Stray Reprints: February 2021

Sunday, February 28, 2021

THE VOYAGE: DAY THREE

“Hey ho,” they sang, sailors all, “the wild winds blow.” Barton was on the brink of marrying, so he led the group, bellowed the loudest, smiled the widest smile. He had the most hope and so was also earmarked by fate as the first to die. A squid leapt from the darkest deep and put its devil-beak around his head, snapping it cleanly from the stalk of his neck. Kevin, the second-loudest singer, felt in his heart that there was no hope, that in fact there was no such thing as hope, only a constant forgetting of the inevitable, and thus he was spared. The rest of them weren’t even really trying, just mumbling along, and after they had mopped up Barton’s incarnadine and the oddments of numbles scattered on the deck, they went below and watched TV. The host of the game show was cheery to a fault and everyone knew who he reminded them of, though no one said. At midnight or so Kevin snapped off the TV set and sent them all off to bed, and they went, drained and docile. Dreams were sweetened by the gentle rock of the boat. Wild winds had never actually shown up, despite the song.

Saturday, February 27, 2021

THE SESSION WILL NOW COME TO ORDER

There is no expositional repeat. Do you understand? Nothing will be explained beyond the first explanation. Comprehension will either arrive in a flash or not at all. Or, true, it may arrive slowly, but not as a result of additional definition, description, elucidation, illustration, or commentary. The first time is the only time. Keep your eyes straight ahead. Clear your ears of debris. Close your mouth but not fully. Let your body relax into a state midway between hard and soft, a readiness, a supplication. Hand your hands at your sides, fingers not touching one another, as that can be a source of distraction. This is the only necessary preparation. This is the conversion from subject to vessel. The first explanation is coming. The first time is the only time. This is the first time. This is the only time.

POST POSITION

He was betting on Inspiration. Inspiration was his brother’s racehorse. It was stabled behind His Brother’s Racehorse, which was a restaurant that had been founded by his Uncle Jerry. Uncle Jerry was the nickname that he had given to the car he used to drive himself to the restaurant, because it was gray and halting. Gray and Halting were the names of the lawyers who had reviewed his uncle’s will and determined it sage. Sage was the name of the woman who had taken him to bed while he was waiting for a payout from his uncle’s estate and demonstrated impressive self-awareness by describing her manner in bed as "moving inexorably from fury to tranquility." Fury and Tranquility were the names of nearby towns, one to the west, one to the east, roughly equidistant from and collinear to his town, whose name he couldn’t recall, try as he might, but which nevertheless was the place where they had all been born, and where death would come for them all, even Inspiration, which could run like the wind.

POINT OF VIEW

I was standing by the window. He was standing by the window. I opened the window. The man opened the window. I noticed the man opening the window. A woman passing by noticed the man opening the window, noticed him not in the broad sense but in the most specific sense, the angle at which his hand took the frame for leverage, the weave of the material of his sweater, the glint of the pin on his breast (a canary, and then a splash of musical notes above it, connected), the interest he seemed to have in the play of ego across his face and the simultaneous suppression of that ego, the poke-protrusion of keys within the pocket of his too-tight pants. We populated the story. We never met. We went to dinner at different times. We drank the same gin and smoked the same cigarettes. I drifted off to sleep before I did, wondering whether I had closed the window or seen it closed or both.

Thursday, February 25, 2021

SHELTER

There were only eleven cases for trial at the Courts yesterday and as only two of them proceeded forward to judge or jury all were disposed of by lunchtime. There were three cases of grand larceny, two of petty larceny, one of arson, one of forgery, and one of disorderly conduct, and the longest sentence of any was fourteen months passed on an ancient offender for the theft of a solid gold umbrella in the midst of last week's lashing storm.

COME IN AND DO THE POPCORN

They hired Bill to write a song about what had happened to Anne. They hired Samuel to write a play about what had happened to Lucille. They hired Ken to interview Kristen and pass a summary of his reporting on to Anders, who would be starring in a film that fictionalized her life, though Ken would change the setting from Missouri to Gstaad and Anders, in turn, would change the corrupt organization whose deviltry powered the plot from Housewares–Retail to the Snow Bike Club. Jean, who was in the midst of designing the world’s first fully automated mine, got the call from Kristen, who was so angry that her tears sizzled as they hit the phone. “You’re my third call today,” Jean said. “Lucille was cursing up a storm. Effing play this. Em-effing theater that.” Kristen asked after Anne, who was always the best of them, always the coolest head, always the clearest strategist. “Oh ho,” Jean laughed. “Come on now,” Kristen said. “Tell me.” She begged Jean to end the suspense. Panic hoisted her voice to the brink of a shriek. She needed to know that Anne had handled matters with her customary sangfroid. “I am sorry to report the precise mathematical opposite,” Jean said. “She was on video and I could see her knuckles like whitecaps along the top of her fist. If we were in an Old West saloon, she would have been smashing bottles 'til dawn” The song, released in summer, was a chart-topping tale of one man’s struggle to overcome privation and cruelty: a real weeper.

BOY-OH- BOYARDEE!

He fell asleep on the couch and dreamed of going to an island. Once he got there, he looked around. He saw trees he couldn’t name, sand so bright he felt ashamed walking across it, back in in the weedy scrub leavings of campfires from beings he sensed were human but not-quite, or maybe human but more-so—there was, along with the sulfurous traces of the embers, another smell, a sharp but sweet odor he could not quite describe, but that he instinctively believed came from elsewhere in the galaxy, and maybe elsewhen, a word that made him chuckle aloud. The sound of his laughter scared a brilliant purple bird from a nearby bush. Its wings opened up like a new idea. Dusk came and then night. He fell asleep on the edge of the beach, still unwilling to step onto the sand, and woke up back on the couch. Spaghetti-O’s were burbling on the stovetop. His heart was frozen at the farce of it all.

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

PAUL'S BAD YEAR, PART SEVENTY-FOUR

He knew his friends well enough to know where their shoes pinched them, as the saying went. But he had no friends. Or rather, he had known his friends this well when he had had them, and he had had many, and one by one they had sensed that he knew them this well, and his knowledge had felt too close, a pressure upon them from all sides, and they had drifted, at first in a manner that seemed accidental, but as they had drifted further they had managed the courage to admit that the drift was intentional, and they had accelerated the drift, and after a while none of them were near him any longer, and they had new friends who didn’t know where their shoes pinched them, or anything else, and whatever intelligence he still held about them, though considerable, was worthless. All of this flashed through his mind as he stood outside a coffee shop listening to a woman he didn’t know sing a song he didn’t know, trying to figure out if it was a live performance or a recorded one. It occurred to him in time that it made no difference anymore, and he went home hoping that he would feel something later in the evening, even if what he felt was pain.

FOREPLAY

“Everything’s a show.” “Everything’s not a show.” “Everything’s a disappointment.” “Not everything’s a disappointment.” “Everything’s a challenge.” “Nothing’s a challenge.” “I challenge every generalization.” “I see what you’re doing.” “I see everything.” “Now you’re just playing.” “Everything’s play.” “Play distracts.” “Everything distracts.” “Distractions add up.” “Everything adds up.” “Nothing makes a difference.” “Everything’s a slogan. “Everything is.”

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

ROOTS MOVE

We went into the forest. At once we were affronted. Index cards of white and blue pinned up on trees lent an air of the ridiculous to this majestic woodland. They carried names, human names, first, last, whose origins were at first unclear. Did they belong to explorers? Botanists? Had these men and women pledged to support the trees through thick and thin, to send water, pruners, surgeons? Our guide read off a few of them. “Jack Rossiter,” he said. “Wendy Gimlet. Abena O’Hara.” It sounded like he wanted to go on. We waited. But he just read those three again and again and again. Eventually a woman in the front row raised her hand. “Oh,” she said. “Oh! I am Abena O’Hara.” Another woman on the tour spoke up and identified herself as Wendy. I clapped my hand to my heart, which was suddenly going a million miles an hour. I was Jack!

THEIR FIRST ANNIVERSARY

He was no more vain than the next man, and no less vain. He was no more foolish than the next man, and no less foolish. He was no more angry, stubborn, capricious, selfish, sullen, childish, or noisy, though no less. She couldn’t see the point of him.

Sunday, February 21, 2021

I WAS GRATEFUL

We met ten years ago in Teddy and the Telegraphs. I sang and played guitar. I was Teddy. Alice came on as a bassist—female bassists were all the rage for a little while there—and started writing with me almost immediately. It was not appreciated by Don Powell, the keyboard player and principal songwriter. Don had written our two regional hits, “New Veneer” and “Lemon Letter,” and he fancied himself a savant because he had been a strong student in high school and was certain that he would have gone on to great success in college had he applied. “I did not,” he said. “Music called.” Alice and I wrote fourteen or fifteen songs together with all kinds of titles, “Big-Time Shirt,” “Ice Brain,” “The Key That Never Fits the Hole,” “London Blanket,” and more, and it was only after the last one that she shattered me by telling me that she was leaving to write with Don. “Do you hear ‘New Veneer’?” she said. “It is an act of genius. What you and I are doing, it’s…” She didn’t complete the sentence and for that I was grateful. She and Don quickly coupled, not just creatively but in all respects. Their cries could be heard outside the dressing room. Don, who had always been cordial to me ,not was positively jolly. Most days he would laugh. I held Alice accountable, because I believe she spoke of me to him or, worse, did not.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

BEVERLY, BIBLIOPHILE

Several books on her shelf had never been and would never be read, including Shasta Canasta, Discombobulation, Memoirs of Hecate County II: The Eco-Brake Deorbit System, Lint!, Flagrant Antonella, They Are A Bit Hungry, The Laundry Detergent Murders, and Hawaiian Kermis. Others had been thumbed through measurably and deemed abominable.

SOUP OF THE DAY

Jim says, “I am doing my best to express the inner loss I experienced. A death occurred, but it was the death of an emotion, and not a pleasing emotion. I had felt those before, felt love, felt joy, felt hope, felt lust, felt the sweet burn of challenge. This was not any of those. This was a sorrow and worse than a sorrow. It was an anger and worse than an anger. It was seeded inside of me somehow and there it grew and there, eventually, it died, and for a moment its death buoyed me, but I sank back down when I sensed that inside me it remained, immobile, immovable, unable to be expelled, dissolved, erased. It was a hard presence, a stone of suffering, and over the months, the years, that it did not pass I became more like it. I now must myself die to take away its power. I know that. I need for that day to come, and quickly.” Jim looks up. The waitress is there, pad out, pen up. “Can I take your order?” she says. Jim pushes out a sigh. “I just gave my order,” he says. Emily hurriedly asks for an omelet to move things along, and wonders aloud about the Soup of the Day as if she’s inquiring on Jim’s behalf, tilting her head in his direction. It is split pea.

Saturday, February 13, 2021

MADE THE PAPERS

A man saw the headline “Messiah Drunk,” felt in his pockets for coins to buy the paper, found only a stray button that didn’t match any on his coat, used all his powers of memory to trace it back to its origins, his brother’s coat, no, his father’s coat, no, and then he had it, the coat of a man whose wife he had been seeing the previous fall, he had bumped into it hanging on the wall, pulling off the button, which clattered to the floor, and he had shoved it deep into his own pocket rather than leave it as incriminating evidence, and with that retrieval he was satisfied, and the paper was forgotten, and he wandered off down the street, insides unsteady, gait confident enough to trick anyone who happened to be watching.

Thursday, February 11, 2021

LOVE CONQUERS ALL

Her mother was from the country while her father was from the city. Her mother drove a car while her father rode a bicycle. Her mother had forty pairs of socks, at least, while her father never wore them, preferring instead to encase his bare feet in boots made from an experimental polymer. Her mother distrusted all official versions of events, up to and including the moon landing, instead insisting that a television crew had staged it in the rear parking lot of an Arizona shopping center, and that if you looked close you could see the awning of a Sears Roebuck in the background, and a stockboy underneath in the shadows enjoying a smoke that was “almost certainly a joint, and probably a sherm.” Her father laughed at that part, though he agreed that man had never been to the moon.

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

CLEM OR SOMETHING

When I first was coming to the United States in 1974, I took a tour through New York. My guide was a young man about my age, and during the flat spots of the tour, he told me that a band called the Lava Snowmen was playing that very night at the Tall Tree Lounge, which was about to close. I jumped up in the air. The Lava Snowmen! I was probably the biggest fan of the group in all of my town back in Italy. The guide told me where I could obtain tickets and I got to the show early and made sure that I was right up by the stage. I sang along to all the words and tried for the lead singer, Pete Barkin, to see me. During the break before the encore I went to the hall by the dressing room to take position for the band as they exited the stage. When Pete Barkin appeared I stopped him and told to him that I was from Italy and such a supporter of the group and that to me they were the best thing to come along in years. We even talked about writing songs and I played for him the beginning of what would later become ‘It Takes me Nowhere,’ though I had no title or lyrics yet, and he made a suggestion about one moment in the intro that I knew would immediately make it better. If you’ve heard the song you’ve heard the change he made. I left with a real confidence that this was my future career. I had the blessing of Pete Barkin. The next day I went back to the tour company because I wanted to thank the guide for helping me to get to the show. I told him that I had met Pete Barkin and changed my life. He had a strange look on his face and then he shook his head. “Pete Barkin isn’t in the band anymore, man,” he said. “He left a month ago. That’s the new guy. I think his name is Clem or something.”

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

"CLASS" IS IN "SESSION"

“Welcome to Intellectual History,” said Clara. She wore a high-necked black dress above which protruded a short white collar. Her shoes had thick buckles no one could see but which she told herself kept her anchored to the ground. She called the whole ensemble her “John Quincy Adams,” which made everyone in the department laugh except Clara herself, who was dead serious. She looked around the room. So many faces, so young. They were as yet uncreased with disappointment or for that matter even hope. They were just there, arguments for their own existence and nothing more. Most stared down into notebooks, scribbling rapidly. A few stared forward, bouncing a leg or tapping a pencil. Toward the back was the Continuing Education contingent. They were older than Clara, taking time off from jobs, from tending to laws and refinancing mortgages. She directed her comments to them to lower what she knew from experience would be the heat in the room. “What is Intellectual History? Is is our chance to encounter ideas that have overdressed by history and undress them.” She checked the response of students: Laughs from the young, dead eyes from the old, the usual. “Undressing an idea is like undressing a person. It can be frightening at first but is always at least a little exciting, and then there is the matter of reconciling what you think you know from what you discover. Finally there is the time alone, just the two of you.” She did not use a single contraction and everyone in the class, young and old, noticed intensely. A girl in the front row tapped her pencil too hard, at the wrong angle, and it launched from her hand and closed on Clara like an arrow. She did not move. There was always the chance of being pierced. That was the beauty of ideas.

ROOMS RENTED BY THE HOUR

The Eight Arms was playful but also dignified, a local landmark that had outlasted several others, a longtime curiosity that reopened under new management promising a return to an earlier era. There had been little effort to update the facade, which remained clad in a faded pinkish brick, let alone its layout and its furnishings, and it seemed to most observers that the primary goal of the renovation was to remain largely invisible, a transparency through which the building’s earlier spirit could be viewed without interference. There was no music in the lobby, no cards displaying Wi-fi passwords, no retail outlets either flagrant or surreptitious, not even a restaurant or bar, unless you counted the oak table against whose rear edge were bottles of spirits, neatly arranged in a line, and clean glasses intended for the use of patrons. How those glasses got there was as much a mystery as other questions regarding the upkeep of the establishment, as house staff was rarely spotted, and the entire place seemed run from top to toe by the sole figure at the front desk, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, but always elderly, always careful in movement and speech. Each key came attached to a small piece of wood carved in the shape of an octopus, a sly joke that furnished not shock but comfort, fitting neatly as it did into the hands of those taking rooms, hands that closed around the bulb of the creature’s head and went up the stairs, the guest with the key either slightly ahead or slightly behind the willing companion, both thankful for the mood of the place that they were now absorbing, a self-regard and privacy that they knew would permit the most outlandish intimacies.

A DATE FOR THE BALL

A wooden sphere, a rare thing, was near another wooden sphere. Each admired the shape of the other, which was, precisely, its own shape, both being spheres, but this pride in similarity was intensified by an appreciation of difference. The first of the two spheres was lighter in hue, a little larger, with a rougher grain. The second was slightly smaller and smoother, darker in color. The smaller sphere was heavier, as it had a greater density, and something about it suggested a stronger presence than the larger sphere. Each emitted a sound, the smaller a constant tone at a stable frequency, the larger a series of evenly spaced clicks. The noises contrasted with one another but also served as complements. Each sphere could see only half of the other, which meant that each was led to imagine what was on the far side. The large imagined that the far side of the small looked identical to the near side. The near imagined that the far side of the large was significantly different from the near side. Both spheres thought the same thing at the same time, which was that they lamented that the ground was perfectly level, since it did not allow one of them to roll toward the other.

Monday, February 8, 2021

PART OF THE SOLUTION

Jim, smoking and watching cartoons on mute, had the radio up too loud. First it was Monk, then Miles, then Diana Ross, then the Raspberries, then the Breeders, then the Idles, then Ivory Joe Hunter, then La Fets and Kitty, then ABBA, then the Orioles, then Kid Koala, then Michael Jackson, then MC Lyte, then Morriarchi, then the Hillbenders, then Alice Reinert, then Jack Green, then Anita O’Day, then UGK, then Andre Williams, then Andrea True, then Jelly Roll Morton, then Merle Travis, then the Quick, then Terry Jacks. Somewhere in there was a song that bothered him. He stood up and turned away from the cartoons. His face was red. He bellowed. “Hey,” he said. “That whole ‘if you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a change’ thing goes way too easy on other people.” He knocked his pipe against the edge of the table and had little to say about what fell to the floor.

ENJOY YOUR STAY

You are authorized to occupy the residence in accordance with terms our letter February third Twenty Twentyone eliminating paragraph three as per your recommendation to me by telephone Thursday last. Jan Clabbard-Handle of Cording Agency will contact you again on specifics in advance of your arrival of next week. Sleep in bed on first floor use kitchen on second floor store clothing in basement park out back any food is permissible except for cruciferous vegetables and shellfish. To your principal concern: Yes you may destroy two pieces of furniture under conditions which are efficient and which are not visible from the street so as not to rouse the ire of neighbors, especially Mr. Taltz, who has a clear sightline from the South and who has been a busybody since the early eighties, when he broke his back in a fall and was laid up at home, though before that he was a laugh a minute, sang the loudest a cappella ZZ Top you ever heard, and in fact owned most of the hammers, saws, crowbars and axes you will take to the furniture. Pieces left behind can be assembled into sculpture. Please submit report upon departure.

Saturday, February 6, 2021

AFTER THE FALL

One day three fellows they all clubbed together. Midway through what they had agreed was the last song of the night one proposed a heist. He had a brute poetry to his description: cuff a watchman, cut a hole in a door no one even knew about, take, take, kill if had to. The others, shorter of stature and more intelligent, would not hear of it. “Head in the clouds,” they said, closing their eyes sadly in alternation, like the time before and the time before that. The tall one turned up his nose and plunged into the crowd for one more dance. The music sped up, and the extrapolated evening was salvaged.

MATCH GAME

Next to the car there was a trash can filled with what was certainly delicious food. The rich bastards around here would throw out anything that didn’t satisfy them immediately. He had witnessed a bald millionaire toss in a bewitching turkey sandwich.

Now he was lifting a newspaper fully expecting to see a caviar-encrusted hortobágyi palacsinta. Ants crawled over his hand to get a look. At his feet a mouse ran the hundred-yard dash in scale. Before he could glimpse so much as a morsel of mince, the nearly silent sound of a yo-yo going up and down its string consumed him from his right. He let go the Canal Of Intelligence and faced into the reversible whisper of the toy. A boy stood there in short pants and a miniature captain’s hat. Beyond the boy the sun was going down. Sudden panic filled him. “Will you tell me something?” he asked the boy.

“Depends what it is.”

“Why should it?”

“I have to withhold a commitment. Not every request is equally reasonable.”

He was flabbergasted by the boy’s eloquence. “Whose are you? Bart and Annie’s?” They were a lawyer and an inventor who lived down the street. He had made a million surfboard aerodynamics.

“No.” The boy shielded his eyes. “But I need to vet your inquiry. Give it to me, man, now, and in the plainest language, please.” Rhythm, consonance, composition—and the yo-yo never stopped!

He was just going to ask the boy for the time. But now he had his hackles up. Man? “I need you to tell me why I have been separated from the only person I ever loved. She’s not very far away but might as well be a million miles. I saw her climbing a fire escape and then accepting a ring from another man. His face was bathed in light.”

The boy took down his hand from his face. His lip was quivering. “I’m not even real.”

Now he began to understand. People were at his back, a crowd of them. The smell of smoke reached him just as he felt the weight of the gas can in his hand. He knelt, taking the newspaper with him, thinking that this was the last day that he would not be in it.

SECOND DATE

A man came to my show with a woman not quite his age. They sat in the front. He looked familiar. She did not. I believed that he had attended before, maybe more than once, accompanied by a different women, maybe more than one. The show, titled “Block Party,” consisted of myself, a table, four large blocks of butternut wood, and several knives. I opened with a greeting. “Hello, Blockheads,” I said. As usual, half the crowd cheered and hooted. The other half responded with our secret signal, two hands in quick vertical parallels, then in quick horizontals, signing a block. I followed with an explanation in dual definitions. “Who knows the difference between carving and whittling?” I said. “Both involve the application of a knife,” and here I selected the one nearest to me and held it up to the audience (for maximum contrast, I wore a yellow shirt and used knives with a deep-purple handle). I went on, sticking to script: “I was taught that the difference lay in the product, that carving resulted in shapes while whittling was a progressive reduction in the size of the block resulting from the shaving away of thin slices of the wood. This is not true. In point of fact, carving requires a complement of tools in addition to knives, including but not limited to chisels, gouges, and lathes. I will be whittling. I will be whittling shapes. For my first shape, I have selected a block.” Here I touched the knife to the closest block. “I am finished.” I said. At this, the woman in the front stood. “This is a trick,” she said, more loudly than I expected. “This is no more than a cleverly worded excuse to take our money. I paid seventy dollars for these tickets.” The man put a hand on her back. “We paid,” he said. She wheeled on him. “No,” she said. “I paid. My credit card, my hard-earned wages, my hours spent breaking my back at the nursery, dragging heavy plants to bored suburbanites who change their mind and leave without a word. And you take me to one dinner that you put on a company card and what, suddenly we’re life partners?” She crouched, and he must have thought she was going to sit back down, because he relaxed, but instead she bounded onto the stage and went for the knives I was going to use to turn the other blocks into Penguin, Bonsai, and Child’s Birthday party. I didn’t stop her. I was curious to see what would happen, above all because it was free.

TWO CHAINSAWS

Jill’s dad had to return two chainsaws, one to his friend Bob and one to his friend Bill. “Why two, you may ask?” he said, though Jill hadn’t asked, and her dad didn’t answer. They went first to Bob’s, where they had been several times, and the TV was on as always, showing one of the Civil War documentaries that Bob loved, pictures of battlefields and illustrations of troops massing among them, and a somber orotund voice explaining that this general came out of the north with a batallion of whatever only to be met by that general. “Got your chainsaw, Robert,” said Jill’s dad and when the show went to commercial, Bob, tall and gaunt, pushed himself up out his chair and said “Thanks much” and asked about the big game and recommended a new restaurant. Then it was to Bill’s, where Jill had never been, and the TV was off, and Bill was sitting on his porch with a book in his hand. “This,” Bill said when he had taken the chainsaw with a gracious nod, “is the story of a man in a car sitting outside a cemetery with a woman who desires to be in it, but cannot articulate that desire. He is torn one way by what he senses in her, her sadness, her lust for it, and torn another way by his awareness that he has to get home and clean his car.” Jill’s dad nodded. “Bob was watching a show about the Civil War,” he said, with an edge she didn’t recognize. “Oh?” Bill said. He wanted to get back to his book. On the drive back her dad sharpened his edge. “What was Bill's book about?" She started to say. “No,” he said sharpening his edge. “It was about the Civil War, too, maybe even more so.” Jill felt that she had been upbraided and fell silent. He softened and patted her hand. “Another story,” he said, “Once upon a time, there was a planet where people couldn’t learn from pictures in a box located between other pictures of people trying to sell things. They could think they were learning, but instead they were just joining a club of people who had seen those same pictures. That planet exploded and everyone in it burned to ash. Then there was another planet with only small trees and small books hanging there like fruit. They taste like what you don't expect, and leave you with the full effect. I'm sorry if that rhymes, honey, but it’s important to remember all the same.” A month later, on her seventh birthday, she blew out the candles remembering it and opened her presents with a diminished hope for the future that somehow seemed to burn brighter.

BLOWN GLASS: A LOVE STORY

The Barn is what they all called it, but it had never been a working barn, only some rich city couple’s idea of one that was made from the start as a gallery. At first they specialized in paintings but no one who worked there could acquire memorably and so most of the drab portraits and seascapes didn’t move, just sank back into the walls. Then the wife of the couple announced that she knew everything about sculpture, and that era was a little better, some nice boats and mama ducks sold, but it ended in bust just like the paintings. The rich couple cleared out then back to the city and sold it to Hank, who had an eye for nothing except glassware, and also a glass eye. He stood by the front, lip up with snoose, and announced colors and locations of recent acquisitions to everyone coming in, one tailored recommendation per customer, diviner-style. “Red by the back window,” he said to the Antropols. “Green, outer restroom wall,” to the Sidneners. Garrick hoisted a hand as he approached Hank. “Bluish,” Hank said, “streaks of ocean, near the stack of postcards.” Garrick was never the same after that. The piece Hank meant was shaped like a tall teardrop, with a base that went more one way than the other, and Garrick was long gone the moment he saw it. Its beauty was in line and hue but something else, too, something that drove straight through his eyes and down the stem of a soul he had not previously been sure he even had. He breathed heavily through a suddenly dry mouth. He was afraid to lean in close and see the price, and he should have been. Garrick was a teacher at a local school that insisted it was an academy, and the vase was eleven hundred, as much as six months of bandaging and medicating the piece-of-shit car that took him back and forth to work. He could not justify the expense any more than he could deny that it was the purest love he had ever felt. But life without access to this beauty was no life at all. and so he convinced his best friend Frank to buy it and visited Frank’s house as often as he could, caressing the vase when Frank went to the kitchen or the bathroom. Just to see light come through the swannish neck of the thing: life wasn’t all bad, was it?

Friday, February 5, 2021

AWARD-WINNING YOUNG POET WORKS FOR HUSBAND’S DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY

“He was a surgical instrument that went out fashion before it could be used, which meant that he was the highest glinting thing in the garbage. He was furniture with opaque plastic slipcovers that robbed him of a clear sense of what he was preserving. He was a lightbulb that promised top wattage but would never be screwed into a socket.” His boss Alan, also his husband, passed by, glanced at the paper, coughed derisively. “Are we having thoughts again?” Alan said. “Delusions of grandeur or even of the opposite can be cured with a meal.” Alan left laughing but came back a minute later with three twenties rolled up and shoved into an empty Doublemint gum package. “The taste that refreshes,” he said, tossing the package on the desk. “Get up and get yourself some lunch, poet. And pick up ink cartridges for me on the way back. I have to print something that really matters instead of that garbage you’re vomiting out. But the highest glinting thing in the garbage.” Alan left laughing again. Marriage was hell at close quarters.

Thursday, February 4, 2021

DR. RAND'S WORST WEDNESDAYS

Dr. Rand was about to be challenged. He was certain of it. He had taught this course for twelve years, and most of them were smooth as silk, his lecture unspooling across the length of the lecture hall, students scribbling with sedulous rapidity. But then in his fourth year he spied a student in the middle of a row, a quarter up the raked seats, staring at him with a mix of enthusiasm and disbelief. It was a young man named Marcus who shot up a hand and then, without any prelude, launched into his question, which was really more of a speech. Dr. Rand parried skillfully. The class laughed. They all moved on. But it had shaken Dr. Rand. The next year was clear of complication, and the year after that. But then it was Fred Alvarez, and the initial move was a clearing of the throat rather than a raising of the hand. Fred had a real point—he had spied a flaw in the central carriage of the idea—but again Dr. Rand slid off into a witticism. That night Dr. Rand journaled furiously, wondering what he had done to inspire in his charges such impudence. Was there something in his posture or tone that suggested that he tolerated it? In his student days he would not have dared put an oar in while a professor was speaking. The next year was clear and he braced himself. Years went by where he kept close watch on any young men who seemed overly sure of themselves. But today he had been surprised. It was a young woman, Monica Kriss, who had that look upon her face. She was tapping her pencil faster and faster. Dr. Rand felt giddy and queasy. He turned to the chalkboard, started to fall, and put out his arm to steady himself.

THIS DISASTER, EPISODE ONE

She had a feeling of growing relief and then a moment of terror when she thought about what she would do when the relief passed, as she knew it would. She was focusing on a band of sunlight on the wall but that couldn’t last forever. It would slide toward the doorway and disappear and then she would be worse off than before. Now she had a growing feeling of terror into which the relief that she still felt slid and dissolved. She went to the light switch and turned it off and on, off and on. It was a metaphor for her. She left it off so she could see the sunlight better and went to sit at the piano. She coughed picked out a few notes that she promised herself would be her theme music when they made a show of this disaster.

YOU THERE!

In one show, actors were playing characters. Everyone understood that model. “I am James Porter, and I am playing the role of Charles Harris,” a man said, unnecessarily. In another show, actors were playing characters who were actors playing characters. That required a bit of explanation. “I am Pauline Untermeyer,” a woman said, “and I am playing Janice Gerson. Janice is the lead actress in a TV show, Anita, where she stars as Anita Wilson.” That explanation was usually followed by a short disquisition on the confusion of responding to multiple names on set, accompanied by an exaggerated eye roll. In a third show, actors were playing characters who were actors who were playing characters with the same name as the actors. “Here’s how it goes,” said Dani Li. “I got cast in this show as Nadia Zhang, who is an aspiring actress in Los Angeles, and in the show she auditions for a part in a show and gets it, and the part is that she’s playing an aspiring actress named Dani Li.” The director, Matt Stefano, interrupted. “A lesser performer might simply assume a different personality for Nadia and then return to her own personality for Nadia-as-Dani, but Dani really gave the whole situation deep thought, and let Nadia, the character she had created, in turn create a character for Dani, the Dani in the show I mean, who is similar to her in some respects but could not be more different in others. It is possible that for the second season, the Dani in the show will be asked to play a character named Nadia Zhang. The goal is to challenge this brilliant woman to challenge us.” Stefano added that he and Dani became close over the course of the first season and are now engaged.

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

UPSTAIRS

When the guy downstairs died, I was just coming out of high school, not aware of much except the blank year that lay ahead of me where I would have to “get it together” and “turn things around” so colleges would take me seriously as a prospect. My parents had different ways of communicating the importance of what I was about to undertake. My mother scowled. My father shouted and then wept quiet, guilty tears. I don’t mean to suggest that I cared about what they did, only that I noticed. I thought about myself only, but narrowly, not what would become of that self or how I might be able to affect that process. The day the ambulance pulled up to take away Mr. Elson was just a Saturday, and not a particularly eventful one at that.

A COWBOY TO ROPE A STEER

I neglected to mention that I will not write another word of this for free. Or rather, not another paragraph. I’ll have to write a word and maybe even a few sentences to give you the lay of the land. I have written a book on this subject and several articles as followup. I have planted a flag and now must point to it. Julia Enterrio, my co-writer on the book that made our names, Ink, Inc.: From Prose to Dough In One Easy Step, put it best in the introduction to the first edition: “Would you ask a doctor to cure a disease for free? A lawyer to litigate for free? A cowboy to rope a steer for free? A member of the demimonde to consort with a gentleman caller for free?” True to her word, Julia required that I pay her out of my own pocket for that paragraph even in advance of receiving an advance from a publisher. “Should I not practice what I preach?” she said. And preaching it was. We neither wrote a single word without receiving some measure of compensation, whether it was our book or attendant materials, from flap copy to press release to academic study questions to interview responses—national magazine or student newspaper, no matter. Julia stood strong in arguments of this stripe with David Firkins, our first kind publisher, and with his successor, Gerald LiPuma, an old man with the luxurious hair of a young one. There was a bit of a burp with Henrietta Lewis, our third publisher, because Julia’s style—half-bullying, half-wheedling, a little tilt of the head, copious eye contact—did not have quite the same effect. She shifted gears into majestic principle. I followed her lead and more than just her lead. For about a year there, in the wake of the second edition, we were private partners as well. I cannot divulge much about that time except to tell you she was ardent. The end of that did not spell the end of this, our writing enterprise, and the third, fourth, and fifth editions followed, each significantly lucrative. The only thing I cannot quite figure, and it is why I must soon end this rare free paragraph, is why she has so much more money to her name than I do. She bought a Jet-Ski and a home gym last month, and also paid for several procedures that shaved away her age but were not so noticeable that anyone would call her out for them. I wilt and melt, staring at a bank balance that is not the equal of hers. Is it time to raise my rates?

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

BRAD'S LETTER: THE BEST THAT HE COULD DO

I was brought in to do one thing and it became another thing. On a chilly evening lit by a sliver of moon, silver dusting the tops of the pines, I drove to the head of the road, walked across the field and stood at the rear door of the house, rehearsing what would come next, the knock, the voice from inside, the creaking of the hinges on the wooden door and the sproing of the spring on the screen door, the man appearing, the man expressing confusion and then consternation, the man grabbed and stuffed into a sack, sack into trunk, car piloted back down neck of road, trunk opened, sack extracted, sack cut open, the man surrounded by faces holding poses of malice that then melted into joy. Happy Birthday, Brad! Happy Surprise Birthday, Dear Brad! The cake was chocolate. He sent me a letter the next day speculating that I took a sadistic pleasure in the deceit. His readable little account, with its capsule summary of the action, its graphs and maps, its brief but accurate description of how I laughed at his distress, landed on me fully, but something in his prose, its essential incompetence perhaps, ensured that I never felt its weight.

SO NICE UNTIL THEN

There was a wealthy young man in Caracas, said her mom, who had the misfortune to be blind. He had not been born that way. When traveling as a young man he contracted scarlet fever in Mexico City and lost his sight. He was the only living member of his immediate family, and stayed in the city, occupying a grand manor in Polanco. He had in his employ a companion who seldom left his side, but he displayed a remarkable ability to conduct his own affairs. His remaining senses were sharpened to a fine point, which resulted in an enhanced cognizance of nearly every environmental fluctuation. “Do you hear me?” her mom said. “Every environmental fluctuation!” Her mom was screaming, eyes wild. She had no idea why. The story had been so nice until then.

JACK'S IN THE CAR

You could be looking at up to a thousand dollars in monthly savings. You could be looking at up to a thousand dollars in monthly losses. You could be not looking at your monthly savings or losses, because you are sitting in the car in the parking lot of your apartment complex, listening unironically to a preacher on the radio, fretting the fringe of the jacket you wore the day you proposed, which was also the same jacket you wore on your honeymoon, which made its way to the back of the closet over the years, not because you didn’t like it but because you couldn’t get into it anymore, seemed to shrink as you grew, gaining weight through the happy years of the marriage, but then came the conflict, then the consequences of that conflict, then the conversations, an excruciating alphabetical creep, and you couldn’t sleep, and you couldn’t eat, and one day you got out the jacket to find that it fit perfectly, that it was just about the only thing that did, and you got in the car and turned out the radio and didn’t go anywhere and eventually tired of the preacher and switched over to music, soul music, tearing up at the songs that were playing and even the songs that weren't.