The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

The American Way

fargokantrowitz — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:31:09 +0000

In general, researchers and listeners are more interested in the answers than the questions (since the answers are usually more varied than the questions, and may go into related topics not directly mentioned in the question). A good rule of thumb is the more detailed and descriptive the indexing is, the better researchers are able to access the tape content. For example, writing “describes fears about not surviving and prayers he wrote in his diary” is more helpful than “fears in battle.” For examples of some excellent logs the Veterans History Project has received from participants, please see sample Audio and Video Recording Logs listed on our forms page.

The Other Side – Dink

fargokantrowitz — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 08:25:42 +0000

The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite

(An important message.)- the other side

We interrupt this sage. Yes. The other side is ridiculous. There is no other side. I repeat there is no repeat, wait, you can’t do tha…wait. Crunch. We interruput your air space with Albert Jones: People of the novel. The world is false. There is no here and there is no there, so, put down the novel and go outside and turn off the sprinklers. See if you can see that blonde who likes to undress by her swimming pool in plain sight of everybody around and it is everybody, Hank, Johnny, even over there on third street with his binoculars and all. Stan, Gus, Joe, Frank, Sam, Don, Bud, and Ron, Eli over from his roof on fourth street. The entire Clavicord family, whose last name I don’t know, but do know that sometimes he likes to play her when she plays it if you know what I mean. I can’t help it. It’s either never enjoy the stars or miss out on when the Mrs. leaves the shade open for ya. )

Jes kiddin, shit, she’d slap the taste out of your mouth and then you still gotta see her on Sunday. I’ve figgered it were more me to do what I do and that’s play bass. Ain’t got time for that kind of stuff. Leave it for daytime t.v. The world’s just not that bad that you gotta go there like a bunch of sniffy dogs in a neighborhood. My only real dream is to go on the road, go on tour. With somebody. Fuck it. So far we got Albert and…me. Oh well. We’ll get it going. The inner world society is doing pretty well, I guess. I’m getting the internet up since Albert is a moron when it comes to that stuff. Not a moron. No, I guess not, he’s not a moron. I[m more the moron really with me all I wanna do is play bass…

We got the stellar breeze inner world society going now, when stellar can make it into the Magi. He llives up in the hills collecting the milk of goats. They live happily and then one day Stellar will throw this email over to the gang and they’d read one of the mountain goat man’s poems for him since it was too hard for him to come down from the hills. But he would send ‘em and that was the stellar breeze inner world society, that name was Stellar’s, and he had the best poetry reading pretty much anywhere, really, that good. Anyway, Time magazine did a piece on him and then he was like, oh, now they think I think I’m something I’m not blah blah, but Stellar finally made it out of his cage on special occasions and it turned out one of these reasons was where he could see some of his poems performed at Albert’s The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Cajmpsite. That was the best poetry reading ever done, one of the best with Stellar’s bathtub sit poetry reading, pink shower curtain, or the Porn Night! We were supposed to bring out mothers. Fucked up shit like that. Shows that nobody would ever go to, but they were packed. We saved Stellar, who was sort of like a non-lethal bullfighter and maneuvering round most any town since he was gay. Stellar was happy all the time. He was joyous! He had found something in his life and it made him light up almost as bright as Jesus but not quite. That kind of guy. Really can write too. He’s a serious poet, even does academic blah blah, but what I’m saying is this “character” was out there. He was the ken kesey of the east Appalachians, from New York City, of course…

Dink Merrick on living in Millsville 2010

Dream

fargokantrowitz — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:05:13 +0000

The children were smaller, on a carousel facing inward, but not moving. It’s just where they liked to stand if they hadn’t “fallen off” and begun taunting each other, posing at each other, fists outstretched, legs bent down like superheroes, their crew-cuts, mother given, ugly as your knowledge of their predicaments locked inside their tiny white heads. I had gone to sit on a bench close to the street. You could see the cars going by and it was a relief, but then it hit me, I was a prisoner there. I would leave when they said so and no sooner. Even though I was 41, I was in no better situation than those children. We were all being kept.
It started when we were about to leave. Me and Christopher, but Christopher was fiddling with his camera. I saw the frightened faces of the Mexican workers and looked around and saw the man with the crossbow. I didn’t know it was a crossbow, but thought it was a rifle with a scope on it. He was about a hundred yards away and he was definitely beginning the task of pointing it at me, or my general area, as I crouched behind the car, behind the tire. I felt like the eyepiece was following me. Christopher seemed unaware of everything.
I sat in a white room with others. I don’t remember why I was there. Christopher would attack me at times. Run up behind me and grab me and hold on with all his strength. I tried to get through to him. One time I yelled into his deranged eyes “Christopher! Christopher!” and as they dragged him away I knew I had gotten through. A man looked closely at me and told me that I had fought back or something to that extent and I didn’t know if he was upset or pleased.
I was then called in for therapy. I am a large man, close to 270, but soon found myself being balanced on the legs of an average sized black woman who was probably about the age of 30. Somehow she could hold me using the weight of her body, her arms and her legs. I fell into it and enjoyed it. Then she let me fall forward and then would catch me. I was asked to relax and fall naturally, but I was almost too much for her. I noticed there were paintings on the wall, pastoral works and I saw prices written under the wooden frames. I don’t remember the paintings well, but they were of summer light in sad places, English hills, barns, non-descript browns and blues.
There was talking too, I remember now, but as she questioned me (it seemed as though the questions came when I was put into positions by the woman)…I can’t remember too well the questions, but the answers seemed to be about my life and my novel. I remember thinking about my mother, but do not remember the context. This seemed and still seems important. Progress was made, but no final answers given. The woman dropped away and then all I remember is being dismissed from the session by a different worker, this time a man and when he walked away I could see that I had just been another therapy session. That was the sadness. To feel as though you were being healed, but it was all a ruse in that you were just another therapy session. That’s when I walked away to the bench and saw the children on the carousel and knew the extent of the problem.
One other thing I remember is the therapists themselves, or rather, what appeared to be interns or something. They were young and they wore white coats and they walked in the glass door from the street on their way to work. I felt like they were giving me intelligent people to talk to finally. One of them had eyes that were very piercing, but I knew that it was in the service of knowledge and not me specifically which made me think of him a little bit like a robot. They all wanted to be therapists and were just learning. But their intelligence seemed like what I needed if I were to finally understand what had put me into this place where I could not leave even if I wanted to, but I didn’t know that. For now, I was just another kid on the carousel.

The Second Literary Campsite

fargokantrowitz — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:32:19 +0000

Welcome to the second literary campsite. I promise that it won’t be any better than the first, but I never promised anything about the first either. I get tired of competition and I’m not about to introduce it to myself as these damned missives to the world continue. You can go screw yourselves if that’s what you want.
Some time ago I got sick of being slick. I tried so hard to be slick for the sake of selling my words that I started hating myself. Now I just want to write and if it comes out as appearing slick (of quality) then that’s a good by product, but I won’t chase it anymore. It’s putting the cart before the horse when you do. That carrot ain’t so tasty anyway.
A lot of people know I’m a writer and they ask me how I can do what I do. Well, I would like to address that question here on the campsite today. First of all, for all of you who don’t consider me a writer, I welcome you to the campsite. Please stop reading now. For those of you who consider me a writer because I am writing now and you are a writer because you write I also offer you a hearty welcome, but writers are few. So for that one percent of you who are still reading because you are a manic word gobbler I will say this: I don’t know.
John Steinbeck, one of my favorite authors, said he had learned a lot of technical tricks on how to be a writer, but once he sat down at that blank page was as lost as anybody else as to how to do it. The process begs questions, unanswerable questions, to produce answers. What part of our minds actually does the writing? That’s a biggie because it asks you to look at your very process of thinking. That’s one that makes us lose fifteen years to the study of ourselves. If you pick up an addictive habit add five to ten years. To get out of it I went and got a graduate degree in a subject called “Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology.” That added five years to my dumbfoundedness in addressing this question.

Now, having failed miserably in answering the basic question of how do we write, $30,000 poorer for asking, too, I come up with the same thing that your high school teacher came up with who didn’t get lost in the world of reality questioning, got a good stable degree, made 30,000 the same year I lost it: Writing itself is the answer. Put the seat of the pants on the chair. The answer comes in the process, the feelings you discover during the process, the uncovering of the mysteries.
The question cannot be addressed empirically unless you want to enter James Hillman Hell. This is a place where seeking types try to become scholars and yet the scholarship consists of believing that unreality has in its kernel, its core, the notion that it is just as real as the real. God is as real as Bread. The inner is as real as the outer. This is exactly what I believed as a child of an artist and spiritualist type mother. But you can’t just take it in. You have to forget you know it in order to know it. It’s all confusing and barely worth your time that Buddhist monks must say over and over for twenty years before they kick aside a pebble and for some reason gain enlightenment. In our society this is not practical. Trust me I’ve lost many very marketable years chasing after the answer.
In sum all I have to say about this particular question is “don’t ask.” Get a business degree, soup up your Chevy, get laid and please, find a pot to piss in.

But a Glimmer in the Eye

fargokantrowitz — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:38:00 +0000

Under Alex’s skin was the dullness again. The sound came from outside. Kids playing their tunes probably, little nothing sounds unaware of themselves that ruled anyway. He went to the window. Not kids, he realized, but the neighbors, people he didn’t like because he didn’t know them and they didn’t know him. By now, after seeing one another for two years, no one cared to bridge this gap.
He closed the window. There was that man who always walked his dog, talking to a woman with blue veins on her temple, a talker, her, one who spoke of things like friends and who gave little notices via her eyes about real meanings that had no importance whatsoever in the world of thought, of ideas, the things that Alex prided himself as having embraced like a lover. He had closed the window so as not to hear the tinny music that the lady always carried with her when she walked. The man never walked, but stood and watched his dog. He was old, too. There was no way to know about them, except that he was not a talker and she was. Did he put up with her as Alex had put up with her briefly before closing the window and going back to his computer? He had 134 Facebook friends. Yet nobody ever called.
He remembered the laughter of the woman. Over the many years laughter seems to lose its luster. It seemed fake to Alex, too loud, too loud to be real, for very few things caused so much laughter to occur unless the person wanted laughter to occur. You could not have real laughter through mere want, he knew. He looked at the happy people on Facebook, hoping that they were not as happy as they seemed. He hadn’t posted in several months and had considered getting off, but his computer was too old now and it wouldn’t let him. He was a slave to Facebook and friends who didn’t write to him, formerly good friends, friends that mattered. All avoided him and his only solace was in thinking that they avoided everybody else, too, that they were philosophically against Facebook so were off doing something else. They probably hoped the same thing concerning him, if they remembered him at all.
Alex had recently quit reading the newspaper in hope of gaining a little bit of solace. He had taken up reading again, novels: J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Russell Banks, only the best of modern writers. He was going to inject the best of thought into his overly worked brain from now on. Everything else had somehow failed him. He had been like those Indians whose sole purpose is to make sure the sun goes from East to West every day. By reading the news he was a watchdog. Nothing too horrible could happen if he was on the job. In the end, he realized, this was a false notion. He had written letters to editors and politicians and had never gotten a response. He had protested the Iraq war. They killed anyway. Everybody does everything anyway, he realized. He had zero impact upon the world by fretting over it. Besides, now that he had let the world go, there would be more of a chance that it would hasten its own destruction and he would be forced to move on, to Argentina or Ecuador or the southern tip of Spain. The nuclear bombs probably wouldn’t go off in these places.
Alex could no longer hear the tinny music of the woman who laughed like she didn’t want to. Janie Frieberg was doing lunch with her sister and she was really excited. He couldn’t put Facebook away just yet. He kept going back to it. Janie was the only girl he had ever dated who remained his friend afterward. She seemed so dull to Alex, viewing her life on Facebook, so much so that he wondered what he had ever seen in her. When she left him, she had been talking about spirituality and politics and religion and sex. When she walked she would sometimes twirl. She was bright-eyed and ambitious, but when she saw him it always seemed like she was looking around him, like she was looking to see if there was something better than Alex. This eventually led to the inevitable breakup. One knows when one is not loved.
Now Janie was married to a man named Styrong. Alex couldn’t place the nationality of that name. Perhaps he was Asian or Scandinavian. It would have fit Janie to go after an international type. She was a romantic. That’s why they originally clicked. She went by Janie Frieberg Styrong on Facebook, proud of herself and her marriage. She was a regular gal now, wasn’t straying that far, was capable of being married and having kids while keeping her individuality which was always very important for she and Alex way back when. She looked better now than she did then, but Alex figured that was just because he still missed her. He loved her then and he loved her still, but now he had to face, everyday, that it was an illusion, that their relationship was a brittle husk at best while it was going on and now was a visible memory anytime he went to the computer. She was making vegetarian tacos for the kids. She got a new shawl that was wonderful. Does anybody else care that meat is murder?
Everybody on Facebook had become a caricature of who they really were, but that was all that he had of them anymore. He had no way of going back to them. He was a failure in this world, living on food stamps, nursing a painful tooth badly in need of a root canal, working at a job that had no interest in his Bachelors in English Literature with an emphasis in Poetry. Poetry. It had failed him. The words had not been enough. The world didn’t want them. After awhile the bitterness seeped into him like the rot into his tooth. More than once he cursed the gods of poetry, those same gods that he saw in the eyes of Janie, that he heard in the music of her voice. He knew what mattered and he was forced to question himself and his choices. Had he majored in poetry because he was lazy? Was he a failure in the world because the inner world really was not as important as the outer world? Had that been a lie? Why did the guys who never bothered going to school do better than he did in the minute intricacies of life? They all got married. All had children. All made upwards of 50 to 100,000 dollars per year. Alex realized that it was willful ignorance and lack of introspection that had saved them. They had not tried to trace the intricacies of God’s grand design and the universe rewarded them for it, like a bunch of Adams before the original thought.
Alex went down the row: Stan Villon, now a professor in South Carolina. Stan was a friend during his post-college days in Chicago. A guy who reminded Alex of Gandhi, Stan had been a student at the University of Chicago. Of course he would now be a professor. Alex sat with these University of Chicago students in old houses while snow fell outside, drinking coffee while reading to each other. They were equals there. Nobody cared that Alex had graduated from a small state school in California of little significance. He sat and listened mostly, always somewhat in awe of the intelligence of his fellows. They liked his poetry, but he always wondered whether he could ever be an intellectual peer to them. They had been vetted by the system and they could take that with them anywhere they went. He had gotten into college easily, for all that had been needed was a C average in high school. Everybody got into his school.
He had watched as these diverse human satellites in the world of the University of Chicago pulled in close just briefly and then veered away into their proper orbits. These orbits were distinctly different from his. Their orbits allowed them to be paid for subtle thought simply because they had also been practical. Many had been groomed. Now he felt that he had simply been allowed to view the subject matter. Nobody ever had any intention, he felt, of letting him also thrive by concentrating on the barely visible truths, pulling them up further and revealing them for the good of all man-kind. He thought of going back to school, a graduate school where he could study philosophy and psychology and poetry and fiction and write essays and treatises and be listened to. Perhaps that was what was needed, to be allowed to be one of the vetted ones, to push it forward, get the title behind his name and just go to work, get paid, get a family, a home, a life. But the brain was dulled by now, at 38, too dulled to forget the pain that he had experienced holding on to a dream made of vespers and silence. He had come to know the realm of poetry, but by this time, the sadness of getting there had chased him away. Half of him no longer respected something that could keep someone from having a family through its virtual insistence upon poverty in order to stay true. This rebellion pushed him back to Facebook. He scrolled down.
A slew of faces, some of them from his time attempting to solidify a weekly poetry reading that fell through. Once again, the real world trumped the inner world. He found that there was petty competition even in the realm of high spirituality. Life always seemed a balance between the animal and the spiritual and the animal always won. God Sex ruled, of course, perhaps because of the spirituality involved on some deeper level, but with it always came the baser power structures, the evil little victories, the savoring of the defeat of others. Once again, the poetic ideal was corrupted by two little things called hope and belief. There was Roger Milens and Fay Disiwala. They were good poets and went on to be in a theater company. He never really knew what they did with the rest of their lives, but they drove nice cars, had mates, were nice people, but aloof. Everybody was aloof. Poetry was about intimacy with others. You could play it, but Alex found that few wanted to live it. God Fun was really the key here. Fun was the ideal once people got together. The urge to laugh became a sort of religion. Perhaps if people couldn’t laugh after every sentence then everybody would have to cry. Everybody would just break down and cry. As people age, the idea of tears became the enemy. No matter what everybody was doing, no matter what a group believed in, the idea of fun always reigned supreme. It was the same on Facebook. Everybody was putting on their perfect face. In the meantime, nobody communicated anymore. Nobody cared anymore. They had all virtually laughed themselves to death.
Brent Helow, Slim Fawaskawa, a Japanese dude who was really funny. Another one Alex didn’t really know. Slim was one of those guys who was in and out. He had an invisible wall around his head, a perpetually smiling head, a mouth of perpetual wit and glee, but a wall nonetheless. He was just another who came out and then went back in where Alex could not go. The death of intimacy, Alex thought. Facebook was becoming a symbol to him of the death of ever being able to connect on a true level with somebody ever again. All of his friends were on it. Every friend that was listed he now knew did not want to know him anymore. It would have been better had he not initiated contact at all. They would have been better off left in the warmer clouds of memory. If left there, there would have been a hope of contact once again, real contact, and it would have held surprise and the memory of the more authentic moments of the past, the true laughter that had simply had to stop. Alex understood having to move on, but he couldn’t quite understand coming back in such an impersonal way. All reunions had been wasted. He would never have a reason to really see these people ever again. They were Facebook friends after all.
Julie Lowe, a model and actress, a stranger; Giselle Luidi, an intellectual from college who laughed like a hyena but behind her glasses possessed one of the finest noses he had ever seen. She was a beauty that didn’t know it who became a business-type, he thought, wasn’t sure, stocks and bonds. Smart girl. He had re-united with her without a word, a simple acceptance of the other’s existence, an acknowledgement that the one is happy that the other is not dead. They had once found themselves alone together for four hours, and talked about everything from politics to the Miami Dolphins. There had even been a chance at love, but it fizzled. Both held back. Both had a feeling about the other, that it just wasn’t that way. They were right. A hello without a hello was in order. Strike Giselle. Tom Julienne, Ty Uflado, a true laugher, a big smile, outdoorsy, probably not at the computer that much. Alex envied him. Jim Lowry, Hillel Lowenberg, Gail Stormer, the list went on and on. All happy. All knowledgeable of him, always would be, none of whom really cared. He hadn’t gotten a personal message by any of them in over eight months.
Alex closed the lid of the computer. Perhaps he could go to the library and use one of their computers to cancel Facebook. He would do it soon, but there was always a waiting list at the library. Outside he heard more laughter. He went to the window and a couple of middle-aged women had joined the dog watching, radio-listening group, whiling away the hours with innocent banter. The middle-aged ladies were loud. They were big lunged laughers who found everything funny and yet had nothing at all to really say. This was the way of the world. People as they aged had gone back to the placid non-thinking of who they really were after all of the bravado of having to be the hero to insure themselves food for their gullets in their old age. At a certain point the hero is let go and the simple, gurgling stream is taken back into their hearts and minds; simplicity and laughter and mere feeling of presence without any impulse to dream forward a finer existence, a more poetic existence, one that magically transforms others while transforming oneself. The idea of a spiritual utopia had been replaced with a toaster and cream cheese reality.
Alex watched the group talk below him for a little while and then went over to the dresser and opened his book. He had picked up, once again, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After only a moment he closed it and picked up a pen and a small personal journal. In it he wrote:

Ever long the day
Not knowing then
That I would never know
Having sought solace
Where solace dare not dwell
I roam still ever inward
All the people gone
A few old faces
Remembering me -
A flicker
Before all – we fly

Eastside All-Star

fargokantrowitz — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:29:01 +0000

I lost the game. I lost the fucking game for ‘em. Jim Buckley came up to me and said it best: You lost the fucking game, Chatworth, and he was right. I lost our team the championship.
Five years later I was walking around the high school hallways all stoned like I usually was and I ran into this kid named Ripley Knox, a bigger stoner than me. He showed me what he had in his bag and I told him I had two bucks and he said that was enough to get a little buzz anyway so we went to the park, just ditched school like we did all the time anyway and sat under a tree and he lit up a joint and we passed it back and forth and when I tried to give him the two bucks he said fuck it so we enjoyed the joint together on this the first sunny day of three weeks when I finally said to him,
“Ripley, you remember that game I lost for our team back in the majors?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Well, it just don’t seem right that one person can lose a game for a whole team does it?”
He looked at me all stoned and shit and just nodded and then said,
“Yeah, why not?”

I agreed enough with him, but I was suddenly angry that he would believe something could be so, then thought again of it, and remembered that day and how it was all my fault. There was no question about it. But I wanted to ask Ripley now that we were more grown up and shit. Ripley played right field more than me back then so he would be honest with me. His mother grew his pot. So I say to Ripley,
“Yeah, I guess so.”

I know so, but I say it that way. Sometimes one guy can screw it all up for everybody. He had me at second base because Ricky Tynesdale was out with the flu. Ricky was good, consistent, but he wasn’t the star of the team. Right off this kid hits me a grounder. It goes through my legs. That’s cool. Shake it off they tell me. But I could see that the coach was pissed. That kid finally made it in on a triple hit by another kid. 1-0.

Then we got a rally and tied the score. We were doing good when I get up to the plate and take a walk. That’s good. That loads the bases and this kid named Kenny was up who wasn’t too bad, but batted seventh. There were two outs and I was leading off a little bit when I see Cindy Miller. I’ll never forget the moment. Because just as I stepped off that base there was Cindy in her little junior high cheerleading suit bopping up to the stands. I think her brother played on the other team. I just got a real quick look at her tits when all of a sudden I hear “bam!” and this kid playing first base just smacks me right in the chest with his glove and then sticks his hands up in the air and gives out the biggest “yeaaaah!” I’ve ever heard. He was like some sort of Viking warrior or something. We all trotted in and I sat down on the bench. Nobody said anything to me except for one kid. Vincent Trollo. I think his family was in the mob. I don’t remember what he said except that it included the fictitious name “Wackworth”and it was a direct allusion to my own name of Chatworth.
I went back to second base and prayed nothing else bad would happen. But God had taken a little vacation for those two hours I would soon learn. Another ball did come to me which I fumbled. That man on base did score so that we lost our lead. The next kid up hit it to center field and he got on first. The next kid hit it to the shortstop who lobbed it directly at second base because he was unable to call it back after it left his hand. He had just assumed I would be there.

For some reason and to this day I still don’t know why, when he hit it to our shortstop, Randy Valasquez, I knew, I mean, I really knew where I was supposed to be at, but the trouble was that I was right in the running path of this kid going to second and I jumped back because I was scared and he passed me. The next thing I knew I was trying to beat this kid who had been running hard for a good three seconds. There was no way. When Randy threw that ball to me I wasn’t even close to the bag yet and it bounced on the ground and this kid just kept running. I couldn’t believe it. He must have thought he was like the big running guy on that team so he just kept running and finally I threw the ball to our third baseman, Vic Green, but the goddamned ball just twisted or something and I threw that thing about ten feet over his head and this kid just kept running all the way home. The kid who hit the ball made it to third and then someone knocked him in. When we got back to the bench I sat down like usual and didn’t say anything. Vincent Trollo was all belligerant then.
“You oughtta take that glove, Wackworth, and whack with it because it ain’t doing none of us any good out here.”
Then the coach cut in and told Trollo to shut up and sit down. I wasn’t afraid of Trollo. He could kick my ass, but first he’d have to kiss it. It didn’t matter much. The coach took me out for a few innings. The score was five to three. I was involved in every one of their runs and every one of their runs shouldn’t have been a run. I was ready to give up sports. I was twelve and soon to be thirteen. My big brother smoked cigarettes and I would too. He told me about this girl who he made out with in the back of his Blazer. How her tits just popped out of her shirt and then just sat there bouncing around and around like a couple of water balloons. That’s what I’d do. So I sat there and waited for the game to be over and for me to be thirteen and then fourteen and then maybe fifteen and by then I’d have watched more water balloons bounce around than Trollo or anybody on my team. But sitting there thinking those thoughts, trying to rescue myself from my low opinion of myself, I knew I’d just about lost the game for us and I prayed the coach wouldn’t put me back in. Then came the fifth inning of a game of seven.
“Chatworth, right field.”

I was back. I was back in right field. Nobody hit the ball to right field. They took out little Jimmy Grove, a kid whose hand was backwards so after he caught a ball he would take it off, place it on his backwards hand and throw it. His good hand was his left one, but I think he was a natural righty because where Jimmy would throw nobody would feign to know. He once threw a ball behind himself, over the right field fence. Before anybody could tell him not to climb over to get it he had already done so, failing miserably yet in an original fashion because on the fall to the other side his belt got caught on the chainlink and the umpire had to unhook him. The kid who hit it to him got a home run. Our coach protested, but he lost the argument. It was just not worth pursuing really. It’s one of those arguments that because it had to become an argument at all we all stopped and thought about what we were doing out there in the first place. It was the most absurd thing we’d ever seen, any of us, except perhaps for the day when I lost the championship for us.
So I was in right field. The fifth went by. No problem. Then came the sixth. We got a run. They didn’t. Then came the seventh and we score two on a home run by Vincent Trollo. I was closer to being able to go home. It’s six to five. Us. We get up again but we don’t score. It’s the last at bat for the other Tigers. My team, the Giants, hadn’t won the championship ever as far as anybody can remember. And that’s how it was, but then I saw Ripley lighting the roach and thought to myself even if it was my fault it couldn’t have been completely. We were a team. The other guys could have hit more or done more of something good but they didn’t. They just didn’t make as many errors as me.
“You believe that, Rip?”
“Yeah. You lost the game for us, man.”

“And you didn’t? You only played two innings before your dad came and got you.”
“So. At least I didn’t make any errors.”
“You didn’t play, man!”
“I played.”
“Right field.”
“Yeah, but I played.”
“I just don’t know anymore, Ripley.”

It’s not that I wanted to vindicate myself to Rip. Rip was always a bigger loser than I was. I was ten times better than him and there he was sitting all smug smoking the last of his joint like he was Mark McGuire or something. This little runt made me sick. But, you know, I couldn’t shake it. He was right. I made too many errors and therefore I had to take blame for the loss. I remember it differently now than it actually was. After so many years you turn events into happenings. It’s like your first kiss. You remember every moment. Every sensation. Unfortunately, that ball was like that. That ball was like a big sailboat floating over my head. I remember my hand reaching out for it and then suddenly realizing it was easily ten feet away from me. Why I reached for it I don’t know. I can imagine what I looked like as if my memory of the situation included a camera angle from the benches. I saw that thing up in the air so high and I started running in. I was running in because I was going to catch it. It was hit so high and I would get that thing so I ran and ran until I started feeling this weird something in my limbs. It was like my limbs were calling me stupid or something. I didn’t feel right. I felt like I was being torn in two because I’d run way too far in and I was suddenly aware of this ball coming back down to earth behind me. I know I should have run sideways, but I didn’t. I started running backwards as fast as I could. By this time Tim Rowe had started running for it and he was calling me off but I couldn’t tell where he was so I just kept running backwards as fast as my waddling little legs would take me until I plowed right into Tim and our heads knocked together and I knocked him out. Swear to God.
I remember seeing that ball rolling away from Tim and Tim’s eyes sort of rolling up in his head a little bit. I remember turning around and looking at that kid running those bases, heading for home and then back at Tim and then back at the ball which had stopped. Vincent Trollo was running out to right field from first base so I knew I was going to be in deep shit, but I still didn’t go for the ball. All I could see was Tim’s little white boy face, the nose all upturned and red and a little snotty with those eyes half open and his arms spread out to his sides and suddenly I didn’t care about that little ball standing there in the grass like it was. I understood better the absurdity of the game, why God would make a child like Grove, with that one arm, want to be equal to the Vincent Trollo’s of the world and I thought just for that moment that if that ball never moved again then the world would be a better place.

Then David Rice got it from left field and threw it to Vincent Trollo who was about two feet from me and he threw it way high over the catcher. The kid had gotten his home run already. It was a waste of time. We’d already lost. I remember Vincent Trollo then. It was like he wasn’t even aware that Tim was knocked out cold. He comes up to me and pulls me up by my shirt and looks in my face and calls me the worst thing a person can call another which I won’t repeat here. And I look at his ugly face and the next thing I know I’ve spat in it and he’s on top of me hitting me and me looking over there at Tim all knocked out as I tried to block the punches from my face and then the coach stopping Vincent Trollo and a bunch of people trying to revive Tim, including Ripley.

“You were there,” I told Ripley.

“I know.”

“You know what happened.”

“Yeah. Tim got knocked out and you got beat up and you lost the game for us.”

“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”

But I was through arguing with Ripley. He’s just like everybody else in this world who thinks that winning is the only thing in the world that matters.

In The Smokies

fargokantrowitz — Sun, 15 May 2011 18:36:40 +0000

You ever wonder what the world would be like if you or mama weren’t ever born? Jed asked his father while they sat up by the campfire.
–”Sure, You wouldn’t be asking me that question.” Tom strums his guitar
I guess not. How come you play guitar, daddy?
“I play guitar because it sounds good.”
That’s all?
“There’s something we got inside each and everyone of us, Jed, and it’s called your soul. You ever heard of the soul?”
Yeah.
“Well, good then. You got it. Your mama has got it. Even your baby brother Albert has got it. Some people even think that the trees got it. Well, in people sometimes it feels good to feel your soul, and I’m able to feel my soul through the playing of my guitar.”
So the soul ain’t real, is it, daddy! It’s invisible!
“Not real? Invisible? God, Jed, I didn’t realize how much you don’t know. The soul is the most real thing in the world. If somebody has no soul then you know it immediately.”
But I thought you said everybody has a soul.
“They do, but sometimes, if you do a bad thing, you can lose your soul. But I don’t think you lose it really. It just sort of goes underground. It goes into hiding. But no matter how far down it goes, with right living, and doing the right thing, you can bring it back up to the open air. That’s called forgiveness. That’s what Jesus talked ’bout, and your mother. No matter what bad you’ve done, if you ask Jesus to forgive you for it your sins will be washed away.”
How Jesus do that? Jed said.

“Jed, I’m not really sure, to be honest. I’ve always done pretty good at doing the right thing in this life. I’m sure your mother could tell you or if you listen up in church on Sunday they might throw you a hint. It’s a good question though…hmmm, wait, I think I know. That’s a damned good question, Jed. I guess, in some ways, Jesus sends his spirit down to watch over us when we don’t hardly believe we’re worth anything anymore. Maybe that’s what his angels are for. I guess the important thing, if you’re in a predicament of having lost your soul, is being open to those heavenly messengers. Now, they may not look like an angel or they may not seem like Jesus, but maybe they’re something that He does for you in some little way. Maybe he will send you a little bird to sit on your shoulder and tell you what to do. It happens in stories.”
Yeah, but those are stories. Let me play, daddy, Jed said.
“Are you big enough?”
Give me the guitar, dad.
“Here, I’ll teach you. This is how you play…you got your soul? “
Yeah, daddy, I got my soul. Gimme the guitar…

(He hands Jed the guitar and teaches him how to play.)

Bus Route 270

fargokantrowitz — Fri, 06 May 2011 22:23:52 +0000

Bus Route 270

The mind is a vast sea, her turbulent waters formless, yet there is form. The road there, his hands there on the huge bus steering wheel, the twelve people sitting behind him on this lonely-ever ride from East Taylor Avenue all the way to Stearns Mall and back. Clive was only 33, but he felt 40. He was too fat for 33. He had found solace in food, and the sitting, of course, led to 150 pounds too many. The solace he sometimes found was a gift, seeping in from the edges of life. Then there were his nightly bus dreams, so random. Half the time he was at ease but then he would flit into a tense and shaky world.
Had there not been a barrier between he and those four million people he knew that he would have lost it long ago. He wouldn’t have been able to control yelling at the masses that do the stupidest things: bring cigarettes on to the bus, become belligerent, or do things like talk uncontrollably while hordes wait to board. Stupidity was so prevalent among his riders that he gave thanks to the Almighty for the barrier. The payment system was automatic and flawless. The only ones he had to worry about were those who didn’t pay, but most paid. Few feel that they can scam a city bus and get away with it. The bus driver was always right there.
But Clive wasn’t right there, not really, for he was too much aware of life. His thoughts were his burden. He could not pull himself from feeling the wracking yet silent storm that doctors call the unconscious. While others go through their lives in basic, outward ways, Clive lived as a true introvert. He made friends with moments, friends or enemies, that is. Unlike others who looked forward to the future while holding tightly to the present moment, those heroes, Clive’s present moments were always things that grabbed him, or perhaps he them, and he was whirled upwards, this way or that, or even all the way down.
Perhaps he was bi-polar, an ex-girlfriend had told him that, but she had been angry with him. He didn’t think so. He was a man who felt as deeply as any woman. He just couldn’t stop feeling the show, the movement of the inner realms. He never made a show of his inward confusions or expansions. Never rambled or raised an eyebrow. He betrayed nothing, but he traced and remembered every colored mood, often perplexed by how things he didn’t even know he was thinking about made him feel.
“You’re too sensitive, Clive. Why don’t you be a man about it,” once said Nancy. Nobody had ever taught him about this unseen ocean inside. He had never sought help. He was simply its chained perceiver, living in an unlikely way, dismissed by most as emotionally void, as day traded day. He didn’t like it, didn’t like living in what he once thought to himself, driving the bus down 12th, a “poetic” fashion. If he could communicate what he felt people might sympathize with the death of his upward mobility, his petrified potential, but they wouldn’t understand him. No way would they understand him. It would be like a foreign language to them, nothing but symbol and fateful, invisible causes; hurts and answers all wrapped up in a cloud.
He couldn’t help attempting to follow the logic of his personal chaos. Sometimes the unconscious river would rise and he would feel a certain emotion that would provide an explanation pointing at actual forms, reasons for his existence and state, like a bottle suddenly visible bobbing on top of the placid movement of the water. These realizations could carry him if only briefly. It would perhaps be a discovery concerning something somebody had said; a relative in the past, perhaps an injustice recently survived that would give him peace and a sense of forward movement that he felt might possibly lead him away from hopelessness, which was the number one thing that kept him driving the bus and not taking chances.
The flow went on and on as he drove these manic streets and he knew about it mainly through his moods which he studied like a scientist, hoping that some final redeeming, life-giving truth would be released and end the process once and for all. He hoped, and there was a lot of hoping, that he would be allowed in on the true story of the process of what he was, because it held secret promises of safe and happy dreamworlds into which to escape and rest.
To live in dream, to bathe in fantasy, with its smooth edges and lifting truths, was the only thing that would budge him out of his chair into a better future. Non-interruption of the dreaming flow could provide the initiative to find more practical truths, things you can take to the bank, like finding that first bit of gold in a giant unseen vein beneath you. To live in dream would be to live easily without first having to wade through those fetid emotions that Clive ducked like incoming fire.
He turned on 7th again and then scratched himself under his thigh ferociously. The itch was a spike, as though his body were revolting suddenly. When he turned he noticed the woman sitting there. She sat on the side seat reserved for the elderly, of which there were none, and when he turned he found that she was staring at him. He smiled faintly and then turned back to his job. The feeling of the woman stayed with him. She was also an African-American, 30-ish just like he was, and pretty, much too pretty for him, but plain enough that he entertained the idea of halving the window down and speaking with her, just for the hell of it.
He felt her while he avoided looking at her. Once again the feeling led him directly to all things past and present, the whole morass, necessary to deal with first in order to attain some better future. The process, so only his, frustrated him. He hated himself. He thought of Nancy and her way of being that was so other than his, then the way that she looked when he first met her at the bar on Tally Way back in Swiss Township, Maryland, where he grew up. Always Nancy, at first, then at last, for Nancy loved him and then ceased to love him.
Already this woman was painted with the color of Nancy so that she was really only half woman to Clive, half stranger and half Nancy, and therefore the mere idea of her was already polluted by the million thoughts that he knew he would have to endure if he were to actually pursue her. He pushed the dream of a new beginning away by snorting out through his nose, a push of air that he tried to cover up by wiping his nose as though he had had a natural impulse, a little sneeze. Aware of his odd reaction, his head naturally turned to the side and back at the woman. He was already tagged when their eyes met. She was still staring directly at him.
Perhaps she wasn’t staring at him but was only looking in his direction. Of course this could be the case. He turned nonchalantly and looked, this time straight on, just to answer the question for himself. She smiled at him and then lowered her eyes. My god, he thought, she likes me. She likes Me! But then he clammed up. The engine roared as ever. Of course, she doesn’t like Me! He quickly reasoned it away. When he looked again, she was no longer looking, but staring out the window just like all the others, watching the city go by, probably feeling what he felt every hour of his day. Of course she had disappeared. He wasn’t sure, but he had perhaps furrowed his brow. Or it would have been the distance that he could put between himself and another in a millisecond without knowing he was doing it. She was probably just like him, he thought. Life was here and now and if we cannot get away from the ugly and dull realities by making our lives better, then we are simply left with ourselves. But he doubted that she had ever gone as far as he could. He couldn’t conceive of such a thing by another, for Clive felt that we are left hanging by an unexplainably strong thread over a million-foot drop. What skill can keep you safe from the unseen world that wants to take you as its own, use you as its sustenance, yet lives unmolested inside in the guise of a perpetual flow of questions, beliefs and fears? We fear the silent monster of who we are behind our eyes, under our skins. In that space that made up Clive’s monster there were too many variable truths swirling and floating and begging for release. We humans, Clive felt, were here to provide that release, but the release is not for us, it is for it, the monster, the sleeping monster whose body is thought buried and pain unrealized yet fully anticipated. It is a ghastly thing, but Clive danced with it anyway, like dancing with a skeleton even while he knew that a woman would be a better dancing partner.
He had no other choice but to abandon her immediately. Nobody but he knew about the battle and, to be honest, he didn’t either, for he didn’t have the words, but he felt it, always felt it, and his belly grew fat in an attempt to appease it, his belief in it ever going away diminished with each passing day. For this reason, Clive had the feeling that he was on the way down. Although still relatively young, he was going down and away from the sweet oblivion of innocence and would soon be saddled with a knowledge that was not knowledge, but only ferocious reality, pointing only to the death of things, the end of things, the reality of hard social stratifications, the idea that there truly is nowhere to lay your head. He could not do harm to such a pretty woman and he knew he wouldn’t talk to her.
The woman got off of the bus without looking at Clive. She hadn’t liked him. He knew he had made sure of that. He did not have the energy to take on such a thing. Why would you go out there and find someone else not down here, the monster inside seemed to ask. Why would you try and escape the world that is more real than any other real because it is a part of you and the other is not? Why do you think that you could escape my knowledge ever? You must come back down and rest. All of everything inside of you will float you forever, take you from here to there. You will be pleased to be with me because I am what you would call “no more.”
More added complexity and confusion. No more gave hope that things would simplify, that Clive’s sensitivities would shrink. He would man up. It was this shrinking that he actually sought, but to go there just fed the monster in that it was also the reason he had put on the pounds. With the daily giving over of himself to the monster he had tried to replace himself with food. Unconsciousness seemed too much like death and he filled in this gap by eating as much as he could.
The incidence of food was perpetual. He ate a big breakfast, a bigger lunch and, of course, a huge dinner, a buffet if possible; The King’s Corner or Madame LaWang’s on 17th street. In food there was once again color, lightness and substance that seemed to bring on forgetting. It was a tangible act that reminded him that there was more inside than just a dark, swirling cloud of need. Hopelessness was briefly stayed. It was a clear marker of where the future actually lay, a real truth, physical. The future became the moment the food hit his tongue. The chewing sent the pleasurable real form into a pleasant real place that allowed him to revel in his body. He ate fast, he ate hard, like a man. He ate with style. It was always good form. But he also only ate alone, ever.
The thought of Madame LaWangs was pulsating inside of him now. It was 4:53 in the evening. In seven minutes he would wrap up this day’s work and someone else would get on the bus and take over for him. There was 9th to 15th left and he had a pretty full bus. The thought of Madame LaWangs eased him. He always got a little bit anxious towards the end of the day as the bus filled with people going home from their long days of work. There was more stupidity on the other side of the barrier toward the end of the day too, maybe because he had less tolerance for it, but still he believed it to be true. He would hold the angst inside of him and try to contain it at this late hour, but he knew it would only exit once his feet hit the pavement and he was on his way to Madame LaWang’s Buffet.
This day was like most others. There had been a few problems where he had to open the window and speak to someone in a tone he despised. He would slam the window shut and it would be gone, but it would have been an extra something to add to the swirling world inside that owned him. Clive knew that he would have a heart attack after awhile if he kept on this job. He understood about stress and its deleterious effects on the human body, but he had no choice. He was a bus driver, fat and too old to do much else anymore. There was 13th Street. Eight off, six on. Of course, he wasn’t too old, but he had accepted the notion that he was.
Nobody knew how much Clive felt relegated to what he did, how he himself insisted upon his career without wanting to, how the monster inside insisted upon it. Nobody was going to cut him a break anymore. He had lost his beauty and his personality, given them up willingly for a paycheck until he perceived himself as everybody else did who got on the bus, as one of the unfortunates in the world, someone whose existence was relegated to going round and round and round on the same track day in and day out not unlike a rat in a cage.
Clive knew he was an object of pity, not scorn, he didn’t warrant that, but pity was just as bad as scorn. It is something that you cannot address with your fellow man. It is one of those things that people live with silently until they break down and cry silently to themselves, usually for other reasons. Tears are for when the monster gets too big and in order not to kill its host allows a venting of steam. A dead host equaled a dead monster. The pity of others was one of the things that made Clive want to melt.
He saw the last stop. He would get off here and take the system to the restaurant and then back home. He didn’t have to pay, of course. He just got on across the street, transferred once, and the next thing he knew he would be outside Madame LaWang’s, and then, after that, his apartment complex at 28th and Fairfield.
He pulled up to the last stop and there was Rachel, also African-American, who once opened her window and threw her shoe at somebody. She was aiming for someone far at the back of the bus, but instead hit an old man sitting in the third row. She had lost it, gone crazy, been suspended for six months, but returned because she was really a charmer, a really nice girl, and the bosses liked her. That’s Rachel, they all said, but that man in the third row wasn’t thinking that when that shoe hit him in the face. Clive made the stop, but did not open the door. He then motioned to the customers who wanted to get on that there would be a change of drivers. When Rachel was at the front of the row Clive opened the door and she got on. He quickly closed it.

Hey, Clive, the demon-children out today for ya?
Nah, not too bad today. How you doin’ Rachel?
I’d rather be on the French Riviera right about now, but I think I’ll do this instead. God, I hope they’re nice tonight.
They’re okay today. The full moon of the last few days not got them riled up about anything too much.
The moon don’t know how to act during the day. You got the sun. Them people sing songs to themselves in the daytime. That moon you talking about is on my shift, the moon and a bottle of Jack.
You deserve a medal then. Remind me to get you one for tomorrow.
A medal? Shit, I need a shrink. Once Robert’s settlement comes in I’m cutting back. Waaay back.
Maybe I should try and get a settlement.
You wanna have a bad back for the rest of your life? Shit, I’d still take this crummy job. He cries out in the night sometimes. He’s earned that money coming to him.
Keep her light, Rachel.
You too, Clive.

Clive stepped out of the bus and waded through the people all the while saying “excuse me.” There was only one thing on his mind and that was Madame LaWang’s. Being on a bus all day is like living in a rolling cage. Once Clive got on the ground things changed. The monster inside of the cage with him shrank a little bit, disappeared a little bit with the power of its host suddenly surging forth. That’s why they named these buffets fancy names about Kings and Madams, because when you’ve decided to go there you are in a position of power, you are tossing caution to the wind since too many instances of eating at buffets can kill you, and you, for a brief moment in time, stand up for what you want and go out and get it anyway. After a hard days work there was no hesitation. It’s the poor man’s simulation of a rags to riches story.
He got on Route 62 and made it to Madame LaWang’s in fifteen minutes. It was different as a passenger on the bus even though he was still in his uniform. People see you more as a person than an unfortunate automaton. There was a nice elderly couple sitting side by side in the elderly seats in front of him. They smiled at Clive briefly. A quick smile to someone on the bus was like a pot of gold. You would think that it would happen more, but it was really a rarity. Most smiles on the bus were defensive, but then again, you never know who you’re smiling at and Clive was no different than anybody else. This was a different plane and Clive relished it. To sit in the drivers seat is to sink into a vortex and do all that you can from going all the way down. Here was calm flight that made him know that the day’s battle was over. He had won another day’s pay. It was a small victory, the only kind he knew.
He got off of the bus a block from the restaurant and walked the rest of the way, passing a motel and a Circle K. The place was hopping. Clive forgot it was a Saturday evening, which brought him down a notch, because he used to plan every Saturday night by the middle of the week. Now Saturday had all the panache of a Tuesday. He went inside and the young girl just inside the door, Chinese, smiled and took him to a table. He didn’t wait. He went to the buffet line and grabbed a plate. First it was a little salad, a little thousand island, egg. Beside it was the Jello, which seemed wrong, but he knew he would come back for it. He moved on and went straight for the meats: chicken and noodles, beef and broccoli, chicken on a spear, beef on a spear. He piled it up on his plate beside some rice and then smothered the entire plate with sweet and sour sauce until he had to wipe the edges with his fingers and then embarrassedly lick them there in line.
He went back to his table and ordered a soda from the waiter. The waiter was good and quick and Clive drank a good portion of his soda before digging in to his food. It felt good. It was right and good. There was a God. When he finished the first plate he went back and got some of the things he had neglected the first time, the pot stickers, a little cheap sushi and some more barbecued pork, chow mein and rice. This would be it except for the Jello. He devoured the second plate almost as fast as the first. By the time it was clean he knew that he was done. He wouldn’t go back for more although he felt like he wanted to. The eyes are bigger than the stomach they say. After sitting there silently for a while, nursing his soda, he got up and went for the Jello. They had green and red, as always, and he grabbed the red for the hell of it, no other reason. He went back to the table and sat down and that’s when he felt the first pain.
He thought it was from sitting down too hard, but there was a dull yet distinct pain just underneath the rib cage on the right side of his body. He pressed his fingers into his belly right there and tried to relieve the pain by diverting his attention from it more than anything, but it did not go away. It was dull, but it was real. He couldn’t figure it out. He’d never gotten food poisoning before, ever. He put the Jello aside. He wouldn’t eat it. He’d had enough. He stared down at the remnants of his feast. Both plates still lay on the table. He studied the outlines of the plates and even the knit weave of the white tablecloth, something, anything, because this pain was growing stronger and stronger. After ten minutes he knew he was in trouble and he got up and paid the check and left. Outside, he went to the bus stop again and waited for the 270 to come and take him home. He would get in bed or take a bath and then watch TV in bed.
“Goddamn,” he said to himself, pressing down into his side, feeling for what was going wrong inside of him, but not knowing what he was feeling for, not knowing anything, but that he also sort of wanted to vomit now, too. Two minutes later after making this realization he did just that, sending a healthy Chinese dinner into a monstrosity that somebody working for the city would have to clean up with curses on their breath. Nobody was at the bus stop but Clive. For this he was grateful, but soon a young girl, about seventeen, white, walked up to the bus stop, also waiting for 270. Clive was in obvious pain now, but the girl said nothing. They stood there for a few minutes when she spoke up.

“Are you alright?” she asked him.
“No, yes, well, no, I’ve got the worst side-ache of my life. I just ate Chinese at Madame LaWang’s and I think they were trying to kill me.”
“Where is it at? Your stomach?”
“Yeah, sort of right here,” he pointed at the spot.
“Yeah, that’s your gallbladder. You got gallstones. My dad’s got gallstones and when he has an attack he’s curled up on the couch for hours. He says that taking a hot shower sort of helps, but really the only thing that works for him is pot. You got any pot?”
“No, I can’t smoke pot because they test me. I drive a bus.”
“Oh. Then take a hot shower. I don’t know if the gallbladder can bust or anything. I don’t think so. I think it’s your gallbladder.”
“Okay, thanks, my gallbladder. Jesus…”

They stood there quietly for a while as Clive moved from here to there, anything to keep the pain away. The girl said nothing more, fully comprehending the severity of the pain, her father after all. All Clive could think as he looked for places to press on his body that he hoped would trigger some sort of pain relief was “why?” Why me? Why now? Why not some other way that wouldn’t have led to a defective gallbladder, gallstones, whatever this girl thought it was? Why would God put all this fat on my body? Why wouldn’t God just tell me to stop it all, to stop the torture, the permanent ruminating over things that are real only if you allow them to be so? Why would God be invisible so that we all think that invisible things are good things, powerful things, things worth listening to? Why? Why? Why?
The bus came for the crowd. There were eight or nine of them. Clive got on last, gave a brief hello to Shari who was driving, but nothing more, and went and got a seat in the back to be alone with his pain. Everything was luckier than him. All of these people lived their day to day lives so sweetly. They lived in another world because they did not have the pain that he felt. They were rich and didn’t know it. The pain had escalated to twice what it was when he first felt it. It grew steadily, getting worse and worse even when he thought that it could get no worse. He considered going to the hospital, but he hated hospitals. It didn’t sound like it was life-threatening according to the girl whose dad gets rid of it with hot water and a bong hit or two. He’d ride it out. Besides, something inside of him was taking a whipping and the feeling, akin to anger, was actually somewhat delicious.
The monster that lived inside of him, lived on him, feasted on him, was screaming in pain just as Clive wanted to but didn’t because of the people on the bus. Lost questions were instantaneously asked, sudden deeply embedded angers were thought of and expressed through quick movements disguised as pain. His hatred of the inner world that had come to control him was gaining an upper hand through this painful episode and if he could, he would have killed it completely. He would have made it so that he never thought about his thoughts ever again. Then he would walk through the world proud and strong, and do only things that he was called upon to do, things that only had their place in the outside world, and he would gain traction and be bolstered where it counted and he would be a hero because his enemy would not be inside of him anymore, but out there, a simple place really, a place where the eye can see the situation and the brain can tackle it. No more full-body angst, wordless questioning, wordless answering, eye movements that are furtive because totally uninformed. He was sensing just how he was controlled by a million past experiences that had all sunk down deep into him and formed a coalition to resist ever facing the open day ever again. These were Clive’s failures. Clive’s. And Clive knew it now.
The dialogue within was a one-sided conversation about every failure that Clive had ever known. School, where he dropped out. He was going to be a doctor, yeah right; Nancy, a failure, because she loved him and yet he wanted to go out on Saturday night and bag a few blondes while he was still filled with his youthful vim and vigor; work, where he was afraid that the corporations he could have joined at one or two junctures would never let him become what he wanted to be, one, because he was black, and two, because he was uneducated, although everybody told him that he showed real aptitude at what it was that he had the opportunity to do; to be a psychological aide. Who knows, he might have become a psychologist. Instead he called it poetry and it almost killed him, but no more.
This poetry was being confronted with a steely gaze now by Clive as he sat in the back of the bus quietly boiling over with anger. It was all self-directed, an acknowledgement of his pitiful state, the monster he was realizing that he just perceived as “God.” He had never really done that before. Had he been wrestling with God every day in his cage of the bus? Could it have been that it was God that hated him so much, needed him so much, that he had lost any semblance of his former self? Once again, why? Why would God do that to me? What did I do? Then, where will I go? He knew it now. There was no way for him to stay. The pain was getting unbearable. He decided that he would go to the hospital. He screamed out.
“Hurry up! Hurry the fuck up!”
Shari looked crossly at him through her mirror.
“I’m not going to hurry up and you, of all people, should not be yelling at me from way back there. I’ll come back there and kick you off the bus and report you. You’re an asshole, Clive, I never liked you!”
“Yeah, why don’t you shut the hell up, man. Leave the lady alone.”
It was a long-haired hippie type sitting just in front of him wearing ear buds and reading a book. He was standing up for something. Here he was, in pain, dying possibly, not really, but it might as well have been since he had been dying slowly these last six years anyway, and this college kid was telling him to shut the hell up.
“You don’t know who I fucking am, do you?” said Clive.
He relished the way he said it. It was unlike any way that he had ever spoken anything before.
“No, I don’t know who the fuck you are and I don’t care. That lady didn’t deserve your shit. You’re just drunk anyway.”
Clive stood up and immediately started hitting the kid on the back of the head with his fist, just his right fist, over and over, a clumsy punch from an overweight man who wasn’t anything near to being a fighter.
“You don’t know nothing! You don’t know nothing! You don’t know what I got in me! You got nothing! With your book and your white lucky skin! You know what I got in me! I got God in me! God! God!”
Upon this realization, coupled with the fact that he was watching his hand hit the curled up young man’s covered head over and over, Clive began to melt. He sat back down. The pain was just about gone or he’d forgotten about it. He knew he was crying in front of everybody now.
“I got God in me. That’s what it is.”

The Barky Concept

fargokantrowitz — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 19:22:48 +0000

The barky concept

This is the story about my dog, Barky, Felix, Barky, Barky never shutups. Barky barks 24 hours a day and we, get this, we Keep him! Keep Him! My mom loves Barky. So this is the story. This is the way that it’s gotta go. Barky’s got to get famous. This is the only way. Barky must be famous so that my mom can be rich and I can get my own room on the other side of the mansion that Barky is going to buy us. Because, trust me on this, Barky can never be quiet. Barky can never Shut up.

This was the plan. Make sure that my mom didn’t find out, but sneak barky out of the house between two and 6 oclock when she got home everyday. I would have to buy my own carrying case. I’ll take Barky to all of the agencies. Everything. He’s real tame. He’ll let me hold him, which is a plus. A plus so far. So Here we go. Get that perpetual barking on command harnessed into a few dog food commercials and we’ll be set. I’ll keep the money quiet until Barky’s really famous and we can get that house and then I won’t have to listen anymore to that dog!

this is the plan. 3:30 got an appointment with Alpo. I know, I know, Alpo. What’s the odds of Alpo wanting Barky, but they need Barkies and I got one. Put out a few fliers and some other things and got a nibble from Alpo. So I take Barky in and they put him on the floor and first look to see how he is around people and he’s good on a leash too. My mom trained him, she wouldn’t take no shit. And here was my mom on the end of the leash right now, going through all the best motions to impress these people and wouldn’t you know it, through her dog of all things, all of my mom’s stuff, right here.

Anyway, we got through that one. That tall guy was the one in charge, I know it. You can never be sure though. Barky did alright. He barked of course, little son of a bitch, on cue, but that’s what he was supposed to do and it didn’t sound so bad once it was put on full form for the cameras. It’s like putting nickels in a slot machine, each bark a nickel, a chance at the big jackpot on a national Alpo commercial. Christ, they need new dogs all the time!

3
get in get out. That’s it. You make sure that you get in fast get the sound guy and the camera going. In the mood, barky! Rawf! Trademark! Another 2 grand in my pocket. Fifteen thousand short of getting the house and this dog out of my life forever!

Barky did it. A Lil’ Nibbler’s Chunky Treat gig with two other dogs, not the best scenario, the one of the lap and the smile, but I’ll take it, $1,800 to the broker tomorrow and we’re in and that dog can go to hell.

5.
Been in the house five months. Can’t hear Barky anymore. Thanks God. People tell me to use Barky as my money making scheme in life instead of doing what I do. I tell them look, I could be living the high life with that dog there. We could easily pull down another five or six hundred thou together, but you know what? Fuck that dog.

End.

I Dream of Mountains

fargokantrowitz — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:34:10 +0000

I dream of mountains.
Perhaps, this mountain or mountains are
the mountains of true dreams or
just another dream by day,
non-distant dreams like dreams
that have been dreamed a hundred times before
by others, and better.
No, these mountains are the mountains of wishes as well.
Wishes are the winds in these hills that whisper
they are not mine to judge.
They are wishes and winds,
whisperers of tomorrow today.