NOTES: ON THE WRITING OF "GUN"

I tend to cleave to places and people, or at least I do at this stage of the game. Maybe part of it is payback for the alienation of my younger years. Or maybe I'm just imagining that. My wife makes fun of me for it sometimes, although never in a mean way, but as a result of this I get treated nicer at the grocery store and other such places than the average customers. It's analogous to the way people treat, for instance, the neighborhood millionaire, which for me is very cool-- the unemployed poet getting the same preferential treatment as the guy who owns the BMW dealership. But there's something a little more to it. For instance: the cashiers at the Harris Teeter, our local supermarket, with whom I have cultivated a certain relationship over the last couple of years, feel just a skosh cooler when they have me as a customer. Now, I don't mean to brag, not in the slightest. I just add that extra element of comedy and comeraderie that makes them feel like their job is not as menial and inconsequential as they sometimes feel it is. Part of it, perhaps, is that I know how it feels to feel equal to your job when your job is being faceless and efficient and subordinant and subservient.

I have been cultivating the same kind of relationship with the people at Cici's. There is a certain esprit de corps at work in the place that... Well, to explain: Cici's is a chain of franchisee-run pizza joints. They started out in Plano, Texas, for crying out loud, back in the mid 80's. There's been a store here for at least ten years (I'm guessing) and the radio jingle is ubiquitous. For many years it was the sort of place where I just assumed the food would be sub-par, so I never made any effort to seek one out.

Then, sometime last year, they opened one in the brand new strip center (or "Power Center," I guess, is what the real estate people want usa to call them now, although this one is nearly half-vacant) across from the Harris Teeter. Now, I'm always looking for someplace new to eat, and the price is definitely right (all you can eat for four bucks), so we tried it.

Cici's, it so happens, is one hip place to eat. True, it's mostly half-full of parents who don't care how goddamned much racket their kids are making, and other times is crowded by church people, but it usually turns out to be a fairly happy and unaffecting crowd. We've learned a couple of things about eating there too: one is always try to hit it near a peak time, either just a bit after lunchtime or just before dinner, preferrably the latter. That way, you're pretty much assured hot, fresh pizza, since the busier the buffet, the quicker and more often it gets re-stocked. (Another rule: don't go at dinner time on a Friday. That way lies madness.) And the pizza is good. It's nothing flashy, it's not Neopolitan Certificate of Authenticity stuff, but they do have some semi-weirdo pies-- ham and pineapple, a "taco" pizza, white pie, spinach alfredo-- in addition to having the standard sausage and pepperoni and combo veggie pies. It's pretty standard for me to have six to eight slices on a visit, along with three to six heavily iced glasses of root beer.

(I should also mention that the Tony Bourdain rule doesn't apply here: since all they do is pizza buffet and salad bar, the ingredients are most certainly not crap they're trying to get rid of.)

So this place has been up and running for most of a year, maybe a bit over a year, and they've had very little turnover. (Another advantage: the kitchen is mostly open to view, so you see that the working conditions are clean and bearable.) The kids that work there-- by my wife's estimate, none of them are more than 23-- all have a sort of esprit de corp, an attitude that they are there to serve and that there's honor in that. It's a rare thing in the fast food industry. If you linger over the selection of pizzas, or if you seem in want of anything, the kitchen guy-- whichever one is at hand-- will ask you if he can get anything for you. We have asked for a particular pie and had it promised to us, and usually within 5 or 10 minutes the pie has been up.The cute chick that works the counter has been a constant since the shop opened, and, as happens in such situations, she has worked there long enough that she has become something of a fixture, and she does take pleasure in her job when possible. And she just loves to see us coming. I don't have quite the relationship that I have with the kids at the grocery store, and probably never will, but still, it's cool. We appreciate them and they appreciate us appreciating them. Symbiosis, dig?

It's all part of how I cope with living in this dumb century. I admit it, I get a certain point America is constantly making about itself that makes me a feel a little dirty and a little ashamed to be an American, and that's that we don't really have to give a damn. We can have our goddamned burgers off the 99 cent menu and throw the kids their Happy Meals with the cheap plastic toys so they can eat on the way to the soccer game in the SUV after a quick stop at Wal Mart for a buncha crap nobody really needs. For the most part, the vast majority of the time, the people treat the poor schlubs who end up working at fast food joints the way they are designed to be treated: as anonymous dolers of cheap food to people who consider them worthless.

So I say no. In fact, I say hell no. I will not treat the person on the other side of the counter with contempt. That is a human being over there, and either we all mean something or none of us mean anything. Better: this is a person who takes shit all day long from the nihilists in their SUVs, someone for whom the slightest error or defect in service or product will as likely as not produce a shitstorm of abuse completely out of line with the quality of food the abuser is being deprived of. So I say hell no: that person behind the counter, regardless of age or sex or even level of competence, gets the royal treatment form me. I figure somebody has to do it. And I maintain, to this day, that it works. Prior to going to Chicago some years ago, I was told the things about social interaction that people like to say about big cities-- don't make eye contact, people will be rude, yada yada yada-- but I swear, for the 24 hours I was in the city, Chicago was the politest place on the face of the earth. I have the same experience in Manhattan. It's not a Southern thing, either. In spite of all the ante-bellum rubbish about Southern manners and Southern hospitality, my fellow Southerners can be breathtakingly rude and mean. I sometimes have a hard time getting it to take down here. But in New York City, for whatever reason, everybody is the nicest person in the world (except in Little Italy, but that's another tale for another time). My point here is: it rubs off. It's that same old corny Golden Rule you learned in school, the one everyone preaches but damned few practice: do unto others. Or, more appropriately, to steal and mangle the dumb motto from that rotten flick "The Tao of Steve:" Be simpatico, be excellent, be gone. It sometimes takes longer for it to work on some people than it does others, but it does work. Down here I make it work on the retail and fast food workers most often-- they need it most-- but I've also worked this particular brand of mojo on some of the nihilists in SUVs when necessary, with suprising results (which is, again, another tale for another time).

(Be simpatico, be excellent and be gone, but also be happy. A sense of genuine joy is something that the fast food environment seriously lacks, and something that the kids behind the counter will return tenfold if it's given to them. An oldster behind the counter will return it twentyfold.)

I have no idea how many times we'd been to Cici's before the shooting, but I know that it was enough times for the chick who runs the register to recognize us, and for us to have a nearly inconclusive debate as to whether she had a hair extensions or a really wild perm (the former, and el Wiferino won). I'd almost like to be saying something corny like we had almost gone there the night of the shooting, but that's not the case. It was all very weird: guy walks up to the joint on a Saturday night just after closing time; the doors of the place are open, the crew taking out the trash and cleaning up the dining area, battening down the kitchen for the night, and the guy just walks in and demands money. This is at the edge of the city, too, mind you, flatlands that had been nothing but scrub-brush and hoot owls before the developers got at it, a very low crime area. I mean, this is not the sort of thing that happens out there. I never got a real clear idea of what happened next, but the gunman opened fire, hitting one employee and a manager. The employee died in the hospital; the manager recovered. There's a part of my mind that wonders if the manager went back to work, and if so when; there's another part that thinks the first part is just sick.

Things like this ring for me on a large scale. It's because I invest more emotion in people and places than most folks. (As my wife is fond of pointing out, I invest more emotion into selecting a piece of cheese than most people do.) That's part of what makes the first thing work: I genuinely give a damn, and that's what's key. The people behind the counter have to sense that I give a damn, or else I'm just another customer with the pre-programmed yes-and-thank-you's. But it backfires on me in some situations, and this was one of them. I didn't know the people involved in the shooting, couldn't pick them out of the faces in my memory, and couldn't make the faces in my memory into the victims. (Call that sentimentality: it didn't register as anything but an inkling in the back of my mind at the time, but I refused, subconsciously, to let any of the people there whose faces I could recall be the victims in my imagination. It was like the back part of my head thought that it could somehow save those I was most aware of from a fate that had alrady occurred.) I went looking for information on the web-- I had already read the reports in the newspaper-- but there wasn't any. A later report gave the victims' names, but that was all and it didn't get me anywhere. I began to find myself wishing they would publish their piuctures, but then I found myself thinking I was getting morbid about this and I should quit while I was still ahead. It was that same day-- this is the Saturday after the shooting-- that Rachelle started talking about going to the restaurant.

The process of acquiescence was remarkably quick. In a matter of less than an hour I had gone from a feeling that eating at Cici's would be an act of strange morbidity to feeling that it would be an act of solidarity, a stroke of support for the welcome and appreciated staff of a local establishment. You may well ask how I managed to convince myself to make this quick change, and the answer is deceptively simple.

I lied.

Just like that. I told myself that I was going there with the best of intentions, without a sense of morbid curiosity, without any intention of doing anything more than eating pizza and supporting my local franchisee, if, for any reason at all, just to do my bit to keep the place afloat. It's not completely unprecedented, after all, for a place to go under after such a violent happening. So we went, and I spent a fair amount of the time pulling a major Wizard of Oz job on myself-- "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!"

Shortly after we sat down to our first plates, the man behind the curtain wouldn't shut up, and I started doing what I knew I was going to do all along: I began composing the first lines of the poem which, I knew very shortly after I began composing it, would be called "Gun."

If I seem to be being overly coy at this point, there's good reason for it. Firstly, writers writing about writing, normally, is considered to be a bad thing, and most often it is (witness almost anything anyone has ever written about writing, witness the kinds of people who write about writing, and witness that people who write about writing have rarely written anything else, except for Stephen King, and witness what kind of crap he wrote when he decided to write about writing). Secondly, it's an odd thing to write about the sentimentality I've invested in a corporate pizza chain outlet. But mostly the reason for this damned tap-dancing-act is the silliest of notions: in the back of my mind, I'm still convinced that I'm somehow not allowed here, that I am over-reaching my bounds as an artist. What in the hell, after all, gives me the right to participate in this tragedy? I wasn't there, I'm not staff or family, I don't even know any of their first names. I'm not connected. It's like what I refer to, in journalism, as Woodward's Disease: the journalist assumes that, since he or she is a journalist, he or she has some particular insight into any given situation, no matter what kind of a souless zombie the creep may actually be in real life. Which is why the poem took on the title, and why it's mainly about guns.

Nasty, huh?

I also didn't want to fall into other traps-- I didn't want to come off as a Naderite, I didn't want this to be an inside-looking-out piece, I didn't want this to be an anti-criminal screed-- I wanted it to be honest and sympathetic and genuine, and I wanted it to be far more about them than about me. Whether I have succeeded in that last matter, I know not, nor can I judge.

It's what I have heard some writers refer to as The Real Thing, what other writers have referred to as The Other Thing. It's what I've been after in this game all along, and it's what I think I do in poetry that so many other writers flatly refuse to do: describe the genuine article genuinely.

(Let me revise something I wrote earlier, about writers writing about writing: there's one guy I know who really can do it, because he really has done it. His name is Robin Hemley, and the reason he can do it is that he is bracingly honest about his writing. There are large chunks of his stuff that relate directly to his life, to the point that he sometimes feels like he is stealing from himself. He was a good friend and a better teacher, and he gets special marks for having come up through the trenches. Robin, god bless you, you never taught me a goddamned thing, but you sure reinforced alot of what I already knew, and most of that is the stuff that keeps me from giving up on this cockememe game.)

So I took my notion of the first lines of this piece and I sat down at my father-in-law's machine and I started writing, and ina one hour, even aless thana one hour, I lose-a-da picture. I screwed it up.

As anyone reading this probably knows, I've been having something of a hard time convincing the people on the Universal Poetry Club to let me in. But there are moments when that doesn't matter. There are moments when all the John Amens in the world don't mean a thing to me, moments when the act of writing, in and of itself, is the most important thing in the world. I'm having one of those moments now, obviously. I also had one of those moments then. One of those soul-crushing, vertiginous, nauseating moments when the writer looks at what he's done and realizes that, for all he really, rationally, specifically knows, the bastards who keep slamming the clubhouse door on his toes could very well have a point.

What I had was a fairly dry technical description of how firearms work, coupled with the insistence that I see the pain in a gun-- which is a line I partially ripped off from a line in a Breece Pancake short story-- followed by an admission that I couldn't fully imagine the scene. I stood the hazard of the dice, and those ugly suckers came up snakeyes.

I let it rest for a while, and after a while I revised my targeting strategy. I needed something to establish the mood, so I did as I do so often: I fished out an expository paragraph, in this case collapsed portions of two separate paragraphs, from the news. I'm sure there are alot of writers out there who would consider this cheating, but I disagree. Something quick and dry to set the mood gives me a kind of emotional launching pad; a connection with the event itself keeps me honest, or at least I hope it does. In this case, it put things more firmly in perspective: my task, if any task were required indeed, would be to register the shock without getting on a soapbox, to express a hatred of the mean little machine that harmed two people I may or may not have known. I was to be a humble advocate for the people inside that building, who provided me with warmth and comfort and pizza. I dimly remembered a line from a poem by a guy I knew in Boone invoking the strangely universal feeling of stepping out of an industrial work setting late at night. That guy's angle was in making a connection between the imported crap that ends up on the shelves of junk stores in tourist towns in America and the workers that produce the stuff in factories overseas. That gave me another possible angle: the contrast between what we expect to be happening in a place like Cici's versus what happened that night. After working that angle a bit, I had managed something that I was not completely embarassed about, but I still wasn't ready for the thing to see the light of day. So, as I sometimes do, I put the thing away, until I had a better idea of where I was going with it. At this stage of the game, the thing hadn't even seen the light of day; not even the wife or Doc Nagel had seen it.

Sometime shortly after this, it dawned on me what I had to do: I had to go back in there. If I was going to get this cockememe thing moving again, I had to try again to see what happened that night in my mind's eye. What I came up with was a blur of movement. I don't know if I was doing that mimesis thing, imagining what I might have seen had I been there, with everything seeming to move in slow-motion due to the shock of the event, or if I was even being that pretentious. Regardless, that's the image I got, so that's the image I used, breaking many many poetic rules that almost any working poet or creative writing instructor will tell you is inviolate.

At this point I checked the thing over for typos and posted it on the WIP page. I don't recall getting any commentary from my loyal fans at this point, my loyal fans consisting mainly of my wife and Doc Nagel, with the occasional enthusiastic outburst from some of the people I correspond with online. The WIP page, really, isn't there for commentary, although thaT is what I set it up for. It's extremely rare for anyone to contact me about something on the WIP page, which is to say it almost never happens at all. There the poem sat, for I don't remember how long, although I think it was a little more than a week.

Finally, a kind of sense of finality came to me: this is supposed to be a simple piece, for several reasons, not the least of which being that the locale itself-- not just Cici's, not just the shopping center, but really the landscape itself, the hard-scrabble, scrub-brush plains of the Southern Piedmont, scraped down to hard, clean dirt then paved over and dotted with fake stucco buildings, the kind my Dad likes to infer are made of styrofoam and plastic, although there's a little more to them than that. It's the kind of landscape that reduces the possible meaning of things in a way. In theory it cheapens the nature of human life; in reality, I think, it represents the mean of human life. As amazing and wonderful as human beings can be-- not to mention as cruel and rotten as human beings can be-- the average is just that: average. Not spectacular, not rotten, just a person who requires food and likes a modicum of anonymous interaction and the occasional distraction. And this is the ideal place for it, in its own way. And the tragedy that ripped my mind away from the simplicity of the place was, itself, utter simplicity-- a single, simple, violent act by a moron who didn't know any better, probably didn't even have the presence of mind to think that if he pulled the trigger a bullet might actually come out of the gun. (I've read studies that demonstrate this principle, but I have to admit that I, personally, don't completely buy it.) So became what was initially dubbed section III, what I thought might turn out to be the middle passage, or might turn out to be the end passage, or might turn out to be the end of the piece finally. To tell the truth, I was sick of it. I was tired of wrestling with the damned thing, I didn't think I was accomplishing anything with it, and with every passing glance at the mess I felt more and more like a ghoul, like I was serving my own purposes by exploiting the travesty. At this point I honestly wasn't sure I would ever go back to it. I began thinking that this was a failed experiment and wasn't worth my time, much less anyone else's, and to hell with it.

So passed a few more weeks before I came back to it. One morning I found it nagging at the back of my head, with the thought that I had left it unfinished, so I pulled it up and read through it one more time. I even went so far as to print it out (having, as so many people do, this strange affliction of not being able to grasp the same understanding from the computer screen as I sometimes can from the printed page). I decided, by sheer force of will, to finish it. What was there was okay, but it didn't really convey what I intended. The force of the event as I felt it wasn't there; nor was the sense of disgust. (The lines about a bullet being a foreign object approached what I was after, but they didn't make it.) I had been holding back and I knew it. So I threw myself into the effort and I came up with what became the third section. I slotted the original third section back and called it done.

That might seem like a haphazard way of working, but it isn't; it's just the way I work. The stuff comes to me and I write it as I see fit and that's that. I felt complete in my description, in my invocation, and that's the best I can do at this juncture. I don't have an editor to say me nay, I don't have an audience in particular to please. I can't take it to the staff at Cici's; likely they wouldn't dig it, and I wouldn't know how to present it anyways. Some of the staff have left since anyways; the cute chick at the counter has gone on, I hope, to greener pastures, and the chick that has replaced her has just come into the first blush of belonging-- and although it is a beautiful thing to observe, I wouldn't want to take the chance of unbalancing the process by making her aware of the violence that occured a few feet from where she is holding court four nights out of seven. She'll move on too, never knowing that some sentimental twerp out there once wrote a poem about the place where she had her first after-school gig.

And that's how we make P-O-E-TRY!