The young man groans out a sharp stifled snicker, while at the podium the famous poet drones on singsong about nests and fire and rebirth and burning love. All around, heads stiffen, electrified by the force of their disapproval, staring violently ahead as if still listening to the poem, but darting holocaust from the corners of their eyes. The room is packed and the visiting poet’s star is very high this year, and the spluttering student has been pressed into service by some well-meaning professor to swell the crowd. When I glance back, the expression I see flickering across his narrow face is an uneasy blend of juvenile scorn and unabashed amazement at the strange ritual in which he finds himself. 

It reminds me of the time, as a fan of dystopian fiction writer Philip K. Dick, I went to see the movie adaptation of his short story “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” retitled as Total Recall, and worked into an action film. What stunned me at the time was how the climax of a violent fight a steel industrial elevator chopped off the arms of the antagonist, Richter, leaving the bloody stubs in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hands. It was a ghastly depiction of human suffering, played for laughs, and yet I was shocked at how rumbustiously the audience laughed at the sight of Arnold tossing the gory hands and forearms and taunting, “See you at the party, Richter!”

Maybe I am lying about that. I do understand the desire to laugh at public rituals---at weddings, funerals, sermons, movies, and poetry readings---to break the tyranny that keeps us in our seats in enforced silence. Especially when you are young, these solemn rituals stink of the ridiculous, and there is a certain callow pleasure, a self-absorbed righteousness in belching into the respectful silence, in puncturing the communal moment with a raucous snort or cackle. It must be the pleasure that activists get when movies trigger their sensitivities and they hiss loudly, and the audience’s imagination deflates through the hole that’s been made in the willing suspension of disbelief. 

Back in the Humanities Instructional Building, the poet pauses mid-phrase. She knows something’s off, but now from behind me comes only fat breaths, the shaky swallowed giggles almost wholly repressed, and so she eases back into her drone while the audience tenses like a muscle in spasm. I wonder if her famous imagination could begin to fathom the strangeness of the youth raised in Irvine, California, where nearly all the housing consists of walled and gated communities. When I first moved here, and was driving around trying to orient myself I asked a local a naïve question: “Where can I find the downtown?” He directed me to a very large mall just down the road. There is no downtown. Instead, the tax base of the community is maintained through mini and maxi-malls sprouting at all major intersections. Growing up as I did in rural Indiana, where malls amass at the outskirts of towns like barnacles clinging to the freeways, and where the great sadness was the plight of the impoverished downtowns and failing mom and pop stores, I can’t help but think of Irvine as a town without a town, a town without a center, a town without a heart. In the place of the old model of a central meeting place, a town square, a town hall, a line of plucky and independent businesses, Irvine has built a series of town malls. It is an anti-town of crime-repellant and homelessness-resistant commuter dream homes in which the very idea of community, of a center, is laughably sad. 

I imagine this snickering boy as the clown who makes fart noises with his armpit in class, who sneaks out of his uncle’s funeral to get stoned with the caterers in the parking lot, who stands on a street corner in Laguna Beach with a crowd of fellow surfers and pretend-attacks tourists to make them jump. I imagine that he does understand some things, such as the crush of the mosh-pit, or howling on his knees on the dance floor at Gecko’s as the cocktail waitress pours tequila shots directly in his mouth. Maybe what he wanted was to share the stage, the way a punk girl with a shaved and tattooed head once approached me in the midst of my coffee shop reading and hung her body casually off mine like a 20’s gun moll, and began chattering to the audience over my own failed attempts to make myself heard. How strange it must be to him, witnessing the etiquette that lines us up in serious rows, listening to this sermon, stranger than his parents’ parties or the acid trips when the air becomes soft as flesh he must push through to reach the maple leaves beckoning like green hands. Maybe what he really wants is to splinter the surface of the art that he can’t enter, to make us a picture of his own fragmented self, shards of a broken mirror. 

Now the poet is searching for the source of the interruption, and her gaze chars my right shoulder as her eyes pass over him, and perhaps he is even surprised at how, instead of chastising the audience, stomping off stage and breaking into tears, tossing her poems dramatically into the air, she reads on, deliberately. Up to this point, she has been reading her work without inflection, without conviction, an actor mouthing lines in another language, and the effect has been (even for so strange a creature as myself, who actually enjoys poetry readings) pompous and excruciating. Now, however, there is a charge of irony prickling the words, and the poem suddenly picks up. The audience, whose attention had begun to wander, focuses in on the poet again. In the row ahead of me, a young woman with brown glasses and a page-boy cut, who’d been slumped into her chair, leans forward as if each word were a blade nicking time, and her eyes lift rapturously to the poet’s face, for all the world like Mary before the empty tomb, seized with ecstasy and searching the heavens.

And this is just too much. 

The young man lets out an incredulous snort, and then, he can’t help himself, emits a high, hilarious titter, and the poet’s eyes lock on to him at last. The room’s attention shifts onto him the way I’ve seen the water in an ocean liner’s swimming pool distend at the deep end like a blue muscle, till the hull rolls and the swell rushes to the shallows, crushing children against the wall. Such pressure. Imagine him flattened like an accordion to his seat, a cartoon thumb pushing down on his head. Who can blame him for losing it completely, sneezing out a storm of little barks and yelps? I look back and see him, skinny, crew cut, and hunched in despair as if holding in a stomach wound. Each breath pinches out like a sob, his body hiccupping sighs and heartbroken sniggers. It is the strangest sort of duet, the boy singing out unwillingly at the back of the room, crushed by the force of his own grief-stricken hilarity, while the poet at her podium finds her voice at last, reading directly to him with her eyes glistening triumph, and with road rage in her smile.