The Henley High Poetry Club Read online

  The Henley High Poetry Club

  Crushing: Book #1

  Written by Jude Warne

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStockPhoto.com

  Edited by K. A. Rue

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Warne, Jude, author.

  Title: The Henley High Poetry Club / by Jude Warne.

  Description: Minneapolis, MN: EPIC Press, 2018. | Series: Crushing

  Summary: Hunter wants to be a writer when he grows up. When Wren, his dream girl, starts

  a poetry club, Hunter decides to push his creative chops to the max. But Hunter’s longtime

  BFF Carmelita doesn’t think Wren is for real. Hunter must decide between his dream girl

  and his best friend, and right and wrong.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016962594 | ISBN 9781680767155 (lib. bdg.) |

  ISBN 9781680767711 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Poetry—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Best friends—Fiction. |

  Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016962594

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For Warren, Gerry, Neil, Greil, and Jack

  I headed straight for the back of the store, toward the Poetry Room, and grabbed a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl from its shelf. Carmelita was convinced that the line was, “I’m with you in Rockaway.” A person had never been more wrong! I was disappointed in her.

  “There—read the word for yourself! Right there.”

  She looked to see where the printed word “Rockland” met my index finger and rolled her eyes.

  “Same difference.”

  “No, no, not at all! ‘Rockaway’ makes me think of Rockaway Beach in New York—‘Rockland’ is the name that Ginsberg gave to this mental hospital in the poem, where the poor schnook Carl Solomon was wrongly locked up.”

  Carmelita frowned. “Well, they’re very similar words.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Carmelita and I had been trying to test our recent memorization of the classic 1950s Beat poem. We had done well up until that line, when we had agreed to disagree, at least until I had demanded clarification. In poems, in literature, these things mattered. One word could make or break a writer’s whole artistic point of view, the view that he presented to the world! I knew that this was true because I was a writer; so was Carmelita. Our pennames were Hunter Zivotovsky and Carmelita Lorca—which happened to be our real names too.

  To solve the Rockland versus Rockaway riddle—a riddle that I already knew the answer to—I had dragged us away from our espressos at Caffe Trieste on Vallejo Street. We ran (much to Carmelita’s chagrin, through multiple yellow street-lights) down to one of San Francisco’s many Beat Poet landmarks scattered throughout the North Beach area—the City Lights Bookstore. The Beat Poets were this super-hip group of guys who hung out in San Francisco during the 1950s; their writing seemed radical at the time and shocked a whole bunch of people then. They were romantic and enthusiastic about living and loving and just being alive. Their vibes still radiated into the twenty-first century, especially in their old hangouts—like Caffe Trieste and City Lights. My favorite was Jack Kerouac who had written my favorite book of all time, On the Road. The book was just about this guy and his friends traveling around America—but it was so much more than that.

  On the Road introduced me to an attitude, an attitude that I truly wanted to steal for myself. It was one of coolness and intelligence, but it was also enthusiastic and life-hungry. It was immediate and instant and of-the-moment. It read like rock and roll music or something. One day, I hoped to write a book like that.

  We momentarily abandoned our Howl efforts and prowled around the store. Section by section, shelf by shelf, writer by writer, book by book. We often prowled here; in fact, though we lived and high-schooled across the bridge in Berkeley, we were here in North Beach, and in this bookstore, once or twice a week. It was our second home. Carmelita and I thought that the more City Lights-ian oxygen we inhaled, the more artistic glory would make its way into our veins and stay there for all eternity. Maybe longer, even.

  I picked up a copy of The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson, my whacko-genius namesake, and toyed with the idea of purchasing it. I had read it before, twice, but didn’t own a copy. Carmelita skimmed through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise. It was her favorite novel of all time. She was always a sucker for romance-infused self-discovery literature. I, on the other hand, went in for the more masculine stuff—as far as novels went, anyway—like seafaring adventure stories or Raymond Chandler’s detective tales, tales that thrived on sarcastic, impossible-to-fool-for-long first-person narrators. You know, guys like me.

  I put the Thompson book back on its shelf and motioned to Carmelita that it was time to split. Vesuvio Cafe, across the alleyway outside, was calling our names.

  Whenever we went to Caffe Trieste or City Lights, we inevitably found ourselves at Vesuvio. It was the coolest establishment in San Francisco. We visited Vesuvio for the same reason we visited City Lights. We wanted our essences to mingle with those of writers who had spent hours and hours there, pondering and creating.

  At Vesuvio, we ordered ginger ales and soaked up the atmosphere. We could only do this during off-hours, because technically patrons needed adult IDs to gain entry. So we usually went during the afternoons and hung out with the owner, Bobcat, one of my dad’s best friends from college. Both Dad and Mom were professors who taught at UC Berkeley: Dad in Literature, Mom in Philosophy. The three of us lived together near the main campus in a book-littered apartment—we always had, as long as I’d been alive, anyway. Before I was born, Mom and Dad taught for a few years at Columbia University in New York, Jack Kerouac’s alma mater.

  Vesuvio could be called one of Jack’s alma maters as well; when in San Francisco, Jack and his fellow Beat poets used to spend days there, sorting out the ideas of life, ideas that would go into their books. Carmelita and I usually did plenty of idea-sorting there ourselves.

  We finished up our Canada Drys, waved farewell to Bobcat, and headed to the BART station to make our way home to Berkeley. We usually took the BART—or Bay Area Rapid Transit—to and from Berkeley and places in the main city. It was a Sunday night and I still had my Physics homework assignment to do. I dreaded it.

  “This happens every weekend now, Hunter. I don’t know why you always do your Science homework last. I do that first, because it’s the worst—get it out of the way, you know? Then I have my Lit reading to do, and sometimes the weekly essay, last—the perfect way to transition from the weekend into Monday.”

  We hit the station, grabbed tickets from the machine, and waited for the seven-thirteen. The fog was rolling out and the October sunset hesitated in the open sky.

  “That’s because you’re more logical than I am, always have been,” I told Carmelita. “You believe in outlines too, before you start writing anything, don’t you? Even though it differs slightly from the Beats’ and my favorite policy of ‘First Tho
ught, Best Thought,’ you probably get a lot more writing done than any of us ever have.”

  Hmmm. I thought I was onto something there.

  “I guess there’s a safety in not planning ahead with creative stuff, because without concrete plans, you don’t feel bad if you never get them done,” Carmelita added. “Once story ideas and chapter descriptions are written out though, there’s, you know, a sort of obligation there. Obligation is motivating. It has to be.”

  Carmelita laughed loudly, flashing all of her teeth. I knew the sound of that laugh well but didn’t always know what it meant.

  “What’s so funny, Car?”

  “We’re getting way too serious. Obligations? We like writing because it’s fun, right? Fun is our motivation. The end.”

  Carmelita and I had been friends since the third grade, when we got into an argument over which Roald Dahl book was more awesome. I argued (and still do) for The BFG, while Carmelita argued (and still does) for Matilda. Every four or five months we revisited the argument for old times’ sake, and to see if either one of us could finally convince the other that she was so, so, very completely and entirely incorrect. So far, original positions had held strong.

  As we glided along the tracks, Carmelita put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. In middle school this would have been a forbidden and unwanted move in our friendship. But in recent months, physical closeness had grown kind of com-monplace for us. On the train, walking down the hallways at our school Henley High, sitting across from each other at Caffe Trieste, Carmelita would grab my arm as she finished a thought, for emphasis perhaps—or something more. One time she had even held my hand as we walked to the Castro Movie Theater during the Silent Film Festival last June. Through middle school, neither one of us had ever become involved with anyone else; I felt that we had silently agreed to prefer good books to most real people.

  Freshman year at Henley High, Carmelita was head-over-heels for her math tutor, Walter, and they dated for a while, but I knew it wouldn’t last. He was an okay guy, but too mathematical for Car; he had no romance in him. The second he got accepted to Stanford—he was a senior then—he dropped Carmelita flat. Around that same time, I was almost in love with this French exchange student, Mara, who was then staying next door to my family’s apartment.

  The night that Car and Walter broke up, I decided to go to Mara and confess my undying love for her. I lay on the tiled hallway floor reading E.E. Cummings poems at Mara’s door, and just when I heard Mara slowly opening the latch to let me in, Carmelita came running down the stairs from her place and over toward me, her face covered in tears. I took Carmelita back to my room, where she told me everything that had gone down with Walter. Seeing her weep like that really tore me up inside; I had never seen Car that sad. I held her in my arms as she talked and we eventually fell asleep on opposite sides of my bed, waking up the next morning to my mom rapping on the door yelling to get the heck up and ready for school. Carmelita snuck out while my mom was in the kitchen. Neither of us had spoken about that night since.

  But that had been two years ago; we were juniors now and Carmelita’s and my friendship was very status quo.

  The train finally pulled into the Berkeley stop. Carmelita and I sauntered off toward our apartment complex. We lived in the same one, right off University Avenue—Carmelita on the top floor and me on the second. Car furrowed her brow and took my arm.

  “What do you think Ms. Reese is going to announce tomorrow? Something big, I think.”

  Ms. Reese was our Lit teacher at school, and I had totally forgotten that on Friday afternoon she had made an announcement to the class—that another announcement, a big one, an exciting one, was going to be made during Monday’s class. Carmelita continued to ponder.

  “You don’t think that she was half-joking, and it’s another research paper, right? I couldn’t handle another one of those.”

  “Nope, Ms. Reese isn’t the type to joke around like that. No, I’m hoping it’s a field trip to Muir Woods again.”

  Carmelita poked me in the ribs teasingly. “You really go in for that nature stuff, don’t you?”

  “I do. I get much of my artistic inspiration from tall trees. So did Jack; ever read The Dharma Bums?”

  “You know I haven’t. And don’t you ever think that maybe Mr. Jack Kerouac—or his ghost, really, given that he’s been dead for decades—might get insulted if he knew you consistently referred to him by his first name only?”

  “No, because he wouldn’t, him of all people—of all ghosts. He was a pro-human free spirit.”

  We had reached our building. It looked like its usual open-airy California apartment-complex self. Ramon and Amelia, a new professor couple who had moved in just this year, were coming down the stairs. Ramon was in Dad’s department at the university and Dad liked him, believing his research on Robert Louis Stevenson to be promising and an asset to the department. Dad was hoping to be appointed Department Chair soon; a new paper of his had just been published in a major journal and he was garnering plenty of industry fame, New York Times reporters calling him up left and right for quotes, you know, the whole bit. I liked Amelia. She looked like a young Joni Mitchell and had an intense love of Hunter S. Thompson akin to my own. She had lent me one of his Fear and Loathing books last month and I still had it in my possession, though I had long since finished it. I liked the way the book’s pages smelled, the same gardenia scent that Amelia exuded as well.

  “Hey Hunter, Carmelita!” Ramon greeted us. Amelia grinned and gave a half wave when they walked past us.

  As Carmelita and I approached my apartment’s landing, she snickered.

  “What?”

  “So when are you gonna ask her out? And don’t you think Ramon’ll mind that you’re super-into his wife?”

  “Cut it out Carmelita, I can’t imagine what you mean.”

  “Oh stop, you actually blush in her presence. On a continual basis.”

  “I said cut it out.” We’d arrived at my door.

  “All right. Well, see you tomorrow morning then.”

  She reached up and kissed me on the cheek before continuing up the stairs to her apartment. She had been doing this more and more lately. It was a friendly enough habit, but I couldn’t help wondering what it meant. I couldn’t help wondering whether I liked it or not.

  I walked in through the front door of the apartment to living room stillness, which for a Sunday night could mean only one thing: Mom and Dad were in the study at the end of the hall working on their respective class grading. I paused for a moment to listen and my ears soon detected the telltale paper-ruffling and Shostakovich record playing softly on Dad’s old turntable. This was the apartment’s standard grading audio that I had been exposed to since birth. It occurred every midterm and final exam season in each semester. It usually meant that the ’rents would be hard at work, and steadily so, for the next week.

  I knocked lightly on the study door, then let myself in. As expected, Mom and Dad sat there in their favorite armchairs surrounded by papers.

  “Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that I’m home. I’ll be working on an essay in my room—and of course, have a blast with your grading.”

  “That’s great, Hunter,” Dad said without even looking up. “Thank you. Good to see you.”

  Mom at least put her papers to the side when she spoke. “Hi, sweetie, how was your afternoon? How is Carmelita doing?”

  Mom had always loved Carmelita and frequently made vaguely obvious hints that I would do well to enter into a romantic relationship with her. She said that my absentminded intensity would be well-complemented by Carmelita’s tell-it-like-it-is-ness. Mom was right about that, I guessed, and it was partly why Car and I were such great friends. As for the romantic stuff, well, I wasn’t too sure. It would be a big leap to make from where we were now to anything like that. I pushed the thought from my mind.

  “She’s fine, Mom. We just bummed around North Beach for a while. Went to City Lights.” />
  Suddenly and simultaneously, Mom and Dad both seemed to remember something and put their total focus on me.

  “Hey that reminds me, Hunter, we ran into your English teacher, Sienna—Ms. Reese—earlier—” my dad began.

  “—and she was telling us about the new poetry club that she’s organizing at the high school,” Mom finished.

  This news of a poetry club intrigued me, and I thought that it might have something to do with Ms. Reese’s big announcement set for tomorrow. I waltzed into the kitchen, grabbed a Coke from the fridge and returned to inquire further.

  “What kind of poetry club?”

  “Oh you know, a sort of after-school thing for students interested in writing their own poetry. Sienna said the meetings would take place at Caffe Trieste on Vallejo, in the city. Sounded right up your alley, Hunter,” Mom explained.

  Dad continued, “It sounded pretty serious too, with auditions.”

  This seemed a bit ridiculous. “Auditions? Really?”

  “Yeah, well, some sort of an approval process for entry or something. That Cooper girl, you know, Sam’s daughter? Sienna said she’s involved, that she’s the student leader of it. Maybe you can ask her about it tomorrow.”

  “The Cooper girl? You mean Wren?”

  “Yes, I thought it was an avian name. Yes, that’s her.”

  All of my blood rushed to my head at the mention of Wren. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I needed to go somewhere and think; a quick exit was in order.

  “Sounds good. Well, I have to go work on Physics, and that essay due tomorrow and all.”

  Mom and Dad had resumed tunnel vision focus on their grading.

  “Mm-hmm okay. Get to work honey. We’ll be right here,” Mom uttered.

  “Good luck, Hunter,” added Dad.

  I walked with my Coke to my room, which was up the half-set of stairs at the other end of the apartment. It looked just as I had left it—in complete and total disarray. The Kurt Vonnegut short story that I had been reading was half-open on my unmade bed, and Sal my Siamese cat lay snoozing over its pages. He opened one eye as he heard me come in and rose to greet me. Sal was more dog than cat and was as trusty a sidekick as there ever was. He was a handsome devil too, with big blue eyes, shiny fur, and an undeniable masculine strength. We understood each other. I scratched Sal’s neck until he lay down again and resumed his nap.