Twisted Straw: Lub at the U Dub, Circa 1969

Twisted Straw: Lub at the U Dub, Circa 1969

He was stunned by the blonde who read Rilke aloud--
ich bin nur einer meiner vielen Munde.
Cocooned in her dorm, Ilsa majored in Math,
and she held her head high as she marched to her classes.

Hal's major was Dreaming; his minor was Scheming,
and he lived off campus, and he lived off his father;
and he hung with the poets, schizophrenics, and painters--
climb up to the Blue Moon, roll down to the Northlake Tavern.

He mapped Ilsa's movements, charted and mimicked her
gestures, drew her eyes & nose with a charcoal stub, designed
wax dolls that he voodooized, and joined the film club that she
was a member of. It met Thursday nights in a room at the HUB.

Thursday, 12th of December. It was snowing and it was going
to snow. That night, The U Dub Film Club would be showing
Nosferatu directed by Murnau (nee Plumpe), to be followed by
donuts and discussion. Hal got ready: He read Bram Stoker's

Dracula that afternoon at the Blue Moon, memorized a bunch
of expressionist critical blah blah blah, and assumed a clever
disguise: he bathed, shaved and put on a clean shirt.
Nosferatu flickered in the little room.
Hal sat next to Ilsa, and never once

snickered. Ilsa, afraid of the rats and the black and white
silence, briefly covered her eyes. Hal laid a chaste hand
on her sweater. No film could frighten him:
he'd recently been to the Northgate
Mall on acid. When the lights came back on, Hal never gazed

at her neck, and he spoke so brilliantly and with such asexual
modesty (re film & Faust & Murnau & Hollywood & Weimar &
Bram Stoker's Dracula & Werner Herzog & Werner's dog Lassie)
that Ilsa agreed to walk with him through the snow, the black &

white silence, to his crib in Wallingford, where the pure air
of the snowy night was charged with the motherly aroma
of mozzarella from the Northlake Tavern's pizza oven.
His door was yellow. The room, dismally lit.
A Navaho blanket on his lumpy mattress.

Walls dark blue. Ceiling red. Plastic geckos glued
to the ceiling. Two posters: a toreador & Dizzy Gillespie
at Newport. Tequila? Gold with a worm at the bottom?
No way, José. Hal loaded two glasses with Martell's Brandy.
For Ilsa, he needed the hammer!

What music, he wondered, unwraps the treasure? What music
unlaces the laces? Unbuttons the buttons? Unsnaps the snaps?
Unclasps the clasps? Stretches the elastics? What music strips
Fraulein Luftwaffe of her Teutonic armor and reveals her

naked trembling edelweiss? Rod Stewart's hot enough but far
too stupid. Chopin? Brilliant but too icy for a Winter's night.
Ah, the genius Charlie Mingus! Just right! Hot and bright!
Removing Tijuana Moods from its wine-stained jacket, Hal saw

on the blue wall, in the little round mirror framed in Mexican
silver, his face, and he saw that his face was a bundle of
twisted straw, smoldering. Is this prophetic--an emblem
of my future state--or just a random residue from Easter's peyote
buttons? Ah, fuck it.

Glasses of Martell's Brandy, Tijuana Moods, Charlie Mingus.
The naked lovers lay on the lumpy mattress. A warm breeze
stirred Ilsa's treetops. Hal curled at her feet like the sea,
lapping. He crept to her altar for hours of prayer,
of sacerdotal cunnilingus.

They spent the weekend together. Monday morning, swollen
with power, Ilsa told Hal that it was all over. He winced &
whined, so she gave him the finger. Soon she changed her major
from Math to Business, with a minor in Spanish Lit, and

then she changed the sex of her psyche, from hen to rooster,
shit-canning forever her Aryan duty to breed. She flushed it.
Her room was often packed with ripe & adoring sisters, to whom
she read Pablo Neruda: Oh invádeme con tu boca abrasadora--

Did she ever think about Hal, catalyst of her transformation?
Almost never. But when she did, it was fondly, as if he were
a dear and cheap souvenir that she'd picked up one weekend
in Reno, or some crappy place like that. Hal was shattered.

His maps, his documents--ruined by rain. His coconuts--
carried away by a flood. Hal dropped out of school (no one
noticed, least of all him), sold his record collection, moved
out of his Wallingford/Mazatlan nightmare, and rented a

tiny houseboat downhill from the Eastlake Zoo. Suicidal?
He ambled across the Aurora Bridge, and was locked up for
observation. What saved him was reading Walt Whitman and
loving the ducks that he saw out his window. Plus his father

set up a trust fund. Before the end of summer, he was stunned
by a young, red-haired ex-nun, Renée, a nurse on the psych-ward
at Harborview, who read Baudelaire (somewhat hysterically)
usually at the Eastlake Zoo, sometimes at the Red Robin:

La femme cependant, de sa bouche de fraise,
En se tordant ainsi qu'un serpent sur la braise…


Harvey Goldner




Harvey Goldner lives in Seattle, which is perhaps the world's most beautiful city whenever the sun is shining, which it isn't. His poems have appeared in various journals, print and online, in America and the U.K. His most recent chapbook, Her Bright Bottom,is available from Spankstra Press (Seattle), and a collection of his poems, The Resurrection of Bert Ringold, is forthcoming from Cinco Puntos Press (El Paso, TX) in the autumn of '07.