From PICC (A Poet in Center City)

Lena, the Temple student who had read with us more than once, was on the scene quite a bit then. She and John were very tender with each other, and Ricky liked to play up the “double date” angle and bring Heather in on the action. I wasn’t seeing anyone steadily, and detested feeling like a fifth wheel. When this formation emerged, I would leave. It’s just that Heather was a sugar-cube underneath, and we had a little secret pact going, and knew it. By Bloomsday ’05 (June 16), we had entered into a full-on, passionate affair, and Ricky was out. Ouch. All the while, John and I had picked up the cudgel to put together a huge poetry reading at the Khyber, patterned after the Poetry Incarnation reading in ’65 Swinging London. It wasn’t an entirely joyless enterprise, but without Christopher and Ricky there was little group espirit de corps. Now we just felt like ordinary hustlers; even if, for the first time, the Philly press were showing some interest in us. We hammed the event up verbosely for them. As it were, and when it was all said and done, spending two perfect nights with Heather Mullen wound up being the apogee of the mid-Aughts ride for me. We managed to encapsulate, in a tiny time-frame, a real marriage; we found a way to give each other everything we had. By the time she took the stage at the Khyber Pass, swaying slightly from a hot ninety minutes spent at the Khyber bar, she had also managed to demarcate what had happened in June, and what was going to happen now. I’d been to Boston and back, and found a way, without meaning to, to cheat. Heather knew by then who Wendy Smith was. Heather clung that night to Sal Benzon, a Philly politico who liked to hang around cultural people. Yet this was the night that, for the Philly Free School, for pure public razmatazz, established a real standard, and won a real game. A paying crowd poured in, and filled the place up. We had received real hype in the press. Heather’s plea was similar to my opening remarks. She compelled to assembled throng to understand, “We live in a new Philadelphia. All the boundary-lines are gone. Who you are now is who you can be in this living painting, this new assemblage.” Heather looked down briefly, futzed with the mike, and piped up, from a higher vocal register, “It’s time for everyone to come together in a way that what you get back is always more than what you give up. You think you’ve seen what Philadelphia can be, but you haven’t. I want every single one of you to understand something about Philadelphia: we started this country, and we’re all gonna start it over again right now, in a spirit of compromise, in a spirit of no resistance. I know how hard everyone here is working, alright? Respect. But who The Philly Free School are and who you are, are the same thing. We’re all here tonight because America needs Philadelphia to take the lead again. Amen!” I won’t exaggerate: not everyone cheered. But there was enough fire in the response to inspire John Rind, for one, to give Heather a big bearhug (for once) when her screed ended a few minutes later. Once again, Heather Mullen became the hub and the apogee of our enterprise, even for John, even for her newly established ex-husband. Heather was better than John and I with the public, in a way: she had political instincts. Even if, despite Heather’s rabble-rousing, the Khyber proved less levitational than the Highwire, stuck as it was on street-level, and in one low-ceilinged room. No one was happy, for example, to see the Plunkett goons sulk dejectedly at the bar. They later insisted that I had stolen their money. In a way, John, Heather, and I, and the rest, were thieves in the night, laying down a cultural gauntlet hewn of unusually genuine materials, and living on a real edge in an unforced way. Our moment there, that night, was a mid-level one, strength-wise: not too fragile, not too sturdy either. But I’ll always love Ms. Mullen in retrospect for daring us to imagine more strength in us than we actually had then. What she imagined then, I am attempting to make a tactile reality now. Amen! The darkest cloud on the horizon for me, personally, was D.P. Plunkett and his crew. The Free School had found ways to upstage them, but we were weakening. The Plunkett poets read at Poetry Incarnation ’05 with many others; but they were morose at the event because we didn’t treat them like stars. They reacted by concocting the aforementioned, spurious tale that I had withheld money from them and began to circulate it after the event. If I wanted to survive, I knew I’d have to stop dissipating my energies and focus on poetry in a singular way. There was no other way to conquer the Plunkett goons; and I’d learned that art events are all too ephemeral. There was little in them left to keep. I had one major piece out in Jacket Magazine; it was time to build on it. And ponder Heather.