Artichoke
Haircut
volume one point five
artichoke haircut volume one point five
spring 2011
editors justin sanders saralyn lyons jonathan gavazzi adam shutz melissa streat
layout & design adam shutz
cover art melissa streat www.artichokehaircut.com
Artichoke Haircut is published biyearly by the people listed above. This is our first web issue (keep it, it’ll be worth something, even though you didn’t pay anything for it), so all the info that’s usually in this space we haven’t come up with yet or we have no idea what it means. We’re poor. Can’t afford lawyers. But we’ve seen this phrase a lot so we’ll put it here: All rights reserved. Copyright © 2011. And oh yeah, watch out for our Spring/Summer 2011 issue, out soon. Happy reading and postulating.
artichoke haircut
volume one point five
editors’ edition jon gavazzi saralyn lyons melissa streat justin sanders adam shutz
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poetry
Unsurviving; A Sign
poetry
Rebound; Nursing Home photography
It’s Almost Over (#2, 3, 4) fiction
E.M.T. poetry
Prometheus, I am No Hercules; I Want to Be Frank O’Hara
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poetry
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jonathan gavazzi
“Lint fascinates me� -Richard Loranger
Unsurviving you tired to outyell time addressing the dead now try to outyell time addressing the unborn -Zbigniew Herbert
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ow the amorphous corners of shadow-spattered boxes that contain me are constricting, letting in the artless glint of another tuesday’s sunset over artless roads, populated artlessly by disappointed people. 6
The writhing metric time & barriered hills I think are growing feathers. They are about to take flight from so long contortionless limbs; They long to outstretch from bone. I want now to tell you what you will never hear: how the air lapsed that day, the brain-jerking broadcast slipping unmissed away from the steady churn of parking cars; about the slow sky’s exhalation; how the minutes swayed downward like sweat Artichoke Haircut 7
& stalled in front of murals;
I could hear the controlled breath of windows communicating, it’s hard to admit, but try. I have tried so to unsurvive myself from your impossible regurgitation, your translucent, impossible hands; Everything I
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have ever forgotten to say cannot save them. The lid’s been snapped perpetual
away, the cardboard bowed, the twine in calm, volcanic knot. I am sending you balloons through the oil-hot floor, where the unwanted, accidental, inadvertent air inside will sink low enough and know what to call you.
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A Sign T
he neon haunting breasts that hung above us, watching, rested like ceramic kettles in the friction-hot midair of the bar. Having long since cried out in readiness, they pretended their curvy soft, and mocked your sourness I think for their heaven-feigning height, their bouldery stillness.
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I did not yet understand then how how the mix had been
delivered—even through the tight stubbornness of your teeth—or how many you had even had throughout the short, contorted hour that passed like stone through a rivery vein, though I had been watching you; I imagine you were succeeding in not looking back, captivating strangers, and I think it was the neon figure overhead, her emblazoned glass arteries, that blanketed your shuttering eyes in a strange red. I did not mean to talk to you that way. Artichoke Haircut 11
Even if I had I would not have. I know it seems there’s something always keeping me. And later, an illusion of dawn given off by the alley’s incessant glow through the window had somehow pacified you.
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The open sign I had stolen years before when the record store downsized & quit me sulked heavy from an upward-bent nail forced immaturely through the unassuming whiteness of my bedroom
walls. The radiator, too, was yawning it seemed & keeping you sweaty from sleep— you had never asked for any of what I’d never meant to give, only for a settling breakfast. Picturing the unclean fridge, its impending absence of eggs, the magnets always falling away until barefoot-morning, the Artichoke Haircut 13
uncertainty of that sauce-encrusted light switch, I saw some ingredient was making ready to move on. I could not sleep throughout the incessant souring. I floated ghostly buoyant around the house, trying not to set the blinking clocks.
Poems from a forthcomming collection from Crack Boat Press. 14
15 poetry
saralyn lyons
“See you when you get home, just enjoy yourself for now; you’ll regret it later if you don’t. Yours Truly, Tibalt”
Rebound T
here is a ghost in my room. You’d laugh if I told you, but I feel it when you and I lay down, your heavy shoulder in my pillow. I feel it when you move in the morning to brush your teeth, and your voice is splintered, and you don’t want me to cook you breakfast. The ghost wants breakfast. It has always loved my pancakes. And it wipes the sleep from the corners of my eyes while you watch your morning ESPN. You’d laugh if I told you.
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Nursing Home A
ll bones and angles. This body used to be round with growing babies. • I lose my balance without the boots I got in 1943. • I met the woman I think I would have married if there were more time. • Artichoke Haircut 17
Chopin. Schubert. Bach. My old friends do not leave me, my fingers keep them. • I don’t remember the faces in the frames the nurse put by my bed. • Every day there’s one less person in the hallway. We are all replaced. • I walked with the nurse outside. Winter is coming, the days get shorter. • Black beads fall on glass when I open my window. This is all I hear. 18
19 photography
melissa streat
“Pain is absurd because it exists.� -Charles Bukowski
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23 fiction
justin sanders
E.M.T
To love and EMS, read the banner
draped over my old partner’s coffin at his service. I’m sitting in the back of the parlor sipping a glass a gin, which normally I hate but that day it was done in tribute. To George and three years together on the job. Three years of endless nights, and dinners of pizza and cigarettes. Three years of service and stinking uniforms, and of lies, and blood, and tears, and drinking. For most people, the term medic conjures up images of some battlefield brave-boy, patching up doughboys on the beaches 24
of Normandy. Or else it brings to mind squeaky-clean visions of blue and white pressed uniforms blazing a trail through the night to help some poor unfortunate. But the public perception of EMS is largely sentimentalized. Any EMT will tell you the reality of working EMS is anything but romantic. I don’t mean that it is long, difficult, and largely thankless work, it is all of those things. I mean the image of Paramedics and EMT’s as caring heroes doesn’t come anywhere close to the reality of the job. I
don’t know that any of us really see ourselves as heroes. Sure, some guys will get self-righteous if you push em the wrong way and launch into a tirade about how they’ve saved lives, but most everyone thinks those types are dickheads and truth be told, I don’t know if even the biggest prick in the service buys his own life-saver spiel. We’re just too callous and cynical for that. Every EMT is an asshole. It’s the only way you survive the job. It’s a requirement. EMS means you learn to stop seeing people as people, and instead you learn to make fun of their misfortune. Some people might call it black humor, but that doesn’t really do it justice. If black humor is finding comedy in otherwise sober situations, say, being at a funeral and having to stifle a chuckle at the goofy expression embalmed on the deceased’s face, then EMS humor is synonymous with sadism. EMT slang for a building fire with four or more third-degree burn victims is BOEC, which stands for Bucket Of Extra Crispy. Picture your clean-pressed and uni-
formed heroes sitting in a smoke filled bar, all in varying states of intoxication, belly laughing at your most intimately horrifying traumas. The time you thought you were going to die and when we showed up you were crying, big blubbery tears with the snot running down your face, and as we treated you, you shared some deep personal secret – how you’re gay and needed to finally tell someone, or you’re still a virgin, or, “If I make it through this I swear I’m going to find my kids and apologize to them.” We’re laughing at your secret, impersonating your voice and your hiccupping sobs, laughing so hard we – George pounds the steering wheel with his fist and almost loses the cigarette tucked between his lips, “Silly fuckin bastards, they don’t fuckin get it do they?” Of course your story isn’t the only one at play, we throw our own in the mix too: all the times we messed up on the job and cost someone their life but managed to hide it. All the times we arrived too late because we were finishing our burgers. All the times we refused to give someone mouth-to-mouth Artichoke Haircut 25
because they were ugly or smelled bad or, “I ain’t never givin no gawdam mutha’fuckin junkie no mouth-to-mouth. What I want with a mouth full of junkie puke?” All the times we were alone in the bus with some unconscious redhead and sneaked a peek at her tits. All the times we lost it with some handicapped vagrant and slugged him, then wrote off the abrasion as pre-existing when we picked him up. Granted, some of the stories we play with aren’t true, but you only survive EMS by lying, to yourself, to others. Lies keep everyone guessing about us, and they allow us to push the worst calls away as not having happened or having happened to someone else. They keep everything impersonal. They shift the blame for death and trauma from us to our equipment or the universe at large. Lying also gives us a persona, one infinitely badder and better equipped to cope with the job than you. We get to develop a second personality – one that’s seen shit you never will – so when we do come face-to-face with horror, you can put up the façade and act brave. It’s not ex26
actly split-personality disorder but it’s just as crazy. We don’t call it insanity though; in the vernacular it’s Toasty. Going Toasty is a low-level form of insanity. That’s what we call it whenever the job becomes too much for someone. It’s always said “going toasty,” never “went toasty” or “is toasty.” The “going” is crucial, because the going in the term implies a constant journey towards a state of madness. Once someone gets too toasty to continue working, they’re referred to as burnt-out, as if the heat of whatever has been cooking them finally finished the job. We’re all “going toasty,” and it is an accepted fate that we will all eventually burn out. Some people burn out like fireworks, brilliant and short, like my second partner Jaime who suddenly stopped loading a gurney one night and told an 86-year-old man with a colostomy bag to go fuck himself. In Jamie’s defense, the old man had decided that the best time to burp his colostomy bag was right as we were lifting him into the back. Intestinal gases that have been
stewing for hours in a bag full of shit leave a smell so god-awful it hangs on your uniform even after two thorough washes. Jamie ended four years on the job that night, sitting in the bus drinking gin out of his water bottle and refusing to answer another call. Other people didn’t so much burn as they did smolder. George, my trainer during my third year, had been on the smoldering end of burn out for years. He had all the classic signs: too-wide eyes, rough skin, and a stare that went off into eternity. He constantly forgot things. When he ate, if he ate, if he slept, if he had finished work or just started. It was like his brain had lost its grip on the consistency and routines of the normal world. Most nights, riding with George consisted of him effortlessly demonstrating proper intubations or how to administer new meds, followed by him passing on some nugget of medic wisdom, “People are gonna sell ya a lotta shit in this job son, a lotta shit. Ya gonna ride with people who swear they seen angels and souls and
Christ and Holy Mary’s cherry but don’t you believe’em. Don’t you believe’em.” After that he’d take a sip from his water bottle and exhale in a way that was long and slow enough to let me know he wasn’t drinking water. Then he’d repeat the whole process from the beginning. It took nearly a month for it to set in that George was an alcoholic, but then that wasn’t saying much, everyone was an addict of some sort. You don’t work EMS and not develop some form of addiction. It’s part of the job. They hand you one along with your uniform and training materials. Alcohol, pills, cocaine and whatever else. I never brought it up for that reason and because George was a neat alcoholic. He only drank on the job when the rest of us were drinking on the job. He always insisted that I drive whenever he was too far gone. And he never really talked about alcohol or drinking or why he drank, which was unique because all the other alcoholics I knew would prattle on endlessly about their relationship with the bottle. It makes Artichoke Haircut 27
sense, the medic world is a cold world. Our addictions aren’t the colorful and tragically beautiful psychological kind, they’re cold hard, chemical dependencies. The result of too many sleepless nights and too many hair-of-the-dog cures. For George, drinking was just something he did, a tool in his personal medic survival kit. I knew he had gone out on a bad call and that he drank to forget it, but he never spoke about it. There were rumors passed by the other EMTs, there always were. The most popular story was that he was the first responder to a domestic call where someone had dunked a newborn into a pot of boiling water. The night we picked him up was relatively calm. I remember thinking that the city seemed unusually peaceful. No sirens, no screaming. The air was soft and warm, smelling of flowers. I had just lit the first cigarette of the night when we were dispatched for a body in the middle of the street, corner of Greenmount and 25th. It was handled as a priority, but I remember 28
thinking it was probably nothing more than some passed out drunk or at worst an OD. That night I was riding with the guy who was soon to be my new partner. I had never really gotten along with Jaime; he was too cocky, a little too brash. He was one of those dickhead types that would get indignant whenever he felt slighted and launch into self-righteous tirades about how he had “saved people.” Things had gotten particularly bad between us the night before when I ran out of cigarettes and he refused to let me bum one. Despite all that, the silence was awkward, so we tried to make as much small talk as possible. All told, it probably took us about twenty minutes to arrive on the scene, but we were still the first to arrive. The body was face down along the median strip, legs sticking out into traffic. Drivers and pedestrians alike took only passing notice of it, just enough to steer around it or point and laugh before going about their business. Jaime was out of the bus first. I had just gotten the last piece of equipment into my
jumpbag when Jaime came up on the side of the bus and started pounding on the window, “George! It’s fucking George man! I think – I think he’s fucking dead or something!” From the look of things, George had been dead for a bit. He was barefoot but still wearing his uniform. The time it took to pull the gurney down and load his body into the bus went by in the slow breath of hours, every moment punctuated by an unspoken horror at finding George’s body, and a growing dread that one of us would need to ride in the back with him to keep a constant check for vitals. We drove George’s body to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. I didn’t hang around to hear the official cause of death, though someone later told me it was a case of alcohol poisoning. Outside the hospital I cleaned out the bus when Jaime walked up to me and offered me a cigarette. “Fuckin George man.” “Yeah.” “You wanna grab a drink?”
“Shit yeah.” We ended up being partnered the next week but it didn’t last long. Jaime burnt out by the end of the year and I got cycled to a different shift. Around that same time I heard about another guy from a different station, Carl, who managed to get himself fired by shooting heroin in the back of the bus between calls. Apparently he had gone out on an OD call, and after they had loaded the guy into the bus, Carl began going through the guy’s pockets until he found a baggie. He didn’t say anything to the guy he was riding with, he just pushed up in the back and climbed into the driver’s seat. Then en route to the hospital he flipped the bus in the middle of the highway. You probably read about that one in the newspaper a few years ago. Some people got hurt pretty bad, and the patient they were carrying died. The story spread through the EMT community pretty quickly as something of a warning to everyone. But it also never really changed anything. Artichoke Haircut 29
30 poetry
adam shutz
“Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite. And furthermore, always carry a small snake.” -W.C. Fields
Prometheus, I Am No Hercules I
was drunk when the sky was collecting into day and you were dying of what sounded like air that tired coquette capricious as a mind & mouth resigning to drink then spit the clouds ready to strangle it. I spoke at your empty gape and smiled: What terribly nice shoes Artichoke Haircut 31
and they were. Patented leather black. Clear even in the fog. This I think you understood. I was your paramedic. For just such occasions I carry sleeves of lightning but the fear you show clinging to a hydrant with more air than water makes me reconsider. You must tell me there is something more beautiful than life. Tell me you have seen it a summer storm under way on the horizon. Tell me you are clothed so clean to forget the dirt of having to walk flat on the street. 32
Just show me you have not meant to mimic my life clinging to an empty pipe. Show me with a steady eye and I will give you again fire.
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I Want to Be Frank O’Hara I
don’t know how to talk to people. Their minds rarely fall to their lips More likely it drips to the paunch. I have a gun in my pocket Which is shaped just like an ear. I don’t remember who said that Or if I was even listening Like I listen to birds Or the whispers of a fight Coming through the vents. The sky rarely fights That I don’t listen But it rarely fights or sings Like a bird which I hear. 34
Maybe I’m going deaf Maybe mute But surely it’s not both. I want to cry at the disabled Or trip and tear them limb from limb. Maybe then in the sunset mess Spilling from their heads I could speak to them Ask them simple questions: What did you have for dinner? Who have you loved? In a breath I believe They would sound like a bird. They would chirp for their loved For they are so close to finding them lost Though their skin still smells of burning and onions. I don’t know how to speak So I stand quietly in line Artichoke Haircut 35
Behind my brother Who also has something to say Tries anxious he fidgets Low eyes and a sigh. I am sorry for this too And fantasize for a moment again of blood But the line to the buffet moves A step a step A step so silent Only wishes like smells Can be heard by the crowd.
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other stuff:
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