“…it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there…” –Gertrude Stein“Smoke weed everyday.”–Alice B. Toklas
Dear Gertrude,
I don’t have to introduce myself to you. You already know everything there is to know about me. You have this insight because I’m communicating to you through the Ouija board of my mind. Often, people compare the mind to a machine or computer. John Locke referred to it as a tabula rasa. Ancient Greeks conceived of it as wax tablet. I reject those analogies. I prefer the notion of it as an occult instrument.
The day suicide bombers attacked the Bataclan, killing fans during an Eagles of Death Metal concert, I went to hang out with my friends Lenny and Lydia. Medical marijuana smoke fogged their living room. Lydia lazed on the sectional. A box lazed in her lap.
After sliding off its lid, Lydia pulled out the Ouija board and set it on the coffee table. Lenny and I sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other across the board. It was our investigative tool. We’d decided to use it to get to the bottom of things in France. Terrorists had already claimed responsibility for the attacks but nobody was left to describe what it had felt like to die during the siege and we wanted to know what it felt like to be enjoying an American band in Paris and then die. Was there a moment of existential anxiety before death? Does existential anxiety persist into the afterlife? How does one experience irony in the French afterlife? We would find out.
Lydia found a Sesame Street style program in French on YouTube. Children’s voices chanted simple sentences, simple enough for me to decipher after three years of French in Catholic high school.
Vanilla candles burned. Their flames provided the only light in the house.
The cat, Ugly, sat by the heater. She watched.
Lenny and I placed our fingers on the planchette.
“Bonjour,” I began. “French spirits, are you here?”
The planchette glided to
O…
U…
I.
Have you ever noticed that the French word for yes is IOU’s anagram?
“How many of there are you?” I asked.
The piece glided to 1.
“Ghost…” I said. “Are you gay?”
The planchette flew to YES.
“Ghost…are you single?”
The shade clumsily guided the planchette, spelling out that she was a lesbian bachelor “living” on a houseboat. After teasing us with that, she quit answering our questions.
Gertrude, please don’t be like that French lesbian ghost. Talk to me. I worship your face. I worship your hubris. Your hubris validates mine.
Dear Gertrude,
I am mostly Mexican but I’m also part Polish. Your face looked like my Polish great great grandma’s. I think of her as a babushka even though that’s a Russian thing. I think of you as a babutchka since you seem maternal and paternal at the same time.
Dear Gertrude,
The French are nuts. A French woman was the first patient in cosmetic history to receive a partial face transplant. The woman had tried to commit suicide and while unconscious, her Labrador Retriever ate some of her. To fix her, doctors sewed on a new face that had belonged to a woman who had killed herself.
That is so French.
I watched the suicide survivor appear on TV wearing the suicide victim. She sat at a table, speaking into a microphone, smoking. That couldn’t have been good for her new face. Which was somebody else’s old face. Shabby chic. It seems very French to get a new face sewn on and then ruin it with cigarettes. So cavalier. So French.
Dear Gertrude,
I’m going to put my name inside you. Gurbtrude.
Dear Gertrude,
A Rosie O’Donnell is a Rosie O’Donnell is a Rosie O’Donnell is a Rosie O’Donnell.
Dear Gertrude,
Here is a text exchange about you.
Me to a lover
Who was the
Last person to
Fist me:
There’s no tender
button emoji.
The fister’s reply:
I ♥ this text.
Texts are somehow
perfect for reaching
the tender buttons.
Dear Gertrude,
If your middle name was Pendeja, your initials would be GPS.
Dear Gertrude,
Pendeja is the feminine form of pendejo. It’s used to mean dummy and it’s pretty harsh. Although it’s used to communicate how idiotically a person is behaving, what it actually means is pube.
Dear Gertrude,
In Spanish, your name is Gertrudis. That reminds me of clitoris.
Dear Gertrude,
You wrote, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.”
You are such a fucking snob.
So am I.
Dear Gertrude,
I hate the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Dear Gertrude,
My heart wears a beret. Here’s why.
When I was little, before my brother and sister were born, before I knew how to read, before I could walk, before everything, my parents took me to McDonald’s.
Mom and I watched Dad order our food and carry it over. He set our tray down in the middle of our table, and before any many, woman, or child could, French fries seduced me. They smelled perfect. I lunged at them. I had to. I wanted them. My tiny fingers grabbed. They ripped fries from their sack and made a fist around them. Steam curled. Grease burned my palm. I wailed. I moaned, “French fry!” In my mind, French fry and Joan of Arc are inseparable.
“Let go!” screamed Dad. He reached to rip the fries out of my fist. I moaned, “French fry!” and brought my fist close to my heart.
I was willing to tolerate pain for possession.
I wailed French fry before I said mother, father, or anything else that mattered. French fry was my first word. That is so American. McDonald’s is my hometown. Ronald McDonald is my president. I speak French. Anyone who orders fries in America does.
Dear Gertrude,
There is a horrible place named HomeTown Buffet. I went there on Mother’s Day with my grandmother.
She devoured four plates of mashed potatoes and meatloaf before making her final trip back to the buffet. She returned with a plate full of fried chicken. She shrouded a breast, a wing, and a thigh in white napkins and shoved them in her purse. My wife stared as fowl disappeared. Realizing she was being watched, my grandmother quit meat packing. She made eye contact with my wife. She still had some drumsticks left to deal with.
In a tone that suggested that the obvious required explanation, my grandmother said, “Its for the dogs.” My grandmother is both Mexican and dead. Someday I will be part-Mexican and dead.
Next door to HomeTown Buffet stands another buffet, Souplantation. I like eating there because there are a lot of fresh vegetables but I find its antebellum name troubling. I steal their apples and muffins like my mom taught me to. I never steal meat or soup. I hate soup anyways. I prefer a meal you can chew.
Dear Gertrude,
What meat do you carry in your purse?
Dear Gertrude,
There isn’t a larger point to this. That’s what makes talking to you fun. I can tell you whatever. When I was growing up, my mom wouldn’t let me answer “whatever.” She thought that was very rude and very American.
For example, if she were to have asked me, «¿Quieres espagueti para la comida?» and I was to have answered, “Whatever,” she would’ve gotten pissed. She never slapped me for answering “whatever.” My mom only attacked me once, when I told her that when it came to Nietzsche, he was right about god. I guess she did also attack me when I screamed at her that when I was fourteen, during a blackout, a boy raped me and took my underwear.
We were sitting on my bed, sharing the underwear detail triggered the hyperventilation, and I didn’t even see her hand. I just felt it smack my face.
It cured my hyperventilation.
Calmly, I asked her, “Why did you hit me?”
“So that you would calm down,” she answered in Spanish.
Mom usually speaks to me in Spanish.
I answer in English.
We have a bilingual relationship.
Dear Gertrude,
Whatever. Whatevs.
Dear Gertrude,
The rudest thing I ever did was thread erect needles onto a man’s chair. I was ten. Once he sat down, I realized that perhaps I’d made a mistake.
Dear Gertrude,
Your name has rude in it.
Dear Gertrude,
This isn’t an epistolary novel. I learned about epistolary novels in high school. There’s something very urinary about the word epistolary. It makes me think of the color yellow. The first book I heard described as epistolary was Dracula. In high school, I really liked the book Griffin and Sabine. It wasn’t just epistolary, it had actual envelopes in it that you could open and tease letters out of and unfold and read. It felt voyeuristic to participate in its world. In college, I read my roommate’s mail. I steamed it open using a tea kettle. When I was finished, I glued the envelopes back shut and put them back on the shelf where I’d found them. Reading other people’s mail, especially when it comes from prison, is one of the most thrilling things in the world. So is vandalizing the vehicles of Pro-Life activists.
Dear Gertrude,
Sometimes I think my gender is coffee. Sometimes I think my gender is art. Sometimes I think my gender is California.
Dear Gertrude,
I first read your stuff in college.
I hated it.
Dear Gertrude,
I used to watch this TV show called In Living Color. It was an urban sketch comedy show and one of the recurring sketches involved Blaine and Antoine, two black fags who reviewed movies from a “men’s point of view.” Their show was called Men on Film. Any time they reviewed a movie with muscle bound guys, they loved it. Antoine described Deliverance as a film about love and camping. Blaine used two words to describe movies he loved: Scrum. Shuss.
Anytime a movie featured women, Blaine and Antoine chorused, “Hated it!”
Anytime a movie featured lots of women, they chorused, “Double hated it!”
Gertrude Stein, that’s how I felt about your work when I first read it.
Double hated it.
It’s so filled with the presence of women.
Dear Gertrude,
I imagine that there’s a graveyard for unanswered text messages in outer space. Letters float through it. Most of the letters are Ws, Ys, and Ds. D is shorthand for dick. My gynecologist told me I have a vitamin D deficiency.
Dear Gertrude,
You wrote that there is no there there about your real home town, Oakland.
I lived there once, in an apartment by a gay bar called the White Horse.
I met my wife at the White Horse. She was a white butch and she bought me a bottle of Budweiser. I sipped it and looked at her. Over techno music, she screamed, “Are you Mexican?”
“Yes!” I screamed back.
She screamed, “I love Selena!”
Usually, when people say stuff like that to me, I want to kill them. Since I was sexually attracted to her, I let it slide. We danced to techno music. She took me for a spin on her motorcycle. We moved in together.
Pink carpeted our apartment. Our ceiling was slanted. From our front balcony, we could see the feminist bookstore across the street. I got in trouble there. At the front counter, I asked an employee, “You guys have any bell hooks?”
The employee glanced to her right. Then, she glanced to her left.
She growled, and I mean growled, “I don’t see any guys around here.”
She wouldn’t answer my question until I castrated it.
Dear Gertrude,
My girlfriend was asleep. Larry was over. We had the Ouija between us. We sat on the pink carpet. We touched the movable piece.
Larry said, “Dad, I miss you.”
I felt sad. To me, we were playing a game. To Larry, this was real.
Dear Gertrude,
In my third grade classroom, a framed poster of The Starry Night hung by the door. I didn’t know Van Gogh had painted it. I thought maybe an amateur, like my grandma, had painted it. When I was bored, I’d stare at it and think, “I could do better.”
Which is not to say that I think I’m better than you. I do, however, recreationally rewrite your work. I also have my own interpretation of your work. For example, I believe your phrase a spectacle and nothing strange is about my gay cousin Sergio. I believe that A RED STAMP which goes if lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not necessary at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue is about white people. I believe that a sad size a size that is not sad is blue as every bit of blue is precocious is about Viagra.
In the beginning of the FOOD section of Tender Buttons, there’s sort of a table of contents of all the things you write about: ROASTBEEF; MUTTON; BREAKFAST; SUGAR; CRANBERRIES; MILK; EGGS; APPLE; TAILS; LUNCH; CUPS; RHUBARB; SINGLE; FISH; CAKE; CUSTARD; POTATOES; ASPARAGUS; BUTTER; END OF SUMMER; SAUSAGES; CELERY; VEAL; VEGETABLE; COOKING; CHICKEN; PASTRY; CREAM; CUCUMBER; DINNER; DINING; EATING; SALAD; SAUCE; SALMON; ORANGE; COCOA; AND CLEAR SOUP AND ORANGES AND OAT-MEAL; SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE; A CENTRE IN A TABLE.
My version goes: RANCH DRESSING; TORTILLAS; CAPTAIN CRUNCH; LEAN CUISINE; PAN DULCE; EATING OVER THE SINK; NON-DAIRY CREAMER; COFFEE; COFFEE; COFFEE; SLEEP-EATING WHILE ON AMBIEN SORT OF ANOREXIC; ALKA SELTZER; CORN DOGS; BLOOD ORANGES; PEANUT BUTTER TRAIL MIX; PLAIN YOGURT; SHOPLIFTING FROM WHOLE FOODS; ASSPARAGUS; LITE ICE CREAM; BUTTER; CHOCOLATE-FILLED CROISSANT; HEIRLOOM TOMATOES; ORGANIC PINK LADIES; RAISINETTES; FOOD FIGHTS; I HATE SOUP.
Gertrude, have you heard of bibliomancy? It’s a form of divination where you ask a question of the universe and then find the answer buried in the Bible. The poetry form of it is called rhapsodomancy. I used rhapsodomancy to answer a question. I asked, “Should I get breast implants?” and I opened TENDER BUTTONS. Guess which poem I opened to? CUPS. I read a single example of excellence is in the meat and a cup is neglected by being full of size. I took this as a yes to my question so when people ask if I got breast implants I say yes. When they ask why, I answer, “Poetry.”
I might be crazy.
Here is a rewrite I did of your poem ASPARAGUS.
ASSPARAGUS
Assparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. You pee and it smells interesting. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather we weather wet.
Your version is more literary but my version is more fun. It’s hard to be fun and literary. But it’s also the best.
You summarize my eating habits with your poem SALAD. It is a winning cake.
In my copy of TENDER BUTTONS, I wrote SH next to the title of the third section of the book, ROOMS.
Some people like to do drugs before they write. I’m not really into that.
Dear Gertrude,
I think I would’ve made a good heroin addict but I feel like it’s too late for that.
