Cracker Etiquette: Stories from Somebody's South by Philip Booth

Cracker Etiquette: Stories From Somebody’s South

Philip Booth

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida

Major Professor: John Fleming, Ph.D. Rita Ciresi, M.F.A. Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D.

Date of Approval: April 10, 2006

Keywords: florida, fiction, key west, movies, rock and roll

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Introduction 1

Smile 11

Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir 30

Just a Kiss 45

Falling 62

The Night Frank Sinatra Saved Pop’s Life 75

What the Neighbor Saw 86

Cracker Etiquette: Stories From Somebody’s South

Philip Booth

ABSTRACT

It might be said that the Old South and the New South meet in this collection of stories, largely set in Florida and centered on characters whose lives are tied to the state.

The protagonists, mostly men and boys, are often observed during moments of crisis. The middle-aged narrator of “Falling,” sifting through bittersweet memories, attempts to come to terms with a loved one’s loss, the impact of that tragedy on his life, and the burden of misplaced guilt. In “Smile,” a young man struggles with an uncaring lover and makes a fateful decision about a stash of stolen money during a strange trip to Key West, a journey spiked with pop-culture references and viewed through the haze of LSD.

A romance between a good woman and a hard-drinking man, begun during the

1940s, is at the center of “Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir,” which visits largely- forgotten times and places in Old Florida and rural Georgia. The rules of romance, circa the 1980s, are examined in “Just a Kiss,” a story of twenty-something sexual frustration and emotional angst set in Tampa and indebted, in part, to a Hemingway story.

An entirely different milieu is explored in “The Night Frank Sinatra Saved

Pop’s Life,” which takes place at a New Jersey family’s beach house in South Florida and centers on a Mafia hit man’s retelling of his long-ago encounter with the Chairman of the

Board.

“What the Neighbor Saw,” the most psychedelic of these stories, and one of the author’s oldest pieces of fiction, closes the collection with a murder mystery told from the point of view of a disturbed suburbanite.

These tales offer a unique perspective on a South that may have existed only inside one writer’s mind.

iii

Introduction

“Journalism is literature in a hurry,” the Victorian poet and literary critic Matthew

Arnold wrote.

As a longtime journalist, I’ve always subscribed to that view, believing that the

news reporting of, say, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Washington Post on the fall of the Nixon White House was every bit as compelling as the finest fiction of the period. Theirs was a bracing narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, an engaging true-life story that began with secrets and lies at the highest levels of government, continued with unraveling careers and concluded with the fall of a once- mighty ruler. No wonder the resultant book, All the President’s Men, and the movie of

the same name, inspired so many writers of my generation to pursue careers in journalism.

Fertile, stunningly told stories, too, drawn from real life and driven by engaging

narrative arcs, are also to be found in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the other non-

fiction work of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson; Tom Wolfe’s true-life

countercultural explorations in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and elsewhere; the long-

form journalism of Norman Mailer, including his The Armies of the Night; and Truman

Capote’s In Cold Blood, born as a series of articles in The New Yorker.

In recent months, fascinating, deeply moving stories of tragedy, survival and hope

have emerged from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf coast,

in the pages of publications as varied as The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The New

York Times and No Depression magazine; these kinds of richly woven, emotionally

resonant tales, too, emerged in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City.

Journalism and literature have always been connected in another, perhaps more

obvious way, too: Talented journalists, like Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest

Hemingway and, more recently, the Florida crime writer Carl Hiaasen, moved beyond

newspapers to become formidable creators of fiction. The hard, sometimes monotonous

work of reporting – gathering facts, seeking out sources, interviewing people, running into dead ends, analyzing information, relating the results to the public as entertainingly as possible – paid off for these writers, and many others. They were each able to successfully transition from the craft of recounting and illuminating the deeds and lives of real people to the art of fabricating and enlivening characters who may or may not bear remarkable resemblances to people living or dead.

So that was the path I had in mind when I made my first serious attempts at

fiction writing, about the same time that I was admitted to the University of South

Florida’s graduate program in English, in the fall of 2003. I had successfully worked in the field of journalism, as a staff writer and a full-time freelancer, and over a period of two decades I had written hundreds, if not thousands of news stories, feature stories and

reviews for dozens of daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and Web publications

around the country. As a journalist, I knew how to give readers – and, more importantly,

editors – what they wanted, or what they thought they wanted, and at the same time

satisfy my own sense of storytelling. And I hoped that I could accomplish the same thing

with literary fiction.

I had studied literature, too, and in graduate school I explored Hemingway,

Fitzgerald and the modernists; Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Toni Morrison,

Jonathan Franzen, and other contemporary novelists; the sci-fi worlds of Ray Bradbury

and Philip K. Dick; and, variously, Dickens and Twain. In creative writing classes, I

delved into the stories of John Updike, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Andre

Dubus, Stuart Dybek, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Louise Erdrich, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice

Munro, Denis Johnson, Sandra Cisneros, Mark Costello, Lorrie Moore and Gabriel

Garcia Marquez, among many others, attempting to understand how and why their short

fiction worked for readers, and what skills and techniques might be useful in my own

work.

On my own, I eagerly consumed the tough-guy crime writings of Elmore Leonard

and James Lee Burke, the psychological crime thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and the

pulp horror of Stephen King; the tales of Southern grotesques in the work of Gainesville

writer Harry Crews and New Orleans writer John Kennedy Toole; and the portraits of

Northern grotesques in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I reveled in the comic

strains of British social satirist Kingsley Amis, and such forebears as Evelyn Waugh and

Graham Greene; and the more darkly tinted work of Amis’s son, so-called “Britpack”

writer Martin Amis. The short stories and novels of Russell Banks, who brought a sculptor’s knife to his beautifully crafted work centered on bleak themes and characters who often struggle with family dysfunction and addiction, perhaps have had more of an influence on my writing in recent years than the work of any other author.

I also learned much from the storytelling found in contemporary screenplays,

particularly those that were the basis for the work of the filmmakers who were part of

Hollywood’s creative renaissance of the ‘70s – Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg,

Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Paul

Mazursky and Stanley Kubrick – along with several who emerged in the ‘80s, including

Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles and Oliver Stone, and ‘90s talents Quentin

Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Thomas Anderson. All of these directors to some

degree have explored the nature of identity in an America whose sense of itself, of its

place in the world, had lost its moorings during the political and social upheaval of the

‘60s, and had yet to be healed of its malaise.

That sense of contemporary angst, a kind of non-religious spiritual suffering accompanied by an endless quest for answers, also attracted me to the tales of the drifters, losers and seekers in the music of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and

Lucinda Williams. Even artists from across the pond tapped into that feeling; it is present in the music of the latter-day Beatles, in the John Lennon and George Harrison solo projects, and in the work of modern rockers U2, who literalized that sense of lifelong spiritual questing in songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Searching For” and

“Sunday Bloody Sunday” (with the lyrics, “How long must we sing this song?”)

Those artists’ secular searching, and moments of revelation, paralleled religious

experiences that I had undergone in the South. As a child and young adult, I attended a

variety of Protestant churches, cycling through several mainstream denominations, and as

a teenager I had a “born again” experience at a summer church camp. Later, I became

closely affiliated with several evangelical churches. I have never abandoned my faith, but

I have gone through several phases and differing degrees of religious devotion. I have

experienced feelings of similar, neo-religious spiritual transcendence while listening to

music, too, whether absorbing the deep, reedy woodwinds and primal percussion of the

World Saxophone Quartet with African drums at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage

Festival, zoning into the throbbing bass and hypnotic patterns of the bands on stage all

night at Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica, investigating the mournful laments recorded by

guitarist Robert Johnson and his Delta blues musical kin or tuning into the open-ended,

musically eclectic improvisations of the Grateful Dead, Phish and other jam bands that

have continued to play in a similar vein. And, long ago, briefly, chemical stimulants

paved a trip through “the doors of perception,” as Aldous Huxley referred to his own

encounters with mind-expanding drugs.

So all of these influences fed my creative impulses as a writer, giving rise, first, to journalistic accounts of places I had visited and musicians and filmmakers I had interviewed, and, later, to fiction. But the reality of moving from journalism to fiction was far more complicated than I might have imagined. It’s one thing to successfully assemble character portraits, describe settings and devise pieces of dialogue. It’s another thing to bring characters to life, and to move them around in a manner that’s compelling to readers. I believe that I’ve made real progress in these areas over the last few years, although I’m convinced that I have much more to learn about the craft of fiction writing; the best fiction writers, I believe, are lifelong students of the art and craft of writing. A story, I’ve learned, is never finished until it’s published, and even then it’s not too late to revise (in public readings, story collections, etc.)

“What the Neighbor Saw,” included in this collection, grew out of my first real

attempt at fiction writing. Its genesis was an exercise in “free writing,” during a session at

the Florida Suncoast Writers Conference at the USF campus in St. Petersburg. The story

began as a single, simple image – a man is able to look across the way and observe the possibly sinister goings-on of his neighbors – that might have had some connection with the action that takes place in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window; while briefly enrolled in the cinema studies program at NYU, I had studied Hitchcock’s four Jimmy Stewart films quite closely. The story also reverberates, I think, with the feeling of the torrid breezes and tropical landscapes of South Florida, possibly as a result of the many occasions, when I was a child, that I visited my paternal grandparents at their old, rambling two- story house in West Palm Beach. “What the Neighbor Saw,” too, is influenced by adventures in psychedelics; there’s a playful, nonsensical edge to the story meant to leave the reader with some mystery about what actually happens to the main character. Does a murder really take place? Are there multiple murders? If so, does the killer get away with his misdeeds? Or do these events merely play out in the mind of a narrator who is decidedly unreliable?

And what should readers make of the ongoing war between the sexes described in these stories? The protagonist in “What the Neighbor Saw” apparently kills his love interest in the story because she may get in the way of his perfect crime. In an early version of “Smile,” also set in South Florida – even farther south, all the way down in

Key West – protagonist Marc symbolically murders his ever-complaining girlfriend

Christine, with a single flash of his pearly white teeth. In a later version, he decides to abandon his girlfriend to a pair of biker toughs who are bent on retrieving the money that

Marc has inadvertently stolen from them. In the final version, or, at least, the one contained in this collection, Marc is the one who suffers for his temporary brush with good fortune.

In “Just a Kiss,” Stuart’s angst, or anger, about his relationship with Jennifer

seems to reach the boiling point. He can’t get what he wants, at first, and he blames it on

the object of his affection, or lust. Nor can he come to terms with Jennifer’s point of view

about the rape scene in Hemingway’s “Up in Michigan.” In “Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of

Memoir,” women kill their male lovers in separate sections of the story, much of which is

told in flashback. Poppy, one of the story’s two main characters, is stabbed to death by a

woman he meets long after he’s split from Mama, the story’s other main character.

Mama, as a child, witnesses a jealous wife plunge a knife into the heart of a philandering

preacher.

Is all of this a result of misogyny? Self-loathing? A combustible mixture of both?

Answers (respectively): I hope not. I don’t think so. And maybe so. At any rate, I’d like to think that the male-female relationships depicted in these stories reflect something true

about the nature of the unceasing struggle between the sexes, a recognition of the

delicate, extremely fragile balance that exists between men and women, and the vast

potential for misunderstanding.

None of these stories are true memoirs, in terms of honest attempts at recreating moments from my own life. But every story, aside from “What the Neighbor Saw,” contains slightly fictionalized, loosely autobiographical episodes. “Just a Kiss” indeed does stem from a misfired near-relationship that began with a sexually charged flirtation and continued with an extended discussion, held on several occasions, in person and by telephone, about the nature of dating. It’s set during a particular time and place – the

Tampa Bay area, during the late 1980s – and I employed a journalistic approach at several points in the story, attempting to recreate the look, feel and sound of that setting,

in that period.

“Smile,” similarly, is based on a trip not dissimilar to the one described in the

story. The idea, again, was to bring back to life a particular milieu, and use that as a

springboard for a story about one young man’s experiences – his first-time encounter

with LSD, his agonizing relationship with a self-centered romantic partner, and misadventures involving a cache of stolen money. No, my own real-life journey to Key

West did not involve the discovery of purloined loot.

“Falling” probably fits the category of memoir more than any of the other stories

in this collection. It’s a loosely connected series of vignettes largely based on a series of

events that took place in and around Central Florida, incidents that my late brother,

Bobby, and I experienced. The job here for me, I think, was to revisit and recreate these episodes without resorting to sentimentality, to give these characters – the older brother, telling the story in flashback, and his terminally ill younger brother – enough sharp edges to bring them to life without portraying either one as saint or sinner.

If I were to probe deeply enough into my reasons for writing the story, which was

originally titled “Two,” I’d probably discover that it resulted from a couple of related

motivations. First, I suspect that the syndrome called “survivor’s guilt” by some psychologists played into it to some degree: Maybe I’ve needed to employ creative writing to explore the questions that I have had about the fact that my brother inherited a genetic heart defect that I did not inherit; why did he pass away, while I survived?

Secondly, I’m guessing that the story was sparked by a subconscious desire to create a tribute to my brother, a way to memorialize and perhaps keep him alive, by documenting some of our experiences together, memories that will be lost at some point in the future.

Maybe there’s something larger here, in terms of why writers write: Is it not an

effort to validate one’s own experiences and feelings by working them out on the page,

and leaving them behind as a proof of one’s own existence? Trite, maybe, but true: I

write, therefore I am.

“Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir,” by the same token, could be an attempt to

explore the meaning of family legacy; the title derives from the fact that all four of my grandparents were born in Georgia. “The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children,” according to Euripides. A similar concept is sounded in the Old Testament: “I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5). The Poppy character, a man with

innate intelligence whose life was felled by alcohol addiction, came from a family of alcoholics, and died at the hands of his female companion, also a heavy drinker. He’s based in part on my own maternal grandfather, whose life fit the above description and

my paternal grandfather, who stopped drinking and smoking, cold turkey, at age 40. The

character’s wife, Mama, is inspired by my maternal grandmother, who passed away last

summer at the age of 94. Like Mama, my grandmother was a nurse who made many

untold personal sacrifices for her children, in an effort to keep them well-fed and secure

in the wake of an absent father.

I’ve always been curious about my maternal grandparents’ early life together, and

I never heard many details about those years, so I’ve fictionalized them in the story. I’ve

also always had a keen interest in the impact of one’s own life – one’s good deeds and

misdeeds – on future generations. And “Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir”

undoubtedly has something to do with an effort to work out that problem on paper.

The entire collection, too, might be said to reflect my attempt to use creative

writing as a tool for a home-made brand of psychoanalysis. It’s an act of discovery, to

some degree, and the process goes something like this: By creating, or re-creating, these

characters, and setting them in motion, I’m able to come to a greater understanding of their real-life counterparts. Does it work out that way? That’s yet to be determined. More importantly, of course, is whether I’ve been able to transform semi-autobiographical memory pieces into narratives with story arcs and characters appealing enough to hook readers and keep them interested until the conclusion of each piece. That’s a task that I’ve attempted to achieve with each story in “Cracker Etiquette.”

Smile

The good stuff kicked in at the restaurant, Captain Carl’s, a pit stop on Marc and

Christina’s meandering tour of Old Town in Key West. They ordered jumbo fried shrimp, conch chowder, a pitcher of Mich Light to soak it all up, and key lime pie for dessert.

They waited on their food for three long hours. Maybe it just felt like three hours.

Christina scanned the jukebox selections – Jimmy Buffett’s request “Wasted

Away in Margaritaville” and “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” singles by Hogtown homeboy

Tom Petty, the Eagles, Santana, the Rolling Stones and other old-school rockers. She peered at the autographed celebrity photos, encased in glass frames, some dusty, some cracked, plastered irregularly all over the front wall of the place, and craned her neck back to look up at the yellowing dollar bills stapled to the ceiling.

Marc used crayons to cover every inch of the children’s menu, from the connect- the-dots sailboat to the word scramble. Time slowed, practically stopping to sync with the lazy rhythms of Bob Marley’s reggae hits. Meanwhile, the action was beginning to pick up in front of Marc’s eyes, right there on the black-and-white checked tablecloth: Tiny gnomish men swung from square to square, hanging on the vertices like penny-sized monkeys. Steamboat Willie steered his ship to the north, south, east, west, shouting out instructions in that familiar, inimitable helium squeak. Gumby chatted with Pokey, the two bending into impossibly contorted positions, and disturbing sexual images briefly flickered through Marc’s mind.

Marc told Christina what he’d seen, and wondered if she had noticed, too.

“You’re hallucinating, shithead,” she said. “It happens. Quit grinning.”

“No, I mean, this is really weird.”

“Get a fucking grip. Be normal. It’s called tripping.”

He winced, and stopped and stared at her for several long moments. “Chill out,

Christina,” he said, before jumping from his seat to visit the bathroom.

Marc waited for a burly man in a leather vest and tattoos, a guy apparently in a big hurry, to pass in the narrow hallway before he entered the tiny men’s room. He locked the door, peed, and stayed at the urinal for a while, his eyes transfixed on the patterns created by the shiny black and white linoleum squares, like the tablecloth. At the sink, he splashed his face three times in quick succession, and looked into the mirror, zoning out before he noticed something odd. An acoustical tile, directly above the toilet to Marc’s right, was sagging, and a tiny piece of paper could be seen protruding onto the metal frame. A dollar bill?

Resting his left hand on the sink for leverage, Marc climbed up on the toilet seat, and almost fell off before he regained his balance. He pushed up on the tile, and several

$100 bills slipped out, fluttering down to the floor. Was this a hallucination, too? With his right hand, he reached up as far as he could go, walking his fingers toward the middle of the tile, and felt a stack of paper, and then a second and a third. He pulled all three out, and then sat down on the toilet and inspected his discovery – three mounds of $100 bills, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Marc scratched his left cheek, hard, and reacted to the pain. At the moment, he wasn’t hallucinating. He felt his heart pounding, and noticed that his shirt was soaked through with sweat.

Hard knocking on the door interrupted his reverie.

“Hey, buddy, let me in. I’ve gotta pee. How much longer are you gonna be in there?”

“Give me a minute,” Marc shouted, a little too loudly. “I’m almost done.”

Marc stuffed the cash into his front and back pockets, untucked his long t-shirt to cover up the bulges, flushed the toilet and walked out into the dark hallway. The man outside, another rough-looking guy with long sandy brown hair, a dark beard, a Daytona

Beach Bike Week t-shirt and ratty jeans, a get-up straight out of the Allman Brothers, rushed into the bathroom, brushing past Marc without looking at him.

Back at the table, Christina’s mood had soured.

“Where have you been?” she barked.

“You’re not gonna’ believe this,” he said, “but I found hidden treasure in the bathroom.”

“Is that what you call it now?”

*****

The affair had begun routinely enough, back in Tampa. The two were already acquainted through a mutual friend, her little college boyfriend Kevin, Marc’s colleague at the newspaper. There, as the paper’s pop music critic, Marc vicariously lived the rock and roll life, and Kevin picked up J-school credit as a clerk on the communications desk.

Marc and Christina ran into each other at a Cramps concert on a misty night in February, at a courtyard in the area’s historic Latin Quarter. The cartoony horror-show music of the sleazy psychobilly rebels handily matched the gloomy skies and faux-New Orleans feel of Ybor City: It was gaudy but vaguely spooky -- a sexy neon graveyard. Freaky-deaky

creatures like Lux Interior and his sidekick Poison Ivy always put Christina in the mood.

So did John Waters movies.

Soon enough, they split the show, and went back to Marc’s apartment, on the second floor of a 60-year-old Spanish stucco building in Hyde Park. The place was crammed with all manner of printed material, audiovisual goodies and other pop-culture detritus. There were souvenirs from the fall of the Berlin Wall, multicolor Pez dispensers,

Rocky Horror posters, a cardboard cut-out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his rock-life prize, a framed, handwritten diatribe from Courtney Love, proof that a bona-fide Rock

Star had paid attention to something Marc wrote:

Dear Marky Marc Simpson, Regarding your review of our Beacon show --

Roses are red Violets are blue Rock critics blow And that means you. Fuck you very much.

XXX OOO, Courtney

Also in the apartment – vinyl boxed sets galore, a Dick Clark dartboard, a Charlie

Chaplin autobiography, everything written by Elmore Leonard, a black Thelonious Monk t-shirt, a “Bird Lives” bumper sticker and a gold-embossed red silk bookmark from the

Dickens house in London.

Christina marveled at Marc’s treasure trove, and they made friends with her bong before undressing each other. She crawled slowly up his torso, pushing her firm flesh against his body, wrapping her warm feet around his icy toes, taking her time before she

straddled him and began moving, ever so slowly at first. He thrilled to her touch, the way their bodies fit together so precisely, so naturally, like two long-lost pieces of a puzzle.

He liked what he saw, and felt. She said she did, too.

“That’s the most I’ve ever had,” she whispered into his ear, kissing it and sending chills up Marc’s spine. “I like it like that. I really like it that way. Wanna go again?”

He started grinning, and couldn’t stop, and they locked limbs again.

The next morning was oddly surreal, for him. She opened her eyes, looked around, and whispered, “Hey, it’s Marc Simpson. You’re Marc Simpson. I’m in bed with

Marc Simpson.”

“Yeah, congratulations, baby. Now what?”

“Marc Simpson. Marc Simpson. I can’t believe it. I’m in Marc Simpson’s bed.”

That afternoon, he figured it out: She was marveling over the somehow vastly entertaining notion of instant intimacy with a minor, sort-of celebrity, a guy whose name had measurable cachet in certain circles and under limited circumstances. It was a poor man’s version of the proverbial star fuck. In a parallel universe, he was Quentin

Tarantino and she was a nubile, willing starlet. He was Mick Jagger – the young Mick, a cloven-hoofed Satyr, crowned prince of the old British Invasion – and she was an eager, curvaceous groupie, handpicked from the front row by a loyal crew member. Strange, thought.

*****

At Captain Carl’s Marc paid the bill, and walked outside. Christina had already left the place in a huff, jetting away on her red Vespa – one of two they had rented for the occasion – and sticking him with the bill. As he pushed open the screen

door, he thought he heard someone slamming around in the bathroom. He hopped on his matching black Vespa and headed to Mallory Square. Marc pulled into a parking spot, got off the scooter and began walking aimlessly. He was lost but pleasantly addled, and wearing a Bugs Bunny grin when he suddenly spied Christina, laughing and talking animatedly to a couple of athletic-looking guys wearing University of Miami muscle T- shirts.

Christina glared at Marc, like she wasn’t all that happy to see him, but she stopped her conversation and walked over. The UM guys chuckled, and walked away.

“Quit smiling, dummy,” she said. “Come on, cut it out. You look stupid. Stop it.”

“Don’t be a witch,” Marc said, or thought he said.

He flashed back to the morning after their first night together. “Has anyone ever talked to you about that little quirk of yours, you know? I mean, have you ever thought about doing something about that goofy grin that’s always plastered on your face?”

Christina had paused, trying to read his face. “No offense, okay? I’m just asking.”

Embarrassed, she had let her words keep on rolling out, in an unstoppable stream.

The more she talked, the deeper she had sunk into her own pile of dirty verbal quicksand. “I mean, it’s goofy. It’s crooked, you know?”

“Look,” he said, at Mallory Square, trying hard to focus. “I want to show you something.”

He walked away from the crowd, to a side street leading back to town, and she followed, complaining. He sat on the curb, and she did likewise.

“What is it?”

He pulled out one of the stacks of bills. She began laughing. Marc waved

the stack in her face, close enough to slap her nose. She jumped back.

“That’s not for real,” she said. “That’s Monopoly money, my sad friend. You’re so full of shit, you can’t even see straight.”

“Christina, look at this,” Marc said.

“Give me a fucking break. I really shouldn’t have dosed you. I thought you’d be able to handle the shit better than this.”

She stood up and began moving away from Marc.

“I’m walking now, okay? Come with me if you want.”

She disappeared into the crowd.

“Christina, come on,” said Marc, starting to panic. But he couldn’t pull together the motivation to follow her; his legs wouldn’t obey his commands to get up and walk. The stuff was really kicking in now.

Don’t fight it, Marc thought. Just give in to the high. He kept smiling, focusing on inanimate objects with delight, reveling in the sudden, inexplicable profundity of a butterfly in flight, bouncing on the tips of his toes. The planet cheese was full in the Key

West night sky, practically winking at him, like in that ancient Melies short. And yet, somehow, he was treading lightly on the moon’s surface, leaping across great distances in a single bound, eyeing a lunar module, his chest swelling with pride at the sight of the

American flag, planted there by Neil Armstrong, once a stranger and now, temporarily, his best pal.

Everything was going to be okay, he thought. Besides, he had a huge wad of cash, the silver lining to a romantic Key West trip adventure gone bad, and nothing was going

to change that.

Marc finally moved again. He got up from the curb, walked toward the square, and consoled himself with a leisurely stroll. Passing a pair of hacky-sack slackers, he walked over to the promenade, the water to his right, the salt spray in his nostrils. He weaved through the overeager jugglers, fire eaters and unicyclists, and shifted his attention to the vendors selling multicolor kites, train whistles, hippie bead jewelry and tie-dye shirts. The sounds – a one-man band here, the mad barking of a trick dog walking on a rope suspended between two barrels, hip-hop blaring from the world’s largest boom box – coagulated, creating a buzzing rush in his brain.

He stopped at a booth where a Jesus-looking guy – straight black hair, scraggly beard, scraped-up sandals, Walkman, cell phone, lap top and all – was selling hemp products. Marc glanced at a little mirror, adorned with tiny blue dolphins. Yeah, he was wearing a silly, lopsided, shit-eating grin. He was sure that everyone could tell. Then again, maybe nobody noticed. Maybe that wench Christina was the only one bothered by his looks.

“You ever try on one of these shirts, bud?” The Messiah fellow was trying, too hard, to push his goods.

“They’re awesome, dude.” Marc paused, wondering how much he should reveal about his situation, and whether anyone not on his astral plane at the moment would be able to understand his words. “Tell me, have you seen a pretty college girl – blonde, green eyes, built, with tight jeans and a black Jane’s Addiction shirt?”

“I don’t know, man. I’ve seen lots of girls tonight. They’re all pretty, and they’re all wearing jeans and black T-shirts.”

“Come on, I need some help. Her name is Christina.”

“No, man. I don’t know any Christina. Sorry, guy.”

His momentary clarity vanished, and Marc resumed leaping across dunes, floating on air, riding an Everglades airboat over the Sea of Tranquility. On the outside, where his flesh interfaced with fresh air, he barely moved. He was paralyzed in concentration, gawking at a trio of men, each of whom looked as if he had just walked out of Marc’s scratched-up print of Papa in Cuba. One of them was wearing a gold ribbon. They glared back, puffing hard on smelly stogies, rebuking him in unison.

Funny how a tiny square of porous paper, with a Cheshire Cat stamped on top, soaked long enough in the right stuff and applied to the tip of one’s tongue, could up-end reality so quickly, and so thoroughly.

“Hey, you Ernies,” Marc said, finally, vibrating and pointing and eventually getting around to asking the white beards about the best way to get to that house of theirs on Whitehead Street, and why all those cats didn’t just go ahead and have eight or nine toes on their paws, rather than the one or two extra. And, oh yeah, had they seen a tall, sexy blonde chick, with a pony tail and a bad attitude? Did they meet Christina or see a girl with that description?

They nodded their heads simultaneously and then, one by one, said “no.” The one with the gold ribbon, the Hemingway on the left, chortled. The Hem on the right said,

“She knows about the cash, and you’re in trouble now.” The one in the middle pointed to

Marc and then made a throat-cutting motion with his right hand.

Marc suddenly felt queasy, like he was about to heave up his jumbo shrimp

dinner. But did Marc actually talk with the Hemingways? Maybe he had just imagined the exchange. Who really knew? Sad how Christina couldn’t be there to enjoy it all with him, or at least to help him figure out what was what. Where was that little tramp, anyway? And what did she know about the money?

*****

After their first few romps in the sack, Christina wasn’t quite as generous in bed.

And she bored easily. Still, he couldn’t help doing a double take, clicking off a quick snapshot in his mind’s eye, transferring it to his mental hard drive, when he saw her strolling naked around his apartment, those long, sun-bronzed legs rising up into a tight little butt. Overall, curves in all the right places. And an unusually pretty, fresh-scrubbed face, lifted off the body of a contestant in a Kansas City beauty pageant. Quite the little package. Not bad. And because of his status, because of who he was, she had come after him. Not bad, indeed.

Yeah, she was cute enough. And they could talk. Christina was one of the few twenty-somethings he’d ever met who understood why it was all downhill for

Michael Jackson after “Off the Wall,” how it was crucial to the survival of rock and roll that the mighty Neil Young stay as far away as possible from those ass clowns Crosby,

Stills and Nash, and why it was necessary for Yoko to pay for her sins against rock and roll by immediately being taken behind a shed and shot, never to caterwaul another horrid note on a concert stage or in a recording studio again. Marc, as he told Christina and anyone else who would listen to his biweekly diatribes on the subject of the Beatles’ untimely dissolution, would be more than happy to pull the trigger.

She got movies, too. Christina could recite entire passages from The Godfather

and trade key bits of dialogue from The Usual Suspects. She understood what was so funny about that Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall. There was no loving Steel

Magnolias or Sleepless in Seattle for this woman, a bona-fide female enemy of chick flicks.

And, again, how about that body of hers, with breasts and a derriere straight off a kitschy Florida postcard, the kind with alligators nipping at the bottom of a buxom beach babe?

“You’re just a dirty sort-of young man,” she said, laughing, when Marc complimented her on her positive attributes. “No m’aam, I’m just a connoisseur of the finer things in life,” he’d respond, turning on his best dim-bulb Southern accent, Big

Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by way of the Strother Martin character in Cool

Hand Luke. “What we have here is failure to communicate.”

Even better, she clung tightly to the idea of Marc as a celebrity, and to her position as the girlfriend of a local somebody. They both got what they wanted – temporarily, at least. Gradually, Marc and Christina settled into a routine that was practically domestic, staying at her spartan apartment, near the university, most nights, and at his place on weekends. Fridays and Saturdays, she’d accompany him on his rock- reviewing assignments, to see headbangers or pop bands or classic rock acts or nostalgia shows at the local enormo-dome or one of the area’s outdoor amphitheaters or concert halls. Late nights, they’d often end up at parties where she’d proudly introduce Marc to her friends, or at the Chatterbox, where they’d play boozy games of pool with UT students to the sound of “Worried Man Blues” on the jukebox. No worries with this

chick, he figured, until he got to know Christina better, until that whole celebrity-status thing started wearing off, and her inner selfish brat began shining through.

*****

As Marc continued his stroll around Mallory Square, he heard a blues band limping through a tired version of “Sweet Home Chicago” in the near distance, probably coming from a bar over on Duval, and Marc gasped, nearly overwhelmed by the smell of funnel cakes frying, and the whole carnie-food menu, emanating from a nearby concession stand. He gagged.

He sat down on a bench, and was serenaded by a quartet of bagpipe players, balding guys with serious demeanors and loud kilts. As soon as they finished “My

Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” he described Christina, and asked if they had seen her.

“No Christinas, tonight,” said the youngest of the four, who introduced himself as

Raymond. “But I’d gladly trade my Elaine for two of your Christinas – that’d be a 44- year-old for two 22-year-olds. What do ya think, ready to make the deal?” Raymond smirked, and glanced at his companions, who burst out laughing.

“No, thanks. Just looking for a girl,” Marc said.

“And so are we all, my friend,” said the oldest of the bagpipers. “So are we all.”

“Thanks, fellas.”

Marc kept walking, and at about 100 paces on he noticed that the surly fellow in the Bike Week shirt was talking to the four bagpipers of the Apocalypse. Time shifted, locking in place, sliding backward and then exploding forward again, like a booster rocket, slowing only when its parachute caught wind. Minutes, seconds, hours contracted and expanded at will. Did what just happened with the guys in kilts really just happen?

Marc couldn’t feel his face. Were those his feet he just dipped in the Atlantic? Did

Christina really walk by, snap her fingers in his face and say “Wake up, you moron!”?

There was really no way of telling. Was there anyone who could help him if he were to fall too deeply into the trip? Was he ever coming back to earth? Would he ever find

Christina? And why was the biker guy following him? Was that Gregg Allman, and did he recognize Marc from a back-stage interview? Maybe he should have just stopped and talked to the guy, Marc thought. Maybe Allman was dying for an interview. Maybe Marc could go back to the tour bus with Gregg, and they could get high together and share rock and roll secrets.

*****

It had been Christina’s idea to visit the Conch Republic that summer, and Marc was up for the adventure. After all, he had never traveled that far south, and he had always wanted to check out Sloppy Joe’s, make fun of Margaritaville, soak up the whole

Hemingway vibe, see the little pastel-colored houseboats, the ones officially doomed for destruction every time hurricane season rolled around, and maybe do a little snorkeling and deep-sea fishing.

Ten miles east of Tampa, the knocking sounds started. He turned up the Seattle grunge (her choice), but they could still hear the pounding, and things started getting tense inside his Nissan. “Stop!” she shrieked. “My bike!” Her mountain bike, not quite secured to a rack on the back of the car, had slipped, and was dragging on the highway.

The frame was bent. So was she.

At Yeehaw Junction, he stopped at a Circle K, loaded up on Doritos and

beer, and, for a kick, bought Christina a “Greatest Truckin’ Hits” cassette and a single rose, lovingly encased in a plastic tube, with Your my everything thoughtfully written on a note attached to the casing. She tossed the stuff in the back seat and went back to sleep.

In Miami, they pulled off the highway and into La Cocina Cubana, a 24-hour diner, and did the Miami breakfast thing, ordering café con leche and a Cuban tortilla from Rosalita.

“Quiero este mucho,” Marc told Rosie, she of the crucifix earrings, too much makeup, and a limited grasp of English. “Esto esta delicioso.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” Christina said to Rosie. Could you warm this up?” And to

Marc: “What’s with this junk? Next time I want a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit from

Mickie D’s, okay?”

They drove all night, tracking the sun’s rise over the ocean and finally pulling up to the quaint, gay-owned 1920s bed and breakfast at 8 a.m., parking out front and crashing in the 98 until the purple-and-pink inn opened. He sprawled on the front seat, dozing, and she slept in the back. Normally, passersby might have noticed, and inquired:

Was something askew? But this wasn’t normal. This was Key West, the tail end of the

South, the last stop before Fidel. Stand close enough to the ocean down there, and you could feel the last skirmishes of the Cold War. Anything was liable to happen in Key

West, and that was okay.

That afternoon, in their bedroom at the inn, she pulled out her sheet of blotter acid, and gave him a hit.

“Just put this little square under your tongue,” she said. “Watch what happens.”

“Am I going to like it? Will it freak me out?”

“There’s always a first time,” she said, pulling off her sun dress and pulling him down on the bed. “You’ll dig it. Trust me. You’ll be fine.”

An hour later, he sat cross-legged in front of the mini fridge, his AE-1 in his hands, taking pictures of a blue bong on the top shelf, and working hard to finesse the composition of each shot. He was making art. Obviously.

*****

Half an hour after meeting the bagpipers, Marc began downshifting from his altered state. On his Vespa again, he sped down Duval, in the direction of the inn. Passing an Irish pub, he noticed a red Vespa out front, and parked his scooter next to it. It was a

Saturday, and the bar was jammed. Seated at a table near the front was a girl with blonde hair, a ponytail and a black t-shirt.

“Christina,” Marc said, tapping on the woman’s shoulder.

She whipped her head to the right, stared at Marc, and said, “Can I help you, honey?”

As Marc eye’s focused on the woman’s face, he realized that she was a he, a 50- ish man with a bent nose, heavy blue blush, thick eyeliner, a diamond earring in his right ear, a five o’clock shadow and more facial hair than any Christina that Marc had ever met.

“Sorry, I thought you were somebody else.”

“I can be anybody you’d like tonight, sweetheart. Pick your poison.”

“Uh, pardon me. I’m looking for somebody. Not you.”

The transvestite paused, sizing Marc up.

“I am somebody,” he said, loudly enough to draw the attention of others in the bar. “My name is Miss Sally Anne. Who the fuck are you, and what do you want?”

“Sorry,” Marc said. “I’m not trying to cause trouble here.”

Miss Sally stared at Marc, waiting to see if he would flinch. Then the tension hissed out of the exchange, and the man visibly relaxed.

“Well if you must know, dear, a nice-looking little gal who looked like me – from the rear, you see, honey – left by the back door just a few minutes ago.”

“Thanks, bud. I owe you.”

“You certainly do,” Miss Sally said, winking at a friend.

Marc rushed outside, just in time to catch a glimpse of Christina, speeding away on her Vespa. Seconds later, a biker guy zoomed by. Marc waved, ran to his scooter, jumped on and followed.

*****

Back on his scooter, Marc lost sight of Christina and the biker guy, and slowed down, figuring he’d find her back at the inn. He parked in his usual place, and began walking toward the lobby entrance when he the biker dude suddenly stepped in front of

Marc.

“Where’s the cash?”

“What are you talking about?”

Marc saw a flash of silver, and felt a knife’s edge against his throat.

Another man, previously unseen, emerged from the shadows, and yanked Marc’s arms back and up, from behind. He gulped.

“Listen,” said Bike Week, his face close enough for Marc to smell the

guy’s nicotine-and-whiskey breath. Bits of fried fish clung to the man’s unkempt beard.

“I know that you don’t know what the fuck you’re dealing with, so I’m gonna let you off easy. All I want is my money.”

“Okay, okay,” Marc said, as the second man released pressure on Marc’s arms.

“It’s up there,” he said, pointing to his room. “There’s only one way out of that place.

Give me five minutes and I’ll have it for you.”

Bike Week raised his eyebrows, and exchanged glances with his partner.

“Get the cash, and we’ll leave,” he said. “We’re in the mood to cut you a break.

No harm done.”

“I swear to God,” Marc said. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

Back upstairs, Marc found Christina vegging on the couch, in frilly red panties and a pink tank top, watching a Red Hot Chili Peppers video on MTV.

“Where the hell have you been?” she said, without looking up.

He threw his arms in the air, and walked out on the ornately decorated balcony, ringed by wrought-iron latticework and surrounded by tropical foliage. The sun was beginning to slip below the horizon, its Technicolor pink and orange and purple strands breaking up into illogically long tentacles, reaching toward his face, cradling his entire body in its glow. It was exhilarating, and, somehow, suddenly, peaceful. He saw Bike

Week, and the guy’s younger buddy, in the parking lot below. Marc held up five fingers and went back inside.

More rapidly now, he began descending from the stratosphere, reality fading back in as the lunar voyage dissipated. Christina did, too, bitching all the way

through an extraordinarily ugly return to terra firma. He vowed to get a good night’s sleep, check out of the hotel the next morning, and leave Key West, with or without

Christina.

He gathered the cash, and dropped it all into a paper bag. At the last minute, he pulled out a stack of bills, and stuffed them into a pair of socks in his suitcase.

It’d be a great consolation prize for a shitty weekend, Marc though. Christina was too absorbed in a Peter Gabriel video to notice what was going on.

“Hey, Christina, I’ve gotta go outside for a minute,” he said, finally. “These biker guys want to talk to me. They want to hang out for a little while. Did you notice that they look just like the Allman Brothers?”

“Whatever,” she said. “Do what you want. But whatever you do, please take that goofy fucking grin off your face. I can’t handle it. I really can’t take it anymore.”

“Screw you,” Marc thought, as Christina’s face melted, threatening to slide off her skull into her lap. Little devil’s horns popped out on top of her head. That, at least, is what Marc saw, before he left the room.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said on the way out. Marc walked down the stairs, passed the reception desk and ambled into the parking lot. Bike Week was waiting, impatiently. His buddy was nowhere in sight.

“Well?”

“It’s here,” Marc said, grinning broadly, like he was doing the toughs a favor.

“What the hell are you smiling about?” Bike Week said.

“Nothing, dude, just giving you what you want.”

Marc opened the bag, and the man ripped it from Marc’s hands. All of a sudden, his arms were pinned behind his back, by the same younger biker. Marc could feel handcuffs being placed on his wrists.

“What are you doing, man? Your money is here.”

“No, it’s not,” Bike Week said. “It’s short about 20 grand. You’re trying to fuck us over, aren’t you, you little shit?”

With that, he threw a right punch at Marc, square on his nose, hard enough to break it. Blood began trickling down Marc’s cheeks, and he started crying. The second biker then slammed Marc onto the ground, face forward. He started coughing, choking on blood, tears and dust.

“Let’s teach this kid a lesson,” Bike Week said. “Hey, Turbo, let’s see if we can’t kick the cash out of him.’

Those were the last words Marc heard before losing consciousness.

Cracker Etiquette: A Sort-of Memoir

1. That Devil Woman Louise Kills Poppy

Long after Mama and Poppy had their troubles and split up, divorcing for the third and last time, we heard that Poppy was stabbed to death by some loose woman named Louise. They were living out in one of those little shotgun shacks, tiny one- bedroom concrete places all in a row over by the Mexican community in Wimauma, tiny front yards crowded out with Australian pines and overgrown with weeds and backed up against a scummy pond.

That’s where the prisoners used to stay before returning to mainstream society.

They were halfway houses, except Mama said that most of the convicts there got halfway out of their bottles, lived like decent folks for a while, and then climbed all the way back in, never again to emerge whole. They were bloodied by the battle with the bottle,

Mama always said, and the bleeding couldn’t be stopped, except by divine intervention.

Not even Mama, with all her medical training, could stop people’s bleeding from the insides, from their souls, she said, not even for Poppy, and his help from Christ never came. Or he never received it. He was just the wrong kind of man, according to Mama.

It was a Saturday night in August, so hot that even the mosquitoes from the pond were too tired to sting, and Louise and Poppy were drunk again, pounding down the

Schlitz and fighting like dogs, when the argument came to blows. That wicked woman won the battle, pounding a steak knife into her live-in-boyfriend’s neck as three dirty

little kids, Poppy’s second family, the brood he started after quitting Mama, looked on in horror. And Mama wasn’t around to help out.

We never heard the whole story about Poppy’s death, but Patty told me it was in all the Tampa papers. I wish it weren’t true, and I never looked it up. But I think it probably was true – Jimbo, one of Poppy and Louise’s little brats, twenty years later told me a little bit about what he had seen, the start of the fight, before he and his brothers ran out the back screen door and hid under the house, down in the dirt with the broken-down lawn mowers and the dusty beer bottles and the old mangy dogs and the ratty thrown- away mattresses.

“Me and Scooter and Johnny Boy could hear them slamming around and breaking glasses,” Jimbo told me one time when I ran into him down at the Crab Shack in

Palmetto. “And then we heard Poppy scream out like an old wounded coyote, and then it was like a big rock crashed to the ground, and there was nothing.

“Damn, Jimbo, what did you all do?” I asked.

“There wasn’t nothing we could do,” he said. “I think we knew that somebody was dead. And then we heard Louise crying, and we knew Poppy was gone. After a while, she came and got us and wouldn’t let us back in the house. And the police came up

– three cars of them – and put the handcuffs on her. She never even said goodbye.”

That sounded like the truth. I guess it probably was.

It’s a wonder my twin sister Sally and I made it to thirty three, the same age Jesus was when he died. But we did. And at the end of that year, Poppy was gone, cold in his grave, mostly forgotten, except by a few loyal relatives, drinking buddies and good-time bar floozies all over Florida. And several dozen creditors, too.

2. Mama Watches a Man Die in Waycross

Poppy’s stabbing death reminded Mama about what had happened with poor old Reverend Roy all those years ago, back in Waycross. This time, though, in

Wimauma, when Poppy gave up the ghost, she wasn’t around to help a bleeding man.

Not that she would have felt like she owed Poppy anything, as mean as he had been to her all that time so long ago. But she probably would have tried to save him. She never really stopped loving him. That’s just the way Mama was anyway, helping people out even after they had hurt her so badly. That was her weakness, Patty and I always said.

She didn’t know any better.

In Cracker Georgia, Mama grew up in the old clapboard homestead, dug hard into red clay. There, stray dogs and chickens roamed free, and the flies practically took over in the summer, when the screenless doors and windows were left open to cool the house.

Mama only saw the neighbors on Sundays, when Waycross Baptist opened its doors for four straight hours of hardshell preaching, teaching, fellowshipping, and socializing. The little white church with the tall steeple, reaching high into the sky in a gesture of hope, was an oasis in her childhood desert of loneliness.

One day, when she was seven, Mama – her real name was Lorraine – did something that changed everything. A visiting preacher, the Reverend Roy “Red”

Rooster, had just finished saying the blessing for Sunday dinner on the lawn when a teary woman ran up to him, opened up her purse, pulled out a steak knife and plunged it into his heart, turning his gleaming white Sunday suit, tailor-made on a recent trip to Atlanta, to a dark pink. As it turns out, the attacker was Reverend Roy’s jealous wife, Evelyn. The preacher had been messing around with a flirty young girl, Charlene, a visitor from North

Carolina. She was fourteen, busty for her age, and looking for trouble, even though everybody thought she was so sweet and innocent. Evelyn figured out about the affair when she was making the bed, and found the girl’s locket under Reverend Roy’s pillow.

She shrieked loud enough for people to hear the next county over.

“Land’s sake,” Mama said, telling the story to us many decades later. “That was the most scared I’d ever been in my whole life, but I pressed hard on the bleeding place until it stopped gushing. I almost fainted. Mercy me.”

Reverend Roy died anyway. “Good riddance,” said Evelyn. “He’ll be there directly,” she said, smirking, looking up to heaven. The wife’s little rival, Charlene, just cried and cried and cried and then cried some more, boohooing until her eyes were practically swollen shut and her stomach refused food. For an hour, she stood behind the sanctuary, up against a tomato field, throwing up until there was nothing left to puke out of her stomach. The church ladies watched, too sad to tut-tut but too angry to help the dazed girl. Three months later, Charlene wound up pregnant by her best friend’s daddy.

Evelyn came to a bad end, too, as most of Mama’s people expected; after all, Evelyn was an outsider, a college girl educated at Ole Miss. She went to jail at the state prison in

Reidsville, only to return to Waycross for her own funeral, forty years later. Her son,

Billy, and a new preacher were the only people who came to pay their respects.

Grandma Gladys and Grandpa Bill, my maternal grandparents, told Mama that she was a good girl for helping Reverend Roy. I think that’s the day she decided to become a nurse. Some of the other church people and the school teacher said Mama ought to go into one of the helping professions. She believed it, and that was good enough for her. And that’s just what she did.

3. Poppy Grows Up Hard

Poppy was the wrong kind of man, like Mama said. By that, I mean he was wrong for his time -- ahead of his time or maybe behind his time. He wasn’t a good fit. Maybe that’s why he had to die so hard. He kept trying to stuff himself into the wrong hole, one that wasn’t right for his soul. Poppy finally got it right, Mama said, when he ended up in a hole in the ground. He was home at last, she said, home at last, in a place where he couldn’t get hurt and he couldn’t hurt anybody else.

Poppy’s real name was George Robert, and he was born in Blackshear – not far from where Mama grew up – but raised from five years old on the wrong side of the tracks in West Palm Beach, a world away from the ritzy mansions. He had come from a long line of alcoholics – red-faced, barrel-chested men with bad habits and nasty tempers. Most of Poppy’s people had paid in spades for their vices. They didn’t live to tell.

Poppy’s father, Leonard, orphaned by drunken parents, was killed in a car accident when he and Granny Shirley drove from Waycross to Atlanta for a funeral of an old friend whose throat had been cut during a bar fight in Macon. When the smoke cleared, the cops found empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans all over the back seat of the old Chevy. Leonard’s little brother, Buddy, Poppy’s uncle, also a big drinker, died less than a year later when he was working under a car in his driveway in Jupiter, and the jack suddenly came loose. Buddy had been sipping whiskey for three hours straight, Poppy told me once. Poppy’s big brother, Erwin, died at twenty two during a fishing trip on a tranquil day. He drowned after falling off a boat off of Vero Beach. That was from the drinking, too, everybody said. Poppy’s stepfather, my Grandpa Joe, didn’t quit the booze

until he was almost fifty and only because Granny Shirley threatened to leave him. He stopped smoking and swearing, too. Mama said that was evidence of God’s handiwork.

Grandpa Joe said he cut out all that stuff because he didn’t have a choice. And then he didn’t die until he was ninety eight – he had a heart attack at dinner one night, after mowing the yard all afternoon one day in August when the temperature reached one hundred and four degrees.

Poppy didn’t exactly make his entrance into our world in a bad way, although it’s good to remember that we’re all born in sin, and there’s only one who can really do anything about that. My daddy grew into his wrong ways by degree, you might say. At first he was full of hope for the future, a bright kid with street smarts, a head for numbers and science and a world of potential, and the next thing you know he was living like a bum – drunk, mad, mean and full of the devil, and all about making somebody hurt on the outside as much as he did on the inside. Poppy was weak from his hurt, the heart hurt he felt from his own daddy, and Satan was already there, just waiting for his chance to take over. And every chance he got, he would take over. He did, too, like always, with Poppy.

Once the horned one got involved, that was it: Poppy was done for. My daddy didn’t stand a chance.

Poppy would wake up on a breezy, sunshiny summer’s day, clean from his shower the night before. Raring to see what the day would bring, he’d fill his stomach full of cheese grits and sausage links and scrambled eggs. Then, by noon, he’d have a six pack in him, and he’d be mean as the devil. He’d walk down the old dirt alley to the beach, and rage at the seagulls, scream at the sailboats, and blame the tides for his bad luck. In the evening, still drinking, he’d stand in the moonlight, and curse the man in the

moon. At midnight, he’d be face down on the beach, drooling into the sand, whispering,

“Damn those sons of bitches, damn them all to hell.” That’s what it sounded like to Patty and me one night, when Mama sent us out looking for him. He acted like he didn’t recognize us, but he followed us back to the house anyway.

“It’s all downhill after twenty one,” Grandpa Joe told me once, if he told me a hundred times. “Nothing you can do about that.” With Joe’s stepson, my Poppy, it was all downhill after that first drink. He kept on rolling downhill, too, until he reached the bottom of the bottle. There was no climbing out for Poppy.

4. Mama Escapes

Mama didn’t want to let down her folks, and the church people, and the teacher, so she left Waycross and everything she knew at the age of seventeen. Loaded down with two marbled blue Samsonite suitcases, lugging a heart that was heavy for having to leave home, she got on the Amtrak. She went to Macon to get her L.P.N. That was enough to get the good jobs, she said. Six months later, she moved to Florida to take her first real job, working the graveyard shift in the ICU at Tampa General. She shared a garage apartment near Bayshore Boulevard with a Cuban girlfriend, Sonia, who had recently left

Miami. On weekends, Sonia got to cooking, starting the mornings with café con leche and later fixing fried plantains and chicken and yellow rice and that wiggly flan stuff. It wasn’t exactly a Southern breakfast, but Mama went along with it. When the phone rang,

Mama answered “hola,” and “buenas dias,” twangy as all get out, just to make Sonia giggle. That was always good for a laugh.

Some Sundays, after church at First Baptist downtown, Mama put out her own

spread, with baked ham and black-eyed peas and green beans and turnip greens and sweet potatoes and pecan pie. The girls invited their landlord, Mr. Banks, and his wife to join them for the big lunches. Sonia didn’t really like that kind of food so much, but she’d eat it anyway, just to please Mama.

“Muy bien, Cleo, muy bien,” Sonia would always say. “Muchas gracias, senorita.”

Mama liked that. She even thought about going home with Sonia one

Thanksgiving, but it just didn’t seem right. Besides, it was too far to travel, practically all the way to Cuba, as far as Mama was concerned. That’s where Batista ruled, and the gambling was run by the Mafia people, and all the natives practiced voodoo, running around in trances, possessed by evil spirits. It was the devil’s playground – no place to go for the God-fearing. That’s how Mama put it, at least.

5. Bad Luck Finds Mama

Poppy and Raul, Sonia’s old boyfriend from Miami and Poppy’s best drinking buddy, showed up at Mama and Sonia’s apartment for a little Christmas get-together the girls threw on Dec. 13, 1941. At first, it was a sad gathering, because of what had just happened in Pearl Harbor that previous Sunday. The Japanese had attacked, and Poppy still hadn’t heard whether his little brother, Jackson, an Army medic stationed at

Schofield Barracks, had survived the invasion. FDR announced that U.S. was going to go to war. It was a sad week for everybody, because nobody wanted to go off to Europe or the Pacific and die. Poppy felt doubly bad, and guilty, because he wasn’t able to serve overseas – a bad ticker, the Army told him.

The four, plus Sonia’s Miami girlfriend, Maria, had their party anyway. They ate

Mama’s special grapefruit ambrosia, drank spiked eggnog, played canasta, exchanged early Christmas gifts, listened to Frank Sinatra on the radio, and took their time hanging lights, tinsel and homemade ornaments on a puny little Christmas tree. Later, they drove over to Ybor City, where everybody danced at the Cuban Club and the three Miami people got to speak Spanish. The men, tipsy but not yet drunk, talked of revenge.

“Those slanty eyes will pay for what they did,” Poppy said.

Jackson didn’t get killed on Dec. 7, as Poppy found out two days after the

Christmas party. But the Japs got him anyway, in the Battle of Iwo Jima. One day, in

March of 1945, a box came to our house, addressed to Poppy. Inside were Jackson’s belongings, including several letters addressed but never sent home. In one of the letters, he said he thanked God for giving him such a swell big brother, and told Poppy to give kisses to their folks and to Mama and everyone. Poppy always said he hated crybabies.

But that day, he sobbed until his eyes were swollen, Mama said.

After that holiday party, Mama and Poppy were pretty much a couple. Mama had had plenty of “suitors,” as she called them, but none quite like Poppy. Sure, he drank too much, he smoked cigarettes, and he didn’t care for going to church, but he was tall, dark-haired, brown-eyed and just as manly as any of the matinee idols she’d seen on the big screen downtown.

Poppy was courtly, and mannered, in his own rough way, holding doors open for

Mama, and bringing flowers to her every time he came over. Poppy pulled himself up by the bootstraps, he said once, working his way through junior college in West Palm Beach,

getting good grades in the sciences and then finding work as a manager for the phosphate mines south of Mulberry, where we all lived for a while before the divorce. He was going places, and then the drinking dragged him back down. But Mama couldn’t have figured on all of that. And even if she could have, she probably wouldn’t have done anything about it.

Poppy and Mama got married in the spring of 1942, and it was a quiet affair, with about forty people gathered at First Baptist in downtown Tampa. That was the first time they got married to each other. It almost didn’t happen, because Poppy got cold feet on the way, called up Raul and they settled in for two hours at the Hub bar, a few blocks away on Zack Street. But then Mama’s brother, Earl, tracked down Poppy and got him to the church on time.

Mama always said she wondered how her life might have been different if Earl hadn’t made Poppy show up, and she had just told him goodbye. I told her that we wouldn’t have been here if they hadn’t got married, but that she would have had a nicer, easier life. She cried when she heard me say that.

6. Mama Survives

Mama did the best she could, really she did, working double shifts at

Manatee Memorial – tending to people’s bedsores, cleaning the bedpans, putting up with the slumming society nurses, and the slick young doctors, the well-dressed strivers, on their way up, using the old bayside hospital as a stepping stone to bigger doings in

Atlanta, or New Orleans, or Chicago. They were efficient with the patients, but careless with the staff. These doctors wouldn’t be running into anyone on the way back down.

Weekends, they’d clear way out of town, call their sweeties in from Tampa or

Miami, and stay at their beach cottages on Anna Maria or Longboat Key, sipping fruit drinks on sun decks overlooking the sea. Occasionally, one of them would mess around with a nurse, but it was only for play.

“Miss, can’t you read the instructions for these meds,” a young doctor would say, impatient, smelling of Hai Karate and disinfectant, ready to get to the next room. Like some of the other doctors, he called all the nurses “Miss,” even the married ones. And he called the Negro clean-up man a boy. “Aren’t they clear to you, Miss?” Well, no, they weren’t, as usual, but the natural response wasn’t the proper one. Short-time nurses, and even one or two supervisors, had been fired for less. One nurse got the axe for what the administrator called her “sass” – you know, a bad attitude from a woman who was clearly not that doctor’s equal, or so he thought. And Mama was raising us all by herself, so she couldn’t take any chances on being out of work. “I’ll read it again,” Mama would say.

“I’ll do better next time. I promise. I really do. It won’t happen again.”

At home, after working the graveyard shift and walking the floors all morning, too, she’d plop down on the settee, stretch out her feet, rub hard on her long toes, and turn on the TV to watch her stories, she called them, all about romance and danger and big careers and vacations to exotic places. The doctors on the show, too, were just like some of the ones she knew in real life – liars, cheaters, gamblers, thieves – and they routinely married the fresh-faced nurses.

7. Poppy Meets the Enemy

Poppy, although kind in some ways, never stopped hating the Japs for what they

did to Jackson. But something funny happened one time Poppy was in rehab in West

Palm Beach, away from Mama and us, trying to get over his sickness. He shared a room with a man from Toyko named Mr. Murikami. This happened in 1951, when we were all still little and living in Bradenton. The two men got to talking about letting bygones be bygones. Poppy helped Mr. Murikami with his English, and even told him some ways to find work in Florida, and which lakes had the biggest catfish, and where to go on Dixie

Highway when you wanted a stiff drink. Mr. Murikami showed Poppy pictures of his wife and two pig-tailed little girls, and said “Let us get together one day, perhaps?”

Poppy said sure, but that never happened. When Poppy left rehab, he even shook Mr.

Murikami’s hand. “You are my friend,” the man from Tokyo said. “Yeah, sure am,” said Poppy. “Don’t take no wooden nickels now.”

Poppy didn’t like black people either. He always called them “the Johnson Boys,” and he thought that cracked everybody up. But something funny happened later, when, back in rehab, he shared a South Florida hospital room with Mr. Pierre Dominguez, whose parents were born in Haiti: They traded the sports section of the Palm Beach Post, talked fishing and baseball, secretly passed a flask back and forth, and talked about what they were missing on Championship Wrestling that weekend.

Poppy and Mr. Dominguez joked around a lot, particularly when the cute young nurses were in the room, and the black man told all about his own life growing up in

Belle Glade, and fishing for bass in Lake Okeechobee. Poppy told the story of the time he took work on the carnival circuit. His job was to clean up after the animals when they paraded through town. Poppy and Mr. Dominguez were even better friends than Poppy and the Japanese man. Maybe Poppy was more accepting of black people than he

thought, or more than anybody knew. But he never did call Mr. Dominguez after they got out of the hospital.

One time, when we were visiting relatives in West Palm Beach, we saw Mr.

Dominguez and his three husky boys drinking from the coloreds-only water fountain at the Woolworth’s dime store downtown, but Poppy wouldn’t say anything to the man. I don’t know why. My daddy just walked by Mr. Dominguez and his sons, like he didn’t even see them. He never told me why he did that. I never asked.

8. Mama Meets Mr. Morris

Mama was always working at the hospital when we were living in

Bradenton, but every once in a while on a Saturday she’d take Sally and me to the old

City Pier on Anna Maria, and blow part of her salary on several dozen live bait shrimp, and Coke and sandwiches from the concession stand. One of those times, she struck up a conversation with a tall man who was visiting from the north. His wife had died of cancer six months earlier, and his two kids, about our age, were traveling with him on vacation.

But they didn’t know anything about fishing – the boy kept jumping back whenever he tried to fish the shrimp out of the bait bucket, and the girl wouldn’t even try.

The man, Mr. Morris, started talking to Mama about church things, and Mama started telling him about all the troubles she was having with Poppy – his drinking and gambling and fighting. I could hear Mr. Morris talking about the love chapter from the

Bible, and telling her that it was her duty to love Poppy with all of her heart as long as she could. Mama said that she would try.

“That man was really nice,” Sally said, when we got back into the old Chevy for

the ride back to town. “Do you think we’ll see him and his boy around here again?

“Mr. Morris was right,” Mama said. “We need to stick by your Daddy and not give up.” She pretended to stare at the rearview mirror, so that we couldn’t see her tears.

“So that’s what we’re going to do, children. Let’s call Poppy when we get home, and see if we can’t patch things.”

“Do you think Poppy can be fixed?” I asked.

“Why sure. With God, everything is possible. It says so in the Bible. I knew that, but Mr. Morris just reminded me about it.”

“Why was Mr. Morris so nice to you, Mama?”

“Because he was raised right. He’s the right kind of man, son.”

9. Poppy Leaves This Earth

Poppy came back into our lives after his third time in rehab. Clean and sober for a while, he at first lived in a little apartment behind the dunes on Holmes Beach, where he worked as an overnight security guard at some rich guy’s beach house. Meanwhile,

Mama and us were living in the old Spanish stucco house in Bradenton, around the corner from Manatee Junior College. After three months, Mama decided to get remarried to

Poppy, and the preacher from the Baptist church over on Anna Maria Island agreed to do the ceremony at our house.

One cold night in February, Poppy had a relapse, and decided to go on a drinking binge at a beat-up little place on Sixth Street before heading to the island for work. Six beers and four shots later, he got up from his bar stool, walked outside and nearly ran smack into a young black guy. The collision surprised both of them.

“Give me all your money, grandpa,” the teenage black guy said, halfway serious, halfway just testing the water, looking for a reaction and maybe a quick way to a free quart bottle of malt liquor for the night. That’s the way Poppy explained it to us, later.

“Give me your cash, old man,” the black guy said, right up close in my daddy’s face. Poppy, without a word of warning, or so they say, pulled out his knife and slammed it into the kid’s chest. The boy stumbled to the ground and died, over nothing but some loose change in another man’s pocket. It was early on a chilly Monday, and the street outside the bar was empty, so Poppy slipped away, and nobody was the wiser.

Fifteen years later, the kid’s attacker would be dead, too, felled by another knife, wielded by a woman he said he loved. Sally told me something once, not long after

Poppy died. She said, that’s the thing about love: Love means the freedom to hurt someone bad, as bad as you want. But that kind of freedom comes with a price: One way or another, that hurt is going to come right back to you. Poppy found that out the hard way.

Just a Kiss

A kiss is just a kiss. But it’s still a real kiss. Unless it’s a wet and sloppy smacker, exchanged when you’re both lost in a drunken haze at a boozy rock-and-roll awards show in a low-rent club on the butt end of Dale Mabry Highway, in a boxy strip mall across the street from the stadium parking lot. Or unless the tongue flicking happens while the two of you are knee deep in frozen margaritas at a fashionably downmarket yuppie watering hole overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, glued to adjacent bar stools and listening to some sandal-wearing moron strum away on Jimmy Buffett songs. The things all of us once did for love.

But neither of those occasions, on two consecutive weekends nearly two decades ago, counted as dates, per se.

That was Jennifer’s reasoning, as she so firmly stated after that second, barside kiss. She told me the same thing again when I dropped her off later that evening at her

Hyde Park apartment building, the one done up in Spanish stucco and equipped with a buzz-in panel at the entrance, where twin concrete lions stood watch.

“You know, this isn’t a real date,” Jennifer said when I leaned over the Honda’s stick shift and went in for a little lip lock. Another atomic-powered kiss, I thought, might lead to groping. And groping might lead to Saturday-night sex. Why not?

But she pulled away – alas, resistance.

Courtesy of a brief spasm in the time-space continuum, I momentarily became the guy in the Violent Femmes, spewing out his brittle, caustic plea over a blast of hard-

strummed acoustic rock: Why can’t I get just one fuck/Why can’t I get just one fuck/I guess it’s something to do with luck. It was the national anthem of teenage sexual frustration.

Yet there I was, an adult, or as close to that as I was gonna get at twenty six. And

Jennifer squashed my desires. She shut me down. Pity, I thought. What a waste of semi- youthful hormonal desire, for both of us.

“Listen, Stuart,” she said, putting on a pensive face. “Listen closely.”

“I’m right here, Jennifer.”

“How can I say this nicely?”

“Spit it out. I can take it.”

“I like you, but we’re not really going out. Don’t you know the difference between a wake-me-for-breakfast kiss and a friendly goodbye peck?”

Sure, hell yeah, but maybe the booze had fogged her memory about what had happened at the Rock-It Club last Saturday, and at Bill’s Beach Bungalow, just that afternoon. We were trashed and all, but those were more than little pecks. There was something oddly enveloping about those kisses, as if our faces and bodies had momentarily fused together – for a moment, I imagined that I couldn’t tell where my lips stopped and hers began. Each kiss was deep and long lasting – not hesitant and clumsy, like a first kiss. But maybe all of this, her forgetting, was part of her art of seduction.

That’s it: She was playing hard to get.

“I’m getting married in June,” she said. “So I’m finished with the whole dating scene. No more meaningless sex. Weekend dalliances are out.”

I gulped. I glimpsed an image of a construction crane’s claw, ripping off the roof

of a ramshackle house.

“I still have lots of guy friends, but, you know, they’re just friends.”

“Who’s the lucky fella?” I asked.

“His name is Enrique, Enrique Ricardo. You wouldn’t know him.”

“So where is Ricky Ricardo now?”

A picture of a cologne-drenched Latin smoothie flashed through my mind. Ladies,

Ricky said, my very beautiful ladies, let me instruct you in the many ways of amor. Let

Ricky Ricardo show you the way. Mi casa o su casa? I smiled, stifling a chortle. She glared at me.

“It’s Enrique. He’s out of town, off on a business trip to a training session in

Atlanta. He works for HP. He’ll be gone for a week.”

“Darn lucky for us, huh?”

I regretted those words. It was clearly a tactical error. Her mood suddenly

changed and she quickly shoved open her car door. I sat there, in my car, slack-jawed, for several minutes, watching as she disappeared into her apartment house. The car door slammed in my face with a meaningful whoosh as she stepped to the curb. A whiff of fajitas – chicken and steak combo, probably, heavy on the guacamole – sucked into the car.

It was a Saturday night, during the late ‘80s, and the Tex-Mex restaurant next

door was booming with business; the investment bankers, would-be legal eagles, UT frat

boys and social-climbing college chick were out in force. The guys, as a rule, were

looking for one-night stands, bragging rights, the better to trump work buddies at the

water cooler on Monday. The girls, generally speaking, were hoping for a relationship

that might still be alive after the inevitable Sunday-morning hangover, aggravated by the walk of shame and cured with a round of Bloody Marys at brunch.

Frankly, prospects for carnal relations with Jennifer, after that little exchange, weren’t very bright. But I simply couldn’t give it a rest. Something about Jennifer, aside from her potential availability as a sex partner, fascinated me. And then, I stumbled onto

Some Like It Hot on cable, and a crazy theory popped into my head. Jennifer, with her curly blonde hair, curvy figure, and breathy, girlish voice, was a dead ringer for Marilyn

Monroe. I’d never have the chance to carouse with Jim Morrison on the Sunset Strip, or hang with the Beatles in Liverpool, or pal around with Dennis Hopper on the set of Easy

Rider. But Jennifer represented an opportunity for me to hold and to have my own flesh- and-blood screen siren. She could be my own personal Norma Jean. Did my interest amount to some sort of necrophilia? Was I merely obsessed with Dead Marilyn? I don’t think so. I hope not. But it did appeal to my pop-culture obsessions, my lust for collecting stuff related to pop icons. Not to mention my Playboy-bred preference for women of a particular body type.

On Wednesday, at home in the rented South Tampa house I shared with a chronically uptight financial planner, I called to check up on Jennifer, gauge her mood, and size up the situation. I asked about her school work. Back then, I was still a lowly adjunct, an American Studies Ph.D. with a bad attitude, struggling to make a living teaching courses in popular culture and film studies, and occasionally moonlighting as a newspaper and magazine writer. She said she had lots of reading to do for her English grad classes at the university. She was making her way through Hemingway’s short stories.

“I like them much better than his novels,” she said. “They sort of hit you harder.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I’m more of a big-picture guy. Give me The Sun Also Rises any

day. You can have your Finca Vigia.”

“Well, they just go faster,” she said.

“They’re shorter, for sure.”

Just like short relationships, I thought. Just like her memory, conveniently short term. Maybe there was still hope. Maybe Jennifer was in the market for one last fling, or at least open minded about just such a prospect.

“But no, it isn’t just that,” she said. “I mean, they hurt more. The impact is

greater, and it lasts longer.”

“I don’t really agree, but give me a for instance.”

“Like in ‘Up in Michigan,’ ” when that poor Liz really loves that big guy, Jim, and he gets drunk and violates her. He rapes her. That’s how I read it. Hemingway really brought it to life – it was ugly, and it felt true.”

“You’re right. It was a raw scene. Pretty realistic, I guess.”

A big bubble of silence settled on the line. I considered switching the subject, and

then changed my mind. Damn the consequences. Why not follow through?

“But it really wasn’t rape,” I said. “She wanted to do it, and they finally got together, alone in the dark and they did it. Who’s to say that she wasn’t toasted, too, and in the mood for lust, and she just changed her mind later?”

“But she didn’t want it, not at that moment. She just wanted his love. I think later,

after she got more comfortable with him, she would have been happy doing it. Just not

yet.”

“So it’s a matter of timing?”

“Yeah, you could call it that.”

“No. Nope. I don’t see it that way. There was desire, there was opportunity, and they were two adults, fooling around in the middle of the night. She followed him out to that dock. It was pitch black, and cold. They kept stopping to kiss each other. One thing led to another, and you know – ”

“I know, but it wasn’t consensual.”

“Sure it was.”

“No, it wasn’t. I mean, they didn’t both want it. She told him not to do it. ‘Don’t,’ she told him. That’s the word she used. What’s unclear about that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that was at the very last second. Just before that, Hem writes that she wanted it, she had to have it. Read it again.”

“I think he could have stopped, to respect her wishes.”

I sighed, rather loudly.

“You mean you think they should have stopped.”

“No, I think he should have stopped, and he could have stopped. He was bigger and stronger, and at that point he had power over her.”

“I really think they both wanted it, and they were just doing the bidding of their hormones.

“You’re wrong about this,” she said.

“Well, that’s how I see it.”

“Why did you call, anyway?”

“I was wondering,” I said, pausing a little too long. “Do you wanna go see Pat

Metheny this weekend?”

“That jazz guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t he play with David Bowie on that one song?”

“Yeah, but there’s a hell of a lot more to him than that.”

“Sure. That sounds good to me. I need an infusion of new music.”

“Wanna get some food first?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll pick you up at 6.”

“All Right.”

On Saturday night, as planned, she accompanied me to the show at the historic

downtown movie palace, a place with gargoyles on the walls and Chaplin in its soul. Her

black dress was short, her heels were high and her lithe, sun-bronzed legs, which made a great contrast with her tiny midnight frock, were exposed when she crossed them. So I went for it. As Metheny leaned into his six-string, his frizzy hair blocking our view of the

fretboard action, his right hand pealing out gossamer tones, his face twisted in some kind

of ecstasy of artistic creation, I reached out and grasped her left knee. I rested my right

hand there for the remainder of the tune. She didn’t object.

But, later, as we sucked down shots of tequila at the Chatterbox, she protested

much.

“Why did you grab my leg at the concert?” she asked.

I was taken aback, so I fiddled with a book of matches before responding.

“I touched your leg, that’s true.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You want the straight answer, or a polite response?”

“No, lie to me, Stuart. That’s what I like most about you.”

“Okay, the real deal. Honestly, I didn’t think you’d mind. I wanted to feel your skin. I couldn’t help myself.”

“You had no right,” she said. “Because this isn’t a date. We’re not going out. I

thought you understood that.”

“No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Well, you can’t do that. You can’t touch me without asking first. I’m engaged,

remember?”

I grinned, and inched closer to her.

“Really,” she said, her breasts pushing against my right arm, her blue-green eyes

soaking up my gaze. “Just who do you think you are?”

“I don’t know. Just a guy, just your regular, average horny guy, maybe falling for

a woman who says she’s engaged but acts like she’s not.”

Another tactical error, and yet I forged ahead. She blushed, but she stayed put.

“I have a question for you,” I said.

“Go ahead.”

“If it looks like a dog, runs like a dog, licks your face like a dog and barks like a

dog, what is it?”

“It’s a dog. What’s your point?”

I steeled myself for an argument, and continued on.

“If a guy invites a girl to a concert, wines and dines her beforehand, takes her out

for drinks afterward, and pays for everything to boot, is that a date?”

“So it’s about the money, then? He’s buying her? He’s purchasing her goods and services?”

“No, no. You’re missing the point. Under those circumstances, would that be

considered a date?”

“By who?”

“By, say, your average, red-blooded twentysomething American male or female.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So if a guy asks a girl out on a date, and she accepts, then is it crossing the line if

he makes a sexual advance? Doesn’t she know already that he’s interested in her, and

hasn’t she confirmed that knowledge by agreeing to the date?”

She sighed, and rolled her eyes. But, again, she didn’t move an inch in the other direction.

“I think it all depends on their understanding.”

“But doesn’t the act of accepting a date imply an understanding that she might be

receptive to his sexual overtures?”

“You’re making my head hurt,” she said. “If you’re talking about us, well, it’s a

special case. Because I told you that I’m engaged.”

“And yet, you agreed to go out with me. Why should I care about Ricky

Ricardo?”

“His name is Enrique Ricardo. Don’t be a prick.”

I glimpsed an image of Desi Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo, going ballistic when he

discovers that Lucy has fucked up again, destroying their apartment or embarrassing him

in front of his show-biz friends. And here comes Enrique, suddenly finding out that his

sweet little Jennifer has been making out with another guy. You got some splainin’ to do,

Jennifer.

“Enrique, Ricky. Whatever. Why should I care about this other guy if it doesn’t bother you? I’m interested in you, and you seemed to return my interest. Where is Little

Ricky anyway?”

“His name is Enrique, dummy. He’s in Chapel Hill, for some more training

sessions. And you’re right, I shouldn’t be here with you if I’m engaged to someone else.

Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No, that wasn’t really my point.”

She swiveled around on the barstool, and stepped down.

“I’m going to the ladies room. I’d like you to take me home when I get back.”

“Come on, we’re just talking.”

“I’m all talked out, Stuart.”

I took her back to her apartment, and it was déjà vu – the car door slammed, the

Tex-Mex smells whooshed inside and she bid a silent adieu with her back to me.

That was probably a clear signal for me to sign off and leave Jennifer the hell

alone. But I wasn’t ready to quit. Maybe the whole Marilyn Monroe thing was just a

weird little construct, a smoke screen. The real reason I was prepared to keep on keeping

on: It was a game, one that I wasn’t willing to lose. I was ready and willing to wait it out

for a shot at a round or two with a girl as gorgeous and sexy as Jennifer. It would be

worth it.

A downside: She liked to argue, for sure. But behind those weak arguments was some kind of intense passion – maybe with a psychotic edge, but nonetheless real passion. Now if I could only convince her to use those powers for good, not evil, for my good, at least.

That’s how I worked it out in my mind, anyway. So I decided to give it a rest for a few days, and then resume my pursuit. I called her on Tuesday. Four rings, and her answering machine clicked on.

“Hey, Jennifer, pick up. It’s Stuart.”

I could tell she was screening calls. I waited several long minutes, and announced myself again.

“Jennifer, it’s Stuart. Are you in?”

Nothing.

“Hey, just wanted to touch base and see how things are going with you. Give me a call when you get a chance.”

I waited a few second longer, and hung up.

I called again the next night, Wednesday, and then again, on Friday afternoon, experiencing two more interactions with the chipper female voice – hers – on Jennifer’s answering machine.

“Hey, Jennifer, this is your personal stalker,” I said, laughing. “Just trying to catch up with you.”

Nothing.

“Are you in?”

Nothing.

“Hey, I’m checking to see what you’re up to this weekend.” Silence. “Okay, well,

I won’t keep bugging you. Get in touch when you can.”

So I switched directions completely, and decided to give up on Marilyn, er,

Jennifer. Yes, she was foxy and mysterious and really bright. But she was married, or practically married. I didn’t have a chance. And really, I knew it from the start.

“Forget the wench,” my friend Steve said that night, over a black and tan at

O’Reilly’s, our favorite Irish pub in Ybor. “You need to put your energies into pouncing

on another future former girlfriend. Plenty of ‘em out there. Look, there’s one right now.”

I laughed, and craned my neck to see the statuesque brunette – tan, long brown hair, Aerosmith t-shirt and tight stone-washed jeans tucked into cowboy boots – settling onto a stool at the bar.

It was a Friday night, so Steve and I wandered around to a few more clubs, drank

to oblivion and crashed at his courtyard apartment. The next week, I went about my

business, teaching freshman classes, spending way too long grading papers and agonizing

over just how long I could survive on adjunct pay. No word from Jennifer, and I

fantasized about her only two hundred and fifty times. Oddly enough, we didn’t cross

paths around the liberal arts building. But I found myself imagining that I could still

smell her skin, which gave off a fragrance like lilac. And I could still taste her lips, all

strawberries and cream. And I couldn’t get over the warmth of her hub, how good her

body felt pressed against mine.

The next Saturday afternoon, I was vegging out on the couch, perusing through an

old Spin – the one with Public Enemy on the cover – and blasting an even older Talking

Heads album when the phone rang. It was Jennifer.

“Hey, what do you want? Why do you keep calling me?”

“Just seeing how you’re doing,” I said. “So how are you?”

“I’m doing great, thanks. Wanna go off somewhere and argue?”

“No. But I would like to see you again. How about we go get drunk at the Hub?”

“I’m supposed to talk to Enrique at 7:30 tonight. He’s still in North Carolina.”

“Well, how about after that? Could you make it by 8:30?”

“Okay.”

A couple of hours into our heavy drinking session – no arguing this time, just more talk about Hemingway and the Moderns, scuttlebutt about the latest news-making faculty scandals in the English department and several enchanting stories about her small- town upbringing in Alabama – and I sprang the question on her.

“Wanna chase these with a couple of beers at my place?”

“Okay. But I can’t stay long. We’re not dating, remember?”

“I get the picture,” I said. “That’s fine by me. Let’s go. You know how to get to my place, right?”

“Not really. I’ll just follow you.”

Ten minutes later, I was parked in front of my garage apartment, my radio blasting, Mick Jagger ooh-oohing in falsetto and declaring that he’s not waiting on a lady.

Jennifer was nowhere in sight. I sighed, walked up the stairs, opened the door and picked up the ringing telephone. It was Jennifer. I could hear drunks arguing in the background.

“Hey,” she said. I could barely make out her voice over the crowd din. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. Where are you?”

“I came back to the Hub. I’m using the bar phone.”

“Why?”

“I’m just not sure about all of this.”

“All of what?”

“You know, I’m engaged. I probably shouldn’t do this.”

I carefully considered my options.

“Look, why don’t you just come on over for a drink and a movie. My roommate is

out of town, so I have the run of the place.”

“I don’t know.”

“It can be just a friends thing. Come on. We’ll have fun.”

“Okay. But I wanna go home and change first.”

“I’ll give you directions from your place.”

Back at my house, she settled into the oversized leather sofa and started poking through my box of laserdiscs. “You have some great stuff here, Stuart,” she said. She found my much-watched copy of She’s Gotta Have It, loaded it into the machine and pressed “play.” The mechanical whirring kicked in and the FBI warning flashed on the screen.

As it turned out, Spike Lee’s debut film made for the perfect date movie. I always

meant to track down Lee’s e-mail address later and send him a tongue-in-cheek note of

thanks, but marriage, kids, a divorce and another marriage or two got in the way.

Mars Blackman and Nola Darling went at it on the screen, and we responded by

kissing, for real. Soon enough, Jennifer’s halter top was gone, lying wounded on the

floor, and I began massaging her breasts. She moaned in appreciation. Minutes later, I

started tugging off her faded 501s.

“We can’t,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

“I know, Jennifer,” I said. “Let’s not.”

She lifted up her butt, helped me pull off her painted-on jeans, shimmied out of

her white panties and held my hand, tugging me toward the bedroom. Later, as she rolled

off me, the sheets falling away to reveal her nakedness, she started talking again.

“That wasn’t sex. I mean, that wasn’t real sex. We were trashed, so it doesn’t

count.”

“I know. That wasn’t even close to the real thing. We’d both know it if it were.”

“Because we’re not dating,” she said. “I mean, we’re not really going out. I can’t,

because I’m engaged. It was just the alcohol making us do the things we did.”

“Right you are. It was the demon rum, the Dixie beer, that fatal third shot of

Jagermeister.”

“I mean, I’d never do that stuff unless we were a real couple. And I already have a

guy. He’s practically my husband.”

“I know,” I said. “You’re exactly correct. We’re not a couple, so we can’t be acting like one.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Let’s not date.”

“Fine by me,” I said. “Consider it undone. We’re not dating. We’re not together.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Okay, we’re not going out. Let’s just stay in.”

Jennifer climbed back on top of me, and began grinding her body against mine.

She stopped for a moment and pressed her mouth against my ear, sending a shiver down my spine. Her voice was just a whisper: “So what’s for breakfast?”

So in the end, it was just sex with Jennifer, garden-variety sex with someone whose passionate, argumentative talk didn’t translate into wild bedroom passion, and then sex for breakfast, followed by a greasy meal of sausage biscuits at the

McDonald’s around the corner. My little obsession, it seems, was mere horniness, and after another lackluster tryst Jennifer returned to Enrique. Six months later, they got married, and six years later I heard through some mutual friends that Enrique had up and returned to his native Cuba, to a wife and family he had abandoned when he came to the

United States, and poor Jennifer was discarded like an old box of cassette tapes. By then,

I was already on to Wife No. 2, a brainy, willowy American history graduate student I had met at the university. That didn’t work out, I guess, because she was way too obsessed with her research – dating rituals in the South during the Reconstruction period.

She was way too young, anyway: Once, not long after we were married, the subject of

Paul McCartney came up, and she said, “Oh, you mean that guy from Wings?”

Last month, out of curiosity, I googled Jennifer, and managed to track down a syllabus for one of the classes she was teaching at UF, a graduate seminar. The title of the course: Eros and its Discontents: Sexual Politics in Popular Culture. “Up in

Michigan” was on the syllabus. “She’s Gotta Have It,” too. And “Bus Stop.” Her office number and email address were listed.

Just one call. That’s all it would have taken, I thought. Then I remembered what

Jennifer had concluded about the couple from “Up in Michigan.” It was a matter of timing, she agreed. Who’s to say that our timing, two decades down the road, would be

better now than it was all those years ago? Maybe it’s a sign of some kind of weird transformation, for me: Life’s short and all, but that’s not a gamble I’m willing to take anymore.

Falling

The photograph, behind a cracked glass frame sitting on the desk in my home office, is one of my most precious belongings. It’s a black-and-white shot, backstage at the arena, probably around 1986 or so, taken by a newspaper photographer. Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith, his waist as skinny as a teenage girl’s, yellow, green and red scarves falling all over his black leather jacket and skin-tight leather pants, is smiling broadly. His arms are resting lightly on the shoulders of a pair of over-eager fans, winners of a call-in contest at the local rock station.

I’m to Tyler’s left. My hair is cut short for a straight job, and I’m dressed in a tacky striped shirt. To the rocker’s right, looking like he half expects an invitation to join the band, is my little brother, Robbie, in his most handsome incarnation, his big, welcoming dark eyes and square jaw framed by long, flowing sandy brown locks that tumble over a black KISS concert t-shirt. The raised T scar, emblazoned on Robbie’s muscular chest, is well hidden.

Tyler’s too stoned, or, probably, too jealous, to say so, but this is what he’s thinking: “For the love of reunions and farewell tours, who let these guys backstage?

Why are they trying to cut in on my act?” That, at least, is what Robbie and I, snickering uncontrollably, decided the first time we saw the picture. Tyler knew.

The closest we’d come to touching rock stardom was as children, when we played Monkees records and strummed tennis rackets, putting on little shows for Jean,

Sally, Grandma Edna (not really our grandmother) and various other babysitters. But we didn’t need six-string prowess or crowds of screaming kids to prove it: Under the skin, down deep in our bones, we were by-God true rock and rollers. Or maybe that was just Robbie’s plan, his original mission as he put it, when he fell to earth from the sky – just like David Bowie in that movie. He would have been a rock and roller. He could have been, if not for his faulty human heart, the result of contamination resulting from exposure to this impure planet. That’s what we always decided, laughing loudly enough to wake up the whole neighborhood, early on a summer Sunday morning after we’d stayed up all night watching the sci-fi movies.

*****

Robbie and I are squatting over a shallow ditch behind the married-housing apartments in Oxford, on the University of Mississippi campus. He’s three, and I’m six.

Our mom, Paula, is a few feet away, pinning wet laundry to a clothesline behind our family’s tiny apartment.

“Let go of that stinkin’ thing,” I yelp, slapping a shiny black water snake out of my little brother’s right hand. We watch, hypnotized, as the snake slithers across the polluted creek. Robbie, who’s barely able to talk but bright enough to understand everything I say, just stands there, pointing, his mouth wide open. The snake, amazingly enough, hadn’t even tried to attack Robbie.

“Get out of that nasty stuff,” Mom says. She drops her work in a plastic basket, stares at us, and shades her eyes from the mid-July sun. “You’re covered in filth. Come inside and wash up. Now. Move. Now, Billy! Come here, Robbie!”

Robbie, already taller than most five-year olds and blessed with the kind of

cherubic smile that always made the other mothers coo over him, runs to our mother. I follow behind, in no particular hurry, stopping only to pick up several soda bottle caps on the ground near the picnic tables, the better to expand my collection. I carefully scrape out the little rubber linings underneath the caps. The fifth one reads Free 7-Up.

“Mommy, I won,” I say, skipping into our apartment, a wood-paneled place defined by the noisy hum of the wall air conditioner and the smell of cheap Latex wall paint. Robbie, crumpling into the corner, cries. “I wanted to win. That’s not fair.” Robbie got the soul – it was amazing the things that a galactic birth would do for you, he always said, snickering. Guess I was the one with all the dumb human luck.

*****

One bright June morning, Robbie and I take in a double feature downtown at the

Polk Theater, a restored 1920s movie palace where Elvis, dressed in a baby blue shirt, maroon jacket, black denim jeans and white suede shoes, swiveled his hips back in 1956, thrilling the teenyboppers but shocking the city fathers and mothers. Stars still twinkle and clouds still float by on the ceiling, but the balcony is closed, long in need of repair and in danger of collapsing. In another life, it was reserved for blacks; later, it was the province of smooching teenagers and married department-store managers, bold or careless enough to fool around with desperate single secretaries on lazy Friday afternoons.

We grab seats downstairs, on the third row, as near to the screen as possible but not too close to the truancy-school troublemakers, and we settle in for a long morning of movies, with Send Me No Flowers, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson throwaway, preceded by

a silly black-and-white racing short. Each car is numbered, and each kid with the corresponding winning number on his or her ticket is entitled to a free jumbo bag of popcorn soaked in yellow oil. I win a bag that day, and share it with Robbie.

Afterwards, we wait out front, under the big, diamond-bright marquee, next to the glass-encased posters for That Darn Cat! and other coming attractions, until all of the other kids have been picked up except for Jose, the quiet brown-skinned kid from the Lime Street projects. Our mom never shows up. Robbie, ever impulsive, begs me to leave, and walk on home. I’m sure we’ll get in trouble for disappearing without telling anyone, but, ignoring a healthy conscience and my fear of swift and certain punishment, I leave anyway.

Robbie and I, holding hands, begin our little unplanned adventure. We walk on the sidewalk along busy Florida Avenue, tasting the freedom of the open sidewalk and inhaling an intoxicating mix of diesel fumes and orange blossoms, acidic and sweet. We pray that Mom won’t be too mad when she finds out, and that she won’t tell our father.

We occasionally stop to gawk at the tightly clustered buildings on our right – First

Episcopal Church, Smithson and Jones Realty, Phillips Photographers, American Bank, the Christian Science Reading Room, Clark Architects.

“Look,” I say, pointing across the street to a long, low building, colorfully painted with animals and Disney characters. Out front is a sign – Miss Janet’s Playschool.

“That’s where Mom used to take us when she worked at the hospital. Remember how we’d put the blue mats on the floor at nap time, and lie down on them, and pretend we were sleeping?”

Occasionally, on our silliest days in preschool, we had imitated the bloodied

vampire victims we saw in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. My little brother, at age four still not inclined to say much, simply nods. “I wanna go over there,” he says, jumping up and down and tugging on my hand. “Let’s go see Miss Janet. Please? Please.”

“Not now,” I say, tightening my grasp on Robbie’s hand. “We have to get home soon, or Mom’s gonna switch us for leaving. And she’ll tell Daddy, and he’ll get out his principal’s paddle.”

“That makes me sting,” says Robbie.

Robbie quits pleading his case and takes direct action. “I wanna see Miss Janet,” he says, yanking his hand out of mine and making a run for the highway. In a flash, tires screech. I shriek. At the last moment, the car stops two feet short of Robbie, like some sort of invisible forcefield had somehow been erected to protect him. I shriek and Robbie falls onto the sidewalk, crying and shaking but barely scratched, with only a skinned knee to show for his near collision with a two-ton metal object. An elderly woman, a blue hair with a crucifix and a green deodorizer swinging from her rearview mirror, laboriously rolls down her window, stretches her head, like a turtle, out of the weathered blue Chevy, and begins hurling profanities at us. We ignore her, and she puts her car back into gear and drives away. Robbie, quiet for several long seconds, suddenly starts leaping around, yelling, in a state of unnervingly intense excitement. “I’m okay, Billy, I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. I told you nobody could hurt me.” I sigh, a loud sigh of fear-drained relief. “Let’s go,” I say. We start walking again. It was a near-miss, one which never would have taken place had I simply ignored Robbie’s begging, and stayed put at the theater. Still, the kid was fearless, and he survived. Nothing can touch Robbie, I think.

Mom, late because of a flat tire, punishes us when we get back home, swatting our legs with a switch, leaving biting stings and a permanent lesson. She doesn’t tell Daddy about our little detour.

*****

We’re in our big backyard on Royal Street, with the tire swing and the sky blue above-ground pool, the one that almost killed me once when I tried it swim in it without removing the heavy plastic cover. It’s shortly after that trip to the movies, on one of those long early-fall afternoons, just after the dreaded start of the school year. What will happen, I wonder, if I drag a cardboard box up to the treehouse, put Robbie in it and push him off? If Robbie jumps, like we both did once when we were on the super-fast glass elevator at that sleek Disney hotel in Orlando, will the jump cancel out the impact of the fall? Will Robbie bounce?

So I decide to conduct a little experiment. Robbie, always up for adventure and, foolishly enough, never unwilling to follow his big brother’s lead, agrees to serve as my project’s guinea pig. He climbs up the tree, sits in the box, and braces for adventure.

I push the box off, and Robbie slams ten feet to the ground, failing to leap at the opportune moment, as he had been instructed. He pretends to lose his breath, and runs around the oak tree like a madman, trying to suck up as much oxygen as quickly as possible. Up in the treehouse, I laugh like a mad hyena, doubling over and nearly falling off my perch. He wasn’t in trouble, I thought – he was just faking it.

Mom, having watched the action from the kitchen window, races into the backyard, yelling “What’s wrong Robbie? Stop, Robbie. Relax. Breathe.” And to me:

“What have you done? What have you done? You’re doing that to a boy with a heart like

his? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you have any sense at all?” If only she’d known that

Robbie was protected by the sky gods, he joked later, she wouldn’t have worried as much.

An hour later, Robbie and Mom return from the Dairy Queen, back from a special-treat trip taken to help him feel better. He’s embarrassed but hardly chastened, his spirits lifted.

“Look what I got,” he says, shoving an ice cream coupon book in my face.

“I’m sorry, bud,” I say, winking at him. “Next time, you push me off.”

*****

Nearly two decades later, not long after the funeral, while I’m desperately trying to make sense of things, I have a dream. I’m still living with my old UF buddies at the two-story house in Hogtown, the one on Northeast Seventh Street, in the historic section near the duck pond, and Robbie has just arrived from our little hometown, two hours south in Central Florida, to visit for the weekend.

“Hey, everybody, my brother’s here,” I say, pounding on all the bedroom doors.

“Come on and see him. He wants to meet you guys.” My roommates assemble in the middle room, overlooking the driveway where the five kittens had been accidentally run over by the mailman.

“Here he is,” I say, grinning and pointing to my brother, reclining on the bed.

Robbie doesn’t respond. “Come on, Robbie, quit joking. Wake up. Quit goofing around.

Say hello. Tell them about the mission.” Robbie stays silent, his eyes closed, faking it again. “Wake up, Robbie,” I say, impatient now. “Wake up, dammit. Come on, man.” In

retrospect, maybe that dream took place at the hospital. All of it blends together now.

*****

A couple of years after I pushed Robbie out of the treehouse, we’re down in West Palm Beach, on the porch of a ramshackle two-story house on Fern Street, in the old downtown neighborhood. My dad sweats, huffing and puffing as he unloads the car for a weekend visit. We always go south for Thanksgiving, for a huge meal of turkey, dressing, salty gravy, cranberry sauce, squash casserole, and pecan, mincemeat and apple pies. Afterwards, Grandma and Mom clean up in a kitchen as small as a little ship’s galley, and the rest of us watch football and Championship Wrestling on the television console. When Grandpa isn’t watching, Robbie sneaks behind our grandfather’s Lazy

Boy chair, and fiddles with the old Scout knife stashed away in the back, behind his stack of magazines with pictures of bikini girls.

“Why the devil aren’t you helping out, son?” Grandpa asks me. I’m playing with toy trucks on the front porch after dinner, instead of helping Daddy take the suitcases upstairs. “Don’t be a bum, Billy Boy. Don’t think I won’t put you on a train right back to Lakeland.”

“I’ll help, Grandpa,” says Robbie, running onto the front porch. “Let me.” He reaches over the railing, grabs a bag that’s much too heavy and falls, knocking his head against the front edge of the porch. Ten stitches later, he’s back in action. Not even

Grandma and Grandpa knew about Robbie’s origins. If they had, they wouldn’t have freaked out getting him to the hospital – he would have healed right up without human help. But I guess it made everybody feel better to pretend like he was normal, just like one of us.

*****

Later, when I’m ten and Robbie’s seven, we’re walking along the overlook at

Clingman’s Dome, in the Great Smoky Mountains, where Florida families go for a little relief from the tail end of the stifling Sunshine State summer, and the ever-present threat of hurricanes.

It’s early fall, not even October yet, but brilliant reds, yellows and oranges are already starting to make a mockery of the dark greens of summer. I smell leaves burning, somewhere down in the valley. Robbie says he can smell them, too. We hear our parents, seated on a bench, talking softly, speculating about the next waterfall on the itinerary, sorting out the best places to stop for hot cider and pancake breakfasts, and complaining about how two weeks’ vacation is too short to see it all. We keep on walking, moving ever closer to the edge. Robbie, against my advice, squeezes between the bars of the protective railing. I follow, and we walk on to the outside promenade, just six inches from the edge, a short leap from a long fall.

We look at each other, exchanging a silent dare.

“Billy, it would be just like when I was born. I wanna try.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t be silly. Get back.”

“Come on. Let’s both try. Nothing will happen to us.”

I consider the possibility for a moment, and then I suddenly grab my brother’s hand. I squeeze back between the bars, and pull him through to the safe side of the railing. In the distance, we hear Mom screaming bloody murder, and the sound of feet pounding on the pavement. It would have worked. It just wasn’t the time.

*****

In Panama City, we’re visiting relatives during spring break, when we take a family trip to the Food Lion. Robbie and I, trailing Daddy and Mom out of the store, are getting rowdy, and I challenge my little brother to a race. He runs up to Mom’s shopping cart, tags it with his hand, and, turning around, stumbles to the ground, apparently losing consciousness. Mom screams. People gather around Robbie, a too-young victim of a cardiac arrest, the result of a congenital heart defect. And then come the sirens and the white coats and the waiting room and the gloomy pronouncements. “I’m afraid the situation is bad,” the doctor tells Daddy and Mom. “If he lives, he’ll be a vegetable.

That’s about the best you can hope for.” It’s the only time I’ve seen my father cry. “Pray hard,” Mom says. At first, I think that Robbie is just faking it again. But then I realize – the planet’s poison is finally taking effect. It’s entirely possible that he isn’t immune.

*****

Mom, Daddy, and Robbie and I are at Disney World. It’s Robbie’s first big outing after waking up from what the doctors called a coma – I knew that he was pretending again. He has had to learn how to do everything all over again. He walked again, finally, on one memorable Palm Sunday, and our pastor led the congregation in a long prayer of thanks. Afterward, everybody came up and hugged Mom and Daddy. But

Robbie still communicates like a toddler. Walking in the lot called “Goofy,” he grabs my hand, but I’m embarrassed by the gesture, so I push him away, and run ahead.

Later that summer, at Coquina Beach on the Gulf of Mexico, where we always go to play in the sun, do a little body surfing and share charcoal-smoke signals with the entire west coast of Florida, Robbie is still unstable, forever clinging to Mom. He’s

singing sweetly, and smiling a little too broadly. After visiting the bathroom, he skips back toward Mom, Daddy, Sally, just a toddler, and me. I stick out my leg, and trip

Robbie. I’m mad at him: I know this environment is poisonous, but why in the name of

Saturn won’t he ask for help from his people, I mean, from his original people, from his home in the stars? He falls to the ground, face first, his feelings hurt more than anything else. He’s quick to forgive his big brother.

*****

Robbie sobs as he removes the final pieces of his furniture from his girlfriend’s place, one of those 800-square-foot starter houses behind the Dixieland mini-mall. I’m there to help Robbie pack up and move back to our parents’ house on Royal Street. I put my arm around my little brother’s shoulder. Linda’s gone for the night, back at the club, probably flirting with one of her former beaus. She’s a one-man woman, but she’s restless – few of her men or boys ever last more than two or three months at a time. And then she declares her boredom, and moves on, only to circle back around to former lovers. She can’t stay with anyone, and neither can she ever really call it quits. She likes the idea of always being wanted, of constantly surrounding herself with conquests from the past and present, along with a few options for future mating (and breakups).

They were a substitute for the family she refused to see, I always thought.

“It’ll be all right,” I say, dragging a mattress into the back of Robbie’s van. “It’ll take time, that’s all. You’re gonna feel better in, like, a weekend. And besides, Linda isn’t the only girl in the world. She’s not the only fish in the sea, buddy.”

“But why doesn’t she want me anymore?”

“Come on, bud. You can’t ask that question. Besides, she wasn’t exactly your celestial soulmate.”

“Billy, cut that out. You know we were just joking around about that stuff.”

“I know. I just mean that she didn’t understand how special you are.”

“Billy, come on, just tell me something. What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing, Robbie. Nothing at all.”

*****

Robbie leaves our planet after dancing all night at an oceanfront rock club in Daytona Beach. His drinking friends, with the exception of Linda, scatter, unwilling to chance feeling guilt over his death – they had never discouraged his partying. The crowd at Central Baptist, back in our hometown, swells to 325 for his funeral, one of the church’s biggest ever. The service amounts to an alternate reality for Mom and Daddy, a scene from other parents’ lives; it’s a feeling they share later with family and friends. I survive by avoiding direct eye contact with anyone, and clinging tightly to my little sister’s hand as we walk down the aisle after the service, headed toward the exit. The burial is a blur, not even worth remembering. I vaguely recall the sound of the preacher, an overly dynamic wah-wah trumpet droning on and on and on, and at one point, the sensation of my knees giving way, and an endless tumble into the springy green grass at the cemetery. Somebody helps me up. I curse the gods who let Robbie down. They lied to him. They lied to me.

*****

Later, I have another dream, a lot like the same one I’ve experienced over and over. I run as fast as I can, take a flying leap, catch the most opportune wind current, and

then, miraculously, I’m airborne, alternately rocketing into the stratosphere and swooping down so low that I’m able to grab fruit off the orange and tangelo trees. This is what it must have been like for him that first time, the day of his birth.

“Grab my feet,” I say, and Robbie, as usual, obeys. “Hold on, brother.” Together, we fly out of the yard, down the street, and over the rooftops of the junior high, following the running track at the school. Still in the air, we move down to the park, across to the big white two-story house, over to the McDonald’s down at the corner and back again to the backyard, where we hover above the ground.

Robbie, without any warning, suddenly loosens his grip, and releases his fingers, one by one, from my ankles. “Don’t worry, big brother,” Robbie says. “I’m doing fine.”

He flashes one of his sheepish grins, accompanied by a snicker. “I just wanted to see what this would feel like. So I could remember how I was born, you know, like we always said. I always wanted to know. Now I do.”

As he falls to earth, his path probably resembling the one he took when he first came to our planet, his movement is all herky-jerky. His image is scratchy and suddenly black-and white. It’s as if he were being photographed in slow motion, with a vintage

Brownie, its rusty innards clicking and clattering, sprung back to life for one final sequence before giving up the ghost. The gods must have their regrets. They’d better.

The Night Frank Sinatra Saved Pop’s Life

Pop didn’t give a rat’s ass about any music except for the moldy tunes by the old

crooners, like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Dino, and a few of the big bands. He

even took Ma to see Ol’ Blue Eyes in New York on New Year’s Eve 1943, when the

Bobbysoxers went absolutely fuckin’ nuts for the guy. Benny Goodman was the headliner, but Frank ruled the Paramount stage that night; he left the schoolgirls

swooning in the aisles, sighing and screaming so arduously and so relentlessly that they

woke up the next morning with parched throats, souvenirs of a night of platonic teenage

ecstasy.

“There wasn’t a dry seat in the house,” Pop whispered at the dinner table, raising

his eyebrows, telling us the story once if he told us one hundred times. This always

happened just after he and Ma got to reminiscing about their so-called courting days –

ancient history, as far as anyone was concerned. It was their favorite topic of

conversation.

“I swear to you,” Pop said. “Not a single dry seat in the place.” He guffawed

loudly, and capped it with a snort, leaning his chair back and nearly crashing to the

ground. That’s my Pop. Classy guy, I always said.

Every time Pop brought up that old story, with a blue punch line dating all the

way back to vaudeville, he’d smirk, and lean to his left and tell Johnny Boy, but only if

and when Ma had left the room to check on the stove. After he told my brother, he’d lean

to his right, and repeat the same thing to me, a little more loudly for emphasis. Our little sister, Rosie, seated to my right between Ma and me, usually overheard Pop’s jokes but she didn’t understand them until much later.

When Ma came back to the table, we’d all have our heads down, looking straight into our plates, desperately attempting not to giggle, hoping not to snort anything out of our noses. Milk was funny out the nose, all cool, sweet and tingly. Marinara sauce out the nose was even funnier, but kind of nasty – warm, spicy, harsh, and likely to stain everything within spraying distance.

“What are you morons laughing about?” Ma would ask. “What’s so funny?

What’s so damn funny?” I always figured that she knew exactly what Pop had said, like he’d been telling the same joke at every single party they’d attended since the night of that show.

During my long-haired, guitar-rocking phase in high school, before I got serious about playing the tenor saxophone, I blabbed to everyone about how great Jimi Hendrix sounded on the Axis: Bold as Love album. And every time I did, Pop would punch me hard, on my shoulder. I thought Jimi was a genius, ripping out shards of electric-guitar noise like he was Zeus, tossing out thunderbolts to the mere mortals in the crowd. At least, that’s what it looked like and sounded like in the movie Woodstock. I was crushed that I hadn’t been old enough to see him play in person. I was all of nine when he died, and I’ll regret it to my own grave. Damn Jimi. Damn Jim Morrison, too, and Janis Joplin.

They all had to go destroy themselves, in a single 10-month period, beginning in

September 1970, before I even had half a chance to figure out what rock and roll was all about.

“I know Frank is great, but Jimi was a real rock star, the best,” I told Pop once,

after he told the Sinatra joke yet again one December night when we were staying at our

beach house in Boca for the holidays. “There’s never been anyone like that guy, and there never will be another Jimi.

“And he could play a mean ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ too,” I added, triumphantly.

This was in 1976, the Bicentennial Year, when everyone went ape shit and all

patriotic for the glories of America and the Revolution and our founding fathers, and

Benjamin Franklin costumes were suddenly in vogue for the trick-or-treaters around our

block back home in Carroll Gardens.

My jab at Sinatra was more of a taunt than an attempt at actual dinner

conversation, but Pop was half-crocked, and Ma was in the kitchen, so I knew he’d go for

it.

Pop grimaced. I could tell he was about to yell at me. My brother Johnny Boy

smirked.

“So what are you saying, son?”

“Jimi played the national anthem that way because he loved America,” I said,

pressing my point, and my luck. “That was a tribute to the good old USA. He was a true-

blue patriot, Pop.”

Johnny Boy stuck his tongue out at me. “That freak didn’t have anything on the

Beatles or the Stones, you moron. Besides, don’t you even listen to the Who or Zeppelin

or Black Sabbath? Get with the program, jerk. Hendrix is dead.”

“You listen to your big brother. He knows his music,” said Pop, suddenly a

supportive expert on the history of the rock and roll he always said he hated. He glared at

me. “You’re giving me indigestion, son. I suggest that you shut your piehole before I shut

it for you.”

“But, Pop – ”

“Paulie, don’t you be starting something,” Ma shouted from the next room. “Quit

while you still can.”

Pop stared at me, his alcohol-pinked face turning another shade of red – I liked to

call it mottled chartreuse. On vacation, he always guzzled bourbon and Coke like he was

drinking water. “Son, that was plain un-American. What he did with our national anthem

was downright sacrilegious. Everybody said so. In fact, I say that Negro fellow was a

communist.”

He shoved away from the table, and stood up, preparing to make a dramatic exit, all set to grab his cigar and barge out the door for a stroll on the beach.

“And besides all that, I owe Frank my life,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Sinatra, you

kids would be orphans.”

He looked around, like he was gauging our interest in his little story. Did we want

him to go on?

“Yeah, sure, Pop. Frank Sinatra saved your life,” I said, thinking he was waiting for an excuse to sit down and resume the conversation.. He glared at me.

“Jimmy, tell ‘em that story, why don’t you,” Ma said, still shouting, from the

other room. “They need to hear it.”

“C’mon, Pop, sit back down,” Johnny Boy said. “Paulie’s gonna’ shut up. I’ll

make him. Just tell us the story.”

“You try and make me,” I said, kicking Johnny’s shins under the table. He yelped,

and covered his mouth with his hand.

Johnny Boy was quick to chime in, hoping to stir up a little bad blood. It always

miffed him that he was the oldest, by five years, but he was the dumb one. We’d both

have jobs in the family business when we grew up, Pop would always tell us. We both

had good shots at being made men. But I’d be the one most likely to go to the top of the

organization. I was the one poised to climb the ladder. Pop would often say this right in

front of Johnny Boy, who’d usually respond by going outside and kicking one of the

neighborhood’s stray cats, and then sulking for a week. The cats, of course, would take

out their collective angst on the neighborhood mice. And on down the chain it went.

Sometimes, for good measure, Johnny would take out his anger on Rosie, pushing

her around, and then she’d respond in kind to her Barbies, creating a mini-colony of

headless, armless, naked plastic hotties with big busts and tiny waists.

“You just don’t get it, Pop. Jimi was a god.”

“Yeah, and now he’s a buried god, as deep in the ground as the god your Ma went

to visit last summer,” Pop said, prompting Johnny Boy to snicker. That was pretty

disrespectful, I thought, on the part of both of them. After all, Ma had just been diagnosed with cancer when she made the pilgrimage to France with Father Mike and some of the other priests, nuns, and sick ladies, men and children from St. Mary Star of the Sea.

“You watch your tongue,” Ma shouted, from the kitchen. “Jesus hears

everything.” She burst back into the dining room, and sat down at the table. She looked

as if she were on the verge of crying; she was tough as a Marine, but deeply sentimental

when it came to all things Catholic.

Pop sat down, and looked around again, like he was still trying to decide whether

he ought to waste his breath on such an unworthy audience.

“Shut up,” Pop said. “All of you, just pipe down. Let me tell you about Frank.”

“Okay, okay, Pop,” I said. “We’re listening.”

“Tell us, Pop,” Johnny Boy.

“Rosie, you get on out of here. I don’t want you hearing this,” Pop said.

“But, Pop.”

Rosie, pouting, left the room.

This is a true story, boys, every word of it is true. It really happened. Just ask

your uncle Leo if you want.”

“We believe you Pop,” Johnny Boy said. “Just tell it.”

Pop wiped his shiny forehead with his napkin. He slurped his drink loudly before

slamming his glass down on the table and sighing.

“Okay, this is what happened. Your uncle Leo and I were out late, drinking at the

Holiday lounge on State Street. It was getting near closing time.”

“Where was Ma?” Johnny Boy asked.

“She was at home with you kids. Now just shut up.”

“Pop, I just wanted to know.”

“Now your uncle Leo and myself were sitting there at the bar, minding our business, drinking and talking shop, when Leo got up to go to the toilet.”

“What were you drinking?” Johnny Boy asked.

“Let me talk.”

“Okay.”

“Like I was saying, Leo goes to the bathroom, and as soon as he leaves his seat,

these two tough guys come up next to me, one on each side of me, and say they want to

talk to me in the alley.”

“Pop, why didn’t you just ask for help?”

“Because I’m feeling the tip of a pistol pushing up against my back, you moron.

That’s why. And they’re telling me that if don’t do what they say, they’re liable to pull

the trigger right then and there, and then go after you guys.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“So we go out to the alley, and the one guy, a fat fellow with a head the size of a

watermelon and fists like mitts, he lets go of my arm and punches the side of my head

hard enough to knock me into the street.”

“Damn,” said Ma, from the kitchen. “That had to hurt.”

“Are you hearing all this?” Pop shouted.

“Yeah, you’re telling it nice,” Ma said.

“So, anyway, I drag myself off the asphalt, and I notice that there are four tough

guys now, all looking like they’re out for my blood. It’s a fuckin’ pisser of a night in

December, colder than a witch’s tits, and these guys all have on their leather jackets.”

“Were you scared?” Johnny Boy asked.

“No,” Pop said. “All I did was piss my pants.”

“Oh.”

“You didn’t have to tell that part,” Ma shouted from the kitchen.

“Yeah, of course, I was scared shitless. Get the picture?”

“Yeah, Pop,” I said. “Keep on going.”

“So the fat guy comes over and says, ‘This is a message from our boss to yours –

stay in your territory or tell your balls goodbye.”

“Gross,” Johnny Boy said.

“Shut up,” I said. “Who were those guys, Pop?”

“I’m not sure. To this day, I don’t know what they were talking about. We, I mean my crew, we always kept our noses clean.”

“What happened next?” Johnny Boy asked.

“Okay, so I figure it’s all over. I say, ‘Alright, you go ahead and tell your boss that his message is understood.’ And then the guy says, ‘Oh, yeah? I haven’t even delivered it yet.’ And he knocks me to the ground again. At that point, the other three goons come over and started kicking me – hard.”

“Were you bleeding?”

“What the hell you think? Yes, I was bleeding from places I couldn’t even see.”

“Sick, Pop,” Johnny Boy said.

“How’d you survive?”

“Hold on. I’m getting there. It was like a dream or something. Just about the time

I feel somebody’s shoe buried in my stomach for the fourth or fifth time, I hear the back door open, and the sound of the jukebox. It’s playing Sinatra’s “Saturday Night (is the

Loneliest Night of the Week).” And then the kicking stops, and I see him walk out into the alley.

“Who, Pop?” I said.

“I couldn’t believe it was him.”

“Him who?”

“It’s like a dream. He’s moving in slow motion, and these clouds of blue smoke

are circling around his head, and trailing up to his lit cigarette. He’s like a king, coming down from his throne to visit.”

“Who was it, Pop?”

“The man himself. The guy on the juke. Frank. Sinatra. He’s decked out in some

Italian number like he’d just had it tailored at Brooks Brothers. And then he goes and saves my life.”

“How’d he do that, Pop?” Johnny Boy asked.

“Easy. He says, ‘Okay, boys, he’s had enough. Let him go.’ And then they scram, without a word. One of the guys even trips over a trash can, knocks it sideways and smashes his head against a gutter. Frank says, ‘Serves him right.’ ”

“So what’s the moral to the story, Sinatra has friends in low places?” I asked, risking certain death.

“Why don’t you be quiet,” Johnny said.

“Shut up, doofus,” I said, kicking Johnny in the shins again. He helped.

Pop shot me a look that could kill. “I’m not done yet.”

“We’re listening,” I said. “Tell us the end.”

“Here it is,” Pop said. “Frank is a true American hero. Your long-haired hippie freak guitar players can’t hold a candle to the Chairman of the Board -- or Tony or Mel

Torme or the Duke or the Count for that matter.

He paused, looked around, and made sure that we were all listening.

“Ma, you come in too hear this,” Pop said. He waited until she sat down.

“I don’t care what you boys say, and what anyone else says. You wanna see a real rock star – go see Frank. You wanna hear real music – play Torme. You wanna see a real

band – catch Benny Goodman. You little peckerheads don’t know a damn thing. I don’t want to hear another word.”

Then the kitchen phone rang. The only people who knew our number at the beach house and called us there were the wiseguys, looking to put Pop on to a job, and, once, the little girlfriend that he kept – as we later found out – in an apartment in the Village.

Pop stood up, but Ma got there first, and we waited in silence in the dining room.

“No, he’s not here, and don’t you ever call here again, you bitch,” she said, loud enough for the whole street to hear. We heard the phone being jammed back into its cradle, and then the sound of something being ripped from the wall.

We looked over at Pop. He smiled a guilty grin, shrugged and then averted his eyes. He sighed and sat back down.

Ma came back from the kitchen, wiping tears from her eyes. “You son of a bitch,” she said, before running upstairs to their bedroom and slamming the door.

We sat at the table in silence for twenty long minutes, picking at our leftovers, and then Pop got up, walked upstairs and knocked on his bedroom door.

“Let me in, sweetie,” he said, gently, but loudly enough for three kids to hear.

“Come on, now. You know that’s all over. I don’t know why she’s bothering us again.”

We heard the door open and close, and then open again. We watched Pop, followed by Ma, make their way down the stairs and into the living room. He pulled their autographed copy of “In the Wee Small Hours” from the top shelf of a bookcase next to the cherry-oak entertainment console.

He gently placed the LP on the turntable, and then dropped the needle, rather violently, on the record, right near the start of side one. A loud scratch was followed by

the sound of Frank’s golden pipes, on “Last Night When We Were Young”:

Last night when we were young Love was a star A song unsung

Life was so new So real so right Last night when we were young

That got to Ma, every time. Pop, too. She forgave him before, and she forgave

him again.

The two embraced, and, maybe imagining they were high-school sweethearts all

over again, danced like they thought they were on stage at the Garden. From war to a

cease fire, in three minutes flat.

I don’t know if that would qualify as a miracle, at least as Father Mike used to define it. After all, it wasn’t a vision of Christ’s suffering, or a personal message from the

Blessed Mother, like the little kids were always receiving. Blood didn’t come pouring

from anyone’s wrists, like with those Sicilian nuns. Nobody was seeing Christ’s face in

the yogurt.

And it wasn’t like what happened when Ma came back from Lourdes, when her

doctor said that she was in remission. The cancer was completely gone from her body.

Father Mike and the priests called it a miracle. Pop called it a real lucky break.

But when Frank sang, or some of the big bands played, and Ma and Pop danced in

front of the plastic-wrapped settee under the pictures of Jesus and JFK – those were about

the only times the Testone family experienced some kind of real peace. I gotta tell you, it

was a beautiful thing, a real beautiful thing.

What the Neighbor Saw

The last time I saw her she was awful small, when she had once been ten feet tall.

And horizontal. Don’t know why. That day was pretty much like all the other days. I woke up. I drank my coffee. I ate breakfast. I read the news. I brushed my teeth. I started the car. I drove away. And, yes, I did what I had to do.

I had been getting taller every day. So tall, in fact, that I could see over the neighbor’s fence. Over there, to my surprise, were the really tiny people, the folks with heads too big for their bodies. You know the type. Demanding. Annoying. Squeaky voices. Odd choices. Pez eaters. People pleasers. Peculiar, but oddly persuasive. Cheap, but flaunting their money. And always creating hassles. Always hassling me. Maybe they would have to go. Maybe I could take care of that.

So when I saw her that afternoon, a Sunday, late September, I told her about my neighbor’s backyard, and what I had seen over there. She sympathized with their plight, saying she had once been just like them. What happened, I asked. I grew, she said.

The next Tuesday, she was 10 feet tall, nearly as tall as me, and there were explanations. The details didn’t account for everything, mind you, but there they were, anyway: It was the platforms. Big, Elton John big. Wooden, Dutch Boy wooden. And, now that I think of it, ugly as death. She had stripes, too, stripes on her pants, stripes on

her garters, stripes on her rugby shirt, stripes on her handbag, stripes on her top hat, stripes on her handbag, stripes on her contacts. What’s that, I asked. Seuss, she said, the

Seuss collection. New York. London. Paris. St. Paul. Auschwitz. I’m dressed for success, she said. I can see your neighbors, too. And I know what they’re doing. Let’s watch.

You’re my kind of gal, I told her. And she was. Until she wasn’t.

I was getting taller, too, despite my best efforts to conceal my growth. So tall that

I could see clear into the neighbor’s back rooms, all of them. And, clearly, he was up to something. He was up to no good. On Thursday, she came back, binoculars in hand, still a full head taller than the average bear. And it was her job to watch, and report. Each of us has a story to tell, and this was hers: The neighbor is laughing, in the dining room, touching and touching the green in his silver briefcase. A little boy is on the floor, crying.

A woman is on the couch, sleeping. The TV is on, playing. It’s all good. Except for the bad parts.

That Sunday, I was feeling stronger, and I could see everything, even more of everything, all the way to the front porch, dusty, littered with leaves and stinking of cat pee. Even from the fence, that long godforsaken red-brown barrier between good friends and good neighbors on a smoky Southern autumn afternoon, the smell offended me, filled my lungs and made me nauseous. That house offended me, and his cash made me sick.

He was up to no good, so I fixed it for him and his. I crept across the way, and held it together, as best as I could. I had to, didn’t I? I left the scene of the imperfect crime, and returned home, briefcase in hand and dots of red ink on my trousers. It was a quiet place,

oh so quiet. But not for long.

Sunday night, she came over to the house again. By then, we were nearly the same height, and our parity was apparent. Her stripes, all of them, were horizontal, as was her smile, and later, her body. She was tall, but beautiful, model tall, basketball tall,

Amazon tall but somehow still like the rest of us. Regarding the criminal matter at hand:

The neighbor was still there, but no longer laughing maniacally. Little boy, crying uncontrollably? No more. Woman, her head oddly misshapen, sleeping? Check. TV, playing? Check. Everything had changed, and yet everything remained the same. The mystery deepened for the tall girl. Her investigation continued. She asked: Why in tarnation is the neighbor so quiet? Oh, yes, the alarm clock was ringing, as was the phone. Seuss girl was tall, but not tall enough to see, not smart enough to know. So she went home.

And then (this was Monday), I heard a knock. Come in, I said, for Pete’s sake come on in. This time, we were exactly the same, neither one of us disadvantaged in physical stature. We could see eye to eye, brow to brow, shoulder to shoulder, although we didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Not after she found out about the neighbor. And what

I had seen, and what I did, and what I took. Why’d this happen, she asked. Why’d you go and do such a thing? You knew about them, too, I said. We both knew, I said. I thought you understood. Why’d you go and ruin our game, she asked. And so it went, on and on, our world without end. Amen.

She wanted to see. So, together, not hand in hand, we walked to the neighbor’s house. His eyes were shut, his ears tilted in the direction of the TV, still playing, something black and white, although it was growing more vivid by the moment.

Something, somewhere, was seeping away. Like our conversation. Like our life together.

Nice hat, I said, but now I’m much taller than you. She winced, and she started to cry. But I was neither alarmed nor ashamed. She wanted to leave. I told her she could not.

She said that what she said was not what she had meant. Why’d you do it, she asked again. I must confess: I was a tad annoyed. She noticed. She said we’re not the same.

That’s not my game. We’re not the same, you and I.

That’s what you say, I replied. My view is that we were just the same, until you changed. There could be no doubt. I shot a grin – loving? menacing? entrancing? – in her direction. Little did she know. She wept, again, and climbed into my bed. Short-sighted, you are, I said. You’ll see.

The next morning, not like all the other mornings, she woke up and stared into my eyes. Lovely, large brown eyes, they were. Perfect, gently sloping nose, I have to say.

And perfect for snooping, I thought, and a little round mouth perfect for talking and telling and hurting, for taking me away. What did she know? And when did she know it?

I was growing ever more perplexed by her seemingly innocent behavior. There was guilt, and she owned it, too. Did she not know? Others would see. An uncomfortable silence followed. How are the neighbors, she asked. A test. They’re doing fine, I said, trying not to lie. Any change? A quick check of laughing, tormented neighbor; crying, tortured boy, his clothes ripped to shreds; sleeping, still woman; blaring TV. Alarms were ringing. The

same, I reported back, being careful to stick to the facts. Here’s what I left out: The woman, oddly enough, had changed colors, perhaps in a salute to our American flag, the one she so little appreciated. I know, the girl said, moments before nodding off to sleep, or, rather, closing her eyes. It was an odd time for her to check out. But just like her, I might add.

That afternoon, the game was on again, the players engaged. We watched, and waited. there was an air of expectancy. Meanwhile, Key Largo was on the television, a trusty 27-inch Sony Trinitron, bought in 1985. The movie: 1948. A hurricane. A motley crew of folks left stranded by a sudden turn of bad weather. Big-city gangsters take over.

Screaming. Cataclysm. It was a drama, not terribly unlike our own. The actors were all now old, or dead, or a little of both, Bogie just a mist, Bacall, too, and Edward G.

Robinson. Nobody remembers anything any more, least of all her.

That evening, at the dinner table, a Wal-Mart particle board special, I ate my Porterhouse, chewed my curly fries, drank my Bud, cranked up the tunes, smiled, smiled some more, and laughed at the memory of my tall girl’s smallest idiosyncrasies and oversights. Annoying little ticks and habits, to tell the truth. Still, they added up. And she knew it. She was tall, when she meant to be merely large in her affections. She was just my size, when she meant for her body to complement mine. She was inquisitive, so curious, when she meant to possess the world, my world. She slept when she should have been around to catch all the action. Her eyes were brown, when they ought to have been

green. She liked soft rock, for the love of Pete. Frankly, I was taller, larger, more powerful. And I could see more clearly than her. She could see over there, once, but she couldn’t see all. She didn’t know. Anybody could tell. And the metal felt so good in my hand.

And, oh, about the neighbor: Over there, he was still sleeping, the boy strangely silent, the woman’s body spread out on the floor, the TV in flames, the clock and the phone ringing. Loud as hell, shrieking, burrowing into my head and setting up camp there. Business as usual. Front porch, dusty? Sure. Littered with leaves? Right.

Stinking of cat pee? Always. Fence intact? Of course. Same as it ever was? Check.

Check. Check. One thing, the last (almost): The briefcase in my hand, silver and black, was bulging, green around the edges.

Over here (the next morning), I’m pleased to report, the situation was improving. The tall girl’s eyes were closed, “Key Largo” on TV was turning into “Hell

Harbor,” with an overacting Lupe Velez fresh from silent movies, and the ringing, the godawful ringing of clocks and phones and microwaves and unattended cars down the block, continued as before. And soon, the blue lights, steam heat, wet air blowing in from the Gulf, palm fronds fluttering in the wind, screaming neon, beach strummers, teens crashing their jeeps into the daiquiri deck, late-summer bunnies scrambling.

So I did what I could, the best that I could, drinking my coffee, reading the paper, brushing my teeth, starting my car, driving to that place, just north of the big store and

south of the blinking red light, where I go to get the money to pay the rent to buy the stuff, all the stuff I won’t need anymore. Or, at least I started to drive there. Instead, I gripped the suitcase, chained to my wrist, swerving left when I should have gone right, going straight when I might have stopped, tossing the other metal into the trees. I drove and drove, and drove some more, heading north, passing five Stuckey’s stores, closing in on peanut country by midnight. It was a Sunday drive, an interminable Sunday drive, the longest Sunday drive ever.

The last time I saw her, the tall girl, she was growing smaller by the moment, practically shrinking, her head ballooning, changing colors once more, soon purple, like the prettiest sunset colors in nature. My view of the neighbor, the boy, the woman, just up and turned to fog. Before leaving the tall girl, I took a bat to the phone, a brick to the clock. It was 3 p.m., the detective told the paper later, a breezy afternoon, sunlight streaming through the blinds into the Florida room, illuminating the little house.

According to his report: The neighbor was nearly ten feet wide, big where he should have been tall. The little boy and the woman, too. The tall girl was small. And I was taller, and stronger, too. Stronger than love.