The reading isn’t anything too special. And yet, it’s something of a milestone for a guy who couldn’t even speak just six months ago. My first attempt at a public reading since finishing treatments for oral cancer. It isn’t a feature spot — I just read 4 poems at an open mic. My poems are politely tolerated by the small crowd gathered there. They applaud — politely.
So now, I stand outside the coffee house after giving my first reading in over 2 years. It’s a nippy December night, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I need some air and some solitude. Unfortunately, this guy follows me outside with his girlfriend close on his heels. They’d been lurking in the back all night. Neither of them participated in the merriment of poetry and song. Neither of them seemed much interested in what was happening on stage. At one point, I thought I saw the guy scribbling in a notebook.
“Damn,” he says, “it’s cold as hell out here.”
“Yeah,” I agree, leaning against the side of the building with my hands tucked into my jacket pockets.
His girlfriend, who looks a little like Avril Lavigne with a bad case of acne says, “Is it gonna snow? I heard it was gonna snow.” I wince at her breath which smells kind of like I’d imagine camel shit smells wafting across a desert.
The girl lights up a cigarette. Then, the guy lights up a cigarette, offers me one. “No thanks,” I say. “Don’t smoke.” He shoots me his best wise-ass glare that says, “Whatever, man” and takes a puff.
“So I thought you were supposed to be some kind of bad ass,” he says.
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Well, aren’t you supposed to be some kind of outlaw poet? I mean, that’s what they say.”
“You know, ‘They’ say a lot of things.”
“This is a pretty lame scene for a true outlaw poet.”
He was probably right about that. Lots of middle-aged, middle-class types reading Hallmark-y Christmas-themed shit. But, on the other hand, at least they had the guts to get up to the mic and read their shit in front of people and risk the slings and arrows of armchair critics.
“You write poetry?” I ask him.
“Yeah.” he says, confident that whatever it is he allegedly writes is in fact poetry.
“How come you didn’t read?”
“My stuff’s too hardcore for this crowd,” he explains.
His girlfriend nods, “Fucking-A,” she agrees.
I take note of that leather jacket he’s wearing that must’ve cost at least $200 on sale at Macy’s and those $100 Nikes. I don’t know where he gets his money, but I know it’s not from anything he’s ever written. Me, I’m wearing wholesale clothes off the rack — a ratty old jacket I’d gotten for $39 a decade ago, a pair of $12 Bobos bought over a year ago that have holes in them. A sweatshirt. Sweatpants.
What I’m thinking is that Jesse James would have just as soon shot a man in the back as get up in front of a crowd and recite poetry — but then again, he was a real outlaw and not an outlaw poet. This guy and his dirty skank of a girlfriend could probably write a manual on what it means to be an outlaw poet. They’ve obviously got the dress-code covered. They probably know the secret handshake and have the secret decoder rings to go with it. But I at least had the balls to get up there with my cancer-scarred tongue and poor fashion sense and read poetry that isn’t hardly tame for an audience that is and isn’t really made up of my kind.
Badass, you say? Get the fuck outta here.
