Day 9.5: The Octagon in Ames, IA
After our brief stint in Omaha, we scooted over to Ames, IA, my hometown.
We read at the Octagon Arts Center, where as a kid I took sculpture classes and where my parents had their wedding reception.
My step-dad told a favorite story of his about the wedding reception in which his ex-girlfriend curled up under one of the tables with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s while his mother asked Frank Tribble, the jazz guitarist, if he could play “Old Oaken Barrel.”
He could not.
I myself could not play “Old Oaken Barrel” then or now, nor do I remember anything about my mom and step-dad’s wedding reception in the Octagon Center for the Arts, and, to be honest, I don’t have a very clear impression of the reading itself as I felt near some kind of cosmic meltdown for much of my time sitting in the room.
Not to say it wasn’t a pleasing kind of meltdown, but I dare anyone out there to bring a bus full of gnarled poets into your hometown and not feel some stirrings of psychic trouble.
11 things I feel pretty confident happened during the night:
1) Anselm read two from his youth: “Not All There” from his book Integrity and Dramatic Life, and “Things to Do Between Home and School” from Some Notes on My Programming.
2) The 70’s analog “Lecternette” all in one podium microphone speaker ensemble the Octagon used completely fascinated Tyler and Matthew until the time came when the thing had to work, and then we turned it off.
3) My grandfather shook my hand and slid me a donation very discretely.
4) My good friend Katie Geha’s parents, Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha, gamely stayed through the whole thing (even though there was a break), and then graciously hosted Matthew, Tina, Blake and Anselm at their house.
5) After a pre-birthday celebration for Anthony over at the Whiskey River, we decided it was not the time for me to get the Iowa Homecoming Treatment (otherwise known as DUI) despite my adamant claims to be “sober enough”, so Joshua, Anthony, Tyler, Josh Wilkinson and I walked along the railroad tracks back towards my parents’ house.
6) On the way Anthony turned his ankle falling off the tie.
7) Once we got nearer to my parents’ house, I realized I had gotten us a little lost and so we wandered up and down my parents’ street for ten minutes or so until I saw that we had been standing right in front of the house. We had been standing there debating whether or not I was ACTUALLY from this town or not (since I seemed to not know where anything was, including my own parents’ house).
8) In what felt like a minute flat, I found Tyler in the kitchen with his shirt off, a potato salad/ham and cheese sandwich in one hand, and a beer in the other. (”I got comfortable real quick,” he admitted the next morning.)
9) I had been looking forward to sleeping in a somewhat familiar bed for days, but by the time I crawled up into the thing, my walleye sandwich dinner had begun talking things over with the beer and whiskey in my stomach.
10) I woke up the next morning at six, as ready as I would ever be to go back into my high school and middle school with a busload of poets.
11) The next morning when we met back up with Bill, I found out he had gone across the street from the Whiskey River to the karaoke bar.
He sang “Brown Eyed Girl” to what he described as “a bunch of tweakers.”
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This, more than any entry so far, makes me feel as though I know what it is like to be on the Poetry Bus.