Slips, Falls

Teeth Pt. III

2011-09-19T17:03:00.000-04:00

I recline, eyes closed, and pretend to be asleep. I pretend to dream, and in that non-dream I pretend to be a Builder, constructing the world around me.

Some electronic device is beeping softly in the next room. If I am in control of my world, then I ought to be able to make those beeps last longer.

I concentrate on slowing down the world around me. I picture a peach-pit, for some reason. I probe its texture with my pretend-self, and it seems that each beep from the other room describes another furrow on its surface. Long beep, deep ravine. Short beep, shallow.

I try to concentrate, but something prevents me. It’s hard to explain.

I feel like raw skin, cicatrized. They took the sutures out too soon; I’m in danger of splitting along the seams. Any sudden movement could unpeel me.

Once on a boat off California’s coast, she and I watched off the starboard bow as the captain told us,

“What you don’t want to do is dart your eyes all over the place. You’ll never spot one if you do that. You’ve got to relax your vision. Look out into the horizon. Your eyes will automatically focus on it if a plume goes up. Just relax your vision.”

There’s a new tone, very faint---coming from the hallway. I know that pitch. I know what it means.

They don’t like to tell the patients, but I figured it out.

I understand why they don’t want me to know. The imminence of death is a difficult thing to accept. Not for me. I’m more afraid of my past than my future.

I wish I could put a frame around it. I wish I could tend and prune it like a bonsai. I want to place it upon my mantle, I want to look at my past with a snifter of brandy in hand and think, that was that.

Instead I’m stuck without a conclusion, an impassioned speech (full of sound and fury) but no end-piece. Life is a candle melting into a pool wax, but the wax will stay there a very long time, pooled at the bottom, the wick submerged or burnt completely---useless.

The lights come up but the credits continue to scroll up the screen.

“So, what’d you think?”

Well, to be honest I’m stuck between “Fuck everybody” and “Please love me.”

I was born in agony and I am slowly dying in agony, and I bore the pain myself both times, naked, alone, unknowing. I spent my whole life learning, being taught: how to read, how to speak, how to use the toilet. And now I can’t do any of those things properly, so what do I have to show for it? I read the story of my life, then promptly forgot it as I lived it, and now I realize the whole time I was burning fuel, and I’m just about on empty. So fuck everybody.

On the other hand I feel like a hot air balloon whose mooring has been severed, and now I’m drifting upwards and it’s marvelous but the further I ascend, the smaller everything gets, until I can’t even remember what I’ve forgotten, and it’s becoming cold and I’m, I’m scared. So please love me.

Teeth, Pt. 2

2011-07-16T15:05:00.002-04:00

There’s a story in my head of a man---I think the man was me---who got sick of making his own decisions. He was sulking at home contemplating his worries one day and his Scottish sheepdog came to bother him for a walk.

At that very moment he made a bold---some would say rash---decision. He deputized all his decision-making to his dog, Melba.

He set out across the Nebraskan countryside, the dog’s thick leather leash wrapped around his arm. Nicked and peeling, but still a strong leash, working its way deeper into the skin of his arm with each tug of his guide.

For two months he continued. He ate what it ate, slept where it slept, shat where it shat. It was a lot of fun actually. Of course Scottish sheepdogs are well known for their herding abilities, and Melba was a credit to her lineage.

He had a purpose out there, sleeping in cornfields and railyards. He was trying to blow off his destiny. He was trying to trick his own fate by pitting it against pure instinct.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out for him. He knew it wouldn’t, but he had to try. The dog ate some mushrooms at the base of an old oak tree. The man knew the mushrooms were poisonous and he couldn’t bring himself to eat the deadly amanitas, which he knew from his youth to never touch.

A fire built near the site of the dog’s death. Shoveling like a beast with his fingers, a shallow pit dug into the moist post-rain soil. The dog buried under the forgetting earth, tears shed into my bread as I ate.

What do I care about memories, anyway? I think as I wipe my ass. Memories are vestigial. I’ve got no need for them. They’re an appendix and better to get rid of them than wait around until they get infected and do some damage.

Teeth, Pt. 1

2011-06-13T13:41:00.003-04:00

Just the teeth and eyes are all that’s left. The rest of me evaporated to the surface of the sun.

When I was born they wrote a book about my life, and every day I’ve had to tear out one of the pages, wad it up and stuff it down my throat.

Now just a few pages and the index remain. If I concentrate, I can recall a few things. Like,

Army, see Military Service.
Military Service,
World War I, 33-76, 37m
National Reserves, 88-100

Also:

DePaul University,
        Undergraduate, 78-95
        Professor of Literature, 226-300

And:

Homosexuality,
        Discovery of, 11-12, 14
        Repression of, 22-32, 74, 90, 103-109, 155, 176, 200-202, 228, 235
        Public revelation of, 289-295

I sit on the edge of my hospital bed holding an old photograph, yellowed around the edges. A sharp-framed army cadet standing there, squinting into the sun. I’m able to conjure a character, like a cartoon, and I try to tell myself That’s you, that’s who you are.

There has been no grace in my aging. I am falling apart, piece by piece. Grace was just one of the first things to go. All I have left now are teeth and eyes.

The cartoon climbs out of the photograph and starts marching around my bedspread, big grin. Learned professor, decorated veteran. Decorated for what? I have no medals or diplomas now. They evaporated along with everything else useful.

I have only moments left.

But the greatest moments of my life may have been the greatest moments of any one’s. I’m sure there are many people who have had greater.

But still, I had a few.

I wish I could continue to live and grow like a tree, not bothering anybody, not needing anybody just living and pulling water from the ground and my food from the sun.

As I get up to use the toilet I pass Cherie, lying in the other bed. She’s nothing more than a puddle in that bed now. Soon she’ll be completely dried up, she’ll be just a stain on those sheets. And then they’ll wash the sheets.

I have only moments left, but moments are elastic. I can twist moments around my fingers like a rubber band. Stretch them until they snap. But what happens then?

As I sit on the toilet contemplating my incontinence, it occurs to me that if I were to have a stroke at this very moment and die, it would be convenient for the cleaning crew. When I inevitably shit myself, it’ll go straight in the bowl.

How many people in history have died sitting on the crapper? How many of them dreamed of dying that way? When they imagined their personal destinies, did any of them think they would expire on a toilet-paper-lined greasy plastic toilet lid?

Did any of them think how convenient that would be for the cleaning crews?

IV

2011-03-24T16:03:00.001-04:00

(The end to this story took a long time to figure out. I have serious misgivings. Any suggestions are appreciated.)

The sugar in my çay had settled and turned to sludge at the bottom of the cup. I was aware of several things without knowing why: the cry of a corn vendor in the distance, the sweat on my forehead, the wires above me humming with energy...

“And that’s it. They never caught him. What do you think of that?”

Music from a passing car radio, the film developing inside...cuts on his fingers...

I thought for a long minute. Then for a longer minute I thought nothing. Then I spoke.

“Well, I think your story isn’t finished.”

“No?”

“No. A story is an answer. An unfinished story is a question, and a question is an unfinished story. What you’ve just done is ask me a question.”

“And what question is that?”

A tram ringing its bell the next street over. A rat scurrying down the gutter.

“The answer is No, Emre, in spite of everything you’ve said and done, I do not have it within me to hate you.”

Emre Çağan fished the lemon slice out of his cup of çay with his thick fingers. He put it to his mouth and loudly sucked the flesh from the rind. Tossing the cup behind him he walked toward me, then past me, and into the slow-moving crowd along the Sandemir marina.

III

2011-03-10T16:25:00.001-05:00

“Now, up until this point the story I’ve told you is hardly remarkable. Bored rich man murders hapless poor man. Happens every day, believe me. What’s interesting comes next.”

Emre ran to the police station and on the way he purposely tore his clothes and scuffed his shoes. He showed up in front of the captain, who was startled from his nap to see the young man standing in his office, panting.

Emre explained he was nearly stabbed and had to defend himself from the booze-frenzied Kurd. Sobbing, he collapsed in a folding chair and covered his face with his hands.

Due process took its course. Emre showed up in court and put on a similiar performance, with Mr. Çağan showing up to testify, tearfully, to his son’s love of peace. Every man, woman and child in the room was wrapped around his finger. The evidence the prosecutor produced, solid though it was, might as well have been made of fairy dust as far as the jury was concerned.

So of course Emre wasn’t convicted. Actually he came out of it a hero.

But whatever Emre was trying to release by murdering that drunk didn’t make it out. It seemed like it would, but really it just poked out its slimy little head, looked around a bit, then receded back into Emre, digging itself in deeper.

I guess when you set out to do something, and you pull it off on the first try, it’s hard to stop there. For men with brains hard-wired for success like Mr. Emre Çağan Jr., it’s impossible.

So he goes out one night and he picks off a drifter sleeping on the beach. The cops had to have found the body eventually, but no one ever heard of it.

A month later it’s a beggar who hangs out by the exit to the old castle and bugs the tourists for their lira.

And so on.

Emre never changes his methods. You’d think a smart guy like that wouldn’t leave such an obvious clue, but then again maybe that’s how he thinks. Chokes them with a wire every time.

And he never takes a hit. Sure, he gets arrested. Guy’s been arrested dozens of times. They put him through the whole rigmarole and every time the whole town flocks to his side like gulls to a dead fish.

Find something that works, then stick with it. Choke a vagrant to death, get yourself scuffed up, play the victim. I don’t know whether he just thought his reputation was that good, or he thought his dad could buy him out of any trouble, or maybe he was just losing it.

But I’ll tell you what, it did work. Not for the reason Emre thought it would. The public let him off because he had become their representative. Their savior. Their strike back against all the Untouchables who spoil the views from their terraces, stink up their bus stations. The good hardworking citizens of Anamur hate those people, and simultaneously they hate themselves for hating them.

So when they acquit Emre they acquit themselves. And there’s one less flaw in their crystal lives.

II

2011-03-05T14:33:00.004-05:00

In the south, on the Mediterranean coast, there’s a small fishing town, Anamur. In the summers it’s a hot spot for vacationing businessmen and their families. There are a handful of luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants, and a ferry that runs daily to Cyprus. All of these are owned by one very wealthy man, Emre Çağan.

Mr. Çağan had a son, named after himself. Young Emre led a very comfortable life, as you might imagine, growing up in a resort. Never wanting for anything, a new car each year, single but many girlfriends---you get the picture.

Tourism money doesn’t get to everybody in Anamur; some of the population still scrapes out a living on 30-year-old fishing trawlers. Those without boats work in the fields growing strawberries and taro, and those who can’t work in the fields, beg.

Sometimes when Emre emerged from his palatial home he had to step over a sleeping bum to get to his Porsche. Like young Siddhartha, the contrast disturbed him.

There was an old Kurd who used to wait by the bus station to panhandle tourists when they arrived. Everyone knew he was an alcoholic, but he had been loitering at that same station for so many years that he was considered a fixture of the neighborhood.

One night in June, not unlike any other except for an unseasonably chill sea breeze, the Kurd was sitting and rolling a cigarette. The last bus from Antalya had already arrived and departed to Adana. He thought to turn and ask the man behind him for a light, and as he did he felt a thin cord pulled around his neck with sudden violence.

After a brief, languid struggle the Kurd expired there on the cold concrete platform.

I

2011-03-03T15:24:00.003-05:00

Annoyed with the slow-moving crowd of gawking shoppers on Sandemir marina, I stepped off the curb and nearly collided with another pedestrian who had taken the same course in reverse.

Where I had bounced off my left foot and put my right forward, he had advanced his left, pushing off with his right. We were both momentarily startled, and I took the opportunity to raise the camera hanging around my neck and take the man’s picture.

He was squat, or squashed---he looked like he was under a lot of pressure. Thick Turkish eyebrows, nostril hairs protruding. Sweat on his neck, cuts on his fingers.

“Hey, did I give you permission to shoot my picture pal?”

“No. This is a public place, you have no reasonable expectation to privacy.”

“Well fine then, how about I take your picture?”

I couldn’t think of a reason why he shouldn’t. I handed him the Canon and watched him adjust the focus. It occurred to me that maybe I should smile, but I didn’t.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

“We can’t. It’s film. I need to get it developed.”

“Yeah, I know. There’s a photolab just over here, let’s go now.”

There was a one-hour wait, and they wouldn’t let us smoke cigarettes inside, so we leaned against a brick wall in the alley behind the place. I bought us plastic cups of cherry-colored çay from a street vendor, and we stood and smoked uneasily.

I looked up at a grey and stolid sky through electrical wires hanging in the alley and thought I saw the lines of a musical staff imposed on the clouds. A single gull flew in a diagonal and played a whole octave from low to high.

“So we might as well get to know one another,” he said, withdrawing another Camel from a pocket inside his jacket.

“I’m curious to know where you were headed in such a hurry.”

“I’ve got a letter to mail.”

I glanced at my watch. Only just after noon.

“The post office will be open for another four hours. What’s the rush?”

“That’s just how I walk. What’s your rush?”

“I was wandering.”

“Just a fast walker like me, huh?”

“On the contrary. I intend to spend all afternoon wandering, and I have no time to waste.”

The man snorted loudly and looked like he was about to spit but didn’t. Cigarette smoke curled around his knuckles.

We stood for some time, silently sipping and smoking.

“I am curious,” I said. “What would you have done had I not allowed you to take my picture?”

“Son, I would have knocked you silly.”

I almost laughed aloud and had to take a big gulp of tea to hide it.

“It’s not that I minded having my picture taken,” he continued. “You’re right; it’s a public place and in these times you can’t go anywhere public without getting on camera. But it’s the fact that you bumped into me, and then didn’t apologize.”

“It wasn’t my fault. Or yours. It was just an accident.”

“Yeah, I know that. But a man can’t go around letting people bump into him, even if it’s no one’s fault.”

“Why not?” I knew I was infuriating him.

“I bet you’re the kind of guy---” he took a slow drag of his cigarette--- “who prances around all day, taking pictures of pretty birds and sunsets and doesn’t really give two shits about the human beings around him.”

“Well yes, I do like pretty birds, and sunsets always send a chill down my spine, but it’s not true that I don’t care about people. On the contrary, I love almost everyone I see.”

He snorted again and looked at his wristwatch. “Alright, kid. Looks like we’ve got another 40 minutes, so I’m going to tell you a story. If you’re smart, it’ll really help you a lot. If you’re not smart, or you’re not paying attention, then my breath is wasted and no one can say I didn’t give you a fair chance.”

Sinta the Sharker

2011-02-06T16:09:00.002-05:00

It just isn’t working. Like before, like the other times.

The whole process had seemed so easy when Sinta was younger, exploring alone in the comfort of privacy. The parts were made for each other, what could be more simple?

Maybe if he changes their position.

Thick forearms, bearing small scars where the fishing hooks have snagged flesh, roll her onto her back. Sinta hopes that gravity will aid him this time. But it is not gravity or strength that Sinta lacks.

Aboard his trawler, he feels assured. Sharks are terrible predators, but Sinta does not fear them. He knows sharks better than they know themselves.

He knows how to call them by flinging chum into his wake. He knows how to hold the snare pole so the beast catches its own jawbone. He knows where to apply the heated knife to remove its fins without touching the bone, and he knows how to hoist a finless shark off the deck and back into the forgetting sea.

What Sinta does not know is how to control an organ which does not seem to be a part of himself.

In the dark bedroom the flesh underneath his hands looks like the pale blue of a fish’s underbelly. A cold, quiet part of his brain conjures images of his hands and the knife, the slick animal struggling under his sure grip.

And his body continues the mechanical, pointless motions without success.

Tom the Temp Worker

2011-02-02T18:26:00.001-05:00

A stack of envelopes on his left, an empty tub on his right. Left hand goes to the stack. With his thumb he flips the opened side to his right hand. Like a squirming earthworm his index finger finds the opening and with the thumb pries open the package, pinching its contents out.

As he stacks their folded innards neatly he tosses the envelopes to a bin at his feet, paper chaff showing on his dark slacks like snow on the wet pavement outside his window. His fingers turn blue from ink and dirt.

10:30. Break time. 15 minutes.

Watching the blind, blinding snow through the window. Coffee is free and awful. It scalds his throat and sits testily in his empty stomach. Fox Business News drones in concert with The Price Is Right on the opposite wall, both turned low.

Tom can’t help but feel like he’s underwater.

Radwa the Rumba Player

2011-01-29T16:34:00.002-05:00

When the Leader entered, the whole room was like iron filings and a magnet. There was a sound like the wind just before a cat pounces.

Radwa rested his bow on his harp delicately. He took deep breaths, waiting for his cue, letting the aromatics of the prelude begin to warm. The bass player set to plucking with his right hand, the one missing a pinkie.

The Leader took a seat at a circular table and his entourage of co-conspirators and thugs filled the other seats like bullets in a revolver.

Kafa began working on the drums, and the beat rippled the water in the pitchers set atop each table.

But no one had touched their glasses. They were waiting for the Leader.

Gregor the Garbageman

2011-01-07T17:35:00.003-05:00

Sometimes they are very heavy, filled with wet leaves or lumber. Gregor has a permanent crick in his shoulder where he rests the cans. Walking to the truck, his head throbs and dirty sweat beads out onto his brow.

Meanwhile the driver Martin slurps the pale brown drops pooled in the lid of his coffee cup, held in one hand while his other manipulates an oversize steering wheel. He takes several gos at a tight alley turn and then, signaling to his partner in the side mirror, shifts into Park and waits for Gregor to hop off and haul the garbage over to the truck.

Gregor listens to the throb in his head and thinks how winter is the most savage season. Children injuring themselves playing on ice. Their parents making themselves sick on strong liquor.

Just before dawn there is a terrifying stillness and while looking at all the city's alleyways and empty bus stops Gregor imagines cold blue fingers curling, tightening their grip.

Pierre the Perfume Tester

2010-12-23T13:26:00.003-05:00

Pierre has a nosebridge like the hump of a camel. His nostrils, attractive cylinders which give the organ an aquatic aesthetic, would look large on any other face. On his they only accentuate the massiveness of the rest of the nose.

He sits on a high-backed, velvet-cushioned chair without armrests. It is a small room, and the chair is the only piece of furniture. A yellow paisley pattern covers the walls and there are no windows. He is dressed sharply and his chest swells slightly as he breathes.

A door is opened and the scientist pushes a simple steel cart laden with rows of corked test tubes. The tubes contain liquids in a variety of shades, mostly amber.

He pulls a notepad from the pocket of his lab coat and hands it to the well-dressed man, who has his own pen.

Silently, the scientist lifts one of the vials and, uncorking it, hands it to Pierre. Pierre draws the object to his heroic nose and sniffs it, just once.

He takes a moment to scribble some thoughts on the notepad, then sniffs the potion again.

He holds his breath almost a full minute, wearing the expression of someone starting to remember something. Then, exhaling, he writes some more. He returns the test tube to the scientist, who sets it aside and begins to uncork another.

“Passion,” says Pierre suddenly, “is the perfume of life.”

Fernando the Fry Cook

2010-12-21T18:16:00.004-05:00

Fernando sticks two fingers into the slit he’s made with the serrated knife and scoops out the pink meat in clumps which stick to his fingers.

“What? This is good meat here. You can taste, see---it won’t hurt you...” he sucks a grape-sized piece of raw pork sausage onto his broad lips, and with a lick of his tongue like a coral eel zipping out of its hole and then quickly back in, the morsel disappears.

“Listen, if you’re gonna stand there with your Little-Miss-Shits-Roses attitude, I’d just as soon you get lost. I’ve got to brown these sausage crumbles and stick them in the freezer before I can clock out. 6:30 a.m., people want their eggs & sausage.”

Dollops of the gristly meat sizzle madly when Fernando drops them into the warmed oil. As he pushes them around the griddle they transform into sweaty, grayish-brown clumps.

“Ya see, I believe people should be at peace with their food, their bodies, their bodily functions, yaknowhatImean? Like this pig I’m cookin’ here, he’s not so different from me. When he was alive, he ate and shat and slept just like I do. And then somebody killed him, and all his shitting and eating days were over.”

As Fernando orates he makes chopping motions with his spatula, as if he were holding an extension of the knife that bled the animal, the cleaver that butchered it, the grinder that sausaged it.

“Now I just ate some of this pig. Later I’m going to shit him out. Rinse, lather, repeat...and then eventually I die. After that they can throw me in the pig trough for all I care. Ha!”

Sealing the last of the crumbles in its Tupperware, Fernando pulls a hairy forearm across his sweaty forehead.

“There’s one thing I’ll tell ya. Whatever ya do, you gotta be at peace with yourself.”

The Atomic Man Pt. 7

2010-11-21T16:08:00.001-05:00

Regaining consciousness only a few seconds later Charlie found himself slumped in his seat, car drifting on momentum down a darkened residential street. His lips and nose ached where they had hit the steering wheel. He braked and the slight change in velocity made his head spin.

For three shaky breaths he thought of nothing as the world stopped squirming in front of his eyes. The truck was nowhere in sight. Through his windshield he could see that the hood of his poor Tercel had crumpled like wet paper.

He pulled to the curb and parked. Then he realized where he was: the 1600 block of First Street, by Bethany's place. He checked himself out in the rearview: not too bad, just a thin trickle of blood from his nose.

Reaching in the glove compartment, he tore off a corner of a partially used Taco Bell napkin and stuffed it into his nostril. It didn't hurt at all, which he chalked up to a lingering drunk. Actually now that he thought about it, he wasn't angry any more either---he felt kinda good. Better than good. He felt warm, like the summer sun emerging from behind a raincloud. His luck was definitely turning around. For sure.

He saw a shadow moving behind the curtains in the window of the house he had parked in front of. "Sure I'm crazy," he hummed as he stepped out of the car and walked towards the door.

"Hey there Bethany."

With big curious doe eyes Charlie's old classmate regarded him from inside her carpeted foyer. She wore an oversize Cleveland Browns T-shirt and denim shorts. Charlie remembers her from high school as a shy girl with pimples and a flat chest; they were neighbors and usually walked home together. He could remember one dark November night when she had been late at school meeting with Debate Team, and she had pretended to be angry at her mom for making him escort her home, but then had laughed at some joke he made and in that moment Charlie realized he had a crush.

"Hi Charlie." Oh wow, thought Charlie, she has grown up. It was the voice of a woman, a wiser woman who was wary of childhood friends showing up unannounced late in the night. No more acne either. Now if only that Browns shirt weren't so loose...

"Are you alright?"

"Oh this? Don't worry, it's just the dry air. What're you up to?" He silently congratulated himself on his quickly improvised explanation.

The pretty doe eyes studied him for a long moment. "Making Hamburger Helper. You hungry?"

Charlie stepped inside and was careful to shut the screen door behind him.

The Atomic Man Pt. 6

2010-11-21T15:21:00.004-05:00

"Sure I'm crazy," crooned Billie Holiday on Charlie's car radio, "crazy in love, I say."

If confronted, Charlie might have claimed he was only too tired to bother changing the station, but actually he was enjoying the schmaltzy tune, drumming the thick tempo on his steering wheel as he cruised home on a deep moonless night. He felt peaceful as a lullaby; the three or four drinks he'd had at the bar went down smooth and easy as sweat down a working man's back. He felt as if he had just emerged from a hot bath.

Putting the '93 Toyota Tercel into second gear, he started to climb what one old-timer had told him was the "third steepest hill in Ohiuh." You could tell the old-timers from the way they pronounced Ohio. An "uh" on the end like an exhausted sigh, like they were too beat to finish the long vowel and just gave up.

It was like some club you only gained membership in once you had pissed away most of your life doing crap work for crap pay in Appalachia, and instead of a ring or a lapel pin you got a twang and a gap in your teeth.

Had Charlie been less immersed in musings on his own unpromising future, he might have noticed the glow dawning atop the crest of the hill ahead of him. Instead he was unprepared for the pickup truck which, barreling toward him from the opposite slope, smashed into his right headlight hard enough to spin him rudely a full 90 degrees.

The impact was so great that he was momentarily unable to see through open eyes. When vision returned, he was looking through the vertical wrought-iron bars of a cemetery and a small, hysterical part of his brain was sure he had joined its population.

His second hormonal response, after shock, was rage.

Charlie completed the spin he had started with such speed that he nearly did enter the graveyard, spotted his prey's taillights near the bottom of the hill, and gave chase. Righteous images of revenge bloomed in his mind like blood through a clean white bandage. He could see his quarry was driving a sparkly silver Ford F-150. Probably some well-off contractor from Columbus or Cleveland. He should go back to his happy bungalow in the suburbs and stop taking honest work from real men, like Charlie, gritting his teeth and cutting his fingers on old rusted tools and drinking cheap piss beer and playing pool on a warped table with no 14 just two 12's and the bartender Brittany never remembers his name and---

His pursuit was overzealous or perhaps his reaction time was slowed by the recent head trauma. Either way, he failed to realize that the truck had slowed down upon reaching the bottom of the third steepest hill in Ohio. Charlie's second impact was too much for his already battered brain stem and he lost consciousness.

The Atomic Man Part 5: The Third Egg

2010-10-25T13:36:00.002-04:00

He cracks the third egg rudely on the side of the pan, noticing a small flake of shell fall in, promising an unappetizing moment later on. Charlie isn't worried about moments, only the ruling hunger in the pit of his stomach. He grows more impatient for the eggs to cook, turning up the flame.

The condom is held between two fingers as the rest are busy unclasping her bra. He can feel the ribs in her back with the sensitive parts of his wrists and it's slightly unnerving. He feels he's playing an instrument. It doesn't want him. It's only performing a function.

He starts to resent her, this mysterious woman who turns off the lights and who is such a quick draw on the prophylactics. She's just---he can't remember her name. Becky? Katie?

Probably not her real name anyway. Probably a fake name she uses on the weekends when she's looking for a fuck. A fake name for a fake woman.

The unopened condom is crushed under her chill bony back as she falls receptively onto the bed with sheets too dark to see but probably filthy.

The eggs sit dry and overcooked in the hot skillet. Turning off the heat, Charlie scrapes the turgid lump onto a not-entirely-clean plastic plate. A brown and grey remainder sticks to the pan like moss.

"Fuck it," he thinks as he puts the pan under the faucet, filling it with water to let it soak and be cleaned tomorrow, or the day after.

Plate in one hand and coffee in the other, he returns to the sweat-damp sofa where his day began to shovel down breakfast in front of the Saturday morning cartoons. Finished, he scratches his scrotum through the flap in his boxers, stupefied.

"Christ, I needed that."

The Atomic Man Pt. 4: The Second Egg

2010-10-15T09:53:00.001-04:00

Searching for the light switch, they find it and reveal the drab severity of their furtively adopted surroundings. She tells him to turn it off.

Just like that. It's not a request. No endearing "dear" or "babe" attached to the end, because he wasn't any of these things to her. He was the tall guy in a striped shirt who outside the bar in between sets had offered her a cigarette, making a flat joke about British slang, calling it a "fag." She had seemed sweet to him then, laughing softly.

She pushes a condom into his hand, not even asking if he'd brought his own. He thinks then that she must be used to situations such as this. The etiquette of strangers meeting in strange rooms. He wonders whether she's into it as much as he is, whether she's putting on a well-rehearsed show whose intermission they had just reached.

Two yellows sit in a viscous pool of translucent liquid which has begun to congeal around the edges. Charlie's stomach churns but anyway he thinks maybe that's hunger and decides to pluck another egg from the carton, thinking "Christ, I need it."

The Atomic Man Pt. 3: The First Egg

2010-10-12T12:29:00.003-04:00

A familiar rotten taste in his throat and an uncomfortable humidity in his crotch tells Charlie immediately upon waking that he has slept in his clothes. The fierce midday sun glowers at him through his living room window where he is sprawled on the couch. Rising, he attends to his first drugs of the day. A tall glass of water, cigarettes, coffee's on the brew. Stronger coffee than the last time because each time he makes it these days he decides to put more grounds in, thinking, "Christ, do I need it."

The first egg feels soft and malleable, like muddy water in his palm. The tips of his fingers caress its shell as he moves it between his thumb and index finger, and cracks it against the lip of the skillet.

The neon lights revealing chipping plaster on the walls of a motel that charges by the hour, a consignment for hormonal burdens. Passions in faded rouge and teal walk drunkenly down a dingy hallway. The lights in their room are off and they stay that way as the door shuts.

The Atomic Man Pt. 2: Charlie In Love

2010-09-09T13:44:00.000-04:00

Charlie remembers how the wan fluorescent lights in his kitchen struck her face and revealed acne scars like moon-craters. He'd never been so turned on by someone's forehead. It was explosive.

The powdered ecstasy prickled the back of Charlie's nostrils and he felt his toes lift off the ground. He wanted to grab her just then, dig his fingertips into the small of her back, and draw their bodies together tightly, like blood between glass slides. He'd observe her closely and magnify everything.

Without touching her, he felt their erogenous zones light up like Operation. Her breast in the hollow of his chest, his thigh against her crotch. His lips scraping the thin tendons in her neck.

He remembers as he sits, naked, on the end of his lonely mattress that night. His lust for the alabaster-skinned girl whose name he has already forgotten is grown cold and stale as the pepperoni pizza, three days old, which he prepares to eat. The bone-dry cheese peels from the crust like burnt skin and he looks out his window at a quietly smug moon.

"Sooner or later," he thinks, "I'll lose my mind."

Bones of Macchu Picchu Pt. 1

2010-08-15T20:57:00.005-04:00

Jorge de Castenada chewed a hanging bit of flesh on his chapped lower lip idly. Having ridden since the now-setting sun was only a promising glow on the horizon, Senor de Castenada had succumbed to shallow contemplation. He was unconcerned with the unsure mountain path ahead. His thoughts lingered, like the hanging strips of dead skin on his lips, on the cacophonous trampling below him; the sauntering listlessness shared with his fellow riders like a jug of intoxicating wine passed wordlessly.

****

Manuel's shin bulged obscenely near his ankle, the shattered bone which he had tried to straighten with vines lashed around a tree branch flexed outward with every torturous step he took. He gasped in agony, and fought the urge to lie on his stomach and crawl the rest of the way up the rough shale. The open sores which wrapped around his bare torso like a torn shawl were a constant encouragement to stay on his feet. As he labored, he grabbed at exposed roots and resilient shrubs, drew comfort from them, feeding his own stoicism with theirs. The air was thick with tropical humidity and he sucked it into his lungs with difficulty; breathing warm syrup. The limestone dust hanging around him seemed to collect in his wounds and weigh him down.

In the suffocating tranquility a Rudyard Kipling fable intruded upon Manuel's thoughts. It involved a rhinoceros, a fearsome armored beast he had never seen. The rhinoceros, an arrogant and vain beast, removed his skin once to take a swim. A man put cake crumbs inside the rhino's hide so that when he re-donned it, the itching was maddening. In his efforts to scratch at them, he rubbed off the buttons which would have allowed him to remove his hide. So the beast was doomed to a life of wrinkles and irritation, which is why, Kipling wrote, rhinoceroses are such violent and cruel creatures.

The thought of a world where such fantasies took place uplifted Manuel. A blithe, saccharine land where pains such as his would only irritate and no one, animal nor human, knew to fear death. As a heron flew overhead Manuel amused himself by calling out to it:

"Hola! Fellow creature of the mountain, might you be so kind as to lighten my load a bit? My pack is heavy with firewood, and I would abandon it were it not for my fear of the coming night which even now creeps up behind the sun with murderous intent. Surely, if any of your relatives are nearby, you could carry a log between the two of you? I will meet you at the top, where we can share the succulent berries which I have gone to such pains to gather, and tell legends around the fire!"

The Atomic Man Pt. 1

2010-07-31T13:16:00.004-04:00

(The other day sitting in class I thought I overheard someone say "atomic nights." This is the beginning of a story built from that phrase.)

Charlie couldn't get his bowl lit. He sat on the bare mattress in his bedroom, holding a purple lighter nearly out of fluid, trying to smoke the little bit of dope he picked up from his cousin last weekend. It would have been hard enough with the piece of shit lighter, but the ceiling fan was on, dousing every feeble flame he managed to coax from the sputtering lighter.

Charlie was getting angrier. Like idling at a green light. Nettles and stinging sweat.

He was tired of fugue days and atomic nights, blazed into fecklessness, nuked to sleep only to rise and face another inscrutable morning.

"Ahh, fuck!" said Charlie the Atomic Man, the housing contractor aging at quantum speed, 28 going on 40. He flung the lighter across the room.

An Abridged List

2010-07-29T12:55:00.003-04:00

Must remember to stretch when I wake up.

Must remember to say "Bless You" when strangers sneeze.

Must remember to keep practicing my whistle.

Must remember to shave that weird hair on my nipple.

Must remember that it's all so funny.

Must remember to be grateful for misery.

Must remember the way the stars looked when I was drunk, like falling tears.

Must remember how happy that woman was when she found five dollars on the street.

Must remember: Mountains.

On a neighbor's front porch during a thunderstorm

2010-07-13T12:56:00.001-04:00

"I know this black guy." Jason stood as he began to relate his story, eager for my undivided attention.

"He's a gangbanger, he used to hang a blue rag out of his left pocket, because he's a Crip. He could walk around all day and nobody would want to look him in the eyes." The tale picked up pace.

"I have this other friend, big fucking swastika right here." Jason slapped the spot on his bare chest, three times.

"We went to the beach in LA. He had his shirt off, he's a big guy." He knotted his shoulders to emphasize, looking like someone pushing a wheelbarrow.

"People would come up to him, ask him about it, make conversation. He talked to them, he's actually a nice guy. But it goes to show you, in this country, people are more afraid of a black gangbanger than a white guy with a fucking swastika tattooed on his chest."

A combination of driving through New Jersey, half-remembered dreams and frantic words scrawled in a notebook at 4 a.m. (Part One)

2010-07-01T12:32:00.003-04:00

I awoke this morning stuck between sky and earth. As I began to squirm free, I realized I must have rolled over in my sleep and wedged myself into the horizon. For a moment, I stopped struggling and as I considered whether to go back to sleep I took a moment to appreciate the intimacy of the situation. My bed had been empty for some months, and the closeness of the eternal, inscrutable blue above me was comforting, though my back itched from the dirt. Half-imagined fantasies, like time-lapse videos of flowers, blossomed and withered in my sleep-drugged consciousness.

Several hours later I woke again. I was still ensconced, but the cool serenity of summer's dawn had given way to imperious noon: a bone-bleaching Sun had ascended to its throne and forbade a return to sleep. Licking parched lips, I propped myself onto my elbows and started to shimmy free. Scraping my knee against a sharp rock on the ground, I managed to escape, and set off in search of a cup of water.

Descending into a bowl-shaped valley, I saw a sprawling industrial town. Heralds of acrid smoke, burning plastic, rushed up the hillside to greet me. Great steam towers like ram's horns boring vertically into the earth emitted a drone which reverberated mightily throughout the town. Cathedral steeples in the distance roiled in the heat of the factories, like a reflection in dirty water. The whole scene was like an overexposed photograph, I could feel the dirt under my fingernails as I held it in my hands.

The American Museum of Natural History

2010-06-27T16:15:00.002-04:00

Hunted
Shot
Bled
Disemboweled
Stuffed
Preserved
Put on display
With the descriptor:
"Savage."

Added A New Page

2010-05-17T12:56:00.002-04:00

Just selected quotes from things I've read that I enjoy.

No Evil Part 2

2010-05-12T23:16:00.002-04:00

Part 1

Stepping inside the tent, Andrei has the sensation of crawling inside an enormous kaleidoscope. Glittering butterfly-acrobats drift to and fro carrying colorful streamers; throngs of disfigured mortals rummage through gilded oaken chests like fevered hallucinations. Exotic monsters from alien shores mingle with man and man-beast alike in a spectacle of glamored biology.

"Theo told me you've got a bone to pick with Popa," said a startlingly corpulent mustachioed man wearing muddy slacks, suspenders but no shirt. Andrei had not noticed him a moment earlier. "Makes no difference to me, long as you've got the money. Better hand it over now, too, bub. Once Popa gets a hand on you you'll be out like that deadbeat Zoltan."

That deadbeat Zoltan rests blissfully, enjoying one of the long periods of heedless tranquility which are so frequent in his life. From an early age, Zoltan learned to live in brief sprints, interspersed with heroic naps. Growing up in the Ukraine he spent most of his time searching for comfortable places in which to lie down and rest, a difficult task in the small wooden farmhouse shared with his mother, grandfather, four brothers, two sisters, and six cousins. He developed a virtuosic ability to wake at a moment's notice: to bolt to his feet and grab a broom in feigned obeisance to his mother's shrieking orders or evade a salvo of rotting oranges launched by rivalrous kin. So exhausting are these snap reflexes that Zoltan spends almost all of his unsupervised time conserving energy with sloth-like efficiency.

Which is how he has spent the better part of this particular warm summer morning, snoring behind a stack of powder kegs in full costume, leather goggles strapped over his eyes. Zoltan the Human Cannonball is primed for action.

Popa is bored. And hungry. Hungry, warm in tent. Itchy-sticky.

"Sir I must say I am glad for the challenge," Andrei said confidently as he removed his hat. "Where is the unfortunate creature?"

"I'm looking at him. Waheee!" The fat man laughs like a donkey whines. "But if you're meanin' the monkey, he's back in wardrobe, getting ready. Wa-waheee!"

The jeers are like waves crashing against stalwart Andrei's mountainous ego. For he is not a fool. He knows well that the arm of human ingenuity is longer than the arm of bestial violence.

Andrei traces his intellectual lineage back to the great minds of the Enlightenment: Descartes and Locke. A train of thought which began with those geniuses who dared to claim, "God wants us to think" continued to the Galapagos where Darwin dared to say, "God weeds out the unfit" and made its final stop, by Andrei's reckoning, in the steam engines which carried him across the Atlantic to the steel mill in Pennsylvania where every day he goes to pray, in his own fashion, to the God-given human intellect which makes Man master of the elements.

Andrei melts and molds steel into the implements of ascendancy. His sweat and labor is a testament to God and to Mankind that he is fit; that of the natural world, his race is exalted. Sometimes Andrei offers this testament in other ways as well. At 19 he became a celebrity in his village for killing a wolf. The people of the town wanted the wolf dead because it had been taking goats in the night. Andrei wanted it dead to prove a point.

No Evil, Part 1

2010-05-05T20:56:00.002-04:00

Eyes with too much white in them stare out from under a vast brow, on which brown tufts of hair grow like a treeline on a frozen mountain. Not a handsome man but he has a strong back and a ready will. No enemies and few friends. He's learned to eat sour lemons. Not unhappy but never satisfied, he is a tired soul who wakes before dawn without knowing why.

Andrei Ilyko is his name, and he stands under a noontime sun in conversation with a dwarf. The dwarf lounges in a tiny chair made of tin, while a toucan perched on his shoulder pecks at almonds balanced around the brim of his dusty top hat.

"What's your problem, fella?" implores the dwarf. "I can't get you. You got an education, I can tell by the way you talk. You got a good job, too, down there at the steel mill. I bet you got an old lady sweet as mince pie waiting for ya in a house with apple trees in the backyard. Now what in the hell do you want to go and fight that monkey for? Why do you want to risk your life? He's just gonna clobber ya."

A cool breeze blows a cowlick free of the top of Andrei's carefully coiffed scalp.

"The beast's very presence is an insult. It is an aberration, an anachronism. His odor and his appearance offend me."

"Why? What did he ever do to you?"

Nostrils flaring, "If you have to ask, sir, then you would not understand even if the skies were to open and the Almighty himself descend to inscribe my sentiments in clay tablets," cheeks flushing, "with lightning bolts cast from his fingertips! If you'll excuse me."

Andrei pulls his coat in around him and strides past the miffed dwarf, dropping a nickel in his lap. As he parts the gaudy green and yellow flaps of the main circus tent, the dwarf makes this remark to the toucan:

"He's nuttier than a fruitcake."

But through the wind Andrei hears,

"Reminds me of Don Quixote."

and his heart is bolstered by the compliment.

A Dance You Should Know When The Lights Are Down Low

2010-04-17T10:44:00.001-04:00

Today I walked for 10 minutes under a noontime sun thinking Nothing. My life flash photography; each moment.

Once I saw a toilet with this inscription around the seat:

"NO SHIT. NO PISS."

Thoughts cast to the ground like a bucket full of child's toys. The pornographic odor of too many blossoming flowers in too little space.

Later with cigarettes and wine we take turns telling dark secrets but I can't think of any. Singing along without knowing any of the words.

Atop a Mossy Rock in Unfamiliar Wilderness

2010-04-10T14:28:00.001-04:00

Thinking quickly I write before it is too dark; even now the tip of my pen vanishes into infinity and the words appear on the page through sheer force of imagination. A cardinal on her polyester sweater, jeans hugging tiny legs like bent twigs ready to snap. The single scarlet phantom of a tree on a hillside painted dead brown. It is too dark. I follow the memory of my own profane passing back to my bicycle's hiding spot.

The moon's magical 'cause it's the sun we can look at without going blind.

The Canary and the Coal Miner

2010-04-08T00:08:00.002-04:00

(Feature piece written for the Athens News Monday)

As we stepped off the bus the sun was at our backs; we encountered a sea of squinting eyes.

"What are they doing here?" the eyes asked silently. "Why can't they mind their own business?"

It was a valid question. I had spent the last two and a half hours pondering the answer, as myself and roughly a dozen other members of the Sierra Club rode a Greyhound from Athens to St. Clairsville, in Belmont County. Our goal: convince the EPA at a public hearing to deny the Ohio Valley Coal Company (OVCC) a permit to build a new coal slurry pond for its two mines in that area.

Some background: The two mines, Powhatan No. 6 in Belmont County and Century in Monroe County, produce 60 percent of the state's coal. They employ 1,300 workers locally and 10 times that number indirectly. If the company's permit is denied, the head of the corporation which owns the mine, Murray Energy, has stated he will close both mines.

Which explains the cold reception. But there were serious issues with the proposed expansion, I earnestly told myself. Coal slurry, a byproduct from the washing process of coal extraction, is a notoriously toxic substance and has been known to seep into groundwater or spill into local drinking water. One may recall the Buffalo Creek Disaster of 1972 in Logan County, W.Va, in which a slurry spill left 125 dead and 1,100 injured out of a population of 5,000.

The most recent spill at the OVCC mines occurred in 2008 and blackened 10 miles of Captina Creek. Before that there was one in 2005. So accidents are not a remote possibility.

The line of people waiting to speak their mind on the issue stretched out the door of the James Carnes Center and down the road. Judging from the looks we were getting, around 90 percent of them were coal miners, forced to choose between their jobs and water quality.

"Coal Miners Never Die, They Just Keep Digging Their Graves Deeper" read the backs of the shirts of the broad-shouldered men ahead of us.

"It gets colder the closer we get to the door," commented one of my companions, and I knew what she meant as we shuffled past metal detectors into the main auditorium.

Sitting near the front, I took a moment to survey the audience. Businessmen with folded legs and workers with folded arms wore similar stern expressions as we waited for the fireworks to start. I noticed one man in an expensive-looking suit staring at me with a look of exasperation.

"When will you learn?" he seemed to be asking.

Eventually four men seated themselves on the stage in front of us, two representing the Ohio EPA and two the Army Corps of Engineers. Jed Thorp of the former group was the first to take the mic. A squeaky voice asked the attendees in the back row if they could hear him.

"Passions run high on both sides of this issue," he observed. "Everybody here has a right to be heard."

After a fairly dry description of the issue, the panel heard questions from the audience, which would not be recorded as public comments. The first question regarded the 2008 spill.

"We don't have that information here tonight," Thorp weakly explained.

One person misunderstood the meeting format and took the opportunity to make a comment in defense of the mines.

"I dirty more streams fishing than these coal companies do."

"What's he fishing with?" I heard someone whisper behind me.

Lights flicked on as the sun sank beneath the horizon ominously: it was time for public comment, the reason we were all there.

For the next two hours a surprisingly diverse procession of concerns were heard.

The businessman I noticed earlier was the first to step up. Revealing himself to be John R. Forrelli, vice president of Engineering and Planning for Murray Energy, he carefully explained his company's commitment to improving the Captina's water quality, though there was "no cost-effective alternative" to the plan being debated.

The loudest response from the audience was earned by John Conway, a resident of Belmont County "for about 100 years."

"I want to point to an endangered species." He gestured dramatically toward those seated behind him. "These coal miners."

Sierra Club representative Nachy Kanfer acknowledged that coal keeps the lights on, but stressed that it wouldn't always be so. "We call on the governor to start working on clean energy jobs in coal country."

When my turn came I didn't use half of my allotted three minutes. My heart pounding in my ears, I tried to argue that miners didn't have to choose between their jobs and the environment, that the company could dispose of the slurry in safer ways. My words sounded more like pleas than promises.

Fellow OU student Stephen Swabek spoke more eloquently about the unsustainable nature of coal power. "In 25, 35 years, when it's all gone, what's going to happen here?"

Perhaps the most poignant comment was offered by a young woman in a pink tee-shirt which read "Wife of a Coal Miner."

"No one is here to say, 'if the coal mine shuts down, we're here for you.'"

By the time the last comment was heard there was a distinctly different atmosphere in the room. Tensions had eased, while the worry remained like a sore thumb. Panelists lauded the audience for their civility and attentiveness.

Col. Michael Crall of the Army Corps called it "a testament to the character of the citizens of Belmont County." The miner's slogan came to mind.

Looking up at a clear starry sky as we filed out of the Center, the words that resounded in my ears more than any other were those offered by an elderly miner, Christoper Rogers, near the hearing's close:

Whatever you decide, he said, "Be smart. Be smart and do it right."

Patty Revere Pt. 7

2010-03-14T14:27:00.004-04:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Alex barely makes it to the door handle. The tall man is on him with the righteous zeal of someone whose privileges are endangered.

Patty screams for no reason she can articulate.

A cheetah and a man do battle before her. The man is armed with technology but the cheetah is wild: scratching, biting, hissing.

The man prevails. Patty remains at her door, wailing like a kettle.

Alex spits and cries from the chemicals in his eyes. The tall man rises to his feet, his quarry subdued and restrained. He lingers there, his legs astride the beast.

"Ma'am, I'm going to ask you to calm down. Please calm down ma'am."

Patty will not calm down. She watches the tall man standing over her cat, sees the scratches on his arms and face from the recent struggle. Alex is lying on his side sobbing, pulling his knees towards his chin with his hands still cuffed behind his back.

Patty can not hear the tall man because she is no longer standing on her front porch. She is standing in the woods with her father. At her father's feet is a bleeding doe, in his hands a rifle. The doe lies on its back in a perfectly inert state, its haunches splayed open frankly, the tendons in its legs having lost their ability to constrict.

Alex is lifted rudely to his feet. Blinded, he's led to the special car. The tall man pushes his head down.

With a large knife Jay begins to slash the doe near its hind legs. Sticking his fingers into the gashes he tugs and like an onion the beast loses its skin. Underneath it is red and purple. Patty screams and she will not calm down. Dead leaves crumble under her boots as she turns and runs. Jay calls after her and she hears him but she will not respond.

The tall man is about to turn to tell Patty that if she doesn't calm down, he'll have to put her in his car too. He doesn't get the chance. The impact in his lower back makes his arms flail out at his sides and his knees buckle. As he falls his forehead slams into the car in the same spot where Alex's would have if he hadn't pushed it down.

Alex makes a yipping noise more reminiscent of a hyena than a cat. Blinking, he rolls out of the special car and joins the rag doll on the ground. Patty has stopped screaming, her massive chest heaving. She is slowly coming out of the woods.

After frantically fidgeting with the keys attached to the tall man's shiny belt, Alex rises to his feet, his hands unbound. He runs to the front of the car and jumps in, gesturing wildly to his friend Patty, who, after hesitating for only a moment, steps over the tall man and into the passenger's seat.

The inside of the car is clean and smells like nothing. Alex smiles at Patty and brings the car humming to life. He leans over to press a button in the center console. Patty gasps and then giggles as the car lights up and plays a song. Alex drums his fingers on the steering wheel and squints into the sun.

END

Patty Revere Pt. 6

2010-02-23T00:58:00.004-05:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

A tall man with a shiny belt is driving a car. The car is painted in special colors and gives him special powers. The radio is playing. It's a commercial for a hardware store.

"Young's Hardware, where you can find just what you'd expect to find at a hardware store."

The tall man's fingers drum on the steering wheel. Signaling, he turns left and squints into the sun.

He likes this commercial. He also likes the hardware store. He's met the owner of the hardware store, and he likes him.

The tall man drives his special car through the town all day, and he looks at the houses and the people who live in them and he thinks, "This is alright."

The tall man is very dangerous.

A crackling noise announces the arrival of a coded message on his radio. He interprets the message and presses a button on the center console. Incredible lights and a very loud noise erupt from the special car as it accelerates through traffic.

Moments later, the shiny car rolls into an empty space in front of Patty Revere's squat aluminum-sided house. The sunlight reflects off its hood fiercely, making it glow like a tanning bed.

The tall man approaches the yellow door. He knocks.

Then again.

"Pittsburgh police! Open up!"

The paint on the door is fading. The tall man waits.

The noise of latches coming undone is the same noise vermin make when they've infiltrated the walls of a house, scurrying and scratching. The door opens and reveals Patty looming tall in her blue nightshirt.

"Ma'am we've had calls about a man trying to force entry into your neighbors' house. White, five foot nine, blond hair. A cut on his forehead."

He ended the sentence by bending the pitch of his voice upward, as if he were asking a question. But it wasn't a question. Patty was confused.

"Nothing to worry about, we're acquainted with the perp, just a local pill-popper. Someone thought they saw him on your front doorstep."

Patty continues to stare implacably at the tall man. His words are complete nonsense to her. But she lets him prattle on because she's struck by the way his clothes are so clean and crisp. His belt is very shiny in the noontime sun.

A cheetah is pressed against the aluminum siding of Patty's home. His heart pounds blood through his head like someone was boxing his ears. He is staring at the special car.

Alex sees himself in the car, feels his foot against the gas pedal. He imagines drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and squinting into the sun. His vehicle rolling down wide suburban thoroughfares and potholed city streets. Through the window he sees the citizens of Pittsburgh wave at him and smile. They wave out of respect and smile because they admire him.

Alex waves back and as he does he can feel the starched epaulet of his shirt rub against his shoulder. Looking down he sees he is wearing the uniform of the tall man, shiny belt and all.

He presses a button on the center console and the car becomes a howling banshee, flashing its multicolored lights like a toy. Other cars submissively drop out of view as he accelerates onward, faster, faster, exploding fuel in his heart and a stampede in his gas tank.

Blue Skies Ahead

2010-02-20T16:55:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday afternoon I climbed onto my roof and looked at the ivory sky and thought, "White is the worst color a sky could have. Even grey is better than white because it has shade, character. White is the absence of character. It's a heedless halogen light fixture over the world that lays bare all the flaws, all the flat listlessness. I miss the blue sky."

It's not until Friday evening with 200 miles of highway under my wheels and 300 more until I reach Chicago that I get to see it. I-70 curves west towards the coming night, and a timid Sun casts furtive glances at me from behind a veil made of violet-orange clouds. The license plate on the car ahead of me reads, "CUBS GO."

Lonely days are gone, I'm'a going home. Baby just wrote me a letter.

Dangerous Lifestyles

2010-01-31T20:19:00.001-05:00

(Sorry for the long post. A short story.)

Lawrence stoically waits out a frigid gust, staring east down Granville Avenue towards the lake. He shifts his weight and feels the foot-warmer packets in his boots squish between his toes and he's reminded of the way the mud in the delta of the Mekong felt between his toes as he stood watch that night.

His company, the 83rd Airborne Division, "The Hirsute Eagles," had made camp under the jungle canopy and it was up to him, First Sergeant Lawrence, to watch for Charlie as they slept. A crunching sound in the dark; there it is again. VC boot? Or just the sound of some other poor creature getting his in this god-forsaken wilderness? A squawk and the noise of futilely flapping wings answers Lawrence's question. Suddenly, to his right, headlights!

Headlights? Lawrence is close enough to the oncoming Xterra to read the lips of its irate driver ("Motherfucker get out the street!") before he jumps out of the way. Picking himself up, he does his best to ignore the blaring car horns, the disparaging gazes, the tsk-tsks and head-shakes. Like a soldier at attention, he stands on the white painted dash line between two lanes of heedless westward Chicago traffic, and holds his cardboard in front of him."Vietnam Vet PLEASE HELP God bless you" reads his signal flare made out in Sharpie.

He hopes and prays for an airlift. Any second now a helo will emerge from that murky horizon over Lake Michigan: the cascading shades of blue where water meets sky will part like a theater curtain and Lieutenant Gumble will appear, grinning that stupid Gumble grin of his and riding that bird for all she's worth to come rescue his comrade-in-arms. Lawrence can see the eagle painted on the side of it, the symbol of the 83rd Airborne, a diving hirsute eagle: its proud beak pointing towards the earth, manly Robert Redford-like auburn hair flowing in the wind.

Traffic changes and Lawrence pivots. His back to the lake, he surveys the perimeter. West-southwest is the CVS where he buys liquor and shoplifts foot-warmer packets. West-northwest, the picture framing shop Lawrence has never had occasion to enter. Someone is crossing the street over there, but they don't have the light.

Upon closer examination, Lawrence realizes they aren't actually crossing at all. A dark figure, bundled in work wear and a black beanie, stands in the intersection of Broadway and Granville during evening rush hour, in the middle of January. Who else occupies this no-man's land? Who would risk life and limb so recklessly, but another soul with nothing left to lose?

The light turns and with the same mechanical fluidity so does Lawrence. His soldier's training doesn't allow him to peek at the mysterious person though it's all he can think of. As soon as the ranks of headlights shining in his face begin to slow he spins around, and finds himself almost face to face with a beautiful young woman.

She pulls up the collar on her coat and walks faster through the crosswalk, allowing Lawrence to see the short, plump lady in hunter camo behind her, gathering her surveyor's equipment and walking in his direction. Pretty Woman, walk my way, thinks Lawrence, and he forgets to lower his sign as she approaches with a rosy-cheeked smile on her face and matronly crow's feet around her eyes.

"Helluva cold one, ain't it?" she asks flirtatiously.

Lawrence's chapped lips crack in several places as he returns her schoolgirl grin.

"No worse than it's been," says a voice scorched by cheap cigarettes and lonely nights. "Don't you have kind of a dangerous job?" he asks, nodding at her bag full of calibrating devices.

"Someone's got to do it," she laughs, and reaching into her pocket, procures 55 cents in nickels, dimes and pennies. As she hands it to Lawrence, their fingers linger, wool momentarily caressing wool.

"Hey, uh, listen," says Lawrence lamely. Pretty Woman bats her eyelashes innocently.

"It is getting cold out here. How about we get some coffee at the Dunkin' down the street?"

Pretty Woman glances away, looks at her toes.

Thinking quickly, "Or Beam is seven bucks a handle at that CVS."

"Now you're speaking my language, stranger," says Pretty Woman with a twang of Appalachia in her voice.

Now Lawrence watches dawn start to creep across the sky as the two lounge underneath a dewy sleeping bag in the alley behind CVS, basking in the lingering warmth of liquor and each others' passion. He can tell by her breathing that his companion is awake also, only keeping her eyes closed to shut out the harsh rays.

"There's something I'd like to tell you, just so's were on the same page here."

"Mrhrm?"

"I've never been to Vietnam. I never even served in the military."

Pretty Woman didn't open her eyes, just pushed her face into Lawrence's ribs to stifle her giggling.

"Are you making fun of me?"

Still giggling, she only points to the black duffel bag at her feet. Puzzled, Lawrence reaches for it and pulls open the zipper. Then he starts to giggle as well.

A tough job but someone's got to do it. The surveyor's equipment that he thought he had seen, but of course it was dark and he only assumed that was her job. Empty aluminum cans, a greasy brush with most of its tines missing, broken Fisher-Price toys and junk food wrappers spill out of her bag.

Lawrence lays back, content in his lover's arms, and closes his eyes. There they remain as the morning rush crescendos around them, two soldiers making camp in no-man's land.

Coffee

2010-01-22T19:27:00.004-05:00

Hours I spent standing at the end of a pier on Lake Michigan. I set my back against a concrete wall so that I was invisible to the humans on the shore, and stared out straight ahead so that all I could see was blue horizon. Waves and clouds were perpetually unfurling toward me but never quite reaching. I felt like I could stand there forever, weathering the frigid winds like a carved face on a totem pole.

At the base of the wall behind me was srawled this message:

"you can put out the fire that started at the but you can't put out leaves when they burn in autumn"

I realized that the numbness in my toes had crept up the length of my legs. I decided to walk.

"Do you have coffee?"

"Yes."

Her simple response meant so much more to me than she could know. To her I was just another New Year's day hangover. To me she was my first reconnection with the community of humans in some 36 hours.

The simple phenomenon of being able to slap my lips, tongue, and teeth together, while exhaling, in a way so as to perfectly communicate my desire for a very specific object. A verbal magic trick, like pulling a dime from behind her ear.

She arrived at my table and she served me the object. I could see the coffee; my eyes vouched for its existence. My nose was useless, the odor of the cup cast adrift on a background sea of scent: an ebb and flow of eggs, beans, sweat, pork, farts, halitosis; pumped through the cramped diner with every breath of its patrons, like a galley full of steadily rowing slaves.

I picked up the cup and I felt its warmth radiate through Styrofoam and skin and hair and tissue and it warmed my bones.

I tried to thank her but I couldn't express it. So I drank my cup and when it was empty I went up to the counter and asked quietly, humbly, for another cup of coffee.

"What?"

Patty Revere Pt. 5

2010-01-16T12:54:00.004-05:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Patty thinks first of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, but then she thinks of Rebecca, the woman who stops by to visit Patty every once in a while, and to bring her a plastic CVS bag. Inside the CVS bag are orange tubes with words written on the side, but Patty can't read, so she has to remember exactly what Rebecca tells her.

"This is medicine for you Patty. It make you feel better so remember to take them, okay? Is okay? You take your medicine Patty?" Rebecca would say.

Rebecca is very funny. The way she talks is funny, like the people on Channel 4 but slower and using words Patty can understand. The way she is so small but moves so fast around Patty's apartment, nimbly stepping over mounds of dirty laundry and VHS tapes, is funny. Patty can never do anything but nod when Rebecca talks to her because if she opens her mouth she knows she'll laugh and she doesn't want to hurt Rebecca's feelings. In the winter Rebecca wears a lime green coat and this is Patty's favorite, because with it on she looks just like one of those tiny green bugs, the kind you forget about until one day you look at a rock very closely and you see one scurrying across the surface.

"You can have some of my medicine. Rebecca tells me I have to take it to feel better, but she's just a silly little bug."

Laboriously, wheezing, Patty rises from her seat. The CVS bag is stashed under the bathroom sink, along with many others full of orange tubes from other visits.

"Rebecca's just a silly little bug. You can have all my medicine. I don't need any."

Alex claws through the bags, their contents spilling out at Patty's feet like the entrails of a fresh kill. Patty begins to laugh.

Alex looks up momentarily, the expired Prolixin capsules he was studying momentarily forgotten. Patty's laugh is harsh and raspy and doesn't decrescendo the way most people's laughs do, but instead repeats itself in a loop, like a broken laugh track. He pops a handful of multicolored pills into his mouth like they were Skittles. He starts to laugh too.

-----

The Magic Bullet sits in the middle of a long marble counter top. Myriad glass bowls, each filled with a measured amount of ingredient, form constellations around it.

Patty and Alex sit at rapt attention as one by one eggs, sugar and cream cheese are poured into the device and subsequently pulverized. An ecstatic young woman in a salmon-colored cardigan pours the homogenized substance into a pie plate, a wan moon set among the stars.

Patty leans forward to flick an inch of ash off her cigarette onto the carpet and it vanishes immediately, whisked away to an invisible realm of forgotten detritus; kept company by gum wrappers and lint. Alex is cleaning himself in the manner of a cat, pharmacopoeia vibrating through his veins like a subway train on a loose track.

The camera cuts to an old woman. Upon seeing a cheesecake made in just five minutes, she raises her eyebrows disapprovingly.

Patty hears it first. "Ooh, another cat come to visit?"

Alex hears the second knock. "Pittsburgh police! Open up!"

Deer may freeze in headlights but not cheetahs. Alex is halfway to the back door when Patty starts to unlock the front.

Patty Revere Pt. 4

2010-01-15T18:28:00.003-05:00

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Patty has a clock. It stopped ticking at 3:27 p.m. years ago and she never took it off the wall. It still hangs over her kitchen sink and now she misses its steady rhythm for the way it seemed to fill the silence.

Silence is an uncomfortable rarity in Patty's life, but she felt she should turn the TV off when entertaining a guest. When there is silence just before Final Jeopardy, music starts playing to pass the time.

Alex looks across the small, sticky aluminum table at his hostess. Before him is a fruity-smelling bowl of creamer. His stomach growls and he thinks that perhaps he is hungry. Patty starts singing.

The cheetah, invited into the den of the antelope, is momentarily paralyzed with confusion.

Alex is tempted but wary. The singing only serves to put him more on edge.

Abruptly the singing stops.

"Are you hurt?" asks Patty.

The bowl of spoiled creamer is a pale pink hue. Another drop of red falls in as Alex looks down. The scab on his forehead is pinched between two fingers in his right hand. He hadn't noticed.

"Do you have medicine?" asks Alex.

Patty Revere Pt. 3

2009-12-19T21:03:00.003-05:00

Part 1
Part 2

Patty doesn't understand. There is a cat at her door, scratching to be let in. It must smell the spilled creamer, or the empty cans of meat in the garbage. This has happened before, and Patty likes to let the cat in. She doesn't mind if it makes a mess out of her garbage or pukes the rotten meat on her sofa. But the cat has never rung her doorbell before.

Patty's vocal chords, unused to the exercise, slap together and issue a trembling call through the door.

"Who is it?"

"Alex."

Alex rubs his fingers frantically on his thigh. He looks down but the paint is still there. He hadn't thought this far ahead. What will he do if she doesn't open the door?

There is a long pause. Cars honk in the street behind him. He feels like he's standing on the bank of a river.

He hears Patty inhale through the door.

"I thought you were a cat."

Without thinking

"I am a cat!"

A pause. Patty inhales and clears her throat.

"May I come in?"

Both of them are surprised when Patty opens the door.

Patty Revere Pt. 2

2009-12-18T14:36:00.003-05:00

Part 1

Alex looks blankly at the peeling yellow paint on the door in front of him, and he thinks about what it would be like to run his finger down it.

When he was a boy he knocked on his neighbors' doors selling candies to raise funds for his school.

Somewhere in Africa a cheetah crouches unseen in a field of tall grass.

Alex scratches at a scab above his brow. Don't pick the scab.

If you pick the scab before it's healed you'll have a big nasty scar.

The cheetah smells the wind and scans the horizon.

Alex rings the doorbell again. Then he runs his finger in a long horizontal stroke across the width of the door. He looks at his hand and there are flecks of yellow. Rubbing his fingers together doesn't seem to help much. Transfixed, he picks at a hanging strip of paint. It peels off the wood like dead skin from a sun-burnt back.

Patty Revere Pt. 1

2009-12-11T18:09:00.002-05:00

(Trying my hand at fiction. First installment below.)

Patty empties her ashtray into the coffee pot to give it some flavor. One part coffee to one part sour Irish Creamer; Patty knows it's good till the last drop. She imagines herself in the Folgers commercial, as the sprightly ballet dancer who awakes looking radiant in a pink bathrobe to prepare her morning joe. Patty sports a moth-eaten baby blue nightshirt, draped across her large frame like a tarp over a swimming pool. After taking the first sip of her coffee, Patty sighs with relief like the dancer. Unlike the dancer she's barely able to get a breath out without four or five wet coughs. Hacking a wad of phlegm into the sink, Patty retires to the sofa in front of the TV to smoke three Newports before the last segment of "The View" has ended.

45-year-old Patty Revere doesn't leave her north side Pittsburgh one-bedroom very often. She never feels the need to. She's more comfortable watching the people on Full House or Family Matters. Nothing much seems to happen outside in those programs; if it does it's usually a special episode and seeing it disturbs Patty. When she was a child her father watched a show with her on the public access channel. Unlike her usual programs, it took place completely outdoors. The ground was made of dust and Jay told her it was the beach,

"Bleach?"

"No, Patty. Beach."

and that you could walk on it for hours and not reach the end. Patty thought about all the debris that fell off her rugs when she shook them off, all the dust she'd swept out her back door. All of it had to go someplace. Maybe that's where beaches come from. All the dust bunnies and rug debris of the world combined to create a vast tan landscape, where people could walk all day.

A strange-looking red bug appeared, crawling on the dusty tundra. An invisible man called it a "hermit crab."

"Decapod crustaceans of the superfamily Paguroidea fashion their own habitats in a novel way.

'One beast's trash is another's treasure for the hermit crab: a discarded sea shell makes for a cozy home."

Patty awakes with a start when the cherry at the end of her cigarette falls on her thigh. She yelps and flicks it into the shag rug at her feet. The pain helps bring her out of the thick snooze brought on by too much spoiled milkfat. The doorbell rings and Patty realizes with a bolt of fear that it is the second time.

Get Everyone In Here Right Now

2009-12-03T21:12:00.001-05:00

The neat basement den of a prosperous suburban family. They've got all the home theater equipment, all the fine wood furniture. The XBOX and the PS3: look out. I'm worried I'll put my drink down somewhere I'm not supposed to, so I don't ask for a drink. A vast white carpet like fresh snow and it's strangely quiet, even with the couple dozen people milling around enjoying the Pabst and pixels.

John wears a stocking cap and flannel and reminds me of a few other acne-plagued scenesters I knew in high school. He's drunk and I can tell he's very sad by the way he earnestly pursues trivial conversation. Not sad like the scenesters I knew in high school, but a more acute misery; a fresh wound.

Later on, a storage locker. Six of us: Anna (whom I'd met the night before and was quickly losing interest in), Sim and Bridgette (the attractive couple with careful outfits), John, and Jason, whose mom was blissfully unaware her son was inviting friends to hot-box her storage locker. Before we light the bowl, John mentions someone named Warren---apparently he was always smoking, whether it be weed or cigarettes.

We need to smoke this bowl for Warren, he says.

We need to get everyone in here right now, says Jason.

20 more strangers, all of them friends, makes it abundantly clear that I'm the odd one out. Three pipes are passing around the room, filling the tense air with smoke like a censer carried around the pews. Sniffles, sobs. John is hugging Jason. It's only now that I realize that Warren passed away a few days earlier. I'm stoned and I'm in the suburbs and I want to be sincere but more than anything I'm just uncomfortable.

So I numbly sit and watch the video games and ponder the excruciation of my situation until it's okay to leave. I do some more pondering on the drive back to Chicago and when I go to bed I'm grateful. Happy Thanksgiving.

Yeah, I know, but it might be fun.

2009-10-13T02:34:00.003-04:00

I feel a pall of loneliness radiate somewhere behind my eyes. Like a kid's fiberoptic wand at the fireworks show. But I have met this foe before and prevailed. I have allies. I have weed, and coffee. I have books and magazines. I have a laptop replete with videos, music and pornography to distract me. I have Tony Soprano and I have Diana Ross. And I have this. Writing this, here.

This morning I took Concerta for the second time in my life. I took two pills two hours before my Communication Law test.

Oncology Encyclopedia Online says: "Patients should not take two pills at the same time."

Essentially it negated my need for coffee throughout the day: It's more than 12 hours later and I still feel like I drank a pot. I think tomorrow I will take three.

I pondered on how my views on health have changed. Somewhere along the line I decided to stop worrying so much about which chemicals enter my temple. I found a pack of Marlboros at work today and took it. On my way home, my bike got a flat. I smoked two as I walked the remaining distance. I wanted to do something bad for me. Something I normally wouldn't have allowed myself.

Then after I finished them a car rode up and its passenger called me a motherfucker. I replied in same, but my outstretched finger-salute soon became a defensive guard as I was riddled with gas-propelled plastic pellets. I must have looked quite the fool chasing them on foot, my bike held aloft, shouting. They looked as if they were going to stop, and I had to reflect for a moment on what I would actually do if they came out. But no, the driver chose to be the bigger man.

The amphetamine, adrenaline, testosterone, caffeine, nicotine---take your pick, it was rushing through my veins and I released some of it when I saw a car by the side of the road. It's been parked in front of a body shop down the street from my apartment for weeks. An old blue sedan, or rather the carcass of one. Tires flat, interior gutted, engine removed, tape deck liberated. Stenciled along the side in pink block letters:

YEAH I KNOW BUT ... IT MIGHT BE FUN

A glance to my surroundings, and the U-lock comes off the handlebars. I turn to protect my face as I shatter the windshield. Side window. Deep dent in the trunk. Incredible, the ease with which merry destruction is wrought. I make a sound like a giant hole puncher and then crushed ice.

I'm bitter. Misanthropic Monday. I'm in control. I cleaned dishes, took out the trash. Made some rice and ate it, brewed some tea and drank it. I took a shit and I read a column in the Athens News called "The View from Mudsock Heights." Generally this prickly old dude champions the small-town, rural virtue of southeastern Ohio. This week Dennis E. Powell tears apart a "cosmopolitan" straw man from New York who asks Mr. Powell why he likes living in a small town.

Powell contends that what makes small towns great, what really makes them superior, is neighborly love. A strong community rises up to seal the widening gaps in public infrastructure. He cites the hypothetical of a flat tire. In Athens, "a half dozen people would stop and ask if I need help." In New York, they'd just hurl profanities at you. Maybe they'd shoot you with an Airsoft gun.

Fuck you, Dennis Powell. I've never encountered a place as alienating and hostile in all of big-city Chicago. Blame the college students if you want; I do.

Hope I did alright on my Law exam.

8 OU Students Arrested at G-20 Protest

2009-10-02T00:59:00.002-04:00

The following is a piece I wrote for the Athens News about some crazy shit I was a part of in Pittsburgh last weekend. It's not comprehensive by a long shot, and it's edited for length. In the future I'll post something that articulates my thoughts a little better.

Silence fell among the paddywagon occupants as a uniformed figure came into view through the metal grate at the rear.

"How does it feel to be a terrorist? Y'all have no rights now."

The "terrorists" had moments earlier been chanting slogans at a rally on the University of Pittsburgh campus. They were gassed, pepper-sprayed, choked and beaten as a result of their efforts.

I shifted uncomfortably in the plastic zip-ties wound around my wrists and thought of the comfort I had enjoyed only a few hours earlier. After a march to Pittsburgh's City County Building, myself and nine other OU students were eating dinner in the city's Oakland area. We decided to attend one last rally before we headed home.

We arrived 15 minutes before the rally was scheduled to begin, but from the law enforcement assembled you would have thought we missed the party. SWAT, National Guard, and K-9 units all served as window dressing to a small army of police clad in riot gear. There were hundreds of these already standing shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter of the area, and it was all I could do to watch in awe as busload upon busload arrived to thicken the ranks. As I surveyed the scattered clumps of protesters---many of them undoubtedly U of Pitt students out to witness the spectacle taking place on their front lawn---I found it impossible to understand what warranted a show of force that would have made bin Laden wet his pants. Authority outnumbered dissent 2-to-1.

We want you to know that this is a peaceful protest, said a fellow protester with a megaphone. I want you to know that I respect each and every one of you.

He got about as much response as if the wall he was talking to was made of bricks and not police.

Minutes later a much louder, amplified voice boomed across the crowd.

"By order of the city of Pittsburgh chief police, I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly."

A wave of panic rippled through the masses as the wall of police began to advance, seemingly from all sides at once.

"Move back!" they thundered, nightsticks in hand.

The crowd thinned as it was harried through a gap in the police line. The bold remainder found themselves in the middle of an adjacent street. Hemmed in on three sides by what looked like a force mobilized for war, our backs were pushed against a nearby park.

"We! The people! Have the right to assemble!" chanted the four dozen-strong unlawful gathering.

The stoic ranks began to close in, forcing us to jump over a row of hedges into the park. As we left the streetlights behind and found ourselves in darkness, the atmosphere quickly changed from one of caution to fear.

People scattered in all directions. The police had entered the park. They themselves marched with purpose, but in as many directions as the fleeing protesters. It was the kindergarten playground again; a big game of cops and robbers, but with higher stakes.

My friends and I, in an effort to stick together, eventually found ourselves trapped. A solid perimeter of stony-faced officers wordlessly encircled us. Fear melted into despair in some and impotent rage in others.

"We want to leave," said one OU student choking back tears. "Tell us where you want us to go!"

Another was on the phone with her father, breathlessly describing the situation.

From somewhere in the impenetrable night another squad of riot cops came charging into the clearing.

"Get on the ground! Hands out!"

We all quickly complied. As my arms were wrenched behind my back and fastened together, I craned my neck to check on my friends. The one on her phone was lying prone, but with the phone still clutched against her face, pleading for help. The armored men were shouting at her, and one began to choke her.

"Hey, get your hand off her neck! She's just on the phone with her dad!" I shouted.

My reward was a boot on the side of my face, forcing it into the earth.

"Keep your head down!"

It was this moment, the sensation of a hard leather boot sole against my face, and an imposing authority figure leaning onto it, that stuck in my head as we were hauled to our feet and whisked off to jail. The scene replayed as we sat out the night in handcuffs, as we emerged from the jail into a cold drizzly Saturday morning, and as we made the trip back to Athens. Five days later, and I'm continually drawn back to this episode. I find it impossible to focus; the other issues in my life pale in comparison.

How does it feel to be a terrorist? Apparently, like this.

A Memory from Summer

2009-09-20T17:49:00.003-04:00

I remember the way the bricks seemed to dissolve under the pressure of the water cannon. Like ice cubes splashed with warm water. Cardboard blocks stacked four stories high without mortar.

Here come a bunch of no-good window-breakers, joked the fire chief in impenetrable deadpan.

I couldn't understand what was going on for a moment. Windows were indeed breaking, but for no apparent reason---spontaneously it seemed. Hundreds of foot-square panels of glass, arranged in a grid across the side of the warehouse, began to fling themselves from their lofty perches, the steady rhythm they made as they shattered on the concrete pier below reminiscent of the water gushing from a gutter just after a heavy rain.

It was only once the window population of this hapless, charred warehouse had been decimated that I could see the no-good window-breakers: firefighters with long wooden instruments. Like the poles used to open tall windows in an old building. They had heavy iron hooks at their ends, which emerged, probing, from the side of the building like antennae.

The burnt-out warehouse, still smoldering, continued to be doused with water pumped by a fire boat anchored in the adjacent Chicago river. A mustachioed, portly chief in taxicab yellow armor told me they hadn't had the chance to use the state-of-the-art vessel in a decade.

Looking down from a bridge onto the scene, I could sense the enthusiasm with which the crewmen performed their duties. They ravaged the long-abandoned, newly-destroyed structure with the vigor of highly-trained marksmen bereft of a target for too long.

Down the river a crane surreptitiously loaded, one metal clawful at a time, a mountain of garbage onto a barge. If cranes are equipped with rear-view mirrors, he must have been watching the battle being waged. Trash to trash, the waste keeps cycling through.

Pestilence

2009-09-07T14:24:00.002-04:00

When I first arrived at this apartment last January I found piles---mounds---of dead flies around the windowsills and heaters. After I cleaned the flies up, I was inundated with Japanese beetles, which look deceptively like ladybugs and leave itchy bumps all over your body if they get into your bedspread. As I stayed in the apartment into the spring, ants became a ubiquitous enemy. My guard was ever-vigilant lest I give a millimeter to the marching armies.

In June I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom and removed all the furniture, handed the keys over to a sub-leaser. My return yesterday acquainted me with fresh entomological evil.

As I hoisted up the sliding door to my storage unit, I was flooded with a torrent of wasps, before I could even register their infernal death-buzz.

I didn't flinch. I just bolted, arms flailing. It was several moments before I edged back towards the unit, my forearm held out in front of me as a knight holds his shield as he enters the dragon's lair.

I hauled three car-loads of my belongings from the lair, venomous insects poised menacingly over each item. Silent, watching.

I wasn't stung once. Valor prevailed.

Hitching with Truckers

2009-09-04T21:17:00.003-04:00

I find that most who make their living inside cramped cabins riding in straight lines begin to wax poetic as they describe home. Home for Tommy, a self-described half-Navajo ex-hippie, was a shack in the country he shared with his son and a half-wild dog, his closest neighbor two miles away.

He's always trying to get me to come over, explained Tommy. But I got 10 acres and I mostly keep to myself.

He gave the distinct impression his interest in companionship with his neighbor ended at the occasional hog roast.

Government once told Tommy and his friends to go and kill Vietnamese. Now it tells him maximum trailer weight and engine braking policy. The "hell no" philosophy of his youth seems to extend to his appropriation of a rural turf.

So he burns swine instead of flags, keeps junker cars on his front lawn and lets weeds lacking psychotropic qualities flourish.

My bus to Chicago stopped at a truck stop in Indiana on the way home. I saw a truck cab with a dreamcatcher hung over the mirror, just like Tommy's. I looked around but couldn't find the driver. I waited by the truck until my bus re-boarded.

Men In Blue

2009-06-27T19:23:00.003-04:00

It's about cardinal past warbler on Cafe Luna's bird clock, which means I have canary and robin until I need to set down my coffee and head to school. Theft school; or as the courts call it, the Rush Theft Deterrent Program.

I doubt my education will have much practical value. Instead it will keep me from winding up like the poor transient trying to catch some sleep on the spare chairs adjacent to where I sit at the counter. I watch as three portly men ask the manager, "You want him out of here?"

I don't hear the response, but soon the diner is filled with the brusque jostling of said transient: a seemingly unnecessary conflagration. I'm reminded of yapping dogs behind a chain-link fence. One of them keeps saying, "Chicago police."

I stink-eye them as they leave. They're probably my teachers.

Context Matters

2009-05-20T22:18:00.003-04:00

Talking to my friend Brenda. She says Jack Kerouac is a chauvinist. I don't necessarily disagree, though honestly it hadn't occurred to me. But I maintain that his art is still valuable.

I muse on that conversation the next day at the car wash, as I watch my coworker Travis suck on enormous pantomimed breasts while moaning, "Ma Ma. Ma Ma."

She's got a little gut on her, he says, but I don't mind. He points his cigarette at the woman entering the pool supplies store across the street. The smoke collides mid-air with jet streams of hot pink wax and soapy water, all three vanishing into the fury of an industrial fan.

More cushion for the pushin', chortles the man who is known to his friends as "SUV." I have a softness in my heart for SUV, but he is a terrible human being. I imagine a meeting between him and Brenda. And that's all I can do; imagine.

Still, today I cleaned rancid honey-mustard sauce and cigarette butts out of a loading dock behind the dining hall. I positioned myself as I swept so that I could see the blond sunbathing on an adjacent patch of grass. I maintain my art is still valuable.

The Lunch Ladies In My Life

2009-04-02T02:00:00.004-04:00

There's Irene, the quiet woman with a worried mother's eyes. I help her unpack magical boxes filled with staggering volumes of Frank's Red Hot sauce, breaded chicken filet, Double Dutch Chocolate Frozen Yogurt Mix. Her son is named Tim, she told me today.

Erica made small talk with me and my attractive co-worker; I appreciated her breaking the ice.

Lorraine is above it all. She masters her Newsday crossword (at least I think it's Newsday, I was never able to get close enough to her to see), leaning over a table. She'll let you know when you need to yell louder.

We're supposed to yell out the name of whatever we take from the kitchen, so the cooks know when they're running out. Bellowing out "Tater Tots!" every 15 minutes or so, only to be graced with a "Thank You!" to which I respond, "Thank you."It is one of the great pleasures of my occupation.

There is another that bears mentioning, but I do not know her name. If I could name her, she would be Bonnie. She waddles in a rapid, skittish manner, making comments to herself constantly. Example: reaching for a jar on a high shelf. "Come here you." Breaking down a cardboard box: "You had to be taped up, didn't you?." Once I responded to one of her twitterings. Something inane like "One of those days?" She seemed surprised that I had talked to her. She mumbled something and walked past me.

I Can't Believe It's Not Food

2009-03-11T15:22:00.005-04:00

"Think Copies," says the laminated notice above the Xerox machine in the dining hall lobby. Not since "Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work" has a sign rung so true.

"Could I get, like, some chicken?" asks the listless freshman in North Face fleece and OU sweats. I dutifully serve them "like, chicken," usually with a side of the "like, french fries." This scene is repeated ad nauseam on any given work day, which is Latin for "to the point of disgust." The nauseam is especially potent on days we're serving gyros, which emit a warm blast of humid fragrance when they're pulled from the oven, reminiscent of an enormous dog panting on my face. And that's after he's gotten into the leftovers.

Being the cultured gourmand that I am, my delicate sensibilities are often shocked at the bizarre convolutions the names of menu items undergo at the dining hall. "Chorizo" becomes "Chizarro." "Ragout" is "rag-out." "Spinakopita?" You mean "puffy things."

I'm not really complaining. Dining hall labor is generally fairly convivial. The only people who manage to get under my skin occasionally are the ones who carry an air of haughtiness about them as they purview my smorgasbord.

"What's that?" they ask with crinkled nose.

"Monkey puke," I want to say. "Whale penis. Shredded donkey placenta."

But that would get me in trouble. Better I should stick to the company line.

"This is Ohio University. It does not matter what that is. You paid for it, and whether you eat it or not is of very small importance to us. As with your tuition, as with your health insurance, as with your parking space, so with your food."

"Go Bobcats."

Hey, Somebody's Got To Clean That Up

2009-02-21T05:52:00.005-05:00

Once in Chicago I worked as a temp in a college office. My supervisor was a middle-aged retired fashion designer who always reminded me of an old house cat, her feline grace impeded by decades of easy living: climate-controlled rooms and mochas with whipped cream. One slow afternoon at Speed-Eaze Car Wash, as my coworker Travis recounted how he'd stabbed his sister's rapist to death (we had previously been talking about how hilly Ohio is), I couldn't help but think that I'd strayed into another genus entirely.

Travis struck me as a precarious man who'd had his ears boxed all his life and learned to give as well as he got. Generally a friendly fella, unless you're black. He conjured in my mind the image of a bulldog, the big powerful old kind that are tired of fighting but not so tired they wouldn't rip you apart given motivation.

This morning was a milestone; I've been working for Speed-Eaze long enough that I was given my own uniform jacket. Navy blue with a patch on each breast: the right says "Speed-Eaze Car Wash," the left "Tim." I envision it being worn five years down the line by a 20-something not named Tim who will pick it up at the Athens Goodwill.

I didn't work; sullen fuck-off-I'm-not-getting-out-of-bed clouds pissed lukewarm rain on us all day. Still I stopped by the garage to pick up my jacket so I could wash it before I work tomorrow, since they starch the shit out of it and it's itchy as shit, or so my boss told me. As I was shooting the shit with her, Travis strolled in with shit on his shirt.

Jeff, the boss' brother, was curled over his boat, working silently and skillfully as he usually is whenever I see him. Travis was muttering something offensive, as he usually is whenever I see him. Something about Somali gangs, who live right up there (he nodded in no distinct direction) and some money being owed. Then a snippet of an anecdote: When he walked in, they had a gun right to his head, so he grabbed it and wrestled with him (Travis pantomimed the struggle, the hem of his gray shirt momentarily riding up to reveal a heroic beer gut), and that's when shots started going off. I stood awkwardly in the corner of the room, clutching my bike helmet. I had planned to nod goodbye, tell everyone to stay dry and ride merrily along, but suddenly it was too quiet. There was some more mumbling about the gangs I didn't understand, then: They're going to find that boy and kill him eventually. They're going to kill his whole family. It's sad, but that's just the way it is.

"What the fuck," Jeff rasped. I couldn't tell if he was talking about the boy or the battery he was working on. Thankfully, Harry, another bulldog, walked into the garage and Travis told him about how he got the shit on his shirt (a nacho mishap). They both laughed and I was able to go.

The Things I Do For Love

2009-02-20T17:53:00.001-05:00

Mexico. Oman. Norwa—no! N...n...Niger. Good. Russia. No!

The country name game was supposed to keep my mind off the frigid winds howling around my ears as I stood on a corner next to an on-ramp to Route 33. It proved counter effective whenever I came up with a cold country. I struggled to stay equatorial, or at least temperate, but whenever I stumbled onto a Greenland or Ukraine it felt like the air nipped at my curled fingers a little more aggressively, like a friend's pet hamster when you were just trying to feed it a cookie crumb. And then you're mad at the hamster, but there's nothing you can do about it; it's just nature.

Being a professional sign waver in the middle of January (a vocation known more colloquially as “a shitty job”) requires a great capacity for mental escapism. Lord knows the thought of the seven bucks an hour I was earning wasn't going to keep me warm, so I did my very best to make believe I was anything other than a degraded, shivering, pathetic-looking undergraduate wage slave. I tried to take pride in what I was doing: I imagined I was a gallant standard bearer, overlooking not a slush-covered thoroughfare next to a Bob Evans but a war-torn battlefield next to a Valley Forge.

And the rocket's red glare

The bombs bursting in air

Gave proof through the night

That Goody's was having a going-out-of-business sale and everything in the store was 30-60 percent off

My mind eventually drifted to less fanciful thoughts. Like how as much as I pitied myself, I was making more than the workers at Goody's were about to. I mused on the irony of the situation, that my economic plight led me to a job where I advertised others' economic plight. I felt like a burn victim arsonist.

And really, I had no right to complain. Even as I stood there that day, I watched a crew of city workers shovel out a sidewalk across the street. Icicle-laden pickups sped by, kicking up slush the color of moldy onions. Where were they hurrying off to, I wondered? From out the passenger's side window of a Ford F-250 two foil packages flew with a cranky but well-meaning admonishment: “Next time dress for winter!”

As I examined my recently obtained “Toasty-Toes” foot warmers, I thought about that charitable stranger, and what she would have needed them for. It made me realize, as I have several times a day for the four weeks I've been in Athens, that there's a lot I don't know about this town. Since I got here, I've worked in a campus dining hall, a car wash, as a personal aide to a man living in the oldest house in Athens, and, least illustriously, as a sign waver. I've had opportunities to interact with a lot of fascinating people, and every one of them has had something to say about what it's like to live and work here. But it's only my first month. I can only imagine the vast sea of stories begging to be told. I would like to record these stories, and through them maybe paint a broader picture of what it means to be a working stiff in the incredible, complex, diamond in the rough that is Athens, Ohio.

At the very least, I figure, it beats the country name game.