Interviewed by Barbara Sueko McGuire

When Nancy Martini was in the third grade, she remembers being the worst artist in her class. That’s because she’d given up drawing.

“I remember kids making fun of me and feeling very awkward,” she says. It wasn’t until the seventh grade, at the encouragement of her science teacher, that she began sketching again. “He made me believe I could be an artist because I had thought it was this special talent,” she continues. “It’s not. He was right, it’s a matter of repetition and practice, and I didn’t stop from there.”

Fast-forward to today, and you’ll find Nancy, who is originally from Chicago, exercising her well-honed artistic talents in Miami, Florida. There, in addition to creating her own mix-media pieces that employ upcycled and reclaimed materials, Nancy works part time an art director for a small advertising and marketing firm.

Sunday Salon touched base with her this summer, as she put the finishing touches on a sketchbook that will eventually be a part of the Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project 2011.

Barbara Sueko McGuire: When did you first realize you wanted to be an artist?

Nancy Martini: I was always a creative child—I invented a lot of products, just crazy stuff, and I’ve always designed thing. A lot of times I had sketchbooks full of designs because I just had to get them out of me.

Art is a different way of expressing yourself. I’m very shy and it’s very hard for me to get in front of a crowd and talk, so I channel those words and expressions through my work. I’ve tried many times not to do art but it’s just something I have to do.

Barbara Sueko: How did you get your start working with reclaimed materials?

Nancy: I began working with reclaimed materials because I have three children and I’ve always volunteered in their schools because art funding has always been cut. I would go in and help do a fun project, but because I didn’t have the money, I would collect supplies from around the house and let the kids go crazy with whatever material I had. I started to see that you don’t need a lot of money—you need creativity.

By working with reclaimed material I hope more so to create a conversation than a masterpiece of art. I want my work to open ideas about green initiatives more than I want to sell a piece of art. I want my pieces to stand together and would love for them to travel so that they can spark inspiration. I realize that with a lot of art that is made from reclaimed materials you can tell what the pieces are, whereas with my work you have to really look for what’s reclaimed. Often, I have to explain it. People don’t understand that the base of my work is plastic bags, that I use soda cans for the color.

You need imagination to understand my art. I think it helps that someone might look at it not get it right away. It’s not something black and white. Some times I do have to explain my pieces, but once I do it makes people think.

Barbara Sueko: Could you describe what you mean by “explain?”

Nancy: Well, for instance, I have a piece called Be Thankful, and when my son saw it he said, “Is someone going to eat her head?” Really, it is about the idea that you have be thankful before anything else. If you just take things for granted and you’re not considerate of others or thankful for what you have, then how do you go from there, especially in relation to the environment? You have to be thankful for the ocean, for the clean water—you can’t just leave your litter everywhere. You have to be thankful for the park you’re at—if you’re thankful for it you’re not going to destroy it.

There’s a lot to the pieces I create and I want people to think about the messages and talk about them. That’s why my latest collection is called Lesson from the Dinner Table. It conveys those ideas from the dinner table that stay with us because you’re with your family. We all know what’s right or wrong, but because we’re not thankful we don’t necessarily care. We have to try to teach our children all these lessons.

And that’s another big part of my work—I may not make a difference in a lot people’s lives but I hope I make a difference in three people’s lives—those of my children. If you make a difference in some way, then that seems to ripple. So that’s what I’m hoping for.

Barbara Sueko: As an artist who normally creates larger pieces that are part of an even larger collection, what inspired you to participate in the Sketchbook Project?

I had a discovery that I need deadlines. I am programmed with my work as an art director to have deadlines, and so when I learned about the Sketchbook Project I realized I wasn’t sketching everyday like I should be. I saw that it had a deadline, thought it was an interesting opportunity, and so I signed up.

I really looked at the Project as a way to get me to sketch regularly. I picked my theme, Inside Outside, and I was thinking about doing opposites of some sort, and then the oil spill happened and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I ended up creating my book based on inside and outside the real price of oil. I thought about the idea of how what happens in the oceans affects those of us on land. A lot of people don’t see the ocean that way and so I wanted to express my thoughts about the Gulf Oil Spill. And the spill is still going on, so I don’t know where we go from here.

Barbara Sueko: What influenced the creation of your pages?

A lot of it was from the Miami Herald. I started cutting out things of the newspaper and then I started to read more blogs and I thought, “How much do I know? How much of this is political?” I wasn’t trusting exactly what I was reading about what was going on because newspapers have to make money, they’re a business. So I stopped with the clippings. I do believe they are an honest newspaper, but I just thought that there might be more to the story. I realized it’s my sketchbook, no one’s paying me to do it, so I can do whatever I want.

I started researching more in the Internet and there’s a helicopter pilot who created some films and I was inspired by the videos of him and what he had to say, as well as the photos regular people were taking. Also inspiring were these social networking groups that got people out to protest in a peaceful way. I think we need to continue that. With social networking we have an opportunity to make a change and make a difference—each day there’s something new.

Barbara Sueko: What message or messages do you hope your Sketchbook conveys?

For me, I think that when you protest in an intelligent way more people listen. I like the idea of somehow protesting in a quiet way, and my sketchbook is quiet and makes people think. They can either do something and take it from there or not. But they can’t look at my sketchbook and say something negative. I’m not hurting anyone, but I am getting my point across and I’m moving people to make a change.

Ultimately, that’s the way I like to approach environmental issues—through my art. I’ve always lived this way not thinking I would be “environmental,” but through a series of people who I’ve met and things that have happened, I’ve come to this point and it’s been a good journey. I’ve really enjoyed it and I don’t regret anything.

Learn more about Nancy and her work at http://www.nancymartini.com

It has to be said: Ed Pavlic is a cool guy. I met Ed in December 2006 at the Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya. He was a curiously calm, welcoming presence to a just-arrived, disoriented traveler. Eventually, I would discover his finely tuned powers as a poet and the inspired musicality of his writing. His most recent book But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, Bard College, 2009) is jagged and beautiful and absorbing. Ed shares the back story of his latest publication and a few other observations about music and life.

Nita Noveno: Tell me about this book.

Ed Pavlic: Well: dhows and Swahili coast, roosters and donkeys, bioluminescent algae and special ops, abandoned beaches and Al Qaeda training camps, little girls searching out peppers and Bwana Mataka’s fort, you know, it’s “INGIENI KWA SALÁMA NO AMANI” and “SAY NO TO DRUGS”. It’s a part head-on collision, part dive-with-no-splash.

I never expected to write it, first. I took no notes as one might while traveling in anticipation of writing a piece or a book. But, in response to a request to do an interview about a trip to Kenya, I agreed to write 500 words against which the interview might take shape. When I finally sat down, on a Saturday, I remember, and I was playing Keith Jarrett’s Carnegie Hall Concert in the office, I remember that, too, but when I began to write I was shocked at the vivid, rhythmic sense of scenes that quickly took shape. I postponed the interview for a month, wrote the book, aligned some of the photos I’d taken into relationships to the images that had appeared in the writing. Then A.C. Hoff and I did the interview and I set upon editing the book for the next year or so. Finally, there it was. Utterly un-publishable. A book of prose pieces and color photos, set on a sailboat, a dhow, and in the islands off the coast of Kenya (near Somalia), and an interview at the end. At the center of the book is a conversation with a man named Muhammad Kubwa who was brother-in-law to a quite notorious terrorist named Fazul Muhammad (google him). So, it’s what amounts to a contemporary trip according to ancient rhythms, the dhow, the wind, the sand-path to a place ‘off the grid’ (no roads, electricity, phones, etc.) that is also amid the traffic of a volatile, international political struggle. Muhammad Kubwa had been imprisoned for years owing to his family association with Fazul Muhammad. Fazul Muhammad is still in the wind. That’s the book. Nine days after we left. The U.S. sent cruise missiles to within 60 miles of where we were in attempts (failed) to kill Fazul Muhammad. In fact, that incident also triggered my impulse to write the book, though, at first, I had no idea what I’d write or how?

Finally the book was done. At first I called But Here Are Small Clear Refractions “documentary lyric.” Since, I’ve come to think of it as an “instigated secret.” I had NO prospects for publishing this book, of course. Publishing a book of poems is difficult enough. One needs lightning in a bottle, a willing philanthropist, and / or poetry enthusiast. In the case of a book with extremely volatile, if unorthodox and off-hand, political content and loaded with color photos of roosters, donkeys and ancient mosques grown-through by vines and trees that would be perilously expensive to actually print, one really needs a miracle. We’d planned the miracle to occur in Kenya, actually. Printed in India, miracles in 2007 seemed cheaper in Kenya. However, when the 2008 election-violence burned cities and villages, killed over a thousand people, it also tore down the prospects for cheap, miraculous poetry books in Nairobi. Imagine. Then, in 2009, The Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College, quite miraculously, decided to publish the book in the U.S.

Nita: Bless The Achebe Center! So who has influenced your work?

Ed: All the notable influences of my work are musicians. Different works grow from different musicians. My first book, Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue was a Miles Davis book, though poems refer to several other musicians. The next, Labors Lost Left Unfinished, was a big, chaotic Mingus book, though, too, there are dozens of musicians folded into that book. Next, Winners Have Yet to Be Annnounced, was centered very literally in the life of soul singer Donny Hathaway. . . .Refractions takes shape directly in response to Keith Jarrett’s Carnegie Hall Concerts, movement two – with the funky, percussive ostinato. I likely listened to that 4-minute movement a thousand times or more during the writing of the book. The title of the book comes out of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Trace Elements.” There’s an influence, more than that, however, there’s a real friend. All the writing I love is an influence, of course, and that list goes and goes and goes. But, the musicians are the crux of it for me. Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Anouar Brahem, Oumou Sangare, Gilad Atzmon, Anthony Hamilton. Soul music.

Nita: What is your response to the gulf spill?

Ed: The gulf spill? Which gulf? Which spill? I was living in Nigeria when Ken Saro Wiwa was in prison. The whole world dared Abacha to go ahead sure that he wouldn’t. He did. Don’t get me started on gulfs and spills. That’s all day everyday. And, Anderson Cooper is no Ken Saro Wiwa. I’ll take Amy Goodman. The BP escapade in the Gulf of Mexico was just a particularly bad and long and public day. And, of course, what it revealed about the connection between government and oil interests is no surprise.

I thought it did make very plain an interesting feature of the relationship between profit and technology, however. That the technology for the money making part of an (which means every) industry is far in front of all other technological capacities. Think of that in terms of food production and pharmaceuticals, banking, airlines, and on and on and things become clearer and clearer. There was even a Representative, I think, from Louisiana, ex National Guard, who had suited himself up to “go to war” against the oil spill. Such spasms to bring things into light, William Carlos Williams said truth appears in the break-up of language. So, in any rupture like that, there are springs to look for. But, they close up quickly.

Nita: What’s next?

Ed: Well. I’ve got several books in the works, always, for whatever that’s worth. Running behind these three children (13, 9, 2) of mine who grow fast and force me to keep up. Living in GA. Gulp. In October we’ll call it fourteen years of marriage though Stacey tells me it’s more like 11 or so. . . or 9? We’re negotiating that. I say it’s more like 23. Or 97. Going back to Kenya in November. Lately I’ve been re-reading everything I can get my hands on by James Baldwin, including the new book The Cross of Redemption. And, wondering why people have made so little analytical, musical sense of his work. I’ve got ideas. That’s it. That’s enough I suspect?

Nita: Yes! And more exquisite poetry ahead. Asante sana, Ed.

Ed Pavlić’s most recent books are But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, Bard College, 2009), Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (UGA P, 2008) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006). Ed teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia. He has taught poetry at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia and at the Kwani? Lit Fest in Nairobi and Lamu Town, Kenya. He lives with Stacey, Milan, Suncana, Mzée and I Am Pozzo in Athens, Georgia.

Historical “spills” like this, or even personal upsets in our individual lives, serve as a wake-up call to the fact that the world is never as it seems.

As a noun, “spills” typically refer to negative occurrences. But, flipped on its side as a verb, to spill is not necessarily a “bad” thing. For instance, writers, whether they be of fiction, nonfiction or poetry, are regularly encouraged to spill—their guts, their emotions, their heart, their soul—onto the page.

Why? Because spills are what make our lives interesting and sharing them connects us to others. They generate a mutual understanding between people who would otherwise be more different than alike.

This issue of Sunday Salon takes spillage face on, in its various shapes, forms and interpretations, and peeps through the surface. So read on to find out what’s underneath. We promise you’ll re-emerge in tact, entertained and connected.

We dedicate this issue to you dear Reader.

- Barbara Sueko McGuire & Nita Noveno, Editors

Yes, yes, yes—
the sandbags I have stacked,
and the sheets of plywood
nailed overlapping my storefront heart.

I have made ready
for your grey eyes to turn me
away once more. The cheerful experts

track your cruel silence.
I press to my ear a radio
jammed to the station
devoted to the crisis you bring:

the ways you will ruin me
if you shift even a few degrees.
Yes, I tune my guitar

to the chimes they play on the hour.
How I have rehearsed the way
I will take the dark O
of your no and drift its innertube
to the house of your family,

allow the swollen flood of circumstance
to lift me to your window.

I am poured out like water,
spilled onto the floor, soaked into wood.

A terrible loneliness forces me
to love a man who says I don’t love you,
too many times.

Removed from me: all things visible,
I will not forget the one who came before.

O Lord,
I shall no longer look
for you in another man’s bed.

I’m sure, I am poured out like water,
slipped backward into the oceans.

I who am in love
have forgotten how to sleep alone.
In this bondage I am broken
and hungry.

How did my body liquefy
into a pool of bones?

Listen,
I am poured out like water,
do you hear me,

I hide
not, fear
not, want.

What shall I sacrifice
for healing and how do I
find you—
How many times do I have to be alone
before love
like yours.

At 14, she was 4’10” at the most, with curly light-brown ringlets, pale skin, and grey eyes, a tiny, explosive little firebrand with a sharp tongue and a quick smile. When I could get her to stand still I’d try to ask her about her life—mainly how her classes were going, or what boys she was interested in. And she would turn it on me like lightning, and start guessing—alarmingly good guesses, often.

“So are you going to go out with José? He has a huge crush on you,” I would say.

She would reply, “Oh, what a coincidence that you should ask, since you’re the one getting your ass stared at by Mr. Marcus every time you walk down the hall! Yeah, don’t even lie—I know who those flowers were from! Anyway, so let’s talk. Are we your favorite class, or is 8th period? You can tell me. I already know we’re the only class you brought donuts for last Friday!”

To some degree, I reluctantly confided in her. You never confide in students. It is one of the cardinal rules of teaching. But she solicited these confidences so easily. It was so natural and quick to tell her something: “OK, you’re right, Mr. Marcus did give me the carnations. But he’s twice my age, and I’m not interested, and I’m terrified of getting the rumor mill started—so don’t tell anyone about that, or about the donuts, ok?” She would nod her head understandingly, and put her little hand on top of mine.

School required no academic effort of her. She was already in a class of exceptionally bright kids; they were far and away the most intelligent and motivated group of freshman I have ever taught. Felicia was in another league. During the first month of school, she told me she was bored with the Young Adult novels in the library, so I gave her Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. She finished it in two days (“It’s the best book I EVER read, Miss!”) and moved on to Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which she disliked, but finished and understood enough to come in and recount for me the various ways in which Eugenides needed a better editor.

“Seriously, this shit’s about 100 pages too long,” she told me. I had liked Middlesex a lot, but there was no denying she had a point.

She should have been enrolled in some kind of “Gifted and Talented” program. She had, in fact, taken the test and qualified for specialized high school placement, but her mom and dad (in a typical lapse in parenting skills) had given their then-13-year-old the job of independently choosing and enrolling in a high school. So she had picked the one closest to her home—ours, with its rock-bottom test scores and constant police patrol. She made solid grades—not what she was capable of, but solid. I tried to encourage her to make an extra effort, citing the incentive of college scholarships for motivated minority kids. And she would just look at me with this expression of “Get real, Miss.” Defeat? Apathy? Disdain? A little bit of all three? I was never sure.

*

Early that fall, a flyer advertising a high school poetry contest was put up in our department office. I mentioned it to the class, and the next day Felicia brought in a poem to enter. Its title was something along the lines of “Why I’ll Be a Divorce Statistic at 25.” She turned it in quite willingly, and that surprised me, because her writing demonstrated more vulnerability than anything she had ever exposed voluntarily.

In the hopes of enticing other students to enter, I made her read her poem aloud in class. She was a cool kid; maybe if the kids saw that she was entering, they would want to do it too.

Usually they listened to whatever she said. The boys were all in love with her, and the girls were all afraid she would kill them, in light of Felicia’s calm threat to a girl who had “trash-talked” her: “Listen, bitch, I swear to God I will stab you in the heart with a pen if you ever do me like that again, you feel me?” But that day they were tired, preoccupied. Maybe it was too close to Christmas break. Regardless, they didn’t pay attention. She stood up in front of the chalkboard reading her divorce poem to a class of 30 kids, all of whom were talking, throwing paper balls at each other, passing notes, and generally acting like the 14-year-old goofballs that they were.

She looked up and stopped mid-sentence. The other kids didn’t notice. She stamped her little foot on the linoleum, registering her impatience, but they kept on talking, acting like she was not even there. I yelled at them, but my belated intervention, while it sobered them, didn’t do much for her. She looked at me forlornly, and then gave up entirely.

“That was discouraging, Miss,” she whispered to me as she slunk back to her seat. The other kids didn’t notice.

After class he handed me a sad, crumpled little piece of paper and I took it home, where I typed it, spell-checked it, and sent it to the contest with a $10 check and a letter explaining that the kid who wrote this poem was from an inner city school, and to please give her the recognition I felt she deserved.

(In point of fact, we would never hear back from the contest. It was probably a scam; I can only conclude that they took the entry fee I paid on her behalf and fled the country.)

She asked me about it, though, a couple of times. “When do you think I’ll hear from the contest, Miss?” It was her study hall period, and I had come barging in because, peering through the window in the door of the classroom, I had seen her sitting uncharacteristically alone. The other kids were looking over at her, confused. Why didn’t she want to play? I walked in and brought myself down to her, desk level. “When will the contest let us know, Miss?” she asked. It was December then; I said I hoped April, maybe May. I didn’t know for sure. I asked her if she was ok. She smiled at me, but there were tears in her eyes. She refused to tell me why.

*

The semesters changed, and suddenly I was not her English teacher anymore. I was working with 10th graders that term, and it was difficult, because they were a rowdy bunch, and by an unfortunate coincidence, all male. I had been assigned to them on the heels of a beloved teacher—a benevolent ex-baseball player aptly named Clausi—who had been very “cool” with them, as they put it. Now that he was on a semester-long leave for shoulder surgery, I was teaching the class. It often felt like they were angry with me purely for not being him.

“What can I do to make you guys not hate me so much?” I asked one day, exasperated. For the past few days they had been throwing baby carrots, stolen from the lunchroom, at my back every time I turned to write on the board. I could never whirl around fast enough to catch the culprits.

“We don’t hate you,” they told me. “We just miss Clausi.”

One of the toughest guys, a kid named Alberto who was a foot taller than I was and about twice my weight, looked at me with a pained expression. “Mister Clausi . . . Miss, no one was like him. He was just like this cool older brother,” he said wistfully.

When he said this, I felt like crying.

In light of my ambivalent relationship with the boys, it seemed all the more important to maintain some vestige of closeness with the class that she was in, a class that, I believed, loved me the way the boys loved Clausi. I came to their advisory period one morning to say hello. Felicia greeted me with her characteristic charm—“Do you miss us, Miss Garon?”—but she seemed distracted.

It was around that time that I found out how much her grades were slipping. Her history teacher was the one who told me. “She’s pulling a ‘D’ in my class,” he said. “She isn’t doing any homework and she basically failed the last test.”

I had never seen Felicia break a sweat in any class. She already knew so much. She watched and understood “The Daily Show” at 14. She made jokes about communism and wore a Che Guevara shirt when most of her peers couldn’t have identified Latin America on a map. She was so much more sophisticated, more worldly than they were. How on earth was she failing freshman history?

I went to her guidance counselor to see what was up. “Yeah, she’s gone down in everything,” the counselor said. She probably was not even supposed to tell me that, the counselor, but she did anyway.

I pulled Felicia from class during her lunch period. I was professional. “You wanna tell me what the hell is going on, girl?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not 7.”

“Right. You’re 14 going on 28. Answer my question.”

“Miss, don’t you think you’re just insecure about your role as a young teacher?”

“Whoa, this isn’t about me! We’re talking about you.”

“Why do you care, Miss?” Exasperation.

“Because I do. Because you’re brilliant, and you know it, and I hate seeing you slip like this.”

“Can I go now?”

“Yeah. Just try and pick your grades up a little, ok? And come see me if you want to talk . . .”

She scampered off.

*

I kept my distance. I tried to give her the space she clearly wanted, as much as it worried me to see her grades going down the toilet. If she had looked happy, maybe it would not have bothered me so much. But when I saw her in the halls, though she was always surrounded by friends, she would laugh with a bitterness that I didn’t recognize. She had stopped coming to see me altogether.

So I went into her advisory class again, ostensibly to see how all the kids were doing. She was in the back of the room, goofing off. Her sleeves were rolled up, and on one of her wrists, there was a little tree. Just like that—a neat little tree carved into her skin, the angry welts reduced to perfect red branches.

I came over and picked up her wrist. “What is this?”

She immediately pulled away, moved her wrists out of sight. “Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing.’”

“My cat scratched me.” Sleeves rolled up. Hands tucked under her arms.

“That’s one hell of an artistic cat.”

She laughed sardonically. “You know it is.”

*

As a teacher, I’m a mandated reporter: legally obligated to inform the guidance counselors if I see a student in a potentially harmful situation. I gave the word. They had her in the guidance office 15 minutes later.
*

As I expected, she was livid. First, she told the guidance counselors that I was a liar and an idiot. She wouldn’t let them see her arms. Then she told them I was stalking her. That hurt. “It’s pretty common for them to say stuff like that,” the guidance counselor told me by way of comfort. “Kids who have never had anyone care about them in their lives don’t know how to handle it when someone demonstrates that they do.” Somehow, that just made me feel worse.

In the hallways, if I saw her, she would turn and run the other way. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, or look in my direction. I eventually started taking a different stairwell so that our paths wouldn’t cross anymore.

One of her friends came to find me. “She’s really mad at you, Miss,” her friend Jennifer said. She said this with a note of glee. Jennifer liked drama. Jennifer also liked having someone who was as miserable as she was; she too was a veteran of self-mutilation, but I’d only learn that much later.

“I know,” I said. I gave Jennifer a book to borrow. “You can let Felicia read it when you’re done, if she wants to.”

“She’s really pissed. She, like, hates you.”

I sighed. “Well, tell her I still care about her, and that if she wants to come and scream at me in person, she’s welcome to.”

I talked to another English teacher about it. “Leave your door open,” he said. “You did the only thing you could do, by law. So just leave your door open. Eventually she’ll come back.”

The math teacher and the history teacher both tried to intervene. “Ms. Garon loves you. She cares about you. That’s why she did what she did.”

“I fucking hate that bitch,” Felicia said to them. “She better leave me alone.”

The worst part was that the rest of my special, smart, talented class turned on me, too. Graffiti appeared on the walls: “Miss Garon is a snitch.” I could have pled that this wasn’t the same as ratting out a peer, that I’d done it because I cared about Felicia, or that it was illegal not to. But I didn’t bother.

Except for once. Another student in that class, Naomi, confronted me online. I’d given the kids my screen-name so that they could ask me questions when they didn’t understand their homework assignments. So Naomi sent me an instant message saying, “You’re a snitch.”

“Naomi,” I typed back, trying to rationalize with her, “This incident was not so clear-cut. I think Felicia needed help. I did it because I thought she was hurting, not because I wanted to get her in trouble or whatever.”

“You helped no one,” Naomi typed in response. “To hell with you.”

She signed off before I could respond, and copied and pasted the conversation on her MySpace page.

*

Humiliated by my bad judgment (who in their right mind tries to rationalize with angry 14-year-olds?) and a little bit afraid that I would incur someone’s wrath (administrators or other students, I wasn’t sure), I went and talked to the social worker who was counseling Felicia.

“I know you can’t tell me anything about her,” I said to him, “But I just don’t know what to do anymore. I wish they’d all stop hating me. I wanted to help her, and I feel like it’s totally backfired.”

Then I started crying. I had been holding it in for a while, but at that moment I realized how hurt and sad I was. I loved Felicia. And she hated me. That was the bottom line.

The social worker listened patiently.

“What is it you like about her?” he finally asked.

I thought about it. “I don’t know. She’s just so funny and cute. And so smart. I sort of see her as a little sister, I guess. I’m only a little bit older than she is, when you think about it, and we certainly have . . . well, had . . . a different kind of relationship than I have with most students.”

He smiled.

“I’ve never counseled a student like Felicia either,” he said. “She has this knack for creating drama. She’s crafty: she’ll ask me to tell teachers this, to tell the guidance counselors that, pit them all against each other to get everyone on her side. She’s a nice kid, but she’s a master manipulator. This is something important to know about her.”

He paused, and appraised me with interest.

“You have to be careful not to get too involved with kids like that,” he said. “It’s easy to do . . . all of her teachers have, basically. She’s really good at luring adults into blurring boundaries.”

I thought about that for a while. I was the adult here—how could I fault her for any of this? She was a really messed up kid; that was basically all I would cop to.

Besides, I still felt like a snitch.

“I’ll stay away from her, ignore her, whatever she wants,” I said. “But please tell me one thing: Will she eventually stop hating me?”

He smiled sympathetically. “You know I can’t tell you that. We’ll just have to see.”

*

I waited her out. I kept my door open, like the other English teacher had said, and I put the situation out of my mind. It was easier to do than I thought it would be. I became wrapped up with the class of all boys. I taught them Sex Education during advisory that term, which was, weirdly, the event that finally bonded us all, despite their lingering sadness over Clausi’s departure. They were surprisingly eager to learn what I had to teach them, and earnest about it. They really wanted to know about women. It was sort of sweet.

I took an old plastic box that had formerly held Twizzlers and cut an opening in the lid to the container. “Here’s where you can put in any questions you have about sex that you’re afraid to ask out loud,” I told them.

The questions that came in the box were mostly along the lines of “Ms. Garon, will you marry me?” But it was not horrible. Spring came, the end of the year was in sight, and I started feeling happier again.

And apparently, around that time Felicia started to feel happier too.

*

It started small. Some of the kids were still going on about how I was a snitch. Three full months later. They remembered everything, except their class notes on test day.

“Whatever. I’m over it,” Felicia said to them. The history teacher told me about that later. And then another time, “It wasn’t her fault. She had to tell. She was required by law.”

(That’s my smart girl, I thought privately when I heard.)

I still kept my distance. Felicia started asking me questions. Not to me directly—through other teachers.

“Felicia wants to know if you have more books she can borrow,” her math teacher told me. “I said she should ask you herself, but then she just ran away.”

A few weeks later, another thing happened. This, too, was told to me by the math teacher. Felicia came up to her after class and said, “I’m cool with Ms. Garon now.”

“Well, that’s great,” said the long-suffering math teacher. “But does she know this?”

“I think so.”

“Are you sure? Have you told her?”

“No.”

“So how is she supposed to know?”

At that point, Felicia looked embarrassed again, and did what all adolescents do when they run out of things to say—rolled her eyes and stalked off.

*

The math teacher asked me to help her chaperone a field trip. “Felicia’s going to be on it,” she told me.

I was hesitant. “Is it cool if I come then?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t have asked you if it weren’t.”

“But Felicia . . .” We still hadn’t spoken in months.

“Yes, it’s fine with her. I already asked.”

I went to meet the kids after school, and Felicia ran up to me and threw her tiny arms around my waist, as if nothing had ever happened between us. “MISS!” she said, in her usual slightly bossy, conspiratorial tone. It was good to hear her voice again. “Your outfit is SO last year. We have to do something about this. Now, let me tell you all about this drama I’m having with this boy named Jesus . . .”

I guess that’s 14-year-old speak for “I’m sorry.” I certainly never pressed the issue. But just like that we were “cool.” A few days later she called me on my cell (I had given it to her many months ago in order for her to call me if she was having problems) and left me a voicemail saying, “Miss Garon, this message is ridiculously dorky. ‘At the beep, do your thing?’ What the hell does that mean? You have to change it. Right now.”

Summer came, then fall, and we were all back. I was teaching in a different school in the same building. But Felicia would occasionally come visit me to say hi, and tell me what was going on in her life. She told me that she had started to pick up her grades. We were not as close as we had been once, but I think that is the inevitable side effect of my teaching a different group of kids from year to year.

The most recent time I saw her was a few months before I left the school for good. I was walking to the subway when I saw her goofing around with some friends a few blocks from campus. She seemed, somehow, more grown up than I had ever seen her: her hair was straightened, and she had applied silver make-up flatteringly around her eyes. I was struck by how beautiful she had turned out to be. She ran up and hugged me, and said, “Are you dating that fat guidance counselor Miss? Yeah, I saw you talking to him. What’s going on with you two?” Then she cackled at my protestations.

I don’t know that I have ever been so attached to a student as I was to her, and I don’t know if I ever will be again. Perhaps it’s healthier that way. But I still miss her.

“They won’t be able to do anything away,” he said. She went to fill out the paperwork at the desk and he sat down beside me. I looked down at his hands to see that one of them seemed tangled, broken all over.

“Does that not hurt?” I asked him.

“You ought to see the other rhino,” he said and smiled. We could hear his gal arguing with the front desk nurse.

“She okay?” I asked. He shrugged.

“The only reason we’re here is because I thought we were coming for her.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

He gestured his eyes up to her and smiled again. He had to be one of the best looking men that I’d ever seen. That smile was self-destructive, sarcastic, and humble all at the same time.

“Well at least she’s pretty,” I said.

“Pretty? Who cares about pretty? Pretty girls ain’t got no soul. They’re about as interesting as a pretty painting.”

“Well at least pretty gets you to the hospital when you need it.”

“What you in for?” he asked.

“Nothing really. Therapy. I sometimes come here with a pint of tequila and just watch. It makes me feel better about my life,” I said.

“Hey can I have a swig of that?”

I screwed off the top for him. He took a third of the bottle.

“Does it hurt?” I asked him again.

“I guess just about as much as it hurts you.”

His pretty gal came back and dragged him down the hall with a nurse in lead. The nurse was also pretty, and she seemed to know Luke like the way one knows who a thief in a crowd is.

I saw the girlfriend leaving a few minutes later. She shot me a look of pity.

“Don’t worry, he’ll like you a whole bunch. If there’s one goddamn thing he likes, it’s ugly, especially ugly women.”

I thought she was just trying to be mean, but it turns out she was being honest. After a gunshot victim, a girl with a broken ankle, and a couple that seemed to be dealing with a sexually perverse medical problem, Luke came out with his hand bandaged up.

“You want to get something to eat?” he asked. “I’m starving.”

We walked to the only open diner in town. “If you had three days to live, what would you do with it?” I asked and then answered, “I would just walk, just walk for three days without eating, just walk until I fell dead.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I would. What about you?”

“I always have three days to live.”

Luke was an only child. His father ran off when he was younger because he was tired of being the pawn in his wife’s family business. His mother committed suicide not too long after that. I guess his father was a heartbreaker like Luke. So Luke inherited a bunch of money.

“Sometimes I win just because I’m trying to lose. That’s how gambling works I guess. I see all the other saps with their life savings dwindling in front of their fingers. Sad as hell, but so goes life.”

He seemed to rebel against all the advantages that were given to him. He had a fortune that he tried to gamble away. He had a brilliant mind that he tried to dull with drugs and booze. He had a beautiful face that he tried to get bashed in bar fights.

“This is going to put me under for awhile,” Luke said about his broken hand. I was eating fries and a banana split. He was drinking a beer and a strawberry milkshake. It was a ninety-degree night out. And he had charm and looks that could strip the clothes off a supermodel, yet he sat in a diner with the likes of a broken down woman that drank tequila in hospital emergency rooms.

Later on, after his hand had healed, after we had become friends, and after he had fucked me several dozen times, I tried to understand why he would be with someone like me. I very possibly could have been the ugliest woman under 30 in Nevada. I had acne scars, misshaped small breasts, an un-proportionate lower body, flat curves, and plain brown hair and eyes, yet he looked at me like I was some kind of beauty queen.

He told me to drop the subject. He told me, “I like the way you forget to use coffee filters. Isn’t that enough?” Luke was sober and peaceful, so I dropped it. There wouldn’t be many moments like that, moments when he was sober and peaceful, and moments when I was secure about my worth.

One of these rare moments came on a brilliantly sunny morning at the end of summer.

“If you could do anything today, what would it be?” he asked me.

“Take a drive in a convertible. Go to a restaurant on the ocean or lake, and get a room with a balcony overlooking the water.” This wasn’t a wish that I just made up. It had always been a thought in the back of my perfect daydream. My dreams fell short of imagination, but it was what I wanted, like if I did this then I could go on peacefully drinking in emergency rooms the rest of my life.

“Okay,” is all Luke said. He finished smoking his cigarette and left without explaining.

Two hours later he showed up in a convertible Volkswagen Beetle.

“Where did you get this?”

“Bought it off this man in the street.”

“What?”

“Saw the car, so I made him an offer. It took awhile to convince him I was serious. He kept gibbering on about paperwork and such, and I just kept handing him money. All I need is the keys, I told him, and he finally handed them to me.”

Luke didn’t even have a license. He had three DUIs and wasn’t supposed to drive for another twelve years. But it didn’t matter, he was trying to make my dream come true.
We hit the road, making our way through the desert and the Sierra Mountains until getting to Lake Tahoe. We found a restaurant right on the south shore and had the best meal I’d ever had. Luke told the waiter to just bring out everything the chef recommended. He ordered the most expensive wine and then every dessert on the menu.

After the restaurant we took a suite with a balcony overlooking the crystal blue Tahoe water. I stood against the railing with a glass of champagne.

“I’ll be right back,” Luke told me as if he was asking permission. He didn’t have to ask me for anything. He had my heart in his pocket.

The sun slowly disappeared, the moon slowly appeared as a reflection on the water, and then the bottle of champagne slowly disappeared. Luke was still gone. I went to the bathroom where I thought he went, and there he was lying on the white tile floor. He had wide animated eyes and a needle stuck in his arm. I pulled the syringe out and a stream of blood shot across my face. Luke laughed hysterically. I pulled him in the bathtub and turned cold water on him. He kept laughing the whole time as if I wasn’t there, and as if it wasn’t his blood over my face.

Almost nothing could have ruined that day, almost nothing… The next morning, after I had slept off all the wine, something felt missing. It was Luke. He was gone. I looked around the South Tahoe casinos, bars, and streets, but he had disappeared with the reflection of the moon. I drove the car back home and tried to forget him. A couple weeks later he showed up at my door. It was after midnight and he had grown a beard. I let him in despite these things, despite all things. He basically moved in after that. I had a suspicion that he couldn’t go to his own home for some horrible reason, but I never asked.

Life went on and everything was great except for that constant lingering of my insecurities.

“Give me something,” I told him one night after a few shots of tequila. “Why don’t you just go find that beautiful woman that you’re eventually going to be with?”

“Most so-called beautiful women don’t have anything interesting in their minds and in their face. The face is such a weird piece of flesh, a receptor for all our senses, yet all we do is look at the colors, shades, shapes, textures, symmetry, and size of these organs that are so much more important than what they look like.”

“I guess it’s all we have to go by. I’m sure if a certain shape of a nose represented a higher sense of smell then it could mean something of attraction also,” I told him. “We just don’t know that shape so we maybe go with symmetry instead.”

“I think they do have a particular shape. You know how the blind have a higher sense of smell and hearing? I think the uglier a person’s face may be the more perceptive they are, that is if they don’t fall into the beauty trap. If they ever wish for a makeover or if they’ve ever stared too long at a magazine cover then they have fallen. Whoever said that we need to look like them!”

“Easy for you to say, someone born with good looks.”

Then he took out his pocketknife and slit off the very tip of his nose. Blood went everywhere while he laughed. He always laughed at blood. “Is that better? Do you still think I’m a prince?”

There we were again in the emergency room with the same pretty nurse at the reception desk. But this time roles had changed, and I was the ridiculous girlfriend. I felt her send me a look of warning, telling me that my pockets were being picked. There was my pint of tequila in one pocket, and there was definitely something missing in the other. I didn’t have the easiness of not caring about any of the passing tragedies. I was in love for the first time in my 29 years. My heart hurt so bad I couldn’t drink it away. I didn’t want this. I couldn’t go through this. I knew what was going to happen, and at the very bottom of my miserable life before Luke, at least my heart was mine, at least that couldn’t be taken from me. Then just like the last time when his ex-gal walked out of the emergency room, so did I.

I left town soon after that, taking a temporary job transfer to New Mexico.
When I came back to town several months later I couldn’t help but go back to the emergency room. I sat in the back corner with my tequila, half-tanked, half-wishing he would stumble through the door with a broken leg, with a slash across his face, but he didn’t. The same pretty nurse was there. She kept looking up from her clipboard toward me. Then as if she felt it was her duty, she came over to me. I hid my pint away under my leg and tried to think up a good excuse for being there.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?”

“For Luke. I guess we all should have expected it, but… it’s never easy.”

She didn’t have to say anything else. She walked back to her post. I reached into my pockets to find the tequila, forgetting where I had put it. They were all empty.

Someone has given my mother a book of “affirmations” by the very prolific and famous Louise Hay. It is sitting here under a bag of the birdseed she can’t put out, because of the bear. It tells the reader that she (certainly a she?) is wonderful in every way (though always open to positive change), that her every decision is a good one, that everything is as it should be. The colorful little book entered this house as a gift, I suspect, from yet another neighbor, a more upstanding one, who is at this very moment monitoring an unwelcome houseguest, the mother of her grandchildren. This ex-daughter-in-law appeared last night, after an absence of a year and a half, in the company of several sinister people, and must be watched lest she get too drunk or drugged and harm or traumatize her offspring, or run away with them, or invite her friends back for more beers with the neighbor’s catastrophically alcoholic husband, or reveal to the children the distressing news that she sleeps in a park when she’s not visiting them. Like many of my mother’s friends, the neighbor woman has a soft heart and a complicated past, and does things like allow dangerous drug addicts to stay in her home in order to reconnect with the sons and daughters they abandoned. The energetic grandmothers of Clackamas County (land of my people, most famous for the trashy figure skater Tonya Harding and the iconic Mt. Hood, east of Portland) find inspirational plaques and books and cards at thrift stores and give them to each other, which is sweet in a way, but I cannot help thinking of ideas such as Louise Hay’s as a degenerative force in this context. “Here I am, world,” writes Louise Hay, “open and receptive to all good.”

People I encounter in my everyday life, when I’m not visiting my family and descending into a trauma spiral, go all misty when I say I’m from Oregon. It is indeed lovely if you’re careful: a visit to Powell’s bookstore, a drive along the coast, lunch in one of Portland’s charming old neighborhoods. If you’re not careful, you end up getting gas on 82nd Avenue at dusk, watching a ruined old man fumble with his zipper for fifteen minutes outside the locked restroom, or you take a hike in the forest and meet my mother’s psycho neighbor, or you sit in the passenger seat as I fight off a crying jag between Shasta and Roseburg. Foresters talk about the “beauty strip,” the line of trees they leave standing along the road; just over the ridge, though, there’s a clear-cut, a hungry bear, a doublewide trailer full of untreated mental illnesses.

Beautiful as it is, in other words, Oregon is a flower “with a base infection” as Shakespeare put it: Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. I’m thinking about corruption because my work has taken me to a lot of foreign places lately, places where the weeds of corruption grow in profusion. Many of my less-traveled friends, relatives and colleagues assume that the minute I enter a foreign country outside the European Union or the Antipodes, I immediately face a thicket of shady and extortionate practices, which is not the case at all. When they read about corruption here, they tend to see the phenomenon as a dreadful alien thing that warps and dirties what is otherwise straight and pure: government operations, morals, the perspectives of hard-working and hopeful women, the breeding grounds of ocean-going wildlife. Lately, though, it feels more like something that exists all the time, and inevitably spills over, like the recent dreadfulness in the Gulf: something latent, something under easily-turned rocks. If you mess around out there, if you do anything, better install multiple safeguards or expect the worst, is the message of that spill. It’s true of oil; maybe it’s true of everything.

Or my own perspective could use some work, maybe. This morning, for example, I watched a plainclothes policeman tackle a scroungy individual on Franklin Street in Astoria, and treated it as a confirmation of my worst expectations, almost a personal affront. We’d gone there, my mother and I, to visit a friend and his partner, to admire their stunning four-story Victorian house, to eat some crab, and contemplate the Lewis and Clark expedition, and wander the fortifications at Fort Stevens, and generally to participate in the exquisiteness, which is available to all, I should not exaggerate my alienation too much. We did all of the exquisite things, but we also scrambled into our car as the violent arrest took place almost at our feet. On recent visits to Oregon, I’ve witnessed a blatant drug handoff – a diaper bag! – on a commuter train, watched as three skinny speed freaks bartered the items they’d boosted that day at several stores in downtown Portland, listened (also on a commuter train) as a father explained to his small son that Eddie doesn’t steal drugs because Eddie doesn’t steal, and fended off a street vendor who insisted that I must buy a soapstone hash pipe. My life is not exactly sheltered – I’ve lived in Southern California for 18 years, ride buses and commuter trains there, and spend time in all kinds of neighborhoods – but only in Oregon, where I was born at Portland’s Emmanuel Hospital and lived until I was of legal age to flee, have I observed that particular variety of flagrant crime combined with what I’ll call drug-induced debasement at such close quarters. I want to love Oregon the way other people love it. But I don’t. I think it is corrupt, ruined to squalor by drugs and alcoholic despair.

Beauty doesn’t help. Last night I watched the ships passing outside the window from Bill and Jack’s guest room after the obligatory drive up the coast, one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. Enormous baskets of flowers hang from houses and street stanchions, it’s cool and green, people make beautiful gardens and objects and exquisite lives for themselves, lives free of drugs and squalor. I know this. It doesn’t help.

A small boy, a grade-schooler, is missing. His stepmother saw him last, when she dropped him at his school on Portland’s northwest side. Everyone thinks she did it. He’s been missing since June, two months. On our way home today through Portland’s ungentrified immigrant neighborhoods, my mother and I saw a billboard, an appeal for witnesses, written in Cyrillic. The police swear they will not give up until they find him, but there is an air of diffused and mysterious creepiness about the whole thing; certainly it is at least a strange coincidence that during the height of the search, last month, the Portland newspaper ran a two-day feature on the 1962 murder of my young cousin, herself a grade-schooler, who was kidnapped on her way to the store, violated, and strangled. My uncle—strictly speaking her stepfather or adoptive father—did not discuss with the reporter his own torment, where he was for a time treated as a suspect by the police, who subsequently let the case go as cold as the ditch where the killer left poor Mona’s body all those long decades ago.

On my way north a couple of days ago I detoured to the Bay Area to pick up a former student, and dropped her in Portland so that her father could take her on to Seattle. Sara taught for a time in Ukraine and Romania, but couldn’t reconcile what she was doing with her ideals: either she’s making up some deficit, teaching students at a for-profit school what they should have learned in their public schools, or she’s coddling the children of the elite who can’t adjust behaviorally to normal institutions and will never be required to learn anything, or to bribe anyone directly, themselves. She’ll teach next year at a Montessori in the Haight where, I warn her, she will encounter every dietary restriction known to humanity. We can laugh together at its pretensions, gently, because she loves the Pacific Northwest, and while we waited for her dad to arrive her spell held: Portland managed to pass as a friendly and charming place. People really do admire this region, and it is fabulous here in so many ways. I grew up with lawns for croquet and badminton, with piles of strawberries and wild blackberries and home-canned vegetables, with camping trips and football games on crisp fall afternoons. The hydrangeas are intensely blue this summer, the reservoirs are full. Portland has free concerts at the zoo and recycling demonstrations and organized bicycle rides across the bridges. Sara and I drank nice coffee and masked our campground odor with perfume samples at Nordstrom, but then she set off for the north and I called my mother and said I was on my way. During the drive east, to the base of Mt. Hood where she has lived since my father died, I looked around and thought, this is lovely, but something is closing in, this is not for me.

After all these years, we’re authorized to discuss Mona, thanks to this newspaper story. It seems to create some distance for many of us, to authorize some disclosure. A great-aunt finally talks about a cross burned in front of their house, some time in the thirties, in Missouri. They were Catholics and immigrants, and the local Klan made do with whatever despised minorities it had on hand. All four of my maternal great-grandparents also lived for a time in Western Nebraska, where the Klan had an active local chapter, and then half the family moved to Oregon, where antique covenants in neighborhoods like my mother’s ban anyone “not of the Aryan race” from buying property. The phrase is in her deed. Mona’s biological father was from what my grandmother calls “a real poor drinking family,” and there were always hints that he, or someone, brought about Mona’s death, that it was revenge or just a kind of impunity. I’m laying all these facts, all these stories out, like the endless games of solitaire my mother plays to fill wet afternoons, to try to make sense of the contradictions of this place, with its vaunted progressivism and its racist reality, but also of my family’s paranoia, our lack of trust in anything like providence.

On my run this evening an unshaven man in a two-tone maroon Bonneville turned around behind me. He’d probably just forgotten something at the Brightwood store or decided to drink another round at the tavern, but all I saw was a lowlife in a dirtbag vehicle, and for the rest of my run I raced from one inhabited-looking house to another along the rural route. Slow down, I scolded myself, relax. Is that really the choice here, the Subaru-wagon-kids-in-soccer thing, or the trendy-neighborhood-bicycle thing, or you’re down in the ditch with the broken Black Velvet bottles?

Last count I had about 200 relatives in Oregon, so it’s logical that they run that gamut. Some are in law enforcement and probation, some are in medical fields where they encounter drug abusers and other casualties, some are themselves drunks and druggies, in jail or on probation, some are doing okay and some not. One cousin is awaiting a bone marrow transplant in a hospital at the top of a hill overlooking downtown Portland, an aerie so remote and rarefied, separated by a security guard and a locked door from all contamination. He works as a horticulturalist for a small city to the south; in his hospital room he keeps photographs of trees and pocket parks he tended through the winter, before he became ill, that are now in full bloom and documented by his co-workers.

At home, among my family and despite my different last name, I am a Lane, a member of a clan touched by a bizarre and scandalous unsolved crime, not quite a “real poor drinking family,” but still a certain strata, more Tanya-Harding-country than organic-urban. Away from there, abroad, for example, I become a privileged outsider, safe from corruption, which nonetheless exists in all the places I visit. Entire states in Mexico are dominated by scandal and brutal crime. Kenya exploded in violence soon after I left, its population outraged by years of patronage and systemic inequality. My Ukrainian and Russian friends say corruption may destroy their countries. Most worrisome to them: the slow concurrent ruin of all civil systems. Schools buy accreditation, students buy grades and diplomas and recommendations. Everyone – police, doctors, teachers – is paid a pittance, if at all, and makes up the difference through off-the-books work or bribes. This summer, in the beautiful Hapsburg city of Lviv, I lived a block away from the police station and saw handcuffed men with swollen faces marched to and from waiting vehicles every morning; not all of them could have been in bar fights. One expat I talked to refuses to see any doctor who graduated after the Soviet system fell apart; a friend’s sister points with pride to her B average – only students who pay get 5s, the equivalent of an A. We have the gentleman’s C; Ukraine has the intellectual’s B. If grades and diplomas, licenses and laws, mean nothing, another friend speculates, perhaps the nation will begin to rely on people who can demonstrate competence in concrete fashion; perhaps the epidemic of corruption will leave the sufferers shaky, but with a stronger immune system, with a new kind of trust in each other and themselves, with entrepreneurial confidence. This is hard to communicate, to describe, hard to make interesting. My sister-in-law would rather talk about how, during the height of the oil spill, in response to news that human hair worked best for soaking up the contamination, people donated such a mass of cropped locks that they filled the warehouses and cleanup organizers couldn’t accept any more. She is kind of notorious for this: dubious or beside-the-point information that characterizes people as noble and competent, as a nation of recycling, lawn-mowing, library-volunteering Portlanders. Her only comment on the story about Mona: my aunt is quoted directly, saying that her parents paid for the funeral; my grandmother always said that we did. Good thing Nanny has dementia, my sister-in-law says, she’d go nuts if she read that.

My cousin who needs the bone marrow transplant operated a nursery and flower store for most of his life, and only got health insurance a year and a half ago, when he took the city job. He sees the hand of God in the timing of his catastrophic illness. This cousin is a decent, sweet man, but my own decent, sweet father died of cancer, as he knows, and I have to bite back the retort about God apparently being asleep when he needed such providential care. “My body represents perfection,” Louise Hay asks her followers to affirm. “I am vibrantly healthy.”

There are kinds and degrees of corruption, habits of mind and politicians on the take. At least I get a salary, at least my students do not need to pay or bribe me to write letters of recommendation for them or schedule their exams. On our late-night drive from Oakland, Sara wants to talk about this, asks for minute descriptions of the kind of letter I write for an exceptional person, for a moderately promising person, for a problematic person who may nonetheless deserve a chance. It isn’t just my own decision; it’s a kind of systemic agreement that letters for grad school, for jobs, for internships, are part of my duties, and not a favor I confer only on privileged or generous protégés. We both know that is not the case everywhere, and agree that people take it for granted here. When I made a decision several years ago to exclude an unreliable student from a study-abroad trip, his father tried hard to make me change my mind, including money and threats, and I had enough money and security of my own to resist. The form of corruption that troubles me in Oregon is subtler, too subtle to describe to my student, who comes from an entirely different background. It’s a sense that there are two versions of this place, one where personal degeneracy is acceptable, and one where it is not even visible. Money and class create the separation, but there’s something else going on, something I can’t locate; in any case, by birth I belong to a family that knew it was on the wrong side of the divide when Mona died, or maybe earlier, when the Klan came calling.

When I leave Oregon and drive south, when I can kiss Shasta’s sunset peak, sometimes the relief is almost physical. It’s not rational at all, but in Oregon, I’ve come to realize, I’m afraid all the time, of the drug people who live along my mother’s road, of the dope-growers and child-tormenters and chronic alcoholics who inhabit this beautiful green-smothered base of Mt. Hood, along the Salmon River. I’m afraid they, and poor dead Mona, and the poor little kidnapped boy who is certainly dead by now despite all the prayers for his safe return, represent the truth, or, in the words of my new tribe, that they at least represent a truth.

Perhaps there is another truth, even if it’s not for me, however long I study the photograph of the detective who re-opened Mona’s case, who, without any DNA evidence or even a living suspect, with nothing but a box of muddy clothing and old interview transcripts and investigative notes, finally packed everything up and traveled several hours on winding roads to the tiny town in Eastern Oregon where my aunt and uncle hid from their own notoriety forty years ago. He told them that he is sure who did the murder, a former neighbor known for “bothering” little girls. My uncle was sure a long time ago and went to the creep’s house with a gun one night, but came to his senses and let fate take its course, which it did: the killer (everyone says he’s the killer; the case is officially closed) died in a car crash soon after my uncle decided not to shoot him.

The detective has young daughters, which seems like a stupid thing for a newspaper to report to the hostile world. He is a big bear of a man, his scalp scraped clean and shiny. He looks tough, incorruptible. In Mexico, a cop like him would probably end up compromised or dead, but here he can do his job, or so I hope. I hope, too, that he has a safe vehicle for these country roads, where deer jump out unpredictably. This is a selfish hope. My brother, the one with the genteel wife, spent several years working for Multnomah County’s mental health system and explaining, as he put it, to desperate people why no one would help them. Safety for one family means leaving a lot of others behind, like the neighbor’s grandchildren, like the multitude of uninsured or just plain sick people who suffer mightily with no respite, who die every day before anyone is ready to say goodbye, but I can’t help it, I hope to God everything turns out, that my cousin’s bone marrow transplant saves his life, that the detective’s daughters, and my young nephews, and the children and grandchildren of my multitude of cousins, encounter nothing to kill or harm or even affront them, that when they grow up they may stay in this beautiful place without invisible hands clutching at them, that the voices that insist I look around for the very worst that exists are silent for them. Degenerate and blasphemer that I am, I hope that, in the words of Louise Hay, loved and trusted by millions, who wants only the best for absolutely everyone, they may create a life they love to look at.

So I’m working, really working, on a better perspective, but can’t shake the feeling that maybe that this project is itself a form of corruption. The news stories I Google up about the hair booms, for example, have all kinds of people, salons and schools, 4-H clubs and pet groomers, mailing their clippings and discarded nylon stockings to the Gulf during the month of May; it seems half the small-town papers in the country ran uplifting little news items. BP said no thanks, so the charity that organized the hairlift offered to supply cleanup materials to municipalities and conservation organizations and has posted the photos to prove it. Still, everything about it feels kind of photo-oppish, wasteful and greenwashed. BP will send its criminally negligent CEO to Russia, where, a human rights group announced this week, corruption accounts for half of the nation’s GDP. Half! Perhaps they deserve each other. The narcos have massacred dozens more people on a ranch in northern Mexico, and the newspapers speculate it’s because the victims refused to mule drugs across the border. There’s a plume of contamination half a mile under the surface of the Gulf and the neighbors are over again, pouring glasses of wine for my mother, who finally lets me dump the last one down the sink.

It’s hard, she says. The winter nights are so long here. It’s August, Mom, I say. But I know what she means. Who gave you this book, I ask, and she says it’s not from the neighbor, it’s from a different friend, one who is of course taking care of grandchildren, and also supporting – why does this not surprise me? – a mentally disabled daughter and a ne’er-do-well son-in-law. When my mother was feeling unusually depressed last winter, this friend sent her a “blue” package, full of little gifts in that shade. The Louise Hay book is a colorful, vivid robin’s-egg and cobalt. Did you lock your car, my mother asks, and gestures toward the acres of fir, hemlock, larch and pine that begin just a few feet outside her door. You never know around here. They should take that stepmother into a little room, she says, picking up the morning newspaper with its inevitable story about the missing boy, they should arrest her and beat it out of her, what she did with that kid.

EDITORIAL

SPILLAGE by Nita Noveno & Barbara Sueko McGuire

FICTION

Be Careful by William Cass

Empty Pockets by Roof Alexander

NON-FICTION

Wingin’ It by Jessica Machado

Distrust the Inner Voice by Alisa Slaughter

Felicia by Ilana Garon

POETRY

Life Taxidermy by Brie Huling

A Psalm of What Happens When I Submit to Love by Bernadette McComish

Fado de Coimbra (serenade) by Mike Stutzman

Heart Decay by Brie Huling

INTERVIEWS

Ed Pavlic by Nita Noveno

Nancy Martini by Barbara Sueko McGuire

In the seventh grade, I asked my father to take me to see Winger, a glam rock band whose greatest hit, “She’s Only Seventeen,” included the lyrics, “Daddy says she’s too young, but she’s old enough for me.” My father said yes, even though the concert was on a school night and he had no idea what Winger was.

When we arrived at the show that evening, the parking lot was a black sea of T-shirts and spandex. It was August of 1989 in Honolulu, and here at the Aloha Tower concert hall, sweat was about to be sacrificed in honor of metal’s dark splendor. A Filipino guy dressed in jeans cuffed to reveal his laced-up boots leaned against the car next to us. Clutching his waist was a woman in a pseudo bra-shirt and studded leather pants. She was armed with a barrage of thick gold bracelets, each etched with her Hawaiian name in black calligraphy. I was wearing a long white T-shirt with a doodle of a spiky-haired character named Fido Dido, whose smile was a confused squiggle against my flat chest. A plastic clip, the same shade of pink as my jelly sandals, held the shirt in a small knot at the side of my hip over my stretch pants. Though I’d later find out my father had been to his own share of misfitted rock concerts in his youth, in this moment, he looked like a geezer with his button-down shirt tucked into a pair of baggy Levi’s. I suddenly wondered why I hadn’t asked to bring a friend along.

Walking into the concert hall, I paced myself five steps behind my father. My head swerved and bobbled, unsure of what to take in. Raspy voices bummed cigarettes around me and I brushed up against a tattooed forearm that read “Youth Gone Wild,” an ode to my favorite Skid Row song. Making our way around the merchandise tables, I almost ran into a pot-marked teenager, several years older than my mere eleven. He raised a brow and shot me a smile.

“You want a shirt, girlie?” my dad asked, interrupting my haze.

I glazed over the selection of graphic tees pinned to the wall in front of us. “Uh, I don’t know.” My head had already flipped back around to look for the cute-enough teenage guy. But he was gone.

“I’m not sure we have something in her size,” said the roadie manning the merchandise.

“C’mon, Dad. Nevermind.” I tugged him away from the table. “Let’s keep going.”

He tried to put his arm around me, but I dodged his move, opening my glittery coin purse to dig around for nothing in particular. My dad kept on walking, unfazed. “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for some candy and soda,” he said, heading for the auditorium.

I trudged behind him, moving slower and slower with each and every step.

*
My relationship with my father had been relegated to dates like this ever since I could remember. Not necessarily hair metal concerts, but trips to the mall, afternoons at the movies, stops for shave ice, and other short bursts of entertainment where, up until puberty, I was usually bubbling with giddiness at whatever we were doing together. My father worked sixteen-hour days, therefore making him a special guest star in my life, whisking me away from the suburbs for field trips of fun, even when my parents were married. This setup further worked to my advantage once the two of them had split a year earlier; the guilt of divorce had made my dad even more apt to spoil me, and so at eleven, it seemed perfectly reasonable that the man I loved most in the world would escort me to see the man I had a serious crush on.

Kip Winger was the hairy, good-looking poster bear for the loud, showy music that seemed much more in tune with my adolescent yearnings and confusions than the sugary pop likes of New Kids on the Block. In their videos that streamed nonstop on MTV, glam rockers like Kip, or Nikki Sixx, or Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, were letting me into a mysteriously adult world that I was hidden from on my island cul-de-sac. These hair metal bands seemed both accessible and forbidden, clownish and wild, with their exorbitant face paint, booze-spraying backstage antics and grins that widened at the sight of half-naked women. As more childhood dolls came down from my bookshelves, more posters of Kip’s curly-haired chest and five o’clock shadow went up on my walls. I waited every afternoon to hear his singles play on MTV’s daily request show, and I snuck out into the living room on Saturday nights to watch “Headbangers’ Ball” on the lowest volume possible, so not to disturb my mother. I had no interest in kissing Kip or even touching him; I had no idea how to go about those things. I just wanted to experience the loud, unabashed excitement I saw him make on television.

*

Aloha Tower’s auditorium seemed a little smaller than the arenas I’d seen in most metal videos, but it smelt as naughty as I imagined it would. A mix of stale beer, clove cigarettes and cheap drug store cologne hung in the air as we entered the blackened warehouse space, cleared for a standing-room-only concert. My dad, carrying his box of M&Ms, headed toward the back of the room, aiming for the four lonely bleachers against the far wall. I stalled, turning back toward the crowd that was assembling miles away near the stage. A guy raced past us. Then another. A third belched in my ear. I turned back around to find my dad had already ascended the bleachers. I jaunted to catch back up to him.

I sat at the edge of my seat half-watching the opening band, but spending more time studying the couple with matching teased manes making out near the speakers. Right below our seats, a woman held a mini wine bottle in one hand and stroked her boyfriend’s arm with the other. When she leaned in to whisper in his ear, she licked it.

“Dad, I’m going to the bathroom,” I announced after the opener. He nodded, “Okay.”

In the privacy of my stall, I removed the clip from my shirt and tousled my hair. Then, I lingered for a few minutes in front of the sink to watch several girls reapply their hot pink lipstick.

As soon as I got back to my seat, the room went black, signaling Winger was about to take the stage. People gathered from all corners of the room, pushing toward the front, screaming. I jumped out of my chair.

“Dad, can I?” I asked, nudging toward the stage with the pretty please eyes I used to beg for ice cream on the way home from school.

He swallowed a gulp of his coke. “Go ahead,” he said, leaning back into his seat. His tone was cool, unhesitant. It was another instance of him giving me what I wanted, another testament of our understanding that I was his little girl and he’d never let anything happen to me.

I skipped down the stairs. Midway, I caught myself from appearing too eager and started slowing down. I aimed not for the stage, but for the middle of the action.

I stood in the back of the black-clad masses for a few seconds before working my way between adults twice my size. At four-foot-eleven, all I could see were the backs of T-shirts depicting some band’s world tour ’89. “Pardon me, excuse me,” I said, as I parted through the crowd. The musk of sweat and whiskey now filled the tiny crevices between bodies huddled together, vying for the best view of the stage. Within minutes, I was blocked by a massive wall of pouffed-out heads.

I looked to my right and there was a scrawny guy with hippie-like long hair smiling at me. “Wanna get on my shoulders?” he asked. My bones felt as if they were shaking from the reverb blasting from the speaker stacks off to my side.

“I’m okay,” I told the hippie.

“Well, if you change your mind.”

I turned away, wobbling on my tiptoes, peeking between sleeveless shirts and around stringy rattails and over the bare shoulders of women wearing tube tops. I smiled at a girl who bumped into me and I backed away from a man who grunted his way through the crowd, swashing beer on my shoes. After several minutes of this, I ended up next to the hippie again. “See anything yet?” he asked. I shook my head. He bent down in a squat. The drummer tapped his hi-hat, signaling their number one hit, “She’s Only Seventeen.” I looked down at the back of the hippie’s neck, his hair swooped to one side over his shoulder. The crowd roared. Whoo-hoos swelled the room. I hiked up my long tee shirt to put one leg over his neck. And then the other. He rose off the floor and I was in the air.

I was above the cloud of sweat and as high as several other women who were on other guys’ shoulders, women who were seconds away from being topless, their cleavage falling out of their tiny shirts and their legs wrapped around the necks of bulkier guys who stroked their calves.

“I see a lot of beautiful ladies out here tonight,” Kip shouted mid-song, wiping the sweat from under his curly bangs. Women screamed. Men raised their fists in a “hell yeah.” A voice from across the room said she wanted to fuck him. “Yes, lots of beautiful ladies,” Kip called back to her, and then belted out the chorus without skipping a beat. Women continued to shriek his name. Bras swung in the air. A high-pitched squeal escaped from my lips.

When the song was over, I bent down toward the hippie’s face and asked him to let me down and thanked him. I pushed through the crowd as the band paused between numbers. Far away, I found my father in his seat, shaking a box of candy into his palm. I wondered if he’d seen me above the crowd in my moment of glory. I hoped he had; I hoped he hadn’t. I slowly made my way back up the stairs.