Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pa): PICC (A Poet in Center City) #42

Competition, folks. It lurks there as a demon between males of the species, doing a sourpuss number on camaraderie and true brotherhood, making a mockery of ties which could bind with more authority, beleaguering situations which shouldn’t matter. “Bros before hos,” Larsen used to say, who was no misogynist but often stumbled around semantics. To be fair, Larsen’s girls were hardly hos, as the saying goes. They tended to share many of his stripes, as Trish Webber shared stripes with me— fetish/boutique stalwarts, underworld slants, heavy tempers, club-and-pub mentalities. It’s just that many of them were also gorgeous and, as I couldn’t not notice, and as began at the turn of the century, none of them had eyes for me at all. I wound up looking like a Larsen-flunky around them. Club-and-pub meant they often wouldn’t even look me in the face— they didn’t need to. So when I found myself, for example, sitting half-naked on the shag-rug in South Philly, looking at Anastasia, a stunning brunette from New Jersey who was famous for starting trouble with guys, in her bra and panties, it was with the exasperated sense of the usual wheel turning— not only no eyes for me, but also no sense that she could even directly look me in the face. But, to shade the painting diligently, with some respect to precision, it must be said that by late ’04 I had a sense of revenge going. It had transpired, in the spring of ’03, that I brought Trish Webber and Tobi Simon to Larsen’s studio for a visit. My ostensible reason was to see if I could match Tobi with Larsen. Trish and I were steady at the time. What happened was cacophonous— we all smoked a bunch of weed, some of it my plain jane stuff, some of it Larsen’s H-laced, cough-and-flu treasure trove. Tobi didn’t think much of Larsen, and vice versa. But, when we were all high as kites, I saw Larsen lock into Trish in a manner that expressed total enchantment. Trish’s long limbs, wide hips, and equally long, lank blonde mane could only be enticing to a Philly guy also entangled deeply with Europe, as Larsen was, who could be, in a number of different sectors, continental at any moment. Larsen locked into Trish, and began to flirt with her. Heavily. “Bros before hos,” huh? At first, I was amused. The level that this was Aughts Philly was a self-conscious one, which meant it would’ve been uncool to try and stop what was developing. At first. High as kites though all of us were, I started to understand that, willy-nilly, Larsen meant business. He really was going to try to fuck Trish right in front of me. Alright. So, gathering my wits, I made my apologies to Larsen and dragged the two ladies down the steps, and out again into the warm spring day. Larsen, on the negative side of things, had taken things too far that day. On the other side of things, I had him— a righteous cock-block of a dude whose girls were constantly cock-blocking me. It never moved, after that— Larsen had a hard-on for Trish Webber that, to his credit, he never really tried to hide. Even if South and West Philly weren’t working together well then. When I broke up with Trish the first time in late ’03, it was that South-to-West imbroglio which made it so that, as shocked me, Larsen made no move in her direction. And, I might add, continued to pine. Trish never denied there was an attraction there, but it was minor for her. Trish had a continental sensibility too, but wouldn’t have liked that Larsen’s self-presentation could be construed as Eurotrash. Then, the camera deadlocks everything, and pans back to Anastasia, stripped to her undies in late ’04, looking (I felt) at everything but me. This is where it remained, because Trish’s big ’06-’07 comeback did a predictable trick of irritating an old wound for Larsen. Yet, in the main, “bros before hos” did manage to rule the roost, and made it so that there was no extended alienation between Larsen and I. The way there was, actually, destined to be extended alienation between myself and Ricky Flint, for what he would always say were a bunch of calculated gambits when Heather Mullen showed up.

© Adam Fieled 2024

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): Flash Fiction: Dominique

So many stories are wrapped up in this next poem, some hilarious, some harrowing. It all revolves around a single woman and her phenomenal ability to enthrall men. Her name was, and is, Dominique, and I’ve never met anyone like her. When I met her, I was a high school junior and she was a freshman. She was stunningly beautiful, with a seductive, feline grace that suggested both Lolita and Liv Tyler. This alone wouldn’t qualify her to play such an interesting part in my life and the lives of those around me; there were a lot of beautiful girls at Cheltenham; but Dominique had something more. What do we call that ineffable IT, that compelling magnetism that certain people have? Is it merely beauty, or charisma, or youth? For me, Dominique’s charm lay in all these things, and also in something extra— a certain mischievous glint in her eye, a certain toss of her head, that suggested a sort of supernatural ecstasy, as if she were walking around in a narcotic trance all the time (which, I was later to learn, she was). Dominique was, quite simply, the most compelling female I’d met up to that point. Oddly enough, I didn’t fall hard for her at all. I was able to keep my distance because, to a certain extent, I saw a hollowness beneath the charisma, an unwillingness to dig beneath surfaces and live truly. Dominique for me was a sort of caricature of adolescent sexiness, and I loved her archly condescending smile, but it didn’t pierce me to the bone.

My best friend at the time, however, was absolutely, unbelievably, and pitifully smitten. He hung on her every word as though she was Godhead incarnate, recorded every encounter in an especially prized notebook, and just basically made an idiot of himself whenever she was around. Then, Dominique started dating another one of my friends, simultaneously making me her “Man of the Month,” and things started to get really messy. A fist fight for me outside math class; a death threat; notes for me in the mail inscribed with lipstick, reading “He finds a deep satisfaction in pain; for that pain comes from her”; and other such nonsense. Basically Chris, aka Mr. Smitten, never forgave me for going after Dominique when he was so desperately in love, while Adam, Mr. Better-Attack-Me-Outside-Math-Class, became contrite years later and started randomly showing up at my gigs, camera in hand.

Having given you this background, you’ll probably understand why running into Dominique on a sultry night in the East Village was such a big deal for me. I was lonely as hell in New York, overwhelmed, numbing myself with huge quantities of pot and speed pills. Dominique, for all her cattiness, rose to the occasion and delivered a knock-out performance as supportive friend with benefits. Unsurprisingly, she supported her academic career at NYU by dealing drugs, and I thought it would be fair game to throw that in, seeing as it was honest. Formally, this piece is me trying my best to write like Keats, sort of the same thing William Carlos Williams was doing in his early twenties. For me, WCW’s Keatsian poems aren’t that good, probably because he didn’t know Dominique. She’s a Muse— a real, honest-to-God morsel of madness. Not that I’ve ever forgotten her implacable selfishness, remorseless narcissism and insufferable insularity; but it pays to remember what’s best in her.

© Adam Fieled 2004