essay

Unpossessed Places

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BY CHRISTOPHER IMPIGLIA

—

The pandemic forced us all to pause, often in solitude. An unfamiliar, uncomfortable place, even for the writer, social engagement now expected, indeed required, and distractions commonplace, writing a navigation between these, between cameos and posts and clicks of elsewhere, nowhere. Between subsisting and pursuing—or being pressured to pursue—more lucrative things, and the guilt we’re made to feel for engaging in what doesn’t readily generate—at least not initially—the only thing we’re told is of value: money.

Netflix, like most media, did its best to invigorate the stillness, force-feeding content, the play button obsolete, the right to choose under scrutiny, algorithms stifling agency, self-doubt fueling algorithms; we trust in them, a safer bet than ourselves. Suggested viewing: not a suggestion, but a necessity, an inevitability.

Season after season after original movie blare on. Every Avenger and their personal trainer will soon have their own must watch show. Streaming platforms have grown into all-powerful megaliths, cementing themselves in the stillness, feeding off our fragility. New ones have absorbed whatever was left lingering in their accessibility, fresh subscriptions and devices required. Add-ons have added to the equation, the extra dollar per-month necessary to elevate us beyond the base subscription and its subscribers. Or simply to rejoin the masses, to not be left behind. Even as in parts of the country, including my own, vaccination has led to re-openings, and maskless faces, scowls—we’ve forgotten how to smile—have returned a sense of normalcy, with variants raging in the background and fresh closures perhaps looming—we turn up the volume, scroll through our phones, try not to think about it—we find ourselves unsure. We hesitate with our greetings—a hug? Cheek kiss? Elbow? Our fragility persists. We crave the ease of our couches. Of content. Our addiction pulsates.

Like many, I retreat. And yet, it’s the stillness I seek. The now familiar discomfort I believe all of us should embrace lest we lose ourselves completely, drown in overstimulation, the ignorance it breeds; the one positive I can draw from the pandemic, its solitude, is that, to some extent, I was able to reclaim myself, forced to. Consuming has its limits. It offers temporary respite. Herein lies the illusion that allows capitalism to endure. I was able to reclaim my world shrunk to a more manageable size: a living room, bedroom, kitchen. A running track. To do what we’ve kept—increasingly—from doing: step back, sit down, and think. Think in the purest sense: about life and by extension death, which has come to sound, unfortunately, like something reserved only for the bygone romantic or emo.

No longer cast into the surging current of a dreaded, endless commute, rapt by overlong meetings and task after endless task, the need or impulse to be productive or social or sociable every second dulled, the gaps in-between widening, no longer filled as they once were, in a paradoxical attempt to rest the mind in its rapture, my innermost self resurfaced. I allowed it to, switching off screen after screen or simply growing bored of them. Books becoming better, more real, company. Welcoming stillness’ strands: boredom, absence, silence. It came in waves, the self, an oft tortuous crashing, ebbing, and flowing.

I was forced to confront it all: the smothered, bottled up, half-forgotten, and ignored, and I have strived, as a writer probably should, to document, summarily, in our age of distraction, what I have gleaned in those difficult moments. What I can only hope will help the reader and fellow thinker find their own stillness. Their own selves. Persist in this necessary state even when eruptions of thought cloud and spill. Singe, engulf, overwhelm.

Life, Calvino notes, is a contemplation of memory. Memory: an unreliable, ever-changing thing that reinvents itself in order to fit your current state physically and emotionally. Where you are in your travels. In your life’s journey.

So that painful longing you feel for someone who inflicted so much pain, who you were certain you were meant to lose; those fragments of your past that haunt you in lulls, tempting you to flood yourself with image, sound, and drink, with oblivion, to dive into motion, shake yourself free, taught, explicitly and subliminally, that a moment of contemplation is a moment lost, to consume, consume; in your dreams and nightmares, buried in your subconscious, in your primal inability to let go, to forget, once an advantage in a primal world, now a hindrance; those words you still hear spoken long ago in voices once music to your ears, now shrieks, growls, wails, poison; words and voices that suffocate, strangle, make your best attempts at soaring a slog through the mud, to which you never replied, but perhaps should have, or did, weakly, wrongly, a better response only later on your tongue, when it was too late: trust none of it. It’s all but what you—we—have been designed to fear: innumerable negatives, some of which we can name: uncertainty, disappointment. Unfulfilled goals, guilt, shame, doubt, regret … harnessing memory, corrupting it, undoing the reality it never intended to record.

This: a realization that might sooth your torment. Allow you to reinvent memory again, sculpt it into idols worth worshipping, into inspiring recollection—feed off it. Let it inform your art, made no longer for catharsis, wet with tears, aflame with anger, but with pleasure. For pleasure. For understanding, exploration, and beauty. All art should aspire to beauty: what all can behold. Into nostalgia—you gaze off, out, back.

A smile comes to your lips. You reach out to an old friend—a real friend, which means a shared past, a perhaps difficult conversation, a confrontation you avoided—nervous, throat dry.     

“Of course I remember you,” they say.

They remind you of who you were. Who you are: flawed, like anyone else. Perfect in your imperfection, to tempt cliché, which hold a certain universality, timelessness. Appropriate. Loved regardless. Like anyone else: capable of being forgiven. Of forgiveness.

“Redemption.” The word rings in your ears.  

Mistakes and successes alike, you now see: glittering gems.

Another realization: you will possess only very little in your lifetime. Considering the vastness of the world, the universe, which only continues to expand, and the fleetingness of your existence, there is so much more you will never have.

Here I again draw from Calvino, who I keep by my side.

Invisible cities the only ones we can now safely occupy.

Everything you possess, therefore, everything you can possess, is precious. As precious as the unpossessed and unpossessable; the grail isn’t meant to be grasped, sipped from. The Fisher King: leave him be. Let him heal his own wounds. Like El Dorado, like fame and perhaps fortune, like the edges of the universe, of consciousness: it’s meant only to be pursued.
  

So take hope, traveler. Continue to retreat. To seek. Lose yourself in unfamiliar, uncomfortable places. Physically: when doors open once more. Emotionally: incessantly. Continue to possess—let moments pass, become memory. Let them acquire that same sacred sheen as miracles. To choose—let memory dictate your choices. Let them be your guide, your lantern, bright with ambition. Continue to entangle yourself in your surroundings, your limbs, like your roots, those of the trees. Your limbs the skyscrapers, the satellites, the reaching, striving of all others. The present: a tangle of all the decisions everyone has ever made.

Trust yourself. Be content with yours.

—

Christopher Impiglia is a writer from Bridgehampton, NY. He also adjuncts and edits art books. He received an MFA in Fiction from The New School and an MA in Medieval History and Archaeology from the University of St Andrews. A Finalist in Nowhere Magazine’s 2020 Spring Travel Writing Prize and the 2019 Hemingway Shorts Contest his words have otherwise appeared in Columbia Journal and Entropy Magazine, among others. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @Impigliato.

Anatomy of a Rabbit Hole

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BY LORI GREEN

—

1.

I have lost myself in Penny Slinger’s archives. It’s an easy way to spend a Saturday afternoon during underemployed COVID times.

2.

Back in 2019 I read a throwaway footnote in a David Graeber book: at some point, the USSR hoped to feed their people with Spirulina, the protein packed algae and modern-day superfood. I failed to locate any evidence supporting this claim.

3.

I did find another Cold War/spirulina connection though, in the LA Times, 1985: Manufacturers of Algae Derivative Claim they could “Feed the World”. In the article, Microalgae International Sales Corp. hosts a cocktail party at which Christopher Hills, the ‘father of spirulina,’ touts the powers of his sustainable green slime. Goodbye starvation. The company operates as an early MLM and donates product to charitable causes–including 1,900 pounds of spirulina tablets for, “Mujahideen Afghan freedom fighters”. Spokespeople claim the Mujahideen are scaling mountains to victory, subsisting on algae and snow. Doctors question health claims and decry the arrogance of shipping pond scum to the poor.

4.

To me, it sounded like the perfect longform article just waiting to be made into a podcast. It sounded like money, bingeable content. You have an MLM, spurious medical promises, a charismatic “Western guru scientist”, and US involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War. Wild stuff. I took some notes and put them away.

5.

Now that I’ve lost my health-food job to the pandemic and have a month without ghostwriting work, I return to the story. I finally have time to “follow the money,” and, “track down sources.” Unfortunately I don’t know how to do any of that. I left school with no research skills and find nothing meaningful on Microalgae International Sales Corp., or on this period in Hills’s life. Every link on his foundation’s website–I try Archives; I try Afghan Refugees–returns me to the homepage.

6.

It’s especially frustrating because Hills is in my reach. He’s all over the internet, photographed with scientists, prime ministers. He received a glowing obituary and in the photo he glows, too. The man was prolific. He wrote books I won’t read because I imagine they approximate the kind of eye contact that washes brains. I assume hypocrisy, the implicit sins of a spiritual conman. I am wary of entertaining that kind of mind after my year with the health food company where I too sold spirulina, under the rule of another aspiring guru. She also wanted to save the world with capitalism and positive thinking. There is no art there.

7.

In all my fruitless research one name keeps coming up: Penny Slinger. Hills’s wife and protector of his legacy, she ran their Goddess Temple after his death. I avoid reading about her because I am skeptical of spiritually driven, age-gap romances, the muse and the bearded man. In the one picture I see of them she’s beautiful and gazing into Hills’ eyes. It scares me.

8.

At my final dead end, I consent and search her name. There must be two Penny Slingers. All these sharp black-and-white photos and collages? This British beauty, domineering, naked, in leather or decked out in a full mane of feathers? Where is the repressed earth mother? Who is this subversive surrealist?

9.

I go to her website and find that yes, there are several Penny Slingers but they are all the one: Penny Slinger. Her lines are solid in portraits, ragged in collage. Rotting and youth is everywhere. Here she is, modern and sleek in the 60’s; here, writing volumes on tantra; in recent interviews she’s a sphynx, composed, grinning and older. 

10.

In one color photograph from a magazine profile she’s standing indoors, indomitable in front of perched falcons. There is surely bird shit on the floor. The scene is a dream I’ve already had, and I dream about the dream.

11.

I look through stills from a film she acted in–The Other Side of Underneath–,the only British movie directed by a woman in the 1970s. It depicted female psychosis. That shoot ended relationships. A man died in its aftermath. I find it for free and skip to the middle. I can tell this movie would destroy me though, so I close the window.

12.

For several years it’s been the fashion to rediscover neglected female artists, the Babitzes and Carringtons. By rediscover, I don’t mean to say that life forgot Penny Slinger, or she it, just that the internet has never pushed her on me. She hasn’t turned up on my Instagram.

13.

She’s the subject of a recent documentary called Out of the Shadows andI watch the trailer. Nowhere do I find the hazy smile of a woman usurped by an old man. I’ve stopped looking for it. I entered my search prejudiced, playing into this fantasy that she stopped making art. To indulge in that fantasy would be a sin and the most monstrous arrogance of all. Of course she never stopped. We were always going to find her again.

14.

Forget Hills. I don’t see green algae in Slinger’s photos so I won’t care about green algae, or my lost job, or capitalism gurus. My vendettas are mine. I should probably work on them. Anyway, now I’m less interested in podcast worthy stories than in falling into a Penny Slinger rabbit hole. And I do, all afternoon. I find everything. There’s plenty and not enough. Her books would cost a fortune to a laid-off woman in pandemic. They’ll come back into print soon though; I’m sure of it, because she’s left the Goddess Temple compound for Los Angeles. She recently designed a set for Dior Haute Couture and gives interviews.

15.

I trace this artist’s face over years and hear her calling me out for storing my womanly powers in the spare room. I am afraid because she is wilder than the life I chose and matches a life I might have chosen. She is brave enough to inhabit a haunted house, formidable enough to gain access to one and does, a place called Lilford Hall. It’s in ruins. Picture Manderlay. Her partner lived there as a boy and grew up to be a moviemaker named Peter Whitehead. The two plan a film together, start shooting in the estate. When they split up he drops the project and she spends years making her own book out of that time and space: An Exorcism.

16.

A quick search tells me that Peter Whitehead’s work has been called unspeakable. At some point he became a professional falconer. Hence the falcons in the magazine piece, I assume. I didn’t know that was a viable career path, but I guess for an English male who spent his childhood in Lilford Hall, anything is possible.

17.

Because anything is possible, I watch myself read about Penny Slinger for the rest of the afternoon. I sign into JStor because it makes me feel academic and membership is free during pandemic. I enter: Penny Slinger Lilford Hall. All I find is a letter from Peter Whitehead to someone named Niki de Saint Phalle. I read the letter to its end, saving some lines but not their contexts. He mentions dropping the film with Slinger. Being from the future, I know she’s going off to make An Exorcism. Peter Whitehead seems mean, but what do I know? I think of a life of meanness, of breaking your word to people but not to your art.

18.

I open a tab for Niki de Saint Phalle and find her huge, joyful statues of huge, joyful women called Nanas. She and Slinger are both stupidly beautiful. Beauty doesn’t seem to matter to them. They use it how they can, like they’d cast it off and laugh and grow old then young then old again. So much scares me but the Nanas don’t.

19.

Have I always been this afraid? The story of a part-time ghostwriter in pandemic falling into the world of someone else’s art won’t buy me anyone’s attention. Considering that Dior set and Out of the Shadows, I’m behind the times already. “This woman,” I hear an imaginary voice scoff, “thinks she has discovered Penny Slinger? She’d never heard the name, Penny Slinger, before Pandemic?”

20.

Alright, but then where are the Babitz/Carrington documentaries? Where is Penny Slinger’s biography? I am afraid if we don’t get them down in print our attention will have only been a trend. I need more information. I need a paperback before she walks away again, off of the internet and out of earshot. I wish I’d learned to write biography.

21.

There are other leads I could follow this afternoon. Why did Peter Whitehead live at Lilford Hall–32,406 square-feet, over 500 years old with 100 rooms–when he was young? Was it already in shambles? I’m curious about his access, but am more curious about Penny Slinger taking it from him. I’m curious about the hall’s disrepair. How long did its ruin take? Lilford Hall had a great fall. All neglected structures crumble. How did they put it together again, and why? More information, please.

22.

I won’t find those answers. But I tell myself a story: some very old family was gifted Penny Slinger’s hardcover on a Christmas morning in the late 70’s. Flipping through the pages, they were returned, after a lifetime away, to their treasured estate. They wandered through it. They found their rooms filled with nudes and floating nuns, scorpions, a mouth in flight.

23.

What these bloated landed gentry said was, “The wallpaper is in strips; the floor is littered with the ceiling; find the old help and rescue those mirrors.” 

24.

What they meant was, “Our ancestral entrance is blocked by a pair of spread legs. We are going to have to exorcise this exorcism.”

25.

And they almost did. How long before dust is the permanent state of affairs? The Lilford Hall website does not link to Penny Slinger’s archives. It doesn’t mention her at all.

—

Lori Green studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Why Superheroes Wear Capes

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BY SHAMECCA HARRIS

I twirled to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” at the center of a doll town I’d created in my mother’s living room. Teacher Barbie stood at the foot of a plastic-covered couch that I’d routinely spill juice, or milk, or germs on. Her forced smile greeted a toy classroom of Tuttis and Todds, Barbie’s lesser-known tween twin siblings. Nearby, just beneath the glass wall unit where my mother hid the good china, a Barbie Bride admired an abstract mannequin in a tiny white dress. Her groom, a hand-me-down Donnie Walberg from Mattel’s New Kids on the Block collection, sat waiting a few feet away in a flamingo pink convertible. I wanted the townsfolk to have a prime view of ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons, so I placed Skipper behind the cash register at the bodega replica in front of the TV stand. In retrospect, I realize that I was no genius architect; I was merely a seven-year-old hoarder of toys.

Fashion occupied the center of my makeshift Barbie world. Each extended holiday away from school, I’d wake up with the sun, splash the entire contents of my toy box onto the floor, and dress and undress dozens of plastic torsos for hours. Barbie’s elaborate costumes reminded me of trips to Buster Brown’s, a local children’s store where my mother and I shopped for the perfect Easter dress, ruffle socks, and patent leather shoes every year. While most children squirm at being poked and prodded by a seamstress, I indulged in my real-world opportunity to play dress up. I was a Barbie girl, after all. I’d dress and undress my own flat torso in fluffy church dresses while blowing kisses at my reflection in the water-stained mirror.

Years after I dumped my doll collection down the trash incinerator, I am still a Barbie girl. As an adult, I no longer need a holiday as an excuse to play dress up and embrace every day as an opportunity for spectacle. My mood is the preeminent muse for each outfit of the day. On mornings when I am feeling fierce, I channel Beyonce with a yellow maxi. On nights when I am feeling fiercer, I channel Rick James with my platform boots.

And then, there are days where there are no words to describe the wildfire blazing in my gut, days where I’m convinced that, if there is a God, He has forgotten I, too, am His child, days where I don’t believe in anything, least of all myself.

July 7, 2016

“Stay with me!” Diamond Reynolds pleads from the passenger seat,  as her fiancé, Philando Castile, bleeds out behind the steering wheel.

Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, has just been shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. Blood spills out from his torso, soaking clear through his crisp white T-shirt. As Reynolds live streams his final breaths from her smartphone, the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna, looks on from the back seat.

“He’s licensed to carry,” Reynolds explains to the camera as Castile moans in distress. “He let the officer know he had a firearm and he was reaching for his ID and his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”

“I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up!” the officer retorts angrily, still pointing his gun at Castile who appears to drift in and out of consciousness.

Castile’s eyes rotate to the back of his skull as he rocks his head slowly back and forth in a hypnotic wave. When he finally stops moving, his eyes settle into a cryptic gaze.

“Oh my god, please don’t tell me he’s dead,” Reynolds wails. “Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went out like that.”

Each time I lay down to sleep, I see flashes of Castile’s eyes in a hostile roll. There is no use trying to sleep; I may as well stay woke. Desperate and dumbfounded, I resort to making a political statement with my wardrobe. I am well are a good outfit can’t eradicate systemic racism but, if I was going to save the world, I needed to look the part. In tribute to the loss of black life, I reach for a black cape with wide sleeves that gave the illusion of wings each time I lift my skinny arms. I complete my costume with a black bandana tied around my face like an LA gangster.  I take a final peek in the mirror and I look like a black-American super-shero, an awkward mashup of Solange and Tupac. I call her Queen Goddess and endow her with the power to kick white supremacy’s ass.

Bodies quickly shuffle into the subway car to avoid being trapped by the temperamental doors. I am among the growing mass of travelers and yet feel as if I’m in a world removed, an invisible bystander of Queen Goddess’ swag. She is I and I am and she.

“Excuse me,” Queen commands. Her voice is robust and powerful. She is not apologizing for taking up space so much as she is demanding that space be provided to her. She speaks to everyone and no one in particular, all at the same time. The crowd parts and Queen confidently strolls down the narrow aisle, her cape catching the breeze of her graceful stride. Shortly after she snags a rare empty seat, a preppy meets hipster man in his early ’30’s, plops down in the seat next to hers. 

 “Is everything alright?” he whispers in her ear.

Normally, I might be moved by this thoughtful gesture. I might thank the subway creeper for his concern and, despite yearning for peace of mind, I might lie and tell him I was just fine. Queen, on the other hand, isn’t so impressed, nor is she so polite. Queen quickly shifts her gaze and covers her eyes with a pair of dark sunglasses. She is blind to the bullshit today. The part of her that wants to be liked is dormant, and what survives is a bad-ass alter ego who just wants to be free.

“No!” she responds, positioning her dark frames on the brim of her nose to flash the fury in her eyes. “I am not okay!”

The man quickly transforms from a pale white to a crimson red as he gets up and walks solemnly to the other end of the car. He keeps his head bowed for the rest of the ride with the exception of an occasional nod. Queen assumes that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but either way, she has no interest in catcalls or small talk. So long as the world could neglect black lives, she could neglect white tears.

When she arrives at her stop, she exits with the same stunning confidence with which she entered. She floats past the idle booth attendant, flies up the sullied stairway, and welcomes the burning intensity of the early morning sun. She has been contained underground long enough. She is ready to unleash her powers in the real world, but she is not welcome there.

As soon as she enters the office, her revolutionary spirit is deflated by the deafening silence of our peers. Their backs are bent, their heads are bowed, and their gaze is fixed on their desktop screens. Her air of defiance is met with cynical stares. No one cares how angry she is. The only talent of value here is a knack for silence.

This is where I step in. I am an obedient worker. I shut my mouth, I put my head down, and I get shit done. Still, despite my best efforts to keep Queen in check, I can’t seem to contain my alter ego’s rebellion, and she eventually storms up to our supervisor’s desk.

“I’m not feeling well,” she says matter-of-factly. “I have to go.”

Queen darts down the steps and out of the building before her boss can respond. Once outside, she pulls a powder blue pouch of Turkish tobacco from her mini-backpack and rolls a skinny cigarette. She presses her lips to the narrow opening and takes a long pull, inhaling the comfort of the warm thick smoke and exhaling the tension from her listless bones.

“Whatever I do, I will not be silent,” she says to herself between pulls before flying back down to the underground subway with her cape in the wind.

—

SHAMECCA HARRIS is a creative writer and teaching artist born and raised in Harlem, New York City. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The City College of New York where she also teaches English Literature and Composition. Her essays, reportage, and experimental writing have appeared in The Rumpus, Global Citizen, and Apogee Journal among others.

Jogging Through the French Quarter

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By Christopher Louis Romaguera

Track this jog through
the French Quarter 
with an incredible 
playlist:  

CLICK HERE
FOR THE MUSIC

It is March, and we are in a pandemic, and I have been writing dark things all morning: about my family’s exile from Cuba, about dead friends in Miami, about ghosts in Patagonia, and some poorly written things about COVID-19. I turn my phone on to see my parents make another plea for me to come back to Miami, to my first home. I am in New Orleans and am not able to fully isolate, and my parents are at-risk, and it is an argument that goes round and round.

I have lived in New Orleans for about a decade. This is my second home. Even my sister lives here now. But so many of my peoples and family still live in Miami. With the COVID-19 pandemic in the early stages in the states, it is hard to know where to hole up. Would either feel like home without my peoples in it? Or just a cemetery of one?

I run to break up my days. Most mornings I lock myself away in my room, sipping on cafecitos or cortaditos, working on various projects. I run to break up the writing, to return to the page fresh, I run to get out of my head, to return to my body, or I run to return to the outside world, to no longer be in the deep darkness in my head, ready for hugs and daps with all our peoples as I cross the street, ready for a shot and a drink with my peoples in the corner of our bar.

Before the pandemic, I worked on the busiest music street in New Orleans. For the past seven years, I’ve worked at the Spotted Cat Music Club. On days I worked long hours after writing long hours, I wouldn’t get my run in, but I would listen to the band, bobbing my head and making it through the night. Sometimes I’d send Pops a video of a song he liked. The music was my reentrance into the world those days. The music was how I’d avoid getting too deep into my head with darker thoughts. So, at The Spotted Cat, we’d throw one of the biggest music parties on the street, in the city, with my friends providing the music, me providing the one-liners and a drink within 30 seconds.

With the pandemic, I am out of work, and while I can still write, I still need my escape. I think of Andy J Forest, who opened the Spotted Cat with me for years, and I hear his song “Bartender Friend”, which goes: “When I get to work, I feel at home, always someone there, someone I know, and everybody, says hello.” And I miss that vibe so much. So I make a playlist and tie my Cuban flag bandana over my face and head to Frenchmen, to run through the streets I’ve worked on for a decade, to run through the streets where I’ve seen all my peoples and made so many memories.

As a kid in Miami, I watched my father run after work. He would come home refreshed, like he had sweated out the venom put inside him by the outside world. When I got older, I’d run with him too. Sometimes we’d have headphones on, listening to our own songs or mixes we made for each other. Sometimes we’d run and talk. Sometimes we’d run and hear nothing but the sounds of our steps, whether we were at the beach, in our hood, or somewhere between. Didn’t matter if I explicitly told him about every basketball failure, every fight I did or didn’t get into that I should or shouldn’t have, every broken heart, every botched drug deal, every everything. And it didn’t matter if he told me of every pain that cropped up from memories of Cuba, or his mom, or his dad, or every struggle he faced working in Miami to support our family. We were in sync, in rhythm. Running helped us both just be in the moment, in this world, helped us return back home.

I think of the “suicides” we used to run to end basketball practices with. Suicides being sprints up and down the court, first stopping on a dime at the foul line, tapping the line with our hand, before sprinting back to the baseline, tapping that line, then sprinting back to the three point line, making our way farther and farther out each time. You felt this drill in your knees, you felt this drill in your fingertips, the asphalt courts you practiced on imprinted your hands. For practices to end, you’d have to finish the suicides, then go to the free throw line and drain a couple of shots. If you missed yours, the team ran. If one of them missed, we ran. It wasn’t just the completing of the sprint, it was keeping your wits, it was being sound of body, being solid, still in breath, to get the work done, to shoot your shot and go home, knowing at even your most tired, back against the wall, you can do the damn thing.

I know I run partly cause I don’t know how to talk about COVID-19, about the fear I have of going to Miami to help my family and being one of the asymptomatic ones that has it. Of the fear I have of this virus taking more and more of the people we need now more than ever. How we lost a culture bearer and a neighbor and a friend in Mr. Ronald Lewis, and how we can’t secondline or celebrate him for a while longer. How mournful celebrations put us all at-risk.

No other cars on the road, I stand on Frenchmen Street, staring at Washington Square Park. I listen to “Out on the Rise”, recorded by The Deslondes, composed by Sam Doores, who is fam to me. The song talks about last calls and closing bars, but I have heard him play it when we lived in the house by the river often, and I have heard him play it a lot of late, as it just seems to make sense for a world that has an indefinite last call. I think of how it is my father’s favorite song of Sam’s. Pops always getting the line “but I’ve never been so good at that” stuck in his head. I start to wonder if I’ve never been good at this. I start to wonder if I’m not being good enough for my family? Should I be heading down, in case something bad happens virally or societally? Or will these thoughts make me go back home, and spread something lethal to my family and loved ones?

I stretch my leg using the gate of the park. My head turns side-to-side, looking to see if someone comes too close, or more hopefully, for a friend. I think of a phrase an old roommate used to always tell me anytime I’d call or pop up, that I was “gonna live a long time, I was just thinking about you.” I want to see my friends turn the corner, because I’m lonely and miss them. I want to see my friends turn the corner; cause I want them to know I’m thinking of them. Cause I want them to live a long time. Cause I want to be a part of that longevity. But I’m happy not to see them, cause that actually means a better chance of us all living a long time. Right now, the absence is a promise of presence in the future. Right now, loneliness is love. But the loneliness still deepens a sense of loss.

Sam croons, “And how come all my closest friends, are so far away.” And I think of how he is isolated in the west coast. How some of my closest friends, are so far away. How the ones in the city that I can’t see, feel even farther away. And how this is my situation. Stuck in a broken and incomplete home. Separated from another broken and incomplete home.

Across the street is the Christopher Inn Apartments, which houses seniors and the disabled. I think of some of them coming into the bar to hit their tambourine with the band, some coming with plastic bags for ice to keep their beers cool outside, avoiding the chaos of the bar, but still within earshot of the band. I think of them always bringing us food whenever they barbeque. I think of all the sidewalk parties they had, with their easily folded chairs, of how when I turned the corner for work, I’d see them all lined up, I’d give them all hugs and kisses and fives and handshakes, like I was being introduced as a starter with the baddest bench in the city lined up for me. I think of how many times we saw an ambulance block traffic on the street, in front of the apartments, and we all would check in with our peoples who lived there. Now, I see people at the help desk with flimsy masks and gloves. I read reports that residents and employees there tested positive for COVID-19. I talked to bartender friends who mentioned seeing some of our peoples on the street the night before the shelter in place order, drinking and dancing, saying “Don’t worry baby, we gonna be alright.” I wonder how many ambulances have been there with no traffic to block, and how broken I will be if the street isn’t lined up and down the sidewalk the first day we all get back.

I sprint down the street, and hear Panorama Jazz Band’s version of “Norma de la Guadalajara” come on. I think of how many late Saturday night shifts I’ve entered the Spotted Cat, hearing this song, almost like my musical introduction to the bar, me tipping my hat at the band, Ben Schenck going crazy on the clarinet, doing his dance, making his way through the crowd, a tip bucket in hand, following me like I was a fullback. I think of Aurora Nealand killing it on her saxophone, and how I’d follow her and this band up and down the streets of Mardi Gras, making it from the Marigny through the Seventh Ward to the French Quarter and back to Frenchmen.

I think of all the times I’d hear my name, and give someone a squeeze or a kiss. I look at all the boarded up buildings that are closed. I wonder how many will come back with different owners or staffs or bands, and then just feel different, be different. I wonder how many won’t come back, remembering how Café Rose Nicaud had been emptied out before the pandemic hit. Wondering how many of my memories in there, writing and coffee-ing before work, will be boarded up. I wonder how much my memory will create boards for all the people I’m missing. I wonder how many of those memory boards will stay up, stay blank, from people who won’t make it back. I wonder if my memory boards will bleed into the scenery, if I will even stop seeing the boards themselves. I wonder how many of us knew the residency was over, but still expected to see Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor again. Hear him miss New Orleans one more time before we missed him.

I think of how I don’t know when the street will return, or when I will return to the street. I think of how I don’t know how I’ll be able to pay for my life again. I think of how I was so paranoid my last bartending shift that I kept washing my hands over and over again, so much so that my hands started to dry up, crack, and bleed.

I want to sprint down the street for one final time before going into the French Quarter proper, changing the scenery and hopefully avoiding the dark curve of my mind, when I see Miss Sophie Lee on the balcony of 3 Muses. She is the owner of the music club, an amazing musician and singer, a former neighbor and a dear friend. She also has been working from the club this week, chilling on the balcony, and taking photos of shirtless dudes running up and down (and she has now included me in that number.) We laugh and joke from balcony to street, no cars to dodge, on the same corner where I once put on a dress and danced in a music video for her song, “Lovely In That Dress.” When she goes back to work, I warm back up, listening to that song, and remembering laughing so hard that not even my bandana could have fully covered my smile. This was a home.

I hear Sarah McCoy’s “New Orleans” as I do my version of “Dancing Down Decatur Street”. The haunting keys play as I go up the never-empty street that is now emptied out. I run down the empty French Market, past all the ghosts of vendors and tourists that would usually be a flowing vein from the French Quarter to Frenchmen.

I think of how sometimes Frenchmen Street wore on me, how sometimes, I’d only clock in and out for my shifts, but not make it to my friends’ shows, needing the break from the people, the noise. I remember McCoy’s last show at the Spotted Cat, how I showed up on the way to class and stood by a column, almost hiding, having a beer, as friends asked if the bartender was sick or something, if I was going to fill in or something. I remember how good that set was, her singing with no mic, amplified out of a bucket, voice booming between whatever little space was left between all of us who filled in the bar to say goodbye. How we were all happy to see her go get gigs in France, even if we missed her already, even if I missed never getting the chance to grab drinks with her before she left, for we loved having her here, but we also loved our friends sometimes escaping the city that forgot to care for its people. And even if her leaving just for a little bit has become years and years now, we’re still happy for her. But I fear that if I live just for a little bit, all the home I’ve built here could be gone for years and years too.

I sprint past the window at Molly’s at the Market, where I used to write with Richard Louth and the New Orleans Writer’s Marathon. That window being the spot where we all looked up and out in wonder and wrote. Using those moments to write about what we saw, and letting it lead into what we felt. The last time we were there, it was right before a hurricane was supposed to hit, the storm wasn’t big, but it was early in the summer, and the river was high. There was fear that it could topple the levee, and therefore topple the city and leave little of us left. We talked about how pretty the day was, which we all knew meant it was coming tomorrow, the occasional breeze whipping bev naps and papers and thoughts around, as we all sipped watered down whiskey or rum, wondering if we should go the way of the rocks.

I think of how so many friends back home watched the news on the storm, and told me to get out of town. How on one group chat where my Miami peoples were telling me to leave town, leave my second home, my oldest friend on the chat interjected with: “Come on now, you know if everyone is telling Chris to leave he’s staying.” And I can’t tell if I was smart, or stubborn and stupid lucky. I can’t tell if I’m being smart by staying now, or being stubborn and hoping to be stupid lucky again.

I worked at the Spotted Cat that night, the storm supposed to hit in the morning. Joking about being the designated no-power/yes-hurricane bartender. I remember how the friend I worked with sang, “Es viernes y el cuerpo lo sabe” as we had a full bar on an otherwise empty street, in an otherwise quiet city. People dancing and drinking their fears away, as me and my friend got sandbags and boards ready during lulls between drink orders.

After work that night, I got a Banh Minh from the bodega across the street, the reliable one I assumed would never close for a disaster, the one that is closed with the rest of us now, and how I walked a mile and a half home after I couldn’t fetch a cab. How I sat on my levee, on the side they call “The End Of The World,” and smoked a cigarillo, drank some rum, as the river crashed against the walls and licked the bottom of my feet like a fire gasping for breath. I left the levee that night knowing we would not get burned, this was not the one.

I run a little loop down the Riverwalk, one dude threatens another dude with a stick, saying “that’s why I keep this around, to protect me.” And think of how that is part of the fear in this moment, there is no physical thing. A stick won’t do shit to a hurricane, sure, but you can see the storm coming, you can barricade the windows and sandbag the doors. But this virus could be all over the stick, all over the spittle from his dehydrated mouth. If it’s licking my feet as I run down the Riverwalk, I wouldn’t feel it, I wouldn’t know it, till I got burned.

I hear The Catahoulas’s “Shrimp and Gumbo”, a band I hear once a month on Saturdays, and I think of what a privilege it is to hear Mr. Gerald French play with so many of my friends. I run down to an empty Jackson Square, the kind of place I typically don’t go to, but when I am here, I enjoy the brass bands playing, I enjoy serpentining around tourists and the clueless in order to give my peoples a squeeze, for impromptu dances with henna artists. How I love ducking into old dusty secondhand bookstores on Orleans, and how I love coming out of cigar shops with a fresh ember on a fresh cut cigar.

But running here empty, I think of how Jackson Square was the place of protest. How the Take ‘Em Down NOLA movement wanted Jackson removed for the 300th anniversary of New Orleans. I think of the friend who got death threats before that protest, David Duke stoking the fires of outsiders who were going to come in to defend the monuments. I think of walking next to my friend that day, wondering what would happen. I walked with him; cause I would want someone to walk with me if I got that threat. I walked with him, cause I had the privilege to even make that choice, so I had to make it forcefully. I think of our mutual friend who got arrested during the protest, at the steps of Jackson, us having more friends arrested than the people who threatened to kill some of us.

I need to get out of my head, so I sprint faster. I think back on the suicides, how we knew they were coming from the beginning of practice, how the hardest part was always waiting for you, and how no matter how hard, you had to use that as an advantage. You’re so tired, you can’t do anything but what you’ve always done, clear minded, take your shot. I sprint, I tap the tile. I flick off Jackson on his high horse every time I run by him. I run too fast to worry about if one of the cowards who gave death threats will see me. I run too fast to worry about COVID-19 for just a moment.

I think of how Pops used to run cross country in Miami for high school, after being a child exile from Cuba. How he taught me how to always end a run on a sprint. To psychologically beat whoever or whatever I was running with. To psychologically beat myself, and any fatigue I felt. Pops was so bad at stretching before he ran, like he was always ready to run out of a situation, but how he was so good at walking off the end of the run, to calm down and find his equilibrium, before returning to the rest of the world, to us. Preparing before returning to a rootless home. I think of how I have inherited that practice, in my new home of New Orleans, where there were no roots before me.

I slow down to Arsène DeLay’s “Coming Home”, which she wrote about coming back to New Orleans. It is the song that my sister listened to as an anthem of sorts when she got accepted into Tulane and joined me in town a couple of years ago. I think of how I lived with DeLay for years, and heard that song play over and over again. How it always makes me happy. I think of how New Orleans has become a home for me, and my sister, but yet Miami still has so many of our peoples. How severed that feeling can be in times of trouble, having two homes, no roots.

I catch myself thinking about my sister’s case with swine flu a decade ago. I was still in Miami, but I don’t even remember it happening, being too high, or too depressed, or too self-centered instead. How I didn’t even make it to the hospital, how I barely even remember the episode. Am I just doing that all over again by staying here? The run gets repetitive sometimes, and the questions repeat too. Am I not being enough for my family? Should I be halfway down already, in case something bad happens? Will these thoughts make me go back home, and spread something lethal to my family and loved ones? Am I being rightfully strong or willfully stupid?

I run down Bienville, hearing Andy J Forest’s “My Excuse for Now.” I hear the line, “Today I forgot to eat, last night I didn’t get much sleep.” And I remember the friend of mine that inspired that line. And I think of how many times I adopted that line while working on deadlines and going straight to the early shift to work Andy’s set. Taking “cigarette” breaks in the alley to edit pieces when on deadline. Forgetting to eat before a friend or a brother or a love yelled at me to. Home.

I see a man curled up in the door frame of a closed business like it was his own personal nook, and I think of how I don’t know how to write about the musicians and gig workers who are struggling with unemployment, struggling to make ends meet, despite being the reason people come here. I don’t know how to write about the one in four people who don’t have internet here to follow orders or find information, just like I don’t know how to write about the one in five that don’t have a car for drive-thru testing or groceries. I don’t know how to write about what shelter-in-place means to the thousands of homeless who sleep in the nooks and door frames of businesses that don’t open. I don’t know how to write about the doctors and nurses and medical workers who are doing their best to keep us from reaching our end with minimal medical resources, buying and rigging their own PPE.

I see a sanitation worker on the street and raise my hand to say hi. He nods back at me. I think of how so many New Orleans cats laugh at me and my bandana that covers my mouth, then wave and pound their chest, me doing the same, making up for the lack of contact with each other by smacking our own bodies more, harder, like our heartbeat had to break out of the cage. I think of how so many tourists or people I’ve never seen before cross the street, as they’ve always done, how they did before social distancing, and how it saves me the hassle of serpentining around them and their possible contagions they chose to bring here. I think of a friend from back home joking about how I should wear darker color bandanas to buy groceries so that people would “socially distance” from me. I think of how sad I got having to explain to my mom why I preferred pink bandanas instead of black ones. About being at-risk outside of a virus.

I run down Bourbon Street, it is quiet, and I see the Preservation Hall closed, rusted gates locking up all the memories. I look inside and see a plastic cover over a podium that briefly looked like the silhouette of a musician or bartender sitting down, waiting for the day they can unlock the gates back to a heaven. I listen to Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Body Electric” and think of how gun sales are going up, how I read domestic violence calls are going up, how I worry about the whole world being crazy, and those who can isolate from a virus but not from their killers. I think of how I once saw Hurray for the Riff Raff do a “secret” show with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, being with my sister and my homies, and seeing worlds collide and create something better than what was before. I wonder if the world we were all on top of a year ago is crumbling beneath our feet now.

I run past the Hard Rock Casino that caved in, killing people, including some undocumented late last year. I stop the music and I jog in place, looking for the body that used to be visible from the street. I can’t find it, but I know he’s there. Am I subconsciously blind to him? Selectively forgetting? I think of how every intimate experience with death for me has always been accompanied by silence, like I didn’t want to attach or associate a song to a death. I think of how the presence of a white sheet never makes death absent. I think of the blue tarp that they covered the undocumented man with, as if that made it less obscene, as if they could further erase him. I wonder if they thought putting a blue tarp on the dead would make him “disappeared.” As if changing the color to blue would erase the violence to the naked eye. As if his color hadn’t already made him invisible to so many. 

I run down Rampart Street and pass through Louis Armstrong Park as John Boutté’s cover of Southern Man comes on. I think of how my family and I saw Boutté play at a fall festival at the park, a place that was “gifted” to the community after they constructed I-10 through it. Boutté talked about how the park “wasn’t always ours,” and right as he said it, sirens blared, coming from somewhere by the I-10, the echo of the underpass making it hard to know exactly where. Boutté raised up a finger, as if he just got validation from the gods, before saying how the community took the park back, how it’s theirs again, before he sang Southern Man.

The wind howled and sirens blared and Boutté sung above it all, everything but his voice calmed down. I sprint hoping to hear a car pull up and honk, to see a friendly face. For I wouldn’t stop, but I’d turn around, running backwards, like a basketball drill and point at them through a cracking border, knowing they’ll be alive for a long time, and so will I. But I don’t hear it, I don’t see it, I don’t feel what I want to feel. So I sprint and see more National Guard congregating in front of a hotel and laughing, I catch another wind and sprint, stopping at the neutral ground and jumping up and down, like I did pre-regulation-games, nothing stopping my momentum. The cars pass and I sprint across the road, back to Frenchmen, back to home, wanting to finish my run on a sprint, like how Pops taught me, syncing up to the times that me and Pops would run, to the time where he runs alone now, on a treadmill for his knees, slowly, but syncing up all the same. I run because I need to, to get out of my head and to just trust my instincts, my shot. This pandemic is a big one, but it ain’t the one, and we going to make it, with or without help beyond ourselves, beyond our peoples, so I run, to clear my head, to listen to my peoples doing their thing, to shoot my shot, until the next time we can all take a shot together in the corner of a dive, when we won’t have to look forward or back to see our peoples, when we can fill the streets again, and I can return to my river, and take off the bandana and scars be damned, reveal my smile in whatever unveiled home I find myself in.

__________

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. Romaguera has been published in The Daily Beast, Curbed National, Peauxdunque Review, New Orleans Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog. He has an MFA in Fiction at the University of New Orleans. You can find him on Facebook at Christopher Louis Romaguera. Or on Instagram and Twitter @cromaguerawrite

A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story by Christine Hume

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Order A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story HERE

We could not be more pleased to announce the April release of Christine Hume’s little book A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story, a disability-forward essay that melds memoir, neurology, chromopoetics, and literary criticism into an ecstatic embodiment of an illiterate girlhood. Shaped as an index, rather than a primary text, Hume posits the cruel optimism of reading, which promises to shape brains and lives, against the dyslexic’s subterfuge intelligence. In vignettes, meditations, lapses, guesses, and fragments, all refracted through the color red, this work questions what reading means and how we come to claim it. 

“What delicious diligent indolence” is what Keats called reading, Christine Hume tells us in her mesmerizing new book on dyslexia, A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. Leave it to Keats, and now Hume, to come up with a wonderful definition not only for the mysteries of dyslexia, but also for poetry and the human mind. “As you read,” she tells us,” can you hear my voice in your head? Does this sentence reach for your hand across the table?” This is a small sample of the wonders to be found here, a book/essay/poem/colloquy on the nature of thinking as well as feeling, on the voice in our heads powerful enough to reach across the table of time to offer comfort, and such delicious indolence. ” – Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize Winner

Order A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story HERE

[REVIEW] The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb

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(Everytime Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI

—

Davon Loeb wants to tell us that all writing—even and especially memoir—means writing what never existed; that all writing demands a mix of imagination and memory, the blending of literal and emotional truths; that even his story, the story of his life—the lyrical narrative of The In-Betweens (Everytime Press, 2018)—subverts our own generic expectations and considerations of what it means to write about ourselves, if only because to write about ourselves would mean to write about all of the people who have formed us, each in their own way, and in ways we may never know, not all the way.

And so Loeb harnesses the speculative and the real, nurturing both, beginning with the hypothetical subjective, entering his story by telling his parents’ story, imagining the life before he had a life, resisting sentimentalism and nostalgia to talk about a past with real stakes: “He was married to a woman his age, and a father of two. She was married to a man her age, and a mother of two. And my father was White and my mother was Black, in America, and everything was stacked against them” (4).

This is a blueprint Loeb continues to return to in his bodily, materially sensitive memoir, in which a memory of tying up a cousin to a tree, leaving her in the rain, ushers in a description of summer thunderstorms; elsewhere, a memory of sitting up in bed interminably waiting for his father to arrive prefaces a larger exploration of his father’s visitations, his frequent absences. The book moves seamlessly through frank explorations of masculinity and gender norms, the superstitious and contractual rites of childhood, racism and the racial imaginary, the failings of education, and the particular experience of being in-between; the everyday experience of interraciality—“the accident ink blot” in a predominantly white, racially-segregated town. Loeb offers lengthy investigations into his own childhood, moving even further back as he imagines his grandparents while re-tracing his lineage; at other moments, he employs lyrical density toward vignettes that encompass all of a single paragraph—a snapshot of a moment that becomes re-contextualized in the voice of an older, wiser, narrator. Yet it’s also Loeb’s ability to imbue his narrative with a disarming and demonstrative self-critique that makes The In-Betweens stand out from countless other memoirs.

Whether it’s in his retrospective unpacking of the family game of “White Boy in the Middle” (“Alabama Fire Ants”), in which he ruminates on his realization of how “somehow if given the chance, the oppressed will always become the oppressor” (44), or his own conflicted relationship to hair and stereotypes (“Thoughts on Hair”), a confession that ends with the self-description of “an actor on stage—guilty of this appropriation—guilty of gainfully being racially ambiguous” (96), Loeb displays both a vulnerability and a self-accountability that is rare, separately and especially together, in a genre that is prone, too often, to a writing of the self which forgets to look inward. In showing his readers his own complicity in the cultural issues he is calling into question, Loeb also forges an emotional bond with his audience; I came away from The In-Betweens feeling as if I had known its author my entire life, a rare feat for any writer, no matter which mode or genre they are writing in or responding to.

But I want to stay here for a moment, to let this linger, to relish it, if only to continue showing how Loeb subverts the genre he is indeed working in, if not also working against. “But I didn’t know what to believe about Richard Downey,” Loeb begins, in a final essay aptly titled “Retirement.” “I had heard so many stories. It becomes a problem when we narrate other peoples’ lives; there’s a misconception of what we think we know and the actual very real story of someone’s life” (184). By relating another second-hand account, while troubling the very nature of relation, of passing along stories that destroy us, yet also sustain us, Loeb complicates storytelling itself; the failure of stories to add up to a life. Much earlier, when he imagines “My Mother’s Mother,” Loeb is quick to intervene in his own narrative, if only to remind himself, and then us: “Then again, that’s just one chapter in this story, one narrative that belongs to a part of her, but not all of her. And it’s important for me to tell you that her life is not to be defined by all that struggle. That there was a beauty in her body and skin before it was bent and broken and blackened—that her skin was just skin before” (12).

As I read this startling debut, which does work “somewhere between telling history and taking on history” (182), as its own author writes elsewhere, to describe another teacher’s instruction, I am reminded of the importance of oral history in recognizing and thereby preserving personal histories so that they might be shared, and in being shared, so that they might validate multiple histories, which is to say, multiple lived experiences, multiple versions of the world as we know it, in an effort to breakdown the singular or authorized dominant account—the as we know it that so often goes unquestioned. “I had to keep my façade that none of this ever bothered me. That I was a participant to learning like everyone else, and not the thing that was being learnt” (86), Loeb writes, in “But I Am Not Toby,” a powerful response to the tokenism of learning Black history once a year, but also the internal struggle with becoming the sole representative of all black experience; the trap of representation in a cultural branding of “diversity” absent a true engagement with difference.

This form of sharing and re-sharing, of passing down, of inheriting and re-distributing has obvious social and political implications, but it also speaks to what might otherwise go unspoken, the trauma that so often results in self-silencing. So much of this book reads like a series of parables, and this is exactly why: Loeb recognizes our own failure—as a people, as a culture—to see beyond our own limited scope of imagination. Who cares if it’s true, as in the delightful and heartbreaking rendition of “On Some Things, I Wish We Did,” so long as these stories become true, and thereby become instructive, to us. When Loeb relates an anecdote about an eighth-grade wax museum project (“O.J. and the Wax Museum”)—“My brother could have been Bill Gates. He always liked computers; we had an IBM. […] Would he have to paint his skin, part his hair, change the inflection of his voice? […] It was all make-believe anyway. And when we tell kids to make-believe, we want them to imagine—to explore the possibilities—or do we really mean to be exactly who you are, what you are” (71-72)—we are meant to take him at his word.

—

Chris Campanioni’s new book, the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019), re-enacts the language of the Internet as literary installations. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He runs PANK and PANK Books, edits At Large Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latinx literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.

www.chriscampanioni.com

Beautiful Ashes: Dario DiBattista

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Presented by Jen Michalski, for PANK. For a description of this guest series, click here.
 
“On Selling the Past”
 

I’ve only stared down a rifle once. A Chinese model SKS, equipped with a fold out bayonet. Not that it mattered with the originally Soviet-designed weapon, but it looked clean enough. No doubt, when the trigger was pulled, the cycle of operations of firing would perform as intended, and my life would end.

Time stopped as I glanced into the black hole of the barrel: that warped darkness no one knows until they come upon it; the shadow area that’s unexplainable in the physical world; the place of the moment of no return.

I knew because I had armed it, the chamber of the assault rifle was locked and loaded, ready to go. Just one bullet. One shot, one kill. I tried to stare at the tip of the 7.62 mm bullet encased in the brass shell, but I couldn’t see down into the barrel that far. Still clutching the hand guards, I raised the weapon to point it directly at my skull. I wondered if I could use this killing instrument to blow out the images of the pain I didn’t want anymore. When I pulled the trigger with my toe, would they splatter behind me like scenes from a projector screen?

Would the vindictive scowl of the woman who shredded my heart smile onto the white wall of my apartment bedroom? Would the images of flag-draped coffins and the ghosts of my murdered friends salute the red and white stripes? Would the EMTs be able to watch the blackout memories of a year of self-destruction arrange themselves as rows of liquor bottles like Arlington headstones glistening against a scarlet sunset?

Or would my memories stick like putty, pasted in place only as globs of spongy brain matter with cascading blood leaking down to the carpet?

Would anyone care either way? No one, I guessed, would want to see the inside of my head.

But I pressed the cold metal against my forehead anyway.

***

A bunch of my friends and I all joined the Marine Corps after high school. Many of them have since become cops. Apparently it’s the only civilian job that equates to the experiences of military service. I’ve asked them and several other law enforcement officers in Maryland about the proper way to travel with a rifle, and none of them have seemed to know exactly what the law forbids. So I slammed my rifle – wrapped inside a fifty-five-gallon trash bag – into the large trunk of my overused and under-repaired Lincoln as I prepared to go.

It was a bright sunny day in July when I entered my vehicle and followed my GPS to Bel Air Gun Supply and Pawn off of Route 1 in northeastern Maryland. Before closing the trunk and leaving, I had walked the gun out in the oppressive daylight, in full view of a cul-de-sac of judgmental luxury townhomes (I was living cheaply in a friend’s basement). I was headed out to sell off the memento of my almost self-murder.

I could not afford to raise my fuel costs by using the AC, so I lowered all the windows as I sped along towards the shop. An unceasing whistle of wind that was being funneled into the trunk, screeched like a boiling teapot. I turned loud music even louder and nervously rolled my fingers along the steering wheel. Sweat pooled under my armpits and lower back. The digital thermometer on my dashboard read 108 degrees. No, that couldn’t be right.

I had gambled big this summer. With the semester over and the rest of my writing program living it up at a conference in Florence – a trip, despite its connections to my Italian heritage, I might never be able to afford – I had to find work. No school meant no student loans or G.I. Bill living stipends showing up in my mailbox as fat monthly checks. I had betted that I could make a living as an artist, prostituting my struggles, making art of the trauma of life after war, for a nonprofit website called Not Alone.

Yes, they said, we have been wanting to work with you more! What ideas do you have? Upon my suggestions, I made them a documentary and created a magazine for returning veteran college students. But the freelancing money wasn’t really enough. And it didn’t show up in time for my bills.

I had already sold my elliptical machine to pay for rent this month. And now the utilities were due.

So I drove ahead on my mission: on selling the past.

***

It was a random online photo of my ex, Lauren (a comment she left on a friend’s Myspace page that showed her new look), that had brought me to this moment. Damn her beauty. Firey red hair like the sun dipping into a sea. The face of a polish princess: digitally-enhanced in its beauty, a stunning attractiveness both devastating and unobtainable. Her image already haunted me everywhere I went, so I tried to banish her from my mind and not look at old photos. But this picture on my PC stood out like a muzzle flash in the dead of night. It called to me as the siren of my suicide. Damn my failures. Fuck my deficiencies. I locked the door as my roommate drank alone and numbed her mind with late-night cartoons in the living room, the TV screen flashing against her darkened form.

I had met Lauren at Chili’s in between my deployments to Iraq. Ours was an age-old restaurant tale: the hot young hostess and the edgy waiter.

Our romance sparked quickly. I would take her home from work sometimes and park my car along quiet forest-side roads. We’d hop in the backseat and grab and grope each other. She liked to bite my shoulders and claw my back. Against my sexual motions, she’d arch her back like some glorious roman monument, our wild breathing syncopating the passion. Concealed by a smokescreen of condensation, she’d curl into me when we’d finish. I would stare at her and she would stare at me and we would say nothing. With her head in my chest, rising with my pulse, my arms around her, I felt as blessed as the richest king.

When I went back to Iraq a few months after meeting her, she wrote me daily and drew me pictures. She scribbled hearts under her name and marked the envelopes with lipstick. I loved her then and she loved me. But when I returned home I became an ugly person – filled with rage and sorrow, prone to excessive self-medication. I had morphed into a manic man I couldn’t control. I scared her away, and she hated me for it still.

Lauren used to dye her hair red for me because I called her my cinnamon girl. Now, I believed, she had only changed her hair back to that color to spite me. She did it to show me how happy and confident she was. To brag about her beauty. To make me feel hideous. To cause me to feel chest-aching guilt and regret. To impress upon me the notion of self-murder.

Just quit, you pathetic motherfucker. You’re worthless.

If just a photo of her could ruin me, how could I ever hope to live for any future? I’d have more moments like this one: a content and daily self-destruction punctuated by moments of thundering despair. She’d appear again somehow. She always did. Usually in my dreams.

If I didn’t pull the trigger, I knew I would have to later.

Do it, you piece of shit. Do it.

***

I parked in front of the small shop on a narrow strip along the main road. Construction leftovers decorated the open area adjacent to the store: pallets of cinder blocks, wood scraps, and piles of thin gravel. I popped open the trunk and grabbed my rifle. The procedures for going inside were somewhat complicated: stand in front of the caged door and hold the buzzer – wait – then pull the door hard.

Upon entering, I observed the store’s selection out of curiosity. Because of the Corps, I’ll always have an affinity and fondness for things that can kill. Minus a small table of random football memorabilia – a signed helmet by Ravens’ linebacker Ray Lewis, and other football gear – it seemed like a typical gun store: deer heads and other taxidermied animals on the wood support beams; cardboard boxes overflowing with holsters and ammo belts; rows of rifles along the walls behind a long display case of hundreds of pistols. Dozens of bumper stickers stuck on a large gray cabinet. One was emblazoned with the Eagle Globe and Anchor of the United States Marines. In bold, black letters it declared: “To err is human. To forgive is divine. Neither is Marine Corps policy.”

“Can I help you?” asked a short blonde woman in her mid-forties behind the counter. She wore light jeans and a tight blue t-shirt, a pistol attached to a cartridge belt looped around her waist. She looked like the kind of girl who could out-drink you and, while still wasted, shoot a gnat’s ass from two hundred meters away.

I placed the trash bag on the counter. “Yes, please. I want to sell my rifle,” I replied, pulling it out of the plastic. “A Chinese SKS.”

“You don’t see many of those models; where’d you get it?”

I just wanted to get rid of the fucking thing. “Another store in Parkville. Long ago.”

“How much you want for it?”

“One hundred,” I replied quickly, as I had thought about that number for the entire trip.

“Give me a sec, hon,” she said, grabbing the rifle to inspect it. “I think we can do that.”

I waited for a long time. She broke down the rifle partially and shone a light through the barrel. And she traced a finger along the inside of the chamber.

“I haven’t taken care of it, but I know those things really don’t need to be clean,” I said anxiously as she methodically checked the weapon. Marine Corps lore is filled with stories of this same kind of rifle working without jamming in Vietnam after lying in the mud or being buried for years. We were taught to respect the enemy’s weapons.

“Eighty bucks,” she said suddenly.

I had hoped to have enough for a week or two of Taco Bell bargains. But, my share of the utilities was seventy-five dollars. “Done,” I replied, happy to get anything. I detached the tan-colored sling, which was the same one I used for my M16 rifle in Iraq.

“I got too many of these damn things,” she said about the type of rifle, “but I like the bayonet,” she finished. Unlike the easily found Yugoslavia models of SKS, the Chinese SKS was unique because of its triangle-shaped blade that causes a wound that is meant to be infectious and hard to patch up.

I wondered how many rifles she purchased that had been used in death, or were once primed for the moment of the kill.

I was at the bottom again, this time financially. But thankfully I could now sustain myself for one more month. I had at least one more month to try to reach my dreams.

I didn’t shoot because I had seen at my friend’s funeral a year earlier what a war death can do to a mom. I stared into her vacant eyes that were devoid of feeling and tried to express an appropriate sympathy for the passing of her son. But there was no comfort for her. And there was no comfort for me.

I thought about how my mother would look at my funeral. In the black hole of the end of my rifle’s barrel, all I could see was her face, wearing a darker torment I reasoned, than my broken heart and poor mental health. They say nothing is worse than burying your kids.
I didn’t shoot but that didn’t mean that I was well. I decided I still wanted to die, but I would let the war do it for me. Several months later, I was stricken with mono and strongly encouraged not to deploy a third time. I thought it was God making things clear for me.

Not uh, buddy. I still have work for you.

Though I would sell it too in pursuit of my dream if it had any value, I still keep the bullet. It’s stashed in a jar of objects that make up the story of my life. Inside it is a keepsake from every job I’ve ever worked, a note a girl gave me in high school, a volunteer wristband from every folk festival I’ve ever attended, a map of the Appalachian Trail, my old dog tags still wrapped in tape so they didn’t clink together while on patrol, other secret things. I want to show this jar to the woman I will marry one day.

I will want to show her how important my life is when measured against the bullet.

***
Dario DiBattista’s work has been featured in The Washingtonian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Connecticut Review, and many other places. Additionally, he’s been profiled in The New York Times and other places, and has been a commentator on National Public Radio. His editing projects include 20 Something Magazine, O-Dark-Thirty, and jmww. He’s seeking publication of his books Go Now, You Are Forgiven: A Memoir of Love, War, and Coming Home and The Contagion: A Novel.