We And Only We Are Right

I’m sitting in the captain’s chair of this classroom. As it turns out, not even the instructor, a published novelist has this seat, I do. But that’s in my mind, so hey, I can make that call. But here I am, captain, king, alpha-male in a room full of Stephen King fan’s and adult women with orthodontic gear. And there’s instructor, he’s been talking for an hour and fifty-two minutes. I’m listening to him talk about a novel written by a young British upstart. He alludes to an argument between the protagonist and her lover as a form of sword fighting. He says parry as he twists his exposed wrist and pale arm in an effete manner, supposedly mimicking a counter draw cross of the saber.

I’m not concerned with this speech my professor is giving though. I’m still in my own world, suspended above a blizzard peaked mountain in my captain’s chair. Just above, slightly higher than my supposed peers. I hear nasal voices and the whistle of hot breath through metal braces with pink plastic bands. We are in a creative writing lecture. And I’ve deemed myself the best. I do this every time I set foot in a workshop. I eyeball, size up, belittle. I am standoff-ish. I daydream myself out of the monotony of style choice lectures and writer’s craft.

When the talk of fleche attacks as word tags and counter attacks as dialogue breaks reaches it’s highest point I find myself counting tiles on the floor. The soiled linoleum has been rolled over and scuffed with the black plastic chairs we are sitting on. Even my captain’s chair. I’m imaging myself doing hopscotch. My right foot is in the third square and my single barrel whiskey with purified water is spilling. The radiant ice cubes frosted over inside my glass tumbler. My dusty sombrero has just fallen off when I reach the fourth square, switching feet (yes, I’m wearing a sombrero in my daydream. It’s normal). I’m drawn from the game inside myself when a classmate brings up an idea for a short story.

A young man dared to interrupt the instructor while he was knee deep in a fencing pose and explaining to us how the character’s discourse is “sharp”. The silence grows in the room as the professor sits down then looks long and deep in to the young man’s eyes. And he says, “I’m glad you asked that.” He’s not glad, nor am I. Nobody is. Now we have to engage ourselves in a discussion about writing.

Mr. Winter (our professor) can no longer enact his fantasies of eloquent duels in front of a group of gawk eyed science fiction worshippers. I can no longer elevate myself in my captain’s chair and watch myself play hopscotch in the bosom of Valhalla. The rest of the students can’t mentally masturbate to images of lush otherworldly planets, visceral red-crested dragons, laser beams and whatever else genre writers think about. Now we must come back to real life. We are harkened from whatever universe we have created for ourselves in the confines of our daydreams. Some are more fantastic than others, but the intent in cerebral escape is the same.

The problem with putting a group of people who have various interests in writing into the same room is that no one really knows how to deal with each other. I can’t fathom having a conversation with my neighbor at our desk table about whatever he claims to read (the book cover shows a desert landscape with two sunken moons) and I can’t understand him from way up in my lavish, velvet captain’s chair. Mr. Winter clearly can’t handle the thought of interacting with a human being in opposition to his invented sword-fight. We are a room of people who don’t know how to deal with other people close but very unlike ourselves. We are all in our respective captain’s chairs.

When I started writing I assumed everyone had read Ernest Hemingway. I imagined we would all sit in captain’s chairs in some smoky Creole billiard’s room having in-depth conversations about an overuse of the word “edifying”. This, however, was not so. I learned that those of us who write acquire and develop very different ideas and creeds of what “good” writing is. We are unlike the mathematician’s who can unify in thought about the plausibility of a cosine function. But we are more unlike the philosopher’s who agree there is no “right” answer. In our minds only we are right, and that’s why we put our opinions on paper.

Now as our lethargic discussion comes to a head I find myself asking about character develop, past trauma, intent of actions and so forth (his story is about a women who is exposed to a flaccid penis in a dance club bathroom). While I listen to the writer, my classmate, propose his solution to the logistical problem of how the flasher snuck into the women’s bathroom I find my captain’s chair is floating away again. It’s taking me back to the empty ashen planes of my mind where I can play c-lo with John Steinbeck and Allen Ginsberg while we listen to the Wu Tang Clan. From the glassy eyed look sweeping across the face and fortified mouth gear of the girl to my right, I can see other student’s are checking out as well.

Even Mr. Winter, with left hand running through his slicked black hair and right hand dimly motioning the gestures of a feint-parry thrust combination with his thought up saber, has checked out.

This is an advanced college fiction workshop, where average human beings are forced to interact for a letter grade. We deal with it in our own ways. Some of us are enthusiastic about third person omniscient tense, some of us became grammar Nazi’s, a large amount (like myself) daydream. When this brief dialogue between the five or six of us who at least want that easy, easy A dies down, Mr. Winter starts back up with his fencing/characterization battle. As he bears down on his fallen opponent (the story’s womanizing antagonist), with his sharpened épée I find myself back in my captain’s chair.

I’ve escaped the girl next to me, punching away at her Blackberry. I’m miles away from the young man to my left nodding off. His spittle splayed across his wrinkled, vanilla colored T-shirt. I’m ancient forests and weathered countryside’s away from Mr. Winter. Apparently he’s still in Great Britain, and he has just cut the ear lobe off his fictitious opponent.

flight/fight

these cosas snaking

inside me–

sprint like frothed animals through my

veinscellsnervesmusclesinsidesoutsides

palpitate,

pulsated,

pump,

pushed.

i shook and i shook.

my limbs astringent,

they throb like the jacitate

of a weathered bull elephant:

cinereal and marred out on the plains.

silent muscles, immersed over the mid morning

stillrain, calm like a frozen steppe when i heard her.

i slept.

afternoons in the countryside

at dusk, i'm sitting in the bed of an archaic pickup truck

58 ford, painted rust maroon with a stolen hinged tailgate.

my limp legs dangle above the road/below as it sails by,

earthswept, mangled and rocky transient beneath the rubber

wheels that pound the highway. i'm holding a twig– right hand,

end of a sandalwood branch, colored a burnt-mud sienna,

spotted alabaster white and knotty like an arthritic finger.

i push it to the ground i travel on and it digs a line, crossing

the dusted road, like a virgin picket fence in an open field.

i dig for oil with my pickaxe twig, held in mile after mile.

and this line goes on for yardsticks, leap years, lifetimes.

the dust expells across the highway we travel, the wind

spit bursts of ragweed and stale air, inhale. i'm still drawing

this line, watching it from my throne in this speeding truck,

and i cling to the truck's dented side panel, to my stick.

i see visages, old and familiar friends at the end of the line

far off in the distance, their faces/features fleet away, gone

like the passing of orange trees in the southen panorama.

i wave, they plea and i'm spent. i've left. i try to yell adios,

my teeth clattered, my words fasten the interior of my throat.

Cold War-Era Relations

I always eye Alex with a vague sentimentality of jingoism and suspicious, even though we’ve talked for years. The reason being is that Alex is Russian, he has a Russian accent, and he looks Russian. I assume he speaks Russian in the confines of his concrete embankment or some other heavily armed, heavily guarded lair. While, I assure myself that he, like myself is just another college student, my mind drifts into the Cold War mentality of the Reagan years, stacking haggard bricks up onto the Old Wall. Or at least in my mind the wall is there.

I picture each one of our awkward interactions where we've talked about civil engineering, the Red Army, Republicans, sports events and the wonders of the Internet to be another brick in our imaginary Berlin Wall. Another brick each time I toss a passing glance at his obtrusive, Fabergé of an Adam’s apple. A batch of mortar each time his squinting, bespectacled eyes hone in on my Hasidic nose, curved like the Bald Eagle that flies over my head. Floodlights and crow’s nest every time the mention of conflict comes up, be they on the Georgian border or in the Kandahar desert.

As it stands, Alex and I both have embraced the universality of college liberalism, and this is our point of departure past the normal customer-worker relationship. We both nod our heads gravely at the news of American deaths in whatever desert we’re attempting to take over. We’ve both expressed solidarity for a black president. We’ve both championed the idea of more money spent on our university.

However, through all these interactions with Alex and MSNBC as our mediator, I still have a lingering suspicious every time his accent, subtle yet remarkably and stereotypically Russian breaks through. His voice was dry like the crystalline vodka I pictured him drinking everclear vodka filtered through Eastern Bloc newspapers and potatoes under his Lenin poster while reading the Brothers Karamazov.

It took me some time to hear his voice, his true voice; husky and morose like the Kremlin era spies heard in a James Bond film. At first I thought he as slow, or drunk. I actually still thinks he drunk, on potato vodka, but that’s just me. But when he says juice, (he likes a fresh-squeezed orange juice) I hear the word “Jews”.

Now, I know logically that he wouldn’t ask for a fresh-squeezed Jews. It would be a fresh-squeezed Jew and I know logically that anti-Semitism is awful and doesn’t occur in college liberals like us. But I still hear it and I still picture him in deerskin ushanka with a dazzling hammer and sickle patch in center asking for a freshly-squeezed Jew as some sort of spy code for you’ve been caught and we’re taking you to the gulag.

Whenever he comes in we greet with a smile and passive wave then exchange hellos. I throw out my typical service industry greeting: “Hey, insert name here. How’s it going?” Alex has his greeting: “Hey Matt, good.” It would seem that a large amount of my suspicious come from action films and general misanthropy. At times though, not remembering someone’s name draws out my suspicions. My name has not, and will never be Matt. Nor Jerry, which he had a stint of calling me too.

There was a month or so when he acknowledged my name was in fact Mike and he used it. His accent made “Mike” sound like “meek”. This came across as an under-handed insult, chalk full of the dreary Russian sarcasm. Meek wasn’t as big as an insult as him calling me Matt. I pictured him calling me Matt was some sort of name-calling native to the bitter, windswept plains of Siberia. As though calling me meek was slowly breaking down what was left of my American fortitude. After so many corrections, I gave up and let myself be called Matt. It’s better than meek.

I can trace my dislike of Alex to his treatment of his girlfriend. Although she is a rather plain girl, she makes up for it with cheeriness and an affirmative attitude that foils his somber demeanor. When the two come in together he sits at the café table and she orders for the two. I’m pro-his girlfriend (I still haven’t learned her name) based on the fact that she smiles. It’s a white-toothed, red-lipped American smile that has yet to break across the jowls of Russia’s finest exchange student.

American Girlfriend orders for the two and waits with certain pensiveness for their drinks. When I finish she takes them back to the table where she usually doesn’t sit down. After dropping off the ceramic mugs filled with steaming black coffee she is sent back for milk. I picture him waving his wrist at her and simply saying, “Milk, I need this,” before sending her away.

Admittedly, I don’t know how the Russians or shall I say Russian men treat they’re women. My knowledge of Russian women come from the dejected mail-order brides paraded across the night-time headline news and Bridgette Neilson as Ivan Drago’s wife in Rocky IV. I pictured Alex having one of these women by his side, completing his twitchy, small mouth and gangly limbs. I’m not sure if these fictional Russian women would put up with his passive-aggressive demanding like his current girlfriend. But then again, I’m not sure about Alex in general.

Alex’s mother once came in and the two were speaking Russian. She was not like these stereotypes that have been cast onto the American audience. She looked tired, had an uneven haircut, crow’s feet circling her eyes and drooping mouth. She looked like Alex. I wonder if she used to waiting on some man, Alex’s father perhaps, much like the American Girlfriend. Alex, however, waited on his mother. She sat and sent him off to the counter so he could order two of the fresh-squeezed Jews that he spoke of with reverence. Alex hung about his mother's side with a pensiveness similar to American Girlfriend. When they left the café he held her hand like a child after punishment, dejected and clingy, walking pigeon toed in his leather sandals. He never brought in his mother again.

The longest conversation I had with Alex about his Russianness lasted about twenty minutes. He was born in Siberia in a small village. I picture Siberia being a plague of small villages speckled with frozen military wreckage from the Kremlin’s heyday. His father had left the family, at some point in his youth, for the burning skies of California. Alex followed suit some point after his adulthood. Now we go to the same university in southern California. That’s as much as he offered me that afternoon. Perhaps the heat, the lack of subservient American Girlfriend and the wool socks/leather sandals combination drove him into my café where he could open up to a stranger. An American stranger at that.

While he talked about his father, a proud look washed over him. His normally rounded and oddly small chin seemed to jut out with dignity. As though a square chin is reserved for talks about Russian fathers and hero's. His usually brown, pebble-like eyes were bold and glowing. I picture his father being a handsome, scientist-spy or state dignitary. The little details that Alex offered about his father made him seem like a character in a novel, some ex-patriot who escaped when life was cruel. His father worked in a lab in Russia, he was respected, now he lives in San Jose. He doesn’t like the Sharks hockey team.

Once we talked about the Second World War, a subject that should never be brought up between people of differing nationalities. While I cut the navel oranges for his fresh-squeezed Jew, a Ken Burns documentary heralded from the television mounted above the sink of my café. “It makes me proud,” Alex said as he stood twitching on the opposite side of the marble counter. I turned and looked at him, knife in hand, apron soaked in orange pulp and we met eyes. “What’s that?” I asked him, hoping to avoid a rant of the Communistic flavor. “I’m proud as a Russian because the Red Army defeated Hitler and ended the war,” he said with an added clenched fist and head nod for full cinematic effect.

While I am not the history buff I believe most young people should be, I know Alex and I were bound to have learned different versions of this War’s outcome. My history lessons on this War ends with two bombs named after body types dropped on the island of Japan. Alex’s history lesson ends with the Russian winter that crippled the German offensive. This moment between us, at the counter in my café was the flair of Cold War-Era Relations. We stacked bricks between us, one by one, with each second that passed. I was holding a knife and he, I fantasize had a Kalashnikov strung to his back by a surplus, canvas strap.

“It’s good the German’s lost,” I said, hoping to ease the awkward tension springing up. I pictured Gorbachev’s purple beauty mark spreading across Alex's head and shining emerald paper George Washington’s spilling out of my mouth and nostrils. His Russianness and my Americanism were bold, with the marble counter as our Bering Strait. These things didn’t happen and we agreed at least it wasn’t the Germans. While people of nationalities will always have tension, they can always converge with a severe dislike for other nationalities. Alex and I bonded over a ephemeral hatred of Germans until we realized, or at least I did, that we are in California, our President is black, that schnitzel is a stupid name for a food snack and that Alex and I are both bonded by the universality of college liberalism.

Alex still comes in and gets his fresh-squeezed Jew. He sometimes ventures into the coffee side of things (his pronunciation of latte isn’t amusing in the least bit). Alex, along with American Girlfriend still exit his silver Honda Civic customized with a Russian Empire Coat of Arms on the hood. We still nod heads about the grave and serious issues that affect the United States. Alex still calls me Matt. I still find him to be a shifty, more-likely-than-not spy.

As I hand him his juice or coffee, which ever it may be, our hands might briefly touch. The contact between our grazing knuckles reaches across our imaginary wall, across the border of vague ideologies and minor suspicious. We are straddling the invisible wall with uncomfortable bodily contact, fingers touching might one day lead to a handshake. A handshake might lead to a beer at the campus pub. We’ll break down our imaginary wall, brick by brick, addressing each strange Cold War notion that us, as children of the 1980’s had ingrained in our heads.

We might hug and I might learn his American Girlfriend's name and we can be great friends. Or I graduate college and quit my job at the café, leaving behind thoughts of Alex, his beady, doubting Russian eyes and our great imaginary wall that represents little more than strange social interactions and garish nationalism by two liberal college students.

7:10 ghost-town

stale time is an arid desert to cross

when i'm on the job. so i travel

by foot, standing, it's easy on the heels.

i cross the midpoint of my journey,

counting minutes and hours trickle

down, like an i.v. pumping balsam

into our empty market place.

the store walls are of a bone-pale

plaster and the tiles floors, speckled

with footprints. time stolen, hand-over

fist. i catch a sight of our parking lot,

where cars are parked– employees only.

church bell down the street is ringing off key

femur bone felt like it was pulling away from my leg today. as though enough strength could separate flesh, muscle, nerve endings and the bone. if the bone broke away, took off like it tried to do so many years ago, where would it go? i felt it pulsating under my jeans, radiating a muted ache from past injuries like fruit flies looming over compost. i could almost hear it. the waves of that dull pain, a near numbness, fled from the femur to the knee i twisted. the knee, that has it's own problems. the knee that came undone, under the piles of flesh and plastic padding and sweating bodies amidst a game of football. the knee, now aged like some geriatric artifice. knocking out and around if there's too much static or too much tension, ready to run away from the leg. the knee and the femur bone would jet out like two teenage lovers, eloping in the summer sweat. but that pain, the knee pain, radiated down across the plains of my foot, spotted with crystalline veins and scar tissue. the pain stopped at the base of my foot, where the three broken toes lay. big toe, the king of the foot, done for when i was still a child. broken after putting my foot into a wall. the middle toe, broken in football, again. not related to the knee injury, but they know each other well enough. they're kissing cousin when a storm rolls in or when the impending is speaking to me through fracture limbs. the second to last toe, broken. broken while drinking twice. this toe was the stand out, the celebrity of my foot. it went the way of it's neighbor after i fell down stairs with shoes. it popped to the side, from the base, crooked liked a home equity sign reading to blow in the wind. that was break number one. second time, same guy, same style of break. this is where the fame came in, broken in front of a crowd by a car with an unconscious driver. the wheel overtook the base of my toe and it was there, done for and out. i popped it back in without so much as a second thought, before the pain started up. before the nerves realized they had been torn from the base of my foot, before i cared about it. the crowd watched. shocked, reality television, sure why the hell not? i popped it in and went along with my night. the feeling hasn't came back. so if the the femur bone and knee are eloping from my leg, splitting to reno nevada for a drunken hitch up would they take the toes with them. it feels like the toes are trying to leave too, but hell, i don't want to force them out. my leg has an open door policy. they can stick around for as long as they want, the injuries. the can hang out as long as they get a job (keeping me walking) without too much back talk (stop fucking hurting so goddamn much) we'll be all right. i'll skip the numb arch and torn ligament since they don't seem to opposed to sticking around. they watch the femur, knee and toes break away from the bone structure and integrity of my right leg like they're breaking for high ground after the heavy rains. they'll watch them tear right out of the skin or under cartilage or hairline fracture and leave on their own accord. they'll watch those injuries, gossip some , maybe be bitter they weren't as brave. they'll know the leg is a good gig, it will keep up for some time but they'll be bitter their injuries weren't as bad, that the torn ligament didn't team up with the acl or the arch didn't collapse under pressure. they'll watch the other's go, leaving me limping and they long to do the same.

stones

she sat and looked at me with something honest,

something brimming behind her eyes. pain more

or less, painful maybe, painless as she talked

about the miscarriage. i watched her eyes focus

on the sofa. they scanned across the chestnut leather,

like a floodlight in prison. maybe a name for the child,

maybe for the child itself. the child had a name—

she said it briefly, a whisper, a murmur. deafening

yet i didn't hear it and when i asked again she spoke

nothing. it had a name. names are given to children,

it was a child. she carried a child with a name.

her motherhood hung around like a bad cough,

between us like a cinder block wall, keeping me

away from her, keeping herself in. but she talked

just the same: about the child, about the months

she carried it inside herself. like some question

gaining momentum, month after month until it

spilled out of her stomach. after birth, the child

didn't give an answer because it had wasn't alive.

she carried an unanswered inquisition, for days

past nine months. asking, yearning, carried, deceased.

i sat like some pro-bono therapist carrying her burden,

problems. friends. her pushing people away and they

push her, a shoving match of relationships. she talked

about isolation and i pictured us drifting off, hunkered

at the safety of the leather couch. isolated on my fifteen

minute break with no escape so i nodded my head, dashing

concerned expressions. the wall between us grew, stacked

when she brought up her husband or ex-husband, an ex.

i sat and looked at my hands. counting the scars

and running my eyes along the deep lines that crossed

like railways across the skin. hands, like mine took out

their anger on the surfaces of her body. hands like mine

balled into fists, like he, the ex was clenching grenade.

i looked up to meet her eyes as i apologized for the hell

she paid but the wall was still there. a graffitied barrier

with each brick and each cinder block for each word

that came from her mouth. fifteen minutes to cover

a lifetime of pain. i don't get paid like a therapist, i didn't

get a degree like a therapist, i'm not in a therapist office

tacking down notes. breaking for fifteen minutes, i count

them as they drag by. my apron is covered in ground

coffeee and stuffed with invoices for groceries. she dives

into the worst period of her life and my feet ache. pulsing

under the arch up to the toes and this woman, carried

miscarried in college. i don't get paid like a therapist

because i'm not a therapist. i make her lemonade,

three lemons, ice, raw agave, water, silence.