MY TWO NOLANS

An obituary for JAMES Nolan and a celebration of the living master of many genres PAT Nolan. Not related by anything but my friendship with both of them.

My good friend, James Nolan, died last week. Jimmy was a true New Orleans aristocrat, who could trace his Creole Catholic family from its origins to its multi-leveled tomb in St. Louis 3 Cemetery. He was a superb story-teller whose books are alive with the events of his adventurous life. While still an adolescent, he frequented one of the only integrated places in the American South, the French Quarter bars where Blacks, bohemians and gay sailors mixed and drank. Still in his youth, he also lived in the redwood forest in Sonoma County, in one of the first settlements in the age of Communes. He was part of San Francisco's radical street theater of the Angels of Light. He taught English in China during Mao's Cultural revolution, lived in Spain during the Franco regime, and was back in San Francisco in time for a literary renaissance.

Each of these places found themselves in his fiction and essays. Threaded through them was always a civilised, erudite and welcoming New Orleans accent. Like the multi-cultural city he returned to after his travels, his prose emanated the ineffable quality of the city, like the sweet olive that blooms unexpectedly behind the St. Louis Cathedral. Jimmy translated Pablo Neruda into English, and wrote highly regarded essays in Spain's best literary journals and newspapers. In San Francisco he had an apartment under a freeway that was the only place in that city that resembled a New Orleans house, with a courtyard and a balcony.

Each of his adventures found another life in the stories he told his friends. We spent many magical hours in the French Quarter, at Molly's on the Market, regaling each other, or anyone who would listen, with our stories. We once discussed all the places we lived in, and decided that ours was the best of them. We wrote a song, titled "There is no Molly's in Tibet," an anthem meaning that even the most exotic locations in the world could not compare with our hangout in New Orleans.

Jimmy was also a superb cook. He lived in an early 19th century house where one could easily imagine John James Audobon and Lafcadio Hearn talking late into the quiet night. An evening meal of shrimp etoufeé and fine wine on a breezy Fall evening on the balcony of Jimmy's French Quarter apartment was a memorable event.

When the mayor ordered the evacuation of the city during Hurricane Katrina, Jimmy was one of the last to leave. Bored National Guard soldiers from five states often gathered under his balcony to drink and holler all night in the empty city. Jimmy retaliated by playing Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" at high volume. The soldiers moved. When electricity was cut, Jimmy lived a time with candle light, which perfectly suited the house and his own taste. It was only when the city shut off water that he left, in the unique style of a true native of the city. Gathered in the lobby of the Monteleone Hotel, where Tennessee Williams often stayed, was a group of tourists waiting patiently for a bus that the Monteleone manager promised would take them to safety. During the longer and longer wait, a yellow school bus requisitioned by a concerned citizen stopped in front of the hotel. "Ten bucks will get you to Baton Rouge!" announced the driver. Jimmy and some locals, including a famous musician, boarded instantly. They were taken out of the city to the safe dry Baton Rouge airport. The hotel bus never came.

Our friendship included mutual admiration for each other's writing. Jimmy's last book was "Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: the Pandemic Years In New Orleans” (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press). He had the good fortune of seeing it in print just before he died. On the back cover, I wrote: "This journal of the plague years beginning in 2020 declares itself crisply on the side of poetry. Even as James Nolan documents, with the flair of the great storyteller he is, the details of his life in a city where life-loving citizens have been sentenced to solitary confinement, he finds the courage and humor to survive. The mix of prescience, sobri­ety, satire, and curiosity that are the trademarks of his writing shine here. I have no doubt that Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar will take its place alongside Pepys, Defoe, and Camus among the great plague chronicles.” All true, yet every blurb is an obituary. His body didn't have a choice, but his guitar will play a long time for us.

---

Pat Nolan is one of my oldest and best friends. We met in the redwoods, in Monte Rio, Sonoma County, California, in the early 1970s. In fact, I moved there after I paid him a visit. I was awed by the giant redwoods capable of seeding their own clouds to make it rain, the Russian River flowing into the Pacific Ocean only a few miles away, and Pat's incredible knowledge of French poetry. Our writing was very different, but we had my Romanian-French-New York avantgarde and his Bay Area-French-New York School avantgarde in common: our territory stretched from Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars to Ted Berrigan, Philip Whalen and Diane di Prima.

We were already, in our 20s, veterans of poetries that made the 20th century our playground and battleground. We collaborated and played, but there was nothing frivolous about it. We were serious. Proof of it, if any of it is needed, is that we are still poets after more than half a century, and still prize poetry over money. We've worked in many different genres, essay, fiction, criticism, etc, but poetry was always the foundation of our work, and the chief activity of our lives. In the last two years, Pat had a sudden and major following in China and ...in Romania, my country of birth. I had nothing to do with this last jolt of popularity, but his novels, excerpted below, were translated, pirated and sold like a NYT bestseller (without the royalties). An anonymous critic proclaimed Nolan King of Nouvelle Noir, a cross between Dashiel Hammett and Charles Bukowski. We have recently hired a detective to find out who the pirates are, maybe we'll make them pay up. So far these literate hooligans are still hidden on the internet.

Pat's short official bio reads as follows, but trust me, there is more to the guy than meets the eye: the author of three novels as well as numerous poetry selections. His writing has been published in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, Exquisite Corpse, Brooklyn Rail, Posit, Otoliths, and the Hurricane Review. His work has also appeared in various anthologies, including Up Late, American Poetry Since 1970, Poems for the Millenium, and Saints Of Hysteria. He is the publisher of Nualláin House Publishers. He has also curated a number of blogs featuring his poetry, prose, and criticism, most recently Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine, and Parole, blog of The New Black Bart Poetry Society. He lives in the redwood wilds along the Russian River in Northern California.

from Week

On The Use of Euphemisms

by Pat Nolan

Wendt took note that the swim consisted of a lot of information about the proportions of oxygen to hydrogen, and a lot of that information consisted of lists, of coincidences, of lists of coincidences, and that he was doing the Australian crawl when he wasn’t doing his favorite, the breast stroke.

His finger was poised to depress the doorbell over which a brass plate bore the name R. Granahan. Professor emeritus Richard Granahan had a duplex over in the Saint Anne’s neighborhood. At that moment the dingy white door with a large dusty square of pebbled glass taking up the top half opened and Marguerite Sayrah emerged, blinking twice before realizing who was standing there. Then she made an unpleasant face and brushed passed him with a grunt of disapproval. She was followed by a short round man with an orange billed Giants ball cap and a patchy black beard. He was dressed entirely in black, except for his orange Converse sneakers. He kept his head down to avoid looking directly at Wendt.

Wendt shrugged and let himself in. He followed the hallway down to Dick’s bedroom. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the old man was given six months to live. That had been nine months ago. Dick Granahan, prize winning poet, scholar, and infamous lothario, had been Wendt’s faculty advisor at State during his ill-fated attempt at a post-graduate degree. As Dick was also fond of a hearty brew, they often went for a drink at The Rustic Union, a pub within walking distance of campus. Granahan’s graduate level Advanced Poetry Seminar met there on occasion. What he called his “meet the masters” class. He would invite well-known literary figures to dinner and drinks in the company of his students. He discontinued it after a while because, as he said, “there was just too much disappointment.”

Then there was what became known as the “Grannyhand” scandal. Apparently, RG, as some people referred to him, had offered extra credit to some of the female students in his undergraduate Advanced Poetry class in exchange for the rendering of a particular sexual favor. Grannyhand seemed to say it all.

Close to retirement, Dick quietly resigned his position at State and the University just as quietly swept it under the rug. Not long afterwards, Granahan was offered the position as head of the writing department at New Arts Inc., the chain of liberal arts diploma mills with campuses in most big American cities. At New Arts Inc., Frisco, or NAIF, sexual relations between staff and students were not unheard of or particularly frowned upon.

The Grannyhand affair was not without its backlash or consequence, however. Dick’s wife, Jane, divorced him. His only son, Austin, refused to speak to him. And his daughter, Marla, possibly exhibiting some of her father’s predilections, became a lesbian porn queen. It had been a rough time for his old friend and Wendt was one of the few who stood by him. Through the odd coincidence of chance and habit, they would get together regularly on Tuesdays. Even so, it was not quite a month of Tuesdays since he’d dropped by. Watching his old friend die was not at all comfortable.

Richard Granahan was a profane little man with a slab of snow white hair slapped across a wide forehead and a nicotine stained cookie duster below the bloated and pocked bulb of broken blood vessels. When RG died, and that might be any day, they could roll him up, attach a handle to him, and he would be no larger than a moderate sized suitcase. But even now, bedridden, he seemed quite alive. At least his hand was, under the sheets. Pummeling? Or grabbing?

“That’s ok, Dick, you don’t have to give me a demo. I’m quite familiar with how it’s done.”

The shrunken old man startled, pulled as he was by two dissimilar impulses, surprise and ecstasy. Surprise won because it was more immediate. “Wendt, you crazy son of a bitch, you could have given me a heart attack!”

“Why don’t we just say that I saved you from another one of those little deaths?”

Dick, laughing now and relieved for the distraction, extended his hand in greeting.

“Hope you don’t mind if I pass,” Wendt said pulling a chair closer to bedside, “I know where that’s been.”

Dick’s face glowed red as the big smile that broke across his face rendered him speechless.

“So, been practicing long?”

“At my age, sex with anyone but myself would just be plain embarrassing. After you reach a certain place in life, your cock is your only friend. You and it against the world! To my amazement I can still get it up. Long enough to do the job!”

“Ow! Please, Dick! Too much information!”

“At one point I figured why not get that momentary pleasure that still puts a sparkle in my eye. I want to die with that sparkle in my eye. I work on it daily.”

“So that’s why you were rowing with one oar.”

“Right, yanking the crank.”

“Stretching the slinky.”

“Choking the doughboy.”

“I always heard it as choking the chicken.”

“Yes, that’s fairly common, as is pounding your pud.”

“Whatever a pud is.”

“I’ve heard that pud is the diminutive for pudding.”

“I guess that makes sense, in its own odd way. As much as baby batter makes sense.”

“On the other hand, it could very well be a shortened form of pudendum.”

“Pounding your pudendum? I can see why it was shortened. But I thought that pudendum applied to female genitalia.”

“It has come to be applied almost exclusively to the female but it applies to the male as well. Interesting that the Latin root for the word is the verb ‘to be ashamed.’ So you can see that self-gratification has a long history of disapproval.”

“Beating your meat, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors, doesn’t beat around the bush.”

“Clearing the pipe is also quite graphic but quotidian.”

“I was always partial to flogging the log.”

“Well, yes, that does have a kind of assonant alliteration that is stock and trade in these kinds of euphemisms. Like buffing the banana or grappling the gremlin.”

“Lobbing a gob.”

“Collaring the cleric, testing the testicles, yes, like that.”

“Venting the ventricle, pumping the python.”

“Have you ever heard punishing Percy? That goes a ways back.”

“Right, like playing pocket pool.”

“And there are those that take on the attributes of labor like varnishing the flag pole or adjusting the antenna.”

“Basting the ham.”

“Painting the ceiling.”

“Warming up the engine, restarting the rotisserie.”

“Lubricating the lance. I imagine that has quite a provenance.” Granahan had started giggling, his eyes moist with delight.

“True, jollying the Johnson is more contemporary. As is jacking junior.”

“I believe that the British have it as wanking the willie, or just wanking which is rather pedestrian for a tribe that prides itself on its poetry, don’t you think?”

“Don’t they also say pulling the taffy?”

“Boffing the bishop.”

“How about fingering the skin flute?”

“No, I think flute refers to another feature of that nether anatomy.”

“I was thinking flute like something someone would blow.”

“Of course. Then there are the ones that refer to other species to aid in their subterfuge. Stroking the snake. Taming the shrew. Tugging the slug.”

“Wagging the walrus. Bending the badger might also be one.”

“Spanking the monkey.”

“Oiling the one-eyed eel.”

“That’s rather exotic but since we’re being aquatic, how about releasing the tadpole torpedoes?”

“Goosing the frog?”

“Hmm, that has a rather cross species perversity to it.”

“Opening a worm of cans.” Wendt smiled at the interpolation, but Dick didn’t seem to notice, intent as he was now on what had become a competition.

“Manhandling the midget, tenderizing the tube steak.”

“Stretching the meat sock.”

“Waxing the carrot.”

“Twanging your magic twanger.”

“Practicing the secret handshake. Also referred to as performing a sleight of hand.”

“Pulling the wool over old one-eye.”

“That’s only if you’re not circumcised.”

“Good point.”

“Then for the educated man there’s always erecting a singular proposition.”

“Oh, in that case, fleshing out the future.”

“Enabling the opposable advantage.”

“The precious thing hard to obtain.”

“What’s not hard? It’s available day and night.”

“It’s Jung. The infantile ego and all that crap.”

“Well, that takes all the fun out of it.”

“You asked.”

“Well, how about this: stealing fire.”

“Exactly what I was getting at.”

“Grasping the awful truth.”

“Dowsing the abyss. For the existentialist wanker.”

“Quickening the pulse.”

“Ordering the hors d’oeuvres, whisking the marinade.”

“Restocking the inventory. For the neo-Darwinians.”

“Slapping your pappy, mastering your domain.”

“Shaking hands with the master.”

“Now you’re getting down to the truth!” Granahan insisted, animated by the amusement of their word play.

“Grappling with the love vine.”

“That’s fine if you think you’re Tarzan. But then who doesn’t?”

“Owning up to your onanism.”

“Tagging the bed sheets.”

“Going blind on a date with yourself.”

The old man shook with a paroxysm of laughter, gasping for breath like a wicked rag doll.

“Shit, Granahan, you ok?”

Eyes watering, a smile full of yellow gnashers, Dick nodded. “It’s laughter you have to watch out for. It’ll kill ya.” He wheezed out a few more chuckles.

“So who were you wanking on?”

Granahan hesitated. “Who was I what?”

“Come on, Granahan, who did you have across your knees in the fold-out spread? Wait a minute! I ran into her on my way out!”

Granahan’s mug was the model of sheepishness. “Yeah, Marguerite Sayrah.”

“Ok, I’m beginning to see a pattern. Wasn’t Kay one of your students at State?”

“Yeah, fuck, Wendt, you’re on the right track. No need to spell it out.”

“A sister in the silly putty sorority of the grannyhand. I bet there’s even a blog devoted to the posting and discussion of their experiences, barbeques, bitch sessions, travels to Cancun where they seek out old retired English professors and fulfill the old farts’ fantasies. Though I’ll bet Kay doesn’t belong to that group or read their blog.”

“I’ve done some things I’m not very proud of. I’m ashamed of my anti-social transgressions.”

“Well, yes, you did teach creative writing.”

Granahan ignored him. “And that’s one chapter in my life I would do over if I could. I’m not going to get the chance. I feel bad enough about it. You don’t have to rub my face in it.”

Wendt pulled the half-pint bottle from his inside pocket and held it up to Dick. “Here, maybe this’ll give you a lift out of your self-pity. It’ll help with that mealy taste in your mouth.”

“Jesus, you really are trying to kill me, aren’t you?

Wendt shrugged and took a bite of firewater. “Headache cure.”

“Now that, on the other hand, is just unhealthy. Wendt, it’s not even noon!”

“I eat at noon. Now’s the time for a drink.”

“You on a tear? You look a little rumpled.”

Wendt told him the tale of his eviction from Dorian’s couch. “This is just going to be one of those days that’s longer than twenty four hours.”

“How is old Dorian these days?”

“Just like you, dying.”

“Yes, and the vultures are circling.”

“Speaking of which, what’s going on with Kay? She just renewing old attachments?”

“Who? Oh yes, Marguerite. Very funny.” Granahan sighed, “She’s under the illusion that she’s my literary executor.”

“Who was the little guy with her?”

“A poet, I can’t remember his name. He is quite technically adept. Which is why I might question his qualifications as a man of letters. They’re different realities, you know.”

“So like Igor to her Mary Frankenstein?”

“They want me to post my thoughts and poems on this blog they created for me. They didn’t like the name I came up with, but they weren’t going to get me to do it otherwise. It’s called With My Last Dying Blog.” Granahan dragged a swivel arm table with a laptop attached to it directly in front of him. “I’ve got this set up, see. It’s supposed to be some sort of cross media engagement of the arts. So I’m to type in some old poems or the couple of new ones, the ones that still dribble out. Or I recycle some of my old essays. Or lectures. I can say pretty much anything I damn well please. People can comment on what I say in this comment box, here.” He moved the arrow to point at the small rectangular window to one side of the page on the screen. “I call it the snark tank. Lot of mudslinging and mud wrestling goes on in there. But what do you expect? They’re just kids.”

“Ill-mannered children jockeying for status in the eyes of their elders,” Wendt volunteered.

The old man sighed, weary. “Some days I don’t feel like saying anything. Then I get a flood of queries asking me if I’m ok when in reality they’re wondering if that last post I put up was virtually the last one and am I now just a flat line.” Dick widened his eyes in mock disbelief. “And the sycophants! It’s like having a whole meadow of sheep lined up to kiss your ass with their bleating inane servility! The last couple of times I’ve posted I’ve been saying things like ‘Get a life!’ Or ‘fuck off!’ That’s why Marguerite and Igor were here. Because I was being uncooperative and ruining her expectations of me.”

“What’s the big deal? You get to ensure your legacy.”

Dick spat “Legacy” as if the word had a bad taste. “I’m a fossil.”

“So you’re immortal chalk. Why not lay down some tracks, let the future generations figure out what you’re all about?”

“I’d rather jerk off.” As soon as he spoke the words, Dick’s look of consternation and dread prompted Wendt to glance back over his shoulder. A tall shadow in a religious habit had materialized in the doorway. There was something very unfeminine in the angles of the face peeking out from the starched frame of the wimple.

“It’s ok, Sister, he’s a friend of mine,” Dick called anxiously as the nun’s shadow melted away.

“What happened to Paloma?” Paloma, a busy little Filipino woman, had been Dick’s hospice worker from the beginning.

“I don’t know. One day this nun shows up. And says she’s one of the volunteers at the Hospice Center and would be taking Paloma’s place until they found a replacement for her. Maybe she went back to Manila. It’s downright creepy. I went to Catholic schools growing up in Marquette. All my teachers were nuns. Do you have any idea what that does to you?”

“Maybe. I attended a nursery school and kindergarten run by two French nuns of an Irish order. The Sisters of Perpetual Redundancy. I learned to speak a little French and dislike the Irish.”

“You know the problem with having nuns as teachers? You fixate on saintly women and end up with one, and everybody knows you don’t want to live with a saint. Let me tell you, I know from experience. We used to fear and hate them. We had this joke. If penguins are flightless birds, what are nuns?”

Wendt shrugged, the bottle to his lips

“Fuckless chicks!”

The nun was having a cigarette leaning against the stucco balustrade of Granahan’s stoop. The nun was a man.

“Got a cigarette?”

The nun reached deep into his habit for a crumpled pack and shook one out.

Wendt accepted a light. “So what’s the story with the nun getup?”

The nun scoffed a laugh and told the story. Granahan’s hospice worker, Paloma, had complained to the parish priest that Dick was doing lewd things in front of her and she was worried that if Granahan kept at it, he would go to Hell. She liked her job and was fond of Mr. Dick, as she called him. She just wanted to know how she could get him to stop. Father Russo, the parish priest, knew the Granahans quite well. As a young family they often attended services together, and he had counseled Dick and Jane before their divorce so he was aware of a lot of the intimate details of their lives. He knew that Granahan had attended a parochial school run by nuns as a child. He decided to try and shame him by replacing Paloma with a nun, but he didn’t want to subject the good sisters to such wanton display. Father Russo knew that he was a performance artist who included a skit about a nun in his repertoire. The man owed the old priest a favor. So he garbed up and roamed the halls looking fearsome.

“Hasn’t helped, has it?”

“No, he’s still greasing the mongoose.”

“Getting rosin for the fiddle.”

from Week

Schools Of Poetry

Wendt met Andy Porter for lunch at Bebop Dim Sum Café on Clement. The place was run by a jazz lover from Taipei who still had not mastered his adopted tongue. The musical ambiance was Golden Age bebop. Whenever the owner saw Wendt he would shout “Bud Powell!” but unfortunately it came out sounding like “butt powwow!” Invariably heads would turn.

He had spent the morning being guilty and dithering over imaginary details. Sometimes his life, like the weather, sucked. Even though there were hints that spring would finally make an appearance, fog banks persisted. There was always sun in the Mission. Just ask those who lived there. Out in the Avenues, cold steel-gray wool clung to the belly of the sky.

Andy was cheerful, maybe a little more than usual. He was young, after all, hopeful, full of ambition, full of himself. This was different. He was bursting with what he wanted to say.

“Good news?” Wendt asked as the waitress placed the pot of green tea between them.

“I got the fellowship. I’m going to China!” Then he shared his excitement, in Chinese, with the waitress who giggled and moved quickly back to behind the service area. Andy liked to practice his Chinese on restaurant staff, often with hilarious results. Wendt was clueless but amused by Andy’s apparent discomfort.

“I think I just said, ‘a dog’s leg is bitter as ashes after sex.’” He shrugged, resuming his cheery demeanor. “I’ll be a year in Shanghai. I’m really looking forward to it. I don’t leave till late August, but I’m going to make an exploratory trip in June, just to get a feel for it.” Andy was beside himself, “It’s going to be really cool,” and blushed at his enthusiasm.

“That’s great, Andy.” Wendt poured the tea into both their cups. “Your girlfriend will be house sitting for you while you’re gone, I assume?” The wheels had begun their spin, tumblers rolling, in the slot machine behind his eyes. Andy lived in a studio apartment on Turk, a pied-à-terre owned by a relative or a friend of a relative.

“I don’t think so. She’s spending the summer with her parents in Rhode Island, and she’ll be gone as soon as her classes are over.” Andy made a fake sad face. “We’re kind of in the process of separating. She’s going to intern in DC, and I’ll be in China.” He turned over a hand, palm up, as if letting something go. “Why?”

Wendt explained his upcoming eviction from the Balboa address. He would need a temporary launch pad until he could find a more permanent situation. He mentioned that Nora was arranging a reading tour for him. He did not mention that nothing had been settled, and often Nora’s schemes resulted in miscommunications and the threat of lawsuits. So, ostensibly, he was assured, virtually, of a cash flow.

Andy agreed readily. And having Wendt look after his tiny apartment would be perfect for the month he was away on his recon mission to Shanghai.

Ka-ching! Wendt thought, which is not in itself a Chinese expression meaning jackpot. The perfect solution had presented itself, an archipelago of house sitting for his friends dotting the summer months while they vacationed in Big Sur or Yosemite, Paris or Athens, someone to collect the mail, stack the newspapers, water the plants, pet the gold fish. The wobble of his flight for the last couple of days stabilized, and his smug became a little more self-satisfied.

There was more to Andy’s show and tell. He handed over an issue of Autoclone, a literary magazine from Tasmania, for Wendt to page through.

“International, with a twist.”

“It’s the first time my own writing has appeared outside the country. That is if you don’t count the poems I published in Perverse Notions, an on-line magazine from Oslo.”

Wendt recited a list of his foreign publications. “Translated into Hungarian, Czech, Finnish, and Romanian. I have no idea if they even came close. I was in that French anthology and whoever translated those poems made me sound like a tight-assed academic.”

“Weren’t you in an Italian anthology?”

“Right, I was. Do you know that in Italian my poems rhyme? But then so do everyone else’s. It’s a wonderful lyrically rich language.”

He tried to remember the name of the anthology, but that had been years ago. Secret Ballot? Something like that. And that had been Sheila’s doing. One of the editors was a friend she made when she’d studied a year in Padua. He remembered how delighted he’d been at the thought of being read in Italian.

Interesting also that the French experience had turned out to be so phonetically askew. And his inclusion in that anthology had been with the help of Val Richards who was a lycee schoolmate of the publisher of the volume. He remembered the name of that anthology because of his original mishearing of the title, something that caused him additional consternation once he learned the truth. He had been told by Val, who had a habit of slurring her words when she took certain pills, that the anthology would be titled L’heure du temps which his rudimentary French told him was a typical Gallic redundancy but, loosely translated, was The Time Of Day. When he finally got his hands on the volume he read his mistake. The title was L’horreur du temps.

Andy passed a book the size of a small shoebox across the table. “Here’s that anthology I was telling you about.”

“Whenever I read an anthology I always think of all the poets whose poems are not represented, and that’s an anthology in itself.” Wendt scanned the columned gallery of names on the back cover. Not one signaled recognition. “Ok, here’s one, A.W. Porter. That’s you, right?”

A rosy glow colored Andy’s cheeks. “Yeah, but you know, the editor was a year ahead of me at Stanford. It helps if you know someone.”

“You’re telling me?” Wendt flipped the volume and read the cover. “Poets of a Later Latitude, A Geography of Poets Under 30. No wonder I didn’t recognize any names.” He set the large book on its spine and let the pages flop open at random. “And look at that, it opened right to your poems! Good placement. Do you have to pay extra for that?”

The noodles arrived and Wendt ordered a Tsing-tao. He was beginning to feel pretty. A significant worry had been alleviated. It made him feel a hundred pounds lighter, virile even. He felt like having fun, special fun, rather than his usual mundane day to day fun. A frenetic Charlie Parker solo punctuated his musings.

“I always like looking through the contributors notes, sometimes they’re more interesting than the poems.”

Andy chuckled his agreement.

“Let’s see now, here we go, Andrew Walter Porter. . . .”

“Walter’s my mother’s dad, my grandfather’s name.” And then as an afterthought, “Isn’t Walter your first name?”

“You are correct,” Wendt said considering his first taste of the old German recipe of his Chinese beer, “but, no offense, I didn’t want to be known as Wally so I go by my nomen, my middle name. It’s one syllable so it’s direct, to the point. Kind of like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck,’ both of which I’ve answered to, by the way.”

“What about Walt? That’s one syllable.”

Wendt feigned consideration with an impish grin, “A little too Whitmanesque, I’d think.” He referenced what he’d been reading with his finger on the page. “Anyway, your note says, born in Santa Barbara in, hmm, for some reason I thought you were older. Currently pursuing a post-graduate degree in Asian Studies at Stanford. Published in Yadda Yadda, This Then, and Contemporary Literature In Translation. So you’ve got some cred, that’s good.”

Wendt turned a page. “Who are these other clowns? Jesus, look at this guy, Ross Arbuckle, associate professor and he’s hardly a few years older than you. Two books of poems, too. You’ve got some catching up to do.

“Jerrold Lloyd, professor of Creative Writing, a string of books from presses I’ve never heard of, the recipient of the Golden Lyre and he’s barely twenty-nine. Ok. Laurel Hardy, also twenty-nine, lives in Vancouver, MFA from SFU, recent book, Special Agent from Scre-eming Lesbo Press.

“Barbara Keaton, professor of European Literature specializing in Beowulf. How can someone so young specialize in Beowulf? Baffling.” Wendt shook his head with mock consternation for Andy’s benefit. Andy, for his part, was enjoying the running commentary.

“You’re traveling in some pretty rarified company. And Darla Costello. A Steiner Fellow. How nice. She’s like a year younger than you and yet she has two books of poems, Don’t I Know You From The Microwave? from Platypus Press. . .must be an Australian publisher . . . .”

“I think that’s a misprint. It should be I Don’t Know You From The Microwave.”

“. . .and Last Warning, Poems of Self-Destruction and Resurrection. Her titles are intriguing.”

“Get this, the guy she studied with is the Buddhist poet who runs the monastery outside of Omaha.”

“Omaha. Perfect place for a Buddhist monastery. Om. . .Aha!”

“So essentially Costello studied with an abbot.”

“You know her?”

“Sure, she’s part of our gang, you know, the writers down in Palo Alto, the two Steves, Panke and Timey, Alfred Falva. Darla’s married to Ben Turpin.”

“The musician?”

“Right, the horn player. He’s been on Leno.”

“That’s some glamorous crowd you’re running with.” And referring to the book again, “How about Laurence Mot-Kerlit?”

Andy shrugged. “I’m like you, I haven’t heard of a lot of these clowns, either.”

“Professor of Abstract Languages at Buffalo. Now there’s a job for a poet, a buffalo job.”

The noodles had cooled to an edible heat though their spice ensured that they were enjoyed tentatively. Distracted, while they slurped and then inhaled big gulps of air through their mouths to cool their tongues, Wendt leafed through the paper brick.

“Ok, so explain to me what these guys are about. Are they any good? Besides you. I know you’ve got chops.”

Andy was bursting to please. “Well, there’s a real mish-mash in here because the editor wanted to be representative. A mistake, I think. Anyway, you’ve got your conpo. . . .”

“Whoa, whoa, your what?”

“Conpo, conceptual poetry. Or poets.”

“Alright, I can see poets as a concept. But I thought conpo would be more like the poetry my friend Deidre Davis, DeeDee the Destroyer we call her, for the number of marriages she’s torpedoed, taught to the inmates at San Quentin or here at juvenile hall.”

“Uh, no, it’s like when you say Ampo for American Poetry. Or Fopo for foreign poetry. And formal poetry too, I suppose.”

“I’ve heard of faux pas, never Fauxpo. But I can dig it. Pretend poetry. That could be what I write.”

“And there’s Fempo and Gaypo.”

“Is there a bipo, you know, for bisexual poets? Or would that stand for bipolar poets? Like Jimmy Schuyler. Or Ann Sexton.”

“That would probably be bipopo,” Andy said without cracking a smile. “And Avpo which stands for avant-garde, or average poetry.”

“Sometimes they’re the same.”

“Mopo for modern poetry.”

“Mopo sounds like one of those Japanese toys you keep on a key chain.”

“And there’s Autopo, Surpo, Clapo, NeoClapo, Pomopo.”

“Northern California Indian poetry?”

“No, Postmodern Poetry. Native American poetry would be Napo.”

“It’s like you’re naming off future generations of Marx Brothers. I mean, look at all the possibilities. Synpo, Cypo, Actpo, Poactpo, Slapo, Slangpo, Slampo, Slurpo, Minpo, Haipo, Gypo. . . no, wait, he really was a Marx brother.” Wendt pointed his faux porcelain spoon at Andy for emphasis. “So by what you’re saying, it sounds like schools of poetry are similar to vaudeville acts.”

“There is a Hypo. It stands for hybrid poetry.”

“Oh, I see, I was thinking of haiku poetry. Hybrid poetry, isn’t that a little redundant? On the other hand, hypo could also stand for hypothetical poetry. I’m pretty sure that’s what I write.”

“That would probably have to be hypopo. And I suppose you could have hypnotic poetry which would be hypnopo, and you’d have to have posthypnotic poetry and that would be pohypnopo.”

“Now you’re talking! We’re starting to sound Greek!”

The pot stickers and pork buns had arrived and both men fell to with a relish that belied the simple fare.

“Come on, Wendt, weren’t there schools of poetry in your day?”

Carl held the slug of beer in his mouth and raised an eyebrow. I’m continually being defined by my past, he mused.

“Oh, sure,” he said finally to ease the embarrassment that had set Andy’s ears aglow. “There was the Homunculus School of Poetry. Only cared about what went on in their heads, the body mattered not. Their poems had that hall of mirrors effect, you know, the repetition of an image ad infinitum. If they’d had any imagination they’d have called themselves The Infinite Regress School.”

Wendt turned his eyes upward and to the left as if he were scanning a script. “And there was the Heavy Metal School. Not to be mistaken for the Leaden School. They were mostly second gen New York School types though they were more into ‘rock mine off’ than Rachmaninoff. Working class kids who got the call. It was short lived. The working class has a built-in bullshit meter and it wasn’t long before they realized that the poetry scene was complete bullshit.”

Andy chortled and had the waitress bring another round of Tsing-taos. Wendt was going to tsing for his lunch.

“Then there were the Homo Poets. The name has nothing to do with sexual preference or orientation, and everything to do with sameness. Some of those people should have been working for the department of weights and measures! Their obsession with the anal perfection of the identical was maniacal.” Wendt stabbed at a pot sticker with a chopstick. “The Pointless School of Poets, they’re still around. The Iceberg School of Poetry, all below the surface, lying in wait for the Titanic of the unconscious. The Surrogate School of Poets and their exclusive magazine, Turret, Vince Clayborn, dreadnaught and editor. The Usurpers, anti-academic slammers who for all intents and purposes grabbed up all the academic posts and honors that they had once so vociferously trashed. OG’s, the Old Guard, and the Leaden School with their dense, turgid paperweight verse.

“Of course, my favorites of all time were the Anti-Gravity poets, floating above the fray, resisting the pull of gravity and it’s aura of authoritarian self-righteousness and inherent elitism. The California Pretenders, a band of wild and wooly poets, essentially neo-romantics, who are no more because romantics are well, lemmings, and so,” Wendt made a mime with his hand that depicted a leap off a cliff, “you know the rest. Defenestration. Did they jump or was they pushed?”

“I had a prof in a survey course as an undergrad who described the romantic poet as posed on a promontory, wind in hair, waves crashing below, an image that’s stuck with me.”

“Exactly! Poised to leap.” Wendt smiled with satisfaction that his point had been proven. “And then there’s the whole underground of secret poetry societies.”

“Really? Secret poetry societies? Who’s in them?”

“Nobody you’ll ever hear of. They’re mainly loose fits, not quite misfits, the lumpen poetariat collected under various acronyms like TANTRA, The Association of No Talent Rejected Artists, or POO, Poets of Outer Orbit, whose motto is Kerouac’s ‘Poetry is shit’.”

“Didn’t Genet say that, too?”

“Probably. It’s a French thing. Merde. Such a poetic word.” Wendt took a sip from his glass. “The AWWA, The Association of Waxed Wing Ascenders also known as The Icari. And of course the C Squared group, the Comic Cosmic poets.” He paused. “Maybe that’s the Cosmic Comic poets. Also known as The Holy Fools.

“Anyway, all this speaks to a factionalized regimented poetry world. There have always been poetry groups, exclusive societies of amateur writers who essentially snubbed anyone who wasn’t part of their crowd. And sometimes they affixed a name to their association, as a kind of shorthand for those in the know. It was Breton and his Surrealist who institutionalized the idea of a school of art or literature. Surrealist and Surrealism became brand names. And now everyone wants to brand themselves, literally and figuratively. I mean, look at the prevalence of tattoos. You can’t be a loner anymore. You can’t be unique. Or to be unique you have to be so extreme as to be the center of attraction that aligns everyone else like iron filings around a magnet. And then you’re just part of a group, a social network, a school. When anyone talks about outsider art, they’re just stating the obvious. All true artists want to be outsiders. But being an outsider, an eccentric is anti-social. Group poetry, by your designation, groupo, is in.”

“So like what are you, Carl? A ronin, a masterless poet?”

Wendt laughed. He liked Andy. Andy was a good poet on his way to becoming a university professor. He had a choice. Be a good poet or be a good professor. One invariably diluted the other. “That’s right, the I-Don’t-Belong School of Poetry that excludes everyone and includes no one.” Wendt drained the bottle into his glass and then looked up meaningfully at Andy. “Being a poet is not a club or association you belong to. Poetry is the leprous affliction of the exiled and shunned. It is not some kind of cult. It is the reaffirmation of a singularity.”

Andy had been down this road, or one like it, with Wendt before. He had an idea of what was coming. But that’s why he paid for lunch. Lunch with Carl Wendt was bound to be informative if not enlightening.

“The independent or non-aligned poet is relegated to the status of hobbyist by the professional cant of the academics who promote their own in a self-perpetuating literary daisy chain that includes big payoffs like inside track on hiring and fellowships. It has nothing to do with literature and everything to do with who is fucking who and who knows who is fucking who and how they can use it as leverage to keep the whole inane squirrel cage spinning. A bunch of no-talent hamsters.”

“Hey Carl, ease up, I’m going to be one of those academics, you know.”

“Not you, kid, you’ve got a head on your shoulders. Besides, you’re a scholar, not a professional poet.”

“Gee, who would that be?” Andy begged with mock innocence.

“Warren Pace, and just about everyone else in the Monotonous School of Poetry, is a perfect example. Also known as the monotones or the monos. Today I suppose they’d be monopo. And the Flatliners, an off-shoot that has lost most of its adherents to attrition or career changes.

“The collective under the banner of ‘school’ is the Trojan horse used to infiltrate the citadel of academe. The Monos created a cachet and marketed it through the exclusivity of social networking. Someone always had to be out, so that its members could be in. Poets United, whose initials says it all, a subset of more rigid intellectuals and poseurs, used exactly the same ploy. No effort is made to understand the undercurrent or the essence of the art, only the desire to make it different which only makes it, by its sheer novelty, self-cancelling.

“And what do they have to offer? Their awful middle class boredom, passing it off as profound intellectual angst. It never worked for me. Their focus on the technical aspects of poetry masks a deep misunderstanding of what poetry is. It’s not about technique. It’s not about how tight your pants fit. It’s about talent. It’s about undermining, not commodifying. But I suppose when you want to appeal to bourgeois taste, you have to think product, the aesthetic object that can be bought or bought into.” Wendt paused. He had to laugh at himself. His aesthetic critiques often degenerated into faux vitriol, amusing bluster of a Falstaffian cast, especially before a bemused audience such as Andy. He wasn’t about to take himself seriously. Not over lunch. But a few more points needed to be made.

“Once they’ve achieved the metaphorical high ground, they set themselves up as guardians of the velvet rope, id checkers, sniffers of social status, quantifiers of the quibble, bureaucrats of subtle hierarchy, enforcers of the status quo, crabs in a barrel, judge and jury.

“I had a guy come up to me after a reading some years back to tell me that he really liked my poems and admired the fact that I still kept at it. ‘This poetry racket is a hell of a hard one to break into,’ he told me. He knew. He’d tried. Eventually he gave it up, too many obstacles, too many tiny exclusive circles you had to run around in. Then he said to me, and I’ll never forget this, ‘they only know what they think and think only what they know. Everything else is unknown to them. The imagination is a primitive construct to mask what we really think about what we know, you know?’”

Sonny Stitt assaulted the bridge of Bopping A Riff, an old Bebop Boys standard from the forties with Bud on the piano comping in stride. How could music so old be so current? The chef was flashing him teeth and a thumbs-up from the entrance to the kitchen area. Wendt returned the teeth and the thumb.

Andy picked up the check and loaned him, in a manner of speaking, a twenty, the unspoken fee for mentoring.

Wendt grabbed a toothpick and a handful of peppermint candies by the register. “Have you heard anything about NAIF and Stoddard Leary?”

Andy made a face. “I don’t have much to do with that crowd, you know.” He tried to sound apologetic. “The last time I saw Stoddard was at Enrico’s, the night you were there.” Andy smiled as if remembering something pleasant. “You left with that redhead.”

“Ah, yes, Mac, the astral acrobat,” Wendt spoke cryptically.

“Anyway, Stoddard got increasingly drunk and boisterous, and at one point took off all his clothes, yelling ‘If Allen Ginsberg can do it, why can’t I?!’ Why?”

“Word is that his teaching position at NAIF is up for grabs.”

“Go for it, Wendt, you’d be awesome! I would even take your classes!”

“I’m sure I’ve told you this before, Andy,” Wendt said sucking on a mint, “I’ve done a lot of bad things in my day, but teaching creative writing is not going to be one of them.”

from Month

The Poetry Reading

Maybe the real reason Wendt had stopped giving readings was that they attracted all the same poetry deadbeats, dead heads, and brain dead. And the women who attended were mostly his age or older, usually the wives of his friends, fans, and or patrons. Not that that ever made the slightest difference. Or the occasional neurotic grad student with absolutely no social skills, and awkwardly sexual besides being an angry feminist covering for sexual timorousness, insistent that she be respected for her brain, not her pussy. The retort could have been “listen honey, I’d fuck your brain but my dick is too big to fit in your ear hole.” He wasn’t that crude or ever that drunk. Well, he’d never be Dashiell Hammett.

Wendt dreaded pushing open the auditorium door. Empty folding chairs in a cavernous space were always bad news. Slowly, as the evening progressed, the empty chairs would become emptier. For now there were clots of listeners scattered throughout to give it the air of being well attended. Fifty or more pairs of buns perched uncomfortably on metal ledges. Divided by the number of poets on the bill, it averaged out to about three and a quarter persons per poet. There was a stage and a podium, as might be expected, and most of the light in the cavernous acoustic nightmare was focused there. He stood at the back to let his eyes adjust. That’s where Irma found him.

“You’ve actually made it to a reading.” She hooked an arm through his. “That’s an event in itself.”

“When do you go on?” Wendt stared at the person at the podium trying to remember his name.

“I opted to get it over with early. That way I can listen to the poets without stressing about what I’m going to read.” She gave a pained smile. “Though I don’t know why I get the feeling that at large readings like this I’m committing public hari-kari.”

“Sorry I missed it. Self-evisceration can be quite a spectacle.”

“Carl, don’t try to be polite, it doesn’t suit you.”

In spite of himself, Wendt’s concentration focused on the reader. He wasn’t tuning Irma out. That would be impossible. She could be counted on to provide a running commentary of the reading and the readers.

The pace at which the poem being read, stately, metered, languid, sonorous with a clinical monotony as if it were being methodically inserted into the listener’s brain which required intense concentration from both the poet and the audience, was all too familiar. If he’d learned anything in his nearly forty year experience as a public reader of his own words, it was that the poem spoken is comprehended differently than read silently on the page. Sense wins out over meaning. Words passed without immediate understanding. Sometimes the pace and the rhythms were oceanic, hypnotic, leaving the listener comatose. On the other hand, the random soundscape of experiment was too often littered with the ponderous boulders of self drama. Some poets tried to read their poems with a tone approximating the neutrality of the page or with stentorian bombast brow beat the listener while others believed that approximating a hacksaw cutting through sheet metal was the best way to inculcate the masses. And yet still others, linguistic sadists, used words as turnbuckles. Fortunately every so often there were those who rose above the drone and caught the ear with their liquid colloquy, a honeyed speech being just that. Regrettably, the level of amateurishness was embarrassing. To an outside observer foolish enough to wander into such an event, there could be only one conclusion: they’d stumbled into a nest of losers.

The poet walked off the stage to a scattering of applause.

“Tom Rowley’s chatty poems are ok. They’re clever in a brain tweaky sort of way,” Irma opined, “but afterwards they always leave me feeling a little cheap between the ears.”

David Bloom, the MC, thanked the preceding poet and announced the next reader, a name Wendt was not unfamiliar with.

“Ugh,” Irma grunted, “Norma D’Monde! Her poems are so bad she’ll probably end up as the head of a writing program someday. And can you believe that dye job?”

It only took a few poems to prove Irma right, clearly writing program verse, anecdotal with barely a hint of music, labored wisdom, false epiphany, no chances taken, no surprises.

“That’s not poetry, that’s high fructose sentiment,” Irma’s snorted elegantly. “I was over at a friend’s apartment and I guess they ran out of cinderblocks because they were using Norma’s trilogy to prop up a corner of the bookshelves.”

“I’d read it as much as I’d read a cement brick” she answered to “Did you read it?”

And so it went, poet after poet, poem after poem: quasi-surreal cross-culture wake-up calls, declamatory lists accumulating momentum and achieving crescendo but then dropping off into bottomless illogic.

According to Irma, the next reader, Ann Tacit, author of Approval and soon to be published long poem entitled Earn, represented the catalog school of poets, which, as she explained, “contrary to what one might assume are not poets of compilation but poets who appear in slickly produced small press catalogs to create their own web of snobby literary assumptions. They’re also known as the California Cuisine School of Poetry—nice to look at but there’s not much there.”

“Ah,” Wendt breathed in comprehension, “overeducated middle class twits.”

There was never any quickness of mind. Some poems were like being stuck in a traffic jam of mirror images reflecting endlessly speculative details of what could have been done or was done or not. Woulda coulda shoulda as the old Indian chief used to say.

He knew Wallace Tambor from years before, still beating the drum of his associations in poems about meeting various famous poets and what he said to them, and they to him, most of them now dead and unable to contest his allegations. The halting sly wit of Ben Gunn’s dignified decrepitude and the desire to be present and accounted for overshadowing any regret. He was someone who reveled in anonymity and wrote a poetry to enforce it. Then Celia Thornbush, which, according to Irma, was an appropriate name for a feminist, and married to Bruce, a severe aesthete with a perpetually pained expression, but “should one wonder as he’s given his name to a woman who exemplifies, figuratively, the image of vagina dentata.”

It may have been a city ordinance that any multi-poet event had to include on its lineup a harangue with saxophone hipster staccato post-beat jive. Enrique Hermanos, aka KK, so his poem stated, offered the notion that music had returned to poetry in the form of a back beat. He was followed by Reggie Sides and some hip hop revolution poetry.

One of the readers, a woman rather elegantly attired but with the nervousness of a novice, read some surprisingly good poems which caused Irma to remark “she has a chin like a bottle opener.” Irma was never one to hold back from casting aspersions on the competition. One line unfortunately undermined all the poet’s good intentions. “The centrifugal force of the poetry whirl flings me to the periphery.”

“That’s not poetry,” Irma scoffed, “that’s just posturing.” And after Art Penn’s reading, “I know so many guys like that whose psychic turmoil makes for great poetry but really shitty lives.”

“It’s not a vocation for the insecure.”

“Yet they’re drawn to it. Moth, meet flame.”

“One does with what one has.”

“Who said it, the life of a poet, less than 2/3ds of a second?”

All the poets for the most part had that lean and hungry look of those who desired more than anything else to take their place in the spotlight and be the center of attention for even the slightest and most insignificant fraction of their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. He’d come to the conclusion that however well-intentioned, most poets belonged to the dissociative school, not that you could call it a school. More like a shark tank. “What was it William Carlos Williams said?” Irma asked, reading his mind, “There are a lot of bastards out there and most of them are writers.” Their factionalism and social ranking was tiresome. That was another problem with poets. They always want you to choose sides.

The next reader was Savannah George, real name Christine but Savannah was revealed to her during a trance. This was only after she had married the university economics professor whose last name she took. She held touchy feely writing seminars for women. Her own writing, homily laced pseudo-epiphany and gratuitous portraiture of women in history, was pedestrian at best. She was, on the other hand, one of the nicest people, saintly in some respects, with a wide-eyed intransigent innocence, nice and warm like the glow of coals but barely a flame above a flicker. Still, people like Savannah made him uncomfortable. They were like lampreys, psyche suckers. She was followed by a handsome young gay man. Funny how, among poets, it was the gay men who were physically appealing, the women mostly homely and severe, Irma and Val being among the few exceptions. His prancing O’Hara-esque faux camp preceded Taz Stevens (not to be confused with Cat or Wallace), an old snake oil salesman who crooned, with deep English sonority, signifying a pulpit gravity, the laments and lessons of an intemperate man.

“Yuk!” Irma exclaimed, “Flypaper poetry!”

Wendt had been thinking of when and where he’d first run into old Taz. Probably at the Blue Unicorn open readings back when any of them had to shave only a couple times a week and were still wet between the ears. Hadn’t changed his tune much since then. “Say again? Fly what?”

“Flypaper poetry. And poets. You know, the feel-sorry-for-my-sensitive-soul, pleas-for-attention school. Crass manipulation of emotions, sticky self-serving self-satisfied cloying sentimentality. Nothing is more boring than a poet left over from an era people have already forgotten.”

Wendt laughed. “Don’t hold back now, let it all out.”

“Did you know his wife ran off with one of her former kindergarten pupils? She’s like twenty five years younger than her!”

“Alright, now you’re just going to make me feel sorry for him.”

from Year

Fogged In Frisco

All women are crazy some of the time. Some women are crazy all of the time, but not all women are crazy all of the time. The old Orphic trick to avoid being ripped to shreds is to know how to identify some of those women and stay well away from them. It’s not always that easy. I tell myself that I’m done with cheap meaningless sex, but when it comes right down to it, I can never bring myself to pass up a bargain. Women by being penetrable are impenetrable. You can have your cake and eat it too but it’s very expensive. Culture does not so easily overcome biology’s overriding purpose.

Angie had dragged me to an art gallery opening on Market, of all places. This was around the time she was shopping for suitable seed with which to become impregnated. Maybe I was showing off. I’d said it before, and it mostly got a laugh. “Forget the sperm bank, I’m a walking ATM.” Third time was not a charm. I’ll never forget what I saw in her eyes at that moment: rage, disgust, disappointment, betrayal. Don’t shoot the messenger I wanted to say. But I’d been on a roll, and the transformation from ham to ass was almost inevitable. Besides who else is there to shoot or decapitate besides the sperm delivering messenger? The purpose of the Orphic is to stir up female frenzy before the mass fuck fest where the sacrificial victim, some old goat, always a male, is torn limb from limb.

That had come up in the discussion of The English Letter by M. Portmanteau in which the Brits were accused of ruining American literature. I’d been chatting with Lily Mao and her partner, Ann Toenin, the Russian author of Art Ode, a long poem consisting of exclamatory expressions such as Oh! Wow! Eeew!! Ugh! Hunh? Wha? Yuk! Bing! Bang! Boom! Arrgh! and Awk!

I was holding forth as usual and unwisely described the nature of women as concentric. Linda “Whore” Eisen gave me a narrow look. I was being serious. By concentric I meant round, full, centered in consensus. My first mistake was not following the golden rule of mixed company conversation. Such generalities are often viewed as mansplaining in the delicate negotiations of cross-gender communications and can leave you out on the proverbial limb.

“Cuntcentric? Did I hear you say women were cunt-centric?!” Linda wasn’t going to hide her disdain.

That wasn’t what I said, but since the opportunity had arisen, I thought I would see how much more of my foot I could fit into my mouth by espousing the minority opinion on the etymological origins of the word. Cunt comes from the ancient Akkadian khnt which denoted priestess in the temple of the Goddess Inanna, and was once a positive term to describe women. With the denigration of ancient cults by usurper religions, the word had accrued negative connotation. I don’t know why I thought that would cut me some slack.

She didn’t mince words. “None of what you say changes the fact that you are a condescending dickhead, Dickhead.”

Nothing can prepare you for the irrational self-righteous bitch or the crazed homicidal maniac, each tainted by their own hormonal destiny and hijacked by the ruthless almond shaped pea-brain.

Men may be idiots but women are lunatic.

It was Halloween and the following morning of dia de los muertos should have found me dead. That was when I came to hate her. It was then I understood Mac to be the most perfect example of feminine impermeability in all existence.

We’d spent the long day together in the Castro as the colorful and often risqué carnivalesque swirl erupted from bars with drunken hoots and shrieks, parading down the streets in high, very high, fashion. And with hardly any chance to talk, to catch up, jollying and jostling with old friends and new acquaintances, my own celebrity but mostly her credit card keeping us well watered. It was an evening destined for excess.

“Listen grapenuts, I’d be gay but I can’t do the snappy finger thing.” And like a broken record, much to her chagrin I’m sure, “Some of my best friends are cocksuckers.” Someone in the group jammed a powder blue wig on my head and shouted in my face, “You’re just an old queen!”

Eventually we found ourselves on the terrace at Enrico’s, a table overlooking Broadway, costumed freaks and partiers parading by, the default costume being do-it-yourself zombie, smeared catsup on face and clothing and moving like imagined reanimated corpses might walk. A few chollos in their best orange and black ambling behind their pit bulls followed by a bevy of transvestites dressed like they had just come from partying with the Sun King or returning from Cinderella’s Ball. Feathered nymphs and bare breasted goddesses exhibited themselves followed by a pack of male supplicants and slaves in leather. Teen couples drinking Jello shots or sucking on alcohol laced sno-cones ventured into the orange neon haze and the shadow black of night dressed as adults, indistinguishable from adults, all history and all mythology exhibiting the seven deadly sins.

On the street directly in front of our table, a man of about fifty, drawn cheeks no makeup could affect, gray stubble swathing his jaw, had stopped to stare at us, holding by the hand a small boy dressed in outsized clothes, and carrying on his arm another small child held to his shoulder. He was a transient, maybe even homeless. The children’s rags were not costumes. Maybe he had taken them out to relieve the horrible monotony of their uncertainty and poverty. It wasn’t on my powder blue wig he had fixed his gaze, perhaps even wonderment, but at Mac’s purplish glowing light-reflecting red satin low cut dress that left nothing to the imagination. That and the pair of little red horns topping the liquid curls of her carrot tresses. The wicked smile was not part of the costume but it fit the occasion.

Song writers say that pleasure ennobles the soul and softens the heart. The song was wrong that evening as far as I was concerned. Even as I was touched by the haunting eyes of such desperation, I felt ashamed for the drinks we hoisted, too big for our britches. I turned to her, to catch her attention and convey a shared empathy. I looked into those green eyes, home of caprice and governed by the moon, as she said, “Those people give me the creeps.” And summoning the waiter, “Can’t someone do something about them?” So maybe hate is too specific a word for what I felt. Certainly disappointment.

For an instant I entertained the notion that I was looking at myself but in the past, and that those children were ours, and I had finally found her after she had abandoned our marriage, and left me penniless and caring for the kids. And it chilled me, that her disdain came so casually, so callously, that she didn’t realize that I was just a step away from them.

When I came back from the can, there were strangers at the table. I snagged a waiter and he remembered Mac leaving with a couple of guys, headed up in the direction of Columbus. The sidewalks were packed with revelers and I had to weave my way through them. I thought I caught a glimpse of her heading up Columbus toward Green St. but I couldn’t be sure. There was more than one devil afoot that night. Then I lost them.

I heard my name called. I didn’t recognize Wendy at first, in her ladybug outfit of black leotards, a black turtleneck, and vest that supported the black polka dot red carapace on her back. She was wearing a white sequined mask around her eyes. On her head two ping pong balls at the tip of wires bobbed independently when she talked.

Every time I ran into Wendy, it was the same thing. She had become a stalker, at first moonstruck and then completely batshit obsessed. And each time I had to explain that I wasn’t avoiding her even though I was, and that I didn’t get back to the old neighborhood much anymore since Angie sold the house, that I spent most of my time making sure I had a place to sleep and enough to eat so I was pretty much occupied with my day to day survival. I had tried not to hurt her feelings, cowardly avoiding the inevitable confrontation. But that night, fed up with Mac and probably myself, I told her, cruelly perhaps, that she had to stop thinking we were in a relationship. Her face contorted in confusion. “You mean I’m not your girlfriend?” Likely it was impolitic of me to point out “We had sex, exchanged bodily fluids. Don’t make it any more than it is” but at the time it seemed a necessity.

I walked away up Green St. leaving behind a ladybug weeping on a corner crowded with superheroes, witches, fairy princes, and hockey masks. I thought I caught sight of the devil going into Giancarlo’s.

If a bar is a hole in the wall with bad lighting then Giancarlo’s is a bar. I had been 86’d from there a number of times, probably the only one ever banned for non-criminal behavior. I could be just that obnoxious. It was a hangout for the Aether crowd, adherents of the questionable poetics of Jack Spicer. And drinking among them was like feeding time at a zoo, every little crumb of a comment was taken with defensive exception. The more outrageous the observation, the more it roiled the self-righteous indignation. So many buttons to push, it was often too irresistible.

That night the big attraction was Rex Coprophilius, King Shit, crowned with a large white spotted red Aminita Muscaria-like Phrygian cap. He was a traditional figure in North Beach at Halloween, dressed entirely in various layers and rolls of newsprint, phonebooks, and streamers, led through the throng so that people might tear at his attire to propitiate the gods and monsters abroad that night, the torn scraps known as “pieces of shit.” He’d started off with twenty pounds of headlines stapled to his chest. By the time I followed him into Giancarlo’s he was down to his yellow pages.

And there was Mac at the bar talking to this little fireplug of a guy in a suit that was definitely not a costume. He was with two other guys in suits and neatly barbered hair. I immediately thought “cops” but couldn’t understand what the law would want with her. Not that it mattered. I walked right up. I said something. Derisive disappointment. Fascinated disgust at her selfish callow evil. She threw her drink in my face.

What words had I used? They hide from me in memory, skipped over like a needle in a groove to the part where the red pissed off face of some guy is insisting that I couldn’t say such things to a lady. I didn’t deign to even look at him. “Get this clown out of my face.” One of my talents is to be a complete arrogant ass.

The bartender, busy as he was, threw a thumb toward the entrance. “Ok, Wendt, you’re out!”

“But I just got reinstated.”

The bartender made a face. “Do you want me to have Jo-jo explain it to you?” Jo-jo was the bouncer, an Albanian giant who didn’t have the reputation for being gentle. I caught the drift and sauntered out to the sidewalk terrace of my own volition. I lit up a cigarette. I should have known it would come to this.

“Snort it,” she’d said. We were in a room at the Hotel Rexroth. She was naked and shiny. I was showing my age. She’d ground up the blue pill in the ashtray. I looked at the blue powder, “snort it?” “Yes, snort it!” Then her phone rang and she answered it. “When?” She stared at me. “Thanks, Nicole, I owe you one.” And then to me, “My husband is in the lobby with a couple of his Fremont cop buddies. They’re on their way up.” And as if she had to say, “You better leave.”

Clutching my suit coat and holding up my pants in the hallway, I heard the elevator ding arriving at the floor. I did an about face and headed for the door with the red exit sign above it. I heard the voices and the knocking as the door closed behind me. My unwieldy lumber jutted out from my briefs constantly in peril of snagging the iron pipe railing of the stairwell in my frantic descent. That had been a close call. It was apparent that Mac’s marriage was not as open as she claimed.

I was leaning on the wrought iron barrier to the terrace out in front of Giancarlo’s mulling the replay when I spotted Wendy coming toward me with a look of agonized determination. I stepped on my cigarette and turned to leave. The fireplug who had been talking to Mac was blocking my exit.

“You can’t talk to her like that.”

“Why, was it your turn?”

“She’s my wife,” arrived at about the same time as his fist to my jaw. Then the rain of blows coming from all directions sank me to my knees. I tried to squirm away on the sidewalk, absorbing the kicks to the gut, shielding my head with my arms, curling up to make myself smaller, more compact, and then the intense bolt of pain as a shoe crushed my shin against the edge of the curb, hearing as well as feeling the snap of bone with my entire body. I screamed, gasping for breath, an anguished naked roar. The gunshots, now that I realize that’s what they were, not the sounds of my rendering, accomplished a pause in the attack. I tried to crawl away, desperately seeking to leave the scene as well as find an equilibrium that might make sense of the searing heat in my mangled leg. What I finally managed was vomiting and lapsing into unconsciousness.

I don’t know if “lousy poet” was actually part of the beating. Maybe I just imagined it. Come to find out it was Mac’s hubby and his cop pals, practiced in the take down. Nothing ever came of it or I never heard that it did. Cops stick together, a fraternity, unlike poets, unaffiliated, cults of one. I’d heard that someone described the incident as “They were beating the hell out of a guy wearing a powder blue wig.”