How It Began Before It Ended: An Excerpt from WITHOUT SAINTS by Christopher Locke

It was two a.m. The Jetta was parked at the curb and I sat in passenger seat, top down. I felt vulnerable in the dark, uneasy with the city’s brick tenements and low sound. Directly overhead, a streetlight flickered like a dying brain. It was humid and I was dressed in shorts, a black t-shirt. I thought about my wife and daughter asleep back home and shifted my weight; my thighs stuck to the leather seats. 

I replayed the evening in my head: After dinner, I finished grading my students’ papers on Thoreau’s theory of needs vs. wants and reread five pages of Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude for another class. I changed Grace’s diaper and handed her off to Lisa, kissing them both and saying I’d be back by 11:00 at the latest. I went to my car, did four bumps of coke off the house key, and squeezed my eyes shut until the stinging passed.

When I arrived at a party in town, I had some whiskey, a little more coke, and then another whiskey. A white kid with dreadlocks got angry because all the tiki torches outside made the lawn resemble a landing strip, burning a symmetrical pattern that made him furious somehow. He pulled them out of the ground, one at a time, and threw them sputtering into the pool. A glass table followed.

That’s when Billy showed up. And what we wanted was only twelve minutes away. We would look for Psychs again. My heart raced. On the way, we drank beer from red plastic cups and talked about our students; we worked at the same school. The latest batch of kids seemed more docile, Billy said. I mentioned how much I liked the new boy from Jersey and all his mad energy, the love for Emerson he professed in my English class. A quarter of the students we worked with were at the school for drug abuse, the others had social/emotional issues, learning disabilities, or a combination of all three. We were viewed as one of the best therapeutic boarding schools in the country. We counseled kids in three-days-per-week groups. Just the day before, I sat across from a girl and spoke in a soft tone as she held her head in her hands and sobbed. Her long red hair fell around her wrists like spun fire. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she choked. I know, I said. I know.

At graduations, I was always a favorite to speak on behalf of a graduating student. For example, I discussed how hard it’d been for ___________, that he’d overcome massive trauma. Back home, he saw someone get tied to a tree and then set on fire for not paying a drug dealer. The sound of that boy screaming woke him up every night. This young man learned, I said, to love his family, and himself, again. At the end of the speech, as with all my speeches, I cried. The student cried. His family and the other well-dressed families cried. “You can do this,” I said. We embraced and then, bravely, he went back into the world.

We found Psychs where we did last time, hanging out in front of the small, withered park downtown. He wore a red Chicago Bulls jersey, cargo shorts and was sitting indifferently atop a cement ledge. I don’t think he remembered us. As we drove him to the place, Billy asked if I could front the money for the heroin. I said I didn’t have the money, thought he had it.     

“What,” Psychs said from the back. “You ain’t got the fuckin’ money?”

“No, no, we’ll get it,” I promised. “Where’s that ATM machine around here?”

The last time we did this, which was also the first night we ever met Psychs, we managed to do the exact same thing: try and score heroin without remembering the money. “It’d be a bad night to get knifed,” Psychs said then, and I pictured a cartoon Arabian sword being pushed through the seats and into our backs, Psychs rolling our stupid corpses out onto the curb. “Stay in the suburbs,” he’d say as he drove off in the Jetta.

This time, after collecting one hundred dollars from the ATM, we pulled up in front of the apartment and Billy turned to Psychs. “Don’t give us any of that white boy shit,” he said. “We want the normal dime bags, ten of them.”

 “Hey, don’t fucking talk to me,” Psychs said. “Just give me the money.” He took the five twenties, quickly exited the Jetta and crossed the dark street, disappearing like a spider down a flower’s throat. I was starting to feel hung over and the coke had worn off.

Silently, Billy and I waited ten minutes.

“That motherfucker better not screw us,” Billy said. A car moved softly down a cross street, left no evidence that it had ever been there.

“Fuck it. I’m going in.”

“In? In where,” I asked.

“Don’t worry, I’m just gonna see if he’s in the stairwell or something.”

Billy left and I sat in his Jetta alone.

I kept waiting for the police to roll up behind me with their spotlight blinding the mirror, their careful approach to my door as they asked to see my hands.

I could feel sweat prickling the back of my neck.

Someone came out of the building and walked with great purpose towards me.

Billy opened the door and hopped in. “Hold these,” he ordered. I looked at my hands and counted ten small plastic bags. He started the car and we drove off.

“I already had a taste,” he said, sliding the Jetta smoothly into third gear. “It’s fucking amazing.”

And I believed him because what other choice did I have?

Consolationeer by Marc McKee

I read, reread and considered Marc McKee’s Consolationeer (Black Lawrence Press, December 15, 2017) on the bus, in the twenty-minute intervals allotted to me between home and work. This was, of course, a matter of practicality. Nobody really chooses to read poetry on a lurching, sputtering metal behemoth in the meager light of sunrise and sunset. There’s chatter from all directions, shoulders brushing against yours. The text scuttles around the page like a line of ants. In my native Chicago, some rides are gaspingly hot and others are glacial. There are often fellow passengers engaged in antagonistic conversations with one another or, more frequently, with themselves, and it’s hard not to dwell on the possibility, however remote, of danger. The windows are flipbooks of poverty and opulence, billboards and graffiti, homelessness and high-rises. Some mornings one misses one’s coffee. Some evenings find the brain bobbing in the marsh of a stressful day’s work. The bus is a maximally chaotic environment for the senses and typically not at all conducive to engaging with a text.

Reading Consolationeer in this setting, however, was a serendipitous exception. If you live in a major US city with an unreliable and unpleasant public transit system, I can’t recommend the pairing enough. McKee’s language is all rattle and excess, loose spokes and depressurizing fuselages. It is the literary approximation of whizzing past shop-fronts and construction sites and dog parks. In “O Passenger Manifest,” one of the later poems in the book, he writes:

…The bus is a colored cloud of ill portent
hanging by an axle disagreeing with a girder,
a baby tooth before before before.

After reading that passage, I looked around me and nodded with a little frown of recognition. Yes, I had indeed found myself anxious on an uncontrollable machine, lunging into who knows what horrifying consequence. Yes, I was balancing on a damp ledge. And McKee had managed to bore a peephole into that sensation.

The poems in Consolationeer are very much of a piece, and they thrive on the suspense of “ill portent.” This is a book about the apocalypse – how we define it, how we describe it, how we contend with it emotionally and philosophically. McKee is hoisting an impossible task upon his shoulders, of course. He’s attempting to make sense of comprehensive finality, to stand in the shadow of a tidal wave and point out the bright side. Even the title of the collection seems to balk at the enormity of its author’s ambition. We are prompted to consider the act of consoling the doomed alongside acts of exploring, piloting, inventing, crafting. We are not used to navigating this emotional territory; intrepid bushwhackers are in high demand.

Certainly, these poems have been sculpted more by machete than by scalpel, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. In fact, there’s a refreshing urgency to McKee’s shotgun style. I hear Eliot’s ecstatic distractibility, Schuyler’s sonic gymnastics and O’Hara’s restless melancholy, all filtered through the dirty chinois of cable news and global warming. A recurring motif is a match near ice, two mutually destructive forces accelerating one another’s demise. McKee writes like a mad chemist scrambling to whip up an antidote – for every soluble line there is a combustible one. And sometimes, he tinkers his way towards something truly revelatory, something that encapsulates all the terror and anger and hope and solidarity swirling around this most frantic of eras.

I can’t stop thinking, for example, of the opening lines to “How We Respond Is What It Means:”

At this time it is impossible not to love
at least one monster.

This is the type of observation we’re all sure we’ve made but somehow haven’t been able to articulate. It’s grammatically and conceptually “simple,” but it contains the depth and mutability of all the best poetry. Listen to clinical register in those first six words. They call to mind canned rejection letters, fatalistic meteorological reports, ultimatums from hostage-takers, insurance companies denying a claim. They ooze mutual disappointment. The phrase, “at this time” also serves to highlight the now-ness upon which these poems hinge. There’s desperation in the double-negative that follows, voice and sorrow in the words, “at least one.” A beautiful tragedy is compacted in these lines. And moments of such luminance pop up like prairie dogs throughout the book.

Sometimes, as in “It Has Never Not Been Thus,” McKee’s apocalyptic landscapes resemble Charles Simic’s, but with the heart shifted confidently to the sleeve. The poem is dire at first:

…It is night. A lemon scythe rises,
then overwhelms its fulcrum,
the plants camouflage themselves
in decline…

But it shifts dramatically at the end:

It’s a beautiful night
among the surviving leaves,
I am happy to be here.

Elsewhere McKee calls to mind Jay Hopler, as in “We Are All Going to Die, and I Love You,” which cheekily begins,

The world is ending again
only this time we are sure.

The poem mounts in anxiety and madness and lyricism, climaxing with,

…But but but! such fantastic plumage of viscera! such spirits
hot-glued to properties! such a muchness,
of dismantled wheels! Really?…

Those tonal changes offer a little glimpse of McKee’s signature move: the insertion of hazily optimistic, affirmative mantras in the midst of catastrophe. I think it’s fair to call them “consolations.” At times, I have to confess, this approach becomes a little predictable. One gets the sense that the poet is resting on his laurels a bit, dropping consolations like puffs of smoke in order to escape from despairing litanies. But when it works – as it does with impressive frequency – it works. The best McKee consolations come on like smelling salts, slaps to the face, adrenaline injections. They’re best when they’re heavy with irony and complexity, when they’re woven naturally into the text that precedes them. Take, for example, the following passage from the Schuyler-esque “Lately Indesolate:”

The yellow car de-hurries so rapid
it appears to ripple and bunch

in the rearview mirror: such a silly yellow
to be screaming that way,

followed after by wheelsmoke
like a languorous countercloud, train

of a wedding gown. Nothing happens.
Which is to say an awful lot very nearly

happens…

Here, the shift from disaster to serenity helps to philosophically frame both sensations. The reader questions his or her instincts – what does danger feel like? What does safety feel like?

I’m also drawn to these two contrasting passages from “Soft Watch:”

Any inventory is a story invented into life,
a swarm of pictures made to march,

this how we row our battered boat
into one now’s future…

…Here we stand among the bramble
of fallen calls and broken shields

and your eyes will not stop opening…

I caught myself reading this poem aloud at full volume and looked up to find a half dozen fellow commuters glancing nervously at one another. I may have been the crazy stranger on the bus before, but I hadn’t noticed until then. In any case, there’s an exquisite development in this poem from collapse to reconstruction, and it contains insight into McKee’s coping strategy. Listing these inventories, these invented stories, is a way to journalistically explore the decline of our civilization. Cataloguing the piles of detritus around us can serve as both diagnostic survey and meditation.

I would say that effect is most vivid in “Some Names of Ships,” my favorite piece in the collection. In it, the speaker walks down a bay and regards the names of docked vessels with alternating bemusement, melancholy and fear. The little lyrical treasures within are too multitudinous to list here, but I’ll point to an excerpt from the center, which I think is both apocalypse and consolation.

What can track a freckle of light right out
of netsnarl and gravity until you forget

you’re at the mercy of the sea?
Here’s Passengers, here’s One Train.
The name should be able to stay almost still

beneath the teeth of the broken champagne bottle.
Are we not always on some dock
choosing between Paradise and History?

And then some boats never launch
at all…

I used to fear the bus, long before I had no other choice. I didn’t like the confinement, the absence of an escape route should something go terribly wrong. I didn’t like how directed it was, how inevitable the stops. I was afraid of relinquishing control. Now, thousands of bus rides later, I can appreciate that all those worries were entirely called-for, but perhaps lacking in perspective. Because while a bus ride is quite like crowding a barrel full of strangers and hurtling it over a waterfall, it’s also a communal experience. An adventure, even. The person sitting next to you is infinite in his or her potentiality. All passengers are stripped of their egos and statuses for a moment. They’re all given to the contingencies of the vehicle. And in that strange, captive solidarity, there’s something exquisite. I think that’s what Consolationeer is about.

Ten Things Ugly Men Say

Maybe we can learn to appreciate “the ugly”? If not appreciate, perhaps respect?  There’s a certain respect, at least, that I have for an ugly thing: that ugly blobfish, Jocelyn Wildenstein (a Swedish woman apparently famous for being ugly), and even Scott Rickard’s TED talk — the talk where he attempted to create “The World’s Ugliest Music.”  And Adam Prince’s collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, like the aforementioned uglies, these stories captivate you with their ugly — that straight, honest, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it-type ugly.

So, in this little top-ten list, I’ll be a little lazy and a little more honest than usual. For the most part, I’ll let Prince’s finely-tuned characters do the talking.

It seems natural that I start with the pick-up lines:

1.  “I’m a man . . . but if I had to, y’know, switch, then I’d want to look just like you” (98).

2.  “If you want me to—I will unloose the primal me” (155).

3.  “There’s something else in my pants too.  You should see, um, what it is” (74).

4.  “Cashiers do it fast and friendly.  Carpenters do it with wood.  Fishermen do it with their flies down. Basketball, baseball, football players or whatever do it with balls . . .” (143).

Here, listen to my buddy Jocko brag a little?:

5.  Jocko says: “I got an offer from this producer buddy of mine, Bill Boyd, to manage the Steppenwolfe reunion tour.  You remember Steppenwolfe? ‘Born to Be Wild’? Hell yeah, I was.  Sober three years and it bore the shit out of me” (16).

6. Then, Jocko says:  “Wait till Crystal gets here. You’ll love her. Smoking body and she’s got this clit ring . . . I haven’t fucked her yet, y’know, because when I’m in a relationship I’m in it, but now, you know, now . . .” (16).

7. Jocko slaps the table, waves around his beer, and says: “did I tell you I’ve got this whole other name? Yeah, I’m really someone else, man.  Kyle Windward.  My real mom’s part Chippewa Indian.  I found out all about her.  I could stalk her or whatever.”

Here, let’s move to some other acquaintances of mine: 

8. Says Keener:  “I’m . . . on a journey. . . . To find my lost artistic. Vision. I. Took a bus” (140).

9. Says Rod:  “I love my wife! I love my jealous, fundamentalist, social-retard wife!” (106).

10. Says Edwin Edward Holt:  “The whole difficulty . . . arose because she refused me fornication excepting when Jay Leno was on.  Neighbor, I attempted compromise. I taped the program.  But I could just lay there with my hard-on sticking into the air as far as what concerned her” (133).

Hey, listen, I’m doing my best here.  See, here’s a bonus:

BONUS

On a particularly hard day, when I was actually considering Rogaine for my male-pattern baldness, I sat down to write a very detailed email to Adam Prince.  I told him that his collection The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is imbued with that classic ugly, the type of ugly captured by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Because it is, damn it.  It is.

Then, I pitched him the idea of the Top Ten List, hoping he’d have a quote to share.  And then, he wrote me a nice follow-up email with this to say:

“I don’t know if I have a favorite line of dialogue, exactly. The thing about dialogue is that it’s so contextual, depends so much on the back and forth exchange. So there are some lines I really like in context that out of context would seem sort of flat or empty. But here’s one from “Action Figure” that I like:

“God,” says Kid, “it’s bright in here. Isn’t it bright in here? Probably so the security cameras work better. But you feel like you’re on an operating table. My dad’s a surgeon. He does face transplants. Isn’t that weird? Face transplants? It means you’re one person but you’re actually someone else. My dad has tons of money, but he doesn’t give any to me. No Barbie cars or other cars, either. Hey, let’s go get a Christmas Eve drink.” Kid flashes his money clip to prove how many Christmas Eve drinks he could buy if he wanted to. (54)

I just like the way his mind works here. The shifts that happen from sentence to sentence. They’d seem like leaps to someone more sane, but once you know Kid and how he works, then they all make a kind of sense. And that’s so fun. To create and convey what sense means to someone entirely different from one’s self.”