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The King Air Conditioner Sits High in the Ceiling
(with no sleep and plenty of coffee, observations in a 24 hour restaurant way before dawn listening to poets trying to break a world record during the 2001 National Poetry Slam in Seattle)
by Robert karimi

The king air conditioner sits high in the ceiling. Fat. Big. It is an eyesore, but it provides comfort because it pushes away the encroaching nicotine that fucks with my lungs.

The man we met earlier in the afternoon said this place is a place where speed addicts and crack fiends congregate. Perhaps. I’m not sure. A man with eyes wide spread from his face is leering at me. Torn between sleep and madness, I cannot tell what he is or who he is. I am in that blur of existence where I am half ready to leave this consciousness, but I am deciding to be more journalist seeped in concrete reality than succumb to the pleasure of sleep.

Like the boys around me have. Men crouched over are in that position we use to take when we played heads up seven-up. Their thumbs are not up waiting to play any game. Their thumbs, their fingers, their entire hands, arms, torsos, legs, feet have given up any chance of tensing their muscles. They are dead. Without ghosts. Or perhaps their ghosts are the ones living their dreams.

Mama (My mama? Somebody’s Mama) used to say that our soul leaves our body when we dream. When we truly reach deep sleep, the souls lift up out through our noses. This way we can breathe easier. Release the day. Give our soul a chance to exercise, so that it can be strong inside us when our bodies and hearts cannot handle the weight of the day.

That’s why we shouldn’t sleep faced down. We should sleep on our sides, but not our backs. If we sleep on our backs, we might cause our souls to come out of our ears. On our sides, we guarantee that we can dream. Mama used to explain that snoring was caused because a soul that wasn’t allowed to leave a body. It was stuck. A person was sleeping in the wrong position.
On these tables, the men snore. Their weary day has placed them in this position, and now, they are just sleeping in this vicious circle. Maybe mama was right.

The waitress circles around dropping ruby glasses filled with water. I am now getting too metaphorical. They are just plastic glasses. Just plastic. With grooves that feel like walls of school buildings.

A boy dressed in a blue sweater with white stripe sits. He wears the kind of sweater you buy in Macys at clearance. He has been touching the waitress when he asks for help. He has violated that code between waitress and patron. You do not touch the waitress like you own her. Like you think she’s some piece of ass. In some places, I have heard that waitresses have been known to poison a person’s food, and in the worst cases cut an appendage off the worst code abusers.

This boy is not from here. He is from Flagstaff, as his laminated green poetry slam badge indicates. He uses his own Arizona logic. It’s more a male logic because he violates the code. He had been watching the poetry reading, but he had half an eye on the proceedings. He watched the waitress do her dance. The pirouette, the stop, bend. The swing. Run. Stop. Swing. Slide. It was beautiful. His one-dimensional mind could not grasp the power of her kindness.

Like the coyote waiting for the roadrunner, he swoops up and grabs her hand, introduces himself again, asks her name, and firmly holds her hand. He smoothly tries to swoon her with his advances. He, the amorous alchemist that can mix love and trickery, thinks that he has captured her glance, her dance, and now this chance of a rendezvous beyond this restaurant. But he has broken the code.

She listens intently. She has work to do; she wants to continue her dance. People are hungry. They do not want her to pause; the music of their growling stomachs have not stopped.

The boy continues and continues. She tries to let go. He is not the partner she wants for tonight. He does not let go. She is beautiful, and he is not listening to her pauses or the stomach growls. He can only see her beauty. This is his only truth, so he pulls himself closer to her to whisper something.

He then kisses her on the ear. She bounces back, unsure on how to react. Not because she can’t. It’s just that she is too focused on her dance.

He looks back, hoping for a reaction. None. She dances onto the front of the restaurant. She does not have time to rebuke him for breaking the code. He follows her pretending he has a chance. He pays his bill and leaves without a dance partner.

She tells me that she is used to this. “Weird shit like this happens all the time,” she shoots off while she serves me my 10th cup.

Six a.m.: switching of the guard. The waitresses and busboys sit in a round table counting receipts and tips under a steady light. The lights were brightened, so there would be no mistakes. An older waitress holds the receipts like cards. Her eyes intent on insuring that the lines for the IRS, the busboy and herself are never crossed. This is a holy alliance. a trinity.
There are a lot of codes here tonight.

A boy in a black t-shirt cuts the air with his arms. His passion is worn brightly on his short shirtsleeves. The King Air Conditioner drops a tear behind his head.

Two women walk in to the restaurant. One with cashmere shirt and leather neck collar. Her hair parted in pippi-lockstocking-powerpuff girl locks divided by the pathway shaved by sharp clippers. It is dyed green, but makes the hair live vibrantly. Her friend has a skinny puppy black shirt with matching skirt. Her tall boots are tied all the way just below her knee. They both look at the boy who cuts the air and laugh. “I AM A POET, O WOE IS ME!,” pippi powerpuff girl howls to the laughs which muffle her statement.

This restaurant is no longer divided between those who pray to nicotine and those who don’t. It is now torn between the metaphor and the concrete detail. Those that smoke metaphor are in that little room under the King air conditioner; those that live concrete detail disdain the metaphor smokers because their second hand smoke chokes them. Is it the carcinogenic reality or is it the filter, the impure ideas that are no longer natural? I don’t know.

That’s why I started writing this. To talk about the poets who are in the room with the black overhang that reads “World Record Stage”. Their bodies look sedentary. Planted in that small box behind the microphone. The boy in a black shirt hold his hands defiant with open palms. His poem about a man whose age and love have impelled him to become a violently angry mime who isn’t silent.

This passion does not waiver even though the clock approaches 7 a.m. It is amazing that I am still here. I am constantly looking at the clock. I don’t know why; I guess maybe because I am playing chicken with time trying to see which one of us will stop. “I will win. I will win,” I silently exclaim. But the madness is winning. Why can’t sleep beat this fucker?

The poets don’t care about time. There is some madness about getting up on stage they have succumbed to. They wait to get on this stage. This is their 15 minutes of fame. They want it over and over again. They don’t care how many people are really listening.

Listening is not the point. In a dual symbiotic medium like spoken poetry, you would think that they would crave listeners, but that’s the eye of the madness. The spilling of the language from their lips is the high. The force of air coming from their diaphragm gives them that ecstasy of a preacher. They all want to be a preacher. They all wish to have words the quality of the new testament, spread worldwide. The words feel holy to them. They feel powerful, magical. They feel they have the power to heal. Soothe.

It’s daylight. The amount of eggs has not diminished. The sun rises on the concrete and does not dance. It just lulls. Sits. Can sunlight shit on a sidewalk if the sidewalk itself is an abomination of nature?

It doesn’t matter. It’s a new day. Sunlight provides hope. The alcohol curfew here in Seattle is over. The two women are now sipping tall beers and holding cigs between two fingers. Their smoke rises above the glasses.

The waitress has finally finished her dance. She breathes in, dying to replace the fumes of hungry customers with a drag of a cig. She rushes through receipts with a glass of orange juice disrupting her rhythm. She relaxes like the rising sun. Slow. Steady. Her calm is her strength; her new day.

The new staff rushes around in a more jittery, less fluid dance. She and the older waitress roll napkins around silverware. It’s the restaurant’s cool gimmick. It’s touch of class. The rolled napkins look like huge joints from far away, but the glimmer of silver disrupts that image.

The light always creates a glow around this waitress, and now that I am sleepier, it seems like a fog around her. Maybe we are both sleepy, that’s why we glow.

The microphone underneath the King air conditioner is empty now.

Just before, a boy read the entire menu in a staccato-punk fashion. Always repeating “Your choice of toast!” The night manager, Rob, decides to play the voice of god: “Read your own poem, he playfully commands from his microphone post at the entrance of the restaurant.

“What kind of toast do you serve?,” the poet demands. “What kind of toast?”

The night manager repeats his previous line, so does the poet. They microphone box until the manager lists off the toast like a schoolboy: “Wheat, Pumpernickel, Sourdough, and White.”

“Why Pumpernickel?,” the poets questions.

I am too sleepy to remember the entire conversation.

Or is it madness? Has the madness set in?

Johnny Cash is raining down from the speakers and I accept this madness. I accept it. I am this hurricane inside. I am all these people I see, and none of them.

I read what I have typed. Damn, I am crazy.

The coffee is talking. The coffee is talking. The coffee. Is talking. And it has my voice.