Leonard Shumway’s first mistake was asking me to judge a poetry slam. Slam—where contestants pander to an audience that doesn’t read. Slam—teenage bravado and rants about social injustice. Slam—where all the poems sound the same and the guy who yells “fuck!” loudest wins. I hate poetry slams but I needed the money.
I loaded my Smith and Wesson 29 with jacketed hollow points and closed the cylinder. The air smelled of Hoppes #9 solvent and overhead lights reflected from its blued-steel barrel. Chekhov said that once you introduce a pistol, it has to go off. Fuck Chekhov! I’ve been carrying ever since that old lady pulled a rusty jackknife at an open mic and I haven’t shot anyone yet. Hell, just one look at my .44 magnum is enough to make a language poet bother somebody else. I holstered my revolver and covered it with a lime-green guayabera.
The audience was lined up for a night of exploitation by the time I got to the theater. Flashing my ID got me past the doorman and inside where I joined the judges in the front row. Shumway handed me a dry-erase tablet. Cindy Lockyear, a writing teacher at the community college, was the only judge I recognized. Rumor had it, she could match Econski drink for drink. Alcohol and bitterness had spoiled her looks. I guess, hanging out with Econski will do that to you. I didn’t know the other judges and didn’t want to. There was a woman in Birkenstocks who wore an amethyst necklace, a jock in a letter jacket, and a balding man in wire-rimmed glasses.
Of ten total points, I give five for performance and five for content. From the looks of the contestants, I’d be handing out a lot of fours and fives. I recognized only a few from local open mics. The rest were out-of-towners or writers with nothing worth sharing. The rules called for dropping judges’ high and low scores and averaging the rest. My presence here would be pointless.
As the crowd entered, someone from the projection booth played a recording of Traffic’s “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.” I flashed back to braless, hippie girls in all the concerts of my youth: King Crimson, Santana, Starship, and Jethro Tull. My good mood lasted until the first contestant took the stage. He was an old guy with a walker who moved slower than continental drift. Real or not, his disability gained the audience’s sympathy.
“I think that I shall never see/ a zeppelin lovely as a tree…”
The crowd went wild. Judges held up ten, ten, ten. I looked at my tablet. The rules stated contestants had to present original work, but that poem was “Trees” by Alfred Joyce Kilmer. Unless Mr. Kilmer was one-hundred-thirty-years old, the contestant wasn’t him. If I let cheating slide, I’d shaft contestants who followed the rules. I scribbled a zero and held up my tablet.
“Boo!”
Cindy Lockyear calibrated plagiarism against the audience’s enthusiasm and awarded an eight. The remaining contestants presented words with all the magic squeezed out, an hour of imposters pretending to be poems, cliches shouted with the false conviction of a sales pitch, not a metaphor in the bunch. It was like a bakery that used extract from a beaver’s butt instead of vanilla. I’d tasted the real thing, I knew the difference, and I was pissed.
Somehow, I’d made it to the semifinals without eating my revolver. Now all that stood between me and seventy bucks were three poets. Slammers have a term for me: the East German judge. Even though I was born in Akron, I wear that epithet with pride. I picked up my tablet.
I enjoyed the first finalist’s description of her relationship even less than when Natalie says, “We need to talk.” My score brought howls of rage from the crowd. Then something stunned me. A skinny guy with a ponytail recited a poem about a Frederic Remington painting. It was all there: the pounding hooves, creak of the leather saddle, smell of sweat and dust, and the horse’s legs suspended in mid-air like in Eadweard Muybridge’s photos.
“Ten!” I shot to my feet.
The theater was silent except for the rustle of candy wrappers. The judges were leaning over their tablets. Slowly they raised six, six, and six. Even Cindy Lockyear gave this masterpiece only an eight, the same score she’d given the plagiarist.
The final contestant had a physique like Pavarotti’s if the opera singer had gone off his diet. What he lacked in craft and originality, he made up for with a voice that was louder than a 747’s GE CF6 engine on takeoff. He mounted the stage, held the mic to his lips, and screamed, “FUCK!”
The audience rose as one to its feet as tens dropped like Nazi paratroopers from a Junkers ju-53. Bottles began to fly as I held up my zero. Soon the crowd broke up chairs and rushed the front row. I didn’t draw my revolver because fuck Chekhov. Besides, the back door offered me an easy escape and this was a duty-to-retreat state. Even if attacked by some thug, a prosecutor who never faced so much as an angry word could throw you in jail for defending yourself because you didn’t run away.
“I’m here for my seventy bucks.” I stared at the bald spot shaped like Antarctica on top of Shumway’s head.
“I’m docking your pay for the riot you caused,” he said.
That was his second mistake.
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception.