Round Top by PW Covington

Round Top
 
I was all about the sirens’ songs.
The sirens’ calls,
Until the sirens called.

I used to love spending time with desperate and lost women…filling nights
and weekends with bottles of sweet and stinging liquors. 

Women; young or older. 
Women that would help me empty my wallet of whatever cash I could
scrape together. 

Then they’d tell me that they could borrow a couple hundred bucks from a
cousin…always a cousin, and ask me to drive them some place. Then
they’d tell me that I’d have to split for a while; that they’d call me when
they had the cash, and that we’d hook back up then, once they had it.

I actually believed that shit, too, the first few times…

I slept in my car a few blocks from the bus station in Albuquerque for a
week, one time, waiting for a call on a pre-paid Walgreens cell-phone,
waiting on word from some red haired chick whose Mom was working in
some program for addicts that served meals for the guys at the air base. 
I guess she must have ended up getting clean and going to work with her
out there, too, or something, without ever telling me about it.
Eventually I got the hint and took off to Nogales. 
Southern Arizona is shit, but it’s cheap, and I couldn’t hang around that
scene forever just waiting.
You can go on that way a while, man…like an orphaned midnight Maine-
Coon cat with a Roman candle up its ass, let loose down the aisle of a
crowded Mississippi church bus during a hail storm. 
You can go longer than you’d ever give yourself credit for, anyway. 
Fucking decades.

Then, it happens one day. 
You catch your reflection in a mirror.
Maybe, in a motel somewhere.
Maybe in a bar, if that’s still a thing you do.
Maybe, just in passing.
Probably, in a goddamned motel somewhere.
You’re fucking 40.
Maybe, a year or two more than that, but if it hasn’t hit you by 50, it
probably never will and either you’re a total shitbird or a Holy fucking
Roman Saint. 
Some kind of cock-sucking Buddha God-incarnate.

Fucking Kerouac never told you what happens now, did he?
Maybe he did….maybe you need to go back and read Big Sur again. 
One thing is for sure, you just don’t have it in you to weep over any dead
mice or dead dogs or dead birds or dead fish or dead whores or dead
whatever the fuck it was he was always weeping about in his drunkenness. 
Weep over one grand dead beat up and cast out world.
But you ain’t got no tears for any of that right now. And this ain’t coastal
California.

This is motherfucking Texas, you’ve got three marriages, two wars, three
felonies, a disabling psychiatric diagnosis, and more decisions made wrong
than right behind you.
For better or worse you’re a writer. You’ve done everything from drive
trucks to tend zoo, but as things turned out, you’re a writer.
You’re a writer.
You’re a writer and you fucking hate being around writers.



                I mean I have some writer friends but they are friends first.

                They happen to write.
                Some of them, most of them, maybe, might not even call
                themselves “writers” if you asked what they did for a living in the
                daytime. 
                Fuck them for that. 
                But, they are.
                Writers.
                And, friends.
                I have friends that I became friends with, and we met as writers…
                But, I know few that I became friends with BECAUSE they were
                writers, if that makes any sense.
                                                  I read. I read a lot. I even read stuff that I hate. I
                                                  read pure shit. I’ll read shit just to try to figure out,
                                                  why…exactly, I think it’s so shitty, Hell, there are
                                                  terrible, young reporters writing for my local paper
                                                  that I read for no other reason. A select few are
                                                   jewels among the shit, but most are shit among all
                                                  the other slightly less shitty shit.
                                                  To actually spend time with most of the assholes?

                                                  Fuck no.
                                                  I’m hiding from them right now.


                                                  Yep. 
                                                  Hiding.



                                                  First of all, I’m at a fucking writer’s conference.



                                                  Round Top, Texas…a town of 90 people. It is
                                                  spring time, the wild flowers are blooming and
                                                  everything is postcard perfect. Antique stores and
                                                  rustic crafts line rural blacktop roads for miles in all
                                                  directions. 
                                                  Longhorn cattle, four or five head per perfectly
                                                  planted seven acre field, graze for effect and, in
                                                  what would, in a suburban neighborhood, be called
                                                  “curb appeal”. It is exactly what a person from the
                                                  city would dream up were they to dream up a
                                                  “beautiful day in the country”. 

                                                 Texan. 
                                                 Very. 
                                                 Former Governor Rick Perry occasionally spends
                                                 long weekends with his family here.

                                                 I am renting a motel room at the cheapest place in
                                                 the oilfield town of Giddings, 15 miles away.
                                                 Hiding from Governor Perry.

                                                 Hiding from the writers.


                                                 I checked in, got my registration packet and
                                                 anthology, name tag, and tickets to the catered
                                                 meals for the weekend; everything Round Top,
                                                Texas, figures that I warrant…every damned thing
                                                I paid for, anyway.

                                                I was taken aback when I discovered that the
                                                editors of the anthology had placed my piece on
                                                the page facing a poem by Robert Hass, the
                                                festival headliner, who had been US poet laureate
                                                for two years, back in the mid 1990’s. 
                                               Shit, not THAT big of a deal, really, I suppose…
                                                his last year as Poet Laureate of the USA was the
                                                year I was arrested on my first felony charges. 

                                                Time fucks with all of us, don’t she, Jack Kerouac?
                                                I’m talking to fat, drunk, Florida, Jack here…
                                                but young, bright eyed, Lowell, Jack would do
                                                well to eavesdrop a bit…yes, he would…

                                                I mean, really?

                                                “Who the fuck am I to be here,” I thought, as I
                                                 looked around the manicured parking lot.

                                                 I’ve got a little over 120 or so college credit hours
                                                 Shit, maybe more than that, if you count the stuff
                                                 from the Air Force Community College. In
                                                 everything from Criminal Justice to Business
                                                 Management, but I could never stick with one thing
                                                 or stay in one place long enough to make any of it
                                                 count towards anything.  Then, by the time the war,
                                                 and prison, and the streets, and living out of a
                                                 bottle, or a pipe, or a bus station sink, caught up
                                                 with me, my nerves just couldn’t take a classroom
                                                 anymore…I tried…I even tried online classes,
                                                 once things started settling down for me. It wasn’t
                                                 that I couldn’t work or do the work; it was that it
                                                 wouldn’t work for me by that point.

                                                 I spend a lot of time on college campuses and
                                                 around professors these days; but, really, who the
                                                 fuck am I?
                                                 I don’t even have an Associate’s degree to call my own.

                                                 Yes, the parking lot in Round Top, Texas was
                                                 manicured…full of Subaru wagons and “Coexist”
                                                 stickers and supposedly Eco-friendly SUV’s that
                                                 had spent the week before at the Austin poetry festival.

                                                 Man, I got kicked out of High School at sixteen
                                                 years old for publishing an underground student
                                                 newspaper, then immediately conned my way out
                                                 of a GED certificate from the Junior College over
                                                 in Victoria, Texas by telling them that I wanted to
                                                 enroll in either their welding or police academy
                                                 program, I couldn’t decide which, but couldn’t do
                                                 it at sixteen unless they’d let me take the GED test,
                                                 so I took it, then worked as a radio DJ at night
                                                 until I could join the Air Force the next year,
                                                 instead.

                                                The writing thing just kind of happened somewhere
                                                along the way, it was never anything that I went out
                                                 looking for or chasing.


                                                Most of the writers that I do know and can
                                                tolerate were either out of state, in Washington DC
                                                at some Social Justice thing called Split This Rock
                                                or at a poetry festival going on in New Orleans.

                                               Others were at a small festival in a remote west
                                               Texas town. A festival and town that I had been
                                                invited to a few years ago as a featured reader until
                                                the city fathers found out about my felonious
                                                background and started sending me waivers and
                                                releases of liability to sign about obscenity laws,
                                                which, it turns out, the Texas Penal code still has
                                                on its books.

                                               Seems they had been warned by some well
                                                intentioned Christian that I might be inclined to say
                                                or do something “obscene” in or around their
                                                fucked up west Texas town.

                                               I can smell a set-up when the wind starts blowing
                                               from Bullshitville. No way was I going to take my
                                               chances with the “prevailing community standards”
                                               of Lamesa, Texas. There are courtrooms in west
                                               Texas where no one can hear you scream.  I try
                                               my very best not to read in Red counties, these
                                               days, no matter how high-profile the potential
                                               punishment.

                                               What the fuck was I doing here, now, in Round
                                               Top, alone, and out-numbered?

                                                It’s like a high priced mental hospital or maybe
                                                some kind of really exclusive, private, white collar
                                                prison; that Round Top Festival Complex. 

                                                Perfect and pleasant in every way. 

                                               The kind of place someone like me has usually got
                                               to get caught rigging the World Series or taking
                                               over the Stock Exchange or cornering the
                                               international butt plug market or something to get
                                               sent to…It was not flesh-tearing to just sit there
                                               and get bit by occasional mosquitoes, but it quickly
                                               lost that limited degree of bucolic charm. 


                                               HOW
                                               IN
                                               THE 
                                               FUCK,
                                               MAN?

                                               I wasn’t in the mood to make new friends, so, I
                                               picked up what I had to pick up, exchanged my
                                               greetings, my hello’s, my thank you’s, my
                                               pleasantries, my brief introductions.
                                               FUCK, I suck more at this every year!
                                               I fucking hate writers.
                                                …and I got the hell out of there.

                                                I stopped at Wal-Mart on my way into Giddings
                                                and grabbed a bottle of $12 white wine and a
                                                frozen personal pizza to take back to what both
                                                Hotels.com and the East Asian immigrant desk
                                                clerk assured me was “America’s Best” Motor-
                                                Inn. 
                                                The moldy, dark, room had a mini fridge and a
                                                microwave, so it worked fine for me. Only a few
                                                months ago, it would have been a bottle of
                                                Bourbon and a double bacon cheeseburger, but
                                                hey, remember that fucking mirror that was
                                                mentioned earlier?

                                                Tomorrow there will be readings.
                                                There will be more that I will want to hear than I
                                                will want to say.
                                                And that will be perfect.

                                                As it should be.
                                                It will be time to gather.
                                                Not time to cast.

                                                I am still lured by sirens’ songs.
                                                Even when I know their every note to be futility
                                                and mirage.
                                                A time to sit and listen to learned, respected elders.
                                                Those that stayed in school.
                                                Those that colored inside the lines.
                                                To nod as if I give an appreciative shit,
                                                For, perhaps I will, actually care.
                                                A time or two.

                                                At Round Top.


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Bio: PW Covington is a 100% disabled combat veteran and a convicted felon. His most recent poetry collection, Sacred Wounds, is by Slough Press. Covington's work has been featured in both academic journals and underground 'zines, and he travels in the Beat tradition, sharing his works from the Texas/Mexico border to the San Francisco Bay area. His work is fueled by the legend and people of the great American highway. He lives in rural south central Texas with his English bulldog, Chesty. Catch up with him at www.PWCovington.com

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