Day 5: Partied out at the Parthenon of the Southside while tangoing in tempo with Tori Amos...

Status: Catapulting into just over 100 hours of Succulent Sobriety II. Still harboring second-cousin caffeine withdrawal related mosh-pit migraines. It feels like various vectors of my brain are crumbling into a friable pathetic Parthenon of chipped Doric slabs toppling into antiquity with a Greek chorus of collected thuds.  My heart seems to be dithering like a bulb buoyed on a dead Christmas tree tirelessly batted by the unsuspecting paws of a neurotic cat. I’m restless. My focus level is somewhere between that of a restless 13 week old infant stranded in a garish nest of sunflowers courtesy of a child-flagellating Anne Geddes' photograph and a 13 year old boy who finally (now that his parents’ are out of town and that he learned how to delete his web browsing history) is wildly clicking away at infinite visual dissemination of the screen, typing  dimensions and sensual scenarios into the rectangular jaw of Google sans the safety belt of a moderating filter.

This is the first night in my five years at this job I have not brewed a pot of coffee after clocking in at 11:00pm. I usually brew another pot at 3am. And sometimes another pot at 6:30 am before I leave. In fact this is the first night I can remember going to a job without getting blitzed off a pot-and-a-half plus of java. When I worked third shifts at Bradley library from ’02-’08 the coffee pot was always snickering in the background, as if chortling in jeer at the dated card catalogue. Before Bradley library I worked at Barnes ampersand Nobles for five years, in part because I got a sizable discount on books (sopping up the bulk of my paycheck) and I got fifty percent off at the café, which at the time served up the only Starbucks in town.

Senior year of high school I worked as a bus boy at Jumer's Castle Lodge. I was saving up to traverse back overseas to Europe and nights, when my fellow bus boy legions would smoke weed in the service elevator or snatch a forbidden swig of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels when the bartender wasn’t looking I could be found, after my shift, reading Ezra Pound and Anne Sexton in the library next to the Black Bear lounge. There was a stain glass window with the picture of the Bavarian flag and I stared out it, reading books that were my life raft in the emotional torrent that was senior year, looking out past my reflection in the Bavarian flag, into abandoned petri dish that is the south side of Peoria. The stuttering time-signature of neon turn signals bleeding in tandem with  the occasional tire screech, the occasional claps of bullets (always in threes) dead dream gutters littered with used prophylactics, food stamps, errant hubcaps, triangular gnashed prisms of shattered forty oz. bottles of malt liquor reflecting the post-apocalyptic waterfall of Western Hill.

 

 From the library I could make out the weary Rogaine dilapidated shingles of the Southside. The poverty.  The hurt. The way a vacuous building looks like the hollow sockets of the human face if viewed from the right angle. From the top of the hill I could make out the AA building, a tufted nest of trees, the inscrutable sandpaper geometry of the building that was shaped like a pyramidal cheese wedge that my dad claimed used to be a sort of ice cream kiosk 30 years earlier that lounged right at the top of the hill, behind Roosevelt Magnet schools where my sisters attending molesting the frets of stringed instruments while singing in choirs that would perform at the White House and West Minster Abbey. From the window in the library at Jumer’s castle lodge I could make out the spine of the church steeple where I grew up sprouting like a stalk shooting nowhere. The building where I was confirmed, fourteen year old limbs attired in the billowing drape, sacrosanct garb of Confirmation Sunday, binding my truncated periphery of the human narrative to something overtly westernized. I could make out houses band-aided with orange stickers and overgrown lawns heralding the violation of city ordinances tacked in the fashion of Luther’s 99 theses. There was Logan pool where we went for free swim and the fenced-up roller rink next door which no one ever used. The field behind Christ Lutheran had two mis-sized soccer poles stapled into the scalp of the earth like suitcase handles. Luggage to leave behind. And the old playground which looked like it was constructed out of sand paper, fairy tale Kingdom, Starr Street Fish market on the corner of Westmoreland, the failed palatial paneling of the pizza palace, the convenient store whose window was shot out last week. The liquor store on the corner of Griswold where cars with tinted windows and baritone subwoofers idled outside. I could make out the spray painted hieroglyphics and gangsta arcana delineating neighborhood territory, the medieval corona signified Latin Kings, the interlocking Hasidic almost Kabbalah looking triangles connoting the turf  of the G.D’s. The flecked l’accent aigus and foreign algebraic emblems that were the Vice Lords.        

If I squinted hard enough I could make out the overhead flatop of my high school, which looked like a wet shoebox. My high school boasted the lowest ISAT scores in the state and the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation. In high school a lot of us felt like we were shaped like the numerical digit on a state-issued statistic. Like the future wasn’t for us. Like the snapping gulch and cement concavity that was Western Hill had somehow sociologically imprisoned us in a bowl of forever failure.

Still there was somehow joy.

 

 

 

After my shift at Jumer’s I would continue to gaze at the seething stain-glass framed diorama that is the swansong Southside of Peoria and read and sip coffee trying to make sense of the ever fluctuating visual punt of the world I found myself optically bundled within. I was here. I was in this place. Seventeen years old, sipping tepid coffee, reading Anne sexton and Ezra Pound, walking down the illuminating wics of Moss Avenue later that spring quoting stanza’s from Prufrock, lost in the pastel-stippled lavender ache, the spring evening spread out against the banner of the sky, smoking swischer sweets, going to a cool (like really cool) therapist at OSF named Dr. Horndasch  who looked like Dana Carvey  gave me his home phone number  in case I ever did anything stupid, informing me to call him first. When I told him how much coffee I slurped in a given day he slapped his head to his forehead. When he saw that I was reading a thoroughly dog-earred annotated edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar he lovingly inquired, given the status of my prescribed anti-depressants, “Why on earth I would want to read a thing like that for.”

 

It was early 1996.I was trying to grow my hair long. My musical mermaid and  emotional crutch Tori Amos was appositely stopping in Peoria on her Boys for Pele tour and  I was certain (yes certain) that when she hit P-town she would stay at Jumer’s (she had to, naturally, it was a castle) and after her performance I would find her lounging down the cobbled arteries outside the Black Bear Lounge. I would thank her and tell her music has been my best friend. I would tell her how I purchased her first album Little Earthquakes on a fluke THE DAY IT CAME OUT at Co-op which had just migrated across Main street to Campus town, yielding its old hollowed-socket haunt to the rectangular cardboard kiosks of ACME comics. I would tell her about how, after I purchased Little Earthquakes I was in 8^th grade and didn’t listen to it for six months until October, freshman year, in my bedroom on the corner of Sherman and cedar in West Peoria, trying to stamp out my thoughts, going through the proverbial PEARL JAM TEN phase, thinking about kissing the minty lips of Renae Holiday in the sunken Japanese garden at Westlake after seeing School Ties, thinking about how her eyes would always envelope into her face and her lips would somehow massage her way above the bridge of my chin and how there was always this mandatory awkward pause that was expected before you made out with someone. Renae wore her high school letter jacket with the oversized digits of 9 and5 ruffled in the right hand corner.     

I thought about all this and freshman year while being astounded by the literary erudition of Mr. Reents and running three times a day, trying to make the state cross-country meet as a freshman, thinking about life as I ambled around the Lagoon in Glen Oak park with Dawn Michelle who was a senior at Richwoods and into art and a state speech champ and took creative writing classes at Bradley, listening to the Cure, listening to Freddie Mercury who Dawn adored even though he died of AIDS, thinking of AIDS, wondering why every week there was always another artist who was diagnosed, thinking about watching Elton John perform Bohemian Rhapsody at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert for awareness, swearing that I entered puberty the moment a frenzied AXL ROSE frenetically scuttled out on stage in an electrocuted sagebrush poetic powwow scamper at the end of the duet. I think about all this, still waking up at 4:40 every morning to deliver inked bulletins heralding the news of the planet, still (occasionally) peeking at nylon sails of the college girls who moved in next door who arrive home late at night, floating behind the obtrusive drape, bodies contorting movements like hovering treble clef signs hatching from a husk, as if freeing themselves from something denim restrictive and tight.

 

 

I would tell Tori that I was thinking about all of this when somehow, her song WINTER floated out of the  muffled lobes of my stereo like self-inflicted quill plucked by a lonely angel in an attempt to feel like a human being.   The song wouldn’t be released until later that year but in that moment listening to those chords stretch and vibrate into an aortic crescendo—I was changed realizing that this spritely red-haired nymph completely knew what I was going through and that her art somehow seemed to perfectly encapsulate the atomic pulse of every demonstrative molecule which I was feeling, providing an emotional canteen where I could go back and sip for nourishment time and time again.

I would tell her all this, lost in the untrammeled porcelain wintry mounds of her cheekbones, the incendiary Pentecostal furl of her hair. I would tell her how I  found myself in London freshman year on a trip that would chance my life and that, upon returning home, I had a dream where I was back with those I loved who know lived so far away and her song, ‘Tear in my hand,’ was playing over and over again like a round of hope. I would tell her how again, I purchased UNDER THE PINK the day it came out, this time in Chicago, from a cool alternative record shop, the lady behind the counter was attired in long pine-flavored stocking, frenzied, giving me a hug, asking me how I heard about Tori because the artist wouldn’t become heavily well-known or anthologized until two years’ later after Pele was released.

 

I would tell Tori how the serene vitrified  glazed cover of PINK felt like I was looking at a snowflake through the magnified lens of the Hubble telescope lost into a labyrinth of artic fractals and crystal overpasses, an ivory honeycomb of frosty sentiment and forever yearning. I would tell her how, when I placed the CD into the gaping mouth of my stereo for its virginal listen, how the sprinkling patter of keys dotting the preamble of PRETTY GOOD YEAR echoing the inflamed-phoenix of her tongue somehow provided a panorama of hope against the inevitable angst-ridden tumult of high school.

I would tell Tori how after I purchased the CD, it took me four months to get past the first six tracks because I kept listening to them over and over again, falling asleep one late-April afternoon, waking up to the ICICILE hovering in the room in a melody of stalactite drips, basked in a glowing chakra-laced metaphysical hearth feeling loved.

I would ask her if she intently titled UNDER THE PINK after the opening line of Anne Sexton’s THE FORTRESS, and when, of course, nodding in assent, I would then begin to quote my favorite section from that poem to her, the part where the poet talks to her child about life not being in her hand. Life with its terrible changes will take you bomb or glands.

I would then tell her how I anticipated Pele. How I started going through a lot of shit in high school and was depressed all the time but how, every Tuesday, when the new releases came, I would walk to co-op in campus town and see that the new Tori cd was pushed back a week.

I would tell her again that I bought it again, the day it came out. I listened to it over and over again. Four years and two decades had eclipsed since 8^th grade and senior year and also, three indelible Tori creations.

 

 

I don’t know what would happen next, in my dream fantasy with the denim clad mermaid. Part of me thinks she would thank me for listening then inquire how old I was, which, of course, I would ameliorate my age from 17-21. Part of me thinks I would try to be cavalier and order her a Grand Marnier at the Black Bear Lodge before pointing at the bulking mammal and informing her that it was actually a polar bear dyed black. Part of me wants to conceded that I would read her poems and that she would fall in love imagery that somehow seemed to capture the heralded hurt of what it felt like to be a human being, but the truth is, I was a pretty shitty and unfledged poet for a long time.

Part of me thinks what would have happen is that she simply would have thanked me. She then would have asked me if I work here and what other bands and music I am into. She then might have inquired what other confessional poets I am into and if I am into the work of Joseph Campbell. She might have said that she really likes this old castle overlooking the dregs of Peoria that is now, years later, a refurbished nursing home. She might have inquired about the history of this castle or if I ever clambered to the top of the turret.

She might have even inquired if I had a sacred spot in the castle. A place where I didn’t feel alone. A place where I went to just to be myself.

And of course I would then lead her up the burgundy carpeted stairs, past the hallway from the Mozart room,  up through the rococo hustle of the second floor dining area, into the library. I would shower her where I sat and read and wrote in between shifts. I would then point to the Bavarian flag stain glass window. I would point to the south side and tell her that through that window is everything I have every known.

 And something tells me that Tori would look through that window like a mirror and say two words.

“It’s lovely.” She would say.