The Architecture of Wenonah Public School and Its Effect on the Young

Second Grade had a lot more challenges than First Grade. But before I talk about what we actually learned let’s talk a bit about how the school was laid out. Wenonah Public School looked a little like a barbell. At either end were the older parts of the school. I wish I knew which was oldest but honestly I don’t. I do know that the end closest to the Water Tower on the north end of the barbell held the Nurses office, the Janitors office, and the Library. When I first began school this was where the 7th and 8th graders had their classes. I was in the last group of children to go through a school that went from K to 8.
Because of population pressures a regional High School was built when I was in 6th grade. It would take the students from 5 sending districts and relieve overcrowding in Woodbury HS. We’ll get there eventually but for right now I’m jammed in a school with kids that are near toddlers and others that are teenagers. All of us dress the same.
The other end of the barbell held the 4th, 5th and 6th graders. In the middle were us schmoos. The kindergartners, the 1st graders, the 2nd graders, the 3rd graders. Because of the same population pressures we were often jammed into combined classes.
The baby boom was too much for Wenonah and too much for large swatches of America. Loads of us were jammed together with older or younger students just as in later generations they’d be jammed into trailers. It’s all the same.
You might be asking why they just didn’t build a bigger school. That’s a larger political question. New Jersey has this fucked up tax structure that basically funds a town’s school system with the taxes of home owners. What that means on a practical basis is that in a town like Wenonah with a number of older residents whose children were grown, coupled with a number of families with young children was that you create class warfare. Every year some knucklehead young parent would lobby hard for an addition or whatever and every year the old people would come out in droves to the polls to defeat it.
This continues even today. When I was living in Wenonah in 2003 there was a school improvement initiative on the ballot. My landlady Rachel asked me how I was going to vote and being a progressive, thoughtful man I said I was going to vote yes. She said I can’t afford to have my taxes go up and if they do so will your rent. Thank God in America your vote is your secret.
At any rate there I am in 2nd grade with a group of 15 3rd graders. This is the dawning of hierarchy. I start to understand I know nothing. The 3rd graders make it clear I know nothing. They can read and write and spell and multiply. I can print and read Dick and Jane and maybe add. I think I could count to 100. I was fucked.
Plus I’m tiny, skinny, and smart. A bad combo. Egghead. Even in 2nd grade I’m a marked man. I might as well have been wearing a target. The only nice thing was I discovered the school library. Next post: Revisionist, socialist literature in a tiny white Republican community and it’s effect on 2nd and 3rd graders or how I learned to love Clarence Darrow.

One foot in One foot out

Here's the thing about Wenonah in 1959. I have one foot in the future and one foot in the past. Look at Mrs. Kaufman's clothes. It could be 1899. Take a closer look at our scuffed shoes in the picture. We could be in a Walker Evans picture. Shoes scuffed and timeless. They could be the shoes of a newsboy in 1912.
They're not.
We don't know anything about our history. We're little kids in a world about to erupt in change. We play games children have played for fifty years or more. We walk streets children have walked since 1888. We're obedient. We don't know about anything beyond our town.
My father's family did what they had been doing for nearly fifty years, if not longer. Men went to work. Women stayed home. Further south of Wenonah there were farms that were farmed the same way for hundreds of years. The connection to the past was long and hard. Our values, our perspectives, our beliefs were all formed fifty or more years ago. Yes, our father's fought in World War II as their father's had fought in World War I. Yes, we hated negroes. Yes, we went to church on Sundays. Yes, we learned reading and writing and prepared for a life just like our fathers.
That was all to end.
If you could see my brother Ted's photos or my sister Mary's they'd be different. My parents changed, everything changed. There were riots. There was a war. There was rock and roll. There were drugs and sex and loud arguments. But for now we are suspended in a strange time warp.
A time warp that had to end.
Over the next 11 years the world would change in ways we didn't yet understand. For better or worse.

My New Suit/First Holy Communion

Summer 1959

First Grade came winding down. I received my first Holy Communion. My parent’s bought me my first suit of clothes, from Robert Hall, and I trudged with a couple dozen boys and girls to the altar to taste the Body and Blood of Christ. Then it was summer. And just like school changed the world into weekdays and weekends, so school gave us summer vacation. Three long months that had a rhythm and structure all their own.
My family took a two week vacation at the end of June each year. We would rent an apartment in Ocean City, NJ and spend two weeks at the shore. The day consisted of waking up, going for a long walk on the beach, to the point perhaps, and then going home to get our towels and toys and going back to the beach. We spent the day on the beach except for lunch. Lunch was a rushed sandwich, tuna or cold cuts or PB & J, and then back to the beach.
We’d body surf and try to float. We’d make great sandcastles. Most of the time we stayed near 59th Street in Ocean City. Until 1962 it had a long fishing pier that stretched well out into the ocean. It also had a row of great Granite blocks dumped along the shore to hold the beach in place. We’d play inside the spaces between the blocks. We found sand sharks in gullies and learned how to find shells in the morning.
Sometimes my father would play box ball with us or handball. It was my father who taught us how to body surf. How to catch a wave just right. In the evening we’d eat seafood from Campbell’s and then if we were lucky go to the boardwalk and ride the rides.
My father had been going to Ocean City his whole life. Ocean City had long ties to the Philly Irish community. The Kelly’s of Philadelphia had a big house that my father never failed to point out to us. Our Uncle John had a home on 42nd Street right on the beach and we’d walk up and visit Uncle John and Aunt Ellie and my fathers cousins, including Aunt Alice who I thought was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
On the boardwalk our father taught us how to grab the brass ring on the merry go round and took us up high on the ferris wheel. We’d watch the great summer moon sink into the sea and then get up and do it all again.
By the time we returned to Wenonah it too was different. Wenonah in summer was hot and humid beyond belief. Nothing moved except the children. That first year we joined the Wenonah Lake and went there to take rudimentary swimming lessons. We played in the kiddie part of the lake and cooked hot dogs and ate snow cones.
We began to expand our world that summer. Mick had gone to Kindergarten that year and now had friends of his own. Some of my classmates were members of the Lake as well as his so we all joined together in games. Hierarchies had not yet been established and we knew nothing of cool. We were just having fun.
In the evenings we could play outside till 8pm when it was time for bed. There was really nothing of consequence on television so we began our long games of Kick the Can. Our friends played it for hours after we’d gone to bed and we could hear the can rattling along the sidewalk from our beds.
Thunderstorms would come rolling through and I’d lie at the end of my bed with my cat Surprise and watch the terrible skies light up. Great trees would fall and crush a house or lie across the road.
Each summer the town would put new macadam down on several of the streets. The smell of hot tar would fill the afternoon and the stones were new and fresh. We had yet to really explore the woods but that was soon to come.
Finally the summer wound down in a long, long slide that took us inexorably back to school. A few days before the first day of school we could walk up to the school and they would have our class listings posted.
Second grade for me would put me in a class with Third graders. Miss Quigley was our teacher. She was blond and pretty and looked a bit like Donna Reed. I was as glad for summer to end as I’d been for it to begin. I was bored with play and wanted something new. Something new I would get. Each September.

Writing this thing

This post has nothing to do with the Wenonah posts. Please ignore it and pay attention to the others. But keep in mind that as I write about my past things come up that I haven't thought of in years. I asked my Aunt Gert, my mother's sister, the one who dated Ramesh, when her father died. She told me 1956. She took me to the zoo that day. I loved my Poppy Glading. He was as distant and removed as my father's father. He died of emphysema, the same disease that killed my father's father.
I dreamed last night that my mother sent me emails congratulating me on my birthday. In the dream I was elated but sad because she sent them to my gmail account which I rarely check.
What the fuck does that mean? What does it mean to spend time looking at your past? In the present I'm under enormous stress. The NYC Health Dept is under pressure cuz they fucked up and now they're fucking all my clients and they're fucking me. I am the man who has to solve their problems. Calm their nerves. Make certain they are in compliance. In the meantime my mother is sending me emails.
This is a hard row to hoe.
It was a warm day today after a nasty rain. I took the day off because I was exhausted and afraid.
My dogs didn't care. They just wanted me near them.
Outside over all of us is the world; and outside over all of that is God. We act and we bend and we fail and care but it is with his grace that we are at our best. I thank God that I am alive. Once I was nearly dead. Now I just get emails from the dead.

The One Black Girl in Mrs. Kaufman's Class

My friend Carolyn in my office has asked me to talk more about Michelle Smith and her family. I've resisted because I thought we should wait for the full thrust of time and society to give her and her family weight. Maybe I'm wrong. Michelle's mother was Irene Smith. She was and I believe still is an strong and powerful advocate for the black community and African American's in South Jersey. Their lives in 1958 were severely circumscribed by the society of the day. I mentioned we drove home from my grandmothers through the pig farms. The pig farms were largely worked by the black people of Jericho. They lived next to them. When I was in high school we rode our buses through Jericho and we could see the outhouses in the backyards. This was a world ten steps away from ours. This was a caste system just like the one that separated Ramesh and his Indian bride. This was and is a great divide.
Irene Smith believed strongly in establishing a strong black presence in South Jersey. She bought a property in Wenonah. It must have been a great struggle. As it was it was just one the outside of everything nestled close against Jericho. She was outspoken. She was proud. She was what black people needed in a time when black people were nothing in South Jersey. When I was growing up South Jersey most closely resembled the deep south. There were long arguments among my friends about what their families would do if blacks moved into our neighborhood. My friend, Chris DeHart's mother, was a southern woman and he had deep antipathies to black people. Most of my friends believed black people didn't belong in Wenonah. When I moved back to get well in 2001 there was a house on Mantua Avenue flying the Confederate flag. It was not because of Southern sympathies. It was because the man who owned the home hated niggers.
In my family that word was forbidden. My mother's father, my grandfather, had deep seated hatreds against foreigners, Jews, Catholics, but most of all, niggers. He railed against them at the table each evening. Philadelphia was a deeply divided city and remains so. For all the good Quakers there were a thousand racists. Frank Rizzo was Philly's hero and Frank fought the Negro menace.
My mother hated racism and her father's bigotry. Nonetheless it was part of her. Wenonah was a white as white can be. Michelle and her brother Michael were of our town but until the late sixties never really part of it. I hate telling a story early but part of what this story is about is how my world changed. I had to leave a party when I was seventeen with two of my friends and my brother with our backs against the wall and fists up because we were "nigger lovers". Nigger lovers. What a sad phrase. I know all the words for black people. Spearchucker, porch monkey, spook. I knew boys that tried to run down black hitchhikers on Glassboro Road for kicks.
When I went to work at Cornell Steel in college my co-worker Jim Sterner said he went to Senior Year in HS with a shotgun in his bag to kill any nigger that got out of line.
Got out of line.
My mother had a series of housekeepers from Catholic Charities. They were all black women who worked for a few months or so helping an overworked woman cope with three overactive idiots. They were paid nearly nothing. That was the only reason my mother could afford them.
I know nothing of the internal life of Michelle Smith. I don't know who she loved, who she gave birth to or where she went to college. She and her brother were the only black people I came in contact with till I went to college in 1970. This is an America that we don't need to go back to. You can guess at her alienation from my own. It's just a guess. You can wonder why this country discounted so many people just because of the color their skin. But we all danced to nigger music.
So all I can offer for right now is this: Motown was the music we all loved. Philly was the heart of Soul. White kids loved nigger music. Something there is in this country that won't let us become a balkan state. I envied the black people I saw because they were comfortable with their bodies. Maybe they weren't. I envied their music. I loved it. With all my heart I wish I'd never heard the word nigger.
In my office people use that word cavalierly. People who don't know the hurt it carries. They don't know that if I use it I don't mean nigga; I mean nigger. It's not an expression of familiarity, it's an expression of derision and hatred and disgust. No, it's an expression of negation. Cuz niggers don't count. They're not even there. Like a lot of people. Like Ramesh. And really like me.

Who's who in Mrs. Kaufman's class

I spent about an hour trying to figure out who everyone was in this photo. My friend Suzy Parker thought Michelle Smith started school in 2nd grade. How nice to see her tall and black figure in the second row. Tommy Woods is in the back row on the right looking all twisted. I'm obviously in the front row, right, looking worried. I look that way in all my school photos. That probably means something.
My Aunt Gert wrote to tell me that Ramesh went to work in LA for their subway system and married an Indian woman. There were problems with caste. There are problems with caste here but not so obvious. I knew all the boys except two and I'm sure my memory could be jogged with help.
Time is a strange thing. Photography a trick with light and chemicals. All of us are older. Older than our parents then, older probably then our grandparents. We look worried and clean and dare I say it, eager.
I welcome my fellow Wenonah friends to help me along this path. Who the fuck are all these girls? I only spent time with boys.
When I said that in the office they all made gay comments but of course what self respecting kid in 1958 hung with girl. Ick. So, help!

Mrs. Kaufman's 1st Grade Class 1958

Weekends at Nonny's

Our weekends with my Grandmother centered on a big meal, either on Sunday or Saturday. It’s important to note that for two reasons I wasn’t used to good food. The first is that while my father was a good provider, we weren’t rich. That meant my mother had to make do with less expensive meals. We're talking hot dogs, hamburgers, meatloaf, the standard hodge podge of middle class cooking in 1958. The second is that my mother was a terrible cook. I don’t know if that’s because she was a product of her age or what but cooking was not her finest moment. We did have fresh milk on the table and in the tradition of the fifties a loaf of white bread and butter. We ate fish every Friday and almost never had chicken because my father hated it.
My Grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a wonderful cook. Everything was fresh and from the butcher or the grocer. Rarely were canned ingredients part of a meal. The table was always full and the desserts were fantastic. Homemade pies and cakes. After the meal the adults would sit and talk. If it was Sunday we watched a bit of television. First Lawrence Welk, then the Ed Sullivan show. I hated both until I was in my early teens. I always hated Lawrence Welk but the toxic mix of European circuses and lounge acts and comedians who appealed to adults on Sullivan bewildered me. At any rate when it was over we’d pack ourselves up in the car and head back to South Jersey. I knew the way so well that when I first got my license I drove there without directions.
We boys were all jammed in the back seat with mom and dad up front. Like most young boys we spent half the way fighting and half gazing out the window. We'd move first through the suburbs of Philly, just off the Main Line. At Christmas you could tell when you moved through a Jewish neighborhood, no lights. Then onto the Schukyll Expressway, past the Sunoco Oil Refinery, the company my father worked for, and over the Walt Whitman Bridge. Going over the bridge was the stink of the whiskey brewery at it's base. Past the bridge and Camden then on through Deptford and into the pig farms of Jericho with their rich smell of garbage to home. Home. Some nights when we came home in the summer the porch was covered in tree frogs. Some nights it was cold with frost. Always it was home.
My brother Ted was always out like a light by the time we got to Wenonah and it was straight to bed. I hadn’t begun the morning ritual of showers yet and so got my bath each night before bed.
I’d go to bed each Sunday, clean, and tired, and ready for a new week of being chased to school by my beloved friends. The rough tough creampuff was me. Each Monday began my torment and it didn’t end till Friday at three. In between were my friends Dick and jane and Far and Away and Here and There and the library in the basement began to beckon. Second and third grades began to open the world to the asthmatic, skinny wretch that was me. Little fool running home chased by two other little fools shouting made up nonsense. The hierarchy of the ignorant. I loved them all; I feared them all; I couldn't wait to grow up.

Weekends at Nonny's

Our weekends with my Grandmother centered on a big meal, either on Sunday or Saturday. It’s important to note that for two reasons I wasn’t used to good food. The first is that while my father was a good provider, we weren’t rich. That meant my mother had to make do with less expensive meals. We're talking hot dogs, hamburgers, meatloaf, the standard hodge podge of middle class cooking in 1958. The second is that my mother was a terrible cook. I don’t know if that’s because she was a product of her age or what but cooking was not her finest moment. We did have fresh milk on the table and in the tradition of the fifties a loaf of white bread and butter. We ate fish every Friday and almost never had chicken because my father hated it.
My Grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a wonderful cook. Everything was fresh and from the butcher or the grocer. Rarely were canned ingredients part of a meal. The table was always full and the desserts were fantastic. Homemade pies and cakes. After the meal the adults would sit and talk. If it was Sunday we watched a bit of television. First Lawrence Welk, then the Ed Sullivan show. I hated both until I was in my early teens. I always hated Lawrence Welk but the toxic mix of European circuses and lounge acts and comedians who appealed to adults bewildered me. At any rate when it was over we’d pack ourselves up in the car and head back to South Jersey. I knew the way so well that when I first got my license I drove there without directions.
We boys were all jammed in the back seat with mom and dad up front. Like my most young boys we spent half the way fighting and half gazing out the window. We'd move first through the suburbs of Philly, just off the Main Line. At Christmas you could tell when you moved through a Jewish neighborhood, no lights. Then onto the Schukyll Expressway, past the Sunoco Oil Refinery, the company my father worked for and over the Walt Whitman Bridge. Going over the bridge was the stink of the whiskey brewery at it's base. Past the bridge and Camden then on through Woodbury and Woodbury Heights to home. Home. Some nights when we came home in the summer the porch was covered in tree frogs. Some nights it was cold with frost. Always it was home.
My brother Ted was always out like a light by the time we got to Wenonah and it was straight to bed. I hadn’t begun the morning ritual of showers yet and so got my bath each night before bed.
I’d go to bed each Sunday, clean, and tired, and ready for a new week of being chased to school by my beloved friends. The rough tough creampuff was me. Each Monday began my torment and it didn’t end till Friday at three. In between were my friends Dick and jane and Far and Away and Here and There and the library in the basement began to beckon. Second and third grades began to open the world to the asthmatic, skinny wretch that was me. Little fool running home chased by two other little fools shouting made up nonsense. The hierarchy of the ignorant. I loved them both.

Weekends 1958

The rest of the weekend in those first few years in Wenonah was bliss. I had yet to get chores assigned to me and my world revolved mostly around my family. I spent many hours just playing in the house with my brothers or watching tv. I can't even tell you what we did. Explored the dark basement, climbed the tree behind the garage, played catch with my father. Not much. No organized ball, no work, no anxieties to speak of.
Many weekends were spent at my Grandmother Glading's. She lived in a suburb of Philadelphia in a nice little house with my Aunt Gersh (short for Gertrude). For a while my Uncle Al and Aunt Gert were also both there though they ultimately moved away as they grew up. This was heaven for me and for my brothers. They doted on us. We got to eat good food. I have a feeling my parents packed us away so they could go have fun but who cares.
We got to stay up late and drink a half a Piels and eat ham and cheese and watch Mike Hammer.
Oh joy. We explored their attic and played in the back and half listened to the alien conversations of adults. My Aunt Gert brought home a boyfriend once who was black. He was from Tanganyika. His name was Ramesh. He was alien and spoke differently and fascinated us.
I never thought how he might have felt or how my grandmother felt. We wanted to hear about lions.

Weekends and Catholicism 1958

Weekends were a new thing for me. Before first grade every day was a weekend. Now the week was bracketed by Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was always the best because Sunday marked the long count down to Monday. A pattern that never ends until you retire. Weekends also marked my initiation into the mysteries of Faith. Yes, that’s right, First Holy Communion and the Catechism. Who Made Me. God Made Me.
Every Saturday morning until I was 15 I went to Mantua to learn the vagaries of the Catholic Faith. That first year I was educated so I could accept the body and blood of Christ. Remember, I was six going on seven. Who gave a fuck who made me. I wanted to run in the woods. I wanted to play with my little men. I wanted to annoy my little brother Ted but instead me and about six other little kids from Wenonah were trucked off to Mantua and the Church of the Incarnation so that we could receive the Sacrament of Holy Communion.
We spent about two hours every Saturday morning being tutored by either nuns or the laiety (shorthand for old Italian ladies from Mantua). We recited our Catechism and prepared to accept the Sacrament. It fucked up Saturday like nobody’s business. There were only about six Catholic families in Wenonah so this was an opportunity to learn about diversity. Or more appropriately about difference. Nobody else in my town knew what I was doing. They went to church school on Sunday, then church, then they went home and had fun.
Not me. Not my friends. We went to listen to dour, nasty, old women talk about topics that to a seven year old had almost no value. Pure, unadulterated torment. I know some people profess to love the trappings of the Mass. It’s rituals and robes. The incense. The mysteries. Fuck that shit. I used to gnaw on the back of the pew in front of me. I grew to love the taste of varnish. In summer I would faint. This was before air conditioning after all. The only time the church was nice was Christmas. The Church of the Incarnation was beautiful at Christmas. There was a holiday bazaar and we had a little party with gift giving. Everyone was kind and thoughtful till Christmas day when the priest told us we were assholes for only coming to church at Christmas. I never understood this because I was there every week. Come hell or high water. Sick, well, sad or happy, I was there to worship the Lord.
I should mention there were also no Jews in my town technically when I arrived in 1958. One family, the Parkers, were sort of Jewish. Their father had changed their name from Katz to Parker but they didn’t technically live within the towns borders and they were never brought up within the Jewish faith. For all I know they went to the Presbyterian church. I think this means they were assimilated.
Most people in town were either Methodist or Presbyterian. Wenonah was primarily Methodist. A dour little religion. No gambling, liquor, or cursing. No fun. Wenonah was a dry town because of Methodism. A lot of towns in South Jersey are Methodist, including one of the great shore towns, Ocean City. No liquor could be bought or sold in Ocean City but the largest liquor store I’ve ever seen was right across the bridge in Somers Point. Next to the Dunes till Dawn, one of the great roadhouses of the world. Fun, fun, fun, till your daddy takes the T Bird away.
It was a sin for Catholics to go to another church. At least that was what we were told. You could get dispensation for special circumstances, like camping trips or a funeral. I only went to a service held by another religion once in my young life. I was in Boy Scouts and we attended a Methodist service in the Pine Barrens. Dull as dishwater. Hard to believe but Methodism is kind of like Communism. It was a mass movement founded by urban activists in England and Europe in the 17 hundreds to fight the excesses of drink and gambling caused by the changes in lifestyle brought on by the Industrial Revolution. See George Eliot for more details.
There are also bunches of Quakers in South Jersey. Several of my friends were Quakers and their services sounded interesting. You just get up and talk once in awhile. No host, no wine, no God really. There is a strong pacifist presence in South Jersey and Philadelphia. My town sent lots of young men to war and our local draft board gave out no exemptions but several young men went to Canada in the 60’s because of their Quaker beliefs.
Anyway, that was the first two hours of my weekend. In two days we get the next 46. Ha ha.

Reading at the Bowery

Hi everyone!
There's more from Wenonah coming today but I wanted to remind everyone I'm reading tomorrow at the Bowery Poetry Club at 2pm. The Bowery Poetry Club is located at 308 Bowery and is a great place to hear poetry. I'm reading as part of the on-going Four Way Books reading series and will be sharing the stage with three other poets of renown and international reputation. They are Ellen Dore Watson, Alexandra Soiseth, and Adria Bernardi. It should be a great afternoon and I hope to see some of you there!
March starts my mad poetry rush with a tour of New England. I'll be teaching High School students in Littleton NH and then doing readings in Maine. Then of course it's National Poetry Month in April. All of which will insure that by May I'll be so sick of poems I'll be the first one on the beach at Sandy Hook on Memorial Day. Here's to a naked summer.

Recess; September 1958

Here we are in the schoolyard of Wenonah Elementary School. Twenty or so spindly kids with our nice clothes on. Girls with peter pan collars and dresses just below the knees. Boys with plaid shirts and khakis, all of us wearing one style Buster Brown's or another, all bought at Ernie's Shoe Post. Standing in line in order of height on the edge of the yard. The schoolyard was yellow gravel with a raised and asphalted section at one end. On the asphalted section there were two basketball hoops, a tennis net and a swing set. Monkeybars too.
We were ready for our first recess. All but one of us is white. The lone black kid, a girl, Michelle Smith, stands out even more as she's the tallest.
Wenonah school is a mish-mosh of three buildings; on each end are the older school buildings dating to the1880's and in the middle is a one story fifties set of classrooms.
Most of us have never met until today. Now we'll spend six years together.
We have recess twice a day. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In first grade recess is fairly simple. We play Dodge Ball or we play Kick Ball. No football, basketball, baseball, or track. Both sports are horror shows for kids. They're all about hierarchy and torture and pain. Plus they're good exercise. For someone. Not for me. We pick sides for our games. The boys and girls play separately. Good plan. We're picked by children the teacher names as captain. The captain picks kids who can do well. He picks children based on their physical abilities. While all of us have some limitations a few of us are severely limited. The worst is Tommy Woods. He must have been borderline retarded. One day he got his leg caught in the bars of his chair. His agility rivaled a milk carton. Then there were the one or two fat kids. Then the skinny and half blind. I was skinny, inept, and full of drive. i always got picked close to last.
That didn't mean I wasn't popular on the field. Dodgeball involves hurling a rubber ball as hard as possible at several chowderheads lined up against a chainlink fence. Like an execution but you never die. Kids seemed to like throwing the ball at me, the ball seemed to like hitting me and so Dodgeball became one of the joys of my youth. That and vomiting.
Kick Ball wasn't quite as bad. I just got picked next to last and fucked up repeatedly on the field and then was reminded over and over again by my peers what an idiot I was. Nice.
After recess and our hour of fun we went inside to study. Outside recess took place everyday unless it rained. It never rained often enough. Our studies started simple. The ABC's. Sentences. Then "Fun With Dick and Jane". Oh Spot! Oh Jane! Oh Mother! Oh Father! Oh great stories spun out each day the winter of 1959. The world began to open. Then each day, twice a day, it would close again in an onslaught of brown rubber balls.
I walked to school each morning after that first morning and returned each afternoon with my friends, Terry and Dottie. Over time they found a way to expand the joys of Dodgeball to walking home. They called it Rough Tough Creampuff. Guess who was it?
Next post...what to do with your weekends when you're six.

September, 1958 First Grade, First Day of School

I began First Grade that September. I attended Wenonah Public School, which at that time was grades K through 8. After that you would go to Woodbury High School. Because my mother had two small boys she couldn't take me to school my first day so she arranged for the daughter of one of our neighbors to take me. Her name was Peggy Sacca and her family had owned our home before we moved in. Peggy was a grown up in my eyes but actually was an eighth grader. Her father Tony owned the local meat market which was located at the back of Bowker's Grocery Store in the middle of town. Her uncle ran a fruit and vegetable truck that sold produce to stores and also door to door.
I thought Peggy was really beautiful and the walk to school seemed okay to me. We only had to walk a little over 1/2 a mile. Four blocks up to the park in the middle of town where we'd cross Mantua Ave and walk the last two blocks to school. Across the street from the park when I was growing up was Margie's Luncheonette. It would be awhile before I'd cross it's threshold but it was one of the placest I liked best in town.
First grade was taught by Mrs. Kaufman. She lived two blocks down from us on N Lincoln. She was an ancient wizened crone who'd already taught most of the people who lived in Wenonah. Throughout the school year she called Terry, Tim, who was his older brother by nearly ten years. She taught Tim. Eventually she taught my youngest sister. I don't believe she retired until the late 80's. A long time with young children. She taught us to read.
She taught us math as well; beyond that subject matter was kind of vague. But I remember reading as being magical. It was something I could do and do well. She taught us to write.
I had the same children in my classes for nearly six more years. Tomorrow we shall meet them. Preferably at recess.

Wenonah, 1958

So here we are at last. August, 1958. Wenonah, New Jersey. I'm 6 years old, about to turn 7 in December. Mick is 5 and Ted a mere 2. My mother is 31 and my father 30. To me they are old. Grown ups. My grandmother Glading was probably younger than I am right now but she was ancient to me. It's late summer and early evening. Summer evenings in August in Wenonah were hot but Mick and I ventured out of the house to meet our new neighbors.
Our house was located on the corner of West Mantua Ave and South Lincoln Ave. Our address was 206 W. Mantua Ave. S. Lincoln was only two blocks long, ending in the Wenonah Woods, then known to me only as "the woods". It was in the woods that I would spend most of my young life. (here's a link to the Wenonah Woods that I found today: http://www.geocities.com/woodsofwenonah/index.html)
Thanks to WW II and the baby boom there were several children my age and Mick's age up and down the street. Our nearest neighbors and the boys and girls who would become our friends were Terry Fleming, Chris DeHart, Gary Condell, Charlie Flitcraft, Robby Cook, Dotty Chattin, and several others we will meet in the months to come. All of our parents were roughly the same age and worked in a variety of trades. My father was a salesman for the gasoline industry, Terry's father was a dentist, Chris' father worked for the family trucking business, Gary's dad worked in the oil refineries along the Delaware. Mr. Flitcraft worked in Philadelphia. I have no idea how he made money. I'm not even sure if Mr. Cook existed. I can't remember him at all but then adults played only a passing role in our lives then. Teachers and other children were the people who made up our world. Everyone else was just part of a larger mystery. One we learned about bit by bit.
This evening Mick and I would meet Gary and Chris, Terry and Charlie. They treated us like the outsiders we were. They wouldn't let us play in any reindeer games. We stood around and watched them play their elaborate games and waited to be invited in; then our mother called us into dinner. We were in bed shortly after. Every night till I was 9 I had to be in bed by 8pm. This was a slow torture because Mick and I would lie in bed and listen to the distant shouts of playing children and the murmur of the TV downstairs, all the time wishing we were older and able to go out like everyone else.
So what was this house like? It was a three story Victorian on a corner lot. All the blocks in Wenonah were the same size; roughly 500' by 300'. Most of the southern part of town and the bulk of the northern part were Victorian homes. They'd been constructed in the late 1880's as a development meant to attract vacationing Philadelphians. The railroad and the nearby man-made lakes were the attraction but it quickly became a bed room community for business men who worked in Philadelphia. Later the oil industry built refineries and tanks along the lower Delaware and the men who worked there came to live in the nearby towns. You'll note I have not once said, men and women. That's because most of the women of that generation stayed home to keep house and raise the children.
At any rate my block had four houses on our side of S Lincoln and of course four on the other. Along Mantua Ave there were also four homes (including our own). We knew the names of everyone on the block and the adjacent blocks. It was a rare house that didn't have a name associated with it. Of course, since we were children, the further you moved from our block the less likely it was for us to know the people there. That would change slowly as we grew.
The street was lined with Black Maples, mature trees all. There were a few oaks and on Cherry St a number of Sycamores. Farther down Mantua Ave, closer to the Mantua Creek, there were taller trees. Not being a naturalist I don't know their names but now and again in a rough summer storm or hurricane they'd come crashing down.
Once tramping through a part of the woods we'd only just discovered we found an immense Elm. So big four of us could just barely encircle it, arms spread. We thought it was the largest tree in the world.
Eventually we became part of Terry and Chris' games. Some of them were familiar, others new and completely made up. Kick the Can, Capture the Flag, yes, but also, He Died at the Foot of the Werewolf Tree, and Who Looks the Deadest. We left the house at 7:30 and ran out to play and play and play. We returned to wolf down peanut butter sandwichs and hershey's chocolate milk and back out again. Talking about it now it sounds idyllic. But idyll's have their hollow cores and children at play aren't just playing.
I was an asthmatic.
I think I left that out.
Mick was as well but only a bit.
Ted eventually was as well and his asthma was severe.
But it was asthma that made games both a joy and a curse.

How Wenonah is Laid Out

Wenonah is a small town. Before we join my youthful self in 1958 you should know how it's laid out. It's bisected east and west by the West Jersey Railroad, a now mostly unused railroad line that was in fact the reason the town was built. North and south it's cut in half by Mantua Ave., the main street of Wenonah, which turns into Wenonah Ave. when it rolls into the adjacent town, Mantua. The northern end of town is bordered by Woodbury/Glassboro Road and the southern end by the Mantua Creek which orginates in the Delaware, a few miles upstream.
The town is surrounded on the eastern, southern, and western borders by a small woodland area. This area is called the Wenonah Woods and was purchased through a gift by a local naturalist in the early 1970's. Here is a link to the google map of the town: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=08090+(Wenonah)&ie=UTF8&z=13&ll=39.792051,-75.153351&spn=0.066082,0.154495&om=1
Mantua, the town on the southern edge was a largely Italian working class community. Just past Mantua farms stretched for miles and miles. Tomatoes and peaches as far as the eye could see. The northern, eastern, and western edges were part of Deptford Township. Deptford was an amalgam of small settlements and suburban developments that in the 1960's began to grow. The area directly east of Wenonah in Deptford was known to us as Jericho. It was an African American community with long standing roots. When I was young it was mostly working class black people. People in Wenonah didn't talk to people in Jericho. More on that later.
The next town up the road on the eastern side was Woodbury Heights, then Woodbury. My father lived in Woodbury as a teenager and it was this connection that led us to Wenonah. My father moved our family from a Levittown development outside of Philadelphia in 1957, first to a rental property in Woodbury, and then to Wenonah. None of us live in Wenonah now but all of us carry pieces of it with us. You don't really get to leave Wenonah.
We moved to Wenonah just after my Kindergarten year in Woodbury. Our family consisted of my father, John Sr, my mother, Louise, and my brothers, Ted and Mick. More accurately, Edward and Michael. Ted was the baby and Mick was a year and half younger than I. My father's parents helped him with the downpayment on the mortgage and so we came to Wenonah.
We first saw the house about a month before we moved. My father showed us the treehouse in the back, the yard, the neighborhood, the damp basement, the spacious rooms. We were used to moving (this was our third since I'd been born) so it seemed like no biggie. Mick and I were excited. I have no idea what our parents thought. That brings us then to August of 1958 and my first days in Wenonah. You'll have to wait a bit for more. In the meantime if any folks that lived in Wenonah would like to contribute memories or photos let's find a way to link them up. This isn't just my story. I know my friend Bob Thomas remembers way more than I do and I don't know anything the adults thought about. I hope you'll find a way to mash these things together.

Wenonah, now and then

Starting today I'm going to be writing a series of pieces on my hometown, Wenonah. Bear with me. Some of you know a little about my hometown, some a great deal, some more than me. These are my memories of a town that made me.
In order to talk about my town let me say this. I'm going to begin briefly with today, then go back to my first days in Wenonah. It's like a time machine without any distortion except my faulty memory. All of this is past. None is prologue.
I was last in Wenonah about six months ago but more meaningfully three years ago. I left for the second time on January 10th 2004. I arrived the second time October 31st 2001. When I arrived I was fresh from the hospital. I weighed 90 pounds. I still had some hair but that would soon end. I moved into the first floor of a house at number 4 South Monroe Avenue. My landlords were Rachel and Ralph Knisell. They lived next to me in a house on Mantua Avenue. Mantua Avenue is the main street of my town. They were devout Methodists. My apartment was one bedroom, a den, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. I had access to a basement with a washer dryer. When I moved, my brother Mick lived across the street in another apartment on Mantua Avenue. He lived there with his two children, Louise and Doug. The second floor of my building was occupied by a man I'd known since childhood, David O'Connor. His family lived one block away on the corner of Jefferson and Mantua Avenue. I grew up two blocks away on the corner of Lincoln and Mantua Avenue. I knew almost everyone in town.
They all knew me.
The town was built, for the most part in 1888, 1890. A second section was developed in the early fifties by a man named Sinnott. One smaller section was finished in the latter part of the 1960's. Wenonah is one mile square. It's population has been at or around 2000 since it's founding. It was built originally as a vacation destination around the newly built West Jersey Railroad. It became a bedroom community for people working in Philadelphia very soon after it's founding.
It was and is a town of white middle and upper class Americans.
When I moved there I was recovering from complications of AIDS. I was close to dying. Obviously I didn't die. When I moved there the first time it was 1958. No one had AIDS. Homosexuals were invisible. Black people were invisible. The town looked remarkably like it did when I moved back in 2001.
In two days we will go back in time to 1958. Buckle up. It's a wild ride.

Cornelia Street Reading

Well, I've got my first reading since Bruce Weber's New Years Day gig. I've got to admit I'm a little worried. I haven't read out loud to anyone but Cookie and Milo and Johanna in over a month. More than that I've got concerns about material. I'm going to read some new work. I'll be reading from Fun Being Me because it's my child but I have new poems that I want to hear out loud. I'm hoping to read 3 poems with Mario Infirme. It's got me nervous cuz they're not my normal schtick. Oh well, stick your neck out right?
I hope you can join me tm'w. The room is nice, the open doesn't suck, and I'll be happy as a clam trying to sell my book. Stop by, buy me a drink and listen to Mario Infirme's life lessons.
Ciao

Poetry Magazine John Barr and the World

Hi all,
I read an account today about the tribulations of Poetry Magazine getting boatloads of cash and everyone bitching about John Barr saying poetry doesn't talk to the present.
Duh.
You're upset? Please say no. It's a good thing that someone gave us dough to do what we do and it's good that that opens up debate on what we do. Who gives a flying fuck about what the founder of the mag cared about when she started it. Life was different then. Poetry had a different place in the world of America.
So this is my direct address to John Barr:
John,
There are poets already in the US who write poetry that is accessible, powerful, real and compelling in a variety of styles. Reach out to them. Find a way to bring them under your tent. Poetry is at it's best when it doesn't give a fuck about audience but connects deeply with the audience.
Ginsberg, Auden, Eliot, Frost, and ninety million others. Reach out to poets that care and not to poets who care to publish.
Print is nice. Audience is better.
People need to hear the roar and natter and quiet of poetry. They need our diverse and stupid views and if they have a way to find it they will respond.
God bless Dana Goia and John Barr. Great men who care about the art, not the artist.
They may be dumb chuckleheads and in fact they are but we could all use their cash.
You can make fun of Billy Collins but the man writes poetry people hear and love and it doesn't suck.
He cares about his art and his audience and his soul. Oh, is that so bad?
For every Billy Collins there's a Henry Rollins.
Open the tent.
Make it a real show.
Invite everyone in and show them the magic.

Cold, cold, and then colder more

I'm sure that most of you that are reading this are freezing right now. Or sitting in houses burning up as much gas and oil and electricity as you can to fend off the cold.
I know I am.
Johanna, being from El Salvador, is no big fan of chilly weather. Today she decided to go to Bergenline Avenue in Union City to a Botanica. For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about a botanica is a store that sells voodoo stuff. Or Santeria. Or offerings to the saints. Or candles. Anyway, I started getting calls about how cold it was about ten seconds after she left the house. They continued through the whole two hours she was gone.
I of course was already intimately familiar with the chilly weather. First Milo and Cookie had to pee and poop at 6:15am when it was 7 degrees or -15 with the windchill. Then I had to walk from 6th ave to our offices. See any earlier post about the unnatural weather conditions created by the evil architechs who created Madison Square Garden, 1 Penn Plaza, and 33rd St. You could probably leave off 33rd street. The schmuck that designed that just knew the wind would whip in off the river like a whip but it does that everywhere till you get above Lincoln Center.
I arrived at the small but cozy offices of Acme Exterminating to find everyone wearing their jackets and gloves and hats. I wasn't entirely surprised because this is a long-standing tradition at Acme. No heat. When I first returned in 2004 on my third day the temperature dropped to like 7 and the boiler failed. We spent three days shaking in the cold. Our boss bought us the little handwarmer packs you put in your pockets and shoes. They were relatively ineffectual.
Eventually he got us electric heaters. They were sort of effectual.
So I was ready for this.
I'm not entirely certain I did any real work today. I spent most of the day huddled over my heater like some 21st century Bob Cratchit. All of us were sore at days end from hunching over.
The walk back to the PATH was okay. The wind was at my back most of the way except right by the Garden where it goes in six directions. I got home and drank some wine and ate chipotle Welsh Rarebit. I'm tired and a little inebriated.
I don't have to work tomorrow. I'm going to see my Dr to find out if I'll be around a bit longer. I'll spend most of the day in a warm car. I'm hoping to go for a run midday to keep up with my health.
They say it will be like this for three more days.
I need a job where I can travel for my health.
Four days in Aruba would be nice right about now.
I would welcome the opportunity to discuss rodent control measures over a rum punch watching the sun dip into the Caribbean. I did get to see the sun set over the Palisades as I got off the PATH.
In closing let me say you should check out Teresa Carson's great poems on the site, buy my book, and find a way to get me some slimy gig talking about poetry in a near tropical climate. Anyone who can help with this will get a bonus. This is not a joke.

Groundhog Day

Well, yesterday was Groundhog Day. A chance to find out how rodents react to the sun and a reference to my favorite movie. That's not entirely true. Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Chris Elliot and all my dumb friends is not really my favorite movie. I have dozens of favorite movies. Casablanca, Duck Soup, The Shop Around the Corner, Swingtime, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, any movie with Jet Li, ET, who fucking knows. I love movies. But there are those movies that I wll watch no matter what and weep copiously no matter what and Groundhog Day looms large among them.
It wasn't on.
Not on any channel.
My friend Willa said what the fuck is up with that? They show it all through Christmas week but today no Bill Murray? No angels in the snow? No chance at redemption at the beginning of the stupidest month of all? A month that seems to be designed by chumps. You can barely remember how to spell it. It's short. It's cold. It takes longer than any month in the world except maybe May in San Francisco but I don't live in San Francisco I live in the New York metropolitan area and it's the living, breathing, embodiment of hell. No. Purgatory.
Purgatory. A lamented Catholic state that should be brought back with bells on. Purgatory. It's just cold. It rains. It snows. You don't have any fun. Oh, there's the Super Bowl, a horrible media event concocted by chowderheads in the NFL that subverts everything great about football. They put it in a dome or the sun for God's sake! Football from late November to January should have snow and ice and fog and rain and men covered in mud looking foolish. No dice.
There's Presidents Day. A made up holiday to get out of two good holidays celebrating two great Presidents. Washington and Lincoln and gluing them together so they are joined at the hip with Grover Cleveland Alexander and Franklin Pierce and George Bush and US Grant who was a good general but basically ate shit as a president.
So all we do in February, unless you live in Arizona and only old people and curmudgeons and people from "the new southwest" live in Arizona, is freeze your fucking balls off and wipe freezing sleet and rain and snow off your face slogging to work every fucking day of a month that is only technically sort of sometimes 28 days long but seems to last till the end of time. Sometime in early January in New York Willa was complaining. She was coughing and sneezing and it was 50 degrees. She said it's "the bad air". Well, the motherfucking bad air is gone for good and even though the ice caps are melting and no one will be sunning themselves on the slopes of resorts in Switzerland in 75 years it's still just like winter always looked. Nasty. Brutish. Short.
They have Fashion Week now in New York but all I can see is armies of down. Men and women swathed in immense cloaks of puffy material sniffling and trudging slowly in brutish weather.
You'd think I could at least watch Groundhog Day. You'd think I could get some small chuckles when Bill Murray doesn't step in the puddle or when he hugs the oafish insurance salesman but you'd be wrong. All the tv programmers in the world are thinking about the great commercials for the Super Bowl. They're talking happily about K Fed or whatever dopey dot com company is willing to bet the farm that they'll drum up biz by being mildly controversial while we're all downing beers and falling asleep before Peyton Manning crushes the Bears and snow devours the world.
February deserves better. Put the Super Bowl on at 1:00pm. Let the Bears win on a snowy day in Soldier Field. Let Bill Murray hear Cher just one more time and please God, please, find a way to change the wind patterns around Madison Square Garden so that it doesn't resemble the Antarctic even in April. If we can't get that then I'll settle for Jesus coming back for the resurrection; but that seems a way off too.
With luck and seven or eight weeks my opinions and the global climate will have changed. Please God hasten spring. Oh. Punxsutawney Phil didn't see his shadow which means the bad air will be back relatively soon.
In a better world the savior would have been born on February 15th or thereabout and you would get holiday gifts and light trees and treat each other with kindness. In this world we have to wait till he was crucified or whatever and it's Spring. Just a little while. Courage.

Todays Post is just a pome

Praises for the Insect and Mammalian Dead

I had a nice day today.
No one cursed me.
No one asked me odd questions.
I went to work a bit late.
I checked my mail and answered some of my correspondents
and then settled back to see what else might happen.

It was cold today.
Not as cold as yesterday but
I have the feeling it will be colder tomorrow.
My friend Jane’s boyfriend died suddenly from liver disease.
This should not have been a shock but it was.
To her.
To his children
Everyone is angry at everyone else at a man who lived life
on his terms and died on his terms and not the way you’re expected
to die.

It will be cold thank God for several more months.
Men will stumble up to me on 9th avenue and ask for money.
They will say it is for food.
Perhaps it is.
People will call me to solve difficult problems involving
mice and rats and other pests.
They will be arrogant and they will be willing but they will be
desperate.

They will be asking me for answers that aren’t simple.
I will fail in my explanations.
I will offer biological and social explanations but in their fear,
in their worry, they will dismiss them.
To the people that I talk to everything I say is stupid.

Like everything we say to a lover we think is leaving.
Don’t go.
Don’t I do this or don’t I do that.
Didn’t I buy you this or didn’t I comfort you then.

It’s all stupid.
My consolation and explanations are all hollow.
Real.
But hollow.
You have mice. You have them because you’re a human in a densely
populated region of the world populated by a rich mess of other humans.
Not everyone gives a shit about mice like you do.
Not everyone lies awake worrying about the bedbugs biting.
Some of them come from places where the bedbugs are like flies.
Some of them come from places where if you raise up your head
someone else will lop it off.

Cherish your mice, your rats, your roaches, your bedbugs!
Love them as you love your sons and daughters.
They are your children!
They live with you as much as you with them.
They huddle in little clutches terrified of destruction and they don’t even
know about terrorists or nuclear devastation or satellites.
The little bugs and mice are the meek.
They wait patient under your stove for your castoff crumbs.
For your drops of water.
For the condensate on your pipes.
They are your poorest children.
They have no other home but yours.
You wretched misers of capital.
You own your apartments!
You own your lawns!
You own your skin and your hair and your sons and daughters!
But all of you muddle under the same dull January sky.
Each of you struggles for a bit of food, a spot of conversation,
the day your boss says, oh, what a nice idea.

This is the time to consider what will come.
Spring and rebirth and a thousand mice and cockroaches.
Ants and termites and love.
You’ll strut down the avenue and duck into little cafes and they’ll
feed off your leavings happy as pets.
They are your children.

They will grow strong and happy and democratic.
They will feed at the common table.
They will join with the bacteria and the viruses and the multitude of plagues
to usher us into the world of paradise.
Say all power and all praises to our Children!
Grant them health and joy!

Poets and Poetry

Okay, I said I'd write about why you shouldn't listen to poets talking about how they write. Here's why. They're lying. Well, maybe not lying, but making it up. They're talking about the act after the fact. Someone asks them how they do what they do and they come up with an answer. Whenever someone asks you a question you're supposed to answer and poets are always flattered that anyone asks them anything so they answer.
But really, it's all postscript. While they're writing they have no clue. They're writing. Later, they're editing but that's not writing it's just part of making shit look right. How and why they choose what they choose is locked inside them in secret places they may not even know about.
It's always good to hear poems in process. It's always good to hear poets read their work and see how it changes and watch the moves they make and the changes they make but why they made them and when aren't things set in stone. It's true when you're learning how to write people help you through this process. Or hector you through it. Or badger you. But once you understand how to put a poem together you just put it together. Oh, you might reach out to people that know your work and ask their opinions but your responses to that are largely instinctual and based on past responses.
I know I write something and if I think it's good but not done I'll send it to people I trust for comments. They say stuff. Sometimes I just do everything they say. Sometimes I do part of what they say. But honestly I never think much about the reasons. The poem has a place and a voice. I say it. There's grammar and structure and words and stuff but everything else is me and my cluttered world and I'm never entirely sure exactly what I intended.
But when I'm done and you ask me how and why I did what I did I'll give you an answer but it's a mishmash of reality. It's more like asking someone who just woke from a dream asking them the structure of the dream. To them it makes perfect sense but as they become more aware, more part of the world the structure disintegrates and they're left with just the dream. Odd and compelling but only a dream.
Last night I dreamed I was at a poetry/food festival. We were at a pre festival meeting of the faculty lying on surfboards in a lake. The leader of the faculty, Howard Levy, was asking for our thoughts on where the festival should go and I had a million ideas. After all, what a great marketing concept: The Food Network meets Longfellow. I sort of woke from the dream and sank into a new dream where Howard had just recently passed away. Apparently he'd been gravely ill throughout the entire process. We were all stunned. A great loss.
Then I was with my friends Danny and Eliot talking about the death of a poet from the East Village. He was a lousy poet with a bohemian schtick that sustained a meager career in a marginalized world. I told them who gives a fuck. He was a nice guy but his work sucked. They were appalled. I said, come on, this guy wasn't Bukowski! He was wasn't Jack Micheline! He was a near psychotic street person that just showed up week after week year after year reading the same scribbled verses on index cards to anyone that would listen and none of them had anything to recommend them. I said a poet should be someone who builds something real and solid and they said oh yeah, what about Frank Lloyd Wright! And I said Falling Water was a shitty building that is falling down and was leaky and nearly uninhabitable and they were really angry at me. I realized I'd chosen a lousy metaphor and was doing everything that I could to extricate myself from my own trap. They just got madder and madder at me for my high hattedness.
You could at this point, mention Moondog or Antler or even Hal Sirowitz as poets who transcend their schtick and take it to a place that is glorious. You could say, Jack you bourgeois idiot! You'd be right.
It was all just a dream. But it did get me to thinking about a cruise theme idea: Poets & Food & Booze. Travel the Caribbean with Mario Batali, Pedro Pietri, and shit loads of great wine. It might not generate any great poems but everyone would eat better than they usually do and they'd be in a better climate and the booze would be free!
One can dream.

Me and Rats

Some of you know I worked once upon a time on rat farm. Specifically I worked at West Jersey Biological Supply for Dewey Parker, my friend Suzy's dad. Dewey's rat farm was a supply house for high schools, colleges, and research facilities in the Northeast. He raised white lab rats primarily. He once told me they were pedigreed white rats...but more about that later. He also did some toxicology testing for the beauty products industry testing shampoos, etc on live rabbits and brokered preserved animal parts for use by classes in various schools (sharks, lambs eyes, and on and on). Periodically he'd have hamsters or goats but mostly it was white rats and mice.
I got the job because Ralph Leeds quit. My friend Chuck Holstein was working there and asked Mr. Parker if I could have the job. Dewey had me come to the house and we went out to the building with the rats. It smelled mostly of sawdust, sanitizing agent, and a vague urine scent. While he was discussing my duties a woman and her young son walked in with a rat in a cage. The boys pet. It was sick and they took it to Dewey to see what he could do. He said it was probably going to die but if they'd like he'd give it a safe place to live, a clean cage, food, water and comfort till the end. Followed by a dignified burial. They thanked him and left Dewey, me, and the rat behind. I looked out the window from the second floor and saw them about to get in their car. Just then Dewey pulled the rat out of the cage by it's tail, spun it several times and whacked it on the end of table. Then he tossed it in the trash. Well, that's done, he said. That was my first day on the job.
I lasted about a month. It turns out I was allergic to the hay the rabbits bedded down in and got asthma and had to quit but I learned a great deal about rats and work.
Anyway, you probably all know I'm an exteminator now. I send people out to kill rats, though usually not as directly as Dewey and I did back in the day. I've also written recently about my love for Joseph Mitchell's "Up in the Old House". I'd forgotten it's long section on rats. It's of a piece with Robert Sullivan's book "Rats" and in many ways takes place in the same byways of old Manhattan. I was interviewed by Kaz Janowski of BBC Radio for a companion piece on the book. I expounded over a couple pints of beer about rats and found myself on the radio at length. You can still listen to my ramblings if you google my name and rats and the bbc.
Finally to bring this little piece to a merciful ending you know I recently visited the Mutter Museum. While there I noted it was funded by the Wistar Institute. I went back and reread "Rats" and noted that the great rat catcher of London, Jack Black, had bred a highly specialized breed of albino white rats and sold them for quite a pretty penny to the Wistar Institute. The Mutter Museum is associated with the Wistar Institute. I called my friend Suzy on the phone and asked her for Dewey's phone number in Nevada. She asked, why? and when I said I needed to know what kind of rats he bred, she said Wistar, he bred Wistar rats.
I've probably done this story before but in less detail. What I'm trying to talk about is the long trail of coincidence and mystery that life makes as it moves along. Where to begin? My name is Jack. I kill rats. I write about rats. I killed the white rat offspring of history's greatest rat catcher. His name was Jack. I was interviewed by the BBC and knew of none of this except how to kill rats. Mr. Mitchell gives less than a line to laboratory rats, doesn't even know they're descended from royalty (Jack Black was the Queen's rat catcher!). Mr. Sullivan knows more but only cares about the ones in his alley. I am not afraid of rats. They're fairly easy to kill. I'm fairly easy to kill. Think about it...rat spelled backward is tar...which means nothing.
But all together it's a great, rich stew on a cold, snowy day. I suggest you pick up a copy of "Rats" or "Up in the Old House", cook up some stew, settle down with a pint of good stout and read about New Yorks most unheralded denizens. I'm going to.
On tap for tomorrow: Why we shouldn't listen to poets talking about poetry

Up In The Old House

I'm reading "Up in the Old House" for what must be the 30th time. I'm reading the parts about Old Man Flood and the Fulton Street Market. My company did pest control in the market for decades. I could never figure out what we did because at 8am they pulled up stakes and moved on. What exactly were we doing. Anyway, I like Old Man Flood and the parts about him make me want to eat oysters, which I hate. But they reminded me of old men and women I knew years ago in New Brunswick. They were old and drank too much (which is putting it mildly) and they were like Mr. Flood without any passion or joy or words.
Here is a poem I just wrote about my friend Tommy, Bang Bang, Barrowman and New Brunswick, circa 1982.

Tommy Barrowman

I meet other people in bars beside Mario.
Tommy Barrowman for instance.
Tommy was born to a well bred family in Skillman
His sister endowed a library in her will.

Tommy was a drunk.
He was small and he was incontinent.
He had spent his youth traveling the world.
Merchant Marine.
One of the other men at the bar told me he and Tommy used to off load
vessels in Persia.

Tommy, Thomas, Tom Barrowman called himself Bang bang.
He’d say, “I’m Bang Bang Tommy Barrowman
what do you think about that”
He’d come into the bar off the short bus from the senior lunch program.
At the beginning of the month he and his friends drank like kings.
At the end of the month they drank like bums.
Really, all month long they drank the same.

Tommy listened to late night talk shows.
Tommy pissed and shit in his pants.
Tommy lived on the top floor of an SRO.
Tommy was blind and diabetic and a worthless hunk of shit.

Tommy said, “I’m Bang Bang Tommy Barrowman, what do you think of that”
Tommy’s friend Ora Nixon was a fat giant drunken woman.
She’d come into the bar shortly after Tommy.
Her family had been rich as well.
There is a part of Edison NJ called Nixon.
In the 20’s or 40’s it blew up in a horrible munitions accident.
Or sabotage.
Ora sabotaged the Nixon name in her own way.

So there we all are at the bar.
Tommy and Ora and me.
Tommy is banging his shot glass and talking and talking.
Ora is flirting with the bartender.
Which is scary because she shit in her pants and she
weighs easily 300 pounds.

I’m watching the rich scions of the 30’s wasting their lives
in an old mans bar in New Brunswick New Jersey.
I’d ask them to tell me a story but I know they can’t.
They don’t remember shit about Persia or Nixon.
They were young once and angry and all that youth and anger
brought them here.

Tommy writes me poems.
They all rhyme.
None of them make any sense.

Well, that's the poem. I used to have Tommy's poems but I think they're all gone. Like me or you in a few years.

Fun Being Me & Stuff

Well today it is a little fun being me. On Friday my friend Barry Seiler sent me a note congratulating me on having "Fun Being Me" picked by Bob Holman on About.com as one of the years ten best books of poems. I'm not usually comfortable with bragging but this kind of made me feel very, very good. Here's what Bob said about the book:

7) Fun Being Me: Poems, by Jack Wiler
(CavanKerry Press, Ltd., 2006) The joke, of course, is that Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun. The fun is no irony. It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book, in his face, in his decision to live it straight, not fancy. Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. The bleakness, the searing truth of it, stops you cold. But, as he says about his brother (us) in “The Taste of Beer in Late Fall,” “He needs to know. / I need to tell.”

And here's a link to the page so you can see all the other books he liked and hopefully buy one or two.
http://poetry.about.com/od/poetrybooks/tp/bestbooks2006.htm
We all need the dough and all of us need the shot in the arm. So thanks to Bob for his kind words and for honoring the work. I'm deeply grateful and honored. Thanks also to About.com for even having a page and place for poetry.
Hopefully now I'll write more poems to justify this hype:)

No Fuck the Eagles

Well the Saints were a hungry dynamic team. They kicked the Eagles up and down the field. It's a sad day in Philly.
Ah well, there's always next year.
At least now I have a team to root for on the way to the Super Bowl.
Go Saints!
No thoughts on poetry today. Johanna's party ended at 4:20am. I got up walked the dogs and now am going back to bed.
Sleep tight America, don't let the bedbugs bite!

Eagles

This blog was originally designed for me to talk about the Eagles in real time during games.
It had nothing to do with poetry.
Right now is Johanna's birthday party so my house is filled with transexuals and gayboys who could care less about football but it's half time and the Eagles are up by 1.
My brother Ted is probably almost having a coronary.
Mick could care less.
It's a tough match up. The Saints are the most dynamic team in the NFl and have a lot of heart.
Fuck them.
Go Eagles.
More to come....

On Being a Poet

Maybe some of you have the same problem I have. What does it mean to be a poet in 2007? Of course, it's the same dumb question we probably had in 1978 but I'd like to think about it a little. Poets are really marginalized nincompoops. Even the best of the them or the most famous dwell in a world that most normal people could care less about. We spend our time writing poems that we hope will be important, or change peoples minds or whatever the fuck each of us thinks poetry can do but the simple fact is most people in the US of A could give a rats ass about poetry.
They read it in high school cuz they had to. Maybe they wrote some poetry when they were young and full of passion but then they got jobs and went to work and poetry receded into the background. Some of us continue to write and sweat shit about readings or getting our ditties published or our books or whether we're any good at all. We get almost zero feedback except in small groups from other nincompoops just like ourselves.
So why do we do it? We may be the most marginalized art form in America outside of quilting but at least quilts cost a bunch of dough.
So what should this shit do? Why do we write it? What does it matter if it's good or bad or indifferent? Why go to grad school or take workshops or have conferences with teachers of poetry? What do we want to happen next? I have book of poetry I'm proud of but quite honestly it might as well be a math textbook written in 1958. With the exception that at least a bunch of kids in 1958 had to read the math textbook.
So?
We all admire or find work we find of value. It makes us feel in a way that no other art form makes us feel. It is exciting and vibrant and real but no one and I repeat no one but us reads it. It's like being a jazz musician in a country where no one listens to music.
I think we all want to change this. I look at efforts like the Dodge Festival or the National Book Foundation or the thousands of websites devoted to poetry or the even more numerous university and small presses committed to the art and I see a real desire by poets to be heard and read but it seems to be read and heard only by other poets.
I read my poetry out loud and the only people in the audience are other poets waiting to read in the open. This sucks.
Poetry can be more. I'd like to see more poets more actively involved in making poetry a living art form. That doesn't mean just hip hop for the kids or a festival or what ever the fuck people come up with. It means a conscientious effort by poets to encourage people to hear and read good writing. This kind of means submerging your own desires for some marginal fame to a greater goal.
I think people love poetry when they hear it out loud. I think they like poetry when it's clear and part of their lives. I think poetry got involved in an argument back in the 30's about the bourgeousie and the common people and that it lost its way. I think that for a couple minutes in the sixties and seventies it seemed poised to be a real art form again but sank under the weight of ego.
Poets don't always give a fuck about anything but themselves. This is nonsense. Who cares about your stupid problems or your ride to work or your backyard. Quite honestly, who really thinks that a poem ranting about George Bush is going to have more effect than organizing a real political movement against his imperial presidency? Poetry can galvanize societies that are oppressed and marginalized but in the USof A that is not the case for the bulk of the poets going for MFA's. They are comfortable middle class folks talking about their comfortable middle class political opinions. Do that at the polls. Register to vote. Vote often. Go to town hall.
Your poems should be real and true and dare I say it? Engaging. Like a novel. Like a great painting or movie. Find a way to make poetry part of regular life. Read in your town at the local library. Read poems you didn't write but that you love. Encourage people to read work you love. Don't read your work out loud unless it's good or unless you're in an arena where that's the point. Don't bore people. Leave them wanting more. Be a savant. Be a prophet. Be a savior. Be a sinner. But please don't be dull and pedestrian.
Think of Larkin's poem about his parents. Any chump on the planet can appreciate that. He's bare and naked and angry but anyone can get what he's talking about. "Whose woods these are I think I know"...everybody in New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine knew just what the fuck Frost was talking about. He wasn't talking down to people or lecturing them or hectoring them. He was giving them a place of their own.
Well, that's it for tonight.
Here's one more from Mario

Mario Discusses the Roots of Information

I’ve been in the bar for several hours.
It’s late afternoon, mid-winter.
The streets are slush filled.
The sidewalks are mountains of blackened snow run through with dog shit,
old banana peels, tissues, and slack, used condoms.
Some ugly, arctic decay.
Mario comes in.
As usual I’m not expecting him.
I smell his Pall Mall before I hear him.
Mario Infirme says, “Don’t shit where you eat”.
I say, “huh?”
I say, “I’d never shit where I eat.”
He says, “everyone says they don’t but everybody does.”

He says, “I know because I spend days sifting through their shit.
Reading it like turgid tea leaves.
Breathing deep, clearing the mind, till I can understand its secrets.
Because everybody’s business is my business…our business; as it should be.
He says that everyone’s shit is a little different but in the end,
shit is shit.”
“Like you,” he says.
“That broad at the blood bank in ’79 or your cleaning lady in ’88.
You might not shit where you eat now but you did once upon a time.
You will again.”

“Your shit is a river that runs to your heart.
Once I read your shit I know your heart.
Once I know your heart I know you.
Once I know you I own you.
Ask Hoover.
Ask Kennedy .
Ask any Tom, Dick, or Harry.
Ask your brother.
Ask your priest.
Ask the guy selling dirty kebabs on the corner.
Ask that fool.
Ask the first Bush or the second.
Nobody’s shit doesn’t stink.
That family has shit that reeks to heaven but just because it reeks
doesn’t mean it can’t have purpose.

That’s my job.
Making something out of it.
I’ve watched men shit their pants just listening while I told them.
It’s a gift.
Telling men stories about their own shit.
You should try it once in a while.”

He stubs out his cigarette, drains his whiskey, and walks like a ghost into the twilight.


Hope you like it. Sleep tight. Pray for our boys on all the shores they guard. Pray for your family and friends. Enjoy this life you've been given...it will end soon enough:)

The Plight of Writers

It's the new year and everything is sort of back to normal. Luis is normal. Willa is normal. Peter is slightly perverted. We've hired two men who seem decent and hard working. Bob is pleasant and thoughtful and the customers are relatively quiet. In the land of poetry I did my time at the New Years Day gig and now am on a hiatus till February when the poetry mill kicks in again. But at least now I have a good car to drive to gigs in and a book and even new poems.
Today I went a googling and found that Bob Holman on his about.com poetry space had made mention of my book in his summary of poetry in 2006. I was flattered and delighted. Here is what Bob said:
"The joke, of course, is that Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun, Fun Being Me (CavanKerry). The fun is no irony. It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book, in his face, in his decision to live it straight, not fancy. Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. The bleakness, the searing truth of it, stops you cold. But, as he says about his brother (us) in “The Taste of Beer in Late Fall,” “He needs to know. / I need to tell.” "
That's not too shabby. Most of us poor schmoos dwell in the outer darkness wondering whether anyone reads our work or likes it or whether it's any good and it's always a rare treat to hear such high praise from a man who knows of what he speaks. Bob has done yeoman work in the trenches of poetry for decades. Besides being an accomplished and brilliant writer in his own right he's also responsible for nearly singlehandedly saving poetry in NY. What a nice thing to have a man like him say such nice things about me.
More than that, how nice is is to know so many great poets and to have heard them over the years.
Performances rich or silly or dull and desparate but always from men and women who cared about the word. Where would one go to pick the best ones? To say this was a night so bright that poetry owned the world. I must have had the chance to hear dozens of nights like that. Thanks to folks like Bob, and Miguel Algarin, Danny Shot, Andy Clausen, Eliot Katz, Joe Weil, Jim Haba, Bruce Isaacson, and a hundred more, a thousand more.
So, let's make 2007 a year of words and verse and cantankerous, verbose meanderings. Blessed be the poets for they shall never inherit anything. They wouldn't know what to do with it even if they did.
Let's make this the year we all try to be Jack Micheline or Allen Ginsberg or Gregory Corso or Charles Bukowski or Elizabeth Bishop or Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Let's be mad crazy saints. What the fuck, it can't hurt. Ha ha.

The New Years Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club

What a wonderful place is the Bowery Poetry Club. What a disastrous, torturous day is this reading. Hour upon hour of poetry. Good, bad, smug, political, dull, overlong, read in the face of alarms and sirens. Why read one poem when you can read two. Or three? I was supposed to read between 6 & 8 but asked Danny to intercede and get me moved up. He was successful.
My friend Joe Weil was not and at some point came up to me around five cursing his fate and stormed off into the preternaturally warm global warming oil industry friendly Saddam hanging streets of New York. Oh, I think the verse got the better of me.
He just stomped outside and bitched and then came stumping back in. The world needs more Joe Weils and less bad poets. In fact if Joe Weil was president we would never have invaded Iraq. We might not have done much else but you got to take what you can get.
I'm kind of being a little mean here. I heard a bunch of funny, cool poems. Taylor Meade, an 82 year old man, was more hip than anyone in the room. Regie Cabico and his crew of actors were funny and cool and Eve Packer did a nice tribute to James Brown. Steve Cannon was thankfully and blessedly brief. The world's greatest poetry critic.
My friend Karen asked for more Mario... here's a new one:

Mario Infirme Takes a Drink

Mario Infirme is at the end of the bar.
It’s two in the afternoon and there’s no one
In the bar but the bartender, Mario, and an old guy reading the Post.
Mario says, sit down, sit down.
I sit down and he says what’s your pleasure?
I say bourbon he says one turkey on the rocks
And then he leans forward and says
What do you know?

I say Mario I know almost nothing.
He says, that’s what everyone says.
Everyone says they no almost nothing
But in the end they know everything.
He says while I was in the bureau we interviewed dozens
Of people who knew nothing but time
after time they gave it all up.

They knew things they’d forgotten,
Things they’d put in the back of their minds.
He says that with a little gentle persuasion
They could be led to the truth and it was always
Dirty, always incriminating, always
and here he takes a sip,
always what we were looking for.

Take the Rosenbergs.
Maybe they didn’t know shit about the bomb.
But they gave us dozens who did and if
they’d had a half a brain they could have walked
but instead they take the pipe.
and still they told us all they knew.

People want to talk says Mario.
Even me.
I hate having no one to talk to, no one to hear my stories.
Oh yeah, I can sit in this bar and fill your ears with shit.
But it’s just that.
It’s just shit.
I can’t tell the truth because I don’t know anything either.
I know I want to talk but there’s nothing to say.

So I sit here in this dusty bar sipping shitty whiskey
and think about what I would say if I were asked.
Talk of bombs and guns and deals and broads but
really most of the time I was just an accountant
poring over the books of men like me.
Men who thought they knew everything but really
really knew absolutely nothing.

I thought I knew who was right and who was wrong.
I thought I could look in a man’s eye and know
he was dirty but it turns out I was the one who was
dirty and now I’m in this dirty bar drinking
with you and feeling sorry for myself.
Who knew?
Who knows anything anymore.
All we know is what we’re told and no one
tells a good story anymore.

That's all for now. Sleep tight America:)

Gerald Ford and the Seventies

I've spent the past several days reading about President Ford and his presidency. It brings back fond memories of the CIA and Nicaragua and secret incursions. Not to mention Gulags and long range nuclear missiles and spies. Oh, what a time! I remember when I was in college several of my friends were members of the Socialist Workers Party. They all used to spend most of their time debating who among them was a CIA mole.
Ha, what sort of great, powerful government would investigate a bunch of schmoos who couldn't organize a checkers game much less a great labor movement. Years later it turns out the government actually had an informant in their dumb little group. Duh! It was the moment I realized our government was as lunkheaded as my rabble rousing knucklehead friends. They wanted to organize the downtrodden workers. Workers with vacation homes in Belmar and a boat in the driveway and two kids (probably them) in college. For some odd reason they thought this country was Russia in 1917.
What a time!
Anyway, this all brought to mind a series of poems I've been working on about a new friend of mine. His name is Mario Infirme and he works for a government group. Unnamed. Here's one from Mario...

Mario Infirme Talks About Secrets

Mario Infirme comes up behind me at the bar.
He whispers in my ear.
He says, tell no one your secrets.
He says, tell no one the truth.
He says, if you do you must cut out their tongue
and if you cut out their tongue you must cut off their head.
If you cut off their head you must bury it in a secret place.
If you bury the head in a secret place you must set a fire to cover
your crime, you must burn the place to the ground.
If you burn it to the ground then you must return and salt the earth.

If you salt the earth then you should return and build a market.
In the market you may sell drinks,
cool lemonade, ice cold beer, shots of whiskey.
When people come to buy the drinks tell them stories.
Tell them about murder.
Tell them about love.
Tell them anything but the truth but don’t stop talking.

They will return, over and over, and you will run out of stories.
Then you may tell them the truth.
By then you will be old and no one will remember you or the reason
you are speaking.
There will be no reason to cut out their tongues.
Lie down at night then.
Lie down and dream.
When you dream you will dream of your crimes and they will be sweet.
Devour them.
Lies and crimes and secrets.
They are all you have.

I turn and Mario has left the bar.


Let me know if you like my friend and his stories. There are a few more I've already committed to paper and he comes to meet me often, late at night. He's not a nice man but he likes his whiskey and he tells a good story.
Good night world

Christmas, New Years, and beyond

It's been a quiet holiday season in the world of Wiler. Not counting Johanna's being assaulted in Washington and getting two fingers nearly severed or Divina being taken to the hospital or my fellow worker Derrick dying of pneumonia (that's a euphemism). Mostly I spent the week between Christmas and New Years taking care of Johanna and yelling at the hotel to get her things back.
I also had to deal with my broken window and an upcoming inspection at Acme. Plus I think my poetry sucks, my book sucks and my life is in the toilet.
But beyond that stuff I did get Sirius Radio from my friends Linda and Patty and can now listen to Howard again! Hey Now! Artie, Robin, Fred, and the gang are back in my life.
Plus while I think my poetry sucks I have been writing so I'm sort of lying about that. I thought it would be good to post my most recent poem here to keep you all up to date with what's the what. Here it is. Read it and weep:)
What You Can Do in Central New Jersey at Christmas

I go with my friend Bill Wasnak to Sayreville or Jamesburg.
One of those central Jersey towns with one long street,
low, one and two story buildings and a half dozen dozing bars.
We walk into one and there are all my friends from twenty years ago.
Big Mike, Debby Fried, Alan Estevez, Bob Zirpoli, Jack Ward,
the Irregulars, all standing around, happy, drinking, laughing.

I’m talking to Pete Keen and I ask him where he’s living now.
He says the North Carolina coast.
I say, what a coincidence, I go there often.
I ask Bill, didn’t we go there, what, two years ago?
He laughs, takes a drink, and says, no.
The last time we were all there was the fall of 2001.

The fall of 2001.
What a cruel joke.
Now I understand.
Now I see the bar for what it is.
The ghosts of Christmas have washed me up just short of Christmas Day
in a dingy old man’s bar with all my lost and forgotten friends.
Bob Zirpoli, who hasn’t spoken to me since 1981.
Pete Keen, Christ, for all I know he’s dead.
Wasnak, married now, with two boys and a lovely wife.
Prosperous business man, avid golfer, man on the go.

I look around again and see the glasses covered in dust, the windows boarded up.
Waiting for the wrecking ball from some developers dream.
The Melody Bar crushed by the jaws of some great earth moving machine.
The Court Tavern huddled up against the New Brunswick of tomorrow.
My friends old and fat and drinking too much.
Working at jobs they hate.
Making too much money, or too little, with wives they abhor or who detest them.

O horrible dream. O stunted joy.
O Melody Bar.
A band now long forgotten plays some creaking punk anthem.
The smell of stale beer and lost love stinks up the joint and we reel out into the dawn.
Asking where’s the party, where’s the party?
Once someone would have said
I am the party
Once we would have laughed and laughed.
Now we stare at the harsh dawn sun, turn our separate ways,
march back home.

It’s hours till Christmas and the ghosts have not found me fit for redemption.
They offer this happy gathering, my long forgotten friends, this bar, this grim lesson.
O Christmas.
O Joy

Anyway, that's all for now. I'm busy planning my new year and my poetic life and my romantic life...all of which are in disarray. I'm reading with a bunch of friends at the Bowery Poetry Club on New Years Day after 3:00pm. Come and hear Danny Shot, Elliot Katz, Joe Weil, Bobby Tiedeken, Chevisa, and me. It's the most goofy, ego-centric reading of the year. Thankfully the bar is open. God bless poetry! Adios Saddam! Hail, hail rock and roll, and goodnight to James Brown! I feel good. To quote Was Not Was, "I feel better than James Brown".
Hello 2007!

Christmas at Acme

Yesterday was our holiday luncheon at Acme Exterminating. Bob took the women in the office and me out to lunch at the local steakhouse, Uncle Jack's. Luis, our boss, was supposed to go but sacrificed himself on the altar of duty to answer phones. There may have been a bit of bullshit in that but he felt we should bond with Bob and that he'd get in the way. Either that or he didn't want to go. Hard to say which.
Uncle Jack's is like every other NYC steakhouse. Pushy, weird waiters trying to get you to eat enormous amounts of expensive food and drink all you can. They interrupt the meal every ten minutes to ask if everything is okay. I'm convinced they grow these guys on a farm in Brooklyn. They're all overbearing and incredibly manly and the whole experience is unnerving. Quite honestly I'd prefer a gay guy saying hi my name is Todd and I'll be your server tonight to this ordeal by manliness.
The good part was the food was great, Bob was pleasant and enjoyable, and the young women I work with all had a fairly good time. They were also careful to order the most expensive items on the menu. If they were older they would have thought to order cocktails.
I myself was exhausted from my birthday celebration of the night before. I stayed up till 1am laughing and smiling and being with friends. I may have drunk a gallon of champagne. I got lovely gifts and reaquainted myself with some old friends and ate birthday cake. Johanna had her friends Sandy and Divina help with the serving and they were both great. Sandy was quite the lady bringing out appetizer after appetizer and Johanna was the queen of the house (in more ways than one).
Today, I'm going to settle back and relax, enjoy my day and roast a chicken. Tomorrow, another holiday party, my favorite, at Patty's house and the Giants/Eagles game. Good weekend, good life.

Happy Birthday

On Dec 14th 2001 I spent late morning and most of the afternoon projectile vomiting. It was my 50th birthday and my friend Danny and my sister Mary had come to visit. Me and Zithromax weren't getting along too well and as a result I puked and puked and puked and puked.
That was five years ago.
Happy birthday to me! Thanks be to God!
Today I will go to work, deliver Christmas gifts to my clients, argue with Luis about some dumb thing and at noon go to lunch with my boss, Bob. We will go to a restaurant I know he doesn't particularly like but which I do like and talk and eat and he'll rush off to an appointment. At 2:45 I'll leave work and go home, pay the rent, pick up two cards and two small gifts, and come home to cook Shrimp and Corn Chowder for Johanna. Then we'll wait for our guests to arrive and drink and laugh and talk till late into the night.
I'm still a sort of broken man physically but by and large I'm not the man that spent his 50th birthday covered in vomit. I don't intend any repeat performances. So here's to milestones and birthdays and simple things! Raise a glass with me and drink in this world in all it's joy. Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to John and Jessica! Happy birthday to you all!

Poetry in Newton

Last night was my last public performance in 2006. Thank the Lord! I went to Sussex County College in Newton NJ. It's far, far away from Jersey City. When I was nearly there they were making tornado warnings on the radio. I figured five farmers and two chickens would show but it turns out there's an actual poetry community there and in spite of the threat of witches and houses dropping from the sky several people turned out to hear me read.
My friend Bob Carnevale did a nice intro and my performance felt solid and I sold my last five books. I've got four left. Time to buy more. I don't know if I've explained this earlier but poetry publishing is like Amway. If I want books to sell at my readings I've got to buy them and sell them. This wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't pissing my money away on wine and food but it's a tough nut otherwise.
On Thursday night I went to hear my friend Jeffrey Harrison read with two other poets from Four Way Books. My friend Martha Rhodes runs the press and it was a lovely event. I had publishing envy. Lot's of other poets I knew were there and the wine was free and Jeff and his fellow poets didn't have to pay for it or organize it. I'm doing something wrong. Ross Gay has Gerald Stern, Jeff has Martha, and I have me and my dogs running the show. I've got lots of energy but little experience and I think it shows in my poor turnouts at my readings. Boo hoo!
It will be good to celebrate my birthday in two weeks with Jessica and John and my friends and then run headlong into Christmas. This is my favorite time of year! If anyone actually reads this and would like to join John, Jess and I at our mutual celebration...come to my house at 590 Palisade Ave, 2nd Fl, Jersey City on Dec 14th and hoist a glass with us. Presents not required wine much appreciated as is food. It's time for Orion to cast his spell. Time to forget about poems and poetry and work and responsibility. It's showtime!