Texas girl? Brando said over his shoulder, before turning back to the two girls who’d presented themselves to him like dinner mints. I threw back another shot, which scalded a little channel through me. The boys cheered. By the third shot, the tequila seemed less poisonous. By the fourth, I felt a cool blue moon rising in my chest.
Though I’d vowed not to drink that week (I had an anthro paper to finish), I’d spied Brando doing shots with his pals and wedged into the group. He cut me a smile before squatting down to unlatch his guitar case, and as he started to strap on the instrument, I saw in the case’s blue velvet bottom a weathered copy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, which felt like a further sign that we were carved from the same wood. That novel was one I innately knew to be unreservedly great, and whose first paragraph somebody started slurrily to recite:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
Next thing I knew, I was earping onto the frozen earth, then girls were steering me loop-legged to my door. Which was the end of that night and more than a few others.
Come Christmas, I caught a ride to Dallas, then took the silver bullet-shaped bus into the Leechfield station, where Daddy stood in creased khakis with comb marks in his black hair. The neck I threw my arms around had gone loose and leathery. For the first time, he smelled old. He took my duffel bag, saying, You could use a few pounds.
Passing through the greenish neon of the station, I felt time curve back, and us in it. The place seemed coated with chicken grease. Even the pinball glass was smoky. A man sat on his shoeshine box listening to a big transistor radio with a coat-hanger antenna. In his raised-up chair was a thin lady with conked hair slicked alongside her head.
Outside, Daddy threw my duffel into the truck bed. The door he opened groaned with rust, the hollow timbre of it tolling my arrival better than church bells. For five months, I’d ached to reenter a familiar slot alongside my fading daddy, but being there my mind went skittery as water flicked on a skillet. Even with the window open, the truck was redolent with Camel smoke and the goop Daddy used to clean oil off his hands with. There was a hint of cumin from a paper bag of corn-husk tamales from a roadside stand. And running under it all like current—what got him up in the morning and laid him out at night was the oak smell of wood barrels where whiskey soaked up flavor.
For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat. He put the upended lid in the ashtray, and before he handed the bottle over, he drew out a corner of his shirttail to wipe the top with, saying, Want a swig?
As a kid sitting on the bar, I’d sipped beer through the salted triangle of his aluminum can, but Daddy had so long and adamantly denied drinking every day that Mother had long since stopped asking. And he’d sure as hell never handed me any hard liquor.
Daddy’s wink echoed our old conspiracy: me and him against Mother and Lecia, whose tightly guarded collusions were traded in whispers and giggles that he and I were meant to stay deaf to.
The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.
As he went to screw the lid back on, my hand swung out of its own accord, and I said, Can I have another taste?
That taste started me seeking out more hard liquor once I was back at school, though drugs were still easier to come by even than beer. I did okay at old Lackluster College—in no way a star, but neither the abject flop I’d figured on. Daddy carried my grade reports in his ancient wallet.
But it’s a truism, I think, that drunks like to run off. Every reality, no matter how pressing—save maybe death row—has an escape route or rabbit hole. Some drinkers go inward into a sullen spiral, and my daddy was one of these; others favor the geographic cure. My mother taught me to seek external agents of transformation—pick a new town or man or job.
That’s why I left college at the end of my sophomore year: I just got this urge to run off, maybe because friends in a band were heading for Austin. Or all the rich kids were going abroad. Or maybe the course work was getting too hard, and I couldn’t face losing my scholarships and reentering the hairnet. I floundered and skipped classes that winter till, shortly before finals that spring, I just stopped showing up.
Over a hotfudge malted with Walt at the corner drugstore one afternoon, I tried to make my slapdash bailout sound like a literary escapade prompted by a lack of funds. I’d get some writing done while working to save up. Then I’ll come back, I told him—though I intended no such thing.
Shirley and I have been talking about that, Walt said, his long spoon scraping the muddy fudge from the glass bottom.
And you’ve decided to donate a million bucks to me, right?
If we adopted you, he said, the college would have to let you go to school as a faculty child gratis.
I lowered my spoon. Stunned, I was, and touched. They’d never fall for that, I said.
I think they’d have to, Walt said, signaling for a check. Shirley talked to a lawyer friend of ours.
Lifelong, I’d been trying to weasel into another tribe. Back in my neighborhood, I was shameless about showing up on people’s porches come supper, then sprawling around their dens till they kicked me out. Wrapped in a crocheted blanket on a hook rug with the game on and the family cheering around me—digging my grubby hand into their popcorn bowl—I could convince myself I was one of them. A few times it almost surprised me when I heard the inevitable sentence: Time to go home, Mary Marlene.
Fishing for his wallet, Walt explained how easy it’d be. He and Shirley had talked it over, and even the kids were all for it. His youngest boy had asked whose room I’d sleep in.
Would I have to change my name? I said. Somehow that would seal my betrayal.
I don’t think so, he said. Or you can petition to change it back.
The sun was warm on us through the plate glass, and I stared at the door, wishing with all my might that Daddy would come striding through to lay his claim. He’d shake Walt’s hand all nice, saying how he appreciated it, but—he’d squeeze my shoulder—he just had to keep me.
The truth was, if it helped with money, Daddy would sign me over in a heartbeat. I was the one who couldn’t bear legally lopping myself off from an upbringing I was working so hard to shed.
So I lied that it would hurt my parents too bad, the same way I used to tell those neighbors I horned in on—right before I figured they’d throw me out—that I had to rush home for a curfew that didn’t exist.
Well, think about it, Walt said. We were at the register by then.
How’ll I ever pay you back? I said.
For what? He limped back to leave a bill under the salt shaker.
All these lunches, dinners, jobs….
You’re not gonna pay me back, he said. It’s not that linear. He pushed open the glass door, and I stepped into spring air.
When you’re in my place, you’re gonna pick up some kid’s check.
The idea that Walt was deranged enough to envision me in the position to buy somebody lunch was maybe a bigger vote of confidence than the adoption offer.
When I asked him to drop me at the health service for the sore throat I couldn’t shake all spring, he said, Maybe it’s just hard to say goodbye.
I whipped around so he wouldn’t see my eyes fill, since I was dead sure I wouldn’t make it back up there.
But Walt never took his eyes off me. During the time I gypsied around, feebly trying to establish a base, he stayed in touch. No matter where I had a mailbox, his letters sat inside.
Which is maybe why—months after working retail down in Austin—I came back to Minneapolis, where a friend knew a glitzy restaurant where I could bartend.
Even there, Walt showed up with other professors to eat the bar’s crappy sandwiches. He always left a book or two or a concert ticket, an article on dream research or memory—subjects he knew I kept up with. He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
4
There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz
People should like poetry the way a child
likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
—a letter by Wallace Stevens
In the dim realm of that horseshoe bar, I was boss, credibly lying to wives and business partners who phoned in that my patrons were not in fact sitting before me hours on end, imbibing. Such lies kept my tip jar stuffed. Plus compared to those guys—with their car wrecks and one-night stands, their lost families and jobs—my occasional blackout or sidewalk pukefest was bush league.
Binge drinking disagreed with me in no way. The hangovers that haunted the other restaurant folk tended to spare me. Or the ones that did knock me out gave me an excuse to bail from ordinary commerce and loll around feeling resplendently poetic. I drank less steadily than some kids my age (twenty-one), but now I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent. Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow.
Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement.
But humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid. Showing up at a normal job was too hard.
Who knows, maybe I’d still be straining martinis from a silver shaker—it was a nice joint—had I not bought a ticket to a midwestern poetry festival so debauched that it couldn’t survive even the extremely low bar of acceptable behavior back in the 1970s. Down the dorm hallways, marijuana smoke hazed lazily. At readings, bottles of syrupy wine were passed around. A poetic Woodstock, I told Mother it was on my call home, regaling her with the circuslike atmosphere she’d have been inspired by.
I actually saw living, breathing poets. Back in high school, I’d fallen in love with the visionary antiwar work of Bill Knott, who’d become a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax. After collecting rejection slips, he’d wound up sending a mimeographed note to America’s poetry editors, saying something like, Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin. The allegedly posthumous poems came out under the pen name St. Geraud, a character in an eighteenth-century porno novel who ran an orphanage and sodomized his charges. The grotesque humor of the endeavor won me over, particularly when Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia, which—it took me a while to puzzle out—referred to masturbation after death.
Knott lumped up to the stage, a hulking bubble of a guy in sweatshirt and pants he might have rifled from a dumpster. His heavy black glasses—worn in a wire-rim age—were lopsidedly held together in the center by bandaids. His fair hair hung in unwashed strings. He drew a poem from a wrinkly paper bag stuffed with pages, and after reading a few lines, he said in a disgusted voice, That’s such shit, stupid moron Knott, asshole. People laughed nervously, looking around. He wadded up the page and tossed it. The room roared.
That’s pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes.
At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn’t get public grants, but this guy really can’t do anything else.
When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.
I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I’d not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.
In our town, the only bookstores sold gold-rimmed Bibles big as coffee tables and plastic dashboard figurines of Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession.
As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot…
Then social mores had intervened. A distinct scene from junior high flushes vividly back.
Girls sitting out of rotation volleyball in gym class stared at me all gap-mouthed when—of a rainy spring day—I spouted e. e. cummings. Through open green gym doors, sheets of rain erased the parking lot we normally stood staring at as if it were a refrigerator about to manifest food. The poem started:
in Just-:
spring when the world is mud-
luscious…
As I went on, Kitty Stanley sat cross-legged in black gym shorts and white blouse, peeling fuchsia polish off her thumbnail with a watchmaker’s precision. She was a mouth breather, Kitty, whose blond bouffant hairdo featured above her bangs a yarn bow the color of a kumquat.
That it? Beverly said. Her black-lined gaze looked like an old-timey bandit mask.
Indeed, I said. (This was my assholish T. S. Eliot stage circa ninth grade, when I peppered my speech with words I thought sounded British like indeed.)
Is that a word, muddy delicious? Kitty said.
Mud-luscious, I said.
Not no real word, Beverly said, leaning back on both hands, legs crossed.
I studied a volleyball arcing white across the gym ceiling and willed it to smash into Beverly’s freakishly round head.
It’s squashing together luscious and lush and delicious, and all of it applied to spring mud. It’s poetic license, I said.
I think it’s real smart how you learn every word so they come out any time you please, Kitty said.
Beverly snorted. I get mud all over Bobby’s truck flaps, and believe you me, delicious don’t figure in.
As insults go, it was weak, but Beverly’s facial expression—like she was smelling something—told me to put poetry right back where I’d drug it out from.
Shortly after this, my junior high principal had actually warned me that any girl aiming to be a poet was doomed to become—I shit you not—no more than a common prostitute. And so the fantasy went underground, though in high school I’d still hitchhiked two hours to Houston to buy (coincidentally) Bill Knott’s first book, which gave me the dim hope that somewhere, a solitary madman knew just how I felt.
Sitting before a living, nose-blowing Bill Knott made all my writer heroes real. It shot voltage through my own poetic leanings, and inside me, some image of myself as a black-turtleneck-clad poet came creaking back to life. The festival must’ve had fifty or sixty podiums, and behind every one stood a poet with a teaching job and a book to offload. They were real, and their ranks looked open.
But how to get there? The small U-shaped bar I tended started to feel like a locked corral I needed to jump out of, but which way other than just not here.
At the same conference, an unlikely first teacher showed up—a rusty-handed Mississippian named Etheridge Knight, whose debut book had been written in the pen. He was lumbering and black, with a scraggly mustache and a soul patch under his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink—ragged and tear-shaped, as if acid flung in his face had eaten away his color. He spoke of poetry as an oral art (this was pre-
poetry-slam America). Without pages, he half-sang the folk tale of Shine, a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to safety.
the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck
with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck
screaming Shine Shine save poor me
and I’ll give you all the pussy a black boy needs—
how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive
but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive—
And Shine swam on Shine swam on—
This language both rocked me back and echoed how Daddy talked. I mean, if he thought I was persisting in something I couldn’t get done, he’d say, You keep trying to thread a noodle up that wildcat’s ass; if he thought somebody was poor, He couldn’t buy a piss ant a wrestling jacket.
Back in Minneapolis, I took the low-tipping day shift just so I could rathole my notebook by the beer spout and scribble.
Crazed to see my name in print, which would prove poethood, I mailed to hapless editors work bad enough that—in retrospect—I’m surprised the rejections didn’t come with a cyanide pill. One snotty bastard commented solely on my failure to hit the space bar after periods and commas. If you could bring yourself to use standard spacing after punctuation, we would find it most helpful.
Two nights a week, Etheridge held a private poetry workshop at his house, charging young writers like me a pitiful hundred bucks to sit for four months in his living room while he conducted our discussions from the sagging trough of a chenille armchair.
The green and imploding house he shared with his poet-wife, Mary, and their two kids (adopted from Africa back when it was odd) stood out amid the tidy tract houses. Everything about Etheridge’s place was off-kilter. The roof sagged. One gutter was untethered. The front screen door hung from a single hinge. Inside, the wood floors buckled as if frozen mid-earthquake. Add a few cypress trees, a front-porch glider, and a hound dog, and the entire tableau could have been picked up by tweezers and used as a set for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.