A Lit. Couch

Sometimes jarring endings can be good. Sometimes not. This one, as far as I can imagine, depicts life in northern Michigan accurately, luring its reader into a false sense of security until the very last paragraph. On second reading I personally enjoyed the way it fit together, but when I read it the first time I questioned whether it offered much more than shock value. Now I know it does. Overall, the way the dialogue makes the characters feel authentic and believable was my favorite aspect of the story.

Enjoy this one by English sophomore Clyve Lagerquist.

“My Town”
by Clyve Lagerquist

Six hundred forty-seven. That’s how many people live in the town that I live in, including my brother, sister, mother and father. Another interesting number. Fifty seven. Fifty seven is the average age of the citizen residing within the village limits of my town. My town is so small that it is not even a town, it’s a village. Sure this place has seen better days, it used to be more prominent, the high school more populated and renowned, yet even in its dusty, quiet pallor my town is incapable of receiving ill thoughts. Like a child. Maybe the image of the town is just making up for the fact that hardly any kids live here at all.

My infantile town of an advanced age is about as exciting as, well an infantile geriatric. It’s quiet, it’s slow, it lacks a dynamic feeling that evolving urban cityscapes possess. Don’t get me wrong, I love the way my town rolls out between two lakes, one Great and one just sort of joining the party and adding a little water of its own. Lake Michigan pours in through a narrow channel to give us our own little lake, and my town stretches back from the union of the two bodies.

In short, though my town is, well I suppose let’s call it pleasant, it is boring. After three days in my town, unless you live there full time, all year round, and have plenty of responsibilities to attend to, there is absolutely nothing to occupy one’s time. In a town catered to working adults and the elderly, there isn’t much, shall we say entertainment. Plain and simple, my town is incredibly boring.

In a town this size, lots of area kids can’t get jobs, whether they are in high school or just back for summer vacation from some university, there isn’t much in the way of employment anywhere around my town. Today, I’m going to hang out with my best friend; as usual he has his video camera. My phone buzzes and begins to ring, I know who is calling before even looking at the screen, I’ve been waiting half an hour for a call. “Hey man, what’s up?”

“Not too much man, how ‘bout you?” replies the casual, groggy voice on the other end of the line.

“Shit, not much, just kinda hangin’ around my house.”

“Yeah.” This sort of sleepy exchange is common. I think everyone around here asks what is going on every time they reach another voice on a phone line, however they always know the answer. Some rarely improvised upon permutation of “nothing.” Today at least, there was a plan of action. We were going to assault boredom with every weapon in our disappointingly limited arsenal.

“Okay, yeah that sounds good, so I guess I’ll just plan to come over to your house in a little bit then, I gotta shower and shit still and take the garbage out for my mom. Ok, cool, no, yeah I’ll bring it. Sure. Right, right, ok, see ya later. Mm’bye.” I close my phone with a click, severing the call connection. I feel a sort of shiver, not really a shiver more like… the feeling that I am about to get the shivers or maybe that I should be getting them. I go to the stereo and turn it up louder.

After getting ready I head over to my friend’s house. Actually it is a cottage out on the edge of town; his parents have another house in a bigger town just south of mine. As usual, when I pull up he is skateboarding in the driveway. His hair is a mess, but he doesn’t care, it looks as though it is actually still damp, and I imagine he just jumped in the little lake and then put on deodorant, in lieu of taking a shower. The cleanliness of summer. As I pull up, he leaps about in mock excitement, also common.

“Woooohooo! What’s up, bro! Yeah! Fuck yeah! Haha,” he continues on this tirade of pretend mirth for a second and we both laugh as I respond in kind, however we both try to pretend that it is the cacophonous yelling, the ultra-frequent swearing, and the ridiculous voices that we are laughing at, and not the sarcastic remark on our own boredom that we can’t really escape.

“So what do you wanna do right now, man?”

“Shit, I don’t really know. We could… we could work on the movie, but I don’t really know what else we need to film.” He trails off, lost in thought, searching for something to occupy our time for the moment.

“We could jam.” I suggest, however we played music for about thirty-seven hours straight yesterday, and our drummer is away today visiting his grandma.

“Yeah, I guess we could. We could skate, too. If you don’t want to or whatever you could film.” This suggestion is sort of a last resort and we both know it, as it would only lead to more questions. Questions like: where are we going to go? Who is going to come with us if anyone? Whose car should we take? The list goes on. Even on days in which we do have something planned, something to look forward too, we are still stuck in a rut, as it were, for every minute prior. Eventually, we grab the camera, we grab my car keys, and we simply go. About to engage in our favorite pastime (by default), reminiscing.

“Haha, remember that time we found that wheelchair just sitting on the side of the road? That was so sweet.”

“Shit yeah man, the Futuro! Haha. That thing is dope,” his voice trails off as we look out the windows on either side looking for a memory prompt. There is a story hidden in every standing, shifting quaking object that we can see, we just have to connect it or invent it.

“How are you and that one chick doing?” I ask calmly.

“Fuck, I don’t know, man. Shit’s just crazy right now, we kinda hooked up the other night, you know when she came to visit? I told you about that right?” I nod and he proceeds, “Well I don’t know, dude, just a bunch of weird shit happened that night. Like, she asked me if I knew this other girl from school, you know the one I was hanging out with before?” “Oh yeah the one with the—“

“Right.”

“What was her name again?”

“L—“

“Oh, right I remember now, never mind. Anyway, go ahead.”

“I don’t know, it was just fucked up, she started asking like, if I knew that other girl or if we’d hooked up or anything.”

“Well what did you tell her? Did you say you did?”

“Fuck no, dude. I was trying to tell her she was just my roommate’s friend.”

“Haha, nice. Good idea. That guy was such an asshole.”

“Hahaha, for sure man, I know; he was such a douche. One night, did I ever tell you this? One night he came back to our room and he was just totally shitfaced and he like passes out on our floor, and when I get back he is just laying there with puke all next to him and shit. Yeah, dude it was fucking sick. I woulda been pissed, but I was so tired I just opened the door and I was like, ‘ohh, nope.’ And walked down the hall to my friends room and passed out on their futon.”

“Nice. Yeah that’s pretty sweet.”

“Yeah. Whatever, I think I will just tell that girl the same thing. It’s just weird because she kept doing that thing where she says nothing is wrong, but then she is really quiet and pissed off, but with that super calm ass face and she never looks at you when you talk. You know that shit?” “God, yeah I hate that fuckin’ shit, that’s the worst,” I agree emphatically.

“Fuck it dude; we should just get drunk tonight,” he states in a jocular voice. He has about thirteen different ways of declaring that we should imbibe to inebriation. Each one funnier than the last: Dude, let’s get shitfaced! Dude, let’s just get trashed! Let’s get blown-out! Let’s get shifty! Let’s get rowdy! And my personal favorite, Let’s go buckwild!

“Man, I miss parties back at school, every single one of them, even the dumbest shittiest one was like, ten times better than anything I’ve been to around here.”

“Yeah, I know.” This is the easiest response, since although I went to some parties back at school, I am never invited to any around my town. As I apply the brakes for a few of the omnipresent deer up in the north of the state, around my town, he rolls his window down and starts to scream at the deer. “Get the FUCK out of the road, you fuckin’ bastards! You goddamn sons of bitches! Steam it!” He always screams at deer when they cross the road in front of us, and then says, “Gotta teach those dumb cunts a lesson,” in an entirely too serious voice and then laughs. That last bit is one of the many little catch phrases that we shout at random. For a time we forget the pressing rush of time through our fingers as we fail to do anything worthwhile except burn up gas at $3.00 a gallon.

“Do you wanna go jump off the pier?” Pier jumping is one of our main summer time activities. Due to the aforementioned lack of entertaining enterprises with which to engage in around my town, we take, in the summer, to jumping off one of the piers that creates the channel from big lake to small.

“No way, man it is still too early. It would be so fucking cold.”

“Yeah, but fuck it! I’ve already done that shit twice!”

“Yeah, and it was freezing!” We laugh.

“Do you remember that horror movie we made that one time?” he inquires.

“Oh yeah, what did we call it? Chiggaboo Jones? Hahahaha.”

“Yeah, haha, that was it, I was thinking, at the end of this movie we are making now, we should just have Chiggaboo Jones wander in and kill someone, and then do something really weird like, I don’t know ask for a bike tire in payment or something.”

At this point, I am laughing so hard it is troubling to try and concentrate on the road. Most of our little cinematic adventures begin this way. We have one off the wall idea that gets catapulted and reworked a hundred times, sometimes even as we shoot it, and eventually comes out to a comic masterpiece that we watch over and over again. Unfortunately, many of the times we are the only ones who think it is funny.

“Also, I’m thinking that for our next movie, we should like write out a script, you should write out the dialogue, man. That would be sweet,” he says as I apply the turn signal into our favorite pizza place to get a Stromboli before we start with our plans.

“I’ll try to yeah. We should definitely do that if we were gonna make a serious movie like we were talking about. I think it is funnier if we improvise for our weird-ass movies.”

“Oh definitely, man. But I was just thinking if we did a serious movie we should. And we totally have to it would be so badass. I mean we have all those old BB guns and fake guns that look real. And we, you know, have that one real one—“

“Shhh! Don’t say that when people are around.”

As we eat we watch a hockey game on TV and shout along with the other patrons, and employees, for our team.

“Strom is so fucking good, dude. I could eat this shit every day.”

“Hell yeah, man. For sure.” As I look out the window, over my friend’s shoulder, I see the sun just resting on the tree-line, about to sink to the beaches that give my town all of the tourism business it sees in the summer. It gets pretty hectic in my town around the Fourth of July with all the out-of-towners. Fudgies. They come up here and eat up all that rustic, nature bullshit. They make long lines in our favorite restaurants. Drive ludicrously slowly on our streets, they even wear shoes on the beach. Amateurs.

As the light goes down over my town, and all the business and restaurants begin to close, the inhabitants flock home to go to bed, or to the bars, to delay going to bed a few more hours and share some liquid enjoyment. Usually we would just go back home, too and watch movies, studying their art with avid eyes, but not tonight. We pull up to the door of a house. It is not mine, and not his. It is far from other homes. It is dark. It is quiet. It is unlocked.

We enter through a side door. It squeaks but we stifle its whine by slowing our pull on the hinges. The moonlight casts a pale white-blue light on the aged, hardwood floor. It creaks softly. We reach another door. There is a minute roar coming from the other side that we identify as snoring. It reverberates throughout the postage stamp-sized house. We open the inner door. From my pocket, I pull a small, thin, black metal object. I check the magazine once more. And arm the firing mechanism. Adrenaline begins to pump through me, and I feel like I am finally alive again. My town cannot rob me of life at this moment. I begin to pass the gun to my friend, but he looks at me and smiles and holds his hands back. I aim, and squeeze the trigger until it goes click. At the report, my friend snatches it from my hands and pulls the trigger once on his own. The flash jumped out and we realized we were all smiling. The old man’s death had brought life back into the room.

Although the number of submissions has ebbed this week, I wanted to post this little pearl to tide you all over, all you countless literates reading my periodic little blog by moonlight.

This one’s self-explanatory.

“The Talk”
by Justin Henry

Reluctantly, I grabbed a hot dog, a bun, and some ketchup. I was not only going to explain to little Jimmy how the birds and the bees worked, but also when.

—-

Come back next week for a longer, more protracted post.

Rick Hale
halerich@msu.edu

Bogged down with proper nouns, drum crowns and grocery frowns. Run-down. That’s what I am this week. I won’t go into it. Why am I telling you? Because it means I didn’t have time to write critiques this week. But I’ve decided to post “Collage, Ages Eight to Eight Hundred” regardless, and for two reasons: (1) It has nearly-perfect rhythm (which alone makes rhyming poetry worth the endeavor, for me) and (2) it is a time machine. My childhood will always make me smile, and anything that reminds me of drums probably will, too.

I’m also posting a second poem, “6:36—- At Shift’s End,” by the same writer, mainly because it makes my own sense of irony laugh at itself. And it made me wonder whether I brushed my teeth this morning. I did.

So here are two poems by MSU student Amelia Larson. All I’ll say this week: Enjoy.

“Collage, Ages Eight to Eight Hundred”
by Amelia Larson

Sonic hedgehog super soakers, mediocre young elopers

Red and yellow honeybees, Lego blocks and climbing trees

Twister tangled up in wire, college sweethearts and desire

Growing up in North Dakota, creamsicles and frozen soda

Never ever let them tell you there is nothing you can do

Keep on walking, babies talking, everything that’s old is new.


	
Rumble packs and sockem’ boppers, rubber hoses with no stoppers

Bathtubs and a radio, Chia pets refuse to grow

Ice cream coolers, two-edged rulers, angels in the Christmas snow

Never ever let them tell you there is nothing you can do

You can ride the bus to school and hide a penny in your shoe.

	
Watermelon Halloweeners, Technicolor window cleaners

Slip n’ Slide infirmary, cowboy-flavored fantasy

BB guns and banged-up fenders, firemen with red suspenders

Greasy fingers swing the bat, wear my cake and eat my hat

Never ever let them tell you there is nothing you can do

Carry popcorn, carry snacks, to throw at people in the zoo.

	
Bigger feet mean bigger blisters, call us mams and call us misters

We will learn to read and write our letters on a old Lite Brite

Coffee-flavored roller coasters, play-dough cookies in my toaster

Dress me up and take me out and climb back up the water spout

Never ever let them tell you there is nothing you can do

Keep on trucking, keep on sucking on that sucker, sweet and blue.

	
Finger-painting monkey barrels, chocolate stains on new apparel

Mortgages and eagle eyes, steal his nose and hope he cries

Fighting lawyers, loving bullies, knowing kids of every size

Never ever let them tell you there is nothing you can do

If you haven’t seen it, then to you it’s brand-and-spanking new.

——

“6:36—- At Shift’s End”
by Amelia Larson

Who am I to criticize, to judge another
Person’s poetry
When I can’t even clean
My teeth properly
I am skilled at fleecing interviewers
Dazzling them
With skills I do not have
So here I sit until the end
(At least till seven)
Watching films
And sucking pay
From people who don’t know my name
The man in half a uniform
I think he was biting an illegal cigar.
But at this early hour
I am no one to judge.

—-

Stay tuned, young tycoons.

Rick Hale
halerich@msu.edu

Well. This is my first ever blog post. Allow me to introduce myself.

I’m Rick Hale, a junior English major who is subconcentrating on creative writing. I enjoy playing music and frisbee very much, and I also like to read. I do that often. My favorite writers are Jack Kerouac, Gabriel García Márquez, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and William S. Burroughs. I will not label Hermann Hesse a favorite because doing so (to me) would be on par with saying that Radiohead is “a good band,” or that Oscar Peterson “can tickle them ivories.” Anything would be unfitting, would only cheapen the thing itself. Read “The Glass Bead Game” if you want to believe me about Hesse.

But why, you ask, should you listen to my unripe, collegiate and possibly jaded opinion? Well – since you countless readers want to know so badly – simply put, written words are my thing. I love them the way you love good beer. And I regard overemotional, mawkish writing with an attitude that I normally reserve only for cheap vodka: The easiest way is very rarely the best way.

I hope you truly enjoy my first choice from this week’s batch of submissions. It’s top-shelf.

“Mick’s Summer-Night Dream”
by Carl Thompson

Between my head and pillow
a Chevrolet sits up on blocks
     bones on display
     yellow sundress
     canned nagiri and lettuce.
That night we wrecked a table
     because it got in our way
     kicked at it
     smashed its wood against it
     tossed it over a fence
     threw bottles to the floor
and marveled in the shimmering
     patchwork, shards of glass.
That night blood and beer looked
     just the same and we ran
     together
     like the waves that carried us
     over long before we ever
     filled our children’s shoes.
Reds, whites, greens, orange,
     Blues,
     St Andrew
     St Patrick
     St Stephen
“And we danced to the music
and we dance.”

—-

Here, dear readers, I invite you to stop reading and draw some of your own conclusions before going on to mine. Both of you.

Fine. Don’t.

Initially, I winced at the Shakespearian-ish title of this poem. I made several assumptions that were eventually proven completely invalid by its content. But I now propose that the Irish references with which the poem is riddled, combined with the revelatory function of the entire piece as a dream sequence, give its title more-than-solid ground.

The first line sets the dream-tone of the poem in a pleasantly oblique way. During the hazy moments immediately before sleep the idea that my thought-pictures are occurring somewhere in the space between my head and pillow would make complete sense. The subsequent images, which seem haphazard upon first reading, quite obviously trigger in the dreamer vivid memories of the broken wood, beer and running that come afterward.

The poem’s ability to utilize the “mashability” of dreams in this way will speak to many people; everyone has dreams that depend heavily on psychologically associative images. The piece starts with a small sequence of these images, then allows the dreamer-narrator to become, in a way, cognizant. Beginning with the line, “That night we wrecked a table,” the narrator begins to recognize his dreams for what they are, and does so to such an extent that he is able to explain – coherently and vividly — exactly what happened on that specific night.

I want to pause to examine one line of this “normal” section, in particular. The way the speaker-dreamer “marveled in the shimmering / patchwork” instead of “at” it conjures a comparatively more powerful image: rather than see a person staring down at broken glass, the reader himself gets to stand in front of the glass and see in it his own reflection. This simple sleight-of-hand on the part of the writer brings the reader into the poem in a physical and very literal way. The understatement involved made it one of my favorite lines.

A word on the line breaks. They work in a very specific way that reminds me — dare I say — more than a little of Ginsberg; when each stanza is read in one breath, the rhythm of the poem creates structure for its flow of images but doesn’t become brash or distracting. Whether these line breaks were intended to work this way must be left to conjecture, but when dealing with words I don’t think intention is nearly as important as reception. I am willing to give Mr. Thompson the benefit of my doubt.

To return. “Reds, whites, greens, orange, / Blues” is where the magic starts to happen. Preceded by the temporal jump to birth and children’s shoes, the reference to color signifies the sleeper’s loss of the dream-awareness he’d earlier attained in the sixth line; he is again submerged and must experience images without consciously thinking about them. This shift completes the poem by connecting its end to its beginning. I won’t pretend to understand the personal associative images that are here returned to; I went to Catholic school for 13 years but admittedly am only familiar with Saints Patrick and Stephen and their own respective Irish significances. But the incantatory nods to Catholicism of those three lines on the part of the poet, combined with the beer, blood-shedding and bottle-throwing of the rest of the poem, convince me that this dream-poem is rooted in Ireland. The name “Mick” also helps.

And the reference to the Pogues’ “Thousands Are Sailing” in the last two lines, eased into by the musical meaning of the stand-alone word “Blues,” is the icing on the cake. The delicious rum cake.

Stay tuned.

Rick Hale
halerich@msu.edu