DISPATCH: Mutt at Francis Kite Club (Manhattan, NY)

Eric Boyd makes a dog's journey to MUTT.

I was on the phone with my mum a couple weeks ago and asked her what kind of blood was in our family. I noticed an aunt has gone to Ireland multiple times so I figured that must be something (and with shit the way it is in the US combined with Ireland making its artist’s basic income program free…it doesn’t hurt to research); my mum was not especially helpful.

“Oh Jesus who even knows. We’re just mutts.”

Welcome to the angle of this dispatch. Despite being covered by Zona before (and mentioned in a separate article about Storyfort before that), nobody has yet to take the low hanging fruit on Nico Lou Monheim Carrasquillo’s Mutt reading series. Don’t worry. I will. Because an angle being easy doesn’t make it bad. Because for something to be easy is the same as saying it is cliché. And because for something to be cliché it must be true.

Once again I take the bus from Pittsburgh. 6:15am Megabus, but Megabus doesn’t operate its own Megabus for this Megabus route. Instead it’s a Fullington Trailways bus. Bland, small, and without electrical plugs. The restroom is clean. There are only six people on the bus. I rest, curled into myself to fit in the seats.

But not for long. We stop at State College and are directed off of that bus to get on another, which is of course full. There are no seats aside from those for the six of us who have gotten on. Nobody wants to free up the seat next to them. Some lay across both seats and pretend to sleep. One old woman picks at her feet as if daring you to sit in the mess of dead skin and toejam she’s left. I find a young dude with a small backpack which he’s placed next to him. He looks at me, then at the bag, as if that’s his response to the matter. I furrow my brow and tap the bag a few times. He snatches it away and sighs.

We stop at Times Square around 1:30pm. A tour bus immediately runs a red light going down W 45th and swipes a taxi’s front bumper off. It is good to be back in the city. I walk to the East Village to be near tonight’s venue, about two miles. Maybe I could have taken a train but it took the same amount of time anyway. Plus it seemed nice out. Slightly overcast, not too hot. But definitely muggy. That’s what gets me. The mugginess. I decide to catch a movie at the Angelika East. When I visit New York I make it a point to see a film I know will probably never reach Pittsburgh. I feel slightly faint and go to the restroom downstairs; on my way to a stall I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My face is red, patchy, covered in sweat. I really do look like a mangy street dog. My hair is unkept from pulling a beanie over my eyes during the bus ride and I forgot to take a comb with me. In the stall I take off my jacket and shirt. I sling those over the door and walk out towards the sinks. I run cold water on my wrists and then my hands to run through my hair and across my face. A man comes in and tries not to stare at me. I don’t love that, but I also don’t let it bother me. I was homeless for a short time and stuff like this just kinda comes with the territory. I go back into the stall and pull at the neckline of my undershirt, wafting as much air through as I can. Once I feel a little cleaner, drier, I go into the theatre and watch a lovely little indie about an influencer and a school shooter.

From the Angelika I visit a Japanese market and grab some food, then walk over to the Francis Kite Club, where the reading is happening. It sits between two closed businesses. Outside, two bartenders lean against the front window and smoke. A squirrel runs in front of the bar and jumps up against the door, cannot get in, then runs away up the street. I watch it disappear in the distance, finish my can of Boss coffee, and go inside.

The bar seems alright. There’s two or three other people in here. I sit at the end of the bar, near a small stage with a mic stand and an upright piano. When I covered the Punisher reading series I was at the far end of the bar and couldn’t get close for photos. Not all of us have zoom lenses and two heads of height above the crowd like Nick Dove. Some of us are built like wiener dogs with old point-and-shoot film cameras. My seat is also good because the free water dispenser is next to me: perfect not just because I’m still hot and sweaty, but I won’t have to find people. They’ll all come to me.

Anyway the bar slowly fills. The 7:30 time listed on the flyers seems to be treated as the door time, not the start. As hoped for, people do begin walking up towards me. First Sam Farhi, then Nico Carrasquillo; Darcey Steinke and I talk about how irritated I am the bartender hasn’t come up to me this entire time. I mention that I do a little bartending, but it’s a strange situation because it’s at an escape room that takes place in a speakeasy setting. “You should write about that,” Steinke says. Sometimes I forget that my life is unlike many people’s. I don’t think that makes it any more interesting to me, but maybe for others. It’s like when people freak out over a patchy, multicolored dog that looks like it has a mustache or something. Show the dog a mirror, it doesn’t care. Steinke promises if there’s any leftover books at the end of the night, she’ll give me one. I appreciate it, but a writer of her caliber won’t have any leftover books.

Carrasquillo starts the evening with a pair of poems from Bob Flanagan, a certified mutt born in New York and diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as a kid. First she reads “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” then “Bukowski Poem.”

I fill the tub with hot water.

CHRIST! I yell.

I don’t take baths; Bukowski takes

baths; I take showers!

Nico Carrasquillo

I was once the same way as Flanagan. Ever since I was a teenager I wanted Bob Dylan’s mustache from his very weird Victoria’s Secret commercial. The moment I could grow facial hair, I shaved it into that Ulysses Everett McGill / Trent Reznor in the Perfect Drug music video shape. Even when it was only blond baby hairs, I penciled it in darker. Then at some point I read Bukowski and he said something about never trusting a man with well-groomed facial hair. That could still be sound advice, but I shouldn’t have let it make me doubt what I wanted of my own face. I may be a mongrel, but I manicure.

Bukowski, perhaps American literature’s most well known mutt, would end up becoming an accidental throughline of the evening. Whether it was Tom Ianelli’s crude asides about a character’s ass itching, or Mikayla Bryant’s casually graphic sex scene; Harold Rogers reading a new take on the Blast Manifesto—mostly known to American audiences after Buk’s California-based publisher reprinted it in the 80’s—or even Darcey Steinke’s examination of heartbreak, of wanting to be sent someone new to love in the hopes of “not fucking it up again.” None of it was Buk himself, but the cranky bastard stained the night as if it were a telephone pole he’d once pissed on.

Tom Ianelli of the very cool Peters Books shop / IG account was the first reader, opening things up with a brand new piece, “Are you there Margret? It’s Me, God.” In it, the CEO of Disney explores a sadomasochistic dynamic with his secretary, who lets him say and do whatever he wants to her, but to increasingly diminishing results. The piece ends up being a highlight of the evening, like an I Think You Should Leave bit that goes on too long and ends up being funnier because of it. The loping, looping language punctuated by lines like, “I hurt just like all you poor people.” It was a piece that felt well balanced between the page and the ear. You would chuckle at it in reading, but laugh out loud with a crowd in listening.

Tom Ianelli

Mikayla Bryant warned us that she’d just gotten her voice back, but that didn’t seem like an issue as she read a piece about a young woman, Sylvia, meeting her ex at a restaurant for what she thought was a date. Instead her ex asks if Sylvia would like to be the godmother to his new pregnant girlfriend’s baby. Sylvia and the ex go back to his apartment, which they once shared, and fuck. The pregnant girlfriend, Christina, comes in and surprises Sylvia, but not the guy. The classic cuck trap. Christina undresses and watches them go at it. The next morning Sylvia throws up in a trash can. Had the story gone on a little longer I imagined Sylvia also getting pregnant and it becomes a whole crazy thing. If Bryant really wanted to help my metaphor here maybe they’d all get a dog together who has a whole mess of puppies. I don’t know.

Mikayla Bryant

Harold Rogers is a guy whose work I should have already known. As someone who’s covered boxing in the past and has been working on a familial polyvocal novel, I really should have been aware of his first novel. Better late than never. High hopes for his upcoming book, Humpty Dumpty, but he only read an intro the publisher “required” him to include to assure that the Steubenville, Ohio he was writing about was in no way based on real people / places / events, etc. Like I said before, he went on to read the Blast 2 Manifesto, which I’d already read and thus don’t have much to say about. I can’t remember the last movement I wanted to be a part of after Dogme 95, but if the Blast 2 substack ever wants more amazing material like this, they know where to find me. As Rogers read the manifesto—hand-written on loose sheets of paper which he dropped on the floor as he finished each one—Sean Thor Conroe watched on approvingly from the far end of the bar, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. I find myself fascinated that Rogers takes the time to pick up all of the fallen pages from the stage as Sam Farhi comes up to read.

Harold Rogers

Farhi is wearing a camo jacket with a black heart made from Legos pinned near the breast pocket. The guy who made the pin is his buddy, Farhi says. Said buddy is in attendance and circles the stage, taking photos of Sam as he reads from his forthcoming novel, The Sapsuckers. In it, two young brothers walk down a trail ostensibly to catch crawfish at the creek, but really to smoke their mother’s cigarettes. One line in particular—”Nature did not devastate us with its beauty. Nothing did”—literally knocked me on my ass. My back was beginning to hurt so I squatted down on the brass bar for the rest of the night. Farhi’s work ends up feeling like the odd man out for the evening—there’s always one—in its old school sincerity. The piece pulls off that tricky childhood fiction balance of making the world vast and unknowable to its protagonists yet intimate and instantly relatable to the reader.

Sam Farhi

Darcey Steinke is the headliner of the night. She thanks Carrasquillo for hosting and marvels at how she’s known Nico since her and Steinke’s daughter went to school together. As Bryant warned us her voice had just come back, Steinke warns that she may stutter through her work, but so what if she does? “Why should everyone talk like newscasters?”

Darcey Steinke

Steinke reads from the middle of her latest book, This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith. In the seventh chapter, Heartache, Steinke connects her bodily pain back to the idea of lovesickness, which the French physician Jacques Ferrand treated as a real illness with real cures (it should be noted the French have not strayed too far from this notion, as Marjane Satrapi’s family officially stated she had “died of sadness” after the passing of her husband). Ferrand’s remedies, Steinke says, included never wearing fur, or perfume; to never eat oysters or that folding a wolf’s right testicle over that of a lecherous man’s will heal his affliction. Steinke’s work, bouncing from memoir to research to philosophy, feels uncomfortably close to my own mind. Earlier in the evening Steinke and I were discussing how shitty back pain is. I recalled how a few years ago I signed up for a medical research study and was given depression meds as they’d shown promising results for off-label usage against back pain. Beyond that, the study doctors told me, “We noticed most people with back pain are also depressed.” Yeah, no shit. Sure enough, after just a couple days on the medication, my back felt better. I remember one morning I woke up and felt great. Really great. I cried my eyes out. People don’t just hurt all the time? I thought. They just walk around and feel alright? It made me mad. If they don’t hurt like I do, then why are they all so angry? So awful and shitty and miserable to be around? What’s their excuse?

I wish I could have stayed on those meds. Steinke sums the feeling up well:

Pain is tied to our need to express it… in our worst moments, we are speechless animals.

Yeah, I get it. I’ve felt the words unable to escape my gritted teeth. Wished I’d just bark instead of biting people’s heads off. It’s hard to hurt and there isn’t much relief going around.

After the readings are over and Carrasquillo thanks everyone, I go into the restroom to splash a little water on my face and get ready to leave. The restroom is lit with a single red lightbulb overhead. Dogs can’t see the color red? It just reads as dark. All they’d be able to make out are the tags and messages and curses scribbled on the walls. I step out and begin saying my goodbyes. I tell Steinke she was amazing; without hesitation she rushes over to the merch table and signs a copy of her book for me. I’m touched she remembered offering. Not many scraps being thrown out for free these days. But I guess every dog has its day.