It was late Friday when I got the news–a brief email from the editor of Happy Heart Magazine, a new kid on the block of children’s poetry. They made a big splash when they arrived on the scene a few months ago. If your poem was accepted, not only would you get a free copy of the issue in which it appeared, you’d also get a set of Happy Heart stickers to put on your lunch box or bike. With that kind of swag at stake, it took me about as long as the batting of a gnat’s eyelash to submit “Fuzzy Buzzy Bumble Bee,” a one-quatrain work I’d been shopping around without success to the big boys and girls; Jack & Jill, My Little Messenger, the children’s poetry-industrial complex, as I like to call them.
I thought I had an angle with Happy Heart–they were a Christian children’s poetry magazine, unlike the heathen rags they competed with. As a former altar boy, winner of the little statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary for highest score in catechism three years in a row, I figured that I had a shot for once. I may have outgrown all the religious dogma I absorbed as a credulous youth, but I could put on the surplice of the sacred the way other poets do when they want to upgrade their status from Dissolute Young Poet to Thoughtful Old Guy Who Needs a Poet-in-Residence Gig to Coast Through His Golden Years.
But the email from Veronica–whose pink ink email signature, as you might have guessed, dotted her “i” with a little heart–dashed my dreams to the ground. “It was a tough decision,” the editor wrote, “but I don’t think it is a good fit for this issue.”
Not a good fit? What am I, I asked myself–a freaking shoe salesman? As always I was tempted to fire back, but I bit my tongue–or rather my typing finger–and just wrote “Thanks for getting back to me so promptly. I will surely submit something during Happy Heart’s next submission period!”
You bitch.
I inhaled deeply, then exhaled the same amount of air. I didn’t want to over-inflate just because my internal pressure gauge was feeling low. And then I did what I always do when I get a rejection from a children’s poetry rag–which is quite often, in case you were wondering. I put on my coat and headed out to The White Pony, the favorite watering hole of children’s poets in Boston.
The White Pony, like most bohemian joints, is a low dive that likes it that way. You go down a flight of stairs–fully out of compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act–then you enter a dark cavern of despair, where guys like me who have just about given up hope of ever having a children’s poem published drink milk products that disagree with our aging digestive systems until the bitter end.
Richard Yates
I recalled Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road and several other critically-acclaimed novels, none of which sold more than 12,000 copies and all of which were out of print when he died. He drank himself to death in a bar on Beacon Street, frustrated by his lack of success. Every so often as I stand on the threshold of The White Pony I ask myself if I’m going to end up like him, but the milkaholic’s self-deception always overcomes my hesitation. “It’s just milk,” I say to myself. “I can quit anytime I want.”
I walk slowly down the stairs, making my way cautiously so my eyes can adjust to the gloom, holding onto the hand rail like it’s the Titanic, or maybe the Hindenburg. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” a tongue-in-cheek sign invoking Dante’s Inferno hangs over the door, right above the one that says “Watch your head.”
I scan the bar and see my old pal “Smitty,” Dustin Cravath Smith. A scion of old New York money, he doesn’t have to worry about paying his bills. He’s the William Burroughs to my Allen Ginsberg; he can fool around with silly stuff because he gets a check from Mommy and Daddy every month, while I have to hustle, cranking out greeting card poems to make ends meet:
I’m sorry to hear about your loss,
it really makes me sad,
but because your mom re-married after the divorce
you’ve still got one more dad.
Stuff like that. Yeah, it corrupts the soul, but I have to keep body and soul together.
“Hello stranger!” Smitty calls out, and I take the open bar stool next to him. He may be annoying but he’s always good for a free drink or six. “What’ll ya have?” he says, trying to sound casual in order to scuff up the sheen of his otherwise high-WASP diction.
“The usual,” I say with a nod to the bartender.
“Nestle’s Strawberry Quik?”
” . . . and make it a double.”
A drink appears in front of me–they know me well here–and I salute my patron. “Here’s looking at you,” I say.
“Here’s milk in your eye,” Smitty shoots back. “So why the long face?” he asks.
“Another rejection.”
“Too bad. Who this time?”
“Happy Hearts.”
“Never heard of ’em. Don’t take it so hard.”
“I can’t help it. I thought because they were new, and were a ‘Christian’ rag, I might have a shot since all my competitors are pagans and infidels.” As I said this I took in the room with a wave of my arm, the one that wasn’t holding my drink.
“Perhaps they sensed a certain mauvais foi in your work.”
“Meaning what?”
“Bad faith. You couldn’t give a rat’s ass about religion.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m more religious than everybody else in this joint put together.”
I had raised my voice a little too much, and the assembled company of losers glared at me.
“Self-awareness lack you,” Smitty said in his most annoying Yoda imitation. Thankfully I’d only had one drink so my head was clear enough to mentally rehash his words in reverse order.
“You can have a religious sensibility without going to church,” I said.
“The pretzels pass please.”
I took a sip of my drink and Smitty thoughtfully signaled to the bartender for another round. “Thanks,” I said. I turned towards the entrance where a last glimmer of sunlight had made its way down the stairs off the Charles River and illuminated a figure from behind.
Dante and Beatrice
“Better clean up your language, a broad just walked in,” Smitty said.
At first it was hard to make out whether he was right, but the silhouette became 3-D reality in a few moments as a girl walked the length of the bar and sat down two seats over from me. I recalled Ernest Hemingway’s line about bars being the place where unattached men and women go to show they’re available, or something like that. She wouldn’t have been here if she was going steady.
“Roses are red, violets are blue–
if you didn’t pick your nose I might like you.”
“There’s what you need right now, pal,” Smitty said with a worldly upraised eyebrow.
“What?”
“A girl.”
“She’s a little young.”
“You’re a children’s poet, she’s a child. Bounce some of your stuff off her.”
“Oh, I get it.” I took out my wallet . . .
“I thought you lost that,” Smitty said.
“I always depend on the kindness of strangers,” I replied, going full Blanche DuBois on him.
“But I’ve known you since we were in college.”
Blanche DuBois
“You always say ‘Hello stranger’ when I walk in.” I saw that I had a twenty and four ones, enough to buy a round and a plate of Pepperidge Farm mint cookies, so I plunged ahead.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” I asked. An old line, but I thought the self-effacing aspect of it might make her more receptive.
“I’m waiting for my mom,” she said. “She picks me up after school.”
She had a voice full of money, as Jay Gatsby said of Daisy Buchanan. If she went to school in this neighborhood, it was a private one.
“Well as long as you’re stopping with us, can I buy you a drink?”
She looked me up and down like I was a corduroy jumper she had to wear but didn’t want to.
“I’m not supposed to take stuff from strangers.”
“I’ll fix that,” Smitty said, leaning across me to introduce me and himself. “He’s harmless, he just looks like a standard poodle with mange.”
That crack brought a smile to the girl’s lips. “Okay–but just one. I can’t spoil my dinner.”
“What’ll ya have?” I asked.
“Chocolate Quik,” she said. “Three spoons full, please,” she added with a knowing nod to the bartender. I figured she’d have a $30-a-day Starbucks habit by the time she was in high school.
“And a plate of cookies, my good man,” I said to the bartender, and then to the girl, “I have an ulterior motive in speaking to you.”
“Men!” she exclaimed in disgust. I figured maybe her heart had been broken–badly–in fifth grade.
“It’s not like that–I’m a poet.”
I’d apparently said the magic word. “Oh, really?” she said. She put her elbows on the bar and propped her chin in her hands. “Do tell.”
“Well, not a successful one. So I’m looking for someone to, uh, stress-test a poem of mine.”
“Sure,” she said. “Hit me.”
I cleared my throat–should’ve ordered orange juice instead of milk, I said to myself, then began:
Fuzzy, buzzy bumble bee,
Hope he doesn’t land on me!
A look crossed her face like her milk was sour. “That’s . . . it?”
“No, that’s just the first couplet, I wanted to give you time to take it in.”
“Consider it taken. Continue.”
Wish he was a butterfly,
Then he’d merely flutter by.
I paused and nodded, to indicate that this time I was through. “What do you think?”
“I think you made an error of usage.”
“What?”
“When you’re expressing a wish, you’re supposed to use the subjunctive, so it should be ‘Wish he were a butterfly.”
“But, the ‘was’ is assonance for ‘buzz’ in the first line.”
“You asked for my opinion, I’m just giving it to you.” She was like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Tough as nails, and she’d hammered me.
Lauren Bacall
“Uh, I guess you’re right, but it’s . . . poetic license.”
“Really–you’re going to use that as an excuse?”
“Why not. Lots of poets bend the rules to the breaking point and I . . .”
“Sure, you figured nobody would notice. But it’s a principle I feel very strongly about.”
“Why is that?”
“When somebody gets as old as you, they ought to take away their license.”
Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “poetry is kind of important.”
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