“My name is Dean Cady,” I heard him say, “and I represent the United States of America.”

I went into the living room, still holding the knife.

*

I’d met Dean at a party given by two friends, Jordan and Anais, a professor and a lawyer who were married to each other. This was ten or eleven years ago. Dean had gone to law school with Anais. They invited him for me, in an effort to get me interested in white-collar men. They said he was a rising legal star, but still a jock: rugged and well-built and devoted to sports. He’d played football in college and he worked out every day.

When I saw him, I was disappointed but not surprised, but which I guess I mean I was bitter. The boxer I had just broken up with was what I considered rugged and well-built. This Dean had long hair and seemed ill at ease in his own skin.

I was writing my second book and had started stripping again to pay the bills. This didn’t help matters. I worked in an arena where desire was based on illusion, and where I myself was elevated on a stage, under lowered lights, washed in neon – a fantasy. This was where I was comfortable and, no matter how empty it might sometimes seem, it was where I wanted to stay.

I liked my significant others to have the same cinematic quality. The men I went out with were reliably impenetrable, with so much built-in distance that I couldn’t hope to truly know them, and there was no danger of them truly knowing me. They were urban cowboys, never to be domesticated or life-sized.

Dean insisted on being real, and that was the most impossible, off-putting and infuriating thing about him.

The conversation at the party wasn’t promising.

“Anais says you played football in school,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” he answered. “I mean, of course, I sucked. It was for Yale. All the Ivy League teams suck, but Yale was just about the worst, as you probably know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. College football was the last thing I could imagine paying attention to.

“Well, we were. The worst. Just a bunch of white boys who’d never make any other team anywhere. And to be honest, even there it was all I could do to hold my own. I pretty much killed myself just to be able to play.”

“I see,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what Jordan and Anais had been thinking when they’d set this up. We talked for a while and it soon became apparent that he apologized three times for everything he said. That is, he apologized for what he was about to say, then again while he was saying it, and once more for having said it. “This is going to sound really stupid, and I don’t know why I’m boring you with it, but playing for Yale meant a lot to me. You probably find that pathetic.”

When I left the party, he followed me out and down to the street. “Where are you going?” he wanted to know.

“Home,” I said.

“Well, uh – can I see you home, then?”

“That won’t be necessary,” I told him. “I’m getting a cab.”

I was putting my hand out as we spoke and one pulled over right away. I got in it and he climbed in after me. I was faintly and drunkenly amused by this. He thinks he’s coming home with me, I thought. I guess I won’t have to pay for the cab.

He did cover the taxi fare and out of some vague sense of obligation, as well as drunken apathy, I let him come upstairs with me and bore me with more conversation. I gave him about thirty minutes and when I could stand it no longer, I said, “It’s time for you to leave now.”

 *

He started calling me soon after that. When I think back now to how often he called me then, and how irritated I was whenever I heard his voice, it’s almost impossible to believe. He reiterated all his phone numbers – home, cell, and work – in every message he left. I never bothered to respond.

Anais was someone else who called soon after that.

“Well? What did you think of him?”

“Honestly? Not very much. I can’t even get past his hair.”

“That’s something you can change,” she said firmly.

“And he’s so self-denigrating. It’s one thing to have humility. It’s another to put yourself down all the time.”

“Well, that’s something else you can change. You can help him become more confident.”

“I don’t want to help him. I want him to impress me.”

“Well, most women would find his professional accomplishments impressive.” She thought for a moment. “At least you have to admit he’s buff.”

“What, are you joking? Compared to Billy?” Billy was the boxer I’d just broken up with.

Anais spoke with exaggerated patience. “Dean can offer you a lot of things that Billy can’t.”

*

Anais and I clashed on a lot of issues. The fact that I was stripping three nights a week so that I could write the rest of the time struck her as short-sighted. She thought I should get a job in publishing, learn the ropes, make connections and work my way up from the inside. But if I insisted on wasting my time in a dead-end job, she said, I should at least work in an upscale “Gentlemen’s Club” like Scores, where I “just might stand a chance of meeting someone worthwhile.” Instead I was in a semi-dive called The Catwalk.

“If I worked at Scores,” I told her, “I’d never get to dance for any real men.”

“Maybe – God forbid – their biceps wouldn’t be as big,” she said. “but you’d probably make twice as much money. I’d think it would be as easy to dance for a rich man as a poor one.”

“White-collar men make me feel like a commodity,” I told her. “Blue-collar men make me feel like a woman.”

“Well, as usual, there’s no talking to you. But do yourself a favor and give Dean a chance. Is he still asking you out?”

*

Dean was, in fact, asking me out repeatedly, and sometimes I would go. I went because he seemed nice enough and I could see that he was ambitious and driven. But he was a maddening dinner companion. His conversation was laden not just with his constant apologies but with the endless tangential anecdotes he needed to illustrate every piece of information he gave me. As a result, he did nearly all the talking on every date.

“Well?” Anais would ask from time to time. “Are you developing an attraction?”

“Why does he apologize all the time? I can’t stand it.”

“He’s just being modest,” she said, “because, believe me, he has nothing to apologize for. Look at the clerkship he’s doing. You have no idea how impossible it is to get something like that, and this is the second one he’s gotten.”

She was right. I had no idea. The hierarchy of law interested me about as much as Ivy League football. “Well, his father probably helped him get it.” I knew his father was a lawyer too.

“His father? Are you joking? His father’s a sole practitioner in a small town. Dean wants to be a federal prosecutor.” She paused for emphasis. “His father can’t help him with something like that. His father hasn’t helped him get anything.”

*

The trial on Court TV was apparently an extortion case. I studied Dean. He had his game face on: impassive and inscrutable. Maybe football had given him something he could use after all.

“What’s up, honey?” Joe said. He pointed the remote at the TV and changed the channel.

“Wait!” I said a little sharply. “Put it back, please.”

“To this?” The courtroom reappeared.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think I knew that guy in school. The lawyer in the gray suit.”

“Oh yeah? Cool.”

Although we had exchanged our romantic histories early and repeatedly, I’d never told Joe about Dean. I never talked about him at all. Which wasn’t to say I never thought about him. On the contrary, I thought about him every day.

On television, the defendant was being asked, How do you plead?

*

Anais’s party was in early December. Dean and I had been on two or three dates before he left a message on my machine the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. “Hi, it’s Dean. Listen, the friends I was supposed to go out with tonight are blowing me off.” This was the most amazing thing I had ever heard someone admit. “I know you’re going to a couple of parties. I guess I’m calling to assess whether you’d feel miserable, or indifferent, about the prospect of me tagging along.”

My life was at a dangerous low. The punks living in the apartment above my own were driving me crazy, night and day, with their noise. Earlier in the week, my cat had died. Stripping was becoming unbearable, but I needed the income too much to quit. And New Year’s Eve was my least favorite holiday of the year.

Next to these things, Dean wanting to tag along with me didn’t qualify as misery. In fact, the wry accuracy of his message made me laugh for the first time in days. I called him back and said he could come out with me if he wanted.

The evening was utterly forgettable, except for the fact that I slept at his apartment for the first time. This was not due to any desire on my part, but because the last party we went to was in his neighborhood and cabs were hard to come by. I was savagely drunk and depressed, and in his bed I clung to him, whimpering, “What am I going to do? I’m fucked up… completely fucked up. My life is fucked up, I don’t know what to do…”

He held me without trying for anything more. “You’re going to be all right,” he told me. “You’re… you’re going to be all right.”

In the morning, I would have been mortified if it had been anyone else. But it was only him, so I didn’t care. I was hung over and in no hurry to go home, because my upstairs neighbors were such a source of tension. I sat at his kitchen table and started writing on one of his yellow legal tablets. It was my morning ritual to write three pages before doing anything else.

He went out and brought back coffee and bagels and a single muffin that he broke in two. He gave me the bigger piece. I noticed this and told myself I should learn to like a man who would probably always give me the bigger piece of everything.

“Do you mind if I hang out here a while?” I asked. “I don’t have this kind of quiet at home. It would be great if I could stay and write for an hour or so.”

He looked uncomfortable. “Well… okay. That’s fine,” he said after some hesitation.

“Are you sure? You don’t sound too sure. If you have things to do, I can go.”

“Look – I’ll tell you the truth. You could stay all day long for all I care. But the thing is…”

“Yeah?”

“The thing is, I really have to take a crap and I don’t want to do it while you’re here.”

I looked at him with disbelief. What was shocking was not that he felt this way, but that he was telling me about it. There were countless alternatives to this kind of confession. He could have gone to his gym, which was just around the corner. He could have gone to the Starbucks down the street. He could have pretended he was taking a shower – that’s what Billy always did. Billy would go into the bathroom, lock the door, turn on the water, and emerge fifteen or twenty minutes later. He would even step under the jet and get his hair wet to complete the charade. I knew what he was doing, and he probably knew I knew. But we didn’t talk about it.

And if none of these possibilities occurred to Dean, he could have said he had work to do, that he didn’t want company, that he needed his space. If he had drawn a line like that, I probably would have liked him better for it. But no. He had to brandish it at me: his humanity and his shame and his shit.

It worked, anyway. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Later that day, a girl who’d been at one of the parties called and asked me who he was.

“He’s a dream,” she said. “Where’d you meet him?”

“You can have him,” I said. “Want his number? Get a pen.”

*

Dean didn’t want to go out with her, and he never did. And knowing I’d given her his number didn’t stop him from calling me. To this day, I’m not sure why I continued to see him, but we dated off and on for almost five months. During this courtship period, if you could call it that, Dean defied everything I thought I knew about the male mating ritual. All the guys I’d ever known had spread their feathers like peacocks and strutted their stuff on the first several dates. If they’d discovered some fantastic bar off the beaten path, they took me there; if they had special talents or credentials, they displayed them; if they had money, they spent it. Dean was the opposite. He seemed compelled to recount to me every slight he’d ever received. The coach who came to his high school to recruit for Princeton, who told him he had heart but was just too small. The upperclassman at the same high school who’d suddenly said to him while standing at the boys’ room urinals, “You fat fuck. Why don’t you lose some weight?” He reiterated, often, that playing football was so far the best thing his life had offered him. “There’s a concept in real estate law,” he told me, “known as the highest and best use. If you have several beautiful acres of unspoiled wilderness, for instance, its “highest and best use” would be for something like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, instead of a factory. Okay? You follow? Well, it never mattered to me that I had a modicum of intelligence, or access to a great education, or any number of other advantages like that. I always felt that my highest and best use would’ve been as a nose guard.”

He seemed to be without a shred of pride. His soliloquies were a free stream of self-loathing. He never passed up a chance to make a crack at his own expense.

Once, on the street, we saw someone he knew from work. After they’d said hello and goodbye, he remarked, “Well, that just blew his mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can just hear him now, saying what the fuck is she doing with him.”

Another time, he volunteered the information that he was “hung like a raisin”.

*

A character witness for the defendant was on the stand. I sank down onto the edge of Joe’s chair as Dean began cross-examining her. She was a beautiful but sullen-looking young woman, probably in her early twenties.

“Ms. Cabrera, how long have you known John Berenger?”

“Long enough.”

The judge glared down at her. “One more answer like that, young lady, and I’ll fine you in contempt of this court.”

“Is that really long enough? To truly get to know someone?”

“For me it is.”

“If that’s the case, Ms. Cabrera, you must be an extraordinary judge of character. Are you telling me that no one has ever surprised you?”

My husband was impatient to get to the Giants game. “Are you… are you really involved with this show, honey?”

I jumped up. “No, not at all. And dinner’s almost ready anyway. Are you going to want the game on while we eat?”

He looked at me sheepishly. “Why don’t you watch it with me? We can eat in here. I’ll explain what’s going on.” He flashed his most charming smile. “And we can talk during commercials.”

*

By the spring, I was still occasionally meeting Dean for dinner, and still going home alone afterward. But by then I had come to care for him in a sisterly kind of way. I pleaded with him to stop taking shots at himself all the time. I found myself echoing Anais when I told him he had nothing to apologize for. He was applying for the job he’d always wanted – as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, in the Southern District of New York – and I found myself fervently hoping he would get it. And when he cut his hair for the interview, I saw that he was beautiful.

*

I called him one Tuesday evening in late April because the next day, I had to go to a hearing in the courthouse where he worked. I asked him if he wanted to meet afterward for lunch. It was arranged that I would come by his office at noon, and somehow, before we got off the phone, our conversation turned to his work ethic. He told me that in order to have peace of mind, he needed to work hard every single day.

“Even when I’m on vacation,” he said. “I like to feel that I’m getting things done. I actually like to clean the garage, and wash the car, and mow the lawn. Do you know what I mean?”

If I have a weakness for anything, it’s a hard-working man. I don’t even care what kind of work it is; it’s the passion that’s important. I imagined Dean pushing a lawn mower and passing a rag over his ’67 Chevy. It made me see him, suddenly, as the kind of man I liked. And it wasn’t such a stretch anymore. The picture had a sudden and startling appeal.

After we hung up, I spent about a minute staring at the phone. I like him, I thought. And the words that came into my head next were from a pop song there was no escaping at the time.

How bizarre; how bizarre.

*

When I got to his office the next day, he was fielding a phone call.

“This isn’t the best place to call with that kind of inquiry,” he was saying. “You’d be better off calling the Manhattan D.A.’s office.” He listened for another moment, and when he spoke again, there was an edge in his tone that I’d never heard. “That,” he said into the phone, “is a perfect question” – an emphatic pause – “to ask the Manhattan D.A.’s office.”

I found myself gazing at him with delight.

I’d wondered on the way here whether my feeling of the night before would survive the morning. It had. I was glad to see him. He looked good.

 *

But at lunch, Dean seemed tense and preoccupied. He kept looking around the room, instead of looking at me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“Nothing. What do you mean?”

“You seem stressed out.”

“You’ve never seen me in the middle of a work day. I am stressed out. It’s a stressful job.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Other than that, yeah.”

He stared into his near-empty water glass, as if there might be a prize somewhere in the ice.

I thought, what if he’s the kind of guy who only likes the chase?

But afterward, walking home along Mott Street, I told myself it was true that I’d never seen him at work. That of course the middle of a weekday would make for a different and stressful date.

It was early spring. The sun was shining on the Chinatown streets. Everything looked beautiful in this light.

 *

About an hour after I got home, my phone rang.

“Listen,” Dean said. “You kept saying I was tense at lunch, and that was true. I want to talk to you about that and I was wondering if I could come over after work.”

“Sure,” I said, surprised and pleased. “I’ll see you later.”

I couldn’t imagine what he wanted to talk about, but I was excited that he was coming by. When he arrived, I offered him a beer, and we took opposite corners of the living room sofa.

“Look,” he said. “I have a proposal. We’ve been going out for a few months now, and it’s not going much of anywhere. And since I don’t really see that changing, I think we should make an official decision to just be friends.”

I looked at him, incredulous. “Are you serious?” I asked. “My feelings for you were just starting to turn into something beyond friendship.”

“Yeah, well, see, that’s what I thought,” he said uncomfortably. “And that’s why I think it would be better not to go there. Because, let’s face it, we probably aren’t compatible, and if we don’t let things go any further, we can avoid the risk of real pain.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, suddenly dizzy. “How do you know we wouldn’t be compatible?”

“Because it’s been no secret that up till now you haven’t really liked me. So how authentic could this sudden change of heart be? I think you’ve just decided that you should like me, or at any rate, that you’ll settle for me until something better comes along.”

“No!” I said. “No. I would never do that. I really do feel differently about you. And I don’t know if it can work, but I can’t believe you don’t want to find out.”

“It’s like I said,” he told me stubbornly. “It’s a very long shot. And if we call it off now, neither of us will really get hurt.”

“No?” I said. “What about me? You don’t think I’ll be hurt?”

“You? Come on. You’ll be annoyed, maybe. Or pissed off. But you’re not going to be hurt.”

“That’s not true,” I said. This admission surprised even me. I wasn’t one to admit to anyone, especially men, that they could hurt me. “And besides, what about you? You’ve put in all this time going out with someone who wasn’t attracted to you. Don’t you now want to go out, at least a few times, with someone who is?” I had gone cold all over and I clasped a sofa cushion against my chest to keep from trembling.

“The point is, I don’t trust it. And I think that first impressions should be respected. If you didn’t like me to begin with, it’s hard to see how you could really make that leap.”

“That’s crazy,” I told him. “That’s why people date. To find out whether or not they truly like each other. If the first impression is the defining one, then why go out with me all the other times?”

“Well…” he said. “There was a certain fascination in being around you. I never knew anybody like you before. And I knew no one could mistake me for someone who was actually with you. So it was kind of a voyeuristic thrill, and in a way I was going along for the ride.”

I started to cry.

He stared at me in alarm. “I can’t believe you feel this way,” he said. “I never thought you would react like this. I thought you wouldn’t care, or that you’d be irritated, if anything. I wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to think that I could hurt you.”

“Well. Surprise,” I said.

“What if I had said this two weeks ago? How would you have felt?”

I thought about this and tried to answer truthfully. “I probably would have been relieved.”

“You see? How could you feel so differently so fast?”

“Just tell me one thing,” I said. “Is this still up for discussion? Are negotiations still open here? Or is this just a formality, and meanwhile your decision is really set in stone?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s set in stone,” he said. “But I really don’t think I’m going to change my mind.”

I was trembling visibly by now. He put a steadying hand on my leg.

“Look at me, I’m shaking,” I said. I felt a wave of grief that was stronger than pride.

“I see that,” he said. “I just can’t believe it.”

“Dean.” I reached out and gripped his arm. “Please don’t do this. What do you have to lose by waiting? You don’t know how it could be. You don’t really know me at all. It’s going to be different from now on… look, I’m sorry about the last five months. I am. I’m really sorry.”

“Oh, Christ. Come on. You don’t have to apologize.”

“I want to apologize.”

“Well, it’s not necessary.”

“It’s important to me. No matter what. Even if I never see you again, I want you to forgive me.”

“I forgive you. There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Listen,” I said. I had no idea what I was going to say, no idea how to show him how I felt. “You just have to give me a chance. I want a chance to be good to you.” I searched for the words. “I want to be on your side.”

He exhaled sharply and put his head in his hands.

“What?” I asked him.

“That’s probably one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said to me.”

“Well, it’s true.” But it was still inadequate. “Look,” I said. “Can I touch you? I need to touch you.”

“You can touch me.”

I moved over to him and took his face in my hands, touching it gently all over with my fingertips. I brought my lips to his forehead, temples, eyelids with a desperate tenderness, almost reverence, and then I got on my knees on the floor and brought his mouth down to mine because I couldn’t help myself. Kissing him was like drinking from another’s canteen in the desert, an act of need and sustenance and agonized supplication.

We stayed like this for long minutes before he got to his feet and pulled me up with him, and then we were standing face to face with nothing between us, eye to eye like drill sergeant and recruit, and he was gripping me by the hair, pulling my head back, tilting my face up to meet his gaze. I opened my eyes as wide as they would go and stared into his as deeply as I could. Tears were still coming intermittently but that seemed all right and just then I thought of the phrase the naked eye, because despite having taken my clothes off for the city of New York night after night for three years in a strip bar, despite the fact that I was fully dressed at this moment, despite the fact that he was looking at me only from the neck up, I had never in my life felt more naked than I did now. His irises were all I could see; they were taking up my whole view and I was swimming along the green, in between the gold flecks of eyes that were the same shade of hazel as mine. We were hanging there together in some balance beyond gravity, a kind of swaying trance, a suspension of cynicism and self-protection and artifice, and not only was it all right, but it was hot, hotter than being with a Marlboro Man or an action hero, hotter than anything I could remember. And it seemed the same was true for him, because pressed up against him as I was, there was no mistaking his state of arousal.

You know what this is? he said to me, his voice low and disbelieving. This is me and you.

I know.

I mean… there’s no one here… but me… and you.

Yes. I know that. I know.

*

He left that night no longer sure of what he wanted. He told me he needed to think about it. I was so grateful his resolve had been shaken that I didn’t even press him to stay. It was as if I’d built my case like a house of cards and if I tried to add anything more – if I even disturbed the air – it all might collapse just like that.

*

I woke up the next morning and went out for a run. I was training for the New York Marathon then, and my regular route was fourteen miles long. Usually this mileage was a hurdle to be gotten over so I could get on with the rest of my day. Today I was grateful, so grateful, to have it in front of me. I could not imagine what I would have done with myself otherwise, while waiting for Dean to reach a verdict. I was sick with fear and wild with hope. I was running with my Walkman, and when the long, boring songs I usually avoided came on the radio, I let them play all the way through, desperate to be lulled. Hotel California, Miss American Pie. The longer, the better. I wished the run itself were longer. I wished I could run all afternoon, go deep into the valley of suffering and endurance then somehow emerge on the other side, rarefied and weightless.

 *

He called at 4:47.

“How are you?” he began.

“Okay,” I said. I was afraid to speak.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about last night,” he told me. “But I’d rather talk to you about it in person. I’m playing in a softball game near your apartment after work. Are you going to be home tonight?”

I wasn’t. I was modeling some clothing for a catalogue shoot as a favor to the designer, who was a friend of mine. It killed me to have to say this, to hold him off in any way.

“Oh. Well,” he said. “The guys usually go out for something to eat after the game. Maybe by the time that’s over, you’ll be done.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I knew I wouldn’t be. These shoots always dragged on late into the night.

“Well, look, I’ll give you a call just in case.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “You know, I have to tell you – what happened last night was one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had with another person.”

“For me, too,” I said.

“And, well, I didn’t want to say this over the phone, but I think we should give it a shot.”

 *

I wish the story could end here.

 *

The next evening – Friday evening – I had a date with someone else, a guy named Jack, so Dean and I agreed to get together again on Saturday night. Jack was someone I’d gone out with several times, and I felt I owed it to him to break things off face to face. Meanwhile Dean left a message on my machine that afternoon.

“I was wondering if you could help me with this problem,” he said. “You see, there was this girl, and I was pretty much convinced she didn’t give a flying fuck about me, and I figured I would tell her that and it would be no big deal, but she did not want to receive this information. So further discussions ensued… and apparently, something has changed… because now I quite frankly can’t get this girl out of my mind. No, much to my consternation, I can’t stop thinking about her, and it’s impacting – although that’s not really a verb – my productivity at work. So I would like to discuss this development with you… I think that further discussions are in order, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but I would really like to see you tonight.”

I wanted nothing more myself and I told him that when I called him back. “Listen,” I said, “I wouldn’t feel right canceling this date on such short notice. But I’m going to tell him I’m with you now, and that I won’t be able to see him again.”

That was what I did, and he – Jack – was so bitter and hostile that I ended up leaving in the middle of dinner. Rain was coming down hard, soaking me to the skin, and I walked on water all the way home.

*

Finally it was Saturday. Dean had plans with his older sister that afternoon. She was coming in from New Jersey to visit him. Over the phone that morning, we agreed that I’d come over as soon as she left.

“I hope the message I left yesterday didn’t annoy you,” he said.

“Oh, not at all,” I told him. “I listened to it a lot of times.”

“You did?”

“Well, sure. I mean, it was nice to hear that you were thinking of me.”

“Actually,” he said, “that’s kind of an understatement. I don’t know what you did to me on Wednesday night, but I have had an erection for the past forty-eight hours. It’s been unreal. I mean, and painful. I’ve gotten next to nothing done at work for two days straight.”

*

Dean’s sister hit traffic on her way into the city and arrived hours later than planned, pushing the time of our meeting back until almost ten. When I got to his place, I was surprised to see that she was still there. She had decided to stay and meet me. After interminable three-way conversation at his apartment, we went to the bar down the block and had a few interminable rounds.

“So,” she said after a drink or two. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you for a few months now. You’re a stripper?”

I looked at Dean, who looked away. I reminded myself that until now, Dean’s feelings for me had been unrequited and he’d had no reason to sell me to his family. I turned back to her. “I’m a writer,” I said.

“And the strip bar is a source of some interesting material,” Dean put in. This was a stretch, but I didn’t say anything.

“Oh, okay,” she said. “So you write… pornography?”

“I’m sorry,” Dean said repeatedly after she left. “That was bad. I know it was bad. I’m sorry she was like that.” But it also seemed he had taken some of her chagrin to heart.

I tried not to notice this. At any rate, I didn’t want to dwell on it. Fuck her; forget her. After waiting three days to see Dean, and several more hours to be alone with him, not to mention all his talk about round-the-clock erections, I was ready to get it on. But he wanted to talk some more first.

“What do you see as the terms here?” he wanted to know. “I mean, do you want to be able to see other people?”

I thought he was asking for reassurance.

“I don’t want to see anyone else,” I told him. “That’s why I broke it off with Jack. I mean, I fell in love with you on Wednesday night.”

“Oh man,” he said.

I wasn’t sure how to interpret this. “Is that all right?”

“Well, the thing is – I’m not there yet.”

“Oh,” I said after a moment. “Well, that’s okay. I hope that didn’t scare you. I was trying to accomplish the opposite.”

“So, wait,” he said. “Does that mean you want to be, like… boyfriend and girlfriend?”

I wondered if I’d been missing something over the last few days. “That was what I had in mind, yes,” I said. “What did you want the terms to be?”

“Well – I just thought we’d be going out.”

I blinked in bewilderment. “Right… so… is there a difference? What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked anxious.

“Are you upset that I told Jack I wouldn’t see him again?”

“No,” he said. “I’m glad you did that.”

“Well, then… is there someone else you want to date?”

“Not now,” he said. “But what if, say, Colleen wants me to meet someone from her firm?” Colleen was one of his closest friends.

“Does she?”

“No. It’s a hypothetical question. What if she did?”

“Well, if you wanted to, how could I stop you? Look, if you want to keep things open for a while, maybe that makes sense. I’m just telling you how I feel. I don’t happen to want to see anyone else.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, listen, it’s not like I’d sleep with you and also be sleeping with someone else. I wouldn’t do that.”

I thought maybe this meant he didn’t want to sleep together yet. If he wanted to keep his options open, and sleeping with me meant not sleeping with anyone else…

“I don’t have to sleep here tonight, if you don’t feel ready for that,” I ventured.

“What? Of course I want you to sleep here.”

I was past confusion. “Look, whatever you want to do is fine. Could you come over here and kiss me now?”

*

He’d said he was hung like a raisin. That was just a lie.

 *

We went separate ways in the morning, and he didn’t call that night, and he didn’t call the next day. By the middle of the day after that, my heart was already broken.

*

After dinner, and the game, and the happy, rowdy sex we tended to have whenever the Giants won, I lay in bed beside my sleeping husband and thought about trust. I’d never cheated on Joe and never lied to him. Yet I was guilty – if that was the word – of the deepest kind of duplicity, and I wondered if the same were true for him. Was there someone he thought about every day, someone whose name I’d never heard? It was an idle curiosity. The idea wasn’t really a painful one.

I trusted Joe to walk through a fire to get me out, and I trusted him to shoot anyone who tried to break into our house. That was good enough for me.

*

But after Dean and I went separate ways forever, I kept wondering about that transcendent Wednesday night. What happened to us then? We showed each other something that, for a long time afterward, I desperately insisted was the truth. I said it to him and to myself, said it out loud and inside my own head. I said it up and down and around and around. That what surfaced that night was the real me and the real Dean – as if it could ever be possible, even on the most extraordinary evening, to truly know another person. As if there was a wall, always between us, in which a window had opened and then closed again. But now I don’t know. Maybe that insistence was nothing more than a dangerous confusion on my part – the confusion of someone’s daily capabilities with his finest, most impossible hour.

 *

There’s only one aspect of the whole thing that I do know for sure:

That night, the night we met in the air, Dean asked me, “What if I had said all this two weeks ago? How would you have felt?”

And I imagine that scenario sometimes. I imagine myself saying goodbye, I imagine myself thinking good riddance. He was right when he said that if we went further and deeper, one of us was going to really get hurt. So in light of what happened afterward, do I wish it had gone that way? Do I wish he’d made his proposal – the proposal to just be friends – two weeks earlier?

I’ve asked myself that question so many times since, and if I were sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the only honest answer I could offer is no. No, because the memory and mystery of that night are still worth everything to me – everything that came afterward, everything I carry around now. And all I know for sure is that my answer will stay the same, even if it always stays as heavy as it is, even if I never get to put it down, even if I will always carry it alone.

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Most people have mothers who guide them through this. My own was never much for such things, partially because my grandparents, dairy farmers in rural Québec, were so thin on money that she’d never been able to conceive of buying them. But she knew the pretty-girl trappings were the price of entry for most young female friendships and this last, she was determined I would have. Indulging me, though, did not make the difference she’d hoped. It took me years to see the waste of time and money it was. For me, I mean; people always read my judging them into that. But the things I had, the jelly shoes and the sparkly lip gloss, the Tribe perfume and the Club Monaco sweatshirt, they didn’t make me more acceptable, least of all to myself. I did like that fake watermelon smell, I liked catching unexpected whiffs of candy all day long. It was soothing.

But none of it changed me in the eyes of other people. The skills of friendship would take a few more years to learn. It would happen, mostly, in an era where I wore all the wrong things but I guess said at least a few of the right ones. It happened in an era where everyone I knew had long since tired of gauging other people by the checklist handed out at the door of what was “pretty” and what wasn’t.

This has made me, as an adult, perhaps a little more hostile to the claims of those who “defend” beauty than I should be.

Of late these defenders have been very vocal about the connection between beauty and writing, particularly with respect to women’s writing. In a (characteristically) beautiful short essay for Lambda Literary, the poet Saeed Jones suggests that “the poetics of beauty isn’t really about poetics at all.” He points out the difference in tone between the way many write about Anne Sexton and the way they write about Adrienne Rich. He pointed out that race and class are wound up in this beauty ideal and he was right. Somehow the louche glamour of the padded shoulder, dark lipstick, draped-over-couches thing is not available to whole swaths of womanhood. It’s a shame.

The essay has a context I won’t get into because I do not know much about it, something about gay men and beauty and queer poetry that I’d like to learn about but haven’t yet. I agree with Saeed, though, that the problem at root is one of prioritizing “bodies over bodies of work,” and I think it goes beyond the context he gives it.

Earlier this year, when Jonathan Franzen wrote about Edith Wharton and commented on her looks, so many of us were incensed. A lot of people were angry that he’d brought her looks into the equation but I barely understood what he said about her looks in the first place. It wasn’t the least bit clear why he thought Wharton wasn’t pretty. He declared this without stating his reasons, reasons undoubtedly derived from photographs, because they clearly never met. He clearly did not have the opportunity to gauge what strikes me as the actual essence of beauty but is rarely discussed: the alchemy between personality and certain “acceptable” facial features — the pert nose, full lips, wide eyes, long lashes. None of these latter have much to recommend them without an animating spirit, it seems to me. Any dead-eyed catalogue page can show you that.

Of course, we knew what he meant, anyway. What he meant was something like what my middle-school guardians meant when they declared a girl ugly — “Her hair is greasy!” “Her eyes bulge!” He meant that her body could not be poured with ease into the fashions of the day. Most of all he meant that he, personally, did not find her attractive, which somehow transmogrified, in the natural way these things do, into the world not finding her so. Men often talk this way, casually inserting appraisals.

I never know how to explain this properly to men but that, right there, is the essential weaponry of the whole beauty calculus: how quickly “I think” becomes “The world knows.”

That is not to let women off the hook, of course, because in a very real way the fetish is ours. Mine too. I write a lot about women and writing because I can’t seem to turn off the faucet, and every time I do so I end up talking about beauty even as I try to steer around it. Just last week I wrote a short piece about Yeats and couldn’t help but comment that Iseult Gonne was beautiful. I had to add pictures of them because I like the pictures, because the eyes are haunted in a way I find instructive.

I want to get away from pictures, really I do. When there was the whole dust-up earlier this year over a young writer who wrote about her sex life the story and the picture were inseparable. People had to look. They had to see. They had to have opinions of who and what she was that were, effectively, all about the picture. Not about the writing. This bothered me more than I should say, because it tapped into a deep well of longing and frustration I had long since thought had been lured underground. There are people who would call that pure jealousy but I think it’s more complicated. I do not want to be a writer with a picture you can’t ignore. I want to be a writer with words you can’t, though. I don’t know any woman writer who wouldn’t say that’s what she wants.

But then I know that, at least for “Girls,” that troublesome category, the question of self and beauty is not really separable. I am not a fan, per se of, the show that’s currently providing a fulcrum for the discussion. Something about it is at once too broad and too uncommitted to broadness to appeal to me. But I admit the moment I really thought was brilliant, that said something I hadn’t heard before, was the one in which Lena Dunham’s character is asked why she has so many tattoos. Her Hannah is not an alterna-punk girl, she doesn’t register as someone who’s read a lot of Michelle Tea or Eileen Myles, and as such her heavily inked back does seem out of place. Her answer to her boy-questioner is something like, I got them because I was gaining a lot of weight, and because I wanted them to mark some control of that. The honesty of that — apparently it’s Dunham’s own explanation — undid me. If only the rest of the show was like that, saw that the brilliance of it could reside in the blank indifferent of the boy’s reaction. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know how it works, for “girls.”

But then, most days, neither do I. I was out the other night with a few friends and was talking to one about romantic disappointment and I said something offhand like, “I am not the type men go for.” I can’t tell you I know what I meant by that, other than cite evidence, but fundamentally it was a ridiculous statement and my interlocutor called me on it.

As women sometimes do in these situations we began considering revisions to my current style. I call the style “uniform,” since it is in essence always the same: black top, some sort of denim, dark lip gloss and eyeliner if I’m feeling fancy. A necklace if I am not feeling lazy. “You have this whole Winona Ryder in the 90s thing going on,” she said to me, by way of sizing up my aesthetic. An absurd statement on some levels — no one will ever use the words “elfin” or “waif” to describe me — and yet one that made me feel, suddenly, as if I had been blessed. Because I know what I know about the way “prettiness” is artillery to the soul, I clamped down on it quickly. But the blush crept across my face, anyway.

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Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit, as a reviewer I was fascinated by the idea of the book before I even read it, because Flenniken, like me, studied science before poetry; her father, like mine, worked at a nuclear site – hers at Hanford, mine at Oak Ridge National Labs; and her childhood, like mine, was spent in a small town supported almost solely by the dollars brought in by said nuclear site. Her language in this book, of dosimeters, Geiger counters, and unstable ions and their disturbing biological impact is heartbreakingly familiar to me. Her two degrees in engineering led her to work at Hanford as an adult, before she moved to Seattle.

What might be surprising to readers is how different this book is from Flenniken’ first book, Famous, a book of personal narratives about life in the domestic sphere – a quiet book almost modest in scope. If you enjoyed that book, you might not be really prepared for this second book, which is sweeping in terms of trying to capture a history, personal, political, and scientific. While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris. The other difference is a palpable sense of threat, of lives at stake, of a dramatic story unfolding in the poet’s capable hands.

One of my favorite poems in the book is one in which she writes to the father of a childhood friend who died of a radiation-related disease, describing an event where her town had a televised event where she, as a small school child, dresses up to deliver the letters she and her classmates had been asked to write to President Nixon to prevent the closing of Hanford. “To Carolyn’s Father” illustrates how she makes the larger movements of the sixties – anti-nuclear sentiment, President Nixon’s soon-to-happen disgrace, and the treatment of children by schools as instruments of government propaganda – happen in the crystallized focus of a little girl nervous about appearing on television:

On the morning I got plucked out of third grade
by Principal Wellman because I’d written on command
an impassioned letter for the life of our nuclear plants
that the government threatened to shut down
and I put on my rabbit-trimmed green plaid coat…
at the same time inside your marrow
blood cells began to err…stunned by exposure to radiation…

In another poem of Flenniken’s childhood, she recounts how the children in her school were asked to lie in a whole-body radiation counter “and do a little for their country.” “Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary” displays her (and by extension, all the people of the area around Hanford) chilling trust in the system: “I shut my eyes again and pledged/ to be still; so proud to be/ a girl America could count on.”

I was impressed by the variety of forms Flenniken used to capture different aspects of her story. Two lovely lyrics, “Plume” and “Green Run,” are concrete poems that reflect each of the environmental disasters that the poems refer to. A series, “Augean Suite,” referring to both the cleanup of the stables of mythology and to a statement of health physicist Herbert Parker’s to Congress about the ways to define the quantities of radioactive exposure, contains the piece, “IV: Augean Gray,” disturbing and beautiful at the same time in its vatic voice and the way the poem is broken over the page:

Women,
        take off your
                    dresses
                                    and undergarments.
        You babies,
                crawl naked
        in the grass.
                Lie down all of you
        under the August sky,
                and nobody ask.
…Lie down, patriot.
        Don’t ask.

Though the book brings together a personal memoir combined with the history of Hanford in an evocative way, Flenniken maintains an almost neutral tone, avoiding inflammatory statements or direct political commentary. She even jokes a little about her history in her poem “Again I’m Asked If I Glow in the Dark.” She does highlight interesting historical notes, such as how different Presidents, from Obama to Nixon and Kennedy, appear naïve in their quotes in the book – at times, dangerously so – about the powers harnessed at Hanford nuclear site. In her lack of condemnation, there seems to still be condemnation in statements of fact, in stories of workers dead from various radiation-related ailments. Yet her tone remains sympathetic towards the men making decisions, her neighbors, her father, her friend’s fathers, aware of the financial and political pressures they were under as well as the limited science about radiation exposure available to them. The awakening of the poet’s skepticism is one of the many stories that unfolds within the book.

Recently, for research related to my own work, I was reading a memoir by a radiation health physicist, Karl Ziegler Morgan, who had worked at Oak Ridge during the Cold War period, and his descriptions of the experiments they conducted there, including taping radium to the wrists of some of the nurses, thinking they might endure nothing worse than a mild skin irritation. It reminded me of the innocent, almost playful attitude people had towards nuclear power in the early days of its development. Reading Plume is not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government.

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In January 2012, I got to meet Alice Bag, who is touring with her book Violence Girl: East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story, and she is warm, open, and forthcoming. She tells me she considers herself somewhere between archivist and activist, rendering and conveying the electrifying aura of the original Los Angeles punk scene in both her memoirs and her collection of extensive online documentation. Alice’s book is a conversational glimpse into her life with music, in vignettes hilarious and dark. It moves through her days as the only child of two immigrants in a tense household in East LA, to musician embodying the Violence Girl onstage, to blogger and author.

***

The Rumpus: You’ve just returned from a book/music tour, during which you read excerpts from your book and coordinated with musicians from all over the country to form different backing bands. Were there any favorite moments?

Alice Bag: I was very excited and a little bit nervous going into it. I’d never performed on the east coast and wasn’t sure what I could expect. Turns out I had nothing to be nervous about because despite the fact that I didn’t know many people out there, I had an enormous amount of support from the onset.

Chris Strunk from Ladyfest Boston spearheaded the campaign to take Violence Girl to the east coast. He put me in touch with organizers in different cities who then put me in contact with local musicians. It was an amazing experience, the musicians were very generous with their time and talent. Each new ensemble added their own flavor to the songs. Along the way, artists designed flyers for the shows, my social media buds spread the word and I had great turnouts. I felt like I’d been adopted by a community I never even knew existed.

The reading at Bluestockings in NYC was especially sweet. If you’ve read Violence Girl, you’ll know that I affirm NYC as the birthplace of punk rock in the 1970′s, so in a way it was like coming home to where it all began for me. I’ve always felt like NYC is a taste-making city and so when I saw the room filling up I got excited. The audience laughed at the right spots and responded the way I hoped so I knew they were on my side. I floated out of the bookstore like a Thanksgiving Day balloon!

Rumpus: You said the book – originally a blog – started on a dare from a friend. How cohesive was it at first, and when did it start to seem like a book?

Bag: I’d been blogging for many years before I started blogging Violence Girl. I have a completely different blog called Diary of a Bad Housewife that one’s just for spilling whatever’s on my mind. The idea of writing a book seemed overwhelming to me and even though I was a blogger I didn’t think of myself as a writer so when I considered the idea of writing a book from that perspective it seemed preposterous. In contrast blogging my story was a manageable task because  it was a format with which I was comfortable and familiar.

Rumpus: How often did you write?

Bag: I wrote Monday through Friday as soon as my daughter was on the school bus. I’d pour myself a cup of coffee and get to work. My goal was to post a little vignette everyday. It was pretty straightforward from the onset. I had my mother’s photo albums which were in loose chronological order so it was easy to start looking at an early photo album and remember a story about the photo. I worked my way through the whole book by looking at photos, fliers, newspaper and magazine articles, receipts, letters, postcards, all this stuff my mom had packed away in the garage for years and years. She grew up during the depression, so not only did she have great recycling and DIY chops, she had hardcore hoarding instincts.

I imagined it as a book and felt it was cohesive from the beginning but my husband, who edited my drafts often helped keep me on the right track. It would have been too easy for me to tell anecdote after anecdote and lose track of the central theme.

Rumpus: Yeah. The book is intense and confrontational, but its anecdotes (and people) are also often hilarious. Are there, as I imagine, many more stories that did not make it in the editing process?

Bag: Yes, my husband kept me focused on the story. I tend to meander through my thoughts when I’m writing. Luckily I had two blogs, and The True Life Adventures of Violence Girl was the one I used for writing the book; Diary of a Bad Housewife is [the other blog] and I post a variety of content on that. Some of the stories that didn’t make it into Violence Girl were posted on Diary of a Bad Housewife.

Rumpus: You have said the book is a kind of oral history, one person’s perspective of a specific slice of space and time. You’ve also conducted a series of interviews under the flag “Women of LA Punk.” How did you find yourself taking on the role of historian?

Bag: I wanted to make sure that the scene was documented the way I remembered it, not because it’s better or truer than anyone else’s first-hand experience account but because it’s equal to any other first-hand account. Each person who experiences an event filters it and views it through his or her own perspective. To get at the truth, you have to have as many perspectives as possible. That’s why it makes me so angry that non-Anglo histories are currently being suppressed in Arizona colleges and universities.

The Women in L.A. Punk interviews are just a way for the women who were involved in the early scene to contribute their perspectives. Some of the ladies have their own blogs and websites but others don’t and the web page gives them a forum. I don’t know if I would call myself a historian. I think of historians as people who collect and interpret data, I see myself more as an archivist, except I have a point of view so maybe I’m more of an activist or an archivist?

I don’t think I can overemphasize how important it is to document your artwork and the work of your community. There have always been people of different ethnicities and different sexual orientations and gender identifications involved in meaningful art and social movements, but they are largely invisible because the people who were documenting – the historians – filtered them out.

Rumpus: Such an important point — the more perspectives the better and more complete the history. What kind of reaction have you gotten from the women you interview for this project?

Bag: It’s been really positive. What I like about it is that it’s not just the band members being interviewed, it’s the whole community that made the scene happen. With each story you really start getting the feeling that women were involved in every capacity. They were roadies, photographers, writers, musicians – everything the guys were doing, the ladies were doing.

Rumpus: Musically, you were at the helm of something completely unknown. Did it seem like brand new territory at the time, or did the realization that you were a part of something huge come later?

Bag: It did feel like it was brand new territory, I knew that participating in the punk scene was changing me but I had no idea that it would grow into something that would affect and inspire so many people.

I think the unexpected effect of the punk scene was the sense of empowerment that comes from being part of a community that works together to achieve common goals, even if our goals as teens were mostly just to be creative and have fun. The punk spirit, the DIY attitude, the feeling that we can steer our lives and circumvent the powers that be lingers long after the pogoing has stopped.

Rumpus: You write “It seemed to me that the early LA scene was unconsciously egalitarian. [...] Everyone involved in the punk scene provided an accurate sampling of LA’s misfit population.” (195) How and when did this change? What shifted in the scene for that to happen?

Bag: As the punk scene expanded in 1979/1980 it reached different neighborhoods, different communities across America. The great thing about that was each community could add its own unique flavor to the mix, however as it spread into the mainstream, I think it picked up mainstream values. It became commercialized and instead of being an art movement that cherished originality, innovation and challenging the status quo, you ended up with some scenes that leaned towards homogeneity and mirrored patriarchal values. I can’t think of anything less punk than that.

Rumpus: The title of your book is from a Bags lyric, but you write about the idea of Violence Girl as something that precedes you (“the seeds of Violence Girl were sown long before I was born”), a transcendent force that overtakes you. The book also contains an emphasis on dualities, like in the passage where you describe your love of Bruce Lee movies and their well-defined roles of thugs and heroes. What do these doubles mean for you, the narrator?

Bag: There are several things that happen when, as a child, you see the adults in your life behaving in ways that seem inconsistent with how you have come to imagine them to be. Initially there’s confusion and maybe even a little bit of disbelief. We treat children to very simplistic explanations of humanity, we tell them people are either good or bad, so when people exhibit both traits and we all eventually do, it can be difficult to know what to do with that new information. It’s hard to figure out how to relate to someone who does good things one minute and bad things the next. In my book, my father is both a doting parent who showers me with unconditional love and the man who abuses my mother. I had to deal with conflicting emotions, I hated and loved my father equally. Experiencing these seemingly contradictory emotions forced me to have empathy for people because I could see the complexity of human nature.

I think it’s probably a feeling that victims of domestic abuse can relate to. Nobody marries thinking they’re going to get Mr. Hyde. I think we all expect our partner’s behavior to be consistent with what they’ve projected in the past. So when the abusive side shows up there’s an element of confusion and disbelief because that’s not the person you thought you were getting, but understanding that people can harbor both sides and that perhaps they are even two sides of the same coin can be another way of looking at that behavior. Sometimes the very thing that makes someone a passionate partner in one instance makes that same person a formidable foe in a different situation. I found a little bit of solace in understanding the duality of my father’s nature.

Rumpus: How do you think the idea of Violence Girl would have manifested without the presence of music in your life?

Bag: I think I would have found some other outlet and I’m certain that if it couldn’t be creative it would have been destructive. Music gave me a chance to express my anger in a more positive way. When I was just a little girl I had a recurring dream that I whipped my father to death and years later when I was part of Las Tres, I wrote a song called Happy Accident about a woman who kills her abusive husband. The song was inspired by my father. I think this is why the arts are so important to our society: they can be an outlet, a positive way to express all kinds of ideas, including subconscious thoughts that can poison someone if they aren’t addressed, ideas that we may not even be aware of and which are too fragile to be caught in a web of words can find expression in art. Music and art allow people to communicate the ineffable.

Rumpus: Despite the harrowing scenes of abuse that take place between your parents, you speak about your father with a kind of tenderness. You also openly discuss your conflicted feelings watching your mother’s abuse (“My mother’s inability to act – even to defend her own life – sent my anger rising to the surface”). Then, the sentiments echo in scenes like the altercations with your boyfriend Nickey. What was it like to confront – and connect – your memories of these experiences?

Bag: Writing the book forced me to face unresolved conflicts, like the feeling that my parents were trapped in a terrible relationship that they had created but which they had no idea how to repair. It wasn’t just my father who created the relationship; my mother chose to stay. I felt a lot of guilt about my anger toward her but I honestly feel that there was an alternative for my mom and she refused it. She used to tell me that she stayed with my father for my sake which made me feel that I was somehow to blame for her situation. So although I held my father ultimately responsible and I was angry with my father’s reprehensible and inexcusable behavior, I was also angry with my mother’s inability to escape.

This reminds me of the classic song “My Man”: I first heard the song being sung by Sarita Montiel. In Spanish, it sounded like a passionate love song about loving your man through thick and thin. A few years later I heard Barbara Streisand sing it and I started to think that it was a little depressing. Then I saw Marcus Kuiland Nazario perform it. He walked out onstage on crutches, his body covered with bandages, sporting cuts and colorful bruises and it finally dawned on me that the song I loved and had found so passionate was really sick!

Seeing the ways in which I was similar to my father was also a source of pain for me, but that’s the kind of pain that is helpful. At least when the problem is mine, I can deal with it. When I see my flaws, I know what I have to change. I do have a say over who I become, so seeing an ugly side of me is painful but it’s an opportunity to improve. Over the years, ugliness has moved in and out of my personality but I keep a look out for it and never let it get a foothold. I don’t want to accidentally end up looking back on my life to find that I’m ashamed of myself, I want to live a life I can be proud of.

Rumpus: It seems you did a lot of your commentary about growing is written through the lens of your female friendships, first with the girls at school, then later with Shannon and the other women of the community around you. You have also collaborated with women in many projects and capacities. How important has this been? How do friendships and relationships with women inform you now?

Bag: My relationships with women are very important to me. When I was growing up, it seemed to me like my mother isolated herself. I think that isolation creates a hospitable environment for abuse. If my mother had had strong female friends to support her she may have been able to find her own strength to fight back or escape her situation. I think I’ve always intuited the importance of surrounding myself with women I admire who can inspire me and I also try to be there for women who need my strength, especially now that I’m older. I feel like a very powerful crone.

Rumpus: What is next for your work, both musically and for the book?

Bag: I’m always writing songs but I don’t have a regular band to play with in Arizona. If I did, I would love to record some new music, maybe some old songs too. My plan right now is to explore the possibilities for Violence Girl. I’d like to see it on the big screen, and I’d also love to see it in a graphic novel format which is how I originally imagined it.

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I looked at it in disgust. “No,” I said. “I want a real dollar bill.”

This is the same grandfather who was a member of the Communist Party for most of his life, who believed that the bounty created by human industry should be divided based not on lineage or talent or temperament, but on need. I can’t imagine how sad that moment must have been for him. To stare into the face of so much childish want. It must have been like staring into the entire futile history of his life.

​***

Here’s another image that’s been haunting me recently:

The funny this is, this photo wasn’t even supposed to exist. It was just one of those things that happens when you’re young and full of beans, when you’ve raised $37 million of other people’s money, and when you plan to use that money to make even more money because, well, money is the whole point. It’s how you decide what matters. It’s the language you speak: value, security, worth.

​And so there you are posing with the rest of the guys at your new company, and after they finish the official portrait for the official Bain Capital brochure, where everyone has to stand around looking responsible, looking like guys who can be trusted with surplus assets, someone (not you, one of the other guys) suggests that the photographer take some more informal shots.

​There are seven of you, clean young executives with dark eyes and white grins, trying to figure how to let your hair down, how to show the world the souls beneath your suits. When the twenties come out, you go with it. Some of the other guys get a little overzealous. They line their collars and pockets. They take the bills into their mouths and grin rakishly. Why the hell not? It’s not against the law. This is 1984. Reagan’s in the White House. The Dow looks poised for a bull run. Gordon Gekko doesn’t even exist yet.

​***

A week ago, Joe Biden told a crowd in Youngstown, Ohio that Mitt Romney didn’t understand them. “My mother and my father believed that if my brother or sister wanted to be a millionaire, they could be a millionaire. My mother and father dreamed as much as any rich guy dreams. They don’t get us,” he bellowed. “They don’t get who we are.”

Biden was hailed for delivering such a rousing populist speech. But look at what he was saying: that the American dream resides in having a child who might someday be a millionaire.

Isn’t that exactly what Mitt Romney is saying? Isn’t that the underlying premise of a photo in which adult men eat money?

​***

Back in 1984, companies like Bain Capital were known as Leveraged Buy Out firms. Here, in brief, is how they made money. They got other people to give them money, which they used to buy “undervalued” companies. They made these companies more valuable by cutting costs. These efficiency measures included firing American workers and hiring cheaper foreign labor, and cutting worker benefits. They also used the companies as collateral to borrow money and issue a special dividend to repay their investors. Bain then sold the company at a profit. Whether or not these businesses survived (some did, some did not) the Bain guys made a profit. And because these millions were classified as “capital gains” they were taxed at fifteen percent.

In the words of one known Communist[1], Bain Capital was “a small group of rich people manipulating the lives of thousands of people and taking all the money.”

​***

A simpler way of putting this would be to say that Romney was very good at capitalism, which, in its purest form acts like a centrifuge, concentrating wealth at the top of the economic test tube.

​***

The reason Bain Capital is now called a Private Equity firm, by the way, is because the term “Leveraged Buy Out” got a bad rep. It was associated with swindlers such as the junk bond dealer Michael Milken, who raised money for Bain and other LBO firms. Also, back in the recession of the early nineties, a whole bunch of leveraged firms went bankrupt. A couple of books came out exposing the inner workings of the LBO world. It was a branding problem. So they changed the name.

Private equity. Much classier.

​***

In a rare burst of cogency, President Obama had this to say about his opponent’s experiences at Bain: “The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Gov. Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He is not touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying he is a business guy, and this is his business.

“When you are president as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off and how are we paying for their retraining.

“If your main argument for how to grow in the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about.”

​***

Let me now, via the magic of the Internet, kiss Barrack Obama on the mouth.

​***

But look: greed has always existed. The desire to have more than your neighbor. We’re needy and rapacious creatures. Ask the rest of the species. Before humans hoarded bills and coins, we hoarded pelts and beads and wives and land. The Old Testament is, among other things, a long and rambling poem about the virtues of wealth: birthright, military might, desirable real estate. To quote the prophet Sting: get your harlots for nothing and your slaves for free.

My own sweet daughter, who is five years old, has collected money obsessively since she was three. She understands what it represents: autonomy, status, power. There’s a dark magic in abundance. We have only to gaze into our loyal screens, where the worship of wealth has replaced religion as a path to redemption.

In this sense, Mitt Romney has offered us a consistent and admirably candid vision of his worldview. Corporations are people. Worth should be defined in material terms and coveted. Efficiently managed greed is the essential engine of our republic.

​***

Still, I keep thinking about that damn photo.

I keep wondering: How would people react to that image if the people in it were young African-Americans in saggy pants and chunky gold jewelry? What assumptions would we make about their values? About the means by which they acquired their prosperity? Or if the figures looked like Paulie Walnuts, with slicked back hair and pinkie rings and tracksuits?

Capitalism wears many uniforms. But it’s designed to select for psychopathic behaviors. You don’t get ahead by doing the right thing, by being kind.

Asking Mitt Romney to help poor people is like asking a hammer to help a nail.

​***

There are times, usually late at night, when my mind replays that moment with my grandfather. I keep telling him I don’t want his lousy fake dollar bill. I want real money. What am I trying to tell him, really?

A few years later, my twin brother Mike and I accompanied our grandpa to the airport. We were supposed to be saying goodbye because he was going back to the Bronx and we wouldn’t see him for a long time. But all we cared about was checking the little change compartments at the bottom of the pay phones for coins. We ran around the airport in a kind of frenzy.

​It must have broken his heart that we spent our final moments with him dashing around after money, that his love wasn’t enough. But he was our grandpa. After a few minutes, he called us over and suggested that we check the two pay phones closest to him. He had left in each of them a single shining dime.

​We knew he’d put them in there for us, but we never said thank you, because we had to pretend it was just luck.

​We were children. The world was about us, our foolish wants. We knew almost nothing about our grandpa back then. I still know very little, because his life was really two lives: the safe, public version in which he worked for an insurance company and fought his way into the middle class and supported a motley cast of relatives. And the secret life, as a member of The Party who wrote articles under a pseudonym and watched his wife surrender her job as a elementary school principal in Harlem to avoid naming names, who dreamed of a workers’ paradise.

​Years later, in the months before cancer took him under, I visited him in his small co-op apartment in the Bronx. I could see that he was in tremendous physical pain and so I sat across from him in the dusk and tried to think of how I might apologize, whether it was too late.

Somehow, for us, for humans, love is never enough.

​***

Honestly, you think you’re eating the money.
But it’s the other way. The money’s eating you.

______________________________________________________________
1 Newt Gingrich

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In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes with something more fluid, more abstract, at a different level of reading. These “word-spirits,” delineated by tildes, congeal into an amorphous work; a floating world of art and poetry. Many readers will enjoy floating along, reveling in the unique ability of poetry to generate experiences and emotions beyond the logic of language. But I look for something solid to start from, a center of gravity that helps me organize my own thoughts and reactions, even if I eventually to decide to drift.

In “Harma Hissarlik,” Yang writes, “each form/ following its intention,/ each carving/ a hidden glory.” From that image I saw the work as a sculpture garden. You can wander through the “word-spirits,” focusing on what catches your eye, skimming over what doesn’t, enjoying the accumulated atmosphere of artistic experience and expression. In “Lyric Suite,” Yang writes, “…I walked with her/ thru the lattice streets of the island/ feeling lost but safe/ …streets where people/ read and cooked, played/ chess, elders watched children,/ commerce spilled into/ conversation, her neighborhood at the city’s/ brink.” From this, I imagined being lead around a village by an elder who shared the old names and old words, telling the histories and stories that defined the village.

Ultimately, Vanishing-Line is more focused and more coherent than a sculpture garden or a village tour. In “Elegy for Ling,” he shows us, “old men sorting thru rubble, brick by brick/ rebuilding the ancient walls/ while the ring roads expand/ while machinery explodes/ the celebrity architects multiply/ ignorant of the original design.” Vanishing-Line is a work of archeology. Yang examines places, people, and cultures in time, exploring their context, their causes and effects, their implications and consequences. He displays ancient words like Clovis points; “Izdubar,” “Zagros,” “(Manittuwond then Plum/ stone, Pluym or Pruym plume Patmos)” “qayaq.” He discovers quotes like potsherds, finding value and context in lines by great poets, historical records, and direct descriptions like those of the explorer Gertrude Bell. Finally, language itself is like a geological record. A culture describes itself through the words it uses and the words it doesn’t; “Lying and deceit are unknown among them because they cannot say it.”

This act of archeology culminates in “Yennecott,” a sprawling, ambitious, brilliant exploration of the discovery, colonizing and exploitation of North America by Europeans. Yang is trying to preserve not just the events of history, but the process of those events, discovering the emotions and ideas of today in the words and stones of the past; “From the ancient base of Piraeus passage/ wharves crowded with trade, sea wine-dark// West to the ‘final stop’ of Olson’s Pacific, Ahab/ ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’// Up to the moonlandings, rockets opening prospective,/ space, secret silo sites below, disgrace, Guantánamo, Bajram.”

But we already have archeology. We have museums and history books. Why apply poetry to a problem which appears solved. In “Yennecott,” Yang writes, “Bierstadt’s stereoscopic expedition/…His Rocky Mountain Lander’s Peak/ the ‘consumable landscape,’/ …Shoshone ideal, 1864/ staged tableau painting, among one/ hundred artifacts…/…today, in the museum gallery,/ mountain grass lake bathed/ in saintly sunset, figures/ of romance concealing/ a history of devastation.” (p111) For all its aspirations of fact, history is a form of storytelling, once used to romanticize as often (or perhaps more often) as it is used to reveal. Poetry has always been one of our primary romanticizers, making it uniquely able to strip conquering historians of their romantic veneer.

Yang’s poetics of archeology continue in the “Bibliographic Note and Acknowledgments,” which is more a manifesto than the usual boilerplate citation of sources and thanking of family. Yang argues for poetry as a technique and expression of history; a compartmentalizing of human events, as all works of history are, that does not sever the inherent connections of event to event, culture to culture, person to person. Though Yang doesn’t go so far as to argue traditional history is inherently inaccurate, Vanishing-Line is an attempt to fill in what is excluded by the rigors of fact and the structures of prose. In history as we understand it, “There was a before and after/ the during consumed.” All past was once “now” and poetry speaks to “now.” To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

Different readers will have different experiences with Vanishing-Line. It can be devoured in one sitting. It can be picked at over time. Many will enjoy it as a sculpture garden or a village tour. Others will enjoy an even more transient interaction with it, drifting from “word-spirit” to “word-spirit,” content to soak up the artful arrangement of words on the page. But because so much of our poetry today seems to be focused on those isolated moments of emotion, I would urge readers to work with the harder more sustained themes in -Line. Yang is making a statement, something solid that can describe the world, and perhaps even change how we understand and interact with it. Though many readers and poets prefer to drift, to Yang, a poem is to dig.

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Edited by Susan Clements.

***

I sat on a bench in the drunk tank of the Bannock County jail in Pocatello, Idaho—also known as Poca-fellow—wearing True Religion jeans, a tight-fitting t-shirt, and hot pink American Apparel skivvies. A man hollered from a jail cell at the desk clerk—anyone—for some Jack In The Box; drunk-food. There wasn’t so much as a shut-up: his carrying-on seized deaf ears.

Fox News blared on a television.

A woman lay sprawled out on the floor lifeless, she probably wouldn’t remember where she had spent the night, tomorrow. Her hair was a ratted mess and I worried about other detainees stepping on her split-ends, not purposefully, but because the crop of her hair was occupying so much floor space.

I had been in a vodka haze, but as soon as the deputy fastened the cuffs around my wrists, and they went click-click-click against my bony nubs, I knew I’d fucked up. The officer was a man I’d run next to on the treadmill at the gym, a cartoonish looking man similar in size and definition to Captain America, a man I’d served beers and wings to at Winger’s, a local restaurant where in animus I waited tables.

On the way to the jail he said that he hated seeing the good ones get caught. I was one of the good ones. I told him that I knew better. I caught his eyes in the rearview and he nodded in my direction like he suddenly remembered me—the bald guy from Winger’s—from where I had remembered him, and in his eyes I could see that he felt bad, but only a little.

I cried into the telephone, my one phone call, and begged a friend to come and get me, “They have my shoes—my shoes! I have been walking around a jail cell in black tube socks and skinny jeans.” He told me to relax, he’d be there in five minutes. In those five minutes I was booked. A female deputy with an obvious affinity for Aquanet-Extra-Super-Hold asked me for my in-case-of-emergency and whether or not I preferred male or female partners?! Her stiff blonde bangs hung above her eyebrows and beneath the thicket was some semblance of a forehead. She directed me to a gray wall and there she took my picture; the only evidence the world had that I wasn’t one of the good ones.

– K. Tyler Christensen

 * * *

I was frightened. There were three men following me along the sidewalk. They had just been looking at a pickup truck with the front end smashed in, advertised for sale. When I walked by they peeled away and walked behind me. Even in daylight there’s something ominous about footsteps behind you, the nuisance of feeling that you are setting a pace. I would have liked to let them go ahead, but I didn’t want to slow down or turn, so I walked to the next stoplight without pausing. As a woman walking alone I won’t take risks. It becomes a game almost. Which block to turn down for a different route home. It’s good to be reminded of these things.

There’s one street I won’t take anymore. It’s a short steep hill behind the elementary school. I thought someone had dropped a shirt in the road, but actually they tossed it over the body of a cat, just one paw sticking out. For the next few days I rode my bike up the hill with a certainty that the carcass had not been abandoned. The night I rode past and saw curled dark organs reflecting the streetlight, the spring air suddenly smelled of decay. I dreamed about dead bodies in dark rooms, and eating something rotten with a fork.

I mostly feel safe walking at night in the city. It used to be that I went everywhere that way. One night I was leaving a date that I couldn’t stand any more. A whole bottle of red at dinner, and he wanted to try the absinthe—that’s what I was walking off. I came under the bridge of the freeway as it crosses a lake and saw a man on the other side of the road. He stood out in the dark because he was entirely naked. I don’t know whether he got off on the exhibitionism or the way my hips swung as I walked faster towards home. In the same week I saw him again, on another street that is generally busy. You’d think I looked closer the second time, but I was angry. I didn’t want to encourage him. When I took my boots to the cobbler to be re-soled, he told me never to bring them in that condition again—the heels had worn down past the foundation, making sharp angles.

– Amelia Apfel

 * * *

“A soul” is what they tell their children, when asked to explain how the bad get to do what they want with the good and eat all candy and stay up late.

“. . .is like a deep well, or a second heart” that belongs to someone else, who wretches at the talons of young love in the jagged hours on the couch and decides to flee even as the last of the cinders smolder to a hiss. What to squeeze for admissions.

“Smudges obscure the surface,” as a patina of broken words, forsaken tenderness, betrayed intentions not unlike expecting the painting of a baby dressed in oil and feathers to take flight. Obscure the surface, not unlike the harbor town that never fades from storm to storm until at once the lighthouse quietly goes down during the shipment of the harvest bounty, and cannot be roused. Someone elusive holds the switch. The leak in this particular pail is lovingly sprung on one side so that one takes notice on the path to the final river, a row of posies is left.

“At the end of the day, your measure of clarity is taken. The soul that reveals her true color is allowed to pass the gates into eternal bliss.”

So the children are sent roaming, toothed with strips of paper for every remark, tasked with digging out the wick, promised or threatened with signet blessings so that the over- turned hand delivers each decree. They are sent digging for bones with rope, their palms after so much drawing from the deep waters eventually etched with telling lines, all the while a thirst goes unquenched and yet each one must secret a legend in their jacket pocket, a code of colors, depth chart, a test for the necessary parts per million fire to brimstone—terminating with a faint scent of how good good was supposed to be, ideally.

– Jeffrey Bennett

* * *

The potter turns the urn with his rough hands carefully examining every inch. Its unglazed surface is the color of freshly cut wheat. Its shape is simple, almost plain, slightly bulbous with two small opposing handles and a lid that locks with a twist. He tilts the urn to examine the interior. Unlike the common exterior, he has glazed the interior of the vessel with vales of numinous blacks. The glazes create a depth and a presence that rival the night sky. If he peers at its darkness for too long, he fears losing himself within it.

His glazes have always charmed the Gods. He has grown fat giving them the warm yellows of a summer day, the cool blues of mountain lakes, and whites that remind them of spring clouds. He has never created for them anything like this. But, Zeus requested it. And no one refuses Zeus.

He gently places the vessel on the workbench. As he gathers wood to build a crate for transport, he glances once more at the vessel. Filled with a sense of dread, he again strains to find a flaw sufficient to delay delivery.

This strange vessel has captured the interest of the workshops. Rumor and speculation abound. Most believe Zeus will give the urn to one of the daughters of Deucalion. They say her name is Pandora.

– Mark Starling

 * * *

I hesitate typing the word f*ck. See. I have to put an asterisk where the ‘u’ should be so that I won’t offend you. But I really like the word f*ck. Actually, it’s one of my favorite words and I use whenever I can which is usually when I shouldn’t on account that I have small children. I grew up believing that f*ck was a terrible, no good, bad word. Saying f*ck would get you grounded at the very least and depending on how much vitriol was behind it, you might get whipped. But today is a different time where you are never but two clicks away from much more shocking things to see and read and yet I cannot stop censoring myself with that f*cking asterisk.

Two mornings ago my toddler daughter came to wake me up an hour earlier than usual. That same night my infant son woke up more times than usual and the combination of those events prompted and warranted a groggy, drawn-out “f****ck” from me. It was the first time she repeated it and I think I fell in love with the word even more. The sound of the word f*ck coming from a three-year old is, quite frankly, hilarious. It’s like a cat wearing a tiny suit. It doesn’t fit, it’s unnatural, inappropriate and so, so wrong and yet still, you smile. Then I was a little sad because I realized that it was time to retire f*ck from my vocabulary. How do you properly memorialize f*ck? Should I give it its due one last time and finally type it boldly, correctly, with all the letters displayed intact? Or should I pretend that it never existed and replace it coldly with a limp and substandard, yet kid-friendly, “fudge”? Should I hoard it and use it only for special occasions like my best perfume thus bestowing upon it an air of utter satisfaction? I’m tempted to just proclaim that now I’m a “progressive” parent and by using the word nonchalantly I will remove its connotation as “bad” and therefore my children will not be tempted to use it at all. Nah. I think I’ll keep every opportunity to say another favorite phrase of mine which was what my parents used to say to me: “You’re in deep trouble young lady.” To which I hope she doesn’t hesitate to say, “Ah fuck.”

– Shannon Lell

* * *

The paramedic stares into her vacant eyes. She’s only nineteen, the remnants of beauty still apparent behind her drawn face and pale complexion, underneath a black hole of make-up. Her mother is screaming in the background about how she watched that Intervention show and is so scared for her daughter and doesn’t want her to die. The mother looks burlap, like she’s had it rough during the years long barbeque of her life. Another girl, her sister, lingers behind everyone. She radiates fresh and innocent, wearing a green college hoodie and seemingly not jaded by life. Yet. The paramedic sighs and in a businesslike, unhurried manner he starts an IV. His partner is applying oxygen and assisting respirations for the young girl. Narcan is sucked out a vial and applied intravenously. Stand back, the paramedic calls out. They wake up quick. The cops put gloves on in anticipation.

Waking up with a startle as the paramedics hover over you with the cops hovering behind them ready for action. They say you weren’t breathing, clinically dead, and ask where you stash the heroin. Your mother appears rather grim. Your grogginess, the haze of black tar heaven you were floating in is abruptly shattered by medication the paramedics slammed into your sallow veins. You are alert and pissed at the disappearance of your high. No heroin, you defensively reply. A few people chuckle. You notice the hypodermic syringe still taped to your left forearm, tingling your skin like a soft wind. Tourniquets, lighters, spoons. The scattered “paraphernalia.” What a dirty word.

You stumble into the ambulance, horse-collared by the paramedic. He tries to lecture you during the ride to the hospital, but his words are meaningless. He says you will be dead in a few years if you keep this up. He says look in the mirror, see what drugs have done to you. Look at old photographs. Look at your sister who seems to have her shit together. Whatever. You are the bad seed, but he doesn’t get it. No, no one understands what you were forced to do to provide for your family, the abuses you suffered at such a young age. An alternate reality is the only chance at a normal life, to protect you from this leeching existence—you haven’t given up hope, you’ve found transcendence.

No one will take that away from you.

– Joe Amaral

* * *

The third time Adam got arrested, Lila was watching. She was on her porch roof when the cop car pulled up out front. “The lights weren’t on, but I recognized the sound, the way engine is different. Like it revs higher.”

She said there was yelling, something about bringing shame on the family. As if Adam’s dad hadn’t done his fair share of hauling disgrace into that house. Hell, he had a matching 12-piece set of shame luggage. Lila saw his dad standing in the doorway, while under the glare of the street lamp, two officers put Adam in the squad car.

“Did they put the siren on?” I asked, up on the porch the next day. There was a short breeze rustling the weeping willow above me.

“No, they just drove down the street. They turned left.” Lila passed two Diet Cokes through her bedroom window and crawled out next to me.

I looked through the skinny branches at the house across the way, trying to visualize Adam in handcuffs. But all I could picture was him as the Tin Man in the fourth grade play, clad in slippery Reynolds Wrap, sliding across the back seat of the squad car. “So, what do we do? Should we go ask his mother what’s going on?”

“I’m not going over there,” she replied. “You?”

“No,” I said as I popped the soda can open, listening to the hiss of gas escaping into atmosphere. “What do you think he did?”

“Stealing, probably. Maybe selling.”

Long tendrils from the willow piled in the gutter just below our feet. Lila’s dad kept saying he was going to cut it back, that it was blocking the rain from draining. Fortunately, Lila’s dad rarely did what he said. I reached up and started plucking leaves off a branch.

“I guess we just wait. He’ll probably be home today.”

“The only thing,” Lila started, then trailed off.

“What?” I asked.

“The only thing is they came and got him at night. That’s got to be bad, right? I mean, to take him away in the dark, that seems bad.”

“Everything seems bad in the dark. Everything.”

– Sue Gelber

* * *

I sat in the cushioned seat of the car, barreling down an interstate stretched through wilderness virtually untouched by human endeavor, propelled between the places I’ve known and loved by fate, not design.

“Fuck,” I was thinking, over and over. My eyes past drained, grief large in me. This is the whimper of the world’s end: the coexistence of multiple unmooring’s, fleshed out and served up resplendent. The day before, and a thousand days before that, I had been confident in my plan, knew where I was going, what I wanted. I took great pains to reinforce that future vision, worked hard at it. Had disciplines in place that most people thought were completely absurd. I awoke every day across years at four in the morning just to make sure every day supported and furthered the path I was following.

Now, though, I was just a lost man blasting down the straight tube of a highway going from nothing to nothing. All rugs pulled away within moments of each other, as if the universe conspired to make it so. There is also this: the breadth of illusion is infinite.  Our blind spots are so ravenous they devour us whole, leave hollow people where we once put on flesh and mounted the world.

“If there was ever a time when you should talk to someone,” she would tell me, days later, “now is that time.” She would know I didn’t want to hear that particular suggestion, didn’t want to talk to anyone at all. She would then add, “but I know that’s not what you want right now.” Because what I would want more than anything, what I want more than anything is to drown in it so that I can somehow retain a vestige of the person I was before.

Finally, there is this: every single thing we know and love, every desire we have and embarrassment we carry with us, they are all fleeting. Even these words are disappearing from the screen as you read them. Particles falling apart the moment they form, endlessly. And I don’t know whether I am at perigee or apogee now, don’t know how long I will hold it together, with the weight of this. Now, just to get home. To be home at last. Then, regroup tomorrow.

– Mitch Major

 * * *

The movers tell us they won’t take the computers. Or the cleaning supplies. Or the office documents. Take your important shit. Move it with that truck, they suggest. There’s a transmission leak in said shitty truck. We should sell it before we leave, I say. It’s fine, the gentleman says, it’ll get to Seattle. Six miles shy of the Continental Divide the shitty truck stops climbing. We pull to the side. Tap on the dashboard. Glare at one another. We are less than nowhere.

I open the door. Flames. I close the door. My heart seems to be choking me. Fire, I whisper. What? Get the fuck out, I yell, this time, quite clearly.

And we do. With alacrity. I don’t even grab my purse. We run to an outcropping of rock ahead and start dialing. No bars, no reception. There’s a moment where our arms simply drop and we begin to watch. I visualize walking to the truck, opening the door, and grabbing my purse. I visualize the truck exploding, vaporizing me into tree food. I don’t move.

The flames breach the firewall and light up the cabin. The fire creeps into to the back and finds the cleaning supplies. Our eyes burn. The gas tank ignites with a deflating hiss. We flinch as the tires blow, one by one, echoing in the ravine, rubbery firecrackers.

Up go the tax records and the passports. The laptops and my locket. Up goes the Drano and the rubbing alcohol and the bleach. Our jeans and our toothbrushes. It’s only stuff, the gentleman says, all replaceable. But I have nothing, I sob. No ID, no passport, no birth certificate, no money. I no longer exist.

Cars finally stop. Another half hour passes before the firemen arrive. The water freezes over the roadway and stops traffic. Worst they’ve ever seen, they say. I bet you say that to all the car fires, I say.

A tow man loads the hulking, steaming, hissing, smoking skeleton of shitty truck and tells us to come by tomorrow. We beg to be taken into town. We cram in with him, reeking of chemical fire. Tow man slows enough for us to tumble out at the gas station/motel.

The gentleman buys me a pack of cigarettes for my nerves. The cashier smiles and says, would you like a carwash with that?

– Camille Griep

My lizard brain: I do what it wants. I can’t believe I’ve gotten away with it for this long. My lizard brain wants to have sex. It wants to eat. It wants adventure interspersed with naps. For decades I even got paid for that: adventure, nap, adventure, nap. I took the naps at my desk and worked into the night.

My lizard brain wanted her. She and her friend were roller skating and trying to teach me. During “couples skate” they thought it would be fun to pull me around between them, making a threesome of sorts, shocking the normals. The minute we got well under way my lizard brain gave a sharp yank and pulled her down on top of me. Ssssssssss!

She figured me out quickly. She went directly to the lizard brain and made a pact. The fussy careful control module was in denial for six awkward months: too young, smart, athletic, tall. Too hot, was what it meant. My lizard brain had no doubt: Sssssssssss!

Now we’re in deep trouble, together, and I’ve never been happier. The lizard brain scored again!

Americans as a cultural group: our lizard brains seem to want to sit on the sofa, watch TV, and eat greasy salty food. We’ll vote for—that is, we’ll stay home and do nothing to fight the megalomaniacal deceitful resource-squandering tyranny of—anyone who looks like they will not interfere with the pleasures our lizard brains have become addicted to.

Now we’re in deep trouble, all together.

I can’t believe we’ve gotten away with it for this long.

And I can’t even be self righteous because I do exactly the same thing. I so rarely exercise self-control. Is it too late for us all to try something different?

Engrave it in adamantine: as a species, we hit a dead end, drowned in our own waste, and this was how and why.

– Julianne Chatelain

* * *

I was riding my bicycle up the parking garage ramps when I spotted the young homeless guy sleeping on the third level sidewalk. I was pissed. Pissed that some asshole had the temerity to invade “my” personal refuge. For months I’d been riding across town late at night, and grinding my bike up the four tiers to spend uncountable hours riding loops on the split upper decks which were open to the clear desert sky. I didn’t ride here because I wanted to. I did it out of necessity. I was depressed, angry, and wrestling with mental demons the likes of which I’d never imagined possible. The garage was my therapy, and had I not spent time every night burning excess hatred and energy by mindlessly looping—riding hard down the ramp across the lower portion, then coasting up the opposite ramp and across the upper slab of concrete—I’d have never slept, nor been able to engross myself in the miasma that was my daily life. Instead of continuing to the top, I descended, cussing and escalating my ever present anger. Pickling up a large, oval, softball-sized river rock from the front landscaping, I remounted and ascended my ramps. Gliding across the third slab I picked up speed and wrath, hurtling towards the interloper. I was about twenty feet away when he slowly raised his head to look at me. There was a shared moment in which we were both cognizant of what was transpiring. His eyes widened with fear or awareness, and for a quick second I realized he and I were quite similar. This only served to increase my rage, and I launched the rock. It skipped off the smooth concrete with a loud “clack”, smashing into my target’s face with such incredible force I could hear and feel the bones crushing and connective tissue violently torn asunder. The rock bounced and spun on the sidewalk while I sprinted by bike to the top of the structure. My heart was racing as wildly as my mind, but I rode my circuit as usual, before checking on my victim, who was sprawled, prone and still, in a pool of blood. I fled home, overcome by the emotion of taking a life. Racked with fear, but not contrition, I later rode back to the scene. He was gone, and by his absence, alive; only a black congealed puddle remained, the inescapable reminder of my transgression.

– Chris Mautner

***

Rumpus original art by Christina Weidman.

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It’s fair to say as well that unless your politics fall within a certain spectrum accepted by the majority, audiences are also not going to want to see it in a movie. Usually, only when a delicate subject has evolved into a moot point does Hollywood venture to summarize the crisis with melodramatic performances and life lessons. Exploring a hot-button issue while it is contemporary is a no-no and criticizing America is generally the nightshade in what constitutes “box office poison.” Going further, if you intend to take a stand against American hypocrisy and frame your frightening dystopian hypothesis within a pseudo-documentary format, you’ll really be pushing it— in the case of Punishment Park, you’ve pushed your release date thirty years, which was how long the film was banned in America.

Made in 1970, the film is very guilty of being of its time. We’re talking Weather Underground, Black Panthers, COINTELPRO, Vietnam, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Kent State shootings, the hyper-politicization of America’s youth and minorities, and the great divide that stretched between those who thought America was the best of all possible worlds and those openly advocating social revolution. There were no two ways of seeing— there was one or the other, and the other was immoral. Were kids who forcibly shut down a draft board office heroes or traitors? In such hotheaded circumstances, objectivity was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Punishment Park takes an authentic piece of legislation— the 1950’s McCarran Internal Security Act, which authorizes detention for disloyal or subversive persons in times of war or internal security emergency— and examines the theoretical consequences should this law be enforced. As the narrator of the film explains in the opening shot of an American flag flapping in the desert:

The President…is authorized without further approval of Congress to determine an event of insurrection within the United States and to declare the existence of an internal security emergency. The President is then authorized to apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe probably will engage in certain future acts of sabotage. Persons apprehended shall be given a hearing without right of bail, without the necessity of evidence and then shall be confined to places of detention.

This narrator is a member of a West German/ British “documentary” team covering the trial of accused subversives as well as the punishment of another group. Over the course of three days, defendants are brought before a citizens’ tribunal where they attempt to justify the morality of their actions (there being no tangible evidence they are a genuine, violent threat, their charges are based on words, ideas, abstracts) and are even offered in some instances to recant their beliefs by signing loyalty oaths to the government.

Scenes from this trial are intercut with coverage of a group of prisoners struggling through ‘Punishment Park,’ an area in the California desert, where prisoners can win their freedom if they “capture the flag.” The flag they are to reach is 53 miles from their starting point. If that weren’t challenging enough, the detainees are sent into the desert with no food or water in stifling meteorological conditions, all the while being pursued by police and National Guard troops, hunted if you will. The park serves a two-fold purpose: it becomes a training exercise for troops as well as a “punitive” trial for “subversives.” Moreover, if some dissidents are killed in pursuit, their deaths save the taxpayers money and keep prisons a little less crowded. If convicted, they are “criminals” and thus their worth as human beings has become negligible.

The accused standing trial are a motley bunch: white and black, male and female, hairy, bearded, bell-bottomed, yet bespectacled and somber, suggesting intellectual habits. The defendants are not garden-variety hippies or armchair revolutionaries. Leroy Brown is an author, broadcaster, and political activist. Jay Kaufman is co-founder of the Committee Against War and Repression. James Arthur Kohler is a conscientious objector. These people are organizers, pamphleteers, and pacifists. It is they who provide the intellectual arguments of protest. Prosecution makes perfect sense in this context. Cutting off the head is pure Machiavelli.

On the other hand, the tribune is entirely white with but a single woman affecting the demographic singularity. None of them is an elected official. They are amateurs working in a jurisprudential capacity wielding indiscreet judgments on lifestyle choices eminently unfamiliar to their own, in effect running a kangaroo court or star chamber in which the game is fixed before it’s even started. It is true that they are generally older, though it’s not necessarily a generational gap thing— whether Frank Sinatra is more of a man than Jimi Hendrix, say– but rather has everything to do with preferred paradigms. After all, the soldiers and police who enforce the decisions of the establishment are the dissidents’ contemporaries and are very much of the opinion that the “criminals… get what they deserve.”

In the deliberations between the court and the accused, everyone’s talking, no one’s listening. The exchange veers dangerously between philosophy and churlishness. More than an authentic trial, the back-and-forth reminds one of bitter family spats, summed up perfectly when one tribunal member complains the kids could have used “less Spock and more spank,” a hit against the baby boomers’ parenting guru Benjamin Spock (who, incidentally, was a major figure in the anti-war movement and was arrested for attending numerous demonstrations). Because of their emotions they cannot rise to their responsibilities nor realize how hypocritical it is that they should imprison those who deny America’s claim to being a “free” country.

You could argue this is the filmmakers’ polemic. Or you might say Main Street is being defensive. Whatever the case, their inane remarks become fodder for the accused to define their dissent in very strong, if not poetic language. Leroy Brown, the black author, comments, “America is as psychotic as it is powerful and violence is the only thing that can command your goddamn attention.” Allison Michener, an activist, elaborates on this during her session, arguing, “People become violent when they are deprived of their basic human needs.”

In the field, the prisoners running for their freedom are tailed by the documentary cameramen who query them on their condition, disposition, attitude. A young man in a ragged shirt, dirty, bruised, asks, “If they kill me now what difference does my politics or any politics make? I’ll be dead.” Another prisoner on the run clarifies, “My view is not committed to revolution…it’s committed to sanity.” Was this sentiment not famously reconstituted by comedian Stephen Colbert when he suggested, “Reality has a liberal bias?” It is one of the field’s pacifists that puts the plight of the accused in the most accurate moral context when he says, “Right now, the honorable thing to do is to be a criminal.” It is a fair extrapolation: if the government’s laws are unjust and it cannot justify its wars or violation of civil liberties, then individuals who break those laws, whether it is draft evasion or persuasive agitprop, provide a moral counterpoint.

When the dissidents are running for their lives in Punishment Park, the narrative of survival becomes a treatment on the various approaches to protest. The prisoners quickly disperse into factions choosing very unique survival techniques: basically they can meet the system with violence or nonviolence. Thus philosophy materializes into a simulated environment with real life consequences. In very tense scenes in which police and National Guard troops apprehend the activists in various stages of flight, the answers prove disastrous. These are probably the very best moments of the film as they are rife with confusion, anger, desperation, and madness. The cameramen too, cannot remain neutral. They become hysterical at what they perceive to be injustice and spar with the police.

One speculates on the casting— these are non-professional actors working from an outline rather than a screenplay— were they chosen for their beliefs? The acting, if amateur, is good. It never feels put-on, even when the dialogue is occasionally outrageous (the character of Leroy Brown has two of the best lines in the film: “How the fuck are you gonna overrule the constitution, man?” and “You just want to sit on your fat dividend-drawn ass and draw dividends!”) Did the director play off the actors’ beliefs in order to maximize tension? (The Stanford Prison experiment was conducted around the same time.) There is an us-and-them feeling to the actors that is hard to fake. As far as pseudo-documentaries go, Punishment Park feels frighteningly historical.

In his closing statements, the defense attorney reads a quotation that best illustrates the inherent dangers the tribune is engaging with conviction and arbitrary sentencing. The speech seems straight out of Richard Nixon’s playbook: “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. The communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic is in danger. Yes, in danger, from within and without. We need law and order or our nation cannot survive.”

But it’s not Nixon speaking in 1970, it’s Adolf Hitler in 1932. Once a country begins cutting civil liberties in the name of national security, the consequences of compromise are far-reaching. As one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, so aptly put it, “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

What does it all mean now? Quite a bit, actually. The drama of Punishment Park is very much alive, more than forty years later. Guantanamo Bay remains open, an escalation of troops in Afghanistan is called a “surge,” and last autumn the police crackdown against Occupy protesters descended into brutality. A “terrorist” is still very much a catchall phrase for those who might try to fight the system, whether through violence or argument.

The director of Punishment Park, Peter Watkins, is an Englishman. A number of individuals were offended that a foreigner had the gall to dramatize our society in such critical terms. But someone’s got do it if we don’t. Dinner table manners be damned.

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(Toddlers live in a perpetual state of demanding something. This is partly because they just learned how to say what they want and partly because their language skills pretty much begin and end in the declarative. The experience of living with a teensy emperor passes eventually. I hear.)

Weeks pass. If this were the movies, tumbleweeds would roll across the abandoned page. It’s perfectly serviceable but no longer feels fresh or urgent and so it gets put aside in favor of other deadlier deadlines, or getting the laundry finished (for values of “finished” that include small children in the household) or trying to determine if your son can wait until the weekend for new boots or if you really need to go after work tonight and get them.

This is a thing that happens, by the way, one of the many things no one tells you – they just shoot up overnight. One day all your kid’s pants are a fine size, reaching all the way to his shoes, and then next day they’re all capris. You find yourself sort of squinting at them one morning, trying to determine how long they’ve been like that, really? No time at all. Don’t worry; they do this.

They do a lot of things. This morning, my son who is a shade over two woke up, announced “It’s not dark. It’s day.” and proceeded in short order to smack me in the nose with a book he wanted read to him, push several towels off the upstairs gallery railing down onto the dog sleeping on the sofa below (thereby waking her up and freaking her out), drop and break a wooden dolphin and then cut himself on the resulting sharp edge, make the alarm clock go off in the guest room and flush the toilet fourteen times. This is at 7:20am on a Sunday, you understand.

(Another thing they don’t really mention about having a kid – they have no respect for the lazy weekend morning for quite some time.)

In any event, when Sunday mornings start like this at our house, we activate what we refer to as the Emergency Pastry Protocol, which is that whichever parent is marginally more functional changes the kid into a dry diaper, puts socks and shoes and a jacket on him, tosses him in the car still otherwise in his PJs and heads halfway across the city to our very favorite bakery for morning things, the place of croissants that are still warm when they open at 8am and are put from an old wooden box into a fresh paper bag. The kid loves this place. They love him back, too, and always greet him by name, in his dinosaur pajamas and his winter coat, like a very honoured guest indeed.

So there we are, having come inside out of the rain at ten minutes after eight am, this very morning, with the small person set on Rambunctious and the big person (me) struggling to keep up. Monsieur Rambunctious issues further demands:

“I want to eat! I want to sit in a chair! I want to sit in a chair and eat my kah-sunt!”

I settle him in a chair, then I re-settle him elsewhere when he – channeling his inner Diva – insists that he requires a different chair. I put him in it, give him a piece of croissant to start with, and go to stand on line to pay. He remains seated for some unit of time too small to measure with common chronological instruments, and then gets up and starts to wander around. The bakery is tiny, and packed, and little man has his mouth crammed full of croissant as he cheerfully and completely ignores my quiet instructions to please sit back down, or come here, or holy crapping tadpoles please just please stop touching everything in the whole wide world one by one.

He’s clearly in his own world, his long curls all but covering one half of his face, munching contemplatively with a tin of sardines in his hand. I’m getting progressively more cross, because he’s not responding to my instructions at all, and that is one of my least favorite toddler behaviours. Out of the corner of my eye I see movement, a gesture that my parental sixth sense tells me is related to my son, so I turn to look.

There’s a guy over by the fix-your-coffee-how-you-like-it station. He has indicated the little dude to his partner, and is smiling at her. She reaches out and takes his hand, and smiles back at him and in this moment I realize that she is at least eight months pregnant, and that they are both looking at my kid with faces of delight and anticipation as he gets crumbs all over the floor and all down the front of his pajamas and wanders at his own glacial pace over to stand beside me and lean his sleep-tousled head on my hip. Still eating his croissant, still clutching a can of sardines.

Oh. Right. They don’t see what I see at all. They don’t see how he won’t sit still and isn’t listening and is covered in a mush of crumbs and smears of butter and raindrops. They see how he’s eating well and watching everything and is confidently taking jars of jam off the lowest shelves, inspecting them, and placing them back on the shelf with the less-buttery hand. When he reaches up to me with one of the jars and says “Papa! This is a boo-berry jam, Papa! Is it yummy?” the man gives the woman a look of such love and longing it kind of spears me through the heart a little bit. I remember that moment of perfect expectation, before the mess and sleeplessness set in.

There. That’s the first thing no one tells you about being a Dad (or the lesbian equivalent): you’re so fucking lucky you shouldn’t be able to stand yourself most of the time. That’s your kid. Your amazing kid who adores you, even when he’s kicking you in the ear or trying to stick his buttery fingers in your eye (and certainly smearing them all over your glasses), and the fact that he won’t sit down and refuses to listen is totally immaterial. They never sit down, and they hardly listen. They’re still magic. Try very hard to remember.

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Week 39, Day 5

So it’s the middle of the night and I hear screaming. It’s the baby, trapped in E’s watermelon belly, and she’s not happy. Ear pressed to this taut flesh-bubble, I can’t tell if the little squib’s yelping “let me out” or “who fucking stuck me in here?”

I wake up gnawing my own fist and stagger to the window, gasping for air in the muggy mosquito farm that is Austin in springtime…. “It’s just a dream,” E mumbles. “Right, right,” I say, rubbing my skin. But my relief is short-lived. Once my brain de-fogs, I instantly flash to our earlier OB/GYN visit, where once again, we bought our popcorn and plunked down in front of the ultrasound monitor.

This time, our camera-shy little girl decided to block the camera like Madonna dodging the paparazzi, covering her face with her elbow. Only according to the doctor, she wasn’t being coy – she was sucking her arm.

“She’s… what?”

“Sucking her arm. Lots of babies do it. It’s sort of like practice-suckling. Though I have to warn you, she might show up with a hickey.”

E raised her head on the table, dizzy from doctor-probing. “Wh-what? A hickey?”

“On her arm, obviously,” the doctor chuckled. “It may take a while to break her of the habit.”

Naturally, I bite my lip. If I don’t I’m going to blurt out my paranoid fantasy. “What the fuck, is she going to show up with a stump?”

I know, I know. I’m not proud. It’s just – how to explain? – there’s a particular species of paranoia particular to looming childbirth. And thanks to the wonders of our friend the internet – half party-sewer, half enlightenment-engine – it’s impossible not to feed it. Add to this the specifically bizarro circumstances of our current situation, waiting for the penny to drop – no, waiting for it to drop the rest of the way – advised by medical professionals to stay close, not do much, lay low… Well, Christ, how not to go online? Or – if you happen to be wired like my high IQ, hard-core life-experience girlfriend – how not to instantly start trolling through Worst Case Scenario Pregnancy Videos?

I’ll skip the opening act. But let me just say, without embellishment, that the Anal Cauliflower has to take the Oscar for all-time Worst Shit That Can Happen Short of Death or Life-Threatening Problems video. What am I talking about? Well, deep in the bowels of cyberspace, there is a mother who felt compelled to go before a camera and share her epic pregnancy-induced sphincter’n’skin-tag trauma. There I said it.

What happened see, is that – for lack of a more tactful description – this Mommy’s anus exploded into a festival of skin-tags. I am not talking about a few. We all have a few. I’m talking hundreds. Maybe thousands. Onscreen, all I can tell you, is that something resembling a cauliflower protruded out of her nether-cheeks, rendering (according to her own testimony) basic bodily functions a daily horror, driving her husband out of the room when she undressed for bed, and last, but hardly least, making the act of childbirth what can only be described as a colossally painful, unspeakably shameful hell-fest.

(On a personal note, it is a beloved family story how my own mother, God bless her, made no secret of how much she resented me for giving her hemorrhoids when she squeegeed my tiny guilt-ridden bottom into the world, half a century ago. Family!)

Which takes us back to the anal cauliflower. Poor E, projecting all her (understandable) dread of the unknown on this unlikely malady, makes me promise I’ll hang in with her, even if she sprouts some heinous, between-the-cheeks skin-tag bouquet of her own.

“Of course!” “I say. “But it’s not going to happen. I promise. If it does, I’ll handle it.”

I almost say, We’ll sell tickets! But, as I’ve discovered, borderline dickish humor doesn’t really work with a pregnant woman. At least not this pregnant woman. (And really, when does it ever pay to be a borderline dick? Unless you’re Mitt Romney?) Instead, what I say is, “why don’t we head out to Walgreens, lay in some liquid nitrogen and scissors, just in case?”

“Talk about a dream date,” she snaps, and I know things are back on keel.

Okay then. Having cleared the anal cauliflower hurdle, made it through the whole baby-sucking-her-arm syndrome and survived my stroll down maternal hemorrhoid memory lane, E and I are finally free to kick back and do what we now do best – stress about when the fuck the little object of our affection is going to get off the dime and hi-tail it down the birth canal.

“I swear, I don’t think she’s ever coming,” E says, shrinking into the couch with her basenji, Alvin, sprawled lewdly on her lap, as he is wont to sprawl, legs up and splayed in some X-rated opposition to the elegant Asta of Thin Man fame. Alvin’s as louche as Asta was cute. But great company when you’re going out of your skull from late term pregnancy, or, in my case, incipient, itchy leprosy. (I know leprosy doesn’t itch – your shit just falls off.) But something in this bug-drippy Austin humidity does not agree with me, and for days now my face looks like something dermatology students would sneak pictures of and pass around at parties.

Still, reaching over and stroking the barkless dog’s spotted belly, I try to rise above, and think of something reassuring to say.

“Listen,” I begin, trying in my ham-fisted way to put a chipper spin on the situation. “Horrible analogy, okay, but it reminds me when I was freshly relapsed, out of rehab, and living with a lady mechanic in Phoenix.”

“A lady mechanic? Really?”

“No longer with us,” I say, only a little defensively. “Or maybe she is. I don’t know. The point is, I used to spend every day waiting for the Fed Ex guy to arrive with the heroin I had mailed in from LA. After a month, I’d self-Pavloved to the point where I could make out the axle squeak of the Federal Express van from five blocks away. I mean, I’d be jonesing, I’d be dying – my dealer only got it together to mail shit once every few days – but suddenly, when I’d pretty much given up hope, when I was, like, totally bottomed out – ske-REEEEEE  – here comes Fedex!”

“So what you’re saying is… ?”

Jesus, what am I saying? “Well,” I faloomph, “I guess… what I’m saying is, you know… Oh, fuck it, I don’t know what I’m saying, let’s just fucking roll with it, okay? You’re nine months pregnant, the baby’s not going to sneak off under cover of darkness, you’re seeing the doctor every few days, and there’s really no way out but the way she came in…”

“So?”

“So let’s see what’s on TV. I think Colbert’s on.”

“Good idea.”

And then – cue kettle drums – she feels something big.

NEXT TIME:.. Does anything rhyme with cervix?… The second word in heaven is heave… D-Day or indigestion… Who has a shoehorn?

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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