Go Jeriko, Go (1) Thirty-two year old Jerry meets Fiona in Iowa City. He’s been invited to participate in a week-long summer writing seminar. He sits, waiting for the campus bus, lost in his own damn sorry solipsistic idea of utter self-loathing. Iowa City wasn't what he'd imagined. He thought it would be a writers' version of Woodstock. It was supposed to be a "festival," after all--a freethinking, diverse gathering of writers from around the world meeting other writers, reading and trading stories and poetry like souvenir pins at a jamboree. He’d presumed that it would be an all-accepting literary community speaking in similes and metaphors about life and the creative process, or so he’d thought. Communal, he'd imagined. Instead, it had felt closed and competitive, literal, insider, formulaic--pragmatic, self-reverent, academic. Jerry and Fiona sit on opposite ends of a memorial bench inscribed: Joan Mowbary, Avant-garde Author & Playwright 1938-1999. They are under an electric blanket sun. He broils like a brisket. Sweat channels through his long, thinning brown hair, does swan dives from his graying eyebrows onto his twice-broken nose, oozes from his black t-shirt, congealing at his groin. Under the glazing sweat he is raw meat. "Hey you," she says. He sits slumped over, motionless. She’s dressed in a cobalt blue halter-top. Gingham patches cover the friction holes in the crotch of her jeans. She sports a CNN baseball cap, Ray-Ban glasses, and sun freckles. Her mahogany-colored ponytail sways as she speaks through a slight overbite. "Hey, Bukowski. You're gonna lose it," she says. The not-often-enough cooling river breeze blowing from across the highway pries open the folder at his sandaled feet. Papers ruffle and one by one peel away from the stack as the breeze turns to a gust. "Bukoooowski! Hey! Oh well. Another Great American Novel swept up by the janitorial gods. You don't seem to care," she yells. "But I do. Shit!" She stomps on the folder. He momentarily feels the ground tremble through his log-like legs and stands, slack-jawed, glaring. "Earth to Bukowski. Come in, Bukowski. I care too much, Bukowski. Fuck you, Bukowski." His melancholy expression changes to one of inquisitiveness. His pinpoint pupils dilate as he catches sight of some crazy woman chasing after a flurry of papers overhead. A few soar over the highway. A Confederate flag waving Winnebago carries two off. "Hey, Bukowski,” she yells, as her cap goes airborne. "Dammit, these are yours! You just gonna sit there like a Rodin, or what?" "Bukow--?” he asks. He’s back. He notices the folder at his feet and puts two and two together. His stomach swallows his throat. "What?" he mouths in a daze. "Me? Mine?" His sweat-pump kicks into overdrive before he realizes that what’s airborne are blanks. His stories, his trading pins, are still safely tucked into the pocket, on a disk. He'd needed to make copies just in case he found them, THE WRITERS. His Microsoft-formatted disk wasn't compatible with the dorm's Apple computers so off he was to find a pc. Every night since arriving in Iowa City he searched the bars and coffee houses like a junkie looking to score, hoping to find The Society--the writers. He yearned to talk shoptalk with like-minded passionate writers. But by two a.m. he'd cab it back to the dorm drunk, depressed, thinking: They purposely don't tell me where they are, where they be. They keep me out because I don't play their academic game. But, I have to be prepared like a Boy Scout at a jamboree, with copies. Just in case. The Society must be hanging out somewhere. Maybe there’s a secret password or an invite that wasn't passed along, he thinks, a guy in the shadows dressed like Tom Wolfe with a Santa Claus beard, shilling from a pushcart, "Ice cream! Get your ice cream!" then, "PSSST, for Electric Kool-aid to writerland follow the crimson flagstone pathway to the third door on the left. Knock twice, then thrice, then twice, and tell the Hobbit, 'I'm closing in on Cacciato, going due east, as the raven flies north for summer.' The Electric Kool-aid, the Electric Koooool-aid . . . to writerland." The brim of Fiona’s windswept cap clips his ear. He picks it up off the ground just as the gust peters out and the remaining airborne papers float down like snow. She gathers up a few, sees that they’re blank, walks to the bench, and sits beside him. Their hips touch, then their knees. "Here Bukowski," she says. "Very funny. Nothing here. I thought I was running down a good story." "I--I . . ." "The hat's mine thank-you. What's the prob? You paralyzed from the top of that thick Deadhead skull to your elephant-toed feet, or what? They are your papers, ya know. Right?" "I'm sorry. Thanks. No, yes they're mine. No, I'm not paralyzed. Just . . .thinking." Her face shadows his. She smells like spearmint. "I thought so. Another brooding wannabe writer," she says. "Why do you keep calling me Bukowski?" "You smell like a Bukowski. Let me guess. Your first name's Charlie, right?" He cracks his first real smile since leaving Chicago. "Close. It's Jeriko. Jerry." He sucks in his blanched belly. "Yeah, they're all probably smelling me from here to Chicago, and beyond. Probably dusted a few crops of corn along the way with this stench. Sorry." She laughs. "First of all let it all hang out, okay? Breathe. Don't die on me. Second, I like it." A yellow transit bus comes into view. He stands as it pulls into the stop. She stays put. "Aren't you coming?" he asks as he boards the bus. "Not my bus, Bukowski. I'm waiting for the blue one." As it rumbles off he yells from the window: "You like what?" " Your smell. I like your smell." "I forgot to ask. Your name. What's your name?" "Fiona." He writes Fiona and Bukowski on his folder. "I like Bukowski. I can be her Bukowski," he whispers, smiling, and promising himself that he will be here, at the bus stop, tomorrow morning at dawn come hell or high water. To wait. For her. It’s the end of his Wednesday. Wow! ******** Thursday morning he wakes before the jackhammer serenade starts up. The workers have been machine-gun jackhammering since Monday. It's routine. They arrive at sunup. Trigger-happy, they leave at ten sated, and from then on the vacant Iowa day simmers and smolders under its sky-high heat lamp, and everyone finds a Frigidaire to crawl into. He's used to the jack-hammering. TOO used to it. At first his bedsprings hum like a kazoo. His drooling mouth clenches shut. His teeth buzz. Then the cinderblock walls of his dorm room vibrate coughing deep maw hacks, shattering his lookingglass sleep. He wakes from his sleep-cave in an icy, air-conditioned sweat from his struggle against the floor swallowing him whole. Now Thursday, he subconsciously anticipates the morning jackhammers like he anticipates the treacherous night streets back in Chicago, keeping his paranoiac third eye peeled for imminent danger. He’d wake fitfully during the week throughout the night. The anticipation of those fucking jackhammers being the cause. Now he anticipates Fiona, putting him in good stead at this Thursday predawn wake-up, his first hangover-free predawn wake-up all week. Flushing the toilet, drumming the sink with the fresh razor, (yeah, a shave is definitely needed,) and toothbrush, singing in the shower, dressing in fresh clothes, his last set of fresh clothes being that his week in Iowa City is drawing to a close, staying in tempo with the early morning rat-a-tat-tatting, he's out the door just as three jackhammers break into a roundelay. Out he goes to the Mowbary bench, sits and watches as the marshy riverbank steam is drawn skyward by the thirsty morning sun. It feels as if it is leeching toxic brain juices to his scalp, unclogging thoughts, working words through the convolutions, and setting them free. For an instant utopia he thinks: Just add Fiona. The air hangs like gauze, cloaking the bench in stagnant sedimentary grit as bandana-wearing landscapers, bricklayers, and laborers toil like ticking time clocks. They spade, trowel, and haul until they eventually wind down with each muscle flex until the sun has sucked them dry. The grit they wear is caked on pores, inching its through dermis, solidifying viscera. He feels like plaster-of-Paris on the verge of turning to marble once removed from nephew hood to the Mowbary memorial. He crosses the road to be at that skein of river. It unravels parallel to the highway glinting iridescent diamonds made visible through the dissipating steam. Enticing reeds dance and cattails sway. He stands struck lucid, coherent, unencumbered, without walls. He’s a writer in his realm. He hears the river calling. It's exclusive, in code: Write me a story. Feed me like generations past another strand of yarn. Let me inspire. Underneath the canopy of a mushrooming weeping willow beside the river he writes: A high cloudless sky suspends from heaven like God’s puppet. Logy waves of sun distort my vision trying to suck the moisture from my body-soul-spirit-being. My body gives in. I allow it, though I won't allow it to sap me dry. Soul-spirit-being belongs to me, and you, Fiona. I am not a prisoner to the heat. I use it to melt my soul-spirit-being into a massive, glowing, fiery energy ball ready to join you. Let's play ball! The National Anthem pipes through our train station terminal and then from space a rousing, roaring cheer resounds. "Attention! Attention! Now arriving on track 413, from The Land of the Beards . . ." Soul-spirit-being overrides the space P.A. as the world quiets to a low, rumbling, smiling murmur. It waits along with me. The scene slows to frame by frame. Click----Clack----Click----Clack----Hisssss. Brakes lock. The world is transfixed into a blur. I am whole, defined. I feel a glow that’s radiant, positive energy building, surging forward through my flesh and pores. It streams out of my follicles, pores, eyeballs, nostrils, ears, mouth, fingertips, and toes. My toes curl and my lungs expand with centuries of dormant Iowa City I must have had coursing through my bloodlines, from I-don’t-know-where, (yes, I do,) when you step from the DNA patina, into focus coming off like a million teaspoons of instant coffee in one cup. A blue, fusing heat, an aura, an epoxy, fixes my eyes onto yours. Regeneration of life, with soul touch, tender and nurturing and placid fixes my self onto your self. A sphere forms. A soft, warm, fluid, salty, engulfing sphere encloses our souls-spirits-beings. We join hands, and the world momentarily whites out. Then it reappears, and the world is ours. ********** Prehistoric looking dragonflies hover as if on patrol through bamboo-like weeds, circling corndog cattails, reconnoitering above algae turf. One squirrel chases another. There's the sound of clucking as claws pierce Dutch elm bark. They zig and zag stopping on a dime as they spiral up and down the hug-sized trunk. Leaves are torn from their stems. Bouncing Betty-shaped seeds rain down-- plunk-plunk, plunk-plunk. Jerry gets up to offer his thanks to the river, stretching his arms toward the sun, then walks alongside the timeless river lost in his new world, oblivious to the old. In a sycamore tree he sees two squirrels reclined in the crotch of a branch. Probably the same two, he thinks. He imagines that one is feeding the other grapes from a bunch as they bathe in a post-coital glow. At the base of the tree he finds a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses and chuckles wondering if they gave the male squirrel an air of mysteriousness, if they were a lure as he seduced his mate. Wait, he thinks. Who lured who? For the first time in this month of years his sweating calms to a thin sheen. Audible words come to him as he sits at the base of the sycamore: My world changed a Wednesday ago. Yesterday. Was it that long ago? The sun's rays penetrated, burning away the clouds in my brain. My being, layers upon layers of my crusty calcified shell peeled away, splintered, flaked, exposing me. She did it. He yawns in an atmosphere, lets out a lifetime, and thinks: Is this just a dream?
Copyright © 2008 Paul B Kramer |