MADOREABLE

Here we have some guest fictive shit-talk surrounding the ego of one Mather Schneider, a new and continuing annoyance for the Jargon crowd. This is Riverbed at his best: piss and literature. -PHM

Mather stood on the corner of 8^th St. and University drinking from a cup of coffee he got at the Wayward Council. He had been coming to the Wayward Council lately. At the Bo Diddly Plaza with the rest of the bums, his friends, he had been telling them about the Wayward Council. That it was a drop-in, and that they could as well as he be happy on lots of caffeine. That day, standing on the corner, Mather had had three full cups of coffee. He had told the twenty-something kid sitting at the desk reading some ugly-made magazine, “I am not angry with writers who are not interesting.” The kid was already weirded out by this thirty-something guy who smelled bad and would make weird facial spasms at any second with no pattern, with no reason.

“Are you saying the writer I’m reading is not interesting?” he asked Mather.

Mather said, “I am only angry with writers who are not interesting, but who think they are fascinating, who primp and posture, who dance around and splash themselves everywhere, who slap each other on the back and blurb their faces off.” The kid on counter’s cheeks became redder. He felt overwhelmed. Mather was laughing but then noticed that someone had sat down on the chair that he liked a lot. Mather went next to that person sitting in his chair and stood in a position of territoriality. He limped over the person acting as if he wanted to read whatever the person sitting in his chair was reading, whatever it was. “Hey!” said the Wayward volunteer. “You can’t be doing that!”

Lately at the Wayward volunteer meetings Mather had been a frequent topic of discussion. At the meetings, where mostly everyone showed up late, at least fifteen minutes had been wasted discussing Mather’s antics. “I saw him,” said one volunteer. “He was outside and I wasn’t opening the store because I was only going to drop some stuff off. I hadn’t signed up for the shift. And I heard him outside telling someone, ‘These shitheads. Why aren’t they open? I told you, usually, you can come here and hang out and drink coffee. Sometimes I imagine the noise they play is classical music.’ He called us ‘shitheads!’”

In truth, and this is the truth because it is how Mather sees things (it’s his perception and it cannot be focused or readjusted), he thought he had said, “I take pride in not being fooled by marketing.” In his eternal delirium, Mather thought him and the other vagabond, who he had befriended at the Bo Diddly Plaza where Mather slept, were respectively each an editor and a critic-writer of Poetry magazine. Mather thought they were hanging out with Charles Simic. Mather, for a second, felt like Billy Collins. Mather felt like an old geezer, but didn’t want to admit it and it was why he needed more coffee.

None of the Wayward volunteers knew how Mather had arrived to the Wayward Council in Gainesville. He just arrived one day and started drinking coffee and they let him. He paced from corner to corner of the space with no pattern, and then walked parallel to the space’s walls in a quadrilateral shape. All this he’d do while making faces, gesturing to people nobody else saw, or to himself, making sure he was understood. Delyn, the bassist of a local punk rock band, felt Mather was harmless. He defended Mather. “I invited him to play synth with my band,” he said. “He just talks crap. He doesn’t matter.”

The day that Delyn understood Mather was harmless, Mather had said to Delyn, “The truth is if you publish a book of any kind you’re telling the world you think you’re pretty fascinating.” Delyn understood Mather as harmless once he got his life-story. Delyn was able to see who Mather was, because before Mather was anonymous, faceless. A nobody.

Mather had a family once, but they couldn’t deal with him. He tried to get help, but he couldn’t stand the feeling of having his hand held for anything he attempted to do until he felt better. He felt seventy-five when he was only thirty-two. That wasn’t that old. “This is pretentiousness,” he told the nurse at the psych-ward. “Because you think you deserve accolades which you have not earned.” Mather then slapped the nurse’s butt and attempted a sexy face but it was more a grotesque-threatening face, and he was put in solitary confinement. In the small lonely room, Mather imagined himself being washed down by half-naked firemen with a high-pressure hose. Mather came on himself.

Outside the Wayward, on University and 8^th, back where this story began, Mather was saying, “I also get angry with editors who publish writers before they are ready and encourage the writers to think of themselves as fascinating, amazing, brilliant, must-read, etc,” to nobody but maybe the cup of coffee in his hand, which when he refilled it, the volunteer on duty became angry within himself. The volunteer tensioned and stared at a corner of the desk with determination.

Mather was drinking coffee. He understood himself to be speaking to a young poet. He felt himself as Rilke. He said, “I don’t know how old you are but it’s hard to tell if you’re serious or not.” He then motioned his hands to the space of area in front of him, where his left butt-cheek would be if he, Mather, were standing in front of himself. He imagined a young poet with very burly facial features, and with attitude. He imagined a hairy Justin-Hydesque poet, but young. He said to his imaginary young poet, “I think you need about five more years of work, and I think you should stop worrying about publishing.”

At that moment, a Wayward volunteer was entering the store, passing by Mather, and Mather thought that the body entering his perimeter was his young poet’s, and he grabbed the volunteer’s butt thinking it was the imaginary young poet’s butt, saying, “The best thing in there was that Hyde poem.” He saw his Hyde-like-young-burly-poet and got a hard-on. The volunteer became freaked and began shouting. Mather was scared from his delusion and was once again returned to reality. He saw the volunteer yelling at him, his body swelling and seeming to become bigger than the volunteer really was. Mather ran off to the Bo Diddly Plaza.

Mather had told Delyn that he was soon going to get a pension check. Delyn had thought this great. He liked Mather. He liked how Mather was so animated and that he needed no stimulation to act in this manner. “I wish more people were like that,” he had told his band mates as support to why Mather should be the synth-player in their band. “I mean, everything would be less boring.” What Delyn didn’t understand was that Mather’s animation wasn’t him just being animated for no reason. He really was speaking to people. People nobody else saw. During Delyn and Mather’s first practice session, Mather had stopped abruptly, ruining the first time him and Delyn had played in rhythm together sounding well, and said, “Some of the very short ones were okay and maybe a line or two here and there jumped out at me but mainly I think every poem needs to be cut and cut and drastically rewritten,” imagining his young, burly, hairy, Hydesque poet entering Delyn’s room where they were jamming.

“What?” Delyn asked.

“I like emotions and strong lines,” Mather said.

“Are you coming on to me?” Delyn asked.

“Focus on points of genuine emotion, not faked, store-bought feeling, and find the imagery inherent in real-life situations,” Mather said.

“What the fuck are you talking about? This is a jam we’re having. We’re trying to have some fun.”

Mather thought about classical music, coffee, and maybe that he was coming-on to Delyn.

Delyn had told his experience with Mather to his band mates, and they weren’t too excited but had agreed to have Mather as their new synth-player. “It’ll be good for him,” Delyn had told them. “He’ll be distracted from whatever makes him go wrong. Plus he has a pension check coming soon and I’m trying to get him to buy a van so we can go on tour.”

That night, where our story occurred, after Mather had become bored with his friends at the Bo Diddly Plaza, after he had told one of them, “If you’re already trying to do this, keep trying,” and had walked away imagining himself leaving his young poet abandoned and alone, Mather began walking around the downtown. It was Friday night. Every bar, every restaurant was happening—filled, and people were walking the streets. The clubs blared dance music—the dive bar, Jak’s, contained poor, dirty white people dressed as thugs. Mather felt content with himself. He was glad that he had left his young poet suffering and alone. He felt that the young poet needed experience to learn, that if not, the young poet would never develop into a real poet. Mather spent most of his days trying to define what that meant, to be a real poet, but could never come up with an answer, but knew that the young poet wasn’t real yet.

Before Mather had left the Bo Diddly Plaza he had told the young poet, “Let the lines out a bit but always come back,” and someone standing around him had told him to shut up. “You fucking psycho,” that stander-by had yelled at Mather. Mather became offended because he thought that his young poet was rebelling against him and had insulted him. That’s why Mather left and was now walking University Avenue past Flaco’s and going west. He thought about coffee when he passed by Flaco’s and decided to walk up 2^nd St. instead of continuing on University. He lefted and was walking close to where all the black people were hanging out parallel to the Venue, the local where all the hip-hop shows occurred at.

There were many black people hanging out all over the sidewalks. It was a tribe there, and women stretched their bodies out from the top of the cars through open sunroofs. Mather said, as he walked imagining the blaring bass sounds coming from the black people’s cars as classical music, “Write about people you truly care about or who legitimately affected you somehow.” He wasn’t speaking to his young poet yet. He was preparing his speech, the speech that would make his young poet love him again, make him respect his opinion and thoughts. Mather became entranced with the classical music he heard and decided to sit close to where he usually found his young poet when his young poet had wandered off to explore, or when Mather had decided to punish his young poet by leaving him sad and alone: behind the Seagle Building.

This is where Mather had met the young poet. The young poet had worked as a telephone-survey interviewer and had seen Mather reading an Ashbery collection. The young poet seemed intrigued with Mather. Mather told the young poet that day, “If there’s nothing at stake, no depth of emotion with a good reason for existing, then I don’t want to hear about it.” The young poet, who that day was a real young poet thought Mather was an asshole and from then on whenever he’d see Mather (which became every day because everyday Mather would sit there waiting for the young poet to finish his shift), the young poet would avoid him. Mather, in his delusion, believed that the young poet would search for him, that the young poet cared of what Mather had to say. Mather felt like Pinsky that day when he met the young poet. Mather felt somewhat-not-too-old.

Behind the Seagle Building, the night this story occurred, Mather was preparing his speech for the young poet. He was saying, “To be interesting all you need to be is honest and deep-feeling.” He wondered where the young poet was. The bars were emptying. It was closing in on two AM. All the black people were parading the streets. They were to begin their driving-party-routine. In hordes, shouting, expressing their exploitation, their used-upness—the fact that they felt powerless and stepped-on—they would drive around the town blaring their heavily-bassed music in their pimped-out cars.

Mather wondered why his young poet had not arrived yet. He had just thought up of the best thing that would cementify their dialogue again. He would say, “Of course there are a lot of people who think they are deep-feeling but who are shallow as rats.” That would hit the young poet in the gut like the feeling of having kidney-stones, and make him see that he needed Mather to become the great poet that Mather did not want to admit he could be. Abuse, Mather knew, was the way to teach and strengthen a person. Mather wasn’t taught to swim by taking swimming lessons. He was thrown into the pool by his father, and he had to figure out how to stay afloat and how to swim, because if not, he would’ve drowned. Actually, he remembered, he almost did drown. He had needed resuscitation. But he tried again! And that was what mattered. He didn’t give up and he learned how to swim. And in this manner, Mather would teach the young poet how to be a real poet.

“The poetry world is filled with bored rambling brilliantly written,” he was ready to tell the young poet. Where was he? Mather needed to find the young poet. He had already spent three hours waiting behind the Seagle building. Nobody was working anymore. It was past the survey lab’s hours. Had Mather really offended the young poet so this time? Had he treated the young poet as some petty translator? Walking the streets, so engulfed in his desperation to rehash the affair with the young poet, Mather missed the pounding bass of the classical music nearing him. Mather screamed out to the skies, to the heavens, to any who would listen to him, hoping that if the young poet could not hear his words then that someone would hear him and pass on his words to the young poet, “Maybe you are an excellent translator, I don’t know, it’s clear my Spanish is weak, but maybe you could gather a bunch more poems like that Hyde poem!” and some of the black kids driving out of the venue’s hanging out area saw Mather screaming. “Look at that crazy cracker!” they screamed. “He’s wilding out. Let’s calm him down.” And the classical music became louder as the car got closer to Mather, as one black kid hung his body out of the car’s window and simulated with his arms and upper body the shooting of an assault rifle, and the car continued towards Mather and Mather said, “Translate them into Spanish, and publish that while you continue work on your own.” And that black kid, being driven in that car playing loud and noisy hip-hop which was understood as classical music by Mather, punched Mather in the face. Mather fell and the kid driving the car braked, and they all emptied out and surrounded the fallen Mather and began to kick him.

Mather heard classical music and finally saw the young poet. He had returned to him. Thank heavens! Mather thought. He yelled to the young poet to save him from the thug-beating he was receiving. But the young poet stood there. The young poet didn’t even turn around. He watched the beating happen until Mather was left as a bloody pulp.