My Name is Brooke, and I'm a Poet

I'm reading at Teddy's in Baton Rouge tomorrow night. This is the first time I'll read poetry in front of a large audience in years (maybe three? yikes!). On top of this I've got to read for about ten minutes and that equals about four poems all of which I'll post here for the two of you to read.

Here's the poem I know I'll read because it's safe. I wrote it high as a kite last Thanksgiving, and titled it this way because it took about 30 seconds to write and another 30 seconds to read, and at the time I thought that was pretty funny. Here it is:

30-second Thanksgiving Poem

The room smells like cigarettes
and we’ve moved with impressive swiftness
from Sarah Palin to Beowulf’s gods
then to the capital G God of Milton and America
but I’ve got to piss
so I go to do so
and bend my head between my legs
to make it come out faster
so I can return the conversation quickly
and proffer my piece:
I think intellectuals can believe in God
even though I don’t
even though in my non-judgment, I’m judging
and I hate that
but Broc’s there
and Jen’s there
and Brock’s there
and they’ve got their pieces on the subject
which don’t necessarily cohere with mine
but they’re all smart
so who is correct
I’m not sure but I love them all
I even love myself right now
and I don’t know of the veracity
or perfection in any of us
but God does

On Being Sick

A leaden lung, two timber legs. My back made from the earth, half-dollars for eyelids. Allow me this tiny attempt at poetry: I have been sick.

Woolf and Didion and others have written beautifully about illness, about the prison of the sick-bed and the horror of the congested head, but I can’t quote them now, because my fingers marching across the keyboard are marathon enough. To pick up a book, to bear the weight of all that ink on sheaves, might be deadly.

I’ll just try to relate what happened last night on top of our brand new sheet set from Wal-mart—army-white colored—which I’ve christened with my sickness. I lay there, sunken down, becoming part of the pillow top. For a moment I had the secret wish that someone would break into the house and brutally murder me, preferably with a sharpened kitchen knife, because to be stabbed would be something visceral, a pain to know, and though it would mean my end, to be finished on that note must certainly be more dignified than passing banally atop pressed army white. Mainframe brand. 200 thread-count. Orange tag clearance sale.

I don’t want to be murdered, not really. But there was a feeling last night, and it was that a force was pushing me into the earth. How low could I go? It felt a giant iron made for unwrinkling humans moved back and forth across my torso: up towards the head to help expel the breath, back down to the feet to secure another inhalation. Something mechanical and invisible in the ether was responsible for my every action and breath. I was alive because something I couldn’t even see said so.

Since I’ve been a grown-up I haven’t taken a sick day, soldiering forth through classes with tissues and Halls Vapor candy. This will likely happen again tomorrow. Something mechanical inside me will find words to say about Henry IV and the need for every person alive to know Shakespeare. But for now I’m of iron, I’m about iron, I’m even among and amongst iron. I am the heaviest human alive, and can see with surprising clarity each thread to count on these new sheets. Being sick often gives me fresh eyes. Still, though, I have a wrinkled stomach and lung and heart.

Malapropisms and other embarrassments

This blog shall serve as a proem to another blog in which I write about my fear of being very stupid. Proof of how silly I'm getting with this blogging stuff: writing an introduction to a blog to be written later. For now I'm just compiling a list of unforgettably stupid Brooke moments:

*The time when I was a kid and my dad told me, because I'd asked, that his IQ was around 150 and that this was no big deal. And then later that year when Dan Quayle became vice-president and Roy railed at his face speaking to us from the television, and I said loudly in order to impress my dad, "Dan Quayle is so stupid his IQ is probably like the same as mine, like 130." And Roy had to correct me and say that would mean he's actually kinda smart, actually way above average.

*The time when I was an even younger kid and my mom was driving me to school, and to impress her I said something I'd heard adults say a lot, but twisted it to fit my meaning. We were talking about my step-sister Dezi, who had yet again failed some 2+2 test, and in order to underscore how undeniably smarter I was than her, I said, "Ah, she always ceases to amaze me." I said "always" because I thought this would mean that she amazed me over and over again. I'd been thinking all my life when people said, "She never ceases to amaze me" that they meant the subject in question never amazed the speaker. I was totally ignorant that the word cease meant something. My mom explained this to me and, red-faced, I slammed the door on her as she blew me a kiss goodbye when we reached the school parking lot.

*The other time when I was a kid and my first stepdad kept calling me a prima donna when he'd fight with my mom and I wondered how he knew something so deep-seated about me because I'd been secretly dancing to Madonna's music alone in my room, and quietly, for years. So then I would call friends at school a prima donna if they liked her music. When I discovered the dictionary in high school I was mortified.

*The time a few weeks ago when I attempted to teach my Brit lit students some god-forsaken text and I said Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England was very, I repeat, very important in the understanding of it, and a student asked what "ecclesiastical" meant. And I paused and had a tremendous out-of-body experience, as I usually do when something goes wrong in class, and instead of asking the students for help and saying something smart like "we have to share the responsibility of knowledge in this classroom," etc., I said before I returned back to my body, "Ecclesiastical means 'definitive,' 'all-encompassing.'" Which of course is wrong. And I had to email them later that day to admit my stupidity.

This list should be much, much longer, but I've got two texts to read for tomorrow and thus must try to work to get smarter rather than revel in these duller moments. Hopefully even when I'm dumb I'm still fun, though. That's my big wish for myself and loved ones.

What's Going On

Early on during Christian's first birthday party, I sat at the kitchen table with my sister Erica and her two girlfriends, listening to them chat. I always wonder what they talk about--one look at Erica's cell phone inbox might as well be Greek: nigga and beez and chillite. Truly their language is incomprehensible, but I was doing my best not to judge them and I didn't once correct Erica or anyone for using the "I be" subject-verb disagreement. I may just be growing up.

So they talked about food and it seems as if they only kind they ever eat is the fast kind. I love to eat--anyone knows this--but after having read Fast Food Nation I just really can't stand the idea of consuming meat with shit in it. Fast food, for me, is disgusting and the new opiate of the masses (unless I'm incredibly drunk: then, genius). But. I didn't tell them this. I acted impressed that Erica hadn't eaten a TacoBell Grande since the beginning of this second pregnancy. Then her thin friend says, "Yee-a, I haven't been able to eat no Taco Bell in weeks." When the fat friend asks why, Erica cuts in and says, "Let me tell her! Ha! It's cuz she's pregnant!" The fat one smiles, says, "Nah-uh, girl, I pregnant too!" They spend the next minute or so falling all over the news and talking about the color of their pregnant throw-up--sometimes green and sometimes yellow and sometimes clear (the best kind!), and I don't tell them to stop, even though I'm trying to eat, and even though yesterday Erica wouldn't hear my very fun story about my having to wipe Lala's ass at the hospital. I wasn't even giving specific gruesome details! It was just part of a larger narrative about how ridiculously attached me and Lala are that now I've even see all parts of her ass inside and out! Big whoop!

But maybe I'm not growing up after all. Because after their throw-up convo dies down I clear my throat conspicuously and say, "I've also got an announcement to make: I am on the pill."

Across the room, my mom nearly chokes. She makes a bigger deal out of this statement than perhaps is necessary. "I mean, what, is there no birth control on the Westbank? What the hell is going on with you girls?" Later she tells me in private, "I loved your response. I mean, that was awesome." I didn't know I was making a political statement. But after the arrival of five more girls with ten+ kids in tow, I knew that something was happening here, and what it was was exactly clear: if having kids at an extremely young age is cool, my sister is the coolest. And her friends are doing their damndest to catch up. In her world, Erica is someone to be revered. Look: one little boy, one on the way, boyfriend in jail. How fucking cool: she can handle anything.

A snag: if handling their children theoretically is to be revered, in reality, it proves to be a problem. These girls like to talk, and when one of their kids slaps another, like one curly-haired devil child slapped and scratched my adored nephew, no one is there to mitigate damages. They're popping gum through words. At one point Christian ran toward me crying, a trickle of blood under his nose. I witnessed the whole thing--it was the two-year-old curly haired bitch who popped him a good one. "Where's the mother?" I asked. The five possible suspects sat around the dining room table and laughed, like, big deal. A little girl scratching a little boy is funny, you see: gender role reversal. But I was pissed, and so was my sister Aimee. "God, Erica has some brown-trash friends, and I'm gonna beat one of them bitches asses!" When Aimee is mad at me, I am fearful, and I call my friends to ask them if I'm a good person and if at least they still love me. When Aimee is mad at someone else, it's brilliant. I just stand back and watch. Because Aimee's arms were folded tight and because her eyes were slit like the dining room blinds, one girl stepped forward to claim her devil child and make her apologize to Christian. Still not satisfied, Aimee said, not so under her breath, "That's right, do your job."

Which got me to thinking what the jobs of these girls are going to be in life. What are they destined to? I've got to think Erica will not be a Winn Dixie cashier for life. That she will becoming a reflecting person, a person who plans, a person with goals who actually fulfills them. But I haven't seen that happen yet. With two kids before her 19th birthday, though, she is definitely a lot cooler than I am. I'm 29 next month.

Working toward a definition

About five years ago I stopped trying to write poetry because all I wrote in every poem were stories about me in a poetic language no one but me could understand. So I started writing personal essays about me that maybe two people could understand.

This blog was born to provide a platform for ideas I may pursue in real essays, but maybe not. I constructed it to 1) give myself a pretend (sometimes real: thank you, commenters) audience, 2) write more frequently, 3) write around my book, instead of inside it, which is still a dark and scary place. (Incidental aside: Lala, my main character and a real person, is in the hospital thus she says I must go to New Orleans immediately to save her lest she die. The first time spoke this sentence I was seven years old.)

Also because of this new platform I’ve learned to hyperlink things and use pictures with text, so I am really becoming a smarter person as a result.

Hopefully this blog will be interesting even if the reader is not a #1 Brooke fan, because, of course, personal essays are not just about the writer. This is a difficult concept for people to grasp. Take, for example, the previous blog in which I wrote about my dad crashing his car into a neighbor’s living room. That was true. What wasn’t true was the line I gave him to say after he crashed: “I zagged when I should’ve zigged!” I can’t know my dad said this as I wasn’t there: I wasn’t yet born. But my dad has slurred stuff like this before in precarious situations. I know him, and you don’t, but I want you to. Thus I give him things to say that reveal parts of him. And I don’t just want you, the reader, to know my dad, but maybe something bigger about loving people who are so strange and wonderful and flawed, and about the fear of becoming a person such as that. Or not becoming that person. Who am I if not my father’s daughter? We all ask ourselves these questions in one form or another in life. These ideas are implicit in any personal writing.

Non non-fictioners might balk at this stuff. They might Joe Wilson me: “You lie!” I don’t think I do. I’m not inventing people or situations—just teeny parts of them. I’d argue this makes them more real. If I had my dad read the line I gave him—“I zagged when I should’ve zigged!”—he’d likely say, “Man, I remember that like it was yesterday. I was funny then.” Glug, glug. He’ll know he said it, because he feels it’s true. That’s what’s most important, I think, about writing non-fiction: writing what you feel is true.

A friend recently mentioned it must be difficult to straddle the line of revelation and discretion—I mean, I’m writing about my life, sometimes about the gritty little parts of it, and posting it on the internet for the world to see. Isn’t that, oh I don’t know, like Lindsay Lohan climbing out of a car with no underwear on? I say no, mainly because I always try to imagine the person I’m writing about reading what I’ve written. I try to say nothing that, if they were being honest with themselves, they wouldn’t admit to being real. This is a form of loyalty to the craft and to the people I love. Ultimately I’m writing to discover something about them, about us. Of course I could lie about my part in all this, make Brooke always witty and charming and not stumbling over words and ideas and not eating another bag of cookies when I shouldn’t be. But then I’d have to Joe Wilson myself.

Oh! I forgot another reason I started this blog: I secretly hope I’m discovered just like the prize winner of Defiance, Ohio. Some Huff Po editor will stumble across Buggy Face and say, hey, we should pay this person for her thoughts! I suppose the University of Alabama already technically does that, but in the classroom I’m forced to speak ideas aloud. Unfortunately sometimes that means we wind up talking about poop and then I say something or other that makes the class think I’m communist. Maybe in two months they’ll think it’s funny to draw a swastika or turd on my evaluations. I’d really rather write.

Two Fine Subjects: Movies and Alcohol

Movies make my world. I’ve always felt akin to Holden’s younger sister in Catcher in the Rye, the little girl who, though “just a kid,” knew the difference between a great movie and a phony movie. This perception of me has also been perpetuated by my father. After I insisted he take me to see Supergirl three times in a row, he sat me down and lectured me about ART. I should be interested in it, possibly make it someday, and Supergirl wasn’t where it was at. He read aloud Gene Siskel’s movie reviews, and I learned what it meant to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. I learned most movies were MOVIES, but the rare great movies were FILMS. Also, evil people such as PHILISTINES and REPUBLICANS hated art and films. We also watched the McLaughlin Group because if I were to understand art better, I should be aware of CULTURE and SOCIETY. Such was the weekend education of my childhood. I learned little else, though the knowledge that two packs of cigarette butts can fit into the empty beer can has proved to be a fun game to introduce at parties.

My dad is also an alcoholic. I’ve never seen him be anything but utterly charming while drunk. The funniest lines from my book are those of my father’s, such as this slurry drunken one: right after he slams into a neighbor’s living room, empty beers cans the only other passengers in the car, and he says, “Goddamnit! I zagged when I should’ve zigged!”

After Roy was displaced by Katrina, he found a new home with me and Brock. We took him in for some of the buggiest and most difficult six months of our lives. Somewhere in the middle of his stay, we invited him to my mom’s for Thanksgiving. The timing was auspicious—it was just short of their 25 year divorce anniversary. He kept my mom in the corner of the kitchen for hours making fun of all the fat pigs in our family, said they should be carved, said they had gravy in their veins. His pants were three inches too short and Brock, also pretty tipsy, made the joke that Roy was still waiting for Katrina. “Too soon?” he asked. It’s never too soon for impropriety. He and I were married a year and a half later.

Alcoholism and the movies converged in my life this weekend when Netflix mailed me the film Days of Wine and Roses. It’s a 1962 flick about a two-martini-at-lunch man who meets a teetotalling secretary, introduces her to the chocolate-y tasting Brandy Alexander, and it is drunken unhappy days for both thereafter. And having known in my life several kinds of alcoholics—the day-long slow nippers, the “I’m only drinking beer from here on out” deniers, the weekend bingers, the hidden vodka in the glove compartment liars—the one thing they have in common is their desperation in trying to conceal the truth, and their stealth at this concealment. Despite Roger Ebert’s lauding review (and his bona fides in being an alcoholic himself), I have to say this movie doesn’t tell the truth, or truths, about alcoholism.

The Jack Lemmon character in Days of Wine and Roses does not care to hide his alcoholism. He actually seems to flaunt it. And I’m not ignoring the historical context of late 50s, early 60s two-martini lunches. The character who seemingly wanted to drink till the end of his days didn’t do the exact things he needed to in order to maintain the lifestyle: he wasn’t private about it, ever. In the middle of the film there’s a scene where, after having dried out for two months, the Lemmon character and his wife are staying with and working for her father. And to reward themselves for their hard work and asceticism, Lemmon pilfers for them three pints of whiskey. Two pints are wisely strapped to his ankles underneath his work pants, but the third he’s insanely hidden in the vast maze of his father-in-law’s greenhouse. What follows is a scene of absurdity in which, blasted off the two pints he’s guzzled, Lemmon rips apart every plant in the greenhouse, basically destroying years of his father-in-law’s work in search of the holy pint. When he finally finds it, dirt and rose petals on his face, he dumps the entire contents down his gullet. He is hospitalized and strait-jacketed and he cries and shakes and sweats for the alcohol. Darn it. If only he hadn’t caused thousands of dollars of destruction, he’d still be able to drink.

My point is this movie proffers tangible tragedies that result from alcoholism, thus making its purpose more didactic than truthful. (At another point in the film, the wife character almost burns down the house and her daughter with it because, whaddya know, she had too many shots of gin and left a cigarette burning overnight. Moral: drinking may cause you to nearly kill your young child). Alcoholics usually leave more emotional destruction in their wakes, a fact the movie mostly ignores. Most alcoholics in the real world live, on the surface, normal lives in which they hold jobs steadily. They tell friends and family all is fine. They are funny. They suffer in silence. Of course many want to stop—but they aren’t willing to lose face in order to do so. Certainly they won’t destroy public and private property at every other turn. Instead they slowly make people fall out of love with them. They forget how to love as well.

So what I’m saying is that I feel an affinity for the idea of this film, or movie, but not the end result. This would make a great contemporary remake. It would show two lovers who drink a lot, who are smart enough to get away with it. Maybe there’s already a film out there like this, only I’m not remembering the name of it. Must be all the years of wine and roses.

Loathing the Live

Because poverty and other boring factors are forcing me to miss the Avett Brothers at the Bama Theater tomorrow—a band I’d actually love to see again—I’m going to write a short tract about the inanities and irritations of live music.

The first concert I attended was that of Julio Iglesias at the long defunct Saenger Theater in New Orleans. Lala forced me to wear my only dress, a white one with a big blue, square collar which made me look vaguely like a sailor. I agreed to wear it because there was a loose seam in the hem, and unraveling the entire skirt would be my project for the two tedious hours. Even then I had no interest in Hispanic men like Iglesias who, according to Lala, made all women wet. Seeing him in the Saenger that night, with its Greek architecture, gold facades, I felt cold and clammy, far from hot or wet like Lala, who used both hands to fan her face and in between her legs. I had the idea—perpetuated constantly by my grandmother—that all Hispanic men wanted was sex, and sex from many women, and furthermore sex hurt a lot, I would see someday—and I just wasn’t interested in any of it. I was five.

Before I could unravel just an inch of skirt string, Lala lifted me out of my seat and pushed me into the aisle. “Baile,” she said. Dance. She pinched my side until, holding the balustrade for dear life, I bent my knees intermittently in what others viewing from their seats must have supposed was some strange form of calisthenics. Lala made me keep moving for the eternity of a five-minute song, which emoted something about what a great lover Iglesias was, and now, finally, I was growing hot, but it wasn’t a good thing: I wanted to kill Lala. I realized, and wished she would too, that you can’t force a person into rhythm. Into feeling the music. Despite my eight subsequent years of ballet and jazz, I knew right then I’d never be a dancer. Dancing, like sex, took moves and a frame of mind that should be private. No one wants to see a public boner. But that’s exactly what I felt like at that moment, dancing in a way I didn’t like to music I didn’t understand.

That’s my big problem with live music which only grew in the next twenty four years: other people moving their bodies as if no one is looking. Because of that formative first concert, I’m looking now. I’m always vigilant of the un-self-conscious, because I think, no one can be that un-self-conscious. The way I see it there is one of two ways to view the moves of people dancing at concerts: either they have fallen so entranced into melodies that they are not in control of how they dance or how their bodies react to the sounds of the band, or, they are full of shit. In life I try to be open-minded, liberal, non-judgmental, sweet and loving, but when it comes to experiencing live music, I go directly to “all these people are full of shit” mode. At concerts, I’m a fascist.

So ultimately I think it’s not me: it’s the presence of other people that ruins live music. When I saw The Roots a few years ago, the only 6’9” linebacker in the House of Blues stood right in front of me. This isn’t an anomaly, or plain dumb bad luck, but a metaphor for what being at a concert does to me. Other fans don’t bring me closer to meaning or movement toward the music, but push me further away from it. Just as I’m starting to remember how beautiful the song “The Seed” is, and speculate why The Roots wrote it, and consider what that song means to me, there’s the linebacker in front of me. Or the girls popping it like it’s hot right next to me. All of them so aware of the effect of the music on their own bodies that I’ve got to be aware of them. And meanwhile, where did the intoxicating live music go? Into the rafters, into the assholes. Definitely not into me.

Psychoanalyze me. Say, “these concert-goers aren’t Lala. They love the same music you love. Enjoy their company. Feel the music.” To which I’d respond, I do feel music: in my car, in my bedroom, when I’m running, sometimes even in public, through my ear buds. But I can never forget the importance of public propriety. The other day at school I had Jay-Z’s new song “Empire State of Mind” in my head. I nodded intermittingly to the internal music, perhaps appeared to be in a good mood, and because of Jay-Z, I truly was. The rap lyrics are brilliant, but I think it’s the six lines of Alicia Keys, the sounds of her soft strong voice that ground the song:

In New York,
concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
there’s nothing you can’t do.
Now you’re in New York,
These streets will make you feel brand new,
Big lights will inspire you…

Later that day, once I’m home, playing the role of Alicia Keys in front of the mirror, I don’t even realize my hips are swaying, that there’s a beautiful solitary rhythm here, that in my bedroom I’m a private dancer. I belt out the entire song and I dance. But after the song is over I do say out loud, “Damn, I’m pretty good. I should’ve been a singer.”