wrong's the new right

new jersey: right turn off I95, or trope for the shared kink in our stories, or -- as my mother says of arkansas, where she was born -- "the jumping off point," the place to flee from -- flee to in my mother's case, even if it meant marrying the wrong man; flee back to in my sister's, the right man.

in the chapter "To Find a Voice" in Patti Smith Complete, 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections and Notes for the Future, ps maps her moves. she isn't from nj in the way that my mother claims to be from arkansas; she got there: born in chicago ("My Kind of Town"), first stop Philly ("South Street, the hippest street in town"), detour to snj, where she played Manrico and trilled the lullaby from Il Trovatore (19).

then, duded up for the "spiritual and cultural revolution" (19) she marched up north and over east to the island across the hudson, her "battlefield" (19). as she describes this move: "I broke from the confines of a rural existence. Farewell the factory, square dance hall, the withering orchards" (20). failed painting, to words on plaster walls recited out loud inside (reving in place), ready? set, go...accelerating to cbgb's, shooting up the place with word-ammo.

is ps from nyc, then, because she found her voice en route from her bunker with Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel to the Bowery Street front line? Or because it was there, and then, that "we gave new meaning to the word 'soldier'?" (19).

we are all mutations

tortoise (terry griffen; my sister dated him when they were both in high school) used to call jerseyites "mutations." he exempted himself because he was from minnesota, forced to live in jersey because his father relocated after a second marriage to mrs. hansen, president of bergen bluestone, after her husband's death.

i had a friend in nyc who referred to me -- along with jack nicholson, bruce springsteen, and patti smith -- as a "jersey mongrel." like tortoise, this friend exempted himself since he migrated to the city not from the other side of the hudson but from south of carolina.

i wasn't from jersey either; "from" is so much more complicated than where i went to high school or where my parents currently live or even where i now lay my hat. in fact, lots of us "mutations" and "mongrels" aren't from the place to which self-describe "exemptions" hook us. instead, from elsewheres, product of remixed genetics, ribbons of this and that dna-knots, generating nonlinear stories, multiple, conflating, shifting, replicating, warring, inconsistent answers to the question "where are you from?"

a man operating the elevator in an apartment building in rio assumed i was from argentina -- something to do with my portuguese accent, i assumed -- and so i was (at that time, the late 80's, brazilians responded more favorably to argentinians than americans; one or the other, still inherited the gene pool of um civilizacao que assassinar los indios) and so i am, because i was for a time, at least to this trabalhador; although before this, i had been taken for french (because i carry a pen case in my bag?).

DUI

"exit light
enter night"

maybe my best thing after all is driving a little drunk, blasting metallica into the ghetto twilight as if i weren't a white girl with a ribbon of african blood the legacy of some unrecorded rape, another strand cherokee, this one vaunted in our Children of the Mayflower pedigree, the First Families of Virginia, DAR legacy I bear on my whicker shoulders, unlike the jews from Alsace-Loraine my grandmother could not stand to hear about when her daughters traced the geneology

as if i were a punk from the trailer park south accused and convicted of child murder simply because metallica was my lifeline and i read books . . . i know real live southern gentlemen who claim to know (second or third hand) that the Gore family has connections to Satan worship, that's how it works

"never me, never free"

as if i were a boy a boy a boy, shifting gears like my hands were born with the knob in my palm, over the legal limit making a right turn out of the diner deserted (Jewish new year) this early evening, past two police cars lights flashing having pulled over a late model blond sedan, and i am willing to bet all the money in my disabled pocket the driver was black, or goth, or just wrong wrong wrong, like me

only this time i don't get caught.

future-redact: shirts on, girls!

"there was never a year like 1977..." (John Tyrangiel, "The 30th Anniversary of Punk," Time 10 Sept. 2007).

Tyrangiel: "Patti Smith could sing with fury, but she was a genuine poet."

separate the poet from the boys -- also fury singing, shirts off, 6-pack abs (from horse not crunches?), writhing punk anguish through frothy mics. her wedding dress tilting off-shoulder (Tyrangiel, pic 26), impish stare, memories of twelve that "have not done well" (ps, "Notes to the Future").

the poet fell from the stage that year...kerplunk into 80's postpunk, draping demeulemeester cuffed linen "sackcloth and ashes" (ps, Notes to the Future"), and "a great reverence for the past" (Mark Holgate, "Kindred Spirits," Fashion Rocks, Sept. 2007), standing where Piaf stood, whisper of sucer francais, exhaled as raspy, nyc blare.

on paris olympia, the shirted poet disrobes les hard-knock mots suces, anthem-to-the-boys: "ain't it strange oh oh oh...girl in white dress boy shoot white stuff" (ps, "Ain't It Strange" from Radio Ethiopia).

an asphalt ribbon or free-floating lint de l’histoire: when we were twelve…

add a jersey tag: the network’s on the grow….

all those girls doing androgyny until they’re stopped in their tracks have the same story. desperate to tell, to share the plot, to join the club that whips jersey off, a defiant fin after the prohibition.

it was my father, too, who conveyed the taboo.

a look, though, not a word, and i knew, even when “hot as hades,” my shirt must stay sweat glued.

happilyeverafter.

ps reading "Notes to the Future"