I don’t know where the days go. I walk, I talk to myself, I accumulate mountains of audio I might never hear or play back, and in between I find busywork and industry-consuming tasks intended to continue the seemingly endless job of purging my living space of needless junk. There’s a rule of thumb that if you haven’t used something in 6 months then get rid of it. I would guess there are exceptions to this rule, such as school yearbooks and other scholastic mementos. But I also intend to keep anything of mine that could be construed as creative, including all my high school and even grade school writings.
I want to find a particular copy of the high school newspaper where I was editor-in-chief. It would be the final issue in which I wrote a farewell poem that I think was titled “On Driving Through Queens, New York.” I don’t remember the poem being anything save for the fact that if you read down the side the first letters of several lines spelled something like FUCK YOU ALL TO HELL. I probably could have been expelled for that. I say that because that is exactly what happened at another school in town when a couple of kids did something similar. I know I did it and others knew as well, since I had some help in rewording certain lines so they’d start with the appropriate letters. I also obscured it somewhat by starting FUC and then indenting a few other lines before continuing with the K. So it looked something like this:
Free yourself from
Usury, futility, and
Cancerous thoughts of suns.
- Then do this
Then do that
I don’t know what to sayKnow yourself for gravity
Youngest of the sandmen
Over on the frozen porch
Underneath the Interstate
And so on. The letters were not boldface, of course. I just made up all that text but now that I think of it I remember one line from the poem that I thought served as a pretty conspicuous clue that I was forcing words into place. The line originally would have been “Pariah, release me, and on we will walk”, or something like that. I changed it to “Yo, pariah, release me…” I thought that was risky, and a stupid way to potentially attract the suspicion of the moderator of the paper who might have suspected me being capable of such shenanigans. He was a sharp guy, the moderator, so I remember feeling amazed that I got away with it. The “Yo” line was noticed by readers, or at least one of them. I think his name was Jim who saw me in the parking lot and shouted “Yo, pariah!” at me. I never explained to him why that word “Yo” had to be in there but maybe someday I will. I happened to notice that the moderator of the paper retired recently.
I was not a great editor, but I was not that bad. I didn’t really take the role of a newspaper as seriously as others might have. The paper was better before me but it was good enough to win some state-level award the name and significance of which I have no memory.
I went back to visit the school a year or so after graduating. The moderator and I talked for a while, with him saying flat out that the paper totally went to hell after I left. I don’t give myself a lot of credit for that, though he meant the comment to be complimentary. I inherited a pretty solid tradition there, starting from Danny, the editor-in-chief when I was a freshman. He went on to become something of a big deal with a début novel published by Knopf in 1989, followed by another book 5 or 6 years later. I never read either but I just looked them up and find that one of them is set in Tampa, or someplace very much like Tampa. I wouldn’t know but I don’t think much literary work is set there.
He was a strong influence on me, though, whether he knew it or not. At the end-of-year awards ceremony the moderator made some comments before awarding Danny some prize for writing. He was emotional about it, delivering his words slowly, saying “In all my years teaching I have never seen such talent.” He paused before and after “seen”. Danny came up to accept his award and the two briefly hugged, which was unusual for that school. I don’t know if anyone knew Danny was gay. It never entered my mind until years later when I saw mention of it in the context of a review of one of his books. I hate to say but I remember thinking that being openly gay might have made it difficult for him to have gotten a job teaching at the school, which for some reason I thought was his ambition. Looks like he did better than that for himself. He is or was a professor at Villanova University.
I was thinking of Danny just last night, I think, when I noticed I was consuming bread and beer. He wrote a poem called “Bread and Beer” for the literary magazine, with the refrain being “Oh dear, bread and beer, if I were dead I wouldn’t be here.” I liked that poem but my mother thought it was lame. I loved his “Desdemona” poem, which I don’t think mother had any issues with. A poem I wrote a few years later was inspired by “Desdemona”.
Mother and I talked about Danny’s writing a lot. I don’t know if she was not particularly impressed by it or if she was trying to sow seeds of ambition in me but it seemed like she criticized his writing an awful lot, as if we were discussing The New Yorker and not a high school newspaper or literary magazine. Whatever her day-to-day complaints might have been she never had anything but respect for his début novel being published by Knopf. She impressed upon me quite strenuously that it was “a big deal” when Knopf publishes anybody.
I scanned and posted all the literary magazines from high school, with at least one issue from either before or after I was there. Now I cannot find them. Years ago on Facebook I encountered John, one of the other editors at the paper who I think (I mean, I know) expected to be named editor-in-chief instead of me. I linked him to my scans of those literary magazines in which were published a number of his stories and poems. He remarked that it was weird knowing that stuff was out there. It took me years to agree with him, but I do. Some of that shit’s just awful, and potentially embarrassing today for whoever wrote it 30-35 years ago.
John might be the first person I ever blocked on Facebook. Certainly he was among the first. We never had much of a connection at school but I found him difficult to communicate with. He was in all the same activities as I, including the Masque Club, the Band, and the literary things. But we never connected or as far as I can recall had a single conversation of any substance. I remember him looking away from me anytime I was in the room. To him it seemed I was someone that was not spoken to.
Things change when we pass to adulthood, of course, but I still thought it was strange that he reached out to me through Facebook, talking as if we had been best buddies back in the day. He may not know this but I edited out a rude comment from him in the last edition of the newspaper. This was the issue where, traditionally, the seniors shared their last will, the “Senior Will” as it was called. Every senior was allowed to leave something to someone in a format that now seems more than a little moribund to me. Was something about each of us dying upon graduation? That’s another discussion. I don’t think any real items were bequeathed to anybody. It was a format for inside jokes. A typical will would be something like “I, ___, leave my freshman year beanie to Sister Raymond, because she likes to wear hats.” I don’t know, I just made that up, but the format of the Senior Will was something like that.
Whatever the nature of the Wills it was John who tried to sneak his past me. His mere attempt at doing this I think reflected his belief that I was worthless as editor-in-chief, and that I would not notice. I don’t remember the exact words but his Will was something to the effect of him leaving The Tiger to me, so that the school could have “a real newspaper again.” I caught it but didn’t quite catch it at first. It almost got through to the printed issue. I thought it was some kind of joke but as I drove home from the printing place I thought “Oh, right. This guy hates me.” It was not a joke. It was a stab.
I could have let it go in the spirit of editorial honesty. Maybe I should have. But I did not. I was the goddam editor-in-chief, after all. I called the printing place and guided the typesetting person to the words in question. She excised them. Now I don’t remember if John even had a Senior Will.
It’s foggy to me now how I got the nod to be editor-in-chief of the paper, but my mother took unabashed and as far as I can recall well-deserved credit for it. “I’m the reason you’re editor-in-chief”, she would say. I don’t know why she would have said that if it was not true but I do not remember her influence being a matter of her doing any of the writing for me. It was nothing like that. It was very strong guidance from someone who, herself, would have been a damn good writer. It was not just guidance, though. It was those daily discussions of what people like Danny and the others were writing in the paper and the literary magazine, and how maybe I could do better. I don’t know if I ever did.
…
I am listening to audio I made on 8th Avenue today, reminiscing about the one time I went to a porn house nearby. It was very late at night or early in the morning when I was going uptown in a cab with a friend from college. As we passed the Port Authority he announced we would exit the cab and go to Show World, a place where you spend money on tokens which are used to see naked women stroke their cunts for small increments of time.
I’ll continue this story later.