Freeform Poetry / My Own Neverland Ranch

DATE: Monday, August 1, 2005
PLACES: Krieger's, Emma's pool
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Me, Peter, Roxana, Jason, Emma, Melinda, Paul


Another Monday at Krieger's, with a group of six friends and an uninvited guest we all used to work with at Pasta House, a white kitchen brother named Peter. Early twenties, decent looking, multicolored tattoos up and down each arm, and mentally fried from the drugs he took in his teen years.

Peter was a dishwasher at our restaurant for a brief period - he compulsively cleaned while off the clock, rode his bike to and from work and was fired for stalking one of our hostesses. Not stalking so much in the physical sense as leaving lengthy notes under her windshield about how he wanted to spend eternity with her and how her ass reminded him of a ripe strawberry.

Tonight Peter came up to Krieger's by himself, and he's latched onto my friend Roxana. Who went to high school with him and has always had that guilt complex about having to be nice to the ostracized people at the party. Roxana's like me, though - in these situations, she mines the bizarre one-liners and personal confessions for morbid humor in subsequent gossip sessions. I'll be sure to compare notes with her later.

For now the subject of most of our group's collective humor is the freeform poetry Peter is reading out loud to Roxana. A few minutes ago, he produced from his backpack a crumpled and folded-up batch of papers bearing typed-up verse. Even from a distance, I can tell there's no punctuation, no line breaks, no rhyme scheme and really no logic to the arrangement of Peter's words.

The funniest part is, Roxana can hear our remarks but Peter can't. She's in the position of having to keep a straight face and pretend she's interested in the poetry recital.

Meanwhile, Jason's telling everyone about the time he made up a bohemian poem on the spot at a coffeehouse's open mic night in Seattle. It was called "Oh Businessman," and it blamed every ill of society on people who wear suits and work nine-to-five jobs. He played it for humor, but apparently it got a standing ovation and beatniks were standing in line afterward to buy him double steamed-milk lattes.

I bring up an aspiring rapper/producer who used to wait tables with me. His name was Danny Diamond, his MC name Double-D, and he spent an hour one night at a party awkwardly trying to freestyle rhymes over some rap tracks that were playing in the background. Nearly all of the rhymes involved references to the Italian restaurant we worked at and the dishes we served, and he was serious as hell about it.

We spend a few minutes trading off Double D-type freestyles involving menu items. My best two are as follows:

"You're wearin' an expression that's kinda pallid /
Cause I told you your coupon's not valid /
On an unlimited-refill salad."

"Don't you talk down, don't you mock me /
Or you won't get your small Pasta con Broccoli."

--

For, I don't know, the eighth or ninth time this summer, the afterparty is in Emma's backyard. It's me, Jason, his girlfriend Melinda, Emma and another of her underage cousins. Last time we were joined by 13-year-old Rachel, the wannabe herpetologist; this time her 11-year-old brother Paul is hanging out way past his bedtime. Riding a skateboard around the concrete patio at 2:30 in the morning and shit.

Rachel and Paul's dad, Emma's Uncle Jerry, split with their mother sometime over the last year. Mom got the house; Uncle Jerry and Rachel and Paul moved in with Emma and her family.

The Keller house is a constant hotbed of activity in one form or another - with the young cousins around, Emma's parents are assured to never have to deal with empty nest syndrome. And, as a semi-frequent houseguest, I've benefited from the noticable spike in junk food and ice cream novelty treats since Uncle Jerry, Rachel and Paul moved in.

Not to mention, since the arrival of Uncle Jerry and children, the back yard pool area is also home to Jerry's hot tub, a five-seater with multiple jet settings and a wicked blue light underneath the surface. It's a welcome addition to our wee-hours summer afterparties.

Emma emerges from the house wearing her black one-piece bathing suit. Her cleavage extends four to five inches out of the suit, but otherwise the theme of the garment is modesty. An attached skirt covers the top half of Emma's thighs - as she constantly reminds the rest of us, "No one needs to see a fat girl in a two-piece."

She's brushed her hair out since we got home. Normally mid-back length and impossibly curly, right now Emma's black mane is frizzed out in a pyramid shape. I tell Emma she looks just like Roseanne Rosannadanna from the early seasons of "Saturday Night Live." She says that's what Uncle Jerry always tells her when she brushes her hair out, and the reference is still completely lost on her.

We sit around the pool, drinking cans of beer Jason and Melinda brought over in a well-stocked cooler, while the newest music station in St. Louis plays from a tiny boombox. As grating promos constantly remind us, the station is built around a "Whatever We Want" format, a random rotation with no song repeating in the same day.

It's a great idea, to trumpet the stylistic diversity of music, but the "Whatever We Want" format seems to extend to only rock and pop music put out by white people in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The station's playlist is hardly daring, especially in the age of the iPod.

Jason tells me the format originated in Nashville, where they actually do mingle country, heavy metal, R+B, pop and golden oldies on the same channel. In the midst of the conversation, The Eagles' "Desperado" starts playing - Emma happens to like it, but the rest of us groan. Jason declares, "If this song was a baby, I'd kick it in the stomach."

Until the sun comes up, we drink and traverse the pool. The 11-year-old cousin is on me like glue - I have this effect on kids sometimes, a kind of combination childlike demeanor mixed with the appearance of being intelligent and listening to what they have to say and actually caring about it and not talking down to them. Especially when I've been drinking all night.

Under sub-sober circumstances, I can be conversational partner to just about anyone. Cousin Paul seems to crave any form of social attention and validation thrown his way, even by a drunk-ass 27-year-old waiter.

"Looks like you made a new friend there," Jason says when we're finally pulling away from the street in front of the Keller house.

"Shit, that kid's an old friend," I reply. "He was my sidekick the entire afternoon last year on the fourth of July. I should start my own Neverland Ranch."