It's Open Mike night at the Exit Cafe. A tall narrow and steamy box with one glass wall and lousy ventilation. Like being trapped in a doughnut box with that stupid plastic window, only louder, since the doughnuts are all poets and wannabes slurping coffee and elbowing each other. I'm late, come straight from my painting class. Amy and David were there when it started though, and they forged my name on the list along with theirs. We all swore to read for the first time.

"It feels more like a sports bar than a literary crowd." I mutter to Amy and David. I was soon to learn how horribly accurate this was. Poetry, in the doughnut box, is a sport.

A big beefy man get up and makes a fist. I can see him picturing his audience there, being squeezed, molded like Fimo. And it works. They quiet and mold to his expectation as he sweeps that big hand... like it's a waldo glove running a robot line, they obey... As he orates, in a rotund florid oblate boom of a voice, I am seeing politics. In a doughnut box. And his pleasure in commanding his audience... I shiver as I watch his tiny, innocent political orgasm and realize this is the seed that Hitler grew from. That simple pleasure in being a big shot, moving a crowd...

I'm not saying a thing about what he read, you complain? That's intentional. Wow is it intentional. No, it wasn't bad, just irrelevant--to him too. The heart of his reading wasn't his art. That you could read for yourself. And you do, I'm sure. Read. But you won't get that fist. Did he write that poem because it had to be, or so he had something to read, a sort of latex glove of justification when he fisted us?

Sorry, edit that out for the mainstream market.

A little guy with a guitar gets up and sings about two stars that fall from the sky, like lovers. He sings in a high weird croon, like some rain-forest animal who wants to become a troubador. He ignores us completely. "Little clay gods, they mold us." he sings. It's marvelous, but very strange. I can't tell if this strangeness is an esthetic choice or because he doesn't know anything else. Maybe he's crazy, maybe he hears all of us barking like howler monkeys. I feel a judge in me saying "It can't be great, because nobody else sings like that. He must be merely eccentric."

Merely! MERELY? I am grateful to him for pointing out my portable plastic popularity judge. Hanging from my dashbrain... furry dice would be better.

Another poet, another guitar. Sings postmodern cut-and-paste songs, tuneless scanless songs, with thin limp wit like the beer here, dear. But it's impossible to laugh at the guy for his half-baked work. He's beaten us to it. By years. Self-referential savaging, the ultimate defense: "just kidding."

David gets up and delivers his ode to television. It comes out flat: without knowing David's erudition and crystalline prose, the piece's deliberate ad-jingle sound, mimicking the tube it mocks, isn't funny for the same reason the mad genius singer got only a wary approval. In the semi-literate jungle of the open mike, the audience just can't tell if David's banality is art or illiteracy. You have to reach a certain trust level before satire is possible. The experienced mikers establish this by talking directly to the audience, making fun of themselves (or a rival), showing they're normal before getting strange. People are pack animals; you don't want to be the only one laughing! Or, worse, the only one sincere.

Amy gets up. She reads a new one, a he-said-she-said dialog that's simple, universal, and quite funny. No raves, but a warm response--everyone in the room has been in one or both those roles, said those lines. Except me I mean. I've never been in a normal relationship--unless you count the one where I was battered, and we sure didn't talk like this. Like normal people. Sad, seeing a whole box of doughnuts laughing at something universal that doesn't apply to me. I'm outside their universe, a celibate celery (unsalaried) among the doughnuts and their wholes.

Sorry, whine that out. I mean line that out.

A tall old man stands up. I recognize him from an art-salon where he read some poems from his third or fourth collection. I thought they were okay; not brilliant, but solid and empathetic. He liked my dream-paintings, so he must be good, right?

He introduces himself, and ponderously thanks the cafe for existing. He wants to play a tape of himself reading a poem with a friend's improvised guitar backing. By the time he's done explaining this, he's used four of his five minutes. The MC warns him of this. He turns on the tape anyway. He has it at the wrong place, and he must fast-forward. His time's already over, as he starts the poem--about visiting Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bomb. Refuses to step down, says it's only a few minutes long, and the MC grits her teeth and lets him go on. The guitar backing is superfluous, mediocre. He could have just read the thing. Yet people sit still for it. Though I hear faint mutters of disgust at my table, we defer to him. His age? No, to his subject matter. This is his shield, as "just kidding" was the po-mo singer's. Though he's insulted us, hogged our time without asking... who dares to be the first to pull the plug on him, change the channel on Hiroshima? You run the risk that you've misread the angry crowd, that you're the only crass soul in this whole stuffy box who doesn't care about mass murder? He leaves at last, to no applause and sullen looks.

I'd call him a disaster, but... what if he got what he wanted? To test what he could get away with? To characterize us as uncaring philistines? To see himself as the lone hero, Daniel in the lion's den? Doughnuts with teeth.

I get up. I'm walking to the podium (four feet away) squeezing through beery shoulders, STILL TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT TO READ. I'm carrying three dreams, two written as stories, one as a poem. The cafe decides for me: the light is so bad at the podium that my printouts are almost illegible. I've only read one of the three aloud, ever, so that's the one I do.

Tune out the audience. Say the title: DEAD RIGHTS. Begin.

I suspect my prose will pass for poetry. I read slowly, emphasizing the rhythm. They get quiet fast. They laugh in the appropriate places. I tune this out too, and focus on the illegible words. I guess and edit on the fly. The subject is dying and being buried and coming back to life and finding the dead are a persecuted minority group and learning to pass and getting politicized and marching and picketing for... Dead Rights. It's a weird story, and I find I repeat more words aloud than I do in the text, for emphasis and clarity. I go slow, and no one complains. My stuff does work this way.

I finish slowly, with the chant, "Dead Rights. Dead Rights. Dead Rights." There's dead silence. I walk back to my seat. Applause! I gasp with relief. A blonde with a lion-mane and a lion-look in her fierce eye grins at me and gestures: thumbs up.

Afterward, in the cool San Francisco night wind, Amy David and I stand and chatter on and on about the reading. Really all we're saying could be edited down to two tiny sentences. "WE DID IT!" And "WE LIVED!"

What did I learn? I notice every reader, even me, took one of three paths. One: act. Pay attention to your audience and play to them; your writing is merely a script, secondary, dispensable, and you wrote it to have an excuse to ham here, not to be read. Two: ignore your audience and just read the piece, following its own rhythms, which may be... unspeakable. Three: combine the first two: try to stay true to your piece AND yet play to the audience.

I came away with a firm conclusion. Either extreme works, but don't mix them. Splitting your attention between the demands of your artistic creation and of some rowdy audience doesn't work. Moderation is not always a virtue.

Serve one master. You or the crowd. You can't serve both.

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