The Blues of St. Louis

Day 6 of Tour

Back where I’m from in Toledo, we talk a lot of the city of Detroit, and how it was devastated by NAFTA, but did you know St. Louis has lost almost 60% of its population since the 1950’s? East St. Louis in particular gets a bad rap for being one of the most violent, gang afflicted, drug addicted cities in America, but did you know East St. Louis is one of the cities hit hardest by jobs leaving the country? East St. Louis has lost over 75% of its population since 1950, and once went over 30 years without a new business or new job opportunity, and even that was only alleviated by a fucking casino river boat.

The city of East St. Louis reached such a devastating point of despair that it became a real life Gotham City. The city cut workers and the sewer system failed. Garbage went uncollected for months. The fire department was laid off. Half the city burned. So much of the city burned that Hollywood used East St. Louis as a backdrop to film Armageddon movies.

The state legislature of Illinois had to finally take over management of the city, once its fourth largest, now a place worse than the worst cities in the rust belt decay. Even Batman wouldn’t live here.

In my late teens I did some crazy things involving drugs, or obtaining drugs, or sometimes just attempting to obtain drugs there was one hell of an adventure. I was less than half a block away from a drive-by there once. It was the first time, but not the last, that I saw someone get shot.

I thought about these things on Day 6 of our tour. Jess and I both slept in late, not having to hop to another city, and enjoying the luxury of back to back tour dates in the same town. We get to do that again in Chicago this weekend.

We stretched and got rolling to go check out the Cahokia Native American Mounds that sit across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. They are between East St. Louis and the town of Collinsville, IL and they’re the largest earthwork mounds in the country, and the site of the largest Native American city known to date. At one time, about a thousand years ago, right here in the fertile Mississippi River lands, sat a city of around 20,000 indigenous people.

We drove through East St. Louis to get there. A city with more abandoned buildings than occupied ones. A city with whole blocks swallowed by nature and whole blocks overgrown into urban forests consuming falling houses and crumbling buildings. It’s a wild place, and a guilty verdict of everything you’ve ever suspected America of.

But the mounds are pretty cool. A sacred, spiritual place. I saw them last in my drug fueled late teenaged East St. Louis days, and it was great to spend a few hours there now, on the eve of my sober anniversary date, praying and walking and marveling at the sacred history that lay around us.

Cahokia Mounds is now a state park in Illinois. They estimate there are, or were, over 120 mounds here at one point, but many were ravaged and redeveloped over the years, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes because fuck it-capitalism. We stopped first at the largest one, Monk’s Mound.

Monk’s Mound is the largest native built structure in America and the largest native built pyramid in North America. Its base is over 14 acres wide and it’s over 100 feet tall. All built with basket full after basket full of Mississippi mud and clay. I don’t know how many baskets it took to build it, but they say it went through four separate building phases over 250 years, and at it’s completion, it held the largest built Native American building ever discovered. One that was 100 feet long and over 50 foot tall. They built this around a thousand years ago, and just like the pyramids in Egypt and the indigenous structures in Mexico, they know why they built these mounds to some extent, but there’s still more than 50% mystery to the place.

Jess and I walked around the base of Monk’s Mound, enjoying the exhibits that showed the fort like adobe walls the indigenous used to build their buildings, and the signs that explained much of the history of the site, from the 1700’s when first found by white people until now. The big earth mound is named Monk’s Mound because French monks owned it at one point in the early 1800’s, using it as simple farm land for their crops. And that’s one of the more honorable uses for the place until it was rescued by the state, who began to finally start preservation efforts in the 1960s.

We stopped later on the edge of the park where they’ve recreated “woodhenge.” A circle of large tree posts with one in the middle that is aligned perfectly with all four solstices of the sun. They suspect they built a structure like this that was excavated from a thousand years ago, because these indigenous Mississippian people worshiped the sun. I don’t know. But all of it boggles my mind with awe and wonder and flutters my heart with sacred spiritual and divine things.

After a few hours at the sacred mounds, we drove back through East St. Louis, and my heart both ached for the pain that capitalism has inflicted upon this place and simultaneously was flooded with gratitude that despite all odds, I made it out of places like this alive. The road goes on forever and the adventure never ends.

We got an afternoon nap. I need more rest these days. Then headed out for our evening reading.

We got to Dunaway Books early, and friends let me tell you now, as a long time book lover and blue collar bookman, Dunaway has it going on. I bet they have a hundred thousand volumes or more. It’s a big place with a basement and a balcony. They specialize in rare and out of print books, so I got to see a signed first edition of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, and first editions of Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There’s first editions of some of poet Kenneth Patchen’s early work. There’s shelf after shelf of those old leather bound classics that rich people adorn their homes with, but rarely read. There’s modern books, too, and a ton of local writers and local St. Louis flavor and history on display. Dunaway is a book lover’s nice Saturday if you know what I mean.

My buddy, the local blue collar writer Joe West, both of us met through publisher ‘A Thin Slice of Anxiety,’ he couldn’t make it, but he hooked me up with a nice little gift bag of local THC products and a T shirt, and dropped it off and had it waiting for me when we got there. Great, nice and totally appreciated pick me up goody bag in the middle of this long tour. Thanks brother!

The crowd was bigger. There was free beer. National Beat Poet Laureate Mark Lipman, the mad captain of the skoolie bus Furtherer, and organizer of the Vagabond Poetry Caravan tapped Damian Rucci of the Jersey Poetry Renaissance to emcee the night, and Rucci in true Rucci fashion roped a local busker from the street corner into opening the show. The busker, stage-named Poopy-Knife, wore a green horse head mask and played a key-tar. You know, the half piano half guitar that Weird Al plays?

So, Poopy-Knife kicked things off, and they actually performed a rocking, hilarious, original set, and the show was off and rolling. On this night in St. Louis, the Vagabond Crew featured locals Dan Wright, Heather Kays, and Dorothy Payne. And the traveling crew of Mark Lipman, Rucci and Alexander Ragsdale of Jersey. Jeremiah Walton of New Hampshire, and Jess and I from Ohio. Wild mix of diverse and mad talent.

The readings ebbed and flowed as the energy gave and took like an ocean coming and going. We went two hours, took a ten minute break and the open mic went an hour longer. Three hours of poets from all over, railing into the St. Louis evening and night. A special highlight was seeing local working class poet T. James Chapman read. I met him when reading last year in St. Louis and we’ve grown to be pals and colleagues since.

After the post show camaraderie, I limped away in the dark, my bag of books just a hair lighter and my heart heavier with hope and gratitude. The road goes on forever and the adventure never ends.

Today we pack up and head across and through the central Illinois farm lands where much of my youth unfolded. And though the ghosts of the fallen no longer haunt me, I will say their names and remember, and thank them. Every war has casualties, but my name isn’t listed amongst the fallen. 19 years ago today, May 23, 2006, my life changed forever and I got sober. I’ve never had so much to live for.

I’m so excited to be in Indiana tonight, the state of my birth, where we will read poetry in a cave, and be surrounded by a dozen friends from the Hoosier state.

Thank you all for making this trip, this dream tour come true. I wouldn’t be out here reminiscing, reading poems and retracing the places that made me who I am today, if it weren’t for you all. I love you. Namaste.

Love,

Dan

ps. A couple of people messaged and asked how they could support us. As always, I’m so grateful for that, and all your help.

This is how:

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