|
|
Post by Jeff on Feb 22, 2007 13:42:56 GMT -5
Howdy!
Here's where you can tell me what you REALLY think about my book, after all the gladhanding is done tonight. I will soon post all the text from Avoid Eye Contact here for easy editing/commenting/misquoating and misusing of my words. ha.
but seriously, thanks for taking the time to read my chapbook and for any comments you may have. I hope to produce a second print for the next reading at the end of March.
Jeff
|
|
|
|
Post by Jeff on Feb 27, 2007 0:09:33 GMT -5
Avoid Eye Contact
I was pretending to check my cell-phone messages, so as to avoid making eye contact with someone else on the sidewalk, when I walked into the hydrant. The square peg collided with my left leg and I swore succinctly, “f**k,” and bent forward to squeeze myself a bruise. It was then a woman, coming out from her passenger-side-door, walked nose-in-her-purse-first into my left side, so down I fell onto my right. I laid out across the sidewalk on my back, still clutching my leg, as the woman finally lost her balance and fell two-handedly onto my thighs. Her husband by this time was now standing over us both – in a position I’ve unfortunately not assumed in some time – and he bent forward to lift his wife by the back. Lurching her up and asking her five times, “Are you sure you’re okay?”, I was about ready to be indignant and offended when I heard fake-nails-on-a-chalkboard scream and saw a red driver-side-door shoot straight up fifty feet as the #7 Carleton tried to slow down and came to a stop in the intersection. Now, the light was green for that #7 but not for that ‘97 Camry, and as I heard the bus-riders scream, I saw the driver of that Camry vanish behind a big marshmallow and, from what I’ve been told, everyone was okay.
Everyone I meet asks, “So where are you from?”
I say, “Toronto. Well, just north of Toronto. You know Thornhill?”
Everyone I meet says, “Yeah, I know Thornhill.”
People in movies cry a lot. People in the suburbs like to watch movies whenever they have a free moment. Time between supper and sleep. Afternoon weekends without family plans. There’s a whole place called Hollywood where they make movies to show suburbanites what emotion looks like.
I had a friend who’s mother kept the house like a museum. In grade 12, he was selling pot to grade 9 girls for blow jobs. I have a friend who had a white carpet and one night we spilt semi-clear soda on it and he wound up on his knees praying to God for the stain to go away. In first year university res, he pretended he had a girlfriend in Israel while he secretly had an affair with a guy who always carried a knife and who one night tried to have his way with a girl asleep in her dorm. Another friend of mine had a girlfriend in the ninth grade and they would motionlessly lock jaws and flick tongues, eyes open wide and glassy, while the rest of us sat on the other end of the 10-by-10 foot L-shaped sofa and watch whatever movie we rented from Blockbuster that night.
People in movies promise to keep people safe; to make sure nothing bad ever happens. People in the suburbs believe this is possible because nothing bad ever happens in the suburbs. The roofs are mended when necessary. When the sun burns the lawn, the green pickup truck comes and unfurls a roll of lawn in its place.
Beavers build dams, so our homes are justified by nature. We drink wine and eat unsalted popcorn and cite their wondrous medicinal benefits. We carry cell-phones so nothing bad will happen, debit cards so nothing bad will happen. I’ll be fine, we assure ourselves, I’ll be fine.
In Thornhill, where I’m form, Pot is the raison d’etre. Without Pot, there would be no socialization, no reason to go out at all. Each night starts and ends with a park or a parked car. Mall-ratting, friend-cest, endless car rides – all high school rituals are kaput for the exception of copious pot smoking. The same high school dealers, the same over-priced $40 half-quarters, the same long joints passed around a circle randomly which no one can recall if it was going to my left or to my right? It doesn’t matter – it’s still just going in a circle.
The suburbanites who get out of their natural habitat thanks to university acceptance elsewhere continue to live subsidized lives, but at least do so beyond their familial subdivisions. Yes, they receive thousands of dollars of unearned support from their parents – but they spend it for food, for shelter, for school.
Those who stayed behind demand and receive the same reparations for the suffering of adolescence – an adolescence without cessation so thanks to parents happy to have their kindelach home to keep the nest warm, to keep them busy with something other than their lives, which they are beginning to realize amount to little more than buying DVDs.
Yes, those who stayed behind with these deservingly stuffed wallets fuel the economy, I’m told. I’m told they support local businesses and entrepreneurs. It is impossible to speak of the suburbs and not descend into a sarcastic anti-capitalist lecture; to wind up making political statements with about as much depth as the width of the fabric of my George Bush=International Terrorist t-shirt.
I’m trying to make a point: There are a thousand tiny packets of salt and a thousand tiny packets of pepper in one restaurant on campus. Two thousand tiny pieces of manufacturing and logging. Two shakers would be stolen by the lunch rush so the packets are the cheaper solution.
Big picture? We don’t make cameras to take big pictures. We sell film in bulk packs and fill the house with photo albums. There are a thousand photos of me standing in front of things, collected in seventy-six photo albums on two tall bookshelves. Once a year I flip through a few dozen to refresh my drying memory. The left-wing revisionists tell me, “History is written by the winners.” As I reconstruct a summer jaunt to New England with my family, I shake and mutter, “History is written by sentimental parents.”
Falling in love is hard on the keys
I’ve got some new emotions
I’d like you to take note of
Come online, check my status
learn which boy I’ve gotten mad at
I must narrate every footstep
I have taken from this morning
so I’ll update, so then you’ll check
in my Facebook, blog or journal
That I’ve broken up with him or I’m hooking up with her
I’m traumatized, I’m ostracized, or maybe I’m not sure
If he notices the song I’m looping on my MSN
If all the universe observes my personal CNN
I’ll post repost and post once more
and hope rehope and hope for her
to be reading what I’ve written slyly and hidden in line 3
which reveals, with cunning subtlety,
just what she means to me
if only she infers from the Arial I chose
I’m not plain and Times New Roman
I’ve capacity to grow
I’m taking notes on what you said
from saving conversations
and I’ve crib-sheets in a bookmark
for your cross-interrogation
Should you say I am not open,
I will hyperlink my soul
Should you say your heart is broken,
I will try to make you LOL
I will sit here by my Windows and monitor your name
And when I see you’ve come online I’ll ask you,
“How’s your day?”
No Time For a Survey
A woman in a full veil picks up the phone, muffles, “Oui?”
“Hi there, my name is Jeff and I’m calling with Ekos Research. We’re doing a public opinion poll on behalf of the federal government – would you have time for a survey?”
The phone bounces in her hands and into the counter. I can hear quick steps and speech under breath & burka & beard.
“Who is speaking?” says a man asks with a chest held out yet hiding a tremble.
I repeat the speech.
“No, no thank you,” and click before I can even say good-nite.
They run back to their work. She holds the detonator in place on her stomach with a thumb and a prayer. He slowly replaces it with his finger. Click, it locks into position. No time to take part in an opinion poll.
Soe-nya
Let me tell you about Sonya & David Green; a sweet girl & a former hunky-high school dream. Dave Green is gonna be a big name on Bay Street, and Sonya, well, with all her make-up is meant, I guess, to look nice on TV. She could be my Bubby beneath the veneer and smears of skin that give her that “wake” look all the girls go for these days. Green, I said, is a former hunky-high school dream and now his looks, which once melted the grittiest pregnant dog into a puddle to splash around in, the brown-eyed looks now fade under too much tanning and hair thinned to gelled shards so his head look positively lunar: there’s a man there but the face can’t be discerned from the shadow-shaped crater features. Is he looking sincerely at you, or is it just the light playing off a thick, protruding temple?
So last night it’s me, Dave Staios, Amanda Neiman, Amanda Urbacher, and Sonya & Green. We’re at Tickled Toad nursing pints. Dave Green waits tables elsewhere occasionally and is telling a story about offering a ride home or some assistance to a drunk female patron who responded in the shriekiest, rape-whistle voice possible. He says he was sincerely only offering her help home.
“But you touched her,” buts in Sonya.
“What?” twitches Dave and here is when I began paying attention to the conversation.
“You told me you touched her,” and Sonya put one hand on Dave’s and pouted, “Are you O-K to get home?” and a giggle came over the table ‘cept for:
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve heard this story 3, 4 times–don’t think I don’t remember how it goes,” and I take her insistence as a sign that I should never allow myself to become one of those poor men who are corrected in their every word by some maternal-surrogate, not as a sign of something brave in Sonya until I tune back into the conversation and hear:
“Why do you always lie like this?” with a stern brow but by now the conversation has drowned under drunken nostalgia being passed around the table. It’s at this point in the evening my eyes start exploring Sonya’s face above her chest–which was a six-inch square of cleavage boxed by a blue-pullover and a white undershirt. Dave puts a hand on Sonya’s thigh and Sonya wraps an arm around Dave’s, which is straight across her like a seatbelt. They remain seated like this for a good hour or so before we leave the bar.
So we’re walking out of the Toad at about half past one:
“Now let’s get some Tim Hortons!” I say with a clap and a pocket full of Chanukah gift certificates. “This is on me. Or, uh, Bubby.”
Tim Hortons is two plazas over, past Pier 1 and the Steeles West Memorial Chapel. Dave Green makes a six-year-old’s face and says we should drive because its cold. I look to his girlfriend Sonya – who has the car we came in – and she joins me in a brisk walk.
“There we go, that’s the spirit,” and the rest of the party grudgingly trudges on behind us. “You, I like,” I say to Sonya. I mumble the following: “I’m no good with names, it’s Sah-nya, right?”
“Soe-nya, and you-ur, Jeff? Wait, what did you say?”
“Sah-nyah. B-b-but it’s Soe-nya?”
“Ah, yeah, that’s what everyone calls me. I’ve stopped correcting people.”
I want to tell her how Soe-nya is such a more elegant while cozier name than Sah-nyah, but between Green, her make-up, and my personality, I say something like:
“Well, ah is a more common sound here than ow – people just aren’t used to it and uh,” I trail off here and she slows pace to walk with Amanda Neiman in locked arm & skip which is how girls find safety from the flirty dorks like me.
At Tim Hortons I take the lead at the counter and start taking coffee and muffin orders. The Pakistani ESL woman at the cash can’t quite register our half-stoned, half-drunk, small black, one-wait-two-wait-one chocolate-chip, double-double-decaf-speak and she asks us to wait, please, while she goes to get a manager to help her out.
David Green loses it.
He’s a waiter. He’s taken far more complicated orders. She’s walked about 10 feet away and knows little English but Dave’s mutterings of dumb-f**k, stupid-idiot-pregnant dog can’t get a f**king order right is spoken in that universal language called hate. Sonya manages to take him by the wrists and turns him towards her and away from the counter but still he owl-thingys his head, that too-tanned block, over his shoulder so he can stare down the dumb-pregnant dog-can’t-do-her-job. Somewhere, under a pound of face, behind the blue and glue that constructs her eyes, is a look of fear in Sonya – an instinctive response to this kind of behaviour. A soft grip around the wrists and a bedroom voice pleading for calm. I hear Dave’s got a huge thingy, so it must be worth it.
“In the bed the lovers . . .
Their eyes are closed
as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them.”
Stolen Goods
I’ve been giving girls poems
Since I was 17 that aren’t mine.
Lifted Leonard Cohen exchanged
for kisses, stolen bases or
just your eyes
pu l l e d t a u t towards mine
on fishing lines
the Bard of Westmount
always makes good bait.
Jade
Tall, blonde & slender
makes intense eyes at me
from their table to my barstool.
It is only when the MC says
“Jade will read a poem next”
I hear Jade’s voice
is a boy’s voice
I remember this is a gay bar.
Thank you, In/Words and all, for looking at me speak.
|
|
