The Henley High Poetry Club Read online

  I momentarily considered approaching Wren and asking her about the poetry club, but I didn’t want to seem overeager so decided against it. First period Lit would start in ten minutes anyway and I would probably hear about it then. Plus, I could see Tyler Jacoby coming over to me with a stack of records and didn’t want to leave him hanging.

  Tyler was my best friend at Henley High, apart from Carmelita. He was totally wild, with brown hair that grew and stuck out every which way, and a denim jacket with music buttons that he practically lived in. Tyler insisted on wearing his purple-lensed Beatles-style sunglasses twenty-four seven, even though he’d received detention more than ten times for doing it at school. Tyler was a total music fiend and super into collecting vintage records. I had known him since freshman year, when we had been partnered up in Biology Lab. Neither of us cared an ounce about anything science-y, other than star constellations, but Henley High had thus far failed to introduce Astronomy into the curriculum. Our mutual disinterest bonded us, as we’d spent lectures surveying each other’s lists of top ten albums, top five musical acts from the early 1990s, and other such lists. It was this same mutual disinterest that had dragged us both to the chopping block when we received failing midterm grades in Bio on our progress reports.

  Both of us being semi-nerds, Tyler and I made a pact that we would lock up our record collections and forego all list-making until the end of the semester. We would study, seriously, all of our Bio coursework until after the final exam. It soon became clear that Tyler had been speaking most literally about the lock-up. The following Saturday he showed up at my house with the hugest padlock and bike chain I’d ever seen and proceeded to pack up all of my records into a cardboard box, lock them up, and throw the key out into my mom’s peony garden. It was a lot of fun trying to find that key when the summer began and Tyler and I were once again free men, free to listen to as many records as we pleased. It took us three and a half days to find it.

  Tyler and I were audiophiles and Holy Vinylists; thus, we were against listening to music via any means other than vinyl records and live performances. All of those online music streaming sites and illegal downloads altered what Tyler called “the ideal sound.”

  About once a month, usually on a Monday morning, Tyler arrived at school with five or six albums to lend me, most of which I had never heard of. He worked part-time at Napoleon’s and had set up a sort of library-loan deal with Napoleon himself so that he didn’t have to blow all his dough on record purchases. When I pointed out that this was a similar method to many of our friends who downloaded music online, in that none of us was paying for it, Tyler insisted that I was wrong.

  “We’re on the level. What you’re talking about, amigo, is straight-up stealing. And that is never, ever, cool,” he had told me.

  I agreed, of course.

  This particular Monday morning, Tyler shoved a stack of jazz records into my arms. He was chewing on a toothpick and wearing his purple-lensed shades, as he always was. Tyler was a true individual kid. I surveyed the records, some of whose cardboard covers were half-disintegrated.

  “Thanks, Tyler.”

  “You got it, Ziv. Good weekend?”

  I thought about the question as Carmelita watched me with a raised eyebrow. She was used to me thinking too hard about simple and common-place questions.

  “Yeah, not bad. We went to North Beach yesterday, hit up City Lights. Saw Bobcat at Vesuvio. He says hi.”

  Tyler grinned and chewed on his toothpick as he answered.

  “Bobby! Oh man, I miss him. It’s been way too long since I’ve been to North Beach. Got to get back there soon. These Napoleon shifts have been taking over my life. Hey Car, how goes it?”

  Carmelita pocketed her aviators and smiled. “It goes, Tyler, it certainly goes.”

  The morning warning bell rang then, urging all remaining students, us included, to get the heck inside a classroom within the next five minutes if we didn’t want to get a late-date on our permanent records. Three of those in a semester and a kid would be facing detention, which meant early-morning Saturday school cleanup sessions. Nobody wanted that.

  Tyler, Carmelita, and I hurried inside and toward our locker section at the end of the first-floor hall-way. It was the best spot in the school and the three of us had sought it out on the first day of classes this year. Locker assignments at Henley High worked as an every-man-for-himself sort of deal each year. A student could claim any locker as his own by throwing a lock on it.

  As I gathered the necessary books for my morning classes, I saw Tyler unlock a secondary locker next to his own. In it appeared to be dozens more records. He gazed at the stacks, patted them lovingly, sighed in satisfaction, and then relocked them up.

  “How long before somebody realizes you’re locker-hogging?”

  “How long does infinity last? Because that’s how long it’ll be before somebody realizes.”

  “You awe me.”

  “Thank you, man, thank you.”

  “Do you even have a record player here at Henley to use those records? Can’t you leave them at home?”

  “I like having them close by. Plus, it makes for easy transit to and from Napoleon’s when I do my afterschool shifts.”

  “You guys do know that the Internet exists, right?” Carmelita asked. “And that any song you could think of would be obtainable within its dimensions? I mean—do you even have cellphones?”

  “Of course we do,” I replied, because we did. I had an iPhone but I tried not to overuse it. Tyler had an old-school flip-phone and refused to utilize its internet functions. He didn’t even have a Facebook account. He only had an email account because Henley High made it mandatory for school-related communications. Tyler was my role model for what we called “timeless existence.” Tyler aimed to live in a way that could easily be transferred to another era, past or future. Direct experience. This was modeled after some of the Beat writers’ philosophies. Tyler was not one hundred percent realistic. But he was one hundred percent into time travel.

  The real first period bell rang and Tyler and I ran to the nearby classroom where Ms. Reese held her Lit lectures. We took our seats next to Carmelita in the second row near the window. Ms. Reese’s classroom was set up in such a way as to encourage mental relaxation—or so she said. All of the seats were mismatched armchairs, dining room chairs, and even a few ottomans. On the walls, in addition to the student work being showcased on rotation, there were posters of the books that we would be reading during the semester, and great black and white photographs of old San Francisco.

  Ms. Reese had an awesome past. She used to live on the Mojave Desert and wrote two novels and a play—by hand, on scraps of paper—while she was there. One night, right when she was finishing the play, an intense desert wind came along and blew all of her pages out into oblivion. She said that she wept for four hours, then pulled herself together, packed up all of her junk, and split. She hitchhiked to Berkeley and never looked back. Now she was our teacher and was engaged to a sculptor who was getting to be pretty famous, or so she told us. Ms. Reese had also published three other books since her desert experience, but I felt that the desert story summed up her character pretty well. If that catastrophe had happened to me and my books, I might not have been so cool and calm.

  I took my essay out of my bag, along with my Lit notebook, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and my favorite pen. Ms. Reese came into the room and began to write the daily plan on the dry erase board. I was trying to decipher her untidy scrawl when I felt a soft tap on my back. I turned around to see.

  It was Wren. She looked beautiful wearing a Doors t-shirt, and her long dark curls were swept up with a large white gardenia.

  “Hey, Hunter. Your hair looks extra-neat today.” She smiled wide.

  And it began again—my face burned in what I imagined to be a crimson hue. I cleared my throat to distract her.

  “Oh, thanks, thanks a lot. I uh—washed it, I guess.” This was true, I had washed
it this morning. Sal the Cat was my witness.

  Tyler turned to survey the scene. He kept silent but offered me a raised eyebrow—a reminder to keep it extra-cool. I changed topics.

  “So, is it true you’re starting a poetry club? Or Ms. Reese is? Or something like that?”

  Wren raised her eyebrow and turned to go sit on her ottoman, saying to me, “Well you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”

  Tyler nudged me hard in the ribs. “Beware of the hippified hipstress, my man.”

  I didn’t quite know how to respond; I wasn’t sure what was going on myself. It seemed that A) a new and exciting writing outlet was in the process of forming at Henley High, and B) Wren may or may not have been openly flirting with me. If these two storylines intersected, I could turn out to be one lucky man.

  The sound of Ms. Reese’s finger cymbals jarred me back to the present moment. I was saved from having to respond to Tyler for now.

  Ms. Reese always began class this way. She had super-long blonde hair and these kooky purple glasses, and she tended to wear flowing scarves and skirts.

  “How was everyone’s weekend?” she asked all of us. The fact that it was first period on a Monday meant that basically no one answered. There were about twenty of us in Honors Lit and there were about twelve of us who hadn’t quite woken up yet. Kate Shankar’s eyes were actually closed. Julian Frey sat cross-legged on his ottoman, but his head kept nodding back and jerking forward every time he realized that he was falling asleep.

  Ms. Reese smiled at the silence and went on. She was the most tolerant teacher that I had come across yet. There was a mutual sort of allowing and acceptance in her class—most of us liked Ms. Reese and the literature that we studied. Plus, we were all nerdy kids, at least about English—the Honors bunch of Junior Year. It was kind of a shame that our class met during first period, when we weren’t even warmed up into the day yet. But Henley High’s scheduling office wasn’t exactly a flexible operation.

  “Glad to hear you all had such great week-ends . . . mine went way too fast, of course. How did the essays go?”

  An assortment of mumbled replies arose from all of us in response.

  “Glad to hear that too . . . think I’ll start serving coffee here in the morning so that we can all speak in complete sentences. Pass your papers up to me, please, and then we have some announcements.”

  We all passed our essays forward to the Turn-it-in Table at the front of the room and Ms. Reese went on.

  “Now before we get into our discussion of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale and the whole Scarlet Letter gang, I have some exciting news about a new extracurricular club here at Henley. Well, we do. Wren?”

  Wren stood up and went to the front of the room. I sat forward in my patchwork armchair to listen. This was going to be good.

  A lilting breeze came in through the opened window. Ms. Reese’s nearby chimes rung softly in response. Wren began.

  “So, since moving here to Berkeley, I’ve gotten super into poetry and especially Beat poetry and spoken word. You know, writing that sounds even better when spoken out loud? Stuff that sounds like music. And the North Beach area, right over the Golden Gate Bridge there, is chock full of history, the history of Beat poetry. So much happened, right there. What better way to celebrate this history than to do it again now, to bring it back?”

  I stole a glance at Carmelita; her gaze was narrowed in skepticism. Myself—well, I couldn’t help but be excited by Wren’s speech.

  “I spoke to Ms. Reese about starting a club here at Henley High—a poetry club for juniors,” she went on. “We’ll meet after school once a week at Caffe Trieste on Vallejo and have readings there. To be in the club, you have to write a new poem every week. The first meeting will be this Thursday and it’ll be more of an intro meeting, an audition. Ms. Reese always talks about peer support during our editing process, and I think to have that same support system in the club, we’ll all have to approve of all of the members’ creative work. So . . . it’s gonna be really fantastic. Hope to see everybody Thursday!”

  Wren sat back down in her seat, beaming from ear to ear.

  “Thank you, Wren,” said Ms. Reese. “I think that this is a wonderful opportunity for all of you to experience the support of your fellow writers, and to appreciate the artistic legacy of where you happen to live!”

  “Will you be there, Ms. Reese?” Carmelita asked.

  “No—no, I teach a photography course at the Art Exchange on Thursday afternoons. I will be reading your turned-in work, surely, and I will be there with you in spirit of course. I look forward to hearing all about your progress.”

  Carmelita nudged me and whispered, “I don’t know about this.”

  I shrugged in response and focused back on Wren. Three days until Thursday. Three days wasn’t that much time to write the best poem in the entire world but I would do my best.

  I looked around the room and caught Wren’s eye. She mouthed, “See?” and gave me a big smile. My face felt like it went up in flames.

  During lunch period Tyler, Carmelita, and I staked our usual piece of lawn outside. We discussed the poetry club news as we grazed on home-brought items. Tyler was all psyched up about it. Carmelita wasn’t.

  “She’s trying to do an open hippie poetry collective, right, but what kind of peace-and-love world uses auditions? And who’s going to decide who gets to stay in? Her, right?”

  Carmelita took an angry bite of her pita bread. I was getting angry myself. Car didn’t even know Wren. Who was she to suggest that Wren was an ego-based judgmental creep? She finished the pita and began crunching away at her apple. I noticed Tyler frowning slightly as he watched Carmelita in action; he didn’t say anything though. Car went on.

  “And I’m sure she’s already in, right? No audition for her because it was her stupid idea. I mean—she just moved here! What does she know about North Beach, the Beat poets, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady? We grew up here! We were born right here in Berkeley!”

  Now I felt my face turning red again but not because I was embarrassed.

  Tyler spoke. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were jealous of Wren’s idea. That you’re jealous of her, even.”

  This is what I had suspected too and wanted to say but couldn’t. I hadn’t wanted to get into a dialogue about it. I had just wanted Carmelita to stop. I’d known her for what seemed like forever and I’d seen her like this before. Not often, because she was, as a rule, pretty cool, as I tried to be. My guess was that she had issues with Wren of a grand order, issues that I didn’t want to involve myself in unless I had to.

  Tyler waited for Carmelita to respond but she seemed to be giving us the silent treatment. I forked up the rest of Mom’s tofu rice leftovers and went to throw out my trash in the can at the bottom of the hill. I needed to breathe for a moment, on my own, away from the Carmelita rant that was in progress. From my stance on the hill I could see Wren and a couple of her friends, mostly guys in the afterschool music program, having lunch on the other side of the field.

  I wanted something new. I wanted to take the next step, to make a leap, to become the artist, the writer that I really wanted to be, that I was meant to be. I felt so sure that this new poetry club was a step in the right direction. I felt so sure that Wren was.

  I returned to my place with Carmelita and Tyler. Both were silent now. I suddenly felt sad and frustrated. Didn’t Carmelita understand what a big deal this was—working on creative material, being part of a writers’ collective, doing readings at Caffe Trieste? It would make Jack Kerouac’s ghost proud!

  “Tyler,” I said, “what do you think?”

  He was lying on his back, tearing a blade of grass in two.

  “About what?” he responded, looking at me upside-down, squinting in the sharp sunlight.

  “The new poetry club that . . . that Ms. Reese mentioned. Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna go on Thursday to the meeting?”

  “If I can get ou
t of my shift at Napoleon’s, man. He’s been running me ragged as of late. That’s because Anita—”

  “—oh yeah, the crazy chick—”

  “—she’s on vacation this week. I’m taking over all of her shifts, plus my own. This weekend I am working two doubles—Saturday and Sunday. May Earth and Sky help me.”

  Tyler was a self-dubbed naturalist. He considered his religion to be of the earth, so instead of using God’s name in vain, he would go the other route.

  Carmelita had opened her Physics textbook and was now reading with her nose buried in the pages. I was surprised that she could even see the words that close up. I asked her anyway.

  “Car. Are you gonna go?”

  She waited a few seconds too long to respond. “Go where?”

  “To the poetry club meeting at Caffe Trieste. On Thursday.”

  Carmelita put the book down and looked at me over her shades. I felt a chill go through my body.

  “Yeah, I guess I have to. Can’t let you two bozos go unsupervised, all the way to the city and back.”

  The bell rang loudly and we hurried to grab our books and junk from off the lawn. Carmelita had Physics next; Tyler and I had Trigonometry. We walked to the main building in silence as the afternoon sun burned high above us. Although the weather in the main city across the bay was all over the place and varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, Berkeley weather was more or less decidedly sunny and bright for most of the time.

  We approached the main inner stairwell and paused; Tyler and I had to go up to the second floor and Carmelita’s class was in the basement.