St. Mark's Church

St. Mark's Church is the venue for a poetry reading that brings Henry Chinaski’s performance anxiety into direct contact with his public persona. Before the reading, he vomits on a grave in the church’s burial ground; moments later, he walks onstage to applause and reads poems over beers. The contrast makes the church a setting where private physical distress and public literary performance meet.

Setting and Preparation

The reading takes place on a hot night. Henry and Tammie wait in a room used as a dressing room, where she finds a full-length mirror leaning against the wall and repeatedly arranges her hair, studying her reflection. The mirror gives the waiting a small, concentrated focus: while Henry is tense about performing, Tammie is absorbed in her appearance.

Marshall takes Henry behind the church and shows him the burial ground, where small cement tombstones carry carved inscriptions. The tour does not calm Henry. He says that before readings he is almost always nervous, tense, and unhappy, and that he almost always vomits. At the graves, that recurring response becomes immediate: he vomits on one of them.

The Burial Ground and the Reading

Marshall identifies the grave with a dry remark: “You just vomited on Peter Stuyvesant,” he says. The line turns Henry’s loss of physical control into an incident that can be named and carried back into the social scene. The burial ground thus places the bodily comedy of the moment beside the inscriptions and the dead it commemorates.

Back in the dressing room, Marshall announces that the audience is waiting. Henry delays by saying Tammie is not ready, while she returns to the mirror, piling up and releasing her hair before looking closely at her eyes. When Henry tells her to come along, she agrees, and they leave together, with Tammie at his elbow.

Performance and Significance

The audience applauds as Henry comes out. He describes the effect of his familiar stage persona as “The old Chinaski bullshit was working.” Tammie moves down into the crowd, and he begins reading. He has many beers in an ice bucket and a mixture of old and new poems; his confidence in the set is emphatic, as he says he “couldn't miss.” He also evokes the church through the cross, making the religious venue part of the performance’s immediate setting.

Afterward, Henry and Tammie return to 1010. He has his check, and the two sit drinking after leaving word that they do not want to be disturbed. He has read five or six love poems about her. The episode’s arc—from nerves and vomiting among the tombstones to applause, payment, and private drinking—shows how performance does not erase Henry’s anxiety; instead, his practiced persona carries him through it, turning the same evening into both a public success and an intimate aftermath.