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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. YOU WILL BEHAVE AND OTHER STORIES

Matthew J. Getty

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Creative Writing

Chair: Kermitit Moyer Q k Richard McCann

Dean of the Collegeor School

Date 2001

American University

Washington, DC 20016

W W lHW BWVERSTY LM Uft

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Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346

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Matthew J. Getty

2001

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. YOU WILL BEHAVE AND OTHER STORIES

Matthew J. Getty

ABSTRACT

At the heart of You Will Behave And Other Stories lies the conflict between

reality and concepts of masculinity. Throughout, male characters struggle to reconcile

who they are with who the world expects them to be as they encounter love, violence, and

obsession. In the title story a mother berates her son for assaulting a Barbie doll as she

tells him the story of his life. In “The Short Hairs” a would-be father-in-law traps a young

man between the needs of women and the demands of manhood. Later, an alcoholic’s

unorthodox recovery plan exposes the links between love and addiction in “The Girl with

the Scarf.” Yet, always the collection offers hope. Especially in the redemptive

“Oncoming Traffic,” and the farcical “Epilogue for a Game of Kickball,” You Will

Behave And Other Stories asserts that, though we wander lost among myths and cruel

realities, we are all connected.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... ii

Stories

1. YOU WILL BEHAVE...... 1

2. THE SHORT HAIRS...... 20

3. ONCOMING TRAFFIC...... 26

4. THE GIRL WITH THE SC A RF...... 44

5. FOOTPRINT BY FOOTPRINT...... 74

6. WHAT THEY MADE ...... 95

7. EPILOGUE FOR A GAME OF KICKBALL ...... 115

8. LOVE LIKE WHISKEY...... 136

9. IN THE W A Y ...... 152

ill

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. YOU WILL BEHAVE

You will behave. You will sit right there and listen until I am finished with you.

and then you will march up those steps and apologize to your sister for sodomizing her

Sparkle Beach Barbie with Darth Moll’s light-saber. Then you will give that poor doll a

proper burial — preferably out back, in the lot behind the garden where you buried ail

those little army men who laid down their lives on your Iwo Jima play-set. And please

see that she receives the same honors as those soldiers — the casket will have to be a shoe

box instead of a matchbox, but you can keep the twenty-one incher salute, the kind words

from the Furbie. She deserves at least that much.

Then you will take Darth Moll — without his light-saber, o f course — over to

Barbie’s Beach House, where he wall just have to face Barbie’s friends and see first-hand

the damage he has done, see with his own eyes that when you rape and murder a lively

young girl with a future as bright as her glitter-streaked hair, you create a deep dark hole

in the lives of those who’ve loved this girl. And yes, Darth will have to face Ken. Ken, of

course, will be strong, stoic, and accepting in his chiseled, all-American way. He will

even shake Darth’s hand before he leaves, and for a second, as plastic touches plastic and

their little eyes meet, Ken and Darth will feel a tiny pocket of inexplicable homoerotic

lust swell inside them. But you will behave. You will walk the dark Sith Lord out the

front door of that beach house, take him back to your room, and he and Ken will forget

their little moment.

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When you wake, march into that bathroom, do the ugly things you have to do,

then get your butt down here and eat your breakfast without saying a word to your sister.

If Stacey’s got anything to say to you, she will say it and you will listen. She may tell you

things you don’t want to hear. She may tell you that your nails are dirty, that your pudgy

face is quickly outgrowing its cuteness, and that violent and aggressive forms of sexual

play have no place in our enlightened society. After all, every girl knows in her heart of

hearts that Ken is really gay. In the same subtle unknowing way they know that there is

already something shameful about certain holes in their own undeveloped bodies, they

know that Ken can do nothing to Barbie but love her. He can hold her, he can listen, he

can drive her around in a lovely little pink convertible, humming opera arias while the

wind does nothing to his sculpted hair, but he cannot “do” her because he has no light-

saber. Take down his pants; he is smooth. And this is why Barbie and Ken are an

appropriate form of sexual play — because they are smooth, because they are clean. You

will understand this some day, but for now you will keep quiet and listen to your sister.

When she is through with you, you will get your books and go to school for nine

more years, and you will behave. You will sit quietly, maybe even fold your hands, tilt

your head slightly in a practiced look of astonishment you learned from studying pictures

of angels on popular calendars. You will listen attentively to men with off-kilter toupees

and sour talcy odors. You will listen attentively to young women in pastel skirt-suits with

matching pumps. You will listen attentively to white-haired men with tweed jackets and

craggy red faces. You will listen attentively to white-haired women who wear hairnets

and squeak mysteriously from the hips when they walk past your desk. And you will

pretend that nothing they are telling you has anything to do with sex — that not a single

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. movement they make is connected to anything in the least bit bodily. In fact, you will

forget from time to time that these voices you hear even have bodies. Do you understand

me? You will behave; you will not picture these men and women — without their toupees,

pumps, hairnets, and underwear — piled into a glistening, oil-soaked orgy. You will not

draw pictures of them engaging in oral sex with each other or with barnyard animals, and

you most certainly will not snicker over these pictures with your pimple-faced friends.

Yes, by this time, you will all have pimples. Feel free to spend seven to nine hours a

week locked in the bathroom caking your face with Noxzema, Clearasil, and some lemon

water and baking soda paste you pick up from the Internet, but it will do nothing. And in

this way — as you listen, as you wash, and as you behave — you will pass your high school

years in a dull and proper normalcy with the exception of one major indiscretion.

In the second half of your senior year, despite all my efforts, despite the patient

teachings of several priests, and despite a $164 collection of soft-core pornography

magazines stashed under your bed, you will fall in love with a cheerleading uniform. It

will be blue and gold - the school colors — with white trim on the sweater sleeves and the

edge of that pleated crotch-length skirt. There will also be a pair of tights — gold. You

will mistake them for panties (though, in fact, the cheerleaders all wear at least two pairs

of panties underneath) and they will draw you more than anything else. For at every

basketball game, at every football contest, at every wrestling match, as sweaty young

men thrust, batter, and rub their bodies against one another’s, you will sit in the first row

of the bleachers waiting for the kick in every cheer — the moment when a shaved leg lifts

to the pulse of the pom-pom and you stare into the fraction of a second, tracing that

smooth contour from calf, to knee, to thigh, to gold.

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Let’s call her Demarcico, Deluvio, or Degenerito. She will be half Italian, half

Puerto Rican (because you will be fascinated by the ordinary magic that dark legs, like

white legs — once they are shaved, moisturized, and covered in a kiwi scented body-

cream — shine like polished plastic), and she will move here in the summer of her

sixteenth year. Eventually, she will be little more than a scandal in this town. A loose girl

— a foul mouth, rumors of group sex behind the pizza-joint, an abortion or two. But then

she will merely be a sixteen-year-old cheerleader, a sophomore, a bright and bouncy

friend of your sister’s, obsessed with mix-tapes, horses, and collages made from catch-

phrases and magazine photos. But really, what does it matter? She will mean nothing to

you. You will behave, and her legs, her sleek little body, her crudely burgeoning

sexuality will be little more than a medium through which you love that uniform.

Her name, in fact, wall carry only the vaguest of meanings. In the same way you

will someday need women’s names for masturbatory purposes, you will need this girl’s

name only because it will provide a concrete connection to your fantasy. Two weeks

before the close of wrestling season, you will sneak through the musky, mildewed scent

of the girls’ locker room searching for that name. Danson, Dawkins, then Demarcico,

Deluvio, or Degenerito — the locker, in which, through the crosshairs of the metal grid

that forms the door, you spy the lovely lifeless material of that cheerleading uniform. Go

ahead, pick the lock, bundle the sweater, the skirt, and the pom-poms into a duffel bag,

and take them home. I suppose you will have to do this, and, after all, we both know from

countless examples of transvestites, serial killers, and evil Jedis, that in the pursuit of

lifeless beauty there are much much much worse things a young man could do.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. When you get it home, you will lay the uniform out on your bed. With

painstaking care, you will use the pocket sewing-kit your father and I gave you to connect

the body stitch by stitch. Sewing pom-poms to sweater, sweater to skirt, and tights to

waistline, you will bring the uniform to life, but you wall behave.

You will sit that uniform in the chair by your desk and talk to it. That’s right, talk.

You will talk and you will listen, and not just act like your listening — blankly nodding

your head while you think about football and unorthodox sexual positions — but really

listen. And please, let’s keep our eyes off the area where the breasts would be. Show

some respect. Focus on the empty space above the collar.

Then, once you’ve given your guest a chance to tell you about herself, you will

take her by the pom-pom and request a dance. So you’ll dance — but dance nicely. None

of that sweaty grinding you’ll see the rest of the little monkeys doing at all those

gymnasium orgies your student council will insist on calling dances. You will use the

steps I taught you — the foxtrot, the waltz, the tango — and you will discover by the end of

the evening that both you and the uniform are indeed lucky to respect each other enough

not to tear off each other’s clothes. To put it simply, you will behave because, as you hold

one pom-pom in your hand and curl your other hand into the small of the sweater’s back,

you will understand that if you did not behave, if you lost control, if you tore the clothes

from her nonexistent body, there would be nothing. Nothing.

And so it will go like this for months. Nicely. Politely. Respectfully. Until she

enters the picture. Yes, I’m referring of course to the Demarcico, Deluvio, or Degenerito

girl. By this time she’ll be your sister’s best friend, spending hours in her bedroom after

school giggling over inside jokes about pop-singers, charm bracelets, and “blow-jobs.”

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There will be a sleep-over. They’ll braid each other’s hair, dance before the television,

and stuff their faces full of Pop-Tarts, until around 12:30 when they will turn off the

bedroom lights, lie side by side on the floor, and softly describe exactly how far they’d

“go” with certain boys in the senior class.

When your sister falls asleep, Demarcico, Deluvio, or Degenerito, will peel

Stacey’s drool encrusted face off her shoulder and rise to go seek your bedroom. Why?

you wonder. Well, you won’t understand this for years, but, yes, she will come to you

simply because she has one of those crushes bad girls tend to develop on the awkward

older brothers of good girls. She will walk down a dark hallway steering herself toward

the line of light at the bottom of your bedroom door and the sound of Mel Torme

crooning from your stereo. She will bump the wall, brush a photo with her shoulder,

regain her balance, and then, pressing her palms against the wood, she will inch open

your door.

The music will surge louder, the light will envelope her, and she will wonder

breathlessly for a moment as she watches you and the uniform she instantly recognizes as

her own glide from desk to bed to dresser in perfectly waltzed circles. Then, as you bend

your beauty back for a dip to the closing horn riff of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,”

you’ll turn to the doorway, and your eyes will look directly into hers.

There are few moments that matter in a young man’s life; this will be one of yours

that does. You will look at Demarcico, Deluvio, or Degenerito’s unmade face — innocent

and hungry, eyes widening as her lower lip swells against her upper — all framed by a pair

of disintegrating braids, you will and feel a shock ripple through your stomach much

more fiercely even than the shocks you’ll feel when your father or I catch you

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masturbating. She will look back perplexed, let her head fall to the side — the frayed end

of one braid dangling against her shoulder — and you will both feel like you are about to

understand something as deep and dark as the hole Darth mined in Barbie’s derriere. The

feeling will be so strong that you both momentarily forget where you are or what you are

doing. She will lean sleepily against the doorjamb, you will loosen your fingers from the

frills of the pom-pom and the worn material at the back of the sweater, and that

cheerleading uniform will tumble to the carpet with a splash that startles you both back to

the awkward reality of the moment. Watch her gasp, straighten, then spin in the doorway

and dash back down the hallway, but do not follow. You cannot. You will not. For you

will know that following her vanishing body in its gray flannel night-shirt and sweat

pants will mean leaving behind the golden girl that now lies lifeless on your bedroom

floor. This will be the first collision between fantasy and flesh in your young life, and you

will make the only decision you can. You will behave; you will choose neither.

The next morning, when you wake, you can try to scoop that uniform up and

make it dance again, but it will not. The grain of the fabric, the tickle of the pom-pom, the

sway of the skirt... It will all only bring back that image of her — little Demarcico,

Deluvio, or Degenerito slumping in your doorway under the weight of wonder and

disgust. So do what you do with all the inanimate dead. Bury the cheerleading uniform in

the lot behind the garden, break out the inchers, the Furbie, and your silly little tears. It

will all add up to your first heartbreak, and you’ll mope around the house with the

adorable melancholy of a cartoon psychopath. Demarcico, Deluvio, or Degenerito will

never raise the issue in school. Ashamed, embarrassed, and confused over her own role in

the discovery, she will only avoid your gaze in the hallways, hug her textbooks a little

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more tightly over her erect nipples, and kick a little more cautiously at the basketball

games.

So this too will pass. You will drift back into the normalcy of teen-aged despair

and pass your final months of high school with thoughts of suicide and military service

that eventually resolve into the acceptance that the only death you desire is the diluted

form afforded by higher education.

So then college. What can I say? Reluctantly, with tears in your brave little eyes,

you will abandon your father and me for a small, beautifully landscaped east-coast

college. At first, you will resist this place. You’ll hold fast to the petty small-town

religion of self you built here. But slowly and surely - as slowly and surely as vomited

beer drips off the dirty rim of a toilet, at least — you will learn to abandon what you’ll

someday term your "post-adolescent idealism.”

The epiphany will come midway through your freshman year. Somewhere in the

hazy midst of a fraternity party, you will look around at the strobe-lit tangle of dancing

bodies, and you will think of something a professor told your Philosophy 101 class.

“Let’s assume what is, is,” he said, and, like that, as you recall and as you look, you will

feel it all slip behind you — the moral high-ground, the grand spiritual essence, the smooth

statuesque surface of Platonism. You will turn and watch it all recede, washed away like

the water-wings that were blasted off your arms by that wave at the shore three years ago.

Only this time, you will not struggle beneath the water. You will not swallow and gasp

and be pulled out of the surf by a burly life-guard who tends to look a little too closely at

the creases of your mother’s bikini.

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You will bathe, splash, and swim. You will learn to wear baseball caps backwards

and enjoy it. You will discover several different ways to throw a frisbee. You will come

to understand that not all girls cry after casual sex. You will wear flannel. You will argue

that the brand of popular music to which you subscribe is made up of “good musicians” —

this will eventually lead to a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with jazz and imported

cigarettes. You will learn about bong-hits, tuck-ins, and postmodernism. You will allow

several overweight girls to perform fellatio on you and then feel guilty because you

cannot bring yourself to touch them afterwards. And that is how you will behave. As you

lie in the dark counting the hours to the rhythm of their muffled gasping snores, you will

realize that you feel guilty for all of it - the hats, the frisbees, the flannels, the sex . ..

And, in this sloppy and sweaty manner, guilt will replace morality.

Then you will meet her. The first one — the first real successor to that cheerleading

uniform. Her last name will be Myron; her first name will never be important. She will

wear black, abhor make-up. and refuse to shave her legs. But she will wear her

nonconformity as proudly as you used to wear the stars they stuck on your forehead for

good behavior at that progressive nursery school your father insisted upon, and, for that

reason alone, you will be helpless to resist her.

You’ll meet her at some protest. “Take back the night” or some other nonsense —

women marching in the street at midnight chanting, “Every ape knows rape,” in response

to several date-rape incidents at the campus football fraternity, which is cutely called A-

P-E as shorthand for Alpha Rho Epsilon.

You will storm out of your dorm room and shout at the throng, but they will all

pass you by — all that is, save this Myron girl. She will peel off to lecture you about her

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cause. She will sneer at you as you stand there barefoot in your father’s old pea-coat.

When you tell her you are just trying to get some peace, she will tell you that that is

precisely what she is seeking. Connection. That’s all it will take — a misguided common

complaint, a girl so defiant and pasty faced, a clever rhyme stenciled on the picket sign

that juts from her tapered fingers, and suddenly you’ll believe that she is the only thing

that can save you from all that crushing guilt.

You will be half-right. You will drink green tea lattes as you discuss

existentialism and French feminist theory. You will hold hands at Amnesty International

marches against female castration in Uganda. You will make clumsy and earnest love to

ambient remixes of Ani Difranco. And, as all of her little obsessions subsume you, you

will discover that the words of Jean Paul Sartre and Helene Cixous, the rhythm of a

protest march, and the hirsute contour of Myron’s naked legs combine to justify and

thereby dismiss all of your filthy little desires. Thus, for a time, you will again behave.

Then, one afternoon, for no reason other than an impulse to establish your own

identity in the same way an infant does when he throws toys from his crib, you will

mortify this girl by leaping to your feet in a crowded coffee shop and demanding that she

recognize what you crudely term the “vastly ignored Ageless Male Holocaust” — oh, you

will have your ideas.

“While women have been objectified, demeaned, and transformed into baby-

producing plastic dolls through the ages,” you will scream, “what have men been turned

into but mindless plastic drones marching off to war, to death, and to torture, all in the

service of the plastic dolls waiting for them on the home-front? No wonder soldiers rape,

pillage, and plunder! Haven’t they earned the right? After all, we’ve all seen the famous

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photo of the WWII sailor bending back some unknown girl for his aggressive victorious

kiss. This,” you will demand as your fist pounds against the table and upsets her foamy

latte, “is what you feminists ignore: The wages of death is sin; the wages of violence is

sex; and the male claims no larger share of authority for his role in the whole mess than

the unconscious female, clubbed and dragged by her painstakingly brushed hair, does for

hers!”

The Myron girl will commit suicide three days later. On a bright and chilly spring

morning, a maintenance worker named Lamont will look up from his weed-whacker, and

there in the wash of April sunlight against the college union building that serves those

wonderful cheese croissants your father and I will enjoy so much on parents’ weekends,

he will see the naked body of a coed hanging from the second-story window with only a

crude banner reading “Plastic Animal” to cover her crotch and the legs that have now

been shaved smooth.

The identity will be determined, and then a few days later the sordid past will be

discovered. Those of the Myron clan who knew her well enough will discuss the history

of instability — the lithium, the childhood of sexual assault, the deep and sturdy iceberg of

which your little outburst was not even the tip, but more so the lone frozen seagull who

perched there solely to defecate. But you, of course, not privy to such details, will

mistakenly read the banner as your own and interpret the suicide as a response to your

“dangerous, but peculiarly compelling ideas” about masculinity. You will suffer the

appropriate nervous breakdown — lock yourself in your room, play all your old Mel

Torme records, and chew violently on the carpet as you murmur her name. But you will

behave.

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You will attend the funeral wearing a neatly pressed suit and the straight-lined

grin of a man bearing up well under the circumstances. You will eat the chicken breasts,

glazed carrots, and potato salad served after the viewing. You will nod your head

appreciatively at the priest. You will even try to console her parents.

Her mother will be gracious and welcoming, but her father will not be like Ken.

He will not be smooth; nor will he be stoic. Stand firm, meet his eyes with yours, but

even this will not be enough. For, as he looks at you and thinks about what has happened

to the daughter he hoped that you would eventually marry and mold into the frumpy

soccer-mom she was destined to be, he will do the one thing for which you are not

prepared. He will break down and cry. Cry hard and cry long. Cry with the unashamed

slobbering enthusiasm of a little girl who has just lost her favorite doll.

Despite a lingering depression that causes you to pull Cs through the remainder of

your junior and senior years and prevents your mother from ever hearing a Latin phrase

behind the name of one of her children, you will graduate from that college and take an

entry level position in a small marketing firm in New York City. So, for a time, with you

falling under the seedy spell of that big wormy apple, who knows, quite honestly, if you

will behave at all? But then — another tragedy.

Three weeks after your father’s retirement, after he has finally consented to buy

me the thirty-foot Catalina sailboat I’ve dreamt of since our honeymoon, we will both be

killed in a sudden, violent, and conveniently unforecasted squall off the coast of Aruba.

You, of course — as you love your mother with the allegiance young men of good

conscience once reserved for God and country — will be far too broken up to deal with the

house cleaning that follows the settling of the will. Let your cousins and sister handle

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that. But, still, your time will come. A few weeks after the lawyers have pulled their

fingers from the pockets our estate, you’ll get a call from your sister demanding that you

abandon the seedy sex-shops of New York City and return home for the weekend to

retrieve those items here that have been designated as yours.

Your room will be stripped bare. All the posters that charted your adolescent

progress from sleek racing cars to sleek bathing beauties will be replaced by empty nails

and tape marks. Yet there, at the foot of the bed you once wept in, you will find a

cardboard box with your name scribbled across the top. Feel free to tear it open and look

inside before you take it away. You will need to do this - to find some remnant there of

your life in this house with the only people who have ever truly cared for you. As you dig

through the pile of yearbooks, baseball cards, magazines, and playing cards, looking for

anything you might still have to remember me by, you will inevitably find them.

At the bottom of the box, caked in a layer of dust and grime, you will discover

Darth and Ken. Darth will be on top, and, as you carefully extricate him from the pile,

you will see that Ken has not only lost all of his bright beachwear and been reduced to a

state of perfectly tanned nudity, but he has also — as if aided by some strange form of

demonic possession — managed to rotate his head so that both his eyes and smooth little

ass stare up at you. At first you will think this is merely some careless mistake on the part

of your cousins or your sister, that Ken was wrongly assigned to your box when he

rightfully belonged in one of your sister’s. But then, as Ken’s face continues to grin at

you, you will realize what has actually happened: Despite your efforts, your actions, and

your restraint, Ken and Darth have not forgotten their little moment and have, in fact,

carried on an illicit homosexual affair for sixteen years.

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You will drop Darth back into that dusty box of sin, and feel — quite reasonably —

that you need a drink. So drive out to the bar where all your high-school cronies not

properly equipped to escape this hometown hell still spend their evenings. Sit on a

barstool and drink four gin-and-tonics with faded and bruised lime slices decorating their

rims. Don’t worry; no one will recognize you. No one, that is, save one unexpected ghost

from your past. As you walk back to the jukebox in search of any Mel Torme song that

might evoke a few memories of our dance lessons, you will be addressed by a voice.

“Aren’t you Stacey’s older brother?” it will ask you, and you will turn to the

booth on your right and discover her — a little plumper, with shorter hair and the

downward curves around the mouth and eyes that only too much frowning can bring, but

still her all the same. Demarcico, Deluvio, Degenerito, or whatever her name will be.

You will shudder, unsure what to say or what to do, but she will stop you before you can

even start.

“Aren’t you the guy who stole my cheerleading uniform?” she will ask with a

sudden lurch that speaks of near-drunkenness.

Tell her yes. By all means. You have no choice. You can at least try to salvage

something of this night, this trip, this life. Nod your head so emphatically your gin and

tonic splashes over the edge of your tumbler and washes your hand cold and smooth.

“Why did you dance with it?” she will ask next.

Lie to her. Of course. Tell her it was her; it was always her. She will believe you.

In fact, even if you tell her that it was only between you and the uniform, she will still

think it was her. For, even after twelve years, two children, six abusive live-in boyfriends,

and one chronically drunk ex-husband, she will still believe that there is no difference

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between her and the cheerleading uniform she once wore. She will not be offended. She

will recline against the soft rubber back of her seat and invite you into her booth.

It’s going to be awkward at first; it always is. You’ll stammer and speak over each

others’ sentences, then laugh and say, “No, you first,” but soon conversations about half

known classmates will drift into discussions of personal lives and confessions of former

crushes.

After five more rounds, two games of pool, and two hand-rolled marijuana

cigarettes smoked in the parking lot, you will get into her car to ride back to her

apartment quite confident that after eleven years of bumbling around in darkened

bedrooms, you now know what love is — that, now, as you open her car door and watch

her plop drunkenly into the driver seat of a battered old Honda, you know that this is

what they really talk about in love songs and valentines: It isn’t the beating of the heart,

the piercing of the soul. It’s the tangible, unnerving feeling of an erection bending up

against the coarse restraint of a pair of jeans. It’s the faint beer-stained moustache on the

lip of a girl who once stood in your doorway amazed at the ridiculous beauty of her

clothes in your hands. It’s the comfortable smell of pine scented air-fresheners in a quiet

car that rolls home in a steady drizzle. It’s the rhythm of an awkward conversation over

the voice of a late-night DJ. It’s the sound of a tired drunk girl who is now a woman

telling you she doesn’t want to wake the kids. It’s the feel of a wrinkled unmade bed that

can only be discovered when it is lain upon by two people who no longer care about

anything but their bodies.

So this is how the rest will go. You will take off each other’s clothes, you will

kiss quietly on the bed, and then you will have to make a choice. They say that every life

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is made up of countless decisions. Those “experts” who make their livings off of

quantum physics or those “Chose Your Own Adventure” books you like to read would

have us believe that life is a series of choices, and that each choice leads us down a

different path, opening up alternative lives, but really, the truth is that each life is made

up of only one such choice. We are given but one chance to mold our futures, and this

will be yours: As you glide your hand down the smooth skin of Demarcico, Deluvio, or

Degenerito’s stomach, pass over the navel, creep across the undefined region between

belly and sex, and then finally feel, with the tips of your index and middle fingers, the

initial tangle of pubic hair, you will or will not behave. The interruption of smoothness

will make you look down at your fingers as you always do, but this time the intensity of

the moment, the combined sensations of lust, acceptance, and defeat will crystallize into

the realization that there is no difference between your hand and that which it touches.

So now your mind will shuttle backwards over everything. College, Myron, the

fat girls, the cheerleading uniform . . . And then as you flash on the moment of original

action-figure sin in your sister’s bedroom, you will understand that just as your hand held

onto Darth Moll, it also held onto Barbie. After all, it was not easy to do what you did

with that light-saber. The weapon did not commit the crime by itself. You needed a

cigarette lighter, a push-pin, and the point of a pencil. And Barbie had to hold still while

you and Darth went to work. She had to want it to happen to her. And if it was your hand

that held her, then it was you - you wanted it to happen to you. Thus, you will finally

know that if you were Darth, then you were Barbie as well. It wasn’t them. It was you. It

was always you.

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You can do one of two things with this realization. You can accept it, let your

hand recoil from Demarcico, Deluvio, or Degenerito’s body, flee from her bedroom, and

run home to your former backyard to seek the Barbie doll you now know to be yourself,

or you can reject it — swallow the little epiphany, forget any connection between your

hand and what it touches, and casually plunge it into the smooth, moist folds of her

waiting genitalia. And so, from that day forward, you will no longer behave, for this is

the decision that rends the very word in two, offering you two possible lives — one in

which you will be, or one in which you will have.

If you choose to be, you will leave this poor confused woman reaching up at you

through her sheets as you clumsily assemble your clothing and dash from her apartment.

Without your car, you will be forced to jog back to that bar and then drive to the house

that molded your childhood. Park your car on the street and sprint to the back yard. By

now, of course, that earlier drizzle will have turned into a raging storm. The sky will be

crowded with darkness, jagged slivers of lightning will zig and zag toward the horizon,

wind will bend trees and spit the rain sideways, and you will bumble desperately in the

mud as you dig for that Barbie doll with your bare hands. Finding places to start your

search will be easier than you think. In the years between your departure and our

untimely demise, your father and I will have extended the garden so that a dying tomato

patch will now decorate the lot where you buried all of your playthings. Look for the

patches of mud where nothing grows, and begin. Scratch, claw, and dig, but for hours you

will find nothing but the soldiers — stem-faced little men with rigid bodies tumbling

through your fingers. As the rain continues to assault you and you pull nothing from the

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earth but these plastic men whio died for an imaginary cause, you will begin to despair.

This, you will think, is how it all ends. Lie on the ground and call up to the heavens: “Let

me drown here with my comrades at arms! Hold tight, men, I come to meet you in

Valhalla!” But soon you will discover that if you are lying down, then this is a patch of

earth big enough for a body — this is a patch of earth you must explore. And there beneath

you, as you scoop away mounds of mud, you will find that golden cheerleading uniform.

Hold it close, hug it to your body, and know that if you danced like this all those many

years ago, it was only because you wanted to wear that uniform just as much as you

wanted to storm that plastic m.ountain and plant your flag on the crest of Iwo Jima.

That is when you will Tnow that you cannot find that Barbie, because you never

buried her; she buried you. Even after you destroyed her perfect little body, she was too

much you for you to let her go. You hid her somewhere in the basement of a house that is

no longer yours, and now, witlh everything gone, she too is gone, packed away

somewhere in your cousins’ o t sister’s houses, waiting in the darkness of some closet for

some other child to discover hier, bring her to life, and commit unspeakable acts against

her perfection. So then, as you leave the garden, this is how you will be for the rest of

your life: alone, miserable, but wise with the unshareable knowledge that you are the

soldiers, as you are the cheerleading uniform, as you are the Barbie, as you are the desire

that seeks to bury them all.

If you choose to have, on the other hand, you will stay with Demarcico, Deluvio.

or Degenerito and fornicate with the ferocity of the storm that rages outside her windows.

In the morning you will hold her as she cries, spilling out to you the knotted yam of her

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miserable life. Tell her it’s OK, pat her shoulder, stroke her hair, and kiss each of her

eyes. You are here now, you will tell her, and everything can change because everything

will change. A month later, you will leave New York and move back to this town

permanently. You will court Degenerito, Demarcico, or Deluvio with the nervous

seriousness of a schoolboy. You’ll bring her flowers, write her unrhymed poetry,

massage her feet when she comes home from waiting tables, and, after a year of

resistance, breakdowns, and sloppy sex, you will marry her, adopt her children, and soon

spawn three more of your own. So then, as you hold her hand, snuggle close in front of

the television, and swear that a sordid past is nothing more than interesting to you, this is

what you will have for the rest of your life: You will have a wife, you will have a family,

you will have happiness, but you will be nothing. You will forget everything. Just as you

will ignore every desire you now deem to be unwholesome, you will forget the soldiers,

the uniforms, the suicides, the Barbies, and, in time, you will forget yourself.

So that’s it. Those are the breaks, kid. You can’t have everything. One way you

will be, and one way you will have, but neither way offers both. You will either walk out

of the garden soaked with rain, caked with mud, or you will learn to love this aging

woman, learn to accept the swell the years lend to your hairy flesh, learn to feel a warm

regard for children who watch you with calm suspicion and resentment. And when these

children ball up their fists and throw their silly tantrums against the world and the living

room rug, you will grasp them by their little shoulders, look straight into their teary eyes,

and say to them quite sternly, but with all due sincerity, “You will behave.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE SHORT HAIRS

So I was nervous enough about going down to Red Creek to meet Jane's pop, and

then she tells me he’s got this thing about “long-hairs.” Right off, I refused to cut the

ponytail. Said it was a piece of me — my spirit, who I am. Then Jane did that thing where

she dances her fingernails on the back of my neck, and she starts telling me that once

we’re married me and her are the same spirit anyway. Now sure, that itches me even

worse than the ponytail thing. I try to tell her there’s things about me she don’t know,

don’t want to know, but Jesus those fingernails. So, long story short: I cut it off, and,

yeah, when I pinched them scissors shut, I felt like I might as well have been turning

myself into a steer, but I can talk myself out of that feeling soon as I even think about

how Jane’s fingernails can tickle up the short hairs on the back of my neck now.

So then we drive out to Red Creek — me with my clean-cut head and Jane with

that flower-patterned dress she always saves for Easter Sunday - and, the thing is, when

we get there, the old man’s not even around. I meet the mother, shake her small limp

hand, set the box of wine down on the table, listen a bit while Jane’s kid-sister squawks

about some high school football player who’s got hands like bear-claws, and I’m

thinking, “Shoot, I cut off the ponytail for this?” Then Jane’s mom tells me the pop’s out

back, I should just head on out and introduce myself, and before I’m even out the screen

door the three of them are sitting down at the table, sharpening their voices the way

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women do and patting their hands on each other’s arms like they need to smooth

something out of their sleeves before they can get their stories straight.

Outside, it’s hot. Red Creek hot — that different kind of hot where your sweat gets

thick as syrup and the air feels like it could drown you. I looked out over the backyard,

already wiping at my forehead, and just past the edge of the porch I saw him, hunched

over and shirtless — just a big wadded-up ball of back muscle crouching over a garden

and cursing up a storm of words I wouldn’t even repeat on a Saturday night let alone a

Sunday morning with guests in the house. So 1 stood right where I was for a second,

looking at the thin silver hairs on his shoulders and wondering what the heck I should do.

Before I could make up my mind, though, the old man spun around after

something and reached for the underside of the porch still cursing up a blue mile. That’s

when he catches a look at me, though, and right away his face is turning purple and he’s

lifting himself up off his knees. He says his “shoots,” slaps the dirt off his palms and

introduces himself with one of those handshakes we used to get from the Navy recruiters

who came around the high school — stand firm, look you in the eye, be all that you can be,

son.

But soon as I get my hand out of his, I’m feeling pretty all right, cause he’s too

embarrassed by his sweat and his cursing to play up the father thing too much, and right

away I start to like the guy for it - the purple face, the sweaty back, the tangle of gray on

top of his head. I figure, he’s all right, so I try to say something to show him I’m all right

too. “Getting in some work on the garden?” I say, and first he’s like, “Yep,” but then he

looks down at the ground, looks back up at me, and says, “I just can’t keep that little

bugger out of the tomatoes.” Now I’m nodding like I understand, like I got my own

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. garden, my own buggers, and my own tomatoes back home. It's all like, *‘Yep, old-timer.

The rest of the world may be against us, but I know how you feel.”

Well, I guess he takes this all a little too seriously, because next thing I know he’s

telling me his plan, telling me how I could help him. Apparently, this bugger he’d been

chasing scurried under the porch, and now he wants to flush it out with the hose on one

side so I can catch it on the other. He hands me a spade, runs through the plan again, and

then just looks at me, waiting for a nod. Now mind you, I got my Izod shirt on and my

Docker pants, and I ain’t in a mind to take any more orders from the man I already cut

my tail off for, but what can you do? I don’t know him enough to do nothing but nod my

head.

So he rolls out the hose and squats down on one side of the porch while I stand

over on the other side wondering what I’m supposed to do with the spade. I wrap my

fingers tight around the handle, roll my knuckles a bit. The air is thick, sure, but it’s got

that summer smell — all mowed lawns and baseball fields. I can hear the women giggling

it up inside, and for a minute I like the way it all feels. I can pick out Jane’s laugh

skipping up over her mom’s and her sister’s, and I look over at the old man nodding his

head at me, getting ready to twist on the hose, and then I’m standing back and looking at

all of us, thinking, this is me, and this is them, and this is all kind of like us now. It’s a

good kind of feeling. Happy. I can picture it all. Jane’s pop walking her down the aisle,

her mom dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex in the first pew, her sis standing by in some

big yellow bride’s maid dress . ..

It all looks just about right to me, and then I hear the swooshing of the water.

Jane’s pop starts cursing again, and I stare down at the hole on my side of the porch,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. waiting for it to give birth to this little bugger I’m supposed to catch. Well, first there’s

just a scratching sound, then a hissing, then you can hear the scurry. I tense up, flex my

thumb and my fingers tight around the big long handle of the spade, and before I can

even ask Jane’s pop what to do, this big old groundhog — long and fat as a cow’s belly -

rumbles up from that hole.

First thing I do is jump back though, cause I’m not one to mix much with animals,

and this little bugger looks mean enough to bite through a couple of toes. Still, even as

I’m jumping back, I can hear Jane’s dad yelling, “Get him! Get him!” So what can I do? I

suck it up, turn the spade so it’s between my shoes and the groundhog, and I start shoving

him back into the comer between the house and the porch.

He rolls against the spade, darts back toward the house, all panicky — not knowing

what’s happening or where to go — and the whole time I’m cutting off all his angles until

I got him wedged up in the comer. Now he’s treading up dirt, rolling and scratching

against the house and the spade, and I yell back to the old man that I got him. And now,

even though I can feel my shirt sticking to my armpits, I’m feeling pretty good again,

like, “Yeah, me and the old man did it!”

Soon enough though, I’m thinking, Well, what now? “Where we going to put

him?” I ask the old man. “What’re we going to do with him now?”

Jane’s pop high-steps his way around the porch, jogs up behind me, and starts

shouting, “Whack him! Use the spade, son. Kill the little bugger!”

Now I’ve never been one for hunting, or butchering, or any kind of animal

handling. I mean I got nothing against it all. I’ll eat burgers and wear my leather jacket

till the day I’m buried, but still, I’ve never had to be the one to do it, and I never expected

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I would. So I glance at the old man over my shoulder, asking him for some kind of help

with my face, but he just keeps on shouting, “Whack him! Whack him!”

The spade feels heavy as a sledge-hammer in my hands — like if I swing it, it’s

going to carry me right down with it. Still, there’s the oid man’s face, puckered up and

red, and there’s his voice ringing out for me to whack away like it’s no big deal, like it’s

something we all do — just part of the routine. And the thing is, the voice somehow makes

that spade lighter, makes my hands lighter, tells me there’s nothing to think about here -

thinking’s done, now all I got to do is do. Next thing I know, I hoist that spade up in the

air and swing it down against the groundhog’s nose. He tried to bolt out of the comer, but

I catch him clean and send him right back against the house with a crunch.

Thing is, the little guy’s tougher than you’d think. Soon as he bounces off that

wall, he’s bolting back out again like nothing happened. I swing the spade again, catch

him on the top of the head, and swing it again, and then again after that, like it’s not even

a groundhog, like I got a hammer and I’m just trying to drive home a nail. But this nail

won’t hold still. He keeps rolling and darting, the spade is ringing up off his hide and his

bones and all, and he starts squealing as loud as a siren. So now I got the old man behind

me screaming for me to kill him, I got this groundhog squealing and hissing, and I’m

thinking that’s why they call you a hog, cause you squeal just like one, and it’s all

sudden, like now I really know something. I know this little critter’s name and where it

comes from, I know how his head and back make the spade handle rattle in my hands, I

know how the spade rings when it hits a hard spot o f bone and how it splats when it hits a

soft spot in between.

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Then I hear something else besides the squealing and the yelling, and I know it’s

Jane — that little half scream, half gasp she lets out whenever I grab her waist all of a

sudden from behind. So I look up at the porch and there she is. She looks at her dad

yelling his face blue, then she looks at me, all crouched over this squealing animal that’s

got only two legs still pumping, and she clasps both hands over her nose and mouth.

Her eyes dig into me. They spread wide and dig like she can’t recognize me, like

the way my hair is all short in the back and stands up off the top of my head makes me

look like a stranger. I want to tell her it’s OK, I’m just working with the old man, just

getting along and all, but that groundhog is still trying to scurry away, still trying to lunge

out at my feet or anything else he can get his teeth into. The sweat on my forehead

trickles over my eyebrows stinging the comers of my eyes, Jane’s pop keeps his shouts

coming, and as I look at Jane and know what I can’t tell her, know that I got to ignore her

and drive the edge of that spade down into the soft spot between the groundhog’s head

and body, I can feel every one of them short hairs on the back of my neck standing

straight up.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ONCOMING TRAFFIC

A deer leaps through the woods in long, fluid strides. Branches and dry leaves

crack away from its body as it surges forward, unafraid and unaware of the possibility of

oncoming traffic just beyond the trees ahead.

Lisa Tomlinson sits belted securely in her silver Toyota two-door, driving north

on Old Blaine Road, silently reviewing the pros and cons of dumping her boyfriend -

Zeke Thomas, a quiet, sturdy, buzz-cut young man belted into her passenger seat - when

she sees the lively patch of beige fur burst through the foliage twenty feet from the left

side of the road.

The sight means nothing to her at first. At a rate of forty miles per hour, which

translates loosely to fifty feet per second, Lisa travels thirty-five feet before she even

realizes that this bouncing patch of animal life emerging from the trees is indeed one of

the very deer promised or threatened by the minimalist yellow-and-black traffic sign she

saw two miles back. She is rolling her head to the left, sucking air meditatively through

her teeth, stuck on the idea that Zeke’s very sufficiency as a boyfriend has somehow left

him insufficient — that she cannot love him simply because he loves her in an

unrestrained, teary-eyed kind of way that gives her a sense of emotional nausea she likens

to what she must have felt as a child when she abandoned an old, too familiar toy to

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complain for one that she knew her parents could not afford - when, bam: sight pulls

together with thought, and suddenly, out of the comer of her eye, a deer happens.

“Oh my God,” she says, fast enough for it to sound like one word.

Tom Manson, tense behind the wheel of an overstuffed mini-van, driving

southbound on Old Blaine Road at a fifty-mile-per-hour clip, twenty minutes into the

family camping trip he’s been planning for seven months, does not see the deer. He has

seen the traffic signs on his side of the road, but right now he’s got other things on his

mind. To his right, there’s Jane, the wife steadily receding further and further behind a

veil of plastic surgery and sexual apathy; in the child safety seat on his rear flank, there’s

Dylan, the three-year-old son who cries in his sleep and grinds his teeth when it’s time to

take his Ritalin; and, directly behind, there’s Mike, the fourteen-year-old son who shows

no interest in life beyond the narrow slice offered within the pages of a tattered book of

old-time baseball statistics he insists on carrying with him where ever he goes.

With his eyes tunneled on the road directly in front of the hood, Tom thinks

back to the day Mike was bom. He’d wedged his arm between his wife’s neck and the

hospital pillow, held her in her bed as she held their tiny, red-faced baby, and felt sure

that he never wanted to move. He wanted to be a family — never pull away, never get up

from that bed. There was a phrase he’d thought for a long time, playing it over and over

in his head since he was eighteen as if it were a line he was memorizing for a play he’d

be performing someday for the rest of his life, and suddenly he felt the opportunity to say

it. “You know,” he said, turning his face toward his wife’s, “I know what I want to do

when I grow up. I want to raise children.”

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Now, this memory is an embarrassment to him. He cringes as if he w ere

remembering the day he declared that his goal in life was to change the face of” rock

music, and he thinks of a recurring dream in which he sees his youngest son D^ylan

twenty years in the future. They are seated at a square table with a deep burgumdy

tablecloth. Dylan, perched atop a barstool, looks down on him, as he seems to I)e

squatting on a footstool or sometimes on an end-table or cinder block. At some: point

there is a toast, the two men touch glasses, and Tom, in a tender yet deep and confident

voice, says, “You know son, it took me almost twenty-five years to realize it, taut when I

saw your brother bom, I decided drat what I wanted to do with my life was raise

children.” Dylan sighs through a sneer, then chuckles. “Really?” he says, and Tom is

about to nod solemnly when his son cuts him off. “What children?” he demancfls. "Really,

what children were you talking about? Hell, I’d love to meet them.”

“What?” Zeke asks, but there is no time for Lisa to explain.

She sees the mini-van streaking toward the deer’s path, but she freez>es when

she reaches to sound the horn for a last-minute warning. The deer bounds steadily

forward, running as if the road doesn’t matter, and Lisa is struck by the singular beauty of

its independent and unaffected stride. Aside from shifting her eyes to follow it_ she is

temporarily unabie to move.

Zeke is wondering at the cause of Lisa’s mysterious “ohmygod,” hoping this is

not another instance of the enigmatic, unreachable moodiness she has adopted recently,

when he too catches sight of the deer. The lean light-brown body plunges forward

carrying its small rack of antlers with such grace that Zeke is at first sure that hie is

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looking at a picture of a deer rather than a live animal. He dismisses this thought in an

instant, but its residue combines with his momentary worry over the “ohmygod” to

invoke an unwanted memory from an anthropology course he took with Lisa a little less

than a year ago.

The topic of discussion was art in ancient tribal cultures — cave paintings to be

specific. The professor, using a deer as his example, had asked the class to theorize the

reason why primitive tribes felt compelled to render the animal form on the wall of a

cave. Several students, including Zeke, offered utilitarian explanations — hunting

diagrams, pictorial instructions — but then Lisa wearily leaned back in her chair, threw up

her hand as if she were reaching for the first rung on an invisible ladder that would

deliver her from the room, and calmly dismissed the entire notion of utility. “It’s not for

any useful reasons,” she said. “Think about it. These people didn’t have much time on

their hands. There’d have to be a quicker way to teach hunting than painting a deer on the

wail. I say, if they took the time to paint a deer on the wall, it was basically because they

had to paint it — just like they had to kill it. They had to have it. They saw the deer and

they just couldn’t resist that primal urge to hold it, to stop it, to keep it still.” Zeke looked

over at the chair-desk next to his and was struck by how remote his girlfriend had just

become. With her eyes focused on the professor and her mouth moving intently and

precisely, Lisa suddenly looked to him as if she had been placed on the small end of a

telescope. He listened as she defended her explanation against questions from a few

students, watched her drift further and further away from that quasi-emotional space he

designated as his own, and understood for the first time why, when he embraced this girl,

he felt the need to hold her so tightly that her back complained in rapid-fire crackles - or

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why, when he gripped her fingers, he always felt like the constant motion of living had

momentarily stopped.

As the deer nears the road and the mini-van barrels steadily forward, the

memory strikes Zeke as an idea, and he wishes, with the desperate intensity of all

impossible wishes, that the deer would simply freeze.

The deer, of course, does not freeze. It charges across the grass with only the

whip of the taller weeds, the streaming smell of the dead autumn air, and the rhythm of

its hooves to guide it. There is nothing now but run. Minutes ago there was fear, but now

that is gone, and all the deer knows is the reality of its own body moving forward - legs

reaching, iegs leaping, muscles tensing and relaxing in spasms that pull it forward much

in the same way gravity pulls rain from the sky. In this straight line that is fact, this path

that can go nowhere but where it must, the deer sees neither road, nor car, nor mini-van.

“Keep still!” Jane Manson snaps as she turns forward, away from her youngest

son, and settles back into her seat. Dylan releases a sustained high-pitched groan that

sounds to her like a car-alarm that has already been blaring for two-and-a-half hours. She

allows herself a theatrical sigh as she glances sidelong at her husband, wondering how he

can allow himself to tolerate his children by simply ignoring them. She remembers him

ten years ago stretched out on the sofa as she walked in the door, her arms bulging with

grocery bags, to find Mike huddled in the comer of the living room busily dismantling

the antique clock she’d spent months restoring.

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She watches Tom out of the comer of her eye, and his face refuses to show the

slightest sign of annoyance or anger as he stares straight ahead at the road. His strong

chin, deep-set eyes, and long Roman nose look to her almost exactly the same as they did

on the day she met him eighteen years ago, and she can’t help but realize that the true

horror of marriage is not that people change, but rather that they do not. Wondering then

at her own efforts to keep time still with silicon and collagen, as if she were trying to

match her husband’s steadfastness non-stride for non-stride, she tilts her head to the right

and glances at her shrunken reflection in the side-view mirror.

That’s when she sees the deer — or not really the deer so much as a blur of beige

impact. Solid motion into solid motion shoots her upward in her seat, veers the car wildly

to the left, and releases a gasp from the tightness of her throat.

Suddenly the running is no more. Straight is replaced by a sudden attack, a

painful lurch, a weightless lifting. The deer bounces off the right front comer of the mini

van. It flies awkwardly toward the shoulder of Old Blaine Road, its limbs and head

trailing the trajectory of its body as it bends toward its destination like an empty bag

swollen with air.

Lisa sees it happen. The collision echoes inside her stomach as she watches the

deer fly one way and the mini-van skid the other. She clenches one hand on the steering

wheel and reaches the other toward Zeke’s chest. For a moment, as the mini-van hurtles

toward her, less than thirty feet away, she thinks of nothing. Her entire body surges only

with action, and she stands down on the brake, throws the wheel to her left, and swerves

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. into the space where the deer had once been. As the deer arcs down to the roadside just

behind her side window, Lisa cannot help but turn and follow it with her eyes. She

watches the animal hit the ground. It drops like a sloughed-off burden and collapses into

the pavement just a few feet from her car. It takes less than a second, but as Lisa speeds

by and swivels her head, she is sure that she and the deer make eye contact. As she turns

back toward the road, lifts her foot from the brake and continues to drive straight ahead

on the left-hand side, thought returns in a rush and she feels like she understands

something. Already she is recalling the twisted half-open mouth, the wide brown eyes,

the face that held something painfully human in it’s confused despair. Already she is

replaying the motion of the neck resting after the body, the head falling to the pavement

like a child’s sinking into the pillow after a long day of frustration.

She will try to tell this story many times. Friends will hear repeatedly about

how she felt those eyes looking into hers, how she thought she could almost hear the

animal sigh out an exhausted “oh no .. . ”. But they will be more interested in the details

of the accident — the make of the other car, the speed upon impact, the size of the deer.

They will depart unsatisfied.

Now, she is just driving forward. With one hand still pressed against Zeke’s

chest and the other wrapped around the wheel, she shows no signs of stopping. Then

someone’s fingers wrap around her right arm and she feels each of them pressing small,

slippery electrical currents into her flesh.

“Slow down,” Zeke says. “Slow down!”

She lifts her foot slowly off the gas, but the rest of her body stays tense. Breaths

come quickly and loudly, and her entire body feels as if it is ready to shudder, but cannot.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “Lisa!” Zeke shouts. “Stop the car. We’ve got to go back and see if they’re

OK.”

She does as he says. Why not? she thinks. Everything suddenly feels so good.

Her palm pressed against his chest, his fingers sealed around her arm, her breath gasping

in and out, rolling back and forth over her lips . . . By the time the car slows to a stop,

even the stillness in the air caresses her skin.

This is when she does what she doesn’t expect. Relaxing her right arm, Lisa

turns to Zeke with a panting smile, then leans toward him and kisses him passionately.

His mouth tenses at first, but he does not resist. Though his arms never claim her, his lips

part, and soon they are both kissing each other desperately and recklessly with no thought

of where they are or what has just occurred. Lisa does not know it now, nor does she

care, but this kiss will be the greatest kiss of her life. Zeke will pull away in a minute,

spill out of the car and trot up the road, and she will leave him in less than a month

anyway . .. But still, decades from now she will tell her grandchildren about this

wonderful boy she could not love, and almost killed, but then kissed in a way she never

quite kissed anyone ever again.

Dylan wriggles back and forth in his child-safety seat, desperate to see

anything. He knows that something has happened but he does not know what. First came

the crunch, then suddenly everything was pulling to the side and grinding to a stop.

Something was already flying away, and then a young man with army hair went rolling

past his window. But now the van is stopped and everyone is just breathing and touching

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at one another. His mother’s hands crawl over his stomach tightening the straps of his

seat.

“Stay put,” she says between the clicking of her long red nails against the belt,

but Dylan is not looking at her. His eyes are locked on the back of his father’s head and

the small gray patch of unshaven cheek that faces him.

Dylan never knows what to expect from his father. His mother he has down. He

knows to the very pitch the exact sounds he needs to produce to make her smile, make

her laugh, or make her grit her teeth and ball up her fists. But his father, working longer

hours and spending much of his free time talking to the television, remains a mystery.

Dylan often looks toward him with the same cautious tilt of the head he uses now, fully

focused but still just reading the man out of the comer of his eye, bending a quiet gaze

superstitiously and ominously, much in the same way sailors once watched the sky.

Doors pop open, and Dylan stops wriggling as his father steps out of the car.

He looks over at his brother, glances up at his mother, and then, as his neck and body

relax, he realizes without shame that he feels most comfortable when his father is gone.

Mike Manson is old enough to feel a vague sense of regret about the fact that

he is most comfortable when his father is gone. Thus, as he sits cradling a one-thousand

page Elias Baseball Abstract on his lap, he wonders if he should follow him. The speed of

recent events is only now beginning to slow down in his mind, and he knows only in

some strange mixture of recollection and realization that his father has just hit a deer.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “Boys,” his mother says as she twists back toward him with her sleek,

expressionless face, “you just stay put.” With that, she pushes her unlatched door the rest

of the way open and exits the vehicle.

Mike glances at his brother and frowns at his worried stare. Dylan’s forehead

bunches into wrinkles and his upper lip curls toward his nose in the way it often does

when Mike refuses to let him follow him up to the baseball field behind their house.

Softly, Mike whispers the words, “cry, baby,” and then turns away.

Mike feels certain that when he grows up he will not have children. In fact, he

is sure that as soon as he grows old enough to leave this family, he will do whatever it

takes to extricate himself from the mess of family life altogether. The last twenty minutes

— with their tangled line of tantrums, fast-food, and one dead deer — rush into his mind as

an insult to the stable and solid facts of Ted Williams’ 1941 .406 batting average, or Joe

DiMaggio’s fifty-six game hitting streak of the same year. In short, they are a weak

challenge, a limp-wristed slap in the face to the American ideal of perfection, which he at

fourteen years of age knows to be nothing less than attainable.

Through Dylan’s window Mike can see the sprawled body of the deer twenty

feet back on the side of the road. As Dylan turns away from the sight, his face begins to

tremble and tears roll down his cheeks. Mike looks at him and feels gripped by a spasm

of hatred. “Baby,” he spits toward his brother, and then turns away, clutches his almanac

with one hand, and unlatches his door with the other. Before Mike’s foot even hits the

pavement, Dylan is wailing with the shrill, piercing intensity of a police siren.

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A tail middle-aged man in khaki pants and a dark argyle sweater, and a thin

blonde-haired woman wearing tight jeans and a billowy white blouse are already standing

over the deer by the time Zeke has trotted to the side of the road.

“You all OK?” he calls out.

The man turns, shading his eyes with his hands and says, “Think so, how about

you?”

Zeke nods and the moment lingers toward awkward silence. “I guess it could

have been a lot worse,” he offers, not sure what to say. “We almost had a real head on

collision there for a second.” Immediately, Zeke hears his last sentence as an accusation

and wants to take it back. That being impossible, he hurries forward, as if saying

something else will cover up what he has just said. “Got much damage to your car?”

At this, the man in the khaki pants turns once toward the deer, spins awkwardly

to look back at his mini-van, and then flashes a weak smile back at Zeke. “Don’t know,”

he says glancing all around again. “I’m really not sure yet.”

Up the road, Zeke sees a thin long-legged boy circle around the back of the

mini-van and head in his direction. “You got kids in there?” he asks. “The kids OK?”

Once again, the man looks back at the deer with a shrug, then turns back to

Zeke. “Don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t even know what just happened.”

The oddly guilty smile, the slouching shrug, and the simple soft-voiced “don’t

know” seem to hit Zeke in the back of the legs, and for a moment he has trouble standing.

Here, on the side of a road he’s driven down dozens of times, he feels that he has

suddenly turned down a side street that he never thought existed. For ten years, Zeke has

planned out his future to reach this point. Man and wife. Father and child. Family.

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Everything there, everything fixed and still, held in his arms. But now, here, in the

presence of a prostrate deer, in the wake of a near accident of time and traffic, this man,

complete and strong enough to hold his entire family in his car, shrugs and smiles, as

helpless as a child who has just overturned a glass of milk.

Tom squats down slowly beside the deer. Its tangled, clumsy-looking legs and

twisted neck immediately strike a chord, as does the subtle rise and fall of the white fur at

the bottom of its throat.

“It’s still breathing,” the young man says from behind him. "It’s not dead.”

“Yep,” Tom answers.

“Well, what do we do?” Jane asks in a hurried voice as she shuffles out onto

the pavement. “What do we do?” She holds her hands out toward Tom. Her long red

fingernails catch slivers of sunlight, but he ignores her. With his eyes focused on the

rhythmic patch of fur, the wet rolled-back eyes, and the half-open mouth, Tom is

suddenly twelve years old, crouched in the woods behind his parent’s house, cringing

tensely as his father stands behind him shouting, “Kill it! Kill it!”

They’d waited in the deer stand until the dew had soaked through both layers of

the thermal-wear socks Tom had pulled on that morning. Three times he had let his eyes

drift closed, and three times his father had stabbed his ribs playfully with his elbow,

telling him to “Keep eye, keep eye.” Then, just at the point when the stillness, the

waiting, the chirping silence, and the blank morning gray of the horizon seemed ready to

crush him, Tom saw a scrap of deer flash through the tangle of trees and bushes about a

dozen feet to his left. Patience spilled out of his body in a rush, and in a single motion he

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aimed and fired his rifle. A patch of blood sprayed out from the nearest foreleg, and in an

instant, the scrap o f deer was gone. Before Tom could even think to stand up, he was

scrambling into the trees with his father, following a connect-the-dot trail of blood from

branch to branch and leaf to leaf, murmuring, “I don’t know,” to his father’s questions

about the deer’s size and point-count, and panting in shallow, excited breaths. Then he

stepped between two oak saplings and entered a muddy clearing where there lay a small,

crumpled fawn, gasping weakly and bleeding steadily from a small hole in it’s fore

shoulder. “Oh, Jesus,” his father cried out just behind him. “You hit a fawn. Shit. It’s just

a pup, kid.” Tom was already on his knees, planted into the cold mud two feet from the

struggling body. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be out hunting deer anymore. He knew what

he had to do. It was a mistake to begin with, but he had to finish it properly — put the

animal out of its misery. Only now, as he looked at it, he didn’t see misery. He saw a

small twitching animal struggling desperately to live, still pumping its legs in a weak,

limp-muscled attempt to run away from everything. His father was already shouting

behind him, telling him he had to shoot the fawn, telling him that it was right, it was

good, it was merciful, but Tom could not move. Even after his father raised his rifle and

fired a roaring shot into the side of the animal’s head, Tom remained there, kneeling in

the mud as silent and still as the dead fawn now was.

Tom Manson has quietly hated his father on and off for the last twenty-seven

years of his life, but now, as he looks down on the face of the deer he has just battered

with his family vehicle and his eyes swell with ridiculous tears, he wishes desperately

that the old man and his rifle were here by his side.

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First, she thought it was a desire to have sex. But then, as she followed Zeke up

toward the couple and the deer, Lisa realized it was just an overwhelming need to touch

everything. Now she looks at the man squatting in front of the deer and has to grit her

teeth to resist the urge to brush her hand along the short hairs on the back of his neck. She

feels the world alive and vaguely electric all around her, and it is only her knowledge of

tact that keeps her from walking over to Zeke and massaging the ropy muscles of his

forearm, or walking over to this woman and rubbing the thin folds of her blouse between

her fingers. Still, she is only aware of this knowledge as an artificial corruption, a social

virus she feels like another emotional nausea, which seems to fade only at the arrival of

the child.

On the other side of the deer, a gangly boy carrying a large book strolls to a

stop and looks up at the older faces that surround the body. “Is it dead?” he blurts out,

and Lisa, thrilled at the innocent bluntness of his question looks back into his eyes and

smiles with complete satisfaction.

Her husband has not answered her question, so Jane asks it again. “What do we

do?”

“I don’t know,” comes the voice of the young man from the other car, sounding

weak but reassuring, like a trembling hand reaching out to steady her.

Jane turns to look at the calm, square-shouldered young man and feels for a

moment as if she were looking at a composite sketch of all the men she might have

married instead of Tom. The neatly trimmed flat-top could have belonged to Rudy, the

lisping merchant marine who pinched her arm until it bruised because she would not keep

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her hand on his crotch as he drove her home. The warm brown eyes might have been

taken from Max, the teaching assistant who wrote her surreal, imagistic love poems in

college. Here, the resemblance is so strong, in fact, that as those eyes fall shyly away

from hers, Jane can hear Max reading the cryptic line, “Our love is the pale fish of the

evening, sliced open to bleed this dandelion kiss.” Then there’s the mouth — a small,

thick-lipped, puckered frown that is entirely Stanley. She sees him clearly on that last

night, the night of her ultimatum, the night he refused to propose.

She’d come to his office, where they were supposed to meet before going to

dinner in the city, but as usual as of late, he was too busy to take off, and they rehashed a

familiar argument in the stairwell outside his office door. She’d told him that if she was

going to have to deal with routine disappointment, she at least wanted to have the type of

commitment that normally accompanied it. Eventually, he asked if this were an

“ultimatum,” and when she said “yes,” he just stared at her with his lips puckered into

that compact frown. It was a challenge, a defiance, a maneuver. She knew it was her job

to give in, fall limply against his chest, forgive him, and wait patiently five more months

until he got his promotion. But she was tired of waiting. She wanted to get things

moving. She could see the next twenty years of her life laid out in front of her in a

simple, tunnel-vision future, and she was ready to let one step lead into the next. So she

looked at Stanley’s face just until the moment she felt tears bum at the back her eyes, and

then she turned and darted down the steps. Stanley called after her twice, but he did not

move. “Stop this,” he yelled. But she would not stop. She ran down three flights of stairs,

walked four blocks to the subway that would carry her home, and two months later she

met Tom at a sad little Christmas party thrown by her second cousin.

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Now, looking at the scene before her, Jane is not unaware of its metaphoric

possibilities. She sees herself first as this deer running blindly ahead, and Tom becomes

the mini-van. But then she is flexible. Maybe she is the mini-van, Stanley is the deer, and

Tom is this confused young man who can’t even look at her. Then she hears the scraping.

From the ground before her comes the sound of hooves scraping rhythmically

against pavement, and as Jane looks down toward the deer, she realizes that she is wrong,

for if she is anything, she is the deer, as she is herself, as she is the mini-van, as she is

anyone in this circle of people gathered around this dying animal.

The deer strains to swallow the air that presses in from all sides. With a slow

roll of its available eye, it scans the five pairs of eyes that surround it and knows with

animal certainty that they are all one thing. The ground, coarse and cruelly shallow, feels

strange beneath it, and all around the scents of grass, trees, and mud mingle with the

sterile smells of metal and stone. Awareness comes slowly, but the deer knows these

smells, and fear is much stronger than knowledge. The eye darts rapidly, and suddenly

the deer knows that it is being swallowed by this animal that watches it from all sides -

this circle that surrounds no matter where it runs. Then as it feels its legs twitch at the

empty air and scrape against the shallow ground, the deer understands that it is not

running. Fear dances softly with knowledge, and the animal realizes with pure instinctual

clarity that it cannot run unless it stands.

The head is heavy, but with a slow graceful arching, the deer rolls up its neck

and then begins to flop violently against the pavement in a desperate attempt to rise.

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He has seen smiles on women before — his mother’s painful smirk, his teacher’s

merciful grin, or even the teasing giggles he sometimes gets from his brother’s baby

sitters — but this is something different- As Mike Manson looks up into the smiling face

of the woman from the other car, something about the simplicity of her expression, the

sweaty glow on her forehead, and the wild gleam in her eyes combine, and he knows with

mathematical certainty that she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. The curve of

her thigh and the exact contour created by the way her jeans hold her settle for him once

and for all the question of why his friends spend the majority of the junior high dances

clutching at their classmates while he leans up against the bleachers recreating over and

over in his mind the perfect balanced swoop of Will Clark’s swing. Thus, as he relaxes

his hand in mute appreciation of an imagined dance with the perfection of this woman he

does not know and the Elias Baseball Abstract slips from his grip, splashes to the

pavement, and startles him back to reality, Mike is the last of the circle to see that the

wounded deer is standing.

Each in the circle takes a step backwards, spreading arms in unison, and from

where Dylan is sitting, it looks almost as if they are holding hands, forming a ring around

the crippled deer as it staggers up on its haunches. Dylan leans into the window, gasps

back his tears, and stops screaming. Now he is only watching. He cannot understand what

he sees, but he will remember it. Someday it will come to him — an undigested morsel of

recollection. He won’t know where or when it comes from, but someday many years

from now, he will massage his chin and wonder at this silent ring of worshipers spreading

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back from a deer on the side of the road as if in dance, as if in some strange ritual — some

prayer for a forgiveness and redemption that only the wounded animal can give.

So now they are one. Neither moving nor standing still, the circle spreads. The

deer wobbles up in the center aiming it’s antlers at nothing, and the circle spreads like a

mouth widening into a stunned and appreciative ”Ah . . .” For that moment, none of them

is thinking of anything but the deer. They are watching and waiting the way primitive

hunters and cave painters must have watched and waited, standing on the balls of their

feet as if they are balanced on the edge of wonder and fear. The deer lurches crooked

with its neck, then rocks it’s balance back to its forelegs, and as everyone takes a step

backwards, the circle spreads out onto Old Blaine Road, solid, intact, unending, and

completely unaware and unafraid of the possibility of any oncoming traffic.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE GIRL WITH THE SCARF

I reminded Ken that I wasn’t invited, but he didn’t care. “So?” he said. “You’ll be

my guest. You’re allowed to bring guests to things like this.”

Ken was standing at my side as I stared into my bathroom sink ready to twist on

the water. He had that stupid grin on his face and that stupid cowboy hat on his head.

"Call me Cowboy Ken," he'd always told me as he brushed his thumb under the brim, and

I always did. I mean, hell, he had the look - clean American features, the strong chin of

an honest statesman or a dangerous loner. Though Cowboy Ken, a city dweller for all of

his thirty-two years, had never so much as smelled a horse, let alone ridden one into the

sunset, he suffered from a striking resemblance to Ronald Reagan in his western movie

days. It made you struggle to keep from smirking whenever he talked to you, but I did

my best.

“Look, Cowboy, 'guests’ means ‘dates,’” I said, touching the stainless steel

faucet. “Guys don’t bring guys to wedding receptions. Everyone will think we’re gay.”

“So? You got to let go of these prejudices, man. You’re building a wall against

reality. Brick by brick, brick by brick...”

Ken might have kept on talking and the bricks might have kept on bricking, but I

couldn’t hear him anymore. When I ran the cold water over my hands, that sharp hiss

seemed to drown out everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Sounds,

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sights, thoughts. I turned on the water and everything melted. Reality? Whatever. It all

vanished, and suddenly I felt myself careening toward the floor.

According to Ken's figures, I was running on thirty milligrams of morphine and

seventy-five milligrams of ephedrine. He said the morphine was supposed to take down

the inhibitions, while the ephedrine kept me on my feet. I’d been officially back "on the

wagon” for six weeks, so I was relying on every non-alcoholic drug I knew of to prop m e

up against that “raging wind of reality” I’d been hearing so much about lately. I was

lucky though: Ken was a pharmacist.

I met Ken in the RMR program. He was my sponsor. Those letters stand for

Release, Management, Reality — it's basically an AA splinter group and, yes. I’d already

been through all that "Hello my name is ..." bullshit. RMRs just took their twelve steps

a little more seriously; no one smiled at any of those confessions of weekends lost in

bathtubs, blondes, and bomb-shelters. It served as a last chance of sorts. Anyone who

turned up in the musky high-school gymnasiums where we met did so for the simple

reason that nothing else had worked. Basically, the RMR theory went through three steps:

the release of all controls — chemicals, co-dependencies, whatever — followed by the

management of some shit I never paid enough attention to, which then all added up to "a

sincere encounter with reality." The main point of departure from other recovery

programs, though, was that in RMR, from day one, all chemicals, legal or illegal, were

off limits. Coke, pot, aspirin . . . all of it out the window, just like the booze. Cowboy

Ken had his own ideas though.

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At the end of my second week in the program, Ken drove over to my place at two

in the morning with a little black doctor’s bag filled with prescription drugs. I’d been

feeling it pretty bad that night. I'd rolled across every inch of my bed, sweated through

two sets of sheets, and vomited twice from the inexplicable stench of bourbon that

seemed to cling to the walls. So I did what I was supposed to do. I called Ken.

"It’s all right,” he said. “Just let it go. Turn on the TV, read a book, do something.

Give yourself a 20-minute break from reality and I’ll be right over.”

When he got there, he opened his little black bag, and I almost had a stroke. All

those little white capsules and clear vials rested and rolled on one another like tangled

bodies piled into some kind of chemical orgy. I hadn’t seen that many drugs at one time

since high school, and the truth is, they looked so damn good, they scared the shit out of

me.

“Now just calm down, Ricky,” Ken said, and it sounded like he knew what he was

talking about — almost like he was a doctor. I mean, hey, he had the bag. So I listened. I

sat down on the couch and he went into his theory of recovery.

“Now you got to understand,” he said. “I believe in the program as much as

anybody else out there. I’m a twelve-stepper just like you, but I’ve been at this for a long

time, and I’ve come to realize certain limitations. What they fail to recognize is

something very basic to the core of human nature. It’s why sixty percent of the people

who start with the first step never make it to the twelfth no matter if they’re taking life

one day at a time or one second at a time. I’ve been sober for three years and I know it’s

something that can’t be done without medication. It’s a basic human fact. Desire is the

only thing that can quench desire. Addiction can only be replaced by addiction. Craving

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isn’t cured by acquisition; craving is only cured by craving something else. Such is the

nature of human appetites.” He pulled out an oblong liquid capsule. “This is codeine.” he

said. “This will get you through tonight. Tomorrow I’ll start you on Ritalin; we’ll see

where that goes. I like to get the right drug synergy going. It’s necessary to keep you at

an even keel while you still get that sense of general well being.” Despite the cowboy hat

and the smile, I admit, Ken always struck me as a smart guy. It was his voice, really —

that smooth pharmisisct’s drawl that makes you feel safe taking controlled substances

about which you know almost nothing.

Still, I took the capsule from his hand cautiously. “What's the difference?” I

asked. "Why don't I just have a drink? If I'm going to take anything—”

"The difference is, you're still letting go — you're still in the release stage. Right

now that raging wind of reality is blowing you all over the place and you want something

to hold on to. You recognize that you're not in control, but you can't self-medicate.

You've been trying with the liquor, but it's not working. So you let go, you let me do it. I

take you there in stages. Replace your control with mine, replace one medication with

another..."

"So," I said, watching the pill blur as my hand shook back and forth, “if I’m

hooked on codeine. I’m not hooked on the booze, and that way I've begun letting go?”

“Right.”

And that was enough for me. I kicked my head back, cupped my hand to my

mouth, and swallowed the large sleek pill. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Of

course, when it's two in the morning and you want a drink so bad that the skin on your

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face itches to the point where you are ready to tear it off, just about anything sounds like

a good idea.

When I woke up on the bathroom floor, Ken was standing over me, looking down

with a mother’s worried smile.

“You passed out,” he said, half surprised. “It was my fault. I fucked up on the

morphine. I keep forgetting to adjust for your weight. Here, try and stand up."

I rolled into a sitting position and it felt like something heavy and loose shifted

inside my skull. My face fell forward into my hands. “Christ,” I said, “I feel like the old

woman who swallowed a fly.”

“Huh?”

“You know the song about the old woman who swallowed a fly and then

something to eat the fly, and then something to eat what ate the thing that ate the fly, and

so on, and so on. Once I was addicted to alcohol, then I was addicted to codeine, then

Percoset, then morphine. What’s next?”

“I’m thinking of moving you onto Valium and beta blockers . . .”

“No, what I mean is where does it all end?” It suddenly occurred to me that this

was a question I should have asked a month ago, and I felt the last word drop from my

mouth with the weight and controlled speed of a wrecking ball that would clobber Ken's

recovery th e o r yinto a pile of dust and rubble.

But the Cowboy was unfazed. With one hand pulling up on my arm, he helped me

stand, and then matter-of-factly said, “Love.”

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The word sounded harsh and sarcastic in the tight acoustics of my bathroom, but I

had no choice but to repeat it. “Love?” I asked.

“Love is the final addiction,” Ken answered as he brushed down my shirt-front

with two quick slaps.

“So love is a drug?”

“Effectively, yes. It’s chemical in nature; it all has to do with the brain.

Dopamine, synapses . . . Love is a drug, and reality is the side effect. That’s why I’m

telling you you have to come to the reception.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Lucy’s gonna be there.”

Lucy. Now there was a name that could still make my eyes dilate. Ken knew how

to press the right buttons, I'll give him that. He knew the whole thing with me and Lucy.

I’d driven him to a condescending smile with the story more than once. Hell, that’s what

sponsors were for.

"Why don't you tell me about it?" he'd asked. "From the start..." Then he’d

looked at me with those rounded eyes staring out from the shadow under the brim of his

cowboy hat.

"I don't know if there was a start," I told him. "I don't know if we were ever

normal. That's the trouble with love. You never can see the difference between hanging

on and letting go. I mean, when does losing control of yourself mean that you have to

take control of her?"

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"Isn't love always going to be about control?" he asked, staring at me with those

same rounded eyes.

"I guess ... But with me and Lucy it was easier to see. We used to do shit. Sexual

shit. You ever heard of erotic asphyxiation?" Now don't think this is such a big deal.

Everything's a little weird when you know about it. Turn the spotlight on yourself and see

how comfortable you are. But talking about it... talking about it's different. I'll admit, I

half expected to see the Cowboy's eyebrows shoot up like two puffs of smoke over a pair

of six-shooters, and I was a little disappointed when they didn’t. If that makes me a little

bit sick, so be it.

"Yeah," Ken said, and he just kept on looking at me.

"Well, we used to do this thing with a scarf. Lucy had this red scarf, and I'd wrap

it around her neck while we were . .. So, you know, it's supposed to make things more

intense. She liked it. I mean, she asked me to do it. She made it up. But then I guess I

took it too far. Sometimes she'd ask me to stop, but it was just play — just stuff to make it

more intense. There was a safe-word — ‘Jalepeno’ — but then Lucy started fucking with

the safe-word. She'd said 'Jalepeno' a couple of times, and I stopped. I thought it was too

tight, but then she tells me she was just getting into it. So then finally one night I'm over

her apartment, and I got this scarf wrapped around her neck, tangled in her hair, half over

her mouth — I mean it's intense shit. After a while. I don't even know what I'm doing. I

mean it's all carrying on and I'm just losing control, going along with myself. But the

whole time, I'm looking down at her face, and it looks like she's really choking. Her

cheeks are turning red, her eyes are rolling back, and the half of me that's still thinking is

looking down on her and thinking, 'Is this real? Is this real?' So then she says it. Hoarse

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and coughed — like a whisper. 'Jalepeno,' she says. 'Jalepeno.' And I don't know what to

do. Yeah, sure. I know. I know I should have known. Hell, maybe I did know. But I didn't

stop, and that's all that mattered. I twisted the loose end of the scarf around my fist and

pulled. Like a sick fucking bastard, I pulled. So she passes out. Limp, right there. I

freaked. I guess I should have waited, tried to bring her around myself. But, you know ..

. I was concerned, so I freaked. I called an ambulance. By the time they get there, she's

awake, but then there's this whole fucking scene. EMTs, cops, everybody looking at you,

dragging you down to the hospital, never even giving you a chance to put all your clothes

on. Shit, I think that pissed Lucy off more than anything else — just having all those

people seeing her like that... So two days later, she tells me she wants to take some

time. She says she can't trust me. She looks at me and she's afraid of me. What can I do? 1

got into the whole thing too soon after I got clean. So two weeks after she starts 'taking

some time' I'm down at Swifty's teaching the bartender how to make a sidecar." (It’s

basically brandy and cointreau with a sugar rim, if anyone’s interested.)

Ken reached out his arm and curled his hand around the back of my neck. His

eyes stabbed into mine, and he smiled. "That's OK," he said. "You let that go. Give it to

me. I'll take care of it for you."

Thing is, he meant it. He went out o f his way to meet Lucy. Followed her to work,

started a conversation with her at the bus stop, exchanged numbers, and they became

friends. No shit. He never even told her that he knew me. “That will come later,” he’d

said, like it was some kind of plan.

Sponsors weren’t supposed to do things like that — even in RMR. They always

talked about boundaries. The importance of staying detached — concerned, but not

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involved — “Brother I can lend a hand but I dare not take the wheel.” Ken didn’t believe

in any of that shit. Like I said, Ken had his own ideas.

“I can’t face Lucy like this,” I said, staring into the medicine cabinet mirror.

“It’s all right,” Ken answered, “I’ll get you a little more ephedrine”

“No, I mean I can’t be on anything. Lucy won’t even look at me till I’m sober.

And when I say sober I mean 100% sober. Sober in the Aristotelian sense of the word,

not the Cowboy Ken Macker sense. Once I get through your program, then I can see

Lucy again.”

“No, but you can’t get through the program until you see Lucy. Lucy is the

program. She’s the last step. Love.”

“I’m telling you, man. Lucy will know. She’ll see right through me. When I’m a

mess, she can see it from a mile away.”

“Yeah, that’s my point. I’ve seen you when you’re unmedicated — sober or

whatever you call it. That’s when you’re a mess, kid. You got no chance in that state. Let

me work up some ephedrine; I’ll counter it with ten extra milligrams of morphine. You’ll

be set. You’ll be charming, well adjusted, intellectual — fucking Cary Grant. Irresistible.

Then you’ll have Lucy and it’ll all be over. Reality, sobriety. The life, man. The life.”

I sank back onto the plastic toilet lid. My head had cleared considerably since I

first sat up, and I wasn’t buying any of Ken’s shit. “No, man. I’m telling you,” I said,

shaking my head, “this one, I’m not following you on. This is too important. If I’m ever

gonna get Lucy back, I can only see her when I’m clean.” I crossed my arms and looked

up at him.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ken’s face sank into that persecuted motherly pout, and I suddenly felt like a

spoiled kid who was about to be punished. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “‘Not following me on

this one.’ Like you’re doing me a fucking favor. Here I am, knocking myself out for you.

Taking you by the hand through this whole thing. Me, your shepherd on the pasture to

sobriety, and this is the thanks I get?”

“Come on, man,” I protested, slouching forward as if he had just rested a large

sack of horse-shit on my shoulders.

“No,” he interrupted. “Look at all the medication I give you. For free. For free,

too. Do you think I give medicine away for free in my other programs? I mean

pharmacists don’t make that much money. I got to survive, kid. I got to think about

necessities. But no, with you it’s none of that; with you I’m doctor fucking Santa Claus.

And this . . . this is the thanks I get? I set up this whole thing. Go out of my way to meet

this Lucy chick, get myself invited to her cousin’s wedding reception and all for who?

For who?”

I rolled my eyes up toward him unsure if he was soliciting audience participation

or not.

“For who?” he continued, “For me? For my fucking health? No — for who, Ricky?

For who?”

“For me,” I sighed, sitting forward and letting my shoulders collapse to support

that imaginary sack more evenly. “What time are we supposed to be there?”

Lucy's cousin, Julia Tottenlieb, had billed the wedding as a private affair — only

family at the service and close friends and their guests at the reception to be held at her

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parents' house. I suppose it's a testament to the charm of cowboy hats and stupid smiles

that Ken was even able to get us through the door. Still, when we got to the Tottenliebs'

house, a small split-level out in the suburbs of Sterling, he did so with the relaxed

panache of a Jehovah's witness.

"Hello, you must be Mrs. Tottenlieb," he said as he extended his hand into the

droopy, speckled fist of a small woman who looked to be in her eighties. "My name is

Ken — you can call me Cowboy Ken ..." (yes. he was still wearing the hat)"... this is

my guest, Ricky Powles."

The old woman nodded twice, chattered something incomprehensible through her

dentures, and then led us into her home. You could see right away that the place had been

knick-knacked to death. Even in the foyer, there was barely an inch of wall space that

wasn't cluttered with some kind of "Bless This Home" mount, tiny wicker basket, or

novelty-sized kitchen tool. I looked around uneasily, as if I was in a new kind of fun-

house where horrifying pieces of kitsch or Amish craft-work lurked ready jump out at

you at any moment. Then we rounded a comer into the living room and I came face to

face with the real horror - Lucy.

Her hair was up, and I have to admit that ever since I was seventeen and dated a

girl who routinely tied back her hair before performing fellatio, I've had an almost

Pavlovian reaction to the unobstructed sight of a woman's neck. Lucy's was smooth,

sweeping - the kind of neck that seems to control or respond to most of the body's

motion. If she leaned, it rolled; if she reached, it cocked; and when she walked, it seemed

almost to sway. Now, she was talking to a shorter girl in a lavender dress, and her throat

seemed to flutter with each word. She saw me too, but that didn't break her. Her brown

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eyes merely shifted for a moment, registered mine, and then returned to look down on the

smaller woman in front of her.

I froze. The extra medication Ken had given me obviously hadn't kicked in yet

and I felt more like a creepy Peter Lorre than a debonair Cary Grant. Luckily though, the

Cowboy came to my rescue.

"Lucy," Ken said, breaking away from Mrs. Tottenlieb, who peeled off toward the

dining room. "You look gorgeous, and I mean that in the way F. Scott always meant it —

simply gorgeous."

Lucy smiled, leaned her head to the side, and cut off her conversation to take

Ken's hand.

"Hey," Ken said, glancing at me over his shoulder and then turning back to Lucy.

"I'd like you to meet my friend—”

"Ricky. I know," Lucy interrupted. "We actually ... know each other. I didn't

expect..." She let the sentence hang unfinished and her smile tightened into a smirk

much in the same way a hand tightens into a fist.

"Hey, Lucy," I said, stepping forward.

"Ricky ..." Lucy's neck leaned slightly backward as she gave me her hand. "How

have you been?"

I tried to shake her hand gently but Lucy gripped me tight. Right on the "been"

she squeezed my hand and widened her eyes into the glazed stare a mother uses to tell her

child that there will be more to talk about when father gets home.

I might have said something like "Fine," but Ken was already taking over.

Stroking the underside of his hat with his thumb, he rushed into that stale discussion of

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small worlds and soon enough Lucy, the lavender girl, and he were talking busily about

Julia, her husband, and the fight they'd had during the photo session in front of the

church. I stood apart nodding, and Lucy glanced at me from time to time out of the comer

of her eye as she explained her reasons for believing that the guests of honor weren't even

going to make it to the reception. "Last I saw, Julia had hopped out of the limo and tried

to hail down a cab," she said, and then Mrs. Tottenlieb was suddenly back on the scene

sweeping the four of us into the dining room.

We all clumped together as we walked down another cluttered hallway, and just

as we entered the doorway toward a long table with ten place settings, Lucy leaned her

head close enough to mine to whisper, "What the hell are you doing here?" The question

had just enough dental hiss to make me wish I was anywhere else, but it was too late; my

next step took me into the dining room, and as I turned to find a place to sit, I came face

to face with a petite blonde-haired girl somewhere in her twenties who wore a long red

dress draped off her shoulders and a tight red scarf tied around her neck.

This was a shock for which no recovery platitude could have prepared me. The

scarf. Red no less. I stumbled slightly, then her eyes locked on mine, and, with a euphoric

rush, I felt every one of those ten extra milligrams of Ken's morphine kick in

"Hi," she said, rising from her seat with a smile of true spokes-model proportions.

"Greetings," I said, trying to return the slow motion pyrotechnics of her smile

with my own as gave her my hand.

But she wasn't looking at me anymore. Leaving my hand empty, she turned just

over my shoulder, let her smile crumble, and said, "Kenny," with a twangy urgency that

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gave me my first clue that whatever was going on here was being controlled outside of

the little rat maze of my existence.

"Evening, Miss," Ken answered as he swept his hat off of his head.

Everyone paused for a moment, hung up in the process of finding their seats.

They looked back and forth between me, Ken, and the girl with the scarf, but nothing

happened. Lucy's eyes looked ready to burst, and her neck stretched slightly as she rolled

back her head with confusion.

Ken, as usual, was ready to pick up the pieces before they could even fall apart.

"OK," he said, calmly resting the hat back on his head. "Let's see what's on the menu for

this evening's festivities." He smiled at Mrs. Tottenlieb, and, like that, we were all

scurrying for our seats.

Ken and I sat side by side with our backs to the wall. On my left, the girl with the

scarf reinserted herself into her chair, and Lucy and two mousy young women in lavender

dresses took their places on the opposite side. In a matter of moments, a large silver plate

of roast beef made its way around the table and we all sank into the uneasy chatter and

chew of a poorly planned dinner party.

The bride and groom never even showed up. Their places remained empty

throughout the whole meal, but nobody seemed to mind. Apparently, they were making

do with the only couple there: the Tottenliebs — our hosts, a pair of shriveled

octogenarians who had been married long enough to comfortably ignore each other's

presence. Mr. Tottenlieb wore the beaten and crumpled look of a man who'd worked too

much in his life. His face was thin and pale. His skin was loose and rubbery so that his

cheeks looked more like jowls. He stood slightly hunched at the back and when he sat

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down he seemed almost completely folded in half. He was basically a skinny man — his

arms and legs were almost bone — but his stomach was round and fat. protruding out over

his belt with such defiant pride that if I hadn’t known better. I would have sworn he was

pregnant. If he had been, I would have been worried, too. He hacked and coughed with

such regularity that it was obvious that every time he excused himself from the table he

was stealing away for another cigarette.

Then, as if the whole scene weren't disturbing enough, you had her - the girl with

the scarf. Sure, I might have had my own reasons for preoccupation, but I couldn't get

that scarf out of my sight. It hung always on the edge o f my view like a scratch on a pair

of glasses.

She thought it was mysterious — glamorous and deep — and everybody bought it.

She told that story about the girl with the ribbon around her neck and the boy who asks

her why she wears it. You know how it goes . . . They're friends; she wont tell him. They

become involved; she won’t tell him. Then, they get married, she takes it off and, bam.

her head falls right off her shoulders. Everybody acted so surprised when she got to the

punch line. Oh dear! Like we’ve never heard that one before, and Oh my! So profound.

Yes, what a delicate and wonderful mystery is woman. Give me a fucking break.

The worst part was that she wore the damn scarf so tight. The knot was tied to the

side, big and firm like a clenched fist pushed into the edge of her throat. It had to be

uncomfortable. But, hell, that's what all these girls want — knot up your neck and then

forgive your fingers so you can blame it on the scarf. OK, that's me. That's my hang-up.

But to tell you the truth, I wish it would have been a little tighter, because even with this

little silky noose around her neck, the girl just wouldn't shut up. By now I'd fully

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absorbed Ken's medication, and every time I was ready to chirp some charming little

epigram to prove to Lucy, how far I'd come, the girl with the scarf was squawking out

cliche after cliche about women and masochism.

"Women," she said as if the entire dinner table hung on her throaty twang, "grow

more attracted to the men they love, but men love the women they grow attracted to. This

is the reality — the rocks — and we, ladies, we are but the wreckage." Then later, cutting

me off in my first attempts to ask after Lucy's personal life: "Love may be the foundation,

but marriage is the house. You can be solid and grounded, but still have a leaky roof."

And the worst part is, each time she spat something out, the table responded with

a chorus of laughter peppered with Mr. Tottenlieb's hacking coughs. I wondered how

much the drugs might be affecting me. I couldn't understand how any of this could be

happening. The girl with the scarf and Ken never so much as glanced at each other during

the meal, but still I felt like he knew her — like he and the rest of them were all in on some

tacky joke at my expense. And then there was Lucy. On the other side of the table, she

might as well have been miles away for all she noticed me. She kept looking from the

lavender girls to the girl with the scarf, and whenever her eyes even chanced to collide

with mine, she cast them down instantly as if they had touched against something as vile

and loathsome as a misogynistic drunk.

We’d chewed and chatted ourselves well into the dessert course when I finally

took things far enough to earn that title. The girl with the scarf had the floor — as usual.

She was looking down at the roasted pineapple ice-cream sundae swimming in caramel

on her plate. “Food,” she expounded, “can tell us a lot about... people.” Silence and

wide-eyes all around, though mine couldn’t help but roll. “Women prefer sweets, while

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men’s tastes lean toward salty snacks. When I look at this sundae, I can see my whole

life, right up from girlhood to this moment. The pineapple, the raw and mildly tart burst

of youth. The syrup, the sugary weight of teenage temptation. And then the ice-cream ...

vanilla, the cool solid — some say bland — balance of womanhood. Ricky ..." Ajnd here’s

where she made her mistake. “What do you see when you look at your sundae?”

There followed that short moment of silence and stillness that precedes all

disasters. All around the table, spoons hung just beneath open mouths, eyes turned

expectantly towards me, waiting for the first time for what I had to say. .And to tell the

truth, I had nothing. Not a single word came to mind. After all the rehearsed speeches of

self-aggrandizement I’d been running though my head, after all the plans of exactly

which words would push Lucy’s head into that rapt tilt of adoration, I had nothing. But

the moment had arrived. I couldn’t let it pass. “Open your mouth, jackass,” the ephedrine

and morphine told me. “Let words beget words, stumble, blather, babble. Just say

something, anything — but make sure it’s a doosey.” What else could I have done?

“Well,” I began. “I’m afraid don’t share your talent for expounding on the

symbolism of dessert food. But that’s OK. I don’t need to look at a pineapple to tell me

anything about myself. And I sure as hell don’t need to look at a pineapple to tell me

anything about womanhood. How about... let me look at you, and I’ll tell you

everything there is to be told about the walking wounded, or, as we call them in the

modem parlance, bitches.” I turned toward the girl with the scarf and drank in an eyeful.

Spoons clinked delicately against plates, eyes darted nervously, and I went on:

“It started with your father. He used to do things to you. Bad things. Feed you

cookies before dinner, let you wear your good dress up to the playground, take you down

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in the basement, pull down your pants, hold lit cigarettes to your genitalia . . . It doesn’t

matter if it didn’t happen that way. In some form or another this is what all fathers do to

their daughters. Sexual abuse, humiliation, physical torture ... This is the essence of

fatherhood. It’s what the word means. ‘Father.’ Say it slow. Fath — er. ‘Fath’ from the

Latin or the Norse ‘fade’ for 'weak' or 'to weaken.' The, ‘her’ from the same root as ‘her,’

the pronoun referring to a female — that one's rather obvious. ‘Fath - her’: to weaken the

female. That’s what they do. They’re the first ones. They prepare you for a life of it. Then

there is that first boyfriend. Oh, he was a shy one. But you brought him out. So ready to

submit, you built a tyrant from a mound of quivering flesh. You liked it when he hurt

you. But it was just emotional at this point — phone calls never returned, busy signals,

nights with the boys, oral sex with your best friend ... you get the picture. So you came

in late for school, dark around the eyes, spending hours in the nurse's office, crying in the

cafeteria . .. Such a thrill to be in pain. Everybody loves you when you’re miserable and

you love anyone that can make you miserable. Then, sooner or later, you find him. The

real one. A common drunk — couldn't hurt a fly. But you train him, tell him to choke you.

It's all sexual. You want to be dominated, then you want to point your finger. So he

chokes you, chokes you the way your father taught you you deserved to be choked, and

you walk around with this scarf, hiding the little finger shaped bruises - or accenting

them with a mask, like the way you color your eyes ... it doesn't matter—”

By this time Lucy was on her feet. "Ricky," I heard her say and then I looked up.

"Stop this," she urged slowly, leaning her neck to the side. "Stop this right now."

"Ricky," Ken added in his calm pharmacist’s voice. "Let it go. Reality is blowing,

let it blow through you."

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“Reality?" I answered. "Reality isn’t the wind. Love is the wind, I’m the sail, she's

the rocks, and this is the fucking wreckage.”

Mr. Tottenlieb hacked suddenly and I wanted to thank him for his timing, but I

didn't have time. There was a point to be made. It was as if every chemical that had been

in my body in the last six weeks suddenly crystallized into an im pulse to tear back the

curtain and expose the little man working the levers to every dinner party in existence.

Mr. Tottenlieb was still coughing, half of the table was leanin_g toward him with

concern, but I needed to make something clear. "This is the wreckage," I shouted, and

everyone spun back to me.

Reaching slowly to my left, I brought my fingers inches from her throat. The girl

with the scarf leaned back slightly, but she was too shocked to stand. Her eyes widened

into circles, her lips parted as if she was waiting to be kissed, and them suddenly my hand

was on the scarf. "This," I shouted again, "is the wreckage!"

I pulled on the loose end. Hard. Hard as I could, at least. My Inand felt limp and

weak, but I wrapped my fingers around the soft material and tugged down with my

shoulder and elbow. The truth is I was trying to choke her. I know it sounds horrible, but

I was pulling to tighten it. “You want to choke? Here, I’ll show you w hat it’s like to

choke.” This is the way I was thinking.

I don’t know how she had the thing tied though. I guess I should have looked at

the knot a little more closely - though I'm glad I didn't — because as I pulled on the end,

the little fist at the side of her neck just slid loose, released, and, as th.e whole thing came

untied, the scarf slid down over her shoulder and floated away in my hand.

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I don't know why people don't gasp anymore, but I'm going to take this

opportunity to say that gasping is something we should do more often. For instance, if

you're at a small wedding reception held in the privacy of some ancient couple's home

and someone suddenly raises his voice and then tears a scarf loose from one of the other

guests’ necks, you should gasp. Just draw in your breath and make a little high-pitched

wheeze. If you're lucky, the rest of the guests will make the same sound, and you will

have yourselves a real moment.

In this case, however, there was no gasp. I opened my hand and let the scarf fall to

the floor, and there it was — the bold sleek inward curve of a naked neck slashed three

inches beneath the chin with a long pink scar in the shape of a legless salamander. You'd

think it would have shocked these people — especially after the whole ribbon story. But

no. There they all stood, mouths half open, eyes wide, but no gasp.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Mr. Tottenlieb was still hacking

away. In a matter of seconds, his pleasantly distracting cough had transformed into a

disturbing bent-over gagging that shook the entire table. The lavender girls shot up out of

their seats and circled to his back. The girl with the scarf was up too. Her hands folded

over her scar in the shape of prayer, and then with a quick glance in Ken's direction she

fled from the dining room. Then Ken was on his feet, slapping away at Mr. Tottenlieb's

back. And Lucy too. She crowded in behind Mr. Tottenlieb, and I tried to catch her eye,

but she only looked at the old man as her neck pulsed breath after breath to the rhythm of

his choked coughs.

Only Mrs. Tottenlieb and I were completely unmoved by the unfolding disaster. I

sat watching calm and detached, and Mrs. Tottenlieb continued to shovel spoonfuls of ice

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cream between her trembling lips. I don’t know if it was the disgusting, half sexual

sounds of her smacking gums, or my sense of defeat, but something was making me

nauseous. Without bothering to excuse myself, I rose from the table and headed for the

bathroom.

The Tottenlieb's bathroom was brighter than any other I had seen before. Its walls

were just as cluttered as the rest of the house — a particularly offensive "Happiness is

being Petie's Memaw" mount hung over the toilet — but somehow the room projected a

clarity I'd been looking for all night. It took immediate effect. I closed the door behind

me, walked over to the toilet and vomited.

After I washed my hands and splashed cold water in my face, I studied myself in

the medicine cabinet mirror. The stark yellow glare of the room brought out shadows I'd

never seen before in my face, and as I ran my eyes over the reflection, I couldn't help but

feel that I was looking at a failure. Another program, another sponsor, another shot at

Lucy, all flushed down the toilet like a half serving of poorly chewed roast beef. But

before I could sink too deep, the bathroom door rattled from somebody's knocking

outside.

"Ricky, you all right in there?" came Ken's voice through the door.

"Yeah," I answered after a moment of silence.

"Let me in."

I took two steps toward the door and pulled it open. Ken spilt in in a rush and

closed the door behind him as I retreated back to the sink. "Great plan," I said. "That went

over like—”

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"Don't worry," Ken interrupted. "The old man's OK. He just had some water take

him the wrong way."

"That's not what I'm talking about here. Remember? Me and Lucy? I told you it

wouldn't work. This was a fucking disaster. I got no hope now."

Ken pulled at my shoulder and tore me off of the sink. "It's OK," he said as he

turned my face to his with both his hands splayed out on the back of my neck. "You can

let go. I'm here for you, Ricky. This is the last step for us. We can do it." His eyes were

inches from mine, and suddenly everything made the kind of sense that doesn't make any

sense at all.

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "Who the hell is that girl? Why did you

bring her here?"

"I'm talking about this. Don't you see? That's what tonight is all about. I had to

show you that you don't need Lucy. We're going to do fine on our own. We've got that

last step."

"Look, Cowboy," I said, pressing my hands against his chest to make him take a

step back. "Why don't you spare me the gymnasium psycho-babble and tell me exactly

what you're talking about."

Ken sighed through his smile and shook his head gently. "Don't you see? This

whole time .. . How long has it been since you've needed a drink? You've been fine for

six weeks. Six weeks."

"I've been on drugs for six weeks."

"No. No." Ken shook his head emphatically. "Placebos. I've been giving you

placebos for six weeks."

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Placebos. Now there's a word to make you think — make you wonder why it is you

feel so dizzy. Perception, reality; perception, reality ... blah, blah, blah, placebos. Even

the sound of it just kind of hit me - steam-rolled up my stomach, then slid down my back,

and, bingo, my posture stiffened and for a moment I felt as sober as a drunk driver staring

into a cop's flashlight. "Wait," I said, waving my hand in front of me. "So how’s that

work? If I've been on placebos for six weeks, how does your theory ... ? What's been my

necessary addiction all this time?"

"Me," Ken answered as he cocked his head to the side, bent his arm up to remove

his hat, and slowly traced a long arc down to his hip. Then he smiled again. Picture a

smile as full, bright, and stupid as any in Ronald Reagan's early westerns, and that was

Ken standing up against the bathroom door. Then picture the romantic sneer of Reagan's

later war films, and that was Ken stepping forward and leaning into my face. Now, finally

picture the confused puckered poker-face Reagan maintained throughout the Iran-Contra

hearings, and that was Ken pressing his mouth against mine.

Yeah, that's right, the Cowboy kissed me. He angled his head to the side, opened

his mouth ever so slightly, closed his eyes, and kissed me. And I just stood there. His lips

spread against mine, and my mouth — yes, my mouth — opened slightly. The rounded

flickering tip of his tongue brushed over my lower lip, raked against two of my front

teeth, and I, standing there with my eyes open and my arms at my side, did nothing for a

moment. Dizzy and unsure, I felt Ken’s mouth against mine as I had felt so many things

I’d pressed against m y mouth. The lip o f a bottle, an uncapped cylinder of pills — it was

all that same. I felt that desire to close my mouth with something else, to choke off desire

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with desire, and for a moment — brief, yes, but a moment all the same — I considered

returning that kiss. Then I realized what was actually happening; then I got pissed.

Now keep in mind, I am only as homophobic as any other middle-class young

man fortunate or unfortunate enough to have reached puberty in the post-Deliverance era.

I harbor no general resentments; I cast no stones. But, somehow — and I think we can

both agree on this — there was more at stake here than those simple "I'm OK, You're OK"

aphorisms. As far as I could see this midnight cowboy mother fucker had manipulated me

for six weeks and one dinner party all for one clumsy kiss. I don't care what your

particular preference, lifestyle, or perversion is, that's reason enough to be pissed.

With my lips still planted against Ken's, I slowly lowered my left hand and

reached for his groin. Ken was squatting slightly — he was a good two inches taller than

me — so I had a nice opening to get my hand on. My fingers brushed against the coarse,

ribbed fibers of his jeans, found their way to his testicles in a searching caress, and then

squeezed.

The denim was thick, so it took Ken a second to realize exactly what was going

on. Poor guy, I think the caress hit him first. He exhaled a soft little moan into my mouth,

backed away about an inch, and sighed out through a sublime grin.

I increased the pressure.

Ken's eyebrows sank down slightly toward the outside comers of his eyes, and his

face wrinkled with concern.

I twisted.

Ken's eyebrows shot up, his mouth dropped open, emitting a soft high-pitched

groan, and both of his hands dove down to my wrist. Another twist and he was taking a

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step back. He tried to pull my hand away, but I was in control. The slightest flicker —

from my fingers, my wrist, my arm, my shoulder — and Ken was moving where I needed

him to move.

"Ricky!" he yelped, and I wondered for a moment if I could make him say other

names as well, if I could walk him out the bathroom door, have him explain everything to

Lucy, maybe even sing for her. But that was hopeless. What was done was done, and at

this point the best move for me was to simply get out of that bathroom, and then get out

of that house.

So I circled Ken away from the door and pushed him back into the comer until he

sank down against the shower curtain and leaned into the bathtub. When I let him go, he

clutched at his stomach and continued to wheeze heavily. I suppose I should have said

something before I left, but, hell, if people aren’t going to gasp anymore, I don't see why I

should give a shit about being clever. I took only a moment to look down at Ken, wonder

a bit at his pain, and half regret my cruelty before I turned away and left the bathroom,

closing the door gently behind me.

I didn't bother to head back to the dining room; I figured the girl with the scarf

would be back in her seat by now, and Lucy could do little more than scowl at me

throughout the rest of the reception. Plus, if Ken needed medical attention I was sure that

would cause another scene, and either way he had those two inches on me, so it was

probably best that I be long gone by the time he picked himself up out of that bathtub.

I was wrong about one thing though. Her. When I got out to the porch, the girl

with the scarf — or I guess I should say, “the girl with the scar,” was sitting on the edge of

the macadam steps with her hands folded over her face.

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I turned away at first, but then I realized I couldn't go back inside, so I took a step

toward her back.

"What the hell is the matter with him?" she groaned into her hands.

"Look," I said. "I'm kind of sorry about what just happened in there."

She lifted her head and turned at my words. "Oh," she said. "It’s you."

"Yeah." I was a little surprised by her nonchalance. "Look, I've been kind of

messed up, and I'm sorry I had to take it out on you."

She laughed. "Oh, please. Don’t worry about it. What do I care? That's what was

supposed to happen, right? It's just him; I can't understand how he can be like this."

I tried to ask her what she was talking about, but she just held up her hands to

silence me.

"Hey," she said. "I got to get out of here. Do you need a ride some place? It'd be

good if I had someone to talk at for a little bit."

Once inside her disheveled Japanese two-door, I didn't quite know what to say. I

mean, I had expected this girl to despise me at this point, but here I was the shoulder to

lean on, her rock, her support. Turns out, I was the least of her problems. Ken was the

only villain she could focus on. and apparently he'd wreaked just enough havoc in her life

to earn both that title and her love.

"I'm his girlfriend," she told me. "Well, ex-girlfriend. He made me come here. He

makes me do all this shit. And I do it too. I'm stupid enough to do it. That's the worst part.

Like I think somehow he's going to change."

"Ken tried to kiss me in the bathroom," I said, my voice sounding like that of a

small child who reluctantly announces that he has just wet his pants.

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"I know. It's sick. He tells me I need to let go. Whatever. I know it's supposed to

be acceptable today . . . but there's something so sick about it. He's not really gay."

I didn't know what to say.

The girl with the scarf, I saw, was another person who clearly had her own ideas,

and she was expounding on them all as we drove around the suburban streets of Sterling.

She wanted me to know that Ken really loved her. that she really loved him, that they'd

been happy together for years, that the scar on her neck was not from a botched suicide

attempt. I listened, did a lot of nodding, and apologized two more times for pulling off

her scarf without first asking permission. Then, finally, as we rolled up to a stop sign

along River Road, she asked me where I wanted to go.

The question struck me as odd, like a phrase for "Please" or "Thank you" in a

foreign language that once seemed so familiar but now was utterly incomprehensible.

Where did I want to go? Had I even been able to answer such a question in the last

decade of my life? Hadn't I merely been shuttled from one addiction to the next? Liquor,

Lucy, Liquor, Ken's pills, Ken... and now you give the kid a choice? What else could I

say?

"Do you know where Swifty's is?" I asked her

"Fifth Street, right?"

"Yeah."

You might think this wasn't an active choice, but really weren't there a million

things I could have done? I could have gone back to talk to Lucy, gone back to talk to

Ken, maybe even pursued this new and unusual creature handling the wheel next to me.

But I chose Swifty's.

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I knew there was a danger either way. If indeed I was in love with Cowboy Ken —

and I admit that his kiss, though clumsy, stirred something in the ugly chasm of my

mouth — then I was only on placebos, and a taste of liquor would mean nothing more than

a plunge back into alcoholism. And if I was not in love with Ken — as certain factors,

such as my unconsciousness earlier that day, would seem to indicate — then I was on real

drugs, and a taste of liquor would most likely mean death, a coma, or perhaps just a good

solid night of stomach pumping, and a month in detox. These possibilities danced across

my mind as the girl with the scarfs rattling compact bumped it's way down Fifth Street,

and then suddenly she was talking to me again.

“They all think they’re so hip," she said. "With their existentialism and their New-

Age bull shit. Letting go. Everybody’s letting go. Giving up on the quest. Letting go of

linear thought. — fragmentation Well, haven’t we had enough at this point? Isn’t it just a

little too easy at this point? All this letting go? What’s the next step? Isn’t their something

beyond? I say it’s time to move on. What we need is a letting go . . . not a letting go of

nothing, not a reaching out for something else, but a letting go of letting go.”

As the car rolled to a stop in the puddle of light cast down from Swifty's neon

sign, I was so impressed by what the girl with the scarf had just said, that I suddenly

wanted to cling to her. I wanted to hold her. Hold her down, hold her up, hold her to me .

.. If I could just wrap my hands around her throat, I thought, I could keep her in one

place. I could hold myself in one place. But almost as if I lived by some general rule only

to act on violent impulses once per evening, I refrained quite calmly. I looked at her and I

smiled.

"That's good," I said. "Letting go of letting go . . . I like that."

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"So what are you going to do?" she asked as I cracked open the door.

"Drink," I said. "I'm just going to have a little drink.

"Want some company?"

"No, thanks. I don't think I’m going to be much company."

And with that I was out the door stepping up onto the curb.

Inside, Swifty's was nearly empty. It was only a few minutes past nine o'clock,

and most of the college crowd that normally filled the place with baseball hats, black bam

jackets, and patent leather purses, had yet to arrive. Two middle-aged men in suits

huddled together at the far comer of the bar, and a young man with clean features and a

cheap tie hovered behind it. Electric pop music rattled out from the juke box on the far

wall.

"Hey," I said to the kid behind the bar. "You know how to make a sidecar?"

"A what?" he asked stepping forward as he tucked his tie between the two bottom

buttons of his oxford.

I breathed in the smell of stale beer, Lysol, and fried food that soaked the air as I

slid into one of the seats at the bar. "Tell you what." I said. "Why don't you just hook me

up with a shot of bourbon?"

"Sure thing."

When he set the wide little shot glass down on the bar, I stared down into it. I

guess I was supposed to feel some sort of anticipation, some sort of rising in the stomach.

You might picture something like a roller-coaster cranking up that first hill - that feeling

where you hold your breath. It's closer, it's closer, it's closer . . . Then suddenly, there's no

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turning back. To be honest though, I was pretty damn thirsty and I just picked the glass

up without thinking anything.

It wasn't until I got the shot inches from my open mouth that I realized with the

sudden clarity one usually gets just before a car crash, that all I had to do was let go. If I

simply opened my hand, let go of the glass, and allowed gravity to carry the tumbler

crashing to the barroom floor, I would be encountering reality about as sincerely as I ever

could. After all, the glass wanted to shatter. I was standing in the way o f natural law,

building a wall brick by brick between myself and the reality of a pile of broken shards of

glass in a translucent puddle of bourbon. Let go. That's all. It was simple. Too simple

really.

I pulled the glass away from my mouth, held it out over the bar for a second, and

said "fuck reality" to no one at all. Holding on is always harder, but, in this life, I figure

holding on is all we have of letting go of letting go ... So I folded my arm towards

myself, almost as if I was hugging the air. and when the curve of the glass touched my

lower lip, I leaned back, opened my own throat wide, and threw back the shot.

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There's a story about a boy named Charlie Parson, but you’ve probably heard it

before. It is, as they say. the same old story. It’s been told a thousand times: boy meets

girl; boy watches girl; boy likes the way girl’s hips tend to swivel when she walks. Boy

admires the shine on girl’s skin, the mediciney, fruited smell of her hair. Boy is unaware

of the color of girl’s eyes, yet he likes the shape of her face — the smooth, reassuring

slope of her nose, the thin pout of her ribbon-like lips . .. Eventually, boy calls girl for a

date. Girl is not entirely disgusted by this boy; girl says “Yes.”

Now the girl in this case was Claire Castille. Again, nothing unconventional — at

least not to the boy in question. Don't get me wrong; Claire had her quirks: at sixteen she

was an accomplished bowler, she had a peculiarly sharp interest in the opposite sex, and

she suffered from an overdeveloped fascination with The Muppets. (Her bedroom, in

fact, reflected a disturbing blend of innocence, burgeoning sexuality, and tastelessness

uncommon even among teenage girls. On die bed, a mountain of tattered Miss Piggies,

Skooters, Skeeters, and one permanently slouched Kermit the Frog seemed to blush under

the gazes of the shirtless young men whose posters hung between shelves crammed with

numerous marble and plastic monuments to the highest average, highest three-game set,

and highest single at Farswick Lanes.) But all this, of course, was unknown to the boy.

You see, Claire was also impeccably pretty, and to a sixteen-year old boy, a pretty girl

can be nothing more than a pretty girl. For when your whole universe is composed of

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pretty girls, how could there be anything more? It would be like asking you or me to

imagine a fourth dimension. Something besides height, width, and length? It’s simply

beyond comprehension. So, for our purposes, Claire Castille was this and this alone: a

pretty girl. Everything else is parenthetical. Erase any other image you may have created

and picture instead the virginal blonde high-school cheerleader — the object of the shy

suburban hero’s affection in countless PG-13 movies and after-school specials. You’ve

seen her before. A thousand stories have been written about her ankle alone. There is

nothing new here.

What is new, what is different about this particular boy-meets-girl story is the boy

himself, Charlie Parson. I'm sure you have heard of, or even encountered, persons like

that infamous West Egg party-giver - persons with an "extraordinary gift for hope" ...

Well, if you can imagine such a personality without any of its romantic magnetism or

tragic integrity, then you have Charlie — a young man with an "extraordinary gift" for

plans.

On the surface, Charlie seemed to be nothing more than a collection of "'that

kids.” He was that kid who always sat in the first row, that kid who typed up his

homework when he was ten years old, that kid who carried a monogrammed briefcase to

junior high school, that kid who loved the look of argyle long before it looked appropriate

on his thin young frame. His bedroom was decorated sparsely: a wide mahogany desk

complete with roll-back top and fountain pen fixtures; four shelves of leather-bound

books ordered from the “Encyclopedia of World History” catalogue; two aluminum filing

cabinets; one firm, military-made bed; and on the walls, three posters: one portrait of

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Teddy Roosevelt, one of Benjamin Franklin, and one of Henry Kissinger — all, of course,

with their shirts on.

If you peeked beneath the surface, however, maybe nosed around under that bed,

pried open the lock on the filing cabinet, or carefully parted the encyclopedias, you'd find

the real Charlie Parson. For though it often moved from one hiding place to the next, the

true text of Charlie's over-achievement — a slim glossy paperbound volume entitled, A

Step by Step Guide to Home Repair — always lurked somewhere behind the polished

glow of that bedroom.

Charlie was seven when his father gave up on his plans for a treated fir deck and

carelessly left the book lying on the bench of the family’s piano for his son to

unknowingly sit upon. In retrospect, it may look like one of those random discoveries that

smacks of destiny — young Bonaparte being struck on the head by a volume of The Art of

Warfare, little Mao catching his foot on a copy of Das Kapital — but at the time little more

could be said than that Charlie liked the pictures. As the years passed though, the book's

rigid diagrams and simple, controlled language reached out a steady carpenter’s hand to

this straight-laced boy stumbling up the winding path of puberty. Charlie had no interest

in home repair, of course, but reading the steady rhythm of a step-by-step paragraph and

running his fingers over the starkly lined, purely utilitarian drawings of men laying

concrete for back porches gave him solace in the fact that no matter how confusing life

seemed, there was nothing that a plan couldn't accomplish. Around this time, Charlie also

discovered caffeine, and, accordingly, he spent most of those late evenings between the

years of eleven and fifteen hunched over his desk scribbling away notes and outlines on a

coffee-stained legal pad: "10 Steps Toward a Firmer Handshake," "The Colonization of

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Mars, Plan 4 (revised)," "How to Make My Peers Stop Giving me Wedgies" ... As

evenings passed into mornings, and boyhood passed into young-manhood, the comforting

pattern established by a simple "How To" book became — like the diamond and crosshairs

of argyle — the pattern of Charlie's life.

When her turn came, Claire Castille was no exception to this pattern. Charlie set

his eyes on her early in the fall of his junior year at Farswick High. After procuring a

copy of her class schedule, he made the appropriate changes in his electives to maximize

exposure to the girl. (He even toyed with the idea of changing his name to "Carson," but,

in the end, the age requirements of certain state and federal laws and the fact that most

classes no longer employed assigned seating allowed him to hang on to the "P".)

Although months of familiarity bred nothing more than familiarity between them, Charlie

eventually moved his plan into phase two. On Friday, the sixth of May — after making

several overseas practice calls to confused but polite residents of Kyoto and Nogano —

Charlie dialed Claire’s number and took advantage of the fact that pretty girls at the age

of sixteen are not yet well versed in the art of saying "no" to the unwanted invitations of

over-eager young men.

From the instant immediately following Claire's politely sighed yes (which of

course seemed sublimely exhaled to our hero), Charlie began planning for the date. He

brewed a pot of coffee and sat down at his desk to brainstorm. After forty minutes of

leafing through his books, twenty minutes of scanning his file of archived school

newspapers, and approximately twelve minutes of deliberating over whether he should

use a list or an outline format, Charlie jotted down 13 topics for suitable date

conversation, and ordered them as he thought they would be most likely to progress:

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1. The differences between junior high and high school:

2. The prospects for the success of the Farswick varsity football team:

3. The drinking habits of the great generals of American history:

4. Cars:

5. The future of robotics:

6. Study hall: waste of time or the student's best friend?:

7. The failure of a Marxist ideology;

8. The many wonders of spackle:

9. Favorite foods, movies, colors, songs, etc.:

10. The aesthetics — and possibly the unorthodox sexual habits — of John Ruskin:

11. Billv Joel’s catalogue of hits;

12. The Weimar republic: Teutonic garden of Eden, or early breeding ground of

Nazism?: and

13. Women’s fashion.

On this last entry, Charlie paused. He finished the “n,” jabbed out a period and

then looked blankly around his room. Kissinger, Roosevelt, and Franklin were no help.

The other topics, he could cover with ease, but here, he scratched his head with the dull

tip of his pencil, flipped it around, nibbled on its eraser, and then decided he would need

to do some research.

The next day was a Saturday; Charlie headed for the mall. Farswick Square Mall

wasn’t known for being on the cutting edge of the young women’s fashion scene, but

they had a Gap, a Limited, an Express, and they had recently gotten rid of their Chess

King. Charlie started with the Gap.

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As he entered the store, strolling into a sea of dull pastels, warm khakis, and plaid

earth tones, he paused, looked to the wall behind the register, and copied the letters “G-

A-P” onto the legal pad he had pinned down to his clip-board. Then he marched directly

towards the first employee he saw — a short, chubby, red-faced girl struggling valiantly to

fold a crew-neck sweater. ‘"Excuse me,” he said. “Let me introduce myself. My name is

Charlie Parson” He hugged the clip-board to his chest and extended a personalized

business card to her with his left hand. “I’m here to do a little cursory research on the

current fashion trends for young women — the ‘juniors line,’ I believe they call it. I was

wondering if you might be able to supply me with a little information.”

The girl’s initial answers were phrases like “It’s my first day,” “You’re looking

for what?” and “Huh?” but eventually they came around to the subject of fabrics and

Charlie was soon scribbling down words like “rayon,” “vinyl,” and “tweed,” while the

girl wandered around the store tucking in sleeves, reorganizing jeans by size and fit. and

realigning hangers on crowded sale racks.

After about forty-five minutes at the Gap, Charlie headed up to the other stores

on his list, and though these latter meetings progressed from the same initial confusion as

his first, he ended his day satisfied. His legal pad was filled with furiously scribbled bits

of information, and he was ready at the drop of a hat to discuss the subtle differences

between lycra and spandex as well as culottes and skorts.

On Sunday, Charlie drove to the Farswick multiplex and previewed each of the

four movies showing there until he picked out the most elegantly suggestive romantic

comedy. Dressed entirely in black - save for a pair of dark argyle socks — he stole from

theatre to theatre while bored ushers in red blazers ignored his hunched, tip-toeing form.

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When he found the movie he wanted - a cute yet sassy yam about a pair of mismatched

lovers who learn to overcome their differences through the magic of dance — he stayed

for three showings. During the screenings, he memorized certain lines, took copious

notes on a fresh legal pad, and found appropriate laughs for each comic twist. The

chuckle, a tight-lipped sporadic hum, would be used for moments of subtle irony and

clever innuendo. The snicker, a full-smiled irregular hiss with the tongue and teeth,

would be used for outright jokes, sight-gags, physical comedy, et cetera. And the guffaw.

a moment of out and out, unrestrained laughter, would be reserved for those instances in

which the leading man was emasculated by his lady-love.

By the end of the weekend, Charlie began to swell with a sense of

accomplishment. He had four more days to work, but already the date was taking shape

in his mind. He saw himself sitting side by side with Claire, chuckling debonairly while

he ran his fingers over a patch of fabric on her sleeve. “One loves the delicate, coarse

softness of rayon this time of year,” he heard himself saying. He sat at his desk with a

smile, raised his coffee mug to Roosevelt’s portrait, and drank to the “strenuous life.”

When Monday came, however, Charlie began the most critical and most

“strenuous” phase of his preparation: the "stake out." The Castille household itself held

the utmost significance to Charlie. It was, after all, the site where all first impressions

would be made. Amy information he could obtain — details of family history, facts

concerning religious habits, or the genus and species of the neighborhood lawns — could

be turned to his advantage. His months of familiarity had informed him that Claire had

one younger sister and that her father had left the family when Claire was in grade

school, but other than that, the Castilles were a mystery.

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From Monday morning through Wednesday evening, Charlie spent two hours

before and after school either stalking through the Castille’s back yard with a clip-board

and a pair o f binoculars, or sitting in his Buick Skylark parked on the opposite side o f the

street, eating powdered doughnuts and drinking lukewarm coffee. During this time, he

made three key discoveries. The first was that the Castille’s owned a dog — a large,

enthusiastic wiemerammer the size of a small horse — that spent most of its time in the

yard by the side of the house and responded well to large raw-hide bones. Charlie made

several notes on his legal pad:

Large dog with predilection for pouncing.

Could develop into a problem.

Must find wav to subdue.

Purchase several raw-hide bones.

Tuesday morning offered all the brightness and warmth of spring, and Charlie

spotted a garden of chrysanthemums outside the Castille house. He actually had to dash

behind a tree when Mrs. Castille emerged from her side-door in a pair of denim overalls

ready to begin the process of weeding. But once she was crouched over those long

stemmed flowers, he peeked out from behind the tree and scribbled onto his legal pad.

Middle-aged woman. (Quite possibly Mrs. Castille.l

Eniovs chrysanthemums.

Purchase chrysanthemums.

Then, Charlie made his most important discovery. Tuesday evening, as he sat in

his car tapping sugary, powder-stained fingers against the dash-board, he finally saw

what that large object just beneath the bay window to the Castille’s living room was. As

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Claire’s little sister — whom Charlie had recently discovered to be an eleven year old girl

named Chloe — perched in the window swaying back and forth and dancing her arms in

strange rhythmic patterns, Charlie reached for the binoculars and saw that the Castille’s

owned a Steinway baby grand piano. Chloe was apparently taking lessons, and from what

Charlie could see, she wasn’t half-bad. From the way her left and right hand seemed to

interact, she appeared to be playing some fairly advanced material. Charlie panned to the

left and then to the right with his binoculars. He spun the focus wheel forward and back,

but he could not make out the name of the piece. Chloe’s body blocked the sheet music,

and even when she left the piano, the bulk of the page was hidden beneath the bottom

edge of the window. He would have to get a closer look.

Charlie, himself, had been somewhat of a piano prodigy during his elementary

school years. He’d played early and often, excelling far above others his age, and were it

not for a subtle yet limiting inability for expressiveness and improvisation, Charlie might

have even played someday on a professional level. But as it was, he had stopped taking

lessons years ago, his family’s small off-white upright had been moved into storage, and

music had been replaced by badminton, quantum physics, or some other activity at which

to excel. Now, however, as he looked at Chloe’s ghostly shadow swaying in the dark

window, Charlie was filled with a single plan: to find out the song the girl was playing,

learn it, and play it himself, spontaneously and flawlessly, amazing the entire family on

his first visit to their home. Before leaving his post Tuesday night, Charlie wrote two

lines on his legal pad.

Steinwav babv grand.

Find that song.

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Wednesday morning he crept around to the front of the Castille house. He walked

softly through the grass on the side, staying close to the brick that made up the first floor.

For a moment he couldn't help but pause to admire the intricately sturdy masonry work —

the potentially endless pattern of brick on brick. He brushed his hand lightly over the

surface, loosing a small cloud of cement dust, and then moved on. When he got to the

comer, he inched away from the wall and looped out around one of the bushes that stood

to the side of the bay window. A light semi-translucent white curtain lay against the

inside of the glass, but through an opening in the middle, Charlie glimpsed part of the

piano. He couldn’t see the sheet music yet, but if he could bring himself to the middle of

the window the page would come into view. He crept carefully along the edge of the

bush, circled around behind another and then strained his neck to the right. He teetered a

little off balance; his position grew hard to hold, but as he leaned further and further,

something was coming into view. He saw a white sheet of paper, the letter “F,” and then

suddenly the curtains flew open and Mrs. Castille stood before him in a well-wom,

orange bathrobe.

Charlie collapsed immediately and rolled beneath the bush that had been in his

way. He wasn’t sure if she’d seen him, but he wasn’t taking any chances. After lying

frozen for a second or two, he rose up to his knees, crawled around to the side of the

house, and then ran back to his car and drove away as fast as the law would allow.

Wednesday night brought rain. The dark sky poured down sheets of water, and

Charlie sat in his car struggling to look through the Castilles’ window with his

binoculars. The lights were on, and he could make out the piano clearly through the rain,

but the sheet-music still lay beyond his view. He nibbled on some doughnuts, drank twice

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as much coffee as he normally did, and waited. Time, he knew, was slipping away as

quickly as the streams running down his windshield. If he was to learn the piece by

Friday, he needed to see it tonight.

At 12:30 a.m. all light disappeared from the Castille house. At first Charlie

thought that the family had abruptly retired to bed, but then, noticing that the entire block

was dark including the street lights, he surmised that the storm had brought down a power

line. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed his clipboard, jerked his windbreaker tight around

his neck and stepped into the rain. He was soaked to the skin by the time he got to the

window, but he didn’t care. He felt safe in the darkness. Even if he could be seen, he

would never be recognized, and he could disappear before anyone from the house was

properly dressed to come out and investigate. He stood between the bushes and the house

about a foot from the window and stared into the glass.

He could see nothing. The darkness inside blended with the darkness outside, and

the pouring rain washed across the window turning the glass opaque. Charlie shook

slightly with nervous rage. Rain ran down his shoulders, collecting in his hands and then

streaming out from his fingers. He squinted, he twisted his head, he pressed his face

against the glass, but still he could see nothing. Then, suddenly and without warning,

there was a flash of lightning. On the other side of the block, a tall oak tree was struck

somewhere in its topmost branches, and the flash of light carried across the street, down

and against the Castilles’ house. The glass came alive for an instant, and, like a single

frame in a reel of film, the clear image of a piano with a piece of sheet music resting

against it appeared and disappeared with equal suddenness.

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If he had blinked he’d have missed it, but he didn’t blink. Charlie stared into the

window with an unblinking, unflinching intensity. When the flash came, he saw what he

needed. He pulled out his pen and scratched one single line into the soaked sheet of legal

paper still clamped to his clip-board:

Fur Elise

Charlie didn’t make it to school on the following day. With a slight head cold and

a stiff neck, he managed to convince his mother that he’d taken sick from spending the

previous night helping a kind blue-haired old woman change a tire in the rain. After his

parents left for work, however, he brewed a pot of coffee, poured it into his thermos, and

headed out to the Farswick Lock and Store.

When he got to the Lock and Store he walked directly to storage bay 3113, and

threw open the blue aluminum bay doors to reveal a small off-white upright piano

surrounded by out-dated furniture, discarded old toys, and a few sets of his mother’s

unwanted evening dresses. Charlie cleared away a cracked big-wheel, tossed aside a box

filled with multicolored action figures, and then laid out the copy of Fur Elise that he’d

purchased from a nearby music store. He sat at the piano for close to six hours pausing

only to drink coffee and rub his legs when they fell asleep. His playing felt rusty — his

fingers tensed and his hands cramped easily — but by the end of the day, he had it. He

played the song through twice without a flaw, and then covered the keys, screwed the cap

back onto his thermos and left the storage unit. He was ready.

Friday evening, the night of the date, Charlie picked out a light short-sleeved V-

neck argyle sweater, reviewed his notes, gave Kissinger a wink, and then left to go pick

up Claire. When he got to the Castille house, he proceeded according to plan. He walked

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awkwardly up the lawn, struggl ing slightly with a raw-hide bone in one hand and twelve

cut chrysanthemums in the other. When the wiemerammer darted out from the side of the

house, he was ready. With a quick flick of the wrist, he tossed the raw-hide bone directly

into the beast’s path and then strolled up to the door unaccosted.

Mrs. Castille opened the front door after two knocks. She glanced Charlie over

quickly, and two worried yet happy patches of wrinkles fanned out from the comers of

her eyes.

“Good evening Mrs. Castille,” Charlie announced through the screen door. “My

name is Charlie Parson. I will be escorting your daughter Claire to a film this evening.”

Mrs. Castille stared at him blankly. She was a large woman with plump

expressive features, but as she Looked at this flower-bearing young man on her porch, her

cheeks just slightly dropped and her eyes grew large and vacant.

“I noticed you were something of a flower enthusiast,” Charlie continued. “And I

thought you might appreciate these chrysanthemums.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. CastilLe said, popping the screen door open. “My gosh. Well,

thank you.” She took the chrysanthemums from Charlie as soon as he stepped into the

house. “Let me go put these in some water,” she went on, and she dashed back to the

kitchen instantly.

Charlie stood in the living room alone. He glanced up the stairs for a moment.

There was no sign of Claire. He crossed over toward the piano.

“Oh, this is really so nice of you,” Mrs. Castille called from the kitchen. “So nice,

really.”

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“Oh, it’s no trouble, I assure you,” Charlie answered running his hand along the

top of the piano.

“No, no, really. We’ve just gotten this new rug in there, so I’ve had the dog

outside all week, and he’s already dug up six of my chrysanthemums.”

Charlie leaned into the piano bench and lightly fingered a few keys. Soft high

notes sang out with a clear and lovely resonance.

“Oh, do you play the piano?” Mrs. Castille called from the kitchen.

“I used to,” Charlie answered.

“Oh, well, why don’t you play me something while we wait for Claire to come

down?” she called again.

Charlie was already seated on the piano bench with his fingers poised and splayed

above the keys. When Mrs. Castille finished her question, there followed only the briefest

moment of silence before Charlie threw his shoulders back, lowered his hands, and filled

the air with a precise but fairly expressionless version of “Fur Elise.” Mrs. Castille

continued to make small talk from the other room, complementing his playing and

thanking him again for the flowers, but Charlie drifted off, basking in his own success as

he continued to play lightly and skillfully at the baby grand.

It wasn’t long into his playing before Charlie noticed a pair of legs at the top of

the stairway that led down into the living room. At first he thought they might be

Claire’s, but they were too skinny at the thigh and too knobby at the knee, and he soon

realized they belonged to Chloe. The legs stood there for a second as if contemplating

him while he continued to play with lightly tinkling notes. One foot lifted off the ground

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and scratched at the other with a delicately nibbled toenail and then finally stepped

forward and Chloe Castille was revealed.

Chloe wore denim shorts and a pink T-shirt. Pig-tails bobbed on each side of her

head, and a large lollipop pointed somewhat accusingly from mouth. She looked a lot like

Claire, same color hair, same slope to the nose ... Her face and body were basically

puckered miniature versions of her older sister’s. She glanced at Charlie only briefly, and

he looked up from the keys with a broad, condescending smile. His fingers tapped on

flawlessly, and Chloe lumbered three more steps down the staircase before she turned her

head abruptly towards the living-room rug.

Charlie continued to watch her, waiting for her gaze to return to his, but it never

did. She kept her eyes on the rug, scanning back and forth over the space of carpeting that

led from the side door to the piano while her eyes rippled through a series of contortions

that ended when she yanked the lollipop out of her mouth and screamed, “Ewww! Who

stepped in dog-shit!? ”

The word “Eww” hit Charlie like a sledgehammer smashing through drywall.

“Eww,” said just right, with the ‘e’ exploding into the air like a nail entering a rotten

piece of wood and spreading a yawning crack of "w's" behind it. “Eww!” — the sound

itself so defiant - that curious young-girl giggle-scream made up of equal parts

fascination and horror, a mere noise, a collection of random decibels that in and o f itself

seemed to say that all foundations must crumble, all renovations must fall. “Eww! Who

stepped in dog shit?!” Charlie heard, and his bemused expression shattered as he

followed the young girl’s gaze to the rug, which was immaculately white save for a trail

of four dark brown spots that led, footprint by footprint, to where he sat.

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Charlie only needed to glance down at his own shoe to confirm his horror.

Without missing a note on the piano, he roiled his head to the side, lifted his left foot and

saw there in the complicated indentations of the sole, a sloppy grid of dark-brown

excrement that covered nearly the entire foot. He looked back at the four dark-brown

footprints and knew exactly what had happened. He remembered walking through the

yard, the large dog, the soft grass, and himself too preoccupied with his chrysanthemums

and raw-hide bone to look where he was treading, too busy planning his next step to see

where his feet were going. And now, there it was — all his plans, all his desires, and all his

steps laid out dead before him in the shape of four large footprints of loose canine feces

on a plush white rug.

Almost immediately, and through no plan of his own, Charlie felt his hands grow

heavy on the piano keys. A rush of sorrow and regret welled up inside him and seemed to

pour down from his shoulders into his wrists, hands, and fingers. Desperately, he began

to pound out the chords with ascending volume. As if from some strange desire to hide

from the world or blot out the visible with the audible, Charlie abandoned himself to that

piano. He bent down at the waist and stared only at the keys as the music grew more and

more torrential beneath him.

Soon, even he wasn’t aware o f what he was playing. He had stopped reading the

music and had begun drifting the melody into a dark minor key. He experimented with

different note lengths, finally playing everything in tight staccato licks as he modulated

into a powerful restatement of his original melody in the key of A. Without any thought

or consideration, he then started to break down his chords and play individual notes with

both hands in sweeping flourishes that sounded like high-pitched screams supported by

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deep gothic moans. Finally, with everything growing louder and louder, he pressed down

the sustain pedal with his right foot, lengthened all his notes again, and built towards a

crescendo in a series of rising arpeggios that called out higher and higher, like a chorus of

fallen angels building a ladder of sound to the foot of some angry and unreachable god.

The whole time, he was completely unaware of what was going on around him.

He played with his eyes on his hands, only occasionally lifting his neck and rolling his

head in spastic flourishes toward the ceiling, but never looking back at the room, at

Chloe, Mrs. Castille, or even Claire, who had begun to descend the staircase curiously as

she heard the music growing wild beneath her.

Accordingly, as Charlie pounded at the piano keys with growing ferocity, he was

free to imagine that everything was somehow going to work out, that the footprints would

be forgotten or even disappear entirely. He saw the entire room and everything in it

revolving around him. He saw the carpet, the footprints, the staircase, all of it spinning in

towards him and his reckless song. He pictured Mrs. Castille and Claire’s younger sister

unable to resist the call of the music. Moved to tears, they would fall at his feet and weep.

They would thank him, beg him to stay; crowds would gather listening in the street;

pianos would be built in his honor; remnants of carpet fiber encrusted with canine

excrement would be sold one day as artifacts of this great and moving performance; and

Charlie, for his part, moved by his own artistry, would walk away from it all — the girl,

the family, the house . . . None of it meant anything to him anymore. There was only that

moment, and that moment, he knew, would never end.

But, alas, in reality, it did end, as all moments do. Eventually, Charlie stopped

playing and everything resolved into awkwardness. He looked back up at the room and

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saw Mrs. Castille and Chloe staring at him in horror. He turned toward the stairs and

managed only a weak smile at Claire who stood frozen on the third step with her hands

clasped over her ears and her face wrenched into an expression of confused pain.

Charlie tried to stand up, but Mrs. Castille was rushing toward him. “No! no!,"

she cried. “Take off your shoes! Take off your shoes!”

Charlie deflated back onto the bench. He leaned over and slipped off his loafers,

careful not to touch the soles with any part of his hands.

Mrs. Castille darted back to the kitchen and returned almost instantly with a

spray-bottle and a dark green sponge. “Dear God. Dear God,” she murmured to herself as

she hiked up the legs of her pants and knelt down to spray ammonia at the footprints in

her rug.

Charlie stood up in his argyle socks, hooking a finger into the mouth of each shoe

and holding them out to his side. He glanced casually at Claire, but she seemed to ignore

him.

She walked slowly down the rest of steps and stared over her mother’s shoulder at

the wreckage on the living-room rug. “Oh, my gosh,” was all she could say.

“Claire,” Mrs. Castille commanded without turning around, “go into the kitchen

and get me the roll of paper towels. Chloe, take Charlie out back and hose off his shoes.”

Claire turned and walked rigidly toward the kitchen, and Charlie took a few steps

toward Chloe. The young girl looked up at him, rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, and

just said, “Come on.” He took two more steps after her and then paused in front of Mrs.

Castille, who was crouched and kneeling before him in the same posture she’d used when

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tending to her chrysanthemums. “I’m . . . I’m . .. I’m terribly— he tried to say, but

Mrs. Castille cut him off with an impatient sigh.

“That’s all right, honey,” she said without even looking up at him. “Just go and

get yourself cleaned up.”

Once outside, Charlie stood in his socks on the edge of the Castilles’ back porch

and looked out over the fence that lined their back yard. He looked over to the tree he’d

hidden behind a few days ago and tried to picture himself there, but suddenly it seemed

like he was standing in a different yard, like he’d gotten lost somewhere and arrived at

the wrong house. He breathed in the calming scents of chlorine and wet grass while

Chloe sprayed water against his shoes with her thumb pressed firmly over the mouth of

the hose. He turned and looked down on her for a moment and then let his gaze drift up

the Castille house.

His eyes moved from the dusty gray cement of the porch and foundation, to the

bold maroon brick of the first level, and then to the sharp white aluminum siding of the

second floor, where a single window to a room just above the kitchen suddenly caught his

attention. A light brown curtain was drawn closed over it, and there wasn’t much to see,

but as the evening sun hit the glass, Charlie could make out the silhouette of a lone

miniature bowler in mid-stride pressed up against the dark curtain. He wondered for a

moment what it could be, but then Chloe was suddenly talking to him.

“Hey,” she said. “What was that you were playing on the piano — at the end?”

Charlie let his eyes fall from the mysterious miniature bowler and fixed them on

Chloe’s face. Her head was cocked to the side, her eyes were squinting into the sun, and

her mouth hung open with the delicate impatience that can only be found in the faces of

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eleven-year-old girls. “That,” Charlie answered. “Well, actually, that was . .. something .

.. Well, actually, I don't know. I don’t know what that was.”

When Charlie’s shoes were clean, he and Chloe went back inside the house.

Clumsy apologies, weak excuses, nervous laughter, and half-hearted handshakes were all

exchanged in their due course, but Mrs. Castille continued to scrub at her carpet,

managing only a half wave when Charlie finally escorted Claire out the door. She told

them to have fun, but her words rang in Charlie’s ear like mockery as he climbed into his

car with Claire, unable to recall even three of his thirteen topics for conversation.

At this point, the story reverts; that same old story resumes. Boy drives car. Girl

plays with radio dial. Girl watches movie. Boy spends two hours contemplating girl’s

hand, the knuckles like little locks of joy calling out to him to be the key. Then boy drives

girl home. Boy is made nervous by girl’s smile. Girl blushes shyly and walks inside. Boy

curses himself aloud over the angry sound of an untuned radio all the way home. Time

passes. Girl vanishes into woman. Girl is gone forever. Then boy settles down. Boy finds

woman. Boy takes a job as an accountant in a small Midwestern town named after an

over-rated nineteenth-century president. Boy gets the life he always thought he wanted.

Boy grows old. Quietly dissatisfied with his own body, his own family, his own

life, and his own efforts at home repair, boy will still spend countless hours thinking back

on that moment when the story was his: that moment when he sat pounding recklessly at

the piano, that one instant when a world of girl’s hips, girl’s lips, girl’s eyes and girl’s

hands; mothers, sisters, chrysanthemums, and four large footprints of dog-shit all spiraled

in towards him — that one brief passage of time when nothing more and nothing less than

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everything, all the boys and ail the girls, and all that anyone could never think to want,

turned slowly to the clumsy velvet touch of his dancing fingers.

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I always told Todd it was a game. But Jenna Wilson’s mom told her love was

what you made it, and that’s exactly what Jenna did when Todd knocked her up. She

made it. I saw the whole thing. Heard about some, but I saw it mostly.

Well, she waltzed in here crying her hair off one night. Heck, I knew what she’d

been hiding for weeks, but I waited her out. And then one night she waltzes into my

bedroom with her hands cupped on her belly and her eyes all streaked with mascara and

that glitter make-up she wears, carrying on about. “I’m having a baby,” “Todd don’t want

it,” “What’s going to happen?” — all that ballyhoo. I just sat her down. I said, “Jenna

Pearle Wilson, you tell your mamma everything, and we’ll figure something out.” So she

did. And then we did.

We were drinking one night. Up at the Tavern. It was back when me, Mike, and

Chris were all still busting hump for the township. Whenever we didn’t get all grassed up

from mowing lawns, we headed over to Freymoyer’s Tavern for happy-hour. She was

perched there at the bar. I knew who she was. Everybody knew her from school. She ran

with that “them” crowd — those sophomore girls everybody chased back when I was a

senior.

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She looked good. It was Like my dad used to say about a woman — “She ain’t

wearing them clothes; they’re wearing her.” That’s the way Jenna was. She had these

jeans on so tight it didn’t even look like there was room for skin underneath.

So we’re all playing pool. Me, Mike, and Chris. And I’m not the only one that

notices her. Chris scratches two breaks in a row, his eyes were so busy at the bar.

Finally, he walks by me, nods in her direction and says, “Jenna Wilson.”

I say, “I know,” and he’s like:

“Tell you what, I wouldn’t mind getting me some of that.”

Then Mike starts in. Right away he’s mocking Chris in that voice he does. It’s

like a German voice - half retarded though. He’s Like, “Toll ooh vut. Me vouldn’t mind

me some of daht.” And we’re both laughing.

That’s the way Mike is. He don’t care. Chris is a big talker and Mike only cares

about the game. He don’t want to listen to Chris tell the story of how him and Jenna were

this close to it at some party senior year. Some crap about sitting up in somebody’s

bedroom all drunk when she staggers in; him and her talk for a while; maybe he even

leans into her — then she passes out. It’s not like it mattered if it happened or not. Chris

tells that story on just about every girl that graduated after we did. “Tell you what,” he’d

say, “if I had that chance again, I wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.”

But this time Mike doesn’t give him the chance, because right after Mike mocks

him, and Chris gets all big-eyed, with his “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike tells

him to relax because he’d piss his pants before he even got within five feet of Jenna

Wilson.

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“Hell I would,” Chris says, and then they’re going back and forth on it for a

while, till it turns into a bet.

“I bet you fifty bucks you ain’t got the balls to say two words to her,” Mike says,

and Chris is like:

“You already owe me fifty bucks for the nine-ball game you lost a half-hour ago.”

That’s how it got all tangled up with pool, because right after that Mike’s talking

about another game of nine-ball and if he wins Chris has to take his bet and try to talk to

Jenna. Then after a little more bull-shitting all three of us are shaking hands on a game of

cut-throat. Stakes are, whoever wins has to take that fifty dollar bet.

Mike got knocked out early. We’d sunk all the middle balls right off, and then I

think Chris was high and I was low. He had two balls left - ten and twelve, I think. So I

line up a shot on the twelve, give myself enough draw to come back for the ten, and then

I sink that one too, not even thinking a grain about what it means.

Then I turned and it was like, there she was - oh, right... I got to do this. But the

thing is, five minutes ago, there’s no way I was going up to her. You know? Five minutes

ago that barstool she was perched on seemed a whole hell of a lot higher — like it

stretched right up to the ceiling. Now, she might as well have been sitting on the floor,

because now it was just a bet — just a game.

It’s like Mike always used to say: You got to make it into a game. That’s all. If

you want to talk to some chick, you got to look at it the same way you look at an eight-

ball combo, or the way you used to wait for Don Flamenco’s swooping punch in Mike

Tvson’s Punch Out. It’s all in the rhythm — wait, wait, wait, and then go. And if you

make it a game, that’s all you think about. You don’t think about how her lip’s going to

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scowl at you; you don’t think about how her eyebrows are going to shoot up before you

even open up your mouth; you don’t think about how she’s going to turn away and leave

you with her shoulder; you just think about the game. That's the whole trick right there,

and seeing it that way .. . That’s the hard part. If you do that, you’re cruising.

So now I had it already done for me. With the bet on me now, it wasn’t about

trying to talk to Jenna Wilson; it was all about winning. Even as I took my first step off

the comer of the pool table, she had her head cocked over her shoulder, and her one eye

was asking me who the hell I thought I was. But I didn’t care, cause I wasn’t anyone. I

was just finishing the game. Wait, wait, wait, and then go... Easiest fifty bucks I ever

made.

He was so cute when he came up to me. It’s like, the first four words out of his

mouth were either “Hey,” “Urn,” or “Uh.” In fact, I think his first sentence went, “Hey,

um, uh, hey.” He sounded like an Indian or something, and I’m all ready to laugh in his

face, but I didn’t.

It’s like, I was used to guys coming up to me in bars. I ‘m not saying I’m beautiful

or anything. I mean I’m not bad, but I’m no Pam Anderson. Anyway, it happens. You go

to a bar; guys talk to you. That’s the way it works. So I saw them from the beginning —

him and Mike and what’s his face. They’re looking and talking, slapping around at each

other ... Then they play another game of pool, and I see Todd come walking over to me.

I was so ready to gun him down. It’s like he was too much set to be Mr. Hero for

his buddies. Sometimes you do it — you know—just to do it. Sometimes you stare a guy

right into the ground, listen to whatever they say, and then turn your back on him. So I’m

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watching him over my shoulder as he comes up. I even put down my cigarette so I’d be

ready to bust out a full spin on him. But then he opens his mouth, and it’s “Hey, um, uh,

hey,” and I know he’s OK. This one, I think, feels right — like when you finally slip on

the right shoe from the cheap rack. It might have been a size too big, a size too small, but

it fits. So I’m all ready to bust out laughing, but the whole time I’m telling myself, “This

is happening, Jenna. This fits.” And when I finally couldn’t hold it in anymore, I just

smiled.

I told him not to start up with her. “Can’t trust her - that’s all.” That’s what I said

to him. You know Mike’s too pussy to say it, so somebody has to tell the kid. And look.

Look what happened. The girl was a slut. I’m not saying nothing about her now. But

whatever Todd’s got to live with today . .. It’s all because of that: The girl was a slut.

Jenna’d been going with Todd for six months; then they broke up and she found

out she was pregnant. That’s the whole story in a nutshell. But then I saw it — or heard

some — some from Todd, some from Chris too.

Todd gave her the money for the abortion. Couple hundred bucks — put it right in

her hand. She came over to his house one night crying. She had this big hair — big and

bleached. This was when she still worked at that barber shop in J.C. Penney’s, so she was

always doing something with her hair. Usually she sprayed it way up like a mane, but by

the time she got over to Todd’s, it was plastered down to her forehead. Todd came out

onto the porch, shut the door, so his mom wouldn’t hear, gave her the money, and he

thought that was the end of it.

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That’s when Jenna talked to her mom.

“OK, so you kids made love,” I told her. “But now you’ve got to make love.”

Because that’s all it is. Today, they don’t understand that. These boys and girls bump into

each other, have a laugh, rub together a little bit, and they think that’s the end of it. They

think it’s all a game, but it ain’t that simple. It’s work really — an endless lot of work.

Back when I was dating Stan, things were a little different. People kept their clothes on a

tad longer, but truth is — not much changes. Love ain’t all fireworks and slow dances and

looking into each other’s eyes. Love is what you make it.

Now, first she was bellyaching about two boys, and I said, whoa Nelly right there.

“First things first. You get one boy Jenna — one boy. First thing you got to make is a

decision.”

She says there ain’t no decision; it was always Todd.

“OK,” I say. “First thing, right off the top, this other boy. Forget about it. Don’t

talk about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t even say his name again. Ever. If you want this

Jenna, you’re going to have to work at it. That’s what making love is. It ain’t sex. First

thing you learn is that sex ain’t love; second thing you learn is that love ain’t love - love

is work. So if you want this, you’re going to have to be willing to do everything I tell

you.”

So we set to talking. She tells me all about Todd — about how his daddy left the

family when he was young, about how Todd still harps on him, talks him up a storm. So I

said that’s it: “Jenna, you don’t talk to that boy, you don’t look at that boy, you don’t see

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that boy until the baby's bom, and then you bring it to him. If you want him, that’s the

way it’s got to work.”

First? First, I was pissed. I didn’t want it. I wanted the abortion. It was easy. It

was just a word. Neither of us said it, but still, it was just a word. Have an abortion, I

thought. She’ll have an abortion. I don’t know how I would have felt if it had happened

before all that stuff with her and Tom Jacobs happened, but as it was, we weren’t even

together. We hated each other. It was all a big mess. And if you got to choose between a

mess and a word, I guess anybody’d take the word.

You make mistakes, and then they make you. or you make them right. That’s all.

It’s like everyone thinks it’s not going to happen to them. Every girl I’ve known since

high school has done some majorly shady things. Everybody. Guys too. Guys especially.

Except for them it’s not all that risky. They can break up with you and be done with it,

but if they’ve left something behind, it’s all yours to deal with. That’s really how I felt

with Todd too — like he’d left something behind. Like, you know how when you break

up, there’s like two months of giving stuff back?

After me and Todd broke up, I found out that he’d left behind a pair of sneakers, a

Miami Dolphins Jersey, two Led Zeppelin CDs, and a little half-formed baby. The

sneakers and all I could give back, but the baby . . . ? I could have had the abortion.

Mamma wouldn’t want to know that, but it’s true. She thinks I had to have the baby so

then I had to have Todd, but really it’s the other way around. I could have given it back,

but it was his, and if it was his, I wanted it.

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I only ever told Mike about it. Nobody else. He didn’t believe me; I could tell

right off. We were driving over to Flying Hills for Thanksgiving the other day and I told

him, “You know when Jenna first started dating Todd? You know that night he went

crazy and busted up the street lights on River Road because he couldn’t find her all night?

She was with me that night.” That night and a bunch of others. Right up until they broke

up, and a little while after. Right up until she got pregnant. Mike just looked at me out of

the comer of his face. He thinks I’m bullshitting him, so I tell him I’m just kidding.

What’s the point — you know? I already did everything I could for Todd. Ain’t no point in

telling the truth now.

I guess they had had a pretty big fight. In the beginning they used to always fight

about Jacobs — Jenna’s ex-boyfriend. Some guy who graduated a couple of years behind

us. Went off to school up at State and then he and Jenna broke up. So she was still

digging that nail out when she started with Todd. Isn’t that how they say it? “It takes one

nail to get out another.” Sluts.

Anyway, Todd went off half-cocked one night, and just drove off from his mom’s

leaving Jenna in a huff, and she came to my place looking for him. What could I do? You

got a hot girl all slicked up with tears, talking about how she’s so confused about this guy

and that guy . . . ? You offer her a beer. One beer tumbles into two beers, tears get choked

back for a couple of laughs, and then me and Jenna tumble into each other, clothes go

flying - you fill in the blanks. Shit, I ain’t saying there was anything right about it, but if

there was anything wrong with it, you can’t say that I didn’t try to set it right.

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Cause two weeks later the two of them were all stitched up at the hip, walking

around in a daze, hands all tangled up together everywhere they went. It was sick. I

couldn’t watch it. I couldn’t just sit there and swallow this pretty little picture o f this girl

who I knew — I knew what she was . . . I couldn’t just sit back and watch her turning

Todd into her “little man.”

So I kept things up with her as far as I could. Todd was still going cold on her

every now and then, so whenever she needed to whine about Jacobs and being confused

or whatever, there I was. I thought that’d be enough to do it too. I thought If I said the

right words, I’d get her to fizzle out on Todd — before she did any real damage. But she

kept going — she just kept ricocheting back between the two of" us. That’s when I pulled

the shit with Jacobs. I knew there wasn’t anything going on between her and Jacobs, but I

knew when State had their Spring Break, so I knew that Jacobs was coming into town the

Tuesday before Easter. I also knew that Jenna was planning to go out to the Tavern with

Todd that night. So I called her. Told her I had to see her. Even made my voice break up

a little bit on the phone.

“What’ll I tell Todd,” she asks me.

“Just tell him you got called into work,” I say. “Tell him you have to work.”

This is about eight months after they broke up — seven months after Todd gave

Jenna the money for the abortion. I go over to Todd’s on like a. Sunday. Chris is already

there. Todd’s mom lets me in, sends me back to his room, and I see Todd and Chris

sitting in front of the TV playing Nintendo - RBI Baseball. Chris was leaning forward,

clicking his thumb away on the button and yelling at the screen because he couldn’t get

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those fat little men to run around the bases fast enough. Everybody says, “What’s up?”

and then I sit down on the bed behind them and I'm like, “Hey, Todd, when’s the last

time you seen Jenna.”

He’s like, “Huh?” and he’s barely listening, leaning over to his right. Cal Ripken

had just hit a deep fly ball to left field — Chris always used the Orioles — and Todd was

trying to run the fat little outfielder under it. So I say it again:

“When was the last time you saw Jenna?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Couple of months ago. Why?”

Then the little white dot — the ball — sails over the fence and into the crowd, and

Chris is slapping his knee, shouting, “Cal Ripken, baby!” and Todd is like, “Ooh, Kol

Vipken baby,” mocking Chris in this voice he rips off from me.

But then I just go ahead with the conversation, and I say, “You know she’s

pregnant?” and Todd’s like:

“She was.”

“No,” I say. “Is. I saw her yesterday. She’s big as a house.”

So then Chris turns around, but Todd keeps looking forward, all like, “No, she’s

not” and all.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Actually, I think she is. I was walking through the mall

yesterday. I saw her in line at the food court. She’s big as a house. Maternity clothes and

all. She’s pregnant.”

Todd was like, “Fuck you,” but Chris kept looking at me until he heard a beep

come from the screen. Todd had just struck out Fred Murray, and Chris starts yelling at

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him, calling him a cheater. But that’s how Todd is — cool about the whole thing. Still

playing the game. Never even looks at me.

I tell him, “I’m serious,”

He says, “Fuck you.”

I’m like, “You should give her a call.”

He says, “Fuck you.”

He must have called her that night. He told me all about it later, but he never told

me when. He asked her if she had the abortion, and she said yes, but then she started

bawling and she asked him if she could come over and see him.

When she got there she was big as a house. Todd was waiting on the porch and he

saw her waddle up out of the car, and he’s like, No way.

She was bawling a lot now, but her hair was sprayed up - she’d taken the time to

do it up in the mane and put on her make-up. None of it mattered to Todd. He just tells

her to “get the fuck out of here.”

Then, they’re both standing on the porch and she grabbed his hand and started

bawling the word “please” over and over again. Then: “Please don’t do this. Please don’t

do this. Please don’t do this.”

“Go fuck yourself and die,” Todd said to her. “Go fucking die!” And he just

shook her off and told her to get out of there.

Todd ain’t normally like that. He gets mad and all, but he’s a good guy. I guess I

should say why. I mean, he don’t really know I know, but the reason Todd was so

torqued up was because Chris’d told him that he’d seen Jenna giving her ex-boyfriend a

blow-job in his car. That’s why they’d split up. Todd never talks about it though. If you

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ask him why they broke up that first time, he says it’s just because he started feeling

pressured. And normally I don’t put too much water in what Chris has to say, but when

Todd told me how he went off on Jenna like that, I figured that was the way it worked.

It was simple — I just told him to call up Penney’s. See, it was my word against hers and

it’s not like she could tell him the truth. I said I saw her doing the kneel and bob in the

driver seat of Jacobs’ El Camino the Tuesday before Easter and she said she was at work.

Tells him she got called in like I told her to say. All right, he thinks. Fine. But then I tell

him what I saw.

First, he’s like, “No way. You’re bullshitting.” We were standing out in his back

yard shooting hoops, and he just kept right on chucking.

I grabbed the rebound, bounced the ball once and then looked him dead in the

eye. “Hey man,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t bullshit you on this. It’s not like I enjoy saying

it.”

He had his hands up by his chest, waiting for me to toss him the ball, but then he

just kind of let them go limp. “Nah,” he says. “Jenna’s not like that. I can trust her,” so

I’m like:

“Well, if you can trust her, why don’t you call up the Salon at Penney’s. Tell them

you want to know the name of the girl who cut your hair last Tuesday so that you can ask

for her again. Then ask them if there was a girl named Jenna there? If you trust her, you

got nothing to worry about.”

So he brings his hands back up to his chest, calls for the ball like he’s ignoring me

and I give it to him. “Nah,” he says. “I trust her.” But I already know he’s going to call,

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because he spins into this little ten-foot fade away, and we both watch the ball arc up and

down, and then splat against the pavement without even touching the rim.

So Jenna just went home after Todd went off on her, and nothing happened for a

couple of months except phone calls — hang ups, star-sixty-nines, all the normal break-up

stuff, only up a notch. Then she has the baby.

So this is like two weeks after Jared was bom: I was over at Todd’s with Chris

again. Me and Todd are playing Nintendo; Chris is sitting behind us on the bed. Darryl

Strawberry had two strikes on him — I always played with the Mets — but I wasn’t

swinging at anything. I was trying to work the count to full. The bases were loaded, there

were two outs, it was the bottom of the ninth, and I was down by three runs. It was like a

story-book set-up. I remember I’d gotten the count to two and two when we heard the

front door open. First we just heard some talking out there, so we just figured it was one

of Todd’s mom’s friends. Then, Todd gives me a fast ball over the outside comer of the

plate, I hit the button to swing, Strawberry pops up a weak infield fly, and Jenna Wilson

walks into the room carrying a baby.

We all looked up from the game. Todd’s mom was standing behind Jenna, and

she said Todd’s name. Todd stood up and looked at the baby. It was all wrapped up in

this light blue cloth — you could barely see its face. Todd opened his mouth to say

something, but nothing came out, and then Jenna held Jared out to him. She had her hair

sprayed up, but she wasn’t bawling. Her face just screwed itself up into this stare, and her

mouth was like a line, like she was thinking: There — there’s our baby. But she didn’t say

anything.

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I remember I looked at Todd’s mom — her face was all soft and curved — then I

looked back at the TV and saw that Strawberry’s pop-up had landed in front of Todd’s

shortstop.

And Todd just stood there. He looked at Jared for a while, and then he smiled.

Then he laughed. Then, he put his face in. his hands and started bawling.

Two weeks later Todd and Jenna moved out to one of the town houses in Flying

Hills. Jenna’s dad got Todd a job running their grounds crew, and they got married the

next year.

Me and Chris split pretty soon after Todd started bawling, but when I first stood

up, I kept the Nintendo controller in my hand. I looked at Jenna, Todd, Todd’s mom, but

out of the comer of my eye, I could see the TV screen, and I could see my base runners

moving around the bases. Chris is up and off the bed, holding his mouth open and staring

at Jenna and the kid, and she ain’t looking at anything but Todd. I gave Chris a look like,

Guess we’d better jet, but even then I kept my thumb pressed down on the controller and

I didn’t let go until I heard four little beeps, one for each of the four little fat guys who

slowly crossed over home plate to win the game.

Todd likes what Mamma said about “making it.” He talks about it a lot, busts the

phrase out every now and then. But the truth is it didn’t really go like that. She don’t

know, but I went to see him before Jared was bom. I had to. I wasn’t going to just bust

out this baby on him one day like that. I knew it too. I knew I didn’t have to trick him

into it. It’s like once I saw him that night, standing up on his porch while I was climbing

out of my car all eight months pregnant, I just knew. He didn’t get mad or anything. He

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just stood there looking at me, and then he started crying. Never said a word, just looked

at my fat belly and cried — like he was a little kid looking at something he’d broken.

We hugged a bit on the porch, then I pulled away and left — not because I knew I

had to — like Mamma told me. It was more like because I knew I was supposed to - like

that’s the way they’d write the scene if it was in the movies or on TV. Just walk away.

See, Mamma says it’s work, but I think there’s a lot of play in it too. Cause up till

I had Jared, Todd would call me up and go on about me and Jacobs — that was the real

pebble in the shoe. I kept telling him it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t say anymore than that,

so eventually I just decided I had to play along. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m sorry.

Please forgive me.” And the funny thing is I was. I played sorry, and then I was. It’s like

with what’s his face. Yesterday, me and Todd had a bunch of us over for Thanksgiving —

Mamma, Mike, and then Todd wants to invite what’s his face, who he knows I can’t

stand. So what can I do? I smile as I pass him the Stove Top, I laugh at his dumb joke

about the nun and the bus driver . . . I even gave him a hug goodbye. “It was so nice to

see you,” I said to him. And it’s funny, but you play the game like that, and there’s

nothing that can touch you. It’s like everything .. . It’s like when I talk to Jared these

days, I can hear myself imitating my mother, you know? Like a big play. But it’s

wonderful really. It’s not just work. It’s actually — I don’t know — kind of fun.

Well, that’s it. That’s the whole ballyhoo. She showed him the baby, Stan got him

a job and a place up at Flying Hills, and they’ve been married for three years. I guess

now’s the point where I say, “It was all because of me.” Jenna and Todd turned out fine

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all because of me. But to tell it plainly, I wouldn’t want to take responsibility for any of

it.

I drove up to their house yesterday for Jenna’s little Thanksgiving party, and

between those two hooligan friends of Todd’s — one with his dirty jokes, the other .. . the

other’s like a gosh-damed five year old, always playing games . . . Then you got Jared.

What with his Star Wars toys and his PlayStation, that boy’s so spoiled he don’t listen to

no one. It’s a mess. A mess. Now she’s got Todd walking around quoting me too - "Love

is what you make it.” Well. I’ll tell you what they made. Those two kids didn’t make

nothing but a mess.

It’s hard, yeah, but that’s the way it should be. It’s hard, but sometimes I feel like

that’s what’s right about it. It’s like when we used to do double sessions for football in

high school. It was hard as hell, but by senior year we kind of liked busting our humps,

because we knew how good it was for us. That’s how it goes. It’s all what you make it.

Yesterday we had them all over for Thanksgiving, right? Mike, Chris, Jenna’s

Mom. And after dinner things got a little bit rocky. Jared is showing Mike how to play

the new Mario Brothers game on the PlayStation, and Jenna’s mom starts pestering Jared

back to the table for some apple pie. So Jared don’t want no pie, and when Jared don’t

want to hear you, he’s got this way of just tuning you out, so pretty soon, Jenna’s Mom is

shouting at him, and then Jenna’s chirping back and forth with her Mom for a while, and

Chris gives me this look, like: Man, look at what you got yourself into. But the truth is,

it’s all right. It’s like double sessions; it’s hard but it’s good .. . Cause I’m just looking at

Mike and Jared on the floor focussed on the TV with their controllers in their hands, and

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I’m like: that’s my kid; that’s my buddy; that’s my wife; that’s her mother; that’s the way

they talk; and this is the way we live. It’s good, you know — it works.

So she got him anyway. I went over there with Mike yesterday and saw the whole

thing — wife, kid, mother-in-law, wall-to-wall carpet, turkey dinner. The whole shit and

shabootle. Can’t say I didn’t try to help him.

I remember she told me one night that they were going to “make it.” One night

before she had the baby, I’d called her up — or she called me — whatever. Anyway, she

said to me: “Me and Todd are going to make it, and you can’t stop it” — all drama-

queenie and shit.

So I’m sitting there after dinner yesterday, and I look around and I think to

myself, well, all right, this is what they made. And that’s what kicks me in the ass — that’s

what gets me. I look around at the imitation oak Ikea furniture, the kid in his little

flannels and Baby Gap jeans, the knick knack crap all over the walls — “Bless This

Home,” wooden spoons, egg beaters ... And it’s all so ordinary. I mean after all her

work, I look around and it’s all so ordinary.

Thing is, you look at Todd’s face long enough, you look at the way he looks at it,

and you’d think it glowed. I swear, if Mike spends enough time over there, he’s going to

be looking to get married pretty soon himself. It’s like a virus or something. Even me.

I’m sitting there after dinner trying to tell this joke I heard from the road crew guys last

week. It’s about a cab driver and a nun. You know — the one where the cab driver admits

he’s not a cab driver and the nun admits she’s not a nun, cause she’s just a queer going to

a costume party. Anyway. I’m halfway into it and I’m looking around at all their faces. I

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see Todd looking at his kid over there on the floor playing video games with Mike, and

all of a sudden I see it too. Suddenly the kid and all the Ikea shit get this little glow cause

of how he looks at it, and now I feel like I’m in church or something. Like the whole

place is suddenly too good for me, but too good only because it’s so goddamned

ordinary. I don’t know. I got through the joke, but every time I went to say "ass” or

‘'"fuck” I ended up saying "butt” or “screw” or some shit. It just didn’t work.

So it ends like that. It ends with Jared. He’s all right too. He’s a cool little kid. It’s

like he’s got everything he wants and he’s just chilling with it. He’s got the new

PlayStation. Man, it’s a trip. I was over there yesterday for Thanksgiving — Todd and

Jenna put out a whole spread - and Jared’s showing it off to me. The new Super Mario

Brothers Game. Little kid — four years old — he don’t even know how to play the game;

he just takes the controller and runs the little man around. But that’s the thing, the way

the game is now, that’s all you have to do. Remember the crappy little Nintendo Mario

Brothers? All you could do was move right or left. Well this one’s like three dimensional,

and it’s endless. You can go up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards. There’s like a

whole world in there and it never ends.

So at first I’m like, “Hey Jared, you got to pick up the little coins.”

He ignores me for a while. Then he says, “I just like running around.”

“But if you want to get points,” I tell him, “you got to pick up as many coins as

you can. That’s how you play the game.”

Then he looks at me - the little guy’s pretty smart. He looks right at me and he

goes, "Nah, that’s like doing chores. I just like running around.”

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So then Jenna’s mom starts calling him back to the table, but Jared’s just chilling

with Mario so he don’t even hear it. Pretty soon, Jenna and her mom start getting into it

about the kid, then Chris starts telling some lame joke to Todd who’s ignoring him

because he can’t take his eyes off of his kid playing this video game. I started to feel like

me and Chris shouldn’t have been there - like maybe these people needed some privacy.

Then I got to looking around and thinking how all these people here don’t know

how much I know about them. Todd don’t know that I know about Jenna and Jacobs,

Jenna don’t know that I know about how Todd told her to “fuck off’ that first night she

came over pregnant, and Mrs. Wilson don’t know that I know she’s the one who put this

whole thing together. Then I got to thinking about what Chris said on the way over.

He told me some bullshit story about how him and Jenna had been going behind

Todd’s back the whole time they were dating. Even tells me to take a real good look at

Jared. “Little tike might be mine,” he says. That’s the way Chris is. He’s all right, but

he’s basically got all the class of a ... I don’t know, something without class, I guess.

Anyway, he told me he was just kidding, and I knew it was bullshit from the start, but

still, it got me thinking: If I know stuff that they don’t know, there’s probably a whole

heap of a lot of stuff they know that 1 don’t know.

So I sat there with Jared. He’d given me the controller, and now I’m Mario

running around in this little world. I climbed up on some mountain, fell in some water,

jumped over some mushrooms, and pretty soon Pm lost. So I turn to Jared and I’m like,

“Jared, how do I get back to the coins?” Course, he don’t even answer, and I’m thinking,

look who I’m asking for advice. Then it’s like, yeah. I’m lost. And I’m here with Todd,

Jenna, their kid, their mom, Chris, and I’m thinking about what I know that they don’t

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know. And I’m thinking about what they might know that I don’t know. And then I figure

it’s all just endless. Cause when I picture Todd screaming on the porch, and Jenna

holding out the baby in Todd’s bedroom, and Jenna’s mom yelling for Jared to get back

to the table, I figure it’s all just as endless as the game.

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I. The Pitcher

Long after the chant of liWe won! We won!” had faded beneath the scream of the

recess lady’s whistle and the scampering of tiny sneakers on macadam, Willy Missiginiss

would continue to behave like the belly-itcher he’d been accused of being on that fateful

afternoon. Not quite able to overcome the insult of Pamela Gimpsted’s skyrocket kick, he

would settle into a pattern of jealous scom for the fairer sex. In high school, he would

become the type to leave partially dissected feline fetuses in the lockers of majorettes and

homecoming queens. In college, he would become the type to scribble the word ”Butt-

Slut” in permanent marker on the foreheads of young women careless enough to pass out

in his fraternity house.

Less than a year after dropping out of college, Willy would move to a Chicago

suburb, meet, alternately sleep with, ignore, and then finally marry a woman who never

outgrew her taste for hair-pullers and bra-snappers. Her name would be Maxine, and

Willy’s habit of ridiculing her as harshly and unfairly as he had ridiculed any of his

pickiest kickers, repeatedly demanding that she wanted everything in life handed to her

on “a fricking silver platter,” would eventually lead her to abandon, for a time, all

attempts at molding herself toward the desires of men. By its second year their marriage

would grow as sexless as it already was loveless, and Maxine would descend further and

115

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further into the frumpy whispy-haired stupor of angry and aggressive feminism until

witnessing a gimpy woman in a sweat-suit beating a young man about the shoulders with

an eggplant in the produce section of her supermarket. The image would hold for her the

simultaneous familiarity and surrealism of an omen, and she would take it as a warning

to: 1) never purchase overripe eggplants, and 2) regain her former feminine wiles in a last

ditch attempt to save her marriage.

Three weeks after the breast augmentation surgery she told her husband was a

month long workshop in the then fashionable form of self-improvement known as "hug-

therapy,” Maxine would return to Willy a surprisingly new and — she hoped - more

suitable woman. Upon her homecoming, Willy would turn from the Rose Bowl game on

TV just as Michigan's quarterback, who’d already suffered three broken ribs, tumbled

into the end-zone for the game-winning touch-down. Later, friends and relatives of the

couple would believe it was this momentary distraction from the culminating moments of

a meaningless football game that set Willy off, but they would be wrong. For when Willy

turned to face his wife’s new body, he would know only those two perfectly round kick-

ball sized breasts straining against a red cable knit sweater, and something about their

shape, something about that roundness disturbed only by each prominent nipple —

something Willy himself would never quite understand - would lift him up from that easy

chair, fill him with a trembling rage against all things female, and force him to offer

Maxine the back of his hand as sloppily and aggressively as any of his bounciest pitches.

Ironically it would be Willy who never recovered from this beating that finally

put into concrete form the abstract misogyny he’d lived with since Pamela’s kick. It

would take four more years of abuse, but eventually Maxine, bleeding from the lip and

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swollen about the eye, would flee from the house, leap onto a Chicago Greyhound bus

bound for New York city, and leave Willy behind forever. With his rage now dressed in

flesh and blood but lacking a consistent outlet, Willy would spend the next fourteen years

of his life developing into a clumsy sex criminal. He would peep through windows, he

would pinch waitresses, he would shout obscenities at streetwalkers from the window of

his car, and then at the age of forty he would be arrested, tried, and convicted for the rape,

murder, and subsequent dismemberment of an eleven-year-old Girl Scout in his former

home town.

Willy would spend the remainder of his life in an Illinois state prison where the

absence of kickball and women would allow him to behave innocently enough to go

relatively unnoticed until three weeks before his death from lung cancer at the age of

sixty-three when he fell into the torpor from which he would never recover and roused

the guards by groaning over and over to his cellmates and all who would listen the

mysterious, enigmatic word, "Mikasa . . . Mikasa.”

II. The Kicker

Twenty years after her would-be homerun kick had fallen into the arms of the

gawky bespectacled right-fielder who loved her, Pamela Gimpsted would still regret her

decision to kick with her toe. For though the ball itself would suffer a permanent dime

sized welt from the blow, both Pamela’s toe and her psyche would bear life-sized bruises

throughout her young-womanhood. The big toe, broken both above and below the

knuckle, would never be treated by a doctor, and, accordingly, it would heal with a

crookedness that affected the entire foot, which in turn affected the entire leg, which then

in turn effected an entirely unattractive limp. For the psyche, the cause and effect

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relationship would be much simpler. Seeing her potentially game-winning kick drop into

the embrace of the boy who had so often courted her with lunch-time juice boxes and

Crayola portraits of the two of them holding hands beneath a manic smiling sun, Pamela

had realized at far too young an age the tendency of male love to smother the ambition of

any female with enough spirit to kick like a boy. The combination of the developing limp

and this premature realization would prove to be too much for even this bright and

attractive girl to handle. In high school, she would become the type to respond to

unwanted fetuses in her locker by tainting the football team’s water-bottles with her own

urine. In college, she would become the type to react to the scent of permanent markers

by kicking fraternity boys in the groin with the steel-toed boots that would be by that time

a mainstay in her wardrobe.

After college, her resentment toward the cruder sex would manifest itself in a

weight problem, a tendency to wear only sweat-suits, and the habit of assaulting would-

be supermarket Lotharios with the nearest piece of produce. Thus, she would spend the

first half of her twenties secluded in her dingy New York apartment, leaving the city only

once every month to go food shopping for a housebound grandmother who lived in a

suburb just outside of Chicago.

At the age of twenty-five, however, Pamela would find direction. A New York

senator running in the Republican presidential primary would schedule a late-morning

speech by the Ohlmscott Fountain in Central Park, and Pamela, after purchasing a nickel-

plated stub-nosed 357 magnum, would plan to attend. The note in her pocket, which she

hoped would be discovered moments after the assassination and subsequent suicide,

would be written in the form of a poem:

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You are the man. the glass-dick ceiling. This is mv kick to the balls of oppression. This time I will not be caught.

But before she would be able to get to the park, her life would once again be altered.

Limping down Broadway, clutching protectively at the gun in her hip pocket, she would

be suddenly grabbed and hugged by a tall thin older woman. Something in this woman’s

laughter, the warmth generated by her arms, and the pressure of her breasts against

Pamela’s would bring to mind a word Pamela had neither spoken nor thought of in over

seventeen years: “Love.” As the woman darted off, skipping her way down Broadway,

Pamela would realize that it was actually this simple word and not the grandeur of a

homerun kick that her life truly lacked.

Back in her apartment she would place an immediate call to the hug therapy crisis

line. Once she informed the operators that she was considering political assassination and

had gone so far as to load the magnum, they would patch her through to a hug-specialist,

who would promise that a premier hug-practitioner would shortly arrive at Pamela’s

address to hug-counsel her personally.

Pamela would never know why this premier hug-practitioner never arrived, but

she would also never give it a second thought after that day. Waiting in the gloom of her

one-room apartment she would realize that she didn’t need to be hugged by anyone, but

rather it was she who needed to get down to the business of hugging. There was a whole

world out there, she would muse, of little girls growing up just like her, and if their

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vocabularies lost that word Pamela rediscovered that morning they would end up just as

lost, lonely, and overweight as she was.

After she disposed of the gun and the suicide poem, Pamela would sit down to

what would become her life’s work. At a tiny desk lit only by the glow o f a single

unshaded lamp bulb she would scribble away at what would eventually become her

proposal for a halfway house for children “who because of poverty, abusive parents, or

cruel but well-intentioned lovers were heretofore prevented from kicking back at a world

that kicks without any care for the well being of its own toes.”

The organization would bear the simple name of “KICK - Knowledgeable and

Intelligent Care for Kids.” Though it would later expand to each of the fiv-e boroughs of

New York City, the founding address would be a rundown brownstone in "the East

Village. There, through the force of her own will and with a recent inheritance from one

dead formerly house-bound grandmother, Pamela would establish counsel ing programs,

cook balanced meals, dress skinned knees, read bed time stories, and roll slow level

pitches for miniature indoor games of kickball, and even if she would never actually

imprint the word “love” on all of the little hearts that passed through her cLoors, Pamela

would still bring laughter to the lives of over 3,212 troubled children before her death at

the age of seventy-seven. And though it probably wouldn’t be one-hundre«d. percent true,

long after her death, it would said of her by the children she cared for and the children

they cared for in turn, that Ms. Gimpsted always looked the same way she- did in that

photograph above the fire-place, because Ms. Gimpsted was always smiling, because Ms.

Gimpsted was always, always happy.

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III. The Right-Fielder

Little Dewey Omam would never get beyond that moment when he saved the

game for his team by catching the ball that broke the toe of the girl he loved. The

immediate effect would be one of complete transformation. This clumsy underdeveloped

boy in orthopedic shoes and plastic rimmed glasses, so long hidden in the deepest reaches

of right field would be — due to the great height of Pamela’s kick and the fact that the

recess lady’s whistle made it the dramatic final out — instantly recognized as a first rate

catch-man. In the recess periods that would follow, his classmates would enthusiastically

urge him to play center field, left field, or the infield, and whenever a ball hung in the air

amid a group of two or three kickball fielders it would not be uncommon to hear someone

among the throng shout out, “Let Dewey get it!” And so this reputation for athleticism

and nerves of finely wrought steel would soon lead little Dewey to replace those glasses

with contact lenses, trade in those shoes for sneakers, and eventually recast his slouching

posture of self-doubt into the straight-backed, chin-up pose of a born leader.

Throughout high school and Long after, success would come to Dewey as easily as

if it dropped right out of the sky and settled into his waiting arms. In college he would

turn his energy toward psychology, obsessed with the process of how self-perception

affects performance, and by graduation he would publish two minor self-help books

entitled “Make the Catch” and “Make the Catch for the Garden Lover’s Soul.” His

greatest achievement, however, would still be to come.

At the age of twenty-one, beginning his third self-help book, Dewey would think

back to the catch that had made him. He would remember the call of the whistle signaling

that this would be the last play. He would remember the image of the ball hanging up in

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the sky, hovering for a moment alongside the sun, looking as distant as an alien planet,

and then falling to earth, falling to him and the waiting embrace he longed so desperately

to deliver to the kicker herself. Thus, as he thought o f the way that ball nestled into his

arms and the way the tiny abrasion Pamela’s toe had risen at the point of impact came to

rest perfectly against his own protruding navel, the memory of that original kick-ball hug

would suddenly manifest itself in a desire to realize human potential by embracing the

entire world.

The book would be titled “Hugging Your Way to Wellness,” and the resultant

“hug-therapy” workshops Dewey designed would launch him into a state of quasi

celebrity. Though his name would never become household, his therapy would, and as

countless lonely bachelors, aging divorcees, and sexually frustrated couples flocked to his

seminars, Dewey’s ever embracing arms would swell with enough riches to furnish him

with a Montauk summer house, a vast collection of vintage cars, and a tiny yet sturdy

footed platinum blonde trophy wife.

Dewey would live the good life of aged single malt scotch, imported cheeses,

weekends on the yacht, and strenuous hard-bodied sex for five years, until he received

that urgent phone call requesting that he deliver a personal “hug-therapy” session for a

distressed unnamed assassin in New York City. Unable to resist die urge to further

popularize his life’s work, Dewey would seek the first available means of cross-state

transportation and thereby placed himself on the wrong bus at the wrong time.

The instant the driver pulled back the glass doors and Dewey stepped on board

that Chicago Greyhound bus headed for New York City he would spot a moderately

attractive woman with a shiner, a red sweater and a pair of perfectly round breasts that

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bore an uncanny resemblance to the kickballs of his youth. Passing by her seat, he would

see the nipples standing proudly, dead center in each sphere, each pointing up to him like

the abrasion that had helped him to make that first embrace that had determined his entire

life. He would shudder, stumble slightly, fight back that primal urge to hold what we feel

rightfully belongs to us, and then give up and pounce on the unsuspecting woman with

animal fierceness. Dewey would struggle for a few minutes to bring the nipple of the

right breast into contact with his navel, to recreate that moment he’d been theoretically

recreating for years, but he would be wrestled off mere seconds before he could make the

connection.

The resultant arrest would bring only a suspended sentence, but the scandal —

carried on several national news programs and sermonized over by dozens of stem

voiced radio talk-show hosts — would topple Dewey’s hug-therapy empire, end his

marriage, and downgrade his posture to the stooping slouch he thought he’d said goodbye

to twenty years earlier. Having always thought that his fortune would continue to drop

from the sky like a kick-ball waiting for a hug, Dewey would have never properly

invested for his future, and accordingly, when the dust and cinders settled on the

playground of his mined life, he would be left with nearly nothing. Thus, Dewey would

spend the better part of his middle age working low level technician jobs in psych-labs,

persistently trying to catch anything that was knocked off a table.

At the age of sixty-seven an obscure and unknown Dewey Omam would attend an

afternoon baseball game in Chicago’s Sosa Yard, and in an urge to recreate or rejuvinate

his waning life, he would wander out into right field trying to catch a shallow fly ball in

the seventh inning. The disturbance would result in a slight concussion, an inside-the-

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park-home run on error, and the second arrest of the once famous Dewey Omam.

Unfortunately for Dewey, his case of reckless disturbance would be handled by a judge

whose love for a certain baseball scene in a popular memoir leads him to cite the

sacredness of America’s pass-time and sentence Dewey to six months in an Illinois state

penitentiary.

The fallen psychologist’s former fame would afford him a private cell, and,

accordingly, he would pass his first four months in a largely anonymous and desperate

isolation unnoticed by the other inmates or the guards. Then late one night as Dewey lay

struggling to sleep on his thin little cot, he would hear a steady groan rising above the

normal midnight prison murmur of regret and desire. He would sit forward in his bed,

turn his ear towards the prison bars, and then, sure enough, he would hear the sound

rising from a cell two stories beneath his own. It would be faint and punctuated by a

hoarse rasping breath, but still, it would be something Dewey could recognize. “Mikasa.”

the voice would moan. “Mikasa . . .”

The next morning the prison guards would find Dewey Omam hanging from the

ceiling of his cell by his own shoelaces. They would cut him down quickly and lay out

his corpse, but even after hours of prying they would be unable to straighten his arms,

which would be wrapped tightly around his body as if he’d been smuggling desperately to

catch his own fall.

IV. The Kicker on Deck

Neil Doseman would spend the first half of his life “on deck.” He would graduate

high school one tenth of a GPA point behind the valedictorian. He would pass his college

years as the second-string quarterback for the Michigan Wolverines and never even get to

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take a snap when in the Rose Bowl the first string quarterback suffered three broken ribs

but decided to stay in the game because as he later puts it, he “was wildly inspired” by

the story of a young female baseball player who played hurt in a popular memoir of the

times. This habit of always chasing after something just one step in front of him would

eventually lead Neil to a career in law enforcement and he would spend the years

between his twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays as a New York City beat cop who

always arrives second on the scene.

Then a disturbance on a Chicago bus bound for New York would reunite him with

an old childhood friend. After the initial arrest, Neil would arrive and be assigned to take

a quiet shame-faced sexual assaulter back to the station for questioning. Neil would find

out the perp’s name was indeed Dewey Orman during the drive, and the sudden reminder

of his elementary school days would make him feel as if in looking back at Dewey

through the rearview-mirror and the mesh screen between the front and back-seats of his

patrol car, he was somehow looking back in time, somehow staring back into that Ur-

moment that created his second string life. He would almost hear the shrill cry of the

recess lady’s whistle cutting the game short as he stood kicking at the gravel in the on-

deck circle, and in that instant he would make the necessary connection and decide that

his entire life was her fault.

After Dewey Omam was processed and questioned, Neil Doseman would wish

his former schoolmate luck, hand in his letter of resignation, and then leave the fifth

precinct forever, taking with him only his street clothes and a small metallic NYPD-

issued whistle.

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Due to her recent fame, Leslie Stardale, Neil’s former recess lady, would be easy

to locate but hard to get near. Using the in-depth knowledge of security systems that he’d

developed in his four years of walking the beat, however, Neil would break through the

security gate surrounding Stardale Ranch and after hours of crawling across the lawn in

camouflage fatigues, he would get to the house. Once inside the cavernous halls of

Stardale Ranch, Neil would make himself as invisible as he’d felt for most of his second-

string life. Ducking behind plants, darting around comers, and plunging into closets, Neil

would follow Leslie Stardale around her house and blow that whistle whenever she could

least afford to be disturbed. Just as she was raising a steaming spoonful of French onion

soup to her mouth, just as her tense neck muscles were relaxing before the moment of

sleep, just as she was carefully admiring one of her delicate commemorative Babylon 5

plates, or just as she was approaching sexual climax with any of her various lovers, Neil

would puff out his cheeks and blow life into that little whistle.

Neil’s startling screeches, which — as far as Leslie could tell — came from

nowhere, would quickly begin to undo the sanity of his former recess lady. He would

choke back his laughter as he watched her begin to talk quietly to herself, pull at the ends

of her graying hair, and occasionally stare longingly at the night sky, and even after she

would apparently try to flee his tell-tale whistle by moving to a much smaller house in

New Mexico, Neil would stay with her, haunting her with that same rattling screech that

had haunted him for so long.

It might have gone on like this for decades but for the arrival of what Neil would

believe to be the most powerful lightning storm he’d ever seen. It would happen on a

clear June night three months before Neil’s thirtieth birthday. He would be standing by

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the edge of one of the strange metal walls of Leslie Stardale’s new home, blowing his

whistle up at her while she raged at the night sky, when suddenly a great flash of light

blew the house apart, trapping Neil beneath the wall he’d been using for cover. The force

of the flash would be so great in fact, that if it hadn’t been for the whistle in his mouth,

which lodged itself into the side of the wall, Neil’s head would most likely have been

crushed. Still, he would lie there unconscious for five hours and when he woke he would

struggle for three more hours to lift the wall off his body. In the course of that struggle, as

Neil’s pectoral muscles surged with blood and adrenaline, as his forearms swelled, and

his hands crushed themselves up and against that slowly rising wall, Neil would realize

that this was the simple type of challenge he’d looked for all his life. As he locked his

elbows and began to roll his legs out from under the wall, he would understand that here,

in the simple act of lifting a heavy inanimate object there was no on deck circle, no line

to wait in, no system of seniority; there was only him and this weight.

Thus, as Neil walked away from the wreckage of Leslie Stardale’s metal home, he

would let go o f his five year grudge against his former recess lady, make an anonymous

call to alert local authorities of the electrical disaster, and decide to dedicate his life to the

one-man sport of weight-lifting. Though he was already ten years past a weightlifter’s

normal prime, Neil would pursue the slow habit of repetition, pain, and binge-eating with

such zeal, that within two years he would be winning amateur competitions in both the

Hack Squat and the Clean and Jerk. By the age of forty then, after a rigorous diet of

brown rice, yeast, wheat germ, and whey protein, and a brief flirtation with steroids -

which his biographers would forever deny — Neil Doseman would become the oldest

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professional weight-lifter to win the Clean and Press at the national strong-man

competition in Las Vegas.

When it came time to retire, Neil would marry a female body-builder twenty years

his junior, move back to his original hometown, and then, at the age of sixty, he would

parlay his fame and his former career in law enforcement into a political career. After

paying his dues in local school boards, and county commissioner seats, Neil would be

elected governor at age of seventy, and as he would live to be a healthy and physically fit

ninety-seven, he would be remembered not for his questionable recommendations for

state museum exhibits displaying body building equipment, nor for his overzealous

campaign to have all decks removed from the governor’s mansion, but rather for his

health, his size, and his death bed request that a symphony of whistles be played at his

funeral — only after the casket has been lowered into the ground.

V. The Recess Lady

Leslie Stardale would never even admit in her memoir that the reason she had

blown the whistle and ended that game five minutes early was because she was due to

meet the gym teacher in the all-purpose room’s supply closet between periods; yet the

longstanding affair between her and Mrs. Hildebran, which cost young Doseman his first

shot at heroism, would still lead to her dismissal. After ten years of illicit meetings in

locker-rooms and supply closets, Mrs. Hildebran and Ms. Stardale would be discovered

in their all-purpose room love-nest when the repeated squeak of a deflated ball beneath

Hildebran’s head disturbed the "Little Orange Bird” assembly in progress outside. When

principal Nieman yanked open the closet door to reveal the half-naked bodies of the two

women in flagrante delicto, the shock of the parents, the grand parents, and the uncles

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and aunts who had gathered there to see their special children dress as birds and sing

near-key show-tunes would be too strong for either woman’s careers to survive.

While Mrs. Hildebran descended quickly into obscurity, Leslie Stardale would

have her revenge on River’s Edge Elementary School in the form of a scandalous memoir

about life as a lesbian in the public school system. “Coming out of the Locker Room”

would be a risky manuscript to publish, and trying to find a home for it would bring

Leslie to the brink of bankruptcy and ruin, but finally on a chilly November morning the

people at Random House would say yes and Leslie would dash from their offices and hug

the first woman she sees on a crowded New York sidewalk.

The book would achieve immediate success. With the rare combination of sports,

sentimentalism, and lesbian locker-room sex scenes, it would be received enthusiastically

by both men and women, shooting it to the top of the best seller list in it’s first week of

distribution and keeping it there for over four months. One scene in particular would

manage to catch the public imagination and hold it as tightly as the final out in the game

of kick-ball upon which it was only loosely based. Though she would transform the

kickball game into a baseball game, and though she would translate Pamela Gimpsted’s

broken-toed deep fly into a broken-wristed home-run, Leslie would preserve much of the

spirit of the moment and render it as the inspiration for her own heroic efforts to break

the bounds of prescribed sexual mores at River’s Edge Elementary School. The public

would love it, and Leslie Stardale would become the type of mediocre writer who never

even pens a second book but still manages to be regarded as a sort of folk hero.

The rest of Ms. Stardale’s life would be shrouded in mystery. At the age of fifty-

six she would begin to complain of strange whistling sounds that, as she described them

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in subsequent interviews, followed her around, “as surely and snuggly as if that damn

recess lady’s whistle were still tied to my neck.” Stardale scholars would debate for

decades whether or not the whistles were real or imagined, but whatever they were, they

would eventually lead Leslie to believe that she was being contacted by “other worlds,”

and in the summer of her fifty-ninth year she would moved to Roswell, New Mexico,

build herself an aluminum house, and begin spending her evenings on her roof with a

bottle of scotch, alternately throwing back shots and shouting up to the star-speckled sky.

Some would call it an electrical storm, others a Tornado, and others still would

claim it was some more intelligent force, but whatever it was, the power that leveled the

walls of that tin-can house a year later would strike Leslie as strongly and cleanly as the

hand of God. For even after a team of rescuers reassembled her house, five different

search parties combed surrounding areas, and over three dozen friends, relatives, and ex

lovers were contacted, no one would be able to account for the whereabouts of either a

living or dead Ms. Stardale. The nearest thing to a clue would come in the form of a tiny

metal whistle that seemed magnetized to the underside of one of the toppled aluminum

walls, but despite numerous theories about whistle-bearing kidnappers, the whistle itself

would lead nowhere, and, in the end, it would only be able only serve a perfunctory role.

After seven years on the missing person’s list, Leslie would receive from her family a

memorial service and a funeral, and when the long line of grieving fans passed by the

open casket, all they would find resting on the tiny silk pillow inside would be a slightly

damaged metal whistle.

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VI. The Ball

The Mikasa-100 inflatable kick-ball, affectionately referred to as the "nipple ball"

by the students of River’s Edge Elementary School for six more years, would finally

succumb to the abrasion Pamela Gimpsted’s toe had created inches from it’s air-hole and

burst on a scorching June afternoon. Afterwards, Ms. Stardale would retire the ball to the

supply closet of the all purpose room where it would lay deflated for six more years only

occasionally disturbed by the din of chaotic lunch periods, the echoing squeak of gym

classes, the thunderous applause for assemblies about bicycle safety and American

history, and the carnal whispers of Ms. Stardale and Mrs. Hildebran, who would regularly

use the ruined ball as a love pillow.

After Mrs. Hildebran’s dismissal, her conservative replacement - a young man

with an almost religious belief in the power of old-fashioned calisthenics — would

discover the deflated kickball, fill it with salt water, patch it’s little wound, and

reincarnated it as the medicine ball that would serve as the cornerstone of his physical

education program. For twenty-two years the students of River’s Edge would graduate

from the fifth grade with swollen forearms and overdeveloped lower lumbar regions, but

then the ball would once again be retired because of another violent and unfortunate

incident. Macky Bussell, a fifth grader thirty-four years younger than the Gimpsteds,

Missiginisses, and Omams, slightly on edge due to the recent disappearance of his older

sister from her Girl Scout cookie route, would stand cradling that medicine ball in his

arms and feel something snap when another fifth grader finished some crude joke with

the line “because brownies taste better than Girl-Scouts.” What would have only resulted

in a broken nose would be complicated by the fact that this gym class comedian was

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standing mere inches from the tiled wall of the all purpose room. Thus, when the

medicine ball struck him in the face it would result instead in a fractured skull, which

then — due to the gym teacher’s tendency to tell even unconscious students to “walk it

off’ and “quit being a sissy” — would result in an unfortunate death and a rather sticky

legal situation for River’s Edge Elementary School

In the negligence trial that followed, the medicine ball would be tagged as

evidence, and even though River’s Edge would be eventually found “not responsible.”

the ball would remain the property of the state and be housed beneath a local Parks and

Rec. building unused for thirty-one more years. Then a nostalgic body-builder-tumed-

govemor, who was trying to assemble something of his own past by commissioning an

exhibit for the opening of a new state museum building that would bear his name, would

request that all Parks and Rec. employees donate whatever equipment they could find to

the display he would name “A Century of Strength Training.” Thus, the kickball-tumed-

medicine ball would surface once again and stand behind glass alongside iron dumbbells

and aluminum stretching coils until the exhibit was replaced by a “Cookware of the Past”

display seven years later. At this point, the ball would once again be put into hiding as it

would find it’s way into one of the museum’s historic time capsules that would be buried

only twenty yards from the playground behind River’s Edge Elementary School.

Thousands of years after the global nuclear destruction of World War IV, the

resultant ice-age, and the passing of man. the Virracocha, an alien race with large

almond-shaped eyes and thick red rubbery skin, would discover, colonize, and populate

the earth. Though Virracochan archeologists would spend decades searching the ground

for any sign of a rumored former civilization on this new planet, they would remain

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unconvinced by any of the first hundred time-capsules they unearthed. The hula-hoops,

the baseball cards, the marbles, and the Rolling Stones albums would look to the

Virracocha like nothing more than a strange new form of dirt, but just as the longstanding

theories of eartism and umantology are about to fall permanently out of fashion, they

would happen upon the time capsule housing that pimple-skinned kick-ball turned

medicine ball. Even for this million year old race, long-steeped in the habits of skepticism

and bureaucracy, the recognition and resultant uproar would be almost immediate. For

that red ball, even after the passing of countless millennia, would still bear the tiny nipple

shaped abrasion stamped their by Pamela Gimpsted’s toe, and for that reason it would

also bear an all too striking resemblance to the oldest of Virracochan Gods — a

father/destroyer figure named, “Mikazakikbal” which if forced into the limited bounds of

our own language would translate roughly into, “Great nipple-headed one.” Thus, for the

Virracocha, a long-dead semi-animist religion would be reborn, giant spherical nipple

headed statues would be erected, and almond-eyed children would once again be taught

to live in fear of the all-knowing “Mikazakikbal.”

Yet for a time they would never know the half of it. Since the English alphabet

meant nothing to them, they would never see the resemblance between the first half of

their own god’s name and the Mikasa brand-name imprinted on this ball. And because

American 20th Century Anthropology was a complete mystery to them, they would never

recognize the odd resemblance between the second half of their god’s name and the

traditional earth-children game for which this ball had once been used. Never, that is,

until a hundred and fifteen year-old request would be honored and the nutronium

preserved brain of the only remaining uman abductee would be delivered back to earth.

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This brain, of course, would belong to the long vanished Ms. Stardale, and when

the bubbling nutronium aquarium is finally brought before the high Virracochan priests

on the seventh annual Mikazakikbal Day, they would connect the ocular synapses to a

pair of almond shaped android eyes and then wire the broca and aphasia synapses to an

android voice box. When the sound-makers outside the great crimson temple click into

life, Ms. Stardale’s brain would report everything she knew of this cosmic coincidence to

the assembled crowd and the rest of the Virracochan population who watched or listened

to the viewgivers and soundmakers inside their spherical huts. As the deep modulated

android voice describes the way the ball’s name and the name of the game for which it

had been made combine to invoke this same father/destroyer god in a language separated

from the Virracocha’s by thirteen vowels and 200,000 light years, over four billion

almond eyes would stretch wide, over two billion red-lipped mouths would yawn open in

shock, and the entire Virracochan civilization would freeze, knowing finally that time

does not exist, that everything that happens must happen, that coincidence is myth, that

all is all, that everything from the fiercest kick to the cruelest catch, from the grossest

murder to the warmest embrace, from the happiest photograph to the brawniest governor,

from the shrillest whistle to the roundest pair of breasts . . . everything is now, as it is

then, as it is always and forever inevitable.

Those who had not played, those who waited in the kicking line, those who

loaded the bases, those who stood in left or centerfield watching the lazy arc of Pamela’s

kick, those who stayed inside during recess because they failed to bring to class their

turkey drawings made from tracings of their hands, those who stayed home with the

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chicken pox, and those who belonged to other elementary schools, in other districts, in

other lands, or other times, would all live and die, cry and laugh, sing and moan, fight

with those they loved most, make a fortune on an internet stock, never confess their love

for a co worker, drive a little recklessly on the weekends, weep at the birth of their

children, visit mother in the nursing home, explain to their spouses that they still loved

them though they were no longer interested in sex, and fail to find time for piano lessons

never coming to understand the beauty, the freedom, and the tragedy inherent in the fact

that for them, as for the rest of us who do not belong to this particular kickball game,

none of it mattered at all.

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My father rarely uses the word “love” around me. and I can't say I mind much.

Phone calls end with, “OK, see you.” Visits end with a slap on the shoulder. “Take care,”

he says and I say, “OK,” relieved that all emotion has drained from the scene just like the

whiskey he poured into the bathroom sink on the only night I did hear him use that word.

Seven hours after I graduated from high school my father stood swaying in my

room with a bottle of Makers Mark whiskey in his hand. He looked dangerous, unsure,

off balance. His short black hair stood up from his forehead in hand-molded tufts, and his

face glowed as if it had been slapped red on both cheeks. He was dressed nicely, but the

front of his fitted blue oxford hung loose and untucked, his black, pleated pants had risen

into staticky wrinkles, and his tie had long ago been transformed into a lop-sided, paisley

scarf. I sat on the bed and gripped the comforter tightly behind my back. My left eye was

swollen shut, I was drunker than I'd ever been before, and I wasn’t sure what was going

to happen.

The graduation/going away party had ended twenty minutes ago. The next day. I'd

be following Chris Tobias's Camaro, rolling east along the interstate toward Ocean City,

Maryland where we planned to spend the summer in a sunshine-haze of pre-college

debauchery. The waves of the Atlantic Ocean crashed only fifty-three miles from the

136

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mailbox in front my parent’s house, but something about all the bulging card-board boxes

and the stripped walls in my bedroom made the trip seem irreversible.

My mother took it seriously. She’d used the phrase “leaving the nest” six times in

that week alone, and even though I constantly reminded her that I would be "nesting" in

the bedroom down the hall from hers come Thanksgiving, Christmas, next Summer, and

probably a few miserable years after college graduation, her mood of sentimental fatalisim

remained strong enough to hold a thin veil of finality over the entire house. Dinners grew

tense. Suddenly everyone seemed to have so much to say, but the food took longer to

chew. Daily routines took on deep and unsettling meanings. I’d brush my teeth in the

bathroom, and my mother would feel the need to inform me that I wouldn’t be looking

into that mirror much longer. The simple act of ironing a shirt somehow prompted a

reaction of somber reticence. The Dr. Seuss book The Places You 11 Go, which had been

given to me at age six, somehow made its way onto the living room coffee table.

When their sons leave home, mothers reflect. They know how they feel and they

tell you. Fathers, on the other hand, obsess over the details of your upcoming trip and the

future maintenance of your car. They ask you seven times if you know which turnpike

exit you’re taking, they remind you more than once to check the oil every other month,

and they go over a dozen different methods for packing a trunk. This is, most likely, the

way they tell you how they feel. And they tell it to you over and over again until you

snap, “all right already,” which is, most likely, the way you tell them how you feel.

By the time my friends started showing up for the p a rty ,my car had been packed,

unpacked, and re-packed three times. “This is the kind of stuff you’ re not going to want

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to worry about tomorrow,” my father said, stuffing a rolled-up blanket between a

television and a desk chair in the back of my Toyota hatchback. Chris Tobias had just

pulled up in his black Camaro on the opposite end of my car. He stepped out with Todd

and Brett — two more of my friends who were coming to the party — and they walked

towards us cautiously, planting their hands in their pockets as they gave my father and me

a series of half nods.

“Hey Chris,” my father said. “Todd ...” - he never remembered Brett’s name —

“you guys can head on in. Mrs. Getty's already got the food out.”

One of them said, “all right,” and they all turned up the walkway single file, with

Chris leading the way to the door. My father slammed the hatchback shut and then

opened it again. I turned away.

“Oh,” he said suddenly, reaching out to grab my elbow, “you got to watch for

this. See this taillight thing? When you got the trunk filled up, you got to be careful not to

slam it, cause it'll knock the wires loose.” He pointed at the small trapezoidal taillight on

the inside of the rear windshield and then fingered the wires leading into it.

I glanced at it for a second and then gazed off toward the street, probably thinking

about some girl.

“Hey,” he said sharply, letting go of my elbow and then smacking me on the

shoulder. “You hear me?”

I didn’t answer.

“You know what I’m talkin’ about?”

“Yeah,” I said impatiently, looking back into his gray eyes and chiseled stare. "I

heard you.”

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“OK.” he said. “Just want to make sure you know these things.”

I stepped away from his hand and turned toward the house. He slammed the trunk

closed.

As the party gradually filled up, my parents' friends and mine split the house into

two separate floors. We took the basement with the TV, the old couch, and a card table

filled with soda and potato chips. They took the upstairs living room with the new stereo,

the liquor cabinet, a cold-cut tray or two, and several deep-fried items in a light, flaky

crust. By 10:00 PM, however, the party had migrated out to the back yard and the two

floors mixed around a gas grill, two picnic tables, and a keg of light beer that those of us

who came from the basement eyed with growing interest as the night moved on.

By midnight, the whole crowd was in high spirits, floating back and forth across

the neatly trimmed lawn amid fireflies and conversation. My father, who hadn't been

much of a drinker in the last ten years, walked with an off-balance swagger from the few

gin and tonics he'd had, my mother laughed animatedly with a wine glass in one hand and

the other waving in front of her face, and Chris Tobias and I had made enough furtive

trips to the keg to be talking loudly and fairly stupidly.

We threw around the type of tender insults close friends use when they don't want

to admit that they're leaving each other behind. We knew we'd be spending the rest of the

summer together, but after that our futures stretched out in different directions, and

somehow the stodgy, cap-and-gown ceremony we'd suffered through that afternoon made

this fact seem more real than the sunburned hangovers that the next three months

promised. Accordingly, as we sat at the picnic table slurring energetically over who'd

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"wussed out bigger" in our final high school football game, Brett and Todd had to grip

our shoulders and tell us to "keep it nice" more than once.

Then Chris got a look at my father.

The "old man" stood laughing behind the smoke that rose off the grill. His pinkish

face, wide-eyed and sweaty, shook with energy as he shouted toward a circle of his

friends.

"Getty," Chris said, turning back to me from the other side of the picnic table.

"Your old man's lit."

Ever since the last time I had seen my father "lit," the idea of him having too

much to drink made me flinch a little defensively. "Shut up," I said. "He's fine."

"No. I think he's drunk. I think the old man's got a problem."

I stood up from the picnic bench and took two steps away, but Chris was right

behind me, laughing in my ear with his hand on my shoulder.

"Look at him," he chuckled. "He's a lush."

"Shut up," I said again, and suddenly I was spinning around, lunging at Chris's

arm to get it off my shoulder, and clumsily knocking his half-filled cup onto his chest.

He flinched back toward the picnic table and his face was instantly transformed.

His eyes narrowed into slits and his thin smile crumbled into a scowl. The red of his

cheeks spread to his forehead and throat, and his nose wrinkled at the bridge. Then he

sprang forward and threw both his palms against my chest as the word, “hey” exploded

from his mouth like a grunt.

I shoved him back before Brett or Todd could get to us. We were both still warm

and red-faced from the beer and the talk. It didn't take much. A few moments later.

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almost as if we had planned it before the last shove, Chris and I began throwing large

sweeping punches toward one another’s heads.

The side of his fist crashed against my ear right away, and then I put my head

down but kept my arms moving in wide arcs. I could feel my fists hitting something —

sometimes something hard, sometimes something soft, sometimes on the skin, sometimes

on clothing. Three more punches glanced off my neck and shoulder, one crashed against

my left eye, and then suddenly someone was grabbing me.

Two sets of arms wrapped around my body, another punch glanced off the top of

my head, and then I fell onto the grass. I twisted and struggled for a few moments against

the arms that pinned mine to my body. I was looking up at Chris being pulled away by

two of my father’s friends and someone was yelling, “Calm down! Calm down!” over

and over again into my left ear. After a few confused moments, I looked up at the face on

top of me and saw a patch of messed up black hair, a sweat-streaked forehead, and my

father’s gray eyes wide with exertion and anger.

A half an hour later I sat slouching on my bed and waited for my father. He’d

taken me inside right away and done a lot of pacing. He kept telling me I was drunk.

“You’re drunk aren’t you?” he'd said. “You’ve been drinking all night.” That seemed to

bother him more than the fight, but still his voice sounded artificially loud, like someone

reciting an oath they didn't believe in. T said nothing. I just sat on my bed and inhaled and

exhaled deeply. “Stay here and calm down,” he said. “I’ll be back. Just relax and clam

down.” When he left he shook his head at me twice and closed the door behind him.

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I watched out my window for a few minutes as he strolled around the backyard

talking to people. I saw him walking up to various groups of his friends with his arms

shrugging out by his sides. Once an old bald man with gray hair around his temples

imitated the wide arcing punches Chris and I had made. He grinned wildly and my father

nodded his head and then scratched the back of his neck. I saw Chris standing with Brett

and Todd. He looked fine. He was drinking from a can of soda and laughing occasionally.

He didn’t even look like he’d been in a fight. My father walked up to him and slapped

him on the side of the shoulder. Chris looked down at the ground. Then they both

shrugged, and my father made soft motions with his hands in the air between them before

walking away.

When he came back to my room about fifteen minutes later he was carrying a bag

of ice and a bottle of Makers Mark with an empty shot glass propped upside-down over

the cap. “Here,” he said, handing me the bag of ice. “Put that on the shiner.” I still didn’t

say anything. I slouched forward and rested my face against the bag of ice in my hand.

My father looked around for a second or two, but he couldn’t find what he was looking

for. All the chairs in the room had already been packed and the bed was the only place to

sit, so he left for a second and then came back with a folding chair from the hall closet.

Before he got the door shut though, my mother was behind him. “What

happened?” she asked excitedly as she rushed down the hallway towards the open door.

My father set down the folding chair a foot away from the bed with its back

facing me and then turned around to fill the doorway. “OK,” he said to my mother. “OK,

we’re all right here. It’s OK.”

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She leaned around him to look into the room and I sat up, holding the ice to one

eye as I watched them with the other. “What happened?” she asked again. “What just

happened outside? What are you doing with the liquor?”

My father lifted his empty hand to his chest and pushed down on the air softly. He

spoke deliberately and slowly. “It's all right. There was a little fight, but he’s all right.

We’re going to work it out. It’s not a big deal. Just let me talk to him.”

My mother looked at him suspiciously. She leaned over again to look in on me,

and I resisted the urge to wave. She asked a few more questions and he answered them

slowly in the same reassuring yet condescending tone, until she finally said “OK” and

walked away, letting the door close between us.

“All right,” he said, pulling his tie loose with a series of quick jerks. “You wanna

get drunk? You like to drink? You think it’s a good time? Well, OK, come on and have a

drink with your old man then.” He sat down backwards in the folding chair, straddling

the seat and leaning forward into the backrest.

I lowered the ice from my face and looked straight across at him. “Huh?” I said.

He set the bottle down on the floor between us, flipped the shot glass off the cap,

and then unscrewed it quickly. “You and me,” he said. “You wanna drink? Then you can

drink with me. Whiskey. Shot for shot with your old man.” He poured the first shot

quickly. The pale liquor splashed into the tiny glass making a ring of small bubbles

around the lip. I looked down at it with my mouth open. “Who’s first?” he asked.

My father never drank whiskey. No one in the house did. The only time I'd ever

even heard him talk about whiskey was when he laughed about how sick it made him in

college. Now he was sitting in my bedroom looking back and forth between me and the

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shot with a sly gleam in his eye, and I knew exactly what he was trying to do. He was

trying to make me sick; he wanted to teach me a lesson. I guess the only problem was

that I didn’t care. I was already pretty drunk, my hands hurt like someone had stepped on

each of my fingers, and my head was ringing with a dull pain that felt like half

consciousness.

Setting the wet bag of ice on the floor, I reached down for the shot glass and then

threw the whiskey back. The clean mediciney bum splashed into my mouth, coated the

back of my throat, and ran down into my stomach with the hazy warmth of a mentholated

cough drop. I gagged sharply at first. Then I dropped my chin back down and stared my

father in the eye. He smiled uneasily as my head shook back and forth in a rigorous

twitch.

“You like that?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, wiping my lips with the back of my hand as that last quick little

shudder shot through my upper-body.

My father poured his shot a little more slowly and then picked up the glass to

examine it. “Don’t ever smell your shot,” he said, as he raised the glass to his nose and

inhaled. “It’s the surest way to make yourself sick.” With the glass pinched between his

thumb and forefinger he spilled the whiskey into his mouth and swallowed. He sat

forward with a slight lurch and then coughed hoarsely into his other hand. When he set

the glass back down his eyes widened for a moment and his face suddenly took on the

disheveled yet lucid look of a mad scientist who has just reached the point of the horror

movie at which he suspects that his latest experiment is beyond his control.

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After the fourth shot my throat and mouth were coated with a numbness that made

the whole thing easier. I still shook every now and then after throwing the warm liquor

into my mouth, but the taste didn’t make me gag. It was almost like it didn’t have a taste

anymore. It was just warm and slightly bitter, but the bitterness was almost undetectable

— it ran smoothly down my throat the way cough syrup does when you are too sick to

taste it. We drank slowly and my head was already beginning to feel warm and large, like

it was being filled with hot air and would soon lift me off the ground.

My father shook his head after each shot and we didn’t say much. He'd raise his

glass, set it down, fill it up and then wait for me to do mine. Occasionally he stood up and

paced around the room, and by his eighth shot his shirt came untucked in the front and on

the side.

“How you feeling?” I finally asked when he sat back down after our ninth round.

He belched softly into his hand and then swiveled his head around in a circle.

“I’m all right,” he said, pouring another shot for me. I drank it quickly, losing track of the

flavor somewhere just past the tip of my tongue. He poured another shot for himself and

then drank it. When he set the glass back down, he reached his right hand up to his tie

and pulled it completely loose so that it hung unevenly around the back of his neck. He

looked at me questioningly. At first it seemed like he was trying to see if I was going to

be sick soon, but then his eyebrows sank together, and it seemed more like he was

wondering what we were even doing in my bedroom with a bottle of whiskey between us.

A few seconds passed and then he reached out and took another shot before I had a

chance to reach for the glass.

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“Look,” he said letting his head drift slightly to the left. “You just can’t hit

people. You don’t wanna be one of those guys ... It’s bad news.” He paused for a

second, swayed slightly, poured the shot glass full again and handed it to me. “I know ...

you have a drink. You have a good time, but you have to stay in control.”

I watched him closely and I listened to what he was saying, but 1 was thinking of

something else. His eyes were dilated unevenly and his speech had grown slow and

slurred. It reminded me of the only time he had ever hit me. Back when I was eight years

old. It was when he still smoked and drank regularly. I guess he would have been thirty-

four.

I used to see these commercials on TV — The American Lung Association. They

would tell me that smoking kills and then I’d see my father light up in the kitchen every

night when he got home from work. He smoked Lucky Strikes and he smoked them down

to the bitter black end. They stained his fingers and thumbs brown, but he never seemed

to mind. Naturally, I had to do something. Cigarettes were deadly. In my mind, it was up

to me to save my father from himself.

I bought a small circular red tin called Tobaccaps. They had this picture on the

back - a cartoon man with a blown up cigarette. His eyes were bulging, the end of the

butt in his mouth was tattered and frayed, and the word “boom” stood out boldly in a

jagged red cloud. I pictured my father with this "boom" in his face, and then I pictured

him throwing his pack of cigarettes into the trash. It was that simple. I took all of the tiny

thin white shafts from inside this case and placed one in each of the Lucky Strikes that

my father had left on the kitchen table.

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That night he came home late with my mother. I was asleep. He was drunk. I

don’t think any of the Tobaccaps actually blew up in his face in the dynamic and stylish

manner the back of the tin had promised. They probably just popped, maybe sizzled a bit,

and basically ruined the last pack of cigarettes he had in the house. After having tried to

smoke each of them that night, he found the empty Tobaccaps tin in the trash. He didn't

waste any time. He woke me up, dragged me out into the kitchen in my underwear, T-

shirt, and tube socks, and asked me twice: "Did you do this to my cigarettes?"

I said "no" twice, and then he hit me on the side of the head with the heel of his

right hand. I fell to the floor and started crying. He paused for a moment, said the word

“shit,” and then fell to the floor and started crying too. I don’t think I ever saw my father

that drunk since then, and I know for a fact that he never smoked again.

The way he was sitting in my room now though, he seemed more than a little

drunk and he looked like he could use a smoke pretty bad. He was slumped forward

against the backrest of the folding chair, his hand was planted firmly on his head, and he

opened his mouth several times, making wet smacking sounds with his tongue. The bottle

of whiskey between us was almost half-empty. I did a shot quickly and then leaned back,

gripping the blanket behind me for support.

My father glanced down at the shot glass, and then just took a swallow from the

bottle. He set it down slightly off balance, and I had to reach out and touch the side of it

to keep it from falling over. “Think of your friend,” he said. “Do you know how hard it’s

going to be to apologize to Chris? You guys aren’t gonna feel right for a long time, and

you gotta spend the whole summer together.”

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I thought about the uncomfortable weeks that immediately followed the

Tobaccaps incident. My father’s nervous hands, his awkward way of avoiding me in the

hallway — always turning around and retreating like he’d forgotten something in the room

he had just left — as well as a dozen or so half-formed apologies that always began,

“about the other night,” and then abruptly ended, “you know your old man wouldn’t do

that to you.” I looked down at the shot glass, but my father didn’t fill it, he took a drink

out of the bottle again, and I finally spoke. “What’s the big deal,” I said. “It’s not like I

got much to apologize for. I basically just got my ass kicked.”

My father lurched forward as soon as I finished the sentence. “Hell you did,” he

said with a detectable slur. “You got your licks in there kid. You might not see the

bruises tomorrow, but... Chris left here with a bloody nose . . . You got him pretty good

with a couple of those hooks.”

I smiled uneasily at his lie and just said “yeah” half-heartedly.

“No I’m serious now,” he went on, standing up from the chair and holding the

bottle in front of him. “You got nothin’ to worry about." He took another drink from the

bottle, and then his voice got softer, his speech sounding even more drunk and

disorganized. “I know you might feel like you got a lot of things to prove right now.

You’re ready to go show everybody what you can do. But hey, there’s one person who

already knows it. I just wish I could help you out a little more you know. I wish I had

somethin’ to tell you, you know . . . but I don’t. All I can tell you is that I believe in you.

and . . ." He paused for a second and looked down at the rug letting his weight shift

forward and backward as he swayed from one foot to the other. “I love you,” he said.

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I looked down at the puddle spreading out from the bag of ice on the floor. The

airy warmth of the whiskey expanded in my stomach like a thick bubble, but I knew I

wasn't going to be sick.

My father stepped back and took another swig from the bottle. “You know?

Father’s love ..." he said, giving the bottle a hard stare. “Father’s love like whiskey."

He paused again to shudder and then smiled at the bottle as if he was recalling a dumb

joke. "Yeah," he said, "father’s love like whiskey ... bitter, strong, and warm.” He stood

there swaying with the bottle for a few seconds without saying anything. Something

about the look on his face frightened me. It was something I’d never seen before. His

eyes were turned down at the comers and his jaw was pushed out so that his lower lip

stuck out further than his upper. He shook twice, and then his cheeks suddenly puffed out

full and he lurched forward with a half-choked gag. His eyes flew around the room

frantically, but he couldn’t find what he wanted.

The trashcan had been packed, unpacked, and re-packed three times earlier that

day.

Bursting out the door, My father hit the hallway in a full sprint. The bathroom

was only ten feet from my room, so by the time the whiskey really struck him he was

safe. I heard a loud cough and a series of splashes, and then he hacked hoarsely for a few

seconds. I felt sympathetic, but I didn’t know what to do. I waited a few minutes, and he

began to throw up again, the sound of his retching amplified by the gaping mouth of the

toilet.

After about five minutes I heard the toilet flush twice and I stood up to walk down

the hallway after him. When I got to the bathroom door, the tiles inside seemed brighter

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and whiter than I’d ever seen them. The room spun slightly as I looked in, but I held my

hands against the sides of the doorjamb and steadied myself. My father stood up from the

toilet slowly. His face was wet, and his bangs were plastered to his forehead in thin

clumps. He still held the bottle ofMakers Mark in his hand and he carried it with him

over to the sink, setting it down gently underneath the toothbrush stand. With a quick

twist he ran the cold water full blast, and splashed it sloppily into his face.

“You all right?” I asked, trying to make my voice sound soft but not too serious.

“Huh,” he said, turning his head toward me as he continued to lean over the sink.

“Oh ... yeah. How about you?”

“I’m OK,” I answered, and he laughed steadily at both of us.

“Well, I hope you learned your lesson,” he said, straightening up slowly and

giving me a sarcastic grin. He looked at himself for a moment in the medicine cabinet

mirror and then reached out for the bottle of whiskey. “Jeez,” he continued with the bottle

up around his eyes. “This stuff is pretty goddamned disgusting.” And with that, he tilted

the bottle over the drain and the pale gleaming liquid ran out into the sink. “Pretty

goddamned disgusting,” he repeated. “Don’t ya think?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, and then I just watched silently and smiled as the whiskey spun

around in the sink, swirled in on itself, and then disappeared down the dark silver drain.

It may sound wretched — like something you wouldn’t want to remember, but my

father still loves to tell the story today. The only difference is that he likes to leave out

most of the details. He never tells it with a specific liquor. It's always just a "bottle of

booze." “Tried to teach the kid a lesson,” he says, “show him how alcohol can get you

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sometimes ... but after a half hour, go in’ shot for shot, I end up face down in the toilet

and he’s fine.” Everybody laughs whenever he tells it, but he will often seem

uncomfortable if I walk into the room while the story is going. He shifts nervously in his

seat, and I walk out with a smile and then listen from, the other room as he tells it

differently each time, always forgetting about the whiskey and always leaving out the

“love.”

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You can't really say why you asked her for a cigarette, but you're not so worried

about "why." Right now you're more concerned with "how." You're trying to figure out

how you should smoke it once she gives it to you. You want to look interesting.

Picturesque. Cinematic even. Maybe what you want is a conversation, the same

conversation you've wanted from every girl you’ve ever asked for a cigarette. But she

hands it to you brusquely. She sweeps her hand down, away from the pack and away

from herself as if she were brushing crumbs off a counter.

"‘Thanks,” you say without backing up, and immediately you're thinking of the

classics. You picture Brando's smoky sneer in Streetcar. Bogart’s ruggedly confident

drag in the Maltese Falcon. But then you come back, as you always do, to the bland and

graceful American competence of Jimmy Stewart. You see him as George Bailey,

smoking in front of his house while his mother urges him to go talk to Mary. His fingers

bend and part over the cigarette, not like scissors but like legs in mid-stride — on the go

and happy to be making something of themselves. Your fingers are clumsy. She lights the

cigarette with a plastic lighter, and they seem to get in the way. They try to step, but they

scissor instead and you just yank the cigarette out of your mouth and spit out some

smoke. “Do you mind if I stand here and bother you for a second before I go in?” you

152

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continue. It is early evening and you are standing in front of a drugstore where you have

come to buy condoms. Your girlfriend is waiting up the street in your apartment.

This girl just looks at you oddly. She squints one eye, cocks the other’s brow

slightly, and suspicion washes over the rest of her features like a bad slant of winter

sunlight.

Just then a small girl with a dirty face comes into view on your left, pushing an

apparently empty stroller toward the door of the drugstore. The girl with the cigarettes

steps toward you to make way, and the little girl’s father, trailing behind, mistakes the

two of you for a happy couple and smiles approvingly.

Even after father and daughter disappear into the drugstore, that approving smile

seems to lurk somewhere nearby. You can feel it almost as tangibly as if it were stretched

across your own face, and you suddenly feel the need to explain it away. “I’m not trying

to pick you up,” you say as the cigarette girl retreats to the spot she occupied before.

Maybe this maneuver offends you, touches a nerve. Even if it doesn't, you go on more

animated, defensive, a soft but shrill note of desperation breaking into your voice. “I

mean, I’m not hitting on you or anything. I’m just addicted to conversation. My mind.

It’s always going. Words and words and words." You pause for a second as if your own

words are a mystery to you — a series of sounds that pull you forward until, suddenly, you

are talking again. "Talk is the only thing that gets rid of it. Sometimes my mind just fills

up with dirty words and the voice of a pretty girl is the only thing that will wash it clean.”

You are immediately ashamed of your last sentence.

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“I’m waiting for someone,” she answers, taking another step backward. “I’m

meeting my boyfriend here.” She turns away and the back of her leather bam jacket

tightens in a way that tells you she is sorry she ever gave you a cigarette.

“Oh,” you say. “Sorry.” Then you take two steps away from her and smoke half

of the cigarette without looking at her only to turn back a minute later. “You know. I

really had no intention of hitting on you. I was just looking to pass some time," you say.

"I mean, this is drugstore, I’m here to buy condoms. I got a girl waiting for me back at

my apartment.” You point up the street and take two steps forward.

The girl pulls her cigarette from her mouth, wraps one arm around her upper body

and sneers at you out of the side o f her face.

“OK,” you continue. “Maybe I was hitting on you. But it’s not sex. It’s not about

sex."

The sound of your own voice saying "sex" trips you up for a second. You look

down at the pavement and realize that you haven't been talking so much as you've been

listening to yourself. It's possible that you want to stop, maybe listen to your words

before you say them, but there's no time. Already you hear yourself, another word in a

story this girl will tell some day. You want to make sure she gets it right. "Give her

something quotable," you hear yourself thinking, and then suddenly you’re rushing

forward again. "I just wanted to know you," you say, "like I want to know thousands of

girls. I got a girl back there, makes no sense to me . . . I can’t tell if I want to know a

thousand girls so I can understand one, or if I want to understand one so that I can know a

thousand. Either way—”

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“Look,” she cuts in. “I have a boyfriend, and I’ve studied shao lin kung fu. for

twelve years. So, please, just smoke the cigarette and Leave me alone.”

She looks like she means it — something about the eyes and the small leathery scar

on her chin — so you step back again and smoke some more, still trying to curl your

forefinger over the cigarette like Jimmy Stewart.

That's when some guy wearing another leather bam jacket walks up to her, puts

his hand on her elbow, says, “Hey,” waits for her to exhale, and then places a small kiss

on her left cheek.

You are almost done with your cigarette, but the thought of walking into the store

at this particular moment fills you with disgust. This guy's arrival has swollen the

cigarette girl a bit, straightened her posture, given her form, as if she were a pair of jeans

he'd just stepped into. Suddenly, you feel as exposed and superfluous as an extra leg. So

you lash out. “Oh,” you say, throwing both hands into the air. “Here he is, your knight in

shining leather, come to rescue you from the lunatic social smoker.”

“Excuse me?” he says. He’d already been looking at you suspiciously and now he

takes half a step in your direction. “You got a problem?”

“Just leave him . . . let’s go,” the girl tries to tell him, but you are already

answering, carried along by your own voice — a voice that now speaks with such

suddenness and energy that it sounds as foreign to you as the first time you heard it on

tape.

“My problem,” you say, “is that it ain’t a wonderful life, ’cause I can’t smoke like

Jimmy Stewart, and Mary’s on the phone with Sam Wainwright, and I’m not there to say

'hee haw.’ I’m out buying condoms, and hitting on strange girls.”

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“What?” he says, his mouth twisting in confused anger. “Axe you trying to be

funny or something?”

“Come on,” the girl says, but again you're answering him.

“No,” you say. “I’m not trying to be funny. Actually, what I’m trying to do is

figure out why when I got a beautiful girl waiting for me in my own bed, I’m suddenly

more interested in bothering a girl who’s so desperate for male attention that she has to

date a guy like you.”

It takes him about two seconds to parse the sentence, but it seems longer. You

might get a full drag off the last little butt of your cigarette before he steps forward

cursing aggressively. Then the girl tries to get in his way. “Forget it,” she says. “Let’s just

go. Can we not do this right now?” But he shoves her aside with both hands.

That seems to change things for a second. The way she stumbles awkwardly on

her heels, the way her purse kind of flails out, the way her hair spins out of control for a

second . . . It all seems to say that something is drastically wrong. For a moment, you feel

like you've wandered into someone else’s fight, like you’ve opened a door into the wrong

living room. You flick away the butt of your cigarette and tense for his approach.

Before he gets to you, however, the girl with the cigarettes regains her balance,

steps into his path, and with one straight, precise thrust, she breaks his nose with the palm

of her hand. He falls to his knees as she shouts, “Don’t you ever fucking push me!”

Then she sees the blood. His hands are cupped over his face, and blood is already

seeping out between his knuckles. Her shoulders soften, then her knees bend, and she

squats down beside him. Her voice goes from scolding to cooing in an instant. “Baby,”

she says. “Baby, I’m sorry. Oh Jesus, I lost it, I’m sorry . . She is talking quickly not

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making much sense, and he answers only with slow curse words deepened into a nasal

drone by his cupped hands.

You are looking at the both of them, wondering if they even know you are still

there, when the door of the drugstore opens and the little girl with the dirty face and the

stroller comes walking out with her father in tow. You look into the stroller now and see

that it isn't empty. As if the young girl has somehow' defied the laws of nature and given

birth to triplets inside the drug store, there are now three passengers strapped into the

seat. They’re fake actually. Stuffed. Little babies, or dinosaurs, or rather little dinosaurs

with stitched on baby faces to be exact. For a second you look down at them and they

look up at you. It is a moment, you guess. With their wide, vacant eyes and their blank

grins, their faces look so drugged, happy, and harmless that you are sure they love you.

They all love you.

Then there’s a sound: “Beep-beep.” First you think it might be a bell, but then you

look back up at the little girl. She is jabbing her stroller toward your legs, saying, "beep-

beep” over and over again. You glance at her father, and then back at the couple. The girl

with the cigarettes has her arm curled around her boyfriend’s back, and they are slowly

rising to their feet like a single solid mass of leather coming to life. “Beep-beep,” the

little girl says, and you turn back to her once more. Her eyes widen impatiently against

your stare, and you smile without condescension as you suddenly realize that she is

telling you that you are in the way.

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