Gene Beenk’s Journey into Night

Enter Beenk

One Thursday night in 1980—that interminable presidential election year now melted into the slippery coin of Reagan’s Shangri-La moment—a Clinton, Iowa, public school teacher drove forty-one miles south to the larger river city of Davenport to attend a meeting of Writers’ Studio, the local club for aspiring (and expiring) literary practitioners. He knew nobody seated at the folding table that spanned the jump-ball circle in the rented gym of a defunct Catholic school. Technically he was not late: we regular attendees were criminally early. I, spinsterish sixteen-year-old male in a Hawaiian shirt, quivered along with my peer group of genuine elders. The stranger wore a V-neck sweater, slacks and loafers, a meditative gaze and thin laconic grin. It always startled us to be found.

Most first-timers suffered under the weight of an aesthetic. Either they had been evicted from another group—Wordsmith’s, Pen Women—or swept out of the bungalow of a fed-up aunt. To us these exiles lugged their trilogy concepts, claims to inborn talent, their influences. Rimbaud! Fletcher Knebel! They careened toward a too-little place at the pad-strewn table, exchanging glances with the uncurling tentacles of our trepidation.

Not this one. This writer specimen paused a respectful distance from our tight circle. Upright, no apparent literary leanings, he stated: “I’m Beenk.”

“Blink!?” yelped cigarette-flicking Blanche Redman, hard of hearing.

“Gene B-E-E-N-K. I saw the meeting notice in the paper.”

It was nothing to see: a scattering of info-grains on the ORGANIZATIONS AND CLUBS calendar in the Sunday Quad-City Times. But in awful 1978 I had also been able to discern the details when I had nowhere else to turn. Fifteen and emaciated, creeping into the club’s previous “digs”—as Blanche called the rented tenement room across the river in downtown Rock Island, Illinois—I was immediately recognized as a force this wrinkled literary band (mostly retirees) lacked and might utilize. The bolt of innocence out of the shadows! If innocence frayed on the edges and sporting a torn literary tone. The pen cap biter.

Wire-rims resided on Beenk’s clean pink nose like a silver praying mantis. His sweater was fire engine red. (Was it that legendary stuff, Pendleton cashmere? I had only heard about cashmere from ecstatic thrift store rack shufflers who at first touch felt they had found it but, moan, second touch, had not.) White hair groomed into a cotton candy plume made Beenk appear not old but conversely youthful.

“I came to find out what you are up to. What are you up to?”

A fair and simple question complicated by the fact that Beenk wanted an answer—really seemed to care about the answer. By gum, what were we up to?

Howard Koenig (born on the same day as Edgar Allen Poe) looked at long-haired Jack (Vietnam vet with the stalled war novel) who looked at Norm Ross (railroad vignettes) who looked at Karen Sternberg (phantasmagoric novel) who looked at John Morgan (haiku) who looked at Gordon (novel-with-no-plot) who looked at Evelyn Sternberg (Karen’s cousin) who looked at Lucille Eye (Blanche’s friend) who looked at Roy Weigant (viral tales desiring to be virile) who looked at Cozie Dias (rhyming cat ditties) who looked at Blanche (eighteenth-century sonnets) who glared at me, her favorite fly to swat. The thing to do when Blanche glared was nothing. Nothing but nod.

Tick-tock went the caged ceiling clock. We . . . we . . . tick-tock, tick-tock . . . were up to the business of writing, and, one might say, no business at all. I strummed the spiral of a notebook tucked under The Waste Land and Other Poems: black letters on storm gray. The book’s thinness was not reassuring either. The HBJ edition had the ambiance of an abridged manual for the complex and dangerous machine of existence. (Reading “Prufrock” daily was likely why I no longer wrote much poetry. Yet I could not stop reading “Prufrock.”) Finally a voice...