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By Charles Rammelkamp
As the poet Robert Cooperman has noted, Alan Catlin is the Charles Bukowski of our generation. Like Bukowski, Catlin’s subject is the ordinary lives of the anonymous poor, alcohol and substance addiction, relationships gone wrong and urban sleaze in general. Like Bukowski, too, Catlin is an extremely prolific poet, his work all over the samizdat press. His current work, Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell, is in keeping with these overall themes.
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Catlin had a long career in the restaurant business in Schenectady, New York. For short, call him a bartender though the responsibilities were more complex than pouring drinks. As he writes in the persona poem “on and off the road.” (this may or may not be Alan Catlin himself speaking),
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After years of hearing people ask me
what else I did besides work behind the bar,
of asking me what my other job was as if
50 hours or so as week wasn’t like real work…
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The poem goes on with the absurdity (or sheer ignorance), until at last the speaker tells us, “I developed
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a stock response, “I’m independently wealthy
and I do this for fun.” After a while I added,
“And I’m gathering material for a book.”
Most people didn’t want to know what kind of
book it was going to be. Maybe they thought
they would be in it and what I had to say wasn’t
going to reflect well on them. And they’d be right.
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It’s a sly joke but true! Take the poem, “Old Man.” The speaker encounters a vaguely familiar face at a bus stop, cadging cigarettes, propping himself up with a cane; ‘mostly bald head / hidden beneath / old Yankees cap // nearly transparent skin.’ The reason he looks familiar? The speaker suddenly remembers ‘how he used to brag // say how I’d made him / his first legal drink // when he was five years / younger than I was // before he became half dead / and twice my age.’ Burn!
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Or take the young woman in “Andy Warhol Revisited”:
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Made up with five shades
of mascara, all of them black,
she was a pan-angelic pixie
embarking on a second childhood
before a self-induced, early
death.
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We’ve all seen her somewhere, haven’t we? Or her sisters or her friends. Or maybe we’ve seen her brother. You know, the guy in “Skinhead Fury”:
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His t-shirt said, Organized Anarchy,
white skulls rampant on a field of
burning crosses; skinhead fury
in crooked black lettering about to
ignite, race wars and random acts of
wanton violence his modus operandi
in between long stretches inside,
courtesy of the state judicial system.
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Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell actually starts in Hell, Catlin the Virgil to the reader’s Dante. “Lady Day Sings the Blues in an Open-All-Night Club” features Billie Holiday stroking the blues with the headless jazzmen and is immediately followed by a couple of poems with the same title, taken from the British writer, David Peace: “many doors to hell; open, all of them open.”
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a voyage in the dark,
the ride of a lifetime, a ferryman waiting inside,
holding a lantern, beckoning for you to follow.
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Sure, I’m mixing my Afterlife metaphors, Charon being the ferryman in Greek myth, but we follow Virgil through the murky rooms of The Inferno, meeting one lost soul after another. There’s ‘the flushed version of a character from / some dead author’s lost novel’ (“Tastee-Freeze”), the former gymnast pulled down now to a place “only Oxys, Demerol and Jack Daniels could cure” (“Fucked by the muse”), the pubescent girls celebrating their thirteenth birthday under the boardwalk, being taken advantage of by older men while their single moms work nine to five, their only goal in life “to live until they were sixteen” (“The Little Darlings”). We encounter them in Las Vegas, Vietnam, the Philippines, Argentina, Malaysia, wherever there’s a bar and somebody who needs to forget. No, nothing reflects well on these people. The title of the poem, “Refugee from Another Planet” could refer to almost any of them.
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Whatever Way Out Machine
he’d come in on must have
malfunctioned and left him
stranded still dressed in
decades-before-the-millennium
duds: bright floral surfer pants,
loud striped t-shirt, leather thongs
and rose-colored glasses that
mostly concealed his drug spaced
eyes. He was trying to hitch
a ride to the coast to join
an enclave of pot growers
and potential cult suicides,
the name of his destination
tattooed on his forearm in code,
a place eight miles past nowhere
at the bottom of a cliff that
a Richter Scale 8 had dumped
into the Pacific, not even memories
left behind.
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These characters are vivid, lurid, vibrant, flamboyant. Catlin, as Virgil, thrusts them right into our faces, as if they were figures from our own nightmares.
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Catlin quotes Charles Bukowski for the titles and epigraphs of several of the poems in Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell. There’s “alone and insane in tiny rooms” (the protagonist “smoking her own special brand / of acquired-from-the-street, loco weed”). There’s “some babbled and some prayed”: “as if end time was yesterday / and they needed more money / for the meter that had run out.” There’s “Sometimes i just fall into it,” set in 1969, during the time of the “useless war” (Vietnam) raging overseas while the speaker hunkers down in upstate New York. There’s “how grimly we hold onto our misery,” which about sums it all up. Catlin also uses epigraphs from various other poets and writers to start other bleak poems – Philip K. Dick, Roy Batty, Lula Pace, Maurice Dekobra, and Buffalo Bill among others. To which the reader generally responds: There but for the grace of God or Whatever…
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Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell is vintage Alan Catlin, not exactly a “delight” to read, but impressive as hell.
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You can find the book here: Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press and most recently See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books.
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North of Oxford 