Hush Up

I used to cover the Hanover County Planning Commission for the Mechanicsville Local. The poor Planning Commission had to approve all the proposals from everyone who wanted to build something new, and listen to the complaints from everyone who had already built what they wanted in the county and didn't want anything else added.

The Nimbys -- Not in My Backyards -- were as united as any political party. Their platform was Stay Away From Me. They usually showed up at the public hearings with the Utopians, those who believed in a world according to their own rules and tastes that protected their God-given "quality of life."

The Nimbys and Utopians shared the same basic argument, no matter what the proposal was. Nobody wanted anything in their neighborhood. Everyone had a quality of life they wanted to preserve, an existence that was like living on the moon: no noise, nothing, for miles around them.

At one hearing, a neighborhood was up in arms about a new store in an existing shopping center that wanted to have gas pumps in its parking lot. It would destroy their quality of life, they said. One man told the Planning Commission that he could already "hear" the Home Depot, which was across the road from the proposed gas pumps, both about a mile from his house.

After the hearing, I drove to the Home Depot to hear what it was saying. What message was it sending out, and how did you hear it? I didn't hear anything coming out of the Home Depot, and I was parked across the street. How could he hear something from a mile away, a mile that crossed dozens of other houses with televisions, music, barking dogs and lawn mower noises?

I tried to write sympathetically about these residents whose quality of life was soon to be destroyed by gas pumps, but then I remembered I lived two doors down from a 7-Eleven with six gas pumps. Two doors! Six pumps! I had forgotten about that because I never heard them, and they were open 24 hours a day.

It made me reflect on what was spoiling my quality of life in bucolic Mechanicsville, what noise did I hear if not the gas pumps?

It was the birds, the damn birds in the woods around my house. They woke up before I did and tweeted with much enthusiasm, waking me up. They disrupted my quality of life.

The second thing I heard was cars. I was always amazed at how many people had to be at work at 5 a.m. because when I woke up at 4:30 a.m. (damn birds! Shuttup!), I heard traffic whizzing by at a steady pace. I blamed it on the early shift at the hospital, which was across the street from the nontalking 7-Eleven gas pumps. The hospital shifts were disrupting my quality of life!

The third thing I heard was NASCAR. I lived close enough to Richmond International Raceway to know when there was a race in progress. All day long, it was rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. But if the television was on and the air conditioner was humming -- which made the pots on my stove vibrate -- I didn't hear race cars. I had to stand outside and listen. Rrrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrr. It disrupted the quality of my standing outside and listening life!!

And the last disruption was the train. Decades ago, my suburb was a little town far enough away from Richmond -- if you traveled by Model T or horse -- to have its own train depot. The site of the station was just blocks from my house, and although the train didn't stop there anymore, it still came through the neighborhood several times a day. All the windows in my house rattled when it did, and the engineer blew a horn to let folks know he was coming through, get off the tracks! The train rattled along right beside a newly built, upscale neighborhood of $300,000-plus homes and was much louder than gas pumps, but the train was there first. The people came later with their 4-bedroom McMansions, four to an acre, 2.5 baths, whirlpool tubs, entertainment rooms over the two-car garage, and interest-only mortgages that would soon be underwater when the housing market collapsed.

The Utopians, and even the Nimbys, considered the train, as well as gunshots and buzz saws "country noises," while Home Depot and gas pumps were "city noises." There's a difference, you see.

Ugly Girl Thinking

I decided that the night we'd go to the State Fair would be the same night my husband knew the guys in the band that was playing, as if he needed an extra incentive to go out with his wife. I still think like an ugly girl, like I am not enough and I need to offer something else in order to deserve a man’s time.

After an hour or so on the midway, and after he stopped three times to talk to friends he encountered, he went backstage to wish the band a good show. With any luck, he’ll come back out and we can go home. The sun had set and it was getting cold. But the bandleader told him, “We’ll call you up to do a song.” So now he was out front waiting for the call-up, which came an hour into the show. With any luck, he’ll take his bow, come down and we can go home. But he stayed on stage, playing guitar, for the last hour of the show. So I wandered around behind the stage and across the field, and around the rodeo, and across the field again, alone. Even married, I can’t get a date.

For awhile I sat on a bench, staring at the ferris wheel lights and realized I had set myself up. I did it to myself. I could have just as easily picked a night when he didn’t know the band playing. Then I would have had his full attention, and we would have left when I was ready. But, I think like an ugly girl and give up control, even when I have it.

Then, the lights of the ferris wheel dislodged an unpleasant memory. When I was 15, my mother gave me permission to go to the North Carolina State Fair, which was a two-hour bus ride away in Raleigh. A boy I had been dating irregularly for four months lived there and he was meeting me at the bus station. He was 18. He was not someone I had fallen in love with. He was just a boy. He had asked me out. I went because at 15, any date is good. Why my mother allowed me to go will remain one of my life’s mysteries.

We went to the fair, and we left with an hour free before my bus back home. He invited me to wait it out at his place, a single room he rented at a boarding house. I foolishly went. He wanted to make out. I had made out with a boy or two before and managed to stop things before they got out of control. This time I could not. Let me say this: it is possible for it to happen and you don’t realize it and don’t really feel anything unusual. It is possible for it to happen without you removing your underwear. I wasn’t even sure if something had happened, but I had a bad feeling, and when I got home, it was confirmed. There was the telltale blood stain of a broken hymen.

I was 15. He was 18. This was technically statutory rape, and since I had not agreed to it, it was arguably genuine rape. But teenage girls don’t think that way. I never told anyone. I just stepped sadly into adulthood. I wrote some mournful poetry about not being ready for this in a notebook I have to this day, despite numerous moves and housecleanings. A notebook I have never shown anyone, a notebook I need to destroy before someone settling my estate finds it. (I keep thinking I may turn out to be Emily Dickerson. But, seriously: posthumous fame – what good is that?)

Two serious problems developed. The first was: every date with this boy after that became a struggle. I had done it once, why not again? The toothpaste was out of the tube. And usually I lost. I could only win if the geography of where we were made it impossible, or if my father was following our car on the date, which he sometimes did. I had to listen to all the ridiculous teenage boy lies like being in pain if he didn’t get relief, and using a condom was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. I did not have enough self-respect to say no and risk losing him.

I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Teenage sex is awkward, uncomfortable, and full of guilt, embarrassment and fear of pregnancy and parental wrath. I wasn't even sure I wanted him as a boyfriend anymore. But I thought like an ugly girl, that this might be my only chance to have one. After all, it took me all the way to 15 to land him! The first one to call back for a second date! What if that never happens again? It didn’t occur to me that I might do better than him when I was 18, or 22, or 30, and I should keep my options open.

And the second problem was: despite it being the swinging ‘60s and the summer of love and all that, I had been raised in my mother’s morality and the Baptist Church and truly believed that you get to do it with one guy and that was it...if you were a nice girl, if you wanted to go to Heaven. No matter what. You made your bed, now lie in it. (A decade later when I brought my second husband home to meet my parents, my mother greeted me at the door with, “So now you’re a whore.” True story.)

So there it is. A trip to a state fair put in motion a situation I could not see my way out of. Fortunately or unfortunately, just weeks after the deflowering, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, so the struggle to not have sex before I was ready or wanted to was conducted only twice a year when he was on leave. When he got out of the army, we went to colleges in different states. Our relationship was in its fourth year when we finally lived in the same town, saw each other frequently, and realized we didn’t like each other at all and never had. He was, from beginning to end, a terrible boyfriend in every way.

But by then it was too late. I was pregnant at 19. He went on to live the life he had planned. My plans went completely off the rails. Our pathetic shotgun marriage didn’t even last a year, and even as I was going out the door, having finally caught him with another woman, he convinced me to co-sign a loan for him. Like an ugly girl, I did.

It was not possible to fully enjoy the college experience when I was limited to night classes and had to rush home to the baby. The career I planned required a lot of time to get started, working nights and weekends, being available to cover a story in some distant place at a moment’s notice, moving from town to town to advance your career. It was going to be very difficult to do as a single mother.

And I couldn’t muster the determination. I kept hoping I had enough talent to make it happen in limited circumstances under multiple handicaps. I did not. I watched women with far less talent and desire move ahead just because they could move without strings attached.

And I continued to think like an ugly girl and give up, give in, and sell myself short. I accepted terrible dead end jobs and stayed in them. I married another person I should have left after a few months, and stayed put for years. Thinking like an ugly girl is a hard habit to break. I need to stop going to fairs.

My Cloverleaf Mall and Peaches Story

As soon as we entered Cloverleaf Mall, I’d let my toddler run loose. Sears and Penneys, the anchor big department stores on either end, would eventually pick up my toddler and start broadcasting over the PA that they had a “little girl” who had become separated from his parents, or “Scott has become separated from his parents, please come pick him up.” My son was neither a little girl or named Scott. Because of his curly hair, sometimes they just assumed he was a girl, and if they asked, he would tell them his name was Scott, which he preferred to Jeff. I have no idea why. (When he became an adult, he changed his name legally, but not to Scott.)

In any case, I knew it was him so I would leisurely go collect him. I was never reprimanded or arrested. They cheerfully handed him over. Becoming separated from your parents in the mall was not uncommon then and the announcements over the PA were routine. Things have changed very much.

There was a Ruby Tuesdays and a Piccadilly Cafeteria at the entrance to the mall, and a two-screen movie theater on the right side of the intersection. There was even a dentist. I went there once for a toothache. They charged me to have every tooth in my head x-rayed by this robotic machine that circled my jaw, flashing my head with radiation, then the dentist found a popcorn skin lodged between my teeth.

I spent many hours in Cloverleaf Mall. The Sears there was a home away from home. At one time, they even sold Apple computers. This was between the reigns of Steve Jobs I and Steve Jobs II, when such blasphemy was allowed.

My second husband knew nothing about cars, so the Sears auto shop in front of Sears regularly charged us to replace our struts. We knew nothing about struts or why they needed to be replaced so often, but we always agreed. Now, I always call my third husband, he goes “what the hell? Put them on the phone,” talks to the auto guys, and the next thing I know, they’ve changed their mind about what I need. No more waving muffin tins and pizza pans at me and telling me my animatron defibulator is malfunctioning and my car is unsafe to drive until I get it fixed.

My third husband spent many more hours in Cloverleaf Mall because even though he lived deep in Chesterfield County, down a long and winding country road that was near nothing but Lake Chesdin, he regularly hung out in Cloverleaf Mall. Just to hang. To sit there and walk around. Just to see who else was sitting there or walking around. It was a Fast Times at Ridgemont High sort of thing.

Chesterfield Towne Center was Chesterfield Mall back then, and derisively called Chesterfield Morgue because nothing was going on down there. But between the loitering teens, urban decay creeping up Midlothian (it eventually murdered the Red Lobster and Steak and Ale on the other side of the overpass years after it killed off the original version of Target/Walmart, a store called Carousel across from WWBT that was half department store, half grocery store), Cloverleaf was in the line of rot. I don’t even remember what was across the street now except for the Best Products, Friendly’s and Peaches. Peaches always had that overpowering incense smell. And at one time, you had one of their crates. You know you did. Maybe you still do. I still have a Peaches cassette crate, full of tapes. I need to throw them out.

Here’s my bonus Peaches story. I worked for them one day. I’m not sure if I was never put on the schedule for a second day or I quit, but one day was enough. You couldn’t bring your purse into the store and leave it in the employee lounge. You had to leave it out in your car during your shift. Any personal items you absolutely had to have with you, you were required to bring them into the store in a see-through plastic bag. At the end of the shift, we all gathered at the door where the shift manager inspected our plastic bags for contraband, activated the security alarm, and we all scurried out at the same time. No one could leave earlier than anyone else.

But even that wasn’t so much the problem as my eyesight. My job was to stay out on the floor and keep checking that the records and CDs and cassettes were all in the right places. I needed my reading glasses to do that. But if a customer asked me where something was, and I looked across the store to find the sign, I couldn’t see it. I needed my distance glasses for that. And I immediately figured out that the behind the counter, check-out jobs went to the favored few who had been there for ages, so moving up at Peaches was going to take much longer than I had time for. My shift manager was very nice, actually cute in a way, and gave me a four-track Ricky Nelson CD (he had an office full of samples) at the end of my shift as a present. I still have it. It has “Hello Mary Lou” and “Travelin’ Man” on it. But I was done with Peaches. I never got paid for that day. Peaches, you owe me money.

My Porn Store Story

The porn store on The Boulevard sits on a median strip, so it looks like it is practically in the middle of the road. My run-in with the store was literally a run-in.

Sometime between 1994 and 1995, I was driving my 1983 Toyota Corolla south on The Boulevard, having just gotten off the I-95 exit. I had 2,000 copies of my newspaper, the Richmond Music Journal, in my trunk, fresh from the printing plant in Ashland, and was starting my delivery route. In my personal life, things were not going well. I was unemployed, on food stamps, and living on credit card advances. I was in the middle of a divorce. No doubt I was preoccupied.

In any case, I was at the stoplight directly across from that porn store when I saw a light several blocks ahead change to green and in response, I pressed down on the gas pedal even though my own light was still red. An old white work van T-boned me. My car went into a spin into the parking lot of the porn store where I slid into the three cars parked there. My car was totaled and I had inflicted damage on four others. I was unhurt. Luck.

Stunned, I knew I had to call the police and get the paperwork done for all these other drivers to sue me. This was a time before affordable and commonplace cell phones, so I went into the porn store to use their phone. Rubber dicks were hanging on all the walls. I explained to the attendant what had happened and could I use the phone, but before I was finished, three men ran out of the store, into the parking lot, and drove away in their damaged cars. Luck.

They did not want to be part of a police accident report that placed them in the parking lot of the porn store in the middle of the day. They’d rather repair their cars on their dime. So that was three of four problems solved. The police came and took the reports. The tow truck towed away my car and the van that hit me. Then I realized I was in a real pickle. My newspapers were in the trunk of the car, newspapers I needed to deliver that day so I could collect the advertising revenue. And I didn’t have the newspapers or a car.

I went back into the porn store and looked up the nearest car rental business and called. Now I needed a ride. A customer in the store volunteered to take me. It is a miracle I am still alive. Yes, I got into the car of a strange man I met in a porn store. Luck.

His car was even older than my ’83 Toyota and was a sea of garbage. It was obvious he never had passengers because he had to do a lot of cleaning just to clear the seat. My legs were still almost knee deep in debris. Off we went down Broad Street to the car rental place. My side of the conversation was moaning about my bad luck and bad driving.

I don’t think he had much experience with real women outside photos in a porn store because he seemed excited and eager to be of service, but still tongue-tied. Finally he rustled through the debris on his dashboard -- coins, food wrappers, tickets, paper – and came up with a sad and sticky looking piece of gum. He presented it to me. “Would you like a refreshing piece of gum?”

No one has ever offered me a “refreshing” piece of gum before. I never forgot it. It was like the most awkward courtship ever, but I did want to arrive at the car rental place so I accepted it, and despite all its dubious history, took off the wrapper and put the gum in my mouth. I dropped the wrapper on the car floor where it was sucked in the muck.

He did deliver me to my destination. I thanked him. He did not ask for my name or phone number or to see me again. That was Courtship 102 and he had barely passed 101 that day. I would have said no, anyway, but politely. Luck.

The end of the story is I rented a car with my credit card, drove to the junkyard, transferred my newspapers from one car to the other, hugged my Toyota good-bye with much weeping, apologized for killing it, delivered my newspapers, and then drove the rental around to dubious car lots on Midlothian Turnpike until I found a 1989 Mercury Tracer for $3,500, which I bought with a credit card cash advance check. Then I filed for bankruptcy, so it was a free car. Remember, I had no job. Luck.

I drove it for 10 years. It had a bend in the top of the antennae, which eight years later, made it recognizable to its original owner who left me a note on my windshield. He had driven that car back and forth from Roanoke when he was going through a divorce and put so many miles on it, he sold it after four years. I probably put another $6,000 into it to keep it running until I finally found a stable job in 2002 and could buy another car.

Also, after the accident, despite only one of the four drivers filing a claim against me, Allstate canceled my insurance. Not only had I had an accident, I was driving while divorced. Divorced women are an increased liability. We are preoccupied and usually drunk. We are suicidal and distracted. All the other auto insurers gave me outrageously high quotes. Remember, I did not have a job. I was trying to figure out what to do when my Allstate renewal bill came in the mail. I called my agent. I thought I was canceled?

“Pay it quick,” he said. “It’s a mistake, but if you pay it and they accept it, then they have to cover you for another year.” I dropped another credit card check in the mail ahead of the bankruptcy. They cashed it. I was never canceled again. Luck.

Every time I stop at that light across from the porn store, I get a grip on myself. Watch the light in front of you, not down the street. Pay attention. And so far I have safely gotten by it every time. Luck.

A Better Job Interview

Job interviews are difficult. Three people with a list of 20 basically irrelevant questions take turns asking them. They methodically write down your answers.

They already know you are qualified to do the job. They decided this from your resume. That’s why you got the interview. This is the swimsuit part of the job pageant. They want to look at you. They want to decide how you’re going to fit into their office based on your appearance, voice, behavior.

The questions reward people who are good at lying on their feet quickly and convincingly. Every answer may be utter baloney, and the interviewers don’t know that.

This gets you a new employee who will be able to call in sick, even when they’re not, and make you believe it. Or provide a creditable explanation why a project isn’t progressing, even when it’s not remotely true.

Then they usually end the interview by asking if there’s anything you’d like to know about the job? I know asking about benefits or hours shows you’re only interested in helping yourself, and not the company, so that’s the wrong thing to say. I don’t know what the right thing to ask them is.

I do know you can’t ask any of the things you really want to know, like how crazy are my co-workers and bosses? Most of the jobs I’ve had, I wouldn’t have applied for them if I didn’t think it was something I’d enjoy or could do. But when I’ve quit, it’s always been because the people were insane.

How many women in your office are childless and what positions of power are they in? If you have kids, a childless woman is not going to comprehend how you have to juggle your priorities. And if you are not raising kids and you are surrounded by women who spend 80 percent of their work time raising their kids by telephone, it is going to drive you crazy.

Who smokes and are they management or peons? If management smokes, the peons who also smoke are going to be sharing quality, relaxation time with the bosses out on the sidewalk half a dozen times a day. They will bond on a level the non-smokers cannot hope to obtain. This is such a truth, it’s been an episode of “Friends.” And if your boss doesn’t smoke, he or she, and your nonsmoking co-workers are going to perceive the smoke breaks you need as wasted time.

How many people in the office wear excessive amounts of cologne, and how close will they sit to you? One cubicle dweller I worked with even took issue with the smell of gum or mints. I have despised jobs where co-workers frequently went out for Chinese, but didn’t stay out with it. They brought it back to their desks where the stench hung in the air for the rest of the afternoon. Microwave popcorn poppers can make a whole floor smell like a movie theater.

Who is a cleaning fanatic, and how much power do they have? The cleaning fanatics tend to be the same group that likes to celebrate birthdays, promotions, and departures with baked goods. Any excuse for yet another office cake is seized, but then they chase you down the hall with a vacuum cleaner because you dropped a crumb.

Are you being hired to do the job as outlined, or are there Secret Hidden Responsibilities, like watering the plants? I once had a boss who hired me for my computer skills but yelled at me every day because the office plants weren’t thriving.

How crazy are the coffee people? The Office Coffee Militia have notes pinned around the coffee area with warnings to pay for every cup, clean up after yourself, don’t leave cups in the sink, turn the pot off when the coffee is low, whoever takes the last cup has to make the next pot, and so on. Half their day at work is spent making coffee, complaining about the coffee area, policing other people’s coffee habits, or obsessing about the coffee situation.

Are the bosses big picture people or little pickers? In the big picture view, the job is getting done. It’s getting done well. It’s getting done on schedule. But that’s not enough for little pickers. They may want you to come in exactly on time. Not five minutes late, but exactly, and this may become an obsession. They may put a stopwatch on lunch or breaks.

Or they may require dozens of little progress reports, explanations of how your time was spent, budgets of how you expect to spend your time next week, time off requests in triplicate and signed by three levels of managers. The evidence that the work is actually getting done is not good enough. Staff meetings are spent discussing disappearing pencils or toilet paper supply. It’s like the Caine Mutiny Court Martial where the captain becomes obsessed with whether or not someone is stealing the strawberries from the food locker, right in the middle of World War II.

These are some of the questions I’d like to ask at job interviews. I want to know the personal quirks and habits of everyone who is going to sit near me, or make decisions about how I get the job done. I’m spending 40 to 50 hours a week with these people. I’ll see them more than my family. But if you actually asked questions like that, they’d think you were insane. You’d never get hired. And yet, it’s the basis of  whether or not you’re going to be successful and effective in that position.

Speak English

Does it bug you that every time you want to get $20, you have to tell the ATM machine you don’t speak Spanish? Or every time you call your bank or credit card for a statement, you have to select “1” for English or “2” for Spanish? Or that all the signs in Home Depot and Lowe’s are now in English and Spanish?

I thought the United States was a cultural melting pot. You get in the pot and melt into a fairly homogenized stew, and somewhere along the line it was decided the stew would speak English. But now you don’t have to.

One way to jumpstart everyone into learning English as quickly as possible is not to have all this coddling with options! At least, that’s what my grandmother would say. Nothing infuriated her more than the proliferation of Spanish. She was living in Kissimmee, Florida, and Southern Florida might as well be a part of South America, so much Spanish is heard. I’ve been to supermarkets there where every magazine at the check-out was in Spanish, driven through shopping districts where all the signs were in Spanish. You could get along very well without ever learning English.

Things weren’t so accommodating when my grandmother came to this country from Italy in 1916 at age 12. Because she didn’t speak English, she was put in a first grade class, despite being a preteen, and expected to figure things out from there.

 “Padrones”—self-appointed negotiators and problem-solvers for Italian immigrants—would visit the neighborhoods and conduct their English business for them for a fee. My grandmother’s family hired one to register the births, and he’d take his commission and make a stop at the corner bar first. By the time he got to city hall, he had forgotten the name of the baby he was supposed to register, so he’d make up a name, much to the surprise of my relatives when they had to get their birth certificates years later for military service or marriage.

My grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage at 14, got divorced when she was 22 and had four children. She supported herself for the rest of her life as a hairdresser. That required she learn English to talk to her customers, and by necessity, she did.

My grandfather did not. He came to America as a teenager and died in his eighties, and all that time he lived in Flushing, New York, he learned very little English. How could that be? How could you live in New York for 70 years, listening to the radio, watching television, and not learn English?

How? Because he lived in an Italian neighborhood, all the tenants in his apartment building were Italian, his first and second wives were Italian, every one he worked with at the wire factory was Italian. All his friends were Italian. He completely insulated himself from life in an English-speaking country. He never learned to read or write Italian or English.

I can’t tell you a thing about him, even though I lived with him for a year when my son was a baby and had breakfast, lunch and dinner with him every day. Our conversation in all that time consisted of a daily commentary on my non-supporting husband back in Virginia—“eessa bum,” and a daily weather report, “eessa louse day.”

My grandmother remarried him platonically 45 years after she divorced him just to torture him to death, and yelled at him in Italian all day. Sometimes he would mumble something back.

 “What he’d say, Nana?”

 “He says he’s going to chop up my car with an ax.”

It would have been nice to find out why—or maybe when—but he wasn’t talking, not in English anyway.

One day I visited Ellis Island—by way of the internet—to find out something about him. I had to guess at what his name was since I knew him only as Sam. I tried Saverio Matera, and there he was. He left St. Marco via the port of Naples on a ship named the Ancona and arrived at Ellis Island, April 6, 1914. He was 16 years old.

Eighty-six years of family history, 70 of it spent in America, and he couldn’t tell me anything and I can’t tell anyone anything about him now. Somewhere along the line he should have learned some more English. The ATM machines in Flushing now probably ask if you want your transaction in English, Spanish or Italian? Maybe even Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Klingon. I noticed the other day my ATM was now offering Russian. There is no large Russian community where I live. Why is this? Where does this end?

No need to melt in the melting pot now. We’ll keep you handicapped in America by accommodating your language requirements for some things, thus limiting your opportunities and keeping you segregated from the rest of us and even your own American-born family members.

Art - Real or Imagined?

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir of her time with Robert Maplethorpe, from their amazing meeting – really, in a city as big as New York, how do you accidentally run into the same person three times in a short period in completely different places? – to right before they both became famous and went their separate ways. Just Kids was an astounding book. Some people just know exactly when and where to stand for lightning to strike.

Through the book, I again encountered the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Smith's hero, and someone who had also hovered over the life of Jim Morrison, another person I once studied for his uncanny ability to attract fame and fortune through poetry while in the middle of self-destructing.

I was a student of Morrison in the pre-Internet era, so this time when Rimbaud reappeared as the mystic inspiration and king of all poets, I researched him, only to find a callow, decadent youth who wrote the bulk of his poetry in his late teens and was burnt out by 21, dragging out his last years in the usual mayhem, decadence, poverty, and illness.

What do teenagers know? Smith and Maplethorpe were barely out of their teens when they spent hours together drawing sketches, making necklaces out of tackle shop beads and feathers, and taking Polaroids. And all this activity is somehow high art, important art, creating a world that is on a higher artistic plain.

When does the humble Polaroid become art? The difference between their photographs and the thousands on Facebook seems to be lighting and background. Plain, uncluttered, stark backgrounds, good natural lighting, an unsmiling person with a prop or two, that’s art. (It also helps to not have a television to drug you, so you actually do spend every evening cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages.)

So I examine my soul because I am unable to appreciate Rimbaud’s poetry. It seems so Anyone Can Do This. So much poetry is the recitation of things happening in nature that you then internalize to an emotion. My despair floats along the breeze like the withered maple leaves of fall. You are hopelessly in love. You are filled with desire to live life only on your terms, even if it means starving and dragging down everyone with you. You let go. You seize the day. You see the light. You plunge into darkness. You quoth the raven, nevermore. You contemplate a fork in the road and take the one less traveled by. Housework drives you crazy, white Godiva, I unpeel dead hands, dead stringencies, and then stick my head in an oven.

Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted, he wrote on her headstone.

Really, poet laureate of Britain, that’s all you’ve got? What does it mean? Anything you want, I guess. It’s the fun of poetry, to decipher it through a lens of your own experience and take it anywhere you want it to go.

Like Jackson Pollack’s art, it seems to be an acquired taste. Why are the same ramblings, or the same splatterings, art in some people’s hands and not in others? It must have something to do with believing you are an artist. If you believe hard enough, hard enough to starve and disrupt and annoy, you’ll convince enough people that you are an artist. My Polaroid picture is art. Yours is a Polaroid picture.

Maybe I have just never believed deeply enough in my own Polaroid pictures. How often are artists discovered that have no idea they are creating art, other than Smithfield the pig? Smithfield the pig meet Jackson Pollack. No, you discover yourself and just convince everyone else.

So, in the spirit of believing, I went back in time to discover myself and pulled out a book of my poetry, written between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was in my tender Arthur Rimbaud years, so ignorant of life that I was still comparing my new emotions to nature, the starry nights, the gentle breezes, the babbling brooks, the silence of a forest, butterflies in a meadow. How amazing to be 15, to have only been on this planet such a short time, in a body still growing, being controlled by a brain with so little information. Everything really was new. If a born blind person suddenly sees, how do they put anything in context?

I try to see art in it, but there’s been too many years, too many experiences, too much pain since then to appreciate how first love felt, why some callow young boy would be so damn important or inspiring, or why losing my virginity left me so thunderstruck and conflicted, when girls today toss it out the window like fast-food wrappers. All I can think now is I must have been crazy insane to feel this way about things that ultimately became irrelevant. Well, if I had drank or drugged myself to death a short time later, or stuck my head in an oven, and left behind these crazy poems, I guess they would be pretty damn relevant.

Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, the musical poets of my youth -- if they had lived, would they still find truth or beauty in their songs? Or would they be as embarrassing to them as my poems are to me?

In a book of astounding sentences in Just Kids, one of the more astounding ones to me was when Patti leaves her bookstore job to apartment-sit for a musician/lover who is touring with Blue Oyster Cult. When she gets to that part of her story, she remembers that it was the last time she ever had to “work” for a living at a day job for the rest of her life. She was barely 21, if that. It was all music, poetry, art, and writing from then on, because she believed she was doing great work at all of that, and so did others. She never punched a time clock again. Not that life was easy all the time after that, but it was art. And for her, it still is.