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Notes of a Bald Cricket
by Luis Rodriguez 1. I sit alone, a bald cricket, in a bar on “poetry” night, face in a bottle, singing the amber waves of beer. Poetry is the excuse, as good as any. Be true to my art. But this is not what keeps me here. It’s the way tequila germinates inside like a knotted tree, the way bodies darken into a sort of sunken beauty, lights low and voices high, the way I can swim between these back-lit walls. There is death to meet us, swollen hands to wake us, a life that is falling into the gaps in the floor under our feet. There are levels of delusions not even churches can attain. Alchemists straddle bar stools, transformers and transformed, awaiting my arrival into their webs of splintered stories while manacled to curled ghosts called gin. I want to trace the lies on women’s skins, to vanish in their wine-drenched eyes. I want to be flute and whisper, pubic hair and cumshot, to warrant enough attention so they try to run me over in their cars. I pause between lingering words, imagining their flight above me, words to pull into my mouth, to drown into a shot glass, words of infinite pain, a pain without words; words that claw at the ceiling, that cough up blood, words that vomit out of me in back alleys beside rat shit and wet cardboard; words that slap me silly, that want to rifle through a man’s wallet and slip a hand beneath a woman’s skirt; words that eat tacos de pollo, with extra-hot salsa, that play muted trumpet into the reeking streets, words to drown out the el train rumbling overhead, drowning out my words. Crying can’t speak. Tears only fall into empty palms. Tears & nights. Night becomes the texture of memory, a humid breath glistening perspiration on my forehead. Wandering from table to table, my glass held unsteadily in my hand, I stave off hungers even a double-champ cheeseburger with bacon cannot do. Hungers for my friend’s girlfriend, blue-eyed, dark-haired, Polynesian-and-Irish, whose fingers I reach out for, whose hair I want to shampoo, whose body I long to tread upon as if it were autumn woods or a stretch of beach, with my toes deep into damp sand. Every smile is a door, every glance a large bed to lay my head, a pillow of eyelashes to soften the fall. Tequila, ron, blue whiskey for a blue emotion. Mammary glands to memory glands. Each recalling a déjà vu of startled intent. There are feels I always want to feel. There are voices I would rip faded curtains to hear. There are faces to break chrome-backed glass for, reflections of a liquid stare into millenniums of stares. I’m dawdling on the edge of this sea in a glass, this last vestige of my mother’s fears, this grandfather poison that poisoned my grandfather, this nectar of dried screams, this bruised cant, this woman who presses her nipples to my cheek, whose chatter cannot be climbed, whose kisses are stained lullabies, who tells me I belong, although I cannot fit, who dares the fool’s lament, the call and response of night crawlers, the tones beneath my rambling, who has become the last shriek of tequila dreaming, whom I now grieve, ambling to the funeral tune of a child’s cry pulsing silent yet determined inside me. O for beauty’s fists to pommel this mask into itself, for taste that is candy and not porcelain, for wisps of saliva to wither on my hair and my chin, for words to nuzzle and soak my tongue, for language’s naked prowlness to enter these shoes, for a bald cricket’s lyrical death on a dance floor. 2. The Austrian wall held my shadow, stretched out across ancient wood that framed my body against the ground. Where was I? People walked around me, speaking fugues I could not recognize. I felt as if I was going to die. I hadn’t felt this way since I last o.d.’ed on carga and whiskey so many flights of stairs ago. I rose from that blessed spot, rose to face the somber street, to wander among the shadows held by walls, to glimpse my mortality reclining against a street lamp. My friends were long gone. Sometime the night before, I wandered off from where we had been gathered: a snitzel and hot dog stand near a bar where I had at least 25 of those large, dark and heavy German beers (I lost count). This strange place, alien enough to break my hard-found sobriety, pulled me into its steely grasp, harsh violin music between my ears, fooling the fool into believing. I numbly went through my pants. In a pocket I found a card with the address to the Salzburg hotel we were staying at. I located a lone taxi and showed the driver the card. I didn’t say anything, but whatever expression I gave him told him what he needed to know. He invited me into the cab, then proceeded to take me to the hotel. I paid and tipped the driver, and he pushed off as if all his nights were spent picking up shadows. The next day, we left the hotel to take a train back to Berlin. On the way out, I briefly excused myself from the others, walked to the public restroom in the lobby, and threw up as soon as I opened the door. In this classroom of crammed heads 3. Trini cried when I cried. I couldn’t tell her why I went to the recovery program until I had already gone and decided I would stop drinking. I didn’t want her to know how bad it had gotten. I didn’t want her to see me, desperate, and then to have her walk out. By rights, she should have. She cried when I cried. Not saying much. Letting my outpouring tell the tale. Letting this say more than what I could have said in letters I wished I had written to all the therapists, to the former wives, to my kids, to confused lovers. Letters I want to compose every night of my life until I expire, letters about the brutal awakening to fire that this sobriety has thrust on me. Trini cried when I cried, as I sat on my office chair in the library of our new home that I knew I could destroy, as other households had been, unless I now opened up, now tasted the salt of Trini’s anguish and know she would still be there, as she was then, sliding up to me and placing her arms around my shoulders, and me feeling so ashamed, so bone-hungry, so liquefied soul, so blood-red sorry, and damn-near death tired. There are moments meant for moments. 4. I sprawled on the ground. My back against a small tree trunk. Along a row of white bungalows. On the wet grass of morning. Before open doorways. Faces peering into the blisters of day. My mouth dry as an unopened attic. My clothes in disarray. My eyes partly shut and unable to make out the figures that strolled past me, as in a funeral march, without glancing toward this pile of leaves that maybe looked human as the Las Vegas sun poured itself around me. The night before vaguely rendered into coherent dialect. I couldn’t recall when it ended. I remembered the five-hour bus ride from Los Angeles to Vegas. The drinking. The good and bad dirty jokes. The singing. The dude with the dick nose on his face, and how silly he looked. I remembered my shirt coming up from my pants. I kept pushing it in, but the shirt kept coming up. I remembered Sylvia, the one I loved because everybody did. I remembered how she kept issuing rum into my cup. How I wanted to lay my face on her neck and just leave it there. I recalled the casinos. The slot machines beckoning like whores. The old people dying in their bones. The serious players in cowboy hats. The steelworkers and the rankled business men. The blustery group of Blacks from East St. Louis. I also remembered Sylvia daring me to jump into a motel swimming pool, and for some reason I said no as if I had some sense. But somewhere between an image of a run in with some vato who in my mind had designs on Sylvia, and a walk I managed to make it down the carpet-strewn sidewalks of the strip, with a woman in my arms--was it Sylvia?--to when nothing comes to me, I ended up on this lawn. Strangers kept vigil above me, but nobody came close or offered me a hand or asked what the hell I was doing there. I laid there a long time before I gathered the strength to get up, barely wipe the dirt off my pants, and follow the parade to the casino’s killing floors. There is a sense of having possessed 5. My Cherokee friend, Fourkiller, barely showed up for work at the Bethlehem Steel Mill. We were part of the “oil gang,” a position officially known as “oiler & greaser.” Our weapons were grease guns, manual and air-powered, and various wrenches and pipe cutters. We greased the bearings, joints, shafts, couplings, and moving parts of all the machines in the plant. Considered the low men in the maintenance crews, we were also essential to every operation. “Hey grease monkey, we got a job for you,” one of the millwrights yelled into the oil shanty where three of us were changing into our work gear. “We ain’t grease monkeys,” replied Bosch, another member of the “gang.” “We’re ‘lubrication specialists.’” Johnny Fourkiller may not have been the hardest working crew member, but he was clearly the smartest. He seemed to master every intricate aspect of the fine art of greasin’. He had come from Oklahoma, joining with other Indians from throughout the Southwest as well as the few Mexicans and Blacks able to snatch some set-aside jobs due to a consent decree against the white-only traditions of the repair crews (some of the best paying jobs in the mill). Fourkiller knew his shit, but he was hardly there. After work, on those days he did show up (“Glad you could join us,” Bosch would say), we would go to a local bar that catered to the mill hands, particularly on pay days. George’s was one of the better known hangouts. Men swarmed around the pool tables, many of them from the surrounding factories and warehouses. I was lousy at pool, mostly because my eyesight was far from 20-20. But we had a scam going, Fourkiller and me. He was a bona fide pool shark (he’d be good at anything if he hung around long enough). So the plan was that I would start to play, with my bad form and missed shots, to entice the hustlers. Once we got a game going, usually for beers, Fourkiller would then rack up the balls and knock them all in. This only lasted a few games, but by then we were beer-dead, and nothing mattered, even when some of them dudes jumped us from behind, cracking heads, and we landed in front of George’s door just as the mill’s air whistles called us back to work. when the wasted poems become dawn and are not gray-speckled haze 6. Weather comes first; Chicago winding itself through tissue and bone. The gray-stone and terra-cotta facades on buildings then wake you to artifice in motion. Finally, the alleys, strewn with the remains of weekend parties and weekday headaches, come around to grab you from behind. For a few years, I roamed the city’s cobblestone paths below El train tracks and slippery sidewalks to poetry open mikes, to poetry slams, poetry beer busts. . . everything was poetry. This was good. Poetry was good. For once, I could get drunk and not have to push aside the art. It came out in violent bursts. Better than fighting. Chicago embraced them with a flirtatious wink. My poems were some of the same angst-filled lyrical blasts that seemed to consume us then, us black-garbed and oh-so-serious folk. But with me there was a twist (everybody needs a twist, a performance poet once told me): I came from L.A., South Central and East L.A. to be precise. I had trekked forth from streets that now burned, that now rudely tossed the bed out the window, that made everyone fear the mortal one, that angered up the blood. People were interested, although I once believed they would throw me out on my West Coast ass. Yet to me, East L.A. and Chicago were similar. People spoke to you. Families mattered. Sidewalk talk and stoop listening mattered. Being real mattered. Love and hurt and late-night quarrels and dancing babies and large wedding parties--these mattered. The gangs didn’t bother me. The craziness creasing out of webbed eyes didn’t bother me. Even the gunfire didn’t bother me (although I’ve dodged a few fat ones in my time). Chicago welcomed the madness in flight that dwelled within. It heard my cries, and looked up. In bars it’s hard to get anyone’s attention. But that’s the point, isn’t it? If a poem works there, it can work anywhere (although, to a drunk, almost any word order can be a poem). So I made the rounds--to places with names like Weeds, The Bop Shop, The Get-Me-High, the Guild Complex, the Green Mill Lounge, Batteries Not Included, the Border Line--there was even a performance space called Kill The Poets, which actually got some people upset as if somebody really meant to do that (although there were probably a few who did). We got to know each other pretty well, us wicked wordsmiths: our intonations, our not-so-subtle subtleties, our internal breathing. We got to know the sexual impulses beneath every line. We started our own institutions--there was already a Letter eX, a poet’s gossip sheet, but also a Pissed Off Poets group, a Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, and Poetry-Beneath-The-Stars; there were poetry ensembles, poetry dance groups, poetry video shows, music and poetry, fish fries and poetry, and poetry lakefront readings. There were presses--Abrazo Press, Juggernaut Press, Mary Kuntz Press, Doublestar Press and of course, Tia Chucha Press, which I named for my favorite aunt. Once I was accused of being part of a poetry mafia, which is silly because there’s no real money in poetry. Still I felt at home here. Right away. In the late 60s, East L.A.--for decades, the most violent community in the country--bloomed in art: murals on housing projects and taquerías, poetry and teatros, garage bands and musical mestizaje. Art and violence are diametrically opposed. This saved my life. And in the late 80s and early 90s, in Chicago, poetry did about the same. Finally, when the alcohol had long overcome the words, I even found the strength to let the drinking die and the poetry live again. I believe Chicago had a lot to do with this, this hard-drinking, lip-busting, loud-yelling place that imagined us as laureates. And even if this proves untrue, there’s something about the way Chicago smiles on you that makes you believe almost anything. Words for clouds to fall away 7. Wading through the lush of memory, through speechless seconds, seeing myself on the backhand of past lives, crumbling emotions surround me, as this obsessive and irresponsible poetry man beckons to write. To tell truths. Oh such a liar. I’m a sleeveless jacket in a closet of worn clothes; I’m the incision of scarring verbs across the faces of all my loves. This Mexican who is a stranger in Mexico, this pocho who hates milk with his coffee, juice with his vodka, who speaks English with an East L.A. accent and Spanish with an East L.A. accent. This Tarahumara’s lost son, this graveled tongue, this ghost beneath every ruin, rising like jaguar’s breath in a tropical storm. All sacrifices reside in me, all jagged chests, all virgin hosts, with the wreckage of two massive oceans, all bloods commingling, this Moor whose poetry stains the library walls, this armor-plated mail-wearing, sword-thrusting, Andalusian who flew landward through Iberian coasts and those of Cem-Anahuac. I am Cortez’s thigh, I am the African beard, I am the long course hair of Chichimeca skulls. I am Xicano poet, a musician who can’t play music as a musician is a poet who works in another language. There is a mixology of brews within me. I’ve tasted them all, still fermenting as grass-high anxieties. I am rebel’s pen, rebel’s son, father of revolution in verse. I am capitalism’s angry Christ, techno-Quetzalcoatl, toppling the temples of modern thievery, of surplus value in word-art —exploited, anointed, and perhaps double-jointed. There’s a brown Goddess in my eye, a Guadalupana for the broken red earth. The sacred is too sacred for walled cathedrals, for incensed and baroque martyrs in vested garbs, for pulpit schemers and sweat lodge fakers and garbled spirtualists on the best-selling lists. I am disciple and elder. I am rockero and hip hop bandit, rapping Aztlanese in-between brick-lined texts. What do I know? What blazing knowledge can I spear? Who can burn with me and not get burned? Violence used to be great solace, alcohol my faithful collaborator, scratching dank words from stale corners. Now there are whole cities in my gardens, Mexika drums pulsing from my temples. Saxophone riffs streaming from the sky like a waterfall into the canyons of my body. Walls carry my name, walls and their luminant fractures. Walk with me then. Walk with me to the Maya. Walk with me along headstones of past loves, past plans, long-gone junctures. Walk with me through the forest of collective remembering, shamed and honored by the trees. I’m no immigrant. I belong because I belong. I’m no shaggy stranger. I’m the holy villain, the outlawed saint, the most Godless and therefore dearest to the mystery. Where suicide is not solution. Where poems No longer puncture the phantoms. Where walking with me is to become brethren to rain and night sweats and the betrayed. this disjointed sneering # Luis J. Rodriguez is the author if four books of poetry and a CD of poetry and music. He is the founder/editor of Tia Chucha Press, and cofounder of Tia Chucha’s Café & Centro Cultural (www.tiachucha.com). His latest book is My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989-2004 from Curbstone Press/Rattle Magazine. | ||
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