Old, White House by Adam Shutz

Old, White House

The house was on fire. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. Mother rushed me up the stairs like it was time for bed. We were followed by grey tails. When she turned in the bedroom doorway, an apse of smoke curved around her and fell as she bent to touch the side of my face. The smoke was from a dream someone else was having. She forced her mouth into a smile. Her eyes wouldn’t do the same.

“Sometimes, things—” She closed her eyes. “It’s just—”

Below us, we could hear the crystal sounds of the fire, the wooden beams of the house expanding and cracking.
“Let’s get your clothes.”

In big armfuls mother grabbed everything inside the dresser drawers and threw them on the bed. The walls of the room murmured. They brought in voices from outside the house, voices which started as shouts on the front lawn and ended as the shadows of sounds humming up the wires behind the walls. Then the air left the room and the color left with it. Across the bed, mother busied herself to leave. The sun behind her, the low light, she appeared translucent in front of the window.

One by one she picked from the pile of clothes a shirt, a pair of pants, folded them on her chest, and neatly placed them in the suitcase open on the bed. When she finally snapped it closed, we were the only things in the room not lost to smoke.

“We’re not coming out yet. I’m not coming out.” Mother tripped as she made her way to the bay window. She had begun to shut her eyes.

I wasn’t there. Mother didn’t want them to know I was there. “You’ll have to wait. It ain’t time,” which she said more to herself than to the men outside, who were grumbling at the walls of our house. From the center of the living room, away from the window–mother warned me from the window, told me, “Nothing good will come of looking”–I saw fifty men if there were five, each identical to the next, faces melting in rage, raising their arms in violent fits, threatening the house with shotguns and signs and rocks.

And, there, just behind them, in a line near the crumbling road, were their women, wives and daughters, old and young, motionless and entranced by the violent gestures of the men: a calm, flat sea behind the breaking waves. I wanted to say that I knew at least a couple of the men from town, but couldn’t. They were lost in fits, blurred as if in passing.

Mother was hunched over. She was breathing heavy from one room to the next, passing with arms full—albums and frames and fetishes and fruit—going one way, then carrying another pile, going the other. Outside, the men became dull in the fading sun. Their outlines only hinted at by the light of the fire spreading from the garage to the roof and down the sides of our house.
​
It was nearing dark. I was hungry. When we first heard the shots on the front lawn, mother was in the kitchen making dinner. The sounds of the gun must have made her remember something. She said, “You’re father… he’ll be late tonight. We’ll have to eat without him.” Then the fire started.

She picked up the suitcase, said I’d have to wait in the cellar for father, smiled again, and looked to her feet for things that had fallen. The smell of supper’s chili was still in the air. Before we made it to the basement steps, the sofa was in flames.

​“Hold your breath,” mother said, as she placed me and my suitcase in with the furnace and handed me a wet cloth to hold to my mouth. When I did she looked angry, grabbed the cloth and tied it around my head.

When mother said goodbye and closed the door to the closet, I laid my head against the cold furnace to hear the cracking of the fire through the air ducts. Inside, there was a language to the embers, a chattering logic of the wind and the wood. I tried to make out what they had to say. When she left I listened to her, to mother, to her steps, their simple rhythm like something on high melting and dripping onto a hollow log. As she reached the top, she turned on the cellar light. The closet remained dark. I watched the smoke seep under the door, a slow, grey cloud lit with an orange center of light. Somewhere in the cloud the planet began to fall away.

​I remember someone saying, “It’s a kind of boy.” That was the first thing I heard.

A man in a fireman’s hat pushed the metal and wooden debris off me. They were black like I was black and everything was wet with ash. Above the man in the hardhat I could see clear through the ceiling, past the smoke slated with light, to a sky bright and clear and blue. ​

Another man in a hardhat, but in a different uniform, pulled me from the furnace and carried me through the cellar door to the driveway. Most of the house was gone. What was left was crooked. Around the driveway were vans and trucks and many more men in hardhats, some in uniforms, others in jeans. To each side of the driveway was a small crowd, smaller and far less menacing than the day before. They wore different faces. They stood different and acted different and were hushed. When the crowd noticed me in the hardhatted man’s arms, what little sound there was fell silent. The scene was softly alive with the grumbling sounds of engines and the terminal type of whisper. One in the crowd pointed and looked surprised. He said something to the man next to him who turned and darkened his face. I cowered into the hardhatted man’s chest and tried to rid myself of his dark look.

I was in the open air. I wanted to be back were my mother put me to be safe, back where it was dark and sleepy and cool against the metal furnace. I didn’t want the crowd to see that I couldn’t hide as well as my mother wanted. ​

The hardhatted man placed me in a gurney in the back of an ambulance, strung a plastic mask around my head, gave me a deep, knotted look, then closed the door. Through the ambulance walls, I could hear the muffled voices of the crowd grow and speculate. They spoke about me, about my house, about my mother, but what they meant I couldn’t tell. I tried to hide myself in the corner of the gurney because I couldn’t tell. After a moment, the ambulance’s engine started. The siren bleeped and stopped and we began to move. From the small window in the ambulance’s back door, I could see a wisp of smoke rising from my house into the sky, over the heads of the crowd, over the vans in the driveway and the fire trucks and police cars, over the road and mailboxes and the neighbors’ houses, over the trees and the sign for Last Stop Tavern, over the overpass and the cars on the overpass, over more trees and roofs and over the green ridges of the hills. Over the hospital gate and doctors’ faces and smiling nurses. Over the television I couldn’t turn off and the machines that beeped and hinted I was alive. Over the grey-suited man who took me from the hospital a week later. Over Belington. Over West Virginia. Over Clair who spoke in a soft voice and kept me in the old, white house for years after. Over the woman that pretended to be my mother. Over my mother. Over the noise of the crowd that gathered at night on the lawn of the old, white house.

Adam Shutz is the editor of "Artichoke Haircut." Adam Shutz once had a dog. Adam Shutz once collected snow. Adam Shutz now collects water and snow and sometimes ice. He doesn't like to collect water, that happens by default. Tragic.

Normal's Gets Ziing'ed January 11!

Blaster Al Ackerman in City Paper's People Who Died

Baltimore City Paper - News and Features

Mole Suit Hits #1! 2013 Top Ten Local Folk and Country Releases

2013 Top Ten Local Folk and Country Releases

Two By Dina Marie Varsalone

We at Shattered Wig Empire in The Ether hope you had a great Thanksgivikkah yesterday, even if it ended weeping to Jim Reeves' "The Blizzard" next to the fireplace with grandpa telling you to get your act together. We ourselves are far from home doing a special report in Alabama.

Here are two beautiful, sparse poems by Dina Varsalone to soothe you as you ponder family, time, mortality and the straining at your waistline.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ideas Of Order

Each false
thing ends.


How did we
come to think


ill humor
should mask


as youth?
We lay


sticky with sleep,
the sense against


calamity. The room
is a quiet, shrinking


motive for metaphor.
The stillness


is the stillness
of the mind.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Fixer of Midnight

Winter dark,
I dropped


into his sea
of a body


for a touch
of salt.


Fogs descended.
Leaning back


I crossed
a hand


over my eyes;
flinging aside


theoretical things,
I could not count on


the stars
or anything else.


I’m growing old
back into odd places.


From the air,
of the body.


And then the window
blotting out reason.




----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Dina Varsalone grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Baltimore Md where she runs writing workshops at the Mill Centre in Hampden. Her work has appeared in print in her self-published zines Ablerug and Take Me, I'm Yours! as well as Reed Magazine, The Watermark, and Embrocation Cycling Journal. She's currently at work on a book of poems and a humor book based on her blog, How to Waste Your Youth (for fun and profit!). Read more of her work at Dinamarietv.com.

"Root Boy Slim" by Fitz Fitzgerald

Going to college at the University of Maryland, College Park in the late '70 s, early '80 s was a pretty miserable experience. I was expecting a '60 s style revolutionary atmosphere with everyone reading Rimbaud and Burroughs, scribbling away at their novels, starting amazing bands, but what I got was a whole lot of drunk business majors throwing beer bottles from dorm windows and viewing my few friends and me as hideous aliens.

Luckily I stumbled into a Half Japanese show in one of the cafeterias and there were always Root Boy Slim bacchanalias to attend. Sure everything went to hell and Reagan became president, but here was one crazy- assed gooey fat guy turning major slack into a high art form. My dormmate across the hall claimed to be his coke dealer, but I'm sure there were a handful of enterpreneurs per dorm who could make that claim.

Here is Fitz Fitzgerald, author of Things To Do In Baltimore, with his homage.

Root Boy Slim

neither slim nor a boy
burning voodoo sex change
present but elsewhere
his eyes his eyes his eyes
banned for inciting a riot
he rushed the white house
out of his mind on LSD
he didn’t run away
his family did
living in a station wagon
the security deposit
a maintenance fee
boogied till he puked

New Sublime Words From Lily Herman

When I heard that Lily Herman had a new book, Each Day There Is a Little Love For You In A Book, published by Dryad Press, I immediately connived her into reading at Normal's Books & Records with Adam Shutz and Fitz Fitzgerald.

I figured Adam would be appropriate on the bill since Lily initially blew my mind at an Artichoke Haircut "You're Allowed" reading that he co- hosts. I am a fan of the series and realized I'd never heard Adam read, except for when he read out loud the contents of a bottle of a cleaning product he accidentally drank at a particularly crowded and boisterous night at the Dionysus.

His reading of the various polysyllabic chemicals that went into the concoction that had blued his lips was gripping, especially when he moaned or yowled after a particularly devious sounding lab creation, but it lacked literary meat. At Normal's he read two great excerpts from a novel he is working on and Fitz Fitzgerald read from his "Things To Do In Baltimore" (buy soul swelling books & records at Normal's was indeed included, as was place a tiara on Carabella Sands' head and find Carlajean's missing bag).

Lily read the beautiful poem that awaits you below.

Untitled June 14, 2013

Chief among the things I never
thought I’d do was get my nipples
pierced in a parlor on the main drag
of a small town in Wyoming, which going
by its own standards is a big
city. One of the dorm buildings—
the one across from one of
the taxidermist’s—weighs in as
the state’s tallest building
at nine or so stories, a still point
of the still world. When everything
is small, one small thing
is bigger, and we have worn out
walking in this town, we have tried
the bars for companions, there is
no place to swim unless you want
to brave the pit nicknamed
Stink Lake.
The seagull population
is similarly transplanted, we strain
to figure out what they are doing
landlocked here with
the rest of us, until you discover
one day that their nest is the town
dump, nestled next to the canyon
where bored men like to go
shooting and shout about
democracy.
You tell me you’d be as avid
in my poems as you are
in my bed if they weren’t all
so concerned with the complexes
of Christmas past. If I hadn’t
documented just so thoroughly
the old fingerprints and phonographs,
the housesitting jobs and homefulness
that can be characteristic of
other people. You want to know
how it was that your unaccredited
nun got drunk with them, went
to bed with them marching
at my request in their
two-by-twos, how I skated through
things then at which I bristle
now. You want
to know what happened to my ease,
and I tell you, it went the way
of my easiness, and that even
properly séanced, you can’t conjure
one without the other. My heart
can be summoned alongside
my pants, but they are sure
to leave the party together
too, hurrah, hurrah.
Chief among the things
I never thought I’d do was
be serious about this
state, long after we lived here
I saw it as the backdrop
for the one-act play of our
success or our doom. Wyoming,
until recently, existed for us
to test ourselves.
Now I see it as it will look
in our absence: How Laramie
is like a tree perpetually falling
to the audience of the emptiest
forest in the lower forty-eight,
and everyone in town swears
that it can anyway be heard.
How they say there is nothing
they need that isn’t already here,
and how if the city leaves you
wanting for anything, the problem
is primarily with you.
But what you need is to be able
to sense, if not see, the ocean, and I
need women who will calmly
reject me if I come onto the wrong
one on our joint behalf, instead of
a place where all the women
who love women are eighty
and live fortified on properties
outside the town’s main postal
code, so that the fires will come
down the mountain and get them
before the pitchforks reaching out
from the city center ever
do.
The last year was the least likely,
your face was nearly impossible
in the first instance of my finding
it, all the men at the wedding
feigning that their collective motive
for leaning on a car was
casualness and not drunkenness,
Chanelle dancing over
to feed you a lily blossom tightly
bound—meant maybe
as an apology, but transformed
by my presence into her
blessing what you and I were about
to eat together, into her
invoking my name for the first
time that I faced you.
I am sorry that my name must be
a flower and not a season, a constellation,
a type of liquor, I am sorry to assume
a sacredness beyond what I myself
have earned, by simple virtue
of my arrangedness, of how well
I can be fit into bouquets and carried
to the summit of either baptisms
or burials.
You shrugged and told all of us, It tastes
like a salad, not trumpeting what
you’d been handed, but not
dismissing it, either.
It was thus that we became the patron
saints of our own travels, but your mother,
afraid we’d be our own martyrs, gave us
a Saint Christopher medal
anyway, and you scoffed, which is
the Catholic education that keeps
on giving, but I told you
the check engine light’s been on
for ten thousand miles, so we can use
all the prayers they’ll spare us.
You assured me that you knew
how to change a tire, and that we needed
no one, and we glanced at the sky
as if to say, Yeah, we’re talking
about you, but still
we drove through Iowa in one
long day to escape the well
in the clouds that seemed
indisputably to be watching us,
and even though it looked
the same over the state
line, we pulled over and went
passively to sleep as soon as we
were in Nebraska. I told myself
that different gods ruled there,
and vowed for the thousandth time
not to argue with any more Christians
who won’t believe that Yahweh was
once one among a council, and that
if they were going to be stringent
about the archives they’d acknowledge
that they were polytheistic majors
with an emphasis on Christ.
But it is often pointed out to me
that I myself have graduated
from nothing, so I steer clear
of them, choosing instead
to recite the same five poems
that I’ve used as home security
for years, that bolster
my inner consumer against
the charms of my inner
salesman. I memorized them
when confronted chronologically
with my fears of death, family,
and rootlessness, but I point out
smugly that I am not afraid
to fly.
I am afraid most, I tell you, of the stretch
of I-25 between Fort Collins, Colorado,
and Denver, riding it at night, I see
the blankness of blackened strip
malls, burned up by darkness, our
smallness increasing with our
diminished proximity to what even
we will reluctantly call a real
city. We are grateful
to return to our reconfigured
ranch town, whose darkness
is the absence of sunlight, of
water or stars, of reflective
surfaces or indeed an image
to reflect, here where
nothing
stands for nothing, where they
are literal with their communion
and godful in their use
of every day bread, and we stand
for our final months, two more
monuments sticking up to guide
the lightning west, wondering if
without us it will just breeze through
town without anyone to call it
home by name, without anyone
to hear it fall.