witnessing am i

Forest for the Trees

2011-12-04T12:46:00.003-06:00

The floor of the woods was blanketed with burnt brown and orange leaves that crunched and slithered beneath his feet. It wasn’t quite yet winter, but Nicky was freezing cold.

“Jesus,” he muttered to himself, as he pulled his folded arms tighter to his chest. “Fuck, it’s cold.”

The sun had fallen from the sky but a soft glow remained, illuminating the bark of the trees with a softness that seemed almost artificial. Nicky had been walking for hours when it had, in fact, only been ten minutes. He was cold and tired, he told himself. He pulled his grey stocking cap lower, over his ears, not sure of where he was headed and how far he had left to walk.

The trees stood in stoic attention as he passed them, even those that let their limbs bend and fall to the side or over the path. They seemed frozen, not only from the sinking temperatures but by time as well. There was a deathly quiet that pushed in on him. Nicky would stop, look all around from left to right, and listen. But he couldn’t hear a thing. There were no noises, no sounds to be heard. He moved his fingers in and out of his blond goatee and found that the density of the woods had closed up on him, for he could no longer see beyond twenty feet in any one direction.

Nicky could no longer remember what led him into the woods in the first place. He had to pee. That was a fact. He could’ve waited, he told himself, until the next road stop or gas station, but “when nature calls, nature calls and you can’t not answer.” He had pulled the car to the side of the road and sat for just a second before getting out. He relieved himself behind the closest thick brush and when he walked back to his car, he looked back down the road, a straight, rolling carpet of grey. Not a car in sight, no sign of anyone. He hadn’t passed anyone on the road for while, either, not for at least the last ten minutes or so. He pushed the door closed and walked back into the woods, past the thick brush, and forgot all about his car, the road and how nature had called.

“God, I’d love me some soup. Some nice thick green pea soup,” Nicky thought, for no reason beyond being cold and tired and, of course, hungry. He kept walking, curling his arms around each other. “Damn.”

He walked among the trees, not knowing where he was or where he was going. Nicky wasn’t sure he was following a path, or if one lain beneath the leaves he stepped, but there did seem to be a definite natural course to follow, and he eased into the openness between the trees, one layer at a time, deeper and deeper in.

A broken branch stuck out, its pointy tip like the tapered lip of a clarinet. It reached out as he passed and caught his leg just below the knee, digging into his skin without breaking the denim fabric covering it. Nicky clutched his leg as he bellowed in pain. “Oh fuck,” he said, “Oh Christ.” He fell to the floor of the forest and pushed this pant leg up to reveal a gash two inches wide on the top part of his shin, just below the knee. He watched the blood bubble at the surface and he was surprised at how quickly it formed and how deep the red was. He wiped the wound with his hand but the blood stubbornly reappeared, now sliding down his leg, worming it’s way through the hair. He leaned back and shoved his hands into the front of this jeans, groping for the waistband of his soft white underwear. He rubbed his fingers along the edge of the cotton, looking for a weakness in the fabric. He found a small whole and pushed his finger though until it reached the skin at his waist. And then he began to tear at the waistband, pulling it apart from the rest of the underwear. He shimmed it down, over his legs. Soon, he held the elastic band in this hands and he looped it twice and tied it around his legs, a tourniquet courtesy of Fruit of the Loom. Like a soldier, he thought, like a soldier, saving lives with whatever he can find. He again swiped at removing any trace of tears (or sweat) still clinging to his face. He wanted to rest, to sit awhile, to even lie down on the bed of autumnal leaves, but he feared that if he did lay down, he may never get up again. He was like a soldier, stuck behind enemy lines, and he had to stay alert. He grimaced but took comfort in knowing that his mind was in fine working order, still sensitive to the potential dangers.

He pulled the leg of his jeans back down and pressed his open hands firmly against his leg. “I gotta make it. I gotta push through. Past the pain, past all the pain.” He rose and hobbled along, his face pulled in pain. After a few steps, the tingly throbbing sensation was forgotten and Nicky concentrated on trying to make out where the grey light could lead him as it peeked through the black silhouettes of the trees. He could feel a shift in the air as it crackled against this skin, moving from evening to night. Soon the forest seemed to close in on him. Where there had been light a half an hour before was now a blanketed wall of a black so deep, he could feel despair as it settled in his ribs, deep in his chest.

He did not know where he was or where he was headed but he still felt like he had a long ways to go. Something just told him that. Nicky remembered a song his mother used to sing around the house and the thought made him smile.

When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will we have rainbows, day after day
Here's what my sweetheart said.

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

He thought of his mother moving about the house — humming, singing — strands of her dirty blond hair falling over her eyes, the lightness in her movements. Her skin was always so pale, even in memory. She was gone now, had been gone for almost ten years but he thought of her a lot. She was always there, so easily accessible, and she was forever in constant motion, holding conversation over her shoulder, as she moved from one room to another. And when he thought of her, it was that image that warmed him. How happy she seemed then. It was different when Daddy came home and a black cloud descended on the house and to everyone in it. Nicky and his brothers tried to get out as much as possible. Playing baseball until it was dark, staying at the Marmells house until it was time for bed. That was all gone though, those days so far away now. Nicky quickened his pace, trying to stay warm.

With each step, he could feel fatigue start to slow him down. It filled him slowly, starting from the tips of his toes and curling up his legs, rising like water from a tap. His knees began to wobble and his shins throbbed. His wound ached. He could feel his voice quiver though he was not speaking. And then, for no apparent reason, Nicky began to cry. He squeezed his eyes and wiped at the tears at first, but then could not keep up and decided to let them harden and grip themselves to his cheeks. He had to fight the tears just as he had to fight the pain.

“Que Se-fucking-ra!” Nicky shouted, his words bouncing off the trees and filling the thin night air. He clinched his fists and let out a shout that was so guttural, so primal, he was surprised by the power of it. It must have echoed for miles, he thought. He stopped, his legs suddenly too heavy to move another inch, the leaves shifting at his feet. He looked up, past the skeletal branches reaching towards a clear sky so brilliantly charcoal grey. The moon was a perfect white circle. It vibrated and glowed and the started to get bigger, bigger before his eyes. He leaned his head back and let tears filled his eyes until he could not see. The cool air seemed to glide across his forehead and nose.

“What will be,” he whispered to himself. He closed his eyes tight and shook his head from left to right. When he brought his head back down, he looked ahead to see the trees separate like curtains at the Saturday matinee. They slid across the floor of the forest, overlapping in the wings of the night. Through the black, a lightness rose and overtook the darkness. He could see the road — silent and peaceful — and his silver Ford Escape glimmering in the moonlight.

“What will be, will be.”

Mecca

2011-11-13T13:26:00.007-06:00

She offers her body
Surrendering a promise
Blind submission — faith
Of the human heart.

She closes her eyes
If only for a moment
And breathes in — deeply
And longs for the words of love.

A lover who knows her touch
Who moves parallel with her every need
But who waits endlessly — withholding
And does not smile.

She is hesitant, as she bits her lip
Knowing herself closed off
She feels the echo of her wants — endlessly
Suspended, lingering.

Her hopes hover within a silent bed
Layers of innocence dissolve and fade
With a single surprise caress — soft
As her skin tingles and pulsates.

The room is empty and still
Her fingers glide softly, gently
Her body moves forward— upward
Eager for approval, her own love.

Amazing Grace

2011-11-07T14:11:00.000-06:00

Out my window on a 7am flight out of O'Hare. Gliding into the morning light.

Can't I Still See You?

2011-10-23T12:30:00.004-05:00

It is Saturday, the first in November, and I will be dead before the next weekend ends. I say that not with a morbid desire to shock. I don’t say it in a desperate need for attention or sympathy either. I don’t need any of that. And I’m not crazy. Just so you know that too. I tell you what I just told you — and I do it in the strictest confidence — I say it because it is a fact. Like saying, I need to pick up some things at the grocery store this evening or I have to go to work on Monday.

I was informed by Dr. James T. Michaelson that I have a rare form of intestinal cancer. Terminal. He actually used that word. “I am afraid it is terminal,” he said. I’m not sure he was actually afraid, since he doesn’t have cancer but that is what he said. I am pretty sure he doesn’t have terminal cancer. I do, I have terminal cancer. He had prepared me during my last visit, telling me the “could be’s” of my condition. He had prefaced it that time with “Now, don’t be alarmed.” I won’t go into all of that now. Let’s just say that I have been feeling pretty lousy for the last year or so, especially after I eat. And with each visit, you learn to read the nurses’ face and you can tell how serious it is. I went to see my doctor about a month ago. It has all happened pretty quickly. He sent me to another doctor and I went for a series of tests and then two weeks ago this past Monday, Dr. James T. Michaelson told me the news. He didn’t have a timetable but it seems that things advanced rather quickly, so this cancer would continue eating away at my insides at a pretty good clip. They could try to slow it down but it was too far along to reverse or stop it. Could be a few weeks, a month, could be a couple of months, he said. But it will get worse, he told me, much worse. Again, I won’t get into it, but basically, all my insides will start to fail. He said that I’ll start to have trouble keeping food down, I will lose my appetite completely. Things I used to do without thinking will now not only take thought, but concentration and a great deal of effort as well. And then all my bodily functions will start to break down. Like a big machine, each part affecting the next. It could get pretty bad, he said. He asked if I had anyone to help me through this.

“Can’t I still see you?” I asked.

“No,” he said as he reached behind him and grabbed a pencil of the counter. “I meant at home, as this disease progresses. Do you have someone you can count on to act as a caregiver? Someone to help you as this begins to make some of the simplest things you do on a daily basis, very difficult. ”

“Oh,” I said.

The fact of the matter is that I didn’t have someone. I don’t have someone. I discovered that these things afflict single people too. On the bus ride home, that is what kept coming back to me. How could I put anyone through that? Seriously. How could I ask someone to clean me up after I went to the bathroom? How can you ask someone to do that? The way I see it, you couldn’t ask anyone except those you really love and who love you in return. And if you love them — really love them — then you would want to spare them that. Right? That all sounds logical but you just sit there in the doctor’s office and all your brains slip onto the floor.

I had sensed that something was seriously wrong but spent three solid days crying. In bed, in the shower, on the couch, over the kitchen sink. I wasn’t surprised by my fate but I was still shocked.

I am a lawyer by trade. I worked in the state attorney’s office for eighteen years. The last seven, I was the top counsel on staff. I got burned out. I couldn’t take it anymore. If you know anything about the American legal system, especially on a state or city level, you know where I am coming from. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was constantly amazed at the cases that came across my desk – they were all the same. Each defendant, every crazy story, all the egotistical judges and every single God-damned verdict. Even the juries that I helped pick began to look exactly the same. Exactly. The. Same. And I knew that those cases would all end up the same. I would sit at my desk at the beginning of the process. I’d open the folder to familiarize myself with the case. I’d read the arrest records, the affidavits, the sworn testimony, and I would realize that I was already familiar with the case. It was ridiculous. I could predict exactly how each one would end up, as I sat there at my desk. I could feel my head begin to explode as I sat and tried to remember pertinent names and the order of events. I walked away from that job and a three figure salary. All my benefits. Just freed myself from it all.

I‘ve been working in a car wash lately. Happy Car Wash on Seventh and McCormick. I’m going to work here till the end. It is perfect. I work my shift and it all feels good. Every day, every single goddamn day I feel like I did something. I can see the cars shine, the mats and upholstery free of stains and crumbs. I did something real, I can feel it. It is a great feeling at the end of the shift, I walk out of there, peel off my shirt and know that I did the best I could that day. I don’t take anything home with me, nothing to worry about. I don’t think about anything beyond myself, ever. Maybe I wonder about how to work more efficiently, how to do the things I do faster or better but that is it. I work alongside a bunch of guys who don’t even speak English and who come and go, week to week. I never recognize their faces, the guys next to me. I don’t know. There have been times, especially lately, when I have to catch my breath or just sit for a bit and they just keep working. I don’t have to explain anything to them, they just look at me and then go back to work. I like that our whole conversation, our whole relationship, can be summed up in an over the shoulder glance. Or with a knowing head nod. No questions, no explanations.

Thursday was a productive day. When I got home from work, I took a shower. I let the hard sprays of water wash away layers of sweat, of dirt. Before I put my clothes on, I grabbed a file cabinet full of paper and every document I had, every income tax return, every insurance paper, all the old bills and invoices. I stumbled down the stairs and then out on the back porch. I opened the lid and threw them on the grill and lit them on fire, bundle by bundle. I ran back in and threw the unpaid bills from the dining room table in there for good measure. What the hell, I thought? Got rid of anything with my name on it, everything that tells my story, even in the least little bit. It was incredibly easy and quick. And it felt good to do it naked. And this morning, I took all the photographs I owned and threw them in the garbage. The shot of my parents walking down the aisle on their wedding date – my father sour, my mother dazed, just the way they would remain for their 48 years together – that was thrown in the dumpster. As was the photo album my mother made for me, with pictures of me as an infant draped over her arm, or the 11 year old me posing with my sister next to my cake, candles ablaze. All of it went. I didn’t even look at the pictures, I didn’t open the boxes or the albums. I just threw them all away. My life in pictures – up until the age of seventeen anyway – was thrown in among the egg shells, the soiled coffee filers and grounds, the vegetable rinds, the used napkins and box tops. All garbage. I didn’t really have any pictures of myself as an adult anyway. After the divorce, I got rid of a lot of stuff but my sister had sent me some pictures. Whatever I had, all of them, boom, in the trash. When I looked into the can I was looking at myself in a heap. The photographs told my story just as, I guess, my garbage did. What I looked like at my high school graduation, and the items I ate and consumed in the last week.

I took all my money out of the bank. I took everything off my hard drive, erased all the memory on my computer. I have been spending some evenings visiting a few people I know, people on my street. I gave my lawn mower, my shovels to my neighbor. My cousin got some paintings, and some books. Some guys I used to work with got my couch, my small upright piano. There is one guy at the car wash, his name is Julio, and he speaks some English. I told Julio that he was free to take whatever he wanted. He showed up that night with a few friends and filled up a pick up truck with the TV, all my pots and pans, the plates, some lamps, some books, so much stuff. Stuff that I have had since college, some stuff Anne and I got, other stuff just a few years old. It didn’t matter. I just sat on the stairs, and watched the four guys move about the place like they had just discovered a treasure chest in each room. Their eyes darted about from wall to wall, they’d pick things up cautiously like they expected to be scolded. When I did not stop them, they hurried the items out to the truck. Julio and the three Mexican guys kept smiling at me and shaking their heads. Thank you, thank you, they said in their staccato English. They were more than welcome. They had no idea what a huge favor they were doing for me.

All traces of me are disappearing, mostly gone now. Layers of myself, my life, my whereabouts. All I have left are the basics to get by for a week. Some paper plates, some milk, some ketchup, some crackers. I don’t have a lot of energy now. I haven’t been that hungry so I am not missing much. This purifying has been incredibly easy, though. Extremely gratifying to rid myself of the past, and just concentrate on the next seven days. Nothing more than that.

So the last few days, as I have rid myself of everything I own, all my material belongings, my “vast wealth” as they say, I am filled, instead, with silence. There is the rush of cleansing, of ridding yourself of crap, years of crap. But when you get rid of everything, you are left with nothing. The emptiness is vast. It is so wide, I feel like I am swimming in it. My mind has been racing but it doesn’t know where to go. It is like trying to walk on ice. I keep moving cause that is all I know how to do, but I’m not going anywhere and I don’t know where I want to go anyway. All I have is one week. I try to think about what is left. What have I left behind? I want to leave this hellhole the way I came in — with nothing, with no pull on any other person. My emotions have been on a rollercoaster though. Anger, relief, disillusionment, confusion, and more anger. But I am mostly tired now. I didn’t anticipate feeling this. I don’t know what I thought would happen but the relief, the sense of euphoria, keeps being short-lived.

I sit on the floor and feel the sun pass through the front windows. I close my eyes and just feel the warmth on my skin, making it tingle and strangely alive, while my insides feel empty and broken. I have a tough time focusing on any one thing and find I don’t have any one thing to try to focus on. My sister stopped calling me but then I unplugged my phone the other day. I am not sure if I tossed it or gave it away but I don’t have it anymore. So if Carol has called since then, I haven’t heard it. I still have a mailbox but I don’t know how to stop the mail from coming.

Carol and I used to be close, when we were younger, in our twenties. We started to drift apart when she had kids and my marriage dissolved. It was tough to talk after that. Her life was going well and I was against the wall each night. She could recognize the differences that were separating us, but she never spoke to me about it. When our parents died, we stood separately in black and greeted cousins and various friends with a smile and a soft “thank you.”

And as I sit in the sun, I can feel my brain getting muddy. I think about things I never thought of before. Simple things, like, I think I should raise my arm up and get that bowl in the cabinet. And I have to push the feeling out, until it becomes an action. I watch my arm move upwards slowly and it is all I can focus on. It is ludicrous.

Dr. James T. Michaelson did not prescribe any medicine for me, at least on that initial visit. I guess a Death Notice is enough of a parting gift from that kind of consultation. He said that he needed to come up with a “game plan” as to how we would attack this disease. I was surprised by this. I didn’t think we were going to fight anymore but I guess you have to fight something. When the living loses out, you begin to fight with the death, I guess. The problem was, though, I didn’t feel much like fighting.

I took a container of pills from my medicine cabinet, and removed the white plastic top and stared down at the pattern of various colors, jagged and elbowing for room. I had been saving them for the past year. Whatever was left in the medicine cabinet, some stuff at least ten fifteen years old. Some heavier pills I got from a friend of mine. But this was the first time I stopped and looked at what I had collected. On Friday night, my forty-eighth birthday, I drew a bath, the water so hot I could barely stand it and slide into the tub with hardly a ripple.

The Metal Box

2011-09-25T16:35:00.002-05:00

The metal box was not much wider in either direction than a bathroom sink. It was about five feet deep, or so it appeared. The double-hinged top was thrown open and a man stood inside. He was thin, with pale skin, large round wire glasses and a wispy, almost transparent brown mustache and beard. It did not appear that he understood English and seemed like he was a foreigner. I could not be sure, however, for he never uttered a single word in any language. Whatever brought the man to step inside that box, it was not apparent, but he was now caught like an animal in a trap.

The factory had been abandoned for at least fifty years. Maybe more. I did not know what had been manufactured there or the name of the company. There weren’t any old signs outside or any visible markers to note. Our town was plopped in the middle of corn and wheat fields, so it was possible the factory made parts for farm equipment or something small within the farming industry. I asked my mother but she could not remember, not in her lifetime, the factory ever being operational. It had always been referred to as “the old factory on 23.” That was all. The history may have been lost but the building itself stood up remarkably strong against years of rain and heat. Its white painted bricks were faded but otherwise, it had stubbornly withstood the test of time.

It was a small rectangular factory, with two floors. Several sections of twenty little square windows lined the building, along the middle and top. If you stood behind the bush near the front entrance and pressed your face to the dirty glass, you could see right through the factory, clear to the back. There were a few empty boxes near one of the support beams in the center of the main room, some wires and tubing lying on the floor, and several pieces of wood that had fallen from the ceiling or had come loose from the floor. There were black metal lights that hung in the center of the main room among a few odd rods and pulleys, suspended in the air as if just cut off from its past glory of pistons pumping and gears pulling. Through the glass, one could almost taste the deathly stillness that filled the factory, a place that, no doubt, once had been soaked with endless life, harmony between man and machine. With eyes close, you could imagine the factory floor filling with shadowy figures and muffled noise. Machines hissing and pumping; men working their arms and legs, invigorated by sweat and ignorance. Eventually, this youth would be pushed to the side and eventually displaced; the engines too would sputter and grind to a halt. Man and machine were gone now. They had all vanished and the building was deathly quiet. A steady stream of soft sunlight peered through the windows and magnified a half-century of dirt and grime. There were dents scattered all over the metal door at the front entrance, but it remained locked. Somehow, the factory had remained free of trespassers and vandals. The grass leading to the main entrance had grown wild and what had once been green had faded to a pale yellow. The entire landscape was void of color, as if a cloudy film had been brushed from left to right, from top to bottom. The metal box was at the back of the factory, attached to the base of a square brick silo or smokestack. The silo was, in turn, attached to the main factory by two large pipes at the top and three pipes at the bottom. A large field sprawled off behind the building, unfurling for a good mile.

“There’s a man trapped at the old factory,” was how I had heard about the accident. Mikey Landow ran past me like a pint-sized Paul Revere and continued down the main street. I don’t even recall now what it was that I was doing or where I was headed, but I stopped just outside the drug store, a cigarette dangling from my lips. I stepped on the butt and jogged the mile or so out of town, until I saw a small crowd standing around the metal box at the old factory on 23. The townspeople stood in clumps of two or three, their heads pressed together, whispering and pointing. I saw the tall, bespectacled editor of our weekly paper, The Kingstown Express, taking notes, hot on the biggest scoop he had had in years.

The foreign man with glasses and thin beard stood in the box with both of his hands curled over the side of the metal wall and a faint smile on his face. He seemed not only unfazed by his predicament, he did not seem to notice that his foot was tangled in a machine that had not been operational for over half a century. He looked straight ahead as if he were about make a great declaration to the crowd that had gathered before him. I heard someone in front of me say that he was a mental patient, escaped from the hospital. Someone to my left said that he had already lost his leg in the machine and “the masher” was eating him whole and that pretty soon he’d be swallowed up whole. I wondered if the newsman was getting all of this down in his little spiral notebook.

When I approached the metal box, I could hear the man groaning, rhythmically, softly to himself. He must have been in terrible pain, his foot and leg chewed and tangled in this rusty old monster. His eyes were gentle and he had a very faint smile on his face. He watched me as I approached the box. The top of the box was higher than I expected, coming even with my forehead. The metal box was resting on a cement slab at its base, making it even taller than I had thought. It must have taken a great deal of effort on his part to have climbed inside.

I asked him if he was okay. He did not respond. He blinked a few times but he did not look at me.

“Are you badly hurt?”

He continued looking straight ahead and it was then that I realized he probably could not understand my questions. I guess it was possible he could not even hear them. I tried to peer into the box but I wasn’t tall enough to master the angle. I could not see to the bottom of the box, where his feet would be. What was it down there that caught him? Was it some sort of masher, like the woman said? And how injured was he? I stepped close to the box, reached up with my arms and jumped as high as I could. I pushed my hands down onto the top of the metal wall, shimmied and then hoisted myself up like I used to do when I was a kid, scaling the fences, just out of reach from the neighbor’s barking dog.

When I looked down into the box, his gazed followed mine and he too looked towards his feet. I could hear his breathing near my ear. I could tell that he was scared. There was not room for me to get into the box, alongside him, or to reach in and try to release his legs. It was much too tight. I was nervous about getting caught in the box myself. The last thing I wanted was to get tangled in the same way the man was trapped. There was a blackness at the bottom of the box, I could see that. The walls tapered in at the bottom and in the middle there were two sets of gears, several horrendous teeth in mid grimace, coming from either direction. They were orange-red and I could not tell where the rusty metal ended and the blood began. I shivered for I could see an animal, for sure, and it was not in the hunted; it was the hunter who was hungry and sensed an injured opponent.

My arms began to shake and I could not hold myself any longer and I jumped backwards, back down to the ground. The metal wall had dug into my hands and I rubbed the debris and the rust off my palms.

“How did you get in there?” I asked him but he just looked at me and did not speak. His eyes were not so resolute now; they were pleading for relief.

“I don’t how to help you. I don’t know,” I stumbled, trying to find the right words, trying to find some kind of answer. “I don’t know what caught you, what’s down there. I can’t reach in. I can’t get to where you’re caught.”

“I am going to try again.”

I climbed up and as my legs gripped the top of the walls for stability and leverage, I tried to reach down into the box, along his legs. If only I could feel what was happening or even to be able to pull at a pant leg to free him. The box was too deep, too slender. I was unable to reach far enough down. My head was jammed against the wall, the rusty metal rubbed against my ear and neck but I could only feel as far as his thigh. That was as low as I could get. Both feet seemed to be lost in the darkness, into the unforgiving set of grinding teeth, as if they had already disappeared. I eased myself back up, out of the box, my neck and shoulders raw, my arms throbbing.

Before I jumped to the ground, I stopped my motion, and my face was close to his. The groaning I had heard before was not pain at all, but him singing, his eyes closed, humming to himself. His voice was soft and lilting, the melody rising and falling like a cascade of water. It was the voice of a child. He then crouched down within the box, and in doing so, a grimace of pain flashed across his face. He looked up to me and brought his four pointed fingers together and touched his heart.

As soon as I landed on the ground, I heard a siren and several sets of tires crushing the gravel and the dried grass behind me. I wiped the dirt off my hands, off my jeans and sat on the ground as two men from the Rescue Unit, dressed in blue short-sleeved shirts and pants, rushed to the metal box. Three other men came with saws and various tools. The five men hovered abound the box, their voices rising, pointing and one man talked urgently into a cell phone. Another man ran to the truck and then, a few moments later, rushed back to the men.

Within ten minutes, one wall of the box had been removed and the men were huddled around the foreigner who was sitting, haunch on his own legs, the chewed and torn skin, the ligaments and bone fallen away. He was covered in blood up to his knees. They put something in front of the man’s face and body and I saw more sparks flying amid the whir of a saw, much like the gnawing sound of a drill at a dentist office, boring into a tooth, into the gums. The smell that hung in the air was that of rotting beef.

When they put the man on a stretcher and carried him to the ambulance, I knew that he was no longer in pain. Blood soaked the sheet and his face was pale and emotionless. I noticed that his wire glasses had fallen to the dirt at the base of the metal box and I wondered if he was still singing to himself. As I heard the gurney clicking and then slide into the ambulance behind me, I felt a sudden rush of cool air brush the back of my neck and I shivered. I closed my eyes. My back ached, my arms and shoulders were rubbed raw. As the siren faded in the distance, my ears were filled with the soft breath of the foreigner, his humming reaching its full power in a gentle crescendo.

Direct Hit

2011-09-10T22:16:00.000-05:00

This was trouble. The doors were locked and it had just started to rain. Douglas wasn’t due back for another few hours – two maybe – and I would lose my light by then, anyway. I stood on the slight step at the base of the doorframe and leaned my shoulders flush against the door, trying to stay dry. Across the street and into the park, the rain glinted and shimmered in the deep black night. It hadn’t even sprinkled, the sky opened and it just started coming down. Hard. I watched the rain and tried to catch my breath. I could hear a woman’s laughter above me, from an open window somewhere in the building, in conversation with a man whose voice I could not hear. Telling stories of great machismo, no doubt — his hands tied, fighting a tiger in the African plains with only his feet and his manly wits. I watched as the drops speared the night like torpedoes across the fuzzy yellow glow of the streetlight. It was peeing it down, as my British friend Colin would say.

I shook my head. I should have known better. I should have never let myself get into this situation. Seriously. I was old enough to avoid shit like this, I had told myself countless times. I was too smart for this. Having a roommate at 35, in a tiny apartment in this rundown neighborhood, drinking too much till too late in the night — not wise moves. Hell, I knew that going in, I did, but something compelled me to press on, to move ahead.

It wasn’t until after midnight that I realized the rain wasn’t going to let up any time soon and I was stuck. I was wet, angry and a little drunk. A losing combination, I was convinced, but it was a fact I couldn’t change. Not now. The streets were relatively free of cars and beyond an errant city bus plowing through the black puddles, the only traffic to be found were couples, ducked under their own outstretched coats or umbrellas, moving between the lights. The sound of the rain was deafening, the echo so loud that I had to close my eyes to concentrate. My brain wouldn’t move and I had to roll it and kneed it to get it going again. I pushed my thumbs against my temples, rotating, erasing any lingering thoughts. Who had a key? Who had a key and how could I get it? I needed it now. Right now. But no one had a key. I made that decision. I was clean now and controlled the flow of people in my life as much as possible. I had made a point of that – no friends, no family, no one beyond Douglas Mac, and even he didn’t have a key half the time and his name was on the lease. He was useless, though he did cover my half of the rent sometimes.

I saw Kaz Kajinski out of the corner of my eye, a solid black figure coming down the street. He had a way of walking on his toes, almost bouncing, that always made me leery. It was as if he couldn’t wait to get where he was going and he was ready to pounce once he got there. He didn’t seem to care that it was raining. His hands were shoved into his front pockets, and he held his head up, letting the rain drip along his cheeks. I could not hide, the doorway was too shallow, and besides, I was sure he would see me anyway. And he did. He looked at me without a blink of the eyes, he just expected me to be there, huddled in a doorway, dripping wet in the pouring rain.

“Hey Curtis, man, whatcha doin’?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Hey Kaz. What’s happening?”

He stopped and faced me. The rain poured over him, water streaking around his cheeks and under his chin. He stood in the night with a glow encircling him. Like an apparition. Or a god. It frightened me and I started to shiver. My teeth started to chatter and I wrapped my arms tighter across my chest.

He didn’t answer but cocked his head a little and asked if I had seen any action tonight.

“No, man. I haven’t been looking though.”

His eyes darted around and I could tell then he was high. His eyes darted around, never really settling on any one thing, and I knew he was anxious to keep his groove going. The first lesson on the streets is that a junkie can’t be a junkie on his own, he lives off his friends and the friends of friends. And whomever else he can pull in his circle. It was all about “keeping the next high close by.” You had to know who to know, and which connections could produce some good stuff. Quickly and safely. I used to have great connections, and junkies knew that. I was never a junkie. I used, yeah, of course, but I wasn’t a junkie. I didn’t have all the same needs they did. I brought people together, bridging the gap between those in need with those who had the goods to fill that need. I enjoyed making those connections. I was very popular, everybody knew me or wanted to know me. Everyone sought to keep me close because of who I kept close. But everything can change in three and a half years. Two years in prison was bad enough but you lose your appeal on the streets when you try to go straight. Kaz knew my circle was not that large any more, I could see the disappointment in his eyes almost from the start. I wasn’t worth talking to anymore, and that pissed me off.

Kaz looked down the street and then turned and looked up, past the dimly lit shops to my right. He was keyed. He was looking but nobody was coming to save him, no quick fix suddenly appeared. He began to get fidgety. I knew that feeling. The high was just starting to come down and the panic kicked in to score quick to continue to ride. I could feel my skin tighten, my veins began to jump. I had an itch all over my body.

“You try Peanut?” I asked, running the back of my hand against the small of my back.

“Huh?”

“Have you seen Peanut? He usually has something.”

“No. No, last time I saw him,” he started shaking his right hand, down near his side, flipping it from side to side. “He fucked me up, man. Zoomer and shit. He ain’t nobody any more. He went bad. He’s fucked up too many people. He’s probably dead by now, anyway, for all I know.”

“What about Barrio? You seen him lately?”

“No, no,” he mumbled. He stopped shaking. “Barrio? No, man. Is he still around?” He looked at me and then up at the rain, his expression taking in each drop like he just realized he was wet. He ran his hands over his face.

“Shit, man. It’s fucking raining. I am on an interplanetary mission and it is fucking raining. I need to score some jum. I need to score.”

“Yeah.”

I could feel his panic, his need. I missed that feeling of going from high to high, connecting the dots, never touching down. To know what you needed, even if the need quickly escalated to desperation. When you’re clean, you don’t have the same drive, that same singular goal – score some scratch, some money, somehow, and keep your bedbugs close by, keep the next hit skin deep. It was all you had to think about, all you had to do. I didn’t want to, but I missed having that focus.

I could see the rain continue to fall in sheets beyond Kaz and I felt my skin tighten with a dampness that went deeper than my pores. Christ, I thought, I wish I could slide past this door, climb those stairs and get into my apartment. I wanted to be safe there, to hide from the elements, from junkies, from everything I knew. I thought of my couch, two floors up. Comfortable and dry. Well, it wasn’t a couch, really. It was the backseat from some old car but it was warm and dry and that was what I was thinking about when Kaz leapt at me. His right forearm jammed into my chest and his right fingers gripped my chin and cheek. The force of this illiterate meatball forced me back, slamming me against the door.

“I need to score, man! I need it now.”

I tried to push him, but his full weight was flush against me and I couldn’t get my arms in place. I couldn’t budge him. He was much further gone than I thought and I thought of what my old man used to tell me, “Never fight with an ugly man for he has nothing to lose.”

This man was ugly and high. And he had me pinned, I don’t know what my old man would have said about that. I had no intention of fighting but I didn’t want him passing out on me either. I tried to push him but he collapsed on top of me. I couldn’t budge this dumb fuck, not an inch.

“Kaz, come on, now, man, I know what you want, I know what you are going though man, but I ain’t got nothing.” I tried again but he was still too heavy. “Shit man, get off me.”

“I am trying to help you think of someone.” I had to keep talking, keep trying. “Okay, what about Peterson? Peterson, little black guy over on Longrove? He’s good, he usually has something. C’mon man, I’ll take you. Let’s go, c’mon, get off me. You gotta move if you wanna groove. That’s what Mac always says, right?”

Kaz took his weight off me, and I lightly pushed him the rest of the way back. His lips were curled, his eyes were closed and his skin was contracting in a wince. The liquor in my body was beginning to hit me hard but I knew he could feel his high slipping away, literally oozing out of his pores.

“Ah fuck,” he said, without moving his lips. He rocked on his heels, his arms at his side.

I didn’t know what was wrong with him or what he wanted. It was like he had given up. Something was not right.

“Ah, man.” His eyes opened just a sliver. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

I looked down and saw that his right hand was covered in blood, all the way up his arm, over his sleeve.

When I looked to my stomach, it too was drenched in a red so deep it was black. I hadn’t felt the knife at all, but knew instantly what had happened. The stain spread up my shirt like ink, and yet, even in the rain, there was a softness to it, like a pillow, welcoming me to sleep. I looked to Kaz in disbelief, in total bewilderment as to why he would do something like that. I was going to help him. Why would he do that?

I almost died. I spent the next six days in the hospital. Kazimer Kajinski missed killing me by an 1/8th of an inch. That is what the doctors told me. I was lucky to be alive. A large, round nurse with a pink streak in her hair rubbed my head almost every night for good luck. She would remind me, with a well-pointed finger, “You have been given a second chance in this life. You better take advantage of it.”

Why should I be grateful for a second chance when I tried to be good with my first chance? I went straight, I did time, I tried to stay away from all the temptations. I did everything I could but the bad barreled in on me, pushed me against the wall and I was rewarded with a blade that tore right through me. As I lay in bed, staring up that the yellow light on the ceiling, I had a tough time seeing the blessing in all of that.

That Mean Son Of A Bitch

2011-08-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

He was a son-of-a-bitch, no doubt about it. To his very core, he was mean and bitter and spiteful. When he spoke, his words were infused with poisonous arrows and daggers and they flew from his mouth engulfed in flames. He would sit at the table, bathed in complete disdain, and would squint his eyes as if he could not bare to look at whomever was talking, the sound of their voice almost inconceivable and certainly intolerable. He did not listen, but merely waited for the annoyance of your voice to stop torturing him, for the love of God. I am sure he must have known his share of heartache and heartbreak to get to such a miserable point, but I held no sympathies. I hated him from the very first moment I met him, and grew to like him less with each passing day.

I was twenty-three years old when I took a job with Harwood City Streets and Sanitation, helping to fill potholes, resurface broken curbs and smooth out sidewalks that had fallen beyond repair and towards a potential lawsuit against Harwood. My direct supervisor that spring was a grey-haired man named Sarge, who had flushed cheeks and the saddest eyes I had ever seen. I could not bear to look at him. His eyes hung so low, the skin drooped and revealed sullen, bloodshot pupils — it was if he had been bathed in tears for months on end. A basset hound at the scene of an earthquake. He was a nice man, a kind man, who smiled only occasionally but he was completely uninterested in anything more than making it through each day, as he inched his way toward pending retirement. He told me that several times a week, just as he told each of the 12 men who worked under him.

I did my job, tried to learn skills and techniques that were completely foreign to me and made great pains to fit in, with men who, in some cases, were old enough to be my father. As the summer came to a close, my muscles began to ease into a comfortable rhythm, settling into some of the movements I had been forcing on them for months. My body forgave me and allowed me to wake in the morning without pain and void of apologies. The fall schedule involved more clean-up work, and some of the contracted help was let go. Even though I was one of the last hired, I was kept on. I started to do more paperwork for Sarge. I filled in the Work Request Forms for those residences which didn’t fill them out with us – which was practically all of them, by the way. He also asked me to organize some files that were stacked on the file cabinets or tables, or at least “do something, just make them fit in the goddamn cabinet. Please.” I grouped some files together and broke others out. At first I told Sarge about each small accomplishment or would asked him questions, but I could see that this part of the job didn’t interest him at all, especially with eighteen months to go, so I kept my mouth shut and made the best decisions I could make on my own.

One morning, Sarge set a dark green canvas pouch on his desk in front of him, slid it across desk, and told me to take it to Holloway. I looked around the room but there was nobody there.

“Who?” I asked.

“Holloway. Take it to Holloway.” He looked at me as if he was pleading. “Just do it, okay? Just do what I tell you.”

“Who’s Holloway?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You ain’t ever gone there? Seriously?”

“No, I don’t what you’re talking about.”

“Holloway is my boss. Or rather, my boss’ boss. You will actually meet him in some rountables we have. We’ll have those later. But then we also gotta go see him, at his office, once a week. Not all of us, just one of us. Anyway, he doesn’t actually work for the city but we make him happy just the same. Actually more happy than anyone else. Does that make sense to you?”

He picked up the pouch and held it out to me, his sad eyes drooping lower, as if offering an olive branch.

“Yeah, okay, where do I go? What do I do?”

Sarge wrote down the address and told me which streets to take to get there.

“Go on upstairs, don’t worry about the signs. Tell them that you have something from District 62. It’s easy, no worries, nothing to think about. Just make sure you hand this to him, personally. Nobody else. You understand? If he is not there — but he’ll be there, he’s always there — bring it back. But he is always there at this time of day. You gotta get going though, okay? No stops. If you need to make a stop – bathroom, McDonlald’s, gas station — take your stops on the way back. Make sense?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Yeah”

I did as Sarge had told me. I did not occur to me, at the time, to refuse to do so or even question any part of it. I hopped into the front of a Streets pickup truck, took the route he told me to take, parked across the street so I could see the building at a distance, and walked into the side entrance marked “Fire Exit,” just like he instructed me to do.

A dark-haired woman in a solid green polyester suit was sitting behind a large wooden desk. She didn’t even ask me who I was, barely looked at me. Without a word, the woman stood up, turned and lead me down a hall and up to a closed door. She knocked twice and swung the door open. She bowed her head slightly, to avoid my glance, and held the door open with her extended right arm as I walked in. I inched past her and into the room. A large room, huge ceilings, and large steel beams littering the space. The man behind the desk was the size of a brick wall. Sweat bubbled on the top of his head.

“Who are you?” he said in a low gravely voice, without looking up. The giant woke from his slumber.

“Uh, I have a package from District 62. I was asked to bring it.”

“I didn’t ask what you have in your grubby little hands. Don’t you understand English? I asked who you are. You sorry piece of shit.” Still the brick wall did not look up.

I hesitated. “I, uh, I’m from District 62.” I didn’t know what else to say. I thought it best not to give my name, although it was odd that if he was so interested in who I was, the least he could do was raise his fat head and look at me.

“Put it on the table.”

I set the pouch down on the table and wiped the sweat from my hands along the front of my pants.

He did not speak and I stood, awaiting the next question.

Finally, still, without looking up, the brick wall spoke once again. This time his voice rose and I could feel his spit spray my face. “Get out of my fuckin’ office.”

I turned and left.

*****

That was my first experience with Holloway. Charming man that he was. I had no desire to see him again, and with each passing meeting, my hatred grew deeper. As did his depth of anger and unpleasantness. In our second encounter, he told me I was worthless and that it was a wonder I was allowed to be born at all. He scratched his head and said, “How you fucking live day-to-day is a fucking wonder. Okay, piece of shit, get out of my office.”

At first I was shocked for I didn’t get a chance to do anything, say anything, to provoke such pleasantries. How could he be so mad? At what? It confused me. But on the drive back each day, the confusion would dissipate and the anger would bubble inside me. I couldn’t believe this animal had so much blackness to give, each day. And I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. How could I? As far as I knew, I was bringing him a bag full of money each week, and I did so without speaking, without anything, and I was the worthless sack of shit? The days were all the same. When I was in that room, I found myself continually stunned, in utter disbelief, unable to speak. His anger wasn’t logical nor was it arguable and so I could not put my finger on it, I just couldn’t understand it. He bullied you, shoving his venom, his spite, down your throat when you least expected it, before you had a chance to defend yourself. It was like being hit over the head with a bat as soon as you opened your eyes in the morning. There was no time to react.

“What’s the deal with him?” I finally asked Sarge one day as I tossed the keys back on his desk.

Sarge just smiled.

“He has a black heart,” he said. “Nothing more than that.”

“He makes me so angry, so . . .mad that I can’t speak, I don’t know what to do.”

Sarge looked me in the eye. “Get used to that feeling, kid. Seriously. I put nothing past him and all the stories I have heard over the years, I believe. So it is best that you cannot speak, that you don’t know what to do, so you won’t speak, you won’t do anything. I hope that you never find your tongue with him. I would shudder to think what would happen.”

“Seriously,” Sarge added. “I hope he keeps you speechless.”

He held out a yellow sheet of paper and I took it and walked out of the office. “Now, I need to you handle this request. Missed garbage in Knowlwood Court. Here.”

I would think about Halloway each night. I would go over the dialogue from earlier in the day, however one-sided it was. I would remember the things he said, his tone, the color of his skin. And I would listen to myself as I stumbled and stammered, at last finding words that were inadequate, to both Halloway and to myself. I so wanted to give him a fistful of confidence right back, to answer him in tones that equaled his, at least in weight, to give him a little back what he had given me. I would lie in bed each night, staring at the faded shapes of light that danced like water on my bedroom ceiling. I would eventually fall to sleep with a scowl on my lips, angry that this man with a black heart had pushed his way into my dreams.

I debated asking Sarge if he could start choosing someone else to make that weekly trek for the drop-off. But I couldn’t. I kicked myself, tried to encourage myself to standup, to be strong, to not give in, to not be bullied by a brick wall. Each day, I vowed I would give as I got, I would not let him walk all over me. But then I thought of Sarge’s warnings and I remembered that there were stories, that there was something behind his threats, behind his vulgarities. Better to be alive and a little humiliated, I thought, than the alternative. Proud and dead is still dead.

It was a Tuesday afternoon when I knocked on the door, was led up and announced “District 62,” just as I did with each visit, and laid the pouch on the table, the same as always.

The brick wall of a man did not move, did not speak, though I knew better than to initiate the next step. I could not move without him barking or yelling or grumbling or waving his large arm my way, the back of his hand swiping me away in disgust. I stood and stared at the top of his head, at the painting hanging on the wall behind his desk, olive green oil paint swirls making a dimly lit vase with a loose arrangement of thin daisies and falling around the lip. I waited. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, never forgetting to keep my body straight and confident, ready for an errant blow, a verbal uppercut.

Still he did not speak, he did not move. He did not look up. He finally brought the back of his right wrist to his face and rubbed it across his eyes – over and back again.

“Okay,” he said, “Okay, you can leave.”

I did not move. I was sure there was more to come. I waited for the litany of curses. And waited.

“Thank you.” The words He said these words softly, so softly that, to this day, I am still unsure I heard them correctly. His head was bowed and I could not really see his face, his eyes, his mouth. Perhaps I willed what I heard but I don’t think so, I though I saw a bottom lip tremble. I am convinced that this day was different. It was a turning point, a day Something happened to him and then to me. I believe that he spoke those words with all the strength he had, for that was all that could come out of him.

I turned and walked to the door, put my fingers on the knob and waited just a moment. The air had cleared and I felt as if I were on a rooftop, with blue skies filling me from every direction. I finally opened the door and stepped into the hall.

As I drove back, I leaned my arm on the door of the truck, with the window open, and felt the traffic open in front of me, red light changing to green. I drove past the mini-malls, the storefronts, the small Cap Cod homes whizzed past me in a majestic whirl of glorious colors, bright and vibrant, reaching out to me, brushing against my shoulder.

When I got back to the office, Sarge watched me walk by and said something like, “Just forget about it. You didn’t see nothing.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but it struck me funny. I thought about that afterwards. It was as if he knew something, but I could never be too sure.

I went back the next day, unsure of what I would meet up with, who I could come across. I was greeted by a snarl, eyebrows ablaze, curses and the familiar refrain to “just put it on the damned table, for Christ’s sake, and get your worthless ass out of here.” I smiled at that mean son of a bitch and left.

On A Train From Chicago To Portland

2011-07-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

On a train from Chicago to Portland several years ago, I met a man who told me that there was a key to finding more happiness in life – personal or job-related, it didn’t matter -- and that he could give it me. He insisted on one condition though: that everything he told me was confidential but that I was to eventually pass this secret along to a stranger, only one new person, once I find myself comfortable with doing so.

This man was so unassuming that I did not think twice about him when he first pardoned himself as he wiggled his bottom against the green fake leather chair of the Empire Builder. He said that he would not make a very good travel companion for he preferred to sleep for most of the train ride, whenever he could, a trip he took once a week. He didn’t go all the way to Portland, but stopped off in Vancouver, an hour shy of the end of the line. He went to Vancouver every Sunday and came back every Wednesday. I smiled and told him it was alright, I had some reading to do. I wasn’t sure I bought his initial assessment as I have often found that the ones who preface the morning stating that they “don’t usually complain” are the ones that often spend all day doing just that. So, I wasn’t convinced I had heard the last of this passenger, but I pulled the paperback book out of my bag and felt the softness of the pages in my hands.

He settled in, stuffing a small shapeless black bag beneath his chair. Soon, his eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep. I too slept through Minnesota and North Dakota and when the morning light peeked through the corner of our window, I read some Faulkner short stories as the train rumbled further towards Montana. Sometime around nine, the man woke and asked where we were. I must admit that I am leery of planes and trains, mostly in wanting to avoid strangers and odd, awkward conversation. I shutter at such small talk. When I am stuck next to someone like that, I usually can count down the minutes, laboriously noting each minute until we arrive at our destination. This particular trip would not allow such a luxury. This trip took forty-four hours and there were things I knew I could not avoid. The man cleared his throat and ran his two fists through his hair. I clutched my book, afraid of a salesman’s pitch or a story, a hardship or a scam to get money that, frankly, I did not possess.

When he mentioned that he had been given a gift of knowledge that he wanted to share — with the oddest of conditions — I listened, for I found I had no choice.

“No reason to be afraid. I don’t have a story, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t have a down-on-my-luck-rags-to-riches story to tell you. And I definitely don’t want your money. I am not even offering you a great scheme or selling angle. My offer is simple, so simple. It is a new way to thinking that could be considered . . .well, secretive. I am guessing that if my knowledge proposition interests you, it is because you don’t have a lot of money, or a lot of luck, and that you could use a little good fortune. I am not selling anything, I promise you, but still I offer you something – a bit of knowledge. That is all. And it is in this knowledge that I hope will help you from this day forward.”

I closed my book but kept my right index finger stuck between two pages, marking my place. His voice seemed kind, his eyes were soft as they glanced out the window. I was struck by this — his ease, his relaxed nature. He didn’t seem intent on making a sale. I didn’t feel the pressure because it seemed as if he didn’t feel any pressure, but I do know that any stranger that tells you he definitely doesn’t want your money, most definitely does want your money, he is just gauging how much he can get. Experience told me that but somehow I trusted him. I didn’t sense he needed to seize any vulnerability I may have showed or would reveal. If it was a sale he was after, he was letting it come to him. I admired that but still questioned his motives. He scratched his chin with the tips of his fingers and watched the dirt brown landscape sputter by, the back of a factory and abandon buildings in Malta, Montana.

He kept looking out the window and as his blue eyes followed the broken towns fall away mile by mile, he smiled and said, “I must tell you my name. That is the first step in trust. I reveal things to you to let you know I am worthy of your time and of your ear. My name is Timothy Jancovick. I am 61 years old, divorced, with a son I have lost. First to an angry and bitter divorce and then to drugs. I am not proud of this but I tell you this because it is what shapes my every waking thought. It has come — as much as I would like to tell you otherwise — it has come to define me. I worked in a spark plug factory for 37 years, but that neither made me a happy man or a rich man. Think about that. Those three things are the first I choose to define me: my age, my marital status, my offspring. With all three, I am on the losing end. But yet I sit here and offer you hope just as I seek to gain hope with my own words. I don’t have a great deal but what I have, most of all, is an understanding, a formula in getting the most of your every moment.”

He placed his train ticket in the silver stem on the back of the seat in front of us.

“Do you realize how much of our lives we spend waiting — for something or someone? Hmmm? Any ideas?”

I shook my head and set my paperback on top of my bag at my feet.

“I don’t either. Once you think about that question, really think about the possibility of the answer, it is startling. The answer is actually probably somewhere around 90%. Hard to believe, isn’t it? It doesn’t take a mathematician or a genius to confirm that number, the common man can answer it most accurately. But that is the truth. 90% of your life is spent waiting, wishing for something else beyond what you are doing at that moment. Think about that. Nine moments out of ten are spent waiting – and not actively doing something for you, you are not productively moving forward. Think about the moments that make up your day, your common every day kind of day. You stand in line – how many in any one given day? You wait to talk to someone, you wait for someone to finish their job so you can do yours, you wait for your dinner to cook, you wait for things to develop. You wait for the work day to end, you wait for the weekend, you wait for payday at the end of the month, your vacation in two months. You wait for the next holiday, you wait for Thanksgiving, you wait for Christmas. You wait for winter to end, for the temperatures to rise. You wait for the clouds to clear, for the sun to come out. You wait until your baby will sleep through the night, you wait for those first steps, you wait until he is potty-trained, you wait for their hugs before they go to bed. Life is not simple, it hard. You wait for things to get better, to improve. You wait for the hard times to become good times. Meanwhile, the waits are extended, they multiply, they overlap, they intermingle and get tangled up in each other. There are so many of them it is hard to tell one waiting moment from the next and soon you forgot that you were waiting. It becomes as natural as breathing. The waiting multiplies and becomes so large that you find there is a hollowness that has eaten you up. There is nothing left but to wait to cease waiting. When you want to stop waiting, you wait to die.”

“Now the flip side of this is that if the numbers were reversed — and you were productive and active 90% of your time — that wouldn’t be good either, you would die from exhaustion. Common sense tells you that.” He smiled at me and shook his head. “So that is not the goal here. But what is the answer? How do you find happiness? And keep it? Long term, no matter what happens to us in our daily lives? Obviously, we must find a balance, a sense of moderation.”

“But sometimes you can’t help waiting,” I said to him. “You can’t help a lot of things that happen to you.”

“Yes.”

“Most of what you said, most of those things you mentioned, you can’t help, you just have to wait for them. You can’t change the weather, you can’t change when Christmas falls or when your vacation starts. You can’t change the commute to and from work. You can’t change traffic or long lines at the market. You can’t change payday, you can’t change so many things. They are out of your control. Sometimes bad things happen, beyond your best intentions or plans, and you can’t do anything but wait. You have no choice. There is nothing you can do about it. Absolutely nothing you can do.”

“Of course,” I said. He smiled at me as if I had given the right answer. I thought at that moment – I am not sure why I thought this – but I thought, this guy seems like a monk or something. It was his smile. Or a yogi or a Buddha or something. He had that kind of calm. When he spoke, his words rolled off his tongue as if it were made of butterscotch.

“Of course. Many things are out of our control but many of those things are in our control. Often, we find it easier to wait — and do nothing — then it is work towards something. Of course, that is human nature. But does it have to be that way? If 1 + 1 = 2 were so simple, it wouldn’t be a lesson that had to be taught. But it is taught — in a billion first grade classrooms. It is only simple when you look back at it. It is the beginning of it all. And it is something that you have to learn first – as a general notion – before you can move on and understand other, more complex rules and concepts. Nothing is simple, you know that, at least not at first. We must remember that obtaining knowledge is very difficult. It is only when we put things into the context of everything else that we can make sense of it all. It is difficult to do, however, until later, usually after we have gone through it. But what if we could? What if we had that understanding before we had to go through the process?”

I did not know if I was supposed to answer that question but I did anyway. “If we had the answers, before we were forced to go through the process, I am imagining that life would be . . .um, a lot less stressful, I guess. Less tense, less pressure.”

“You are right. If you are able to balance your expectations and your reaction to those results, however seeped in disappointment or frustration, you will be well on your way down the road to living better days, and enjoys clearer nights.”

He smiled and again looked out the window. I watched out the Montana landscape slide past, the dizzying array of green and browns, lulling me back to sleep. When I awoke, we were still in Montana.

“You like Faulkner?”

I sat up in my seat. “Uh, yeah, so far. This is just some short stories. This is the first book I have read by him. I mean, I have always meant to read something but I just never did.”

“He was a drunk.”

“He was?”

“Did you know that?

“No, I didn’t. I actually don’t know anything about him personally. I just know he was a great writer and I should have read AS I LAY DYING in high school, or whatever it was that I was supposed to read.”

“So you will read him now. And now is the time that you should read him.”

I looked down at the cover of my book and traced the words “Collected Stories” with my thumb.

“All writers are drunks. Or philanderers,” he said with a laugh, “Or both. And that is probably how it should be, I guess, since their writing doesn’t seem to suffer from it. We hear the sad and tragic stories but it is only about the great writers we hear about, so maybe there is a connection. Or maybe the tragedy happens to us all, great writers or not.”

“Yeah.”

He reached down and grabbed his bags.

“No more waiting. Use your time. Don’t wait. Not for anything. Make each moment work until you reach the next moment. Think. There is a lot of time to waste. Don’t do it. Don’t resign yourself to reaching from one point to the next by merely waiting – fill that time with complete thoughts and full events.”

I watched him rise and throw his bag over his shoulder.

“Were you wondering why I go to Vancouver each week?”

“Yeah, I was. Why Vancouver? Why so often?”

“It is where my son is buried. I took a job there so I can work for him. I bring him closer to me by being there, working, visiting his grave once a week. It is what I want to do, all I want to do. My goals in life have changed, and given where I am right now, this is where I want to be.”

He turned and headed up the aisle towards the vestibule of the train. I did not watch him leave, but opened my Faulker and stuck the bookmark further into the book and began a new story, “That Evening Sun,” as the morning sun watched through the glass of the train, it’s heat warming my face.

Two Lives, One Way

2011-06-16T00:05:00.004-05:00

Sandra Gomes shut down her computer every workday at 5:30pm. Precisely. Never a moment sooner, and rarely a moment later, if she could help it. She would begin to clean up her desk, including her computer, at about twenty minutes after five and then watch the clock in the bottom right of her computer screen as it counted down. After the papers on her desk were shuffled into neat piles for the next day, she would close down all her open programs, and even though Randy, the computer guy at Humphries & McDougal, said that she did not have to shut down her computer each night, she preferred doing it. “I like to give it time to rest,” she told Randy, as if her machine, beneath the wires and bars of memory, was secretly a laboratory animal that needed a breather before the next day’s obstacle courses and mazes. “Suit yourself,” Randy had said with an uncommitted smile, the day that he upgraded her software. Sandra readied her things at the close of each business day, so that the following morning would be more manageable, at least visually. The office would officially be closed at 5:30pm and any phone calls that came in after that time would be considered “after hours” and would go straight into the voicemail system. As her computer shut down and the monitor shown black, she would grab her purse and be out the entrance door and in front of the elevator bank by 5:35pm. Once on the street, it was just a block to the underground subway station, and if the trains were running in her favor, she could be in her living room each night by ten minutes after six. There was an order to this part of her day that Sandra took great comfort in. The nights were hers and she liked to count on knowing when they would start and that they were all hers.

It was just after she began working for Humphries & McDougal in Suite 630 that she noticed the young receptionist who worked across the hall, in Suite 620. The woman was no older than herself. Sandra would have no way of knowing this, but the woman was exactly the same age as she was. The two women had never met each other. Never a head nod or even a wave. They never spoke or caught the other’s eye at the same time. Once, Sandra thought about walking across the hall, pushing open those glass doors and introducing herself. But she soon dismissed it as inconsequential. Besides, what would they have to say to each other?

It happened one evening, after a long day, when Sandra was putting on her coat at exactly 5:39 pm. She looked up and through the two panes of glass, the angle of the hallway and the glare afforded by the distance between the two suites, Sandra saw the young receptionist putting her coat on too. It was if Sandra was looking in a mirror, far away. They both stopped when they sensed the others’ eyes falling on their movements. But only for a moment, long enough to realize that the other was indeed looking and then, instantly, the two resumed getting ready to leave, their jackets shimmying the rest of the way over their shoulders. Sandra grabbed her purse and headed out for the elevators, expecting to see the young receptionist waiting as well. The floor was empty. Sandra pushed the down button and was disappointed at being the lone rider the entire trip down the six flights to the lobby.

The following Monday, it happened again — mirrored movement from across the hall. The young receptionist rose from the desk, walked to the entrance and wiped a large smudge from the front glass with a large white cloth at the very moment Sandra held a paper towel in her hand, and was making her way to the front door to do the very same thing. When she realized the coincidence, Sandra wheeled on her heels and moved back behind her desk. It gave Sandra the chills.

When Sandra went home that night, she could not stop thinking about the young receptionist. She did not know anything about the woman, not her name — one Angela Holmes, though she would never find that out — or anything about her. She only knew that the young receptionist worked for a company called APAC International that was located in the same building, on the same floor, across the hall, in the sequential suite from her company. The suites looked to be the same size, set up in similar fashion. It seemed like APAC was roughly the same size as her company, Sandra thought — and she was right, at maybe 30 people or so. She never got a good look at the young receptionist’s face, however, as it was hard to see from that distance and through the glass. But she could see enough, just a glimpse that ignited the heated desert of curiosity. What was her name, she wondered. What was her story? What brought her to APAC? Was she from the city? The suburbs? Was she married? Have kids? Did she have sisters or brothers? Who was she? Who was this young woman? What hobbies did she like to do more than anything else? What kept her mind racing and did not allow her to sleep?

For the next several days, between the emails and the monthly billing, Sandra watched the young receptionist, her eyes darting around in an effort to keep up with the movements of Angela Holmes. She kept looking out of the corner of her eye, watching as she typed on her computer, talked to the UPS guy or the pasty man in a white shirt and red tie, trying to keep her within view, which was easy enough to do since they both seemed to be at the desk at the same times. She never went to lunch or disappeared too long. At least not that Sandra saw. She had never noticed that before — how much she could see from her desk, how easily she could follow this young receptionist from across the hall. Something made her feel uneasy though. It was odd to be drawn to this unassuming woman, a person she did not know at all. Sandra would stop herself, run her fingers through her hair, and force herself to concentrate solely on her computer screen. She felt like a stalker, but she reasoned to herself that she wasn’t harming anyone by just watching. She did it from the safety of her desk, after all, at her job, ducking behind her computer, trying to not be noticed. She was a detective, she deduced, she was more like a detective than a stalker — following someone to gain information, to look for clues in which to unwrap a mystery. A personal mystery. Just call her Detective Sergeant Gomes.

There were times when Angela Holmes would suddenly disappear — “where did she go?” Sandra would whisper to herself — just before Sandra was to go to lunch or run an errand or step away from her desk for any length of time. Maybe she was going to lunch too, or running an errand at the same time. They seemed to be on a similar rhythm, Sandra had surmised, which of course, was a silly conclusion. Most people working in an office hold similar daily patterns, and do things, similar things, at roughly the same time. It is the way the workday is set up and it follows the way human beings are wired to function within that set structure. It made perfect sense if you were to think about it, which Sandra did. It was silly to think such thoughts, she reminded herself. The young receptionist had started working at the front desk, and doing her set pattern of movements, just two days before Sandra got her job, which was almost six months ago. Sandra, of course, did not know that. Angela had been doing the same things, coming and going at the same time, for as long as Sandra had been working and yet, she had never noticed before. As she stirred a small pan with noodles, she vowed to forget about the woman, to forget about their mirrored movements, never think about the similar patterns again.

When Sandra set her bag on the floor the next morning, against the filing cabinet, she turned quickly towards suite 620. A new thought hit her: what if the woman, this young receptionist, was following Sandra with her eyes? For if Sandra could see her and watch her, surely she could do the same in reverse. What if the young receptionist was watching Sandra? What if she was having the same kinds of thoughts? What if it was Sandra who was the suspected criminal? What if Sandra was the one who was being stalked?

That day, Sandra sat at her desk and tried to look busy but wanted only to look across the hall and watch the silent movie being played out in front of her. Sandra did not catch the young receptionist’s eye, and quickly looked to her monitor the split second she feared any such eye contact. She could not take her eyes of office across the hall and searched desperately for any potential clues. She watched her and that was all she wanted to do. She put off any work that she could. If a project wasn’t due that day, it could wait for her attention until the next day. The young receptionist sat at her desk, typed at the computer, talked on the phone, reached down to file something in her cabinet drawer, she would get up and walk out of the frame and then come back in, people walked by, some stopped for a second or two, most did not. It was fascinating to watch, even without sound, as silent as her own imagination. Every once in a while someone would walk straight towards her and through the double glass doors, almost as if they were headed her way but once they were in the hallway, they would turn either right or left – towards the elevators or down the hall to the bathrooms. Sandra tried to look deeper — was the young receptionist watching Sandra in return?

Sandra thought about the young receptionist all weekend, and actually looked forward to work on Monday morning, anxious to detect any new developments, to follow the woman who moved with steps similar to her own. When she went out with her boyfriend Daniel on Saturday night, she felt as if she were betraying his affections by thinking nonstop of a woman she did not know.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his chopsticks open, poised over a roll of vegetable maki.

“What?” She looked to him, a puzzled look in her eyes, as if he had just sat down at the table. Had he been sitting there the whole time?

“You seem distracted, like you are thinking of something. You seem far away. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Did something happen? Did someone say something to you?” Sandra did not answer right away, she did not know what to say. How could she tell him what she was obsessing about – really, it was about nothing. She could not begin to tell Daniel how her mind, her every waking hour, had been filled with another woman’s movements. Nothing more than that. Just movements. Nothing happened, there was not even a story to tell. She could not tell him that, he would think she was crazy, which may not be far from the truth. Sandra said nothing and Daniel’s mind raced with thoughts of something more. This had happened before in his last relationship, just over a year ago, with a girl named Katie – she dumped him for her boss at work. No warning. Just a quick talk one night on his couch. She left and he sat on the couch for eight straight days. The thought of it happening again made him sick and he set down his chopsticks.

“Did something happen at work?” he asked, almost fearful of her answer.

“Yeah. No. No, I’m fine.” But she wasn’t. She closed her eyes and silently, she corrected her assessment, No, actually, I’m not fine. I am losing my mind. I cannot stop thinking about a woman I don’t even know, a woman I know nothing about. I think about her all the time and don’t even know what I am thinking about. Am I crazy? Am I gay? Am I falling in love with a woman? Have I lost my mind? Sandra did not say anything more, but merely smiled and asked Daniel about his week ahead at work.

When Daniel dropped her off at her apartment, he did not ask to spend the night, as he always did. He kissed her goodnight and told her he would call her tomorrow. He was not sure he actually would, and as he walked back to his car, he admitted that she probably wouldn’t even notice if he did or not.

When Sandra got off the elevator on Monday morning, fear poured over her like a downpour. She stood in the hallway, her eyes fixed on the texture of the carpeting that led her way, suddenly afraid to pass by APAC International on her way to Humphries & McDougal. She walked slowly, breathing deeply, vowing not to look into any suites that lined the sixth floor. How could she spend another day like she had spent the last several? She didn’t think she had the strength. She had not been doing her work, she was not eating well, and her mind had been constantly filled with thoughts of the young receptionist. It felt like worry — what she was feeling? — yet more of a dreadful, fateful feeling. She started to feel nauseous, as she walked through the front door of her suite.

She went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and saw Randy as he dipped a tea bag in and out of a cup of hot water, and back in again.

“Hey Randy.”

“Hola Sandra. How goes it, chica?”

Sandra smiled, and grabbed a white cup from the counter and pushed down on the plastic pump on the top of the coffee carafe. She had forgotten to look in the cup to make sure it was clean – the dishwasher at Humphries & McDougal was spotty, at best. Randy held his wet tea bag with two fingers, threw it in the garbage and rubbed his chin, his patchy beard moving around his fingers.

“How was the weekend?” he asked.

“Oh, it was okay. How was yours?”

“It was okay. Not long enough, that’s for sure” and Randy laughed when he said this, his large belly moved up and down against the counter. His orange and black stripped shirt wiggled with each giggle. Sandra enjoyed this moment away from her desk, a certain sense of freedom and relief, but she quickly became anxious. What if she was needed? What if something happened across the hall or at her desk? She smiled and walked out of the kitchen, with Randy following.

As Sandra turned to go to her desk, Randy kept walking towards his cube, and it was then that she looked across the hall to see the young receptionist come into view. She could see a heavyset man, with a stripped shirt and a scraggly beard just like Randy’s, walk behind her just seconds after Randy had done the very same thing.

Sandra set her coffee cup on her desk and sat down. The grey walls seemed to move in on her, their rubbery texture pulsating like sweaty skin. Sandra could feel the perspiration bubble on her forehead, her tongue dry, stuck to the roof of her mouth. She grabbed her purse and stood up, hesitated in front of her desk, and then reached around and put her purse back near her chair and ran through the glass doors and down the hall, past APAC International, past the empty reception desk inside. The sweat poured down her cheeks, her dark hair pressed against her temples. With two fingers, she pressed the elevator down button. She pressed it again, two, three, four times. “C’mon, c’mon,” she said, trying to breathe, to calm herself down. She could hear the elevator mechanisms grind slowly below the floor, a distant sound that eventually began to rise. “Oh come on,” she said.

“Oh hi,” a voice behind her said.

Sandra turned and saw the two violet eyes of Angela Holmes. Sandra could not make out who she was at first, though it took no further thought to realize the face that had suddenly appeared in front of hers was as familiar as her own.

“I just quit my job,” she said with a half smile. “I didn’t plan to. Isn’t that weird? I just quit. On the spot. “ Angela curled the straps of her purse over her shoulder and looked at the elevator doors. “Just grabbed my things and left. I am not even sure why I did it.” She smiled.

“ I guess I have to call someone and tell them I am not coming back.”

Sandra could tell as she watch the young receptionist that she was of the same height, had the same coloring and wore black flats just like Sandra. She recognized her full lips and the young receptionist wore her hair in a soft side ponytail, just like she did. She turned to look at the elevator doors too.

Sandra could not think of what to say in return but couldn’t help wondering if she had just done the same thing. She had left in a hurry, on the spot, but had she just quit? Without even realizing it? Maybe the young receptionist knew something that Sandra did not. Perhaps so much of their circumstances intersected, that everything was blurry, and in one moment Angela would lead their mirrored movements and in the next moment, the young receptionist did. Perhaps that is all it was – two people dancing but from afar. Were they moving together now? Did Sandra make the first move this time and the young receptionist followed? Or was it the other way around? Wouldn’t she know it if she had just quit, though? Wouldn’t she know it? She shook her head, no, no. She left her purse back there. One doesn’t quit and then leave their purse behind.

“Good luck to you,” Sandra said. “I mean, I am sure it is for the best.”
Angela smiled, “Yeah, I guess,” and she walked into the elevator and the doors closed.

Sandra turned and walked back to Suite 630 and her desk at Humphries & McDougal.

Writing Contest

2011-05-07T10:36:00.012-05:00

Don't know if anyone ever visits here anymore, but I wanted to pass along word of a nice writing contest at http://writingcontest.thenovelette.com/, a nice new avenue for women’s fiction for the web. I am well aware that I am not a woman but the theme of this contest is "desire in any of its myriad forms."

I entered an old, old, old story called "Cleansing Rain." It is not a great story, by any stretch, and it is four years old, but I thought it might fit in nicely with such a cool theme.

http://writingcontest.thenovelette.com/

Read, enjoy, vote.

After Life

2011-04-17T14:50:00.002-05:00

My father was seventy-seven years old when he told me that he was gay. As I held the receiver to my ear, I could feel his voice quiver in a way I had never heard before. It seemed like he was holding his breath, like a teenager searching for the right words, for the first time.

“I guess I have always known it. Not known it, but rather, I have always known about different kinds of feelings. Not different in a gay-different kind of way but just feeling like I had more things inside me,” he told me, “Things were never black and white, they were always grey, I guess. But now seems like the right time to . . . it feels like a good time to do this now.”

I could hear him on the other end of the phone, his breathing held back but labored. I did not know how to respond or if I even needed to, but the silence between us grew quickly and too loudly for comfort. “That’s good, Dad, that’s good.” I said. “I am a little shocked, that’s all. I didn’t know. I’m surprised, to be quite honest, but I am happy for you that . . .you know, that you can be happy.”

He was right. He was different, we all knew that, my two sisters and I. Always quiet, withdrawn. Not your typical father, but then again, maybe he was, compared to other fathers. He was all we knew. But I never would have guessed this. Not this, and not now. Not at this stage.

I am not sure if he was listening to my reaction, for his words continued to tumble out. “You see, I looked in the mirror a few weeks ago. I was in the upstairs bedroom, I was shaving and I cut my chin. A simple little nick, you know. Nothing that I hadn’t done a million and seven times before.”

“Yeah.”

“And the blood came out. Pretty fast. And really dark red. It must have been a deep cut because it bled pretty good. I let the blood drip into the sink for I kept staring into the mirror. My face was white, my hair grey, thin and grey, my skin folding in ways that surprised me. I looked like a ghost. A strange ghost. I realized that I was dying. I could die right then and there, in fact, just bleed to death, you know? Maybe it wouldn’t stop and I would just bleed to death. Anything could happen. I am almost seventy-seven years old and I am getting to be an old man. I am an old man. I have regrets, I wish things were different in my life, but I tried to always to do some good things in the world. But now I am old. The kind of old man you don’t ever think you will become. Your grandfather never made it to sixty, yet alone seventy. Your mother suffered so much in that last year and I don’t want to die yet, not yet. There was still something in me that I wanted to explore. Something in me that I needed to get out.”

My mother had passed away just after Christmas, a little over a year earlier. I wondered what she knew, what did she know of her husband, as she sat in her chair, quiet, staring into space. He was her nurse then, and he would wipe her mouth and push her hair off her forehead. Did she know? What had she known before she got sick? Did she know that something was amiss? Hell, what did he know? Did he know it then? Or had he known it for years before that? He picked up on my thoughts somehow.

“I haven’t lived a lie, Cal, I haven’t,” he said with conviction, “You kids need to know that. I was always true to your mom. I am still true to her, actually. I never lived a lie with her. It’s hard to explain but I just never paid too much attention to things over the years. You know, desires, things I felt, things I wanted. I mean, things for me. I don’t remember the last time I did something, something I wanted to do. It has taken me a long time to get the courage to ask myself the questions. I have thought a lot about this. For a long time. This thing, this feeling, it grew in me, and now, it just seems right. It seems like the right time.” He took a breath. “I don’t know, Cal. You are the first one I am telling, I haven’t called your sisters yet. Rachel is probably not even home anyway but I feel like I need to tell you all.”

“Did something happen, Dad? I mean besides the shaving thing. Did something happen to make you call now? At 8:30 on a Saturday night?”

“What do you mean? What could happen?”

“I don’t know, anything. I mean did something happen that made you call now? Did you, I don’t know, go on a date or something?”

I could hear him smile. “No, no date, it just clicked in with me. And I decided to accept it.”

“No, Dad, I understand. Listen, I think you should hold off on telling Emily and Rachel, at least for a bit. Maybe they need to hear this in person. A phone call is hard, for something like this, to hear something like this from your father. Just out of the blue. No offense.”

He was silent. “Yeah, I guess it is. I didn’t think too much about that.”

“Look Dad, what are you doing tomorrow? I will come over. Let’s do lunch or something. Let’s just talk.”

“Cal, you can’t talk me out of this, you know. You know that, right? It isn’t something you can reason away.”

“No, I know. I don’t want to do anything. I just think we need to talk a little more about this and it just seems weird to talk to your father about something like this over the phone. It’s just weird.”

“Okay,” he said, “I am free for lunch.”

***

It is true that I did not know my father well. He had been a lawyer for forty years, and had his own small law firm in the town next to ours. He was very reasonable, a very practical man, but he kept his emotions in check. There was a reason for everything, and everything had a reason, so he never got too caught up in any one moment. Emotionally. It was his strength, I guess, but also his weakness. He was a ghost when my two younger sisters and I were growing up. Physically as well as emotionally. My mother was the parent who did everything for us. My father went to work in the mornings, usually before we awoke, stayed out until deep in the evening. After dinner, he cleaned the dishes while my mother helped with our homework and then he sat on the couch with a pile of manila folders stacked on the coffee table, and scribbled on a pad of paper. When my mother came in to our rooms each night and give us a hug, my father held back in the hall, leaning on the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, smiling. He never broke the plane, never really came into view. It was as if he was never really there.

He wasn’t involved in our lives, really, so he didn’t know his children, and we didn’t really know him. It had only been since my mother’s death that he and I began slowly to have a real relationship. I sort of forced myself upon him, helping him in the yard or moving boxes to the attic or to the curb for garbage pickup. He began to open up to me because, I reasoned, he didn’t have anyone else.

My sisters could not let go of the fact that he was always late. He was late in coming home from work each night, late for school concerts (when he was able to show up) or late in showing his affection. They continued to hate him for it, whereas I had accepted it a long time ago. There was a reason for it, I tried to tell them. His affection was always late too. His hugs consisted of a slight squeeze of the shoulder and they came long after my mother’s, and often too late. He just seemed uncomfortable as a father, as someone’s father. I remember him attempting to give me “the talk” one summer evening, as I was packing my car to head off for college. “That’s okay, Dad,” I told him as I soon as I could see where he was headed. “I know what I need to know.” He nodded his head, exhaled loudly, backed up towards the house and just vanished.

We met the next afternoon at the Capital Restaurant on Broadview and Second Street. My father slunk in the booth, his eyes were drawn. He seemed tired and worried. His jacket hung loosely over his shoulders and his eyes darted around the restaurant. After our coffee had been poured and we placed our order, my father finally looked at me and gave a quick, half smile. He said he thought that he would feel a lot better after he told me — and he did, he made a point of noting — but he still felt kind of lousy. His head still felt muddled, he said, and he hadn’t been sleeping well for several weeks.

“I’m afraid of seeing someone here,” he said. “Someone I know. You know, a neighbor, someone I used to work with or worse, someone who knew your mother.”

“So what? Are you afraid of someone seeing you . . .with me?” I didn’t understand his fear.

In a whisper, he said he was worried that everything would be transparent now, who he was would now be visible to anyone who cared enough to hold his gaze.

“Look, Dad, ‘I am now gay’ is not visible on your forehead, if that is what you are worried about. Okay? At least not in this dingy restaurant lighting.”

My father did not laugh. “I just don’t want to see anyone. I just want you kids to know. It’s no one else’s business.”

I ordered a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with fries and a pickle, while my father dipped his spoon in his vegetable soup, moving it in looping figure eights, sipping a little only now and then. We talked about my mom, and his eyes grew glassy when he told me that he missed his wife, really missed her friendship. Even when she was dying he always felt like she was listening. He didn’t know who to talk to about things any more. He never had many friends. He needed my mom now, he said, more than ever, but now was the time he had to do without her, and he had to do this all by himself. He knew that, he said, he knew that facing “these feelings,” as he called them, and accepting them would be something he had to do without anyone’s help or support.

I asked him how long he had had these feelings, and he looked to the booths along the windows. “I don’t know, Cal, it just sort of grew on me. Somehow. For a while now, for a long time. It’s not like the plumber came by, took off his shirt and my world opened up.” He shook his head. “No. I wish it were that easy. It didn’t happen that way.”

“Did you have . . .um, feelings for other men when we were kids, when we were around?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not in a real, you know, not in a real way. It just sort of grew, Cal, that’s all I can tell you. But I got a problem now that I have accepted it, see, I don’t know what to do now. Now that I feel like I turned a corner and am ready to be what I want, I really don’t know what to do now. How do I be that person? I don’t know what I am supposed to do, what I am supposed to want. I don’t know what I want.”

“Is there anything else you want?” the waitress asked. More coffee or desert? My father and I smiled at each other, “No, no thanks, We don’t want anything.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll get the check.”

My father didn’t know what to do next. Unfortunately, I could offer no advice. I was not gay, I was very heterosexual, and didn’t have any idea as to what to do next: what bars to go to, what to do to meet . . . other men, heck, or if there was a support group at the local hospital. I had no clue. I just asked that he not tell my sisters until after he took the next step, whatever that next step might be. I was afraid that there would be a huge reaction from Emily and Rachel and I wanted him to be in a better place to do that. They still harbored a great deal of anger and resentment.

I drove him home and squeezed his left shoulder as he got out of the car. I made a point of calling him each morning for the next two weeks. We didn’t speak of anything of consequence. “Everything is in excellent order,” he would say. We talked about the weather, the tree in the backyard that was drooping dangerously close to the roof of the house, his upcoming doctor’s appointment, the movie he had seen on the TV the night before. I didn’t ask him about any personal questions, I just figured he would tell me if he had anything new to tell me.

“I met someone,” he said one morning on the phone, after I asked how he was feeling.

“Okay.” I was afraid to ask for further details. It was weird enough that my father would have feelings for someone other than my mother, but here he was, on the cusp of a new relationship — with a man.

“I don’t want to talk about it, but I just wanted you to know.”

“Well,” I said, “But we can talk about it — if you want, you know — if you feel comfortable. It’s up to you.”

“Okay, thanks. But I don’t want to say anything yet. I got to tell you, though. The grocery store is a helluva pickup joint, did you know that?”

I laughed. “Uh, no, no, I did not know that. But then, I don’t think it is, for 40 year old married guys dragging their daughters through the aisles.”

“Yeah, maybe not. But if you are single, it’s funny the looks you get from other single people walking down those aisles, walking in different directions. From men and women alike. I just can’t look at the women. They remind me of your mother.”

***

Another two weeks went by – more talks about the weather and follow-up doctor’s appointments and his lawn mower and the new Italian restaurant that just opened on the corner where the drug store used to be.

We were just about to hang up the phone one Sunday evening when he said, “His name is Brian. He’s an accountant.”

“What?” I asked.

“Brian, the man I know, his name is Brian. He works at an accounting firm downtown and has two kids, grown, but younger than you three. He is a little younger than I am. His wife died last year too, near Mom. He is very nice.”

“Okay.”

“Can I tell the girls now?”

“Sure, Dad, whatever you want to do.”

“I’d like to have them over, maybe Friday or Saturday night. I’ll get a few pizzas.”

“Not him, right? You’re just talking about Rachel and Emily.”

“Yeah, just the girls. Just us. And I’d like you to be there too. I’ll need your help in case Rachel gets rabid.”

“Sure. Friday night? Yeah, that, that sounds good.”

We moved the dinner plans to Saturday because Dad had a conflicting doctor’s appointment on Friday afternoon. As my sisters and I sat around the table, the same places, the same dining room seats we sat as children, I looked to my father and waited for his lead. “I have some news,” he said quickly. “ I wanted to share something else with you, but it will keep. Tonight, I need to tell you that your father . . . that I have stage IV cancer. Prostate cancer. And that it is growing quickly.” He swallowed hard and held back his tears. “I wanted tonight to be different, but sometimes . . . you don’t have a choice in things.”

My father was never able to deliver the news he so wanted to tell his two girls. His daughters never got a chance to get angry with him. The time just never seemed to be found. All of our days were suddenly filled with doctors appointments and chemotherapy treatments and hospital visits. He needed to tell my sisters what he had told me, he needed to know that they accepted him for who he was, who he truly was. But he never got the chance. Life got in the way and death forced the detour. My youngest sister Rachel took his illness very hard, but I tried to keep things in perspective. Within six short months, we found ourselves in hospice, huddled together at the foot of his bed. Death was part of life and our father suddenly looked the part of “an old man,” as he kept insisting he was. Emily and Rachel held his hand and kissed his forehead and as tears dripped onto his thin cotton sheet, they told him that they loved him very much. As I sat next to him, alone, I whispered that everything was okay, that we didn’t need to understand everything in order to love everything. As the room grew dark on a November afternoon, we watched my father vanish for the last time.

Brothers

2011-03-27T15:30:00.005-05:00

I am the last of five kids, with three older brothers. As the youngest, I have always looked up to all my brothers, physically as well as emotionally. They have led me, guided me, looked out for me, kept me safe, kept me involved and protected me, in so many ways. So, when I think of brothers, invariably, I think of older brothers and I think of their sacrifices and how they surrender so much for their younger brothers. All my brothers sacrificed so much for me.

When I was young, I loved Elton John. He was the great rock and roll piano-playing singer known for his flamboyance – in his eyewear and his large and colorful costumes. He had hit after hit after hit in the early- and mid-seventies. I had a bunch of his albums and played them on our small white turntable countless times. I remember one boring Sunday morning, in particular — it was probably 1973 or 1974 — in which my eldest brother John gave up his morning for me. John was always the leader of the four brothers, the one who invented games and activities out of nothing. On this particular day, he and I went downstairs to the basement, laid out some newspaper and proceeded to make an Elton John hat and glasses. We just started cutting and bending and gluing, I had no idea what the outcome would look like. It was all John’s vision. It turned out to be a tall top hat, made of cardboard, with orange colored paper and glitter. The glasses were twisted aluminum foil with two little American flags sprouting out of the two sides of the nosepiece. I don’t remember how long it took us to make those two items but my memory tells me it must have taken us a few hours. My big brother gave me his great idea and then gave me his time and craftsmanship. At the end, John suggested we take a picture. We pulled out the little tabletop organ that we had, and set it gingerly on a TV table. I positioned myself behind it with my hands poised on the keys, so it looked like I, as Elton John, was belting out “Bennie and the Jets” before a packed crowd at Cobo Hall.

As great a sacrifice as my brother John made that morning, the ultimate sacrifice was still to come. We put an uncovered tennis ball on top of an empty paper towel roll and wrapped aluminum foil around it to make a microphone. My older brother Mark pulled his hair back, stuck a clip-on earring on his right ear and became “Bernie Taupin” for my photograph. In the picture, I am “rocking out” as Elton and Mark is regulated to the background, “harmonizing” sweetly into the microphone as Elton’s unremarkable writing partner. That, my friends, is sacrifice.

That is the lesson I try to teach my sons about being brothers — you give and sacrifice and you protect your brother, and you do it without fanfare and sometimes, without recognition. Sacrifices come unconditionally, yet with love.

An Ace And A Photograph

2011-02-19T14:10:00.004-06:00

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, Rachel and I would meet for tennis at the River Bank Athletic Club. A couple of sets in the morning, a light salad for lunch and then back to our daily routines by two in the afternoon. I had errands to run before I had to pick up my boys from school later in the afternoon and she always had a full schedule that would take her deep into the evening. More often than not, I would already be in the locker room, getting into my outfit, hanging my blouse and jeans on the little hooks in the small metal locker, when she would sweep in, tossing her red, white and blue Bicentennial gym bag on the long wooden bench that ran between the two rows of lockers. She would flip her hair back off her face and with a wave of her hand, complain about traffic or the new girl at the front desk. This Tuesday, however, was different.

I had known Rachel since college and I swear, she had not changed one bit since then. She is still calm, confident, so in control. It was hard not to be attracted to her, then or now. She always had a boyfriend at State – one devoted boy or another – for all four years. And she was as well-liked by the girls as she was with the boys. Her laugh flowed simply and openly, and a huge part of her attractiveness was that she seemed perpetually one step removed from actually caring about things. She was the kind of person who ran her fingers through her hair instead of a brush, wore clothes that seemed to be thrown together and recently thrown on – but somehow it all worked so well. She ended up in real estate and made a good living but never cared enough to be part of the Million Dollar Club or whatever it was that the men in her office aspired to. Men still were drawn to her beauty, now more than ever. As I got older, I wish I had maintained her feeling of carelessness. She wore it well.

“You will never believe who I just ran into,” she said, her voice hovering just above irritation.

“Who?” I asked without picking up my head.

“In the hallway leading down to the locker room.”

I was stretching the mouth of my white socks out, so my feet would slide in easily. “Who?” I repeated, a little louder this time.

“Charlton Heston.”

I turned my head, “Seriously?”

Rachel raised her eyebrows in affirmation, as if she was saying, “How’s that for some news?” I lowered my naked foot to rest on the bench.

“You ready for some doubles?”

“Who,” I asked. “Me? Us? With Charlton Heston?”

Rachel started to pull her clothes out of her bag. “Yeah. You and Chuck against me and Billy Helms. He goes by ‘Chuck’ to his friends. He’s friends with Billy from way back, I guess, who knows how long. That’s who introduced us. When they suggested some doubles, we figured we would have to mix it up – male/female. And since you weren’t there, and Chuck was new, we thought you two could make a pretty good team. I think it was really because Billy wanted to be on my side, to be honest with you. Probably just wants to stare at my ass for an hour. He will be so disappointed to know that I wear panties on the court. And granny panties at that. Poor sap.” She looked down at me and smiled. “You ready to up your game, missy?”

I stared at the rust carpeting with the red and blue diamonds and began to sweat.

As Rachel and I walked onto the courts, we saw Billy Helms and a tall man in a dark blue polo coming towards us. They carried their wooden rackets in their hands and Billy had a red bag that he held by one strap. The top two buttons of the man’s shirt were open, exposing a hairless chest. Billy introduced the man in blue as “Chuck” which surprised me for I had forgotten that he was no longer “Charlton Heston, the movie star.” His hair was a lighter color than I would have thought and his nose was like a Roman god’s, long and straight with a slight bump. His eyes crinkled beneath his brown eyebrows, his lips were full and his smile seemed to stretch across the width of his face. Kind of like a good-looking Cheshire Cat. He reached out his hand to me and gave me a firm but tender handshake. He angled his head down just a bit, his eyes moving into mine. When he released my hand, I felt like I had just been made love to. Except that it happened really, really quickly.

We hit the ball around for a few minutes before Billy suggested we start playing “for real.”

“Aren’t we already ‘really playing,’ Billy? Or are we just acting like we are?” Rachel joked. She smacked Billy on his butt with her racket. I think that was her way of flirting with Billy before he could flirt with her. “Okay, we serve first, since our team makes a lot less money than you guys do.”

We all smiled. Chuck asked me if I wanted to receive first. I stretched out my arms, and shrugged. I told him it didn’t matter. He was a movie star. He could receive the first serve if he wanted.

We won the first set, 6-3. My serve was working well, more accurate and powerful than usual, and I felt pumped and excited. Chuck came up behind me.

“Nice game,” he squeezed my shoulders and said, “Okay. Let’s finish them off, what do you say?”

It began to fall apart in the first game of the second set. I double-faulted twice and I could feel Chuck next to me, watching. When I hit one long in the second game, letting them go up 40-Love, he spit out a “damn” in a hard, hushed tone and my body stung as the word landed. I could not bear to look at my doubles partner, who just happened to be the Academy Award winner Charlton Heston.

They won the second set, 6-2.

As we began the third set, the tie-breaker, I vowed to pull myself together. We lost the first game but were up 40-15 in the second. Billy returned my serve with a soft lob. In a flash, Chuck raced to the net and slammed the ball for the game-winner. The ball careened into Rachel’s thigh, then bouncing high and landing two courts away. Rachel screamed and rolled on the ground clutching her right leg. Almost immediately, you could see the skin bubble and turn a pasty red.

“Jesus! Moses just hit me with a tennis ball!”

Everyone on the other courts stopped and watched Rachel writhe in pain.
I dropped my racket and ran towards the clubhouse. I filled a paper cup with ice and a grabbed a thin white towel. When I came back out, Rachel was sitting on the bench at mid-court. I dropped a couple of cubes in the towel and applied it to her thigh, gingerly placing it on the red speckled mound that was emerging. She looked up at me, her eyes filled with tears.

“Fuckin’ Ben Hur . . .” she said softly.

I walked back on the court to get my racket and saw Chuck standing at the net, posing for pictures with some other tennis players.

“How ‘bout one with my partner, huh?” he said. He stood in front of the net, the neck of the racket between the fingers of his left hand and with this right hand, he pulled me close. “I think we had ‘em,” he said behind his rows of white teeth. I gave a half smile in return, looking off to the side as the shutter was snapped.

Two months later the young woman at the front desk gave me the picture. I still have it in a photo album, and whenever I pull it out, my husband and I shake our heads and mutter, “Fuckin’ Ben Hur.”

The Postcard (Final Version)

2011-02-14T09:31:00.004-06:00

This is a short story that I wrote in April of 2009. I went back and did a couple of edits to it, lengthened it, and tried to tighten it up a bit, make it work a little better.
_________________________________________________________________________________

It was tucked between the electric bill and an oversized mailer from the local car dealership. It was in almost perfect condition, its corners slightly dog-eared.

The colors before her, like sweeping brushstrokes of yellow and deep blue oils, seemed to pulsate in her hand. She set the rest of the mail on the dining room table and slowly lowered herself down on the third step of the stairs leading to the second floor.

Gloria held the postcard, trembling slightly, the deckled edge pressing gently into her palm. She read her name and address written in a script she did not recognize. The large “G’s” in Gloria Gundry were over-accentuated and her entire street address was tilted right, as if a strong wind were blowing from the west.

On the left hand side of the postcard, someone had written in the same blue pen:

Gloria,
France is beautiful. Just as we’ve had always talked about. It’s all a dream – the architecture, the people, the language, the food. You should have come.

Paris was rainy but amazing. I saw the Eiffel Tower and then at Notre Dame, I fell down some stairs (I’m okay). I am now in Nice for the next five days. I wish you were here.

Bisous,
Helen

At the top of the postcard, printed in light grey, it read “La Côte d’Azur, Nice” and then below that, the image was identified as “La Promenade, la nuit.” She had taken French in high school so she remembered that “nuit” meant that it was the “at night." She turned the postcard over to reveal a retro image of Nice. It appeared to be a photograph that had been hand-colored. It was a shot taken from above, the viewer looking down on the main drive next to the ocean at night. The sky was black, the water pushed against the road was black as well – or maybe just a deep dark blue – with a hint of deep aqua green. Silhouetted palm trees ran down the middle of “the promenade” separating the two lanes, with a bright yellow glow coming from the streetlamps reflecting off the street like fire. The road wound from the bottom of the postcard up, twisting left at the top of the card, vanishing in the darkness.

She flipped the card back over and gazed at the message. “I wish you were here.” Who, Gloria thought, who wishes I were there? “Kisses, Helen.” Who is this person? She did not know anyone named Helen. Did she? She certainly could not think of a Helen she knew well enough who might write her a postcard from France and sign off with “kisses.” She flipped the card back over to see the handwriting. It was obviously intended for her – her name was correct, the address was correct. This address had been hers since she moved out of her parents’ house over fifty years ago. Jack had bought the small white Cape Cod house on Sonny Street right before they got married in September of 1954, following their graduation that spring from North Hamilton High School. The postcard was meant for her, and it had made its way to her mailbox, all way from France. But who sent it? Who was Helen?

Gloria rested her hands in her lap and looked at the hallway wall facing her, the living room beyond so comforting and familiar. It’s contents were the same as they had always been, unmoved since Jack had passed ten years before. The same painting hung near the front door, golden wheat billowing in the breeze. The same lamp and table near the couch, the same daylight came in through the living room windows. The house was quiet. Janie and Tom were both grown, living downstate, both with families now, with teenagers of their own, as a matter of fact. She thought of Jack and how she felt lonely without him. She could not distance herself from that loneliness, it was always there, like a dull, throbbing pain, but in times like this, it was more acute. How she longed to simply ask him a question like, do we know a woman named Helen? That was what she missed the most – the moments that almost weren’t moments. He would look to her, think for a second, and then say “Nope” and continue shaving, or whatever it was he was doing at the time. Her heart ached for him, in the quiet of her everyday.

She sat and thought about women in the neighborhood, up and down the block, but she could not think of a Helen. Her inner circle was certainly not large. She thought of the four or five women in church, those who sat beside her on the Liturgy Commission on which she served, but there wasn’t a Helen there either. She though of her fellow poll workers who served at the local elementary school gymnasium on election days. No Helen.

Gloria pulled her hair off her shoulders. It was odd, she thought. She shared a love of France with this woman yet could not remember who she was. As a matter of fact, the card implied that they had talked and dreamt about France together. “Just as we’ve always talked about.” But she hadn’t even given France a thought, not in any real way, in years. Many, many years.

Her mind reached for the name, the face, the owner of these friendly words. She ran through the checklist of women in her garden club, and as she softly said “flowers,” she remembered that there was a Helen Crower that she knew in high school. She sat behind Gloria in their senior French class. That was the only class they had shared in their four years but they really did not know each other that well. Gloria remembered Helen's wide face, like a strawberry. She was short and blond and always wore thin sweaters regardless of the weather. She was a sweet girl, even if she was trying at times. She was always whispering in Gloria’s ear, always in French and always when Gloria was concentrating on the lesson being mapped out on the board. She was from Sarnia, Ontario, just over the border from Michigan, and Gloria had never known anyone who was actually from Sarnia. She would tell stories of fighting with her sisters, she was one of eight girls in her family. Gloria remembered being annoyed by Helen but they must have been close enough to share some intimate thoughts, to warrant a special postcard from this woman after so many years. But why would Helen write a postcard now?

She noticed the canceled stamp in the upper right corner — a strong-chinned woman in a robe holding a vase, an ornate pale orange frame around the woman with the words “Republique Française” at the top and “25c Postes” along the bottom. Gloria looked at the cancellation over the postage stamp where the black ink formed an intermittent circle. She could vaguely make out “JU” for either June or July, perhaps, and “1955.” Gloria pushed her glasses back up on her nose and read it again. Nineteen hundred and fifty-five. That was over fifty years ago, Gloria thought. Was this a joke, she thought, a prank by somebody? Fifty-four years ago is a long time. Was this postcard in transit the entire time? For fifty-four years? She had gotten tons of mail over the years, so why did this one piece take so long?

As Gloria sat there, in her empty and still house, her heart racing, she realized that there had been something of this odd young girl with her all this time. A small yet singular pull of another awkward and searching seventeen-year-old girl. It was clear that Helen was still sitting behind Gloria and had been there for fifty-four years. It was something she had never realized or even felt before this day: sentiments in a postcard she now held in her hands, intended just for her, words that were carried across the miles, across the ocean, across the years, across two lives, so separate and yet, in the end, intertwined.

The Imprint of a Hand

2011-01-28T17:56:00.004-06:00

Maureen was a waitress at Donna’s Donuts. She served coffee and donuts and worried about her three sons. For seventeen years, she would arrive each morning at 5:30 am, and hang her coat up on the hook by the back door. She would smile to herself knowing her boys were still in bed, their hair tussled, their long limbs thrown about the mattresses. She wondered about them as she steadied the pot against the lip of each customer’s white ceramic mug, she thought about them when she cleaned the tables, wiping the crumbs into her open hand. She would run to the register when Butch was in the back, and check out the customers she just waited on, but mostly she moved about the floor, laughing and brushing away the flirtatious comments from some of the regulars. Lefty, Big Tim and Clark were three such customers.

Maureen was 47 years old and had striking blue eyes that sometimes looked green and sparkled against her pale skin and dark brown hair. She still turned the head of the local supermarket stock boy named Devin, who noticed her curves and her easy smile. She also caught the eye of the manager, Bob Wilkens, as he stacked and arranged the fruit into oblong pyramids. When she stopped for gas, the man who owned Philly’s Gas always took extra care to make sure he counted her change correctly. She would make a lighthearted comment about the weather or she wondered if business had picked up. He would bend his neck downward and smile. He wished he could have an insightful comment to return but he would find himself stuck in the eighth grade, unable to say just what he wanted to. He could only blush and thank her for her business. She would then put on her sunglasses and head back outside to her car.

Her husband Joe worked at the plant, where he had attached doors on Chevrolet sedans for over twenty-three years. He would come home each night, and run his hand through his thinning hair, now more salt than pepper, and he would grimace when he talked about his supervisor, the noise in the factory that penetrated his ears, the pain in his lower back. By his own admission, Joe didn’t like to complain, but he liked to be home and sit on the couch and think that he made a difference, at least in the lives of this his kids. He sometimes felt lost, though — many times, so acute that he was often on the verge of tears — as he walked into the bowels of the factory before his shift. However, he never told Maureen this. He did not want her to worry.

Maureen carried a secret within her too. When she was sixteen years old, three years before married Joe, she had become pregnant by her boyfriend at the time, one Doyle Mattingham. Doyle was tall and lanky and was so frightened by the thought of being a father — and a husband — that he enlisted in the Army the very next day, telling Maureen that it was all a mistake. When Maureen asked, What? What was a mistake? He looked at her as if she had swallowed her own head. He raised both hands and screamed, Everything!!

Maureen could not have an abortion but she knew that she would have to give the baby up for adoption. She was too young, and did not have a husband. She wanted her baby to be happy, to have a stable life with two parents, like she had. Life was hard enough, she reasoned to herself. They took the baby from her immediately in the birthing room and that is when the crying began. She cried that night and every night since then, always feeling the heavy bright lights in that room, trying to ease the pain of being a childless mother. She overheard the nurses mention “he,” so she knew she had had a baby boy but she was not allowed to hold him. The pain never ceased, though she was able to give birth to three more sons, whom she was able to cradle and love. She loved being a mother. After the third, she smiled at Joe and said, We are very lucky.

Doyle Mattingham never did make it back to town, by the way. The second year of his four year enlistment found him stationed in Mobile, Alabama, and it was there he met a small blonde-haired woman named Carol who found men in uniform irresistible. They had four children within the first five years, but were never married.

One day, in the fall following a very hot summer, Maureen paid for her gas and walked out into the sunshine. Instead of climbing into her car, she turned and walked back into the gas station office. The owner of Philly’s Gas, Tommy Jankowski, had been watching her the entire time, just as he always did.

She took off her sunglasses and blew the strands of hair from in front of her eyes. “Are you busy?” she asked.

Tommy stood straight and rubbed his hands on his thighs. “Uh no,” he muttered looking slightly in each direction.

“When I was sixteen years old, I became pregnant and ended up giving my baby up for adoption.” Maureen looked to Tommy to gauge his reaction. His eyes shown and he did not blink. She felt safe to continue. She proceeded to tell Tommy about being sixteen years old, Doyle Mattingham and the baby boy that she yearned for these last thirty-one years. She cried, but only softly. When she finished, she wiped at her tears and then she eased herself around the corner and hugged a surprised but grateful Tommy. She put on her sunglasses and drove away.

At that same time, a little over 148 miles away, thirty-one year old Clee Bishop swallowed the pills from three containers — different colors and shapes and medicinal qualities. Discontentment and depression had hung at his heels for many years now, even after he found the courage, at age seventeen, to stand before his parents and tell them he was gay. It was the hardest thing imaginable, he told his sister — to fight the whole world for the permission “just to be me.” Unfortunately, that declaration did not stop the hollow feeling he continued to feel. There was still a void he could not understand, the insides of his heart held a tempest of faceless emotions that ran in on him like rolling thunder. He had been estranged from his parents since his admission, and yet they had never found the courage to tell him the truth — that he was not their blood child. The pills went down his throat with incredible ease. As they settled deep inside him, his body offered no resistance. For once, he thought, something was easy for him.

That night, as Joe had curled his back to his wife in bed, Maureen cried deeper than she ever had. The tears had come from places she did not know existed, the sounds from her throat like that from a wounded dog.

Two Way Joint

2011-01-22T11:14:00.007-06:00

Her breasts were just beginning to grow and I was absolutely sure that I was falling in love. I had never in my life seen anything as spectacular. As we walked through the midway, I was drawn to sneak glances at her chest, a great mystery revealing in small blooms before me. She was so beautiful, I thought, her brown tussled curls falling to her shoulders. Her skin sparkled against a sky so black it seemed to expand forever, her eyes glistening beneath the lights, her smile white and wide. And now having breasts was almost too much for my young heart. I certainly did not need the extra incentive, but I was thankful nonetheless. It was like being in Paris, feeling awe at seeing the Eiffel Tower, its strong beams and precise angles. And then, for the first time, hearing French breathlessly whispered in your ear. It was dizzying.

With a loud click, we were locked into our seats of the Tilt-A-Whirl, the metal bar pushed against our laps. We looked at each other with nervous anticipation. The safety latches clinked in the other cars around us, sharp echoes ricocheting in the night. There was nervous laughter from a couple in front of us, though they were out of our sight, hidden by the back of their round car, a shiny purple with red lighting bolts. Suddenly, the gears started to turn against each other and, slowly, we began to move. Beneath our feet, we could feel all the parts of this large machine waking from its slumber and joining in, gear grinding against gear, piston pushing into piston, gaining momentum and power. Our capsule began to glide and almost as an afterthought, spin. Forward and then a looping twirl. In a matter of seconds, we were at full speed and we pitched forward and flipped around backward, quicker and faster. Our bodies moved back and forth on the metal seats, our butts slid together, touching, only momentarily, and then we were pulled apart. I could feel her presence next to me but I could not look at her, I stared straight ahead, trying to focus on my hands, gripped tightly around the handlebar, my fists flush red and pale white. I tried to concentrate on keeping my wits ¬¬¬¬— and my dinner. We swung left and then jerked right. The neon sign for the Fair store whizzed past me, the trees behind the mall a fuzzy green blur. My stomach jumped, my muscles tensed. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on something, anything, besides my body being whipped and tossed against my will, against gravity. I thought of a bright yellow meadow, like in that scene from “The Wizard of Oz,” the one at the end of the yellow brick road. I couldn’t do it. I decided to try and just wait it out. With my eyes shut, I could actually feel the skin on my head spin, all my insides being tussled and jumbled. When the ride finally slowed and gradually wound down, our car finally ceased spinning right in front of the ride monkey, a good looking, and young guy in his twenties, thin, with a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, his scraggly mustache a sandy blond. His hands rested on the control box, and he smiled. He reached a hand across his chest and scratched his shoulder as we stumbled out of the car, our legs rubber; our sense of balance had been left in our seats.

What had been — just two days before — the dirty grey cement parking lot of the North West Plaza had been magically transformed into a carnival midway, it’s light radiating a clear yellow glow, a palpable energy bubbling with possibility. It was as if a large blanket had been thrown over this city block and it was completely changed into something else. Something new had emerged from the desolate slabs of sectioned concrete. Rows of booths had popped up, an assortment of rides extended from side to side and over and up, higher than the mall, taller than streetlights. There was a fresh aroma of cotton candy and hot dogs and a stale, intoxicating scent of grease and freedom.

The carnival was a great place to be on an early September evening, the most amazing place for a boy who thought about girls all day long but was without the freedom of a car, or an apartment or even his own room. The carnival offered a ticket to another world, a new world that had been erected especially for this town, this configuration unique to this neighborhood. It would be gone in a day or two, but for right now, it was a magic space. It was a world where kids were not only allowed to run free, but were welcomed to do so. The carnies knew that parents used the carnival like a babysitter and took comfort in how far a handful of one-dollar bills would take them. The color of money was green, plain and simple, regardless of who was buying the tickets. As long as they weren’t Lot Lice, and actually spent money on games and food and rides, kids were just as welcomed as adults. Even more so, actually, for they were usually a lot less suspecting of scams, and aggressive and combative when they suspected they had been had.

Lynette was thirteen and a cheerleader, beautiful and breathtakingly radiant. She had brown hair that fell to her shoulders, her skin as clear as a sunny day. The bridge of her nose had a slight bump as if it had been broken many years ago when the bone was smaller, but was now an enticing curve. Her Jordache jeans were skin tight, hugging her long thin legs, and she wore a sky blue t-shirt. She was popular and fun and the most attractive girl in the 7th grade. I was a fourteen-year-old boy, a full grade ahead, but desperately struggling not to fall within the cracks.

We waked past the Bumper Cars and a row of games — Duck Race, Basket Throw, Ring Toss, Water Gun Race and Milk Crate Toss — past the ticket booths, a popcorn machine, hot dog and funnel cake stands. I kept my hands stuffed in my pocket, my fingers gripping my remaining nineteen tickets. They were the currency of youth and all the power I had. I pulled out two tickets to win the “really cute” yellow bear that Lynette pointed to at the Balloon Shooting booth, but I could not shoot out enough balloons, the final soft round red balloon swayed and teased, but would not pop.

“That’s okay,” she told me, “I have a stuffed bear at home anyway. On my bed. It was just kinda cute, but I don’t need it.” You had to like a girl who could reason like that.

We stopped at a set of stairs leading into the make-shift boarded structure with two doors — one on the left went into the Fun House and other going right to the house of the Lizard Boy. A jointee sat on a stool between the two doors, cigarette in his lips, taking tickets for each. He looked to be our age or maybe a little older.

I looked to Lynette. “You wanna go in?”

“Which one?” she asked, her face a soft yellow in the light.

“I dunno,” I said, “Whichever one you want. Or both.” I tried to think how many tickets that would use up and if I would have enough.

I looked at the sign for Lizard Boy. A painted figure with a solemn human face on a green lizard body, it’s tail swooping down and over into the L of his name. I wasn’t sure I could take the spectacle, especially after the Tilt A Whirl. “The drawing of that guy kinda creeps me out.”

Lynette raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, maybe later on that one. I’m not a big fan of lizards.” She smiled at me. “Let’s do the fun house though and then the Ferris Wheel.” She grabbed my hand and we climbed the stairs. We walked through the mirrored walls, the slanted floors pushing us left and right. We pointed and laughed at our gargantuan heads, our stubby little legs, our index fingers fat and elongated. We didn’t realize it but we traveled in a circle and ended up exiting out the same door that we went in. As we descended the stairs, Lynette looked back over her shoulder at the Lizard Boy sign and laughed. She pointed across the fairground.

“C’mon, let’s go to the Ferris Wheel. Look how high it goes. I wanna see what it looks like from up there.”

“Wait a minute,” she stopped, turned and began to run to our right. Then she stopped and ran back to me. “Will you buy me a cotton candy?”

“Yeah, of course.”

As we walked back towards the line for the ride, she tore a piece from the pink sticky cloud, and slid it in her mouth, her chin moving upward. We stood behind a mother and father, who tried to retain their place in line while alternately chasing down their two small boys, who kept running off in different directions. I reached in, and with a finger and a thumb, and grabbed a layer of cotton candy and let it dissolve on my tongue, the stickiness becoming wide and thin. We were sharing our first meal, I thought. With a squeal and a frantic wave of her hand, Lynette stopped Diane or Debbie something, a small blond friend who had been walking by with her boyfriend. He was tall and handsome with a chin so strong and imposing, I was convinced it could whoop me all by itself. He wore a football jersey — a white 49 against his red jersey. That number gave no clue as to whether he played offense or defense, but he seemed pensive and agitated. He looked at me — seizing me up and down — and then his lips curled in disgust, and he turned his head away, looking far down the midway. A minute or two later, as they walked away, he turned back to us, shook his head and laughed.

“Your chariot awaits, m’lady,” I joked as Lynette and I boarded the Ferris Wheel, steadying the carriage as it continued to swing gently, even after it touched the ground. We were the last couple in and once we settled in, the large wheel began to turn. We were lifted up, almost straight up, as if on air. The motion was smooth and I moved in a little closer, our thighs almost touching. Lynette looked out, like a kid, as the world below us got small — the trees turned upside down and the houses were squashed to their roofs. Her eyes widened and her smile shined like a beam in the dark night. The sky was pitch black now, stars just small pinholes littered absently as far as the eye could see. Once our little car reached the top, the town opened in front of us. I had never in my life been so high.

“Can you see your house?” I asked.

“Um,” Lynette turned in her seat and looked around a car dangling slightly behind us, “No, I don’t think so. Can you?”

“No,” I said with a laugh. I looked left and right and could see nothing. “I have no idea where my house is.” Yet I could see everything, I could see so much in every direction. It was dark but I could make out trees, and streets and flickering lights and warehouses and cars with their headlights illuminating its way. As the arc turned the other way, we faced the same direction as our car descended.

When we made our way back up, the city spread before use and we were on top of it again. It was intoxicating. Nobody was higher than we were; there was no way anyone could be. We were royalty. I was the king, if only for a split second and if only in the here and now. Lynette sat next to me. She was beautiful, she was a cheerleader, she had a great nose, she had breasts and she was with me, only me. My heart thumbed in my throat, it echoed like a drum, off tempo but loud. It got louder until I panicked. I reached in to Lynette’s neck and kissed her, catching the corner of her mouth with mine. I closed my eyes and held my lips against hers, partially, and breathed in, the summer evening pouring into my skin. I could feel sweat rest between us and I noticed that the ride had stopped, I didn’t realize until I pulled back. The ride had stopped with us on top. She smiled and I looked away.

“Oh look, look,” Lynette was pointing down over the edge of our car. “It’s the vegetable guy. Look, down there.”

There was no roof and you could see right into the Fun House and the Lizard Boy’s house. In a small, square room, with carpets hanging as a backdrop, two sets of lights pointed towards a young man sitting on a pillow, without legs. He was without a shirt, and from our vantage point, we could see his skin was a flaky layer of scales glistening beneath the light. He looked up at us. At the top of the Ferris Wheel, on top of the world, I looked down and extended my middle finger in a great salute. Fuck you Lizard Boy, I thought with a smug smile. Fuck all the carnies, fuck the rides, fuck number 49, fuck that Balloon Shooting game, fuck it all. This moment transcended me somewhere without merit as the big Ferris Wheel turned again and brought us both back to the ground. Lynette did not see what I had done but smiled and raised her eyebrows when our car went past the landing, which meant we would get to go up again. The wheel pushed forward, lifting us back up into the night. When we reached the top I peered over the steel edge of our car and watched Lizard Boy emerge into view again. As he did, he extended his hand and gave me the finger right back. No emotion in his face, but an aggressive and well placed return gesture that shot through the air.

“Oh my gosh, did you see that? The vegetable guy,” Lynette grabbed my arm. “The vegetable guy just flipped us off. He just flipped us the middle finger. I never saw that before.” She began to laugh. “Oh my gosh, that is so hilarious.”

The sky swallowed me up, the stars disappeared and black fell away in shattered pieces. “Good for you, Lizard Boy,” I thought, “Good for you.”

The Wages of Sin is Death

2010-12-04T11:30:00.000-06:00

It is really not fair what happened. Some thought I was pushed and others thought I jumped but nobody thought about actually reaching down and grabbing me by my coat and pulling me up. Nobody thought about saving my life. I heard some gasping, I guess, their mouths open, but every single one of them remained up there on the platform, frozen. Not one of them actually moved, not even an inch. Some pointed, as if by merely recognizing that another human being was laying motionless between the rails that would suddenly render him airborne, and, miraculously, out of harms way. Spineless twits. The train was coming fast, it was very close, but I could have been saved. No one gave a single thought to saving my life. They didn’t budge. The train came maybe a minute after I landed, it’s headlights bearing down on me. Almost from the very first moment, I could feel the heat of the light. Time was short but I could have been saved, if only somebody had had an actual backbone.

Even though it as slowing down as it entered the station, that subway was coming in at a good clip. I tell you, they are a lot faster and more powerful when you are just sitting right in front of one, instead of standing off the side on a platform. Those things can really fly. My body was crushed immediately; almost all of my insides were shattered, contained by my bruised and battered skin. My bones crumbled as I bounced off the front car and hit the cement wall and then back again countless times. I don’t recall being afraid or even being in pain, I just remember bouncing around like a pinball, my breath escaping through my pores, my skin peeling away as if in a dream.

The story in the newspaper the next day seized the most fantastic option, of course, the solid black headline boldly accusing a gang of “malicious teenagers” of shoving an innocent businessman onto the tracks of the subway, where he was crushed just moments later by an oncoming train. One witness even confessed to hearing the kids talk about it before committing their crime – and these quotes are what they said they heard – “That guy needs his face smashed against the tracks” and another said, “I’m going to do it.” I am laughing now, recalling that. That didn’t happen. I swear it didn’t. There were some kids in a clump hanging near the trash can several feet away, but they didn’t say those things, and they didn’t push me. People’s truths are whatever they want it to be.

The papers really ran with that angle, the newsprint ablaze with a story full of twists as the so-called facts were uncovered. The next day’s headlines revealed that the “innocent businessman” was actually a lawyer who was under a federal probe –– the investigation centering on his firm’s clients who had been “taken advantage of.” They love to play up the good guy/bad guy scenario. Yeah, I was being investigated, singled out, but the clients in question were so clueless, that a baby could have taken candy from them. I didn’t do anything wrong though. The probe was misguided, and I was innocent. Some of the partners were really putting heat on me, really pissing me off, proving to me that they didn’t care about the truth, only their precious reputation. It was all garbage and they knew it. Peterson and Flojack were so eager to tell the papers lies and sound like heroes, and that is just what they did. Spineless twits. Most of the claimed accusations could not be substantiated — that was as clear as the nose on my face — but It didn’t matter. Or doesn’t matter now. It sold papers for a few weeks and then it was forgotten about. The story died away and I was still dead.

If truth be told, I was not pushed and I didn’t jump. I didn’t kill myself that day. I did a stupid thing, I will admit that. I kept looking down the track to see if a train was coming, but the fat guy standing beside me kept looking down the tracks at the same time I did, every time I would, so I couldn’t see. This guy was one fat ass. It was ridiculous. Every single time. My temper got the best of me and in a huff, I took an angry step out to get a really good look. I slipped on the edge of the platform, right off that hard yellow rubber coating designed to give passengers better footing, and tumbled down to the floor of the subway. I hit my head on one of the rails and couldn’t move. Fat ass was up on the platform and I was a lame duck lying on the tracks.

If I hadn’t done that one stupid thing, I wouldn’t have fallen. If I hadn’t hit my head, I would have lived. If I had lived, I would have been able to climb back up. I would have been able to defend myself from the half-baked truths that people were signing their names to. I would have shown them that there were huge holes in every single story those people had came up with. Every single claim was unsubstantiated. I was too good to let something like that happen. I could have burned huge holes in every single charge, every single angle. But no, things are a little different now. It’s just not fair what happened.

When This Flesh and Heart Shall Fail

2010-10-30T16:05:00.003-05:00

A fisherman drove two journalists down to the lake where he had found the body two days before. It was a cold November morning and the men could see their breath as they uncurled their bodies from the front seat of the pickup truck. The journalists pulled out their notebooks and their small cameras and let the fisherman lead the way. “Right over here,” he said.

The men walked down the bank, through twenty feet of trees. The men leaned against tree trunks along the way, with barks hard and unforgiving in the crisp air. The leaves heaved and cracked below their feet. The fisherman looked to the ground as if he were tracing his own footsteps, which he most certainly was. He knew this land by the ground in which he moved over, for he had traveled this very path since he was a child. The journalists followed, trying to keep pace and yet at the same time they wanted to take in every inch, they didn’t want to miss a thing. A clue, an angle, inspiration. They looked over their shoulders, and then out across the lake. Finally the fisherman came to an area, high with weeds, limp and slumped in every direction.

“Here, here is where I found her,” the fisherman said and looked at the two men. They did not write in their notebooks or take any pictures, at least not yet. They just looked to one another and then back to the fisherman.

One of them spoke, “How did you find her? How did you come upon this place? It seems,” he looked back over his shoulder,” It seems pretty unremarkable.”

The fisherman looked out over the lake. “Well, it was a morning. Warmer than today. And I was walking by to get over there.” He pointed a few yards away, further around the lake, to a clearing. “That is a place I like to fish. Just like to go there sometimes to pass the time. Funny to think that being a fisherman, what I like to do on my time off is the same: fishin.”

“And you just saw her body lying there?” the second journalist asked.

“It was floating. I saw the red of the jacket. That is what caught my eye – the red.” He looked to the other men, now writing in their notebooks. “Funny that as soon as I saw the patch of red, I knew it was a dead body and I just knew it was a young girl. It didn’t come as a surprise at all. I just knew.”

The second journalist spoke again. “So what did you do then? After you saw her and realized it was a dead young woman?”

The fisherman scrunched his eyebrows and scratched his scalp. He didn’t anticipate having to answer all these questions again, not after the police had made him go over the details countless times, the evening after he had pulled Janice Piotrowski from the lake. He thought he was just doing a good deed, showing these men the place so they could write their story, or whatever they were here to do.

“I don’t know. I just looked at her, I guess. I looked at her face and wondered what her last thoughts were and how she could have ended up like this. Her mouth was kind of open as if she was about to talk but she didn’t. I didn’t think about nothing else. I got into my truck, same one I drove you with, and went to the police station to tell them what I found.”

As the journalists inched themselves closer to the edge of the lake, looking into the murky grey green water, the fisherman turned and walked slowly back up to the truck. He sat for just a minute and then started the engine and drove off towards home.

Til Death Us Do Part

2010-09-11T11:59:00.018-05:00

Every morning she read the obituaries first. She hated to dwell on the national news for she found it far too depressing; the local news only slightly less so. They were hidden at the back of the “On The Town” section of The Shiawassee Daily Harold. After the local news and the neighborhood crime blotters, the obituaries were tucked behind the want ads — a fitting location, perhaps, for it was where everyone in town would eventually end up.

She was extremely aware that as she aged, these two pages took on a greater relevancy. Yet their true attraction held some mystery to her. She did not search the death notices with a normal human curiosity, in search of a footnote to some lost life she had once known. Granted, that happened more and more with each passing year – old high school classmates, old neighbors up and down Burgess Street, men and women she used to work with during her twenty-three years at the telephone company – they fell away one by one, she noted, without her influence or prayers to the contrary. She was not led in validation of her own life, noting the accomplishment of having lived at least one day longer than those poor souls that were listed. And she did not scan the death notices in a desperate confirmation that, despite her unforgiving muscles and fragile bones, she was still alive. No, her attraction to the obituaries was unique. Each day, her eyes darted over the names in bold, the ages at the time of death, her eyes lost in a sea of “God called him home” and “Beloved wife and mother”, she scanned the rows of faces in search of an explanation. Though she would quietly whisper “Katherine McCarthy” softly to herself as she looked, she did more than look for her own name. She wanted to find but a simple explanation surrounding her name. It was from the death notices that she longed for words to emerge, to be born in ink and blood, and explain how she could be alive and yet, at the same time, be married to a widower.

Her husband, Gordon McCarthy, was never one to give in to sentiment and with a growl and a casual wave of his hand, called the death notices “the section of past tense.” He avoided the section at all costs, perhaps out of fear. He ceremoniously took the front page first, whipping the pages to their full extent, his eyebrows raised to receive the news about corporate bailouts, the two young boys murdered near the tracks at Culver Avenue and political misfortune in the statehouse. His mouth would open slightly, his bottom lip protruding out in a melted curl, providing an inverted bookend with the bottom of his nose. His head slowly fell and then rose again as he scanned the columns for the headlines that interested him. He read his newspaper in silence, clearing his throat now and then as if the bad news had evaporated from the newsprint and collected at the back of his mouth, needing to be dispensed. He would drink his coffee and rub his hand back and forth through his thinning hair, waking the vast skin on top of his head. He shuffled the section back along its inherent crease, folded it in half, and set it on the coffee table, where he knew it would be waiting for him, untouched, when he returned from work that evening. He climbed the stairs, brushed his teeth, adjusted his tie and gathered his bag. He gave the front door a clean, heard shut behind him, pausing only to hear the lock click and echo against the walls. He would turn and walk the two blocks to the commuter train. He did this each workday morning, and each workday morning, he neglected to give Katherine a proper good bye or wish her a good day or even inquire as to what she was going to do that day. It was as if he lived in the house alone. To him, the house was empty when he left and would remain unstirred until his return.

The silence settled after his departure and it was only then that Katherine began to slowly move about the house, as if reemerging back into her own life. Her living day only began after he left. So perhaps it was not a person she looked for in the obituaries but rather a reason – how she seemed to not be alive when he was around. An explanation as to how her husband had become a widower, and was living the life of a widower, without actually ever having lost his wife. But she was his wife, surely. They had been married for almost thirty years and she was still alive. Katherine was still living and breathing. Wasn’t she?

When she thought of this, Katherine would smile to herself. She was alive, of course, she did not doubt that. But she could not understand how it had all happened. When did it happen? As much as she thought on it, she could not remember when it was that she had “passed away.” When did he stop seeing her? When did she feel as if her skin were transparent? Since she retired from the phone company, her days did have a formless quality to them but they were real days, she was sure of it, and they were her days. They were the days of a real living, breathing human. She enjoyed her mornings and afternoons, full days alone while Gordon was at work. She relished getting out when the weather was nice, kneeling on her hands and knees in the garden. She liked to pull the weeds, she would tell the young girl at the nursery, with a giggle. She liked to sweat a little, it felt like the right thing to do in the summer. In the afternoons, she read mysteries and loved to do crossword puzzles. Three days a week, she would meet up with Carol, who lived two doors down, and they would drive to the nature preserve and walk along the path for a good forty-five minutes. The time was all hers and she enjoyed the collective moments that made her day.

The evenings, however, were different. He would come home and the air seemed to change. The house would be his again. She seemed to evaporate upon his arrival, her personality taking on a translucent hue. Out of the corner of her eye, as she sat at the dinner table and paid some bills, she would watch Gordon as he moved about the house, putting a fork and a plate in the dishwasher, flipping through the mail, grabbing the leash off the small hook near the front door and hooking it to Cookie’s collar. Little things. Small things he did when he got home from work each evening. Sometimes she actually stopped what she was doing and watched him. She did not understand it but his every movement seemed to be done within an echo. It made her think he was moving in an empty house, completely void of her presence. He did not speak much, he would grumble about what an awful day it had been or why did they have to go to that open house on the weekend or did she pay the electric bill yet? Small talk, small tasks, of small importance, really. And even those utterances seemed more like a monologue rather than dialogue. He never really wanted an answer or didn’t wait to hear her reply. He would sink in his chair, the tone of his skin matching the pale brown fabric and he seemed to disintegrate into the evening. Often he just gazed out the window, his eyes staring, lost, deep in thought. Katherine would shake her head and think that their times together were like Gordon’s obituaries — they were “evenings of past tense.”

She longed to be alive again, all day long. She wanted to be whole again, to exist, to be longed for, to be listened to, to be touched. She wanted to be a complete person again, twenty-four hours a day. The distance grew and as the years rolled into more years, the absence in his eyes grew deeper, and Katherine began to slowly pull away from Gordon, at the very time she knew she missed him the most. She searched but she could no longer see the man she married. His skin had become pasty, his cheeks full and jowly, his hair thinning and wiry. The paunch around his midsection was large and full, like a pillow pushed against its case. His shoulders had vanished and his arms hung from his neck as if they were held together with rubber bands. His physical appearance did not bother her all, not by itself, but it was coupled with the fact that his body had, somewhere along the way, rejected her body. Maybe even rejected his own. What frightened her was when she realized that she could not no longer see him in his own eyes, or even in the way he walked, the way he moved his fingers. She no longer could see the man she knew, the man who had made her heart jump and expand when she picked up the phone and he would softly say her name. His voice had melted her. What had happened to that man, she thought, the man she had fallen in love with?

Katherine moved down the pasta aisle, the small back wheel on her silver cart squeaking with each turn. They used to go grocery shopping together, she remembered, back when they first met. They loved to walk around the bulk food section, pointing out the brilliant color of some new spice, dropping small clear bags into their cart. Her mind swam in her thoughts of yesterday. She moved past the shelves of odd colors and shapes, remembering and forgetting things she thought were long lost. She thought of when she was a young girl and she was sit at the kitchen table and stare at her father’s sideburns. They seemed so big and bushy, so foreign to anything she knew or called familiar. She closed her eyes and smiled, remembering how he smelled, how he walked. There was an old high school boyfriend named Tommy Jenkins, with whom they were their class’ cutest couple their senior year. He was the first boy who told her that she was pretty and when she was around him, she felt pretty. She even recalled an installer at the phone company who would stop by her desk every other day or so and flirt with her. They were both married and he spoke of his wife in a straightforward manner, always praising her as a wife, as a mother, but she was sure he was flirting with her nonetheless. As she picked up a jar of pickles, she found that she could not recall his name. She smiled at the thought, of his smell. But she just couldn’t remember his name. She pushed her cart to the edge of the checkout area, feeling utterly lost. As she held the dog-eared grocery list in her hand, she glanced around at people pushing their carts around her and through her. She turned in both directions. She was lulled by the glow of the florescent lights, and the aisle signs urging her to “Buy Now” and “Sale” What was his name, she wondered, Jack? Jake? John?

Each time she headed to the grocery store, she always grabbed the grocery list and stuck it in her purse. She did not need it to shop, however, and would only look at it after she had finished. She did not need to; she knew what she had written during the week. She would pull out the list only when she had finished the routine of walking up and then down each aisle, filling her cart, one box, one bottle, one canister at a time. Not yet committing herself to the checkout line, she would then stand at the end of an aisle and cross items off the list that were resting askew in her cart. That was part of her shopping routine. Today was different, however, she didn’t even bother to look at the list. She pushed the paper back in her purse. Ho hum, she thought. If she forgot anything, whatever she might have missed, could be picked up with the next trip.

She loaded the bags into her trunk and then sat in her car, her keys in her hand, staring through the windshield, unable to move. She closed her eyes and remembered sitting behind the wheel over thirty years before, giving Gordon a ride home on that very first night they met. He was filthy from trying to fix his car, his muffler had fallen off. His hands were almost black, his arms tattooed with black grease. And his eyes – oh god, his eyes – were so soft, they seemed to understand everything she was feeling. They were blue, but they weren’t really blue. They had a depth of brown to them, a darkness that held the blue. She fell in love the moment he slid into her passenger seat and looked at her with those eyes. She never told him that but she was his from that very first moment. He was so beautiful, every part of every piece of him. The way his mouth curled when he smiled. He kept looking away. He was embarrassed to be so dirty, his hands and arms, the front of his shirt, but she thought he looked perfect. He looked just as he was supposed to look, Katherine thought later. His voice was gentle, higher then than it was now, and his words fluttered and soared like small birds around as he spoke in short sentences. He had a knack for giggling in mid-sentence, without missing a beat, so his words floating in and around his smile. She thought he talked like a song, the pitch extending in several ways, all at once. That night she thought she could listen to the sound of his voice for the rest of her life.

She forgot the groceries in the car, and walked into the house, her memories pulling her along, her body weightless like a ballerina carried across the stage. How she longed to be alive with Gordon, once again, in love as they once were. Young and open, dirty and vulnerable. Her heart ached; her skin seemed to peel away as she floated past the kitchen and into the dining room. She could hear Gordon’s voice. The pitch, the giggle, the laugh, muffled into the phone, just as it was when he was twenty-five and newly in love. It was all so vivid to her now. Her smiles covered her skin and warmed her every pore. She was alive now, here with Gordon, young and in love. It was foolish to say “again,” for, surely, she was in love still. His voice then cracked and she distinctly heard him say softly but vividly, “Oh come on, Michelle, a red wine would be perfect.” She stopped, her body dropped, falling suddenly. The name, the reality grabbed her by the throat. She reached her hand against the wall, her hip pushing against a wooden dining room chair. He laughed again, hushing his words in the phone. She could actually hear him smile. Somehow in his voice, she could feel his heart leap, much like it did thirty years ago.

It was when she heard him say her name a second time – there was no mistake -- the pain flashed down her body and back up again and she understood what was now painfully true. It was as true as her own breath: he was a widower. In his heart, she was no longer alive.

The Man Who Repaired Watches, Chapter 4 (first draft)

2010-06-25T22:16:00.001-05:00

I was born in 1922, in Monschau, Germany. It was a little village, small farms and little shops. We did not have a lot. My father, my mother, I had a younger brother and sister. I was the oldest. I was named Adolph Adler, after my father’s brother, who died of a fever when he was twenty years old, just before I was born.

My mother was small and thick as a house, as strong as an ox. She was a very sweet woman, very kind-hearted. She did not have any education but she was not simple-minded. She used to take my cheeks in her hands, squeeze my face until my lips puckered, kiss my forehead and say that it was a kiss from God. She was only there to deliver it, she would say. She loved to do that and it always made me smile. It made her smile too.

We came to America in 1932, when I was a little boy. I was ten years old. We came into Ellis Island but then went by train to New Jersey. I remember being very afraid of everything during the trip. I didn’t remember too many things that happened, I only remember being afraid for long periods of time. I can still remember the feeling of being on that boat to this day, swaying as if we were sloshing around in the bowels of a great giant. It all took such a long time. The boat and the train, the wait. Always the wait. It was like being afraid was my normal state. Once we got off the boat, my father was afraid of losing me. My father held my hand very tightly when we first came, when we stood in the Great Hall. I held onto my brother who held on to my sister but my father had me. I remember that, very well. He squeezed all my fingers together. There were so many people here, in America, that I could hardly breathe. I saw more people in that first day in America than I had seen in my whole life combined.

We settled in a little town called Hammonton, New Jersey. We lived on Bellevue Avenue. It was a good street, good people, the best in New Jersey. A family from our village had settled there a couple of years earlier and they were able to give us shelter when we first arrived, and they helped us in our first days as Americans.

My father was a simple man, he did not want much in life. He cared very much about his family and doing good. He made violins in a little shop with two other men, August Hoffman and Frederick Geisler. He was a very good violinmaker, my father. They would put ads in the paper and people would come from miles away – New Jersey, sometimes Philadelphia – to get a violin made by him or they would plead with him to repair a violin that had been broken or had come apart. He charged $10. The Josef Metzner violins cost more, $75, 80. The violins that my father made were even more beautiful, I think. His fingers were delicate and his eyes seemed so focused on a bridge or an errant string, that he sometimes forgot the time and as sun had set, my mother would have to send me to the shop to retrieve my father. “I just need a little bit longer, my son,” he would say, “Just a little bit longer. Stay here and count for me. I will be done before you reach one hundred.” I would sit on a stool against the wall and begin counting. As much as I wanted my father to be finished and to begin our walk home together, I knew that he needed me to count very slowly. I never failed to reach triple digits. Still not ready, Father always begged me to start again at zero.

Hammonton New Jersey was a long way from Germany, I can tell you that. There was no comparing one to the other and I never did. Once we were in America, I did not look back. None of us did. It was just so different here. Better in so many ways so I never thought about Germany again. Oh I thought of smells and trees from our village, but I never wished to be back, not for a minute. My father said that we would have a new life in America, where anything was possible. It was true; you could feel it from the very first day. We could make things for ourselves and do things for ourselves. My mother cried a lot at the beginning. She would sit in her chair in the evening and rest her head on her hand. The candle would burn on the table next to her and she would gaze out the small rectangular parlor window and watch the people move up and down Bellevue, right near the corner at Third Street. But she made friends here and became “the mayor” of our block.

Adolf Hitler came to power at just about that same time we left, 1932. I don’t remember if he was in power before we left or not. Even if he wasn’t actually in power yet he was around. He had written that book he wrote five, ten years before so he was around. I remember him but it was in America that I realized what he meant to our family. It was after we arrived, that my father would sit with his coffee each morning and mutter about “what would have happened to us” if we had stayed in Germany. He worried about our friends and his aunts and uncles, all those who remained. My father knew that that little man was trouble. Hitler was a very charismatic and he came along at the right time – or rather, the wrong time -- he gave the people a great deal of hope. It was only the idea of hope, I guess. It was a hope that was rooted in anger though, in lashing out at all the things he could point his finger at. He had such energy, and what seemed like such love of Germany, and his people, was really based on anger and hatred. He called us the Great Race, but what he really felt was hatred for any other race, especially Jews. He raised his fist and his anger quickly became our anger. I wish we had really listened to what he was shouting about in those squares. I wish we really thought about those words. We only heard the things we wanted to hear. I cannot talk for all of Germany, but I did not know what he was really talking about then, not like we know now. Now, we know. I remember his speeches were like songs. He spoke of revolt and how we shouldn’t be suppressed. Germany was the greatest nation in the world, he reminded us; the German people came directly from God. He said that our country was great. It was beautiful land and that we had everything – art, culture, industry, delicious foods.

He believed that we could be a world power, but we were in a slumber, he said, and that we needed to rebel in holy hatred against those Jewish bankers who had dishonored Germany and put us in that slumber. As a German Jew, I felt like those bankers must be bad but the thought that they were at the root of all that ailed the country made me sick. I was only ten years old, after all. He spoke about removing the Jews that had come to Germany since 1914 but we didn’t know exactly what he meant to do. We thought he just wanted to remove any power those men had. I remember that he first spoke about a dozen bad Jewish bankers and then by the end of the war, we heard the numbers were much worse. All the men, all the women and children. We didn’t know.

We were just people looking for hope. Many people in Germany were very down at that time, many poor people and they wanted to believe everything that man said. At first, I know I did. Like any child, I wanted my father and mother to be happy and not to worry, about anything. Even as a young boy, as a young Jew born in Germany, I could feel the change in energy. My father, however, did not like the man. From the very start, he knew the “bad” he held in his heart would only gets worse over time. A leader, he told me, has to be able to see all points and make good, rational decisions. He said Hitler’s head was filled with cabbage and that at the end of the day, the German people would still long for real nourishment.

I remember listening to him once or twice on the radio then and, of course, he was spoken of in our home a great deal. We did not know then what we know now. At the time, many Germans thought he was good, that his approach would bring prosperity. My father did not believe it. I guess he had read his words more closely than I did, he knew what was happening. I remember him shaking his head a great deal during that time. He would hold the book he was reading firmly in his hands, or the newspaper, and bring them to his chest. I think he knew what would happen, he seemed to know that he would not only not bring prosperity but he would bring irreplaceable damage instead. Looking back, I felt that Father began to mourn his own life at that time. He knew his Germany was changing and that he would never be the same. It was as if his first thirty years had been wiped out.

Once we had reached America, I remember cutting wood in a field in the late afternoon. It must have been around 1940, the winter of ‘40. My hands were very cold, red and chapped. My father walked up to me with his hands in his pockets and when he spoke, it was in a very quiet tone. He seemed very troubled. He said he was sorry that I had to share such a name. Such a great name, really. He told me that the name had been his brother’s name and that I should remember that it was a great name, indeed, a name to be proud of. He shook his head and said that his brother Adolph was everything that he was not, a great young man. He looked up to him and it was a sad, sad day when he died. He had hoped that the name would be a source of pride for me, that it would be a reminder for how to be great, like my uncle. Not like the man now in Germany. He couldn’t even say his name after a while. The names of both men were spelled differently but when spoken, they were exactly the same. I tried to remember what Father told me but it was very difficult. Over the years, it proved to be the worst name imaginable. No matter what I knew about the origins of my name, I could never tell people about my uncle. I never got a chance. It was too unique of a name here in America no matter the spelling, and people already drew a connection before I had a chance to speak. It was a German name and the name of one German in particular. The name became a scar etched all along my skin, visible to all who looked my way. It was a reminder, a connection to evil and hatred. But they were not my crimes. But it did not matter. You cannot escape such a name, as much as you would like. When you have a name that people hate, it becomes a poison that seeps through your skin. You begin to hate yourself too.

This man

2010-06-23T11:40:00.005-05:00

That man
Alone in the park
In the soiled and ragged flannel shirt
Struggling to stand

Was told by his English teacher
In the 11th grade
That he was special
That he had a gift
That he could paint pictures with words
That the future was his.

But it only took a few soft turns
Almost unrecognizable at first
And my future was lost.

Monday morning

2010-06-14T11:39:00.002-05:00

She was breathtakingly beautiful
But she smelled of vinegar.

The Man Who Repaired Watches, Chapter 3 (first draft)

2010-04-21T21:08:00.013-05:00

Four months later, I returned to A & A Watch Repair. The crown had begun to stick. It was a little hard to turn and made a very slight clicking sound when I wound it. The watch was made to be worn but when it is a fifty-year-old watch, it also needs a little more attention and care than the newer models, just to survive.

After explaining the problem, I stood at the door, just as I did months earlier, and watched this watch repairman raise his head just slightly and look at the watch as if for the first time. He shook his head and told me to come back at the beginning of next week.

“Hey, do you have a business card?” I asked. “I, uh, I was talking with a guy from work and he has a watch . . .” My little lie trailed off and I did not finish my sentence.

He looked around and gave me a postcard, yellowed but, otherwise, in mint condition:

Not exactly a business card, but it gave me my first bit of insight into this little man who repaired watches in a tiny suite among the gold and silver and diamond shops. A man who repaired all makes of defective watches, and complicated watches were his specialty.

When I picked up my watch four days later, I greeted him with a smile. “How are you? I asked.

“Oh I am alright,” he responded with a slight head tilt.

“Well, you look great.”

“Ah. But how do I feel?” He scrunched up his face. “I have no choice.”

He reached down to a shelf below his bench and took out a small worn box, upside down with the opening facing up, the cardboard edges worn to tapered curves. I watched as Adolph Adler held my watch between this thumb and forefinger and then delicately placed it in my hand. I tried to grab it with the same care in which it had been handed me.

“That watch,” he said, pointing his eyes. “I remember that watch.”

“Yeah. It seems to like you. I tried to stay away but it keeps wanting to come back,” I laughed. “It must really love your tender loving care. Who am I to stand in its way?”

“No, that watch, that Bulova. I remember that Bulova. It was one of the first watches I ever fixed, one of the first wristwatches I ever touched.”

I raised my eyebrows and listened. “When? How? You remember this kind of watch?”

“Yeah.

“Just like this one?”

“I had just opened my shop. It was nineteen hundred and fifty-three, so the watch must have been brand new then. I had learned to fix pocket watches but hadn’t really worked on wristwatches yet. I don’t recall if it was the first or just one of the first wristwatches I had ever seen, but I marveled at the way it looked when I held it in my hand. I had never seen something so fine, and I watched the light dance off the face. It was very beautiful.”

“Wow, you remember that watch, this watch? That is unbelievable. And what a coincidence that I come to you with the same kind of watch.”

“I was still very young then, thirty years old, but I did not feel like that. I remember that I felt like an old man. Only then I did not know what that meant. The watch tired me out, it made me feel very tired. And I just wanted to rest. I just wanted to hide, to disappear behind a sea of watches, with all the wheels and bridges. I stood in my shop, this shop, and I knew how important it was that I would fix watches. I wanted to be in control. I did not want to feel old too soon, I wanted to hold time, to fix it. I wanted to be with watches and always know what the time would be.”

At that point, Adolph Adler looked up to me and smiled. It was a slight smile but he held his gaze and his lips parted, to reveal yellow teeth, slightly pushed together and overlapping, like dominoes in a line, reacting to the previous and affecting those that followed. I wasn’t sure if the smile accentuated that which he just revealed or if it implied it was a precursor to a budding friendship.

“Do you remember who brought the watch in? Do you remember the man?”

Adolph turned away. He reached for the papers on a desk that stood at the back of the wall, an old wooden desk, the top obliterated by a mass of letters and receipts and torn open envelopes.

“Yes, I remember that man very well. I have thought about that man every day of my life.”

“Wow, that watch must hold a special place in your life. For you to remember it after so many years and to even remember the guy who owned it. That is pretty incredible.”

“Yes, it is a beautiful watch. It is hard to forget such beauty. Some things so beautiful touch you and you can remember it as long as you want to. And sometimes you have no choice, you cannot forget some things. You have a beautiful watch, young man, just like that first watch that I saw.”

“You must have some great stories. All those years,” I said, but I could see he did not hear me. He shuffled slowly back to his workbench and rested his hands on the counter.

“But the man I remember too. That man is a dog.”

The Man Who Repaired Watches, Chapter 2 (first draft)

2010-04-15T21:53:00.002-05:00

“It is the canon pinion, more than likely” he said. “I can have it for you in two days.”

I ran through the calendar in my head. “That would be, uh, Tuesday?” I asked.

“You want it sooner, I can do it this afternoon. Maybe I can fix it today. For you. You are a good boy. You came in before, many months ago. I remember.”

“Yes, well, that would be great. If you can . . .”

“I can do it today.” He smiled at me. “I want you to wear your watch. It was made to be worn. You should wear it.”

“Oh I agree,” I said with a smile. “You know, I didn’t wear it for years after I got it. When I first got it, I kept it in my sock drawer, in a little cloth sack that I made in the fourth grade. I didn’t want to damage it. But I loved it. I looked at it all the time. The numbers, the hands. Even the slight little dents and scratches. Then I realized that if I really loved it, then I should wear it. I should use it to tell the time. Just like you said, like it is supposed to do.”

He looked up from the watch and smiled. “Ah, it can be done in a few hours.”

As he stood there at the door, he set the watch down on the small counter that hinged off the back of the door, which served as the working counter in his small shop. He reached for a small tool and began to work on my watch then and there. He opened the back and began to look inside. I watched his face; his eyes darted around the small rectangle. He took everything in, moving his head slightly in different directions, making sure parts were where they were supposed to be, and looked just as they should. The gears and the various wheels, the pins, the springs and coils. The inside of the watch was a silver maze, with tiny caverns and alleys, but this small man who stood before me drew me in. As we stood, only a door separated us but there was so much more that rested between us. He was an old man and I was a young man with over forty years connecting us. I did not yet know his name and only then, did I really look at him for the first time. He looked like a sea captain, a small and gentle sea captain. His skin was pale and I could see his grey whiskers peek through his cheek and chin. His eyebrows were more salt than pepper and a few hairs reached up to his forehead. His face was small, gentle and his nose looked as if it had been broken in his youth, with a gentle bump leading down to a soft point. He was serious as he gazed down at my watch, as if it were a lover and he were contemplating where to touch and kiss first. His fingers were small and thick, a permanent dirt covering the tips. He held my Bulova with no force but with all the gentleness of an artist about to apply his craft.

I stood and watched him lift parts delicately out of the watch, this watch that, now in his hands, seemed to belong to him more than me. The watch surrendered itself to this man at A & A Watch Repair, and he, in turn, touched it just as it needed to be touched, the right parts in the right order. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. I felt like a voyeur.

“Do you know anything about that particular watch? Someone told me once it was called a Lindy, after Charles Lindbergh. Do you think that is true? His big flight was 1929. That would make it pretty old.”

His bottom lip curled out a bit, as he looked down, his thumb and forefinger gently squeezing the band of my watch.

“No, no,” he muttered. “It is not like that. Look here.” His fingers gently held the pieces loose on the face side. Still holding the band, he flipped it over and pointed with his right pinky to the case back of the watch. Etched in the silver plate of the back, under the word “Bulova,” was a marking – “L3”

“Roman numerals. It was made in 1953.”

“Ah,” I said in a breath and shook my head quietly. “Well, still over fifty years old.” I waited for more information, but that is all Adolph would give me.

“You come at 5 o’clock and I will have the watch ready for you.”

That was the way one should do business, I thought as I entered the elevator. There was no claim ticket. I knew where I was — my watch was at A & A Watch Repair, in Jewelers Row in Chicago. In turn, I didn’t need to give him my name. I was the face that brought in the watch and the timepiece he was fixing was my Bulova made in 1953. That was all that was needed.

The Man Who Repaired Watches, Chapter 1 (first draft)

2010-04-08T21:51:00.007-05:00

It was a Bulova men’s watch from the early fifties, thin and sleek in design, with a rectangular face, beveled crystal, framed by gold ornamentation. The hour and minute hands were slender with tips that seemed to have been dipped in gold as they narrowed to a severe point. The second hand was regulated to a tiny circle resting right above the “6.” The numbers too were gold, rounded in an old world font. The dial itself had a soft, light bronze tone.

The wristwatch had been my late grandfather’s, though I did see how he could have worn a watch with such a small wristband. He was at least three inches taller than I was, much heavier, and yet the watch fit my wrist perfectly. In 1978, shortly before his death, he had passed the watch on to my older brother – who was, in fact, ten inches taller than me – who, in turn, gave it to me. I don’t think my brother ever wore it and surely, did not realize what a gift he had given me. It was a beautiful watch, almost feminine in appearance, clean and simple, in excellent shape except for the small and unfortunate fact that it was also not running.

I knew instantly where to go and whom I trusted to get the watch back in perfect working order again.

I held it in my hand as I walked past the front desk in the lobby of the Mallers Building on Wabash Avenue. It had been several years since my last visit but I still knew the way. The elevators were divided into two banks: one for floors 1-13 and the other car for the remaining floors14-26. I got in the first car and pushed the button for the thirteenth floor. The metal accordion doors came slowly to a close, gingerly meeting in the middle. The Mallers Building had been built in 1926, and I wondered how old the elevators in fact were, if the cars were original to the building, for they seemed to have witnessed their share of riders. The car shook with a start and then moved upward with a low grinding sound, gritty and determined. A young woman enter from three, the floor with the cafeteria, and broke away from her phone call long enough to push the tenth floor button. I could smell her perfume waif through the car as she complained about someone “being a bitch.” The woman was proud she did something and declared, “she’s just jealous she didn’t do it first.” As the door slowly slid back open, the woman got off, and disappeared from view. I looked up and watched the numbers resume their climb to 11, 12 and finally the 13th floor.

I followed the directional signs pointing me left and then around the corner and down the hall. The air was musty, the carpeting a dirty grey with a maroon red scattered throughout. There was no other activity on the floor, either in the hallways or, from what I could see, in any of the suites of jewelers and diamond shops.

Finally turning the second corner, I came upon the familiar suite 1300. I could see directly into the window that butted up against the front door. It was odd sensation since in all of my previous visits, I could never see into the office for the usual clutter and the limits of the walls and ceiling. The suite was tiny, a mere closet really. The width was that of the front door and the side window, a distance of maybe six feet. The depth of the shop was equally confined, maybe eight or ten feet deep cut with a thin wall that separated the “front” part of the shop from the “back.” It now occurred to me that since the space was so small, it seemed silly not to utilize its entirety. The front door was the same, the deep mahogany wood with its brass door knob, the dirty black mail slot and the glass window which had always been blank except for the suite number at the top now held a new logo – a geometric diamond shape in bronze with black letters, TLC Jewelry Designs. This wasn’t right, this just wasn’t right.

A & A Watch Repair had been there for fifty-seven years. The same location, the same tiny little suite on the thirteenth floor of the same building. It had been there through the several wars – big and small – and many presidents. It had noted the passing of changing social mores and fashions, political and economic climates and a swirling array of tenants that had come and gone on the very same floor. A & A Watch Repair had seen watches move from self-winding to electric, from being beautiful pieces of jewelry to being constructed as large durable and rugged, made to tell the time in seven zones and withstand constant drubbing against the side of a mountain. The constant was simple. People always needed to know the time. They needed to be at work on time or to catch the 7:17 train. They needed to meet their husband for dinner. They relied on their watch to time a three-minute egg or know when to come back home, at the very time their mother told them. Invariably, people always needed their watch repaired. They depended on their watch and depended on it performing accurately and with precision. For fifty-seven years, they had depended on A & A Watch Repair to make their watches run as if brand new. There had always been a wrist somewhere wearing a watch that needed a new crystal, that needed a thorough cleaning, a watch that was running a little slow. Watches that needed some tender loving care by a man who knew all makes of watches, all kinds of problems. Surely those watches were still around. A watch repair shop cannot just . . .close.

I walked through the hallway and found it eerily quiet. I still didn’t see anyone in any of the suites but now the floor felt even more barren. The entire floor seemed vacant. The air was still, very still. I pushed the elevator button and the doors opened quickly, as if they had not moved since letting me off ten minutes earlier and had just waited to take me back down to the ground floor. My head swirled and I thought of the first few times I had come to his shop, those first few visits where we shared our thoughts. I recalled the times I spent standing at his door, watching him ply his trade, as he told me stories about his life. He was such a knowledgeable and capable watch repairman, such a remarkable man. But now as I stood in the lobby of 5 South Wabash Avenue – my watch still in my fist – I was reminded of the obvious.

Eighty-five year old Adolph Adler was gone.

Guns Are Very Heavy

2010-03-02T20:46:00.002-06:00

I had never seen a real gun up close, yet alone held one in my hands. It was very black and extremely heavy. The color was so dark, so deep, that the shine on the barrel seemed to melt upon my gaze. It was firm, cold and angular. I held it in my palm, bouncing it lightly up and down, feeling the weight, it’s thick dead weight. My fingers curled abound the metal, my index finger of my right hand pressing softly against the trigger. I felt anxious, guilty, as if I was preparing to rob a bank. I entertained the thought of twirling in on my finger but I didn’t have the guts to do so. Knowing my luck, I would probably shoot off my shoulder. Plus I wasn’t sure I had the finger strength to actually pull it off. The gun was very heavy indeed.

I set the gun on the desk and walked to the small kitchen window above the sink. Through the pane of glass, the sky seemed out of reach, grey, distant and streaked with mild indignation. Blue skies, fresh air, freedom were lost somewhere. Hell, the very idea of freedom seemed so far away. I had to face it. I would never be free. It was not my nature, not my calling in life. I had a job to do, and while many didn’t have the stomach for it, I did. It was all about business, everything focused on the job I had to do. Sure, the guy was looking out for me, he said he would, but I had to do some things first. It was right, it was would should happen. I told him it would be no problem. I had nothing to lose. I had the stomach, I had the nerve. I was an outlaw to my core. The papers would surely brand me as such. They would soon litter candids of me on their front page – no doubt – as I left a local clothing store, bags in hand, or pumped gas at the Mobil station near the entrance to town. Yeah, a diligent and sly cameraman might catch me now and then – I might even stop and show ‘em my good side (which was my right side) – but the law never would. I was convinced of that. I was too fast, too aware. As the stories of my escapades became public and were embellished, as fact will want to do, the momentum of my charm would surely prevail. Surely those newsmen might work the story to portray me in a hero’s light, say, a new kind of criminal, a modern day Robin Hood. A fighter for the common man. Okay, maybe not for the common man, but I would be recognized as a common guy. Though it would be revealed that I was not so common at all. I would be blessed with extraordinary talents. The man with strength on both sides, they would say – a heart of gold and a backbone made of steel. They might give me a great nickname, like The Neighbor Hood. Maybe The People’s Bandit or just The Outlaw. Something dangerous and unexpected. The Thin Explosion or Walking Inferno. Something that would make good news copy, I didn’t mind. I deserved a good moniker, hell, I welcomed it. I was happy to help. Whatever it takes to sell a thousand papers. I was happy to help.

Who knows, maybe David Schwimmer could play me in the movies. He needs a hit and he would be perfect to play me – this new kind of hero. An Everyman but more than that -- a SuperEveryman.

I stumbled at the door, bumping into the frame. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know what to do with the gun. I didn’t know where to put it. I had neighbors, especially the Crowers next door, that always seem to be getting into their cars when I am getting into mine. Richard and Betty. They will see me, I’m sure, they will talk to me, they will ask questions. I had to hide it somewhere. Cowboys always had holsters or they stuck their guns in their weathered leather belts. I wanted to be a cowboy but this thing was bigger than I expected and more pointy. Do I shove it under the waistband of my pants? It seemed too big to do that, I’d have to loosen my belt at least two notches. And I would probably shoot a huge hole right through my leg anyway. Or somewhere even worse. Where else could I stick it? It wouldn’t fit in any pocket. I grabbed a kitchen towel and wrapped it around the gun as well as my hand and stepped outside.

As I got into my car, I tossed the towel over my shoulder into the backseat and threw the gun on the passenger side seat. It bounced once, turning so the barrel was now facing me. I could see straight into the blackness, a hollow void aimed at my head. I thought I heard a click and the gun seemed to adjust itself, in centering its aim directly at me. I began to slowly -- slowly -- raise my arms straight up above my head. I heard a very familiar voice, as if my own, but lower, more stern, say, “Don’t get so distracted. Lower your arms, you moron. Just do what I say. Put your hands on the wheel and concentrate on driving the car.” The hollows of the barrel seemed endless and I gingerly moved the angle of the gun with my forefinger towards the glovebox. And exhaled. That was close, I thought. I had to get back to business. I stuck the key into the ignition and started the motor. I was on a mission, I told myself, I needed to do the thing, I had to take care of the business that needed to be done. It was not a complicated matter. A thing had to be done. Nothing more, nothing less. Doing a thing was just business and this thing, I told myself, would be taken care of tonight.

I parked the car behind the bar, back near the woods. I had a clear view of the back of the bar, with the wooden pallets, broken in a loose heap near the back door, and the green metal trash bin, it’s rusted lips grimacing. I turned off the motor and listened, as the motor shook, sputtered and eventually settled down. It was quiet, deathly quiet, eerily quiet. No sound from inside the bar, no music or laughter, no traffic in the parking lot or on the road. My breath began to fog the windshield and I rolled down the side window to let some air in. I could hear a freight train from very far away and some crickets. A litany of crickets, from somewhere in the weeds. I couldn’t quite place where the sounds were coming from, if they were behind me or on the side of me, or in front of me even. I listened to the silence within that and waited, with baited breath, for anything that spoke of a human. I just had to wait, I knew. I had done my research and knew his patterns. He was always here at this time, alone, so he must be around now, probably inside. Somewhere. I grabbed the gun and held it with both hands between my legs. I would be ready for him when he came. Wherever he was now, in his last moments of living, I hoped he was enjoying his last breath, even though they were filled with ignorance.

I was enjoying the power of this, of knowing his life was mine, mine now to take. I enjoyed the power of just knowing that he was at my mercy, even before he actually came into sight. His fate was assigned to me. I would be merciless, unwavering, emotionless, I was cold, relentless and downright vicious. Well, I wasn’t yet, but I would be. Now was the time for my EverySuperman to emerge, to push forward and make my legend come alive.

The backdoor creaked and opened slowly. He had on his faded red baseball cap and wore a thin tank jacket. He moved in and out of the light, inside the bar, deep shadows moving across his chest. As I had done many nights before, I just watched as he moved about the kitchen. He grabbed a garbage bag from the floor, opened the screen door and threw it in the trash bin with one fluid motion. It was all so quick. I did not move. I squeezed the gun in my hands. He stopped at the doorway and looked out towards the woods. The light over the backdoor made his skin seem more pale, more yellow than I had remembered. I wondered if he knew, I thought, if he felt it. Like an animal hunted in woods, did he smell the fear, the danger? Did he sense that his death is imminent? He moved back inside and closed the back door. Darkness and silence followed once again. He was gone.

I got out of the car. I wasn’t sure if I should follow him inside or should I wait to see if he would come out again. I didn’t want to go inside, that was a sign that I was losing control. He knew the bar and how to get around inside the bar, in case he needed to. The outside, that is where my strength was. I needed him to come to me, come back to me. I just wasn’t sure he was going to come out again. I hadn’t gotten that far in tacking him. I always stopped after his first visit outside to throw out the garbage. I didn’t think there was a need beyond that. I wasn’t sure he would come back out again. But he had to. Surely there was more garbage inside, more things to throw out. I got back in the car. The gun felt heavier, bigger than it had before. “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered under my breath, the last selection coming out in a growl. He had to come out again.

As soon as the words left my lips, the backdoor opened, the blur of his red cap flickered in the night and he moved, as if in slow motion, out the door and past the dumpster. One hand held the bill of his cap, the other ran back through his hair like snakes slithering through shag carpeting. He had a good head of hair, that was for sure. He looked out, the movement of his head slowed as if moving through a thick syrup. Now was my moment, my time. Now. Now. I pushed the car door opened, tripped over my own legs somehow and fell with a thud on the ground, knocking my head against the metal on the edge of the door. My cheek was flush against the earth, I could taste the blood easing its way down my temple, my gun tumbled before me. “Do not move,” a voice echoed in the still air. I felt a large foot push down on my butt and then the clicking of handcuffs encircling my wrists. I never felt real handcuffs, but I was amazed how uncomfortable they were, the metal digging into each wrist like thick circular knives.

One-Sided Dialogue

2009-11-20T23:01:00.006-06:00

“What I'm trying to say. . . what I'm saying is that it’s all fucked up. Beyond all recognition. All of it. I mean it, man, like from out of nowhere, it was just all fucked up. I tried to think to myself when it all happened -- not the events but the whole string of bad luck -- and how I could have stopped it but, man, once it started, it was like a tidal wave. And I didn’t even know when it started – or how.

When I was a younger, man, much younger than I am now, I used to think I could do anything. I was the Incredible Hulk. The fucking Incredible Hulk. I was so strong and it was all because somebody pissed me off, you know. I mean, I was all nice before that, but if some dude made me mad, watch out – I became invincible.

Well, now, I don’t know what happened to me. I ain’t nothing. I lost all my power and I just can’t fight anymore. No matter how mad I get or how much you crossed me, I just can’t get green anymore. I can’t even muster up a little faint green. That has been the biggest shock in all of this – how I just stood there and couldn’t do anything, when it all got fucked up. I tried but nothing happened. My strengths couldn’t do a thing.”

Tony sat down at the kitchen table across from me. He barely looked up, his head bowed, moving crumbs in small diagonals with his right index finger. I just sat and listened, calmly, lifelessly.

“Look, the fire started quick. I tried to think about everything that was there, all the valuable stuff you told me about and I just kept trying to think that I had to save everything I could. And I tried, man, I really tried. By the time I found the extinguisher and figured out how to use it – like, where were the directions, anyway, man, they were fuckin’ hidden in small little words at the bottom part of the can – the living room was charred. And the hallway. And the stairs and the bedroom. And the bathroom door. And those parts of the kitchen,” he said, pointing.

“So that was Tuesday. On Thursday morning is when I realized your car wasn’t there. I woke up and looked out and it was gone. Whoosh. Vanished. Your driveway was naked of anything, no car. No oil patch, nothing. I was so puzzled at that, it drove me crazy. I kept wondering who took it. There was nothing I could’ve done about it but I still wracked my brain. When I got out of the shower, I went to feed Brutus and I saw he was all panting and wheezing. I figured it was all cause of the fire so I let him outside to breath some good air, some fresh air, you know, and then when I went to let him back in, he was just lying there on the patio, stiff, his tail curled like a question mark. It hadn’t been that long, maybe two hours. That was when I figured that it wasn’t going to be a good week.

I didn’t know the insurance guy wasn’t really an insurance guy. He would’ve fooled you too, I swear. I was hoping it could all be cleaned up before you got back so that is why I let him take all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, I know it seemed odd that he would need to take all those things with him, but he said it would make the claim easier to process and that you would get a check cut a lot sooner. I did it for you, man, I was thinking about you.

But, now, I can see that it was all fucked up from the very beginning. It was probably fucked up since you gave me the keys and I lost them before that first day and I had to break into through the kitchen window just to get in the goddamn house. That should have been the sign, I should have know right then. The Incredible Hulk has left the building. A long time ago.”

Days of Rain

2009-10-20T06:37:00.004-05:00

It rained for twelve consecutive days in the summer of 1976. Twelve straight days. Almost two full weeks of constant rain. It would come down in buckets at times, and other times it would pull back to a light pattering, but it never stopped raining the entire time. Not that I recall, anyway. It was twelve days of living beneath the confines of damp and satiated umbrellas, running from storefront to car to the front door of the house. The sun had disappeared during that time; the bright blue skies a distant memory. The grey that descended above the trees and over rooftops settled in as if it would never go away, as if it would be overcast for the remainder of our days - the sky forever suffocated by a thin charcoal mask, stretched across in every direction. Even when the rain let up, the clouds seem to hover, and the gloom one felt inside never lifted. Those twelve days changed my life.

I was twenty-two that summer, just out of college, working at Thomson's Gas Station at the corner of Vine and May. I had finished my last classes at the end of April, with graduation in June. I was the first child in my family to have a college education. It was a very big deal to everyone I knew. My bachelors was in communications but I didn’t know how to apply it to a career, not only in my hometown but anywhere. What would I do and where would I do it? I enjoyed communications but was at a loss as to actually using in a resourceful and economic-generating manner. I wasn't even sure why I had gone to college, what I wanted to do. Did I want to get into advertising? Or even go work in some office somewhere? Nothing appealed to me. So I decided to get a job, any job, just to clear my head and plan my next move. At least that is what I answered when faced with the perpetual, “So, what are you going do now, big shot?” My uncles, all my aunts, my mother, my neighbors, my old high school teachers. Their happiness seemed to hinge on my answer. I could not answer my own questions yet alone theirs. I just need time, I told them, I just need a little break from school. I just need a little time to figure what to do next.

So I spent the summer pumping gas and helping in the garage however I could. I didn’t know enough about cars to do any real tinkering under the hood but I held up hoses and steadied the crusty metal pan as the old oil drained like thick, deep blood from the Buicks hoisted high above me. Business was steady in the spring, just as Mr. Thomson said it always was. His station was the only one on the east side of town, out near the train tracks that loop around the edge of town. His customers were loyal and regular. It was in the middle of July when the heat spell of mid-summer was broken by a welcome relief of rain. The first day was fast and furious and we all smiled at the sight of the pouring rain as it soaked dry grass, parched cornfields. The rain, though, kept coming. It did not stop. For almost two weeks straight. It did not take long before puddles were everywhere, basements were flooded, grass disappears beneath newly formed lakes in front and backyards. Customers didn’t come to Thomson’s very often during that twelve-day rainy period. It was if the entire town decided to wait as long as it could, in hopes of avoiding getting any wetter than they absolutely needed to. The repair work could wait; gas was a necessity.

When a customer pulled into the station, I would run out, leaping over large puddles like landmines on the way to the pumps. I’d pull the brim of my Tigers cap low over my eyes, squint and ask how I could help them, though I knew the answer would always be, “Fill ‘er up.” Minutes later, as I stood with the pump in my hand, listening to the sound of gas cascading through the hose, splashing into their empty tank, there was nowhere to hide so I gave in and let the rain cover me. For me, there was a great sense of magic in those moments, when all you could do was just give in to the elements. Sometimes the best times are when we cease fighting and let ourselves go.

Often I was alone for long stretches in the afternoon and I would stand at the front window and watch the rain fall from the misty clouds, an endless parade of silvery glitter shimmering in front of my eyes. I would lean against the glass of the office and the moist heat from my skin would leave a vaporous fog. My skin was sticky, perpetually damp to the touch. I remember always feeling dirty during those days; I never felt clean, even after stepping out of the shower. I always felt wet and sticky and sweaty and tired.

The sound of the rain was a constant, and would fold itself into the fabric of everyday life. It was only when I stood at that front window that I remembered to listen to the sound. I would look out from the office and watch the houses across the street disappear, the large oak trees vanish behind a sheet of moisture, a dew that hung in the air. Up close, I would concentrate on the individual drops, trying to focus on a sliver of perspiration. The rain would sparkle and glisten in a hypnotic rhythm. My mind would wander and drift.

I would close my eyes and tried to place myself squarely inside my memory. I concentrated on the location, the surroundings, the atmosphere and then I tried to imagine my feelings at that time, my thoughts, what was topical and pertinent to me within a certain moment. I could never remember exactly what I was feeling so I made it up. But I surrendered to my imagination. It was easier to do for more recent memories – I started with that very morning, placing myself in the moments before I got ready for work that day, picking out my clothes, eating breakfast, really remembering the stories I read in the newspaper, how the spoon felt in my hand, the sound of my feet scuffling on the wood floor. I remembered the things that would make an impression on me on a given day, whatever it was. I pushed myself, pushed my recollections and impressions from my first day of high school when Martin Brady pushed my head so hard into the lockers, I had a knot for a week. I tried to recall what our summer vacation felt like when we camped out in a tent my dad had borrowed. We went to the General George Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky. In my desk at home, I have a faded picture of him and I that day, standing in front of a tank, his floppy mop of dark hair and a sly grin as he leaned his arms over my head, against the light tan metal. My mom must have taken the picture but I don't remember her being with us. I tried to remember the April morning when I was seven years old as I looked out my bedroom window and looked down and saw my father throw a suitcase and a duffel bag into the back of his car. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, he got into his Chevy Impala and drove away. It looked as if he was just going to get gas or run something to my Uncle Bucky’s house, but I knew he was leaving for good. I just didn’t realize I would never see him again. He would be dead within six months, a ruptured appendix as he sat at a red light in a small town somewhere in northern Wyoming. He bled to death by himself in his beloved automobile. I tried to remember the feelings I felt as I watched my mother stood at the telephone table in the hallway, the black receiver pressed to her ear, her head bowed, and then calmly tell me the news once she hung up. Fourteen years later, as I stood in the quiet of Thomson’s office, my head swirled as the rain seemed to envelope me, though I remained warm and dry. As I tried to replay moments in my life, I found that some memories were very difficult to place myself in, while other memories I did not need to remember at all, since I had never fully let them go from being immediate, no matter how long ago they first occurred. Being seven years old again was, unfortunately, extremely easy.

My reverie was halted when I heard a car coming up on Vine, it’s tires splashing in the gravel, hitting the bumps and holes of the wet dirt on the shoulder. The car roared by in a blur, accelerating as it passed the station, a large bag thrown from the back seat. The bag tumbled over itself and then came to a rest, landing in our lot. I ran out of the office in time to watch the fuzzy pink taillights shimmer behind a cascade of rain drops, eventually disappearing into the heavy grey dusk.

When I reached the bag, I stood over not a bag at all but a human body, broken and curled in unnatural twists. Even in the rain, a pool of deep red was visible under the neck and right shoulder. I could not detect where the face was or if the person was still alive. I saw no movement and could only think that, given what I assumed had just occurred to this person – the last of which was being thrown out of a moving car -- the last breath had already taken place.

I stood over the body and my eyes suddenly began to fill, tears flowing down my cheeks. It felt odd, even then, for there was no connection between this person and myself. I bent down and moved the left arm gingerly with my finger, revealing a man’s face. It was a thin face, ashen white, a sparse grey stubble, lips a faint pink. There was no sign of life, no residue of breath. He was so pale, it looked as if he had been dead for a very long time. I rolled him over a bit – so fearful I would crack a bone or separate a shoulder – and his broken body rested on my lap, thin, like a gangly teenager. The rain splashed against his exposed face, thinning his matted hair, bringing his mouth forward. I looked at his arms, his chest and torso, his legs. It took me a moment to realize the angle of his right leg was pointing into his body, so grossly twisted that I quickly turned away. The lot was empty, the street void of anything but the pattering of rain failing on the cement. Just then I a heard a gasp for breath, two short intakes, the second on top of the first, and then nothing. I quickly moved my body out from under his and rested him on the ground. I put my ear to his chest but heard nothing. I could not hear or feel a heartbeat. I moved my fingers to his wrist but felt no pulse. I saw no movement in his body, no struggle or fight. I put my ear near his lips and there was no breath. Even without a doctor or a priest, I knew that he was dead.

I sat back down in the wet minefield, among the multitude of puddles, and took his shoulders – gingerly – in mine and held him. I did not know this man nor did he know me, but we were now connected. I squeezed his shoulders and felt the life that still filled his arms and chest. I rocked us back and forth while the rain flowed from the sky, baptizing us both. “I don’t know who you are,” I said, “But you deserved better than what happened to you. I am sorry for that. Sorry that you had to die this way. To live all your days and then suddenly die this way.”

I picked him up in my arms and struggled in carrying him to the office, a dry haven for us both. I rested him against the counter. He looked even worse inside then he did outside. He had a large gash, a slit on the right side of his neck and there seemed to be blotches of blood everywhere – his shoulder, his chest, his thighs. I wiped my brow. I did not want to explore any further. I didn’t want to know too much of what happened. I slid my hand cautiously into each pocket to see if there was anything he left behind, any information or identification. There was no wallet, no keys, no money. I did find a handful of receipts in his pants pocket -- cash register receipts that were at least three, four months old. At the very bottom, curved and battered, there was a paper library card with the name “James Mauldin” printed in blue ink. The letters filled my heart with such happiness and I smiled in relief, as a drop of water fell from my hair onto my nose. I rolled it over my tongue – James Mauldin. James Mauldin. He had a name, a history. His name was James Mauldin and he was a person, after all, not just a body filled with holes, dumped to rot on the side of the road. Jim Mauldin, maybe, or possibly Jimmy to his mother. He was James Mauldin and he was sitting in Thomson’s Gas Station with me. In purple ink, “Santa Clara City Library” was etched at the top. I held the card in my fingers knowing that James too had held that same card in his fingers when he was alive.

I flipped the card over to see some scribbling in pencil – a word written and then crossed out and below that, seven shaky numbers. Some numbers were bigger than others and there was a weird break in the sequencing but I had to believe it was a phone number. Whose number could it be though? Did the word above it have any connection? Was it a name? Of a lover? A wife? A job? The horizontal markings were many, and too thick. It was a single word, I was pretty sure, but I could not make out what lie beneath the strikes. Something with a capital “S,” maybe, but beyond that, I just could not read it.

I pushed the card and the receipts in my pocket and grabbed the ring he wore on his right hand – a simple silver band with three thin intertwining gold strings wrapped around each other – and put that in my pocket too. There was a small piece of paper hidden under the cash register with Mr. Thomson’s home phone number on it. I lifted the cash register and then phoned my boss to tell him what had happened. I barely got the words out before I began to cry again. I was embarrassed but it prompted Mr. Thomson to assure me that everything would be okay, that he would be right there and he would take care of everything.

I went home and took a long shower. I stared at my reflection in the mirror and noticed the same grey skin tone, the same stubble I had seen on James Mauldin’s face. I slept hard but woke several times from a dream where I had scabs all over my body but I could not explain them to the doctor. He ordered me to go to the hospital, immediately, for tests but nobody could find anything wrong with me. The nurses were all very nice, like a grandmother or something, like they were in for a visit, just striking up casual conversation. They just kept commenting on how young I was and that this kind of thing usually happens to older men. They would sit in the side chair for idle chitchat but then would forget to take an xray or whatever they came in to do. I began to panic, wanting them to do whatever it was they came in to do, feeling I would die any minute. Three or four of them came in and each of them did the same thing, but I could not speak. As I was listening to these woman talk, the scabs multiplied and soon covered my body. I didn’t remember what happened after that.

The next morning I went to the library and found the section in the reference area of phone books. I grabbed a California book and found the area code for Santa Clara. I went home and dragged the phone to the kitchen table and sat with the library card in my hand. I dialed the numbers from the back of the card, adding the Santa Clara area code first. “Jetson Is a Son” the woman’s voice shot out after the second ring.

I didn’t catch what she said, “I’m sorry, what? What did you say?”

“Jacobs and Peterson.”

“Oh um, I am looking for someone who is a . . . a relative, maybe, a wife of a Mr. James Mauldin.”

“Who do you want to speak to?” the young woman asked, curtly, with an exhale, resigning herself to the fact that this very well would not be an easy or quick conversation.

“No, I’m sorry, no, I don’t want to speak to James Mauldin – I know him – but I am looking for someone . . .he may know. He gave me this number. He is really sick and gave me this number to call. I am not sure who I am supposed to talk to.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

I tried a slightly different approach. “Is there someone there with the last name of Mauldin? A man or a woman named Mauldin?”

“No,” she answered, “There's no one here by that name.”

I felt a little desperate; I could feel my only chance slipping away. “Has there ever been anyone there by that name? I mean, maybe that person just quit or something. Anyone named Mauldin at all?”

“No, no one I have ever heard of. I have only been here eight months,” she told me, “But I have heard lots of the names here.” There was a slight pause. “Sorry.” And she hung up.

I didn’t have much to go on and my options were limited, but I did know two things. I knew his name -- James Mauldin -- and I knew that at one time, he lived in Santa Clara, California. I went back to the library the next day and searched through rolls of microfilm - US Census for Santa Clara. I started back ten years thinking that was a safe place to begin. It took me several hours to find something in the 1945 Census – one William J Mauldin homeowner, wife Margaret, daughter Kathleen, 10 years old.

I spent the next day and a half in the library. Finally on Friday of that same week, I boarded a bus with a small bag and through a dirty glass window, watched America as it rolled by for the 2026 miles until I reached Santa Clara California.

On Tuesday evening, I stood in front of a small brown house with a white eagle over the front door on Winslow Avenue, and I felt an immense sense of exhaustion and nausea pound down on me. A middle aged woman answered the door. I handed Kathleen Winbeck her father’s wedding ring and library card. I told her that I found her father on the side of the road, in front of where I worked, and that I didn’t know anything else. She offered for me to come inside but I politely refused.

I did not go home. I stayed in Santa Clara for the next twenty-seven years. In all my time there, I was never able to escape the feeling of immense suffocation whenever it rained for a long period of time. I was forever thankful for the sun that seemed to forever shine on southern California.

test

2009-09-10T11:00:00.001-05:00

sfsda

The Postcard

2009-04-10T22:47:00.004-05:00

It was tucked between the electric bill and an oversized postcard from the local car dealership. It was in almost perfect condition, its corners slightly dog-eared.

She set the rest of the mail on the dining room table and sat on the third step of the stairs leading to the second floor.

Gloria held the postcard in her hand, trembling slightly, the deckled edge pressing gently into her skin. She read her name and address written in a script she didn’t recognize. The large “G’s” in Gloria Gundry were over accentuated and the entire address was tilted right.

On the left hand side of the postcard, someone had written, in the same blue pen:

Gloria,

France is beautiful. Just as we had always talked about. It’s all a dream – the architecture, the people, the language, the food.

Paris was rainy but amazing. I saw the Eiffel Tower and then at Notre Dame, I fell down some stairs (I’m okay). I am now in Nice for the next five days. I wish you were here.

Helen

Above the greeting, there was printed, “La Cote D’azur, Nice” and then below that it said that the image was of “La Promenade, la nuit” She had taken French in high school so she remembered that “nuit” meant that it was “at night." She turned the postcard over to reveal a retro image of Nice. It appeared to be a photograph, shot from above, that had been hand-colored. The sky was black, the water pushed against the road was black as well, with a hint of deep aqua green. Silhouetted palm trees ran down the middle of “La Promenade” separating the two lanes, with a bright yellow glow coming from the streetlamps reflecting off the street like fire. The road wound from the bottom of the postcard up, twisting left at the top of the card, vanishing in the darkness.

She flipped the card back over and gazed at the message. “I wish you were here.” Gloria did not know a person named Helen. She could not think of any Helen who might write her a postcard from France. It was obviously intended for her – her name was correct, the address was hers, it had been her home since she moved out of her parents house over fifty years ago. Jack had bought it right before they got married in September of 1954, just after they both graduated from North Hamilton High School. The postcard was meant for her, it had made its way to her mailbox, all way from France. But who was Helen?

Gloria rested her hands in her lap and looked at the wall. The same painting hung near the door. The same lamp and table near the couch, the same light coming in through the living room windows. The house was quiet. Janie and Tom were both grown, living downstate, both with families of their own, with teenagers of their own, as a matter of fact. She thought of Jack and how she felt lonely without him. She always felt that loneliness, it was always there, like a dull, throbbing pain, but in times like this, it was more acute. How she longed to simply ask him a silly question like, Do we know a woman named Helen? Her heart ached.

She thought about women in the neighborhood, up and down the block, but there wasn’t anyone with that name. She thought of the four or five women in church, those who sat beside her on the Liturgy Commission on which she served, but there wasn’t a Helen. She though of her fellow poll workers who work at the local elementary school gymnasium on election days. No Helen that she could remember. She did not know who this person was, how she knew her.

It was odd. She shared with this woman a love a France but yet could not remember who she was. As a matter of fact, the card implied that they had talked and dreamt about France together. “Just as we had always talked about.” But she hadn’t even given France a thought, not in any real way, in years. Countless years. Too many years.

She noticed the canceled stamp in the upper right corner -- a woman in a robe holding a vase, an ornate pale orange frame around the woman with the words “Republique Francasise” at the top and “25c Postes” along the bottom. Gloria looked at the cancellation over the postage stamp where the black ink formed an intermittent circle. She could vaguely make out “JU” for either June or July, perhaps, and “1955.” Gloria pushed her glasses back up on her nose and read it again. Nineteen and fifty-five. That was over fifty years ago, Gloria thought. Fifty-four years ago.

And then she remembered that there was a Helen Shamanski that she was friends with in high school. She was short and blond and a very sweet girl. She sat behind Gloria in their senior French class and she moved away soon after high school, a few years after graduation, class of ’54.

Gloria remembered Helen's face, and tried to remember her voice or something they did together, but she could not. She could not recall why or how they had bonded. Did they see each other after class? After school? Gloria didn’t think so but it all happened so long ago. She had lost sight of Helen, had lost contact with her. It had been so many years now. But as Gloria sat there, in her empty and quiet house, she realized that there had been something there, all this time. Something she never realized or even felt. The connection of a postcard that was carried across the miles, across the ocean, across two lives, so separate and yet so parallel. A connection that had taken fifty-four years to complete.

91724

2008-11-21T23:06:00.006-06:00

A short story the begins with a running theme of something being handed to the main character, a device to propel the plot. This particular story seems to desire a little more time, a few more words than the previous stories in this series. However, this is all I have so far.

The man handed me a small ticket with the number “91724,” printed in elongated red numbers across the top. I took the ticket with my left hand and handed the man my car keys with the right. The man did not look at me. “We’ll be out around . . . I don’t know, 11, 11:30,” I said as I dropped the keys into his open palm. “Okay,” the man said – that is, I think that is what he said – and slid behind the wheel of the car, moving the seat back so quickly it did not seem possible it could have been moved at all. He closed the door and drove off in a blur, around the corner.

I stood with ticket 91724 in my hand and watched my car disappear from view. Where did he take it, I wondered. Where could he possibly be parking my car in this city? I couldn’t find a spot anywhere, how the heck is he going to? I slid the ticket inside my pants pocket and looked down at my shoes, at the cement in front of me. The ground was littered with cigarette butts. It was if someone had stood all afternoon in the very spot I now stood, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I buttoned the middle button of my jacket, pressed my fingers against my collar, making sure my tie was straight and walked towards the glass doors of the Art Museum.

The banner above the doors announced the opening of a new exhibit of Renoir paintings, never before seen in North America. The show would open in two days and tonight was a special preview party for members and benefactors. Just as her mother and grandmother had been before her, my wife was a Life Member, and as her husband, I was fortunate enough to share the privileges. I swung the door open and moved into the museum, the world inside was soft and oddly quiet. The murmur of voices in the crowd had evolved into one soft low hum. I stood at the entrance and watched a swirl of people cascade in front of me, like extras on a movie set. Men and women, beautiful couples and groups of people in newly shorn hair, makeup, and varying degrees of black and white. Their teeth were so white, their skin so rich and healthy. So much black and yet so much white. I felt dizzy and looked out into the room, over the crowd and back again. I could not see my wife.

I made my way down the stairs and began to move through the crowd – groups of tightly packed people with wine glasses propped at the end of their arms, forming defiant and impassable L’s. A small dark-haired woman in a dinner jacket appeared before me and offered me a plate of hors d’oeuvres, small toast with spinach and a tiny circle of salmon. I quickly declined and almost instantly, wished I had not. It looked good. All before me, I saw a multitude of heads from varying angles, back and side, ¾ and ¼, but none of them looked straight at me and none of them were my wife. I tried to take in the whole room all at once and yet concentrated on what caught my eye. I looked left and right and then left again but I could not see a familiar face. I began to feel the slightest beginnings of desperation creep in. In a crowded room this large, I surmised, I could lose her forever.

“She is not here,” a deep voice said. I turned to a man standing before me and smiled. His hair was deep black, his skin a baked bronze. He held his hands up toward the sky, in a futile gesture. “She is gone. She is not here.” His voice was thick with an accent, an origin I could not place. It did not matter for I was more concerned with who he was referring to.

“Who,” I asked the stranger. I was sure he did not mean to talk to me.

He looked at me directly and spoke with the gentleness of a friend, his eyes softening the words he struggled to speak. “Your wife. I am afraid she is gone. She left, my friend. She looked very beautiful tonight, a glittery light green dress, her hair with more curls than I have seen before.”

“How?” I shook my head. “How do you know this? How do you know my wife?”

The man looked to the floor and then across the room, a whisp of his dark hair falling across his forehead. “I am a member, like your wife. She and I have mutual friends. I do not know your wife well, but we have friends in common. The man she was talking to tonight, I did not know. He was a man I had never seen before.”

“When was this?” I tried to wrap my head around what this man was saying. “Are you saying that this man . . . took my wife?”

“I don’t know what happened. He was a tall man, dark hair, very good looking. He wore a bowtie that I can tell you for certain. But I did not think too much of anything when I saw them together, standing very close, I did not think too much of it at the time. I remember his bowtie though.” He shook his head. “I do not have much information for you, I am afraid. I am only telling you that I saw this man talking to your wife, say, twenty minutes ago and then, poof, I do not see your wife here anymore.”

I wasn’t convinced of this man, not his story or his assumptions. Hell, I doubted everything, even his sincerity. “Well, she could be here, she is probably here. This is a huge room, a very large room. She could be in the bathroom. She could be near the corner. She could be here. There are lots of people here. I mean, I’ve been looking for her since I arrived.”

“Oh, yes, I am sure you are right,” the man said. “So, when you looked for her, all that time you were looking, did you find her?”

I stared at the man, his dark brown eyes echoing the seriousness of my own. I realized that with his question, I had no choice but to trust this stranger standing before me. To what degree was still uncertain, but right now, I was forced to listen to him and trust the words he spoke. “No,” I said, “No, I did not.”

The night air had turned cool and I walked into a small circle of singular smokers, five men and women alone, standing at intervals of a few feet between them, but joined together as a group by their addiction. My wife did not smoke but I wanted to check the one area that was outside the main room as a possible outlet. She was not there. I turned and headed back inside to find the dark-haired man standing, his hands in his pockets, surveying the room. He glanced at me and then looked again out to the room. “Any luck with the outdoors?”

“No, she must be here. Inside,” I said.

“I think we must not lose sight that time is a most vital issue. If she is not here, which you are still not convinced of – contrary to what I have told you – then every moment we spend in this room, the further distance is between ourselves and her actual whereabouts. Time is escaping from us right at this every minute. Seconds make up minutes, and minutes multiply and lead into hours. We cannot afford to lose any more time. We must not lose her.”

I could not speak. It was dawning on me that my wife was missing. Missing from my sight, or perhaps even from the building. This man was implying that my wife had been abducted, taken perhaps against her will.

“My name is Andrei. I am a friend of Barbara Gainer, the publicist. Your wife is her very good friend.”

“Yes, I know,” I interjected.

“Yes, of course you know. That is how I am acquainted with your wife. I thought you should know that. It is vital for assurance to be based in knowledge, however slim or fleeting that knowledge is. Without it, we are left with empty hope and, ultimately, disillusionment. I am trying to give you that knowledge, whatever knowledge I have.”

Book of Chance

2008-11-07T09:09:00.004-06:00

He stood in the hallway, slumped against the wall, his face flush and drawn. I could not speak, I knew not what to say.

"It will happen because I want it to happen. It will happen because I need it to happen. It has to happen, it must. I just need a break, a sliver, a glimmer of hope. Just a hand to reach out, a hand to hold."

I shook my head. Yes, yes, that is what we all need.

Ah, yes, if only . . .

2008-11-06T09:30:00.002-06:00

Today

2008-11-04T08:58:00.007-06:00

Today is Election Day, a day to officially welcome a new day in America.

I was at my local polling place at 5:45am and was the tenth one in line, waiting for the polls to open at 6am. It was an exciting feeling there at that little church a half of a block from my house, the sky still dark, a sense of pending change almost palpable. And to be in Chicago, home of Barack Obama, the site of his huge rally tonight . . . well, suffice to say, that there is a great feeling of hope in the air.

I share that hope, I am bathing in it. But I remain a might fearful. I hope America gets it right this time. We need it.

Please vote, if you can, whatever your choices. If you cannot, please keep this election in your good thoughts.

The Next Story

2008-09-19T10:16:00.010-05:00

This story you are now reading – the one that begins just like this – is my next story. Just as you read now, I have labored over each word, the combination of words, and each sentence. With furrowed brow and fingers poised over the keyboard, I searched for the right words, always the perpetual quest for the right words. For I want to make it a good story, perhaps a great story, if that is possible, a story that the reader will enjoy, will connect with, and feel real emotions as he or she reads my words. I want this story to withstand the test of time, to live for the ages. I want this story to make a difference, even if for just the moments that a person reads it.

I will try to throw in a lot of verbs -- talk, sprint, reverberate, germinate, convulse, oscillate, transpire, solidify -- to make things interesting, and more vibrant. Also some key adjectives like milky, vivacious, rotund, acute and brittle. Work in other words, nouns or not, that I am particularly fond of -- trousers, facilitate, therefore, earnest, fuzzy, nonetheless, waif, subsequent, conjecture, fiddle.

In drawing characters, I will fondly recall my father, my mother’s smile, my first grade teacher, my best friend from childhood and his reddish blond curls. I will remember the way my uncle sat on a folding chair at Christmas, always a little off-kilter. I will color the story with the little things – the movement of my grandfather’s hands when he talked, like a conductor harnessing in an orchestra, the faint buzzing sound of a fly circling a light on a summer’s evening, the small heart-shaped tattoo partially hidden under a ponytail, on the neck of the woman standing in front of me in line at the grocery store, the way the newspaper man’s face crinkles in sour displeasure when I hand him a $10 bill.

I will try to relax my whole body and, acting as a mere conduit, I will try not to get in the way as the story makes its way through me. I know that it is the only way to write this story. I cannot control it or fake it or even make it up. It is like dancing with a lion. I must let it lead, yet I must be so close in my corresponding movements that I am not noticed. The story is in me, around me, and it only takes the right moment for it to burst forth. I just have to be open to receive the stimuli. Like a junkie taking the needle into his bulging vein, I must release my body, surrendering it to the currents surrounding and imbibing it. I will let it flow and go in places I never thought possible -- all a sudden, the man extended his arms and flew away -- but will be forever grateful for each word that drips and falls into my keyboard.

That is my story. It is different each time and yet it is the only story I know.

A Birthday Wish, Part II

2008-09-10T14:57:00.001-05:00

His 43 year old reflection showed a hollow man, a frail man; it reflected confused, dazed eyes, skin seeped in shock. He stared at the stranger looking back. Am I really . . . about to die? Is today my final day on earth? Of being alive? He looked to himself for an answer. It was a sobering but real thought. My final hours? Perhaps even my final minutes? His mind was awash in an empty numbness. Thoughts rushed in and then quickly dissipated. He could not think, could not process how to feel. His head swam, ached and yet he felt nothing at the very same time, he could not hold a single thought. He felt nauseous and anxious. It was if a large bag of fear, like encased powder, had imploded inside him and was numbing his insides as it reached every inch of his body. The skin in his cheeks, under his eyes, was ashen with thin streams of sweat creasing its grey hue. Almost corpse-like. A hapless and lifeless suit. What was happening to him? What had already happened? He looked like he was dead, or was dying. His reflection gave no answers but merely echoed his own fears: this living man will soon be dead. As he stared at himself, it was if he was already counting down his final moments on earth.

Neil tried to breathe, regain some sense of composure. After all, it was a story in a newspaper, Neil thought, nothing more. Why am I reading so much into it? As he turned right onto Wacker Drive, Neil felt a sudden urge push forward and he threw up against the side of a building. He leaned his elbow into the brick for support, his knees and lower back shaking. As he gasped for breath, Neil could feel tears fill his eyes. He heaved again, and then tied to catch his breath. “Dear God,” he said, almost breathlessly. “Please. Please make this all be okay. I don’t care what happens to me, but I hope that you take care of me, take care of things.” His stomach contracted quickly and he heaved again, this time only his breath pushing forth.

He took off his tie and wiped his mouth and then the sweat from his brow. He threw the soiled tie in a small trashcan near an old light post. Neil stood straight, bending his back backwards to stretch his muscles, and looked down Wacker Avenue. He looked to his his right, up Wacker, but there were no clues, no answers. People passed, barely looking in his direction. Nothing seemed odd or extraordinary. There were no black clouds that he could see, no roaring engine, no indication that an end was imminent. He breathed in deeply, trying to calm himself, gain control, even if only for a few moments. He wiped his eyes and began walking north. He felt his knees wobble a bit but he pressed on. The sun was beating down now, warming his skin, the sky a clean palette of purple blue. A beautiful Fall morning. It was a day like so many others, Neil reminded himself, just an everyday day.

A woman ran past him, trying to keep herself balanced with a huge brown bag over her shoulder and a small black phone pressed to her ear. She jumped off the curb just before Neil, right in front of a cab, a disruptive fog of yellow growing large before them. It appeared like a flash. The brakes of the car squealed and gritted its teeth, veering a little right towards the curb, in trying to avoid the woman. The car stopped less than a foot from Neil Paul’s legs. The woman staggered the rest of the way across the street, unharmed, never breaking stride or the flow of her conversation. As Neil stood with his left hand on the front hood of the yellow taxi cab, perspiration covered his body from his head, down to his toes. The cabdriver put a foot outside the cab and screamed “What you do? You are crazy,” he said, “You almost killed my cab.”

Neil watched the women continue down the street. “Oh my God,” he said, “That was meant for me and she saved me, her carelessness saved me.”

Eight minutes later, Neil was in his office, silently sitting at his desk, his bag at his feet, his body covered in sweat, his hands resting in his lap. Actually, he was slumped in his seat, relieved to be safe at work, physically exhausted to have made it thus far. It was 8:28 am. His computer screen faced him, his ghost-like reflection barely visible within the black. He felt a vast openness throughout his body. His mind felt numb, his body limp. He did not know what to do. He could not, for the life of him, imagine what it was that he was supposed to do that day. He could not think of the tasks that had not been completed the day before. He tried to think. He tried to concentrate. Did he have a meeting to prepare for? A project he was working on? A client to call? He could not even remember the names of any of his clients. He looked at his phone, the red light flashing at him, alerting him to a message, but he could not recall what to do, how to retrieve his messages.

He walked back outside his building. He retraced his steps and walked slowly back to the train station. Once inside, he could see that the station was a great deal less chaotic then when he had left it that morning, the morning rush was over. The man at the newsstand straightened the stack of papers, picked up some scrap wrappers that littered the ground. There were families milling about, in the city for the day, looking up, pointing, checking their maps. Neil stood at the top of the escalator and watched the train board as the lights flickered and blinked. An update occurred and the times, the destinations and track numbers twinkled and displayed new sets of numbers. The next train headed due west was boarding on track eight. He boarded the train and leaned his head against the window. As the train began it’s lethargic march, he felt an odd calm – sitting in the cushioned seat, he was back to where he was when this whole mess started. Maybe he was safe now, maybe time could move backwards for him. He watched the city float by, stop by stop, mile by mile, disappearing behind him. Through the glass, he watched his own stop slide into view, the station standing silently off to the side of the tracks, as the train came to a stop and then rumbled off again. Neil did not even think about getting off the train. He sat and watched each station, people hopping off, people climbing the steps getting on. Neil took the train to the end of the line, got off, and began to walk. He did not know the direction in which he was headed, nor did he know his destination. The sun was shining, there was a slight breeze filling the trees, ruffling the brittle leaves. Right now, he thought, I just don’t want to worry.

He walked down a sidewalk in a town whose name he did not know. As he walked along rows of houses and storefronts, crossed small streets without street signs, he felt the shadow of giant oaks hovering above him, and the day slowed down. He could breathe again. In front of him, further down the sidewalk, Neil noticed a small black object blocking his path. As he neared, he could make out that it was a small boy, sitting next to a small bicycle. As he passed, he noticed the boy was crying, quietly, swallowed by a grimace and great determination. Neil stopped and turned back to the boy. “Are you alright?” he asked but the boy did not answer. He stepped towards the boy, crouched on one knee. He could see that the foot on his other leg was wedged between the spokes of his wheel and the metal frame. He hadn’t noticed it as he had passed, but the boy’s foot was bent at a rather uncomfortable angle. The further the boy moved, the deeper the foot would get caught within the spokes. Neil centered himself in the middle of the bike, stretched his fingers around the metal bars, and lifted the frame. With his right foot, he nudged the black tire, turning the wheel. In an instant, the boy’s foot sprang loose. As soon as Neil put the frame of the bike back down, the boy hopped on the bike and rode away.

Neil stood and watched the boy disappear down the street, his black figure getting smaller and smaller, until at last he was gone. He smiled and felt himself lose all its weight and in this small unnamed town, Neil Paul floated away.

A Birthday Wish, Part I

2008-09-09T19:56:00.002-05:00

Neil Paul was 43 years and 364 days old. He was on the brink of yet another birthday. In his mind, however, he was on the cusp of just another day. His birthdays had long lost any significance or shine. He was no longer a child, nor a young man even. He no longer waited in anticipation of his “special day,” as the Hallmark cards kept reminding him a birthday was, nor was he pained by the milestones of passing years, either. If he chose to think on it, he would barely recall his fortieth birthday. The day had passed with neither a well-orchestrated surprise party nor him wallowing in self-pity in the corner booth at Old Green Tavern. He kissed his wife in the morning and went to work. He came home and they had dinner. That was the extent of things. His thirtieth had passed the same way, he was sure, but he could not remember. It seemed so long ago. He didn’t know if his failing memory reflected more the uneventfulness of the day or his fleeting faculties. The day had always, for him, merely passed.

He did not need a birthday — or New Years’ Eve for that matter — to mark the marks in his life and what it meant. The calendar told him less about the passing of time than his actual life did. He knew what was happening. His youth was fading rapidly behind him, and he felt himself get older with the emergence of each new day. He felt his body and his mind becoming more dull, the lines in his face getting deeper, softer at the end of each day, more so than not each year. He felt his fatigue grow, he felt his body take a little longer to react, to respond, in certain situations. These things did not happen once a year, they happened every day. He had requested that his name be removed from the Birthday List that was posted in the breakroom at work. He joked with the Office Manager that he no longer had birthdays, that he given them up for Lent one year and never resumed having them. The truth of the matter, of course, was that he just no longer cared.

It was on this day — October 4th, the day before his 44th birthday — that things changed for Neil Paul.

The day began innocently enough, like any of so many workdays before. Neil woke one minute before his alarm was to go off at six am. He reached over and turned it off and then ran his fingers through his thinning hair as he sat up in bed. He did not look at his wife lying next to him, but felt her presence, the curled body beneath the large, heavy blanket. He rose to his feet and ambled downstairs. He turned the thin knob to begin brewing a pot of coffee and then went back upstairs to shower. After dressing in black trousers, a pale yellow shirt with a red and black striped tie, he pulled the glass carafe from the white plastic coffeemaker. Adding milk and sugar, he poured his portion into a travel mug and the remaining coffee into a brown ceramic cup with “Hawaii” in white script and illustrated with a white silhouetted palm tree. He brought it up to his wife as she lay in bed, her mouth slightly open in a deep sleep. He placed it down on her bedside table, kissed her on her cheek and went back downstairs, grabbed his things and headed outside. He scooped up the folded newspaper from the sidewalk and stuffed it in his briefcase. As his neighbor wrestled with his two small dogs, the leashes intertwining, Neil waved and felt thankful that he did not have a pet. He walked the three blocks to the commuter train and boarded the 7:16 express, just as he did every morning.

As the train rumbled along the track towards the city, he glanced over the shoulder of a woman a row in front of him, as she held up the front page of the local newspaper. Neil immediately noticed the date nestled under the paper’s masthead and was reminded of his pending birthday. And further down, just above the woman’s hand clutching the side of the paper, he noticed that one of the top stories, on this day, the day before his birthday, was of a local man who had been struck and killed by a drunk driver after exiting a restaurant in the early evening hours the night before. It had been the night before the mans’ forty-forth birthday. Neil leaned in. The victim’s name was Paul O’Neill. That fact, in and of itself, shook him by the throat. So similar to his. And exactly the same age. As he read, Neil Paul gasped at each turn, each fact that tumbled out before him, in black and white. The victim lived in the very next town. He held a good job with a good firm, was well-liked, well-thought of, just as Neil imagined he would be, if he were the victim and written about in the newspaper. He had no children but the man left behind a wife of 21 years, the same number of years for Neil and his wife. Both men were married to a woman named Kathy. Just then, the woman flipped her wrist and turned the page of the newspaper.

He stopped. He could not breathe. He felt a hollow thud echo through his body, as if he were a kettle drum at the back of an orchestra, being tapped rhythmically with increasing intensity. As he gazed out the train window, he had to fight back the sudden urge to cry, to weep for a man he did not know. This was no coincidence, Neil thought, this was all too similar, way too similar. Or maybe it was a coincidence, his mind racing with backhanded logic. So, maybe that is all it was, something of little consequence. Just a few facts that seemed to resemble his own few facts. It held no meaning, just a few random facts. It did not matter, nor could he determine anything, nothing he could do, not now.

Twenty-two minutes later, the train hissed to a stop. As Neil began his walk from the train, passed some glass partitions, through the station, vast throngs of people who converged in from both sides, from the platforms of other incoming trains, down the stairs, into the street. His body moved with the crowd, his brow furrowed deep in thought. Facts bounced inside his head like rubber balls. The similarities were striking but where and how, he wondered, would they end? On either side – did the man’s parents resemble Neil’s? And then . . . what about the other side of things? The similarities would end, he thought, wouldn’t they? As he stood at a red light, just outside the train station, waiting to cross, it occurred to Neil: like his counterpart in the newspaper, perhaps he too was to die. Perhaps he would be run over by a car on the way to work, just as the man had been killed, or perhaps tonight on the way home. That made sense. Either way, what if today was his day to die.

The sunlight greeted Neil as he continued to walk the five blocks from the station to work. It was a beautiful morning, perfect actually. And yet there was an eerie nature to it all – people moved around him, none of them standing too close, or walking too closely past him, as if they wanted no part of an accident that was sure to occur. They walked around him. Cars moved in slow motion towards him and then sped up as they passed, almost in double-time. And – eerily – there was no sound. Was there literally a black cloud following above him that everyone but him could see? The world was strangely quiet, deathly calm. He could hear himself breathing, in a magnified way, as if his external hearing had been muted by earphones or ear plugs. In front of the windows of By The Sea, a small holistic health and beauty shop, Neil gazed through the glass, looking at a display of pale soaps, the window reflecting a fragment of a man, disjointed face and shoulders and torso. Yes. He remembered bringing Kathy her coffee that morning, but did he kiss her cheek? Did he tell her he loved her? He could not remember. How the hell could he have forgotten? No, no, he must have kissed her before leaving.

(part two of this story will be posted tomorrow)

Meme Moo Moo

2008-08-26T09:41:00.006-05:00

Very belated but a wonderful meme passed to me from the ever gracious Taffiny. I think I was supposed to do this in June -- yikes (see the the list of bad habits below).

1. What were you doing 10 years ago?
My first thought to this was concerning "work." Ten years ago, I was working a job I enjoyed, something I felt really good about and had a lot of passion for, a job I enjoyed going to each day. I miss that feeling. Ten years ago, I had only one child and he was only two at the time. My wife and I were in the process of looking to buy our first house. Obviously, I was a lot younger then. About ten years younger.

2. 5 things on your to-do list for today?
I have a list of about ten things to do at work today. I also plan on leaving work on time today so I can go back home at a decent hour. I plan on playing bocce tonight so I am looking forward to that.

3. What would you do if you were a billionaire?
I am not sure what a billion dollars means but I would like to be able to spend more time with my family, doing things (writing) that I love to do, not worrying about the small stuff, not worrying about the mortgage, bills, etc. Just like every one else.

4. What are three of your bad habits?
Besides doing memes very late? Um, uh, habits? Bad habits? I bite my fingernails. I know, I know. Um, uh, I sacrifice myself too easily (my wants and needs) for other's wants and needs. I get very anxious at times, very impulsive and then I procrastinate at times as well (we are all guilty of that, aren't we?).

5. What are some snacks you enjoy?
Popcorn, chips and guacamole, pizzelles. Did I mention popcorn?

6. What were the last five books you read?
Oh boy. I am reading THE DIAGNOSIS right now. Let's see if I can remember the previous four -- COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER by Michael Ondaatje, THE DOUBLE, by Jose Saramago (what an amazing writer; goodness, he thrills me), USED AND RARE: TRAVELS IN THE BOOK WORLD by Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone (this was awful), WHAT A TIME IT WAS by W.C. Heinz (a disappointment) and THE MIRACLES OF SANTO FICO by Dennis Smith.

7. What are five jobs you have had?
My first job was at a 7-11 convenience store right out of high school. I have some great stories from that one. Also, I worked at a Chess King clothing store during college. I have had many jobs as an actor (do those count?) over my life -- all different kinds of acting gigs. I have also worked in several corporate settings (which is where I am today). I was an Office Manager, I have worked for a few photo studios, a huge stock photography company, a few marketing agencies, as a photographers agent. Too many jobs, really. I need to settle down now.

8. What are five places where you have lived?
I have only lived in three cities: my first 22 years in Flint Michigan, six apartments in Chicago and now a house in Park Ridge, Illinois.

That's it. That's all I got.

Amazing

2008-08-15T08:30:00.004-05:00

Just an amazing photograph I ran across on the web and wanted to share. This is of Erice, in Sicila, a "medieval mountaintop fortresses" overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

I saw this shot via Google Earth, on panoramio. It was taken by Giampaolo Macorig, whom I hope does not mind me posting here. I do so in admiration.

by Giampaolo Macorig

What Was There

2008-08-11T12:31:00.009-05:00

He lied in the hospital bed, a sea of white, his face in a perpetual grimace. "It hurts so much, my leg is killing me," he said as a nurse stood near his bed, slightly behind him. She checked the fluids in his IV. The nurse looked down and noticed that his hands were curled tight into fists, his skin stretched and red from the pressure. He pushed his head back into the pillow and a tear ran down his cheek. "I wish you could give me something. My leg feels like it is being torn from my body."

The nurse pulled the thin blanket up and pushed it under his arms, but did not look him in the eye. With a firm but gentle hand, she straightened his bedsheet, smoothing the fabric down to where his legs had been before they had been crushed and severed beneath the wheels of a commuter train two days prior. "My leg hurts so much," he said softly, almost pleading.

She walked out of the room, leaned against the wall and began sobbing, feeling a pain in her heart so acute, it made her long for her parents and her two sons, back in Poland.

A Sense of Place, Chapter One

2008-08-04T07:23:00.000-05:00

The body was small and thin, smooth and indistinguishable. A white sheet covered the dead body, stretching far over the head and the then far beyond the feet. The body was lost beneath the white covering, it’s features and limbs barely visible. The outline of the shoulders and the chest could not be seen, the nose protruded just a bit but other than that the body seemed featureless and sexless. The sheet was like a reflection, so white that it forced all who stood close by to shield or squint their eyes, holding their hand up or turning away, as if blinded by a rectangular sunburst. It was 11:15 in the morning on May 25th and the sun already shone high and bright.

The large woman in a crème colored nightgown told her bespectacled husband, “I’ve never seen a dead body before.” He did not look at her, nor did he respond, he only ran his right index finger along his brow and then into his right sideburn. “Oh I seen plenty of ‘em on TV, on those crime shows. They can get pretty grizzly, those shows. Blood all over the place, a blue hand escaping on a gurney. But that is all TV, all makeup and camera angles. It’s just an actor under all that blood. It’s all made up. I know that, I know the difference. Not like this. This is real,” she explained, “A real person dead. I’ve never been so close to when the person actually died.” And she said those last two words, “actually died” in a pronounced and pushed hush, as if not to offend – or to inform -- the nearly departed. It was offered as a loud secret spoken between spouses but her husband did not answer, but only ran his fingers through his curly black hair, scratching his scalp, wincing as he did so.

“Who knows how long she’s been dead? She could have been dead a long time, you don’t know,” he said.

“How do you know she’s a she? The dead person could be a he, you know. I got good instincts in these things, I always know the killer in the TV show. I say it’s a he, and I say that he just died, maybe this morning. I think maybe he called the police after he was shot or stabbed and he struggled for the phone but couldn’t hang on long enough. So, I think he’s been dead for less than an hour. You can tell by his body. That’s what I think.” Her husband would have nothing to say in reply to that, she was quite sure. She smiled and folded her thick arms, one on top of the other, and watched the body being lifted into the back of the ambulance. The two men closed the back doors and separated, each going around to opposite sides of the truck. Within minutes, the ambulance had moved down the street and turned the corner on Sheridan Road, traveling south to the hospital less then a mile away. The patient inside would be pronounced dead upon arrival, the cause of death would mistakenly be recorded as “heart failure.” It would take another two days for the next of kin to be notified, a nephew would lived across the country in California.

Urban War

2008-07-25T08:35:00.008-05:00

What becomes of the body
Of the soldier
Who is felled in battle
At the heels of his brothers
As the wages of war
Burn and tear into flesh
Spilling blood with tears

His body left behind
To ache
To wither
And disintigrate
Into the earth
Becoming
One

What if the ground does not give
If it is concrete and steel
That lies beneath
The fallen

What becomes of him?

A Day Like No Other

2008-07-18T05:32:00.003-05:00

His glasses kept slipping down his nose. He was forever pushing them back up, his right hand reaching across his nose in an unorthodox manner to the opposite side of his face. With a thumb and a curved forefinger, he would gently push the left corner of his thin brown frame. As he sat at the bar, a small bar at the end of the main strip in a small Midwestern town, his elbow resting on the counter, the general consensus by a casual observer would be that Norman Green was quite unremarkable. He was a slight man, pale skin, light brown hair, with a white buttoned down shirt with four heavy creases extending from his shoulders down through his mid-section, disappearing behind the steady stream of buttons. He was doughy and yet very, very ripe, as we like to say.

I walked around him and sat down on a stool to his right, leaving an empty seat between us. I exhaled audibly and shook my head. I then muttered an expletive; I cannot remember now which one. I told the bartender to bring me another beer, whatever was on tap, whatever was closest, whatever was coldest. It mattered not. Even as the glass was placed before me, next to a small white napkin, I knew I would not finish the drink. I let Norman Green come to me, I let him do just as he wished, in his own time. I would prod him along though, pulling him into my world through mere curiosity. People may not want to hear every detail of another person’s full sordid story, but they do love to hear a smattering of other people’s misery. It makes them feel a little better about their own, I guess. I grumbled, pressed a few numbers on my phone, and waited. I had not turned it on, so it made no sound, nor did it dial. However, I waited in anticipation — to the silence, as if a phone was ringing somewhere at the end of the connection. After a few seconds of waiting, I pinched my fingers to the bridge of my nose and then wiped my eyes. Both of them. Repeatedly. As if I wanted to leave no trace of tears, tears that had never actually been shed. I cleared my throat, wiped my eyes again and put my phone in my pocket. By the time I brought the beer to my lips for the first time, I could feel Norman Green’s eyes on me, his inquisitive human nature on the rise. He had taken the first step. He listened. He was interested. He was mine.

“You okay? he asked. I looked to him, my face blank with surprise. His glasses teetered at the bottom of his nose and he reached across his face and pushed them up. “Yeah,” I answered, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” “Hmmm,” he said and turned from me, back to his glass, back to his own misery. I did not think of what his misery consisted of. It mattered not to me. No doubt it involved “unfulfilled promises.” However, I did not care, nor give it more than a passing thought. He pressed his fingertip to the corner of the white paper napkin on the bar before him, and turned it repeatedly in a circle – right to left, right to left. He could that all night, I thought. I played with my phone again, pulling it out, dialing and listening to what seemed to be unanswered ringing on the other end. I waited, and shook my head. I closed my phone and returned it to my pocket. “Thanks,” I said.

“What?” Norman asked as he turned to me.

“Thank you,” I replied. “For asking. If I was okay. That was kind of you.” He smiled and I shook my head softly. “If only . . “ I said but did not finish. Instead, I turned away, facing the small front window of the bar, leading onto the street. “Oh, man,” I mumbled softly, too softly, I was sure, even for Norman to hear.

“You’re welcome,” Norman said and drained the last remnants of his beer, setting the empty glass down on the bar, the suds sliding down along the inner contours of the glass, while he motioned to the bartender for another.

I pulled my phone from my pocket quickly, opened it and brought it to my ear. “Hullo?” I said. Norman looked to me, and listened. “Yes, yes,” I said. “I was waiting for your call.”

“Look, I just want to know if she is okay. Is she okay?” I could feel my voice rise. I lowered the volume but not the intensity and turned away from the bar for a little more privacy. “She is my little girl,” my words like solid punches into the receiver. “I will do what you ask, I will do anything. You know that, I know you know. You are banking on that, I am well aware. But you should also know that I will do anything to keep her safe, to keep her alive. I will kill for her. Do you realize that?”

I could feel Norman moving to the edge of his stool, his beer resting against his hand. I could sense his brow furrowing, his head tilting to hear my every word.

“Yes,” I said, I shook my head. “I know. I’m calm, I’m calm.” I faced the window but I could feel Norman close behind me. “No, no one. I have not . . . told anyone. I am by myself.” I exhaled, audibly, nervously. “In a bar, an empty bar. No one is here.”

“Where?” I said urgently. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and wheeled around to the bar, snatching a small paper napkin. I jotted down an address, “Wait a minute. 238 Billings Street. Got it. Yes. What? Well, I don’t have a car. No.” Norman was right behind me. “Excuse me, do you need . . .” he said softly, afraid to interrupt. I did not acknowledge him, lost in my conversation, I kept on. “I’ll get there. I’ll be there . Yes.” I closed my phone and put it in my pocket. I put three one dollar bills next to my glass and ran outside.

As I stood on the sidewalk, just outside the front door, Norman appeared. “Do you need a lift? I can give you a ride?” I looked to Norman, my face sick with worry, with fear. He was giving himself to me, his kindness worthy of a feature article in the local paper. “Would you?” I walked around the corner of the bar, following him towards his car in the small adjacent parking lot.

Two minutes later, I left Norman Green lying against the large brown brick wall, just inches from his car. He was bleeding from the mouth, and from the left ear, his skin sweaty and ashen. His shirt was torn, as were his trousers. He was out cold. He was still alive, I made sure not to go too far. My fist throbbed. I picked up the car keys that he had dropped and reached into his pocket for his wallet. I pulled all the bills he had stuffed in the back — he obviously did well, our friend Norman — and pulled the credit cards from the leather slats and threw the wallet back down towards him. It landed in his lifeless lap.

I reached down and pushed his glasses up on his nose and planted a small kiss on his forehead. “Thank you Norman, my friend” I said and drove away in his brand new automobile. My brand new automobile.

Summer Breezes

2008-07-07T23:32:00.001-05:00

It’s hell being seventeen. And yet, the summer after I graduated high school was the last time I remember being happy.

It was a long and lazy summer, the days were sunny and bright and when school ended, as I gazed from June to September, the days also seemed endless. My dad had gotten me a job, working three days a week at the gas station around the corner from our house, on Pasadena and McClellan. I pumped gas and worked the cash register from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. When I walked home, I would stop by the local convenience store and buy one of those frozen, slushy drinks -- an equal mixture of Coke and Cherry flavors. By the time I reached home, the cup was empty, the sticky red straw nestled between my two fingers.

My father was all over me that summer, just as he had been the previous two years, but that summer was worse. He would catch me unaware and he would shake his head, wondering in his exasperated tone, “What the hell are you waiting for? Huh? What are you gonna do with your life?” It didn’t matter that I had now graduated from high school, I still didn’t have any idea. After all this time. And the more my father screamed, the further I seemed from ever finding the answer. Whenever he shouted at me, it cut me to the core. I knew that I was supposed to know, I was supposed to have an answer, I should have had a plan. I could not find fault with his anger, his exasperation, I shared his frustration. I just wished he would stop yelling. As much as I wanted it otherwise, I had nothing to offer him, no logical explanation. I would shrug my shoulders and tell him, “I haven’t decided yet.” I was proud of that answer for it seemed to imply that I was contemplating several options. It seemed like an active answer, it bought me time. It was stretching the truth, I knew, but it was the truth nonetheless. My father would sit in his chair near the window; turn on the small table lamp and snap open the newspaper. He would tell me repeatedly that idleness was a disease that compounds itself and multiplies without you realizing it. The key, he would say, was to never let it inside to begin with. He thought that if I didn’t go right off to college, or get a good job, or have my stupid life mapped out right then and there, that I would fall victim to the mere notion of uncertainty and would be doomed forever. If I sat down, he feared, I might discover I liked lounging around, and might not ever get up again. That is why he wanted me to get a job -- any job -- and “at least, take some classes at Mott, for chrissake.” So I did. I had registered to take a business course and an English course at our local community college that September but that was just to placate my father, just to waste time, until I decided which college to apply to, which major to center on. After all, I hadn’t decided yet.

I was seventeen years old. At a time when a young man is supposedly on the cusp of his life, a time of great discovery of ones own manhood, I found myself falling into a hole, retreating from my own desires, pleasing only my father in the few ways I could, for I knew not how to please myself. I felt myself succumbing to a different sort of idleness.

I remember feeling numb that summer – for at least the first month or so – and thinking what a strange feeling it was. I would actually say to myself, Christ, I feel numb, as I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when I got home in the afternoons. No feeling at all. I also remember that I read a lot in the afternoons and into the evening, comic books and a few novels. I picked up TREASURE ISLAND on a fluke and really enjoyed it, I read LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA and a small collection of Checkov short stories that I found on a little bookshelf in the basement. With a deliberate hand, my mom’s name, her maiden name, was written with blue ink on the inside cover. My routine idleness would involve me taking a book and a sandwich and walking to the back of our yard. There was a rather large rock hidden among the trees and I would hide away back there, reading of places and people who did not exist.

In mid-July of that year, a couple moved in next door. Or at least that was when they showed themselves for the first time. I saw no moving trucks but I also had not seen them before that July and they would eventually disappear from our neighborhood less then a year later. Our neighbor’s name was Cedric B. Howard and my dad said he was friends with my Uncle Larry. I saw him only once, one Saturday afternoon, working beneath the hood of his red sedan. His wife I began to see a lot, during the long summer afternoons. She would move around the house, around the yard. She would carry a box from the house to the garage, she would plant flowers, bend over a large tub scrubbing storm windows with large soapy bubbles spilling onto the grass. And every other day, she would hang laundry on the line. That was when my summer changed, when my life was altered. I would watch her move, and she did so in slow motion, her sun dress moving as if underwater. She moved about in silence, utter silence. The quiet was so deafening that I swore I could hear the air move slowly before me. The earth seemed to stop, all sounds, all noises and the sun shone brightly on her. She was breathtaking. So beautiful in an almost plain way. More beautiful than any cheerleader in our school, more breathtaking than any prom queen. Or any movie star. She did not look like the girls I went to school with, her body, her face, the way she moved. She didn’t look like anyone I had ever seen. I supposed she was in her thirties but I could not tell. Her dark brown hair was cut in a loose bob and it was always a little messy but quite perfect still, with loose stands dangling before her eyes. She would carry a round wicker basket, filled with clothes, from the house and she would set it on the grass. One by one, she would hang each garment, moving the clothespins from her hand to her mouth, back to her hand, to the line. It was a great choreographed dance and I was transfixed. I can still see her standing there, whipping the damp clothes out in front of her and then pining them over the line. She was twenty, thirty yards away from me but I could see her so clearly. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

The moment that I remember most was when she would stop, with the wet clothes before her, she would look around over her shoulder, and then place her hands at the base of her back and bend backwards, stretching to ease her muscles. I would watch her grimace and stretch both left and right, and I was convinced that the world was the most perfect place to be.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice pulled me from my reverie. I looked up from my book and saw her at the fence, her arms crossed and leaning on the top railing. I hadn’t realized she had come into the yard. “Hi, my names’s Janice, I live back there,” she pointed to her house, behind her. “Could you give me a hand?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said and put Mark Twain on the large rock beside me and walked quickly to the chain-link fence, hopping it with one step. I followed behind her as she walked to her house. “Come in,” she said. She held the back door open. We walked up the two steps into the kitchen. The kitchen was small, situated a lot like ours, but in reverse. Their dining area was on the other side, and it took me a few seconds to understand the similarities. There was a single bowl on the counter, with a spoon resting inside. Other than that, everything seemed clean, put away. “I need to move that table. It’s not heavy, it’s just too big, too wide for me to move by myself.”

“Sure,” I said and moved around the chairs, to the opposite side of the table, near the wall. I pressed my fingers beneath the top and waited for her lead. She reached down and as I waited, I could really see her face for the first time. She was close, so close to me. I tried to smell her but I could not. The first thing I noticed as she extended her arms to grip the table, is that her skin was almost golden, the color of honey. Her shoulders and neck, her cheek and jaw. There was a line on each side of her mouth, two gentle wrinkles, as if she was used to smiling. I had never seen skin like that in my life and I was sure they were there, just for me. When she looked up to me, I was surprised by her eyes, they were blue, crystal blue. But they were . . . soft and somehow sad. They looked to me as if they were looking for nothing and yet seeing everything. She had slight wrinkles coming from the corner of her eyes, like sunbeams. I stood beneath the ticking clock on the wall, praying to God to just please, keep me alive. In this moment. Forever. “We’re going into the far bedroom.” We picked the table up in unison. She led the way and we moved slowly from the dining room, and then down the hall. I wrapped my hands over the edge of the table, I was very careful not to bang the walls. As we shuffled our feet, her in front and me in the back, we angled it – slowly – through the doorway of the small empty bedroom. “In the middle’s fine,” she said and we set the table down. She ran her fingers through her hair, shaking her hand a bit on the top of her head. “Yeah, that’s fine.” She looked at me and smiled. Her smile took in those wrinkles and her face softened and radiated all at once. “Thank you.”

I walked back out the door, hopped the fence and picked my book back up and tried to read, but I could not. I could not breath or focus or sit still. My heart was so full that it sank and covered every inch of me.

I have told myself that I learned how to love that summer, but it went deeper than that. I am not sure how it is possible, but Mrs Janice Howard touched me more than any woman I have ever met, before or since, deeper and with more assurance. I fell in love with her, without really speaking to her, without really knowing her, a love I have never been able to ease myself out from.

A Dying Man

2008-06-27T14:02:00.003-05:00

Slowly he looked to me.
Is this real, he asked.
Yes, I say, yes it is. It is very real, as real as you and I.
Then I'm ready, he says, and smiles softly.
Okay. Then I am too.

Revolting Possums

2008-06-20T07:57:00.006-05:00

“The possums are grouping together,” he said as he waddled past my office. He stuck his head back into the doorway. His eyes were large and round. “Can you believe it?” Crenshaw’s voice shook and quivered. “We’re forming a union!”

I sat in my chair, my pen falling to my desk, my mouth open in disbelief. I couldn’t believe it. A union. I wasn’t really sure what a union was, but we possums were forming one, we were unionizing. We were actually forming a group, to have one voice, one cause. This was big, I thought, a momentous day for all possums, for each of us. I stood on all fours, not knowing what to do. There had been talk for months now, but someone had actually organized a revolt. It was all very surprising really. We weren’t normally aggressive creatures. Hell, we’d rather “play dead” than actually fight. However, someone had the guts, someone actually did it. I rubbed my backside against the side of my desk as I passed, padding my fur into a respectable rhythm, and walked out of my office, eager to catch up to the commotion that I could hear brewing down the hall. We huddled together, twenty, fifty, seventy of us, our tails were jittery, moving quickly from side to side. We moved en masse down the hall. The excitement was almost palpable, as we moved down the stairs and out into the daylight. We all squinted as we neared the open glass doors. As the midday sun shone through the glass unto the lobby floor, we knew this was something big, something big was happening, we could feel that. We would bare the sunlight, as long as we could. We looked to one another, each taking a deep breath, and we walked through the door. In single file, we scurried along the building, to the rear, into a nearby alley.

A large possum stood on a box, with slightly reddish fur, his little pink hand curled into a fist. He kept banging it into his left hand, palm open skyward. His fur on the top of his head was curl upward, in a scholarly wave, his pink pointed nose was scrunched like a wet napkin that been squeezed and twisted.

“We want respect and a little understanding! Is it too much to ask to be treated fairly? At least as well as we treat others? My friends, that respect starts right here, right now, with us. We must stand together and it is only together that we will stand tall!” He smiled as he gazed over the crowd, growing deep and full, from left to right. “Fellow possums, I look out at you and I don’t see ugliness, I don’t see any faces or bodies that are frightening. I don’t smell a bad smell. I don’t see animals that should scare human children and adults alike. I see gentle creatures, with cute pink features and caring eyes. I see sensitive souls that merely want to love and be loved. Isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t that what we all crave? But the respect, the change, ladies and gentlemen, must start with us, each and every one of us. We must raise the flag, our flag, and we must hold it high. The change must start from within us.”

I smiled at the words this possum spoke. I looked to my right and Crenshaw was beaming, almost to the point of being in a trance. There was a bit of slobber escaping from his mouth, as he nibbled on a berry. I looked around and saw possums of all shapes and sizes leaning in, taking in the speaker’s every word. They were spellbound.

“We can survive in the day, we MUST survive in the day. We are out here now, each of us, in the daylight, nightfall still hours away, but we have to strive for more. Longer periods. Whole, complete days. Outside. I know this is a scary thought but you must trust the possibilities that await once that door opens and we expose ourselves to daylight in a prolonged manner. We must open our minds to the idea. The possibilities are endless once we do that. Just imagine that we live in the day and sleep at night and suddenly we are “normal.” Look down the alley behind me – what do you see? Do you see that dumpster? Well, if that was a car, zooming down the road – in the daytime – the human in that car would be able to see you, and swerve to avoid hitting you. We are not fast creatures and we need that driver to see us. Humans are not too smart, you know, they cannot see in the dark like we can. Daylight could be the difference for us, between life and death. My friends, we don’t have to be road-kill.”

It was my turn to salivate. This auburn-furred possum made a lot of sense and really touched on something. I had never thought about what humans could see in their cars, or not see. I assumed none of my fellow possums had either. None of us wanted to die that way, either, under a fender or a tire, and yet many of us did. We did want to live, we did want love, we did want respect.

“We make this one change,” he continued, “This one small change, and our whole world opens before us. Because of one really small change, we will end up living longer lives – who knows how long – maybe into our third year or even a fourth year. Imagine that! We live longer, and we get to know our children, our grandchildren. And the best part, my friends, remember, that as long as we live, we grow. Think what a glorious thought that is! Just think how big we can get with an additional two years of living! As big as one of those large cats, or even a German Shepard? Or maybe as large as a horse? How about a Volkswagen Beetle? The possibilities are limitless. Just think about what we can achieve. But we have to live in order to achieve.”

Moments later, I was bending over a folding table, writing my name and address on a green index card. I signed on the line and I paid my dues, right there and then. The next day, I was eager to begin a new life. I walked out my home into the late morning sun but became frightened, hissed and went back inside and waited for night. I never again ventured out during the day after that.

Several weeks have passed since that day in the alley. In hindsight, not much has changed. I surely didn’t change all that much. Most of the possums I talked to didn’t either. Crenshaw sure didn’t. I did, however, try to hold tight to the “respect flag” that the speaker spoke of, and from that day forward, made sure anyone around me always referred to our species as “opossums,” and never again as mere “possums.”

Help On The Street

2008-06-17T07:30:00.002-05:00

He was a broken man, sitting on a newspaper leaning against a building. He stretched out his arm as I passed, almost touching my pantleg. "Change?" he asked, his voice almost cracking, his right arm jiggling the white plastic cup nestled in his fist.

I stopped. Yes, yes, I thought. I turned back to him, his attention now focused back down the street, away from me, awaiting the next to approach him. Yes, I raised my voice, I want to change. Please, help me.

Reconstruction

2008-06-04T07:36:00.005-05:00

He was awakened by silence, by nothing. The thin fuzzy red digital numbers read “3:38” and a strange light shone through the window. A clear blue light as if someone were holding a large lamp in front of the lone bedroom window in Andrew Beachum’s apartment. He strained his eyes to focus on the room, the grey lumps of a chair, piles of clothes, and then looked down at his right hand. It was covered in dried blood, the flow of red solidified like paint, each drip frozen as it straining to escape down his hand, toward his wrist. There was more red covering his flesh than the pink of his skin. He winced at the sight. His arm ached, his back. He felt sore throughout his entire body as he strained to turn over, from his side to his back. As his body came to rest, his face pointing up at the ceiling, he groaned and exhaled loudly. “Fuckin’ Russians.”

The steady cry of a siren pierced the air – a cop car or an ambulance – blocks away, or perhaps even miles away, as the sound cut through the summer night. But soon it faded off and then there was silence once again. The dog in the next yard, just below his apartment, was quiet for once, there was no loud talking on the street, no kids squealing their tires as they made their way down his block. He lay in bed and could feel his heartbeat slow and beat in a gentle rhythm. He moved his legs straight out and suddenly felt his knee throb, his thigh pulsate in what felt like one large bruise. “I’m gonna kill those fuckin’ Russians – or whatever they are – I swear to God.” With a groan, he swung his body out of bed and hobbled across the floor. He leaned on the doorframe as he passed and turned the corner of the hall into the bathroom. In the semi-darkness of the maturing morning, he lifted the toilet seat and peed, hearing a splash of water only intermittently. As he stood, he swayed slightly in tiny circles, and he felt his entire body throb, from his head to his toes and then back up to his head again. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill ‘em.”

The previous day had started innocently enough, just as many days had before that one. He woke, he showered, he poured himself a glass of orange juice. He folded his newspaper once and stuffed it into his brown briefcase, the only remnant of an ex-wife gone ten years. As he reached the landing of his apartment building, he wondered how the landlords let the teenagers trash the lobby like they did each night. They never listened to his complaints; they never did a thing about it. He stared at the candy wrappers and moved past the row of mailboxes in the lobby and out into the street. He lit a cigarette and smoked as he walked the four blocks to the train.

Every weekday morning, he would pass a truck, a red construction truck. As he passed each morning, he would notice three men who sat inside the truck or stood next to it, talking loudly about the work they were to do on a house that morning. They were construction workers, just like his father had been, but these men were foreigners. Clearly. They looked like foreigners, they acted sneaky like foreigners, they spoke a foreign language. They were doing work that his father or his father’s friends would have been in line to do, the very same work. Erecting a house on a lot that had once been barren. The blond 2x4s, the circular saws, the joyces, the nails, the beams, the drywall, the concrete. Those men performed the very same tasks his father had done on a daily basis. The very same work that his father was performing that day when he slumped over, just after lunch, hammer in hand, his head settling against the bottom step of the interior stairs leading to the second floor. Invariably, his father's life had been sacrificed for that new house on Dewey Street, a house that was no longer new. It had been eighteen years since that house was built, the one house his father could not finish. These guys, though, these Russians, or Polacks, didn’t even have the decency to learn the language, he thought. Every day, he glared at them. Every day he muttered to himself that they took the jobs of Americans, that they should just learn the goddamn language, for chrissake. it wasn’t that difficult. Every day his glare became more pronounced, his mutterings a little louder. And every day, the three construction workers watched as he passed, and every day, they noticed him more.

That evening, he was a slightly later than usual in coming home from work. He had stayed an extra forty-five minutes at CC Barker and Associates to finish a report that was overdue. Again. It was a monthly report and he was always late with it, even though it didn’t take him more than an hour to actually complete it. His boss, Mr. Prince – who was certainly no prince – had been barking for that report for two days now and Andrew was glad to be done with it, though he secretly enjoyed seeing his boss squirm in the interim.

The sky was a deep gray as he walked from the train, a lightness in his step. He was just a block from home when he suddenly felt a fist crash into his jaw, a solid jolt moving his skull so quickly to the right that he felt his skin loosen and shake. His whole body buckled beneath him. In a flurry of pushing and grunts, he could make out two men above him, two silhouettes hovering around him, with fists and arms like whips, knocking him to the sidewalk, beating him, kicking him in his sides, his legs, his arms flying about, in a futile attempt to shield himself in defense. In just a matter of minutes, all was silent again. He lie limp on the sidewalk, the taste of blood filling his mouth, his wallet gone, and no sign of the two men who had beaten him.

Layin' Low

2008-05-13T08:42:00.006-05:00

This blog is currently on a bit of a hiatus. Hopefully a short hiatus.

Child

2008-05-12T02:13:00.001-05:00

He sleeps with his mouth slightly open. In deep sleep. Still, even now, so like a baby.

His body protected beneath a white blanket, his brown hair gently unfolding on the pillow, his eyes wrapped in sleep. His skin so soft, so quiet, so like heaven. A softness, a stillness, as he swims in his childhood dreams. What does he dream of, I wonder?

I stand at the foot of his bed, visible still in the dark, and I am reminded of my own weakness, my pending mortality.

Cleansing Rain IV

2008-04-29T02:38:00.005-05:00

Same first three sentences as the other three Cleansing Rain stories. Just seeing where these three little sentences take me.

It was coming down in buckets. Literal buckets. All of a sudden.

"Are you awake?" she asked.

"Yes. Kind of hard to sleep," he said, rolling his head on the pillow to face her. She was sitting up, her hands in her lap, a faint light coming in from the window.

"Because of the thunder?"

"Yeah. It's really coming down."

"I looked out," she said, "And it's raining sideways."

He pushed his pillows against the headboard and sat up in bed, rubbing his hands over his eyes and then through his hair. “I can’t sleep,” he said. “Did you sleep at all?"

“Yes, for a few hours but I’ve been up for last ten minutes or so, when the thunder started and the rain came down. The way it is hitting the cement, it’s as if the ground is breaking.”

“Maybe the ground is breaking,” he said, staring into the darkness, towards the TV, straining to reflect the room, the window, the man and woman sitting in bed at 4:35 in the morning. “Perhaps this is the rain that ends it all. The Armageddon. The great disaster, brought about by the hand of man. One act that made the rain possible. So much rain, so much water, we have nowhere to go. We are submerged and unable to breathe.”

She looked at him in the darkness, his profile softer than she remembered it, his thinning hair pushed to one side. “That is quite the optimistic view you have there,” she said with a slight smile, knowing full well the sarcasm was laced with truth.

“It’s the way I feel. Maybe it’ll just drown me, this rain. Maybe I will be the only one not to survive it. You and the kids will be just fine.” He swung his feet off the bed and stood up. He pulled on the jeans he had discarded the previous night, and the white buttoned down shirt, and he walked out of the room and down the front stairs. The whole house shook with the thunder, the beating of rain filling the air at every turn. He slipped on his shoes near the front door, easing his naked feet into his loafers. He turned the two deadbolts and the chain, and opened the wooden door. A brush of cool air laced with bitter rain instantly pushed their way through the screen door and against his face. He closed his eyes and let his face rejoice in the shower that swept over him.

He walked out in the morning darkness, his body becoming instantly drenched as he turned with the sidewalk and followed it to the main street that ran three doors down. There wasn’t any traffic on what is usually a very busy street, he thought. Visibility was difficult but there were no cars, nobody on the sidewalk. “This is perfect,” he said aloud, “The world is asleep and dry. No one is out who should be out. Except me. I am in my own world right now. This is my world right now. I can’t see anyone and it is entirely perfect. I am all wet, it is all mine.”

He raised his arms up and moved them in circles. He looked up to the sky, and closed his eyes and let the rain fill his pores, fill his body, and he began to laugh. He stood in the rain without a worry or a care, without regret about the past, without a thought about the future. “I am lucky,” he said, “This is my life, my life to lead, this is my world. It is up to me.” He let his hands drop to his side and then his head fell to his chest. Softly, two fingers, then a hand touched his shoulder, his shirt drenched to his skin. He turned and saw her standing next to him, her hair like blankets, her skin glistening. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a mistake and I am very, very sorry.”

The words were just escaping her lips when the man and the woman heard a sound building behind them, a rumbling, two headlights jiggling in the darkness, behind the pellets of rain. They turned and saw the two beams of light get larger and then sway to the side. The body of the car was almost lost in the movement of the rain as it seemed to move in on them from every direction. They leaned into each other, paralyzed by the swaying of the lights, the body of the car lumbering towards them. It moved left and then right, and with an explosion of light, of sound, it swerved over the curb and pressed itself around a light pole, the impact echoing deep into the night.

The rain pressed down as they looked inside the car, it’s front end suspended in the air, the front tires turning, winding down. The driver was slumped in the seat, his body thrown against the wheel and the dashboard, his limbs were tangled. There was blood escaping in all directions, his head was smashed in. It was clear that the man was no longer alive, had probably died instantly, on impact.

The man and woman walked home, the rain cleansing them, filling them with despair, with such sadness, and yet also filling them with hope. They spoke no more of that night. All sins were forgiven. Life continued, as fragile and as strong as ever.

Words I Like, VIII

2008-04-17T09:53:00.005-05:00

Haven't done this in a while. Twenty more simple, everyday words that are fun to read, fun to say out loud. Nothing fancy. Go ahead, say them aloud. Say them slowly, letting each of them dangle in your mouth for just a bit. I dare you. Double dare you:

Peanut
Conjugate
Farthing
Paperclip
Bath
Courier
Fashion
Exfoliate
Cabbage
Burp
Flaxen
Petulance/Petulant
Libation
Germinate
Sinewy
Tumble
Carriage
Teetotal
Fathom
Posterior

Transfiguration

2008-04-10T09:36:00.002-05:00

I feel them when I climb into bed each night and turn out the light. My head settles into the pillow and I stare into the darkness and quietly pray, "Please don't let them come - please leave me alone."

I close my eyes and I feel them as they slowly move under the covers, across the bed, and sniff at my skin, their whiskers brushing the hairs on my legs, raising the top layer of my skin.

I don't know how they get in, I don't where they come from. I don't know what I did to have them here. My mother tells me that I need to settle down, that it's all in my imagination but they are real. She is wrong, she thinks I imagine lots of things but she doesn't know, she doesn't know anything about it. They are there, each night. I can feel them, I can feel all of their movement. I can feel their little feet, their nails, moving over my body. I don't know what they are looking for. I feel their tails like tiny strings move behind them. There are so many of them. I don't know, 20, 30 of them. I never look under the covers, I don't want to see them, see their bodies, their little noses twitch and sniff. I know what they look like, I don't need to look. But I can feel all of them move over my body, skittering left and right, over my legs, my torso, my stomach and chest, sniffing. My body stiffens and I do not move an inch. I hold my breath for as long as I can, and then exhale quietly, uneventfully.

After about ten, fifteen minutes, they move off me and they disappear. I don't know where they go. When I feel them gone, I can feel my body shake. Tense, like when you are outside and you are so cold. I drift off to sleep, my eyes still filled with terror and tears. This happens every night, every single night. Somehow, I have to end this, this has to stop.

Spam I Am

2008-04-09T08:32:00.007-05:00

Like most of you, I have been beseiged with spam as of late. At home, at work, it matters not. Yes, I get lots of offers from doctors and various men and women to "increase my equipment." Their word choice and phrasing is often puzzling and mildly humorous. (The latest one promised me, "Your fantastic device makes her shake." Not sure if that was a question or a statement or an offer.) While I thank them for thinking of me, I have declined their generous offers. And as of right now, no, I don't have any need or desire for discount medicine or enhancers.

I also get spam that offers me great sums of money -- as much as $25 million dollars!! I have received these offers from banks, high officials in foreign countries, reverands, Army sergeants and yes, I even got an email from Kofi Annan, eager to get in touch with me for the sole purpose of giving me money. All I have to do is contact them. Talk about being one lucky guy.

It seems to have gotten worse lately, my spam folder fills up so quickly each day. Now, I am not sure what the response (click) rate is on spam messages, but I guess since it costs very little to send them out, the response rate doesn't have to be great to be worth it to the spamers. Too bad, really.

Every once in a while, something gets through our tough shells though. I got a spam email yesterday that really touched me. A very simple email. The body of the email was only three words and a link. It was beautiful, really, pure poetry. I didn't click on the link but, goodness, I really loved it. I have yet to be able to delete the email because I just like to look at it now and then.

From: osario@xxxx
To: witnessing am i
Subject: You make my world beautiful

Wanna hug you http://xxxxxxxx.com/

Wednesday Night

2008-04-04T08:25:00.006-05:00

The train rumbled over my head, so loud it seemed to shake the cement below me. The tracks rattled as the train wheels pressed against them, the vibration stuttering and crying out. It was deafening.

It was then that I became one of those people who sings loudly in public --

Winter sounds the crying
Like an old man slowly dying
And the only sound
The wind that fills the trees

I fear there is no hope for me afterall.

Father

2008-03-28T08:38:00.001-05:00

When I was a boy
My father towered over me
He was an adult, a man
Tall and large
Big shoulders, large hands
His temper was explosive
His rage seemed limitless
I was convinced that he could kill me
If he wanted
If only he desired
For I could never match his strength
Could never equal his power

He vowed that his four boys would
"Never be able to take the old man."

My father is into his seventies now
Older, gray
More human
More mortal
Two of my brothers grew
Taller than my father
The third brother grew
Strong
But the youngest
An adult now
As tall and strong
As I will ever be
Still crumbles beneath
The old man's
Shadow

I will never be stronger
I will never be able to take the old man

Until
He is old and feeble
And not able to defend himself
Against all things
Great and small
I am devastated by this thought
This realization.

Novel Rejection

2008-03-21T08:46:00.003-05:00

This graphic comes courtesy of the incredibly reputible news source, The Onion. It made me giggle and I thought you might enjoy it as well:

I actually think there may be some truths up there.

The Receipts

2008-03-11T08:37:00.006-05:00

The third in a series of short stories that begin with the narrator being given something, being handed a piece of paper or object. The first two were "The Letter" and "The Summons."

She hands me the receipt. The woman with glasses and a blue smock thanks me for shopping and I grab my bag and walk away from the counter, towards the door. I walk past the newspapers and the tabloids sprinkled with the drunken escapades of some young actress I have never seen before, large sunglasses at night, stumbling towards the camera. Is that real, I wonder? A few magazines are angled towards the aisle and I stop before Vogue magazine. A brilliant deep red cover with a brunette staring at me, sultry perhaps. She is very near my type. She looks a little like me, her nose, her eyebrows. Her lips are fuller, her eyes more deeper, darker. Her hair is longer than mine, flows down her shoulder, and she is much thinner than I am, but she is me. I feel fat and old. But she is me, perhaps, if my life had happened differently.

Moments later, the woman behind the counter is handing me another receipt and I am clutching my magazine in my left hand as I walk through the glass door and onto the sidewalk leading into the parking lot. It is a clear spring day and the blue sky in the distance, beyond the sea of cars, tucked between two dusty clouds as bookends, is a brilliant azure, like the perfect blue lakes from one's childhood. What a stark contrast to the cars, I think, a stark contrast to the pavement, to the low rust brick buildings ahead, the shops. An old woman is walking up to the store, with a silver cane, clutching her creme-colored purse to her waist, against her creme-colored jacket. She looks at me, her face open, so familiar like my grandmother's. I smile at her. A gentle face, her skin so pale and clean. She does not smile back at me, though she holds my gaze as she moves slowly past me. I am still, rigid almost, the magazine suddenly heavy in my hand, as she moves from my periphery. My head begins to follow her but instead I look to the ground, my eyes filling with tears. I hear the sliding glass door behind me open. And then close shut. She is me. Or rather, I am her, perhaps, if her life had happened differently.

Suddenly, I feel lost. I don't know who I am. In a matter of one's heart beating, I am several woman, none of them really me. I drop the magazine, letting it slide from my fingers, the magazine me, shocked and confused. The magazine me wonders what has happened, looking up to the world now from the ground, as she keeps her pose, her hands on her hips, that same sultry pose. I have no answers for her. I am not sure what is happening, I think to myself. How to explain that to the magazine me or even the older woman me? What do I tell them? That eventually they become me? Or that I will become them? My head swirls, I can feel my body shake. Why wasn't I thinner? Taller? Why didn't I have fuller lips? Why wasn't I more sultry? Or happier? What will happen to me? Will I become the older woman me, in one form or another? Have I already? How did I get to this point? How do I explain what has happened to myself?

I walk across the street, letting the cars whiz past me. From both directions. I stand and wait with the other parents, mostly other mothers, outside the school as my daughter runs up to me, her pink backpack bobbing behind her. I hug her, glad to feel her close to me. A few moments later, we are waking past that same drugstore, my daughter's hand in mine and I can feel it, a little behind me, the sun continues to shine. As we walk, I revel in hearing tales of a really annoying boy named Pearce and art class and how my daughter thinks she left her hat at school, though she isn't sure.

Sensations

2008-03-03T13:58:00.000-06:00

I am wrapped thick
And vulnerable
January air
Thin and yet heavy
Cutting through me

The clank of a
Railroad crossing gate
The smell of chocolate
From a factory
Over the river
Gliding like
Speckled glass

Mondays

2008-02-25T08:24:00.004-06:00

Mondays are the hardest.

I leave the house without my skin, my heart curls into itself, looking for warmth, protection.

Writing Meme

2008-02-21T07:37:00.003-06:00

A belated and humble thank you to Absolute Vanilla (& Atyllah) (and others before) for the gift of honoring "powerful words."

____________________________________________________

A WRITING MEME

A wonderful writing meme passed along from a wonderful writer, a poet and a very nice woman, Reading The Signs . Thank you for tagging me with this. Honest.

What is the last thing you wrote?
The post before this was the last thing I wrote (and finished, though I use that word loosely).

Was it any good?
Not that good, no. I liked some things about it but it needs some work.

What’s the first thing you wrote and you still have?
I was very young, maybe five yars old. I still have the piece of paper. "My dad shot a bear. He hung it on the wall. He had a big party and invited all his friends." Okay, it was a very short story but it was pure fiction, baby, and it was all mine. There was another story a little later about a boy who was so sad that he cried, and then his mom cried and pretty soon the whole world cried. That was it. Not a great deal of plot but it was pretty darned gut-wrenching.

Write poetry? Angst?
I do write poetry and I do feel great angst about it, thank you for noticing.

Favorite genre of writing?
Cinnamon.

Most fun character you’ve ever created?
I am not sure "fun" is something I have done yet. I'll work on that.

Most annoying character?
Nor have I done "annoying." I'd like to think each character has some of both of those things.

Best plot?
Still working on that.

Write fan fiction?
No, not on purpose. But I have been influenced by so much of what I read. It is impossible not to. How can you read Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jose Saramago and not want to write like them?

Type or write?
I write in a little brown suede notebook. Things I see on the train, little things I think of -- a sentence or two. Many of those things make it into the blog. But I do all my real writing on my lovely Mac Book.

Ever go back to an old idea?
Sure, I have pulled almost everything from the recesses of "old ideas." Some ideas are dressed as memories, some as emotional breath, some as revelations.

Favorite thing you’ve written
I really like one short story I wrote a while back -- about a musician and what he sees as inspiration.

Do you show people your work?
I try to. I try to show my wife some things, but I guess that is partially what my blog is for. I am convinced that I really need to get out more.

Did you ever write a novel?
Um, yes, a short one, called OF THIS EARTH. Looking for an editor/publisher now.

Favorite setting for your characters?
I like everyday settings. Places that people know, places that maybe we take for granted, we forget about.

How many writing projects are you working on?
Two -- a new novel and the next post for my blog.

Do you want to write for a living?
No, but I would like to. Why? Are you offering me a job?

Ever written anything in script or play form?
I wrote a play when I was in high school and it was so very difficult. And the play I wrote was very, very bad. Stilted plot, clumsy dialogue. I have a great deal of respect, perhaps more than anything else, for a well-written play or script.

Five favorite words
Love, breath, texture, possibility, death.

Which character most resembles you?
All of them. I am, after all, all I really have to use as reference.

Where do you get your ideas for other characters?
People I know, people I see, people I imagine. All of that. And more.

Ever write things based on your dreams?
They have flavored things but I usually don't have the most vivid of dreams. I rarely remember them. I wish I did. I guess it would help if I actually slept at night.

Do you favor happy endings, sad or cliff-hangers?
I love happy endings but seem to go with what I consider non-typical happy endings.

Ever written anything based on an artwork?
Once for a writing contest, never before or sense.

Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write?
I try to be but I try to not let it stop the flow.

Ever write entirely in chatspeak?
Is that a real question? Really?

Entirely in L337?
Now, stop that. Those are silly questions.

Does music help?
Yes, but I much prefer the rhythm in my head, in my bones.

Quote something you’ve written.
"Rufus laughed
And Rufus grinned
When Rufus farted
Into the wind."

If you would like to do this meme, please do so. I can't quite reach far enough to actually tag anyone, so consider yourself tagged if you would like to be.

The Summons

2008-02-13T08:58:00.002-06:00

The second in a series of short stories that begin with the narrator being given something, being handed a piece of paper or object. The first story was "The Letter."

She handed me a piece of paper. A small piece of paper, slightly bigger than my palm. She had hurriedly written on it in black ink, telling me not to worry but that she merely wanted to be safe in what she was prescribing. The paper was face down, and when I turned it over, I was startled to see that she had written so many words, so many words so quickly, long words that I did not recognize. How sick was I? Was she not telling me the whole truth? The prescription called for at least four items. I think it was four separate names. Was I that sick?

I paid the receptionist - did I get change for my $20? - and ducked my arms into my heavy winter jacket. As I zipped my coat up and wrapped my scarf around my neck, I suddenly felt very sick. My insides thin, my limbs weak. Shouldn't I be in a hospital? I wasn’t sure I could make it home. I left the office in a daze, my head in a fog, more worried than when I entered, feeling more sick. As the door of the building shut behind me, I did not know which way to walk. Left or right, I could not remember where I had parked. The cars lay before me like a broken checkerboard. I could not remember the color of my car -- silver? no, wait a minute, green? -- how could I begin to think that I could find it among the mass that lay before me? I followed the path of sidewalk left, towards the street, the piece of paper in my hand, both stuffed deep into my coat pocket. I followed the road right, going with the traffic, feeling the big SUVs and the small cars brush past me. Whirled. My steps slow and deliberate, but I felt unstable, the movement around me swirled, making me feel susceptible to the force of the wind the passing cars pulling me within them. It was as if I were suspended high above the earth, on a suspension wire atop the Golden Gate Bridge, swaying in the wind off the bay, one foot extending before the other.

When I reached the corner, I waited for the light to change. And when it did, I decided to wait a bit longer. I wasn’t quite ready, I told myself. I had to catch my breath, get my strength back again. I watched the light turn red, and then green, then red again, and green and then red once more. A man with a wide nose, a goatee and cap appeared beside me. He looked at me, his brows dipping in one long furry line. Why had I not moved, he probably was asking himself, no doubt. He looked up to the light and then he crossed the street. Halfway across, he turned back to look at me, and then I could see him shake his head from side to side. I could not move, couldn’t he see that? Wasn’t it obvious that I was sick? I was at death’s door, I should be in a hospital. The "Walk" sign flashed to "Don't Walk" and then back again. I stood and watched the lights flash and then blink. I lost all interest in the words themselves, their goal to help me across the street safely. I waiting for the changes, My heart raced and then leaped at a countdown I could not see but could feel throughout my body. I could only breathe when a new direction stayed on in a solid flash. I was lost in the dance of the words, the changing colors. When I could not wait any longer, I turned from the corner and walked slowly back.

I pulled into our driveway, our small white house a welcoming sight. It made me smile. I walked through the front door to a quiet, still living room. Ellen was still at work. I took off my shoes and placed them on the mat by the door, curling the billowing laces and stuffing them back into the shoe. I walked into the kitchen and lit the gas burner on the stove, the blue orange flame igniting in a thin circle. I walked to the living room and grabbed the photograph of Ellen’s first husband, the father of her children, who died from cancer three years ago, a year before we met. I held the photograph over the flame, eager to rid myself of his ghost, his spirit, his looming presence in our lives. I could not do it. I lay the photograph on the kitchen counter and opened my other fist and lit the piece of paper on fire. Smoke rose in a thin rope, like a mountain river. Thin, twisting and fast. In a moment the prescription was gone.

State of Affairs

2008-02-08T09:15:00.001-06:00

Walking to work the other morning, my head filled with things I had to do at the office, how much I hate my job, blah blah blah, and then ran across this:

My morning, in retrospect, didn't seem so bad.

__________________________________________________________

I just saw Harry Morgan
The television actor
He was wearing a cap much like the one
His character wore on M*A*S*H
He was standing at the corner of Erie and Orleans
Waiting for the light to change
He looked just like he did tweny-five years ago
Except he was Asian.

__________________________________________________________

Skin so perfect
So smooth and
Soft to the touch
Somehow
Shears me

Journey's End

2008-01-17T05:35:00.000-06:00

I
The clear sky of mid-January
Snow tender and soft
Pale webs as breath
Slowly brushing in from the heavens.
Half footprints suspending me
Marking my way
Never quite sinking
Never quite reaching
Frozen gravel buried beneath
The white cake that lifts me.
I close my eyes
And I swear I can smell it.

II
Dusk has fallen
A sweeping grey brushstroke filters azure
The barren branches and towering trees
Once distinct, now jumbled
Once familiar, now distant.
Dizzying silence, whole and clean
Fills me, stifles me.
I slow my pace
And yet my periphery recedes
Pulled from me like the slipping of time.
To focus, to focus, to slow the descent
But I am drowning
Submerged within the sterile, brittle air
Of deathly, deadly winter.

III
Ahead of me only desolate stillness
Stark cold forced against me
Behind me the swirling wind has erased
My presence, any sign of life.
Drawn away from the knowing and the known
I am lost.

(photograph taken by NMB)

The Letter

2008-01-11T08:03:00.000-06:00

He handed me an envelope. It was face down, the seal side up. Small and white, soft white with aged yellow brown at the corners and along the sides. I held it for a moment before turning it over. The writing was small, a cursive I did not recognize. It was addressed to my grandparents, here at the very house my father now lived.

"It's a letter," he said. "I wrote it on my nineteenth birthday, I was stationed somewhere in Sicily, in some little god-forsaken town. It was warm and dusty, I remember. October 1944. I didn't write home often but I did that day, my nineteenth birthday. I should have written more. I didn't know that my mother kept the letters I did write. I threw the rest away, but I kept that one." He looked at the letter, his letter, that I held in my hands. "Don't read it now. Read it later."

My father pointed with a brush of his hand out to the backyard. He said the shed needed some work done, there were some boards that needed repairing. It all needed to be done before it got too cold out, he said. I looked at the shed, pushed into the far corner of the yard. It seemed so small out there, so vulnerable. I turned to my father and said, "We can do it tomorrow, okay?"

He looked at me and smiled, "Sure. Tomorrow." We then sat for a long time, the fall air catching us both by surprise. The turning of leaves was almost palpable, you could smell the change.

"Do you know what I miss?" he asked. I had an immediate sense that it was not me he was talking to, though, so I did not answer. "I miss the future. I miss thinking about the future, I miss dreaming about the future. I miss knowing it's there. I miss the comfort of knowing it'll always be there."

I didn't read the letter for two days. For two days, it sat on my kitchen table. I stood and looked at it but I was never sure it was actually there. As it sat there, quietly, the white became illuminated and it seemed to hover above the dark wood grain of the table, like a memory. However, it wasn't my memory to hold and I was afraid of the stories the letter would tell me. I was afraid of the words I would read, the hopes of a young man on the verge of his life. I certainly did not know who the boy was that wrote it, and I was now hesitant to learn of him, to know him. I did, however, know what became of that young man. I knew the man he became. I knew that he had been wounded in the leg two days after his nineteenth birthday -- just two days after he wrote the very letter that beckoned to be read once again. I knew that my father eventually got married and had two children. I knew that he worked for fifty years in a car factory and he retired just shy of his seventieth birthday. I also knew that my father walked with a limp, a limp he always had. I never knew my father without it. I never thought too much about, it was just part of the man that was my father. He always wore long pants, so I never saw a scar, I never saw the wound. A limp, that was all.

As I held the envelope in my hands, I was reminded - perhaps for the first time - that he didn't always have a limp. I was reminded that my father was alive before my life, that there were dreams and hopes and fears. I sat on the couch and pulled the letter from the envelope, letting my father live again, if only for a few moments.

Things I Am Convinced Of

2008-01-07T07:08:00.000-06:00

No matter where you stick a Starbucks -- even if one were plopped down in the middle of a cornfield -- you will always find at least one car parked illegally along side it, hazard lights flashing, at any and all hours of the day.

The mere prospect of peace will forever inflame the greatest fears of the narrow-minded to violence.

The heart, once broken, will never again be whole.

Where there is power, you will find abuse of power.

Simple is more interesting than complex within art for it allows the viewer/reader/audience to engage their imagination. "Leave 'complex' to the mathematician," someone once said.

One man's hands are very, very small in comparison to the size of the world.

Strength and weakness travel as a pair.

The power of unconditional love can overtake any superhero power.

Words I Like, VII

2008-01-02T07:00:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year everyone.

New year, old theme. Twenty more simple, everyday words that are fun to read, fun to say out loud. Nothing major, just little words found here and there. We use them everyday but sometimes forget what silly little balls of fun they are. Go ahead, say them aloud:

Preposterous
Milky
Crescendo
Bob (the verb)
Secular
Teetotaler
Imprudent
Scrim
Vernacular
Whistle
Portal
Simile
Peculiar
Lingo
Parlance
Ergo
Populate
Cheeky
Vivacious
Bliss

Rebirth

2007-12-28T07:08:00.000-06:00

It was late on Friday night, few weeks back, that I stumbled across a blog I have admired for a while but never commented on, An Innocent A-Blog. I read that Bernita was hosting a little fiction contest based on a supplied photograph for inspiration. The problem was that the deadline was that very night. I challenged myself to write something quick and honest and short (man, writing only 250 words is tough). (Thanks Bernita for the challenge and the avenue.) And here it is:

REBIRTH

“I’m ready now,” he said. “Let’s make love.”

She turned to him, smiling. “You are a romantic. Maybe you should buy me dinner first, big boy.”

“I’m serious.”

Her smile slowly faded. “You're serious? Here? You want to do it here?”

“Yes, now, here. Yes, I am deadly serious. I want a child. I want a child with you.”

“Here? In the grass? Aren’t there . . . people around?”

He smiled. “No, look around. There is no one around. I lay down my coat and we are under the skies, among the breeze.”

“Among a bunch of large dead oak trees?”

“Look, I know this sounds crazy but it makes perfect sense.” He took her shoulders gently in his hands. “These oaks aren’t dead. We had them at my house growing up. You think they are but they still have a lot of life in them. They will bounce back. They always do, year after year.”

She put her thumb between her teeth and looked down the hill, then past the row of large oak trees. “So, you do want a child? We talked about it and you always . . . well, never wanted to talk about it.”

“Yes,” he said, “You know I do, I just didn’t feel like it was time. For some reason, now, now, I feel . . . it’s time.”

Her smile met his and he led her under a large oak tree, void of leaves, its bark jagged and coarse. Its trunk was mammoth and it was there at the base, that I was conceived.

Happy Go Lucky

2007-12-20T07:09:00.000-06:00

Whistling as he walks
A spring in his step
Walking cane at his hip
He smiles with his eyes
And tips his hat

He is a man that cannot be touched
A man on a mission
A man following his own voice
No one can stop him
Or ignore him

His presence is felt, touched
As he passes by
In his footsteps
In the feeling that lingers
Long after he is gone

"I am alive," he tells a child
He stands next to
Waiting at the crosswalk
He bends at the waist
Raises his brows
Smiles
And asks
"How about that?"

The Warmth of December

2007-12-14T08:43:00.000-06:00

It is a well-lit restaurant. December evening. She sits against the wall, the large mirror cascades along the wall above her head, multiplying the light, illuminating what is reflected, and reflected again. The sound of laughter behind me, a young couple sharing a plate to our left, waiters in white shirts and aprons glide between the tables.

Her skin is like cream, her eyes engaged. The blue in her eyes seem to glow as she talks of a movie she recently saw, her lips moving, a nod of her head. She smiles and glances down to reach for her drink and with that move of her fingers, curling around her glass, I am falling beyond, forward, within. Every part of me is pulled within the breath of this moment, hushed and suspended.

I stand and reach down with my hand and gently graze her left hand, resting on the edge of her chair. "I'll be right back," I say as I turn from the table and walk through the restaurant and step outside. I am not a smoker, so I stand for a minute motionless and feel the cold air cut into me. The valet asks if I have my parking ticket and I shake my head. "No," I say, "No, not yet."

I don't know if it is from the cold, but tears fill my eyes. I squeeze them shut and then head back inside.

Night Train

2007-12-04T07:56:00.000-06:00

The train station
Still of night
Dimmed lights
Yet light remains
Soft
From life that begins anew each day
I feel so serene
so at ease
I want to cry
I am at home
In such rooms of faded memory.

There are people there cleaning
And the odd, distant click, click, shuffle
of a fellow commuter
far off around the corner, somewhere
I pass the stores that will again
Be lit and hum with human activity
I pass the walls I do not recognize
Always blurred by coats in motion.

I pass a quiet
A pocket, a lull
A hollow yet full silence
It hangs in the air, it moves about
Around my feet
It is cold in the December air but I am warmed
Stillness
It fills me up
If only for a moment.

I Wanna Be Leonard Cohen

2007-11-27T10:12:00.000-06:00

Inspired to write in the vein of the mighty Leonard Cohen

Cuddle with me, baby
Slide your hand inside of mine
Cradle all your fears to me
Until the end of time

Bury time within me
I will wear it like a glove
My breath will dry your wettest tears
So surrender to this love.

And let me love you
Until the end of time.

Elvis Has Left The Building

2007-11-19T11:25:00.000-06:00

Blatherings and Tidbits:

Perhaps I am too old, perhaps I don't fit into my white jumpsuit any longer. I have had too many donuts perhaps, my voice isn't as strong as it once was. I was "an actor" again last Sunday night, acting in a small film. It was film without a script, relying on a basic plot outline, some rituals. I had a small role, in only two scenes. It was filmed in a little cottage somewhere in Indiana so it was a two and a half hour drive for me. I didn't get home from the shoot until 2:30am last Monday morning. During the shoot, I fell into what was comfortable to me -- how I approached things, an intensity, a desire. But I found my acting muscles soft, my instrument a bit rusty, rather worn. Do I care enough to get it in shape again? Do I? What struck me that night, as I drove in the rain in the wee hours, what strikes me now, is that was the probably the last bit of acting I will do. Who knows what will happen in the future (I never say "never") but it did feel like "the end."

Just as every blogger here in blogland seems to be doing, I too am fighting something. A bug, a virus, something. I am achy and congested and dog-tired. Perhaps it is just my body reacting to the coming of winter. Or maybe just the Monday blues. That is quite possible.

Still making tweaks to the novella. Character name changes, clarifying some things. Is this the third draft or fourth? I don't recall. Also doing my homework on agents and publishers and first steps to take once I am really ready to do so. I am also letting some ideas germinate inside my little noggin' for the second novel.

Gearing for the holiday on Thursday, one of my favorite holidays. I know that all the holidays have noble intent, but a holiday to "be thankful" seems like a pretty good one. Whether we are thankful for a good harvest, our family, our health, our lives, it seems like a good day to be with family. My wife, two boys and I are heading to my folk's house in what was just crowned the 3rd most dangerous city in the US. Ah, my hometown. I am thankful it is not the first.

I have 45 cents in my pocket (one quarter, one dime, one nickel and five pennies), my Italian jukebox coin, a twenty pence coin, my key card for here at work and a piece of paper with the names of two singers (my wife and I heard them during a film we recently saw, and liked them).

Happy Monday and Happy Thanksgiving all.

Restless Dawn

2007-11-14T09:22:00.000-06:00

Another fiction contest. Only 250 words, inspired by the below photograph, taken by Jason Evans. It's a wonderful short fiction contest at Jason's blog, Clarity of Night. My story is in a slightly different tone than what I usually do. I tried something different because of the small word count. Lots of great short stories there, though. Check it out.

The End of Day

We had been mortal enemies since elementary school. Always in the same classes but never really friends. As the years grew, so grew the distance. By high school, Erik was handsome, popular, a great athlete, a good student. I too was popular, but in theatre. We would vehemently stare at each other in the hallway, always aware of the other’s every move. We were as different as Cain and Abel.

Years later, I fell in love with Erik’s ex-wife. She was lovely and gentle but had grown tired of Erik’s listlessness, his anger. One morning, as we sipped coffee, Katrina mentioned that Erik had invited me to spend the day with him. It’ll do him good, she said, make him feel better, remind him of his youth, better days.

An hour later, as he bent at the waist, getting out of his truck, I noticed a pistol stuffed in the waistband of his jeans. My mind raced. Years of hatred, disappointment, abuse, an ex-wife and me. He’s going to kill me, I thought. As we walked into the woods, I kept my distance, aware of his every move, just as I always had. Suddenly he stopped and faced me. “You must be asking yourself why I wanted to see you,” he said with a smile. I did not respond. He reached back and grabbed the pistol and held it towards me. “My life is for shit,” he said softly, “It’s always been shit. Don’t let this happen to you.” And he pushed the barrel against his temple and squeezed the trigger, the gunshot echoing into the fiery red sky.

My Seven Year Month

2007-11-07T08:29:00.000-06:00

Many people are writing a novel this month as part of NaNoWriMo-- a novel in one month, four weeks. That is amazing. My hat is off to those folks. And with good reason. It has taken me seven years. Last night, I put the finishing touches on my novel, OF THIS EARTH.

After completing my family history in the fall of 2000 (which took me eight years to compile and write, by the way), I began writing the fictionalized story of a few key events in my grandfather's life. So, in doing the math, it was a story that I lived with, actively, in one form or another, for the past fifteen years. There were several years in there where I did no writing at all but in January of this year, I finished the story, as it existed in my mind. I was so happy, so so happy.

However, it was pointed out to me then that with the 25K words that I had written, I did not really write "a novel." I had maybe written a novella and quite possibly just a long paragraph. I was heartbroken. What to do, I thought. After pouting for several days, it occured to me to write the full story -- finish the story of my grandfather, fill in the gaps, take him along and write the rest of the story. I tried to seize the momentum I had and gave myself a May 1st deadline. I didn't come close to hitting it. But last night, after almost ten months of working on the second half, I finished the second half and thus, finished the story, finished my grandfather's story. I actually wrote the words "The End." I could almost hear the clip clap of typewriter keys as I did that.

Now, I have some editing to do to the second half, but if I were to die today, if I were to get hit by that proverbial bus, I would have the pleasure of knowing that I completed a novel -- something with a beginning, a gob of middle stuff and an end. And yeah, it took me seven years longer than one month to do it, but I am proud of that too.

Now, I can move on to the second novel. A story of a man and a woman . . .

The Train Ride In

2007-11-06T08:09:00.000-06:00

How can you go wrong with Gabriel Garcia Marquez? I marvel at his skill, his mastery of turning simple phrases, using a comma. His amazing balance of telling enough but not too much, his wonderful ability to throw in an impossible image in a totally plausable way. I was down to the last five pages of his latest novel, savoring his words like the last remnants on a dinner plate, soaking the sauce with the last of my bread.

But I stopped. I closed the book and put it back in my bag. I stared out the window of the train and listened to the three men sitting in front of me. They were from Africa or the Middle East, I could not tell. Perhaps they were from somewhere else. It did not matter. The sound of the three mens voices, in a dialect, a language that, for me, was reduced to sounds, and rhythms, overlapping and intertwining. One of the men would laugh, or raise a voice to make a point, but I did not look at them. I just stared out the window, watched the landscape pull by and was lulled. There were no words, no sentences, no meanings. Just sounds and cadences and music. As powerful and beautiful as the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Alive, He Said

2007-10-31T07:27:00.000-05:00

The temperatures dropped, suddenly, like a cascade of dripping paint, forcing a cold chill to move through his body. He slides his hands in his pockets. His breath visible, hovering before him, beckoning. Somewhere far off a voice is heard, moving delicately within the sound of the wind. A man's voice but very far off. This place, he thinks, this place has become foreign to him. It is as if a favorite shirt just no longer fits right, just doesn't feel comfortable in the shoulders or in the way it hangs. Perhaps it never did.

He walks into the house, letting the back door shut behind him. He moves through the kitchen and then into the living room. He stands in the middle of the room, and looks around. The photographs on the wall seem etched in dust, the paintings just as they have always been. It is as if looking at the walls with paintings are paintings themselves, a single capture of life as it was. The couch, the two red chairs molded with life that used to move within this room. He remembered jumping on that couch. Did he? Really? He cannot imagine being allowed to do that but the sensation seems real. He walks to the window, looks through the dirty glass, out unto the street. The concrete is wet, filled with leaves, bristling in circles, but otherwise there is no life there, just memory. He is drawn forward, his skin close to the glass. He moves his fingers against the pane and then chips his thumbnail against a dried drip of paint on the glass. He stops and turns back into the room.

On the side table in the hall is a book, a hardcover with red fabric binding. He picks it up. Nobody Starves by Catharine Brody. The letters are in a thin gold foil but the title, the book are unfamiliar to him. He flips through the pages, from back to front, letting the words jump and bubble before him. A novel, fiction. It's an old book. First printing, Longmans Green Publishers, 1932. Who's book is this, he thinks, who put it here? Who left it here? He looks around the room again, half expecting his father to be standing by the stairs, smiling, looking down at him, as he used to watch him, reading on the floor, but no one has been in this house for over two years.

He looks to his left, back into the house. There is no movement, no sound. He glances up and decides to head upstairs. The first room, at the top of the landing, a small bedroom. This was his room, he remembers, is empty now, a single shoebox in the corner between the two adjacent windows. The light from the fall day peeks through, though without fanfare. A solid dull light. He walks down the hall, gingerly, for there is a palpable feeling here. The second bedroom is empty as well, it was the guest bedroom, for he was the only child. The master bedroom is at the end of the hall, the room large and airy. The bed sits against the large wall opposite the windows, just as it always has. Just as it should. A small delicate crucifix hangs above the headboard. Two small white lamps sit on the bedside tables. They don't match each other but are similar enough at first glance. He didn't recall that they were different. He also didn't remember the crucifix. How could he have missed so much, how could he have forgotten? But he can close his eyes and feel it all come back to him, flooding him. He is a child again and the sensations, water dripping over him, covering him. He remembers being so small as he approached the bed, crawling up and across the covers, moving between the warmth of his parents bodies. The comforter now is smooth and without a wrinkle. It is as if she just made the bed, moments ago. In this house, the moments have been suspended. Time has stopped.

On the dresser are two photographs. One is of his parents on their wedding day, two young, pale figures in black and white. She is sitting in a chair, he is crouched next to her. He is so thin, he smiles awkwardly, his top teeth showing. She looks radiant, young. Her hair is short and full, her lips black. The other photograph is from years later, the three of them, at Christmas or Easter when he was four or five. He is on his fathers lap, smiling for the camera but still reaching for something, off to the left. That was so long ago, he thinks. He smiles and opens the top dresser drawer. Beside some jewelry and two small boxes lies a single card, a memorial card. A painting of St. Christopher carrying Christ is on one side and as he turns the card over, he breathes in. He recognizes the name at the top, the dates listed as his own. He was only seven years old and yet he remembers how fast the car traveled down the street, leaves flying from the tires, how quickly it all happened. He remembers lying on the ground as the leaves fell back on him.

Back out the rear door, with the red novel firmly in his hand, he walks through the backyard. He looks back at the house and keeps on walking, as if he were never there.

Quiet of Early Morning

2007-10-22T07:09:00.000-05:00

He is a mere silhouette
His grizzled figure alone at the bus stop
His body hunched on the bench
His head slumped to his chest
His left leg crossed over his right knee
His boot dangles in the light
A rounded toe with frayed edges

He is solitary
Unmoving
Asleep or resting
Perhaps dead

Behind him, the rising sun
Emerging over a factory or warehouse
A star burst
Encircling this figure
A ray of light
Breathing life
Somewhere
Beneath his coat
I listen for breath
But I am too far away

In this moment
The quiet of early morning
I am hushed
By the power of a radiance
From heaven

A Post About Posts

2007-10-18T08:08:00.000-05:00

My many thanks for your concern over my recent absence from blogland. Unfortunately, I have not been on vacation in Sicily (except in my dreams), I have not been off solving this world peace crisis, I am not hammering out The Great American Novel, I am not doing a great deal of anything. I am, however, well.

I have been a bad blogger as of late, even more so than normal -- not reading the blogs I love to read, not writing on my own. As a matter of fact, it has taken me about 5 days to write this post. Talk about pathetic.

I am going through a few things right now and reevaluating my time and my commitments. The death of a loved one will do that, as will a change in one's occupation. It has been two months now, but losing my father-in-law has touched me in many more ways than I thought possible. The memorial for him was this past weekend. He was a poet, a writer, a professor, a father, a husband. We are similar, though his greatness is beyond me. While I am thrilled by comparisons, I know I have so far to go to reach his greatness. Thus, I have been thinking more of how he lived his life, overall and with each of his days, and subsequently, struggling with who I am. This coincides with a slight change in occupation. I haven't yet changed jobs but will within a few days and am a little stressed about the whole affair. I worry most about how "my life" will be affected by this change. That will eventually work itself out, one way or another.

As I struggle with thoughts of time and destiny and legacies, I am I have also been struggling with the idea that my novel continues to sit and wait for me. I had given myself May 1 as a deadline but that date has come and gone (and almost come 'round again). That makes me very mad and extremely sad. There is more than my novel waiting for me -- the rest of my life is pending, I suppose. Still and always. And as "time" seems to be squeezing before me, I am struggling as I sit in front of my computer each morning. As many have before me, I have been struggling with the age-old dilemma of whether blogging takes away from more "serious" writing -- the writing of one's novel.

Nothing major, just thoughts milling about in my brain.

But I am alive, thank you all.

And I am thankful for you.

From the Edge/Here

2007-10-03T12:33:00.000-05:00

From the edge
Here
I fear I am lost
But I can see everything
As far out as imaginable
As far down as life will allow

From the edge
Here
I fear the suffocation
But find the air full
Soft and swirling
My lungs fill and expand

From the edge
Here
I fear my life is over
But tears flow from me
I am empty
I am hopeful