7/22/2016 0 Comments Round Top by PW CovingtonRound 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. 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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