Pescador Libre

I don't know why I feel the need to share half-written work on here---I guess I crave justification, even if not a one of you reads this.

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One day on the broad white sands of the western Mexican coast there is a man. He is stoop-shouldered but sturdy, and perched buzzard-like on the overturned hull of a dugout canoe. His face is limed from the steady beating of the salt air and the thundering of the waves that have pulsed always in his thoughts and on the horizon of his dreams. Mostly he is still. But his leather hands move regularly and all of his eyes are on them as they repair the broken meshing of a cast net, which has been without fish for one day and already one day too long. He is the man from Teacapan.
Now a second man approaches from the mangrove forest up shore. He is the traveler. Carrying a tin box with one hand and a fishing pole in the other, he comes out of the shadow-leaf canopy and onto the sand. The box he carries swings like a dull hunk of lead at his side. His pole pierces the milk-glass sky like a stalk of goldenrod and sends the sunlight sprinting across its length with each jostling step. The man walks with a heaviness that defies his lean frame, as though his shoes are full of mud and his legs logged with saltwater. Though, even such a clumsy gait is absorbed by the dunes and the break, and his passage takes on the quality of a ghost or a whirlwind moving slowly across the sand. The man whistles as he comes, and in his bone-khaki clothing and red bandana he looks like something washed up from the Iberian coast. But as he draws nearer, the illusion of his cloth escapes into the air above his sunburnt features, ushered off by the decidedly American melody blowing across his thin lips.
Unabashedly, the traveler walks up to the canoe, shedding the hunk of lead and leaning against his fishing pole like a winded and colorful frontiersman. All of the man from Teacapan’s eyes roll over to the man in white and then slide back to the cast net like two obsidian marbles.
"Have you got any water, friend?" the traveler says, surveying the rim of sea foam.
The man from Teacapan stitches the net with his eyes.
"Good damn, it’s hot. The sun’s liable to bake this whole ocean to a crisp and all the fish with it," he says with his hand on his hip. "But that wouldn’t be so bad. Make catching them a whole of a lot easier. Know what I mean?"
The man from Teacapan works the net.
"How about that water, friend?" he says, waving laggardly at the man on the canoe. "Hello?" he says. "Hola. Water?"
The man on the canoe looks up, then reaches into the shadow beyond the gunwale and produces a swollen brown bladder. He unscrews the neck and passes it to the man in white, who accepts it eagerly and looses a fat trail of quavering droplets to the hot sand before settling the stale water to his lips. The spill is gone before he has a chance to notice. The man on the canoe watches the spots dry out.
"Thank you much," the traveler says, handing the water back. "Been a while since I had a drop. Good damn, it is warm," he says while stooping to open his tin box. He pulls out a bundle of bandana and unfolds the ragged cloth to a fillet of dry red meat. It flakes apart as he picks through it, and he holds the red fish out in the palm of his hand like a tiny dinner tray.
"Have a bite," he chews. "It’s snapper, and damn good too."
The man from Teacapan shakes his head, all of his eyes on the net, stitching.
"Yes" he says. "Come on and have some. It’s the last of it."
The man from Teacapan lets the net droop between his bowed legs. Accepting, then, the situation, he pulls off a petal of red fish and pockets it against his gum. The man in white seems to be smiling as he squints across the sun-bleached sand, first down shore, then at the man on the canoe, then out onto the water. In the shimmering distance, a pair of grassy discs buoy with the tide, their navigation unclear and arrested against the staid horizon. Closer, a pair of discs track southward. Beneath them, the deep brown length of a boat creeps like a wooden shadow. The traveler finishes the snapper and looks down shore, and the man from Teacapan studies the patching of his net with serious hands and expression. His lips purse in thought. The waves break four or three times.
"Where you from, friend? Down south?" the traveler stands and brushes his knees. "There hasn’t been a single sign nor spirit since I left Escinapas about six days ago. Thought I’d fished myself over and beyond the edge of civilization."
"Si," the man from Teacapan says. "From the south. Yes."
"Far?"
"Yes."
"Figure could I make it in the day?" he says, rattling his fishing pole. "I set against something heavy a few days back and snapped my line."
"By night, I think," the man on the canoe says. "But then you do not want to go. Dark."
"No," he says. "I guess not."
For a time nothing is said, and the damp echoing of a seabird dips out of the trees and dies fast against the pillows of quiet sand. Somewhere in the canopy, invisible wings whip up a torrent of leaves. The traveler sucks his cheeks. Then nothing.
"That’s a serious piece of meshing you’ve got there, friend. I don’t imagine you would have an extra length or two of line, would you?" searching his pockets. "Not for nothing, of course. I’d pay you for it," he says, and he produces a gold clip of bills. Fanning it out, he pulls two green notes and then pockets the rest. "This ought to be more than generous."
The man on the canoe stares dully at the man in white.
"No," he says, waving a slow hand. "No money."
He reaches around in the shadow and pulls out a loosely raveled weed of clear line.
"Here," he motions. "Here. No money."
"Are you sure?" the traveler says. "It’s nothing really."
"No. Is okay." He spools off a length and cuts it free. "Is okay. No money."
"Thank you much, friend."
"Si."
The traveler threads the line through the eyes of his rod and winds the reel. The pickup ticks and spins slowly like the neck of a wobbling steel top, and he watches the thread feed. Out on the water, a staggered school of dark bodies roll up in the spun-glass curl of a wave and then vanish below the mounting crest. Closer in, the wave leans and crashes white. Then again, the shifting, shapeless dark appears in the depths, twirling for a moment just below the surface, then diving like a child beneath the swell of the tide. The wave breaks and the traveler catches his line just before it slips through the last eye. With a quick knot, he affixes a pounded-tin minnow at the end of the rod. The lure dangles for a moment and twists in the breeze like the ball of a wind-chime, the sunlight throwing off of it in tiny racing arcs.
"There," the man in white says with a tired satisfaction. "Better."
Beneath the break, the dark swells up and sinks back. The traveler looks in time to see the green-black shapes go under.
"Good damn," he says, as the man from Teacapan spreads his net out on the ground. "Did you see those fish?"
The man on the ground squints up at the traveler and the sun, then out at the ocean. The dark rises and falls.
"Dead Man’s Fingers," the man from Teacapan says.
"What?"
"Seagrass," wiping a backhand across his brow. "Is called Dead Man’s Fingers."
He sits up.
"In the storm, the tall waves, these boats take on water," he says, tapping on the hull of his canoe, "not so good. Just solid, you know. Can pull down pretty fast beneath the wave. Drift too. Sometimes the boats, they no come back up," he buoys his hand. "Here is bad, you know. Out there."
"By those boats?"
"No, closer," he points. " Reefs come up beneath, you know. Is good for fish but bad for fishermen."
"Right," the traveler says, watching the dark of the waves.

(etc.)

22.27.00.06.20.07

I've been feeling especially uninspired lately, so I wrote a poem---bullshit, I know.

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Tonight a man I do not know
told me to look at the sky
to watch the station and the shuttle
pass slowly and quietly by
the white summer moon.

I followed his finger and tried
to see what I thought were men
in the stars, but all I espied
were two water bugs gliding
across a black lagoon.

They skimmed along the surface,
taking time to pass, and I
wondered if the heavens had sunk
or if the earth began to fly,
its furnishings strewn

against the dark glass of space.
When soon those peopled stars, those high
dreams of our limited sight,
submerged themselves in the watery sky,
their gravity unhewn,

and then the bugs faded like sparklers die,
cooling and falling on the fourth of July.

The Seated Scribe

The old man sits in an obdurate leather armchair. His skin is grey, his beard is grey, the hair atop his unblemished head is white. Very patiently and very deliberately he writes through the pages of a book, crossing and correcting until the nib of his pen becomes vulgar and dull, ephemerally satisfied. High and behind him, an inaccessible casement window casts its attenuated glare upon his desktop, and soon lamplight replaces dusk. Somewhere in the steep hours of the night, the old man trains his limpid eyes on a passage in the text: and there came, during that irascible misadventure, no cause for recoil. He produces a fresh nib from the drawer and impresses the same line, retracing it over and again in varied and impassioned script, until nothing of meaning or consequence can be lifted from the ink. Somewhere in the small hours of the morning, the old man slips briefly into a dark and troubled sleep, only to awaken with the lingering twilight; the pen, already in his hand.
The book in which he writes has no formal name. That is to say, the text is not conscribed by any one title or term. Some have called the book Longing, others have known it as L’ Appetito, still others, Forbearance. The old man believes in part to have once referred to the text fondly as Home, and later more keenly and bitterly as Aerugo; though, he cannot be certain of either, because many conceivable, cureless names preceded their delivery, and many more persisted, and still persist, after their realization. He can only be certain that the text has had a name, and that by some brevitous discovery it will have one again. There are X pages in the book. The number of pages keeps with the number of years in the old man’s mind, of which he has never taken count. Were he to tally them all, the summation of his efforts would be a number irreducible by division, both continuous and naught; for each page turns into the next, and when one page rescinds yet another page unfolds, and with it the records of him continue. Paradoxically, he is both conscious of and eluded by the unenduring devices at work in the book. He has charmed them into being. He has forgotten their spell. By his hand alone, the letters and lines have been lifted from the soil, carved and regarded with devout ambition, then buried once more beneath fathoms of similarly designed passages. Like fragments from a heatless fire, the lines of the text have been fortuitously recovered and recommitted by the old man, his attention never failing to impress upon them something foreign, something of the present. Thus at any moment, in any furrow of the text, even the smallest word may bear no semblance to its antecedent self. At one time, the old man believed there to be a linearity to the progression of the book, but as the text has been transcribed and rewritten, lapsed and remembered, performed, its meaning and direction have changed, its point of revolution, reversed. The aggregate of the pages is now a dim and porous cage of the old man’s construction, for which there is no sliding latch to open, nor an interstice wide enough to permit his reentry or even his rediscovery of what has been bound up inside.
Through diligence, the old man has come to witness a great many realities live and die within the pages of the book. With his pen, he has been the rector of silent victories and sentient awakenings. He has stood amid the ribbed vaults of a rayonnant cathedral, hung upside down over green waters from the branches of a kapok tree, floated in the eyes of a lover. He has swept dust from checkered floors and felt the breeze of winter breath suddenly in July. He has heard singing in the night, reached out and held only the darkness. He has fallen infinitely through the vestibules of time and space, dragging his heels in the air and whistling. He has smelled weeds and the deracinated roots of hyacinths, dined in the company of strangers. On his back, he has conquered the highest plateaus of the sky, sustained himself on rainwater, and known himself to be a god. He has forgotten days to dreaming. He has applied himself to the study of the natural sciences and realized the impetus of creation. He has fired a rifle into the air and pulled the defeated slug from a hole in the ground. He has known the tenor of the long arc of friendship and the brief, perfidious arc of passion. He has swallowed loss, gazed upon ruined, frescoed walls, and known the infinitesimal consequence of his misfortune, the value of his suffering. He has consumed corners of the world to which he has never been, climbed apogeal heights he has never seen, and held fast to a myriad of memories and self-truths that have never existed. The old man has known all of these things. He has known them to be the fantastic shadows of his irrecoverable past. They are the vestiges of his home, the rust of copper, and he has directed each one of them into being.
The realities of the book, like those of the old man, are axiomatic; their practice, based in a universal truth. Namely that the myth and the word are indivisible: neither can exist alone, and each creates the other. The old man’s history has given rise to the book, and in turn the book has initiated his history. It is by this truth that the old man has been able to permit the evolution of the text, and with it the dissemination of his past. Over time, the innumerable symbols of his memory have transubstantiated and evanesced below the stoke of his pen. They have suffered the muted crimes of the mind. Through his sustained reimaginings, he has come to lose, little by little, the features of an unalloyed past. People and places, moments, have spread out across the limitless enclaves of the book. They have lost touch with themselves, evolved in seclusion. Every attempt the old man has made to recapture some recess of the text has served only to reshape it, the mien of one event replacing the cast of another, wholly different yet no less true than the first. Unwittingly, he has altered the material and spiritual realities of his life beyond repair. He has suffered an infinite loss.
However, the old man has not been unaware of this fact. Through precipitated realizations, he has come to know something of his great failing. He has come to witness the realities of the corporeal world and the realities of the text as stark and incongruous. He has been unable to align the two. The old man has forgotten the walls of his room and the names of the birds in his window. He has lost sight of the moon, the ever-present smell of juniper, the cool sensation of his knees against the plain of his desk. He has become ignorant of the grey dust growing thick around the base of his lamp. He has forgotten the anatomy and function of his own tongue, the expulsion of breath from his deflated chest. He has become alien to the dull, rolling pains of hunger. He is unable to recall the impression of being awake. He cannot remember the word for pen, nor the word for change or time. He cannot name his want, the anger that he feels against what has been taken from him. He cannot define his privation of self. Though it is not that the old man fails to perceive these things. Quite the opposite. In his soul, he is able to sense the void of a life lost. He is able to roll the pen in his hand, recognize the desk at his elbows and the walls crowded in around him, experience the movement of his heart. He knows that he is aging, but he cannot articulate this concept. He cannot pronounce the world around him because all of these perceptions, and countless others, are not represented within the pages of the book. They have been locked away. Fleetingly, the old man has searched the text for some outline to his immediate experience, some codification of his reality. But all he has arrived at is a cyclical configuration of episodic impressions, wholly dissimilar and removed from those that he believes to be real. He has come to doubt the truth of the book. He has come to question the validity of its many corrugated and fantastic realities. He has come into the habit of removing page after page of his theoretical past, crossing and countermanding that which he does not remember, that which he does not believe. Gradually, he has come to lose both his true history and the speculative history expounded upon within the text. He has come to a pristine reduction. He has come to the first line of the book: I was born. He has come to doubt even that.

The Green Room

She comes into the green room at one in the afternoon balancing a tray in her left hand stacked with two china saucers and two china teacups and one small blue china teapot and she sets the tray down in the middle of the room before drawing the shade.
"Why do that?" the blonde-haired child asks as he pokes around the soil of a large, low-hanging rhododendron pot with a branch he has broken from the same dwarf tree. "The sun is so very white and long."
"Because, Simon, this room is green," she says as she pours out the steaming tea. "These plants would brown and wilt if I left them out in the sunlight for too long a time."
"No, that’s not right."
"Actually," she sips carefully, "The sun can hurt these plants as much as it helps them."
"But then how did these plants live before you came along to draw down the shade for them?"
"Well."
"They had to be outside."
"Well, they’re from another part of the world. A part where the sun doesn’t shine so very white and long."
"Oh," the child says and he snaps the twig between his pale hands. "May I have some tea?"
"Yes, certainly. Sugar?"
"Five spoons."
She sifts out five spoons.
"That’s too much for a boy your age."
"No. It isn’t," Simon says as he drags the old mauve armchair around to face the shaded window. Its varnished wooden feet moan against the varnished wooden floor.
"You know, when I was young, we weren’t allowed more than two," handing him his saucer. "Usually we took one or none. That’s how our parents drank it. Strong black tea is more rich and better for the body."
"It’s not the body that concerns me."
"Well, it stimulates the mind as well."
Simon looks down through the slant blinds on the window and out into the yard across the street where the grass is clipped and brown and the trees are tall and brown and the house is grey and still.
"It’s not right of you to keep these plants in here," he says. "They’re shrinking at the roots and they’ll never grow up."
"But they’d die if I didn’t."
"So what," he says and pauses to consider.
"It’s better to live and die tall and brown than to hide and be small and green."
Mrs. Basu thinks about this for a time and sips her tea and Simon looks away through the window. The tilted shadows from the blinds and the sun spill in across the green walls and across the middle of the room where they settle upon her bare forearms and lap. The white light lingers long over her skin and it feels very sharp. Mrs. Basu tries to rub the heat away but stops and quietly decides then that Simon is absolutely right, but that she would never tell him this. Her plants are healthy, perfectly healthy.

Anniversary

It is eleven o’clock and Bride’s dress is torn and she knows that if she does not mend the shoulder tonight she will be unable to do so in the morning. She will be unable to wear the garment ever again and the sight of it on her sewing chair, frayed and decumbent, will only depress her. It will remind her, when she would like nothing better than to entirely forget the consummation of this tear and go about pretending that the sleeve had not been pulled from the shoulder. Better now to patch and stitch at night before the whole dress unravels; a heap of loose thread will never do. Things seem so utterly irreparable in the light of day.
Groom snores and the chop of his snore sounds as though he is choking on his soft palate. It is a girding and returnless sound and it fills each part of the bedroom without prejudice. If the noise were to give out, Bride will know that either Groom is buoying infirmly between sleep and cognition, or that his breathing has stopped completely. She does not consider former or latter and hopes instead for the droning to continue on through the night and most of the day and that when he finally surfaces he will be resplendent and new.
Bride wonders if Groom dreams.
As she works the dress down over her mid-section, Bride watches herself in the mirror hanging on the door of her chiffonier. The light is thin but there enough, coming naked from a streetlight through the blinds. When she peels the fabric back along the widest part of her hip, she stops. She sees. Floating in the airless silver circle of the mirror, a plainness; the walls and the windows bending in and a face as muted as her breath. The eyes are dark spangles, unrecognizable, and she cannot move them into something familiar. She blinks and they do not change, arresting her with the feeling of untried discovery. They are deeper than her other two dimensions and where they bottom out she does not know. The back of the room. The back of her mind. The bed. The. Bride rakes wispy fingers through her tired hair, folding it behind her ears and smoothing it above her shoulders. Bits of it pull loose, and in the dim glow of the streetlight the wiry strands are the same tincture as her black, colorless eyes. Bride draws the hairs out and wonders where the years have gone and mutters under her breath, Mercy.
She steps free and the dress rumples quickly and quietly to the floor. Bride flicks on a small brassy light and clambers through the top drawer of her chiffonier until she finds the proper thread and needle. Groom rolls onto his back and snores with more force. From her sewing chair, Bride looks over her lap and over the room and into his mouth as it gapes and maws before she puts a basting stitch to the fabric. It is cooling fast, the warmth from her body no longer working to preserve it, and before long the dress will be a vague, heatless nap to her hands. Bride works nimbly now, but the lavender and white oleander pattern of the cloth makes the process slow going and soon she loses focus. As she bobs the needle through the ragged shoulder, Bride does not think about the long and circular motion that she weaves. She does not yet realize that the seam will not hold. All she can see is her husband’s breath moving in and out, in and out, and when she closes her eyes she hears his stale, fetid voice whisper, I do, I really do, and then him coming down heavy upon her.

November Smoke

First draft of a story I wrote for a workshop

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November Smoke

In the back yard a fire burned. A quick burn of dead, matted leaves to make mothers nervous, small children delight, and white-bristled gentlemen softly reflect. On what, one could assume either the glint of a memory or the nature of an ember. Both would suffice and sustain for the moment. Under and around this sudden fire the frozen ground softened and the crystalline blades of grass, hastily encapsulated by a mid-November frost, slipped free from their watery prison. Those around the blaze tossed foliage by the handful and a dry heat burst headlong from the pile of leaves, only to be forced into retreat by the cold. It was a trifling, evasive warmth. At each sprinkling of umbrage the flames leapt skyward, lapping at the heel of a thick whorl of smoke and carrying off the dizzy shards of leaf that flitted like brilliant moths before extinguishing in the cool evening air. The children jumped and the mothers distressed.
Mr. Lomen could see none of this. From his perch on the high truss, he could make out only a thin column of smoke, substantial here, drawn out there, rising slowly at an angle with the wind. To those unfamiliar it would have seemed nothing more than a silver ply of yarn, fraying against the fabric of a darkening sky; a curious strand of cloud, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. Mr. Lomen, however, would not be so mislead. He knew what this was. Even from a distance he could smell the dry leaves, taste the bitter ash. It was the winter pyre, one of many that would be burning across the region to clear the fields and mark Autumn’s passing. First frost had finally settled upon the valley.
Reasons. Someone had asked for reasons.
Mr. Lomen gripped up on a girder and scanned the hilly horizon, making a conscious effort to ignore the shifting of tired legs and intermittent conversation at his back. Surely the rabble would have thinned by now; it was, after all, the dinner hour. In his time on the truss, Mr. Lomen had felt the luminance of spectacle rise as the people gathered and then fade when they remained. In the space of an hour they had made their presence felt, and now their persistence, their quiet, lingered like hot annoyance on the back of his neck. What business was it of theirs, a considering man? Had these people no families or warm homes in which to retire? Certainly they did, he thought. Yet they came in spite of their pleasant trappings, drawn on by the lure of spectacle like a parade, each man and woman preoccupied with the same enduring thought: someone is on the bridge. What they so anxiously waited for Mr. Lomen could not be certain of, but he guessed it to be one of two outcomes: down or off. One of two diametrical opposites that for the last few hours had been pulling on each other, grating across the fulcrum of a rust laden iron truss. Down or off. And while he hoped that the people willed the former, in his heart Mr. Lomen knew human nature to be far less forgiving; off drew the crowds, off made the papers.
Presently he glanced over his shoulder. A stranger clothed in the thick blue and grey wools of the local constabulary stood between Mr. Lomen and the crowd. In caution, the stranger raised his eyebrows and his hands, which had become raw from prolonged exposure to the air. This was the man who moments ago, after an extended consultation with his book of procedures, asked Mr. Lomen for a reason, reasons. A well-intentioned, though poorly exacted pursuit of dialogue. Yet, bumbling as they were, the question and the red-cheeked stranger stirred in Mr. Lomen the embers of thought that had gone dormant during his long vigil on the truss: reasons, justifications, troubles.
By the accounts weighted and deemed worthy, Mr. Lomen had no reason at all to find himself in his present company and situation. There were no chinks or breaches to be found in his well-being; nothing to speak of really. He did not ail from weak joints or an arhythmic heart. Both his vision and hearing were sound. He had never been troubled by money, in acquisition or retention. In love, he had never suffered so great a besieging as could not be mortared and masoned to its original strength. He did not smoke. Only rarely did he take drink. No troubles of any concern to the banker, the butcher, or the doctor. No, what troubled Mr. Lomen stood behind the whitewashed battlements and dry-cleaned linens. It swirled in the window wells of respectable living, falling quiet from time to time but never spending itself before precipitating a fine layer of grit on the once clear pane of glass. What troubled Mr. Lomen was the bridge itself. The thought of the bridge and the small child that he had seen step from it.
Precisely how these things came to calcify themselves in his mind was no mystery. He had seen the child a few days prior and time had not yet degraded her image. Though, he did not see her there, not on that exact iron bridge. Rather, he saw her on a grassy commons, from a park bench, from the shade where he so often sat to consider.
Reasons.
It was late afternoon and all around Mr. Lomen the world was turning to glass. Shadows from the forest began to grow long and fan out across the landscape, reclaiming, if only for a short while, their dominance over the fields in which they once stood. The taut shafts of light that clung to the tips of the ash trees were close to collapse, and they would very soon snap and fall back to the sun; already there were great clefts in the corners of the sky. Gradually, the air began to crack. Mr. Lomen allowed this to happen. The last fine rays of daylight, he believed, were nature’s best tool for whetting the mind. Clarifying, he thought. Crystal, he thought. But that was all, nothing more; these were his only thoughts. Neither the black branches that swayed above him; nor the cold, climbing through his coat; nor the echoed yelping of the dog who sniffed anxiously about the base of a sycamore; nor the tang of duff and dead leaves; nor the sound of his own tired pulse, pushing languidly across his eardrums: only crystal, only clear. How empty Mr. Lomen would have felt, had he been aware of this. But for a time he was not. And so Mr. Lomen sat vacantly, meditating on nothing at all, and drifted out above the commons, where everything was crystal and clear.
However, one cannot escape the wanderings of the mind indefinitely; a knee will jerk, a voice will call out, a thought will crest the quiet surface. Mr. Lomen knew this of course, yet the return of his senses came none-the-less as disturbing and inelegant, and he found that he had been staring off into space rather dully. As he clenched his teeth and shifted his seat in an effort of self-appraisal, Mr. Lomen felt unusually apparent. This awareness was redoubled when he noticed that the space in which he had been staring was occupied by three small children, and that these children, though now contentedly playing beneath a rutted swingset, had probably seen him stare.
The idea of his leering made Mr. Lomen shift once more. If he had bothered them, he thought, they showed little sign of it.
In fact, the children showed little sign of anything. Physically, they were quite ambiguous. Cherubic and freckle-cheeked, with bright shocks of coarse-cut red hair. Only after much consideration did Mr. Lomen place them as girls, though their navy overalls were faded around the knee and their tartan-fringed jackets mudded along the sleeve. From where this deterioration came, he could only guess, for their play, if it could be called such, would have been of complete imagination. Since he had been watching them, the girls had scarcely moved. They sat in a lazy semicircle, their lower halves splayed haphazardly as if each one of them had been dropped to the ground like a rag doll, which only after a period of settling came to assume its current posture. In an occasional and hushed manner, the girls would exchange looks and low voices. What was said, Mr. Lomen imagined to keep with boys and cakes and rings, but even these things could not hold the girls’ attention very long, and quite abruptly they would descend into silence. Only the rise and fall of the breeze, which carried airward the fine tendrils of their hair, gave the continued impression of subsistence to the three children. It seemed to Mr. Lomen as though they belonged to noone.
But this could not be, such peaceable and unassuming youth. It would not be fair. They were so unconfined; their stillness, so natural. Serene, he thought. Surreal, he thought. It made Mr. Lomen feel heavy, knowing that at any moment the children might suddenly become active and shake away their calm, and that when this happened he would remain pacified, and his own stillness would sit untouched. That for some reason beyond his control they could be moved, but he could not.
These were cold realizations. So cold, indeed, that when Mr. Lomen pulled them back into himself, they made distant the inner workings of his chest. His blood slowed, his lungs became short, and as he worked these thoughts down, wore them to slim shavings of ice, he saw that the children were now completely aware of him. One of the girls was smiling softly in his direction. How incredibly affectionate and disarming this gesture was, for the warmth of it settled upon Mr. Lomen with the conciseness of a spark, which fades quickly after it is felt. The other two girls craned their necks to follow the path of the smile. These two faces, unlike the first, were white and inexpressive. Empty. Though, there was nothing of calculation to their blankness, nothing of indignity. Rather, they looked on Mr. Lomen frankly, as though their minds had no preformed response for dealing with strange old men in parks. It was with this same frankness then that all three girls rose to their feet, gathered up their knapsacks, brushed the twisted sheaths of grass from their overalls, and seated themselves on the swingset.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Legs in, legs out. Back and forth. And Mr. Lomen could breath once more.
From this swingset, there ran a long, downtrodden chain of slate stepping stones that had been designed to join with the gravel path of the park in the most roundabout of ways. The stones made a great swooping arc that, bending by gradual degrees, came toward and then ran alongside the gravel walk, finally merging with it after spending some fifty or sixty slabs of slate. Many seasons and many thousands of tiny, spirited feet had taken their toll on the stones. Some flaked, others sprouted shoots of grass, still others had vanished completely, having been either ground to dust or physically displaced. The overall impression was that of a crescent moon balanced artificially on its tail, a connect-the-dots that had yellowed and faded with age.
As the sun smothered under thick iron clouds, the children made their way to the nose of this worn-out, stone moon. The two girls with hollow faces approached mouth to ear, and the smaller, more larking girl fluttered at a close distance behind them. This one, Mr. Lomen decided, was the younger sister. No doubt that the distance she maintained had been placed upon her, ingrained by years of hair twisting, nose flicking, and name calling to the point of tears, and then the tears, and then her sisters playing nice. Though it seemed she still maintained a resiliency toward the arrangement. This too would fade, Mr. Lomen thought. Long is the road, Mr. Lomen thought. And sure enough, when the two girls reached the first stone slab, they removed their knapsacks and tossed them at the feet of the smaller girl. Almost compulsorily, she began to pick them up, looping one on each arm and struggling to keep their many straps from dragging on the ground, as her sisters hopped away. The new game brought a sudden color and liveliness to their faces. From one broken stepping stone to the next, they exacted their leaps, making clumsy calculations so as not to land on the grass. To land on the grass would have been to fail. Mr. Lomen learned this when one of the two girls over shot her mark, hollered, and then, defeated, began again from the first slab.
Their gaiety faded only when the smaller girl followed them out onto the slate. At this, they did not revert to their look of blank indifference, but instead turned sour, downcast eyes upon her. Mr. Lomen knew what such looks meant, how such undue bitterness felt; the younger sister could only watch. She had been relegated to the role of a dumb beast, lapidated into obedience. Her reward was inactivity.
Yet, the verbal crating of her sisters proved only so strong as the propinquity which it maintained, and when the two older girls had bounded halfway across the moon the smaller girl stepped out. Not onto the stone, however, but instead upon one of her sisters’ knapsack. She then placed and stood upon the next, taking great care to avoid the grass. For a moment, the girl paused at the end of her short progress and surveyed the ground she had just covered. From there she turned, lifted up the first knapsack, tossed it a small distance it in front of the second, and took her third step. It was in this way that she fashioned her own two-piece span across the grass. Measure by measure, she moved away from the swingset, away from her sisters, away from the slate moon. She was some twenty steps out before the others realized what was happening. Even then, they would only shout to her, call to her with sugar forced into their words and give her reasons as to why she should come back. Though this was only a secondary concern; they would not abandon their game.
The small girl seemed to know this, and it soon became clear to Mr. Lomen that the she would not ever turn around. That she would continue across the commons and through the treeline and through the night, carried off upon her own unfolding trail. That she would not bend to her sisters’ requisitions. That in doing so she would, for a transeunt moment, unburden herself. If only she could stay above the grass. If only. The other girls realized this as well. But by the time they let go of their game and took off running through the park, their sister had already gone, eclipsed in the distance by a forest of ash. With an urgency as much out of fear as out of concern, they pitched into the woods after her, and Mr. Lomen was left alone with nothing to regard but an empty field at dusk. And a moon that would not set.
Reasons. Someone had asked for reasons.
Behind Mr. Lomen the faces in the crowd had grown hard. They were strange, disinterested faces, for which he held no significance. Weary eyes, sagging mouths, and running noses, that sniffed impatiently, that thought they smelled something in the air: fire, or failure, or frozen blood. It would not be long before they would encircle Mr. Lomen and, following the lead of the policeman, begin baying at him out of frustration; the gall had already worked its way into their hungry throats. Here was a man in need of communion. Though, their noses had led them mostly astray, for in Mr. Lomen they would find nothing of frost or frailty, only flame. Nothing they might do could bend him. These people would not know this, however, for in their numbers they felt immune and in control. How terribly unaware each and every one of them was. How complacent, Mr. Lomen thought. But, they were on the bridge too, he said to himself. Stop. Go. Stay off the grass. They were all on the bridge, and he was slowly rising above. The policeman was the first to see this and called out to him. Then the crowd broke into an uneasy gossip as Mr. Lomen stepped from the truss and rushed past. A number of the women were round and stunned that a man might do such a thing, covering their mouths and whispering, how terrible, a lost soul. The men were graved with a sense of rage and mockery; they believed their name would be tarnished with his. Some cursed him, others reached out to him, but Mr. Lomen shook all of this off. He would not hear it. He was already some twenty steps out and floating past the moon, rising up out of an empty field and curling like November smoke.
And everything was crystal and clear.

Through the Darkness, Kansas City Jazz

This is a creative, personalized research project. I like it--hence it is here. I think I might expand it with a deeper analysis and pepper the thing with photos, format it like a small coffeetable book--a small kickass coffeetable book. I've omitted works cited for this entry.
-----Learn Something.

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Through the Darkness, Kansas City Jazz


"Kansas City [. . .] has elements in common with histories of other notable artistic communities. [. . .] Some twentieth-century examples of these communities and their best recognized arts are: New Orleans in the teens, also for jazz; Paris in the twenties for literature; New York in the 1940s and 1950s for visual arts; and London and San Francisco in the 1960s for rock music." (Pearson, Goin’ to Kansas City xviii)

In the summer of 2006, I was in Kansas City for a concert at the Starlight Theater. I had never been to Kansas City before, though having driven through Kansas several times I had developed relatively low expectations for the city; expectations springing from the cowish monotony of the state itself. I was surprised then, despite my erroneous prejudgment, to discover that KC had high-rises, civic centers, and all the amenities that a city should have. But more surprising than this was a discovery I made while burning a few extra hours before curtain at the Starlight. While wandering through the streets, I and a few good friends of mine stumbled across the American Jazz Museum on 18th Street. Yes, culture, it seemed, had found its way into Kansas City along with the high-rises.
But a jazz museum in KC, a city quite literally in the middle of the country, as far removed from the cultural coasts as possible? As far as I was concerned, this building had no business being anywhere other than New York or New Orleans. I had to make sense of this. And so, led by curiosity and spare time, I passed through its doors, where inside I fell upon a series of exhibits that illuminated Kansas City as a former mecca of the jazz scene. There were names that I knew and recognized: Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker. These jazz masters were musicians who I associated with NYC, the place where they gained their broadest fame. I was stunned then to learn that these men, along with scores of others, came to musical fruition in the streets of Kansas City during the 1930s. My self-purported acumen for jazz was shattered.
However, I was slightly redeemed by my friends’ similar ignorance. We had never heard of the Kansas City jazz scene. But were we the only ones who had missed the train?
The question had been rolling over in the back of my mind for several months, forgone but not forgotten, before I thought to seek out an answer. We couldn’t be the only ones ignorant of this piece of musical history. And so I conducted a survey, rather informal, of a cross-section of my peers. In the survey I asked my subjects to name three American cities associated with jazz. My hope was that their first two answers would allow for the big players of New Orleans and New York City, and that the third city might reveal something more removed from the beaten path, something like Kansas City perhaps. Of the thirty people I questioned – I realize that the number is scant, but I could assume the results would be roughly the same with a larger pool – no one deviated from New York City and New Orleans. For the third city named the results are as follows: Chicago, 19 times; San Francisco, 4 times; Los Angeles, 3 times; Memphis, 2 times; unable to named a third city, 1 time; Kansas City, 1 time. (Iredale)
The results of my informal survey solidified my belief that I and my friends were not the only ones to overlook Kansas City as having an association with jazz. The thirty people I questioned also revealed a general knowledge of the jazz world, as nearly two-thirds of them settled upon Chicago, a reputable jazz city, as their third choice. I have to wonder what the results may have been should I have asked for four American cities associated with jazz. Might all of the people who said Chicago for their third choice have then chosen Kansas City as their fourth? But, speculation aside, the fact that of those thirty people, who on the whole seemed to possess a general knowledge of the jazz world, only one of them said Kansas City, lends itself to my point and question. Namely: why did Kansas City Jazz slide under the radar? Where did it come from and where did it go? What happened in Kansas City?


Love that Swing

Kansas City’s unique style of jazz developed from a great number of musical influences, due largely to its geographic location. Famed jazz commentator Ken Burns explains the centrality of Kansas City as having appeal to every traveling musician "between Chicago and Denver, Galveston and Minneapolis"(Burns). Musicians were arriving from every territory of the middle of the US, bringing blues from Texas and Arkansas, Dixieland from New Orleans, and integrating it into the traditional style of ragtime, which was native to Missouri.
These three distinct styles, blues, Dixieland jazz, and ragtime, came together at the crossroads of Kansas City to create a wholly unique style of music that began to emerge in the late 1920s. Ragtime, a fast paced, straightforward piano driven music lent its background of intricate melodies and "hot" syncopations to the mix. The blues offered a strong 4/4 rhythm and a twelve or sixteen bar backbone for soloists to work over. And the New Orleans influence, coming up by way of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, peppered the blend with a movement towards improvisation. The end result was the fast swinging, rhythmically driven, improvisational commodity of KC jazz (Pearson, "Political" 185).
Though, the style of improvisation prevalent in KC jazz of the late 1920s and early 1930s is not what we would think of as improvisation in the modern jazz sense. These musicians were not as freewheeling and avant-garde as a Miles Davis of the early 1950s. KC improvisation was much more structured, as the blues element would suggest. "What we hear in Kansas City jazz," Dr. Martin Williams of Oxford suggests, "is a disciplined dance music whose strengths lie in its energy, its ensemble verve – in that fine paradox between power and relaxation"(21). I believe this ensemble verve refers to the structure and size of the KC jazz band, most of which were between eight and fourteen musicians in number. To accommodate for the sheer bulk of instruments, Kansas City musicians developed the style of "riffing." Essentially, this was the creation of a brief, repetitive passage by one musician, which would then be picked up by others, and used as a harmonic backbone over which soloists could rip. Renowned KC jazz scholar Nathan W. Pearson explains:
"Setting riffs (creating the riff structure), building new compositions through riff-based improvisation, and using the base of swinging riffs for extended solos were all part of a musical ethos and were a splendidly effective way to blend dance music with improvisational jazz" (Goin to Kansas City 114).
"Riffing," with its endless supply of combinations, gave Kansas City jazz a real communal feel. Musicians would create continuing variations of a certain riff, while trading solos, and jam into the small hours of the morning. Jazz pianist Sammy Price recollects the atmosphere: "I remember once [. . .] I came by a session at about ten o’clock and then went home to clean up [. . .] I came back a little after one o’clock and they were still playing the same song" (qtd. Williams 23). This exuberance for creation, coupled with "hot" tempos and rhythms and the big band atmosphere developed Kansas City jazz into the premiere dance music of the late 1920s and early 1930s: swing jazz.
But, simply resting at a geographic crossroads was not the only factor in the development of KC jazz. The middle of the country could be the middle of nowhere if there weren’t some attraction for citizens, and more importantly musicians, to settle there. Above all else, the thing which drew musicians to Kansas City was the uncommon level of prosperity and vice that flourished there during the late stages of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression. These good times were made possible by political kingpin "Boss Tom" Pendergast (Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12).


Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The powerful and corrupt political machine of Pendergast had held dominance in Kansas City as early as the mid-teens. By the early-twenties, Tom had decanted the practice of crooked elections, and a public generosity to please even the smallest man, to a science. With prohibition keeping the American mouth dry and desirous, Pendergast found it best to aligned himself with the bootleggers of the day, in return for kickbacks of course. The streets of Kansas City were flooded with booze, and with the bureaucracy letting things slide the city gradually became a magnet for all manner of vice. Underworld operated nightclubs and gambling dens sprang up, their numbers reaching in the range of the hundreds, and by the end of the 1920s, around the time of the Market crash, Kansas City had become a wide open town: the Paris of the Plains (Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12).
As the Depression began to take hold around 1930, and the country floundered in economic turmoil, Kansas City with its booming, though illegal, flow of commerce shone like a beacon in middle America. Musicians who had been traveling throughout the heartland of the county during the 1920s now found work hard to come by in the wake of the Depression. Nathan W. Pearson explains: "With massive unemployment and lower standards of living for most Americans, few were comfortable paying [. . .] for an evening of dancing. [. . .] Musicians quickly realized that Kansas City was somehow immune from much of this" (Goin’ to Kansas City 77). KC offered a safe haven for these musicians because it operated in its own economic bubble. People had alcohol to drink, money to spend, and, hang it all, they wanted to dance.
Never before, and possibly never again, had a town been so primed for a musical explosion. With an abundance of nightclubs and performance venues available to them, and with organized crime looking out for them–because what’s good for the musicians is good for the clubs is good for the men in charge–the Kansas City jazz musicians had no trouble finding work and play. Pianist Mary Lou Williams, who arrived on the scene at the end of 1929, reflects on this period of affluence: "Politicians and hoodlums ran most of the nightspots, and the town was wide open for drinking, gambling, and pretty much every form of vice. Naturally, work was plentiful for musicians"(qtd. Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12). It was this wanton environment that harbored the musical chops of pianist Bennie Moten, trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page, tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and Kansas City’s most famous jazz musician, before the emergence of Charlie Parker in the late 1930s, pianist and band leader William "Count" Basie (Williams 21). All of these musicians bounced and "riffed" off of one another from the end of the 1920s to the middle of the 1930s, cultivating the KC sound and embracing a musical environment whose pinnacle and rapid decline would soon come to pass.


The Inside’s Out

With all the talent and musical energy booming in Kansas City during the first half of the 1930s, it would be a great oversight to assume that the rest of the country was ignorant of this scene. You can disguise great music with the Midwest, but eventually its echos will drift to the coasts. After all, what’s buried underground cannot stay hidden forever. KC was a cache of virtuoso musicians just waiting to spill into the national scene. Eventually, and not surprisingly, one act transcended. In 1936, the Count Basie Orchestra was discovered by Columbia Records executive John Hammond. By early 1937, the fourteen piece ensemble that carried the heart and spirit of the KC jazz scene began performing and recording in New York City (Williams 27). Basie’s steady, rolling rhythms and "hot" tempos and technical prowess were unparalleled. "Combined with several brilliant solists [. . .] all of whom were relatively unknown, Basie hit listeners and fellow musicians like a thunderbolt"(Pearson, Goin’ To Kansas City 134).
One might assume that such national exposure and reception could be nothing but a gain for KC jazz. However, Basie’s ascension to the top, more importantly his recording in New York, set the table for a period of massive migration. Hammond had found his newest musical tap in Kansas City, and was set on bringing that tap to the most lucrative market in the country. Mary Lou Williams explains Hammond’s reaction to KC jazz:
"He was knocked out by what was happening musically, because he’d never heard such a thing. And he began to get jobs for the musicians. [. . .] It was very beneficial what he did, but it left no one there that anybody could copy or to continue what was happening, because everybody that was playing left" (qtd. Pearson, Goin’ To Kansas City 184).
The prospect of "hitting it big" in NYC, as compared to simply skirting along through the dens of iniquity in Kansas City, was too palpable for most to pass up. As a result, the best of the KC swing scene hopped a bus and headed east. Their sound then gained recognition and prominence through the clubs and radio stations of New York, and little by little the KC jazz sound took on an association with its new home. Undoubtedly, this was a great benefit to the individual musicians, but it proved a bane to the city and scene that cultivated them.
A second layer lurks beneath the dissemination of Kansas City jazz, which may have been more influential than John Hammond in the musician migration. Count Basie and company were not simply going to where the money was, they were going where the work was.
Around 1937, the freewheeling, racketeering, open spirit of Kansas City began to gain negative recognition throughout the rest of the country. In response to the seedy image that developed under Tom Pendergast’s control, newly elected Missouri Gov. Lloyd Stark made it his top priority to bring this period of lawlessness to a close. In 1938 "Stark declared war on vice in Kansas City" (Haddix "Tom’s Town" 13). Through enacting a series of investigations and reforms Stark began a cleansing of the city and an ousting of Pendergast. One of the more devastating new pieces of legislature required that all bars and performance venues close their doors by 1pm. This greatly limited the business of nightclubs, and resultantly limited the amount of work available for professional musicians (Haddix, "18th & Vine"). By the end of 1938, most of the mob run clubs, gambling dens, and performance venues were shut down. Finally, in 1939 Tom Pendergast was convicted and jailed for income-tax evasion, a symptom of organized crime previously made famous by Chicago’s Al Capone (Pearson Goin to Kansas City 86).


Ain’t Nothing But a House of Cards

When Kansas City jazz began collapsing in on itself, when all the pillars that held the musical roof up either moved out or were imprisoned, a new talent emerged. A talent so genius and incomparable that, if he had chosen to do so, I believe this talent could have resuscitated the spirit of KC jazz, and drawn the music back. I’m speaking of course about saxophonist Charlie Parker.
But this talent did not, and would not, resurrect the Kansas City style, simply because his virtuosity was too great for the style to contain. You cannot bury a Charlie Parker in the works of a twelve piece ensemble. His level of skill and progressive innovation calls for a much smaller, more intimate collection of musicians, so that his music can take center stage. The rise of Charlie Parker, and the general rise of the individual talent, as opposed to the big band dynamic that flourished in KC, led jazz into its modern age. The ensemble "riffing" and steady rolling rhythms of swing jazz dissolved into the more free flowing, intellectual and uncompromising form which it is found in today. Effectually, when Charlie Parker came along, jazz stopped dancing. And when jazz stopped dancing the people stopped showing up. The broadly popular style characteristic of Kansas City in the mid 1930s was no longer the direction in which jazz was headed. The form that Parker initiated then waned in national acceptance and became relegated to a pure underground of jazz afficionados. Kansas City’s prodigal son, as it turns out, put the final board across the door of the KC jazz scene. That, along with the fall of "Boss Tom" Pendergast, the cleaning out of Kansas City’s underworld influences, and the contractual attention of Columbia Records executive John Hammond, led to the very rapid collapse of KC jazz.
However, fingers should not be pointed, and blame should not be placed. Neither Parker, nor Hammond, nor Basie, nor Pendergast should be faulted for the disappearance of Kansas City jazz, because each of these men, in their own way, wrote the history of what we call Kansas City jazz. They were all benefactors and victims of a beautiful and unrepeatable place in time. These men met on the windswept streets of Kansas City and played their cards out on the table, for all who wanted to see. It just happened that their cards piled up into the shape of a nightclub, which, for a short but glorious while, towered over the world of music. Whether they were unaware or unshaken by the infirmity of this house of cards is something only those who built it can know. Maybe they believed it would endure forever. Ultimately though, despite their sincerest wishes, the unbending prairie winds toppled Kansas City’s house of cards and carried away the individual pieces. By the end of the 1930s, the Paris of the Plains was merely a shadow of its musical past; just a ghost town of empty, echoing nightclubs.