Woe to The Vanquished

New Jersey Will Have Its Revenge on Manchester, New Hampshire

It’s been over a month since I returned from Manchester, New Hampshire and I’ve been struggling with telling this story. In one of my daily phone calls with Milo I told him about this new phenomena of people watching my social media stories and wanting to get the full recap so they sign up to this substack. We were always worried about the Pat the Bunny syndrome, you know the folk punk dude who sang the soundtracks to our youth in Ramshackle Glory, Johnny Hobo, and Wingnut Dishwashers Union— who galvanized scores of folks to hop freights and bounce around America but also left a series of heroin addled crusties in his wake. We were conscious of this. Sure we weren’t doing heroin but we weren’t much better off and to tell the stories of this journey was dicey. Whatever happened to Pat anyway? He quit music and got a job in tech parked in a regular home in Tucson. Glory was fleeting but when it’s your only commodity you tend to drown yourself in it. And boy we were drowning.

“You just have to ask yourself if you are ready to pimp your life out for the story? To give it all to the moment and tell the full story of your life” Milo said.

“I think I’m already there. What else is there?” I said and sat down to write this story.

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When we first drove up to Manchester, we had this terribly stupid meme bouncing around the car about cum-tributing Jack Kerouac. If you don’t know, a cum tribute is when someone busts a free one on a picture of a person. This was all for the lols but it grew more and more as an artistic statement and we teased the internet with our threats to CUM TRIBUTE HIS GRAVE! The likelihood of that happening was slim to none, it was preposterous and sinisterly funny but I try not to get off around a bunch of dudes in a graveyard. But the idea behind the profane notion was that the idols of the past were gone and we were agents of change. I love Kerouac just as much as anyone but the literary scene hangs on to these tropes and idols and all of them are old. They’ve been old. It was 2024. A year ago a devious idea had brewed in the minds of Milo, Jack Giancola and I and that was that the poem is no longer just the written page or just the spoken word. The poem was living and breathing and we were the poem so thus by extension anything we did was poetry. We were on a great crusade to make poetry cool and break it away from the cages of monotony in which it had been prisoned. Or at least stir up a bunch of shit along the way.

When Lucas Rockdale, the golden haired cement truck driver who had become a fixture in the Poetry Renaissance came back up to Manchester to rescue me, we were passing through Massachusetts when we saw Lowell. It was Christmas Eve and we found his grave, a large headstone nothing too remarkable except the dozens of bottles and joints around his headstone. We smoked at the grave and talked about his influence, the man who had spearheaded a youth movement in America became a bitter drunk conservative and drank himself to death. The boy who was mad to live told William Buckley that the Vietnam war was a conspiracy to get the Vietnamese jeeps. The boy who was mad to live had abandoned his children and praised McCarthy All of my heroes were dead and most of them died before they ever even hit the grave.

“He would probably hate us” Lucas said.

I agreed solemnly and dumped out one of the bags of blow we had from Kags onto a flat rock that rested on his grave as if it precipitated our arrival.

“Woe to the vanquished” I said as we made short work of the powder and tipped our hats to Mr. Kerouac turning back to our own legends.

A week earlier we packed Rockdale’s car up and set the GPS for Manchester, New Hampshire. Manchester, the sleepy city where Milo was running the New England Renaissance. Manchester, the Constantinople of the Renaissance and the city that took my front tooth. The show was billed as NJ’s Revenge and the boys were hyped. In the parking lot of the coffee shop in Matawan, Rockdale had his car geared up and ready. He was the Neal Cassidy of any voyage, the only poet I knew who could take a part a car, put it back together and talk to you about quantum mechanics while doing it. The patron saint of smoking a cigarette while playing the harp. In the backseat was Grayson White, a radical comedian who started every show by obliterating the eardrums of every one in the audience. He wore a leather jacket and was the first one to call out an injustice, a Bayshore kid like me growing up in the shadows of Kevin Smith running from cops on the Henry Hudson Trail and watching the cosmic glow of Manhattan from the bootleg beaches of Monmouth County. Matt Alvarez was the youngest of us but he was already lost to the wolves, the first comedian to truly come up in the Renaissance. He once hosted a comedy show that devolved into a near race riot and now used the white guilt of the audience to then horrify them by brandishing a knife.

These three were some of the new hosts in the Renaissance and this was their first time on the road. We pulled out of Matawan with two bottles of liquor and three ounces of weed and sang punk rock songs as we passed around the bottles and chain smoked joints passing through New York through the strange world of Connecticut and it’s strange little rest stops where Dunkin Donuts quarreled with Subways for a traveler’s dollar and broke into Massachusetts greeted by the thick plumes of White Pines and Red Maples void of their colors and leaves just dead wood obelisks lining the two lane highway as we barreled onward to Manchvegas, to sing those working class bar poems and to grab a handful of the moment. By the time we crossed the Queen City Bridge and rolled into Elm Street we were properly marinated and I stood out of Rockdale’s sunroof swigging a bottle of whiskey cheering to the frightened pedestrians while he blasted Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

A man must show up in style if he is to show up at all. Come on now.

There was Milo outside of the venue, doing the nervous host walk, the pace back and forth behind a cigarette questioning every decision. We all knew it. I’ve been nervous before every show I ever hosted but soon the place was bumping and people came from all around New England trekking down from Massachusetts and Maine and we were holding court. Soon Kags came, the coke dealer with a heart of gold, the boy from Lynn where they sing “Lynn, Lynn city of sin, never come out the way you came in” who had all of Manchester in the palm of his hand, who wrote poems of masculinity and also carried a Glock. We knew where we were going to go after the show.

The show went off like a freight train and the Rockdale, Grayson, and Alvarez swung home-runs and I closed out making up for my last set there where I “accidentally” threatened the audience six times. But the show was over and it is in the wake of those moments when a banger comes to a close that heroes are born and we stood atop of Olympus that night. A caravan of cars tore off down Elm Street to party at Kags and before long his entire apartment was full of artists of all sorts swarming his couches and floor. The last time I was here I was contemplating beating up Milo for knocking out my tooth but now several months later we toasted to the night, we toasted to the Renaissance, we toasted to this strange beautiful life we had found ourselves in and we pounded booze and ripped rails and talked about power to the people and such. We chased dawn and dissected poems and Alvarez was passed out the whole time because he was a consciences objector to blow so thus he was a martyr of being too hammered the whole time. The night carried on until just before the sun began to stretch out and pull itself above the clouds and we found ourselves back at Milo’s sprawled out on the floor with our noses clogged like a gang of bohemian mouth breathers.

In the morning Alvarez’s glasses broke so he taped them up like a soldier and we all shook the ache from our bones walking around the city to get coffee and make sense of how such a great night could beget such a crippling morning but the boys stayed another night because there was an open mic a half hour away in Portsmouth. “Looks like I lost my job” Alvarez said and we laughed before squeezing into the car. I rode shotgun and Milo squeezed between the Grayson and Alvarez in the back and we tore off for Portsmouth to meet up with the poet Marty McClure who had popped out the night before. He was a stunning character that looked like he just walked  off from a Black Sabbath album cover with long hair and a 70s porno mustache of legendary proportions. He always has a guitar backing his poems and he would work himself into a frenzy climbing atop the bar and screaming his words. Marty invited us to his city to this show and we descended on Portsmouth like the Huns.

We found him at some bar and took the streets in pursuit of liquor and providence. The entire city was a Hallmark card with its cottages and perfectly cobbled brick roads that led to everywhere and nowhere all at once. We loaded up on booze and walked our beers pounding them laughing and singing songs as if we were the only souls alive in the entire city and every piece of architecture was built just for us. There was a moment there where this could have been anywhere else in the world and there was just the five of us laughing up a riot and I found it. For a split second I remembered why I did any of it and it was this moment, it was camaraderie, it was adventure it was being with new friends and singing silly songs and owning the night. It was the love of it and it was the excitement of breathing new air.

“This town would be cool if it wasn’t full of fucking yuppies” Grayson said.

And out of the horde of peacoat wearing yuppies came a voice, “I hear you. This place is full of em. I’m not one though”

“Yeah okay, fucking yuppie fuck”

We burst out laughing and found our way into the venue for the open mic talking to the local poets and drinking while we worked on our set lists. There was music accompanying the sets and for some reason they really fucking loved doing that up in New England it was like almost every show you went to there were dudes playing behind it. Different strokes. We lost sight of Alvarez and found him cooked beyond all repair double fisting beers and already slurring his words. Rockdale took the mic first and apologized to the crowd for what was about to come and hit em with some killer poems, then came Milo who’s poem about Nancy Regan had the entire crowd chanting THROAT GOAT and then Alvarez took the mic doing comedy about the Peruvian civil war to a room full of champagne liberals and had the band doing James Brown behind him. It was all preposterous and the audience was heckling and after my set we made it out to the sidewalk.

Rockdale had work in 8 hours and it was a six hour drive home. Now that’s some real savage shit but Milo and Alvarez were following some red headed poet girl to some other bar and were caught up in the typical plight of man pursuing a woman into utter uncertainty and ruin. I threw Milo over my shoulder and Rockdale grabbed Alvarez and we drug them towards the holy eject button that was Rockdale’s Equis. When a man has to drive a cement truck in eight hours in this economy — there’s no room for discussion. Then Lucas Rockdale, the sweetest man in North America, the cowboy mystic of Old Bridge danced with Milo in the streets of this foreign city we had just conquered and he then swung him in circles like some long forgotten dance of some pagan folk song that no one can recall and within a moment had him by the hood “get in the fucking car Milo, get in the fucking car” and we were off like bottle rockets sparking across the virgin skies of a brilliant new world.

We said bye to Portsmouth and it became alien behind us again as we tore off through the pined highways of New England back towards Manchganistan and we sang the songs of triumph barreling down the highway as Alvarez grew quiet and pale. There is a feeling when you go to a new place and everyone hits the ball out of the park— it’s electric, it’s everything, it’s the greatest feeling I have yet to uncover and in that drive home we held it within our fingers. Two shows back to back and we did the damned thing but we weren’t out of dodge yet and we pulled off to the shoulder of the road to let Alvarez puke and he tumbled all the way down an embankment face down on foreign grass with the guttural moan of defeat.

We were all out of the car and laughing and screaming to whatever powers may govern the sky. In this moment we were liberated, we were reborn, we were pilgrims looking for something and we found it— and Alvarez laughed through his groans and Milo cackled like the golden coyote he is and the great comedy that was life had somehow brought us here and we were poor so the world was ours and no matter what the heavens had in store for us, it was in this moment that we were alive.

We carried Alvarez to the car and blasted off back towards Manchester while we all chanted “no man left behind!”

It was all about the now. Woe to the vanquished. Woe to ones who have never tried. Woe to tomorrow.

For a single passing moment we had it all figured out.

Oh and just for this week. Special edition t-shirts here

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Next Tuesday, I’ll be publishing the sequel to this and this Thursday I’m publishing an article about being an open mic poet. If you want to support the journey please consider donating to the mission