Saturday, February 1, 2014

Tucker F. Katonah! circa 1990


I was speaking to Dino Andersen - whom I used to see on Sundays at the cafĂ© on Prospect Avenue where he would drink endless cups of coffee until a white sheen gathered around the corners of his mouth - of the Milwaukee poet John Koethe. I had recently read that with his lucrative position as a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Koethe would occasionally take a flight to Paris just to have dinner and then return home. I told Dino, who had been writing art limericks for many years and had amassed several thousand of them, that it seemed as if John Koethe had realized his dreams and that it was for this reason that his poetry was ethereal, a trail of words that led far into realms of consciousness that felt like visions of mist. Dano responded that he did not believe that Koethe had realized his dreams, but that he rather had “solved” them. Koethe had solved his dreams.

Koethe wrote:

“There seems to be, about certain lives,
A vague, violent frame, an imperceptible
Halo of uncertainty, diffidence and taste
Worn like a private name that only God knows,
Echoing what it hides, that floats above a bottomless
Anxiety that underlies their aura of remote calm.”

---

I observed Tucker Katonah! for some time before I decided to introduce myself and talk to him. He cut a strange figure: knickers, a burgundy knit cap encircled with flowers, a teal cardigan sweater and toting a carpet bag suitcase, also teal with an old-fashioned floral design. He would show up at the Moulton Union, though he was not a student, ensconce himself at a table and write. He would later pen the phrase, “He died writing.”

I came upon him writing his thoughts into a Star Wars-themed notebook and told him my name, shaking his hand. He acted as if he knew that we knew we would eventually meet, that there was some wavering beam of light emanating from each of us which sought the other. This I felt, also.

The writing he did was his distillation of the reading he had done for years, including time “starving in the mountains in Colorado,” with his girlfriend Wendy. He no longer read and told me he was “digesting” all of those books: James Joyce and Richard Ellman’s biography of him, Kerouac, though he declared resolutely to Bill the bass player that he had tried and failed to read The Subterraneans multiple times, as Bill asserted the book’s wonders. Tucker’s distillations took the form of crystalline aphorisms which formed the basis for his songs and also his poetry hand stamps with which we peppered Portland, Maine.

"Living in these hard times
Learning to play the guitar
Living in these hard times
Wanna be a wannabe
Living in these hard times"


Liking the same woman was inevitable. This happens regularly among close friends: we like the same music, the same poems, the same women. Calendar Finch worked the breakfast shift at the downtown Portland Holiday Inn. Tucker chose to like her from a distance. I went to her breakfast shift where the playful waiter named Elvis tried unsuccessfully to hit on her. She was happy to see me at my table. We went to her house later and kissed listening to the Ciccone Youth album by Sonic Youth.

Tucker showed a vague jealousy – it wasn’t expressed directly to me, but was rather communicated via silences and wry comments: How was it over at Calendar’s last night? It was a woman that brought Tucker from New York City to Brunswick, Maine (population 45,000).  Four years after high school graduation, at age 22, the memory of Pamela Perry’s dark hair, Mediterranean features, and cool playful bearing surged into his mind, compelling him to purchase the Greyhound bus ticket. He appeared at the door of her room in the Grateful Dead co-ed frat house and announced himself and his intentions. Pamela said, I’m sorry, Tucker, I don’t feel that way about you.  And Tucker, O.K. and he decided, I may as well stay on this town: a college, pretty women, 19th century buildings with New England gothic spires and a fine bookstore...





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