Transitioning stumbling blocks into stepping stones—a salute to the man simply known as Sully

His face was the color of damp cardboard, the type you’d find stranded in an alleyway behind one of his many fine establishments, flattened and vertical, a domestic beer logo branded in its center. He walked with a certain cogitating lank, a thinking man’s gait, as if he were about ready to break out into an Irish jig of enlightenment at any moment. He chained smoked Marlboro lights. He was gregarious. A raconteur. He was kind. He drank cheap beer but served scotch that had been aging in a cask in Scotland for over seventy percent of my calculated existence. He had unkempt stringy hair and an angular nose and a rich oaky smile that made you feel as if you were staring at the hazy Irish sunrise the morning after St. Patrick’s day heavenly hung over on green beer. He drove some sort of dustbowlesque truck that looked like it was flat out of a stage production of “From Mice to Men.” He was always scribbling down shit on a notepad. He hired coifed perfection behind the counter that would pour you a pint of British ale before grilling you the best damn pepperjack burger in town. He was a huge fan of “The Bug Dance Rhythm band” which my dear friend Dave McDonald played a mean folk mandolin in. He was married to a woman I used to work for at Barnes and Noble who wore long swaying lavender dresses and had black hair and ashen skin the color of parchment a renaissance poet might use to compose Petrarchan sonnets on. Together with their dog (who would just never shut the hell up) they lived on the same street I grew up on in the West Bluff, an Irish Flag saluting out from the side of their abode like a wounded javelin. Later in his years you would almost always see the wiry bangs dripping from his scalp cloaked in a beret like a flaccid halo or loose liver, the organ that whistled out on him, fretted on a Gaelic cross on a hillside outside of Dublin.

He loved to loaf. Loved to laugh. Loved to shoot the shit over a plume of smoke followed by a chorus of wit and laughter banked by the clank of goblets and the call for another round for everyone.

The name listed when he took his first communion at St. Patrick’s parish was J.M. Sullivan. But everyone knew him simply by two syllables.

He was simply Sully.

He loved to open bars.






I first met Sully long before I realized he was the Guinness godfather of the Peoria nightlife scene. I was in my early twenties trying to make it as a writer living in an apartment that was part of an historic 1844 mansion on High street (the coolest mansion in Peoria) with an unparalleled view that overlooked the swarming neon nest of downtown. I taught English for district 150 at an alternative high school, walking to work every morning, the sun pouring in from the east in rich tangerine streams like a vodka screwdriver. It was the autumn of 9-11, my hair was a long limp stem tied behind back of my skull in ponytail fashion like a door handle to fire escape of my brain. Every morning I traipsed down from the antiquated crags of High Wine, swerving down the boomerang cement swoop of Main street hill, taking intermittent swigs from my coffee cup, blurry-eyed and just a tad bit hungover, composing dissipating jet stream sonnets of immortality inside my head. Every morning I would see him and he would bob his head in a singular act of acknowledgment holding out his flat palm in a gesture that teemed with the familiarity of seasoned drinking buddies. Of Family. Sometimes he would motor past me in his dustbowlesque vehicle smoking cigarettes. But more often than not our encounter transpired in front of the bar he owned, SULLIVANS, nestled like a sylvan hearth swallowed between a gay and Podunk bar respectively. Every morning he was almost always outside, sometimes sweeping corky butts and glass off the sidewalks or scaled up the rungs of a ladder, tinkering with the window display. With his impish lank and hair that looked like it could pass for a dehydrated yucca plant, he resembled a fairy tale troll, one that would request that you answer his riddle o’ three before allowing you to cross over the inebriated pond of enlightenment alcoholic excess often avails.

I had lived in his bars of course. I had gotten kicked out of ZZ POPS when I was only seventeen for attempting to catch a glimpse of (and hopefully seduce) scarlet haired violinist Rachel Barton, who was gigging there before playing with the symphony orchestra later that night. I had my first gratis (fruity what-the-hell-is-this-concoction) twenty-first birthday shot at the carousel domestic horseshoe sports den that is the original Sullys. I smoked weed in the urine-stained troughs at the old SOPS on the corner of Main and Madison (listening to more than my fair share of Dave Matthew tribute bands than could possibly be salubrious for my sanity in the early part of the millennium). Together with my best friend Dave Thompson (who ran the bacchanalian Vesuvius Lounge inside Dominics at the Metro Center), we would sip 17 dollar scotches before hitting a night on the town or heading to the now defunct Grill or going to Opera Illinois, my long hair dripping into the tulliped chalice of my imported libation, thinking of Jim Morrison slovenly requesting to be taken away to the next Whiskey bar and not asking why surrounded by bottles of scotch that looked like organ pipes bearing names likes Oban and Mccallister and Belvanie. Names that sounded like Tolkein Dwarves.






But for me the only bar that mattered was the original Sullivan's on main street (the bar which now adheres to the somewhat disgusting moniker of Mushrush, ie 'Mudrush,' but whose interior remains intrinsically unscathed in the Irish décor Sully himself so selected and prized). Sullivan's authenticated Irish pub no. 558. Sullivan's with the trademark Gary Coleman sized Guinness harp branded on the front door as you enter giving fair warning to the seraph of sobriety to pass over this public house of drunken bliss. Sullivans with the emerald lampshades and various Irish bric-a-brac and hummeled cheeked leprechauns and vignettes of Michael Collins and one pensive looking-watercolor of JFK stamped on the wall that defies you not to cry. Sullivan's with a coniferous-shaded atlas of Ireland splattered on the wall near when you walk in like a missing Green giant jigsaw piece. The bar with the quote Céad Míle Fáilte (100 thousand greeting) plastered above the leering eyes of the beer fridge.


Sullivans where they always gave you a fifty cent piece for change.

Sullivans where on a Saturday afternoon in autumn blue-collar catholics would loosen the noose of their ties after mass and curse at the television screen as Notre Dame once again came up short on fourth and inches. Sullivans where my dear friend and neighbor Dave McDonald played every weekend, the cidery cone of his amish-like beard dripping into the baritone frets of his guitar as I sat on the corner of the bar near the ersatz stage getting hammered on Caffey's stout or Boddington's pub ale. Sullivan's which was (with the exception of Jimmy’s) the first bar in this area code to have Guinness on tap in the late 90's.

It was the bar where you punctuated the narrative of the evening in exclamatory fashion-- ending up at Sullivans at 3:00 in the morning after a night of clubbing trying to guzzle down as many pints as was humanly possible before moshing your way through the faces of mingling inebriated beautiful mid-twentysomethings reflected in the mirrored rectangular Guinness placards festooned below the menstrual chipped coating of the ceiling, packed, a bouquet of jostling limbs, each crashing into the oak bar like a wave to a pier, getting lost in both the sight and scent of the stranger sitting next you, your eyes momentarily averting into the cyclopic digits of the Tullamore Dew clock stationed above the entrance, waiting for the carol of last call, getting lost in the sight of her forehead, her lips, the sudden snap of her smile.


A few weeks later I would be formerly introduced to the wiry-haired man himself at the establishment I so loved by my roommate the impeccable Dave Thompson, the three of us sitting in hard Euclidean angles at the end of the bar, smoking cigarettes, the seasoned proprietors imparting wisdom salted with wit to the partied out poetic plebeian (I had been 21 for less than two years) telling me stories about bars I have never heard of (what the hell is Barnacle Billy's or The poison Apple?), bitching about things being different from the way they once were. About politics and bar licensing and P-town not being what it used to be.

For the next six months I would stop in after teaching, laptop in tow. If he wasn't there I would adhere to my writers mantra of “ten typed pages a day—No fuckin' around!!” diligently slipping into my back pew, chain smoking, almost always nursing a Boddingtons, wildly pecking into my laptop like a young junior high kid and a drum set after hearing his formative first metallica album. But if Sully was there I would sit next to him and listen to his stories.

There are other barkeeps and restaurant owners in town you salivate like a Pavlovian chihuahua just to be around. You have the jovial Santa Clausian girth of Vince down at Jimmy's. You have Shaman Paul at One World whose good medicine mantra baptizes the metaphysical purring in your soul. You have stories of good ol’ Al Zook olfactory jisming out of control on cocaine and hitting a patron over the head with a pool stick and then looking at you when you order a spirit with the word reserved on the label and treating you like you just graduated from some school with Ivy weave and a cement tower because you know how to pronounce the surname of that certain libation. You had Dave Thompson the armani- clad classy oenophile who always made you feel like a cultural deity as he talked about verticals and vintage years in a way that was not pretentious in the slightest, in a way that somehow made you feel loved.

And there was Sully and there were his stories and for a young writer entering the bar and sitting next to this chieftain and sopping up every narrative sentence that spilled out of his mouth it was nothing short of an honor indeed.


***

No one told a story like Sully, the beerkeg bard. The story of the wayward baby alligator he bought during the Khaki Jack era scuttling out of his apartment like the emblem off a lacrosse jersey is timeless. The story about the time he yelled at an employee for wearing her cocktail apron while smoking a cigarette at the bar after her shift ended (admonishing her that she needed to be more professional and not wear her uniform while in medias sozzeled) not realizing that she worked at the bar across the street, telling me later that after being informed of the error that he apologized to her and then hired her on the spot to work for him instead.

My favorite “sullyism” concerns the origin of the whiskey bar F. Scotts. When I asked Sully if he was thinking about Fitzgerald when he named the bar he tapped an ash off his cigarette commenting, “Now that’s an interesting story, Dave,” holding his beer in his palm like a gavel one second and a feather the next telling me about the time how, when he was in junior high at a catholic school he said the word, “fuck” aloud in class and the Nun who was teaching the class made his stay after school for a week, telling him, “I’ll give you a word that starts with the letter F you’ll never forget,” coercing Sully to scribe out the initialized first middle and last name of the author who scribed THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 500 times on what was then called the blackboard after school for an entire week.

“I guess you could say the name somehow stuck.” Sully added with that smile.

His stories coupled with that of my own memories of his bars.

Taking my best friend Dainish out (we share the same birthday July 6th, his 21st, my 26th) and after slaloming down from Gorman’s to Rhodells, sloshing through Water street (myself knocking over a table at Martinis) raving inside, god, what was then the androgynous ecstasy that was the Underground, having heavily-masacred trollops pinching their cleavage together as if in prayer as we devoutly tithed one dollar bills from our lips inside Big Al’s, throwing up outside of the old SOP's we ended up at Sullivans. John, lost in the bacchanalian din and swirl of blurred voices and limbs the dyslexic first and second primed integers alcoholically avails to the itchy soul. Dainish, telling me he needs to excuse himself and hit the head. After twenty minutes later of combing though the restroom and looking outside and asking the Keep if they've seen this heavily soused dark skinned Lithuanian lad celebrating his twenty-first, I notice that the side door leading top the crypt of the basement is wedged open and on a whim decide to plunge into the darkness yelling out his name eventually to find my best friend and brother John (ie Dainish) seated a la Rodin's Thinker style on a beer crate in the back of the basement, alighting his bottle like an alcoholic scepter in the hand of a bemused patriarch who had just bartered his kingdom for a zip-lock bag of magic beans.

The silly stories: The time folk singer Dave McDonald started playing almost Raffiesque renditions of Kids songs on Sunday afternoon inside Sullivans and (I shit you not) the whole place started doing the hookey-pookey with the exception of one overtly disgruntled author who kept yelling out the name of Woody Gutherie at the top of his libation-filled lungs as if he were at a Freedom March.

The activist stories—my crazy methed-out rockstar cousin spontaneously arriving on my doorstep with his guitar from Chicago in April '07, wanting to FIGHT THE INCUMBENT SMOKING BAN set to take place at the beginning of the next year. The two of us passing out placards all over downtown Peoria reading THIS IS NOT AFGHANISTAN-SAY NO TO THE SMOKING BAN!!!! Out of all the bars we stepped in, only one owner treated us with civility and agreed to pass out the flyers dictated for our cause. That owner was Sully, telling me that this smoking ban shit was enough to make him even want to sell his bars. And one of them he did.

The late-late night Kinky stories. Cruising through the chorus of last call and being way too drunk to drive and stopping off at Swingers world to sober up after a night of hardcore hedonism watching videos in a half-opened state regulated shower stall that I can't even imagine what it must look like under the glower of a blue light. Or the time I was standing in front of the porcelain chin of the urinal at 3:30 in the morning inside the mens room at Sullivans when a beautiful glitter faced girl enters the mens bathroom in tight jeans and linoleum clattering heels and reels both her jeans and panties down to the caps of her knees in one unbuckled yank like she is lowering a flag to half-mast as she squats down on the urinal next to where I am earnestly trying to drain my own baton of masculine flesh, and because I’m sort of an innate flirt and just a lil' bit tipsy I immediately tell her “nice ass-baby” and smack the tanless side of her anatomy that is currently squatting on the jawline of the urinal, not realizing that we are peeing together, not realizing that she is giggling and starting to blush as I touch and begin to bite into her ass with the claw of my finger tips. Herself, finishing before I do, standing up, any garments that zip and or snap into place still wreathed slightly above her shins. Her vagina winking in my face like a portal to another world, her lips giggling, knowing that she wants me, knowing that there is a vacant stall less than three feet away as my mind freight trains out of control imagining our bodies locked and bent over, forming what Sesame street might classify during their curtain call as being brought to you by the lower case letter h lost in the lecherous abeyance of thrusts and pauses, unbidden scratches pinned with quick muffled screams of feral and unalloyed lust.

And somehow in the moment I went to kiss her, my hand still on her ass, certain vectors of my own physiology jutting blood stiff and out of control, I somehow saw Sully's sandpaper visage in the side mirror(even though the bar is now called Mudrush's and they no longer give out fifty cent pieces for change) perhaps telling me even though she wants you, don't take advantage of this cute lil' thing who is throwing herself at you because she has been twenty-one for all of five months and is drunk. Not in this bar you damn near don't and instead of kissing her, I placed my pointer finger between the hyphen thin opening of her lips like pressing an elevator button to nowhere helping her to wriggle back into the lower-hemisphere of her attire like a mermaid to a denim fin.

The fleeting passionate stories:

Or the last time I found myself after fifteen hours of brachiating from barstool to barstool, finding myself like old times, ending the night inside the bar that once housed the proprietors last name. The woman I knew somehow from another lifetime ago and inexplicably recognized the moment she echoed the confetti syllables of her first name. The girl who would smile and laugh as she would almost surgically peel the label off her beer in a Catcher-in-the-Rye Jane Gallgher keeping-her-checkers-all-in-the-back-row kind of way. The woman whose petite lips tasted like a poptart as she waded the gradeschool valentine of her tongue inside my lips like a child pushing a toy boat into a Sunday pond immortalized on an impressionistic vignette of light, grabbing my hand, yanking me away from the sylvan plank of the bar, making out in the seedy alleyway behind what was once Sullivans, her fingers tumbling inside the grip of my palm like some sort of vital pulsating organ that has just been transplanted to a willing donor as she wore my jacket and I escorted her to her apartment in the frosty breath of late February, the sun rising from the east as if on stilts, a chalkboard smudged horizontal pillar of heavy pink light indented into the pastural aerie of tufted clouds and the potential promise of a new found spring.

But there's one sullyism I can't stop thinking about. One story that for me coronates every bar stool anecdote, every late night drunken fete. Its a story about how one man jousted a grim medical diagnoses head on.

Shortly after he was diagnosed a local columnist from the Journal Star interviewed the ageless wonder that is Sully about the recent news of his ailment. The video was stamped on the Star’s website in early January. The interview gives a solid barstool post-shot tingling snippet of the joyful proprietor’s persona. In the interview he says something profound. Something I’ve thought about nearly every day since first I heard it a few months back. When presented with the query of how he expects to deal with this diagnoses Sully tapped the ash off his cigarette and responded with the following:

“Yer gonna have to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones sometime in your life and this is the first day, you know, you do it. And you better have fun doing it. Why make yourself miserable.”

I think about this all the time. I think about how pretty much every one whose sight peruses the paragraphs of this homage to P-towns premier barkeep will, come five whipped decades from now, be reduced to nothing more than a vacant hillsboro coffee can of ash, the collected narrative of their corporeal sojourn licensing a loam of earth as if locked into a bad mortgage. I think about how pretty much every one I know shields themselves in a veneer of naiveté (myself including) to avoid dealing with shit that is often blatantly uncomfortable and painful to fucking stomach. Shit that is scary. I think about Sully. Turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones into metaphysical rungs to scale and to climb and to grow. To approach the cocked nozzle of the unknown with a beer and a smoke and smile and with laughter. And maybe tell the impending shadowy drape of death a story.

This is courage in its most pure and unadulterated form.

You face up to shit that is difficult and unpleasant and lonely and emotionally taxing and arduous and hard and you do it. And you better have fun while you do it. After all, you are here, on the scalp of this planet for a finite time, why make yourself and everyone around you miserable.

Spoken like a true proprietor of a man who honored this fleeting happy hour called life indeed.


***


The night I heard of Sully’s passing I found myself cradled in the saltine limbs of my ex-girlfriend, a local poet. We both work burn out jobs with burn out hours to be able to support the “sexually frustrated demands” the time and nature our respective crafts entails. We stopped dating around thanksgiving, but earlier this year we started spending one night a week, holding each other fully clothed, squeezing the fuck out of each other. When we were dating we never even held each other after sex. Now we don’t even kiss and our elbows and thighs are locked together like legos in a gable of clothed flesh with gentle nocturnal breezes emanating from our lips on each other’s neck, blithe aerial ribbons hailed from a summer wind. Sometimes Zorro the cat sleeps on the mattress with us. In the morning we make coffee and she slides her glasses on her visage the way the ophthalmologists assistant instructed her when she was in third grade, grabbing both stems with both hands and saluting them onto the geometry of her face in one swiping motion of grace.

I have vivid dreams when her pulse drips into mine and the dream I had less than 24 hours after Sully's demise is as follows:

In the dream I am attending Sully’s wake (which for some inexplicable was in a building where Geier Florist is located on Heading avenue down the street from where I live in West Peoria). In the center of the room Sully’s casket is placed in the huge vignette that for some reason is rather rococo and last-suppery-like with a pink sunset hue and looks like something a Davinci scholar might scrutinize with a magnifying glass before authoring a pamphlet on conspiracy related issues. In the dream Sully’s eyes are welded into his gas station cigar-colored face and all these monks, in taupe robes are flanked around his body with their fists tucked into their robes acting very hush-hush. In the room there are mourners and there are tufts of plastic funeral flowers and the monks keep on oscillating around the barkeep. When it is my turn to pay reverence to the man known simply as Sully I walk up to his casket and look at his listless body when the next thing I know, one of his eyes delicately hushed close as if in prayer blossoms open and winks at me. Startled I turn to the monks and point and they assure me that he is dead. As I look at Sully's sandpaper countenance again his supine anatomy starts to titter and shake and his head slowly begins to transition into this blue-windex color. The monks are flanked around his coffin so that only myself and the reticent posture of the monks are witnessing this anatomical transmogrification of the flesh. The flashes of blue splotches out of his pigmentation and his face returns to its healthy color. Sully then audibly “snaps” his neck, opens his eyes, looks at me, winks again, makes a plosive “shhhhhh!!!” sound and then falls limp as if he is only feigning death.

And in the dream I go apeshit. I start telling mourners that he is still alive. That there has been some sort of grave medicinal error. That he is still alive. I begin to titter and to shake, Sylvia Plathing out of control in the dream funeral home of Geier Florists (that has this visible field of rye and wheat gargling like a stainglass sunset outside the window). The mourners are assuring me that there has been no mistake, that he is dead. I point at the monks, I begin to verbalize to the crowd that you can ask them. That they saw the whole thing. The padres remain stoic , standing like untrammeled bowling pins that has just missed the marble globe of the ball to the gutter, silently commenting aloud that they saw nothing.

I get irate. I scream out the word fuck!! I begin to kick the wall. I thrash a bevy of nearby peace lilys. I tell the fellow mourners that they are making a huge mistake. That Sully is still alive. I then call up my brother-in-law (who is a doctor at St. Francais in real life) and tell him that he needs to send an ambulance up to Heading avenue because a significant medical mistake has been made. I go outside and wait for the paramedics to arrive. When the medical staff arrive I lead them inside. I mourners are quiet and looking at each other in shock. Where Sully's body was is now vacant. The casket where he was lying and where he cracked his neck back into consciousness in overturned, wilted flower petals are scattered in the fashion of a damp nest.

I am standing next to the paramedics when a parishioner turns next to me.
“Its Sully,” He says, “The monks stole him.”

I wake up from the dream in agitated sways, inadvertently kicking Zorro the cat off the bed. My ex-girlfriend fishes along the side of her bookshelf looking for her glasses as I relay to her my dream. We make coffee, chain smoke a.m. cigarettes and find ourselves in downtown Peoria an hour later. I stop into the Liqour store across the street from the Pere Marquette, purchasing a six pack and a newspaper. When we get back in her vehicle we drive to Bradley Park. I begin to quote Waylon Jennings about the beer I had for breakfast not being bad so I'll have one more for dessert as I pop one open as the two of us begin to comb through the paper, looking for details on Sully's death.

“Shit.” I say aloud, verbally responding to my ex-girlfriends query of what by telling her that of all the places in town, Sully is being buried at St. Josephs cemetery, the cemetery located on the street where I live, the cemetery that sits directly across the street from Geier florists, where my dream last night took place.

My ex-girlfriend looks back at me with her lips slightly ovaled. She then smiles and gives my non-beer swigging hand a little squeeze.

***

I was in Chicago the afternoon of Sully’s wake and the day of his funeral. When I arrived back in town I went down to Mudrushes. It was my first time spending significant amount of daylight hours inside Sully’s former establishment since I used to sit next to the man himself all those autumnal afternoons ago, pissed off that the Tullamore Dew clock had been moved to the opposite end of the pub(the bar has a much more placid feel at 3pm than at 3am). I drank five pints of Moose Drool (thanking the alcoholic forces that be that this blissful big sky libation has finally managed to migrate its way east) and slammed down four Guinesses, ordering the last round two beers at a time so that I had three separate chalices in front of me. I sat in the same oak patch on the landing strip bar where I tripped into the smile of the beautiful spritely-lipped girl only two months earlier taking down notes, chatting up several of the crisp-haired lads behind the counter telling them I was a writer and asking them what there favorite “sullyism” was (note: the naïve short haired fucks response was 'Sully hasn't owned this place in about two years'). As we were conversing the phone rang and the bartender came up to me.

“Yer not gonna believe this bro."

“What?" I ask the Naïve Fuck.

“You've been asking all these questions about Sully. Phone just rang and it was some guy actually asking if Mike Sullivan was in.”

“Did you tell him he died last week.” I inquire.

“No,” The naïve short-haired fuck bartended replies, “I simply told him that Mike Sullivan was no longer here.”

“No longer here.” I thought to myself, settling my tab, tipping the ill-trimmed sideburns of the Naïve Fuck behind the counter, and, when his back was turned, after I garnered my sans fifty cent piece o' change, I then nonchalantly slipped the superfluous Guinness chalice into the side pocket of my jacket, entering a dizzying splash of spring air as I walked past the fire-hydrant sized Guiness harp petrified on the door exiting the bar, thinking about just how wrong this Naïve Fuck is with his "no longer here" assertion as I look down into the variegated neon signs sprouting out of the sides of dead tooth brick buildings on Main street, thinking about how Sully's legacy is here, how it never left, and how, like my dream, his influence won't die, not any time soon. In fact I saw Sully everywhere downtown that spring afternoon shortly after his untimely demise.





I could see his lanky frame refelcted in the tint outside the windows of the former Sullivans, but I could also see him in the beer patio of Sully's, in a gasoline puddle near the cement star outside of the Madison theatre, near the original SOPs, in the alleyway where F. Scotts used to be. I could see his influence dotted up and down Waterstreet epsecially with bars like Martini's and Kellehers, perhaps emblematic of the "Monks" in my dream who stole his body.

As I drove up Main street that day I stopped at a nearby liquor store and purchased a six pack of Guinness. I then motored into St. Joseph's cemetary, across the street from the flower shop in my dreams on the street where I both live and work, on Heading Avenue , the street where another lifetime ago you fell in love and now have a desk in the Nuclear woods. I parked my car outside the pitching mound of dirt that is the man known simply as Sully's final establishment. I unearthed the filched Guinness chalice from the side pocket of my jacket, propped open a Guinness, filled the goblet and set it near the bottom of his grave. I then bowed my head in reverence and told him thank you.

I then told him cheers. Cheers to you brother.....

poem for Kyle....

Traipsing through Target on Valentine’s Day Eve Disgruntled and All alone after walking in on my girlfriend fucking her roommate, noticing how everything is red, I think about William S. Burroughs




In Mexico City inadvertently
shooting his wife in the frontal lobe
while playing a drinking game
Variation of William Tell on a bet
Requesting that she balance her wine
Chalice on the balcony of her brow
Like a beach ball and a trained seal
Standing in totemic posture ten yards away
The drapes of her eyelids hushed closed
Blinking during the family Christmas photograph
Snap of his revolver
The china-tea of her earlobes
Simultaneously registering
The click of the trigger
When the voice of God the father erupts
Through the crust of her forehead
Ribbons of diverse crimson hues
Skiing down chin and cheekbones
The pale aspirin shock of Burroughs visage
Aghast reflected in the cold puddle of life
alphabetical putty exiting her skull
a wisp of sulfur billowing over
her body like a pair of panties
half ascended up the camp flagpole

the summer when first you fell in love

Before Waking up inside Target on Valentine’s Day Eve

Noticing how everything
Is that damn red color

My thoughts circulating lost and alone
across the elliptical prostitute
lipstick smudge gritty ventricle
clotting transience of linoleum isles
Seeking freight train silence
through the aortic valves of commerce
empty parking lot cart materialism
pausing near the bus stop
wishing I had a beer

No amount of over the counter
Benzedrine shot up with Ken Kessey
Could have assuaged the
Hurt I felt that afternoon when
The cardiac tiles of my chest
Mingled with the Asbestos of her breath
Offering hosannas in mid coitus
The moment I opened the door

Finding the arched steeple
satyr thighs and legs spread like
half-opened albino triangles
facing each other
trying to consume each other
A mason symbol of wedged bodies, stuck
Ready to come in an abbreviated pulse

As I stood in the door
The junkie eating his lunch naked and alone, I

Peeled my heart from my chest like a fresh water trout
And held it above me head
For all the world to see
A coronation of our expired dream.
When you reached in the dresser beside your bed
wielding the hard steel of a weapon instead

saying “Trust me. I’ve done this once before.”

"That on the Ashes of his Youth doth Lie" A retrospective panoramic verbal eclipse of a year gone past

The year convened swallowed in the wintery valance of uncertainty, December, the cold aged wedding cake frost of the earth, the hard breath of failure, the sunken helium of the chest, the sight of my inky shadow elongated beneath the slender stem of an overhead yawning streetlamp, snow dribbling past in wet prisms of moisture, an overturned ashtray of celestial decadence sifting like something freshly severed and grazed on top of my head as I traipsed home downtrodden and distraught and feeling all alone in the world, freshly battered and emotionally betrayed, exiled from the interior of the building where I endlessly scribed over 3000 pages over the past ten year (and subsequently every blog that has ever been published). Fired for my benevolence to strangers and aesthetic seekers. Fired for lies generated like a nuclear accelerator by a student worker I caught cheating on her time card. The building where I had 98 books checked out at the time of my dismissal while my Boss played Tetris all day and the library director lived vicariously through a torso-slimmed variation of herself via the cyber-medium of second life. The building that I gave my fucking heart and soul to since early 2000. The building where I worked around the moustached-numerical oval of the clock overtime esp. around finals and wasn't paid a buffalo nickel in remorseful recompense while my nepotistic sexually frustrated co-workers would come in before the building even opened to play on-line video games, exiting their allotted shift prematurely, leaving more work for the night staff to attend. Fired after I had just spent 600 dollars on holiday gifts. Fired from the building where I wrote my first short story in the basement (entitled ‘The Drowning’) while still in my teens. Fired from the fuckin’ University where my name is scribed on a plaque in Bradley Hall. Fired from the university for an ersatz education I’ll still be paying for come twenty years time. The canning that somehow turned out to be a blessing. Finding myself full of thought thinking of Jonathon Larson as I ambled through the snow-flake static into the backroom of an anonymous building on Main street catering coffee refills for the dried out souls as we sat around as if in a private book club whose narrative has escaped us and talked about what has somehow brought us to this place.




The year where I monopolized the month of January crushing can after can of PBR in my apartment, watching Bob Proctor's synopsis of THE SECRET over and over again like a congregational holiday round, not caring if all my intellectual quote-unquote well read friends who use footnotes in their writings think he’s some sort of a charlatan. The year I became David Sereda’s first friend on Facebook (something about havin’ a bond with fellow wayfarer’s named David I’m telling you). The year where I spent a small fortune on accumulating the digitalized library of Joseph Campbell after losing the bulk of my collection through the move.

The year where I became re-obsessed with the Journalism of the late Rick Baker, scribing his name on the white interior-flank of my forearm as a ritual before clambering on stage every time I read my poems in public. Thinking of the seedy taverns of my youth where he used to frequent—thinking about the working class wayward souls for whom he sloughed up his sleeves and for whom he so assiduously fought giving hope for the hapless working class arcana— the downtrodden, the disease-ridden the financially-fucked, the emotionally enervated, the perennially pissed, the eternal, the all. Paying fifty dollars for his posthumous novel “Mary, Me In search of a lost lifetime,” and crying as he combed across the arable welcome mat of the midwest taking intermittent swigs of moosehead madly seeking for the identity of a woman who had no name.

The Raymond Carver of Peoria.

The year of being interviewed for my new job two hours after watching Barrack Obama hold one palm out as if being read by a Parent-teacher league gypsy at a grade school carnival while his antipodal palm symbolically blessed the leathery forehead of Lincoln’s own bible in oath—an emblem of change, a punctuation to the absolute political inanity and democratic disgrace of the last eight years.

Somehow for me I have an errant predilection for life-altering shit happening to myself around the date of every incumbent presidential inauguration. The day after Clinton was initially sworn in I won a scholarship-slash-sojourn to England that changed my life and ultimately made me a writer (thanx Greta-Gazelle and Mark-Andrew). The day after W. Bushy was sworn in I got a job teaching inner-city truants, dropping out of college with a four hundred page manuscript tucked under my shoulder like a freshly triangular folded American flag after taps. milking the last eight years lost in a late-night haze, hurtling my heart into the icy rink of a fresh page.

The new job on the end of Heading avenue.

The job that is emotionally rewarding. The job where I pretty much am given 7 hours a night to write.

The year where I moved out of my cockroach-riddled apartment (although I still miss the Murphy bed and my library shelves) across the street from St Mark’s parish. Filching a usurped jenga stack of milk-cartons from behind Sav-a-lot, listening nonstop and full blast to Tom Petty's FULL MOON FEVER, to Peter Gabriel's SO (dreaming of Mercy and of Anne sexton) to Tracy Chapman talking about a revolution baby as I dismantled the books on my shelves like bricks from a dike and packed them. The apartment where the red-haired girl of my dreams and myself broke furniture and overturned beer chalices while dry humping on the Persian carpet in an incendiary blaze of nothing short of unalloyed love and pure metaphysical communion. Wading into the pond of each others spirit through the orifice of each others lips, the knock and sway of our clad torsos bleating for joy. Thinking about this poem by Yeats even now today as I think of her:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

The apartment with the Wonkavator ( which was really just the interior of my kitchen cabinets clad with hundreds of diverse beer caps) and bookshelves and college kids and crazy neighbors. The house whose furniture as a whole was a collective assortment of bric-a-brac found combing the alley's behind Moss avenue and frat row in the first week of May. The apartment where I always partied with Gilbert who lived next door—Gilbert who likes a beer and a good time and makes a mean margarita and who looks like a lovable hybrid between Ben Franklin and some really nerdy yet cool dude whom you’d meet at a role-playing convention talking about his seventh level dwarf, Gilbert who Hale lived with for two years, filling a Pepsi machine in their living room with cheap “canoe” Beer—the Hamms, the Red Dog, the Blatz, The Old Style, the PBR (long live the heralding immortality of the Beer machine!!!!.) Gilbert who, along with the maternal benevolence of Diane Happ I eternally am indebted to and will never forget their encouragement and kindness that served as an air mattress for my deflated spirit those lonely and turbulent weeks.


The apartment where I said Goodbye to Tara in early spring, acolyting candles in my apartment cupping her hands and dancing slowly holding each other as if buoyed in the other’s limbs to stray off the inevitable descent of drowning, the inevitable departure. Tara with her Hippie dresses and cool azure jewelry and cool apartment replete with Buddha statue and ferret. Tara who fucks like Mt. St. Helen. Tara who loved to drink and party summer last when it felt like we were a local variation of F. Scott and Zelda as both our banter and our wit brachiated from bar stool to bar stool. Tara who I cheated on with a married woman then tried to justify it because she always openly made out with girls every time we went out. Tara who I burrowed myself in the bouquet of her arms five minutes after hearing that David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September. Tara who the last night in my apartment, made fun of my hair that I was coerced into cutting when I applied for the new job: “I’ve never seen you with short hair before David. It Just doesn’t look like you.” before we kissed for one last time, no tongue, no junior high back seat six pack hormonally induced make-out session, just a kiss, complex in its terse simplicity before she got into her car and began to drive cross country through the galloping overhead thunder storms of early spring, across lone highways of Nebraska and Kansas at night, alone with her ferret and life packed in her car, flinging across the pan handle of Texas like a fledgling stripper and a random flag pole, eventually dipping into the arid aura of New Mexico—the narrative of her life awaiting a new found genesis. A new beginning. A moist dawn of everything that is to come.

The year of flirting with Haydee at Casey’s gas station every morning often buying a cheap six pack or ersatz grape cigarillos or a newspaper or coffee before ambling back to my house via the Nuclear woods, the woods sliced between the fertile neck of heading avenue and Farmington road, the woods behind Nate Lockwoods house where we used to play growing up, the woods I immortalized in my first novel as the “Nuclear Woods” when I was living on High Street and never would have fathomed living on the cusp of the wooded meadow itself—a permeating halo of serenity ensconcing my limbs as I traipse past the oak stalks draped with snow and come across a family of deer in the winter peace of early morning.

The year saying goodbye to Gormans pub, holding my bar coaster out like a handkerchief billowing from a pier on a maiden voyage as I watched my local watering hole for the past decade slowly drift into the hangover horizon of the soon to be incumbent yesteryear. The bar that was one of the first bars in P-town top get Guinness draught on tap in the mid 90's. The bar where I drank with my fellow writer friends. The bar where I quoted Tennyson and made out with Manito-Meredith from Dr. Blouch's English class on a pool table in the back room senior year. The bar where John and I jipped work to witness the red sox win the world series. The bar where Nick-the-writer introduced me to pitchers of Guinness that would take five minutes just to pour from the tap for 14 dollars (no bar does pitchers anymore!!) going through five or six in a sitting, talking about the big boys-- Jim Harrison and George Saunders and Raymond Carver and Don Delillo and Rick Bass. Nick who phoned the library when I was out and said that he was Dave eggers and that the story I sent was accepted and when I went into work early Saturday morning and saw who had phoned I pensively walked out into the billowing November mist and smoked a cigarette and thought to myself that shit, after all this time, I somehow fucking made it before looking down into the scribble on the paper and realizing that it was a local area code. The bar where Nick and I talked about writing and watched sports—where we witnessed the televised slug-fest between Ron Artest and Ben wallace in '04 when the bar went crazy—witnessing a year later the greatest college bowl game in history, as a battered Texas defensive line somehow halted Reggie Bush and co., Vince Young blasting into the endzone on the final two-point conversation heralding an unprecedented upset.

A game that made the underdog in you want to fuckin' cry.

The ritual of egress with Nick the writer and myself, the two of us always punctuating the night with a syrupy-tangerine shot of Grand Marnier served in a translucent tulip-shaped goblet—a shot we'd toast to the writers who have somehow gone before us , who have endured volumes of solitude and shattering hurt and just plain fucking loneliness, the existential requisite of our craft, sipping the orange serum reflective and quietly, as if knowing our role as writers cosigned us the task with going back to work alone.

The bar where English majors would congregate at the end of the semester for the final class period, smoking cigarettes while slurping cheap lager, each verbally reciting one final poem. The bar where I would always saunter into my old high school classmates and try not to make mental cliffnotes about receding hairlines and burgeoning beer belly's—try not to note how age has inevitably settled into the once fertile throne of our anatomy.

The bar with stoic eyed Pete the bartender whose angular visage looked like something chiseled from granite on Easter Island. The bar where, every Wednesday we would smash tables together anticipating gratis platters of pizza.

The bar with the most depressing restroom you ever could imagine.

The bar where I spent hours laughing with the impeccable-hearted Jim Jager.




The bar where I did an unprecedented nine (count 'em) senior walks ending last May watching the now (somehow inexplicably young) college co-eds do fruity shots on top of the bar in their bras. Unbeknownst to anyone, spending the last night Gorman’s was in operation buying my Uncle a beer after he helped me move, sliding the key to my apartment under the winking bottom slit of the door, dropping my books and boxes of manuscripts in the garage of my new house before entering Gormans for the last time, buying my uncle a pilsner-pitcher of 312 before he left, sauntering into the cropped velvet haired artist I fell hard for two years earlier. The girl with the good wedding china cheekbones who spends hours dressed up like a samurai hunched over the hearth of a kiln. Having only enough money left for two PBR bottles, which is what we drank, slowly, as we sat at the bar, the two of us for the last time, and I watched the reflection of her smile tangoing in Blakean symmetry with the reflection of her laugh in the mirror in front of us, the mirror that read simply GORMANS in calligraphic emerald font.

The year where I moved back in with Uncle Mike. Mike who has always been Gandalf to my fretted-frodo. Uncle Mike with his beautiful Baha'i stories and marveling relentless enthusiasm for the faith. Uncle Mike the psychic. Uncle Mike who the first time I met him when I was living on High street told me to “look around you'll be living here someday,” and I looked back at him like he was so full of shit he should be working on a marketing campaign for Charmins. Uncle Mike who I left hanging a few years ago. Uncle Uncle Mike who used to give Psychic readings to Greta Alexander of all people. Uncle Mike who can fucking cook.

Uncle Mike who is the only person I have ever met who I swear grows younger each by calendar square.

The year of partying with ingénue-eyelided Shannon Moore on my birthday. Drinking at Mike's tap with my surrogate-soul mother Dr. Blouch and Dr. Vickroy, conversing with her cool psychologist husband about the intellectual art of implosion. We ended up that night playing pool at the Owl’s Nest.

The year of watching my cousin Matthew stand in front of the altar of whatever God there is and become ordained in the faith that raised me.

The year of monopolizing too much time on (fucking) facebook. Seeing pictures of the women I lost the virginity of my heart to years ago sprinkled in the snow of her wedding gown and thinking that she looks like a little kid playing dress up in her mommy's closet. The year of reconnecting with my brother the inimitable Ali Alibadi, whose lascivious largess is an intellectual lamppost of endless laughter and light. The year of hearing the gentle wind-chimes of Harmony Anne Dusek over the phone for the first time in fifteen years— the woman who half my lifetime earlier I let hold my heart like a grandparent allowing his knee-size lineage to sit on his lap and steer first gear as I held her on the Thames river in the winking lavender dusk of that April and somehow the narrative of my life felt complete.

The year of wildly smiling every time I read a blog creatively crafted by a certain Gazelle goddess or quickly espied and waded in a picture painted by a girl named Polly (honestly babe, how you can be that good after not picking up a brush in a decade does nothin’ short of astound me).

The year I was supposed to meet Daniela at the airport in Bloomington Illinois only her trip got rescinded at the last second, which, we joked, probably saved us a few trimesters.

The year of becoming emotionally enamored with the cyber-pulchritude steeple of renaissance light that is Carolina de Luca (of Exile, WI). ‘Nuff said.

The year of spiritually salivating over Chicago Bridgette. The artist who let me use her office phone to call a dear friend in California the first time I visited the House of worship in Wilmette. The girl with the cinnamon-hued stalactite French braid that slinks down the back cinnamon slope of her neck like a curtain rod to her dreams. The woman whose smile I tripped over and fell into like a maladroit waiter on roller blades. Bridgette with her placid sunrise over the lake shore smile that illuminates her visage like a little kid playing with light brites. Bridgette who gave me hug in the bookstore while a coifly dressed rich kid looked on in almost irritating disdain (yes!!!). Bridgette who I looked for and couldn’t find and then decided to leave and then sauntered into her leaving the architectural dome majesty of the building like it was something in slow motion cut from of a Merchant-Ivory flick.

The year my best friend John's cool martial arts diva girlfriend taught me how to break a board as in a karate chop which I succeeded on the first try. John telling me that I sliced through it like a plastic knife and a rectangular slab of leftover margerine. Kelly telling me that "That was nice, but you are supposed to scream when you break the board."

And yell I did on my second endeavor splintering the plank of wood, yelping like I was trying to get something atavsitic and primal back as the slant of my palm splashesd through the impenetrable hymen of oak.

The year of the swine flu and everyone flooding into panic although no one got very sick.

The year where I just couldn’t stop watching religulous.

The year of MJ suddenly moonwalking into the ashy scalp of the planet. The year of R and B going Gaga over a poker face; of Text-sex and tell’em with a smiley face. The year of having a ravishing woman I hardly know send me naked pictures of herself on my cell phone, which perhaps, makes it not a bad year indeed.

The year my sister Jenn (who was brilliant as Jo in Little Women) and her husband eric (who was brilliant as the lead in One flew Over the Cuckoos nest) moved to New York to pursue the vacillating glory of the stage. The year where Beth and Dan bought a summer house in Arcadia Michigan, two blocks away from the Lutheran summer camp that was my late father’s favorite place on earth. Beth who I can’t help but break into caroling the self-devised Junior League pledge every time I see her, (Ahem), “I pledge, to shop shop shop, to wear pink, to marry a man who makes six figures, to sometimes be a bitch”

The year of waking up in a cloudy bubble of intoxicated oblivion and being unable to speak in complete sentences before finding myself ensconced by the flagellating tempo of ambulance lights inside St. Mary’s cemetery. A writer friend picking me up at the hospital later that evening, screaming, haranguing, asking me when I’m going the quit prostituting my health and all I could tell him that I still can’t get over her after all these years.

I just can’t.

Realizing later that night that three years earlier I wrote a scene in the large novel that takes place in that exact same cemetery, ST. Mary’s in west Peoria, where the protagonist goes crazy and comatose and is found (albeit in a pink silo) three days later.

The year of my crazy Johnny Depp look-a-like rockstar cousin Larry from Chicago telling me that it was possible. That if he could do it anyone could do it.

The year of the Nuclear Woods.

The year of my mom really being there for me when I needed her most.

The year of Nothing makes me more happier in this pebble skipped eternity of space and time than meandering into the labyrinth that is the Bridgeport community in the south side of Chicago on a spring day, stopping by Uncle Johnny's, listening to his stories before gorging on one of his out-of-the-elliptical-gravitational-sway-of-this-planet amazing Italian Beef sandwhiches before hitting up 3rd Base (the bar, not the metaphorical adolescent sexual rung) for a few pints before wending my way to the old ball park, always with my best friend John. We saw Peavy's debut this year. We watched Quentin hit a grandslam on a perfect autumnal evening. We watched Thome nail one right above are heads--but every moment of this season, and other season, would be void without the continuity your friendship in both sports and the 90-feet betwen second and third in the often arduos pitchers ballpark of life.

Thank you.

The year of rediscovering One World. Hanging out with the raconteur wonder that is Shaman Paul. The year where Rachel ordered the priciest entrée on the menu and we found ourselves in a dervish alcohol-infused haze and eventually found ourselves praying for peace in a dim-lit burrow that looked like something a manacled Plato might try to escape from in the basement of the Newman Center. One world with Glover and Hannah and the liter committee. One world with dearest Dave Thompson and Matthew.

The year of reconnecting with Laurie N______ my mistress-muse for over a decade. Making love on her kitchen floor while concocting dinner in her house on the north side of town, the house with the pool and the hammock the ceiling sized bed. Hearing stories about her rich alcoholic husband who drank nothing short of one bottle of Beefeaters a day until it burned through his liver. Looking at pictures of her in her wedding dress pictorial snapped the same year I entered Kindergarten. Waking up after a long nap and walking barefoot and brandishing a Dos Equis in her backyard, telling me in her sensual Newport Cigarette monotone that sounds like jazz that she doesn’t fuck like she just turned fifty years old, while I asked her if she hears the oratorio of crickets that seem to be exploding in punctuation marks of a summer somehow ending, finding a modicum of peace stapled in the sentimental hovel of her arms. As if being single were an ocean an every three months I find myself raft mattress of a different yearning soul, feeling her lips kiss my forehead as she leaves for work in the am hours and I am left asleep somehow again all alone.

The year of drinking at seedy bars where you can smoke (where would I be without the Getaway on Western avenue that looks like something out of an Eugene O’neil play???) Shawna, who flashed me five minutes after I sat down. Smoking cheap cigars with Hale as we blast out into the pumpkin moon autumnal sunset the last Thursday of every month is search for the perfect Podunk haunt, the Road house in Elmwood, Willette’s winery in the sleepy doe-eyed southern hamlet of Manito where another lifetime ago I lived with and fell in love with a beautiful girl. (nothing like going through three hundred bucks at a tasting) the 801 club in Bartonville, the Shed with the beautiful country girl bartenders with “bad teeth and big boobs” in Buzzville.

The year of my mentor, the Great Doctor Palakeel, publishing a kick ass sleek variation of the epic of Gilgamesh and presenting it to me like a confirmation bible over kick-ass Southern-Indian cuisine.

The year of losing the copper around my birthday for four months, the metaphysical talisman that has almost always been pocketed in the indecipherable lata and longitudinal creases of my palm given to me by an eternal companion whose seismic smile alone shatters the poetic geiger counter burrowed in my chest.

Finding it four months later when I was doing room check and a resident had it on his dresser claiming that he found the copper, the thumb sized pebble of my heart in the parking lot a month earlier and kepy it because he thought it was just “a really cool looking rock.”

The year of chainsmoking my way back to a certain parkbench placidly abutting the Evantonian lakeshore, basking in the residue of her lips, the refulgent scent her smile, the warmth of her spirit, the chorus of her song.





The year of Will's monthly poetic gala's at Champs west, the Bohemian nest of local poets. The piano bar on western ave (that I still remember when it was Buzzies Ice cream, when it was staffords dairy) that is owned by my old coworkers at Jumers and that looks like the magnified interior of a clover, home to the artists in town who inspire the fuck out of me. Ethan with his goggly lank and convivial swagger and poems about Lane Stanely. Steve’s cidery beard and fondness for kick-ass spirits (Will whips up the best ol’ fashion in town, I challenge you as if in a dual to find one better). Adam who is shaped like a human exclamatory mark and who reads his work with a very sincere plowing monotone that simply defies you not to cry.

Beautiful Hannah, whose refreshing spirit and abundant enthusiasm for the art (as well as for litter) has been a blessed benchmark in my life for well over a decade.

And good ol’ Shan (god love her).

There is also classy Abby who for some reason reminds me of Virginia Woolf and who is an accomplished scribe in her own poetic inflection. Brittany whom I have known since she was single integers in age and sang Finoa Apple and who is now getting her Masters in English and who looks like she just stepped off the cover of the latest Victoria Secret catalog. Beautiful Megan who scribbles all her poems in hardback stationary notebooks and reads with the authoritative assonance of angels. Cool Alfredo who all the girls fall in love with. Sensual-lipped Anna whose poems rock my world. Groping hands with the “lock and dam” ebullience of Miss Stephenson underneath the oak helm of the bar before she empties the audience of their collective breath in one collective stanza—a poetic pillar of light escaping the podium where she stands.

And Will, the poetic avatar of P-town, a modern day Japhy Ryder pedaling up and down the gritty arteries of Western Avenue. Will, whose promulgation and promotion of the craft I love is unparalleled in the area code that shelters the current poet laureate of Illinois..

The year autumn was reserved for Princess Jessica, a poet.

Jessica who reminds me of Scout Finch smoking camel filters. Jessica who is small and waifish with a whip of scarlet hair often reeled back in a pinch behind her neck. Jessica who wears thick glasses and has cool reiki tattoos coating her entire back like armor and composes out-of-this-fucking- stratosphere damn good poetry. Jess who has a gargantuan queensryche poster vertically splattered over her bed that looks like something an avid CS Lewis scholar might mistake for a wardrobe entrance into another world.

Jess and I who the first month we were together it always rained. Jess with the cool CD collection and a two year old named after a romantic poet. Jess who I fell hard for when we parked our car amidst the stalking cement effigies of Springdale cemetery and she put on John Denver. This song.

Jess and I making love in the tangled brush of the Nuclear woods beneath the optic lens of the moon, the same gravity that holds and presses the earth in tandem to its nearest lunar orb swaying in time signature with the rhythm of our own pulse, the feral sway of our own bodies coupled with the carnal cauterwaul of unyileding confusion and hurt and need and joy.

During the day jess and I would sit in the parkbench in the Nuclear woods and read Walt Whitman and Rodney Jones and hold each other while I would sip beer between our relationship-decimating work schedules, lost in the smattering of autumnal stainglass leaves crunching below.

Jess and I who the first week of our rapport I received a verbal cyber-assault from a guy at the end of the bar who told me he was gonna kick my ass if he saw me talking to her again which only made me want to talk to her again more.

Jess and I who couldn't even make it to Christmas.

Jess who I surprised the last time I saw her at Firehouse Pizza as I lassoed my arms around her waist and kissed the bulb of hair on the back of her head while she was picking up a delivery before walking her out to her vehicle, somehow realizing that this would be our last collective moment together. Jess ask me simply to kiss her in public (which she never did before) before her vehicle shuttered away in an overture of fumes.

The year of sauntering into my surrogate sis from a decade ago, the lavishing countenance of Brooke Ferero on thanksgiving eve and telling her as I kissed the dome of her cheekbone that I am proud of her baby.

So very proud indeed.

There were other memories of course. Making more money than I have ever made in my entire life (which is still far less than 30 g's but makes me feel like the prince of Tides) and still hiding from creditors. Reading everything I can get my grubby little literary paws on. Spending Christmas with my cool cousin Brianna hours before her wedding, adhering to our holiday tradition of driving out in the country with a few beers in tandem, getting lost on the tortuous back roads of Hollis township off Tuscarora road where the leftover glacial slopes are reminiscent of Canada.

On the incipience of a new year the one memory I remember most from twenty-zero-nine transpired inside the Billy Goat Tavaran in downtown chicago. I had just been escorted off of Millennium bridge by a security officer for smoking a cigar while admiring the architecture of the newly opened Modern wing of the art institute (which looks like something I made once in summer camp with tooth and popsicle sticks) and I was pissed of at the Li-young Lee "City in which I love you." Pissed off at the hog butcher to the world. Pissed off at the city where my great grandfather worked as a bootlegger for Al capone ferrying a coal and Ice truck (stowed with moonshine) down the buegreoning industrial ash and chrome of Wabash. Pissed off that she wasn't with me. Pissed off at the superficial rich fucks walking past the lonely solitude of the poor in existenital suitcase doting existenial traipse. Pissed off at all the tottering sadness and loneliness in the world. Pissed off that, for many us, our dreams and ambitions and potential are all too often occluded to the dome of our area code.

Pissed off that I was having all these thoughts when I have lived in the United states my entire life and, sadly, unlike the bulk of the planet, have always had access to nutritious processed food. To clean water. To toilet paper. To a surplus of technology that I can utilize to assauge my existential loneliness twenty-four seven and make me feel that I am entitled to more. The advent to individualized human avarice.

Pissed off that the rich fuck who calls himself an artist by making a recursive looped video of a santa clause taking a dump purloined my grant money (I’m sorry, a recursive-looped video of a holiday harlequin taking a dump is not art and will not be considered art a century from now).

Pissed of at the city of Saul bellow and Studs Turkel and long time south sider Nelson Algren (miss reading those award stories in the trib!!!). Pissed off at the city of my beloved White Sox and vernal-meadow coating of Goose Island IPA. The city where I was blessed to introduce my mentor, George Saunders at the now defunct Barbara's Bookstore on Wells back in 2000 during the kick ass Pastoralia tour (read “Sea oak” and “The barbers unhappiness”) and then afterwards on the subway, saw the most beautiful girl toting a violin case ( remembering how smiled at me and blushed and grabbed my wrist and then, I shit you not, dissipated) I had ever seen. My fourth chapter portrait of the artist as a young man Bird woman angelic muse.

So pissed off that I did the unthinkable and went into the Billy Goat Tavern. The worlds most notorious Cubs bar.

I ate a few "doubles" my body, enervated, slouched over the lip of the bar like an over used question mark in a junior high exposition paper and began drinking. The bartender was an old man in his early sevnties and wore an all white apron like the bartenders used to wear years ago. Two other old men sat next to me on all sides. Old men who were born during the blitzkgrieg genesis of the second world war. Men who have endured bouts of cancer. Men who each wore thick glasses and had catarcts. Men whose face looked like wet-corrugated cardboard. Men who has been drinking in this damp chicago hovel, waywarly cheering on my cross town rivals since the late fifties.

Men who have been sitting in this exact bar the same day Catcher in the Rye was published.

"This is the sort've bar guys like us a place go to to get away from all the tampons and the nail polish." The guy next to me said. I lifted up my Schlitz as if in salute, seminally feeling out of place on the alcoholic wing of the geratric ward.

"She-cawg-oh ain't what it used to be though. You used to be able to smoke in here. The whole fuckin' place was just one nest of sportswriters and smoke. Now you have to fuckin' go outside to smoke. That fuckin sucks if you ask me."

I again toasted my chalice o' schlitz in Salute

We began to talk. I told him that I was a writer from downstate and that I come up here every three months just to walk around and look at people.

"If yer a writer you'd be interested to know that Mike Whoi-ko used to practically live in here."

"Who?" I ask

“Whoi-ko” He says again, as if ordering from a Sushi menu, pointing to a wall splattered with articles.

“Ryoko?” I ask. The old man nods.

“Yeah,” He says, “Harry Caray used to drink here too. As well as John Candy. But there was no one like Mike Royko."

When I ask them where former tribune columnsit Bob Greene used to imbibe he smiles.

“He used to sip tea with the all four year olds at the american girls store down the street.”

There is a collective chuckle inside the bar.

Fifty years from now Ryoko will be Kobe to Rick Baker's Michael Jordan. Both are amazing, but Baker died tragically when he was only thirty-six. The same age as Jonathon Larson who wrote RENT. The same age as Mozart.

Still Royko was damn good. Ask ask journalism major. And this was his bar.

"Royko used to drink beer and talk about the cubs right about where you are sitting.” The cool bartender dressed all in white said, handing me my third beer.

I began to sit with men and average thirty five years my senior and talk about sports. They knew that Ryne Sandberg had been coaching in P-town for the last two years and inquired if I thought he was moving up the coaching eschelons of the Cubs organization. We talked about the bears and Jay Cutler and Bobby Knox. We laughed. For over and hour we sat and drank, the elders and the wild child talking about sports.

Then something happened that I wasn't expecting. The bartender, the old man clad in a sheet of white looked both ways, grabbed my empty beer mug, filled it quickly and then placed it in front of me. When I placed my hand inside my jacket to fetch my wallet he swatted his hand down in front of his face as if warding off late-summer insects indoors. This happened three to four times, the old man, noticing my goblet was empty, looking to see if his boss was watching him, before replacing the emptiness of my mug joyfully with suds.

Jovially I'm known in over half the bars of Peoria and I always tip at least 20 percent depending if the bartender has boobs and the only thing I have ever received gratis (outside of a few cool bars I won't name) has been a completely curable case of Chlamydia courtesy of Missy the bartender at Crusens on Farmington road.

That and a few severed hearts and the occasional hangover.


But I hardly ever get a free drink especially from a bar I just dipped inside of to escape the hoi-poloi materialistic redundancy of the streets. Especially from a Cubs bar.


A man goes into the earth to be reborn. To plant something into the arable womb of the globe. The Jesus I celebrated on easter Sunday when I was five fingers old goes into the soil of the planet a man and is reborn a diety. A basic meditation ritual of Shamanism is to mediatte on slinking into the earth, sprouting out of the crust of the planet with a very Jack and the bean stalk green-like stem in which to only ascend.


That I had somehow made a fraternal bond with these gentleman who probably have less than a decade of life left here on this planet. In this bar. In this city that continues to steamroll forward and continues to change.

That mythologically this bar was for me what the male initiation rights were at the caves of les trois freres. Going into the earth, being reborn and coming out and learning how to give through heartbreak and pain and the toppling dissipation of years. Learning how to give through old age, learning how to bring forth that metaphysical copper burrowed inside of us, learning how to look at the planet in awe and wonder, learning how to bathe in the joy of this plurality of time-space, this place of existence.

Learning how to fucking love and to enjoy and to create in the place we have found ourselves for the next year. And the year after that. And beyond. Before we enter the crust of the planet for good and are unable to return.


Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


After all as a good writer friend of mine who I see every day once told me in print damn near ten years ago, "My friend, as long as we are here, we are immortal."

"Human beings came and went" an epitaph of thanksgiving to my mentor the late David Foster Wallace

In my late teens and early twenties Infinite Jest was my best friend. I lugged the glossy tome of erudition and narrative bravura with me everywhere I went. I ploughed through the continents of paragraphs, brandishing my pen like a scalpel as I chiseled annotations into each page. I loved how each individual sentence revved up and sputtered before driving the reader deeper into a neon Golgotha of an overtly subsidized, spiritually vacuous future. I loved the acronyms and the irony and the lack of punctuation—how everything fractl'd out of control with the subtle velocity of a mouse click and the startled sunrise of a new web page. I loved how from page one, Wallace allowed the reader to stumble and wade into a sea of characters in the book-- creatures who are seeking and yearning. Creatures who are fucked up yet fighting. The scene where Tiny Ewell is confessing his pubescent chicanery to a comatose Don Gately still to this day reverberates inside my chest with the resonance and flap of angel wings. Or the scene where beloved maladroit Mario asks the Moms how she can tell if someone is sad. Open to around page 200 in nearly any version of Infinite Jest and you will witness a miracle in print, the epistemic of a heart that wildly observes and blinks as well as pulsates with the aesthetic drive of all mankind as it lurks and scopes out a simple halfway house while detailing the errant souls that dwell within.

I annotated and re-read and pondered and dreamed. I talked about Wallace to anyone who would listen. I started carrying around a vial of Visine. I told them that Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain had been to a generation of lyricists. I told them that the linguistic mortar binding the jacket of this book together contained the ever-elusive "it" in which we as a collective human species were all somehow seeking. The book was marketed like the purported failed entertainment itself—glossy and gargantuan. Epic and exhausting. The blurbs of Moody and Vollmann and Franzen sprouted off the back cover with the intensity of fireworks blossoming above the tinted window showcasing the pensive author himself, looking as if he had just inhaled something green and potent while mulling over the outcome of a game of frisbee golf. He looked like what I thought a literary savior should look like: a wizened Spartan wordsmith. A feral wildman boasting about the glory of his fresh inky kill. He looked like someone who had been there, a washed up itinerant emotional Ishmael, who had not only survived the to tell the tale but one who wished to convey it in a fashion that had simply never before been conceived. That he wished to push the (porous) borders of the page as far as they would allow. Wish to amp up the volume of the contemporary state of American letters. That he wished simply to stretch out the possibility of the human experience and immortalize it in the tattooed hieroglyphics of language.

But more than anything what inspired me about David Foster Wallace was that he lived forty-five minutes away from the aching bluffs of the river town where I was born. For a formative teenage writer lodged in the genital wart of the Midwest nothing is more needed, more revered, more sacred then finding superman occupying the corner phone booth in the sometimes empty avenues of your artistic ambitions—and when that superhero looks like David Foster Wallace and writes like a wild-haired caged mad man howling at the harvest moon, you know you have found a true mentor of the soul indeed.

The summer of '97 I would drive down the cement arteries of I-74, lost in the emerald husks of corn, thinking to myself aloud that "This is David Foster Wallace, country" as I chained smoked Camel Turkish Golds thinking about Don Gately or Hal Incandenza or Himself pressing microwave integers or thinking about the ravishing, unforgettable Lenore Beadsman from Broom of the System (my favorite DFW protagonist of all time) wondering if I would spot him at the Denny's he was rumored to write at. Apparently he would put his television in his front lawn when he wished to log in some serious writing hours. My friends who had met him said that he always referred to writing as "work." That he smoked like a chimney at a nuclear facility. That he was apish in stature, hairy and uncouth and dipped even when he was in class. That he was brilliant. That he smelled. That he couldn't play tennis anymore because he had a sore knee. That he didn’t know how to shave. That all the girls loved him. That he would often enroll his creative writing students through two weeks of remedial grammar at the onset of every semester because they didn't know how to punctuate worth shit. That he would chew up your individualized slain over manuscripts and spit out the romantic residue of your tears. That he was going through writers block. That he had his own private study in Milner library. That he could sometimes be a real asshole. That he had gotten it on with fellow writer Mary Karr at Syracuse and had her initials tattooed somewhere on the hirsute boundaries of his flesh. That he looked like a hybrid between a court Jester or a samurai warrior in that ubiquitous bandanna he donned with the cagey assurance that he could either easily amuse you to death or simply fuck with everything you have ever believed in.

I never had a class with David Foster Wallace. After I discovered the blinding shield of linguistic light that is Infinite Jest I began to consume every writer and book David Foster Wallace recommended. For me personally, this was where David Foster Wallace, the image of a jaded hip insomnia-addled novelist chain smoking cigarettes at a local coffee bar comes to life--that image made me simply want to read and write books and sent younger writers a message that if you openly indulged in your literary fetishes you might also influence others in the process.

Everything David Foster Wallace recommended I devoured with the appetite of hunger strike riddled martyrs. When I first discovered Wallace I was lost in the mire of serpentine sentences brought on by an unyielding "beat and James Joyce phase" that compels so many young (esp. males) writers to forgo the piecemeal rudiments of punctuation, sandblasting a ditzy clang of syllables into the drywall of the page in hopes that a metaphor encapsulating the human condition might somehow be revealed in a dash of brilliance. While my education at that time was (to plagiarize Wallace again) "A few french fries short of an academic happy meal," I never received anything close to the edification and encouragement and the joy inside the classroom that Wallace offered me via his prose and his enthusiasm for contemporary state of letters. There were the writers on the back of the book cover, Sven Birketts urging us to "THINK" William Gaddis and William Gass and John Barth and (oh yes) Thomas Pynchon. I read William James' "Varieties of a religious Experience," I fell head over knee caps enamored with Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus based solely that Wallace's first novel Broom of the System had incubated inside the epistemological rungs of this philosophical ladder.

A sentence referencing eternity in respect to the vicissitudes of time culled from that positivism bulletin provides the title of this particular blog.

But then I also began to read his contemporaries. If Wallace was vaulted into the coveted dome of the literati spotlight, he was sharing his champagne and confetti with writers who struggled and wrote long side him. Younger writers. I read the writers whom he was compared to yet seemed to vehemently despise (McInerney and Leyner). I read the writers he adored. I read Susan Daitch and AM Homes. I read and re-read Galatea 2.2 and fucking wailed til their were tear drops on my testicles ("Richard Powers," Wallace applauded in an interview "Who lives all of 45 minutes away from me and whom I have met all of once.") I fell in madly love with the spritely wit and windex clear prose of Lorrie Moore. I slipped into the frigid late-70's ambiance of Rick Moody's icicle prose parading over the upholstery of Updike. I lauded the beautiful carnivalesque clan and narrative tomfooleries of Don Antrim's "100 brothers." I ordered a copy of 27th City and even submitted my name to Oprah's book club in hopes that I would be a guest panelist during the one week that Jonathan Franzen itchingly anticipated CORRECTIONS was chosen to be in the aborted media spotlight.


After all, I knew all about Franzen. David Foster Wallace had introduced me to his work years before.

I read more William T. Vollmann then could possibly be salubrious for my spiritual longevity. More than once I got laid plagiarizing the quote "Gave my heart an erection," a metaphor he quoted in an interview while talking about Carole Maso's ravishing novel "AVA."

Some of the books Wallace introduced me to have become my best friends. I can't imagine where I would go for emotional solace if I didn't have Delillo's WHITE NOISE or GREAT JONES STREET. During the IJ tour Wallace was quoted to having said something like, "The writer I'm most into right now is George Saunders Civil War Land in Bad Decline."--Saunders becoming a second literary avatar who I was honored to introduce in Chicago during his book tour for Pastoralia.

I read every DFW interview I could land my postmodern inflicted paws on. To this day I feel the Larry McCarffery Interview featured in the 1993 Summer issue of THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION has served as my emotional rod and staff--it is the one piece of exposition I have been going to like a confidant for over a decade to confirm my devotion to this craft.

In the interview (published when Jest was still in its second trimester)Wallace said things like "Fiction is what its like to be a fucking human being." He talked about Wittgenstein and about chasing what Yeats called "the click of a well made box " How he talked about the craft and loyalty to composing stories being an act of love. "And I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you are smart or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories to carry you in the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself that talk out the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe that just plain loves."

The interview with Larry McMurphy stewarded to my life what the New Testament proclaims to give to tithing Born again arms flailing Christians. It gave me orientation and encouragement and still to this day part of me feels set on fire every time I read it.

the author of this blog (right) endeavoring to emulate the attire of his mentor, circa 1998



The first creative writing seminar I attended at Bradley University I wore glasses and a bandanna to class. After the class period I chatted with my instructor, the great Thomas Palakeel, about post modernism and Wallace’s place in it. A year later I transferred to Illinois State to save money. Wallace was on sabbatical that semester but I remember jipping class and spending all day burrowed 400 meters from his office writing in the basement of Manchester. I had a crush on the scarlet-haired professor with the tight ass whose office was adjacent to Wallace's academic den. I would hang outside his office, my manuscript folded beneath my arms like an American flag configured after taps, waiting to be discovered. There was nothing remarkable about his office. I remember that he had a New Yorker cartoon posted on his office door (something about rogain, middle age and chest hair). He also had a quote stating how he would be on sabbatical followed by the phrase” FARETHEWELL FELLOW TRAVELER.

When I called his office just to hear the voice of my avatar on his office answering machine, hoping to introduce myself as an eager student and enthusiastic fan of contemporary fiction I was dismayed when the semi- nasal tone of his voice offered out a bitter caveat stating, "This number is for student and academic inquiries only."

I met a cool cafeteria worker at Illinois state who was a late-middle aged writer paying his dues like every other aspiring chronicler I know and who walked out of Wallace's classroom after a heated discussion where Wallace ripped his story apart.

"The one word to describe Dave Wallace is "intense." He said, after telling me about a recent rejection letter he had just received from Esquire.

We had a mutual friend named Nick who worked at Brewster Beans and who looked just like Tiny Ewell from Infinite Jest. Nick had met DFW in hallways of Stevenson one afternoon and knew him solely as a professor. Nick was also an English major and I remember feeling appalled when he confessed to me that he had no clue of DFW’s literary renown. Nick had never heard of Infinite Jest, was oblivious that his friend Dave Wallace was named to the New Yorkers "Top twenty writers for the New Millennium."

Nick was working on an adaption of Hamlet for class.

"He has a really cool set up for writing." Nick said. "When I was inside his house last week he told me that he was working on something very serious and that he trusted me not to look around too much."

Nick told me a story how DFW's home answering machine apaprently kept weekly updates of the Bears 2000-2001 sloven season.

"By the way," It would end, "The Bears are still oh and five."

I edited a copy of Nick's Hamlet manuscript. Later Nick work shopped the manuscript. Next to my scribbled comments were those of DFW's. His handwriting was a lot neater than mine.The closest to Dave Foster Wallace I would get that semester was having my handwriting on his writing desk, wondering if his lips offered a snicker of delight when he saw my request of "Needs to have more Alas Poor Yorricks."

I transferred back to Bradley to wade ad infinitum in a haunting quagmire of debt but still somehow determined as fuck to scribe out my heart on to the unblemished pasture of snow that is the beckoning freshness of a blank page. I fell in love with girl who was the most beautiful (visually stunning) and ebullient gifted writer I have ever met (for all you jest-heads out there, her smile alone would make Joellen PGOAT look like she belonged in a barnyard bargain book bin). When John Updike came to speak at Bradley University that fall, I inquired about the future of fiction. Updike mentioned the name of David Foster Wallace and the whole room visually turned in my direction. I made friends with Kris, a James Joyce scholar whose IQ may be soaring somewhere next to the hubble telescope. Together with the PGOAT we maxed out autumnal afternoons driving around Bloomington, leaving Babbit books with a pagoda of postmodern texts busheled in the basket of our arms. We visited Dalkey Archive press and Fiction Collective 2 in Fairchild Hall requesting back issues of The review of Contemporary Fiction. We tramped through Stevenson Hall in search of simply spotting the author. We made Wallace out to be an elusive sasquatch and even coined the term "Wallace droppings" whenever we came across a twinkie wrapper. We bought more books. We read more interviews. We listened to folk music (Dar Williams, Ani Difranco, Greg Brown) and smoked weed. Thanks to the mind blowing Hyperbolean philosophical orations of Dr. Greene we spent that autumn immersed in the incendiary soul poetry of Husserl, Levinas, Battaile and Blanchot. We loved life. We howled and screamed. We fucked and accused. We continued to pelt out the confusion of love and the love of confusion into the keyboard every night in forlorn hopes that a metaphor might somehow be conceived.

We dreamed.

Still Wallace had been the most influential writer in the last half-decade of my life--his prose and literary recommendations alone served as the impetus to my every creative craving and try as hard as I fucking may, I never saw him once.

the best writers of our generation destroyed by madness-- Pulitzer prize winner Junot Diaz, Rick Moody, edwidge danticat, DFW, George saunders, Pulitzer prize winner jeffrey eugenides, New yorker "top 20 writers under 40" June 1999.


I finally met David Foster Wallace at Borders Books store in downtown Chicago on Bloomsday 1999. He had just appeared in the New Yorker top 20 writers for the new millennium issue, standing next to George Saunders, doing what looks like a fist pump of joy.

He was large. With his bulk he looked like an offensive center hunched over on all fours about ready to hike a football shaped exactly, somehow, like the book which I felt was the greatest text in the English language. He wore a pink bandanna, shorts and purple socks. He looked nothing like the saint I had drooled over the past three years. I remember telling my girlfriend that I thought he looked like the energizer bunny clad in that pink bandanna lumbering across aisled of reduced bestsellers brandishing an empty Evian bottle like a scepter, using it solely for a tobacco spittoon, the jester taking court, center stage, waiting to tell us a story.

He looked like a poured hybrid of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately.

He gave a kick ass reading, his voice soft, a late spring breath rustling over the Midwestern prairie reeds. When the plenary Q and A section of the book signing convened and one gentlemen asked him what he was currently reading he answered, "Hannibal" followed by a pause followed by a, "like the rest of the nation" rejoinder. When a middle-aged lady asked him where his inspirations come from, he scratched his head in an apish fashion and confessed that he really didn't know.



After the Q. and A the audience configured into an exclamatory mark of anxious bodies standing in the direction where the author was seated. David Duchovnyof X-files renown cut my girlfriend ( the PGOAT) in line and stepped on my foot in the process in order to be the first to offer Wallace a congratulatory shake. Wallace seemed completely unphased by Duchovy's presence.

I had one copy signed for me and another addressed to Doc. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof at Bradley university. I began to get tense. I tittered. I tried to convey to him the gratitude I felt for everything he had given me. He brushed it off like he could care less about what his work had meant to the general populace at large. When the person behind me in line made a reference to the date of June sixteenth being Bloomsday I almost on cue broke out into a fulsome rendition of Joyce's "Ineluctable modality of the visible," warranting a scowl from my Waterhouse visgaed PGOAT girlfriend which strongly insinuated to quit being so pedantic in public, honey. DFW continued looking down as he autographed his, "with best possible wishes" bromide in the interior of each Hardcover book. When I asked him if I could shake his hand, he said I could but then commented in a very James Joyce May-I-kiss-the-hand-that-wrote-Ulysses-germane-to-Bloomsday-kind-0f-way that if he were me, then I should still wash it, preferably with soap. I kept on wanting to talk to him. I wanted to ask him the perfunctory interrogation of "What advice would he give young writers? Who do we need to sleep with to get published?" As he scribbled the rehearsed sentence into the collar of my book I tried to thank him again for every thing he has given me. Stuttering I mentioned how I had read his five, "Direly underappreciated American novels" appearing in a recent on-line issue of Salon and how I had read each of them and how this constituted my overall affection for himself as the author, that not only did he make me want to give up everything I was doing and write books he simultaneously made me want to give up everything I was doing and read books as well.

When I told him we were from Peoria and attended Bradley University he paused for a moment and said "You guys have a really good basketball team, though, right? That one white guy."

"That one white guy," I thought to myself as I held the porcelain handle of the PGOATs palm in mine and two autographed copies of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men between us like a newborn as we left the bookstore on Michigan Avenue, the late-afternoon tint of over head lego-stacked buildings adorning downtown Chicago like a spiking utilitarian nest of beauty falling all around us in fragments of shadows and in spangles of fresh light.

I don't think the author ever looked up at me once.

***

You could see it after Infinite Jest. You could see Wallace trying to change. You could see Wallace trying to stretch the perimeters of the page. You could see it in Adult World (II) and other more abstract selections of BIWHM. It was as if he wanted to perform electroshock therapy on his readers psyches. It was if he wanted to push the envelope of language past the shoreline of the page into the ocean of reality , the feeling of wading in a pond of consciousness, a feeling of what it means to be a pulsating, sentient human being alert at all times versus, as he quotes, “a very sophisticated mammal” or as Wallace elegantly espoused in his 2005 Kenyon graduation speech: “It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

This is the world we are all blessed to somehow an astonishing part of.

Wallace demanded that you look at a piece of fiction (or reality for that matter) with this sort of 24-7 metaphysical cognizance---to scrutinize the vessels and shapes of the alphabet in a new way, which in doing so, coerces the individualized reader to look at his world from a wider self-expanded periphery. You could see this in Tense Present Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage. You could see it most vividly in HOST with its cryptic interpolated urine stained continents of prose. It looked like witnessing a crop circle from an overhead bush plane. Linguistic alkaloids and metaphorical algorithms and a lot of avant-gardish where the fuck am I going with this—but mostly, I thought to myself as I leered into the foam of sentences ornamented into the page was that this looked like a lot of cryptic slop and I longed for a novel, an adopted Chinese sibling for Infinite Jest to cuddle up with for an eternity all for my own.

Still, in the last half decade of his life, Wallace wrote some astounding shit.

Less than a month after 9-11 A View from Mrs. Thompsons was published in Rolling Stone. Wallace recounts witnessing the tragedy and shock of that day on a neighbors couch. He was writing about 9-11, but he was writing what was transpiring on that day in my back yard. I felt every resident in central Illinois should buy five copies of the article and memorize it. Again I was seminally pissed that no one I knew in the community seemed to care that DFW was writing about the lens of global loss from the vantage point of our own backyard.

Wallace even published two nature poems in Triquarterly "Peoria," named after the city and the lush prairie environs where I have lived for the bulk of my life.

“ Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and sky line of canted rust and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to a place beyond the windbreak, where unfulfilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat…. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and wholrs of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite, Very old land. Look around you. The horizon, trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

Reading that poem, thinking about all the late nights I spent driving in the country, smoking cigarettes in David Foster Wallace’s zip code, chasing the peach blink of the sunset as it gradually dissipated in the autumnal vapors of the west, thinking about how I too, wanted just to be like this man who had inspired me, it seemed that Dave Wallace had composed these two poems somehow just for me. But I wanted novels. I wanted another 1000 page emotional lifeboat with labyrinthine plots and random minutia. I wanted another Lenore Beadsman and another Great Ohio Desert and a pub where all the bartenders dressed up like Gilligan and a sumo-shaped proprietor who simply wants to eat everything in sight. I wanted the scenes, banal and beautiful, Don Gately trying to rouse fellow residents at 2 am to prevent their vehicles from being towed or precocious Hal Incandenza trying to feel that he is more than just a corporeal version of the OED with a killer backhand—trying to feel that he is somehow a human being in a world where even the calendar days are corporate cavities of the heart.

I wanted another novel.

Candidly I began to give two shits about Wallace’s essays. I checked amazon dot com and the Howling Fantods religiously with the anticipation of seeing an upcoming Work in Progress. When the 2002 O.Henry awards came out I paid more attention Anthony Doeer's resplendent THE HUNTERS WIFE then I did to Wallace's GOOD OLD NEON, a story it seemed to me that was a run off sentence blistered from a previous bildungsroman. Not to bash G.O.N, a story which has meant much to many readers, it just seemed to me that it was nothing more than an extracted B-side raked from the galleys of Brief Encounter (read B.I. #20 12-96 and re-read it and re-read it and re-read it again).

All I could do was bitch that he didn’t write fiction the way he used to anymore.

By this time I was working at Bradley University library as a third shift access coordinator, still writing my ass off every opportunity I got. I turned in a single spaced very heavily David Foster Wallace induced 700 page novel to my creative writing professor at Bradley for my senior project (my other senior project was about the efficacy or lack thereof of MFA programs entitled, “Jack Kerouac never got an MFA.” ) I would periodically find myself back in Normal visiting my artist friend, going to Folk concerts at Illinois Wesleyan still finding gems inside Babbbits used books bin.

I would even traipse around the cigarette stained contours of Stevenson Hall wishing to talk with my mentor, wanting to share with him my nest of rejection letters or convey to him the jolt of electricity I felt every time I massaged the tips of my fingers on the welcome mat of the keyboard. I wanted to tell Foster Wallace how much inspiration his work and artist's purview continued to add joy to my life.

I again wanted to tell Wallace all this only I couldn’t-- Wallace had abandon his longest teaching gig at ISU, leaving the trigonometric back road plains of central Illinois for Pomona California where rich corporate demagogue awarded him 0ne million dollars to teach two classes a year.

****

In the apocryphal Book of Enoch a story is relayed about the fallen angel Penemue, exiled from the presence of God, jettisoned from eternity in heaven for being the first ever teacher of the craft of writing. Even an amateur etymologist could surmise that from name comes the origin for the writing instrument.

“And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom. He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper. Therefore numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day. For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith; Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure. Nor would death, which destroys everything, have effected them; But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them. "

The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it is also the lance in which the damned author will slit his wrist .....

***

This is how I heard about the suicide of my mentor: I monopolized that entire September weekend blanketed in the late night din and fracas of a local bar, blatantly cursing at flat screen digitalized rectangle to see if my beloved White Sox would inch into the playoffs (note: they did). Sunday afternoon when I awoke I was pensive and inexplicably felt broken glass shards coating the interior of my lower stomach lining. My girlfriend kept inquiring what is wrong and I could not give her a valid answer. Ironically my girlfriend of two months was reading Broom of the System. When I arrived at work there was an e-mail. Fittingly, the news of his suicide came from Dr. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof. The heading to the missive simply read "Sad news." Before the New York Times link Dr. Palakeel wrote the sentence, “ I know he has tried this before.”

*****

For the over last decade I’ve been telling everyone that David Foster Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain was to a generation of musicians and now Wallace has joined that cadre of elite souls too brilliant and too misunderstood to cope with the book jacket binding that serevs as their own flesh. Wallace joins the extolled likes of Hemingway and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath. Dying young cements that there will be a mystique around the narrative of your life—that scholars will probe into every facet of your tortured genius, that teenagers will attire themselves in black while locking themselves in the bedrooms of their parents suburban casa numerating ways that there life is sad and lonely just like that of their mentor. Dying young grants you the cool aura Fitzgerald and Jack London and Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. Dying young grants you a romantic aura of Byron or Keats or Shelly. Wikipedia writers who have committed suicide. Vachel Lindsey drinking Lysol. Virginia Woolf’s grave being marked in an effervescent tombstone of expired bubbles. Jesrzy Kosinski leaving a suicide note that reads simply:

“I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity".

An essay from Denise Levertov published three decades ago discusses the suicide and death of so many young writers with fervor germane for today's literary community:

“My own sadness at the death of a fellow poet is compounded by the sense of how likely it is that Anne’s Sexton’s tragedy will not be without the influence of tragedy in others lives. She herself was obviously, too intensely troubled to be fully aware of her influence or to take on its responsibility. Therefore it seems to me that we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. The tendency to confuse the two has claimed too many victims. Anne Sexton herself seems to have suffered deeply from this confusion, and I surmise that her friendship with Sylvia Plath had in it an element of identification which added powerfully to her malaise. Across the country at different colleges I have heard many stories of attempted—and sometimes successful suicides by young students who love the poetry of Plath and who suppose that somehow, in order to become poets themselves, they had to act out in there own lives the vent of hers. Innumerable young poets have drunk themselves into stupidity and cirrhosis because they admired John Berryman or Dylan Thomas and came to think they must think like them to write like them.”

One doesn't much like to ponder the bleak possibility come a decade or two from now of a young writer in his late teens with so much potential hanging himself in the manner of his mentor, a bandanna clad around his limp neck like a fallen halo.

David Wallace becoming the Kurt Cobain for a generation of those who decided to read.

***

Part of me is pissed off and wounded. Part of me wants to buy him a beer and say funny anecdotes so that he can laugh. Part of me wants to give him the finger, tell him he's an overrated fuck up, tell him there are so many young writers, good writers working piss-ant jobs, struggling, impecunious, lonely, fucked-up who harbor knee-deep suicidal proclivities every time they try to explain the jaded nature of their vocation to their parents, to their girlfriends, to their peers-- see the deflated expression etched into the face of a writer who has scribed over a million words in the last decade and still can't find a publisher or make rent but refuses to yield to the chorus of his calling at all costs.

Part of me is learning (on the recommendation of a feathered spiritual friend) to seriously, like Don Gately in IJ get down on my knees and pray for his soul and in hushed reverence thank him for everything he has simply given. That his soul needs help. That it is in a confused state and that it needs fellow wayfarers and dreamers to assist him in his journey between the oscillating spectrum of light casting shadows and prisms between this realm of being and the inscrutable wonder of the world to come.

Part of me doesn't like to think about the method in which he died. Part of me can't imagine killing yourself in such a manner in which your surrogate soul mate or spouse walks in on you hung from the neck, swaying like the stem to some unknown pendulum, an octagon thatch of urine staining the infield of his crotch, his keen eye prodded free from his socket, duck tape manacled around his wrist like an identification bracelet from some Podunk country hospital, the smiley sick clowned faced emblem of Infinite Jest unable to find any more amusement by the simultaneous recurring wonder that is the failed entertainment cartridge of ones own shot at existence.

Part of what gives me the Howling Fantods is that someday, in the not so distant subsidized future that is subsidized academia, some grad student whose published academic drivel on writers include more footnotes than Wallace ever employed will one day quote the death of David Foster Wallace as being the death of postmodernism.

What gives me Howling fantods even more is that he may have had this whole shit planned for some time. When you think of stories such as "The Depressed person," or "Suicide as a sort of present." Or when you look at the time line linearity of Infinite Jest and begin to randomly ponder if Wallace had choreographed this shit: As a fellow Jest head notes:

Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U., which is probably Gregorian 2009. Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that Y.D.A.U. corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years prior to Y.D.A.U. (n. 60). It is also possible that Y.D.A.U. is 2008---

YDAU equals autumn 2008.

That “Himself” was Foster Wallace himself. That he gave his readers an sos cryptogram of help and that, throughout the adulation and the praise and the grants and bandana wielding and the dip, there was a tortured soul veiled only as the letter Q. to the astute reader seemingly blinded by his brilliance--a soul who direly needed someone to see him and to hold him and just to pull a Marley and tell him that every little thing is gonnna be alright.

Later in that afternoon I would call Dr. Palakeel, only to hear his voice on the other end of the phone, saying that he knew it was me on the other end of the line the minute the phone rang.

***

Poets and writers drink more intensely. Smoke more intensely. Worship God more intensely. Poets and writers fuck more intensely. Poets and writers give more willingly-- spilling the alphabetical marrow of their souls out into the albino sonogram of hope that is the page, hoping some stranger whom he or she has never before met turns to his crafted syllables in time of dire need and somehow finds solace, finds laughter finds a friend. The best writers will gladly serve as damaged dantes to the romantic whims of their readers Beatrice-like longings. The best writers will be butchered by academics--the same academicians who use footnotes of another mans failed genius as stilts to publish anything at all. The best writers have their hearts turned into a maxi-pads day in and day out. The best writers will understand poverty. The best writers will be self-published. The best writers will watch as rich spoiled North shore brats who have been wiping their asses with two dollars bills their entire lives publish simply because they were able to spend two years on their fathers' yacht writing full time.

The best writers never make it during their lifetime.

The best writers fail.

Again and again and again.

The writer sees. He feels. He loves. And more than anything, he gives, even with the heartbeat and breath of everything that is lodged inside of him.

***

When Foster Wallace died I thought about a lot of things. I thought about his closing comments in the aforementioned Review of Contemporary Fiction interview, in which, when asked about the future of fiction he replies:

"For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back—I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back—which means we’re going to have to be the parents."

I thought about how so many writers fall pray to this maxim of Shakespeare , "On the ashes of his youth doth lie/ As the death-bed whereon it must expire/ Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by..."

I thought about how the ashes of too many writers fertilize their corpse buried deep in the soil of the page. I thought about good ol' Penume and how the writer is seemingly damned from the outset, perhaps even by a Deity for endeavoring to tell the truth.

Writing is the most lethal vocation I know. No one knows what indeed was concealed behind the bandana Wallace shielded around his skull like a turban or a helmet.

No one truly knows what emotional shit he was goin' through.

I also thought about this quote, by former poet Laureate Donald Hall, written shortly after the death of Dylan Thomas.

“The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate. The human who confronts darkness and defeats it is the most admirable human.”

**

Two weeks after his death I did the only thing I knew I could do-- I phoned up his office in Pomona and left a message for him. I had been trying to contact him for years. I wanted to convey to him everything he had meant to the discourse of my life. I wanted to tell him how he made me want to devote my life to the craft of fiction.

His voice on the answering machine identified himself as "Dave" Wallace followed simply by a high pitched electronic purr. In that moment, as I wallowed in the pause that followed the sound of his deceased monotone. I then told him what I had been waiting to tell him for nearly a decade. I thanked him for everything he had given me.

I quoted his Kenyon commencement address, parts of it verbatim. I told him how he said in his address speech that the "Capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death," and how his life, his prose, his astute observation about the world around him, his incessant curiosity towards the habits and vices of the human race impelled me to want to write books, made me want to read books, and made me want to convey his joy and beauty found in this beautiful pond of reality we all find ourselves skinny dipping through.

Thank you David Foster Wallace.

Bravo!!!!

For reasons I can't explain I even told him that I loved him.

Twice.