Holy Toledo (pt 1 of 3)
I wanted to drive up the eleven hours to Toledo, Ohio to attend the Underground Lit Fest, a two-day poetic odyssey, ten of those minutes earmarked for me and my shit. It had been ten years since I engaged in a face-to-face conversation with Michele McDannold, and fifteen years since I raised a beer with William Taylor Jr. Most everyone else I’d be meeting for the first time, though I knew most of them by their literary output, their reputation, and their social media presence.
This was going to be a hard sell for my wife. Our eleven-year anniversary fell within a week of the fest, and, truth be told, I think she would have rather spent the extended weekend at Narvarre Beach down in Florida, her toes in the sand, sunshine on her face. The sound of the waves crashing along the shore was poetry to her ears.
“Trust me, baby,” I said. “Toledo, Ohio is like the Pensacola Beach of the Midwest.”
“Really?”
“Look at the atlas I got you for our last anniversary. Toledo is nestled right up there next to the lake. The whole town is famous for its beaches.”
“Oh, really?”
“At the very least, we could leave a day early and just meander the backroads of Tennessee, drive up and down the mountains, see all the changing colors of the leaves.
Autumn travel is difficult for her to resist. As much as she loved eating mahi mahi tacos on a patio overlooking the Gulf of Mexico while some bedraggled drunk strummed an acoustic guitar, singing Jimmy Buffet tunes, badly; she loved the red, yellow, and fiery orange hues of dying leaves clinging to skeletal branches only a little bit less.
That first day, traveling through Tennessee, will be chronicled in my short story “Last, Desperate Stand at the Inbred Café,” or “There Are No Denver Omelets East of Knoxville,” or “This Ain’t the Football Season to be Driving Through Tennessee with Alabama Plates.”
Anyway, the next day was a straight shot up North 75 from Corbin, Kentucky, to Toledo, Ohio. I sensed now that my wife had gotten an eyeful of discolored foliage and had critically injured two hatchet wielding Tennesseans, herself only armed with a ceramic mug of coffee and the .38 she kept stashed in her purse, she was beginning to lose interest in this expedition. In order to keep her engaged, I made a game of enticing her to get on the phone and find a half ass decent hotel for us to stay the next two nights.
“This seems like something you should have done in advance,” she said, once again hypercritical of the way I chose to live my life.
“I considered it,” I admitted.
“Then what happened?”
“Well, then, I said ‘fuck it’ and decided to wait until the last moment. As always.”
I discovered many strange things about Toledo that weekend, but nothing quite so bizarre as my GPS’s utter inability to grasp the intricacies of the city’s urban landscape. According to my GPS, hotels just didn’t exist in downtown Toledo. We managed to locate The Attic on Adams for the Friday night Poetry Reading and also Culture Clash Records where the Underground Lit Fest proper was being held. We extrapolated from there as my Polish ancestors had done since the early days when my people first got together and decided to form a country where they could live without anybody burdening them with the expectations of actually having to do anything.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Hotels existed in Toledo. I knew this to be factual. We just needed to find them in relation to where we wanted to be. So, we searched out the venues first.
Maybe a mistake. The wife immediately developed a case of the nerves brought on by the sight of homeless minorities wandering the broken sidewalks outside abandoned storefronts.
“I thought you said this area was gentrified,” my wife hissed.
“It is gentrified. What can be more gentrified than two poetry readings two nights in a row. And near bars where an IPA or a microbrew was within easy reach. And, look, there’s a mural painted on the side of the building.”
“That’s not a mural! Someone just smeared feces on the brick wall.”
“Not that wall. That wall. Doesn’t that look nice?”
The city was a helluva lot nicer than my hometown of Hammond, Indiana. Not once had a poetry reading ever been held within Hammond city limits. Mostly, it was just Mexicans shooting each other beneath murals of five pointed crowns and three pronged pitchforks depending on what block you found yourself on.
“I read there’s a high crime rate around here.”
“Relax, crime only occurs when you allow it. It’s a goddam known fact that the Polish Hammer has never been bested in single combat by anyone who hasn’t lived at least five years at an established residency.”
And, another thing, she just shot two motherfuckers not twenty four hours ago for singing “Rocky Top” while we were eating scrambled eggs the short order cook refused to throw any vegetables on.
There may have been hotels close to the venues. We weren’t able to locate them. We zig-zagged throughout the city. The place, honestly, reminded me of home. The style of houses and corner bars, the bridges and train tracks and the occasional dude brandishing a tire iron sauntering along the road. I felt at peace. I just couldn’t find a fucking hotel.
And, then, finally, we did find a fucking hotel. A Comfort Inn nestled behind a Taco Bell and a Burger King.
“You think it’s a nice place?” My wife asked.
The Comfort Inn looked nearly identical to every other Comfort Inn I’d ever seen in my entire life.
“It’s gotta be nice,” I reasoned. “It’s right behind a Taco Bell.”
Once inside our cozy room with our shit unpacked, my wife seemed hesitant to leave.
“I really want to make it to this poetry reading,” I said.
“Why? Are you reading tonight?”
“No.”
“Then why go? We’re gonna have six hours of it tomorrow.”
This was a fair point. I guess at that moment it finally occurred to me after fifty-one years that I might actually enjoy poetry. Reading it and hearing it performed.
“I want to meet my peers. I want to be reminded how it’s done. It’s been ten years since I’ve read in public. C’mon. These are the streets of D.A. Levy, Bob Philips, Michael Grover, Dan Denton, and that one guy who looks like Jack Sparrow fucked a hobbit.”
“D.A. Levy’s a Cleveland poet.”
“But I’m sure he heard of Toledo at some point…”
“You’re maddening. And who’s the poet that looks like Jack Sparrow fucked a hobbit? You’re such an asshole, you know that?”
“I go through life perpetually looking like Charlie Brown right after trying to kick the football Lucy jerked away. I’m allowed to judge.”
We arrived at the Attic midway through the set.
“You sure this is the place?” My wife asked.
Though the streets were strangely devoid of people, the bar was jumping with a college age crowd, all of them looking to hook-up. Of course, I’m never sure any place is the place, so I just shrugged my shoulders. Push comes to shove, I knew I could just get really drunk and mingle with the college folks…
Before I could elbow my way to the bar, Dan Denton appeared, larger than life. A whirling dervish of positive energy. As beautiful and vibrant a human being as one could ever hope to meet.
“The reading’s in the back room. It’s standing room only,” he warned me.
Well, what kind of asshole only sets up three chairs? I wondered before maneuvering into the room and discovered it was fucking jammed packed with humanity. Forty people, more? All of them engaged by the reader slinging words on the stage. Once I got my wife situated on a chair with a mixed drink in her hand. I found an empty seat next to William Taylor Jr. and settled in with a couple German wheat beers.
The local poets were uniformly excellent. I was really impressed with a fella by the name of Huntor Prey. Such a great name. Like Warren Peace. I once entertained the possibility of going by Polish Intelligentsia, embrace that whole dichotomy thing, but I was far too entrenched in the whole Polish Hammer persona.
The night ended with a bohemian girl who read her poems in an odd, little girl sing song voice. I’m not sure what her poems were about but they sure rhymed A LOT. That’s when I discovered Bill and I possessed a telepathic bond. He looked at me. I looked at him. And our thoughts exclaimed in unison, rhyming trauma and drama and working in karma within the same sentence ain’t a great look.
But I wasn’t there to shit on the poets. And shame on Bill for telepathically implying she was lacking. Or maybe he raised his eyebrow in regard to the German beer he sipped on. Anyway, he wore his black suit, and I made a mental note to make sure I wore all black tomorrow as well. As I circulated and touched base with Michele, met Aleathia and Misti Rainwater-Lites, both poets who knock my lights out with their poems, I realized I’d forgotten all about my wife.
I found her surrounded by the bohemian poetess and her Charlie Manson-looking boyfriend. They were menacing my wife with their homemade poetry chapbooks. Twenty bucks a piece because of all the sparkles and glitter. My wife was reaching into her purse and not for her money, either.
“Okay,” I said. “We don’t need a repeat of the Rocky Top Café.”
“Would you like to buy…”
“Actually, I want two copies, but I gave my cash to that black clad man over at the bar with the hair combed up. See that guy with the pale ale? He said he’d go ahead and buy you out of what stock you got in that strangely Amish-looking little poetry wagon you’re pulling there.”
As they fucked off, I grabbed my wife’s hand and said “let’s go.”
“You just doomed your friend to have to fight off those poetry Moonies,” she said.
“He’s from San Francisco, he knows how to deal with those ragamuffins.”
I grabbed her hand, and we raced down the stairs and out of The Attic on Adams. We thought the worst of the night was over. It was not.
To be continued…
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
