Perry Garvin - 1/20/00 - Short Assignment #1

 At age two I fell in love with pots. Being so small, I could fit into the bottom kettle drawer and surround myself with pots and pans, crashing them around and placing each one on my head again and again. At age five I dumped pots to start a new affair with water. Standing on my toes I would lean into the shiny metal sink flicking the water on and off. Just what water was I did not know, but that it was a mystery I was certain. I couldn't hold it, yet I could feel it. It's path upon contact with a surface was random and unpredictable. After water came grass and after grass came spoons. But now these everyday things - once enchanting - are merely normal. The mystery of the mundane has been exposed. I've been told that pots and pans are for cooking and not for wearing. And I've been taught that water can't be grasped because of hydrogen and oxygen slipping around one another.

The things that delight me are dwindling as my sense of wonder seems to evaporate. Why shouldn't a chair be absolutely hilarious? Why can't wind baffle me any more? Why do I take gravity for granted? I want to love something intensely the way that the surf shop owner loves the shape of the surfboard - its weight, density, and lines. Or the way the art dealer does with a keen sensitivity to color, texture, lights, and darks. Hickey says that teachers and professors and experts capture, explain, and monopolize the wondrous. But blame can't be placed entirely on someone else. There is something about ourselves that we allow to get lost. That bounce that Hickey talks about, unless you are lucky, just seems to go away.

Luckily there are still a few simple things that give me great pleasure: seeing my reflection in a curved mirror, the unpredictable sounds that come from tapping on random objects. But I'm mostly afraid of the future and the toll that age seems to take on astonishment. Physically, I know that I will deteriorate but I'm not concerned with that so much as I am concerned with my spirit fading, my desire to turn into a sigh. I feel that I have lost so much already in so few years that when I reach a rocking chair at eighty-two, too late, I will have lost all of my joy.

Few are the people that find something that they love and even fewer are those that wonder around. With all the answers and specialties and specialists out there, it's too hard to keep wondering about things. Who cares why the wind blows. Who cares why the car starts. Let me entertain whatever thoughts I will. Let me think that pots are hats and that I might be able to grasp a sheet of water if I'm really lucky this time.

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Perry Garvin - Short Paper #2 - 1/22/00

Phish Heads, Phish-philes, Phishers, Phans, Pholks, Phriends. They are all like me and all names for me: phollowers of the rock band Phish. The band and their loyal phans, a symbiotic unit, travel through the United States starting in staid, snowy Eastern cities: Fitzgerald, Murfreesboro, Marion, La Junta, La Plata, Bayard, Beckley, Moore Haven, Bridgeport, Marietta, Ann Arbor, and Citronelle. Through dry and aging Midwestern cities like Erick and Elk, Amarillo and Aurora, Ulysses, Wallace, Carthage, and Max. Creeping across the West via Mescalero, Encampment, Weed, Bowle, Blythe, Minersville, Taft. Finally slipping up through California's saintly San Diego, Santa Ana, Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, San Bernadino, Santa Lucia, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Rafael, and finally resting in San Francisco - my home, where I first saw them in concert in 1996.

Phish is Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Page McConnell, and Jon Fishman (a.k.a. Fish, Bob Weever, Shirley Temple, Short Fat Ugly Guy). The name Phish is derived from compressing the name Phil Lesh (the bassist for the Grateful Dead) into one. Phish's music is inspired by the guitar noodlings of Jerry Garcia and the gut buckling axe wails of Carlos Santana, Paul McCartney's lyrical tenderness and John Lennon's bespectacled freakiness, Los Lobos, and James Brown, Jimi Hendrix's drug tinged guitar, showy 70's bands like Turmeric & Spice, Murphy Legends, Richard Saltsman, Oxen Counters, Maybe Tuesday, Henry Ock, Fux, and countless other rockers, punks, funkateers, rappers, B-Boys, jammers, bluesmen, and noise makers.

Phish is improvisation. Tweezer, Stash, Roggae, Guyute, Foam, Simple, Split Open and Melt, Bathtub Gin, Harry Hood, Wilson, Mike's Song, Character Zero, Divided Sky, Chalkdust Torture, The Mango Song, and Weekapaug Groove are classic jam songs rooted in a simple chord progression: C, D, G, E minor, A, A, F, F, C, G (repeat). As the song progresses the more and more hell breaks loose as each member of the band, still adhering to the chord pattern, improvs on his own. Then there are other songs that are short, clear, catchy, and simple: Lawn Boy, Nellie Kane, Funky Bitch, Axilla, Julius, Dog Faced Boy, The Wedge, NICU, Free, Tube, Driver, Farmhouse, Cavern, Glitter, Train Song, Dogs Stole Things, Ha Ha Ha, and Bouncing Round the Room. Phish's covers of tunes like Tubthumping, Cry Baby Cry, Sabotage, Rock and Roll Part 2, Getting' Jiggy Wit It, Boogie on Reggae Woman boil with surprising accuracy then simmer into a jam that takes themes from the original and layers them into Phish's jumpy instantaneous fortissimos, fortes, pianos, pianisimos, prestos, vivantes, allegros, andantes, legatos, staccatos, crescendos, decrescendos, retardandos, and glissandos.

Phish is unlike any of the other bands I have liked. The glam rock, hair bands: Poison, Motley Crüe, Warrant, Whitesnake, Def Leppard. The 70s classic rockers: The Doobie Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, The Steve Miller Band, Hall & Oates, Eric Clapton, Santana. The gangsta rappers: Tupac, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, NWA, Eazy-E, Snoop Doggy Dog. The ragtime composers: Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Luke, Zez Confrey, William Albright. Cha cha, swing, African, funk, disco, country, techno, creole, metal, a cappella: my interest in all these styles must have led me to Phish where they mix, match, and mangle all of the above.

Phish is on tour right now playing to thousands of hippies, yippies, boomers, Generation Xers, Nexters, Yers, and Iers. Gary Radakovich, Tavi Black, Drian Dyck, Roger Pujol, Leigh Forman, Julian Watkins, and Dave Heard will light the stage. Bob Neumann, Peter Luther, Paulo Rodrigues will mic the stage. Lisa Sharpe, Hohnny Lynch, Jenny Craven, and Alvert Lovelace will cater the food.

Perry Garvin – 4-Page Paper #1 – 2/24/00

Teapots at Wu Fah’s in Chinatown cost a lot less than they do at the Uptown Mall downtown. You can get a 1-liter glass Bodum teapot for thirty bucks at the mall, but walk just 3 blocks away and you can get the exact same thing for less than ten. True, the lighting in the Chinese store isn’t very bright, and the floor’s usually kind of dirty, but when it comes to purchasing a product, a fancy décor only makes things more expensive.

I used to distrust Chinese people because Mom said that they were all as tight as Jews. Well I say let them be as tight as they want as long as they pass the savings on to me. I don’t want to pay for poor renditions of Gershwin tunes – I’ll take silence. And I don’t want to pay for bright fluorescent lighting when it makes my complexion look bad – I’ll take dimness. And I certainly don’t want to pay for service if that means fat women tottering around in suits two sizes too small with black belts cinched around their waists so tightly that all their middle-aged fat and guts get squished up into their saggy boobs and down into their droopy asses – I’ll take the stern looking Chinese woman in Fu Wah’s any day.

Tea is not Chinese for life. Richard Foley, a devout Catholic from Stonewall, Oklahoma informed me of that after I had tried to impress two girls sitting next to me in the school cafeteria with my knowledge of Chinese. I could have killed that guy. I said, "Fine, what does tea mean then?" He didn’t say a word but pushed his front teeth out over his bottom lip, pulled at the sides of his eyes, and said in an exaggerated Chinese accent, "I daun know, whyt boy." Those two girls smiled at him and giggled and flipped their hair, wafting their scent over my teacup. I tried desperately to think of a comeback, but just sat there on my stupid ass seething into the brown water.

I know that to be a fact because I read it in The Joy of Cooking and if anyone wants to question The Joy of Cooking then they better question the Bible too, and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary on top of that. I make a good cup of tea because I, a) buy expensive tea, b) use Brita filtered water, and c) use the correct proportion of tea and water. And trust me, if you don’t do those three things you aren’t going to get a good product.

Everyone knows about coffee. Lattés, mochas, cappucinnos, espressos. Everyone makes fun of themselves for liking coffee and being addicted to coffee and for spouting off these Italian phrases. But people love the whole coffee concept – the coffee bars, shops, ice cream, brewing techniques. I’m not a sociologist, but I know that this is the same mob beverage mentality that grabs humanity every once in a while. Pepsi Clear, spring water, and Snapple all had their heady highs and their dizzying collapses. Coffee’s next. When people wake up and find that the coffee bandwagon has lost momentum, they’re going to jump off and come lurching to tea. They’ll set up tea shops and invent tea drinks with fancy Chinese names, and eat tea ice cream. I will look at all of them and smile ruefully. Richard Foley and his two giggling girls will stagger around gripping tealeaves, smiling inanely, and I will be vindicated.

One day I’m going to prepare a Thermos full of green tea, get on my bicycle, and pedal down Velango Street out past the duplexes, through the stucco suburban neighborhood, past the sprawling townhouses, and far past the city limits where Velango turns into Medina Way. I’ll keep pedaling along Medina until I climb the first hill and pass the third windmill and turn off onto that dirt road and bike through asparagus fields until I reach the crest of that far away hill. I’ll put my bike down on the ground and sit with the small of my back against the seat. I will pour a cup of steaming hot green tea into my porcelain cup and I will sit there, fortified against the chilly wind, and pause.

A Chinese guy once wrote, "The first cup of tea delights me. The second cup of tea takes me to heaven. The third cup of tea introduces me to God." I don’t believe in God but I believe in beauty. I’ll look into my cup and look at the horizon and the little houses and dots of asparagus plants and try to find what ties them together. I’ll sip my tea and let it linger in my mouth for a long time and resist swallowing it until it feels cool and my taste buds become desensitized to flavor. I will look into my tea cup and let my eyes glaze over with condensation so that I will not have to blink. I will smell the tea, dip my fingers in the heat, and spread a filmy layer against my skin. I will wait there until the sun has set, the tea is gone and I have come closer to finding beauty.

When I am an old man my teeth will be brown from the years of tannic acids and sulfides that stream through my teeth when I drink my tea. My hair will be a rich nut brown and my skin will exhude a copper glow. I will lie back in my hospital bed and pour what will be my twenty thousandth cup of tea and I will feel it splash about in my ruddy mouth and roll into my tan tummy. They might need to take my blood sometimes and I will relish the puzzled expression on the faces of the new nurses when they draw brown blood from my veins - dark chocolate syrup. When I have another heart attack the doctors will cut into me and probe through mahogany layers of flesh to stitch and sew some chestnut sinews. And when I die, I will be cremated into little flakes of cinnamon. My family or my friends will gather me into a a bronxe urn and scatter my shavings over the vast asparagus field.

Perry Garvin – Advanced Composition – 3/30/00

Tremors on Dawson Way sent me careening off of Daniel’s bicycle and over Mrs. Krawjewski’s hedge. He said that it was just a little earthquake that caused him to swerve the front of the bicycle enough so that I slid off the seat, upset the balance and made him slam on the breaks propelling me over my neighbor’s hedge. I never felt any tremblers but if Daniel says it happened, than it probably did because he’s majoring in geology and knows a lot more about plates, crusts, and continents than I do.

I watched the Summer Olympics in 1993 during a five-day bout of flu. These skinny slips of muscle and flesh in tight leotards skipped, bounded, and flipped around a blue-matted gym while I was laid up in bed sucking on a chilled container of Capri Sun with the heating blanket turned to hi. Apparently Anna Varenska, a gymnast from Russia, hadn’t been practicing enough because after she came running down the lane, she catapulted off of the spring board so hard that she completely missed the pommel horse and landed with a thump, thighs jiggling and eyes wild, right in front of the judge from the Czech Republic.

So it was no surprise, I suppose, that right in the middle of my flight over the hedge all I thought of was Anna. And when I landed on my head and rolled over my shoulder and crashed onto my back, I realized how lucky I was that there wasn’t a stadium audience, or television viewers, or a judge from Czechoslovakia to witness my fall. Anna, after her ungainly fall, jumped up and threw herself into that pose that gymnasts strike after the completion of a routine: back arched, head back, right leg extended. I, unlike Anna, did not move a muscle. And while I enjoyed the tickle of Mrs. Krajewski’s well-fertilized grass behind my ears and although I relished the cumulonimbus clouds sliding across the sky, I didn’t move not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t. I tried to lift my legs but despite how hard I tried, they wouldn’t budge. My arms, too, were lead. My trunk was as still as though it were strapped to the ground with thick leather straps. And right as the word paralysis entered my consciousness, Daniel came pedaling up sputtering out apologies and listing excuses.

I’ve lived in Mrs. Krawjewski’s front lawn now for more than 3 years. Daniel graduated from college with a degree in Philosophy after his girlfriend dumped him and moved to Spain. And seeing that geological theories couldn’t adequately explain his sense of loss and confusion, he turned to philosophy to ameliorate his woe. He later would remark that his penchant for wearing black clothing never really fit in with his geologically minded peers who preferred hiking boots, khaki shorts, and T-shirts. Philosophers’ clothing tastes suited him much more. The bicycle that sent me to what has been my home for the past three years was sold to a ten year old girl named Elizabeth who had just moved from Chicago. And I was here in Mrs. Krawjewski’s lawn.

Right after my fall, my first vertebra in my neck snapped in two places. The sharp edge of the bone must have cut cleanly through my tender spinal cord and blocked any re-growth because I haven’t moved a muscle from my neck down since that accident more than three years ago. Daniel was profusely apologetic and offered to get medical help, but after my initial panic, I turned his offers down and instead sent him to Mrs. Krajewski to negotiate an agreement that would allow me to stay in her lawn. She agreed but the issue was rendered moot when she died of a heart attack just four days later.

I have managed a fair life in the garden. The grass has grown completely over my body and as my clothes have biodegraded, their rotting fibers have nourished a number of wildflowers and a thick carpet of grass. I am not certain whether or not my skin has dissolved or meshed with the soil for my nerve endings stubbornly refused to report my skin’s status. I have managed to stay alive by nibbling at the grass and other foliage that grows around me. If I am lucky a bird or a squirrel will forage around my head and come close enough to my mouth so that I can slam down my jaws and catch them alive. Swallowing a bird or a small mammal can sustain me for up to five days. I once caught a cat and after quite a battle getting it down, staved off hunger for more than two weeks.

Time passes slowly in the yard but I have never been bored. At first I did have to adjust to a slower pace of life, but once I made that transition I found peace, beauty, excitement, and humor in the daily activities of the garden. Squirrels, although I do have to eat them, are terribly amusing creatures. For mobile pedestrians squirrels possess an expression of perpetual shock as if they are simply flabbergasted that they have been seen. But for a yard dweller such as myself, squirrels will remove their facades and behave in a more normal manner: sure footed, arrogant, brash, and witty. Worms have fantastic therapeutic affects and their wriggly bodies and squirmy movements massage my face and their mucousy goop soothes my lips when they get chapped. The only mammals that I will not consume are moles for, not only do they taste badly, they are difficult to catch and their family members hold fierce grudges. Until I stopped eating them a thirteen months ago, I would often wake up with vengeful bite marks all over my neck.

Weather is temperate in these parts, so I’m never too cold nor too hot. For the first seven months or so I was exposed to sometimes cruel elements but as the foliage carpet grew over me, I began to synthesize myself with the natural elements. Visitors are infrequent and those that stop by never stay for long. Every Tuesday, Jimmy the kid from across the street, comes to mow the entire lawn except for my plot. He’ll fill me in on local news and the weather forecast, but otherwise I am alone. I have forsaken friends, family, and lovers for precisely this reason. In the lawn, I have total peace and quiet. Life is simple – the birds chirp, the flowers grow. I’m connected with the environment, protected and safe. After three years I am in perfect symbiosis with the earth.

I can never leave this lawn. A doctor named Richard Feltzman visiting from Miami Beach was sightseeing in my neighborhood when he came across me and gave me a free consultation. After poking through the dirt and taking a blood test, he found that I was in good health, but was as much soil as I was flesh. I have considered being transplanted from this lawn to another one in Florida, but it is hard to find property owners willing to take on a lawn tenant. And even if I could find a taker, different soil pH levels, animals, and weather conditions might threaten my survival. So I suppose that I should stay here and see what happens and see if I ever die.

Perry Garvin - 3.9.2000

My cousin Molly and I decided that we needed an adventure. An incessant rainstorm had kept us indoors for three days straight. For the first couple of days we were content playing solitaire, gin rummy, monopoly, hearts, pinochle, and eight’s. We made an indoor fort between two twin beds out of pillows and a moth-eaten blanket. We scarfed down peanut butter, banana, and potato chip sandwiches, scooped out the filling from Oreo cookies to feed to Grizzly the cat, and began filming a soap opera with my Dad’s Handicam. By the third day of rain, however, no activity could divert our boredom and a general malaise my mother called "cabin fever" settled over the cabin. We began to quarrel over silly things like whose shoes were more waterproof, what kind of hairspray was most effective, and the kind of birds that lived in Africa. The atmosphere in the house became tense and Grizzly, in a show of discomfort, lingered underneath my grandmother’s bed careful to show herself. Cabin fever turned into full blown cabin disease until the fourth day when the sun came out.

Our adventure was to pack a lunch and paddle around Blueberry Point in the canoe. We tossed lifejackets, extra paddles, water, snorkeling equipment and snacks into the bottom of the wooden canoe. Like true adventurers we smeared on sun block, affixed sunglasses, strapped on sandals and shorts and set off for our trek across the lake. But after five minutes of straining weak shoulders and tiring the tender red knees on which we knelt, we leaned far left and then far right, rocking the boat from side to side, until, with quick twist of our hips, we flipped the canoe over. We spilled out and plunged into the chilly lake sputtering out laughs between spastic gasps of air. Water bottles, paddles, sandwiches, chips, cookies, snorkels, face masks, and flippers bobbed around our inverted craft. Buoyed by our lifejackets, we spun the canoe upside down exposing its cedar belly to the sky and forming an air pocket underneath the boat. We gathered the scattered food, clothes, and swimming equipment and stashed it underneath the canoe for safe keeping. And with a heave and a push from my cousin, I scrambled on top of the slick belly of the boat. Molly tried to pull herself up too, but the boat, like a bothered whale sluffed us both off and we knocked against the canoe as we splashed back into the water. Looking to the shore, I saw my parents snapping photos of my cousin and me as we mugged for the camera. Out of 24 photos taken, one would end up as that year’s Christmas card.

Playing on a canoe is perfectly normal when one is ten. But when one is seventeen, horseplay with a boat begins to err on the side of immature. I was reluctant to allow my parents to release this canoe photo for the 1995 Christmas card. I imagined recipients of the card at first chuckling at that plucky Perry, but then thinking about it some more and wondering why he wasn’t doing something more adult like playing the piano, or reading, or just standing there, smiling. But my parents were adamant and so there I was with the canoe. My concern that year paled in comparison to future years when in 1996 I was pictured playing air guitar with a rake, 1997 when I was smearing tar on a roof, 1998 when I was yodeling with a Swiss man, and 1999 when I was sitting in a lawn chair with my guitar, laptop computer, and a bad haircut. This year I expect that my mother will dig into her archive of candid shots and pull out something that will further reinforce people’s impressions of that poor Garvin child – the mindless schizophrenic.

I have visited Crane Lake every year since my birth in 1978. The cabin at Crane Lake has seen: my turtles Goldie and Sarah and their fort, "Turtle Dominion," that I built for them in the well-fertilized grass behind the outhouse; Grizzly, my cat, meowing for hours on end vainly pleading with me to open the front door to let her chase the chipmunks; my father fighting bats with a broom and nursing a sore back just minutes later; star gazing on the front rocks with an illicit bottle of beer while my parents slept silently in the cabin; thoughts of a girl I tearfully left in Europe; near collisions between jetskis and powerboats; "The Mule," a motorized cart that we drive up and down a crude path between the house and the car port; Winston Fazio a boy my age back in 1988 who insisted on inviting me to go water-skiing every day until I finally told him that I just wanted to be alone; over thirty unfruitful attempts to get up on a slalom ski; three airplane models (an F-16, P-55 Lightning, and a Mustang) and two car models (GMC Jimmy, and a Harley-Davidson Boss); too many puzzles to keep track of; my best friend Lance and his hilarious Pee Wee Herman impersonation where he spreads his cheeks, sticks out his bottom lip, makes dopey looking eyes and squeals in a high pitched voice; nibbling bits of rat cheese on stale whole wheat crackers; granite rocks made hot by sunshine that burn my bottom and send me jumping into the lake to cool off; a strange orange eel-like creature that flirts with the shore right in front of our cabin; this absolutely beautiful girl who I always looked forward to seeing every summer; a fire boat tearing up the lake at six in the morning to fight a fire in the woods.

I don’t know when I will return to Crane Lake. My predictable routine of school and summer, school and summer will be broken upon my graduation from college this year. The working world will beckon and unpredictability will rule to the point where Crane Lake might be relegated to the back burner. The same birch trees will wave in the wind, shimmering their green leaves in the sun. The same chipmunks with the white racing stripes will dart from hole to hole looking for acorns or, if they are lucky, peanuts left out for them by benevolent cabin residents. The same whine of the powerboats will terrify the loons and send them under the water only to emerge a few second later to warble that same forlorn cry. Crane Lake will always be there and I anticipate that I will pop in and out of that place every once in a while to dip into the lake, lie in the sun, rock in the hammock, or just sit on the front rocks and remember all the times passed.

Perry Garvin

Advanced Composition

April 27, 2000

Hot chicken legs, wings, thighs, and breasts; crispy, blackened skins and pieces of juicy flesh are balanced precariously on a white ceramic plate as I transfer them from the outside barbecue to the kitchen counter to be arranged neatly on four plates, garnished with mashed potatoes, polenta, and broccoli and served to my parents and their two friends. Tongs in my right hand and this pile of poultry in my left, I kick open the kitchen screen door and step down not on the hard terra cotta tile as I was expecting, but on Grizzly the cat.

Cats are, by most respects, silent animals. In the thirty percent of the day they are awake, the most vocalization a cat will make might be a few soft meows or some gentle purring. Grizzly, my cat, is even more silent than the usual feline as she often goes for days at a time without so much as a peep. When she is hungry she won’t meow plaintively, but will quietly pace around her food bowl. When she wants to be pet she won’t cry wistfully, but will softly jump up on a lap. When she is upset she won’t growl, but will wistfully tuck herself into a small hunch and sit, glaring through two eyes narrowed down to horizontal slits. So not only was I surprised to plant my foot down on her back, but so shocked was I to hear her burst out into such terrified squawking, that I staggered backwards, upsetting the plate of chicken and sending a cascade of legs, wings, thighs, breasts, juice, blood, barbecue sauce, and skin down my trousers and all over Grizzly the cat. Pinned underneath my foot and facing a deluge of chicken parts, her screech escalated into a pained wail that sounded like a needle being dragged across a record. Jerking back my foot, I freed her and she took off, bolting through the open kitchen door and scurrying into the garden to scowl at me and nurse her wounded pride by licking her greasy coat.

And so the dinner meant to impress my parents and their friends was ruined. They all adamantly disagreed and praised the fine polenta, the miraculous mashed potatoes, the outstanding broccoli. But the chicken was absent and so I deemed the meal a failure. My mother, father, and I are tight knit and not prone to competition except when it comes to chicken. For our family, chicken is not a foodstuff meant to delight; it is a proving ground for one’s culinary skill. Without a doubt, my father is the king of chicken in our household, with my mother a close runner up. He can, time and time again, grill the perfect chicken: pink and tender, with clear juices dribbling out of golden skin. The perfect chicken does not most satisfy your taste, but your sight and your smell. The skin should fall off the bone and resist only slightly in your mouth before giving in to delightful mastication. My father prepares the perfect chicken nearly all the time. However, when he occasionally over- or undercooks the bird, he affects a sour mood and grumps around the house until the next day when the meal is forgotten. When my mother fails to prepare the perfect chicken, she too pouts, purses her lips and sighs. There is a silently competitive spirit between my parents over who can prepare the best bird the most often. Consequently, given the expectations, I had avoided preparing chicken of any sort. I delighted in making crème caramel, or cakes, or pasta salad, but chicken remained frightfully out of reach. When I turned twenty-one, however, I felt as though at such an age I could no longer avoid what seemed like a rite of passage in my family.

When I offered to prepare a full meal complete with salad and dessert for my parents and two of their friends, they graciously accepted. But it was only when I announced that I would be preparing barbecued chicken that their eyebrows raised. I had accepted the chicken challenge. The time had come for me to prove myself as an adult in our family. My ability to make chicken to a Garvin level of satisfaction would earn me a new level of respect within our family unit.

The Joy of Cooking advocated simply tossing the chicken onto the grill and cutting into it every so often until the juice ran clear. Other cookbooks suggested cooking all the chicken parts in the oven until they were ninety percent cooked and then finishing them up on the barbecue to provide color and some smoky flavor. A friend of mine thought that wrapping the pieces of chicken in bacon would lock in the juices and result in tender, perfectly cooked flesh. Among the differing methods, I chose the Joy of Cooking method not only for its simplicity but because it was the more challenging way to go. The more daring I was in my preparation, the more impressed my parents would be.

I purchased the highest-quality chicken I could and, using the sharpest knife I could find, cut the bird into the right shaped pieces. The breasts were smooth ovals of firm blond skin. The chicken legs were plump, the white skin clinging to the flesh. The thighs and wings, too, carried more meat than bone. They sizzled when I placed them on the barbecue and crackled when I smeared the sauce all over their skin. Fat dripping off the meat provoked flames to leap up from the coals and lick the meat leaving black marks. For the twenty minutes it took me to cook the chicken, I didn’t take my eyes off the griddle. Turning them, smelling them, assessing their color, texture, weight. My parents may have come by to see how things were going, or their friends poked their heads outside the kitchen to say hello, but I dismissed them with a nod and kept my focus on the bird.

When I cut into a breast piece and saw a dribble of clear juice dribble out from a pink interior, I knew their time had come. Swiftly, I pulled them off of the grill and piled them onto my plate balancing leg against wing, and breast against thigh in a pile about a foot high. Tongs in my right hand and this pile of poultry in my left, I kicked the kitchen screen door open and stepped down onto the familiar hard terra cotta tiles that covered the floor in interlocking polygons. I took the five warming plates from the oven and nestled the chicken among polenta, broccoli, and mashed potatoes. Still intent on delivering the perfect chicken, I didn’t step back to admire my work, but I should have for the plate was piled up with beautiful food arranged so neatly and carefully on the plate. With little fanfare, and as nonchalantly as possible, I brought out each plate of food and placed it down in front of each person.

My father and mother smiled graciously, clinked glasses with their friends, cut into their meat, brought this perfect chicken into their mouths, and – asked their friends about their trip to China. Did they enjoy the Shandong Province? How was the Peking duck? No comments on my bird? Was it not clear that this was no mere meal but a coming of age ritual in which I had willingly engaged? Was this dismissal meant as part of the ritual? The night wore on and I grew increasingly silent as my parents and their friends chatted on. While they cleaned their plates down to the white ceramic of the plate, never a comment was made on any part of the meal. And so I was left with the belief that my chicken was a failure.

After dinner, after parents went to bed, I sat down at the kitchen table. Grizzly smugly chewed her food and looked at me with what seemed like a smile. For the second time, then, my chicken was a failure. The perfect chicken had eluded me twice. Once under the feet of cat, twice from a silent family. The third time would be, as they say, a charm. I would not be foiled. I would graduate from my youth by nailing this bird, no matter the time involved. My parents anniversary was coming up, then one week later would be my mother’s birthday and two weeks later would be my father’s, and each time I would present a gift of chicken until I finally made it right. I went off to bed and before I drifted off to sleep I thought I heard Grizzly meow.

Jenny Becker & Perry Garvin

Advanced Composition

April 6, 2000

Fresh haircuts, tan faces, hunched shoulders, bent backs, slow laughs, and critical gazes, we all shuffled into our section lounge to meet each other, find commonalties, find friends, find out who would fit in and who would not. Silence predominated, and despite the excellent facilitation from our over-enthused RA, silence was hard to break. I felt threatened in this pack of men. They all seemed so much older than me with big hairy faces, broad shoulders, and deep voices. An air of competition and tenseness lingered in the room as we tried to identify a status hierarchy within the group. Who would be the clown? Who would be the smart one? Who would get the ladies? And so I sat in smug silence trying to look cooler than everyone else, more intelligent, more tough, more funny.

I was going to share my room with someone. I had never had a roommate before. Actually I’m going to have to take that back if I want to be completely honest. I did live in the same small confined area as my sister for approximately four years of my life. I was really into purple Play-Doh and my enormous stuffed zoo animals at the time though. We had our bedroom. This bedroom was the blue room. And then we had the playroom. All kids need a playroom so our parents made us one. They sacrificed one room in our house to be the playroom for a good ten years. They got the animal wall paper and the hard wood floors and Crayola-proof blinds and the plastic bins for our toys and the poll we hung our stuffed animals from (my mom, the ingenious seamstress that she was at that point in time, attached Velcro to our stuffed animals so they could simply hang from this poll which had the other half of the Velcro all up and down it). I really think that our animals enjoyed the set-up more than we did. They got a good view of the world – my wonderful childhood world. But this playroom soon transformed into my sister’s bedroom. The years spent we both spent sleeping in the blue room really don’t constitute the definition of roommates. At least in my mind.

But now I was getting a ‘real’ roommate. Someone who I didn’t know at all. Someone who probably snored. Someone who probably got up at six every morning. Someone who probably played her music loud. Someone who partied all the time and someone who got drunk eight nights a week. I was determined that these were going to be the characteristics of my future roommate. I don’t consider myself to be a pessimist by nature. I will always look at the glass and think of it as half full, but I am a bit skeptical. I was very skeptical at the delicate age of eighteen. I was frightened about exactly who I would be sharing the next nine months of my life with.

We didn’t fight that much I guess. Our relationship was constituted more with those silent wars. Everyone has silent wars with someone. I think it is just a fact of life. I would open the window in the morning just a crack to let fresh air in. I would promptly return from class a few hours later and the window would be closed. Simply closed. My roommate would go take a shower and the classical music would be turned off and replaced with my country CDs. That was pretty much the way it worked. We never talked about it. We didn’t even make eye contact when I saw the window closed or Garth Brooks could be heard singing at the top of his honkey-tonk lungs. We just lived that way. If someone had told me that would be my freshman roommate experience I would have cried myself before I left for the grown-up and sophisticated world of college. But I was OK with it. We were both OK with it and that was the entire year. I went to bed around midnight on the weekends and I could find my roommate asleep by nine thirty most nights of the week including Friday and Saturday. Different worlds collide when you are assigned someone to live with. I know people in my section that instantly became best friends with the person sharing the same small quarters as they did. I know people who re-arranged their furniture to suit their own needs and drew a white line with masking tape down the middle of the room to divide it evenly. It all works. We never could have been best friends. Maybe we could have established a better friendship and talked about the window and talked about Mozart and "Friends In Low Places." But we didn’t. And in the big scheme of things a year spent with another individual doesn’t count for all that much - unless of course they changed your life.

Ghetto Safeway changed my life. This may sound trite or absurd or not plausible at all, but I am telling the truth. My freshman year would not be what it was without this grocery store within my walking distance. And come to think of it – my relationship with Ghetto Safeway has lasted a lot longer than that of my freshman roommate. I wonder what that says about me (or my roommate . . . or the grocery store).

Some places are more scary at one in the morning than they are at one in the afternoon. Grocery stores fall into this category of venues being scarier in the middle of the night as opposed to the middle of the day. Something about all that sunlight filtering through the canned peas advertisements is reassuring. In all actuality, there really should not be that much difference between grocery stores. But in the greater Walla Walla metropolitan area there is a huge division. A line is drawn between the proletariat and bourgeois. A huge divider separates the ghetto grocery store from the middle class Americana grocery store. These different two food outlets are on other side of town. They have the same name but, let me tell you – that is where the similarities end. They could practically be on opposite sides of the globe (well maybe not that far apart – I don’t know how well canned peas could sell in inner-city Beijing).

Not a Bourgeois Safeway, but a Ghetto Safeway I found to be the designated one-stop shopping center for Whitman students - students without cars that is. Those who did have their own automobiles at school could live the high life and drive across town and venture into the golden halls of the Bourgeois Safeway. But for us, it was the pale light from the hanging over-head light fixtures that would cast shadows on the isles of baked beans and stir-fry spice packets. Since I was on food service, and did not need practical foodstuffs, I would go to the Safeway and buy odd items like mangos, prickly pairs, kumquats, portabello mushrooms, Chinese beans, chard, grits, pickled pigs feet, hooves, tripe, chicken feet, lard – any unusual food I could find so that when I came back from the store, my section mates would grab for my bag and ask in exasperated, but interested, voices what I had bought?, what had I bought!, roll their eyes, and laugh. Outings to Ghetto Safeway created many memorable midnight outings with friends and section-mates that I do not believe would be the same if our Safeway been the up-scale luxury grocery store which is enjoyed across town.

I grew up with a number of Ghetto Safeways in San Francisco, but not a single wheat field. And so I foolishly believed that the only thing a wheat field was good for was growing wheat. But within my first week at Whitman, I realized that wheat fields are used as bonding grounds where dormitory sections flock to acquire group memories under a sunset. What I found to be the most exciting aspect of such forays were not the sunsets, nor the scenery, nor the fresh air, but the possibility of getting caught by some angry farmer wielding a 12-gauge shotgun foaming at the mouth with rage. He would appear from behind our group and start pumping shots into the air, scaring us so badly that we would pack into the cars, and rush back to the safety of our section Whitman, and collapse in fits of laughter as we recalled how close we came to death.

I will be leaving Whitman in just one short month. And behind me I will leave the canned peas and the raging farmers. The memories have been as sweet as the onions. There were some sour spots in those four years, but they will melt away with the rest of them eventually. And so as I take my last Horizon airplane flight out of this town, I will savor the good times and relish the mediocre, because they all contributed to The Whitman Experience.

Hash – in this last paragraph, Jenny and I traded off writing sentences. I wrote the first, she wrote the second, etc. And we figured out that it is pretty difficult to take writing with another person really seriously – as is demonstrated by the cheesiness of this stuff.

Perry Garvin

Advanced Composition

May 9, 2000

It was called Le Box. At maximum it could carry 192 cubic feet of cargo, 10 soft drinks in black plastic holders, 20 magazines in netted bags attached to the back of each seat, 25 cassette tapes in a large tray stowed within the front seat arm rest, and 14 travelers/comedians/actors. It was an awkward vehicle – the kind that other cars make fun of. Like the kid in eighth grade who has thick hairy legs and a deep post-pubescent voice, but delicate, smooth pink skin, and a scrawny torso, Le Box was in a weird state of vehicle puberty. Too big to be a car and too small to be a truck, Le Box was a huge gray metal cube dropped onto four tiny wheels. The sides of the vehicle oozed out of over the wheels like a plump man’s waist rolling over a belt cinched too tightly at his waist. Le Box’s backside didn’t taper into a point, but remained the same flat square size as the rest of its body – a great vehicular bottom. When we drove it on the highway, the other cars seemed to titter with laughter as Le Box, engine grinding and whining, managed to lug its oversized frame into keeping with the other, smaller, more nimble cars. Trucks, when they should pass, snarled at this upstart Box with its seeming intimations of grandeur. Le Box always seemed to me a bashful sort of van. When it couldn’t fit through one of those narrow European alleyways, its sides scraping against the old brick walls, it would shudder to a stop and let out of sigh from its brakes. Looking at the van from head-on, its windshield wipers were angled above the headlights in such a way as to resemble an apologetic old man, with big bushy eyebrows.

Le Box acted as our home for 6 weeks during the summer of 1996 when I, and thirteen others, traveled around performing improv theatre on the streets of major Europeans cities. After a hot, sweaty day of performance for tourists and locals alike, we would pack up our gear (a white cotton scrim, props, masks, costumes, water, Nutella, bread, pepperoni, cheese) and stack it in Le Box’s vertical space behind the back seats. At night we would drive off into the countryside and with the help of Le Box’s headlights, find a secluded field on which to sleep. We’d pull out sleeping bags, sleeping pads, cooking stoves, pots, pans, water, Nutella, bread, pepperoni, and cheese from the back of the van, fix a small dinner, and crash into a deep sleep, our bodies spread out in a circle around the safety of Le Box.

When it rained the van was just big enough to hold us as we played cards, tried reading French magazines, braided leather, fixed up a damaged mask, stitched some torn fabric, or napped. The tink, tink, tink of rain clattered against the roof as Le Box stood resolute against the elements. When cold, fierce winds whipped so hard across the land that it hurt to stand outside, Le Box would hold us, taking each blow against its broad metal frame, shuddering at each gust.

There were actually two Le Boxes on our trip. Both were grey, both were plump, both were awkward. In honor of their manufacturer, we nicknamed one "Peuge" (pronounced "pooj") and the other "ot" (pronounced "oh"). Although they were similar in most regards, they were not identical. Peuge had chronic respiratory problems. The air conditioning never seemed to work except on the days when it was raining the hardest. The vents worked but constantly blew in dirt and leaves, the source of which we never found despite much exploration under the hood. Peuge, too, overheated on hills over five miles long and it took quite a bit of water and fanning of air under her steaming hood to resuscitate her for another 5 miles, until she passed out again and the process repeated itself. When we reached the crest of the hill, the trip down the hill made Peuge underheat. Coasting down for several miles all would be fine until the temperature gauge indicated that Peuge had gotten too cold and put, put, put, she’d just peter out.

Ot was a much healthier car internally. No respiratory problems or oral, aural, or other. But while the van remained healthy on the inside, Ot had an alarming predilection for masochism. For some reason inexplicable by drivers of Ot, the van attracted walls, poles, birds, insects, cars, trashcans, signs, buildings, and Spanish men, and hit them with varying degrees of speed and accuracy. Drivers would claim it was not their fault, but the mysterious attractive force of Ot. I myself, can attest to the eerie sense panic that seized me when, driving towards a stationary object, I fell completely out of control to stop Ot’s fateful advance. Even with an array of controls within my reach (brake, steering wheel), nothing could seem to stop Ot from greeting every foreign object with a bump or a bang, a crash or a crunch. By the close of the trip, Ot’s grey coat was nicked and dinged with different colors – a red smudge from Madrid, a purple line from Lisbon.

It was for this reason that, despite its internal failings, Peuge was the preferred transportive vehicle. At night we parked the vehicles side by side, slung a tarp between the two and set up our dinner, nestled safely between the flanks of Peuge and Ot. For six weeks we traveled through France, Spain, and Portugal and must have logged thousands of miles after detouring in a mountain village here or some seaside retreat there. Ot kept up and Peuge limped behind and provided for our traveling minstral group a home. Paul and I were from San Francisco. Allegra, Emily, and Vanessa were from Rhode Island and pronounced their "r’s" as "ah’s." Matt and Jason lived in New Joy-sey. Melissa came from Tarpon Springs, Florida, home of the saltwater sponge. David was from New York City. We came from all over the States, but were now all residents of the sovereign states of Peuge and Ot.

They were rental vans. Their odometers indicated that they had traveled thousands of miles with other people. Maybe they carried screaming parents shouting to their screaming kids in screeching Spanish. Perhaps they carried drug dealers with their narcotics secretly wrapped up in plastic baggies and stashed in Ot’s panels to prevent discovery by attentive border guards. Ot might have transported an old couple, an Elmer and Martha, on their first trip around France. Peuge might have begun the slide into senility from hard-driving English college kids out on a summer road trip around Germany. Workhorses, these vans. Lugging and tugging, pulling, hauling around cargo and people, itineraries, guide books, foreign tongues. Braving the weather and faithfully chugging along through the winds of La Mistral, the searing heat of the Loire River valley, the snowy mountainous ranges, dry rolling hills, deep valleys, and high plains.

We left them in a parking lot in late August at the end of our trip. They looked oddly out of place. Their grey coats covered up by a thick brown layer of dust, they sat juxtaposed against the smooth black asphalt of the city. We couldn’t say they looked any more melancholy than usual. Surely we didn’t mean much to them – just another gang of travelers in a long line that would stop only when their fan belts were beyond replacement, their engine cylinders had worn clean away, their windshields had cracked enough to be rendered irreparable. We left them and we left each other in Europe that year.

Perry Garvin - Short Paper #3 - 1/26/00

Big Kevin is the master of unruly pans, uppity grease, and laconic molasses. A mighty sweat gland, Big Kevin sweet-talks his gumbo like a cajun Don Juan. "Come on baby. Oh baby, baby, baby. Oh y-e-e-a-a-h." The gumbo perks up every once in a while to lock Kevin in its gaze, roll its onion eyes, and burp out a jet of saffroned steam. Big Kevin caresses his jambalaya with a wooden spoon and whispers sweet nothings into the roiling yellow rice. The pralines, wooed by Big Kevin's solicitations, lock arms, giggle, and duck into their butter bath, drowning in the sound of Kevin's slippery syllables.

Big Kevin is a seven foot tall Nawlins, Louisiana oyster, pockfaced with loose lips, a forest of barnacles adhered to his face, and a lone tuft of kelp climbing out of the crest of his muddy brown head. When he turns left and right to attend to a boiling this or a blanching that his belly swings around his core - a billowy sail rotating around its mast in a strong wind. Big Kevin dresses impeccably in an immaculate white chef's coat that gathers and bunches around his torso like dunes in a shifting desert.

When Big Kevin chops, his knife turns into a gleaming silver Marlin. It leaps up, shines in the lights, and falls down drawing left and fading right, nipping at the pork laid out on the white cutting board. Snarls, licks, and hisses sneak out of the knife as the blade slices off a lump of gristle and nicks a line into the greasy pig flesh.

Big Kevin's kitchen is the mysterious smell of a natural foods store. An achy scent of spice from cayenne and Tabasco, the earthy bitterness of chard and spinach, the smell of stick and goop and glop from the okra. He coaxes volcanic aromas from ordinary foods and wafts the smells into the audience with great sweeps of his powerful arms.

After Big Kevin charms a blackened catfish, he lurches into the audience collecting used plates, empty cups, greasy forks, stained napkins, and fallen lobster tails. He glides around the kitchen gathering fat sopped towels, translucent shrimp shells, and broken chicken legs. A crab scavenging the seabed, Big Kevin glances into the audience with his hard red face and glassy black eyes and nibbles at scattered pralines, errant flecks of green onion, unused milk. He greedily stuffs in leftover egg whites, cornstarch, fins, suet, and skin and roars with laughter, relishing the studio audience's disgust.

Perry Garvin - Paper #3 - 1/31/00

My neck loosens from my thigh. I'm holding my pinky between my knees and is that my head? My left arm lengthens like a bean sprout in a fast-motion video. It escapes the dirt, head bowed, and then stopping to catch its breath, then bending back to open its mouth. Its lips draw back over its teeth and chin and nose and peels back over its eyes until all the skin on its head - hair and all- sort of sloughs off and its eyeballs pop out of its sockets and blink, blink, blink with translucent lids. The bones in my hand do not blink, however, they merely nod and suggest that I untie myself.

I only see things if I keep my eyes closed. Orange, green, and yellow chemical paint balls smash on my retinas. Jackson Pollack throws a bit of paint on my corneas. My open eyes only detect black. Black the color of the mucus from the men that work in the coal mine next door. I see them, sometimes, from my hole when they get home. They are covered in thick dust except for their white eyes and their hands where they have taken off their gloves. They cover their mouths and blow so hard that their white eyes bulge and all sorts of grease, oil, ball bearings, tar, and ink dribble onto the ground in long soupy strings.

The process of leaving my hole is lengthy, tedious, and boring. When the worms' nibbles at my flesh reaches a fearful itchiness, Mr. Pollack, in a spasm, throws his paint can against my optic nerve and engenders my awakening. First I have to loosen my neck from my thigh. Then my pinky from between my knees. Finally I must wait for the instructions from my hand to untie myself. As it berates me for my slowness it repeats the daily news over and over again. With my other hand I have tried to silence those chatty fingers but related limbs apparently have an affinity for one another because it never works. Once I am untied I push up through the dirt the way a frog kicks its way through water.

Although I can predict everything under the ground from the way that the plates will move to the nitrogen content of the walls, things outside are unpredictable and variable. Some days I push my head up into a beautiful lawn, lush with fruit trees, symmetrical lakes and carefully manicured bushes. Other days I push my head into a storm of hooves, blood, men clad in rusty dull metal, and hoarse grunts. Occasionally (and increasingly) I find myself clinging onto a chain of DNA. I dangle between C and G while I spin with the double helix. I like to climb this ladder until I get to the very top so that I can look down through all that genetic material and gaze through lipids to salute a phagocyte or hail a ribosome. But today it appears as though I have popped up into myself and I don't fit too well. In fact, I am uncomfortably snug. Form fitting, actually. This, I note, is the first time that I have ever had anything that was a perfect fit. Even those Oxford shirts advertised as "perfect-fit" can't match this.

Cramming into your own body, as I am learning, has its limitations. If you are not careful, you can rip. Major joints like knees, hips, ankles, and necks are problem areas. I've already blown out both elbows and my wrist looks like it might go at any moment. The 98 degree heat would not be so bad were there some ventilation but except for some air wafting in through the elbows, I am quite hot. Walking is stilted and I am extremely self-conscious even though there appears to be no one around. But because I am seeing double, and blearily at that, it is possible that someone might be looking at me right now, snickering at my wobbly gait. No matter. For where I find myself, whether it be in my own body, on a battlefield, or in a lush garden, my hole always waits for me just footsteps away.

Unlike others I have talked with, mine is not a pushy hole, but instead patient and understanding of all my foibles. My hole is too small to be called comfortable and too tight to be called cozy. But I should not complain because if it were not for the kindness and sustenance from that hole, my life would certainly have been terminated when my parents buried me alive.

Perry Garvin – Advanced Composition – 4/12/00

My alarm clock rings at 6:00am. It’s still dark outside. I roll out of bed and plod to the kitchen in my underwear and a green flannel shirt from my deceased grandfather’s wardrobe. My ritual: pour boiling water into a cup of Folgers instant coffee grounds, suck it down, quick shower, electric shave, six back-and-forth sweeps of anti-perspirant under my arms, tuck the flannel shirt into a pair of white pants from my deceased uncle’s wardrobe, pull on a gray wool cap, grab my art, lock the door in three places, walk down three flights of stairs and hit the streets until 4pm when I change into my maroon uniform and flip hamburgers and mix shakes at Dairy Queen until midnight. Repeat.

Today is Tuesday, and every Tuesday and Thursday I plaster up posters around downtown. Basically, I walk around looking for any large space – a wall, bus stop, portable toilet, bus, trash dumpster, sidewalk, window, awning, fence, billboard, you name it. I used to put up my posters in areas that have signs that say "Post No Bills," and chuckle at the irony. But soon I realized that it was just trite and obvious and so I stopped. I don’t post my signs on moving vehicles or private property. Public property, I believe, is a public forum. But private property I have respect for unlike the anarchists who call themselves guerrilla artists, but who are really vandals looking to destroy things. I’m no capitalist and I have my socialist bending, but I draw the line at vandalism.

I am a guerrilla artist. To be a guerrilla artist, you have to use your art as a social commentary. Art has an insurgent power that is dulled by a gallery. Art that speaks to social inequality and injustice must be out on the street where it can be accessed by everyone. By putting my art out there on the streets and using the language of advertising and images that people in our society naturally connect with, you can raise social commentary, but mock the power of advertising and break down it’s cultural monopoly on media, images, and signs.

Posters are nice because they are light and easy to put up. You just prepare some wallpaper paste, brush on the glue, and slap on the poster. I like to do my postings in large swaths of posters – sometimes as large as 30 across and 30 down, all right next to each other. I design all the posters myself. My current one is a photo of a can of Coca-Cola but instead of the Coca-Cola label, I’ve replaced it with one that says "Rainforest." You know, implying that with every purchase of a Coke product we are contributing to the consumption (and destruction) of the rainforest; the Coca-Cola company has been quite destructive to the Brazilian Rainforest by the clear-cutting of millions of acres to plant orange trees to make their Minute Maid products. Guerrilla art attacks people’s consciousness. By putting up social messages where people don’t expect to see them, you force them to confront issues that are otherwise kept confined. I see my art as being "conscience bombs."

On Wednesday and Friday I do more three-dimensional public works. Something that I’ve been working on lately are these dummies dressed up as homeless people. You know, real shabby clothes, dirty, smelly if you got close enough. I stuff the clothing with pillows, other clothes, anything to fill them out a bit to give them the rough shape and size of a human. Then I take two of them downtown and sit them against a building just like homeless people sit: tired, shameful. But instead of a face, I put on their heads an expressionless white paper-maché mask. I then sit across the street and take pictures of how people react to them – do they look at them? Ignore them like they do homeless people? I’m hoping that they will notice the similarities in the ways that they treat the dummies and the way they treat the homeless people. In our city, homelessness isn’t a social problem but an aesthetic problem. Our mayor doesn’t care about the welfare of these people, only in how the city looks. With my dummies I seek to demonstrate the dehumanization of these people by illustrating how the society views them – as objects, not as people.

Out on the street. Pretty chilly, but the air feels good. There are 1000 posters in my hand – exactly 2 reams. I live in an industrial area about 10 minutes away from downtown – the best gallery for guerrilla art. When I first started doing guerrilla art about 9 months ago, this walk to downtown gave me the jitters. I’d get so damned nervous and worried that the police would catch me that day, or that pedestrians would curse at me, or that shop owners would hit me or chase me away. I used to have to reassure myself that what I was doing was the best way to spread a social message. Now, however, I’m more sure that what I’m doing is right. As I mentioned before, there are lots of kinds of guerrilla art. There are the anarchists who want to destroy private property with their art. There are artists like me who only post on public spaces. Some guerrilla artists specialize in certain media (posters are extremely popular). There’s no organization at all within the guerrilla art movement, but I’ve met a few artists and we talk about our difficulties, and successes. There’s nothing better than finding an enormous wall and covering the whole thing in your posters. It turns a regular, utilitarian wall into a powerful social message.

I’ve been arrested 9 times, got off 5 times, had to pay a 200 dollar fine 3 times, and once had to spend a terrifying night in jail. The risks are worth it for what we do. Guerrilla artists have an important duty to bring consciousness to the people whether they want it or not. My actions, even if they are deemed illegal, are necessary to create a cultural shift in social priorities. Art has to attack you, confront you, challenge you. But art in a gallery is impotent and powerless by being put up against a white wall, being viewed by an elite clientele. Art needs to be where the people are, and that is out on the street.

After my day of conscience bombing, I go to work at the Dairy Queen in order to make a living. I’ve considered sticking little pieces of paper with a social message into every take-out bag of food. I’ll get around to it. For now, however, I’m content with my mass public art works and the social changes they’ll bring about.

Perry Garvin - 2/7/00 - Short Paper #7

The kid's name is Tonto. His parents claim they didn't know about any Indian but just liked the sound of the name. Luckily, the kids his age don't know anything about The Lone Ranger so he's spared their teasing. But oddly enough it's the fifty year olds that really give this kid a hard time.

I met him through my parents at a garden party in the summer. Tonto was surrounded by fat old men bombarding him with questions, looking at each other with these goofy smirks, and rolling on the balls of their feet: "Does the Lone Ranger always wear his mask?", "Did your horse and Silver get along?" "How does the Lone Ranger get those silver bullets anyway?" Tonto kept saying he didn't know and eventually managed to weasel his way out of the circle of sniggering red-faced men.

Tonto isn't an Indian; he's from Yonkers. He doesn't have black hair; it's ruddy brown. He doesn't know how to ride a horse, much less track a posse of bad guys by putting his ear to the ground. After the garden party I saw him around town on occasion staring out a bus window or scurrying down a street. And a few weeks after the garden party, I forgot about him.

I went back to school and absorbed myself in homework. I picked up a new girlfriend and spent all my time with her. We broke up and I went back to my studies. I passed two of my classes and flunked one and felt pretty bad about that. It was around this time that I saw Tonto in the coffee shop on Delaware and Highland. The sight of a twelve year old in Chesterfield's was pretty funny. He's not a Bohemian and instead of Nietchze he was reading J.K. Rowling and sipping what looked like hot chocolate. I kept my eyes locked on him through the glass as I walked into Chesterfield's and ordered a cup of coffee. He must have been totally transfixed by Harry Potter because Tonto's eyes didn't meet mine even as I stood next to his table looking down on him. "Tonto," I whispered and sat down across from him. He lowered his book. I smiled at him. A bemused, wistful expression rippled over his face. His eyebrows sloped down, forming an inverted V over his eyes. His bottom lids brimmed full and a lone tear slid down the round of his smooth cheek. I asked him how he was and he stood up, indicating that we should leave.

We walked down the street in silence looking at the ground. I felt embarrased. I must have been about 10 years his elder, but I felt awed by him. The way he carried himself was awkward. His feet were too big and his legs bent too much at the knee. But he maintained this sense of confidence and awareness. I kicked a chunk of concrete skittering down the sidewalk. Tonto dashed after it and rolled it around in his palm. He slipped it into his pocket, looked back at me and slipped into an alley and out of sight.

I started seeing Tonto more and more. Browsing in a bookstore or playing chess with old men in the park. He was, afer all, just a kid. He got fidgety and kicked his legs that were too short to touch the ground and he cried easily. But his actions betrayed what appeared a deep reverence for life. What I mean is that he focused on things. Intensely. When he was playing chess, he was more calm and peaceful than these wisened men in ill fitting beige jackets and black slacks. Tonto had patience unususual for a child his age. He would mull over the pieces and without an expression move a piece here or there to victory. I was convinced that he was a sage. A prophet. And I began following him.

Maybe he saw me around town or maybe he didn't. I didn't care either which way and it appeared as though he didn't either. I just wanted to watch him move, and concentrate, and think. I studied him not because he was young or pure or unspoiled by life's hard knocks or because he reminded me of myself when I was a kid but because he seemed to forecast what I would be like when I grew up.

In my dreams I asked him questions about what life was like in the 1940s. He didn't know. About what experiences he could pass on to me. He couldn't say. About lost loves. He shrugged. I asked him to show me beautiful things. He smiled that same melancholy smile that only comes with age and shook his head.

Perry Garvin - Short Paper #7 - 2/10/00

I took a test on Tuesday, came home, and turned red. Peering into my bathroom mirror I saw a quarter-sized crimson patch right in the middle of my forehead standing in stark contrast to my pale skin. The test I took wasn't difficult and after completing it early, I felt quite good about myself. On my way back home I stopped for an ice cream cone to celebrate my success. So stress or a case of nerves or some other psychological malaise couldn't account for this scarlet mark on my face. Initially the blemish did not bother me. About ninety percent of the way through puberty I was used to strange eruptions on my body of all sorts of colors, sizes, and textures. But as the hours passed, I frequented the mirror more and more to see what once was a scarlet splotch lengthen into a scarlet ribbon that draped down the front of my face. A hastily consumed dinner and another trip to the mirror gave this discoloration time to drip further down my face, curl around my mouth, and wrap itself around my neck like a red Amazonian snake. Soon my face turned such a deep auburn that my lips could not be distinguished from my cheeks and the one white in my eyes now positively turned into round, polished rubies. Little pools of red covered my shoulders and trickled down my arms coloring my fingernails like little cherry Ju-Jubes and turning my fingers into skinny ballpark franks. By nightfall every square inch of my body was a deep red bordering on purple and swiftly approaching black

Suffice to say, rest did not come easy that night. I would lay down, try to dismiss my metamorphasis as some pubescent phase, and get some sleep. The heat radiating from this red and the pressure distracted me and drove me repeatedly to the mirror to check for any changes. As my sleepless night wore on, my palor became more and more alarming. I was a huge bruise and giant blister. This red, I surmised, could only be blood that had somehow gotten lost in my body and migrated to the surface for unknown reasons. I did not feel as though my life were in danger, but I was determined to try to remedy this problem.

Returning to my room I dug through my office supplies to find an appropriate implement. Staples were too small. My knife was too big. The pins were too dull. I finally settled on a drawing compass that I used for my art classes. The sharp point on one of the legs that ensured a smooth a perfect circle drawn with the other leg would work just perfectly.

I walked into the bathroom, took a last look in the mirror and, seeing my complexion worsening, wiped the nib of the compass with my shirt and pressed its steel point deep into the most crimson part of my arm. The tine immediately punctured a hole in my arm through which thick blood came coursing out. The tiny prick, submitted to unusual pressure from the blood, began to rip in a jagged line up and down the length of my arm. I dropped the compass to the floor with a clink and clasped my hand over the lengthening slit in an attempt to stop its slow spread. Thick, rich blood oozed out between my fingers and poured into the toilet where I was desperately clutching my arm. My grip apparently stopped the incision from growing and the once torrential flow of blood soon slackened into a trickle and finally sputtered to a stop after a few drops. I loosened my grip on my arm and stood up to assess the situation. The toilet water had been replaced by blood. The white in the tiles was now a brownish red pocked with scabs. And when I looked into the mirror I was greeted with my usual pale self, haggard, but as white as usual.

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Perry Garvin - Short Paper #7 - 2/10/00

The sun! Bursts of light stream through the slats of my shades. On my back, exposed to God, I run my sleepy hands through my hair blessing my good fortune. My bed - that soft landing for my body, a giant hand rouses me to wakefulness. Oh! Sweet water - crisp, clean, and warm. Splash over me and invigorate me. My tears of joy get lost in the shower's spray and course down the drain, diluted. Towels: kiss my body and tousle my hair. Foot powder: caress me! Hair brush: tame my licks and smooth my curls. Mirror: praise me and laud me as I do you. And you. And you. Each one of you beautiful plastic, aluminum, glass, and paper creations. Each one of you that neatens me up for the day.

Cereal and milk: combine into a pasty, nourishing gruel to delight and power me through the day. My tears of gratitude plink and plop into the milk, salting my meal. Slip and slide down my esophogus and play in gastric my juices. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for your vitamins, your minerals, and your bran.

Clothes: hold me. Belt: support me. Shoes: protect me. Bless you all. My blissful tears stain my shirt and mark my pants. Soon I'm sopping and I walk outside to greet the beautiful flowers with their happy faces all looking just at me. I wish I could gather them up in my arms and kiss and lick them and run them all over my face and stick them in my ears and into my mouth and consume them. The sun! Burst over me and guide me for the rest of my day.

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Perry Garvin - Short Paper #7 - 2/14/00

I took a test on Tuesday, came home, and turned red. Peering into my bathroom mirror, I saw a quarter-sized crimson patch right in the middle of my pale white forehead. It did not seem very alien. It was not hot, its texture was of the same smoothness of my skin, it didn't look veiny or speckled. It was as smooth a red as if someone had rubbed a bit of rouge into my skin. It just sat there looking quite complacent and not the least bit sinister. Initially the blemish did not bother me. About ninety percent of the way through puberty, I was used to strange eruptions on my body of all sorts of colors, shapes, sizes, and textures. But as the hours passed, I frequented the mirror more and more to see what was once a scarlet splotch lengthen into a scarlet ribbon that draped down the front of my face.

A case of nerves, stress, or some other psychological malaise could not explain this facial blemish. I was in high spirits both because my test was easy and because I had stopped for a banana ice cream cone on the way home from the testing center. But after a hastily consumed dinner and another trip to the mirror that showed the discoloration dripping further down my face, curling around my mouth, and wrapping itself around my neck like a red Amazonian snake, my high spirits began to flag. Healthy applications of cortisone cream did nothing to its advance. Soon my lips could no longer be distinguished from my cheeks and the once pearly whiteness of my eyes hardened into round, polished rubies. Little pools of red covered my shoulders and trickled down my arms coloring my fingernails like little cherry jujubes and turning my fingers into skinny ballpark franks. By nightfall every square inch of my body was a deep red bordering on purple and swiftly approaching black.

Rest did not come easy that night. I lay down and tried to dismiss my discoloration as some pubescent phase - a normal side effect from a testosterone surge. But sleep eluded me as heat began radiating from this damned red spot and increasing pressure all over my body kept driving me back to the mirror again and again to check for developments. As my sleepless night wore on, my pallor became more and more alarming. The blood that must have somehow migrated to the surface of my body was turning me into a huge bruise, a giant blood blister.

Around 2:18 in the morning, after a particularly disheartening engagement with the mirror, I returned to my room and dug through my office supplies determined to exorcise this scarlet curse from my body. Finding an appropriate implement for the removal process was surprisingly difficult. Staples were too small. My knife was too big. Scissors were unwieldy and pins were too dull. I finally settled on my house key, which, while not sharp, had a good serrated edge and a strong metal composition.

I returned to the bathroom, and ran the key under hot water in a weak attempt to kill any germs. My swollen skin throbbed and pressing the key into my flesh was like pushing on the surface a balloon. I wiped away the excess water from the key and rammed the key's head into the meaty part of my forearm. The head of a key is not much of a point, but my skin was at the very limits of its structural integrity and so the key slipped into the crimson pool beneath my paper skin. Thick blood coursed out in a forceful jet of liquid red that splattered against the white tile wall. The small hole, submitted to unusual pressure from the blood, began to rip. A jagged laceration crept up and down the length of my arm growing from a few inches to nearly half a foot in less than a minute.

In 7^th grade I was voted "Most Likely to Keep Calm" and my response to this spreading gash proved such a designation quite apt. Lightheaded and sopping in blood, I dropped my keys to the tile floor with a clatter and clasped my hand over the lengthening slit in an attempt to stop its slow spread. With my teeth, I drew the spreading skin together and closing my eyes to the pumping inky blood held tight through the onslaught. After a few horrendous minutes, the torrential blood flow slackened into a trickle and finally sputtered to a stop after a few lone drops from my arm. Loosening my stuck fingers from the clot and tissue, I let go of my arm and stood up to assess the situation. The toilet water had been replaced by blood. The white in the tiles was now a brownish red pocked with scabs. And when I looked into the mirror I was greeted with my usual pale self, haggard, but white.