21 POEMS - Edwin Forrest Ward

21 POEMS - Edwin Forrest Ward

NIGHTS WITHOUT LOVE

nights without love

I looted unlocked

cars, drunk

stumbled I upon

lookin’ for

a bride tossed garter

I’d lost long ago or a

bow for my broken arrow

in my ransacking ways

I was an indian angel

among the trinkets

of glove box and floor

here a condom, there some gum

aglow on the dashboard

saint someone protects

the plunder from me

I take little, just read signs

recycle debris

these nights without love

make a barbarian of me

COUNTERMEASURES

aside water pools and water

falls, stone beneath four feet

in places such as this

we pile rocks

scribe names

to make tomorrow weep

carved intaglio, ancient pine

will fall in time upon

assembled spelling stones

eras leave no bone unturned

mountains tremble

chasms yawn

years from now

arrives too soon

love like ours

nights like this

the only countermeasures

A SERIOUS ADVENTURE

longing

risk

the undress of a waitress

in morning

coffee black and cigarettes

the silkiest lounging attire

TIME IS A PLACE

it ain’t easy

to quiet the world

it ain’t easy

to set the stage right

it’s a tease to look me in the eyes

it’s a tease

to stand in such light

a bureau of cosmetics

a nightstand of books

the lamp off now

the window outside

a dawn bed of flowers

time is a place

a bouquet of earthly locations

HEADSTONE

death is the dilemma

an epitaph cures

write yours now

THEY BURY IN PAIRS WHERE I COME FROM

it is always morning

flesh against flesh upon

lush carpet in a poem to promises kept

Away Forever Swept

SIMPLY SAID

simply said

sun enlightens earth

even the moon needs

sunlight to ride

white across the night

is this not apparent to all?

I wonder

 in these days of art

when upon the face of it

they paint a woman’s flirt

as if the sun were flower

come on! I know

the anatomy of

orchid and fire

who brings light

who is flower

POEM FOR PASSION

all right, kid

put this in your pocket

with the house keys

she will always be younger

than you

with your ability

to woo

even in the city

where quantity obscures

you’ll find her

smooth face, bright

shiver of light, cupped

flesh in your hands

another key:

what to do with it

her youth and willingness

TRUST

trust

it wasn’t easy

to give up the many

for monogamy’s one.

I’d slide my eyes along the lie

of every passing female thigh

every woman met, undressed

for what attire conceals

the toss of eye

the hair reveals.

some say the face. some say

the verb of bending. must

needs be unending, the

tangle of reasons for love.

PUPPET POEM

you need no ESP

to sense the strings

we’ve tangled

the physics of the world

strings the astronomical

the small

puppet to puppet

with no puppeteer

we, the lovers, dance.

I am rising

you are rising

too

THE DISTANCE TO HER ALWAYS

quicker. love

puts lead in the foot

the accelerator to the floor

it’s always a

hurry-home

to love

A CONSPIRACY FOR TWO IN EROTICALLY MAJOR

we do everything together.

sleep, cook, eat, shower, water, weed and flower

play, empower, mistake, parent, work, procreate

inspire, desire, conspire

we do everything together.

now she primps as I write.

the perfect lay of dungaree denim

announces her intention

attracts my attention.

my lover has new lucky jeans.

look how well they fit, she says

I’m dressing for sex at the office today.

lucky for me we work together.

lucky for me we do everything together.

CROWN OF LIGHTS

upon my knees I look up to see

a diadem of galaxies

vortex the cortex of my love

incredulous she asks

how do we make the sun go up and down?

with our love, as always, with our love

A STRUCTURE IN 13 LINES / A WEDDING SONG

this woman

like a poem needs

another’s hands

to make it tight

the love around the braided hair

for this man

what’s to do?

but tie the knot

or lift the hair

to kiss the face

that love would wear

to see the white light

shining there

EVEN THE MOST KINDRED SOULS

HAVE SEPARATE BODIES

love is couscous cake

with lemon curd, the

affections of an afternoon’s kiss

giving up lust for Lent.

love bends an ear to hear

a fantasy to sharpen its

delights against and asks

questions of fidelity

and the trust of just

one name between us.

ah, drive time with my Valentine.

in the back seat, the kids asleep,

and a picnic keeps, as mountain towns

a century golden old ghost by.

the curves along the creek

host an infinity of light

sliced by jagged peaks

as we fly in the face

of a suitcase of facts against us

- we legatees of outlaw mountain lore.

recognize, we do,

the effect the music has on us

as the road follows water through the canyon

while centrifugation creates

our lean of bodies

‘round snakes at fifty-five

and switchbacks at twenty.

we babble our way unto the next

descent and reminisce,

taste the sweat of a hot springs rendezvous

with you, your Pinto winding west

across a valley so high

‘twas lit by stars that moonless night.

one hand upon the wheel I

keep one upon your thigh.

even the most kindred souls

have separate bodies.

even the most kindred souls

have separate bodies.

THE POT QUEEN

a ranch relic lust, who but you

o creatrix, could sativa trust?

who but you, shape shaper of silver night?

who but you insights with light?

in a small garden, in a small place

…no, that will never do…

in a valley vast the mother of the harvest fires up

another fecund moment, a full moon swoon

creeping through the groin of earth itself.

children gather ‘round her, their eyes, like

adoring spacecraft.

the moment is the happiness of handing him, the

partner, man

a flower bigger than his dick, bigger than a bird,

bigger than his appetite.

the Pot Queen loves the measure of his delight at

his first sight of it

anticipates the pleasures of the making love he’s

promised her for later.

the Pot Queen attends well, charms again, this

creature she has captured.

her radiance, the pleasure of happy

I am to see you.

her world, one of interested beings

still interested in being.

her taste, the velvet throat of imagination.

her face, the verb to luster.

NOW THAT STEVE IS BACK

(for Steve Wilson)

now that steve is back

the plainer poems

dressed like bookman

scouting lawn sales

the ass pocket a jingle

with miniatures of vodka

one shot per slug

rambling a bit to insure

the territory’s covered

before opening the bag

that carries home the pumpkin pie

IF EVERYONE BELIEVED IN GHOSTS

if everyone believed in ghosts

there’d be no lies

fortune tellers would

be out of business

or in charge of the future

we could nothing to connive

what with all the family watching

we would just have flower gardens

and throw parties

sculpting beautiful statues

of our selves

for our children

if everyone believed in ghosts

there’d be no bad deals

no short weight

and very little conversation

in the government

the pain would slacken

no stiff necks

and love

would be the subject

of our experiments

THE MAGICIAN

nobody knows

what he does

inside the trick

ever

always

he hides the strings

she moves his hands

IT’S NOT EASY

it’s not easy

to throw away

old clothes

the buttons alone!

BILLY B – (for William S. Burroughs Jr.)

billy b

he be dead

at thirty-three

(like a cypress tree cut down

to clear the air around

a stop sign

- the idiots!

something cute about

 a pirate and a poet

funning themselves

on colorado boulevard

with me on the lark to luck love

and the baby you divined

and you

casually on your way to early death

(aye

and sainthood in a cutthroat heaven)

yes

we were outriggish as you said

the clothes the hearts the hair

and you

on the hospital morphine fly

so high

you’d pass out on a toke of good weed

and I’d take you home to your chair

where you’d smoke your cigarettes

drink your beer - schlitz malt liquor please -

and stare

at alice liddell

doc holliday

or joe frazier

maybe get your strength back in a while

and throw a knife into the wall

or bayonet the couch

I’d water your philodendron

a tropical rarity you claimed

for a year I was gonna get

a new pot for it, billy

and remember lili, billy

an angel come to see you

            I’d hoped there’d be a meeting of the hearts            

and remember the day

you ernie and ray

dressed in wedding bests

out the door at 9 am

catching a ride

to the finest celebration of the summer, your last

tattooed children

actors and painters

cool jazz on the balcony

beautiful dresses across the floor

with booze on the tables even

and mushrooms in the bag

tony scibella was throwing hats

off the edge

and you warned about knives

and revenge in relation to your hat

and that hillside

child-mad you were

defending your hat

and on the way back that night

you wanted to stop at mcdonald’s

but I didn’t have the hour

it would take you to eat

I dropped you off hungry

in front of your pad

and pointed at

the jack in the box across the street

"In My Mother's Bed"

 “In My Mother’s Bed”

as always

for Marcia

The great American poet, Robert Lee Frost, was once asked, “What is the most significant event, the most important thing that ever happened to you?” I’m sure the interviewer thought Frost’s response would have something to do one of the following: with Frost’s recitation of his poem “The Outright Gift” at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1963, the first time ever that a poet had the honor of reading at a presidential inauguration; or being selected to be the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1953 to 1959; or receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, in the years 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943; or receiving Yale’s Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1963; or his marriage to his high school sweetheart and co-valedictorian, Elinor White on December 19, 1895; or the births of any of his six children. Robert Frost’s answer, however, had nothing to do with any of these important events and dates in his life; rather, his answer – “a road less traveled,” if you will - had to do with Frost’s own birth in San Francisco on March 26, 1874: “I was born in my mother’s bed.”

Now I’m not sure how I came to know this odd fact. My best guess is that I heard it via a recorded interview with Frost that was broadcast on early public - as in University of Pennsylvania - radio in the 70s, a decade or so after his death. Regardless, it was an indelible tidbit etched on my hard drive that I never forgot and which helped to inform my getting on board with Marcia’s decision to pursue a homebirth when she became pregnant in July of 1980. Our first child was born on March 27, 1981, like Frost, in its mother’s bed, in particular at 542 South Pearl Street in Denver one hundred and seven years, plus three hours, after Frost was born. This is the story of that birth and the fortunate happenstance of the five women, the midwives who assisted.

Marcia and I were not exactly trying to conceive a child when we did. As with many of the important moments together in our lives, a wedding played a part in Marcia’s impregnation. Indeed, our history as a couple is wedding rich: Marcia and I met as blind dates at a wedding and we both have spent decades working as wedding professionals, Marcia as a photographer and I as a celebrant. Our own wedding in 1979 was so over the top personal that those in attendance still speak of the poems burned, the mushrooms distributed, the fact I wore no shirt, the motley tent made of sown together drapes that shaded her family and my friends from the July noontime sun in our South Pearl Street backyard, the severe frown on my father-in-law-to-be’s face. And much of what I know of spirituality and ritual has been engendered by what I’ve experienced at weddings.

Now the particular wedding connected to our first child’s conception was the wedding of my boss at the time, Tommy Larkin. He managed the Boston Half Shell where I waited tables. Thus it was an Irish/restaurant-worker wedding with more than its fair share of fine food and drink; and I do believe the alcohol offered and imbibed that day in Aspen Colorado played a significant role in Marcia’s miscalculation of her ovulation cycle as we made love the night of Tommy’s marriage. Nonetheless, when, a month or so later, it became apparent that something was missing in Marcia’s life, the regular monthly punctuation signaling all is as it has been, that she might be pregnant, we both were ecstatic with joy at the prospect of parenthood and we embraced the pink color of the test strip and the confirmation of her pregnancy with an almost rabid fervor. It would seem that something I wrote in a poem after attending Tony Scibella’s daughter’s wedding in 1979 – “At weddings, a woman, sometimes two, will get pregnant” - had been prophetic.

And soon, Marcia and I were off in search of a midwife, not an easy thing to do in 1980 as midwifery was generally frowned upon by most practitioners of modern medicine and not the usual choice of young married couples, even though humans have been born without hospitals, doctors and drugs for over two hundred thousand years. Many of the people in our lives at the time thought us a bit crazy, if not irresponsible, to pursue homebirth, including Marcia’s parents who would never be on the same page, culturally and spiritually, with their daughter and son-in-law. Marcia and I took to searching the postings of community bulletin boards in the Bohemian establishments we frequented: coffee houses and bookstores and what were then known as natural food stores. Although practically everyone we knew characterized our search as foolish, dangerous, and hippie-dippy, we thought it to be wise, natural and empowering, if you will, “the road less traveled.” And the midwife we soon hooked up with proved to be wise, natural and empowering as well. Rare would be the woman who could say she had walked in her shoes. Her name was Gina and to this day I consider us lucky to have found her because her underground network of fellow practitioners of black-market midwifery was so large that a curandera, i.e., a woman healer in Texas, her wisdom, was largely responsible for solving a difficulty that presented itself during the birth of our first child, and the elderly healer never even knew of us.

Marcia’s labor was exceedingly long, over thirty hours: morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, all night, into another morning. Because Gina was an on-the-down-low teacher of midwifery as well as a practitioner, there were three other midwives assisting Gina during the first twenty-nine hours of Marcia’s labor, and a fourth arrived about twenty minutes before our child was born. Ramona, the last to arrive – in the nick of time you might say - had just returned to Denver after two months of study and training with an elderly and legendary indigenous midwife, shaman and teacher who had been present at and assisted with the births of some thousands of kids in rural Texas. Upon arrival, Ramona had telephoned Gina’s house after departing the Greyhound bus on Twentieth Street and had been told by Gina’s daughter that Gina was attending a birth on Pearl Street. Informed that the birth most likely was imminent, given that Gina had already been gone from home more than twenty-four hours, Ramona took another bus, the Number 5, from downtown Denver and arrived at my house with a backpack full of traveling clothes and a head full of wisdoms recently learned. Still, she was quiet and calm and deferred to the more experienced and older midwives in attendance as Marcia’s labor progressed, that is, until things got dangerously complicated.

When my child entered the birth canal, there was a problem. Gina told us the baby wasn’t breech, but its seemingly large head and shoulders were positioned in such a way that, were this birth taking place in a hospital, given the duration of Marcia’s labor, most attending physicians would call for a surgeon to perform a Caesarian. I had all the faith in the world of Marcia’s determination to see things through and immense confidence in the midwives present, but I must admit I was apprehensive. Worried I was about the extreme effort Marcia was putting into pushing, concerned about her understandable exhaustion, disturbed by the gritty and growling moans that accompanied each push, fearful of the fluctuating information of the fetal monitoring, anxious about the time my child was spending in the birth canal. And then when Gina said we might consider going to the hospital if the progress through the birth canal remained impeded much longer, the young apprentice, Ramona, offered a suggestion, something the elderly curandera had only spoken of, a technique Ramona had not actually observed or employed.

Marcia sat on our futon bed with her back to the wall. Gina, monitoring our child’s vitals, squatted between Marcia’s legs. With a midwife on either side of Marcia, Ramona, with the assistance of Fiona, Gina’s primary assistant, did a handstand aside Marcia, the kind of handstand where one’s feet are used to walk up a wall with one’s head facing the wall. Ramona then sidestepped with her hands until she was centered over Marcia, an arm on either side of Marcia’s outstretched legs. And then as Ramona’s legs walked further up the wall above Marcia’s head, the three midwives lifted Ramona up, with their hands under her upside down shoulders until Ramona could place her hands lightly and gingerly on Marcia’s stomach, at which point she was literally doing a handstand on Marcia’s fundus, although the accompanying midwives were totally supporting Ramona’s weight and there was no pressure on Marcia or our child within. After exploring the surface of Marcia’s stomach like a masseuse and finding what she was looking for - our child’s rump I guessed - Ramona directed the three who were holding her up to ever so slightly let her weight come to bear on Marcia’s stomach. And as the women began to let the force of Ramona’s upside down weight come into play, I heard the sweetest words I’ve ever heard above the howl of Marcia’s final moan: “It’s a boy.”

After the birth of my son, I began writing letters to my assorted governmental representatives advocating that midwifery be legalized in Colorado. I wrote letters for thirteen years. Only one politician ever wrote back, my state house representative, and he informed me I was dangerously insane. Every year for more than a decade he told me the same thing. He was dead set against midwifery. And then in 1993 he wrote to thank me for my persistence as he had changed his mind and had voted to make midwifery legal in the state of Colorado.

I guess I should have written to thank him, but I did not. I simply burned the thirteen letters wherein he informed me of my lunacy, as I am the kind of Irish who enjoys a shaman’s voodoo as much as holding a grudge. On the other hand, I have been writing Thank You’s in the form of poems, novels, plays and stories to Mr. Frost these last thirty-four years, thanking him indirectly for the wisdom of his answer to the question of significance “I was born in my mother’s bed,” words that have inspired me and others – Marcia, Gina, Ramona, and many others – to take the road less traveled. And this tale is one of those Thank-You-Mr-Frost letters that I wish Ramona and that Texas curandera might read one day.

Valentine For Marcia

                                               Valentine for Marcia

I make my living creating and conducting wedding ceremonies. As the marriage officiant, I usually begin by assuring the gathered family and friends of their importance in the lives of the bride and groom. I tell them in my welcoming that “although the day belongs to the bride and groom, it is also a tribute to all of you. For knowing you and interacting with you has helped to make the bride and groom who they needed to be in order to find each other and to find love.” I also generally entice both the bride and groom to secretly write love letters to each other for the purpose of creating a little mystery, for all true human ritual requires mystery as an element. So in keeping with the notion of a wedding or Valentine love letter written in secret to be shared with guests on the special day, this love letter, this story is for Marcia, all of you, and everyone who’s played a part in the story of Marcia and Eddie. In truth, the ingredients that go into the solution of anyone’s love-quest are many: the quirky twists of fate, the circumstances of time and place, the happenstance of accidental match makers, the players from both one’s inner and outer circles, the unexplained coincidences, and the act of seizing opportunity. My thirty-four year old marriage to Marcia, its beginnings, involved more serendipity and luck than winning the lotto. It also involved a wedding at which I was a last minute guest.

My biological clock was ticking. Above the clickity clack of dice skittering across backgammon boards in nightclubs, above the roar of an electric Bob Dylan on the stereo blasted through Advent speakers that filled my bachelor’s abode, just outside the psychedelic musings of LSD inspired cosmic starry symphonies composed on camping trips, through the sound barrier of fogs engendered by Heineken and Grand Marnier excessively imbibed (most days), beyond the orgasmic, satiated murmurings of the many women with whom I was involved, louder than the pounding beat of powder up my nose, there was a sorry sad song singing itself always on my auditory periphery, the dirge of a childless future. All my lovers were great companions, and more than one I could envision as wife, but none seemed right to be the mother of my children. The Irish in me disliked the thought of buying into a song of no progeny, and hence, no matter how happy or stoned or drunk or sober or sexually content I was, I was always aware that I was yet to find my mate, my anima.

Earlier I mentioned camping trips, as camping is the one of the principal reasons I live in Colorado. I had spent the summer of 1974 hitchhiking the West and had spent a couple of weeks camping at Rabbit Ears Pass and the Strawberry Park hot springs outside Steamboat. I had the time of my life and vowed upon my return to Philadelphia at summer’s end to return someday to Colorado and set up camp for good. Camping, in a very round about way, also helped bring Marcia to me.

Two months prior to meeting Marcia I had gone camping with a good friend, his girlfriend, a girlfriend of hers, and three dogs, in my 1974 Dodge Tradesman van. On I-70 barreling down Floyd Hill on our way west, the pistons of my 225 cubic inch slant six engine overheated and the engine block cracked, because, as it was revealed, the oil reservoir was bone dry. You see, because I owned a van and was part of the twenty-something generation of Capitol Hill denizens who often moved from apartment to apartment, people were always asking me if I and my van would help them move. Lugging couches and beds and such up and down the stairs of low rent Denver walk-ups was not something I enjoyed spending my free time on, and so I had devised a response to those who asked for my help that was both selfish and helpful. “You can borrow my van but not me. Just return it with a full tank of gas, and it’s yours.” The first two years I was in Denver I probably loaned my van to a couple dozen friends and friends of friends to enable them to move. Unfortunately I never realized that hauling apartment furniture in my van consumed more oil than normal. And I had not required that the van be full of oil as well as gas upon its return. And in the week prior to the demise of my engine, a former roommate had moved a house full of possessions, including a disassembled baby grand piano to Evergreen Colorado. He’d made five separate trips up the hills to Evergreen, all with excessive, oil consuming loads. 

After aborting the camping trip with my friend, the women and the dogs, I had my van towed home and it sat in my garage for months. I took up bicycling, taxis and buses. I would need a thousand dollars for the installation of a rebuilt engine. Thankfully, as it turns out, I did not have a thousand dollars because my lack of a vehicle was a pivotal step in putting Marcia and I together. Who would have thought that the lack of oil would grease the tracks to love?

A casual acquaintance, a cocktail waitress where I worked, approached me after her shift one evening. “Ed,” she said, “I understand you are an artist. I’ve seen the Isis you painted on the glass of your Pearl Street front door. You might not know it, but I live but one block north of you. So I have a favor to ask. I’m getting married in three days up in the Genesee foothills and I’m hoping that one, you might attend my wedding, and two, you might create a Just Married sign for our car. The wedding is Sunday morning and the afternoon reception will be right upstairs in Brooks Tower. So, even if you have to work Sunday night, you could make it.” Now as I said, I was merely a casual acquaintance of my inquisitor, a woman some ten years my junior. But always on the look out for adventure, with the thought of meeting some one new, I answered my co-worker’s query somewhat outrageously. “Barbara,” I said, “I’d love to attend your wedding and paint you a sign. But my busted down van sits in my garage, three hundred dollars shy of repair, and I have no way of getting to the mountains. But surely, you must have a beautiful woman friend who might give me a ride. If so, I’ll dust off my acrylics and paint a sign announcing your soon-to-be new status: JUST MARRIED."

Well, Saturday late nights in the life of a twenty-nine year old bachelor getting off work can easily involve excess. And on the eve of Barbara’s wedding, mine did. A midnight hour plus at The Lift in Glendale was followed by a couple more hours at Muddy’s in The Highlands. Thankfully I had painted Barbara’s sign on Saturday morning. So when Sunday morning came, quite unintentionally, I overslept even though the day was to involve a blind date with Barbara’s friend, a college student attending The University of Wyoming in Laramie, name of Marcia who Barbara assured me was charming. I was exceedingly hung over and showering when I barely hear the do-ray-me of my doorbell chimes over Bob Dylan singing “I married Isis on the fifth day of May.” Out of the shower I practically stumble and throw a threadbare bath towel around my waist, hoping to exploit the sexual charge that is germane to the day of a wedding. Through the translucent painting of Isis that adorns the beveled glass of my front door I see my date for the day, Marcia, and immediately I wish my faculties weren’t so fuzzy.

“Come in. Sorry I’m not ready,” I mumble as I gesture for her to enter. “Give me a few minutes to shave and dress. I hope you like Dylan ‘cause that’s what’s stacked five high on the turntable. All I ever listen to. Oh, and if you like, there’s some pot on the dining room table. Roll yourself a joint.”

While showering and dressing I look in the mirror but my memory of the woman in the other room is what fills my visual cortex. Blue eyes, light brown hair, a smile as welcoming as my mother’s. A body to lie for. A look in her eyes, a sparkle, to die for. And when I join her in the dining room her catalogue of charms only gets better when she tells me, “I, too, love Bob Dylan, and here’s what I prepared for the day,” as she hands me six perfectly hand rolled joints. My entire consciousness smiles at her tastes for Dylan and intoxicants. And later my hangover disappears completely when, on the way to Genesee, she suggests I eat some of the Brownies she’s made for the potluck reception. The fiber is Michoacan. The chocolate: Girardelli. The pecans are from Georgia.

Well, it’s a pretty happy Eddie who spends the day with Marcia. Many are the gentlemen at the wedding and the reception that follows who have an interest in my blind date, especially when they are informed of her baker’s skills. She invites many to partake of the joints she rolled for me. Marcia and the bride’s brother, Robert, seem to know each other well and I’m hoping not intimately. He has no trouble putting his arm around her when everyone is posing for photos after the ceremony. I realize that of all the subjects of our conversation on the ride up, her status (in a relationship or not) was not one of them.

Not one to put all my eggs in one basket I half-heartedly interact with other women after the wedding ceremony. Barbara has a couple unattached sisters from both the East and West coast who are closer in age to me, but I have already buried my heart in Laramie. Thankfully, when it’s time to depart the ceremony, Marcia distances herself from Robert and the other young bachelors sniffing around, and takes my hand as we head back to her Pinto for the return trip to Denver. I cannot remember when holding a woman’s hand was as exciting. I hope this gesture is as meaningful as it is casual, that it is not to just gain better purchase on the rocky trail we walk.

Back in Denver at the reception, again I am faced with competition for Marcia’s hand. Many men ask her to dance and she dances with a knowledge of country dancing that frightens the 60s   dancer in me. I never could lead like Robert leads her, but I could Bristol Stomp, slop, mash potato, and free style with the best of the best; Hell, when I was sixteen I was chosen to dance on stage at the Concord Roller Ring in Philadelphia as fourteen year old Little Stevie Wonder  played his Motown rhythm and blues hits Fingertips and Uptight (Everything is Alright). But leading a woman at country two-step swing was out of my comfort zone.

When it was time for me to go to work downstairs at The Boston Half Shell, I was thinking about calling in sick, for fear that Marcia might end up dancing the night away. But when I told her I had to leave she asked me to escort her to her car as she had to drive back to Laramie. She had school in the morning. Before getting in her car, she bussed my cheek with a quick kiss and whispered something along the lines of “If you’re ever in Laramie, come play with me. Here’s my address.” To be truthful I had no idea where Laramie was, other than somewhere in Wyoming, and my van was a month or two away from being repaired. Not knowing how long the window to “come play with me” would be open, that evening at work I arranged with the relief waiter to cover my shifts for the next five days. In the morning I hitchhiked 155 miles from my South Pearl Street home in Washington Park to Marcia’s student apartment in Laramie. It was the longest ten hours of my life, involving the good will of a half dozen drivers whose names I never knew or don’t remember but whose kindness played an essential part in my thirty-four year old marriage, ten hours that ended with me spending my first night with my mate. A mate I found because I painted Isis on my front door, because I freely loaned my van to friends, and because I did not have the money to fix a vehicle. Because a co-worker played matchmaker. Because I wanted kids and the moment I met Marcia I saw the Madonna within. Had I contact info for the people who originally turned me on to the Strawberry Park hot springs, and to the short term, long forgotten friends on Capitol Hill who borrowed my van and did not check the oil level, and for my benefactors who offered me rides on my way to Laramie that September Monday morning in 1977, I most surely would have invited them to my wedding in 1979, at which, coincidentally enough, like at the moment I met Marcia, I was shirtless. Similarly, I would share with them tonight this ritual love letter that I’ve written. For without them I might not have been able to find love, to find Marcia.

FERRISLAND

FERRISLAND

as always for Marcia

I always wanted to be a shaman, a voodoo master, a high priest with entrée to the divine, able to influence the luck of circumstances, mine and others. As has been said, one better be careful about wishes for they do, sometimes, come true, although wishing is not a sure fire strategy because, to paraphrase Ben Franklin: magic is diligence. Well, after sixty-five years of being au contraire, looking inward not upward, walking backwards, and an adulthood of scrupulous honesty, I am left wandering and wondering. There is no knowledge I possess that sets me apart, nothing glamorously glorious. No book of revelations will be written by me, although I have been privy on occasion to some arcane understandings.

Some twenty years ago, my oldest son came down with chicken pox. Already close to six foot, he was an adolescent young man living in an already adult body. And the pox hit him hard as it can with adults. His body produced anti-bodies to the varicella virus; unfortunately those anti-bodies ran amuck in their defense and attempted to infiltrate his brain. Had the anti-bodies gained access, they would have most likely caused death. Fortunately the brain has a defense in cases like this. It swells with water to block entrance. The swelling of the brain, however, caused my son to lapse into a coma that lasted almost week. During the time my son was in a coma, my dreams were unlike any dreams I’ve ever had, before or since. My extra-special dreams were many, but this story is about just one of them and its consequences in the real world, consequences that resulted from my having acted upon the information in my dream. And just so you know, to alleviate your anxiety, my son recovered from his bout with post varicella encephalitis.

My revelatory dream begins with a fabulous rock and roll bus parked outside our – me and Marcia’s – office and studio on 12^th Avenue in Denver’s Congress park neighborhood. Essentially a futuristic bus – something the Rolling Stones might engage to tour – it was, what with its racecar contours, pulsing electroluminescence at roofline, and almost soundless - Could it be electric? - idling engine. According to its destination window it is not headed “Further” or “Farther” but to “Ferrisland.” I can’t imagine what this magical bus is doing parked before dawn in front of The ImageMaker. For that matter, I can’t imagine what I’m doing here in the 5 am darkness. And where the hell is Marcia?

As I approach the front door of our studio it opens and out steps Bobbi Blanc, the widow of the man who sold me and Marcia our photo business. “You’re gonna make some money with this one,” she whispers conspiratorially as she walks on by. “Marcia’s inside waiting on you.”

Well, the inside of the studio is packed with people, dozens and dozens of actor types, all dressed to the nines. It takes me awhile but I eventually find my wife among the throng and she tells me that we are redoing yesterday’s album cover shoot for the jazz band, Images. Images was founded by a former roommate of mine, the pianist Lee Bartley, and the bass player, Rich Sallee, over the years had become a close friend and occasional business partner in sundry counter culture endeavors. Rich played bass for my 1979 Denver Poets Day performance and Lee had accompanied my poetry at numerous venues over the years. I had arranged waiter jobs for both early in their music careers when they needed to supplement their gig income. So it was only natural that Marcia would be doing the photography for their latest record. What’s unsettling in all this is that I can’t remember anything about yesterday’s photo shoot, a disquiet that reminds me I am dreaming.

Now, not only is Rich the bass player for Images, but he is also the band’s business manager. And for the purpose of the photo shoot, he is also the art director. He tells me his concept in three words: Above the Crowd. That’s the album name and the approach we are to take in creating an image. All the extras, some fifty or so, are to form a field of faces. In the album cover final layout the faces of the band mates will float “above the crowd.” My job will be to help get fifty faces into one arrangement for Marcia to photograph. Not impossible but something that will take time. I’m guessing we’re going to have to erect some sort of bleacher-like contraption to get the actors heads and faces all in the same plane of focus. I’m deep into the depth of field geometry of my thinking when this dream takes a turn with Rich’s pronouncement.

“Never mind, Ed. I think the shot from yesterday will work after all," and he hands me a color 4x5 Polaroid from yesterday’s session. In the photograph, a barefoot man lies in a coffin. The satin interior of the coffin is psychedelic and flowery. The man is a rock and roll drummer named Larry with whom I have but a passing acquaintance, a friend of Rich’s, but not the drummer for Images. Strangely, the photo is of a younger Larry, Larry in his late teens, not the forty-five year old Larry I know. I’m wondering who did the make-up as this illusion of a youngster is down-right magical. Larry’s long hair expresses a lion-like vitality absent in the present day Larry’s long thinning hair. His clothes are 60s mod – very British, not 90s grunge or late 80s techno, an outfit Larry might have worn when he first stated drumming professionally at age sixteen. No crow’s feet adorn his penny-laden eyes, no wrinkles crease his forehead, no forty-five year old late night bar tan colors his complexion. At the same time, he appears dead and sunny as a new born day.

Now I’ve maybe had two or three conversations with Larry in my life, mostly when we would cross paths at Rich Sallee’s, although the last time we spoke was right here in the studio some six months ago. Larry had stopped in because he was auditioning with the Cherry Bomb Club, a techno band that lived in a loft around the corner from the studio on Madison Street. We patted each other on the back about still doing our own thing despite the disappointing economics of being artists. I had showed him team photos of the youth baseball league I ran, the CYRA. He told me how lucky I was to have such a part in the lives of my sons. His relationship with his daughter had been sketchy, as her loyalties were with her mother from whom he was bitterly and long since divorced. His bar band salary had not been up to the task of supporting a wife and child.

Anyway, Rich’s decision to use the shot from yesterday is disappointing in that we have all these extras here, no small financial investment on the record label’s part, and I was looking forward to helping make the shoot happen. Additionally, Marcia has already loaded dozens of 4x5 film holders with color transparency film. And so, in attempt to save the shoot, I ask, “What does a guy in a coffin have to do with being ‘Above the Crowd’?” Rich’s nonsensical response – remember this is a dream – “The crowd is on Abbey Road” closes the door on further discussion. Soon everyone is filing out of the studio. All fit easily onto the bus. Dawn has broken. The bus driver exits and checks on the luggage compartment that he opens, closes and locks with a remote in his hand. I notice the casket from the Polaroid photograph amidst the drum kit and guitar cases that fill the storage area. And then the bus sans engine noise heads east towards the dawn just as the sun pops over the apartment buildings on Colorado Boulevard. The sun’s rays in my eyes end my dreaming and I awaken to a real dawn, in the hospital, beside my comatose son. I jot down what I remember of this extraordinary dream and find myself exceedingly annoyed that I cannot remember Larry’s last name as I make my notes.

A little later that morning I call Rich Sallee.  Without going into detail about my son’s situation or the nature of my dream I simply ask about Larry’s last name, which Rich tells me: “Ferris.” Rich also mentions that he hasn’t heard from Larry the last few days, an odd thing, in that Larry spends most of his life sitting at a table in his little one room crash pad above a garage in Park Hill, rolling and smoking joints and talking on the phone, his way of self medicating the manic depression that consumed him. Larry generally checked in with Rich most days as Rich was very connected in the live music world of Denver and Rich often hooked Larry up with one night engagements whenever a band was in need of a drummer. Rich ended our conversation with “I think I’ll give Larry a call.”

The next morning Rich calls me. He’s astonished to tell me where my inquiry concerning Larry’s last name led. Rich had called Larry a couple of times yesterday but Larry never answered. And if Larry wasn’t playing somewhere, he usually was home. That was Larry’s pattern and his practice, and he always answered his phone. So Rich called Larry’s married daughter who also lived in Park Hill. And when she went to check on Larry she found her father unconscious, unresponsive, but still breathing, on the floor of his apartment. Apparently Larry had suffered some sort of aneurism. He was still alive on some level, but brain-dead. He stopped breathing shortly after the paramedics arrived.

Now you might wonder why Larry appeared in my dream as he lay dying. I spoke with Rich at length about it, and he told me that Larry had always spoke admiringly of me, for he saw me as someone “above the crowd” who had managed to keep the dream of being an artist alive while not succumbing to what had laid him low: poverty, depression, the dissolution of his marriage, the drugs, the alcohol, his ill health. Even though I never made it big, I had managed to be a lifelong artist, and a husband, and a father. Hell, in my spare time I ran a youth baseball league that allowed three thousand kids to play organized baseball, something that, according to Rich, truly amazed Larry. I guess, Larry somehow knew I’d take care of the business of having someone find him so he could get on that fabulous rock and roll bus that was headed towards the stars.

JOHN LENNON & ME

Cover Art – John Lennon

John Lennon and Me

as always, for Marcia

ONE (1974)

My first father-in-law, like my second, was not too keen on my appearance. While my second dislikes my personal barbering (I've cut my own hair the last forty years), Al Rossi, a union garment worker, thought I ought to dress better, and, man of action that he was, Al informed me in 1974 that he had purchased for me a three-piece suit. All I had to do was pick it out and up. I arrive at the address of the clothing manufacturer and enter. A salesman greets me and is apparently aware of the arrangements Al had made. “One of these, please,” he tells me with a gesture indicating I should pick from about a hundred different suits that hang nearby. “Pick what you like and I’ll find it in your size.” When he returns with my choice of style and color, so that I can try on the suit coat, I ask him to hold the book I carry, Daniel Kramer’s pictorial essay of a young Bob Dylan. “Are you a Bob Dylan fan?” he asks. When I tell him that I am and that I even teach a high school English class about Dylan, all salesman propriety evaporates as he bellows, “Hey, Marty, come on down. There’s another Dylan freak here.”

Well, Marty is the owner of the clothing company and an insanely serious Bob Dylan fanatic. He asks about my class and what Dylan bootlegs I might own. Satisfied that he has what I have, he takes me to his office, a cluttered room, the rear wall of which is covered with clothing swatches, a couple hundred or so. He asks me to take a peek at what’s under the more colorful swatches as he tells me of his Dylan fanaticism. He owns a dozen copies (with shrink wrap in tact) of every Dylan album; three copies of every book about Dylan, one of every brand and style guitar Dylan has been known to play (including three Stratocasters like the one Dylan went electric with at Newport); five original copies of the New York Times containing the Robert Sheldon review of Bobby D that helped launch his star; and other artifacts that add up to an overwhelming litany of Dylan memorabilia. He also speaks about his home recording studio where he has rerecorded every published Dylan song with the help of Philadelphia’s folk and rock and roll elite. He calls himself a Dylan parrot with perfect pitch. But the most telling indictment of his kookiness is what I find when I lift up my first clothing swatch: a photo of a teenage Dylan at a birthday party! In fact under every colorful swatch I lift is a very personal Dylan photograph. All are obviously not publicity photos. He goes on to explain that he hired a couple of professional burglars to steal the photos from Dylan’s Woodstock home, a photographer to reproduce them, and the US mail to return the originals to Dylan. “Only a week from heist to home again!” he quips.  To buy my silence, he ends our meeting with “On your way out, pick out a winter coat, on me!” which I did. I was still wearing that coat in 1977 when I met another rock and roll fanatic by the name of Nicki Indigo.

TWO (1975)

When I left the East Coast and settled in Denver in 1975, I bought a house on Pearl Street in the Washington Park neighborhood. It was the consummate 70’s bachelor’s abode. I generally had at least two roommates, and a card game or backgammon game was in the offing twenty-four seven. One night my housemate David returned home from work with a boyhood pal, Nicki. Nicki was deep into an On The Road adventure and had crossed paths with David in La Place Pigalle, a cocktail lounge/party bar in Brooks Tower adjacent to The Boston Half Shell where David and I worked. David hoped that I wouldn’t mind if Nicki spent the night and crashed on our living room couch. I was agreeable and we spent the night listening to records, mostly Dylan bootlegs, smoking ganja and tobacco, drinking Heineken and Grand Marnier, and telling stories, one story of which was the story of my winter coat. Nicki left in the morning but not without telling me that the previous evening had been one of the highlights of his travels: crossing paths with David, meeting me, and listening to my tall tales. “I didn’t come across the ghost of Neal Cassady as I had hoped, but I found you. Guess I’ll head back now to New York,” were his parting words.

THREE (1978)

A couple of years later, long after David had moved on, I received a letter from Nicki addressed to David. Because I had no forwarding address for David, I kept the letter as there was no return address on the envelope, just the words Nicki Eye. Once a month for a year or so, another Nicki Eye letter would appear in my mailbox. After the thirteenth epistle arrived, I decided to open one in the hope of finding a return address where I might send them. The address I found was for a mental institution in upstate New York. I gathered up all the Nicki Eye letters, added a note of my own informing Nicki that I had no idea of David’s whereabouts, and mailed the package to Utica State Hospital.

FOUR (1980)

In the fall of 1980, my wife Marcia was pregnant with our first child. On an Indian summer November day, we were in the backyard of our Pearl Street home putting our first summer garden to bed, turning over the soil and spreading the year’s compost, when the door bell rang. Marcia and our three dogs scampered into the house to see who had come calling. No sooner had Marcia disappeared into the house than she reappeared. “You had better answer the door. I have no idea who he is, but I don’t like his looks.”

When I arrive at the front door, my usually docile Malamute is barking insanely. A translation from Malamute to English would be something like “Come through that door and I will devour you like a snow shoe hare, balls, ears, eyes and hair!” After quieting all three dogs, Maku, Dylan Dog, and Cheiba Chieba, I step outside and greet an exceedingly strange looking young man, strange because half of his head is shaved and the other half flows to his shoulders, he’s wearing jump boots and camouflage, and tattoos seem to bubble up his neck and onto his cheeks. For a third eye he sports a Hindu swastika, and he’s holding in his left hand a duct taped cardboard portfolio that has a shoelace for a handle.

His rapid-fire speech must be pharmacologically induced: “Hello Ed. Remember me? I’m David’s friend Nicki. You put me up one night a few years ago. You told the story of the Dylan burglary and your coat. I still have those Bobby bootleg songs in my head. For three years I sung myself to sleep with them in Utica. Upon release after winning my lawsuit I knew I had to come and tell you “Thank You.” Thanks for returning my letters and thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. No one has ever shown me such kindness. Not even my lawyer who got me sprung and got me my small fortune. Really. Two days ago I was in a mental institution and now I’m here to say ‘Thank you.’ I even brought you a present.”

Nicki hands me the portfolio and asks after David. My only suggestion is that David liked the ladies at La Place Pigalle and perhaps one of them might know of his whereabouts, a suggestion Nicki takes in earnest. “Well thanks again. Bye, I’m off to La Place Pigalle.”

“Hey, Nicki, what about your portfolio?”

“It’s my gift to you. Last night, after my lawyer doled out my first ten grand in cash I went in search of a good time. Eventually I wound up in lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village to be exact, in the wee hours of morning. Even New York City is quiet and dark at 3 AM. That’s when I saw this bookstore with its lights on with two men inside. Inside the windows I could see that many of the bookshelves were covered in white butcher block paper and one of the guys was pinning artwork to the paper. The door was locked but when I knocked I was let in. Well, damn, you’ll never guess who the artist was. No, it wasn’t Bob Dylan, but it was someone just as famous. It was John Lennon! The owner of the store and John were good friends and both were extremely friendly to me, despite my De Niro-does-Travis Bickle hairdo and duds. Apparently John Lennon buys his books there because the proprietor guy was Lennon’s go-to-man for reading recommendations. And because the bookstore was in dire need of a financial infusion, Lennon was hosting on the very very down-lo a sale of left over lithographs from his Bag Series, the series of fourteen lithographs he created as a wedding present for Yoko Ono. No advertisements of the exhibition and sale; just a chance for the regulars of the bookstore to obtain some Lennon art and for the bookstore to obtain the funds necessary to avoid bankruptcy. Hell, I bought two lithographs on the spot and John signed them: one of John, Yoko, and the minister who married them, and one of John, Yoko, and their lawyer in bed. I took a cab to Kennedy, bought a ticket to Stapleton, flew here, and now I’ve said my ‘Thank you.’ Enjoy!” And off Nicki raced to catch the Number 5 on his way to La Place Pigalle. My last image of Nicki is a half a head of hair flowing out the open window of a bus.

Now, all through my meeting with Nicki on the porch I could hear Marcia, who stood just inside the door, repeating a mantra of sorts in a low voice. “Don’t let him in. Don’t let him in. Don’t let him in.” Now that Nicki was gone she had changed the mantra to “Leave it on the porch; don’t bring it in. Leave it on the porch; don’t bring it in.” Her pregnant woman’s intuition - which I discount – proves, however, to be right on when I open the portfolio. There are, indeed, two signed John Lennon lithographs inside; they have, however, apparently been “altered” by Nicki. Defaced and ruined might be more accurate, for sometime between last night’s 3 AM purchase in Manhattan and their 3 PM delivery to me in Denver, Nicki had taken liberties with Lennon’s art, so much so that I couldn’t tell what was Nicki’s art and what was John’s. Nicki had Magic Marker-ed the lithographs and glued instamatic photographs of himself and the pornography of others all over the imagery. Magazine cutouts of vaginas and David Bowie were glued helter skelter. Simply said: the devil was in the added details.

Marcia’s response to our viewing was reasonable: “Get them out of the house. Now!”

Now, I’m Irish. I never gave the Beatles much credence as superstars – they weren’t even in the same universe as Dylan – and, besides, they are English, and my prejudice against the British Empire runs generational-ly deep. Still, I was not about to throw the destroyed lithographs away. After all, they had been a Thank You present, no matter how perverse. And because I believe there is a solution to every problem, I wracked my brain and came up with an inspired one: I took the next Number 5 downtown, walked two blocks east on Colfax Avenue to Jerry’s Records that was owned by a poet friend of mine, John Loquidis, and pinned the lithographs to the ceiling of the record store where they remained for the next twenty-five years.

FIVE (1988)

In 1988, some eight years after the murder of John Lennon, a Public Radio announcement caught my ear. Apparently Yoko Ono, whose daughter lived in the Denver area, was hosting an art exhibition, “the first sale ever in America of John Lennon artwork.” Well stickler for detail that I am, I knew the hype to be false because I was privy to Lennon’s bookstore lithograph sale that had occurred the month before his murder. And since the John Lennon Art Show at The Oxford Hotel was but a short walk from my Wazee Street loft, I decided to go and check it out in the hopes of learning what the lithographs had looked like before Nicki Eye had enhanced them. So into the lobby of the Oxford Hotel I go. It is summer and I’m sporting my Stetson Panama, karate pants, Birkenstocks, and a Hawaiian shirt. I ask after Yoko. She’s not there. I ask after the curator and I’m directed to a guy in a three-piece suit. In the hopes of having a little fun, I begin by telling the curator that his advertisement for the show is a wee bit misleading. “This is not the first John Lennon Art show ever to be held in America.” He’s not simply defensive in his rebuttal but angry as well: “This most certainly is and who are you to say it’s not.” For the next minute or so I attempt to calm him down with my tale of the lithographs I own ending with “They’re hanging on the ceiling of Jerry’s Records, if you don’t believe me,” to which he responds with the snap of his fingers and a mean-spirited directive, “Kick his ass to the sidewalk.” Two very large men, body-guard types, appear out of nowhere and do as directed. My arms are twisted behind my back and I am removed from the Sage Room on whose walls hang the fourteen different lithographs comprising the Bag Series, guided through the lobby, past the Cruise Bar, to the front door, and I am tossed to the sidewalk by the two thugs who grin like Cheshire cats, their smile intimating that the sidewalk burns on my face are nothing compared to the harm I’ll suffer should I attempt re-entry. A fun-ster I may be but a fool I am not. I returned to my loft and my family secure in my belief that someday I would get to tell this story, and look here, I even brought along the lithographs!

DIAPER DANCE

Cover photo: Marcia Ward

  

Diaper Dance

as always

for Marcia

My first son was born at home thirty-two years ago when I was thirty-three. In an attempt to reinvent myself after six years of teaching followed by six years of waiting tables, I broke all the common sense rules of getting ahead. I was so Be Here Now / in the moment, at this time in my life, so into my belief that I had somehow been anointed, that I sold my house, quit my job, burned a decade’s worth of unfinished manuscripts in a fifty-five gallon drum, stowed a few cherished house hold items (Bob Dylan records, a blender, a dozen or so artworks) with my sister-in-law, and yardsale-ed the bulk of my (i.e., our – me and Marcia’s) belongings. Zen-ing out we called it, this approach to a less-is-more lifestyle. In search of a new home in some other place, we planned to hit the road for a year or so in my van with the money I had made on the sale of our Washington Park home and live off of the interest of the owner-will-carry loan I’d made to the buyer. So to celebrate my wife’s twenty-fifth birthday, the first three months of our son’s life, and our seeming good fortune, we went on a waiter’s holiday of sorts to a neighborhood restaurant, The Plum Tree, on Pennsylvania Street. We hoped to eat the best food Wash Park had to offer at a place outside the envelope of our new parent lives.

We arrive at The Plum Tree with a pocket full of cash and baby in arms. Among the happiest people in the world we could be counted as we approach the front door of The Plum Tree. I’m so fucking happy, in fact, that the first hint of unwelcome-ness encountered I let ride, although I tuck it away in my “un-pleasantries” file, when we are told by the maitre d’ that the restaurant is not yet open. “We open at five; you’ll have to come back then.” Well. I’m not into jewelry but I do wear a watch, a Timex inherited from my father a dozen years ago, and it lets me know that it is four fifty eight, almost four fifty-nine as the second hand is half way around the dial. It’s not so much the information imparted that I find off-putting, but the antagonistic and authoritarian tone of its delivery. This maitre de apparently is clueless when it comes to any notion of “friendly service.”

“Well, we’ll be back in a minute,” I deadpan to the grump of a host, adding, “I understand you have no liquor license but we can bring our own; so I’ll just spend the next sixty seconds procuring a bottle of wine from the liquor store across Bayaud and return when you are open,” careful to exaggerate the pronunciation and longevity of the two syllables, “O” and “pen.” My disdain is now rather transparent, as the maitre d’s strict enforcement of The Plum Tree’s hours of operation has moved his gracelessness from the “un-pleasantry” classification to one of aggressive, hostile prissy-ness.

When we return from the liquor store with our wine (a couple of bottles of Louis Jadot’s Beajoulas Villages – the same wine we drank four years ago during the first night Marcia and I spent together (it was the only red wine in Laramie that I could find that had a cork!) - I can’t help but notice the maitre d’s continued unwarranted incivility when he attempts to seat us in the completely empty restaurant at a back two top by the bathroom doors. Ignoring his request to follow him I direct Marcia to a corner four top by the front window where I spread our belongings - wine, Marcia’s serape, diaper bag, and my Stetson Panama – about the empty chairs. When the maitre d’ realizes we have not followed him his sigh of disbelief is as audible as is the clatter of fine china, silverware, and crystal made by me as I gather up the two unnecessary place settings and slide them to the side of the table top to make room for Passion, our infant, upon his removal from the Snuggly Marcia wears. Upon his awakening, propped up in my arms upon the French linen of the table top he beams as only a recently changed, breast milk fed, well rested baby can: beatifically. His cooing signals his appreciation for the newness of this environment. Most things outside our Pearl Street residence in his young life are “firsts.” Similarly, this is our first time eating out with him.

Soon a waiter arrives, a nice enough fellow, who seems unaware of the maitre d’s lack of appreciation for us. A bus boy removes the extra place settings as the waiter opens our Beajoulas while detailing the evening’s specials. We order extravagantly as, after all, we are on a waiter’s holiday, something I let our waiter in on, going as far as to mention I’d just resigned my position as head waiter at Denver’s premiere seafood establishment, The Boston Half Shell, in downtown Denver, a remark which is overtly code in the waiter world signifying that we are brothers of a sort and a great tip is in the offing, information that is not lost on our waiter as he quickly returns with a second round of warm bread without our asking. As I’ve said we are on a waiter’s holiday and it is Marcia’s birthday so we have ordered sundry appetizers, soup and salads, all of which we enjoy before we order our entrees.

Soon my Timex tells me it’s six and now the restaurant starts filling up with both walk-ins and reservations. A party of eight is seated next to us and I can’t help but notice that the maitre d’ pays them especial attention, addressing some by name, leading me to believe that they are regulars enamored of the trendy Plum Tree. With feigned aristocratic formality, the maitre d’ asks if he should inform their waiter that, as usual, they will be having two of every appetizer on the menu, all this while unfolding the napkins that sit fanned across the dinner plates which he places on the laps of all. When he turns away from the table to return to his station at the door and looks inadvertently in my direction, my smirk and glare shamelessly inform him that I found his fawning to be as pretentious as it was shallow, reminded, as I am, of every ass kissing insincere suck-up I have ever met. It’s amazing what an aggrieved countenance can reveal.

Soon our main course arrives: veal scaloppini for me and shrimp saltimbocca for Marcia. The smells are so flavorful that I ask that our waiter compliment the chef on our behalf. The plated presentation is as beautiful as the food is delicious. Unfortunately, I do not get to finish, because as I attempt a second bite, my reverie is ruined as I become aware that the maitre d’ is addressing me with a fervid hostility bordering on verbal assault. “The smell of shit, sir, is pervading the restaurant; please remove your child to the restroom.”

I look at Marcia. She is aghast and knows the maitre d’s assertions to be a lie as not two minutes before she had breast-fed Passion under the cover of baby blanket and serape and had Passion’s diaper been fouled, she would have known. In fact, she knows he’s not even wet his diaper, and this she silently mouths to me. “It’s dry.”

I stand abruptly and turn to face the maitre de behind me. I announce to him most poetically, “I am deaf to all but truth and hence know not a word you’ve uttered. Let’s try again. What did you say? Perhaps I can read your lips, their lies.”

“The smell of shit, sir, pervades my restaurant. Remove your baby to the bathroom or yourselves from this restaurant!” Time dissolves as does place. I am everyman who has ever suffered prejudice, be it for any reason, great or small. The spirit of an angry Metamora in the person of the tragedian Edwin Forrest overtakes the waiter on a waiter’s holiday. All indignities ever suffered at the hands of titled aristocracy inspire my next moves as I ask, “You mean I do not get to eat this food?” And as the maitre d’ responds “That’s right, now leave my restaurant,” I clear the table where I sat of wine and water and their respective glassware, my veal and china, bread and bread plate, forks, knives and spoon, and respond, “Well, if I don’t get to eat this food, then no one will.”

Needless to say, my host is speechless and agog as I turn to address the other diners in the room. “Excuse me, but I can not abide his lies. The smell of shit does not pervade the room, just the odor of his lies and his foppish pretentiousness. Come on, have we not the right to eat here, or are children simply not welcome among such young professionals as yourselves. Please, tell this man he’s crazy. What have we done that we should be ostracized as he would ostracize us? Please stand up for us, the family that we are.” No one does. All return to eating, ashamed or embarrassed to take a side in this most inane confrontation. None know of our maitre d’s earlier passive aggressive actions.  I look to Marcia who has put Passion in the Snuggly. She intimates with eyes and tilt of head that she would like to leave. I agree as who knows what could possibly come of my sitting back down to eat at an empty table. To punctuate my position that it is Marcia and I who have been wronged, I clear Marcia’s setting as well. I leave a fifty-dollar tip for our waiter who stands dumbfounded at a nearby table without asking for the check. Because Marcia’s wineglass did not shatter when I swept it to the floor, I mazel tov it with my left Birkenstock in a dramatic mockery of a goose-step. Its conversion from stemware to a thousand shards makes an explosive noise similar to a gunshot, a sound which is followed by the swinging kitchen doors exploding open and slamming against decorative hammered copper of the doorway’s border through which passes a gentleman I take to be the chef given the professional carving knife in his right hand. Marcia and I make our way to the front door slowly as the chef surveys the room, paying especial attention to our empty table surrounded as it is by broken china, shattered glass, splattered wine, silverware, and upturned, uneaten scaloppini and saltimbocca. We soon exit not without the help of the chef’s left hand that pushes on my shoulder, so forcefully, that I stumble almost knocking Marcia and our child to the sidewalk. The restaurant door can be heard being locked behind us. Upon arrival at my van we catch our breath and turn back to look upon The Plum Tree, the upscale trendy little eatery where we had hoped to celebrate. The chef stands at the front door, still holding his carving knife and glowering. Given the crimson glow of his countenance and the fogged lenses of his eyewear I deduce that he’s as mad as I am - me for the indignity I’ve suffered; him for the havoc with which I countered his maitre d’s obvious prejudice against children.

Marcia opens the side door of the van to stow the diaper bag, but before she can close it I ask her to give me Passion’s diaper. Still under the influence of my anger I am short with her when she asks “Why?”

“Just give it to me. I’m not finished with The Plum Tree. Just give me the diaper and trust me. This is not over. In fact, please go next door to the Health Food Store and bring some people out. I want witnesses for whatever is about to go down.” Marcia lays Passion on the mattress in the back of my van and changes his diaper. She gives me the unsoiled cloth diaper, which I affix with a rubber band to the end of a folding umbrella that I carry in my van’s side door. The umbrella is the staff of the cotton diaper flag that I will carry into battle. I fearlessly approach The Plum Tree waving my white flag of surrender, a visual proof that the maitre d’s assertion that Passion had filled his diaper with something stinky was bogus. My body language as I waive the diaper at The Plum Tree’s patrons through the window is obvious in its demand that I receive an apology from someone, that at minimum, further discourse is required.

And then out he comes, the chef. He no longer holds the carving knife but the language of his hands says that he wants to strangle me. But as he approaches with his hands raised neck high, I poke the diaper in his direction. It is a comedic dance we do as he feigns and lunges and I parry his advances with a wag of the diaper to his face. Around and round we go as I counter every move he makes, diaper to face with every lunge. Our unrehearsed ballet lasts more than a minute before he rushes headlong with accelerating speed into me, knocking me up against the side of my van. In my heart I know I’ve Charlie Chaplin-ed him and he’s assaulted me. A half dozen witnesses stand on the sidewalk outside the corner heath food store.

He’d like to slam my head against the side of my van but all he can really do, given the people on the corner, is threaten me. “Set foot in my restaurant and I’ll kill you,” he says, to which I reply, “The only way I’ll ever set foot in your restaurant is for you to buy me the dinner I did not get to eat.” He turns to leave and as he does, I remove the diaper from the umbrella and throw it at him. It unfurls like a parachute after passing the zenith of its trajectory before ensconcing his head like a manta ray its prey. Upon its landing he reacts as if he’s been shit upon. His head dances like a hanged man’s in an attempt to remove the cloth without using his hands. His comedy is as sad as mine had been ballet-like.

Needless to say, the chef/owner of The Plum Tree never does offer to buy us dinner. We both attempt to press charges with the police against each other. He wants compensation for his broken dishes and the dinners I trashed and I want him charged with assault. The police decide not to get involved. Still I’d like to think my voodoo diaper dance was part of the equation of The Plum Tree closing before Marcia’s next birthday. Like the butterfly fluttering its wings in the Amazon that leads to a storm in Belize, perhaps my waving of the diaper in June summoned the winds of recession that bankrupted The Plum Tree in October

A SAD SIMPLE TRUTH

A Sad Simple Truth

as always, for Marcia

The last time I was summoned for jury duty a sad simple truth got me excused.

Arriving in the jury holding room, my number is selected and I find myself in a pool of twenty or so prospective jurors that is to be whittled down to twelve. The judge addresses us with a seriousness befitting the case: “This trial concerns heavy-duty narcotics trafficking. You will be hearing the testimony of police officers and confidential informants who the defense might characterize as liars. So before we begin jury selection, I have a question to ask of you all. Do any of you believe a police officer might lie while testifying?”

I scan the room.  Everyone’s eyes are darting nervously as they look around the room. All are wondering: Is this some sort of trick question? Does the judge really want us to answer? I raise my hand and am called upon to speak.

“Your Honor, not only do I believe a police officer might lie while testifying, I know for a fact that they do. I was a defense witness in a case here in Denver back in 1979. One Charles Ross was charged with assaulting a police officer. I was at the scene, not ten feet away. Two police officers testified. As did I. Their accounts which dovetailed perfectly were entirely fabricated as I had witnessed the event, and I know what I saw happen. Based on my testimony and other inane assertions on the part of the prosecution, the jury acquitted Mr. Ross of all charges. As I said: I don’t believe a police officer might lie, I know they do.” No surprise here: the prosecution dismisses me. But before I am escorted from the courtroom seven other jurors raise their hands to assert their belief that officers might lie while testifying. 

Here is the simple sad truth of Charlie Ross and his acquittal.

Charlie Ross was a student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder and Allen Ginsberg’s personal secretary. Poetry was our connection as I was heavily involved in producing Denver Poets Day in August of 1979, an event that brought together scores of poets from Denver and Boulder. I collaborated with the bassist Rich Sallee that day and I must say we rocked, as did scores of others including Allen Ginsberg, Larry Lake, my wife Marcia, Ann Waldman, Ken Babs, Andy Clausen, Eileen Miles, and Charlie Ross. It was an exceedingly hot eight hours in the sun as the event ran from 11 AM to 7 PM in Denver’s Civic Center Amphitheater. It was a very emotional day as well. The previous Denver Poets Day in 1978 had honored the notorious Colorado poet James Ryan Morris who had died soon thereafter, and his widow, Diana, her presence at this year’s event – a memorial of sorts for Jimmy - kept the specter of human mortality in play. Tensions between poet egos – academic and street – combined with shade-less triple digit temperatures also contributed to everyone’s exhaustion at day’s end. Wrung out we were. To recuperate many participants decided to head to the Satire Lounge on East Colfax for Mexican food, refreshment and more poetry shoptalk, myself and wife included. Diana Morris asked if her seven-year-old daughter Pagan could ride with me and Marcia as Diana planned on spending a little adult time with and giving a ride to a group of her deceased husband’s friends. Marcia and I agreed to look after Pagan until Diana regrouped with us at The Satire.

Now it’s approximately 8 PM on a summer Saturday night and Pete’s Satire Lounge is packed tight as an unopened pack of Camels. Marcia, Pagan and I are among the first dozen to arrive, and we are seated at a large corner table and the hostess is made aware that another dozen or so are likely to join us. We agree to make the best of the crowded accommodations, assuring the hostess and our waitress that we will stand and sit as need be. Charlie Ross and I are more or less co-hosting this gathering, with Charlie welcoming late arrivals from Boulder and me those from Denver. Pitchers of beer and plates of nachos fill the table as people talk up a storm. A half hour or so into the this impromptu poets rendezvous, above the din, I hear the agitated voice of Diana Morris and I immediately leave the confab of poets and make my way in her direction. A waitress, not ours, is telling Diana that she will have to wait to be seated. When Diana, ignoring the request of the waitress, makes a move in my direction, the out of the loop waitress with her body’s shoulder blocks Diana’s path. She even stiff-arms Diana with her right hand while holding a cocktail tray of drinks in her left. Both the body block and stiff arm prove to be foolishly provocative moves, for Diana asserts with almost divine authority, “No one keeps me from my daughter, bitch,” and throws a mean right hook, knocking the waitress, the cocktails, and civility to the floor. The crowd around the front door dissipates and Diana looms over the stunned waitress. I spy the bartender picking up the phone and whisk Diana out the front door and beg her not to reenter as I step back inside and tender an apology to the waitress: “I’m sorry for what happened. You’ll never know the circumstances surrounding this day. That lady just left a memorial for her dead husband after eight hours in the sun, and you stood between her and her seven-year-old daughter. Again, I apologize and am sorry. Here, please accept this for your troubles, and I hand her a fifty-dollar bill, before exiting to attend to Diana who I find on the sidewalk, contemplating the use of her gun. Her right hand, inside her fringed vest, its fingers fondle the steel of her thirty-eight that hides there. I know she never leaves her cabin in Wondervu without it.

“Diana, you have to leave. The police are on their way. I saw the bartender dialing. I’ll bring Pagan to you later. Please, I am your friend and I’m begging you. Go, Pagan will be fine and we’ll meet up at Jesse’s later.” Keep in mind; I am speaking to one of the most intense persons I have ever met. Fierce, addled, capable, agitated, mean, gun-totting, upset, angry, grieving, vindictive, vengeful, crazy, and on the verge of mayhem are but a baker’s dozen applicable descriptions of the present and imminent danger with which I am confronted on this hot summer Colfax Avenue sidewalk Saturday night. Distant sirens grow louder as Diana contemplates her next move. “Diana, Pagan does not need your being arrested. Please go before it’s too late.” Mention of Pagan brings common sense into the mix and Diana thanks me as she gets into her Subaru, which is parked illegally, blocking as it does the Colfax entrance to the Satire parking lot. But instead of heading east Diana accelerates into the parking lot at a high rate of speed and purposefully smashes into a Cadillac parked diagonally on the west side of the lot, twice, seriously damaging the rear quarter panel and rear end of the formerly cherry sedan. Then without assessing traffic she backs out haphazardly onto Colfax and races east right through red lights at Race, Vine, Josephine and York. I’m not sure if I am dreaming given the last three minutes of my life. But, guess what, the craziness is just beginning.

Back inside, I realize that I don’t want to be here when the police arrive so I gather up Marcia and Pagan and suggest that Charlie and his intimate crew (he’s got four Boulder poets and two children riding in his van) follow me, as we had originally planned to convene back at Drew Becker’s house after dinner to listen to recordings of the day, and Charlie did not know where Drew lived.

Now both Charlie and I had parked our vans in the Satire parking lot on the east side. Since we were going to head towards Elizabeth Street where Drew lived and because the south east exit of the parking lot was now awash in police activity, there were two squad cars and a couple of police motor cycles clogging that end of the lot, I suggest to Charlie that we simply back out onto Colfax and avoid the boondoggle at the Race Street exit. It will be a hard maneuver so I tell Charlie I’ll guide him backwards when it’s safe to do so.

I am behind his van guiding him rearward when a voice out of nowhere that brooks no dissent barks out orders: “Stop right there. You just backed into that Cadillac. Exit your vehicle with your hands up.” Now only two people on earth know the circumstances surrounding the damage to Pete’s -the owner of the Satire Lounge - Cadillac, and I am one of them. Furthermore, not only does the officer ordering Charlie out of his van not know what I know, he also is apparently unaware I am even present, standing between Charlie’s van and the damaged goods that is Pete’s Caddy.

I make my presence known by stepping into plain view of the officer who has come out of hiding and is now standing by Charlie’s door and announce, “If this van just hit that Cadillac, I guess I’m an unsubstantial and invisible man, a ghost, because it would have had to run me over in order to hit it, seeing as how I’ve been behind it guiding my friend the whole time,” an assertion to which the officer has no reply or rebuttal. It is apparent to him that I am giving lie to his charge that Charlie hit Pete’s car. The silence is as deafening as the situation is volatile. The electricity in the air has my neck hair standing up. Where can this conversation possibly go from here? The cop needs an out but can’t come up with one, so I do. Not pressing my knowledge that I’ve caught him in a lie, I ask the officer politely to help us back both of our vans out onto Colfax so Charlie can follow me, a request the cop takes up without any further talk of Charlie having damaged the Cadillac. The officer steps out onto Colfax blocking the right lane. I back up out onto the Fax and head east with Charlie doing likewise. We do not run the red lights at Vine and Race, as had Diana, but before reaching York I notice a police car in the left hand lane motioning with siren and lights that Charlie (whose van is immediately behind mine), that Charlie pull over to the curb. I do so as well and exit my van to see what’s going on, as I fear further police inappropriateness. I just caught one lying and can’t imagine any reason why Charlie’s been made to pull over. I am all ears and eyes as I approach the scene.

Charlie is clearly upset and bewildered. Angry as well. A huge cop exits the shotgun side of the squad car and tells Charlie to exit his vehicle. Charlie’s window is down and he asks, agitatedly,  why he’s being stopped. The officer provides no answer and again tells him to exit his vehicle. Charlie hesitates. Given that another cop had tried to pin an accident on him less than two minutes ago Charlie is hesitant, reluctant, fearful, wide-eyed, and not ready to comply. He is not about to simply roll over. Again, he asks why he’s been pulled over and this time the cop comes up with a reason: “the George Carlin poster in your rear van window is blocking your view and that makes this an unsafe vehicle,” to which Charlie replies with unfettered disbelief and exasperation, “Jesus Christ, I sometimes sleep in my van and the poster affords me privacy. I live in Boulder and have been stopped for traffic violations and no other officer has ever mentioned the poster. Hell, commercial vans have spray painted rear windows, so thieves can’t see what’s inside and semis have only side view mirrors” a retort which seems to infuriate the cop if his next actions are any indication.

In one deft move the cop reaches though Charlie’s open window with his left hand, depresses the handle and opens the van door. With his right hand he grabs Charlie by his long hair and the back of his neck, forcing Charlie to exit and move rearwards along the side of the panel van, out of sight of Mary Lu, Charlie’s girlfriend, who rides shot-gun. Once Charlie is toe to toe with him, the cop exclaims, “Well this ain’t Boulder, punk, and your hippie van ain’t no big rig” and then the six foot six, two hundred and fifty pound cop slams the five foot six, one hundred and twenty pound Charlie face down across the hood of the patrol car, following up the slam down with a half a dozen whacks to the back of the skull with a night stick he removes from his utility belt. A bloodied and broken nosed Charlie is then handcuffed and taken away in a second police car that has arrived because there already is a shadowy third person in the back seat driver’s side, someone not in uniform, an earlier arrestee, perhaps. This is the second act of utter bizarreness that again I seem to be the only witness to, as neither the people in Charlie’s van nor the officer driving the cop car, given his sightline, could see what actually transpired. Only me as I stand in the street on the driver’s side of my van, not ten feet from where Charlie was assaulted.

Later that night I bail Charlie out of jail. He’s been charged with numerous offenses, crimes such as resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, disturbing the peace, but I note, not with driving with an obstructed view. Well, to make a long story short, Charlie is offered a deal. Plead to disturbing the peace or some such nonsense and all the more serious charges will be dropped. Sounds easy, but poets are not a simple lot. Many, you might say, are principled. And as Keats wrote, truth is beauty. Thus, Charlie poetically tells the DA to take his deal and shove it up the ass of the officer who attacked him, one Officer Brooks. Charlie wants a jury trial and he eventually gets it. His girlfriend’s brother-in-law, a Denver lawyer, represents him. I am to be the defense’s primary witness, along with my wife who can place me at the scene. The DA is annoyed that Charlie did not take the offered deal and so he plays hard ball, going as far as to sequester me away from Marcia during the trial, as if a husband and wife would not be on the same page. The DA has never bothered to depose me because, after all, he has two officers who will testify that Charlie came out of his van swinging and that Charlie’s injuries were a result of Officer Brooks having to subdue him. A third prosecution witness, a wanna be cop police dispatcher, who was doing a Saturday night ride-along in the back seat of Brook’s cruiser, will also testify that Charlie came out swinging. This means that when I take the stand only Charlie’s attorney is in the know as to what I will say.

First defense council exposes my background. A Jesuit educated prep-ster, with a Bachelors Degree in Humanities and Technology from Drexel University in Philadelphia, my recent six year stint as an English teacher and president and contract negotiator for the Woodbury Teacher’s Association present me as someone quite different from the long-haired sleeping-in-his-van Texas hippie that Charlie appears to be. My testimony, along with the rehearsed pat testimony of law enforcement, not to mention the unbelievable assertion that skinny little Charlie would attack the hulking buff Brooks, left little doubt that this hot Saturday night altercation was nothing more than a machismo cop taking out his dislike of the brazen and long-haired (and possibly of George Carlin as well) on an innocent kid who had the audacity to be upset at being harassed. The cops’ rendition was perceived as the utter fabrication it was and a jury of his peers exonerated Charlie on all counts. It’s hard to believe that the DA had ever bought it; chances are he simply resented Charlie for telling him to take his deal and shove it. And Charlie Ross didn’t stop there. He later filed a civil suit against the officers involved, alleging false arrest and assault, a case that would drag through the courts for years. Unfortunately, during the time Charlie’s civil case snaked its way about the legal system, we had a falling out – a separate story in itself having to do with Gregory Corso, LSD, and a female black-belt bouncer at the Blue Note on the Boulder mall – and we lost track of each other.

Then one day in late 1984 I get a call from Charlie on a Sunday night. He informs me that earlier that afternoon he had learned that his civil suit is going to trial on Tuesday, after having been postponed almost ad infinitum. After all this time, after having been falsely arrested and beaten by a Denver cop, not to mention, abused by a legal system that forced him to go into debt to his lawyer, that he might win some satisfaction, not to mention money, was a godsend to Charlie’s impoverished family. I mean poetry is truth and beauty but it is neither food nor clothing nor rent. He was calling to see, despite our differences surrounding the Gregory Corso affair, if I would testify again. He was hoping to scrape up airfare from others in the commune where he lived with Mary Lu and their four children.

“Of course” is my response. “Let me know when you’ll be landing and I’ll even pick you up at Stapleton. You can stay with me and Marcia.” He tells me he will call back in the morning once he knows his flight info.

Now personally, I’m looking forward to Tuesday as I’ve always wondered whether Officer Brooks ever came out of the S&M closet that was his police uniform. My gaydar, no matter how inexact the science behind it, had led me to believe that the police dispatcher in the back seat of Brooks patrol car that August Saturday night had more than a love of blue in common with the cop. At trial I had surmised that Brooks was showing off his sadism for the benefit of someone, most likely his buddy in the back seat, who, along with his partner in the front seat, had lied about Charlie’s beating and arrest. I know that neither could see what went on between Charlie and Brooks given their sight lines from the driver’s side of the patrol car. Yet testify they had!

Well anyway, Charlie never does call on Monday morning to let me know when he’ll arrive in Denver. So Monday night I call him back to find out the system had screwed the hippie in him once again. Apparently, his lawyer, after all this time wanted money. For himself! The City of Denver had offered a deal: settle for attorney’s fees, the city’s and Charlie’s, or risk winning nothing. Charlie’s lawyer, now divorced from Mary Lu’s sister, told Charlie that if he didn’t accept the deal, attorney’s fees without any compensation to the plaintiff, he’d drop him as a client and sue Charlie for payment of his fees, a situation Charlie couldn’t afford, given his alternative communal lifestyle. Besides, Charlie admitted he had not been able to scrape together airfare to come to Denver. Thus he took the deal, and everybody got paid, everybody except Charlie, a lamentable and simple sad truth.