In conversation with Cuba's Porno para Ricardo

One of Cuba’s most notorious bands, Porno para Ricardo is nothing if not controversial. Their unrelenting anti-Castro stance has made them a thorn in the side of that regime and a darling of the Miami exile community, and fellow punk rockers debate the band’s position within the island’s small scene: some applaud their cojones, others call them clowns. Most, however, adamantly defend their right to free expression. In August 2008, PpR frontman Gorki Águila was arrested on the dubious charge of “social dangerousness,” an offense punishable by up to four years in prison. After Generation Y blogger Yoani Sánchez called international attention to the case, these charges were reduced and Águila got off with a fine. The following interview, with Águila and PpR drummer Renay Kairus, took place with the help of a translator in late September 2013, in Havana. In light of the United States’ recent (and long overdue) decision to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, I thought I’d revisit that conversation.

Read more at the PDXX Collective website.

In conversation with author Karelia Stetz-Waters

Novelist and PDXXer Karelia Stetz-Waters is having a remarkable year. Her first book, a thriller called The Admirer, was published in December of 2013, and August saw the publication of a second thriller, The Purveyor. A young adult novel, Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before, comes out October 31st, and in January, Grand Central Publishing will release a romance, Something True. As a publishing student at Ooligan Press, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before—a book whose YA designation nearly scared me off, but whose honesty and lyricism quickly won me over. (This interview, then, is something of a shameless plug for a book I adore.) Though I’ve yet to meet Karelia in person, I was grateful for the opportunity to speak with her aboutForgive Me, the importance of strong lesbian protagonists, and all that writing (four books in three genres and counting!): “Ten years of work,” she says, “all came to fruition during an eighteen-month period.”

Read the rest at PDXX!

Women in Cages, 2012

[So much of this piece (two years old?) is already out of date--which is such good news for WMMA.]

“...girls do not think of boxing, wrestling, or karate as suitable for them, and properly so…”

- Self-Defense for Girls and Women: A Physical Education Guide, 1975

I saw mixed martial arts live for the first time this January. Screaming in my ear, six dollar Bud Lights at the bar, blood ten feet distant: live. Rumble at the Roseland, produced by Portland, Oregon’s Full Contact Fight Federation, was celebrating its tenth anniversary, and the line outside the venue extended the length of the block. The card’s headliner was a girl fight—the only one of the night—between amateurs Liz “Lightning” McCarthy and Liz “The Titan” Tracy.

At the bell, Tracy came at McCarthy, who managed immediately to stick a right jab. Then Tracy tried to get McCarthy on the ground, but when McCarthy didn’t budge, someone— Tracy’s coach?—yelled, “Come on! Knees!” leading Tracy to knee her opponent twice in the abdomen. The crowd went bananas, chanting for “Tracy! Tracy!” who was harnessing her size to push McCarthy against cage. McCarthy took a moment to regain some control, and then, holding onto Tracy’s flanks and bracing her own back against the cage, she swung her legs up quickly, inverting her body and locking her knees around Tracy’s left shoulder. McCarthy then went for an arm bar—straightening Tracy’s arm at the elbow—and that’s when she felt the snap.

A guy in the crowd started barking like a dog.

“I felt it,” said McCarthy afterward. “That was a freaky moment, because I hit the arm bar and it was so tight, and I thought, All right, this is it. I just won this fight. And then I felt her arm break and she slammed me down. And so it was kind of like, oh shit. Because I made the mistake of thinking I’ve got this before the ref was there breaking it up.”

Stunned by a surge of adrenaline, overcome with the desire to prove herself, Tracy responded to the break with brute force, dropping her knees to try and buck McCarthy loose, powering McCarthy’s head into the floor. When the final horn sounded, I wasn’t sure who’d won. Tracy looked confident, beaming until seconds before the decision was revealed—and then, somehow, she knew. She brought a hand to her face and began to cry.

“From the blue corner!” the announcer shouted into his microphone. “Liz! Lighting! McCaaarrrthyyy!”

I hadn’t seen the break happen; or, rather, I’d seen it without knowing. Tracy was the fight’s early aggressor, and to my eyes, she’d been making quick work of McCarthy’s tiny frame. `

After the fight, news of Tracy’s broken arm spread fast among the folks milling around backstage. Breaks of this sort are unusual but not unheard of in mixed martial arts, but what really amazed everyone was that Tracy’s arm had broken in the first round—yet she went on to finish the fight, going all three rounds at three minutes each. Was she crazy to keep going? After all, as an amateur she wasn’t being paid to win, or even to participate. At stake was not money, then, but the FCFF women’s straw weight title and a championship belt to prove it. At stake, too, were rewards that are harder to touch—like honor, and recognition.

If you think about mixed martial arts at all, chances are you conjure an enclosed cage with two hulking men locked inside. Probably they are tattooed, and beating each other into bloody pulps. Or maybe you picture female fighters. Maybe you’re familiar with Gina Carano, whose transition from a successful MMA career with Strikeforce promotions to a fledgling career in Hollywood made has entertainment headlines of late. Maybe you’ve seen her in the Steven Soderbergh film, Haywire.

Carano’s last fight, in August 2009, was a doozy: it pitted her against MMA superstar Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos, and marked the first time that female mixed martial arts fighters headlined a professional event. The fight aired on Showtime, and according to Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker, it was the second-highest-rated show in the channel’s history, averaging 576,000 viewers and peaking at 856,000 during the main event. Carano, “the prettiest face in MMA,” walked away bloodied, bruised, and $125,000 richer. Santos, who defeated Carano by knockout to become the new featherweight champion, took home a pittance by comparison—a $25,000 purse, including a $5,000 win bonus.

Enter, in early 2011, “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey, an Olympic Bronze medalist in Judo with a professional MMA record of 4-0. When she got into the sport, she cited Carano as an inspiration, and opinions differ on whether Rousey earned or talked her way into a title bout against Strikeforce bantamweight champion Miesha “Takedown” Tate. For her part, Rousey said she was trying to change the game—or at any rate, the face of the game—more doggedly pursuing the “pretty face of MMA” role that Gina Carano somewhat reluctantly found herself in as a star on Strikeforce’s featherweight roster.

Veteran fighter Sarah Kaufman, who became the first Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion in February 2010, had a professional record of 14-1 and was the presumed next in line for the title shot. She’d successfully defended her title against Roxanne Modaferri in July 2010, losing it to Marloes Coenen that October; Coenen was then bested by Tate—and because the women’s bantamweight division is small, it was widely believed that Kaufman would get the first go at Tate’s belt. It therefore came as something of a shock to the MMA community when Scott Coker announced that Tate vs. Rousey would headline the March 3^rd Strikeforce card.

In response to criticism of this decision, both Coker and Rousey pointed to her Olympic medal as justification for the title shot. But Tate and others felt Rousey hadn’t done enough to earn it, hadn’t worked her way through the ranks like Kaufman had. It wasn’t her turn yet, they said, and furthermore, at 145 lbs., all her experience had been in the featherweight division. It didn’t help to smooth matters when Rousey adopted a provocative public persona, playing up the marketability of two pretty girls fighting and trash-talking her detractors, including Tate.

Back in November 2011, when the Tate-Rousey matchup was still just speculation, a popular online show called MMA Hour hosted a call-in round table discussion with Tate and Rousey. Both acknowledged that their looks would help sell the fight, but disagreed—among other things—about whether that marketing strategy was right. Sarah Kaufman called in, indignant over the idea that women’s athleticism wasn’t enough of a selling point, and angry that she might be denied the next title shot.

“I think that the fight between Miesha and I is an exciting fight, and I think that it could be marketed in a very exciting way,” Kaufman said. “And you know, Miesha is kind of like that prettier girl, and I’m definitely more on the serious, sporty side. And I’m ready to smash Miesha’s face.”

Kaufman worried that if someone like Rousey could use looks or charisma to leapfrog more seasoned athletes, the rest of the division stood to suffer. She said that for the sake of women’s longevity in the sport, a fight like Tate-Rousey should be built up over a longer period of time, “have the fans get into it,” she said. “And if [Rousey] runs through people, which I don’t think she will, then I’ll be happy to beat her face in. She wants to be pretty? She won’t be as pretty after our fight.”

Newly captivated by MMA after seeing the McCarthy-Tracy fight at the Roseland, I signed up for a grappling clinic led by Miesha Tate and her boyfriend and trainer Bryan Caraway. Bryan fights for the sport’s top promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and at the time, Miesha was still the Strikeforce bantamweight champion, with an impressive professional record of 12-2.

I’d brought a friend along to partner with, and we were very much out of our league. The other attendees, all men, had at least a rudimentary idea of what was going on, and some had amateur fight experience. One guy had a black eye. Coordination has never been my strong suit, and I was intimidated—but our instructors spoke in encouraging platitudes.

“Everybody has to start somewhere,” Miesha said, smiling.

 “It’s okay—just keep trying that first hold. You’ll get it!” Bryan assured us, as I rammed a knee into my friend’s crotch.

“Oops! Sorry,” I said, adjusting my leg. At one point, while Bryan talked us through the initial hold, I was lying on top of my friend, cradling her head. “It looks like I’m trying to romance her,” I quipped. The position did not feel tough.

He smiled charitably at my joke, and then his face went dead serious. “I guarantee you won’t think there’s anything romantic about it when she’s kicking your ass,” he said.

A month later, I drove up to Washington to spend some more time with Miesha and Bryan as they prepared for the Rousey fight. We met at Yakima Mixed Martial Arts, bare-bones gym in a dual-storefront strip mall, the air oppressive despite ceiling fans spinning at full blast.

“I was kind of oblivious to it at the time, but I think at first they really didn’t want us there,” Miesha said of her days wrestling in high school. “They tried to make us quit. They were like, these girls are not here to be serious. I mean, what girl wants to wrestle? It’s not a woman’s sport, you know? They always put us in with the best wrestlers, and wouldn’t give us any advice. It was just like, go. Wrestle. You wanna be here, you wanna wrestle, get in there. And we would just get smashed. I had no clue what I was doing and the guys were grinding my face into the mat—just being little buttheads, you know?”

Bryan and Miesha met as students at Central Washington University. He was a little older, an experienced wrestler and fighter who’d started an MMA club on campus. The school had no wrestling program, so with some hesitation, Miesha decided to join the MMA club. Bryan wound up coaching and cornering her first amateur fight, and eventually they started dating. For a few years, they lived with Bryan’s best friend in a 22-foot mobile home parked outside the gym, so they could quit their day jobs and dedicate all of their time to training and fighting. By virtue of their shared profession, Miesha and Bryan spend most of their time together. They live together, train together, and travel together. They have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences.

“For the women there’s a lot more than just fighting ability that we have to have, in terms of what the promotion wants… like the feminine side,” said Miesha.

“…because women’s MMA,” interjected Bryan, “I hate to say it, but it’s still like a novelty. It’s not taken as seriously, it’s not considered a sport as much as men’s.”

Miesha pulled her hair into a high ponytail. “We’re still working.”

Brian agreed. “Yeah. It’s taken like a sex symbol—like sexy wrestling.”

“Unfortunately.”

“But it’s still legit. I mean, they’re fighting. Trying to kill each other. It’s coming around, but…”

“...it’s not as much of a priority as men’s fights,” said Miesha.

She got up and started jogging in place. Bryan laced up his wrestling shoes. “Girls are not as big of perverts publicly as men,” he said with a chuckle, stepping onto the mat.

 Miesha rolled her eyes and corrected him. “We’re just more reserved about it.”

Bryan started doing leg sweeps across the mat, running his body gently into a punching bag. “You’re gonna talk your way out of training,” he warned. Miesha did some jumping jacks and then joined him on the mat.

They trained for two hours without pause. The pair talked quietly and in sometimes-unfamiliar language, half-sentences, jargon all their own: I heard something about a pirouette step, about the wizard, about windshield wiper-ing. Mostly they were reviewing and perfecting transitions—“flow wrestling,” Bryan told me later. For a minute, Miesha got hung up on a new move. Bryan stood wide-legged, and she held fast to his calves, attempting to take him down.

“Hold on,” he said, retracting a leg and wiping sweat from his brow.

Miesha blew her nose lightly into her shirt collar. She was frustrated. “I can’t fuckin’—”

“Yeah, you can,” Bryan said. “I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to show you a move. You gotta wait until I show you. You’re not listening.”

 Crouched, she rested her chin in her hand. “So basically I need more momentum.”

“Yeah. So now what are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’m gonna jump on your back,” she said, jumping on his back and taking him down in a

mock attack.

Bryan made funny fight sounds, and pretended he was kicking her in the face; both laughed and then resumed the original position. Miesha did a mental inventory, muttered the steps aloud, and started over. She dropped her left knee and kicked her right leg out behind her. She did it again. She still wasn’t quite getting it.

She said to me, by way of explanation, “I’m learning, so I’m thinking too much.”

Without hesitation, Bryan said, “Don’t think. Just do. Do something! Something is better than just breathing. You already turned the corner. You’re just not… It’s hard. There you go. Right when you drop your knee, then you sweep. BAM! Step and sweep. That’s better!”

Unprompted, every fighter I’ve talked to likens mixed martial arts to a physical game of chess, and the more training I watched, the more I appreciated the analogy. The sport requires concentration, strategy, knowing one’s options. With submission practice in particular, I also envisioned things like origami—seeing grapplers’ bodies as pieces of colorful paper, their transitions mimicking intricate patterns of folding and unfolding. I saw them as wooden rings in a disentanglement puzzle, patiently trying every angle, every maneuver until they succeeded.

Miesha and Bryan repositioned themselves into a standing tangle.

“Now punch towards my truck,” Bryan said, and Miesha did it: she punched toward the black Chevy Silverado parked out front, knocking her boyfriend off balance and throwing him to the floor with a spectacular thud.

“The stage we’re at right now,” Miesha had said that morning, “we’re fighting for more than just winning a single fight. We’re fighting for equal acceptance, and to be taken seriously as athletes.”

Glimpsing her training camp, it’s no wonder she and other female fighters get frustrated when they’re not treated by the fans or the promoters with the same level of respect as their male counterparts. Online—the domain of most MMA news and chatter—comments like the following flourish: “thegaps in her game...i will fill with my penis” [sic]; “all girl fighters mighthave girlfriend prolly she dont want boyfriend pregnant just wonder” [sic, sic, sic]; and perhaps more to the point: “Something just feels so wrong watching2 women dishing it out inside a cage...”

Glena Avila is a blonde, blue-eyed, curvy and compact; a women’s kickboxing and submission instructor, she’s also very tough. A 36-year-old title-holding mixed martial artist with three years of fighting under her belt, Glena began training at an age when most women, and many men, are beginning to think about retiring from the cage.

At eighteen, Glena was a single mother of a baby boy, so a few years later when she met her now ex-husband—a military man, she says, and well put together—she thought he’d provide her with the stability and support she craved. Together they had a daughter, Annie, but Glena says she was deeply unhappy in her marriage.

“I felt kept in a cage and controlled. I had a very controlling husband,” she told me. “It was suffocating.”

Glena had been a fan of MMA since the early nineties, and after she and her husband separated, she saw a women’s bout online and decided that she wanted to try it out. She got in touch with the promoters (Full Contact Fight Federation) and asked if she could be set up with a fight. With no experience to speak of, Glena trained for just six weeks before her first bout—which she says in retrospect was not very smart—but she won, and she remains undefeated. In MMA, Glena found a cage she was happy to step into—one she could walk out of on her own terms and with her head held high.

She likens life as a fighter to being in college: schedules can be messy, and there’s not much free time or money, but the potential rewards for working hard are plenty. For one thing, Glena fights on professional cards now, which means she can earn a couple thousand dollars for winning a fight. But more than that, she said, “I’m able to show Annie so many things that parents forget about, like perseverance, working hard to obtain your goals, dealing with people talking negatively about you, and how you handle that. And at some point, I’m going to have to talk to her about losing. And how to lose well.”

She told me about a fight she was offered once against a really pretty girl, about how the promoter was pushing to make it happen, how he anticipated swift ticket sales. He was planning to market it as a “battle of the big-boob blondes.” Though she was confident she could beat the opponent he’d proposed, Glena said no.

“Do I want to just be labeled like that, for a paycheck?” she mused. “I don’t know. I’m a mom. I have a little girl. My son is a young man. I don’t want to portray that image. It doesn’t hurt my feelings at all if someone wants to call me a hot fighter, but make no mistake: I came to fight. This is a mixed martial arts competition, not a bikini contest.”

I asked Glena what it’s like getting in the cage, duking it out in front of all those people. “There’s a big crowd,” she told me, her eyes firing, “and they’re all bloodthirsty and screaming and yelling, and you’re in a cage locked in. If you could ever have a gladiator moment in your life, that’s what it feels like.”

It’s a fitting analogy. At the root of mixed martial arts lies pankration (“all powers”), an ancient Greek sport that was among the most popular Olympic events after its inclusion in 33^rd ancient Olympic Games. Practitioners fought naked, using a combination of wrestling and striking techniques; and with no established rounds or time limits, bouts ended only in submission, knock-out, or death. Alexander the Great was a practitioner and trained his armies in pankration; it’s been surmised that their hungry eastward march toward world domination helped spread the practice to Southern Asia, and in that case pankration may have played a part in the development of certain Eastern martial arts. In any case, the Romans—whose tastes favored cruelty of the armed variety—incorporated pankration into their gladiatorial training, thinking it wise for a gladiator to have some recourse should he be disarmed during battle.

There exist numerous literary references to female gladiators (and to laws banning them), too: they fought little people, animals, and each other, apparently topless, in undoubtedly brutal and entertaining fashion, and stood as symbols of the relative wealth, extravagance, or depravity of a given emperor or private host.

Mixed martial arts has more contemporary roots in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which, with its emphasis on leverage and momentum over size or brute force, is a combat style well-suited to women. Today, however, the sport is almost unanimously linked to Dana White, the outspoken UFC president who has continually insisted that women will never fight in his organization. As a result, professional female fighters have been relegated to fighting for Strikeforce and lesser-known promotions like Bellator, neither of which has the cultural cache or payout power of the UFC.

In March 2007, UFC parent company Zuffa bought out rivals Pride Fighting Championships and World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) and folded both into the UFC, solidifying its place at the top of the MMA promotions heap. The plot thickened for women in March of 2011, when Zuffa purchased Strikeforce, the top independent promoter of women’s fights. Zuffa has said it plans to honor the contracts of all fighters currently on the Strikeforce roster, but the question on everyone’s mind, especially the women, is what will happen when the contracts run out? Will Strikeforce be allowed to carry on as always, or will it be folded into the UFC boys’ club, like Pride and WEC before it? And if the latter, what will female fighters do? How will they preserve their place in the fight game?

White’s latest argument against females—that the talent pool is not deep enough to warrant a new class of fighters—is short-sighted but not entirely unreasonable: Strikeforce has only eight women in its bantamweight division and six featherweights, including the currently-suspended Cris “Cyborg” Santos. Bellator, by contrast, has only one female division, with eight fighters in total.

On March 1^st, two days before the Tate-Rousey fight, Strikeforce held a press conference featuring all fighters from the main card. In the lead-up to the fight, there’d been a lot of trash talking between the two women—Ronda claimed to be shaking things up to sell the fight, and Miesha quite frankly didn’t care for Ronda’s big mouth. Unsurprisingly, the media was still interested in hearing them sound off on each other, on what sells a fight, and on how the female athletes of this still-evolving sport wish to—even ought to—present themselves.

“I don’t care why people are watching my fights,” said Ronda. “I look at the YouTube comments. Some people watch the fights because it’s the only time they get to see women’s bare feet.” There was considerable laughter from the gathered journalists.

“I do care, personally,” Miesha answered. “My goal is to have us be respected more as athletes and fighters than [for] our looks, and I think that comes first and foremost.”

Before the title bout against Miesha, Ronda’s longest fight had lasted a mere 49 seconds, and each of her four wins had come by the same vicious arm bar submission. Detractors called the Judoka a one trick pony, but in a way, that trick put her at a real advantage: Miesha’s camp had very little footage of the newcomer to study.

On fight night, the bell rang and Miesha came out swinging, landing the first several punches. But she pushed her punches, didn’t snap back as quickly as she should have. This gave Ronda the power of Miesha’s weight and she took Miesha down pretty fast, started punching her in the head.

“Hammer fist to champion’s head!” roared the announcer.

Ronda started looking to take side mount and nearly secured her signature arm bar less than a minute in, but Miesha recovered—something none of Rousey’s competitors had ever managed to do. From standing, Miesha took Ronda’s back; she was trying for a rear naked choke but never got full control of Rousey’s free arm.

“Rousey! Wearing Tate like a backpack!” the announcer hollered.

It was an exciting fight: tons of complex ground work, an angry standing clinch, some good kicks and punches from both sides. With just over a minute-and-a-half to go, Ronda threw Miesha down on her back and took full mount, sitting on Miesha’s chest and hurling fists. It looked like the fight might end by knockout right then and there, all the personal animosity coming out through Ronda’s fists while Miesha struggled to break free.

With fifty seconds remaining, Ronda made a move. On her back now, she had Miesha’s left shoulder squeezed tight between her thighs, the arm extended along her torso, a second attempt at the arm bar. She held fast to the writhing Miesha and pulled back on Miesha’s arm. What followed was one of the most gruesome arm bars ever caught on tape: Miesha’s arm bent in altogether the wrong direction at the elbow, her face contorted in pain. But she held and struggled, determined not to submit.

And then, four minutes and twenty-seven seconds into the first round, Miesha tapped. Her heart sank. Ronda extracted herself and the ref came over to hold Miesha’s mangled arm in place on the floor of the cage. Breathing hard, Ronda paced the ring, looking down occasionally upon the now-former champ. Sarah Kaufman—who’d won her undercard fight that night against Alexis Davis—smiled on the sidelines, sure she’d be next and ready to reclaim her title.

“She calls herself ‘Rowdy,’” said the announcer, “but there’s no doubt about it, she is the Arm Bar Assassin!” It was difficult to disagree, but Miesha, now flanked by medical staff, had blown everyone away with her borderline-reckless hesitation to tap.

“What a heart,” the announcer crooned. What a heart, I silently agreed. Still in the cage, a reporter asked Miesha how she felt. As they will, rumors were flying that her arm had been broken.

“It’s a little sore,” said Miesha. “But you know what? I came here to put on a fight. I really didn’t like her, so I wanted to come out here and come out hard. I got a little overzealous; she caught the arm. I gotta give her respect. I respect her as an athlete.”

The fight, aired on Showtime, averaged 431,000 viewers, peaking at 506,000 during the main card between Rousey and Tate. It drew markedly more viewers than the prior Strikeforce event on Showtime, an all-male card in January.

Not long afterward, Zuffa CEO Lorenzo Fertitta said that he was “blown away by the fight, blown away by [Tate and Rousey’s] athleticism and the way they promoted the fight, the whole thing.” He said maybe it was time to consider starting up a new women’s division. And even reliable old Dana White appears to be budging some, whether because the women’s athleticism won him over, or because he’s preparing to cede his stance. For now, no matter: in the aftermath of the fight, White said something very strange for a man who not long ago dismissed the question of female fighters with a wave, with a cocksure “No. Never.” White looked straight into a reporter’s camera and said that Miesha “was put on this earth to fucking fight.”

Strikeforce recently disclosed the payouts from the Tate-Rousey card. In the penultimate matchup, winner Josh Thomson earned $80,000; his opponent took home a $38,000 purse. Miesha, former champion and one half of the headlining card, took home $19,000. And Ronda Rousey—the Olympic medalist, the Judoka, new “pretty face of MMA” and now Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion—earned $32,000, including the win bonus—less than half of Thompson’s pay.

So: Were these women put on this earth to fight? And if so, could it finally be time for them to get their due? I know a few women who’d answer without hesitation, yes, we were, and yes, it is.

"Glena" Raises the Bar for Films About Female Fighters

When Portland, Oregon documentarian Allan Luebke began working on Glena, about mixed martial artist Glena Avila, he’d envisioned a month of shooting that would result in a short film. But Avila, a single mom who began fighting in her mid-thirties (an age when many in the sport are considering retirement) proved to be an open book with an interesting backstory: she grew up in poverty, her once-solid relationship with her teenage son was flagging, their house was on the verge of foreclosure, and her ex-husband had initiated a custody battle, claiming that Avila’s fighting had a negative impact on their young daughter. Luebke wound up filming for a year and editing for another three, and after a lengthy tour on the festival circuit, Glena made its small-screen debut on Showtime this month.

Read the rest at Bitch!

Talking about wrestling with my good pal Jason

My feelings toward the act of writing run hot and cold. The cold is existential dread. With interviews, it is quite the opposite. If I could spend half the day in conversation—walking around or sitting on a riverbank or sharing a meal—and read for the other half of the day, I would be the happiest camper. Other but not all writers feel this way.

Ahead of an interview, no matter who it is, I feel first-date nerves—good nerves. When things are going well, I let the conversation meander and carry on too long. I am not in control. I even like transcribing (it’s true!) and the opportunity it provides to revisit, to pick up on whatever I might have missed in the moment. I savor whittling a transcript down into something consumable, into something that honestly mirrors the voice of its subject.

In embarking upon this series for The PDXX Collective, I’ve humbly borrowed my title from the late Studs Terkel, to whom we storytellers, we who value the preservation of all voices, owe such a great debt. Acknowledging that I’m no Studs Terkel, still I intend to use this space to introduce the voices of friends, acquaintances, and passing strangers—some you will have heard of; most, not.

I’ll begin with a friend. Jason Ellis, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a walking encyclopedia on heavy metal and horror, a metal singer, a radio host, a DIY music promoter, and a longtime volunteer at the Milwaukee Women’s Center (for whom he also organizes an annual fundraiser, DIY vs. Domestic Abuse). The conversation that follows is not new; in fact, it’s one of the first interviews I ever conducted. Having been assigned a short profile piece for a class a few years ago, my original subject fell through and I had nerves—bad nerves—until Jason agreed to fill in at the zero hour. The dude is smart, hilarious, a true brother—and once upon a time he tried his hand at professional wrestling.

Read the part where I finally let Jason talk, here. 

Transcuba. Bitch Magazine #64

The rad ladies at Bitch Magazine let me write up this gorgeous book of photography and words for the Love/Lust issue.

Writing Process Blog Tour

My dear, sweet, smart, handsome, multi-talented, hardworking friend Cooper Lee Bombardier invited me to join this Writing Process Blog Tour, and I said yes. It is impossible to say no to the ones I admire the most. Also, this seemed like as good a time as any to revisit the blog I never remember I have. 

1. What are you working on?

I am working on my thesis (Still? my friends and family ask; Still, I say), which— because these things need to be named—is called Cuba Libre: Punk Rock in the Belly of the Crocodile. In short, it is a group of essays about the punk movement in Cuba; more precisely, these essays are about my encounters with this movement and a swell of other issues, besides, including but not limited to hunger, economic disparity, effort, censorship, tourism, borders, and what I think of as a universal inclination toward a sense of freedom.

Beyond that, I’m in the early building stages of something whose form has yet to announce itself, about my adolescence-into-early-teens best friend and I and an ongoing fascination with the story of James Vance and Ray Belknap, the young men whose suicide pact was blamed on the supposed subliminal messages within Judas Priest’s Stained Class LP. (Note: my best friend and I did not have a suicide pact. Another note: Stained Class is one of the greatest records of all time. Another note: sometimes it's not hyperbole, it's fact.)

2. How do you think your work differs from others in its genre?

I began to answer this question by listing all of the things my work is not (but that I wish it were)—a characteristically Piper answer I'd like to avoid, because this doesn't strike me as an appropriate forum for self-flagellation. Instead, I'll say some words about what I think my writing is, though whether the answer highlights any significant difference from other writers in the (enormously varied) genre of narrative nonfiction, I don't know.

I guess most often I find myself writing around questions that I know I will never quite answer, but that nag at me anyway—and my hope is that the work demonstrates the sort of befuddled awe with which I move through the world, as well as some occasional bright ideas. I hope that anyone who reads my work appreciates the transparency, has a few laughs, learns something they didn’t know before, and/or walks away with questions, with invigorated curiosity... really any kind of reaction (though preferably positive) will do.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I write because I can’t sit and visit all day long, because things nag at me and writing is the best way I know to work through them, because I think better on paper, because I am awestruck and want others to share in my wonder, and because words are a joy and the love of my life. 

4. How does your writing process work?

I’m not nearly as diligent as I wish I were. My blood gets extra hot—in a good way—under a deadline, even a generous one, so those help a lot. Having a good audience, ear, and/or editor-—when I'm ready for it, and sometimes when I'm not—is an incredible motivator. I almost always begin with pen and paper, and I prefer to do early revisions that way, too. If I try to commit anything to type before sufficiently working it through in a notebook, I tend to freeze up and fall into the usual, embarrassing distractions. Deadlines aside, I write in fevered bursts and then don’t write for days. And I rely heavily on my home library, my school's library, and the public library for inspiration and some company along the way.

Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee: Where Poetry Month is Year-Round

Sometimes you have to write a blog post, and occasionally you get to write it about a place you love. Read about this magical bookstore in Milwaukee, here.

Notes from Cuba. MRR #368

While there's no queer punk scene per se in Cuba (not yet, anyway), when the editors of Maximum Rocknroll asked if I wanted to contribute a scene report to their 2014 Queer Issue, I knew immediately what it would be. Like the piece itself, I'll keep this short and sweet: Santa Clara, you are my favorite. El Mejunje, you are like no-place else on earth!

1991:

"Amadeus" is screened in a 7th grade classroom. Two young critics refuse to be thwarted by the room's near-total darkness. THEY KNOW THESE WORDS WILL BE IMPORTANT SOMEDAY.

Interview with Faythe Levine

[Excerpt]At 34, Faythe Levine is a doyenne of the independent arts and crafts movement: a documentarian, contemporary folk art collector, curator of Sky High Gallery in Milwaukee, and founder of the wildly successful Art vs. Craft fair, her 2009 film Handmade Nation garnered widespread attention; in the years since its release, Levine’s work has been courted internationally and featured in such publications as ArtForum and the New York Times. In October, Princeton Architectural Press will release Sign Painters, the companion book to Levine’s forthcoming film, The Sign Painter Movie. This latest project—a collaboration with filmmaker Sam Macon—is the culmination of three years spent interviewing and working alongside American sign painters, whose craft has helped shape the aesthetics of our public spaces. 

When Faythe and I caught up in late June, it was midnight on the eve of a nasty Midwestern heat wave and several weeks sooner than we’d planned—I’d locked myself out of the Milwaukee house I was sitting and she offered up her guest room. The next day, over a supremely tasty breakfast of poached eggs, polenta, greens, and iced coffee, we talked a little bit about personal stuff and a lot about the people who paint signs.– Eleanor Piper

[Read the rest at The Believer Logger]

Coffee Creek Correctional Facility visit

to the Prison Garden!

The Elusive Beast: On Evidence and Belief in the Utterly Unproven

Some say he is an animal: he has fur

like an animal’s, and sharp teeth;

others say he is a man, or something

that was once a man; his hands are a man’s,

his eyes face forward.

To me he is neither,

what he is for you

will depend on what he wishes to show you,

what he is for you

will depend on what you want from him.

(from Margaret Atwood’s “Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids.”)

This is it. It’s early December, hat-and-scarf weather here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve just driven into a fog so suddenly dense that I had to slam on the brakes. Fog that blanketed the North Fork Reservoir like down. I crept through that fog going ten, fifteen miles an hour; climbing out until the ground glittered beneath my headlights, as though the earth were sunk with jewels. I’m alone. The wind, steady and cold, carries the smell of skunk. They say that Sasquatch smells like skunk, like garbage, like carrion. I’ve come here to find Sasquatch. I can hear the flow of the Clackamas. I can see my breath. 

Thom Powell lives in these parts, and it’s here, in these woods, that he says he’s communicated with Sasquatch. Something of an elusive creature himself, Powell is a middle school science teacher in Hillsdale, Oregon, and the author of two novels about Bigfoot. He claims to have had numerous strange encounters with the beast. “They have the ability to cloud your thinking, to interfere with your ability to perceive what they don’t what you to perceive. Some of us have experienced this thing that can only be described as a cloaking capability,” he says, adding that the Sasquatch has a complex society, that they have weddings and funerals, secret meetings. “So when you ask us to provide proof that Sasquatch exists, that it has language, those of us who’ve been doing it a while are just totally bored with that. We don’t want to talk about that because we worked past that a long time ago.”

One problem that the novice Bigfooter confronts is that hoaxes abound in this world, so that sifting around for Truth – the universally accepted kind – can get mighty hairy. Every Bigfoot believer I’ve spoken to has mentioned hoax perpetrators and perpetuators. Enoch author Autumn Williams, one guy said. Tom Biscardi, pretty much everyone agreed. Cliff Cook, proven hoaxer. And then there’s Ray Wallace.

In their day, Wallace and his brothers owned a logging company in Northern California. In 1958, the company was clearing a timber access road near Bluff Creek, when a cat skinner named Jerry Crew discovered some rather large, deep footprints near his bulldozer. These were the first of many such tracks found at the jobsite, and the media were called in to investigate the phenomenon. The Humboldt Times (who coined the term Big Foot) ran a story, and then another and another, and the story took on a life of its own. But Wallace was a known trickster, and after his death in 2002, his family admitted that the Bluff Creek prints had been a prank perpetrated by Wallace in good fun; a prank that got out of hand. 

Yes, there have been hoaxes. Does this force us to approach all evidence with mistrust? All proponents of Sasquatch with scorn? Benjamin Radford, in his wry Tracking the Chupacabra, recalls his years searching for lake monsters and Bigfoot as a “robust history of gumption (and near-spotless track record of failure).” Nevertheless, he sets off to find another mythological creature, the Chupacabra. This requires gumption, yes – and a sense of adventure, and the belief, common in Cryptozoology, that there have simply been too many sightings for every last one to be a hoax.

Guy Edwards is, at 37, one of the younger members of the Oregon Bigfoot community, and he considers himself an armchair journalist on the topic of Sasquatch. To that end, he runs a website called Bigfoot Lunch Club. He’s also been my unofficial guide through the world of the ‘Squatch and an indispensable source of information. Guy has never seen a Bigfoot but he is a believer, and is a strong proponent of developing a solid methodology for its study. 

“I think we just need some good, solid models, and then to test against those models,” he says. “So if it is an orangutan relative, what do orangutans do? If it is nocturnal, then that’s a different story. Then we need to ask, what do lemurs do? Most people think it’s nocturnal, but to me, that would be a question of – why would a primate be nocturnal? Most primates are not.” Guy is part of what’s known as the flesh and blood camp of Bigfoot believers. These are people who seek physical evidence of the Beast and who believe said evidence is out there and deserving of real scientific study.

For evidence, many Bigfoot stalwarts point to the Patterson-Gimlin Film. Taken at Bluff Creek in 1967 and named for the two ranchers who shot it, the film is short and grainy, but inarguably depicts an ape-like biped walking through the woods. Among believers, the biped is known as Patty, and Patty is a large-breasted, barrel-chested, seven-foot-tall female Bigfoot. However, the film is not without controversy, as accusations of hoaxing and other shady dealings have swarmed it from the beginning. For one, a fellow named Bob Heironimus claimed that Roger Patterson paid him to put on an ape suit for the film. Guy Edwards believes that the footage is real, but concedes that it cannot be the be-all, end-all evidence. Footprints, a body, DNA, bones – this is what Guy and many others want to see.

Dr. Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University is the most vocal and respected academic in the flesh and blood camp of believers, and his work – influenced by the late Dr. Grover Krantz – focuses on footprints and dermal ridges, mid-foot flexibility in bipedal locomotion, DNA evidence, and evolutionary linkages that he claims are suggested by his vast collection of Sasquatch footprint molds. Some people say that Meldrum’s work is pseudoscience, but among believers, he is a pillar.

In the footsteps of Krantz, Meldrum posits that the creature we call Bigfoot is a possible descendent of Gigantopithecus Blacki. This presumed-extinct oversize ape, writes Meldrum, has left “a meager fossil record consist[ing] of two mandibles and isolated teeth…. That an ‘extinct’ giant ape is accepted by science on the basis of such scant fossil evidence, one might ask why serious consideration has been slow in coming to the hundreds of documented footprints (not to mention sightings, vocalizations, hair, scat, etc.).” The argument goes that the dearth of physical evidence isn’t reason enough to rule out Sasquatch.

Ron Morehead, a Bigfoot researcher from Mariposa, CA, calls himself “absolutely, a believer.” He’s ruddy-faced with a shock of white hair; he’s not very tall. His first encounter with the Sasquatch came in 1971, when he was at a high-altitude hunting camp in the Sierras. As he tells it, “there were six of us at camp. We were disturbed during the night by horrific sounding somethings. The tracks that were left were eighteen-inch, five-toed prints. This was the beginning of several years of this particular family of creatures coming around our camp.” 

Since then, Ron’s spent a great deal of time in the Sierras, making recordings that he has released collectively as the Sierra Sounds. “At first the sounds were very intimidating, like they were trying to scare us off,” he said, “but then it kind of mellowed out after a couple years. I think they trust us, trust that we’re not going to shoot our own. They’re like a people, and that’s what I say. If you treat them like Native Americans that don’t want to be found, well, they don’t want to be found. They don’t want anything to do with us.” 

I have listened to the Sierra Sounds, the crying and chest beating, the teeth popping and rock-rolling. There is howling and crying. Whistling, hooting, some very inhuman-sounding noises, indeed. Were these sounds made by people? By bears? Or by some unidentified primate? Unfortunately, because the study of Bigfoot is by and large considered pseudoscience, those in a position to answer that question are generally unwilling to ask it in the first place.

M.K. Davis of Benton, Mississippi has been studying the Patterson-Gimlin Film for some fifteen years, and is credited in the Bigfoot community with clarifying and stabilizing the once-shaky footage. He is adamant that the film’s Bigfoot is real, but he theorizes that Patterson and his partner Robert Gimlin walked into a Bigfoot massacre that day, insisting that there are at least ten minutes of unreleased footage showing other men, some dogs, and a pool of blood. 

“I found another film that was taken the same year, where men were down there hunting with dogs and horses for Sasquatch. On the very best image of the [Patterson] film, down at the bottom there’s a bloody red paw print of a dog. It was cropped out of most of the images that were released to the public but I got this from Mrs. Patterson. They made up this story, ‘two innocent guys just walking down the creek and they just happened upon a Sasquatch in broad daylight and she didn’t run in the woods,’ – Nope. That’s not true. They were there in an effort to hunt Sasquatch, in an effort to kill them. Patterson was not a part of the group but he stumbled upon them. He didn’t have anything to do with it; I don’t believe that for a minute. He became a part of it by accident.” 

But why would anyone want to kill Bigfoot? Davis argues that the creatures were a hindrance to the logging industry, frightening off the workers who were clearing access roads into the forest. 

Davis believes the Sasquatch are a people who have intentionally eluded society. Over the phone, he was kind, gentle- and plain-spoken, and clearly sympathetic to the Sasquatch. He told me “these people have been hiding out for a long time. And there’s also other mixes of people that have been in there. 10,000 Chinese were in there hydraulically mining gold at one time. So when you see the film you don’t know whether you’re seeing a typical Sasquatch, or a mix, or a hybrid, or what.” 

“Hybrid, meaning what?” I asked.

“Hybrid meaning a mix of Chinese or perhaps whoever happened to be in the area. Indian? Indigenous?”

I changed the subject. I asked something about the importance of Sasquatch to society. What it would mean if we were to find irrefutable proof. Rather than answer my question, he referred back to the film, in his opinion the only real evidence there is, and the only evidence we need. I admired his tenacity. I admired his disinclination to answer my fluffy philosophical questions. “I would like to elevate [the Sasquatch] if I could, but if I can’t, it’s not going to bother me. They’ve been living like that for a very long time and they’re perfectly happy as far as I can tell.” 

I’ve been wondering about the lack of physical evidence; specifically bones, and I’ve asked many enthusiasts why no Bigfoot bones have been found. Well, they’ve said, the forest is vast and impenetrably dense. The Northwestern soil is high in acidity which speeds the process of decomposition. There are many creatures who feast on carcasses, and anyway, they rhetorically ask, how many Bear bones are found in the woods? And this is a good question.

Dr. Virginia Butler is a professor of Anthropology at Portland State University who specializes in the study of animal remains found at archaeological sites. I asked her about bones.  “We can’t use the absence of Bigfoot bones to defend the case that Bigfoot doesn’t exist. We don’t find remains of many animals that we know once lived in a given area. What gets preserved for the long-term is only a crude reflection of what once lived in a given place.” Further, she explained, “in forested environments of the Northwest, bone preservation is problematic. The best places for bone preservation are caves or lava tubes in our basalt rich area. But the only way we’re going to get animal bones in there is if an animal naturally dies or a predator or scavenger drags the bones in there.”

In his own NPR interview, Dr. Meldrum stated “I don’t use the word[s] I believe in the existence of Bigfoot. To me, that connotes a conviction in the absence of proof or evidence, at least. I simply say that the evidence is there, there’s no refuting that.” Meldrum has amassed a large collection of footprint casts, which he regards as solid proof of Sasquatch’s existence.  “What does the evidence tell us?” he wants to know. “Where does it lead us, and is there something behind this persistence of this phenomenon in western North America?”

Once a month, Bigfoot believers and other interested parties gather for discussion at Pattie’s Home Plate in St. John’s, north of Portland. I attended a meeting in the fall in order to hear Thom Powell speak on the future of Bigfoot research; I’d been forced to cancel our prior meeting and my attempts to reschedule with him had been thwarted. More specifically, he was no longer responding to my emails. Thom is sinewy, with the complexion of an outdoorsman; he’s got short, salt-and-pepper hair and had a few days’ beard growth. 

I got to Pattie’s around 6:30. The walls were covered in pegboard and faux wood paneling, and dusty 45s hung by dusty strings from a water-stained drop ceiling. There were framed posters along the walls that said “Jazz” in a jazzy font, and Coca Cola ephemera was scattered about the place. I spotted two mannequins, numerous trophies, and a playpen with a real live baby inside. Behind the counter was a horseshoe, hung luck-side down. There were two paper towel racks on the floor by my feet, each holding full rolls of paper towels. It seemed as good a place as any to discuss our mysterious friend, the Bigfoot. There were maybe 18 or 20 people in attendance for the meeting. Ceiling fans whirred at top speed.

I sat down at an octagonal table across from a fellow named Dan Ronyak, a friendly, baby-faced man who was probably in his forties. I asked him what the most compelling evidence in support of Bigfoot might be. 

“I think the best evidence is seeing someone close to tears as they recount what they saw,” he answered. “When somebody has seen something, and they’re the average Joe, they wouldn’t have gone out of their way to make up a story like this. And then when they describe what they’ve seen, it’ll almost give you chills.” He adjusted his glasses. “I mean, I want to get to the point where I have chills and I’m scared to walk out of here.”

At 7:00, Thom began. “You might be on the cusp of a big game changer,” he said, announcing that Sunday’s New York Times would feature an article about a Bigfoot movie, “Letters from the Big Man”: “They’re actually treating the subject with an uncharacteristic amount of respect.” The next day I leafed through the Times, eager to see this potentially game changing article. The article, “In the Deep Forest, an Unusual Bond and Untamed Beauty,” was in fact a film review with very little to do with Sasquatch, but the reviewer called it a “lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic” film and its Sasquatch “beguiling…. an elusive and transformative presence.”  “Harry and the Hendersons” this is not. 

A woman who looked to be in her fifties sat behind Dan and I, intently listening to Thom while filing her nails rhythmically. Ch-ch. Ch-ch. Ronyak was wide-eyed and smiling toward Thom, nodding in recognition. There was a plump, middle-aged woman with a cute blonde bob sitting in front of us.

“It’s not for everyone to go that deep into what’s going on,” she said. “It can mess with your head. It can crack some people’s psyche to know these are not animals, to know holy cow I’m dealing with something really, really powerful. They do speak your language, no matter what that language is. They can speak Hmong, they can speak Vietnamese. I have a good friend that’s Hmong from Vietnam, her family came over in the early 70’s through Thailand to here. They were staying in Northern California and her uncle saw the Bigfoot sitting down in the river, and in his head he heard what do you want, what are you doing here? And I said, ‘was that in English or was it in Hmong?’ and she said it was in Hmong. So they do speak many languages. They speak your language, they speak other languages.”

Thom nodded, and the lady went on: “I don’t know if you’ve heard of Henry Franzoni – he dubbed a term called telepathic ventriloquism – you can hear it in your head, you think it’s being said out loud but it’s not.” 

“Right,” agreed Thom. 

I looked down at the checkerboard floor. I contemplated the wooden paper towel racks on the floor beside my feet, and their full rolls of paper towels. I looked over at Guy, who offered a wry smile and rolled his eyes like a kid whose parents have just done something embarrassing. This paranormal stuff is not for everyone.

“My whole dream is just to see Bigfoot,” Guy told me once.  I asked him what he would do if that happened. He told me that he spent a few months during his twenties in Thailand as a Buddhist monk. That when he was there, he saw a man get shot. “I was almost incapacitated,” he said. “I had to prop myself up. I saw his blood. It took me a long time to get help; it might’ve been 2 seconds or it might’ve been 2 hours. If I ever saw Bigfoot I’m sure I’d have the same reaction: My knees would get weak, I’d just stand still.” 

Before Thom’s talk, I’d asked Ronyak about belief. “For me, the question ‘do you believe in…’ right away sets up the whole scenario of ‘are you a kook?’ But you wouldn’t come out and ask someone that,” he said. “When you ask, ‘do you believe in Bigfoot?’ for me it’s just something that’s out there and part of the biological community.” 

So what, ultimately, is the appeal? How do all of these folks maintain interest in something that is utterly unproven? I’ve been thinking about this as I stand alone in the dark, smelling skunks on the wind, listening to the river, listening for the call of the elusive beast. Just what led me here into the deep Oregon woods on this frosty December night? I reflect on something that Ronyak said to me, and the answer is really quite simple:

“The stories are great. Listening to people talk about something they saw, they’re sure they saw, something that I have not seen….” Dan paused then; looking past me, looking toward an undefined landscape of his own imagining. 

“I love a good story,” he said. “And there’s some truth to most of it, probably.”

eap, December 2011 - “the Beast term”

The Novelist, The Beast, The Citizen

I first read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night in my middle-teenage years, a time when I was a pitiable sweat-and-tears mixture of anger, idealism, and profound naiveté.

To illustrate: it was around this time, having read perhaps halfway through a history of the Chinese Revolution – an account whose romantic bias in no way alarmed me – no matter – I was inspired to paint a red star on the lapel of my jacket. I tried to hide the star from my mom, who surely would have given me an oral examination on the subject of revolution, generally, and Maoism, specifically. I would have had no cogent responses and would have felt very silly indeed. I soon painted over the star.

At this time, too, I read about the SDS and the Weather Underground, I read War Resisters in Prison; I pawed through anything relating to Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, the Antiwar Movement, the Chinese Revolution, Gay Rights, Black Power, the American Indian Movement; Emma Goldman though not much else to do with Russia, Castro’s Cuba, and so on. Much of what I read was pretty good, some was very smart indeed, and most of it is a blur to me now. I mean, a lot of this stuff was also very dry reading. Among a few books that I recall – and with fondness – is Armies of the Night. Mailer was like this light-beam from the heavens amid so much gloomy text, text, text. He was energetic and brazen, arrogant and opinionated, and yet he did not take a hard and fast position. This last fact is what made the book a revelation to me. It gave me an immensely pleasurable, instructive, and less-obstructed view of what it was like, in the ten or fifteen years before I came to be, that fueled so much of my parents’ lives.

Understand: not long after his high school graduation in the mid-1960’s, my father lived a solid year in prison rather than serve in Vietnam. And my mom was wound up tightly with all sorts of antiwar activity beginning around 1968 when she left her husband.

Until I read Armies, though, when my mom talked politics, more often than not I’d roll my eyes. (Oh, great: first I’m not allowed to watch Taxi and now you’re dragging me to a meeting about lead paint. Can I get some Garbage Pail Kids, please?) (Harrumph: another draft board action story. I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be home.) (So the government wants to bury toxic waste in the next state over. Guess what, Ma? Your revolution failed. The world is doomed.)

I harbored the attitude because I sensed too much self-importance in my parents’ activism and subsequent nostalgia, and this just ripped my own sense of self-importance apart. I was the kid. I wanted to be the center. I wanted to learn about this crap on my own and not through their biases. And I’m sure it had something to do with having a stressed-out and overworked mom, with being abandoned by a father more interested in politics and agitation than his child. Pop psychology. That stuff: I’m over it. 

Whatever it was that made me resent their past lives, suffice it to say that nothing really changes until it does. With Mailer I found this funny, cynical, sardonic, altogether other view of that America, and it lent color and validity to my folks’ stories. He made exciting and undeniable fact of those previously-grating reminiscences in ways that no old newspaper article or stuffy academic polemic had done, and in ways that I sure as hell wasn’t ready to hear from my parents. 

There’s much about Armies of the Night that I’m sure I didn’t appreciate on the first go-round. I’m certain I glossed over the last third, where the Novelist passes his baton to the Historian. But now – my goodness! Up until the Novelist takes his bow, Mailer has paraded himself around, a highly entertaining hero in his own book. And then suddenly: Them’s the facts, Ma’am. Once, a “prisoner of his own egotism, some large vital part of the March had ended for him with his own arrest,” now we have a journalist, all business, uncovering the entire weekend’s bigger picture. Once, “trusting no one else in these matters – certainly not the columnists and the commentators – would never know whether the Reverend King had given a great speech that day,” now seeking to reveal all that he missed; to tell about the armies of bikers and hippies and to flesh out the beatings that took place that weekend.

I called my mom to see what she remembered about Mailer, about Armies of the Night, about the mid-to-late sixties. “The only thing I remember about that book is him going on stage drunk and railing about how he’d just taken an amazing shit! [Sic: wasn’t it a major, desperate piss on the floor of a public restroom?] I don’t know if I have much to say about him. He was so peripheral to everything. Anyway I wasn’t at that march.” (And what of that time period? Where were you in 1967?) “I was raiding draft boards!” (No, Ma. Not in 1967, you weren’t. That was later.) “Listen, I’m at an Occupy meeting. I’ll call you back in a few hours.” As promised, she called me back in a few hours. “I remembered where I was in 1967! I was still in Japan with Hal. I think we came back to live in Baltimore in November of that year. I was miserable. I wanted to get a divorce but I needed money. So I started looking at the classifieds and ended up working for the American Friends Service Committee in Washington, DC. My first big demonstrations were in 1968. Draft board actions maybe 1969.” (Okay. Any other thoughts on Mailer? Besides the piss? Do you remember the book and did you think it was a fair account?) “Do I remember the book? Ellie: you know how my memory is.” (Okay. Thanks, Ma. I love you.)

My father, on the other hand – his mind is a steel trap. He’s largely self-taught. Last time I saw him he was reading a book in French. I said “I didn’t know you ever studied French,” and he said “Oh, I guess I’ve always just sort of figured it out as I went along. Better than reading a shit translation.” He’s a cynical bastard. He could tear Howard Zinn a new asshole if he had a mind to: none of our heroes are safe. The one time I thought it right to introduce my father to a boyfriend (we were both rooted in the Boston area, were visiting our respective families there, were madly in love, were beginning, together, what would prove to be a horrible year of make-believe, etc.), this boyfriend – an apolitical Spanish language sociolinguistics geek – this boyfriend brought up Noam Chomsky at our lunch. As a result, we were all subjected to my father’s acid retort – a Boston-nasal diatribe on the Many Deficits of Chomsky. Which was not the point, of course; Noam was but a pawn in this unfortunate game of meet and greet.

Anyway.

I feel certain that my dad has read Mailer, has read Armies of the Night, remembers the latter well, and has an opinion on both. I suspect my father wouldn’t have held back like Mailer did when he bunked with young Noam Chomsky on the night of the mass arrests at the Pentagon. I tried to reach my dad for comment but he has, thus far, declined to respond. (Thanks for nothing, pop.) 

As for me, the darling daughter: I adore Mailer at all of his different ages and with each of his many faces: the Novelist, the Beast, the Citizen. Because he was not beholden to any sect, because he felt that political parties would be better off with motorcycle gang names, because he harbored mistrust of the Press, where “nuances were forever being munched like peanuts,” and criticized the New Left for being wimpy and complicit, because he said “the Hawks were smug and self-righteous, the Doves were evasive of the real question,” and then concluded, simply, that Vietnam was a very bad war, because he loved filth and vice, and he sucked the boring out of my family’s nostalgia: I love Armies of the Night for all of that, and I love it for helping me to understand where I come from.

eap, October 2011 - “the Beast term”