Apprenticeship
We were the outcasts of our MFA program. He was too cocky and I was too shy. After workshop we’d skip the bar where everyone was going to gossip about who the new hire would be. We didn’t care. We wouldn’t be there next year anyway, and even if we had been, we still wouldn’t have cared. Instead we’d drive out to one of those little towns that surround all college towns, a town centered around an old stone courthouse that blares Christmas carols for its citizens as they walk in and out with deeds and summonses, and went into one of those bars we loved, the kind with a sign over the bathroom door that reads, In case of tornado, take shelter in the urinal – hasn’t been hit in years! We laughed trying to imagine the professor we hated walking in there, not into the bathroom but into the bar, trying to order a glass of shiraz, trying to read his Walter Benjamin by the light of a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign. We hated Benjamin, who he pronounced (correctly) Ben-ya-mean, if only because the professor who we hated loved him. One day, after the professor had made us read a bunch of Ben-ya-mean, my friend raised his hand and said, “Who’s this Benjamin guy we keep talking about?” We didn’t see what Ben-ya-mean had to do with writing poems, which was what we thought we’d been put on earth to do. I like Ben-ya-mean now. But back to back then — we liked to scribble lines on the thin square napkins the bartender always slipped under our beers, in a way that reminded me of how it’s always your friend’s girlfriend who makes the couch up into a bed for you when you’re too drunk to drive home, though I can’t really explain why the way she laid those napkins down before setting down our beers reminded me of that. In any case, by the end of the night the napkins would be sodden and torn, the poems illegible, but that was the point. We believed back then that the most honorable path one could follow in poetry was to never be read, which was probably just a defense mechanism, but it felt noble at the time. One night though I caught the bartender trying to read one of the napkins before dumping the paper basket of popcorn seeds into the trash (popcorn with lots of salt and red pepper flakes being our idea of dinner on these excursions). I hope she was able to make out at least one line and I hope it was my friend’s. His lines were always so beautiful, unlike mine, which were, I realize now, pale imitations of poets I loved, whereas his came from some deep place that had nothing to do with anyone, not even him. So we wrote a little but mostly we drank beer and listened to all that talk about Nascar and deer hunting and did you hear what Mandy actually said to Amber yeah but no wait did you hear what fucking Shaun did, got another DUI, his dumb ass, has to drive his lawnmower to work now and so yeah get this the other morning the sheriff pulls up alongside him and Shaun’s thinking he’s gonna offer him a ride but instead the Sheriff says, “Why don’t you mow the grass while you’re at it?” and Shaun says, without missing a beat, “I would, sir, but I’ve thrown too many bottles into the ditch over the years.” And driving home along the unmown ditch grass in which Shaun’s empty bottles lay, we talked about how we wanted to do that, that back there, whatever that was.