(Victorious) Shame That Tune - 11/9/12

Listen here: if you haven't been to see Shame That Tune @ Hideout, you're a damn fool what's been robbing yourself of terrific experience. Abraham Levitan is an improvisational musical genius and Brian Costello is a sharp, wry host. Their interplay is spot-on, and the whole thing zips along briskly. Oh, and I won. I may lose at WRITE CLUB with frequency, but it's clearly an outstanding proving ground, because whenever I do anybody else's competitive reading, I seem to win.

The year was 1978, and I was on the cusp of my sexual awakening. Which I think we all recognize as literary code for “still pubeless and untouched by the hand of another.”

In 1978, I was 12 years old, and, knowing nothing, I was drawn to the same coltish and blandly attractive girls as the other dudes in sixth grade – all of whom seemed more advanced and sexually precocious than I.

I just copied the other guys – your Ray Wilsons, your Paul Theilmans, your Mark Tibaldis. In the sixth grade of Fort River Elementary, there were two alpha females – one blonde (Kristin Mallory), and one brunette (Dana Townsend), just like Betty and Veronica.

I developed a bad crush on Kristin, the blonde one. The Betty. She was a gymnast, so she was everything I was not – where I was a chunkwad who had to shop in the Husky department, Kristin Mallory was lean and tall and straight. Where I was halting and dopey, Kristin Mallory was graceful and poised. She was a sun-kissed wonder. I was a hapless and artsy little nerd.

That was the year that the sexual baseball diamond method for categorizing intimate encounters was explained from boy to boy. Honesty compels me to report I had yet to even round first base, because I was, as you will recall, on the cusp of my sexual awakening.

As a budding artist, I had a vivid inner life, and my dreams were far more engrossing than what passed for reality. It was the revelation of one such dream, about an amorous encounter with Kristin Mallory, that made me a sixth grade pariah.

The dream was this: each spring, a fair came through town – a Tilt-A-Whirl, and Ring Toss, and so forth in the town square. In real life the fair was always a shabby mud pit where you had to dodge puddles of puked-up funnel cakes.

But in my dream, the fair was held on a clear and bracing spring afternoon, the grass lush and green. In my dream, Kristin Mallory and I were on a date – I had won her a stuffed panda, and had demonstrated valor by not blowing chunks on the After Burner, which all agreed was the scariest ride. We were ending our perfect date with a placid ride on the Ferris wheel just after sundown.

The bony-faced attendant of this dream Ferris wheel possessed secret carnie knowledge, and though he did not speak, his wall-eyed gaze wordlessly imparted the following as we boarded:

“I kin tell it’s true love for sure. Imma hep you out.”

I feel I may have super-imposed this Sling Blade voice later on, but still. Feels right.

My carnie mind-meld matchmaker then STOPPED the Ferris wheel when Kristin and I were at the tippy top.

Which in dream logic made it sexy time. I totally felt her budding boobs, you guys – AND, she let me put my dream hand down her dream pants, touching the mysterious and fleshy gateway that we sort of learned about in health class, the exotically named parts of which, like labia, I always got confused with the names of flower parts, like stamen. Even in my dream I worried there would be a quiz.

I spent the balance of that dream making tender finger-love to Kristin Mallory in the swaying cradle of the Ferris wheel.

Which would have been fine. It would have remained a cherished memory from the cusp of my sexual awakening.

Except that later that week, I told a few of the other guys in my class that I got to third base with Kristin Mallory in my dream. And they immediately ran and told her. And with scalding tears running down her enflamed cheeks, she confronted me. I hung my head, struck mute by her mortification and outrage.

It being a small town, and word of my perversion traveling like wildfire, I didn’t touch a live human female for two years after that.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Start, 9/18/12

Start is the best and only site of auspiciousness, the only place where everyone has equal reason to hope. Start is the only place where each pair of feet set into the starting blocks is as fleet as any other in the race, the only place where every rocket will deliver its payload to the stars, the only place each preschooler is a genius and each freshman is valedictorian.

Starting is best. There is no defeat in starting. There is no woe or sorrow. There is a limitless vista of victory and valor. The start is the only place on one’s timeline that is not sundered by disappointment. At the start we are each of us lean and lithe, our features fine and fair – our beauty is arresting and total, since it predates the intercession of mirrors and their attendant judgments and unkindness.

At the start, we are limitless in our capacity, we are favored by providence. At the start, we are unhindered by custom, we are unhobbled by misfortune. It is only at the start that our world is swollen with possibility and promise.

At the start, the phrase “he has SO MUCH POTENTIAL” is not a lament, as by an exasperated guidance counselor, but a statement of plain fact.

The start is the only place where universality and harmony are attainable, the only place where we can claim commonality with our fellows, the only site of equality. Up to a certain point, the fetus of a human, and the fetus of a pig, and the fetus of a chicken are nearly indistinguishable from one another – vertebrate tetrapods, curled like fiddleheads. They unfurl, of course, the fetus of the human and the pig and the chicken, and grow into the big-brained bipedal primate that is master of all he surveys, or lunch, as the case may be.

And it is not just that start is thrumming and fulsome with all things bright and beautiful – far from it. The start is engorged with the entire spectrum of possibility, every eventuality of every sort stands beneath its infinite canopy – in the manner of the expanding universe, the start represents everything currently possible, and enlarges to include every possibility not yet conceived. It is no exaggeration to say that the start includes everything within it literally – that every conclusion is foregone, every culmination or consummation – no matter how far off, no matter how involved or improbable, no matter how internecine or circuitous – every ending, every FINISH, has its roots at the start.

There can be no finish – no finish of any kind, ever – without having had a start. Start is the primordial ooze, the enzymatic slop, the genetic material without which there could be no finish.

Think of stories. They do not begin:

“And they lived happily ever after,” or

“And they found, on the handle of the car door … a METAL HOOK!” or

“And then he turned the gun on himself.”

Were stories to lead with their finish, they would be deeply dissatisfying exercises fraught with confusion that would only contribute to our sense of dislocation and misery. Stories would, instead of fostering a sense of kinship as they do now, by their nature make us feel like stupid losers. We’d have no idea what was happening.

Which is what my opponent is attempting tonight. Finish is intent upon making each of you feel like stupid losers with no idea what’s going on. Finish considers you ignorant swine undeserving of any kind of sensible progression. Finish is all massacre and aftermath and rubble.

Start is pudgy, sweet-smelling babies. Finish is placenta. Viscous placenta between blighted rows of corn. On a wind-swept plain. Trailing between the emaciated and blood-streaked legs of a dying Okie, tethering her to the scrawny wad of her stillborn son.

Start is the bloom of a first kiss, dewy and trembling. Finish is robotic missionary sex with your spouse of many years, on sheets gritty with the dander of your failings. Scheduled sex – a chore for which neither of you has any appetite – you avoid eye contact during this dry and joyless grinding.

Start is the tentative shoots of the crocus probing upward to the sun through the winter-hardened earth. Finish is the dying breath of the final Scandinavian botanist tending the world’s last seed bank deep beneath the scorched and sandstorm-blasted hellscape that was once Norway.

Start is sinking one’s teeth into the first bite of a meal lovingly prepared on a sun-dappled porch, surrounded by people you love. Finish is the last drop of acidic and acrid-smelling bulimia-barf, pushed to the back of your closet, in a Nine West shoebox lined with a Forever 21 bag. And you know something? YOU’RE STILL FAT!

Start is the first hour of the first day of your first real job. Finish is being escorted from the building, with your personal effects in a file box.

Start blushes and yearns; it is that place we carry inside us before we were ground down and compromised and leached of our hankering. Remember if you can that pure version of yourself – I’m talking about yourself at your most unafraid. That self you are meant to attain, the one untrammeled by circumstance, unbowed by worry and in no need of solace. I speak now to your strongest self, the hero within you that cannot be struck down; the stalwart and steady-eyed self who remains willing to start even though you know you may not finish.

To this self, your best, most fervent self, your self that aches for discovery and wonder and majesty. It is ONLY in starting that these things are possible. It is my hope that you find for possibility and promise – to do so, you must find for Start. To find in favor of Finish is to concede that your dreams are dead, your aspirations extinguished. I know you to be a dreamer still, and know that you will vote like one.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Madness - 7/3/12

The year was… I wanna say like ’87.

Because when you drank as I did from like for the period between 1983 and 1994, all dates are approximate.

Because check it out – all that enriching experience you were gaining – all the international travel and internships and Peace Corps shit you were doing? I took all that focus and initiative, doused it in firewater, and poured it down my gullet.

You know the most hammered you have ever been? That hammered where you need to piece things together and wake up feeling like somebody drove a shit-covered spike through your skull? That’s how drunk I was getting all the time.

But ’87 feels pretty right, or right enough.

The scene: New York City. Early spring. A party. Cold as fuck outside. My girlfriend had a friend visiting from L.A. Naturally, he was terrified – this was not the post-Guiliani, post-9/11 everybody-play-nice New York we enjoy today.

In the 80s, New York still had the residue of its reputation for senseless violence and decay – a place where there’s packs of feral dogs roaming a hellscape right out of Bronson’s Death Wish franchise. And as in Death Wish, the feral dogs wore lots of eye makeup, and had bitchin’ mohawks.

Tell what these feral dogs did NOT do, however. They did NOT wear CBGB’s t-shirts. Cause what’re they? Fucking tourists?

So we go to this party, and I am stealing beers and turning inexplicably hostile and threatening to jump off the roof.

So then we ride the train home. 3 A.M., like you do. And this guy, this L.A. guy – who looks like an extra from a Knack video, by the way – he tells my girlfriend later that he was terrified on that train – like pants-pissingly scared. He thought – as all out-of-towners did back then – that the feral Death Wish dogs were gonna get on at the next stop and stuff his skinny tie in that pretty mouth of his and rape him like crazy. He KNEW it was gonna happen, like at any moment. You know when you get terrified and you fixate on the terrifying thing and it keeps growing in your mind until it squeezes everything else out of your skull?

That’s where he is – feral dogs, high on club drugs he’s never heard of, are gonna board the train and rape him with their glistening red penises. And all the jaded and joyless New Yorkers on the car are not gonna help him one bit.

But then he catches a glimpse of me. And it’s like a bracing wind of hope. He looked over at me, he knew. That everything. Was gonna be OK.

The next day, after we’d slept it off, he said – and I’m quoting, here:

“I was scared out of my mind, but Ian looked so fucking crazy I knew nobody would fuck with us.”

My insanity – the roiling miasmic cauldron of inarticulate hatred and arrhythmic chaos strobing behind my eyes carried with it a menace and volatility sufficient to shelter this callow and scrawny boy from Los Angeles from the menace and volatility surrounding us.

It could not be more clear: crazy can save you.

Or at least spare you the most egregious intrusions upon your fleeting peace.

I don’t drink any longer, so that madness is no longer boiling just below the skin. I need to send the bucket deeper into the well to fetch it. But it is there – like a wicker basket full of battery acid. So trust me when I tell you: crazy has its uses.

Look. Order and pleasantry have their place. No doubt about it. But there is JUST. TOO MUCH. EXASPERATING. SHIT. In this life.

So when you are able to lower over yourself a cloak of I Seriously Want to Kill You Right Now, you are granted a wide berth by the Relentless Forces of Dumbassification and Arch Criminal Dickbaggery. This does nothing, obviously, to slow the march of these forces, but it prevents their enlisting you in their dubious cause.

Which isn’t to suggest that Dumbassification is what my opponent is engaging in. No. He’s reasonably bright.

It’s worth asking, however, why Bob Stockfish – a name of disreputable Scandinavian origin, by the way – has consistently failed to publicly oppose Arch Criminal Dickbaggery in all its forms.

Not ONLY, ladies and gentlemen, has he steadfastly REFUSED to denounce Arch Criminal Dickbaggery, he has sought at every turn to become the enemy of this Great and Glorious Enterprise we call WRITE CLUB.

Those of you who’ve been to the show previously will recognize him as the trollish and foul-smelling presence holding up the wall over there and issuing forth an unbroken strand of slanderous and hurtful untruths about myself, about the show, and about the many worthy and gifted persons who have donated their time and talent to appear here. But most hurtfully, and if I may say, most SHAMEFULLY, ladies and gentlemen, this bitter and wall-eyed little creature has had the TEMERITY to impugn you the audience of WRITE CLUB, which science has determined is the most fetching and whip-smart audience to be found anywhere on the planet.

That this snaggle-toothed little bastard would have the guts to show up anyplace and run people down is the very DEPTH of self-delusion, folks. If you good people have an ounce of self-respect – as I know you do – you’ll send this scurvy little grease monkey scuttling in defeat back to the shame cavern he calls home.

You must find in favor of Madness, ladies and gentlemen – if you fail in this, you will open the floodgates of unchecked criminality and dickbagishiness. Which none of us want. Except Stockfish. Because he is the absolute worst.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Damned, 5/29/12

Exalted if you do, exalted if you don’t. Am I right?

No. God. Obviously.

To be exalted is to be rarified and exceptional. Subject of acclaim and regard. It is be elevated, to be inside the castle walls.

How many among us can claim to be that, to have that? None.

We are the damned. All of us.

The damned are the relegated and the cast down. The damned are the excluded and the cast aside.

Where once exaltation meant proximity to God, now, in this secular world it is proximity – or more precisely access to – money that renders us exalted; money that confers exaltation.

It is money that fortifies the castle walls; money that makes the punji sticks lining the trenches around the castle; money-gators that patrol the moats.

I cannot have inherited a position of exaltation in this world. I arrived into a family of slender means. And when I grew, I went into the arts, thereby taking an ironclad vow of poverty.

My efforts in the intervening years – acquiring skills I could sell; burnishing my credit; taking a wife; purchasing vehicles and a lawn maintenance tools; acting generally with a measure of prudence and responsibility – these efforts have proved fruitless.

The pit of poverty into which I was born has grown only more steep and shear and unforgiving.

My efforts to commandeer a spare little sliver of The Dream have come to nothing. The house we bought – a modest little thing, far from the castle walls – is a sinkhole. The wealth we aimed to build – not real wealth, not the kind of wealth that would even draw the notice of those in the castle – is reduced to ash. This shell game of the exalted has rooked us, as it always seems to.

I received this letter from within the walls of the castle, which reads in part:

Dear Homeowner,

As you may have read or heard, Residential Capital, LLC (ResCap), recently announced that it and its subsidiaries, including GMAC Mortgage, are restructuring under Chapter 11. Although you may not be familiar with our name, ResCap is the parent company of GMAC Mortgage, which services your mortgage.

…The restructuring of ResCap and GMAC Mortgage does not change your obligations as a mortgage borrower. As such, you must continue to make your scheduled mortgage payments on time and in full to the address listed on your monthly account statement.

This last in bold.

This is a cherished tactic of The Exalted.

Since The Exalted put their anthrax torpedo up the ass of the world economy, the phrase “work hard and play by the rules” has entered the lexicon with a persistence unrivaled by any since the emergence of the phrases “sex tape” and “throw under the bus”. It is the tagline of the damned. The damned are the saps, the suckers who’ve held up the whole house of cards for the past few centuries. We suit up and hit the field and take our bruises and keep playing. By the rules.

Not so The Exalted. If you’re inside the castle and the game’s not going your way, you burn the rulebook and decry it as an enemy of the free market. You burn the rulebook and execute all your opponents. And, as you stand in the acres of the slain, you pin the remaining damned with your orangey eyes and you excoriate the fallen for the idiotic temerity they showed for having stepped onto the field in the first place.

Then you plant a single sapling among the corpses and lead the quaking damned who ring the arena in a chant extolling your virtues as a champion of peace. And, to ensure ongoing compliance, you pluck a baby at random from the crowd and you eat it in full view of the trembling and grubby crowd. When the baby’s mother screams reflexively, you grab her by the ankles and beat her on a rock like river-washed laundry, as you defy the damned to stop chanting your praises.

And when you grow weary in the arena – when your soft-fingered hands ache and you wish to return to the castle – you command the damned to lift you on their bowed shoulders and carry you across the drawbridge. And they better hustle back across because that thing is going back up, and if they slide into the moat to provide an extra meal for the money gators, it is their own failing. Pick up your feet, you lazy fuckers.

The Exalted are the fixers and the deck-stackers; the chiselers and the cheats. They are the house that always wins. The Exalted own the refs and the stadium and they’ll charge you seven dollars for a hot dog. They’ll soak you for parking and skin you on convenience charges. If you make noise, they’ll throw you in the drunk tank. When you launch a website called “crushTheExalted.com” they sell you the domain name, and you lease their bandwidth, and you store your data on their cloud. If you take to the streets, you gotta get your permits from them and the cops on their payroll will corral you along the route they approve. And later that day, their TV coverage of your protest will be snide and dismissive.

“So why bother?” you might be asking. “Their victory is assured. Why would you even squander your limited resources on this futility? Why put your bloody face print on this brick wall? Why punch your knuckles into fucking porridge? What’s wrong with you?”

Simple. It’s not the fallacy of ascribing to the damned a frail nobility that isn’t there. It’s not the misguided romance of throwing in with the doomed. It’s not the false hope of revenge.

It’s an allegiance – perhaps a vestigial one only – to humanity.

Because, as Dr. Cornel West tweeted earlier today:

“There's nothing wrong with being successful, with money or power. The question is -- is it connected to something bigger than you?”

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Found, 4/24/12

We’ve all seen the flyers. LOST DOG – with plaintive-looking pictures, and offers of rewards, and pleas for information.

When you see that flyer, you have one of two thoughts:

1. That dog took a powder, man – they are never gonna see that thing again. Or:
2. I’m looking at a picture of a dead dog right now. 

But when you see the flyer that says FOUND DOG, then you’re talking about a dog that was so WINNING, the people would not only take the thing home, but they would actually make a flyer.

And the flyer people dig the dog so much, that even though they REALLY wanna keep him, they consider his feelings, and would hate to contribute to his unhappiness, so they post a flyer. But even as they do, they cling to the unexpressed hope that his owners never see it, or that they are persons of such dubious priorities that they don’t want this dog, even though he is the BEST BOY.

So to review:

• Lost Dogs? Smelly morons who in all likelihood are already dead because they were too stupid and unappealing to figure shit out.
• Found Dogs? The most magnetic and lovable animals there are. These dogs will live on in your memory and prompt wistful smiles and feeling of tenderness for the rest of your days. Indeed, years from now, when you’re a different life stage, without a landlord to worry about, and you’re visiting the shelter looking for a dog, in your mind’s eye, it will be that flyer dog – that you search for. 

Look: they don’t do those milk cartons anymore, do they? With the missing kids on the back. You know why? Cause Cinnamon Toast Crunch does not go well with despair.

Lost hair. Lost gloves. Lost dreams. Lost hopes. Lost pennies. Lost at sea. Lost cities. Lost keys. Lost souls. Lost weekends. Lost heroes. Lost memories. Lost generation. Lost highways. Lost glasses. Lost in translation. Lost love. The lost boys of Sudan? ENOUGH.

Things I have lost? They number in the tens of thousands, and they range from ticket stubs and receipts to my own father, and I miss not a goddamn one of them.

Things I have found? They are few in number. But these things have a luster and a persistence and a capacity to tug at the hem of my mind in a way that that lost things never will.

The shell of a robin’s egg.

A cedar box full of time-burnished medals from my grandfather’s naval service.

A series of sand dollars and seashells, trapezoids of sea glass, abraded to perfection.

A snowy owl. Happened upon in a fog-shrouded clearing as the moonlight slipped through the clouds.

This one time? Ten bucks.

The carcass of a four-foot shark. On a Cape Cod beach. The day after we saw Jaws.

A possum, sliced clean through at the waist by a passing freight train – it landed on the flat of the cut. So it looked like a zombie possum that had nosed its way out of the earth, its face a rictus of terror and hatred, and its spindly little flesh-claws splayed in the Nosferatu style.

The only surviving photocopy of my dad’s suicide note, tucked in a file of police reports. The original was destroyed.

In the woods near our house, when I was like12: a marshy and leaf-strewn stack of Playboys – and this was the 70s, mind, when they still featured fully human females – each page needing to be coaxed away from its neighbor, so boggy and crumbly they were. You could spend ten minutes teasing apart a VITALLY important photo spread only to have the most critical components fuse together into a clot of sodden white pulp.

All these and scores of other items - stacked in the cigar box of posterity, the repository for the too-sporadic, the too-infrequent brushes with magic that make life bearable.

Found is discovery and intrepidness; it is the consequence of courage, or at least an awareness sufficient to recognize and snatch at happenstance. At the center of Found is a fondness for adventure, borne of a willingness to get off your ass and LOOK. The Tomb of the Pharoh and the Terracotta Warriors are made plain ONLY to those who get off the goddamn couch.

Look: there’s no ducking loss. We all know this.

The day we buried my grandfather – all the movie funerals can’t prepare you for the compact little box of the cremated, no bigger than a cinder block. It was disorienting to watch him lowered into a hole the size of one you’d dig to bury a toaster. My grandma knelt to stroke the box one final time. As she did so, a gold bracelet slipped off her narrow old lady wrist and into the small pit containing her husband.

She stood and brushed off her knees. “He can have it,” she said.  

My mom – abruptly, with a manic edge – dropped to her knees at the muddy lip of the hole now containing her father, and reached in. She retrieved the shimmering strand of gold.

“You keep it, mom,” she said, setting it in the cove of grandma’s palm and clasping it there.

It had been lost. But now was found.