Mean – Three Days of the Condor (Phoenix Poets) - Hardcover

Atkinson, CL

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226030571 ISBN 13: 9780226030579

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

Three Days of the Condor. Because he takes Kathy Hale. Ties her up. He's in the CIA. Someone's trying to kill him. He needs time to sort things out. You'd think she'd panic more, but she doesn't. Would give anything to be spared having to go to the mountains where the boyfriend, Ben, is waiting in Vermont. He's nothing now that she's sleeping next to Joe Turner, who's just threatened her. He needs some shut eye. And the night is still young. She's less interested in running. When the guy dressed as a mailman goes after Turner, Hale gets in on the action. Finds a carving knife. That's her man. Blond hair and sweatered.A Doxa sharkhunter watch. Under the umbrella of his drama, she never notices her hands are still bound. Forgets to ask to be released. She'll help him. However she can. I'm no Kathy Hale, but I love bookish Joe Turner. And not because he's got an exciting life. But because he'll erase mine and make me the 'ol spyfucker he can count on. A kind of prisoner to something larger. After years together, he'd still ask me: do you know anybody that well?In the appropriately titled "Mean", Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged exhusbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone. Managing to 'say' what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, "Mean" lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours.

About this title

About the Author

Colette LaBouff Atkinson is associate director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

mean

By COLETTE LABOUFF ATKINSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03057-9

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................ixSpace Race...............................................................3Mean.....................................................................4Mean, Part Two...........................................................6Medium Intense Red Copper................................................8Rocket...................................................................9Loose....................................................................10Heat Wave................................................................11Hart Crane Slept Here....................................................12Four.....................................................................13London (1987)............................................................14Wrecking.................................................................15Three Days of the Condor.................................................16The Glass Show Lounge....................................................17Bakasana.................................................................18Deal.....................................................................19"I'm sorry I was blind"..................................................20Hover....................................................................21Intention (The Dead Leaves)..............................................22Gain.....................................................................23Spring Fling.............................................................24New World................................................................25Laurel...................................................................26Replacement Monkey.......................................................27Spirit...................................................................28Proximity................................................................29Juju's Sister............................................................30Gun Dog..................................................................31Flower Girl..............................................................32Park Bench...............................................................33"Perhaps this verse would please you better-Sue-(2)".....................34Prosthetic...............................................................35Garden Variety...........................................................36"For God's sake, get out"................................................37Route....................................................................381652.....................................................................39Graphic Novel Romance (V for Vendetta)...................................40Ghost Squad..............................................................41Hips.....................................................................421971.....................................................................43Port of Los Angeles......................................................44"Taking it like a little soldier, aren't you?"...........................45Fortune-Telling..........................................................46Gardena Freeway, California..............................................47Notes....................................................................49

Chapter One

Space Race

I knew him before he was broken. He wanted me and I wanted to break him. And then I wanted him not to want me anymore. And then I wanted him to call. When it happened-all of it in just that order-I drove to his house. We watched the longest movie, The Right Stuff, which I had the patience to sit through since I knew at the end we'd have sex. Somewhere in the film, in the middle of an argument about how chasing women who don't matter can ruin everything, Gus Grissom says The issue here ain't pussy. The issue is monkey. And that movie watching had nothing to do with space or history or men or monkeys. All he wanted was sex. I'd waited a couple of years for that: to have seen him broken and mended and then looking right through me, right on to the stars. I would still want to mean so little that I'd be see-thru. Sometimes I can daydream him back to breakable. Mostly, I would want to watch movies with him while he's in love with someone else and helping himself to me.

Mean

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one go, I'm really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away. You were never sweet, my mother says.

* * *

In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy's crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there's his mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough, he says. Tough. When Chicago's Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather-then five-and took him to deliver the money. That's all you'll ever get, she said, and don't touch my kids or I'll kill you.

* * *

My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don't have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I'm three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won't tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he'd send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn't pretty. She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.

Mean, Part Two

Wife one was a child-bride. He introduced her to me in Greenport, New York, eight years ago. She wore her black skirt the same length I wore mine. A woman like that, who covers her legs, likes to hide. Right away, she told me she was always torn over work. Told me how she cried her eyes out years earlier when, divorced, she had to leave her baby for a long day away. By then, she'd been left for wife two.

And you have to wonder about a guy like that: trading in his child-bride, leaving his son and newborn, for another. But we skipped over that part of the yarn and didn't stop to speculate. Besides, it would have been disloyal. She asked: Where'd you get those shoes? Later, I sent her some fabric for a cushion. She dug a chair out of the trash, varnished it, recovered it, brought it to me whole and new. I stopped by her house for tea. She came to a barbeque to celebrate my first anniversary. We roasted pig. Where'd you get that skirt? I asked. She sent me postcards and recipes for bisque. Thanked me for taking care of her son in California. Once she flew here with her youngest, a girl. We went to the beach. Got burned.

Two years ago, I went to New York and we did the city museums. On the first floor of the Met, like a docent, she led me through the armor: The boys always loved this part. It was still magical, you could tell, not the armor, not the shield of King Henry II of France, its battle scene intertwined with the story of his marital wars. Just a memory of boys looking at gold-gilt or dreaming. For the afternoon, we were at home among steel, brass, and iron. If things were difficult as a child-bride, you'd be surprised how much wife one doesn't let on. If things were ever rough for me, I'd be hard-pressed to complain to her. We're both loyal, after all. We learned it late. Better just to know it: who he is, how we were both mean to wife two, how, if you saw the length we wore our skirts and heard us talk over lunch, you'd wonder who on earth we were.

Medium Intense Red Copper

At the hair salon I swept floors. Answered phones. Got my hair colored weekly: deep reds, black. Before a trip to Mexico, I bleached it Barbie-white. My father said I looked like Eartha Kitt. A hairdresser I met asked if I'd let her cut my hair and, on the spot, I moved to her side of the salon. The guy who'd been cutting my hair for years didn't mind. Besides, everyone could see she made me look better, like a girl. I got to know her enough to beg her for more: a deep conditioning. Straightening. Just a few lowlights. What I should have said was please turn me into someone I'm not. Just the way Eartha Kitt sang in 1954: And whatever I've got I'm eager to lose. Or, please turn me into someone I'd like to be. Like Catwoman. The hairdresser knew what I meant. She'd grown up on Catalina Island-where the world was doll-like-and married her school-sweetheart before she preferred girls. She and I drove across town and to bars. We danced, and I was masquerading in whatever new color I'd barely washed out. She was pretending to be someone not interested in me. Her forearms were always stained with the tint.

Rocket

Dead Calm had been advertised in the trailers with phrases like A voyage into fear. High Seas. Deep terror. Try to stay calm. In that movie, a couple takes a trip after the violent death of their child only to find, in the middle of the ocean, a maniac. But the wife, Rae, even if she is grieving, saves her husband and gets the killer, too. I was on my way to the movie because I was a flirt, which meant trying to look good and something as shallow as hoping I'd be someone he'd see again. On the highway back from dinner, yellow and blue tile on brick. A white light display. Things shine nights like that. In the heart of Laguna, a stoplight. Coming soon, like high seas, would be a big drop into nothing-chiffon-where I would nod and talk, but mostly keep track of his desire. Did he like me more? Did I make his world wide? The minute I thought he might like me less things would be over. But I plunged in. Like the baby who rockets out the car windshield in the film's opening scene.

Loose

Between the good days and what came next, I made a point of getting him to a party where I would be star for a half hour. I didn't care that he was still interested in me or that he might not have wanted to be somewhere to see I hadn't meant the invitation to be a door to anything. I was just glad to have him there. Like decoration. A hummingbird feeding in my courtyard: a pulsing, intense center in my scene. I talked to everyone but him, whom I avoided because he wanted something-I wasn't sure what-that I would never give. Especially because he wanted it. Especially because he meant well. When he wanted to talk about this, I stomped and left. Drove a direction I told him I wouldn't. Fuck him, I thought, if he wants to watch me run. And saying this hardened me. Fuck him, I thought, again. Saying this turned me to stone; I drove south to hide out with someone else. Dug my nails into my legs until they bled. Remembered the day I loosed a young cat into a field because I figured she, like me, could make it in the grass on her own. Stone. Who could want that?

Heat Wave

The Garnet Market for candy from the Korean couple who ran the store. Two more blocks and a right at South Lucia Avenue and Wendy climbed the hill to Prospect. But first we would have to pass the stretch of rentals. And I tried to rush, but I don't know why. At one apartment, there was a garden of weeds, surfboard in the dirt, a door opened. A man, long-haired and tired, walked out into the sun. He looked at Wendy and me and then only at me. Hey, little girl. I want your soul, he said and then seemed sucked back into the house behind his door. Wendy started to laugh. I ran. My soul. His want. Linda Ronstadt crackled from my bedside radio. Burnin' in my heart. He was coming for me.

Hart Crane Slept Here

Each morning, downward, Maria Stella Maris Church glows out the passenger-side window. Further, the corner where the Salvation Army stood and Hart Crane spent the night. At a shore-edge bar, where they'd finally met up, they shared bottles, walked out toward being together, a hotel, and then got rolled. Crane spent the night in the shelter. E., bruised, shipped out the next morning. The hungover poet took the train back toward Altadena. From my car, not much has changed; I see young stevedores shrug off last night's drunk. Past New Dock Street, a cigarette splits, balloons into orange under my wheels. Hot ash. My unkindness is thrown over and over. Door to door, a ride is for what I've squirreled away, not riches but a pile: the ways no thing mattered, how a kiss didn't count, how a friendship could be severed by a coyote walking between us or a dream. My windshield is a tracery. Long ago, down Gaffey, we raced in my hairdresser's sports car. She drove with her knees. Her perfume, the want, filled the heated car. We drove once to her husband's parking lot, switched cars-he'd shipped out for days-and toured in his jeep. But in this home I've chosen, there's a church on every corner and mourners in between. Boys pair up and nothing happens. Girls hold hands. We get rolled. They ship out. Liquor is drained. The train returns to Altadena. Mary, star of the sea, watches over the gem of a filthy port like the hawk, diamond-shaped ahead. She lets me pass five days a week. On my way uphill there are ovals of golden light, then no one home. Shoeless child, chimes, and stevedore off work. Burnt lawn. Hellhole. Haven. Next stop, my house.

Four

Angry, I came home talking about Tasha. She'd been following me through the sandbox, across blacktop, all the way to our desks. She wanted me to be friends with her only. I'd been stretching my circle further at the preschool where I cut shapes and named clouds. Lately, I had been hanging around the boy with the stitches in his finger. Tasha wanted me to stop, and, when I didn't, she followed me down the slide, into the barrels, onto a swing. She won't leave me alone, I told my mother. I'll be Tasha, my mother said, and you be you. Practice, she encouraged me, telling her to go away. My mother followed me room to room around the small house twice. I said this is silly. Pretending to be myself.

London (1987)

Coldest winter days in its recorded history. After Elvis Costello at the Royal Albert Hall, I made my way downstairs to a caf. Ordered a drink. I asked for it. This ruins people, I thought, thirsty. And The Cure sang show me, show me, show me in their sad mascara longing. In the London dungeon, I looked for someone to run with, too. I was good for running. In my own way-inside-just ruined.

Wrecking

We ate, maybe. We might have seen a movie. Later, there was a Southern California warm breeze we'd grown up with coming through. He showed me a photograph of him eating flapjacks in Santa pajamas. I slept hard into white sunlight. When I woke, I didn't know what to do. Picked up my clothes. Knocked the foot of the bed. Told him I'd call him. Or asked him to call. I was beginning, then, to get ahead. As if it had been a race. I took the keys and drove out of the city founded as a temperance colony where, later, there was a goldfish farm and then a mall built over that. Perfect streets. Perfect like someone else. I drove as fast as I could. I could feel it, too: drive-in, farmland, aircraft, sugar beets, goldfish, a film of myself. My past behind me. A blur on the best morning. Drive fast. Be steadfast. Use it wisely. Feel the earth beneath. Wood pulp. Don't return calls. Don't go back. Get drunk. Don't get undressed. Be sweet. Apologize. If you need demolition, use it. Skilled powdermen don't die. At the end of the workday, the best are bone-tired.

Three Days of the Condor

Because he takes Kathy Hale. Ties her up. He's in the CIA. Someone's trying to kill him. He needs time to sort things out. You'd think she'd panic more, but she doesn't. Would give anything to be spared having to go to the mountains where the boyfriend, Ben, is waiting in Vermont. He's nothing now that she's sleeping next to Joe Turner, who's just threatened her. He needs some shut eye. And the night is still young. She's less interested in running. When the guy dressed as a mailman goes after Turner, Hale gets in on the action. Finds a carving knife. That's her man. Blond hair and sweatered. A Doxa sharkhunter watch. Under the umbrella of his drama, she never notices her hands are still bound. Forgets to ask to be released. She'll help him. However she can. I'm no Kathy Hale, but I love bookish Joe Turner. And not because he's got an exciting life. But because he'll erase mine and make me the 'ol spyfucker he can count on. A kind of prisoner to something larger. After years together, he'd still ask me: do you know anybody that well?

The Glass Show Lounge

I'm looking for Juju, my great-uncle, dead since 1984. He shot himself in Hollywood, Florida.

But no one is talking.

The closest I get is someone remembers a neon sign-a face and cigar in lights. One dancer in aquamarine pasties. Or pictures with him at Leavenworth. I find a musician in Chicago who remembers Juju and The Glass Show Lounge. He pretends to give me the straight story, clears his throat: Well, he was a fair gangster. But he mostly wants to talk about piano, the old days. There was a Polish singer there who had real pipes. He tries to dredge her name. Instead, he sings. My old flame, I can't even think of his name / But it's funny now and then / how my thoughts go flashing back again / to my old flame. He remembers the singer while he stands at the hallway pay phone in Chicago. He tries to be standup, says he's been away and would like to get back, get a gig. He's just as lost as I am: Do you know where I can get a gig? Can you help me? In one letter's postscript, he reassures me: Juju died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds due to lung cancer. I can tell what he's saying: He was dead already. The musician's good-guy show falls away: Blew his head off. That guy had the nerve.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from meanby COLETTE LABOUFF ATKINSON Copyright © 2008 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226030571
• ISBN 13: 9780226030579
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 72