I had been brooding over my situation for several days when Scott Ericson dropped in, just after dinner, with a twelve-pack of Shiner Bock. Now, in addition to being a bold experimental poet, Scott was, and is, a brilliant evolutionary biologist. You should hear the guy riff on genetic drift, or fitness landscapes, or punctuated equilibrium, or sexual selection. Anyway, we opened a couple of beers, and I told him about my dilemma. I told him all about the wine bottle, and the MFAs, and about being over-rated and derivative.
"Well," he said, "I wouldn't go so far as to call your work derivative, but I have always thought it revealed a fairly transparent reverence for your influences."
"If I ask you to get out, will you leave the beer?"
"Probably not."
"Nevermind then."
I went on to tell him about the website and the blog. He didn't believe me, made me go online and show him.
"Can you believe this shit?" I asked.
"Well, you can be a little abrasive, but I wouldn't go so far as to call you..."
"A douche-bag?"
"I thought you were over that."
Then he asked if I'd like him to recite his latest poem. I said sure. He stood up, took a drink of his beer, set the bottle on an end table. He took a sheet of paper from his hip pocket and unfolded it.
"'Cage'. By Scott Ericson."
Then he stood perfectly still, without saying a word, his eyes scrolling side to side. After shifting in my seat a couple of times, I asked him what was going on. He handed over the creased page. I have re-created the poem here, with Scott's permission:
Cage
by Scott Ericson
I.
,
.
, .
.
, .
II.
.
;
. .
—
.
III.
. . .
, .
...
.
, .
"It's a tribute to John Cage," Scott explained.
"Of course. I get it."
"Patterned after his composition, 4'33"."
"Yes. I understand."
"What do you think?"
"I think it's the best thing you've ever written."
"Better than SELECTED WORKS BY E.E. CUMMINGS?"
He was referring to my previous favorite, his first chapbook: SELECTED WORKS BY E.E. CUMMINGS by Scott Ericson. It was a collection of poems by e. e. cummings, rendered in all caps. ALL CAPS. Pure genius. "At once slavishly reverent and unrepentantly heretical... uniquely original and idiosyncratic... a plagiaristic tour de force," as reviewed in The Observer.
"I'm putting together an anthology marking the ninety-ninth anniversary of Cage's birth — in 2011. I'll need two-hundred seventy-two writers, not counting myself, from all genres and sub-genres, to provide wordless tributes — wordless poems, wordless plays, wordless fiction, wordless essays, wordless whatnots and bric-a-bracs. Maybe you could contribute a story?""Why not?"
"Of course I'm asking that all the works be genuine — that they reflect the true spirit of Zen inherent in Cage's work. You would have to actually write a story — a great story — and then delete all the words. You'd have to vow never to publish the story in any form, never to repeat it to another human being — to do your very best, in fact, to erase it from your memory. The mindful destruction of an entire collection of masterworks. That's what I'm really after. That's the ideal, unattainable though it may be."
I told him I didn't think that was how 4'33" came about.
"Of course not, but here's the thing. When Cage composed 4'33", it was perfectly original. It had never occurred to anyone, in the whole history of music, to write a sonata without notes. But now it's been done — and done forever — so we have to go farther. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than a farce. Simply filling a few lines with random punctuation won't do. Creation and annihilation - that's the thing. Shiva's dance and all that. Alpha and omega. Birth and extinction. Big bang and big crunch. Any asshole can type a few commas."
A couple of weeks later, an epiphany. I went to the grocery store and loitered near the door. As people came out, I asked if I could have their shopping lists. "I'm conducting a sociological experiment," I assured them. This freaked a few people out, and pissed off a few more, but I managed to collect a half dozen shopping lists before the manager told me I had to leave or he'd call the police. Now, in my experience, the police tend to be less than enthusiastic about sociological experiments. Also, I had an outstanding warrant for expired registration. So I left.
Back home, I put the shopping lists through the shredder. I spent the whole weekend painstakingly rebuilding a wine bottle from shards of glass and glue. I put the shredded shopping lists inside. I wrote on the label, in red marker, the following imperative: "In case of apocalypse, break glass."
Three days later, I sold it online for seventy-five dollars.
A couple of weeks after that, Scott showed up at my door with a twelve pack. "When was the last time you googled yourself?"
"I don't know. Last week?"
"You should have a look."
I did. Apparently the Smiths had changed the name of their website to Don Hucks is still an asshole, but we admire his sense of humor. Their home page had photos of my revised art piece, before and after they smashed it again and taped together the contents. They had internal links to each of the shopping lists, recreated in Bookman font. Shopping List #1 by Don Hucks. Shopping List #2 by Don Hucks, etc.
"It's progress," I insisted.
Scott wholeheartedly agreed.
We opened a couple of beers and sat on the couch. Scott pulled a roll of stapled pages from inside his coat: the first chapter of his new novel. He dropped it on my lap. James Joyce's "Ulysses" by Scott Ericson. As best I could tell, it was identical to Joyce's original text, except Scott had added quotation marks to all the dialogue — in place of those leading dashes, which I happened to know Scott had always considered to be "eyesores."
Of course, I thought. Joyce. In quotation marks. It was so obvious. Well, what could I say? The guy was a genius. I sat drinking my beer and skimming the manuscript and wondering: why the hell couldn't I think of this shit?
Don Hucks's fiction has appeared in various niches, including decomP, Bartleby Snopes, The Battered Suitcase, Why Vandalism?, Pindeldyboz, and Ghoti.