Karaoke Night At the Old Ships Mate

Its always desperate at this time of night, right before the start of the singing, when the host is drumming up support for what purports to be an evening filled with laudable yet irritating renditions of secretarian standards.

She's pleasantly elegant, almost out of place at the Ship's Mate. It's like a transplant from England, only its in Multomah Village, the floors have been stripped bare from the asbestos removal, but a few Louis and Clark students call it home, and the faculty meets here a few times each month to kvetch about improper renderings of narratives, mull over implausible plot lines, and bitch about insipid prose.

The bar staff is comforting in its brusqueness, warm in the way only family can get away with being that rude.
Dr. Pauley is the first one up, and soon after the aggressive chord changes of "American Idiot" is piped over the incapable soundsystem, her shoes come off, bright silver buckles kicked off, sliding underneath the skeletal pool tables.

Dr. Pauley does a faithful job, cackling in between verses. There's a face she holds, if just for a moment that speaks volumes.
"I'm up here, and this song for me, is not only a stab at the current administration, but for this cathartic moment that can only come after a hectic week. On Friday I can meet my colleagues, kick off my bright silver buckles, and thrash wholeheartedly to a song many of my students play as they consult their MLA manuals and try to find an outlet for the currents of electricity surging through their fevered minds.

Or maybe I say that. Because when she looks at me that way. And because I'm on my third I falsely interpret this as a come on, even though its not, its her getting lost in the moment, having a laugh, so for a moment she can forget about the fact that she continually undermines her desire to break out on her own, move out to the Andes, hiking and wandering amongst the old Mayan ruins.

She doesn't want to be in a sunless room, going over the finer points of Bartholemy to students so assuredly convinced of their own brilliance that they cant see passed the fact that life is always transparent, always has been. Anyone can put thoughts to paper. But Dr. Pauley, when she writes (I know because I've snuck into her study at dinner parties, in between lulls of conversation, while I'm supposed to be in the bathroom.) she conjures up the primitive yearnings in nature, connects the primordial energy into something more palpable. It's abstract, serious and deathly funny.

The song ends and with it the radiance the stage took while she occupied it. I'm realizing the feelings I have for her, and I have to step out of this realm for a moment, going down the street, looking at the glimmering reflection of the frost on the road.

Its like standing in the middle of an old coastal village, weather-beaten and impromptu. No matter what time of year I stand here, I always feel like I'm the only one alive, at the end of a long raw patch of land, waiting for the moon to carry me away.

She's standing behind me. I can feel her breath behind me, and the warm laugh that's about to come rolling out of her.

"Couldn't stand the singing?"

I turn around and envelop her, standing with arms around each other, we embrace and sink into a plush kiss. We both know we can't do this, Her husband seated in front of a bowl of mixed nuts one hundred feet away, and yet the racing of my heart, its pounding out all the thoughts that tell me otherwise. To run away, to stop now before it turns into something ugly. Stop and just savor the moment when it was all subtlety and innuendo.

But I cant. The longer we stand there, the more I'm keenly aware that her husband could walk out at any second. For me, the risk is comparatively minimal. I'm divorced. She is still married.

We stand there, submerged under the spell of the Multnomah Village moon, wondering when the moment will end, and we'll be back to watching the other faculty members sing lonely Neil Diamond covers.

It might be our last chance, if we didn't know any better.

Charlie Rose and the Dreams of Narcissus

On my couch the other night watching another chat show on PBS, I noticed something. Beyond the instant recognition of the subject matter, I detected a distinct feeling that not only had I been here before, but that I was somehow a part of the show I was watching.

I'm being interviewed on Charlie Rose for my latest movie, noted for the candidness in which I approached the rather delicate subject matter of the increasing role of the underclass in America. I somehow managed to convince the right person that I was interesting enough to at least pique the interest of a bonafide psychopath. Have you seen the Charlie Rose Show lately, do you know how off putting he can be?

He failed to ask me how the underclass somehow referred directly to my boyhood experiences of having milk sprayed into my face by way of a twisty straw, or how the underclass in America, and the way it was being misrepresented was actually represented in my film by my lack of appearance on any Homecoming Court roster at my High School.


None of these examples seemed to face Charlie at all, and I nervously sipped my water while he delicately praised me for "Addressing the elephant in the room", even though the real elephant in the room was how I had revealed all sorts of embarrassing information about my childhood in a ham-handed documentary that was turned down at the Hackensack Film Festival.

But back to my dream. It is a dream of course, how often could I expect to appear on the Charlie Rose show in real life? I'm sitting in the leather chair that makes up the set that hasn't changed since 1978. The same austere round table, chair and nondescript menacing wood paneled background.

If I failed to mention this earlier I apologize. I am naked, sitting in front of someone who not only does not take notice of my nudity, but does not expose me for the charade that I actually am.

"A scathing diatribe against the rampant consumerism of Western Culture in the 21st century, Alan Clarke's powerful documentary peels back the levels of hypocrisy and reveals to the audience the fraudulent double-standard perpetrated on the American underclass, the wedgie scene at the end of Act One, where did that come from?"

I can't hear my response. It's buried beneath canned laughter whose whereabouts are unknown.

Looking out into the window when I awake, I see the pattern of the figure and the ghostly after-affects of the swaying empty branches, reflecting movement that is now offscreen.

The white horse gallops through the barren woods, shaking off the cold. Steam emanates from its nostrils, reminding me of the smoke from the revolver the night before. There's a close-up of his head wound, lying in the swamp, staring up at me until the white is bleached out.

I lean over to the projector and switch it off, returning to my seat in Mr. Pauley's seventh-grade science class.

"Kevin, could you tell us why a fracture in the right femur, could be undectected, as a hairline fracture for up to several months?"

The light is still on me, projecting a shadow onto the white screen.

In it I can see Marlon Brando in The Wild One revving his motorcycle and daring anyone within an eyeshot to take in all that raw masculinity and ask him an Algebra question. The camera pushes in as he removes his sunglasses. He's demanding something. His gang stands behind him, sternly framed in the shot.

I'm in college watching a sixteen millimeter film at the Nikelodean theatre. My friends are setting fire to the seat in front of me, and the free jazz on screen moves in the same pattern as the cinematographer, who runs up and down staircases, through alleys, houses and streets.

My cat has been dyed white, and is parched. She laps up water faster than that of a canoer who must bail out his vessel before he swallowed up by the dark brime beneath him.

My wife doesn't seem to notice either when we pick her (the cat) up from our Turkish friends house. I know the real secret. That they've used her for some sort of ritual. Even though this makes no sense, and there's an inherent misunderstanding of cultures that I am keenly aware of. I can help but be a bit ashamed as I wake up to find the lower wall of my mouth tight, wired shut and swollen.

A shave is painful leaving my face splotchy and red. As I leave for work, stepping out of my house onto the icy steps, I can't help but notice the smell that the fire left when it finished consuming my entire block. It's the smell of burning tires, even though the rain has come in overnight, flooding the streets. Gondolas decked out in tar, sand paper and roofing tile traverse the vicsous streets teeming with squid, electric eels and lamprey.

The feeding is almost done when I arrive, ready to dive into the inky river, replete with glowing starfish.

Chicago,John Prine and Warm Bars

The street leading down to Joe’s place was iced over, to the point where traversing it was barely worth the effort, if not for the glowing warmth of the neon sign outside Joes place, well, I wouldn’t be here now.

Once Inside I could rub my hand across the smoky wood of the bar, and stare into the ancient mirror that seem to house as many lost souls and sacred demons as I did right now.

But that would be a few hours from now, where’d I be snug leaning against the bar, swaying to whatever tune would be on the jukebox: Something single, solitary and empowering, in a spiritual way that made me feel wonderfully happy to be sad and alone. It’s one of those single guy moments when you’re just glad to be alive, and someplace familiar.

But out on the street, walking across the ice was difficult. The ice came early this year, late October. The sky wore a jaundiced pallor, as the level of forbearance grew in each passing of subsequent panels of iced-over concrete like frosting on an unwanted birthday cake.

I thought about a lot on that trip to the bar. Firstly, the very fact that I was willing to traipse through all that ice and snow meant that I needed the comforting feeling of home that I wasn’t getting at home, currently a dilapidated hollow box of an apartment, slumming it on the eastern side of Chicago.

It was one of those moments where I wished I was in front of a piano, which always made more sense. My emotions could just run out on the ivories, launch out at all angles of the bar, reflected back at me from the stained cherry wood shelves that mounted the mirror, that drenched in the suffused smoke and warmth of the place.

The microphone felt squeamish the first time my lip accidentally grazed it, during that open mic night when I made the decision, right then and there that the piano and the succeeding series of bars that housed them, would be my traveling sense of home.

Throughout all the boroughs of Chicago, there wasn’t another place that gave me the same rush of emotions, even sitting at the bar alone, swaying to Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, John Prine, or whatever cracked soul leapt out of the fluorescent confines of the jukebox and wrapped my heart in adoration more than the whiskey that flowed through my blood.

But tonight on the way over to Joe’s, I found a locket, entombed in one inch of snow. A rosary encased in glass, with a fragrant picture of a woman I had once known. In the supermarkets, bars, back alleys or bookstore, at some point I had encountered her.

I may have even written a song about her. And as much as I tried to get it out of my mind, I couldn’t leave it behind without trying to free it from the icy confines of its captor.

I reached into my pocket, and placed my house key between the two knuckles of my right hand. I made numerous stabbing motions before I cracked it, freeing the locket from the ice with a swift kick of my boot heel.

I brushed off the snow and ice, and read the inscription on the back.

I had known her more than once, for a year when I first arrived. I had forgotten about her, until I caught the last letter of the engraving on the back.

Sam, with her curly brown hair, scrubbed the misery out of my brain like a healing brillo pad, taking out the cynicism, empowering my playing.

We didn’t last longer than two weeks, and since then I’d managed to completely forget about her.

I’m in the bar, staring into the locket, and crying salty tears into an empty glass, wondering where she is now, and if she's had any thoughts about me, and the song that lives somewhere between the remnants of our affair and the layers of ice on the east side of Chicago.

Lenny, Van and the Van Hundrith Brothers

He'd be a poet then, and let every note wring out the truth that befalls even the darkest Burgundy spill, though not as badly as a merlot.

He was hearing this conversation as he heard most things, seated elegently, poised between the iron sharp angles of the olive table cloth. It matched the sag in his hair, the way the bangs seemed to emulate the balancing act the table cloth played, as it settled into the beginnings of a raucous evening.

Seated at the bar were two old school chums,Robert Patrick Sullivan and Van Grady Sharboneau. Van had squandered his fathers fortune into a chain store empire of punk barbershops, and made a lot of money doing it, even if half of it did go off to pay the child support for the three kids sheltered away up at Hammond, until the first thaw came in, and the kids ran around the town touching their silvery moneyd elbows into the flatbush back alleys of rural Lordstown.

He thought about the squandering, Lenny did, and he sat as his childhood friends boasted and bragged of bedazzling sentimentality, weaving it thick like cotton candy on a the tepid edge of a blade.

His thoughts trailed off during these sessions, as he often did. He would slip away in the middle of dinner, while sitting at the Bistro on this February evening. His thoughts would turn to his own creative ideas, ones that only came to him after the third glass of merlot, after Van would spill his, and chuckle at the angle the waiter would attack the stain, with a dozen starched white napkins. Spread out like a bloody piece of oragami, they would get a big kick out of it, while Lenny sipped his and entertained thoughts of what he was going to do now that the divorce papers had been signed.

Hed be a poet, then if she'll have me and make the morning run into Anchorage, if Ihe could find his way back to Montana. He'd take the railroad and guitar and just get out. Play, move around, love women who struggle, make babies and live in a log cabin along the banks of a defrosted river, run warm with heat, love and the knowledge that awaits like the first frost that come and destroys all of yer crops.

But the voice changed, and Robert piped in.

Lenny regained composure, he was at his local, afterall. The first frost had arrived, and the daughters were home from school This was his chance to get out and see more, alone and free, moving though the long stretched cabins of the Combine train, sleek in the way it came out of the tunnel roaring at 85 mph.

Hed sit on the dining car composing sesistans while dreaming of bedding the single rich women of the gentry. They'd voyage down from Canada each winter. Too cold for the rich, theyd say over conversation.

But Lenny was still at the bar, listening to Van go on about how much hipsters would pay for a straight razor shave.