Bargain Counter

[rowens]

When I was sixteen years old
I got a ticket for being found at an R-rated movie.
My friend, who was thirteen, was in the movie
is why I was there to see it.

There was a nude scene in the movie
where a man was briefly shown on the verge of urinating.
For that reason, the movie was rated R,
there was no other reason:

Something I'd been doing all my life
and actually going through with the urination
had cost my parents over a hundred dollars:
I had broken the law,
and nothing was going to change that.

My friend, who was a background character in the movie
and who had gotten both of us free tickets from the film-makers
because of the use of his image in the movie
was not given a ticket like I was,
since I was sixteen and legally, in my state, obligated
to not corrupt a youth, at the same time as being obligated not to allow myself to be corrupted,
and was given a ticket not because I was an underage person in a rated R movie
but because I brought an underage person to a rated R movie;
a movie he was in,
but still.

And since I didn't have the money myself to pay off the ticket
and my parents were made to pay it,
my parents, having felt the brunt of having to afford the penalty,
were seen by the parents of my friend who was in the movie
as not only bad and irresponsible parents but as bad people in general,
and my friend was never allowed to see me again.

He has a website where people come on and say:
"Hey, I saw you in that movie, that was one of my favorite movies when I was little."
And after the one time I posted a message asking if he remembered me from back in the day,
I was sent a restraining order and registered as a sex offender
because of something he posted on his weblog.

[Erthona]

Well as you are claustrophobic and like being restrained, a restraining order wouldn't be so bad, unless it is like the restraining they use on green beans. That would be harsh. It's great that you are now a registered a sex offender, that's how you get all desperate middle aged women who put pictures of their children on the internet so someone like you might marry them in an attempt to get at their underage kids. And how they throw out those little covert messages about how they work at nights and need someone responsible to watch the kids while they are working. I am of course surprised as I thought you were more into dogs, but hey whatever works...right?

[rowens]

When I was twelve, I felt like a pervert for finding Lolita a hot girl.

[leesharks]

This piece is discursively dense, somewhat artfully rambling, building on a kind of straight-faced satirical impetus through repetition, among other devices.

I felt you achieved this style most strongly in the second-to-last stanza, and least strongly in the final stanza, which seemed off topic, or at least like it slipped the rambling that carried the rest of the piece. The rest is explained in exhaustive detail, this final stanza, not so much.

My favorite stanza:

And since I didn't have the money myself to pay off the ticket
and my parents were made to pay it,
my parents, having felt the brunt of having to afford the penalty,
were seen by the parents of my friend who was in the movie
as not only bad and irresponsible parents but as bad people in general,
and my friend was never allowed to see me again.

I like the way this stanza is both obtusely repetitive (e.g. carrying appositive tags that we don't really need: my friend "who was in the movie") and torturous in its subordination--"having felt the brunt of having to afford the penalty"). That last is actually my favorite line--I think it captures what's working, for me, in this style. It reminds me of Gregory Corso or, more recently, Tao Lin, whose "you are a little bit happier than i am" is more than a little bit fantastic, in this same vein.

[rowens]

"having felt the brunt of having to afford the penalty" seemed stuffy to me but I thought it was fitting.

The last stanza is my straightforward, matter-of-fact experience of the present.