They weren’t listening

They weren’t listening. Like every other night that he took the stage, no one looked at him. He did all the things he was supposed to do, he kept the rhythm of each word, pausing on a beat to emphasize certain parts. He spoke in a soft, faux pleading voice with each line. He even made sure to lean in close to the mic in the beginning. But no matter what he did to ape the styles of every other slam poet that had graced the stage, no one took notice. They talked, held their hands up to order another drink, and laughed loudly at their own jokes through his set.
He finished up and walked off the stage. He couldn’t understand it. He thought that maybe his material wasn’t bold enough. He needed to be more offensive, in your face. So he spent the last two weeks crafting a piece about masturbation. He didn’t even read it from his ruled pad of paper- one he had tried to make his trademark by drawing an oversized exclamation point in magic marker on the back. The other poets sitting backstage patted him on the back and muttered words of ‘next time’ and ‘pearls before swine’. It didn’t help. They were applauded when they left the stage, he wasn’t. “I’m not buying that shit,” he said, “I worked my ass off on this one. It was even more bold than Clint’s bullshit about his balls.” Clint came out of the bathroom wiping his hands. “Well, maybe you’re one of those talented guys who writes the great works, but others perform it for you. Maybe you just don’t have the showmanship…”
“What showmanship?!” He interrupted. “I do all the same shit you guys do. I even grinded up against the mic stand when I talked about blue-balls.”
“You’re too self-conscious” Clint said. “Everyone can tell you’re not comfortable up there. When you didn’t bring your notebook…” The others laughed quietly to each other, “You didn’t know what to do with your hands.” He stood, positioning himself stiffly as he tried to understand what his hands had to do with anything and what his next words were going to be. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your hands! You spent the first couple of minutes trying to put them in your pockets, then you spent the rest of the time with them just hanging at your side. Like they were dead.” Clint sat down. He was right. They were hanging at his sides, which probably made his mic-stand-humping-bit look even more awkward. As the others kept offering advice his mind wandered. He kept thinking about his hands, how limp and transparent they made him. He could hear the buzzing of others talking but they were drowned out by his internal repetition of ‘my hands, my hands…’ Followed by a slideshow of times that his hands had ruined things. How they laid dead on the table during interviews. Allowed pens to slip out of them when signing for a mortgage. Laid limply across the shoulders of woman on a failed date. By god, he wasn’t going to allow it to ruin his dream of slam poetry.
After a late night of researching he was able to find a seminar on “The Art of Hand Presentation – Add some flair to your life”. It was in Las Vegas. He had a little in savings, and about a week of PTO to use so he bought a plane ticket and flew out there. It was life-changing. The first day he learned all about a German hypnotist that could mesmerize entire audiences with his hands. He was so influential that Adolf Hitler mimicked his technique. On the second day he learned about technique. How a fleshy hand needed to be forceful and commanding, while a thin hand with long fingers needed to pass through the air like seaweed under the ebb and flow of passing currents. They watched videos, they had group practices, and that night he couldn’t sleep as he lay in bed watching his hands float against the ceiling’s shadows like a lunar moth. He wasn’t alone either. During the breaks and lunch he met others who also came to the same conclusions by their own means. Some were steel workers, lawyers, doctors. One was a mother who couldn’t get her children to listen to her while during home schooling. He realized that they all suffered from a metaphysical crisis. Their only solution rested in the very hands that had crippled them all their lives.
When he returned to work he put his skills to practice. At first his gestural attempts felt forced. He worried that by being too self conscious of what he was doing he would ruin the effect. He felt like every one could see through him. But he could tell the difference when he finished a statement during a meeting with a fluttering of his hand. Waiving it in the air near his head as if lazily swatting away a fly. It felt stiff and the room was silent for a minute. His hands had spent the hour in his lap, unmoving. But he made a point of saying something toward the end because if it failed he didn’t want to sit in defeat for the rest of the time. As soon as he did it he felt ashamed. Then, clearing his throat, the CEO said, “Go on. Finish your thought.” It was if the entire room grew brighter. He flung both hands out toward the center of the table as if throwing jacks. “Well,” He said, “I just think that if we put more people on the project-“ he balled both his hands into fists, “really define the roles- that we’d have a faster turn around.” He slowly opened both hands with palms up like two flowers blossoming. After a moment, he gave two small claps and dropped his hands back in his lap. Everyone started chattering around him. He had created a flurry of excitement at the table. He looked around at what he had created until his eyes fell on the CEO who was leaning back in his chair with arms folded, smiling. ‘Could he, out of all these people, know what I was doing?’ He thought to himself. Where he should have been happy that people were taking him seriously for the first time, he only felt fear. He wanted to duck out of the meeting, but everyone around him were adding to his idea excitedly. This was going to go on for another hour. Declarations of, ‘Barry- call the client! By God, this changes everything!’ Or ,‘Write that down! Write that down before we forget it!’ swelled up around him. All the while he couldn’t stop staring at the CEO. He was chuckling quietly while staring at him. Then he pulled one hand out from under his arm and made a gesture. The kind of gesture he had seen on one of the convention films. It was waving motion with a twinkling of his fingers so skilled, so graceful, and from a chubby hand that his mind reeled at trying to comprehend what he had just seen. Forget slam poetry. He was in a new world now that words failed to express.







