This blog represents the online writing portfolio of jonny Lupsha. Please visit our publisher's website and FaceBook page by clicking the A Carrier of Fire links below. Alternatively, you can view my other work, organized by category, by visiting my other blogs at the links below. Thank you for visiting!

Monday, January 31, 2011

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Unpublished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.

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