Lit: A Memoir

All these lunches, dinners, jobs. …

You’re not gonna pay me back, he said. It’s not that linear. He pushed open the glass door, and I stepped into spring air.

When you’re in my place, you’re gonna pick up some kid’s check.

The idea that Walt was deranged enough to envision me in the position to buy somebody lunch was maybe a bigger vote of confidence than the adoption offer.

When I asked him to drop me at the health service for the sore throat I couldn’t shake all spring, he said, Maybe it’s just hard to say goodbye.

I whipped around so he wouldn’t see my eyes fill, since I was dead sure I wouldn’t make it back up there.

But Walt never took his eyes off me. During the time I gypsied around, feebly trying to establish a base, he stayed in touch. No matter where I had a mailbox, his letters sat inside.

Which is maybe why—months after working retail down in Austin—I came back to Minneapolis, where a friend knew a glitzy restaurant where I could bartend. Even there, Walt showed up with other professors to eat the bar’s crappy sandwiches. He always left a book or two or a concert ticket, an article on dream research or memory—subjects he knew I kept up with. He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

4 (#ulink_ca28c10e-5a93-5da6-8cb7-1e4e8b9c2794)

There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz (#ulink_ca28c10e-5a93-5da6-8cb7-1e4e8b9c2794)

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

— a letter by Wallace Stevens

In the dim realm of that horseshoe bar, I was boss, credibly lying to wives and business partners who phoned in that my patrons were not in fact sitting before me hours on end, imbibing. Such lies kept my tip jar stuffed. Plus compared to those guys—with their car wrecks and one-night stands, their lost families and jobs—my occasional blackout or sidewalk pukefest was bush league.

Binge drinking disagreed with me in no way. The hangovers that haunted the other restaurant folk tended to spare me. Or the ones that did knock me out gave me an excuse to bail from ordinary commerce and loll around feeling resplendently poetic. I drank less steadily than some kids my age (twenty-one), but now I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent. Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow.

Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement.

But humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid. Showing up at a normal job was too hard.

Who knows, maybe I’d still be straining martinis from a silver shaker—it was a nice joint—had I not bought a ticket to a midwestern poetry festival so debauched that it couldn’t survive even the extremely low bar of acceptable behavior back in the 1970s. Down the dorm hallways, marijuana smoke hazed lazily. At readings, bottles of syrupy wine were passed around. A poetic Woodstock, I told Mother it was on my call home, regaling her with the circuslike atmosphere she’d have been inspired by.

I actually saw living, breathing poets. Back in high school, I’d fallen in love with the visionary antiwar work of Bill Knott, who’d become a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax. After collecting rejection slips, he’d wound up sending a mimeographed note to America’s poetry editors, saying something like, Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin. The allegedly posthumous poems came out under the pen name St. Geraud, a character in an eighteenth-century porno novel who ran an orphanage and sodomized his charges. The grotesque humor of the endeavor won me over, particularly when Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia, which—it took me a while to puzzle out—referred to masturbation after death.

Knott lumped up to the stage, a hulking bubble of a guy in sweatshirt and pants he might have rifled from a dumpster. His heavy black glasses—worn in a wire-rim age—were lopsidedly held together in the center by bandaids. His fair hair hung in unwashed strings. He drew a poem from a wrinkly paper bag stuffed with pages, and after reading a few lines, he said in a disgusted voice, That’s such shit, stupid moron Knott, asshole. People laughed nervously, looking around. He wadded up the page and tossed it. The room roared.

That’s pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes.

At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn’t get public grants, but this guy really can’t do anything else.

When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.

I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I’d not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.

In our town, the only bookstores sold gold-rimmed Bibles big as coffee tables and plastic dashboard figurines of Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession.

As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot …

Then social mores had intervened. A distinct scene from junior high flushes vividly back.

Girls sitting out of rotation volleyball in gym class stared at me all gap-mouthed when—of a rainy spring day—I spouted e. e. cummings. Through open green gym doors, sheets of rain erased the parking lot we normally stood staring at as if it were a refrigerator about to manifest food. The poem started:

in Just-:

spring when the world is mudluscious …

As I went on, Kitty Stanley sat cross-legged in black gym shorts and white blouse, peeling fuchsia polish off her thumbnail with a watchmaker’s precision. She was a mouth breather, Kitty, whose blond bouffant hairdo featured above her bangs a yarn bow the color of a kumquat.

That it? Beverly said. Her black-lined gaze looked like an old-timey bandit mask.

Indeed, I said. (This was my assholish T. S. Eliot stage circa ninth grade, when I peppered my speech with words I thought sounded British like indeed.)

Is that a word, muddy delicious? Kitty said.

Mud-luscious, I said.

Not no real word, Beverly said, leaning back on both hands, legs crossed.

I studied a volleyball arcing white across the gym ceiling and willed it to smash into Beverly’s freakishly round head.

It’s squashing together luscious and lush and delicious, and all of it applied to spring mud. It’s poetic license, I said.

I think it’s real smart how you learn every word so they come out any time you please, Kitty said.

Beverly snorted. I get mud all over Bobby’s truck flaps, and believe you me, delicious don’t figure in.

As insults go, it was weak, but Beverly’s facial expression—like she was smelling something—told me to put poetry right back where I’d drug it out from.

Shortly after this, my junior high principal had actually warned me that any girl aiming to be a poet was doomed to become—I shit you not—no more than a common prostitute. And so the fantasy went underground, though in high school I’d still hitchhiked two hours to Houston to buy (coincidentally) Bill Knott’s first book, which gave me the dim hope that somewhere, a solitary madman knew just how I felt.

Sitting before a living, nose-blowing Bill Knott made all my writer heroes real. It shot voltage through my own poetic leanings, and inside me, some image of myself as a black-turtleneck-clad poet came creaking back to life. The festival must’ve had fifty or sixty podiums, and behind every one stood a poet with a teaching job and a book to offload. They were real, and their ranks looked open.

But how to get there? The small U-shaped bar I tended started to feel like a locked corral I needed to jump out of, but which way other than just not here.

At the same conference, an unlikely first teacher showed up—a rusty-handed Mississippian named Etheridge Knight, whose debut book had been written in the pen. He was lumbering and black, with a scraggly mustache and a soul patch under his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink—ragged and tear-shaped, as if acid flung in his face had eaten away his color. He spoke of poetry as an oral art (this was pre-poetry-slam America). Without pages, he half-sang the folk tale of Shine, a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to safety.

the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck

with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck

screaming Shine Shine save poor me

and I’ll give you all the pussy a black boy needs—

how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive

but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive—