Standing In Line For Forgiveness

The Problem.

I get to the SHOUT OUT late and the poets were already in the back, waiting patiently in the dark for me to arrive. I turn on the house, set up the stage, had a little problem with the amp and had to ask one of the musicians to help me fire it up. I could have done it in time, but time was a luxury that I had very little of. The minute that I walked in, I was bombarded with questions, and the major question that came at me over and over again was: "Is OBSIDIAN coming." You know...I just don't know.

After I got the stage set up for work, and the sign-up sheet circulating in the audience, I started the Open Mic. The SHOUT OUT was officially in full effect. The time now, Four Thirty PM. NOT FUCKING GOOD. We lost a half an hour of having people read. This is the major problem. There is becoming a full audience and not enough time for readers to read. The more people in the audience means the more time we have to have for them all to have a chance at bat. Something of a commodity when we only have two hours in the joint. We never believed that attendance would get this good, and today, we had more than standing room. Every chair was filled, drinks were being bought, people were enjoying themselves, even though we started late, the poets were gracious enough to be patient with us, and we just ran out of time. A jazz band was walking in just as we had something like five or six readers left. Five or six. We had a total attendance of Thirty Six. One of the larger crowds ever at the SHOUT OUT. Our feature, George, really packed the house.

But this is the problem, as I said before.

We have got to be out by six. Simple as that. We have to hit the road. And the poets love to read, so many go overtime, which takes a lot of time away at the end of the show. We were miffed when we had to close down and Frank Wood walked into the venue, ready to start his own form of harassment. The little gnome is a mean sonofabitch. Turn your back on him and he'll bash you across the skull with a pipe wrench. When we did close down, the jazz band's leader came in and went straight to OBSIDIAN, no doubt because he's the last one on the stage acting as host, and talked to him at length about allowing their band to come in while we still have the poets, allow the reading to go over into their time, and co-mingle the jazz and the reading together into one seamless show.

Hmmmm.

Now that would solve our time problem. That would also add more variety to the show, because there is nothing like jazz and poetry. It sounds like suddenly we have an elegant solution to a thorny problem. OBSIDIAN and the female promoter of the band are going to work out the details and then we'll try a few shows to see how it flies with the poets. It will also make for a pretty long day, which will take its toll on OBSIDIAN and myself. Four hours of poetry, music and comedy. You don't even have shit like that on television. Plus, if the SHOUT OUT grows any further, there will not be any room to have anyone in the venue. There is a maximum number of people that we can fit in the joint. It's as simple as that. Soon, there will be no room for us here. None. I think that with this new number of people, it might be beneficial to go back to Smith's Bar and Restaurant. It's big enough for the crowd, and it has a front area for stage space.

It would work nicely except for one problem. The owners are assholes. The only cool one there that manages the space, Lenny, is the only one that is the one with any common sense. The rest of those dumb fucks are just lucky children with fucking money. Dad and business partners can scrape together cash so that the kids can play businessman. Shit. I had to muscle my company from the ground up. From one client to nearly ten, all on the sweat of my partners. No dads with trust funds to be found.

Like the SHOUT OUT, which is growing in momen- tum. We have no money to buy out a space for ourselves and invite everyone for as long as we need for everyone to get a chance to read. But the road to such a place has not been found yet. Not impossible to find. Just hasn't been found yet.

The SHOUT OUT was mag- nificent, ending with a bang. We all filed outside and hung out in front of OTTO's for a little caucus, where we talked about everything before OBSIDIAN and I walked over to Kennedy's Fried chicken next door and had a good meal of fried chicken, and I had a bunch of sweet potato pies. My downfall on Saturdays, and my reward. We headed uptown to Madison Avenue Starbucks where we computed for a little while, until closing and then called it a night. OBSIDIAN is leaving town for a few days, leaving me alone for a week. He will not be able to get online, nor make a phone call to me. Hopefully he'll be back for the SHOUT OUT next week.

I head home the quick way. I take the Six train out of dodge, the Shuttle over to Times Square, and crawl on a wounded number Three up to Ninety Sixth street. It took so long that I felt half dead, like the train itself, when I got home. I stopped off and got a Subway Hero Sandwich for lunch tomorrow.

I stayed up to fuck around online until late, and then crawled into bed tired.

I'm tired.

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