Rooftop Poetry Club - Gary Earl Ross

Gary Earl Ross

Bio:
Gary Earl Ross is a writing professor at the UB EOC, where he has taught since 1977. He is the award-winning author of more than 170 published short stories, poems, articles, scholarly papers, and public radio essays. His books include The Wheel of Desire, Shimmerville: Tales Macabre and Curious, and the children’s tale, Dots. He is also a playwright. Sleepwalker: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, based on the classic silent horror film, was staged in 2002. His 2005 courtroom thriller Matter of Intent played to sold-out houses and standing ovations at Ujima Company’s TheaterLoft, won the Emanuel Fried Best New Play Award, was optioned for future production in New York City, and won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Presentations of his plays in 2007 included the thriller Picture Perfect at the Tennessee Stage Company in Knoxville, and the political drama The Best Woman at TheaterLoft in Buffalo.

WBFO-FM Commentary

Originally aired February 28, 2006

Some years ago I published a newspaper op-ed piece that was reprinted in Traditional Parent Magazine under the title “The Age of the Dummy.” The basic thrust was that the national intellect was in a steady decline because modern American culture made stupidity a life choice. Since that article’s appearance, things have gotten even worse.

A 2004 National Endowment for the Arts study showed a significant decline in literary reading. A president who lacks the good sense to be ashamed of his own mediocre grades and professed dislike of reading was re-elected to an office for which he is clearly unfit. A 2005 National Center for Education Statistics study found only 31 percent of college graduates proficient in understanding prose. China, with four times our population, graduates ten times as many engineers. A recent ABC News program showed multilingual Belgian students laughing at the ignorance of their monolingual American counterparts.

As book sales drop, libraries close, and reality TV expands to fill the vacuum left by diminishing brain activity, critical thinking seems to be roadkill on the American highway to tomorrow. How long before we completely lose our capacity for self-governance?

Despair not. A solution may be on the horizon—ironically, a spin-off of the government initiative to see if Internet porn filters work. Theoretically, children are kept out of X-rated websites by the requirement that a credit card be used for access. Such a practice rewards kids smart enough to copy their parents’ Visa numbers while it deprives adults smart enough not to have a credit card in the first place.

Imagine, however, that access to porn sites were regulated by general knowledge questions we should be able to answer when we finish high school or college. What are the dates of the Civil War? 1893-1898? Wrong! You get no look at nude celebrity photos tonight. Never heard of Stockholm or the Pythagorean Theorem? No Swedish school girls or hot threesomes for you. Think humans and dinosaurs co-existed? Get used to your Ice Age, pal, because you’re frozen out of Naughty Nymphos until you’re smarter.

In fact, such a program could be extended to other diversions that help keep us stupid. Want to play Grand Theft Auto? First score 80 percent or better on a randomly generated quiz with questions about grammar, history, geography, math, science, and current events. Until you do, you’re locked out. Want to watch Jerry Springer or Maury Povich? Identify William Shakespeare or Rosa Parks. No, he wasn’t the president of England, and she wasn’t the grandmother of Martin Luther King. You have to hit the books to earn a look at those toothless love triangles and disputed paternity tests. You’ll appreciate your guilty pleasures so much more when you have to work for them.

This literacy testing approach—which I call Every American Catching Up—would work not only for kids who cling to ignorance like a winning lottery ticket but also for adults from all walks of life who have abandoned their obligation to participate in our democracy for a seat on the couch. Lifelong learning means it’s never too late to start, and the first lesson should be that voluntary stupidity hurts.

I’m Gary Earl Ross.

Evil — An Abridged Autobiography

in the beginning was the worm
and the worm was without form
newborn and hungry and writhing
in the fledgling human heart—
i was the worm and you fed me
the wet purple strings of your own soul

hunger taught you to kill for your belly
but i taught you to kill for a belly laugh,
to wade through viscera with a smile—
jack-booted and wrapped in many flags,
gloating behind the many masks of god,
i have walked all the battlefields of time

i have watched you fall by the millions
beneath the studded wheels of imperialism,
manifest destiny, racial supremacy, caste systems,
class systems, ethnic cleansing, collectivization
and other blind ideologies—and laughed
while whipping my bat-winged horses forward

i lashed backs that built pyramids and
grew fat inhaling bloody dust in the roman colosseum—
i dined with vlad the impaler in a forest of death
and slipped into witchfinder dreams at salem—
i piloted the amistad and gave the sick to the sea
and held down the slave women i told you to take

i introduced poverty to women in whitechapel
and offered them a deliverance from hell named jack—
i taught rasputin to preach and lenin to write
and little joey stalin to rise above his stature—
i turned on the gas at auschwitz and treblinka
and later licked the cyanide from adolph’s lips-–

from lynchings in america to suttee in india,
from plowing ruined flesh into cambodian soil
to sacrificing ogoni lives for nigerian oil,
from the extinction of indigenous peoples
to the honor killing of veiled rape victims,
i have been everywhere, caused everything

i shred hungry children and child warriors
with concertina wire boots—israeli, palestinian,
american, european, chinese, indian, african—
child appetizers in the endless feast of souls,
where i peel skin from history’s sacrificial lambs
before tearing into them with yellow fangs

as i once walked slave quarters by night
i stalk the floors of far-flung factories
whipping awake those who sleep beneath
their sewing machines, forcing the fearful
to immerse their arms in toxic sneaker glue,
parting reluctantly with every penny i pay

later i shoot out another mosque window and
pour smack into another vein, poison into another
sky, and anthrax into another envelope
before sharpening another box cutter and
boarding all the planes—whom should i bomb today?
nuclear perhaps? i stop to think, why not?

i am a shadow parasite as old as time
a blood suckling as young as this instant—
i gorge myself on your fear and your hatred
i am pain-fed to ungainly size, swollen to
ungodly proportions but always small enough
to find another way into your heart

which i consume,
slowly,
from the inside out

Cinda’s Lucky Day

Cinda’s face was thin and dark, with high cheekbones, weary, yellow-tinged eyes, and a lower lip that usually sank into the space once occupied by her bottom front teeth. But today the gap was visible because she was smiling like a child with a cherished birthday gift. There amid the bits of trash beneath the hedge of a church lawn she passed daily was a single crumpled dollar. She bent to pick it up and knew exactly where to go, just a few blocks away.

Two or three afternoons a week, between 1:30 and 2:00, Cinda could be found seated in one of the city’s few remaining delis, a bare ashy heel tapping the broken back of an old black slip-on, the edge of a dime working through the gray gunk of a scratch-off ticket. Some days she bought five or ten tickets, other days just one. However many she tried, a bystander could always hear the whispered prayer and the urgent “C’mon! C’mon!” as her hand moved in a blur over that day’s chance for salvation. Today, for the first time in nearly a year, with a single ticket bought with a found dollar, she won and won big. A hundred dollars!

“Must be your lucky day, Cinda,” the deli man said as he counted out five twenties and put them in her outstretched hand. “What you gonna do with all that money?” “Don’t know,” she said, stuffing them into her small black pocketbook and stepping into early autumn sunlight. For a moment she stood in front of the deli. Home was just three blocks north, one block west. She could go there, to her narrow room in the back of the modest house owned by her niece Alana, who never asked her late mother’s sister for rent from her $427 a month Social Security check. Alana asked only that Cinda sometimes straighten up the kitchen and living room, that she put a little food in the fridge when she could. Well, she could today, Cinda thought. She could catch a bus north to the Aldi store and lug a few bags of groceries back to the house. But however compact the house seemed in the evening—Alana helping her twin girls with homework in the dining room and 16-year-old James stretched out on the couch in front of the television—the place was empty and cavernous during the day, with the kids at school and Alana at General, working as an LPN. It was especially lonely in the afternoon, when sunlight streaming through windows ignited floating dust motes and Cinda, weary of Jerry and Maury, sat remembering how once she’d spent afternoons waiting for Otis to come home from the mill; how later, after the mill closed, she sat hoping he’d find other work. Otis was long dead, and poor or close to it for most of his life, he’d left Cinda nothing. Now in the afternoon, she dreamed of having her own place and inviting Alana and the kids to live with her. Money could make that happen, which is why she bought scratch-offs, lotto tickets, daily numbers slips. All she needed was one big win. Sooner or later, she believed, God would point His finger and change her luck.

Across the street, an inbound city bus squealed to a stop for the red light. Cinda read the panel: Creek Casino. She thought of the found dollar and the winning scratch-off, and, despite the flashing amber hand, stepped into the crosswalk to intercept the bus.

Must be your lucky day, Cinda.

All the way downtown she imagined and furnished the house she would buy if her luck held. A pretty white two-story, it would have at least four bedrooms and two full baths. The kitchen would be modern, a flashy blend of stainless steel and wood paneling. There would be a patio and a big flat screen TV in the living room and a finished basement where James and his friends would shoot pool. Pool. Yes, she would have one in the back yard, a big oval where Alana and the kids could cool off in the summer and maybe even Cinda herself would put some kind of swimsuit on her tired, skinny body and sink into the water.

If there was enough she’d buy everybody clothes. Matching outfits for the twins. Jeans that fit actually James in the waist. Fancy dresses for Alana, so she could get out now and then, impress a good man. And for herself? Shoes, good shoes, not the cracked old things she wore these days, and a few stretchy pantsuits, maybe a nice dress for church—which, if she won, she would definitely start attending again. Of course, they would need something to take them to church, since Alana’s Geo had died almost a year ago and never been replaced. As the city rolled by, practically unseen, Cinda stared out the bus window at passing traffic to contemplate what kind of car she would buy . . .

The bus deposited Cinda in front of the Creek Casino at 2:15, and, drifting through the large center doors, she was swallowed by the lights and bells within. By 2:49 she was back on the street, without the hundred she had won and the seven additional dollars she’d had in her purse, without even bus fare home. It was going to be a long walk.

When she had gone only two blocks, Cinda spotted something pink and shiny at the edge of the curb and stooped to pick it up. A child’s plastic change purse, with a pink puppy on the side. She opened it and gasped at the sight of the five dollar bill and three quarters inside. Twice, she thought. Twice, and it was still afternoon. It really was her lucky day.

Smiling widely enough to reveal her gap, she turned and started back toward the casino.