storiesbybrian

[storiesbybrian]

Sam at Sea, Excerpt 1

“Real truth about it is... no one gets it right.” -Jason Molina

 Nah, Sam thought. He rubbed his eyes with cartoonish vigor, not so much jogging the optic nerve as clowning around for a figmentary audience. The overcast skies on a late Sunday afternoon, the truck stop in Delaware, the precipice of national importance, those were all real, even the last one, making this the worst possible moment to crack up, and thus, Sam being prone to honoring self-destructive impulses, the most possible moment too. Still monkeying with the windows to his soul, Sam wondered if they would have seen the same thing if Lori were sitting next to him instead of inside taking a whizz. But that was just another way of asking himself whether the figure that just darted across his rearview mirror had been real, or one more member of the phantom audience Sam was amusing with his slapstick eye-gouging. He grabbed the steering wheel and sighed, tasting the rental company cleaning product fumes, hearing the engine tick and the interstate gush. He needed Lori to get back in the truck so they could keep moving forward, to a newer, more meaningful life.

No way. Impossible.

Sometimes she grunted when she came. Never in great shape but obscenely flexible, Sally Decker had been invading Sam’s thoughts at least once a day for the past 10 years. It never felt unhealthy though, until he swore he just saw her flailing through a parking lot off the interstate while his somewhat yogically adept wife squatted in the travel plaza Ladies Room, probably taking great care to avoid tush to seat contact. And despite what the mirror said about the subjectivity of distance, Sam tried convincing himself that reality is objective. Wasn’t no wiggle room the whole point? Then again, nobody was looking. And he really didn’t need snags like this right now. Accountable only to himself, he could deny seeing anything strange, and keep plodding along to his new home in a new town for his new job, unencumbered by inconvenient images or x-rated memories. And the only one who could say otherwise was Sally, whose real name was Sonja.

The last time he saw her was about a year before he met Lori, in the town where he’d gone to college. The night before his old roommate’s wedding they went to the bar where older residents sought refuge from the shrieks and vomit emitted by drinkers in their 20s, but also to duck the consternation of the same kids who, ridiculous as they were, probably would not wind up as townies. At first Sam just noticed an attractive woman. It took him several seconds after she said “Hi” to realize that she assumed he recognized her. And her face was the same beneath the drastic change from long, brown hair to short and Raggedy Ann red. 

“Hi!” he said, failing to stanch the immediate flood of lewd memories. Fearing he’d already blown it, and not quite sure whether talking more or less would be helpful, he said, “Only in town through Sunday.”

Sally smiled back and took him by the hand to the parking lot. They pulled over once before they got to her place and, with denim skirt dangling from one ankle and panties from the other, Sally said, “It is amazing to see you again, Sambo.”

They continued their tryst at Sally’s house, whisking past a roommate watching tv from under a blanket on a couch but not before Sam noticed how gorgeous she was. And though Sam was mature enough to know the difference between epidermal sheen and fun in bed, Sally’s sagging and sprouting made the roommate glow more brightly to him. While he was waiting for another erection, he asked Sally about her. Sally sat on top of Sam and told him Missy’s story.

Missy got her looks from her mom Linda, who was a nurse at the same hospital as Sally.

Could’ve had anybody, Sally said. And still made the worst choices. At least Turtle was cute. Better than cute. If you remember the Hitchhiker, that softcore HBO show from the 80s, Turtle looked like him. Like a homeless Marlboro Man still in great shape. So they met in the ER. He’d been brought there from a motorcycle accident. Made the most noise when they had to cut his leather jacket up to get to where his ribs were jutting through his skin. Anyway Turtle tells Linda the accident wasn’t his fault and she believes him. They start seeing each other and after about a month, he starts borrowing money and not paying it back. So I told her to tell him to fuck off. And if that didn’t work, just cut off all contact. Maybe I thought if Linda couldn’t stand up for herself, then what hope was there for me? So I said it with a shitload of conviction and Linda, God bless her, she does it. Tells him not to call until he pays her back and moves on with her life. She even goes out on a date with another guy. I mean, I thought I had pointed Linda in the best direction she’d gone in years! Then Turtle shows up on Linda’s porch. She opens the door and he sticks the muzzle of a shotgun against her face and pulls the trigger. He just blew her head off.

Those were Sally’s exact words: He just blew her head off. And somehow the line coincided with Sam retumescing. Whether the violence excited him, or his excitement was indifferent to homicide, Sam couldn’t say. Either way, it convinced Sam that his amoural connection with Sally was amoral. And now, several years married, Sam realized that his adult level of relationship commitment had been guided more by decorum than physical affinity, and that he had allowed the unexamined belief that rawer behavior drove one closer to disaster shoo him over to safer, duller terrain. But that was wrong too, and not just overdramatically underdramatic. Because a new, unprecedentedly exciting chapter of his life was due to unfold about 100 miles south of this parking lot. He could feel its path ripple. Or maybe that was another trick he was playing on himself. For his own good, though. Right?

So yes. Whatever the fuck she was doing here, that really was Sally in his mirror. It was the saner explanation anyway. Let his carnal true north be in the same place as him for, presumably, the first time since the night before Robby’s wedding. Whatever was weird about that was certainly preferable to conjuring her to stymie his progress toward improvements so drastic they almost represented a rebirth! Admittedly he could be bad at accepting good things, but surely not to the extent of self-sabotage right when he was on such a verge. All he had to do was keep waiting for Lori, smile when she bounded back into the truck with excessive cheer to prove she didn’t mind using public restrooms, drive another 100 or so miles without saying anything stupid, christen the house and show up to work on the appointed day. The sudden appearance of the most torrid lover he had ever known was simply an obstacle to surmount. And Sam wasn’t waiting any longer for his new life to begin. Sally or not, he was living it now, and no hurdle was too high for the New Sam to clear!

Lori popped up on the driver’s side and pecked him on the cheek. 

“Move over bacon!”

Sam’s knuckles were still crowning the steering wheel. Lori climbed all the way into the cab and Sam loosened his grip and applied it gently to her, goading himself to ignore her clammy, undried hands. He tried to hold her on his lap but there wasn’t room so he scooted over and she took the wheel.

“OK,” she said. “I know we’re only a few hours from our big, beautiful new house, but I was wondering…”

“Yes!” Sam said.

“Ha, nice try. No, I wanted to know if we could eat dinner at the buffet they have inside.”

Seconds earlier, Sam thought he was being tailed by a woman whose best friend suffered ballistic decapitation. Now he was bound to someone whose idea of risky behavior was impulsively unhealthy dining. Two women, occupying the same space, intimate with the same man, oceans between their proximities to disaster. Lori gunned the engine and Sam wondered where his own trajectory might falter, crash, implode, explode, burn, freeze or drown, all in vivid, plausible enough detail to make the 50 yard trip across the parking lot the most harrowing ride he had ever taken.

Although. Sam could never lean too hard into distress without remembering his cousin Patty. Captain Patricia Fields deployed to Iraq when she was 23, serving two tours before her honorable discharge after an insurgent attack on the supply convoy she was escorting. In the ensuing firefight, Patty’s bravery and decisiveness were credited with saving a private security executive, along with 8 of the 10 vehicles in the convoy, locating and neutralizing the sniper who opened fire after the lead vehicle got IEDed, but not before he shot her left arm below the elbow. By the time of Patty’s arrival at Brooke Army Medical Center in late 2007, she was as well-known as any surviving veteran of either war the US was prosecuting at the time.

Sam carried gnarled fried chicken, powdered mashed potatoes and wilted salads littered with carrot shreds back to a seat at the counter. Lori tonged two pieces of something labeled broiled cod that looked neither broiled nor aquatic onto her scarred plastic plate. Sam surveyed the other diners and travelers, bloated, anonymous members of the American public he was about to begin serving, fellow citizens on their own odysseys carting children, unstamped cigarettes, livestock and nuclear waste in various directions along the 48,181 miles of the American Interstate Highway System to a soundtrack of music he’d probably hate, podcasts that made their listeners insufferable, or audiobooks read by sitcom actors eager to branch out from their signature roles. Sam wondered if his middling career thus far had anything to do with how easily he satirized his surroundings. And by wondering, he meant that he cut himself enough slack to pretend he was less guilty than he absolutely knew he absolutely was. Perhaps this was one more thing the New Sam should abandon before they got to Maryland. And by perhaps…

He caught Lori watching him with a fond, maternal expression and he played up to it, boyishly savoring the dregs from his second bowl of butterscotch pudding. Self-satire was still ok, right?

In the parking lot, they held hands and looked at the darkening sky. Vehicles coughed and rumbled around them. Sam felt like he should say something meaningful. Lori and he both knew their material upgrade was a product of nepotism. And Sam knew that Lori was fine with that. He wanted her to believe that it bothered him immensely, but if that were true, wouldn’t he have refused Patty’s job offer and stuck around New York until he found a direction and followed it? He lowered his gaze from the sky to the other people in the parking lot, noting that none of them were Sally, who didn’t have the family connections that Sam did, and finally faced his wife.

“Do you know what they call prostitution on cb’s?” he asked.

“What?”

“Like when truckers are going hundreds of miles and keeping each other company on the radio, you know they’ll use code to offer black market stimulants and shit, right? So sometimes a hooker’ll go on and say, ‘If any of you gentlemen of the road might be interested in a little commercial beaver, it’s available by appointment at the Flying J off Route 9.’”

“They do not!”

Sam nodded sincerely, even as he realized he was trying to sound street smart to compensate for how insecure he was feeling around so many people who seemed tougher and more serious than him. Lori nestled closer and he wondered whether she was impressed with his trivia or saw that he was distressed. He wasn’t even sure which he preferred. Lori must have her own set of worries, he thought, even if they don’t involve potential stalking by former paramours. But she seemed happy at the moment, and Sam didn’t want to spoil that by inviting her to step in the shit piling up within him. He couldn’t help chuckling as he realized that the whole ‘good fences make good neighbors’ thing applied to marriages too, that intimacy and transparency were hardly the same thing.

His friend Beeswax liked to remind him that nobody cared about his honkey-ass anxieties.

“Well what if they’re relatable?” Sam asked.

“Relatable and excusable aren’t the same thing,” Beeswax, whose given name was Ramesh Karra, said. Sam conceded the point, but still felt certain that his privilege didn’t protect him from injustice. What about all the micropunishments he incurred at moments when certainty was expected and Sam remained confused, or pressured into making poor decisions? It’s not that he expected pity for every petty indignity or real physical trauma he sustained, but he was in constant search of ways to show his bruises without seeming pathetic. Whether to coax more empathy out of everyone or merely to engender greater sympathy for himself, Sam really couldn’t say. Maybe he’d have a clearer sense after he’d been at his new job for a few weeks.

“OK one more,” he said.

“Let’s hear it,” she said as they climbed back into the truck.

“I-95 connected to the Del Mem Bridge in November, 1963. JFK cut the ribbon.”

“OK,” she said. “That’s pretty good. Wow. Can you imagine him standing up there, talking a mile a minute, scanning the crowd for starlets?”

“Totally unaware that that was the last pair of giant scissors he’d ever wield?”

“I can’t believe we’re making fun of this,” Lori said as she connected her phone to the dashboard USB jack and started the truck.

“Well,” Sam said. “As far as I’m concerned, the only thing sacred between us is us.”

Lori looked at Sam very seriously. For a second he worried that he’d said the wrong thing. Should he have been more reverent of the 35th president’s unwitting final days? Sam was no conspiracy nut, but he did believe in the existence of shadowy forces more powerful than the most powerful person in the world. 

“Sam?” Lori said. “Um. So while I was in the restroom? I uh, I… Well I peed on this.”

She pulled a pregnancy test from her hoodie pocket and showed Sam the plus sign. Before Sam could respond, she put the truck in Drive and tapped back into the southbound vein of I-95.

Sam felt suddenly tired, and the energy he tried to summon to mask or overcome his fatigue only compounded it. So he threw as many declarations of delight and enthusiasm as he could at Lori until he felt free to doze off without spoiling one of life’s Big Moments.

“Can I kiss you while you’re driving?”

“I love you so much!” 

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh man, this is so wonderful!”

“Is there anything you’d like right now, honey? You name it!”

At Lori’s first sign of retreat from Sam’s assault of support, he caressed her shoulder, leaned back and closed his eyes, feeling the dashboard LED glow on his face. Lori played a female-centric playlist that she never shuffled and Sam fell asleep before Chrissie Hynde finished singing the first song. His dreams were vivid and memorable until he was awakened, severing all access to the complex narrative his unfettered mind had crafted, as though a portal to a parallel dimension had been sealed and hidden, as though consciousness was wet cement.

“Sam,” Lori said, nudging his shoulder. “We’re here.”

Bethesda.

Since the 40th President of the United States’ budget director ratified the 34th President of the United States’ “Circular A-76,” a volcano of money began erupting in Washington, D.C. with mundane regularity and extinction-level violence. This private bonanza at the public teat increased the average home price in 8 different zip codes in Northern Virginia by more than 3000%. Sam was coming to the nation’s capital to improve his circumstances too, but not by selling pieces of the country to private interests over meat raised with greater care than some of its consumer’s constituents. He was relocating from New York City to a middle-class Maryland suburb named in 1871 for a church built in 1820. And his job would be such a vertiginous promotion that he would need to feign expertise he lacked the experience (and possibly talent) to possess, and his salary was earmarked by the federal budget. So OK, maybe he was defrauding the American public too, but only a little.

Professional commitment and advancement were foreign concepts to Sam. Like the little pig too frivolous to build shelter sturdy enough to resist lupine panting, he’d spent his 20s goofing off, bouncing from one short term gig to the next, accumulating picaresque experience that felt equally split between genuine life lessons and learning how to fake wisdom. His older sister Sheila and younger brother Jerry both got better grades than Sam in school, and now that he had finally outgrown scoffing at their slavish respect for authority, he wished he had the humility to accept help from the various gatekeepers of prosperity that he reflexively spurned. Even if Sheila hadn’t married a doctor, her career as a distressed credit analyst would have won her more financial security at 25 than Sam thought he’d ever attain. And Jerry’s amenability to grooming by experienced investment bankers had allowed him to attend Super Bowls, World Cups and Oktoberfests while Sam sweated the price of an airline ticket home for Thanksgiving. He didn’t begrudge his siblings their comfort and success so much as he lamented his own inability to navigate the adult professional world. That he was a very good musician did not amount to much of an excuse. The flimsy-shacked pigs could play too.

His aimlessness changed when he met Lori. Neither of them would call it love at first sight, but somehow, after one conversation, all further courtship was just a formality. And now in five days, Samuel Fields would commence his duties as the Deputy Director of the Federal Monuments Commission, a new agency extrapolating from the Antiquities Act of 1906, and its more enforceable sequel, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. The FMC’s charter, as authored by Sam with minimal edits from his superiors within the organization, would harness the spirit of rebellion inherent in the American artistic community, synthesizing well-trained creative energy with the larger public desire to form a more perfect union. The FMC’s joyous albeit serious mission is to infuse this land with a patriotism that is ever more vivid for its inclusivity. The Commission’s executive director would report to a Board of Directors that included high-ranking officials at the Department of Interior and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the spouse of one multi-term senator.

There were two primordial figures in the creation of the Federal Monuments Commission. Three, according to Sam. The agency’s founder was Captain Patricia Fields. Sam had classmates at various stages of his education who were admirable enough to prompt the ol’ “that kid’s gonna be president someday.” Everyone who ever met Cousin Patty said that about her. She was brilliant, charming, somehow attractive despite being homely, and when Sam was 9, she kicked him so hard when no one was looking that he fell out of his cowboy boots. She loomed over him with no malice on her face and reached out a hand to help him up.

“I just feel like you don’t cry enough Sambo,” she’d said. “Are you ok?”

And even then, despite the shock and pain, Sam felt enthralled to honor Patty’s dare to be a good sport about the hard knock from out of nowhere. He searched Sheila, Jerry and their other cousins for signs of similar treatment and even though he didn’t see any, he suspected they were all just good at hiding it. And he knew for certain that if he brought it up to anyone, they would tell Patty about it as quickly as they could, maybe especially if she’d done it to them too. His suspicions about Patty and those in her orbit extended to when she first enlisted. While everyone else celebrated her principled patriotism, Sam thought she was just putting one foot in front of another along a very specific, power-accumulating path.

[Patty’s heroism]

Posing for photos at Brooke Medical Center with the CEO of the biotech company that developed her new hand and forearm, she was recruited by both major political parties to run for office. Captain Fields eschewed the urgings of nationally syndicated program hosts as publicly as she could, “not because there’s no nobility in seeking and holding office, but because pleasing everybody in America is more appealing to me than pleasing half. And since I’m a triple threat in that I can neither act nor sing nor dance, my civic and organizational skills will have to do.”

Sam was amazed that more internet sleuths didn’t publicize the public record of Patty making the exact same statement, including the lame Singin’ in the Rain joke, across multiple forums.

The second indispensable person in executing Patty’s vision was 9-term Congressman Gilbert Pfaff of New Jersey’s 11th District. Gil wore bow ties and a matching mustache. He had come to Washington from a successful career in banking, ready to “give back” in ways that never amounted to a penny’s reduction in his district’s nation-high property taxes and thus earned the nickname “Robin Estates” as he seemed to take from the rich and give to the richer. Never a prominent supporter of military issues nor cozy with the Department of the Interior as some of his industrialist constituents lobbied for pollution schemes that even the notoriously permissive DoI blanched at, Congressman Pfaff seemed an unlikely rabbi for Captain Fields’s initiative. But Congressman Pfaff’s daughter Lorenza was married to Captain Fields’s cousin Sam.

And per Sam, the third person Patty had needed to found the organization that would offer him such blurring advancement was the Iraqi sniper who had shot her right arm off below the elbow.

 Sam and Lori had driven a truck loaded with the belongings they were keeping from their life in New York. New dishes, flatware, socket and lightswitch plates, bedding, a bed, sofa and loveseat purchased by Lori’s parents had already been delivered. Sam had smiled and accepted these gifts with as much gratitude as he could muster, but he felt humiliated by the charity.

“Just thank me by having children who wreck the whole damn house,” his father-in-law had said.

Sam put a hand on the congressman’s shoulder and nodded almost solemnly, hoping to seem sincere without betraying how ridiculous he thought such exhortations were. Furniture for grandkids? Whatever you say, sir.

Lori nosed the truck into the circular driveway and parked by the front door. She sat behind the wheel expectantly until Sam finally roused himself enough to understand why she was waiting. He hopped out of the cab and ran around to the driver’s side, unsure whether she should leap from her seat into his outstretched arms, or if he could lead her down by the hand before scooping her up for the threshold crossing. Lori sensed his confusion and saw herself out of the truck, seeming more irked than Sam thought she should be, but there wasn’t enough time to salvage the moment by adjusting her expectations. He shrugged, smiled and swept her off her feet.

“Shit wait,” he said, putting her down and digging the front door key out of his pants pocket. “OK ready.”

Lori’s enthusiasm waned further. Sam tried to think of a way to revive it, knowing there had been many moments over the years when the right thing to do or say felt so apparent but, for whatever reason, this was a different, stupider moment where he felt himself sucked into a tiny vortex of exacerbation, leading the mood in front of the new house steeply downward. Standing there holding his pregnant wife and readying himself to ascend the doorstep, even the house seemed to say, “I know I have to let you in me, but I cannot believe you’re fumbling such a simple, important thing here.” He knew it had something to do with Sally, whose hollering and thrashing suddenly dominated his thoughts so egregiously that he pictured her kicking through black-shuttered windows glaring at him from both sides of his new front door. All he could think of was to disguise his mental malfunctions as horniness for his wife. He quickened his pace and hurriedly unlocked the deadbolt above the knob. As soon as they were inside he looked for somewhere soft to throw Lori down and jump her.

“Oh!” she said.

The loveseat was in the room to the right off the entryway. It was covered in plastic. Sam wanted to take it off first but he was too committed to the act of needing Lori immediately so he plopped her on the new furniture, ostensibly undeterred by the loud crinkling. She looked up at him and smiled. He ran back to close the front door. Returning to his prone wife, he saw something rigid in her face and sensed she was more excited about the “wildness” of what they were doing than the actual genital contact that was due to begin as soon as the needed parts were unveiled. Sam shifted from crouching over Lori to sitting on the floor beside her.

“What happened?” she asked.

Sam shook his head.

“Hey,” Lori said, and Sam thought, if she really wants me, she’ll get off the couch and straddle me here on the floor. She sat up on the loveseat and Sam thought maybe he shouldn’t apply such absolute interpretations to everything. He took Lori’s hand and kissed it.

“Was it the plastic?” Lori asked.

It wasn’t, but Sam nodded.

“Come on,” Lori said, leading Sam by the hand. “Let’s try the kitchen!”

 In New York they’d lived in a 600 square foot one bedroom apartment. Their new house had two stories, four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms, financed by a mortgage enabled by Sam’s new job plus a stock transfer from Lori’s dad. As they walked out of the closing with keys in hand, Lori wanted to name the house. Sam suggested calling it Cornelius. Lori thought that was stupid and when Sam explained that they were near Chevy Chase, Maryland and Chevy Chase the comedian’s real name was Cornelius Crane, she thought it was even stupider. Sam waited for her to voice her own idea but she just stood there with her hands on her hips looking perturbed and gorgeous so Sam said, “Alright, what about Gregory?”

“As in Doctor House?” she’d asked. “No too obvious.”

But still no counter-suggestion. Sam wondered if he was supposed to come up with some sort of anglophilic country estate name like Brideshead or Baskerville, because if she had something that pretentious in mind, even ironically, he was going to boycott the whole matter. Lori could see her husband starting to take his ball and go home.

“Alright,” she said. “What about Chez Lounge?”

“Pas mal!” Sam said, though he had already made up his mind.

In the absence of carpeting and window treatments, echoes pervaded Cornelius and Lori’s footsteps seemed to boom as she marched from the living room to the kitchen for house-christening duties. Their dishes and cookware were all wrapped in paper and Sam was too unsure whether something was porcelain or copper to sweep it clear to lay Lori on the counter. They began undressing in the dark. Sam flipped a switch and the overhead lighting felt brighter than a klieg.

“No!” Lori said.

He turned it off and tried the neighboring dial. Track lighting flared along the blonde wood cabinetry and he dimmed it a bit. They met naked between the island counter and the oven and copulated on the floor.

“Sam,” Lori said. “Don’t be so gentle.”

Even mid-coitus, Sam noted that Lori was taking extra care to be tactful, referring obliquely to the baby so she wouldn’t bring unwelcome images into their lovemaking. Sam appreciated this, even the intimacy of Lori’s recognition that he was the fragile one. It made him more fervent. But he also wondered how abnormal it was to have thoughts like this during what should have been some of the more thrilling and consuming sex they’d had in weeks, if not months. He never got so self-conscious with Sally, nor usually with Lori. He tried to thrust his way out of his head. Lori seemed to approve, which he understood but also made him feel more disconnected from her, which he thought might help him last longer. But Lori drew her knees back and dug her heels into the middle of Sam’s back and it was so sexy that he didn’t last another 20 seconds. He pressed his face into the nape of Lori’s neck and groaned loudly. At a moment supposedly designated for brainless, unbridled passion, there was agenda in his groan. A streetlamp at the edge of their property sent light through their undressed kitchen windows, coating them palely in the eerie quiet of their new house. Devices loomed nearby, holding unanswered messages that suddenly commanded Sam’s attention. But he couldn’t just hop up abruptly and say something like “Well, lots to do!” He could only signal the finality of his sexual utility by making the kind of noise that told his wife she had overwhelmed him with pleasure, and that no, of course not, he wasn’t feeling any embarrassment whatsoever. He felt like he owed Lori several apologies- for intimate deceit, for thinking so much at a moment when people were supposed to be at their most bestial, but mainly for his sudden unavailability just when she was becoming more aroused. Or maybe he could just apply a mouth or a hand where his penis was no longer helpful. Lori caressed him and kissed his shoulder, and Sam couldn’t help thinking this was a graceful demonstration of sublimated disappointment that most women developed by the time they were 20.

“I love you,” Sam said.

“You too Sambo,” Lori said. “And now I gotta go christen the bathroom.”

“Pretty sure I paid the plumbing bill,” Sam said as he rolled off of his wife.

They disengaged, relieved themselves of bladder pressure and estrangement from their devices, slit open the BEDDING box, made their bed and got into it. Lori sat up reading a book. Sam closed his eyes and relaxed unto slumber, convinced he had physically swindled and subtly gaslit his pregnant wife, secretly hoping she was sharp enough to catch him, and merciful enough to love him anyway.

 The next morning Sam threw himself into unpacking, wondering if Lori would recognize it as the cliched metaphor for sexual shame that it was. He hauled all the packed boxes into one room so he could roll out rugs so he could move large pieces of furniture into their floorplan-appointed spots so he could bring the boxes back in and begin unpacking them. Help had been offered and Sam had demurred. As a kid he had been exceptionally lazy, composing baroque excuses to seem like he really wanted to perform the physical labor he was shirking. In junior high, he faked an illness to get out of running a mile in gym, realizing by the end of that day that the shame and regret he’d brought on himself would plague him far more acutely than a few minutes of discomfort on the track. Rather than address such unhealthy decision-making in a wise and salutary way, he fled from his wimpiness by fetishizing strenuous activity. But as long as the work got done, he wasn’t going to let neuroses derail his momentum. He had never discussed this with Lori, nor anyone else, and assumed that she assumed he had always been vigorous and hard-working. As he heaved the boxes around, he pictured Lori watching him lustily, thinking something like, “Ooh that man o’ mine!” But he had learned not to invest too deeply in remote admiration fantasies because then when it turned out that Lori was on her phone thinking “Ooh that text o’ mine!” instead, he wouldn’t be too upset by her insufficient appreciation of his efforts. And anyway, the New Sam didn’t need incentives to work hard. The New Sam lived capital-adjacent, ever ready to deploy his immense strengths to accomplish whatever task was at hand, completely undaunted by the effort required. The New Sam unloaded half a box of family photographs and took a break.

And there sat the father-to-be, spent despite an evening of sexual underperformance, due in four business days to begin instilling the third most populous nation on earth with a sense of civic pride that had been under decades-long assault by cynicism, obtuse irony, and no small amount of reckoning with domestic atrocity, overwhelmed by the tedium of unpacking, sinking into his sofa, now unsheathed from its plastic covering. Seduced by cushioning, he vowed to plunge into this nap as Old Sam and arise anew, ready to keep working until the entire room was unpacked.

He didn’t know how long he’d been sleeping when something metal prodded at his temple. His first thought was that Lori was angrier with him than she’d ever been, and that getting more rest than a pregnant spouse was a terrible idea and that he really should have at least gone down on his wife when she got back from the bathroom last night. But no that would be gross. But so what? The portal through which his child was implanted to emerge at a later date should be immune to petit bourgeois hygiene concerns and for all the pain that area was due to experience, the least he could do was make it feel as good as he possibly could.

“Sambo!” said a voice, shoving him flailingly through the morass of exaggerated self-recrimination, and he realized that Lori wasn’t mad at him at all, and if it had been her waking him up, the prodding would have been gentle, in the shoulder, and by a human hand. Sam awoke to see the steel claw, inches from his eye, connected to the elbow of his father’s brother’s oldest child, Captain Patricia Fields, in full dress uniform.

“Hey,” he said.

“Come on,” Patty said. “We’ve got a lot to discuss over lunch.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “Now’s not such a good-”

Patty stuck two metal fingers into her mouth and whistled. Four young men in grey jumpsuits marched through the open front door.

“Interns baby!” she said. “They studied Lori’s floor plan all weekend. They’ll unload the truck and return it if you want ‘em to. Right fellas?”

“Right!” they said in unison.

“Welcome to Washington,” Patty said. “Now don the proper attire and let’s eat. Lori care to join?”

Lori stuck her head into the room and nodded to Patty. Something about the exchange made Sam feel like he was being babysat. 

Over three steaks and two martinis, Patty couldn’t stop grinning at Sam and Lori. Sam wanted to appreciate Patty’s keeping quiet about the joyous implication, but he knew she was just leveraging her discretion to win over whatever part of her cousin still wasn’t devoted to serving her. And Sam knew that Patty respected his transactional analysis of what was happening at the table. 

“Alright Sambo,” Patty said. “Let’s run down what you’ve got so far.”

Sam was caught off guard, but knew immediately that he shouldn’t stumble over such a reasonable question.

“Well,” he said. “I’ve spoken with Kelly, the office manager. She’s got stationary on order. And uh…”

“Any raw material bids?”

“I thought sourcing was Nelson’s job.”

“And he’s gotten a few. Just asking if you A) took the initiative to get any of your own because I know you dealt with sculptors in New York? And B) have touched base with Nelson. There’s no buck-passing on this team, Sam.”

Sam scowled at his cousin while drumming on the table.

Patty smirked forebearingly and said, “The French have a saying-”

“Oh do they now?” Sam said, drumming more forcefully.

“Well,” Patty said. “Ironically, the saying is ‘To lead is to anticipate.’”

“OK?”

Patty paused, giving Sam a chance to recognize he was blowing this rare opportunity to get free management lessons from one of the world’s great leaders. Sam knew that what Patty was saying was right, and that he did need to gain more mastery over how well and fast he could help the Federal Monuments Commission sail. But he also clung to the idea that he was too new at this to deserve a lecture. Sam always suspected that Patty spoke more freely with other people than she did with him, which sent him rummaging through a daunting jumble of insecurities, trying to pick the right ones to address so that Patty might trust him more. So now her anticipation of one particular set of shortcomings, her completely justified desire to address Sam’s potential fuck-ups before they did real damage to the entire project, got garbled by Sam’s emotional static, which crackled more violently from Patty’s implication that he was already stacking up unfavorably to his co-Deputy Director, Nelson Vaquero. Everybody loved Nelson. Patty probably felt completely at ease confiding in Nelson. So he countered Patty’s pause with insolence.

“Alright, look,” his cousin said, as though the previous exchange had never occurred. “The earmarks that Gil got for us seem like good politics for everybody right now. But if we go over budget or seem amateurish in any way, that funding gets endangered. So PTF, Protect The Funding, has to be one of your guiding principles. OK Sambo?”

Sam knew the wise choice would be to nod agreeably to Patty’s orders, and maybe it was the martini but mostly how slowly Patty had spoken to him.

“Jesus Patty, can you just shut the fuck up for two seconds?”

Patty stilled herself and looked at Sam.

“Oh so now I’m getting the thousand yard stare?”

Patty looked to Lori, who seemed more embarrassed than Sam would have preferred.

“I just… look. I know I’ve never had a job with this much responsibility before. But just because I haven’t called the Iron Smelters of America or whoever doesn’t mean I don’t have some semblance of a clue what I’m doing. So I’d appreciate if you could dial back the condescension just a smidge. OK Patricia?”

“Sure,” Patty said. “Sounds good.”

Several tensions loomed over the table and each person silently but emphatically delegated the responsibility to resolve them to the other two.

Finally, recognizing that he had contributed the most negativity, Sam conceded the game of Awkwardness Chicken and said, “This steak is-”

“Sam does have his pride,” Lori said. Patty nodded appreciatively and Sam wondered whether she was even aware that she was exposing a preference for gaining an ally against him in this moment over getting the agency off on the right foot. Or maybe that was too Sam-centric to be plausible, particularly when he couldn’t imagine Patty spending much time worrying about his petty, ongoing rebellion against her ultimate authority. Purple Heart veteran Nelson Vaquero certainly had no problem playing the good soldier.

“Anyway,” Patty said. “Since we can’t enter the office until after the ceremony, I’ve set up a base at my apartment. If you could come over later tonight, I really would like to get things moving.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “Sounds good.”

Lori nodded and smiled at both of them as she beckoned their waiter and asked for a dessert menu.

On Tuesday, Lori kissed Sam goodbye and drove off to begin her new job as a literacy specialist at Amidon-Bowen Elementary School. Alone, Sam felt like all the newness he kept trying to generate was getting old. Cornelius was still littered with unfinished touches that Lori cared about, while Sam really didn’t. Stray wires dangling from walls, art propping against furniture and dirty windows all sheltered them just as comfortably as a more manicured domicile would. He had heard that pregnant women develop a nesting instinct that compels them to prepare the home for the new arrival. But that thought alone, or the shameful one under it that sounded something like, relax, Lori’s hormones’ll take care of all this, sent him fleeing toward productivity. He got right to work before the erotic surge of unaccustomed solitude sent his hand inexorably dickward. 

When he was finished hanging paintings and fastening outlet plates, he took a snack break. He’d always appreciated the knobs on the toaster he and Lori had in New York, ribbed for tactile purchase with one slight but unmistakable alpha-ridge set to point toward whatever mode of cooking the operator desired. Sam found comfort in using a little mohawk to set a dial rather than massive dorsal fins. It felt like a vote of confidence from a major industrial corporation, a subtle but wide-reaching avowal of assurance that the average consumer needs very little guidance to toast bread correctly. But the Korean toaster Lori had insisted on getting for Cornelius had obscure controls that felt imposing and judgemental. Even the machine’s door taunted him, with its teflon latch affixed to the same side as its polymer hinges, and a digital command screen that signalled contempt for the simpletons who preferred setting their appliances to programming them. Maybe untoasted bread triggered Sam’s xenophobia, but he could swear this manufacturer was hostile to his intuition.

“Fuck you,” Sam said, and took his frozen bagel to the oven.

Lori had the nicest oven of any girl he’d dated. Was it really that simple? Sam had tried shifting into a lot of different shapes to accommodate his assessment of a wide array of female desire. Deludedly, he believed his intuition was illuminating obscurities people preferred to keep hidden when he was really just making shit up about people. Cornelius housed the third oven he’d shared with Lori. The first was the one she came with. Sam thought he was drawn to everything that her well-furnished, tidily organized apartment represented about her. But maybe that one piece of industrial equipment kneaded him into shape. Because Sam (unwittingly) believed (incorrectly) everybody else was constant and he was the wild card, that his calibrations determined everything. He just got them wrong a lot. But a girl like that with an oven like that? He just had to adjust the dials precisely, to be “himself” whatever that was, while also, contradictorally, convincing her he wasn’t professionally stagnant, while also assuring her he had the capacity to tolerate, nay embrace, her flaws, while also being utterly unapologetic about how often and how badly he wanted to fuck Lori Pfaff. Did he pull it all off in response to a 36” Viking with a six-burner rangetop, the coziest post-modern hearth he’d ever found? Sally wasn’t the only sexual partner he preferred to his wife. Drunken hook-ups, casual affairs that lasted a few weeks, assignations arranged over the internet. A few occurred in pretty nice apartments, but none of his other partners inhabited their homes like Lori did. Something about the way she respected the art on the walls while never grabbing a towel before fucking on whatever piece of furniture was nearest. Sally’s oven had plastic white dials and handle, the window stippled with some kind of heat-resistant decal. Did people who used Vikings, Wolfs and Jenn-Airs know anybody who got their head blown off? Maybe men who provided safety and shelter didn’t speculate on the relationship between their security and their mates’ appliances. Or nobody got serious about anyone whose kitchen was flimsier than their moms’. Either way, Sam thought he didn’t care about privilege. But he most certainly did.

Sam’s most serious pre-Lori relationship, the one with the most prolonged intimacy, girded by the most formal aspects, had been with Maya. She was 31, recently divorced, and Sam was 25. Said she’d rushed into it with David because she just really wanted to be married. She and Sam would go for walks in the park on Saturdays and they’d run into some of Maya’s friends who already had children. When they tumbled off the edges of the parents’ picnic blanket and agreed to carry a bagful of diapers to the nearest public trash can, Maya would turn to him and say, “We’re never naming our children after biblical prophets!” Then she would watch him keenly to see if he was alarmed by her declaration. And the whole notion of setting up their own blanket and crumpling and uncrumpling all that foil while they hailed childless couples strolling across the Great Lawn, of wanting to let the little napkins dance away on the breeze and never return, but getting up to chase them to avoid the scorn of others, all of it horrified Sam, but not as much as alienating Maya. So he took her hand and nodded in agreement as they walked by mimes and rollerbladers and softball games and ice cream stands and slump-shouldered ex-cons selling cold beer out of garbage bags, hoping the difference between offering assurance and making promises would manifest itself before it was too late, knowing that it wouldn’t, but denying it to keep getting laid. But how was he so sure he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with Maya? He loved her. He did. Surely it wasn’t as simple as where the chicken got roasted. Of course it wasn’t. So why did Sam allow their relationship to end? The easiest thing to say was that he wasn’t ready. Some 25 year-olds are, but Sam wasn’t. But he wasn’t ready for Lori either. 

And now they were bringing a child into this cold, indifferent world. And in 15 years, biblical name or not, that baby could become a sexually depraved drug abuser who brought home bad grades. Or worse. Sam imagined more puritanical times, when the raw holes blown through society’s hypocrisies weren’t so accessible, when it was a very special occasion for a teenager to get drunk, instead of a matter of course that happened with competitive frequency. Sam’s own generation had seized all of the tools at their disposal and forced the authority around them to loosen up and let them have their fun. Parents afraid of alienating their kids, parishioners afraid of losing their flocks, coaches afraid of losing the big game, teachers afraid of seeing all of ‘em back next year, kids smelled this fear and exploited it mercilessly, scooping out cavernous tunnels of freedom, leveraging their value to have more fun, more sex, more beer, less discipline, less education, less honor. Less talk, more rock. And so, while Lori might feel surest of Sam’s love for her when she paid him more attention, all their child would have to do is breathe. And Sam understood again that boundaries needed to be enforced, and that a large part of his relationship with his children was going to be adversarial. 

What were Sally’s parents like? All Sam knew was that they’d named her Sonja and that she thought that was too European, though Sam was pretty sure she was fleeing something more specific than a continent. And again he wondered how everyone’s personal mixture of presence and evasion was composed. Sally was “there” for Linda, but couldn’t protect her. Sally was certainly there for Sam. Even while lolling on Cornelius’s luxurious couch, he felt Sally undulating with him, encasing him, giving, taking, licking, screaming. That was love too. And yet Sam slipped away with minimal fuss. How many other men had dallied so passionately with Sally, only to move on down the road to sturdier furniture and fancier appliances, which for all their solidity were just gossamer curtains raggedly shrouding the real object of desire: wealth? 

Sam took his bagel out of the oven and smeared cream cheese on each half. As he wielded the expensive paring knife that would slice the tomato he would drape over his shmear, he acknowledged how other men went out and built their own shelter instead of seeking it from a mate. And while Sam was busy inaccurately evaluating everyone else’s childhood trauma, the anemic development of his inner hunter/gatherer never got much attention, Sam intuiting that dipping so much as a toe in that stream would probably leave him drenched in shame. And by probably… 

Two days later, the Federal Monument Commission launched under pristine skies. Sam sat on the dais in a new blue suit next to Nelson Vaquero in his dress uniform. Nelson wore sunglasses and Sam wanted to believe he was napping behind them, but he was probably listening intently and supportively to everyone’s speech. Sam tried hard to look like the serious type of person who belonged up there, even though he was too busy errantly imagining what the various speakers were thinking to listen to what they said. Gil and his across-the-aisle co-sponsor gripped the podium, fulfilling the American obligation to refer to each other as “my friend.” Patty got a standing ovation before word one. Lori sat in the front row next to Patty’s mother Mimi and nearly made it through the whole ceremony without checking her phone. Before the audience arrived, the white folding chairs reminded Sam of a cemetery. While several veterans were in attendance, he doubted the chairs held anyone as closely associated with civilian gun violence as the woman who still played such a large role in Sam’s cosmology. And since her sudden, strange appearance in his rearview mirror, Sam vaguely expected Sally to crash this ceremony. He kept trying to scan the crowd more carefully, in case his gaze accidentally swept right by her, like it had initially in that townie bar. When he finally agreed with himself that she wasn’t there, he still wasn’t sure which sense took precedence- relief or disappointment.

After the ceremony Gil and his second wife Brenda took Sam, Sam’s parents and brother and sister out to lunch. Sam always appreciated how kind Lori’s father and stepmother had been to his parents. Later that day, Gil would be giving Sam’s family a personal tour of the Capitol, culminating in a brief meeting with their home state’s junior senator. 

Sam raised his glass, “To Congressman Pfaff, Captain Patricia Fields, Sargent Vaquero, my mom, my dad, my brother Jerry and sister Sheila, and my beloved Lori. This is an auspicious moment for all of us. And I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for each of you. Cheers!”

“Cheers!”

Glasses clinked and Sam wondered whether he had said enough, or if it was too blatant that he was trying to stay banal to avoid saying anything stupid or offensive. His side of the family knew him better than Lori’s, and he scanned their faces for signs of relief that he had handled a Big Moment without fucking it up. Or were they disappointed that he hadn’t said something more heartfelt and meaningful? Maybe they were just hungry. Sam felt so unsure that he decided to avoid conversation for the rest of the meal. 

That lasted less than 30 seconds.

“So Sam,” Sheila said. “What happens if an artist wins a commission and then you find out he’s a Yankee fan?” 

Even Gil and Brenda were familiar enough with Sam’s unhinged antipathy for the Yankees to laugh along with his parents and siblings. And Sam would have liked to appreciate Sheila’s unifying gambit, but the New Sam didn’t want to be known and loved for idiosyncrasies. He wanted to be seen as solid, responsible, with affections hinging on his dependability, not quirks. But he played along and laughed with the group. Everyone noticed that Lori wasn’t drinking but nobody squawked. 

After lunch, Sam reconnoitered with Patty and together they entered their whirring new office. Patty liked what she saw, heard and felt. She sauntered among her new colleagues bobbing her head like they were cranking out a danceable beat. Sam gripped Andre their receptionist’s left shoulder and shook his right hand. He had planned to greet everyone there with similar ministrations but now it felt pompous. Patty went from person to person slapping five, shaking hands, bumping fists, patting shoulders, even hugging a few staffers who Sam assumed were veterans. His office was not next to hers and he wasn’t sure whether to carve his own path or follow in her social wake. He actually thought it made the most sense to run ahead of her to his office doorway to greet her just like everyone else was doing, but he was afraid of disrupting the rhythm Patty had established in these precious minutes of the agency’s infancy. 

Nelson Vaquero stepped forth and began applauding, sparking an ovation within seconds.  Sam was the last person to join in the clapping, though he was pretty sure nobody caught him holding out. Amid the office thunder, Nelson approached Sam and wrapped him in a bearhug. 

“This is it, brother!” he said. 

Sam was overwhelmed by Nelson’s warmth. He hugged back and felt relieved of enormous tensions. Nelson reminded him of a slightly crooked brick wall, scarred by war but still impassible. He smelled like sunscreen and bacon. Sam tried not to let feelings of inferiority pollute his bond with his colleague. When their embrace loosened, they looked each other in the eye. Sam tried to conceal his nervousness, while looking like he had nothing to hide. Gauging what Nelson perceived was a challenge because of his burn scars, or more specifically the skin grafts he had received at the Brooke Army Medical Center in Fort Sam Houston. Beyond Nelson’s very apparent intelligence, Sam projected an added canniness happening behind the epidermal patchwork of his co-deputy’s face. Sam further presumed that, unlike himself, Nelson accepted whatever credit people gave him, allowing neither under- nor overestimations to affect his reliability. Integrity like this was an advantage Sam lacked, but maybe Nelson would inspire Sam to access more capabilities than he had thus far in his professional life.

While Sam was performing all these invasive and inaccurate calculations about Nelson, Dwight Van Scoy, the agency’s chief congressional liaison approached and laid a plump, lotioned hand on each man’s shoulder. If Sam’s status as a qualified member of the team might be undermined by the staff learning that his previous job had been office manager at an art gallery rather than the gallery manager Patty had led everyone to believe, it would be thanks to Dwight. So while Sam felt insecure around Nelson Vaquero, Nelson operated honorably. Dwight was sleazy, and that was a threat.

“Wyoming!” Patty said.

The gathered office cheered more. A coin flip had determined that the monument installations would begin in Wyoming, then Alabama, then Wisconsin, going from the tail of the alphabet to the head and back and forth (skipping Alaska and Hawaii for now) until they reached Missouri in the middle. Patty had named Casper as the installation site, out of respect for the town’s production of a Vice President of the United States. Whether the former VP would be on hand for the monument dedication was yet unclear, which Sam interpreted as “I’ll show up if the art is respectful,” which made sense to him. In Sam’s capacity as primary judge of which artistic proposal the FMC would commission, he was still deciding whether to exercise his power to welcome the VP or repel him.

He had already begun an informal review of proposals, and Patty had asked him to lend weighted consideration to submissions from veterans. A Veterans Affairs study had determined that only one third of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans claimed the benefits to which they were entitled so a major component of the FMC’s modus operandi would be to conduct outreach to underserved vets throughout the monument installation process. This tangible service attracted increased publicity and political support, and goosed morale among staff, who would track these projects with the conviction that they were doing God’s work. Sam only hoped that the quality of his work would be elevated rather than crushed by such evangelical pressures. How much could he lean on Nelson and Patty without incurring resentment?

In his research, Sam had been surprised to learn that Wyoming was the first sovereign entity in the modern world to grant full voting rights to women. Further research showed that the territory held six men to every one woman at the time the measure was passed, so female enfranchisement was borne more of loneliness than enlightenment, but still. Wyoming was also one of seven states that sent more senators than congresspeople to Washington. But unlike most of his coastal elitist cohort, Sam didn’t need to see Wyoming’s progressive credentials to respect the folks who called it home. He knew better than to attribute rural America’s deep redness to a paucity of wisdom. He and Patty had shared a brilliant, successful, conservative grandfather who died before Sam ever had the chance to win an argument with him. Grandpa Joe was a first generation American who, by graduating in the top five percent of his high school class, got a full scholarship to City College of New York, back when it was known as the “poor man’s Harvard.” He joined the Army after graduation, made captain, and won a Silver Star in World War II for his role in commanding the 746th Tank Battalion’s push from the Roer to the Rhine. After the War, Grandpa Joe left the City and settled in North Carolina, first as garment salesman, then as a textile executive. As a child, Sam’s parents would joke that he could only sleep over at friends’ houses if everybody wore Fields Pajamas. When Grandpa Joe was around, the rule stood but the humor drained from it. But since Grandpa Joe played golf every weekend with Al Sternberger, owner of the town’s largest department store, Sam’s friends were more likely than not to support the family business. 

“Sam!” Patty said. “Sorry to disrupt your reveries of Smalltown, USA but if you have any prepared remarks, I think now would be the optimal moment to deliver them.”

Sam woke from that precise fog and made his way to the front of the common area. Feeling the scrutiny of his new colleagues, he decided to acknowledge that Patty had been exactly right, hoping it would create the fleeting impression that he was as affable as Patty was intuitive, even if it meant he hadn’t lasted an hour into his tenure without lapsing into daydream. Did anyone appreciate the specificity of his shrug? Or interpret his intent? What if he raised his hand and scratched a mark in the air with his index finger? Or was he now just looking weirder and weirder? Guessing that was the impression he was creating, he shook his head to indicate that he was merely an absent-minded creative genius, fresh in town, rousing from his natural habitat in mind-boggling complexity to lash his silver tongue over the assembly of highly qualified public servants, winning their favor with the verve he’d be applying to every project the FMC undertook. All the eyes on him seemed to blink at once.

“OK so welcome?” he said. He paused to follow that up with something more emphatic, but the staff mistook the interval for an invitation to respond, which they did in a collective murmur of half-assed reciprocity. 

“In 1789,” Sam said, opting to launch into his prepared remarks and hoping no one would realize it was because the extemporaneous portion of his speech had failed resoundingly. “Our newly constituted government commenced its business in what had til then served as New York’s City Hall. New Yorkers spared no expense in renovating the building from City to Federal Hall, with the cost of the project ballooning to double the initial estimates. But we have no record of civic outrage. And while the lavish expenditures succeeded in gaining admiration from all visitors, the real goal of Federal Hall was to secure New York City as the permanent capital of these United States. Pretty sure we can call that a failure.”

Sam took a moment to scan the room for recognition of the history he was recounting, and admiration, which he sought as reassurance that his high position at the FMC might start to feel more fit than shoehorn. He couldn’t sense much of either before he felt compelled to start talking again.

“What’s always been interesting to me is that today, when our status as a nation is far more secure than it was in the 18th Century, any project with a well-publicized budget overrun bears the permanent taint of fiasco. Now. I guess we all know that our first installation will be located in the rodeo capital of the world. So when we roll up there… Anyway, fiscal responsibility is paramount here, of course, but where’s the border between our jurisdiction and that of our artists? Do we say we want to commemorate Wyoming’s place in history as the first state to elect a female governor? Or find some way to celebrate Wyoming’s ranking as the third most patriotic state in America by no less an authority than a stat blog called WalletHub? Or do we just say, ‘Do whatever you want, but maybe ease up on the cowboy thing.’?” Sam felt the emanation of slight amusement from his colleagues. He’d take it. “But then I concluded that the wisest course, and one I wish I’d taken right here right now, is to get out of the way and leave the big statements to the artists! To liberate art, not influence it! The artists know what we’re celebrating. They know that even the sophistication that leads them to believe they’ve transcended Americanism is only afforded by America! And they sure as hell know the difference between liberty and guidance from government bureaucrats, no matter how hip. What they need is support. So that’s what I’m here to provide. And I am so proud to be here, in our nation’s capital, amplifying an artistic, patriotic mission with you fine folks. So thanks for suiting up.”

Sam took a step back and the applause was more than polite, less than raucous. He hoped Patty and Nelson didn’t think his line about suiting up was disrespectful. Then he remembered overhearing Patty say that Wyoming suffered from PMSSD, Post Matthew Shephard Stress Disorder, and he realized that respect was relative with respect to his relative.

Unofificially, FMC staff had first convened at a picnic on the National Mall after attending the dedication of the new World War I Memorial. Mingling freely among a moral Cirque du Soleil of politicians, plutocratic donors, politically transcendent dignitaries and the hunched, brittle children of veterans of the Marne, was the agency’s congressional liaison Dwight Van Scoy. Patty’s vetting and hiring decisions for the FMC were conducted with the same efficiency that she applied to every task, from writing a treatise on the utility of religious respect in urban counterinsurgency to keeping her sweaters from unraveling when she punched a metallic claw through their sleeves. She had shared every applicant’s resume with Sam and sought his views, and Sam could only conclude that a higher order governed the erraticism with which she took anything he said seriously. On paper Dwight Van Scoy was highly qualified. Georgetown law degree, congressional aide experience, government liaison (lobbyist) for Total Systems Service, a cat’s paw of the credit card industry, sterling references and a brother who served in Vietnam. 

Other finalists for the position were similarly accredited and the sense of injustice that the ultimate hiring decision would be made by someone with a resume as paltry as Samuel Fields’s was felt most acutely by Sam himself. But Sam had become less abashed in his belief that, while not being able to show his achievements on paper, he had amassed an enviable fortune from the brisk marketplace of American anxieties. He did not possess the scientific bona fides to quantify his emotional intelligence, but he had developed a private taxonomy of frailties that enabled a depth of empathy, and occasionally an abject lack of patience, that he would stack up against anyone’s. That he was wrong, or that ethereal wealth was a complex people developed to compensate for their failure to build real wealth were possibilities that Sam was excellent at denying. So when Patty had been skeptical about elevating him all the way to Deputy Director, Sam brashly insisted that she introduce him to anyone she knew, and then let the subject decide if he seemed up to the job. 

Patty agreed right away, presuming that pairing Sam with one of the more self-possessed people she knew instead of someone with apparent vulnerabilities would strike Sam out in three pitches. She introduced him to Lieutenant Colonel William Gallagher, her immediate superior and battalion commander in Iraq. Whether or not it was an application of his emotional expertise, Sam was convinced that the trouble Patty had taken to trip him up said much more about her supposedly nonexistent doubts about herself than it did about her doubts about him. Meeting for drinks at 5 PM in the Bull and Bear Bar in New York, Lt. Col. Gallagher was not the chiseled silver fox Sam was expecting but a short bald man with the face of a very cruel baby. Sam shook his hand firmly and maintained eye contact, subjecting himself to the XO’s appraisal with a benign smile meant to convey that he did not need to know anything extra about his new acquaintance to feel comfortable with him. Perhaps a decorated military man instinctually assigned everyone a threat level, but Sam, who certainly understood that some people were more dangerous than others, had found that he got much further being socially reactive than proactive, that avoiding preemptive tension put people around him at greater ease, and also signaled for anybody checking that he wasn’t worried because he was ready for anything that might be thrown his way. 

“Thank you for your service, sir,” Sam told the Lieutenant Colonel. “I’d be honored to buy you a drink.”

Gallagher ordered an expensive scotch. Patty ordered an expensive gin. Sam ordered a beer. 

Sam tried insisting on being the last one to sit down, but rather than seeming courtly, he just looked stubborn and foolish as Patty and Lt. Col. Gallagher stood ramrod straight, bemusedly watching him try to wave them into their chairs. Sam stilled himself and waited another beat, just to make sure this wasn’t some test to see how easily he’d bow to the stillness of others and when it was apparent that rank, or some protocol he didn’t know about was involved, he said, “My first actual standoff and I surrender in under a minute” as he sat down. Patty smirked appreciatively but Gallagher acted like he hadn’t heard anything, and thus Sam decided he was a humorless man and that even as a leader, he merely enforced the rules that he had advanced by following. This was going to be easy.

Jazz piped into the room and Sam was prepared to identify the performer and tune to anyone who was interested in hearing, and since noone was, he restricted the peacocking of his knowledge to drumming along on the table.

“So what brings you to New York, Lieutenant Colonel?” Sam asked.

“The Acela,” Gallagher said. As quickly as possible, Sam tried to compute how much amusement he’d have to pay this remark. Gallagher didn’t seem smug enough to demand full on giggling, and Sam was loathe to grant him any, though if it did seem that a chuckle was the best move, he wanted it to seem authentic, or at least show the XO that he had a good facsimile of laughter in his social arsenal. Patty smiled more widely than she did at Sam’s standoff comment, so, before the window of spontaneous response closed, Sam nodded out a mild snort that seemed at least to assure the XO that he was not one of those Monty Python-quoting comic supremacists that men like Gallagher probably disliked. 

“Will you have time to take in any sights?”

“I have a sister in Yorkville,” the Lt. Col. said before rolling a tiny puddle of scotch along his tongue. “Plan to spend the rest of my non-conference time at her disposal.”

Gallagher sat still, facing Sam but staring into the middle distance. Sam declined a follow-up, giving someone else a chance to advance the conversation. Nada.

Gallagher did not seem interested in seeming interesting, so Sam stopped showing him interest. Patty had plopped her underachieving cousin together with this decorated national servant in this fancy bar and tasked Sam with charming the charmless. As a quiet that either was or was not a malaise set over the table, Sam smiled at Patty. She did not smile back and Sam understood. She had rigged this social obstacle course and now she thought he was refusing to traverse it. But Sam was more prepared than Patty thought he’d be.

“Lieutenant Colonel, I don’t know if you discuss matters like this with civilians, but I can’t help wondering if you were the CO who ordered the mission where my cousin lost her hand.”

Gallagher stopped drinking and stared at Sam. Sam stared back, looking for something sharp in Gallagher’s face, finding only bluntness. 

“Yes. I was.”

Sam put on his most empathetic expression and said, “I know the fate of three other soldiers in her company was far worse. That must be very difficult.”

The XO nodded and Sam perceived a bit more simpatico between the two of them now. He felt a tension release from Patty as well. 

“Did you reach out to the fallen’s next of kin?”

Gallagher shook his head.

“There are protocols for that sort of thing Sam,” Patty said.

“Yes,” Sam said. “I’m familiar with the Defense Casualty Information Processing System, I’m just wondering how often a field grade officer extends beyond protocol to offer support or remorse.”

“Not often,” Gallagher said, glaring at Patty more than Sam. 

“Of course,” Sam said. “It’s easy for civilians like me to sit on our candy asses and question the chain of command, with no regard for general morale, or budgetary allocations for bereaved families or any number of concerns that keep Casualty and Mortuary Affairs busy around the clock in peacetime, much less during war.”

Sam was aware that he was showing off the homework he’d done, but his intuition was that Lt. Col. Gallagher warmed more to hearing Army protocol terms than to discerning Sam’s motives for listing them. The drop in Gallagher’s glare validated Sam’s guess, and also told him that this man, for all his rectitude, was surprisingly susceptible to flattery, and more easily swayed than a man of his rank should have been. Patty saw it too, tipping her glass a begrudging 10 degrees as Connie Kay’s brushwork skipped over the clinks and chits of the Bull and Bear’s dishes.

“Well,” Sam said, raising his glass. “Here’s to the untallied life and limb you’ve saved through your diligence. May the fullness of your duties clear your R and R of worry.” 

Gallagher nodded appreciatively and raised his glass even higher than Sam’s. Patty grimaced in a way that her CO could perceive as amicable as she lifted her glass an inch off the table. Sam was conflicted as he gulped his beer. He had just prodded along until he located a seam of vulnerability in a much more formidable man, and at the first soft spot he found, he stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. It was thrilling, but he dared not lean into the thrill since he recognized how sordid manipulating a man of duty as a kind of job interview really was. But he supposed his willingness to do it, and the ultimate gentleness with which he wielded such skills, proved exactly what he was willing to do, and who he was willing to treat as a prop so that he could go home and tell his wife that he got the job she told him to go out and get. Beneath the gussied equivocation, Sam wanted to call it what it was: venality.

So he felt better about himself when he sat across a small conference table from the riotously venal Dwight Van Scoy. Listening to him tick off the money he’d siphoned from farmers credit unions to pay for black ops political ads, or the fundraising cut he’d taken from candidates he knew were going to lose, as though the more larcenous the exploit, the prouder one should feel, Sam was astonished by Patty’s insistence on hiring him. He could see that she took his trust in her judgement for granted, and decided not to set her straight because, while trust was meager, fear was abundant.

Because one thing Sam believed, mistakenly or not, was that Patty was more decisive than he was because she was less insightful, not more. Sam held out for years in search of someone who understood him. He told himself remaining aloof of commitment was a type of decisiveness too, and that he was missing a great deal of complexity by bed-hopping through his 20s instead of sustaining intimacy with one long-term partner. But somehow, nobody made him want to hang around for more than a few weeks. His original dalliance with Sally barely lasted a month, and rather than unify or crystallize the tendrils and live wires of Sam’s erratic conscience, time spent with her foreclosed on multitudes in favor of a few large strains of physical pleasure. Maybe some people sought that type of simplification, but Sam associated tidiness with boredom. Lori was amused by Sam’s complexity, but she had no idea how cautious he was about what he shared with her. It didn’t have to be a woman or a soulmate. Just someone to hear the furious tapping beneath it all, the desperate entreaty of OK so maybe I’m not doing this exactly correctly, but can’t you see how hard I’m trying? So even while the signal was honest, the belief in its clarity was not. It was like Beeswax said. Nobody heard the tapping. Nobody was impressed by his profound deliberations. Instead, they were annoyed by the robust results his muddling promised, and the paltry ones they delivered. But Sam dodged full responsibility for this failing, so that he could continue seeing himself as the hero of his story. An accurate biography might cast him as the villain, which was probably why he magnified the flaws of others before he realized what he was doing, so he could foist some of the villainy on those around him. Was this man of self-conferred, and thus distorted and delusional, heroism the right man to realize the Federal Monuments Commission’s vision of rescuing America from polarization and malaise? Maybe.

It was unclear how heroic Sam seemed to Dwight Van Scoy, or if much about Sam registered at the picnic on the Mall, but Sam’s misgivings at the interview flared into visceral hostility toward this meringue-pompadoured man who never made eye contact but always seemed to keep the colorful lining of his blazer in view. Everybody else seemed to like Dwight, while he struck Sam as morally deficient on a fundamental level, aware of it, and ready to deploy unfettered viciousness toward anyone skeptical of the sterling character he claimed to possess. Beyond Sam’s belief that Dwight Van Scoy would collaborate with Hitler at the drop of a pith helmet, his antipathy was informed by the older man’s unapologetic pomposity. Shaking his fat, scented hand at the picnic, Sam imagined a golfing trip to Scotland whereupon an artisan was bribed to sew a Van Scoy coat of arms that Dwight would try to pass off as an ancestral crest. Sam couldn’t say what he had against fake old money, except that maybe of all the misrepresentations that he, Sam, thought might be worth perpetrating, what kind of agenda led a person to need people to believe his blood was blue? A compassionate view might have considered that everyone wishes he were someone else sometimes, and maybe Dwight Van Scoy was guilty of nothing more than carrying the kind of childhood trauma that lends those wishes fervency to the point of desperation. But Sam didn’t reserve that kind of compassion for Dwight, now living in a very large house in suburban Virginia with a very small second wife and her normal-sized mother, who was a friend of Dwight’s first wife. Sam also despised the reverence Dwight had for authority. He pictured Dwight bragging to past and current iterations of his family about how much his bosses liked him. 

It never occurred to Sam that he might be wrong about any of this. Lieutenant Colonel Gallagher was no isolated case. While outwardly presenting as epically uncertain, Sam spelunked rapaciously into everyone’s untold personal histories, assessing their stature and potential, speculating whether Tom’s formative years were scored by abuse, was Dick well-adjusted and popular in high school or did Harry come from a home where the elderly walked around naked? And yet he never risked the scrutiny of airing his conclusions, and thus his untested belief in his own unparalleled intuition remained unshakeable, and unearned. To reconcile public uncertainty with secret implacability, Sam maintained an insistent suspicion that contingencies must be treated with only slightly less respect than conclusions, lest he foreclose on possibilities that might turn out to be more interesting than the ones to which certainty led him to commit. In other words, Sam walked around quietly challenging the unjust verdicts of reality, and had no fucking idea what he was doing.

“Now that, my dear Samuel, was oratory,” Dwight said, clapping Sam’s right hand between his two meaty slabs and bobbling the whole sandwich up and down. “Just top notch rhetoric. Really! Oh I can see why Patricia picked you as a cousin. Eh, Hombre?”

“That’s right Dwight,” Nelson said, as Patty joined the group.

“I call Nelson Hombre,” Dwight said, finally letting go of Sam and stuffing his hands into his seersucker pockets. With his livid, bulbous face and ill-fitting but expensive clothes, he reminded Sam of someone who derived all of his wealth from one good day at the dog track.

“Well, we’re lucky to have you aboard Dwight,” he said. He didn’t want to check Patty or Nelson for approval but he did anyway. He was annoyed by how good it felt to see them nodding encouragingly to him.

“Now,” Dwight said. “Forgive the buttonholing here, but perhaps we could take in a meal together first thing next week? Nothing too formal, just a friendly exchange of views over a little dry-aged bistek? We all must eat, hmmm?”

“Well, Dwiggity-Dwack,” Sam said. “If we must, we must.”

Finally Dwight looked at him. There was an implacability in his eyes, a stony flash that said don’t fuck with me, son. The look knocked Sam from mocking to intimidated with chilling suddenness, and Dwight smiled watching it happen, revealing teeth so unnaturally straight and white that Sam was unreservedly certain the original set got rotted out partying in cheap motels with Marion Barry. Dwight Van Scoy nodded into a clumsy version of a curt bow, slapped Nelson Vaquero on the back and walked away. 

Kelly, the FMC’s office manager, approached. She was the tallest person in the office and Sam liked her as much as he loathed DVS. Every night that week she had been at Patty’s “optimizing organization to ensure productivity from the get go.” Sam looked up at her and smiled at how perfectly monumental she was.

“Hello Sam,” Kelly said. “Nice remarks.”

“Thanks Kelly,” Sam said. “For everything.”

“Great,” Patty said, clapping a hand on Sam’s shoulder and giving Kelly a light punch with her claw. “Then let’s get to it. Sam?”

Sam thought there might be more speeches, at least to give a few other senior staff members a moment in the spotlight, but that was it. Time to put shoulders to the wheel and start making the country feel better about itself. Except for Sam, who was already being called to the principal’s office.

“Close the door,” she said. He turned around, unsure what to say because he already had closed the door. He turned back to see Patty smiling.

“Ha!” she said. “In Israel the colonel invites fighter pilot candidates into his office and tells them to shut the door. If they turn around like you just did, they’re too uncertain of their own actions to have that kind of death and destruction at their fingertips.”

“So… I failed?” Sam asked.

“No, just something to bear in mind. But what the fuck was that shit with Dwight?”

Sam shrugged.

“Listen Sambo. Dwight’s an animal, alright? Nobody likes him. But you can’t let him know that. Trust me, your disapproval won’t change shit about that guy, so just… you know. And he won’t be the only guy like this. They’re probably a fucking majority.”

“It’s like swimming in pig shit,” Sam said. 

“Welcome to national service. The use of snorkels is prohibited.”

*****

Sam Fields left his office door open and assumed the position of deputy directorship. Over the last several months he had convinced himself that the combination of expectations, mission fervor and high risk of deep shame would transform him into a man of results. He studied his desk. Its empty drawers, shelves and cubbies gaped like baby bird beaks, demanding their surfeit of important materials. The old Sam kept tax documents in the same drawer as batteries and deodorant. The New Sam would take advantage of the functions of this desk and keep a library within reach at no expense to tidiness. He nodded at the pair of chairs facing him, wondering whether their cushions would get more warmth from the asses of superiors or subordinates, and again unsure which he’d prefer. He had a lot of ideas and unprecedented support to execute them and though past experience suggested his ardor would flag, right now he sat in his executive-style chair feeling very powerful. All he had to do was show up each day, talk a little, listen a lot, and move projects forward. The glory would be in the accumulation of daily efforts. Right here, right now, the New Sam needed to graduate from pursuit of ethereal jolleys to erector of monuments. Re-invoking his favorite fable, he needed to put down the piccolo, stop hopping around like Ian Fucking Anderson, step into his overalls and start laying bricks.

Time to get down to business. Sam ignited his computer. Summoning the same strength Samson probably  needed for post-haircut demolition, he avoided all personal temptations and imported 20 applications for the Wyoming commission. So many websites beckoned, including resources that might help explain Sally’s appearance in Delaware. The New Sam eschewed them all, steepling his fingers and swiveling his chair for a look through his office window. 

The FMC was on the ninth floor of a building that housed start-ups, think tanks, law practices and lobbying firms. Mostly lobbying firms. Sam’s south-facing view didn’t feature any of Washington’s iconic architecture but the upper floors of the building offered a sliver of the Potomac. Sam could see through more than 25 windows of the building across the street; none of which, he caught himself checking, and quickly assuring himself was normal and definitely not perverse, was a bedroom or a bathroom. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were wide enough for Sam to see their brick borders. An astonishing number of DVS clones strolled carelessly one way, and scurried like they were late for a very important date the other.  He could make out the edge of a small park next to the building across the street. Sam could tell that the entire area had been developed recently because with each passing year, the strictures mandating adherence to Washington’s original City Beautiful aesthetics loosened. Nothing within a four block radius of Sam’s office had any doric columns nor arched walkways nor marble balustrades inviting passersby to descend from thoroughfare to bowling green for a friendly wager. The brick accents on the sidewalk were the quaintest touch he could see. This place needed a monument! Before swiveling back to face his desk, the New Sam spun around and around, Zeus transforming into a cyclone, disco-pointing his fingers to rain monuments down on economically robust, emotionally impoverished office parks all over America. Spinning, Sam felt poetic and ingenious, thinking, this is exactly how I should feel to prime myself for doing great work. He stopped spinning, raised his hands above his keyboard, wiggled his fingers and eyebrows.

Oh America, I unleash my army of artists to beautify you from Maine to San Diego! And our collective pulse will quicken and art-inspired harmony will swell from sea to shining fucking sea and artists will get their due and new language to contend with our history will be fostered and old barriers will fall and new bridges will extend and colors will fly and conversation will become almost musical and happiness will increase and shame will wither and rancor subside and beauty standards will become more realistic. From this office in the nation’s capital, let the Reign of Art commence!

He was startled by a knock on the glass wall by his open door. It was Nelson. Sam waved him in enthusiastically.

“I’ve got it, brother!” Nelson said.

Sam looked at him questioningly.

“The design for Wyoming,” Nelson said, joining Sam behind his desk. “Check it out!”

Sam opened the email Nelson had sent him a minute earlier.

The artist’s name was Mary Nesbitt. She was a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom who’d seen action in Somalia and now worked as a counselor for veterans suffering from PTSD. The core of her counseling practice was metalwork using scrap from decommissioned tanks, planes, helicopters, jeeps, cannons and guns. The bio concluded with a quote from Sgt. Nesbitt: “Creative work is already therapeutic, but repurposing the very weapons that caused us our pain into works of beauty and meaning can lead us on a vivid path to healing.”

Sgt. Nesbitt’s proposal was graphically rendered as a giant bronze eagle, large stars and stripes streaming from spread wings, eyes gentle but ready to terrify, beak twisted into a laconic smirk. It was entitled Liberty Soaring. Sam hated it. But Nelson seemed so happy. Sam didn’t want to piss on his parade but he did want to put such amateurish notions of artistic value in their place. He recognized the relief of the moment, the brief respite from feeling inferior to Nelson, and he knew how quickly it could turn if he was too patronizing in his rejection of Nelson’s monument of choice.

“What a great story, right?” Nelson said. “Hey Patty! Patty, come in here! Look what Sam and I found.”

Sam thought Patty was probably on her way to the restroom when Nelson flagged her down and he tried to pout while shaking his head slightly to reassure his cousin that she didn’t need to rush into his office to celebrate Nelson’s supposedly great news. 

Patty either missed or ignored Sam’s micro-gesticulations, and joined her deputies behind Sam’s desk.

“Fuckin’ nifty!” she said about the mock-up.

“Wait, check this out,” Nelson said, grabbing Sam’s mouse and scrolling back up to Sgt. Nesbitt’s biography. “And if you don’t mind my sayin’, she looks like she might like the ladies too, so that, like, checks all the boxes!”

Nelson turned to Sam, his lips pulling creases along the grafts on his cheeks, his nose skeletal and discolored as Michael Jackson’s. Sam tried to smile back, knowing it was inappropriate to feel bullied but feeling bullied anyway. His wanted his opinion of Liberty Soaring to matter more than his opinion of Nelson, but didn’t know how to advance or even express the notion that they should rearrange their priorities right here and now. The personal took precedence over the artistic and Sam wasn’t sure whether validating Nelson’s joy counted as excellent performance of his duties or a complete dereliction of them.

“Good to flag?” Nelson asked.

Sam nodded. Nelson clicked. 

“Great work, guys,” Patty said. “Come on. Beers on me!”

“I hear that!” Nelson said, following Patty out of Sam’s office. “How ‘bout it, Sam?”

“Be right there.”

Alone again, Sam opened the folder he’d made for submissions received from artists he admired. At the top of his list was a proposal from TaiPei Jackson. Sam didn’t even care what her concept was, nor that she had not served. He knew it would be his favorite, and sure as shit better than something copied off a t-shirt at a monster truck rally. The best piece of work Sam ever saw was TaiPei Jackson installation called Niggers In Your Bathroom. Maybe the highest voltage of the piece’s shock value came from its confirmation of exactly what even the most supposedly enlightened visitors imagined when they heard the title: A nice suburban restroom wrecked by litter, graffiti, excrement and tightly coiled pubes. Plenty of provocative art tried to goad its witnesses into confronting their own prejudices and anxieties, but TaiPei’s piece cut through all that Sontagian bullshit, clearing away the “am I interpreting this correctly?” agita and offering a clarity of experience that almost no other pieces achieved. NIYB was a minor sensation in New York. Sam suspected TaiPei Jackson herself muffled the hype surrounding it because she didn’t want it to define her.

He didn’t review her proposal for the Wyoming installation. He wanted Nelson, and maybe even Patty, in the room when he did. Let them all experience the idea together. Let TaiPei Jackson convince them without Sam diluting her power. Let the veterans yuk it up at some local watering hole without modulating their behavior to include a weenie civilian like him. Sam was going home to have dinner with his pretty, pregnant wife.

*******

Dwight Van Scoy began his morning at 4:30 AM. He ritualistically dipped his feet into the shearling warmth of his deerskin slippers. Then quietly, to let Colette sleep, he descended the Turkish-carpeted stairs to the kitchen where he started the Jura with his phone and padded to the adjacent half-bath to perform his morning toilette while the Jura ground and brewed enough coffee for himself and Kate in case she came down from her wing of the house. Using a term for morning wash-up that evoked taking a dump was a scar from his marriage to Judy. He’d love to go back to plain English, but the harder he tried to exorcise the pretenses she’d drilled into him, the louder they boomed between his bloodshot ears. The charcoal tile and onyx pedestal sink seemed more Latin to him anyway, but what the hell did he know about interior decorating? Dwight did, however, prefer the way he looked in this particular mirror. Whether it was the dark background or angle or hour, he didn’t really care. He just liked the momentary relief of believing his face was more symmetrical and his jawline more pronounced than it always looked in photographs. 

Dwight took his clean face and hot coffee to the backyard for his predawn stargaze. And in a yard so large and well-manicured, they did feel like his stars. Casting from his sleep-encrusted potato head to the perfection of the cosmos had become a sort of exercise. Mornings used to begin with push-ups, even after his football days were long past. Now this quick swing from personal to universal was his calisthentic, his giant leap to whatever business the day would hold. 

Other worlds were out there. Dwight was sure of it. And someday humanity would figure out how to interact with them. It might happen long after he was boxed and planted, but Dwight liked to believe that pangalactic civilization would be advanced enough to detect souls, and probably recognize them too. So he wasn’t worried about missing anything big after he died, and maybe that was the point of the speculation in the first place. Though he did wish he could see the Lions win the Superbowl from this side of the grass. Just counting the years it had been since anybody like Barry or Rodney had suited up brought him thudding back to earth. At least the goddamn Vikings hadn’t won either.

Slurping coffee in his dark backyard, he found Rigel winking like a brand new spur on Orion’s heel. That little glimmer up there was at least 20 times more massive than the sun, and most idiots didn’t even notice. You mean the ones on the belt aren’t the biggest? Dwight felt his blood dance as he contemplated the energy and gravity exerted by something that mind-bogglingly large. Maybe he was even drawn to it by actual gravity, some little vortex rooted quadrillions of miles away. What would the most powerful forces on earth, the earthquakes and nuclear explosions and ambition of Captain Patricia Fields, look like if you multiplied them by 20? It wouldn’t just be hotter fire and harder rain. It would be a more comprehensive view of history, more detailed views of quarks, more sophisticated understanding of the mysteries of the universe, and more effective recipes for peace and justice. And more luxurious luxury. All alone on the spread he’d managed to snag, he didn’t have to pretend his favorite word wasn’t “more.” What kinda sports would beings capable of hitting lightspeed pitches play? 

Dwight sat on a chaise lounge by his pool, still staring at the Hunter’s foot. If beings as limited as men knew that it had already molted from dwarf to supergiant, surely the life forms in its orbit were advanced enough to escape its cataclysmic expansion. Maybe whoever populated Rigel’s stellar system were already in conference with Aldebaran, Sirius, Pollux and even Betelguese, all exponentially more significant heavenly bodies than the sun. The stars reflected on surface of the pool. From his phone, Dwight turned on a light hanging from the poolhouse’s roof gutter, and now the blue and white stripes of the tent over the chaises reflected on the water too. Colette called this pool financed and filled by the momentous drabs of Uncle Sam’s ever-nurturing teat Ol’ Chlory. 

One day he was gonna have to write all this down, especially the stuff Colette said. She was quite the wit. Everyone said so. And he’d met plenty of authors, most of whom were too busy studying the clock’s gears to notice the second hand sweeping them that much closer to death without accruing more wealth. They certainly didn’t understand that you could do a nifty bit of work for the credit card industry and wind up with a spread like this. He still smiled when he thought of it, like hitting a grand slam, scoring a touchdown and fucking the homecoming queen all at the same time. Elegant in its simplicity was how a former EPA head put it in a congratulatory note, long before her son got his seat on the Bench. Like more of these things than people preferred to believe, it began with a bet over lunch. 

“They want me to goose credit card fee revenue by 10% in a year,” Big Billy said, his fat crimson throat puffing is he shook his capsized his wineglass over his protruding tongue.  

“So?” Andy said. “You think DVD player sales alone won’t tilt half the lunchpails’ accounts?”

“I can do 20!” Dwight said. 

Big Billy stared at him, squeezing a fistful of A-1 dalmationed tablecloth, and for a second Dwight thought his boasting might have started a fight he wasn’t sure he could win. Billy released the tablecloth when he noticed the other wheel-greasers at the table were staring at Dwight instead of him.

“Hell, Dwight,” Big Billy said, pawing crumbs off his lap. “You’re even drunker than me!”

“20%,” Dwight said, sliding the check to Big Billy. “Or lunch is on me for six months.”

Everybody played both sides of everything, sometimes even better than Dwight. But he knew the Environmental Defense Fund had been running around town for years accusing the American business community of arboricide. So fine. Let’s start with those tomes the credit card companies send their 100 million customers every month. Democrats had the senate so they’d be glad to chastise the tree-haters over at MasterCard. And it just so happened the EDF had a 10-year plan encouraging all companies to transition to paperless communications. With no sign of canary-swallowing, the targeted companies acceded to the legislative rule that credit card statements could be no more than 8 double-sided pages long. 

Oh well, AmEx said with a regretful shrug. Guess we’ll just have to make our fine print smaller to meet these new requirements. Just doing our part to save the planet!

Fee revenue went up 23% and the Democrats were to blame. Dwight’s cut of that windfall was eight figures. He plucked a deflated volleyball from under his chaise and hurled it across the pool’s surface, tattering Ol’ Chlory by dawn’s early light. Occasionally he still had to countenance questions about the exploitative nature of his work, and he always had an answer that shut people up: nobody’s entitled to own shit they can’t afford. Any penalty they incur for forgetting that is their own damn fault.

Philosophy like that should go in the book too. Lots of people told him he had a way with words. The decorator Colette hired even mentioned the penmanship on the checks he’d signed. Yep, after he retired, he’d collect all his early morning thoughts and market it like one of those feel-good books on management. What else would he do all day when the daily grind ground to a halt?

His coffee was cool enough to sip. Soon he’d go inside and reel his focus from the heavens to earthly business. But the stars were never far from his thoughts, and their general indifference to everybody’s petty dramas were an immense help to Dwight when tensions arose and ol’ DVS was there to provide a long, cool view. He loved the idea of the Federal Monuments Commission, despite the naivetee of its leadership. Even Patty. He wanted them to understand that he’d gladly do most of the dirty work necessary to keep the agency in congressional favor, but if they all thought they’d be able to start erecting actual structures on a smooth schedule with their ideals intact, then they were sorely mistaken. In fact, the more successful the project was, the more compromised it was sure to become, and Dwight looked forward to watching the distress set in when Patty’s smartass cousin’s high-falutin’ ideals corroded. 

Dwight had a brother like Sam. Nick thought he saw through it all. Always bragging about all the poetry he read, never quite able to use what Keats taught him to explain why he didn’t finish his degree and couldn’t hold down a job. Almost 50 and didn’t own a car. Acted like he loved their brother Otto more than the rest of the family. And maybe he did, since Otto was the only one Nicky never hit up for money. It had gotten to the point with Dwight where he just wished Nick would come clean and stop pretending a handout was a loan. Dwight didn’t need the money back, and he didn’t mind helping his brother. He just wasn’t sure how helpful it was to keep enabling this charade that whatever ship Nick was waiting for was ever going to come in. Nick would say that Dwight was just trying to stick it to him, since Pa basically cut Dwight off for working for anti-unionists. And maybe Nick was right. Maybe he did want to get the last laugh. What did the union ever do for Nicky? What did it ever do for Pa that he couldn’t have done for himself? Dwight put himself through school working at campus dining, which was unionized, and selling encyclopedias door to door in the Michigan summer, which definitely wasn’t. And throughout his time in Washington, beneath all the false manners and off-key elegance, he could smell the difference between the silver-spooners and the hard-knockers. It was the real reason he’d left Judy for Colette. 

Judy acted like she’d rather die than admit she couldn’t buy herself a new background, that she was no arriviste, but had always been Judith Van Scoy, Doyenne of Prince William County, while the Judy Paskie who gave him handjobs in the back of the Court Theater was just some sordid fictional character. In her own way, Dwight knew she was trying to authenticate their luxurious life. And at first, he indulged her to the point of going right along. And if he had to be honest, he went right along with it until it embarrassed him during a meeting with a group of congressional aides. Aping his wife, he referred to his coat as a portmanteau. Hardly a diplomatic incident, but that one instant of a fucking page biting her lip as she smoothed the camelhair over the hanger’s wooden wings felt like cataclysmic shrinkage. Security could have tossed him from Longworth House and it would have been less humiliating. But still he tried to honor his vows and use the same occidental terminology Judy insisted on applying to everything they ate, saw or touched.

It started to make him sick, trying to convince himself he was doing her a favor by playing along with her ridiculous charade. He tried sending her signals, first of foreboding then of disapproval. But Judy knew the exact path to take to avoid noticing and Dwight was too exhausted to chase her. So the boys didn’t get into Sidwell Friends. Was that the only good school in town? What was wrong with reminding her what public school in Michigan had been like (great!)? And now she was scoffing at Trinity Christian? Dwight couldn’t bring himself to point out who was funding all this, but why in the world should he have to? And even so, he knew he’d get blamed when the elephant shat on the helicopter. 

Colette understood all of this. She even felt sympathetic for how desperately Judy tried not to seem desperate. Colette’s mother Kate had brought her along to one of Judy’s soirees and after everyone had had a few drinks, Colette snuck up on Dwight and told him she admired how gallantly he was contorting himself for his wife. Dwight had noticed Colette before. Everyone had. Big Billy would’ve said, “She was 28, but had the body of a 17 year-old.” Dwight could probably repeat that to Patty. Definitely not Sam. Hard to tell about Nelson. He seemed like a good enough guy, Dwight couldn’t read his face to know how freely they could speak. He knew most people assumed Colette was attracted to his money. But that moment at that party when she complimented him on his grace, it felt like more than flattery. It felt like Colette would stick with him if it all went away. Like she loved him.

And while Judy acted like unflattening her a’s would get her mistaken for Anouk Aimee despite not knowing the difference between an eclair and a profiterole, Colette had studied at the Sorbonne. And yet it was Colette who gave a rat’s ass about which china patterns the Middletons favored, while Dwight had managed to shed most of the pretenses Judy had imposed on their home, but still felt like he’d need an honest to God exorcism to break free of the fear that he’d embarrass himself again by unwittingly imitating his ex-wife.

Dawn prompted Dwight to resash his silk robe. Returning inside, he tried again to wipe “morning toilette” from memory banks. But there it stayed, uttered tauntingly by Judy as she bashed him over the head with a fresh baguette. 

Sam was summoned to Patty’s office. She was seated on the corner of her desk while her chair was occupied by a very thin man who looked about 50.

“Sam, Dr. Song. Dr. Song, Sam.”

Dr. Song nodded without taking his eyes off the monitor. Patty pressed a button on her phone and the blinds in her office closed. Dr. Song’s glasses were so bright and opaque from the monitor’s reflection he looked to Sam like he was shooting beams from his eye sockets.

“Come on around,” Patty said. “We have something to show you.”

Sam and Patty gathered behind Dr. Song and, though he had a vague idea of the sand-bagging Patty was luring him into, he gasped at what he saw. It was a startlingly realistic view of North Wolcott Street in Casper, Wyoming, across the street from the Ohio Oil Company. This was the sight of the FMC’s first installation.

“Dr. Song’s a lecturer at West Point. One of the world’s foremost cyber-psychologists.”

“Well…” Dr. Song said. 

“All that understanding about the human psyche, still doesn’t know how to accept a compliment,” Patty said, tapping his bony shoulder lightly with her claw.

Dr. Song tapped a few keystrokes and the passersby onscreen began emitting faint clouds of different colors and shapes. 

“This program,” Dr. Song said. “Uses satellite photos to recognize the various natural and commercial features of a given block or neighborhood, then sends people of varying demographics and tracks their emotional reactions to their surroundings. The colors are coded for emissions of dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin and serotonin. The greys and blacks are for cortisol and adrenaline. We’re basing the levels they carry around at any given moment on factors like socio-economic status, health of relationships- you see those teenagers holding hands with the purple and turquoise miasmas? And then we add in external factors like cracked sidewalks versus newly paved ones.”

Dr. Song typed in more commands and the clouds around a lady struggling to push a baby stroller past a dilapidated building brighten as the sidewalk smoothes out and the building renovates instantaneously.

“What about weather?” Sam asked.

“Yes!” Dr. Song said, typing in more sunshine.

“But that’s not the point of this demo, Sam,” Patty said. She nodded at Dr. Song and suddenly an enormous bronze eagle popped onto the screen. The foot traffic’s auras all brightened.

“Well?” Patty said. “How bout them apples?!”

“What’s with the bird?”

“That’s gonna be our first monument. If Dr. Song can hover… there. ‘Liberty Soaring’ by Mary Nesbitt. Is it my imagination or is there an extra pep in everyone’s step now?”

“That’s part of the program,” Dr. Song said. “Emotional improvement results in a brisker pace.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Sam said.

Dr. Song turned to him with a bemused expression. Away from the monitor’s glare, Sam could see the doctor’s eyes. They looked kind, but Sam learned long ago that kindness could easily be mistaken for fatigue or fear or, more likely in this case, stealth appraisal.

“This software has been developed by some of the brightest engineers in the Pentagon,” Dr. Song said. “I can say with absolute certainty that happier people walk faster.”

“Right,” Sam said. “And when I say ‘giant bronze eagle’ to you, how much mood juice does that send coursing through your veins? Or does Jason Gedrick have a bigger fanbase than I realized?”

“Mr. Fields, any real human being’s responses to art-”

“Oh, is that art to you, Dr. Song?”

“Sam,” Patty said, grabbing his arm and tugging him over to the sofa against the wall by her mahogany bookcases. “What did decorum ever do to you?”

“Oh come on, Patty. This is bullshit. A fucking paperweight?”

Patty smirked, giving Sam the impression that she had anticipated his reaction and all of his motivations and still had more cards to play.

“Dr. Song,” Sam said from the couch. “Do you know who Vernon J. Baker was?”

“Well…” Dr. Song said.

“What about Kevin Behm?”

“Ok,” Patty said. “Now you’re just making stuff up.”

“Kevin Behm, for your collective information, is one of the most incendiary painters we ever showed back in New York. He makes his living as a sys admin for a financial firm. But when he gets into his studio, he absolutely transforms and creates images that will haunt you for the rest of your goddamn life. You see, art? That’s my bailiwick. And I expect my opinion about it to carry more weight than the military personnel around here.”

Patty tugged Sam back to behind her desk and nodded at Dr. Song. With a few keystrokes, Liberty Soaring changed into a replica of the Marine Corps War Memorial, informally known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, the bronze casting of five men, undaunted by heavy enemy fire, raising Ol’ Glory on the top of Mount Suribachi. Predictably, the auras of the foot traffic darkened. Sam wondered if any of them had been programmed to know that only three of the five men depicted survived their flag-raising mission. It still seemed utterly bogus to him that abstract symbols would be more pulse-quickening than evocations of real human triumph.

“And now?” Patty said.

Dr. Song input another command, and the memorial morphed into Sam’s favorite candidate for the Wyoming installation.

TaiPei Jackson’s proposal for the Wyoming monument was a black infantryman trying mightily to plant Ol’ Glory in the soil, beset by Nazi soldiers on one side and hooded figures on the other. Elements of the Nazis and klansmen were distorted and grotesque but the name BAKER was emblazoned very clearly on the archetypically heroic American soldier’s sleeve. 

Sam had shared the design with Patty the previous week and watched as she took it in.

“I saw that,” Sam said. 

“Saw what,” Patty said, knowing exactly what he meant.

“It’s wrong what happened to this guy. And you know it. But you’ll put some bullshit bronze eagle up instead if it means a former vice president will show up.”

“And you disagree with this calculus.”

“I most certainly do,” Sam said. 

The BAKER in question was 2nd Lieutenant Vernon J. Baker, the first black WWII veteran to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and a Wyoming native. It had been known for decades that the Congressional Medal of Honor Society applied Jim Crow standards to recognition of valor but it was not until early 1993 that an official study sanctioned by Defense Secretary Les Aspin exposed this racism for the purpose of rectifying it. This meant that the study had been prepared and awaiting the green light of the incoming administration to publish its findings, which also meant that the data had been available to the preceding administration, whose Secretary of Defense, despite being Wyoming’s lone congressman for 10 years, had chosen to ignore the valor of black World War II veterans rather than criticize the army. Lt. Baker, who had to visit several recruiting offices before being accepted for military service, who completed officer training only to have his commission stripped after the war because he had no college degree, led a weapons platoon of 25 men in an assault on the German stronghold of Castle Aghinolfi in Viareggio, Italy, killing at least nine Nazi soldiers in the attack, taking out two machine gun nests, one observation post and one grenade dugout before providing cover for his platoon mates who were forced to retreat when reinforcements didn’t arrive to finish the job Lt. Baker had begun. The battle for Aghinolfi occurred in April of 1945. Vernon J. Baker retired in 1968 with the rank of Master Sergeant. His valor was recognized by the President of the United States in January, 1997. Sam was 80% certain that TaiPei Jackson’s design featured Sgt. Baker for the specific purpose of highlighting the contrast between the fortitude with which the former Defense Secretary and Vice President confronted critics of his role in inconclusive American military adventures, and his failure to stand up for an actually heroic Wyomingite. And that might have been part of why Sam liked it so much.

But commissioning the piece would certainly scuttle the man’s attendance at the FMC’s inaugural dedication and clearly Patty believed that having him there was more important than the quality or poignance of the piece itself. Since Lori had shown him her urine-soaked pink line, Sam believed that every decision he made needed to consider what was best for his family. These considerations were like complex math problems performed without pencil, paper or calculator and thus, usually incorrect. So, though he would have loved to shine a brighter spotlight on one of his favorite working artist’s talent, while rubbing a historic wrong in the former Vice President’s face, it felt best for his family to keep the Vice President happy. On the other hand, wouldn’t he best serve his family by standing up to Patty and insisting on doing the right thing? This is how it happens, he thought. 

At his old job, conflicts of interest between artists and gallerists were common, with no set formula for resolution. Some successful galleries were notoriously exploitative and others were lauded for their fairness, none of which seemed to have any bearing on how long they lasted on West 20th Street. 

At Patty’s prompting, Dr. Song commanded the return of the bronze eagle on North Wolcot Street. Brighter hues returned to the digital miasmas.

“What can I tell ya, Sam?” Patty said. “The algorithms have spoken.”

And yet, despite lacking the pugilistic skills that bristled from Patty like a Van de Graaf generator, he wanted to win this fight with her. He took a lot lying down, but he wouldn’t know how to deal with ignoring TaiPei Jackson’s tribute to Vernon J. Baker in favor of some big, bronze banality that might consolidate Patty’s power. Maybe if it had been perpetuating Lieutenant Baker’s underrecognition, or shafting a superior artist for a boring craftsman alone, he might have been able to stomach a more flow-going stance. But the reason he’d dreamt up this agency in the first place, and it was Sam’s brainchild that Patty and Gil had gotten off the ground, was to make a genuine difference in how Americans engaged with our own history. More than a quarter of Americans passed by some type of monument every day, intentionally or otherwise. And to be sure, recent installations like the Pflugerville Fallen Warrior Memorial near where Nelson grew up were solemn, effective reminders of those who gave the last full measure of devotion. But Sam wanted to reach the cynics and the candyasses, the folks who couldn’t reconcile their love of country with their recognition of America’s long, painful history of atrocity. And he was smart enough to know you couldn’t do this by coopting artists who articulated those grievances most vividly. No, these were exactly the people that needed to be lionized, which required capitulation from the same authority needed to marginalize the trouble makers to continue benefitting from whitewashing history. It would take finesse, but Sam believed he possessed a nuanced enough understanding of art, history and current public perception to make a difference. Was that more compelling than his position as linchpin between seasoned congressman and war hero? Not at the moment. They were aware that Sam wasn’t entirely giftless, but they expected him to be coopted without making a fuss. Well fuck ‘em. That just wasn’t going to happen. And no matter what the software said, no bronze fucking eagle was going excite a real Casperite on his way through town. What could Sam call on to prevail? What advantages did he really have over Patty? Could true mission fervor help him triumph over self-service? 

Sam’s left hand had balled itself up and cocked itself on his on his hip. Ooh, he thought, guess this means I’m strategizing! He was staring at the family photo on his desk. It came from a photo session his parents commissioned for his grandparents’ 40th wedding anniversary. Patty wore a denim jacket with the collar turned up. Her bangs were frizzy and her teeth were crooked, but she still exuded the confidence of a swimsuit model. The photo session had been in Patty’s parents’ backyard and Sam remembered watching Quimosabe their Cocker Spaniel chewing on a green hula hoop. In the photo they’d given to Grandma Sylvia and Grandpa Joe, Sam was looking right at the camera. But in this one his eyes were turned to Quimosabe, and it almost looked like he had no pupils or irises at all. Sam had always seen a scaffolding of psychic hierarchy in the picture, his brother’s good humor and the favor it won from the entire family, Sheila’s earnestness, the inner hum of athletic prowess that made Patty’s brother Timmy’s body sing just as loudly in a sweater with his hands on his knees as it did on the soccer field, Sam’s own flightiness. But he understood things. God, how dumb that sounded. But he did. Things that most people didn’t. And if Patty was so great, she’d be able to run through a little controversy without stumbling. The plan had to be solid. And if cocking a hand on a hip helped, cock away.

[storiesbybrian]

You Live In A Zoo

Ken was riding alone in the elevator, holding a large black forest cake when he sneezed. He aimed his face away from the cake, but the volume of snot and spit oozing down the elevator’s wood-paneling suggested the cake had not escaped the sneeze’s blast radius. Well, Ken thought. Maybe the cake deserves it for preventing my hands from taking one for the team. So it was unsurprising to turn back and see the white-piped letters reading HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESSICA glistening with effluvia, but it was still dismaying. Ken would have loved to blame the person who insisted that cake boxes, with their thin cardboard and non-biodegradable plastic skylights, were preposterously wasteful, but that ever so environmentally ethical person was the same one who just exposed the cake to his own inner environment. He tried blowing the cake clean, which sent a flagella of mucus he hadn’t realized was dangling from his nose lashing across both Ps, just as the elevator stopped on his in-laws’ floor.

He stepped out and placed the slimy cake on the hallway carpet. Sounds of merriment  streamed from the cracked door of his wife’s childhood home. Sounds of merriment and his father-in-law’s favorite record, Extensions by the Manhattan Transfer. That damn record was going to play on repeat all night. Ken took a tissue from his pocket and poised a corner of it over the cake, hoping to absorb his nose’s unwelcome contribution without disturbing the calligraphy. He caught one substantial gob that way, but a few streaks still glared up at him. Using a different corner of the tissue, he swept these toward the nearest cherries where they could just blend right in.

When the most damning of the evidence was cleared, Ken stuffed the tissue into his back pocket and carried the cake the rest of the way to his mother-in-law’s 70th birthday party. Jessica and Boris’s apartment had five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms, all centered around a dining room so large, Ken always expected Irish wolfhounds to come running in at dinner time, even though the building was pet-free. Ken was nearly sure he would have hated the art they slapped all over their infinite wallspace even if his in-laws’ rent wasn’t lower than what he and Caroline were paying for a one-bedroom 10 blocks away. But maybe he did feel more brutally assaulted by that economic outrage than he did by the enlarged ads for a French liqueur, the brown, crumbling opera announcements, the braille transcriptions of rap lyrics and poetry by Havel, the portraits of all six members of their immediate family, all those ornate frame corners poking from the mint green walls like dungeon spikes.

“Happy Birthday!” he said loudly enough, he hoped, for his mother-in-law to hear him anywhere in the cavernous apartment. He turned left, ducking under copper whisks and ladles hanging from the kitchen doorway to hand the snot-smeared cake off to his brother-in-law Gene, who ruled the kitchen with a despotism his cooking did not merit. Gene took it with one hand, without looking up from his phone. Caroline was pinned to the living room sofa by two of their nephews. Ken stood at the edge of the room, giving the entire party one more chance to herald his arrival, and maybe give him subtle guidance on who to kiss first, his wife, the birthday girl or scotch. Just in case any of Rebecca’s guests noticed he was there, he imagined them judging him most harshly if he greeted anyone before his wife so he wended his way past Caroline’s siblings and parents’ friends to the skirmish on the couch.

“Hi Uncle Ken!” his nephew Elijah said. “Can I tickle your armpits?”

Ken knew permission didn’t matter so after glancing disgustedly at the cluster of paintings, charcoals and lithographs, united in their celebration of 19th Century Japanese agriculture, he stiff-armed Elijah and leant over to kiss Caroline. He wanted to be able to confide in her about the splash he’d made on her mother’s cake, to have it be their dirty little secret, which made him think of Betsy, a girl he’d known years before getting married who, one winter, dared him to stick his tongue up her nostril, which he did. And while getting his tongue poked by her jagged, salty boogers wasn’t much of an erotic thrill, goddamn it was intimate! But Caroline’s devotion to her mother was too slavish to allow her to conspire, even mildly, against her so, with Elijah swiping away at his underarm and kicking at his shin to get closer, Ken just smiled and told her she looked nice, wondering why breathing in the chopped herring on her breath didn’t feel as intimate as Betsy’s boogers.

Elijah reached a few finger tips to Ken’s armpit. Ken clamped his arm down, trapping Elijah’s wriggling fingers against his ribcage. Ken smirked and said, “Still too thin to win, boy.”

“Uh, Ken?” Gene said, swatting his own torso with a spatula right where Joan Jett’s eyes squinted from his dark denim Meow Mix apron. “May I see you in the kitchen?”

Everyone at the party intoned her own version of, “Uh oh, what’d you do?”

Ken assured Caroline that everything was fine and dragged Elijah toward the kitchen ready to deny everything. Absolutely everything. Just before the utensil stalactites, Ken raised his arm and Elijah ran back to the sofa, stopping briefly to try crying but abandoning the project when no tears sprang forth. In the kitchen, Gene gave Joan Jett a break and pointed his spatula at a Royal Copenhagen gravy boat on a shelf he couldn’t reach.

“Gene,” Ken said.

“Yes, Ken?”

“You know I’m not the tallest one here. I’m not even your tallest family member.”

“Darling,” Gene’s father Boris said, poking a rare nude spot on a wall repeatedly. “I’m hungry.”

Boris tried to maintain deference to his son while also entering his own kitchen and sticking spoonfuls from every pot into his mouth, using a different spoon each time, and leaving it there, until it looked like he was trying to swallow a very fancy bicycle gear. Boris was almost elfin in his slightness, his ribbed turtle neck sagging from the slender limbs of his 4’ 9” frame. But then there were his eyebrows, which Ken believed could hold carnations by their stems.

“Daddy!” Gene said. “How is it?”

“That one’s great, that one’s pretty good, that one’s very good, that one’s too mushy and that one needs salt,” Boris said, extracting the spoon corresponding to each critique separately.

Ken felt like the entertainment value of the family schtick had reached its apex, so he handed Gene the gravy boat and made his way to the bar.

Boris had hired the same catering company that handled Ken and Caroline’s wedding, but only for beverage and waiting service. All of the food was courtesy of Gene, who bravely ignored the disappointment shrink-wrapping every thank you and congratulations his parents’ guests lavished on him. Gene’s menu was modeled on Boris and Rebecca’s first date, when Rebecca’s grandmother had served them beef stroganoff by candlelight on the fire escape of Rebecca’s childhood apartment in Middle Village. In addition to the egg noodles and beef stew, Gene had kasha varnishkes, steamed carrots, roast broccoli, cold potato leek soup, and fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with goat cheese. The shard of blossom batter Boris had hacked off with a spoon edge was what needed salt. Ken had never eaten Rebecca’s cooking, which led him to believe it was bad, and he wondered how Boris finessed deploying gusto on their first date with exiling her from the kitchen for the next 40 years.

“Scotch and soda?” Ken said to the bartender.

“Single malt or blend?” the bartender asked. Ken was slightly perturbed to be delayed by further consideration, but this was a special occasion so maybe Boris had sprung for some of the good stuff.

“Single malt,” he said. “Hold the soda.”

The bartender poured a slug from an oddly shaped bottle of a brand Ken never heard of into a wine glass. Tattooed flames rose above the cuffs of her tuxedo shirt, licking at her palms, making Ken feel warmer.

“Hey,” he said. “Have I seen your band play? At the Mercury Lounge?”

“Nice try,” she said. “But I don’t think so.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Ken saw Caroline’s twin brother Tommy watching him get his drink and somehow Ken knew that Tommy had already made the bartender tense about getting hit on.

“No really,” Ken said. “I’m… married, but I do get out to see music pretty often.”

The bartender nodded with all the polite contempt she could contain within the boundaries of professionalism. Ken had his drink and now she’d really like to stop interacting with him. Have a nice day, sir. But Ken felt embarrassed and protected by his connection to the payer of tonight’s bills, so, beneath the shroud of his own bullshit version of decorum, he declared himself the arbiter of when this little chat would be over.

“Drums?” he asked.

“I’m not in a band,” she said. “You don’t recognize me.”

She looked past him to someone else who wanted a drink. Ken turned to see who, hoping it was somebody he didn’t know. In five minutes, he’d secretly ruined the birthday cake and meta-cheated on the birthday girl’s youngest daughter.

“Two red wines please,” Caroline’s sister Gretchen said.

“Hey,” Ken said. “Elijah’s really getting stronger!”

“Yeah,” Gretchen said, taking her wines. “I really wish you’d help me discourage his more violent tendencies, Ken.”

Am I crushing it or what? Ken thought. Well, the scotch was very good. Time to move on to the next exhibit and pay tribute to his mother-in-law.

Rebecca was in a group that included her brother Alan, and her department dean at CUNY. They stood by Boris’s large oil of a barn in Vermont. Ken couldn’t look at the painting without picturing two farmers holding Boris by the ankles so they could paint the barn with his eyebrows.

“No!” Rebecca said to her brother.

“Oh yes,” Uncle Alan said. “Ken, maybe you’ve heard about this.”

“About what? Happy birthday, Rebecca.”

“Thank you, Ken,” she said, extending her cheek to be bussed. Ken never found Rebecca attractive, but her hair was well-coiffed and her jawline was strong and she usually smelled nice. “How’s the cake look?”

“Like a potential fire hazard,” he said to a heartening amount of chuckling. “What am I supposed to settle here?”

“Well, Alan says there was a guy on his flight who was whittling. Whittling! On an airplane. Is that really a thing now?”

“Oh yeah, I have heard something about that,” Ken said. He had not.

“See?” Alan said. “And it was a full-on bowie knife too!”

“Must’ve been a service knife,” Rebecca’s dean said, waiting for his subordinate to laugh at his wit. Rebecca nodded without mirth and Ken tried staring at the dean, daring him to be petty enough to make a note of Rebecca’s defiance, but wary that the dean might mistake his look for a ha ha I’m funnier than you taunt. Someone tapped Ken’s shoulder. It was Tommy, beckoning Ken into the bedroom where he still lived.

“Boys,” Rebecca said. “No vaping!”

Tommy closed the door. Ken had never been able to square Tommy’s bedroom decor with his personality. Floating shelves jutted from one burgundy wall, holding several dozen coffee table books on subjects ranging from wartime photography to arctic wildlife photography, none of which Ken had ever heard Tommy talk about, even when relevant subjects came up in family conversations. The opposite wall was dominated by a wide oak desk that held three monitors across which Bloomberg financial data perpetually ticked. His bed was a stately four-poster that Ken doubted ever saw any action. Tommy sat on it and invited Ken to sit next to him. Ken declined.

“I do have a pen, if you want some,” Tommy said.

“No thanks.”

“So… uh, just thought you should know that the reason Gene called you into the kitchen was to settle a bet we had.”

“Uh huh?”

“Ken,” Tommy said. “You know Caroline tells me everything, right? Like, everything.”

“Well I’m sure there are some-”

“Everything.”

“I see.”

“So, like, my bet with Gene,” Tommy said, now fiddling with the vape pen. “Gene says he can smell how long it’s been since somebody’s… you know. Had sex?”

“Um, for just how much was this bet?”

“Five bucks.”

“Ooh, high stakes!”

“Hey, you can make fun of me if you want Ken, but has it ever occurred to you that I might be helpful to you here?”

Ken tried to leave the room and Tommy yanked him by the arm til he was sitting on Tommy’s plaid comforter with the edge of a sham pillow under one buttock, Tommy’s weight by the foot of the bed seesawing Ken till his feet didn’t reach the floor. And sure enough, Caroline had told Tommy everything, everything being that Ken had not had sex with his wife in several months, and that she correctly surmised it was because he had gotten so tired of being the sole initiator of sexual contact with his wife that he had vowed to leave his balls in her court until she was ready to pick them up and play with them of her own volition. And even with Tommy’s spin on the state of his sister’s marriage, it all sounded pretty reasonable to Ken. What Ken was afraid to say, to Caroline or Tommy or anyone, was that he just wanted to be wanted, that he was tired of doing all of the wanting, so tired, and ashamed of how unwanted he felt and further ashamed of how hopeful he was that his wife’s overweight twin brother might actually be able to help him out here. So they talked some more. And vaped. Ken was about to ask Tommy to put on some music when his phone chirped. It was a text from Caroline reading CAKE!

Ken and Tommy emerged from the bedroom to see everyone gathered and facing Boris and Rebecca. Boris signaled Gene to turn down the music mid-Coo Coo U. Ken stood next to Caroline, trying not to seethe at her for exposing his private foibles to what now felt like the entire party. Did everyone around them seem extra gentle and sympathetic with him? Or was that Tommy’s pot?

Boris gave a bland speech about how thrilling it was to share this milestone with so many of his and Rebecca’s nearest and dearest. Ken estimated the toast was about 15% too long, but Rebecca managed to keep her smile looking genuine the whole time.

Ken went off to use Gretchen’s bathroom, because it was the only one with a door that shut completely. Gretchen’s room was being used for changing and storage by the caterers. Among the various duffels and totes was one Hello Kitty backpack scaled with buttons featuring ostensibly rebellious slogans: Save the Rainforests, They/Them, Fuck White Supremacy, Stop All Wars, People Over Profits, Health Care Is A Right, Leave Britney Alone, Oil Kills and more, plus a few that were just pictures or symbols. Ken used his toe to undo the backpack’s zipper, and then the same toe to widen his view into the backpacks contents, just enough to see the scarred blonde wood of a few drumsticks. He tried his best to not feel ashamed by how good this vindication felt. But with that much joy for a triumph that frivolous, the shame could not be kept at bay. Out of fury at the flame-wristed bartender for her role in his present difficulties, he did not bother to rezip her backpack.

Gene was waiting for him outside of Gretchen’s bathroom.

“Best lock?” he asked, handing Ken a piece of birthday cake.

Ken nodded and took the cake without eating it. They ambled together back to within earshot of the Manhattan Transfer. Ken pretended not to notice Gene’s pretending not to notice the guests smiling more widely over the cake than they had over his fare.

“Saw you talkin’ to Tommy,” he said. “And I dunno what he told you, but if you want the advice of somebody with a more robust love life?”

“You mean you,” Ken said.

Gene stopped walking for a millisecond, as if to warn Ken that he was about to blow his shot at the gems Gene was feeling generous enough to offer. And while he was still hiding how desperate he really was, Ken put enough remorse on his face for Gene to continue.

“You’ve gotta be an animal Ken! You know? Primitive! Find something deep within yourself and just let it out. Rowr! That’s sexy.”

Ken nodded agreeably. Too agreeably, like, give me a medal for being such a good agreer.

“Thanks Gene,” he said. “Here. You can have my cake.”

[storiesbybrian]

No Goats Were Harmed in the Celebration of this Bar Mitzvah

           Most of Carew’s friends had self-righteous parents, well-meaning adults generally respected and admired by their adolescent kids. But Carew’s parents meant extra well, like repair the world well. When he was younger, their moral exertions felt negligible. While trick or treaters came away from the Shapiros’ front door with copies of Notes from a Birmingham Jail, Carew still hauled in a bucketful of candy from their less, or maybe more civic-minded neighbors. But as the hormonal tide of adolescence rolled in, Ralph and Bettina started requiring Carew’s participation in their ethical olympiad. Carew presumed they mistook his physical maturation for a readiness to join the family’s devotion to restorative justice, because he was still too immature to allow himself to realize that their disruptions of his constant attempts to, in honor of his namesake, steal third, were not entirely unintentional.

           At a bat mitzvah party in April, just after his mother had finished helping lift his classmate Aviva’s family members up in chairs, while Carew tried finding the best angle to see some flesh through all that royal blue taffeta, but not wanting to see too much lest the arousal become unbearable, he felt a hand rest on his shoulder, and even recognizing the feel and weight of his father’s caress, his first thought was that a policeman had responded to a call from Aviva’s horrified parents and got there as quickly as he could to haul Carew to jail on charges of private lewdness.

           “Hey,” Ralph said. “Got a sec?”

           Carew tried to recover from the jolt of contact, and then from the strange absence of relief that he’d been approached by someone who loved him instead of an apprehending officer, accomplishing neither and just following his dad out of the hotel ballroom and into a lobby where children were giggling at each other’s high-pitched profanities between sips of helium from unknotted, steel-colored balloons. Ralph gestured toward a circular banquette that reminded Carew of an impaled ring of pineapple. Bettina exited the ballroom, checking her watch for confirmation that this appointment was happening right on schedule, and sat down next to her son, close enough to darken his blazer with the sweat she’d worked up during the hora.

           “Hey buddy,” she said.

           “Do we have to leave?” Carew asked.

           “No no,” Ralph said. “We just wanted to ask you, well tell you, well-”

           “Carew,” Bettina said. “Do you remember Aviva’s Torah portion?”

           “Well, I didn’t really study-”

           “No. I mean, do you remember what it was about?”

           “Oh,” Carew said. “Yeah, it was about all the specific instructions Moses got on Mount Sinai for the Ark of the Covenant and how to decorate the tent where they’d keep it.”

           “Never mind that last week was Mishpatim where they lay out the rules for free labor,” Bettina said. “Post-Exodus codification of ethical slavery. Hmph!”

           “Well your mom’s the family scholar, that’s for sure!” Ralph said. “But, do you see anything related to uh-”

           “Terumah,” Bettina said.

           “Right, Terumah here? Like, anything?”

           “Um, shiny decorations?”

           “Carew,” Ralph said.

           “Well I think it’s a really fun party, and Aviva looks beautiful!” Carew said. “I mean, look how much fun Mom’s having!”

           But even with his balls distorting every signal his brain received, Carew knew there was no point in arguing with people who believed they were doing God’s work, and that the smartest thing would be to warn his friends that his bar mitzvah was going to be… unusual.

            The Shapiros biked home through the faint crispness of early Spring. Ralph ignored his son’s subdued disappointment (he was beginning to feel deceptive about all of Carew’s feelings and activities he pretended not to notice), while simultaneously making it seem like keeping up with Carew was a struggle, knowing Carew was no dummy and that too much obtuse encouragement would be identified as the pathetic compensation it really was. Inhaling deeply, imagining his family crashing through the remnants of winter, the contrast between how Ralph felt and how he wanted Carew to think he felt amounted to a level of manipulation that made him very uncomfortable. Bettina cruised ahead in the biking gear she’d changed into after cake was served. The moon came in sight and Ralph decided that blow-softening wasn’t manipulation. It was kindness. And parents always guided their children, whether they noticed it or not, and if anything, Carew should have as great a sense of autonomy as possible. So Ralph kept his tongue dangling in faux exhaustion as they approached the biggest hill they’d tackle between the Marriott and their house.

           With her toes clipped to her pedals, Bettina was halfway up the hill before Carew started climbing, Ralph not far behind. Her breathing was easier and skin drier than it had gotten in the thick of the Romanian folk dance she’d been sure to explain to Ralph and Carew had been appropriated as “Jewish tradition” by kibbutzniks in British-mandated Palestine in the 1920s. As ever, she’d assured her husband and son that the hora’s ersatz authenticity shouldn’t diminish the joy it brought to families who assumed their ancestors had been stomping, circling and hoisting for centuries. But that was one more thing to cross off the list on Carew’s big day.

           “Come on, you two,” she called back down the hill.

           The asphalt sparkled under the sodium lights, wiped briefly dark by their passing shadows. Ralph raised from his seat to put more body weight on his pedals. Though he’d long outgrown the bitterness he carried from his own bar mitzvah 34 years earlier, he could still hear the clang of metal chairs unfolding on his family’s cracked driveway while his father set plastic bottles of off-brand soda on a card table in preparation for the spare, poorly attended celebration of his attainment of Jewish manhood. He remembered coming home from school that Friday, hoping for some rest before services that night. But his father needed him to clear out the garage so they could set up a ping pong table borrowed from the synagogue before Sabbath began. Ralph tried to muster gratitude for his parents’ efforts, mainly because he loved and genuinely appreciated them, but also because he sensed his father was testing him, daring him to complain, or even betray a glimmer of disappointment that no hall would be rented, no meal would be served and Saturday night’s dj would be Grandma Corrine playing her favorite cassettes on his boombox. Ralph hoped that he’d been gentle enough with his father’s pride that an unspoken accord was reached, one that recognized how gracefully Ralph handled the weight of expectations his father was placing on him. But, as he stood on the ping pong table wrapping a lone blue streamer around the dangling lightbulb, it felt eerily like the perfect time for his dad to offer some sign, some expression of appreciation, not only for the flawless job he’d done in front of the entire congregation that morning, but for the perfect dutifulness and lack of entitlement he’d shown in its aftermath. But, like so many of his Hebrew school classmates who had better things to do that night, this was one more rejected invitation. Now that Ralph could stand and be counted as a member of his community, the faith he’d maintained and even bolstered that his father was watching him intently for signs of true manhood was shaken by a suspicion that the real message his father was sending him, intentionally or not, was get used to disappointment. And Ralph’s response had been a private vow that when he had children, they would know that he was proud of them. And when they reached adolescence, he would celebrate them lavishly. 

           Carew pedaled harder, catching Bettina near the top of the hill, and as Ralph crested a few seconds behind, he loosened his tie to let the wind of the downhill cool his hot, sweaty neck, amazed by how wildly he could vascillate between feeling like he’d arrived at a given moment along a coherent, linear path, and the more realistic sense that a man’s life entailed cracking, spilling, gutting and rotting before hurriedly gathering up the filthy encampment one laughably called the self, and how fraudulent but necessary it seemed to keep zooming out until the whole mess was far enough away to seem whole again.

           The trio turned onto their street and Carew and Bettina broke into an all out race. Ralph hung back, hearing his wife and son laugh as they shot, Tron-like toward the three-story house they’d owned since Carew was 9. He still got a jolt of dopamine from attributing his success to discipline and hard work. But as soon as they’d met, Bettina told him about the “green lights for whites,” ticking off a list of unacknowledged advantages he’d been granted by seeming, even as a Jew, acceptable while so many people of color worked harder than Ralph ever did, only to wind up in Ralph’s parents’ neighborhood, so much more grateful for so much less that they still sent their kids off to fight wars to protect such sacred privileges. The way Bettina’s discourse swooped in for intricate detail, then back up to the general idea had an electric effect on Ralph. He listened eagerly as she described how black people stuffed themselves into “honky-ass personas” just to be considered for a job, a raise, a clerkship, a business loan, a taxi ride, an office lease, only to be perceived as threatening anyway, and the resilience it took to go through that much self-betrayal. Sitting with her over coffee, Ralph felt cleansed of whatever residual self-pity he still carried from his modest upbringing, and he loved her instantly. He loved how fiercely she inspired him to be a better man than he thought he could be. He loved how Bettina helped him love himself more.

           Carew beat Bettina by a few bike lengths and Ralph opened the garage with his phone. They hung their bikes from hooks on the giant peg board Carew and he had put up the previous summer, and hung their helmets from their handlebars.

           “Can I play FIFA for a little while?” Carew asked as they entered the house through the garage.

           “What chapter are you on in your book?” Bettina asked.

           “Um, the one where Menelaus retrieves Patroclus’s body from the battlefield.”

           “Book 17. Alright. Don’t stay up too late.”

           “Thanks mom!”

           Carew dashed further into the house while Ralph and Bettina shared their special “that boy’s alright” smile with each other.

           Bettina knew more history, but Ralph had more history with bar mitzvahs. They were able to acknowledge this difference and felt assured that they could avoid a conflation that might damage the harmony with which they were enlisting their son to enjoy a much more serious type of bar mitzvah. But as much as they wanted to believe there was no daylight between their values and those of their adolescent son, Ralph had caught signs of Carew wobbling, lololol’ing at offensive jokes in chat rooms, exaggerating how much he bench-pressed, shunning some of the kids he’d played with since kindergarten, shrugging and looking at the ground when speaking with other adults; all normal, but still disappointing. Maybe now wasn’t the best time for statements some might call radical, statements that might knock Carew over just when he needed more shoring up. Ralph understood that harboring notions of secret, nay conspiratorial alliances with his son was an invocation of exactly the kind of privilege Bettina loved him for purposefully eschewing. But he began to wonder, Am I limiting myself for the sake of wokeness? It was an insidious thought, a damn spot he couldn’t scrub out, which is why he avoided sharing it with Bettina. Because she was right. A teenager’s well-being had nothing to do with caterers and fog machines.

           Since becoming a widower when Carew was 10, Ralph’s father came over every Friday for dinner. Tension got high enough often enough that the ritual never felt permanent, like any Friday might be the last one. But seven nights later, he’d be out on the front porch in his houndstooth fedora, holding a half-gallon of non-dairy mint chip. On the Friday six weeks before his bar mitzvah, Carew went out on a limb.

           “Grandpa Eddie, have you ever heard of Utnaphishtim?” Carew asked after his grandfather had blessed the wine and bread.

           “Who?”

           Carew looked at his mother like he needed help. He did, but not the way Bettina thought.

           “Utnapishtim,” Bettina said. “A character in the Epic of Gilgamesh who mirrors Noah in the Torah.”

           “Oh boy,” Eddie said. “Here we go. Alright, let’s get it over with. Come on, come on. Do I need to take notes?”

           “It’s-” Carew began, knowing his mom would take the bait and activate a high and mighty tone that Carew loved, whenever it wasn’t directed at him.

           “It’s contextual, Eddie, and no I will not apologize for using that big, fancy term,” Bettina said. “Because we want Carew to understand the cultural values of-”

           “Cultural values?” Eddie said. “The Jewish People-”

           “They weren’t Jews, Eddie,” Bettina said.

           “They were Hebrews!” Carew and Ralph said in unison.

           “My favorite part of the evening,” Eddie said. “When my daughter-in-law gives me Judaism lessons. Actually Bettina, the Hebrews split into the Judaeans, aka ‘Jews,’ and Israelites around 2600 years ago. So as I was saying, while other cults in the desert were trying to make camels fly, the Jewish People invented the very concept of ‘cultural values’. What happened to the people that wrote this other flood story?”

           “Dad would you please pass the broccoli?”

           “OK, Eddie,” Bettina said. “Sorry for getting pedantic. No offense.”

           “None taken,” Eddie said. “And the chicken’s delicious tonight, too.”

           “It’s just that we’re very excited.”

           This is what Carew was waiting for.

           “Oh yeah?” Eddie asked.

           Bettina looked hopefully at Ralph, who took his cue.

           “Dad,” he said. “We’re taking on the Bar Mitzvah Industrial Complex!”

           “Really,” Eddie said, showing no signs of awareness that Ralph’s bar mitzvah was the moment when things began to change between them. “And how do you plan on doing that? No wait, lemme guess. You’re renting a cruise ship and filling it with endangered animals.”

           “Cruise ship?!” Carew said. “Like one with a big water slide?”

           “Carew,” Ralph said. “No one’s renting a cruise ship.”

           “Uh Ralph,” Eddie said. “Are you ever gonna give that broccoli back?”

             Carew continued his studies, still hopeful Grandpa Eddie might make enough trouble to steer his parents’ lances toward a different windmill. In one of his weekly meetings with Rabbi Foreman, he asked the rabbi what made Noah so superior to the rest of the antediluvian global population? If the life expectancy was upwards of 500 back then, didn’t that mean people were treating each other better than they did nowadays? And what about all the animals on the Ark? Were they the moral exceptions to their species too, or were those left behind just innocent casualties of mankind’s iniquity? Most students just wanted to memorize the Hebrew so they didn’t embarrass their parents when the big day came, so Rabbi Foreman was thrilled by Carew’s inquisitiveness. On the other hand, he was in too much demand as it was, and afraid that kindling too much warmth with the Shapiros would make it harder to fend off Bettina’s involvement in more synagogue affairs. The recycling program she’d implemented was one thing, writing letters to supermax inmates another, and it was too hard to explain the thorniness to Carew’s mother without exposing himself to accusations of complicity in society’s dooming actions. Still, when a young congregant was genuinely curious about Torah, his rabbi should the last person to mute that interest.

           So he explained about Nephilim, the semi-angelic beings in the previous chapter, who had intermingled with mankind to produce giants not only capable of fathering children in their 500s, but of building watercraft that could rescue all of life on Earth. Rabbi Foreman spun the same yarn Carew’s parents did, about how research used to be relatives’ encyclopedias and trips to the library and requests by mail to the Smithsonian Institute, and how he wondered if the knowledge stuck as well when it was easier to come by.

           “So you see,” the rabbi said. “These ancestors, they were heroic in the ways that mattered most to our people, mentally, morally, and yes, physically.”

           “Or maybe,” Carew said. “They exaggerated their virility because men who subjugated women back then were just as insecure about their masculinity as they are now.”

           “Maybe,” Rabbi Foreman said, stroking his beard and looking at the clock.

           The rabbi thought about the passage immediately following the Earth’s restoration of habitability. It was only three verses, about post-flood humanity’s attempt to build a tower to the heavens. Maybe they were just striving for safety beyond the floodline. But even if their reasons were not as noble, Rabbi Foreman never really understood why mankind’s unity incurred the wrath of God. What was so wicked about working together to build something great? Or was the destruction of a great tower and the scattering of its tiny inhabitants supposed to be a much more symbolic rebuke of toxic masculinity?

           “Rabbi Foreman?” Carew said.

           “Yes.”

           “I asked if we could meet a little later next week? I’m supposed to visit that dairy my parents talked to you about.”

             The following week, in the car on the way to Telmont’s Dairy Farm, Carew dispensed with all subtleties and socraticisms and spoke openly about his feelings.

           “I feel trapped,” he said.

           “The windows are shut to keep out the manure smell, buddy,” Ralph said.

           “Dad.”

           Bettina shot Ralph a look and he dropped his innocence act at once.

           “Trapped, you say?”

           “No. Mom. I just- look. I know how that sounds. But yeah. Like I feel like I either have to be in lockstep with you guys or I’m a bad person. Feels… stifling.”

           All three Shapiros stared out of their respective windows at the farmland they were passing, the corn and tobacco fields just beginning to brown, the pasture sod stiffening at the tips. Carew drummed on the little shelf by his door.

           “Carew,” Bettina said. “What would make you feel better?”

           “I mean,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even. “Just, a normal party? Where our friends and family can have fun instead of being reminded of how short they’re all falling?”

           Bettina parked the car by the dairy office and turned around to face her son.

           “But they are falling short, son,” she said. “Even we, who work so hard, don’t always embody our ideals. Do we, honey?”

           Carew shook his head, unable to keep tears from springing forth.

           “I’m sorry,” he said.

           “Well you should be!” Ralph said.

           “Ralph!”

           “No! Look at this!” Ralph said. “Oh I want a big party, OMG stop making me feel so guilty! How in the world have all the years we’ve put into raising him amounted to this?”

           Carew wept more openly. His mother handed him a recycled tissue.

           “Fine,” Carew said. “Let’s go commune with beasts.”

           “No,” Bettina said. “Wait a second!”

           Carew and Ralph were already out of the car, refusing to look at each other. Both were confused, but Ralph’s impulse to project certainty was stronger. Carew seemed to have already abandoned whatever that little rebellion in the car was, but something felt unsettled.

           A screen door squeaked open and whacked shut. A large woman in a Doc Martens and a tattered gingham dress crunched across the gravel to greet them. Both of her arms were fully sleeved in tattoos.

           “Hi!” she said. “Zippy Telmont. Y’all must be the Shapiros!”

           Bettina was still in the car. Carew’s face was still streaked and puffy. Ralph was still too furious and confused to be authentically friendly.

           “Yeah,” he said. “Zippy. Could you, would you mind if I just talked to my son for a minute here? Alone?”

           “OK. I did think y’all were the ones on a tight schedule, but…” Zippy lowered her face to her phone and walked back into the office, murmuring to herself.

           Carew glared at his father, sensing his doubts, silently accusing him of bullying. Ralph stood guilty as charged, trying to slow his breathing. And maybe it was the inhalation of cow patty fumes, but suddenly Ralph was disgusted by the dairy, and ashamed of their plan to bring friends and family there to work the land alongside the addicts and runaways Telmont employed. His hands were balled up and he wanted to get back in the car and drive away and never come back. Looking around, his gaze fixed on a brightly painted silo jutting from behind the office. It took him a moment to decipher the nursery rhyme splashed along its walls, the red and blue Holstein’s lunar leap, the laughing mutt, cheshire musician and romantically involved tablewear all waving from the back of a psychedelic haywagon. Bettina finally got out of the car, but stayed where she was, giving Ralph a chance to resolve his own outburst. Ralph just stared at the silo, hoping Carew might look at it too, and find a better message in its cartoon than anything Ralph could think of to say. Carew blew his nose and shrugged at his dad. 

           “Ready?” Ralph asked. Carew nodded and Bettina came to join them. Zippy loomed behind the screendoor. Ralph beckoned her and she came out and shook everyone’s hand.

           “Alright!” she said, squeezing Carew’s shoulder with an absent-mindedness that felt studied. “Lemme show y’all around.”

             Two weeks later, Carew Daniel Shapiro flanked Rabbi Foreman on the pulpit. Facing a sanctuary packed with family, friends and fellow congregants, Carew recited the blessings that bracketed the last four verses of Genesis 11, and his Jewish adulthood was official. He also read chapters 7-10 in Hebrew, and chanted chapters 54 and 55 from the Book of Isaiah. The pervading theme of both readings was the assurance of post-flood humanity’s survival.  

           In his speech, Carew got tepid laughter from a line about the flood in Genesis being “the ultimate Chapter 11.” He wondered aloud what bar mitzvah boys 1000 years ago thought about Noah. Did 600 year-old superancestors seem as improbable to pre-Enlightenment teenagers as they did to millenial ones? Or were medeival communities superstitious enough to believe such holiness and longevity were still within reach? Carew paused for effect, paying extra attention to his mother in the front row. Her eyes were glistening and he knew he was on the right track. He pivoted to a bit about how common language wasn’t much of a safeguard from miscommunication and saw that Bettina was so rapt by what her son was saying that she didn’t even look around the sanctuary to check everybody else’s reaction. Carew closed his speech by quoting God’s promise to Noah:

“So long as the earth endures,

Seedtime and harvest,

Cold and heat,

Summer and winter,

Day and night

Shall not cease.

Shabbat Shalom.”

Carew stepped back from the podium. Knowing he was a few hours away from getting bossed around by people with much bigger problems, while covered in dung, he tried to bask as presently as he could in this moment. The most prominent face in the front row now was his grandfather’s. Eddie was brimming with such pride that he unconsciously clapped a hand on his son’s thigh. And at that moment, for the first time in a long time, everything was alright with Ralph.

[storiesbybrian]

Trigger

“Well,” John said. “He’s at it again.”

Matt nodded, wiping sweat from his face. The sauna benches creaked.

“I just want,” John said. “To start my day with a little peace and quiet. Is that really so much to ask? It’s so early.”

The sauna door opened and Bobby entered with his newspaper, reminding Matt of a naked commuter. Matt knew Bobby’s name but Bobby didn’t know his.

“Huh!” Bobby said, jabbing his newspaper toward the noise. “Guess Starbucks rejected his confederate money again.”

John chuckled. Matt offered a non-committal wince that could be perceived as a smile. He thought Bobby tried too hard with his wisecracks, but he wasn’t looking for an argument.

“Great,” Bobby said. “Here he comes.”

Chuck ambled up to the window and knocked on it, shaking the towel he had tucked into the folds of his pink tummy. “Hey there fellas!” he said.

John sniffed, Bobby nodded and Matt waved.

“Well,” Chuck said closing the door behind him. “One o’ youse is my pal. Right Matthew?”

Matt preferred not to speak this early in the morning, so he looked Chuck in the eye and nodded. He knew his friendliness toward Chuck disappointed John, but John would either get over that or he wouldn’t. He didn’t care at all what Bobby thought.

“Whaddya say there, Johnny boy? How’s life in the business of show, eh?”

“I’m gonna go shower,” John said, and walked out, his damp calves wisping against each other and his nose in the air.

“I tell ya,” Chuck said. “That John. He’s so confused he don’t know which way to go.”

Bobby glared at Chuck.

“Oh you got something tough to say to an old man, ya Marxist?”

Bobby sighed and snapped open his newspaper.

“Ya see,” Chuck said to Matt. “That’s what happens when you don’t got any kids. Hey Bobby, you know Matthew here has two daughters? Right Matt?”

Matt smiled ruefully at Bobby and nodded.

“What are you,” Bobby asked, his glasses sliding down his nose. “Harpo Fucking Marx?”

Matt honked an imaginary horn.

“See?” Chuck said. “How many young people know who the Marx Brothers are? Watch this. Matt, what’s Groucho’s real name?” “Julian.”

“See? Unlike you, this guy actually knows something.”

“Alright Chuck,” Bobby said. “What’s got you so worked up this morning?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, running a meaty hand over the top of his skull. “Hoo! Is it hot in here or what?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. “It’s a sauna.”

Chuck looked at Matt and nodded toward Bobby. “You see this wise guy? I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. Same thing that bothers me every day. And it oughtta be bothering you too.”

“These scumbag politicians?”

“That’s right! Thieves, the lot of ‘em!”

“Well,” said Matt. “I have to go. Have a great day.”

“I know you don’t wanna hear me grouse Matty, you can say it. But hey,” Chuck said, yanking the towel from his crotch to wipe his face. “You do computers right?”

Matt nodded.

“I’m trying to find some information. I know it’s in that computer at the library. It’s in there, but I don’t know how to make it come out.” “Well what is it? I’ll print it out and bring it to you next week.”

“Old friend o’ mine. Elmer Burke. Trigger. Trigger Burke.”

 Matt showered and left for his psychiatrist appointment.

 The gym was Matt’s favorite part of shrink days. He would get up at 3:30 AM to be in the pool by 5 so he still had time to lift weights or go outside and run, with 15 minutes to spare for the sauna. He knew that many of the older guys on ellipticals or handling smaller weights, and even some of the heavy lifters noticed the intensity of his workout, while neither Chuck nor John seemed to exercise at all. To them it was part lodge, part spa, with John seeking peace and quiet in the sauna while Chuck explored as many crannies as it took until he found somebody to engage with him for more than five minutes.

None of the guys in the locker room knew that Matt’s trips to the gym were precipitated by throwing his wife’s toothbrush out of an eighth floor window while she was still trying to use it. Slouched quietly on the sauna’s warping benches, he was easily mistaken for a young man who had his shit together. Or at least 42 was young compared to his comrades in sweat.

John was the first person there to be friendly to him, and they built an intimate, anonymous acquaintance over several months, knowing each other’s backgrounds and career paths. After Chuck took a shine to Matt and asked him outright what his name was, highlighting another foothold the brash gained over the meek, Matt wanted badly to go back and grant John the currency of knowing his name first. But how could he explain to either of them how much he liked being a wishbone?

 The next week Matt slipped a 9” x 12” envelope containing printouts of four different bios of Elmer Burke into his gym bag. Elmer, whose nickname derived from his practice of sticking a pistol behind people’s ears before shooting them, was raised by his brother Charlie, who was murdered while Elmer was serving one of his many prison sentences. Reading the various accounts of this obscure criminal’s life, Matt was fascinated by the combination of personal and professional homicides, multiple prison escapes, assumed identities and ultimately a pre-chair meal of well-done steak and six cigars. But he wasn’t shocked until he caught a piece of Trigger’s story that coincided with something Chuck had mentioned once in the shower.

 “You’re from the Carolinas?”

Matt had nodded.

“I went down there, to Charleston. With Issy Sabel. He froze Manischewitz into popsicles and sold ‘em to college kids. Made a fortune!”

And here, according to a freelance Charleston tour guide’s blog, after Elmer Burke escaped from a Massachusetts prison where he was locked up after a botched hit on one of the key participants in the Brinks Robbery, it was Issy Sabel who helped him establish himself in Charleston as a Mr. Dean who consorted with various judges, aldermen and police brass at the YMCA. And Chuck knew these guys first-hand! Matt wasn’t sure he’d ever met anyone with friends who’d gotten the chair before.

 Now Matt cut his workout short to spend more time in the locker room. He could hear Chuck’s voice bouncing along the tile.

“Get the hell outta here with this me too shit! What’s the point of a man’s advancement if it doesn’t increase his chances of getting laid? You’ll cripple the entire society! Hey Willy, put some of that eucalyptus on!”

Other men walked to their lockers shaking their heads. Privately Matt was amused by how difficult these adults found dealing with retrograde attitudes like Chuck’s.

John sat in the sauna, beatific with one towel slung across his hairless torso and another blanketing his lap. Matt wondered why this was the first time he’d noticed how little John actually sweat. He stepped inside, wishing John could know he was forsaking a eucalyptus steam with Chuck to join his first friend in the dry heat of the sauna.

“How goes it?” John asked.

“Very well,” Matt said. “Have you settled into your new desk at work?”

“Oh, it’s an adjustment. But I don’t like to think about that now.”

“Seen any good plays?” Matt asked.

“We did,” John said. “Carousel. With Renee Fleming.”

“Wow.”

“Aw what a voice that broad has!” Chuck said, slapping the window. Matt and John looked at each other wondering how he possibly could have heard them.

He entered the sauna and sat closer to John than Matt. Matt saw John rock to the balls of his feet, poised for escape.

“Oh yeah,” Chuck said. “How ya doin’ John? Yeah, I saw her in the Marriage of Figaro! And then of course she did the anthem at the Super Bowl. Before these idiots started disrespecting the troops, you understand.”

John opened his mouth and then closed it audibly.

“He thinks we oughtta turn our backs on tradition,” Chuck said to Matt. Then turning to John, “OK wise guy, what do you think we should sing instead?”

John just shook his head.

“You know, John comes from a military family,” Matt said.

“That right?”

John gave Matt a comically outraged look.

“And what about you Johnny? Don’t ask don’t tell?”

John closed his eyes and shook his head slowly.

“Hey Chuck,” Matt said.

“You’re right,” Chuck said. “Hey John, I’m sorry. That was outta line.”

John nodded.

“You know,” Chuck said. “When Bobby made that crack. One of many, I know. The one about me jerkin’ off to pictures of Bernard Goetz. You thought I didn’t see. But I did. I saw you snickering and I got a little sore.”

“Well,” Matt said. “That is kinda funny.”

“Excuse me?” Chuck said.

Matt wiped sweat from his face and considered the air in the sauna. An obligation to say something placative seemed etched into the heat. Matt sensed the vague appeal of further antagonism, but also of making immediate amends, with nothing pulling him one way or the other beyond the impetus of being nice to the elderly. He tried to think of something to say that split the difference and at the same time considered saying something to upset John so maybe the two men could gang up on him. But that seemed unrealistic, and possibly influenced by dehydration, and an unwelcome sidetrack anyway while he was trying to calibrate a response that evinced loyalty to Chuck and John without sacrificing his appreciation of the Bernard Goetz joke, which made Matt chuckle. Before Chuck could move from outrage to fury, Matt changed the subject.

“Hey, do you guys ever have a problem handling casual affection?”

“Um… what?” John asked.

“Like, you get friendly with other adults and then at some point do you start kissing the lady hello or hugging the guy or whatever? And then once you’re on kissing terms, do you kiss every time? I’ve always felt really awkward about that.”

Chuck and John stared at Matt. Matt exaggerated his embarrassment to hide the surge of contempt he felt for how pathetically both men handled his curveball, how limited and ungame they were.

“Well,” Chuck said. “Back to the steam room for me. Willy brought the eucalyptus!”

“Yeah,” John said. “I gotta go too. Uh, see you around Matt.”

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “See ya Matt.”

Alone in the sauna, Matt realized he’d forgotten to tell Chuck he had the Trigger Burke printouts. Or not so much forgotten as pivoted toward a more John-friendly morning. No, forgotten. Because why wouldn’t he have mentioned that when he was rummaging his brain for something to placative to say?

Matt hopped off the sauna bench and stepped into the locker room, forgetting his towel. Naked he ran to his locker to retrieve the envelope he’d brought for Chuck. He brought it into to the steam room, closing the door quickly behind him.

Chuck had been talking to Willy, a dentist Matt really disliked. The conversation ceased when he appeared, fanning steam with his large envelope. Matt suspected Chuck had been recounting his weirdly superficial but still personal confession in the sauna, and though he couldn’t tell for sure, he felt an urgency to smooth things over, so he presented Chuck with the envelope.

“What the hell is this?” Chuck asked.

“The computer printouts you wanted,” Matt said.

“What? When did I tell you I wanted computer printouts? And why are you bringing them in here, getting them all damp?”

Matt wasn’t sure how to answer. He stood there naked, sweating, coughing from the eucalyptus, growing increasingly agitated that he’d learned nothing in the sauna, and was having an even harder time knowing what to say now.

“Hey listen,” Willy said. “Maybe you should just hit the showers and call it a day, hah?”

Willy couldn’t have known how fragile Matt was at that moment, nor how intense Matt’s antipathy for him was. And now in lieu of knowing how to handle the situation, all Matt wanted to do was make absolutely certain that Willy knew what a grievous mistake he’d just made.

“Hey!” Chuck said. “Jesus, get security! SECURITY! HELP!”

[storiesbybrian]

With Experimental Music Clogging My Arteries

Everybody thought my brother Jesse would stop lying so much when he got older, that the music the rest of us had to face when we fucked up would rouse him enough to at least recognize a need for change. But before Mom and Dad did, I realized that we were operating as though we were morally superior to Jesse, while he, despite mounting professional and financial defeats, saw things so differently that he was able to dismiss all criticism as noise. Moving back home at 37 and still there at 40? All part of his master plan. So finally I said what the hell, and started believing everything he said.

Jesse: I’m making a movie.

Me: Can’t wait to see it, I’m sure it’ll be great!

Jesse: I’m starting my own company. 

Me: If I can help you find office space, lmk!

Jesse: I’ll pay you back.

Me: Take your time, bruh.

The night after a marathon he’d spent months telling everyone he was running that I never saw him train for, I asked him how it went.

“Hard,” he said. “But worth it!”

“Well,” I said. “We should celebrate.”

My friend Susie ran a 5K earlier in the year and it took me nearly a week to recover from the ensuing celebration. So for a second I thought about calling her to take Jessie out wilding. But I understand Mom and Dad better than Jesse, like I can get what they want without them having to speak, and the way they saw us off at the door suggested low key was best, which was fine by me. A new hotel had booked me to sing at their rooftop bar in a few weeks, so I thought we’d get the best treatment there. Off the elevator, among the wicker chairs and divorcees, Jesse sat by a ledge and pulled out a little notebook. I came back with our drinks and he closed it quickly, but not before I saw the phrase “star-sugared sky.”

“Are you writing about your marathon? I’d love to hear about it!”

Jesse shook his head and took his drink and just held it. Suddenly I realized what a terrible idea taking him out had been. He was looking around at the other people there, then up at the dark sky, whose glitter did seem kinda sweet, and for the first time since we were kids, I saw how afraid he was. I don’t know why any of us hadn’t seen it before, except that we’d probably just become so disgusted with Jesse that we stopped looking at him closely.

I reached out for his shoulder, stopping before I touched it.

“Maybe we should go,” I said.

“OK.”

Jesse brought our half-finished drinks to a table occupied by people younger and prettier than us and asked if he could put them there while he went downstairs and smoked.

In the elevator he asked if he could drive. I will never stop wishing I hadn’t said yes.

“Now,” he said, caressing the wheel. “Let’s talk about you. Like when’s the last time you got some goddamn exercise?”

And then he mashed the gas and took us to a part of town I had avoided for 15 years. Jesse parked on the street in front of a house with decaying walls and a brand new door.

“Come on,” he said.

The driveway was just two tracks of intermittent gravel crumbled over rampant weeds. I heard the squeals of rodents as we walked up to the door. Jesse pulled out a key and opened it. Ammonia fumes wafted out, along with a cabbagey smell the chemicals hadn’t been able to reach. Jesse stepped into the house. I stood outside shaking my head.

“Jesse,” I said. “You know this is right near where Cam bought it.”

“Yeah Beth, I do. Now come on.”

I stepped into the house and Jesse shut the door.

“Flabbergasted?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

While the decorating choices were gaudy and metallic, like a futuristic medieval castle, the furnishings were a fuckload more expensive than mine, as well as our parents’.

“Is that a throne?”

“Wanna sit in it?”

I ran fingers along the armrests. They were mirror-plated with purple upholstery.

“Jesse, what… the fuck?”

“Like you’d believe me.”

My best guess was online gambling. But it wasn’t just the provenance of the silver wallpaper and white tiger throw rug, it was the why. And the when. Mom and Dad told me he rarely left their house. But I guess now with GoPros and such, decorating remotely ain’t no thang. But that left the why. What was it all for? Who came here?

“Have a seat,” Jesse said, patting a white sofa. When I sat down he pressed hard on my shoulder and knocked on the wall. Three secret compartments opened, one with a small control panel and two that cranked out silver shackles. Jesse affixed the shackles to my wrists then diddled the panel to shorten the chains and bring my hands up like wings. For a second I tried to remember if Cam had ever tied me up, but most of our time together was such a fog that now my memories were more of sensations than actual events.

“Jesse, this isn’t funny.”

“It’s not?”

I shook my elbows and flicked my fingers until I ran out of breath. Jesse stood there staring at me.

“OK,” I said. “Time to go home.”

“I’ll make that decision,” he said.

He just stood there staring at me, with a confidence I hadn’t seen in him in years. The way he stood made me feel like nothing I could say would have any effect on what he’d do. But there had to be some kind of desired effect he was going for, so I felt like if I showed him whatever that was, I could go home and try to make this a foggy memory too. I looked at his face and body for clues to what would satisfy him, whether it was to see me squirm or to harangue him for being so full of shit, or just let him know how upset I was, or maybe just act like it was all a big joke and I must look hilarious flapping my chunky arms around, making the chains shake like King Kong. The problem was, beyond shock, I didn’t even know what my natural feelings about this sudden turn of events were. Was I proud of Jesse for accumulating treasure and pulling a sudden power trip on me? Was I resentful that my attempt to honor his fake accomplishment seemed like it might land me in serious danger, like always seemed to happen in this neighborhood? Or did I just feel sorry for how warped my brother had become? I just needed to unconfuse myself and figure out what the hell reasons he had for pulling this shit.

“Jesse how long are you gonna keep me like this?”

“Few days.”

“Jesse I have a family.”

“Well Beth, they’ll probably enjoy the break.”

“Jesse do you hate me?”

He sighed and went into another room.

“Hey,” I called after him. “Can I see the rest of the place?”

“Very funny,” he said from the kitchen.

I started to cry. Jesse didn’t seem to care. Or maybe he was glad, which made me cry harder. And my hands couldn’t reach my face. Behind the shock of what was happening was the shock of how clueless I had been about what was really going on with my brother. Even after I’d sat down on the couch feeling super uncomfortable (even though it was a really, really nice couch), what kind of signs could I have seen that he was going to chain me up? Did the throne have cuffs too? I just couldn’t tell.

“Jesse?” I said. “I can see that there’s a lot more to you than I thought. Can we talk about it?”

Jesse breezed back through the living room, his vague reflection floating in the shiny walls. He smiled while jangling my keys and left through the front door, locking it from the outside.

“JESSE!”

Tears stung my eyes, snot and spit swung around my head like electrons, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Did Jesse want me to understand what it felt like to be him? Or was my first mistake trying to understand him at all? What difference did it make whether he was a kind, sensitive soul, with his star-sugared sky and ghetto fabulous dungeon? I started making puppet motions with my hands, the right one the devil condemning my piece of shit brother for torturing me. The left one pointing out that I hadn’t been this curious in years.

I tried falling asleep, but the only sensation bothering me more than all the stuff dangling from my face was the hunger that hit me while it was still dark outside. By sunrise I had eaten off a mouthful of my own hair. Soon after that I pissed myself. Good, my right hand said. Damage that sofa. Damage it good.

The door opened and Jesse came in with Mom. She knew about this place? I started crying all over again.

“Hi Beth,” Mom said.

“Hi Mom,” I said, sticking out my face so she might wipe it.

“Beth,” Mom said. “We’ve been needing to have a talk with you for a while.”

“About what, Mom?”

Mom sat down next to me on the sofa. Jesse hopped into the throne.

“Well, it’s about your brother Jesse. I know we’ve talked about him not being well,” Mom said.

“Ya think?”

“Please Beth, sarcasm doesn’t make this any easier.”

I clenched my teeth together so hard I thought they might crack, which helped me get my sobbing under control.

“Do Pliscoe and the kids know where I am?” I asked.

“Beth,” Mom said. “Jesse has been staying with us to help take care of you.”

“What?! Mom, I have band practice today. Can you just let me loose?”

Mom looked at me without speaking. I saw her neck bob as she swallowed. Jesse was engrossed by something on his phone.

“Is this about my weight?” I asked.

“Beth,” Mom said. “Do you remember how much money Jesse borrowed from you?”

“Yeah, it was two hundred bucks.”

“Beth, where did you get two hundred dollars to loan your brother? Think very carefully.”

“I got it from my purse, what is this?”

“Was it this purse?” I only had three and mom held up the beige one. I nodded.

“Beth, did you know that it was Jesse who put the money in there in the first place?”

“What?! No, I earned that money at work! Can somebody please, please, please unchain me?”

“Beth, you haven’t had a job in four years.”

“I do commercial real estate. You know that, Mom.”

Suddenly Mom started to cry.

“Aw come on!” Jesse said. He pounded on the purple pads on his armrests.

“Jesse?” I asked. “Where are we right now? Is this really your house?”

Jesse looked at Mom and she started crying harder. Then Dad came into the room.

“Beth honey,” he said. “What did you say to Mom?”

“Nothing, I was just… I just want my hands back if that’s not too much to ask! I mean, Jesse’s telling bullshit stories about running marathons and I just thought maybe if I humor him he won’t sink any deeper than he already is and next thing I know I’m in that room at the end of 2001 chained to a damn wall! It’s just, well it’s unfair is what it is.”

Dad summoned Mom and Jesse and they all left the room. I could hear them murmuring outside, maybe with someone else. A woman. Oh if only I could talk to Pliscoe, he’d put an end to all this. Only Dad came back into the room.

“Alright Beth,” he said. “We’re gonna go. We’ll come back tomorrow and talk some more.”

They left me there. I listened hard for the sounds of other people outside the living room, but all I heard were the little rat howls in the front yard.

I wasn’t always overweight. In high school I was a majorette with serious relationship experience by the time I graduated. Two of them had been other students and Cam had been an assistant baseball coach. On prom night he took me to an apartment building a few doors down from where Jesse shackled me. He told me to wait in the car and when he came back we were gonna see God together. After I waited for more than an hour, a very skinny woman came outside and told me to get the hell out of there.

Police showed up at our house the next day asking me all kinds of questions about Cam. First thing Mom and Dad wanted to know was why they’d shelled out for a prom dress I didn’t even use, and then what I was doing down in a place where I knew I wasn’t allowed to go, and then had I been careful with Cam. I felt like the police were watching this happen and one of them looked at me under his cap like he could do anything he wanted to me as long as I didn’t waste my parents’ money. That made me too nervous to evaluate my own priorities.

After the officers left, I went to my room thinking, well I guess Cam really did meet God last night, and isn’t it weird that my night turned out better than his anyway? I didn’t feel bad about thinking thoughts like that about Cam because that was part of our bond, that we could say what we really thought, most of which was flat out selfish. I came down for lunch and my parents told me I’d have to stay home and not drive for the foreseeable future. I was due for community college in two months but now they weren’t sure if it was worth their paying for. Jesse waited until Mom and Dad were away from the table, then he asked me if I thought he still had a shot at baseball tryouts next season.

“No,” I remember saying, “Because you suck.”

I thought he understood that I said something hurtful because I was hurt, but maybe he never did. Or maybe he understood but just didn’t care, or maybe he even thought I had brought that pain down on myself by running with who I ran with. But that had been so long ago, and maybe I had gained some weight in the meantime and got tired pretty easily, but why did that disqualify me from knowing all this stuff that was going on with Jesse and Mom and Dad?

I was dizzy when the door opened up again. All three of them came in and surrounded me.

“Beth,” Mom said. “Have you been eating your hair again?”

I didn’t speak. Wilting hadn’t gotten me free so now I decided to show them some backbone, like I should have done when Jesse asked me to drive in the first place. For me, that was the turning point and if they had a different one they could either share it with me or not. I just stared at them, making sure they knew that they were wrong and I wouldn’t stoop to engage with them further on the subject.

“Jesus,” Jesse said. He went into the room with kitchen acoustics and brought back a bucket and mop. He dunked the mop into the bucket and then started jabbing it around my butt.

“Ow!” I said. “There’s a pimple there that stings!”

“Jesse,” Dad said.

Jesse stuck the mop back into the bucket.

“OK Beth,” Dad said. “Have you had time to think about why you’re here?”

I didn’t answer.

“Beth,” Dad said. “You have five seconds to answer me or we’re leaving again.”

“Because I was condescending with Jesse?” I said.

“Beth,” Mom said. “You’re a very sick person. It’s not just the weight, or even the drugs.”

“We’ve known about those for a while now,” Dad said.

“OK, I’m just going to ask this because whatever, but am I a pathological liar and Jesse’s actually got his shit together? Or is all of this just because Cam was black?”

Mom and Dad swallowed their lips and took deep breaths. I looked at Jesse, who was back on his phone.

“Anyway, I go to Dr. Morris, like, once a month, and she never says anything about me being very sick.”

“Beth,” Mom said. “How much do you really know about Dr. Morris? Because we did some research and, well, none of us would ever be her patient!”

Before arguing, I thought about this. It sounded crazy, but I hadn’t really gotten any healthier since I’d started seeing Dr. Morris. Pliscoe still liked me plenty, so I didn’t worry about it. But maybe the problem really was that everything that felt totally normal to me was actually totally messed up. What if I was lucky to have a family that cared enough to do this?

“Beth,” Dad said. “Are you putting on a puppet show?”

“I’ve been here a long time,” my left hand said expressively. “Maybe you guys could let me loose?”

Jesse gripped the mop handle. Dad nodded at him and Jesse knocked on the wall, twisted something on the control panel and my wrists were free. First thing I did was scratch myself everywhere.

“Am I too gross for a hug?” I asked.

Mom stared at the floor.

“Well,” I said. “Does this place have a shower?”

“Beth,” Mom said looking up. “These are all very good questions.”

I tried to get off the couch and fell down. From the floor everything looked different. A week earlier my friend Myra had pointed out to me that we haven’t used tin foil since the 1950s. That’s almost 70 years of using aluminum foil, but we still called it tin. Anyway, that’s what was on the walls and Jesse’s chair. It was starting to peel in places. My face was very close to the white tiger fangs. I tapped one. It was plastic. I rolled onto my back, knowing my parents and brother would think beached whale. I took a few deep breaths and considered going for the shiv I used to keep in my shoe. But these weren’t those shoes.

“Hey Beth,” Jesse said. “Why don’t you sing us a song?”

I sat up. I couldn’t tell whether my family was hopeful or cruel. Or me either, really. Mom brought me a glass of water and I tilted it so fast it splashed on my mouth and spilled down my neck. Asking myself if I could see things more clearly than I had at the beginning of this ordeal, and then feeling like if I had to ask, then no, not really, I felt very, very scared. Did I have to be ready for horrible things all the time now? I didn’t even know things needed to change. Could I even sing?

I stood up. Music swelled inside me and I sang it out. I looked at my family’s faces and they didn’t look like they were wincing. They looked like they were hearing something beautiful, same as me. Halfway through the chorus, I was walking around the room, serenading each of them personally, searching their faces for the shine I try to bring out with my music. I hoped they could see that I was committing an act of unconditional love, and that if I could sing for them, I could forgive them. Jesse barely looked up from his phone. So I grabbed him by the ears and brought my real fangs right up to the tip of his stupid fucking nose.

[storiesbybrian]

The Barber of Ludlow Street (June, 2000)

MK had been in the guitar business for 20 years. When he saw desperate marketers whine about the fickle nature of youthful passion, he scoffed. “A myth!” he said, squirreling away the commissions his boss let him keep until he made enough money to open up his own shop in the nearest epicenter of wildness that he knew, New York City’s Lower East Side. But his time worn formula for getting money out of crazy kids and indulgent parents bought him his independence about three years too late. To MK’s dismay the slow weeks piled up, held together by a thick mortar of bills, until he finally learned that kids today prefer Hip-Hop to Rock ‘n Roll. The Lit Fuse Guitar Shop, the culmination of 20 years of sacrifice, dedicated to serving the dreams of a new generation of Rock ‘n Rollers, opened to an indifferent public.

But MK wouldn’t give up. Conducting his own marketing survey, he noticed a lot of Asian kids strolling around the neighborhood, the yokes of their purchases cutting wide swaths in the sidewalk. MK remembered a piece he had seen on 60 Minutes about the Japanese Hip Hop craze and he snapped his fingers in revelation. He recalled wealthy Japanese kids tanning themselves and having their flat black hair professionally damaged into spongy manes of dreadlocks. So, with the help of RS, his one, slow-witted employee, MK changed his outdated Rock ‘n Roll shop into a one-stop, negrofying boutique that he hoped would keep the Fuse lit for as long as the wind blew black. He needed his customers to trust the with-itness of his taste though in his heart he knew it was only a matter of time before rock stars recaptured the imaginations of alienated children. But until the day when the wail of his guitars could swallow up the beats of his newly stocked dance records, he was gonna wring every dollar he could out of this rap fad. Behind the shop, he poured concrete, installed an old-fashioned barber’s chair, hung a mirror from a hook, draped a mylar canopy over the whole thing and invited kids to let the Rude Boy Salon tend to their fashionable grooming needs. And a haircut got you a 10% discount on a guitar.  

 Morning at the Sunshine Hotel is met with toothless grumbles of resentment.  Morning carries a price tag of $10. Those without monthly benefactors shoot out the door south, south west, west, north west and north like crooked spokes from the Sunshine’s Bowery horizon looking for the means to reserve the pleasure of the Sunshine’s accommodations for yet another evening by the 7 o’clock curfew. But PJ hooked around the corner and went east, to Ludlow Street. He was 54 years old.

           Everybody knew PJ- the police, the neighbors, the mailmen, the supers, the bartenders and owners, the children, the garbagemen. Everybody. He was an inevitability on Ludlow Street with his boisterous gibberish, big bang cloud of cologne and his broom. “I’m fine as wine! You a frien’ o’mine! Anytime you need a rhyme! I see you, cuz!”  

His dire financial straits, his alcoholism, his age- none of it meant a damn thing to PJ. It took a strong being to crumble the way he did and keep his sweaty black resilience about him. He swept and mopped for his pocket money and told stories about busting the spine of the man he caught with his second wife or about his position of authority when he worked for the sanitation department. He had also been a cook, a gardener and a barber, as anyone within 20 feet of his rantings could attest.  

When CN, the owner of a local bar called Barratoba, had t-shirts made with pictures of PJ on the front, his cult status in the neighborhood was lifetime guaranteed. MK, still a new kid by block standards, immediately cultivated a friendship with PJ, thinking it was his ticket to fitting in in the neighborhood.  

One day in August, MK was outside smoking a cigarette and scanning the block for professional music enthusiasts. His sales for the month were still off and the haircut gimmick had no one abuzz. He had hired a barber from a local salon. But too many customers were demanding refunds, disappointed with the authenticity of their new dos. MK was left wondering whether he needed somebody who knew more about hairstyling or less. PJ was taking out the recycling from CN’s bar across the street.  

MK called out to him, “PJ, my friend! How are you today?”

“Yo, cuz! Gimme dolla!”

MK reached into his pocket and PJ crossed the street towards him hand first.  

“PJ, my main man!” MK said, slapping PJ five, “How would you like another job?”

PJ blinked at him seriously for a moment and then burst out laughing.

“No, really. How would you like to cut hair for me?”

“I was a barber for seven years in Nokalyna!”

“That’s what I hear. So how ‘bout it? I pay you ten bucks a head and anytime you want a bottle of anything, you just let me know. Deal?”

PJ shook MK’s hand and told him, “I be back after I get the flo’ mats at Quinine.  They pay me extra to do them. Good music over there. You ever wanna go, you jus’ let me know. But ssshhh. Don’t tell anybody, a’ight? You a good guy. I get you in at Quinine, ‘k? Den I go get Barratoba’s and Guiseppe’s. They nice, too.”

“OK, PJ, I’ll see you later. Thank you.”

And MK had his barber. PJ took off to wherever he went when he had money and MK dropped his cigarette and went inside. Within weeks, PJ’s distinctive style became MK’s greatest source of revenue.

 Any grandparents who came up through Manhattan’s Lower East Side, be they Jews from the first half of the last century or Spanish from the second, would be shocked to learn that one block of Ludlow Street now has seven fancy designer clothing shops and almost no drug trade. Girls who never would have set foot on Ludlow Street five years ago are now running the Community Board.  

The newest proprietress of a clothing shop was called EW. EW had quit her investment banking job to open Glo, an astronomically upscale accessory shop. She had a German shepherd named Tamburlaine who did not get along with PJ.  

A few days before Glo’s grand opening in late August, EW was supervising the finishing touches on her window display- a thick pyramid of handbags that were custom stitched from maple leaf shaped patches of leather and suede in front of a poster of an orange lagoon. Tamburlaine began to growl from inside the window and EW turned to see PJ lugging enormous bags of trash and plopping them down on the sidewalk in front of her new store.

“Excuse me sir, but you can’t put that garbage here,” she said politely to PJ.

“Huh? Naw, dey comin’ for it in two hour.  I use to work for sanitation. Two hour,” PJ said EW.

“I don’t really care. You can’t put that garbage in front of my store.”

“Who you? Ask anybody on the block. They know me! They my friend! Ask cuz over at barbershop.”

PJ dropped his bags and went back inside, returning seconds later with another load of garbage.

“Sir. You’re not listening to me. That’s somebody else’s trash. Put it in front of their building.”

“No!” PJ yelled. His right knee began to pop involuntarily out of joint, an ancient baseball injury that flared up in times of stress. “This the same garbage from the same building I been puttin’ in the same place for 20 year!”

Sensing his mistress was in trouble, Tamburlaine bounded outside and began barking at PJ. PJ said, “You better get that muthafuckin’ clown away from me!”

“Or what?”

“Don’ you worry none. You just get that thing inside. I don’t like him!” PJ said, his trick knee hopping and forcing his hips to grind back and forth.  

At this EW stepped quickly back and pulled out her cell phone and called the police. “Yes, I’m calling from Ludlow Street between Houston and Stanton,” she said. “Yes, a street man is leaving rubbish in front of my store and threatening my dog and myself- what? Right, garbage… Yes. Thank you.”

PJ clucked his mouth exasperatedly, knowing that when the cops learned that the alleged source of trouble was he, they’d laugh the whole thing off and explain PJ’s prestigious status on the block to newcomer EW. He wiped the sweat from his brow and then clutched his leg, trying to get it to stop twitching so violently.

Inside of five minutes, a squad car pulled up next to PJ’s plump row of garbage.  

“Yo!” PJ greeted the pair of officers. “Tell this blonde woman leave me alone!”

One officer got out of the car while the other sat behind the wheel with a pen and summons pad spread across her lap. Tamburlaine continued to bark viciously.

“What’s up PJ?”

“A’right!”

“Hold on a second, PJ. Alright, miss, are you the one who filed the complaint?”

“Yes and thank you for coming so quickly,” said EW, raising her voice to be heard over her dog’s racket. “This person is harassing me and dumping this trash in front of my building.”

“Who, him?”

“Yes. Him.”

The dog continued to bark and flinch everytime PJ’s knee jumped.

“Alright sir,” said the cop with his hands on his hips. “Where is this trash from?”

“Man, you know where this trash from. ‘S from Guiseppe next do’ but I ain’t gon’ put it in front of no goddamn fire hydrant!”

“Well, what about over there?” asked the cop, pointing to space in front of a nightclub that wouldn’t be open until much later.

“Man, I don’t get paid to be draggin’ this shit all up and down the block!”

“There’s no need to yell at the police, you know.”

“Miss, we’ll handle this.”  

“Well, look at how he’s acting. It’s like he’s gonna attack me.”

The cop noticed PJ’s jumpiness and stepped back and began fingering his nightstick. “Sir. Move the garbage and stop bothering the lady or we’ll have to arrest you.”

Drained from the officer’s face was any trace of recognition of PJ. His partner in the car stared down at her lap. With a vicious grunt, PJ snatched up the garbage bags and began dragging them the 10 feet to where the cop had designated. EW and the officers stood over him until he had finished hauling the entire pile of bags and continued to eye him until he left, which he did, cussing and twitching the whole way. PJ needed a drink.

 Meanwhile CT and FL were sitting at Kennedy Airport, waiting to pick up their friend, BD. BD’s flight was arriving from Tokyo via San Francisco. The girls could not stop giggling. They hadn’t seen BD in several years but they kept in touch regularly and now they could finally show their dear friend all of the wonders and marvels of New York in person.  

During the years that CT and FL had been building a life for themselves in New York City, BD had been building a reputation as a world class interior designer. His arrival in the States was greatly anticipated by the design community who found him so fascinating. Throughout their time apart, CT and FL fully cooperated in BD’s plan to cultivate an air of mystery which his arrival would solve with what all three friends hoped would be sensational panache.

When the plane taxied up to the gate, CT and FL clapped their hands excitedly. BD burst from the tunnel and all three old friends met in a fierce collision of joyful reunion. Each of them began speaking rapidly at once which led to uproarious laughter.  The girls had so much to tell BD and to ask him, and he them. CT and FL each clasped one of BD’s hands and led him down to baggage claim where his limousine driver had already collected his gear. BD told them a funny story about customs in San Francisco as he handed his carry-on luggage to the driver as well.

In the back seat of the limo on the way into Manhattan, the girls asked BD what he would like to do first.  

“Well,” BD said with much relish. “The first thing I want to do is visit Rude Boy for a haircut.” And he showed them a small article torn from a Japanese magazine. The article featured a picture of a famous Japanese record producer. The producer’s mangled head looked like a lopsided Rastafarian who had changed his mind about enlisting in the Marines at an extremely inopportune moment.  

“Ahh,” said the girls collectively. “PJ.”

             The article BD held pointed out that MK didn’t allow customers into his barbershop unless they brought at least two friends to hold them down in the old chair. Insurance purposes. It also offered Rude Boy customers a 10% discount on all guitars in the Lit Fuse. So, CT and FL instructed the limousine to drop them off in front of the Lit Fuse and then take their bags to their own shop, which was just one block away on Orchard Street.

The girls led BD into the Rock ‘n Roll/Hip Hop shop where MK greeted them warmly and asked if they’d like to see anything in particular. BD handed MK the cut-out, which flattered MK tremendously. His adaptation to the changing of the times had garnered international notoriety. A glow rushed about MK’s face and his mouth flapped back into the biggest smile that he’d worn in years.  

MK shook hands with CT and FL while BD was looking through the store’s album collection. After a moment, BD returned to MK at the counter with a very high stack of records. CT and FL asked MK if they could leave these records on the counter and cash them out after BD’s superfly haircut. Mentally adding up the value of BD’s purchase, MK wagged his head like a puppy. Then he led the three of them back to the barbershop under the tinselly outdoor shine of the canopy.  

           BD sat down in the chair, flanked by CT and FL. MK gave the chair a good spin round, determined to delight BD to the pits of his soul and surpass every dream that BD had ever had about American Hip Hop culture. BD smiled and closed his eyes, ready to be transformed in appearance to what he already felt in his heart.  

           “Be right back…” sang MK and ran back into the store to summon PJ.  

           Befitting the grand entry of his star attraction, MK had taken a page from the NBA and engineered a garish bit of fanfare to let PJ, and the whole neighborhood, know that he had a customer. With the push of one button, a series of cherrytop police car lights began swirling in the Lit Fuse’s windows. Sirens and ice cream truck songs howled to a techno rhythm, punctuated by blasts from a lifeguard whistle. And then an announcer’s voice blared through the circus jungle beats:

 “THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS! HE STILL AIN’T CROAKED! ANOTHER HEAD FROM A FARAWAY LAND LOOKS TO BE CURED BY THE THUNDERBIRD HAND OF THE MAN OF THE HOUR, MAN OF THE DAY! LET’S HEAR IT HO’S AND G’S FOR HIS TRAVESTY, P-J!”

             The first few times that this explosion of bells and whistles rocked Ludlow Street, a few of PJ’s many friends and empathizers applauded as he burst from wherever to go careening through the Lit Fuse, hellbent on revising the possibilities of a hairdo. But after PJ’s work began to attract a larger number of customers, the frequent cranking of his theme song became a hardcore nuisance. MK received enough complaints that he began to sneak off the premises as soon as he turned on PJ’s noisy invitation. He would wander through the back way to sit and have tea down the street, leaving the store in RS’s incompetent care rather than field complaints from the neighbors.

           So, as BD waited in the chair, the clanging and screeching BOOM BOOM BOOMed to summon PJ. PJ was down in Barratoba’s swilling gin, trying to recover from the shameful outrage of the policeman making him kowtow to that new blonde lady. PJ remembered when that cop was eight years old and shot an old man in the shoulder with his beebee gun. PJ tried to suck the liquor out of the tilted bottle faster than it could pour and it splashed out of his full mouth and ran down his chin in silver trickles. When the bottle was empty, PJ cast it aside and jerked his sleeve across his mouth. Then he charged out of the bar towards the noise that was calling him to sculpt someone’s head like an African banzai tree.

           PJ whirled out into the bright light of the street, his dirty limbs gangling like giant pinwheels. Cars slammed on their breaks to avoid this stumbling dervish that seemed part liberated bull, part agitated rodent. Pretty young women shopping up and down the block reared back in horror to allow PJ to swarm his way past the pounding speakers and blaring lights and into the Lit Fuse.  

           BD was waiting for PJ in the back with an outstretched hand. Something about the scene seemed vaguely familiar to PJ and for a split second he wondered if he had ever fought overseas. He found his hand being tugged vigorously, worshipfully by the young Japanese man with the flat black hair. The mylar glinted above him and his muddy eyes took on a look of understanding.  

           BD mistook PJ’s newfound orientation of his whereabouts for an acknowledgement of their spiritual kinship. He smiled at the older man and lay back in the chair, waving off CT and FL. The two girls went back inside the shop. BD beamed ecstatically from his chair, overjoyed to be face to face with his kindred enigma, PJ. He handed his remaker, his redeemer another picture of the haircut he wanted. This picture was taken from the same magazine but the article was about police brutality in New York City, of which the young man in the picture was a victim.  

           PJ tenderly fingered the ragged edge of the picture and briefly forgot that he was too drunk to stand up. He held out his hand to BD. BD handed him two $100 bills. PJ’s eyes lit up and something about the image that sat under the money in his strong hand clicked. He nodded his head and got to work.  

           BD closed his eyes. PJ shaved tiny stripes into the young man’s eyebrows. Then PJ took the scissors. He raised them straight up and assumed the exact pose of Lady Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door. With his other hand, he pressed his large palm to BD’s temple and took a snippet of hair between two of his fingers. Then the scissors began jawing rapidly and swooped down at BD’s head. BD became secretly terrified in PJ’s shaky hands. But the scissors plunged along the shape of his sleek head accurately, shearing off a shaggy wing of hair. It was exhilarating and BD relaxed a little, surrendering to the moment. PJ reared the scissors back like a tailor’s needle. His trick knee had subsided and hardly jerked at all. On this pass, the hand on BD’s forehead rolled towards the incoming razor bomb. With a horrible squinching sound, PJ snipped off BD’s ear.  

           “Oh Lo’d!” shouted PJ as the blood spurted all the way up to the silver ceiling. BD began to cry and chant the comforting words of some of his favorite songs.

           “Docta! We need a docta! He’p! He’p!” cried PJ, dancing around in BD’s blood. BD began convulsing in the chair. “Shee-it!”

           CT and FL were inside the shop listening to BD’s new records on headphones. RS was watching the records spin round and round. But a few other customers peaked into the back to see what the ruckus was about. When they saw PJ’s ghoulish dance under the canopy and the young Japanese man writhing in the chair murmuring “you gon’ make me lose me mind-up in here, up in here” in a thick accent, they immediately searched about the place for cameras, certain as they were that a music video was being filmed out back. It was so easy to accept the absurdity of the scene as some vaguely symbolic play on entertainment and modern medicine. But something about the lack of cameras and the amount of blood blasting out of the side of BD’s head seemed too lavish for a rehearsal. What was going on back here? “i am walrus, i am walrus, ki ko ki shoom,”? Almost apologetically, the gravity of the situation asserted itself and the two young guitar shoppers were forced to accept the irrevocability of what had happened. One of them had been shopping for a guitar, the other a bass. The guitarist swooned but the bass player kept his cool and dashed back into the store and behind the counter to call an ambulance for the mutilated Japanese boy in the chair.  

           Rather than sobering PJ up, the accident thrust him into an entirely different realm of intoxication. He still thought maybe he could keep this whole thing quiet and nobody would find out. So he placed BD’s ear on the counter next to the jar of blue disinfectant. Then he combed some of the blood out of BD’s hair and skillfully continued the abstract trimming he had begun a few moments earlier. BD passed out, certain that his plane to JFK hadn’t even landed yet.

             The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and rushed BD to the hospital. Police arrested PJ and pulled BD’s ear and $200 from his pocket. The ear was perfectly in tact, like an unbitten cookie, but it would never work again. Blood and hair had clogged BD’s auditory canal and damaged his eardrum during his convulsions and the entire left side of his face caught an infection from PJ’s rusty scissors. At CT and FL’s insistence, the ear was sewn back onto BD’s head for reasons purely cosmetic.  

           BD stayed in the hospital for a few days. His design and magazine contacts were notified and they all came to visit him. It was a great disappointment for all parties concerned that the mysterious BD should finally be revealed in a hospital cot with a useless ear freshly stitched onto such a blotched, ugly face, capped now by his astonishing haircut. Several established members of the industry in which BD starred were horrified to learn of the conditions of the Rude Boy Salon. None of them were opposed to underground fashion per se, but a homeless drunk using unsanitary blades seemed too extreme. This was not a haircut. It was assault and they demanded justice.

             Back on Ludlow Street, word spread. MK stood in front of his store smoking and furtively looking for anyone wearing one of CN’s PJ t-shirts, which he was prepared to buy for as much as $35 apiece. He needed to distance himself from the incident and keep his store open. As soon as the police had taken PJ away, he had taken down the canopy and the chair and dumped the remaining furniture in a different alley, in Queens. Then he had RS scrub BD’s blood off of the concrete behind the store. Rude Boy was finished, but he’d be damned before he’d lose the Lit Fuse. He considered offering to pay BD’s medical expenses, but then thought that such a gesture might suggest greater responsibility for the assault than he could afford to accept. PJ lived in a flophouse on skid row. He had no family, no money and, to MK’s way of thinking, a primitive, ill-developed grasp on reality. PJ could afford to take the whole rap.

           But how would a rap stick to a man as disenfranchised as PJ? With no driver’s license, no social security number, no fingerprints on file, no credit, no library card, no nothing except a nickname, he was a phantom, completely disentangled from the institutional marionette strings yanking most of us around.  

             PJ was being held at the 7th Precinct. Detective QV had been called in to help discern PJ’s identity. PJ was little help. No matter what question they asked him, PJ said, “I cut that Chinese boy. I cut that boy.”  

           QV pulled PJ’s arresting officer aside.

           “What do you know about this guy?”

           “Officially, not much, detective. Everybody in the neighborhood knows him but nobody knows anything about him. Last name, where he’s from, nothing. The guy’s slicker than batshit. Most famous John Doe I ever met.”

           “The kid in the hospital pressing charges?”

           “That’s what proprietor of the guitar shop says.”

           “Lit Fuse?”

           “Yeah.”

           “Yeah, I know that guy. MK. He’s a real cocksucker. Wish we could arrest him instead.”

           “Nothing tying him to the incident, detective. The alley where the barber chair was ain’t even his property. And any business ties he had with homeboy in there were strictly off the books. Not a thing we can do about it.”

           “What about all that noisy shit in his window?”

           “He says it’s a gift from some Japanese kid whose friends request him to play it. So how long we gonna keep Mr. PJ in there?”

           “I dunno. Assault like that’s two to four. But we don’t really know who he is. No assets to lean on, no retribution for the kid’s ear. Just punishment for the old guy.”

           The phone rang and the officer went back to his desk to answer it. Detective QV paced back and forth, rubbing his head and smoking. He didn’t like any of it. He was worried that PJ would be remanded to the mental ward at Bellevue with the rest of the John Does if he didn’t cough up more details about himself. But PJ was too distraught to recount a personal history. People around the neighborhood repeated his stories about North Carolina and the sanitation department, the Sunshine Hotel stuck to its policy of non-cooperation, and civic records had nothing that matched his prints or general appearance. He didn’t like any of it.

           PJ’s groaning lament continued: “I cut that Chinese boy. I cut that boy. I cut that Chinese boy. I cut that boy.”

           Several months earlier, back when BD was still in Osaka, AO finally scraped together enough money to buy his guitar back from the Lit Fuse. But MK wanted more than double what AO had hocked it for, which was considerably less than AO had saved up. So, needing something to play on his upcoming tour of central Michigan, AO was forced to settle for an inferior guitar. He handed MK his hard earned cash and stared up at his own baby hanging on the wall, gleaming forlornly back at him. MK shrugged behind the register in mock empathy with AO.  AO was PJ’s cousin.

                       MK sat behind the counter at the Lit Fuse, sweaty and nervous. He hadn’t slept for days and the only thing he’d eaten in the last 24 hours was half a bottle of aspirin. Three times yesterday, he thought he heard PJ shouting in the street. He turned down to his pocket video game to distract himself from the strange paranoia that had afflicted him ever since he had visited the 7th Precinct to wriggle himself out of any occupation of the space between BD and his ear.

           A mist jammed his nostrils and yanked out a sneeze.  

           “God bless you.”

           MK looked up to see PJ towering over him in a cowboy hat.

           Two police officers in uniform entered the Lit Fuse and handcuffed MK and read him the Miranda warning. PJ pulled AO’s baby down from the wall and handed it to him.  

             Back at the hospital, BD was going through therapy to regain a sense of balance and adjust to his hearing loss. CT and FL informed him that PJ was out of jail and that the owner of the shop had been arrested instead. The owner of the alley behind the Lit Fuse had been summoned to prosecute MK for vandalism and conducting unlicensed surgery on private property. PJ had been bailed out by a relative.

           BD wanted to know what the relative had told the police about PJ.  

           “Not much,” FL said. “Just that he didn’t used to be so simple. He wouldn’t say what happened or how he dissipated so or anything.”

           “Is he in any more trouble?” BD asked.

           “That’s up to you,” CT told him.

             A few days later, BD checked out of the hospital and went downtown to see PJ. He wore a hunting hat with earflaps to cover his wound. BD was directed east to a small jazz club called Quinine where he stood outside, smoking cigarettes and waiting for PJ.

Sure enough, the older man emerged from the club lugging his garbage. He was much less exuberant than he had been the first time the two had met. PJ stopped for a rest and struck up a conversation with the young Japanese man in the hat.  

           “Yo cuz! Gimme cigarette.”

           “Here. Take two.”

           “Thank you. Thank you.”

           “Yes.”

           “I used to cut hair over Ludlow Street.”

           “Really?”

           “Yeah. But I hurt somebody. He a Chinese like you.”

           “Mmmm.”

           “He a nice young man, too. I felt bad.I used to be barber, before I work for sanitation department.”

           “Ah.”

           BD looked down at his cigarette.

           “See, you got to learn more English. This the USA, man! This ain’t China.  USA!”

           “I trying. Thank you.”

           “A’ight cuz. See you later, k?”

[storiesbybrian]

Prime Catch (June, 2007)

Albert knew all about that first step into the restaurant. Everybody would turn and smile at him, and Davey would release the skipper’s wheel nailed to the podium, and weave through the crowd for a handshake. It was as close to a grand entrance as Albert would ever make, but now he hesitated outside. Then he reminded himself, seven weeks of sneaking off to the restaurant, seven weeks without bursting into tears.  

An Explorer pulled up and unloaded a family. Hiding among them, he watched the crowded lobby genuflect toward the squealing hinges and then recoil in mild disappointment. Then Albert revealed himself. Sure enough, there were the wooden nubs wheeling around unmanned, and here was Davey, smiling and hospitably pumping his hand.  

Waiting for Davey to let go, Albert watched two boys handling purple uzis chained to a video game console, pretending the free demo was real combat. To their right a man was trying to recrisp his money along the rim of the cigarette machine. Closer to the dining room, a chubby black boy sat on the aquamarine banquette while his older sister stood on one of his feet, holding her balance until their stout mother shooed them apart. Albert nodded toward these children and Davey rushed off to find their father.

           Melvin Turner was an enormous man in his late 20s, with sparse, lint-like facial hair and palms facing backward when they dangled. He smelled like cigarettes, which made Albert especially happy.

           “How are you this evening?” Albert asked.

“Doin’ okay,” Melvin said. “Doin’ pretty good, matter fact.”

The unselected diners trained their attention on Melvin’s family. His wife stared at the lobster tank, pulling her children to her breast. The children gawked at Albert.

“Well Melvin,” Albert said. “I don’t want to make this any weirder than it has to be, but the fact is that your dinner, including the crab leg supplement, has already been taken care of.”

“Aw, well I don’t see why-”

“Now it’s free if you want it to be. But what I’d like to ask is if you might allow me to break bread with y’all tonight. No sellin’ or preachin’ or anything like that. I’m just a guy who’s played a little bit too much golf in the sun. We’ll have our meal. Together. And then you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine,” Albert said. Leaning forward, he added, “And just so you know, I’d be glad to sit in the smoking section.”

“Aw, that’s alright. I usually go outside to light up. But hold on. Lemme, uh-”

Melvin looked over at Celia, who was avoiding everyone’s gaze, and turned back to Albert and squinted. Albert thought that Melvin might be trying to figure out if he was the object of some clumsy, racially motivated charity. Albert wished he had said “eat” instead of “break bread” and hoped that Melvin noticed the disappointment spreading among the customers Albert had left to the cruel fate of paying for their own meals. Melvin scratched at his chin and waved the rest of his family over.

           Melvin, Jr. studied the clusters of dessicated marine life glued to the mariner’s net hanging by their table.

“Ooh, they eat starfish here!” he said.

“Oh my gosh!” his sister Kathy said, balling up her fists and stamping her feet. Kathy’s mother folded her arms and cocked her hip, Kathy glanced quickly at Albert, and her scoffing stopped immediately. I did that, Albert thought.

           At the buffet, Albert nestled vegetables between two kinds of fish, and handed the slotted spoon to a woman who seemed about to tell him something. Albert nodded, encouraging her to speak, but she just dug up a serving of vegetables and slapped them onto her plate before the spoon had fully drained. Nearby, Kathy ladled creamy Italian dressing onto a pile of Chinese noodles and bacon bits. Staring at her plate, Big Melvin did not notice the steamy white blur charging from the kitchen, so Albert put his plate down and nudged Big Melvin out of the way. Rolando stumbled past them, slamming a fresh tub of unnaturally yellow corn on the cob down on the lip of the buffet, rattling the serving utensils, and strewing campsites of green beans across Albert’s flounder.

When Rolando’s face emerged from his sweat rag, he saw that the old tub had been removed from its well.

“Gracias, Senor Alberto,” Rolando said, shoving the full tub forward until it rang into its slot.

Albert raised the old tub to his chest and tilted it slightly. Rolando looked nervously at Davey, who shrugged. Albert smiled and dumped the old tub, spilling the watery margarine and watching the old ears blend into the new pile. Davey patted Albert on the shoulder and continued his rounds. Albert smiled proudly as he watched Rolando drag the empty tub back to the kitchen.

 Melvin, Jr. tugged at his sleeve. Bearded with hush puppie crumbs, he asked his host, “What’s black and white and red all over?” Albert’s own children used a punchline about a menstrual nun.

“Now wait just a second young man, I think you must be confused! How in the world can anything be both of those things at once?!”

“How about if it’s a newspaper!” Melvin, Jr. said.

Albert banged the table and laughed heartily, to Melvin Jr.’s delight. Celia nodded once at Kathy and Albert thought, I held her tongue again. No need to conjure epiphanes, just orchestrate a little harmony.

           Celia put a hand on Albert’s shoulder and said, “The mackerel here is out of this world!” She flashed her large, rickety teeth and Albert seized up, as though he’d been fed a lump of information too large to digest. He nodded quickly, grinning with his mouth shut. Celia held her smile, but turned it away from Albert, toward a middle distance that accepted her delight rather than being taken aback by it.  

           Albert lived 40 miles from the restaurant and he spent most of the drive transmogrifying his dining experience into a comparable session with the Bereavement Group his immediate family believed that he had joined. Every Sunday, alone behind the wheel, he girded his charade with a fineness of detail that convinced him he had heretofore undiscovered creative talents. The lies he fashioned had become his favorite part of the evening.

Neither especially discrete nor voluble, this was the biggest deception Albert had ever wrought. And rather than throwing his sense of fidelity to Janeane into tumult, the wounded people he described led to such marked improvements in his behavior around the house that he felt completely justified in making them up.  

The group included Lena, a licensed psychotherapist, and several fellow adult grievers, each of whom had been furnished with an exquisite set of issues in Albert’s ever mounting pile of bullshit. He had even described a few pieces of children’s art hanging on the walls of the classroom where the sessions were held, telling Janeane that he would stare at these daisies and choochoos when he got bored listening to Warren the dairy farmer hijack another discussion with boasts of his prowess, making it that much more obvious to the rest of the group that he was actually trying to use the sessions to overcome his impotence. In a way, the very superiority that Albert lorded over each of the fake people he had created was precisely what made him feel even more pathetic. But wasn’t his need to feel superior to real people a primary motivator of his weekly gig as ad hoc patriarch at the Prime Catch? And if so, what exactly did he have to do to bring about the Sunday when forays into other families held less appeal than staying home with his own?

           The Turners had preferred to sit in the non-smoking section, so Albert had gone with Big Melvin when he went outside to light up. Whenever Albert came home smelling like smoke, he told Janeane that Kyle had shown up that week. Albert wasn’t sure if he reeked enough to pass for spending a full hour with the chimney-like Kyle, but it would not surprise Janeane to hear that the poor fellow had run out halfway through his first pack. The rest of his fellow grievers, even Warren, and perhaps even Albert himself, were in terrific shape compared to Kyle. With his waxen, tattooed skin, his stunted growth, and his privates confused after years of handling by a cycle of predatory authority figures, Kyle always cried and hugged most readily and when he showed up, his problems dominated the session. Albert had based him on a Jerry Springer guest he’d seen once in his dentist’s waiting room.

           “Well?” Janeane asked. “How was it?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Seems to be working....  Was Kyle there?”

“For a little while, yeah.”

“Another breakdown?”

“Yeah.”

“I should’ve sent that jacket along.”

Albert shrugged.

“What?”

“If I bring it now, he might try and sell it or something. Let’s wait until the weather gets cooler, okay?”

“Oh Albert!” Janeane said, draping an arm on Albert’s shoulders. “You mean you plan on keeping this up?”

“Well, Mrs. Miller. Is that the type of news that might lead to something more strenuous?”

“Albert!”

Maybe one night, while pressing against the woman he had loved for 24 years, Albert might blurt out, “Honey, I’ve been hanging around a seafood buffet every Sunday night, taking random families out to dinner.”

 What would she say? She’d laugh, of course. She might even ask to tag along sometime. But first she would separate from him and cover herself up. Albert’s inability to imbue his explanation of something so hare-brained with anything close to the coherence with which he had been deceiving her for the past four months would hit Janeane hard. And once she was up and in her robe, they would fulfill their marital duty and hash it all out, pinpointing the frailties that had spurred Albert’s collapse into what would not be unfair to call psychosis. And then Janeane would allow herself one brief moment of irrefutable superiority, which she would immediately regret, no matter how justified. But what then?

           The surprising pain of Albert’s recent orphaning was no secret. And the morning after he had served his niece whiskey until she vomited, then kept his keys jangling just aloof of Janeane’s infuriated swipes, then handled Janeane far too roughly in bed, he was in no position to argue with her tactful suggestion that he “talk to someone.”   They had friends in various forms of therapy: couples counselling, psychoanalysis, Weight Watchers, and could not help but state more firmly than was necessary that they did not judge anyone for reaching out for professional help. But wanting to save Albert further embarrassment, Janeane handed him a newsletter from First Lutheran, a church in the same town as the Prime Catch. With a green felt tip, she had circled a bulletin on the yellow paper offering group grief counselling every Sunday night at the Vandalia Community Center.

“Have you called them?” he asked.

Janeane nodded.

“Did you sign me up?”

“It’s open. You don’t even have to use your real name if you don’t want to.”

“Covert therapy,” Albert had said, chuckling at his own cleverness while Janeane looked away.

So having been worried before, the perversity of the truth now would scare the shit out of her. What sorts of things would he ask her to do for him, knowing now of the wickedness at the root of Albert’s improved behavior? Even after the recent troubles, she still considered their vows to have been honored for all 23 years of their marriage, and so it would be wrong of her to fear or resent any burden he might ask her to bear. But she could not escape the suspicion that a sincere commitment to helping him might include a humiliation for which she was totally unprepared.

 Albert had discovered the Prime Catch Seafood Buffet on the drive back from his nephew’s wedding. His parents had still been alive and his sister was still speaking to him. But after four hours on the road, the mood of his immediate family was deteriorating. The street off the exit ramp was lit by a familiar American gallery, but no one in the car was surprised when Albert slowed in front of the place with the jungle gym built like a pirate ship. As though hoping that Albert’s braking was not tantamount to a commitment, Janeane waited until he flipped his turn signal before speaking.

“Albert, we’re less than an hour from home.”

“Seriously, Dad,” his daughter Tracey said. “Do we really have to go everywhere that reminds you of that place in Myrtle Beach?”

“The Sea Captain’s,” said his son Todd. “’Where one basket of hush puppies was never enough!’”

Everyone in the car giggled and Albert took them all to Wendy’s.  

 On his ninth Sunday at the Prime Catch, Albert stood in the crook of his car door wondering how many of these people were TiVo’ing 60 Minutes like he was. Aloud, he said, “I’m not here to judge.  I’m specifically here not to judge.”        

           Earlier in the day he had gotten into an argument with his son regarding college applications. Todd had met earlier in the week with Michael Woodbridge, an alumni representative from Washington University who was related by marriage to one of Albert’s Kiwanis friends. After the interview, Michael Woodbridge had told Albert how impressed he was with Todd’s taste in movies. Todd felt so good about it that he decided to spend Sunday shooting baskets instead of finishing his other applications. Albert hung around under the hoop, letting the ball bounce before passing it back to his son. By Albert’s calculation, Todd was shooting 15-20%. His form was crooked and theatrical, hopping off of one foot and wagging his elbows before release, his jaw swivelling away from his shooting hand as if it were just the counterweight to keep him from keeling over after every shot.

           “When’s the deadline for Columbia?” Albert asked.

Todd made his shot. Albert held the ball.

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t say anything, guy” Todd said, his hands demanding the ball.

 Albert’s first impulse was to carry the ball back inside. None of the kids at the restaurant called him “guy.” But, as Janeane had noted, Todd did not respond well to being put in his place. It had never occurred to Albert to use such words and tone with his parents. Lately Albert had wondered whether he had committed some crucial misstep during Todd’s infancy that his parents had had the hardscrabble wisdom to avoid. Surely they had confronted the same contradiction of physical supremacy and inverse emotional leverage that he had. All parents must. But how then had their respectful son raised such an insolent lout? Albert had studied and studied the effect that his parents had on Tracey and Todd’s behavior, but he was never able to wield the same authority over them that his mom and dad could. And now that they were gone, he settled for the small victory of making it through another confrontation with Todd with eyes remaining dry.

           “I believe it’s tomorrow. Have you finished it?”

“So you knew before you asked me?!” Todd said.

“Have you finished it, son?”

“No!”

“Okay, Okay. So maybe we could work on it together? Now?”

Todd slumped his shoulders in resignation and approached his father. But when Albert smiled and turned to go inside, Todd swiped the ball away and went back to shooting.

“I write better at night,” he said, throwing up another brick.

Albert remained under the basket, kicking the rebounds back out to his son. 

“Things did go pretty well with Woodward, right?”

“Woodbridge,” Todd said. “He likes John Woo.”

“He does?”

“Y’know Dad, not everybody is so disdainful of the creative process,” Todd said.

Albert opened his mouth and rushed inside before anything came out.

 The playground was aboil with children. They were on the swingset, the horseless merry go-round, the pelican, seahorse and dolphin on stiff, rusty coils and, of course, the pirate ship, with its Jolly Roger waving from a crow’s nest that they dared each other climb. Their parents and grandparents waved from the benches, shouting, “Hi Albert! Hello!”  

           Albert waved back, enjoying the feel of the breeze on his hand. A screaming toddler chased a duck into the parking lot. Albert bent to grab the boy, but his mother caught up to him first.

“Hey Albert,” she said, squatting to hold her son. “How are you?”

Albert had never seen this woman before, but he nodded and waved, noticing the Maori tattoo on the small of her back. He halted a few feet before the entrance. More people had been greeting him this way. “How are you?” How are you? How you? How ya doin’? even How are ya? were all fine. But How are you? connoted more serious problems than those one got from too much golf in the sun.  

           The first time Albert had entered the restaurant, he felt like an intruder, as though all of his private embarrassments were repugnantly apparent. The other customers seemed like an exclusive clique, and Albert’s Big Daddy act felt too false to go through with. But then he had seen Davey, enjoying an exaggerated handshake with a teenaged boy, and Albert stepped forward and introduced himself with the most confident smile he could muster. In retrospect, Albert had to concede that he would have turned around and driven home if the teenager had not been retarded. But the boy’s affliction had felt like an opportunity to show off his big-heartedness, and he seized it eagerly. And by the end of the evening, the boy’s parents considered Albert a friend, and had to pull their son away after five minutes of hugging and kissing Albert, saying “Thank you Albert. Thank you!” Every Sunday after that, Albert accumulated more good will, and spent more money securing the Prime Catch as a province of the authority he lacked at home.

           Now a known quantity, whose conflation of largesse with charisma seemed to be expiring, Albert bypassed all the gussying and preening, the mendacious well-wishers, and went straight to the lacquered stretches of rope spelling BUOYS and GULLS. A scruffy man cornered him by the paper towel dispenser.

           “Albert, my man!”

“Oh, hi...”

“Kevin... McAlistair! Remember? We met two weeks ago by the scallops?”

“Oh, yes. How are you this evening?”

“Good, real good. Listen brother, have I got a surprise for you tonight.”

“Really?” Albert was beginning to realize that Kevin McAlistair did not have to use the bathroom.

“Now, you look around that lobby and you’ll see some nice lookin’ families. Maybe a few pretty girls, too. But nobody else is havin’ a family reunion like the McAlistairs are. We’ve got twelve people in our party- and I know how much you like the big, happy gatherings like the one we’re having!”

Albert tossed his paper towels and walked out of the restroom with Kevin McAlistair’s arm around his shoulders. Albert tried to spin away, but the arm hugged him closer.

“We’ve got a whole mess o’ people just dyin’ to meet you, Albert!”

Albert stopped and smiled at the man. He said, “Quite a gamble you’re taking, isn’t it Kevin?”

“What’s that, bubba?”

“12 people. That’s a big bill.”

“Never thought about it.” “No?” “Nope.”

“Well, maybe I could come by your table at some point to say hello, then.”

“Come on over, now! They all know aboutcha, my man! Come on, they’re right over there.”

They were halfway down the corridor between the restrooms and the lobby. Kevin McAlistair’s family was no more sunburnt or overweight than the family Albert had joined the week before, but among them was one man with a normal-sized head atop a noticeably smaller body. Not a dwarf, just severely stunted. A sinking in his cheeks suggested dentures. Albert drew a breath as he noticed the tattoos creeping out of the little man’s sleeves.

“Excuse me, Kevin?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“I’ll be right back. I just have to go outside for a moment. Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

 A gunmetal Lexus SUV pulled into the driveway. Albert counted seven passengers in the car and waved at all of them. The car was new, and unpatched except for one white oval with the letters KM in it. The driver wore a pink oxford and blue blazer, smiling bemusedly as he waved back at Albert. The doors opened and disgorged three generations of women, all pretty, two strapping teenaged boys, and an older man. The driver’s gold buttons winked as he saluted Albert and went off to park. Albert beamed at the thought of joining such a handsome family for the night.  

The older man excused himself from the teenagers and held out his hand.

“Well, hello!” Michael Woodbridge said.

Albert shook his hand and, before he could help it, gulped exaggeratedly. He raised an index finger and shook it once to excuse himself.  

Inside, Albert took Kevin McAlistair by the arm and signalled for Davey.

13, he mouthed.

Davey slumped and winced.  

Over the complaints of several hungry people, Ashley led Albert’s party back into the smoking section where Davey and Rolando were still dragging tables together to accommodate the McAlistair family reunion.  

           Albert had expected his practice to end when he felt good enough to outgrow it. He never figured on running into anyone he knew and having to resort to the slapstick of hiding behind a menu. And yet here were the wilting laminated panels, bisected by the golden elastic with the frayed tassel, hinged by Albert’s knuckles. Was Michael Woodbridge expecting him to return to their unstarted conversation, or had they had the type of encounter that is forgotten moments later? Did Woodbridge recognize Albert specifically as Todd Miller’s father, or just as a familiar face? But even if it were the latter, the Prime Catch was no place for Albert to maintain anonymity. He peeked over his menu and saw that most of the McAlistairs had gone to the buffet.  

           For the hell of it, Albert ordered a Salisbury Steak from the Land Lubbers section. Davey took the order himself and betrayed only the slightest apprehension when Albert asked to hold onto the menu. Confirming his meal ticket suspicions, the McAlistairs didn’t seem to mind in the least that Albert remained seated and engrossed in the listing of food he had been eating once a week for the past three months. Even if Michael Woodbridge never approached the table, Albert knew that this was his last Sunday at the Prime Catch Seafood Buffet. Next time it would be someone who knew him even better than some freeloading, cinephiliac alumni rep.  

 Empty beer bottles were accumulating on the table. Albert did not check to see whether the McAlistair family junkie was drinking or adhering to a recovery program. When he had been outside, Albert had imagined having an elegant, pre-supper cocktail with the handsome older woman in the gunmetal Lexus. Now he began to calculate his bill, wondering whether the drinking rate would accelerate or slow down from here.  

           Before he had a chance to carry any numbers, Albert saw Michael Woodbridge holding a plate below his chest and peering into the smoking section. Albert’s own view was impeded by milling customers and staff, and he saw just a flash of a befuddled face, hardly even familiar, but unmistakably recognizing him. He hopped upright, jangling the table with his knees and knocking back his chair. He lurched toward the exit in a comically slow escape. Rather than threading between the customers untouched, he groped their shoulders for support, an arthritic Tarzan negotiating a stunned human thicket. Winded, with his tongue lolling out, crouching continuously for the next burst toward the skipper’s wheel and beyond, his periphery began to cloud. He could make a scene but Woodbridge would only see his back when WHAM!

He was on the floor, Rolando on top of him, their sweat mingling, the empty corn tub clanging an instant later on the brick-colored linoleum. From his back on the floor, he saw a shower of corn, perfect spirals landing with widely variant sounds on the mackerel, the crab, the jell-o, the floor. Albert remembered that his face was exposed. He swiped Rolando aside and scrambled to his feet. Amazingly, several people in the restaurant were not staring at him. For those that were, Albert waved and turned to leave.  

But Davey stepped into his path, feet spread, hands behind his back. Albert tried to wave Davey aside, but the manager stood firm. To avoid collision Albert spun to his left, smacked into a fiberglass marlin mounted by the lobster tank.  The lobster tank wobbled and Davey ran to steady it while Albert staggered through the exit.

           Most of the clientele went back to their dinner. But a small group of men and women, some of whom had broken bread with Albert and some of whom had not, stepped outside the restaurant. Looking past the parking lot, they saw him slumped on the deck of the pirate ship. When Kevin McAlistair came charging out, they held him back and quieted him down. From the driveway, they could smell the hydrogenated emulsion and see the brilliant yellow kernals studding his head and body. Albert sat perfectly still, and the group outside began to think that he would wait out their scrutiny before making another move. Moments passed, and then he brushed off some of the corn, scooted forward and slid to dry ground.

[storiesbybrian]

Sexy Abe (June, 1999)

Part I          

His heritage was dormant inside of him. Why should he care about his people’s legendary dealings with sacred powers? Life was good. She was hot and they were gonna get drunk. He thought he might even love her.  

           Anyone could see that Lori was special, with her honeyed hair spilling past wicked eyes. She told dirty jokes and liked sports. And dogs and old movies. Abe’s friends would all agree this was the best one yet. He met her at a party where they talked about Woman of the Year. Abe happened to know that the bar where Tracy and Hepburn got drunk and fell in love actually existed somewhere near Union Square, a factoid he remembered from his one semester of film school.  

It stood lower than the sidewalk, cowering in the gutter. It was the type of place that fills up in broad daylight and, full, has an assortment of canes and crutches leaning against the bar while the rusty stools get gobbled up by a floppy row of gin-pickled asses scarcely contained in cheap fabrics. At the hour Abe and Lori stepped down to its door, the street’s neon lights had just been switched on. It was a summer evening and nightfall was hours away, but the blaring pinks and blues adorning most of the storefronts were so luminous that the sun’s own rays seemed enfeebled, creating the affect of a premature dusk.  

           He led her inside, where a jukebox rattled the bottles. Abe was ready. They sat in a booth in the back. There were rips in the burgundy naugahyde upholstery and a carved orgy of letters coupled and tripled in every conceivable position on the lacquered surface of the booth’s table. Abe looked around to see if anyone was impressed with him for bringing in such a beautiful girl. Nobody seemed to care, which felt unfair to him. He realized that the frivolities of this crowd were different than his own, but he still expected appreciation for brightening up the spot with such a hot babe. And yet he tried to blend in, unaffected, real. He even tried ordering drinks in a down to earth manner since he wanted Lori to think he was a man of the people.  

           Inconsistent as he was though, Abe wore a shirt the color of blue tin foil. This was set off by shiny shoes, shiny hair, a shiny gold bracelet, and dead black pants. His baller-est stuff. He leaned against the bar, then turned around to look at Lori. The bartender was was adorned with tattoos, piercings and a gorgeous belt buckle depicting dice bouncing along under the slogan “LADY LUCK.” A light emanated from under the bar, shadowing her face like a ghost storyteller on a camping trip, which frightened Abe when he turned back around to face her. But he played it cool. He waited politely while she toweled the bar. He looked back again at his date and she waved through the dark at him.  He nodded and turned to the bartender and said, “ ’Scuse me.”

           She looked up at him and sneered, revealing a small blue rhinestone grafted into the gum above one of her canine teeth. It had a brief morse code conversation with Abe’s shirt.

           “Is this the bar from Woman of the Year?”

           “Check.”

           “Pinky here?”

           “Stabbed and eaten by his youngest granddaughter.”

           “Oh. Uh, do you have Amstel Light?” he asked.

           The bartender turned towards the line of dusty beer bottles on a shelf behind her. There, standing between the silver and red of Coors light and the fake plant green of Heineken, was indeed a bottle of Amstel Light. Abe stood by the bar waiting for the woman to bring him two of them. After a moment of silence she was about to go back to her grey rag so he said, “Two please?”

           Another idle moment ticked away before he gave in and said, “Two Amstel Lights…. please.” He wanted all encounters with all peoples to go smoothly on this date.

           While LADY LUCK took her time getting the beers from a cooler, Abe surveyed the company and was surprised to see, among the usual suspects, a middle aged Hassidic Jew drinking a fruity vodka drink with what appeared to be a lady of the evening; or, in this case, late afternoon.  

           “Stop staring,” said the bartender as she stamped the bottles onto the bar so that foam dribbled from their spouts. “Eight-Fifty.”

Several drinks later, Abe had moved over to Lori’s side of the booth. They sat with their arms touching, sharing whatever fact about themselves seemed relevant. Unlike most of his dates, Abe was not in control. He was well practiced in the art of self presentation. But with Lori, he felt he was over-extending himself, awkwardly groping inward to bare his most soulful qualities instead of casually whipping something out from his usual jackpot of admirable character traits. Since Lori was so special, he tried very hard not to cheapen her by using any of the techniques that always worked on dumber girls. So, instead, he found that he was promising himself to live up to personal standards that he was creating on the spot.

           “Smoke?” he asked, mainly to see if he had permission to do so himself.

           “Never,” she said with a corroborating smile.  

           “Are you warm enough?” Abe asked.

           “Why don’t you check?”

           Abe moved closer and slid his arm around her. She was burning, which somehow made Abe shiver.

“Where does your family come from? Originally, I mean,” she asked hiccuping softly.

           “Lawrence.”

           “Funny, you don’t look Algonquin.”

           “Wha?”

           “I mean, like Poland? Russia? Lithuania? Germany? Which old country is your country, Abe?”    

“Oh. Um, Poland, I think. I never really knew my great grandparents, so…  What about yours?”

           “Well, my dad was born in Russia but my grandpa earned enough money over here to send for dad and grandma just before the war. And then my mother’s parents were survivors.”

           “You mean, like, the Holocaust?”

           “Yeah,” said Lori. “Auschwitz.”  

           “Wow.  I mean, you know.  I don’t mean to sound happy impressed but, I think...” Abe trailed off. He withdrew his arm from Lori’s shoulders, thinking hard for something interesting to say.

           “Is your family religious, Abe?” she asked.

           “Oh, yeah,” he lied. “Yours?”

           “Yeah.  I went to Yeshiva,” she said. “You’ve gotta funny looking shirt on, Abraham.”

           “Want me to take it off?” Abe asked with his hands already throttling over the blue buttons. He had an impressive physique.

           “Maybe later.”

“Do you want another drink?”

           “Sure,” she said and leaned her downy head on his shoulder.

           “I wish they had table service here.”

           “Mmmm, me too.”

           Abe sat there with Lori, in awe of her. He could just imagine the kind of happiness she must bring her family. The Yiddish word for it is “nachas” but Abe didn’t know that. He only knew that Lori seemed to have given her parents more to be proud of than Abe had his. But he knew better than to get down on himself like that in the middle of a date.

           “Lori, wanna do a shot?”

           “Alright.”

             Abe decided to buy in bulk from the bar so he would not have to go far from Lori again for a while. He snuggled back into the booth with a salt shaker, a dozen lime wedges and three shots apiece of tequila.  

           “What should we drink to?” Lori whispered.

           “To… to heritage. Yours and mine,” Abe said. Lori shrugged and threw the pale liquor down her throat. Abe looked at the flash of her delicate neck and lurched violently with longing. He wanted so badly to grab Lori and kiss her but something stopped him.  What? Did kissing Lori like this on the first date turn her into just another chippee? No that wasn’t it. It was her grandparents. Lori had used the past tense when she mentioned them, but to Abe, they were sitting in the kitchen, numbers peeking out of their bathrobe sleeves, waiting up for Lori with a nice piece of cake. Waiting to hear if this evening had brought her any closer to giving them great grandchildren. And then Abe realized that yes, he could be that man with this beautiful girl. Of course, he would have to become more serious in his own life, but, hell, that was no problem. Not if it meant Lori. He looked at her with more meaning but he still couldn’t kiss her.

The incongruity of this perfect, drunken moment and his total lack of resolve was brand new to Abe. He knew that if he didn’t want to completely blow it with Lori forever, he must not get caught being so materialistic and so assimilated. His eyes darted around in 359 degrees of avoidance while he tried to remember hot narrative passages from the cheap romance novels he and his friends used to read in junior high school.

As Abe slumped towards Lori, he tried to remember things that other girls had liked about him.

           “Know one of the things that amazes me about you, Lor’?”

           “Hmmm.”

           “You’re so fuckin’ smart. See, in my family…  And your legs. You’ve got the most wonderful legs. I love how the narrowest parts of them are your kneecaps, like a heroine in a comic book. The swells of your thigh and your calf,” but then he stopped talking and just shook his head with admiration before he could finish reciting something his father had written in one of his medical journals about the marriage of femur and tibia in a symphony of bone and cartiledge. Abe’s dad was an orthopedist.

           “Thanks.”

           Silence hung between them and she looked at him again but Abe still couldn’t kiss her. He excused himself and walked very quickly up to the bar.

             “’Scuse me,” Abe mumbled, tapping the Hassidic man at the bar on the shoulder.

           “What?”

           “Look, I know this is gonna seem weird, but, well, see that girl over there?”

           The Hassid turned and peered through the thick darkness at Lori. She waved at them.

           “I’m sorry,” said the Hassid. “I don’t know her.”

           “Yeah, I know,” said Abe. “But, well see, she’s like kosher and all and I grew up reformed and I don’t really know anything to say to her but I think I’m really in love with her, so I was, like, wondering if you could tell me something Jewish to say. You know, like a Mel Brooks movie I can watch. Something like that. What’s your name?”

           “Mendel.”

           “Abe,” he said, shaking the other man’s fat hand.

           “I don’t think so,” Mendel said and turned back to his date.

           “Look!” Abe said and wheeled the older man back around by his short arm. “I really don’t think you’re in a position to gimme any of this high road shit. Know what I mean? Now can’t you just help me out a little? Come on, bro, I’m askin’ you nicely.”

           “I think you’ve had too much to drink. Smells like tequila.”

           Abe felt he had been bullied and condescended all evening by these losers at this dump and it was time to assert himself.

           “Look, old man,” Abe whispered.

           Mendel turned to face him with a pleasant expression on his face and blinked innocently. This mollified Abe and he got ahold of himself.

“30 seconds. Ok?”

“Do you really believe,” asked Mendel, “that devotion to God is going to help you get laid?”

“Well, you’re getting laid, aren’t you?” snapped Abe.

“Well, yes but certainly not because I’m religious.”

“Dude, are you gonna help me or not?”

“Young man,” began the Hassid.

“Abe, please.”

“Avram-“

“No. Abraham.”

“Whatever.  Look,” said the older man, “I suggest you go back to your date and allow me to attend to mine. I judge by now you know that you are wasting my time as well as my money?”

But Abe was possessed of a different logic and so he was not deterred.  “What do you do?” he asked Mendel. “For a living.”

“I own a toy store in Brooklyn.”

“Well, here,” said Abe and pulled two crumpled $100 bills from his pocket.  “That’s fair, then. Right?”

Mendel eyed the money drunkenly. His date and the bartender watched his face, silently rooting for him to push the money back to the obnoxious boy. The man stroked his beard with his thick, dry fingers, sighed and shook his head slowly. He turned his gaze from the money back to the boy and nodded him back to his date.

“What does that mean? Aren’t you coming over to talk to her?”

“Listen. Kid. You’re not doing me any favors. You’re trying to buy me so I can chant a few magic spells for you and stir your little golden bowl of borscht over there to a boil. Wait. Please, let me finish. It’s true that your money would help me. Your $200. But I don’t think it would help you much. I’m not sure that anything would.” And with that, the older man turned to the girl on his left while sliding the money back to Abe on his right. The woman and the bartender nodded their approval and then glared at Abe, LADY LUCK’s sapphire gum glinting brilliantly in the dim light of the bar. Abe’s shirt had no response.

Abe ran both hands through his hair, unsure what to do. He turned back to Lori who lolled her head about drunkenly, her birch hair brushing down her cream neck.  

“Alright, look. Keep the money. Just tell me like, where’s a good synagogue or deli or something. A’right?”

Mendel ignored him.

“Hey! I asked you a question!” Abe hollered.

“Drop dead you bourgeois high school jerkoff!” said the hooker.

“Hey, you can’t talk to me like that you fuckin’ whore!” And all heads not confined to neck braces turned toward Abe, except Lori’s, who could not hear any of them over the loud jukebox.  

“Wuddy say?!” asked one of the older customers with a gnarled hand cupped behind his useless ear.

LADY LUCK looked at her watch, upset that the bouncer wasn’t due in for another two hours. Mendel’s hand gripped his drink tightly but still he remained turned towards his date and away from Abe. Abe was by far the youngest, strongest, healthiest person in the bar.

“OK, OK, look, I’m sorry I said that. Alright?”

Mendel winced his eyes shut in prayer. The bartender threw two beers at Abe just to get him away from the customers at the bar. Abe’s pretense of virtue, rooted in some mythical Brooklyn where the first generation of American Jews grew up to be Gershwin and Heifetz, scattered quickly into his generation’s spoilt Long Island reality. Abe was mad at the people at the bar. But Lori’s grandparents, still seated hopefully in their kitchen in his head, shook their heads sadly and shamefully at Abe. And Abe couldn’t argue with them, especially now that their sleeves were rolled up. He took the beer back to Lori. He left the money on the bar.

“Look, I’m drunk,” he told her when he got back to the booth. “You wanna go?”

“Alright.”

As they were gathering their things, they were approached by Mendel’s date whose hard stare implored both of them to sit back down in their booth.

“You know your friend here,” she told Lori, “wanted to buy Jewish lessons from my uncle over there at the bar. But I think you should have it. I think you could find a better catch willing to blow $200 on you too, sweetheart.”

Lori looked through her bleary eyes at Mendel’s niece in delightful amazement. The woman liked Lori immediately because she could see that Lori had the good sense and class to avoid the mock empathy that most non-working girls threw her way. Then they both looked contemptuously at Abe.

Abe snatched the money from the hooker’s extended hand and said, “Christ!”

“Maybe that’s where you should go, kid,” the hooker said and traipsed back to Mendel at the bar.

Abe could feel Lori staring at him and he wanted to hide under the table. He wanted to punch the wall until his hands bled. He drew a deep breath and then turned toward Lori but she was gone. He looked around the place but it was just a regular Thursday evening. The light had gone off in Lori’s grandparents’ kitchen, too. He sucked down the beer he had gotten from LADY LUCK and then started in on Lori’s bottle.  

How had it come to this? He was an inexperienced brooder but he was overcome by a horrible sadness, not only for his own loss but for the splintering of the collective identity of these people whom he considered his own. Boy, girl, Hassid, whore- weren’t they Jews above all? And wasn’t Abe an exemplary specimen of Jewish manhood, strong, handsome and rich? The specter of Lori’s grandparents now sat at his table, their sleeves rolled back down but their heads shaking heads back and forth. No one in his community ever shook their heads like that at their children. They got disappointed in their children just like anyone else, but not with such sadness.  

Maybe if Abe had ever felt sheepish before, he wouldn’t have slept with nearly 50 women by the age of 24.  But now he realized that all of the sparks of attraction he had felt with other girls that sent his penis toward them like a dart; all of the hours or weeks he spent with them angling, positioning, trussing them up for conquests had ill prepared him for his date with a nice Jewish girl. Deep down, Abe knew that with a girl as bright as Lori, manipulation and deceit were the only ways to prolong her inevitable rejection of him. Until when? Yes, it was true. Abe had been foolish enough to think that if he could just get her into bed, then she would love him despite their ultimate incompatibility. But, if they weren’t right for each other, why did he want her at all? Abe knew the answer to this, too. Lori was right for anybody. It was Abe who was wrong. Finally, her grandparents nodded.

    Part II

             The young reporter popped a fresh cigar into Abraham Lincoln’s mouth and lit it for him, careful not to singe his whiskers, which had become scraggly in the recent weeks since the election.

           Lincoln puffed on it and grumbled out of the side of his mouth, “Thank you, Mr. Bellingsworth.  Thank you, indeed.”

           “Not at all, Mr. President. I assure you that the honor is entirely mine to have the opportunity to share my joy with our nation’s chief executive. A-hum! A-hum!” chuckled Bellingsworth, the buttons of his stiff white shirt glinting like silver coins as his fat belly heaved up and down with delight.

           “Won’t you sit down, please?” invited Lincoln with a sweeping movement of his large, wood-colored right hand.

           Bellingsworth quickly took up the flaps of his blazer and rushed his substantial posterior into the nearest chair. Seated, he delicately crossed one well-tailored pants leg over the other. Lincoln fell into the small wooden chair behind his desk and folded his big hands before him.  

           “Well, Mitchell-” began the President.

           “Mitch, please, Mr. President,” said Bellingsworth. “If you’ll permit me to interrupt.”

           “Little late for permission… Mitch. Hmm Hmm Hmm,” said Lincoln.  Bellingsworth joined him in the riotous cackling, his whiskers puffing out as he rolled his head about his pillowy shoulders and, for the second time within a minute, the Oval Office was filled with the hearty cheer of the two boisterous men.  

           After a moment, Lincoln snapped his mouth shut while Bellingsworth continued to quake with delight. Lincoln waited patiently for Bellingsworth to calm down. While he waited, he mused to himself that Bellingsworth reminded him of an overheated stove on the brink of combustion. Finally, Bellingsworth regained control of himself and nodded formally to the President that he was ready to continue their meeting.  

           Lincoln decided to extend the informality a bit further so as to put Bellingsworth at ease. He asked, “So, what’s the delightful little scamp’s name?”

           The reporter’s eyes glowed with pride that the President of the United States of America should take such an interest in his affairs, when it was he, Mitchell Stacey Bellingsworth, who was dispatched by his publisher to jot down a mere thirty minutes worth of Abraham Lincoln’s comments regarding his assumption of a second term of office. He summoned the finest timbre he could and purred out his favorite words in the world, “Victor Lamonte O’Hanagan Bellingsworth, Mr. President.”

           “Alright. Damn fine name. Damn fine,” said Lincoln who, ever since amending the Constitution, had come under the impression that his opinion was valued in all matters. “Now, Mitch. Let’s get down to the railroad spikes. What would you like to talk about today?”

           “Ah, well, Mr. President, I know your time is limited and I don’t want to rush uncomfortably into anything too blunt, but, that is, if we could discuss your policies with regard to a few of the recent tariffs, if it seems a reasonable thing for you… Well, Mr. President, ah, you see, several states, that is to say that you’d care to opine wherefore we might…”

           The President’s eyes began narrowing suspiciously but Bellingsworth did not fall silent until one of Lincoln’s hands unfastened itself from the other and raised up like a paddle to halt his fumbling speech. Lincoln’s stern demeanor softened once again as he stood up and turned around. He twisted his head back towards the reporter and offered, “Drink, Mitch?”

           “Oh,” stammered Bellingsworth. “Oh, hum, well. Well, certainly, Mr. President.”

           “Please. Call me Abe.”

           “Beg pardon? Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly… President Lincoln, perhaps... or maybe- um- that is- on the most chumly of occasions- Abraham. But, oh dear.”

           “Nonsense,” said Lincoln as he turned back around to face Bellingsworth with two crystal bulbs of port in one hand, his cigar in the other. He slid one of the bulbs across the desk to Bellingsworth, hammered the ash off the tip of his cigar, sat back down and swung his enormous feet onto the desk. Tilting his drink towards the reporter, he said, “Mitchell. I want you to call me Illinois Abe. Alright? Now that’s an order. You’re a proud father and here we are hoisting better days ahead, toasting camaraderie and such and I’m asking you, man to man, to call me Illinois Abe. Now say it.”

           Bellingsworth, aghast, shot back his port and on his rheumatic exhalation muttered, “Illinois Abe.”

           “See?” said Lincoln as he leaned across his desk to refill Bellingsworth’s glass.  “That wasn’t exactly a debate with Douglas, now was it? Now I’m going to sip my drink, remove my shoes and we’re going to pick up where we left off.”

           Bellingsworth was dumfounded. He had interviewed Lincoln several times before and had heard at press functions of some of the strange tactics he had used upon younger, greener reporters than himself, but neither he, nor anyone else to his recollection, had never been confronted by two gigantic yellow feet propped upon the nation’s most prestigious desk, sharply undermining the quality of the world’s most hallowed office’s air. Again Bellingsworth referred to his crystal bulb and again the President slopped him more of the thick purple drink from the black bottle.  

           “What do you think of these socks, Mitchy?” asked the President, dangling the things over his desk. “My secretary, Mrs. Kennedy stitched them for me last winter. Man my size needs custom made everything. Even underbritches! Wanna see?”

           “Really, Mr. Pres-”

           “Oh, come on! Don’t be such a stick in the mud! And I’m not going to tell you again what you’re supposed to be calling me,” the President chided playfully as he lightly cuffed the journalist on his ample chin.  

           As Bellingsworth’s friend Marsh had noted during the campaign of 1860, Lincoln’s frequent attempts at gentle horseplay usually resulted in painful cracks and bruises. Bellingsworth rubbed his chin that throbbed with the privilege of such treatment as he remembered Marsh’s observations. He had watered his share of punch bowls and clogged his share of muskets during his days at Dartmouth. And, while a stickler for decorum and gentility, Bellingsworth had always been careful not to place himself above those whose regard for propriety was somewhat laxer than his own. For Bellingsworth understood that a lack of refinement was almost always (and certainly in the case of the sitting President) the result of a lack of opportunity. And yet, for the first time since becoming White House correspondent in mid-term of the Buchanan administration, Bellingsworth, like a child’s innocence being stabbed viciously by adulthood when he sees the first crack of fallibility in his parents, began to consider the possibility that Abraham Lincoln might be something of a boorish ass.  

           Despite his foppish stammerings, Bellingsworth’s composure had an epic threshold. So, as Lincoln arose from his chair and softly rounded the desk while unbuckling his vest, Bellingsworth calmly reached around the President’s slender waist and helped himself to another serving of port. After a moment of unfastening, Lincoln’s winglike hands were hooked around his hips and his pants sat loosely about his ankles.  

           Bellingsworth took a moment of his own to summon the timbre of voice that would not betray his shock before saying, “Well, Illinois Abe, I can see why you need bespoke underbritches.” Then, reaching onto the desk for his note pad and pen, Bellingsworth knocked over his empty glass. Its crash on the floor startled Lincoln and he hopped up in surprise. Because of the position of his trousers, he keeled over instead of landing on his bare feet.  Bellingsworth quickly helped the President up, brushed some of the crystal shards from his bare thighs and set about sweeping up his mess with one of his shoes.

           “One second, Mitch,” said Lincoln. “I’ve got an idea.” Lincoln pulled up his pants and made his way to a closet on the left side of the office. He returned with a small red bundle. “You know, Mitch. Sometimes being President is a lot like having a pregnant wife. It can get quite lonely, if you know what I mean,” he said, batting his eyes coquettishly at the journalist.  

           The blue in Bellingsworth’s blood boiled in astonishment of the President’s behavior. But, rather than allow himself to be carried away by his upper class sensibilities, the fourth estate in Bellingsworth began to wonder how much of this peculiar interview would make it into the morning papers. The entire country wondered how President Lincoln dealt with the loss of his own two sons. Was this it? As he daydreamed of the headlines, Lincoln approached him with the small bundle.

“Man my age, my size?  Well, let’s just say you eventually learn how to fulfill your needs in the most precise of fashions,” Lincoln whispered into Bellingsworth’s ear as he removed the reporter’s blazer. “Oh now I can understand if you’re still locked in to the archaic ideal of love.  Plenty of men in your station are. Especially the new fathers, all humbled by the frailty of new life, marvelling at the vague lightening of infantile comprehension, the gray strands of electricity wandering from synapse to vein, searching for a connection of bio-logic. And then some are not. Shall I name them for you? Oh not that you belong in the same pile of conquests with those other louts. I’ve always cherished the moments you and I have spent together here. Anyway, as I was saying, sometimes the rush of war-“

“War?”

“Yes the cut and thrust of battle, the marching formations of men. It can whip up such a lust in a man that one simple evening in the company of an old-fashioned prude like Mary Todd just doesn’t do the trick. I swear to you, Mitchy, that woman belongs in a goddamn convent!”

           Bellingsworth shivered beneath the grasp of Lincoln’s hands, one of which crept around and began unfastening the buttons of his shirt.

           “Illinois Abe, might I be so bold as to request a new receptacle for your delicious port?”

           “Not until you’ve cleaned up the remains of your first one, big boy.”

           And with that, Lincoln tore Bellingsworth’s shirt from his back, balled up the stiff white linen and tossed it aside. He forced the shorter man down onto his hands and knees before the littered pieces of glass.  Then, with a flourish, Lincoln whipped the red bundle into its full expanse and draped it across Bellingsworth’s shoulders.  Had the reporter glanced up for a moment, he would have seen the flash of the Stars and Bars as they came swooping down on him like a spangled insect. Lincoln had also donned his stovepipe hat, which clung miraculously to his large skull.  

           Although Bellingsworth was already prone, shamefully huddled under the confederate flag, Lincoln issued the orders, “Now on your knees, boy! Clean up that mess! Whoop-dee-daw!”

           All of the private tutors and gourmet meals and lolling about the mahogany furniture of Europe’s finest salons that had sailed through Mitchell Bellingsworth’s life in such a splendid stream of pageantry so that he may, among other things, keep his dignity firmly intact under the most bizarre of circumstances, flitted away like smoke in the rain. Were he sober enough to be conscious of his thought process, he would have been surprised by the enthusiasm with which he fell to his duty. When the spanking began, he welcomed it as if his backside had throbbed coldly with neglect until the President’s merciful attendance.

           “Come on now, boy!” yowled Lincoln. “Ever last crumb!” And he straddled Bellingsworth and began riding him around the Oval Office, tugging on the man’s ears and scooping behind him for turgid fistfuls of flesh. Bellingsworth panted and groaned and shuttled the President around his desk, awaiting his next delicious humiliation.  

           “Giddap, you fat floozy! Giddap!”

           But then suddenly, Bellingsworth’s hand mashed down on an object that sent a fierce pain charging all up his arm and into his chest. This sensation put his quivering body over the edge and, after the dam had broken, he rocked to one side to get his hand off of the burning cigar.  Lincoln toppled from his saddle, taking Bellingsworth over with him in the vice grip of his five-miles-to-school thighs. Bellingsworth licked his hand and squirmed his behind towards the President for more contact. And all the while, the cigar beckoned him to remember little Victor Lamonte.

           Breathless, the two men embraced on the floor, Bellingsworth’s girth a worthy match for the span of Lincoln’s condorlike arms. Bellingsworth snuggled his bald head into the thick whiskers of Lincoln’s chin and sighed exhaustedly. Lincoln hardly seemed tired at all. In fact his caresses seemed perfunctory, as if he would take his leave the moment he was sure it wouldn’t hurt the reporter’s feelings, and even that consideration was rapidly fading.

           “Oh, Illinois Abe,” said Bellingsworth.  

           Lincoln smiled craftily, unseen by Bellingsworth as he figured out how to escape from the journalist’s pudgy reach. “Mitchy?”

           “Yes, Illinois Abe?”

           “Congratulations again on the birth of your son. I’m sure you and the wife are beaming with pride.”

           The wife. Bellingsworth looked ahead in terror at the thought of returning to bed with little Victor Lamonte’s mother, a woman he had known since his boarding school days. She may not have been Mary Todd Lincoln, but how in the world would she react to his plump behind wriggling around her in the hopes that she might just brush against it accidentally? Was she an astute enough lover to distinguish his theatrical sighs from his involuntary shudders? And how would he react when, thrashing through the sheets towards her while the dawn gently overtook heaven’s blackness, he learned of her indifference towards him; of her distant routine that he had been buying as genuine intimacy all these years? It was too much to bear and only one solution presented itself- spend more time with the Lincolns. And as he loosed himself from the bony tangle of limbs and beard and stood up, he searched his mind for the first opportunity for a get together with Illinois Abe and Mary Todd. And then, as he was unballing his shirt, he recalled that the wife and he had extra tickets to the new production of Our American Cousins.

[storiesbybrian]

Dad Rock (January, 2017)

With company expected, Tilden’s patience with his daughter was especially, pathetically delicate. Like so many people he knew, and unlike the few he admired, he was aware of how counterproductive his harsh reactions to his child’s childishness were, but instead of calming him down, that awareness only made him ashamed of being a bigger baby than her.

“Jesus Lucy!” he said from the kitchen. “It’s really not that hard!”

Lucy was eight and she had asked him for help with her homework. Tilden could never keep track of how smart Lucy really was. Sometimes she grasped sophisticated concepts and seemed capable of greater concision than her father by far. For example, when Tilden spent five minutes explaining why his opinion of the mayor was so different than the media’s, Lucy said, “So you should be suspicious of what somebody’s enemy says about her.” But other times Tilden expected Lucy to respond to obvious cues and was almost contemptuous of her when she did not. At a recent Christmas party, she just missed colliding with a college student carrying a tray of spring rolls. Tilden had raised his eyebrows and assumed Lucy would stop running around. But 30 seconds later she was swinging a two year old boy to and fro and one of his feet knocked a drink off the arm of a very nice couch. Guests halted conversations to stare at him when he yelled at her. After the party, Tilden wondered if he would have been less angry if the college student with the hors d’ouvres hadn’t been so attractive.

He left a half-sliced carrot to go over the homework assignment with Lucy. 24 matchsticks were arranged in a grid of three by three squares: Remove eight of them so only six squares remained. The squares could be different sizes. Tilden solved the problem quickly in his mind, and then waited for Lucy to figure it out. He wanted to watch her apply deduction with what her teachers referred to as grit. Grit would send him back to the kitchen without feeling torn. But instead she seemed enthralled by her own dauntedness, as if the incentives to be vexed were greater than those contingent on mastery. It was true that the problem was more challenging than the pedestrian fare she normally brought home. And he still had an hour before anything had to go into the oven. So he pulled up a chair and availed himself to Lucy.

Immediately, Tilden recongized her slavish respect for the perimetric three stick by three stick square, and attributed the fear of undermining the master structure to Lucy’s mother, who was at work while he was at home trying to prove of equal worth despite contributing no revenue to the family coffers. Their marital therapist, whom they could neither afford, nor afford to fire, talked a lot about mutual traps, and certainly Tilden’s eagerness to resent Fiona constituted one of those. So while he knew better than to deprive Lucy of the challenge, his social and love lives were somewhat dependent on the quality of his own work in the kitchen. So he gave her a sizable hint.

“You know how you have small squares, medium and then the large one?”

“Yes Daddy?”

“Well you don’t need the large one.” He started back to the kitchen.

Only then did Lucy start extracting matchsticks from the outer frame of the grid. But she still had no vision of what six squares should remain. And that lack of vision rendered her whole approach diabolically ignorant of logic.

“No!?” Tilden said, settling back into the chair.

Lucy’s hand hovered over the dining table that doubled as her school desk, and tripled as his writing desk, and quadrupled as Fiona’s ultimate leverage when he had the temerity to issue a marital expectation during Top Chef. All she had to do was glance at the shoddy varnish and he would retreat back to their room, where his guitar sat on their bed, in tune but out of ideas. He might have to strum it for their guests tonight, to play the fascinating friend, not solvent enough to join them for weekends on the slopes, but just so damn entertaining, and not the least bit socially desperate. Maybe the nice tablecloth should cover him instead of the table.

Tilden knew, more than vaguely, that he was joining a long, sad line of fathers who projected their failings onto their children. He had recently read half of a book about the means by which global elites rigged the economy to capture larger shares of capital before it filtered to working people all over the planet. And Tilden wondered if he was so fucked up that he had coopted the book’s message to exercise this same kind of bullying over his own daughter, belittling her in subtle ways to compensate for his own pathetic, self-induced insecurities. And as per his secret policy, he conceded that anything he suspected of himself was damningly true, warranting full inward confession.

Tilden ran into the kitchen to finish slicing carrots. Fiona had taught him to slice them on a bias, to maximize the surface area exposed to heat.

He returned to the living/dining room to find Lucy beaming with her arms folded. Her solution had the sixth square sharing a side with one of the other five, leaving one matchstick bristling inharmoniously in the lower left quadrant. Tilden asked Lucy if that stray would be necessary if her sixth square did not share any sticks with the other five, but that presumed they agreed on which square was the sixth. So Tilden rolled his eyes and pointed with the knife he was still holding to the square he was taking about, a chimney jutting from the two by two grid she had spared from her haphazard groping. Tilden tried to ignore the all too slight difference between the quality of wood in the matchsticks and that of the table on which they, and so many other aspects of his family life, sat. Taking a deep breath and counting to 10 was actually effective, but it did not occur to Tilden at the moment. He recognized that he wanted to get angry, that even if it wasn’t productive or helpful or nice, it would feel good in a way that he guarded from the incursion that logic already made on so many of his choices. The irony that his anger was mitigated by the blade he was wielding, that being more dangerous goaded him to become less so, was not lost on him.

“OK,” he said, storming back to the kitchen. “Why don’t you take a break and come back when you’ve decided to turn on your brain?”

To Lucy’s credit, she remained at the table. Tilden sliced fennel bulbs, pretending to ignore her. Lucy knew she was not as correct as he wanted her to be, and that striving made Tilden put down the knife. He was so ashamed of his treatment of his own daughter that now above all else, he wanted her to recognize that he was not worth pleasing. But eight years of parenting had taught him that this was the last thing he should try to impart, that it was incumbent on him to perpetrate whatever fraud he had to to maintain Lucy’s trust and respect.

Tilden came back to the table. Lucy put all the matches back into their spots on the grid. They had established that five of the squares would be comprised of four small ones with the fifth being their perimeter. She removed matchsticks from the upper right and lower left corners.

“Good,” Tilden said, wondering if his tone mattered more or less now that he’d already allowed it to get so raw. He wanted to start all over, and wished he knew the cumulative affect that his denigrations, both forceful and subtle, had had on Lucy so far. Or maybe if he were overly sensitive she would turn out too fragile. Or maybe eight year-olds have already turned out however they are going to turn out and her succumbings to hard drugs and promiscuity were set into motion long ago. Tilden could already see himself blaming her for the bumps in the road she was now destined to hit, because he would be too cowardly to acknowledge the depths of his own failure as a dad. Even these private self-flagellations were probably totemic introspections, enabling him to avoid addressing more fundamental failings. And, per the rule, by probably he meant definitely.

Lucy still had four more matchsticks to remove. She inspected the ones she was holding. Tilden ran back to the kitchen to finish slicing fennel, hoping a match would accidentally strike, and shoot a spark into his bedroom to immolate his guitar. Until Lucy was five, he had enjoyed a career. He was never a rockstar, but he licensed enough of his music to avoid giving lessons, and he and Fiona could afford a nanny. He kept a running estimate of how many people had heard him play, both live and broadcast. Gigging at venues to audiences between 10 and 400 people on average of 15 times per year for 17 years, he had reached approximately 50,000 ears in person, plus more than 200 million via video games and a juice commercial. And then the tunes just stopped flowing. And then he exhausted his backlog. And then they let the nanny go.

He could trace the shriveling of his output to an early May evening with his friend Jerry. Jerry was an artist who had lured, there really was no other word for it, Tilden to the biergarten at Whole Foods. Tilden had vowed never to shop there but Jerry insisted the beer selection and rooftop setting warranted greater flexibility. Plus, Jerry said, isn’t it more punk rock to have no rules? So Tilden convinced himself to participate in a racket he despised, which required convincing himsef himself that he was neither a sucker for the trappings that tricked Whole Foods’ customers into embracing 125% markups, nor very serious about his initial boycott, so that he could convince himself he was at liberty to change his mind rather than vacating deep principles for an hour or so in a synthetically pleasant environment that supported the retailers of his craft beer to an even greater extent than its crafters. But the entire contortion had felt too easy, and any pain that was supposed to be entailed in shrinking the gauntlet of compromises down to almost nothing would have to be manufactured by Tilden, which seemed too unnatural to feel convincing.

He related the whole thing to the first time he and Fiona took Lucy to an art museum. Lucy had been small enough that Fiona could wear her and, standing in front of a Van Gogh, Tilden’s eye focused on Lucy’s little shoe, relegating the painting to a background blur. He knew the brushstrokes beyond the shoe were exquisite and that comparisons between the industrial marketing committee that had designed Lucy’s footwear and the genius who had painted the canvas hanging on the wall were absurd. But finding greater appeal in the painting than the crimson and chartreuse stitching on the faux suede maryjanes encasing his daughter’s tender feet required a vigilance that, exhausted from a productive morning, he just didn’t feel like mustering. And now, here he was on the roof, suspecting himself of innate preference for easy, synthetic pleasures over the soul-nourishing of true art. But what did that have to do with drinking beer with his friend? Was a dive bar true art? Perhaps because it welcomed the craggy locals that Whole Foods whitewashed, yes.

But Jerry was seductive, and beneath the easy flow of their conversation, Tilden wondered whether Jerry was testing him on purpose. And delighting in Tilden’s failure. Because Tilden preferred to enjoy himself with Jerry. Why was that a subversion of principles? But somehow it was. And maybe he’d never been an artist to begin with, certainly not one as comfortable in his creativity as Jerry, who could be crass and shallow without it marring the quality of his work. They had said good night, slightly drunk, and Tilden went home feeling like he’d been fucked by someone who would never call him again. He hadn’t written more than a few measures of decent music since.

Within a year they’d let the nanny go, and that summer Fiona suggested day care for Lucy and an office for Tilden. Now salting the chicken before trussing it, he wondered if whatever damage he might have incurred wedged between flourescence and a desk would have spared Lucy any of the dings she picked up from spending too much time with her unstable father.

“Daddy!” she said.

He put down the chicken and surveyed her configuration.

“Aw, good job honey!” He waved his greasy hands and shrugged, meaning he wanted to hug her, but… salmonella. Did she understand? He went back to the kitchen.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah.”

Lucy stood in the kitchen doorway. Tilden put garlic and half a lemon into the cavity. Then he pulled a strand of twine from its ball, nodding Lucy toward the scissors on the cutting board. She stayed in the doorway.

“Wanna cut the string?” “Oh, sure.”

He trussed the bird, salted it some more and nestled it among the biased vegetables. Dinner went into the oven in time for the evening meal. Tilden washed his hands, smiling at Lucy.

Lucy bobbed at the knees. Now it was his turn to decipher what she wanted but preferred not to say. Pausing only briefly enough to notice he wasn’t hesitating, Tilden took Lucy’s hand and marched her into his room. He grabbed his guitar and sat on the bed. Lucy sprawled along his back. Her dad began to play.

[storiesbybrian]

Jane, His Wife (September, 2014)

Paul is about to miss his plane. A viable excuse is right up his ass, a cannaboid suppository purchased as a kind of reward after a very contentious meeting. He could probably amuse his boss into forgiving him for not even making it to the airport with a straightforward account of his inability to resist grabbing something from a shelf labeled “Edibles and Anables”and then, being on such an impulsive roll, marching straight from the register to the unisex bathroom where he pretended to defecate but really went ahead and dented his anal virginity right there in the dispensary, higher than Robert Mitchum before the water from the fake shit flush  finished swirling. But the real reason Paul’s flight takes off without him is a girl he used to know. He thinks her name is Sonja.

Emerging from the bathroom, more of a man/less of a man, too confused to know which codes to honor at the moment, Paul bumped into a guy engrosssed in his smartphone. He was very muscular, with a barcode tattooed on the back of his bald head, and he wore a coat, tie and acid washed jeans. Ironic or resolutely earnest, again Paul couldn’t decipher. So, before manners or fear could stop him, Paul peaked at the phone screen, hoping it might give him a better sense of what this guy was all about. And there she was, holding a baby, grinning unabashedly at the semi-well-dressed man and telling him something about a movie she was almost finished watching. Over the past 25 years, Paul had imagined seeing Sonja again many times, but never in fulfillment of Jetsonian prophecy by the bathroom at a legal weed emporium.

Paul remembers her name as evoking kerchiefs and ice skating, so maybe it’s really Brigitte or Helena. Theirs had been one of those acquaintances that advanced too rapidly to ask for a reminder without compromising the probability of sex, especially since she made a big point of knowing his name, shoehorning it into nearly everything she told him. And then, after what had happened, the mutual acquaintance that had introduced them never mentioned her again and Paul was not about to ask after “your friend, you know, that depressed girl with the ungainly feet and Jupiter spot on her eyeball?” Those feet. They seemed to be clutching something delicate, or maybe she was just trying to make them seem smaller. Anyway, Paul follows her husband out of the dispensary, knowing he has to call work, and his own spouse, and no surer what to say to either of them than how to broach a conversation with a stranger whose physique and pants might imply a penchant  for violence.

Paul follows Mr. Sonja across Rainier Avenue to Chinook Beach Park. This must be where most recreational customers go to light up as now, with one acid washed leg draped over the other, far less threatening seated than upright, the bar code-necked man rolls himself a blunt. For a moment, Paul is afraid of being mistaken for some kind of moocher who hangs around the parking lot waiting for someone to come out and offer him a puff. But just about any misrepresentation, no matter how unflattering, would be preferable to who Paul really is to the mother of this guy’s child.

Meanwhile, what about Paul’s more pressing concerns, like the personal and professional upheaval he causes by being here instead of home in two hours? And in an irony he feels like he has to be very still to keep straight, Paul notes that he is drumming up excuses for the homefront to delay his encounter with a sartorial schizophrenic, while he very well could have mistaken the visage on the guy’s smartphone and set off in pursuit of resolution 25 years in the making to put off the stresses inherent in maintaining all of the routines he is forsaking to be here.  Like he’s avoiding returning to the life he’s now invoking to avoid further avoidment.

He pulls out his own phone and starts dialing Anna Lyza’s mobile number. Her name is not symbolic coincidence, just the product of really strange parents. Paul has made vague allusions to a girl he traumatized in college, but never told Anna Lyza the full story of his day with Sonja. And to go into it now would sound like he was lying to cover for something far more nefarious than a digital goose chase.

So Paul needs to lie to his wife, tell half truths to his boss and come completely clean to this weirdly dressed stranger on a bench. Great, let’s talk to the very strong guy who has good reason to hate you. While he’s high. Paul starts repocketing his phone when it rings. It’s Dan.

“Hello?”

“Paul! So glad I caught you!”

“Oh hi Dan.”

“Listen! Can you talk?”

“To you?”

“Funny. Look, at the meeting earlier today? Jordy said he licenses all of his material through Quatre Saisons? Not true, my man.”

“So we don’t want to…?”

“Dude doesn’t license any of his stuff!”

“Like it’s all-?”

“Open-Sourced! So why were we about to shell out 2nd round funding for free shit?”

“Because you said-“

“Ehnhnhnhnhnh! I didn’t say shit Paul. You said we needed to deal with the Franco-Vivaldi fuckers.”

“Well…”

“Alright, whatever. We’ll talk about this when you get back.”

“Yeah well-“

“Hey Paul?”

“Yeah?”

“Dude, you sound higher than me right now.”

Paul hangs up the phone and rubs his head, appearing far more stressed than he actually is. Sure enough, he gets Sonja’s husband’s attention from the next bench over. Paul gives him his best hangdog and the guy smiles and offers him the blunt. So phase one initiated, but Paul’s resorting to manipulation to make progress toward amends for 25 year-old emotional abuse makes the whole thing feel tarnished before it even gets off the ground.

“Thanks man.”

The guy nods, then thinks better of silence. “Hey, what’d you get in there bro?” His voice is raspy.

Paul takes a deep breath and points to his ass.

“No shit!”

“Not right now.” It gets a laugh.

“So gimme that back, yo. You’re already baked!”

Paul nods enthusiastically. “Appreciate the company though.”

Either the guy will accept the friendly overture or reject it and maybe get suspicious. If the suspicion can manifest itself in a way he’s supposed to notice, Paul will flash his wedding ring and broach the topic of spouses (though the irony of grousing about being married to women as a way to tell men you are not gay is not lost on Paul). But the guy just blanks out and it occurs to Paul that people can say “bro” without awkwardness and still have gaping social deficiencies. In fact, how many times has Paul mistaken one or two words for more comprehensive coolness? He needs to restructure his entire socio-evaluative process but now is not the time. Or is that more personal procrastination and cowardice? Why not now?

“Nice here,” Paul tries.

“You ain’t from Seattle?”

“San Francisco.”

“City by the Bay. Nice bro!”

Paul nods. Briefly he considers just asking the guy what his wife’s name is. But he can only see it seeming  like he’s got a jacket lining full of hot watches for sale. And maybe the guy’s impression of Paul is still unformed enough that coming across as sleazy and awkward himself will not seem out of character, and might even arouse compassion. Like maybe the guy will assume that Paul’s life is so pathetic that sharing the details of his own will seem charitable. But that’s a stretch, even between two stoned strangers.

“Been there? I mean do you live in Seattle? Actually I don’t know what to ask.”

The guy laughs and slaps Paul on the back. It hurts.

“I like you, bro. Name’s Paul.”

“No way! That’s my name too!”

“Bullshit!”

Paul pulls out his driver’s license. The whole time he has been trying to seize the opportunity to bestow an apology whose due is old enough to rent a car, he has assumed that Sonja relegated their afternoon together to some minor episode that never bore recounting to anybody. And before he can consider otherwise, his ID makes Acid Washed Paul potentially angry.

“Did you go to Boulder bro?”

It would be easy to say no, catch another flight and try to smooth everything over back home. But Paul can not chalk all of the other things he’s neglecting to be here up to larkishness.

“Yes.”

“This might sound fucked up, but I know who you are.”

“I saw you FaceTiming with her. I was hoping…”

Paul clamps a hand on Paul’s shoulder and squeezes cruelly. Paul tries to squirm out of it but the grip is too tight. With the other hand Paul holds the blunt close like a paintbrush.

Paul has never been in this much physical danger. He thinks that if he had, or anyone had ever hurt him very badly, he might not carry as much guilt around. As the ember glows an inch from his face, black trees past it swaying by the water, he realizes that maybe he wants to get burned. That rather than explaining to Sonja that he enjoyed being kind to her when she expected cruelty, but then couldn’t help switching to contempt when she started expecting or even demanding kindness after only knowing him for two hours, it might be more satisfying to all parties concerned if her husband damaged him permanently and then brought pictures of it home to his dear sweet wife as sort of a trophy, first prize in the KarmaBall League.

“I wanted…”

Acid Washed Paul’s eyes narrow, but the ember bobbles and his threat of burning seems to recede. Paul almost starts crying and wishes that he would.

“I wanted to apologize to her. She’s… She’s told you what happened?”

“You know what she says? She says it was like you lifted her up to the greatest view she’d ever seen, and then you kicked her lower than she’d been before you’d ever met. She didn’t even wanna know anybody else named Paul, much less marry me! You know she’d just gone back to school after a suicide attempt.”

“No. I didn’t know that. I really didn’t!”

“And it’s stayed with you too, huh?”

Paul nods.

Paul stubs out the blunt and unholsters his phone, weighing it in his hand.

“Well this is a buzzkill.”

Paul tries to maintain eye contact and now he does begin to cry. To his shame, it’s probably out of relief that he escaped a mangling.

“Jesus. You need a drink more ‘n me!”

“I don’t drink.”

“What?”

“I quit when I turned 40.”

“Like W.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. Well, he is disciplined I guess.”

They go to a coffee shop that serves beer. Paul seems to know several people there, though Paul can not tell how highly they regard him.

Paul gets a pint of something dark and frothy. Paul has Earl Grey tea.

“Is she… happy?”

“Who Anna?”

Paul rocks back in his seat. All this time he had her name wrong but meanwhile married someone else with the same name. And of course so did she. He thinks it’s a coincidence that shouldn’t mean much, but worries again that dismissiveness is tantamount to cowardice. Paul does not know anything else about Paul. If Paul shares more information, the coincidence will gain the freight of expectations and make the whole thing look like some time bomb detonating at the altar. But he cops out and sits on it, pretending he knew Sonja was Anna all along, and that her San Francisco counterpart is named something other than Anna Lyza.

“I mean… If you’re askin’ how guilty are you supposed to feel, I can tell you that plenty of dudes have done her way worse than you managed in one afternoon.”

“But, well, do you know all their names too?”

“Oh yeah. All named Paul. Every last one of ‘em!”

Inhalant Paul looks bewildered for a moment, then cracks up loud enough for dozens of faces haunted by laptops to stare at him. He can not stop laughing. The faces plead for quiet. Rectal Paul is not sure whether to laugh along, stay mired in the horror that seized him when he thought Paul was serious, or take the spectral freelancers’ side and admonish Paul to simmer down.  He sips his tea without committing to anything.

“Man, I don’t even think she remembers every one’s name. And trust me, it ain’t like I ain’t done my share of damage too. But I’ve stuck around so…”

“I really would like to apologize to her.”

“Yeah that probably works for you bro, but I’m not sure it’s such a good idea on her end. Mad hormonal since the baby.”

“I hear that! We have a two year-old.”

“Tell me it gets easier.”

“It does. I mean, you get to start sleeping through the night again. But that’s right around the same time they learn to move on their own so there’s more chasing ‘em around, instinctively covering every table corner with your hand.”

Paul does not ask Paul any follow ups, how old, how masculine, any others. Paul is relieved by this. If Paul were generous enough to be curious, he would occupy the high road more imposingly. But being all about his own deal, Paul does not have to cede as much moral leverage for his past sins.

Music has been playing continuously, though a specific song comes on before Paul notices. It is a classic rock anthem that Paul’s high school classmates used to sing along with and quote in yearbooks while he felt alienated for cherishing the knowledge that the song was the musical equivalent of shit past its expiration date. But now he smiles and feels the urge to sing along, nearly certain that Paul will join right in.

Before the verse drives up to the chorus, a giant hand tries to pry the coffee shop’s roof from the top of its walls. Everything quakes. Coffee cups chit and shatter. The song keeps playing. Nobody wants to be the one to shriek. The giant hand can not separate the roof from the walls. The quaking stops for a moment, then the giant hand punches through the roof, smashing into a pinball machine. It tries to shake the plaster and glass out of its wounded knuckles. It has a wedding ring that knocks people down.

Paul and Paul look up through the hole in the building. Giant Anna glares down at them, raising her foot til it blocks out the light.

Paul says, “Holy shit that’s my wife!”

Paul thinks with so many people under threat of imminent smushing, he might have pretended otherwise. But in his final moment before Anna grounds him and everyone else there into the carpeting, he envies Paul’s lack of guile.

[storiesbybrian]

Orgasms of the Camel (March, 2014)

           It dripped from the tour guide’s hat.

           Are you ok, Ofer? Todd’s mother asked.  Are your eyes burning?

           The rest of the group’s sympathies shifted, nearly involuntarily, from Ofer to Todd, who must have been stricken by something when the camel went wild near Ofer.  While Ofer wiped his face, glaring at the Bedouins and feeling keenly aware of the Uzi hanging from his shoulder, Todd slumped on the ground, shivering in the desert heat.

           I’m alright, he said, sitting up and trying to smile at the stunned group of his parents’ friends. But the gleam that usually lived in his eyes, which seemed to have intensified in the months since he’d moved to Jerusalem, was swallowed by the shadow of his brow.  After coming to rely on Todd’s assurance to determine their own feelings about nearly everything on the trip thus far, this aberrant moment of weakness on his part really did make them feel stranded in the desert.  Even Ofer felt slightly unmoored without Todd’s unofficial guidance.  But whatever gifts they ascribed to Todd, no one, not even the supposedly mystical Bedouins, connected Todd’s wobbliness with his role in dousing Ofer in ungulate jizz.

           Earlier in the week, Walid had relayed to his father a rumor he had heard in Be’er-Sheva about strange things happening with camels all over the country.  The Sheik had dismissed his son’s latest attempt to gain credibility through something other than obedience and hard work, and even now, with his Ministry of Tourism permit in jeopardy, he had to silence Walid’s pleas for vindication so they could focus on raining blows upon the offending dromedary until it had suffered enough to re-oblige their guests to remember them fondly when the trip was over.  

           Groan! the Sheik said to the animal, looking at the group between wallops, sharing their revulsion of the beast, and hoping that the beating’s severity might salvage a few positive online reviews.

           Todd’s sister Ruthie knew that he had pulled this stunt because Ofer had made her walk instead of riding the camel the whole time.  But she was thinking about Alan Solomon, the fluffy-haired kid with safety pins in his ears who had kissed her in the desert last night.  Alan got along much better with his parents than Ruthie and Todd did with theirs, so it seemed like he had better reasons for his piercings and tattered clothing than parental disapproval, though what those could be they had no idea.  Ruthie thought her parents might be jealous of the Solomons’ relationship with their son as well.  Maybe Alan would marry her and that would repair everything.  Or maybe, Ruthie thought, it’s hot out here and I’m being a very silly little girl.

           Todd’s father was unaware of any newfound supernatural abilities in the family, but angry anyway. He scowled at his son, wordlessly pointing out that things like this didn’t happen in Atlanta.  And Todd lit up a cigarette, returning a look that said, No they sure don’t.

Before his family’s trip was over, they wanted to see the apartment Todd shared with four other students in the Old City.  Todd told them they couldn’t all fit in at once, hoping his parents might forgo his religious squalor in favor of some last minute gift-shopping, but they insisted on coming up for a visit.

By the Jaffa Gate, Ruthie pointed out a girl gyrating in a belly-dancing outfit.  Todd’s views on modesty had changed drastically in recent months, but what really bothered him about this girl was the incongruity of her blissed out face and thick, clumsy-looking feet.  Todd had gotten angry with Ofer for his insensitivity toward Ruthie’s difficulties on hikes and now he fixed the same ire on this pseudo-hippy dancer, happily stomping those peasantine slabs on some of the holiest ground in the world while Ruthie hobbled around in her special shoe.

Ruthie hadn’t told Todd about Alan.  With the best of intentions, Todd would have nipped her romantic fantasies in the bud.  But Ruthie didn’t want that kind of protection.  She wanted to get her hopes up.  Maybe she even wanted a crushing disappointment too, since that was probably better than the usual disappointment of being pitied or ignored. After that night in the desert, she had tried very hard not to look at Alan too expectantly.  And while she couldn’t accuse him of avoiding her her, post-kiss attention had dropped off steeply.  And then last night she’d seen him dancing with another girl on Ben Yehuda Street and felt stupid for crying but did it anyway.

Todd knew none of this, but he could tell that the contempt that Ruthie held for the dancing woman was a transference of some kind, and that keeping it from him made her feel empowered.  So he saw her contempt and raised her, moving from the stupid feet to the faux-ecstatic punim.  The rebbes had counseled his class not to be too suspicious of joy, but this wasn’t joy. It was a self-conscious imitation—happiness utterly reliant on being seen being happy.  And because she seemed unconstrained by pesky concepts like reverence or modesty for the place where she was grinding her thick hips, blithely trespassing on the sacred energy field throbbing from the nearby Temple Mount, Todd suspected her of not even being Jewish.

           He assumed that being so capriciously petty would bar his access to supernature, so he proceeded with the same ritual he had used on Ofer, really just to prove that nothing could come from the impure of heart.  The nearest camel was female, led by a bushy-faced old Hashemite.  He sang the heavenly song he had overheard in an alley behind his bathroom, and the she-camel strained against her bridal.

           Stanna! said her master.

           The camel was so insistent that her master stopped yanking and followed her over to the young dancing woman.  Todd scratched his knees and the animal began to shiver.  The Arab staggered, teeth jutting out from his mustache.  Todd did not know how long it would take, nor if she was a squirter but- well, yes she was.

           The shuddering animal, spewing more fluid onto the young woman with each new scream while the shocked master could not look away, interrupted all other activity along the ramparts by the Jaffa Gate.  Shopkeepers from within the Old City ran out to try to rescue the woman.  The camel snarled and they backed up before she flung her bilious saliva onto them.  Only the master stayed, rousing from catatonia to offer the woman a bandana.  Ruthie looked at Todd.  She was not amused.  Nor were his parents, nor any of the soldiers drawn over by the commotion.  Todd tried imagining the sated camel enjoying a cigarette, but no cartoonish jokes could overcome the dread his perpetrations had instilled in him.

           His family skipped the apartment visit, and they returned to Atlanta unsure if they’d ever see him again.

             Back at the yeshiva, Todd’s time with his family had left him several hundred pages behind his classmates.  He could not follow their conversations, and some even lorded their advancement over him, since he had always seemed so effortlessly superior to them.  Alex understood, because his path to the yeshiva was similar to Todd’s—a secular life brimming with social, athletic and sexual success that only wanted more light.  They never thought of themselves as wallowers in darkness, but they, and many others like them simply discovered that studying the oral and written traditions of the sages was even better than a bong hit during a blow job.  Todd had heard Alex tell a friend over the phone that he wished he could bottle the high he felt so he could give it out in pill form. And Todd knew exactly what he meant. The clarity, the deliciousness of God’s miracles, the striving for new ways to express gratitude for His mind-blowing gifts to all of us, and the blessing of cognition, enabling the cycle of praiseworthy gladness, begetting more praise, which brings even more gladness!

           The intimacy Todd felt sharing this clean-burning joy with his classmates had nearly induced him on several occasions to tell Alex about his ability to stimulate camels through prayer.  But while he relished staying up late listening to more advanced students grapple with Rashi or even the Besht’s more cryptic commentaries, discussing personal mysteries felt like a breach of the yeshiva’s unspoken discourse policy.

           Rav Eishra approached Todd while he was poring over Gemara at lunchtime, trying to make up for lost ground.

           Topol, the rabbi said. You’re trying to concentrate, but you can’t.  We’ve all noticed.

           Todd looked up from the book and gave Rav Eishra his foxiest look.  The rabbi smiled.

           You are a young man of light, Topol.  Great scholarship is clear in your lineage.  But your learning has slowed.  From great gulps to tiny sips.

           Todd sighed.  Rav Eishra caressed his head.  Todd bristled.

           All manifestations of the love we feel for Torah and Talmud, Rav Eishra said, are holy Topol. Remember that, and come see only me when you want to talk.

           Rav Eishra withdrew his hand and walked away humming a niggun.

             After morning prayers the next day, Todd snuck out of the yeshiva to research camel husbandry at an internet café in the Armenian Quarter.  By noon he was on a bus to Be’er-Sheva to visit Israel’s largest camel farm.  He had explored the alley behind his apartment, looking for some sign of the voice he had heard through his bathroom window. One legend of the Besht tells of a young rabbi who begged Reb Eliezar to teach him how to speak to animals.  So Reb Eliezar obliged, giving the young rabbi an hour of this holy knowledge before uttering a prayer that erased the memory forever.  The young rabbi was at peace with this.  Todd looked for any commentary on this that might be relevant to his situation, finding none.

           A few Breslavers and one strikingly beautiful cleaning lady came through the alley, all of them acknowledging him, the girl perching her chin atop her broom handle and smiling at him, but none of them sang nor recognized him as the recipient of such contraband knowledge.  Do I want this ability removed? Todd wondered.  Or should it be whether I want it to or not?  How did I even know I had it anyway?  

           On the bus, looking out the window at a landscape of wild divergence, desolate plains, lush fields, shepherds guiding flocks past high-tech labs, Todd wondered whether this power was within him before returning to Torah.  He hadn’t been much of a prankster in his secular life.  Some of his high school friends used to make fun of the dorkier kids, but Todd never felt the need.  Occasionally they’d mistake his acceptance for a ticket to better parties or cuter girls and glom onto him for weeks.  Todd’s friends would advise him to confront them, embarrass them or even punch them.  But Todd would usually keep his interest level in them honest, and eventually they’d just gravitate back to their real friends.  Did any of these dorks feel marooned in a desert, and need ferrying from a more well-adapted creature?  No, Todd was not the camel.  And no liturgical explanations had presented themselves.  Ruthie and his parents knew, but they just saw it as further proof that he should drop the fanaticism and come back to Atlanta.

           Presumably from the dust, the sky was paler in Be’er-Sheva.   An amplified muezzin called from a nearby minaret, reminding Todd that he had skipped his own mid-day prayers.  Although he was still among so many Jews, Todd felt further away from God in this city.  He’d never been to Cleveland, but Be’er-Sheva reminded him of it anyway.  He listened to the muezzin sing to Allah and looked around to see if anyone was rushing off to a mosque, or sinking down to salaam right where they were.  But even the Arabs in Be’er-Sheva felt irreligious on first impression.  

           On a large lot by the bus station, he saw a small herd of livestock.  At first they seemed unattended, but then he saw their master rise from the ground, his worship complete until early evening.  Todd kept his distance, guaging the man’s relationship with the goats, sheep and camels milling around him.  He noticed that the man had dusted his robe off carefully to avoid spooking the animals.  Todd took a few steps toward him.  He had no idea what he would ask the livestock dealer, and was afraid that formulating too much of an approach might get one of the camels off by mistake. Maybe the power wasn’t so hair-trigger, but Todd did not want to find out.

           Salaam aleikhum, Todd said.

           Aleikhum salaam, said the Bedouin.

           English?

           OK.

           Thank you.  Are these your animals?

           Yes.  You want to buy one?  Or many?  I have more if you need.

           I-

           The camels stirred. Todd stepped back.  They brayed.

           Saiket! the Bedouin said.

           Todd ran back to the bus station to wait for his transfer to the camel ranch.

             John Cougar Mellencamp had set Todd on his current path.  Two weeks before he took a free trip to Israel, he was in a bar with some friends and Jack and Diane came on the jukebox.  People all over the bar broke away from their conversations to shout out the chorus.  Todd’s friends sang with as much gusto as anyone, but Todd found the moment lacking any true marvel.  The people in the bar appeared to gain deep affirmation from a chorus that seemed too obvious to Todd to mean anything.  And amid the neon-glazed throng, Todd felt a rare moment of alienation. He didn’t want the American Fool doing his philosophizing for him (never mind that a Beatles song had nearly the same chorus 15 years before Jack and Diane).  And he didn’t need this kind of lock-step to feel comfortable.  In fact, he couldn’t understand why acting like a lemming would make anybody happy, even if it were over a better song.  

           And now, sitting on a bench over land that had been absorbing the blood of competitive monotheists for millenia with plenty of appetite for more, Todd envied the people in that bar, because they knew their place in the world.  He lit up a cigarette.  He heard snarling.  It was the livestock dealer.  Gloosh. It was camel semen.  For some reason, the first thing Todd noticed was that it had extinguished his cigarette.  He looked at the Bedouin, whose face was rotten with anger.  But Todd didn’t care.  For the first time in several days, he wasn’t alone.

[storiesbybrian]

Beholders Begoggled (January, 2015)

The girls were gathered in Caroline’s living room during what Val said was the third most important football game of the year, Chrissy the second.  And while they were proud of their disdain for high school football, they took Spring Break almost as seriously as exams.  The hickeys, the sand, the vomit, the memories.  The secrets.  

Five of them were squeezed together on the couch, with two more in other chairs and Sarah standing by the wall.  Caroline knew that the condition of her home’s furniture bothered Sarah.  Maybe the rusty springs and ragged upholstery reminded Sarah too much of her native land. Or maybe no family in her culture, no matter how poor, ever let their home dissipate the way that Caroline’s family had.  Caroline was stung by Sarah’s meek but unmistakeable revulsion, but Sarah was so pretty that Caroline couldn’t maintain a grudge about it.

Most of the girls assumed that Sarah would not be allowed to go with them, which made Melanie the prettiest.  Chrissy’s legs were longest and slimmest, but the skin running along them was chalky and the knees were oddly shaped and barely bent when she walked.  This had not stopped Willie Burgess, a member of the swim team, from fucking Chrissy and Robin and getting a blow job from Val at the Burger King drive-thru line during lunch one day.  All three of Willie’s paramours had tried unsuccessfully to charge him with deep emotional abuse, but the places where he had kissed, pawed, licked and secreted on them continued to glow, as though the girls’ turgid inner beauty had surged forth and broken through their homely exteriors at all points of male contact. So now that every episode of Willie Burgess lore had been committed to memory, the whole group was convinced that, with proper planning, they were guaranteed to return from a week among drunk, horny meatheads feeling nearly as beautiful as Sarah.

But surprise!  Robin clapped her hands five times and said, “Ladies?  Sarah has an announcement she’d like to make.”

They paused the movie and turned to Sarah, eyes bugged, jaws slack.  

“I have spoken with my father,” she said.

They leaned toward her.

“And he says, because my grades have improved so much since meeting you all…”

Chrissy gasped.  Val said, “Yeah?”

“That I can go with you for five days!”

Caroline’s living room exploded.  They cluster-hugged Sarah, promising her more fun than she’d ever had and assuring her that she wouldn’t have to cook if she didn’t want to.

“I mean,” Caroline said.  “It’s not like we’re gonna be sittin’ on the curb, sucking cock for heroin.”

“I’m bringing my Monopoly board!” said Melanie, and everyone laughed even more excitedly, tacitly agreeing that a new inside joke was now in rotation until further notice.  Sarah laughed too, looking at Lexy and thinking Community Chest.

“Do you know,” Sarah said, “that I don’t even own a bathing suit?  Or a beach towel, or a plastic shovel, or-”

“Well then let’s go shopping!” Tiffany said. “You make more in tips than I do.”

“Yes, but I have to give them straight to my father,” Sarah said.

“Listen,” said Melanie.  “We’re like a family here, Sarah.  And we won’t let anything bad happen, not on the trip and not with your parents.  Any discomfort you feel at any point between now and Spring Break, just remember that you’ve got eight strong, beautiful women who love you and will be there to pick you up if you ever, ever fall.”

Sarah nodded and blinked rapidly.  She reached out her arms.

“Awwww,” they said as they patted her back.

On the way home, Sarah stuck her head out Val’s passenger window, her cheeks fluttering like batwings.

The beach writhed with teenaged bodies from all over the country.  Sarah did not like the taste of beer, so that was one promise to her parents that was easy to keep.  But her abstention and the baggy maroon swimsuit she had borrowed from Caroline, along with the company she kept, suggested to boys that she was too modest to be worth their trouble.

Chrissy promised a good time, though.  Every day she matched the color of her toenail polish to the band she tied around her sunhat, and each afternoon, her body seemed to accumulate more thumb-sized bruises.  Sometimes she would run off with one boy and direct his friends’ attention toward the rest of her group, but other times she would take two or three with her back to the girls’ rooms.

On their third night, Sarah was cooking dinner for everyone when Robin screamed from the room they were sharing.  The other six girls rushed in to see what the matter was and found Robin pointing at a wet spot on her bed.  All attention swung onto Chrissy, who shrugged and shook her head.  For a moment, the only voices heard were the local newscasters on TV, who sounded to Sarah as if they’d known her since she was a baby.

“Chrissy McGuire Medford, you change my sheets right this instant!” said Robin.

“I didn’t do that, Robin Melissa Surral!” Chrissy said, fanning her yellow fingernails along her hips.

“Well, nobody else was up to any of that,” said Caroline.

“Yeah, how do you know the one with the dreadlocks didn’t come in here while you were in your room with his fat friend?”

“Because all three of us were in the shower the whole time.  That’s how!” said Chrissy.  “I invited Tiffany to come with us.”

“Ewww!” Tiffany said, hoping that everyone would laugh.

“My parents never would have let me borrow those sheets if they thought…” Robin said, shuddering.

Sarah went back into the kitchen to continue deveining shrimp.  Chrissy came with her.

Tiffany stormed into the living room and stood across the counter, staring at them.  She seemed about to cry.

“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.

“I just know we’re not gonna get our deposit back,” she said.

“Oh Tiff, what are you on about?” said Robin, holding the balled up sheets with a pair of salad tongs. “This is a problem with personal property.  Not structural damage or anything.”

“Yeah, but everybody’s just being so wreckless!” Tiffany said.

“Look,” Sarah said.  “If somebody chops vegetables, I’ll put the sheets in the wash and we’ll forget this ever happened.  Okay?”

“But you shouldn’t have to do it, Sarah,” said Val.

Sarah waited a second too long to respond and now everyone was staring at her.

He had told Sarah his name was Tom, but she didn’t think it really was.  She had gone to the suite to use the bathroom and he was sitting in the lobby reading a book. He got onto the elevator with her and she could smell rum on his breath.

“So you’re the hottie with all those dogs, right?”

Sarah was quiet.

“What’re you? Korean? Parents fundamentalist Christians? Last name Park?”

Sarah giggled.  Tom got very close to her.

“Are you always such an expert?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “But we don’t know each other.”

He got off on her floor and neither of them hesitated.  It was only the second time Sarah had ever kissed a boy and she had certainly never seen a naked one in person before.  She let him slide a finger inside of her and thought she might weep. He was gentle and she was amazed by how easily this all had happened, but she also had a strange sudden thought. The only sounds were their breath and there was something shocking about the quiet in the rest of the room.  Sarah realized that the silence crackled with the absence of her parents haranguing her.  She shuddered and the vibrations felt deliciously free, but also terrifyingly so.

Tom did not speak until Sarah put him in her mouth. It was brief, but enough.  

“Oh, thank you very much!” he had said, so earnestly that it made Sarah laugh.

And that was how it got onto Robin’s bed.

After breakfast the next day, the girls rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs as if nothing was the matter.  Three muscular, acne-free boys walked by and Lexy waved until they stopped.  She slid her sunglasses halfway down her nose and said, “Hey!  This is my friend Sarah.”

They stood there until Sarah held out her hand, then two of them squatted and shook it.

“Anything going on tonight?” Robin asked.

Chrissy wiggled her amoxicillin-colored toenails and the heavier of the two boys started sifting handfuls of sand over her feet.

“We were thinking about pre-gaming over at the Yachtsman and then trying to get into the Galleon.  Y’all have ID’s?”

Everyone looked around.

Sarah was curious about the third boy, who stood with his feet in the water, talking on his phone.

Caroline, who was the least likely to get attention on her own, said, “Sarah and I were looking for the kind of time you probably don’t have in a nightclub.”

The boys looked at each other.  It was hard for Sarah to tell whether they were excited or just amused by Caroline’s big talk.  They looked to their friend by the water.  He held up a finger and then looked right at Sarah.  His nose looked like it had been broken several times, but it fit well with his face.  Sarah wanted to slide her mouth along the edge of his jawline.

He finished his phone call and approached the group.  He took off his visor and held out his hand to Sarah.

“Paul,” he said.  He looked at his friends and they tore their caps from their heads.

“Sarah,” she said.  Then her friends looked at her and she giggled.

“What’s so funny?” Paul asked.

“It feels like we’re alone here.”

Paul looked at his friends and hers, all staring at them.  He knelt beside Sarah and smoothed out the sand by her legs.  Then he drew a line with one finger.

“This is Route 17,” he said.  “And this right here, this is where we’ll be from 5 PM til. You’ll be there, won’t you Sarah?”

Sarah didn’t move but Chrissy, Melanie, Robin, Val, Tiffany, Caroline and Lexy all nodded.

“It was real nice meeting you, Sarah,” Paul said, and he was back on his phone before he finished standing up.

Melanie waited until they walked away before stamping the map away from the sand.  She glared at Sarah, as though her own discomfort was her friend’s beauty’s fault. Sarah pretended not to realize Melanie was angry and said, “Hey, I bet what that party really needs is your Monopoly board.”

The Sea Captain’s Inn was bunched next to several other motels with small, dirty swimming pools and balconies festooned with custom air-brushed beach towels.  

Motorcycles roared up and down every side street and boys and girls in frayed scraps of denim wandered tipsily along sidewalks dotted with black circles of old gum.  Howls emanated from the balconies and Tiffany tried to answer each of them by raising her red plastic cup and screaming, “WHOOO!”

Caroline felt too dizzy.  She slumped over the sidewalk, arousing a cheer from somewhere. Sarah got under her arm and held her up. A motorcycle pulled over, its rider’s face obscured by a golden helmet with black claws furrowing red gashes painted along its sides.  

“How ‘bout a ride, Mister?” said Chrissy.

“Only got room for one o’ye,” he said.

“You go ahead,” Sarah said, patting Caroline’s arm. She stepped forward and the boy took off without her.  A group of people in a second floor balcony cackled until two of them fell over.  Caroline’s friends rushed to put their arms around her, which aroused more laughter from the balconies.  

“Let’s just go back to our place,” Chrissy said.

“No!” shouted Tiffany.  “We came for some action and that’s what we’re gonna get!”

Caroline wiped her eyes and said, “Hellz to the yeah!” a snot bubble inflating til it popped on the lip of her plastic cup.

Sarah could not find Paul at the Sea Captain’s Inn.  Melanie recognized his heavier friend Hunter, who now had a visor on sideways, his curly hair poofing out of the top and his pharoah’s beard moussed into a point.  He wore a t-shirt with a Confederate flag furled and inserted into a conical hat.

Melanie ran to Hunter, making a conscious effort not to stop herself from putting her arms around his neck and pressing against his body.

Hunter smiled vaguely.

“Melanie.  Sarah’s friend from the beach!”

“Oh yeah,” he said.  “Sup.”

Hunter began to sweat, which felt encouraging to Melanie.

“I really like your shirt!” she said.

“You do?  I mean, that’s cool.  I just thought y’all were from somewhere up north.”

Melanie caught herself before she made a literary reference that might turn him off.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she said.

Hunter put his ear to her mouth.

“I’ve never funneled a beer before.”  Melanie made sure to claw at Hunter’s dampening shirt a little when she said this.

Hunter and Mike had asked all of the girls to sit on the bed while they had a quick discussion in the bathroom.  Before they had gone in, Mike turned up the volume on the room’s clock radio MP3 player and now the girls were listening to a rap song that none of them recognized.

Val put her fingers in her ears.  Tiffany walked to the window to see Sarah sitting alone by the side of the pool, feet in the water with her flip flops still on.

Hunter and Mike came out of the bathroom.  They seemed a little dazed, and Mike was sweating too.

“OK,” Mike said.  “Ladies.  Here’s the thing.  Uh… See, we didn’t expect.  I mean, the beer, if that’s what.  Well.”

“The guys who helped us get this much is gonna come by,” Hunter said.   “Now, he might not exactly wanna interrupt his own party to make a beer run for a coupl’a kids, know what I’m sayin?”

Robin flared her nostrils and removed her shirt. Hunter and Mike looked at each other. Lexy and Melanie removed theirs as well. Then Tiffany, then Val, then Caroline. Robin began unhooking her bra when Chrissy said, “Now you too.”

“Well,” Mike said.  “We were kinda wonderin’ if Sarah could come up.  The beer guy, he kinda likes… um… y’know.”

“So call her up here, you pussies,” said Val.

Hunter and Mike looked at her steadily.

“That’s gonna cost you your pants,” said Hunter.

Val took off her pants.  Mike and Hunter looked at each other again.  Hunter shrugged.  Mike picked Val up off the bed, carried her to the bathroom and shut the door.  The shower turned on.

“Looks like you’re outnumbered, sailor,” Chrissy said.

Hunter looked at the girls and really did look like an animal caught in the headlights of a car with no brakes.  If he could ignore the right things, all of his options were wonderful.  But somehow he knew that if he made a mistake, in how he related to any one or two or three or all of these girls, things could get ugly in a number of ways. So he put on kind of a show.  

First he tiptoed over to the balcony windows, winning titters from his audience.  Then he wrapped himself in one of the drapes and slid open the door.  Hunter knew that he had near immediate access in his room to more orifices than he might ever again.  But the more he threw himself into this little comic ballet, the more burdensome sexual opportunity felt.  By the time he made a delicate hop onto the balcony, all of the girls were laughing uproariously though none could say exactly way.  Hunter smiled appreciatively at the laughter, then turned to look out over the pool.  

Without turning back around, maybe unsure whether to address Sarah or the girls back in the room, he said “I wonder if I could land in the pool from here.”

[storiesbybrian]

Synchronicide (November, 2005)

Danny Miller had been told repeatedly to stop delving into what had happened between his cousins Beverly and Christine.  It had been five years since Christine had murdered Beverly and now Danny was home from college, sitting on the back deck at his aunt and uncle’s house, staring at the swimming pool where it all began. The seeds of rage were sown in that water, where Beverly and Christine, identical twins save a scar Beverly had on the right side of her neck, devoted their adolescence.  As the load of ribbons and trophies the sisters won spilled into extra rooms of their house, the Miller family tasted a glory that they never dreamed they would when they brought Beverly and Christine home from the hospital 27 years earlier.  Sacrifices were made, coaches hired, grades dropped, dates spurned, friendships neglected, all in service of a routine that was alarmingly perfect.

    But now Beverly was dead and Christine was in prison for committing the murder.  The governor herself had allowed Christine to attend the funeral, in black scraps of polyester beneath manacles that everyone heard clinking during the graveside service.  Danny’s own parents told him to forget the whole thing to make it easier for Aunt Stacey and Uncle Kenny to forget as well.  Danny’s father pointed out to him that, while Cain had to answer to God for smiting Abel, the Bible never narrates a reckoning with Adam and Eve.

    But Danny couldn’t stop hearing those shackles, draped like Soviet tensil over Christine’s upright body.  And he couldn’t stop thinking about the other thing either, the Great Gaffe, they all called it.  

    When Beverly and Christine performed their routines, both girls wore bandages on the right sides of their necks, so they’d be totally indistinguishable.  What few commentators there were on the local synchronized swimming beat complained about the unfair advantage twin sisters had over other teams.  But at the national level, the Miller Sisters were one of several serious teams whose twinhood granted them an extra dose of synchronicity.  And it was with the field evened out that Beverly and Christine Miller, each doing the other’s make-up, their mother affixing the trademark bandage so noone knew which one was scarred Beverly or clean-necked Christine, made their way to the 1992 Olympic Trials.  

    Danny kept a file of all of the articles written about how one of the girls flailed wildly and actually kicked her sister 20 seconds into a routine that had been 15 years in the making.  But the blame game that ensued was never solved, with Beverly claiming it was Christine that had ruined their lives and Christine saying no, it was Beverly.  A few local sportswriters tried reviewing tape of all of their performances, the perfect ones and then the one that cost them their bid and possibly their medals, but no definitive opinion was ever reached and the feud that developped between them, each Miller sister blaming the other for shitting all over a lifetime of hard work, was only exacerbated by the attention of the press.

    Even as a teenager, Danny noticed that the synchronicity that had brought Beverly and Christine such success leading up to the trial was the curse that kept the truth from ever surfacing, since the sisters were so deeply and even biorhythmically in tune that whoever was lying mounted an offense and defense just as sublime in her deception as her twin’s possession was of the truth.  

    Soon after the Olympic trial, Beverly and Christine both quit swimming and moved away from home and from each other.  The Miller family attempted reconciliations but they always ended disastrously, with each sister haranguing her parents for remaining neutral.  Christine was always a little bit wilder and more popular with boys and sometimes Danny suspected that it was she who screwed up the trial, but then he realized that it was just because he had always felt a little bit sorrier for Beverly, for her scar and for having less fun than Christine.  And for the same reason, sometimes Danny thought that Beverly’s resentment at needing greater discipline to maintain a focus equal to her wilder, unblemished sister had led to the stumble that splashed them out of contention.

    After four years of argument, the Atlanta Games of ’96 happened and Danny’s brother Jeff got married that summer.  Beverly and Christine each came to the wedding.  Phone calls went out to relatives prior to the weekend asking that everyone forget the sisters’ glorious past altogether in the hopes that bygones finally could be bygones.  And there on the dance floor, just after Jeff’s best man made his toast, the girls did come near one another for the first time in years and noone at the wedding could help but notice how, even after such a long estrangement, Beverly and Christine’s moves to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” were spookily similar. Danny had been watching them the whole time and he knew that it was Beverly who was drunk while Christine had had only one glass of champagne, but the sisters touched hands and smiled and switched dance partners and when the song was over, they embraced and there were tears and the band was signalled to wait while the whole family made a circle around them on the dance floor and applauded.  Both girls shook in each other’s arms.

    Danny looked to Beverly and Christine’s parents and saw that they were crying too, and he hoped that everyone could breathe more easily now, that they could go back to being a closer family now that this war was over.  

    But somebody had won and somebody had lost and nobody knew which was which.  After a year of peace, Beverly tried to cut the right side of Christine’s neck with a pocket knife.  They had been on a camping trip, Christine with the same boyfriend she had brought to Jeff’s wedding, Beverly with someone new.  Sitting around the campfire, roasting marshmallows and passing around a bottle of Rebel Yell that Beverly’s boyfriend had brought, Christine’s boyfriend asked Beverly how people told them apart when they wore scarfs or turtlenecks.  One of the boyfriends told Danny that Beverly had stared at Christine, Christine had smiled and Beverly grabbed the open knife from the picnic table and crawled toward Christine with the knife in her mouth.

    “Bev, no!” Christine had said.

    Beverly’s boyfriend grabbed her around the waist and tried grabbing the knife from in between her teeth.  Christine began to cry and her boyfriend held her, a green stick with a flaming marshmallow on the end of it still clutched in one of her hands.

    “Come on, Beverly,” her boyfriend said as she swerved her head side to side, finally spitting the knife onto the ground and collapsing.  Each sister lay by the campfire in the arms of her boyfriend and noone said another word.

    A year later, on the eve of Beverly’s wedding, Christine went into her sister’s bridal suite at the hotel and smothered her to death with a pillow. She confessed the crime immediately but continued to deny that it was she who had screwed up so badly at the Olympic trials so many years before.  

Family and authorities assumed that Christine, the killer must also have been the liar for all those years and Beverly, the victim had been the one telling the truth.  But Danny never stopped wondering if Christine’s torment had come from being so deeply wronged by Beverly.  He never stopped believing that if he could only figure out what had really happened at the Olympic trials, he would understand something essential about truth- and whether someone was more likely to murder the person closest to her in the whole world in defense of the truth or to protect a lie.  

Sitting on the back deck at Aunt Stacey and Uncle Kenny’s house, counting the leaves pasted to the rotting tarp that covered the pool, Danny supposed that the liar would be using the lie to defend herself while the truthteller would be using herself to protect a virtue.  But beyond that, his thoughts always became convoluted as he thought about how most wars seem impersonal but duels do not and he had to admit that violence and philosophy were not always so neatly reconcilable.  Still, Christine had always shown him greater affection.  And he couldn’t help believing that her wilder life was less about herself and more about principles, which, to Danny, made her more likley to kill for truth than for a lie.  But he never was able to get more certain than a slight lean to Christine’s side, and to this day, sitting in prison with nothing more to lose, Christine still says it was Beverly who committed the gaffe.  

    But it was Christine.

[storiesbybrian]

Buddy’s Buddies, February, 2002

I kick Sam Zane in the belly. Then I grab him by the hair and sling him to the ground. These new lights are giving us a heavy sweat. Sam stinks. If I was a certain type of jerk, I could have him fined for not wearing deodorant. But he’s just a kid and everybody makes their mistakes. So I drop an elbow on his solar plexus and say, “Sam. They can smell your ass in the mezzanine, man.”

           “I know,” says. “They lost my luggage in Richmond. ‘Sgot my Speed Stick in-”

           I cut Sam off before he can finish, picking him up and whipping him into the ropes. When he bounces off, I’ll set him up for my big finishing move. The Olive Press. While he’s bounding tape to tape I have a second to think. It’s amazing how much thinking you can cram into a short period of time. I’ll be seeing Buddy today for the first time in three weeks. Things got pretty bad for me while he was away and I know he’ll be a sight for sore eyes.

           Sam comes back from the ropes, kicking up tiny clouds of powder with every stomp on the mat, and I bend forward and toss him over my back. Sam flips through the air and lands near the middle of the ring. When somebody lands hard on the mat, the apron around the ring’s supposed to ripple from the impact. But Sam, though he’s got potential, is a long way from being a great faller. He hardly even bounces.  

The small crowd boos, knowing that Sam was beat long ago and I’m just being sadistic. But that’s the way the American Wrestling League, and every other major professional wrestling body operates. In a non-marquee matchup, the bad guy drags out his match as a time filler, and he gets the crowd involved, taunting them, kicking his opponent while he’s down. One thing rednecks claim they can’t stomach is seeing a beaten man get abused further. Whether that’s true in real life, I’m not too sure. But their deepest moral indignations always come howling out at wrestling matches. I’ve gotten over 100 death threats for what I “done” to Buddy last month.  

           With Sam writhing around on the mat, the stray boos from the half-empty arena get louder. I taunt the folks in the stands, trying to give them their money’s worth. I start bellowing fake opera: “Oooooohhhh, Dio Mio!!!” Then I strut over to Sam and kick him a few times. My red, green and white patent leather boots catch the glare of the ring lights. The crowd noise picks up a little bit more. I cross my right leg in the air and tip over onto Sam, elbow first again. I say, “45 more seconds, kid.”

           I pull Sam up to his feet and smack him in the chest. He falls right back down and I strut around some more under the hot lights, trying to wring more life out of the crowd. A few half-empty soda cups fly past the ropes and into the ring. I kick them at Sam and fling my fingers from under my chin at the crowd. The front rows start screaming at me, telling me I suck, that I’m a dead man. I wag my tongue at them and press both of my hands downward, the sign for the Olive Press. Somebody tries to start a chant of “Grease-ball!  Grease-ball!” but it doesn’t catch on.

           I grab Sam by the hair and drag him over to one of the corners and sit him up on the top turnbuckle. He smells and it’s genuinely pissing me off. If I had a shot at the national syndicate at his age, the last thing I’d do is act unprofessionally. As Sam sits there in a tortured heap, I preen around the ring one last time, slicking my hair back and kissing the tips of my fingers like a proud chef. Then I stomp over to Sam and give him the Olive Press. The Olive Press is half Super-plex, half Gorilla Slam. I hoist Sam off the turnbuckle and then windmill him to the ground so hard we both bounce a few times before the referee comes over and counts him out. More powder gasps up from the mat.

           “That’s how you fall, son,” I say to Sam.

           The bell rings and the referee comes over to raise my arm. But we’ve got more in store for this small crowd. We want them to tell their friends that they really missed something today. So I growl and stick my thumb behind my front teeth and flick it at the referee. I shove him to the mat and kick him with my shining Italian boots. Then I pick Sam up and give him some more slaps across the chest. As I draw him close to throw him into the ropes for a clothesline, I say, “Hey asshole! Next time they lose your luggage, go out and buy some more goddamn Speed Stick!” And then I whip him bouncing into the ropes at the east end of the ring.  

             Buddy. He’s everybody’s port in the storm, the only man the rest of us can love openly without seeming like homos. “Hell,” he’d say. “Only difference between us and movie stars is we do our own damn stunts!” And that’s how he makes us feel.

And I’m his best friend. He appreciates my insights. After all, it was my idea how he could go to the Bahamas with his wife in the first place. I know it sounds selfish now, but if I thought that me “turning” on Buddy’d mean the kind of sacrifices I’ve had to make, I’m not sure I would’ve gone for it in the first place. But Buddy is my friend and his marriage was in trouble and maybe if I’d covered for him a few of those nights when he didn’t come home, he wouldn’t have needed to take Donna on vacation in the first place. So I guess it all evens out in the wash.

           I hold Sam in a headlock and gouge him in the eye. Suddenly the angry shouting from the stands turns into excited cheers. Buddy! Fans are running, stomping towards the southeast aisle of the arena. And there he is with Solomon Grande and Chief Mustang, charging towards the ring. I can see his ice blond locks shimmering, even in the darkness of the aisles. He’s even faster on his crutches than they are on foot, the fat goons. The crowd starts yelling, “Buh-Dee! Buh-Dee! Buh-Dee! Buh-Dee!” And like nobody else can, with his body swinging on those crutches, he acknowledges the love of his fans. “Whoo-Weeee!” he calls.  “Whoo-Weeee!” the crowd answers. And now they sound like a sellout at the Omni.  

           I get terrified, like I’m supposed to. I cast about for the referee to save me but he’s long gone. Then I act like me and Sam Zane are good friends, helping him up and draping an arm around him, trying to revive him. But he stays limp. Chief Mustang and Solomon Grande torpedo into the ring and tear Sam’s flaccid body away from my false embrace. The Chief prods a huge finger into my chest and I cower to the other side of the ring, pleading, “Oh no, signori, no mi piace, signori! NO MI PIACE!” Then I hear Buddy clear his throat into the ringside microphone.  

           “Hey!” he says. The crowd, who’s missed him almost as much as I have, goes even wilder. They chant his name, like they’re witnessing the second coming, which, in a way, I guess they are.  “Hey, Don Palermo!” He points one of his crutches at me. I shake my head wildly, trying to pretend this isn’t happening and that I’m somewhere far away and safe. That’s one of the tricks of the bad guy trade. We’re fakers. We’ll incur the wrath of the good guys, but rather than own up to it, we’ll try to hide, say that it can’t be. The good guy knows that it is and imbues his every action with the belief in the here and now. You can call it existential if you want. But that’s why the good guys are beloved and the bad guys reviled, even though we all wrestle, we all use the same violent moves. Our audience doesn’t want to retreat. They want to face the music. And the music is Buh-Dee.  

           “Hey, Don Palermo! Why don’t you try kickin’ somebody who ain’t already been put down? What kinda man are you, anyway? Twirlin’ your mustach-ee-o, singin’ that opera crap! Whatsa matta? You ‘fraid of a little Rock ‘n Roll?!”

           The frantic screams from the crowd get organized. “ROCK AND ROLL! ROCK AND ROLL!”

           I drop to my knees and lace my fingers in supplication, pleading, “No, Buddy, no!”

           “Yeah, boy, yeah! You used to be my friend. And then you sneak attacked me! You stabbed me in the back! Made me sorry I ever trusted you in the first place! Now I ain’t ashamed to tell you good people, that hurt me. It hurts to lose a friend. But brother, Buddy Flash is instant karma! Somebody hurts Buddy Flash, ohhhh, they gon’ get theirs, baby. So you! You, Don Palermo, I wanna show you somethin’!”

           Buddy raises one open hand and the crowd pitches down to a low rumble, craning to see Buddy’s visual aid. He grabs a couple of enlarged X-rays from the ringside table where they’d been waiting for him. Only Buddy Flash could get scientific with this crowd. He holds up one of the X-rays and says, “Yeah, people! Doctor Jorgenson says Buddy Flash is on the mend. The good doctor says I’ll be back in the ring come Thanksgiving! And Don Palermo? Brother, you are cordially invited.”

           And Buddy hurls the X-ray into the ring and skips on his crutches back up the aisle and through the tunnel to the locker room. Man he moves fast on those crutches. Solomon Grande and Chief Mustang shove me off my knees and wave bye bye to me. I curl up in the fetal position and tremble for a good two or three minutes. I put my thumb in my mouth and try to show the crowd that this babyish action is even more pathetic because it actually soothes me. They buy it, razzing me with a new sense of purpose.

             A few weeks earlier, we’d been in our locker room, showering after a tag team match. The floors were cream colored tile and we each had our own glass door and chrome dials with latches to control the water pressure and temperature. Not like back in Florida, but Buddy was still forlorn.

           “I dunno, brother!” he said. “I think Donna might be serious this time. Maybe she’s just been waitin’ until her half of the nut was more to her likin’.”

           “Well, Buddy,” I said. “One thing I know about married women. Their favorite anniversary present probably ain’t special shampoo.”

           “Well, she wasn’t the only one sufferin’ there, boy! Why you think I started shavin’ all over?”

           I didn’t know what to say.

           “Hey,” Buddy said. “You remember how dirty them showers down in Florida used to be?”

           Buddy was always making me laugh. “Yeah man! You were like to be dirtier after ‘n before. Huh huh huh huh!”

           “Those were some days, boy, I tell you!” Buddy hollered. “Back then, me ‘n Donna were inseparable. I hardly messed around at all down there.”

           I turned off the water and walked over to Buddy’s stall. I was still sweating from the match and the steam in the locker room. “Hey Buddy,” I said through the spray.

           “Ymmm?” he said.

           “Why don’t you take her off to the Bahamas? You remember what a good time I told you Tammy’s sister had with her husband down there?”

           He finished rinsing and turned off the water. He went and grabbed one of his ochre towels with the silver initials BF on it. His head was furled up in the towel so his voice was muffled but I could still hear him ask, “Huh?”

           “MaryAnne. My sister-in-law. Don’t you remember?”

           “Oh yeah,” Buddy said, wiping the ash blond hair out of his face and smiling at me. I could see the grid of scars he had on his forehead. Buddy cut himself plenty in the early days. The promoters loved to see his light hair get soaked with blood. “Nassau, right?”

           “How can Donna be mad at you in a tropical paradise? Making love under waterfalls…”

           “Spl-spl-spl-splt! Great idea, son,” Buddy said. He flicked on his blow dryer. “How the hell am I gonna take my goddamn wife down to the Bahamas and still do promos and matches five days a week?”

           “Well!” I shouted over the echoing blow dryer. “You never let me stay upset for this long! So gimme a little time and I’ll figure something out! OK?”

           “Whatever.”

             I watched “Circle in the Square” yesterday. “Circle in the Square” is a weekly talk show about wrestling developments hosted by Mad Mike McDonough and Sir Algernon Crawford, two of the most respected commentators in the business. Buddy’s and my grudge match was the lead story. They played the statements that we’d pre-taped a few days earlier. In Buddy’s it was all about what a dirty yellow dog I was, betraying him like ‘at and all. And mine was about how now everybody can see who the real man behind our operation’d always been and it’s about time to see the great Buddy Flash get knocked off his high horse. Oh, it was gonna be some match, alright.

I had mixed feelings about the segment where they interviewed fans. They asked a bunch of Flashbulbs (Buddy’s hardcore fans who travel to see him wrestle) what they thought about our feud. Boys and girls alike, they all had their hair dyed white-blonde. And they all said that it was obvious that I was jealous of the spotlight and not humble enough to play a supporting role to Buddy. I had to laugh because what could be further from the truth? In my role as the foe, I’m more supportive of Buddy than ever. But I’m also proud of the job Buddy and I are doing with this feud. We’re like shining examples to the other wrestlers out there, showing ‘em how you really galvanize the public. Our ratings are up past FCCW and are fast gaining on the IWA. So what if the fans get carried away and forget it’s fake? That’s the whole point.

The cameras were filming in Roanoke, Virginia. A high school football team said their team Thanksgiving meal was gonna be early so they could watch Buddy stomp me to death. One young lineman said he hoped that Buddy would “torture that no-good, yella-bellied traitor for quite a spell. Quite a spell.”

           The way we had it planned thus far, that’s exactly what Buddy was gonna do. We were choreographing a marathon of a match. Standard marquee dynamics. First Buddy would storm into the ring and I’d climb the cage to get away from him. After about five minutes of Buddy inspiring sheer terror in me, he’d get ahold of me and pummel me for a while. But then, just when things seemed to be all Buddy, I’d do something dirty and yank the momentum right out from under him. After a few minutes of me wearing him down, I’d put him in a submission hold. We hadn’t decided between the Boston Crabclaw and the Figure Four, but either way, Buddy’s job was just to grimace and writhe without giving up, a testament to, if not stoicism, then at least the epic pain threshold of a true hero. Just past the 20 minute mark, somebody was supposed to throw a rigged chair into the ring. It’d get busted up and then Buddy and I were supposed to rub wood chips in each other’s faces and gouge each other with splintered chair legs until I was to slip in a pool of my own blood. Then Buddy’d be upon me with his piece of the chair aimed at me like a stake. For a second, his face was supposed to be stamped with the blood lust. But then humanity would creep into his face and his eyes would unbug and his teeth would unbare. And this is where we need to decide what to do next.

           This won’t be the first “I Quit” match in the history of the American Wrestling League. But the concept, if it isn’t handled properly, can run counter to the whole point of professional wrestling. The thing about wrestling is that you have us characters with our “genuine” differences, and we settle them violently. A three-slap on the mat should satisfy any grievance the crowd has, whether it’s personal, romantic or political. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the bad guys were bald-headed Russians, evil-eyed Sultans, or those indomitably mean, bland Chinamen that everybody loved to fight, nobody ever wanted to see those guys get killed. Victory is no fun for the fans unless the loser’s around to wallow in humiliation, to concoct fantastic excuses and test the market to see if revenge is in the cards.

But with Buddy’s and my “I Quit” match, we’re toying with death. Neither of us likes the idea. Buddy put it best: “How’m I gonna beat you without killin’ you?” Nobody wants that. But we are definitely wratcheting the violence up several notches. And by all indications, this is only too fine with our audience. “Boy,” Buddy said one day at rehearsal, “they are howlin’ for your blood!”

“No friggin’ way,” Jerry Boone had said.

           “Now, Jerry,” Buddy said. “Quit starin’ out that window like General Patton or whoever and take your hands out from behind your back and sit down here at this big ol’desk o’ yours.”

           Mr. Boone came back to the desk. “Buddy,” he said. “I know you’re at the top of every poll we run here, but don’t come in here forgetting who’s in charge. Who’re you feuding with right now, Isis the Samurai?”

           “That’s right.”

           “Well,” Mr. Boone said, trying to sound crafty. He flipped open his cell phone and dangled it over the desk like a butterfly knife. “How’d you like to drop that and get into a thing with Colonel Slocumb?”

           “That faggot?!”

           Jerry looked calmly across his desk at us. Buddy had mispoken and now Mr. Boone thought he was in charge again.

“Mr. Boone,” I said. “I change my name from Kid Amore to Don Palermo.  Look at these sketches. I start acting like a mafioso. We plan a big match, Buddy kicks my ass, and that’s it. We figure the ratings boost’ll be worth the vacay.”

“Come on, Jerry. It’s only three weeks.”

“No.”

Buddy and I looked at one another and smiled. We still had our trump card to play. Buddy nodded for me to break the news to Mr. Boone. “What if we could guarantee that-”

Buddy jumped in, “We’re bringin’ Macon Tolliver in on this one!”

I smiled and Buddy slapped me five. “So waddya say, Jerry?”

Mr. Boone snapped his cell phone shut and took a look at my drawings of my new character.

           Buddy and I came up together through the Florida organization. Roughly half of the AWL’s superstars got their seasoning on the Everglade Circuit. The most creative, ambitious and professional of us paid our dues for five or six years and then moved up to the national syndicate. But as far back as anyone can remember, Macon Tolliver’s been the king of Florida wrestling.

           He worships Satan. Nobody knows how old he is. He wears a black velvet wizard’s cloak and has a way of gliding down the aisle for his matches while the PA system plays “Sympathy for the Devil” (how he could afford the rights to that song is another mystery). He spits green mist into the eyes of good guys and treats the bad guys as rivals for his own dark power, crippling them with ancient spells. All three major wrestling bodies, the AWL, IWA and FCCW issued invitations that’ve been standing for the last 25 years. But they all stipulated changes to Macon’s act so he stayed in Florida, putting the greatest show in wrestling on in union halls and high school gyms.  

           Buddy and I got to know Macon real well during Buddy’s four and my five years down in Florida. He said he saw something in us. He said Buddy was the embodiment of all that’s great about professional wrestling. He taught us most of what we know. But, unless you were a hardcore wrestling fan, you’d never have heard of him outside the state of Florida until a week before he and I Pearl-Harbored Buddy.  

           I was fighting some pushover. It was a quick match because I was a good guy. Buddy was watching from outside the ring, snapping the apron and leading the crowd in cheers. “Kid!” he’d call.

           “Ah-Mo-Ray!” the crowd would answer.

           “Kid!”

           “Ah-Mo-Ray!”

           But then, just before the match ended, a small commotion kicked up by the northwest aisle of the arena. I couldn’t see the aisle well from the mat but up on the video screens, sure enough, was Macon Tolliver floating towards the ring, hood pulled over his head like a Gregorian monk. Most of the fans had never seen him before but he had an effect on them anyway.

           Macon made it to the corner opposite Buddy and stood there silently, oblivious to any attention he was being paid. He stared hard at me. At first I noticed but then I went back, gave my guy the Olive Press and pinned him. Buddy helped me on with my robe and we left Macon standing there by the side of the ring.  

           The same thing happened at each of my non-marquee matches for the rest of the week. As the week progressed, Mad Mike McDonough and Sir Algernon Crawford “dug up” the identity of the mysterious stranger who had started showing up at Kid Amore’s matches. They filled the public in on Macon Tolliver’s dark mission in life, inspiring dread like a couple of real pros. If you knew Mike and Al, you could see how excited they were to finally have Macon in the AWL. They seemed to defame him with more vigor than they’d displayed in years.  

           Meanwhile, Macon built a stable of wrestlers, conjuring loyalty from the most savage characters in the League- Nehru the Cannibal, the Tanzanian Devil, Steppenwolf der Havocmeister and Moustafa the Anatolian Giant. Backstage, there were more wrestlers lined up to work with Macon Tolliver than there are movie stars for a Robert Altman movie.  

           I acknowledged Macon’s presence at my matches with a statement they’d play before commercials: “Lemme tell you people somethin’! If that Satanic freak wants to watch Kid Amore dismantle a coupla unworthies, he’s more than welcome. But let him buy a ticket like the rest of the Kid’s hard workin’ fans! I don’t know what makes that lilly-livered servant of evil think he’s so special that he deserves a ringside seat, but if he wants one so bad, let’s have him bring one of his non-English-speakin’, unpatriotic goons inside the ring for me to handle. ‘Cause baby, when you’re in the Press, you ain’t nothin’ but mush. ArrivederLa!”

           So, in short order, a match was set up with Steppenwolf der Havocmeister, master of the iron claw. Macon was in his corner, staring silently and intently from under his dark hood. Buddy was in my corner, helping the crowd taunt, “Ste-Fa-Nee! Ste-Fa-Nee!” I was winning the match and Steppenwolf der Havocmeister was almost ready to get the Olive Press. Buddy was pounding the outskirt of the ring, leading “Kid!”

           “Ah-Mo-Ray!”

           Suddenly, Macon started babbling. He had a mike in his cloak so everybody heard him. He was incanting something, “Cumis ego ipse oculis vidi in ampulla pendere.  Cumis ego ipse oculis vidi in ampulla pendere.” I’m not sure what that means but it sure did scare the shit out of the crowd. And that was before they’d all noticed Buddy. When they did, he was on his knees, clawing his own throat. His platinum hair was shaking frantically with every gasp for air. I ran over to the corner and reached out my hand to him. “Buddy!” I shouted.

           But then Steppenwolf der Havocmeister ran up and kneed me in the back. I fell to the ground and he started to stomp on me with his bulky jackboots. Finally, Macon shed his robe and slithered his fully tattooed body into the ring. The referee had the bell rung, signaling me winner by disqualification. The big roar from the crowd was frightenend and despairing. As soon as Macon kicked me, Buddy broke out of his choking spell. He sat on the concrete outside of the ring, trying to recover. The fans were urging him to run into the ring and help me.

           Macon had handcuffed me to the middle rope on the ring’s south end. He and Steppenwolf der Havocmeister methodically continued my beating. I was still conscious but barely. The crowd started chanting “Buh-Dee!  Buh-Dee!” to help him get his strength back so he could rescue me.  

           After a minute of heartbreaking grogginess, Buddy staged a full recovery. He was up and shaking his whole body with fury and juice from the crowd. He leapt up to the top of the apron and flipped over the ropes into the ring. The crowd went wild. Only Buddy could pick people up so quickly and only Macon could knock them back down. Buddy drop kicked Steppenwolf der Havocmeister and then squared off against Macon, light versus dark. Unlike most bad guys, Macon showed no fear. He shot out his fingers and spit his green mist into Buddy’s eyes.

           Once again, the great Buddy Flash sank to his knees incapacitated. And then the final blow. Macon unlocked my handcuff and led me to where Buddy was lying blind in the middle of the ring. I was furious. I turned to Macon and the crowd screamed for me to avenge my partner. I knelt down and took one of Buddy’s hands. But, to the audience’s ultimate horror, instead of helping him up, I laced one of my legs over Buddy’s arm and dropped to the mat, crushing my partner’s arm and taking the abrupt leap over to evil.

           “I don’t believe what I’m seeing,” Mad Mike McDonough wailed from his ringside broadcasting table. “In all my years as a commentator for the American Wrestling League, I have never seen a betrayal so treacherous, so cowardly, so disgusting. Fans, I am sick to my stomach right now over what has just transpired here in Louisville.”

             “‘Don Pulayermoe,’ that’s how it’s spelled” Jerry Boone reads, “‘You are one dead ginnee f***wad. I don’t know who let your ass into my cleen country of hours, but I promise you will never spred your filthy ginnee seed on our soil. See you on Thanksgiving, boy.’’”

           Mr. Boone holds the letter out across the desk to me. Buddy is chuckling, shaking his head slowly.

           “I don’t want to get my prints on it, Mr. Boone.”

           “Frank,” Mr. Boone says, getting up from his desk and turning towards the window. “I’m putting you on 24-hour guard.”

           “What?!” I yell.

           “Huh?” says Buddy.  

           “And another thing,” barks Mr. Boone. He turns around and plops both fists down on his desk. “Don’t either of you let me hear another word about your wives being seen together.”

           “Now, Mr. Boone…” I begin.

           “Now nothin’ boy!” Mr. Boone growls. He sits down. “You think our fans are stupid? How many of ‘em gotta see Donna and Tammy at the nail salon before this whole dang feud is blown? You two are supposed to hate each other, gol’dangit!”

           “But Buddy’s my best friend,” I say. “How am I supposed to deal with death threats and the like without-”

           “Just a second, Frank,” Buddy says assuredly. He leans across Mr. Boone’s desk and fiddles with the pile of hate mail. “Now, Jerry. I understand what you’re sayin’. And, obviously, Frank’s safety is priority numero uno. But you gotta understand somethin’, my man…”

           “Can it, Buddy,” Mr. Boone says. “This is as much your fault as anyone’s.  ‘It hurts to lose a friend?’ You think our fans pay to see your softer side? You’re too busy trying to show your range for the Hollywood people and Frank here’s getting blamed for it!”

           Mr. Boone pounds on the table with one hand and rubs his forehead with the other. It’s funny to watch him be bossy and worried at the same time.  “Look,” he sighs. “From now on, what with Frank’s security detail and the extra precautions we have to have outside the rehearsal gym, this thing is becoming a major pain in the you know what. Now, Frank, you’d be doin’ everybody a big favor if you just checked into a hotel in secret until the match. You know the League’ll reimburse you for it.”

           Now I have to walk around the room a little bit. “I dunno, Mr. Boone. I mean, I know this whole feud was my idea in the first place. But a man can only be so professional if he ain’t got the comforts of life outside the workplace. I mean, why do we do any of this in the first place? I didn’t mind losing my soda contract so much. You know the bad guy motto, ‘Better to be hated than doubted.’ But first you cut off all contact between Buddy and me, and now me and my family? I dunno, Mr. Boone. Especially after I did my part to help boost your ratings. Heck, I’m just doing my job.”

           Jerry Boone smiles benevolently and says, “Too well.” Then he lights his pipe.

             Thanksgiving is the AWL’s biggest night of the year. So ever since we made it big, our families have eaten our traditional Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday night so we don’t cramp up during our matches. We used to eat together. But, this year, they’re being kind enough to let me out of my hotel to eat Thanksgiving dinner with my immediate family on Wednesday at AWL headquarters about 30 miles from our home in Charlotte. Tammy and the kids pick me up from the hotel. They are not pleased.

           “Who ever heard of Thanksgiving dinner for five people?” she says in the car on the way over.

           “Yeah!” my daughter Marie chimes in from the back seat. “Doesn’t that trailer trash know wrestling’s fake?”

           “Marie…”

           I hate it when the kids use language like that. Since I first crossed over to the bad guys, Mr. Boone and I have been meeting to draw more lines for me to cross. Out of respect for my professionalism, he’s given me carte blanche but there are certain things I won’t do. I will spit on children. I won’t be racist.  I will grab my nuts and stick my tongue out at old ladies. I won’t moon anybody. I will say “redneck.” I won’t say “white trash.” Sometimes I realize what a crazy job I have and it makes me laugh.

           “Oh, you think this is funny?!” Tammy says.

           “I miss Uncle Buddy!” says Frank Jr.

           “Come on now, gang,” I say. “Y’all just need to change the way you’re looking at this. Now who’s hungry?”

           My wife and children grunt and look out the windows of the car. I see their scowls in my rearview mirror. I hope the AWL can cook.

             We get done late. The kids are all asleep in the car when we pull up to the hotel. There’s a big surprise waiting for me at the desk. It’s a message from “Blanton,” otherwise known as Buddy. The night clerk gives me a dirty look and points me to a courtesy phone.

           “Hey, brother. Donna and I just wanted to wish you and Tammy and the kids a happy one. Sorry we’ve been out of touch lately. You know what Jerry ‘Baboone’ says. So I’m just tryin’ to take the outer layers of the reality of our match more seriously. We ain’t getting’ any younger, you know. Anyway, I oughtta get back to all the brothers and sisters and cousins, even though they’re all the same, right? Just kiddin’! Any-hoo, I guess I’ll just see you tomorrow. Hey, after the match, maybe we can get together and I can finally show you the pictures from our trip. Later gator!”

           Tammy can tell by my face who it is. She touches my shoulder and gives me a look of understanding.  

           I put my arms around her and hold her tight. “You know I’d never let anybody hurt you and the kids, Tammy.”

           “I know, Frankie. I know.”

           She kisses me and goes back to the car and drives the kids home.

             The locker room’s a zoo. Security is doubled on my side. I hear Buddy’s pissed because it means less guards to keep the Flashbulb skanks out of his locker room.  

           Macon’s giving me a rubdown when I hear my theme song. Louis Prima.

           “Alright, kiddo,” he says, slapping me in the small of the back. “Let’s get this over with and go home.”

           “I hear that!” I shout. I stand up and clap my hands. Two attendants help me into my robe. It’s fashioned after a baggy pinstriped suit. I like the silky kerchief in the breast pocket. A third attendant carefully places the black fedora onto my head. Macon rolls his eyes and ducks his head back into his hood and nods it over his face. How he can see outta that thing, I’ll never know

           He pulls me aside for a moment. His voice creeps from under the hood. “Who do you hate?”

           “Buddy,” I say.

           “Who?” he asks, raising his voice a little.

           “Buddy!” I say.

           “Buddy who?”

           “Buddy Flash!” I stomp my feet a few times and spit on the floor. I’m ready. I’m totally in character.

           “Let’s go!”    

             We see the mess at the end of the tunnel. It’s small at first. Blurry studs of faces, bright snippets of the ring in the ropes in the cage, flashbulbs, press tables. We see bits. Going down the tunnel it gets clearer. The place is crazy. The Coliseum’s locker room tunnels are short so we have a longer path of exposure before the ring. The place is going wild. We exit the tunnel and get swallowed by the visual roar. The sudden switch from a low ceiling to an arena dome is like falling upwards for a second. A rush everytime. The floors are already densely littered, but nobody’s run out of things to throw at Macon and me.

           “Out of our way you 8 to 5 losers!” I say.

           The security guard in front of me gets hit in the face with the eraser end of a pencil. We try to speed up our pace to the ring. But traffic in the aisle is thick.  I’m focused on the wide patch of light in the cage. It’s automatic in there. The microphone dangles in the middle. All 16 ropes are white to highlight the blood. It sure is slow going in the aisle. The hatred is strong. Suddenly a big rockfaced lady jumps out in front of me. Just like Jack Ruby. She hauls off and drives a heavy brogan smack into my nuts. My eyes water. The scene blurs again. I double over.  Security shoves the big bitch aside and surrounds me. I feel Macon’s hand on my shoulder. But it gets yanked away and the crowd jumps on my guards’ backs. Too many people are surging. They’re trampling me. My bones are breaking. The noise is changing. I curl up best as I can. My balls are throbbing. Somebody kicks me in the neck. I can still make out the ring. I try to crawl that way, between a guard’s legs. He falls away and I’m unprotected.  More fans jump the aisle, raining down the blows. Security’s a memory. I keep crawling. Somebody spills hot coffee onto me. The anger is being satisfied. More big farmer shoes. Stilletos. I crawl a little further. The aisle collapses completely. I can’t see the ring. All I see is trash and spit. Fury. Tears. “Grease-ball! Grease-ball!” Deafening. My $20,000 robe is filthy tatters. Rotten teeth calling me names with lockjawed conviction. A micro-dump of coca-cola, popcorn, tobacco juice and broken airplane bottles. I feel one of my hands down the aisle. I reach it out along the sticky floor. Cheers for my destruction. The hand begs. The hand pleads. My lungs feel shred by busted ribs. I feel the burning holes when I breathe. They’re cheering. I stretch the hand out further. They’re getting their way. I extend. And then I hear his song. “Black Dog.” And it isn’t a snap and it isn’t a click and it doesn’t even feel all that sudden, but I realize that I’ve been reaching for Buddy. Buh-dee. My best friend. Doesn’t even wait for me to make it into the ring. And I don’t care if the PA system had his song set on a timer. I hear the crowd. I feel their joy. And I can’t wait another minute to get in the ring and tear that bullshit motherfucker apart.

           I throw my arms around two security guards’ necks and they whisk me the rest of the way down the aisle like a wounded soldier and hoist me into the ring. Not the dramatic entry we had planned but I’m here now. And I see him. He’d never enter the ring before me, so he’s hopping around, shaking hands, kissing babies, telling the camera that he’s number one and those folks know what it’s like to see Buddy Flash in action. At first he’s the same spectacle you see on television. But then he touches you. He points to your section and gives you a serious nod, in the midst of all this hoopla. And you just know he’s gonna fight his ass off for you and that all that shit you’ve been taking from your job and from your family and from your lodge, tonight they’re wrong, you’re right and you are gonna win, baby.

           So I get in there and I wait. My body aches but it’s just a few bruises.  Nothing I haven’t fought through before. I like these lights. “It’s been so long, but I’ve found out what people mean by down and out!” And then we’re in there together and Jerry Boone himself comes under the microphone. I’m not sure how I can tell but I just can that Mr. Boone’s tux is a rental. But I’m thinking about me. Clearly, finally. Oh, I’ll go by the script at first, but the next time that microphone worms into this cage, what’s Buddy gonna do? Whine to the fans that I’m not being fake enough? Now who’s trapped by the public?

           It isn’t like I didn’t do my share of carrousing with Buddy. But, unlike Mr. Flash, I was careful. Tammy never caught me and she never caught anything from me. Buddy, sometimes he acted like he wanted to get caught. He’d have Donna on the phone in the middle of it. He even had ‘em over to his house. And then there were those unwanted pets he gave her just before their anniversary. I covered for him as best as I could and nobody could blame me for his bumpy marriage. But fairness was never Buddy’s strong suit. Without ever saying a word, he was always trying to make me feel guilt commensurate with his own, like if he got caught, it wasn’t fair that I didn’t too. Oh, he never ratted me out, but he always seemed to skew the reciprocity. It seemed like every morning that the kids would ask what Uncle Buddy was doing on the couch, he’d wink at me and say, “Well, since your Daddy didn’t sleep at my house, I had to come all the way over here to see you little buzzards.” And Tammy would kiss me and glare at him and, instead of being glad that one of us made it, Buddy’d stew.

           Just before Jerry Boone is finished with his announcement, Buddy invokes good guy privelege and grabs the dangling mike. The crowd noise dims and Buddy takes a deep breath, getting ready for the long haul. “Palermo,” he says. “I don’t know how long it’s gon’ take, but I am gonna kick your fat guido ass!” We aren’t supposed to use profanity but the crowd really loves it.  

           The bell rings and we charge each other, locking arms and shoulders. Buddy rakes his arms through the tangle and stomps to make it seem like a violent move. I back up and then relock. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Buddy whispers. I was supposed to cower into the corner. I actually had forgotten. “Hey,” Buddy says. “You okay?”

           I can’t wait any longer. I loose my right arm from the lock and hammer it down on Buddy’s back. Buddy falls to one knee with a great pounding noise. When he’s down there, I knee him in the face.

           “Goddamn, boy!” he says.  

I spit on him. Kick him in the ribs. Let him feel a little of the pain he’s caused me. I can’t believe how good it feels. I give him an elbow drop, a fake move.

“What the hell you doin’?”

“Shut up, Buddy!”

And I grab a fistful of his crinkly bleached hair and bang his head into the mat. With my other hand, I punch him in the face. I can’t remember when’s the last time I really hit somebody with a closed fist.  

“Wha?” Buddy says.

I keep working on him, slapping him, slamming him. I’ve lost my sense of the crowd. For all I know, they can tell that something’s wrong. But I don’t care. The only way they’re gonna start being fairer is if Buddy lets them down.

“Quit?” garbles Buddy.

I look in his eyes. They’re messed with blood and he’s trying to blink it away. His face is slicked so red I can see my own reflection, haloed by the ring lights. Buddy coughs and I let go of his head so he can turn and spit.

Suddenly, I get a blow to the back of my head and the crowd explodes. It was the toe from Buddy’s boot. It doesn’t hurt so much but it stuns me enough to knock me off of him. And now he’s up and kicking me some more.

“You wanna play like that, huh, boy?  Whoo-Weeee!” I have never heard a happier crowd. And it’s my pain that makes them cheer so loud. My pain and Buddy’s triumph. But Buddy doesn’t deserve to triumph. I do, no matter what the crowd believes. They don’t know. But they do. This is professional wrestling. They know. But they don’t care, don’t want to be reminded of my humanity. And that’s why Buddy must be destroyed.

But asshole though he may be, he’s still a stud. He drops an elbow on me and, the way he’s recovering his strength, you’d think he was coming back from a fake beating instead of a real one. Shaking, the whole bit.  

There’s Mad Mike and Sir Algernon. They own their tuxes. For tonight they have to wear newer, smaller headphones and wireless microphones instead of their usual bulky ones.

“Here comes Buddy!” Mad Mike announces.

I’m on the mat, looking up at Buddy, at the lights and the faint shadows of the cage they make on the mat, getting darker where they overlap. And now the chair comes sailing over the top of the cage and splinters on impact with the mat. Buddy isn’t sure whether to fetch his weapon or attend to me.

“Don’t you move, Frank!” he says and gives me another kick. He marches over to where the chair legs are. I get up and follow him, jumping on his back and hugging my arms around his neck. He straightens up and starts spinning around. Faster and faster. The red the white the brown the black. The shine and the shadow, they all swirl and I don’t hear a thing. Wrestling’s different from this. We’re slowing. Buddy’s choking. I hop off his back and wheel him around by his shoulder. His head is hanging. I hit him in the stomach. By reflex, I stomp my boot on impact. I’m not used to fighting. I run at him with my arm outstretched, giving him a clothesline. Buddy drops the chair leg.  

“It’s a bloody bloodbath in there!” says Sir Algernon.

Buddy writhes on the mat. I give my head a few good shakes but I still feel dizzy. Now I can give the crowd a good look. They’re confused. They aren’t exactly out of hate, but they don’t seem sure that expressing it would effect what they see here. This thing has degenerated from ballet to brawl and, seasoned as Buddy and I are, neither of us have been in a real fight in 20 years. Not knowing what else to do, I raise my hands and roar. Buddy looks up at me. He doesn’t understand what I’m doing. He’s coherent, but it doesn’t make any sense to him, as if this time is a real betrayal, as if he hasn’t betrayed me, the man who loved him best. He’s disgusted with me. And it works. I feel kinda bad. But I fight through that and fall to the mat and begin punching him some more.  

Buddy grabs me by the hair and pulls me down. He rolls over and gets on top of me, pinning my arms with his knees. We’re still close to the shards of the busted chair. Buddy grabs a piece and knocks the dull end of it across my head.  

“Come on, now Pilgrim,” he says. “Let’s see what you got stuffed with today!”

It comes as a surprise to me that the crowd is not excited about this turn in Buddy’s favor. Buddy continues to batter me with the chair piece. But it’s clear that his real moves don’t capture the crowd’s imagination the way his fake ones do.

“Buddy,” I say. “We’re losin’ ‘em. We gotta go back to the script, man.”

Buddy tosses the wood aside and smacks my face. “What did you say, boy? You wanna quit now? I hear the crowd just fine!”

Buddy rises to his feet. “YOU WANNA QUIT?!”

And now the crowd gets reinvolved. But Buddy’s still intact. And so am I.  I roll over onto my belly and my best friend drags me by the wrist over to the announcers’ table. He reaches his free arm out, and they hand him the microphone.