Goodbye (for now)
Welcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingWelcome to The Other Stories podcast. This is your host, Ilana Masad, and today I’m speaking with… well, no one but you, listeners.
Continue ReadingThe following excerpt from Zigzags by Kamala Puligandla is published with permission from Not a Cult Press. The Obvious Combination of Beef Stew and American Cheese Richard saw himself in me since the day we met, which was something I had never been able to shake.
Continue ReadingThe below excerpt is from Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel © 2020 Ava Homa. Published May 12, 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS.
Continue ReadingThe following is excerpted from Brad Fox’s To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020) and is reprinted here with permission. To Remain Nameless –
Continue ReadingThe following story from How to Walk On Water and Other Stories by Rachel Swearingen is reprinted with permission from New American Press.
Continue ReadingThe following story by Brenda Peynado originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Volume XXXV, No. 1 of Mid-American Review.
When Nikita was born all blue and purple, wet and scrunched like a raisin, they told us she wouldn’t survive for very long, that she had aspirated amniotic fluid. We lived off Cheetos and PopTarts and Pepsi in the NICU and pushed the waiting room chairs together to sleep, and it seemed like floating, counting the seconds our baby would live. Then, in the middle of the night, they told us she was choking and she couldn’t breathe and she would be dead in two minutes unless they transferred her to a hospital across the city that could do the operation; that is, if they could make it across the city in two minutes. So we ran to the ambulance. The driver flew, blew every red light, although they kept saying that she would never make it, and Jaime and I held her tiny feet as if that would help, while the one EMT woman pumped her small chest with two fingers and the EMT driver melted his gas foot to the floor, honking and honking and honking.
If we could only freeze time, I said.
If we could only freeze her, Jaime said, so we could make it in time.
We hit a bump and then the ambulance sprung off the road and stuck high in the air like a plane.
The driver said, Fantastic, now we’ll never get there.
We had lost our momentum. All that gas and we were only moving as fast as the turning of the earth. The rubber of the wheels spun and peeled and burned and created vortexes of air but we went nowhere. The city moved at exactly the same speed underneath us, the same traffic lights, the same towers we would memorize forever.
She’s stopped coding, said the EMT woman with her fingers on Nikita’s pulse. It appears she’ll survive until we get there. As long as we’re up here, she’ll live without breathing.
We exhaled and we rejoiced.
I have a family down there, said the EMT woman, who resumed pumping our blue baby’s chest with her fingers.
They’ll have to wait, I said. You’re ours now.
Years passed. The air was thin. Old buildings blew up, crashed down, were erected again along with still taller ones. From the back window of the ambulance, we could see into the 117th floor of an insurance company that rose like the tower of Babel. We waved to the occupants. Every fifteenth day, someone in a corner office held out a sign and plastered it to the window that said, Keep Fighting the Good Fight, and then that night someone took it back down. Everyone else on that 117th floor continued their work, as if we were merely an ambulance-shaped cloud.
Meanwhile Nikita still had not breathed. She learned to talk, but because there was no air passing over her vocal chords, we had to read her lips, her beautiful blue lips. Her eyes were electric navy from her dad, and her skin was ashen cerulean. The only thing that wasn’t blue was her hair, jet black, which once a month the EMS driver cut with scissors made for slicing bandages and clothes. But she grew.
Father, what does breathing feel like? she mouthed.
And Jaime, because he was a percussion major in college, answered, It hurts and it rasps and when you scream the little hairs in your ears vibrate and then the whole world wants to close like a clam.
Mother, why are you so pale? she mouthed.
Because we’re dying with love for you, I said.
Nurse, what is love? she asked.
And Nurse said, It hurts and its rasps and it makes you want to scream and the whole world opens like an oyster.
Father, what is an oyster?
So he explained to her about pearls and how women string them around their necks, their scientific categorization, but she had stopped listening he realized, so he said, Never mind, it’s another word for a clam.
What are words? she asked.
I said, They’re like oysters with murky pearls, and then the person that hears swallows the pearl and coats it in meaning and spits them out again on their tongue, and the next person swallows and coats it and so forth.
Jaime tickled her. While she squirmed, he said, Or they’re like little ambulances, sirens blaring with meaning, the person’s experiences inside. Nothing will ever mean the same to you as to us, and nothing will ever mean as much to us as you. And you’re a little ambulance too, holding tinier ambulances in you. Isn’t that funny?
But we could not hear the gasp of her laughter. She only trembled and smiled, her black hair waving with her mirth.
Mother Father, she mouthed, I want all these things.
One day, we said, when we get there.
She is fifteen when the driver announces, I think we’ve moved an inch!
We all look out. The sky is a sunset and it makes us shiver with the contrast between its salmon-colored reds and our blue daughter, for whom we would die if it would save her. The skyline is different now. We do not remember it. In the insurance building, the occupants are all looking our way as if they’ve finally noticed the ambulance hovering in the sunset outside their windows, their eyes bug-eyed and naked and strange. We know something terrible, awful, will happen if they’ve seen our beautiful blue daughter. They will drag us all out and make us come down, they will eat her, they will skin her for a startling pelt.
Stay away from the windows, we beg Nikita, and we clothe her in gauze and bandages from the medic’s kit.
For the most part she listens, except we sometimes catch her sticking her head in the driver’s armpit to peek at the horizon, so it looks like a blue, round plum is growing from his armpit hair like a vine.
What if I die when we get there? Nikita asks.
Nurse says, You very well may. I always thought this whole endeavor was very tricky.
Jaime and I confer that night when Nikita is sleeping. We want to push Nurse out of the ambulance, but in the end decide against it, because she’s been pumping Nikita’s heart with two fingers and her hands for fifteen years, and has to keep on doing it while we work on raising our child in the ambulance, even though she’d probably be grateful so she could go down and see her own children who by now barely remember her.
When the driver cuts Nikita’s hair with the surgical scissors, slipping its silk through his fingers while he separates each and every strand—one million and five he counted once—we wash each strand of hair after him with hydrogen peroxide and alcohol from the disinfectant cabinet. He watches her mouth while he works so he can know if she says something. All of us spend our days watching her lips for her words, for the slightest exhalation if it ever came.
Driver, Nikita mouths. Are we there yet? Can you see the ocean?
Oh, yes, the driver says putting down the scissors. To the right is the Hudson Bay, as beautiful as you, the color of your blue.
He turns on the radio, and he sings, and she puckers her lips into a silent O and tries to push out the fluid in her lungs, the fluid which fed her and kept her warm in my womb. We realize the driver has fallen in love with Nikita. Even Nurse disapproves. So when Nikita turns eighteen, we have a birthday party and give her all the candies in our pockets from the hospital’s vending machine that we’ve saved almost two decades for the occasion, but we’ve forgotten that because she cannot breathe, she cannot taste, to her they are just hard little nuggets that dissolve smaller until they are gone. Either way, she gets sugar drunk, and while she’s sleeping we push the driver out the door of the ambulance.
The next day we wake before Nikita. Jaime and I are horrified to find that Driver has been hired as an accountant on the 117th floor, and he holds out signs to Nikita from his office, saying Jump and Trust Me and then finally just NIKITA, and when she turns her face to the sunrise we scream at her, Stay away from the windows!
To distract her from the driver and the windows, we tell her stories about the most outrageous things: HoHos, and Poptarts and Pepsi, and how we survived on them for weeks, and it works, because she asks us for months, What is a Cheeto? What is Vick’s Vap-o-Rub and how can you smell coolness in mint, which is a sensation in a taste in a smell? Is it a donut because of absence? What is Haiti? What is camping? We salivate with the memory of carbonation bubbles tickling our tongues and descending in a sweet elevator down our throats, and we taste the sour salt of the ocean and we remember the rancid deliciousness of cheese, the oily crunch of a potato chip, the awfulness of TV, and the air! The open, full air in the mountains, the green and animal smell.
After she exhausts herself with questions and we exhaust ourselves with the scenes of our lives, we sleep for weeks while Nurse pumps hard at Nikita’s chest, beating at her ribcage. We dream of bruises we can never see blooming on her blue, smooth skin.
When we wake, Nikita asks, If you were never happy, how would you ever know you were sad?
We don’t answer but we look outside, and while we’ve been sleeping, the inhabitants of the 117th floor have exited their building and are busy constructing a human ladder to reach us, like the tallest cheerleading pyramid. Driver is the top man, rising and rising towards us, bobbing on the shoulders of suits. They hold signs and placards, so that plastered like paper-mâché around them are the words: Blue Baby! Look at me! Keep fighting the good fight! and so on. But really they want to smell her, they want to taste her, they think her blue skin would smell like cool mint and they could be washed of their sins in that blueness, baptized, their horribleness hidden beneath her skin that they will wear if they can take it off her, and they pretend to be redeemed by love.
Nikita says, What if I roll down the windows for fresh air? Maybe that’s been my problem all along.
And we scream, No!
I want to look outside, she insists. I want to see how much closer we are.
So we strap her down to the gurney in the middle of the ambulance.
Nurse pats her hair with one hand and pounds her chest with the other and tells her, You’re such a good girl.
Don’t worry, we whisper to her, one day we will get there. We sing her childhood songs. Finally she calms down.
Then she asks, Mother Father, if I’ve never seen the world, am I real?
She is at the peak of her beauty at nineteen. She can name everything in the world that we’ve explained, all the math and science that we can remember, but she has seen only rainbows from the windows of the ambulance, only the people like ants underneath us, and touched none of it. Her lungs are still the size of a baby’s. She glows blue with youth unsullied, untouched, like a cosmos, like a priestess for how our lives could have gone if we’d never lived them. In response, we smell the salt crystals in her eyes, we kiss her skin which tastes like pistachios, we taste the toes on her feet, which we have not stopped holding all these years. Underneath her toenails we still taste amniotic fluid like cake and iron, we breathe in her black hair like rippled silk which reaches down to the floor in our little van now that it is no longer cut by the driver, and still we cannot believe her, this miracle that came out of us.
You’re very, very real, we cry, but we hide our eyes in shame.
**
Brenda Peynado’s stories have been selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 and won prizes from the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, Writers at Work, and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review Online, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, EPOCH, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, and others. She received her MFA from Florida State University, lived in the Dominican Republic on a Fulbright Grant. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.
**
Image: Flickr / Nick Page
Here are our authors’ new and upcoming publications. Click through the links to find out more!
Todd Dillard (episode 7): The poem “Palate of the Babel Fish” is soon to be published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and the poem “Every Story Is an Origin Story” is soon to be published in Split Lip Magazine.
Julia Lee Barclay-Morton (episode 57): The facebook page for The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani is now live! She also now has an agent (Johanna Maaghoul at Waterside). She edits and writes freelance, and if anyone needs any help with writing (editorial, tutorial, or coaching), you can find her at edit.originofwriting.com.
Jesse Bradley (episode 2): “TOM HARDY AS BANE COMMENTS ON THE NATIONAL’S “CONVERSATION 16”,” published in Barrelhouse Magazine; “Nuture,” published in Ghost Parachute; “The Bowling Green Massacre,” published in Portage Magazine.
Natasha Yglesias (episode 1): “Slate,” forthcoming in Issue 3 of Waypoints Magazine.
Peter Haynes (episode 82): “A Winter Ramble to the Site of the Shapwell Ghyll Spacecraft,” published in 365Tomorrows. On May 7th she will be at the Birmingham(UK)-based PowWow Literary Festival to read her short story “Trap Street Irregulars”.
Shannon Lippert (episode 9): “Ditching the Myth of Isolation for Feminism and Friendship in South Korea,” published in Mookychick.
Jason Gordy Walker (episode 78): Jason Gordy Walker was recently awarded a scholarship to attend the 2017 West Chester University Poetry Conference.
The following excerpt from The Peculiars is being reprinted with permission from Penguin South Africa.
Nazma was in denial about several things, one of which was that working at the kiosk was going to become her full-time job. It was supposed to be a temporary job until she found a real one, but she had worked there almost every day for the past three months. She wanted to be a pastry chef, and spending her days in the kiosk with its stale food was like being an artist and having to do colouring by numbers. But she had scared herself out of possibly ever being able to get a proper job. In this city – in any city in South Africa – you had to be able to drive. Transport fascism had doomed her to a life of working for her parents.
To keep herself busy Nazma conducted daily kiosk experiments. This morning it was an exercise in measurement. She was balanced on tiptoe, on her left foot, with the smell of curry spices and cigarettes drifting into her nostrils, tickling the hairs and reminding her brain where she was – in a tiny train-station kiosk waiting for her world to change.
Her left hand was outstretched, its painted nails pressed up against the wall in front of her. Beneath this hand were jars of brightly coloured sweets. Their labels described multiple ingredients in Chinese, and their logos announced names like ‘Healthy Love Vitamins’ and ‘True Fruit Colours’. Next to them was the stack of cigarette cartons from which loose cigarettes were handed through the bars to those in the throes of nicotine addiction.
In the right corner, beneath her outstretched right arm and directly beneath her right hand, was the old-fashioned cash register. Its numbers had long since worn away from vigorous pressing in countless sales. Nobody needed receipts from here, and when they did they didn’t get them.
Above her right arm and hand was the shelf where the newspapers stood. The shelf itself was not much to look at. It was painted white but the paint was peeling, and every now and then she would have to dust curls of paint off the pies and other baked goods before she heated them. It was so poorly lit inside the room that nobody noticed any of this, so she and her parents hadn’t bothered to repaint the shelf. The peeling paint was perhaps a chemical aversion to the news in the papers. Die Son, Daily Voice, and other sources of shock journalism screamed headlines such as ‘Baby eats poisoned cat and survives’, ‘Father says mother drove him to the brothel’, and ‘Strange sex a growing market’.
She found the size of the newspapers appealing. They weren’t too big to unfold comfortably, and she thought that this simple design was perhaps why they sold so well. They were easy to hold on public transport or in a crowded space. A while back she’d picked one up to read. The headline that day had been about a soccer star who had hired a tokoloshe to help him defeat his opponents. Nazma had wondered if the tokoloshe was like voodoo, where you have to believe in it for it to work, or if he could work on you whether or not you believed in him. Thinking about this had made her feel quite nervous, and she’d had to sit with the door open and her feet up on the stool for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t read the papers any more; she didn’t need the extra stress.
Another source of dismay inside the kiosk was the food. Abigail, Nazma’s mother, told those outside the bars that the baked goods, normally pies or samoosas or sausage rolls, were made fresh every day. Abigail’s earnest voice, bovine eyes and the low prices of the pies allowed customers to convince themselves that she was telling the truth. Technically, on Mondays and Thursdays, she was. On the other five days of the week they were freshly reheated, paint curls dusted away. Nazma always worried that someone would complain about the paint or get food poisoning or something from the pies. She made sure to dust them extra well each time before putting them in the microwave.
The microwave was near-prehistoric. It had weathered the move from Tongaat and was now underneath Nazma’s right foot. The distance from corner to corner in the kiosk was only a little more than a metre: she probably could have taken the chance and put her left foot up to become fully suspended above the floor, but didn’t want to descend into complete lunacy. After all, the microwave’s clock told her it was only ten in the morning.
So there she was, part spreadeagled, in the four corners of her tiny train-station kiosk. The yellowish glow from the uncovered bulb cast a strange light on all the items in the store. This was lucky for Nazma because if it hadn’t made everything look so unappealing she suspected she might have become obese from eating all of the pies herself, one at a time, day in and day out. Obesity from comfort eating was one of her more realistic fears.
Julius, the station guard, was standing on the platform trying to see her movements through the security bars. He had seen her attempt to put her foot over her head before, as well as various other acrobatic feats, but this was new. She seemed to have truly lost it this time. He radioed his colleague at Newlands to tell him she was at it again, and then continued to watch with interest. He wondered how long before she flung the door open in a panic this time.
Her experiment to touch four shop corners while standing in the middle of it had proved less time-consuming than she had hoped. Thinking she was unobserved, Nazma took down her hands and foot after one last consideration of moving her left foot to join them, wondering if she could balance up there like Spiderman. She brushed down her hair, sat back down on the stool, and waited. It was too much. She opened the door and stepped out, despondently breathing in the fresh air. Julius felt sad too, as his show was over sooner than expected. He got up and walked towards the subway.
As she stood in the doorway, Nazma began to daydream about baking. Her favourite recipes were for simple things. Apple crumble, vegetable soup, butter chicken curry, muffins, crunchies, vetkoek and biscuits. She missed spending days in the kitchen preparing food for her family, as she had done to practise while she was studying. Now, because she wasn’t bringing in any income, she was relegated to working here, serving warmed-up food and stale chocolates. She contemplated suffocating herself with a pie, but instead returned inside and slumped a little deeper into her stool. She noted a possible next experiment: slouching as far as she could without falling off. The thought of living with her parents and working in the kiosk forever made her feel light-headed, and she put her head between her knees.
Breathing deeply, she had to admit to herself that, on an ordinary day, there were some highlights in the kiosk. At seven-fifteen, give or take a few minutes depending on Metrorail’s daily delays, a train would pass through her station. Before its screeching brakes, the gentle tinkle of a tambourine and the steady throbbing of a drum would fill the air. The drumming came from the people in that particular carriage all stomping their feet in tune to the singing of the crowd. She had never left the shop to see what was happening in the carriage, nervous that the illusion she had of the magical musical train would be shattered by the revelation that it was just a group of ordinary people, singing an ordinary, comprehensible song. Or worse, that it was religious.
Nevertheless, she strained her ears each morning, waiting for the train to arrive. When she heard the music she would close her eyes and the light behind her lids would pulse red, warm yellow and soft orange. It was a daily dose of Zen before breakfast. While the warmth lingered she used it to psych herself up for the day ahead. When the train left the station she always felt lighter.
Now, she thought about the night before, and how strange it had all been. She remembered the long queue, the old man with his gilded stick and that strange woman who had watched them with the binoculars, the smell of the smoker’s shirt against her face. Not being able to go out alone at night meant she hadn’t really spent much time around men since she’d finished studying six months before. Public transport really limited a woman’s ability to get some.
Still daydreaming, she heard a scatter of pigeons and immediately straightened up into a posture of business prowess. The pigeons were her warning bells and were entirely dependable, if a bit mangy. She plastered her most inviting expression onto her face and leant forward, ready and waiting. Moments later her father, Zubair, appeared, gazing in at her through the bars. Julius, seeing him approach, turned back down the stairs to walk to the other side. He had learnt to avoid Zubair, not because he was bad-tempered, but because he was so very lonely. You could greet him with a simple hello and spend the rest of the morning trying to get away from his conversation and his desperate attempts to connect with another human being.
‘How have the morning sales been?’
‘Fine, Dad. Mostly Styvie blue and a few copies of Die Son.’
‘And what about the pies, eh? Good to have a good start to the day with some nutrition. Why are there no signs outside advertising today’s options? It’s Tuesday after all.’
‘Because we didn’t sell the entire Monday special, Dad. Despite the signs.’
The ineffectiveness of his signs was an intense disappointment to Zubair. He’d made the last batch himself after losing faith in the professional printed kind. He’d laboured with pen and ink, attempting various forms of handwriting on all different sizes and styles of paper. The only thing he didn’t change was the fact that they were frequently selling reheated pies.
He withdrew from the bars, extending his pelvis forward, gazing at the little roof outside the stall, and sighing loudly. Zubair was sporting Thai fishing pants which Abigail and Nazma tried to convince him were from the ladies’ section. His open sandals revealed his toes, polished like chess pieces. His walk was a hips-flung-forward purposeful stride. He always carried a bag of crumbs in his right hand, and placed his left hand on his hip, elbow out. Sciatica, he claimed, made him thrust his hips forward, and his ‘paining hip’ apparently made him rest his hand there and exaggerate his side-to-side wiggle. ‘Can’t be helped,’ Abigail would say with weary eyes. ‘His poor hip,’ she would proclaim on stronger days.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Zubair, ‘a new sign may entice people. Take down this old one and redo it. You know how people love to see a brightly coloured sign. Do it with those juicy Kokis.’
He walked away, leaving her to herself again. She fell back into daydreams for a while, the platform quiet between train stops. But soon she jumped as the electric tingling and singing – tsssssssssik tssssssik tsik tsiiiisssk – and the final ear-splitting screeching of the brakes announced the arrival of a train. She sighed and looked at her cell phone. Still no contact from the Centre. She reached for the Kokis and began to write a new sign. As she picked up the colourful pens, her phone peeped and, although her stomach was tense with worry, she forced herself to look.
Thank you for applying for the study. We’d like to inform you that your application was successful. Please reply ‘yes’ to confirm your place or ‘no’ to decline.
She was so relieved that she began to cry. Working in the kiosk, and the sense of failure that came with it, was like carrying a heavy shopping bag and putting it down, only to realise the circulation has been cut off from your fingers. In an instant the colouring-in of yet another sign advertising pies didn’t feel so awful, and the light in the room seemed comforting rather than oppressive. She had a chance to escape. Quickly, she replied ‘yes’ in capital letters.
That afternoon, closing up the shop felt like freedom – she didn’t even slam the door like she usually did at the end of the day. Walking home, she planned her life as a new and improved person who could drive. She pictured the car she would drive, and the cds she would have inside it. She pictured the shoes that would be left behind in the back seat and the gravel that would almost surely pile up inside the door. She couldn’t wait for her windscreen to mist up in the rain, and to know what to do to clear it. She was ready. This study was going to get her over her fear of driving.
Their double-storey house smelled like the steam from an iron, and as she walked in she saw Abigail, stooped over the board as she usually was at this time of day. Abigail was watching The Bold and the Beautiful on tv. Nazma wished her sister Nafeesa was there so she could tell her about the study.
‘I got in, Mum.’
Her mother muted the tv. She could look at Nazma in a way that made her embarrassed for the feelings she hadn’t realised she was experiencing. At that moment, Abigail looked like she was going to hug her, or at least like she was thinking about it.
‘That’s so good, my girl. I’m so happy for you.’
‘We start next week. Will you speak to dad about time off?’
‘I’ll speak with him. But you know how he’ll want to speak to you too about where you’re going. Just tell him you’re going to a cooking class or something like that. He won’t ask too many questions. He’ll probably know where you are, but you know he likes to pretend he doesn’t know, and you must pretend that you don’t know he knows.’
Nazma put out her hand for the high five she’d taught her mum to give in the absence of hugs and kisses. Moving through to their kitchen, she made herself a toasted cheese, onion and chilli sandwich, and went up to her room to read and to imagine her life on the open roads. Downstairs, Abigail unmuted the television and watched the familiar characters do familiar things, but, this time, felt something different.
Jen Thorpe is a writer and researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a Masters in Politics with Distinction from Rhodes University, and Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Jen published her first novel, The Peculiars, with Penguin South Africa in 2016. It was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Fiction. Jen has published poetry, flash fiction, and short stories on a number of online publishing platforms including Itch, Brittle Paper, Aerodrome, Saraba Magazine, BooksLive, and Poetry Potion. These pieces can be found on her website. By day she works as a researcher on women and gender, focusing on LGBTI rights and violence against women. She writes regular features on these topics for publications such as Women and Girls Hub, W24.com, and others.
I’m making a film of my boyhood, like Francois Truffaut in The 400 Blows. I began in the late ’60s, and here we are in the new millennium. That’s a long time to make a film of your boyhood. I’m making a film because it’s easier than writing a book.
I got into filmmaking years ago at the University of Iowa. I was in the Writers’ Workshop trying to learn how to write. But it was too hard. Actually, the film of my boyhood exists already as a home-movie in my head—a jumble of scenes of the things I remember—not in grainy black and white or fuzzy romantic soft focus, but in Kodak Ektachrome. All it needs is a bit of editing and blowing up from the little screen in my head to the big screen at your neighborhood theater.
The best thing about the Writers’ Workshop is that you take courses in things other than writing, like pottery and sculpture and filmmaking. They make you do things, as if there’s a correlation between the lead in your pencil and the lead in your ass. It worked. I gave up writing and became a filmmaker.
* * *
My first film was a disaster. It was supposed to be a pattern film, for Calvin Pryluck’s Cine-Tech 101. I shot it in a local graveyard. I spent hours planning all the shots.
Graveyards are really interesting. And heavily symbolic. The stones are like so many sculptures. At certain angles they line up in neat rows. But from other angles they’re a jumble—like the scenes of my boyhood in my head. I was going to shoot the stones with a long lens to get a foreshortened effect, so they’d all look packed in tight.
As if people were dying to get in there.
I shot for three hours on a sunny afternoon in September. There was a fine interplay of stones and shadows. I could hear the camera whirring away, an old 16mm World War II documentary Bell & Howell that looked like Mickey Mouse ears turned on end. It had a big wind-up key.
As I shot I kept humming Beethoven’s 9th, the tune I intended for my soundtrack. I could see the film unfolding before my eyes.
Later, when I opened the camera, I noticed that all the film was still in the top canister. I turned the camera upside down to make the film be on the bottom where it should have been. It didn’t work. I had threaded it improperly. I’d been shooting air all afternoon.
* * *
In Iowa I met Zygmundt Sulistrowski, the director who made The French Girls and the Nudists. His work has won at the Cannes Film Festival and that impressed me. The film of my boyhood is destined for Cannes.
Ziggy was a guest lecturer in Calvin Pryluck’s Cine-Tech 101. “For ze filmmaker,” he said, “zair is ze technical hump. Unless he first gets over ze technical hump, he will never be a filmmaker.”
I knew what he meant. I asked him if he had any secrets about threading film. He
thought I said shredding. “Not enough filmmakers shred zair films,” he said.
I smiled, undaunted. If I couldn’t thread it, I couldn’t shred it.
* * *
My second film was much improved. I returned to the graveyard but with a crew this time. His name was Arnold. He was a photographer from Wyoming who hated films as much as he hated filmmakers.
“A single photograph is all you need,” he told me.
“Then why are you taking Pryluck?”
“It’s a requirement of my program. It’s to make sure the photographer sees things in continuity.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said. “Why don’t you try writing?”
“I’ve got nothing to say.”
Pryluck had designated Arnold and me as crew members on the first day of class. We all had to stand up and announce our intentions in hopes of pairing up crews with similar interests. Most crews consisted of three or four students.
When it was Arnold’s turn he said, “I hate films as much as I hate filmmakers.”
I said, “I’m going to win the Cannes Film Festival. Just call me Truffaut.”
After the crews had been picked only Arnold and I were left. Unfortunately, he was sick when I shot my first film.
“How’d it turn out?” he called to me as I pulled in to pick him up at his trailer home on the outskirts of campus.
Arnold was sort of a wimpy-looking guy but he was married to a gorgeous piece. She was sunning herself on a blanket in front of the trailer. As I approached, she reached
behind her to unsnap the top of her bathing suit.
“Didn’t shoot it yet,” I said. “Decided I needed your help.”
I told Arnold I was thinking of freeze-framing a few shots in my graveyard film
and that got him all excited. It was almost photography.
“I made some peanut butter sandwiches for lunch,” he said, holding up a brown paper bag.
“Why don’t you thread the camera as we ride out?”
* * *
Now the 16mm World War II documentary Bell & Howell is quite a piece of machinery. It’s heavy and sturdy and indestructible. It took pictures of Hitler and pictures of Hiroshima. After the War the Army bequeathed a number of them to the University of Iowa. Ours was a functional antique.
The camera carries three lenses that screw into a revolving turret. There is a long lens, a medium lens, and a short lens. I told Arnold to shoot with the long lens. He wanted the short lens, the wide angle. “It’s my film,” I snorted. Arnold screwed in the lenses and snapped the long one into position.
It was another sunny September day and I was getting excited. “Dum dum dum daaa,” I sang to myself as I took the light meter out of the camera case. I took a reading and we began shooting. Arnold, surprisingly enough, was cooperative. The afternoon flew.
“Enfin, c’est fini,” I announced like Truffaut himself.
But when the film came back from the lab it was all washed out. And out of focus. Instead of a graveyard it looked like a ghost yard. Vague ashen stones stood against a white sky. It was haunting. My rhythmical pans looked like a military review of a blurred Ku Klux Klan.
“What the fuck went wrong?”
Pryluck was pragmatic. “Light meter was probably out of calibration. Everybody just throws ’em in the case.”
“What about the focus?”
“The lens wasn’t screwed in tight.”
“Ze lens wasn’t screwed in tight!” I aped Ziggy. “Once again ze victim of ze technical hump!”
When I saw Arnold I was furious. “The lens wasn’t screwed in tight!”
“I told you we should have used the wide angle.”
I wanted to shred his head.
* * *
I was twenty-six years old when I went out to Iowa. Before that I was a high school teacher. I once wrote a definition of teaching. “Teaching,” I said, “is like leading gentle children barefoot through a field of broken glass. There is the letting go of the hand and the all but inevitable bleeding.”
I thought it was pretty poetic. I showed it to this one girl and she cried. I showed it to this other girl and she said, “That’s bullshit. Just wear shoes.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded convincing. Soon afterwards I dropped out of teaching and went out to Iowa.
* * *
My next film was a technical masterpiece. (Pryluck had given me a “D” for my
previous effort.) It was shot at the Eagle Supermarket. Out in Iowa they have Eagle’s instead of A & P’s.
I had to hassle the manager to let me film in his store. “Listen,” I told him. “This
is 1969. The whole country’s freaked out with people doin’ their own thing. Nobody’s gonna flip over a man with a camera in a grocery store.”
After a while he consented. I positioned myself behind the Cheerios.
Pryluck wanted us to do a non-directed film, a sort of documentary in which you have no control over the action. I decided to shoot the checkout girls. There were seven of them all lined up in their chutes, whanging away at the cash registers, too busy to notice my head popping up and down along the row of Cheerios.
I shifted to 64 frames per second for some slow-motion shots. I was having a great time.
Then something happened that taught me a great truth about filmmaking. Some guy walked right in front of me, pushing his basket of groceries. But when he saw the camera he suddenly stopped, ducked, and retreated as if he’d committed a sin. The great truth about filmmaking is that people think filmmakers are sacred. With a camera in tow you can get away with practically anything. It’s the conditioned Hollywood response, a lesson that would prove helpful in making my boyhood film. If you ever want to get away with anything outrageous, just carry a camera along.
Anyway, my non-directed film turned out to be mainly about one of the checkout girls. Her name was Marsha and she was very pretty. She was seventeen and it was a pleasure to watch her check out groceries. She had long chestnut hair that flew about her baby face as she punched the keys and bagged the goodies.
I went over to her after I had finished filming and said, “What’s a pretty girl like you doin’ in a joint like this?”
She was apprehensive. “What?”
“You oughta be in pictures.”
“What?”
“How’d you like to be in a movie?”
“No thanks.”
“Well, you already are. I’ve been filming you for the past half hour.” I held up the magic Bell & Howell. It was too much for her.
“What?”
“I’ll see you outside when you get off work.”
The only problem with Marsha was that she was only pretty from the waist up. From the waist down she was pure Iowan—corn-fed, chunky, thick-thighed. She was wedged into a pair of Levi’s so tightly it made me wince. It had all been hidden beneath the counter. How could I have known? I had been too hasty. And now I was stuck with Marsha for my next film, a film I hadn’t even planned yet. I’d just have to make sure to shoot her from the waist up.
“What kind of a film are you making?” she said outside, all excited.
“Not sure yet. But with you, how can I miss?” I was trying hard not to stare at her thighs.
Marsha beamed. “What’s it for?”
“The Cannes Film Festival.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “In Des Moines.”
* * *
I got a “B” on my Eagle film. “‘A’ for technical aspects,” Pryluck wrote on his comment sheet. “The lighting was perfect. ‘C’ for conception: the slo-mo hurt the
rhythm. ‘B’ for the film.”
I was ecstatic. A two hundred percent improvement! I had threaded the film, calibrated the light meter, and screwed in the lens all by myself, all without Arnold who had to take his gorgeous wife to the doctor’s.
I was climbing ze technical hump.
* * *
At this point in time I didn’t know that I would be making a film of my boyhood. The film I had in mind for the Cannes Film Festival was what Pryluck called my “Cine-Tech 101 Wonder”. It was a combination of the films I was making in his course.
The idea came to me while watching a Bergman film in Iowa City not long after I had met Marsha. I saw it all in a flash, and it would use every foot of film I had already shot plus the new roll allotted for the assignment.
Our third film was to be a directed film. Here we could control the action, direct the actors, and make significant weighty statements. In the Bergman film Liv Ullman went running through a field. I saw Marsha running (in waist high grass).
The story came quickly. The pretty checkout girl at the local Eagle mourns the recent death of a loved one—father, brother, lover (on purpose we don’t make it clear). She visits his grave after work and then repairs to a serene and natural setting for solace. Out of focus graveyard shots show the confusion in her mind. It was fall now, November, and the season itself would reflect the melancholy mood of the film.
I took Marsha out to the graveyard. Arnold came too. I only wanted him for one shot with his own camera—a single still photo of Marsha looking down sadly at a gravestone, shot from behind the stone so the name was hidden (along with her thighs).
Arnold was inspired. I figured I’d have him blow up his shot to an 8×10. Then I could film it back in the studio, pinning it to the wall and shooting it from a tripod close up. It was all much easier than freeze-framing—the endless duplication in the lab of a single frame of film, a technique reserved for Cine-Tech 102. I figured the lone still shot would lend the film an air of poignancy.
I dismissed Arnold after his photo and sent him home to his darkroom and his lovely wife. “By the way,” he said in parting, “she’s pregnant.” Then I took one long lyrical shot of Marsha running through the graveyard directly at the camera, screaming and flailing her arms in classic grief. I shot it in slow motion thinking, “Fuck you, Pryluck. I’ll get the rhythm right.”
In my head I tried out different tunes—from the Beatles to Bolero—while Marsha ran at me, screaming like a sixth grader at a snake. I focused on her head and arms.
Then we moved a few miles out to the reservoir, a clear blue lake surrounded by trees from which decaying leaves, symbolic of death, were dropping nicely. A gentle stream entered the lake on the north side, falling over a rock ledge and rippling out like a river meeting the ocean. Directly across the lake stood a section of pine trees all stark and scraggled, like a grove of charred Christmas trees ravaged by fire. More death. Death all around!
I had Marsha walk down the path to the little waterfall, pick up a brown leaf blowing by, and set it gently in the stream, where, like a little boat, it was borne out to the wide waters beyond—like her father-brother-lover crossing the bar. The shot ended with a pan upward to the death trees across the lake.
As Marsha walks back whence she had come, she turns once more for a last look
at the scene, the breeze spreads her hair, and—the look on her face isn’t sad enough. Just sort of cute. I knew then that I’d need some heavy music before the credits.
* * *
Pryluck gave the film a “B”. “The story line’s not clear,” he wrote. “There are too many disjointed parts. It’s like three separate films. The girl is happy in the supermarket. Then we see her sad in the graveyard with no transition. She’s not right for your story. The best shot is at the end, when she looks back. She looks good there. You should have built your film around that look.”
I concluded that Pryluck had no imagination.
* * *
Marsha loved the film. She wanted to make another. I told her I had used up all the film the course allowed me. The semester was ending. I didn’t tell her I had signed up for Cine-Tech 102. There we would learn freeze-framing, dissolves, fade-in’s and fade-out’s, sync sound and lip sync (until now my sound had been played on an accompanying cassette), and A & B roll printing—all the assorted mysteries that produce the magical effects on the silver screen, the technical camel’s second hump. But I shan’t bore you with how I mastered them. Suffice it to say that I did.
And I did, finally, get an “A” out of Pryluck. The film that did it was the masterpiece my film of Marsha should have been. And for this one I never touched a camera.
All second semester, when in the editing room, I picked up scraps of film thrown away by other filmmakers. The editing room closed each day at five o’clock. Each day I would show up around four-thirty and grab pieces of film from the wastebaskets at the twelve editing stations. This began as an editing exercise for practice in splicing film, a hassle that involves cutting the film, scraping off the emulsion with a razor blade, applying glue, and sticking it all back together again. I did it daily to master the technique, so my films would stop falling apart in the projector.
One day, just for fun, I ran the film to see what I had. To my surprise the random shots fell into rough patterns. There were shots of a bus in Chicago, a black girl throwing a rose into the Iowa River, a man playing with a dog, cars in a junk yard, a record player, a wheelchair on its side (one wheel spinning), a man raking leaves (spliced in upside down), the main street of a small Iowa town, a bulldozer, a collapsing geodesic dome, a student giving the camera the finger, Senator Hughes on campus, a little boy with a dirty face, the foyer of the library, a still of a Playboy centerfold, desks in a classroom—and on and on.
I added loud rock music and called the film Garbage Cannes.
Pryluck raved. “It’s life!” he wrote. “So many slices of life!”
I had made my best film from the scraps of other filmmakers. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, Ziggy.
**
Claude Clayton Smith is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, and the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of two others. His work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. He holds a DA from Carnegie-Mellon, an MFA in fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, an MFA from Yale, and a BA from Wesleyan (CT). He lives in Madison, WI, with his wife (first reader and editor) of 40 years. Visit Claude Clayton Smith at claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com
**
Image: Flickr / Nathan Forget
You know things have taken a hard left when even the corpses are conspiring to further screw up your life. Sadly, I never needed help from the living or the dead. For nearly four decades, I had done a grand job all by myself.
The forces that conspired to keep me trapped in Steubenville, Ohio, in the summer of 1989 were not of my devising. For once, I was not guilty of the stupidity and poor decisions that had defined my entire adult life.
It was solely the fault of that festering, bullet-ridden corpse.
My guilt or innocence aside, I became the primary suspect in his murder. For those of you unfamiliar with the justice system in this country, that is very bad for a guy who has just walked out of a federal penitentiary. I quickly became what law enforcement officials like to call a “person of interest.”
All I wanted was to put the Ohio River Valley in my rearview mirror and start my pathetic life over some place where they had never heard of Johnny Earl. But I couldn’t.
When I was six, my mother bought me a hamster at J. G. McCrory’s five-and-dime in Steubenville. I named him Herman, and that little guy was the first thing in my life that I loved more than myself. I carried him around the neighborhood in the pocket of my sweatshirt and played with him for hours. Mom bought a hollow plastic ball in which I could put Herman so he could run around the house on our hardwood floors.
I took him outside in his plastic ball one hot afternoon to let him run around on the garage floor. The kids next door were playing Wiffle Ball, and I went over to get in the game, forgetting about Herman. The poor little guy rolled himself off the driveway and got stuck in the grass, where he cooked to death in the afternoon sun. I was devastated.
I thought of Herman often that summer of 1989. Not unlike Herman, I was trapped in a ball, the metaphorical heat coming in from all sides. If there is a God in the universe that cares about small animals, this was Herman’s revenge.
It was never my life’s ambition to be a cocaine dealer. My goal in life, from the time I was old enough to hold a baseball bat, was to play in the major leagues, make a boatload of money, and be inducted
into the Hall of Fame. When I was in high school I would practice my induction speech by standing in front of the bathroom mirror holding a hairbrush for a microphone. I became a cocaine dealer by accident. Unfortunately, I was every bit as adept at dealing cocaine as I was at hitting a baseball, and I was the greatest baseball player to ever come out of Steubenville, Ohio. That’s a fact. The biggest difference between the two is this: To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been sent to a federal penitentiary for booting a ground ball.
I’ve really screwed up my life. That’s also a fact. I had it all. I mean, so far as Steubenville was concerned, I was the king. I was the best-looking kid in our school. I’m not bragging—just telling you the way it was. I’m bald now, which I hate even more than the idiotic tattoos I allowed a white supremacist to ink into my biceps with a sewing needle while I was in prison. But in high school, I had thick, dark hair that I parted in the middle and feathered back over my ears. My eyes are pale blue, I have a little cleft in my chin, and I had the most perfect set of teeth you ever saw. They’re still nice, except now I have a partial plate that fills the gap where that black son of a bitch, Andre Edwards, a psychopath who should have been in permanent lockdown, smacked me with a piece of pipe and knocked an incisor and an eyetooth down my throat.
There were probably some girls in my class who would say that Jimmy Hinton was better-looking than me. His family owned the big dairy and cattle farm out on County Road 724 near New Noblesville, and they had, as my dad liked to say, more money than God. Jimmy always dressed up for school—never wore blue jeans or sneakers like the rest of us—and he drove a very cherry, midnight blue ’55 Ford with blue lights under the wheel wells. He wore nicer clothes than me, and he had a much sweeter ride, but no way was he better-looking. He was a pretty boy—curly blond hair, a baby face, and sleepy eyes. Hell, I always figured he wasn’t interested in girls. After all, he played the clarinet in the marching band, for Christ’s sake.
I also dated the most beautiful girl in the school—Dena Marie Conchek. That’s another fact. If you want proof, look at my senior yearbook. She was the head cheerleader, she was the homecoming queen, and she had the most incredible ass in Jefferson County. I was tapping that action every Friday and Saturday night and getting head on Sunday afternoons when her parents were visiting her grandmother at the nursing home. Since we weren’t married, Dena Marie thought it was sinful to have intercourse on Sundays but apparently didn’t think God had a problem with oral sex. It was typical Dena Marie. She was as crazy as she was beautiful, but putting up with her lunacy was a minor sacrifice in exchange for such great sex, especially when you’re eighteen years old and sporting a perpetual boner.
If I had spent any time at all studying, I would have been valedictorian, too. Maybe. Lanny Chester was pretty damn smart, but I would have given him a run for his money. I was smart. Well, book smart, anyway. Most people would tell you that I never had a lick of common sense, and, given my recent track record as a guest of the Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, it’s hard to put up a strong argument to the contrary. But I was pretty close to straight A’s, and I never cracked a book. I finished in the top ten in the class—eighth, I think.
Grades were never a big concern, because I was the best athlete in the storied history of Steubenville High School. Again, I’m not bragging—I’m just telling you the facts. You can find people who will tell you that little limp-dick Jimmy Hinton was better-looking than me, and that Lanny Chester was smarter, but no one will argue that I wasn’t the best athlete to ever wear the crimson and black of the Steubenville Big Red. I was first-team all-Ohio six times. Six times! Three times in baseball, twice in football, and once in basketball. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that being all-state in basketball was probably a gift—name recognition from my baseball and football accomplishments. But that doesn’t matter. It still counts. First-team, all-Ohio, six times. You can check it out if you like. Photos of the all-staters hang in the front hall of the school. I’m the only one up there more than twice. At least, I think I’m still up there. After the drug conviction, they might have decided that I was too big of a disgrace and taken them all down.
I was five foot ten, a hundred and ninety-five pounds, and built like a statue of one of those Greek gods. My belly was rippled so tight you could hardly pinch the skin. And I was born to play baseball; I swear I was. I had twenty-three home runs my senior year. No one in the history of the school had ever hit twenty-three in a career, and I hit them in one season. I was a dead fastball hitter. You could sneak sunrise past a rooster easier than you could sneak a fastball past me.
I have always been very competitive. My friend Fran Roberson was at a high school debate competition and a kid from Mount Pleasant High School asked him what I was like. Fran said, “If you met him on the street, you’d think he was a nice guy. But he hates to lose, and he’s an absolute prick between the lines.” To this day, I consider that the highest compliment I’ve ever been paid. It was true. I would do anything to gain the advantage, including getting under the skin of an opponent. I was pretty good at it, too.
My senior year, Jefferson Union had a pitcher named Harry Bantel—a lanky kid who wore horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Buddy Holly. Before the game, he yelled into our dugout that he was going to challenge me. I yelled back, “Give it your best shot, Buddy.” Everyone laughed, and that pissed him off. He tried to blow the first pitch by me, and I hit it over the bus barn behind the centerfield bleachers. I touched home plate and asked, “Hey, Buddy, when are you going to start challenging me?” Next time I’m up, he gives me a dick-high fastball and I hit it into the tennis courts beyond the left-field fence. I said, “Do your ovaries hurt today, Bantel? You don’t have your good stuff.” Now, he’s furious and I start singing “Peggy Sue” while I’m circling the bases. Next time up, he tries to put one in my ear. I dodge it, give him a wink, then hit the next pitch through a shop-class window. Take that, Buddy. Three swings, three home runs. I laughed all the way around the bases.
The Baltimore Orioles drafted me in the second round. I was pissed because I thought I was a sure first-rounder. Still, any thoughts I had of going to college ended when the Orioles flashed a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus in front of me. It was more than my dad made in two years at the steel mill. I went right over to Ohio Valley Chevrolet and bought a new Camaro and drove straight to Jimmy Hinton’s house. I raced the engine until he came outside. “Whatta ya think of this?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“Okay?!” I couldn’t believe it. “Better than that piece-of-shit Ford you’re driving. They’re going to pay me a lot of money to hit a baseball, Jimmy boy, which is lots better than shovelin’ shit and tuggin’ on cow tits for the rest of your life.” I laid rubber a hundred feet down County Road 724. Jimmy Hinton was as nice a kid as you would ever meet, and he had never done a thing to me, but I was so scalded that some girls thought he was better-looking that I had to show off.
Admittedly, there were times when I was a first-class horse’s ass.
Most everyone in Steubenville was real excited when I got drafted, with one notable exception—Dena Marie Conchek. The day I signed with the Orioles, she wouldn’t stop crying. Ultimately, though, I asked the question to which I already knew the answer. “Dena Marie, what’s wrong?”
“If you leave, we’ll never get married,” she blubbered.
“Dena Marie, I never said we were going to get married.” That was a fact.
“You don’t want to marry me?”
“I want to play in the major leagues.” The wailing began anew.
A week before I left for my minor-league assignment, I said, “Dena Marie, we need to break up.” She was still bawling when I left her house, and I didn’t talk to her again for more than eight years.
Here’s another thing, and it’s a stone fact. When I got to the Orioles’ rookie league team, I learned very quickly that there are a lot of guys outside of Steubenville who can play the game. I was a fastball hitter and that was great in high school, where you get a steady diet of fastballs. That wasn’t the case in the pros. They had the most unbelievable breaking balls I had ever seen. I flailed away at curveballs and missed so mightily that it was embarrassing. And here’s another thing: Once word gets around the league that you can’t hit a breaking ball, and you can trust me on this, that’s all you see.
I was basically a career minor-leaguer. I hit some mammoth home runs, but my average was about two-twenty, and I struck out seven times for every home run I hit. For those of you unfamiliar with the statistics of baseball, that is not good. The Orioles were patient, but I only made it to double-A ball, and after six years I was traded to Pittsburgh. In the middle of my second season in the Pirates organization, the left fielder at their triple-A affliate got hurt and I got moved up. All of a sudden, for reasons that I cannot explain, I started hitting the ball like Babe Ruth. It looked like a cantaloupe coming in there, and I was spraying line drives all over the park. That was the year I got the call to the majors. It was an end-of-the-year call-up, a cup of coffee, but it still counts. I, Johnny Earl, was a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates and a major leaguer.
My claim to fame was hitting an off-the-wall triple off of Nolan Ryan. That’s right, the Nolan Ryan, and I rocked his ass for a threebagger. A big crowd from Steubenville had come up in a couple of charter buses to see me play, and they were all on their feet, cheering. I was standing on third, grinning, all proud of myself. That’s when Nolan Ryan looked over and said, “Enjoy it, rook. It won’t happen again.” And it didn’t. The next three times up, he struck me out on three pitches.
I thought I had finally gotten the hang of professional pitching. The Pirates thought it was a fluke and traded me in the off-season to the Detroit Tigers. My agent said they wanted to unload me because they thought my sudden ability to hit a curveball had been an anomaly. Unfortunately, they were right. By the time I got to spring training, I was again floundering, flailing away at curves like a blind man at a buzzing fly.
My career ended on a damp evening in July of 1979 in Toledo. I sent a loopy fly ball down the right-field line and blew my knee rounding first. I crumpled into a heap ten feet from the base. The pain was excruciating; I felt like I’d been shot and my leg was on fire. The right fielder threw the ball to the first baseman, who leaned down and said, “Sorry to do this to you, pal,” putting the tag on me as I rolled around the infield. That was the last time I ever stepped onto a ball field. I had reconstructive surgery and went back home to rehabilitate and consider my future.
In a little more than eight years, I went from signing bonus to sayonara. At age twenty-six, the only thing on my résumé was 158 minor league home runs and a major-league triple off of Nolan Ryan. I was depressed and humiliated by my failure. When I was in high school, you couldn’t have told me that I wasn’t going to play in the major leagues. If you had, I would have laughed in your face. I was Johnny Earl, goddammit. You get a distorted view of the world growing up in a place like Steubenville. I had had such great success in my little pond that I thought I couldn’t fail.
But I had.
**
Excerpted from A Welcome Murder by Robin Yocum (Seventh Street Books, 2017). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
**
Robin Yocum is the author of the 2017 Edgar® Award-nominated A Brilliant Death He is also the author of the critically acclaimed novels Favorite Sons: A Novel and The Essay: A Novel as well as Dead Before Deadline: …And Other Tales from the Police Beat (with Catherine Candisky). The president of Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing firm in Westerville, Ohio, Yocum is well known for his work as a crime and investigative reporter with the Columbus Dispatch from 1980-1991. He was the recipient of more than thirty local, state, and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing.
The Audubon Zoo on Ash Wednesday is an eerily tranquil place. Ed and I decided to take advantage of the stillness and slip through one of the side gates without paying admission. An hour earlier, we’d each swallowed two hits of acid, and the effects were coming on strong. We swooped through the gate as though a sudden updraft had caught our bodies and rendered us helpless. Probably, we would have gotten away with our minor act of theft, but I giggled inadvertently, and the ticket vendor spotted us. “Um, excuse me,” she said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
I gaped in terror at the direction of the voice. A portly, middle-aged black woman stared serenely back at me from the tiny fee window. In an infinitely patient tone, she explained, “Both of you can go into the zoo for free. I just didn’t want you to walk past me without saying hello.”
I was astonished by her lack of anger. The zoo normally cost ten bucks, and we only had fifty dollars of our face painting money left. Ed had spent most of his proceeds on Bourbon Street for cups of warm, overpriced beer, and we’d blown the rest of our modest wad on food and lodging.
The two of us had arrived in New Orleans four days earlier, nearly penniless, after scraping together our funds in Madison, and then hitting the road in my mother’s pickup truck. My mother lived in San Miguel de Allende. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the Mexican government had forbidden her to keep her beloved truck in the country, and she had reluctantly given it to me as a gift. I hadn’t bothered with the necessary title paperwork, and the license tabs had expired. I wasn’t worried, since the cops never pulled me over, even though Ed and I couldn’t have been more conspicuous as we barreled down Interstate 57 in a pickup truck with expired Texas plates. At the beginning of our journey, the cab of the truck was filled almost to overflowing with dirty Wisconsin snowdrifts. I’d shoved bottles of white wine into the snow, so we could enjoy chilled beverages at our pit stops. Originally, this had worked brilliantly, but the snow had completely melted by the time we reached Mississippi, and we’d also run out of wine.
I grinned stupidly at the ticket vendor, and she smiled back. “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “Enjoy the zoo. It certainly is a lovely afternoon.”
We waved at her merrily and continued on our way. The late afternoon sunshine was already waning, and cool breezes blew through the magnolia trees. The puffs of wind seemed to increase and decrease randomly, as if someone was turning on a giant air blower and then abruptly shutting it off. Ed and I sailed along like boats, catching the random wind gusts, twirling in circles with our arms outstretched.
“This is good acid,” Ed commented. “I’m glad that guy in the dorm was so generous with us. We certainly didn’t deserve it.” Four nights earlier, after we’d arrived in New Orleans with only twenty dollars in our pockets, Ed and I had driven to the campus of Tulane University. Ed fell into discussion with a privileged young Deadhead, who proclaimed, “You two are living the life! You’re the coolest people EVER!” and offered us the use of his single bed. Ed and I squashed our bodies together on the narrow mattress, while our new friend slept on his linoleum floor. In the morning, the generous fellow gave us four hits of powerful acid and told us to enjoy Mardi Gras.
Though I’d had a fond vision of the two of us wandering through the streets of the Quarter on Fat Tuesday, ripped to the gills on LSD like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, I decided it was better to wait until the revelry was over. Mardi Gras was a drunken, crowded, sinister event, and our face painting efforts had abruptly turned ugly when a police horse slipped in a puddle of beer and capsized in front of us. Ed and I dodged the flying hooves, and the officer flew through the air and landed, face-down, on the pavement. Fortunately, our meager stash of face painting supplies was unscathed. We were able to resume our efforts only a few minutes later. Extracting money from drunks was no problem, but saving our cash was impossible. Our original plan of returning to Madison with hundreds of dollars was obviously not going to pan out.
Anxiety about our future was the furthest thing from our minds as we skipped along the sidewalk, past the lion cages, with their pacing felines (one of whom roared comically as we strolled by, causing us to shriek with laughter), the primate house with its earthy smell of simian urine, and the outdoor dolphin pool. Ed paused for a while in front of the pool, and said, “It’s hot. I think I’ll go for a swim” several times, until people gaped openly at him and I finally pulled him away.
After an hour of this, we collapsed onto an iron bench. A strong breeze pushed through the heavy magnolia trees and hit us both in the face. Ed flinched slightly. He was prone to flinching, an after-effect of having spent his first eighteen years dodging sudden blows from his father. I’d once seen a childhood picture of Ed and his family. He and the other family members had assembled in front of their split-level Wisconsin home. The females looked humorless and bored, the men menacing in the pedestrian manner that was typical of the mid-1960s. Ed’s father had cropped hair, rolled-up white shirt sleeves, and the requisite mouth-dangling cigarette. He looked exactly like the sort of guy who would hit a kid for no reason.
Seven-year-old Ed stood to the left of his slightly older, more confident brother. Chuck gazed arrogantly into the camera, but Ed hovered on the edge of the group and clutched his face with both hands. Ed’s shirt had escaped from the inside of his dress pants, and the two bottom buttons were undone. Obviously, Ed was in a state of disrepair, but the other family members were completely oblivious to the source of his unhappiness, and not a bit interested in resolution.
The February sun sank lower, and the zoo became quiet, as if all the animals had decided to rest simultaneously. People filed past us, then gradually disappeared without so much as a glance in our direction. A dozen stray peacocks strutted in front of our bench in a slow-motion parade. Suddenly, one at a time, each of the birds flapped its iridescent wings and ascended to the top branches of the magnolia trees. They snuggled their bodies into the white and pink blossoms, tucked their heads under their wings and fell asleep.
Ed and I gaped at the scene, unable to believe our eyes. “Do you think this would look as beautiful if we weren’t tripping?” Ed whispered. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I think it would probably be just as beautiful, but we wouldn’t notice it as much.”
This made perfect sense to Ed, and he nodded with apparent delight. “You’re right,” he said. His voice sounded unnaturally loud, like he was speaking through a microphone. Ed leaned backward and pushed his spine into the iron slats of the park bench. He rested for a second, but then his eyes widened, as if remembering something that he had deliberately forgotten.
The color drained abruptly from Ed’s face, and purple blotches appeared on his pale cheeks. The remaining white portions seemed translucent, and I could see dark veins and corpuscles underneath the surface of his skin. Ed’s expression slowly changed to one of abject terror. “We have to return home tomorrow,” he announced. “The wind chill in Madison is going to be below zero, and I don’t have a place to live.”
I was seized with pity for him, and an accompanying desire to help, but then I remembered that I didn’t have a home, either. After only a few months of cohabitation, my boyfriend Steve and I had recently decided to go our separate ways. Apartment hunting in freezing temperatures was always tricky, especially without deposit money or steady employment. I’d managed to score a part time job as a driver for Badger Cab, but few shifts were available. To make matters worse, I had an extremely poor sense of direction. Ed had obligingly accompanied me on most of my driving assignments. He possessed an extensive knowledge of the city’s layout, gleaned from many months of aimless meandering.
A few weeks earlier, I’d informed my roommates that Ed would be crashing in the living room for an indefinite period, and there was nothing they could do about it. No one had argued with me about this, not even my boyfriend. While Steve slumbered peacefully upstairs during the beginning of my pre-dawn taxi shifts, Ed rose from his reclining position on the couch and met me at the front door, tattered map in hand. He never shirked this voluntary task, or hesitated for even a moment. We called our ritual “going cabbing” and it was always the high point of an otherwise hellish week.
After a few moderately lucrative cab shifts, I managed to save enough money for our escape to New Orleans. My eviction from the house meant that Ed was displaced from the couch, as well. It made sense for the two of us to flee south together. My housemates all felt sorry for Steve and thought that he was the injured party, but at least Steve had a roof over his head, a set of tuition-paying parents, and a future in corporate America. Ed’s complete lack of such advantages was the reason for our close bond, the source of our mutual attraction. He and I were card-carrying members of the Loser tribe, and we needed to stick together and shelter each other against the onslaughts of stronger, more rapacious clans.
I opened my mouth to tell him this, but it was too late. Ed was weeping copiously, without making a sound. Globs of water coursed down his cheeks, blurring the purple splotches until his face resembled a watercolor painting. Ed’s tears dripped onto the ribbed collar of his tee-shirt, completely drenching the fabric. He lowered his head, shook it back and forth in a gesture of futility. “I don’t understand,” he sobbed. “Everyone always tells me to just find a job and keep going to it, and then everything will be okay. I’ve never had a job that didn’t suck shit, and I don’t think I ever will.”
I couldn’t fathom the degree of self-loathing that would make a twenty-three year old man decide that his employment options would be miserable for the rest of his life. Despite my own hardships, I remained firmly entrenched in the belief that my luck would change, that my current limitations were caused by a combination of youth and poor time management. Reality had repeatedly failed to confirm my optimism, and yet I was remarkably stubborn in my commitment to it. I smiled at Ed, and placed one of my hands on his shoulder, but I could think of nothing to say.
Ed cried hard for several more minutes, and then subsided. He shook his head again, and a few stray tears flew around him like droplets from a hose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all right,” I assured him. “Life’s not for the squeamish.” Ed mopped his face with the palm of one of his hands. He squinted at me through his tear-drenched eyelashes, and then suddenly smiled. “Well, at least the winter is half over,” he said.
I realized that the sky had grown completely dark. The early evening air was cool, but pleasant. I could hear the peacocks rustling fitfully in the trees, in search of better sleeping positions. There were no other sounds, except for the distant buzzing of insects. The zoo grounds were completely devoid of other humans. “I wonder what time this place closes?” Ed asked. “Did you happen to notice the hours while we were sneaking inside?”
Both of us laughed then, relieved that we were able to find humor in our self-imposed ordeal, our mutual idiocy. “I forgot to look at the sign,” I said. “I was trying to be invisible, so I didn’t see anything.”
“I guess we’d better go,” Ed replied uncertainly. He rose to his feet, lifted his filthy, shredded backpack from the ground, and hoisted it over one shoulder. His eyes darted back and forth, then rested on mine. “Do you remember which way we came in?” he asked.
At that moment, I realized how dependent I was upon Ed’s sense of direction, his usually unfailing ability to navigate the two of us out of any geographical predicament. I had simply followed him into the zoo, assuming that he would remember the route to the gate when it was time to leave. The zoo was spacious and beautifully landscaped, with groves of trees that stretched away from us in all directions. In the darkness, the groves appeared sinister and maze-like.
The two of us stumbled away from the park bench. “I guess this way is as good as any,” Ed said, pointing towards the closest blob of trees. Bravely, we forged ahead, past scores of darkened cages. Occasionally, a slumbering animal stirred as we passed. A Bengal tiger lifted his head and peered at us irritably, then decided that we weren’t worth his time and went back to sleep. The tiger was comfortable in his cage, he knew where he fit. On the other hand, Ed and I were searching for a niche that existed somewhere outside the scope of our knowledge. We were on the other side of the cage, but we were utterly clueless.
After a while, we realized that we were navigating in circles. We passed the tiger again, but this time he did not even stir. I felt strangely tranquil, as if it didn’t matter if we ever left the zoo grounds. “We keep ending up in the same place,” Ed announced. He leaned casually against a railing and stared at me with an odd smile on his face. Since his earlier meltdown, Ed had achieved a state of Zen calm. “Perhaps there’s someone around that we could ask.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, I noticed an elderly man on a bicycle. He wobbled towards us deliberately, then finally came to a halt about six feet away. The man wore a navy blue uniform shirt, which bore a plastic name tag that identified him as a zoo employee. “The zoo’s closed,” he said, unnecessarily. He gestured expansively towards the right, but I could see nothing, except for darkness. “The exit’s over there. You can’t possibly miss it.” He climbed back onto his bicycle and laboriously pedaled away.
Ed and I pressed on towards the exit, but it remained hidden. “You know, this is a beautiful place for a person to be lost,” Ed said. His face grew thoughtful. “That woman at the front gate was a saint. She just wanted to make sure we acknowledged her humanity. She didn’t even want our money.”
I nodded vigorously, and was immediately lost in my own rabbit hole of thought. The two of us had no reason to rush to the exit. Eventually, we would find the gate, and then the adjacent park trails would lead us inexorably towards St Charles Avenue. My mother’s truck sat beside the streetcar tracks, patiently awaiting our arrival. Once we found the vehicle, we would return to our cheap motel room, sleep for a few hours, and drive back to Madison with a few dollars in our pockets. Despite our ill luck, people had been kind to us, as they so often were.
Struck by the absurdity of our ordeal, I began to laugh uncontrollably. After a sidelong glance and a moment of bewilderment, Ed joined me. Soon, the two of us were guffawing loudly, joyfully, holding our sides, wiping tears from our eyes. “Lost in the zoo,” Ed gasped. “Only you and I would get ourselves into such a predicament.”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the elderly zoo guard reappeared. He seemed to be in no particular hurry to hasten our departure. The guard pedaled our way on his bicycle, parked in front of us, and smiled. “You sure like our zoo, don’t you?” he chuckled. We laughed harder, and he pointed again, this time towards the left. There, in plain sight, was the exit turnstile. Beyond the gate, the park grounds stretched out expansively in all directions.
We thanked him profusely, and pushed our way through the turnstile towards freedom. The metal grates clanked behind us as we made our way into the park. I grasped Ed’s hand and gave it a little squeeze, looked into his eyes, and smiled. Ed smiled back, and then we continued our long walk towards my waiting vehicle, and the road ahead.
**
Leah Mueller is an independent writer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of one chapbook, Queen of Dorksville, and two full-length books, Allergic to Everything and The Underside of the Snake. Her work has been published in Blunderbuss, Memoryhouse, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Sadie Girl Press, Origins Journal, Silver Birch Press, Cultured Vultures, Quail Bell, and many others. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest.
**
Image: Flickr / Frank
I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never been to New York but I have an idea of how it is shaped. I have an idea, concrete, from novels, a novel, the novel in my bag. I’ve never been to New York but when I arrive at Penn Station an early morning hits my eyes as I try to move through waves of New Yorkers I’ve never met because I’ve never been to New York. Because I’ve never been to New York I get spit out at Tenth Street and I see the taxis, the homeless, the buildings of solid glass, hot dog vendors, drug dealers, business men, the fashionable 50 year olds conversing, idle, with crust punks, spastic, and at least one semi-famous person I recognize but won’t acknowledge because if I had a somewhat recognizable face I wouldn’t want people to interrupt my day with their mundanities either. Someone tells me I’m doing this wrong, being to New York, but I’ve never been to New York so I don’t know how to do New York. From there I grab the N train to Houston and—which, yeah, someone tells me I’m saying that wrong but I’ve never been to New York—and switch to the D and sit next to a woman crying, tears seeping through the cracks of her iPhone 4, her headphones crackle the tiniest grumble of a conversation or message or prayer or song and it’s breaking her world as we cross into the Rockaways and out the window I see the People’s Library nestled sweetly on Boerum Hill, lined by the quasi-literate waiting their turn for the bathroom, the only public-use toilet on Sixty-second street, that is, of course, unless you count the de-facto one in the McDonald’s by the Park. I’ve never been to New York but I’ve read enough books—like the one in my bag which is based in this city so known it’s like a new city for everyone who doesn’t know it—so you’ll believe me when I tell you that as I disembark onto Broadway I confront scores of traffic to catch quick the 5 train as the clock atop the Manhattan Bridge says it’s nearly 9AM and I have to be in Grand Army Plaza, the Madison Avenue side, before 930. The train climbs the Brooklyn Heights, scrambles by Chelsea, stops on the Promenade to gather up the geriatrics careening toward youth. I’ve never been to New York but we speed by Zucotti Park where the ghosts of the protesters in the novel in my bag shimmer in the rising light, the train circles Long Island once and spits people into Lincoln Square, at the Applebee’s in Flatbush. I’ve never been to New York. At the FDR Drive stop I consider getting out on the NYU side, but I’ve never been to New York so I watch the doors close on someone’s coat tails and at the Wall Street stop the coat falls to the tracks. I get off here, recognizing the gravitas, and turn onto the sunlit Upper West Side corridor of East Seventy-ninth Street, watching my back for artists and enemies and realizing just how jaded you can be even if you’ve never been to New York. Because I’ve never been to New York I have to see it all—La Guardia from the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, New York Presbyterian from the roof of Columbia’s School of Fine Arts. I’ve never been to New York so I have to find reasons, reason to and reasons not to—dying hydraulics, coughing smokers, ignorant slapsticks, sludge on food, slime in noodles, shoelace hackers and semaphoric exchanges between the heights of windows. On the summit of the north side of Cobble Hill on the corner of Sixty-eighth and Lexington a hunched man hobbles along with me and directs me to take the 2 across Central Park, just over Twenty Sixth, past the Whole Foods in Union Square, take a left toward the lower east side near Canal Street and presumably I’ll see Manhattan off in the distance like a cold water bath gone grey with the dust of this city and its habitual, daily rinse of people, like me, who have never been to New York. I begin, mark my progress with the Frank Gehry building, and emerge from an alley blocked by the mad rush of Atlantic—the street the narrator in the novel in my bag seems to be constantly traveling up and down and I see just how complicated it is to be in a city I’ve never been to, to never be in a city where all the characters of every book have been, to know the ghosts of narrators and protagonists who have walked this street, fallen in love on this street, fought just here under the sign for West Fourth on this street, the arguments and kisses that have been witnessed by the pigeons in Sunset Park on this street, the fictional shenanigans of young men and women finding their true selves on this very same bench I sit on now, staring out at the streetlight on South Street, where they’ve been. This bench here, just on the border of Brooklyn, carries the history of patients in gowns, doctors with hangovers, children with oblivious balloons, mesmerized housewives contemplating just where their husband had an affair last night, her conflicted by the city and the lights on Delancy where, if she was worked up enough and dressed up enough and in the right mood enough, this city she’d never been to could easily wipe her memory of her children and house and marriage and life. I’ve never been to New York so I know this place through the treading of novels and characters—the scenes set with the pillars of the American Museum of National History overshadowing the brisk walkers on Eighty first-Street. I could go in, see the history within the histrionics, but because I’ve never been to New York I take a right off Fourth Avenue and hit Union Square where a street performer is performing taxidermy to the sounds of whale song vowels, where a guitar strums from a rooftop and the clouds billow in and cover the facade of the Park Slope Food Co Op and I lean against a defunct phone booth. Life bustles and the truest fictions simmer in this city I’ve never been to—the lives influenced here, the scenes remembered for their reality, their vibrancy, their truth: how did Holden Caulfield decide it was time? where did Nick Caraway get his break and settle the hell down? how did Francie Nolan feel about these cigarette-lined streets? why didn’t Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska get consummate without all the fuss? I’ve never been to New York but I find some pizza slices on the East Side of Fifty-ninth at a shop with two vendors occupying the same space, both vying for my dollars. I rip one in half, make them share, congratulate myself on getting the hang of New York and walk out the back exit to Park Place, on Fifth Avenue, and realize, looking across the Hudson to see Long Island City’s hazy ball of shame in the clouded light of lunch time, that I’ll never understand New York because I’ve never been to New York. After buying new shoes at Union Market and lacing them in front of the Met, a payphone rings and I grab it up, desperate: a more desolate voice than mine tells me to meet them at the Soho Crate and Barrel near Fourteenth, their heart breaking audibly and the view of the Brooklyn Bridge from here is like a suture too far away to use and too huge to offer. I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never been to New York but the N train hurls me past the tramps of Manhattan, away from the Union Street rickshaws and Thirty-sixth Street trainspotters, just skirting Furman and the Brooklyn Bridge Park, to the last stop at Redhook between the upper west side and the first C stop and it reminds me of home. To never visit a city like New York is a like never going home, like knowing cities are finite containers holding an infinity of denizens who elaborate days with meaning and death. Inhaling: a ripe scent in the air of blossoming daisies and dandelions and orchids and orangutan sloping grass and vivisecting bees pollinating the branches of oaks bringing acorns, finally, back to Hanson Place just down the block on Henry Street near the Carroll Gardens. I’ve never been to New York and navigating has never been so marathonic and Sisyphean, rolling the rocks of midday toward the Upper East Side were I find shade, tangible shade under Crown Heights and I nap. Or attempt. But it’s a melancholic waste, though I wouldn’t know as I’ve never been to New York. Over the hovering hum of BQE, I consider the book in my bag, the one that’s been in my bag, the one about New York, where I’ve never been: would I appear in these books about New York if I ever went to New York? Would I be a detail in a memoir? a distraction in a novel? a device in a play? a nuisance in a poem? a roadblock in the middle of the street when a cab driver can’t get a supporting-character away fast enough as the earthquake strikes and the tidal waves crash and the High Line derails into the buildings of Queens where protesters are wallowing in self pity and out somewhere a reactor blows and everyone in Dumbo on Columbia succumbs to the initial blast, instantly eviscerated? The East River boils along Saint Mark’s while I consult the narrator of the book in my bag. Rumors in the air. They taste of Chinatown after sweating my way over the Upper Thirties past the ghost bike where the narrator of the book in my bag, still there, considers all the New York I should consider—the restaurant off Lafayette and Grand Street called Teleran, the art major with synesthesia on the B63 telling me to get off at Centre Street, here, the East Village. Here, at the BP gas station on Douglass Street, I finally pick up a conversation with a semi-famous person packing a pack of Camels, walking up Flatbush. I ask for one. I tell them I’ve never been to New York and they tell me, like they’re picking up on a left behind discussion, that City Hall had a bomb threat earlier, to not go down that way to Staten Island because the Gowanus Canal has flooded and Midtown is a wreck. Turns out to be Thomas Pynchon and he comments on my tattoos and insists I hit the nearest bar in Prospect Heights and tells me they have the best Manhattans in Manhattan you can get. He says its right near the Century 21 across from Ground Zero, left of Park Slope and fifteenth. We shake hands in a conspiratorial way before he sprints across the Greenwood Cemetery past Thirty-ninth Street. And because I’ve never been to New York the trees sway and the people laugh in the late afternoon glow of the Financial District as I pass thorough on Central Park South. And because I’ve never been to New York I find this Pynchonian bar and order a Manhattan, looking out the windows at the Goldman Sachs building and the twin towers’ grave site. I take my company out, the narrator of the book in my bag, you remember him, we follow every character who has ever been up Eighteenth past Coney Island, every true, vibrant, person from all the books about New York I have accidentally read without ever being to New York. Because here’s the thing, I say to the narrator who sips his own drink and returns my look without turning his head, I’ve never been to New York and it’d be nice to have a tour guide.
All place names taken, without permission, from Ben Learner’s 10:04
**
Michael Badger attended Harvard on a classic mixed-up transcript snafu. After they caught up with him they demoted him to a sister university, yet still in Cambridge. Which was fine. After many winters tending bar, many summers farming cannabis on the west coast, and a dubious stint in Seattle, he ended up at Bread Loaf on the waiter scholarship program and helped charge in the Great Waiter’s Revolt of 2016. He now lives in Vermont, obsessively turning wood into kinda pretty utilitarian objects. That’s it.
**
Image: Flickr / Aftab Uzzaman
Here are our authors’ new and upcoming publications. Click through the links to find out more!
Grace Finlayson (episode 50): “The Lookout,” published in Scum.
L.N. Holmes (episode 41): “One Woman’s Junk” was published in Newfound on March 20.
Blake Kimzey (episode 22): Blake Kimzey recently launched Writing Workshops Dallas, an independent writing school for hardworking, talented writers who want to strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication along the way. Writing Workshops Dallas offers multi-level writing workshops in Dallas, TX, but also offers manuscript editing, MFA Application Prep, and individual coaching and critique to writers located anywhere. All Writing Workshops Dallas instructors are professional writers, teachers and editors, who have taught at major universities and attended top MFA programs across the country. No matter the stage of a writer’s career or their physical location, there is a place for them at Writing Workshops Dallas.
On March 23d, Blake Kimzey gave a talk at Know How Dallas titled “Writing Out of the Wilderness: Craft a Memorable Story, Survive Rejection, and Forge a Path to Publication.” Blake showed the resources and strategies you need to put your work out into the world with purpose, and will also discuss building a memorable character, a believable setting, and how to use narrative inventory to architect your story.
Levi Noe (episode 48): The audiobook of “Rain Check,” published on Audible and iTunes.
Stephen Langlois (episode 60): “New White House Submission Guidelines,” published by Heavy Feather Review; “Reading Across America: On the Importance of the Venue,” published in Literary Hub.
Peter Haynes (episode 82): “Witch Houses” (originally published in Hypertext Magazine), was re-printed in The Island Review.
Douglas W. Milliken (episode 80): “Fandanguillo,” published in The Stoneslide Corrective; “Boys’ Life/Rough Frontiers,” published in The Lascaux Review; “Swans (Elsewhere)” and “Settle/Return,” published in Atticus Review. He also recently finished up a mini-tour through Eastern New York State with Nat Baldwin.
Riona Judge McCormack (episode 47): “Horse Winter,” published in the Dublin Review.
Eileen Merriman (episode 54): Her YA novel Pieces of You is forthcoming (and available for pre-ordering!) from Penguin.
Todd Dillard (episode 7): “Shapeshifter’s Love Poem,” available in the next issue of Mirror Dance. He also recently joined a narrative medicine group in the hospital where he works, and would love to meet anyone else who is involved in narrative medicine.
Craig Fishbane (episode 42): “To Be Worthy of a Smile From My Immigrant Students During this Presidency (#First100Days),” published in The Good Men Project; “The New Kids,” published in New World Writing. He read for the F Bomb Series at KGB Bar in New York City on Friday April 7th at 7 PM.
Most quaint New England Inns claimed to be haunted as a way to make themselves stand out from the rest, but the Derrick Inn, where Emily and Gabe were spending their anniversary, was purported by CleanSpirit listserv to be an astral goldmine. There were rattling doorknobs, disembodied footsteps, windows that slammed shut without warning. There were sightings, of course: a tall, slim woman in a tailcoat and riding boots; a decrepit old man who seemed to favor the second-floor hallway; a mangy orange cat that appeared on the tops of dressers throughout the inn, though whether or not the cat was actually a spirit was disputed.
Then there was the teenage girl in ripped jeans and a plaid shirt—this was said to be Beth Kentridge, the daughter of a former bartender. Beth had gone missing; her body discovered by some hunters in the woods behind the inn. The bartender had something to do with it, allegedly, but he was never convicted. Customers of the restaurant claimed to have seen her in the dim, dingy bathrooms, applying makeup in a reflectionless mirror.
**
“This must be the main drag,” said Gabe, as Emily steered their rented Prius onto a street of boutiques and novelty shops. “The Derrick’s up there, it looks like.” The three-story, colonial-style house with a wraparound porch stood at the end of the shops. Emily parked the car on the street and the two of them got out and stared at the building.
“Charming,” said Gabe.
“Yep, pretty cute,” said Emily, pulling her coat tighter around her.
She squeezed Gabe’s warm hand with her cold one and the two of them proceeded up the steps that way. Inside the bar on the first floor, the bartender and several rosy-faced patrons were staring at the television, watching a basketball game. Gabe walked to the bar and Emily followed.
“Hi there. We’re the Montezes. Checking in,” he said.
“Hang on,” said the bartender, and turned back to the television. “Oh HOOOOO!” he shouted with the patrons at a play taking place on the TV.
Gabe nudged Emily. “Authentic.”
“Seriously,” she said.
While they waited, Emily assessed the bartender, wondering if he knew Beth Kentridge’s father. He wore a ragged polo shirt tucked into his jeans, and a hat with a team logo on it that she couldn’t place. He took a sip from his beer.
At the commercial break he disappeared through a door behind the bar and returned holding a key.
“Room 11, on the third floor. Two hundred bucks for both nights,” he said. Gabe held out a credit card. “And wifi’s out for the weekend, so don’t bother.”
“I hate how they always assume we need wifi,” Emily said, as the two of them walked up the narrow, creaky staircase.
“I’m sure they get loads of city-slicker asshole tourists here asking about it,” said Gabe.
“Isn’t that us?” said Emily.
“No,” said Gabe. “We have a reason to be here.” He unlocked the door.
The room was small and square and painted an institutional beige, with a queen-sized bed taking up the majority of the space. A single window overlooked the town’s main road, where a truck clattered by. There was a closet, a dresser, a desk. It was identical to most of the rooms in the rural roadside inns that ghosts seemed to favor. Emily plopped down on the overly springy mattress while Gabe opened and closed dresser drawers. She watched the way he moved: practiced but jerky. He’d done this a thousand times but was still eager and excited. He smoothed his hands over the top of the dresser and ran them over the wall, turned the faucets on and off in the bathroom.
He stepped back into her line of vision and stood.
“Come here,” she said, sitting up and wriggling out of her coat. He held up a finger, indicating for her to be quiet. His eyes fluttered shut and his breathing quickened.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Em. They’re everywhere.” He opened his eyes.
“Can we do this later?” said Emily.
“You can’t feel it?” he said, putting his hand to the wall.
Emily closed her eyes and let her thoughts fall away, one at a time. All she felt was a rumble from a passing truck. “Maybe?” she said. “This room is just really loud. Do you think they’d let us switch?”
“No way,” he said. “This place is the hub. I’m not taking my chances.”
She envied the hunters who could stay for nights at a time and try out different rooms. This two-night stay was all she and Gabe could afford.
“I guess I just need a little more time to settle,” she said.
He sat down next to her and took her hand as the mattress groaned beneath their weight.
“Of course, babe,” he said, and kissed her lightly on the lips. “This place is the real deal, I can tell. Trust me, you’ll feel it soon if you don’t feel it now.”
**
Gabe and Emily were Clean Hunters. The majority of Paranormal Enthusiasts used top of the line EMF and EVP readers, but Clean Hunters just used their Sense. Rather than spending hundreds of dollars on equipment, Clean Hunters spent an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening meditating, keeping their Sense sharp. Emily and Gabe would abstain from drinking alcohol in the month before their hunt, just to keep their minds honed and ready for contact. Audio and video recording was forbidden; it distracted from the immediate experience of communicating with spirits. Instead, Clean Hunters kept detailed Hunt journals and posted their findings on the CleanSpirit listserv. Part of being a Clean Hunter was trusting the CH community—Hunters who embellished unnecessarily were warned and then immediately expelled.
**
“Why don’t we go walk around town before the snow starts?” said Emily.
She looked over at Gabe. His eyes were closed, and he had a complacent smile on his face. “You go,” he said. “We’ll meet back here for dinner.”
Emily tried to stifle the frustration she felt welling up inside her. It was their damn anniversary. Couldn’t he lay off the ghosts for two seconds? But she knew that if she’d felt anything, she would have gladly sat with him with closed eyes and let their presence wash over her with icy tingles.
She walked down the narrow staircase and looked through the window that faced the woods where the Kentridge girl’s body was found. A shudder went through her, but she couldn’t tell if it was astral or just her own reaction to the idea of slowly bleeding to death in the woods. She pulled a piece of chocolate from her pocket, removed it from its wrapper, and popped it into her mouth.
**
The sky was white and the air had the heavy, damp feeling that came before snowfall. She crossed over to Main Street and passed a discount liquor store, a nail salon, and an antique shop with a jumble of furniture and knickknacks hastily stacked up against its dusty windows. She stopped in front of a used bookstore. Wind chimes tinkled as she pushed the door open, and an older woman with wild white curls poked her head up from behind a pile of books that surrounded the register. She gave Emily a brief smile before plunging back down into whatever it was she was doing on her computer.
The store, unlike most used bookstores that Emily had been to, was carefully organized—the yellowing paperbacks and faded hardcovers sorted alphabetically by genre. Some of the covers were wrapped in plastic archival library casing. Emily ran her fingers along the spines absentmindedly. Maybe there was some spirit here, among these old books. She’d heard of it happening before, on the listserv.
She let her mind drift back to the party at her co-worker Mara’s, the last time she’d made contact. A Valentine’s Day party, she remembered, nearly a year ago. In the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, it had hit her. That unmistakable hum, that faint vibration. No water came out of the sink’s faucet when she turned it on to wash her hands. Pulling aside the shower curtain to try the one on the tub, she saw an old man sitting there, bony gray knees to his chest. He stared at her with those empty, silver eyes. She stared back, holding his gaze, feeling the tingling that came with being in the presence of his kind. A knock startled her and she broke eye contact for a brief instant. When she looked back at the tub, he was gone. The water began running from both the sink and the bathtub.
In the cab back home she told Gabe what she’d seen, and he’d told her, holding her hand, that he’d sensed something, too.
“But I didn’t see him,” he said. “You always see them.”
She’d felt a glow of pride, then. She hadn’t even meditated that month, and she’d had a glass of wine. But still, she’d seen the ghost.
“It just takes practice,” she told him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think you’re a natural. You really have a gift. I’m jealous.”
“Stop it,” she said, nestling closer to him. He began playing with her hair.
“It’s true. I just hope it rubs off on me.”
**
Had she known it would have been her last sighting she would have stayed in that bathroom longer. Even in places where people with the tiniest bit of Sense could feel it—the pipe organ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (if you listened closely you could hear hymns), the hangman’s tree in Washington Square Park—she drew a blank. They became backdrops that she whisked by on her way to wherever. She hated the injured way Gabe looked at her when she said no, she didn’t feel it. She knew it made him lonely. So Emily did what she thought was the right thing to do as a wife, as a partner: she pretended.
It was so easy. She’d been through enough hauntings and read all the books. She was careful to let him sense the spirit first, and then embellish on his own sighting. What she was doing, she knew, was breaking the most revered rule of Clean Hunting, but her marriage was worth it. The community was worth it. She had seen how the ones who lost their sense were ostracized, were left off certain threads, eventually forgotten. Surely this was just a phase.
**
She stopped at a shelf of ancient looking tomes. They were 19th century medical books, she realized, and she lingered over a heavy volume full of anatomic drawings, some in color, featuring graceful braids of muscle inked in delicate reds and blues. Whose body was that? She wondered. How did they die? The medical profession was a haunted one. The listserv insisted that you never saw old ghosts in cemeteries—grave robbers had long ago pilfered their bodies and given them over to medical schools at universities and private practices in exchange for reward money. When she turned to a page with a diagram labeled “Genitalia of a fourteen-year-old girl,” she shut the book.
Snow was beginning to fall by the time she stepped out of the bookstore, and for a moment, she felt the way a regular vacationer must feel—a sense of aimlessness and calm, and a desire to wander and explore. Emily slid her hands into her dark green leather gloves, a Christmas present from Gabe, and continued on down the sidewalk, away from the inn. As she walked, the snow came down harder and harder, and the houses were spaced farther and farther apart. The sidewalk ended abruptly and there was only the shoulder of the road and the dead-looking forest, but she kept walking, her boots crunching in the thin layer of white that had accumulated on the ground.
She should be with Gabe, she knew, drinking hot cider, watching the snow fall, cuddling in the creaky bed. It was their anniversary, after all. But Gabe had chosen the room, the ghosts. She imagined him there now, scribbling in the leather bound notebook she’d given him as an anniversary present. Didn’t distance signify trust? And wasn’t trust the ultimate expression of love?
**
“You saved me,” he’d said one night, early on in their courtship, as they lay entwined on her mattress in her old Carroll Gardens apartment. She’d only been able to piece together fragments of his story, at that point, from the bottles of pills in his medicine cabinet and his bouts of insomnia. It wasn’t until several months into their relationship that she learned that, because of his Sense, Gabe had been seeing a psychiatrist for decades. Soon after they’d started dating and began hunting together, he’d gone off the meds—welcomed the visions rather than trying to hide from them. His parents were horrified. “I’m a free man,” he said to her.
Sometimes Emily wondered why the same hadn’t happened to her. They were both from the hyper-medicated generation. The only answer she could come up with was that she was better at keeping things to herself. She’d spent adolescence like most girls she knew: trying to stay off her parents’ radar. Gabe had been an only child, a golden boy who was the son of golden children. His parents, both first-generation Mexican-Americans with medical degrees, believed that the key to success was not just studying hard, but also fitting in. Visions of phosphorescent-eyed beings slinking through the dark were not going to help their golden boy fit in, hence the pills. Emily’s parents were just thankful that she wasn’t her sister, who was constantly getting nabbed for shoplifting by mall security.
**
Since that night, she’d felt love, but also an intense responsibility. The ghost hunting always happened together after that, a secret between them and thousands of anonymous internet listserv members. There was no more fooling around with Noah from HR. Guys like Gabe didn’t come around very often. Sometimes, before Gabe, she would wiggle her way into a pair of control top tights, put on a pushup bra and heavy black eyeliner, go out with her girlfriends, and pick up whoever would take her from the bar, but it was never her choice who, and it didn’t really matter that much. Her friends regarded Gabe with stunned politeness, as if they couldn’t believe Emily’s luck.
The daylight was fading fast, and she knew that soon she would have to make her way back to the inn in darkness. The trees were beginning to thin again, giving way to houses on either side. Checking her phone, she noticed that a half hour had passed. She approached a diner, its blue and pink neon sign turning the snow sherbet colored, and felt an intense craving for warm, fried food. Why not? She was on vacation and it was cold. She pulled open the door and was greeted by a middle-aged woman with tightly gelled curls, and clear braces.
“Sit anywhere you’d like,” she said, smiling a pink-lipsticked smile. The place was empty except for a withered old man at the bar, picking at an omelet. She sat a few seats away from him and ordered fries and a coffee. The radio was on, and the DJ was taking requests, her husky voice casting a comforting calm over the whole restaurant. When the coffee came it tasted bitter and burnt, but the fries were hot and crispy and scalded her fingers and tongue. She momentarily forgot her melancholy as she dunked them, three at a time, into a blood red pool of ketchup.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. One text from him and she would turn back, call a cab to take her through the weather to the inn. There was nothing. Her fingers left greasy smudges on the touchscreen as she scrolled through her work email, looking for a distraction. By now Gabe was probably holding court with Beth Kentridge’s spirit, asking her what it was like to die. He always asked them that question, which she found distressing and slightly disrespectful. They never answered him. You weren’t supposed to ask questions. You were supposed to listen to what they had to say.
To hear a spirit speak was the ultimate goal of Clean Hunting. You kept your mind sharp for their voices. It had never happened to Emily or Gabe, though she fantasized about it often. The boards said their voices created a physical sensation, like a fever, or sweating under a warm coat on a cold day. Some compared their voices to the clicking noises an old computer makes when it’s performing a task, others compared them to a cat’s purr.
She finished the fries and ordered a slice of apple pie á la mode, despite the growing ache in her stomach telling her she’d had too much. The waistband of her jeans was uncomfortably tight—she wished she’d put on leggings before going out. The waitress took the empty basket and greasy plate away and replaced it with a steaming slice of apple pie and vanilla ice cream, which she began to methodically devour one forkful at a time. The old man, she could sense, was staring at her, waiting for her to do something that could lead to a conversation. That was one sense she still had, at least—but she ignored him and continued shoving forkfuls of the dessert into her mouth. Between bites, she heard him mutter something. She stopped eating and looked at him.
“Can’t you see. Can’t you see?” he repeated.
His folded skin was mottled with brown spots, his blue eyes cartoonish through his thick glasses.
“Pardon?” she said.
He broke her gaze and stared at the waitress, who was folding napkins around the silverware that had just come from the dishwasher.
“A hole in the wall,” he said, his voice quivering.
Dementia, she decided, and felt helpless.
“Excuse me,” she said to the waitress, who looked up. “Does this man have a ride home? He doesn’t seem well.”
The waitress furrowed her eyebrows. “He’s my father-in-law,” she said. “Can I get you anything else?”
The old man began shaking his head slowly back and forth.
Emily felt something in her gut, beyond her stomachache. The old feeling, the sense, for a moment, but it dissolved quickly when she heard the DJ’s gentle lilt break through the guitar licks on the radio.
“That was ‘Can’t You See’ by the Marshall Tucker Band for Jimmy in Carbondale…”
“No, just the check,” she said, tossing her napkin on her plate.
**
She’d lived in the city so long that she’d forgotten how dark the woods got, but here she was, in the snow, her hand in her pocket clutching her phone in case Gabe called. Cars honked as they drove by. Snow was getting in her boots and she leaned over to scoop it out.
If she were to fall into a snowdrift and never come out, would she haunt Gabe? Would Gabe even try to summon her? Or would he meet someone else on the listserv—a taller, blonder, thinner version of Emily who would take him in her arms and comfort him and not pretend to see ghosts. The two of them would sit together with faint smiles on their faces, as she and Gabe had so many times before, meditating and taking in the surroundings on their respective astral planes.
She could see the lights of Main Street in the distance. She’d make it after all.
Emily made her way past the Derrick Inn bar, roiling with noisy patrons, and up to their room on the third floor. She paused at the door. The lights were out, which meant that Gabe was mid-séance. She pushed it open and slid into the room, silent as a phantom.
In the dim glow of the streetlamp that shone through their window she could see Gabe’s shadow. He was in lotus position, perfect posture, measured breathing, so lost in concentration that he didn’t flinch when she came in. He looked like the Buddha statue in her mother’s garden.
She slipped out of her coat and boots and sat down next to him on the bed, its creaking springs disturbing the silence of the room. She closed her eyes and let her breathing slow, listening to the sounds of the bar through the floorboards, the hiss of the cars driving through snow on the street outside. Gabe squeezed her thigh.
“Do you see her?” he whispered. “She’s here. She’s looking straight at you.”
Emily opened her eyes. The glass of the TV screen glinted faintly in the darkness.
“Yes,” she said. “I see her. She’s beautiful.”
**
“Clean Hunters” first appeared in full in The Masters Review. We have reprinted this excerpt with permission from the author.
**
Lena Valencia is a writer and teacher. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Masters Review, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches at Catapult and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and for three years hosted and curated the HiFi Reading Series in Manhattan. She is the managing editor of the literary magazine One Story.
**
Image: Flickr / krheesy
Gay Talese: Thy Neighbor’s Wife (amazon / indiebound) / The Voyeur’s Motel (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (amazon / indiebound)
Tom Wolfe: A Man in Full (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / I Am Charlotte Simmons (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / The Electric Kool-Aid Test (amazon / indiebound)
Hunter Thompson: Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (amazon / indiebound / ebook) / Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (amazon / indiebound) / The Rum Diary: A Novel (amazon / indiebound / ebook)
While Floyd was out, Marcy tried to organize her mind. “You know, like those pill organizers they have, with the compartments for daytime and night? I wish sometimes I could organize my thoughts like that, seven days a week.”
She had said this while getting her hair done a few months ago and everyone had laughed, so when she got home that went in the book. She was writing down all the things she said that made sense to her, with hopes of putting them all on cards or maybe refrigerator magnets and selling them; they could always use the extra cash! Which reminded her, so she checked her secret stash, not the money Floyd gave her like it was killing him, but a little something extra she kept in her brassiere. Sure as hell nobody would be looking in there.
Truth was, she used to be able to organize her thoughts like that, until Floyd retired. Now he was always hanging around, talking to her, asking what she was doing. Every time he went out, which wasn’t often enough for her taste, he would ask her if she needed anything and then look angry if she did. Sometimes he’d look angry if she didn’t. Now she looked for errands for him, just to get a moment’s peace. When she sent him off for milk this morning she could have lived without it. But she couldn’t have stood listening to him complain about the bus ride to Atlantic City before it happened, not non-stop for the next two hours.
“You’re creating your future,” she told him. “Whatever you’re thinking and feeling, that becomes your reality.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” he’d said, putting on his coat and hat. He had been wearing that same damned hat with the stingy brim so long it had come back in style.
“It’s the law of attraction,” she’d continued. “You can deny it all you want but that don’t mean it’s not true. Everything coming into your life you are attracting into your life. You’re like a magnet.”
“Well, this magnet’s going to attract some milk,” he’d said before going out the door.
He had made fun of her ever since she first heard Oprah talking about The Secret but deep down she thought that maybe he believed her. Or would, if he would just give it a try. He would come home so angry about something that happened out there — the security guy asleep in the chair, or someone who wouldn’t give his seat up on the subway — and she would tell him, “Every bad thing that comes into your life, you make happen.”
Sometimes that really made Floyd angry. “Is that right? Every bad thing? I made happen every bad thing that came into my life, Marcy?” He would tower over her, breathing heavily, staring at the top of her lacquered hair until she was silent.
She looked closely at the big digits on the clock by the bed. It was almost 8:30 and she still had not done her makeup. From the drawer in the nightstand on her side of the bed she looked for her own pill organizer and then realized she had already taken it out. She put it under the light, right beside that picture of her two boys, smiling in the lap of a black Santa, and looked at Wednesday. There were still pills in the morning box but the evening box was empty. Maybe she took the evening pills by mistake. Not that it mattered ‘cause they were basically the same. Or maybe she hadn’t filled the PM part.
Looking at the rainbow-colored compartments (Wednesday was green, Thursday red) she thought of Wilson, who had the hardest time with his R’s when he was little — “Weeding Wainbow,” he would say about his favorite show, and his brother would laugh at him. She felt overcome for a moment and then heard her husband’s keys in the door.
She took the morning pills, four altogether, as Floyd shouted at her from the kitchen.
“Do you know how much they wanted for a half-gallon of milk?”
She imagined his face as he said the price and the way he would look at her afterwards. He might be looking that way right now, even though she wasn’t there.
“Cost of everything is going up,” she yelled back. Then she stood and headed for the bathroom. “I got to get a move on.”
“Ain’t you even going to drink your milk?” She heard him swear as she closed the bathroom door.
The bus driver turned out to be some white guy who’d been sleeping in the back while people waited outside. The whole bus was talking about it, even after they got out of the Holland Tunnel and were getting on the turnpike, people tsk-tsking and hmm-hmming until Floyd wanted to yell, “Who told you to stand out there in the first place? It’s not even cold.” But he kept quiet and sat by a window, alone thank you very much, though Tommy, who acted like he was Floyd’s best friend, insisted on sitting right in front of him, while Marcy huddled on the other side with a bunch of ladies. They outnumbered the men five to one anyway; he let Tommy represent, going back and forth across the aisle like some congressman making a deal. Each time he went over to the ladies he would say something so low that Floyd couldn’t hear and they would all laugh and holler.
“I think it’s about time for some music,” Tommy said after one of his sorties. He had a gym bag with him that said Mets on it, and from it he pulled a boom box that he tried to balance on the seatback in front of him. He pushed play and Johnnie Taylor started in on “Who’s Making Love” and the ladies all laughed, even though the sound was kind of wobbly. From the front of the bus the driver said something; they could see him looking at them in the rear view mirror, but no one tried to hear him. In fact Tommy stood up, with the boom box on his shoulder, and started to shake it in the aisle, which made the driver get on the mike.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to sit down.” He had some kind of accent, Russian or something, but no one really paid him any mind.
The hits kept coming; Tommy jammed the boom box between the headrest and the window so it wouldn’t fall down and turned around to look at Floyd, but not before looking at the driver, who had his eyes on the road again.
“How ‘bout a little taste?” Tommy said, taking a half-pint in a brown bag from the pocket of his jacket.
“Too early for me,” Floyd said, looking out the window. To him it always looked like New Jersey was halfway through being torn down.
Across the aisle Marcy was in the middle of a conversation with the other ladies but she didn’t feel quite right. It started as soon as she left the building; she had picked out a brooch to go with her blue blouse, a little gold tree with red apples on it, but she had left it sitting in front of the mirror. Now she felt naked, all that blue stretching out below her chin like an empty ocean almost and she felt like she was being pulled back from drowning each time one of them stopped talking. That meant somebody was supposed to say something; you were supposed to jump in like it was a game of double- Dutch.
“What I value most is the privacy,” Marcy said, but no one answered. She had a feeling she had said that before. The topic was assisted living and how to know when you needed it.
“Until you wake up privately dead,” said the lady in the Kente cloth. Marcy didn’t remember meeting her before, a friend of Helen’s was how she was introduced, but she didn’t like her now. She had these gray and white streaks in her hair, extensions by the look of it, but it reminded Marcy of mud. Besides, she was probably the youngest woman of the bunch, what was she talking about dying for?
“My boy checks in on us every night,” said Marcy and immediately wondered why she had. It wasn’t true. Most times she had to call Eric and he never sounded too happy to hear from her. He did come to visit though, once a month at least. They saw less of him after his divorce, though you’d think it would be the other way around.
“Where are we?” she said suddenly, looking out the window. Everything looked the same.
“You keep asking that,” the lady in the Kente cloth said, or maybe she said. Marcy wasn’t looking at her and the music Tommy was playing made her feel lost.
“Sending this one out for all you ladies,” said Tommy, like he was some deejay, and they all laughed but Marcy didn’t think it was funny. It was that song about sitting on a park bench that always made her sad. “I see her face everywhere I go/on the street and even at the picture show/have you seen her?”
There was a hospital up there high on a hill and for a second she felt that the bus was going to take off and fly straight up to its doors. She closed her eyes and felt herself rise.
They parked in the lot of the Showboat casino. Though they could have gone anywhere they wanted, the thirty-odd passengers that disembarked made for the Showboat as if summoned, shuffling and limping toward the entrance in a broken conga line.
“No one says we got to go to this casino,” Floyd said to the crowd of ladies leading the way.
“The Showboat has a Mardi Gras theme,” said the lady in the Kente cloth. She turned around to give Floyd the fisheye, pulling down her glasses as she did. “Besides, we got coupons for the Showboat.”
He fell in line sullenly beside Tommy who offered him another drink. Floyd took a swallow this time without pulling down the brown paper to see what it was. It tasted like mouthwash.
“Jesus, what the hell you drinking?”
“Little peppermint schnapps.” Tommy tried to slap Floyd on the back but the big man danced away, handing the bottle back as he moved.
“What she mean by a ‘Mardi Gras theme,’ anyway?” Floyd said.
Tommy shrugged. “As long as they got free drinks and blackjack I don’t much care.”
Seagulls screamed overhead. Floyd saw his reflection scowling in the window of a parked Humvee. He went to New Orleans during Mardi Gras when he was in the Navy, how many years ago? He got lost and someone stole his wallet. A man dressed as a woman tried to put beads around his neck, he remembered. You could have your Mardi Gras.
Marcy was among the first of the women to enter the casino and the air conditioning hit her like a cold wave. “Good thing I remembered my shawl!” she said but no one answered. The music and the sound of the slot machines, dinging and ringing with sirens going off every five minutes as if some crime was being committed, swallowed her voice.
Marcy had thought to bring rolls of quarters and silver dollars. While the other ladies were getting change she was already pouring her silver into a red plastic cup provided to her by a girl in the shortest skirt she had ever seen.
“You must be freezing!” Marcy said but the girl didn’t seem to hear her. Maybe she just got tired of people trying to talk to her.
The slots area had thousands of machines and at noon it was already half filled, mostly old-timers like her and Floyd. He and Tommy had set off in the other direction like there was a sign saying ‘Men, That Way.’ The carpets were in a pattern of red and orange and gold that reminded her of a kaleidoscope and the ceiling was made up to look like stained glass, though she knew real stained glass when she saw it and this wasn’t it. She felt like if she didn’t sit down she might just fall into the colors. She sat down at a quarter machine and began feeding it. She didn’t know where the other ladies had gone and looking over her shoulder left her none the wiser.
“Y’all gonna have to find me,” she said, and as if conjured, a different lady in a short skirt appeared.
“How you doing today?” she said. She had a tray filled with drinks and a notepad tucked into her belt. “Can I get you something to drink?” “Well I suppose you can!” Marcy turned in her chair to show her appreciation. “My name’s Marcy by the way, I come here from Brooklyn with a bunch of folks from my church group.”
“Now isn’t that nice? My name’s Kim Sue. What can I get you?”
Marcy smiled and opened her mouth. But she could not think of the names of any drinks, not just the fancy ones but any drink. She felt a trickle of sweat run down her back underneath her blouse.
“It’s funny,” she said, embarrassed. “My mind’s just a blank today.”
“Sure, no problem!” Kim Sue smiled back at her like one of those Chinese dolls, her name right there on her badge. “We have beer and wine and soda and mixed drinks.” She kept smiling at Marcy and continued. “I could make you a nice white wine spritzer, if you like.”
“Oh, that sounds nice,” said Marcy, and it did sound nice, like a sprinkler in the summer time, the kind the boys used to play in. Kim Sue left and Marcy returned to the machine. Cherries and plums rolled past, never stopping at the same time.
Eric used to chase Wilson through the sprinklers in the park and sometimes when Marcy wasn’t looking he would hold his little brother down and try to pull off his shorts in front of all the other children. She would get so mad at him, always teasing like that, knowing it would make Wilson cry and come looking for her, but she had a job then, looking after a little white boy named Oskar whose parents lived in Park Slope and worked all the time. Oskar’s parents didn’t mind too much when she brought her boys with her when she took him to the park. “As long as you remember,” the father said, “that Oskar is your first priority.”
Well of course he is, mister doctor man! Why would my own flesh and blood come before your little prince? Good gracious, the things that man would say. If the wife heard him she would weigh in and try to soften the blow. “What my husband means is that we don’t want you to get too distracted. Three children is a handful.”
Now that was the kind of thing only a white person would say. Where she came from, three children was just getting started, even if she was done after Wilson, something her own mother could never understand.
“Oh, don’t worry, ma’am,” Marcy would say. “I won’t ever let Oskar out of my sight.”
All these people thinking someone was going to steal their child, like the whole country had gone crazy. Soon they’d be putting their pictures on milk cartons and billboards and on TV during the news — “Have you seen Brandon?” Usually white kids. If a black kid went missing generally people knew who took him.
“Here you go, ma’am.”
Kim Sue was back with her drink. It was in a big plastic cup with a straw that went in curlicues, like a roller coaster, like this was for a child. She started fishing in her coin cup.
“Drinks are complimentary, ma’am.”
Like I didn’t know that. She pulled out a Susan B. Anthony and put it on her tray. “That’s for you,” she said.
“Very nice of you, ma’am. And if you need anything else you just let me know.”
She turned to leave and Marcy was afraid to see her go. “Kim Sue, it’s like your momma gave you two names.”
“Kim is my family name. Family name comes first in Korean.”
“Is that right?” said Marcy. “Well I think family should come first, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Marcy thought that was something else she should write in her book but realized that she hadn’t brought it with her, and then forgot what she had said. “But they probably don’t spell it like that in Korea, do they? The Sue, I mean.”
“No, ma’am, we have a different alphabet.”
“Now isn’t that something?”
She was balancing a tray full of drinks while she talked so Marcy let her go, disappearing into the big Tiffany lamp around them. A band was playing Dixieland and Marcy strained her eyes to see them. The music seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, “When the Saints Come Marching In.”
“Let me tell you another,” she said, sipping on her drink.
The lady at the machine next to her looked at Marcy and then moved away, taking her quarters with her. Marcy watched as the drink spun up the straw when she sucked. Here we go loop de loop.
Sometimes Eric would help her push the stroller as they went around the park, and Wilson would run so far ahead she would shout after him. “Don’t go where I can’t see you!” she’d holler, and Oskar, too big to be pushed around in a stroller, would try and stand up and yell after her. “Go where I can’t see you!”
Wilson would hide like that at home as well; hide so good she couldn’t find him sometimes. They were living in Prospect-Lefferts, more house than they needed but you could afford those big limestone buildings then, even on a Con Ed salary, and Wilson would go into different rooms and be so quiet that she would get hysterical, be practically beside herself by the time her husband got home. Then they would hear him laughing. “Got you!” he would say and emerge from the cupboard or from behind the sideboard and Floyd would get so mad. That one time he came out of her closet wearing her bra and Floyd just about went crazy; took off his belt and chased him.
She put in a coin and pulled the lever: a watermelon; a bell; the number seven in gold.
“What numbers are you playing today?”
She turned her head but nobody was there. Who had spoken? Just turning her head made the colors around her move and when she looked at the floor she saw the pattern there was moving too. It was like a flying carpet, the Vale of Cashmere —
The Vale of Cashmere! That was the name of that strange corner of the park where she took the boys now and then. They were getting older; other boys took the place of Oskar, and Eric got too big to want to be with them. But Wilson kept her company as she made the rounds, bought the kids ice cream and wiped their sticky hands. People used to call it The Swamp and there was a muddy pond okay and some hanging trees.
“How come you don’t play with boys your own age?” one of the kids had asked him once.
“I just like to help my momma,” he’d said.
He was the one who found out the real name of The Swamp, checked an old book out of the library and showed her on the map. There was a poem that went with it and Wilson stood up by the pond and put one finger in the air as he read: “Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere/With its roses the brightest the earth ever gave?”
Another babysitter saw them by the pond once and came over to warn them. “You shouldn’t be down in there,” she said, afraid to come too close with her stroller in front of her. “They say men get together down there.”
And after that Marcy noticed them, lurking about, standing in the trees. Once when she came down with Wilson and a stroller two men ran out, going in different directions.
She didn’t think about it again for years, until Wilson was grown and still living at home, and he came back one night that first time with his face all bloody, drunk or high on something and smiled at her, blood on his teeth.
“Hey, Momma, I been to the Vale of Cashmere!”
That’s when Floyd said no more.
“What numbers are you playing today?”
She turned and the colors whooshed like a scarf being wrapped around her head. She saw her this time, a little woman, no bigger than a dragonfly like the ones the boys chased in the park, Wilson would put them in a jar with holes punched in the top, while Eric tried to cover it up with his hand so they would smother.
“I’m looking for three sevens,” Marcy said to the dragonfly woman. “Are there some other numbers to play?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” said the faerie. “Are there other numbers to play?”
And then she flew away, just like a little hummingbird, and Marcy got up to follow her, passing into the pattern of colors and leaving her cup of coins behind.
Floyd went through all his money the first hour. Not all his money but all the money he’d meant to spend, the money he put in his shirt pocket, seemed to fly off the table. Dealer beat him every time: if Floyd had 18, the dealer had 19; if Floyd sat on a 19, the dealer hit him with two bricks.
“I guess this lady feels like she has to show us what a blackjack looks like,” said Tommy, when the dealer drew her third in ten minutes. She apologized to them both, even though they didn’t tip her, and Tommy’s luck was better than hers: He doubled down twice and made a hundred bucks in the blink of an eye. All Floyd could do, once he had spent the money he had earmarked for this outing, was sit there and simmer in his resentment while Tommy’s chip pile grew.
That was when Helen, the lady in the purple pantsuit, came and asked if he knew where Marcy was.
“I thought she was with you,” said Floyd. It came out like an accusation.
“Well, we agreed to meet for lunch at three,” she said, “but then nobody could find Marcy. We figured maybe you two went off together.” And that’s how well you know us, Floyd thought. “Maybe she just went off to another casino by herself,” he said. Even though he was losing, and wasn’t even playing at the time, he didn’t want to have to leave his spot and go look for his wife. “There’s no law says we got to stay here.”
“Blackjack,” said the dealer, flipping another ace.
But after a minute he did get up to look, as he knew he would, leaving Tommy, who still had a hot hand and was no doubt wondered what all the fuss was about.
“Did you try the ladies’ room?” Floyd asked Helen.
“That was one of the first places we looked. They have sofas in there, you know.” She paused. “Do you think we should call security?”
The suggestion made his blood pressure rise. “No, I don’t think we should call security. Christ sake, grown woman goes off for a few minutes and you want to call the cavalry?”
“Does she have a cell phone?”
“Our son gave her one but she couldn’t figure out how to use it.” Eric had given them each one last Christmas, and neither of them could figure out how to use it. By the time Floyd got the hang of it he realized that the only person he would call was his wife, which was kind of stupid since he saw her all the time anyway.
They looked all the places that they had already looked and the lady in the Kente cloth joined them, acting more concerned than Floyd felt. “We need a system,” she said, as they circled the room for the second time. The place was more crowded than ever and Floyd could hardly hear what she was saying. “How about I go stake out the buffet and you stay here?” she suggested to Helen.
“How ‘bout I go stake out the buffet?” Helen said. “I haven’t had lunch yet.”
Floyd said they could both go feed themselves and take their time doing it; Marcy would turn up. He stood like a sentinel beneath the bells and sirens of the Mardi Gras slots, scowling most of the time. He hated slot machines; there was no sport in it, as he often told his wife. With blackjack at least you were playing the odds. Slots to him was just dumb luck, like a rabbit betting it wouldn’t get run over when it ran across the road. Twice he thought he saw his wife, and each time he took pleasure in anticipating just how much grief he was going to give her. But each time he was wrong.
By four o’clock they were back together, Tommy too, and they began to set out in search parties. They were a small group: most of the travelers didn’t want to leave their stations, since the bus was scheduled to leave at six and this whole business had already cut into their time as it was. The lady in the Kente cloth, who finally introduced herself as Niobe, took charge. She contacted hotel security, who seemed to have some experience with old folks wandering off, and as the witching hour neared, and the day-trippers started heading back toward the bus, she went out and argued with the bus driver, who was pretty adamant about leaving on time.
“You can’t just go off and leave an old lady alone,” she scolded him. The engine was already running, gently shaking the bus, while the AC gusted out the door in heavy welcoming breaths.
“I won’t be leaving her alone,” the driver said. “I will be leaving you to find her.”
He agreed to wait as they made one last search. A handful of them fanned out, going to neighboring casinos and restaurants, off the boardwalk and into the side streets. Floyd couldn’t help but think that Marcy was messing with him the whole time, and when he saw the impatient faces of the other folks on the bus — they’d lost their money and had their fill, they just wanted to go home — he couldn’t help but side with them.
As he wandered, most of the people he saw were wearing shorts and T-shirts. Used to be people would get dressed up to go someplace. And when did everybody get so fat? Walking down the boardwalk, bag of French fries in your hand, what did you expect? The new motto for the city was “Always Turned On,” which he found kind of creepy. There was nothing that he saw that turned him on.
Doors were open, air conditioning blasting out, cooling nothing. Floyd took to popping into places and doing a quick look around, not even asking half the time if they’d seen anyone who looked like his wife. One, they couldn’t hear you with all that noise and two, half of them couldn’t speak English.
“You seen an old black lady?” he shouted at one girl scooping ice cream. Her nails were so long he figured they might end up in somebody’s cone. “Blue shirt, about this high?”
She stared at him like he was the one with the language problem.
He kept walking. Going in and out of the summer sun was making him thirsty. He wished for the first time that Tommy was with him. That man would always stop for a drink. He saw people in those rolling chairs, being pushed by young people, girls sometimes. And you wonder why you so fat?
Down at one end of the boardwalk he found what looked like a real bar. The crowd had trickled off as the sun sank lower in the sky. Go on, get out of here. A lot of good you been. Floyd ducked inside and felt the rivers of sweat roll out from under his hat and chill on his face and neck. His glasses steamed as he took a seat at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. He perched on the stool and looked up at the game on TV. The waitress brought him his drink and man, did that taste good. No skimping on the gin, either. He forgot to ask her about Marcy. His wallet was bothering him; he felt like he was balancing on it. When the waitress asked him if he wanted to start a tab he simply nodded.
“You got a phone?” She pointed to an old-fashioned booth in the back, the kind Superman used to change in. The place was filling up, young couples waiting for dinner. Once inside the paneled wood booth he forgot who he was going to call. Eric, right. He searched the scraps of paper in his wallet for the number he never had cause to memorize and let it ring, go to voicemail, and then dialed again.
“Hello?”
“This ain’t no telemarketer.”
“Hey, Pop.” He did not sound happy to hear from him and Floyd had already put enough change in the machine so he cut straight to the point.
“We in Atlantic City and your mother’s gone missing.” He backtracked from there, explaining the whole afternoon in greater detail than Eric needed, but never did his son sound any more excited than Floyd felt. He asked the obvious questions — had they called the police? Who else was looking?
“Did she have her cell phone?” he asked, pointedly.
“That’s why I was calling,” Floyd said. “I figured maybe she’d called you.”
Eric was silent. Floyd imagined him at home, still in his work clothes, the sound on the TV muted, his eyes on the game. From his perch in the booth Floyd could see the TV over the bar. Jeter was trying to steal.
“I’m sure she’ll turn up, Pop. I mean, where’s she gonna go?”
“I know that.”
“You got your cell phone with you? So I can call you if she does?” Floyd muttered something and got off the phone. That boy would go to his grave asking about those damn phones. He should just wrap them up and give them back to him for Christmas. Turn ‘em into salt-and-pepper shakers.
When he got back to his seat at the bar Jeter got picked off and he ordered another drink. Now they could send the search party out for him. The tumblers were tall and when he turned in his seat he found he had company. Big old white dude with long hair and a pointed beard. He was sipping a Budweiser longneck and looking at the screen. His arms were covered in tattoos; dragons, snakes and skulls disappeared into his shirtsleeves.
“Fuckin’ Yankees,” he said and turned to look at Floyd. “Nice hat.”
Floyd turned to face his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “You wouldn’t believe how long I had this hat,” he said.
“There isn’t much I wouldn’t believe,” the man said.
They got to talking. Turned out he worked in a tattoo parlor on the boardwalk, which explained all the ink. Halfway through his second drink, Floyd was feeling generous in his opinions.
“Back in the day,” he said, “man had a tattoo it meant he’d been someplace. In the service, in the joint, you know.”
“I hear you,” the man said. “These days it just means you been to the mall.” He drained his beer and held up the empty. “Buy you a drink?”
“Let me buy you a drink,” said Floyd, and pulled out the fat wallet that had been giving him such a pain and laid it on the counter. Soon he had the pictures out and was showing him snaps of Eric, bragging on his son’s job even if he wasn’t exactly sure what he did. Then one of the whole family, when everyone was young.
“Where’s your other boy?” the stranger asked.
Floyd made a face like he was sucking on a lime. “Wilson got killed in a hold-up ten years ago,” he said.
“Oh, man, I am sorry. They catch the guy who did it?”
“No, it was in Prospect Park one night. Lot of crime in there.”
“That’s why I could never live in the city,” the man said, which struck Floyd as funny. Most people would be scared of this dude, even in Brooklyn. “So what happens when folks get old?” said Floyd, changing the subject. “Maybe they don’t want all those tattoos any more.”
“Shit, you don’t have to wait ‘til you’re old to regret something stupid you did.” The man laughed and Floyd got a glimmer of a gold tooth in his head. “People come in all the time wanting to have tattoos taken off, usually the name of some girl that don’t love them anymore.”
“Can you do it?”
“Sure,” the man said. “Hurts like hell and costs twice as much. But we can do it. Easier just to change it, though.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, there was this one girl who loved a guy named Chris and had it tattooed on her ass. Until she found Jesus and then we just added a ‘T’.”
He didn’t smile at first and it took Floyd a minute to figure it was a joke. “Hey, I got one,” Floyd said. The stranger’s eyes gleamed in anticipation. “There was this guy who loved this old girl so much he had her name tattooed on his johnson.”
“Now that’s gotta hurt!”
“Hell, yeah.” Floyd wiped his mouth. “Then they broke up, you know, and soon he started missing her real bad. So he went all over looking for her, from Wisconsin all the way down to Jamaica. Then he’s in the bathroom one day and he looks over and he sees this other guy’s dick.” He stopped for a minute. The stranger kept staring at him. “Now I can’t remember that girl’s name.”
“Is it important?”
“Yeah, it’s the whole punch line.”
“Uh, oh. Better have another drink.”
Floyd felt flushed and excused himself to go to the bathroom. There he stared straight ahead at the wall and read all the graffiti as if looking for a message. And by the time he got back to the bar, he was not surprised to see the stranger was gone and with him, Floyd’s wallet, though all Floyd could feel was a keen sense of disappointment: He remembered the end of the joke now. He had remembered that old girl’s name.
**
“The Vale of Cashmere” was originally published by Harvard Square Editions in Voice from the Planet.
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Sean Elder’s writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, New York Magazine, Salon, Slate, Vogue, Elle, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Details and many other publications. The essay he contributed to the collection of men’s writings The Bastard On the Couch (Morrow, 2004) was reprinted on three continents; his essay on ecstasy, included in the collection of drug writings entitled White Rabbit (Chronicle Books, 1995) was called “seminal” by Granta; and a piece he wrote about being a stay-at-home dad for Oprah was included in her best of O collection, Live Your Best Life (Oxmoor, 2005). He has co-authored several books, including Websites That Work with designer Roger Black (Adobe Press, 1997) and Mission Al Jazeera with former Marine captain Josh Rushing (Palgrave, 2007). He also works as a book doctor and helped edit the forthcoming Making Rounds with Oscar by Dr. David Dosa (Hyperion, 2010). He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and daughter.
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Image: Flickr / Shinya Suzuki