Get Out

Coming in on the second half of April now, Miltonians all across town celebrate the first real nuzzle-nudges of Spring’s gentle return to our fair lands.  Things are happening, now.  Our second Fort Saint Davids Portland event came and went, a smashing success.  It gives us ideas, not just for our own event but for the future of our literary endeavor.  We’re considering, for the first time in a number of years, of making books again.  We tried it, back in the days of the Philadelphia Independent. but the price tag was too steep, the effort to great, the risks too much.  We were broke, brother, and no one would give us a dime.  But perhaps a system of pre-orders, using the now-advanced powers of the Interwebs, and our network, you, the proud, the faithful, the Miltonians.  Get enough orders to pay for the product.  Produce the product.  How interested would you be in a print version of the Daily Miltonian?  Or a forty page booklet containing Erik Bader’s Cherry Hill. Or the complete Twenty Stories About Twenty Towns in New Jersey?

Let us know.

Fort Saint Davids Presents: The State of New Jersey

Fort Saint Davids is pleased to announce a fiction-reading type event—20 Stories About 20 Towns in New Jersey—on April 9, which is Second Thursday (TM). At WorkSound Gallery (820 SE Alder). At 7:30 p.m.

It goes like this: It goes like the title: Authors Erik Bader and Matthew Korfhage wrote 20 very, very short stories about 20 places in New Jersey, chosen pretty much at random. So Middletown, Hi-Nella, and Egg Harbor are in, and Jersey City is out, but there’s no real reason for that except the feeling.

For those of you unfamiliar, New Jersey is an American State, situated at the exact geographic center of heartache, memory, and god-damned freedom.

Dutifully also on offer are Wine, Art, and The Music of Bruce Springsteen (TM).

Above: Fort Saint Davids, in Moorestown, New Jersey, late September 1995.

You got other questions? Here’s a strictly hypothetical interview we hope will clear all that up for you:

Q. Why New Jersey? 
A. Because New Jersey has more Americans per square foot than any other state in the country.

Q. Have you visited these places? 
A. No. The whole point of being American is that our histories and myths remain tantalizingly up for grabs.

Q. So you’re patriots? 
A. When we see the sky, we know it isn’t ours.

Q. Can we see one of the stories?
A. Sure. It’s down there.

Q. Is there anything we can do to help?
A. We are accepting donations of up to 5 dollars, for the wine and the entertainments. More would embarrass us, but less, including nothing, wouldn’t bother us.

Q. Thanks for talking with us.
A. You love this. I mean, we love you.

 

Pennsauken

I wasn’t the one who found it. J.P. called us over. You could tell he didn’t know whether it was funny or a god-damned tragedy.

Right on the shoreline, there it was. A bald eagle had somehow stuck its head and one of its talons through the loops of a plastic six-pack holder and was upside down in the mud. It was scrapping with the free leg, trying to claw out, but it pretty much had to face the facts: this bird was in a real awkward position. 

I’d wanted us to go find some nature because I thought the town was putting into me the unreformed heart of a murderer, but as it turned out the Delaware pretty much gave as good as it got.

J.P. squared up on the eagle. “That’s a hell of an American symbol right there,” he said.

“Shut up,” said Tim.

“This picture could be in a museum.”

“I could stab you with a knife,” said Tim. “You know how it goes? We let this thing die, the government hunts us down.” Tim was nervous, jumpy, fearful. He had been driven crazy by injustice.

“Nothing hunts you down, Tim. They look you up.”

Tim punched J.P. in the back of the shoulder with the dull part of his knuckles. “The Feds sniff you out like you’re a dog. Footprints, blood type, whatever, anything. It’s ludicrous.”

“So what?” I said. “We cut it loose, right? We snip the plastic.”

Nobody wanted to go near it, was the problem. Trapped or not in a soda can holder, this was a scary-looking bird, mean and loud. The sound it made didn’t come from its throat so much as take over the whole air. One little flick of a talon and your neck could spill onto your shirt. This was the image in my head at the time.

“I don’t think they’d do anything to us,” said J.P.

Nobody was listening. Tim was hunting around for a long-enough stick, and Little John, who’d up to this point tended mostly to his cigarette, had gotten something holy in his face.

“We’ve got to save it,” he said. “We’ve got to save the bird.”

Tim had found what he thought was a good stick and was trying to snag the other end of it on one of the plastic loops. The eagle emitted a siren. It made a sound like what death would feel like from the inside, a sound behind a sound, God’s mouth opening out into darkness.

“Leave it the fuck alone!” I said.

“We have to save it,” said Little John, quietly, reverent as a lunatic.

“You don’t fucking touch it.” I was ready to fight him, J.P., anybody. J.P. turned his face away. “Tim, you put the stick down, now.” Mournfully, Tim put the stick down. “We call the cops,” I say, “from a payphone, and then we go back to the neighborhood and tap shoulders for some schnapps. Because this thing doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

The bird had its head back against the mud and only one wing was flapping while the other was folded in against its side. Symbol or no, nothing good was ever going to happen to that thing until it died. Sometimes, just out of the corner of your eye, you see the one thing that is true.

We looped the busses around all summer. We went down to the Mart and bought knockoff sunglasses and made like every single thing was ours from there through Philadelphia. The dust hung in our sweat and every girl we saw made us stunned, depressed for hours. I swear, I could tell you the name of every feeling. I could tell you the secrets in every feeling.