How lonely it is:
A rattling freight train has left
Fields of croaking frogs.
From 1979 to 1982 there was a show on pirate radio that could be heard on Sundays from 3 am to 4 am in Richmond and El Cerrito and spasmodically on the car radios of drivers along the Berkeley and Oakland border. The show was called “Numbchucks” and featured interviews with subterranean writers, filmmakers, first-edition book dealers, organic farmers, and former boxers.
The most riveting segment on each program was when the host, who went by the name of Smedley Yi, opened up the phone line to callers. There was ever only one caller, who Yi referred stubbornly to as “caller” as though to cloak the man in the possibility of multitudes.
Yi and the caller had an antagonistic relationship from the beginning, according to long-time listeners. The caller would come out swinging about some position Yi had staked minutes earlier about Octavia Butler or Nam June Paik. Their voices would puff their chests out, then duck and weave looking for a weak spot.
When Yi reached a pitch of exasperation with the caller, as he often did, he would interrupt and insist that they needed to go to a commercial break. Then he would swiftly cut to himself aggrandizing about a regional brand of potato snack or delivering a hushed public service announcement about what to do in the event of an earthquake. He was most adamant about spare batteries, which seemed irresponsibly magnified beyond keeping a reserve of bottled water, for example.
Is there anything as simultaneously intimate and remote as the voices of a live call-in radio show in the early hours of the morning when you are awake? Are they not saving your life?
The show eventually went off the air. But five years later, reports came in that Yi was once again on the airwaves, roughly in earshot of the same coordinates, but on Wednesdays from 4 am to 4:30 am. Also, he was calling himself something else and the format had changed. Each segment involved his calling an 888 sex line and asking for a maid, or a professor of Eastern Religion. The segment would follow their stomach worm conversation, which was about 30/70 sexual.
The show was called “Numbchucks.”
I used to wait in another room, listening to the voice of my husband talk to other people as he made his way toward me. I would make no effort to move or otherwise make myself known. I could say I wanted to anticipate him with every one of my senses. Or I could say the truth, which was that I wanted to be found.
We moved a lot in those days. I’d walk the streets pretending to be a deaf-mute. But no one ever tested for me, except a kid behind a bodega counter who asked me if I was stupid.
The first time after we did it, she leaned back and said, “I could’ve used a little more teeth with that.”
Another thing she’d do: ask me, “Do you mean that subjectively or objectively?”
Who gives a shit. It’s what I know to be true.
“If lonely, read Lonely People Magazine, 10 cents, PP Box 178, New Haven, CT”
“Mr. Lonely Man, Join the Chicago Friendship Club for results. Hundreds of ladies belong. If sincere, enclose stamped envelope, 3928 Broadway, Chicago IL”
“100 Ways of Kissing Girls, Illustrated, 30 cents, American Sales Co. Springfield, IL
A little advice from me to you: Don't be afraid of beauty but stay away from nostalgia and you'll be good.
Maybe I’m not the thickest book on the shelf. But in my defense I was never above anything. I was always right there.
For years I’ve stood sentry
My profile by night
Brute threat and as false:
Perhaps you find it odd that a statue
Should speak to you now
As a dog. It’s new
For me too:
Clock of pumps
Loosie shuffler
Spilled oranges, newspaper sop
Little girl who named me:
Nicked and debauched
As I am
Dumb as a 2-liter bottle of RC Cola
None the wiser, no
None so careless
as the protected
as the loved
I'll take that lamp that lights a room like the sun scallops the sea
I'll take those jewels, eyes swallowing the narrow face of no one's house cat
I'll smoke the dope that makes me tremble w/o sauce
I"ll buy the political theory that evaporates from inside a board game hourglass
Forget about my type. Kick his ass
I'll take the blanket textured like sand caught in the heat of your neck
I’ll take the night, capsize it to cover you
I’ll take that lamp that cools a room like the moon wingtips the sea
One day you'll give me that long Satyricon stare which is why I practice writing dialogue
Little shipwrecks hunched at the bar, diamond in the nostril of night
The check casher’s eyes blink like digital clocks + camphor
I was forgetting to “feel better”
I was ready to tell you everything, like so much cold chowder in weeping parlors
Left my glove in the ashtray of your narrow pelvis, a ruse to earn your confidence
ESL will have to do at this hour + the candied instrumental
of a military dirge strung from the soft underbelly of a fungus
Let me put it this way, tenderly
a rotten yolk passed between two mouths