plan b

misdirected, we were
misdirected, we all
missed the point and
jumped off the toll road

Caroline, The Pale Young Lady

On the screaming hot summer afternoons of Bethany, when the waves crept lazily over and around the black rocks of the jetty and most young women lazed in the sun's full blast, a pale shade of a creature, wearing a heavy bathrobe, would pick her way down the steps of the boardwalk. Her feet in slippers, a beach bag under her arm, and her face obscured by a sun hat and shades, she would steal across the sand to place her towel in the boardwalk's cool shade, laying near the wooden framing, joined by the sand crabs and beach ants that likewise made their homes away from the sun.
She always came alone, and she always left alone, floating down the parkways towards an unknown home. Slight, she looked as though she could be no more than sixteen, though no family accompanied her.
Silent, she watched the young men throw their footballs while the beach bunnies tanned themselves, giggling, and the families built castles in the sand. Obscured as she was in her corner, no one seemed to notice or approach her.
I first took notice of Caroline (Caroline was her name) one evening as the clock on the main drag struck 5 and the lifeguards blew their whistles. As usual, the guards on our part of the beach pulled their stand towards the boardwalk. They barely noticed Caroline; Steve nearly stepped on her before she said, “Excuse me,” Her voice surprisingly low and smoky.
“Oh, sorry. Beach's closed. You're going to have to move.”
Caroline stood and stole out of the path of the lifeguard stand, briefly stepping out into the fading sunlight as she did so.
Her hair, long, straight and reddish-brown, hung down below her shoulders. An athletic-looking two-piece suit covered her important parts. Her skin was white, obviously too white to be touched by the midday sun's rays, and accented by the darkness of her suit and her striking hair. She stole one look out towards the horizon, her eyes stained glass. She stepped back under the boardwalk into the shade of the evening sun as families and beachgoers cleared out.
I sat, watching the shadows, trying to reconstruct that brief glimpse. When she reemerged, she wore her disguise, nearly jogging westward towards her home. I caught her in the parking lot.
“Hey, what's your name?”
“Caroline.” She kept walking.
“I'm Jake.”
“Hi, Jake.” She kept walking.
“You've been coming to the beach a lot this summer?”
“Every day...”
“Why don't you come out in the sun with us?”
She was quiet for a bit. I kept walking beside her. “Mom says I'm too pale to go in the sun, plus I'm allergic to the stuff in sunscreen. So if I don't want huge burns, I have to stay in the shade.” That was all I could get from her.
We got to my street, and I hadn't caught Caroline looking at me yet, so I said I'd see her around.

Caroline didn't come to the beach for a couple days, but soon I saw her again, and watched carefully as she got set up in the shade.
“Hey Jake, what're you looking over there for?”
“Ah, no real reason.” I walked over to Caroline.
“Hey, remember me?”
“Yeah.”
“Say, how bout you come out into the sun with us for a little? A short time won't hurt you too bad.”
“I'd better not. My mom says I shouldn't go. I could get hurt.”
“Come on, how can you always sit there in the shade like that? Come on out and toss the frizbee with us.”
“Why do you want me to come out and play? After all this time I've been laying here in the shade?”
“I only really saw you the other day. Plus, what's it matter, now that we know each other? C'mon.”
Caroline reached for her coat and summer hat.
“No, don't grab that. Just come on out. I promise, you'll be fine.”
“I don't know, my mom said...”
“Just come along.” I reached for her hand, and she stood up.
Caroline stepped out of the shade. She winced at first as her delicate foot buried itself underneath the hot sand, but seemed to get used to it pretty quickly. I grabbed her hand so she wouldn't fall.
Her skin was so pale it was almost powder blue. She grabbed my hand tighter as we walked across the sand towards my friends.
“Guys, this is Caroline.”
They were pleased to meet her.

I took her into the water and we played in the surf. The waves rolled up and crashed, each blue impact stripping a little of the pale sand off of the beach as it rolled away. The water, cool to the skin, seemed to protect us from the sun. I splashed Caroline and she splashed me back while the sun crept across the sky. My friends sometimes paused their game of catch to glance over.
On one throw, my friend managed to land the frizbee on the shore. “I'll get it!” Caroline shouted. She ran, slipping and stuttering a bit as she tried to creep out of the ocean. As she bent to pick up the disc, she stumbled in the loose sand and fell. She lay there. While we had been in the water, her skin had turned from pearl-blue to faint red. I could see scratches on her skin where the sand had bitten into the new burns. She still didn't move. The waves washed up and began to lick gently at her skin.
The lifeguards cleared the water and took over on the shore. An ambulance pulled up and they took Caroline away on a stretcher. Someone in the crowd came over with her belongings, covering the unconscious girl with her robe as she was swept off. I sat on the rocks. My friends got the frizbee and went home.

At five o'clock the guards cleared the beach and made sure I was leaving. I didn't come back for a couple of days. When I did, of course Caroline wasn't there. It was a while before I tried to talk to another girl.

Would That We Could Be So Empty of Weight

Winter's ended, the long streams of wind
Shiver through windows in stone houses;
White the snow that melts from our walls,
And white the candle that lights my page.

The clock in the hallway accosts us by night,
As the flame in the hearth burns low;
I will leave you now, my darling child,
I'll walk till I'm covered by the thinning snow.

Bethany Beach, Optimistically Titled "One in a Series"

Bethany Beach in southeastern Delaware is a racist joke*, an odor of crab meat ripe for devouring at the hands of ravenous vacationers, a clanging of dishes in the kitchen, a cloud, an anxiety. Bethany Beach is purified and profane; from young to old, from country-club set to fortunate West Virginia hick real-estate speculators--“We're still poor!” they exclaim, half-ironically (for half-irony is the best one can hope for in Bethany)--it is the distilled vision of America as viewed from the vantage of the intuitive, the Christian, and those “familiar with the philosophy of Carl Gustave Jung,” as one of my favorite Literature teachers was fond of saying. Bethany Beach serves Freedom Fries in family restaurants where you can “Relax, God is in control.”
The drive out to Bethany Beach from Washington, DC, up New York Avenue to Highway 50 East to Maryland, to 404 in Delaware, then 113 South, to Route 26 East, is pleasant. The vacationer passes picturesque farmland, is gently reminded to buckle up, to keep his headlights on, and to keep under the speed limit. Most vacationers won't get lost on this road; the signs are well-placed and easy to follow. But if a mishappen vacationer drives off the path, turning south on 213, 313, or 113, he'll get stuck in the winding roads of Route 20, and he'll find things rarely seen on the shore community. He'll see trailer parks, he'll see mom and pop 7-11 type joints run by worn-out, bleary-eyed women of indeterminate age, and he'll see occasional working-class folk who don't work in any of Bethany's fine restaurant kitchens, people who obviously struggle.
Once at Bethany Beach, though, a visitor will notice the quaintness of the area. The restaurants are named “The Cottage Cafe” and “Mickey's Crab House,” It seems that everyday Americans—provided you mean white Americans, like the group of ex-fraternity brothers that banded together to found a chain of restaurants along the coast, or the friendly overweight serveuse in one of Bethany's many greasy spoon diners—it seems like down-to-earth, good-natured folks run the joint, and have been doing so for quite some time.
I had the privilege of meeting some of these fine citizens—only a couple brush-strokes in the wide canvas that is the town of Bethany, by no means immediately representative of the whole--when my grandfather, who lives by the beach, invited me to join him at some friends' house for a steak dinner. Hungry, without income, and eager to meet anyone in this strange land, I obliged, and we took the brief mini-van ride up to South Bethany to meet the Johnsons and their friend, Clara.
Keith and Marjorie Johnson spend their winters in a mountain ski lodge in West Virginia, and summer at Bethany. The Outer Banks of North Carolina, they claim, are “too hot” in the summer, so they prefer to sun themselves on the steeper and granier, but more mild, beaches of Delmarva.
As we sat down to steak dinner, the usual topic of conversation, the multi-million-dollar plots of land being sold in this booming real-estate frenzy, floated about the dining room table as they often do in quaint, multi-million-dollar oceanfront homes. After a couple hours, though, we moved on.
“So, Mike, what do you think you'll be doing with yourself when you grow up?”
I said I'd try and find a job in writing.
“Oh, then you must read a lot of books! Have you read The Da Vinci Code? The sequel came out not too long ago!”
Now, I don't know exactly where the conversation took a wrong turn, but I've had relatively few conversations go the right way after somebody brings up any of the Dan Brown novels, intellectually challenging and well-written as they might be.
I said I liked it alright, that it was a quick read, and that some of my friends were offended by the charicatural description of Opus Dei, a conservative segment of the Catholic Church dedicated to doing “the work of God.” Clara, the family friend, five G&Ts to the wind and as many cigarettes in her lungs, jumped on the topic of religion.
“Well, as far as I see it, if you're going to set yourself up as different, I gotta know what it is you're doing for other people. If you want to wear your hair in little curls and look stupid like those—what do you call them? Hassidic jews—you better be doing something other than making yourself look different from everybody else.”
I would have laughed if she was joking. The Johnsons nodded assent, and my grandfather looked at me with vague apprehension. We were guests in their home, after all, and, racist or no racist, I'd drunk about five of their beers and packed down enough top surloin to last me about a week. So I told Clara the first thing I could think of, which was a plausible factoid I'd just made up right then:
“Actually, the Hassids--”
“What are Hassids?!”
“Hassidic jews run some of the biggest charity organizations in the world. They're great people.”
Conversation progressed from there, stopping occasionally for Clara's minor, tangential comments (a few favorites: “The Indians burn their wives when the husband dies? That sounds exactly like a dumb son of a bitch thing they would do. I hate those people.” “The Muslims just blow people up.” “I didn't put the tomatoes in because i didn't want to n_____ up the salad.”). Amid these varying digressions, Clara, Keith, and Marjorie all proved themselves in posession of some positive, if not entirely redeeming, qualities. They genuinely consoled Jerry on the recent passing of my grandmother, encouraged him to go to his high school class reunion this fall, and assured him that he was always welcome to come by for a meal. Jerry and I thanked the Johnsons for their hospitality on our way out. I did my best to keep from vomiting; I'd stomached a lot of steak, followed by a steaming pile of hard-boiled ignorance. In a glorious grand finale to her acrobatics of obliviousness, Clara stuck a perfect-10 dismount with this one-liner:
“You know, Bethany's probably a great place to get writing! So many people, such great atmosphere.” Clara, baby, if you only knew...
On our way to the car, Jerry, sensing my raised hackles, consoled me. “They're nice people.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
But in one sense, these hillbilly entrepreneurs were treating my grandfather, a man in need of much support, as well as I've seen anyone treat their friends. Clara and the Johnsons, with their potbellies, their sloppily and horrendously misguided views, but their undying loyalty to occasional values they get right, look a lot like our staggering, swollen, bumbling nation. Get a lot wrong, get a little right, but get the little right in spades.
Driving back, we got passed by a truck with a W. Bush '04 bumper sticker and a yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbon. We passed a house that proudly floated the American and Confederate flags on equal poles. Bethany Beach is a reprehension, a nausea from too much food, healthy salt air, beautiful girls in bikinis. Bethany Beach cares about you when it's not busy hating your guts for not belonging. Bethany Beach is great. Bethany Beach is shamefully fucked-up. Bethany beach is enough like America to be worth watching. More to follow.

*Big ups to JS ca 1945.

Graduation, Jane Austen, and the Beach

Four years of college, which can best be summed up as four years of swimming, drinking, and misunderstandings between myself and the opposite sex finally ended on the twenty-first of May of this year, 2005. Like the rest of the clowns who stumbled in black lycra gowns across the stage on that fateful ninety-degree day in Washington, DC, I now finally had to at least appear to value all the heaps of privilege, status, and opportunities that came with that little rolled-up piece of paper as it slipped out of my soggy hand and sat limp in my lap. I thought I could feel Graduation speaker and honorary degree recipient Richard West, Jr., head of the American Indian museum and no stranger to white privilege, gazing down over the entitled with resigned disgust.
So, like any other up-and-coming mover and shaker, I made a monumental decision; I'd move to Bethany Beach, DE to wait tables, live rent-free with my grandfather, drink beer, and lay in the sun (but not without an intermission of mooching off my folks for a brief and extremely well-deserved vacation in London and Vienna). A smooth plan, particularly for an ambitious guy like me, but, as is usually the case for the the bootstraps American, not without its problems. Old grandfather Jerry didn't have Internet access, and the prospect of running cable through the clapboard, warped walls of the old cottage didn't seem to appeal too much to him.
Summer is a hot time, and without the prospect chatting idly with friends, without the chance to send mountains of emails, or, most importantly, without immediate access to gigabyte upon gigabyte of free pornography, it can get a lot hotter. It looked like I was going to have to dig deep to keep from going insane, getting blueballed, or both. If I was going to avoid another summer of locking my bedroom door, Sears Catalogue in hand, I was going to have to get off my ass and find some summer reading material.
Further, since I had just graduated from a high-and-mighty university such as Georgetown, I would probably die if I were completely cut off from the intellectual stimulation I'd received daily at an ever-increasing dose. Like an alcoholic who'd spent years swilling the hard stuff without even a moment's reprieve, I doubted if my system would handle going off the brainy stuff cold turkey. Even cutting down to a 3.2 drink like The Da Vinci Code might not keep me off the respirator. So I decided I'd need a classic if I was going to make it through a DSL-free summer. More than a classic, I would need a challenge, something that might even give me some trouble, a Triple Cuervo shot of a book to shock my system back off the intellectual wagon.
Now, as most of you already know, Jane Austen is not Charles Bukowski, Edward Abbey, Chuck Palahniuk, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, or even Tom Robbins. No. Jane Austen is not like them at all. Jane Austen is a woman. And, like many women, she received a hell of a beating the first time a teacher tried to ram her down my throat in high school, for obvious and perfectly legitimate reasons. As most high-school dudes know, chicks just can't write the good shit about war, getting drunk, and, most importanltly, fucking tons of chicks. Jane Austen lived a short (read: non-existent) life in my academic career. I watched Ang Lee's movie version of Sense and Sensibility and, out of refusal to follow the boo-hoo plot, wrote about the colors Ang Lee used to make the film “look neat” (I think that phrase was actually in my thesis).
The years of categorical refusal finally let up when a lady in my life whose opinion I respect told me that not only was Jane Austen worth a damn, she was also pretty funny. Moreover, I'd noticed that the makeouts had been far less forthcoming if I had been hating on Jane in prior conversation, so decision time had just about arrived. I'm a sucker for two things: love and a good laugh, so I trucked out of the cottage and across Highway One to the Southern Sussex County Library to check out a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Though not as celebrated by my ladyfriend as Persuasion, it was by far the more recognizable of the two, so I took it back to Jerry's place and set it on the coffee table, hoping to catch a little boob tube before cracking the three hundred page beast that lay before me.
Jerry eased his gigantic, potbellied, blasted-kneed, broken-tickered old frame down the stairs, waking up from a nap. He caught the Jane Austen book laying on the table and looked up at me, slightly curious.
“Pride and Prejudice! That's one of my favorites! I love Mr. Bennett.”
Let me tell you what little I know about my grandfather. At seventy-seven years old, he's a dude's dude. He pounds down five or six drinks a day, minimum, and is constantly surrounded by a flock of retiree groupies who cook the meals he lives off of and probably secretly hope to marry his charming, wrinkled ass. He didn't strike me as a Jane Austen fan.
“What?!”
“Oh, yeah, Elizabeth's a real riot, too.”
“Christ,” I whispered to myself.
I put that aside for the moment, writing off the surreal moment in favor of some mid-day TV. Unfortunately, time wasted flies by, and before Regis and Kelly could even give away a third trip to the Bahamas, it was time to head to the airport for some broadening of the ol' cultural horizons. I packed my good buddy P&P in my backpack along with the hip-flask, a pair of aviator shades, and a couple pairs of underwear; I was headed to London, anyway, so it made a bit of sense that I'd prime myself for some Brit-on-Brit action before jumping the puddle. Little did I know I'd finish Pride and Prejudice at breakneck speed, having to steal a copy of the Monkey Wrench Gang from Mike Callen, my London hookup (respect), just to stay out of withdrawal (my tolerance had been higher than even I could've suspected).

So, a couple things about Jane Austen.

1)Pride and Prejudice isn't half bad of a book. Sure, little Janey spends all her breath lampooning British high society only to have her protagonist wind up with the same aristocratic ideal she so clearly finds problematic, but even so, who wouldn't swoon over the dashing, honest, and well-endowed Mr. Darcy? A girl's only human, anyway.
2)If you're ever on a Virgin Atlantic flight, crack open a copy of British Enlightenment literature, and I guarantee that the middle-aged lady sitting next to you will snuggle up against you as she tries to get her mid-flight nap. If I'd been reading Persuasion instead, I probably could've joined the Mile High Club.
3)Old people don't care that you mooch off of them and have no life direction, provided you appear to be reading Great Literature, and make occasional gestures towards “graduate school.”
4)Reading's good, but as you can tell by this blog posting, I'm back on the internet. In the interest of maintaining a balance between the hormonal and cerebral, though, I'm making sure to google “bitches in corsets” every now and then. Got to keep the ol' homefires burning, as you know.

put it out there

dreams mainly of men
piled on men but also
of a frightened look from a girl
in a wig who jerks mightily

and phrases clipped,
countless lays beside me,
restless in a double bed,

cried and sometimes even have shaken
me from sleep and into waking night
where eyes hurt and
bottles break and televisions speak
.

speak up

comb the alleys for frothy
young maidens who, their hair in curls
and their eyes gazing upwards,
as boxers before they fall,

will light you on fire
in the back of the liquor store--
douse you with all manner of hooch,
take one cigarette, and flick

it gently through the air.

the narrow gate

"The tempter approached him and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.'"
--Matthew 4:3

"You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter"
--T.S. Eliot

"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."
--W.B. Yeats

give me the sweet,
the aspiring lady
who will strip before a fractured mirror

and weep as her hair
brushes off the side, ripples
over the cracked silver and glass,

who will cry out as her chest rises in dry cold,
die a tiny gasp of hungry breath
as she holds her ribs, reaches for her breast.

give me a girl who will kiss
as naked and blind as a toothless young
bear with her mother under early sun.

give me this girl, but not until
i have fasted, not until
the fields are empty of fruit; not until

i have met and accused and aroused
the belligerent, the saddened, the depraved,
and burned the very last of the slumlords;

not until i have shouldered degenerates
and befriend the least clean,
until my droplets have collected on
and vanished from from the grain,

until i have rained back down
onto scorched fields
until the mud has run off the hard rock
and servants pluck me from the golden grasses.

give me this girl
and i promise i will fall as rain
to the depths of the fields. i will die,
and every rock will wash away.

findings

"i was gonna get right back"
-s. carter

the sheerly malformed
and unhappy gentleman,
who papers his letters under
surveillance, cringes.

his wife, a long fattened
cook, squares another plate
and calls the children to eat.

the man is man as many are,
and so he disappoints,
is selfish, unthinking, cruel.

he forgets along with all his children,
the simple rule of marriage,
wiry war and plaited pants.
he'll not know the way back in.

tiny death

the tiniest of death sits along
the benches in the hall,
waits for the bell to sound,
waits for you to rise.

when will you have died enough
that wind will crawl on buried paws,
carry you, lithe and willing
toward the branched trees?

when you will have aged enough,
will you light fire,
hear the crack and slither,
and find the tiny death?

for the old, tiny death does not lurk far;
he sings a song of hardest water.
when you are dead enough,
the wind will blow, final from your lips.