Karl Sherlock
Phone: 619•644•7871
E-mail: karl.sherlock@gcccd.edu
Instructor Website: www.grossmont.edu/karl.sherlock/
Karl Sherlock is Co-Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and teaches Creative
Writing, Drama Writing, and literature, including American Literature and Views Of
Death and Dying in Literature. His degrees include a Master of Arts in English from the
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of
California, Irvine. In addition to being an Academy of American Poets prize winner, he
has worked under such writers as Eavon Boland, Milton Kessler, James Liddy, James
McMichael, Sherod Santos, Alan Shapiro and others. Poems from his book-length
manuscript, The Forthright Wishes Of the Dead, have appeared in a variety of journals,
including The Jacaranda Review, Dickinson Review, South Coast Poetry Journal, The
Alsop Review, and in gay writers journals such as The James White Review. His play,
Things I’m Afraid Of, was scripted into a short film in 1992.
QUOTABLES
"We all discover early on, one's
own words are clearer, more deeply
felt and discerned. That's why, drained of heart
and self and speech, somehow my instinct
knows well enough to fold my hands
against my ear at night, let slumber
be what it is, a chance
to listen to my prayers,
a chance to answer what's
larger than my self,
but smaller than God."
(from "Echo")
ON WRITING: "We are, all of us, egotistical to think that anything we have to say
through our creation is worth the public’s attention (thank goodness)."
Link to Karl Sherlock's website: http://www.grossmont.edu/karl.sherlock
Poetry
Scissors and Comb
As It Happens
Church and State
Drama
The Suicide Clause
Creative Nonfiction
from "Clear: A True Story"
all works on this page © Karl Sherlock
CREATIVE NONFICTION
FROM
Clear: A True Story
Slumped into his desk chair, Max has precious minutes to get on the road for one
of his many doctor's visits this month, but I can't tell if he's sleeping or braking for pain.
"Hope to Gosh you're feeling better," I say, to test him. I don't normally use such flaccid
language as "gosh," but it's one of our spontaneous word games; this one's inspired by
reality TV censors who insist on that three-word, squeezed teabag of excitement, "Oh
my Gosh."
He plumps an eyebrow; he's awake. He replies, "Gosh moves in mysterious
ways." Yes, very mysterious. The big mystery to me is, he rarely lies down to sleep
and, to distract himself, spends hours on-line reading everything from The Huffington
Post to Harry Potter slash about first Mud-Blood kisses and the magic of love over He-
Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. He swears these stories are written better than Rowling's. I
have no comeback, but I like that there's a character whose name the reader must be
spared out of political correctness. "We gotta go—go with Gosh," I say.
"Yes, in Gosh we trust," he says.
These languid, last-minute sick scenarios are not at all new. Even on that
Wednesday afternoon in July, he neatly pressed his piqued body into Sunday clothes
and I rushed him downtown. In the Court House elevator, he straightened my jacket
collar and suddenly sparkled—handsome, older, familiar as a favorite fountain pen.
After eighteen years, we were marrying. On a bench, a young Marine in his dress
uniform nervously gripped a clipboard, scribbling whatever his pregnant bride
murmured, and while Max and I filled out those same forms, I pretended marriage to be
as prosaic as a correction on our electric bill. But, as the judge ceremoniously spoke, I
saw our life measured in years of mundane sickness and health: we'd play our word
games unmaking the bed; worry about blindness and roughage; lob obscenities at the
news when another gay kid is killed; watch Say Yes To the Dress on The Learning
Channel; yes, we learned--we learned to grow old, and then much older, enough to
lose our smug certainty it'll all work out. I heard Max say, "I do," and I felt at once
celebrated and forgotten, as though the only people who would ever see what was so
extraordinary in the ordinariness of this moment were right there in the room with us,
and they would clear their heads of us by the two-thirty nuptials.
Max pivots his chair and powers up the oscillating fan. "For the love of Gosh," I
urge, "we gotta leave. Move it out."
But we don't leave. Instead, he fiddles the top buttons of his short-sleeved shirt,
stippled with sweat, and says, "I give up. I'll have to take some drugs." He doesn't even
have to hear it to know a puff of exasperation has crossed my lips. "Sorry. Not much I
can do," he says. "Gosh grant me the serenity."
He despises that saying but, having played this game since Monday, we’ve
already taken our easiest turns, so our versions of "Gosh" have grown eccentric. He
speaks German; I want to say to him, "Mein Gosch in Himmel!" but I'm not really sure if
"Gosch" is something in German, so instead I punt with a risky Elizabethan phrase,
"'Osh's bodkins!"
Max bests me with "'Shwounds!" He's read all of Shakespeare and studied Anglo-
Saxon in his classical education, a lifetime ago, before we met.
"What about In Gosh we trust?" I ask.
"Bzzzzzt,” comes a reply. “Said that one. Penalty point: you have to fix me a
cocktail." He means his medicine. I was a licensed bartender when I was eighteen--a
watered down, shopping mall version of one. In an era of long hair, the barbers from
next door would come every night to dull their pain over a bratwurst and one of my
shitty martinis. Clearly, this mixology isn’t about that kind of pain, but the recipes do
favor: one part cranberry juice, two parts black cherry Kool-Aid; drizzle a heady amount
of liquid narcotic; ice; sip lugubriously. He presses the chilled glass to his forehead
first, and then to his lips.
We feel the particulars of pain differently, he and I. Doctors glibly call mine the
"suicide" headache. Direct sunlight is its muse, and when the gash of it clears, I
sometimes discover myself tearing up into a dark room’s darker corner. A routine
histamine response, sure, but pain, vile and insipid as warm cantaloupe, is sad as well,
even as it corners you. Misia, a terrier who, in her declining years, we passed from one
family member to the next like an urn of ashes, spent her final days under my father's
watch; she would languish in a restful patch of afternoon light, moving, like a sundial,
with its warm hours across his parlor rug. When she instead began to stare into a dark
corner beneath a desk and bleed into her stools, my father took her in for the injection.
"She wanted to take that one last step and couldn't," he explained. I knew the step he
meant. There was a woman buried just below the permafrost of his memory; he'd tell
her story only on the coldest days, when steam from Sunday’s cabbage froze inside our
kitchen windows. He was sixteen leaving occupied Poland with his family on a train
destined for a forced labor camp in the Arctic Circle, and she boarded it with him, at the
point of a Russian soldier's bayonet. When the train nodded to rest on the tundra, she
hobbled out of view to loosen her bowels, collapsed in a clearing of snow, and was
soon surrounded by guards. She pleaded, she could walk no further. They gave her
this choice: go back to the train, or remain and die. My father saw her totter to her feet
then seize one trembling, deliberate step--in the opposite direction of the train. A
bayonet fired, and the train inched forward.
And now, the gritty particulars of my husband's condition: Max grew up in the
Michigan Assemblies of God, became an Honor Roll student, and looked after his
younger brother whose blindness embarrassed his parents; when he was seventeen, a
church member told them she'd seen Max enter the iniquitous Hosh's Grill, where men
in silk dress shirts met for an evening coffee and cigarillos. The next afternoon, after his
mother lured him to lunch, Max’s father, secretly parked outside, prodded him into an
idling car and delivered him into the roughshod hands of two orderlies at the Battle
Creek Sanitarium. His father instructed them, do whatever; make him straight. And
straight away, treatment began, with rounds of humiliation, pictures of slippery-breasted
porn stars, and the starvation that brainwashing craves. When Max didn't respond, they
restrained him, choked him on a corrosive brew, then blistered his brain with
electroconvulsive therapy. None could explain why he'd awaken from the clear period
far sooner than they wanted, and staff members were becoming unglued by his
involuntary screams, so they buckled him to a gurney and suffocated him on Indoklon
gas, not to quiet his mind, but to paralyze his vocal chords, then ramped up the
electricity. He remembers clearly that voiceless torture, his brain and body pulsing with
brimstone; he remembers pleading when they pushed down the mask, pinched the
hypodermic, then tripped the toggle switch--every two days, for the next three months,
right up until his eighteenth birthday. Years later, he would wear the imprimatur of
those wounds: ulcers would burgeon and devour his stomach so savagely, most of it
would be removed, leaving a chute where a gut once was, and his flagging pancreas
would turn days of rampant diabetes into moments connected by dull lancets and
Humulin injections. For their part, I daily visit upon his parents a living death wish. I
know the darkness of such wishes are like a vacant corner that can seduce you,
hypnagogic and certain all you'd need is one more step to pass through it. I wish them
anyway. I used to think a life like his, one of such hardship, could be ennobling, sprung
from the mind of a God with a fine and secret purpose. It is not. Suffering is rancorously
mundane and godless; it bores us while it violates us, like the memory of an ex-
boyfriend's lovemaking. A hard life is so jealous of anything you enjoy, the only way to
outwit it lies in the contradiction of cherishing what you don't.
I say, "Gosh never closes one door without . . . "
"Stop,” he says, now buttoning his shirt. “It's a trap. They're all closets under the
stairs." He rises. He's The Boy Who Lived.
I go, "Then what about, ‘There but for the grace of Gosh . . . ‘"?
" . . . go I," he says. And with a little grace, I winnow out one my canes and we go.
In the car, the ignition turns like a cleared throat, and I produce our wedding rings
from a vest pocket. We don't ever leave the house together without them. We had
designs for a January ceremony at home, brimming with friends. But there was
Proposition 8, and I felt such a dullard for having been hopeful. That morning, after I
cast my ballot, a grey sheet cake of clouds drizzled down its misery, and a freight truck
thrashed out spinnerets of mist on the freeway, kicking up a chip of stone at my
windshield, and a small, fractured iris of glass opened its unblinking eye at me. I felt
this one inexorably: we were going to lose. Why? How could I meet anyone's eye not
knowing which of them silenced us, again? The wipers flinched and—I couldn't help it
—a scream opened from my mouth and held and held until it crazed the back of my
throat. I stopped, tried to shout again: my voice was already gone.
Our garage door thrumbles open and, even though undraped windows stare
down on us from across the alley, I don't wait to find out who, if anyone, is watching; I
just let the car smolder in its own exhaust. We have this one absolute sacrament: I ask
him to hold out his hand.
"Are you sure you want to do this now?" he asks.
"Yes," I say, "Absolutely. I do." He waits. I kiss his ring and carefully slip it over the
cracked skin of his finger; he kisses mine, and sidles it past my scarred knuckle. I let
him take whatever time he needs now. We're already so late. Then I kiss his hand; I
kiss his mouth. I inch us forward, together, into whatever sunlight remains.
POETRY
Scissors and Comb
His safety lamp is hooked
from a basement cross bream, cord
straightened to counter the overhead
floor. He moves it
here, and over a little,
until the light timbering all sides is
just so. So many years, this has been
the carpentry of my haircuts, a stage
nailed out from his lamp, and bearing out gently his
disappointments. "I don't understand it," he says.
"Your mother, sometimes, you know she's
sick in the head." Again, he'll say he's the victim
of a madwoman, of her hatred for the foundries,
and the cigarette smoke from neighbors'
bedrooms that fumed its way through
her open windows years ago. I listen till
the scissors and the fast hands work
obliviously, and the endless blames
have become his own confession. And
choked inside his barber-spread, practice at
changing his subjects, telling him,
"Don't trim over my ears." Yet, with the silent
moments of hair painting my shoulders, I hear myself
quietly blaming him for my awkward looks--
that unbending neatness, his stale ideas
about clean appearance, good
families, and what love
should be. And when he's caught
my head between his hands,
muscled and squeezed it into the
good positions, the best light,
I question if this is all he knows
about love for me: his fingertips
warming between scalp and scissors, needing
to flourish his lines
with the shuffle of a whisk broom
beating my shoulders; sick
in his heart, and wearied for the moment
when the cut hair falls into the light, perfect
and blameless, and lands at his feet.
As It Happens
As hay bends and divides beneath the blades, as the terrier,
vigilant, courts the danger of the tractor tires,
my uncle's harvester
grumbles to a standstill.
He's hit a pheasant nest unwittingly
in the tall palisades of yellow grasses,
and dismounts. Somehow the hen still lives,
however frenzied, and now at the field's far end
she careers around the thick shoulders of lower branches,
thrashing and tilling the air, but won't alight
with those raw and glistening nubs where her legs
once were. And here in this rousted place
where she had once scratched aside the dirt
and hatched out several chicks--the terrier
gnashes the half-dead things, his teeth
drawing in the flattened corpus of down
and parody of stricken yellow claws, until we try
to stay the horror: snatch the dead nestling
from the obdurate jaw; flag my uncle's jacket after
the skeet of stumbling feathers so that the hen
wheezes forth a phrase, bewildered, and lurches
into the hopeless shelter of other fields.
There's an end to it.
And when the growing season has ebbed,
we'll deny again what the terrier's teeth
were meant for all along. Somewhere,
the viscous coil of the terrier's spoor
sinks below the moss. Somewhere, the thorny
bits of claws and bones hedge themselves
in roots. Somewhere, the thresher
has long since flocked the field
with a pale distance of dirt, and a bird
will never drop from the sky. Somehow,
we were never there to see it happen.
Church and State
A SESTINA
Converting church to polling station seems a breech of faith:
in place of font and tabernacle, here, a ballot box;
and where, against these walls, the pooling candles should have cast
their soulful flickers, now with room to romp, a lawless child
deals his mother glancing blows. Even the minister keeps
a layman's spellbound gaze fixed upon the desperate measures
she must take to bring the boy to heel. We're all the measure
of a parent's worth, but hardly does it hearten faith
in political institutions or the moral charge wherein we keep
our trust, to see her act with pride in civic duty, and then box
her son about the ears. I begin to wonder, whose brainchild
was this, to strip a sanctuary bare, enlist this stoic cast
and crew from the church's congregation diligent to cast
upon my civic duty such a pious feel? But then, these measures,
props, seats and senators--so often they're just child's
play for church and state. And votes, just prayers: for shaken faith
of migrant farmers kneeling at those dirty crates which box
our grapes and melons; for communion of the rich who keep
a city's dreams protected for themselves; or for the upkeep
of the cross on public lands. What to do with indigents, cast
from park to depots? Gay men crucified on fences? A box
of simple ballots saves or damns the souls of many; measures
morals in reduction of the taxes; imbues the poor with faith
in economics or casinos; or, with the stubbornness of a child,
miraculously changes the canyons into acreage. As a child
I prayed to flags and banners hung behind a priest who'd keep
the votive candles burning at all hours, and administer his faith
in contributions tithed, in scraps of soap and aspirin, outcast
tee-shirts bundled for Biafran children; he'd countermeasure
Father Groppi marching viaducts beside Negroes, yet our poor-box,
chiseled finally off the vestibule wall, never once was filled. One backs
these pulpit politics, especially when told to see as a child
sees the world and multiply the hymnal numbers to measure
out the mystery of life. But, safe at home by order of the curfew, I'd keep
my scapular and missal boxed, then listen to the soul's downcast
sermon of the things that fill our prisons and our pews: blind faith
in every promise sworn before a child; the great and measured
guards and gods who keep our hopeless company; and the ballot, cast
into its cardboard box, then winnowed with a little faith.
DRAMA
The Suicide Clause
from
SCENE TWO
At Rise:
An hour or so has passed. The table that once held papers is now
haphazardly strewn with half-filled plates, dirty silverware, crumpled
napkins, stacked bread plates, crumb-festooned buttery knives,
clouded glasses. The bottle of vodka that appeared unopened
previously unopened is now clearly half-empty. Two sloppy cordial
glasses should be easily visible, above all else if necessary. The
dinette chair occupied by EVELYN seems kicked backwards, on its
side. In the kitchen area, in back, pots, pans and food containers and
other kitchen disasters are everywhere, suggesting that the simplicity
of cooking store-bought pierogis was not as simple as anticipated.
A smile from KELLY, a quick glance up
from EVELYN's feet, then the final
settling of the raiments.
KELLY
Do y'know, you have a remarkable ability of looking up even while you're looking
down?
EVELYN
I'm sure it's all part of the sex appeal of this moment.
KELLY
You have . . . you have attributes . . . lasting attributes. You're lucky. People don't
always keep them.
EVELYN
I think you'd have been the type to see the emperor's new clothes.
KELLY
Nah. That'd have taken a kind of optimism I know I don't have.
EVELYN
Are you telling me you are an optimist or you're not?
KELLY
I'm saying I'm a certain kind of optimist.
EVELYN
That being . . . ?
KELLY
That being the kind who can hope for tomorrow because it's very simply not today. Any
other kind of optimism is a matter for prayer.
(shudders)
EVELYN
That takes some strength. Some people would keep an habitually prayerful attitude in
your condition . . .
KELLY
. . . if they knew what's good for them. Yes, I've heard that one before too.
(singing)
Back on my knees again
For that's where I know he wants me
Back on my knees, agai-ain
In a prayerful attitude.
EVELYN
What the blazes are you singing . . .
KELLY
Sshh, sshh. I'm taking my little trip to Bountiful now.
Asking the Lord for mercy
Back on my knees again.
EVELYN
You can get up now, Geraldine.
KELLY
I used to hear my Aunt Lucy singing that one.
EVELYN
(talking over KELLY)
They're starting to all sound like one aunt. Are we talking just one side of the family?
KELLY
(oblivious)
Not at the High Masses of course. After the all-day tent revivals. Some sweaty
preacher . . .
{BEGIN TABLEAU}
EVELYN
(talking over KELLY; smart-alecky)
Come for the brainwashing, stay for the pie.
Sensing EVELYN's impatience, KELLY
begins a foot rub, first the paralytic foot,
then the other. EVELYN relents and
leans back to enjoy it.
KELLY
. . . , the seventh son of a seventh son. She met her Mr. Reginald Hannigan at one of
those. The man who would convert her to the Pentecostals.
(singing, again!)
For that's where I know he wants me
Back on my knees, agai-ain
In a prayerful attitude.
Has no one figured out the sexual fetish in these Southern hymns? "In a prayerful
attitude"? C'mon, who wrote that? Sophie Tucker? From the first moment some lonely
artist tacked up an image of Jesus in a loin cloth, Christianity and sexual sublimation
would be synonymous forever,
(crossing fingers tightly)
and Jesus Christ would be just another pinup model in the minds of sexually frustrated,
oppressed Southern women and sexually repressed bi-curious good ol' boys. Am I the
only one who gets that?
{END TABLEAU}
EVELYN
Now you're stooping to the level of a gossip.
KELLY
Look me in the face and tell me the entire two-thousand year old tradition of Christianity
is not about the power of the gossip, to use the truth in whatever way causes the
greatest torture. You know the language; tell me "gossip" and "gospel" aren't from the
same . . .
EVELYN
Bloody hell, stop now. You're obviously now channeling the ghost of Madeline Murray
O'Hare. Where are the bodies buried, Kelly? Your grandmother did it, I know she did.
You can tell me.
KELLY
No, Dear Evie. Experience has taught me that all religion is a pustule on the human
condition. Once you've left behind the training wheels of your Faith, there's only one
direction to go: away. Far and away.
EVELYN
This certainly doesn't sound much like a Klan approved position, either. It's a wonder
you're still alive.
KELLY
Let's just say I hid the scapular under my sweater--which is the history of scapulars,
anyway--and confused them with hifalutin words they never learned because they
wasn't in the King James Bible. And the King James Bible, as I was told once by a
corner preacher in Tuscaloosa, was the version good enough for the Good Lord himself
to use. For these morons, religion is just a matter of choosing AOL over Earthlink
because their ads are louder.
EVELYN
Born-Agains did launch the success of the internet.
KELLY
I never did quite figure that out. Sounds like Al Gore all over again. Enlighten me about
that sometime.
EVELYN
(counterfeitly philosophical)
We mustn't be ungrateful to the universe for the little things, or the birds will stop
bringing us flowers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
KELLY returns to EVELYN'S feet to
replace the booties.
KELLY
By the by, I went to . . . Lift. That's it. I went to the Hemlock Society web site the other
day--you know--thinking it was the best place to find out what the fatal cocktail might
be. . . . Again. Okay, you can rest your foot. Of course, you know the incorrigible
consumer in me--that little voice of Aunt Helene in the back of my head: straight to their
Hemlock Shop on-line! Bought their tote bag for you. It should arrive in eight to ten
business days.
EVELYN
I should attend Physical Therapy with a Hemlock Society tote bag? You're joking, aren't
you?
KELLY
Fair enough. Not sure if it's durable. Anyway, no luck at the Hemlock Society. I had
more success with the Physician's Desk Reference and a little inspiration from Aunt
Gwen: X amount of Haldon taken with X number of martinis. Just shuts down your
autonomic system. I have the recipe written down; should only take several hours to
work. And we'll have a gay ol' time as well. I mean, you'll have a gay ol' time, drinking
martinis. I'll have a . . . well, point of fact, I'll be out of time, won't I. Lord, if Aunty Gwen
could see us now.
EVELYN
Give me a second. I'm still getting my mind around this Hemlock Society tote bag thing.
KELLY
Despite what they tell you, you can not take it with you.
A bit of gravity and silence between
them.
EVELYN
You can take those with you if you like.
(doesn't quite get the pronunciation right)
Your pierogis.
KELLY
Nah. Don't fret about them. They were just . . . A silly and last minute . . . well, a lark.
You know what I mean. I need to tell you . . .
EVELYN
(even greater gravity)
Oh Kelly, look at the kitchen. Will we ever have enough time to . . .
(unable to continue)
KELLY
It's about the money. The insurance, I mean.
EVELYN
(greater gravity still)
Money. The money. I told you. I don't care about the money. I just care about you
staying.
KELLY
I found someone, a man in Santa Ana. He was very polite, very respectful. He said
many people in my position were doing it.
EVELYN looks down with unconcern
masking concern, but says nothing.
KELLY
I . . . I sold him my policy. For eighty-five thousand in cash. It's a little less than if I . . .
you know. But it yours, Evie. It can't be withheld from you now. They won't . . .
EVELYN
The clause, you mean. They'd have used the clause. Against me.
KELLY
That's the one.
(setting the moral compass, now, to true north)
I'm not ashamed I did it. I'm just ashamed I kept it from you till now.
We see now that EVELYN, with lump in
throat, is glassy-eyed and ready for tears,
staring into a distance unwaveringly.
EVELYN
I'll be sure to keep every penny of it in the tote bag.
KELLY
We'll think of a better place than. In a while. We'll talk about it. Together. When you
feel more like talking to me.
KELLY squints at first to see into that
same distance but understands it is a
private place for EVELYN; KELLY
instead looks unwaveringly into
EVELYN's eyes, and takes in hand one
of EVELYN'S feet to continue a foot
and leg rub.
LIGHTS FADE.
End of Scene Two
