Mary, a smart, curvy blonde from Oklahoma, drew paychecks as a social worker plus writing and fighting against apartheid, but even if she’d cleaned from dawn till dusk, I believe that from whatever spot Etheridge occupied, chaos would’ve spread out like kudzu vines, for he was an addict of the first caliber. Allegedly sober, Etheridge ran his own beer-and marijuana-maintenance program. While he spouted lines from Dickinson, he kept a forty-ounce of Colt malt liquor between his knobby knees.
Back then, in magazines like The New Yorker, stories were mostly about ex-Yalies wearing deck shoes. (Ray Carver was about to change all that.) By contrast, Etheridge lectured wearing a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue. He turned his plaid house shoes into slip-ons by stepping on their backs. The Free People’s Poetry Workshop, he called us.
What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don’t do it, dog. The stuff I was fighting to avoid sometimes slipped out in vague disguise: a kid raped, a lost father, a woman on the shock treatment table. But because I refused to use sentences—just strung phrases willy-nilly—nobody understood it anyway. The word cerulean, I believe, was used.
It’s experimental, I argued to the baffled readers arrayed on Etheridge’s furniture.
It’s in-fucking-comprehensible, he shot back.
Still, the first poems of mine that ever saw print were sent out under Etheridge’s aegis, in envelopes he paid postage on. Thrilled to see my name in type, I told my pal John, who’d wallpapered his bathroom with high-class New Yorker rejections. His response? Just as there’s a woman for every man, no matter how ugly, there’s a magazine for every poem.
Etheridge’s blessing also helped me to snag a job as a poet-in-residence for the city of Minneapolis, the most dubious post I ever held. The city had scrounged up some grants to promote the arts. Some fifty or sixty poets and painters and dancers—hell, we even had a mime, the Mime Laureate of Minneapolis!—got hired to do…well, what?
We weren’t sure. It was the seventies. Enrich the outer landscape.
Why they hired me, I can’t fathom. Age twenty-two, I maybe lied that I had a degree, and I did boast in the interview about three community teaching jobs, two of which were fibs: I’d filled in for a pal working with seniors at the Jewish community center. There I’d befriended a stately holocaust survivor who showed me you could live like an intellectual whether you were in school or not. He loaned me a translation of Dante’s Inferno, which I left on a bus one drunken night, baldly lying it was stolen—what mugger says, Hand over the Dante!
Walt and his wife also hooked me up running a weekly class for severely disturbed kids, but I couldn’t handle it. A few months in, I’d had to restrain a psychotic girl in my lap, making my body a living straitjacket, crossing her arms across her chest and wrapping my legs outside hers. Ten and bird-boned, she was. I never went back.
My real teaching job involved a group home for fairly functional retarded women. Once per week after their factory piecework, I showed up with a canvas tote bag of poesie. Only a few could read a little; others just signed their names—the vast majority, not even. They spoke their poems while the staff and I wrote them out. At the end I’d read a handful, then type them all up to copy and pass out the next week.
To say the women changed my life may be a stretch, but only just. I’d been worrying the bone of whether to go back to school for poetry. Or what? Sell kisses at the train depot? Some days all I did to be poetic was wander the public library in black clothes and muddy lipstick. Hell, I’d even moved to England for a spell, tramping around the hills looking at sheep and daffodils. How to go forward was otherwise foggy.
Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety.
The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the Church of Poetry.
That first day I stood at the window of a dayroom looking down as the bus disgorged them. Shedding their coats and the clasped-on mittens that flapped from their coat sleeves, the women bumbled out. They dropped hats or pencils or keys or lunch boxes. One trying to find the end of her scarf turned around in a circle like a slow-motion cat chasing its tail. This halted the women behind her, a few of whom bumped into her and each other.
As staff people herded them in, I felt my armpits grow damp. The faster ladies spilled into the room around me like kids lining up for a pony ride. A flat-faced woman with the severe and snaggled underbite of a bulldog stood introducing herself with a handshake before she sat. I’m Marion Pinski, she said. P like Polack Pinski. She wore a brown beret flat atop her head like nothing so much as a cow pie.
Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls’. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they’d been grown underground. It’s a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.
Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me. Looking at her, I felt smart all of a sudden, also lucky. You could talk these women out of their bus tokens. Still, glad I’d dodged the bullet they’d caught almost implicated me in their handicap. (At the time I saw only their difficulties. Now I also marvel that they could with verve hug an individual they’d just gotten off the bus with, and that total strangers shampooed Katie’s red hair and rubbed lotion on her freckled arms.)
I started off with Pablo Neruda and a thinly disguised Neruda imitator. Good poem vs. cliché. The staff people had warned me the ladies could get distracted and bored, but the Neruda snapped them to attention. Walking Around begins, It so happens I am sick of being a man…I am sick of my hair and my eyes and my teeth and my shadows…At one point he says,
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
Kill a nun! Katie Butke called out—whether in outrage or enthusiasm, I couldn’t tell. The poem ends with wash on the line from which slow dirty tears are falling.
Once I stopped, there was a collective sigh, like the pneumatic sound of an engine giving up. A big silence held us. Then applause broke out. Feet were stomped. A few ladies got up to hug each other again. If there’d been pillows, they’d have all started whacking each other.
What did the guy feel who wrote it? I asked. Every hand shot up, but Katie Butke slapped the side of my boot. I pointed to her.
Happy? she said. A few ladies agreed. But a forest of white hands kept flapping.
The recalcitrant Marion Pinski crossed her short white arms across her front, but I called on her anyway.
The shirts, she said in a murmur. The shirts are crying. Sad. The shirts are dirty. The shirts didn’t get washed right. The shirts are crying. The man doesn’t want Monday.
We broke into small groups, and as I copied down their words, they marveled at my pen’s passage across the lines. That’s me? a lady named Dawn asked, touching the letters. That’s my name?
I kept a copy of the poem Katie Butke wrote that day. It’s called Monkey Face. Every poem Katie wrote was called Monkey Face—a phrase no doubt imprinted on her in ways I hate to think about.
Far away St. Paul
People like robots
Wash their tables
Scrub the floor
Bored things
Washrags on the window
Put it away now
Look at your leg
Tie your shoe. Look
At yourself. A monkey.
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One line of Marion Pinski’s still pricks me with fresh envy: I get to dance with the deep boys and the day boys. (A Buddhist friend would later tell me that Marion was a bodhisattva sent to show me how comical my artistic pretentions were.)
When I gave a local poetry reading—in addition to the Minks and a few local writers—the women came on a bus, and Katie Butke leaped up, shouting with a gospel singer’s conviction, You a monkey face. (To date, my truest review.) They clapped wildly after every poem. Katie Butke even stood up a few times, taking an operatic from-the-hip bow.
The unchecked emotion they embodied was exactly what Etheridge was trying to drag out of me for my poser’s pages. It drove him crazy how I’d stick in fancy names and references I thought sounded clever.
Etheridge used a pen to poke the fedora back on his head. Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now, why is a little girl from Bumfuck, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche—kicking and screaming—into this poem? Like you’re gonna preach. You ain’t no preacher, Mary Karr. You’re a singer.
When I bristled that I’d been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that’s all you’re telling anybody. What you took in college. You’re pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know.
But according to you, I don’t know squat.
Your heart, Mary Karr, he’d say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don’t. Or won’t.
He wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you’re standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up?
This prospect of actual readers flattered me less than it scared me. He kept pushing me to go back to school. Also, long before seeing shrinks helped me to reconcile my warring insides, Etheridge fought to import Daddy onto my page. In one poem, he picked out some feeble old guy whose hands shook as he tried to bait a hook and said, Your old man’s knocking on your door, and you won’t let him in.
Etheridge spoke to the pool-shooting, catfish-gutting, crawfish-sucking homegirl I was trying to squelch.
Such an unlikely savior. Etheridge sometimes banged on my apartment door at three a.m., trying to mooch money for dope. Mary once caught him in the bathroom—with his kids in the next room—a hypodermic in his jugular.
He talked to me about this new kind of graduate writers’ program in Vermont—low-residency, they called it. You show up a few weeks at a pop, twice per year, for lectures, readings, workshops, intense tutoring. A poet tailors a curriculum with you, and for six months you mail manuscripts and papers he or she works over. What did I think? It was either bogus, or I’d never get in.
Meanwhile, I cobbled up an experiment with the ladies to see whether the poems I brought had sunk in at all, for the scene was part spelling bee, part revival meeting. Each week, I’d pit two poems against each other, a great poem and a crummy one. With an accuracy that rocked me back, they’d boo the crap stuff, then hallelujah the Yeats. Walt talked me into keeping a running tally to see how consistent they were, which I did on an index card taped to my closet door. Over two years, some 80 percent of their choices were as good as most book critics’. Even hard pieces by Stevens and Apollinaire, they’d go crazy for. The sole exceptions? If both poems were average or okay, or if one poem was plain speech and one ornate—in those cases, no predicting what they’d go for.
At the symphony one night when Shirley couldn’t go, Walt pressed on flaws in my method, asking, Any way you’re swaying them?
You mean I’m unintentionally signaling them somehow? I said. Maybe intoning the gorgeous ones in some hyper-approving way?
The violins were tuning up, the different bows trying to find the same note. It was that instant before a concert when I always wanted to bolt, because what if I didn’t like Beethoven, which I’d never heard? Maybe I should beg off and say I’m feeling sick. At home, I could make a hoagie and turn on the tube, rather than stay captive in an overheated hall in a seat that made your legs sweaty with a stranger on one side hogging your armrest.
Walt’s face had that expectant air, though, he maybe knew the music was so magnificent that even a plebe like me could hear it. He said, Let’s say the women do have some innate taste, despite lacking any analytical tools they could articulate. What’s that mean, you think?
I can’t remember how I said it—and we both knew I cared too much about the outcome for my little test to pass as science. I told him I wanted to believe in quality the way I had as a kid, when a great poem could flood me with certainty that there was something good in the world. Or somebody out there knew who I was even if we’d never met—or never would meet. Which made poetry one of the sole spiritual acts in our mostly godless household. Just because the ladies never went to school didn’t mean they couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven and The Hokey-Pokey. Awe was okay with them, possibly their natural state. No really crap teachers had ruined their native taste by preaching what they were supposed to like.
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.
Which was what the symphony did that night for the first time, me sitting alongside Walt while the soft timpani mallets with the dandelion-puff heads banged loud enough for the dead, deaf composer to rouse from the distant German dirt.
Afterward, Walt and I didn’t say much, just walked through the parking lot exhaling steam with the crowd, everybody’s eyes glancing in opposing vectors, brushing off each other but meeting, too, with that soft recognition you have after being drenched awhile by the same orderly chaos. We were like swimmers walking out of the sea. Every ten paces or so, headlights flipping on would turn shadow figures into full-fledged human units. Unlocking the car, Walt brought up my half-assed experiment again, saying, How’re you sure you know which poem’s best?
I slid inside, saying, I just do.
Which—ignorant though I knew I was—the ladies had proved to me in some way. And the next day, at Walt’s urging, I sent away for that graduate application.
5
Never Mind
You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.
—George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”
My first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears.
Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems.
Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time.
Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims.
Your complicated mother. Your absent father.
We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still.
Tell it again.
In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife.
Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her.
Usually, my daddy does that with a cleave
r—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding…
You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings.
Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy.
Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night?
We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble.
For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves.
I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray.
Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about? Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head.
Once when Walt met me for lunch, I asked if these nonalcoholic blackouts were definite proof I was crazy. Just tell me straight, I said, upending the sugar canister into my coffee. Don’t hold back.
The brain sometimes has a hard time incorporating certain memories, he said.
I liked that he talked about it in physiological terms, to make it feel less like me, more like a car we were staring into the engine of.
So it’s not me—just my brain?
Are you your brain?
Don’t try to trick me into learning something, I said.
Your level of functioning contraindicates serious mental illness.
Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life.