Eli Hastings's Blog, page 5

SELECTED DISPATCHES FROM THE GUERRILLA LIT GRIND

May 14th, 4:16 a.m. PST (Facebook)

 

I finished your book last night. It’s going to stick with me for a very long time. It’s achingly beautiful. You did Serala right in this book. And yourself. I kept coming back to the fact that I’ve never come close to any of the experiences you’ve been through, and yet I could totally, completely understand everything, and feel, deeply, for every single person in your book. I found myself folding down page after page because I want to go back and read those pages again and again.

 

May 4th, 1:03 p.m. EST (Facebook)

 

NOT interested.

 

 

May 3rd, 3:57 a.m. PDT (email)

 

I bought your book and it came two days ago and I just finished it, spending many more hours last night and tonight reading rather than sleeping, and wanted to thank you for the journey of your life that you were willing to share through the memories written across pages. I think you are very brave.

 

I cried hard in the end, for your pain, for “serala’s” resiliency and sorrow, and for the many glimpses of myself that I couldn’t deny.

 

All this to say, thank you. And well fucking done.

 

 

May 9th, 8:00 p.m., EST (a visit to X local indie bookstore)

 

“Hey, how are you?  I’m a local author, just released a book this month.  I’ve been in touch with you guys a bit as I think my publisher has.  I wondered why I couldn’t find my book here…?”

 

“Hold on.”

 

[Slim hipster slides to the computer monitor and strikes keys, slides back].

 

“Well, we had two in stock, but it looks like they sold out right away.”

 

“Oh…..great…..?”

 

“Yeah. So, we’ve ordered two more.  They should be on their way.”

 

May 10th, 2013, 10:15 a.m. PST (text)

Reached out to X (mega-indie) bookstore for you.  No luck.  Here’s the response: ‘I looked into Eli’s book and our buyers elected not to carry that title in stores.  We don’t bring inventory into stores though events, so we would decline a request to host Eli.  This goes without saying, but this is not a judgmento n [sic] the quality of Eli’s work, we just can’t carry every title that get’s [sic] published each season.’

 

January 15th, 2009, 10:15 a.m., PST (email)

 

Dear Author:

 

Please forgive this impersonal note regarding your query, which we have considered but must decline. As we receive a tremendous number of queries, we are unable to respond to each submission individually, but we thank you for the opportunity to review your work.

 

We encourage you to keep writing and to try other agents.

 

Yours sincerely

 

February 26th, 2011, 3:53 p.m. EST (email)

 

Dear Agent X: I’m glad to be able to finally get something like an initial offer out for you and Eli…. But I want you both to know, no matter what happens, that I truly love this book. I’m haunted by it, and honestly, I’m kinda in awe. Now. Still.

 

To get it into enough folks hands we’re going to have to be creative in how we market it, and we’re going to have to get Eli as involved as possible—talking about it to anyone who’ll listen.

 

And then, hopefully, a couple great reviews. And then good word of mouth….

 

And finally, again hopefully, it really takes off.

 

It deserves nothing less.

 

You know I wish I could offer the moon, but this really is fuzzy and uncharted territory for ECW. I honestly don’t know how the book will do—all I know is that it has to be done.

 

 

 

 

March 19th, 2013, 14:25, KCJD, Delta Hall

Today, the doors are salmon.  Well, all days the doors are salmon—what I should say is that today we are in Delta Hall (instead of Echo Hall or King Hall or Lima Hall or), which is the same as all the other halls in every aspect except for the fact that the cell doors are salmon.  This lone stroke of individuality and color, this solo suggestion that monochrome and uniform is not necessarily the tyrant it seems, has always struck me as odd.  What was the bureaucratic process like that ushered in the decision to brightly paint the cell doors of juvenile detention?  To enforce a rigid standardization that is straight up disorienting—even after five years of Tuesdays in here, I still walk the wrong direction down the hallway half the time—but to allow (or did someone insist?)—upon a blaze of primary color for the cell doors, a shocking slate of liveliness to host the stenciled black numeral 1 – 10.  It is a small triumph but I can only say that, perhaps, as a visitor.  Maybe if I were a resident I would see it as a taunt, or a jibe.  The carnivaling of the enclosure.  The truth is that these colored cell doors frame rectangular portions of kids’ faces when they press against the plexiglass window in curiosity, desperation, fear, expectation of release.  Maybe seeing dozens of pairs of kids’ eyes framed in that little window became too heavy for the (after all) heart-bearing guards swiveling at their control posts.  Maybe someone fought the fight to make sure the sets of eyes were properly framed by fresh color.  Maybe these doors are nothing more than rose-colored glasses, a way of fooling oneself into seeing cheer instead of devastation.

 

Still, I like the salmon, and the canary yellow, though I am unsure about the hue of blue down in Lima.

Crocus Punch

 

 

For FP

 

It’s true to say that there were April freeways—

More true, in fact, than to say that there was pain

 

Pain is a squirrely concept, sullied and conflated

As it is with time’s inevitable rot

 

April freeways are sleek black ribbons

Beneath blue canvases like God Frisbees and

 

Always there is the bang of a stock car stereo uncontaining

Guitar licks and the sunroof doing that

 

Thing with the cigarette smoke as well as

Dark glasses and her dark locks like bullwhips

 

In the wind and most importantly of course

There are bends in the road and countless

 

Possible destinations

WHAT I TOLD THE CHAPLAIN

 

When I met God he told me you’d be surprised at the way it all shakes out these days, how virtue and vice lend each other ballast.  The depths of spirit that contradiction and hypocrisy sometimes suggest if you can—as he can—just lift the silly veil of those concepts, which are, after all, flimsy, cycled so many times through our bullshit puritanical washer.  No, God told me, while he might conjure a friendly nod for adherents to black and white Good as they giddily slog their way through the pearly gates (these are useful but inaccurate symbols, of course, as they always have been: pearly gates, God as he, etc.), but it bores him.  He finds himself most passionate about border-dancing souls regardless of where the gravity and gusts of this world ultimately cause them to land: in his cloudy grove of bliss or the fiery pits below (God sounded particularly bored with this last symbolic illustration and I sensed that if he’d had the energy he might have made quotation marks in the air around it).  He experiences a rush of the sacred now only when he can usher a controversial case into everlasting peace.  The monk who spends all week on robed knees, then bullies a Harley through the hills come Saturday, a Sig Sauer strapped to his hip.  The feminist wonk cutting her way verbally through seminar rooms and news shows who submits powerfully to brutal gangbangs when she clocks out.  The pro bono abortionist doc braving picket lines, who decided at age sixteen that he’d never be party to the medical liquidation of his own seed again.  The psychotherapist weed whacking and vine chopping through dark and tangled psyches toward fragile truths, who closes his door at night to watch back to back episodes of Lost.  The vegan yoga guru and insight meditation instructor deep into her six-pack and blunt at one a.m.  The cop that thrashes abusive husbands in the squad car.  Etc.  No, it’s not rigid adherence, not dogmatic integrity, not fanatical embrace of virtue or literal acceptance of scripture that make God’s heart skip a beat these days.  Maybe he’s just gotten old, God said, but things have changed.  And he shook my hand, but also told me that despite himself he’d probably feel a certain pleasure—definitely a thrill—when they dropped the hood over me and threw that switch.

 

IRRESOLUTION

The insidious entropy of resolutions

Is violent

 

The tradition wears a virtuous costume:

Spine erect, eyes reflecting a fire but

 

The scaffolding sags if not with dawn

Then with

 

February’s dark expanse or

Certainly April’s giddiness

 

Certainly: adherence as an examination

Of will

 

But also: a proscribed space

To commit acts that ought

 

To roll and bloom

From the landscape of life

 

December 25th is for generosity

February 14th is for love

November 23rd is for gratitude

December 31st is for change

 

I resolve to place no more cages

Over the moments

 

In which I can stop

And rethink,

 

Act,

Love.

Counting Down

 

 

 

 

 

For FP, after Amy Gerstler’s gangster soliloquy

 

 

 

Fragments of sordid recollection come careening down on me at this time of year like the surplus missing posters of her danced on the airstream of a bonfire in a North Cascades meadow when we sealed the end of 2004 with flame.  Fragments of sordid, I said: the piss stink and shuffle lurch of dark figures in the alleys she might have crouched in; the gravestone faces of swing shift workers huddled in a bus stop, deadpanning us like the poster of her deadpanned them; a huff of plaster dust and arc of blood from a knuckle traced by a laugh that is not a laugh; the butt of a large knife pressing my hipbone while I cut my eyes at a lying addict.  The whole city reels through a rainy nighttime kaleidoscope that describes rivers of embers, stoplights and blood and if we could have stayed vertical long enough perhaps we would have tread every loop and found her supine and pooling away in time to give her our breath.  Everybody’s looking for something and when I disobey the leash law of my mind I suppose I’m looking for a wormhole back to those streets and a different dawn on a different horizon but she laid down in a neighborhood called the West Edge within screaming distance of the black Sound and the end of this land.  While the city sleeps toward the Holy Days again I am most awake when the gusts hit the top of their velocity and I am free to shiver in bed and pull whole fucking soliloquies of what might have been said through the cracked window.

 

Jesus v. Santa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear son,

It occurs to me that as houses light up psychedelically and you begin to see fat men in red costumes everywhere you go, when the size of boxes and bags seems to swell and there is suddenly a tree in the middle of your play space, that it might be incumbent upon me to clear up what is for some children an understandable confusion about Christmas.  It is the birthday of a man named Jesus—or Jesús as mamá would say, if she had much interest in him—and, also, the busiest day of the year for a man named Santa.  I use the term “man” both intentionally and roughly, because one of the things that Jesus and Santa have in common is a lingering controversy as to whether they are—or were—truly men and not merely stories made up for various purposes. But that’s not what I meant to write about now.

 

 

Here are some other things that Santa and Jesus have in common: both can magically produce gifts, though from Jesus you are likely only to receive wine—that’s “mama juice”—and fishes (not much like Nemo) and if you’re angling for a Hot Wheels track or remote control helicopter (as I suspect you are), Santa is a better bet.  Both Santa and Jesus can do magic—Jesus, for example, can walk on a lake and Santa can make his wagon fly with the help of deer with bright red noses.  Both Santa and Jesus are kind and caring and have particular interest in making children and sick people happy.  We make offerings of food—that’s “num-nums”—to both Jesus and Santa, though in the case of Jesus it’s mama juice and crackers, and though it’s an offering, we get to eat them ourselves, whereas in the case of Santa it’s cookies and milk and…well, kids don’t get to eat them.  It’s confusing, as are many things about this time of year.

 

 

Here are some ways in which Jesus and Santa are different: Santa is fat and Jesus is very skinny, like tía Helena, but even more. Santa’s home is at the North Pole, which is made out of snow and very, very cold all the time but Jesus came from the desert, which is why the pictures of Jesus aren’t very good—they make Jesus look like papa’s friend Sean when he probably had skin more like uncle Onyx’s.  We’ll talk later on about why they do that. Jesus doesn’t like stuff very much and some people say he didn’t even wear shoes; Santa, on the other hand, really is very focused on stuff (especially toys) and spends most of his time commanding a small army of fully grown men about your size to make stuff, which he then gives away (to be clear).  Santa has a wife, who is also fat and kind but Jesus did not have a wife according to most people, though that story may be changing.  No one seems to know who Santa’s papa is, whereas Jesus’ papa is God, which is like the biggest papa of all.

 

So, what about Christmas Day itself?  Simple: it’s Jesus’ birthday and Santa helps make sure that we celebrate it by flying around in his magic sled and laughing a lot and landing on roofs and jumping down chimneys to eat the milk and cookies that you leave for him and leaving you lots of presents that his little army made in his factory up in the north pole.  He does this because he’s a “saint,” which is like a friend of Jesus except he gets to wear shoes and eat a lot.  Those are the stories anyway. Next year, probably, we’ll start talking about the truth.

 

Merry Christmas,

 

Papa

 

 

 

Dear Moonfaced Man

 

Dear Moonfaced Man:

 

You were a demon to me only for moments, then for many years a ghost and eventually a teacher, I suppose, though I won’t reify you or the hungry shuffle you might still commit on darkened streets where desperation’s scent is as strong as urine.  You tried to buy me or at least to rent my body, but I must tell you that renting the body of a young man may differ little in impact from the purchase of his soul.  That night I was interested mainly in tasting rage like the silhouettes wreathed in cocaine smoke were interested in the glow of their pipes, and my rage had little to do with you, perhaps.  I believe in the necessity of emotional disguise, even now, and the ire that almost got you chopped down probably wafted from the snuffing of my innocence—you see, I didn’t understand when you first asked if I was still working, I thought you were drunk or ill, anticipating a cappuccino despite the shuttered café I stoop-sat.  When the meaning of your question filtered through the day’s cannabis and caffeine, my own naivete flushed my veins with flame.  And what did your mind do when I caught up to you a block north with a work boot in my fist and a friend at my side?  What did you hope for with your denial?  I can tell you now that calling me crazy did not help your case—other elements that you could not wield are what kept you whole: the way the moon lit your face and showed your age; the curve of terror in your Baltic eyes; my friend’s uncharacteristic hesitation; the group of Asian gangsters blowing blunt smoke against the stars and looking just a little bit sorry for you despite my harangue and accusation.  But, also, I was young, a boy, and you were a man, and old, and there lingered in me a vestige of respect or perhaps its dark cousin, fear—fear that you would produce a blade or else go down too easy and despite your intentions land me in a cage where worse things than an old man’s hand stuttering over my body might occur.  Dear Moonfaced Man, I have learned a great deal about loneliness, about starvation, even, not to mention lust and shame and greed.  I have learned how flesh and desire stretch backwards through time.  You were old and I was young; perhaps I should have merely thanked you for the compliment.  Wherever you are now you are safe from me and I hope also from yourself.

 

Your student, Eli.

 

 

 

IF MY FIST COULD SPEAK

 

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would recount dumb reptile incidents of fractured picture frames, how it didn’t even injure the lies the photos told beneath the bloody glass

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would refuse to

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would put lyrics to metronomes originally beaten against car dashboards

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would scream

 

 

 

If my first could speak it would tell you of the inadequacy of plasterboard before traumatic sorrow

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would grin through scars

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would explain that everyone had always talked about taking down that wall anyway—and that now we can see each other, from kitchen to porch

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would shake instead

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would assure you that it has only been aimed at things it was ready to hit

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would decry the system of safeties that binds it

 

 

 

If my first could speak it would tell you about disappointments, betrayals, about the paradox of its effects against rapists and bullies

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would sing bluely about its tribulations in a world of guns

 

 

 

If my first could speak it would lament how Bona fide targets slip like mirages before it can land, about how divorce, neglect, injustice and loss have no cartilage

 

 

 

If my fist could speak it would say that it’s just about the size of a heart

 

 

 

 

Commuting

8:17 a.m.

 

podcast bleeds Syrian over the unbuckling Velcro of studded tires on the wet pavement and despite the California stop of the cat at the four way I press the brake like a cockroach and let him go first

 

8:20 a.m.

 

stoplight winks green just as a dark tangle of motion steals my attention in the parking lot north where a fifty-something balding man in a burgundy Aero 19 hooded sweatshirt and torn jeans is striking and choking a small Hispanic woman in a khaki coat and backpack up against the fence so I honk and he invites me to join them; the honk of those behind me eager to arrive at their jobs jars me into closing my door and dialing 911 where a stern dispatcher gobbles up the details as man and woman dash in different directions

 

8:24 a.m.

 

in the six inches of shoulder that the onramp affords a ballcapped dude the age of my dead father grips a torn cardboard plea for assistance in his hands and a determinedly appropriate half-smile on his weathered face and I fork him a dollar over news of Walmart protests

 

8:51 a.m.

 

I sit in a foyer halfway through a cup of coffee. A fountain gurgles tranquility to my right and progressive, hip and well-educated colleagues in pea coats and scarves chatter smoothly awaiting the opportunity to sit around tables and consult with each other about the people we try to help heal in the world