Finally, Creighton stops talking and smiles. He’s been pausing between lines of poetry to smile deliberately around at us throughout the recitation. The smiles always arrive on the heels of what Creighton obviously believes to be his wittiest, most cutting lines, as if to help us along in our understanding of his drollery:
Clever, no?
It’s a taut, closed-mouth, crinkle-eyed smile, and insufferable.
In the hallway, after the reading, Sherrie keeps begging me to keep my voice down, and I’ll look around before hunching toward her and reiterating my objections in an urgent series of mutters. I think I’m doing a pretty good job, but a few minutes later Sherrie hushes me again, and I realize that I was practically shouting and people on their way down the hall had to duck to avoid my flying arms.
“You get so
angry
, Lawrence,” Sherrie hisses.
“I’m not angry,” I hiss back. “I’m perplexed. I don’t understand.”
“Shh!”
I pull my arms in and glance around. Jim is herding Creighton out into the hall, hand resting on one of the poet’s shoulders. Todd trails in their wake like a flower girl after a bride and groom. Claude is also nearby, leaning against a wall with his arms folded, close enough to hear what I’m saying but bodily placing himself outside the conversation.
“I feel like I must be missing something,” I hiss.
Sherrie puts on a patient, teacherly face.
“It’s just a different kind of poetry, Lawrence. It’s kind of Bukowski, I thought. In the narrative sense I mean. You don’t have to like it.”
This infuriates me.
“No! That’s bullshit!”
“Shh!”
I look around again. Jim is now standing between Creighton and Todd, as if mediating their conversation. He looks over at me and grins.
“He heard you,” Sherrie accuses.
“I agree,” says Claude.
“What do you mean, you agree?” says Sherrie. Meanwhile, I’m agape because, looking at Claude, I already know.
Claude hoists one shoulder as if he can’t even be bothered producing a full-on shrug. “I mean I agree with Lawrence. It’s jingoistic claptrap.”
My gape widens into an open-mouthed, all-embracing smile. “Yes! Yes! See?” I pinch Sherrie’s shoulder by way of emphasis. She gives me a look before rounding on Claude again.
“I’m surprised at you. You’re usually so tolerant of different kinds of work.”
“I am, if it’s good,” admits Claude. “But this—” He gestures down the hall toward Creighton. “—is no good. The only difference between me and Lawrence is that I don’t see the point in getting worked up about it.”
“It’s
jingoistic claptrap
,“ I exclaim. “It’s just one big polemic.”
Claude’s nodding. “Polemics and poetry don’t work.”
“No,” I agree. “They don’t.” I have to suppress an urge to slap Claude on the back, or start pumping his hand or something.
Sherrie seems to have taken a micro-step away from us both. “Well,” she says, “Jim seems to like it.”
We all glance toward Jim and note that he’s approaching. He ambles smilingly down the corridor, taking his time, trailing his still-sunny atmosphere along with him, warming the hallway. Our faces turn to him like flowers.
“Folks,” he greets, arm landing soft across my shoulders, like a blanket. No crazy heat burning from his armpit these days, but there’s a smell. The unlaundered Jim-smell of outdoors and woodsmoke and dog. I haven’t noticed it since before Christmas.
“So howdja like that?” Jim asks of us all.
“I enjoyed it very much,” says Sherrie after a moment.
“What about you, Claude?” asks Jim, grinning as if he’s just set some sort of ingenious trap. It occurs to me that I have never seen Jim speak to Sherrie directly, except when he answers her points in the seminar. But even then he’s responding in a general, classroom-oriented way.
Claude smiles and shrugs. Jim points an endless index finger at him.
“That,” he says, seeming pleased, “is exactly what I was expecting.”
He laughs, and turns his laughing face to me. For some reason, I’m the guy appointed to laugh with him.
I don’t let Jim down on this front. I don’t see how I can. Claude just keeps smiling, arms folded tightly as if to lock himself into a permanent shrug. Sherrie, after a moment or two, turns away—either to look for Todd or else just to look at something else—and I feel, for some reason, queasy. Lately a pair of words keeps popping into my mind unbidden, always accompanied by the feeling I associate with Janet and her bedroom—an eight-year-old’s bowel-level shame.
occasionally struggles
Once we’ve finished laughing, Jim gives me another little pat and wipes his eyes. “Now, I just wanted you folks to know,” he says, “you’re all invited over to my place Friday night after the second reading.”
Sherrie turns back, and I’m not sure I can describe the expression on her face except to say that I feel for her the way you do when a good friend’s fly is open—I want to take her aside, to usher her out of view until she’s properly zipped up.
Charles Slaughter is sitting at his desk with a pile of mushrooms and medicinal capsules in front of him, methodically bashing the mushrooms into dust with a hammer. A few guys were gathered meekly around his open door when I arrived, pleading with him to stop because they were trying to study, and Slaughter, not looking up from his work, was yelling at them to go stick their heads up their asses if they were looking for quiet, and not to be such fucking useless pussies while they were at it, because he was
busy
.
It turns out Chuck is preparing for the weekend. He had the capsules from an old prescription lying around, he tells me, and had discovered that once he cracked them and dumped out the medicine, he could bash about twenty
mushrooms up into a fine powder and cram all the powder into a single capsule. I sit on his bed watching him for a while, wincing every time the hammer lands. Chuck is turning the surface of his desk into a pitted moonscape.
“See?” he says, holding up a completed capsule. “This way, you can do, like, twenty mushrooms in one pop.”
I lean forward to squint my appreciation. “But,” I say, “
should
a person do twenty mushrooms in one pop?”
“Of course, a person should,” says Charles, and swallows it.
“Please stop the noise,” a timid freshman calls from the doorway.
“I will come over there,” replies Slaughter, “and I will impale you on my fist.”
Slaughter may seem like an odd sort of friend for a poet to have—I certainly thought so when I learned of his friendship with Jim. But now that I’ve gotten to know him, it seems to me that Chuck is a kind of poet himself. That is to say, there is a poetry about his weirdness, and his bigness, and his violence. His good cheer and his loyalty. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I heard someone describe poetry once as something you experience not intellectually, but with your nerves and instincts—and this is how I’ve always experienced Slaughter. Nothing is laid out or explicit with him, but evoked. You never know quite what the deal is, but you get feelings—feelings of unease, or warmth, or tension—and they circle. They never seem to land but just keep circling, blurring into one another.
“What ever happened with the backhoe?” I ask once we’re sitting across from one another at Quackers.
“What backhoe?” says Slaughter, gazing over my shoulder, out the window and onto the street.
“On the weekend? You stole a backhoe.”
Slaughter’s mouth opens. “I did, didn’t I? Fuck, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why Mittens has been so pissy all week.”
I don’t mention Claude, or Slaughter seizing him by the neck, which seems to me a more obvious, if less flamboyant, motive for Sherrie’s pissiness. Instead I ask, “What is the deal with you and Sherrie, anyway?” stretching my arms to illustrate how relaxed I am. “Are you two going out or what?”
“Well, she’s mad at me now,” grunts Slaughter. “So, no. I don’t fucking know.”
“She’s mad about the backhoe?”
“Oh, who knows what she’s mad about.” Slaughter keeps staring past me out the window. He doesn’t seem much for conversation today. “I’m too big an asshole when I get drunk or something.”
“So are you going to the Creighton reading?” I ask, since a conversation-change is clearly what’s required here.
Slaughter frowns. “Who is this Creighton fuckwad, anyway?”
I lean forward. “He’s
awful
. He’s the worst poet I’ve ever heard.”
“Let’s kill him,” says Charles, cheering up.
“I’d like to. I hate him. Like—the moment I saw him.”
“I love that,” says Slaughter, nodding approval. “I love hating people like that.”
I point across the table. “I thought of you, actually. When I was sitting there hating him. It was just like you and Rory Scarsdale.”
Something happens then in Slaughter’s face and, it seems, throughout the bar. The lights are lowered in acknowledgment of evening, voices grow subdued, the jukebox music shrieks and grates. Night falls all at once.
It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening.
Slaughter just sits there, letting silence fill up his turn to talk. His mouth hangs open and his eyes have wandered off—he grows a crease between his eyebrows. It’s like he’s listening to a distant, unfamiliar voice.
“What’s the thing with Scarsdale, anyway?” I say. “Is it because he threw you out the one time?”
Slaughter grips the edge of the table, causing our beer mugs to shudder.
And then Slaughter starts talking like this:
“It’s because there are all these fucking men, all right? And they’re saying stuff and showing you … like … all this neat stuff. And you don’t know, you just go along, right? Because you figure they know what they’re doing. And everybody’s supposed to be fucking friends. You’re sitting around and it’s like, Okay! This is how it is, I get it, and it must be true because they say so, we’re looking out for each other, you know? And then one day the fucker hands you a shovel. And he’s like, dig. And you’re like, why? And he’s like, because I fuckin’ told you to dig. And you’re like, well that’s not a good enough reason, that’s not, it’s not
reasonable
, and everything you told me before, it’s all—like all of your reasons are based on … on
reasonability
, right?”
“Charles,” I say, looking around.
“And it’s like they hate you all of a sudden! And then you’re thinking that maybe they hated you all along! And maybe this was all a big fucking ploy! And maybe the whole deal was to just get you
here
, in the middle of a
yard
, with this goddamn
shovel
in your hand, as if everything’s been your fault all along and they’ve just been waiting to
punish
you and make you
suffer
for it!”
“Charles,” I say, “people are …”
“I didn’t do anything, Campbell!”
He’s yelling at me.
“I know, Chuck,” I tell him.
We stare at each other. The bar has gone quiet and noisy all at once. That is, it’s so quiet, tiny noises like coughing and pouring and muttering seem amplified.
“I gotta—” says Slaughter, looking slowly around. “Fuckin.’ ”
“Chuck?” I say. “How you doing?”
“I gotta call Mitts. I’ll be right back.”
And then, instead of pushing himself away from the table, Chuck pushes the table away from himself and beer flops itself from the mugs, onto me and everywhere else.
When I look up, Slaughter’s gone. I flag the waitress for help and she comes with a rag and tells me that I, and my university compatriots in general, are slobs and idiots to a man.
“Little Lord Fauntleroys,” the waitress keeps repeating, never raising her head to look at me as she sops the spilled beer. “Every one of you kids. Townload of Little Lord Fauntleroys flouncing around. Doing whatever the hell you please.”
I sit at the bar for the next half hour or so, not self-conscious about it because there is such a fuss of activity all around me that the fact of my being here alone isn’t pathetically apparent. Besides, it feels kind of cool to be sitting at the bar by my lonesome. The poet, alone with his musings, needing drink but not company. It strikes me as a pose I might find Claude in.
After a while, though, I’m feeling bold and bored enough to let my eye wander around the bar, see if anyone is taking note of my poetic isolation. Just as I turn on my stool, Cousin Janet, whom I haven’t seen since Little Billy’s, walks in. She is with a gaggle of girls and looking thinner since Christmas.
“Hey, Larry!” Janet’s eyes are glassy and wobbly as puddles. I’m fogged by a dual waft of patchouli and vodka fumes.
“Janet,” I say. “You’re half-cut.”
“I’m fully cut,” says Janet. “I’m fully cut,
mon cuz
. You have to meet all my friends!” And the next twenty minutes or so are lost in a disorienting deluge of hails and sloppy, hollered introductions. The other girls are as fully cut as Janet, shine-eyed, rose-cheeked, and they all seem delighted to meet me. One of them yells that they have been having a party. Another yells that Janet is the best friend she’s ever had. Janet bellows like a cow and hugs this person before leaning into me and explaining the party was for her. A going away party. A congratulations party.
Whooo!
The girls suddenly exclaim in unison and raise their drinks. I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.
“For Columbia?” I holler to Janet.
“Yes,” she says. “For Columbia!”
“Are you excited?” I yell.
“I don’t know,” Janet yells back, staring at me through the puddles of her eyes.
“You don’t know?” I repeat.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m drunk. I’m just drunk. That’s all I know for now.” Janet grins at me, face shining and slick.
“What about your folks?” I say, not sure what I’m asking, but speaking intuitively.
Janet shakes her head. “They don’t care what I do anymore. Nobody cares. Who cares?”
Janet yells the “Who cares?” around at her friends and they all raise a bizarre hybrid racket of mournful celebration. One of them throws her arms around Janet.
“We care,” she keens. “We love you!”
“I love you guys too!” Janet yells, turning from me—just getting lost in her friends for a while.