let your loins settle down and concentrate on just one (or two or three) person(s). But Sarah, a punk girl who walked tall along the downtown sidewalks, with the high black leather boots and short spiky blond hair and perfect European model lips, would not take me seriously.
Sarah was young, independent, smart, and somewhat aloof with the popular boys in the band scene. Everyone knew she was unique and maybe the sexiest girl in town, but she seemed to be holding out for someone special. Not your usual Spokane dude—a Rainier-swigging, pot-smoking tattooed boy—but someone different. And sure, Spokane had its group of weirdo “other” artist types—guys who turned their warehouse apartments into Goth-rock haunted mazes for Halloween, that tall Asian-looking guy who made short films of people squirming around in bathtubs full of pudding, and even that band who used lawn-mower engines to simulate a symphony.
But I was the only young guy in town who was publishing his poems and doing readings at rock clubs. I was unique and maybe a little bit insane. Someone once called me the Poet Laureate of Spokane.
Still, Sarah was cool as crushed ice, and even though we became friends and confessed guilty pleasures to each other (she liked Seal, I liked Suzanne Vega), her demeanor was never flirty and she became the subject of much unrequited lust poetry.
I thought I could be happy with Lisa. I thought I could be with her and let the others slide to the sides. But being perpetually lonely, bored, and horny was a burden.
When Lisa wanted a night out with her gossipy friends, I would find myself running into Laura at one of the two good clubs and going home with her. She lived only a block from me, so it was also convenient. We could practically yell each other’s names out our windows.
Or Ingrid would call me, wanting a ride to Molly’s apartment. One night, while sitting around at Molly’s, I caught Ingrid and the army guy kissing in one of the rooms. I know I had no right to be mad but it caught me off guard and I left. A few nights later, at a party somewhere on the outskirts of Spokane, in some barn somewhere, one of Ingrid’s friends started yelling at me about how I was such a jerk and how I made her get together with the army guy. It was so dramatic. I thought I was going to get my ass kicked.
The nights I spent in Lisa’s little apartment were great and made me feel like I was in a real relationship. We would sleep in together and she would make espresso in this tiny machine in her kitchen. In fact, she was always making espresso, even at night. We’d lie in bed, listening to Galaxie 500, and sip our homemade lattes. When we’d have sex, I could taste espresso all over her body. It seemed to ooze from her skin. Before I moved out of Spokane though, in the summer of 1991, Lisa went incommunicado on me. She thought she was pregnant and wasn’t sure how to talk to me about it. But she wasn’t pregnant, and a few years later I would see her again and she was still the same giggly girl from before, which, for some reason, didn’t seem quite right.
My connection with Laura was odd. Since she was a poet, I began to feel more for her than any of the others. We actually said to each other: I love you. She had no confidence in herself and her writing, but I published a book of her poems because I thought they were great and disturbing in a quiet, simple way. Later, after leaving Spokane, I would lose touch with her. A few times I’ve met people who remind me of Laura or maybe look a little bit like her. I am instantly drawn to that person and it makes me feel a little sad or foolish.
A few years ago I got a postcard that was not signed but I’m almost certain it was from her. It said:
Arkansas
I moved to Arkansas when I was twenty-four. I don’t really have a sensible reason except I was getting bored of Spokane and wanted to try something totally different. Of course I didn’t just poke a blind finger on a map. Paul, a guy I went to broadcasting school with, had gotten in touch with me and said I could get a job at an all-news radio station in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I had never liked Paul and was a little surprised that he even graduated with me, but his offer sounded like a good chance to get more of a fulltime radio job.
I packed most of my stuff into my friend Stephen’s Dodge Omni and we asked Vince if he wanted to join us on a road trip. Stephen and Vince had been my best friends and confidantes during my stint in Spokane. I had made music, shot films, wrote poetry, and rode motorcycles with them. Just a couple of months before I decided to move, I had a breakdown in Stephen’s car and told him that I felt like we were drifting apart. He had been the first person to take me seriously as a writer, even when I wrote garbage. I didn’t want to lose him.
The three of us drove to the Oregon coast, down Highway 101 to San Francisco, then to Las Vegas, Arizona, Texas, New Orleans, Memphis, and, finally, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Stephen wouldn’t do acid but Vince and I dosed a few times on the trip.
When we arrived in Fort Smith, Stephen and Vince dropped me off at Paul’s house. I hadn’t seen him since broadcasting school and he had since gotten married to a girl in our class he’d been going out with. I always thought they were a weird couple. She was a hyperactive New Waver and he was a tobacco-chewing oaf who made fun of the other students even though he could barely speak into a mic without twisting his tongue. When they moved to Arkansas, he dropped out of radio to pursue a window-washing business while she did news at a low- ranking AM station. He’d gotten her pregnant and she had developed this unhealthy infatuation with Reba McEntire. There were posters of her everywhere and cassettes played constantly throughout the day while I tried to read Camus or Dostoyevsky or whatever I was reading back then. Sylvia Plath probably. She also owned a collection of Reba T-shirts.
I soon found out that the radio job I thought had been offered to me wasn’t going to happen and I had to find other work. I stayed with my ex-classmates in their trailer home and rationed myself a couple of dollars a day before I became officially broke. Most of that money seemed to be spent at a cheap bakery I found that sold glazed doughnuts for fifteen cents a piece. Eventually I got a job at a factory assembling baby cribs and I was able to move into my own place. That job lasted a month before I became a busboy at a Mexican restaurant called El Chico in Central Mall.
In the meantime, I had bought a used ten-speed and would cruise the small downtown area in search of any kind of youth culture. When I lived in Spokane I went out every other night and I was anxious to find a social life in my new city. I was starting to wonder if moving to Arkansas was a mistake. When I asked people about fun places to go, they’d always say Tulsa or Dallas.
I found out about a place called the 700 Club, a warehouse-type space where local punk and alternative bands played. They had an open mic night coming up and I was eager to go. When I got there that night, it turned out that whoever had the keys to the place hadn’t show up. So one of the club regulars put the tailgate of his truck down and made that the stage. It was a humid late-summer night and unlike the Spokane open mics, most of the people who came to the 700 Club (or at least its parking lot) were there with acoustic guitars. It was more like a punk hootenanny.
There wasn’t any kind of sign-up list. After someone played a few songs they’d just ask the couple dozen people there who wanted to be next. I watched three or four people strum and sing before I felt like I could get up there. I stood in the bed of the truck and read a few poems. At the time, I was heavily influenced by a Seattle writer named Jesse Bernstein, who wrote violent and funny stories and read them in a crazed scratchy panic. I did my best to imitate Bernstein’s voice as I read my own attempts at dark humor. I prefaced my reading by telling everyone that I had just moved there from Washington State. Afterward, a few people talked to me, mostly to ask about the Northwest. Apparently, the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had debuted just the night before and a couple of the kids at the open mic couldn’t stop talking about it. They couldn’t believe it when I told them I saw Nirvana play once in a parking garage.
One of the girls there was what I always envisioned a sweet Southern girl would be like. She was warm and pixielike, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a face that glowed with honesty and hope. The only thing missing was the Southern accent. I talked with a few of the guys there and they all acted like they wanted to date her. She had gotten out of a long relationship recently and they were just trying to figure a way to ask her out. After two more open mics, I finally worked up the nerve myself.
We started dating and fell in love. I felt a little weird since she was still in high school, but as soon as she graduated, we decided to move to Portland, Oregon. We ran an espresso cart business and I started publishing more of my writing in magazines. I also met many more writers and began publishing more books by other writers.
