Category: indie author

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Crazy Boy

I think this section from my new novel THE ROCKY ORCHARD makes an especially good flash piece.

Teenage boy with thick curly long hair blowing in the wind, serious look

Sick. I felt sick, fucking sick, when the telephone rang. I wanted to snatch the old 20-pound, rotary dial monstrosity of a phone right out of the wall and fling it through the window. I wanted glass to shatter and fly in a million directions and create rainbows of light in mid-air. I wanted the shards to rain down razors and cut the room into little ribbons. I’m too young for this, I thought. I’m fourteen years old and I am too young for this. For this shit, for this utter shit.

“Hello,” I said into the receiver.

“I’m pointing a knife at my stomach,” Tim said. “Tell me why you broke up with me.”

Suicide was just a word, a vague concept. Something whispered, read about in books. Nothing that had ever come near my own world, just a specter keeping itself hidden and far away. I had not even read The Bell Jar, hadn’t thought of Sylvia Plath turning on the stove in the apartment where she lived every day. Had not been stuck with the picture of her putting her head into the oven with the gas jet running, her two young children sleeping in their beds on the other side of the wall.

Daddy Mommy, I thought. I don’t know what Tim is going to do. I’m scared. I think he’s going to do something to himself. Help me, Daddy Mommy. I need your help, I thought.

But I didn’t say anything.   Not to my parents, not to anyone.

Tim’s younger sister, the one that was in my grade, the one that I knew, was the first one home that night.  She found him.  Still alive, but unconscious.

It’s a blur after that.  I can picture flashing lights and sirens and a lot of people and a lot of running around, but that doesn’t really make sense, does it?  They wouldn’t have been at my house; all of that would have been at Tim’s house.  Still, I have a sense of a million faces looking at me.  It seemed as if the whole world was staring at me – a vast sea of expressions.  Such concern.  Some people blamed me; I could see it in their faces.  Most people were torn, anguished even, between the part of them that wanted to stare at me, and the part of them that wanted to look away. I’d become scary to people somehow.  So many different things that people felt when they looked at me.

All I’d done was broken up with a boy.  A crazy boy.

 

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Grand Canyon

grand-canyon

Here is another section from the “When I Was 4, 1960” section of my current novel.

Way before we got to the Grand Canyon, I was pretty sure my mother was just making stuff up. So by the time she was making exuberant wide gestures while talking about time, and a river, and layers of rock, and millions of years, millions and millions of years — I just felt sad and confused.  My neighbor Patsy had already told me about the whole world being made in just seven short days, well six really, cause God took one day off to rest. She had learned this at church, and this story was from God himself.  They said so at church, a Presbyterian one, but my other neighbor Carrie was an actual Catholic; and Carrie confirmed this was, without question, the truth.

I felt a little better when my brother and I were allowed to feed some peanuts to the chipmunks that were running around everywhere. I was scared they would bite me, but they didn’t, and their teeny little claws felt creepy and good all at the same time when they crawled into my hand to get the nuts.  I had to keep very, very still.  I felt like there were my personal friends.

But back in the car, as we drove away from the Grand Canyon, there was a whirl going on inside of me.  Kind of like when you make those whirly paintings at carnivals, the ones where you squirt bright, beautiful colors from ketchup bottles, and then the whole thing spins around, and you think it’s going to be so so pretty; but it’s a mess. An ugly, dark mess.

Why would my own mother tell such whoppers?

After the Grand Canyon, I was cranky, and I stayed that way the rest of the return trip, heading east once again on Route 66.  Pancakes and hotel swimming pools had lost their allure, and hours upon hours bumping along in the back seat – with nothing supposedly dazzling to look forward to – were pure torture.  After the mountains flattened out in the vast, monotonous and scorching prairie, there weren’t even any more roadside attractions to bring us to a precipitous halt.  My mother packed away her movie camera one afternoon, and the next day her regular camera, and took to staring silently out the window, turned away from all of us.  My father stopped pulling over to rest and smoke a cigarette; instead he lit up seemingly continually, sending endless clouds of choking smoke to add to our back-seat agonies.

My brother and I knew that we would get in big trouble if we fought or argued out loud, so we traversed a couple thousand miles of the United States by perpetuating a stealth war of silent punches, kicks, and the occasional pinch.  It was the only entertainment we could muster.

When we got back home, I began to secretly believe that I had been adopted, that I had come from different people entirely than these two grown-ups who ping-ponged between sphinxlike impenetrability and riotous, nonsensical laughter.  I started to have bad dreams.  In some of them, we were back on our road trip vacation, and they had left me behind at one of the endless places where we had stopped.  In others, I was trying as hard as could to run away from something awful, but my legs wouldn’t work.  It was as if I was in super slow motion, while the rest of the world – and the awful threat – came closer.  And then, I died.  For the first time.

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When I Was Four, 1960

thanksgiving-station-wagons-ford-countrty-squire-trumpetMy aunt and uncle had a new baby.  She was my cousin, they said.  It was a miracle, they said, because my aunt had tried so hard to have a baby and wanted one so much.  They told me that she had lost 15 babies, which I found completely confusing but nonetheless terrifying.  How could anyone lose babies?  The idea made me feel cagey about my aunt, and I guess my mother sensed this, because she kept reminding me that I loved my aunt very much, as was evidenced by the fact that I didn’t shy away from her for even a single second when she had to stick her finger down my throat and made me upchuck because I had eaten cockroach poison.  That was during our last visit to my aunt and uncle.  I was less than two years old; I didn’t know what I was doing.  I just figured that something lying on the floor in a pretty little bowl was something I should definitely taste!  Of course, I have no memory of this myself, being so young at the time, but my mother told that story so many times that it’s like a movie that can play in my mind at the merest mention.  I can picture my aunt’s pin curls flopping in front of her eyes as she held me over the sink.  I can smell the smell of her breath combined with the fragrance of her bright lipstick as she panted with effort.  I guess I didn’t upchuck all that easily, which was all part of the story of my good nature in not holding an immense grudge against someone who hoisted me under her arm and forced her finger into the back of my throat over and over.

We finally got to California, where everything looked unreasonably bright and like the whole world had been bleached into an eerie whiteness.  It didn’t seem like it could possibly be safe to  go outside into that sea of brightness, and I even made sure to keep clear of the windows in mid-day.   My aunt and uncle had just moved into this new house and had practically no furniture, just a lot of empty, freshly-carpeted rooms and a nervous little dog that looked like he’d been given way too tight of a permanent wave for his hair.  As for the baby cousin: I’d pretty much never seen a baby before, and I wasn’t at all sure she was real.  She just sat there doing absolutely nothing most of the time.  Every so often I would pinch her, to see if she was real after all.  She would scream or cry or something, but somehow I still wasn’t entirely convinced.

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Hope you enjoy this re-worked piece from the novel I am currently writing, tentatively titled THE ROCKY ORCHARD.

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The Woman in the Orchard

Please enjoy this continuation of what I expect to be my fourth novel.

orchard

 

Mazie stood behind the chair that had always been her mother’s place at the porch’s outdoor dining table.  She ran her hands along the welted seam of the – what was it called…Naugahyde? – chair, the miracle synthetic material that supposedly lasted forever.  Mazie smiled down at the gray, marble-patterned Formica table.  Her parents would be astonished to know that the chairs and table they had carefully chosen with their eternal vigilance to thrift would one day be precious collector’s items for scores of retro-crazed home decorators.  Neither the word “chic,” nor the value it represented would ever had entered her parents’ lexicon.  They insisted that their furnishings and possessions be practical and durable enough to weather children, animals, friends and the vicissitudes of life in general with a minimum of worry or bother.

Mazie ran her hand along the Formica, and once again along the welting at the top of the chair before lifting her gaze back to the orchard.  She thought she saw a flicker of movement between two of the old apple trees on the far slope, and she unconsciously rose up on her toes to get a better look.

It was mid-morning, not a time of day that one would expect to see a deer.  It was also unlikely that a deer would decide to amble through a relatively open orchard well before the time of year when any apples could have ripened enough to fall.  Mazie saw a flash of red, high enough above the ground that she reckoned it could only be a person, one who seemed to be plodding in slow motion through Mazie’s orchard.

old-woman-stands-in-flowers-near-his-house-and-looks-at-the-camera-ukrainian-elderly-woman-in-red-headscarf-stands-near-wooden-hut-and-looks-at-the-camera-female-looks-at-the-camera-and-

Mazie stood and watched fixedly, shock, wonder and suspicion whirling within her, as an elderly, snow white-haired woman came into focus.  The woman wore a cotton print dress, much as Mazie’s grandmothers and their various sisters had worn most days, with ankle socks and well-worn walking shoes.  Around her neck she wore a red bandana, the flash of red that Mazie had seen from afar.  The woman carried a cane in one hand, or perhaps it was a walking stick, which she leaned on heavily.  She watched her feet intently, making her way among the multitude of rocks in the thoroughly uneven, hazardous orchard.  The woman had gotten all the way to the near end of the orchard before she chanced a glance upward, at which point, she immediately saw Mazie standing behind the chair at the outdoor table on the porch.

The woman raised her cane in the air, a kind of salute.  “Oh!  Hello, dear!”

Mazie was not sure what else to say besides, “Hello!”

“I’m not used to seeing anyone!” the woman said. “You gave me rather a start.”

“It’s my place,” Mazie said, “my family’s place.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is, dear, seeing as you’re standing there on the porch.  But I walk through here every day, through your orchard there.  So, you’re what’s different for me.  Never saw anyone before.”

“I was just thinking about the orchard,” Mazie said.  “Wondering why anyone would choose such rocky, uneven ground for an orchard in the first place.”

“Well, I can’t answer that one,” the woman said.

“What I’m wondering is, why you would walk through such an… inhospitable orchard, when the road is right there.”  Mazie pointed.

“The road gets a little boring after a while, lovely as it is.  I do walk on it.  This is my little foray off the beaten path, as it were.  Just through your orchard and back on up to the road.”

“You know, when we first bought this place, my parents were intent on trying to mow it, you know, tame it into a nice, grassy meadow kind of an orchard.” Mazie laughed.  “You can’t imagine the sound when a ride-on lawnmower hits a rock.  The lawnmower engine stops dead, and this…enormous…noise reverberates through the woods in every direction.  Oh my gosh, I can still hear it clear as day.”  Mazie laughed.  “Except that one time, the whole lawnmower rolled right over, right on top of my father.  That wasn’t so funny.”

Mazie observed herself, talking to a total stranger, who was technically trespassing on her old family farm.

The woman smiled.  Mazie regarded her.

elderly-woman-walking-woods-400x400

“Oh.  Perhaps you’d rather that I don’t walk through it,” the woman said.

Mazie considered. “Well, I’m not sure that makes any sense,” Mazie responded.  “Seems kind of mean-spirited and arbitrary, out here in the middle of all this land.  No, you go right on walking through the crazy, rocky orchard any time you like.”

“Very kind of you, dear.  I suppose if you’re up and about, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Where are you headed, anyway?”  Mazie asked.

“That way.” The woman pointed up the road, the opposite direction from the one she had come, and began walking without another word.

grandmagatewood_0.jpg.638x0_q80_crop-smart

Bottom photo is of Emma Rowena Gatewood, better known as Grandma Gatewood (October 25, 1887–June 4, 1973), an extreme hiker and ultra-light hiking pioneer who was the first woman to hike the 2,168-mile (3,489 km) Appalachian Trail from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine solo, and in one season.

 

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Hip, Hip…Hooray?

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I cannot predict the future, but I do know what will happen.

This morning, when I set out for my morning dog walk, my calendar told me that the date was November 10, 2018.  The sunlight that shone through my window was vast.  The air that hit me in the face when I opened my back door was not the bracing, invigorating air of late fall, the chill that brings a healthy rose to your cheeks and energizes your step.  It was the unwanted, unwarranted, unexpected, entirely RUDE slap in the face of mid-winter.  21 degrees.  I could sense the sun laughing at me.  Hahaha, fooled you.

Here is what will happen.

One hundred nineteen hours from now (seven thousand one hundred forty minutes, four hundred twenty-eight thousand four hundred seconds), a man will hold a brutally sharp knife just above my skin.  He will have marked the spot.  Possibly with a Sharpie.  He will slice my skin on a precisely drawn line, and he will watch as six or more inches of my skin separates into parts.  Copious amounts of blood will spread from the split.  People, ones who are not holding the knife, will have prepared for this.  They will mop up the streams and rivulets with highly absorbent sponges.

The fall has lingered this year.  It has taken its time, languorous and slothful in showing its colors, the trees refusing to let go of their flaming displays.  But after a blustery rainstorm, many trees gave up all at once, raining a thick carpet onto the ground.  When it dropped well below freezing last night —  for the first time —  another miracle.  Trees and leaves can no longer cling to one another.  Emblazoned leaves let go, one at a time, in a slow motion and silent shower.  They spin, twirl, dawdle in their descent, and they come to rest among the thick carpet of their brethren.

Once the myriad tissues have been cut through or pulled to the side, the man will put down the knife.  He will remove my femur from my acetabulum, or in simpler terms, he will dislocate my thigh bone from my hip socket.  He will then take a bone saw and cut off the top portion of my femur – the largest bone in the human body.  He will cut it entirely off.

Perhaps I can predict the future.

On the morning of November 10, 2018, I watch the leaves drift one at a time to their resting place on the newly-frozen ground.  Their crunch underneath my feet, even as I walk along with my cane, is one of the glorious sounds on earth.  My dog sniffs for the perfect place to plop down and roll back and forth in the leafy carpet.

When I walk among the leaves a year from now, I will not need a cane.

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BANG(s), new flash fiction*

indian2

Besides, it was Friday. Fabulous Friday.  Fucking Friday.  At 5:00 pm on the Friday at the end of her very first week of her very first job, she had gone straight to the nearest Walgreen’s and bought a six-pack of Bud Lite. She had read that it was the number one selling beer in America, and she wanted to feel like an American.  She’d finished college, gotten a job, and worked a forty-hour work week. She was staggered to find herself utterly exhausted from the seemingly straightforward task of sitting behind a desk for all of those hours.  Jesus H. Christ, she had thought, how could I be twenty-two years old and be so f-ing wiped?  From that day on, Friday was a day to go home, pop open a Bud, take off her bra, and veg out for a significant chuck of time even if she headed out later.

She savored a long draught from her beer, saying “Ahhhhhhh,” aloud.  “Thank you, Friday. Thank you for coming,” and raised her bottle in a hearty toast to the empty space of her hallway.  She detoured into her bathroom to pee, took a swig, and automatically turned to her reflection in the mirror to check her hair.  She arranged the bangs that were forever in a state of indecision – hers – as to whether she was keeping them or growing them out.

Her boss had unexpectedly asked her to lunch that day.  Awkward.  She liked him fine, but he was her boss, and at least ten or fifteen years older than she was.  He had a whole plan for his life, which both horrified her and intimidated her.  Stodgy, but clear view ahead.

She was genuinely surprised to find herself having such a good time at lunch.  Her boss was telling her about the remaining – and increasingly torturous – final details of his upcoming wedding. Though the seating charts, and place cards, and party favor bag ribbon colors were driving him completely insane, she remained fascinated, rapt with attention.  Also, his fiancée still hadn’t decided if she wanted to change her name, he told her; and whereas he didn’t actually care one way or the other, he was exhausted by her continual deliberation, over the course of months, out loud and directed at him.

wedding.planning

“Names are kind of important,” she had said.  “They can really mean a lot, about how we think about ourselves, how we think about who we are.”

He looked at her as if suddenly remembering that she was there. “Really? You think so?”

“Yeah, I do.  Are you ready for this?  I actually changed my name.  It used to be Vanya; that’s what my parents named me.  It’s a pretty popular girl’s name in India, a forest deity.  I just got really tired of everyone thinking I was a Russian guy.  Russian.  And a guy.”

“You picked ‘Ananya?’”

“I did.  It’s a common-ish name in India.  But wait til you hear this.  Some say its origin is Hindu, and it means ‘unique, without peer.’  Others say that it’s Muslim and means ‘care and protection.’  Then there’s the group who says it’s from Sanskrit and means ‘terrible misfortune.’  How cool is that? I get to encapsulate a whole regional religious war with just my name! Plus, it sounds like a girl, and doesn’t sound Mexican. Oh, I forgot to mention that not only did everyone think that I was a Russian boy when they saw my name in print; then they assumed that I was Mexican when they saw me in person.  So, yeah.  Ananya.”

She reached up to shift her bangs off her forehead.

That was the moment. When her fingertips grazed her hair, and she felt the strands brush across her forehead.  Oh my God, I forgot to go to the restroom when we got here; I don’t even know if I look ok.  I don’t know if my hair is ok.  I shouldn’t even be talking right now.  What the fuck am I doing talking? What the fuck was I thinking?  I’m drawing his attention to me. He’s looking at me, because I’m talking.  Because I just had to tell him the whole name story.  My bangs.  I think my bangs felt greasy. I should have let him talk.  Kept him talking.  Then he sort of looks around the room and moves his eyes back and forth and doesn’t just stare at me.  Me with the bad hair.  Me with the shit hair that’s never looked right, never.  And greasy bangs! FUCK.  I can’t believe I didn’t check in the mirror.  How can I be so fucking stupid? Stupid and shitty hair.  I gotta get out of here?  How much longer do we have to sit here so it won’t be even more awkward if I say that I need to go.  How long have we been here? I gotta come up with some questions to ask him, keep him talking.  Anything.  Anything to keep him from noticing my hair.

Ananya regarded herself in the mirror, drank the remainder of her beer in one gulp and said to her reflection, “OK, this ends now. Or at least as soon as I pop open another brew.”

She often went to one of her favorite bookstores mid-Friday evenings, and browsed through the newest graphic novels.  A lot of the stores carried esoteric ones that the artist/writer had given the store directly, so she rotated through a number different stores to see different comics.  Plus, that meant that she wasn’t a serious regular at any one store, which would have made her feel like even more of a dweeb; and, none of the well-meaning bookstore folks got all up in her business too much.

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It was a cool evening for summer; Ananya wrapped a long scarf around her neck and over her head.  She was standing at a busy intersection when a waft of breeze whooshed the scarf from the top of her head.  She had an immediate instinct to jerk her arms up and replace it, but she resisted.  What good was her decision to end the tyranny if she just turned around and covered it up.

When she walked through the door of the bookstore, the girl at the counter looked up from her book.  They always did that.  But this time, the girl didn’t look back down again. She sat up a little straighter in her chair.  “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Ananya was already walking toward the graphic novel section and didn’t even make eye contact when she said, “No, thanks. I’m good.”

She picked up a copy of Bad Girls, which she’d heard about.  It had everything:  a crazy pop art style, Fidel’s 1958 Cuba, murder, and well, bad girls.  It also had a whopping $25.98 price tag, which was seriously steep.  But this was a special novel, and it was a special day.  She let out a little whistle under her breath, a mixture of sticker shock and celebration, and walked to the counter.

The girl, except that now that Ananya was closer, and actually looking at her, the bookstore person appeared to be maybe mid-40’s.  She turned the novel towards herself and said to Ananya, “Oh, this is a great choice.  Just a great choice.  I’ve heard so much.”

“Yeah,” Ananya said, having no desire to share a lot of words.

“Did you find everything that you were looking for?”  She scanned the book’s price into the computer, then replaced it on the counter and folded her hands. “And I can gift wrap this for you.  If it’s a gift.  Or I can just wrap it really nicely for you to take it home.”

“No, that’s ok.  Just. Whatever.  A regular bag is fine.” Ananya shifted from one foot to the other, a bit perplexed.

“I mean, if there is anything else that I can do for you.  I hope you’re doing… OK.”

After a nanosecond of thinking that this woman was completely bonkers, Ananya figured it out.

Oh my god.  She thinks I have cancer.  She thinks that I’m totally bald because I’m in chemotherapy.  She’s being extra fucking nice because she thinks I’m dying. OH MY GOD, I shave my head because it’s the only way I can think of to force myself to stop thinking about my hair, like every freaking minute, like the way my hair looks determines whether it’s even ok for me to talk, or to have people look at me, or just walk down the f’ing street, and this is what ends up happening?  People think that I have fucking cancer and that I’m DYING, and now they’re just gonna look at me MORE?  I seriously did not see this coming.  Epic fucking fail.  But hold it.  Hey, I’m not thinking about how my hair looks. So, well, there’s that.

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*My novel PUSHING THE RIVER will release in EIGHT days.  THANKS for reading this, and for indulging my need to take a break from the endless and soul-killing marketing of a new book!

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The People on the Stairs

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The one from the basement started it.  He crawled up from his underground lair, from the smell of epoxy that he uses for projects, from the array of fluorescent vests that he wears to work.  He took up residence on the stairs.  Early in the morning, he was on the stairs.  Late into the night, still on the stairs.

Others began to gather.  I never knew where they came from.  There would just be another voice, a conversation, coming from the stairs.  Or I would come home, and have to step around and between others, bodies leaning this way and that as I made my way through their habitat.

I didn’t want to hear them, tried to not hear them; but they were on the stairs.  There was really no escape.

Sometimes I would take a long walk go for coffee invent an errand visit a friend drive to the lakefront, all with the hope that when I returned, the stairs would be a dazzling open space — no residents.  No clutter and detritus of citizens who had created their own fiefdom, on my stairs.

In the evenings, the sound of the citizenry would swell like a great ocean storm.  Still, occasional single voices would ring out like a carillon bell, random snippets that made no sense and created ripples of unsettledness: “ …had to escape my marriage in the cover of darkness…”  “…heard you can’t ever get rid of that smell, no matter what you do…”  “No, no, that wasn’t the time I got shot; that was a…”

The voices stop, a crashing silence.  A million eyes turn to me.

“Hey, how ya doing?”

“Doing great, Jason.  You?”

stairs

 

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Putting the FUN Back In…Fiction

PUSHING THE RIVER —  my third novel, set for release this October by Amika Press —  currently lay in the trusty and capable hands of their graphic designer/production person Sarah Koz.  If you are a writer yourself, and you are reading this, you know exactly what this means – that I am wandering around the various circles of Marketing Hell in a bleary daze, waffling between dutiful determination and dejected drudgery (and stooping to the lower depths of ill-advised alliteration).

How to bring the FUN back into writing – that has been the challenge I have posed to myself.  And as I cast around with the beginning of the beginning stages of Writing a New Novel, I have been “trying out” various characters, almost in the same way a director might audition actors.  Here follows a character who, out of the blue, inhabited me and began to tell his story:

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First time I was over at Bert’s place, he yelled at me right through the screen door.  “YO!” He yells, “come on IN.”  Didn’t get up or nothing, just hollered.  I was a little shook by that, to tell you the truth, cause all I could see was nothing – just like total blackness on the other side of the door, that’s how dark it was inside.  I sort of followed the sounds, the music and rustling and all, down this hall til I could make out Bert like some dim faraway spirit.

Bert was sitting in the nicest chair, meaning the one whose stuffing was sprouting out of big gashes in both arms, and had seat cushion that didn’t even fit in the frame any more – that’s how caddywhompus and old and tore up it was; still, it was a damn sight better than any other place to sit in the room.  Bert’s own dad, in fact, was sitting on the arm of what must have once been a couch.  I figured it was his dad, because I knew Bert lived with him and because the guy on the arm of the chair was a lot older than anybody we hung around with.  Anyway, Bert was sitting in the quote nicer chair, which I also thought was a little weird, because I mean, come on, it was his dad.

Once my eyes started to adjust to the near-darkness, I could make out that Bert was rolling a joint on his lap, using a greasy old magazine to hold his paraphernalia.  I looked at his dad, and back at Bert, and Bert looked up for the first time and seemed to register that I was there, also for the first time, in the middle of this living room, I guess it was, while he was rolling a joint and shooting the shit with his dad.

“Oh, hey,” Bert said.

Man, I have never before felt like a stick-up-my-ass, stick-in-the-mud conventional, conservative prick, but I’m suddenly feeling all disapproving.  Jesus, the one time my dad wanted to prove that he was as open-minded as the next guy, and to demonstrate it he was going to go get a marijuana cigarette that he’d been given by a friend ages before, and that he’d been keeping all of this time, and wouldn’t it be fun to get it right now, at Thanksgiving, and pass it around the table before dessert and coffee.  I thought I was going to seriously lose my shit, partly because, needless to say, I was already high due to spending Thanksgiving with the fam in the first place.  And when my aunt said, “Do we have to share the same one?  I really think I’d like my own,” then, really, that’s just a Twilight Zone-type situation you can only hope comes to a swift and relatively painless end.

So, yeah, I’m feeling kinda judgy of Bert for taking the best chair in the room and for rolling a doob right in front of his old man and not thinking a thing of it, and also feeling pissed at myself for feeling judgy in the first place, and like of jeez, who knew, turns out I’m just a regular old middle-class honky white boy right along with the rest of them.  So I’m kinda testy when I say to Bert, “I thought we were having a party here, man.”

“What do you think I’m doing here?” Bert says, holding up the doob, which is just about the size of one those small little cigars. “I’m getting ready!”  He says this with some element of triumph.  “Already mixed up the punch.”  He gestures towards the fridge, which is, in fact, not very far behind him in this same room.  “Grain alcohol and grape juice.”  And he adds, with a giant ass smile, “Ohhhh, yeahhhhhh!”

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Tennis Racket Banjo and Other Unexpected Encounters

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I was living in a space that was approximately 4’ x 10’, with a ceiling of the usual height.  During the daytime, I would put my feet on the floor and gaze out the window.  At night, I put my legs up and my upper body down, rearranging the pillows so there would be one for my head.  I would close my eyes,  facing away from the windows, and sometimes I would sleep.  For the first few nights, I pulled the drapes closed, blocking out the lights from the enormous construction project as well as the blazingly-lit buildings that surrounded my location in all directions.  By the fourth night, I stopped closing the shades, finding the idea of the lights gleaming just behind my head to be strangely comforting, a presence I wanted to maintain.  Even with the sense of being immersed in a constructed reality – my own personal Truman Show – the lights of this Stepford world flickered just as prettily.

In a city known for its unreasonable hills, perennial fog, and enchanting Victorian architecture, my couch home existed in an area that lay completely outside the farthest bounds of expectation.  It was, in other words, completely flat, continually drenched in blinding, bright California sun, and so utterly brand new that the majority of the area was a cacophony of rebar and beams and gridwork.

I knew that I would awaken the following day well before the natural light of morning flooded the room.  Sometime between 5:30 and 6:30 am, a voice would pierce the pre-dawn by saying, simply, “I’m awake.”  This would be followed by complete silence – unusually complete, for the general layout of the area made for an absence of the routine sounds of early morning, such as birds chirping, dogs barking, a stirring of the natural world. Perhaps ten to fifteen minutes later, once again, “I’m awake.”  The tone was neutral, not pressed, or irritated, or perplexed at the lack of response – simply a statement made into the dark void.  Then silence once again.  Ten minutes later, when the voice returned, there was a difference.  Factors had been weighed.  Conclusions had been drawn.

Unable to reconcile the possibility that the voice may have been heard, but not responded to, the conclusion was that the voice must not have been heard in the first place.  Thus, when the voice cried out again, it was outstandingly loud, and crisply clear, and delivered in the slow, exaggerated way that we often speak to people who are hard of hearing, or have a different native language, or whom we are openly dissing by acting like they are total cretins.  “I AM AWAKE.  I AM READY TO GET OUT OF MY BED.”

The brand new fake wood floors muffle every iota of sound.  There are no footsteps, no shuffling scraping warnings.

A moment later, I open my eyes.  A very small person stands two feet from my face.  He holds a spray bottle in his mouth, his lips closed around the nozzle while the bottle hangs down.

“You’re starting with the saxophone today, I see,” I say to him.

“Saxophone first.  Then tennis racket banjo.”

“What song are you playing?”  I ask him.

“Bump.”  He says.  “After that: Chick Habit.”

And with the naming of his two favorite songs from his most favorite band – a Chicago Punk Marching Band – my day with my 2-year-old grandson begins.

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