Queen Mob's Teahouse

“It’s a little hole in the wall,” Luce says, humble-bragging, “but they make the best dan dan noodles in Beijing.”

I just nod. Luce is trying to be sweet. She is trying to impress me. It’s been nine years, but I can tell she still has a crush on me. I find that I’m flattered.

But what really catches my eye is the familiar sign for ice cream cakes on a new building facade. “Carvel!” I cry. “I haven’t been to one since I was a kid.”

I can’t believe it. A full store. Fancy too. Awning, plate glass windows, neon sign.

I haven’t tasted a Carvel cake since my brother’s eighth birthday.

Luce’s voice is too loud inside the Jeep. “Do you want to stop? It’s the first Carvel in Beijing.”

We stop. Luce pulls into an alley lined with cars haphazardly parked alongside the bricks of the hutong walls. She finds a spot and eases her Jeep into place as a few bicyclists whiz past angrily ringing their tinny bells.

Sean was already pissed. He’d only left the White House a 3 months – and he was being “escorted” to the Press office by an armed guard, wearing a “Visitor” pass, like he was on a goddamn tour or something

The officer, Trent, if he remembered his name right, lead him to his old office, a trip he didn’t need an escort for, and could have taken with his eyes closed.

“Right in here, sir”

“Thanks, Trent – is Anthony in there?”

“Troy, sir, and he’ll be here in just a moment”.

Shit – he knew it started with TR…. fuck it, he doesn’t work here anymore.

He let himself in, and was relieved the administration trusted him to sit in his old office alone without a guard, while he waited for “The Mooch” to be late to the meeting he had set up.

He looked around at the office. Of course, like the eternal 22 year old college football star he was to remain, The Mooch had placed bullshit inspirational posters up – “A journey of a mile begins with a single step”…. Jesus.

He was mid-eyeroll when there was a single knock on the door and the Mooch walked into the office.

If Spicer hadn’t turned around right away, he would have known it was the Mooch by his cheap smelling Aqua Di Gio, which Spicer would (rightfully guess), he had worn every day for the last 15 years or so.

“Sean! Have a seat!”

Sean sat down at the desk, facing his old seat.

Good God, stuffed in an office with him, he decided Mooch spritzed about 2 sprays too many of his cologne every morning. Or refreshed it too much during the day. It was borderline nauseating.

The Mooch sat down.

“I hope you don’t mind I changed up the office, I’m not one for the stuff the National Archive lets us borrow – I like the stuff we had up at my Wall Street office – keeps me -”

“Can we cut the bullshit? I don’t care what you did to the office, it’s not mine anymore.”

Anthony took a breath, both hands on the desk.

Sean Spicer stood in his office. Or, rather, his former office. It was small and dark and he’d always hated it. But now, as all of his decisions from the past few days rattled around in his brain, he loved it more than anywhere in the world. More than his boyhood bedroom, more than the confessional at his church where he’d once snuck a nap as a kid. He’d confessed and atoned for that, of course. He was a good Catholic boy. He couldn’t think too much about God today.

A shadow appeared on his desk. He heard a sigh and matched it, assuming it was Priebus, coming to rebuke him. It was just his way of saying thank you. There was so much unspoken between them…. maybe once the dust had settled….

Of course, what Sean didn’t know was how soon Reince would be showing up on his doorstep with a bottle of whiskey, unemployment forms, and a wry smile.

Spicer turned around and started. It was Scaramucci. The Mooch. Goddamnit. GodDAMNit.

Jeremy Fernando presents: ‘Grievance’ by One White Raven

Please answer the following questions with as little forethought and as much plain truth as you can muster. Be quick and be bold! There are no wrong answers, only tedious detours on the road to self-awareness.

For what celebrity, performing artist, dance show contestant, or professional athlete are you most frequently mistaken?

Do you allow family members to define you, and complete strangers to criticize your core beliefs, or do you shrug and go your merry way?

Ignoring for the moment issues related to stretch fabric and muscle mass, what is your secret superpower?

What historical figure—coloratura soprano, pro-bono defense lawyer, reclusive spinster poet, eccentric scientist, tragic queen, or victorious general—is your go-to guy?

Where do you find inspiration—the play of dappled sun and shade, a mighty oak, clouds like sheep that ramble across the sky, a green tendril, the sound of waves that crash on the beach, the written word, or the toothless smile of a newborn baby?

Babe – /bāb/

1.) A description.

a.) Look at that babe, she’s out of my league.

2.) Term of endearment. Personally preferred over the childlike ‘baby’

a.) Hey babe, I missed you.

b.) Can you please make me some coffee, babe?

Ball and chain – /ˌbôl (ə)n ˈCHān/

1.) Playfully derogatory name for the wife. Occasionally used in jest, usually when under the influence, never intentionally in her presence.

a.) Best I call it a night and head home to the ol’ ball and chain.

The rough hemp noose gives another inch. Your bruised trachea crackles. Smells old and strong. Dipped and cured in some furious nutritive. You know the taste. The local intoxicant of kerosene and turpentine. It grows wild on the outskirts. Not even. The fraction of. The numbest hollow of breath. The muscles in your lungs tighten at instinct. Force them apart. Leave a gap and tighten. Your handler whoever they are tonight or today. You can’t tell how many days or hours has past. Hesitates with a private knowledge. The low necrotic murmur of his laugh. Private enough for you. Tightens in your bowels. You know this knowledge of the grasp, the subtle trust of the fingers. The flicker of gloved fingertips that stay to long across the skin that says they know. The flexible skin along the back of your throat hungered pulled and buckled. But buckles the rope to the strangle collar. Its weight makes you buckle your knees. Don’t buckle them. Pull your back straight. But the luscious breath like dark lurid wine. The pressure like wet rust, like a gentle tourniquet. The sigh trapped deep in the throat cannot rise. You couldn’t force it out. 

The crocodile isn’t very adept at hunting, but when deer flock in fear, forever ignoring that lonely spot, outside, that could have saved them, what will save them?

Once upon a time it did not occur to the Aristotles, the cherries on top of all the intelligentsia, of the horrors of slavery. On the contrary it was deemed to be a necessity. They read more books than me. Wrote more books than me. Thought way more than me. But am I to judge?

Buddha, twenty five years after ‘enlightenment’ could only reluctantly allow a woman within his Sangha.

The earth used to be flat. The world fashioned into a globe at the expense of a dead body upon which stands the church of science.

Once upon a time we fed warriors to lions dragged out of jungles. For Royal entertainment.

What and who has made us less sadistic? Not more books surely. Not the intelligentsia surely. Who are the deer amongst us that drive us towards the spot no crocodile or tiger can reach? Who are these saviors? How do they see what a hundred years of contemplation by a dozen geniuses have missed?

How did you start out as a writer? How has your craft or method of writing changed since then?

I began writing poems in earnest when I was a teenager, inspired by Neil Young’s song Thrasher. The song paralyzed me with its combination of direct earnestness and abstract imagery. I wrote the lyrics out by hand and taped them to my bedroom wall. Then I typed them out and taped those to the wall. My own writing followed shortly afterwards, unleashed by the possibility of writing I gained from Thrasher. I began studying the lyrics of other songs by Bob Dylan, Robert Hunter, and David Bowie.  By the time I discovered Alan Ginsberg and George Bowering, I was already reading with an eye on technique and affect, and thinking about how I was writing and could do more. All of those early poems were not for anybody but myself. My writing style shifted dramatically when I realized, many years later, that poetry can also have an audience.

What was the planning process like for a poem like “The Obvious Flap”? Was there a clear beginning and a clear place you wanted to go?

“The Obvious Flap” began with a series of experiments that Gary Barwin and I passed back and forth to each other. We kept editing one piece in particular, adding more and more lines until those broke off into new poems. It evolved very quickly and organically. There was no plan until we had a full manuscript was complete and then we went back and edited. The beginning of the book was the idea that language was weird and wonderful.

One day I remember walking down to Seaton’s, the corner drugstore, to pay the utility bills, slow summer day, rather long letter to post, the air out salubrious somehow I can’t now seem to explain, yet a lugubrious senescence settles over me as on my walk I feel myself aging.

I waited at Seaton’s small post office window for the clerk Amelia to weigh and post my letter, and I also purchase a half page of stamps. “Drugstore Cowboy commemorative page,” Amelia smiles.

I then browsed the aisles for knickknack knockoffs, picked up a last-second gift card, and waited to watch a strawberry malt whipped up for a little girl, the pink stuff spilled from hand held lade ladles handled delicately – Amelia’s vessels of oak and wool woven sails as she spun the concoction. Here again I feel a portage of age from one bondage portal to my next epochal position.

In other words, I felt upside down, the company store closed, and caught up in Gas, Oil, Electric, Water, and Phone Bills, living in an age of fossil-fuel habits, in a diseased society. Ridden in and on, no cure here, piece of the old neighborhood, now dead letter drugstore while drone dreary mosquitoes fill the air with gewgaw.

Misfit

I am fat. If I say this about myself, friends or co-workers are quick to say some variation of, “no no, you’re not fat.” For a long time I would say nothing in response. I knew they thought they were being kind or helpful. I wanted to tell them that I wanted to be fat. I didn’t see it as an insult or a negative to be called fat. What I really wanted to tell them was that I am not fat on accident. I am not longing for a thin body. I want to be fat. I am fat on purpose. In fact, I want to be fatter.

Transformation. The concept fascinated me from an early age. At nine years old, it took the form of wanting to be a vampire. I had this recurring dream that there would be a knock on the front door late at night that only I would hear. The rest of my family would sleep through it, unaware of what was transpiring not that far from them. I’d go downstairs, open the inner door, and see a vampire standing there. The orange glow of the light tucked into the overhang over the house splayed shadows across his pale face. It was always a male vampire in my dream, usually around my age or just a few years older that had come for me.

The screen door kept us apart. I knew enough vampire lore that I knew he couldn’t cross the threshold of the house without an invitation. For once, my house was a safe space.  I would have to invite him in or go outside for him to do me any harm. I worried about him hurting me, even though in every dream, I knew without any word from him that he wanted me to go with him. He wanted me to be like him. Part of me wanted the same thing. Another part of me was terrified. I had no idea what being a vampire would actually be like. I was, perhaps, too practical a child, even in my dreams. It also scared me that I wanted to be a vampire.

The desire for vampiric transformation would eventually fade away, but not the desire for transformation. I don’t remember what age my desire to be fat kicked in. Maybe it was before the vampire, maybe after, maybe they nested inside each other in some way. I knew that I could never tell anyone about it. I knew that my family, especially would think it was odd, gross. I was a chubby kid in a family of people geared towards thinness and sports. The pressure to be like them was constant. My father’s solution to my fatness was to sign me up for any sport I showed even the most minuscule amount of interest in. My mother’s tactic was to put me on diet after diet, ones where I had to limit my calorie intake to 1500 calories and could have a few slices of cheese with crackers. There was no space for me to say that I liked being fat. Although I didn’t even have the vocabulary to express that I liked it. I wasn’t supposed to. I internalized it as something wrong with me. So I would go to the soccer practices, eat my few slices of cheese, and wait for a moment when I could eat from the jar of peanut butter that I hid in a shoebox under my bed.

I wish I’d never been born. No, that’s not quite true. I wish he’d never been born. The magnificent Oliver Jones with all his genius ideas. But he wasn’t a genius. They were all wrong, and if he’d never existed, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to do the things I’ve done. “Build a city,” he said. “It’ll be an English paradise.” He was so, so wrong.

He was running out of time. Oliver had been at work in his study for hours and had come up with virtually nothing. He was supposed to be coming up with his next big entrepreneurial enterprise of 1995, an idea that would have the common people of England jumping from their chairs when they saw it announced on TV or their eyeballs bugging out of their heads when they read about it in the magazines and the papers like they had with his last project proposal. So far, all he’d gotten was a thick layer of wadded up sheets of paper covering the floor of the study. Oliver removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation.

He wished desperately that he could just escape to some relaxing little haven where he wouldn’t have to worry about stimulating the real estate market, like a nice little villa where he could spend his days surrounded by similar people who knew exactly what kind of experience he was looking for. Oliver’s eyes popped open wide. He was back in business.

Oliver could see it all in his mind’s eye: A luxurious little city of quaint little villas lining each street in all manner of whimsical pastel shades, people strolling leisurely along the sidewalks or whizzing past in golf carts, maybe a few facilities for various recreational activities here and there, palm trees and a tropical cabana down at the nearby beach. No, wait. That wasn’t right. There were enough island retirement paradises already. Scratch the pastels and the Bahamian breeze; give everything a more rustic shade and bring it all closer to home. England didn’t have anything that would even come close to something like that. Until now. Oliver knew there had to be space available somewhere. He buzzed his secretary and told her to get him a list of all the vacant spaces in England. He bustled around his office, grabbing his coat and hat, and just barely managing to take the list from his secretary and thank her before he sped out the door.

Man Against Nature

I stand near the boiling stockpot warming my fingers while the chicken and vegetables melt, the smell making our apartment strong. Canned wind howls from the TV screen in the living room, producing a cool glow. He loves man-against-nature shows which are really just a buff-looking model talking to himself (and his hidden film crew) before lunch, which is probably catered sushi.