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They’ll catch me. They’ll find out

Posted by Aaron - 29/04/09 at 03:04:00 am

A sign near the door read “Escape Risk. Open Carefully.” Already intimidated by the warnings to not leave my car running unattended, the plasterings of signs reminding people to please keep all doors locked and the naked old man standing helplessly in the hallway that I walked around to get to the elevator, I rang the doorbell.

I don’t open doors with warning labels.

Delivering sandwiches to the psychiatric hospital always made me nervous. Standing outside the door of the third floor wing, I clenched the white paper bag holding a nurse’s sandwiches. My fingertips wrinkled the paper, making small indentations. I shifted my weight and wondered if the doorbell worked.

————–

Rumor has it that Malcolm X’s mother was once a patient at the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital. I often wonder who else was or is a patient. The old naked man I walked around just looked lost. He didn’t look crazy.

The hospital opened in 1859 as the Michigan Asylum for the insane. At one time, the hospital had more than 3,600 patients. I don’t know how many patients are inside the haunting, sprawling buildings on top of the Oakland Drive hill. I have heard there are about 30. I have seen two, a naked man in the hallway and a woman who tried to talk to me.

————-

As I drive to the hospital, usually at night, I make up stories about the patients, treatments and history. I convinced myself that Edna Pontellier, the main character from Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” checked into the hospital, and Chopin made up that whole mess about swimming until she drowned as a cover. Sort of like when Lindsay Lohan goes to rehab. I invented an entire floor, the fifth floor, not accessible in the common elevator, when unmentionable treatments still occur. I envisioned patients hooked up to electrical outlets with bare copper wire for a low budget round of electro-shock therapy. Their hair is gray and frizzy, like a cartoon-stylized Einstein.

In reality, the hospital is not anything like what I imagine. Except for a small incident in June 2008, where a patient escaped, broke into a Kalamazoo home, ate some food, drank some beer, played Grand Theft Auto, stole a car and then ran out of gas in Indiana, the hospital has had a quiet 150 years. The remaining warning signs may just be vestiges of the hospital’s golden age.

Behind the door, still waiting for the nurse to come and get her sandwiches, I hear voices. First thought: Are those really voices, or am I just hearing them? Am I going crazy? Something about standing in the hallway of a pysch ward suddenly made me question my sanity.

What if they found out, I think, what if they know? That I talk to myself, long multi-sided conversations, that I make erratic noises just for my own entertainment, that I wish the food at the sandwich shop would talk, and I think me and the pickles in the pickle bucket would be friends. At least it would give me someone to talk to during my shifts. Never mind my co-workers; I’ll talk to the pickles.

Do they know I often believe improbable rumors and outright lies—like that I am adopted from Korea—just to make life more interesting?

Sometimes I think I am crazy. What if they do to? Will they grab me, fit me into a straight jacket and toss me into a padded cell? I bet they have plenty, jackets and cells. I bet they have my size. I better act normal. Wait, I am talking to myself. I’m caught, for sure.

But still, I hear voices on the other side of the door. They are real, and I suspect they are plotting. The voices, the patients. I know every patient in the hospital wants to escape because of all the signs warning about escapes and leavening your car running and the guy that got out in 2008 and the woman I talked to last time who asked me to give her a ride away from the hospital.

Surprised at the question, I answered, “No, I don’t smoke cigarettes,” jumped in my car, sped away, terrified to look back.

They must be plotting. They probably think they can overpower me, knock me down and take off for the elevator. It’s just a short ride down, a few turns and long hallway before they are out in the parking lot. Shit, did I leave my car running?

Maybe they will hold me hostage and walk out the front door into a waiting vehicle under threat of harm to me. I doubt they are that organized.

I could hear the voices, wispy and un-tethered, and the shuffling of feet behind the door. They are getting ready.

To distract myself, I read the signs posted outside the ward’s door. One outlined the items not allowed behind the door: ropes, sharp objects, cell phones, cameras.

“Well,” I thought, “Dana better come to the door, cause I can’t go in.”

Dana was the nurse who ordered the sandwiches. Her name was the ticket. I had my cell phone in my pocket; it had a camera. Two strikes. My keys, also in my pocket—means I must have turned my car off—were on a braided piece of rope. Strike three, but not out yet. I had a ball-point pen shoved into the band of my hat, and it had a sharp point. Strike four. I should have been out a while ago.

Dana opened the door about a foot, a serious door, about two inches of steel, painted brick red. She blocked the opening with her body and wedged her foot to keep it ajar. Many people open doors like this when there is a cat or dog that they don’t want to run out. Dana wore brightly colored rubber shoes. The heavy door dented the rubber. She was tiny, certainly no match for the army of patients forming behind her ready to make a run for it.

I handed her the bag of sandwiches. She signed her credit card slip. During this I peeked over her head, the top of it came about to my chin, and peered down the ward hallway. Patients milled about, some leaning against the wall. There was no mob, no horde of insane people ready to escape.

“Are they crazy,” I thought. They didn’t look like crazy people, not the way I had pictured them during my drive up the hospital, not the way television and movies had portrayed them. “Are they crazy?”

I would have studied them longer, but shifted my gaze after only a few seconds. I didn’t want Dana to catch me starring. But just before I did, the sad, empty eyes of an older man caught mine. Great big blue oceans. Vast. Vacant. He looked down, and I looked away.

“Crazy?” The question mark dominated my thoughts.

I walked away. The old naked man was out of the hallway. He sat in a room near the doorway, wearing a loose collared shirt and jeans. He had frazzled gray hair like an old Einstein. He looked lost, scared.

The room had a sign outside of it, “Processing.”

File this…

Posted by Aaron - 28/04/09 at 06:04:00 am

one under awkward moments from my young adulthood.

Scene. Aaron and girl sitting at the bar. Aaron has been talking to girl for most of the night. Girl asks a lot of questions.

Girl: Do you look my like your mom or your dad?
Aaron: My dad (proceeds to tell joke about being adopted from Korea. Girl laughs)
Girl: Well you must have a pretty cute dad.
Aaron: If you look like your dad, you must have a cute dad too. (does not go over well pause)
Aaron: Does that make me gay? (She laughs)

I got her number.

Fodder for some book sometime.

First sentences

Posted by Aaron - 27/04/09 at 04:04:00 pm

I’ve been thinking about Hemingway today.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’ve been thinking about that.

Write one sentence.

I wonder if Hem ever danced around his room trying to come up with that one sentence. I did. I am. I am also folding laundry, drinking coffee and writing a poem. I call it poeming. It is an active process. The poem goes like this.

Forever Unfinished

someday i will write
a poem
and it will go like this
he wore a three-day old beard on his chin
but he was only 25 so it was pretty thin
then i will rhyme coffee
and spree
but i need words to hold them

The poem isn’t done. Nor will it ever be. It took me two months to write that much, and I wrote half of it just now, dancing around my apartment, trying to write one true sentence, folding laundry, drinking coffee. Wearing flip-flops.

I wonder if his friends called him Hem.

But I’m thinking about sentences, one sentences, true sentences, first sentences.

I’ve written a lot of first sentences; I’ve read even more. In journalism, we call first sentences leads, and we spell it wrong, ledes, because we’re journalists and that’s that. I’m good at ledes, I think. I take time to craft them into effective launching pads for my story. My mentor taught me about ledes, and there are many types, but you should find your own mentor.

But I’m thinking about sentences, one sentences, true sentences, first sentences.

Here are some first sentences. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are true. All are one. All are first.

“I’ve been thinking about Hemingway today.” Aaron Aupperlee

“I stood at the soda fountain, filling the big plastic cup that came with my value meal.” Aaron Aupperlee

“The tiny snapshot is fuzzy and stained with ink.” Jacqui Banaszynski, “AIDS in the Heartland.”

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye”

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.” Norton Juster, “The Phantom Tollbooth”

“Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau.” Kurt Cobain, “Plateau”

“The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature.” Roberto Bolano, “2666″

“The concept of Christ is considerably older than the concept of zero.” Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale.”

“December 1958.” Mary Clearman Blew, “The Unwanted Child”

“When you grow up you can be anything, they said, but that’s a lie too.” Bryan Charles, “Grab onto me tightly as if I knew the way”

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ ” Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood”

“I can’t tell much from her silhouette.” Charles Bowden, “Torch Song”

“Then there was bad weather.” Ernest Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast”

The best part of that exercise was scattering books across my table like a real writer.

I just read the first sentences written by students in my mentor’s class. They are pretty bad. I just read many of my first sentences. They are pretty bad.

For instance:

“I think the biggest change came when I completely stopped obsession about actual women and decided to focus on the concept of women for my obsessions.”

That’s the first sentence of the first entry on of my latest journal. I wrote in on December twenty eight two thousand eight. I could dig up the first sentence of the first entry of my first journal, but it is at my parent’s house. I probably wrote it in 1995, and it is probably much better.

Have I gotten worse? No. I doubt I was at my writing zenith hunched over a notebook under a small light next to my bed in sixth grade penning about girls and wanting to be different and wanting to be accepted and wanting to be everything all at once at the same time, and I hadn’t even read Jack Kerouac yet.

No. I haven’t gotten worse. I forgot how to write a sentence.

The big write off that wasn’t

Posted by Aaron - 15/04/09 at 06:04:00 am

I guess it bothered him.

He deliberately reached over to my seat at the bar and grabbed the dollar tip I set in front of me. I thought to correct him—”no, that’s for the bartender young man”—but he starting loudly scratching the wrinkled surface of the dollar with a pen he pulled from his jacket pocket.

Great, I thought, another writer, trying to show how impulsive he is, trying to show the power of a thought explosion mid-pint by grabbing the closet thing to him and scribbling out a poem or sentence or phrase. Writers do this. I do this.

I moved to this town to be that erratic writer. Watch out, you never know what he will pen next. Hell, I had even walked into this strange new bar near last call on a week night just to stretch a few free-spirit muscles. I ordered a Pabst, sat down alone and set to looking at the bottles of liquor lined up behind the bar.

Yeah, I was writing, in my head. I was making up conversations between the different patrons, inventing story lines, fights, romances, and awkwardness. I tried combination after combination of words to describe the bar, none of them too flattering, not exactly my type of place. I even smoked a few cigarettes and followed the wafting smoke through the air with my eyes, thinking about how I was thinking about nothing and that was cool.

I was guilty of nearly everything I detested about the man who defaced my dollar, except his jacket—leather, shiny silver spikes sprouting here and there. Go home little punk. But I had come to the bar penless that night, completely unprepared for the writer battle about to go down all over George Washington’s face.

I rubbed the tips of my thumb, index and middle finger together, warming them up for the quick snatch and write I would have to execute as soon as I looked down at the dollar. I contemplated throwing out an American sentence, an Allen Ginsberg poetic form I had spent the day studying. Take that you uneducated barroom writer fighter. I’ve got the Gins.

He pulled his hand away. I leaned in, looked down.

Just a thick black line.

He had scratched out the words “In God We Trust” printed in the middle of the back of the dollar. He pushed the dollar back toward me. I relaxed, shrugged, and went back to drinking
.
I don’t care if my money says that we trust in God or not. I trust in Him, but I have not picked sides in the “In God We Trust” debate. I support the phrase out of laziness. It would be a lot of work to remove it. But oppose the phrase out of ambivalence. If people want it gone so badly, get rid of it. It is good that I am not the person in charge of these matters.

The man at the bar, he thought he was in charge of such matters. His erratic explosion that night was not to prove what a wild and crazy writer he was—maybe it’s just me then— it was guided by his desire to abolish that little phrase set before him. How long had those words ruined his night?

The man went back to talking to his friend. I caught a few words of the discussion. It was not about the dollar or the phrase but something even more trivial. I went back to the bottles of liquor behind the bar, admiring the different colors, the shapes, the order, and concentrated on making my last call beer last until 2 a.m. I did not want to pull another dollar out.

Listen to this: I love the radio

Posted by Aaron - 13/04/09 at 04:04:00 am

At work, I overheard two coworkers talk about music. One said he would be surprised if the other could make him a mix CD with a band on it he liked and hadn’t heard of yet. She said she’d try. He said good luck.

The reason for his bold statement was this: The man claimed he spends hours searching for music. He surfs the Internet, watches Youtube videos and wades through mountains of band-spam on Myspace trying to find the next big thing. He takes music seriously, he said, and is proud of it.

Later that week, a different coworker asked me what type of music I liked. I am new at the job so everyone is asking the requisite “getting to know you” questions.

I screwed up my answer royally. When asked, I launched into the convoluted description of the type of music I like. I mentioned rock, indie, techno, country, folk and bluegrass and tried—unsuccessfully—to connect them all to one reason why this was me. I wanted to come off as complex but ended up confused, which does not account for my poor audience. I don’t know what she thought of me.

And that bugged me. Actually, a few things bugged me – my epic fail on the music question, the fact that a coworker probably thought I said I listened to everything to try and impress her and that I didn’t know what music I liked.

I redeemed myself a few days ago. While working with the same woman who asked me the music question, I slipped into casual conversation that I liked the radio.

“I listen to the radio a lot,” I said.

It’s true. I listen to NPR in the morning, with coffee, breakfast and early phone calls. I listen to country on Sundays. When driving, I power up my satellite radio and listen in on bluegrass stations, British pop stations, 1990s rock and alternative stations, techno stations, indie and college radio stations and baseball games. And I try to listen to Top 40 pop stations, to countdowns and caller request shows. It’s important.

Whether anyone would like to admit it or not, Top 40 music is a reflection of culture. True, record companies pretty much pick which singers and singles make it onto the charts; they tell people what they should like. But masses of people go ahead and listen to them and listen to it. They buy the albums and concert tickets and subscribe to a prescribed fandom. They keep their radios locked to certain stations in their cars and in their offices. The songs become a part of their lives, and they like it—or at least accept it.

Why?

Because these record executives know what they are doing; they know what buttons to push and how to create a culture, and this manipulated culture reflects who a majority of the people I come in contact with everyday are. I don’t have time for 20 questions, but I learn a lot from what the radio stations pump into people’s lives.

I’m never going to be at the cutting edge of music culture with this attitude. I listen to music once it’s been processed and distributed for the masses. Most of the time I do not know which band is playing. I listen to a lot of bluegrass but can only name a handful of groups, but I don’t care. I like it, that’s enough for me.

I do not pretend to be a member of the music elite. I don’t know how to mine the bins of obscurity on the Internet or at a record store for the next big thing, but that is OK. There are plenty among the music elite who do and endlessly share their finds with anyone who will listen. And that’s a culture too.

So I need you both. I need the bloggers and the friends to tell me what to like. And I need to radio to tell me what everyone else likes. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have room in my car for hundreds of radio stations not hundreds of friends.

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