Thank you for that introduction, Elizabeth.
That was a really flattering introduction.
I feel like I don't know how to follow that introduction of me.
So that kind of made me blush a little bit.
It was so nice.
I brought a few things, but I think
I'm going to read a short story, and I hope you like it.
So that's my goal.
[LAUGH] That's my secret goal.
And I just want to say thanks to everyone who came today.
I haven't been to Arizona in a long time,
and it's really good to see some familiar faces, and, of course,
I appreciate everybody else.
There are a lot of people here I don't know,
and I appreciate that you came too.
And there's Bob.
Hi.
How are you?
Good to see you.
It's really good to be back.
And there's a man here named Ed, who
is actually from Portland that I was surprised to see is here.
So it's kind of a treat to be in this area.
So this is a story called "Lady Liberty."
Am I too close to this?
Is that OK?
OK.
In the beer soaked corners of Los Amigos,
I found the regulars scattered at side tables and playing
pool.
But there was a new man too at the bar.
I tried to look away.
My eyes came back to him.
Warmed by an amber beer light, the rumples
of the man's white flounced shirt screamed secret history.
He could have bought that shirt at Forever 21,
had it handmade in Venice, or stolen it
from a Shakespeare Festival.
Who dresses in soot marked flounce?
Los Amigos is a dirty and dim place.
I like it, especially on a Sunday.
The bartender is this woman who I'd say works there
because she wants an excuse to be in a dive bar on her own
and in charge.
She wouldn't go in alone if she weren't working,
and she wouldn't stand behind that counter
and pour drinks without a pistol.
I'm American though, and American women
drink by themselves just fine.
The new man rested his feet in boots
on the wooden planks of the floor
with a confidence beyond that of anyone I'd ever met.
I said a timid, "Hola."
my Spanish was a revived high school
class I'd been making use of up and down Mexico.
He nodded, and said, "Sit."
His was a command.
He said it in English.
I climbed onto the tall chair he indicated.
The bartender had black hair bleached blonde
with long, dark roots.
Her shirt read, "Sonic Youth."
Her apron said, "No hay resacas si sigue bebiendo."
She held a pint glass in one thick hand, gave it a toss,
caught it again, and scoffed at my willingness.
I saw the roll of her eyes.
Everybody's jealous of Americans.
I wouldn't admit even to myself that maybe,
secretly I hoped I was the first to stand
in the light of this man's blousy charisma.
Maybe I was the first tourist traveling his path.
I'd met guys like that since high school,
overlooked, hot though in a way nobody else noticed.
He had a fleck of napkin caught in the growth
of his rough shave.
Who else would see the charm of a man with lint on his face?
It was like I'd found a steal in a goodwill bargain bin.
This was in Guanajuato, which is to say,
officially, Estado Libre y Soberano de Guanajuato,
but nobody used that name.
Nobody used names much at all, not my name, anyway.
So it surprised me then when he asked what my name was.
"Maria de Socorro., Maria of help," I said.
Of aid, of relief, of succor.
Or sucker.
Maybe.
Where we sat wasn't his country and it wasn't my country.
It was a good bar with cold beer and no police at the moment.
We were travelers together.
The map of wrinkles around his eyes was familiar as family.
I said, "I've seen you before."
He said, "Sure.
Picture the evening news."
He made a gesture as though slicing himself
in half at the waist.
"Historic uprising."
He made the quotation marks sign with one hand
around those words.
I said, "What's that?"
He didn't look like a newscaster.
"I'm very 'televisual," he said, and made the quotation mark
again with one curled hand.
"Telegenic, according to Newsweek."
His accent was decorative, and didn't
interfere with his English.
That's when he told me he was not a newscaster,
he was the news.
He gave me the rundown.
He said There was a little revolution.
And he blew through his narrow lips,
making a dismissive sound.
He lifted his beer and its sweating bottle
and tipped it, then drank.
He added, "Kicked out.
After all I did for that country."
So he'd lost control of a whole country,
sure as a car skidding down an embankment.
"I am now," he said, "a deposed dictator."
And my knees went wobbly, my spine hot.
The baddest of bad boys.
Yes, I have a weakness.
He smiled, and turned to me, and his lips were very red
for a man's.
He was Freddie Mercury.
So Freddie Mercury was alive and in Mexico.
Freddie Mercury had been, once upon a time,
his own historic uprising, now deposed.
I swallowed, and asked, "You were in Queen?"
He said, "Queens?
No.
I stay out of the US.
I have a cousin there, though."
So he wasn't Freddie Mercury, and his name
wasn't Charles Taylor.
It wasn't Manuel Noriega, the pineapple.
It wasn't Maximiano, Mustafa, Rafael, Idi, or Raoul.
He was not Muammar, and not Hosni.
That's all I can say.
His name is confidential.
He said, "These days, I'm a shit magnet."
So what did that make me?
I refused to take that personally.
He was hurt.
He was a man who needed a country,
and I was a woman who needed a man.
I'd be his country.
He'd be my dictator.
I saw our future unfold like a history book.
He looked at my feet.
He said, "Are those Israeli?"
My sandals he meant.
I felt right away the need to stay neutral yet engaged.
What was his relationship to Israel, pro or anti?
The Gaza strip was in need of medication, that's all I knew.
And my mind blanked.
I lifted a foot, where I sat on the bar's high chair,
and pulled my foot up until I could
see the bottom of the sole.
I looked for a brand.
There was the worn tread of walking in a foreign country.
A bottle cap surprised me, rammed into the high wedge
heels.
They were a comfort-stride cork.
I could run in them when I had to, and still go out dancing.
They were party shoes, of no particular political party.
He reached over and pried the beer cap from my cork sole.
When it fell, it was a soft tap and rattle
against the wood floor.
His was a sweet gesture.
He rubbed his fingers together to dust off grime,
and shook out his dark curls.
He said, "What do you know about revolution, except for movies?"
I said, "And books."
The words came out small, and thin,
and so I offered what my high school English teacher
called supporting details.
"Castro learned about revolution from Hemingway
in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
He learned how a small contingent
can overthrow a ruling party."
I nodded as though back in class,
as though I hadn't given up on school a long time ago.
And his nod was slow, and qualified by doubt,
but he turned to where his jacket hung
on the back of his chair.
He took a reporter's notebook from a pocket, found a pen
and wrote it down.
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
There it was.
I'd helped a dictator.
[LAUGHTER]
He read his own words over again.
He scribbled something else below the words,
and I let him write because a good woman knows when
to stay out of a man's way.
And it was too fast beers before I got my courage up, and asked,
"War crimes?"
When you fall in love, you have to know dark things.
And I was falling.
He laughed, warming to me.
He put down his pen, and said, "War crimes is a metaphor.
People who haven't been there never understand."
And he spit over his shoulder onto the wooden floor
so I spit over my shoulder too, only more discreetly and away
from him, practicing.
I wanted to know how it felt to spit on the floor.
But my spit landed on the back of my denim jacket.
[LAUGHTER]
And I wiped it with my palm, and felt my face go hot,
and thought I would practice next time at home.
So this man was my teacher, my father, my rock and roll crush.
He ruffled my hair and said, "Some day, little one, maybe
you'll manage your own country, and you'll move beyond books.
Then you'll understand war crimes."
How did he know?
Yes, I wanted power.
I loved the very thought of it.
But my power would come by association.
My power would come by giving in to his.
And the bartender put a finger in my beer bottle
as she reached to take it away.
She wagged her finger, the bottle dancing, and asked,
"Más?"
She did that on purpose.
There was still a good swig in the bottom of the bottle,
but her fingers on the lip?
Her finger inside it?
It was practically gynecological.
[LAUGHTER]
No thanks.
She waited to see if we'd order more.
I waited to see if he'd buy.
He put his pen and notebook away.
He said, "I'm broke.
The military budget is over."
Didn't they get a severance package?
So I pulled out a Visa card from my tiny purse,
and laid it on the worn wood of that bar top.
And the bartender looked with a steady gaze
that conveyed so clearly her words, are you joking?
She didn't even have to say it out loud.
The flair of her nostrils told me all.
There was no credit here.
I lived on credit.
So she uncooked her finger to drop the bottle
in the vat of empties.
I said, "My credit is great."
I'd maxed out so many times, they raised my limits.
Back in the States, I could buy a whole mall.
The dictator said, "Give Miss America her credit."
His words were a slur.
The bartender put a hand under the counter.
Did she reach for her soda or the pistol?
Either way, negotiations over.
So I reached and lifted the spot of napkin
from the rough cut of my drinking man's beard-growth,
and tossed it on the floor, a speck.
I said, "Let me walk you home."
He laughed, and I thought he laughed at me.
Walk a dictator home?
But no, he pushed against the bar's counter
and climbed off his tall chair.
"Adios, Los Amigos," he said to the bar.
So he'd leave with me.
The bartender leaned against the wall
and dried a glass with a rag.
And my heart picked up.
He was wobbly.
He needed me.
I was his support.
I pushed against the heavy wooden door until it opened,
and he stumbled.
The floor was uneven.
Outside, a small dog ran up to our ankles.
My dictator said, "There you are, Little Lick."
He crouched in both his knees crackled at once.
His jeans were rock and roll snug.
The dog gave my dictator long-tongued kisses
all over his face, and the dictator closed his eyes
and let it happen.
And he smiled, and he said, "We call him Liechtenstein
because he's so very small."
[LAUGHTER]
Then he stood and kicked the dog.
He didn't kick it exactly, but gave it a good, solid push
with one booted foot.
And he pushed the dog this way, then
he pushed the dog that way as we walked.
And the dog ran ahead and came back for more.
And the dog loved it.
It ran at my man's side with its tongue out.
That dog was in love.
That dog was proof.
This man was lovable.
He was kind, even in his gentle kicks of military combat.
And he murmured, "Are they following us?"
The night was dark.
The Sunday streets empty.
There's nobody.
There was nobody except old men smoking.
My dictator saw them and turned down a narrow alley.
"Quick," he said.
Is it wise to go down a narrow alley with a drunk and paranoid
deposed dictator?
This was new terrain, but I was an adventurer,
a student of no school, giving myself credit
for any experience at all.
And he knew the alleys.
I followed like the dog at our feet.
My currency was my body, and I'd spend it how I liked.
Why not?
But the dog moved under the dictator's feet too fast,
and the man stumbled over Liechtenstein.
He might have fallen except I stepped in so close,
and put my shoulder under his arm, his arm around me,
and he didn't hit the ground.
And I wobbled in my possibly-Israeli heels.
I said, "Sir, I will be your human shield."
He said, "Let a falling dictator fall," because he was drunk
and in a blue mood.
And I said, "I have a better plan."
He said, "Miss America has a plan."
He liked it, if he liked anything.
I unbuttoned his pants.
I slid the zipper down.
In the back alley, I released the scent
that is what it means to get to know a man.
There's nothing like that moment, his cock unwrapped
for the first time.
He was sweaty.
He'd had long days.
I slid my hand down the line of fur that was his hair,
and he leaned back against the cracked wall of a building.
When my fingers reached lower, and what I found,
he was soft, not hard.
He said, "Human shield, I'm no threat to anyone these days."
I said, "Hush, hush.
It's the booze.
I can erect you."
I said it like he was a statue, or a sculpture,
or a building on the verge of collapse.
He said, "It's the decline of civilization."
That's what he wanted to hear, civilization there in his cock.
I tried again with a politico sweet talk.
I said, "The dollar is still strong."
He said, "Your dollar, propped up by foreign interests."
I had his foreign interest covered.
I said, "I'm interested, Mr. Fahrenheit.
Let's go to your place."
And I tugged his pants closed, and we walked stumbling steps
together in the alley, his arm over my shoulders.
And he said, "We can't wake my mom."
[LAUGHTER]
I said, "Your mom lives with you?"
He said, "It's only temporary until the country lets me in."
He seemed to grow smaller right there at my side.
So where was my danger zone, my adventure?
I'd actually dated this man before.
I'd loved men like this before, and I wouldn't give up.
So we kissed then, long and damp in the alley.
I kissed my dictator.
He stumbled backward and tripped on boards piled there.
Lichtenstein was underfoot, and the dog
yapped as the man went down.
And I went down too, one hand to his head, holding him close.
And we sprawled on the bricks and packed earth.
And he said, "Miss America, it's too late."
And I lay on top of him, laced my fingers
through his black and gray curls,
and said, "No hay resacas si sigue bebiendo."
It was from the bartendress's apron.
There are no hangovers if we keep drinking.
The only way out was forward.
"You'll find a new country."
And I licked his face, and his stubble
was rough under my tongue.
And Lichtenstein joined in the mix,
and ran his tongue over my dictator's cheek.
And I said, "I'll be a dictator's wife.
You'll be my commander."
Our future was delicious, and it was so clear.
I said, "I'll look great at your side."
"That you would," he agreed.
And I had this vision.
We'd climb the political ladder.
I'd channel my repressed drives into conspicuous consumption
as a beacon of hope.
Maybe I'd buy shoes, like Imelda Marcos.
I'd moved so far beyond my possibly-Israeli sandals.
I'd write magazine articles and politically-induced monogamy.
And why not?
That's a fine housewife hobby.
But shadows fell across us, a flicker in dim light,
and somebody passed at the mouth of the alley.
He said, "We could both be killed."
I whispered, "In grade school, a boy choked on Jell-o.
Death is that common."
[LAUGHTER]
"We can have the world."
He said, "We have the world.
This is it."
And his fingernails were dirty as he
traced a line over packed dirt between bricks.
My dictator's head rested on a stack of boards.
A rusted nail poked through one plank.
"Young Lady Liberty, my Miss America, you're
much too young to remember Rome.
But here we are, the fall of Empire.
And this one is yours."
Look at this.
I offered my best party trick and hoisted my skirt.
I slid my underwear down, and peed against the wall.
I peed like a man.
I have good muscles.
My urine, that hot human truth, drew a slim dark river
over old bricks.
I raised the hand that wasn't lifting my skirt.
I raised it like the Statue of Liberty,
as though holding a burning torch.
"Give me your poor, your huddled asses."
[LAUGHTER]
He said, "Really?
And what would you do with them?"
I laughed out loud.
I was Lady Liberty, and I was Maria de Socorro,
there to help.
I said, "I don't know, but you're mine.
What we have, my dictator, my war machine, what we have,
you and me, is grand.
Where can we go?"
He said, "My mom's cool with it."
[LAUGHTER]
But I had bigger plans.
The earth between bricks was so dry it was like fired pottery.
The rivulet of my urine took the shape of Florida.
I said, "Florida!" and pointed.
Our future?
My deposed dictator half sat up to see what I saw.
Would Florida welcome us?
But by the time he looked, the spot
has had morphed so it's ragged edge expanded.
"Zimbabwe," he said, with less enthusiasm.
[LAUGHTER]
But our future wasn't finished finding its shape.
There was South Sudan, then Costa Rica, then
Venezuela clear as day.
Stop!
I thought.
I hope for Venezuela, and held my breath.
It was like a roulette table in that way,
but the mark kept moving.
And a silhouette blocked the mouth of the alley.
Enemy or wanderer?
The streetlight came back to the alley,
the interloper had moved on.
My dictator extended a single finger, stretched his arm,
and reached.
He touched my urine.
It was an intimate move, and it was dirty.
He drew a complicated, jagged line,
a country I couldn't recognize.
I said, "Las Vegas?"
[LAUGHTER]
"Congo."
His sly smile offered a challenge.
The Congo?
Perhaps the worst place on earth to be female.
At least in the top five.
Clearly, our relationship was suffering
from a cultural difference, or his lousy childhood,
or my failure to communicate.
I ran my hand over his drawing, put my fingers in my own urine,
tried to change his mind.
"This is what you've done to me," I said.
Yes, I even tried guilt as I surrendered to his influence.
He said, "Wait here."
And I rested my head on the board, closed my eyes,
and waited under that moonless sky.
In our future together, I'd sign my name Lady Liberty,
as he christened me.
And he'd come back with an apology,
and we'd forget about the Congo.
He couldn't possibly mean it.
And I heard his feet over loose stones.
My head was throbbing.
I listened to the lullaby of street sounds.
I heard actual music like a bar in the distance, perhaps
our bar, and the alley grew so quiet.
When I sat up, nobody was there.
I walked to the end of the alley,
and called my man's name, but he'd disappeared.
I called, "Dictator?
Honey?
Sweet pea?"
And my voice cracked with the smoke and booze.
"We can try Congo."
[LAUGHTER]
I offered, ready to make concessions.
But I spoke to the dark.
I knew, already, I was on my own.
The world was one big political party,
and I, American in body and spirit,
healthy, debauched and dedicated to travel, had no date.
I felt a simmering discontent.
What was the use of the currency of my body
if I couldn't spend it?
So I left the alley, and headed back
toward smoke-filled rooms where I'd find another entrenched
leader, a dictator, an accomplice, my shill,
deep in the next dark bar.
That's it.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]