Excerpt from "Sincerity"

Part 1: The Dream

It’s Friday night and I’m on the Hogwarts Express into Brooklyn. I signed up for a poetry open mic. The train is full of people who express themselves through their clothing. Even worse,  it seems, their aim is to appear interesting. I’m an ass and assume none of them are. I dislike  playing board games with adults for similar reasons. Games are for people who have nothing to  talk about. Plus, why would I want to learn more rules while boozing, aren’t they what the booze  is trying to get rid of? Not for me. When it’s hot out, like it is today, I want cold beer, a few  uninterrupted rants, and synthetic material. I don’t need decorations. UA now sits atop my heart  where it once read U.S. ARMY, though there’s hardly a beat under this Under Armour™.

I jump off the L-train and arrive at the venue, which is the entire second floor of a  remodeled brownstone. I’m guessing the crowd can’t be too anti-establishment with digs like  these, which is good, but it might also mean they’re rich, which might be worse. Rich poets only  mattered when the rest of us couldn’t read. All the artists in Brooklyn pretend to be poor. Only  rich people think being poor is cool. Inside, I see an impromptu bar which I immediately make  for but hesitate. This is my first time doing this sort of thing, I’ll booze after. I’ll have a coffee instead.

I make a joke about being the DD tonight, which the woman working doesn’t get or find funny.

“How do you want it?” she says.

“Black,” I reply, resisting the urge to make another joke for fear of strike two. Lewis was black but his insides weren’t, which I had to hold for almost twenty minutes until the medic came but it was too late. You don’t want to put intestines back inside someone once they’ve come out for fear of contamination, so we just sat there until it was just me sitting there. Lewis  liked the army, he’d say, because we don’t have a race problem, everyone is treated like they’re black, which he heard from somewhere else. I told him it’s the same reason we don’t have a gay  problem, because we all are, which I heard from somewhere else. A boring paper I had to read  for school called that “homoeroticism.” We just called it being in the Army. I read that Melville was only on a boat eighteen months and then jumped ship. Then the guy goes off and  writes a thousand pages. Writers.

I take my coffee and find a seat, it’s a good one. I have a clear path and line of sight to  the entrance/exit which I like to keep an eye on in case an active shooter or a beautiful woman  walks in. Both excite me and make me think of death.

It looks like we’re starting soon, and I see that the man in charge is a man. He walked to  the podium, introduced himself as our host, made some quips, and said we’ll be live in five.  According to him, the school he’s a professor at sucks. He doesn’t support its lack of support for this, and he stands against their stance on that. I think he’s too old for the too-cool-for-school act. He has a group of young attractive women following him around whom I’d imagine still believe  poetry is important. I think they’re graduate students and I think he’s slept with one or two of  them given the varying amounts of attention and eye contact he makes or doesn’t. Poor girls. In their late twenties, hopefully sooner, they’ll come to realize what  losers the older men they dated were. He’s an academic—at least waste time with an asshole who  can buy you stuff. I’m insanely jealous of him. I want to be someone’s regret, but I can’t stand  the thought of being naked and alone with anyone right now.

“I’m just really nervous. I feel like I’m going to look stupid,” a man sitting at the table to  the left of me says to said table.

“No one is ever paying attention to anyone except themselves. Except me.” I say,  imperceptibly, facing away, and under my breath.

“Don’t worry, you already do,” another man at his table says to him with a smile. He’s a good friend. “But seriously, just read off the paper and it’ll be done before you know it.”

“Yeah, I know. I just have really bad anxiety,” the first man says, as if the crippling  uncertainty of existence is a diagnosis, that reality, its chaos and indifference to our will, is  something exclusive or special to himself. It’s called being alive, brother. I think anxiety is a  form of narcissism or entitlement at the very least. It’s not only silly but selfish to overly worry  whether things will work out for you because it operates under the assumption that they should in  the first place. Why should your schemes and fantasies, which are in constant competition with  everyone else’s, triumph? It’s an inflated ego, I think. Relax, mate. You’ve got nothing to lose. Actually, I think it’s these damn phones. We spend half our lives on these little fuckers now. You cannot tell me that a single-user experience which allows us to cruise time and space as faceless  omnipotent avatars on catalysts that have had billions dumped into them so that they’re “user friendly” and keep us glued, does not make this reality harder. Basically, you spend half your  day as a tyrant god and then have to come back to this, real reality, the least user-friendly  experience of all, where all the other users aren’t you. Maybe they were right this whole time: "Don’t sit so close to the TV, you’ll go blind.” But I think I’m talking to myself again. I look  down at my shaking hands. I got the A too.

The table on the other side of me is a group of women and they’re talking about men. I  can’t make out much, but I get the gist. If they only really knew what beasts they walk amongst, how twenty-first century society and its modern workplace is propped up by the not so nascent  but universal male addiction to porn, feminism’s unsung yet true champion. Did they really think  we changed or learned anything in the last two decades? No, we just got off before work, which  no harm to anyone (but ourselves). Your coworker isn’t an ally, he’s seen more tits than Genghis  Khan. That’s what the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was about, busting a nut… ain’t  that strange at all. Perverts, the whole lot of us. At least the beasts have a serum now.

The man in charge comes to the podium and after a few more quips calls my name, which  I don’t like coming out of his mouth, which is odd for me. Someone in a movie said “cellar  door” is regarded as one of the most phonetically beautiful phrases in the English language. Not to me.  The most phonetically beautiful phrase to me is my name. And that’s in any language. Besides, most words are just convoluted ways  of saying my name anyways.

Me and my piece of paper head to the podium. I look out into the faceless crowd. I  introduce myself once more and begin:

“This first poem is about online shopping:

‘I ordered a samurai sword on Amazon

Now I dream of home invasion

I hope he doesn’t have hepatitis

I smear his blood across my brow anyways

Arigato.’”

I briefly look up then back down.

“‘Everything is delivery these days

Amazon brings our groceries

Drones drop our bombs

Except tonight:

It’s not delivery

It’s DiGiorno.’

“I’m 32,” I say, “in college, and I wrote this on the bus.

‘I still feel like a kid

Took the crosstown to school the other day

A yellow bus full of kids pulled next to me at the light

We looked at each other through the windows

I flicked them off.’

“This next one is called Calligraphy.

‘I want to draw beautiful sentences

Writing them is too hard

Oops

I’m hanging from the pull-up bar again

Sorry, baby

It’s monkey business.’

“This one doesn’t have a title, either, but it’s about the importance of compromise in  relationships,” I say, and read on.

“‘I like to do it with the lights on

She likes it with them off

Now we use a strobe light.’”

What the fuck are these? I don’t remember writing any of this. Sadly, I know no one else  could have. I bet if I was taller or had a massive hog I’d talk a lot less. I wouldn’t be doing this, I

know that.

“And this is Calligraphy pt. 2.

‘I tried watching Planet of the Apes

Couldn’t do it

Too many monkeys

Which is odd for me.’

I chuckle, the only one it seems, and read on. “This next poem is called Fragility:

‘These intelligent women

They drive me up a wall

What floor?

Boner.’”

“Ape!” I hear a woman cry from the sea before me. Given my recently disclosed affinity  for primates, I mistake it for a compliment and continue.

“‘I bought a Kindle so I can read on the train without lugging around a book I like that no one can see what I’m reading

I used to worry about being judged for reading Franzen

Now I read smut.’

“And my last poem is about getting older.

‘I find myself doing things because I know it will be the last time,

often things we did as kids

The other night I watched Thumbelina, I wasn’t even stoned

Holy shit, this is racist

I still like the frog with big titties

The movie made me very sad

Sad that my little sister will die one day

Goodbye, Thumbelina.’”

Something small and red whizzes past my head. Then another. There’s a loud splat on the  wall behind me. I duck behind the podium. Oh my god, tomatoes, they’re throwing tomatoes at  me! I peek up from behind the podium and see a wall of red coming my way. I duck back down,  my back to the podium, which is now being slammed with tomatoes. Fuck, they’ve got me  pinned down. A tomato rolls next to me. It’s not a tomato, it’s a grenade! And this ain’t  Brooklyn! I jump left to a nearby table which I flip over for cover and crouch behind. I’m  somehow not hit in the process. Lying on the ground next to me is an M4, just like the one I used  to have. I shoulder the rifle and ensure there’s ammunition in the magazine and one in the  chamber.

“Let’s party,” I yell. I think of the WW2 propaganda poster I have hanging in my  bedroom. It’s the only thing left from my great grandfather. He killed someone on a plane in the  ’60s and died in prison before I was born. My family doesn’t talk about him, but I know he saw some shit in The Pacific. My grandpa Rick was sad when I enlisted; “It’s not going there, it’s  coming back home,” he’d repeat. He was a coward and ducked Vietnam. Not me. Pour it on,  motherfucker. I spin up from behind the table and start shooting. After a few shots I can tell  something is wrong.

“Fuck!” I scream. I’m shooting blanks.

“Vaughn!” someone yells.

I spin back around and get down, safe behind the table, which is getting pelted with effective  tomato fire. Sitting next to me, legs out, hands holding his stomach, is my old team leader.

“Sergeant Wutzhisnutz?! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Hell.” Is this  Hell? I peek around the table quickly to look at the crowd. Can’t be, too many women. Is this a  dream? Are they my subconscious? I look around again but don’t see Leonardo DiCaprio.  Shame, I liked that movie.

Before Sergeant Dan Wutzhisnutz can answer I yell, “Sarge! you’re hit! Medic!” There’s  red leaking from behind his hands.

“Relax, Vaughn,” he says, “it’s tomato juice.”

I stick a finger inside him and then bring it to my mouth. He’s right. Needs ice. “Dan, what the fuck is going on? I ask. “We’re taking heavy fire.”

“It’s your poetry, kid,” he says.

“Shit, I knew I should’ve called it  ‘My Fragility.’ Or was it the thing about the frog?”

“It’s not that,” he says, interrupting me. “It’s not what you’re saying—” he now looks like  he’s in pain—“it’s what you’re not saying.”

“No riddles, Dan. This table is about to give,” I say.

“Art should be honest; it should tell the truth.”

“But I did! Besides, I don’t know if I even believe in the truth anymore. My professor  said that everything is just a story, that there is no ‘there’ there.”

“Bullshit!” he yells as he grabs me by the collar. “How the fuck would they know if  there’s a ‘there’ there? They haven't been anywhere!”

He lets go of me and grabs his stomach again.

“Sarge, that ain’t tomato juice,” I say.

“Look, Vaughn, forget the truth. It’s about being sin…”

But before he could finish a tomato or a grenade rolled between the two of us.

✽ ✽ ✽

Trevor Shultz is a U.S. Army veteran (2010-2014) who deployed three times to Afghanistan as an infantryman in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He is a stand-up comedian, writer, and poet. Originally from Florida, he now lives in NYC with his dog, Dagny, who can talk when featured in his fiction, which is often. Following his service, he spent nearly a decade lost but has found his new home in the arts.