Allison Whittenberg

A Whittenberg is a Philadelphia native who has a global perspective. If she wasn’t an author she’d be a private detective or a jazz singer. She loves reading about history and true crime. Her other novels include Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, Tutored, and The Sane Asylum.

The Bard of Frogtown

      Like most writers, I am full of shit.

      Sometimes I look at the piles and piles of half-started prose and think, “Got a match?”

      And then, I think, I’ll write a poem. Poems save paper.

      So all of a sudden I am a poet.  Yet, I still have nothing to say.

      Write, writer, write!  Goddamn it, write you fucking idiot.  Asshole, hole in the ass.  Craphead.  Son of a bitch!

      Hey!

      What?

      Don’t get personal.

      By the way, my real father, yes, the one I have never seen in my life, is a goddamn poet.  My mother still gets an occasional sestina through the mail from his as yet to be published chapbook entitled, The Part of Me that No One Knows.

      Tell me about it.

      Yet as a poet, I just don’t feel like I am any good.  When I was younger I used to read my stuff with a sense of accomplishment.  Now I just cringe.  After work I  come home and try to get busy on something gold and it turns on trite, banal, and unkempt.

      Children are natural artists then they get old and they dry up.  I am 19 now.  And as I keep saying I have nothing to say.

      I’ve lived with Debra for the past four years.

      When I left home it was like a funeral except no one had died.  I was so sad.  I cried once I hit the main drag. Big tears, buckets of them.

      I was fifteen when Debra and I found our own place.  We moved from a little town to a big city. From West to East while still staying North.  We live in rough and tumble Frogtown.   In Frogtown, us people sell crafts, they line the drags with their manufactured baskets, pottery, metal works, and textiles.

      She is a little bit older than me and helped me out a great deal.  Not just with the security deposit but she listens to me hash out about my childhood.  Long nights we spent therapeutically bottle and blunt passing till I got it all out, the words.  I realized now that not only do I hate my stepfather, but I also resent my younger brother, and that my mother is a continual source of frustration.

      With all that memesized and catharsis-size, I should crack open like an egg.  I should have plenty to write about.  I should look at a blank piece of paper and fill it.

      I wash airplanes for a living. 

      Somebody has to.

      I wake up at five in the AM and go down to the airport and scrub the thick plastic windows with a long-handled brush.  I have always loved planes, always dreamed of floating above things.  Tempting God with man-made angel wings.

      When I got home this afternoon, Debra was in broken-in jeans, a teal tee shirt and the familiar fawn-colored leather jacket. She wears all of this indoors because we have limited heat.  Sometimes the walls get frost-covered Still, Debra is a diligent writer.  She does songs.  I walk in an she is holding the guitar pick between her teeth as she scribbles notes on a page.  She flicks her head back an winks at me.  She is a winker.  Always winking, an I think just who in the hell wears the pants in this relationship.

      She does.

      Debra loves bits of clutter: Books and papers and hankies that she blew her nose on.  I can’t stand it.  Often I just want to tidy up but dare I take liberties with her, her, her—well, I suppose genius is as good a word as any. But perhaps it’s still not the right one.

      A few months ago, Debra sold one of her songs to a big deal Cosmopolitan company. She got 500 dollars outright. We had steak for a week.  That’s the problem with being a Zoe and dealing with the Cosmos everything you sell is sold outright and haven’t us Blacks have given enough away.  They have stolen our land, our women, now our music.

      The name of the song was, “A White Sleeve of Moonlight.”  And when Debra sang it felt Black.  It was textual and lilting yet bodacious as cowboys.  She used steel strings instead of the Cosmopolitan twinkling of a piano.  I heard the Cosmo version on the radio and I almost kept passing the dial.  It was a totally different song, and a corny one at that.

      Oh Debra...  She was the sanctuary from my problems I forgot she had so many of her own.  She was like an regular Zoe with a family tree that tangled at the root.  I could never get it straight but I knew she was the half-sister of the dead Rice Street Man.  The Rice Street Man that my brother, Jack, was so enamored with.  The Rice Street Man that smelled worse than his dog.  And as if that weren’t bad enough, quite a few of Debra’s short on dollars, long in the tooth relatives used to stay over temporarily for months and months.  And poor little Deb was treated like she was invisible.  She was forced into disappearing to create a room. 

      She used to have to give up her bedroom and sleep on the couch. It was then that she learned to play that funky old guitar that she’d found in a dumpster.  At night while all the live-ins were raising Hell she’d mouth the words, practice fingering, playing without sound.  Just another blond-haired girl, in a country that overflowed with them.  

      So unprettied up, you could take her for granted.  I have never seen her in a dress but then again she’s never seen me in one either.  I like to use her life in my writing even more than I like to use my life in my writing.

      Writers are the worst type of people God ever put on this earth.  They note the way the dirt falls on a casket of a dear friend because they know they can use it later.  It is always my writing, my writing, my writing.  The whole fucking world revolves around my writing.

      I want to write a poem.

      Lovers make the worst critics, so why do I always ask my Debra? 

      I show her my words few and she says, “I don’t know it sort of sticks in my throat.”

      I snatches the paper back from her and tell her that she was supposed to fucking read it not fucking eat it.  

      She laughs at me.  She laughs at me.  She throws her lovable head back and laughs at me.

      I read my work aloud:

      Salt without bread.

      Thorns on a cactus.

      Buddy Holly, I miss you.

      Why didn’t you go Greyhound?

      I smile, puffing my chest out.  Sure, it needs some revision but it’s not all bad.  The images are clear and concrete.  The sound and rhythm may need some spit and

polish.

      All right, it sucks.

      It bites the big wiener.

      But at least it has punctuation and it does not employ the lowercase “i.”

      I want to be Langston Hughes.

      Enough of these meditations.  These scream fests on the mysteries of freedom, love, and hate.

      I want to be remembered.

      I know I am not a great writer I am only a great rewriter.  Half the time there is nothing pithy in the first draft.  Half the time I don’t know where it’s going it’s all improved.  I don’t have a style or tone that I wish to effect.  I feel like screaming at myself where is my theme? Where is my message?  Why am writing this poem in the first place.

      I will switch back to prose.

      Inside every fiction writer there is a failed poet.

      Metaphors, like my heart is dry like a big red balloon, are inflated but then I think all right so where do I go from there?

      I break for supper.  Debra fixed homemade pizza pie with marmot meat and shrooms as topping.  I down a few pizza slices and drop the crust. She’s not a bad cook, but I’m a little better, I measure, I do not estimate so much.  She has a great smile, nothing but teeth.  Big teeth and squinchy eyes. I enjoy this time a couple of low-rent artists eating pizza off a white plate with blue trim.  She asks me about the planes and I tell her quite recently they had entrusted me with an unbelievable amount of keys.

      “How many is too many to believe?”

      “37.”

      “Unbelievable,” she winks at me. “Now don’t fly off with the place.”

      I stand and she makes a grab for my butt, smiling, “Off to do more writing?”  she asked.

      “That’s a good question,” I answer.

      After our meal, she washes the dishes and I take my compositions to the bedroom. 

      In this next expanse of time, I had done everything to write.  I drew a bath, drank some murk, splashed cold water in my ears, danced the bop, the bump, the butterfly, the electric slide, the four corners, the ickey shuffle, the mashed potato, the shingling, the worm.  I felt refreshed, but still no words.

      So I light up and dream, I was making love to Debra only she has thick black hair and the wind blows and exposed her blond roots.  Her eyeliner ran down her cheeks like fast graffiti.  Those long full breasts had shrunk to teacups. 

      I dream of white food as symbolism. Rice pudding and glazed doughnuts.

      SPACE.  Time and space.  Time sitting, smoking in the numb silence, watching the snow, as if it were doing something wild, like disappearing instead of the same old same old.  I press my face against the pane and gaze at the wide, white city below. 

      Winter.  Heavy snowstorms at the floodgates bringing up a whirlpool of memories.  Snowing as marvelous as sugar—pink and white candy-coated Christmas.

      Debra, her bland blue eyes told of a fairy tale of cabbage and rye toast.  Toy soldiers.  Debra shouting a rendition of “White Christmas.”   I start singing along real low and soft you’d have to read my kisser to tell.  Wilting.

      The soundtrack mixes over and over.

      “Are you gonna share or is a contact high all that I can hope for?” is the question that wakes me. 

      Debra stands by the doorway, 25 years old, and wasting her time on me.  I’m just an adult child still so full of dreams.  Unable to achieve any synthesis.

      I roll a herb her way.

      Sometimes it’s better not to force it I think as my ram road is in her and I’m frictioning her.  Sometimes it’s better to distill in the hope of further cross-fertilization.

  I do have a beginning of something: 

      Snow like sweat

      or smoke, like mercury,

      rising above itself

      in a cloud.