T. Plank Struthers Bio, by Alfred Wichly

Disgraced professor Wichly remembers a writer who stabbed him

For fifteen years I was allowed to teach my dense brand of creative tutelage at a community college. Hot off the dumb buzz of a successful first book (meaning, for poetry, a thousand sold), the powers that be winked and I was given a modicum of control at a tiny English department. I stocked the school with some of my people. I was even possessed by enough comfortably common arrogance to start a family, marrying the requisite pert former student. All applause to her for leaving her abusive master in the lurch the second our quite minor luxuries ended, the second the culture to which she enslaved her proclivities deemed my motivations outright sinister, despite (the love and devotion and providing and care and attention and helping her bring up our children the best I could and now cannot) what has been revenged upon all western intent (especially in the fickle-political arts). Bravo! I was often called a genius against my will (before the national discovery that my every talent was handed to me by a pricey skin tone) and one’s enemies disagreed with, at worst, lighthearted vigor. I don’t recall indulging in many of the crimes my presence on a campus came to accuse me of, but I am certain they’ll stay mentally savored, regardless. My main offenses were: speaking openly (which I assumed, naively, to be covered by a portion of the paycheck) and absconding with the library’s rental cameras, recording interviews with poets who, by my estimation, were severely under-appreciated for the oddness of their writings, not for political reasons (or those too). This was when assessment still tilted toward the work itself, or the mystique of whichever brain had fouled its pages, and not the caste or make of its maker.

There were no tumbleweeds on set when T. Plank Struthers stabbed me over a petty disagreement that had been snowballing since he began crashing on my family’s couch and didn’t seem to want to leave (perhaps I was a bad husband after all, but my wife requested variety in bed, because of the terrible advantage of my being six manipulative years older than her, and I guess ole T. wasn’t blustering enough to fill this supposed desire, not that either of them consulted me beforehand, but fair enough–a few sparkling students still dug me). Struthers later found cult status due to the semiliterate simpleton language he pretentiously employed against pretension. He was a more preposterous cow Bukowski, or a Heming-lame, one of these Cormac McNether Regions of the wanton dust. I suspect he chose short stanzas because he couldn’t count high. The Paganini of cow pies ended up more fazed than me at the manufactured trauma of his affront, as I finished the interview bleeding in front of my loyal and traumatized students, two of whom later inducted me into my first three-way (a better time, a gruffer species of student, if you can imagine).

I don’t know much about Struthers, aside from the fact that there is no way he was born in the fucking south. The cowboy hat was as much of an affectation as his literary style, literary being a word he openly, and moronically, detested, in a vain attempt, I assume, to appeal to young halfwits, or ancient steer handlers who think themselves bound by the flailing wisdom of another lived life to study the arts in their twilight. He wore his hat incessantly, was fall-down drunk twenty-four seven, and (luckily before my children could read) scrawled a reinvented name for each weekday, combined with an ethnic slur or two, off the calendar and across the wall of our house, after I had the gall to insist we might be late for the class I was paying him to guest lecture. In his defense, I did laugh a long time before physically throwing his ass out to commingle with fellow erroneously canonized demons of the street. He roamed on for a while, playing his harmonica (a living cartoon of male bravado, working every shitty manual labor job a writer would brag he once did, classic drifter–what swag–many single mothers await him still), scribbling the occasional sharp line on bathroom stalls, where he reposed (I know his verse on sight and have tracked down many of his lonely toiletries: they are hence displayed, imbued by my esoteric consecution, further enjambing his homely breath with a little glottalic mishmash), and died trying to ride the rails like the depression era heroes he retardedly idolized. I happened to be traveling on a lecture circuit through the unbearable Midwest of this country (as opposed to its insufferable coasts) when they called me in to identify Struthers’s body. Nearly unrecognizable, the skin was marred into an ashen, mannequin consistency. The teeth were cracked loose and gulped down fully lacerative (I guess to transition the rape and create a protective lubricant for upcoming fellatio), and his corpse, submerged in multiple urinary sources, including his own (I won’t mention the gaping, maggot-laced fissure carrying sphincter to interior testicle, crossing his perineal, forking into a gnarled bruise, or that his entire rectum prolapsed and dropped out of his body intact, never to be recovered: a souvenir I would buy back from its dastardly owner at a high sum, were I of the means), bared a homely, ironic rictus (his first detestable use of poetic justice). His features were slight and angular, and I’m to understand he pleased thousands of ladies across the dust belt (a convicted bigamist, a thumb-sized Stephen Crane), mostly with their consent (even by today’s arbitrary definition of the word), and probably a handful of men to boot, so it made sense that he would be the focus of a gang rape (now that all our writerly, pious, and goal-oriented careerists have also partaken). I’m positive that he and I (before bored morgue attendees) will forever giggle maniacally in tandem throughout our most cosseting ordeals.

Struthers’s populist Homer Simpson literature (not Nathanael West’s Homer Simpson, unfortunately–notice how his Atticist breed excuse their paucity of skill by repeating the words “heart” and “raw”) staked its trailer park claim, another fifteen minute drizzle. Fetishizing working class pride is a smart way to steal yourself some gritty thunder if you’re an Ivy League poofter. The poets I selected are largely working class, or below, because that is my own pathetic background. The mark of a cursed tramp dedicated to the craft: someone unable to comprehend why abstract pride could be taken about pedigree. If you’re that horny to live, wasting paper catcalling the conglomerate spew from which you were laid into a people is redundant. Frank Norris had a point, over a hundred years ago, but then the twentieth century fully vulgarized literature. Perhaps we can thank the peasants (stations above any poet) for their services and try to make the word holy again.

Alfred Wichly is the editor of Mother Tongue of the Foreign Born: A Neutered Anthology, the producer and host of The Alfred Wichly Show, and a bona fide cursed poet.

ILLUSTRATION: John Travolta in Urban Cowboy