The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles

~for Chall Gray and the Proprietors of Little Jumbo

by Eric Steineger

Last night, I remember a bottle of pleasant strangers. Sitting around a wooden table on a ship. Overhead, a bulb swung with the waves, cards slipped onto the floor. It was stormy. A green parrot with an eyepatch repeated the word Damn through its cage. There was Teddy Roosevelt in spectacles, bourbon in hand, regaling the group with his hunt. Alice Waters nodding, talked sustainability. And Lucille Clifton wrote in her notebook, her left hand holding the table like a soothsayer. Solange spoke jazz and the allure of Houston in June. These were the faces and a couple from Barbados with dazzling teeth when someone asked, “Mr. Charles, what do you do?” I mentioned getting back to Little Jumbo where the creature in the corner makes me feel at home. At this point, the pot was huge, and nobody spoke to me after that, but I felt like Solange and I were on the same wavelength. With Waters gone, with Clifton and Solange singing, Teddy snoring face down, one hand in the ice, the other on his binoculars, I played his hand. The couple undazzling, rose to shake the parrot’s cage. “Mr. Charles, what’s next?” someone asked, breaking the unspoken rule. “Well,” I said, looking around the table. “We’re in the last act, let’s divvy up the pot.” “Sold,” said Waters returning with a baguette and wine. Not sure how long we ate, but it was late and when Clifton stood to read her poem, the sea.

Eric Steineger lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee. For ten years, he was the Senior Poetry Editor of The Citron Review, and his creative work has been featured in such places as Waxwing, The Night Heron Barks, Asheville Poetry Review, and Rattle: The Poets Respond. His manuscript, Curtain Call, was recently a finalist for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. When he is not teaching, he can be found at home with his daughter and his Great Pyrenees, Evie.

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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Rum Escapades of Mr. Charles”?

At the high school where I teach in Nashville, my students call me “Mr. Charles,” as my real name is Charles Steineger. “Charles” kind of stuck, and now, half the people who know me call me Charles; the other half call me Eric. I invite the chaos. My first published collection of poems was a chapbook called From a Lisbon Rooftop, and I wrote it from the perspective of Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms.

After my divorce, Charles took on a special significance, and my friend and bar owner Chall Gray, who co-owns the bar Little Jumbo in Asheville, NC, talked about him. We played around with the idea of “Mr. Charles”—how he is this larger-than-life character, perhaps related to the Dos Equis guy: The Most Interesting Man in the World. Chall surprised me by naming a drink after me—or my alter ego, I guess.

I thought of the first line “Last night, I found a bottle of pleasant strangers” and went from there. Chall was reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt at the time and talking about the read, so I made TR a character. I love food and wine, as well as the music of Solange, so those aspects/characters were included.

To get the prose into fighting shape, I went back and forth with a poet I trust, eliminating excess language. It took a minute to get the narrative where I wanted (line lengths, imagery, etc.), but I was happy with the end result.

One other note: Originally, I had more language around the ending, but I shortened it to “… the sea” as I wanted the reader to imagine what became of this scene. Who knows what will become of Mr. Charles? I’m rooting for him.

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