L.A. Woman — The Doors: A Riff on Love

Decorah is in northeast Iowa. Luther College is there. I don't know what else. I suspect not much.

They invite me to do a reading. My first book has won a prize. I've thought of myself as a writer for a long time, but being certified has a new feel. The place is two hours from the nearest interstate. To this New York City boy transplanted to Iowa, that fact seems exotic. No one passes through Decorah. No one travels to Decorah. Why the hell is Decorah there? Why is Decorah anywhere? Gee, already I am learning how being a real writer can take a real person real places...

To impress the hoi-polloi with my great heart, I plan to read a story of gritty passion, but when this woman built like a semi with crosses on her uniform's dark lapels stands, everyone in the dining hall joins hands and she leads us in Grace. I am a nice Jewish boy, and not likely to be smitten with Holy Revelation, but I see the error of my ways. This, Glasser, is Luther College, get it? Tales of wanton desire read by the Brooklyn-born Yid who glommed the maraschino cherry from the top of his fruit salad before prayer will not be well received. I stop flirting with the undergrads, all of whom seem to be corn-silk blonde girls taller than I, and I mentally opt for a more sedate tale, one that will keep me from being hurled into Perdition and perhaps forestall a pogrom.

I really am at last a writer, young, male, just old enough to seem wise, just young enough that when I am introduced there is a titter and giggle that I know has nothing to do with the high-mindedness of the occasion, nothing less than the Cause of Literachure.

After my reading, there is no drinking, no party. Never mind a bacchanal, by ten o'clock the brownie plate holds only crumbs and the OJ pitcher is sticky and empty. Gripping a lectern, I answer the magic questions: I write in the morning. Yes, I use a pencil. No, I can't speak for other writers. The kids are earnest. These questions need to be asked. I smile and nod. They are paying me one hundred dollars. At the evening's end, my host, an earnest guy with a thin neck, a rash on his Adam's apple, and a scraggly beard, leads me to a dormitory room. He talks about what he calls "my art and our struggle." I respond and do not laugh.

At 1:00 a.m., comes a soft knock at the door.

This perquisite of being the writer is maybe nineteen. She is dark-haired, long shining tresses that loop below her waist, jeans, a gray sweatshirt with a torn collar showing a very white bra strap on a very fair shoulder, no shoes, no socks. Her eyes are downcast as she tells me she just wants to write. That's all. Just write. Her room is on the floor above mine. She carries a lighted candle in a water glass. She could not sleep. I tell her I understand. She is plain, round-faced, and I realize I could drown in her chocolate eyes, but she has about her that air of desperation I have already marked in so many women from the Midwest, that tension at the base of her throat like the pulse of a panicked rabbit, an unarticulated resignation of the sure knowledge that she will live and die in these vast open spaces among men whose strength is silence.

And here am I, the writer. A voice.

We talk and smoke together; a touch of sin is what she most requires, and the candlelight and overflowing ashtray offer a taint of worldly danger. After an hour, I beg fatigue and I usher her out, unkissed. Will she lie to her friends? Do they know she was here? I might have been her first.

In my late night dream, she is grown to a lush, corn-fed beauty, wanton and eager, innocent and willing. In my dream, her breath smells sweet as hay, her breasts hard and small as apples. I could have done anything, anything at all. Once, I awaken and ask myself, Why not, why not?

Morning, I throw my book bag into my car. I am to teach a class back in Des Moines at 11:00. Before me lies a four-hour drive from the edge of nowhere, where I am, to central nowhere, where I need to be.

After years of humping a rusted 4-cylinder Chevette with a wire coat hanger where the radio antenna should have been, with a steady job, I treated myself to a muscle car. My newly purchased standard-shift Camaro slides me into the landscape. I'd arrived in darkness, and so had not seen the land, but now in the February dawn I take in the rolling hills, brown earth, silos, still cows in frozen fields and that limitless Iowa horizon just beneath a heatless white sun that ignites hoarfrost glinting with cold reflected flame.

The scene is breathtaking. Atop a small rise, I have to stop simply so I can see and remember. I want this moment forever. I step from the vehicle and walk once around the car. Has air ever felt this sharp, this crisp, or this new? This landscape is so obvious and so sentimental that if I were not in it I would laugh, but leaning against my car's hood in this Iowa February morning, my arms crossed at my chest, I am solemn. The cold air barely stirs. The trees are black fingers. Only the cows stir. This is what is here. This is what is in Decorah. This is what the girl who wants to write wants to escape. I am her emissary from elsewhere, but how can she know what she has?

There is no more time to lose. My car radio finds a station from Iowa City, a college town, maybe the best college town in America. Before I find second gear, squeezed from the dashboard speaker comes Jim Morrison. Jim shrieks and moans about the L.A. woman.

Are you a lucky little lady in The City of Light
Or just another lost angel?

In this landscape, who could put together what they see with what they hear? Nothing will merge. The universe lifts its skirts before our eyes, but we are clueless as to what, what, what it means. You know this. You know how it happens. First there is this. Then there is that. You make connections. You draw lines. A coherent picture emerges. But to impose sense on it is finally only an act of will. I'll be a writer. I'll struggle to draw the lines yet another way, and what was coherent will become something else altogether. I know that Mr. Mojo Risin' is an anagram of Jim Morrison. I know that. Everyone should know that. But what is that knowledge in this landscape of fire, ice, art, prayer, innocence and longing under a heatless sun? The elements won't come together. The mole on the belly of this exquisite whore just might be the maraschino cherry on my unblessed cup of fruit. Last night's cheap, easy taste of virtue is already below the horizon miles behind me, and this morning I awake speeding through a countryside consumed by cold flame, nothing before me but a high-octane soundtrack ode to restlessness. Joining hands to pray. My art, our struggle. The girl. That sweet, sweet girl. Me, here, now. It just won't work together. None of it will work.

I accelerate. I crank up the volume.

L.A womaaaaaan, you're my womaaaaaaan.

I soar over the road at 80, 90, 100 miles per hour, a road slick with black ice. It's dawn. The Camaro and I fly through a Currier and Ives print, a frozen cornfield is being violated by my muscle car, my passenger compartment is the womb that sustains and suspends me, the writer, in private madness, while in the white farmhouses that dot the land, families eat golden pancakes and hot brown biscuits running with yellow butter; they drink scalding sweet dark coffee made in great blue speckled iron pots. They down whole meals of virtue every day.

City of night. City of night. City of night!

At 120 miles per hour, the car vaults over a bump. I am actually aloft for a heartbeat. My empty stomach is jolted by the sudden swell and my belly drops to my balls when the car hits the ground. But I am singing. No, I am howling. Howling loud as Jim. The sun is not a half hand over the horizon at the start of this new day, me and Jim are in the City of Night in God's own northeast corner of Iowa.

Jim's long dead, but I sure am not. Not me, Jim-bo. No, not this day. Not me.



Stairway to Heaven — Led Zeppelin: A Riff on Love

Though my students have wrapped their cars around trees, succumbed to leukemia, injected rat poison in their veins, slid evil substances down their throats, and have even been struck by God's own lightning, my three students who succeeded at ending their own lives leave me most melancholy.

Anita Marie for a year sat in my high school Junior Honors Creative Writing class, period five every day, first seat, first row. She laughed frequently and easily, at herself as much as anyone else, and she had a bizarre associative mind that gleefully identified the ridiculous in anything—anti-drug "rap" sessions conducted by middle-aged New York City apparatchiks who could not recognize the aroma of marijuana; History classes assigned to students who spoke no English; our tone-deaf Music & Orchestra teacher too vain or too far into denial to wear a hearing aid. Anita Marie was partial to dark colors, the fashion of the time, but my mind insists on remembering her with some sort of eyelet lace collar.

A fair complexioned African-American girl, her hair was by red rubber bands bound into short pigtails, and she wore very little make-up, no more than a touch of lip-gloss. Her smile could charm Stalin from the Kremlin, and that smile most often danced on her lips when she spoke about Rat, her Puerto Rican grocery-clerk lover. That, she insisted, was the boy's name. He was Rat, and Rat could be no other. When Anita Marie wrote a breathless prose tribute to the wonder of his eyes and the marvels of his hands and shoulders, the flatness of his abdomen and smoothness of his forearms, in all the hormonal enthusiasm of her 16 years, with little notion of the language's resonance and potential, she began with four simple words: "Rat worked the Meat." That placed him at the deli counter, all right, but by her sly smile, I knew she understood her words suggested a little more.

I never knew Anita Marie really well, so I'm clueless as to why one hot July night she and Rat ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe to the passenger compartment of his rusted Toyota. They were found in each other's arms, gray with death.

Michael hanged himself. At the New England college where I taught for a decade, Michael was an effeminate vortex of need who regaled everyone within earshot about that on-going disaster, this marvelous opéra bouffe, his life. Nothing ordinary ever happened to Michael. Nothing. In a mere two hours, he could relate the most incredible, amazing, unlikely details of a thirty-minute trip to the convenience store, incontrovertible evidence of how the universe conspired to amuse, frustrate, educate, and entertain him. He was a brilliant mimic; his stories spared no ethnic accent, no gesture or mannerism. Michael's hair went from green to gold to white and back to green, and one spring afternoon when the boy de jour spurned his avowals of eternal devotion, Michael underestimated the force of a melodramatic gesture when he looped his belt over the steam pipe that ran across his dorm room ceiling, climbed atop a chair and dropped into Eternity. He botched it, of course; it took Michael several days to die of the brain damage he suffered from oxygen deprivation brought on by asphyxiation. He'd failed at breaking his neck, and so was found strangling and kicking, but frantic efforts did not save him.

And there was Beth, a certified schizophrenic lesbian whose parents had sufficient wealth to pay and pay and pay again for the readmission and rematriculation of their only daughter to Drake University, the expensive private school in the Midwest where Beth enrolled in a loosely structured course of study she herself designed. She studied nothing; she studied everything. During her less lucid intervals, Beth was consigned to a discreet mental institution; The Bin, Beth called it. Maybe the two campuses looked alike. I would not know about that. But I knew, because Beth told me, that Beth loved love, to be in love, and especially to be falling in love anew.

She could disarm you with a glance and a question. After confessing her fascination with women's muscled arms, Beth once leaned across a campus cafeteria table and with her index finger moved her auburn hair from over her eyes to ask me for the precise features of female anatomy that made me turn my head. She's a stranger, said Beth, and she's strolling toward you in the mall. You'll never see her again. She's absolutely unaware of you. Come on, Perry, what exact part do you watch as she goes by?

Beth was happiest in her off-campus apartment writing dozens of tiny Post-It notes to be found by her lover. "Treasure Hunt," she called her game, and at the end of the trail of rhyming clues there were tulips and chocolate-covered stemmed cherries and Beth herself, each prize suitably gift-wrapped in green ribbons and yellow cellophane. Because during my years at Drake I was the sole parent of a nine-year-old girl, I frequently held class in my living room, an arrangement that not only lessened childcare problems, but also made me something of a campus resource. It was commonplace for my students to drop by; as often as not they found other students had done the same. Beth found her way to that living room at odd hours. If vodka and lithium do not mix, Beth had not heard. One night, at an hour when the good people of the Midwestern plains were long asleep and dreaming their good dreams, Beth showed me the crosshatched cuttings she'd sliced with a serrated steak knife on her smoother skin below her bicep. The wounds still oozed, and as she pressed the bath towel I gave her over what looked like a blood-etched chessboard, she told me she had maybe skipped some meds, did I think she was in trouble?

Six months later, Beth was dead by her own hand. She had been in residence once more at the Bin, so none of us who knew her as a student had any inkling as to how or what or precisely when Beth had done what Beth did. We knew only that Beth who loved love was irrevocably gone.

They leave me blue, my suicides, but they also leave me very, very angry. I don't know what to do with my anger. There is no one to shout at, no one to shake, no one to lecture, no one to improve, no one to challenge, no one to motivate, no one to inspire, no one to receive any of the ministrations a teacher is prepared to deliver.

If you're middle-aged as I am, on the grimmest nights all you know is the opportunities missed, the paths not taken, the indiscretion you wished you had had the courage—or stupidity—to commit, and so you wonder how anyone still gifted with youth could discard so much sheer opportunity.

Now, occasionally some lunatic demonstrates that the Devil intones self-destructive suggestions on recordings played backwards. Most of us cannot make out the words going forward, but these visionaries inspired by the Lord testify that "Stairway to Heaven" played in reverse says, "I sing because I live with Satan." This powerful, if somewhat dyslexic, suggestion engages a mechanism that robs an adolescent of his will, forces him to seek out a weapon, and then proceed to blow his brains out.

The guardians of American values find that demonic explanation preferable to any notion that the culture in which suburban white youth find themselves may be wanting. Malls, shopping in malls, driving in traffic to get to malls, growing up to make the stuff sold in malls...why aren't they delirious with joy? Isn't this Heaven itself?

Meanwhile, in the ghetto, a place where weaponry presumably is far easier to obtain, children seem only rarely to spatter their own brains onto a wall or starve themselves to death. Perhaps the Master of Lies dislikes hip-hop played forward or in reverse, but since the kids chanting inner-city rhythms have far less disposable income, perhaps they more easily develop a purpose in life: they have tangible goals to accomplish.

Purpose. A meaningful life. The imagination to envision a life that will change for the better. How did we miss making that part of the curriculum?

Maybe my suicides are flotsam in the wake of divorce, or the result of a million mind-numbing hours of television, or perhaps they are the consequences of careless lives consumed by sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Maybe kids need an unequivocal spiritual center, regular church attendance, proscribed behavior, and better hygiene; maybe they need less Prozac and more good, clean mountain air. Whatever the diagnosis and prescription, I don't believe any of it. Not a word.

I know only that at some point my Anitas and Michaels and Beths preferred Ending to Struggle. Despite all our work to educate, they felt as though they had placed their foreheads against a concrete wall. Their eyes were open wide, but for lack of imagination, they believed that all they saw, the limit of their sight at that moment, the blank grayness inches from their eye that extended featureless out and forever away, was all there is and all that ever would be.

There is little more to say. My Anitas and Michaels and Beths are better than the kids who embrace self-destruction by turning sad hopelessness outward in a fusillade of bullets aimed at teachers and classmates. Years of teaching, yet I have no program, no wisdom, not even a prayer to offer. Nothing but the sodden weight of failure.

My Anitas and Michaels and Beths are dead. Nothing else. They are nothing more. They are nothing else. They will never be other than they are. The pathetic little memorials of stuffed animals, heaped flowers, white crosses, cards that read, "We Remember" scrawled in crayon set beneath a smiling photo in a $3.98 plastic frame purchased in haste at Wal-Mart, these trappings of grief are soon swept away. My Anitas and Michaels and Beths are not become saints, they are not called to be among angels. They heed no summons to God, they are vouchsafed no Divine vision. They know no final flash of cosmic wisdom. They are not unfulfilled potential, they are not saved innocents, they are not victims, they are not martyrs, they are not even remembered.

My Anitas and Michaels and Beths are dead.

Nothing more.

Dead.



Sweet Communion

Sweet Communion
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Rosy Circle

Rosy Circle
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Ekleksographia:
Wave Three

May, 2010

Memoir & Paintings

Memoir by Perry Glasser
Paintings by Diane Ayott

Perry Glasser is the author of Dangerous Places, a collection of short fiction from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that was also named the recipient of the National "Best Books 2009" Award—Fiction & Literature: Short Story Fiction. His two prior collections of fiction are Suspicious Origins (St. Paul: New Rivers Press) and Singing on the Titanic (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press), a book recorded by the Library of Congress for the blind. His work has three times won P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Awards, and in consecutive years was named a winner of the annual Boston Fiction Festival prize. "Iowa Black Dirt," a memoir, won First Prize from The Good Men Foundation and was also named Best Personal Essay for 2009 by ASJA. His story, "I-95, Southbound" in 2009 received First Prize in the Gival Press Short Story Award contest and is nominated for a Puschart Prize.

Diane Ayott's work is known for its multi-layered and intricate mark making as well as for its exquisite use of color. She is represented in several private contemporary collections and is shown by Markel Fine Arts in NYC. This winter of 2010 the painter had a solo exhibition, "Diction," at Markel Fine Arts and was included in several group exhibitions of abstract painting at Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland Maine. Other recent exhibition venues include: the Danforth Museum in Framingham, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, the Fitchburg Art Museum, Montserrat College of Art, Jane Deering Gallery in Annisquam, the Attleboro Museum, Hall Space Gallery in Boston, Real Art Ways in Connecticut, and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago. Diane Ayott lives and works on Boston's north shore.