There isn't a mission. There isn't a goal. It's just words on fake paper, sliding and tripping and flowing all over the place, because we're all full up on words in here and there is no way we can keep them inside. Like Tony says, "Nothing in here is true."

Monday, November 28, 2005

Polish Poconos

It’s not Broad and Erie; not Seventeenth and Shunk,
It’s better than your car and anything you got in the trunk.
Take a pile of trash; you take a pile of junk,
Put it all up on a hill and you call it Manayunk...

Old head limericks, complete with big, sweaty High Life quarts,
Little kids with dirt rings, broken Chic-O sticks in their knifed shorts.
Trash-truck juice stained streets, nostrils filled with summer,
Dad’s whistling from the door; game over. bummer.

Massive games of build-up, after the sun has run amuck,
Celestial satellite illuminates white parts of telephone-wire Chucks.
Out with the old, in with the new street type ritual,
Get laughed at big time, if your shirt didn’t fit you well.

If you asked me then, it was the center of the galaxy,
There’s other neighborhoods in Philly? Really? You speak fallacy.
Jallousy windows and ribbed green awnings were our favorite marks,
Throwing Grade A’s, Getting chased by a big Mercury, muffler dragging some sparks.

Manayunk, The Polish Poconos. What’s better? You tell me.
Especially when the objects of boyhood desires, on their feet, wore jellies.
Accompanied by stirrups, Aquanet, and Blow-Pops--a little boy’s confusion.
Kiss them? No. Throw rock at them. Trip on slate sidewalk. Knee contusion.

Now as a grown man, I’m still a little bewildered,
Not what to do with a cute girl; but I’m wondering, is it still her?
There’s still no parking and your sloped face remains the same; there’s no doubt,
But what the hell are these boutiques, Jettas, and sorority girls with big dogs all about?

It’s like it never happened, this childhood that I speak of,
What happens to a neighborhood gentrified?, I never got to get a peek of,
My little kid chasing his sister up Ripka Street, ignoring my dinner calls,
300,000 dollar row homes is what happened, that’s why I live in East Falls.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Coffee and Ointments

Parking in a spot not too far from the house, I’m beat.
No kids on the corner, it’s dark, so I’m incogneet.
Oh, would it be nice if time and money weren’t my opponents.
Pop would say, it sucks to be poor and white, don’t it?

He knows all too well about 16 hour days of duties unsavory,
Do what you gotta do, familial bravery.
As I sit in the idling car, ready to shut it off and get out,
I have thoughts that I’ve been spread too thin like wet grout.

When I was a little boy with more bone than muscle,
I played stickball all day, wishing I was Chuck Hustle.
Or maybe Mike Schmidt with the shimmy than home run,
But so far, life’s been short and prudish like a gnome nun.

Not saying woe is me; life hasn’t been all that bad,
But there’s vacuous voids, or shit that I wish I had.
Like making money everyday while feeling utter enjoyment,
Instead of working shit jobs, driving in a car full of coffee and ointments.

Neosporin and other stuff for people suffering from adult acne,
I can’t get rid of the facial Vesuvii, I’ve had them since I was a latchkey.
In other words, I’m tired and I want to be shot with a musket,
Thank God my little wife’s inside making instant mashed and chicken cutlets.

Friday, November 11, 2005

P__c_-N_z

My work had largely ground to a halt. I woke up some mornings uncomfortably sprawled over the giant cable spindles, odd-sized orange crates and double-rolled hobo blankets that formed the bulk of furniture in my shed-office. I would work some hours, as if in a fugue, but would review the words I'd written and find they were all complete garbage. I was unmoored. Also, I smelled a little funky.

Most nights I was sleeping in the house, and showering the next morning, but the number of hours spent in the poorly ventilated and badly decaying shed were starting to show in terms of odd smells permeating my hair and skin. I don't remember what exactly had happened, but one morning, I heard my neighbor mowing grass and I realized it must have been Saturday. I decided to walk the earth. Or at least walk the neighborhood.

Rondo, my neighbor with the lawnmower appeared to sleep approximately never. He wasn't like regular party-neighbors, overgrown frat boys and the like. He was of an undetermined age, and probably from some country in South America. He had large earlobes like an Inca, and was drunk between 50 and 75 percent of his waking hours. Sometimes his truck didn't work, so he would ride a bicycle. All the folks on our street lived in fear of the truck permanently ending its run on earth, because it was bound, therefore, to join the decaying Soviet-era Lada and similarly non-functional eggplant-colored Opel that marked the beginning of Rondo's large lot.

Rondo mowed the grass on Saturdays, quite early. He never 'won' the battle with the grass, and routinely was the subject of complaints from the townspeople. It is possible that this is because he mowed the grass still drunk from the previous evening's revelry. He told everyone he was an artist, architect of sculptor. Most people thought he painted houses for friends.

I wandered out past Rondo's wild patch of earth and saw him pushing the mower over a barren patch of dirt under heavy tree-cover. The mower was either missing a wheel or had the four wheels adjusted to different heights. I could see how his mowing was largely ineffective.

The walks had become more routine, but as the neighborhood had gentrified, there were less folks there Monday through Friday than on a Saturday morning like this one. I strolled down the street parallel to our own and thought about how smart it would have been to bring a dog on such a nice walk. I spotted a yard sale and decided to peruse the goods. There was very little chance I had any money to buy spend on my person, but I determined that there was equally little chance of finding something I really needed.

Then I saw the pince-nez.

They were in a leather pouch maybe three inches across and barely an inch tall. The inside was lined with delicate velvet. The tiny metal horseshoe that connected the lenses was gently used but silvery with a patina that made it beautiful. I may have even said it aloud, but I surely thought: "I must have this." I went to the person who seemed in charge of the yard sale to determine their price. My pockets were empty, I knew, but I felt as if these pince-nez had found me for a reason. I would possess them.

A clump of bills in my pocket formed my offer: "Seven dollars."

"Fine." The ornery homeowner turned his back on me and I dropped the leather pouch into my shirt pocket.

Returning to the shed at a half-run, I'm sure I looked like I had to use the men's room. I sat behind my word processor and with a flourish attempted to perch the pince-nez on my nose. In my head, a envisioned the great writers of a bygone era, sitting behind Underwood typewriters in tweed suits banging out exposes and muckraking novels with a pince-nez sharpening their focus. Upton Sinclair, I.F. Stone, F. Scott Fitzgerald, all surely used the pince-nez as an inspiration at one time or another.

The lenses were filthy. After some elbow grease, I made them usable. Perched on the end of my nose, with my head further than normal from the screen, I began to type. This would be my turning point. I would remember the pince-nez moment.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Genius at Work

My wife was more than skeptical of the shut-in plan. I insisted that my universe of distractions was making it impossible for me to write like I used to, and that this was the only way to recapture the magic. Both of us left untouched the possibility that my heavy smoking and drinking also figured into the equation. I could still drink with the best of them, but I felt strangely unmoored drinking in our suburban house while folding laundry or whatever. And I had quit smoking because we both agreed that dying of lung cancer would put a crimp in our plans to live together happily for the rest of our lives.

Realistically, I think maybe I wanted to put a lot of effort into this shut-in and write in the 'office' venture because I wanted to know once and for all if I could make this life happen. Somewhere in my head, I knew if I could get away with this, the experiment would end with me knowing definitely if I was a barista or a writer. I never highlighted this a motive for the plan. All I said was that I had too many distractions.

It's possible that my wife also secretly believed that I was going a little nuts. She has a real job, she goes places and types emails and has conference calls with Germany (so efficient), and in contrast, I'm just about fringe material. I had a string of interesting but unfulfilling jobs with non-profit organizations, all revolving around parlaying a meager talent with computers and a powerful ability to bullshit older ex-hippies. It wasn't a career, that's for sure.

I was basically on day two of the shut-in thing, though I was counting it as the first day, because I was all wopperjarred off getting the spit-flying call from the coffeeshop the day before. I thought things were pretty clear when I walked out with three hours left in the shift, after discussing my leave of absence, that I wasn't coming back. This was not the case. Things got ugly, certain statements were made, and a fourth stint at the Gigantic Coffeeshop Chain is probably not in the cards.

There I am sitting on a huge spool that once held shielding for underground cable with a keyboard on my lap and eleven words on the screen when my sister walks into the office-shed. She is already talking, and I am looking to see who is coming in with her, but it turns out she had just started talking to me early. It is 9:48 am.

"...and I just don't think it's going to work," my sister is saying. With these nine words, I'm prepared to conclude that my wife has summoned my sister to talk some sense into me, which would be rich. Though my wife is surely through talking about this, her efforts to decode whatever it is that is happening in the shed have only begun.

"I've got to figure out if I can do this, Lis."

"What? What is it that you're figuring out? People don't hide in sheds when they're figuring things out. They go to therapy, or they talk to their preacher, or their friends or whatever. Or they just accept what's happening and, you know, go to work."

My sister had never been happy at a job in her entire adult life. She worked at a bank once and liked it when they made her sit in the little tiny box (a shed, if you think about it) and process transactions for people too lazy to get out of their cars to conduct their banking business.

I rested the keyboard on a shiny box that probably held something organic and frozen once because the shine came from an impressive amount of wax treatment on the cardboard. I hadn't been writing very much, and, truth be told, at the moment my sister came in, I was wondering how people typed long messages on Blackberries because the keys were smaller than baby teeth and my thumbs would have pressed a half-dozen keys at a time.

"When I was in college, I couldn't keep it in, Lis. I was writing two columns, two reviews and two editorials a week, and probably throwing two more stories worth of work into the paper as completely re-written work by idiots. I used to be a writer. I want to be one again."

Lisa didn't see the agony of this former glory. She was terribly practical. "Then get a job as a writer." She was already leaving. I could see her heart wasn't really in this discussion. She wasn't really a tenacious opponent in arguments of this type, which is something that comes with middle childhood.

I had stood up to turn a record over (the shed-office was also the home of the LP collection and the turntable). She assumed I was rising to hug her goodbye. I complied. As she left, I heard her issue a fairly standard Lisa-dismissal to my wife, the kind we all heard about whatever parent or other sibling was under discussion. It was 10:09 am. Don Cherry and Gato Barbieri started talking on the back half of "Complete Communion." I sat on the big spool and typed the words "Blackberry teeth."

A Plan Is Afoot

I got it in my mind that I was suffering from a surfeit of distractions, and I decided to try an experiment. I would take a leave of absence from the coffeeshop, I announced to no-one in particular, and spend as many hours as humanly possible in my 'office.' (I'm forced to put 'office' in quotes because it was essentially what you might call a shed, or more charitably a garage, if your car was about twice as wide as a standard entry-level gas lawn mower. It had electric power for the word processor and various pieces of nearly-useless trash arrayed around which could be fashioned into a desk, chair, guest seating, drink table, night stand and what have you. There was a smell like a mulch pile passing the critical point at which 'mulching' is code-language for rotting. This is probably because that exact biochemical event was happening on the other side of a less-than-airtight wall behind the shed-office.)

Taking a leave of absence from a gigantic chain coffeeshop was easier than I thought. Getting fired, was what you might call it. Ten years ago when I worked for this same gigantic chain coffeeshop, they didn't feel so gigantic. They seemed to care about me, and we were always talking about 'having fun' and eating muffins and danish after fraudulently reporting that they'd fallen on the floor or spoiled in some other way. This was when there were only a handful of outposts of this gigantic chain in my particular neck of the woods. This most recent go-round at gigantic coffeeshop chain (GCC) was my third, and if I wasn't management material by this time, I was destined to be a bench-warmer forever. So I told my manager I needed time off and he handed me the restroom key, which is attached to a comically large (but no less frequently stolen) defunct home espresso machine. People attempt to steal this prop twice weekly. I asked why he gave me the restroom key.

"You've got to clean the mens room. That hobo showered up in there again this morning."

"I want to talk about my leave of absence."

"Good one funny guy. Restroom stinks, get on it."

That was pretty much it. I took the enormous key fob and the key and went into the restroom. The hobo hadn't showered in there as much as it appeared he had essentially exploded. There was hobo-related paraphrenalia everywhere. This included nineteen gold-toe socks laid out on a long piece of unbroken craft-colored paper towels. They were drying. After a few seconds of staring at the socks, I noticed that one of the stalls was occupied.

"Roy?" Roy was the fourth street person who had adopted this location as his home-away-from-home. Homeless people trace a lazy arc from recently on the street to hard-core hobos which frequently tracks closely with a declining mental capacity. The last three hobos had become more and more deranged until we had to ban them. Roy was early in the cycle, which was reflected in his commitment to keeping his nineteen socks clean.

"Hey, my man, you have the time?" Roy was shoeless but fully clothed, sitting like a buddha on the toilet, which didn't have a lid. It appeared he had somehow made the toilet into a chair be adding something rigid over the top of the bowl, and a surprisingly dainty cushion.

"It's like 10:45, Roy. We talked about getting out before the rush ended and all those old biddies come in for the cappucino hour, guy. Come on."

"Socks are drying, my man," Roy's stories were likable enough, though they had become a little repetitive. He said, 'my man' a lot, and left the impression that he hadn't exactly been living the high life before his recent turn to the streets.

"Well hey, let's get everything but the socks packed up and give the bathroom back to the paying customers, okay?" I was a little irked mostly that my request for a leave of absence had been essentially ignored. I'm not 19 years old or anything. This manager is like twenty-two months older than me, and boring as shit to boot. But perhaps my annoyance telegraphed over to my encounter with Roy, the toilet-dwelling hobo. I don't really recall.

In any case, he got weird at this moment, perhaps forecasting a steeper than expected decline into madness, which would be a sad thing. His face went expressionless and he said, like he was on a sitcom full of twenty-somethings, "You've changed, my man. You've changed."

I didn't know what to say, so I muttered something like, "Allright," and left the restroom. I recall that Django Reinhardt was playing on the carefully programmed ambient music which was conveniently packaged and available for purchase next to the register. The track was "How High The Moon" and it was scratchy. I took my apron off and handed it to my colleague working the register. She said, "What the fuck," and I left without saying goodbye.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Trust

It's hard when you're juggling about eleven-hundred little life items and something throws number 1101 right into the air above your left shoulder. I know. I'm not some magic man doing more than any human can, but I'm pulling a lot of weight for my class, regular-dude. I got the finances and a lot of the kid management, and all the trash handling, all the trips to the basement I hate more than anything on earth, all the non-flower-related yard work, all the car maintenance and recordkeeping, stuff like that. I keep the balls in the air, but don't fuck with me right?

I'm sitting at the desk in our house and I'm doing something I don't know what, because it's night, and the dryer's running and the kid's asleep. I haven't gone anywhere, and I don't care to, but sometimes I should. The way you should go visit your mom, the way you should get that degree, the way you should call your long-distance good friend. So I went out to some schmoozy shindig and come back later.

And I get the trust question. Because it's been about ten years, but I used to sneak cigarettes in the past. And cigarettes are my great vice.

Seriously, a decade in this thing, kids and a house and all that, and we're getting the raised eyebrows of a whiff of smoke? For real?

And it's got me thinking, because I trust her completely. All that she does, and all the places she goes, in a world she denies but I know is filled with chauvanists who sleep with their co-workers on their long trips together, and I don't blink an eye about her faith, her fidelity, her character. She is impervious, in my mind, whether it's true or not (and I believe it's true).

But I get the eyebrows. And I haven't smoked a cigarette, tonight or any night. I haven't smoked a cigarette in years and years and years. We almost broke up over a cigar once about nine years ago, for christ's sake, would I really be screwing with this arrangement at this point?

So what's with the looks? I don't know. I guess it's all about trust, and that's what I'm wondering about. That's all. I know she trusts me, because we're dependent on each other, we're connected, and every interaction is a reinforcement of that trust. People shouldn't start families and become this entangled if they don't have the trust. So I know she's got the trust. But I'm wondering to myself. How much?