What I’d done was write about having an abortion. It was a reluctant abortion: my baby’s brain, spine and legs had failed to develop correctly so we’d chosen to ‘interrupt’ my pregnancy rather than deliver him to a life of pain. But still, it was an abortion, and this was Texas. My story described our heartbroken drive from the obstetric office to the abortion clinic, and how new state laws meant that we were harangued about our choices. We’d also been forced to view sonogram images of the child we’d never meet, then were sent home for a day to consider our imminent ‘mistake.’ I was grief-stricken and angry and, because I’m a writer, I wrote it all down. Then I pitched my story to the Texas Observer. For weeks, the Observer’s editor hovered patiently over drafts like someone waiting for a complicated cake to rise. Finally, when the No. 7 bus pulled into afternoon traffic, he was ready for my story to be read.

Against all expectations, the story spread faster than a Texas wildfire. Influential publications forwarded it and tweeted it and recommended it; the Observer’s page views soared, thousands of commenters and bloggers across the ‘net discussed the article, and emails of support poured into my inbox. “I want to be sure you hear a thank you,” strangers said, and “It’s so important that stories like these are told.” “I hope your stories and others like it will help Texas lawmakers revisit and revoke this law.” Requests for radio and magazine interviews came in. My neighbor crossed the street to tell me she’d read about my abortion on Facebook. The New Yorker, the New York Times and TIME linked to the original piece. Meanwhile, as my husband and I watched, astonished, at how our most intimate of stories was going viral, our daughter put her polka-dot shoes on the wrong feet and zigzagged across the kitchen with a broom.

]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/vintage-fringe-when-stories-develop-lives-of-their-own/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/vintage-the-revolutionarys-wife/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/vintage-the-revolutionarys-wife/#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2012 04:55:40 +0000 Lizzie Stark http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=9778 Those who have served the cause of the revolution have plowed the sea.
—Simón Bolívar

One thing I should explain right away. I still refer to the Great Man as my husband, though he divorced me forty years ago. You probably didn’t know I existed, did you, till you started your research. I doubt anyone’s left alive who remembers me. Except him, of course. Coffee? No, stay here, I’ll bring it out.

In the official biography—the early editions—they gave me two or three whole sentences. In the latest version you’ll have to look for me in a footnote. I don’t complain. I know what his life is like. Each day he’s under a microscope, he can say, “It’s raining” or “Pass the rum” and he can be sure someone will quote him reverently in tomorrow’s paper, and someone else will write a diatribe against him. Obscurity has its advantages. I’m free to express myself because no one’s listening.

Well yes, there was one other interview, years ago. Not a reporter, exactly. A famous writer. I suppose I should have felt honored.

“You’ve had a hard life,” he prompts. Most of the article is written already, but it won’t hurt to add the spurned wife angle. Besides, he’s got an unlimited travel budget in addition to the fee they’re paying him, a staggering amount that will tide him over till his next book comes out. The woman frowns. She’s small and lean, wary as a feral cat.

“Could you talk about how you adjusted to life as an exile?” he says. “Day-to-day things, you know, learning a new language, negotiating a new currency . . .” She informs him she’s fluent in three languages and has no problem understanding monetary theory, and somehow she gets from that to the International Monetary Fund and underdevelopment.

He makes his tone sympathetic, tries to bring her back to the point, “Do you resent your husband?” but she’s on a roll. Sweatshops. Exploitation. Imperialism. He smiles and nods, doodles in his notebook. He can’t wait till the article comes out, a bold exposé of the revolution on its tenth anniversary. He’ll make people feel foolish for romanticizing this guy.

He starts writing a description of the scene; he prides himself on his flair for visual detail. When he glances up she’s looking at him with a disdain so pure and impersonal it makes him wonder if anything would be different if she and not her husband had wound up in charge of the Revolution.

When the magazine comes it’s a month old already. A man at the marina gets it from someone who docks his yacht there every weekend. She scans the article, her name buried in a sentence near the end. She reads about the worn wooden floor boards of her front porch, the torn plastic cushion on her rocking chair, the coriander and sweet pepper plants growing in coffee cans.

My footnote in the biography still describes me a “child of privilege”–as if my husband weren’t. It’s true, as a child I knew nothing but fine things. The floors in our house were of marble quarried from Tuscany, the furniture hand-carved mahogany and rosewood; nothing touched my skin except Italian silk and Irish linen. It was a novelty to see something like plastic, concocted by scientists in the laboratory. And this furniture here—they have this process, I’ve read about it, where they take the little odds and ends of lumber and grind it into sawdust. Then they mix it with water and press it into whatever form they want–tables, chairs. Before you know it God will show up and form it into people. Maybe better than our kind.

Religion—I won’t start in on that, don’t worry. When I first got here, the local priest showed up to welcome me. You’ve probably heard the saying, the enemy of my friend is my enemy, and the friend of my enemy is my friend and so forth. It goes on and on, like a folk dance. The priest must have been assuming something like the jilted ex-wife of my enemy is my friend. He gave up on me soon enough.

“Surely we have more in common than you think,” he says. “We’re both exiles. We’ve been wronged by the same person.”

She looks at him as sternly as a schoolteacher about to correct his grammar.

“He’s wronged you—how? By confiscating church property, taking your mansions away from you?”

“We were a godly country.”

“What a paradise it was. With the representatives of Jesus on earth defending justice for everyone. Like they did during the slave trade. Like they did during the genocide of the Indians. A pirate on the high seas did less damage than those pious fathers.”

“Slavery? I don’t see what . . . that was before my time.”

For a moment she almost pities him. If the man can’t think metaphorically, what is he doing in the priesthood?

He reminds himself what she’s been through, how far down she’s come in the world. And she’s a lovely woman, after all. He forces himself to speak patiently, gently. He knows what an effect his soothing voice has on women.

“We can help you with groceries.”

“Spare me your pity.”

“Your neighbor tells me you’re living on two potatoes a day.”

“We had no more than that in the mountains.”

He’s about to say, You’re too delicate for armed combat. He thinks better of it.

What was he like? As a young man? He was handsome, certainly. But he wasn’t the only good-looking man I knew. I’ve never known how to explain the force of physical attraction between two people. The excitement of the student protests must have added to the romance. And now scientists are saying it’s all a matter of chemicals, some kind of hormonal essence that wafts off you, and there’s always someone who has the right receptor for that essence.

With all the work we were doing, everything that was going on, sometimes all we could think about was each other. My molecules responding to his molecules, a key turning in a lock.

His revolutionary activities. Yes. That’s what you meant, of course.

As you probably know, it started with the upheavals at the university. We met when all that was just starting. He saw me in class debating my professors, he saw me on campus handing out pamphlets and arguing over Hegel with students passing by. “You have a man’s mind,” he said. He meant it as a compliment.

I spread word about our meetings, I found ways to get our pamphlets and broadsheets printed when the authorities had shut us down. Later during the fighting I managed to make contact with the foreign press so the world knew what was going on. We had allies in many countries. I kept them informed about our needs, medical supplies, guns, ammunition.

He should have given me a cabinet position. I would have been minister of communication, not fleeing for my life and leaving behind my only child.

Sometimes I think about what he would be like if he’d been overthrown in a coup. It’s a humbling experience, it would have been good for him. He might have landed on these shores, who knows? I would have shown him my little cinderblock house, safe from hurricane winds, my view of the ocean—yes, I have a view, if you put a ladder against the east wall, climb up to the flat part of the roof where the rain cistern is, lean far to your left, and look where the roof of that restaurant almost meets the balcony of that guest house. You’ll see it. A wedge of blue and white. I don’t complain, I can walk to it anytime.

Some people think the ocean is a goddess, did you know that? Not only the ocean. Lightning. The wind. There’s also a god of iron. A god of herbal healing. In my country besides the official religion there was also what you could call a folk religion. The people who believed in it were mostly black and mixed-race, mostly poor. For centuries the government tried to suppress it. Among the upper classes people ignored it or called it superstition. That’s the kind of world it was—lots of poor people, a few very wealthy ones, all of us white. The only black people I came in contact with were the ones who laundered my clothing and cooked my meals or chauffeured my father to his office.

There was a cook who worked for my parents, an old black woman named Chlotilde, who always wore a blue head-scarf and a blue and white checked apron. I vaguely understood that those colors stood for the ocean goddess. I learned the goddess’ name much later. Yemayá. At the time I had no interest in religion of any kind, in nature or inside a church building. I was a rather arrogant child, and Chlotilde wasn’t fond of me. I respected her for that.

The girl trails her father around the house, talking at high speed. A perfect score on her math test again and something about a Mr. Darwin. The father is busy, he will need to go back to the office later. He tells the housekeeper to make arrangements for an extra dinner guest.

“A long time ago,” she says, “there weren’t any humans. Just apes, and a group of them changed, slowly—millions of years—into humans. Isn’t that amazing?” She pauses. Was it millions or billions?

She’s almost bubbly, like a normal girl instead of so serious. He wonders if she has a crush on a boy. He glances through the letters arranged on the tray in the entrance hall. Nothing of interest. Social invitations. Relatives. The important things come to his office.

He’s gone again before she can tell him more, but it doesn’t bother her. She’s picturing people digging up old bones buried in the earth, learning something important about ourselves, and it thrills her that the mind can jump across long spans of time and logic, that if you look long enough, and think long enough, a door opens. This will be a pattern all her life, exhilaration at a new idea, an insight that brings her slamming into truth.

The cook has set out some food for her on the kitchen table, the usual things the girl eats after getting back from school, farmer cheese and jellied guava, fresh bread from the bakery, milky coffee. She can see the child’s bursting with these school lessons, almost pities her even though she’s as spoiled and self-centered a child as Chlotilde has ever seen.

“So we come from monkeys,” Chlotilde says. “And what does your book tell you about where they come from?”

“I don’t know. Some other mammals.”

Chlotilde’s granddaughter, twelve years old just like this one, is already working in a kitchen in a house nearby, no question of schooling for her. Will it occur to the girl to wonder about that?

“And those, then, where do they come from?”

“The mammals? They evolved from reptiles.” The girl realizes she has only a sketchy grasp of the details. She tries to remember how the science teacher put it. “And reptiles evolved from amphibians. And amphibians from fish. And fish evolved from . . . I think it started with fish.”

“Is that so?” Chlotilde could have told her it all begins in the ocean. Even the white people may be starting to understand this.

She adds more charcoal to the stove, starts in on the bowls of green peppers and onions she needs to chop. After that a mound of plantains.

“Red snapper’s on the menu tonight,” she can’t resist saying.

Grilled ancestors.

I see you’ve stopped taking notes. Your attention is wandering. I don’t mind. I know the reason I’m of interest is that I was briefly married to the Great Man. My husband also had no patience for religion. It was an obstacle to revolution, to progress.

We had such faith in progress. When the old regime was gone we were going to make everything new and better. Education. Transportation. Farming methods. There was a dairy farm where they mated a meat-giving breed of cow with a milk-giving breed. The result was a cow that was perfectly suited to our climate, but it was no good for either meat or milk. I heard about this and said, “Well, it’s a revolutionary cow. It refuses to be exploited.” My husband was not amused.

By then he was no longer my husband, technically. Somewhere on his way to being a hero and a world leader—a Great Man—he decided I was a liability.

He used to laugh at my pointed comments, but that was when I aimed them at other people. He hadn’t expected to be a target himself.

We weren’t the first couple to ever end their marriage, that’s an old story. Custody of the child was handled reasonably: our son was too young to be in school, so he alternated between us, a month with me, a month with him. On the other hand, not many women have their divorce papers delivered by government agents, along with warnings against talking to foreign journalists and suggestions that it was in my best interest to leave the country.

The threats weren’t so subtle when he made them in person.

“Lack of respect,” he says.

“It was nothing. A casual comment.”

Even now the woman argues with him. “There has been more than one.”

She’s been sorting coffee beans all day and her neck and shoulder muscles are burning. She hadn’t thought it possible that each phase of production—picking, drying, hulling, sorting—would leave her body aching in a different place. She was looking forward to a dreamless sleep when word came that he was here. His car was parked on a side road at the edge of the woods. She’s had to pass the outdoor drying tables and the hulling sheds, a good ten-minute walk from the workers’ dorms.

“A coffee estate in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I thought here at least you would do something useful and manage to stay out of trouble.”

She leans against the car, tries to look nonchalant. She wishes he had diminished somehow, or that she would stop noticing his beauty. “The kid who brought your message, he looked like he’d seen a ghost, or a god.”

“You’re bordering on counterrevolutionary.”

The word has started to mean firing squads or disappearing into prison and never being heard from again. He moves closer to her, draws her hair away from her forehead.

“Don’t think I won’t have you thrown you into a prison cell.”

How many times had they and their comrades told each other, You must never let fear be your motivation. They had talked about justice. Not anger. Not desire.

“I’ve noticed lately,” she says, “all of a sudden whenever there’s a photograph of you in the newspapers, you’re always the tallest person in it. There are other men as tall as you, or there used to be. Have you had them all shot? Or are you surrounding yourself with short people these days? And I haven’t mentioned that to journalists, in case you’re wondering.”

The woman is infuriating. So stubborn, so needlessly argumentative. You’d think she had a demon inside her. It irritates him all the more that at a moment like this he’s resorting to religious imagery.

He strokes her neck and whispers, “At a word from me. . .”

He doesn’t have to finish the quotation, they’ve both studied the history of the Roman Empire. Caligula. At a word from me this head comes off.

She’s pushing him to the ground at the same time as he’s pulling her. From the years of fighting he knows how to fall without injuring himself, how to keep her balanced on top of him as if she were a priceless and dangerous weapon.

When she’s older and she reads about pheromones, it is a relief to think about desire that way, molecules leaping from his body to hers, from hers to his. It pleases her to have an explanation.

Science answers so many questions, doesn’t it? The chemical composition of the human body, for instance. Carbon and water is what we mostly come down to; I still remember learning that in high school. It amazes me even now.

The girl natters on about it.

“A random bunch of chemicals,” she tells her parents, the servants, anyone who’ll listen. “That’s all we are. Why do we think we’re so special?”

Her mother is horrified.

“Why are we letting her study this?”

“What can you do about it? It’s already in my brain and you can’t take it out again.”

Pressed by Chlotilde, the girl finds she has difficulty explaining what “chemicals” are. Or “elements.” The scientific terms are dear to her despite their slipperiness.  She’s like a tone-deaf child happily plonking piano keys.

“As if that explains everything,” Chlotilde complains later to the other servants. The chauffer leans in the doorway, the maid and housekeeper sit at the kitchen table. By this time of night they’re usually too tired to do anything but be together for a few moments.

“Because they’ve figured out what our bodies are made of, it means there’s no God? Have you ever heard anything so foolish?”

They shake their heads.

As she wrings out the dishcloth she sees the moon edging into view of the kitchen window.

“Moon, I greet you,” she says, like her mother, her mother’s mother before her. “I ask health for all.”

“Prosperity,” the maid adds.

The chauffer: “An end to war and sickness.”

It makes her stop, take a breath.

Carbon and water.

With tongs she pulls out a charcoal from a burner on the stove, sets it on a small plate at the table. She takes a tumbler of clear glass and fills it with water. “Wait, I forgot.” She throws a pinch of salt into the glass. They watch it cloud the water.

“This is what we’re made of,” she says.

“Uh-hmmm.” The others have become the audience. They wait for more.

“How do you put those two together to get people?”

“Yes indeed.”

They approve her dramatic staging, the way she’s worked toward the rhetorical question.

Chlotilde points to her little finger, holding it out from the rest. Simplifying the question, narrowing it down.

“Tell me how you get this finger by putting those two together? That’s God.”

“Yes indeed.”

It’s all in the gap, you know, between the carbon and the water.

Don’t get the idea that I had nothing to do but sit on the beach and think. What an easy life that would have been. I’ve earned my living; before I retired I taught foreign languages and gave lessons in piano. Those were the sorts of things, the only things, that girls like me were supposed to learn. Accomplishments to make me pleasing to my suitors. If I hadn’t insisted on going to the university, who knows what nice, respectable boy I would have met?

Sometimes my husband sends men here to give me money. Maybe he thinks of it as alimony. Or he worries that some reporter will track me down one day and how will it look if I’m in desperate poverty? At the beginning the men he sent were thugs, assassins, they had orders to get rid of me if it looked like I was starting to make trouble for him. There was no chance of that. I was quiet as the grave. I hoped I would get time off for good behavior, or at least a chance to visit my son.

I know you don’t want to hear this. You admire him, as do many people. As do I, to a certain extent. You can choose to believe it as you like.

The order of expulsion is short and direct. She is given a week to leave the country. After that date there are standing orders to shoot her on sight.

This doesn’t stop her from one last confrontation with her husband. She makes it as far as the main staircase before one of his lieutenants notices her.

“Dramatic, isn’t it?” she tells the lieutenant. “Enemy of the people showing up at the presidential palace. And the damndest thing is, it’s still called a palace. Did I dream the Revolution?”

He frowns. The Revolution a dream. His parents were cane cutters, their dream was for their son to have an easy job, a chauffer to a white man. Without the Revolution he would have spent his days with eyes discreetly lowered, opening doors, “Yes sir,” “Thank you, sir,” bundled into a clownish uniform so no one would be frightened by his muscular black body.

“What are you doing here?” he says.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. The pope has excommunicated me.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Was that disrespectful? Are we calling him God now?”

“That’s enough. You have to leave.”

“I demand to take my son with me. He needs me.”

He grips her thin shoulders, hard. He has been in the mountains with this woman. They’ve been hungry together. They’ve slept on the hard ground side by side. Fatigued beyond what either thought they could ever have endured.

“You won’t do him any good if you’re dead.”

Just another henchman, she thinks, following his boss’s orders. Only much later does she decide that perhaps he truly didn’t want to see her killed. A simple act of kindness.

The lieutenant will do well for a while, rise to the rank of general before the falling out. The firing squad. When the woman reads about it she will go to the ocean and send him a flower on the waves.

The folk religion I told you about, there’s another god they have. Guardian of the crossroads and the thresholds. Elegua. Every path belongs to him, every door. He opens a door for you if he wants, and if he doesn’t want, he doesn’t. Or it looks like he’s opening it but then he slams it in your face, or he puts his foot out and trips you as you’re walking through.

I started to think about this god when I was expelled from my country. He more than any other deity that I’ve ever heard of, old men in the sky, saviors on crosses, this was the one who made sense.

The truth of Elegua—well, have you ever learned something, found the answer to something, that was so true you couldn’t breathe, so true it made you want to cry? Have you ever felt like that? You want to cry because you’ve fallen flat on your face but then you have to pick yourself up because what else is there to do? And so you laugh. You fall in the dirt, you have scrapes and bruises, broken bones, you’re covered with dust. It’s him. It’s his foot that got jammed into your shin and sent you sprawling. And there’s no guarantee he won’t do it again if he feels like it, no matter how much you try to appease him.

It’s not a question of right or wrong, deserving or undeserving. It’s not cruel. Why waste your breath calling the universe cruel? You have to laugh.

The woman dreams that a raft is carrying her to her birthplace across a warm ocean. Her hunger and thirst and the hot sun are making her delirious, she thinks she is arguing with the priest. Father, she is saying, that blue and white plaster virgin standing in your church, we’re floating on her, she’s big and warm and salty. One moment we were molecules of salt water, we were part of the all, and then the next moment we were single-celled living things, and then onward, floating, swimming, crawling, flying.

The leap of faith is to think that she wanted to give birth to us.

The raft deposits her on the shore and people are so astonished–no one tries to sneak into this country–that they watch silently while she stands up and walks away.

Of course. You must be busy. And you’ve been quite patient. I expect you’ll whittle all this down to a sentence or two: Even the Great Man’s former wife expresses qualified admiration.

Yes, it’s true neither of us has remarried. I wouldn’t make too much of that. Neither of us is the marrying kind.

Now that the sun’s not so high I’ll take my folding chair and walk down to the beach. I have plenty to read. The newspaper. People give me old issues of science magazines.

They say that after the Revolution there’s no need for God, that science can explain everything. But they’ve elevated science to a religion. They take its precepts on faith. Look at the concept of gravity. It’s everywhere, all-powerful. A force, an attraction, a relationship between every physical body and every other physical body in the universe. That sounds magical if you ask me. And what I want to know is, who are we to say that that’s not God?

Objective :

I began work at age 14 to save for a car.

Relevant Experience:

• Retail Salesman

I walked the floor of a costume and accessory shop to encourage sales. Leering masks of the worst celebrities, augmented into even more ghoulish versions, hung sentinel over us on hooks angled into their empty craniums: our premier items. Halloween theme songs looped over the span of the six-hour shift. Of course, obvious boredom was forbidden. I chatted with my biker coworker, even rode home once with another coworker—an older girl who dressed in our Catwoman costume to attract customers. Soon talking amongst ourselves was forbidden too. I dressed like Gumby and stood in front of the shop to pass the minimum-wage hours—$4.15 at the time—and encouraged sales. Some classmates shoved Gumby against the wall and slapped him. Halloween passed.

• Would-be Sandwich Artist

When boredom shined his pale countenance, my hands prepared with fury. Customers fled when I slung cold cuts. Our manager was an ex-drug dealer who had sold through the sub shop, but who also swore all statutes of limitations had come to term. The crackhead, who removed pans bare-handed, dropped elbows on me from the sneeze guard. We tossed knives, passed around a bloated bladder of a sanitary glove filled with water, smoked cigarettes over the accounts the manager cooked, toked in the freezer. We couldn’t stand the boredom, one sub following another, no matter how unique, how special it was to us, to our customer. I closed the shop during lunch rush one day, drove home, and hung up my apron.

• Telemarketer

Not the most boring job. The needling our voices took on after too many repetitions of the script pricked our customers, mostly poor working stiffs themselves. Boredom broke us down. Our friends impersonated customers and made false sale agreements to meet quota and salvage our Saturday afternoons following the morning shift. But insurance salesmen don’t like their time wasted. They’re bored too.

• Closer at a Doughnut Shop

I closed a doughnut shop for three months. From the first night the job bored me until the trainer lobbed an overfull Bavarian cream at my face, which burst like a pimple. But then he was gone. The doughnut-makers arrived at two a.m. to prepare those cursed rings, dying of bored exhaustion. The doughnut has stirred nausea in me ever since.

• Museum Guide

I counted money and directed tourists at a museum built by Henry Ford to memorialize the car every family in his town owned. By this point, I had my relief from boredom programmed—I finished reading novels there, awaiting coughs or throatings to interrupt me. I smoked with the Henry Ford look-alike, sneering at the cashier who quoted Old Hank[1], calling cigarettes “the little white slaver.”

• Letter Carrier – U.S. Postal Service

The job of Bukowski and Faulkner before him, though the latter was a clerk. My pride fended off boredom for a longer while than most jobs: I fed off it, humping my bag through the streets and almost never deadheading[2], then hiding out in the back of restaurants waiting for the sun to set, darkness being a “safety hazard.” The office drives clerks mad with its teeming boredom, its windowless fluorescence, and echoing repetition of boredom’s soundtrack. I was free and began my sequel to Post Office[3] on the backs of junk mail envelopes until, bored brainless, I crashed the truck.

• Librarian

By this point, I was well aware of boredom’s power over workers. I advertised reading, free of charge to the library where I circulated books. How could one deny me the pride of doing my job? Shouldn’t all librarians advertise what keeps them fed? The understood rule is: librarians should be seen but not listened to.

Related Skills:

• I do my work on the job. Interpret as you wish.

• The man, the overseer, wants me bored. Old Hank, at whose museum I worked, knew how to cage a man in procedures rather than leave him to do his work. The managers will even bore me trying to unbore themselves, talking about their bad work. I fight the boredom, wrangle it, tuck it into a locked drawer.

• Bored workers have no imagination or don’t use it. Bored workers stand and wait for the customer: at the library they stare, with gazes desert-long, into the shelves of books forbidden them to read. They’re as translucent as ghosts. All thought wrung from them by the hands of the manager, the good worker who took the lead with boredom and hardsticking his nose to the grindstone—the nice guy who never wanted to ruffle anyone’s feathers, rather fluff them a bit, comb them, flatten them to a boring plane. God be with them. This is my example? My imagination damp or inexistent?

References:

Read the newest British study in the International Journal of Epidemiology[4]: “We conclude that those who report being bored are more likely to die younger than those who are not bored.”

Goals:

Of course, I never admit boredom. Trouble comes, and work is necessary. But when I’m bored, when I ache because of infernal labor and dream of a bar with a highball and an ashtray, when I hurry early through the lunchroom and watch the last minutes of the day take their time to pass, when the habit is more comfortable than breaking it and my life’s no longer necessary, save for my working limb—why then, I write a little rhyme, a haiku, sing a song or a poem, draw myself throwing a left hook at a boss, stare out the window at the day I’m missing, the time I’m not spending but earning. I kill the boredom. I kill it before it kills me.

[3] Post Office by Charles Bukowski

[4] Annie Britton and Martin J. Shipley. “Bored to death?” International Journal of Epidemiology 2010:1-2. ]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/resume-against-boredom-2/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/blackbirds-2/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/blackbirds-2/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 13:00:26 +0000 Anna Lena http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=9394 Tapas. Tiny food. And if you drink? —this is the time, time for very high heels. (Hold me) The cousins wondered Red wine is best. Sit at the table, ankles crossed. (How old?) there are twenty-seven blackbirds I tell you: it gets better, if you (hold my hand) —into the ocean (go the girls) each one is a speck of the birds are all black, they eat dust. Take a picture: twenty-seven Majas. Mi americanita, he says. (There is no Chardonnay from CA) mírame. Oh, the music throbs— the line starts here, all the way in Las cosas están malas. (in the back) he’s really (an actor, a magician, a fraud). In twenty-seven inch high heels. “Las muchachitas” have gone (wild) a parrot screeches Hey! the music throbs (how old are you?) Here in America, (16 oz. is a measure) here in Spain. –mamá, las cosas están —nothankyou. (Arriba) Words paradox. are you? take the veil. Mírame get old. This is an egg, this is a girl, this is a blackbird. Tócame (there is barely any time) una guitarra to measure. (Pour the wine) —the blackbirds fly— (in an arc) in go the girls. (Out) twenty-seven times go I am a terrible spy the blackbirds. Twenty-seven girls (like tiny dishes) Pop! goes Your mouth. (Here is an opening) Place your finger —on the edge red the color of leather muñequita (flip the coin) into the barrel Go with the blackbirds. Mamá, things are bad. A dog crosses the street. (at night) all the girls wear heels. How old? (Si estuviera) —I Could not possibly. Por qué? (it’s a little like yakitori) You know, at night all (the girls) are blackbirds. (Come with me) Forever, he says. Is no time at all (no es suficiente). (All the girls) go into the ocean. All the birds se me metió (like a scented, sweet wine) —I didn’t mean to porqué? On the beach a cradle of mountains pour the wine (in an arc) High all (around the coast) Twenty-seven blackbirds —over your head. Scented, Sweeter than girls. (muchachitas) they will not want (picture it) they will not taste —porqué? (hold my head) above the water twenty-seven Times I have been to Spain. (I saw your face) your mouth (things are) not bad, he said cuenta conmigo —you will always be here (a bride) A blackbird. Red wine leaves (an indelible stain) Mi vida, send me twenty-seven postcards (send me) sweet, scented wine (if you leave) I will not —the birds cover the ground with their scent how can I return? Look. Here are the mountains. (sit) Ankles, crossed, las muchachitas Do not wait for me in Spain. Pero? (things are bad) Twenty-seven blackbirds will fly (across the ocean) you will not return. You will see the mountains Crowds walk the streets. They sit at the tables. Las muchachitas pican at their food. ]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/blackbirds-2/feed/ 0 http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/how-to-be-a-good-chinese-jewish-hapa-vintage/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/vintage/how-to-be-a-good-chinese-jewish-hapa-vintage/#comments Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:00:32 +0000 Dave Duhr http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=9309

Pause at the checkboxes. Hover above them, blue ballpoint pen in hand, as you read the choices offered. After your name, address, and social security number, the Common Application for Undergraduate College Admission requests one last piece of identifying information:

What is your racial or ethnic background? (Please check all that apply.)

__ White

__ Black, non Hispanic

__ Asian or Pacific Islander

__ American Indian or Alaskan Native

__ Hispanic

__ Other (Please specify:___________)

Carefully peruse the possibilities. Imagine your fellow high school seniors—a homogeneous representation of the primarily Irish and German Catholic town where you grew up—glibly checking off “White” as they sail through the seemingly cut-and-dry “Personal Information” section of the application. Realize this is the first time you’ve had to articulate the precise nature of the distance you always felt from them. Try to decide which combination of checkboxes will most accurately sum up your identity.

For as long as you can remember, no one could ever pronounce your last name. It’s taken you seventeen years to cultivate the patient, withering stare and nod you deploy when someone inevitably asks, “What, are you Asian or something?” You’ve stopped looking for your Chinese grandmother’s eyes in your reflection in the mirror. Your mother’s European traits dominate your face, but there is something that no one can ever quite put their finger on; an “exotic flair.” Sunscreen was never necessary. People have looked at your olive-toned skin and asked, “What are you?” Guesses have run the gamut: Hispanic, Hawaiian, Greek, Vietnamese, and once, Turkish.

Compare your background to the checkboxes. Wonder if “Jewish” is different somehow than “White.” Recall when once, as a child, a friend’s older sister said scornfully, “Jewish isn’t an ethnicity. You can be from England. You can’t be from ‘Jew-land.’” Practice filling out the form with a confident swath of blue handwriting:

√ Asian or Pacific Islander

√ Other (Please specify: Russian Jewish)

Repeat your answer on every application you fill out. Tell yourself that consistency is the first requirement for any credible story.

***

One year later in California, embrace the opportunity to reinvent yourself in a sea of college freshmen. Make the most diverse friends of your life thus far. Flinch when your Vietnamese friend Nick says it’s too bad that you’re “not Asian enough” to go to a dance at the Asian American Students Association. Laugh it off. Tell him he’s too short for you anyway.

Flirt. Go to Hillel events with your first crush, a nice Jewish pre-med named Adam. Nod like you know what “Hookah in the Sookah” means. Worry that you might not be pretty enough; realize later that by “pretty” you really meant “Jewish.” Date a half-Mexican guy named Daniel. Live vicariously through the details of what you consider his rich ethnic heritage. Ride with him to the airport when you leave for Christmas break. After you board your separate planes, imagine him eating tamales with his aunts, uncles, and cousins on a sunny ranch in Texas. Look forward to dim sum dinners in Chinatown and pastrami sandwiches on Long Island, and envy the solidity of Daniel’s traditions and the unified family who celebrates them.

Learn from your classmates about an emerging multiracial community group on campus. Endlessly dissect the word hapa; originally meaning “half” or “part” in Hawaiian, it now can also mean “mixed Asian” in California—much to the chagrin of several Hawaiians who claim that their language has been corrupted by “California Wanna Be Hapas .” Wonder why a description for multiracial identity has to be imported from somewhere else. Wonder if hapa is only really applicable in Hawaii, or if you too, can wear the label for just a little longer, until a better one comes along.

Decide against joining the multiracial group. Tell yourself that you’re not ready to publicly overanalyze your identity. Worry that you’re “not mixed enough.” Immerse yourself in courses in European literature, philosophy, and drama. Avoid words like “ethnic,” “postcolonial,” “feminist,” and “diaspora.” Savor the stark neutrality of the white, male-dominated academic discourse that you see the world through like a pane of clear glass. Stand looking out that window, nose pressed up against the glass, long enough that you almost forget what shape your nose really is.

***

Graduate from college. Move back to the East Coast, get your first apartment, and learn to cook. Make your Chinese-American father teach you how to cook rice without a rice cooker, using his “ancient Chinese recipe.” Scoff when your friend who studied physics in college says that the method is unscientific; cite 2,000 years of cooked rice as repeatable results. Measure the water with your index finger joint, and imagine a Chinese housewife in the Ming dynasty holding up her finger next to yours. Cook rice often.

Date white guys while you harbor only a hint of lingering anxiety about marrying someone who will water down your Asian blood. Wonder why you don’t worry about watering down your Russian-Jewish blood. Remember Daniel’s family traditions and how you sometimes found yourself imagining your hypothetical “double-hapa” kids—the children of two mixed parents. Wonder what kinds of family traditions you will someday create for your American family.

Cook potato latkes for your roommates and think of how your Jewish grandparents would be proud. Wander the aisles of Super 88, the huge Asian supermarket in Boston, doing your “Asian grocery shopping.” Deliberate between five bewildering kinds of bok choy. Scrutinize the long cases of frozen shrimp dumplings. See yourself in the reflection of the glass door—your face blank as you stare into one small corner of a culture you always hoped to carry with you, unintelligible as an ancient Sumerian stone tablet.

Admit finally that Chinese culture is as foreign to you as the sands of Israel, and as the forests of Russia where your great-grandfather hid when he escaped the Czar’s army in 1912 to come to America. Maybe if it were easier to claim an ethnicity as your own, it wouldn’t be worth so much.

Choose a package of shrimp dumplings at random and pay for your purchases. Bring your thin pink plastic bag home and unpack it in your kitchen. Store the dumplings in your freezer, next to the frozen hash browns you use for latkes and the low fat toaster waffles you eat for breakfast, and relax a little about forming your own traditions. They will come in time. They are forming already—the beauty and the curse of living like a good hapa.

AlwaysWinter, Poland

20.

               I’ve heard that Polish wives
cook beets        into a broth
that bleeds, as though from hemorrhage.
               They fill white bowls
with dumplings pressed into the shape
of shrunken ears, their thumbs
            molding pastry to look
like lobe and auricle. Awful,
to hear one’s own devouring
before it comes.
                                     Consider ears.
They know the scrape
that metal makes inside the bowl—
pale cochleae, so vulnerable
they float across the soup,
               poor things, that cannot seal
themselves against the sound but roll,
ears swirling past a spoon.
               I wonder at this meal
for cannibals.
With such an audience below,
who wouldn’t lose the taste for dough?

John Mully and I were sitting in the ER, Johnny holding my undershirt to his bleeding eye, me tapping my foot to the rhythm of the heart monitor attached to a bum lying in the hall. We were waiting for our mothers to come find us.

2.

All I could picture was Eddie standing over Johnny screaming, “Stay on the floor motherfucker, stay on the floor.” I remember that sounding funny to me because as a matter of fact, Johnny was on the ground, rolling around in the dirt and grass, and not on the floor. Part of me wanted to let Eddie in on this but then seeing the blood oozing between Johnny’s fingers and making little dirt pancakes made me think it was smarter to just let Eddie keep on like that.

3.

Eddie threw a rock at Johnny when they were running at one another during a kickoff. When Eddie finally stopped yelling about the floor we got out of him that he’d done it because Johnny had winked at him. “I ain’t down with that faggot shit,” Eddie said.  I got that mixed feeling I always got about Johnny. What I mean is, Johnny didn’t need to wink for someone to go hitting him with a rock. He was just that kind of kid. The kind of kid people hated and tortured even though most of the time they couldn’t give you a good reason why. Still, when he did shit like that—winking at a crazy asshole like Eddie—it made me buy into what the other guys were selling: “The fucker was asking for what he got.”

4.

In the ER I tried to play it cool with Johnny. I didn’t want him to think I was mad at him, because by then I wasn’t. He called me his friend and I was pretty sure he meant it. I could tell by the way his dopey eyes glazed up every time he said it. I wasn’t sure where Johnny stood with me. I was the closest thing he had to a friend and sometimes that did as much to make me dislike him as it did to make me like him.

5.

During the six hours we sat there mostly waiting, Johnny must have asked me, without malice or hint of desired response, these same questions fifty times:

“What do you think of Eddie?’

“Wouldn’t it be cool if I got to wear an eye patch?”

“Do you think he really did it just because I winked at him?”

6.

Because I was conflicted I struggled with the two tough questions—the ones about Eddie. So I focused on the eye patch.

“I bet you’d get a lot of ass with an eye patch,” I said.

“My dad had to wear an eye patch once. Man, he looked real cool.”

“You could miss a ton of school and still get As just off the sympathy for having to wear an eye patch.”

7.

Johnny was more perceptive than any other guys I hung around with. Maybe that’s why they all hated him. “Eddie kept saying ‘floor’ ‘cause his dad beats on him,” Johnny said. “I’m sure he’s been told to stay on the floor so many times he just had to say it to someone else.” Johnny’s dad hit him too. He’d told me about it once when we were hanging out alone. That’s how he knew about Eddie. The strange thing is I think Eddie knew about Johnny too.

He pushed the trunk lid closed with his elbow and started toward the side door. Was she charting his trips to the supermarket now? Estimating the contents of his freezer? She’d been curious about him, perhaps even, if truth be told, a little afraid of him ever since her grandson had disappeared. Little Aaron. Right out from under her nose. Without a trace. He’s not far Granny, he thought, stepping carefully around a patch of ice on the black asphalt. Right next door. He turned at the bottom of the steps and used the railing to reposition one bag and get a better grip on it. He didn’t need to look to see her out of the corner of his eye, still at the window watching him. She really was irritating. He had fantasized about what those vinyl curtains would do if touched with a flame. How the brown melt would eat into the sunflower pattern. Mrs. Meltzer smoked. Such a thing could well happen. She wore yellow-patterned dresses that looked like they were made of the same flammable material as her curtains. If touched with a flame, he thought, the old bird and her glasses would melt down just like the curtains.

He took the steps carefully, gingerly as they said, whatever that meant. Carefully meant with care, gingerly obviously meant with ginger. How in the world could non-native speakers be expected to learn a language riven with such insane expressions? He shifted the bags to attack the door. His back wasn’t what it used to be. Too many years of Santa lifting children, ha, ha. The fourth lumbar vertebra. That was where Krafft-Ebing located the ejaculation center. Oh, he’d pay for it in the morning. Five-thirty and the light was already fading. In California the Safeway store had been open all night. One could get up, as he regularly had, at three a.m., and be perfectly alone in frozen foods.

He remembered the days in Palo Alto when he had to take his laundry to a Laundromat, exposing his underclothing that way, having all those promiscuous gray metal vanes and porous, water-sucking surfaces pasting themselves to his intimate garments. What an outrage! How had he survived it? He pulled off a glove with his teeth and worked with rapidly numbing fingers at getting out his keys. He began fitting them into the double locks and deadbolts. Nippy, as they said. Nippy out. What a word. And how odd that only the weather could be nippy. That puppies, even though they had coined the phrase, so to speak, even though they were by far the nippiest creatures in the world, could not be referred to as “nippy.” As in, ‘Harry, the dirty bastard, has a very nippy puppy.’ No. In a student essay he would circle that in red.

You get lost looking for the sign that says You Are Here.

As the good Girl or Boy Scout that you are (or suddenly wish that you were), you think to stay calm and to shout on occasion and then to shoot your gun (thankfully you have that) twice in the air to signal your friends when they come out looking for you as of course they will, eventually, this is what you think or sometimes say to yourself (or write in your journal: they will come looking, they will), until it gets completely dark and only a distant fire can be seen, flickering on some ridge, accompanied by a soundtrack with strings.

After the fire dies out, a moon appears, in real time, which takes years.

Hispanic Man Working a Weed-eater Against the Bank

Before the session, you find yourself sitting in conference room Spruce, next to Pine and Fir and just across the hall from Aspen and Birch, when a Hispanic man in goggles approaches from outside with a weed-eater, working it against the bank just beyond the patio doors in a determined and somewhat aggressive manner.

As difficult as this is now proving to be—the man as welcome as a yellow jacket at a watermelon feed—you and the other early arrivals decide to sit politely through his display. Don’t panic. Certainly don’t swat at him; that will only make him upset. Just ignore him, basically, pretend that he’s not here—pretend invisibility—and eventually he’ll fly away.

Sometimes a Mountain

But imagine what it must be like before it all begins, while standing at a second floor office window, for instance, while holding a mug of painfully strong coffee in one hand and in the other a glass of water. Imagine slowly pouring the water from the glass into the cracked dirt of an unknown office plant left behind months before by someone who had been laid off, someone you were recently hired to replace. Imagine what it must look like to any of the others who happen to see you there, as if you are simply standing at the window to water the plant.

When the truth is of course that you are having a sort of bulletpoint moment.

The dwarfed trees spaced equal distance one from the other in their square plots up and down the sidewalk just outside the window have yet to bud. Are these dogwoods? No one seems to know. Through these trees, between the frame of the Ben Franklin Parking Tower on the left and the Marriott Hotel on the right, you can see the river, slow and brown and full of secrets. Beyond this river is the interstate and then more of the city queuing out from the city and much farther out sometimes a mountain.

Imagine seeing it if you can, on this clear midmorning in winter, through leafless trees, between the tower and the hotel, past the river, the interstate, the city beyond the city.

Hello. If you are reading this, please come help me. I am stuck inside of a giant bottle in the middle of a grassy field. I’m not sure exactly where I am—I was hiking around the Acorn Valley Reservoir and at some point I wandered off the trail. You’ll find my red Saturn in the parking lot. Walk on the trail starting from that parking lot for, I don’t know, twenty minutes, then turn LEFT and walk into the forest. After a little while, you will emerge from the forest into a large grassy field. In the middle of the field, you should see a GIANT BOTTLE. That is where I am, inside of that bottle. Please come find me as soon as possible.

2.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS, PLEASE COME HELP ME. I AM TRAPPED IN A GIANT BOTTLE. The piece of paper that you hold in your hand was thrown by me through the top of this giant bottle in which I am trapped. I am tossing these notes out in the hope that the wind catches and carries them to someone who can help. I’m in the middle of a large grassy field outside the Acorn Valley Reservoir. Bring a ladder and some rope.

3.

My name is Robert Ebenhoe and I am trapped in a field near the Acorn Valley Reservoir Hiking Trail. Please send help right away.

4.

My name is Stacey Miller and I am being held against my will in a field near the Acorn Valley Reservoir Trail. Please come help me before my fiendish captors do something awful. I’m twenty-two years old and beautiful.

5.

Robert Ebenhoe—Late September (?) 2007—I am stuck inside a giant bottle in the middle of a grassy field. I said before I was hiking here. That was a lie, sort of. I left my wife. That was about two weeks before I got stuck inside here. I told myself that she was boxing me in, that if not for her I would be free. But after she left I just sat around the apartment, so in an effort to prove to myself my own freedom, I drove out to the reservoir and walked into the woods. And then found a giant bottle, and became trapped inside it. I’m near the Acorn Valley Reservoir. The bottle is green. Come get me.

6.

I realized that I started the first note I threw out of the neck of this bottle with “Hello.” Seems kind of funny now. But at the time it felt weird to just dive into things without some kind of greeting, especially because of the strangeness of my position. Anyway, my name is Robert Ebenhoe, and I’m stuck in a giant bottle near Acorn Valley Reservoir. It’s like a wine bottle, tipped over on its side. It looks like there was a label at one point, but it’s been peeled off so now there’s only sticky white backing left. I sit underneath its shadow at noon, when the inner temperature of the bottle peaks. Also, the bottle is filled with receipts and other scraps of paper. Hamburger wrappers and stuff. If you’ll turn this note over you’ll see it’s written on the back of a receipt for chewing gum from the Union 76 station on Redwood. The date on the receipt is worn off. But I have to assume this means someone knows about my bottle, and will be along eventually. But you should come and help me now, anyway. Bring some tools and stuff.

7.

Robert Ebenhoe here. Stuck-in-a-giant-bottle guy. I climbed into the bottle. I never said that before, because I was embarrassed, but that’s how I got in here, in case you were wondering. I was wandering around in the woods, and then found this giant bottle in a field. It’s lying on its side—did I say that already? It is—so if somewhere else you’ve found an upright giant bottle, that’s the wrong one, I’m in the tipped over giant bottle. I can see what looks like the stem of an upright giant bottle peeking over the tree line, but I think that it’s actually a water tower. Anyway, the neck of the bottle sits about eight feet above the ground, just low enough that you can jump up and grab it, and hoist yourself up and crawl down the stem. But the thing is, once you get inside the main part of the bottle, the sides are curved in such a way that you can’t climb back out. Your feet can’t get any traction because of the glass. So I realize my mistake, and trust me, I won’t make it again. Now please come get me.

8.

If you found a note from Stacey Miller saying she had been kidnapped and brought to a field near the Acorn Valley Reservoir, that was actually from me. I thought people might respond faster if they thought a twenty-two-year-old girl was in trouble, instead of a middle-aged divorcé stuck in a bottle. Either way, send help.

Stuck in a giant bottle in a field,
Robert Ebenhoe

9.

Is it possible that there exists a race of giants among us, so big that we can’t even comprehend them, yet their giant wine bottles occasionally find their way on to our plane of being? Is my presence in this place some kind of test they are putting me through? Are all human endeavors merely responses to obstacles put in our paths by these giant drinkers? Or perhaps I overstate my own importance. More likely I am to them as a mouse is to normal-sized humans, a creature to be ignored except when it wanders into one of our human-sized wine bottles and becomes trapped and starves to death, or maybe dies of fright, only later to be picked up and pondered by some behemoth conservationist trying to rid his world of one more piece of litter. O strange mysteries of life.
—Robert “Stuck in a Giant Bottle” Ebenhoe

10.

A bird today flew into the mouth of the bottle! Whether by an act of God or a simple misjudgment like my own, this seagull soared through the neck with remarkable grace, but became panicked upon its emergence into the larger chamber and in its alarm crashed into the thick glass base, at which point I took advantage of its bewilderment and descended upon it. I must say that my system is unused to meat, subsisting as I have been on the moss that grows in the corner, and the occasional piece of chewing gum I find amongst the paper scraps that I now use for bedding. But gastronomic maladies aside, a new energy surges through me, and I recommit myself to my winter preparations. Seagull jerky will serve as a crucial addition to my stockpiles, and the rendered fat will be useful fuel for my stove, keeping warm my receipt hut. My name is Robert Ebenhoe and I am stuck inside a bottle!

11.

I found a note today. I woke up and it was lying there near the entrance. At first I thought it was just another receipt, but then realized that was impossible—all available paper is incorporated into my winter shelter (and then occasionally picked off to write these missives). But on closer examination, I realized this was a note to me! It reads:

Dear Robert, I just want to say that I enjoy your writing very much. I once got my finger stuck inside the neck of a bottle, and boy was that a pickle! While I can’t imagine what you must be going through, every time I find one of your notes, blown up against my front steps, or one time on top of a leaf pile, I drop what I’m doing and read right away the latest installment. My only request would be that I think you should talk about the seasons more because I always think that area out there is so pretty when the seasons change. Otherwise, keep up the good work! Yours truly, Leslie Tate

Well, Leslie, we’ve reached that time of year when every morning I wake to find a gentle frost blanketing the ochre grass, and the glass of the bottle becomes a milky white, fogged on the inside by my precious body heat. Hibernation seems to have come for the deer and the rabbits, but thankfully there are crows and the occasional quail to keep me company. Is that enough for one note? Also, did you come out here? If you come again, do you think you could bring help and get me out of this bottle? I’d appreciate it! Thanks for your comments, and keep on reading!
—Robert Ebenhoe

12.

Greg Hickey writes:

Hey Ebenhoe. I was stuck in a bottle once, and I sure didn’t whine about it as much as you do! I made sure to buckle down and get myself out of there as quickly as I could. The fact that your still in that giant bottle is because your lazy. I’m tired of reading about it, and I think people are wrong when they say your a good writer.

Well Greg, would that it were so easy for me. I can’t speak to the size or location of your bottle, but believe me when I say that I would not remain here by choice even for a minute. Don’t think that I haven’t tried charging the mouth of the bottle, hoping to build the momentum required to then dive headfirst into the bottle’s neck, only instead to slide hopelessly back into this green glass tomb. And do not assume that I haven’t attempted weaving every receipt at my disposal into a rope, which I tie around the end of my shoe and heave out into the clear air in an attempt to grapple my way to freedom, but in actuality losing a good number of receipts and my left sneaker. I am glad to hear that you’re free from your own bottle, but please don’t assume that your situation is the same for all others. R. Ebenhoe

13.

Today I received at the mouth of the bottle this critical excerpt:

Ebenhoe’s ‘notes’ have unfortunately lost the terse wit and poignant observation they once carried, and now appear to be exclusively responses to his fan base and critics. It seems that Ebenhoe may have embraced his newfound celebrity, and in the manner of so many college professors and lecturers (and several critics I could name), turned his back on the creative endeavors that led him to the top of the tower. While Ebenhoe may have a future as a workshop instructor or magazine editor, it seems clear, to this critic, anyway, that the sun has begun to set on the Robert Ebenhoe school of writing.

The rest is shallow name dropping and general intellectual masturbation. I quote this only to note that this is the first mention I’ve heard of a school of thought associated with me. I can’t speak for those who emulate my work, but only to my own writing, which has never been intended to please critics, or even a readership, which has never had any other purpose than to relay the details of my physical condition and location, and which, rest assured, I will continue to do until that condition changes.
—R.

14.

I am Robert Ebenhoe. I am trapped in a giant bottle. I will not be silenced.

Chuck and I were standing in the hot lunch line holding our blue trays. We were tired of waiting. He pushed at the tray’s edges and spun it like a basketball on his pointer finger. I held mine steady. I would like to say that it was because I was reverent and respectful and aware of my actions, but, indeed, I couldn’t make trays spin on my pointer finger, attracting the wide-eyed gaze of both younger kids and coming-into-themselves girls.

At some point during the painstaking wait, while I was counting floor tiles and arranging them into some grand Escher extravaganza, a few boys lanked by and not exactly whispered, niggers.

Chuck was aware of its meaning, but I was more naïve. What is this niggers, I thought? At home my mother explained to me the significance of the word and the whys about not using it, but only after popping me in the mouth with a flick of her hand.

Kahului, Maui, HI

I used to think that it was because my mother forced me to school that first day, in nearly seventy-degree weather, clad in a tight chocolate wool sweater and fading brown corduroys. I tried to imagine that it was the glasses that my mother made me wear, all brown-rimmed and big, two storm windows across my eyes. I was sure it was the way I laughed and how I scrunched my nose, the bridge seeming to buckle between my eyes, which squinted and lost themselves in the folds of my lids.

It was a Japanese girl named Susie who noticed it first—when I raised my hand in Hawaiian language class when the teacher asked, Who here is Hawaiian? Susie turned to her pasty friend and said, He’s not Hawaiian…he’s hapa haole. I’d heard the term before, but consulted my mother when I got home. She told me that it meant half white and that it was bad to say. It was a way of saying that someone isn’t really part of something.

After that year in sixth grade, Susie never let up and, instead, was able to recruit many more to her cause.

Chuck, however, was never harassed. I thought that it might have been because he was a football player, had confidence, got popular. I thought it might have been because he had lighter skin than I, that maybe because he didn’t necessarily look Hawaiian, but possibly more Italian, they didn’t expect as much from him.

Chuck told me that I didn’t fit in because I didn’t speak Pidgin. Because I couldn’t:

Ey, bra? or

You hear dat Mrs. Takanawa go da kine? or

Da car broke down already, bumbai go make, die, dead, eh? or

Some fool you. Like one backhand?

And he was right. I couldn’t. It didn’t make sense. I tried once with my Samoan friend, Ka’inalu, but he told me I sounded like some asshole in the movies. He said that I sounded da kine, which clearly meant hapa haole.

I tried to explain to Chuck that I knew more about Hawaii than they did. I knew the dances. I knew the music. I was better at learning the language. I had my mother’s stories about old Hawaii. And I was Hawaiian. I was kanaka. Though not of Hawaii, I was part of Hawaii. They were the transplants.

Hapa haole. I would rather they called me hapa Hawaiian.

Jacksonville, FL

My brother, Terry, is as dark as me. He has that same thick, brown nose. My mother calls it Hanamaikai, her family name.

Here, there were more differing colors of skin than in the Midwest. His first day of school, Terry stopped for water at a drinking fountain. A boy interrupted and told him that it was a white-only fountain. Not wanting to get into a fight or make an issue, he moved on to the black fountain, biting his tongue all the way. As he bent down for a sip he was interrupted by a black boy who told him that he couldn’t drink there, that it was a black-only fountain. He wondered where the brown-boy fountain was. He spent that year drinking out of the groundskeeper’s garden hose.

Bradner, OH

They made me sleep in a trailer, she said. I asked them if the babies could sleep inside, but they wouldn’t allow it. We all had to sleep in a trailer.

My mother thought that Hawaii was bad, being second class in your own country, having to move to the side when a naval officer passed by, hearing the ladies cough from under their half-mooned hands, carrying handkerchiefs, Damn, jungle bunny. But there was worse. Like:

Marrying a man named Gomer who loves you, and you give him two children, and he takes you home, to Texas, and he is so certain of himself that he doesn’t stop to think about his family who hates blacks and how they might see his brown wife and they won’t let you or your children through the door, they simply turn the corners of their mouths down, fold their arms across their chests all pious-like, and tell him, not in this house, and he obeys and you sleep outside and you ask them if the babies can sleep in the house, but they won’t allow it and you and the babies sleep outside while your husband drinks scotch in the living room, making small talk, catching up, remembering old times. You’re just happy there’s a pot-bellied stove in the trailer.

In a Bathtub

There came a point when being white seemed to be my only option. So I filled the tub with bleach. Three gallons of bleach. Some hot water. I lay in that tub until I couldn’t take the burning anymore. My skin pealed and cracked. I couldn’t wear pajamas that night. The soft mattress picked at me. So I fixed myself on my back in one spot on the hardwood floor, and tried to look through the ceiling, tried to look beyond the roof and the tree and the clouds, their wetness cooling my skin, and tried to go even further then, shooting through the stratosphere. To float. And if I didn’t find God then, I would blend in with the dark. They wouldn’t find me in the nightness.

—as a light bulb can be seen from all sides—

How true, thought Builder. Shifting in his seat causing loud cracking noises to come from the chair legs, he took off his cap, laid it on the table and continued turning the pages of the black and grey book.

At the Bury St. Edmunds’ Manor House Museum, renaissance clocks made in Augsburg Bavaria are prized. Nothing like them was made anywhere else. The mirrored room fills with ticking and gonging and no one in the room has trouble telling the correct time, unless they’re too young to tell time, of course, or too old to remember.

Jenkins chews at the inside of his cheek, closes one eye and screws up his mouth, then stoops down low and throws the dice. They bounce back from the painted wall of the tool shed and rattle across the dirt.

Seven! he exclaims. Wow! Seven on the first throw!

The large-faced Other pushes away from the tree he’s been leaning on and points to the dice with a long-nailed grimy finger. His lank hair hangs down on the sides.

Oh, seven’s easy to get, it’s the one most likely to come up with any roll of the dice, says The Other. There are six different ways to roll a seven—the most ways of any number.

Scowling, Jenkins bends down and retrieves the dice. He shakes them in his broad fist, ready to roll again.

We’ll see, he says. He spits into the dirt at the feet of The Other. The Other’s shoes are brown and badly scuffed.

Bright-eyed Dale came into the room where Builder sat and he sat down at the other end of the brown table, his chair legs also creaking as though about to snap. Without looking up Builder turned a page of the book. Dale placed his hands on the table and watched as Builder continued to read.

—fainter stars have become visible through telescopes— Builder leaned back in his chair with the book held before his eyes. Dale licked his upper lip. He doesn’t seem to notice me, doesn’t he even notice me—

If this is the case—if this is what the masses are consuming—what hope is there for experimental literature’s survival? In a Harper’s Magazine article, Ben Marcus rages against the judges of 2004’s National Book Award in fiction, saying their quick dismissal of low-selling works was “a clear announcement that the value system for literature [is] tweaked to favor not people who actually read a lot of books but a borderline reader…who might read only one or two books in a year.”[2] Marcus’ argument is based on a premise that American readers are not interested in being mentally challenged and that the publishing elite cater to this by marginalizing economically any writer “interested in the possibilities of language…[who] appreciate artistic achievements of others but still dream for [them]selves …[and believe] that new arrangements are possible…new connections of language that might set off a series of delicious mental explosions.”[3] Though the publishing house numbers would support this assertion, what Marcus fails to account for is the fact that experimental writing, from avant-garde to postmodern, has never held the dominant interest. In fact, this is specifically a condition of its existence. As long as mass-produced and formulaic literature exists, there will be marginal groups addressing the crises and conflicts internal to literature itself. And that is okay.

I recognize that the term “experimental” is problematic, and has been found frustrating by many writers. Among the more vocal was Kathy Acker, who openly complained that it invalidates the finished work and creates an illegitimacy that more traditional forms do not have to deal with.[4] She saw the label as “another way of sticking people in the corner,” focusing solely on texts that would be more aptly named transgressive. In contemporary society, it is easy to blur boundaries and get confused. While the experimental and transgressive can overlap, just as the experimental and postmodern can, they are not necessarily the same animal. Experimental writing, for the purposes of this discussion, includes the transgressive, postmodern, and avant-garde. It acts as an umbrella term; a foil to traditional, formulaic, formalist writing.

Experimental writing provides a means of expression that is different from traditional narrative by shifting focus from empathy to sympathy—from “I feel what you feel” to “I feel a supporting emotion about your feelings”—a distancing that creates objectivity.[5] It not only allows the writer to access areas that may have been blocked off by traditional, formalist approaches, but creates an opportunity for the reader to shift consciousness and become aware of the present. And while experimental writing, like other forms, will always exist, it can never become dominant due to its nature to demand shifts in cognition: “Whenever the present achieves expression, those living in it will find it annoying, irritating, unnatural, ugly. Consequently, art can’t be made present by accommodating it to popular styles or dominant ideas” because it will lose its present-ness as a result.[6] Experimental writing will need to reconcile itself to the fringe of publishing society and accept that what it is creating now will most likely not be appreciated for many years to come, when its innovative approaches have become integrated into popular culture and are no longer threatening.

Since the 1960s, an experimental fire has been brewing in France. At first only a slow smolder, the kindling has in the last fifteen years begun to take and spread its embers about the globe. This fire, to end the metaphor here, is the literary form of Oulipo. Now, I must be careful because maybe form is not quite the right word. Genre? No, even that’s debatable. For now, I’ll leave the categorization up to you.Oulipo—otherwise known as Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, OU.LI.PO, and OuLiPo—is experimental, provocative, and transgressive. Oulipo is political and subversive, superficial and multifaceted, weighted and impartial. Oulipo is poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, mystery, romance, comedy, and tragedy. In short, Oulipo is everything.

The question, of course, begs to be asked: if Oulipo is everything, how can it be something? In order to answer that, some backtracking is in order. In the early 1930s, a group of French mathematicians gathered together secretly to begin writing a series of books under the collective name of Nicolas Bourbaki. The group’s mission was to rewrite all of mathematics using Set Theory and rigor to create a unifying foundation. Operating as an underground group, Bourbaki managed to publish extensively, subverting conventional mathematics worldwide, particularly at the advanced level. The originators of Oulipo (François Lionnais, Raymond Queneau, et al.) considered their group an homage, parody, and extension of Bourbaki—their intention being to invent and reinvent restrictions by which literature is composed. Oulipo translates the rewriting of mathematics as a whole into the realm of language arts.Unlike formalist approaches, Oulipien literature begins by setting up rules for itself; rules that do not coincide with the conventions of tradition or with which readers have understood to constitute a proper work of art. These rules can be as simple as Christine Brooke-Rose’s decision not to use the verb “to be” in her novel Between, or as complex as Georges Perec’s choice to follow complicated mathematical equations and chess moves in Life A User’s Manual. The rule, once set, then becomes the only initial constant—it is the sole framework within which the author will create.
Many of the constraints that have already seeped their way into popular literature include the anagram, acrostic, and lipogram. The anagram, for those unfamiliar, rearranges the letters of one word to create another (angel into glean, for example); acrostic poems use the vertical succession of a word to form the first letters of each line of the poem (John Cage did this quite a bit); and lipograms exclude one or more letters from the text (Perec’s A Void manages to exclude the letter “e” from the entire novel). Other less familiar constraints conform strictly to mathematical formulas, like W ± n. This relation was originally devised by Jean Lescure and is also known as S +7 and N + 7. Here W stands in for a word, and n stands in for a variable number. The formula is simply to replace each noun in a passage with the seventh that follows in the dictionary. The original texts can be taken from traditional sources or created originally for the project. If we take the quote “Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief” (Act v, Sc.2) from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and try the formula, we get: “Honest plain workshops best pierce the Earhart of grieschoch.”The amendment, in and of itself, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So what’s the point? Simply, this is one of the easiest ways of breaking down the pre-programmed language structures that condition our experience and expression and subsequently one of the easiest ways of creating something new. By their very nature, these strategies require a lack of intention on the part of the author—the method becomes the focus, rather than the result. This lack of intention within the constraint, though, is only the initial approach to creating a text. It is a compositional approach, just like freewriting or Madlibs. The author does the work of accumulation under constraint and arrives at a point where all of the elements are ready to put into a composition. Oulipien writing, unlike trangressive or avant-garde, is not about rebellion or political agendas. It is about finding new combinations of things, new ways of expressing and seeing, and nothing more.

Where formalist approaches make structure invisible so as to allow for full immersion in the subject-plot, Oulipien approaches draw attention to form and make structure part of the reading experience. Formalism’s structure “conceals certain assumptions about that pre-existing order and its role in creating the possibility for human action and critical theory” and can easily reinforce the framework of society so that readers do not consider re-evaluation.[7] Oulipien, and other experimental forms, subvert this framework.

So what can American writers learn from the French? That we can be more proactive in thinking outside the box with regards to our compositional structures. If mathematics and literature can be combined, why not try other non-literary areas? Why not physics, or ecology, or plumbing (yes, you read that right). It’s an exciting world, this realm of the experimental. Aristotle burst many a bubble with his everything already exists idea—why not find out what connections are lying hidden? Who knows what can happen as a result.

Some notable Oulipien texts worth reading:

Life A User’s Manual and A Void (La Disparation) by Georges Perec

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Cosmicomics, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

My Life in the CIA by Harry Mathews

Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans le Metro) by Raymond Queneau

Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie

Notes

[1] BookWire. 9 March 2006. Bowker, Inc. http://www.bookwire.com/BookIndustryNews.asp

[2] Ben Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” Harper’s Magazine (October 2005): 41

[3] Ibid 40

[4] Kathy Acker interview. http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_acker.html The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1989, Volume 9.3

[5] Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” NARRATIVE 14.3 (October 2006): 207-236

[6] See R.M. Berry, “Avante-garde and the Question of Literature,” Electronic Book Review, ed. Joseph Tabbi 27 Apr 2003 http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/AVAnt

[7] See Jim Hansen, “Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory,” New Literary History 35.4 (Autumn 2004): 663-684

“Why is your face so red?” I remember asking.

Neighborhood kids said my father looked like Santa with his beard and belly, shirtless in summertime as he strung the hose across the lawn to fill up our Kmart kiddie pool, strategically placed over the oil slicks in our driveway. Six feet tall, he carried weight well in that he looked sturdy, reliable, and likable, if a little sad—like Santa. He wasn’t that fat, either, but neighborhood kids were never discriminatory in their cruelness. Nor were their parents sick. I didn’t know how to defend my father without giving away a part of my life that I could never verbalize, and besides, I told myself, the neighborhood kids would never understand disease if I myself couldn’t. Instead, I began to tell people that he wasn’t my father. A girl who’d lived across the street from me for so many years reminded me of this. It was in high school that she embarrassingly admitted, “I believed that lie about your father for so long!” I was confused—what lie?— and then I remembered with such clarity that I wondered how I could’ve forgotten in the first place. No telling how many children I told, how many afternoons on the school bus where I fabricated details about his busy shooting schedule, if I ever danced with him, and maybe even about his hair products.

In 1992, my favorite movie was Dirty Dancing. And so I’d begun to tell all who cared that my real father was Patrick Swayze.

***

Six cans a minute, six cans a minute, or you are fired. Twenty-five cents an hour.

This is the street of Adelino the fisherman and Clara the canner; their marriage is a tapestry of five years and two children. Adelino speaks almost as much Spanish as Clara speaks Portuguese. This is the street of Clara’s sister, Rose, with the dandelion laugh. She is the poker champion of the Row and the first boss lady of the canners.

Six cans a minute, six cans a minute, or you are fired. Twenty-five cents an hour.

This is the street of the Martín girls: Dolores, the eldest, is the beauty. She has two children but is proud of her hour glass figure. Her once candy-pursed mouth is beginning to pull. Rosa is Dolores’s daughter. She is twelve, petite yet big bosomed. Her head is filled with Nancy Drew mysteries, and impossible romances.  When she hears the ocean she can feel her pulse with the waves. Dolores makes her say she is fourteen so she can work. Rosa’s sister is eight. She is given ribbons for her hair and stays at home. Rosa is unhappy but she must work or her mother will pull her hair.

This is Bella’s street. She is Dolores’s younger sister, the tiny one, the sickly one, the one who will marry in a wedding dress nine inches above her knees to a man from a family her father cursed. This is the street of Carmen with the girlish laugh; she is Dolores’s youngest sister and the fastest canner on the row – a thousand cans an hour. Carmen enjoys the title, but earns the same pay as everyone else.

Six cans a minute, six cans a minute or you are fired. Twenty-five cents an hour.

This is Nick’s street, Rose and Clara’s brother. He has picked up Italian, Portuguese and English so he can work on any boat in the bay. The fishermen call him “waves” because of his perfect curls. His admirers say he is “the most handsome man on Cannery Row.” The jealous say his sisters put his curls in rollers every night. He is in love with Carmen, but she refuses to acknowledge the son of a gambler.

Six cans a minute, six cans a minute or you are fired.

This is the street of Christina, twenty-five years old and fresh from a Palermo convent, and her brother, Giuseppi. Both are angel cheeked, always smiling, and in love with wine.

Twenty-five cents an hour.

This is the street of Jenna, who keeps a finger rosary in her pocket and a widow’s shroud of death over her shoulders.

This is Megumi’s street, the fish cutter with quick hands and a plan.

This is Anthony’s street, his cannery will be the first to burn.

This is Giovanna’s street. This is Katie’s street. This is Connie’s street. Isabelle’s street. Francisco’s street. Billie’s street. Anne’s street. Julia. Margaret. Richard. Adolfo. Ruth. Renee. Pablo. Gustavo. Rafael. Césario. Vivian. Carla. Diane. Beatrice. Carol. Mary. Frances. Rosemarie. Christina. Gabrielle. Jorge. Adelle. Federica. Caroline. Carlotta. Justine. Roberto. Sebastian. Sofia. Dorothy. Andrew.

This is the street of silver harvest; musk in your mouth; knife-edged fish stink.