7th of this month, which is a Sunday afternoon, that
will be our contest awards reading in the University Art
Museum.
But there are several other readings which
I'd like to announce to you.
This Sunday night will be the regular Lamplight
Reading with Gloria Myers, Will Inman, and Randall Tease.
And next Wednesday night in this auditorium Writers at Work
will have their next reading--
Nancy Mairs and Ann Cummins. Among Other Things
will be sponsoring a reading on March 12th.
That's a Saturday night.
And the reader is Charles Alexander.
At the end of spring break is the three-day Tucson Poetry
Festival.
And I brought a big stack of these newsletters
and put it out on the book table for you
which announces the times and places for all
of those readings because I know you can't
remember all of those things.
We have books on sale tonight.
And also Sonora Review has on sale their most recent issue
and back issues of that beautiful magazine.
Plus copies of Barbara Anderson's Junk City.
I love that title.
Junk City is Barbara's second book.
Her first book was a chapbook from Porch, wasn't it?
Porch Press called Ordinary Days.
And Junk City was Robert Pinsky's choice for the 1986
National Poetry Series award.
Barbara's been a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford.
She's received a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
And her work has appeared in many anthologies
and little magazines in addition to the two books.
She's teaching at the University this year,
teaching the composition.
In addition to her poetry she's also working on a novel.
Barbara was teasing me the other day,
and she said, I always say so and so comes to us from,
so Barbara comes to us from Stewart Street in Tucson.
And it's a great pleasure to introduce
Barbara Anderson to you.
[CLAPPING]
Well, my book, I was just scared by my own voice.
Actually I was getting kind of nervous
about this reading, the home game and all.
It's really easy to go in front of a bunch of strangers
and just be anybody or say anything.
And I was getting really nervous.
I was just coming out in the lobby coming in here to read
and I saw my son and he said--
I thought HE was going to maybe come to the reading
and he says, mom I need $5 because I want to go--
said, I want to go play to video games.
And that just shook me back to reality.
I'm going to begin by--
I guess about half the reading it's
going to be from Junk City, my book,
and the other half is going to be new poems.
The first poem is called The Coat.
I'll give just a little background on this.
It mentions Mad Magazine Upside Down Year, which was in 1961.
I remember going to buy Mad Magazine which
I bought every month.
And it said 1961, the Upside Down.
You could turn the magazine upside down
and still says 1961.
And it said it was the first upside down year since 1881
and there won't be another one since 6,009.
I remember just-- it just seems somehow imbued
with some kind of significance but I couldn't quite
figure it out then.
And this poem also mentions a New Year's Day
which was a big deal in our family
because my parents took us to Times Square
every New Year's Day in New York City.
For some reason we used to go these little cafeterias.
My father really was just fascinated with drag queens,
with people in drag and they were always in Times Square.
And after we ate dinner or lunch,
we used to follow them around for some reason.
The whole family, two middle aged parents and their kids.
That just vaguely mentions this one.
OK, The Coat.
The first time I noticed the blue on the white snow
was the day my father found a $20 bill on the way
to the subway and cautioned me.
I'm going to start that again.
I substituted my mother for my father.
I've always done that.
The first time I noticed the blue on the white snow
was the day my mother found a $20 bill on the way
to the subway and cautioned me to walk always
with my head to the ground if I ever expected to find anything
in this world for free.
It was the first day my father wore
the enormous brown overcoat, all he
had left of his dead brother.
The coat I was afraid of because I believed my father walked
everywhere like a ventriloquist, wisecracking
to his fat unfunny brother like they
always had on Sundays around the kitchen table
while my mother basted the chicken or peeled the potatoes.
It was New Year's day 1961, the upside down
year I turned over and over again
on the cover of Mad Magazine while my father got drunk
on the subway and joked and cried
for his brother, who he would never see again,
not for auld lang syne, not for all the coming emptiness
of 1961 which turns over and over like my uncle's
inscrutable riddle about the weight of gold or feathers
that I had to answer before he'd give me $1 or a chocolate kiss.
On the first day of 1961, my father cried on the subway
as my mother took the whole family
to see Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty fall
in love in a small town in Kansas
in a time my mother said she couldn't remember,
the brief good years before the Depression.
She was my age then, 13.
On January 1st 1961, it was so cold on the balcony
of the Loew's Valencia my mother allowed my father
to give me a sip of the brown liquor, and then another,
and another, as Natalie Wood ran hysterical from a classroom
after losing her first love and reading
a passage from Intimations of Immortality.
Words about loss and strength I memorized as the theater
went dark again and we all rode home,
a little drunk and silent.
And the artificial midnight lighting of the IRT
where I wrote my first poem.
And my mother counted her change like feathers or gold.
And my father fell asleep on her shoulder,
snoring, with his ghostly brown coat wrapped around them.
OK.
Next poem is called, There and Here.
Someone's lost and someone turns on the light.
In the middle of the night, the boy
rushes into his parents' room but they are not there.
Only the rustle of his mother's night
dress as she packs his father's shirts and books, binoculars,
and the paperweight faces of the old poets, magnified
under glass.
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman,
a gift from the woman they argued
about when his father returned home from a trip.
Thank you, the woman had written on the note with a hotel
letterhead.
His mother packs that away too and what
is hers in another carton and the child's in a third,
and the words, there and here, in thick black print on a line
tablet from the first year he learned to read.
His teacher wanted him to know the difference.
The distance from school to home from this morning to afternoon
when he fell asleep for so long he thought no one could find
him, until his mother took him out to feed the ducks
in the park.
Really she wanted to tell him that now he'll
have two homes, one here and the other there.
And her finger pointed away towards the mountains
on the other side of town.
There, in that direction.
He didn't cry and his mother bought
him metal soldiers with cannons that shot out
if you pulled the lever.
Soon they would be packed away or broken.
Isn't childhood really a form of insanity?
said said his mother's new friend.
And the night to come when he would sit with his father
and look down through the binoculars to the city lights,
a place that is neither here nor there.
The next poem is the title poem of the book, Junk City.
And it's written during a time when
I was a single parent and living up in Palo Alto
when I was at Stanford.
And one morning I was trying to write.
I had some free time and I was just
spend a day trying to write and it just wasn't working.
And my son kept on coming into my room
and asking a whole bunch of questions
and telling me that he had some really great to tell me.
That he and a friend had a plan and he
had a dream about this plan.
And I sent him away and tried to write
and he kept on coming back.
And finally I decided to listen because I wasn't doing anything
really.
And he told me this wonderful story and part of this poem
is from the story he told me.
He helped me write this in a sense.
I think that's why he's not here,
why he went to play video games, because it
talks about when he peed in his bed when he's seven.
Don't tell him I told you if you see him.
I'm sure he'll be back for the brownies.
Also since I used his title as a title poem for my book,
he said he wants some money from it
like I'm going to make a lot of money from this.
That's the first thing he said is, how much do I get of that?
The child speaks as a persona poem, Junk City.
This morning when I asked my mother why I pee in my sleep,
she said not to worry.
It's just a mystery.
It's not anything.
Just a mystery, like whether there's a God
or not, or whether people came from the ocean or not.
My dad believed something like that.
He lives in the desert and drinks red wine
and lets me sleep with him and we don't pee in our bed.
But my mother likes to sleep alone.
Sometimes I hear her praying through the walls
in a constant voice like she's saying the alphabet,
talking to herself like she's singing to a baby,
and she knows I hate babies.
Today at school, Greg and I were talking
about making a city of garbage, a kind of junk
city of rusted nails, bent paper clips, ripped up bushes
that no one wants.
Last night I had a dream about a scavenger hunt
in junk city where everything was dead
and we were looking for something alive,
like a walking screwdriver or a buffalo.
There were shoes starving of starvation,
a dinosaur could be alive and so could a broken chair,
but a kid could be dead.
It was like that.
It was raining hard outside and I kept on being thirsty.
But when I went back to sleep, I was in Junk City again
making something dead or alive whenever I wanted it.
I could be born in 1974, the real year.
Or the time that God made the first pterodactyls fly.
Junk City is so big it could cover the living room rug.
Buildings made out of tin foil catch on fire.
In one dream the first president's name
was Junk Washington and he put out
the fire in the other dream.
It was like that.
I got older and Greg got older.
Making Junk City so big, we started
building it under the ocean like a tunnel,
using all the ocean junk like tangled seaweed
and rotted shark's teeth, rusted jewels
from a pirate's treasure chest.
We made castles for eels and crowns
for mermaids out of junk rubies and junk diamonds.
It was so good that I tried so hard not to wake up.
So hard did I hold my breath that the tunnel
gave way and water rushed in.
So hot I didn't know whether it was cold or not.
But last night was different.
I usually like to dream my dreams awake
to make them come true.
It's like thinking about Junk City
so long you can move inside it and no one will ever
call you back home again and no one can make you leave it.
Whenever I put my head up I hear my voice going up.
Let's see.
Do I sound like I'm going up and down like [INAUDIBLE]..
I don't know.
The next poem.
I wonder if you could hear me.
If anybody could hear me without.
I'll just keep it.
If my voice sounds like it's going up and down too much,
I don't know, send me a note.
Is it OK?
Good.
The next poem is about my son's diabetes.
My son, when he was three years old
was diagnosed as having juvenile diabetes.
And when they first found out, a doctor
misdiagnosed him and thought he just had a flu.
And the next day he went into a coma
and he was in this coma for seven hours
and they weren't sure if he was going to make it.
But he did and and he's doing fine.
And after a while, I decided it was me who had most problems.
I had more problems adjusting than he did.
And this is a little poem about really
about me adjusting to the diabetes
and also about letting him go when I have to.
That didn't sound good.
It's called Sugar.
He was three years old and growing smaller.
Seven hours in a coma while the nurses probed
his tense white skin until the silvery life of electrolytes
and insulin kicked in.
He'll make it.
I asked for Valium and stepped outside where the question
moon suggested vertigo beyond blood numbers, digital, a wind
beyond those cubicles of artificial light.
Diabetes mellitus will make it.
Breathe it in, the doctor said without apology.
Put it in your lungs.
We moved around some, got adjusted, fragrant autumn
nights he leaves the back door open.
He says he likes the way it looks to let the outside in,
to see nothing but the glow in the dark astronaut
poster, and the luminous Earth from where he falls gracefully
through space.
Isn't it beautiful, he says, to be almost blind?
And he's fine now.
I can say it.
Even when I touch his 11-year-old needle toughened
skin, I only feel my own fear.
It's me who's growing smaller, wondering how he sees me
by day as he drifts slowly down the hill alone on his way
to school, waving to me as though my face were
the Earth and he the luminous astronaut floating
beyond the gravity of home.
For My Therapist.
On the subject of my pain.
First of all, it is not an object.
I put my finger on the center of an imaginary lightly dotted
square, like a road map's D5, parallel to my hip bones.
It doesn't smell like anything except maybe a place where
a rainstorm has evaporated on black asphalt.
My son's been there but he was too small to remember.
We used to share the same symbols for mountain peaks
and time zones.
He was smaller than a green fist of space set aside for a park.
We were healthier together.
Once I had a lover who said he could feel it like a spider.
His mother was a suicide so I believed him.
A one car high speed late night accident.
I held my breath while coming.
I didn't want him to know too much about me,
to peel back the fabric of skin and lace and web,
to know the exact spot.
I know you think I'm not being specific enough when addressing
the subject of my pain.
That I'm not saying, dear pain, you are useful in my love.
I've done the other exercise for pain five times today
and it still comes out the same.
The right hand holds all the good memories,
all the ex pretty, the ex years, the mock empty Christmas gifts
department stores showcase in their windows.
The left hand rattles the dulled silver of the train.
The noise the pain makes as it grinds over the track
can lull the race track loser to sleep with only train fare
home.
I swear for a small amount of morphine,
for the liquor slick throat of anyone
for the flesh and the light, I'd retreat into the tunnel.
The pain which is dedicated to me
would perfectly fold into itself and we would both sleep side
by side like indifferent parallel necessary mates
navigating our way across the country.
Have a slight cough.
The next poem is loosely based on the time when
I was living in San Francisco and teaching
at the University of Santa Clara, which
is a Jesuit college.
I was divorced at the time and there
was this priest who was head of the English department named
Father Phipps who look kind of like a Jesuit Cary
Grant in a sense.
And he used to have these really lavish parties.
And he used to say, everybody bring
your husband or your wife.
But he never could say bring your boyfriend
or your girlfriend, he always says,
bring your significant others.
Bring your husbands and wives or significant others.
And in this University there was a dress code for teachers.
I mean, you weren't allowed to wear jeans
or-- it's not like here.
You weren't allowed to wear jeans or just casual clothes.
And one time actually Father Phipps
called me into his office.
The way he told me I wasn't dressed right was he said,
I think that you're dressed a little youngish.
And he said what he meant is that the students like role
models and they don't just want to see
anybody who looks like them.
They want to look up to us.
The famed composition department.
And then I used to go home and get out of all my fancy office
girl clothes.
Kelly girl, he liked us dressed like Kelly girls.
And get out of my Kelly girl clothes
and just put on the latest San Francisco garb
and go down to the punk bar and dance.
I used to feel wonderful, just having those two kind of lives.
The persona of this poem is of course fictitious.
I mean really, I didn't go to this length.
I know too many people here, I don't want them
to think that I'm like this.
Ex-students, good friends, significant others.
At the right-- let me-- wait before I start.
My throat is really bad tonight.
At The Rite Spot, a corner bar between Folsom and 17th,
I'm caught again half drunk in mid-sentence between Tuesday
and the story of his life these days.
This oriental stranger who shines paper or something
for a living.
Snakeskin shirt and eyes, ruby studded lapel,
he's jazzed on something not for sale, something
I get if I go with him and slow dance
to the rusted music on the jukebox,
if I answer his senseless come ons about love.
Who knows?
Maybe I dress like I should go with strangers
up and down the lumpy spine of the city,
praying to the marquee of light at the Roxy
where they're featuring Marilyn Monroe in her last year,
bolt upright with fright and sleeplessness, plump
and almost ripe.
The drunker he gets, the more he babbles about Japan
where the symbol for suicide is the cherry blossom,
live briefly but gloriously.
Who has time for early warnings, for the fur and diamond
aura of movie stars, for the traffic and receipts?
She died by accident.
Love, isn't there another subject, another place
to go without sleep?
Come morning he'll guide my American heart
and portable shoulders and walk me down to the vacant Pacific
where ocean liners are getting ready to disembark.
This side, the highway is stalled
in its recent memory of evenings when things run out.
The heart fails, sleep seizes the wheel, the disappointed
lovers and insomniacs.
Saturated, he rubs his belly like a stupid
Buddha, fluffs out his lap, and calls me over.
It's obvious, he doesn't have to ask.
He knows my type.
Dedicated to Father Phipps.
Let's see.
I went through it--
I guess I'm still going through a time I
really like reading biographies of movie stars
and famous people, especially old movie stars.
I know movie stars, like '40s movie stars.
Particularly Montgomery Clift, I read those two biographies.
And also the James Dean one which I'll
talk about in my next poem.
And it's kind of nice.
I noticed that the two times I was interested in movie stars
so to speak is I think that they're basically
for adolescent girls and the very married.
It's nice to be very married and have this kind of safe romance,
vicarious romance with Montgomery Clift who's dead.
Your husband never minds that.
In fact, I must admit.
I have a wall in my study and I have
pictures of like Montgomery Clift, and James Dean,
and Bruce Springsteen, and Richard Gere.
And my husband one day I came into my study
I noticed my husband put a picture of himself
amongst the stars.
I left it there.
Anybody's invited to see the gallery.
I read a quote by this San Francisco poet named Steve
Abbott and I really liked it.
It's about the biographies.
He says, I read biographies.
The woes of geniuses and stars cheer me up.
I confess.
Because fantasy has no gravity and old boyfriends
are like a row of motels without marriage,
I sit in my living room--
my voice has gone.
I sit in my living room of stale perfume, late movies
for a background, fondling the biographies
of a '40s actor gone wrong.
Now dead, his life a public property.
They can say what they want, the way
you do about old boyfriends.
The one who looked so much like Montgomery Clift, people
stopped him at luncheonettes.
Don't I know you from some war?
And he made me feel as glamorous as Elizabeth Taylor,
a debutante when so obviously I wasn't.
And our own famous story obviously nothing
more than a grade B fantasy run to death.
And then there was the convict I loved.
Of all my old boyfriends, for only one or two would
I lay myself down in the gutter.
Could I imagine confessing anything and then
emerging like the convict on the front page who
admitted hating himself every minute of his life
and the judge who pronounced.
But everyone's terrific at hindsight and he was right.
Who's to say who's wrong or who will have the last word?
Who's to say if we'll be remembered like Monty?
For being a lousy lover or having bad credit.
Or would we maybe be spared to float down pleasure river
forever, meeting old boyfriends unexpectedly in the emergency
room of dreams.
Who's to say what's to become of the past?
Those perfectly edited stories.
All those histories of false confessions.
I'd rather watch it on the movies sitting faithfully
on my mauve sofa like some Hollywood guru of self-denial,
of glamour and passion gone wrong or just gone.
I have to get a cough drop, excuse me.
Next part of the reading will brought to you
by Halls Cough Drops.
The rest of the poems are new poems after the book.
This is my James Dean poem.
Just a little bit about James Dean.
The only thing you really have to know-- you
don't really have to know this but you may as well know it.
The little bastard in the poem is the Porsche
that Dean was killed in on his way
to Salinas to race it because he was a race car driver
and just killed in a regular auto--
I think this high speed auto accident
when he was 24, going up to race this little silver Porsche
Spyder.
He was stopped twice on the way for speeding tickets.
It's called Over Easy.
From zoom to pause and I in the vacant mirror
door am almost the public voice like not quite there.
To be everybody at once is hard work and nobody loves you.
In media res, in the long unfolding dream
of yesternight evening, it's the dream actress again playing me.
This time planted somewhere north
on the DNA double twist of California Highway number 1.
Yes, she's fine when the silver Porsche Spyder pulls up
alongside.
The little bastard, it's my hour-old boyfriend,
who struts majestically out wearing James Dean's
famous horn rimmed glasses.
And when he gets out, she impersonating me,
gets one of those dreamy dream hugs,
putting her definitely outside her body map.
Exactly like him another in the passenger seat
bangs his hand to the music of the '50s against the dash.
Am I jealous?
Do I need two hugs?
Do I think that James Dean is everybody's old boyfriend?
And am I jealous if they sell his life sized poster
in every store so as anybody who wants
one can have him and dance with him
and kiss him when necessary?
Or is there a pill that feels like a hug?
I want to know in other words, if say one morning standing
behind the red vinyl light of the shower curtain,
can I touch some secret inconspicuous spot
and get a hit of that old ubiquitous razzmatazz.
That and the power to will the likeness of my well- vacationed
form skidding down the sleepy now slide
happily zap me through the most ordinary of unprecedented AMs.
And then on the mirrored restaurant wall,
my life screened again, behind, above, below.
The waitress tagged "Nicey" brings me
my coffee and over easy.
Tomorrow, unless they've changed it,
supposed to be real bad again through smeared unfocused
lipstick about the weather.
My spider mouth opens wider in anticipation,
zinging in acceleration, my rhythm the silverware shocks
cold.
This poem I wrote after watching a real live murder
trial on cable TV.
It's called Meat Never Cooks in the House of the Murderer.
It's a lousy thing when it's not a movie.
Exhibit 41 A, a small jawbone from a pack rat's nest
that her mother had to say was her, was hers.
And the dented black Z car his.
And more than coincidentally scarred just the right shade
of guilty pink from the bicycle she never returned home riding.
Evidence more damning than any derelict alibi, like a place
he could have crashed when the sun went down by his time
at the homeless park.
And that personal sense of time was everywhere
as was the inscrutable miracle hearsay.
Mass witnesses, mass remembering September 2 years ago.
A late afternoon, nobody fully attended.
Just a pink blur on adobe and the more focused pink smudge
from his car that experts agree to be the pretty pink
from her bicycle or one taken from an identical source
so help her God.
It's because the world comes in extremes.
One witness's voice beamed through to my living room
where I sat sipping Coca-Cola, listening
to the snaps on cable TV.
The cause of death, the fact of death, death by misadventure,
and that brilliant duck.
His lawyer offering you the intimacy of his entire
magnified cratered face like a father.
You hear me what I'm saying to you?
You hear?
But whatever it was I've done wrong
I couldn't remember that whole realm
of standing on the edge of things.
The railroad tracks, the breakwater, the precipice
of an ancient futuristic urban ruin
are things that would invade my dreams,
things I couldn't talk about but recognized, deja vu.
And the hungry hollow eyes of the
accused and also in the eyes of the dead girl's mother
broadcasting revenge, which is a hungry feeling too.
The night before they found him guilty
and sentenced him to die, I dreamed I was his girl
and trapped in an apartment while a hunk of meat
rotated in his family's rotisserie, luminous
like a real live TV.
They made us watch, said we were witnesses who couldn't move.
Meat would not cook in the house of the murderer.
It didn't cook, its bruised surface like a pink verdict,
like a handball of bones and steel and anger,
and a smashed bicycle, and a bumper
from a car in the hard edge lines of madness and luck.
Lois said that since this is a poetry reading,
I can't read any part of my novel.
Yes, you did.
I remember.
I have the date and time on it.
So I'm going to cheat a little.
I'm working on a novel basically about--
it's a first person novel about a woman
obsessed with those kind of hard core late night talk shows.
The hard core sense, it's not that kind of hard core.
It's a psychiatrist on the radio.
It's an 800 number.
And you call in to the psychiatrist.
And these are people who really, really are in pain.
People who are like paranoid schizophrenics, and psychotics,
and people who have attempted suicide, et cetera.
Multiple personalities have been a few of those.
And I know I've been listening to this for--
I just came upon it accidentally about a few years ago
and I'm sort of addicted to listening to these shows.
And people talk real poetry, just spontaneously it seems.
And I would occasionally copy down really nice lines
and save them in a notebook.
And so what I did, actually I started
working on a series of what I call poems
but they weren't quite poems.
The novel is also about this woman's adventures,
I won't go into that.
But what I decided to do is make this series the sort
of dramatic monologues.
So sort of not poetry and not fiction.
I mean, they're phone calls.
There's no precedent for that so I could
be as sloppy as I want here.
I'm going to read three of them.
Some of them are kind of long.
The first one is actually--
I wrote this about a year and a half ago.
It's the shortest one.
And it's not very typical of basic poems.
The basic-- excuse me, phone calls.
But I'm going to read through.
I'll start out with the short one
and then I'll read two others.
And I wanted to give a short-- a brief reading and I'll do it--
hope my voice holds out.
The only thing you really have to know
is the doctor's name is Dr. Alan Berman.
Good evening, Dr. Berman.
I'm a first time caller and you know, nervous.
It's these doctors.
You see they keep telling me to put endings on these dreams
like I'm a winner.
Really, I'm only a woman, 34 years old
and living in this night.
Jesus Christ, I don't know why I'm sleeping.
This man comes to my door, black and shiny,
in a red satin outfit and little hat,
who says he wants to kill something, me.
Sometimes he's only a flat and sweaty face
propped on my doorstep like falling apart
in slow motion and the dark time before which
goes on and on like a bingo game where
they call all the numbers and still no one's winning.
And then I hit Dunkin' Donuts knowing how
everyone wants a piece of me.
Those characters with their always
in trouble personalities.
Just for the fun of it, they can rip me apart,
go through my bag and body and still not know
how my days borrow endlessly through the grocery aisles.
Dr. Berman, I'm telling you this from my heart.
Killing alone doesn't seem to satisfy some guys.
This is why I can never die, why I can never be satisfied.
In tonight's dream I'm driving through this deserted Sunday
town.
A red and shiny convertible pulls up alongside me.
Baby, says the red and black man, baby I want you.
And I'm wanting him too, the music
exploding from his car radio.
The whole town looking like it would through red sunglasses.
Every storefront window on fire.
And my desire so immense.
But I can't say yes.
But Jay Carney says, baby you can do anything in a dream.
Then I shut my eyes as tight as they go, turn
down the volume of my radio till something clicks.
And I pick up the receiver, smooth back my hair,
and call in your show like I'm a winner.
Oh, I forgot to say.
My name is Patricia and I'm calling from Baltimore.
The next one is going to be kind of difficult to read
because it's a guy named Bill and he's a kind
of country and Western guy.
I don't even want to pretend that I
could talk like a country and Western guy
so you're just going to have to pretend that I am.
I tried it at home but it was just too embarrassing, even
in front of a mirror.
These two are very, very new.
Bill.
I want to say right off that I've learned
a lot from your show, Alan.
I wish every damn fool would listen because I'm
one of them damn fools.
But like they talk about in country songs, a fool for love.
You see, I love women and I can't resist
the one I might make happy.
You think that would be a good thing in itself
to love, to stand on the street corner in your eelskin boots
and see what's happening by.
Shoot.
I was married a few times and had me a few kids.
Take off the wheels and put down the bricks,
mobile home kind of life.
For 10 years, 15 years, that happened.
Until it got what I personally came
to call that pulling feeling.
At first I thought it was magic being pulled
by I don't know what, when I looked up for my coffee
at this beautiful waitress with permanent wave black hair
and a happiness so direct like 3D
I wanted to reach out and touch it.
That was the sexiest thing I've ever seen.
For a year after it was her and nothing else.
She was the white stuff and I was a drug addict.
Sure, there was always this point
where I tried to clean up my accents,
where I try to clean up my act some, be a real citizen,
be on time go home, but there was nothing else in the world.
But before I knew it, it would happen to me again.
I turned the corner at the Kmart and be at the mercy
of some pretty little thing.
Goodbye.
It was off to the races again.
It was all over.
See what I mean?
I was having all this bad fun.
I was the saddest song on the radio
and I needed more than I could handle.
It was like trying to fill this big old hole in my belly.
And I need hundreds of them and still wake up empty and alone.
It was a sad song and I danced.
Well, I would say seeing three at
once until I made them too much like me for me to want them.
It was like I neutralized them or something
until they didn't mean a thing.
Then I do all the right things and see
lawyers and the shrinks.
And as it turned out, I had this problem ever
since I've been on Earth.
I'd open doors and they'd change the locks.
And so it turns out what with all these women and rooms,
that I'm as homeless as they make them.
So I call my old man in New Zealand.
He moved there three years ago when I was a pup.
Because I remember that one time I asked him simply like a kid
asks, what was the best thing, I meant of everything?
Hell, he scrunched up his face and said "women," just as plain
as a curse.
You can't live with them and you can't live with them.
And I had always just remembered him
as a big fat bulbous nosed drunk, ugly as a pooch.
So now like 35 years later I call long distance
and tell him my problem.
So he asked me matter of fact like nothing's happened, what's
the best thing for me?
And I go well, hell, it's got to be
whatever particular girl I happen to be
with in any particular moment.
And even over the phone I hear him scrunch up his face
and he goes, it's OK.
You'll be all right.
Bob's your uncle.
Bob?
What?
I say because I don't know no uncle Bob.
And he goes, Bob's your uncle.
It's New Zealand talk from the airline pilots.
I think it means piece of cake, everything will be all right.
Something like, live it all out.
It all adds up to the same thing.
Kind of like Johnny Cash but less intellectual.
But in the end Dr. Berman, all that philosophical stuff
ain't nada.
When that pulling feeling gets its claws in me
and I start to feel something like a giant,
I want beautiful women to explode inside me.
You know, that's a good description of it.
I want to be the biggest guy on Earth, the one who
takes care of all the women, the one whose only problem that is
that his cup so to speak runneth over
instead of the big daddy crying in his beer.
I can't resist making certain female type individuals happy
if that's a problem.
I myself think that the answer is in the eyes of the beholder.
But I need someone professional like to second me.
What do you think?
[CLAPPING]
OK.
This is going to be the last one.
I decided I wanted to make this short reading because I
appreciated Joy Williams-- as one
of you I appreciated Joy Williams' short reading.
This is a more somber person but it's the last person.
Her name is Dorothy.
Dr. Berman, I'm a faithful listener and first-time caller.
I know that other people still need you--
let me start that again.
Dr. Berman, I'm a faithful listener and first-time caller.
I know that other people still need your solution so I won't
take up much of your time.
My circumstances are that my father died in '75,
though actually he's still in the phone book.
My mother in '80, and my brother died of suicide in '81,
though I predicted that.
For years I woke up with this feeling like a raw egg.
When you wake up into a sort of amnesia,
not remembering exactly who you are
or what's been happening in your life.
And then you force yourself up and snap up
the shades just to prove it to yourself you're not
trapped in one of those layers of sleep
where you think you're awake but you're not.
And the sun, well, it's a little like being electrocuted.
I don't know if you've ever been electrocuted or not.
It involves the surge from survival
to get away quick but also this more intense
urge like an orgasm in a magnetic field to stay put.
In other words, it's like a thrill of fear, it weakens you.
But I don't want to get off the point too much.
I sometimes think I'm psychic because I see things
that no one else does.
I can sense shapes and such in the dark, spirits
and evil passions.
It's the way I pay my debt though I see them
for what they are.
I could put on the light but the fear is still there.
I saw it, it's like that.
I was a kid when I first discovered this.
I used to feel there was a part of me
that no one else could see, some aura
made of light beams and invisible currents.
Something that lacks the substance to die.
I remember walking around the neighborhood
thinking I could never die because I was never not here.
I simply remembered too much that no one could account for.
The first time I felt this was when I saw The Wizard of Oz.
It explained a few things to me.
And the strange thing was I had braids at the time
and my name was originally Cecilia Dorothy,
then Cecilia, then Dorothy.
Because of the movie I changed it to just Dorothy.
You see, even then I was always chipping away
little pieces of myself and I lived in the moment.
I know you're probably thinking how silly I am,
that it all sounds so silly.
But it's all I had.
I had no friends to speak of or anything.
But I remember skipping to school pretending
to be Judy Garland singing that ditty, Lions
and Tigers and Bears.
Oh my.
And then I'd start thinking, Oh my.
The kids always teasing me about being too skinny
and wearing thick glasses.
And when I'd cry the teacher would say,
Cecilia, turn off the waterworks,
which of course made me cry more and them laugh more.
Till the time came when I'd skip home
thinking, thinking, thinking, oh my.
Danger would appear everywhere suddenly like flies.
And then of course like the movie,
everything from behind the block and in the bushes
was watching me, was scratching and howling and blowing up.
By the time I was a teenager, I felt sure everything
was spying on me.
Everyone knew a secret and they weren't telling.
And the faces in the shopping malls
became grotesque and horrible masks,
and the masks became the faces.
And with my own eyes I looked at the merchandise
on the counters become animate and dangerous.
Boxes of band-aids opening like mouths.
And outside, hallucinations stalked the streets of town
until I was sure I was being followed around by a magician.
That's what it came to.
Maybe the bottom line came when everyone died
and I got this heaven obsession that I've
been falling into lately.
Heaven as a kind of movie where the illusions are real,
where the illuminated specks throat floating
through the darkness are really the stars
you see suffering, laughing, emoting on the screen.
A kind of negative Earth where the souls
are turned inside out.
And that's what's visible.
Maybe I've come to think of it as some giant Hollywood
with floodlights and romance, the whole bit.
And everyone desirable and 30.
I'm 40 years old already and figure if anything interesting
was going to happen, if anyone, well, it would have.
You see, I'm not calling for help.
I've tried everything you have to offer, church, God,
sex, drinking, trying too much of everything,
the way Judy Garland died.
What I'm calling for is a say in public
that I've tried it the other way, that slowly
killing yourself for years way.
And so I know there's a seven second delay in the radio show.
But I hope sincerely you won't cut me off or try
to convince me to save myself.
And especially I don't want to be saved
and especially don't want to be saved again and again, which
I have been already to this extent
over and over again saved.
I'm tired of saying 2 plus 2 equals 4, I can't stand it.
2 plus 2 equals 22.
Isn't it marvelous?
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]
Thanks a lot.