Joey Cloudy online

chapter 9

TRAMP: Writers’ Block Ten Years Running

“It’s like a jungle sometimes

It makes me wonder

How I keep from going under.”

-Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five

Mona wasn’t a very prolific writer. Her output had been limited to a few very short, intense pieces since they began doing the poetry gig. The incident with her diary had done a real mind fuck on her, and where she had never had a problem writing whatever she thought as a child, after her mother read her diary, she had been unable to write. Even the simplest writing assignments at school, she could not complete without great difficulty. Every essay, book report, and term paper sent her into an unbearable panic as she agonized over every syllable as if she were penning the goddamned Gettysburg address or the Magna Carta.

Nathanial had long since given up on trying to help her, as his even speaking to her at these times usually resulted in her having a crying jag or screaming at him at the top of her lungs as she kicked the desk and pounded on whatever was in front of her, that usually being his keyboard, with her fist. If she did manage to finish a paper, it was inevitably turned in late. Although usually she would get too far behind, ditch school, then drop her classes at the last minute.

The only thing she had written lately was a poem titled ‘Prayer’ about sucking Gods “great big cock made of spirit.” it was a work of bravery and brilliance and that along with one of Trevor’s older, premedication, pre-chemical lobotomy, poems called ‘thump, thump, thump’ both of which had been the poems that really help Aaron break through and realize that you could say whatever the hell you wanted when you wrote a poem. Those two poems were the inspiration for his pornographically blasphemous opus ‘bew’. The first poem he wrote in his own voice. The first poem to ever get him banned. In a town as provincial as Dallas, you’re not a real poet until you write a poem that gets you banned from at least one poetry reading.

When asked how long he’d been writing during a recent appearance on a local cable access show, Aaron answered since December of 1999. Which is not a hundred percent true. You couldn’t simply sit down one day and within a year be writing the caliber of poetry that he was producing. It takes a well-developed mind decades spent in contemplation, an awareness of the self not achieved by most, keen powers of observation, a respectable knowledge of several philosophies, sciences, and a sense of history. None of those things are any guarantee that a person will be capable of producing great work. There are things such as luck, talent, desire, a work ethic, tenacity, integrity, and courage. The ability to grow and change. Aaron’s been writing all of his life; he just didn’t know that he was a writer.

The first poetry reading that Aaron ever attended was started by Mona and Pastor Chucky at the Paper Backs Plus, a used bookstore located in a no-mans-land between Lakewood, East Dallas, and Lower Greenville. It was raining steady sheets of cold water all day; it was December of 1999. Aaron and Chucky had previously met at Mona’s. They worked on press releases, flyers, with websites, and emails to come later.

The second meeting took place at Chuck’s garage apartment in Lakewood, where they drank lukewarm long, long-neck bottles of Lone Star beer and smoked a bunch of joints rolled in American flag papers. During the day, while Chucky and Aaron were at work, Mona overcame her natural shyness to phone and email the radio stations that would announce the event on the air for free. Those being community radio, public radio, and the classical radio stations, each had a literary events get free mention on the air policy.

Aaron printed up a few hundred copies of the flyers on the copy machine at work. Mona contacted the local newspapers to get the reading listed in the arts section of the Times-Herald and the Dallas Morning News. Chucky drove around town in his decade-old, faded-to-napals yellow Ford pickup until he eventually contacted a bookstore where he was given the ok by the old suburban hippy who owned the used bookstore to host the event on Sunday evenings.

The first night of the poetry reading and workshop was a disaster. It was raining hard all day and all night. No one showed up besides the three of them, Chucky, Mona, and Aaron, so Reverend Chucky ran over to a nearby bar and talked a few of his Lakewood drinking buddies into coming over to the bookstore so they wouldn’t lose heart.

A tall, doughy Mexican in kaki dockers and a pink Polo shirt, who seemed like he didn’t want anybody to know that he was, in fact, a Mexican, made up haikus all night. A half-drunk Irish catholic construction worker with a degree in English literature and a Texas A&M bumper sticker on his pickup truck read from Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Cat In The Hat’ or was it ‘Green Eggs And Ham’.

The next week, they put out even more flyers in restaurants, coffee shops, the library, bookstores, bus stops, and train stations. Aaron even passed out flyers to the girls he worked with at the gallery. The next week, the weather was good, at least there was no rain, and still no people. Reverend Chuck’s friends were all smokers and alcoholics, and while we brought a box of wine for the drinkers every week, there was nothing to do about the smoking. It was a bookstore after all.

Aaron headed downstairs to the bookstore and searched the poetry section to see if there was anybody there who might like to come to the reading. That’s when he ran into Trevor Dickson, an English major getting a degree in poetry, of course, at SMU. Trevor asked if the girl with the dark hair was at the reading. Aaron said yes, never realizing that the only reason he had come into the bookstore was because he had seen Mona standing out in front of the building before they went upstairs.

Trevor’s classmate Brandon Goodman is also a poetry major, the two of them being the reason that the school started the poetry program back up after nearly a decade-long hiatus. The school stopped offering a degree program in poetry shortly after Tim Siebel’s had graduated. The students who enrolled in the specialized program for English majors were so gloriously ignorant of the history of English literature in general and especially poetry.

Every single one of them were such embarrassingly bad writers that Mack Johnson informed the head of the English department that he would no longer teach the poetry course until he found someone worthy of teaching. That had been over a decade ago. Once Mack met Trevor Dickson and Brandon Goodman, who both had grown up with poetry. He reopened the poetry major class. Trevor’s schizophrenic mother, a ballet dancer by training, had even had an affair with Tim when he was a student.

As Mack remembered, those were some of Tim’s best poems back then. They smoldered on the page with an understated sensual urgency you never see in these new poets anymore. The majority of the kids didn’t know the meaning of the word subtlety, hell, most of them couldn’t even spell it, let alone use it correctly in a sentence. They were so ignorant that they thought the Dallas slam team winning the nationals was the peak of literary accomplishments.

Brandon Goodman had been friends with Trevor since he was grade school, although his parents had to move out of the Park Cities recently due to economic distress. He had benefited from attending one of the finest public school systems in the state. Like his best friend, he too had been a shy bookish child, who had even read the best of the Beats by junior high and kept a letter he received from that murderous old junky pedophile William S. Burroughs himself in a frame hanging over his secretary’s desk in his bedroom ever since he was thirteen years old.

Together, the two of them were the reason that Mack Jackson walked the corridors of one of the most notorious party schools in the nation with a little bounce in his step. This was better than a blow job for a passing grade or boning those tight assed little teaching assistants. These two boys were already great writers and devoted readers of poetry. It was good to be teaching poetry again. Granted, he had to let in more than just the two of them to justify the course, but it was worth the exquisite agony of reading all the radical lesbian feminist legions of Plath fanatics’ “Daddy” poems and abysmal “Proofrock” imitators in order to mentor these two young talents.

Brandon came with Trevor the next week, and the week after that, Trevor’s best friend Victor Manning/Reagan Reese, an engineering student who wrote short stories and social satire, came with another friend named Carl Richter. Chucky would occasionally bring a friend, but they were usually just local cranks like himself, weirdo’s and hacks who’d been around forever, not the stuff to start a revolution with. More revolting than revolutionary.

Aarons was handing out flyers everywhere he went, even leaving them at bus and train stations, as well as leaving small stacks on the bus and the train. He began to sneak them into the newspaper machines between the pages of the city’s papers. Some of the people he worked with began to show up at the readings. While the local literary scene was old news to Pastor Chucky and Mona, who had hung out with the local slam scene before, it was all very new and exciting to Aaron.

A month later, they were also hosting the Tuesday night open mic at Insomnia, a coffee shop in Deep Ellum. The previous host was a well-known, well-connected rapist whose modus operandi was to wait until one of these little poo butt heroin chic poetesses shot up, then, after she was on the nod, he’d climb his big fat old ass on top of them and get his rocks off while they were on cloud nine.

A few of the girls remembered being mounted and never returned to the poetry scene. Most were so fucked up on the drugs that a horse could have sodomized them and they wouldn’t have noticed. The few who had threatened to prosecute him didn’t get very far, a heroin addict from a middle-class family claiming a well-known local writer, who was the husband of a lawyer, wasn’t going to ever walk into a courtroom. Everyone on the slam team knew he was a rapist; they just didn’t care about that as much as they cared about holding on to their positions on the team and competing in the nationals.

Everybody knows Burroughs and Ginsberg were pedophiles; it’s just something that the writers around them overlooked because they were such humongous talents, and they didn’t want to be kicked out of the sycophant legions. But eventually the sex got in the way of the writing when Bobo Flusher attacked a poet for reading a poem titled “Prestidigitation; Wrist Fucked, Fist Fucked” that detailed the events of the evening Bobo and his wife double teamed a girl who was a close friend of Lazs. Bobo charged the stage, tackling Lazarus before he began to punch him in the face repeatedly while the poet, still holding the mic, continued to chant the refrain of his poem. “

Honey, that’s not my ring, that’s my watch.” “Nothing up my sleeve! Presto! NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T! fist FUCKED! FIST FUCKED!” The management was forced to ban Bobo from ever returning to the coffee shop. They didn’t want to do it. The fat bastard may have been a piece of shit rapist, but he packed the place on a Tuesday night, so rapist sprapist, he was good for business. So, it was little wonder that Chucky and Mona received a rather unenthusiastic welcome when they inquired as to whether or not Jester was interested in starting the Tuesday night Open Mic poetry reading again.

Jester leaned across the counter, his bony web covered elbows resting on the streaky glass counter, eyeballing Mona’s tits as he spoke.

I don’t know Mona, an unknown host on a weeknight ain’t much of a draw.

Take my word for it, he won’t be unknown for long.

Hey! Reverend, you know this guy?

Not in the biblical sense, but yes, I’ve met him socially. Is he as good as she thinks he is? He’s got something, but he’s very raw, new to poetry, an unrefined talent, yes. However, our girl here’s always had an eye for talent, ain’t she?

Yes, she may be right about this one. Her Pygmalion protégée certainly isn’t biding his time playing the faux bohemian, waiting on his inheritance, like the rest of these trust-fondled babies. He’s the real thing.

What do you think? Has he got any heat?

He’s gonna burn this shithole to the ground.

So, how many poems has he written “for Mona”? laughed Jester.

Mona, careful not to give away with her eyes that he’d offended her, buried her anger.

He doesn’t dedicate poems to her.

No shit? Now, I’m almost impressed. So, let me get this straight: he’s got no money, and he doesn’t dedicate his poems to our princess here. He must really have something, then, huh? Mona was insulted that he would think so little of her, that he would even think that she would be susceptible to such a corny sort of flattery.

He’s already running the Sunday night reading at the used bookstore Paperbacks Plus.

At least when that sorry son of a bitch Bobo was hosting, he could guarantee that all of those rootie poot assed slam team cunts and their coked up groupies would show up.

All of the slammers that have met him have asked him to join the team. They all seem to think that with him on the team that he could lead them to victory in the nationals. And all of the ex-slammers love him because he just doesn’t give a fuck.

You want me to turn the stage over to a nobody, based on nothing but your say-so. Jester laughed. I don’t know Mona. Plus, I gotta give this yahoo half a yard whether or not I make any profit that night or not, not to mention the free coffee for the performers.

Mona loved that expression “not to mention” because whatever it was that they were “not to mention” was always mentioned next. It was such a chicken shit way of talking. The irony made her smile a little.

I just don’t know about this.

Every time Jester said “I don’t know…” he would slide his hand over his crotch to adjust his package. They knew where this was going; he wanted to get his knob polished. Chucky sat nonchalantly at one of the small tables behind Mona, absentmindedly sipping his latté, reading the personals in the back half of the Observer, looking a little bored.

She didn’t really remember him, though he obviously remembered her. It had been almost ten years. Back then, he was just another jug-headed, redneck, fresh back from the Gulf War. Of course, this was before the neon blue Mohawk, the 26 facial piercings, the tattooed sleeves, the tongue piercing, the triple 000 aught gauge earplugs, the KISS boots, and the Jacobs Ladder. Back when Mona hustled, she was rarely in any position to study a trick’s face; blowjobs being her forte.

So, can we go into your office for a moment and discuss the details in private?

She smiled seductively, looking through the streaked glass of the pastry-filled display counter, eyeballing his leather-covered crotch, arching her brow. Jester grabbed the keys to the bathroom off the nail on the wall behind the counter, and they walked into the toilet together.

Three minutes and fourteen seconds later, they exited the bathroom. Mona now had a place for them to read their poetry on the strip and fifty bucks in her pocket. She walked behind the counter, reached into the cabinet, took one of the slices of key lime pie, she snagged a brown bottle of IBC root beer from the cooler on her way out without bothering to close the cooler’s sliding glass door. She couldn’t wait for Aaron to come by the apartment after work so she could tell him all about Insomnia. Reverend Chucky took a final gulp of his Latté before he followed Mona out the front door.

Within six months Mona and Aaron were attending a different poetry reading almost every night of the week; there was the Monday night Zen Sufi reading at the Cosmic Café, the Tuesday night workshop held every other week at the used bookstore before they went to weekly event at Insomnia, the open mic drum jam at the Coven; the site located in the same building where old Jack Ruby used to hang out with his Mob buddies before he clipped Oswald.

The first Saturday reading held at Half Priced Books, the monthly Barnes and Noble reading, as well as the readings at the Ice House, a Latino community outreach center in South Oak Cliff near Kessler Park, and the reading at the erotic art gallery in an artist commune held every other week, a few blocks southeast on off of Jefferson Blvd. Not counting the pinacol of venues, a feature reading at SMU’s Macfarlane auditorium and the most prestigious literary stage in the city, the McKinney Avenue Arts Center, aka the MAAC. Those venues were simply out of their league. Three years later, Aaron Rainer Moore would read his Magnum Opus at the MAAC.

-about the author JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.