A Quick Cutback Across the Reading, the Radio & the Soul

So I met up w/the Great Nettelbeck Saturday afternoon at The Avenue Bar on Pacific.   Pitchers of Bud while talking “The Poems”.   He’s a solid poet heart & mind & a devout alcoholic.   Brother poet.   It was good to at long last meet & run the tables of our souls.   But then Nettelbeck insisted upon tequila which okay I said one, which multiplied into I don’t know how many, & somehow I made the short drive back home without getting popped by the cops.

Felt rocky on Sunday morning trying to get my balance back while reviewing the short set of poems I had prepared for the reading.   At 3pm Pamela & I head out to the Avenue to meet up w/Nettelbeck & his lady Billie to prime ourselves for the set.   All’s well, though I’m still battling the leftover tequila & Nettelbeck’s got a slight buzz buzzing as we walk up to the gallery (on the way I ducked into the liquor store for cigs & a sixer of Tecate).   We get there just as folks begin straggling in & meet & greet Jim who set the reading up under the auspices of his New Cadence Reading Series.   A good kid, w/”The Poems” in his eyes.   I meet Stephen Kessler, S.Cruz poet, & long ago compatriot of Nettelbeck from the 70s & 80s.   He’s everso slightly bemused.   But some dude from Moss Landing (I got a boat—Do you live on the boat?—No, I just sleep there) pulls out a fifth of Knob Hill & Nettelbeck’s tipping it back & an “uh-oh” floater floats past my otherwise amped & distracted singular mind.

Soon enough Jim intros me & I’m up there letting it go the way it should go, locomotion style, picking up speed, inside the lines, where I live, & it all works, to my ear anyway, which is all that we can ask of the Muse when we find ourselves so nailed to the mic.   I intro Nettelbeck who staggers up & the previous flutter of “uh-oh” is a 10 ton crash of metallic debris as he starts off cool, working the strings of “The Poems” but quickly implodes before the 25 or so sets of eyes watching, dropping his poems twice (the second time tipping the makeshift podium) the white paper splayed across the floor like a lost message from the buckshot wings of the Muse, as his syllables tumble into disconnected diatribes that last three quarters of an alcoholic second, a collapsing veil of bronze-tinged never that submerges the word at last at last, as it must, & fuck if it ain’t.

A distraught Dennis Morton emerges from my helpless witness to whisper me outside where he lays it down as I knew he must—“I can’t have him on the radio tonight, I mean in the state he’s in now, I mean I can’t” etc, & I know & I know but I don’t want to hear it.   (We had set up the radio gig months in advance, The Poetry Show, KUSP FM).

Nettelbeck finishes & is roaring, or growling, as he bumps thru the ragged scene now & I’m sleepwalking the howdy, I liked your work, you should have read more, tiny dance of confetti that falls around me, as a paltry few books get sold or stolen & Nettelbeck weaves like a boxer who refuses to stay down for the count.   I’m trying to move all this along now, get outside as Nettelbeck is pissed off at the gallery owner for some reason I know not of & fuck yous rain & somehow we’re outside where Billie says we got to get away the guy’s calling the cops, but then dear Billie is blurred w/the buzz as well.   I tell Nettelbeck that the radio show is out, but it glances off several times before it takes, as Pamela drives up w/the Jeep & Billie climbs in along w/Moss Landing & his Knob Creek & Nettelbeck, pickled & fried, but we can’t find the motel where he & Billie are staying & I gotta piss like a racehorse & Billie keeps repeating Knight’s Inn, Knight’s Inn, & Nettelbeck rolls from nowhere to nowhere in pinwheels of disintegrating logic & sad time spilling beer.

After forever we pull into the Knight’s Inn, rumble into the room (me straight to the john to piss) & some other whitebearded lost soul enters from the reading & Nettelbeck’s still pissed at the gallery owner & asking about the radio show & insisting I have some whiskey but I’m sticking to the cerveza although Pamela takes a couple swigs from a big jug of some kind of bourbon & we sidle out into the damp drizzle of night eventually & back to the house to grab a snack & nap for an hour or so then all in a rush to the radio station to stand outside the locked door waiting for Dennis who drives up after a while & we get inside.

Who am I anyway & what the fuck as the kind lady arrives to work the board & we’re on-the-air like they say.   Dennis is a good soul, a steady even mind of kindness & we talk some of Nettelbeck’s work & swing around to some poems.   I read a few Nettelbeck poems & some of my own lines & banter in some fashion that drifts past easily like we’re sitting on the edge of the pier fishing & bullshitting, so I doubt I made much sense at all but it’s only “The Poems” that matter & nothing.   It’s all lost in what I probably never got a chance to say, but painless enough so that there are smiles & regrets & a kind of slow shuffle thru the pages of the heart.

We got home as it started to rain once again, I drank a last beer & dropped into dreams only to awake at 4:30am w/flu-like nausea which Pamela also had.   I don’t know if it was a 24 hour virus or maybe the reheated meatloaf we ate the night before was tainted, but a lousy sick day of lowgrade fever & the runs & fasting perhaps to pay off the lopsided Muse for our loss.