Nobody was at the stage, and nobody was standing up, so Charles stood up, and proudly walked forward to the stage. A few people clapped and he put his right hand up in recognition of the fact.
“Thank you, thank you, I’m glad a few of you have preemptively noted my greatness and are now, as they say, with their fingers on the pulse of the hip subculture,” Charles acknowledged, “But tonight I will be reading to you from my personal history, and just to show you how productive and prolific I am, I will read you exactly what I wrote today, unedited, shorn of the sheen of the tripe released from the publishing houses of today. Remember, nothing has been altered.”
Thus, here was Charles’s performance:
“Where did I leave off? I left off where my grandmother came to my parent’s front door, hugged me, and told me she was going to take care of me. It was not a very easy thing to take. There are few moments in a life where you can truly say you take a complete 180. This is the only one I have to speak of, but I have no complaints on my personal experience. At the time, when I was 13, I was extremely upset. It took me more than a year to adjust to my new way of life.
“My grandmother did not dote on me the same way my parents did. True, she was very nearly as wealthy as them (due not in any small part to the “gifts” they had given to her for her to “enjoy” herself in her fixed-income retirement), and all of their combined wealth had been left to me, on top of a life insurance policy which promised to keep me living the “charmed” life until the day I would die, but in spite of all this she insisted upon living a simple life. We lived in a modest 3 bedroom home in Crystal Lake. I switched schools for eighth grade, and I went to high school in Crystal Lake. My grandmother was eighty-five years old. She would still drive me to school until I got my license.
“I should mention something about my grandmother. She is an exceptionally hip woman for being in her mid-nineties. She came of age in between the two world wars. She had been educated enough to know of the atrocities going on in the 40’s, the 60-70’s, and she is still sharp enough to recognize the fucked-up situation that is the current state of our home country. She has always been an outspoken protester. She owes her good health to two practices: active work in the outdoors and a meat-free diet. In both the backyard and front yard of her modest home in Crystal Lake, she has kept a beautiful garden for the last thirty years, since her husband, the grandfather I never knew, died. He died not long after Elvis Presley, and he had been a very big fan of Elvis in the early days, and he had also played guitar, and my grandmother told me that as he was dying, she would tell him to practice a lot with Elvis so that the two of them could put on a good show for her as soon as she died and got to heaven. There was never a question of her getting into heaven or not. While I had to go to Catholic school until college, and the Bible insisted that heaven really was quite hard to get into, and hell really was quite easy to fall into, I didn’t buy that shit for a second. Absolutely nobody I knew was going to hell, no matter how terrible they seemed.
“But there are so many more things to say about my grandmother. I really could write her biography. She’s told me so much in the last twelve years, I wouldn’t even need to consult any notes, I could just go and say everything strictly from my own memory. And she would deserve it because she is so exceptional in so many ways. I just love her. She really is a second mother to me. And I am a second child to her. She raised my mother forty years before she raised me. I owe her so much, I owe her everything, and that is why this history is dedicated to her.
“Funny story, I told her I was doing this a few days ago and she told me ‘Now more than ever, you’ve got to be working hard.’ I am still listening to her, though she doesn’t approve of this method as a means to an end. She thinks that what I am doing is the equivalent of kicking my legs in the air as if I were pedaling a bicycle. I am doing this for myself, but I am mainly doing this for her, as she is nearly 96, and the world needs to know about her, and my hope is, she’ll be congratulated on the wonderful job she has done as a human being in her lifetime. She will not be canonized as a saint, because she has not been extremely helpful to so many people besides myself, but the good she has done me far outshines the typical type of treatment I receive from thousands of people in this city everyday. She is a saint to me, and while this book is not exclusively about her, it is dedicated to her, and it is written in the hopes that she will be appreciated as she deserves to be.”
“Thank you,” Charles said, and walked off the stage amidst enthusiastic applause.
I went up as Charles went back.
“I just wanted to say something,” and a few people said, “Shhh.”
“This has been a crazy week for me, and for a lot of the people here now. Most of you won’t have any idea of what I’m talking about. But a few of you do, and I’d like to call on the one person who hasn’t handed me back his microphone yet. I want all of you to know how much I appreciate your help.”
“This isn’t a public announcement station, this is for reading poetry!” a drunk student shouted.
“I don’t care, my young friend, this is poetry.” I said to him.
Luther walked up to the stage with his microphone pinched between his forefinger, index, and thumb. He kissed his lightly as he gave it back to me.
“That, my friends, is all. You see, you don’t even know what’s going on here, and you probably never will. This is not considered a significant event, or this is considered a significant event, equivalent to the first Sex Pistols concert in Manchester, U.K., the one where Morrissey and Mark E. Smith and Ian Curtis and whoever else was who in post-punk who became obsessed with punk that night.”
“Read a poem, and stop the lecture,” a drunk girl shouted.
“Fine, fine,” I said, pulling out a sheet of paper I had scribbled a poem onto.
This was my poem:
Weather and Love
Clouds pass over a city, as predictably happens
Three or four or five or six times a week,
Rain falls on a town, every once and a while
Once or twice a week or four times or never.
Eros will meet the young on many occasions,
And he will ignore the old, and the lone.
Those that least deserve what they get,
Always go home with a lover at their side.
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