Having Lunch with and Almost Getting to Meet Mark Doty

Now that AQLF is over and done, I can get some writing done. I have ton’s of new books to read and lots of inspiration. It’s interesting though that through the whole festival the biggest slice of life event that stuck with me was something that happened after an event.


Getting to Have Lunch with and Almost Meeting Mark Doty

It didn’t start well, I was late getting out of the office and traffic sucked. Emory Unversity is currently undergoing what seems a complete rebuilding of itself and it took a while to find parking and wind my way through the construction sites. In an effort not to be too terribly late, I walked so quickly up the hill towards the quad my shin splints kicked in painfully, and I had to stop at the top of the hill, legs throbbing in revolt, and huffing and puffing, feeling my age. Once I found the student center, there were no signs pointing to the event, and I wandered around trying to find the room number by process of elimination but every hall that looked promising ended in a dead-end just a number or two off what I needed it to. Finally I found it.

The talk/lecture/workshop went well. It even resulted in a new piece I’d like to work up about the big chest freezer my parents kept in our back utility room. This was the big freezer chest that each fall my parents would mysteriously fill with meat in the middle of the night. They’d wait until I’d gone to sleep, so as not to have to explain that all those steaks, ribs, and hamburger, were all that were left of Buttercup, or Betsy or whatever my pet cow had been that year. They never did explain how little Betsy didn’t really go to live with “all the other cows” in a nice big pasture (except if you take it metaphorically). Instead she’d gone to the butcher and gotten a nail gun through the head and ended up being snuck into our ice chest at 2 a.m. a few days later. It’s a story all about the treachery of parents and the loss of childhood innocence -- But… that’s another story, for another time.

The workshop was well attended, standing room only. There were earnest students, fellow writers, faculty and administrators, and an assortment of other various and sundry characters (myself included). One shared that they’d suddenly realized how all the apartments they’d every lived in had never felt like home, one broke down in tears as he'd been reminded of his father. I tried not to be judgmental, but it was hard. Reminding myself just how much I and others can be so cruely judgmental, I chose to keep the whole Betsy being nail gunned and snuck into the freezer in the middle of the night... well I decided to keep that to myself. Fearing I might get those sad sympathetic eyes for someone who’s parents were obviously sadistic tyrants and had no concern for the deep scars they were inflicting on their sensitive son and the years of therapy they were driving him into. Though in the end it wasn’t so much that, as just the fear that talk of having a pet cow named buttercup on a tobacco farm, would just make me sound like such a damn redneck.

I thought I had to leave right after the event, I pardoned myself, so I could check back at the office, half expecting to be needed to go back. I was not all that keen on the big after event lunch though, not wanting to seem too desperate or too much like a hanger-onner. When I didn’t have to go back to the office though, it struck me – “why not go?”. I knew a good number of the people and would like to know some of the festival guests better, I’d actually been invited, so technically wasn't barging. I’d been at several events so far and had at least briefly met everyone but Mark Doty, and I figured we’d might get a chance to speak, but que sera, sera.

We made this long trek through the Emory campus, student center to the grassy quad over to the Emory Village area and Everybody’s pizza. I was put off a bit though, I always am by Emory. It reminds me so much of Wake Forest, another southern private school. The one I attended until the whole coming out, fight with the mom and step-dad, running away from home, being disinherited, having to leave school thing kicked in. I’m just reminded at Emory of that old Pre-Med, Organic Chemisty Major, taking Honors English student I used to be. Not that I’m complaining, but it just makes me confront all those alternative universes. The one here was the what if I had stayed at Wake, changed my major from Organic Chemistry to English, then I could have actually become one of these writers that teaches at one of these schools and attended all these festivals, but again que sera sera (thank you Doris For the mental soundtrack)

The walk was awkward, as are most walks with a group of friends, acquaintances, but mostly strangers can be. As we went along the group got stretched out, forcing you to choose a sub group. I tried miserably to carry on a conversation with Daphne Gottlieb, but it never got much past the “how do you like Atlanta? must be a big change from San Francisco” crap. Plus, I couldn’t stop staring at her breasts, I just couldn’t help it. Even as a gay man, I have to admire women who’s breasts seem to defy gravity. I couldn’t see a bra, but there had to have been some great feat of engineering at work there. Add the peek-a-boo tattoos, the plunging neckline, the cleavage it’s all pretty intimidating. I started feeling like a real sexist pig, though honest I wasn’t staring in any sort of lurid way, more just in admiration, like you’d stare at the great pyramids.

We finally made it to the restaurant “The big poets” all sort of clumped down at the end of the long table, all professorial and oblivious to the rest of us at the other end (coordinators, administrators, lesser poets). If it had actually been two tables, they’d have been at the “adult” table. The chosen few around Doty though did include though a young boy from Tennessee who was following Mark Doty around a bit like a puppy. He had admitted to us earlier how he’d come here just to meet Mark and found it hard to even talk in his presence, being so in awe of his poetic greatness. It was sweet. I was reminded how I really don’t work that hard to meet any of my heros and role models anymore. They always disappoint, never matching up to what you’ve inflated them to be in your mind, so it’s often just best to let them exist in this nebulous cloud of sublime godliness and enlightenment, than to find out that they’re for the most just mere mortals with a book award or two. This kid was not there yet though. He’d obviously read Mark’s works and somewhere along the lines felt it spoke to him (and I mean directly and only to him) that somehow they were soulmates, there was some inner connection, etc., etc. – like I said – Sweet.

I’m reminded in some biographies of Charles Bukowski, how after a few of his books had become successful that it wasn’t uncommon to find young girls camping out on the front porch. Girls who’d often driven across the country, all because they knew they’d found their soulmate, someone who truly understood them. He apparently found it amusing, and a great way to score some prime ass – now he was a real pig.

The lunch lasted a long time and the conversation was great, there were some really interesting people there, even at the child’s table. Someone even picked up the tab for everyone (always a plus). Then we were all on our own heading back to our respective vehicles.

I had one last chance to meet Mark Doty as we were leaving, but let it pass. Not that I was planning on being rude or anything, it just happened that way. I’d always remember it though, that lunch I had with Mark Doty and almost got to meet him.