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