Tools of Potential and the Salt-Corroded Jar of Young Poets' Tears

I had occasion again today to tell my cherished stories of the fabulously mean teachers and professors I have encountered throughout my academic career: My first poetry professor at Vanderbilt, Kate Daniels, who threw my work at me, (not to me, mind you), several times across her desk and would narrow her eyes saying, "If this is the best you can do, then you need to find another class,” or my second poetry professor, Mark Jarman, who would pound his fist on the table and insist, "You will write in American English. You will write in your own goddamned American English!" or my early English lit. professor who told me I was doomed to write dreck forever because I didn't know Latin, or, progenitor of them all, a teacher I had in high school who would read my convoluted essays and say, "This isn't Sartre, Michelle." 

In telling these stories I am reminded again how grateful I am I received my education where and when I did because, as I understand it from several of my friends who received theirs elsewhere, the kinder, gentler education standard that is so pervasive would probably never have permitted my dear, mean professors to throw things at their students and rattle the tables with their demands the way they were free to do at my schools and at other similar schools where, for some of them, their rubric for teaching excellence was based in part upon how many students left crying during office hours.

This is not exaggeration.

My fiction professor once told our class that he loved to keep his office door open when the department head had his office hours because, lined up on the cushy humanities couches, there would sit all the would-be writers, literary critics and academics waiting for him with their pride trembling--going into his office brash and leaving in a crumpled heap. The department head would then lean out his door and call, “Next,” like spider says to fly, and the students would nervously eyeball each other to see who was next up to slaughter. 

And, oh, my fiction professor said, he would sit in his office and laugh and laugh. 

This wasn’t exactly how it worked with me. I would rather sew my tear ducts shut with a dull needle than let them know where my tearful goat was tied. I always had the opposite reaction to that sort of thing. With me it was, “Oh, well, we’ll just see who’s the tougher one here and whose paper is trash, and who won’t know what because she doesn’t know Latin, and who’ll cry uncle first with all the extra work. Pile it on, you rotten so-and-so, and we will just see,” which is equally as reactionary as crying but might have been the rising up for which they were hoping, though for others they had to cross through the veil of tears first. And writers, even writers-in-training, are all such punks, (I suppose all late teen, early twenties know-it-alls in every discipline are). We all deserved it. We all needed it desperately. What a mess our academic and professional lives would have been without the rough stuff. How our raging, unteachable arrogance would have taken all our hopes of progression away. 

Although I am quite formidable and take it as a solemn duty to thicken the over-precious artistic skin, I, myself, have never thrown anything at any of mine, yet, (though this is often a sore temptation), nor do I measure my success by how full I can get the salt-corroded jar of young poets’ tears I keep under my desk, (still, there is the jar, or at least the myth of the jar, which serves my purposes just as well), but I’m also not as wise in the craft or as long in it as they were and I suppose how “spider to fly” I eventually become will depend on how many years I put in, how much I love it, how hard I work and which permissions are granted by whichever institution employs me, (brave bastards). 

I hope the young ones coming up appreciate the biting insistence. They have no idea how important it is in life to learn how to receive and rally to the challenges of those who respect them enough to demand excellence of them--and how important it is to know that the ones who don’t do that, don’t do it because they do not value them at all--and those are the ones--the ones that constant billow the smoke and sunshine--those are the ones of whom they should be most wary, because those are the ones who will be the most crippling to them in the end. Those are the ones who will give them every excuse to sit still and indulge the stupid fantasy of the level playing field. Those are the ones who will hand them a greasy mirror and tell them that the obfuscated shine they see there is the light for which they should strive, when the real light is far removed from that place. And because of this they will never learn how to charge uphill in their strength, or how to take a fall on the downslope and get back up on their bruised feet again. 

The ones who do respect them however, will break the mirror, stir the stillness, murder the excuses where they lie, disillusion the level fantasy, direct the attention toward real light and be the ringing voice that calls for the uphill push as well as the will to shake off the inevitable, unceremonious fall. This process is often unpleasant. It is always unpleasant to discover you've been had, been lied to, and that you were never the hot stuff you thought you were, but the unpleasantness is a small price to pay for being given the tools to meet your potential. 

These tools are: Steel in the spine and work in the hands. Let them hold this like a prayer to that noble thing inside them that is worthy of prayer. 

The steel in my spine and the work in my hands.

Let it be so.

-M.

Love and Vehicle: 34 Things I Learned in My 34th Year

I learned love is not the only thing. You can’t be without it. It makes the vehicle go, but you do need a vehicle.

I learned I was not loved where I gave love, wanted love with such dogmatic fervor that I denied and disfigured my life and spirit daily to fit into its sorry shadow. I learned what it is to be place-filler, one as good as another, warm body in the bed that happens to have the right parts. For the first time, I learned these things consenting. 

I learned the most desperate loneliness is born of dismissive company. I learned a new depth of wanting. I learned even the sorry shadow of love can be disfigured by addiction.

I learned poverty. 

I learned that having a need to pawn the opal ring my grandmother bought for me when I was still a baby and she was dying of cancer is one of the few things that make me cry. I learned another of the few things that make me cry is coming home after going to a food bank for the first time, hauling in bags of generosity—ground venison from an abundant hunt, three Ziplocs full of chopped, homegrown red bell peppers, sweet potatoes, sweet rolls and tiny, prepackaged bowls of cereal meant for my young stepson to eat before school—then going to the mailbox after and hauling in piles of packages containing silvers and antique pornographic postcards and almanacs and unnecessary opiates that the addict I once loved used the grocery money to buy. 

I learned what it feels like to go hungry so a young one you love, to whose care and protection you are devoted, doesn’t have to.

I learned this is the love in the vehicle.

I learned “Stone Soup” is a true story. Loving neighbors, combining pantries, can somehow make a feast for seven when, by themselves, they might have only been able to feed one or two. And the feast of loving neighbors is mighty—salad from vegetables grown illicitly behind the duplex, chicken, Thai style fried rice and chocolate cake. Full bowls. Full bellies. Full hearts. 

I learned what it felt like—finally, finally, finally—to hug my stepson, stroke his lustrous hair and tell him openly that I love him, with the bones of me, I love him. I learned this the day I had to let him go.

I learned a true friend is one who, after not having seen you in fifteen years, will walk into the squalor into which you’ve been cast, look at you, see that you look like shit, see that everything good and brilliant in you is near to death, see and know intuitively this must have been going on for years even before the squalor and lack, and not utter a single word of reproach, but simply grab your suitcases, your animals, your hand, then drive for days across the wasteland with life-lifting, smart-ass humor and without complaint, to get you safe, to take you home.

I learned this is the love driving the vehicle.

I learned there are uglier places than the California desert where I was raised. Oklahoma is a fine example. I relearned the pleasures of swimming in an outdoor pool in February.

I learned the peculiar joy of going out to play with adult friends who knew me before puberty. I learned that inventing “white trash mimosa” is within the bounds of my creativity—swig of orange juice, swig of beer mixed surreptitiously in the mouth so as not to further offend an overly judgmental waitress at the coffee shop we have all been going to since we were children. I learned that going with girlfriends to get our eyebrows ripped out of our heads is much more pleasant when we’re all half in the bag at the time. “Ooh, God,” belly laugh, unfortunate jerk of the head, “that hurts more than it tickles!”

I learned from the California State University educational system that my knowledge of calculus does not qualify me to do algebra. I learned that if anyone needs three days a week of a class in “personal and social adjustment,” it is probably me.

I learned my humor again.

I learned how to take care of an ailing parent who is retreating to childhood in many ways. I learned I’m a hard-ass when it comes to encouraging and implementing necessary physical therapies. I learned, bad eyeballs or not, I am capable of restoring somewhat the house where I grew up—installing a garage door opener, fixing a garbage disposal, tweaking an air conditioner, rebuilding a bed frame that was apparently built the first time by a crack addict.

I learned these hands that can rebuild crack-bed are still capable of making poetry.

I learned this is the love fueling the vehicle.

I learned what addiction can do even to the shadow of a childhood hero. I learned predators are capable of having done a good thing once. I learned “honoring a benefaction” does not entail making myself sexual or emotional prey.

I learned to take gracefully a solid dressing down about the spelling of “ellipsis” and the nature of my own courage.

I began to learn my own courage.

I learned beginning courage is the love and it is also the vehicle.

-M.

The Best Metaphor for Everything

It’s probably not smoking black cigarettes and reading poetry on your lunch break that makes you cool—that makes you a poet.

Some jackass “accidentally” set fire to his car in the parking lot of the WalMart where I work the other night—by playing with his cigarette lighter (he wasn’t even a smoker). The fire damaged two employees’ cars as well. The jackass doesn’t have insurance—of course—and, of course, WalMart won’t be held accountable either.

A guy from Channel 4 News called to find out how bad it really was. He was angry I wouldn’t let him talk to a manager, “Sir, I’m sure you can imagine, they’ve got their hands full at the moment” and he sounded disappointed that by the time he got to me, the fire had already been put out. When I told him it had damaged only employee cars, he hung up on me.

Smiley, who works in the freezer, was standing by the desk drumming his fingers on a DD boxed bra, waiting for me to get off the phone. When I was free he said, “Dear, would you mind getting on the walkie and telling the managers that R. in the dairy case is having a heart attack?”

I made the call and for a minute there was silence—I imagined a terrible dilemma—Sideburn Manager and Young Obama Manager drawing straws over who got to stay and wait for the hazmat team to clean up the toxic exploded car nonsense and who would attend the ailing dairyman. Sideburn Manager lost and went running to meet the gasping R. making his way with Smiley to meet the ambulance at the door.

The ambulance went to the wrong door.

It went to the door where the old folks go to get their four-dollar blood pressure meds instead of the door where the cool kids go to smoke and talk shit—the door where our twenty-two year old dairyman fell to his knees waiting for treatment—the door where Sideburn Manager stood waving his arms above his head and yelling “Wrong door! Wrong door!”

The ambulance went to the wrong door…isn’t that the best metaphor for everything?

R. was either all right, or needed his paycheck more than he needed recovery, because he showed up for work the next day, laughing it off and looking more than a little tired. The hazmat crew did an excellent job in the parking lot—unless you knew better, you’d swear there was no incident at all.

I know better, but at the moment couldn’t care less. My work week has ended and my ears are still ringing. I’ve been dreaming about flailing Sideburn Managers and piles of flaming jaded news reporters. I woke up this morning and noticed I’ve developed a slight limp.

So, for now…

The dairymen have gone.
The phone has stopped for a minute.
Fuck everybody!

-M.

note: I originally wrote this while doing my stint working as the fitting room mistress, lingerie wrangler and switchboard operator at a WalMart in Nashville, TN—a surprisingly inspiring job that me and my limp miss every day.

Nicotine Bitch

There was this dude at the movie theater today—

Let me explain, this little theater I’m talking about is nestled in the ghetto all funky and crumbly and local and cheap and uncrowded and scary and wonderful.

So there was this dude—handsome surfer type—flirting with the ticket girl as I came in to take my mom to see Dark Shadows for a belated Mother’s Day. (Sidebar: the serial killer waiter at Black Angus prevented us from going on our first attempt.) So this dude was there semi-flirting with the ticket girl while at the same time being a total douche making her call her boss to confirm that indeed he did get two free tickets to the show because he had his SAG card on him. Now, the thing is, if he were a little further from L.A., perhaps the ticket girl, myself, and all the other people he told in the theater about his SAG card and how he had met Johnny Depp and Laurence Fishburne on set and how they were odd, odd fellows—maybe if he were a little further away from L.A., that SAG card and his stories might have been more impressive, but he doesn’t live further from L.A. and, as any good So Cal-er knows, a SAG card is a fairly common article. You basically just have to sneeze in the general direction of a production—and pay your union dues—in order to get one, so, needless to say, no one was impressed. In fact the tension among the twenty or so theater goers was almost palpable as his boisterous posing got even more ridiculous with every single minute of the extra twenty minutes it took the reel-master to get the projector running and the sound right because, as I said, this is a funky little ghetto theater and shit like that happens.

So this dude—this preening, pompous, jackass dude—this friendly dude in front of me in line at the movies got two free tickets with his SAG card, turned around, smiled and handed one to me.

And all the heinous, evil thoughts I had about him after he showed me this kindness are the reason I bought cigarettes today and intend to start smoking them later. Listening to myself internally nicotine-fit-bitch about the shortcomings of this poor, kind, lonely man trying to break the ice with strangers by sharing with them his proudest achievement—makes me like myself less.

I like myself less—smokeless.

-M.