Vo l . 10 N o . 2 women on the street so love to call heretics—we know God as well as any suit or set of golden robes. God is just misunderstood. God is there, it's just that no one's listening." "People are soul sick,” I said. “…the whole country is soul sick and dying because they don't see enough stars, don't walk enough, don't walk through the mountains and the forests, don't talk enough; to each other, to their kids, their wives—America has lost her way." I jumped at every chance to give some little speech like this. And I believed it to be true. But more than anything, I just liked to see people get all fired up. I dug stimulating conversation. Everybody had something to add, even Brian, Roland’s buddy and fellow classmate from the U.W. Brian was from L.A., clean cut; a handsome devil, and though I'd never seen or heard any of his writing, he said he was a writer and I guessed that if he said it, it must be true, or why would he be hanging out with this crazy group of fools. And then we all got over being hot and bothered and agreed that, yes, we all agreed. America was sick! And we'd laugh and pass the bottle, pass the pipe. We were out to set things straight, through the words of America’s new poets, the twenty something, thirty something hipsters who'd never gone away. The poets that were just lost to the world at large, missed by the media, passed over in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Not that you'd know it. Everything was happening. Ginsberg was still touring. Rhino Records had just released a bunch of Burroughs with rock music behind him. Jesse Bernstein had been dug up by Sub Pop. MTV was taking poetry and clipping it down to thirty second video snippets about the general, or sneakers, or condoms. Poetry was enjoying a comeback in America. Everything was. The economy was booming. The media was hungry to talk about anything and everything it could pass off as news. Hell, this trend we'd used to our own advantage. We had gotten quite friendly with several local reporters, who wrote about our mad events. "It's the Paris of fucking America!" Roland would say. And everywhere you went, there were hip little coffee shops popping up, cafes, breweries, boutiques. And every coffee house, every cafe, had new art on the walls every month. Most had, or at least had tried to have, the odd poetry reading. It seemed the youth of America had nothing better to do than sit around in coffee shops, smoking cigarettes and talking about the most terribly meaningless things under the sun, what a boring wonderful place in the universe was Seattle. We were bitter. We were a walking contradiction of ourselves. It was
111 our angle. We were having one hell of a good time, and we were getting some real writing done, though we saw the way it was going. America’s passion for development. And we hurt for America's wildernesses. Roland worked out of his apartment. His mad, bohemian apartment, with the futon bed on the floor, tapestries and strange artifacts filling every nook and cranny of his many bookcases. Turkish and East Indian incense burners. Charms from Indonesia. Japanese printing blocks. And on the walls, his career: from photographs of himself, taken with friends in the Peace Corps, to cartoons, drawings, writings from his own fertile imagination. Photographs of us, his friends, and letters, rejection notices, insults, praise, everything documenting his life as a writer, pasted and tacked upon his wall. Roland wrote for an environmental magazine, out of the East Coast somewhere. He lived in a world that might have been designed by Franz Kafka. Each month, a large package would arrive via UPS. You could tell when it was nearing the beginning of the month, or when he was broke. He would check the mail incessantly, sometimes three times a day, despite the fact that he knew nothing was coming. When the package finally did arrive, Roland would disappear into his apartment for a week, sometimes two. He'd stop coming around, stop calling, and when he answered the phone, he was short and didn't want to talk. "I've got to get some work done." It was luxurious work. I would have killed to have his job, to work from home, to set my own hours. He wrote for a living. But I'd come to find what he did was less like writing and more like annotating. In these packages, were dozens of magazines concerning the environment. There were membership magazines to Sierra Club, Greenpeace. And there were hard scientific journals, government reports regarding environmental impact studies of one sort of another. Reams and reams of all sorts of reading material, covering everything from apple farming in Washington, to dwindling zebra populations in East Africa. All this material came with post it notes concerning certain articles. These articles he was then to read, change about the language some, condense, then send back to the company in the same box, along with the original materials, back to from whence they'd came, so that they might publish said rewrites in their own magazine. For the first year or two that I knew Roland, he was quite secretive about what he did for a living. Then one day, I happened to be there when the package arrived. By now, we'd become quite close friends. And Roland said it was fine if I stayed and hung out, but I'd