| A Walter Sloke Memorial Collection Written by Walter Sloke and Karl Johansen, compiled by Karl Johansen previously published on Thieves Jargon Poem #348 By Walter Sloke sometimes when i sit to write my soulwhatever takes me places i’d rather not go having dedicated my life to the pursuit of the muse i have blindly followed her wherever she leads it is here that i sink in regret i sink in could haves and should haves my family name stops with me and my unkempt beard continues to gray the words in my head have trouble finding new partners so they dance tired dances with bone-weary silence i fear my brain is wrinkling like my tired body Regrets by Walter Sloke I was sitting in my dingy hotel room, drinking Miller Highlife from a can. I had 11 more sitting in the hotel sink, packed with ice. I saw the Gideon Bible laying on the bedside stand, but that’s not my thing. I’d rather get my glow on and watch cheap old tits-n-ass movies on cable. I’m not willing to pay for anything new, no pay-per-view shit, or anything like that. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better. I think someone once called that idea chronological snobbery. It seems like they used to put more breast shots in the older movies anyway. I was sitting there reevaluating my life. I had run into an ex-girlfriend at a wedding tonight, and it heightened my loneliness. Sure, it was me that ended the whole thing. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the summer after we had graduated from college. We were walking in the park, and I turned to her and said, “I don’t love you.” She said, “You mean you fell out of love with me?” And I said, “No, I don’t think I ever loved you.” You know, seeing her there tonight makes me think I really did love her. I just loved the idea of what I could be without her even more, and now that I’m done...my dreams have had a limited run at success… I guess I’m just able to admit, in my late, middle age, that I’m a narcissist, and realize that the only thing I ever loved was myself and my dream to become a successful writer. Anyway, she was glowing as she introduced her husband, Dr. Something-or-the other, and her two beautiful children, whose immunizations were surely up to date. After the wedding I was in a cheap hotel room, 400 miles from home, feeling pretty lonely. I realized that there was no sleazy cable movie that was going to cure my loneliness, so I flipped through the phonebook until I found the escort service section. I pick the ad with the sexy silhouette of a woman’s body. I figure they’d know what I wanted; at least their ad said they would. So I called and arranged for a date with a white woman with brunette hair, they were out of exotics for the evening. I gave them my hotel room number, and they said she’d be there within the hour, and that according to company policy, I should be able negotiate the cost of the date right away, upfront and everything. There was a knock on the door after my fifth beer, probably about 45 minutes later. I excitedly opened the door, like a child opening Christmas presents. There she was, a brunette all right. She was taller than most women, but shorter than me. Her brunette hair was long and greasy. It looked as if it hadn’t been washed in days. She had on an olive military trench coat; its color highlighted the bags under her eyes. I could tell that she used to be beautiful at one time in her life, but now she seemed to be running on fumes. I asked her if I could take her coat. She said, “Not just yet.” She then pulled out a glass pipe, held it up toward me and asked if I minded. A bit shaken, I said no, and immediately looked around for the smoke detector. “I need to bump up a bit before I do this stuff, you know the sex and everything,” she said, as she dropped a tiny rock in the pipe, lit it and inhaled deeply. “I’d offer you a hit, but this is my last rock,” she said as her eyelids closed slightly. “How much do you charge?” I asked, trying to act as if none of this fazed me. “A blowjob will cost you sixty. Straight up sex will cost you one twenty. Anything beyond either of those, we’ll have to negotiate.” “No, that’s okay,” I said, suddenly regretting the whole thing, “there’s no need for further discussion.” “Straight up sex then, I assume,” she said as she began undressing. I didn’t say anything as I watched her undress. Her collarbones stuck out as the flesh around them sank, like shrink-wrap into her body. Her chest plate was riddled with pimples. As she stepped out of her jogging pants, I could see that her underwear had not been cared for in sometime, and the room filled with an unsavory body odor. Before she could take her bra and panties off, I said, “Thanks for your time,” as I flipped through my wallet for a hundred and twenty dollars, and gave it to her. “What, you gay or something?” she asked with an accusatory look on her face. “I don’t know, maybe,” I said, not wanting to damage her already low self-esteem, and handing her the trench coat. “Well fag, thanks for the cash. You want me to stick around and help you drink those or something? I feel like I owe you something.” “You don’t owe me anything,” I said as I opened the door to let her out. I sat on the bed after she left, thinking about the wedding and my ex-girlfriend, wondering if I would ever be able to love anyone other than myself…and I got another beer. Winter Morning Coffee w/Walt - 02/12/07 By Karl Johansen Sitting in our corner of the Harold Washington Public Library, wishing we had enough money to sit, in the ambiance filled coffee houses Walt asks if I’ve ever had a poem written by someone else about myself. “No, I haven’t - have you?” His eyes began to burn like hot coal when it meets oxygen. They glowed cold blue youth set in deep old sockets, surrounded by exhausted facial hair. “That’s my dream,” he leaned toward me and whispered. “To have my being preserved in a word photograph to be shown, to be read, at my funeral. Do you think you could do that for me? Could you write a poem about me a eulogy of sorts?” My dear friend, you know what a procrastinator I am, you’d better live a bit longer, give me more stuff to write about… Walter Sloke’s Origins By Karl Johansen Walter Sloke’s origins were questionable. His mother, Emily, was part of his life for only a few short months before she passed away. Her death was also questionable. His uncle Karl and his aunt Elizabeth raised him. Emily was Elizabeth’s sister, and according to the men in Johnsonville, Emily, the younger one, was the looker. Unfortunately, she was also a bit slow. According to rumor, her mother, Beatrice, kept her locked in the house so she didn’t have to deal with any of the Walkersville men’s false pretenses. She said she could smell bullshit a mile away, and that Walkersville men, single and married, smelled the worst. Beatrice’s husband had left her a fortune after he passed away and their farm was sold off. Emily lived with Beatrice until the day her mother died. The very next day, she moved into Karl and Elizabeth’s home. In exchange for Elizabeth’s promise to her mother that she’d take care of Emily came the money from the farm. Karl, who’d worked all of his life as someone else’s hired hand was more than happy to have Emily move into the house. It eased up on his workload, he ceased working overtime. Karl was not an easy man to live with, and Elizabeth welcomed the comfort and company Emily brought into her home. The only drawback, according to Elizabeth’s estimations, were that since Emily moved in, Karl was around a lot more. She attributed that to his working fewer hours since the money was not tight anymore. While they were younger, they would go through the normal spats that siblings go through. It wasn’t until they were young teens that Elizabeth realized Emily was a bit special, a bit slow. There was an incident where a young man lured Emily into the boys’ bathroom. After that Beatrice decided that Emily, alone in the community, was a liability that she wasn’t willing to risk and kept home from school, never to be sent again. It was at that point that Elizabeth’s feelings for her sister changed. She no longer was jealous of the attention she was receiving from the young men in town. A seed of sympathy had been planted in Elizabeth, and it grew as they got older. Shortly after Emily moved into the house, the old feelings of jealously began seeping into Elizabeth’s thoughts again. She frequently felt guilty for having these thoughts, and told herself that they were rooted in her feelings of inadequacy and her inability to give Karl the son he so desperately wanted. She wasn’t even able to give him a girl. She often thought Karl was giving Emily more attention than was warranted, and would find reasons to shoo Emily out of whatever room Karl was in. Before Beatrice died, in a sort of deathbed confession, she told Elizabeth that she had married for money, and that she had earned every dime of it. Elizabeth began to understand what her mother meant; keeping Karl away from Emily was draining. Due to Emily’s limited mental capacity, Elizabeth was very aware of her sister’s menstrual cycle. When Elizabeth suspected that Emily was pregnant, she began parading her sister about town. The lock down policy that her mother had once imposed upon her was now seemingly nonexistent. Emily began accepting male visitors on the front porch. The talk around town was that Elizabeth wanted to marry Emily off and keep the money. There was many a suitor that would sit with Emily until the sun set and then have his way in the evening shadows, but none of them were willing to marry her. By the time Emily began to show, Elizabeth had successfully thrown the shadow of suspicion off of her husband. The town talked, and the men who used to sit with her on the front porch no longer came around. Emily became visibly upset. Her behavior became very erratic. She would burst into Karl and Emily’s room at all hours of the night with her nightclothes torn. She would stand at the foot of their bed and scream simple sounds while raking her fingernails down her face and chest and pulling chunks of hair from her head, leaving dime size scabs all over her scalp. Elizabeth began locking Emily in her room at night. There were days that she would not leave her room at all. This continued for the remainder of her pregnancy. The birth of Walter Sloke was relatively uneventful. It was quiet, just as Elizabeth had planned. Elizabeth was quietly overcome with the love she felt for the child. When she held the boy all of the loud chaos surrounding her was drown out with a comforting hum that came from the center of her heart. Her head was clouded with the reality of the situation, but her heart longed for the weight of the boy in her arms. The first few weeks were sleepless, and Elizabeth did everything she could for the boy while Emily pulled further and further into herself. She wouldn’t hold the baby when he latched onto her breast; she just stared at the wall, like a cow being milked. During these times, Elizabeth would stroke the baby’s head, knowing that he needed his mother’s love to thrive. Emily only left her room to go to the bathroom. She only left her bed to stare blankly out the window. Walter was two months old when Emily refused to get out of bed. She began moving her bowels where she laid. Her urine-saturated mattress was beyond saving. Elizabeth switched the baby to formula so he would not have to be part of the unsanitary mess that his mother had become. She enjoyed feeding him. Her heart ached when he cried for his mother, and she feared she recognized that slight hint of jealously swell within her chest again. It was Tuesday when Emily died. Elizabeth called it a compassionate suicide. Something Walter would question as he grew old enough to realize that Elizabeth’s truth was not much different than brainwashing. Karl came home that Tuesday to find Emily’s broken body bent beneath her second story window. Of course the town talked. Many fund Elizabeth’s “compassionate suicide” comments odd. Some would go so far as to question whether it was really Elizabeth’s idea of a “compassionate homicide.” Years later, when Walter asked his aunt how his mother passed away, she used the phrase compassionate suicide. When Walter asked her what made it compassionate, she said that his mother had tried to make it look like an accident, and left no note. Elizabeth said that his mother was the kind of person that wouldn’t want anyone to feel guilty for her death, so she made it look like an accident. Walter wondered… For Walt By Karl Johansen Walt over thought everything, including his movements. He moved like a cat stalking its prey. Sometimes others winced at the sight of Walt. He was like a walking open sore. He overcompensated for this with his self depreciating sense of humor. He wanted people to like him, to love him. Women dabbled in Walt, those hungry for the sensitivity their husbands won’t give, but lacked the courage it took to share his raw life of poetry. They felt sorry for him, never realizing his poetry leached off the pain their shallowness brought. I saw his athletic youthful shape (with the aid of rich food and fine liquors) morph into the couch pillow laying here before you. His life was not a Hollywood beautiful his love was not a movie love there were no happy endings in Walt’s world. His was a life filled with nasty pus. Walt used to say that pus was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. He would rub the seepage around between his fingers and smile. He smiled at white blood cell sacrifice, he saw the beauty in the giving, the ultimate giving. At the root of everything was his poetry, his pus, his sacrifice… HOME |
