TWO DEAD GAY POETS, A STUFFED FROG, SANTA MONICA HOBOS & ONE BORED, WELL-READ MODEL: Transcontinental Conversations in the Key of Rod Serling...

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation.

Conversations with Los Angelenos are always interesting

She started right into what had been on her mind the last few days, how it was affecting her normal party-all-night, sleep-all-day lifestyle, how growing up was, in her words:

Man, life's crimping my style hardcore right now... I think I'm turning into a fucking reclusive hermit... like you, ya know?

On the West Coast, in the all-night diner in West Hollywood from where she was calling, it was only 10:30 on a Friday evening. Traffic on La Cienega Boulevard was somehow too much too bare for the L.A. native. She couldn't make it all the way back down to the Sunset Strip for a night of clubbing after dropping her Girls Night Out dinner companions off at their respective homes.

Instead, some unseen force pulled her into her favorite hang-out, a place she used to dine at regularly when she didn't have much money, couldn't sleep, needed a comforting place to people-watch and read the free alternative weeklies and trade publications they always have in bins in the lobbies of those sorts of places.

Here, in Ohio, it was just after one in the morning when she first texted her usual "RU Bzy?" queue, the one she uses when she's looking to reach out and touch somebody. She uses the same message, all the time. I'd just gotten in from a nice quiet night out, contemplating life over a few beers at the local watering hole here in Oxford.

Bored out of my skull, well, I decided to return her call. Stupid me - I forgot how tired I was, forgot that it was still early on the West Coast, forgot that these sorts of conversations tend to go on for hours.

"I just don't feel like doing shit. Don't feel like dealing with fucking creepy guys or, ugh, the Lakers fans, or snotty bitches."

"Chica, everybody feels like that at times."

"But I feel that way a lot. It's fucking Allen Ginsberg's fault, I think."

"Uh...s'okay. Allen Ginsberg? As in the dead Beat poet?"

"YEAH! THAT FUCKER! You ever read his shit?"

* * * *

A pause, the sound of a woman who frequently makes those Name 10 Hottest Models You'd Bang lists of frat boys and Moose Lodge poker nights smacking her lips around a breakfast sausage link, and, finally, an answer.

Of sorts.

Bear with me. She was a bit tipsy, loaded up on Red Bull and coffee.

"You know he wrote this poem about, like, running into Walt Whitman in a grocery store. It was in "Howl," ya know...

"...Dude, so I saw a homeless guy in Santa Monica last week who looked just like that, so asked something like 'Where are you going, Walt Whitman?'...

"You know, from the Ginsberg poem, right? Anyway...the old dude gave me this, like, stuffed frog from his backpack... he said he, like, met Ginsberg once and, like, said Oh Captain, My Captain ...

"...And then he, like, ran away... I mean, that's not normal, right? I mean that's weird, right? I mean, it was a joke, sorta, and..."

I put the conversation on speaker, sat it down on the bed to undress. I forgot, momentarily, that I was actually in the midst of a conversation - I actually removed my contacts, stripped, brushed my teeth, all while she was telling her story.

I know. Very rude.

I apologized profusely and pledged to my late-night electronic cohort a free shot to the ol' nutsack next time we meet in person.

* * * *

"So, okay, lemme get this straight... Allen Ginsberg somehow made you a hermit?"

"No. Walt Whitman. But not like the pictures you see. EXACTLY like in Ginsberg's poem. And that homeless guy."

"...S'oookay. So, you've been reading a lot of Ginsberg, ran into a guy who looked like how Ginsberg described another old dude - like Walt Whitman - in grocery store, and YOUR guy gave you a stuffed frog--"

A burst of excitement, a girlsqueak.

"Man, do you believe in curses and shit? I think that crazy homeless guy put, I dunno, a spell on me or something. Is that, well..."

"Um, yeah. Chica...now that's crazy."

I suddenly felt very sorry for eavesdroppers on her side of the conversation, those poor, helpless bastards in that West Hollywood diner, with only bits and pieces of a conversation involving two American poets and a plush toy.

"YES! Dude, I keep having, like, dreams with, like, Jesus, this crazy hobo in them. I'm reading too much - is that weird? Ohmygod, I'm going crazy, right?"

How does one respond to such questions? Does one even attempt an answer? In the wee hours of the morning, half-asleep?

* * * *

From there, the conversation went from only slightly insane to downright absurd.

Dream symbolism, food interactions, even the existential nature of homelessness, Magical Hobo and Phantom Traveler tall tales, time travel, even hauntings and demonic possession.

Maybe Allen Ginsberg was an alien, a creator of a Whitman clone, a madman? Was Walt Whitman?

Or maybe her amphibian-wielding Santa Monica vagrant really was Whitman caught in some time vortex, appearing to Ginsberg back in that supermarket decades ago and now, to her? Maybe Ginsberg was an evil wizard, had trapped Whitman in a poem through some trippy peyote-filled magic spell?

Was the stuffed frog she still had in her over-sized diva purse really a frog? A metaphor? Alien technology, merely stamped with a beer company logo and Made in China label as a form of camouflage?

Was Space/Time Walt Whitman's alien gift somehow bleeding its Beatnik neutrinos into her MAC lip gloss?

Like I said.

From downright batshit insane to downright fucking absurd in under five fucking minutes.

Amazing the places the human mind wanders sometimes. Places where, thankfully, our very real, tangible world refuses our wild imaginations passage in this existence...

... Or does it?

We ended our long, rambling conversation at just past three a.m., my time, midnight in the City of Angels.

I'd dozed off twice. She'd sucked down enough diner coffee, fried eggs, and hash browns to send her into one of those FUCK.... four hours Cardio Sunday... Los Angeleno things.

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation.

If for no other reason than the fact that all human beings lose some sense of reason every now and then.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: On Writing, Drinking, and Writing about Drinking with a Writer who Drinks PBR from an Ancient Plastic Pitcher...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) – There he was, this marvelous young writer, this future ringmaster of the American Literary circus, sitting on the other side of the table, chatting away with his siblings about everything but his writing.

No writer, you see, wants to discuss writing or literature after a reading. Most of the time, readings leave writers on edge, or leave the writer contemplative and waiting, patiently, for some armchair critic to skewer his or her art.

Public readings of your work, of your poetry and prose before a group of mostly faculty and friends, can sure take the fun out of writing. And we'd come to the bar afterwards not to offer up critiques, not to celebrate, but to unwind. Poetry and prose readings, well, take an emotional toll on a writer's friends and family, too.

His father squinted in the bar's orange glow, reading the dedication in his son's masterpiece. His mother glanced around the bar in near silence, radiating her satisfaction at having raised such an asshole of a child. His girlfriend sat across from me, and we did the smalltalk thing, and she rolled her eyes when I rambled on about something she clearly wasn't interested in discussing.

Nobody else at our table was drinking, save for Fatsuit McUmmings, his parents, and myself. And while his parents drank their beers with the class and dignity that comes from having put a son successfully through college, the pair of us writers drank in that great Oxford Fucking Ohio tradition --

Cold cheap beer, straight from ancient plastic pitchers.

* * * *

You see, in the Land o' the Buckeye, from the banks of the Ohio River to the dirty waters of Lake Erie, from James Thurber to Rita Dove to Sherwood Anderson, poetry and prose readings are best followed up with Pabst Blue Ribbon and the best onion rings in town.

Places that serve nice sipping wine after a reading, complete with plates of expensive cheese and crackers and hors d'oeuvre platters, are reserved for literary critics, pompous novelists, and the young twinks and college girls they pay to suck them off in between lectures and workshops. Writers, artists, and scholars should, at all costs, avoid such high-and-mighty events. Blowjobs mean nothing anyway, other than an excuse to keep on a-pounding away on writing and drinking.

Why waste a good bottle of wine recovering from a reading anyway? Who wastes good booze on artists? A good Merlot is best held for private moments with lovers, for a rainy evening alone with just a copy of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal or while dreaming about Chicanas, reading José Antonio Burciaga's essays aloud in the dark.

No, after a reading, after any performance, one should hit up a saloon and drink until the madness of literature is gone. Trust me. I'm a librarian. And librarians know (or should know) these things.

* * * *

Whitman never did this, here in Oxford Fucking Ohio. He died a century too early, without ever having -- GASP! -- heard of that academically-neutered beast we now call Comparative Literature. Ginsberg never sat in this tavern, never stared into the rafters filled with hockey sticks and old jerseys. Allen never howled in the men's room, never gargled semen in the dark corners of the alley outside.

...Well, dude, it's not hard to imagine either man drinking away a Wednesday night with us. And, well, they probably would've been awestruck by Fatsuit McUmmings' reading, too, would've been honored to drink cheap beer, to swap stories...

William Carlos Williams would've been content, to set his Modernist doctor's bag at the end of the peeling hardwood bar for a bourbon. Carl Sandburg would've felt at home singing folk songs, performing Good Morning America into the wee hours of the morning. The floorboards reek of Bukowski and Céline, Albert Camus prowls the shadows. I can smell Steinbeck in the hair of the women from the trailer parks and the flophouses, smell Mark Twain on the college girls and alumni...

When in bars, all men are writers and all writers end up drunk off realistic daydreams of the everyday world...

* * * *

I was, obviously, still lost in that madness of language, still trapped inside the insanity of wordsmithing, storytelling, and other everyday nonsense.

Thank you, cold cheap beer. Seven dollars and fifty cents for one whole pitcher of some bland ambrosia called Bud Light.

“Okay now,” the shift manager hollers at me from behind the bar, “You're drinking that pitcher way too fast. Don't make me cut you off...”

"Wha...? Uh...why, hon?"

"Because you look seriously drunk."

She wouldn't have cut me off, of course. Though the sight of me, the Cuervo-guzzling librarian, drinking beer is about as rare as seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a lump of dogshit.

* * * *

“Why the fuck do you drink so much in that place?” many folks have asked me here in Oxford.

“It's so... weird in there, the people are weird, they let in scary people...”

Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that some of those guys cooking in the kitchen sometimes graduate, sometimes write grand novellas and poetry and short stories, those guys who represent the best the ol' Local U has to offer, men who understand that art is made through the toils of the everyday and not through the whimsical nostalgia of the Academy.

Or maybe it's guys working at the door, spinning yarns about hot women and police raids, maybe it's the hot female bartenders who, well, tell stories about trips to China or about catfights in redneck saloons or who, well, occasionally play grab-ass with certain librarians of ill repute.

Hell, I could write a novel myself about last Saturday night alone, about being felt up by a gay man, about being told that, wow, I'm apparently pretty well-proportioned in certain places, about whispering into one sister's ear, half-joking, that I'd love to take her home and break her in half and whispering into the other sister's ear some drunken nonsense about taking her home, too...

Yes, I behaved very badly last Saturday. But it'd make a great story someday. Maybe I'll write about it...

Daydreams whilst drinking cold, cheap beer, straight from the goddamn pitcher. How sweet it is, sometimes, to be free to dream, to write, to think.

Shit, dude, you do get a lot of decent essays outta this fucking place, don't you?

* * * *

I stared down into my almost empty pitcher. Lost. My mind, lost.

I'd been hitting the Bud Light just a little too quick. For all the liquor I can drink, beer is my kryptonite.

“Hey! You're usually not this quiet!” Fatsuit McUmmings' girlfriend says. “So what did you think of ____'s reading?”

I really didn't know how to answer the question. My mind, lost...

I'd been thinking again, daydreaming within the madness. Singing the body electric within my own mind, absorbing both my song and my surroundings like a sponge.

And I was praying that, yes, by having helped Fatsuit McUmmings edit his work before its final presentation, by showing up to bear witness to his artistry, I'd helped keep the world from having to see another greatest mind of our generation destroyed by madness...

* * * *

“So how do you think your image around town as a 'playa'... not 'player' but 'playa' ... librarian,” a colleague recently asked, “...reflects upon your colleagues and this institution...?”

Well, somebody's gotta do it.

What do I think? Hey, don't hate the playa, hate the game. Blame Archibald MacLeish, too, for setting such a miserable example as to the risks librarians are supposed to take, the games they're supposed to play with writers, artists, researchers, and other madmen of knowledge.

He's the former Librarian of Congress, the one who cleaned up that bureaucratic clusterfuck back in the 1940s, the one who won all of those Pulitzer Prizes as a poet, the guy who hung out with the likes of Hemingway and FDR yet never went to Library School, the one who, well, tried to make modern librarianship a part of the modern literary establishment...

MacLeish wasn't much of a drinker. And, well, I do have an ALA-accredited master's degree, which makes me, technically, a librarian. MacLeish never bothered to waste thousands of bucks on the parchment...

MacLeish never lived in Oxford Fucking Ohio or worked with its hard-drinking patrons, either. He's also been dead since the 1980s...

And I don't see too many other librarians – we, the supposed gatekeepers of literature, of the various records of humanity and society – out at 11 o'clock on a Wednesday night, drinking with the folks who will one day produce our next great wave of great books.

All library usage is, at the end of the day, a local phenomenon. How better to understand the natives than to simply embrace them as friends, compatriots, even, at times, lovers? Why hide behind something as silly as a degree and a job title, when it's just as easy to wade into the jungle, to ravage the tender brains and bodies and souls of those asking to be played or who beg for the sweet, satisfying release of knowledge, accomplishment?

* * * *

The party broke up with a whimper and a few hugs. Fatsuit McUmmings and I were the only two left, so we moved our discussion to the bar. The shift manager had just punched out for the night, was just beginning to nurse her first drink.

She joined us, stirred her cocktail, and, as usual, giggled for no reason whatsoever.

I wonder if she was thinking about how much of a fucktard some librarians can be sometimes, especially when drunk on beer? Or if she was thinking about Fatsuit McUmmings, how unliterary he can be when he's got a few pitchers in him, about how, well, he never seems to forget that writing's his real job and that working his way through college as a cook is just, well, a research grant with a bit of beer money thrown in for good measure...

She does this often, just gets these sparkles in her eyes and laughs at the strangest things. Her full-time job, besides working at a bar to pay for school, is as a visual artist.

Pfft. Artists. And their sparkling giggles, their whiskey-cokes, their smiles and their art.

Madness. Sheer madness, built upon the insane foundations of knowledge...

* * * *

“So what'd you think? Holy shit, dude, you wouldn't believe how nervous I fucking was...”

“You did great, man! Now, it's smooth sailing until graduation. And I loved how the e.e. cummings - influenced poem turned out...”

“Fuck! I'm just glad it's over. Man, I'm so ready to graduate it's not even funny.”

And then, after the booze kicked in, after our egos had been greased down to an honest purr, then could we discuss writing and literature. And, yes, it was intermixed with crude comments about women's breasts, with references to the overrated genius of guys like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, critiqued some of the mixed-media, post-modernist absurdism that's blanketed the literary landscape for the last few years...

Mostly, however, we talked tits.

Tits are wondrous things. There isn't a straight man in the world who doesn't marvel at both their purpose and their aesthetics.

Yes, motherfucker, yes! We can, yes, still write about tits in this grand Information Age! We can sculpt them from paper and clay, from stone and atop a laptop keyboard! We can drink and be merry and puke in the alleys, be failures and martyrs and cocksuckers. We can do lines off our cable modems, carve sonnets and sestinas and novels into the backs of the spiders of our World Wide Web...

What good is information technology, after all, if we forget that knowledge itself is the key to our own madness, to building our beautiful creations of song and word, that all else is gimmickry and whiz-bang farts into the bedsheets of humanity?

"Hah. Uh, yeah. The librarian's fucking wasted!"

Goddamn writers, librarians, and their swinging cocks full of jism, knowledge, Carl Sandburg's “The Fog,” and jokes about fucking your mother in the ass. Just keep the pitcher's flowing, and neither will have anything to bitch about...

Hey, don't hate the playa. Hate the game, baby, THE GAME!

- # # # -

LONG NIGHTS WITH THE ZENFO PRO: Defying Librarian Stereotypes, One RenFest-Hating Shot at a Time

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- For the record, nobody I hang out with on a regular basis ever calls me The ZenFo Pro.

Hell, I'm lucky if anybody I know even bothers to call me Jason.

The night this photo (at left) was taken, months ago, the women who requested I join them for one of just about every damned shot at a certain Oxford bar simply referred to me as that guy.

According to my staff, colleagues, and friends, there are several others floating around Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Some of the nicknames are flattering; some are probably meant to somehow piss me off.

To many folks, I'm known simply as The Librarian. I'm also known as The Cowboy, Tex, Boots, Drunken Master, Brokeback Librarian, The Motherfucking Asshole Who Slept with My Girlfriend / Ex-girlfriend / Friend's Girlfriend, Professor Punker, Old School, Peaches (no clue on that one), the Hot Librarian, The Chach Hunter, and, of course, That Weird Guy from the Library with the Blog.

But there's one nickname that only friends are allowed to call me here in Oxford, particularly in bars, taverns, or, well, wherever fine libations are served.

Church Lady.

Does the picture above make anybody think of church?

* * * *

Yes, Church Lady.

As in The Church Lady, a recurring Saturday Night Live character from the 80s and 90s.

A buddy of mine gave me that unusual nickname a few months back.

Whenever he thinks of librarians, or people who work in libraries, he usually thinks of Dana Carvey's legendary Bible-thumping, uptight, crotchety prude.

I'm sure the fact that my buddy thinks of Dana Carvey's character as being symbolic of the physical appearance of librarians just pisses the hell out of a lot of folks.

C'mon people. Lighten the fuck up.

Have you ever seen that stupid Librarian Action Figure? The outfits, stiff movements, and glasses are virtually identical. Who the fuck do you think most people think of when they hear the word Librarian? Winston Churchill? Cameron Diaz? Roger Clemens? Betty Paige?

Please.

Give Mr. Carvey's character 700 cats (20 of which are named after Jane Austen characters), a stack of genre fiction on the night stand and an overworked vibrator in a drawer, and, well, you've created the Perfect Librarian Stereotype...

* * * *

This morning, I had one of those oh-so-awkward run-ins with a woman I briefly dated (i.e., a fling) at the grocery store. She was back in town, helping a friend move.

She told me she'd dated another librarian, in the city she currently calls home, a few months ago. It didn't last long, apparently.

Jason, I never thought of you as a librarian. You're more like going home with a cop or a construction worker or something...

...Oh my God. He took me to a RenFest. A RenFest! And he recommended that I dress like an elf or hobbit or some shit. The dude was fucking weird, like serial killer nerd weird...

...I mean, you're weird but not like scary homeless guy weird...

You know, I've only been to one Renaissance Festival, ever.

I ended up puking in a porta-john for 20 minutes. I was seventeen. The bellyful of Thunderbird, combined with an overabundance of guys who reminded me of more obnoxious, armored versions of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, drove me to purge away a perfectly good afternoon.

I'm not knocking real-life Comic Book Guys here. Comic book conventions? I can deal with Comic Cons, no problem. Get me into a good debate about the DC Universe, about how Ted Kord was a much better Blue Beetle than either Dan Garrett or the new kid, and I'm set for an afternoon.

Hell, there are more hot women working in comic book stores than in most strip clubs. I quit collecting comic books because, well, I tend to get into quite a bit of trouble when there's a fangirl involved.

But RenFests? Nope. It's psychosomatic.

Fake broadswords and Highlander wannabes? Well, even writing about them now makes my stomach churn.

* * * *

So Friday night, a couple of friends of mine, including the guy who named me Church Lady, turned their garage into a concert venue, a celebration of Oxford Fucking Ohio's biggest holiday - the annual Running (Away) of the Local U. Kiddies.

Two local punk bands, no cover. Enough booze and cheap beer to deliver Boris Yeltsin unto Russian Alcoholic Valhalla in working-class style.

It reminded me of, well, my high school days - a bit of soothing balm for the ol' Quarter-Life Crisis. I'm fairly certain that I was the oldest guy at the party, actually.

With age comes a lower alcohol tolerance and, well, by midnight I was already nursing a pending hangover from earlier in the evening, dulling the pain with a second round of intoxication.

Let's put it this way. I'm going to be 29 next year. I've been attending impromptu garage rock-outs in college towns since I was 13 years old. It is probably not the best idea to leave me alone for too long near the keg.

One of the nasty little reminders that I'm, well, approaching the beginning of my fourth decade on this planet is the fact that my poor ears are a bit sensitive to prolonged concert-volume music. I've already sustained some hearing loss, thanks to my own years playing in various punk and hardcore bands back in the day, so I'm extra careful about spending too much time in small, reverberating pits o' sound.

At one point, I stepped out of the garage to let my ears rest and to get some fresh air. The bands were breathtaking, but the large crowd was downright suffocating.

A pair of intoxicated women huddled together against the building, arguing about whether to continue drinking my friends' free beer or move on to the next party.

I lit a cigarette. One of the women, mid-sentence, turned to me and asked if I'd be willing to bum her a cancer stick. I obliged and, well, being a bit too tipsy to be better behaved, I butted into their conversation. The smoking girl, my tobacco thief, seemed to appreciate the male attention.

"So do you live here?"

"Nope. But I know the hosts. Name's Jason, by the way."

"I'm _______.So what do you do? Do you go here?"

"Nope. I'm a librarian."

"Nuh-uh."

"Yep."

"Nuh-uh. Where?"

"______ Library."

"Nuh-uh. You're too young."

"How old do you think I am?"

"Um... 23?"

Bless you, my child. Nice to know that I won't be mistaken for a stupid librarian action figure anytime in the near future.

* * * *

I was almost willing to forgive the fact that one of her friends ended up puking all over me and one of the party's hosts.

Definitely not the kind of women I'd ever allow to call me Church Lady, much less allow the chance to develop their own pet names in more, er, intimate settings.

Ugh. Regurgitated corn and rum. My jeans were covered in the stuff. I simply scraped the kernels off with a stick and kept on going.

The smell reminded me of that RenFest porta-john. And I haven't even seen the bottom of a bottle of Thunderbird in more than a decade.

* * * *

I managed to make my way home by four o'clock in the morning. I grabbed a quick slice of cold pita bread from the fridge, put some Magic Sam on the stereo, and tossed my vomit-covered jeans in the shower to further ripen.

I stretched out, butt-naked on the bed, reading the same line from Ginsberg's "Howl" over and over until I finally crashed:

...they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy...

No, I wasn't thinking about something literary or snobbishly intelligent.

I was thinking about the Orioles being in second place in the American League East, despite going winless against Oakland and Boston last week. I was hoping, somewhere in my half-sober superstitious state, that somehow reading the line over and over, here in Ohio, would jinx Cleveland for the weekend series.

* * * *

I think I passed out at five or five-thirty. I awoke at 9:30, fight as a fiddle, with only the smell of corn and rum soup to remind me of the previous night.

The compact disc changer had played through all five CDs in the stereo - the sounds of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the Wu-Tang Clan, KMFDM, and, of course, Magic Sam drifting through the apartment.

Well now ...

Isn't that special?

- # # # -