The Dancing Sausage Web Journal: July 2001 Archives

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July 29, 2001

Like a Dead Elephant/Garbage Like Dead Elephants

Leanne and I had an unconscionably heavy bag of garbage to lug out to the dumpster. We ended up carrying it on a stretcher made of a baby-blue towel.

It's like a dead elephant, Leanne said, wrestling it into the dumpster's mouth.

heh heh heh

with no apologies whatsoever to Papa Hemingway

Why can't you just throw it in the dumpster, he said.

I can't do that, it's a part of me, she said.

Posted by me at 2:02 PM | Comments (1)

A Month In Lesson Plans

or, Arts And Crafts For The Spiritually Drained Post-Graduate

or, Non-Alcoholic Drinking Games For The Graphomaniacally Inclined

Another Web Tutorial

These are my last days at the workshop. I have driven the last of my kids from web staff to the airport, some of the same kids I had "brought into this world" when I picked them up at the airport three weeks ago: the cocky punk kid who spent his last minutes at the workshop giving his counselor tips for landing as many women as he had at the workshop, and then tried to kiss me when I complained about not getting enough action; the heavyweight slam poet in the fedora and overcoat who made out with about a dozen stuffed animals in the final video our web staff made.

I didn't cry with the fury I did when I left here as a student. I know I run less risk of losing contact with these kids than I do with my closest lifelong friends: they'll be on AIM every night. I wasn't sad. I felt lighter -- not like a weight had lifted from me, but rather like every cell in my body was expanding and rising, full of warm air. I feel grateful that I met these people, that they showered on me the kind of admiration kids do for counselors they like even when I was feeling like a miserable excuse for a teacher; more so that they shared with me their unfettered passions for music and knowledge and each other.

What I'll miss most about this place is the creativity of it. That should be obvious, right? Not that this place was at all good for my writing; to the contrary, I think I'll take months to get back to the contented writing place I was before I got here. It's the collective creative endeavors that I'll miss, the creativity in everyday human relationships. I worry I'm going to lose it again, so I want to share what happened with you. A number of the things listed here was ceremony surrounding our nightly counselor meetings. We had an invocation at the beginning, where one counselor would have a brief creative project for us to undertake, and we would end with the reading of a poem. I'll miss that ritual.

Swapping Writer's Block

Leanne, who was a friend of mine when I was a student here, and was now a counselor, arrived the very first night I was in town, before any of the training started. I told her I had writer's block on a fiction piece I was trying to write about a family that has an unwanted nude portrait hanging in their dining room. Why don't I write it for you, she said, and you can write the poem I have been trying to write as a response to one I wrote years ago about being sixteen. We read them to each other afterwards. It was remarkably useful; though I got hung up later in the piece, the initial details she gave me sparked my imagination and I got a few solid pages out of the exercise. The novelty of the swap was foreshadowing of all the other great innovations of this place.

Exquisite Corpse Poem

The counseling staff wrote one daily, each of us adding a line if we remembered to when we stopped through the office. Some of them were lame, some turned into inside jokes, and some were strikingly beautiful. Jeff Miller, one of the songwriting TAs, kept insisting our contract from Penguin Books was in the mail.

Magnetic Poetry On The Bathroom Walls

made so much more sense than on the refrigerator.

Tattoo Poetry

Someone found temporary tattoos of teletype words in a local boutique, and had us tattoo the person sitting to our right for one invocation. I put "born radiant / essential" on Jen Rose's neck. My co-TA, Cahill Zoeller, gave me "no televised freedom honey" as an armband. god bless her, even though she claims to be a Republican.

Nightly Jam Sessions

I've got the chekere. Allison Taylor's on the mic. Carlos is doing beat box. Suffice to say you can't top an acoustic version of Baby Got Back.

America

At some point Laura introduced me to the idea that everything you say can be made to sound dramatic and profound if you prefix it with "America." We'd have whole conversations this way. America, look at me, I'm up too late again. America, I ought to be packing and getting ready to go.

Quote Walls

Every suite had a big piece of butcher paper tacked to the wall where kids could write funny things people had said. We had these in college, too. I wonder if they would work with elementary school kids in the home: a way to nurture comic talent in your young ones? You know once you put one up everyone's angling to get on it. I guess that's fine, because then we all laugh a lot more.

Saints

One of our counselors was Catholic and obsessed with saints, so we made small devotional cards for each other one evening, each of us considering what the person to our right needed saintly oversight for. Sadly, I never received one. There was also talk of altar-building in the air -- the twig shrine to a fallen dining commons banana out front, and talk of using the urinals in the women's bathrooms as some kind of devotional area.

Five-Minute Musicals

The songwriting staff was fond of having people pick a topic and write a musical about it in five minutes. Last year's topics included someone's mom and muscles.

Double-Blind Postcards

We sent anonymous postcards to an unknown partner through the head counselor. My person never wrote back to me after the second round, but the possibilities of the excercise remained intriguing.

Notes On The Way To Your Grave

This was another of Leanne's innovations. One night I found her gathering old receipts, bits of tampon boxes, post-its, pieces of ribbon, old xeroxes, etc. together into a vintage suitcase. The idea, developed for her poetry class, was to walk to the graveyard and on the way write something they might write to themselves on their way to the grave. I should check with her and see how that one went.

Rolling Down A Hill

Cahill and I had our class do this to focus on physical sensations in their writing. They loved it. One of the most striking things about rolling down a hill when you're twenty four and weigh 140 pounds is how uneven your body is: your legs roll faster than your shoulders, and you usually end up going sideways.

Neverending Tye Dye

The front steps were littered with rubber bands and multicolored clothes for much of the week. At all hours you'd find someone squeezing out a newly blue set of underwear. I got a great-looking bra out of it.

Freestyle Scrabble

OK, so this is my idea and I still haven't pulled it off, but if it would happen anywhere it ought to happen here. I talked about it with Eleanor and Jessica on the last day of nonfiction class as we played Scrabble, and they think it's a good idea, so you should try it. The idea is to make up words and score them on three qualities: plausibility of structure (based on prefixes, suffixes, pluralizations), plausibility of definition given, and moxie.

Poetry Slam

We were so g0dd^mn lucky -- a kid who'd built up some cred at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe was a student this year, and he led two poetry slams, with votes by student judges egged on by a crowd yowling for poetic justice. Did I mention two web staff kids tied? I couldn't have been prouder if they'd crawled out of my own womb.

White Pennies

This is an older one: When I was here as a student, we started finding pennies around the dorm which had been painted white on one side. A single word was written on the white paint. Old pal Kube and I snatched up as many as we could find and tried to make sense of them. Then we tried to make sentences with them. In the end we took them home and sent them to each other and other workshop friends, one by one. I think they were intended as writing prompts, but they made for great reasons to correspond, too. I don't know if any of them were ever spent, but if they were it is somehow also right: this time, as last time, I am coming away from this place with its creative currency, wanting to spend it on everyone I know. (you're not all too mature for that, are you? if I love you, I will try this out on you sometime soon, because I worry we've all lost our ability to cut loose and have a spontaneous parade or write a script together, the way these kids do.)

Posted by me at 1:13 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2001

Death in Genoa

A protester has been shot dead by Carabinieri police in Genoa. I would give you an Indymedia link, but I can't rouse either Indy main or Indy Italy -- maybe you'll have more luck.

This is the first known death in the two years of anti-globalization protests. It seems distant, but we all wonder when something will happen here in the States.

Posted by me at 5:30 PM | Comments (0)

It's Ice

Think about going backward. Think about going forward. Think about hard surfaces. Think about slick. Think about the throb of your feet, the hot focus point of this endeavor. Don't think about the steel blade holding up each sole, or how your grandmother worried you'd be cursed with her weak ankles. Think about right. Think about left. Think it, and you'll go that direction.

This is the first time I've been ice skating since I learned to drive, even since I learned how to ride a bike, at thirteen. Both have improved my skating: I understand how how torque applied to velocity should be subtle. Too much and you fall over. Dance helps, too, especially the Charleston.

Think about your hips. Think about your arms; think of them like sails. Consider speeding up to compensate for the Zamboni's hourlong absence, the deep deep grooves in the ice. Think about arcs and tangents, not cornering too fast.

For the first time I envy the little nymphs spinning and leaping and speeding backwards through the rest of us, purple skirts fluttering. I took ice skating classes when I was maybe six or seven. Spraddle-legged, ready at all times to fall on my green mittens. I was only there because I had just moved from Maine and I missed the cold. I learned enough to get a patch with a penguin on it for my Girl Scout uniform. I didn't want to jump. It looked too dangerous. Now I'm jealous there's things my body can't do. Dance computes, skating doesn't. It's hard to keep from taking my feet off the floor, ever. I appreciate once again the way water asks our bodies to alter our usual movements, whether it's solid or liquid.

(and it makes me go all David Byrne on your ass. bumpy things. putting the garden in the house.)

Posted by me at 5:28 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2001

Blink And You'll Miss Us

Kube and I went out to the Lawn today and performed for the University's RotundaCam. We were there right before sunset, standing right in front of the statue in the foreground forming letters with our bodies. Watch for the couple who comes to have a picnic -- they showed up shortly before we did. At least, in time-lapse time it was shortly before. It reminds me of the way they tell you that if you compared the life of the earth to a day, starting at zero hour, from its creation, humankind would only show up in the last few seconds. Kube and I show up for a few frantic frames; then the day dims out. Catch us while you can; the movie will only be up for the next five days or so. (Can someone download it for me?) It's much easier to view on a Mac -- adjusting the frame-by-frame controls works much better.

Posted by me at 2:57 AM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2001

Best Birthday Elective Ever: A Web Tutorial

The Workshop continues to deliver the best birthdays I've ever had, despite my seven-year hiatus. I took seventeen kids out today for an elective I called Intro to Culture Jamming. I didn't have high hopes, because political stuff can be a shot in the dark despite the experimentations in the air here, but everyone got really into it. We marched in the street on the way over, chanting -- even the shy kids loosened up and shouted a little. Then they researched various culture-jam-oriented organizations -- they chose the Yippies, Barbie Liberation Organization, Billboard Liberation Front, Radical Cheerleaders, Food Not Bombs, Riot Grrrls, Guerilla Girls, and Robotic Objectors, passing up Reclaim the Streets, Robbie Conal, and other luminaries.

I was amazed. Whereas the critique in workshop tends towards I like it/ I don't like it most days, these kids talked about the tactics employed by each of these groups/stunts/artists, and decided all of it was effective. They were having realizations that politics doesn't have to be a deadly serious, full-time commitment; they were connecting these topics to things they've heard in history class. One of my students has decided that she's going to start an Extreme Freestyle Walking political movement to protest the banning of skateboarders and bladers from public places. She's sitting here next to me, in her beads and tye dye, and emailing her friends telling them about her movement.

Rock over London. Rock on, Chicago.

Other phenomena I would suggest if you want to look into culture jamming:

Adbusters

Billionaires for Bush or Gore/ Students for an Undemocratic Society

Bread and Puppet Theater

Burning Man

League of Radical Toy Airplane Pilots

Michael Moore

Radical Faeries

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping

rtmark

Ruckus Society

San Francisco Mime Troupe

Surveillance Camera Players

Posted by me at 6:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2001

We Love Anthropomorphic Little Blobs

There is a Flash version of everyone's favorite classic, Puyo Puyo. Please don't start playing if you're working on a term paper.

Posted by me at 8:03 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2001

Just Call Me Mr. Butterfingers

Just looked at Emo Phillips's Website for the first time. Check out his list of times he's been struck by a typewriter, and his recipe for cole slaw.

Posted by me at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)

I Am Looking For Something, And It's Not Here (Baby Gonzo II)

Scene: A high-ceilinged bookstore, downtown Charlottesville. White pillars. The air is cool. I'm on the scene keeping an eye out for the workshop's nonfiction class, who are on their highly sensitive Gonzo Journalism assignment.

I am looking for a book -- Glass, Beans, Paper -- by Leah Hager Cohen. (I have the name wrong; it's Glass, Paper, Beans.) I ask one of the tanned women running the store if they have it.

She thinks they do. What's it about?

It's the writer's exploration of her morning cup of coffee -- who harvested the beans and where, what forests were cut down to make the paper for the napkin. It's nonfiction.

Oh, how cute, the woman says, adjusting her huge glasses below her highlighted poof of hair. Yes, I think we have that.

She heads for the Psychology section and looks up expectantly.

What are you looking for? asks another woman.

Glass, Paper, Coffee, says the woman with the glasses. It's... essays about the simple life, she says.

I'm mesmerized by the huge bow at the back of her skirt waistband. It look like it's made of couch-cover chintz. Seafoam green.

That's a hard book to classify, she says, still staring up at Psychology.

Don't you have a literary nonfiction section? I ask. No such luck; nobody knows we're a genre.

She's an alumn of my college, I say, the author. (That'll be sucessful. I don't tell them I went to Hampshire.)

At that point, a blond toddler named Henry goes missing, and we all drop the book search to find him. Before we reach hysterics one woman finds him in the store window display. (They're dumbfounded. I think it makes sense. That's where you put the books you want to get seen, anyway.) Henry has a crazed look and a red baseball cap without a logo. His mother picks him up and proceeds through the fantasy section and up stairs in the back, cooing, Yes, yes, yes!, pointing out books in a high babble. Reminds me once again that I want to be just like my own mother, singing commercial jingles and bluegrass.

Posted by me at 2:53 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2001

From a letter to James G.

things are going much better here. The [kids] from first
session have left, and in their place there are now 40 alumns and 48 older
and wiser newbies. They don't wait for us to hold their hands; they know
what this place is all about, and they set to their mission without
prompting, laying creative dynamite all around them until the landscape is
littered with shards of hot words, completely re-formed.

I'm daily stopped dead in my tracks by one brilliant blast of creative
youth or another -- asses shakin' on the balconies before bedtime,
discussions of the uses of poetry over lunch, pranks in the computer lab
which use the autocorrect function to turn You to Me, night to day.
Impromptu parades singing "We all live in a Yellow Submarine," banging on
cardboard boxes and tambourines and trashcans. We do live in a yellow
submarine; we've got our own atmosphere which we swin through. I stand
there and watch the kids; they sing out gleaming hellos and try to involve
me in their games, but I feel old. Dead wood. I stand there for fifteen
minutes trying to come up with a witty rejoinder, but by that time the
parade has moved down the hall.

(Today we came back from dinner to find a circle of sticks on the ground surrounding a banana and a series of religious symbols -- Wiccan, Jewish, Unitarian -- also done in twigs. "The banana's dead," said one of the boys. Jeff Miller asked if maybe all it needed was to be peeled and eaten; it appeared whole and unblemished. A wail went up. Sacrilege! "But it's dead!," the boy reiterated.

And then we came back from staffs and sports, and a small orchestra -- two girls wailing, another on kazoo, and a guy on bongos -- were playing a song that went something like

Menopause rocks my world

It should be free to all the boys and girls.

Oh. And one of them was in the computer lab checking out disturbingauctions.com. They may not all know who set up us the bomb, but they know a lot of things about cultcha that I don't.)

Posted by me at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2001

Smalltalk

Sleeping and showering and eating and hanging out with the same people all day, every day, I am reminded how much I hate smalltalk. I go sit with Carlos at lunch. I hang my head over my same-iceberg-lettuce-ad-infinitum salad and ask him how his suite is. Good. He asks me how I am. Good. Leanne arrives with a tray of pizza and we ask her the same questions. Good. Everyone sips their iced soda in the icelike plastic cup between sentences.

There's more we'd like to say. Sometimes we manage, and talk about Don DeLillo, or journals to get published in, or we open the pressure valve and let some hormones leak out over each other. We need the smalltalk, though; I hate it, but we do. We are tired of thinking of ways to convince our students that marauding through Charlottesville unchaperoned is not a vital part of the writing experience. We are exhausted from obsessing over where we'll live when the program's over. We need some way to reassure each other quickly that we're alive, despite our complete sacrifice of our waking hours to younger writers, and concerned with each other's well-being, I guess. Still, I always want the deep stuff.

When did smalltalk start? It's only recently that I've found myself among big groups of people trying to hit my mark. I feel like I've written this before, but the part I hate most is adult kinds of parties. I used to love these when I was little. In elementary school I used to be at all my dad's parties with his running buddies, or in junior high, parties thrown by the USC Slavic Studies department, where my mother was studying for her Master's. I'd huddle in a corner, sneaking Doonesbury or Bloom County books off the bookshelves, reading them cover to cover. I got to be invisible and listen. One time at a 24-hour relay my dad was running, I stayed up long past midnight under the daylike lights of the track and wrote down snippets of conversations I heard outside our tent, stringing them into a long, impressionistic piece as the dew condensed on the tent sides. Every now and again I'd drop into the circle of conversation, make a precocious comment to a grad student some twenty years older than me but cute anyway, wow 'em with my early adulthood.

Being smart doesn't have the same charm at parties anymore. I don't turn invisible if I curl up in the corner with a book. That comes off as antisocial now. I can't just start talking about Star Trek, either, or whatever else is on my mind. There's new protocols for approaching people. It's awkward, and unreal, like there's some cardboard cutout of me in the room, a placeholder, and people feel inclined to interact with it. Behind it somewhere I'm still in the corner, listening and wondering who Jeane Kirkpatrick is when she's not dating Bill the Cat.

Posted by me at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2001

Arse Poetica

Words substantially like those spoken to me by a young poet named Dan on the first day of the workshop, second session, in the dining commons

Yeah, I started off writing poetry as therapy too. I've gotten into exploring things more intellectually. I think that's the case for everyone, going from therapy to something broader. Well, maybe not for T.S. Eliot.

It was important to me to capture my feelings when I started out. Nowadays I have an idea I want to get across to people. A lot of my poems, the heart is there, but not the head. I think I might want to go back to a lot of them and approach them in a different way.

When someone says you're not a good poet, you should take it as a challenge. I have a teacher I took my work to who'd say "You can shorten this" or "This is a cliche." I'd work hard on it, bring him things to show him what I was learning. Take it as a challenge, don't give up poetry.

* * *

Did I mention why I gave up poetry? I gave up poetry because Garrett Hongo said I was a very good nonfiction writer and an OK poet. We were sitting in a corner of the big Bread Loaf barn in some period of downtime. Nearby one of my nonfiction classmates was playing the piano for women draped across it. A few nights before, Garrett had given me a look on the dance floor, when we were all out there shaking our rumps, and said, If only you could write the way you dance. I pestered him about that for a few days, because I wanted to know what he meant, but he only looked embarrassed. Looked like everyone but me was drunk that night.

I literally turned off my poetry after that day in the barn. All there's been since is a few pieces of doggerel too short and spare to be essays, and late-night dallying in front of the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

Dan looked at me confused when I said I'd turned it off. People like to think writing poetry is an impulse, like love. Really, I don't believe that about love, either. I turn it on and off, just like a spigot, with no squeaking, even.

It is even worse to romanticize writing than it is to romanticize love. We've got this whole cult of writing, poetry in particular, where it's supposed to be suffering. People go mad to do it -- everyone loves Sylvia Plath, right? All the teenagers at this writing workshop do. We aim to blaze and burn out early, artfully. There was this girl in my classes with Martin Espada once upon a time who would show up two buses late to class, sighing and spilling coffee on her already ink-stained hands, throwing down her notebooks and clutching her artificially wild red hair and wailing, "Oh, I have such WRITER'S BLOCK!" She'd bought the whole package. Martin raised an eyebrow and went back to teaching a poem about janitors.

It's a kind of intellectual anorexia, this cult of poetry. Workshops are all about fluffing your poem and trimming its nails and recoloring the parts of it which were born too light or too dark. It's read in a wraithy tone of voice, and it's all about inspiration, not work, and god am I glad to be out of it. What I loved most about turning myself over to journalism was writing because you needed to get information from one place to another. The editor wanted your information to be on some reader's dinner plate. It was a relief to not have to wait for the muse to strike. Poetry is a beast of workshops and readings, and now that I'm back on those catwalks I'm glad I work in a genre which has a tenuous relationship with them. I don't miss wondering whether hers are bigger than mine, or whether I'll ever end up getting a piece in Ozymandias Review.

I needed to get out of poetry to make sense of my life. Under Martin's tutelage I'd been studying Pablo Neruda, who said he wanted his poetry to be a roof over his readers' heads. He wanted it to have handles: to be accessible. Martin, meanwhile, was a regular Old Faithful of fumings about workshop-circuit writers who wrote about the perfect brie or putting a new wing on the house in the Hamptons. Bathroom Tile, he growled; this is Bathroom Tile poetry. He let us out of class to go to a protest, and stood watch over us, smiling from under his Kangol cap, out of his Castro beard.

It was my first protest, in an unseasonably warm winter with sun glinting on the signs and chanters. People were carrying food to the kids occupying a building over a change in workstudy rules and welfare rights. I wanted to help. Bemused, Martin excused me from a second class period to be outside.

It's hard to live with Sylvia Plath all the time when there's people in the streets and a nice breeze.

In the end, I gave up poetry because it was one more thing going on in my life. I was midwifing sheep and trying to make cable TV shows and editing part of the newspaper and breaking up with and returning to the bisexual boyfriend who'd provided so many poetic ideas. I had a year to settle down to one subject and make a thesis out of it. My thesis was in nonfiction.

and here we are tonight.

Posted by me at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

July 2, 2001

Baby Gonzo I

I'm going to be real casual here; writing at a workshop is fsckin hard, and I haven't been able to make coherent sense of anything since I got here. Nothing seems of universal importance when your job is to hang out with people who are writing all day. Much of my time at the moment is taken up in running around making sure my suite of sixteen-year-old writers get to class on time, have their work edited and turned in, are eating breakfast and not throwing it up again, aren't fscking the guys, etc. They get all up in my face about how this place doesn't give them enough freedom 'cause they can't leave campus at the drop of the hat. They throw the brochure for the workshop in my face, saying, Hey, this program is supposed to give us a college experience, this is a College Experience, we want our cars and we don't want to be given a specific writing time, we want to write when we please and spend the rest of the time impressing guys who we admit are sleazy and immature.

So Saturday night I told them they had to turn in their pages at four o'clock the next day if they wanted them in the yearbook/lit mag, and then I didn't warn them again, because I am not a nag and I am not their mother and it ain't my g0dd^mn deal. Sunday I watched them leave campus when they should have been sprucing up their pages and I didn't warn them then, and I watched them run around ten minutes before the deadline fussing with their hair and whining "This is just like having a term paper due!" as if to say We reject your overweening authority, Mr. Man, how is it you think you can turn our College Experience into a High School Experience with your oppressive deadlines?, and we were all half an hour late for dinner, and I muttered, You want college? Fine, here's enough rope to hang yourself with. Welcome to the fscking college experience. You can't handle it.

Further evidence karma is out to get me, I don't know what for... probably joining the longhaired rebel boy in my high school class in staring at Laura's blonde old head and psychically willing it explode. I'm sorry, god! Why god why am I cursed to relive high school schisms? Why did I end up with the people I went to Hampshire to escape, the people who wanted college to be all about beer and Freedom while I just wanted to talk about the Beatniks outside of class?

I'll never have children. Working out a way to say "pick that empty cookie box up off the floor" without being authoritarian is a fsckin mindbender. I have infinitely more respect for my mother now. This is like working in afterschool, only I don't get to go home and decompress at the end of the day. Plus the kids are so white and privileged, and so ignorant of it, for the most part, that I want to run up and down the balcony clutching my head and screaming.

Friday the literary journalism teacher took us out to the downtown kitschified area to do Gonzo journalism pieces. Some of the kids got prepped for it. A girl in my suite taped a towel to her belly and put a sweatshirt over it -- pregnant -- put barrettes in her hair to make herself look like more of a teen mom. The sweatshirt said Princeton on it. Huge drops of sweat were welling up all over her movie star nose. Another kid had Groucho glasses, one Gothed up, one tried some fake bruises and went around looking pathetic. Most kids didn't do anything.

The fake-antique trolley with the wood benches we were supposed to take didn't show up and didn't show up. We stood around outside the bus shelter in the sun like a bunch of cows at Harris Ranch. No grass underfoot. Two black guys we didn't know stood inside the shelter.

Anyway eventually we gave up and commandeered a workshop van. Me and one of my girls got left behind. While we were hanging out a UPS guy saw fit to comment on her fixing her bra straps. I told him off. My girl was impressed and said she didn't figure she could do that herself.

Finally we all ended up in Downtown Schlockletsville. The teacher was there waiting, in her usual witchy-woman robes and a glass pendant. We hung out in a caf� drinking cold things, hit with blasts of air coming from an environmentally-sound and mostly useless fly buster at the door. Felt like a bunch of plantation owners with the kids out in the sun working. One group, we later found out, was busy harassing a Latvian waitress who didn't understand what they meant by "non-alcoholic beer." A Manhattan society-type was chucking snap caps at the feet of passerby. Some of the kids got lucky and fell into conversation with God freaks, Nigerian carpet dealers, ancient musicians.

We reconvened on the schlock bricks as an afternoon storm began to progress through the city. The kids didn't think they had any stories -- they tried to conceal this fact, but it was thick in the air like the humidity between the big drops the sky was shaking out. My girl who was pregnant had bought baby booties and a rattle. Here was a story -- she had referred to my girl who'd been harassed by the UPS man as if they were having the baby together, and thrilled the boutique owners. Girl #2 was chagrined.

They'd been watched closely in the store. Had the cashiers caught on to the gonzo ruse? The teacher pointed out that fake pregnancy is a preferred method of covering shoplifting. They hadn't even thought of that. "I want a baby," whined Girl #1. Girl #2 concurred. What other excuse would you have to buy cute booties?

epilogue

The pregnant girl did write a gonzo piece in the end. I would put it here, if I could. Let her speak for herself. She wrote about how white trash it made her to be pregnant.