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T M M OOOOO RRRRR PPPPP OOOOO RRRRR EEEEE V V IIIII EEEEE W W
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MM MM O O R R P P O O R R E V V I E W W
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H M M M O O RRRR PPPP O O RRRR EEE V V I EEE W W W
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M M O O R R P O O R R E V V I E WW WW
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E M M OOOOO R R P OOOOO R R EEEEE V IIIII EEEEE W W
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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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Volume #3 February 8, 1996 Issue #1
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Part I of a Special Second Anniversary Double Issue!
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Part II will be published February 22nd, 1996.
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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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CONTENTS FOR VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1
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Editors' Notes . . . . . . . . . Robert Fulkerson and Matt Mason
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Porky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tara Calishain
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At the Gates of Hell . . . . . . . . . . Bruce Harris Bentzman
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What's Out There is More of Here . . . . . . . . David Alexander
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Another Poem Written on Company Time . . . . Robert W. Howington
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Chant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dr. William F. Lantry
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Amazed By Her Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Appell
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Narrowing the Meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bardofbyte
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Wisdom's Maw (an excerpt) . . . . . . . . . . Todd Brendan Fahey
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About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Authors
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In Their Own Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Authors
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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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Editor + Poetry Editor
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Robert Fulkerson The Morpo Staff Matthew Mason
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rfulk@novia.net + mtmason@novia.net
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Assistant Editor Fiction Editor
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Kris Kalil Fulkerson J.D. Rummel
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kkalil@novia.net rummel@creighton.edu
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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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_The Morpo Review_. Volume 3, Issue 1. _The Morpo Review_ is published
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electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this magazine is
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permitted as long as the magazine is not sold and the entire text of the
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issue remains intact. Copyright 1996, Robert Fulkerson, Matthew Mason,
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Kris Kalil Fulkerson and J.D. Rummel. _The Morpo Review_ is published in
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ASCII and World Wide Web formats. All literary and artistic works are
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Copyright 1996 by their respective authors and artists.
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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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EDITORS' NOTES
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*** Robert Fulkerson, Editor
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++ Life, Morpo and Everything
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I spend a good portion of most of my days doing one of three things:
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spending time at the University of Nebraska at Omaha two days a week
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being a full-time instructor in computer science; spending time at
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Novia Internetworking two or more days a week (and many hours online)
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being a partner in an Internet Service Provider company; or any of a
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number of other projects that I'm involved in, which includes editing
|
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_Morpo_.
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Some of our long-time readers may remember that a little over a year
|
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and seven months ago, I married a wonderful woman. That same
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wonderful, beautiful woman stands by me or is in my thoughts
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|
throughout each minute of every day. On the average, we probably see
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each other awake about an hour or two every day. Her full-time
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graduate school schedule and work schedule don't overlap with my
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activities very well, and therefore we don't get to spend too much
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|
time together. But the time that we do spend together, although we're
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both usually fairly exhausted, is a wonderful, refreshing time. It
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sounds flaky and corny, but it's true. It's the fact that she's there
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or that she _will_ be there when I get home or when she gets home that
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is very invigorating. It keeps you going.
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_Morpo_ is celebrating its second birthday this issue. Ten issues
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|
(that's two years to you and me) ago, we went to press with an issue
|
|
that we were very proud of. Ten issues later, we're going to press
|
|
with an issue that we're very proud of. What has never ceased to amaze
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|
me is the constant quality of the material we receive for each issue.
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|
I'm no more proud of this current issue than I am with the first,
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third or eigth issues. They're all special in their own ways, they all
|
|
have their own distinctive slants and curves. If pressed, I wouldn't
|
|
be able to pick a "favorite" issue or a "best" issue. Nor would I be
|
|
able to pick a "best" or "favorite" poem, story or column.
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|
In the past three months, _Morpo_ has received some very favorable
|
|
reviews and mentions. In December, we were reviewed as a five-star web
|
|
site in the premiere issue of _Internet Underground_. In January, we
|
|
were selected as a "GNN WIC Select" site. Now, in the February issue
|
|
of the popular Internet glossy, _the Net_, we received a B+ rating
|
|
with high marks in both content and technical web savvy.
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But, when you boil it down, the staff of _Morpo_ is receiving these
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accolades. Unfortunately, we're just four folks we read submissions,
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discuss them at Barnes & Noble or a homeless shelter and print what we
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|
believe to be the best of what we've received. Except for the
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occasional column or poem, we're not really _Morpo_. _Morpo_ is all of
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the authors that we've published over the past two years. They've
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taken pieces of their lives, shaped them with pieces of other peoples'
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lives, and shared those creations with us. Our authors and you, the
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gentle reader, are what keep _Morpo_ going.
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... and it's my lovely wife that keeps me going when I'm feeling tired
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|
and peaked. It's my loving wife who tells me that it's okay to spend
|
|
time in the computer room to finish writing a column for the current
|
|
issue of _Morpo_, so that it can all keep going on ... and on ... and
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|
on.
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++ Live Web Chat with Todd Brendan Fahey
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On Thursday, February 22nd, 1996 at 9:00 PM, CST, _Morpo_ will be
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|
hosting its first ever _Morpo Review CyberCafe_ conference. This first
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|
conference will be with the author of this issue's book excerpt,
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|
_Wisdom's Maw_. To participate in the conference, which will be open
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|
to about 30 people on a first-come basis, you will need a graphical
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|
World Wide Web browser (preferrably Netscape, as the Microsoft
|
|
Internet Explorer appears to have problems with the chat site) and a
|
|
connection to the Internet. Point your browser at
|
|
http://morpo.novia.net/morpo/chat/ and follow the instructions from
|
|
there. This should prove to be interesting, if not a bit chaotic!
|
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|
|
++ Censorship on the Internet, American Style
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By now, you've undoubtedly heard that the United States Congress has
|
|
passed the 1996 Telecommunications Regulation Bill. Nestled inside
|
|
this bill is the dreaded and ill-intentioned "Communication Decency
|
|
Act", a bill proposed by a senator from my own home state of Nebraska
|
|
(is it any wonder he's not running for another term?).
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I'm not going to stand on a pedastal and shout that our First
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|
Amendment rights to free speech are being stomped on. We all know
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|
that. In a statement issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on
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|
their WWW site at
|
|
http://www.eff.org/pub/Alerts/cda_020296_eff.statement, they state
|
|
that:
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"[The CDA will] create a new "access crime", equating the posting of
|
|
material on a web site, or even the provision of basic Internet
|
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access, with willful transmission of indecent material directly to
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minors - harming the online service industry, and retarding the
|
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development of the electronic press ..."
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"Electronic press", of course, means _Morpo_ and any of the other
|
|
literary magazines and magazines on a variety of other topics that can
|
|
be found solely on the Internet. This is an unfortunate state of
|
|
affairs. Does this mean that stories or poems published in _Morpo_
|
|
that contain references to sexual matter, or that contain "foul
|
|
language", will fall under this new "access crime" category? Probably.
|
|
Does this mean that _Morpo_ will stop publishing literature that
|
|
contains references to sexual matter, foul language or other items
|
|
that could be considered "indecent"? We certainly hope not.
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Since this bill affects everyone on the Internet, including our
|
|
friends in foreign countries, I would encourage everyone to take a few
|
|
moments to read up on this heinous intrusion on our basic human right
|
|
to free speech at some of the following sites:
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation
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|
http://www.eff.org/
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The EFF Action Alerts Section
|
|
http://www.eff.org/pub/Alerts/index.html#exon
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The EFF Blue Ribbon Campaign
|
|
http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html
|
|
|
|
Latest CDA Update From CDT (just send a blank message for an info-bot
|
|
response)
|
|
cda-stat@cdt.org
|
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|
|
Center for Democracy and Technology
|
|
http://www.cdt.org/
|
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|
|
CNN Interactive's Telecom Bill Web Page
|
|
http://www.cnn.com/US/9602/telecom_bill/index.html
|
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|
|
HotWired's Net Censorship Crisis Update
|
|
http://www.hotwired.com/special/indecent/
|
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|
|
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
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|
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*** Matthew Mason, Poetry Editor
|
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|
Having survived the Holiday Season, the air still seems to have
|
|
holiday images swimming through it like the jolly Salmon of Goodwill
|
|
returning in their late-winter spawning run.
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And so with snow still slushy on the streets of Omaha, I think of two
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things (besides jolly salmon): Elvis and cows.
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In a similar spirit, I left my post here at Morpo-Central and spent
|
|
Thanksgiving with The King on a roadtrip to Memphis, as, hey, Paul
|
|
Simon sings about "Poor boys and Pilgrims" making the trip, and I'm a
|
|
poor boy and Thanksgiving's the time of Pilgrims so why not?
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|
|
And, indeed, it was a holiday to remember: Elvis already had his tree
|
|
up and the lights of Graceland were no less than a kingly display of
|
|
holiday wattage. It really got me set for that ol' holiday spirit,
|
|
even though I had to do it without solid gold sinks and bell-bottom
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jumpsuits; it's the essence that matters, not the trappings.
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And cows. What would winter be without cows? Kicked out of their
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|
stable 2000 years ago by an innkeeper packing in paying customers in
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any closet, hole, and stall he could get them to cough up a few coins
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|
for, it is those noble cows freezing in a pasture, running in a panic
|
|
as bright angels appeared above them and the poor beasts couldn't lift
|
|
their heads to see that it was only flying androgynous harpists up
|
|
there as they stampeded over the stray shepherd or two.
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|
|
And so in this bovine spirit o' the season, I'm introducing Morpo's
|
|
first ever "Cows N' Elvis of Christmas Past Poetry Contest!" Submit
|
|
your finest poems featuring a cow or an Elvis by April 30, 1996 and
|
|
we'll award fabulous prizes such as.. uh.. as.. well, seeing as we
|
|
don't have a budget (except that one time when Bob bought everyone hot
|
|
chocolate, but that hardly counts), we'll publish you in the Mayish
|
|
issue and give you something keen to put on a cover-letter (and won't
|
|
the New Yorker be impressed to see that you got a Runner-Up award in
|
|
that "Cows N' Elvis" thing!).
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The number of awards will depend on how many entrants we receive.
|
|
Poems need not be holiday or even winter poems. Some restrictions
|
|
apply. Your mileage may vary. Previously published poems ok, though
|
|
non-published preferred. You can do what you want but stay offa my
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blue suede shoes. Please clearly mark your submission as part of this
|
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contest (hopefully we'd notice, but you never know).
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Good luck, and have a Holly Jolly Valentine's Day.
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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"Porky" by Tara Calishain
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Porky withers and smiles in the reeds.
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|
Thirty years gone to a stuttering heart
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|
a smooth skull amiable in the low tide
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|
all corners rounded by time and the lapping wave.
|
|
Sixteen-year-old Porky, they remember you
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|
around the dining table, over dinner
|
|
Porky the dire warning, Porky the victim
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|
Porky the foundering archetype -
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|
Granny tells you in a tale smooth as a bone flute
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|
(Porky the marble under her tongue)
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|
He is a die with no faces, a mood gliding
|
|
into my conciousness, lean with a fluttering sail.
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|
Granny makes you into a bundle
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|
feeds you to us, Porky the memory
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|
and I dream of Granny dancing you alive
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|
passing you around, and how you smile
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|
with leaves over your eyes
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|
and how you sink beneath for the last time
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|
traceless, ageless, utterly white.
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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"At the Gates of Hell" by Bruce Harris Bentzman
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Once every two or three years I return to the old neighborhood,
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|
where I grew up, to visit with my parents. Most of my friends from
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|
that time have moved away, having not returned to their suburban
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|
homesteads after graduating college. My parents are good folks who
|
|
allowed me to take a Wanderjahr after graduating high school, but as
|
|
one year stretched into ten, they developed an attitude of
|
|
disappointment in their wayward son. They were worried that I did not
|
|
possess the ethical fiber to hold a steady job, and they could not
|
|
appreciate my constant happiness in various trials at hard labor in
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European industry and agriculture.
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They feel better about me now that I have reasonably steady employment
|
|
as a journalist, my contributions usually being to American and
|
|
British car rags, and sometimes travel magazines. It isn't a whole lot
|
|
of money and it doesn't arrive with any kind of regularity, but my
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parents don't know that. They are especially proud that I am married
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and have a daughter, but do not realize that, as a fairly renowned
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stage actress in France, my wife, Jeanette, actually supports the
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|
family. They say, "if you have a good job, why does your wife have to
|
|
work?" She does it because it brings her happiness. Of course if she
|
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appeared on Broadway, or in the Hollywood movies, then they might
|
|
grasp the value of her accomplishment. It doesn't count to them that
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|
she has had several small roles in European films.
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This was a special visit, because it is rare that my wife can
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accompany me to America. We left Giselle, our daughter, with
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Jeanette's parents because she still had to attend school.
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The dinner was my mother's specialty, tuna noodle casserole, made with
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cans of tuna and cream of mushroom soup, sprinkled with chopped
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cashews when we had company. This meal was probably the greatest
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|
challenge in Jeanette's professional career, but she pulled it off
|
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convincingly. After dinner, my wife and I decided to stroll, while Mom
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'wanted' to wash the dishes, and Dad 'had to watch' one of his
|
|
favorite television shows. I was grateful to be alone with Jeanette.
|
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Dinner was rather humbling and I wanted to apologize. Jeanette
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interrupted me, putting her finger to my lips. "You have no need to be
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sorry," she spoke in French. "They are quite adorable and I love them
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because they gave me their son." She smiled, she kissed me, and then
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she asked in English, "this tuna noodle casserole, it is a popular
|
|
American dish?" She grinned. Recognizing sarcasm, I was formulating a
|
|
witty response, when our paths crossed with that of Doctor Samuel's.
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Doctor Samuel was Suzie Little when she was living in her parents'
|
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house across the street from my parents' house. She came galloping
|
|
from the other direction wearing fleece pants and sweatshirt. I did
|
|
not recognize her as quickly as she recognized me, bringing her
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exercise to a sudden halt and gaily calling out "Flower". It was an
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old nickname I hadn't heard in a generation. Still, I was as delighted
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to see her again as she was to see me, and I introduced her to
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Jeanette. Later, I had to give Jeanette the details to this particular
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nickname. For you, dear reader, let it suffice that it was short for
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flower child, as I was a self-styled hippie in my youth.
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Suzie took the opportunity of this chance meeting to inform me that I
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had just happened to have arrived on the night preceding our high
|
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school graduating class's twenty-fifth year reunion. We had both
|
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graduated from Eisenhower a quarter century earlier, and it was the
|
|
reason for Suzie being back in the neigbourhood and visiting her
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parents.
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Jeanette insisted on dragging me to the Ramada Inn, where the
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twenty-fifth reunion was being held. I really didn't want to go. High
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school had nothing to do with my life. It was more of an interruption
|
|
to my life and education, the longest postponement to self-improvement
|
|
and creativity I have ever had to endure. It was not a tragedy.
|
|
Tragedies are eventful. High school, for me, was drudgery, a long and
|
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tedious Hell.
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Furthermore, my ego didn't feel sufficiently accomplished to make an
|
|
appearance. Had I been carrying the Nobel Prize, or at least the
|
|
Pulitzer, under my arm, I would have enjoyed this opportunity to
|
|
gloat, to show that everyone had been wrong about me. If only my
|
|
novels would get published, if only I would finish writing one. Still,
|
|
Jeanette insisted that we try to crash the party, and it was easier to
|
|
relinquish than to resist her indomitable spirit. So I permitted her
|
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to play Virgil to my Dante.
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We had difficulty finding the Ramada Inn. In the quarter century I
|
|
have been away, occasionally returning for the briefest of visits, an
|
|
enormous number of malls, stores, townhouse developments, hotels and
|
|
office buildings had popped up where once were woodlands, farms, or
|
|
just a grassy knoll. Everything was new. In contrast, it is the long
|
|
history, the continuity with ages past, that keeps me in Europe. The
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Ramada Inn was built just outside the city limits, one among several
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gigantic dolmens rising from a field of black asphalt. It was
|
|
difficult to determine the front of the building with certainty, and
|
|
we drove once around this faceless slab to be sure of the proper
|
|
entrance. This building was never intended to stand for centuries as a
|
|
model of the aesthetics of this or any era. It was just doing its job
|
|
being indifferent; a pragmatic and temporary compromise trying to
|
|
avoid offending any taste.
|
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|
No sooner had we arrived than some people on their way to the rest
|
|
rooms began recognizing me from afar. How it is that everybody can
|
|
identify me I cannot explain. Since leaving Eisenhower High, I have
|
|
sported a beard and have grown bald. Who the hell were these people? I
|
|
had little memory of most of them and couldn't identify them without
|
|
first reading their name tags. Sometimes not even then.
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|
My fellow graduates urged us on, inviting us to join them in the
|
|
ballroom where the class had gathered. They couldn't see the harm in
|
|
it, so long as we didn't eat the dinner. Several said they had empty
|
|
places at their tables where people did not show. I was hardly dressed
|
|
for the affair; a leather jacket, no tie, and blue jeans. Still,
|
|
Jeanette was keen on trying. Her slim, graceful body always bore an
|
|
elegance regardless of whatever frock she chose to wear, but that
|
|
night she was also wearing blue jeans, a man's white shirt, and she
|
|
sported a suede matador's jacket, dyed red, green, and blue, by a
|
|
French designer whose name escapes me.
|
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|
|
A pair of plain double doors, one pair gaping wide, presented
|
|
themselves. Above the door a plaque read "Ballroom", but for my
|
|
reaction should have announced "lasciate ogni speranza, voi
|
|
ch'entrate" -- abandon all hope, ye who enter here. It was sufficient
|
|
to speed my breathing and upset my stomach. I remembered sleepless
|
|
nights agonizing over the homework and studying I could not bring
|
|
myself to do. I could remember the frequent illness I would endure on
|
|
bus rides to school, when I had not prepared for tests on subjects
|
|
that held no interest for me.
|
|
|
|
When we tried to enter the ballroom, the others went ahead to their
|
|
tables. The ballroom at the Ramada Inn looked more like a gymnasium
|
|
than a ballroom, which seems befitting the memory of our high school's
|
|
proms. Just inside the doors of the ballroom the hotel had
|
|
considerately set up a stand to serve refreshments. I stopped to order
|
|
a drink from this cash bar with the hope of reinforcing my courage,
|
|
while allowing the time to collect myself. There were bottles of
|
|
vodka, gin, scotch, but not the famous brands, two large jugs of New
|
|
York State wines, one calling itself Burgundy, the other Chardonnay,
|
|
two plastic three liter bottles, one of Coke, the other of ginger-ale,
|
|
and some Buds and Millers on ice. Nothing excited me and I could not
|
|
make up my mind.
|
|
|
|
During my delay a very tall and angry fellow, not anyone I recognized,
|
|
was quick to intercept Jeanette and me. He rudely interposed his tall
|
|
frame between me and the bar causing me to instinctively step back.
|
|
|
|
"Excuse me, but who are you?" he asked with a belligerent voice. He
|
|
had already nailed me as a crasher, probably because of my clothes,
|
|
and didn't feel it necessary to first introduce himself, or ask if I
|
|
was invited, or if I carried a ticket granting me entry. I gave him my
|
|
name, the last syllable having cleared my lips when he shot his next
|
|
question at me. "This is a private affair, do you have a ticket?" I
|
|
told him no. He sharply turned to the elderly woman who was managing
|
|
the bar and who was evidently part of the hotel staff, and he severely
|
|
reprimanded her for trying to serve us. "You are not to serve these
|
|
people anything." I could think of two hundred ways he might have
|
|
politely informed the woman. She had no way of knowing the difference
|
|
between paying guests and crashers. I looked at the slip of paper
|
|
stuck to the chest pocket of his jacket. Hello, my name is Ted
|
|
Bradley. Underneath was his photo-copied image from the yearbook. I
|
|
had a vague memory of him being the popular quarterback and I had the
|
|
notion that he was one of the bullies that used to threaten me. As the
|
|
old woman had gained her composure and was reacting to Teddy with
|
|
indignation, I searched the room for familiar faces.
|
|
|
|
These were people older than those I remembered. The men wore suits
|
|
and the women wore evening gowns, and their clothing suited them. We
|
|
appeared incongruous when we wore such adult costumes in our youth.
|
|
Still, it seemed inappropriate that such richly dressed adults should
|
|
now have to sit on folding chairs of steel. Then Teddy stepped around
|
|
me and placed himself into the center of my view, again stepping too
|
|
deeply into my personal space, again inducing me to retreat a step.
|
|
"If you want a drink, or if you want to eat, the hotel has a bar and a
|
|
fine restaurant. Why don't you use them? You have no business here,"
|
|
he asserted. He stretched his long arm towards the doorway, fingers
|
|
extended.
|
|
|
|
"This is my class, the class I graduated with."
|
|
|
|
"You went to Eisenhower?" So he had as little recognition of me as I
|
|
had of him. His arm came down, but I don't think he was believing me.
|
|
He took another half step towards me and I another half step back.
|
|
|
|
"Yes and this is my class." He had me repeating myself and it was
|
|
uncomfortable bending my neck to look up into his face. I tried to
|
|
look at other things, not wanting him to think that he was important
|
|
enough for me to regard, yet every time I tried to glance around his
|
|
trim frame, he reinserted it into my view. He was determined to keep
|
|
me from seeing old acquaintances if I was not paying for the
|
|
privilege.
|
|
|
|
"Can I see your tickets?"
|
|
|
|
"I don't have tickets." His face darkened with restrained anger.
|
|
|
|
"If you want to stay it will cost you fifty dollars apiece." He
|
|
extended his palm for immediate payment. He became Charon, the
|
|
ferryman, demanding his fee. I tried to get a peek past him to see if
|
|
there was any reason worth staying and once more he shifted to block
|
|
my view. "You can't stay if you don't pay." The veins were popping out
|
|
of his forehead and neck. Briefly, I felt a rush of fear and wondered
|
|
if he took traveler checks.
|
|
|
|
In that moment, with Teddy's face glowing red and green from the
|
|
effort of stifling his intent to damage me, I recognized that old,
|
|
familiar fear that had once plagued me in the halls of Eisenhower
|
|
High. I had entirely forgotten the sensation. And that fear passed as
|
|
quickly as it had arrived, because I am no longer that hapless
|
|
adolescent I was in school. My brain calculated the consequences of
|
|
Teddy attacking me. Bigger he was, yes, stronger, yes, but I would
|
|
hurt him, too, and from the start, I could endure any pain he was
|
|
likely to administer. Hell, afterwards I could have him arrested and
|
|
sue him; furthermore, before it could become serious, others would
|
|
surely come over and intervene. The situation with Teddy was less
|
|
dangerous than some of my close calls on the amateur racetrack.
|
|
|
|
It occurred to me, here was the old school bully puffed up with the
|
|
only moment of power that this life could afford him. It was no wonder
|
|
that this vacuous affair was so important to him, his only chance to
|
|
relive the times when he had power and popularity, before he was cast
|
|
adrift in the real world. He stood before me prepared to defend those
|
|
few short years of history during which he flourished in a tiny corner
|
|
of the planet, and from which he had never wandered very far. It must
|
|
have been he, among others, who tracked classmates, organized
|
|
reunions, and sent out invitations.
|
|
|
|
The absurdity of the situation was that he was keeping me from
|
|
rejoining a time and place that held no attraction for me. I thought
|
|
of teachers who dictated rules, trying to project themselves as the
|
|
sole authority of "true knowledge" and "right morality". Teddy, you
|
|
old high school rah-rah, you who with the other rah-rahs believed you
|
|
were the sole determinants of "coolness", the only ones privileged to
|
|
discriminate and exclude others. You elected yourselves to the student
|
|
governments, to join clubs and such, as if the pretentious roles had
|
|
any significance.
|
|
|
|
I was no longer frightened of this pompous guard of the sacred high
|
|
school memory, he who was defending his last bastion of personal
|
|
success. I actually found myself trying not to offend him by laughing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
"If you aren't willing to fork out the fifty dollars entry fee --" he
|
|
began.
|
|
|
|
"No, wait," I interjected, trying to choke back the laughter bubbling
|
|
up inside me. "You don't understand." How was I to explain it to him.
|
|
He was thinking that I was trying to come up with an excuse for
|
|
entering his precious reunion, and I was tickled from the silliness of
|
|
being kept out of where I never wanted to go. "I don't even want to be
|
|
here." I was unable to conceal my laughing, which goaded this stern
|
|
fellow. I was trying not to burst, and I grabbed Jeanette by both
|
|
shoulders and bodily shifted her between me and this tall bouncer,
|
|
thinking she would protect me. She was more deserving of taking the
|
|
brunt of this ill-humored protector, as she was the one who wanted to
|
|
crash the party. "Talk to her," I explained to him, "she is the one
|
|
who wanted to come, not me." And now I was wickedly laughing out loud,
|
|
my head tucked into Jeanette's back between her shoulder blades.
|
|
|
|
Poor Jeanette, I didn't recognize it at the time, but she was
|
|
intimidated by this tall bouncer, whom she found menacing. Nervous and
|
|
confused, she began rattling off an apology in French. Teddy had no
|
|
French. She was saying how we'd only stay a minute, that she just
|
|
wanted to meet some of the people with whom I passed my childhood.
|
|
Then she turned to me. "Were you so bad in school that they will not
|
|
now let you come back?" she asked.
|
|
|
|
"Me, bad? No, no my love. It is nothing like that," I said, then added
|
|
in a French whisper, "this is Cerberus, the three-headed dog who
|
|
guards Hades, only he's confused and is keeping us out instead of in."
|
|
I took her hand and led her away. "We Americans are more materialistic
|
|
than sentimental," I explained when we were out of earshot. "He is
|
|
probably protecting his interest. For all we know, he might be getting
|
|
a kickback from the hotel for this."
|
|
|
|
Being thrown out of my twenty-fifth high school reunion was wonderful.
|
|
It made the day for me and made me feel jolly good. I thanked Jeanette
|
|
for making me attend. That stern Teddy, who blocked our entrance,
|
|
reinforced my deep belief that high school ran counter to my nature.
|
|
He was high school personified; strict, self-confident, provincial,
|
|
and completely clueless as to the real world. Fifty dollars a head,
|
|
what was the money for? We found out.
|
|
|
|
Jeanette and I plopped into a comfortable couch in the hotel's lobby
|
|
beneath a seven story atrium. We had the waitress bring us a bottle of
|
|
the hotel's best Champagne, my reward to Jeanette for making the
|
|
evening so wonderful. And that was where Doctor Samuel found us.
|
|
|
|
"I heard you were out here," she said. "Why don't you come in."
|
|
|
|
"Is it worth it?"
|
|
|
|
"Well, actually no. The chicken is really dry and disappointing, and
|
|
to think I spent fifty dollars for it."
|
|
|
|
"Well, then, why don't you join us and have a glass of Champagne."
|
|
|
|
She sat and we talked a long time. I was made to explain what happened
|
|
to me after high school. I hadn't really thought about it for many
|
|
years, yet at that moment, explaining it to Suzie, I realized high
|
|
school actually did play an important role in my life. In our senior
|
|
year I was in an advanced English class, and in that class we were
|
|
made to read William Somerset Maugham's novel _The Razor's Edge_.
|
|
Larry Darrel, the subject of that book, became my model. After high
|
|
school, I went bumming in Europe instead of partying in college. It
|
|
was my intention to spend my life abroad reading, studying, and having
|
|
conversations with great minds. These were things I did not believe
|
|
were available to me in New Jersey. I was not as accomplished as the
|
|
fictional Larry. I did not have his ability to acquire other
|
|
languages, although I learned to manage French, nor did I have Larry's
|
|
power of concentration to sit and read for hours on end. Also, I did
|
|
not have Larry's income that permitted him to be independent. So
|
|
events unfolded differently for me than they had for Maugham's
|
|
fictional hero. In the end Larry returned to America. I was just
|
|
visiting.
|
|
|
|
That was how the evening concluded. Various old chums, upon learning I
|
|
was out in the lobby, abandoned the ballroom to meet with me and my
|
|
wife, and to complain about the food and the money they had spent. So
|
|
many forgotten friends re-entered my life that evening. I had not
|
|
expected so many. Resting against my wife on that deep couch, she who
|
|
is my greatest success in life, her arms around me, I suddenly felt
|
|
that I have succeeded in life. I would not have changed a single iota
|
|
of my past actions because of the possible risk that fate would not
|
|
have brought Jeanette and me together. While we held court there in
|
|
that comfortable lobby of the Ramada Inn, not one hundred feet from
|
|
that stark ballroom from which I was exiled, my darling was asking of
|
|
my classmates for the stories that would most embarrass Flower.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
"What's Out There is More of Here" by David Alexander
|
|
|
|
Yin and yang revolve in endless permutations, and every action
|
|
contains the seeds of its antithesis. Marty, now Tulku, is neither
|
|
Marty nor Tulku, for both follow the path of becoming. Only the
|
|
process of becoming is real, and even this is illusion. Neither Tulku,
|
|
nor the steam grate outside the building on Park Avenue upon which
|
|
Tulku squats in the lotus position, have any true substance. Both are
|
|
manifestations of _samsara_, the world of phenomena.
|
|
|
|
When Tulku was Marty Kellerman, a computer technician for the Sperry
|
|
Rand Company, he lived in a co-op apartment on York Avenue not far
|
|
from the steam grate upon which he now sits. When Tulku was Marty
|
|
Kellerman, he pulled down sixty grand a year, minus bonuses and perks,
|
|
administering the sprawling LAN into which hundreds of PCs, printers,
|
|
modems and other hardware were plugged and which was itself plugged
|
|
into the global Internet. When Tulku was Marty Kellerman, he liked
|
|
having drinks at Manhattan's preferred watering holes, betting on the
|
|
ponies and trading up to a new Mazda each year. He knew nothing of
|
|
metaphysics and cared even less. Marty Kellerman was nuts and bolts to
|
|
the core.
|
|
|
|
Just the same, Marty's samsaric yang was already evolving into Tulku's
|
|
nirvanic yin. Marty just didn't know it yet. By the ineluctable laws
|
|
of _dharma_, his co-op in the doorman building on York was becoming
|
|
the steam grate on Park. His Pierre Balmain suits the grimy layers of
|
|
second-hand clothing he now wore. His wife a divorcee. His computer
|
|
LAN the all-embracing Vishnu-network of the astral plane. His former
|
|
life dissolved, as though it had never been. All of this had happened
|
|
barely two years before, and the moment at which yin and yang began to
|
|
switch position was the Archimedian point about which all of these
|
|
cosmic perambulations turned.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The van that departed the Club Med at Vishakapatnam one humid
|
|
morning was rented as a joke. Marty and his wife Eileen had gone to
|
|
Club Med for all the usual reasons. But the endless round of eating,
|
|
racquetball, fucking and watching half-naked women flirt with
|
|
three-quarters naked men by the pool and at beachside became boring in
|
|
the extreme. Eileen wanted Marty to attend yoga class with her, and to
|
|
this he reluctantly gave his assent. It was at yoga class that they
|
|
met Dan and Dawn, who were agents of Bodhisattvahood, only they didn't
|
|
suspect it.
|
|
|
|
"You know, they say there's a holy man up in the hills near here who
|
|
gives audiences," Dan remarked after yoga class one day. "Dawn and I
|
|
and another couple were thinking of renting a van from one of the
|
|
navvies and having a look. Care to come along?"
|
|
|
|
"I don't know," Marty opined. "I basically just want to catch some
|
|
rays."
|
|
|
|
"Come on, Marty. Let's do it," Eileen pressed.
|
|
|
|
"You wanted to work on your tan this week, honey," Marty countered,
|
|
hoping she would get the message that he wanted to lose Dan and Dawn,
|
|
who were obvious flakes.
|
|
|
|
"Oh, forget the tan," she insisted. "This is much more interesting."
|
|
|
|
So the following morning, despite a big argument that night, and Dan
|
|
and Dawn's bowing out at the last minute, they did as Eileen wanted.
|
|
The other couple, Al and April, were two aging hippies -- who referred
|
|
to themselves as "newageinarians" -- from San Francisco. They lit up
|
|
joints and attempted to pass them around. Nobody in the van accepted,
|
|
except for the driver, who exhaled the smoke in the face of the
|
|
securely bound chicken which lay beside him.
|
|
|
|
"This is just fucking great," Marty said. "I'm so glad I came. Thank
|
|
you Eileen. Thank you a thousand times."
|
|
|
|
"Don't spoil this, you bastard," she snarled. "For once I'm having a
|
|
good time. She took the joint from the driver and inhaled some grass,
|
|
avoiding the wet end as much as possible. "Is it far?" she asked the
|
|
Indian at the wheel as she gave the joint to April.
|
|
|
|
"Holy man live in cave up on mountain. Today good day. He comes out of
|
|
cave on good days."
|
|
|
|
"How do you know?" Marty asked. "You phone him or something?"
|
|
|
|
"He is very holy," the driver said with a little laugh.
|
|
|
|
"What's his name?"
|
|
|
|
"Holy man is called Rama Om," replied the driver. "You sick, he can
|
|
cure you. You sad, he make you happy. Whatever you know, he knows
|
|
also."
|
|
|
|
"Sounds like my mother," Marty quipped.
|
|
|
|
"Yes. He is like mother. Like everybody's mother," the driver replied.
|
|
|
|
After a lengthy journey up winding mountain roads, the van finally
|
|
came to a stop at the crest of an escarpment overlooking a defile in
|
|
which a muddy river sluggishly flowed. Not far from a small cave, a
|
|
figure was seated in the lotus position on the bare ground.
|
|
|
|
The driver approached first, bowed reverently, and then spoke to the
|
|
holy man, telling him that foreign devils had come to seek an
|
|
audience. The driver next presented the holy man with the now
|
|
moderately stoned chicken, leaving it tied up on the ground. The holy
|
|
man beckoned to the four other people who had disembarked the van to
|
|
draw near him.
|
|
|
|
"Fire your stockbroker, Marty," he said to Marty, "he's ripping you
|
|
off."
|
|
|
|
"This is a joke, right?"
|
|
|
|
"No joke," the driver said, shaking his head. "Rama Om knows all. This
|
|
I tell you before." On the fringes, the chicken squawked
|
|
halfheartedly, as if in assent.
|
|
|
|
"Give me the medicines," the holy man next declared, addressing the
|
|
two aging hippies standing to one side of Marty and Eileen. "I would
|
|
like to try them."
|
|
|
|
"What medicines?" asked Al, in the serape.
|
|
|
|
"The ones which bring sublime visions to the mind."
|
|
|
|
"You hear that, baby?" exclaimed Al to April. "He knows we brought
|
|
acid."
|
|
|
|
"_Give_ him some, Al," his wife urged. "This is really getting
|
|
incredibly strange."
|
|
|
|
Al reached into the stash pocket of his serape and held out two
|
|
gelatin capsules filled with white powder. He placed them in the
|
|
cupped palm of the holy man's extended hand. Rama Om asked Al if there
|
|
were any more. Al gave him another two capsules.
|
|
|
|
"Look, guy," he warned the holy man, his face wearing a pinched,
|
|
worried look. "You better not do this. We believe you."
|
|
|
|
Rama Om swallowed the four LSD capsules anyway. For several long
|
|
minutes, he sat contemplating his audience with a faint smile.
|
|
Otherwise his expression was completely blank and he did not move a
|
|
muscle.
|
|
|
|
"This is interesting, but it is not the genuine _bhiksu_," Rama Om
|
|
finally said.
|
|
|
|
"I don't _believe_ this!" an awed Al exclaimed. "He should be going
|
|
apeshit by now with all that acid in him!"
|
|
|
|
"Far out," April asserted boisterously. "Far fuckin' _out!_"
|
|
|
|
"Bullshit. It's a setup," grumbled Marty. "These two guys are shills."
|
|
He meant the two from Frisco. "And the old guy on the ground is a con
|
|
man."
|
|
|
|
"Hey, who you fuckin' calling 'shills,' asshole?" Al replied.
|
|
|
|
"_You_, dickwad," Marty hollered back.
|
|
|
|
"Behave yourself, Marty," Eileen warned her husband.
|
|
|
|
"Okay. We'll see who's an asshole. I wonder if you could tell me the
|
|
address of my orthopedist?" asked Al of Rama Om.
|
|
|
|
"You do not have an orthopedist," returned the holy man. "But you have
|
|
a dentist named Doctor Driller, who recently performed root canal
|
|
surgery on your left rear bicuspid."
|
|
|
|
"See, you putz," Al yelled at Marty. "This guy's for real!"
|
|
|
|
The holy man then turned to Marty, and said, "The vegetable peeler you
|
|
have lost has fallen behind the dish washer."
|
|
|
|
"What?" Marty looked stunned. "What did you say?"
|
|
|
|
"The vegetable peeler you lost last spring," Rama Om repeated
|
|
placidly. "When you return to your apartment you will now have two."
|
|
|
|
There was no way this guy could have known about the vegetable peeler,
|
|
Marty knew. He had forgotten all about it himself until Rama Om had
|
|
brought it up. It was a little thing that had nagged at him in a major
|
|
way, like a hangnail. Marty had used the peeler to make his Sunday
|
|
morning cucumber salads until it had disappeared. Despite turning the
|
|
apartment upside down he'd never found it. Ultimately he had bought a
|
|
new one.
|
|
|
|
Marty felt as though someone had just brained him with a two-by-four.
|
|
Now suddenly he too knew that Rama Om was everything he had previously
|
|
not accepted him as being. He knew that Rama Om was for real.
|
|
|
|
Marty was not at that time aware of what Zen adepts called "the
|
|
transmission of the lamp," but this is what in fact had occurred. Yin
|
|
and yang had begun to pivot on the axis of infinity. The veils of
|
|
illusion had begun to part. Enlightenment glowed through the mists of
|
|
_maya_.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It took another six months before Marty became Tulku. Back on the
|
|
Upper East Side, in familiar surroundings, his experience in India
|
|
could for a time be dismissed as an unimportant trifle. But ultimately
|
|
there could be no denying what had taken place.
|
|
|
|
Marty had received enlightenment. Nothing looked quite the same to him
|
|
anymore. Not the Upper East Side. Not his job. Not Eileen. Not the
|
|
ponies. Nothing.
|
|
|
|
"Marty, it's not normal you meditating in the middle of the living
|
|
room all day," Eileen would tell him on Saturdays as he practiced the
|
|
_samadhi_ exercises he had learned at Club Med. "Let's go out for
|
|
brunch."
|
|
|
|
Marty stared at the _mandala_ on the floor and did not utter a word in
|
|
answer to his wife. On occasions such as these Eileen customarily left
|
|
the house in tears.
|
|
|
|
Though Marty continued to go through the motions of his obsolete
|
|
existence, it was nevertheless crumbling all around him. He still rode
|
|
the Lex to his office every morning, still performed his salaried
|
|
duties, still returned home at day's end. But these were mechanical
|
|
functions. The wheel of _samsara_ still turned, though Marty felt its
|
|
motions inexorably grinding to a halt.
|
|
|
|
Soon it would stop entirely and begin to turn in the other direction.
|
|
Soon yang would become yin and _samsara_ transcendence.
|
|
|
|
"I'm leaving you, Marty," Eileen told him one day, over the phone,
|
|
while he was at work. She was calling from her lawyer's office, she
|
|
said.
|
|
|
|
"The bridge flows. The water does not," Marty told her and promptly
|
|
hung up.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
He returned home to an empty apartment. All the furniture had been
|
|
taken away by Iraqi immigrants from the Nice Jewish Boy with a Van
|
|
company and even the carpet had been stripped from the floor. Marty
|
|
smiled. In the midst of turmoil he was at peace. _See how it all
|
|
dissolves_, he thought. Eileen was a cosmic catalyst, an embodiment of
|
|
the _shiva_ principle, helping along the dissolution of the old Marty
|
|
into his new _dharma_ body. On the bare floor lay the only thing she
|
|
had left him. His _mandala_.
|
|
|
|
Marty sat on the floor facing the _mandala_ and tucked his legs under
|
|
him. He rested his hands on his knees and began to perform his breath
|
|
control exercises. He stared at the _mandala_ until it opened up and
|
|
his consciousness entered its sacred portals. There, he saw a vision
|
|
of himself squatting atop the steam grate of a building on Park
|
|
Avenue, and he knew the name he was destined to take.
|
|
|
|
Tulku.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The following day Marty went into his boss' office to tell him he
|
|
was quitting. Marty bowed respectfully and apologized for not giving
|
|
the company two weeks' notice, but his _dharma_ compelled him to act
|
|
immediately. Marty left the office and went to his bank where he
|
|
transferred all the money in the joint account he still retained with
|
|
his wife over to Eileen.
|
|
|
|
He was now penniless. Technically, he could still occupy his apartment
|
|
for another sixty days because the month's rent had been paid and the
|
|
month's security was still in force, but he did not want to remain
|
|
chained to the cosmic wheel a moment longer than was necessary. Tulku
|
|
had no possessions. No connections to the world of illusion held Tulku
|
|
in thrall. Tulku needed only Tulku and the enduring light within.
|
|
|
|
By that afternoon, Tulku had found the steam grate outside the Lincoln
|
|
Building that he had seen in his prophetic vision while meditating
|
|
before the _mandala_. Below the grating, immense pipes carried waste
|
|
steam from the fifty story skyscraper's boiler room up to street level
|
|
where it could vent into the air in warm, humid clouds of
|
|
stale-smelling vapor. Tulku was now without food, without shelter,
|
|
with nothing except the clothes on his back.
|
|
|
|
But Tulku did not care. Though it was late autumn and the nights were
|
|
growing chilly, the steam would suffice to warm his body. If Tibetan
|
|
holy men trekked the frozen Himalayan wastes with only the flimsiest
|
|
robes for protection, Tulku could survive on his steam grate on Park
|
|
Avenue. All that mattered was that he had severed himself from the
|
|
wheel of _samsara_. Whether he lived or died was beside the point. All
|
|
consequences would flow from his act of casting off his chains. Events
|
|
would begin to shape themselves.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Autumn became winter. Tulku sometimes augmented the warming power of
|
|
the steam that rose from beneath the grate with a large cardboard box
|
|
scrounged from trash awaiting pickup on the curbside. Otherwise, his
|
|
daily regimen seldom varied.
|
|
|
|
He sat in deep meditation, never looking at passersby, never speaking
|
|
unless addressed. When asked to move on by the doormen of adjacent
|
|
buildings, Tulku moved on, but inevitably returned to his steam grate.
|
|
Though he never begged for alms, passersby frequently threw coins into
|
|
his lap. With these donations, Tulku bought what little food he
|
|
required to sustain his life in nearby coffee shops and delicatessens,
|
|
where he also relieved what meager bodily wastes his virtuous life
|
|
produced.
|
|
|
|
During these times, Tulku sometimes chanced to glance at himself in
|
|
the bathroom mirrors, or glimpsed his reflection in the plate glass
|
|
windows of the neighborhood shops. The reflections were of an
|
|
enlightened being wholly different from the mundane terrestrial dross
|
|
that had once been Marty Kellerman.
|
|
|
|
This new being's hair grew long and matted, and an equally long, thick
|
|
beard covered his face. The frame upon which the crazy quilt
|
|
assortment of ragged clothes hung was gaunt to the point of
|
|
emaciation. Yet Tulku moved with a slow, graceful gait that the
|
|
ever-hurrying Marty had never displayed.
|
|
|
|
No other homeless people ever tried to usurp Tulku's position on the
|
|
steam grate. Some revered him as a saint, others feared him as a
|
|
sorcerer, but all left him in peace. When Tulku reassumed his position
|
|
atop the grate and commenced his meditations, the bliss he experienced
|
|
radiated from him from avenue to avenue and from block to block.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Time passed, and it was again early fall. Tulku had spent another
|
|
round of seasons atop his grate, and had ascended to yet a higher
|
|
plane of enlightenment. To the residents of the neighborhood Tulku had
|
|
by now become a legend. Dogs, leashed and stray alike, would stop to
|
|
lick his hands. Young girls and little boys would bestrew his steam
|
|
grate with flowers. Stories circulated about how the wizened homeless
|
|
man squatting atop a steam grate would spontaneously divulge
|
|
extraordinary things about people whom he had never before met,
|
|
accurately foretelling their futures and revealing long-buried secrets
|
|
from their pasts.
|
|
|
|
There was, for example, the heart specialist who had scoffed when
|
|
Tulku had told him he had three weeks to live, but died exactly three
|
|
weeks later, struck by a crosstown bus in front of Tulku's steam
|
|
grate. There was the Lotto pool of doormen which accurately played the
|
|
winning number Tulku had given them. There was the blind woman who
|
|
could suddenly see, after accidentally striking Tulku with her cane,
|
|
the mugger who beheld God when attempting to steal Tulku's meager
|
|
alms, and countless other stories of a similar sort. Some, including
|
|
beat cops, cab drivers, and other reputable witnesses, even claimed to
|
|
have seen Tulku levitate above his gridiron perch, amid a pungent
|
|
cloud of rising steam.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One of the new arrivals to the neighborhood, a young stockbroker
|
|
named Adam North, had also heard these stories, although he
|
|
disbelieved them and scoffed at those who gave them credence. His
|
|
wife, Beth, had told him about the holy man of Park Avenue and said
|
|
that she had personally witnessed the snow melting around him due to
|
|
some strange, inner energy which his person gave off. Adam, a graduate
|
|
of Princeton University, who held a Masters degree in Business
|
|
Administration, was a dollar-and-cents man and ridiculed such
|
|
superstitious tales as nonsensical hogwash.
|
|
|
|
Besides, he had more important things to think about, such as how to
|
|
keep his six-figure-a-year job with Merrill Lynch. Responsible for
|
|
handling the investments of some of the firm's most high-profile
|
|
clients, he was a sleek greyhound running the financial fast-track.
|
|
There was no going back for Adam. In his world you were either moving
|
|
forward or falling behind, and those who fell behind were toast.
|
|
|
|
Adam had, of course, passed Tulku's steam grate every day on his way
|
|
to and from the Lex, and frequently on weekends when he went down to
|
|
buy the paper and bagels and lox for breakfast. Often he even passed
|
|
Tulku's flower-strewn grate in the company of his wife.
|
|
|
|
But on all those occasions, Adam had deliberately not looked Tulku's
|
|
way. He shut the squatting mendicant from his mind, just as he
|
|
expelled all the city's other homeless beggars from his thoughts. Adam
|
|
didn't believe in giving charity to these parasites. On the contrary,
|
|
his attitude was that they should be taken somewhere en masse and put
|
|
out of their misery. This so-called "guru" was no different from the
|
|
others. He was just a whacko with mental problems. Why should Adam
|
|
make anything special of him?
|
|
|
|
Just the same, on one cold winter evening when Adam had drunk a little
|
|
too much with some clients after work, he reached into his pocket on a
|
|
whim as he passed the steam grate and tossed a handful of change into
|
|
Tulku's lap. Tulku did not, as usual, so much as glance up to
|
|
acknowledge the gift, and Adam, with a little snort of drunken
|
|
laughter, prepared to hurry upstairs to his duplex condo.
|
|
|
|
"Thank you, Adam," Tulku said before his benefactor had a chance to
|
|
take his first step, and the remark stopped Adam cold in his tracks.
|
|
|
|
"How did you know my name?" he asked Tulku. "My wife told you, right?
|
|
Or you overheard it on the street."
|
|
|
|
Tulku was now uncharacteristically looking up at Adam, and Adam's
|
|
first thought was that his eyes were beautiful. They were two large,
|
|
round pools, within whose limpid depths a great wisdom seemed to stir.
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Why do you hate me, Adam?" Tulku asked in a soft voice. "Is it
|
|
because you fear what you will become?"
|
|
|
|
"Hey, I don't _hate_ you, and I certainly don't _fear_ you," Adam
|
|
retorted with a show of contempt that surprised him. "And I sure as
|
|
hell won't ever _become_ you."
|
|
|
|
"Do not grieve for your brother Edward. He forgives you," Tulku said.
|
|
|
|
Adam gave Tulku a long, steely stare. He opened his mouth to say
|
|
something, but Tulku had already turned his face to the sidewalk and
|
|
had sunk into deep meditation. Adam hurried home through the biting
|
|
wind, thinking to himself that there was no possible way that the guy
|
|
could have known about Eddie.
|
|
|
|
Twenty-one years before, Adam's kid brother had drowned in a lake near
|
|
Allentown, Pennsylvania, the town where he had grown up. Nobody knew
|
|
that he had been responsible for Eddie's death. It had been an
|
|
accident and he had never told anybody about it. Not his wife, not his
|
|
parents, not the cops, though they'd tried every trick in the book to
|
|
get it out of him. Yet somehow, the homeless guy had known all about
|
|
what happened, just as though he'd been able to read Adam's thoughts.
|
|
|
|
That night, Adam continued the drinking he had begun at the bar near
|
|
his office, and his wife had begun to be more concerned than she
|
|
usually was on such occasions.
|
|
|
|
"You're white as a sheet," Beth remarked with trepidation. "What's
|
|
wrong, honey?"
|
|
|
|
"Nothing," Adam told her. "Leave me alone."
|
|
|
|
When she persisted, he went into the bathroom and locked himself
|
|
inside, sitting on the toilet seat with the neck of the bottle gripped
|
|
tightly in his hand.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The following day, Adam stood in front of the holy man. Tulku looked
|
|
up, his face a tabula rasa.
|
|
|
|
"How did you know about Eddie?" he asked.
|
|
|
|
"Do not fear this knowledge," Tulku replied. "He does not blame you. I
|
|
do not care."
|
|
|
|
"I asked you how you know," Adam pressed.
|
|
|
|
"I do not know how I know," Tulku answered with a guilelessness that
|
|
could not be disbelieved. "I just know."
|
|
|
|
"Okay," Adam said with a nod. "Tell me some more, then."
|
|
|
|
Tulku did. He told Adam about things Adam had not only told no one
|
|
else about, but did not even realize he himself knew. Adam was
|
|
dumbfounded, and he hurried away again, unable to accept what his eyes
|
|
and ears revealed to him. When he told Beth about the conversation
|
|
later on, she was amazed. She was even more amazed to hear Adam
|
|
announce his intention to have the holy man come up to the apartment
|
|
as a guest.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you would like me to go with you, I will," Tulku said when Adam
|
|
put the question to him on the cold, darkened street sometime later
|
|
that evening. Rising from his steam grate, he followed Adam along the
|
|
street.
|
|
|
|
Upstairs, Tulku sat in the Norths' living room and meditated, showing
|
|
the Norths how to do the basic yoga postures and breathing exercises
|
|
he had himself learned a lifetime before, while vacationing at Club
|
|
Med.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Adam's invitations to Tulku became more frequent as he and Beth
|
|
became more involved in yoga meditation exercises. Adam began growing
|
|
a beard, and eating macrobiotic foods. His after-work drinking stopped
|
|
and his interest in money and how to manipulate it began to be
|
|
replaced by concerns of a more spiritual nature. For his part, Tulku
|
|
began to become a fixture at the North household, often staying
|
|
overnight at their behest. Meanwhile, flowers continued to strew his
|
|
steam grate and alms were left at its side, even when he was no longer
|
|
there.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Early one morning, Adam rose from the crosslegged meditation posture
|
|
that he, Beth and Tulku had assumed on the living room carpet to leave
|
|
for work. After he was gone, Beth spoke candidly to Tulku.
|
|
|
|
"I've been meaning to tell you about something," she said to him. "But
|
|
I don't know how exactly."
|
|
|
|
"Speak," he said to her. "Just say it."
|
|
|
|
"I want to have sex with you," Beth told him.
|
|
|
|
Tulku looked at Beth without registering any emotion.
|
|
|
|
"If you would like me to have sex with you," he told her, "then I will
|
|
have sex with you."
|
|
|
|
Afterward, Beth told Tulku that she had felt herself levitate when she
|
|
climaxed. It was definitely a religious experience, she went on. She
|
|
didn't feel dirtied by it or anything. She didn't even feel like she
|
|
had cheated on Adam or anything either. In fact, she felt as if it
|
|
somehow bound them all together even more closely now.
|
|
|
|
How did Tulku feel about it, she wondered? Did he feel the same way?
|
|
|
|
Tulku just looked at her.
|
|
|
|
"The buffalo down the hill," is all he said in reply.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Several days later, as they sat in the Norths' living room, Adam
|
|
came to Tulku with a request of his own.
|
|
|
|
"I believe your steam grate is a holy place," he told Tulku. "I would
|
|
like to sit there."
|
|
|
|
"If you would like to sit on my steam grate," Tulku told him, "then
|
|
sit on my steam grate."
|
|
|
|
Adam's hair and beard had grown into a long, thick mass of tangled
|
|
curls by now, and with the layers of clothing he wore to keep out the
|
|
November chill, he looked enough like Tulku to be his fraternal twin.
|
|
With his head bowed in meditation, none of the passersby on the street
|
|
had any inkling that Tulku was in fact up in the Norths' bedroom
|
|
having sex with Adam's wife Beth, or that Beth's climaxes were of
|
|
consistently cosmic proportions.
|
|
|
|
The following morning was a Saturday, and Beth awoke to find Tulku
|
|
meditating in the lotus position on his side of the spacious,
|
|
queen-sized bed. She pecked him on the cheek, and informed him that
|
|
she had just had a visionary inspiration.
|
|
|
|
"Share it," Tulku told her.
|
|
|
|
"I was thinking you should cut your hair and shave off your beard,"
|
|
she explained to Tulku. "You would look much cuter that way."
|
|
|
|
"If that is what you would like to do, then cut my hair and shave my
|
|
beard," he informed Beth.
|
|
|
|
A little while later, Tulku was shown his image in the mirror that
|
|
Beth held out in front of him. She had cut his hair and shaved his
|
|
beard, just as she had seen in her vision.
|
|
|
|
"You know, you look a lot like Adam this way," she remarked. "Even a
|
|
little better. In fact, you could be his brother. It's just amazing."
|
|
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Later that morning, Tulku, wearing a quilted goose-down parka and
|
|
tailored jeans was sent down to Gristede's to buy bagels and lox and
|
|
then to the candy store to fetch the Sunday newspapers. On his way to
|
|
the store, he passed the steam grate where Adam sat meditating.
|
|
|
|
Peeling open one of the parka's Velcro pockets and reaching inside,
|
|
Tulku came up with a handful of loose change which he tossed to Adam,
|
|
and knew that yin and yang had once again completed another
|
|
permutation of their eternal mystic dance. Adam, who had become Tulku,
|
|
did not look up, and Tulku, now Adam, hurried to the store, his mind
|
|
on Beth's shopping list.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
"Another Poem Written on Company Time" by Robert W. Howington
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jesus, the philosopher (I don't
|
|
call him the Son of God, but
|
|
that's another poem), once told
|
|
his fans, "For the wages of sin
|
|
is death."
|
|
|
|
I sit here at my desk at work,
|
|
a career paper pusher for Uncle
|
|
Sam, thinking I'd much rather
|
|
plunder, rape, murder, pillage,
|
|
fuck, gamble and consume drugs
|
|
24-7-365 than work 8-to-5 for
|
|
40 years in a boring office,
|
|
plus be a goody two shoes the
|
|
whole time, and fucking die
|
|
anyway.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
"Chant" by Dr. William F. Lantry
|
|
|
|
|
|
"give him the darkest inch your shelf allows... "
|
|
--Robinson, on Crabbe
|
|
|
|
There's something in the half-forgotten words
|
|
she spoke tonight that lingers flickering
|
|
like candles on an altar with these prayers
|
|
abandoned to a broken window's wind;
|
|
there's something in this ritual that sings
|
|
of waves and broken wood. This evening
|
|
|
|
when souls are said to walk unbodied, I
|
|
again find incantations on my shelf
|
|
inadequate, like these few words, and hear
|
|
her lingered voice repeating what the nights
|
|
compile in their darknesses of sound,
|
|
those silken rushed confluences of hers
|
|
|
|
shipwrecked or saved or saving-- take the waves
|
|
as echoes of her voice continuing
|
|
and I, in this torn robe incanting on
|
|
this undetermined vision of return,
|
|
as if this very repetition of
|
|
her rhythms could reconjure her to me.
|
|
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
"Amazed by Her Beauty" by David Appell
|
|
|
|
|
|
Please, just let it be quiet.
|
|
|
|
Nothing can be worse than this. The noise; and the screaming. We were
|
|
just sitting there, on break. Wilkins made a joke, something lame.
|
|
Jesus, what did he say. It came out of nowhere, landed behind them.
|
|
Couldn't have been more than fifteen, twenty yards away. When I was in
|
|
the air I saw Ronnie's body, bending around, saw him jerk like a
|
|
marionette, slow motion, I'm tellin' you. Then his leg was yanked
|
|
away, like it was no longer his. Like it was theirs. I hit and sucked
|
|
in my stomach and pressed into the ground, made myself as small as
|
|
possible. Smaller. Jesus. I had my hand over my helmet when the
|
|
shooting started, and all I could think of was get my fingers away,
|
|
get them down so I didn't lose any. My uncle lost one in an accident,
|
|
and I always thought it looked ridiculous, a hand with three fingers
|
|
and a thumb, with a big gap between them. So I shoved my hands under
|
|
my face, shook, prayed, listened. I swear I could hear the bodies rip.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jesus God, what did Wilkins say.
|
|
|
|
And now there's screaming, just scared, coward-screaming. Who cares.
|
|
It sounds like laughter, the way all the individual screams mix all
|
|
together. Who would have thought. Now this one big mixed-up scream's
|
|
gotta life of its own, coming down from the trees and the hills and up
|
|
from the ground, and this bastard scream is mocking everything, even
|
|
itself. Who knew there was so much screaming in war.
|
|
|
|
Focus. Focus. God, there's dirt in my mouth. Dry, flat-tasting, like
|
|
that year in Pony League. Came into second, not sure about sliding,
|
|
and I decided too late. I heard my leg snap and knew right away it I
|
|
broke it. No pain at first but then like a flood, and I knew. I rolled
|
|
over and laid there with my face in the dirt and started crying. I
|
|
didn't care. Dirt; fine, light brown, kinda dusty. Dirt nothing was
|
|
ever going to grow in. The coaches came out, people standing around.
|
|
My tears fell into that dirt and made little spots, black and moist,
|
|
made it look fertile, like dirt in a garden, like my grandma's. Just
|
|
like this dirt. Like that's all it takes for the possibility of life,
|
|
a tear here and there.
|
|
|
|
I was thirteen. Kinda old, but I cried. I couldn't help it.
|
|
|
|
Oh shit that was close. I heard it zip. Oh Jesus, I'm gonna die. I'm
|
|
gonna die. Nothing's gonna survive this. Face it. Jesus, I don't wanna
|
|
die. Everybody says that but shit most of the time it's just talkin',
|
|
just some lame joke. It doesn't mean nothing. What else is there, but
|
|
living? Dying wasn't real - not growin' up, not in Basic, not even
|
|
after I got here and started walkin' around this damn jungle, wet and
|
|
sore and tired all the time. Dying - I mean, Jesus, that's what
|
|
happens to other people, to old people, something that happens in the
|
|
city. Come on, not here. Not now. I got people I told I was comin'
|
|
back. Family, cousins. They made me promise. I promised.
|
|
|
|
It's not gonna matter. Dig in deeper. Dig it does matter God dammit.
|
|
Deeper.
|
|
|
|
Pictures in my vest, I can feel'em.
|
|
|
|
A wallet, worn, cheap leather. I keep it wrapped in plastic, keep it
|
|
dry. A picture my mom gave me, the morning I left - the house, from
|
|
the front. Green grass, rose buds next to the porch. Shit. Another one
|
|
in front of my grandparent's garage, a big game of poker on a card
|
|
table, my cousins and an uncle, my pap and me. We'd started with fifty
|
|
pennies; a pop cost five cents. My little sister Megan would run
|
|
inside and get you a loan from the piggy bank but you had to promise
|
|
she could stand in front of your chair, between your legs, and let her
|
|
play your next hand. We let her win, and my pap drove us out to
|
|
Harkins for ice cream, and she paid for it. My pictures.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Suddenly. . . nothing. Just like that, quick again. I'm not lookin'.
|
|
I can't even breathe normal; I got my face buried and I'm just
|
|
listening. Like never before. No movement, no screaming. Some moaning,
|
|
some crying. Someone's sucking air like through a pipe. Someone's
|
|
gonna return fire. Someone's gonna come around, check for wounded or
|
|
call a retreat. Someone's gonna stand up and do it. . . not me, shit,
|
|
but someone. . . don't even know where my damn rifle is. That'd happen
|
|
your first fight, they said. I'm just stay here, wait. Stay small.
|
|
|
|
The wallet's jammin' in my ribs, pushing, pokin', like it wants in all
|
|
the way. It's gotten fat, mostly Kristie. There's a way to take the
|
|
taste of dirt outta my mouth, to make this all go away, lose all this
|
|
in the night and then let her hold me until this whole thing is over
|
|
with, like a bad dream the sun takes away. I was with her, just that
|
|
once, two days before I left. We talked about waitin' 'til I came
|
|
back, 'til we were married, but leavin' got too much, we got too
|
|
close, and there was only one way to get closer. God we shoulda done
|
|
it a thousand times.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
She lived four houses down Cleary Road, like she'd been there
|
|
always. Growing up I didn't pay much attention; I played ball, rode my
|
|
bike, pissed around in the woods with Ricky and Steve. The girls,
|
|
they'd point at us, whisper and giggle, we'd shout something and ride
|
|
off, confused and embarrassed and kinda proud too about somethin'.
|
|
That summer I broke my leg I didn't know how, how they could make us
|
|
feel all those things at once, and without Kristie I mighta never
|
|
knew. But one day when I was laying half-naked on the couch in our
|
|
living room with that plaster cast propped up on throw pillows,
|
|
killing flies and sweating and wantin' to be anywhere else, she
|
|
knocked on the screen door and asked if she could come in. She had a
|
|
pie her mother baked and some ice cream and a book, and she said she
|
|
felt sorry for me having to lie there all alone when it was so hot,
|
|
and so she came to read me a story. I went to put on my shirt but she
|
|
smiled and said, don't worry, I've seen a boy's bare chest before.
|
|
Without much to say I laid there and ate pie and ice cream and watched
|
|
her read _Catcher in the Rye_. She came back the next day and read
|
|
again, and by the end a that summer she'd gone through a few more
|
|
books that I don't remember, but I began living for her knock on that
|
|
door and the way she smelled and to see what kind a ribbon she had in
|
|
her hair that day. Towards the end she started putting the book down,
|
|
kinda bold, and told me about her little sister, about her daddy's new
|
|
ridin' tractor and her plans for freshman year. I was still on
|
|
crutches when school came in September, and not even asking she just
|
|
came by in the mornings, took my books and walked me slow to the bus
|
|
stop. And I started noticing how people began talking not to me or to
|
|
her but to us, and they didn't laugh or smirk or roll their eyes like
|
|
in Junior High.
|
|
|
|
It was still another year, almost two before we started goin' out. By
|
|
then we were best friends, and the rest came just like dandelions in
|
|
June. Only once was it rough, in our junior year when Bobby Murdoch
|
|
started lookin' at her, talkin' to her with his long hair, and one of
|
|
her girlfriends said, why not, it'd expand her horizons. Kristie
|
|
wanted to see other people, said it'd be good for us, said she
|
|
decided. It was two months, worse for me, but after we got back
|
|
together there wasn't much doubt I don't think for neither of us. We
|
|
coulda done it then. We did everything else that last year. Then just
|
|
after graduation I got my draft notice.
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The moans are getting quieter. I can hear the birds again, high up;
|
|
they sound pissed, I can hear it, resentful, but seem to know it won't
|
|
help. I can hear. . . there's. . . shit, there's someone, I think,
|
|
someone walking, maybe us maybe not. Jesus, don't move, can't if I
|
|
wanted to, can't look, can't think of nothin' else. Oh God, let it be
|
|
someone who's come to help. Please. Please. Please.
|
|
|
|
Shit! they're talkin', somethin', not too loud, but shit oh God it's
|
|
just quick and oh shit real fast like they do and something's rippin'
|
|
my heart out all of a sudden it ain't us, no one comin' here to help
|
|
us, just them, comin' in to clear the area, just like we'd do if we we
|
|
laid down fire. Oh man how're they here already there's another one,
|
|
another voice, high like they have, and oh no a quick burst and oh
|
|
fuck. . . .
|
|
|
|
They're killin' the wounded.
|
|
|
|
Oh no no no I gotta think I can't think I can't and Jesus there's
|
|
another one ain't there any of us left but me and no it can't be no. I
|
|
gotta stop breathin', I gotta try just real small in and out like I
|
|
ain't and maybe they'll think I'm gone, leave me alone and what else
|
|
is there to do. . . ah another shot more shots they're probably
|
|
shootin' everyone just to make sure just like we'd do too admit it
|
|
that's what we learned not back there in Basic, God that was nice,
|
|
that was easy, nothing at all, but after we got here there's rules
|
|
Wilkins said and then there's rules Oh Jesus God damn them.
|
|
|
|
But I gotta breathe, more, this ain't enough, I gotta, real small, it
|
|
hurts, maybe like dying hurts, but I'm real scared what else am I
|
|
gonna do. I want to breathe, I can't. . . like underwater, like below
|
|
the surface of a lake or somethin', ripples and the sun shimmerin' off
|
|
the surface lookin' up, when I look up, air and life and everything I
|
|
ever wanted but I know that I can't come out there's worse things than
|
|
not breathin' ain't there there is. God God it's a baptism
|
|
never-endin' just water just dunked in water and not allowed out and
|
|
what am I gonna do I gotta end it end it myself there's no choice and
|
|
I can't even cry and. . . clench my teeth, real tight, try to suck
|
|
some air just a tiny bit into me don't move don't let them know just
|
|
suck and don't move anything at all Again! another burst just over
|
|
there closer God God loud no listen some loud drawn-out shit hell
|
|
Ronnie isn't it yes it is Jesus what was he thinkin' lying there all
|
|
this time with only one leg.
|
|
|
|
Oh no after everything, after what's comin' up when I get back, not
|
|
like this after those hot hot summer days playin' ball swimming down
|
|
at Jacob's falls cold water and fall and winter sled riding until we
|
|
were half-froze, coming in to thaw out hurtin' when our feet started
|
|
to warm up and it was OK to cry? Jesus there wasn't enough and now I
|
|
want waking up next to Kristie every morning and in the evening dusk
|
|
walkin' with her and lookin' just lookin' and is it all gonna end with
|
|
me lying here in this dirt alone like this just like this and now I
|
|
ain't never gonna see her with no baby God I was lookin' forward to
|
|
that. Both her sisters got real big with theirs and one day it struck
|
|
me how there ain't nothin' better and once last summer we went out to
|
|
Brady Lake and she was tan and smooth and I asked her to stick her
|
|
belly out. . . up and out far and I ran my hand over it and 'round it
|
|
and then I took her picture her actin' all swollen up and tryin' not
|
|
to laugh but her eyes sparkling and just then I snapped it and got it
|
|
now in my wallet and that's all it's gonna ever be is a picture ain't
|
|
it ain't it?
|
|
|
|
Jesus Christ another shot something air leaving and a branch snapped
|
|
and my heart is pounding to explode and run run the legs won't move no
|
|
for sure they'll get you just stay here don't let it drive you fuckin'
|
|
crazy the fear don't breathe don't move don't move. Just a few! feet
|
|
away three three quick shots and something stops they are so close
|
|
hurts my ears some words I don't understand and what are they doing
|
|
just standin' there my face is in the dirt and I can't tell. . . How
|
|
many just two or a whole platoon and oh fuck they're probably lookin'
|
|
around don't breathe to see who else is alive those bastards killing
|
|
just like we do what else we got comin'? towering over me I can feel
|
|
them big and big and thinkin' they got the power just cause a that gun
|
|
in their arm just like I seen guys in my company and if they knew
|
|
maybe dead now they do how just all you want is bein' alive.
|
|
|
|
Them sharp words commands don't breathe and FUCK! someone steps in my
|
|
direction I can tell I can slowly but I know it I know everything now
|
|
this wallet I know it and FUCK! it's all I got all I have left just an
|
|
image of what there was and oh but how important that is right now
|
|
just this paper these symbols and maybe I'm gone but maybe they won't
|
|
and maybe what's left will keep them safe and that's what I want now
|
|
nothin' else and the hell with me they can take me but not these
|
|
they're mine and they don't know no not me not me not me.
|
|
|
|
Don't move don't but move and move, lean so they can't tell, roll roll
|
|
don't breathe get my back 'tween the wallet and the guns an don't move
|
|
but I gotta have to not and have to breathe soon and just do it now
|
|
for once just do it and just DO IT and. . . no no no. . . oh how it
|
|
would feel breathin' but no but someone yells and someone else i can
|
|
hear i can and oh God Pap wasn't that great and Megan that hair the
|
|
way it would blow and my mom kiss on the cheek just once more and and
|
|
i can't even smile now that i have to. . . oh my God. . . stick my
|
|
belly out Kristie i see you the lake all that air and my belly out now
|
|
got it out can't get it out no further don't care gotta breathe how
|
|
many no no and it's wet Kristie but no more and. . . and. . . gotta
|
|
now gotta move AIR!! and there it is i'm comin' up i'm breakin'
|
|
through the surface and the sun is so bright Kristie and . . . oh my
|
|
you are so. . . beautiful.
|
|
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
"Narrowing the Meanings" by Bardofbyte
|
|
|
|
|
|
Were I to say I love you what precisely would I mean?
|
|
Love, the word is used too often.
|
|
Don't the sages of conscience dictate that love
|
|
is what I should feel for all humanity?
|
|
So how can the same word cover
|
|
what I'm supposed to feel for both you and them?
|
|
|
|
Take a gold brick, a good solid piece,
|
|
it has weight and depth
|
|
and all its worth can be embraced
|
|
in just one hand.
|
|
Now exploit its malleability,
|
|
hammer it, hammer again, and again,
|
|
pound it to a sheet a mile square.
|
|
What results?
|
|
Tissue
|
|
almost transparent, with hardly any weight or depth.
|
|
Try covering a multitude with such a sheet;
|
|
a twitch of a finger, a drop of rain
|
|
and the sheet shreds.
|
|
|
|
What other word could I use to describe
|
|
my feelings for you?
|
|
An honest, lawyer-like accurate word?
|
|
Exhibit A,
|
|
this wide angle photo of you at Coney Island.
|
|
My eyes become telescopic,
|
|
so many other faces surround you but I
|
|
focus
|
|
sharply and instantly
|
|
on you.
|
|
My eyes resolve
|
|
the design on your blouse
|
|
and even the freckles on your face.
|
|
The surrounding faces are blurs.
|
|
The objective eye would discern different details,
|
|
but to me
|
|
you
|
|
are my focus,
|
|
my focus.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
"Wisdom's Maw" (an excerpt) by Todd Brendan Fahey
|
|
|
|
Visit Todd Brendan Fahey's web site to read more about his
|
|
soon-to-be-published book _Wisdom's Maw_.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jack Kerouac stepped off the plane at San Francisco International,
|
|
everything he owned in a rucksack, a scowl pinching his sunparched
|
|
face. Raising his eyes to a stewardess, he started to say something
|
|
but couldn't get the words out, and settled instead for an embarrassed
|
|
shrug and the involuntary flapping of hands at the waist. The lights
|
|
of the terminal hurt his eyes, which were moist in their sockets and
|
|
rimmed in shades of vermillion. He lit a cigarette and shuffled slowly
|
|
to the entrance of gate 42, where Neal and Carlo would be waiting for
|
|
him, if they weren't still sucking each other's cock at Carlo's
|
|
apartment, or off speeding God knows where, oblivious to the haggard
|
|
traveler from Long Island with phlebitis in his legs and a heart so
|
|
heavy it felt like it could sometimes damn near fall out through the
|
|
stomach floor.
|
|
|
|
The writer grimaced as he pushed his way through a thicket of spades
|
|
blocking the exit. Everywhere he looked, some foreigner, a Jew, sat
|
|
savoring an evening in an America he used to have doing tricks for him
|
|
through a hoop. He walked past a man in a turban and caught a waft of
|
|
body odor so bad that he spun around and screamed at the man to take a
|
|
bath or get out of his country, for Chrissakes. The man stared, saying
|
|
nothing, until Jack waved him off, muttering something about being
|
|
poor once, too.
|
|
|
|
Seeing only a seething, unfamiliar mass, he sped to a jog and ducked
|
|
into the nearest cocktail lounge, where he tossed his sack under the
|
|
barstool. "You gotta Jameson's with 'ol Jack's name on it?" he
|
|
slubbered.
|
|
|
|
The bartender nodded slowly. "I've got forty two kinds of liquor, with
|
|
blanks for just about every name in the book. Jack's as good as any, I
|
|
guess."
|
|
|
|
Kerouac leaned forward. "Bet'cha never poured Jameson's for a living
|
|
godblessed author."
|
|
|
|
The bartender set two ounces of whiskey down in front of Jack. "Last
|
|
week I served a creme de menthe to Saul Bellow."
|
|
|
|
A flush of violet passed over Jack's stubbly jowls. He slapped his
|
|
hand hard on the counter. "Saul Bellow, well, well! I wish I coulda
|
|
been here, barkeep. You gotta tell me, was Saul with the other rabbis?
|
|
Herbert Gold, maybe? Ha!" he bellowed, drawing stares from every
|
|
direction. "Piss'n their creme de menthe. Another whiskey for the King
|
|
o' the Beats!"
|
|
|
|
Carlo and Neal heard Jack raving from two gates away. By the time they
|
|
reached the lounge, the bartender had cut off his tab and was
|
|
threatening to call security. Carlo pulled him off the stool, while
|
|
Neal flung the heavy sack over a shoulder with a snap of his left
|
|
wrist.
|
|
|
|
"H'lo Carlo, Neal," Jack grinned sheepishly, staggering out into the
|
|
terminal. "Guess I kinda made a fuss back there, huh?"
|
|
|
|
Neal Cassady was nursing one of his long silences. He walked with Jack
|
|
and Carlo, bobbing his head every so often until reaching the parking
|
|
lot, where Jack laid a sodden stare on a mint condition two-toned
|
|
Hudson, complete with spare tire affixed to the trunk.
|
|
|
|
"Thought you said you was broke," Jack gaped. "Damn, that's a
|
|
beeeuuuuuutiful machine, where'd you steal her from?"
|
|
|
|
Neal said nothing, just nodded his head and shrugged.
|
|
|
|
"We put a downpayment on it Friday," Carlo answered. "Neal got a small
|
|
settlement from the railroad for ruining his thumb."
|
|
|
|
Jack looked down and noticed for the first time a huge dirty bandage
|
|
covering half of Neal's right hand. The tape was unraveling, and a
|
|
section flapped against his wrist.
|
|
|
|
"He broke the thumb at the nail. Infection set in," Carlo frowned.
|
|
"Neal's pace isn't conducive to injury, I'm afraid."
|
|
|
|
Neal pointed at a tube in the breast pocket of Carlo's shirt.
|
|
|
|
Carlo shook his head. "You've had enough already, Neal. You're wired."
|
|
Then he offered a tab to Kerouac, who hesitated briefly, before
|
|
popping it into his mouth.
|
|
|
|
"This isn't going to be some big queer session, is it?" Kerouac
|
|
muttered. "I don't go in for that stuff anymore. Wasn't big on it to
|
|
begin with, y' know."
|
|
|
|
"I know, Jack," Carlo nodded, and began driving down the coast.
|
|
|
|
Jack stared out at the water, feeling the amphetamine course through
|
|
his veins--a chill that ran clear through to his fingertips. The late
|
|
October surf smashed against the cliffside, turning to foam, then out
|
|
again, gaining strength to beat down upon the jagged rocks. Jack
|
|
rolled down his window. The frigid air whipped his overheated forehead
|
|
and snapped his neck back stiffly. He inhaled deeply, but instead of
|
|
sea salts drew in a stinking, vaporous iodine so vile he grabbed the
|
|
handle and reeled the window up furiously. The scent he kept to
|
|
himself, but the reaction sucked him down into the passenger seat and
|
|
saw him pulling his coat tightly around his chest as Carlo sailed down
|
|
Pacific Coast Highway, dragging heavily on a joint and bobbing his
|
|
head to a John Coltrane riff blasting out of the tape player in the
|
|
dash.
|
|
|
|
Neal straightened up from the back seat, pushing his head over Carlo's
|
|
shoulder. "Can you hear it? The reed vibrating so perfectly, so
|
|
acutely aware of the moment, not the past or what's going to happen
|
|
two seconds from now, but NOW, right this very heavenly second when
|
|
the tongue and the teeth come in contact with that stiff li'l reed and
|
|
BLEEEEEEAAAAAUUUUUUWWWW!!!"
|
|
|
|
Jack Kerouac smiled for the first time in many weeks. "Good to have y'
|
|
back, Neal, you crazy angel."
|
|
|
|
Neal patted Jack on the shoulder and kissed him fast on the cheek.
|
|
"Never gone, Jack, just restrained from the spoken element of the
|
|
moment. Every once in a while even a motormouth like your's truly
|
|
needs a li'l calm and respite in his life."
|
|
|
|
Jack reached down into his sack and grabbed a bottle of whiskey by the
|
|
neck and gulped down the last two or three ounces. "Know've a good
|
|
liquor store 'round here, Carlo? Looks like I'm outta sust'nance."
|
|
|
|
Carlo shook his head. "Try some of this," he smiled, passing him a
|
|
joint.
|
|
|
|
Jack shrugged several times, then began to whimper. "Oh...c'mon, pal.
|
|
I'd score you a lid if you ran out of smoke. You know I would. C'mon,
|
|
I'll just be in and out. Look, I've got my own money," he nodded,
|
|
pulling out his wallet and flashing two hundred dollars in crumpled
|
|
bills. "I just cashed my check from Esquire for the piece I wrote on
|
|
what's left of us Beats."
|
|
|
|
Carlo smiled and kept driving as the Hudson sped smoothly down the
|
|
California coastline, thick masses of fir engulfing the hillside
|
|
toward Big Sur.
|
|
|
|
Neal leaned up and over Jack, sticking his broken Roman nose out the
|
|
window. "Heaven can't smell much better than this, m'friends. And in
|
|
fact, it would not surprise me one tiny iota to find at the inevitable
|
|
moment that the Pearly Gates open up right here where it is we're
|
|
going. What about it, Carlo?"
|
|
|
|
Carlo chuckled, mumbling something about a poem in Neal's primitive
|
|
Christian instincts: "`A Heaven on Earth, and Its Name is Big Sur,'"
|
|
Carlo giggled.
|
|
|
|
To Jack it felt like Hell. Every so often, he would dig deep into his
|
|
sack, just to see if he might have smuggled some lone mini-bottle from
|
|
the airplane. Defeated, he finally took the joint from the ashtray and
|
|
began frantically sucking its marrow. The station on which Coltrane
|
|
was blowing his horn fell to static in the fog of the wriggling
|
|
coastal highway. Jack tried not to hear Carlo and Neal laughing at
|
|
him, or notice the big, sinister trees on the sides of the road, like
|
|
something he had seen once as a child under a high fever, the gnarled,
|
|
hairy arms that stretched over the road, fondling the stolen Hudson,
|
|
dropping bits of nature's filthy decay onto the windshield.
|
|
|
|
"Hurryup," Jack grimaced. "There's cops all over this road. One look
|
|
at us, and we're on the inside fr'at least a week."
|
|
|
|
"Alright, Jack," Carlo said calmly, sensing Kerouac's desperation.
|
|
"We're almost there."
|
|
|
|
Neal put his hands on his old friend's shoulders and began rubbing
|
|
them, filling Jack with nausea at the memory of his sporadic
|
|
homosexual encountersDnights of stoned youth, stumbling back to some
|
|
grungy North Beach rooming house he had shared with his road partner,
|
|
full of wine and gage and the tender euphoria of Neal Cassady fucking
|
|
him in the ass. Jack pushed Neal's hands aside and crouched forward
|
|
into a rumpled ball.
|
|
|
|
The Hudson pulled to a soft dirt trail and came to a stop in front of
|
|
a rambling, splintered cabin. "Ours for the weekend, Jack. Isn't she
|
|
lovely?"
|
|
|
|
Sack clutched tightly in his fist, Jack bounded out of the Hudson and
|
|
stretched his legs, breathing the fragrant mists of Bixby Canyon. A
|
|
bluejay hopped down a thick bough and began screeching at him. He
|
|
cringed and ran into the unlocked shack and almost over a stately,
|
|
silver-haired man who sat in the livingroom, drinking a glass of port.
|
|
The man recoiled upon seeing his friend's bloated red face.
|
|
|
|
"Jack!?" he smiled, his right eyebrow raised askance.
|
|
|
|
The traveler nodded quickly, then began rifling through the kitchen
|
|
cupboards for something stronger than wine.
|
|
|
|
Carlo and Neal walked into the cabin, whereupon the former apologized
|
|
to Harve Serengeti for their friend's general lack of decorum. "He's
|
|
in terrible shape, Harve. I hope he won't ruin your taste for
|
|
hospitality."
|
|
|
|
Serengeti shook his head and was silent for a long moment, watching
|
|
helplessly as Jack poured more than a pint of whiskey down his throat.
|
|
He loved Jack. They all loved Jack. Crowds of noisy street-poets in
|
|
front of his Holding Hands bookstore in 1954 filled Serengeti's
|
|
memory. Carlo standing full of nerves and wine, letting out for the
|
|
first time the majestic stanzas of Growl, the unruly audience falling
|
|
into an anxious calm. In the stillness, Jack had raised his jug of
|
|
burgundy, and began chanting, "Go, Go, Go..." And then Neal
|
|
intertwined his own methedrine rap, and within minutes Harve Serengeti
|
|
was host to the birth of a revolutionDCarlo Marx stripping off his
|
|
white tunic and dancing naked at Broadway and Columbus, dozens of
|
|
pipes sending a pungent cloud through the air and into the straight
|
|
world only a street away, and Jack, sweet Jack, clapping so oblivious,
|
|
and not one policeman intervened.
|
|
|
|
"How long has he been like this?"
|
|
|
|
Carlo shrugged and shook his head. "He's been living with his mother
|
|
on Long Island since '61. He doesn't speak to anyone. It's really
|
|
nearly a miracle that something in Neal's letter got him out of the
|
|
house."
|
|
|
|
Jack screwed the cap back on the bottle, smiling through a bleary
|
|
mask, then hugged Serengeti tightly around his shoulder. "Don't worry,
|
|
'arve, I'll pick up a coupl'a replacements. Jack's no freeloader,
|
|
y'know. Not like Neal," he spat. "When'sa last time you paid fr'yrown
|
|
liquor, Neal? Bought y'rown pills? Huh!? Nobody ever called Jack a
|
|
freeloader, no, no."
|
|
|
|
"I think it's time for some food," Harve whispered. "I thought we'd go
|
|
the cafe at Nepenthe."
|
|
|
|
Neal shuffled through his pockets, then scratched his chest.
|
|
"I'll...ahh...stick around and watch the house, Harve. How about
|
|
that?"
|
|
|
|
"Let's go, Neal," he nodded. "I'm sure there's a couple times I never
|
|
paid you for watching my store. We'll call it even with dinner."
|
|
|
|
Neal's head bobbed spasmodically, his face brightening as he threw one
|
|
arm around Harve and the other around Kerouac. "I know you don't mean
|
|
it, Jack. You've been, and will always be, my brother."
|
|
|
|
Jean Louis Kerouac sobbed quietly and continuously from Serengeti's
|
|
cabin to the restaurant, wiping the tears quickly and frequently on
|
|
the sleeve of his flannel shirt, hoping no one would notice. Nepenthe
|
|
reminded him of an old wine-and-coffeehouse in North Beach, where he
|
|
used to write for blocks of ten hours at a clip, after cracking open a
|
|
couple benzedrine inhalers and dumping the camphorous strips into a
|
|
cup of black Turkish coffee. Neal would come over to his table all
|
|
excited, pointing out the shortest skirts, and Jack would shoo him off
|
|
like a dungfly with his left hand, still pounding out fifty-words a
|
|
minute with his right. He finished On the Road in twelve days. That
|
|
was 1952. Now his stomach turned just thinking about that camphorous
|
|
paper.
|
|
|
|
A cluster of long-haired men sat laughing and passing a joint around
|
|
their table on the sunbathed redwood deck. "Bet they're communists,"
|
|
he mumbled to himself. "That, or fairies."
|
|
|
|
A table was waiting for Serengeti near a window which overlooked a
|
|
forest of thick scented pines. Neal nodded appreciatively, rubbed his
|
|
stomach and squeezed Serengeti by the bicep. Harve patted Neal's
|
|
shoulder and smiled.
|
|
|
|
Kerouac refused a menu from the waitress. "A fifth of Canadian Club
|
|
and a bucket'o ice," he growled.
|
|
|
|
Carlo leaned forward. "How about a hamburger, too?"
|
|
|
|
Jack crouched in his chair, grimacing. "Quit looking at me! All I
|
|
want'sa goddamn bottle of whiskey! Jeez, y'racting like Mom."
|
|
|
|
Carlo started to say something, but Harve waved him off. "There's
|
|
nothing anyone can do," he smiled thinly.
|
|
|
|
Jack nodded his head furiously. "Thass right. Nothin' anyone can do
|
|
f'r'ol' Jack. Pity don't work, can't get any respect from the
|
|
criticsDthe Jews. Y'wanna know how much I made last year? Huh?"
|
|
|
|
Serengeti lifted his shoulders in an embarrassed shrug, but said
|
|
nothing.
|
|
|
|
"Eighteen hundred dollars, thass what! Nobody buys my books anymore.
|
|
Kids steal 'em, the Jews call 'em trash. Say I'm a imbecile, brain's
|
|
gone soft," Jack shouted, his eyes full of tears. "I just got so tired
|
|
of waiting, 'arve. Took the Jew bastards five years to figger out On
|
|
the Road was some kind'a genius. They said they couldn't take it,
|
|
'cause it was written on a big roll of teletype paper. Said it looked
|
|
like a salami. Said it was weird. Five years. A man loses part of his
|
|
spirit wait'n 'round that long," he whispered, raising the glass to
|
|
his lips. "Gotta get some comfort somewhere."
|
|
|
|
After dinner, Carlo rubbed his huge beard, then his tummy, and told
|
|
the men of his standing invitation at the Esalen Institute, and of its
|
|
24-hour redwood hot tub. Jack shrugged and nodded, breaking into
|
|
something of a smile. The Hudson rolled south down Highway 1 about
|
|
seven miles, then fell abruptly down a steep driveway overlooking the
|
|
great, rippling blackness of the Pacific ocean. Esalen availed itself
|
|
as a week-long session in self-discovery to those who could afford it.
|
|
But neighbors said strange drugs were used; there were hints of
|
|
orgies, and muted howling could be heard on clear nights.
|
|
|
|
Carlo looked at his watch and walked into the lodge at 9:45 p.m.,
|
|
where he recognized Milosz Grosz, the Czech "migr" who served as
|
|
Esalen's staff therapist. The poet approached the doctor with a smile,
|
|
hand outstretched. "We met last year at a symposium for the American
|
|
Academy of Psychedelic Therapy," Carlo said.
|
|
|
|
Dr. Grosz nodded distractedly. "Of course. You are poet-revolutionary
|
|
with unfortunate surname."
|
|
|
|
Carlo laughed loudly and clapped his hands. "Maybe some day I'll have
|
|
it changed. I've brought some friends, and we'd like to make use of
|
|
the hot tub. Of course, if--"
|
|
|
|
Dr. Grosz shook his head. "Make yourself comfortable." Looking out the
|
|
window, he took notice of the three companions. "You must excuse me. I
|
|
have work. A pleasure to meet you again, Mr. Marx." The doctor trotted
|
|
into a conference room, closing the door solidly behind him. General
|
|
William Creasy sat at the head of the oblong table, surrounded by most
|
|
of the staff of Project MK-ULTRA. "Most unusual visit, General," he
|
|
said. "Two of the famous Beat writers wish to bathe in our tub."
|
|
|
|
The word "Beat" snapped Creasy's head upright from where it had hung
|
|
over a pile of clinical profiles. "Who?!"
|
|
|
|
"The poet Carlo Marx and three of his friends. I know only Mr.
|
|
Kerouac, not the others."
|
|
|
|
Creasy giggled like a child on his fifth Twinkie. "Doc, do we have any
|
|
LSD on the premises?"
|
|
|
|
Dr. Grosz shuffled in his seat. "Well..."
|
|
|
|
"Get it," Creasy grinned. "And give it to every one of them. Slip it
|
|
in their drinks. I want to see what happens."
|
|
|
|
The doctor hedged.
|
|
|
|
"Goddamnit, I've been left out of the loop for nine years now, and I
|
|
demand to see results."
|
|
|
|
Dr. Grosz left his seat and picked up a phone in the corner of the
|
|
room. After some whispering, he cradled the receiver and returned to
|
|
the table. "I will leave before it takes effect. I do not condone this
|
|
type of practice."
|
|
|
|
Creasy waved off his complaints, and returned to a thin folder.
|
|
"You've studied the file, doctor. What can we expect from Franklin
|
|
Moore?"
|
|
|
|
Dr. Grosz opened a copy of the chart from the Menlo Park Veterans
|
|
Hospital. Nodding slowly, an upturned crease developed in the center
|
|
of his gaunt face. "Young Mr. Moore is amazing patient. He possesses
|
|
almost perfect control under tremendous psychological strain. His
|
|
verbal and mathematical skills while under LSD-25 are the highest I
|
|
have ever had the pleasure of analyzing. Will you have him as part of
|
|
your government, perhaps? He is born leader."
|
|
|
|
General Creasy smiled. "He'll be well-placed, doctor. Thank you for
|
|
your concern."
|
|
|
|
"If that is all," Grosz nodded, "I will retire to my bungalow. I wish
|
|
to know nothing of the activities of Mr. Marx and his friends," he
|
|
frowned, then slipped out a side door and walked in the moonlight
|
|
through a thicket of trees to his cabin.
|
|
|
|
Carlo, Harve and Neal each slid completely out of their clothes and
|
|
into the hot tub, leaving Jack in a well-worn pair of boxers, pacing
|
|
back and forth in indecision. His bloated stomach stood as a grim
|
|
testament to years of excessDno longer the stocky athletic build of
|
|
his football years at Columbia, but almost corpselike in its advanced
|
|
state of putrefaction. He coughed violently, registering to the
|
|
painful spasms in his gut. Before a handsome waiter could kneel to
|
|
serve the men in the tub, Jack swiped a glass of wine from the tray.
|
|
|
|
"Compliments of Esalen," the waiter said.
|
|
|
|
Carlo smiled back at the man, winking through his heavy black frames.
|
|
"Care to join us?"
|
|
|
|
The waiter issued a professional apology, placed a stack of oversized
|
|
towels on a chair, then disappeared inside the lodge, leaving Carlo
|
|
somewhat anguished.
|
|
|
|
"It's hell getting old," he said. "I used to be able to attract the
|
|
loveliest menDall over the world. I remember in Tangier--"
|
|
|
|
Neal moved closer and laid his head on Carlo's hairy chest. "I'll help
|
|
you out, if you need it, old friend. Can't count the times you've
|
|
parted your various orifices for me in my times of desperate carnal
|
|
need."
|
|
|
|
Harve smiled at the two, then excused himself to savor his wine on a
|
|
reclining deck chair, wrapping himself in a towel. Jack had polished
|
|
off his glass in two gulps and was looking fruitlessly around for
|
|
more. He finally sat down beside his patron and publisher.
|
|
|
|
"Bright little buggers," Jack said, staring up at the crowded,
|
|
blinking sky. "Feels like they're talking to me," he giggled. "`H'lo
|
|
up there. H'lo...whadd'ya think they're trying to tell me, 'arve? Must
|
|
be pretty important, for all the chatterin' they're doin'. Look at
|
|
'em."
|
|
|
|
Harve Serengeti stared at Jack Kerouac, then into his own wine glass,
|
|
feeling the trees beginning to come alive...the sounds of the ocean
|
|
more restless as the LSD entered his brain. "It's okay, Jack. Have fun
|
|
with it," he said, then whispered to Carlo and Neal, who were heating
|
|
up the tub. "Do you feel something? I think our drinks are salted."
|
|
|
|
Carlo smiled, his head resting back upon the lip of the redwood tub,
|
|
Neal's bandaged hand pumping vigorously underneath the water's
|
|
surface. "Oh, yeah. I feel everything."
|
|
|
|
Jack continued to talk back to the stars, his mind racing from one
|
|
delirious tangent to the next, trying to make sense of the insanity
|
|
that had overcome him without warning. "Yeah, well, whadd'you know!"
|
|
he shouted to the sky. "V'you ever been lonely? Fuck you! Not like
|
|
them. Was never a communist, thass who's after Jack. It's 'cause I
|
|
won't lay down for the Reds, like m'friend Carlo. Makes 'em mad. Well,
|
|
fuck 'em every one of 'em!!" he shrieked.
|
|
|
|
Jack dropped his head and shrugged to Harve, who was paralyzed as
|
|
equally by the acid in his own drink as he was by the chemical
|
|
schizophrenia to which he was bearing witness in one of his oldest
|
|
friends. Jack stripped off his shorts and walked toward the hot tub.
|
|
He swayed uncertainly at the steps, then stepped back in horror as
|
|
thin strands of sperm floated to the surface and Carlo sighed and Neal
|
|
hopped out of the tub with a hard-on.
|
|
|
|
"Goddamn fruits, m'best friends are fruits. Everyone's got it out for
|
|
Jack...aaaAAAUUUGGGGHHH!!!!" he whinnied, gripped in a terrified
|
|
dementia. His clothes clutched wrinkled in his paw, the Beat avatar
|
|
ran up the driveway and out onto Pacific Coast Highway, and kept
|
|
running.
|
|
|
|
Neal stood puzzled, oblivious to the nature of the foreign sensations
|
|
in his body and head. "What spooked him?"
|
|
|
|
Ten minutes later, the lights of Neal's Hudson flooded the shoeless,
|
|
stumbling, and dazed form of Jack Kerouac. Tight in his grip was an
|
|
almost empty quart of whiskey, which he finished off while blinking at
|
|
the Hudson from a shoulder of the road. Carlo jerked him by the wrist
|
|
into the back seat, where he belched what smelled to be the essence of
|
|
his bile duct.
|
|
|
|
"How 'bout it, Carlo? How 'bout a blowjob, f'r'ol Jack," he sputtered,
|
|
unzipping his pants and pulling out his organ. "One f'r the road. HA,
|
|
HA, HA...haacckkksshhppt," he chortled, coughing up a thick wad of
|
|
mucus. "Put'cher head right down 'ere'n do what'cha do best. C'mon.
|
|
I'm old and fat, and haven't had a decent girl for years. Juss whores.
|
|
Whadd'ya say, Carlo?"
|
|
|
|
"You're drunk and you're sick, Jack. You should be drying out in a
|
|
hospital with healthy food and some rest."
|
|
|
|
Jack scoffed, calling Carlo various derivatives of "cocksucker," until
|
|
they arrived at Harve's cabin, where all but Jack went immediately to
|
|
sleep to distance themselves from the odious presence.
|
|
|
|
When they awoke the next morning, Jack was slumped over a kitchen
|
|
table littered with at least two gallon's in empty bottles, including
|
|
the cheap sauterne Harve normally used for marinating the local trout.
|
|
He was twitching uncontrollably and whispering about pain and all
|
|
manner of death, his eyes wide like half-dollars. Harve gave Jack a
|
|
big glass of water and half of a mild tranquilizer, then carried him
|
|
over to the sofa and sat down and cried as the Dharma bum fell asleep.
|
|
|
|
|
|
At five o'clock that evening, Harve Serengeti drove a groggy Jack
|
|
Kerouac to the airport and deposited him onto a plane back to Long
|
|
Island. "Try not to let him drink," Harve said to the stewardess.
|
|
"He's a sweet man, but he has no control."
|
|
|
|
Jack nodded and shrugged, held his friend briefly, then left
|
|
California sick, desperate, confused...in a word, beat.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
About the Authors
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
David Alexander (alexium@megaweb.com) collects packs of sugar from
|
|
restaurants all over the world.
|
|
|
|
David Appell (appell@asu.edu) grew up in the mountains of western
|
|
Pennsylvania, where he watched the Viet Nam war on television and worried
|
|
that he might have to go when he got older. He is now an MFA candidate in
|
|
the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University. His work can be
|
|
found online in _Kudzu_, _Webrunner_ and (to appear) _The Blue Penny
|
|
Quarterly_.
|
|
|
|
Bardofbyte (bardofbyte@chelsea.ios.com) is a biology teacher and has
|
|
been for many years (since before Darwin). He has been writing poetry, off
|
|
and on for many years also. He has had poems published in many magazines,
|
|
such as _Small Pond_, _Oregon East_, _Blue Unicorn_ and many others. Lest
|
|
you think he's on an ego trip, he has been rejected by far more.
|
|
|
|
Bruce Harris Bentzman (bhbentzman@aol.com) was born in the Bronx in
|
|
1951. "My greatest achievement is to earn the companionship of a splendid
|
|
woman, to whom I have been married for eight years." He earns his income
|
|
working for AT&T as a Communications Technician. "And I am presently
|
|
alive and well in a suburb of Philadelphia."
|
|
|
|
Tara Calishain (copper@mercury.interpath.com) fixes computers and does
|
|
more and more writing for a living. When not busy with that she composes
|
|
music and plays fetch with Herbie the Wonder Cat.
|
|
|
|
Robert W. Howington (robert.howington@chrysalis.org) runs DEAD MEN
|
|
SITTING AT TYPEWRITERS PRESS and publishes the critically-acclaimed
|
|
DRIVE-BY BOOKS and BROADSIDES. To get a sample book send $2 cash only to
|
|
4405 Bellaire Drive South #220, Ft. Worth, TX 76109-5103.
|
|
|
|
Dr. William F. Lantry (WFL38@sruvm.sru.edu) is a professor of English at
|
|
Slippery Rock University. A former recipient of the Paris/Atlantic Young
|
|
Writer's Award, he has given readings in Paris, Rome and Monte Carlo as
|
|
well as throughout the US.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
In Their Own Words
|
|
_________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Porky" by Tara Calishain:
|
|
|
|
"_Porky_ was written after my grandmother related a story of a
|
|
neighborhood kid who drowned in Kerr lake forty years ago. There was no
|
|
emotion to the story.. it had been smoothed away long since. There was
|
|
only the stillness of the telling.. I could almost hear Porky lying there,
|
|
the lake shifting all around him."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"At the Gates of Hell" by Bruce Harris Bentzman:
|
|
|
|
"One of the perks of being a writer is revenge. You can selectively take
|
|
details from an event in your life, modify it to your own glory, and, if
|
|
you're lucky, your representation will outlive your enemy."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"What's Out There is More of Here" by David Alexander:
|
|
|
|
"Some of my principal objectives in writing the group of stories from
|
|
which _What's Out There is More of Here_ were to create fictions that
|
|
resisted easy categorization, crossed boundaries of style and form, and
|
|
preserved, as far as possible, the rhythms and cadences of spoken
|
|
language. Most of all, I was interested in writing stories that were
|
|
epiphanic, revelatory; that challenged conceptual norms, and that avoided
|
|
the studied irrelevancies of most contemporary commercial fiction.
|
|
Privately, I coined the term "rap fiction" for some of these stories,
|
|
"enigmas" for others, and one or two more for the rest. But lately, I
|
|
don't like tags. I would prefer to let the stories stand on their own and
|
|
speak for themselves."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Another Poem Written on Company Time" by Robert W. Howington:
|
|
|
|
"I wrote this poem at work last summer. The quote from Jesus I had read in
|
|
some litmag and it got me to thinking. The result of that thinking is the
|
|
poem itself. I wrote the poem at work, scribbling it onto some note paper.
|
|
I write most of my stuff at work because that's where I'm trapped for 40
|
|
hours a week. If you're a disgruntled worker slave like me I suggest you
|
|
check out http://www.disgruntled.com/."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Chant" by Dr. William F. Lantry:
|
|
|
|
"I wrote this poem across a modem, using vi on a s5r4 Unix machine as part
|
|
of The Electronic Poetry Project. It was written on a midsummer's eve,
|
|
and I was hoping to catch, in electronic meter, some of the mystical
|
|
nature of that evening-- hence the calls to candles, rituals, and wind. I
|
|
hope it also includes a feeling of loss and of limitations and of
|
|
possibilities, inside the strictures of formal realism-- hence, the
|
|
epigraph."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Amazed by Her Beauty" by David Appell:
|
|
|
|
"I had been reading a story which ended with a soldier's simple death, but
|
|
I thought that all the fascinating and most important details had been
|
|
left out. I often wonder what goes through the minds of those within an
|
|
extreme situation like war or torture or a terrible accident, and suspect
|
|
that until I experience it firsthand some dark but crucial corner of the
|
|
universe will necessarily remain unknown to me."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Narrowing the Meanings" by Bardofbyte:
|
|
|
|
"My main interest in this poem was to play with word "Love." The word has
|
|
so many meanings that it's meaningless. It's too easy to say you love
|
|
someone or something. What about the person or thing do you love? Can you
|
|
define it? Can you put it into words? Love is not only the word that has
|
|
been overused to incomprehension, there are many other words such as:
|
|
values, faith, morality. There is nothing wrong with the words, or in our
|
|
intelligence and ability to use them. The fault is in our basic dishonesty
|
|
with ourselves and with others. We make meanings foggy then hide in the
|
|
fog. We won't focus on the truth. That is the philosophical background, in
|
|
the foreground is the image of a former girlfriend."
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Wisdom's Maw" by Todd Brendan Fahey:
|
|
|
|
Enchanted by the history surrounding the CIA's notorious LSD experiments
|
|
of the 1950s and 60s, Todd Brendan Fahey has sought to recast Project
|
|
MK-ULTRA in the form of a novel, altering space and time as if in the
|
|
powerful throes of an acid trip, and with the dimensions redrawn to
|
|
benefit certain human agents who may have been neglected proportionally by
|
|
state-approved historians.
|
|
|
|
The result is _Wisdom's Maw_, perhaps America's most controversial
|
|
unpublished novel (as believes author Ernest Gaines). In the excerpt
|
|
published herein, Fahey retells the infamous nervous breakdown that claimed
|
|
Jack Kerouac while at poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin near Big Sur,
|
|
California. As Beat and psychedelic generations collide, according to CIA
|
|
plan, and through a powerful lysergic lens, we witness the death-knell of
|
|
innocence, and the beginning of the end of Jack Kerouac.
|
|
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
|
|
|
WHERE TO FIND _THE MORPO REVIEW_
|
|
|
|
Back issues of The Morpo Review are available via the following avenues:
|
|
|
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|
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! = Electronic Mail (Send the command "get morpo morpo.readme" in the body
|
|
of an e-mail message to majordomo@novia.net, exclude the quotes)
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= Gopher (ftp.etext.org:/Zines/Morpo.Review)
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|
|
|
= Anonymous FTP (morpo.novia.net:/pub/zines/morpo or
|
|
ftp.etext.org:/Zines/Morpo.Review)
|
|
|
|
! = World Wide Web (http://morpo.novia.net/morpo/)
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|
|
|
= America Online (Keyword: PDA, then select "Palmtop Paperbacks", "EZine
|
|
Libraries", "Writing", "More Writing")
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|
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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SUBSCRIBE TO _THE MORPO REVIEW_
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We offer two types of subscriptions to The Morpo Review:
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You will receive the full ASCII text of TMR delivered to your
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If you would like to subscribe to The Morpo Review, send an e-mail
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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ADDRESSES FOR _THE MORPO REVIEW_
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! rfulk@novia.net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Fulkerson, Editor
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! mtmason@novia.net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Mason, Poetry Editor
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rummel@creighton.edu . . . . . . . . . . . . J.D. Rummel, Fiction Editor
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! kkalil@novia.net . . . . . . . . . . Kris Kalil Fulkerson, Layout Editor
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! morpo-submissions@novia.net . . . . . . Submissions to _The Morpo Review_
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! morpo-request@novia.net . . . . . . . . Requests for E-Mail subscriptions
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! morpo-comments@novia.net . . . . . . . Comments about _The Morpo Review_
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! morpo-editors@novia.net . . . . . . . . . . Reach all the editors at once
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR TMR
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Q: How do I submit my work to The Morpo Review and what are you looking for?
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A: We accept poetry, prose and essays of any type and subject matter. To
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get a good feel for what we publish, please read some of our previous
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issues (see above on how to access back issues).
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The deadline for submissions is one month prior to the release date of
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an issue. We publish bi-monthly on the 30th of the month in January,
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March, May, July, September and November.
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If you would like to submit your work, please send it via Internet
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E-mail to the E-mail address morpo-submissions@novia.net.
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Your submission will be acknowledged and reviewed for inclusion in the
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next issue. In addition to simply reviewing pieces for inclusion in
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the magazine, we attempt to provide feedback for all of the pieces that
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are submitted.
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Along with your submission, please include a valid electronic mail address
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and telephone number that you can be reached at. This will provide us with
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the means to reach you should we have any questions, comments or concerns
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regarding your submission.
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There are no size guidelines on stories or individual poems, but we ask
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that you limit the number of poems that you submit to five (5) per issue
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(i.e., during any two month period).
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We can read IBM-compatible word processing documents and straight ASCII
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text. If you are converting your word processing document to ASCII,
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please make sure to convert the "smart quotes" (the double quotes that
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"curve" in like ``'') to plain, straight quotes ("") in your document
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before converting. When converted, smart quotes sometimes look like
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capital Qs and Ss, which can make reading and editing a submission
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difficult.
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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Our next issue will be available February 22nd, 1996.
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This will be the concluding portion of our Second Anniversary double-issue.
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+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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Robert Fulkerson \ "I'm not looking back but I want to look around me
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Novia Internetworking / now. See more of the people and the places that
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http://www.novia.net/ \ surround me now."
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rfulk@novia.net / -- Neil Peart, Lyricist, Rush
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