The Atlantic’s Survivalist Problem

Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails.

The survivalist problem is the US Marine Corps Scout Sniper School problem. You’ve expended an immense amount of time, energy, and resources to be prepared. You’ve made personal sacrifices to become engaged and proficient in a wide range of highly practical, exclusive, hard-to-acquire skills. And you’ve done this in response to something that seems more or less inevitable.

You’ve been taught that there’ll be a cataclysm, a collapse, a threat, a danger to life, to loved ones, to the social order, even to the political abstraction that raised you and put a gun in your hand. And you’re convinced that you’ll be called on, possibly by superiors, but certainly by circumstances, to begin pulling the trigger.

Maybe so. But what the trigger will feel like before, during, and after you pull it remains to be seen. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just have a sense. There’s a vague blur, somewhere in the indeterminate future, hiding exactly how it’ll all play out. But you know something’s bound to happen. You feel the weight of it bearing down, emerging from the fog of cultural spite, social tension, and violence you read about every day in the news. Something’s got to give. We can’t go on like this.

And maybe, though in the light of day you’d hesitate to openly admit it, you want hell to break loose. Otherwise, what was all that planning for? Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails. Train someone up to do a thing and it becomes their raison d’être. Place a gun in someone’s hand and the fingers will close.

As Mendes’ Jarhead puts it, “If you are lucky, in that window will one day emerge . . . the figure of the enemy. The JFK shot. The pink mist.” If you’re lucky, fate will one day conspire to fulfill what has become your reason for being. The unlucky ones are sometimes called “preppers” in the sense that they are always preparing, always in a state of frustrated training and unfulfilled belief. But you—one day luck may smile on you in a moment of satisfaction: the pink mist, the apocalyptic moment, redemption, validation.

Apocalypticism has a long history in the United States, closely associated with exotic forms of Protestantism, then skewing into UFO abduction cults and transdimensional disembodied reptile prophecies from ancient Lemuria. But it’s all of a piece. Mythologies and reasons can be goofy, can emerge from a Star Trek cargo cult as easily as from an established religious body, because the survivalist problem isn’t about reason.

It pretends cause and effect, but it’s really just emotion, often with an opportunistic subtext. Interestingly enough, the highly trained 22-year-old with a Mk22 Mod 0 Advanced is also fairly low on syllogisms. His trigger’s greased. 7.62mm. He doesn’t have to think about it. He’s just having certain feelings while he waits for the word.

The survivalist problem is also the media problem. The first USMC Scout Snipers go back to 1943, but the media problem goes back to at least 16th-century Venice with the first avvisi. The survivalist problem likely began as early as the rise of agriculture and got markedly worse with the Industrial Revolution. But the DNA is always the same: the existing order is corrupt, immoral, lost, and there must be a purification—messiahs, flagellants, fire-and-brimstone preachers, broadsheets, social activists, op-eds, Atlantian ghost masters, and angels of vengeance notwithstanding. The Big One’s coming. We brought it on ourselves. See page B-5.

So it’s not surprising that The Atlantic, a publication named after the lost city as much as the ocean, is trying hard to regain some of that sweet Trumpian dread that goosed up their readership back in 2017. They seem to have resumed publishing unapologetic apocalypse pornography in spite of the Biden Administration sedation. Now that Trump has returned and is performing electroshock on the federal bureaucracy, The Atlantic’s back to prepping with a quickness, the only thing left being some sort of culmination, some apotheosis of all that frustrated desire.

Aziz Huq’s “America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State” (originally “A Warning Out of Time” in the print edition) is a fair example. Huq is a solid writer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, something he mentions in his second paragraph, and his op-ed exudes a kind of spectral reasonableness in spite of the fact that it’s built on a thin historical parallel with the rise of Nazi Germany.

When he declares that Trump is trying “to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules,” he’s too canny not to immediately follow with “By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis.” Ah. Good. I was worried for a moment that we’d descended into Man in the High Castle.

Still, he continues, “it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism.” Maybe or maybe not, depending on how transparent Professor Huq wants to be about the inevitable legal firestorms at the state level contesting the validity of these executive orders.

For example, Washington state is currently trying to prevent the implementation of an executive order to end federal research and education grants focusing on gender affirming care. For the time being, the Western District of Washington has enjoined the enforcement of the order and thereby prevented the federal government from acting on it in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Colorado. The court system isn’t asleep. The legal system is designed to prevent executive overreach and is, in fact, doing that. The courts have received a certain amount of voltage. And there is no sign that this is going to subside anytime soon.

Huq’s facade of reason collapses when he overstresses his historical parallel: “it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.” Now we really are in Man in the High Castle.

How we got there in two paragraphs after “but this is no Weimar collapse” is a bit mysterious, but here we are—along with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s “Americans Are Buying an Escape Plan: Is it time for a second passport?”, Russell Berman’s “Musk Comes for the Third Rail of American Politics,” and Timothy W. Ryback’s, “What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler: Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a ‘Little Man’ whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.”

At first glance, we might conclude that the magazine has a Hitler fetish. But it’s just the survivalist problem in an SS uniform. The Atlantic is yearning for the pink mist. The trigger’s greased. The figure of the enemy has emerged. They’ve been prepping for so long. Now they’re just having some feelings and waiting for the word.

 

No Such Thing as a Free Basket

Every morning on the way to my office, I walk past the business school, which is built like a hilltop crusader fortress, replete with battlements, a machicolated inner wall, turrets, crenelations, and arrow-slit windows. Somewhere inside, between accounting and management, there must be a dragon and a mountain of gold.

Headshots of rich and influential graduates flutter around the outside. They’re all smiling. Day in and day out, this becomes unsettling. Sure, it’s part of the business school’s self-promotion (you, too, can be this smug if you study here and make a load of money), necessary marketing perhaps because an MBA typically offers less concrete knowledge than a BS in peace and conflict studies or a semester at sea and because there is not, nor has there ever been, an education requirement for entering most business careers.

To make money, you have to be good at what you do. You do not need a certification saying that you are. You can get that peace and conflict degree, study basket weaving for 15 weeks in Spain, and still join the firm. But no disrespect: management courses surely have things to teach (I took some and learned a thing or two) and to become a certified professional or para-professional in the business world, like a CPA or a project manager or a contracts specialist, you do need the piece of paper. Ergo, the fortress, the pictures, the smiles.

Lots of smiles. They haunt me. One woman in particular has a grin that radiates a kind of dark energy. By any estimation, she seems attractive and smart, but that grin says, I’m clever and, not only that, I’m crooked. More importantly, I’m richer than you. Richer than thou. Richer than god. Study here, my young apprentice, and together we will discover many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

By the time I reach my office, I often find I have to cleanse my aura if I’ve allowed myself to notice that woman’s picture. Bring on the crystals and the sage. I also think about the sullen post-adolescents sitting in their cars along the street—not the shitbox deathtraps my friends and I drove in college, but SUVs, Teslas, Audis, high-end Accords with factory tint, and occasionally a Beemer or a Benz paying homage to the classics—cars that have been bought for the children because no 20-year-old can afford a $43k Tesla 3 in freshman year. Maybe their parents studied crusader management in the fortress.

What are these sleepy, sour-faced kids thinking as they stare at me through their windshields? At least some of them have to be considering the cost of things. How could they not? The cost of their education (having been lectured many times by dad that money is found in crusader castles, not growing on trees), the cost of their sweet ride, the cost of messing around the way they did two years ago in senior year, opportunity cost (when I was your age, I was in the Army and look at me now—what you need is self-discipline, son, not a cruise to Costa del Sol), maybe the lab fee for Basket Weaving 210. Everything costs money. Even money costs money. No such thing as a free basket.

I have no doubt that more than a few of them are picturing their own faces up on the battlements, smirking down at hapless students with all the condescension of success. And even more than the implications that flow from our illustrious school of business, that’s what gives me pause. What does a post-adolescent undergraduate know about what she wants for the next 20 years? For that matter, what do any of us know? We know what mom and dad have drummed into our heads (if we’re even that lucky) and we often fail to understand that they know about as much as we do, which is to say, nothing.

At some point, if they’re solvent enough to buy that new Tesla 3, they did what they were told and got rewarded for it. But what is the nature of such a reward? What does it mean? We know what we’ve assumed along the way. Sometimes, we know or think we know which educated guesses have worked out and which ones haven’t. Usually, we’re blind, expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and hopefully doing our best.

When I was as young as these kids, I had a friend named Chris, who came from a family of classically trained musicians. He, too, had a gift for music and was getting ready for the long uncertain life of the creative artist with an all-consuming vocation that might not earn him enough to buy lunch at Taco Bell. He also had a wisdom that, compared with the insight of most college kids, seemed far beyond his years. Once, he said to me, “Some people get exactly what they want. The rest of us become philosophers.”

I’ve been smiling at that for almost three decades. It’s funny and absurd, especially in the exasperated, road-weary way he said it. Now I’d laugh and say, shit, kid, last year you were a teenager. Try to have a little fun before you say something like that. But I wouldn’t deny the evident truth of it. Though, I might modify it a little after all my years of philosophizing: some people get what they want; some people don’t get what they want; everybody becomes a philosopher. Because I got everything I wanted in my 20s and I’m still asking what it all means.

Just don’t make me go to business school in a fortress. By the time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop, I am, once again, infused with the immortal wisdom of Guitar Slim: “The things that I used to do/ Lord, I won’t do no more.”  Preach, brother. For me, it’s not about what I wanted back then. It’s not even what I want right now. Because I acknowledge that I have no actionable grasp of what the world is.

I only have subjectivities and assumptions. I see through the filter of my memories, beliefs, and preferences, many of which are subtly irrational. I try to do the best with what I think I know and keep in mind that, because my knowledge of the world amounts to existential spit and bailing wire, anything other than humility is a failure state.

So you have to be good at what you do. But how do you know you are? Are you making money? Is that the metric? Maybe. Maybe not. When you look in the mirror, who looks back? Do you have any idea? Maybe. Maybe not. Do you even know what you don’t know? The ghost of Donald Rumsfeld was here just a moment ago and said there are unknown unknowns. I believe him. I’m taking it on faith.

AWP in Ten Exotic Fruits

The guy who sold a superhero script to Disney was giving a talk in the Jabuticaba Room. The topic was whether superhero scripts were still commercially viable. The consensus was that they were not. The consensus was also that a superhero script optioned by Disney could pay the rent for up to three years in west Los Angeles if one lived frugally. The crowd appeared very amenable and the speaker was loud and effusive. It seemed like this was the most exciting thing he’d done in a long time. He told jokes and a few people laughed. A knot of MFA professors sat together, sipping the free coffee, looking on with blank expressions. It was the first event of the last day of AWP.

The aged lesbian who’d written a dystopian novel about gang rapes on a subterranean moon base was hosting the Mangosteen Awards Ceremony for the year’s top 30 writers under 30. It was called Mangosteen’s 30 Under 30, which had nothing to do with gang rapes on a moon base unless one wanted to think in very abstract terms. It was being held in the Tamarillo Auditorium and was listed at the top of the programme.

The important thing was HBO had adapted the moon base novel into a three-season series. Everyone wanted to know: how did this happen? How did she get an agent? How did her agent get an agent? How does one sell a novel to HBO? How does one sell a novel? Could I sell a novel to HBO? Could I sell you a novel to sell to HBO? Where is your agent’s assistant? Could she be sitting somewhere in the Tamarillo Auditorium right now? Are we in the Tamarillo Auditorium or are we somewhere else? Who are you?

The third top writer under 30 received her medallion at the podium and began to speak about her literary influences. She wanted to thank her mother and her fiancee, Matt. She wanted to thank Mangosteen Magazine for this award and for saying we see you. She knew she wanted to be a writer at age three, when she wrote her first short story. It was about a young girl with impostor syndrome. Moon Base broke in, said thank you and now we need to move on to the next medallion recipient. The third top writer hesitated, looked at the audience, then sat down in her folding chair.

The fourth top writer was called. His name was Durian Miller. Extremely pale and thin with spiky carrot-orange hair, he leaned into the mic and spoke directly to the first two rows, which appeared to be fellow students from his MFA program. They cheered like a high school pep rally. He wanted to thank his girlfriend and someone named Parcheesi. Or maybe his girlfriend was named Parcheesi. He’d already published a chapbook with Operose Press and wanted to congratulate them for going all-in on his recent short novel, The Whitest Tooth. He wanted to thank his agent for believing in him. His agent was also his mother, but she was his mother before she was his agent. He grinned and the first two rows clapped and hooted and called out, “Durian!”

Then came a pause for refreshments. Smokers over the age of 40, ineligible to receive a medallion from Mangosteen Magazine, shuffled toward the exit. A few others dashed past them. Neil Gaiman had been sighted in the bar across from the convention center, which created some anxiety. How long would Neil be there? Would there be time to approach Moon Base, ask her about HBO, and still catch up with Neil? There were 26 more top writers to go.

There was the panel discussion of nature writers who were now or had once been high school English teachers. It was held in the Tamarind Business Plaza, two blocks south of the convention center. This was an older crowd. The event was not well attended. Multiple glasses of water were drunk. There were many thoughtful, perhaps mordant, pauses in which panel members and the audience seemed to turn inward and ask themselves how it could have come to this.

A gray-haired panelist named Jacob spoke haltingly about his creative process, then stopped in mid-sentence and sighed. Someone at the back of the room began a phone conversation. But, because it was a small room, everyone present came to understand that the dog had gotten loose and the wife had been driving around the neighborhood with the kids calling its name. Its name was Salty.

The large woman to the left of Jacob had her hair in a thick braid that ran over her shoulder and coiled in her lap. She spoke slowly about the ecological conditions in western Paraguay, the Gran Chaco dying because of social media, her brother-in-law’s stomach cancer, and the rise of fascism.

Salty had not been located. Did you look in the park? Not that park, the one by the rec center. I know it’s getting dark, but you’re going to have to walk around. Tell the kids to stay in the car. I know they’re upset. IT’S NOT MY FAULT THAT THIS HAPPENED WHILE I’M GONE, CHERYL.

Someone said Neil Gaiman’s giving a reading in the bar across from the convention center, but the audience didn’t react. The woman with the braid had moved on to systemic racism Canada. Rare earths pillaged from Africa. The organ trade. Tibet. Birds killed by wind farms on the Central Cordillera. No one had the energy or the inclination to interrupt her. She did not speak about writing. People were constantly returning from feeding parking meters along the street.

The closest bar was the one where Neil Gaiman was supposed to be reading. It seemed probable, even necessary, that after this everyone would go there. Not for Neil but for solace. The parking meters would need to be fed along the way.

Back in the convention center, there was a different reading scheduled on the Jackfruit Mezzanine. Poets. Poets but actually MFA students who’d written poems, calling themselves poets. Well, that’s what they were, right? If you write a poem, doesn’t that make you . . .

A young woman had printed business cards. They read, L. B. Hannaker, Writer & Poet. They had a Gmail address and blog URL. Nice paper. Embossed. Would make a good bookmark. Could you let me have a few more? But L. B. was already across the room, still handing them out, smiling directly, if only for a moment, at every recipient. Blond hair. Big blue eyes. You’ll go far, my child, one thinks and then berates oneself for unconscious sexism. Of course she won’t go far. She’s a poet.

She’ll go as far as the podium to read something called, “My Grandmother’s Hands.” After that, she’ll read one entitled, “I Loved You In Sadness.” A knot of MFA professors will look on with blank expressions—except for L. B.’s poetry professor, Kyle, wifeless for the duration of the conference, who’ll give L. B. a loud, standing ovation. The other MFA professors will slowly turn their heads and look at him.

All these things will come to pass like dust in the wind, like blossoms on the cherries, the cherries of fate, the cherries of consequence, perhaps mistaken for salak in denser climes. Called “snake fruit,” salak have a scaly exterior that suggests snakeskin. They grow in Malaysia, Sumatra, Indonesia, Thailand. They’re a fruit-lover’s fruit the same way J. K. Rowling was once called a “writer’s writer.” But who called her this? Maybe a literary journalist, trying to stir something up. Maybe someone on a low-level pop-culture site, prospecting for clicks. J. K. Rowling is the snake fruit of the publishing industry. Once the darling of emotionally stunted grownups who liked to dress like English boarding school children outside Harry Potter movies, she’d become a pariah due to her political statements on social media. She was not invited to AWP. Still, there was a rumor. She’d arrived with her security detail at nearby hotel. There’d been a protest in the lobby. Arrests. A group of anti-trans-exclusionary furries. The donkey punched the puma in the face. A large rabbit was also involved.

Still, still. The important thing was that J. K. Rowling had a new book in spite of the controversy and a Potter TV series. The important thing was: how did this happen? How did she get an agent? How did her agent get an agent? How did she get stinkin’ rich? Can I get stinkin’ rich? Can I at least make enough to live in west Los Angeles for up to three years? J. K. Rowling, the salak of our times, might know.

People snuck out of the convention center and went looking. They slipped away from the “Creative Non-fiction for Social Justice Symposium” and the “Is Moral Fiction a Thing of the Past or the Future” address. They redirected their questions from Moon Base to Rowling because, after all, Rowling was richer and more famous than Moon Base. The world will never know whether Kyle, L. B. Hannaker’s poetry professor, was actually one of the furries arrested in the lobby, perhaps the man-sized pink lemur.

The last thing, the continuous thing, was the book fair itself, a noni of possibilities, lumpy, green, and undeniably pungent. Despite its smell, noni is highly valued for supporting the immune system. And so it was with AWP’s central book fair, more convention than conference, each booth containing a pocket dimension of dismay and prevarication, desperate glad-handing and perspiration. Walk around that noni and grow stronger.

This is where the business cards that say “Writer & Poet” really start to flow, where the indy press people, in their raggedy T-shirts and jeans, affirmatively and regularly remind themselves not to grind their teeth because, after all, they don’t have dental. It’s where you can walk the length of the floor, looking at new books, magazines, and literary journals from all over the world and not feel interested in any of them, everyone smiling but not wanting to smile, everyone passive-aggressively sharing contact information, eyes wide, thinking about the future or lost in the past.

At the end, the rumors about Neil Gaiman were revealed to have been started by the owner of the bar across the street. The reader was Neil Greenman. But by then, nobody gave a shit. Everyone just wanted a drink. The juice of the rambutan with four shots of soju. The devil’s soursop, a margarita of despair. The last night of the last day of AWP is when the healing could begin, but even that had a price. And Salty was still missing.

Oda a Frank McCourt

Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Frank McCourt,

he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas . . .

Working at a state university provides certain unasked-for pleasures, certain unwanted fringe benefits, and a wide assortment of things you thought you’d left behind a long time ago, not unlike drinking turned wine instead of putting it in the compost. Why do you do it? You’re not broke anymore. But you have various poor-person habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. You don’t throw the past-date wine out. You drink it or it’ll go to waste.

Likewise, you know better than to have idle conversations with students dressed in black in punishing tropical humidity outside the big humanities building. But you have certain adjunct writing instructor habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. 87% of your digestive system knows better, but the idealistic 13% that’s still refluxing with teaching takes an interest. You don’t avoid an inevitably stupid and pretentious conversation. You start right up.

Oh, you’re MFA students? Fiction writing? I was something of a fiction writer myself a long time ago.

Working Monday through Friday in the admin wing of an academic department far removed from anything you studied, before you got old and late-stage adolescents stopped taking you seriously, adds an unmistakably robust bouquet with fruity secondary notes. But striking up conversations with grad students who actually are in your field—which should be a better experience but isn’t—finishes with a mouthfeel of straight vinegar. You meet Eden and Zan and speak to them about their writing program. You know you shouldn’t, but you do.

It’s hard being the sort of person who can find meaning in anything. Zan explains this when you ask him why he wants to be a writer. He snaps it out, the elevator pitch of a theater kid, which is what he was before he arrived to do a master of fine arts in creative writing. He smiles, condescending and awkward at the same time. He asks what you’re studying and you tell him you aren’t. You’re an admin in Obscure Social Sciences Related Department. Ah. He smiles again and puts his arm around Eden, who has the same smile, though perhaps slightly meaner, and gives off tentative girlfriend vibes or lost soul with boundary issues vibes. Because you are old, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Makes you think of something Harry Bryant says to Deckard in the first act of Blade Runner: “You’re not cop, you’re little people.” In that noir retroclone cyberpunk world, Bryant can back up his elitism with violence. In the insecure incubative MFA world, Zan backs it up by continuing to smile while meticulously rolling a cigarette. You’re a university admin office drone? You’re little people.

College kids these days don’t really smoke, which is why he does. Eden doesn’t, though. Her thing is just staring intensely at you over his shoulder until something happens.

Nothing’s ever going to happen. You ask if their names have always been Eden and Zan or if those are stage names or pen names. Zan says he doesn’t like being limited by personal history.

You notice Eden has a very thin ring through her septum and you try not to look at it. Every other student seems to have one. It’s not so edgy. It’s like a tramp stamp or various pronouncements etched on the upper arm, almost compulsory now. E Pluribus Unum. To thy own self be true. In loving memory of the world’s greatest grampa, Leonard Johnston, 1958-2020. Brad Is My Love. The Truth Hurts. Sure, sure, don’t be a jerk. She might have technicolor Foghorn Leghorn playing a harp on her inner thigh but she’s got the soul of a poet. You’re just old and cynical.

She does have Foghorn Leghorn on her thigh. Or a menacing chicken wearing boxing gloves who looks a lot like him. But you’re not staring at the nose ring. So don’t even start with the thigh. Let the kids smoke and sweat like they’re supposed to and tell you about how much meaning there is in the world.

You make things worse by asking what they’re reading. He’s reading the Marquis de Sade’s stories. Because of course he is. She’s reading We Were Liars, a YA horror novel. Zan asks what you’re reading and in a flash ofpreventive insight you say, “Spreadsheets, mostly.”

He expects something like that. Or, “Nothing. I don’t read,” which would also have been acceptable in the grand calculus of the little people, the wee folk up in some administrative office, who putter about in a haze of Obscure Social Sciences Related data. Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, ye Schweinehund. Cast ye them not. Nay.

She says she’s reading Angela’s Ashes in her narratology of memoir seminar and it’s cool because Frank McCourt was, like, 60 when he published it and then he won the Pulitzer. You say you think he might have been 66, not 60. And she looks at you.

But who gives a shit about Frank McCourt? “Not I,” said the cat.

The March of Dimes

I went to the west side to see Moth, but the girl who lived on his back porch said he wasn’t in and she didn’t know when he’d be back.  I said you’ve got to be kidding me.  She said, “Wut?”  So I paused a second then told her she’d be seeing me again, which scared her.  She thought I was about to shoot the place up or some other awful thing.  Good, I thought, serves her right.  I don’t like to be put off by some back-porch girl who spends all her time laid up and stoned in the heat.

I didn’t know how Moth got his name.  He probably didn’t know, either.  And I wasn’t about to bring it up.  If I’d had time to bring up the old days and names and stories and the legend of King Arthur and shit, I wouldn’t be wasting it on Moth.  I had other things to talk about, like my $1500 running a weekly 30% vig for, oh, I don’t know, maybe the whole time he was on the boat in Alaska trying to scrape up the jack to pay me off.  Now I put it around $10gs, which I thought was very merciful.  It doesn’t get more merciful than that.  Moth should have been more appreciative.  To be honest, he should have stayed in Alaska.

$10gs was nothing.  I could toss it in the fireplace.  That’s not why I drove down the block, did a U, parked under a tree, and waited for the girl to put out the light.  I could see the back of Moth’s house, a little yellow square in the dark.  Then it winked out.  I figured they were in there, running around like headless poultry, packing and cussing, scared to death that any minute I’d start blasting the windows.  I didn’t even own a gun at the moment.  I owned a card room downtown.  I wasn’t some hard case.

It was a humid Missouri evening, the kind that makes you feel dirty 10 minutes after you shower.  Everything had a smell.  It got so hot in Hauberk one summer when I was a kid that I had to sleep in my dad’s car every night with the windows rolled down.  Of course, that didn’t do much good.  To this day, most tickets in and around Hauberk, MO, are probably earned by people who don’t have working a/c in their cars and have to maintain a certain speed just to breathe.  It was hot like that.  Dense air.  Like I had a fever and was about to go out of my mind.  But I knew what I was doing.

I started the Impala and rolled down the street with the headlights off.  What did Moth expect me to do?  People were already laughing, calling me “ATM,” Mister Free Money.  So he runs to Alaska.  Then his lowdown sister shows up with a suitcase full of weed and tries to settle his debt because she and her family don’t like it that Moth’s up in the frozen north, on a boat with a bunch of fellow ex-cons, pulling nets in the dark.  Well, that was truly a shame.  I told her to go sell the weed and bring me some cash and in the meantime not to let the door hit her on the way out.

The things people will do to get out from under their own bad decisions never cease to amaze me.  I knew a guy just like Moth when I lived out in Montana.  He used to be a bible camp counsellor every summer with a trunk full of booze so he could invite the older girls out to the parking lot.  Once, he locked himself in a park restroom at midnight and I had to drive up to Whitefish with a crowbar.  Got fired from a solid night janitor position at the university for stealing.  Like that.  Always thought he was the cleverest person in the room and was always wrong.  Make enough of those choices and stupid becomes your way of life, if you can call that living.

I never wanted to be the guy who swept up or lifted crates.  It’s like Henry Ford once said, if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.  When I bought the card room, I definitely thought I could.  I was done for good dispatching at Starlight Cabs.  At least, I thought I could avoid having to work every waking moment until I died like my old man back in KC.  But Moth and a few other regulars just like him were fucking it all away.  Pretty soon, I’d have to buy another gun.  I didn’t want to.  But I’d have to just to survive.

Rolled up beside them in the street, Moth and his girl, and didn’t say anything when I powered down the window.  She had a stuffed camo duffle bag with little rollers on the bottom.  He had a backpack and a vinyl briefcase that looked like it had been fished out of a dumpster.

I said, “Hey,” and they both jumped about three feet.

“Oh, hi,” Moth said.  “I was lookin’ for you.”

“Yeah?”

He had the appearance of someone who’d been shot out a cannon into the middle of the desert and had to walk all the way back.  Leathery.  Bony.  Bald on top with curly mane down the back to make up for it.  Not a lot of fat on Moth.  And he didn’t look much like a moth.  More like a dude who’s been poor for a long time, who likes to tell himself stories about how it’s made him smart and hard.  Sure.  He must have just run out of the shower because even in the half-dark of the streetlight I could see his mane dripping.

“Yeah, Marty.  Serious.  I just got back from work.  Gotta go back right now.”

“At the garage?  You going on a business trip at 7 on a Saturday night?”

“Well, you know.”  He grinned.  “All work and no play.  Ain’t no rest for the wicked, am I right?”

Back-porch girl looked down.  She had a blue-black dye job, bobbed and sprayed since last we spoke, and it looked like she was now wearing all her clothes: jeans, possibly multiple sets of underwear, two flannels, some kind of blouse under those, maybe some T-shirts.  She’d put on lipstick, too.  International travellers, they were.

“That’s for sure.  No question about that.”  I turned on the headlights.  “Why don’t I give you a lift?”

“That’s really kind of you, uh, Marty, but we were heading out for a bite first.”

“I’m hungry.  I could eat.”

They looked at each other.  The girl opened her mouth and Moth glared like he was about to slap her silly.  Then she looked down again and he broke out in a wide, friendly smile.

“That’d be grand,” he said.

But you can’t do simple things with a felon.

We went to Flapjacks, which was open all night and therefore packed with the degenerate bar crowd.  We ate some waffles and eggs without saying much.  The girl, who’s name I learned was Corgi, kept her eyes on the table.  She didn’t order anything.  She just took little bites off Moth’s plate.  I wondered if that’s how they did it at home and decided, yeah, probably.  When we were done, I picked up the bill because I’m a classy guy.  It made Moth shit himself that much more.

I’d parked out behind the restaurant in the dark.  And walking back to the car, I could feel Moth’s anxiety—like he was weighing the odds of running as fast as he could across the highway into the wheat field on the other side, like what were the chances he could get away before I ran him down with the car and put a bullet in his neck.

Corgi was inside using the bathroom.  But not really because I saw her out the corner of my eye take an immediate detour toward the pay phone in the restroom hallway.  Flapjacks had one of the few remaining pay phones in the state of Missouri for all kinds of reasons, none of them good.  More deals were made on that pay phone and then completed in the dark lot out back than you might expect now that the restaurant had an alternative vegan menu.

Given the usual clientele, I couldn’t imagine who’d want a vegan menu, but times were changing.  After five pitchers of Blue Ribbon and some shots, maybe you want a gluten-free hemp short stack while you wait to hand over a jacked Honda out back to some methed-out hillbilly who runs a chop shop in Muskvane three counties over.

Maybe you have to let him get a kombucha spritzer first.  It’s beyond me.  Probably a Generation Z thing.  I don’t actually know what gluten is.  Regular food is supposed to be pumped full of it and that’s why your dick falls off at age 50 or something.  Pretty soon, someone like Moth will be selling gluten in baggies out behind Flapjacks.  But tonight, we sat in the car and waited for Corgi to finish her pretend bathroom business—probably just her trying to call one of Moth’s associates to come out and fuck me up.

I asked did he want a shot and he said, “No,” all low and ominous.  And I said, “Okay, well, I want one.  I got a bottle in the trunk.”

He didn’t say anything.  I got out, real nonchalant, went back, and popped the trunk—but not so wide that I couldn’t see the passenger door open just enough for him to slip out.  Now we’ll see, I thought, and got the bottle of Four Roses I had back there in a paper grocery bag.  But I didn’t notice Moth running for the highway.  So I put the bottle down and grabbed my crowbar instead.

When I walked around the Impala, he was already standing by the driver’s-side door, pointing a little .22 automatic at me.  It gleamed in the headlights hissing down the highway.  I could see Moth’s eyes and I heard him shout, “Fuck you, Marty!”  Corgi gasped somewhere off to the side.  And then I hit his arm as hard as I could with the crowbar.  The gun went off with a pop.  Then Moth was on his knees, cradling his arm.

“Fucking shit, Marty.  I think you broke my arm.”

“Sorry.  Was that you trying to kill me a minute ago?”

He explored the break with his fingertips and moaned a little, which I could hear, even over the constant truck traffic on the interstate.  Then he said, “You know a little piece like that can’t do shit.”

I stood over him, kept the crowbar ready by my leg.  Because: Moth.  And I hadn’t seen where the gun went in the dark.

Corgi came up, wiped her eyes, said, “Please don’t kill us,” which made Moth cuss until he started coughing.  He ordered her into the Impala and I helped him up by his good arm.

“I don’t got your money,” he said.

“I know it.”

“Then—what?”

“We can’t go on like this, Moth.”

He nodded, cradled his broken forearm.

“Your sister tried to buy me off with a valise full of weed.”

He nodded some more.  “That was my idea.”

“Stupid.  I don’t take it out in trade.  You know that.  This ain’t the March of Dimes.”

He kept nodding.  “But I don’t see how else to square up.  And it just keeps gettin’ bigger.”

Moth was right.  He was in the hole.  He wouldn’t be digging himself out.  And there was a line that would eventually be crossed—maybe it already had been—where I’d have to make an example out of him or I’d never hear the end of it.  Everybody and their brother would try to cheat me.  Eventually, the business would go under and I’d be done in this town.  Like I said, the money wasn’t really the point.

“Well, you got any savings, things you could cash in, favors people owe?  Can your sister borrow some just to get you out of the hole?”

He shook his head.  Nothing like that.  “I could hit some stores.  Maybe get a little scratch.  Do some deals.  There’s these tweekers up in Moon Town doing a lot of biz.  We could go fuck ’em up.”

“We?  With that little gat of yours?”

Moth leaned against the car, wiped his forehead with his unbroken wrist.  “I got other items I could use.”

But he could see I didn’t like that idea.  And his eyes kept drifting to the crowbar in my right hand.  I didn’t have to explain that this was his problem and that I didn’t intend to start walking around in a Born Loser T-shirt with “ARREST ME” on the back.

“Okay,” he sighed.  “I guess I better figure something out, right?”

That was right.

But then he turned around and looked at Corgi, sitting in the front seat, staring at the endless, red, back lights rocketing through the night toward Tibadeaux, Senneta, Scroton, Muskvane, and on to Hermitage, Bolivar, and eventually Springfield, like a stream of fireflies.  There was no telling what a girl like Corgi might be thinking at a time like this with men like us.  Maybe she wasn’t thinking anything at all.  Maybe that’s what put her here in the first place, in the front seat of my car, while Moth tried to weasel out of this.

“You like her?  You think she’s worth a little grace?”

A sixteen-wheeler thundered by and, for a moment, Moth’s frown looked strobed in white.

“I’m not saying everything,” he added, quickly.  “Just a little grace.”

I nodded and a look of relief passed over his face.  “Okay,” he said.  “Okay.”  And he slipped into the driver’s side.

I could hear him in there shouting at her.  She was crying, saying something.  And then I think he slammed her forehead against the dash and things got real quiet.  Then Moth got out, said he’d be in touch, and made his way around the corner of Flapjacks, still cradling his arm, no doubt to go use the payphone inside.

I found the .22 about a few feet away on the ground.  I must have hit Moth’s arm harder than it seemed, but that was appropriate.  I knew he’d pull some shit.  By the time I moved the Impala around to the front and got some ice from the skeptical cashier lady, who’d seen it all a million times and looked over the register at me like she was Miss Cheryl at Window 4 of the DMV—Oh you hurt your foot, did you?—Moth was long gone and Corgi’d stopped crying.

I had the ice in a paper napkin and told her to press it on her forehead, which she did without comment.

“I think Moth just sold you to me for a grace period on his debt.”

She didn’t have a comment on that, either.  I positioned the car facing the bright side of Flapjacks.  We stared in for a while and watched the bar culture wolf down waffles and ice cream sundaes or maybe tofu ham substitute and spirulina crepes.

“So I guess I belong to you, now,” she said.  Dull voice.  Dull eyes.

“Why were you with him anyway?”

“Dale traded me to him for a turntable.  Dale’s a musician.  He’s super good.”

I shook my head.  “You’re worth more than a turntable.”

“Dale didn’t think so.”

That was the truth, her truth.  Before Dale, there was probably a Randy or a Stu or a Ronald or a Bobby in some unbreakable lineage back to whoever once passed for dad.

“Can you waitress?”

“Never tried.”

“What can you do?”

“Did some dancing.”

Ah.  “Well, since you belong to me now, there’s a woman named Gabby at the card room I own, who handles all the money, and she’s going to teach you how to serve people drinks.”

She looked at me as if I’d said we were going to worship snakes at the bottom of a well.

“Okay?”

Corgi put the ice back on her bruised forehead.  “Okay.”

“And you can stay with me.”

She nodded slowly.  Of course.  This is where she figured she’d be putting in the real work.  That wasn’t how it was going to be, but there was no explaining that to her.  Girls like Corgi are all show don’t tell.  Show me the money.  Show me there’s a lock on my door and you won’t be coming in there in the middle of the night.

Well, there was a lock on my daughter’s old room, now a guest room, but really a store room.  Before she left me the final time, my wife, Sonya, said I should put my moose trophy in there because at the time I was big into hunting and she hated it.  Then she added I should go fuck it.  I hadn’t fucked my moose trophy.  And I didn’t plan on fucking Corgi, either.  But I was going to have to lock her in.  Because maybe she wanted to know there was some kind of barrier between us.  She needed to feel like I wasn’t going to go in there at 2 AM and make her pay the rent, but I needed to feel she wasn’t going to cut my throat in my sleep and rob me blind.

That little lock my daughter wanted, when she became an embarrassed teen and I was still out all night dispatching cabs for a living, was going to keep things nice and calm.  Because Moth still owed me.  Because I had to be able to get my beauty sleep.  And you really cannot do anything with a felon.

I pulled out of the lot and got on the interstate.  We were almost to my house in east Hauberk when Corgi said, “Moth’ll be back, you know.”

“I’m counting on it.”  I grinned.  She frowned.  And that’s how I got my first waitress and moved her in shortly thereafter with Gabby, who needed a roommate.  A waitress needs drinks to serve—why I eventually applied for a liquor license and turned the card room into a mostly drinking establishment, which improved my overall mentality 100%.  And it’s how I eventually met certain public officials who led me into the business I’m in today.

But at the time, I was just trying to do something maybe not so bad.  And this girl, named after a fluffy poodle-dog, with ice on her forehead, kept looking out at the lights of the houses of Hauberk going by, maybe thinking about Dale the super-good musician and his turntables.  And I was thinking about Sonya and the giant taxidermized moose head currently staring up at the ceiling of my daughter’s old bedroom.

And yes, I knew Moth would be back, but I could not have foreseen that he’d try to shoot me a second time and that I’d beat him so severely with the crowbar that he’d be released from the hospital to a facility up north and I never would get my money.  But yesterday is only a dream.  And tomorrow is only a vision.  And in-between we try not to shoot each other or let our regrets become unmanageable.  At least, that’s how I try to live; though, it doesn’t always work.  Then again, what does?

Dark Passanger

Marketing isn’t the root of all evil.  But, if evil exists, marketing’s probably involved.  And, for creative types trying to survive in a world generally hostile to their values and intentions, marketing can serve as a kind of anti-life navigation system, offering a thousand opportunities to sell out and ten-thousand more to destroy oneself.

Marketing also keeps the lights on, puts food on the table, and may even allow an artist to run a convincing simulation of normal life if she’s very lucky and not overwhelmingly stupid.  It’s everywhere all the time.  We engage with its principles, its ubiquity, on a daily basis.  This is why, as writers and artists, we often don’t like to talk about marketing or even acknowledge it exists.

It’s a great servant but a terrible master.  When we’re honest, we’ll admit it’s usually functioning as the latter not the former in our lives.  It’s an invisible presence everywhere we go, our dark passenger, the demon elephant in the center of the room that we can’t bear to look at but around which everything else moves.  Like this paragraph, marketing runs on clichés, uses clichéd logic and clichéd sensibilities to transform art into commerce.

Marketing sees creative works in terms of units, thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the greatest novels ever written because of its sales figures, considers a velvet painting of a dolphin under the moon superior to van Gogh’s Sunflowers due to consumer research in China and data from post-menopausal office workers who can name every Kenny G album in order of release.  Marketing has no taste.  It’s crass, often dumb, and worships the bottom line.  But I couldn’t say these things yesterday to a group of fashion design students in their early 20s.

I work in an academic department that houses a fashion design merchandising program.  And sometimes, because I’m an old, often befuddled, straight white guy who looks like he found his wardrobe jumbled up in the “Men’s Bin” of a dollar store, I stand out to post-adolescents who want everything to be cool, edgy, beautiful, and, above all else, culturally relevant.  In a perfect world, we’d never speak, since explaining the arcana of fashion to someone like me would be tantamount to explaining the physics of a bicycle to a cockroach.  But, for better and worse, we don’t live in a perfect world.

In this one, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with the interesting, friendly fashion design professors, who are always willing to answer my questions about what they do.  And I’ve even had a few conversations with some of the less insecure and fragile program undergraduates—who no doubt took down their dolphin wall art last summer; though, mom probably couldn’t bear to toss it and put it back up in the den.

What I am able to say to these students (especially since they are not my students) is very limited.  As for the question of whether it’s possible to lead a creative life and also make a living at it, I do not talk about the amount of suffering that normally entails.  I don’t tell them to enjoy these years because art school (of any sort) is a beautiful opportunity for them to focus exclusively on their creative work without having to labor in a basement and worry about food stamps.

I don’t point out that getting a college education is tantamount to buying time and that, even if they aren’t on student loans, they’re on existential student loans.  They’re staking years of their lives on a gamble that these studies are going to mean something.  Unfortunately, many of them seem to be waiting around to be told what that something is.

There are no answers, I could say.  There aren’t even questions.  There’s only time and space, what you want to do versus what you have to do, and the attendant marketing.  But these are the ideas of someone who’s been working in a creative field for almost 30 years—not a 22-year-old in a fashion program worrying whether her top is culturally relevant.

As Hemingway writes in “The Capitol of the World,” about the young Spanish waiter who gets killed while pretending to be a bullfighter, “He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions.  He had not had the time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end to complete an act of contrition.  He had not even had the time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.”  That’s a perfect expression of what I saw in my recent conversation with four fashion students—they haven’t had the time to even understand that there are things they don’t understand.

It’s perfect except that I hope they live to somehow broker a peace between their illusions and the harshness outside their university incubator—if only because, like the young man in Hemingway’s story, they’re beautiful, noble, and so very ignorant in seemingly equal proportion.  And who doesn’t love that combination?

I also went to art school.  For me, it was an MFA creative writing program close enough to the black sun of the Manhattan publishing industry that the amount of status anxiety, absurd catty competitiveness, Machiavellian exploitation, desperation, and self-marketing (which, at times, seemed more like a highly intentional, entrepreneurial form of prostitution) met and exceeded anything I’ve seen in these fashion students.  That’s good, I suppose.  But, like a spouse, maybe you tend to get the person you deserve.  Nobody’s innocent.  If you marry a good person who can stand you, it means you did something right.  If you go to an art school that doesn’t kill you with marketing, maybe you’ll be okay.

There’s only time and space and how you choose to spend it.  I wish more people would choose to spend it making art.  I wish fewer people would spend it worrying about marketing themselves and whether they’re going to be able to get married to someone beautiful, travel to new and exotic locations, make their parents proud, attain true and lasting happiness, and be famous all before the advanced age of 30.  But maybe I haven’t had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.  I’m not trying to be a bullfighter.  I know what life is all about.  Right?

I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write.  And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it.  We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared.  People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated.  Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss.  We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!”  Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul.  He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen.  Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me.  But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford.  And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable.  One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar.  That’s bullshit.  You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves.  So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’”  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock.  Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you.  Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul.  I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared.  I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am.  The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me.  It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation.  I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings.  Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage.  Nothing.  No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation.  You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work.  There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions.  Turn up the amp.  Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right.  Too bad for you.  You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

Happy Birthday to Me and a Bunch of Ruthless Killers

Regarding certain meaningful coincidences in time.

The grand synchronicity of life is at all times mysterious. This morning, I slept in, as I usually do on my birthday, and I woke up around the time of my birth, which in this zone, comes out to be 6:10 AM. I’ve done this as far back as I can remember. Why does it happen? There’s a secret here that I prefer not to dismiss in terms of subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition because it’s more satisfying to think like a poet than like a reductive psychologistic materialist. It’s my birthday and I can engage in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and irrational, intuitive, a priori assumptions if I want to.

I subscribe to the Poetic Outlaws newsletter. So, of course, the poem today was “Growing Old” by Matthew Arnold, in which the author describes the subjectivity of aging in melancholy terms: “It is to spend long days/ And not once feel that we were ever young.” To this, I must respectfully answer, “That is complete bucket of tosh, Mr. Arnold.” Still, the synchronicity of receiving such a poem today is palpable and I should at least celebrate Matthew Arnold for wishing me a ghostly happy birthday.

But what is synchronicity? I’m using it colloquially to indicate ostensibly disconnected or only slightly connected events that seem to correlate in a surprising way. Deciding to sleep in and waking up at the approximate time of my birth on my birthday is curious. Perhaps it is simultaneously more and less curious that it seems to happen this way every year.

Receiving a poem by email the same day, entitled “Growing Old,” is even more curious. The strange feeling that accompanies synchronicity would have been even more powerful if I’d received the email at 6:10 AM. Unfortunately or fortunately, it arrived at 2:04 AM—no doubt, automatically scheduled by Erik Rittenberry, who runs Poetic Outlaws, and with whom I’ve never spoken. (Buy the man a coffee. He does good work.)

In Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle (taken from volume eight of his collected works, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche), Jung describes it as “the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time.” He adds that it can take three forms:

a) the coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.

b) the coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a “synchronistic,” objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.

c) the same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.

Whereas in the first case an objective event coincides with a subjective content, the synchronicity in the other two cases can only be verified subsequently, though the synchronistic event as such is formed by the coincidence of a neutral psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision).

Phantasms, dreams, and visions. This is why I love Jung. For me, the most significant language comes from the first item on his list, the quality of perception in the person having the synchronistic experience. This is because, in order to write this blog post and have it be meaningful to you, it first has to be meaningful to me. I have to look inward and, much like Guy de Maupassant’s character standing before the grave of his loved one, say, it’s curious what I felt. Back to Arnold’s subjectivity, if not his melancholy. Back to the self, suggesting that synchronicity may depend, to a large extent, on whether or how much we’re paying attention.

Jung died in Küshnacht 12 years before I was born 5,973 miles away in San Diego. I find the fact that he can speak to me across time and space also profoundly mysterious—more so than current A.I. reconstructions of dead intellectuals from history. I try to read their works, where the real intelligence rests. Nothing more artificial than a book is necessary. But no matter how much I read and how many synchronistic experiences I have, I wonder whether there is some first cause, some transcendent unity in which all synchronicities could be reconciled.

In his critique of Schopenhauer, Jung dismissed this idea, noting that the former “thought and wrote at a time when causality held sovereign sway as a category a priori and had therefore to be dragged in to explain meaningful coincidences. But, as we have seen, it can do this with some degree of probability only if we have recourse to the other, equally arbitrary assumption of the unity of the first cause.” In other words, grand unities are baseless suppositions. So let’s not start talking about god unless we’re reading Lord Byron.

But what about DNA? If we go back only a few generations, say 300 years, we have thousands of ancestors. We all know this, but looking at online charts that approximate the average size of a 10th ancestral generation is sobering. Given the range of genetic diversity it implies, doesn’t it seem at least somewhat likely that perceptual states (and, by extension, the depth and breath of synchronicity in one’s life) might emanate not from god but from heredity? Another baseless supposition, maybe, but one that might be a little more persuasive and more than a little unsettling.

This is especially true when I think of my Welsh, Italian, and Armenian ancestors. I suspect they didn’t survive to reproduce and pass on their genes because they were noble and loving children of the cosmos. I think it’s far more likely that they survived because they were tough, many of them ruthless, hard-edged killers (especially on the Welsh side), able to persist, generation after generation, through war, famine, plague, persecution, imprisonment, transportation, exile, and genocide. This gives me pause and makes me wonder who I am, in a genetic sense, and whether, if I were to meet one of my 10th-generation grandfathers, I’d live through the experience.

DNA cannot replace god; god cannot replace uncertainty; and uncertainty seems to be at the root of synchronicity. This morning, before I sat down to write, I looked at the news and saw an image of Pope Francis paying his respects to the remains of Padre Pio at Santa Maria delle Grazie.

You will not find a more quintessential Catholic image. But without an a priori grand unity, it’s just a preserved corpse, just another Lenin. Maybe so. And without either a metaphysical, genetic, or somehow transcendent cause, maybe birthday synchronicity is nothing more than subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition, nothing mysterious about it at all.

Thank goodness I’m a fiction writer and not a scientist. I get to rely on the spontaneous overflow of inner feelings (instead of inner plumbing), speak with angels and the ghosts of poets, even the ghosts of scientists, and make the mysterious great again. So happy birthday synchronicity to me and to all those who survived so that I could say, it’s curious what I felt.

Closer to Fine

 

A story that floats by, into the sun.

Kelsey sent me an email from Saint Louis, said did I want to come out there and do drugs.  She didn’t mention what the drugs were, just did I want to come out there and visit her and, by the way, there were some drugs.  It was fine and I could stay with her.  And the implication was we could do the drugs together.  Coming from Kelsey, that was just about a protestation of love.

But I didn’t want to do some drugs.  I also didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  I would’ve liked to have stayed with Kelsey for a couple months, fuck a lot, get up late, eat fancy breakfasts, and pretend we’re Seriously Involved With Each Other the way we’d done once or twice in the past.  But drugs made me nervous.  She didn’t say weed.  She didn’t say smoking in the oblique stoner way that meant mellow days and hazy good times.  She came straight out with it: There’s some drugs.  It’s fine.  Fine is the worst word in the English language.  Fine means trouble and misery.  It means bad shit.  Whenever there’s some drugs, it’s always fine.

She was staying with Grant, who I knew from Kansas City, and Denise, who I didn’t know, but who I’d heard of.  And I can say that both of them were fine.  So fine I might go far out of my way to ensure that I never encountered them in a house or on the street or in a bar or in the office of an attorney, all of which nearly happened back in KC but didn’t.  Not ever doing some drugs with them ensured that it wouldn’t.

But part of me might have still been in love with Kelsey.  Or, if not in love, then in a feverish kind of lust and affection that made me overlook things like her history of minor offenses and her ODing in my bathtub three summers ago and trashing the place because I said she couldn’t have a cat.

“What’ll you feed it,” I asked.

“I’ll feed it whatever.”

“No,” I said, “you’ll give it cheese puffs and then forget all about it and it’ll die or it’ll try to eat your ear off in your sleep.  And then I’ll have to kill it because it’ll have become a menace.  And once I kill it for your own protection, you’ll blame me.  And this’ll come up again in like a year and I’ll never hear the end of it.  So no.  You don’t get a cat.  Do you want a burrito?”

“No, I want a cat.”

“You don’t get one.  You may have a burrito.”

“Fuck your burrito.”

Then she proceeded to break all our windows, screaming about how she wanted a cat and fuck my burrito.

I could overlook all those episodes with Kelsey, all those fine moments, like when she tried to turn a party of horny Air Force helicopter pilots against me by flirting with each one of them because I had a cold and wanted to go home.  She didn’t want to go home because there was a lot of booze in the Air Force’s kitchen and, at the time, we didn’t have any in ours.  So many fine moments that almost ended in a fistfight or a car wreck or jail.  But still, still.  We all have those people who affect us like some drugs, and Kelsey had that effect on me.

So she was out in Saint Louis and there were the drugs and Grant and Denise and it was all just fine.  Kelsey thought I knew something about something.  She thought I could come back into her life and say this is good; that’s not; do this; don’t do that and everything would work out.  Like I exuded the gravity of a small moon.  It wasn’t much, but it could keep her from floating by, into the sun.

I bought a train ticket from Hauberk, Missouri, to Saint Louis’ Gateway Station.  I could have driven to Saint Louis in about three hours, but Grant and Denise were in my thoughts.  I wouldn’t have trusted either of them with a rusty bicycle, much less my ancient Dodge Dart.  My neighbor had a shed.  So I paid him $50 to keep the car locked up in there for a week and we shook on it.

Kelsey would eventually tell me Grant and Denise were deep into ketamine instead of oxy, if that makes a difference, like saying so-and-so is a Lutheran instead of a Catholic.  Different culture, different furnishings, same facial expressions, same doom loop.  Addicts, like expert oenologists or bespoke flügelhorn valve artisans, will disagree that it’s all the same.  They’ll see a world of differences between certain wines or horn valves.  But I’d been clean since the bathtub incident three years ago.  That was three years of meetings and calling my sponsor twice a week.  I didn’t want to think about one drug versus another.  I found myself thinking about it anyway.

In Grant and Denise’s case, and maybe Kelsey’s too,  I’d have guessed oxy or DMT or even old-school valium, because coke was definitely out of their pay grade.  But it didn’t matter.  They’d chosen ketamine.  They looked completely out of it when I arrived.  And I knew they wouldn’t not be out of it anytime soon.

I was sitting on the sofa, drinking a cup of instant coffee with Kelsey and Byron, who had a guitar instead of a shirt and gave off the powerful vibe of a person who sells some drugs, when Byron’s boyfriend, Petey, walked in wearing a yellow WWI gas mask and nothing else.  Grant and Denise were on the other sofa, sleeping again.  Byron strummed the same chord over and over.   Kelsey had her head on my shoulder and I thought she might also be asleep.

Petey had no body hair.  He presented himself in the middle of the living room.

“Nice,” I said.  “What are you, naked apocalypse guy?”

“Is it nice?”  Petey’s voice sounded tiny and flat from inside the gas mask.

“It’s nice,” said Byron.  “So nice.”  He strummed his chord.

Petey did some body builder poses.  He was skinny and had the rubbery look of someone who assiduously waxes and moisturizes, all sharp angles, smooth planes, veins, and stringy muscles.

Then Denise sat up.  She coughed, worked her tongue around her mouth because she’d been sleeping with it open, and gave Petey a look.  “Do us a favor and put on some pants, okay?  I don’t want to see that.”

“This?”  Petey thrust his hips at her.

“Yeah.”

“Why not?  You racist?”

I thought Denise was going to overcome the pill-head stereotype and physically throw Petey out the door.  She was a big woman, pretty and Midwestern-solid in spite of the T-shirt, sweats, and tangled hair.  She looked like once, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, she might have had her life together.  Maybe before she hooked up with Grant in KC.

“Don’t say dumb shit in my living room.”

“I’m Portuguese.  You can’t handle that?”

“Get going, Petey.”

He looked at her through the gas mask, then padded down the hallway and slammed the bathroom door.

“Can you get him out of here?” she asked Byron.

He stood up and nodded, slung the guitar across his back.  “Namaste,” he said.

I spent that first night far from any lust and affection or even conversation.  Kelsey said three words to me before she passed out: “Shit, you came.”  She’d gotten so high before I arrived that the sense of her as a human being was totally absent.  Her body was now a hollow thing, mind and soul elsewhere.  I carried her to bed.  Then I lay down next to her, listening to her breathe, looking at the tree-branch shadows on the wall.

The next day was better.  Kelsey’d sobered up and her usual wary look had returned.  She’s not telling me something, I thought.  Something’s messed up and she doesn’t want me to know.  Then I laughed.  Of course.  What did I expect?  Everything was fine.

Grant and Denise didn’t answer when I knocked softly on their bedroom door.  So Kelsey and I took the bus to the university to see Byron read his poems.  Byron had discovered a T-shirt and looked high and his poems were bad.  But everyone I knew seemed like they were high so often it had become an empty designation.  Byron frowned and said:

You are literally trembling.

I didn’t mean to be cruel.

That doesn’t mean you were kind.

Then he strummed his guitar a few times.  Nobody in the audience clapped or even moved.  It went on for 45 minutes.  There were a few professor types checking their phones, a few fidgety kids who might have been on a high school trip, and what were probably the students from Byron’s creative writing class—all sitting up front with shrewd, critical expressions.  Petey was sitting with them.  Without the gas mask, his shaved head gleamed.  When he looked back at us, I saw he had a bushy gray mustache.

Kelsey put her hand on my leg.  “This is killing me.”

“We can go.”  I put my hand over hers but she pulled away.

“No.  We have to be nice to Byron.”

I took a break to get a drink at the crusty water fountain in the hall.  The university auditorium was enormous but attendance was low.  I was surprised there were people milling around in the hallway outside.  But then I wasn’t.  They all looked the same: unnaturally thin, glassy, twitchy, like their train was about to leave the station but they didn’t have a ticket.  Ah yes, I thought.

Two girls leaned against the bulletin boards on either side of the hallway and stared at me without turning their heads.  The third, a guy farther down, was announcing board notices like it was his poetry reading, too: “University alterations.  A stitch in time saves nine.  Military discount.  Hey, a Navy recruiter’s gonna be here next week.  Do something with your life, son.  Human subject pool.  You can make twenty bucks.  Farmer’s market in Lot B.  Shit, vegetables.  They’re fresh.”

I got my drink of water and one of the girls came up to me.  She had a black mini-skirt, bright green rubber sandals, and a gray zip-up hoodie with a faded emblem of Garfield the Cat.  Her curly brown hair looked damp.

“Hey.”  She smiled.

I nodded.

“So you know Byron?”

“Who?”

“Byron.  You know.”  She looked at the auditorium door.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I’m just a poetry aficionado.”

“What?”

“I’m Professor Burke.  Edmund Burke.  At your service.”  I extended my hand and she tentatively shook it.  Hers was clammy and, for some reason, made me think of Florida.  This is how they shake in Florida, I thought.  People need to catch a train.  But first they need to find Byron.  They’re nervous.  They’re trying to join the Navy and get some vegetables.  Parts of their bodies that should be cool and dry are warm and moist.  Their hoodies don’t match their green rubber sandals.

“Oh my gosh!”  She smiled again.  “A professor!”  I caught a little contempt in the corners of her eyes, thought of her smiling like that while thrusting a broken beer bottle.  “We’re friends of Byron.  The poet.”

“Ah, the poet.”

“Can you introduce us?”

“I thought you were friends.”

Confused for a moment, smile fading, she looked back at the other girl, who was still watching with her eyes but hadn’t decided to turn her head.  The guy farther down the hall continued reading: “Therapeutic massage.  Psych 463.  Learn about emotions.  Mousetrap at the Wilson theater.  Bagels.”

“Bagels sound good right now,” I said.

“So can you introduce us?”

“I’m a professor.  My job is not to introduce.  My job is to profess.”

“What?”

I went back in but the reading was over.  Most of the people had filtered out.  Petey held an unlit cigarette while he gestured at a very tall man with a gray bowl cut.  Kelsey stood by the podium talking to Byron, her face an inch from his.

In order to avoid running into Byron’s customer base in the hall, I went out the side door by the stage and then through a maze of stairwells and windowless passages.  Just when I was beginning to despair, thinking I’d have to backtrack and confront Petey’s gleaming head, I emerged in the lower lot.  This is it, I thought.  This is the hero’s journey.  I’ve gone through the underworld.  I’ve faced the minotaur in the labyrinth and survived his shitty poetry.  I’ve spoken to the fates in their rubber slippers.  Now it’s time to make the voyage home.

I took the bus back to Grant and Denise’s.  It was good that I did, since Kelsey went somewhere that afternoon with Byron and didn’t come back.  A party.  But a party at Byron’s house was what?  The K-hole and naked Petey in his gas mask?  We have to be nice to Byron, she’d said.  Sure, sure, we’re friends of the poet.  I got it.  I knew that kind of nice.  I watched downtown Saint Louis pass and thought about when I used to live there.  The bus went down some streets where certain things had taken place in which I hadn’t presented my best self.

Grant answered the door in a narrow black suit and a jade bolo tie, his hair slicked back.  He looked like a small-town mortician from the 1940s.  He didn’t recognize me.  “Hey, we’re really not interested.”

“It’s me.”

A look of confusion crossed his face, then anxiety.  Denise came up behind him and whispered something in his ear.  Grant murmured okay, nodded.  He had a long face and a chiseled jaw, but years of abuse and crime had taken a toll.  Being drug-thin made his head look too big.  He had a habit of squinting and sucking in his cheeks, like he’d swallowed something bitter.  Grant got confused a lot.  A far cry from the old days when he ripped people off on real estate deals and drove a big gold-rimmed Escalade.  His crimes got smaller over time and his drugs got bigger.

Denise waved me in, pointed Grant to the bedroom.  He obeyed.

“You want a cup of tea?”

“Okay.”  I never drank tea.

She brought out two ceramic mugs of bright red tea that smelled like chemical roses.  When she smiled, I noticed the dull gold tooth on the left side of her mouth.

I wondered if she was married to Grant, but I didn’t think so.  That’s not how the scenario went.  What was the point?  Marriage says you can stay with someone through various circumstances, that your decisions are strong enough for something like that.  It says you won’t need to change your personality, have to leave your job, have to sleep in some other place with someone else, or have to listen to someone’s shitty poems.  Those are things you do when some drugs are making the choices.

“This town’s getting tedious.”  Denise sipped.  I felt like I should take a sip, too.  It tasted like sweet hot perfume.

“I’m thinking of making a change,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  I got a friend down in Texas.  She needs a boyfriend.  You ever visit Texas?”

I said I hadn’t.  Then, “What about Grant?”

She smiled, took a long sip of the poison perfume.  “Who?”

Then she put down the mug and stood.  Denise had on a polyester rainbow muumuu straight out of the 70s.  She let it drop around her feet and stepped in front of me in nothing but her bra.

“You into vagina?”

“Sure.”  I felt like I was on automatic, like I was reaching the natural outcome of my visit and I didn’t have the willpower or options for anything else.  Denise’s thighs were enormous and pale. Her gut made a crease over her shaved pussy.

“Kelsey’s never gonna fuck you,” she said.  “She’s all dried up.”

“I think she’s with Byron.”

She grinned, leaned down, and kissed me on the lips.

The next morning, Kelsey still hadn’t returned.  Weeks later, I’d discover that Grant had decided to use up the last of his secret heroin and that he’d shuffled off to eternity in the middle of the night.  Or, pill-head gossip being what it was, maybe it happened the next night or a few nights after that.  Or didn’t happen at all.  When I heard about it, I remembered Grant answering the door dressed like a mortician with his hair slicked back and that jade bolo around his neck.  And I thought that’s how he probably wanted to go, dressed as well as he could manage, dressed to the nines or, in his case, to the fives.

I got to Gateway Station early and drank multiple cups of coffee before the train started boarding.  I had a powerful urge to get drunk, which, I knew, would lead to worse things.  Kelsey’d thrown me over for some drugs.  Denise threw Grant over for me and a road trip to Houston.  Moving to Texas might have actually been a good idea, but not with her.  The effort something like that would take seemed enormous.  As for me, I’d thrown all of them over after a two-day visit that was supposed to last a week.  I knew, deep in my heart, that my days with Kelsey were done.

The train moved through a rock-filled gully and came up into Missouri farmland.  I watched the landscape go by and tried not to think.  In my haste get out of there, I hadn’t showered and I could feel Denise on me.  I could still taste the rose-flavored tea.

The conductor came by and punched a hole in my ticket, looked at me for a moment, said, “Had a good time in the city, huh.”

“No.”  I said, “I went to a poetry reading.  I’m a friend of the poet.”

“Right-o.”

“Yes,” I said when he handed the ticket back, “Namaste.”