University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring 5-17-2013 Building Bonfires Michael Haines University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Haines, Michael, "Building Bonfires" (2013). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1632. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1632 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Building Bonfires A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Film, Theater, and Communication Arts Creative Writing by Michael Haines B.A. Pennsylvania State University, 2009 May 2013 Acknowledgments Thanks to my committee, Amanda Boyden, Barb Johnson, and M.O. Walsh and to my peers and instructors in UNO’s CWW. To everyone who had to deal with me while writing (friends, family, strangers), your struggle is recognized and will continue. ii Table of Contents Heroics Vol. I: Origins ................................................................................................................ 1 Dead Kids ................................................................................................................................. 12 Inertia ....................................................................................................................................... 25 Being with Ghosts ..................................................................................................................... 35 Love Stories .............................................................................................................................. 47 Building a Bonfire ..................................................................................................................... 66 Little Changes ........................................................................................................................... 82 Twelfth and Sycamore .............................................................................................................. 93 Somewhere ............................................................................................................................. 107 Wire Service ........................................................................................................................... 121 Vita ......................................................................................................................................... 132 iii Heroics Vol. 1: Origins Found a kid wearing just Underoos in the middle of my store, and what did I do about it? I listened to him talk about Moon Knight while I drove him home. Who did I tell? Nobody. When Cindy asked me, after I moved to the city, if I heard about the little missing boy, Cody, who they were then guessing had gotten lost in the woods before being eaten by coyotes, I said no. I didn’t even think about it. Didn’t even cross my mind that maybe I was the last person to see this kid, or that after I saw him I moved immediately out of town. I dropped him off and saw him hug the dog in the front yard of the house where he said he wanted to go. I sat in the car and thought maybe I should knock on the door and say hello. Say, Hey, maybe you should keep an eye on your kid, huh? But after I watched him hug the mange-covered dog and sit down and pull the package of beef jerky I gave him as a snack out of his Underoos, all I did was think, Well, it’s good to go out on a good deed. And since I was set to move anyway and all of my stuff was already gone, that’s exactly what I did. I walked into my closed down, smashed-windowed grocery store to find a kid wearing only Spider-Man Underoos who would only talk about Moon Knight, and what I did was take him to where he said he lived and leave town without mentioning it to anyone. Now, Cindy follows up about the boy: “They found an arm in the woods, Stanley,” she said. “It’s decomposed, like it’s been out there since before the cold snap, and pretty torn up, but they think they might be able to pull a print off of the hand to match to the Identikit that he did at the library day camp.” I nod, and after a little while Cindy walks away to take a phone call. Once 1 she’s gone, what I want to do is scream as loud as I can, but we’re living in her childhood home, and even if her kid sister’s out, it seems as if her parents—who, like Cindy and the rest of the family, are so understanding and happy to help, so happy to let me wander and not pay bills and whatever else—never leave. We’re here mostly because I’ve spectacularly blown it for about three years in a row and succeeded in turning fifty years of my family’s black ink into a foreclosure and a drawn out Chapter 7. So I just sit there for a minute, the internalized scream throbbing around the loose, toxic scree that’s been my head since news started coming to me about Cody. I push out through the front door. It’s only seven o’clock, early enough to get to Atomic City to grab the new Moon Knight before they close. The sun is only just starting to set, so the streets are still friendly. Even the fish stink of Washington Avenue is bearable, the wave of heat of the last week having driven the vendors back into their storefronts and off of the street. A trendy young mother, out pushing a baby carriage, sweat gathering and staining the back of her shirt, asks the drunks outside of a bodega where the best phở is. I don’t get the response as I quick-step by. It’s slurred and probably indecipherable even to the young woman, but I catch a wave of smoke and hot breath. I see one of the men grab at his crotch and thrust his pelvis at her while he leans back on his heels against the bodega’s window, and I smell a rush of lilac and melon as she swishes past me, tilting the stroller up quickly and with the muscle memory of someone who pushes a carriage on the streets often enough to know better than to talk to a squad of early evening street-drunks. I cross at the light at Eighth and walk past the Friendly Lounge, where the academics out slumming will gladly yell at you about Proust, Satie, or Tarkovsky, but it’s just as likely that the old man sitting by himself at the bar, nearly planted, rooted, would bend on about Harry 2 Callahan, Charlie Bronson, or Travis Bickle. “Clean up these fucking streets,” he said to me one late night after the bartender locked the doors and shut off the exterior lights. I could only assume that he was talking to me as he had been looking straight ahead, at the rows of bottles, all night. “Know what this neighborhood used to be like? Working class. Irish. Italian. Travis Bickle wouldn’t stand for all this shit.” He spat onto the floor. The bartender, who had been sweeping up cigarette butts and bottle caps, probably waiting for us to get out and hoping that the old man would leave her a tip, leaned on her broom and said, “Get out, Ed. Go home and get some sleep.” He knocked over the stool getting up and pushed out into the dark, Budweiser long-neck dangling loosely from one hand, the other hand out of view but almost surely shoved in his pocket, fingering the knife he showed me earlier that night. I shrugged at the bartender, but she just looked at me and said, “You too, Stanley. You’re the one that got him all riled up.” And as I went out into the cool night, I half expected to find the old man heaving, knife in hand as he stood astride a prone, rapidly exsanguinating body, but the night was quiet, and the only movement that I could see in any direction was the old man bumbling his way north. I knew he didn’t get Taxi Driver, that maybe he was one of those people that thought The Graduate had a happy ending too, but I thought that my complicity in Cody’s death, disappearance, his mutilation by animals, murder, kidnapping or whatever other possibilities there were, would allow me to look the other way if I saw him down the street playing at vigilantism. I wouldn’t help, but I would look the other way and silently root for the old man. But today, I just pass the bar. At this hour of the evening the old man wouldn’t be drunk enough for me to glean any courage from him, and that’s what I need, with nothing but a 3 notebook full of half-baked clues and observations in my back pocket. As I walk up Eighth Street, it transforms gradually from vacant lots to kept-up squats and austere but cared for row homes. Finally, there is vinyl siding, garages, parallel-parked BMWs, houses that are practically confrontational about their comparative wealth. But even with all that space and money, their representation of humanity is just as poor as it is anywhere else in this city. As I pass a small park on Franklin, I see two men walking groomed, leashed dogs, one toy sized and the other a Labrador. The men are screaming at each other, loud and unabashed. “You motherfucker, why don’t you mind your own business?” “Why don’t I mind my own business? You’re the one acting like an idiot in my neighborhood—” “Your neighborhood? I was born and raised here, and I ain’t never seen your ass before.” The sound of the block had snuck back into the tenor of the conversation.