So we did. I picked a seat on the aisle, in case I decided to duck out early. I’d seen an old Ernie Kovacs comedy routine once, where Ernie was a poet named Percy Dovetonsils, and wore a paisley smoking jacket and spoke with a lisp. I kept thinking about that and while I knew it was meant to be funny, an exaggeration, you figured it had to be based on something.

The guy I’d come in with sat down in the row ahead of me, a few seats over, so he wasn’t exactly trying to sit with me, which would have been pushy. The place was still pretty empty. He turned around and said his name was Matt and he was a student at SFSU and he wrote poetry but it kind of sucked. “That’s been the biggest part of my education. Learning how much I sucked.”

He laughed, so he was at least good humored about it. He was short, or at least shorter than me, with a lot of dark curly hair and glasses. It wasn’t hard to imagine him bent over a notebook late at night—for some reason I didn’t think poets used computers—all wound up and agonizing over the next word or the next line, getting up, going to the refrigerator or the bathroom, coming back and reading what he’d written, crumpling the page, starting all over again.

I said, “You still write poems?”

“Guilty,” he admitted. “Guilty but mentally ill.”

“Then you can’t think they’re all sucky, or you’d stop.”

“Yeah, there’s these moments when I think I’m a stone-cold genius. But I try not to listen to myself.” He laughed again. I guessed he was one of those people who has to make a joke out of everything. “How about you, do you write?”

I could have told him I had enough problems with basic reading, but that wasn’t anything I shared in casual conversations, so I just said no. Matt said he’d been to one of Viridian’s readings before, had I? Had I read her poems? No and no. “So, what brings you here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I saw the poster.” I didn’t care to lay out my brief but eventful history with Viridian. That I had dug in her garden, that she’d watched me while I slept, that I had showed up at her door late at night. People were starting to file in. I looked around the auditorium for Oscar, since it might be awkward to run into him and I wanted to either hide or brace myself. I didn’t see him. I said, “Is that her real name, Viridian?”

“Define ‘real.’”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s the name she writes under. Her professional name.”

“Sort of like Sting, or Queen Latifah?”