Samigina.

Unpublished

The road to Baltimore at midnight in January is so cold your tires will complain. In a mid-size two-door sedan with a heater working part-time, it’s hard to talk or think about anything but the weather, which doesn’t help. No matter the volume of the radio, or the quantity of salt and processed cheese on the bags of chips, the discomfort of the bladder and the skin permeate anything under the moon.

The foam 1-Up mushroom from Super Mario Bros. atop Stuart’s radio antenna was so cold it practically broke in half as we made our way east, then north, from Leesburg, VA to cross the state line and towards Baltimore. Our conversation changed from what our balls had turned into to what our relationships had turned into.

“Sarah and I have a deal,” Stuart said. “If she runs a tangent on a subject she knows holds no interest to either of us for more than three minutes, she has to bake me a pie.”

“Oh man, that’s a deal,” I said.

“What about you?”

“We just tolerate each other’s tirades, I guess.”

“How does that work out for you?”

“Fine, overall. I mean sometimes she…well, I’ll…”

“Yeah?”

“Man, it’s fuckin’ cold.”

We made our way downtown and struggled with our printed directions for a few minutes before locating a crowd of pilgrims and onlookers lining a 10-foot stone wall around Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.

“Is that them?”

“That has to be them; look at the make-up on that chick.”

Stuart parked the car less than 10 feet from where we camped the rest of the night with the other members of the crowd. There were 50 or 60 men and women of all ages bundled in jackets, scarves, snow hats, gloves, thick skate shoes, boots, long johns, blue jeans, snow pants, ski masks, beanies, mittens and, oddly enough, a couple miniskirts in our accompaniment. Among the crowd, our teeth chattered, our noses turned red and ran, we shivered and cuddled and drank and talked. Unlike the blizzard of the following winter, which brought our neighborhood together into a community of sharing and symbiotic friends, nobody along the wall seemed to have hot cocoa or coffee to share. A few people broke out heating pads and acted as misers over them as though they were the last food on a desert island. Everyone tried to become friends with the guy who had the heater powered by a crank generator.

We met a short, stout English teacher with black hair and her husband. She’d driven in from the Midwest and her students were texting her incessantly to inquire about the night. Stuart piped up first.

“So, you’re an English teacher?”

“Oh, honey, look; Jennifer from my third period just sent a picture of her and her friends’ sleepover since they couldn’t come. Can you believe it? What great kids. Yeah, I teach freshman English Lit just outside Chicago.”

“I’ve been thinking of teaching myself; is it worth it, all in all?”

She was responding, and her keypad went click, click, click.

“I love English; it’s a great subject.”

“….All right then.”

None of us knew we were, in all likelihood, there to witness the end of an era. It was just another January 19 downtown to most of the troupe and Stuart and I did our best to blend in. There were a few tiny goth girls enamored and late-teen sports boys attending for extra credit, but primarily there were middle-aged men and women and a few real eccentrics in the crowd to cheer on the Poe Toaster.

Edgar Allan Poe never escaped controversy, nor mystery. For every student who loves and understands the loss and harrowed loneliness piercing through the majority of his body of work, there are ten who will ask “Didn’t he marry his cousin and die of rabies?” Stuart was even in a production of a play at college called “Nevermore,” which offered a romantic look at the final days of Poe’s life, during which he went missing and was later found dead.

Then in 1949, Boston’s own Evening Sun reported that a mysterious figure dressed all in black, save for a white scarf, had been seen stopping at Poe’s grave on the anniversary of Poe’s birthday, leaving at his headstone three roses and a near-full bottle of Cognac, only missing enough for him to have drunk to Poe and made his peace.

The next year, it happened again.

Over the next 60 or so years, people began to wait outside Westminster all night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Poe Toaster and share in the commemoration of the life and work of the renowned poet. At first oddities fanatics and thrill-seekers, then more somber English scholars and lifelong fans would crowd around peering through the shut cast-iron gates on January 19 every year. Surely the Poe Toaster caught on, as his tribute metamorphosed from a plain stroll to a near magic act to avoid crowds, lest he be unriddled and unmasked by the curious onlookers.

As far as the public could tell that night, there were only two entrances to the cemetery where Poe had been laid to rest: the main entrance, which the majority of us surrounded, and a smaller gate around another side which offered a far more limited view of the area. Between both entrances was the high stone wall, and beyond the other entrance was a city block, ending the cemetery with a tall office building. The church itself bordered another wall and the fourth, we were told, was also blocked in by office buildings.

As the night drew on, every person walking the streets was suspect. “Did you see how quickly that guy walked past us?” a woman said. “I bet that was him. He was just scouting the location, seeing where his best entrance would be.”

“Well I was sure I saw someone in that office building behind the cemetery a few minutes ago,” someone else said. “I bet he’s got the lights off and a window open and he’ll scale down and pay his respects.”

Stuart and I were fascinated by the event and happy to honor the writer, but we couldn’t help slipping in a few comments. “Nah, man, you see that headstone next to the mausoleum? That high one, that looks a little too new? I swear I just saw it wobble. He’s probably in it and he’s making his way over an inch at a time to visit Poe.”

Then ten minutes later someone came over and said “I heard he might be in one of the gravestones; my buddy and I saw one move a few minutes ago.”

“What do you think, Stu?”

“…It is really, really cold out here.”

He was right. We had stopped moving around as every step was agony on our frozen toes. A woman reading “The Raven” with as much gusto as she could muster had stopped long enough to tuck her face into a winter jacket and continue her recitation through its collar.

“Mmph a ruvmph, ‘Nevermore.’”

A large metalhead had been carrying around a foot-long coffin all night. God knows what’s in it, I thought. Then I saw him talking to an elderly gentleman on the other side of the gates, who we believed was the curator of the grounds. I trotted over to them on my heels so as not to snap any thawed toes and listened to their conversation.

“…so they’re just like little tributes; I brought one for the Toaster and one for you, if you think your connections at the museum might be interested in carrying them.”

“Oh, yeah,” the other man said with a clear air of dubious caution. “I’ll definitely take this inside and show it around the next time I see the rest of the staff.” It was the same tone I used when a threateningly aggressive man approached me in a bookstore the previous Christmas season and ordered me to buy a spy novel by his favorite author.

Near the metalhead with the coffins, the teenage Goths with the zombie Poe t-shirts and fishnets stared in mock indifference at the graveyard. In reality I could see a thrill dancing behind their eyes so fiery they could barely sit still. Between us and them was a tedious dork who kept asking us what our favorite story “of Edgar’s” was, taking for granted that we were all on a first-name basis with Poe.

“I have to find a bathroom,” I told Stuart.

“There’s a hospital a block that way and down the side street,” replied a man with snow caught in his beard.

I fled and sought the hospital. Everyone’s personalities were starting to grate my nerves like the beating of the hideous heart. I began to wonder if even Stuart and I were starting to get sick of the sight of each other; we’d been rolling our eyes at some of the more fanatical members of the crowd for hours and it was only a matter of time before that intolerance extended to each other. That’s what below-freezing temperatures do to friends, I imagined.

I was allowed into the lobby of the hospital by security but not into its bathroom.

“Oh come on man, it’s 15 degrees out and we’re all waiting by Poe’s gravesite and I really have to piss.”

“Sir, this bathroom is for patients and visitors only.”

I left and tried to find another bathroom or street corner to relieve myself. Before I could, I managed to catch the attention of a suspicious-looking man who started walking towards me from 50 feet off.

I tried to nonchalantly turn and walk the other way, and he continued to follow me. I rounded the corner of the hospital, out of his sight, and ran until just before he would be able to spot me again. When he came around the corner, he broke into a jog to catch up with me.

Fuck, I thought, walking briskly back towards Westminster. How stupid am I to walk around downtown Baltimore in the middle of the night alone? This is how idiots die, jonny you…idiot. They camp outside famous people’s graves like stupid tourists and get mugged.

Just before he got to me I rounded the last corner and started loudly talking to the crowd of onlookers again. My pursuer stopped and turned around, retreating to his street in front of the hospital. I doubled back and pissed behind a dumpster near the crowd.

As I passed the small gate towards the main entrance, a couple of the younger kids tried scaling the wall, getting boosts from their friends and snooping over the masonry in hopes of seeing the Poe Toaster. A few minutes earlier, one had hopped over and tried hiding in the shadows on the corner of the property from the caretakers and curator, but they found him and ushered him back out onto the sidewalk.

“How’d it go?” Stuart asked. “You find a bathroom?”

“More or less.”

“I’m not sure I can take much more of this cold.”

“If you don’t mind risking a mugging there’s a hospital where you can argue with a security guy until…”

“Until what?”

“Stuart, look at that.”

A van turned onto our street and turned its lights off and kept driving.

“Why’s that guy got his lights off?”

“Looks pretty suspicious.”

“I think he’s stopping.”

One by one, everyone turned and stared at the van.

“Stuart, I think that’s him.”

“jonny?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you whispering?”

“…I don’t know.”

There was no movement inside the van. There was no movement in the crowd. The frostbite, the tedium of company and the wait all melted into the background. Minutes passed and enough of the crowd turned back to what they were doing that it almost seemed to have never happened. We kept our eyes peeled.

An eternity later, the curator appeared again and told us the Poe Toaster had already come and gone and we should all go home and get out of this weather. Nobody believed him. Nobody moved. Denial turned to anger, and people started cursing and leaving. Our group diminished from 50 to 20 over the course of five or ten long minutes.

Then one indignant woman, standing next to our English teacher from Chicago, declared she was going to go find out who was in the van. No sooner had the sentence escaped her lips than it started up, its brights blinding us all, and peeled out of its parking spot at an alarming speed. It was like someone had punched the gas and was escaping a bank robbery.

It was only then we saw the manhole over which the van had been parked.

“Oh, son of a bitch.”

“He walked right under our feet! He opened that manhole and went and paid his respects while we all stared at his god-damn van!”

“I am not coming back for this next year.”

“What a genius!”

A few of us started laughing. The little we’d seen, the winter we’d braved, the pomp and circumstance of the night all ended with such an anti-climax it was befitting of some of Poe’s most underrated work. The night felt like it needed a redo, another viewing.

Confused, half-frozen and hungry, we all moped back to our cars and drove home. Stuart told me a few days later there was a blurb about it in a Baltimore newspaper he’d found online, after returning home. At the time we’d felt cheated, but had we known it was the last visit of the real Poe Toaster to Edgar Allan’s final remains, we surely would’ve raised a solemn glass with him and saluted his life and work, imitating his same admiration of one of America’s great writers before disappearing into the biting cold fog of New England for the last time.

Ka'ahumanu

from 'The Xenophobe'

It occurred to me in 1996 at some point. I was at the front of my middle school’s campus and the buses had just dropped us off. It was bright, hot and early that morning. My backpack had about 30 lbs. of books in it and I was looking at the field, the portable classrooms, the big peach-colored buildings, the countless bugs swarming and the construction work going on near the other corner of campus.

“Man, fuck this.”

And I turned around and left.

I got to the edge of the school property and took my first step into a larger world, of optional class attendance and absenteeism-for-mental-health. I remember feeling like a total badass. I walked to the end of the block, then over to a tourist-trap strip mall. I bought a Coke with my lunch money and sat at a table for about an hour trying to come up with something to do or someone to see.

But everyone was in class. Shopkeepers started giving me dirty looks. “Don’t you have school today?”

Sheepishly, I wandered back to campus halfway through the day, warm Coke in hand.

“Dude, where were you all morning?”

“Ditching.”

“Whooooooa.”

The entire fruits of my labor were three missed lectures and a warming bottle of soda. Even still, I was hooked. It was shortly thereafter that I reached high school and the stakes were raised.

Maui High faced east. This meant from the front of its campus, staring at the whole of its collection of buildings, you were pointed west and the Iao Valley was a lovely, foggy backdrop against it.

Maui High had a six-foot fence around its entire perimeter, with the exception of two spots. The bus lanes that dropped the kids off at the front of the campus had locking gates. Even if they hadn’t, they were right in front of over half the staff’s and faculty’s offices, and the remainder of the front of campus was empty, save for that chain-link fence, so any escapees were visible to anyone peering across the front half of the campus.

The other spot was at the northwest corner of campus. There was a soccer field adjacent to the locker rooms and a banyan tree at the corner of campus with a trunk you could park a Mini Cooper inside. There was also no chain-link fence, and the buildings were mostly windowless classrooms. When you combine those with its seldom visits from campus security, it was like The Underground Railroad of slackers, stoners and misfits.

The real problem was security. They patrolled on golf carts at approximately 60-second intervals around campus. They were almost always somewhere along the front of campus, but only intermittently in view of the northwest corner. The trick was to hang out until they passed, and once out of their field of view, run. From the locker rooms it was a 20-second run to the far side of the banyan tree, then another 10-second dash across the street and behind the nearest house to campus. The neighborhood next to school hid the ditchers from that point on, and the mall was nearby.

Freshmen and sophomores who had struck up paid deals to hide in the trunks of seniors with early leave were suckers, I thought. What kind of self-respecting punk handed over cash for the privilege of being locked in a trunk face-down in jumper cables and red dirt until the driver felt like letting him out in front of God knows who? Those of us with dignity just dropped our books in our lockers and hauled ass. By the time the trunk-ditchers were released from their tombs after their drivers had run an errand or two, most of the rest had hoofed it to the mall and gotten the best tables at the coffee shop and drunk whatever was in their bags.

We knew half the staff at the coffee shop – one of them managed my first band – and so they’d get us free drinks on occasion. Also, the post-high school mallrats were always in abundance: Omar, who had gauged his tongue bar out so far he could lock a Master Lock through it; Charles, who worked nights and had nothing to do all day but hang out with us; Portia, the first transgendered person I ever met and nice as could be; Jade, who home-schooled, etc.

The third option was more of an emergency escape hatch than anything else. Near the southeast corner of campus, almost directly opposite the soccer field, the portable classes lined up in a row and one in particular stood across the street from the closest house to our high school. Coincidentally, my third period American Government class was held in this very shack and I had triple the absences in it than my closest second.

As it went, the street bordering the campus on the south, running east to west, was angled ever-so-slightly north as it ran east. At that nearest point, just at the corner of my Government class, was one tiny three-foot wide gate the school had been made to install for emergency evacuation purposes. To get to it, nobody could waltz around the front of the building – the teacher knew the gate was there and promised security she’d keep an eye out for ditchers – and if you went around the back, there was an additional appendage to the chain-link fence that blocked the route to the open gate. This fence appendage was about two feet shorter than the rest of the fence and 18 inches shorter than the bottom of the windows in the classroom, so to get out was an acrobatic feat of vaulting over the fence while keeping low – and quiet, of course – but not until after hearing the teacher sit in her chair and start to call attendance. Once over, it was easy to walk straight south out the open gate and into the residential neighborhood. Of course, to get to the only point of interest, the mall, it added an extra 15 minutes of circumnavigating campus to escape from the southeast corner, so most of us just used the soccer field.

School, in that sense, was like its own little battle map. Every student in attendance at that institution could point out the best spots to ditch, to smoke, to egg classrooms, to disappear with a fling and of course which bathrooms to avoid. Some of the locals had developed nasty crack habits and took to smoking it in one set of bathrooms in a big building on the southern end of campus, which made them even more prone to violence against littler kids than usual. Often on the way to class I’d smell that smoke coming out a bathroom window and it would make me shudder – it was like the smell of death in amphetamines and sky blue tile.

The strangest story we ever had while ditching was that one of the faculty members had decided to ditch school too, so when we saw him it was incredibly awkward. It was strange enough for us being semi-caught a mile from campus, and it was stranger for him to be negotiating with 15-year-olds and saying “If you don’t tell on me, I won’t tell on you.”

It wasn’t until the end of my tenure on Maui that security discovered our route near the soccer field and covered it en masse, after our last great adventure out. A school assembly had been called and none of us had any intention of sitting through 90 minutes of cheerleader pep and being slapped in the back of the head by locals. We had to leave in several groups, as nothing draws suspicion on or off campus like 10 kids hanging out in a pack, constantly peering over their shoulders.

I went on the first party, of underclassmen. It was three younger friends and me. The second party was leaving the opposite end, via the narrow gate, around the same time. We were the guinea pigs; if we got caught, the older kids knew security was onto us. I was actually older than two of the kids in the third party but they were decidedly cooler so I got stuck babysitting the freshmen and geekier sophomores.

Security passed by and we picked our moment and ran. I was paranoid about being seen with my backpack at the mall so I ditched it under our car, which was parked at the corner behind the banyan tree. We sprinted for the next block and embraced freedom after making our way northwest; I planned on picking up my bag after school as we got back to the car.

We went bowling, first; our bowling alley had the best food on earth and we had lunch and bowled a couple games for about $6 each. We moseyed to the mall and spent our usual day window-shopping, chatting and wasting our idle youths away.

By noon, only one person from the second group showed up and came running, soaking wet. It was one of the local skaters.

“Man, everyone got fucked.”

“What?!”

“I barely made it here; security caught me and the other freshmen a block from campus and I jumped into some dude’s swimming pool to hide. They didn’t see me when they rolled on by to catch everyone else running.”

“What about all the upperclassmen? Where are they?”

“Man, I don’t even know. I heard some yelling when I was crossing by the houses near the soccer field but who the hell knows; I wasn’t stickin’ my head out to see.”

Anxiety got the better of all of us, then. We worried far too much to enjoy our free time and ended up going back to school early.

We came back via the soccer field. If we ever had to come back in the middle of the day, odds were good we could blend in once we got back on school property. Plus my bag was there, under the car, with all my books in it.

Only when we got to the car, there was no bag. There was no 40 lb. stack of $30 textbooks in it. There was just settled dust and dying grass and the car. The bag wasn’t in the car, so I knew my brother hadn’t put it in there for me. My stomach tied itself in knots and I spent the rest of the day coming up with any excuse, any lie, anything to get me out of losing an entire set of textbooks.

By the time I caught up with the upperclassmen – Jeff, Eli, my brother, Alicia, Roach and Jago – I was livid.

“What the fuck happened to you, Jeff?”

“Cool it, buddy; security caught us by your car and we all got shat on. You guys are the only ones who made it out.”

“So I’m supposed to feel bad for you because you can’t run your fat asses fast enough across a soccer field? Where’s my bag? It was under the car this morning.”

“I don’t know.”

“Eli, where’s my bag?”

“Haven’t seen it, dude.”

Eventually someone remembered they saw security take it.

I went to the security office and asked for my bag. I figured they were going to hold it hostage until they could run me through the ringer and make me admit to ditching out. I’d get a detention or two, sure, but it would be better than replacing those books. They claimed not to have it. I had to go home and tell my parents the whole story, front to back. They were furious. They were even angrier when they got off the phone with the school, everyone at which swore not to have seen my bag.

It never turned up. I got out of having to buy a few of the books, but my parents and I had to fork over almost $100 for those I couldn’t escape. In the end, it mostly took the wind out of my absentee sails.

By the time we moved to Atlanta, schools had started cracking down on ditchers. All absences had to be accompanied by at least a parent’s note if not a doctor’s, and we were made to carry around handbooks with personal attendance records in them. All absences and tardiness were marked and initialed off by staff and faculty, in pen, and we had to check in at the end of every few weeks. Too many absences meant detention, and too many more meant expulsion. I went to all six classes five days a week. The last resort would have been to fake sick and spend an hour in the nurse’s office, but come on.

Of course, in college nobody cares about attendance; nobody gave a damn when I took a day off. Most of my classes had mandatory attendance, but those professors gave us two freebies – any more than that, and they bumped our grade down a full letter at the end of the semester. Also, I wasn’t in class from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. straight, and the beatings decreased in Atlanta high schools and became non-existent in college so it was a much easier institution to stomach. Playtime metamorphosed from playing hookie to barhopping and students were so unafraid of teachers they brought beer to class, but the real secret weapon the schoolmasters unleashed was simply of our own aging. Near-perfect attendance records and knowledge gained from our educations became points of confidence, not shame; the loose schedule and price tag accompanying a university matriculation were enough incentive to spark in us a sense of personal responsibility.

But when we were young, we damn sure made those security guards earn their paychecks.