River City, Tonight

I dove in full tilt, head first, not realizing what I was in for. The guys behind me started laughing when I came up for air covered in filth. A large branch hung at my side and floated by while I pulled a tattered and stained piece of cloth from off my head.

“Told you! You stupid fuck. It’s too dirty to swim in. There’s no point even getting in,” one of the guys in back bellowed after me. I swam back to the edge until my feet hit some slimy rocks at the bottom. I heaved myself out of the water and sat on the bank, dripping fowl water. “I wish we would’ve had our iPhones out for that. Priceless,” he continued.

His name was Baron or something like that. They usually called him B. I didn’t know him that well; he was friends with Tanner and Jeff. We’d been biking together most of the summer and going on little exploratory adventures throughout the city. It was like being 12 again, except that the trips we took always involved alcohol and at least a couple of us doing something unwarranted and regrettable. This was my turn I guess.

On this night there were six of us: me, Bob, Baron, Jeff, Tanner and Goldie. Goldie was Bob’s roommate. This was the first time he’d gone biking with us. Normally he was busy selling weed out of the east-side house they stayed in. It was an older house from probably the 40s that had once been a mansion but was now overrun by four college students. They were all younger than me, but nobody seemed to care.      

I went around the corner behind a bush and took off my jean shorts to wring them out. When I came back, the guys were all up on the hill above the river headed for the bridge.

For whatever reason, I was always lagging behind. Maybe because I was older and more reticent or maybe just because I moved at a slower pace. I usually took up the back end of our biking formation and watched for traffic coming up behind us. The other guys would fly through the streets as we all guzzled oversized cans of Milwaukee’s Best, Jeremiah Weed Road Tea or whatever swill was cheapest at the rundown gas stations that we stopped at along the way. Typically we were the only white guys in the area. The locals would get a kick out of our little bike gang and ask us what we were doing in that part of town, before finally wishing us luck as they headed back to their own cans of swill and broken down Buick Le Sabres on the corners of neglected neighborhoods.

The abandoned rail road bridge was one of our destinations almost every week. It was in an area of the city called the Bottoms that had once been a bustling stockyard and shipping area. Now it was mostly abandoned except for some warehouses and the occasional bum. We would chain our bikes to a pole in the gravel lot and climb up the side of a concrete wall. Then you could walk straight across the old tracks to the other side of the river. In between we would stop and get high while hanging our legs off the edge. Tanner would always climb up the metal girding that formed the outside and upper most portion of the bridge. Sometimes others would do the same, but I never had the balls to take part. 

Across the street was the old arena built in the 70s where bands like Van Halen, Aerosmith and the like had played in their heyday. When I was kid I used to go there almost every weekend during hockey season to see our local minor league team. The year we won the cup I clipped every newspaper article about the team and saved it in a tan spiral-ring notebook with pockets.

After tiptoeing my way carefully across the rotted and missing rail road ties, I finally caught up with them in the middle.

“Here he is. Finally,” Bob said. He looked up at me and gestured with the dugout pipe in his right hand. “Hit it.”

I took the pipe from him with both hands and set my backpack down on the tracks. Carefully, I scooted myself on to the edge and let my feet dangle over. Below was a small tributary portion of the river that connected the Kaw and Missouri Rivers.

“You gonna jump off this week, B?”

Baron was the daredevil type and had jumped off the bridge a couple times before. The handful of times he’d ridden with us he always did something that seemed stupid and outrageous. Jumping off a 50 foot-high bridge into a fast moving tributary was surprisingly one of his lesser feats.

I ripped the bowl a few times and covered the opening with my lighter to shield from the wind. Then I spaced out for a few minutes and passed the bowl to my left. In my eyes were the blinking and stationary lights reflected by the rippled river water. If you looked down into the water, you got the best view of the Bottoms possible. None of the blight or old buildings shone back fully, just the lights from the trains down the way and the lighted corners of structures still in use. The refracted picture of forgotten and decrepit buildings danced off the water.

From down the way, I heard something heavy hit the water and start to float away. I wondered if it was a body at first. Later they told me Goldie had found an old table on the other side and thrown it in the water. In the distance I could hear the rest of them chastising him for throwing more shit in the river. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bob gesturing at me from the end of the bridge.

“You coming?” he yelled and broke my reverie. Without a word, I lifted myself up and headed for the other side.       

Liquid Plumr: Anti-Feminist Rhetoric, or Double Penetration to Clear Poop From Pipes

Is there anyway this isn't totally offensive?


I almost wish I was a woman so I could take personal offense with this. Pornography is now officially  mainstream (damn you internetz). Don't get me wrong, I watch porn but I don't want it in my plumbing commercials. With no subtlety, this advertisement has effectively described women as: a) helpless when it comes to household issues like clogged toilets, one plumber is not enough she's so helpless she needs two; and more importantly, b) extreme whores who like to engage in "Double Impact." Why waste our time with this? Just show us an image of a woman being doubly penetrated and holding a bottle of Liquid Plumr. Now that's something I could get behind.  

Pizza Driver

There’s something about it that I miss. Flying through the empty suburban streets all night, alone and stoned. Listening to so much music. It was special, solitary and workman-like in a way that I haven’t felt since...

Wet streets under light rain beneath flickering and fading street lamps. Each corner, each stop light, each road sign was another chance to reflect on the lonely emptiness of suburbia. 

Delivering pizzas is the true way…or the truer way. It’s a zen koan. Doing meaningless work brings meaning. Figure it out for yourself.

Teaching doesn’t make me feel that way. It makes me feel sort of old and pitiful. I’m not old but it feels that way sometimes. How could I be an authority figure? My own life is a mess of indecision and well intentioned, but ultimately poor judgment.

On Saturdays I would work until 1 or 2 in the morning. Some nights I’d have to clean marinara sauce off the seats of my car. Other nights it was buffalo sauce. Then I’d go home late, smoke and watch Nature on PBS. At those times, I was alone, completely alone, but I felt closer to the world.

When I come home from work now I just do more work. Work that seems to go nowhere and has no effect. I start and end a semester by correcting the same mistakes and offering the same unheeded advice.

I have no friends at work now. There are just students. When they laugh at my jokes I wonder if they actually think I’m funny or if they’re just trying to get ahead. If I like them at all I go easier on them.

In my pizza/salad days, there was always someone to dick around with. A cook missing some teeth, a grizzled veteran driver that had been working for the same store for 15 or 20 years, a lesbian with a pock marked face (80% of the women in the pizza industry are lesbians), a poor busboy from St. Louis who rapped poorly, a manager who worked 60 hours a week and hated his life…

I miss the tips too, the random ones. Not the money but everything else people would scrounge up. One time I got a mango which I promptly ate in the car. Another time a can of Tecate which I chugged mostly in their front yard but finished in the car (later I returned to the same place and was disappointed they didn’t offer me a second)…cigarettes, bowl rips, one time I smoked weed with a crack head couple in a dirt bag motel off the highway (the foil pipe was as shitty as it got), one time some lady gave me a DVD porn and said she worked at a sex shop. When I brought it back to work, my manager and I watched it in the back room but the cook working with us ran away and hid. 

People would pay me to give them rides. Teenagers, drunk people. Sometimes I would deliver booze or smokes for old men. They always tipped well.  

People now think it’s really prestigious that I’m a college adjunct. Most of them don’t know what the word adjunct means, but they know I teach college part time. My friends tell their acquaintances and actually ask me to tell others sometimes when we’re out.

“Tell them what you do,” Jerry says to me with a big Gomer Pyle grin on his face. He stares at me, perched on the end of a bar stool. He never went to college and he’s an alcoholic. To him I might as well be an astronaut, it’s that exotic.

I brush off his suggestion and try to avoid telling anyone anything about myself. It’s better that way. “He’s a professor!”

Fuck, then I is (spell check told me to put that instead of “I am”) in for some questions and some real shitty conversation.

“So you teach like, writing then? I really admire you.” Thanks. No matter who they are or what they do I inevitably tell them they make more money than I do. Not that it matters, but I could be delivering pizzas again and make just as much.

It’s then I become the sounding board for everybody’s English experience. What books they loved, hated, they all come up. It’s hard to avoid I guess. We could talk about punctuation or grammar, and that does come up, but that is so much more tedious and pointless. Somehow I become the punching bag for every issue they ever had with teachers in high school or community college English. And people have a lot of issues.  

One time my friend’s sister asked me when you were supposed to use “whom.” I can’t remember if I knew or not, but I just told her I wasn’t sure. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “the English teacher doesn’t even know, see!” It seemed like an awkward topic to discuss when we were in a hospital room with her brother/my best friend terminally ill from leukemia in the bed next to us. Some of her immediate family was sitting around the bed as well. 

I never had the heart to tell her about using whom with prepositions when I saw her again at her brother’s funeral a couple months later. Their younger brother came up to me when I walked in the church and asked me to read a Bible verse about fathers and sons. Nobody else would do it because they were too upset. I looked over at their cousin sulking and agreed to do it.

I can’t really remember what it said but everyone thought I did a real fine job up at the pulpit. They said it was because I was a professor and I knew how to speak in front of people.

When we were crowded around eating at their house after the funeral, their dad started yelling something confusing and incoherent at me. He was a big Italian man who’d come over on a boat as a kid. Sometimes he suffered from emotional outbursts. Right in front of everybody, he said he wanted me to start a charity in his son’s name and use all the money that had been given to the family. He said I was the smart one and I needed to study up on it.

I never did though. I think somebody else might’ve. I guess it doesn’t require the kind of smarts I have.

Popcorn Lung

                                                                 
When she told me it was over I cried a little bit and then hung up the phone and raced over to her apartment to drop off her waffle iron and her dog. We’d actually discussed it the day before, so I wasn’t completely shocked. The next day was just the end of the end I guess.

She’d broken up with me a few times before, so the waffle iron was the only thing I had left of hers. The time before she’d given back one of my DVDs and another French one that belonged to my cousin. We never watched it.

I don’t know why in the hell I took her dog for the night. Sentimentality maybe, or I just thought we’d actually get back together again the next day. Her landlord was coming over to look at the AC vents because they smelled like sewage when the guy upstairs flushed the toilet. The dog was pretty excitable, so it was best if she wasn’t there. I didn’t mind watching her really. 

We went for a walk the next morning and she squatted in the yard of a small apartment building. She’d already shit somewhere else, but I looked around to see if anyone was watching. On the basement floor of the apartment I saw an old man with pale, wiry hair staring at us from below.

He yelled something out the window about having respect. He sounded German or Yiddish, I wouldn’t have known the difference.  

“She’s just peeing…a dog’s gotta pee,” I said and dismissed his concern with a wave of my arm in the air. That must’ve incited him because then he yelled ‘fuck you’ over and over until we walked away. An old woman came up behind him and grabbed his arm but I couldn't understand what she was saying. Both sets of eyes looked like moon pies or Little Lulu eyeballs. I returned a ‘fuck you’ to him once, but felt guilty as we strolled away at a decent clip. I’ll never forget the image of that old man peering up from the basement, his face level with the dog’s ass. She really didn’t shit though. He had nothing to worry about.  

Year End Review: A List of Work I've Had Published This Year

For all you sycophants out there (...0...), here's a list of work I've had published online or in physical journals this year. Each link is to my story/poem or to the publication itself if the story is not available online. I had a decent start to the year but things have slowed down since the summer. Oh well, keep writing I guess:

Kendallwood (Haiku) and Cripples (short story): the 555 Collective is a non for profit arts group that supports victims of abuse. (NOTE: the haiku is about the 13th one if you scroll down the list).

"Time Together" (short story): the Legendary is a literary blog/online journal.

"The Jerk Chicken is Sardonic" (flash fiction): Thunderclap Press is a small online literary and physical publication that is currently on hiatus. My story appeared in issue #9 over the summer (#9, #9, #9...) which is currently the final issue.

"Summer in Hell" (short story): Kerouac's Dog Magazine is published by a vanity press out of the U.K. This story was accepted over a year ago, but issue 5 which it was scheduled to appear in has yet to come out. I think KDM is mainly a money making scheme, so beware to writers in the future if and when they start publishing again.

"The Portentous Menacing Road of a New Decade...": HipsterFight! Magazine is an online literary journal. I'm currently the Fiction Editor of said journal. This was an essay I wrote on turning 30 and the implications therein.

Blogs, Messagboards Etc.

Contributor/Blogger: Demencha.com is a local/national music blog based out of Kansas City. The primary focus is hip-hop but I often write pieces about indie, post-punk, alt-country etc. The link will take you to a list of my postings.

I'm also a regular poster on the message boards alt-country.org and notorg.org. What's my user name? That's a secret I'll never tell...

Dancing, Leases and Leaving

I was dancing around the room like a fool when you walked in. Gyrating my hips and moving my wrists back and forth limply like I’d seen others do. The music had ended long before you saw me, but I still kept it in my mind. It was some sort of repetitive hip-hop beat I’d heard on a car commercial. My feet jostled back and forth for position one in front of the other while I imagined the loud and distorted rhythm track. 

            I didn’t feel embarrassed at all, but I probably should have. You weren’t the first to be turned off by my dancing.

I’m guessing that’s how you felt at least. Since we haven’t talked again since August, that would be my assumption. I tried calling you a couple times at the end of the summer to no avail. A man answered and said you didn’t live there any longer, but I knew he was lying. Your lease wouldn’t have been up until October and I know you didn’t have a surplus of money to go around breaking leases.

When we first met and started dating you prided yourself on not signing leases. I thought it was an odd thing to pronounce, but in retrospect it may have been one of your finer qualities. I guess I found it ironic then that the lease is what hemmed you in and forced you to have that man answer the phone and lie to me. I can only imagine the conversation you had with him where you instructed him to answer the phone and say you no longer resided at Orange Gate apartments.

He had a pretty breathy voice. I won’t lie, I felt like getting to know him when I first heard him speaking to me. I knew why you’d left me and took up with that voice. It was convincing and fairly persuasive. He probably could’ve gotten you to do anything. I wanted to believe you weren’t there based solely on the conviction and gravitas in his voice. For that reason, I don’t really blame you.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Domestic Violence: Assigning Blame in the World of 21st Century Pop Culture

By all appearances, Rihanna and Chris Brown are now officially a couple again (and may be engaged). The negative press their relationship has engendered can now ostensibly go full throttle or secede to the next example of domestic violence. In that case, those of us in the blogosphere are now free to imagine a world where the two are described as a celebrity power couple rather than just typified as members of an abusive relationship where the man holds power over the woman. Pop culture has a short memory and an even shorter appreciation for stories that go beyond soundbytes and have relevant issues at their crux. (Apparently Rihanna does as well, but she'll be continually reminded of the situation by Brown's newest tattoo.)

At the same time this week, those of us in Kansas City (and anyone at all associated with the NFL) were greeted with another incident of domestic abuse of a different magnitude when Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered the mother of his child and then committed suicide last weekend. Despite calls from many to cancel last Sunday's game against the Carolina Panthers, the NFL and Chiefs ownership decided the show must go on at Arrowhead Stadium. The Chiefs happened to win that game, and despite their hapless 2-10 record this season, stories of redemption and hope were floated around the city and the league. What's lost in the shuffle as the story quietly gets swept under the rug is the message we're sending to our young people in this country.  As the story of concussions, drug/alcohol abuse and domestic violence (because the murder of a woman by her significant other is the ultimate act of domestic violence) has unfolded, we've lost sight of seeking answers in the name of assigning blame. The average teenager or college student could pull several narratives out of these events, but in large part they've been lead by the media and our culture to place value in only a few possible explanations. 

Twice in recent weeks some of my female freshman/sophomore students have told me that they not only don't blame Chris Brown for what he did to Rihanna, but that they also enjoy seeing them together and think that getting back together was a positive move. I openly reacted with disgust and asked them to explain their position. Neither could beyond some vapid exclamations of love and non-sequitors that went nowhere and so we were left at a stalemate. We often discuss feminist literature and critiques in class, so it might trouble me more than others when I hear these sorts of unjustified responses. It's not my place to assign value in a situation such as the Rihanna-Chris Brown scenario but I feel a duty to call into question unfounded logic in the same way I would in an essay for class. Supporting and justifying an abusive relationship does not make sense unless you yourself are the abused. 

In some sense I have to conclude that feminism has failed the broader populace of young women. Send out the white flag, pop culture's lust for blood and rampant nihilism has won out over what could've been a chance to teach our young people about the dangers of co-dependence, abuse and the still hegemonic patriarchy itself. My students, by all counts midwestern women from small towns or suburbs are the ones who need feminism the most and instead they've been fed a diet of sex and celebrity worship by the mass media. You could ascribe their naivete to youth, but accepting domestic violence and encouraging or applauding a victim who returns to her abuser is not acceptable at any age.

The midwestern domestic women will be the ones most likely to face domestic abuse within their lifetimes, not the empowered urbanites working at start-ups in New York or Los Angeles with no time to settle down, the ones ultimately so full of confidence in themselves that they they no longer feel they need a man in their life (at least one that does not measure up to their standards). The Kate Bolicks of the world will probably never face the situations that those in the flyover states will, and it's telling that many in this area seem much less prepared to avoid or leave an abusive partner. Postmodern theories about gender and the reclamation of sexuality by third-wavers will not reach the masses nor will it teach any of these women anything about avoiding abusive relationships. Feminism may not be "radical" as some have continued to claim, but its certainly become abstruse when, at it's core, it should be a simple way to teach our young women self-confidence and female empowerment.

Assigning blame to a victim is essentially what we do when accept abuse and violence in our culture. Belcher's girlfriend Kasandra Perkins was a student at one of the colleges I teach at (although I did not know her), so I feel a responsibility to address the situation in one of the final class periods of the semester. Where would I start though? It's so easy to assign blame in what was obviously a situation that defied common-sense logic; should we blame the NFL for not having a better policy on domestic violence or for not better protecting it's players against head injury?; how about blaming the ownership and management for not clearly recognizing a player who was suffering from addiction?; perhaps we call it a day and take the easy way out and accept that Belcher was solely responsible for his own actions and it's pointless to try to make sense of it all (as someone on Facebook told me this week in not so many words). Any or all would probably satiate the media enough and serve as an excuse to move on to the next soundbyte. (Thankfully the NRA has released a rare statement that makes sense of the entire situation, claiming simply "...one thing missing in that equation is that woman owning a gun so she could have saved her life from that murderer.")

It's all a moot point though. Influenced by an anti-feminist and sensationalist media, young people have already begun assigning blame. Yesterday I heard two young men (also in KC but not the same school where Kasandra Perkins was a student) discussing the case in the student union of the other college I teach at part time. I sat quietly munching on some holiday chex-mix, cookies and M&Ms while one male student detailed a revelation in the case to another. He asked his friend if he'd heard what had been discovered about Kasandra Perkins. The other said no, but listened with rapt attention. Apparently it had been divulged to him by an unknown employee of the Chiefs that Kasandra Perkins had cheated on Jovan Belcher and given him AIDS. The second student reacted in surprise, questioning whether the story had been confirmed on the internet, but then woefully accepted the hearsay as he even went to the lengths of calling someone else on his cell phone to relay the story. With that an abuser has been absolved in the minds of several young men and an explanation weighted heavily enough against the victim but sensational enough to entertain once again has gained traction.