Some Kind of Something...
We had to abandon our sense of humour on the soft shoulder of the freeway, a smoking wreck that managed to sputter a few times before kicking over and finally expiring. It would be a long walk to the next wisecrack.
We had just managed to squeeze out during a sleepy lull in the festivities. Marta and I were actually dead bored of the Spanish-speaking sword-swallowers by this time, their novelty worn out like an old, busted shoe at about the fifth pass of the bottle. The problem with whiskey is that it makes everyone the same at some point—or, worse, too much like they really are, which can be a problem if one is a closet bore or a half-human jukebox.
Marta was a third-class performance artist of a kind. Her shtick was to videotape herself masturbating 5 with slaughterhouse organ refuse, 6 which was considered the top shelf of kitsch spectacle until the flavour of the week changed—now the big thing was recording people getting frustrated while filling out their taxes. Finally, art had reached the people, and actually became a bit more interesting. There had been a dust up of sorts in Kitchener that neither Marta nor I were all that eager to make sense of. All we cared to know at this point is that some lout made some noise and I snuggled in my fist to make it stop. Nasty things were flashing up all across our dashboard of adventure. Always count on lousy luck.
The night began poorly, which should have tipped me off and prompted me to call it quits early. There was this poetry slam where some guy in ripped plaid ran off the stage all around the bar screaming something about a magic bag before returning and issuing some sober, quiet line. The delivery was awful, and I'm sure the other bar patrons who didn't bank on their watering hole being invaded by the mustering majority of wildebeest poets were not all that amused when they were hit by this streaking-style drive-by ersatz poetry. The top prize went to some hay-haired girl who wrote maundering poems about dead butterflies. She was seen as some complicated girl with deep and delicate poetic sensibilities, but it just sounded to me like some pseudo-pagan who listened to too much Enya and still thought that menstruation was "magical".
"Why don't you read some of your stuff?" Marta had asked me.
"Nah. I'm not in the mood or mode for this scene. These people want a different kind of shit than what I write."—I ordered another drink.
"C'mon," Marta prodded, using the English language's most effective argument.
"The problem with readings is that people just read and don't listen. I can do that just as easy reading in front of a mirror in my bathroom and give myself my own half-hearted, disingenuous applause." 7
"You're such a grumpy old cynic."
"Do you know any optimistic young cynics?"
We shut the bar down and went trolling for some more action. Some stragglers from the poetry reading where wandering about like lost ducklings without their mother. Among them was my old editor who had published an excerpt of my novel, And all the Angels Have Knives in Their Teeth in his rag, Crusty Shorts.
"Henry! What are you doing down here in the low side of town? Long time no see!" beamed my old editor.
"Just taking the air. Change of scenery," I said.
"Hey, guys," he addressed the others, "you know who this is? This is Henry Binowski! I used to publish his stuff. What are you up to these days, Henry?"
"Well, still haven't kicked the writing habit yet."
"Ha ha! This guy's a riot! You haven't changed a bit!"
"Well, now I get paid."
And that was partially true. My newest collection of poems, The Deadly Baron Sleeps in His Knickers received some crummy award for best poetry collection produced by a male alcoholic down on his luck in southern Alberta. It beat painting eyes on dolls in a factory.
"Say, Henry, me and the crew here were thinking of going somewhere for an after-hours little pow-wow and drinks. What say you and the lady come with us?"
I was about to decline, knowing how these things usually turn out—endless yammering and gossiping about the new poets, ugly jealousies aired, how hard it is to make it, same old heehaw—but Marta accepted on our behalf.
"Ok, lead the way," I said.
We were led into an apartment complex with stained carpets. The hallways smelled like boiled dirty socks and marital dysfunction. Once we entered the apartment, I scouted for the drinks and promptly poured myself a long whiskey. I downed that and poured another generous dose before relinquishing the bottle to the next in line. Eventually, the topic got snagged on politics. By this time I was pretty deep in my cups and fatally bored. Maybe famous poets actually did work while all the rest who haven't quite yet made it just stood around, opined, drank, puffed cigarettes, parading their "genius" and pretending they had it all figured out. I've met some genuine famous poets—they didn't go to frou-frou after-parties and talk about Marx while dipping into the Sambuca. Rather, they tended to have an instinctual fear of the public, received guests with all their monotonous praise with begrudging reluctance, and just wanted to be left alone to drink vodka in their dark cellars 8 to write the next great encomium to mass suicide. 9
Some confused utopian putz was going at length about the need for a mass global strike, the big proletariat revolution. The reality is that the workers don't give a shit about fighting the system, and it always seemed that the ones who never worked a day in their lives were the only ones beating the war drums for the proletariat. I decided to talk without caring very much if anyone was listening:
"Well, we all know that whenever the President opens his mouth, the price of gas wobbles. We also know that, while the rich have crackshot accountants to keep them from paying taxes, the war is funded by the middle class and the poor while the politicians dole out trillion dollar cheques for machines that will more efficiently bomb small, armed children who have had more gritty life experience then all of us here put together. Big deal, shop at Wal-Mart, etcetera."
"We must promote a global mass strike!" said one of the creatures whose beard refused to grow right.
I poured myself another drink and sawed the air:
"The Left died of boredom long ago. Fucking ennui-leftists sitting in their anarcafes with their café-style righteousness. Manifestotality, more like, and what's more"—another big gulp—"Your values are squat earthenware ideals in the squalid back-alley galleries of revolutionaries. Go forth and storm the next G8 only to buy the barricades back on eBay as nostalgia items, the great globotomy...balsam wood idols! You shrill, shrieking harridans so many streets behind how things actually are, wrestling with phantoms you take for this thing so blandished as state, hopelessly entangled on the rotten entrails of your antiquated Marxist arguments...What a bunch of jejune moralists powered by collective wrongheaded conviction...a brigade of sour and stale enthusiasts! Besides, even global warming is just the warming up to the idea of finding new ways to inaugurate gloabl government."
My staccato utterances had managed to put a lid on the room, everyone dish-eyed and shocked. I just kept drinking. And then this was when the sword-swallowers ran Marta and me out with my ex-editor calling after me, "only a wretched bum violates a peaceful space! A wretched bum!"
Marta and I parted at the Greyhound station, and I headed down south for a gig.
I was drinking dinner with Bill (the name is changed because his real one really stinks), and I thought to break the doldrums of the evening by joining him in firing our Berettas into the floorboards to see the raised wood-nipples stipple across the floor. Indeed, it was much more fun than having your face chewed by feral dogs while sleeping off a beer-head in a park. Now, Bill, he kind of looked like a shit smear with sideburns and had this nasty habit of falling for airline stewardesses who kept running—or flying that is—away with his money. He wasn't a bright boy, but that's not the reason we keep him around. Some people are just absolutely possessed by a humor quotient made so incredibly inflated by being living slapstick tragedies. Our Bill: reliable laughingstock and made-to-measure inevitable country song suicide.
So we were getting our whiskey on in proper measure, which is to say, in measures according to liver failure, and trying to get overboard with some rather extempore amusement. One time, while on a whiskey night just like this one, we decided to wing padlocks at each other, smashing about four of his windows and just about all of his mounted knick-knacks. The difference tonight was that this was a motel room in Missouri and I was on a book gig, due in six hours to face a poetry conference or convention or some kind of sad excuse to corral a bunch of wordy ego-criminals together in one space. And there would be no way of getting sober for a long while, which was made the more difficult by the fact that I insisted that we blast through the whiskey reserves Bill and I pulled from the duty free shop.
"Let's go rustle up some possums and chase 'em around," Bill offered.
"Not a wise idea," I said. "We are talking about an animal that, despite having a predilection for getting under-wheel of meth-driven semis on the highway, have fifty teeth. A critter with fifty teeth is Nature's way of telling the world that we ought not to fuck with it."
"Ah, those teeth are probably really tiny."
"So are the teeth on a band saw, but I'm not about to stick my hands on it when it's in motion."
I once met an struggling author by the name of Jango 10 who was wont to wax long and hard on the animal kingdom. According to him, the possum is this continent's only marsupial, a family of animals that have built-in pockets. The possum also has an opposable thumb which means it may be able to handle a very small pistol if properly trained. It also has the ability to play dead when in danger—a skill it shares with politicians under scandalous fire. Bill couldn't hear the note of reason behind the thick haze of whiskey tipping and was insistent that we find a possum. I suggested something safer, like an armadillo or an amusing wino, but Bill wouldn't be deterred. I did, however, manage to convince him that we ought to leave the Berettas in the motel room.
Speaking of Berettas and motel rooms, the sound of erratic gunfire was enough to elicit a complaint and bring the motel manager huffing and puffing to our door. I immediately threw one of those cheap universal motel orange-y earth tone bed covers on our modern art.
"What's this about somebody firing off a gun here?" puffed the manager.
"We were trying to kill a possum outside our window," Bill covered.
"You can't do that here! That just ain't right! What the heck's the matter with you, boy? You got water between your ears?"
I stepped up, "We're very sorry. We don't understand your great country; we're from Canada."
"Do people do this kinda thing in Canada?" the manager asked, still incredulous.
"For sure. More of a national pastime than hockey. Why do you think we have no more moose left?"
"You guys sure have a strange way about ya."
"Is it true," Bill was beginning to ask, "that your president stays up all night playing Risk and drinking root beer with the Saudi royals?"
"Huh?"
"Don't mind him," I interjected as I was closing the door. "He's an alcoholic. And a Canadian. Bad mix. Doctors give him three months to live. Seriously bent. We won't be having any more live fire exercises. Bye."
The manager stuck his foot in the door and made a puzzled face. "Why is the comforter on the floor?"
"Uh...what comforter?" I stuttered.
"That one, there yonder. Right there!" he pointed.
"Comforter...comforter...Oh, right! That. Um, yeah, it's another Canadian thing. As you know, we have same sex marriage up there, and this whole multicultural 11 multigrain touchy-feely solidarity thing. It's mandatory that every heterosexual male do six months service in the gay army. 12"
"And what do you think God thinks about that?"
"Who do you think authored the legislation? Now, if you'll excuse us, we're on maneuvers."
My last royalty check for my books was lucrative enough to pay off my mortgage if I lived in a birdcage. I suppose I could have opted for a more practical line of work, like real estate or headhunting for Latin American politicians, but the line of work I did choose afforded me the luxury of flexible hours and without the albatross of financial stability. I had financed this trip mostly on my own, and this junket would see me wax smart-ass on high morality rates in the core dump of values. Bill was my unofficial talent manager who enjoyed smoking eucalyptus and kept insisting that I do it with him so that we could become koala blood brothers. He also had one of the largest gun collections I have ever seen, every one of them unregistered and illegal makes. He tried once to sell me a Kevlar vest (he has seven or so) and also boasted of having one of the largest collection of police badges in case he wanted to play master of disguise in a law enforcement way. He also kept a pair of handcuffs on him at all times, but had learned his lesson a decade ago to always carry the keys when a woman 13 had cuffed him to the bedposts naked and he had to dial a police friend with his nose. He was, however, not so avid a hunter. This had more to do with his sudden pangs for the sport when he was on the whiskey tilt-a-whirl, and all the elk he claimed to have blasted with his AK-47 seemed to be made of splintered bark.
It was one of those nights when the primeval hunter came out in Bill. He was still intent on bagging a possum—rather literally now with a shopping bag. My words of caution seemed to have suffered the perils of bad translation as they reached my tongue, for my utterance was of complete encouragement. I bagged the Berettas in plastic and hid them from Bill in the toilet tank where we were keeping some beers cold.
Let me avoid the usual palaver of cloying travel writing and not bother describing what kind of bombed Dresden this town in Missouri actually is. Making one's way to the backwoods is easy since the whole place is backwoods. Stinking, verdant, possum-infested backwoods occasionally run through by a highway. Our purpose was the possum itself, and we had less than six hours to find one before I was due to appear at the university. We succeeded in getting desperately lost and confused. 14
The event was billed as a congregation of famous poets. How I managed to get put on this bill was a matter of uncertainty and, perhaps, grievous oversight.
We went to see Chesterton Bloch and Roger McLuhan read. McLuhan read like he had a bunch of dead tarantulas in his underpants that he desperately wanted to convince us were actually alive. Roger had a lisp and a laugh like a drunken donkey. Chesterton was not much better: he wrote some kind of "lang-po" that sounded like he was both speaking in tongues and trying to pass a hard shit. He couldn't really write, but he was famous because he looked like a fantasy home repairman. The postman flushes twice. I was still quite drunk and slightly ornery. My connection, a creative writing professor we'll call James, was trying to lighten my mood with questions that invariably would darken my mood:
"What do you think of Peggy Inwood's newest book?"
"It's like the Odyssey without the body count, narrated by Nestor."
"How do we attract more attention for poetry readings?"
"Give out free drinks and strippers. The problem with poetry is that it has always had too many romanticists. They all make me suffer a migraine of the soul."
"Should poets demonstrate more rhetorical rigour by being more politically correct in their subject matter?"
"If you mix milky words with meaty concepts, the poem ceases to be kosher." 15
I waved James off after a while, seeking a bar. Bill came along and we spent the remainder of the poetry conference away from poets.
James came and fetched me for my reading segment. I won't bore you with what I read, how I read it, or any of that noise. I will say, however, that the whole affair ended with the best fistfight I've had in years.
Notes:
5 At every inflection, permutation and conjugation of this word in the primary text (there are 415 of them), the letters are highlighted and linked to some mechanical expedient which brings forth vibra-matic effects and what is called a "ring tone," based on a pirated version of "Tammy's in Love," sampled and mashed excruciatingly with Shostakovitch's nightmare orchestration of "Tea for Two."
6 The text is linked to a video clip of the Niece doing just that. It's unspeakable.
7 An actual piece of left-path liturgy, prescribed by the Megatherion in one of his lesser Libri, for summoning minor undines.
8 The life will be melanized out of "Faucher," hence the darkness of the cellars here so nightmarishly evoked. A moment in the shadows is needed to gather courage before suicide by ultraviolet rays.
9 If, like the wretch in the counry of the Gadarenes, we all contain legions, this can be seen as a characteristically left-handed self-reference to the farewell note laid out before us now. It now seems finally to dawn on our soon-to-be-late author that his complaint might be aired posthumously.
10 An Anglicization (ironic on our heptalingual author's part) of the given name of the great gypsy guitarist whose unfinished symphonic masterpiece was to be called Diminishing Blackness—which conceit, if applied epidermically like camomile lotion, can be said to express our author's deepest fear/lust.
11 It's the height, or rather depth, of irony that one of the accusations which drove this ostensible "Faucher" to his melanomic grave was that of "anti-multiculturalism." This, in a Chaucer who chose five authors of disparate socio-ethnicities, topped by Pound, whose Idahoanness is the most "diverse" of all. A Hottentot with her apron could hardly be more exotic than an Idahoan—unless she hailed from the grotesque political entity due south of Poundville, like the Sam Edwine whose acronymic suppurating encephalitis plagued our author. (See note 98.)
12 Our text's first and only conscious sally with the sin that dare not speak its name. (See note 36.)
13 See note 67.
14 This is a thinly veiled autobiography of our author's antepenultimate misadventure, in a part of the world with rather more rattlers than possums.
15 See note 19, on thin ice.
Kane X. Faucher is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario and the author of several novels. His next book coming out in autumn 2011 will be a Borgesian mystery, The Infinite Library. He lives in the other London, in Canada.
Tom Bradley's latest books are Vital Fluid (Crossing Chaos), Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing), Lemur (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Bomb Baby (Enigmatic Ink), Even the Dog Won't Touch Me (Ahadada Press), My Hands Were Clean (Unlikely Books), Calliope's Boy (Black Rainbows Press), and Acting Alone: a novel of nuns, neo-Nazis and NORAD (Drill Press). His nonfiction titles, Fission Among the Fanatics (Spuyten Duyvil) and Put It Down in a Book (Drill Press), were named 3:AM Magazine's Non-Fiction Books of their respective years. Family Romance, a novel illustrated by Nick Patterson, is forthcoming in 2012 from Jaded Ibis Press. Further curiosity can be indulged at TomBradley.org.