____________APOCALYPSE AVENUE

A Letter from Your Secret Admirer

2012-01-17T14:45:00.001-08:00

Dear ______________,

    I was very taken away when I first saw you. It’ll be a strange comparison, but you reminded me of my first car. A 1967 sky blue Ford Fairlane. Something about the ocean, the sound inside of a seashell between the both of you, though there was no sound of a seashell at all, in either of you. That car shook violently when I drove it, you, I haven’t even heard your voice.
Just a vague feeling. A comfort. The stretched out blue ocean dissolving on the curve of the earth...you both remind me of the stupid Ocean.
    You wouldn’t understand. I know that about you now. You are the type of person who doesn’t have feelings that are scattershot like that. You are a person grounded in the ordinary world. I envy that about you. I am a person so full of wild ideas and misunderstood love that I often feel like a balloon instead of a human.
    Just floating across rivers illuminated with pure radiating fire.
    Well maybe not fire, that would pop a balloon.
    Your reaction to my “good deed” the other night was very disheartening. Serves me right for trying to be kind. I figured, we’re both single, attractive...in the market, why not try to be kind. As I have already said, I tend to do things differently, the average guy would have sauntered up to you in the bar and he would have made some clever little comment and then cleverly have attempted to buy you a drink and then cleverly...a lot of cleverness, all of it. I don’t operate that way.I think there is room in this world for soft beautiful light, people are just often too afraid of embarrassing themselves. Closed tight like flowers that bloom momentarily in certain moonlight.
    I could see how you would have been a little uneasy, thinking about how someone had been in your apartment while you were sleeping. That would creep anybody out. I am however, completely puzzled as to why you felt the need to involve the police. Obviously my intentions are good. If they weren’t you would have known all about it, much earlier. I wish I could have been listening when the officer took the report, “What? Someone broke into your apartment while you were there and did what?” “The dishes.” “The intruder did the dishes?” “Yes.” “The intruder did the dishes?” A second time, skeptically, “And left a sweet note.” You would clarify.
    Later, I could just imagine them, standing in a circle in the station, their cop moustaches bouncing up and down, swaying back and forth, as they laughed about your strange incident.
Sure, it was odd for me to come in like that. Don’t be mad at your Superintendant, it’s not his fault. I could steal just about anybodies keys. If you are going to be mad at anybody, be mad at yourself. You are not all you are cracked up to be. Your exterior might be a marvelous thing, your inner light is not all that pleasant. Plus, you snore. You drool. You really need to water that plant in the kitchen a little less. Wouldn’t the living room be a much better place for it? The sunlight, is all.
The truth is, I have been coming into your apartment periodically, though we are complete strangers, or truthfully, one sided strangers. I know a lot about you. Though we haven't talked, or even exchanged glances, I am drawn to you. Last Tuesday I organized your CDs alphabetically. A couple nights later I did your taxes. For real. Check your file cabinet. Done. I found your grocery shopping list and figured that I would be romantic and go shopping for you, have the brown paper bags waiting on the counter when you walked in after your yoga class. I was worried that you would come home with your own groceries and then there would be just far too many groceries. It would go to waste. I was concerned that the Butter Pecan ice cream would melt.
    The Silly things that keep people confined to their own small lives, apart from one another. In a better world, our desires would be necessary things that kept us alive for each other. Our desires would not be just hobbies.
    So, there, our love affair is over. It saddens me, and perhaps, it will bring you relief.
    I thought that I would write to you and point out something good that came out of this for me. Once I realized that it wasn’t going to work out between us, I turned my attention to the thing that was really making me unhappy.
    My sky blue 1967 Ford Fairlane.
    Some years ago, I was forced to sell the car. It was in bad need of repair and I am just not the kind of person that can make heads or tails out of how to repair it. That old song, you know the words, I needed the money. At the time, selling it was just something that I did without all that much thought, later it became something that I regretted. The years peeled away from me and then, the first hot day, to my horror, suddenly here was the car. Cruising around, restored. It had always been in my mind and now, here it was resurrected from my dreams into the daylight, the windows down, the radio on, an arm sticking out, getting the best trucker tan he could after a long brutal winter.
    That’s right. The man who bought it from me, was something of a force of nature. He took my decaying vehicle and transformed it. I would have to watch my old car, drifting by on the roads of my small town and try not to let it completely break my heart. It was under so many layers of wax that even the sun had to turn away from the glare. The chrome was something that only your dreams could polish that bright. The glug glug glug, purr of that exhaust was like a small orchestra to me as it coasted through the traffic light. The worst part of all of this was that I was on foot! Yeah, I didn’t even have a car.
    So, thanks to you, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t need you, that you were just a stand in for something that I really had to take care of.
    I went to the man’s house while he was at work and I did all of his laundry. I used fabric softener. I used spot remover on a shirt stained with wine. I cleaned out the dryer lint trap after every load. I neatly folded everything. Then, I fed his cat and cleaned his bathroom. Scrubbed the hell out of the toilet. Got all of the soap scum off of the sliding glass shower door.Emptied all of the trash cans. Changed the sheets on his bed. Sent his mom a birthday card.
    Then, satisfied, I went out into the garage and took my car back.
    It really drives like a dream. I’ll tell you this and you probably won’t believe it, but it is impossible for this car to get stuck at a light. Every light it hits is green. Everyone would fall in love with me if they were in this car, on my bench seat, just try not to smile.
The weather has been hot, there is no better time to be cruising down the coast line with the windows down. The wind whirring in your ears so loudly that you couldn't’ ever hope to hear the radio, but that is the point. The wind in your ears like that, it is like if you listen very closely, you are getting direct orders from the same beautiful noise stuck inside a sea shell.
    Soon, I will be at the ocean.
    The sun on me, and the car. As it belongs. As I lay on the hood. My hands behind my head. My feet splayed out. The stretched out blue ocean dissolving on the curve of the earth.

                         Best,
                    Your Secret Admirer.

Phyllis

2012-01-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

My friends showed up. Matt and Jack, the little brother of Stacie.
    I say little, because he is younger. He’s a pretty big human. Giant. Gangly. Beer bellied, a head like a block of stone. Odd limbed and awkward, deep sunk eyes and crooked jaw.
    Jack is wearing a Spandex Under Armor bike shirt tucked into blue jeans with a white studded belt. He’s got on cowboy boots.
    I stand there looking at him in my doorway, thinking, at least he doesn’t have on his cowboy hat.
    I’m not too excited about taking Jack down into the city dressed like this, but whatever, I’m just glad he’s here.
    His sister is getting married and we are all meeting up with the groom and the groomsmen, for a bachelor party. It’s Saturday night, in the late spring. You have to take full advantage of Saturday night in the late spring. Blink and you’ll miss it.
    Matt, small and quiet, has a bottle of cheap vodka, that he keeps at his side at all times the way a gun slinger from the Old West keeps his six shooter. So we get into that vodka. Jack wants beer so I send him down to the corner store.
    When we are alone, Matt says, “He’s got like four dress shirts hanging up in his car. I thought when he got here, he was gonna put one on. I was wrong.”
    Jack, comes back with Old English 40 oz. malt liquor and sits down on my couch.
    I’m glad he’s here. He’s a fucking weirdo. I love weirdos. He's a good friend to me. I would rather spend my time with odd ducks than with people who bore the fuck out of you.
    “That Spanish chick at the store is mean as Hell.”
    “She hates white people.”
    “Rightfully so, it’s a Dominican neighborhood and you’re killing it.” Matt says.
    “The corner store girl, she knows you’re with me.” I explain.
    “Yeah, how?” Jack asks.
    “She just knows, she can smell it on you.” I said, “Spout went down to the corner store on Cinco De Mayo...man, she get’s excited about all the holidays, all of them, even like President’s day…”
    “This is true,” Matt confirmed, “I was there on Columbus Day, she wanted to have a party.”
    “See.” I said, “So, there it is, Cinco De Mayo, she comes home and says, “HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO! Then, she wants to have tacos and Coronas. Sure. So, I start cooking and she goes down stairs to the corner store for the beer. Well, she opens up the door, addresses everybody in the store, throwing her hands in the air, “HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!
    “The girl behind the counter almost killed her. She yelled out, “WE’RE NOT MEXICANS!
    “Then they kicked her out of the store and wouldn’t even sell her the Corona. I had to walk down there and explain to them that Spout gets excited about all of the holidays, even the bullshit ones like Flag Day and says Happy Cinco De Mayo to everybody on the 5th of May, even black people. They didn’t believe me. I told them that we definitely knew that they were Dominican and, then they barely excepted my apology and wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Plus, then my god damn change was wrong when I bought the beer.”
    “Oh Shit!”
    “Now I’ve got to go up the hill to the other store for beer.”
    We had a few more drinks there in my apartment and then Jack finished his 40. He was already getting kind of loopy. Big as he was, he really couldn’t handle his liquor.
    I liked him anyways.

    We took the train downtown. There was a young chick, maybe 19, with a cast on sitting next to me.
    The cast was covered in signatures.
    “Even the UPS man signed it.” She said proudly.
    Matt was a mailman, he nodded solemnly.
    “He’s a postal carrier.” I said, “Do you want him to sign your cast?”
    “Ok, sure.”
    “Do you have a pen?” Matt asked.
    “No.”
    “A marker?”
    “Forget it.” She said, “You missed your chance.”
    She was joking, but nobody laughed.

    We met them at a small strip club somewhere in the East Village.
    They weren’t drunk and we were about halfway there. I said, “You guys got some catching up to do.”
    They gave me the deer in the headlights look.
    I was happy to see my buddy, the groom, but his friends, his groomsmen, were not my style. There were two of them. The quiet fat kid who didn’t say anything and then, the best man, who as these things go, wouldn’t shut the hell up.
    He kept talking in circles. I didn’t hear a word of what he said, I just kept looking at his weird greasy hair. It looked like an overgrown bush of pubes that was only overgrown so bad because it was majorly thinning out. You know, look horrible for the sake of self defense. If I had that kind of curse, I would shave my head.
    The guy also had a high pitched lispy voice and seemed effeminate. Certain mannerisms. A non issue, he’s queer, I thought. Who cares?
    I found out quickly through conversation that he was an amateur stand up comedian and writer. He was annoying and so are all stand ups.
    He’s gay and so are all stand ups.
    On with the show.

    Inside the strip club, the girls looked worn out. They were low energy. Their tits did not point upward to Heaven. When they walked, their knees knocked together.
    This was just another Saturday night in their long eternity of shame and glitter.
    I took a seat at the bar and ordered two beers. One for me, one for the groom. The beers came out in bottles because there was no tap. The bartender was not a bartender, he wouldn’t have known how to fill a glass full of beer if you gave him a detailed YouTube video to study.
    As soon as my change came over, a bloodthirsty dancer was rubbing my shoulders.
    “Do you want a dance?”
    I spun around and studied her over. Like when you are in a used car lot, kicking the tires of a Chrysler. Like when you consider buying Army Surplus goods at the flea market. Ect. Ect.
    “No thanks,” I said.
    I already had all of her diseases. I was looking for new unique ones to round out my collection. Hers were tired.
    “What’s your name.” I like hearing stripper names. Rocket. Candy. Razzle.
    “Phyllis.” She said.
    “Phyllis?” I was puzzled, “That’s not a stripper name, that’s a lunch lady name.”
    “I’m not really a stripper.” She said, “I’m just doing this to put myself through nursing school.”
    Over the stereo, Motle Cru came on, “Girls, Girls, Girls”
    Everybody in the place let out a desperate sigh of dissatisfaction followed by some nervous twitches that they were not conscious of.
    I’ll tell you all about your unconscious nervous twitches if you tell me about mine.
    "Phyllis," I said, "Do you see this goofy white guy here beside me?"
    "Sure."
    "He's getting married." I handed her a twenty dollar bill, "Would you be so kind as to give him a dance."
    She took his arm and lovingly led him through the curtains. Into the darkness of the netherworld between our plane of reason and the champagne room.
Alone like that, it didn't take the best man too long to find me. He took a seat next to me at the bar.
    "What's up?"
    "Phyllis." I said.
    "Heh?"
    Then I took a good look around. Man, it really was a run down piece of crap strip club. What the Hell was our problem? Why were we here? There were only three girls giving lap dances, no one dancing on the pole. It was vacant. Dusty. Was it broken?
    The three girls consisted of a heavy set Puerto Rican with lots of extra flab to love or hate. Whichever. The white girls, though not crack head tinged, sure had a lot of sad miles clinging to them. Pam and Phyllis.
    Then out came my buddy Matt from behind the curtains with the heavy set Peurto Rican.
    Jack was buying us all shots.
"That girl's name is Phyllis." Matt said.
    "It's a name, like if we were using a time machine." I said.
    It didn't take long for Jack to disappear in the back with our prize pony, Phyllis and I sent the groom off again into the back with Pam, who had started to look bored at the bar. Matt grabbed the Peurto Rican again, dragged her in the back.
The best man took this opportunity alone with me, "What's the deal with Jack?"
    "What do you mean?"
    I know what he meant.
    So do you.
    "Is he gay?"
    "I don't think so." I said, "Just weird. Eccentric."
    "Oh."
   "He seems gay."
     I shrugged, said, "Doesn't matter."
    I changed the subject.
    Phyllis came back out. She looked blue. It wasn't the lighting.

    "Where are we going?"
    They trailed behind on the sidewalk. We'd been walking for five minutes.
There wasn't a subway to take us to where we needed to go and all of the cabs, god knows, where all the cabs were.
    "hey where are we going?"
    I ignored their calls from the rear. They knew where we were going. This had already been discussed.
    "Yo dude! Does anybody know why we are walking so far?"
They were used to being inside of automobiles. This was freaking them the fuck out.
New York City. Just shy of midnight.
    "How much farther, man, I need a break." it was the fat kid. He hadn’t walked this far, ever, in his whole fucking fat life. It had been about 12 blocks. 12 blocks, motherfucker.
All you could do was ignore their frantic pleas for help until they dissipated. Sore feet. Locking up knees.
    We arrived at the club. There was a long ass line, but we got on it, comforted by the fact that Jack knew one of bartenders inside and all of our wounds would be cured by magic elixirs. Mandy the bartender. we were going to drink for free. Sure. Sure. You believe that?
I didn't. Fuck it.
    Inside the club it was a gigantic bubble of turmoil. It was an utter mess. People slid through walls of people in patterns that collapsed inward on themselves to the disjointed rhythm of mathematical dance pop kick drum death buried under puke inducing synth wails. Put your hands in the air and swing em like you just don't care.
I was trying to make my way to the bar. It was hopeless.
    Matt was off chasing tail. Jack was trying to find this illusion bartender at anyone of the five bars on multiple floors. The groom, his fat buddy...who knows.
Looking back over my shoulder, I realized again that I was alone with the best man. He was haunting me.
    "hey man, let me buy you a drink."
    "alright, go for it."
    He flailed his way through the crowd and came back with two Malibu and cranberries.
    "what the hell is this?"
    "Malibu and cranberry..."
    I tapped a girl to my immediate left on the shoulder and said, "I got you a drink."
    When I came back with my beer, the guy was still here. No shaking him.
    He started into it again.
    "So hey, what's the deal with Jack?"
    I shrugged. Then, I figured, screw it, I didn't feel like going through the whole spiel again, I just cut to the chase. I said, "hey man, do you want me to hook you up with him?"
    "WHAT?"
    "come on, I know what your getting at. It's cool."
    "OH MY GOD!"
    His reaction wasn't what I expected.
    "I'M NOT GAY! WHAT THE HELL WOULD MAKE YOU THINK..."
    "You kidding me? No offense, actually, yeah that's a pretty shallow thing to be offended about."
    Now the guy looked like he was going to throw a punch.
    "hey, pal, you've been sweating this kid all night, I say...just go for it. You like him, just go for it."
    His head looked like it was about to explode. I was just trying to be nice.
And that was that, the best man disappeared into the crowd. That was it. He was gone. Poof. Vanished. Didn't see him again for the rest of the night.
    I was lost in that place for about an hour. Just going from bar to bar on the different floors. Looking for anybody. Matt. Jack. The groom. Any of them. Not a soul in sight. Believe me, the lighting was so bad in there and there was so many people jammed in there, god damn, you could barely find yourself.
    At this point I was drunk, I mean, drunk. It was nice. All of my problems had dissolved.
I figured, I'd just go outside the door, see what was up out there. It sucked inside this club.
Sure enough, out on the sidewalk, there was Matty.
    "There you are!" He said, "I was looking for you!"
    "Hey! I was looking for you too."
    "Jack is over there."
    "where?"
    "across the street at that pizza place down the block."
    "oh, getting a slice?"
    "no, he's passed out at a table by the ATM."
    "oh, nice"
    "where's everybody else?"
    "I think they left."
    "they left?"
    "I think they went back to their hotel."
    I looked at my watch.
    "it's only 3am."
    "I know, weird, right?"
    "fuck, what now?"
    "what do you mean? I'm not done drinking."
    "well, yeah, I hear you."
    He finished his cigarette."Come on."
    We crossed the street. There was Jack. He was laying across a table in front of the pizza place.
    "what the hell."
    "he might be past the point of no return."
    I pulled on Jack's shirt sleeve, since it was Spandex it didn't pull so well.
    "...just leave me."
    "what?"
    "...go on."
    I expected him to say, save yourselves.
    "come on, get up."
    How the hell had he gotten so drunk so quickly? He couldn't even stand up.
    "you found that chick?"
    "I found that chick." he said.
    "the bartender?" Matt said.
    "what bartender?" Jack said.
    "let's get a cab." I said. I went to the curb and stood watch. Matt helped Jack to his feet.
    "you gonna puke."
    "I don't puke."
    It was true. I knew that. He couldn't drink but he also couldn't puke.
    "I need to go home." he said.
    I leaned in and told Matt we were gonna go uptown on the way. Stop at a few more places.
    "couple more beers. You can handle it." I said.
    "home."
    "water." I told Matt. "he will just drink water.
    A cab pulled up and we climbed inside.

    We got out of the cab at 75th street on the upper west side. Jack couldn't really stand on his own. We had to carry him like we were carrying a wounded soldier off the battlefield, his feet dragging.
    I pointed at the neon sign.
    "this is the place, Matt."
    Halfway up the stone steps, Jack just become complete dead weight and we had to set him down.
    "come on man, get up, you can't lay on the steps while we go in the bar."
He said something incoherent.
    I opened up the door.
    "we can't leave him here like that."
"This place has a fish tank. It has a jukebox. You gotta see this jukebox."
     "Sure. I think Jack is going to choke on his own throw up, is all."
   We looked down at him there. Lifeless. Though he appeared happy to be out. Was that a small smile I detected?
     "If he starts to choke, I'll be right there to pour a beer down his throat to wash the vomit away."
     "You said a jukebox?"
    "we'll be right at the bar, we will have a clear view if the cops show up. That happens we'll spring into action."
    "shit."
    Then, Matt just followed me in and we sat down at the bar. The place was pretty dead, but there was a really great bartender. She was no nonsense. She poured the beer as if she had brewed it herself. Not a drop wasted.
    "those guys really split quick on us."Matt said.
    "yeah.." then I explained to Matt what had happened with the best man. How he had been grilling me about Jack. Matt just laughed. He pointed out that the wedding was going to be awkward now.
    "you think?"
    "probably."
    "I think it will be a good time."
"Which one of you two are getting married, or are you marrying each other?" The bartender asked.
    "No, our friend getting married, already went home. Nice send off. Guy is drooling on his rented pillow as we speak."
    "What? It's early." She looked at the clock, "It's not even 4, yet."
    "I know, right. Doesn't everybody know that they are gonna die one day?"
    "Oh that!" She said, "People forget."
    "And it annoys them when you remind them."
    "Rust sets in."
     "It's now or never again."
     "Cheers."
     "This one is on me." She said.
    Then, as she dealt our beers, the doorman walks out of the bathroom beside the jukebox. I knew what was coming. I motioned for Matt to drink quick.
It didn't take long, the doorman came right in and said to me and Matt, "Do you know this kid on the steps with the spandex shirt and the cowboy boots?"
    I hesitated. Then said, "Yes, he is a close friend, what about him."
    "if you don't get him off the steps in thirty seconds, I'm gonna call the fucking cops."
    "one more round." I told the bartender.
    She thought that was just about the funniest thing she ever heard.
It's nice to have a bartender on your side, if even fleetingly.

    We get another cab, find our way the rest of the way uptown. It’s tough getting Jack up the stairs to my apartment, but we manage, you know, as we would manage a dead body if we had to.
    I put him on the couch, but he keeps getting off the couch and laying down on the hardwood floor with no blankets or sheets.
    I’m sitting at my kitchen table shooting the shit with Matt still, we’re still drinking, because there is a lot of shit to shoot on a Saturday night in the spring of your youth.
    “Hey, pal, what’s wrong with the couch?”
    “I like the floor.”
    “You want a blanket, or a pillow or something.”
    “I’m fine, I like the floor.”
    I like Jack. There is nobody like him. I don’t mind taking care of him when he gets out of bounds. When he gets banged up. He would do the same for me. You’ve got to find your own. You’ve got to take care of your own.
    “Enjoy the floor.” Matt says.
    “Thanks.”
    “what the Hell is that?” Matt says.
    “What?”
    “Is that the sun?”
    “Yes, it is the sun. It’s coming up.”
    “You know what that means.”
    “Another beer?”
    “Yes, and eggs.”
    “Ahhhhh, breakfast.”
    “breakfast.”
    “You want toast?” but he didn’t answer.
    “Hey,” he said, “I think I’m in love, you ever have that happen to you?”
    “yes, I have.” I said, “her name is Phyllis.”
    “You better stay away from my girl. Phyllis is all mine.”
    “She’s your’s buddy.”
    “In a perfect world, I would always have bacon in this fridge.”
    “Nothing is that perfect. We have to accept it.”
    “Sure, sure.”
    "We should just go to the corner store and get bacon."
    “I would…”
    “Oh fuck, Cinco De Mayo.”
   "Remember what that girl on the subway said to you?"
     "That I missed my chance." I nodded.
     "Worst thing you'll ever hear in your life."

Lucky

2012-01-02T00:14:00.000-08:00

I used to try and catch the wild cats. They seemed to be everywhere.
    I took a bowl from the cabinet and filled it with half & half, placed that on the front porch and hid behind the wood pile.
   There wasn't a sound anywhere except for the bird. The Grackle who lived in the holly thicket and should have left by now. Summer was long over and that bird should have fled to warmer stations, but it had not for some reason.
   Everything else had.
   We lived in Cedar Creek Campground. Past Labor day. The tents were gone. The pool was closed. The only remaining people were the ones with RVs who might still come on the weekends until the cold broke sometime near Thanksgiving and the possibility of frozen pipes sent them away until the Spring.
   We lived in a rented house. We would be there during the snow. They would not.
    I used to try to catch the wild cats.
   Why not? I was a lonely child and there was nothing to do. My friends had all disappeared. Their vacation was over. I was alone in an empty campground and bored out of my mind. At least if I caught one of the cats, I could have some kind of company. Even if by design, a cat, had no use for a human. Somehow, when I was seven, I had use for a cat.
    All the wild cats who roamed around the campground were jet black. They haunted the dumpsters near where the canoes were stored, but since I had been putting out tuna fish and milk every day, to my fathers annoyance, they had began to come up to our house. Roam around near our porch. It hadn't quite gotten to the point where they would eat the tuna or drink the milk, but, sometimes I would see them from the living room window, pouring themselves over fences like a drop of water slipping off a leaf. Prowling around in our yard. Watching, waiting. Weighing the consequence. It was only a matter of time.
   I sat crouched, in turn, watching and waiting for one of the wild cats. It was my plan to catch one. Reign it in. Can you ever do that with something that is wild?
   Then, from around the back of the house, came a small grey cat. It came walking up, kind of stumbling and unsure. Not watching. Not waiting. Not weighing the consequences. After a brief period of realization, it went up into the porch. Right to the bowl of half & half.
   That's when I jumped out from behind the wood pile and scooped it up. I opened the door to the house and sprang inside. Stunned. The both of us. The cat was really just a kitten. All bubble belly and ineffective needle teeth and claws that barely worked yet. It didn’t hiss. It opened it’s mouth, but didn’t even cry. I would have cried if a giant had raised me up and was holding me like it was about to crush me.
   I charged down the hallway and opened up my mom’s door. It was the middle of the day but she was still asleep from her night shift at the factory. The room was a place suitable for vampires. Heavy shades. A sliver of light will vaporize you.
   “I CAUGHT ONE!”
   She sat right up.
   “Huh?”
   “I CAUGHT ONE! I CAUGHT ONE!”
    I turned the light switch on and almost blinded her. I stuck the cat in her face. She couldn't believe what she saw.
   Then there was the whole business, of, your father won’t let you keep the cat.
   “You can’t keep it.”

   What happened, was this: the previous night my mother got out of the factory at 2am and went through town. There was a 24 hour A&P Grocery still alive. We needed eggs, milk and fish sticks. Walking from her Ford into the lights, she ran into a woman with a box of kittens at the automatic doors.
   “Can you take a kitten home? They need good homes.”
   “I can’t. My husband would kill me.”
    So, she went into the 24 hour lights and did the logical thing. She left the grocery store with eggs, fish sticks and a kitten.
   She forgot the milk.
   That’s why I had to put out a saucer of half and half to try to catch the wild cats.
   My mom drove through the dark, watching the cat climb around on the passenger seat. Dammit. She couldn’t take the cat into the house. She kept thinking about my father's reaction when she showed up with a cat, when he had said so many times that he didn't like cats. So, my mom let the kitten go beside the holly thicket when she got home to the camp ground and figured that it would just become one of the wild cats.
    It must have been a long night for that cat, but I imagine it falling asleep after a while and finding a little bed for itself in the leaves inside the thicket. I also think, that it was woken up the same way I was, by the jarring, ugly voice of the Grackle.

   Then, the next morning.
   I caught it.
   “I put out a bowl of half & half and when it was drinking it, I caught it!”
   “Good job.”
   “There was no milk.”
   “The milk, damn. I forgot to buy the milk.” She said.
   “Dad will let me keep him.”
   “I don’t think so.”

   When my father came home from work, I let him take his work boot off. I let him shower. I let him drink a cup of coffee. I answered all his questions about my homework and about what was going on in the third grade.
   The fish sticks were out of the oven and on the table. French Fries too.
   After dinner, right before mom had to leave for her shift, I said to my father, “I caught one of the wild cats.”
   “You did?”
   “Wanna see?”
   I went down the hallway and brought the cat out. I had made him a little bed inside a shoe box.
   “Can I keep him? I want to keep him.”
   “I shouldn’t let you.”
   “Please.”
   “I don’t know.” He said, “You won’t take care of it.”
   “I will.”
   He looked me over for a minute, grinned.
   “You can call that cat, Lucky.” He said.
   Lucky, he could stay, Lucky he had found his way on the porch. Lucky for a lot of reasons.
   I was too.

A Christmas Short Story

2011-12-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

       We were latch key kids. Everyday after school we were alone in the house for a few hours and could do whatever we wanted. Whatever we wanted as long as we covered our tracks before our parents came home from work.

      I remember the fist time that we found our Christmas presents. We found them, right away. Not even a challenge.
     "Found them." my little brother said.
     "where?"
     "moms closet, behind her boots."
     "behind her boots?" it was vaguely disappointing to me to find out that she would pick such a disrespectful place to hide our gifts. I mean, we weren't stupid little kids anymore. I was 9 my brother was 8.

So, the two of us went into their room and stood there looking at the pile of our presents. Bright, glossy boxes, colored pencils, scented markers, Hot Wheels, squirt guns...
      "which ones are yours?"
      "all of them." I said.
      "NO WAY"
     "Way."

      So, that was that. We closed the closet and casually went about killing each other until the sun went down and they came home to make us eat fish stick dinner and force us to wash the filth from our bodies.

      When we opened all of our presents, our mother must have noted our lack of surprise. She must have also noted this comment, "I got the HOT WHEELS! I knew it! See, all the presents weren't yours."

      The next year, in the closet, behind even more boots, the god damn presents were wrapped.
     "look what you did"
     "I didn't do it."
     "it was that stupid comment. Don't you know, loose lips sink ships."
     "huh?"

      For a minute we stood there, just looking, looking, looking.

     "at least they have our names on the tags! We can tell which size boxes are ours."
     "yeah..."
    "you don't have x ray vision, do you?"
    "yeah."
    "you do! What am I getting. What's in this box?"
    "oh that one, that's a box full of goose shit."
    "GOOSE SHIT?!"
    "Goose shit."
    "I don't believe you."
     Then we stood there looking, just looking. Looking.

"we could just open them."
"they'lll kill us."
"sure, you're right, it's not worth dying over."
"put me in the dryer instead, that sounds like a better idea."
Off we went.

The following year, there we were in mom's closet, surrounded by even more boots. We had Exacto razor knives. We were slitting the scotch tape, precisely, little tiny surgeons.

"don't cut the paper, just the tape."
"I know, I know!"

With the tape sliced away, the neatly wrapped boxes opened up with ease, flapping up, revealing our presents underneath.

"I got a light saber!"
"I got a light saber too!"
"I'm gonna cut your hand off."
"I'm gonna cut your hand off!"

After we opened all of our gifts, and noted the excellence of each one, we folded the wrapping paper back down and re scotch taped over the old scotch tape.

The following year, older and bolder, we cut the tape, opened up the wrapping paper, took the god damn toys right out of their boxes. Played the Hell out of them every day for two weeks before Christmas.

On Christmas morning, after opening up our gifts, we took our favorite present, Contra, a game for Nintendo featuring a pair of 8 bit commandos teaming up to machine gun the living fuck out of an endless barrage of Aliens. We plopped down on the shaggy living room floor, turned the game on, typed in the code, "up up down down left right left right b, a, select, start."

We matched right through the game, no problem. Our parents watched over our shoulder. We didn't die more than four times each. Mom and dad knew right away that something was up.

We were in trouble.

The following year, to our horror, the presents weren't in moms closet.
"all it is a shit load of more boots!"
We checked dads closet. Not there either. Fuck. Not in the attic. Not in the crawl space. Not hidden under the back porch. Not in the woods. Not in the trunk of either one of their cars.

The presents werent nowhere to be found.

"maybe we aren't getting any."
"they don't have the balls."
"you think?"
"I know."
"how do you know?"
"if we don't get presents we'll burn the house down."
"true."

What they had done, rather craftily, is to move the presents to a safe location.

We found out later, that the entire time we searched our house and the surrounding area for our gifts, they were tucked safely away at Uncle Tom's house across town.

Our kids are assholes, our parents said, they keep finding their presents, opening thier presents and ruining Christmas.

Sure, no sweat, Uncle Tom will keep these presents tucked away safely from these Jr. detective Christmas ruining assholes.

Only problem, is that Uncle Tom was a heavy drinker. A pitch perfect alcoholic. He would come home from work, get into the bottle, get ripped up, get bored and open up alll of our presents. Take them out of the box. Play with them. Then, a few days before Christmas, he had to re-wrap everything and he did such a bad job re-wrapping, and he forgot half of the tags on the boxes and the other half that he did put on, he mixed up, so that I got my brothers new seat for his dirt bike and he got my hunting bow even though he doesn't go hunting.

My mom was very silent, my dad was too. We were really quiet too. Finally she said, "fuck it. Next year, you guys can come with us to the toy store two weeks before Christmas, you can pick out all your presents. Save us all this trouble."

We were all so happy, even though it wasn't snowing. The cat swan dove into the wrapping paper and was not seen again until the Turkey came out of the oven.

Good Deeds/Being Watched

2011-12-06T02:32:00.000-08:00

    GOOD DEEDS

all kinds of good deeds
we do them in our dreams
we kill terrorists and nazis
we send Godzilla back to the sea
and we ride the life eternal
of movie stars and superheroes
into the sunset of our golden years
yes, all kinds of good deeds
we can’t be bothered while awake
we do them in our dreams

                 ABOUT
                 US

    our displaced
    energy
    could
    re-route
    rivers
    and
    approaching
    bombs
    had we any
    reason

    Lubv Birds

get glue for all the peeled up feathers
that have tumbled off my fake blue wings
everybody knows I'm a red red bird
everybody knows you are a red red bird
why did we glue blue feathers on our red wings
and why did we sand paper
the gold from our beaks?
and why did we drop our eggs from ledges high
instead of letting them burst open
in our home by the river?
I don't know why I act so stupid
and why I let you act so stupid
and why you let me act so stupid
we are divebomb fliers
and our claws are razor pliers
we are scatterhearts,
we never know what we want
but we stay together in the middle of storms
and we stay together in the midst of snipers
and the sound of the hungry cats sends you huddled to me
and the sound of the crazy cats
sends me huddled to you
it doesn't matter as long as we are allowed to go down together

Being
Watched

when all else fails
I will be good
when all else fails
I will be good
when all else fails
I will be good

The Obligatory Zombie Play

2011-12-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

There are three people sitting on the ground in a dark room illuminated by a lantern that is almost out of power. There has been an outbreak of zombies, which is presently there chief concern, as the zombies cannot yet get in, but they cannot yet escape because of ummmmm the zombies, which are right outside the door, waiting and moaning, and such.

Chris: I think I'm ready to give up hope.

Bill: Then just give up hope, you don't need to talk about it.

Chris: I would kill myself if I could find something to kill myself with.

Sarah: No, don't say that.

Chris: Well, I would...

Bill: When the lantern finally really burns out, you could swallow the lantern, it would block your windpipe, no air would pass, that would be it..

Chris: I wish I had a gun

Sarah: It would help against the zombies, surely

Chris: Not to bumm you guys out, but I had plans long before all of this and those plans involved me ending my life- I wish I hadn't delayed... If we had a gun right now, I don't think there would be any doubts about what we should do with it

Sarah: Suicide is so sad

Chris: To think about how miserable that job made me, life made me, ehhh, horrible. I should have stayed in Minnesota and killed myself instead of moving to Queens and taking that job.

Sarah: Look on the bright side, if you had stayed there, we would be dead- if it wasn't for you and those cans of tuna fish, me and Bill here would be eating dirt to survive.

Bill: You may very well have lived a pointless life, but I am glad that you were on my train when the bottom fell out

Chris: What a very bad chain of events. (motioning to Sarah)
I saw you on the subway, you always looked happy...

Sarah: I had a good job and I had a good life, a nice apartment, a friendly dog.

Bill: Me too, but all of that is over, we have to think of the future

Chris: No such thing. Hey would any of you two be willing to strangle me, or I don't know, give me your shoe laces so that I can hang myself.

Sarah: Absolutely not. Come on, cheer up!

Chris: Ok ok ok, I'll try. Oh shit! I'd love to just jump out there and see how many of them I could take down with a shotgun before they surrounded me and ripped me apart.

Bill: Too many of them, it wouldn't be a help. The best thing to do, is to wait it out and well... think about what we can do as men and women to preserve the future of mankind

Sarah: Oh please don't get on that again, not the best time to make propositions, eh?

Bill: I'm just saying that it would be for the good of mankind.

Chris: You two screwing in a subway maintenance room isn't going to save humanity.

Bill: I disagree

Sarah: Not happening. Not gonna do anything with you, Bill.

Bill: But it would help pass some time, bring a little joy into our bleak lives. Five days in a dark room with you two has been very bleak... I mean, thanks alot for the suicide threats and the stories about your gas station attendant days in Minnesota, and Sarah, thanks for your optimism and your general sexxy aura, but... action speaks louder than words and we have a debt to fulfill

Chris: I don't want kids

Bill: I don't think it's up to you at this point, in order to...

Sarah: Yeah yeah I know, preserve humanity... well just leave me alone, ok, not happening. I'm engaged. (holding up her hand with the wedding ring on it)

Bill: Still, how can you be sure.

Sarah: That what, the zombies didn't get my fiance? I know, ok.

Bill: And how do you know

Sarah: I know in my heart, and if John was dead I would just know in my heart.

Chris: You are very optimistic, thankfully you are here to keep us all in good spirits.

Sarah: Well, there is no reason to give up hope. Hopes a good thing. I don't think suicide is a good answer and I don't think sex is either... we just have to wait it out.

Chris: I can hear them out there, they are waiting, maybe we shouldn't talk

Sarah: Oh, I would rather get eaten by zombies then to sit here in complete silence

Bill: Agreed, hey, you know what, I just had an idea...

Sarah: what?

Bill: Maybe if me and you started fucking then the zombies would hear our moans of passion and confuse them for zombie moans and they would become disinterested in our living flesh, and well, press on, thinking our living flesh was zombie flesh.

Sarah: Not gonna happen, you see this...(holding up the wedding ring)

Bill: Sorry, sorry, don't mind me, just trying to save the world.

Sarah: You saved us, thank you, yeah if it wasn't for you they would have eaten us like everybody else on the L train.

Bill: Well, I just did what ever I could do. I used to sneak into this room to catch naps and smoke cigarettes when I got tired of sweeping up. I always dreamed of getting a beautiful young buinsess girl in here alone, now as soon as Chris kills himself, I will get my wish.

Chris: Ok, now in spite, i am going to keep living, keep your shoelaces asshole... (Bill shrigs and begins to retie his laces) Yeah, thanks for saving my life even though I wanted to die and still want to die.

Bill: No sweat kid, I know how you feel. I see a lot of people in this subway, I can tell by the look on their face that 1/4 of them are thinking about jumping in front of the train, and that's just on a regular manhatten morning, forget about the end of the world mornings like we've been having. They stand there on the platform, and I see that look, the look, ohhhh- I expect a lot more of them to jump down then the ones tat do. Every once in a while somebody does. It is all part of that fake big apple dream, very romanticized....this i'm gonna jump off the empire state building, or i'm gonna jump infront of the F train...Once I saw a guy jump down onto the tracks and he was standing there waiting for the train to come and hit him. I was all alone, it was like three in the morning.

Sarah: Oh my god

Bill: Yeah, he was just standing there with his arms out his legs spread, he looked like a big X. I was sweeping, like I said, and then I stopped sweeping and walked to the edge of the platform, and I just stood there looking at him. After a minute it became kind of awkward. he was crying, I said, hey, you know, that train is done for awhile... its gonna be like twenty minutes, late night and all.

Chris: what did he say

Bill: He didn't say much, he just stood there, a big X, crying. Then after a minute, he put his arms down so that he was no longer an X and he walked to the edge of the platform and I had to reach my hand down to pick him up.

Sarah: Suicide is so sad.

Bill: The guy picked up his bag and walked up the steps back into the port authority, still crying.

Chris: I'm sure he had a good reason.

Bill: Yeah, I'm sure too. The world is fucked up. Probably why we got all of these zombies. All of the racism and fast food and crappy sitcoms and car bombs and homeless people and lack of faith, we deserve to be eaten alive by the living dead. The human race had this coming, my uncle was a minister, he used t always say to us kids, ya know world is gonna end revelation... revelation, motherfucking zombies gonna come, zombies gonna come, have a plan! Know Jesus have a plan!

Sarah: Deep. And you probably thought he was crazy, saying that...

Bill: You would have too, we were standing around a mental ward, he was crazy! We used to go visit him in the home, he attacked his nurse with a spear that he made from a cardboard tube and a sharpened garden spade, we were all surprised that she lived, that was terrible... terrible, and he was getting old and looney, said that he thought that she was a zombie. ZOMBIE! Imagine that! Said it was the way she walked, see she was a real weird lady, walked like she had broken legs, couldn't get around that fast.

Sarah: John had a dream that something bad was gonna happen, only in his dream, it wasn't zombies...

Chris: What was it?

Sarah: Giant Rabbits.

Bill: From outer space (laughing)

Sarah: It would be no more ridiculous than this.

Chris: (laughing) No, That would be more ridiculous.

Sarah: How do you figure? And also, I don't appreciate you calling my finance ridiculous (smirking)

Bill: Ex finance, respectively

Sarah: Actually, any minute now, we'll probably hear gun fire and he'll kick down the door- to save me. Of course, in defense of my honor he'll have to kick your ass a few times for all of the lewd remarks. (smirking) I'm kidding.

Bill: I know karate, wouldn't matter bout your honor.

Sarah: He's a fire fighter.

Bill: I used to beat up firefighters all the time.

Chris: I hope he brings a big mac.

Bill: You eat that shit?

Chris: Yeah, I eat that shit. Death wish, remember.

Sarah: What's the deal with the death wish, what happened?

Chris: Nothing.

Sarah: Nothing?

Bill: Yeah, yeah, heard this before. I had a depressed uncle, you remind me of him- only he had a reason to be depressed.

Chris: what was his reason?

Bill: He lived in georgia ghetto and his father was a crazy minister who threw a spear into his nurse, who said the world was gonna end.

Chris: I loved a girl and she didn't love me.

Bill: You know how many times that happened to me?

Chris: How many?

Bill: Must have been ten million times a year, sweeping garbage in the subway, you see all those beautiful intelligent women- easy to fall in love. Always in love, man, always.

Chris: This one girl in particular, when she left me- that was it, game over. I came to the city to find her.

Sarah: That's romantic

Chris: She has a restraining order on me.

Sarah: That's romantic.

Chris: I got drunk and tried to break her door down. She thought I was trying to rape her. I was just trying to give her the birthday present I bought her... I came all the way from Minnesota on a bus, then the bitch won't even let me see her...

Bill: What did yo get her?

Chris: Sex in the City Season Two on DVD. Turns out she had it anyway, big deal.

Sarah: But the thought was beautiful, and inspiring... that there could be a love strong enough to make you want to kick down a door to get to her.

Chris: I wound up getting maced by the police, which is actually ten million times worse than I had ever guessed it would be.

Bill: I been maced, its no fun. You ever been peppersprayed?

Chris: No.

Sarah: I carry pepperspray.

Bill: I know, I saw you try to use it on that bag lady

Sarah: In my defense, I thought that she was a zombie.

Chris: When you are panicked, you don't think. She might have been a zombie, but, she was sitting next to me on the train, and... well-

Sarah: well, I feel awful

Bill: She would have been devoured regardless, don't dwell...

Sarah: So much to dwell on.

Chris: No sense crying over spilled milk, or stolen ideas. That's another thing that kills me about Heather... it was always my idea to move to New York, I always said that i hated Minnesota and that i was going to move to New York, and she says that she loves Minnesota and wants to live in Minnesota forever, and then she dumps me and moves to New York and I think that its just a test and I come to new york and she won't see me. So I'm living in a rotten collapsing hotel, and then still trying to get her to see me, and its not happening and getting too drunk on a saturday night and trying to give her Sex in the City season Two on DVD and the next thing I know BLINDED!

Sarah: By love...

Chris: By the police, dragged into jail, left to die in detainment.

Sarah: Things will work out with you two.

Chris: I'm not feeling too strong about it.

Bill: Yeah after the zombies are gone, you tow love birds will move in together and watch Sex in the City, eat big macs, play nintendo and do kama sutra.

Chris: I hope.

Bill: Crazier things have happened. Like zombies.

The lantern in the room has dimmed to an ultimate last gasp.

Sarah: Well that looks like the end of the light.

Bill: We were lucky to have it as long as it lasted. Thankfully I am a pack rat, and this was my rat den... and thanks to the kid for all of the tuna fish.

Chris: I stole that. I steal feel guily.

Sarah: Forget it!

Chris: never stole anything in my life, I was out of money, just had enough for the ticket back...

Bill: No sense getting all weepy, I wish that you had stolen some D batteries, then we could have some light.

Darkness envelopes them. The sound of the zombies outside the door is the only sound. Then a sound can be heard in the room, motion.

Sarah: what are you doing? Knock it off.

Bill: Oh, sorry...

Sarah: Hey, stop!

Chris: Hey, leave her alone.

The sound of a small struggle.

Bill: Ok Ok, I get the hint.

Sarah: I still have that pepperspray, for your information...

Bill: I'm just being realistic

Sarah: Right now, what you just tried to do seems like the most unrealistic thing that could ever happen in these circumstances.

Then, an odd blue light comes through the wall of the room, and the darkness is broken partially. Ryan, a ghost enters. He is a ghost in his early twenties, he is dressed in a canadian tuxedo, blue jeans, blue jean jacket- he has large sideburns and wears a dream catcher

Ryan: Don't be scared.

Chris screams, Bill screams.

Ryan: I'm a friendly ghost.

Sarah: Really

Ryan: yeah (motioning towards the door) My body is out there trying to get in here and well, devour all of you.

Bill: Tell it to knock it off.

Ryan: It won't listen, I've tried.

Bill: Try harder.

Sarah: What's going on out there, is help coming?

Ryan: I have no idea. I don't think so.

Chris: that is disconcerting

Ryan: How do you think I feel? Shit, this is fucked up... I was reading poetry in the tunnel when out of nowhere, I get chomped on the neck and the hand and then... well, ghost in da house!

Bill: Sorry.

Ryan: My body has been on a killing spree, it drifted up through Bryant park with the rest of the horde eating people all through times square... tourists who deserved kicks in the head but not zombie attacks!

Sarah: The city is in ruins.

Ryan: Very very ruined. A lot of people evacuated, but let me put it to you this way... New York city is not a good place to be right now. This is probably the real end of the world.

Bill: How is your body holding up

Ryan: starting to rot. It's hot down here and it was pouring rain for two days- apparently, zombies don't like the rain, and they aren't intelligent enough to operate umbrellas. (suddenly annoyed) I was a fucking Buddhist, how do you think that makes me feel about watching my body eat people! Innocent people!

Sarah: Not good.

Ryan: DUH! When I was alive I never even hurt a FLY, literally if I was walking around and I saw a bug, I would FUCKING STEP OUT OF THE WAY. GOD!!

Bill: So what now?

Ryan: So what now what?

Bill: well, how do we get out of here?

Ryan: I don't know how you can get out of here.

Sarah: Well, is there some secret door or escape hatch that we don't know about, or...

Ryan: Nope.

Chris: Can you create a distraction and we'll make a run for it.

Ryan: Run for it? You are completely engulfed in a sea of the undead. Plus there is no place to run.

Sarah: Food (shrugging) any food?

Ryan: I can't carry anything, I'm a ghost... I would if I could, but, well... ghost, so... sorry.

An awkward silence passes. Ryan begins to tap his foot. Chris coughs.

Ryan: So what are you guys up to?

Sarah: Nothing much, starving to death in the dark, dunno.

Ryan: Oh, that's cool. You guys mind if I hang out, kind of boring out there...

Bill: Fine, yeah.

Chris: It's kind of nice, you glow a nice blue color, like a faint fire. Much better than being in the dark.

Ryan: yeah, that's the only nice part I like about being a ghost. The blue fire is nice. walking through walls is awesome also.

Chris: Can you fly?

Ryan: a little bit, its exhausting though... I don't know how birds do it.

Sarah: Birds have hollow bones.

Ryan: Oh yeah, well I don't have any bones.

Sarah: You don't have wings...

Bill: what does being dead feel like?

Ryan: Feels the same. Just very boring, nobody to talk to, and I'm kinda bummed, I thought that there would be an afterlife or something... now, well- I don't know what is gonna happen. But i guess that's everybody.

Bill: That's probably the biggest common thread among humanity, we're all worried about what is gonna happen.

Chris: Dogs worry too

Sarah: I hope my dog is fine.

Ryan: Zombies don't like the way that dogs taste.

Sarah: I am so worried about her, and John...

Ryan: Oh... I could check in on them...

Sarah: Would you?

Ryan: Yeah sure, no sweat. (snapping fingers, suddenly dissapears)

Chris: Weird.

Bill: Yeah

Then suddenly the ghost rematerializes.

Ryan: the dog's fine, John wasn't home. She says hello, by the way.

Sarah: You talk to dogs, of course.

Ryan: She misses you and is hungry.

Chris: Don't say anything about food.

Bill: Yeah. We ran out yesterday, and what we ran out from was just that old jar of olives that I kept on the shelf.

Sarah: I don't ever want to imagine an olive again. Spam and olives... what a horrible last meal.

Bill: At least there is one comfortable chair for us to take turns sitting in... I still kick myself for not having a can opener in here.

Chris: (to ryan) We thought, what would an otter do? Then we broke the cans open on the brick wall... that's how I almost cut this finger off (holding up his hand, the finger looks infected)

Ryan: You better have that looked at.

Sarah: That's what we said, it looks bad, right.

Bill: You ever had to eat tuna fish with dirt and soot and pieces of brick in it? No good, no good. I grew up in Georgia and we were poor, but we never had to eat brick crumb tuna, like a bunch of animals waiting around to die... and my wife always laughed at how much I played the lotto. Every man has to dream, even if that dream is ridiculous.

Chris: you got lucky numbers?

Bill: My daughters birthday. 11 25 81. Then I play 23 because that was Micheal Jordan's numbers and I throw in two sevens, for well, duh, sevens are motherfucking GOOD luck!

Sarah: That's sweet, that you play your daughters birthday.

Bill: They're both probably zombies now. My little girl and my wife- And don't bother getting all teary eyed, I'm not being senti mental... just a realist

Ryan: Almost definetly they are zombies, everybody is now.

Bill: I played the lotto five days a week, last twenty nine years... probably got the winner in my pocket right now. (to Ryan) Something been killing me, you see last Wednesdays Power Six drawing?

Ryan: No, you want me to check?

Bill: Would you check?

Ryan: Sure. (Ryan snaps his fingers and dissapears)

Chris: Seems kind of desperate

Sarah: Oh come on, he's nice...

Bill: He is desperate, I remember him, he was always reading bad poems and beating on a tambourine. It was bad enough, then him and that weird flute guy got together and you had to deal with bad subway poetry combined with bad subway flute.

Chris: I'm not into ghosts

Bill: Who is? They are majorly freaky.

Sarah: Scared?

Chris: A little. I grew up on a haunted farm, this isn't the first ghost I ever saw, the other one wasn't as... well friendly.

Sarah: You saw a ghost? (she sounds skeptical)

Chris: Yeah. I saw a ghost, just like, you just saw a ghost! and well, it wasn't pleasent. I think it is one of the main reasons why I have always been depressed.

Sarah: It scared you that bad, I'm sorry.Maybe you saw a ghost just now, but i didn't see a ghost, a saw a hallucination brought on by lack of food and water and possibly rotten olives and hysteria and stress and shock...

Chris: I'm embarrassed to say what really happened, I never told anybody.

Bill: Don't start now.

Sarah: No, go on, just say it, you'll feel better.

Chris: Well when I was little, I was molested, by a ghost.

Sarah: Oh.

There is a silence, a long silence.

Sarah: Molested by a ghost! Impossible.

Bill: I saw a UFO, but I had just staining the hardwood floors in a pancake house.

Sarah: No such thing as UFOs.

Chris: We are surrounded by the living dead, ghosts are checking our lottery tickets, I don't think now is a good time to be skeptical, and yeah I was molested by a ghost and it has made me uncomfortable ever since with the idea of... well everything.

Sarah: I just don't see the logic in believing in ghosts or god or... whats next unicorns, big foot? No offense to you Chris, or you Bill. As an engineer, I just don't see the scientific backing for...

Bill: I have a friend who saw big foot in Montreal, explain that.

Ryan rematerializes. There is a Chinese man, who is also a ghost who also materializes. This man glows with a green fire, he holds a flute.

Ryan: Hey, I want to introduce you to Jimmy.

Jimmy: Hi everybody.

Ryan: It was a crazy coincidence, I was checking the lottery numbers at the new stand and there was Jimmy! We used to entertain in these tunnels, now I guess we are doomed for all time to haunt them.

Jimmy: (nodding to Bill) Hey, I know you.

Bill: yeah, I know know you too, Hello. You're the flute guy.

Jimmy: That's me! Good memory. And you are the broom man, the sweeper. Good to see you again.

Sarah: Hi.

Chris: Hello.

Ryan: Bill, you're not going to believe this, but last wednesdays numbers were 11 29 81 7 25 and 7... yo got five out of the 6!!! You have any idea what that pays!!

Bill: HOLY SHIT! I WON I WON!! (Bill jumps up. He runs in a circle around the maintenance room. He kisses Sarah on the cheek, he tosstles Chris's hair, he dances for a moment...) I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!

Ryan: I don't think anybody claimed the money either cause like the whole east coast was swarmed with zombies the day after the drawing, you are looking at a good hunk of change even on 5 numbers...

Jimmy: Congrats (he plays a few crazy notes on the flute in celebration)

Sarah: yeah congratulation Bill.

Bill: Now I can finally get Kim that house she's always wanted... goodbye shithole death trap apartment... and I can send Claire to college without her worrying about debt! Oh lucky fucking day!

Chris: But...

Bill: yeah, I know what you're gonna say, and don't even think about saying it. (A look of grief comes over Bills face. But he smiles again anyway. Kissing the lottery ticket, placing it back in his wallet. Putting the lottery ticket away.)

Ryan: Things are looking up. The rain stopped, the zombies are filing out of the tunnel, slow but steady. Its still certain death toleave but... well, at least they aren't right outside the door.

Jimmy: Those things are so dumb!

Ryan: Yeah, almost as dumb as turkeys. I was a vegetarian but I would eat turkeys because they were the dumbest animals in the world.

Sarah: Turkeys are stupid, that's a fact.

Chris: What makes them so stupid.

Sarah: When it rains, a turkey looks up at the rain transfixed with its mouth open and drowns.

Bill sits down in his chair, he is quite. He is staring off into space.

Ryan: These zombies do the same thing, they look up at the rain with their mouth open, except they can't drown because they are already dead so their bellies fill up and swell and swell and then burst. The smarter ones hang out waiting for trains that aren't coming anymore... so on.

Bill: Where is the army, where are the tanks!

Ryan: I don't know...

Chris: Fuck this, this sucks...

Ryan: It could be worse, really it could be.

Chris: I don't see how.

Jimmy: What's your problem? Chill out.

Chris: I don't like ghosts alright.

Jimmy: What kind of a thing is that to say!

Ryan: Hey, he didn't mean anything by it.

Chris: Sure I did.

Jimmy: Look, I don't appreciate rascists- keep your nazi rascist comments to yourself

Chris: Rascist?

Jimmy: Yeah, you got a problem with me cause of my race, ghost is a race you know... asshole.

Sarah: How is ghost a race.

Bill: It is, dudes dead, he's not a chinaman no more, now he's a ghost.

Ryan: Yeah, (motioning to Bill) just like when you die you won't be black anymore, you'll be a ghost.

Bill: Fuck that, I'll still be black. I'm proud of my heritage.

Jimmy: I came in here to play some nice flute, I didn't come in here to listen to rascist anti ghost comments.

Sarah: In his defense, he is completely insane...

Chris: Mind your own business Miss Goody two shoes.

Sarah: No, go on, tell your hallucinations what you said before...

Jimmy: Hallucinations? Excuse me for trying to bring some entertainment to the table...

Bill: Don't mind those two, that one is a scientific prude who won't give it up and that one over there is a sad pathetic loser who claims, get this... that a ghost molested him as a child in Minnesota.

Jimmy: Fuck you!

Ryan: I don't appeciate that brand of hate, how could a ghost have molested you!

Chris: It happened.

Ryan: Impossible.

Jimmy: yeah, for instance, I want to punch you right in our face right now for suggesting such a hateful claim, but I can't, because GHOSTS CAN'T MAKE CONTACT WITH THE LIVING!!

Chris: I know what happened, and I know how uncomfortable it made me feel with myself ever since, so don't...

Jimmy: Don't what.

Sarah: Can we change the subject please.

Chris: No, now that I started this, i want to end it. This is what happened... I was lying in my bed, hugging my teddy bear and the closet opened and the moon was full and it was shining right htrough the window and I saw a ghost in a white sheet with the eyes cut out and it had chains, shackles, and it was moaning and it came closer ot me and it said, "Christopher... lye down and close your eyes and if yo say a word, I will haunt you forever, boo booo booo!"

Ryan: I'm out of here.

Jimmy: (in disgust) yeah me too. later on biggots.

The ghosts disapear.

Bill: We're better off without them.

Sarah: Yeah, at least now its quiet...

Bill: Any second those two were going to break into flute playing and poetry recital... I could sense it.

Chris: I'm gonna hold my breath until it kills me.

Sarah: that wouldn't work.

Bill: When my daughter was four years old she threw a temper tantrum and held her breath until she got her way, she didn't get her way and we had to spend the night in the emergency room- she tuned blue and they had to shock her with the defibrillator. Bad way to find out your little girl has a bad heart.

Sarah: You know, I hate to say this, I know it sounds stupid to you guys, but I feel like if John was here- he would get me out of this mess.

Chris: He sounds like a real super hero.

Sarah: He is

Bill: Was.

Sarah: Is.

Chris: Its quicker to die of thirst than it is to die of starvation, I'm gonna stop swallowing my saliva, I think it will help me die faster

Bill: Oh man, that just made me think of something... so you know how swallow all day...

Chris: Not anymore

Bill: Anyway, well you swallow spit all day right- so would you spit in a cup all day long and drink the spit at the end of the day, even if it was warmed in the microwave, isn't it fucked up to think of that?

Sarah: Yeah real fucked up.

Bill: Life is real tough, man, its real tough.

Sarah: I am gonna miss going to the dog park with Gracie and John on a Sunday morning, throwing the football for her and kissing John under the elm tree

Chris: I'm gonna miss Heather and watching Sex and the city with her- you know, I never got to do anything with her, I'm still a virgin, horrible.

Bill: Maybe, you two, Sarah and Chris, maybe for the future of humanity you two should have intercourse... and then when you are unfulfilled from his meager first time- then I'll step and bring sweet orgasm toyour last sane day in the darkness of this subway...

Sarah: pepperspray. Ok, understand, pepperspray.

Bill: Don't mind me, just another crazy old man in the dark waiting to die on a comfortable EZ chair

Chris: At least you have the EZ chair we have to sit on the concrete

Bill: Hey, who brought you here, who gave you spam and olives and who had a leaky pipe that drips rusty water for you to drink, and who has a winning lottery ticket so when we get out of here he can buy you a cool car and some lobsters and Michelob, hehh? who?

Sarah: thanks again

Chris: Yeah thanks again. Even though...

Bill: yeah yeah... save it. (sighing) Don't worry, any second now, the Army is gonna start storming through times square with tiger tanks and M-16s and they are gonna blast all the zombies to peices and we'll be saved and i can go cash this ticket in, and you can kiss your dog and throw your football to your firehunk and Chris over there can bust a nut over Heather and finally get to see Sex in the city season 2 and... shit! None of that is gonna happen.

Sarah: Bill, please stop yelling.

Bill: NO! I've had it! Why didn't I pull some hot loose girls into this room, why did it have to be you two! Man I could be having a party in here if I had picked the right people, ohhh what I wouldn't give for some latino girls, they are fun and smart and man they know how to make a guy feel good even in the worst of circumstances. It wouldn't matter if there was darkness, girls like that are so warm, they light up the room by just being in it with you. That's why i married one, oh my god, talk about a girl who makes a man feel like a king!

Sarah: I don't think its my responsibility as a woman to make a man feel like king...

Bill: Suit yourself, I just feel bad for your fiance.

Sarah: I went to college, I'm not some house wife who is going to bend and meet the demands of whatever my man wants just because he's my man

Bill: You ever read the bible

Sarah: No need, its all just fairytales and ghost stories.. superstition.

Bill: Figured you would say that, all college girls say something stupid like that, think they know everything, even more so than the good lord

Sarah: Don't drag religion into this

Bill: Into what, into life, into death? You got your head up your ass... and the bible says that woman are hear to serve men, if you ever read it you would know that.

Sarah: So what?

Bill: When you're busy burning down in hell I'll be in heaven eating lobsters and drinking Michelob with Uncle Manny, the minister, yeah, and the angels will sing and sweet latin girls will be sitting on our laps playing the harp or whatever

Sarah: No such thing as heaven or hell

Bill: Or ghosts?

Sarah: yeah

Bill Or zombies?

Sarah: You got it

Bill: (laughing) Hey Chris, you been quiet an aweful long time, still holding your breath, hows that working out for you buddy?
(no response) Chris? Hey, Chris?

In the darkness, Bill stands up from the Ez chair and goes to Chris, shakes him, calls his name, still no response. Suddenly, a pink light appears and the ghost of Chris comes through the wall.

Chris: Sonofabitch

Sarah: Chris?

Chris: Fucking A! I died, and went up to heaven and some asshole told me that heaven was too full, that I wouldn't be able to get in- fuck!

Bill: What's it like?

Chris: I didn't get to see much of it. There was a bright light, I went through the light and then a waiting room like the DMV. They played classic rock radio, I had to listen to AC/DC and van Halen while I read Popular mechanic, it really sucked. A woman who had just died in a car crash of course had her newly dead newborn kid and the fucking kid would NOT stop crying... everyone was exchanging looks, like, YOU ARE DEAD THERE IS NO MORE PAIN... KNOCK IT OFF!! Nobody had the guts to say anything to her.... ewwww and then she was brest feeding, very innapropriate.

Bill: You hear any news

Chris: You guys are fucked, crtain death is closing in on the whole planet.

Sarah: dammit.

Chris: A short guy comes out and hands everybody slips of paper that say we are eligible to get into heave in a decade, unless its still so full, which I am sure it will be.

Bill: So now what.

Chris: Same thing that's gonna happen to a lot of people.

Sarah: Nothing, a whole lot of nothing. I'm gonna have to haunt this subway station from the minimum of a decade upwards to something ridiculous like infinity, eternity, whatever.

Bill: No, come on, that' bullshit... Oh boy. I guess death isn't any better than life.

Chris: wouldn't it figure... and also, I checked the lottery numbers, you didn't win. That jerkoff was just egging you on.

Bill: I am gonna kick his ass, as soon as I get to be a ghost, I'm talking major ass kicking.

Sarah begins to break down, she cries heavily.

Chris: Don't cry.

Sarah: I'm sorry

Bill: Don't be sorry

Sarah: I just wish that I could see John one more time.

Chris: well chances are he's dead and he is a ghost somewhere in the city, which is good news...

her cries become even more so amplified

Chris: You can visit him once you are dead... speaking of which, I hope Heather is dead too, she's got something coming from me, that's for certain

Bill: I don't want to die

Chris: Too bad.

Bill: SO you say.

Jimmy and Ryan appear again. Ryan is holding a few sheets of paper, Jimmy has his flute.

Ryan: What happened buddy, you died?

Chris: Yeah, unfortunately.

Jimmy: Welcome to the club.

Bill: (to Ryan) Oh and by the way dickhead, I don't appreciate you lying to me.

Ryan: I thought it would cheer you up.

Bill: I am gonna kick our ass so hard when I exist on your plane of matter... or anti matter or whatever

Sarah: Probably the fourth dimension, an ectoplasm field of some sort, if there is any explantion other than hallucination.

Bill: Thank you Nancy Drew

Chris: Mrs. wizard... (no one gets it) Like if she was married to Mr. Wizard...

Ryan: Who is Mr. Wizard?

Chris: A TV scientist

Ryan: I was a Buddhist, I didn't have a TV...

Chris: You really missed out on life.

Jimmy: In communist China we didn't have TVs.

Chris: But you had big macs.

Jimmy: They were awesome.

Ryan: Ok, well, were bored, beyond bored, so we decided to come in here and end not only our boredom, but you're boredom... we are going to do a little bit of performance art...

Jimmy begins to play the flute and Ryan begins to read the worst poetry ever uddered. It is torturous, horribly torturous. Bill becomes angry and frantic, he goes to the door and opens it, hungry mouths clamp down on him, he screams. Sarah slams the door.

Ryan: What the fuck was that? We aren't that bad! Are we?

Sarah moves to the newly vacant comfortable chair, crying lightly.

KID A

2011-11-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of acid around.

We were in the living room. The place was destroyed. It was a gradual destruction, as to seem almost un-noticed in the midst of the party and we were in the middle of it. People were coming and going in such a state of flux that it had become almost I possible to figure out who's house it was, who were the actual friends of who evers house it was. The kids I was sitting with and had been talking to very closely for the last four hours, they didn't know me. I didn't know them. They kept assuming it was my house.

"can We open up this wine?"

"sure."

"do you have anymore spoons? I can't find the silverware anymore."

“I even checked the trash.” Another one added.

“Use your hands.” I suggested.

“It’s soup.”

They must have been high out of their minds. There was no soup at this party.

"will you put on some music?" One asked me.

"yeah, I'll put something on."

There were a few CD books stuck to the carpet. I pulled the book out of the shag and tried to flip through it, the pages were badly stuck together.

"Sorry, Bob, I think some kid spilled a three liter bottle of soda on that yesterday."

"that’s where the cherry soda went?!"

Everybody was dying of thirst and kept getting up and drinking tap water. They would stick their heads under the kitchen sink faucet and fill their mouths up. The orange juice was long gone. There were many discussions and talks about the need for more orange juice. I had stashed a lot of beer underneath the kitchen sink, behind the RAID and the TIDE and the BLEACH and the Brillo pads. Pretty soon, one of them was gonna figure out that I had beer stashed under there and they were gonna start guzzling the RAID and the TIDE and the BLEACH, accidentally. I was really glad this wasn’t my house.
         There were many problems, we didn’t have any problems at all. See, at this time in the world, pills were very good and pills were very cheap. So, needless to say, everyone was full of MDMA and loved each other. They were so courteous, so polite. I really didn’t have to worry at all about anybody stealing my beer, but reflexively, I was still hiding it. Like a true piece of shit alcoholic. The last thing any of us needed was beer.

There I was, pounding beer after beer, so completely swimming in drugs that the alcohol was useless, that my brain was laughing at the alcohol, “HA, YOU THINK YOU CAN EFFECT ME! GET FUCKING REAL! I AM IMPERVIOUS TO YOU!”

One of the kids, leaned on me and said, “Bill, this is seriously the best party I have ever been to. You throw a fucking wild party.”

“It has been.” I said.

“It’s not my party.”

“Your wife is so hot too.”

“I’m not married.”

“You are so modest.”

“I came here alone.”

“Though, I do have a confession to make, I fell over before and my head went into the mirror in the hallway. I cracked it. I don’t have any money, but I’d like to give you some more acid.”

“I’m good.” I said, “I’ve been up for like three days now.”

“I also used the last of your toilet paper.”

‘What we need is music.” I said. “This silence is killing me.”

Those things go hand in hand you know. Drugs were made for music. Music was made for drugs.

“You hear the new Radiohead album. Kid A?”

“No.” I said.

‘We gotta listen to that.”

“Put it on.”

“I would! I don’t have it here!”

“Where is it?”

“It’s at my girlfriend’s parents house in their garage. Fuck! I want to listen to it right now.”

“Where do they live?”

He told me the address. 54 Oak Drive. I wasn’t from the town. Had no idea what town it even was, didn’t know how far the address was or any other logistical points of importance. I said, “Let’s go get it.”

“I don’t have a car.” He said. “Plus, I’m too fucked up.”

Too fucked up?

“it would be easy to find. I recently packed up everything I own, because I’m in the process of moving into a coworkers basement... I know that the CD is somewhere in one of the first couple boxes against one of the four walls somewhere near the middle of the stacks. I think it was a brown cardboard box...”

“Sure. Sure.”

Then I went back into the living room and some kid had taken my seat. It would have been easy enough for me to just ask him to slide over or for me to just sit on the rug, but at that exact moment, it just seemed so clear to me what I had to do. Duh! I went into the kitchen. There was a hook with a set of keys on it. I took the set of keys. I walked out into the night. Inside this house it was like a boiler room. Outside it was cool and clear. I would have needed a jacket if I was part of the planet Earth, at that moment I was not.

I tried the red Honda in the driveway. Nope, not its keys. I tried the blue Nissan out by the mailbox. It started right up. No problem, I thought, I’ll just cruise across town real quick find this 45 Cedar Lane, or 34 Maple Street or whatever it was, go into the garage quickly find the Radiohead Cd in the neat and orderly pile of a 1000 cardboard boxes and just come back to the party before anyone misses their crap ass blue Nissan. No sweat.

I couldn’t sit in complete silence any longer and I suddenly REALLY wanted to hear this Radiohead album, at all costs.

So, off I went. ZOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

For awhile I noticed the car sounded like it was going to explode.Then after a few miles I realized it was just because the parking brake was on and that it was a manual transmission car. I had been driving in first gear. No matter, sometimes it is exciting to drive in a vehicle that sounds like a NASA space shuttle preparing for lift off.

I navigated my way aimlessly through this darkened foreign town. I felt fine to drive. Generally, I make a point to never ever, under any circumstances drive under the influence of alcohol. It is so very sad to me to read about people who are killed by irresponsible drunk drivers. I was not drunk. Sure, I had consumed in my estimate, somewhere near ¾ of a case of beer this evening, but the pills and the acid had counter effected the booze and tucked it way way back into the background. It was a moot point. I was not drunk at all. My hallucinations had waned and now I was just seeing some tricky things when headlights and street lights or house lights, let’s just say, lights, appeared- but other than that, good to go. It was a DARK night. I was doing just fine.

I came to a stop sign. I was sure to come to a complete stop just in case some cop was hiding somewhere watching from one of those secret hidden cop spots. I paused there, looked both ways eight times and then counted to 25 mississippi. All clear.

Quickly I surmised that I was in the marsh lands.

How the hell had I gotten to the marsh lands?

Didn’t I live in the city somewhere? I thought about it for awhile how I should have been there instead. Working on something important, where ever the hell this was. I mean, I had important work that I should have been doing, not driving aimlessly around looking for god a god damn Radiohead CD that I had never heard before. What time was it? The clock said, 11:23, but it wasn’t my car, how could I know that who ever’s car it was hadn’t set the clock wrong, or to some sentimental European time zone where their ancestors or something were from. There was a good possibility that the music store was still open and that I could just drive there, off these lazy back roads and onto the major highway, where I could really get SOMETHING done. I could just buy the CD myself, I was never going to find 75 Cherrybush Lane or 13 Blueberry HIghway, whatever the Hell that address was that the random nobody had suggested at that party. Should I even go back there? Those idiots were probably burning the place down. What the hell would it matter if I went back there. It wasn’t like I had anything to gain from a fire. It wasn’t my house. I wasn’t privy to any of the insurance money. I needed to focus on my own bank account, it was rapidly diminishing and that was really starting to bum me out and...

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

Someone was suddenly LAYING on their horn, a pair of headlights had appeared behind me. I was still sitting at that god damn stop sign, zoned out.

Cops?

FUCK!

I lunged forward and pulled to the side. A white pickup truck zoomed past me.

“WAY TO DRIVE ASSHOLE!”

Some people they just feel like they own the road. Even back here on these darkened marsh roads beside the Bay. The way that guy was driving, it was sure, he was gonna get in an accident. He was gonna drive right off the road, wreck his stupid truck.

I made a decision right then and there to make my way madman style out towards the highway and really lay on the gas. I didn’t have all night to waste back here feeling sorry for myself and my wasted opportunities. Sure, I was getting too old to be getting completley blitzed at a random house with people who I didn’t even know for days and days on end, but, so what. Tomorrow was a new day. I could go back home, get my shit in order. Wait, why wait until tomorrow? Fuck that? I had a car, it had half a tank of gas, that would get me part of the way home, I’d just have to figure out a ride for the other half once this thing died. It wouldn’t be that tough. This was a good time of year to hitch rides. People were driving like crazy people this time of year, they would be more than happy to pick up somebody like me on the side of the road who had a solid sense of direction. I can read a map like nobodies buisness. Just try getting lost with me as your co-pilot. Me and you could find El Dorado. We could find Atlantis. We could find...”

I laid on the gas, boy, you should have seen me. You would have thought I was in the Indianappolis 500. I cut the wheel sharply and burnt rubber towards where I thought was the road that led out to the highway. Something was wrong. I think there was a streetlight out or something, I won’t ever know for sure, but the next thing I know, I'm being thrown all around the car. I’ve somehow driven this blue Nissan right into the water.

The water!

Imagine that surprise! I assure, you, you wouldn’t like it. A very jarring experience.

To make matters even worse, the water was kind of deep. I didn’t undertsand that part. I don’t have much experience with marshes, but it was always my understanding that marshes were very shallow and very delicate eco-systems. Well, if they are such shallow delicate eco-systems, answer me this, “How did it swallow up that blue Nissan like it was anything but shallow and anything but delicate?” That car sank quick, buddy!

SLURRRP!

After I told a girl this same story at another party, she hypothesized that the marsh was not really a marsh at all but rather, was a section of the actual Bay.

Imagine that? Me being fucked up enough to drive a car into the bay! As smart as she seemed, and as nice her body seemed, I had to distance myself from her right away, how are you ever going to get anywhere with the kind of person who thinks that you are the kind of idiot who was going to drive a blue Nissan into a bay!

So, now, here I am, flailing around like a maniac in the car, trying to get out. One of two things is happening. Either the weight of the water is pressing against the doors, or the doors simply don’t open from the inside. They could potentially just open up from the outside to let you in, I wouldn’t know, it wasn’t my car. So, not thinking about it any farther, I open the sun roof and climb out through there.

I get soaked. Completley soaked, getting back to the road. It’s kinda cold out and I still don’t notice. I have my mind on other things. I need to get out of the area. I need to get out of sight. I run across the road and sprint down a street, then another street, the next thing I know, I’m on a dirt road. The dirt road comes to a dead end.

I am forced to turn around and walk the other way.

Eventually, I make my way to the highway, but it takes a long time and it isn’t a very pleasent walk. I am rather distracted during the whole walk, because I keep thinking about one thing, how I was led into this disasterous misadventure by an album that I had never even heard. I mean, I’d heard other albums by Radiohead. I had never even heard Kid A.

I made it to the bus stop. I got on a bus, soaking wet, going completley the wrong way and to this day, Kid A is still my favorite album.

3RD WATCH/APPLES/TEST RUN

2011-11-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

THIRD WATCH

I don't know what to do
when you keep sleeping
except to sleep with you
hang out in your dreams

APPLES

We slow drive through the mountains
It's getting colder and the apples are down
find a bridge collapsed and the mud of storms
this summer was a shit show
we'll have to rebuild, buddy
after the snow.
I take you for breakfast, sometime just after dusk
they don't take credit, we'll have to pay
in something called "Cash"?
then the music comes up and the pancakes come out
about as big as trash can lid
our waitress points out that we aren't from around there
I politley explain,
I live in the epi-center of a riot, where I can be found
with both my shoes untied
my girl says, "We like your town"
It's true. Walls of pine, the river, the smell of fire.
I've got a car, specificially, just to get to places this high
up where the buses don't fly, pop.
Then, after coffee, let's walk some of this trauma off
let's find their version of the neon light
where they pour the real thing, not some watered down version
it smells like snow outside and we're correct
if we don't get a beer, we are going to die
It's above the post office, a dark, warm tavern
inside they sing the dirges of America
over and over the place sways, side to side
around us the mountain and the winter descends
and we huddle in tighter and tighter
it's getting colder and all the apples are down.

TEST RUN

please file out of the blast radius
in a calm and collected manner
don't worry about your luggage
don't worry about your invisible friend
just worry about yourself
as you make you way
calmly and collectedly
out of the blast radius

YOU CALL THEM, I'LL SET THEM OFF

2011-11-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

    YOU CALL THEM, I'LL SET THEM OFF

    I’m Eight years old, sitting in the drivers side seat of the broken down Winnebago on the side of my Aunt Judy’s house near the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by weeds and old tires. A picket fence that is being over taken by thorn vines and discarded fish nets. I call it my aunt’s house because my uncle was never there. Always on the road, driving a semi truck, his headlights aimed at oblivion. I am looking up at the dark sky and the few stars that are visible through the windshield and over the trees.
    Light pollution around here is pretty bad. Only the brightest of all the stars appear over the boardwalk which the Winnebago is aimed at in the empty lot. A view of skyline lit up unnaturally by the neon and the spot lights, the Ferris wheel of Seaside Heights, New Jersey- population, you and me and everyone we love. The spot lights leveled on it from the great beyond. Jelly fish in the water pulsing and quivering, the dark beach and the idea of summer a thing in the hearts of all those who are eager enough to keep taking breaths.
    The inside of the Winnebago smells like Cinnamon the dog, who doesn’t smell anything like cinnamon, who smells like dog death. I smell like jelly fish and zeppolis (fried dough covered in confection sugar served hot, sucker). I lost all of my birthday money trying to win a Nintendo Game Boy, I used to smell like birthday money, now I just smell like dog death and tears.
    It’s the fourth of July and I’m looking up through the windshield over the tree line at the sky line because I’m afraid of fire works and I didn’t want to go to the beach with the rest of the family.
    It’s the fourth of July and Rebecca has drawn shortest straw. She has to stay with me at the house rather than going down to the beach with the family though she is down on vacation from New Hampshire and doesn’t get many opportunities to see fireworks over the Atlantic Ocean.
    I’m sunburnt from my days on the beach. My skin red and peeling, my hair cow licked and still full of sand. I spent most of the day with my younger brother, digging a massive hole on the beach with our mini folding army shovels, unfolded for full effect. The life guards came by and told my mother that we weren’t aloud to dig a hole that massive in the middle of the beach, she stood up from her beach towel and screamed at them until they retreated. Her kids can dig as big a hole as they want and if somebody falls into it and breaks every bone in their body, then oh well, they are obviously not locals and they deserve it.
    She’s lived here all her life.
    It’s her beach and as far as she’s concerned, our beach.
    We filled the hole in when we were done, the sun sinking and the air growing chilly. The tide was down there at the bottom of our hole, and it was obvious to both me and Willy that we could never have dug to China, even if we really wanted to. This was good having our mother close by, because usually she was not around, at least I don’t remember her around. She worked night shifts in an aerosol can factory and we were raised by wolves. In all my other memories besides this one, she is absent and the wolves are taking me to the park, the county fair and to township league basketball sign up.
    When I hit my home runs in little leagues, the wolves foamed at the mouth in pride. Sometimes swarmed the fans on the other bleachers, tore their throats out in celebration.
    Touch em all, lil, pup.
    The memories are delusional and warped by time, she was there, my mother and she gave me what I wanted, what I needed and what I seldom didn’t deserve out of only pure unwavering love. I recall puking as a child in the hallway of our house and my mother cleaning it up and then coming into my room, lying down in the top bunk with me, kissing my eyelids as I shook. Telling me that everything was going to be alright.
    The passenger side of the Winnebago opens up, Rebecca climbs inside.
    She is sixteen and heavy set. She has curly hair as if it was an afro. She is my favorite cousin, she gave me all her tickets from the skeet ball and I got three spider rings, a yo-yo and a glow in the dark super ball.
    “Here you are, I’ve been looking all over for you.”
    “You have?”
    “Yeah I have, I was worried.”
    “About what?”
    “I don’t know, I didn’t know where you went.”
    “I was here.”
    “You ready to see the fireworks?”
    “I guess.”
    I’m afraid of fireworks, of horror movies, of my mom and dad getting a divorce, of thunder and lighting and of anybody finding out that I am deaf in my left ear and taking me to the doctor, who will cut my head open.
    Becca is a good person, she doesn’t rub it in that my little brother is at the beach, ready to watch the fireworks and is not afraid. None of them know that I’m afraid of fireworks because I had a baby sitter once who had company over and the company was shooting bottle rockets on the back deck while I was playing with my Thunder Cats sword and one of the bottle rockets came straight at my head, hitting the aluminum siding and causing me to piss my Osh Gosh ‘s.
    “It’s Ok, we’ll see them all from here, just me and you.”
    “Ok.”
    Then, the first of them appear, right on cue.
    “That one’s cool.” I say.
    “Not so bad from here, huh? It’s a Purple Popper.” My cousin calls them out like a baseball announcer, “And that one is a blue bell fizz.”
    “Woah.”
    “That one’s a red rocket.”
    “It’s really cool.”
    “It’s wicked.” She says, cause she’s from New England.
    “I like that one, what’s it called?”
    “A green dragon fireball.” She says
    Etc. Etc. Etc.
    We watched the rest of them and she called them all out by name. I didn’t know that they were made up names and that she was bullshitting her way through them all just for me. I honestly thought that she knew the name of every single fire work that was exploding over the ocean. Thinking back on it now, I’m very grateful for that line of bullshit.
    It made it easy to be inside that Winnebago. It made it feel good to be an outsider with an inside edge that none of the people on the beach knew anything about. It made me not afraid of fireworks, though I still sometimes go back to the Winnebago and watch them from the passenger seat instead of standing on the beach with the crowd.
    My heart is a collapsed picket fence with thorn vines climbing over it, discarded fish nets tangled within the lines of distorted truths and memories. Always there, in that vacant lot, there are the ghosts of my youth, calling out the names of all the starts that are not really stars, but are loved more, because they are forever named.

Fires.

2011-11-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

SPOUT

i always wanted a gun
now i got you
and you're a beauty
i aim you at animals,
then drag them
into the fire
you set,
inside the cage
of my ribs

BY A FIRE

your cheerleader prayers
and your communion song book
adorned with medals of war devoid of bluebirds
i'm a dog of mud puddles
through my teeth slip a cry
that no museum preserve
that no cop shine his shine light
that no devil open like a can of tuna
to suck the fish water into a mouth wide cursed
your kiss of gold sets my skull into decision
that in this place i am settled
in this place i am yours
shake your pom poms on me
sing your song of God way out of key
pet my wet fur and scratch the fear
from behind my supersonic ears
I am a transporter of insects
and a sideline watcher of your gift of fire

DEFENSE MECHANISM

when things hurt it’s easier to be funny
than to sit there dying with everybody looking
all the glory of medicine and the threat of rain
the mice in the walls &
overtime parking fines unpaid
why does everybody have a balcony
to watch us waiting for them to leave?
why don’t we put up some iron ore curtains
to keep out the neighborhood radiation?
I get the feeling that if the fire is not in your apartment
it's going to be everywhere else
so lets just stay in and be private
rather than turn to ash.
when things hurt it’s easier to be funny
than to sit there dying with everybody looking

Love.

2011-11-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

I will be your only friend
if everybody else puts their hearts back in their suitcases
I'll still be on the lawn
with a space for you in my arms and a notch for you in my spine
I don't blame you at all
though it's be easy to accuse you of rain clouds and extinctions
you're a comfort to me
when everybody else is a scab that I can't help picking till its a scar
you know a lot about my dog
and I fed your cat while you were away even though I wanted him to die
love is a battery jumped by another car
that finds you on the side of the road
love is the frozen meat thawing on the counter
love is the search for missing persons after major disasters
though common sense says that they are dead
no common sense in love

I'll take/save the change out my pockets
and I'll buy you a bulletproof vest for judgement day stitched with roses
I'll paint the hospital bed your favorite color
and then I'll burn it so that you'll never have to lay down and squirm
I'll catch all of the birds and make them into a blackbird pie
but you won't have to eat it if you don't like. just know why.
you're a saint in my nights
when everybody else has devoured my birthday cake
love is the guesstimates that are somehow 100% accurate
& allow the sun through the fog to come back up
love is a broken window that we climb through
to get out of the god damn rain
love is getting stabbed in the neck and having somebody
to close the wound with their mouth
so that you can never die.

Take One, Or Else

2011-10-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

I was 17, too old, officially to trick or treat. I had a car. I had a girl.

So, sure, me and the girl were drunk off our asses, driving around the neighborhood, passing a bottle back and forth while little kids went darting out in front of our headlights. Miniature witches and pirates with sacks full of candy. Screaming and yelling. I rolled down the window and yelled at them too, “LOOK TWICE BEFORE YOU CROSS!”

She rolled down her window too, “THEN LOOK AGAIN, ASSHOLES!”

Sound advice, look three times before crossing on Halloween, these teens new behind the wheel are new with vodka. They are trying to figure both of these new experiences out.

We didn't have any responsibilities on our mind. The only thing on our mind was getting into each others pants. ASAP.

Her parents were gone for the evening. I parked my car out on the street, a block away. Way, way out of sight. Just in case her mom and dad came home early from the parade.

As we walked down her street, kids were everywhere. They came streaming out of the woods. They came unfolding from around corners. They came rising up out of the ground. They came descending from the sky on black wings dripping with dove’s blood.

“Is someone hiding in your bushes?” I said.

“What?”

“Look...”

“Creepy.”

A full grown man was standing in there, staring at us. He was in dark blue zip up coveralls. He had on a Micheal Meyer’s mask. His hands were clenched in fists at his side. He had on white Nike Air Force One’s.

“It’s just, Bob.”

“Hey Bob!” She yelled.

He didn’t respond.

“I see you Bob!” She yelled again.

He pulled off the mask and laughed. He looked horrible. His face was splashed with fake blood. “I thought I could scare you guys.”

“Nope!”

Bob was in his mid thirties and still living at home with his parents. Instead of handing out candy from his own door, he had left a note next to the bowl of candy on his own doorstep that said, “TAKE ONE, OR ELSE!” He explained this to us, with much satisfaction.

“Wow, cool.” She said.

Then Bob just grinned at us uncomfortably before flipping down his mask.

“You guys drunk?” He asked.

We just walked away, not even responding to that stupid comment, left him standing behind the bushes, watching kids take candy out of his mother’s mixing bowl filled with Milk Duds.

"Don't be rude!" He said. "You're parents left me in charge while they're gone."

What? Fuck you, weirdo.

So, into the house we went. There was a note on the kitchen table that said, “Kate. Turn on all of the Halloween lights and please give out ALL the candy. We don’t need any in the house after tonight. Me and Dad are on a diet. This last part goes without saying, No Boys.”

Right away, we stripped all of our clothes off. Did not turn on the Halloween lights, Did not hand out candy. Instead we got into the heavy business of heavy petting and kissing so hard that we almost chipped each others teeth. We were mastering that. The sucking face aspect.

Ding Dong.

Kids were ringing the door bell even though all the lights were out?

Ding Dong.

“Can you believe this!” I said.

“Don’t stop. Just ignore it.”

Then the bell rang about ten times in quick succession. I pulled myself off of her and went to the window, looked downstairs at the front step. It was empty.

“Nobody is there.” I said.

“Come back over here.” She said from her position on the couch.

Then, I noticed Bob standing there looking up from the edge of the hedges. He was standing in her yard. Looking up at our window with that stupid mask on. Now he had a butcher knife in his hand.

“You’re neighbor is a wacko.” I said.

“No shit.”

“He’s standing down there, looking up here.”

“He can’t see in.”

“Let’s go to your room.” I said.

We went down the hallway and jumped into her bed onto a pile of homework, clothes and loose spiral notebooks.

She put her hot lips on my neck and made like she was going to eat my throat out. I mock pretended that I was going to rip her chest apart and take her heart out, give it to the trick r’ treaters. What do you think of that. She put her hands on my nuts, I stopped playing around. I was in no position to play around any longer.

Happy Halloween!

There was a noise outside. Commotion. More kids yelling. A stereo started up. Somebody was playing the monster mash. A dog started barking.

We went out in the kitchen in our underwear. We drank glasses of water in the darkness with the lights off. Then we went to the window. Her neighbor was still out there on her front lawn.

“Look at that idiot.” I said, “He’s all red.”

His mask wasn’t white anymore. His Nike’s were sloshed with goo. His hands. His knife.

Some kids came walking up his driveway. He stood there like a statue. Just an innocent Halloween prop, kiddies. Pay No Mind.

Now clear as day, I saw the kids come to his step. A robot. Bat-man, a girl dressed as Raggedy Anne. They saw the note: “TAKE ONE, OR ELSE” They ignored it. They scooped up massive handfuls of Milk Duds.

What little assholes. Nobody likes Milk Duds that much. They were just being shitty.

Now, this set off Bob!

“IT SAYS TAKE ONE!”

The kids screamed and scattered. Bat-man and Raggedy Anne were gone in a flash, the robot boy stumbled and fell over on the lawn and Bob latched onto him. He pulled the kid behind the hedges and stuck the knife into him.

Then he stuck the knife in again.

Right through the cardboard, as if it was nothing.

Well, that sounded stupid. It was nothing. It was just cardboard.

Now here was Bob, looking down at the motionless kid and here was me, going, “Holy, shit, Holy shit, oh my fucking Christ!”

“What? What!”

“BOB JUST KILLED A ROBOT!”

“WHAT?”

He pulled the boy farther down the property line and threw his limp body into the recycling can.

“HE JUST THREW HIM INTO OUR RECYCLING CAN!”

The way she said it, made me think that she was mostly mad that he had dumped the body into her family’s can instead of using his own.

Bob went over and refilled the Milk Duds and then resumed his position behind the hedge and watched, silently while we stood there watching too. What the hell! Before we could even react, here came more kids. A Ninja Turtle. A Ghost Buster and a zombie.

The kids, scooped up way too much candy and here comes Micheal Meyers, lunging at them, plunging his butcher knife into ALL of them. Blood comes spraying out of the zombie, a little fountain. The knife goes right through the plastic mask of the ninja turtle before he can even think of defending himself with his nun-chucks.

Please, take one, or else.

Now, he is dragging these three dead kids into Kate’s yard. He uncovers a green tarp and beneath which, is not a pile of leaves, but, a pile of mutilated children and what looks like, to me anyway, to be Kate’s dad. Ernie.

As much as I didn’t like that guy, it troubles to see him in that pile of dead bodies.

“WE’VE GOT TO CALL THE POLICE!”

Kate rushes into the kitchen and flips on the light switch.

Her parent’s note on the table now has been replaced with a new note that appears to be finger painted in blood it says: “KATE, THE PHONE SEEMS TO BE OUT. SORRY. SIGNED, BOB.”

Kate tries to use the phone anyway.

Sure, it’s not working.

Now I have hysterical Kate to deal with. She starts to make this barfing noise and she’s all hyper ventilating and this does nothing for me. All it does is make me start to make these little barfing noises and get all super hyper ventilatey.

“OUR CLOTHES!”

We rush into the living room, where our clothes should be lying in a heap on the floor with our cell phones in the pockets of our jeans. Our clothes are gone. Our cell phones are long gone. There are two dead bodies on the couch, they are stripped naked, in faux staged bang action.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” This is Kate’s response.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” This is my response.

“IT’S MR. AND MRS. KLOAN!”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I say again.

Then, I also say this, “WHO ARE MR. AND MRS. KLOAN!”

“HIS PARENTS!”

I don’t get it.

“WHO’S PARENTS?”

Then, I get it and feel stupid. Bob’s parent. Fuck.

Then the doorbell rings ten times in quick succession and Bob comes into the house.

We run into her room and lock the door. Bombard the door with the dresser, with the bed and the other dresser.

He can’t get in.

So, after a knocking a few times and politely asking us to come out in the hallway and get gutted, and a few rounds of us politely declining, he just goes away.
Out into the night, towards your house.

As they came back in from the wild

2011-10-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

   We walk through the darkness of the campground towards the voices and music. The sound of a very tinny radio echoing off the RVs. The insect rub their wings together in such a fever that the radio seems to fade out.
   There is a neon cooler on the edge of ring of the light from the campfire.
   Kurt and me crouch down, in the brush and then lay on our bellies in the dark as if playing soldier. The impression I got was that silence and stillness were rewarded by some . Talking in code, Kurt Norther says, "Delta alpha 1 nine you think much longer, copy?"
   I didn't respond. He’s just a little kid. A whole grade behind me.
   "10-4, Eagle eye what is your 20? Over." He says.
   "I don't think you know how this works." I say, annoyed.
   The adults go for a walk, wet bottles in their hands. Short cut off jeans and feathered hair like head dresses. Leaving the radio, the dart board, the campfire, taking their cigarettes, their mustaches and hands and arms around each others waists. Do you know the way that women laugh late at night when they are far away from home? Neon tank tops and wine coolers, It was late. A summer moon was up there spinning like a quarter flung onto a glass top table.
    “Maybe they went to the pool.”
   “The pool is closed and locked.”

    I open up the cooler. There is a young girl, watching from the inside the window of the RV.
   "Dont take very many" She says in a soft southern voice.
   “We won’t.”
   “What are you doing in there?” Kurt asks
   “Trying to sleep, but they are so loud. I’m glad they went away.”
   She was quiet while we tried to get the bottles open. Watching us try to twist the lids off like they were sodas.
   “You gotta use a bottle opener.” She said.
   “We knew that!” Kurt says. Then he snatches a garbage bag from a pile next to the picnic table and starts to pile four more bottles into the bag.
   "I watched you guys kill frogs against the wall, yesterday."
   "They were toads." I say.
   "I watched you kill toads..." She says.
   "Yeah. What of it?"
"Nothing. Just that if you are gonna kill frogs, a good place to do it would be on top of the showers...you could throw them down through the skylight at these girls who gave me a bad time today at the pool."
     "A bad time?"
     "Older girls. They picked on me. Pulled my hair."
     "Maybe we'll pull your hair too." Kurt said.
     "I'm letting you take those beers. We're friends."
      "Sure." I said.
   "You should go up on the roof of the girl’s showers. When they get back, you could throw frogs at them."
    “Why would we want to waste these frogs on girls?”
    “They are shitheads.” She said. “Real nasty shitheads. They deserve it.”
    “Go ahead, take as many beers as you want, and then go...get them, good.”

The field outside the showers was wet from the rain. Our pant legs soaked up to ankles. At our leisure we caught the toads that hopped between blades of grass beside the bachee ball pit. Put them in the same plastic bag as the bottles of beer. It was nothing for us to catch toads, we could have done it professionally, been millionaires. If there was such a thing, professional toad catcher.

"look how They jump in the bag trying to get out"

"of course, wouldn't you?"

He gave me a look like, I had two heads, "how to hell would anybody find a plastic shopping bag big enough to fit me? I'm big for my age."

Then, we scaled the side of the building. Going from the picnic table up to lattice work. Onto the low roof. Up there you could see rows and rows of sleeping camp sights. Darkened RVs. Not even many stray fires to speak of. Weren’t these people on vacation?

I lived there.

They were on vacation and, damn, it looked like they were all asleep.

The summer moon is fat and full, and they slept faultlessly through it all.

Before too long, those girls come walking across the stones in their flip flops. Their voices carrying. Idle banter.

They entered the bathroom and we looked down through the sky light with the light suddenly on. The black below us all white tile. I was conscious that I was looking down into heaven. Such a strange angle to be at, where you could look down into heaven.

The girls undress.

Kurt messes around with the bag of frogs.

I shake my head at him. He doesn't get it. I say, "I think it'd be better just to watch."

"huh?"

"be quiet "

"I didn't catch all these fuckers for nothing. I'm throwing them"

"don't"

"why you scared, be a man."

He didn't get it

"be quiet"

Three of them. A blonde. Two brunettes.

One of them had hair between her legs.

Then the young flat blonde looked up why she washed her neck and caught a glimpse of us above the rafters. She dropped the soap, it skidded away on the tiles, we ducked for cover.

"we've been spotted."

Now two things happened simultaneously. The blonde was squawking down below. Yelling about weirdos watching on the roof. Her cries bounced off the sinks and toilets and spiraled up and out as if megaphones. Kurt ran across the roof leaving the bag of toads and jumped down, twisting his ankle and then limping across the field back to his campsite two of the girls disappeared into the toilets, getting their clothes.

One girl remained. She stood there in the center of the shower, slowly washing her arms. Really suddsing up. Her eyes were wide and she looked up to where I still was, watching her. She didn't care.

Then she slowly turned around and started to wash behind her knees bending over, exposing herself.

I thought about it.

I thought, what could be bad about a girl like this?

Then the doors opened and out came the shy ones flapping their flip flops down the stone path and out into the road. Still in towels gripping their clothes to their breasts over plain white towels.

Wet hair stuck to their still wet backs.

They reminded me of horses, running hard into the darkness.

It went on like that. The girl spun around and washed her breasts, all the while looking up at me.

Then, when all the suds were gone and the steam was thick and her skin very hot pink, she took her eyes from me and shut off the water. Turned and casually walked away, out of my line of sight.

I looked back across the field. There was someone coming. An old woman. I moved to the other side of the roof. I dropped myself down onto the picnic table outside of the door where you went in to rent the canoes.

Then I crossed the field away from the campfires. Into the darkness of the pines. The fireflies would appear at random. Like odd moments.

Two things occurred to me crouching there.

First, what could be bad about a girl like that?

Then I thought about how I had forgotten all about the plastic bag of toads. They were still up there. There is a chance that thy are still up there, living up on the roof. Watching through the skylight at the bodies rinsing off the mud as they come back in from the wild.

From The Cliff

2011-10-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

FROM THE CLIFF

    Joe lying down, eyes closed. Dreaming of Annie in her swim suit doing that dive that she used to do off of that rock in Fiji. This was when they were both very young and when she did things like dive off of high rocks into far down waters.
    Warm winds moving tropical trees full of red flowers. Also catching Annie’s long dark hair. Nectar. Small orange birds darting past your eyes too slow to see anything but t he hint of their color. An impossible wall of ocean and sky that doesn't seem divided.
    Annie; sometimes the winds would send her little body into the rocks on the way down and she would crack against the ledges and land broken on the farthest rock ledge, nothing much Joe could do to save her then, often he completed that dream by bringing her into the jungle, burying her among the vines and overwhelming scent of the fruit and flowers, all while something in the darkness laughed. Often enough an animal, other times, something worse.
    Was it you?
I'd like to think it wasn't you.
    Now, watch as Annie raises her arms, spring loads her legs, doesn’t she look too good for this world?
     When Annie leaps, your eyes will hurt, because the sun is always behind her, like everything is disintegrating and the shadow of her is not. The bomb going off will level everything else, but she is a tangle of molecules that will forever be interconnected.
    I wish it was that way.
    Her arms spread, fingers splayed, a quick jerk and then propelling herself off of the ledge into the open free fall of hundreds of feet. Look how honest. How natural. Like a satellite in orbit. Legs in sudden easy union, a four Mississippi count and then she breaks that paradise surface in easy jack knife, minimal splash.
     Joe sat on the rocks, looking down at the water, which was impossible blue and full of darting neon fish. Then looking all around at the dark jungle encompassing them, drinking the last of the beer and waiting for Annie to come up for air, but she wasn’t. Annie used to be able to hold her breath for a very long time. She could hold her breath for all our lifetimes and for all our favorite songs played eternal on jukeboxes. Never get tired of your own dreams. Your own songs.
    In these things, Annie never drowns, that would be too easy.
    Then, as is always the case, Annie comes up out of the water, breathes a big gulp of air, laughing, waving up. Sometimes in the dream, the waving and the thrashing of her body causes the dark shadow to rise up out of the water behind her, just to drag her down. Other times, it is clearly a shark that surfaces, some fifteen feet behind her, what a slow eternity those fifteen feet are as it approaches, also seeming to smile and wave at Joe way up there in outer space himself. What a wonderful shark, smiling as it brings those cross cut saw teeth through her back, as she screams, as she is separated, her torso and her legs split by division of the belly.
    And then she floats like that, just her torso, but she calls up to the top of the cliff, "I love you, even though you are afraid."
    Her makeup running and the blood making the water spread out forever into purple from the scene of the attack. She back paddles like that, he legs gone, singing, our wedding song.
    I wonder two little things, why is she wearing mascara? And what is she singing? I can't quite make out the words. I don't even think she knows the words. That's what kind of dream this is. She sings gibberish, ruining the verses and choruses of all our favorite slow dance make-out songs.
    I can't listen to the radio anymore. I can't walk past a jukebox.
    Thank you, for that, shadows of my dreams.
    Usually she sinks. No air bubbles come up.
    This time however, there is no dark shadow surfacing from the water, no tentacles to suddenly pull her into the instantly boiling foam, no flash of fin and roiling bloodied wake spoiling the idea of paradise. No, this time she swims to the little beach below and calls up to Joe, climbing onto the gold sand, “Hey, come on down here. JUMP!”
    Joe shakes his head.
    “That’s your thing. I don’t jump.”
    “Come on, if you love me, you’ll JUMP! It’s not as bad as it looks.”
    “I must not love you then.”
     She flashed him the bird, laughing, waving him down.
     He always regretted that, having said that, because of what really happened next, outside of the dream.
    Joe stood up off of the rock and walked with his beer in hand towards the stone stairs that led down to the beach, to Annie. He was drunker than he normally would be because he was on vacation and because of the sun and because he was nervous that he had just married Annie and he didn’t think that he would be able to take care of her. He stopped just before the stairs and looked out over the water.
    There was a boat coming in from the great depths. Sometimes in the dream, the boat would be a strange black vessel that suddenly began to fire ammunition on the beach. Other times it would release a missile of some kind that would strike against the stone walls, sending down massive boulders and jagged fragments onto Annie. This time it was a cruise ship, and some passengers were out on the deck, looking at the beautiful island and the beautiful cliffs that the divers went off. They were looking for divers with their binoculars, all they had was Joe, who was not a diver.
    He looked down at the beach, surprised to see that there were others on it with Annie. The man, Dirty. Who did not look like a tourist, a vacationer. He was an islander and this place that Joe and Annie had wandered into was his, whatever that really meant. He was from the darkness of the jungle and would take Annie into the darkness of the jungle, where death waited, twiddling its thumbs.
    “Annie.” He called down, she flashed a look upwards and was suddenly shoved by the man into the sand. Joe dropped his beer can and descended the stairs faster than he should have ever done. He lost his footing and started to fall down it, but he caught his balance, his hand on the wall saving himself from going end over end, a broken neck averted. Which would happen sometimes in the dream, he would reach the bottom of the stairs injured and the man would laugh at him, and while Annie screamed, he would rape her right there on the sand while he lay there greatly broken, unable to stop him.
    Most importantly, to save her, because usually after he was finished, the man would slit her throat open and leave her gasping like a fish while she lay in the sand that grew muddy with her blood.
    This time, for the first time ever Joe reached the beach, the man dragging Annie into the darkness of the jungle. Pulling her by her long hair, by her arms, her feet flailing behind. Joe called out to him, cursing at him. Suddenly he was on him, all he could think about was revenge for what they had tried to do to his wife. Joe hit the man in the face as hard as he could, the man fell over, Joe put him in a head lock, the man gasped for air. Joe tightened his arms till the man flailed for air, for a way out of the grip, hoarsely the man begged and cried, Joe hit him again in the face, something cracked, the man’s nose, warm blood spilled down Joe’s hands. He wouldn’t let Annie die again.
    As he choked the man, he scanned the beach for Annie, she was gone. Where had she gone?
In a panic he released the man and he fell over. “Annie!” He called. “ANNIE!” Scouting the beach and the tree line, no sign of her or any of the others. Then turning back, he saw that the man had pulled himself to his knees, was reaching for the long knife that so often he had seen him use to slit Annie’s throat in other dreams.
    He stomped over to the man and used his fist like a hammer, right into the man’s teeth. Then he took the knife from him and he brought it down again and again on the man’s belly, into the belly…


    This was when Joe was awoken from his dream by a woman pulling him back to reality, scratching at his face, then the voices emerged, “JOE! JOE! JOE! STOP!?”
    The lights were on, he was in his bedroom, back on Hilltop Avenue in Johnson County. It was a Thursday night, the little digital alarm clock.
    Victoria was on the floor on the side of the bed, broken nose, three missing teeth. He had been using the hair brush from her night stand, thinking that it was a knife. One of her ribs was fractured.
    Victoria was crying, like no man should ever have to hear his wife cry.
    The other woman was Becky, Victoria’s little sister visiting from New Hampshire. She was standing there huffing and puffing, Joe’s skin still under her fingernails, her eyes crazy with fear. She had been awoken by Victoria’s screams, by Joe’s loud booming voice and by the accompanying sound of furniture being knocked around. She dove out of her bed and ran into the room, now, looking at Joe and at her sister on the floor, Becky backed out of the room and ran down the hallway, back into the guest room- where she dialed the police.

    Annie had died five months after their honey moon, while shopping for groceries.
    Something in her brain popped and she died there, on the tiles, next to the mangoes and pineapple's.
      Yet, it was always back on the beach, that dream, where Joe had tried to save her life.
      You can't have a dream where you save someone from a pine apple. Or a mango.
      Now he stood in his bedroom, looking at his second wife Victoria, her face broken by his hands, his hands already becoming sticky with her drying blood and he heard the police sirens coming. He sat down on the edge of the bed not even trying to help her up because she was too hysterical to understand and he knew that she would just recoil from his hands.
     He heard the police siren coming and he looked at the wall, the painting that hung next to the TV of a cliff in Fiji where the divers would dive into the waters below, breaking the surface without a splash, the neon fish scattering.

Watching Allison Lewis Play Basketball

2011-10-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

A short story about being a lovesick teenager. I am gonna re-write this shortly and submit it for a magazine running a zine about nudity. Sure.

Watching Allison Lewis
   Play Basketball
   (Not American
   Football. Basketball.)

    Seventh Period. I am on the top row of the bleachers, leaning back. I watch Alison Lewis run up and down the basketball court for most of class. She is working up a sweat, you can see it on the small of her back where her blue shirt has become darkened.
    I watch her perfect breasts, and her perfect legs and her blonde ponytail and I can’t help but think that she is too beautiful to be a real girl. Maybe Alison Lewis is as beautiful as the Pacific Ocean stretching out far past the California cliffs. Or as beautiful as the sunset in one of those sunset paintings those painters over exaggerate. Wait, look at this, Joe Frick is trying to steal the ball from her, but she dribbles it between her legs, pivots and passes it to Mary. That is how beautiful Alison Lewis can be, she is a heartbreaking sunset without even being a ball hog.
    Mary tries to shoot but the ball gets swatted down, mid air.
    "Rejected!" Tom Frick yells.
    That was uncalled for. Alison thinks so too, she flips off Tom, and then he chases after her, tackles her to the ground and commits what looks like a series of welcome fouls while she laughs about it, them rolling around while we all watch. They are going to be prom king and queen, its three years away but even as freshman we all can see it coming. Mr. Keiser isn’t even out in the gym to blow his whistle. He’s down on the track with some kids who need to make up time trials in the mile run. We are lawless. We are being trusted not to fight or fuck, or in my case smoke dope on the top of the bleachers. As I haven’t ever had the opportunity to fight or fuck. She is too beautiful to be a reality.
    Tom and Alison eventually get off of the ground, and its clear to everybody why they are class couple. The rest of us are devastating losers in living in their mighty shadows, and we will be the rest of our lives.
    Populating the gym class with our envy, our jealousy and in my case a hard on. They start shooting hoops again. Still boys verses girls, which is the stupidest idea anybody ever thought of. Boys verses girls? Why not get me down on the court, and have it be crippled kid verses everyone. I’ll even give them a ten point lead. I don’t have to come to the gym. They don’t make kids in wheelchairs participate in gym class if they don’t want to participate. But to be honest with you, I’d like the opportunity to feel like a normal
person, to be able to come to class and play basketball like everyone else. To join in during the ping pong games. However, I usually don’t even dress.
    Why don’t I dress? I don’t dress because Mr. Keiser told me I didn’t have to do anything in class if I didn’t want to. I could sit up in the bleachers and do nothing and I would still get an A. What kind of asshole would play basketball when he could be up here with a perfect view of Alison Lewis’s tits and ass?
    The only problem with my wonderful gawking, if that the social deviants who sit in the bleachers with me all think it’s high time for conversation, as if I’d like to interrupt my vivid "fucking Alison Lewis in a hot tub" fantasy to talk to the non wheelchair bound kids that are strewn about like sacks of potatoes (a term my mother loves). Even worse I suppose are the ones who failed ninth grade multiple times and live up here on the bleachers most of the day, drunk or high or just plain ignorant. For instance, Kevin Daniels thinks I want to not only watch him carve a swastika in the bleacher below us, but that I’ll want to talk about why it is so cool for him to be carving a swastika in the bleacher below us. "Too bad Keiser can’t be thrown into an oven with all of the other dirty Jews." He says. Initially I ignore the comment, because really, stupid comments like that aren’t headed anywhere, but of course Kevin has so much more to say on the matter. "I’ve been in Keiser’s Jew gym class for the last three years and the motherfucker keeps failing me because I got a confederate flag flying from the back of my pick up."
    Kevin Daniels was supposed to graduate high school three years ago, but instead he is a fourth year freshman. A true imbecile. "Sneaky Jew." He says. "Conniving money grubbing Jew. Jew." He says.
    "Jew." Finally I can’t take it anymore. "Its funny how
Jews all stick together too. Jews suck. Dumb Jews."
    "Not that it matters, but I’m Jewish. So don’t sit here and talk crap about Jews."
    "You’re a fucking Jew?"
    "My last name is Goldstein." I say. "I’ve heard of ignorant bigots before but …"
    "Fuck you, you stupid crippled Jew."
    "Are you done yet?" I ask.
    "You done being a filthy money grubbing filthy Jew?" He asks me.
    "Yeah." I say. "Sure. I’m done. I quit. Nevermind. Nevermind the whole deal Poof just like that, not Jewish. You see me right now, no longer a Jew. What would you rather I be?" Then luckily Kevin Daniels decides to spit on the bleacher and walk off to the locker room, where I am sure he is robbing the lockers once again. Taking wallets and chains and whatever else is strewn about by these careless gym participants.
    And then she comes slowly dribbling up the court, her golden hair flowing behind her, and I see the whole thing in super slow motion. She fakes out Eddie Wake, and he didn’t see this at all, it’s Alison Lewis putting the moves on, coming up on a breakaway pass, catching the basketball mid stride (in my mind she is moving so fluidly that her shoes slip off, her socks slip off). She dribbles gracefully past Henry Tai (her shorts slide down), the other girls calling from behind cheering for Alison. Where has this sudden burst of competition come from? This is gym class not a playoff game. Alison is point
guard on the team (her blue shirt slips off and now she is in a pink bra and matching panties), the only freshmen to ever play Varsity. Alison Lewis is amazing. My mouth drops, hangs there, I want to drool, need to drool, but can’t. Tom Frick steps up, the last man between her and the hoop, and he is all grins, (Her bra unclips itself and falls to the gym floor) she cross dribbles and he reaches in for the ball, finds only air, loses his balance. She is airborne, soaring overt he freshly waxed floor (Her ponytail comes undone), her arm extends, the ball in fingertip (Her panties slip off) and Alison Lewis is naked,
hanging from the rim of the basketball net. Peaceful serenity on her face and, my eyes transfixed on her.

Swallowed up by Pennsylvania

2011-09-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a short story that I wrote for a website that was posting stories based off of Bruce Springsteen song lyrics. They rejected this one.

    The girls were bored and that wasn’t a good thing. It was the first hot night and we sat on the concrete apron looking at the pool, still closed for the season. Our beers sweating in our fists
    “It’s too bad.” She said, “I’d like to swim.”
    “I know.” I said. “Me too.”
    Our friends had been vague. They hadn’t mentioned that the swimming pool wouldn’t be open. Now, didn’t we look like assholes in our bathing suits. Drive all the way out here, the pool’s still closed, the beer is skunked and there’s not even a stereo.
    Fuck Pennsylvania.
    Man, how did we ever wind up in this state?
    “You want to get outta here?” I said to my girl and her girlfriend. “You two want to go find a lake? A stream?”
    They shrugged.
    “A polluted toxic river that will melt your flesh off? I know where that is.”
    Not that either.
    “So, we’ll just sit here frowning. Looking at that tarp. What a nice tarp.”
    “Fourth of July, here…a god damn light year away from the board walk.”
    Then, headlights flooded the driveway. Mary and Terry were back in their beat up Dodge.
    “I got the charcoal and I got COLD beer!” He said, barreling through his new fence. Mary had the ice and some hot dog rolls. The two of them were gonna die out here, weren’t they?
    How could they ever hope to survive this far away from the Atlantic Ocean?
    Goners.
    Absolute goners.
    I gave them the sign of the cross.
    “Nice knowing you.” I said.
    My girl punched me right in the shoulder.
    It’s tough losing good friends to Pennsylvania. Man, I know that she felt the loss too. Mary and her would become ghosts to each other on a telephone now, wouldn’t they?
    I went in the house and talked to Terry.
    “I’m sorry about the pool.” He said.
    “What about it?” As if it was a non issue.
    He pointed at my striped swim shorts. “I thought we were gonna be able to open it, but it just didn’t work out. Been working way too much.”
    “I feel you. I’ve been spending too much time in the refinery…”
    He was pouring us all shots of medicine in shallow glasses. Trying to be a good host. Then he whapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, I know what would make this better.”
    Terry took out another shot glass. Filled it up. Now there was six shots on the counter.
    “I’m gonna get my neighbor over here. He’s a complete and total train wreck. You’ll love him.”
    Terry went out on the deck and started to yell, “YO JOHNNY! HEY JOHNNY COME OVER HERE!”
    Then just like that, here he was. This big drunk idiot with a dented head. He was floundering through the door, obliterated.
    “What’s up, guys?”
    “Just trying to get drunk.” We said.
    “Trying?” He looked at his watch, “Guys, it’s nine o’ clock at night. I’ve already been drunk, sobered up got drunk again, sobered up and now I’m working on a third drunk of the day.”
    We forgot the girls, we went to quick work on the shots.
    Terry, a natural born manipulator, began to work his hooks into John. He quickly finds out that his neighbors wife and kids are out of town at their shore house. He starts to suggest that maybe the party would be better over in John’s yard.
    “In my yard! You are so right! We need to go over there.”
    Then we go outside and tell the girls to get their stuff we are going next door. John goes across the lawn and through the fence, flips on all of these flood lights. Holy shit!
    “That’s a god damn big house.” I say to Terry.
“What the hell does this guy do?”
    “Not much.” Terry says.
    “Not much?”
    “He’s got brain damage from getting hurt inside a Home Depot.”
    “Brain damage payed for that place?”
    The stereo fires up over there. It sounds like the Rolling Stones are set up on his back patio.
    “He’s got some great brain damage funded stuff over there.”
    “Cool.”
    Then John is sticking his head over the fence saying to the girls, “Come on over here, I want to show you girls my deck. Don’t you want to see my deck?”
    I encourage them to ignore this.
    We go next door. In quick order, the girls are all swimming in the pool and we’re all drinking and drinking and drinking. Like our throats were full of sand. Then I’m in the pool, sinking down to the bottom, holding my breath and passing like a turtle under all the beautiful feet of these summertime girls out of their element.
    When I come to the surface, John and Terry are off somewhere. They’re smoking a bong to death. I’m fucking around with the stereo and singing along, all wrong words to the wrong song.
    “You wanna see my deck?” I say to the girls, mocking Johnny.
    “Man, he’s a creep.” Mary says.
    “He is.” Angie said, “You see the way he’s looking at me? Pennsyltucky trash.”
    When John came back, he was practically carrying Terry. See, John’s brain damage strength weed was no match for Terry’s normal brain weakness. Before too long, he was off in the stones losing hamburgers and hot dogs.
    Mary took him home.
    Now it was just myself, my girl and Angie and Johnny was all cross eyed and insistent that the girls get in the hot tub. This was cause enough for them to flee back to the Mary’s house.
    I stood there with him, not sure what to say. Jesus Christ, it was some house, I thought, I really needed to get my foot in the door lawsuit wise, quit my job at the refinery before it killed me.
    “Don’t go.” He said, “Let’s do a shot. You like tequila?”
    “Sure.”
    “Come inside my house, dude, I got the best tequila you’ve ever had.”
    We went in the house. The lights were all out. He stumbled around in the darkness crashing into things like a two hundred and seventy five pound pinball. I went in the kitchen and leaned against the counter. He was screwing around with the stereo again in the living room.
    A song I didn’t know was on.

    Then he came into the kitchen with a bottle and he poured us both a really big slug. We knocked them back. It was really nasty shit. I know good tequila. This wasn’t it.
    “What the hell was that?”
    He held up the bottle.
    It wasn’t even Tequila. It was a plastic jug of Mescal. Whatever. I thanked him anyway.
    Then something really strange happened. Over the stereo, came the opening strains of Thunder Road.
    “THIS IS MY FAVORITE SONG!” He said, stomping around the kitchen.
    “Mine too.” I said, honestly. And then it was official, I was sentimental drunk.
    “Screen door slammed/ Mary’s dress waved/ Like a vision she danced across the porch while the radio played…”
    Here I was, in a big empty house funded with brain damage money in the heart of Pennsylvania. So far away from where I should have been.
    Not here, but to the east, the ocean and the boardwalk all lit in a wild dream while fireworks popped above them like flowers on fire burning themselves apart against the ferris wheel rolling forever end over end, over end…
    I thought about my friends, waiting for me back on the concrete slab beside the tarped pool.
    Johnny was singing, out of key and in another world, but he knew all the words. Even a fucked up guy from Pennsylvania knows all the words to a song that good.
    He swayed back and forth and then stopped, looked at me with pained, heavy eyes, that said, do you really have to leave?
    I said to him, “Hey, you got anymore of that good tequila?”
    “YEAH!” He shouted, happy as fuck.
    “Alright, let’s have another.” I said.
    We knew all the words. We sang them all. Then put it on again. Just like you should.

MOLOTOV MICHELOB

2011-09-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

    All of us had a kid who just, you know, liked to blow shit up. Always dressed in Army fatigues, camouflaged everything. Heavy boots. Our kid was Tommy Norther.
    He was my friend in the 6th grade and a lot of the time he used to come and play with me and my brother, Bill.
    I remember one time he came over after school with a brand new Dark green parka on, it was too light for the weather, but he had gotten it in the mail as a late birthday present from his mother in Arizona, who it seemed, had forgotten how cold New Jersey is in the winter.
She was too far away.
      It was alright, he said, he didn’t like to be too hot anyway, he liked being on edge and ready for battle.

That day, In his war stocked back pack Tommy Norther had a six pack of beer, that he had found stashed in a broken down car on the side of his garage. Tommy had an alcoholic father who wasn’t supposed to be drinking anymore and it really upset him to find it there.
Michelob, glass bottles.

“I fucking hate my dad, man.” he said to me.
The guy, for how tough and crazy he always seemed looked like he was on the verge of tears. “My dad is such a piece of crap. I really hate him.” He set the six pack on the floor of our fort and then zipped up his back pack. His wild hair disheveled. Just like his life.

Now, I remember looking at the beer thinking, cool, Tommy brought beer. I knew a tiny bit about beer. I was interested in furthering my education. Now something I hadn’t considered happened next.Tommy Norther cracked open the beers all one by one and dumped them onto the floor of our back yard fort.

“I don’t ever want to be like him.”

He stuffed the empty beer bottles in his back pack. Zipped it tight.

That backpack was always with Tommy Norther. He kept his gear in there. Fire crackers. His nickel zippo lighter. MREs. A little army shovel. A flashlight. An extension chord for some reason. Now, some empty beer bottles.

My brother Bill, smarter than me, knew that Tommy was the type of kid who needed to do something, to take his mind off his screwed up house. So we went walking in the woods.

It was cold. It hurt you at the tips of everything. We walked silently without talking towards the trails. The sun was falling. When we got to the cranberry bog it was frozen, it looked like a big skating rink. I stood up there on the brim of the trail looking down at it. It was the first big freeze of the year.

Tommy went went right on down onto the ice and started messing around, walking out to the middle. My brother Bill had found a dead goose half frozen in the ice. It was lying on it’s side. as if it was asleep. Have you ever seen a goose laying down on it’s side like a person? One eye wide open facing the white sky? The other eye under the water, looking down, looking down into what?
Just ice.

We hadn’t. So, I was standing there looking at it with him. Enjoying the view.

    “Wow.” I said.
    “So cool.” Bill said.
    “In the spring, we should come back and get it.”
    “It’s be great Jersey Devil bait.”
    “I was thinking shark bait.”
    “True, true.” Bill said.
    Now, we looked down at Tommy Norther, just a forest green speck of fatigued little kid way out there in the center of the bog.
    “He’s really far out there.” I said.
    “Wanna ditch him?” Bill said.
    “I don’t know.”
    It was real fun when we were little to just ditch people. It wasn’t to be mean. It was just to ditch. Nothing personal. You just ditched people. Invited them to come and play, maybe set up a whole game of manhunt in the pines, just get bored and ditch them. Leave them hiding there forever. Go do something else. Until, maybe, you got ditched. Then you could just ride your bike somewhere. There were options then, that can’t be relayed now.
    “Look at that!” Bill said. He was pointing to the far side of the cranberry bog. Way past Tommy Norther, there was a figure walking along the path.
    “Oh shit!” Bill said, “It’s old man Thompson.”
    “Old man Thompson...”
    See, back then, there was a farmer who had a place on the other side of the bog. He had muddy fields and small greenhouses where he grew things that he sold on the road in a little stand. We had heard that the guy didn’t like kids playing in his cranberry bog and that when he caught them, he would mess them up real bad. We had heard that he had a salt gun.
    That he shot kids with his salt gun.
    How stupid do you think we are? Only a baby would believe that crap and we were not babies. Far from it. I’m eleven and Bill is ten, go suck an egg.
    We could hear old man Thompson start to yell at Tommy Norther.”GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE! THAT'S NOT A PLACE FOR YOU TO PLAY!”
    “FUCK YOU!”
    “WATCH YOUR MOUTH BOY, I’LL BUST YOU UP!”
    “TRY IT!”
    Then, I saw it.

“Look, he’s got his salt gun!”

“What the heck is a salt gun, anyway?” Bill said.

“That thing right there, stupid. It’s loaded with salt instead of bullets.”

Bill scratched his head.

“TOMMY!” I SCREAMED.

“RUN!” Bill shouted.

Instead of running, Tommy Norther, our brave neighborhood commando said this, “SCREW YOU, OLD ASSHOLE! YOU CAN’T SHOOT ME. I’M TOO FAR!”

I’m too far.

BOOOOOOOOOM!

The gun recoiled. Smoke flared out. The salt ripped into Tommy Northers ass cheek.

I’m too far.

“HOLY CRAP!”

My brother and I couldn’t decide whether or not to be scared or excited, entertained or full of dread. It was quickly decided that we really were far enough away and that the action was something on TV. The wonder of being out of range.

Tommy Norther was clutching his right butt cheek and yelling, yelling in pain for a bit, then finally, forming this looming insult, “YOU... COCKSMOKER!!!”

“GET OUT OF HERE! TAKE YOUR FILTHY MOUTH HOME, OR I’LL FILL THAT WITH SALT TOO!”

Tommy stumbled along the ice towards our perch.

“I'LL BE BACK!” HE SCREAMED. “I’LL KILL YOUR WHOLE FAMILY!”

Old man Thompson disappeared back into the woods and walked down the short path that led to his modest farmhouse.

“I’LL BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN!”
Tommy went up the burm and out of the frozen bowl. We watched him walk along the rim and then disappear over the side. He was taking a short cut through the woods, over a shallow spot in the creek. He was going home. To lick his wounds. He might have been crying. We didn’t get to see.

“Damn.” I said. “I wanted to see where he got shot.”

“Me too.”

“I’m sure he’ll be back.”

“What now?” Bill said.

“It’s cold.”

“It is cold.”

“Let’s go.”

Back at our house we messed around for a little while. It didn’t take very long for Tommy Norther to show up. You just can’t keep a dog like him down.

“I gotta get that dirt bag, you guys gonna help me?”

We insisted he show us his gun shot wound. All it really was was a hole in the side of his butt. It looked like a real bad bee sting. Deep though. Like maybe from a monster psycho bee. We asked him if it hurt. He said, no. It didn’t hurt at all. He said he’d had fire ant stings that hurt worse.

“That guy ain’t got nothing on me.”

Tommy had an absolute crazy look in his eyes.

He opened up the backpack. We peeked inside. His father’s beer bottles had now become Molotov cocktails. Full to the brim with gasoline, rags stuffed in the top.

“I’m gonna blow him up.”

“We’re in.” Bill and I said in union.

Then we marched full of joy at this new campaign of revenge. What good luck we had found by being friends with Tommy Norther. Sure, this was just another boring Tuesday night after school. We should have been doing our homework by now, but instead we were blessed with something much more beautiful.

Dinner wasn’t for another hour. We had plenty of time to go and firebomb old man Thompson, his farm, the cranberry bog, the greenhouses and even the roadside produce stand before we had to be home for Stove top stuffing and whatever else mom was making.

Rather quickly we were back through the woods and on the burm of the cranberry bog, trudging ever closer to old man Thompson’s little sleepy farmhouse peeking through the trees.

Now Tommy stopped and started yelling, “I’M BACK!”
"he ain't gonna do shit." Bill said to me.
"I SAID, I'M BAAAACCCCCK! TOO BAD FOR YOU AND YOUR FARM!"

He opened up his bag and gripped one of his Molotov Michelob’s.

Bill and I looked back and forth between Tommy and the farmhouse, Tommy and the farmhouse.

I remember saying kind of under my breath to my brother, “He’s too far to reach from here.”

Bill shrugged.

Tommy was pumping himself up. He gripped the Molotov Michelob real hard. Then he gritted his teeth and shouted, “I TOLD YOU I WOULD BE BACK TO BLOW YOU’RE WHOLE FAMILY UP!”

Did old man Thompson have a family?

“Aren’t you too far to even reach from here?” I said.

“Yeah.” Bill said.

“LIGHT ME UP!” He hollered at Bill.

Bill thought the same thing, you could tell, that we were too far to hit anything. Maybe he thought too, that none of this was about old man Thompson. Sure, he had shot Tommy, but, it was really about Tommy’s dad. Right? Even little ass kids could see that.

“I think you’re too far...”

“LIGHT ME!”

Bill was like, SURE! Let’s face it, both of us were thrilled to see some fire bombing. We’d only seen that kind of thing on A-Team. My brother sparked up Tommy’s silver Zippo and then, there you have it ladies and gentlemen, that’s what a Molotov Michelob looks like burning like a torch in the crisp January after school dusk.

If we burnt the world down to a heap of ashes, chances are our elementary school would somehow survive.

Tommy let out a savage grunt. He was all rage. He was also uncollected. Instead of flinging the Molotov Michelob sideways like a well trained, or at least well studied anarchist, he threw the thing overhand as if it was a baseball. This sent the gas spewing out of the bottle and all down the back of his parka.

To our horror, here was Tommy Norther suddenly with a flaming green parka. Here, simultaneously was the bottle skidding across the ice, gas and fire spreading EVERYWHERE. Panic set onto me and my brother and of course, much panic and much heat was set all over Tommy Norther.

He was running around, flapping his arms. Bathing himself in more and more oxygen and more and more fire.

My brother grabbed a-hold of Tommy and knocked him onto the ice and shouted, “STOP DROP AND ROLL!”

I eyed up the Molotov Michelob, spinning end over end, gushing out more and more fire across the ice. Was it going to explode? Were we gonna be blown to smithereens? Shouldn’t we be running away.

“STOP DROP AND ROLL!”

Thankfully, we’d sat in that fire prevention assembly in our grade school taut by the fire chief of the local volunteer fire deaprtment. Stop. Drop. Roll. Tommy Norther wasn’t stopped, but he was dropped and he sure was rolling. Rolling. Rolling. Like a little steam roller switched into overdrive. Sonofabitch, my brother and I watched in disbelief as he rolled right off the brim of the trail and went down the side of the hill away from the bog into the creek below the creek.

He tumbled right into the icy water. As quick as we could, we lept down the side and tugged him out. His green army parka now black and smoldering. Trashed.

He sat there in the frozen leaves, beside the creek just looking at the parka. Really inspecting it on his body. So upset about his burnt up, god damn parka.

“My mom is gonna kill me.”

Me and Bill didn’t say anything.

“My mom is gonna kill me.”

We helped him up. He was completely soaked. Drenched. No one said anything. We walked in silence through the leaves and out towards the road. It was getting dark, rapidly. You could see the warm orange lights of some of the houses through the trees.

Tommy Norther was shivering. By the time we got back to our house, he couldn’t even walk. It wasn’t because he had been shot. It’s because his pants were frozen. Frozen. He couldn’t move his legs if he wanted to. You could hit his camouflage pants with a bat and he probably wouldn’t even feel it. The parka peeled off him, he clutched it, squeezing it with numb blue hands. Wide eyed.

Kid had been shot, burnt and nearly drowned in icy water and when we got him into our house all he kept saying was, “My mom is gonna kill me.”

I couldn’t understand how his mom was gonna kill him, all the way in Arizona.

He stayed for dinner. Then he went back to his old man, who caused him such throbbing misery and pain. And who was someone that Tommy Norther did not want to be, at all costs. Too far. Everything and everybody too far for Tommy Norther. I sent him home, In some of my dry clothes and one of my old jackets.

I couldn't understand how his mom was gonna kill him, all the way in Arizona.

My little brother and me and Silver Bullet

2011-09-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

   I remember sitting in the living room with my little brother, watching horror movies on the VCR. First, Swamp Thing. Then Lost boys. It was Halloween time, all the leaves had changed. We would have probably played some Nintendo, at that point, but the Nintendo was broken. No matter how hard you blew into the games, they just wouldn’t work. A flickering blue screen.
    I was nine and he was eight. Jittery little lunatics with bad haircuts and wild ideas.
    We would have played outside. No amount of football and bike riding could bore us, but it was raining. Cold, runny nose rain coming down in sheets.
    So, a third movie.
    This one, would become my brother’s obsession.
    Silver Bullet.
    It’s the story of a paralyzed kid in an electric wheelchair who lives in a small town. People start to turn up dead and the police start to look for a maniac on the loose escaped from an asylum or something, the boy of course, is suspicious that it’s a werewolf.

Little kids fantasize about that kind of thing all the time. Vampires sweeping in, taking over. Werewolves everywhere. Finding some trinket in the dirt that a god damn genie comes out of. I remember when I was nine years old. I was pretty sure that German terrorists were gonna take over the elementary school and it would be up to me and my friends to stop them. Disappointing when these things don’t happen.

These scenarios unfold out into infinity in the brain of a small child. You know that. Do you remember hiding under the blankets, because you were safe under there? Do you recall being afraid to swim in your own pool because of sharks? How about ghosts? How many ghosts roamed the life of your childhood? Probably thousands. You almost knew how to fly didn’t you? You thought if you hit a jump just right on your bike you could just keep going up over the sun.

Now you are an adult. You are boring.

You traded the absurd dreams that used to make you interesting for a mortgage payment and a desk job. You don’t even think werewolves are real anymore. You suck.

I’m not sure if Silver Bullet is a good movie. I haven’t seen it since I was a little boy. I remember less about the movie and more about what happened because of the movie.

My brother who had been a very lazy eight year old suddenly wanted to do chores. He approached my dad and told him he would take out the garbage and he would wash the cars. He would even rake the leaves. Rake the leaves? What kind of asshole wants to rake leaves?

This went on through the autumn. My little brother, the little worker. Pocketing little wads of money weekly. Though, he never spent it. He wasn’t buying candy with it. He wasn’t buying toy cars. I took my allowance to the video store and the book store. Somebody should have caved my head in.

Around Thanksgiving, my brother approached me.

“I got twenty dollars.”

He held it up for me to see.

“OK.”

“I’ve been saving.”

“For what?”

“I think it would be the coolest thing in the world to have an electric wheelchair. Like the kid in Silver Bullet.”

“That would be cool.”

“Then I could just drive around.”

“Yeah.”

“It’d be fast too. With like a jet pack on it.”

I completely agreed with him. You could zoom around and do wild stunts on that kind of thing. Sure, we had bikes and skateboards...you just can’t limit yourself.

“There’s a problem though.” I said.

“What?”

“They are expensive.”

“I know.” He said, “I’m not worried.”

“It’ll take you forever to save.”

“I’m not gonna buy the electric wheelchair. Mom and Dad will get it for me.”

“Mom won’t buy you an electric wheel chair. Not for your birthday and Christmas combined.”

“They’ll have to.” He said.

I shook my head. “Never gonna happen.”

He waved the money at me again.

“Twenty bucks,” I said, “Big deal.”

“Will you take twenty bucks...”

“For what?”

“To help me get into an electric wheelchair.”

Oh, fuck, he wasn’t saving his allowance to buy a material possession. He was saving his money to buy a service. My little brother was a very diabolical little eight year old.

“All you gotta do is break both my legs and you get twenty bucks.”

Again, he fluttered it before my eyes.

I had never had twenty dollars all in one shot. The idea was so tempting.

“If I have two legs broken real bad, they will have to get me an electric wheelchair and then, here I go, zooming all around, doing spins, jumping stuff, down the stairs, rolling down the trails...”

My eyes were wide imagining it.

“I’ll even let you use it sometimes. You just take me out of the chair and set me on a bench or something for a little while.”

I took the twenty bucks.

“Deal.” I said.

Right then and there we went out into the back yard.

“How are we gonna do this?” He asked.

I thought about it for a moment. Sledge hammer? Run him over with dad’s car? All good ideas, but this of course, would have to look like an accident or else I would get grounded for crippling him. My mom and dad wouldn’t stand for that kind of thing.

Finally, after much deliberation, it occurred to me.

“Got it!,” I said, “You can just lay down on your back and put your legs up on the bottom step of the stairs and I guess I could drop a few cinder block from up on the deck and bust your legs up, crush them into dust.”

“THAT IS AN AWESOME IDEA!”

It was a foolproof idea. Our parents would never detect that it wasn’t an accident. See, I was just up on the deck, playing with some cinder blocks, nothing suspicious about that, my brother was just down below on the ground,laying in the leaves with his feet up on the steps when, can you believe it, some of the cinder blocks somehow got blown off the deck by the wind and went flying down on him. What bad luck!

Mom and dad would say:

Oh, boy, crutches really won’t do.

Two useless legs...gotta get our poor boy an electric wheelchair. No other way around it. A cool one. With a jet pack.

So, I did what anybody would have done in my position. I lugged a couple cinder blocks up to the top of the deck and placed them precariously on the railing.

He sprawled out down there on his back.

“Be careful.” He said, “Don’t hit my face.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Ok!” He called, “Go ahead!”

“They are heavy, I’m gonna have to do one at a time.”

“Why?” He said, “Just knock them both off. It will be fine.”

“If I just knock them off the aim might not be right.”

He placed his hands over his nuts. He nodded, understanding this unseen danger I had identified.

“You maybe should have on a helmet too.” I said.

That was a joke. We didn’t own helmets. He laughed at this momentarily then resumed his stone cold seriousness.

I picked up one cinder block in my hands, leaned over the railing, I closed on eye to make my trajectory a little more reliable.

“Here goes!” I said.

Just before I could release the cinder block my mom opening up the sliding glass door behind me.

“Bud, what are you doing?”

I set the cinder block down.

“Nothing.” I said.

She came out and looked down below. There was my brother. Eyes clenched, hands in little balls. “COME ON! DO IT!”

Then, inexplicably, we were in trouble.

Can you believe our luck? We were so close.

She separated us. Got the stories out quite easily. The twenty dollars was taken from me. She told my little brother that she would hold it for him and if there was anything he wanted to buy with it, he would have to come to her and propose the idea. Get approval. The VCR was taken from us. Silver Bullet taken away from us. The broken Nintendo taken away from us. We were both grounded as fuck.

I was always getting grounded.

It didn’t bother me that much, they always let me read when I was grounded.

I guess, I’m still grounded.

Sometimes, I think about it all, Silver Bullet, my brother’s electric wheelchair dream. He never got his wish. Perhaps, kids these days would have more luck, a wealth of information about spinal injuries. If we had known back then in the backyard that all we had to do was crush his spinal column with a baseball bat to score him an electric wheelchair, we would have made out like bandits before any one could have intervened.

Made off like bandits.

Me with my twenty dollars.

Him with his wheels. Jet powered and all.

A HOODED SWEATHSHIRT IS A SUIT OF ARMOR

2011-09-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

A poem about being 19. Getting drunk off Keystone light in the backyard of a house on the other side of the industrial park. Learning the rules, so they say. Not sure what to make of them.

NOT QUITE A
HOUSE PARTY

a shotgunned beer
we were thirsty.
in the dark backyards
beneath the powerlines.
throwing rocks at the water tower
creating echoes off the houses
we were in hooded sweatshirts
like suits of armor
gathered together
along the chain link perimeter
the stereo played unwound tapes
between our small conversation
nothing important
too young to make mistakes
the body gets what the heart wants
out alone, no more nest, school’s out
shit jobs and bombed out apartments
forget about it for a little while
throw another colder one back.
sometimes a sound from the highway
comes through like an escaped wave,
The laughs of the girls
on the other side of the light
they always laugh over there
not so much over here
here, where our mouths are always dry.
and somehow, occasional like a bad joke
rises up, the lone police siren driving by
blue & red, woot woot, a stray, lost wolf
looking for injured things
stumbling out into the rays of the moon
out into the two lane highway.
we are not worried,
at all. Not at all.
this development is a maze
and you’ll never find us here
we’ve come here together
invisible on a Saturday night
to self destruct the things we brought
and dissolve into the skeleton of those we want.

Wild. Feral. Kitten.

2011-09-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

I found a cat today at work. One of the wild cats in the refinery made a nest of sorts for her new kittens beneath a pile of large steel beams lying horizontal. It’s a good place for them. Nothing can really get in to kill them. So, they are safe.

It just so happened that I had parked my truck near the beams and was walking along towards the fab shop when a little orange furry creature stuck it’s head out from under the metal. I stopped in my tracks and looked down at it. The size of my fist. A modest bunch of grapes. Blind. Milky eyes. It wasn’t aware that I was standing there looking at it.

Instinctively, I crouched down right quick and scooped it up gently with one gloved hand.

All it could do was hiss and scream and try to sink it’s little tiny needles in me. The problem was that the needles were too tiny to pierce the gloves and the hissing of a kitten; it’s only line of defense really, was not the kind of thing that installs fear into anything other than maybe a baby mouse.

Now, here I was, walking around the middle of an oil refinery with a kitten.

Can you think of a worse place for a kitten?

Maybe a kitten in the middle of jungle warfare. Maybe a kitten on a sinking submarine.

Sure, oil refinery. Third worse place for a kitten.

I carried it into the shop. It had started to rain. I wasn’t sure what I was really doing, just getting it out of the rain. I don’t want a cat. I don’t like the idea of a litterbox and I don’t live in the suburbs, where you can just open the window and let the cat out.

A few of the guys were hanging around in there, taking stainless steel welding certification tests. They put down what they were doing and they came to look at the cat. What a find! What a great way to break up the monotony of a boring work day.

“Where did you find that?”

“Under the steel out by the road.”

“What did you go fucking with that cat for? It’s still blind!”

“I didn’t fuck with it, it stuck it’s head out and I just...caught it”

“It’s not good to take them away from their mothers. Now you can’t bring it back. It will die.”

“It won’t die.” I said.

“It will, the mother disowns it. Won’t give it any milk.”

“You believe that?”

“Sure, you kidding me. Everybody knows that.”

“No,” I said, “Everybody knows that is something every mother tells their idiot kids so they don’t go bringing home baby bunnies and baby birds and whatever other wild life is slouching around.”

“What makes you the authority?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“So, you think my mother is an idiot?”

Usually this type of conversation would rail on and on and this would be the beginning of the fist fight. However, there was a crucial difference here. I was holding a kitten. You can’t beat the living shit out of somebody who is holding a kitten. Just try it. It doesn’t work.

Instead, I turned away and made my way back towards the door. It was too loud in there anyway. People were using the saw on the other end. Hot sparks slapping against uninsulated sheet metal walls.

Joe, non-argumentative Joe, followed me out into the rain. It was really coming down now, boy.

“Put it in the box truck for a while.”

We walked to the truck. In the cab of the truck, I made a little bed for it out of clean work gloves in the coffee cup holder. It laid down thankfully in this new nest as if it was a place it was thoroughly familiar with.

“We should keep it.” He said.

“How are we gonna keep it?” I said.

“In this truck. It’s a big truck. It could live in the truck.”

“That wouldn’t work.”

“You don’t think so?”

“A work truck with a litter box?.” I shook my head, “It wouldn’t be right.”

He shrugged.

“Orange cats are the best cats there are. They aren’t nasty. They’re just good cats, man.”

“Is this true?”

“White cats are deaf and they just have a shitty attitude.”

“Black cats are bad luck.” I said.

“Calico cats are loopy.”

“Tabbys are good cats.”

“Which ones are they?”

“Tiger looking cats.”

He nodded and rubbed the cat on the top of its forehead. It didn’t know what to make of this. It started to shriek and hiss and spit at him. He pulled his hand away. The kitten closed its eyes and appeared to suddenly dose off. What a swing! High to low!

“It’s sleepy.” He said.

He rubbed it’s ears and it didn’t respond. If a megaphone had been hooked up to its lips we might have heard the faintest little kitten snore at normal human hearing range volume. Joe just leaned in real close and looked at the thing with absolute fascination.

My phone was ringing. I went off away from the two strange animals and answered the call. It was my girl. Just saying hello. Hello. Hello. How are you? I explained the situation about the cat. She relayed the information to the girls in the office and almost instantly one of them said that she wanted the cat.

“Is it a girl or a boy?”

“I’m not sure.” I said.

“She says she only wants it if it’s a boy.”

“Girls are trouble.”

“She’s already got a boy cat, you know, less cat romance that way.”

“Hopefully.”

“Can you check to see...”

“What?”

“If it has cat nuts.”

“I’ll call you back.” I said.

I went back to the cab of the truck. Joe hadn’t budged. He was nose to nose with the sleeping thing. Just looking. Looking. Looking.

“Somebody might want the cat.”

“Who?”

“Somebody.” I said, “A girl in the city without a boyfriend. She’s starting a cat collection.”

“Oh...”

“It happens.”

He nodded.

“I gotta take a look at this feline’s undercarriage.”

“Interesting.”

I picked the cat up. It was crunching itself up in an awkward ball. It’s tail curled up tight between it’s legs. I couldn’t see anything. I held it up higher. I couldn’t see anything.

“What are you looking for?”

“Nuts.”

“Cat nuts?”

“Cat nuts.” I said.

I started to gently tug the tail down. The kitten was not happy. I felt like a pervert.

“This is getting weird.” Joe said.

“The girl only want the cat if it’s a boy.”

He understood immediately. OK.

Then. I had overpowered this half pound creature and now I had a full view of it’s cat sex. I had a problem though. The problem had to do with my total idiocracy. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. I mean, sure, I understand what I am supposed to be looking for, but just how big would a kitten dick be?

Am I the first person to have this problem?

“Chick or dude?” Joe asks.

“I can’t tell.”

“Can’t tell!”

He looked too.

“Chick.”

“I can accept that.”

“That’s too bad.” I said, “I’ll just have to let it go.”

He looked around the truck, perhaps about to propose his box truck cat apartment again but then resigned to the reality of the scene. He wasn’t taking a cat home. No one was.

We waited until the rain let up and the work day drew itself to a close and then we let the tiny thing crawl back into it’s dry hideout beneath the steel beam pile. I caught the slightest glimpse of some of the other kittens scurrying around down there and even saw that one of them did not have milky blind eyes. Full eyes. Blinking back at me, five times too big for it’s miniature skull. I wondered briefly if our orange kitten would be blind it’s whole life.

Nature sorts out those things.

Then the mother cat was spotted on the fence line, watching. When we were far enough away, we saw her saunter over to the hideout and disappear beneath. Going in to wash her young. Feed them. Warn them again to stay the hell out of sight.
Good. it was better off with it's mother, in this place. Than separated from her, into somewhere better.

“Too bad about that girl.”

“Yeah, too bad.”

He nodded,

“Which one?” I wasn’t sure if he was calling the cat “that girl”. It was almost something you would say about a dog. Not a cat.

“That girl who collects cats.”

“Oh, her.”

“She must be lonely.”

“Lonely. Sure, who isn’t.”

“She good looking.”

“I imagine so.”

“Why do you imagine?”

“I just do.”

“Find out for me.” He said.

“I will.”
"Either way."
I nodded.

“Shame she couldn’t get a cat.” He said. “I’d like to buy her a drink.”

“Yeah.” i agreed.

“I’d like that a lot.”

we’ve suddenly realized that our veins are full of gold

2011-09-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

                    1
    I wake up late. For work.
    I mean, I’m not gonna make it there in time. Or, if I get a highway miracle, I’ll make it there my the fucking slimmest skin of my teeth imaginable. I look at the clock, again from the bed, I look at my girl. She looks good.
    I’m getting old. I’m getting stupid. I get out of the bed. I get dressed. I find some money crumpled up in a pair of dirty pants. Got my keys. Got my wallet. Got my cellphone. Alright. I say goodbye to my girl. She looks god. She sounds good. She says, “Come back to bed.” I have to pry and kick her twisted claws off of me. All a joke, isn’t it? Go to Hell.

Out the door. Down the stairs and out down my stoop and onto the sidewalk. The trash cans have all been knocked over. A stray cat comes shooting past me down into the storm drain. It’s windy but it’s not gonna rain..

    It’s still dark. the street lights are on.
    I said I woke up late. I’m not saying I wake up LATE. I work for a living. The car is parallel parked just a couple blocks down. I make my way over there, realizing I am completely shot full of holes without a cup of coffee and nowhere open yet to stop and get a cup on the way over the bridge into New Jersey. No time anyway.
    When I get to my car, I have a surprise all over it.
    During the night somebody has vomited all over the hood. Pink. Explosive. A human digestive volcano. I stand there looking at it for a minute. I don’t even try to clean it off. It’s solid. It’s attached to the car like its part of the paint. I just get in my vehicle, turn the ignition on and turn the radio up, because like most Americans that is what I have been trained to do when I have a problem with my car. Turn the radio up and tune it out, even if it is silent.



       2

    I work all day and even some overtime. The place where I work is dangerous. Somebody had to get medi-vac’d out. Ambulances rolling through, buddy. Deadly, deadly. Double cross-bones. They made a big deal about it, rightly so, we all had to sit in safety meetings mid-day and they made us all put the Emergency number into our cellphones. It’s called the 600 number. All you have to do is go to a plant phone and dial 600 if you’re on the verge of dying and they will notify your wife so she can start planning the funeral immediately.
    We had to show the safety guys our phones. He had to write down in a little book that he had visually confirmed that we had the emergency number.

Then, after that, we had to go back and finish our motherfucking work. So by the time I punch out, again I am pressed right to the wire for time. I’m meeting Spout across the water, uptown. We’re going for dinner in the city. Where else would you expect us to go to dinner?

    There’s no traffic and I don’t really have it in my mind at all about the vomit on my car. I’m flying up the dark highway towards the bridge and I’ve got bigger things on my mind than the problem still sprayed all across my car.
    It’s Friday night. I have the concerns of Friday night on my mind.
    Not the small concerns of my stupid work. Or my little tiny car that is too new and too expensive for me because I don’t care at all about it. Not those problems attached with mailing out the bill money. Or how about that laughable thing, no food in the fridge! Fuck that. Friday night and my girl is in the prime of her life. She’s milling around her desk in midtown right now, checking the clock, looking out the window across the city, wondering how far off the bridge I am. Got to time these things just right.
    I swing around car after car. Weaving through traffic, not like an asshole, not like speed racer. Just like somebody who is sick as anybody can get with anything other than my girl and Friday night. Someone like that? It never takes them very long to find a parking spot. Even in the epicenter of a frantic maze about to explode on demand.

I need a shower. I need deodorant. I need to brush my teeth twice. I need to make sure I put on a clean shirt. I need to make sure I put on some pants that are only marginally dirty. A pair of socks that only been worn once or twice, please. I don’t need to shave, stubble, fine. I don’t own a comb. I need to fill myself up to the brim with old black coffee reheated in the microwave and I need to get on the subway ASAP if I am gonna meet her where I said I would when I said I would.

                                3.

    She is there. Waiting for me in the gardens.
    We walk together and pick a random restaurant. There are tables outside and it is a nice evening. Summer has dissolved. In the new cool of the evening, we watch the street, taxi cabs slowly making their rounds, people walking aimlessly. Dogs. Every dog in the world, out on the sidewalk, careless old men strolling behind. Young couples like us, looking, just looking, checking menus in windows. Talking. talking about nothing. Rumors. Great debaters passing along through this place that never fills with shadow, on their way to debate the fruits of Friday night.
    “Somebody puked on my car.” I say to her, just as she put her fork to her mouth.
    It’s thai food. It looks like puke. It tastes like puke. Anyway. Anyway. Puke with ginger, Ok.
    “Somebody puked on your car?” She repeated.
    “Yeah. can you believe it?”
    “Well, I kinda can.”
    “Not this again.”
    “Karma, Bud.I just wish that you would try to be nicer to people, every once in a while.”
    “Sure. Karma. Understood. I had this coming. A quiet Thursday night. I had puke coming all on the hood of my Audi.”
    Her line of defense, her easy line of defense should have been that an Audi is a douche bag car and it deserves to be puked on. Instead, she pointed out, some more of these boomerang principles attached to the common binding strings of the universe. Jesus, she sounds like a real shitty hippy when I write this down.I promise she’s not.
    She said, “I keep waiting for somebody to stab you.”
    “Waiting for somebody to stab me?”
    “I know you’d be fine.”
    “If I got stabbed?”
    “Yeah. You’re the kind of guy that could get stabbed a lot. You’re tough.”
    “I gotta buy you another beer immediately.” I said. Then I did.
    We sat there at that table for a little while and then we took our beers out onto the legitimate street even though you’re not supposed to do that kind of thing. I don’t think that makes us assholes for breaking that rule. It’s a fake rule.
    Now we were set up on a nice bench outside a coffee place, just sipping and talking. She was sitting Indian style facing me, playing with my dirty hair.
    There is something to be said of these moments, with the city like your favorite song, playing over and over again Not so loud, just off in the distance, but if you close your eyes and aim your head just right, you can catch it all broadcast off the building, bouncing off the taxis making their slow circles, projected through the pedestrians like funeral swans floating along the canals of this dream. Every once in a while, a car horn breaking up the chorus of this, your favorite song, but that’s OK. Like I said, it plays over and over again on a Friday night just like this with summer suddenly on the retreat and somebody got himself killed at work but it wasn’t me and the waitress is looking for us and we wave and she comes over to the bench from the outside seating area of her restaurant and tells us that we can’t sit there and drink and we say that we’re smoking and that she can bring us our bill and we tell her, go on back to your restaurant, we are let loose in the city and we’ve suddenly realized that our veins are full of gold.Just try to drag us back in there now. We say, bring us our check but we have to say it loud because our favorite song is growing in volume.

And that the moon is coming down closer and closer and soon it is going to crush something. We are out on the street, safe, sheltered in the valleys of indestructible New York City.

Spout and me are Friday night mid sentence, mid conversation when a kid walks up. Presents himself awkwardly to us. For a few seconds he mills around, shuffling his feet. We eye him up, waiting for it. Waiting for it. You know, the pitch. Odd. Not the normal, pitch man. He is an Indian kid. Maybe 19. 20? Dress clothes. The GAP. Button up shirt. Nice shoes. The real kicker is that he’s holding a big gift bag, overflowing with wrapped presents. You can see the ribbons shooting over the brim of the bag.

“Hi, I was just, uhh wondering, I wanted to ask you something...” He begins, eye contact a real issue.

“We aren’t undercover cops.” I said, “If that helps.”

“Uhhh.” He smiles. Then after a long pause he spits it out, “I’m trying to get a hold of my sister, but I don’t have a phone. She lives somewhere around here. I’m not sure. The address she gave me seems wrong.”

I don’t say anything. I just look right at him.

“I was wondering if I could use your phone?”

I dissect the scenario for a moment.

“Give me that big ass bag of presents.”

“What?” He looks shocked.

“They are for my sister, it’s her birthday.”

“Not to keep. To hold.”

“To hold?”

“So you don’t run away with my phone.”

“Oh my God, I would never do that.”

“Go ask somebody else.” I say.

He smiles and hands me the big bag of presents. It’s huge. I peak inside. Spout looks there too. It’s a bizarre scene.

“If I ran with your phone you would probably catch me.”

“Probably!” Spout says, “This guy here would definitely catch you. And it wouldn’t be fun.Please, run away with that broken shitty iphone.!”

Then, the kid makes his call, figures out where he has to go and everything is suddenly solved. He is going to momentarily be on his way to a PARTY! He hands me back my phone and I hand him back his presents. Then he does another odd thing, he introduces himself. He is not from around here at all, man. He doesn’t understand that the civil thing would have been to just thank me and disappear from our lives.

“Yeah, it’s her house warming/birthday party. She told me I could invite some of my friends...what are you guys up to after this?”

“Us?” I say, “Jesus.”

“You guys want to come to a party?”

“No.” I say, “That’s alright.”

“Oh, it seems like it will be a lot of fun.”

“I bet it will.”

Now, I’m trying to flag the waitress down. As if in some fantasy world she would bring us beers to this bench. Shipwrecked again. Looking down the barrel of a gun.

“It will.” he says.

Then he wants to know where we live. We’re vague. Then he wants to know how old we are. Then he starts asking us questions about the neighborhood. We have to pretend that we have some place to be. We fake get up and he says goodbye and walks don the block. After he disappears he we get two beers from the bar in the restaurant and because it’s early enough in the night that the bouncer isn’t there, we take our bottle out to our bench again and wouldn’t you believe it, not five minutes later here comes birthday present boy again and he’s laughing. “I JUST WALKED THE WRONG WAY! HA HA HA! OH MY GOD! This is so much more confusing than Rhode Island. Did I mention that, that I’m from Rhode Island. I want to go to school here. I like this neighborhood...you guys don’t know anything about how to find an apartment around here do you?”

Now I have to be out right rude to him to get him to leave, we would have never got rid of him. Ever. he would be sitting in my fucking living room right now if I hadn’t been vicious. On his way up the street, he said, “See you around the neighborhood.”

I sat back down. Spout and me were quiet. Fuck.

The whole evening was thrown off rhythm. It was gonna take a little bit for it to fix itself. It would fix itself. Temporarily, we were in a void.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, before he comes back.” I said.

Then, my phone started to ring. I looked at it. A number that I didn’t know. Not one of my contacts.

“Who is it?” She said.

“I think it’s the number that kid called.”

I sent it straight to voicemail.

We had to put some distance between us and the scene of the crime. We made our getaway. this time for real. Vanishing into the folds of the city that folded in and in and in and in.

    Things begin to blur into black but the city sings our favorite song to us from all the jukebox gutters. We are alive and will be this way until further notice.


                        4.

    The next thing is, suddenly, September 11th. We take my puke draped car across the bridge and down the turnpike.
    We are going to see a an old old Lowe’s movie theater in Jersey City that we want to try and rent out for our wedding. When we get there, the place is under renovation, but the owner has agreed to show it to us so we can make a decision. Strange street people volunteers mill around the place picking up construction debris. Me and my girl walk around, amazed at the insanity of the place.It is perfect. It seems haunted. Suspended in time.So much intricate wood work and plaster work that it just makes your eyes bleed. Chandeliers and walls and walls of mirrors reflecting back walls and walls of mirrors and you and the long long hallways that project down the sides of the place. Dark maroon carpet. Tile. Leather couches in a parlor room outside the bathrooms. The kind of place that has a pipe organ that comes out of the floor in front of the stage on a giant turn screw. Still good as the day it was installed. Hydraulic seals would have failed by now.Not classy in a conventional new money way. Beautiful in an art fucked, bomb just went off kind of way.
    It’s a very good option. Put a smiley face next to that one, girl.
    On our way out, we walk down the large staircase and into the lobby. The homeless people ripping up carpeting are frothing at the mouth. We make our way up towards the box office and just as we are about to cross out onto the street something happens.
    The air raid siren starts to go off.
    It goes off for like 30 seconds and one of the creepshow volunteers says, “I think it’s a test of the emergency broadcast system.”
    Fuck. The owner comes and stands with us there we all just hang there looking at people out on the street looking up in the general area where the air raid siren is coming from. Where is that? Heaven or Hell? The heart of the beast? The sky? The trash cans? Does it come out of the street lights? Is it amplified out of the giant golden arches? Save my life, point me in the direction of your bomb shelter. Your fallout shelter? Is it stocked with ample canned beef, carrots and peas? I am not gonna eat creamed corn. You can’t make me. Spout tugs my shirt sleeve. I give her my hand.
    The siren wails on and on. I’m not sure how long. My heart was in denial. If it wasn’t in denial, it would have been jumping up in my throat making me cough blood.
    Then, just as they had started, they just... stopped.
    Normal life.
    Cool.
    The tenth anniversary. Now get me back into New York City. Where I feel safe. The big fat target all lit up. Snipers on the roof.

Wait, first. I promised you breakfast...

I take my car to get washed on the way home. There’s a spot in the middle of the hood where a team of Spanish guys descend on the car. They are all armed with sponges. Hot water. Power washers. More power washers. More soap. More water. Then more of them coming out from behind the concrete block wall with hoses, washing. Scrubbing.

They are having a real hard time getting the puke off.

They gather around the grill, blasting the shit out of it. Then, backing off, discussing it.

Then blasting some more. I can see them out there, judging us, condemning us to an eternity in the lower regions of Hell.

Understoood.

Then, job well done. we are directed out the other side of the concrete garage where even more guys descend on the car. They are all armed with wonderful rags to sop up the evil water beads. Holy fuck! ALL THESE PEOPLE FOR FIVE BUCKS!

It was one step above slavery.

I tipped. I tipped.

I tipped again.
The sun wasn’t out, if it had been out. It would have been so dangerous for the other drivers on the highway as we made our way home. The reflection of the sun off my hood would have killed them all.

Home. We spread our things out. We had made a huge mess. It was Sunday. Sunday is a day to reign destruction in. So we set about cleaning up. The grocery delivery showed up. We put that away. I cooked us some lunch. We did laundry. We put the stereo on. Folded sheets. New pillow cases.

She called her sister in California and I worked out. After my workout, she was still on the phone and I decided to go for a walk around the block. Just because.

I did my loop around the park and past the basketball courts and when I got back up on my stoop, I rang the bell. Rang and rang and rang the bell. She wasn’t answering. Still on the phone or doing dishes, or in the shower. I hoped not the shower.

Then I took out my cellphone and was about to call Spout when I noticed my call list said this...

1 Unknown number (from the same city in which I work)

2 600 call

3 (516) XXX-XXXX... the NY number the kid had dialed

4 SPOUT

5 SPOUT

6 ECT.....

I looked down at my phone in fucking sickness... After the kid had called his New York City number looking for his sister’s birthday and handed me back my phone, I must have pocket dialed the 300 number. The emergency work number.

SHIT.

The unknown number, which came after my pocket dialed 600 call had been from the emergency response team in the town. They were trying to find out if there was another person who needed to be medi-va’d out of the fucking plant.

Great.

Ass dial.

Pocket dial.

I was going to have to deal with those blood sucking protocol idiots when i showed up in the morning. They were going to crucify me. I had accidentally dialed their sacred little fucking number. Surely got a bunch of panties in a bunch. Those people HATE being sent to voicemail.

Hi this is Bud Smith I can’t take your call right now because I’m knee deep in Friday night and breathing electric through all the pores of my body, fueling this city, myself, my country. my corp. never eat shredded wheat.

I called Spout. She buzzed me in. I sat down on the couch and she came out of the kitchen. Her arms were all wet with soap suds. She has been doing dishes. Bless her heart. I kissed her deep and we laid down on the couch like that even though it was too small a couch for the two of us.

The world was in slow motion at that moment, a strange thing for Sunday evening- which usually accelerates approaching the start of the work week, and all because I had decided suddenly that I was older and not s stupid and that it was a bad thing.

Fuck work.

I’m not going to sleep.

And neither are you, my dear.