Skyspeak
, won the
Writer Magazine
/Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her next book,
Orphan
, will be published in 2014 by Alice James Books. Levi is also the editor of
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader;
served as consulting editor for the new edition of Rukeyser’s
Collected Poems
, and is currently working on a biography of Rukeyser. With Sara Miles, she coedited
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
.
ethics class, 1971
by jan heller levi
Don’t be frightened, Mr. Bliss said, we’ve got
to talk about these things. You can be honest—
how many of you have experimented
with drugs? Mr. Bliss was cool. So, okay,
about half of us, shifting in our seats, sneaking
looks at one another, slowly raised our hands.
An hour’s discussion ensued about pros and cons,
and sure, the moral issue. Yes, it’s true, Mr. Bliss
agreed, Thoreau said you
should
break a law
you don’t believe in, but didn’t he also say the body
is a temple, that the gift nature gives us is
to be shown matter, to come in contact
with rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!
the
solid
earth! the
actual
world! There were
half-decent questions asked, and answers
none of us took too seriously. And when the hand-raisers
got home that afternoon, we’d each been nailed
by a phone call from school. It wasn’t so bad
for me, my parents already knew I was rotten.
But Jamie got the shit beaten out of her,
Stan’s parents shipped him off to military school.
Wesley gave up pot for drinking; in April he drove
himself into a tree. Through the rest of the year,
Mr. Bliss continued to pose interesting questions—
If a baby and a ninety-year-old both fell off a ship and you
could only save one, which would it be? Your mother’s
sick, you have no money for her medicine,
Would it be wrong to break into the pharmacy
and “borrow” it? What about risking
the life of one to save the lives of many?
For our final—stoned on some primo hash,
I wrote a B- essay on honesty.
J
OSH
G
ILBERT
is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He currently resides in New York City with his girlfriend and their son Henry.
the devil smokes ganja
by josh gilbert
It was in the mid-1990s when the famous Godfrey Jackson walked into my office wearing his vintage dreads and Birkenstocks and asked me if I could help his daughter Gladys land a job in the film industry. It wasn’t as if Jackson didn’t have the connections necessary to help her find a job—he surely did—but he didn’t want to call in a favor and risk rejection based on some old industry beef or an unpredictable blindside. As Jackson spoke, he slouched down into his chair across the desk from me, and being the ever-sycophantic aspiring junior executive that I was, I eased into a slouch to mirror his and begged him to please continue.
He told me Gladys had just returned to the US from Russia where she’d been studying existential Russian poetry at the University of Kiev and was lost back in Los Angeles and always had been. Being the daughter of a celebrity was never easy, and Gladys had turned her Freudian angst into sexual promiscuity, while her brother Munsey had developed a nasty mean streak and an unruly belligerence.
I was relatively new to the business at the time, a recent film school graduate, driving around town in an old wreck of a BMW with no money to fix it—your typical big-hat-no-cattle film industry hack with a total of three midlevel connections that I milked for everything they were worth. With a cocky reassuring nod, I told Jackson I’d see what I could do.
“Thanks, mon,” Jackson said, “I’ll have Gladys give you a call.” He ambled out of my office, leaving me slouched in my chair, wheels churning about how to find the girl a job.
Jackson had been directing, starring in, and producing a self-financed film that our production company was line-producing called You Best Shut Up! about an unemployed bicycle mechanic with the IQ of a cabbage, who rides off on a journey in search of Life’s Greater Meaning. Like most of Pepperpot and Jackson’s comedies from back in the day, the flimsy story line did little more than serve as an excuse for audiences to laugh at the mishaps of a pot-addled idiot while smoking themselves into oblivion.
I’d been a huge fan of Pepperpot and Jackson comedies since I was a kid and was starstruck from the moment Jackson had walked into my office. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no celebrity ass-kisser. Far from it. I grew up in one of LA’s storied canyon communities, lousy with big-name entertainment industry icons, all milling about at the local food mart. But Pepperpot and Jackson had that seminal impact on me as a kid that wields the ultimate influence on any fan—a history of preadolescent enthusiasm bordering on obsession. And while Jackson’s fortunes were way down at this point in his career, during their heyday, the comedy team had amassed a monumental following of ticket-buying enthusiasts and potheads.
Several days later, Jackson’s daughter Gladys called me, and for the next few weeks we wound up spending many late nights together, sometimes wearing clothes but mostly naked, with me giving her pointers on script analysis, and after several Bacchanalian all-nighters, I became unequivocally convinced she had what it took to truly succeed in Hollywood, and with a concerted effort and a little luck I managed to land her a job interview with Cecil B. Glazer’s production company. It was a relatively easy thing to do because Gladys was bright, beautiful, and sexually uninhibited, and Cecil was the cad son of a billionaire with a weakness for nymphomaniacs. When Gladys got the job, Godfrey Jackson was thrilled.
It was at this time that Jackson was becoming totally obsessed with catching up to his former partner and arch nemesis, Aaron Pepperpot, who had leveraged his post–Pepperpot and Jackson comedy career into a solo one by starring in a series of hit films and prime-time television shows. As Pepperpot’s stock rose and Jackson’s fell, people in the industry openly opined to Jackson’s face that Pepperpot had always been “the funny one.”
When my company organized a screening of Jackson’s You Best Shut Up! at a prestigious theater on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, the venue was filled with studio heavies, a smattering of Blist celebrities, and his former sidekick Pepperpot, who had played a bit part in the movie as a professional courtesy to Jackson. Jackson had made a lot of people a lot of money over the course of his career and even though the chances were slim he’d do the same thing on his own, this savvy crowd knew the possibility existed, however remote, that he could be the next big Hollywood rebound story.
But not this time. Each bad joke on screen elicited a groan from the audience, soon followed by the disruptive rustling of people heading toward the exits. As the theater emptied out, it became painfully obvious that redemption had once again eluded Godfrey Jackson. When the curtain closed and the lights came up, Pepperpot gave Jackson a condescending pat on the back, said, “That’s show biz!” and walked out of the theater with a look on his face that could only be described as schadenfreude.