Q.) How did you get into punk rock? What were you into before?

A.) I was never big into music, but I went from listening to Carol King and Joni Mitchell to buying a Patti Smith album because of a review in Rolling Stone. The first listen, I didn’t get it, but by the third I was hooked!

At about the same time someone was posting Personals ads in the Reader which were kind of arty and witty and abstract—not ‘boy seeks girl’ stuff at all—and signing them ZaZa Lipsoidic. The Reader did an article on him with a picture, and in the interview the subject, Alex Hirka, mentioned he was into Patti Smith and punk rock. This was the first other person I ever heard of who was into punk, so the weekend of the Patti Smith concert I posted an ad saying something like, ‘ZaZa, was that you at Patti’s show? If so, it was love at first sight,’ etc etc, and signed it ‘TigerLady.’ After going back and forth a bunch of times he finally proposed that we meet, and we did, and we wound up seeing each other until he moved to NYC. He was the one who turned me onto LaMere.

Q.) Can you describe the era, paint me a picture of what it looked like, what it felt like at LaMere’s?

A.) Back then I was hanging out at a place on Devon (in Chicago) called Cunneen’s, where they played Emmilou Harris and Ry Cooder. If I told someone I was into punk they either looked at me horrified, or would ask me what I was so angry about. I brought the Horses album in with me once and asked the bartender to play it (they had a turntable behind the bar) and he let it go for about 10 seconds and then pulled it off. I was furious!

I wound up at LaMere probably only because Alex had attended the initial Punk Night, after seeing the ad in the Reader. (LaMere had been a gay disco and was in decline, but bartenders Sparkle and Taco worked at a record store and talked the owner, Noah, into doing punk one night. It was so successful he practically went punk overnight.) I was in Key West hanging out for about a month, and when I got back I started going with Alex and quickly became a punk widow. I was very shy, but used the punk ‘attitude’ to mask my extreme discomfort with trying to get along with a crowd of people. But everyone was such an oddball and nobody really paid attention to what you were doing— it was completely laissez faire.

Q.) Was it a female friendly environment? Did you ever feel as free as men to engage in activities of your choice?

A.) I was never very feminine, and never really woman-identified— probably more half and half. I bought my first motorcycle that first summer that LaMere was open, and eventually wound up working at a bike shop doing mechanical stuff and riding cross country.

But, no, I don’t remember feeling like I wasn’t accepted or suffered at all in any way because I was female. I remember trying to use the john at LM and finding men in the stalls, and men and women doing coke on the counter. I was propositioned by a woman with red hair and heart shaped eyeglass lenses, who wanted me to engage in a threesome with her husband. I remember she gave me her business card which I seem to recall indicated she worked for the electric company in Indiana. Once some guy started yakking at me, telling me that he could tell by looking at me that I was into S&M and that he would be the right person to guide me into that, blah blah blah, but I don’t recall feeling threatened or intimidated. I just walked away.

However, there were women there that obviously felt very free to explore their fantasies in this public arena. There was a woman named Mary, I seem to recall, who wore tap pants and camisole tops— underwear, basically, with high heels, all made up, and walked around the place like that all night, night after night. She seemed very comfortable and appeared to be having fun— and didn’t have guys pawing at her, or bothering her, that I saw. Then there were the ‘Tutu Ladies,’ who wore tutus and did pirouettes and other balletic movements on the dance floor. They were bizarre, and seemed to be in a world of their own. They returned time and time again, even won the Halloween contest with their joint costume— white tutus with big blue, red and green spots on them— called “Dot.” I ran into a guy at the recent reunion night who remembered them, and he mentioned one night they came in chained to each other.

There was another woman named Claire, tall and very thin, red hair, used to wear spike heeled boots and was rumored to have a stiletto blade knife in her boot leg that she would pull out if someone was messing with her. She was always there with her boyfriend who I don’t remember anything about.

Q.) Did you ever aspire to be in a band? How did you feel about the other women in bands?

A.) I think I had a fantasy about that, but I sound like a frog when I sing and I have no sense of musical timing. I think maybe that’s why Patti (Smith) appealed to me so much. I’m not sure that I felt one way or another about women in bands— I loved Debbie Harry, and Annabelle in Bow Wow Wow. I used to wish that Tina in Talking Heads was more assertive, but then she went and did Tom Tom Club with her girl relatives. One person who bugged me was Exene in X, that girl did not MOVE when she performed— no swaying, no toe tapping, nothing, kind of like Sade.

Q.) What about all the people who went there? I’ve heard stories of a person who walked around on all fours like a dog and even tried to hump someone’s leg. Who were all these people? Can you describe some of the notable characters and where are they now?

A.) The only people I knew from LaMere that I still know today are Alex Hirka, and Denise Turner. I don’t remember any other people specifically, other than those I mentioned above. In general, there was a gay crowd, everyone dressed like bikers (though I was the only one I recall who had a motorcycle parked out front), it was very high energy. I remember some of the dancers deliberately slamming into people on the dance floor and I remember the bartenders were a bunch of nuts. There was one guy called Luna who was always having some little drama going on and having very feminine meltdowns. I remember a very heavy nurse who called herself Sheena setting up a piercing booth on the 2nd floor. I remember Beluga doing his performances, some of which were pretty outrageous. Once he pulled some guy out of the crowd and shaved his head on the dance floor. I mentioned it at a party once years later and some guy that was present said he was with that guy the night that happened, that it was totally impromptu and his buddy just went along with it.

I also remember that the police started busting the place for not carding and letting minors in and Sparkle and Taco (the bartenders who worked at Sounds Good) were very angry with Noah for letting anybody in, cuz they felt he was being greedy and irresponsible. One night Beluga came in dressed like a cop and ‘raided’ the place as his performance that night, and afterward all the bartenders wanted to throttle him because he had scared the bejeezis out of them, they all thought they were going to jail again.

Oh yeah, there was the guy Todd who hung out with the Tutu Ladies. I remember he always looked waif-like, and one night he wore trap door PJs, with the trap door down and his naked butt exposed. He had pierced his butt cheek with a giant safety pin and did not look very comfortable all night. There was a gal named Punky who wore Catholic school uniforms and had her hair dyed red with shading that made it look like an animal skin. She supposedly committed suicide, I think I recall hearing.

Of course there was Mary Alice, who was small, but loud and brassy, always carrying on about something and enjoying her status as a self-styled punk journalist and— dare I say?— groupie of Joey Ramone. In a lot of ways it was very high-schoolish, and people in general seemed really really young— barely out of their teens. There was a huge exodus of people moving to New York and you’d hear folks talking about it and sometimes Mary Alice would make fun of someone for going. I remember she talked about so-and-so once and said that she thought she had gotten a job doing laundry for a certain band.

People were doing poppers on the dance floor, smoking doobies under the south wall along the dance floor and of course, there were drugs galore in the bathrooms. It was rather annoying if you had to actually pee.

Speaking of which, Alex and I used to get into the band parties that occurred after record-signings at Sounds Good. We climbed the alley wall once and then when we were discovered they invited us to everything. I was at one for the Ramones and another time I got to meet Robert Gordon and have a dollar bill signed by all the guys in his group. I have a bunch of T-Shirts and posters and buttons and pins from the time, and a red scarf with ‘The Stranglers’ printed on it.

As an aside, I used to take the train in from Evanston and play racquetball with a girlfriend at the Y on Sunday mornings, after which I would go to the Luxor bath house on North Ave for hours and hours on end. I would bring a bunch of punk and new wave albums to play for her. One morning her roommate, a very exotic-looking Mexican girl that we knew from high school (Lake View), came downstairs and saw the Elvis Costello album cover and shouted, “Sally, that’s him, that’s the guy I met last night at Yahtzee’s!!!” Elvis was apparently out with his manager after a gig at the Aragon that I had attended and was trying to pick up this gal, but she was having none of it— had never heard of him before! My jaw dropped to the floor!

Q.) And how about you Kris, what did you do after LaMere burned? Where did you go after that? As I understand it, most LaMere people did not like going to O’Banion’s.

A.) I hated O’Banion’s. It was too big and lacked that coziness that LM had. I never found another place like LaMere. I lived in a house in Evanston near the Northwestern campus and at one time all my roommates were gay women on the NU women’s tennis team, so we started going out dancing nightly to the women’s bars— CK’s, Augies, the LadyBug, etc.

I had worked for Windy City/Jam Productions ‘frisking’ (a brief patting) women at the door of the Aragon Ballroom— to pull bottles, cans, knives and other weapons off them— and got into the punk and new wave shows for free whenever I wanted. That’s how I saw Patti Smith her first time in Chicago and the place was half full only. I went to Neo’s a bunch of times just to dance, but the atmosphere was totally different, it was trying to be a Euro disco and people were too self-conscious and posing. At LaMere it was more of a spontaneous acting out, although there were some folks who were trying so hard to be seen.

I wound up tending bar at a place called Maxtavern, working side by side with Gavin Morrison and got to listen to all the punk and new wave I wanted to there. Gavin is the guy whose pics were shown at the LM reunion. I don’t recall seeing him there, but I stopped going to LM late in 1977— I had been seeing another guy after Alex left Chicago who I brought to LM, and he got so into it that I became a LM widow again, and he became a doorman there. We broke up and I just didn’t feel comfortable going there anymore. Plus, it had gotten too touristy and was being raided by frat boys looking for a freak show and they were the type that would get in your face and bug you.

Q.) How do you feel about the renewed interest in the LaMere generation? Do you think we’ll be seeing more of you folks coming out to shows now?

A.) I think LaMere was a fascinating phenomenon, but it’s long gone. We all grew up, got married, got jobs, got pregnant, etc etc etc.

Now that there’s no smoking in public places I have been getting out more, but I’m not sure I’m going to do punk and heavy rock. It took me almost a week to recover from pogo dancing at the LM reunion at Club Foot! Thanks for opportunity to reminisce— it was fun!

I’ll never fully recover
I’ll never really completely get her
out of my system
We spent years together
raging against the reality
of the world.
We created our own world,
a false and sometimes
magnificent world
that was all our
own.

But it all came crashing down
when we came to the realization
that our peace
was really just an imitation
of the real
thing.
Our love
was just an imitation
of the real
thing.

We tried and
we failed,
but to have never tried
would be much worse than
that of our failure.

She writes me
every now and then
and it pains me to know
that this beautiful
brilliant
goddess
of a woman
who no longer
shares the bed with me
is doing worse now
that what we had is
over.

I want to rise up
and take her into my
arms and erase the troubles
the fear
the depression
I want to make her all better
and I want her to
sport an infinite and
radiant smile.

We fucked and
fought
and made out
in public restrooms
and alleyways
and kept each other
from a single day
or night
of boredom.

I can’t erase the past
and I can’t take back
what I did or said in the
dark times of our demise
but I can now tell you, babe,
you improved my life
immensely
even now,
sitting sipping on a cold beer
at this typer.

I can’t take back what was
said or done
but I can tell you now
I can now sit in this room alone
think of her
and not feel any resentment
or bitterness towards
her at all.

We’ve come a long way
and I just wanted to let you
and everyone else know
that the sun rises.
It’s even rising now as I
hold up this beer to my lips
and type out this poem with love,
baby, with love.

———————————————————————

For: The foxy gal waiting tables at Pint who doesn’t know
what to write poetry about.

Poetry can be about:

A cocaine razorblade
looking for a wrist
to cut

The black lace panties
of the foxy Italian girl
that poke just ever so slightly
out the top of the back of
her jeans
as she bends
to pick up her bag-
jutting out her perfect
ass sending you into
orgasmic bliss

The piss-drunk old man
on the park bench that reeks
of piss
shit
and alcohol

Losing yourself
in her broken bluesy whisper
over conversation on
Sylvia Plath

A lone mouth
searching for
a scream

Screwing a girl
or boys brains out
in a seedy nighttime
movie theater

Concussion number
2,000 from yet
another hazy
drunken night

Staring into the
large mouth opening
of a 24 ounce can
of Old Style

Sleeping 15 solid hours
in a twin bed with
the most beautiful
girl you’ve ever
had the privilege of
knowing-
let alone touching

A continuous blood flow
drip dripping from
your nose
from a night of blow

A walk through the
starry streets
of whatever
city you may
be in

A drunken
drug-fueled
fistfight
with your old lady

Killing your enemies
dousing them
in lighter fluid
and burning the motherfuckers
in front of their women
and children

Holding hands
and kissing
on a rickety rusty
carnival
ferriswheel

A sweaty beery smoky
basement show
featuring your
favorite punk-rock bands

Feeding ducks
at the park all alone
on a sunny Saturday afternoon

A girl who once
held onto you
but who now
is holding on for
dear life

Bukowski
Carver
Fante
Faulkner
Crews
R. Perez
Selby
Cometbus
Burroughs
Ginsberg
Cassady
Kerouac

Things you wish
you could tell her
but
can’t

Losing your wedding ring
on a regretfully boozy
evening consisting
of being 86′d
and stomped
to shit

Your first
second
third
fourth
birthday without her
by your side

Waking up
covered in mud
blood
and beer
and having no
recollection
of what
happened

Smashing your thumb
with a rubber mallet
trying to drive a spike
through a baseball bat
to fend off
imaginary
burglars

Shooting a raccoon
in your basement
after you thought you
had rid of
the son of a bitch
for good

Cunts and cocks
and eyes and smiles
and teeth

Drunkenly dancing
your ex-girlfriend
across the icy
sidewalk
outside the bar
in front of her current
boyfriend

See?

Poetry can be about
anything you
want it to be
so long as you follow
your heart’s
purest thoughts

That’s my secret
in plain view
FOLLOW
YOUR
HEART

So,
now that I’ve let
the cat out of
the bag
revealed my trick
my secret-
you’d best
get crackin’,
kid.

written by RebeccaB

We ignore
What we do see
The violence, the hate
The atrocities
Ku Klux Klan
They must have the right plan
Look at their cross
The way they act the boss
Showing no fear
Causing their tears

The whips upon chains
The cries, brutal pain
Death in the streets
Treated like beasts
Just for skin color
Aren’t we all sisters and brothers?
All from the same father?
Then why do you even bother
Trying to hate
Discriminate
Just because someone’s black?
That idea’s way off track
Sorry man you’ve got it wrong

This poetry sings out a song
Brothers and sisters is what we are
I know that feeling goes very far
We’re all equal,we’re all same
So just leave it alone
But to each their own
I won’t stop you, do what you do
But in the end, when all is through
The punishment will be on you
Ku Klux Klan
It’s the wrong plan
They aren’t the boss
They just burn that cross.

I can look out, into nothing
with my eyes squinted, hazy, dusty, smoky.
Hold my eyes closed and see.

I can see my mother walking beside my father’s
blue 1967 Chevy convertible, refusing to get in
as we coast slowly along, she at the roadside.
I can feel the cold white leather seats
on my young thighs and behind as my two older sisters
sit in silence beside me.

I can see my father slamming hard on his breaks,
jerking the car into park, exiting the vehicle,
hear the frightened cry of my oldest sister
‘He hit her! Oh my God! He hit her!’.
I can still see my mother getting up off the ground,
blood oozing from her nose from where my father had
just slapped her to the ground.
Hear her sobs as she steps back into the now parked car seconds before
my father begins driving again.
I can still hear my father shouting at me from the front seat
to knock off all ‘that goddamn noise’
as I’m reciting the ABC’s aloud so as to ease my terrified 5 year old mind,
so as to hold the tears building up from bursting from my eyelids.

Then-

I can open my eyes. Blink. Reopen my eyes.
See clearly. See the beautiful sunlight.
Breathe in the clean fresh pure air.
Feel at one with all that is around me.
Peace.
See, I can play make believe.
That’s my trick.

My father lay there on the hospital bed with a bandage covering the right side of his throat from the esophagus cancer surgery he’d just had. He lay there limp, weak, helpless. My pop, the man who served 5 years in the U.S. military between 1962 and 1967, the toughest son of a bitch I’d ever known lay there not even able to lift his arms to feed himself the ice chips the nurse’s had left for him to keep his mouth from drying out too badly.

The rest of the family, my girlfriend, and brother in-law were all there, too frightened to feed him the ice chips so I did it. Leaning over him with a plastic spoon in my hand I gently dropped a few ice chips into his mouth, a thin-lipped Belgian mouth that he inherited from his father, the same thin-lipped mouth I inherited from him.

As I was feeding him my pop opened his eyes half way to tell me ‘Matt. Matthew. You’ll always be my favorite son…’ before passing back out into a drug-induced sleep, snoring away like an overgrown, stubbly, fast-talkin’, hell-raisin’ son of a bitch, that my pop is.

Maybe it was the drugs talking or just a poor use of words or maybe he was just trying to joke around to let the family know he was okay but I mean of course I’ll always be his favorite son, I’m the fuckin’ guy’s only son.

This was heavy. Yes, the surgery was successful. The doctors had caught the cancer early enough and were able to cut it out of his body. But, to see the man you once boasted to your childhood friends about for having the ability to lift a house over his head if he felt like it knocked out and beaten, looking so frail, so weak, so close to the other side, this weighed on me.

I didn’t know it then but the events that unfolded that day had shaped and molded me in more ways than one and made me realize in order to not explode completely from the inside I was going to have to start doing something, anything, to get these things, these feelings, these monsters out that live inside of me.

On the drive back from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Chicago from my dad’s cancer surgery that night my long time girlfriend announced to me that she no longer wanted to see me. I’ve written about this in the past quite extensively and am somewhat tired of the subject as it’s become mundane and we’ve recently made peace so I’ll just say it made quite an impact and certainly molded me into who and what I am today for better or worse.

After the split I found myself living in a dumpy dingy dive with 4 other people in a 3 bedroom apartment. I lived there for 9 months and was drunk and depressed and doing drugs the entire time. I’d lay in bed blasting sad broken hearted love songs and drink until I couldn’t see. I wasn’t writing music or doing anything creatively. I had no outlet.

With no outlet and no place to go my behavior went from rational to irrational. My thought was that there’s no reason to even try acting rational in an irrational world where lovers turn their backs on one another and world leaders kill off women and children for their own financial benefit. This world was not kind. It was fucked up and I hated it and wanted to destroy it.

I went from bad to worse: Throwing glasses in bartender’s faces, pissing on people’s kitchen floors at parties, kicking in headlights of parked cars, smashing bottles into my own face out of drunken spite, drunken pain, etc. I had a fist full of problems and nowhere to go with them and noone to talk to.

This was where I learned I could hold my own with the best boozers in the world and where I discovered that I could get a woman to find interest in me. After my long-term relationship ended I never thought I could get another girl to speak to me again. Soon I was out womanizing and pouring booze down my throat at least 5 days a week.

I was always coming home in the morning from a night of drinking covered in bruises and cuts and couldn’t explain them. I had no recollection of what had gone on many times after bar close and often couldn’t even tell you whose floor I had woken up on or who the girl sawing logs in bed beside me was before sneaking out of her house and making my way back home.

My only accomplishments in those days was meeting some great people, making friends, staying out of jail, and getting and holding down a social service job working as a job counselor with developmentally disabled (mentally retarded) adults. Despite the benefits though, this wasn’t quite enough to soothe and satisfy my diseased and damaged brain.

After 9 months I moved into another 3 bedroom apartment with another 4 people. I was drinking like a fish and tried getting into martial arts to distract me from myself and help me relax. It worked for a little while but then it took a backseat to booze before becoming something nonexistent in my life.

I wasn’t quite as self-destructive anymore in the way of physical injuries even though my drinking had gotten even worse. This was where I learned I needed a 15 pack of Old Style or a fifth of Mad Dog 20/20 every single night to make the screaming in my head come to a soft and subtle whisper.

I could drink my beer and hang out at home playing my own records. I didn’t need or want people around, but when I’d lay down for bed 2 or 3 hours past the time I should have been in bed that’s when it would all begin, all the darkness. In my head I’d make a list of my failures in life and this was death to have your mind screaming at you, keeping you from even a second of rest. Suicidal thoughts and heartache and wanting, needing something else, but what? I didn’t have any answers. The slate was black.

I was miserable and it was obvious. Friends of mine knew I wrote record reviews but they told me they thought I was capable of writing about so much more than solely music. ‘What would I write about, though?’ I asked them. ‘Anything. Whatever you want. Get it off your chest…’

I can’t remember when I sat down and wrote it but the first thing I wrote was a sloppy untrained raw abstract musing on how my life was spiraling out of control but how I still had hope that I could get things back to ‘normal’, if you could ever call my life that, again. I titled it Untitled, like how I felt, and to me though sloppy, much like most of my work done even as little back as a year ago, it still holds a certain beginner’s charm and was done in some ways like an unschooled similar style as Last Exit To Brooklyn.

After writing this story, if you will, I felt good. It all just poured out of me and I felt for the first time in almost a year like I had accomplished something. That ‘something’ was getting feelings out of me onto paper that I didn’t feel comfortable enough to talk about with my friends. It was like a gorilla being lifted off my chest.

I started writing more and more, feeling good, ambitious. I published my first zine around this time and named it after my favorite song, Panic Attack. I did a few readings around town and they were all well-received and the zine was being bought and given good reviews.

Feeling good and ambitious didn’t last long though and soon I was off to drinking more heavily than ever and when I’m drinking I can’t write. It would be months before I would even sit and try to write another word.

I was out on the town a lot by this point. Parties, punk shows, bars, literary events. People were introducing me to their friends as a writer. ‘writer? Me?’ I thought. I just grinned and talked the talk, feeling like a fraud. How could I be a writer when I haven’t written a thing in months? Every writer I knew wrote and seeing as I wasn’t writing squat I wasn’t a writer. Not in my eyes.

Frustrated, I sat down one night after receiving emails and requests to have me out reading. I sat there and started typing and what came out was good. Real good. Surprisingly, taking a couple months off without writing had somehow made me a better writer. So I sat back down the next day and more words came and soon I was on my way. I had somehow managed to sit in my little room in my underwear with a cup of coffee and type out a very well written fiction story about a girl trying to send a boy, the hero of the story, to AA against his will, which easily displayed the finest dialogue I had written at the time.

Satisfied, I ran off to the liquor store, feeling accomplished, and went on another 2 month bender where I wrote virtually nothing, save for the occasional poem. Poetry is a nice easy form. You can knock it all out in one page and when you nail it you feel perfection in the printed form, the best feeling I’ve experienced yet. But unfortunately the booze man was right across the street and he gave me the store discount on 15 packs of Old Style and like I said earlier, when I’m drinking I can’t write and from 5 pm to 1 am Monday through Thursday I was drinking. Weekends I didn’t stop drinking. There was no time to write so I drank and drank and blasted my music and broke a few hearts, never really able to get over my own broken heart. The booze was keeping it all at bay and without writing these beasts and demons inside me were beginning to gnaw away at my insides and grow stronger than ever.

A year went by and I moved into an apartment with one roommate who worked different hours than I. I had the run of the place from around 5 to 8 or 9 pm on most nights. I used these valuable hours I could be using for writing, for drinking beer and sitting on my ass or staring a hole into the floor.

Alcohol shakes weren’t new to me but they had started coming on so strong that they were becoming obvious to my parents and co-workers. They’d ask if everything was okay and I’d just tell them ‘too much coffee’. Just one sip will stop the shakes but to be going through withdraws of this kind is not healthy, or natural. Your nerves have got to be pretty fucking damaged and your body, chemically dependant, on the substance you’re using/abusing.

Nights were getting even worse and I was missing many days of work. No vacation or sick or personal time left for me and I was only halfway through the year. All pissed away from weekend benders that didn’t end on Sunday morning. At night I’d think of the stories I’d written and had plans of sending them out to be published but my brain would begin screaming from inside my skull ‘Punk-ass motherfucker! Why ya gonna send that SHIT out, man? It’s fuckin’ bullshit! You look and sound like a pussy! Noone’s gonna take it ’cause nobody’s THAT fuckin’ stupid! Phony little bitch!’ and I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off, shut it up.

Then it hit me, out of the blue, like a baseball bat to a kneecap, I came up with an idea: I’ll write that motherfucker’s mouth shut and anybody else who ever doubts or disrespects me again, I’ll write their ass into the ground. Kill ‘em all with these words. These words are all I got.

The next day I sat down and decided whether it be good, bad, or the other, I wasn’t going to stop until I could breathe normally again. I pecked away and away feverishly for hours on end, sweat dripping down my nose, eyes blazing with a scowl on my face nailing poems to the walls, drilling these words into the heart’s of those I loved and hated. These were poems of love and hatred and understanding and searching and compassion and broken hearts and sadness. These poems were my bullets.

The next day I wrote more and more and with a bit of time the prose began to form again and more stories were written, not so romantic this time around, aged, finely. The passion had returned and I swore then that I wouldn’t let it escape again.

With writing, and I won’t lie, it did take years, I was finally, eventually, able to overcome a broken heart and the mortality of myself and my loved ones and I did it all alone with only myself to thank. The screaming in my head has stopped and at this time I can say I am well, though I am not a saint. In fact I can be mean, selfish, strange, withdrawn, egotistical, sloppy drunk, and obnoxious. But deep in my heart I know, and those closest to me know what’s really lurking about in there. Nothing ever comes up roses and sunshine for me but I feel I’ve moved slightly away from the darkness. I don’t know if I can stay in the light for long. Only time will tell. But mark my words: when the writing has finally come to a permanent stop, it’s probably pretty safe to assume that the authorities are zipping my limp, lifeless body up and dragging my carcass out of my house in a body bag.

I’m addicited to hope.
Everyday I shoot faith into my blood.
I dream to believe,
but my reality is less than I perceive.

Days run short.
The end comes closer.
I’m nearing the final stage.
Of this false I’m falling off into a bitter age.

It’s a wound which will never heal.
It doesn’t speak it yells in RAGE!
To engage in what it feels.
To engage in what’s not real.

Relentless
Relentless
Relentless
It won’t let me go

I’m addicited to hope.
Everyday I shoot faith into my blood.

29 and wasting time at work. . . Work was a retail retirement home of some 85 years. Immediately following the holidays comes the mediocre task of markdowns. You know, dropping prices to clearance. Pink on blue. Pink price stickers over the old blue ones. Drone work. Standing in front of a clothes rack or rounder changing stickers. A monotonous existence for a few hours a day. Stressful, but not high energy stressful. Stressful like a helium balloon slowly drifting far enough to be out of view, then gone. Tack on to that my suspicious demeanor. Pink on blue. A rage building on an otherwise cool personality. You wouldn’t want to approach me on a sales floor. Before you had the chance to finish asking if I worked there, I’d say ‘No’. Neglect like holding up your hand trying to get a teacher’s attention only to be called on and give a wrong answer. Letdown. Pink on blue.

The way the feminine form of my ex slinks over my best friend. I’m sure he doesn’t care. Her passion, his stoic nature. Pink on blue. My rage over cool. Neglect or rejection. Markdowns. Becoming less than the sum of your parts. A man on a clearance rack. Overlooked by the more fashionable. The name brand wearing social elite there to be seen. The ones who could get away with wearing pink on blue.

But I’m still there forcing stickers over stickers. Staring blankly into customers faces. Breathing faces asking the dead for passage.

No reply.

No best friend.

No ex-girlfriend.

No more answers.

Life over death.

Pink on blue.

I’m not scared of dying. . . anymore. I am the reason for so many things, so many changes, that I will live forever. I am already immortal. What happens after this doesn’t really matter anymore. Who I am, you already know. Television had my face flashing all over world. Children in third world countries know my smile. They will grow up to tell their own children that if they’re not good, it’ll be me that comes to get them at night. My name won’t have to be translated for people to know who it is you’re talking about. My given name, my Christian name, will be forgotten. I will be the last face that people see in the darkness as they shiver under a down blanket in the summer. My laugh will keep people from entering a room without reaching in to turn on the light first. I made the church sit up and listen.

Where I am, light hits the floor in columns. Grown men cry at night for their mothers as they sleep. Where I am, the man in the next cell wears too much make-up and has government issued dentures that flash almost colorless in the dark as he takes them out to service a guard. That guard will close his eyes as that number glides back and forth on him and replace him with every high school fantasy or porno or unlucky female driver he stopped when he himself was still on the streets. Behind his closed eyes, red and blue flash like strobes in a strip club. He doesn’t care that it’s a man on his knees in front of him. All he knows is that it’s the best head he’s ever gotten and, in here, it’s not illegal if nobody sees it.

The difference between that guard and me, one day he’ll have to answer for his sins. I won’t.

That guard keeps me up at night. Not out of fear. He tends to be a bit. . . vocal. Deep down, I know he’s trying not to make a sound. But his effort to keep quiet forces more noise. Even though it’s after lights out, there is still just enough light to make out shapes.

Through this cage wall, I’ll stick out my hand with a mirror in it and see this guard standing with his chest pressed to the bars. Sweat beading on his brow, glistening against the bit of moonlight trickling in through the barred window within. He’s a heretic and a sinner and, in his afterlife, he won’t have that cross around his neck to clutch at. His God will take it away from him. For all eternity, he will complain how it isn’t fair. He should feel lucky he’ll even have an afterlife.

I won’t.

How long I’ve been here is irrelevant. Every day and every night is exactly the same to me. Outside in the natural light of the sun, hundreds of people line up holding signs calling for my execution. Signs and banners that read like poetry if you line them all up:

Let him burn/The eyes of God weep for your soul/

There is no mercy worthy of your sins/The end is

nigh/Your end is nigh/Redemption Now!!!

Not good poetry, but poetry nonetheless.

The people-protesters, believers, judges, all of them. All will be judged, not me. These people stand behind their Bibles and Christmas carols and an idol made of two sticks cursing me while their own sins get swept under some divine carpet.

I know these faces.

The man standing on the hood of his car, when he was seventeen, he and his teammates pulled a train on some drunk cheerleader after a homecoming game. She bled on them as they stabbed away her innocence.

The woman wearing the WWJD t-shirt is thirty-two years old. She videotaped her neighbor having sex. That isn’t a sin. Selling that tape to some on-line trader and ruining the lives of two people seems a little hypocritical now.

Who would Jesus videotape?

She made a fortune off that tape. Her neighbor was a tele-evangelist that used to tour the whole of North America with his family, a wife and twin daughters. His partner on the tape was not his wife. His partner on the tape was a friend of his teenage girls.

Sodomy on tape fetches more money if the catcher looks underage.

The sin that sin produced.

That videotape is paying for her time off from work at Planned Parenthood to be here right now.

There’s two families that came together. Their RV sits like a retarded senior after a shot of morphine. There are six of them: four adults and two kids.

These kids, their parents are yelling Bible passages at me about repentance and salvation. These kids are out behind the RV looking for frogs or baby birds to strap fireworks to. The frog that goes the highest or rips into the most pieces wins.

Is that freedom? Or free will?

If God is all-knowing, all-seeing, knows the beginning and the end at the same time, does free will cease to exist?

If our path is predetermined, do we really have a choice?

Does one choose to sin or is he destined to?

I’ve already made up my mind and God knew about it a long, long time ago.

They don’t let me out in the yard if there’s a lot of people gathered out there. And with my execution just days away, it looks like I’ll never feel the sun again.

Every time someone was executed for their crimes before me, there would be a group of anti-death penalty demonstrators gathered. They’re not here. All the faces out there, they’re all angry.

The sin that sin produced.

They all want me dead. They all want to see my body writhe and twitch as thousands of volts of electricity run through my veins. They want to see my eyes bleed and bulge out of my head without a blindfold when the switch is thrown. They want my body to be wrapped in barbed wire, to have that barbed wire tied to rope tied to the tails of four horses facing different directions. Four executioners would slap those horses and let them rip me apart if the people had their way. These people don’t really want to see me dead, they want to see me die.

Everyday for the last couple of weeks, the crowds have gotten bigger and bigger. I always end up seeing distant faces of fellow sinners. Sad we won’t meet after midnight Thursday.

One of those faces I see looks very familiar. It’s the face that put me here. None of it was my fault. I can’t really blame her now that she’s dead. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, none of this would have happened. She was bored with the life she chose or was chosen for her. She couldn’t stand being sheltered behind the black and white walls of her habit. She hated being told what to do by women who never really experienced life. She ran away. She found me. She cheated on God. How was I supposed to know she was a nun?

Because of her, the church changed its views on abortion. She didn’t tell them what really happened. She cried rape after she missed her period. She said that a monster had forced himself on her and made her accept his seed so that Satan could take his place among the living.

The sin that sin produced.

By the time her story made the news, I was hundreds of miles away playing voyeur to the sins of the heartland. My picture was all over the country. I became synonymous with evil.

Who could do such a thing?

Who knew that kind of evil existed?

Who would Jesus videotape?

Even when the tape she and I made was played in the courtroom, nothing changed.

By that time, she and her son were dead.

The lawyers for the “good guys” painted a gruesome picture of what I had done:

The defendant stalked. . . no, hunted the victim for months trying to find

her whereabouts. When he found her and after she pleaded for her life, he

stabbed her with this knife over sixty times in the face, neck, and chest.

But he wasn’t done yet. He took the very same knife and proceeded to

cut from her womb the eight month old fetus. His son. Detectives only

found a leg of the child next to the body of his mother.

Who I am is evil. Where I am is hell. Tomorrow won’t be like today or yesterday. Tomorrow I won’t be here. Tomorrow I won’t be. . . period.

I’ve been here for thirteen years watching the guards and numbers fondle each other. For thirteen years, I’ve heard Bible quotes and bad advice from free sinners. Thirteen years ago, I stopped believing in God. Most death row inmates go the other way. Abandoning God was redemption.

I’m not afraid of dying anymore. What happens after this won’t really matter anyway. Without God, there is no afterlife. I simply won’t be.

I’ve thought about it for thirteen years, amid crying men hellbent on salvation. . . sex with nuns is only illegal in the eyes of God.

That’s why I became an atheist in prison.