another word.
The hotel's lounge was small and dark, and Miller slumped on
the stool and signaled for the barman who was down at the other
end talking to two women. The bartender was leaning forward
earnestly telling a story. The women—middle-aged maybe, maybe
older, but not bad-looking, Miler noted—were both smoking and

196
the one closest to him was unconsciously pulling at her ear lobe. He
knew from an article on the secrets of body language that both the
women were interested in the bartender, especially the one fiddling
with her ear. And the bartender was playing it cool. He knew what
was going on; he knew how to handle it.
Miller reached for the small wooden bowl that had a layering of
popcorn on the bottom. They were mostly old maids but there were
still some attractive fluffy pieces; and he located a full kernel and
tossed it in his mouth. He noticed from a tentative test chew that
the kernel was stale, and so he maneuvered it to his tongue where it
could dissolve in his saliva of its own accord.
When he tended bar at the Hot Lobster he always had plenty of
salty popcorn which he served in wax-lined paper boats. Miller
knew the routine, customers ordered a beer, then slid a boat of
popcorn towards themselves. At first the popcorn is a novelty. You
look down at the yellowy mass and pick at it slowly, choosing the
kernels that looked best, the fat yellow puffy ones. But—and he had
observed time and time again—the patrons would stop paying
attention to the popcorn, start staring off into space, and begin to
shove the corn into their mouths faster and faster.
He had read a little secret about movies and popcorn; that the
real money in the movie business was at the concession stand and
not on the screen. Once in a movie theater Miller turned himself
backward during a bright scene to test this piece of knowledge. He
had observed the hordes behind him unconsciously shoveling
handfuls of the stuff into their huge faces, loads at a time, hands
like steam shovels digging into bushel sized bags and scooping out
grosses of it, kernels rolling down their bodies, jaws set on autopilot
pulverizing and grinding like machines. Miller never let himself
get carried away in frenzied pleasure like that.
Another thing about popcorn, Miller thought, getting angrier;
it was a just supposed to be a snack, a god dammed treat—something
to do with your hands while making small talk. But they took
advantage, people, they made meals of it! The idea that you could
come to a bar at happy hour and eat ears and ears and get away with
it—something for nothing—dinner and beer for the price of a beer.
He was different from those people; more in control, better.
The bartender was ignoring him. Didn't he see Miller just sitting
here like an idiot? Why didn't he come over and get his drink
order? It was starting to get humiliating. When Miller tended bar he
would never have humiliated someone like this. Miller brought
more spit to his mouth and let the stale kernel dissolve on his
tongue before fingering the bowl again for another.

198
-COLUMBIA INTERVIEW
The Possession of Danny Hoch
Weaving together theater, performance art, and spoken word, actor/ writer
Danny Hoch has been called the voice of a new generation. From Flipp-Dogg,
the white teenager who dreams of being a black gangsta rapper; to Victor, a
young Puerto Rican man on crutches who rhapsodizes about his dancing talent;
to Blanca, a twenty-something office worker who worries about her roommate
having AIDS, Danny Hoch draws on the rich oral traditions of New York
City to portray a range of late twentieth-century characters. His solo show,
Some People, won a 1994 Obie Award at PS. 122 and the Joseph Papp
Public Theater (directed by Jo Bonney). Hoch's third solo show, Jails, Hospi-
tals & Hip-Hop, opened in 1997 and is now being made into a film. A grad-
uate of the High School of the Performing Arts, Danny Hoch spent the first
half of the 1990s bringing conflict resolution through drama to adolescents in
New York City's jails and alternative high schools with NYU's Creative Arts
Team.
The following interview with Danny Hoch took place during the fall of
1999 on the windswept borders of the Miesesque local hipsters call "The Inter-
net. " Just one day before completion of this interview, Danny Hoch was spot-
ted breakdancing on MNN, Manhattan 'sfine cable access station.
COLUMBIA: You once described home as "a forest of high-rise
apartments in a no-name neighborhood on the edge of the Long
Island Expressway in Queens." There's a strange kind of quiet to
this characterization; it reminds me of the moment just before the
curtain rises, when everything is still, waiting. What voices do you
remember first filling this silence? Was your own one of them?
HOCH: I wouldn't call it silence at all. It was loud with the sounds
and smells of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Russia,
Israel, India, Senegal, Antigua, Eastern Europe. The neighborhood
had no name because it was at the crossroads of four neighborhoods
(Lefrak City, Rego Park, Corona, Forest Hills) at the geographical
center of Queens. Not high-rises in the Manhattan sense,
but projects and low-income apartments in the Brooklyn-Queens
sense. A melting pot for sure of poor middle-class people from all
over. There were ten floors in my building, and nine apartments on
my floor. On my floor alone, seven nationalities and histories were
represented, and in my building/neighborhood, forget it, but hip-

200
hop culture was the dominant one for youth in my hood to the late
70s, late '80s.
COLUMBIA: I ask this question partially because of your ability to
really hear who characters are through their voices—not who you
think they are, or what a stereotype says they sound like. What do
you think accounts for your particularly keen ear?
HOCH: My mother is a speech pathologist. She didn't teach me
"accents," although that would sound cute, I'm sure. But she taught
me the value of listening. And that combined with the fact that
there were thousands of dialects of English and a few dozen other
languages floating around, you had to listen to understand everyone
in the neighborhood (it wasn't something one had to think about,
you just did it). And I'm an actor, and an actor is supposed to reflect
and respond to his/her community, so that's all I'm doing. Really
nothing fancy, although writers get a kick out of making me into a
theatrical anthropologist. Whatever.
COLUMBIA: You say in the book based on Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
and Some People that "Theater is about language. Oral, physical, and
spiritual language, and that's it." You also say that when you first
started performing, you didn't want your characters to be confined
to a page—that "they were alive, allowed to breathe, to go wherever
they wanted." Then your director, Jo Bonney, made you write
your pieces from Some People down. How did this feel for you? What
characterizes the transition from voice to page?
HOCH: The transition is one from the visceral, ancient way of creating
theater (hearing voices and allowing oneself to become possessed
by those voices/spirits in order to learn from them), to a literary,
Western intellectual way of creating theater that makes you
think more about plot and story than character. It's boring personally,
but it's effective because this society is story-obsessed, and if
you're going to pull people in, you'd better have a good story. At
least that's what they say in Hollywood, but they can go fuck them-
selves.
COLUMBIA: I have seen you perform twice, in 1995 and 1996 in
Chicago. When I read your book I could hear you—your characters—as
if you were speaking through the page. How do you capture
the spit and sweat and muscle of speech? What do you listen
for? What do you leave out?
HOCH: I don't consciously listen to people's speech patterns. That
is anthropological, journalistic and Anna Deavere Smith-ish (which
is dope, but that's not what I do). I am happy that the language
comes out on the page. I didn't do anything. I just wrote down the
oral language in my head, and here and there tried to put it into syntax
that would make sense on the page.
COLUMBIA: The pieces seem more structured than their earlier
counterparts—less playful, in a way, than the very musical, tonal
pieces like Caribbean Tiger and A.I Capon. You described this kind of
work as "clarified visceral stories that sounded like riffs." How do
you start working on a piece? Does it come orally at first? Is there
anything lost in the writing?
HOCH: The vulnerability and spontaneity is lost in the writing. I
used to develop characters by getting on stage with very little idea
of what I was going to do. I just had the character, and I would
allow it to flow. Yet, again, what is gained by writing is a clearer context/story,
which I hate to say it, makes it more accessible. But that's
not such a bad thing, if I can maintain the complexity and richness
that challenges the audience. I ain't trying to be accessible and have
people sit there thinking about nothing, like the majority of "accessible"
work.
COLUMBIA: Oftentimes the crux of a story is buried at the heart of
a piece—there, but tiny, like something your characters don't want
to see. How does a story emerge for you? Where do you try to put
the weight?

202
HOCH: A lot of my characters spend the majority of their monologues
talking about everything BUT the story. They circumlocute.
I don't like big words, but I like that word. It means that they try to
talk about everything other than the story to distract themselves
from the point. For instance, Andy is in prison, HIV infected and
under brutal prison conditions, but he chooses to talk about Martin
Lawrence and McDonald's. Victor was shot by the police, but 95%
of the words are his trying to make conversation to get a girl's
phone number. So, what is the story about? McDonalds? Getting a
date? Or police shootings? I don't know. But you find out a lot more
about people from what they don't say about an event, than if they
just expounded about what the point was. People don't watch theater
to see the point, they want to watch people avoid the point
because lives are revealed in that behavior.
COLUMBIA: Your portrayal of Victor—the kid on permanent steel
crutches—made me cry the last time I saw you. Who is the character
who's moved you the most?
HOCH: All of them.
COLUMBIA: Has a character or story or voice ever eluded you?
HOCH: Yeah. Those characters don't make it to the show. But I do
work them out on stage in front of live audiences and it's exciting,
even when they flop.
COLUMBIA: You've been doing quite a bit of writing lately—
screenwriting (for recently released White Boys and Subway Stories, and
the upcoming film of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop) as well as the book
in 1998. Have you always written? How does this dovetail with your
performing?
HOCH : I never wanted to write and am still trying to avoid it. I really
wanted to act. But there was nothing to act in that was about my
diverse community or my hip-hop generation. So I started creating
characters. Then people called me a writer and said, "Write something."
So I've been writing a lot, but the pleasure for me is in acting.
COLUMBIA: The reviews I have read of you speak of you as a phenomenon;
the "multicultural chameleon," one writer called you.
Few discuss your art: the integrity and logic of each character, your
metaphors, your staging, your blocking, your inspirations (prisons,
hospitals and hip-hop being some of them). Why do you think this
is?
HOCH: They only call me a phenomenon because I appear to be
white (meaning a member of diluted ruling class cultural white
America), and they are brainwashed like the rest of us into thinking
that everyone with white skin must come from wherever they think
all white folks live (the suburbs I guess), and go on expeditions to
the ghetto in order to associate with "the other." This thinking is
more damaging to people of color than white folks. And they don't
call Anna Deavere Smith a phenomenon because she's "mixed," so
it's expected of her. I read that in an article somewhere. Everybody
wanna talk about the Great White Hope, but no one wants to talk
about class and welfare and prisons and profit and revolution.
Things are fucked, I tell you.
COLUMBIA: Tell me more about what inspired the tide, Jails, Hospitals
and Hip-Hop. What is each to you? How do you feel them? How
does each provide you with a world from which to make art? Make
change?
HOCH: I really was working on two separate shows: one about the
Prison-Industrial Complex, and another about the evolution of hiphop.
They collided because each was too much of an endeavor on
its own. And I had some hospital characters sitting around and I
thought, oh—three institutions coming to a head in the '90s. OK,
jails, hospitals and hip-hop. Far be it from me to try and be clever
about a title. Let's just call it what it is.

204
COLUMBIA: Political activism is central to your performing. You've
turned down big roles (on Seinfeld and in a Quentin Tarantino
movie) partially because of this commitment. Is there any tension
between art and activism for you? How about entertainment and
activism?
HOCH: Yeah, I walk that line everyday. One phone call I'm talking
to ABC or Fox or Universal about how they wanna be "in business"
with Danny Hoch, and I gotta navigate not getting exploited in this
terrain of bullshit and greed, and then I'm talking to my compafieros
about how can I take these opportunities to help make
money for the revolution and shit. Then I'm just trying to make my
art and have it be good quality shit.
COLUMBIA: Following on the last question, you've at times had a
problematic and tumultuous relationship with the global media
construct we call "Hollywood." In your one-man shows you've gotten
a lot of press. But when your recent movie, White Boys, came
out, it played in like one theater in New York. It wasn't really
reviewed, and it left in less than a month. What's going on there?
HOCH: We got word from reliable sources that the people up high
at Fox had "issues" with releasing a movie on a wide scale that dealt
with young white kids' rage, in the wake of Littleton and all these
mass shootings across the country. In other words, it's okay to
release films with frustrated black kids committing violence, but not
white kids. Then they put out Fight Club, but it's detached from any
community. Which is my conspiracy theory, that whenever you see
white folks committing violence in film or TV, they are psycho and
live in a vacuum, (this absolves white folks or white communities
from any guilt in violence), but when people of color commit violence
in the media, it is completely a product of their communities,
implicating the entirety of colored folk on the earth. Also, the exec
on the film didn't like the film because he felt it was unclear whether
it was a comedy or a tragedy. Precisely, motherfucker! like um...life?
Lindsay Law at Fox Searchlight has lost all credibility among independent
filmmakers.
COLUMBIA: A major theme in your work is cultural appropriation.
A character like Flip-Dogg, in White Boys, will wear Tommy Hil and
Timberland in imitation of urban black kids, who are themselves
appropriating white kids' yachting and camping and hiking wear. It's
a kind of escape, but it's also an attempt to get closer to ourselves,
to who we really believe we are. Where does cultural appropriation
end And culture begin? What is rising out of the mix?
HOCH: Cultural appropriation begins with colonialism and it ends
when The white kid who's been bangin' Biggie Smalls realizes that
it's actually a better idea to graduate college and take that corporate
job than go to prison, get denied loans, mortgages and taxicabs or
get shot by the police for mistaken identity.
COLUMBIA: I am often disappointed when I hear people talk about
the art forms of hip-hop: rap, graffiti, breakdancing, DJ-ing and all
that is done in the spirit of hip-hop. Too often, whether praising or
denouncing it, people only emphasize the political aspect of the art
form and not the imaginative ones. It would never go over to speak
about jazz that way—that is, only acknowledging its social characteristic
and not its aesthetic or imaginative ones. What kind of literature
is rap? How has it influenced your dramaturgy? Do you
freestyle? How is it different from your other writing and how does
it feed it?
HOCH: I love that question, at least the end part. I do freestyle. I
love it. And my creative process of monologue making is a freestyle.
It is the ancient form of theater. The griot. People do not often
relate the griot to becoming possessed by a character, to an MC
becoming possessed by language. I see hip-hop in its original four
elements as organic urban Reaganomic resource theater, period.
Also, I am one of those folks who love to discuss hip-hop's political
contexts, because I think it is the answer to politics' problems,
but I also am feeling its social/aesthetic contexts. Few people talk
about the multicultural contexts of hip-hop, or the social contexts.
But now I sound like a motherfuckin' college professor and shit. I
can play that character too.

206
COLUMBIA: I like your comparison between what you do as a performer
and this role of the solo African griot, who "reflected, celebrated,
reconstructed, and questioned the community." You call it
"pure unfiltered theater." It's kind of like an MC, who is responsible
for showing the crowd a good time, but also for educating, questioning,
and providing a voice—a channel—for an essentially communal
experience. What is the relationship between entertainment,
festivity, activism, and art? Do you feel responsible for actively
engaging your audience? What other responsibilities do you feel?
HOCH: Yes, in this country, people are brainwashed into thinking
that the compartmentalization of art is the be-all and end-all of art.
We are suckers for falling for this modern and simple capitalist trick,
and for not realizing that all of our ancestors participated in multifaceted
performance. That is: education, entertainment, politics and
religion, all rolled into one. Now we just got categories: comedy,
magic, dance, talk shows, politicians, priests, rabbis, Mariah Carey.
We need to get back to combining those elements so we can get
engaged. If you ain't engaged, then you are passive, and all responsibility
to your community, your people, your generation, your environment
is lost.
COLUMBIA: Who are some of your favorite artists today? Who do
you think is doing work that makes a difference and why?
HOCH: Roger Guenveur Smith, Sarah Jones, Toni Blackman, Culture
Clash, Rhodessa Jones, The Roots, Universes, Talib Kweli, Mos
Def.. .DEAD PREZ!!!! These are the griots of my generation.
COLUMBIA: Along with writers, teachers, and activists Kofi Taha,
William Wimsatt ("Upski," who wrote Bomb the Suburbs and No More
Prisons), Gita Drury, and Jennifer Calderon, you're part of an organization
called Active Element. What kind of work do you do
there? How did you get involved?
HOCH: I'm on the board, and we seek out young activists of this
hip-hop generation and youth-led activist organizations that are
committing activism on a multitude of levels with no money. Then
we seek out young people in this hip-hop generation that are making
money or inheriting money and we try to redistribute the wealth
to these young activists and organizers instead of giving it to Uncle
Sam who's spending it on shit that doesn't benefit our communities
at all.
COLUMBIA: What kind of change might a new millennium bring?
What projects are you looking forward to working on next?
HOCH: I got no idea. Remember, I come from the same hip-hop
generation that didn't think we'd live to be thirty or even get to
2000. Right now I'm working on a few plays, some screenplays, and
a hip-hop musical for the end of the world. But I'm optimistic.
COLUMBIA: And finally, what are you doing New Year's Eve?
HOCH: I don't know. Most likely I'll be in Brooklyn, holding shit
down.
—TARA SMITH

208
—ALAN ELYSHEVITZ
Father Figure
I try to keep my word. When my son is involved, I try especially
hard. Rushing home after work today, I drove by this very baseball
field where I promised to take Ronnie for a catch after dinner.
Recently I bought him a catcher's mitt, and he wants to break it in
right away. Every afternoon, like a major leaguer, he massages the
stiff pocket of the mitt with linseed oil. The leathery smell reminds
me of something from my past that I can't quite put my finger on.
Something about ducks.
This evening the field is rutted and dry. The wind conjures tiny
dust storms—miniature tornadoes—from between dying patches
of summer grass. I watch Ronnie move away, pacing slowly, one
foot directly in front of the other, measuring the distance from the
pitcher's mound to home plate, both of which are imaginary. Ronnie
is meticulous in everything, ritualistic in the way of most children,
and as superstitious as a professional athlete. He seems to
believe in his own metaphysical power, as if he is the crucial variable
in the universe, the controlling factor of fate. Reaching his destination,
he re-ties the laces of his left sneaker, then his right, and
kicks dirt into the divots at his feet. After kissing the tip of his
catcher's mitt—a precaution against errors—he crouches and raises
the mitt in front of his chest.
"Ready, Dad!"
I'm astounded by my son's technique, the gestures he has mastered
when imitating his elders, not just baseball players. Impressively
polite, Ronnie amuses grownups with his seriousness, yet he
laughs without comprehension at their jokes at his expense. A little
boy who mimics maturity. Having failed to keep Ronnie childish,
swaddled in paternal safety, I wonder how my own insecurities may
have passed to him. Through blood? Through example? What fears
and uncertainties have induced him to adopt grownup airs of selfdiscipline?
It strikes me as unnatural, perhaps even dangerous, that
his grade school teachers love him; the parents of his playmates
love him; distant relatives love him. That is, adult strangers love
him. Sometimes I wish he were less cooperative, more rebellious, so
he could release frustration incrementally and minimi2e the risk of
explosion.
I hold the ball.
"Throw a curve, Dad!"
Though I would like to oblige, my pitches have always been
straight, easy to hit.
Both the afternoon and the summer are waning. Beyond the
outfield, the sun is sinking behind a grove of bone-dry trees whose
leaves have begun to disintegrate. The evenings are cool now, and
my wife makes Ronnie wear a jacket whenever he leaves the house
after dinner. Overhead a flock of ducks is circling, rehearsing for
migration.
Ronnie crouches, waiting for a curve ball. His knees have begun
to quiver and his mitt has sagged below belt level. But he doesn't
complain. He flashes a few bogus pitching signs with the fingers of
his free hand.
A thirty-year-old image rises to the surface of my memory: my
father at a carnival swinging his arm in a great wide arc as if preparing
to deliver a blow.
I finger the seams of the baseball, then let it lie in my palm, my
hand like a scale weighing the probability of failure. I raise my eyes
to the cloudless sky. An impulse takes hold of me. Shifting my
weight to my right foot, I lift my left leg and hurl the baseball as
high as I can in the direction of the airborne ducks.

210
Something about ducks. Ducks made of fabric stuffed with
sawdust. Legless fowl as flat as flounders, each with a plastic disk
for an eye. Rows of them, dozens of them.
My father rolled a baseball in his hand and picked at the stitches
with his fingernails. Satisfied with the feel of it, he wound up in
the old-fashioned style, his arm twirling like a propeller blade, and
hurled the ball at the stuffed replicas. One duck fell. He ordered up
a second ball, paid a quarter and pitched again. Another one fell.
And finally a third. Three dead ducks. A winner. He chose a prize
for himself: a transistor radio no larger than his hand, complete
with leather case and ear plug.
Smiling, he looked at me. "Now I can listen to music at work."
I asked him to turn it on.
He played with the dials, but no sound came out. "Batteries not
included," he said.
I examined the other prizes on the shelves against the rear wall
of the carnival hut: an array of stuffed animals (none of them
ducks), toy soldiers, children's games. I coveted a war game packaged
in a colorful box, which required military tactics beyond the
grasp of a six-year-old. With patience my father might have taught
me the rules. But we drifted away from the hut and merged with the
fairway crowd. My father appeared to be gloating over his skill with
a baseball. He seemed serene and distant, almost smug.
"You could have played in the big leagues, Dad."
"Me?" He grinned. "No, Eric, not with my tendonitis. Anyhow,
I had other plans."
The air was saturated with the fragrant smoke of meat sizzling
on grills. I was hungry. Children my own age passed us by, chewing
on blackened hot dogs cradled in toasted buns. It was nearly dinner
time. My father's mind seemed to be elsewhere. Walking several
paces ahead, he held the little radio up to his ear as if it generated
music audible to him alone.
We approached the carnival exit. A banner hanging from a
makeshift archway said "Ulster County Dog Days Carnival."
Beyond the exit lay a hazy field transformed into a temporary parking
lot. Scores of cars were neady aligned like the ducks in the baseball
pitching hut. So many cars. I marveled at my father's ability to
locate our Oldsmobile in the midst of them all. But this orderly
congestion wouldn't last. After the carnival ended in a week,
teenage boys would again bring their bats, balls and mitts by day and
their six-packs and girlfriends by night. And their radios playing the
harsh tinny music that went with them everywhere.
My father's music was more appealing to me, more temperate
and humane. The crooning of his favorite singers was linked in my
mind with the Oldsmobile, especially its climate controls: the heater
turned on during a winter storm, the air-conditioner purring in the
middle of July. Moderation. This day was the hottest day of the
year, and the air-conditioner was running at maximum.
"Remind me to stop for batteries," he said.
Over the radio a baritone was singing wistful lyrics about the
end of summer. The melodious grief of the singer brought a tingling
sensation to my shoulders and neck. Traffic was sparse. My
father steered the car with two fingers, cruising the countryside in
high gear. His bare arms smelled like heat and sand, like the beach,
but less oceanic, less pungent.
For a moment I overcame my desire for food and asked him
what he was thinking about.
"Thinking?" We stopped where the highway intersected a
country lane. A half dozen boys of various ages crossed the road in
front of us, trailed by a jolly big-eared dog. Squinting, my father
peered beyond the children into the distance, perhaps at the steeple
rising above the treetops at the foot of the hill we were about to
descend. "It's dangerous to think while you drive."
"I can't stop thinking," I told him. "Does that mean I can't
drive? Is that why kids can't drive?"
"No, you're confused."
The car was moving again, gliding downhill.
"Is that why? Because I'm confused?"
"No, you're too short," he said.
We came to a stop sign on the outskirts of town. "Can you read
yet?" He looked at me as if he'd never seen me before, his eyes narrow
as if scanning fine print.
"Yes," I replied, gambling that he wouldn't quiz me on some
complicated billboard ad. I did know how to read, but only ele-
21

212
mentary school books and only very slowly, one word at a time.
"Well," he said, "you could probably get by on the written
exam, but I'd still bet against you on the road test."
For the remainder of the drive I nursed my hunger, hoping that
my mother had cooked franks and beans for us. At our house this
was a typical summer meal, easy to prepare, which she usually made
as a concession to the heat or fatigue or badgering from me. And
lately she'd been serving it more and more often, laying steaming
plates of boiled hot dogs and canned beans in front of my father
and me with a kind of dignified exhaustion. My mother seemed
especially tired these days. Though she was young to be the mother
of a six-year-old, and slim as a weasel, her gait had become the
ponderous waddle of an overweight grandma. Her smiles were still
frequent, but limp and watery. At the dinner table she barely spoke
at all.
Every night I thought I heard cobras down the hall in the direction
of my parents' bedroom, hissing sounds that almost resolved
into human voices. Pulling a sheet over my head, I cringed beneath
the double darkness of night and linen until I dropped off to sleep.
In the optimistic light of morning, I told myself that the cobras
were imaginary, a hallucination that shouldn't frighten a boy on the
verge of advancing to the second grade. So I said nothing about the
snakes to my parents. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that my
mother heard them too, that the conversations of serpents kept her
awake at night, and this was why she looked so tired all the time.
I forgot about the batteries until we reached our house on the
far side of town.
"You've got to help me remember things," my father admonished
me. "That's your job. It's not so hard, is it?"
"No, Dad. I'm sorry."
"I've got too much to think about...."
"But not while you're driving," I said.
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Forget about that," he said. "I've got so much
in my head, important stuff. You have to keep track of the little
things for me—batteries, errands, things like that. Details. Remember."
I imagined what it would be like to have X-ray vision, the ability
to see into my father's brain, swollen and gray, perhaps a little
pink at the edges from rubbing against the interior of his skull. A
brain filled with things beyond a child's comprehension—big
words, complex data, adult secrets.
The two of us got out of the Oldsmobile. I would like to have
been hoisted on his shoulders, my legs draped over the lapels of his
shirt, and be carried into the house at a great height to observe my
family's domestic life from the vantage point of a grownup. But my
father, climbing the porch steps ahead of me, removed the leather
case from the radio and pried open the plastic panel to examine the
battery compartment. Absentmindedly he pulled the screen door
open and let it slam shut before I could overtake him.
A month later he disappeared for four-and-a-half years.
The leopard had no spots. But at eleven I already suspected that
most things were not as they appeared at first glance. I studied the
big cat pacing in the putrid cage, its sinewy body brushing up
against the cold-looking bars, its eyes as blurry as a drunkard's. The
leopard was charcoal gray, nearly black, but I could make out traces
of vestigial spots, like a wallpaper pattern not quite covered up by a
coat of dark paint.
"It is a leopard," I murmured.
"That's what the sign says," my father replied.
I had hoped for more from him.
He had come back to us three weeks before. Now he insisted
that I call him by his given name, Robert, so I called him nothing at
all. He had just taken a job as a technical consultant in Poughkeepsie,
and though I had no idea what a technical consultant did, I
assumed that this work required great intelligence. My mother said
that while my father was away he had gone to school on the GI Bill.
Whatever that was. My mother, too, had taken courses—to learn
bookkeeping—and had gotten a job as office manager for a dental
practice to support the two of us. She liked working with numbers
and said that it helped take her mind off our troubles. Because my

214
mother never failed to smile when she said this, I hadn't worried
much. Even so, in my father's absence, life had contracted. Meals
were smaller and, unfortunately, greener. I had to develop a taste for
peas, broccoli, green leaf lettuce and an unpalatable thing called
okra. Franks—but not beans—were no longer welcome in our
home. I had to make do without the spacious front seat of my
father's Oldsmobile and get used to being stuck between the pudgy
and allergic Helmholtz brothers in the back seat of Mr. Helmholtz's
compact car when he drove us to little league baseball games. After
hitting a solid triple over an outfielder's head, I had to be satisfied
with terse congratulations from some other kid's father who lavishly
praised his own son for reaching first base on a throwing error.
But over the years I had adjusted. Gradually I had taken possession
of a brittle self-sufficiency. Now my father was back, the same man
as before yet different somehow, and not quite real to me.
"What kind of leopard?" I asked him.
Robert, my father, shrugged. "A black leopard."
"I never saw one like this before."
A shutter opened in the wall at the back of the cage, and a slab
of meat jumped out of the hole. The leopard pounced like a
domestic cat on a catnip mouse. But this cat didn't play with its
food. Crouching, with one huge paw on the slab, the leopard tore
at the meat with its canines. For a full five minutes I was transfixed.
Afterwards I decided that my father's most appealing trait was that
he didn't try to coax me from cage to cage too quickly. Still, I had
to think hard to find something to say to him. He was amiable but
taciturn: a presence, an entity, a benevolent shadow.
"You took me to a carnival once," I said.
"Oh? Where?"
I could recall only fragments: the smells of hot dogs and hamburgers,
a vast baseball field covered with cars, and something
about batteries—and ducks.
"Upstate, near our house. I forget where."
When I'd had enough of pens and cages, I wanted to see the
"savannah"—an exotic word that piqued my curiosity. This was not
how I had pictured a zoo in New York City: spacious and airy. I had
imagined animals on exhibit in the lobby of a skyscraper, everything
indoors, like the great hall of the Museum of Natural History
where we had seen reconstructed dinosaur skeletons the day before.
"What's a savannah?" I asked.
He thought for a while before answering. "A place for wildebeests."
"Huh?"
"And antelope."
"What do you mean?"
"Zebras."
An ironic smile raised the corners of his whiskers.
"Are there ducks on the savannah?"
He looked down at me, his jaw thick and sturdy. His mustache,
grown while he was away, was dense and bristly like a cheap hairbrush.
"No. Hyenas."
Suspicious but curious, I asked, "What's a hyena look like?"
"Half dog, half cat," he said. "Very sneaky. It laughs like a
witch in a fairy tale."
I tried to imagine this zoological oddity—a creature with
strangely mingled characteristics—and managed to produce a sly
animated teddy bear with fangs.
On our way to the savannah we meandered past an enormous
wire cage teeming with colorful birds, then a pit containing
anteaters and armadillos, then a walled-in area that exuded the
stench of a kennel but was really a home for dull-eyed llamas. A
man approached with a small transistor radio pressed to his ear. As
he passed by, I heard a sportscaster describing a ground ball to second
base, his thin electric voice piercing the radio static. I followed
the man with my eyes until he disappeared into a plain brick building
marked "Reptiles."
"Your mother thinks we should spend more time together," my
father said. "Get reacquainted."
I sensed that he expected a response, but I couldn't think of
one. This was how most of the weekend had gone. Fizzled conversations.
Misunderstandings. At times he said things that sounded
meaningful, yet I couldn't gauge his intentions, his feelings. My
nerves were on edge. His return home had caught me off guard,

2l6
upsetting the efficient partnership between my mother and me.
Implicitly she and I had devised a system. My mother provided
food and shelter, nursing care when I was ill, a balance of affection
and discipline. My role was to stay out of whatever she defined as
'trouble,' do my homework regularly and tend to a variety of household
chores. I fulfilled my obligations with so much zeal that I
became a man in my own eyes and, at the very least, a man-like child
in the eyes of my mother: uncomplaining, pretending to know
more, and feel less, than I actually did. Now that we were a family
of three again, I didn't know what to feel. My father had been away
too long, and this man who called himself Robert was a stranger to
me.
At the savannah we watched giraffes as lazy as cows browsing
the treetops. Soon I wanted to eat, to fill myself with hot dogs and
ice cream in a last ditch effort to derive satisfaction from this weekend.
Bored with the giraffes, I studied my father's face. His mustache
concealed him from the world, from me.
"When do you get to shave?"
"In the morning, usually, unless I'm running late for work."
"No. I mean, how old do you have to be?"
"It varies with the individual," he said. "But you're too young,
definitely."
He tussled my hair. It was the first time he had touched me
since he came home. Even after he removed his hand, I could sense
his fingers, like twigs tangled in my hair.
"When can I grow a mustache?"
"Not soon."
We found the food concession area and stepped in front of the
hot dog stand.
"How many do you want?" he asked me. "Two is the limit."
At seventeen I sometimes dreamed about a leopard covered
with spots that blinked on and off like the stars. A black leopard,
said a voice in my head.
Every morning I would wake up in my bedroom on the second
floor at the southeast corner of the house, surrounded by sunlit
relics of childhood: the old blue carpet rubbed raw from years of
pacing; the pinewood bookshelves my father built before I had
mastered the rudiments of reading; baseball paraphernalia—
posters, banners, souvenir balls. Yet in this familiar room I seldom
slept well.
After a short-lived divorce and several months of wanderlust,
my father had returned again, demanding that my mother and I
start calling him by his middle name, Ernie. A new alias. He had
always been elusive, distracted by a private agenda, possibly criminal
in nature. The day he came home he shaved off his mustache
like a fugitive changing disguises.
During his latest absence I myself had begun to shave, to
remove the soft boyish hairs from my chin, feeling for the first time
the marvelous smooth efficiency of the safety razor followed by a
nick that just wouldn't stop bleeding. After that, I took greater care.
Also, two or three times a week, I had borrowed my mother's car
keys on the sly to teach myself how to drive, inciting wide-eyed
alarm among the elderly pedestrians whom I nearly clipped on
Sycamore Street. By the time my mother caught on to my scheme,
I already felt comfortable behind the wheel.
Now that my father had grafted himself to our lives once more,
I secluded myself as much as possible. Throughout the house I felt
his chafing presence, caught whiffs of his aftershave, discovered his
electronics magazines strewn about the rooms.
"Why did you take him back?" I asked my mother.
She was leaning against the kitchen sink, drying her hands with
a dish towel. Her body was virtually the same shape as it had been
the first time my father deserted us, and her face had changed only
slightly, artificially, as if her features had been altered by theatrical
makeup to create an unconvincing illusion of age.
"When he's good, he's very good," she said.
I didn't care to acknowledge—at least not directly—what that
could possibly mean. "You still look young, Mom, compared to the
mothers of my friends."
Flattered, she gave me a patronizing smile. "Your
father...Ernie...He's made mistakes. Everybody makes them."

218
"What was he doing all that time? Did he teli you?"
"No, we never talk about it," she said. "That's part of our
agreement."
"Agreement?" My parents were conspiring to stay together. As
always, their life as a couple excluded and mystified me. How could
she continue to love him? "What do you mean? An agreement in
writing, like a contract?"
"Call it an understanding."
She stood on tiptoes to place a frying pan on the top shelf of
the cupboard above the sink. As the hem of her sky-blue house
dress crept up her thighs, I averted my eyes.
"Just don't marry him again. Whatever you do, don't do that."
I infused this statement with a clear threat, a choice between Ernie
and me.
"That's part of our arrangement," she said calmly. "No marriage.
He won't stay if I push for marriage."
"That's good," I said. But it seemed to me that this new partnership
was perilously enigmatic and favored Ernie.
"Want some coffee? I'll reheat it."
"No, thanks." I lit a cigarette.
"Please don't smoke in the kitchen, Eric. I'm still getting over
this cold." She rested the coffee pot on a flaming burner. "I thought
you gave up cigarettes."
"I gave up coffee instead." Holding the cigarette vertically
between my fingers, I searched the kitchen in vain for a good substitute
for an ashtray, while a thread of blue smoke rose toward the
ceiling.
"Is something on fire in there?" cried a voice from the living
room.
"It's nothing, honey!" my mother replied. She turned to me and
tapped the side of her nose to indicate his acute sense of smell.
"Want some more coffee, Ernie?"
"Fresh?"
She hesitated. "Yes, honey, pretty fresh."
"Yeah, sure, I'll have a cup."
My mother approached me. I sat at the table helplessly as the
cigarette burned down to a worm-like ash. When she bent to whis-
per in my ear, I inhaled her odors of soiled towels and moisturizing
lotion. There were too many smells in the house, I decided, too
many conflicting human odors.
"He must have heard us talking," she said. "Every word."
"Mom, you're nothing but a hot meal to him," I whispered. "A
warm bed, a laundry basket."
Before my mother could respond, Ernie came in. He poured
himself a cup of coffee and started talking about his time in the
army because he'd just seen a report about the military budget on
the TV morning news.
"The army may be less than honest about how much money
they need, but they're telling the truth about one thing." He gazed
over my shoulder out the kitchen window in the direction of his
past. "They really do give you an opportunity to see the world. Hell,
they sent me to Southeast Asia free of charge. Paid the air fare,
room and board, the works."
My mother smiled rigidly. She and I had heard this quip a hundred
times. My father looked as if he'd been up all night. He seemed
wild-eyed, elated.
"It wasn't easy though," he said, pulling a false long face. "That
office in Saigon was hotter than the jungle, even with a dozen electric
fans going. The best and worst year of my life. Both at the same
time. If you weren't there, you can never understand." Then he
looked at me the way an NCO glares at a private. "Snuff that damn
thing out!"
Cigarette in hand, I stormed out of the kitchen. Into the future.
Why did I do it? This is the question in Ronnie's eyes. The baseball
has plummeted to earth like a spherical meteor fragment. My
son rises from his crouch and retrieves it from a clump of desiccated
grass. The ducks, unharmed, have moved on, flying southward
toward a springtime elsewhere, while the bloated orange sun
perches in the treetops beyond the outfield.
"You could have killed one," Ronnie says as he hands me the
ball. His allegiance to animals is something I understand, a nexus of

220
empathy between us.
"I doubt it," I tell him. "Nobody can throw a baseball that
high."
He looks up at the slowly darkening sky as if trying to determine
whether my recklessness has made a dent in its purity. "But
you scared them, Dad."
"I shouldn't have done that," I confess. "Let's get some practice
in before it's too dark."
Ronnie retraces his steps to the home plate in his mind, repeats
his rituals of shoelace tying and divot kicking, and settles into the
perfect squat of a major league catcher. This time I don't keep him
waiting. Quickly I establish a rhythm, announcing and then delivering
an array of fast balls, sliders, curves, knucklers, none of which
rise or dive, every pitch the same regardless of the label I give it,
regardless of the elaborate but meaningless pitching signs my son
makes with his short dirty fingers in the cove between his knees.
The baseball speeds through the evening air and resounds with a
satisfying thud in Ronnie's stiff new mitt. Sitting on his haunches,
he tirelessly flings the ball back to me with all his might. My son
possesses the durability of youth. He could, I believe, play catch
eternally. If the sun never set, if he never grew up. And I would
gladly continue pitching to him just like a machine, with a robot's
immunity to muscle inflammation, failing eyesight, boredom, selfishness,
coronary disease and sudden death.
Finally Ronnie misses a pitch, and the ball sails past his ear,
rolling all the way to the colorless trees. It's too late to see now—
we have to admit it. The instant I stop throwing, I feel a corkscrew
ache in my shoulder. The breeze has assumed an autumnal sharpness,
a hostile edge. Going off to fetch the ball, Ronnie in his blue
windbreaker vanishes against the dismal background of tree trunks
on the boundary of the field.
I call out to him. "Can you find it?" No reply. But I detect his
squirrel-like rustling in the grass far away. Across the road, street
lights come on abruptly like cadets snapping to attention, and I see
my son shuffling along in front of the maples, feeling for the ball
with the toes of his sneakers. "Hold on, I'll help you."
For fifteen minutes we hunt for the baseball. I circle the trees
one by one. Methodically, Ronnie trudges back and forth, covering
ground like a lawnmower. In the end I call off the search.
"I'm afraid we'll have to declare this one 'missing in action.'"
A clear recollection: my father sipping coffee while subjecting
my mother and me to tales of his foreign war as if he had served
as commander-in-chief. Missing in action. If it had only been that
noble, that romantic. In reality the stranger who called himself
Ernie died of natural causes overnight in my mother's bed, in the
pose of a devoted family man: a pretender to the throne of our
household. My son never asks me about his grandfather. Maybe
intuition warns him that the topic is forbidden. A survival instinct.
I am determined to shield him from the residual anger embedded
in me like a fossil.
"Do we have to quit looking, Dad?" he says. "I can still see a
little."
"It's all right, we'll buy another one tomorrow," I assure him.
"Do you know how many baseballs an umpire throws out in a big
league game?"
He shakes his head.
"Plenty."
Before starting the car, I tug on Ronnie's seat belt to check that
he has secured it correctly. If my parental ritual annoys him, he
doesn't show it, his forbearance remarkable for a boy his age.
"Are you cold?" I ask him.
"I'm okay."
Once we start moving and the engine warms up, I switch on the
heater. The air bombarding our faces feels woolly, soothing. I keep
one eye on Ronnie and the other on the gloomy residential road
beyond the range of our headlights. It is then that I have a brainstorm.
"What do you say we drive down to the Bronx on Saturday?
Just me and you."
To most suburbanites the Bronx is synonymous with unlivable
tenements, baroque graffiti and violent crime or, at best, Yankee
Stadium. Though we love baseball, to Ronnie and me the Bronx signifies
only one thing: the zoo.
"Will the lions still be outside?" he asks. "And the gorillas?"

I sense the expectation of disappointment stirring within him.
How has this poisonous organism migrated from me to my son?
"Of course they will. It's not too cold yet. I read somewhere that
they've got a new exhibit." I pause for effect. "Vampire bats."
This does the trick. His excitement rising, he tells me everything
he knows about bats. He insists that their blindness is a fallacy.
Bats can see well enough, but they use a form of sonar to track
prey more efficiently at night. And so-called vampire bats do not
attack people, but catde. In a wildlife film shown at school, he saw
a vampire bat clinging to the foreleg of a cow like a grotesque mosquito.
A parasite. Driving home on an unlit curbless road that discourages
pedestrians, we cruise past ranch-style houses, crew-cut
lawns and bandaged saplings planted in small square plots of chemically
treated soil. As far as I can see through the darkness, this is a
bat-free night. Still, I know that parasites are everywhere. Some are
bipedal, over six feet tall, and as hard to classify as leopards without
spots, for they control their own shifting identities, constandy eluding
the grasp of their hosts
Ronnie exhausts his information on bats and falls silent. I
switch on the radio and let him tune in to any station he desires.
When he settles on a vitriolic talk show, I conceal my disapproval.
My child enjoys radio call-in shows. Though unable to come to
grips with this fact, I let him have his way. I'm aware of my indulgence,
my eagerness to accede to his whims and to support him in
any of his aspirations, realistic or not. I'm even willing to aid his
accelerated quest for adulthood. To the sound of a radio personality
ranting against the tax code, I watch Ronnie out of the corner
of my eye. It is gratifying to imagine the paternal constancy my son
must see in me. When I'm immobilized by illness in my terminal
bed, awaiting the final touch of his fingers on my concave cheeks,
my feverish brow, my cracked and frosted lips, then—even then—
my son will refer to me as "Dad." Always "Dad" from beginning to
end. Not Eric. And never Robert. My middle name.
—BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Pluranova
Our bodies are stunted with scarce
infinity. With our bodies
we hate stars.
Anything endless begins at the end
and moves toward less.
This is why stars die without us
knowing. Not like stars
die here, with scrimshaw-like
etchings in a billion
faces, and one collective
electronic teardrop
quivering in approximation.
Celebrity deaths vivify: their end
is a fresh take on us. Before, we were
stalling in our squares
trying to checkmate our mates
and denude our nakedness
in the dark.
But celestial bodies perish like they'd
been scrimping on light
because they had to pay for it,

224
and no longer could. And froze
like so many little match girls.
When it was dark everywhere
I saw ten thousand grapes
and kissed you.
You saw a Museum Wall
beaten by wooden beams,
and bleeding gelatinous pulp.
A wick's assistant struck
a body in the sky, a distant
flint, then dropped it here. I missed
it. Yes, I killed it. I kissed you.
—BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Vessel
The woman wore tall, thin heels in a snowstorm, shined, curvy
hooves. She felt she had to. The man had no lips, had sucked
them both in long ago, and he was taking her to dinner. I had no
business there. The waiter proved marvelous by providing the
woman with two small rosewater towels for her feet.
The woman had never been to such a fancy place, and the waiter
was filled with a desire to serve and please her. The man worried
what I might someday make of this, if I could sense something,
and would I later tell people?
The waiter was patient, and as he served the woman her exquisite
fish, he was rewarded with her great hounded look: I will eat here
forever. The waiter kept his silent, gracious manner though consumed
with a feeling so unlike what he usually felt with the
patrons.
The man was absorbed in what he had to say to the woman,
which was that he couldn't marry her. The man said he was sorry;
he would pay for dinner and that she should eat for two, be more
careful in the future. The man left.
The woman stayed in the restaurant for months, mostly in the
back room, watching her waiter dodge among the tables, filled
with the light and expectant shine of her watching. The waiter
himself never ate a thing.

226
My whole life, lived in this back room with the flour and wine, I
never saw him with a crumb or a drop. My mother was his sustenance
and his purification, thirst and vessel. I'm grown now, and I
too have felt such creature pleasures. The puli of surprise in taking,
half-empty, the half-full.
—NICKY BEER
My Stolen Macintosh
for]. Y.K.andD.
I hate the regularity of the night: the land and sky
flattened against each other like praying hands, the ceaseless
circulating noise of the overpass, the certainty
of the flybuzz. There is a maddening pulse to everything;
even loss comes in a meted harvest.
I stood at the lip of the room, cheek to doorjamb, counting
all the spots in the floor where the wood seemed to flush suddenly,
but squarely, signifying where objects had once been.
Dust girdled the edges in slow cities.
The shadows by the bed were propped at the lee, gathered
for winter. The whole remaining body of heavy things held
a preparatory pose, anticipating a grizzle of blue frost on the cushions
and frozen roots twisted at the bolted legs.
I remember that you were mutely sleek, like a deer.
I raise my hand into the space before me; it hangs
for a moment, a bird shot suddenly,
before falling to mimic
the lost arc of your body.
He was undoubtedly young, possibly good-looking.
The neighbor said she saw a green coat.
The police were politely ineffectual. At least
the hole remaining was symmetrical.

228
—NICKY BEER
Shore Leavings
Monday already? The world cranks onward!
All I remember of Sunday is scattered around
the deck chair: hulled almonds, hibiscus,
rum-soaked sand. Forgive the smears.
How is it that you persist (suet sky
head cold and all)? Obliteration, come
and scour me to frosty abalone. Gulls,
droop in the porous air. Shut down the surf,
the whole damned season. Will you devour
even these parings off my day? Savage!
Gloat at the regularity of this tide—
shepherded, trussed and meek all days but Sunday.
Well. Are the ferns browning over yet?
These native sandals have cut me new feet,
and I am as dark as the hourly driftwood.
Write, and send the geese down soon.
-JOHN ASHBERY
A Lot of Catching Up to Do
Dark days, lit by a falling flame
from time to time. A door stands open
or not. It's much the same.
Only the top layer is of any importance;
the rest, why the rest is immanent,
that's all.
It hurts only when you think about it.
To my friends in the rough:
When all the toys were swept out of the attic
only a bluish pitcher remained,
as though marking time. Shadow of wing in the air,
the dream nevertheless wanted to be congratulated for its condolences.
It took off prudently, however.
Then there were many napkins, many knives in the Seine.

230
—JOHN ASHBERY —GABRIEL NERUDA
The Lyricist
So I was bewildered, OK?
Around here we keep the toilets flushed
and look out the window over the kitchen sink
at redstarts. "This is New England, dear.
It's pure. There are churches. Walking along the road
a girl comes. She could be a duchess
or a goose person. It doesn't much matter
in the state we are in. Awkward, yes, and not a little disconcerting."
And the driveway behind the satin drapes
glides to its destination.
That evening when you sat with all those people and were happy,
other forces were at work. In the flume
was gesturing, shouts.
We cannot hear what we are supposed to know.
But I'd also be happy just in a life of crime.
The key is sticky with the blood of other wives.
He looked so displeased
and now it's all over, isn't it?
The spinning out or at,
telephone switchboard of the Grand Hotel.
Great looms the shadow of the shuttle.
Anglefish bloom in aquaria.
Head
It has been suggested that an accountant is only an historian of
recent moneys, and wears only the same mind an historian wears,
arranging variously misleading needle-points of data so they may be
handled more comfortably. An acquaintance, a friendly acquaintance
perhaps but not quite a friend, who was captain of a cargo
ship told me he wanted a purser, an accountant, for a voyage from
London across the Atlantic and through the Amazon.
Having no knowledge of shipping and yet feeling adequate to
accountancy I agreed to accompany him.
In earlier conversations when he had mentioned his numerous
adventures in shipping I had suspected him of behaving conscientiously
with an accurate responsibility, and of possessing a core of
intelligent kindness, so mosdy I was unworried of long days looming
under his command, of long weeks and of long months bobbing
like Huck Finn's fishingcork.
London is England's principal itch, like a suppurating pimple
continuously exacerbated by bacteria from everywhere. So when he
said London I understood he meant London money, and that the
ship would sail from Swansea.
I meandered from San Francisco to London, and to the docks
in Swansea, and was unimpressed when I saw his massive steamer,
WHITE WHALE. Captain Sanctuary was no Ahab, as well as I
could tell, and the lord knows I was never intended to be an Ishmail.
He did not brood and gnaw his fingers, and I was naturally too
cautious often to walk into traps.

232
I arrived at the bloated great boat in the evening before the
morning of our sailing, noting that all of my prospective mates who
had already arrived had been partaking of the frivolities of the local
parlors. The reek and bluster of cheap booze was everywhere, and
the drifting haze of tobacco, etc. Amiable feminine shrieks were
loud, subduably loud, loud enough to be called upon to hush.
I found my berth, my cabin, earlyish, which was tiny as a prison
cell and yet bigger than a hatbox. It had a dim bulb, and in a cupboard
a lamp which threw greasy shadows upon the edges of a
greasy yellow light.
I tried to read, and was unable, so I lay on my bunk, or cot, and
chased and gathered my lines into a circle, and I smalled the circle
until it was a point, and I slept.
Sounds of the morning gathered about, and I could smeU the
dawn, just passed, and the sizzling breakfast. Once more I was an
early arrival to the scene, and I introduced myself to the great jolly
cook, Pluck, and to the engineer, Sandy.
Both men were born to smile.
"Filthy goddamned brig," Sandy greeted me jovially. "What in
all the lengths of hell was them bastards doing while I was toying
with the ladies ashore? She was stowed amiss. You can feel it in her
bones.
"It is bloody ill," he smiled. He growled, and he grunted, and
he flushed the clogging in his nostrils violendy into his cupped fingers,
and he wiped the goo across his shirt.
We shook hands.
Pluck, our Santa Claus of a cook, jolly as could be, was chugging
around like a great choo-choo train. His chins bounced in a red
and friendly manner, and the flabby lobes of his ears flapped happily.
Sweat bounced from his pores and swung from his earlobes
like pendulums and let go.
I was to be ducked whole in the micro-politics of the ship, and
I looked forward to the earnest frivolity. I had been there before,
and was unscarred, mostly.
Our breakfast was wealthy with hot salty fats, blessedly somewhat
relieved by Pluck's own freshly baked bread which was rich
with germ and bran. Coffee ran.
1
Pluck had been with Captain Sanctuary for ages and ages, and
theirs was a love embellished by a wonted reciprocity. It was joy to
behold it. Pluck slept in a cabin off the galley and its outlengths,
which were farm, or garden.
His galley was fully furnished with everything a cook might
request, almost, with pots and pans, cauldrons aplenty, knives and
fridges and freezers. The knives he kept keen as Excalibur, and the
fridges and freezers at an assortment of temperatures. He had cans
and tubs and crates.
Hanging from the ceiling were bales and boxes in nets and in
bags, swinging in swirling whorls, labeled and not, hanging at two
levels touching, with their ropes gathered in bunches and strung like
the strings of balloons to hooks driven in the walls. An army night
have hidden up there.
Pluck's able, fidgety helper, was a litde fellow called Knockers,
for reasons I choose not to ponder. He was a miniature personality
and an exceedingly serious individual indeed. Once he informed me
that he had changed his name when it had occurred to him that his
parents had been presumptuous when they had christened him,
cruelly presumptuous because they could not have known what his
personality would be. "By naming me in their ignorance they
attempted to define the limits of my soul," he said.
And so when he was able he had changed his name.
Many times I have found that my interests were best served by
withdrawing into an appearance of misunderstanding what is laid
before me, and so I did now. I responded with my commonest noncommittal
retort, and I said, "Good."
Knockers was employed, much to the gratification of everybody
concerned, in the farm which lined the outlengths of the galley.
Pluck, who was a wise man in our human ways, told him his job.
Wondrous healthy crops were produced, a rarity in any situation and
aboard a ship a secular miracle.
They grew broccoli, and we dined upon sprouts and leaves and
flowers. They grew soy, and we ate sprouts and soup hot and cold,
and the beans every way. They grew cabbage and we ate unsalted
salads of cabbage. They grew onions, and we ate leaves and bulbs.
They grew dandelions, and we ate roots, leaves, and flowers, in our

234
unsalted salads. They grew potatoes, o blessed potatoes.
But our meat was always canned, salty, fat.
Somewhere among these considerations the ship shoved off
and the sea rolled under us like the years of lives, running. Days
occurred, each but a little different from another, much as people
are each but a little different from another and each has its little day.
Days occurred, and nights occurred. The weather was good
and the weather was bad and the weather was in the welter between,
in a chaos of calm and wild.
Soon I and my fellows became familiar and friendly and we settled
into the common fall of things. Although I was effectually a
non-entity I dined with Captain Sanctuary and the Chief Engineer,
Sandy, and with the Doctor, Dr. Equanimous. Also the Chief Mate
was there, and Pluck rolled about us like an attendant wheel.
Knockers fidgeted in the background, darted to our foreground,
and sped away, sometimes just listening although nothing magnificent
was ever spoken.
We ate in the saloon, which resembled a livingroom and a diningroom.
Heavily stuffed chairs inwardly surrounded the walls, and
those chairs had been wrapped thoroughly in a coarse plastic which
drained the moisture both inside and out. I remembered, every time
I sat in one, how it always felt when I stuck my hand and my arm
in a cold sandy hole searching for clams on the beach.
And yet they were a bulwark to be grateful for, like wombs
unaware of their inhabitants and of the comforting effect produced
in their inhabitants by the immersion in estrogen. We complained
of them constantly, and yet as if we were hippopotami in a wateringhole
we wallowed in them amiably.
During meals we sat round a table in sturdy unupholstered
chairs which had been bolted deliberately. Captain Sanctuary's chair
possessed the only cushion, and was unbolted.
Such was an inviolable principle. Only the Captain might swing
about like a cannon to address whom he chose.
Captain Sanctuary's eyebrows were imperious in themselves,
and leaped forth from his forehead like the sails of the grand old
sailingships, like the wings of eagles. From their perch below, his
eyes could bore in upon the recipient of their gaze until one's mind
hung in smoking tatters, or felt clutched and skewered. His only
knowledge was an information concerning affairs pragmatical, as he
called it, taking a sly dig at those who fancied useless esoterica. He
was a sly old sea dog.
My guess is that he was hightailing it from something in petticoats
and a nursery, or from his lack thereof.
Dr. Equanimous sat at the table also, and obviously he was the
icon of sophistication, clever as the devil. Often I wondered why he
had been cast among us, and suspected he had misbehaved, having
been tuned a few lines too finely by the Creator. Perhaps he had
never been given a fit example to live down to.
Sometimes as we chatted, the Doctor would raise his hand
before his mouth and smile. Sometimes he would accompany us in
our sallies of vain inanities, our silly and important gossipings.
If he smiled behind his hand, we knew that soon he would beg
politely to be excused and then he would stroll away onto the deck
or to his cabin, or to his surgery. If this happened, the Captain
would bend to me and say, "I do not understand that man. His
aplomb confuses me and angers me." Clearly, the Captain was
intrigued by the Doctor, but the Doctor would intrigue with
nobody.
Sometimes after our dinners closed, at his explicit invitation,
which was often couched as an entreaty, I thought, I would pad
across to the Doctor's cabin, which was a better cabin than mine.
He dearly loved his nightly tipple, and he had provided himself ably
with gin. He had been in many of our world's theaters, and he had
more tales than had Boccaccio, and he delighted in an audience of
one.
My cabin was a tiny thing, though much bigger than an eyelid.
In my innocence I had brought too many books and had scrupulously
arranged them on the shelf provided, according to the
birthyears of the words. But soon I learned that the sea did not care
about my scruples, and now they were neatly piled in a bag hung
from a nail.
Shakespeare was there, and Boswell's L^fe, and Blake and Shelley:
two men of the earth, one of the fire, and one of the air. Our
fellow of the water had not yet appeared to us, and any of the ether

236
would be inscrutable.
Each copy was something like a not overly complete oxford,
with a print exceedingly clear, a clearness of line which became an
invisible clarity once entered. And I had similarly big volumes of
Charles Fort, who always had the effect of arranging my mind into
an ease, and of Edgar Allan Poe, who made me smile.
I felt I was well-mounted against the proud meaningless forces
of chaos. I understood that some of these friends would be unable
to speak with me during some of the times to come, and I felt prepared.
I was not wholly an inexperienced fellow and I believed I did
understand how people behave when we are stuck together for
lengthy spaces, and being a bit of a seditious inciter I brought with
me several cheap paperbacks which I intended to lose tactically
among my fellows once the time had drawn through sufficiently.
Always I have experienced an identifiable pleasure in placing
mindbombs clandestinely, and these books I selected consisted of
works by my fellow inciters, by such as Charles Williams and by
Theodore Sturgeon, by Edward Lucas White. I sought explosions
to jar one's perceptions of psychological orderliness.
It has been mentioned that it is commonplace for us to place
deliberately specific books, on our coffee-tables and in our bathrooms
so that they might be seen by our neighbors, our visitors and
friends, and what I proposed to do was a simple corollary to this
illuminating procedure.
Mostly in those evenings when I was alone I did just what you
do in those evenings when you are alone. Sometimes I browsed a
volume lazily and ruminantly, and sometimes I was able to read a
book vigorously, entering far.
Sometimes I could not get beyond the face of the page, and I
would stop the effort and I would only doodle on a page, scribbling
what was sometimes poetry, and commonly scribbling what would
later prove the usefulness of nonsense.
It is no easy thing to go outside of the self but it is also no easy
thing to stay inside of it. One evening I dictated some pieces I
called imperfect equations, pieces I alleged.
Perhaps my favorites of these imperfect equations were, "Wis-
dom is selflessness accepting its ego," and, "Preconception is
death." Such things are only paper poetry, I suppose.
On those evenings when my mind ran black I would force
myself to sleep. In earlier years when that would happen I would
pour my tipple down my throat until I disappeared.
Wisdom is a bitter virtue, but it is wiser simply to force oneself
to sleep than it is to disappear altogether. Weariness has taught me
that pretty notion, and I am grateful for that weariness.
Frequently as I entered my cabin I smiled bleakly at the black
stampede as the cockroaches flashed from my sight. Our ship has
cockroaches as plentifully as any political convention has boastings
of a virtual morality, and always I found it impressive. I could never
determine whether they fled from me or from the burst of light.
Some of those roaches were as big as both of my thumbs, and
it seemed wasteful the gods has not devised some cuddly fluffy
roach-gobbler who loved to purr while its tummy was being tickled,
and who always smelled as if it has just been shampooed.
The doors to our cabins had locks, of course, but they all
responded to the same key. Sometimes I fancied it was just as well,
since I had left my clutch of Faberge eggs at home in my estates in
the Cotswolds, ha ha.
Sometimes if I left articles on my cot they would disappear, but
I did not much miss them. It was on my cot I left some of those
subversive paperbacks, and invariably they scooted off to do their
work on some hapless thief. Grief is meaningless to the immortals,
I surmised, but vengeance is good hard fun. Many a cabin has been
used as a trap, I guessed.
These rolling days were shreds of wonder, hallucinogenic.
Sometimes it dawned on me that I participated in something quite
special, inspired perhaps. In the distance on the cloud-capped ocean
I could almost catch sight of flaming dragons which fled as I
brought my focus upon them.
I was not unhappy.
Much time I spent in my office, counting among the numbers
in the ship's books. It was easy to sneak my better books in, and my
time was so easy I spent many long days just reading what I chose.
When together with the other men we chatted amiably abut tri-

238
fles, much as you do, and we gossiped hugely concerning the way of
the ship, concerning each other's idiosyncrasies. I could never trust
anybody who did not enjoy gossip.
And sometimes I would go visit the skipper, Captain Sanctuary,
in his comfy cabin, which was clearly the best cabin on board. His
books, I noticed, were mostly professional manuals, and travel
books by T.E. Lawrence, H.M. Tomlinson, Wilfred Thesiger. Curiously,
he had none of the books of those old sea voyages: if it is
not contemporary it does not exist, I supposed.
Because he was the Master, the Skipper, the Captain, his books
obeyed his will and did not fall from the shelves during turbulence,
and so they were placed neatly in no particular order I could discern.
I did notice that most of the blue ones were together.
Pluck, our Cook, obeyed and babied the Skipper, I noticed, and
sometimes brought him uncalled a choice bauble, or a choice snack.
But then Pluck was the soul of sweetness and generosity to everybody.
When he was a child, I thought, someone must have been
kind to him.
Sometimes when I chatted in the Skipper's cabin, Pluck would
bring us merely the simplest wedges of cabbage, and we would
thank him as garrulously as a landsman might thank a man who
yanks his daughter from the path of a train. This demonstrativeness
pleased everybody and was not just air.
Pluck's assistant, Knockers, kept the Skipper's cabin, as he
called it, "the spotlessest cabin on the ship." Knockers had the
knack of being invisible, and he was never there when I was chatting
with the Skipper.
This cabin was a livingroom, had nice chairs, his own little
stove, an aquarium that appeared to have nothing in it except for
water and a few rocks. From a stout brass hook hung a fishingnet
within which were glass fishingweights, I supposed, until I got closer
and saw they were half a dozen or so of shrunken human heads
such as an equatorial cannibal tribe might bestow upon an exceedingly
well-armed and assertive visitor.
They were small enough for cats to chew on.
Days rolled under us like stars.
Every seaman aboard appeared a superstitious fellow, as is cus-
tomary where people move among a vastness. Every seaman
watched the birds as if personally directed portents, sibylline commentary.
Commonly a man would lean against the railing above the
waves and would speak to his wife, and speak to his beloved dead,
a mother maybe, or a lover he has never known. Always this is a
communication with his god, spanning the essential silence, a testament
in aloneness. I do this, and so do you.
Tales would be told with unsaid endings, tails whose beginnings
and endings might be merely incidental. Glances would be used to
bring forth the bad birth, and a message would be passed like a
baton.
The winds rolled over us and all around us, mixing the air and
the water. The winds were a grim avalanche, and every dawning
brought us warmer as we came closer to the green belly of the
world. Our few chickens were long plucked, and our freezers were
running out of meat: mostly now we ate a flesh hot, salty, and fat.
I thanked heaven for Pluck's fresh veggies, his godsend.
My duties continued scantly.
The winds rolled over us like time pressing.
Some days I watched the sea.
The sea was comprised of individual tendrils flowing in cataclysmic
symbiosis toward a distance and from a distance, immeasurably.
The tendrils wreaked and wove in violent tapestry around
and through their neighbors and themselves, beginning and ending
someplace none can say. Every movement is a wrapping, and the
symbiosis strangles every participant.
Tree in every forest, and people on every space, and the grasses
of the flat plains, are equally wrapping, weaving, ripping, strangling.
The hidden limbs of the earth, those multitudinous veinings
that insinuate through every cubic inch, are equally wrapping, strangling,
pushing, forging forth.
It is too awesome a spectacle for folks to appreciate, to understand,
and to have inklings of, and so we believe ourselves discrete.
It is a single phenomenon.
Days follow days, as I watched this astrology of the earth which
was too profoundly vital and too immense to comprehend. And yet
I was permitted to be a witness.

240
And the days followed the days.
Doctor Equanimous and Captain Sanctuary, and I, many mornings
would visit the forecastle. Carefully the Doctor's fingers would
prowl through his clothing for little beasties, always he would find
some.
Captain Sanctuary and I were free men, relatively speaking, and
seldom felt the need. Bugs and insects had no use for us, and left us
alone, blessedly. Possibly we smelled bad, and what is a scent but the
promise of a taste?
Sometimes the Doctor would then suggest a variation in our
diet, and I suspect he enjoyed our tinned flesh as little as I did. Curiously
enough, the ship had no fishingpoles, so we improvised satisfactorily,
and always I prayed for tuna.
As you have observed, prayers are seldom answers in a voice
capable of being heard by humans, and commonly before too much
time had elapsed we had on board some one of Neptune's great
thumping steeds, and it would be wrestled and hammered and
spiked and gutted, and would get et.
Frequently this debacle occurred, and every time it did occur
each of us acted like it was a new idea freshly dropped upon us
through the winds. We played many innocent painless games to
beguile the tedium.
It is no wondrous thing that most sailors choose not to fish, for
on a long tedious journey it is kindest to oneself if any unnecessary
anticipations are avoided, and so sailors commonly prefer to eat he
same foods every day.
Endlessly the sailors watched the sea, and to common unimaginative
fellows it appears identical and meaningless day after day,
because it is a reflection of the mind. Eccentrically these men might
see the promise of visions and visitations, but they would see the
promise only, and never see the visions and the visitations.
The sea was only the sea, and it followed itself as it had preceded
itself, endlessly....
Days followed the days, endlessly.
Some mornings I woke to doleful yelpings, and I knew the
Skipper was thrashing his dog, Cerberus, and I knew he held in his
hands a sturdy belt and he held it by its buckle, probably, and his
mighty arms were swinging like the arms of a windmill, and blood
was not flowing, probably.
I do not believe the dog ever understood the excuses adopted
by Captain Sanctuary, nor could the dog have understood the function
of these beatings. Our Captain required such an outburst of
pent frustrations, as every beater does, and the dog's misbehavior
was used to furnish this outburst its door.
Finally the exercise would be done, and the dog would slink
away to lick his wounds and his balls, awash in self-pity and selfloathing,
and the master also.
What I intend when I mention the tendrilous configuration of
our individual humanities, and of every corollary existence, is that
we as the members of a species are extensions of our genetic lineage
or strandings which travel extensively throughout all planetary
lives. We are individual starpoints on these gyrating tendrils that
reach and grope through the millennia and the species of our cosmic
awakenings. We are spots on our genetic wanderings as the
galaxies are compromised beyond the reach of innocence.
This was true of the dog, and of the man also.
Our passing had become quite warm, almost sultry, and in the
evenings that great beating heart of the sun more coolly desisted its
hammerings. In these evenings, being rampant with leisure, we
would carry lamps and stroll the decks gathering flying fish for our
breakfast. Always we would gather, and the amiable Pluck would
later cook, enough fish for anybody who might want one.
Some of the men did like fish, some of the men wished merely
to ingest that nutritionally marvelous flesh, especially after the
nippings of the night before. Men who sleep alone, and men who
pretend to sleep alone, do tend sometimes to indulge at the glass,
and since, in this monstrous hulk of a ship, individual berths had
been provided for every body that might want one, such habits were
allowed to occur.
Women and men are head and hat, and civilization without
women was sufficiently difficult to achieve without burdening the
men with the humiliation of being observed continously. Thus, the
remarkable civility happening on the ship had been a choice deliberately
made by its masters. Everybody appreciated it, every day.

242
It was hot as we approached the tropics, and it was hard to get
clean. Commonly I would wake at six, to the sounds made by the
men washing the deck, using their massive hoses. This was my signal
to come clean.
Wrapped in a towel big as a bedspread I'd leave my cabin and
pad to the engines where a barrel had been filled with scald from
the boiler. A faucet had been rigged with a screen and I would stand
as the wash doused me. It was no easy thing not to shriek but I was
resolute in my civility.
Next, I would pad, or scamper, upon the deck and the hands
would blast me with those massive hoses as I rotated. Always this
would be to an accompaniment of jocular remarks by the hands,
and commonly these remarks were very indelicately jocular.
I remember once when Pluck, our cook, our enormously
great-bellied Cook, was performing this roundward ritual to a universal
glee, and his great belly was bouncing alarmingly, and the
men joked that he was pregnant with a baby elephant and that if
one looked very very closely one could see its trunk hanging out. I
suspected that Pluck had heard this joke before, once or twice, and
yet he understood his shipmates had no malice and he laughed
heartily along with his torturers.
"But can you see its ears?" one of them asked laughingly.
Played once, twice, or thrice, it was a good joke, and yet I suspected
it had been performed so frequently that its value as entertainment
had petered out somewhat.
One day the Doctor and I were arguing amiably about some
stupefyingly meaningless trifle, such as how much the earth would
weight if it were stacked upon itself, an identical object, and Captain
Sanctuary approached us and asked for our considered opinions
concerning when we might reasonably expect to see the coast.
Of course he was sharping us, since he knew that answer far
better than either of us did, but we played along. What it came
down to, of course, was that he bet each of us a pound of tobacco.
I had no more use for tobacco than a mouse has for a toupee,
but soon I had to buy a block of it from myself, the Purser. Our
Captain was a gambler.
As we entered the river estuary it was a new experience for me,
and that day it was as if I were experiencing two whole dawnings.
First, the sun rolled out from under us and the day began with an
appearance of lightfall, and then the liquid emerald of jungle rolled
its wild splendor into my view.
Of course at first I had the attitude of the immortals who only
watch our finite goings on, without deigning to be participants, but
with the passing of novelty I understood I was a participant. I was
no longer a tacit chorus.
I was grateful for this vision though I could not keep it. And
soon we anchored.
Soon, in tropical time, a launch bobbed alongside our ship, and
our political formalities began. The customs officer was a strutting
swaggering fellow, pretty and perfumed, confident as Valentino.
The Doctor and I proposed going ashore, and he hid his treasures
carefully, and he locked his door. I chid him for such an inhospitable
incivility and in my self-consciously superior civility quite
ostentatiously I placed my favorite huntingknife on my blankets and
my door ajar.
The Doctor patted my cheeks and said he loved babies. I was
monumentally unruffled and dignified, and I told him he was a sour
old fool.
We hopped aboard the launch and rode the mile of soft water.
Still feeling definably superior, I thought I handled myself excellently
like an old sea dog. I felt exquisitely graceful, from ship, to
boat, to dock.
White buildings were the town, with red roofs, and broadleaved
trees dropping with fruit. People were dark, and poached by
rains and sun. Noise was loud, the sound of rivers and of equatorial
emotions.
A Yankee hustler, scalawag or carpetbagger, invited us for quinine
splashed on gin, on his veranda. Some men live among their
individual days, and some among their decades, and some among
the millennia or so, and this man appeared to slide rootlessly among
them all.
He told us a story.
He told us to notice the jungle was watching and closing in on

244
us. It hedges everything, he said, and it closes everything, and it
knows.
He said that somewhile back an assertive little man came to the
town through the jungle, claiming he had found a cache left by the
conquistadors of emeralds set in patterns of gold. This assertive little
man wanted a mule-train to haul out his find. He was as unpleasant
as could be, and sorry to behold.
A man with a small man's complex is only slightly less unpleasant
than is a woman with a small man's complex, he said, and this
man had the additional misfortune of wearing a strawberry birthmark
across both eyes, resembling a dancer's domino, a coon's spectacles,
or Zorro's mask. And his skin was as yellow as an old manuscript,
with blackish splotches like burned holes. His attitude was
the white man's burden.
This man bought his mule-train and he struck back into the
jungle hoping to swipe the treasure from under the noses of the
cannibal tribe he said it belonged to. He was not heard from,
though a couple of years passed, or a few.
Much later a prospector came through the town, and he sat
swilling my gin just where you fellows are sitting, our tale-bearer
told us, and he drew a bundle from his bag, undid its covering of
leaves and showed me a shrunken human head he said he bought
for a song upriver. "He told me it must be a thousand years old, and
I saw that it had a curious discoloration about the eyes, like a coon's
eyeglasses and I said I doubted if it was that many days."
We sat there. The Doctor and the hustler and I, and we swilled
a drop of gin, each thinking or just feeling or, more likely, a little bit
of neither and both. I was in no land of soft green meadows.
In reciprocity, the Doctor began a tale. He said that many long
years earlier he had been attached to a party of explorers, mercenaries
really, and they were sent for money through the bush. They
had been told of a pygmy tribe, and a certain entrepreneur wanted
samples.
These little dolls had the best eyesight in the world, and the
healthiest, most robust tissues throughout, and a scientist in America
believed he had a solution for harvesting these rewarding parts.
Enough money was available to provide litigation and legislation to
make this business feasible.
An adult male would attain two feet in height, so they should
be easy to capture and to transport.
Where our maps led was in the distant bush, and no natives
could be found. It was as if a network of telepathy controlled the
land.
One day a white man stumbled into our camp and he was hot
with fever. He told us he and his party had been on the same adventure
we were on, and had found what we sought. In his bag was a
bundling of shrunken, or miniature, human heads, and they smelled
like mushrooms, faintly.
The leader of their expedition had run afoul of the pigmy
priestess, he said, and lay dying in camp. "How is he dying?" we
asked, and we were told he was in a tent alone. Voices were heard
from the tent, voices shrieking, arguing, and the singing of weird
songs in many voices raised sometimes athwart each other simultaneously.
And the voices would interrupt each other, speaking at different
speeds.
None were permitted to enter the tent, and the dying man
brandished his rifle toward any who attempted to cross the door.
And yet he begged for, and received, water and foods in great quantifies,
as if he were feeding an army.
Someone had slit an aperture in the tent and had watched as
their leader hacked at his body with a huntingknife, something like
great carbuncles was growing there, and blood ran, and his body
was covered with fist-sized bumps, and wounds.
Our man died, and we proceeded toward the camp.
Only one white man remained, and the bearers had gone. We
heard that cross-running chorus of screams and pleadings issuing
from the tent, and we entered the tent. The man was in, and he
appeared delirious. He was lying on his cot.
In one hand he held a bloody knife, and the floor was a welter
of little heads, and blood. I thought I could hear the echoes of an
agony. His eyes tracked us as we moved, the Doctor said.
Everywhere he had been heavily muscled were cicatrices,
wounds or scars, nearly round and the size of a fist. "I felt," the
Doctor said, "as if I were witnessing a thinning of the tapestry we

246
call the world of matter, and as if something was attempting to
force a passage through from the far side."
Fresh bulges were developing around his belly, and as we
watched two of them opened and small heads burst forth, about
the size of a man's fist. Their eyes were open, and the man on the
cot was watching them now, and they were watching him.
He screamed and with his dripping knife chopped and sawed at
their bases, their necks which were sliding forth from his body's
openings. The heads lopped and rolled.
He lay back, and shuddered as the third head broke through.
Their eyes were fixed upon each other's eyes, and had no room for
us. He seemed exhausted wholly.
Slowly the intruder slipped forth, past his neck and his shoulders
and farther. His eyes now swept the room, understanding
everything, and when my eyes met his I knew he remembered how
my mother had cooed to me when I was at her breast, and he
remembered, if that's the word, everything I had ever experienced.
Now his body was revealed to his thighs. It was anatomically
correct in every particular, and it was an adult uncircumcised male
perfectly. An umbilical cord ran through the genital pelt down his
left leg and disappeared into his host's body.
I thought of centaurs.
"What is a man but the shadow of his chains?" the homunculus
said to his host, who was lying in apparent resignation, waiting.
"You have betrayed a formidable obligation, and this results. Let us
return together," and both men collapsed.
The Doctor ceased his narrative, and again I thought truly this
was no land of soft green meadows, gamboling fawns, and sweet
music. Mozart was never here, observing Vivaldi past his steepled
fingers. This was Wagner country, harsh, unempathic, brutally innocent.
Once more we were in silence. Each of us pulled at his gin. I
did not know what to say, and somehow I felt embarrassed at
receiving such a tale. The Doctor saw that out new acquaintance
and I shared a difficulty, and he said, "Please forgive the indecency
of my manners. I appear to have the habit of indiscretion."
And we returned to our ship. Of course my huntingknife was
gone, thought he door was still ajar. The Doctor's door was still
locked.
With us, two Brazilian pilots climbed aboard, to guide us
through those dangerous waters to come. These men were not stoics,
but behaved as if life were an uninterrupted joy. They loved
being hotblooded animals where the sun was hot.
Going the river they chattered like Bedouins, remarking on
each tiniest spectacle, on this shadow and on that shadow, on this
floating twig and on that floating twig, on this bubble and on that
bubble, endlessly. This resembled an infantile chattering, to my cold
northern ears, and kept the thoughts at bay.
Every hovel we passed, every rubber-farm, had its own satellite
dish open to the messages of consumerism. These ears reminded
me of a gypsy's crystal ball, or Sauron's palantir, and they brought
into each acquisitive personality the insatiable carnival of moguls,
popes, and presidents.
The mosquitoes were as commonplace as was the human
riffraff we saw everywhere along the shores. We saw people in the
last throes of despondency, twisting into cruel caricatures of their
natural selves.
Our prime Yankee woman-damned man-damned goddamned
mogul, salesmen of presidents and popes, Daniel Ludwig, proprietor
of the Empire State's Building once brooding rapaciously in his
eyrie in its high eye-sockets, bribed and captured and butchered a
Brazilian land as big as Connecticut, razoring it until the bloody guts
washed down the Amazon into the sea.
Now along the riverbanks we witnessed the vestiges of his
error as it slunk toward the primeval ooze of its reentry. Creatures
of every tribe, race and species, slunk in consciously uncomprehending
agony from the eviscerated jungle homelands toward the
uncaring sea.
I was reminded of an innocent sailor boy who once stood
incomprehensible in bravery for his hanging. As an organism he
died as the hemp closed about his neck, and as he was raised (for in
a sea-hanging one does not drop), he was watched by his mates not
to squirm.
He did not squirm, of course, because this living organism was

248
not hanged: it was a dead man who was hanged, and he cheated the
hangman, and he cheated the hangman's masters most bitterly. He
did not win.
Weather was variable as we rolled up the sinking Amazon
against the tide of myriad floating islands of verdure, and alligators,
and half-submerged trees floating to the sea. Alternately we were
poached and we were floated out to dry, and bugs and insects kept
us company.
Mosquitoes were rampant.
As we moved the jungle receded like an ancient scroll fitly
rolling out its tale. We watched the rolling of its patterns, observing
the color of its weave.
The Doctor sat placidly in the deck shadows, searching an
immense tome about tropical diseases. I felt like a bait the jungle
decided to swallow.
Sometimes a canoe pulled alongside, and we would spin off
toward the land on a mission of discovery. We were shown a local
Stonehenge, and local immense sculpted heads, totem poles, burrowed
rings.
Once in an explorer's journal I had read of an anaconda sixty
feet long. The explorer's commentators did not dispute the figure,
because of the explorer's reputation. Commonly in the papers I had
read of a village being terrorized by a forty foot specimen which,
once captured and killed, was resolved into a twenty foot corpse.
The locals called this beast sucuruja.
From such canoes we purchased many fresh foods, including a
welcome variety of fruits, and many freshly killed birds.
Our cook, Pluck, bought a baby ocelot which immediately ran
up into that forest of bales and bundles to play with the rats. Everybody
knows that cats are bad luck on ships, and yet he bought it
anyway, and it was the cutest kitten I ever saw. I did not think it was
time to tell him that venerable joke, that one way to titillate an
ocelot was to oscillate its tit a lot, but I figured I'd get around to it.
I am a patient fellow.
Soon the kitten had the run of the ship and we became close
pals. One day I found a freshly killed rat on my pillow, but I just
tossed it overboard and turned the pillow over. I figured the flies
would find that blood pretty soon, so I washed the pillow and the
pillowcase the following morning.
One day we hauled aboard a businessman's herd of cattle, longhorned
beasts with thick necks. A crane was elbowed over the water
and a noose was dropped around the cattle's necks, one at a time,
and they were swung aboard. I'd guess there were maybe eighty of
them.
Every day on the river as I glanced along the riverbanks I saw
the villagers' livestock, and in the individual hovels along the banks.
Often pigs and chickens lived under the stilted dwellings, and goats
and llamas moved in the open spaces. Frequently the owners
cracked the forward ankles as a means of hobbling the beasts inexpensively,
and I could see the beasts stumping about on their two
and two halfs legs.
I was rattled by the sight.
But the jungle did not move in the clearings every night, and
the river was a jungle in itself. The sucuruja was not a phantom
from exaggerated myths, and piranhas and gators poked about, and
there were cats to marvel at.
Soon, so to speak, we were where the Amazon meets the
Madeira, and that is a broad expanse. The sun was reflected as widely
as it had been reflected when we were on the sea, and as sharply.
And yet by the sight of the jungle we knew this was a river and was
not the sea, as we rolled upward toward the Andes.
I fancied the jungle resembled a god who had appeared in our
dreams and had strengthened his powers of communication until
the dream dissipated and the god remained.
Floating island and half-submerged trees continued to pass us
in their escape to the sea. Wildlife rode on these moving lands.
Mosquitoes were prevalent. The Doctor said, "Here are mosquitoes
big enough to carry a man off," and he was not wholly kidding.
Every day every man took his quinine, in gin or not. Some
men neglected to tuck themselves securely in their cots, leaving a
gap in the netting, and they paid dearly.
The Doctor now fancied himself an entomologist, and he
asked me to help. "Some bugs bite and some bugs do not bite," I
told him, "and I prefer those bugs who do not bite."

250
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
DONALD ANDERSON'S fiction and essays have appeared in the North Amer-
ican Review, Fiction International, Epoch, PRISM International, Western Humanities
Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart
Prize and Best American Essays. In 1996, he received a Creative Writers'
Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Editor
of War, Literature

KIM JONES was born in 1944. He received his BFA from California Institute
of the Arts and his MFA from Otis Arts Institute. He has participated
in numerous group and solo shows throughout Europe and the United
States.
HEE JIN KANG is a photographer who lives and works in New York City.
She is currently working on a project about Asian-American women.
JULIAN LAVERDIERE received his MFA in sculpture from Yale University
in 1995. His work was featured recently in Experimenta Design 99, a Portuguese
biennal dedicated to material culture and design. He has exhibited
extensively and currently shows at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York.
DANIEL S. LIBMAN lives in northern Illinois, where he teaches English. His
fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and The Baffler.
WILLIAM LOGAN'S most recent book of poetry was Night Battle (Penguin
1999) and his most recent book of poetry criticism Reputations of the Tongue
(Florida, 1999). He teaches at the University of Florida.
GABRIEL NERUDA has worked all his life in timber mills and lumberyards.
Born in Vancouver in 1949, he was almost born in Sao Paolo. He attended
Chico State University, where he had the good luck to represent the liberal
forces of evil in a debate with then-governor Ronald Reagan. Though
he is short and stocky like a Spaniard, if you met him you'd think he was
a Swede.
JOHN O'CONNOR is a songwriter-turned-poet who lives in New York City.
His poems were chosen second and third place by Philip Levine in the
252 1999 Randall Jarrell competition.
MARIE PONSOT'S fourth book of poems, The Bird Catcher, was published
by Knopf in 1998 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award the
following year. She is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching in the
graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University, Columbia
University, and the Poetry Center of the YMHA in New York. Among
her other awards are an NEA Creative Writing grant and the Shaughnessy
Medal of the Modern Language Association.
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY'S poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The
Yale Review, The Boston Review, Chelsea, and elsewhere. Her first collection of
poems, Interior with Sudden Joy, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in
June 1999.
BRIAN TEARE is an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where he held the
1997-98 Lilly Fellowship in Poetry.
HEATHER WON TESORIERO lives in New York City. She is currently at work
on a screenplay and collaborates with Electrolex Multimedia Productions.
JOANN TfeACY's story, "Birthday," began when her husband set a twin
mattress out on the porch and it stood there for a month. She is now
working on a novel. This is her first time in print.
CAROL TUFTS teaches English and Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She
is currently at work on a first collection of poems.
REBECCA WOLFF was born and raised in New York City. She is the editor
of Fence.