ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

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Mine company’s headquarters, Megalo Livadi, Serifos. Panoramio photo by glavind.

“JUMP!”

by Andreas Economakis

Serifos is a beautiful little island, not 3 hours from Athens by boat. Rocky at first glance, one soon realizes that there is quite a bit of greenery hidden here and there, mostly in the craggy gorges and Lilliputian valleys. The island is deceptive. It has a ghostlike quality at times, the majority of visitors being Athenians who come only for the weekends. The real natives, a scant 600 or so, work as construction workers, shop-owners, municipal employees or fishermen. The rest are old folk.

Serifos’ once booming population and economy, both products of the island’s iron ore mining facilities, slowly disintegrated when the mines shut their doors in 1963. In the small village of Megalo Livadi, on the far side of the island, the German mining company’s neo-classical headquarters stand semi-dilapidated amidst a row of palm trees at the end of the seaside village’s only main road, a dirt road. Kind of like a spaceship that landed in the middle of nowhere, the “villa,” as the locals call the building, is too huge for the place and yet beautiful to look at. Chickens peck along the dirt road an the sandy beach in front of two solitary coffee shops, both devoid of customers in this once bustling mining town that must now have no more than 10 permanent inhabitants. Tourists tend to roll in with mouths agape, sensing that they’ve happened upon some sort of landscape conjured up by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or his Greek equivalent.

Next to the crumbling headquarters is a memorial to the four miners killed in a protest strike against the mining company in 1916. The miners died fighting for better work conditions and an 8-hour workday. During the strike, the despised owner George Groman suddenly ordered his thug-like foremen and a small group of gendarmes to open fire on the striking workers in order to get them to return to work. Four miners fell dead and scores more were wounded before bystander wives and workers picked up stones and counter-attacked, killing the armed detachment to a man and throwing all the bodies into the sea. A workers’ commune was proclaimed and set up but it was quickly thrown into disarray by the arrival of a French battleship. The French returned Groman to power on the condition that he accept the 8-hour workday.

When I first visited Serifos I had no idea this village existed, no idea Serifos was a mining island, no idea people had died here fighting for a bit of human decency. There is something mystical about Serifos, something hidden from the eyes. There’s an old sayin in Greece that wherever you dig, you will find the bones of brave ancestors. Serifos is no exception. People died on this island fighting for justice. The dirt and rocks have been soaked with blood. One gets the sense that the land has taken notice of this, that something important is stirring under the earth, deep in the island’s history. Call it a feeling, call it an energy. One definitely senses this energy when visiting Serifos. At least, I did.

A few summers ago, when I first set foot on the island, I wanted to be alone. I needed time to gather my thoughts after a long job and an even longer broken relationship. That desire lasted all of 10 minutes after I set foot on the port. All of a sudden I wanted to be social. Not yet aware of Serifos’ history or powerful energy, I attributed the change in my disposition to the brilliant white buildings, the crystal blue sky, the seagulls, the happy people riding on scooters, everything and everyone so very alive in the clean salty air.

Like most first-time visitors to Serifos, I had been deposited by the ferry on the busy side of the island, near the small hotels and bars and restaurants and boats and noise. I remembered that my cousin Anna had a summerhouse up in the mountain village of Chora.  I called her up on her mobile, wondering if she was nude bathing on the island’s white sand beaches as I’d heard she liked to do.  Anna was happy to hear from me and invited me up to her village for drinks right away.

The epidemy of a social creature, Anna was surrounded by a horde of lively people at the local café.  I took to the new climate and crowd like a fish to water. I met Rachel, an English lawyer specializing in Romani law, with whom I would eventually develop a film on Kosovo Gypsies, a film we never made (if only someone would have given us the money…). I also met a couple from Manchester. He was a musician in a fairly successful band there. She was a teacher.  She was gorgeous, simply stunning.  I spent every minute I could with this English couple.  Simply looking at her in her flowery see-through summer dresses made my heart skip a few beats.

On their last night on Serifos we all went out drinking.  We were down by the port where all the bars are.  Eventually the bars closed and we bought some beers and decided to go back up to Chora and catch the sunrise.  As there were three of us and I was the only one with a bike, I offered to give them a ride, one by one, up to the village. She rode first.  We rushed up the hill, she clinging onto me tightly. I could feel her warm body against my back, her soft thighs pressed against my legs. She rested her head close to my neck to shelter her eyes from the wind.  Her breath sent shivers down my spine.  I swear I could have ridden all night.  I wanted to take her to the abandoned mining headquarters, to swim naked in the phosphorescent sea with her, to gaze at the yellow moon together as it slowly drifted against the pinhole black sky.  At the fork in the road, I made a right and continued to Chora, to our original destination.   Maybe if I’d made a left my life would be different now.  Simple as that: right or left?

When we got to the village, it was all I could do to not kiss her.
But I rode back down for her boyfriend.  Back up in the village we stumbled around the small, cascading white houses, which literally crawl up against each other like a Lego blocks.  We were having fun jumping from one house to the next.  We came across a big divide between two houses.  Perhaps one could leap to the other side, but it would be suicidal.  Especially with all the booze we had consumed. Her boyfriend had developed a macho attitude over the course of the night, perhaps sensing the turbulent chemistry between his girlfriend and me.

He announced that he was going to jump. His girlfriend pleaded with him to not do it. The more she pleaded, the more he wanted to jump. He took a few steps back and prepared himself for the death leap. I watched with baited breath. This musician was going to sacrifice himself at our feet, right there before the altar of our burgeoning love. He would surely die and I would end up in her arms, kissing her wet salty cheeks, sweaty skin and arms entwined, little children laughing, a house in the English countryside, summers in Greece, the trickle of cold ouzo gliding down suntanned skin as frothy blue waves washed over our tingling flesh, alive, together, eternal…

“Don’t do it man,” I yelped at the last moment. Why did I say that? He stopped and looked at me. “You’ll never make it. You’re way too fucked up,” I went on, my lips moving mechanically, some greater force controlling me like a puppet. His girlfriend stroked my arm in thanks and a flash of electricity rushed through me. My other self yelled, silently, desperately: “Jump, you English fuck. Jump!”

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANI DIFRANCO

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FUEL

by Ani Difranco


They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan
And they discovered a slave cemetery there
May their souls rest easy
Now that lynching is frowned upon
And we’ve moved on to the electric chair
And I wonder who’s gonna be president, tweedle dum or tweedle dummer?
And who’s gonna have the big blockbuster box office this summer?
How about we put up a wall between houses and the highway
And you can go your way, and I can go my may

Except all the radios agree with all the tvs
And all the magazines agree with all the radios
And I keep hearing that same damn song everywhere I go
Maybe I should put a bucket over my head
And a marshmallow in each ear
And stumble around for
Another dumb-numb waiting for another hit song to appear

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room
Now everything is cross-marketing
Its about sunglasses and shoes
Or guns and drugs
You choose
We got it rehashed
We got it half-assed
We’re digging up all the graves
And we’re spitting on the past
And you can choose between the colors
Of the lipstick on the whores
Cause we know the difference between
The font of 20% more
And the font of teriyaki
You tell me
How does it… make you feel?

You tell me
What’s … real?
And they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
Even when they’re as dry as my lips for years
Even when they’re stranded on a small desert island
With no place within 2,000 miles to buy beer
And I wonder
Is he different?
Is he different?
Has he changed? what’s he about?..
Or is he just a liar with nothing to lie about?

Am I headed for the same brick wall
Is there anything I can do about
Anything at all?
Except go back to that corner in Manhattan
And dig deeper, dig deeper this time
Down beneath the impossible pain of our history
Beneath unknown bones
Beneath the bedrock of the mystery
Beneath the sewage systems and the PATH train
Beneath the cobblestones and the water mains
Beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
Beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
Beneath everything I can think of to think about
Beneath it all, beneath all get out
Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel

There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel


You can listen to “Fuel” by clicking on the “Play song from Lala.com” link here.


Ani Difranco is an American singer, guitarist, and songwriter. She has released over twenty albums, is a Grammy Award winner, and is a feminist icon.

Editor’s Note: This post was by request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment.

Today’s post continues our conversation about music and poetry, and whether songs are, in fact, poetry. The consensus from our earlier discussion seems to be a resounding yes, and I agree.

For me, some songwriters are really getting at the heart of poetry with their lyrics. Ani Difranco is at the top of this list for me. My personal favorite Ani Difranco lyric is from “32 Flavors” and reads “and god help you if you are an ugly girl / course too pretty is also your doom / cause everyone harbors a secret hatred / for the prettiest girl in the room / and god help you if you are a phoenix / and you dare to rise up from the ash / a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy / while you are just flying past.” I simply cannot see that as anything other than poetry.

I think today’s piece is extremely exemplary of how a song can be poetry. If you listen to the recorded version you will see that Difranco essentially speaks the entire song. This is almost more of an example of spoken word poetry with accompanying music than it is a song, and yet, it is featured as a song on the artist’s album “Little Plastic Castle.” Beyond that, the song covers topics such as politics and the state of the world today – topics traditionally covered in poetry.

Want to read more by and about Ani Difranco?
Ani Difranco lyrics from a devoted fan
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FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: Amy Fleury

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At Twenty-Eight

by Amy Fleury


It seems I get by on more luck than sense,
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.


Amy Fleury’s upbringing in rural Kansas shaped her unadorned poetic style and her appreciation for the outdoors. Her first book of poetry, Beautiful Trouble, received the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. She is currently the poet-in-residence at her alma mater, McNeese State University.


CHRIS HEDGES

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HOW THE CORPORATIONS BROKE

RALPH NADER AND AMERICA, TOO

by Chris Hedges

Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.

“The press discovered citizen investigators around the mid-1960s,” Nader told me when we spoke a few days ago. “I was one of them. I would go down with the press releases, the findings, the story suggestions and the internal documents and give it to a variety of reporters. I would go to Congress and generate hearings. Oftentimes I would be the lead witness. What was interesting was the novelty; the press gravitates to novelty. They achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the newsworthy material. They covered it. The legislation passed. Regulations were issued. Lives were saved. Other civic movements began to flower.”

Nader was singled out for destruction, as Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan point out in their engaging documentary movie on Nader, “An Unreasonable Man.” General Motors had him followed in an attempt to blackmail him. It sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway supermarket in a bid to meet him while he was shopping and then seduce him; the attempt failed, and GM, when exposed, had to issue a public apology.

But far from ending their effort to destroy Nader, corporations unleashed a much more sophisticated and well-funded attack. In 1971, the corporate lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote an eight-page memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” in which he named Nader as the chief nemesis of corporations. It became the blueprint for corporate resurgence. Powell’s memo led to the establishment of the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and power to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell memo outlined ways corporations could shut out those who, in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,” were hostile to corporate interests. Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked government regulation and environmental protection. His memo led to the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics and economists in universities and on the airwaves, as well as drive out those in the public sphere who questioned the rise of unchecked corporate power and deregulation. It saw the establishment of organizations to monitor and pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests. And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote corporate interests in the courts and appointment of sympathetic judges to the bench.

“It was off to the races,” Nader said. “You could hardly keep count of the number of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks. These think tanks specialized, especially against the tort system. We struggled through the Nixon and early Ford years, when inflation was a big issue. Nixon did things that horrified conservatives. He signed into law OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency and air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of the people from the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last Republican president to be afraid of liberals.”

The corporations carefully studied and emulated the tactics of the consumer advocate they wanted to destroy. “Ralph Nader came along and did serious journalism; that is what his early stuff was, such as ‘Unsafe at Any Speed,’ ” the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me. “The big books they [Nader and associates] put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, ‘We see how you do this.’ You gather material, you get people who are articulate, you hone how you present this and the corporations copy-catted him with one big difference—they had no regard for the truth. Nader may have had a consumer ideology, but he was not trying to sell you a product. He is trying to tell the truth as best as he can determine it. It does not mean it is the truth. It means it is the truth as best as he and his people can determine the truth. And he told you where he was coming from.”

The Congress, between 1966 and 1973, passed 25 pieces of consumer legislation, nearly all of which Nader had a hand in authoring. The auto and highway safety laws, the meat and poultry inspection laws, the oil pipeline safety laws, the product safety laws, the update on flammable fabric laws, the air pollution control act, the water pollution control act, the EPA, OSHA and the Environmental Council in the White House transformed the political landscape. Nader by 1973 was named the fourth most influential person in the country after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and the labor leader George Meany.

“Then something very interesting happened,” Nader said. “The pressure of these meetings by the corporations like General Motors, the oil companies and the drug companies with the editorial people, and probably with the publishers, coincided with the emergence of the most destructive force to the citizen movement—Abe Rosenthal, the editor of The New York Times. Rosenthal was a right-winger from Canada who hated communism, came here and hated progressivism. The Times was not doing that well at the time. Rosenthal was commissioned to expand his suburban sections, which required a lot of advertising. He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations, and he did not like me. I would give material to Jack Morris in the Washington bureau and it would not get in the paper.”

Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Noam Chomsky from being quoted in the paper and met frequently for lunch with conservative icon William F. Buckley, demanded that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research. This tactic meant the stories were never published. The authority of the Times set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the Times, other major papers and the networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations. It was harder and harder to be heard.

“There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of journalism,” Nader lamented. “We worked with the press to expose corporate abuse on behalf of the public. We saved lives. This is what journalism should be about; it should be about making the world a better and safer place for our families and our children, but then it ended and we were shut out.”

“We were thrown on the defensive, and once we were on the defensive it was difficult to recover,” Nader said. “The break came in 1979 when they deregulated natural gas. Our last national stand was for the Consumer Protection Agency. We put everything we had on that. We would pass it during the 1970s in the House on one year, then the Senate during the next session, then the House later on. It ping-ponged. Each time we would lose ground. We lost it because Carter, although he campaigned on it, did not lift a finger compared to what he did to deregulate natural gas. We lost it by 20 votes in the House, although we had a two-thirds majority in the Senate waiting for it. That was the real beginning of the decline. Then Reagan was elected. We tried to be the watchdog. We put out investigative reports. They would not be covered.”

“The press in the 1980s would say ‘why should we cover you?’ ” Nader went on. “ ‘Who is your base in Congress?’ I used to be known as someone who could trigger a congressional hearing pretty fast in the House and Senate. They started looking towards the neoliberals and neocons and the deregulation mania. We put out two reports on the benefits of regulation and they too disappeared. They did not get covered at all. This was about the same the time that [former U.S. Rep.] Tony Coelho taught the Democrats, starting in 1979 when he was head of the House Campaign Finance Committee, to start raising big-time money from corporate interests. And they did. It had a magical influence. It is the best example I have of the impact of money. The more money they raised the less interested they were in any of these popular issues. They made more money when they screwed up the tax system. There were a few little gains here and there; we got the Freedom of Information law through in 1974. And even in the 1980s we would get some things done, GSA, buying air bag-equipped cars, the drive for standardized air bags. We would defeat some things here and there, block a tax loophole and defeat a deregulatory move. We were successful in staunching some of the deregulatory efforts.”

Nader, locked out of the legislative process, decided to send a message to the Democrats. He went to New Hampshire and Massachusetts during the 1992 primaries and ran as “none of the above.” In 1996 he allowed the Green Party to put his name on the ballot before running hard in 2000 in an effort that spooked the Democratic Party. The Democrats, fearful of his grass-roots campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an absurdity that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the thought-terminating clichés of television.

Nader’s status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked assault by corporations on the working class. The long-term unemployment rate, which in reality is close to 20 percent, the millions of foreclosures, the crippling personal debts that plague households, the personal bankruptcies, Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury, the evaporation of savings and retirement accounts and the crumbling of the country’s vital infrastructure are taking place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses and compensation are enjoyed by the corporate overlords. We will soon be forced to buy the defective products of the government-subsidized drug and health insurance companies, which will remain free to raise co-payments and premiums, especially if policyholders get seriously ill. The oil, gas, coal and nuclear power companies have made a mockery of Barack Obama’s promises to promote clean, renewal energy. And we are rapidly becoming a third-world country, cannibalized by corporations, with two-thirds of the population facing financial difficulty and poverty.

The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of our democracy was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1965, it took nine months to federally regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Two years after the collapse of Bear Stearns there is still no financial reform. The large hedge funds and banks are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to once again engage in the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate press, which abets our vast historical amnesia, does nothing to remind us how we got here. It speaks in the hollow and empty slogans handed to it by public relations firms, its corporate paymasters and the sound-bite society.

“If you organize 1 percent of the people in this country along progressive lines you can turn the country around, as long as you give them infrastructure,” Nader said. “They represent a large percentage of the population. Take all the conservatives who work in Wal-Mart: How many would be against a living wage? Take all the conservatives who have pre-existing conditions: How many would be for single-payer not-for-profit health insurance? When you get down to the concrete, when you have an active movement that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.”

“The real tragedy is that citizens’ movements should not have to rely on the commercial media, and public television and radio are disgraceful—if anything they are worse,” Nader said. “In 30-some years [Bill] Moyers has had me on [only] twice. We can’t rely on the public media. We do what we can with Amy [Goodman] on “Democracy Now!” and Pacifica stations. When I go to local areas I get very good press, TV and newspapers, but that doesn’t have the impact, even locally. The national press has enormous impact on the issues. It is not pleasant having to say this. You don’t want to telegraph that you have been blacked out, but on the other hand you can’t keep it quiet. The right wing has won through intimidation.”

–Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a graduate of Colgate University and Harvard Divinity School. He is a former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times (where he shared a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for coverage of terrorism) and has also reported on current events in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. In 2002 he was the recipient of an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism and in 2009 the Los Angeles Press Club named him the Online Journalist of the Year. He is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. Hedges is the author of nine books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

This piece was first published in Truthdig on April 5, 2010.

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

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MY LAST DAY IN HARLEM

by Andreas Economakis

I enter a dirty, run down bathroom.  My hair and blue work clothes are covered in white dust.  The wall is pockmarked with holes, sprayed with messy graffiti and blood.  My steel-toe boots crunch over spent syringes and a bunch of empty crack vials with colorful plastic caps.

Drilling sounds and faint Salsa music can be heard in the background.   A door slams and a couple can be heard arguing and screaming at each other.  Then a baby starts wailing.

I take a leak and approach the cracked bathroom mirror.  I look at myself.  Red eyes, tangled hair, unshaven.  I exit the bathroom and head toward the living room.

“You know, I’m going to miss this place,” I say as I walk down the dark dirty hallway.

“This dump?” Ernesto calls out from the living room.

I enter the living room, which is in the process of renovation.  Tools and building supplies are stacked here and there.  A small radio plays Willie Colon.

Ernesto is on a ladder, swaying his hips to the music as he dismantles a light fixture.  Thin stiletto mustache, angular Puerto Rican features.  He has a V-shaped body-builder’s torso, huge muscular arms and a powerful neck.  Strangely skinny legs in tight jeans, the same blue NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development work shirt as me.  Difference is he’s clean, spotless.

“The City should tear this shit down instead of trying to renovate it.  What’s the fucking use anyway?  This place is going to be trashed the moment we turn it over, right?”

“Depends…” I reply.

“On what?  They should blow up the whole block. Cono!  Filthy crackheads!  How can these people live like this?” Ernesto says, snipping a wire.

“Ernesto, man, it’s the culture of poverty.  Like the reverse Midas touch.”

“The reverse… what?  Did you just smoke a joint, cabron?” he says, looking at me with a quizzical smile.

I pick up a tattered old black and white photo.  An elderly Harlem couple smile arm in arm on the street, circa 1930’s.  They are dressed in their Sunday finest.  A clean, safe, grainy world.  Frozen in time.  At least, frozen in this frame.

“Just as wealth begets wealth, so it goes with poverty,” I say.

“Wealth beget… Shit!  Is that what they teach you crackers in college?” he quips.  “Hand me the crow bar.”

I rummage through Ernesto’s heavy toolbox, looking for the crowbar.

“It’s been planned this way.  They want to keep the people anesthetized and divided.  Racism, sexism… all the “isms” really, they’re just a weapon created by the powers in charge to increase their profits.”

“Cubism too?” Ernesto says, smiling.  I smile back.

“And they don’t even need to wield the ‘ism’ weapon themselves.  It’s a like virus.  They just hand it over to people like you and me and we turn it on each other.  We become self-replicating stereotypes while they provide the junk that destroys us at a profit.  They wait until we chop each other up into little pieces and then they have us for dinner.”

“Shut up, maricon!  You’re making me hungry!”

I finally find the crowbar and pull it out.

“Have you ever wondered why there are so many liquor stores and funeral homes in Harlem?  And why is it easier to buy crack here than pizza?” I say, extending the crowbar toward Ernesto.

“Crackheads don’t eat pizza, bro.  They’re never hungry,” Ernesto replies with laughing eyes.

One hand on the fixture wire, Ernesto grabs the crow bar, sending a jolt of electricity through my body.  I fall on my ass in a cloud of sheetrock dust.  Ernesto bursts out laughing.

“Wake up, dude!”  Ernesto yells.

“Jesus!” is all my shocked lungs are able to squeeze out.  Ernesto steps down off the ladder.

“A full year here and you didn’t learn anything college boy!” he says, helping me up onto my feet.  He tries to dust me off but quickly gives up.

“Ich!  Hopeless,” he says, a disgusted look on his face.  He looks to clean his hands instead.  He then looks at his watch.

“Shit!  Let’s pack it up.  Time to get the fuck out of this rat hole,” he says, excitedly.

Ernesto pulls his shirt off, grabs his bag and dances to the bathroom, in tune with the music.  His muscular back is covered with a huge tattoo of a bald eagle in flight with a bleeding heart in its talons.  The heart has an American flag printed on it.

“I can’t believe it’s your last day, bro!  Fucking blowing this dump!  How does it feel?”

“Like a refreshing bolt of electricity,” I reply.  “Jolting!”

“You know, I’m going to miss your do goody good Leave it to Beaver humor…”

“You’re going to miss electrocuting me!” I say, trying to dust myself off.

“That’s right bro!  Call it the reverse Puerto Rican touch!  Death row revenge!  It’s about time we turned up the juice on you crackers!”

Ernesto stalls in the bathroom, horrified by the filth.

“Oh fuck!” he cringes.

Careful not to touch anything, he starts washing himself by the sink.  I start packing up his tools.

“So, you excited?  All that sun, the chiquitas…” he asks over the trickling bathroom water.

“I’m psyched to see Marisa again,” I reply.

“It was about time, bro!  You’ve been going on like Groucho… Marx and shit!  You get all fucking political when you haven’t gotten laid!”

“You think?”

Ernesto shines me a big sunny smile from the dark bathroom.

“Just listen to you,” he says.  “You’re like a god damn pocket revolution about to go off.  Yeah bro, you’re ripe!  Ready to drop off the tree ripe if you ask me.”

“Ripe and ready to join all the other fruits in Cali-forni-ay, huh?” I smile back.

Ernesto looks pensive.

“You know what I like about California?  It’s clean out there.  Sunny and clean.  That’s why everybody’s got a big ass smile on their face.  Just like in Chips.  Not like this dump!”

Ernesto pauses as he inspects himself in the mirror.  “My man, Eric Estrada,” he adds.  I’m not sure if he’s just mentioned the actor because he’s a symbol of California or if he’s referring to his mirrored self.  Ernesto could easily play in the movies.  He’s got the look.  He’s got all the right angles.  Cameras love guys like Ernesto.  And Eric Estrada.

Transported if ever so briefly to the Golden State, I start humming a Woody Guthrie tune as I finish collecting all the tools.

“California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see.  But believe it or not you won’t find it so hot if you ain’t got the do-re-mi…”

“What, is that from the Bible or something?” Ernesto asks as he starts to brush his teeth.

“You could say that…”

“You know, I never could figure out what a college-educated, Upper West Side boy from fucking Europe and shit is doing over on this side of hell.  I mean, shit, what’s the point of college if you end up in the ghetto?” Ernesto wonders, blue-green toothpaste suds overflowing out of his mouth.

“Depends on what you mean by end up in the ghetto.”

Ernesto spits the toothpaste out.

“I mean end up in the ghetto, bro.  Here.  Rubbing elbows with the living dead.  This is where we are, right?” He wipes his face with a towel.

“How do you mean?” I ask.

Ernesto dries himself, puts on a fresh shirt, combs himself carefully and splashes some cologne on.

“Questions, questions.  But who’s got the answers maricon?”  He emerges from the bathroom, looking fresh.  He smells like springtime in deep winter.

“You got a date or something?” I ask, my nose tingling in the minty chemical breeze.

“What? Just ‘cause I work in the filth means I gotta be filthy?”  He looks at me with a frown on his face.  “I mean, just look at you, bro!  Aaach!   You look like a… god damn… junkie ran over you.”

“I’d get jumped in a second if I walked out of here looking all fresh like you.”

Ernesto laughs.

“Homeboys would be lining up to bust all over your cracker ass!” he says with a wide grin on his face, air fucking just in case I didn’t get it.

“And what if God is black?” I ask.

“Then your ass better be the size of Texas, bro!” Ernesto quips right back, slapping his skinny leg with his muscular hand in full glee.

Some sort of “Dennis Dalton meets the Mahatma Gandhi for drinks in Hailie Selasie’s Ethiopia” thing takes over me and I turn toward V-Man with a skeptical look.

“What if we go to heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the black man as an inferior, and god is there, and we look up and he is not white?  He’s black.  What then is our response?” I ask, quoting Robert Kennedy (how did I remember this?  I mean, I’m from Greece…).  What’s gotten in to me?

Ernesto sizes me up with a glint in his eyes.  He smiles, a small pointy curve of a smile barely visible on the corner of his mouth, like a small and concealed fish-gutting knife.

“There you go again, bro!” he says, preparing himself like the Pro Wrestler of all orators.  He snorts.  I take a step back.

“Well shit, first off I’d ask God to put down the motherfucking crack pipe he’s been sucking on like a titty all these years and explain to me why the fuck he’s been torturing his people so hard.  Shit!  That’s what I would ask the crazy motherfucker!  And I’ve got a million other questions for him too!  Like what’s up with slavery and prostitution and AIDS and poverty and kids dying of hunger and disease and thirst while all the fucking Nazis controlling all the wealth and power party it up in our faces.  If God were black!  Where the fuck do you come up with this stuff, homeboy?”

Not sure if Ernesto is joking or serious, I watch him stomp his way to the door.  He grabs his heavy toolbox like it’s feather light and exits, leaving me all alone in the dusty room.  The familiar sounds of the building breathing with life come back, making me feel all the more alone.  I look around one last time and head for the door.

I slowly exit into the rundown hallway.  Syringes and crack vials, broken walls, filth and blood and graffiti everywhere.  Hard to believe people actually live in this building.

Ernesto steps out of the dark, a shiny American padlock in his hands.  He pulls the chain around the doorframe with force and closes it with the padlock.  He pushes and kicks the door hard to make sure it can’t be forced.

“Don’t know why we fucking bother.  Fucking zombies always get it, right?” he says.  He turns and starts walking down the stairs.

A nearby door is unbolted and a little old lady in her seventies cautiously peeks out into the hallway.  She makes eye contact with me and quickly closes her door in fear.   I turn and follow Ernesto down the stairs, leaving a trail of dusty white boot prints.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Let x, by Chad Simpson

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Let x

by Chad Simpson


Let x equal the moment just after he tells her he’s starting a club for people who know something about computers.

It is summer, 1984, and this is their grade school playground. She is idling on a swing over a patch of scuffed earth. He stands just off to the side, one hand on the chain of the swing next to hers.

Let y equal her laughter. Her laughter sounds like a prank phone call at three a.m. It sounds a little evil.

She throws her head back, and even though he is hearing the y of her laughter in the wake of that moment x, he can’t stop staring at her hair. He can’t believe how black, how shiny, how perfect it is.

She stands up out of the swing and asks, “What do you know about computers?”

It is 1984. Nobody at this elementary school—or in Monmouth, Illinois, in general—knows all that much about computers.

Let z equal the face he makes. The face is not a reaction to her question but to her laughter.

He was trying to impress her with this computer club. He knows she is smarter than he is. He knows that she was, in fact, smarter than everyone in the entire fifth grade, and that next year, when they start pre-algebra, she will be the smartest person in the sixth grade, too.

He can’t help the z of his face. He feels humiliated. His ears are tiny fires, and her hair and face, both of which he finds beautiful, has always found beautiful, are beginning to blur together. She has stopped laughing, but he can still hear the ghost of it as he searches for a variable that might make it as if none of this ever happened.

In a moment she will step closer to him, recognizing in some way his humiliation, and wanting to make him feel better, but he will think she is about to say or do something even worse than she has already done, and he will misinterpret her gesture. When she gets close to him, he will kick her in the stomach—harder than he has ever kicked anyone.

He will regret this before she even begins to cry. She will double over, gasping for breath, and look up at him with dry eyes, and he will know that the hurt he has just inflicted upon her is at least equal to but probably greater than the hurt caused to him by the y of her laughter.

He will feel terrible, and he will immediately think back to x, the variable that started this whole rotten equation.

Let x equal not the moment just after he tells her about the computer club, but the moment just before it.

Let x be his saying nothing about this club and instead telling her something he’s always wanted to say.

Let x be a different gesture altogether. Something honest. Tender.

Let x.


Chad Simpson‘s stories have appeared in many magazines and journals, including McSweeney’s, Orion, and The Sun. He lives in Monmouth, IL, and teaches fiction writing and literature at Knox College. The above story originally appeared in Esquire and is available in his recent chapbook, Phantoms. It is reprinted here by permission of the author. For more info, visit Chad’s website here.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MAC OLIVER

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A pen-and-ink drawing of Wallace Stevens by Mac Oliver.


ANOTHER DEATH TO BRAVE

by Mac Oliver


And soon enough, foreseeably, you’ve lost
Another one you love, another death
To brave, more ashes thrust into your face,
More thoughts about the walks, forgotten nights,
More dust to walk upon, to think of ghosts
Of the departed, real as a dream
From which you had no wish to wake, in which
They breathe & blink again. I’m vexed at his
Brown study now, as Ransom wrote, a poem
Present in a half a dozen books,
Anthologies, he gave as Christmas gifts.
He left a stack of ancient magazines,
A trunk he tagged for me before he died,
A simple note attached to it, unseen
At first, left hidden in the flat, that said
“These items are for Ham, to be preserved.”
He made his living room, entire place,
Hospitable to poetry, to keep
A kind of purity at heart, in mind.
The rest, as Hazlitt quotes from As You Like It,
Is mere oblivion, a dead letter.


Mac Oliver is a bit of a mystery. As I can piece together, he earned his degree from Tulane in 1994 and went on to study poetry in the Doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. His first book of poems, Ham & Mercury, was printed privately, and another book of poetry, Savior of the Netherlands, is available in full online for free. Oliver is also a pen-and-ink artist, and, at least in 2008, a resident of Santa Barbara, California.

Editor’s Note: This poet was by request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment.

This happens to be my favorite request thus far on the Saturday Poetry Series, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to post it straight away. It was requested that I post any poem by this poet “because he is beautiful and I love him but I’ll never be able to tell him.” Now, the hopeless romantic in me was instantly won over. Unrequited love, a mystery love story, and a poet who is himself a mystery. How could I possibly resist?

What I can glean from the limited information about Mac Oliver on the web is that Oliver is a poet influenced by the poets of yore. He seems to like to explore poetry in form and uses antiquated language to create poems that are vignettes and that function like flash fiction. He also was strongly influenced by his uncle, to whom his book Savior of the Netherlands is dedicated, and who makes a number of appearances throughout Oliver’s work. I believe, from the context of the book, that “Another Death to Brave” may be about his uncle as well. Oliver was also strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound, which I think is evident in his use of form and choice of language.

Want to read more by and about Mac Oliver?
Savior of the Netherlands
Pen Drawings by Mac Oliver at Elsie’s
Maverick Magazine

BRYAN DE ROO & GINA BORG

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Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble – Crystal Mesh, Oil on canvas, 24×30″


A CONVERSATION WITH

BRYAN DE ROO

ABOUT PAINTING

by Gina Borg


Bryan de Roo sits on the floor making drawings for the windows of Gallery Extraña on the occasion of our dual exhibit, Temples of Transition. Brushed bone black chinese ink on scavenged ledger paper. A columnar pad. He makes with quick brushy strokes drawings which are like UFOs, architecture, crabs, robots, insects. I ask him questions while he draws.

G: Do you think that our work has in common a decision making process interested in weight vs. buoyancy, or a spacial, sensory presence? All of your UFOs seem to have landed.

Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble – Crystal Mesh, Oil on canvas, 22×28″

B: I kind of want to blame Morandi. Well, in Chinese calligraphy, characters are anchored to the wall or floating on the wall, and you can tell if you’ve done it wrong if it wants to fall off of the wall. In drawing, you work until it has a weight that is suspended. In painting, if the colors are dingy the painting is just trying to slide onto the floor.  The color has to shine, it is part of that floating.

G: Why do you want that?

B: There’s something going on, it can’t be just marks. Why does this thing need to exist? There’s so much that’s just throwaway in this world. I don’t want to be involved in that kind of product creation. Inert matter comes to life somehow. Paint is just dirt, colored dirt. How do you throw dirt up in the air and make it stay there? Or how do you make dirt into light?

Gina Borg, Big Pink, Oil on canvas, 40×40″

G: Are you trying to make something indelible?

B: Yes. I’m trying to make something happen. Something perceptible that’s not just paint on canvas. A pregnancy, a fecundity, like this could be so many things.

G: Possibility?

B: Yeah. If it’s indefinable, it’s previously unknown. If you can’t say for sure what it is, there’s something apparently new about it.

G: Do you want the feeling to be indelible? Or the buoyancy of the color to be indelible, or the image?

Gina Borg, White Mountain, Oil on canvas, 28×28″

B: The feeling. The artifact itself. The reason it’s indelible is the feeling caught in it.

G: Are you talking about emotions, or sensations?

B: Sensations. I don’t know about emotions, I’m not interested in the art of evoking emotions. I don’t expect an emotional response from these drawings I’m making. I don’t even know what is or is not an emotion. Is fear an emotion? I feel emotions while painting but I don’t know if they get trapped in the painting.

Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble – Crystal Mesh, Oil on canvas, 22×28″

G: Emotion is sidetracking us perhaps, but it’s interesting to me because you were so much more influenced by the Ab-Exers than I was. Lots of emotional stuff there. I mean, people always talk about standing in front of Rothko weeping. The talk of those guys was as if spirit, or soul, was trapped in the painting.


B: I’m not sure it’s an emotion, but maybe an action, movement, a little twitch, something that is not inert. That’s what I want, that’s what creates that dizzying quality, that sense that there is something of value contained within the work that is not easily quantified.  Also, a modulation between warm and cool, light and dark, which comes from observing natural light. The best paintings feel like the light of the sun is in them.  Painting seems to need this because we expect paintings to be little windows still.

…When I was teaching, I showed the students Gwen John to talk about that.

G: You showed your students Gwen John? That’s awesome. She’s great.


Gina Borg, Green on Pink, Oil on canvas, 24×24″

B: Yeah, maybe it would not be hip to mention her.

G:  I think we should.

B.  OK, but not her brother.

G: Or her lover.

_______

Temples of Transition: Bryan de Roo & Gina Borg
runs through June 19th at Gallery Extraña.

FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: John Surowiecki

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What I Know About Epistemology

by John Surowiecki


As the light goes, go.
Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from
convention’s good graces: learn, or someone
will have you filing files or writing writs,
demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge

door to door; someone might even drop
your lovely life into a factory and have you
derusting rings on the coolant-spouting
turntable of a vertical lathe.
It’s best for everyone that what you know

is generally thought of as general knowledge.
You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars,
in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms
where it whispers like a ribbon untying;
you can even find it in schools. But be careful:

it’s dangerous, inescapable and exact
down to every atom of everything there is,
to every name each thing goes by and every
law each thing obeys. And the best part is,
you always know more than you know.


John Surowiecki works as a freelance writer from his home in Connecticut. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Author of six chapbooks and three books of poetry, his most recent work is Barney and Gienka (CustomWords, 2010).


[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

COMMENTARY

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Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Flickr photograph by Dylan Charles.

HOW I DIED IN VIET NAM

by George Evans

April 30, 2010, marked the 35th anniversary of the day the U.S. war in Viet Nam officially ended. It was not a clean break. It’s a day famous for, among other things, a photograph of the last U.S. helicopter ready to lift from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, dozens of people crowding a ladder-like stairway up to the landing pad. We can tell they won’t make it up the stairs, let alone fit in that tiny aircraft. It’s a poignant, lasting symbol for U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.

By then, North Vietnamese troops had already invaded the city and were storming the presidential palace. Gerald Ford’s administration went to work conjuring lingo to convert defeat to victory for public consumption. A habit of deceit had applied to everything related to Viet Nam since John F. Kennedy and is a major reason politicians have been forced to trick Americans into agreeing with U.S. military interventions ever since. The U.S. Viet Nam War was the mother of all deceptions. George Orwell would have had a field day with its euphemisms. Current warspeak phrases like “collateral damage” and “asymmetric warfare,” describing war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan, are right out of the U.S. Viet Nam War playbook.

The war ended five years earlier than that day for me, but “ended” is yet another nuanced word where that war is concerned, just like the name of the war itself. “Vietnam” Americans call it, a synecdoche for everything related to the war, but which doesn’t distinguish between the war and the country, the name of which is two words, “Viet” and “Nam.” We invented the word Vietnam, and it has always bugged me, compelling me to mention and correct it at every turn.

Actually, I died in Viet Nam. I’ve lived a rich and varied life the past 40 years, but back in early 1970, I never made it home like I was supposed to. At least the me that was did not; that is, the one who died in Vietnam, Viet Nam.

He was a young man, just this side of still being a kid, with life details similar to his military peers: lower working-class Pittsburgh high school drop out runaway wise guy gangbanging doo wop singer who also wanted to be a boxer and a painter (of canvases, not houses).

If he made it back from the war, he would have few prospects beyond, maybe (if lucky), a minor steel mill job. Or he might even get on as a driver somewhere if his Teamster father forgave him whatever transgressions he committed during a wild, lunatic youth (not the least of which was running away and not coming back). If his father used his connections, he might even land a long haul rig, or delivery route (beer or UPS, the steadiest).

Things like that took connections, but his father knew, however casually, somebody truly powerful, the not-yet-disappeared Jimmy Riddle Hoffa of Brazil, Indiana–mystery of mysteries–because he, my father, drove trucks from the time he was a kid, and was a button-wielding, card-carrying Teamster who stood out on the skull-cracking strike lines with a fish bat or blackjack right alongside Jimmy R. and other fellow Teamsters–long before his own long war, where he also died, in the islands, before coming back to die over and over in Pittsburgh behind the wheel of his ice and coal truck.

Don’t get me wrong. Confessing I died in Vietnam is not meant to demean the memory of thousands of Americans (some of them dear friends) who never actually came back from Viet Nam except in coffins or on lists of the disappeared and missing, or millions of Vietnamese (some of them dear friends) who did not survive our 20-years-plus presence in their country (though if we count the first American soldier who died there, in 1945, we lasted 30 miserable years).

When my walking, talking living corpse returned from Vietnam (the war), Pittsburgh was hardly the city I left four years earlier. Plenty of flags were flying back then, but a lot of native sons had died in the interim, and the war’s dark face was exposed. To the city’s credit, I discovered an army of hippies and antiwar activists, though I was dead and not much interested until my corpse reanimated almost automatically by plugging into the hippie subculture. It was suddenly (the world) all about weed, women, and rock & roll, and I didn’t care if I never heard the word (or words) Viet Nam again, not ever. Period.

Unfortunately, that was impossible.

Every April 30 I think about the beauty of spring and the end of that war. It was a painful day. The boy who died nearly came back to life, something I did not want. It was a day I never thought would come, and when it did I tried to ignore it because I could not believe it. I’d been tricked by so much deception (the whole country had) that it simply could not be true.

I was in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University attending graduate school, having managed to somehow turn a GED test into an education. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I was supposed to stay dead, but there I was. It was Wednesday, a glorious spring day. I walked from one end of the city to the other, to Lexington Market. As if there was not enough plenitude inside, the streets outside were lined with arabbers–colorful horse drawn fruit and vegetable wagons that used to roam the streets. The drivers, each with a unique song to hawk their goods, were all singing, competing for business, and the sun was shining. I was certain it would shine forever, and though that is all I remember of that day, it is still as real to me as the boy who died in Viet Nam, not to save his country but his life.

–George Evans

This piece was first published in New America Media, April 30, 2010. It is an excerpt from Evans’ memoir, “How I Died in Viet Nam.”


More writings by George Evans:

A Standing Ovation: My Lai Redux

Woodstock Nation, Viet Nam

Desert Winds