Sooner Or Later They're Going To Cancel Me For This
How The Bada-Bing Poetry Tour Almost Never Happened
I don’t know when, but sometime ago I gave up on the idea of living in polite society. The comforts that have been afforded to others always seemed so out of reach for me. I had spent years bouncing around on the road doing poetry readings along the Rustbelt and Midwest. Performing my poems in dive bars and little bookstores, living off of chapbook sales and crashing on people’s floors and couches. Arriving in little towns a stranger and making life long friends over cold beers and pot smoke. The always going of that life just worked with my soul. Making the decisions to skip eating to get a good buzz or haggling my books for pot money; there’s a certain kind of person that chases America. The kind of person who burns daybreak, who searches for the truth along the back roads of cow-towns and never thinks to look back towards home. When I was kicked out of the residency (and we’ll get there one of thee days, ‘cause that’s a whole fucking story), I came crash landing back to New Jersey and went back to the day job: back to being an apprentice butcher at a corporate supermarket chain in New Jersey.
That kind of life I excel at too. It’s a savage and ancient profession and one of the last bastions in the supermarket realm where you can still make a living. They call it skilled labor and sure butchering is that. There is an art to driving a blade through flesh. To take muscle and sinew and sculpt appealing meat fixtures is no easy thing. It’s a hard life filled with hard men and we operate under completely different standards and rules than the rest of the store. The meat department is a relic of a bygone era operating under the facade of human resource bullshit and corporate overviews. Plausible deniability is how every meat department on the east coast operates. Whatever it takes to get the job done. A place where drug use isn’t against the rules. A place where if you were caught on heroin you’d be fired but if they caught you blasting some of that white marching powder up your nose, they wouldn’t even blink an eye. It was encouraged. How else could you bang out seven days a week and fourteen hour days? A fist fight? Did management see? No, oh well, what happens in this room stays in this room. We got work to fucking do.
It was in that room that I met I’ll call him Ezekiel, Zeke for short. I was his boss and he was a Jersey boy who had joined the service, moved to Florida, got hooked on shit and caught an attempted murder charge. I’m not using his real name as he is still on probation, but he fit the bill quick in the meat department. We would work all day, go to the bar and drink the pain from the work night and do it all again the next day. Zeke was there when I began to get involved into the poetry scene again. Back when I was still running that small show up in New Brunswick, before the NJ Renaissance had even been formulated. He would hear me talk about my plans in the meat department between lines of whatever we were sniffing, He was there when the three shows began and had been a fixture as it began to grow and expand.
See in those early days in the winter of 2022, I didn’t expect any of this to last. No one did. No one imagined the amount of people that would come out or what would build out of these little shows we were throwing around the Jersey Shore. We brought the meat room culture with us. If the shows were good we celebrated by binge drinking and blowing lines and if the show was bad we did it even harder. As the shows grew, a bureaucracy and a group of “yes men” were surrounding me and Zeke was the president of that. Anything I needed anytime was available. It was a time of crazy excitement watching this whole thing just begin to manifest around us. Within a month we went from yelling our poems at dive bars to a handful of people to packing venues to the sidewalks. I was working my twelve hour days and then leading some crazy new poetry movement around the state.
Those days were wild and crazy and the fact that the whole thing didn’t burn down in the first few months is nothing short of incredible. You know when some asshole is driving drunk and crashes his car and is so fucked up that he goes through the windshield but his body is so loose that he ends up unscathed? That’s how I feel. I couldn’t do it again.
It was April and the night before a big tour from NJ across the Rustbelt. We looked at it like a Promethean journey, to show the country what we were doing. It was also the first day that they were shooting for what would become Voices in the Garden. They were going to meet us in Ocean Grove and film us packing up the van before we tore off for the country. The night before Zeke called with an adventure. See when Zeke called, it was always an adventure and he wanted to go down to Seaside Heights for some drinks with one of the girls from the scene. When all of the attention hit, I had been prepared for the drinking, I had been prepared for the drugs but I hadn’t prepared for women to swarm me with attention. My partner and I were going through it and this was all new to me.
The problem with drugs is sometimes they just switch on you. What you had been doing to get through work or to get more writing done can play with your synapses and just switch up on how it effects you. And ecstasy had switched on me. A drug I would use to work long hours come home and fuck now seemed to fire my synapses and send me down these crazy adventures with Zeke and this was one of em. Him driving ninety miles an hour down the Garden State parkway while I’ll call her Elaina and I passed a bottle of patron back and forth chugging down tequila as he drifted between lanes. If I ever robbed a bank, Zeke would be my get a way driver. His Eclipse would shoot the gap from one lane to another like some cosmic game of Tetris, always fitting into each space smooth as butter.
When we hit the bar, we already knew it was going to be a night. I had like three felonies in my pocket and the night was already sinister. Elaina, the dancer, the mystic, the woman somehow enthralled with my tales of hard living and playing Kerouac was bombed and I wasn’t far behind, All of my angels were on vacation, so you know it was time for trouble. An argument had started outside when we were talking about the future.
I’m a Doomer at heart, not that I look down on life but I’m here for the moment baby. I don’t know if we will see tomorrow but we have tonight. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. I live every day like it might be my last. When I drink, I drink. When I eat, I fucking eat, when I love, I love and when I fuck, I fuck. I try to be in the moment. I spent so much of my life drifting away in disassociating thoughts. I made a comment about dying young and that was met with her throwing her drink at me.
“You’re not fucking Jack Kerouac”
I was stoked she knew who Jack Kerouac was. Before I could reply, she stormed off and began to leave with someone she had known from the strip club. Still covered in the drink, Zeke and I decided to bounce. We got in the car but than the empathy bug kicked in so we circled around the bar to make sure she was in fact leaving with that guy and not just stuck waiting outside.
That’s when the lights appeared behind us. Four cop cars surrounded the car. Zeke and I were pulled out and they searched the vehicle finding the empty Patron bottles. He blew hot on the breathalyzer and was now on the hood of his car being cuffed while I was gripping on the car so the cops could see my hands.
“Sooner or later I’m going to get cancelled for this” I said and Zeke laughed as they dragged him to the cop car.
I was thinking fast now and realized the odds of my catching a charge was high. I had enough ecstasy in my pocket to fuel a small rave. If I was arrested, the tour would be over.
The cops were surrounding me asking me questions and I just figured I’d shoot my shot. “If you don’t search me, I’ll make you laugh” I said with the confidence of a millionaire.
“What?” The cop was surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“I have to call my fiance and tell her I’m in seaside heights and Zeke was arrested. She doesn’t know I’m in Seaside”
There was a moment of silence and my balls were in my stomach.
“Do it, pussy” The cop said.
And I did. Calling her on speakerphone and her reaction was one of resigned fury. The cop started laughing and didn’t search me. I stood outside of the bar in cold sweats. The ecstasy was now giving way to the tequila and I waited for Rebecca to grab me so we could scoop Zeke from the drunk tank, knowing that in four hours we would be recorded for television. Knowing how close I had been to being taken in.
Sometimes walking the line is dangerous but boy does it make your heart pump. If you’re wondering how the filming went it went. I showed up with rave sunglasses on, you know the ones that blink in the dark, at eight am black out drunk raving about the night before. We packed up our stuff and did our seven day tour across the country.
This wouldn’t be my last dance with ecstasy, that story is even more fucking crazy but we will get there. I’m telling you, if I had to relive that era I don’t think I could do it again without fucking everything up.
Very fun read