Author: Emily Carter

He didn’t want to strike me from the rolls,” says twenty-nine-year-old Becca Cillian of her father. “But he sort of had to … he was the bishop.” She’s a solidly built young woman with a wolf-like grin and curly hair that tumbles in an exuberant cascade down to her shoulders. The fact that her own father excommunicated her from her Mormon faith has not visibly affected Cillian’s sense of self. “Dreams of glory,” she says with a laugh when the photographer asks for an arm-wrestling rematch. We step out into the backyard of her girlfriend’s house with Lucinda Williams’ feisty trill following us out into the sunlight, and Cillian begins to demonstrate her combinations. Her feet, of course, demand attention, carving up the ground beneath her into instant squares almost faster than the eye can see. As she continues, her self-consciousness drops away, and she’s no longer even showing off.

“I like boxing because it exercises your mind; it’s a mental challenge. I’m jazzed up to go into the dark place of the unknown,” she says. But this morning, what’s evident is light. Her face glows and she laughs and laughs at how easily she could knock me down with her right cross. When she talks about her day job and career path, she zooms into a discourse on the divisions between social work and social activism that have appeared in the past century. As she talks, her face looks just like it does when she’s boxing, beaming with an intense enthusiasm, combined with the subtle swagger of knowing what one is talking about.

Cillian is one of a close group of clients and staff at the Uppercut Gym, housed in Northeast Minneapolis. Like almost everyone else there, she is startling in her individuality, and at the same time is typical of the city, the time, and the country in which she lives. In one sense she is anomalous: a female boxer and a lesbian of Mormon extraction. In another light, she couldn’t be more representative. A social-work-studying dyke living in South Minneapolis? Narrow it down, please; you could be talking about any of a hundred people. Someone who ran up against a grotesque interpretation of the phrase “moral values”? Again, all too typical.

The Uppercut is itself fairly typical in that it’s one of many small business ventures set up in a formerly industrial urban area—lampshade shops, Tao-Chi studios, cafes, and tiny art galleries—but it’s also undeniably unique. The physical space is nothing like the grubby back rooms called to mind by too many schmaltzy boxing films. There are no old guys stubbing out soggy cigar butts while cursing inventively. There is no pickle-juice smell from balled up sweat socks, no peeling hunter-green paint, no thugs hanging on the sidelines, no aura of desperate hope. The walls and ceilings of this former light-manufacturing warehouse are painted a clean, calm white, slightly softer than what you’d see at an upscale clothing store.

On this evening Cillian is working the concession counter, along with a few other clients and staff members. It’s a Golden Gloves night—the gym is hosting—and the match begins shortly. The Uppercut’s owner, Lisa Bauch, glides through the crowds and the noise. Some people, paradoxically, look most relaxed, even bemused, when they are most tightly focused. Bauch isn’t one of them. She’s like a pale-feathered raptor, her blue eyes glaring with concentration. Sarah Mickelson, Bauch’s second-in-command, swoops from one group of people to the next, attending to last-minute details. With her jaunty head kerchief and sleek physique, Mickelson could be any bike-riding, nutrition-conscious U of M graduate student. “I’m not what you’d call an athletic type,” she says. “I was against sports. I only did this to have something to do with my sister.” Her sister has since been distracted by motherhood, but Mickelson got hooked on the activity, on the gym, and, later, on the diversity of her clients. This evening, though, her anxiety is as evident as her competence. Uppercut students are boxing in almost every weight category tonight.

By seven thirty, the space is almost full and the crowd of parents and friends is starting to settle in. Sometimes Minneapolis seems lonely, as if everyone has disappeared. You drive down empty residential streets with dark windows hiding invisible residents. Where, you wonder, did everybody go? Tonight, it seems like everybody is here. African-Americans, Latinos, pale-skinned people of Northern European extraction, all jostling and teasing, yelling encouragement. The Golden Gloves officials lend an air of control with their perfect posture, strong arms, and silver hairdos that recall Elvis. These are representatives of the Upper Midwest division of what is one of the oldest amateur sports associations in the U.S., and they carry themselves with an air of understated importance.

Bauch is a secretary and assistant regional director in the Golden Gloves organization, and likely to move up through the ranks. It’s not unheard of—there are some older female judges—but it is unusual for a slight blonde woman who looks much younger than her age to maneuver herself into a position of authority. You might expect to see someone who looks like Bauch in the ring, but she’d be in a swimsuit, holding up one of those cards indicating what round the bout is in. She might be the subject of jocular speculation and dirty jokes. No one looks at her that way tonight, or if they do, they keep it to themselves. This business owner and coach is as much a figure of authority as any of the strapping older guys.

The first match is in the 112-pound category; two thirteen-year-olds, still scrawny, go gamely through their paces. Then the 125-pounders come up; the bloody towel makes its first appearance after one kid gets off a surprise right cross. By the time the 135-pounders take the ring, the action is getting more plausible, and you feel as if you are watching young athletes who really know what they’re doing. One of them, a fifteen-year-old who later introduces himself as Scot Barton, has the cherubic face of a prepubescent, tomboyish girl. Any confusion, however, is put to rest by the sight of his thickening arms and stocky, hair-covered legs. His hair falls in his eyes, and he moves with the sturdy grace of a juvenile mountain goat. His mother, his aunt, and a few friends are sitting up close, cheering. His coach touches his arm and looks intently at him after he gets a bloody lip. In an age-old gesture of invincibility, he nods that he’s OK.

No, Barton’s mother says later, the blood doesn’t bother her. Her other son has had two major knee reconstructions from playing soccer; this is much safer, she thinks. Barton doesn’t win his match this evening; he’s a little rusty. A year ago, his grandfather died. Boxing was what they did together. Everyone else is here tonight, though—his mother, his big brother with the bad knees, his friend, his friend’s pretty, sparky girlfriend. The moment he gets out of the ring, it’s teasing and flirting and horseplay all around.

The evening progresses and the guys get bigger, the footwork fancier. The white towels get bloodier. Bauch and Mickelson are coaching their respective students, leaning in close, speaking low, their hands miming the patting-down of invisible pillows, soothing the stress before it grows unruly. Like all of the coaches here, they communicate with a calm, almost parental manner. When Jeffery Ratcliff, Bauch’s student, loses by a narrow decision, she seems to have taken the hit herself. She leans into him, searching his eyes for signs of distress. “We’ve got to get him back here,” she says later. “We don’t want one loss to mess with his head.” It must be good, having someone so efficient looking out for your mental well-being.

Though not a total triumph for Uppercut (other gyms do better this particular evening), the night is nowhere near lost. Uppercut’s heavyweight, Alex Vasquez, dominates the ring, even agains
t the longer reach of his opponent, winning in an easy decision. A week later, before an evening sparring session, Vasquez and his cousin Alfonso, who also coaches at the gym, are still feeling good about the fight. Vasquez is stocky and pleasantly thick. In contrast, Alfonso is built like a panther or an anaconda, lithe but solid. These cousins found each other when Alex arrived in East St. Paul from Los Angeles, where he was getting in “too much gang trouble.” Do these two big, strong Latin dudes have any problem working out at a gym run by women? Do they mind having a tiny blonde boss?

“Not at all,” Alfonso says, while his cousin nods in agreement. “Lisa knows what she’s doing. That’s all I care about.” Alfonso is one of those guys with just enough felinity around the eyelashes to make him appealing to women, which may be why he seems so poised and comfortable talking about himself. He has just got off work at Target, where he is in employee relations. What he does there is mediate disagreements before they turn into conflicts. So yes, he does like to let off some steam in the evenings. Alex is a mortgage specialist and does most of his work on the phone. They regard boxing as a sport, primarily, a way to challenge themselves, rather than a way to prevail in a fight or even as self-defense. Clearly, that is not what boxing is about for these two gentlemen. Cillian had said earlier, “My favorite sport is engaging my brain.” Watching Alfonso and Alex spar, it becomes clear that they are using just as much conscious thought as built-in reflex.

At first glance, Adam Langino and Chandra Clarke seem like two very different specimens. Adam seems to be an almost archetypal boxing enthusiast—“I’m Italian,” he says. “So of course I watched the Rocky movies, and that inspired me.” Really? He’s not just yanking chains here? “Really,” says the twenty-three-year-old law student from Suffolk County, Long Island. Forty-three-year-old Chandra, on the other hand, was inspired by the pounds she lost after gastric bypass surgery. The initial weight-loss operation got her believing she could move her body around without passing out, and she’s now lost seventy pounds doing circuit training. She has long dreadlocks kept neat by a hair band, and works for a public management agency that oversees a housing project in Minneapolis. The up-and-coming young white lawyer and the African-American community organizer both cite the same thing when they talk about the gym. “Community,” they say. For both of them, the gym functions as a club, a social identity. It’s worked its way into the fabric of both their lives.

One of the youngest clients at the gym is also one of the fiercest. Seventeen-year-old Dagne Willey is up for a handful of college hockey scholarships. She’s being recruited by women’s teams, but right now she plays with the boys. She’s still wearing her glitter eye makeup from a school rally last night, but her hair is pulled back and the bulky sweatshirt she’s wearing makes her look small. She doesn’t look like a boy and she doesn’t look like a girl. She looks like an elf who could beat you up. Her face is a poreless mixture of youth and hope, shyness and self-confidence. All her life, she says, she’s been playing with the boys in the neighborhood. She claims she’s never felt excluded by those boys, or judged by the girls. Loath to talk about herself, she lights up like her coach Becca Cillian does when the subject turns to boxing. Of course it’s a great workout. If you go three minutes without getting totally winded, it means you’re in great shape, but what the kid really likes is the mental challenge. If you were simply to look at her, it would be alarming to imagine this little girl on a hockey rink getting cross-checked in the corners. But watching her box, she radiates a humble fearlessness and calm calculation—qualities every girl should take with her when she leaves home.

Cillian said she likes the way boxing gives meaning and gravity to her words. A few months ago, a drunk on the light rail put his hand on her thigh. “I looked him in the eye and calmly said, ‘Don’t touch me.’ But it was my knowledge of boxing that made that statement real.” She likes knowing her words aren’t just empty threats, but units of real meaning. Willey is getting a lucky start in whatever life she ends up living; her words are already welded to her actions.

My blood is just slightly tainted. I’ve never tried to hide my HIV-positive status, and I am, if anything, a little embarrassed by how useful I’ve found it. In my defense, one works with what is at hand—it’s not as if I sero-converted simply to get some good material. But then what? What can I say about blood that makes me more interesting than anybody else? Emily Carter on blood. Better than Emily Carter on drugs, I say.

But I have another alibi, or an excuse, or at least an inspiration. It all started with Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. In that movie, blood was beautiful, and so was death, and so, in fact, was everything else, including the title, The Blood of a Poet.

“The blood of a poet.” I want it—the phrase, not the blood—for myself. The glamorous and distant idea is, of course, that someone would actually allow her blood to be spilled for poetry, for beauty, for freedom from cruelty. I sit in my warm little office, my computer playing a radio station from Cape Verde, and I contemplate blood. Meanwhile, it’s being spilled on the floor.

That’s what the news reports said about the video of the terrorists terrorizing all those Russian schoolchildren and their parents and their teachers. Blood is clearly visible on the floor. You can see blood on the floor. For something that’s supposed to be kept on the inside, blood is certainly beautiful. It is scarlet, perhaps to call attention to itself. In nature, bright color is reserved for mating or warning. The little frog that looks like a jewel is often poisonous. Even, and especially, the birds know this. Bright colors tell you to stay away unless you want a painful death. There is no such warning on the human label. Terrorists, for example, look exactly like human beings. Their blood is no more a warning (or an invitation) than anyone else’s.

I watched the video of the schoolchildren and the blood on the floor because curiosity is stronger than choice. I’m no more of a ghoul than anyone else, and the desire to see what shouldn’t be seen is only human. Blood on the floor, hair on the walls, that’s the promise used to get my attention. You can see blood on the floor. The blood seeps into the tiny moats between the tiles, and threads its merry way along a maze-like path of cracks, just like it did that lunchtime twenty-five years ago, the trickle escaping from the gashed head of a boy who’d just thrown himself off the third-floor balcony and into the stairwell. Bright red blood running through the black and white marble.

I remember the face on Brenda, the school psychologist—frozen half-smile, whispered curse—before she bolted to the emergency phone. It was a small school for disturbed but talented adolescents and it didn’t take long to get the word that Brenda and the fallen boy—a Zappa-worshiping, Tuinal-gulping kid from an outlying suburb—had been having an affair. The whole school was crazy; I have no idea whether or not it was true. I just remember marveling at the fact that the boy was still, somehow, alive. The human body, that eggshell full of guts, amazed me with its strength. Even when the inside got outside, the way it was never supposed to do, that thing can take a licking and keep on ticking. It’s true, or we’d all know even more people who had driven themselves to death at an early age.

Anyway, that certainly was not the blood of a poet. It was the blood of a messed-up adolescent boy who, the story went, had just been dismissed by the beautiful older woman who no longer found his services necessary.

There’s actually not much that’s poetic about blood, a liquid medium in which basic processes occur. Respiration, mitosis, meiosis, whatever. It’s just not that exciting a substance, in the end. It fades, for one thing. All those handkerchiefs dipped in Dillinger’s blood were splashy red to start with and ten minutes later were nothing but faded brown, instantly sepia-tinged and historical. Blood fades as fast as the shock of seeing it. The first decapitation video, I was transfixed. I was about to see a human head removed from its body, to look at death. Naturally, the tawdry mess of it is what stays in the mind, the inept sawing, the face with no particular expression, as if surprised mid-thought. In the pornographic light of poor production, the blood looked almost black. That was only the first video. The others appeared, one after the other, in a toxic flurry. It has been a year of death presented like two fat hookers faking sex with each other for rent money. No elegant vampire would want that blackish, sticky, clotted substance.

The blood of a poet, in other words, oozes prose-like out of the body. It carries no potent charm; in the societal power structure, the poet is less significant than the plumber, who, at least, is a hero when he last-minute fixes the pipes everybody thought were going to be frozen all weekend. The blood of a poet is worth less than the blood of a plumber.

So, oh well. So be it. I am no poet, but I am poetic, and my blood carries a little something extra. Gugu Dlamini’s blood carried the same virus as mine. She, however, lived in South Africa in a place where your HIV status didn’t get you any grants like the one for HIV-positive writers I just applied for. What her HIV status got her, when she disclosed it, was stoned to death. Her blood was the same color as mine, but she herself made a brighter splash. She knew that in her town, disclosure meant death, but she disclosed. She was sicker of the denial than she was from the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus, the kind of sickness that makes one ready, almost eager, to have her own blood spilled. Which is what I call transgressive, which is what I call “edge.” I don’t know if I have it, and, God willing, I’ll never need to know. I can picture the red brushstroke painted by the first stone, however, a gash splitting her eyebrow like a signature. There was nothing to protect her. “Can’t you see,” the poet Akmatova exclaimed, “I am naked, vulnerable, while the rest of you have armor?” There was someone who was not afraid to let it spill. I like to think of her and Gugu in heaven, laughing, happy and drunk upon the blood of so-called saints.

Never mind those thin-lipped, controlling dog ladies with their utterly bizarre fashion sense. Alexander Vyatkin is the most serious trainer you are likely to come across in this overfed, underworked nation. He has no time or tolerance for people who let their dogs in the driver’s seat. Today for example, up at Red Star Kennel in Hudson, Wisconsin, he’s doing “bite work” with one of his Presa Canarios, and his corrections leave no doubt about who’s the big dog. When the eager, hundred-pound animal is released, she goes flying at the “agitator” like a rocket made of muscle. The agitator is also large; he is a well-muscled volunteer wearing a padded suit, who is yelling and slicing the air with what looks like a large wooden riding crop. Eighteen-month-old Jedda leaps on the agitator and clamps her teeth onto his arm. Dog and man go reeling around and around, the dog airborne, jaws locked, a ballet of will and aggression. The guy yells. He hits the dog with the stick; she couldn’t care less. This is thrilling but not amazing. How hard can it be to get a dog full of drive to bite? The surprise comes when, at a single word from Vyatkin, the dog drops the sleeve, turns around, and walks calmly back to his side. It’s like watching a freight train instantly reverse.

My saucer-eyed bulldog looks up at me, his body tense with desire to get in on the action. Someday, maybe. We’re still in basic obedience. In fact, it’s me who’s getting trained; I keep walking left instead of right, stumbling into my dog. I just want our heel-sit-stay to be a little more, uh, precise, and for him to stop chasing after mountain bikes.

Back in the Ukraine, Vyatkin won medals in the Russian Army’s canine unit. Here, he continues to exude a military mystique. Breeders, firemen, and animal control officers speak about him in glowing, almost worshipful tones. More to the point, they make up a big chunk of Red Star’s clients.

In America, trainers often come in two breeds that we’ll call Strange Lady and Soldier Guy. Vyatkin and his spouse, both Soldier Guys (though Irina is not a guy, and was never in the military), came here in 1993, partly to escape Kiev, a city only forty-five miles from Chernobyl. Once here, they began breeding Presa Canarios—large, sleek-coated, Mastiff-type dogs from the Canary Islands originally used as guardians and fighters. They now own one of America’s best-known kennels.

The Vyatkins are passionate about ethical breeding. If you sound thuggy on the phone, Alexander will quote you a puppy price of fifteen thousand dollars. He operates as if he were in Europe, where the business is regulated, and he favors tighter controls. Here—where a kind of mind-your-own-business libertarianism rules, especially at the more rustic end of the dog-breeding spectrum—Vyatkin has been told more than once to take his Commie ass back to Russia. This is ridiculous on several levels, not the least of which is that Vyatkin is a big believer in private property.

“When people come up and ask can they pet my dog, I say no.” He smiles devilishly. “If you want to pet a dog, buy your own dog and pet him.” This, oddly, is part of his sales talk. “People are always amazed at how my dogs come right to me in the dog park with all the other dogs and distractions… When I walk by my dogs, they follow me with their eyes, asking, ‘What can I do now, what do I do next, how can I please you?’ I am like a god to them.”

In the kennel, the worshippers of this god eagerly await his arrival. The door opens and a gamey canine smell saturates the air. The dogs do follow him, anticipating orders from their general. They’re the cream of the crop; while mastiffs like them are often slow, these dogs are fast, agile, and “drivey.” Red Star animals frequently win the Iron Dog Triathlon, an insane contest involving the same kind of endurance trials in the human version of Iron Man, with the added bite-work required of protection dogs. Imagine running two miles, jumping over barrels and through hoops, then having some monster in mutant hockey equipment jump out of the bushes to pick a fight with you.

Today Vyatkin is returning to its quarters a German Shepherd puppy he’s holding for a client. The puppy does not want to go; it stiffens its fluffy little body, splaying out its oversized paws in a show of passive resistance. Little puppy, you are about to incur the wrath of God. But Vyatkin just tugs a little bit on the leash, laughs at how the dog wants to stay outside with all the people, and picks him up. Even a deity can display tenderness toward his subjects, as long as everyone knows who is who.—Emily Carter

My neighbor Venus is the front person for a band called All the Pretty Horses. He or she sports a lovely pair of partridge-sized breasts that peek out over a leather bustier, a talent for fearsome guitar licks, and a vocal apparatus that effortlessly blends the power of Diamanda Galas with the decadence of David Bowie. The subject of Emily Goldberg’s upcoming documentary Venus Of Mars, my neighbor redefines notions of rebellion and where it comes from: It’s one thing to be a transsexual glam-goddess in Manhattan’s seen-it-all Meat Packing district, where trannies strut their stuff as a matter of course. It’s quite another to walk into Mill’s Fleet Farm in Oakdale at eight in the morning, wearing a lace-up midriff and standing six feet tall in platform boots. So when All the Pretty Horses went to New York City a few weeks ago to promote their new album (title: Dolls With Balls), I tagged along just to see the effect this inexplicable band would have on the city that’s supposedly been there and done that.

One thing is immediately obvious. For all its recent tragedies, all its supposed jadedness, New York has not seen everything. The Pretty Horses still make a strong visual impact, even on Third Avenue and 25th Street on a hazy summer afternoon. They look like a Jim Rose circus act without the irony. The back-up dancers’ flaming neck tattoos and Mohawks aren’t retro, and they aren’t kitsch. It’s hard to explain, but they’re just… plainly sincere. And it’s the sincerity more than anything else that shocks, whether it’s New York or Minneapolis.

We settled into the Carleton Arms, a hotel where every room is an art installation. From there we trudged over to Le Bar Bat, where the Horses were scheduled for a “showcase” gig. The promoter assured everyone that there would be plenty of “industry” present. The Horses were to headline. The show got underway, and the warm-up bands presented the usual neo-punk, garage-rock tropes—New York Dolls and Ramones references, young boys in black playing a half-step off time. It was good, but it’s the usual.

Then All the Pretty Horses took the stage. Venus and the band rocked the house in ways it has not been rocked before. It was practiced, professional and, unlike all the punk posturing, genuinely disturbing. What did all these little rock and roll kids make of a six-foot tall transsexual jumping off the stage and getting down with the guitar like a heavy metal god crossed with Marlene Dietrich? I walked up to one drop-jawed member of a band naughtily named Smack Darts and asked if he liked them.“I have to admit,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“What is that,” I asked, “when you see something you’ve never seen anything like before?”

“I guess…” He stops to think. “Originality.” I can’t help thinking an old-fashioned, punk-rock thought: Originality is always threatening, especially when paired with quality. And that’s as true on the edge of the country as it is in the middle.

The Fringe Festival arrives again, this year with more corporate sponsors than ever, and I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation and obligation. So many options, so much creativity, so many challenging theatrical experiences to seek out. As always, it’s the seeking that intimidates. Must I really drag my sporadically employed butt out of the house in all this heat and humidity to sit in some barely ventilated venue fanning myself with the program like a fat woman at a gospel meeting on the out chance that I will see something that’ll change my life? The answer’s yes, of course. But the question’s “why?” Why, just because something calls itself the Fringe should I believe it’s any more fresh and original than all the dazzling assertions of individuality I can find on the Internet? A whole world of original thought can be mine—from skate-chick rants to entire web rings devoted to a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. All I have to do is get out my credit card and pay Qwest (A WorldCom Subsidiary) $52.95 a month. Certainly, those pop-up adverts for car insurance and software security that litter my screen with all the graphic subtlety of fast-food wrappers are suspiciously slow to click off, but it’s a small price to pay for the world at my fingertips. Besides, there’s no real Fringe anymore, no alternative, just a bunch of various phenomena waiting to be absorbed and distributed at a reasonable price.

I use cynicism to disguise my laziness. The truth is that the Fringe is worth leaving the house for. In the first place, it’s live theater, and live theater, almost by definition, resists repackaging. Once it’s on video, DVD, CD-ROM, or cable TV, it’s no longer live. More important, however, is the question of whether there is still a fringe at all, and if so, will I find it at the Fringe Festival?

Of course the first Fringe Festival wasn’t called that. It happened in Scotland 56 years ago and might just as easily have been called “Eight Disgruntled Theatre Groups Get Turned Away From The Edinburgh Theatre Festival and Decide To Put on Their Own Damn Show.” By the next year the practice of staging dramas in unofficial venues began to attract attention and the term Fringe was coined by (who else?) a cultural critic. It’s no surprise that half a century later the phenomenon has grown up and solidified into a world-wide theatrical happening, taking place in cities all over the western hemisphere. Coca-Cola and Target banners flutter gaily in the press releases, and on all these flags, it’s the artists and performers who are the fringe.

Lest you think I’m one of those bitter, unsuccessful artistes who cry sell-out at any event not staged behind a grain silo at 2 a.m. in February, let me assure you I am an entirely different type of bitter, unsuccessful artiste. I think creativity should sell. I happen to think it should be fetching a much better price. If we artists are not going to get paid in dollars and sense, then we should be collecting the wages of fear. Being alternative, avant-garde, or simply on the Fringe, should carry with it the license to disturb and even enrage, not just the “mainstream” but your very own peer group. Alternative art of any kind ought to be scary, like rejection or death, especially when it’s funny. It should be something no one would dare turn into a beer commercial.

But speaking more broadly, what is Fringe anymore? I’m not sure, but I know it looks something like a guy I’ll call Capricorn the Poet. In 1982, when slamming was just something poets did with shots of whiskey, the open mike scene in the East Village was already churning it’s rusty gears into action. This was years before MTV showed up, before the phrase “spoken word” was coined, and before the poets themselves got suspiciously good-looking. Like verbal karaoke, everybody, lousy or excellent, got famous for exactly three and a half minutes before the proprietor’s egg-timer started buzzing and you were out of there. Naturally this democratic forum attracted a lot of furloughed mental patients of whom Capricorn the Poet was the most notable. For one thing he actually wrote metered verse. With his furious black-socketed eyes, a mop of dreaded-out unruly hair, and a precise Eastern European accent, he seemed to come from another century when poets thought they had the right to demand respect. He bellowed out his poems, giving each line the biblical weight he knew it deserved, his English antiquated and ornate, as if learned solely from books. His words themselves are unprintable in a non-fanzine context, consisting of violent, graphic smut that would make William Burroughs squeamish. His oratorical brio made it impossible to tune out. Feminists would leave the room in confusion, since you couldn’t really take a lunatic to task for commodifying women’s bodies. Even the young guys would get uncomfortable, all their bohemian posturing diminished before this literal onslaught. Capricorn, oblivious to audience response, would simply continue his philippic diatribe against aristocratic women who dared to tell their Lord and Master, Capricorn, that they were too good to have sex with donkeys for the purpose of increasing his onanistic delight, and I’m really giving you the lite version here. Finally some people wanted to 86 Capricorn from the open mike, but there were no grounds—he would always dismount the stage in a fit of verbal abuse when his time was called. “Sycophant, may you choke on a hemorrhoid!” was one of his tamer exclamations—but he would dismount. Capricorn stayed.

There are still open mikes in the East Village, though now everyone takes the subway, since the rents are too high for anyone who can even pronounce the word poetry. Miraculously, Capricorn is still there, arrogant, pompous, obscene, and insane as ever. Twenty years of what had to be hard times have not affected his confidence in the least, even though Russell Simmons is never going to put him on HBO.

It’s incredibly foolish to romanticize mental illness, which is no more an alternative to homogeny than pancreatic cancer. But when I think Fringe, when I think Alternative, I think of Capricorn’s enviable inability, or refusal, to understand his position. I am the choice, he seems to shout. It is you who are the Alternative! I am the flag, it’s you who are my fringe!

The Minnesota Fringe Festival takes place August 2-11 at various locations. See www.fringefestival.org.

Emily Carter is a Minneapolis author. Her collection of short stories, Glory Goes and Gets Some, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 2000.