Recently in Fiction Category

Mo doesn't want me to tell you this, but I once had sex with his wife, before she was his wife, but while I knew he was in love with her, and I don't know if I can ever live that down. Now I am married, and happily I may add, and I don't want anyone other than you to know. I am a sonofabitch.

Today, he wants me to kiss his ass though, and I am not married to her, so I refuse. He wants everyone to bow down to the holy Clower ass, and we all rise up, and say no. Each and every one of us.

I am so sorry to you, dear readers, but not to him. He's an asshole and I just want all of you to know that.

It's hard to not love New York City, even after your twenties are long gone. In the approaching autumn of that year I found myself there again and was transported back to post-college-graduation. The world as a proverbial oyster. Surely, NYC would come, but the job was at a newspaper, back home, in suburban North Carolina; just a step on the road to the Times and a loft in the Village. So, in that year, my early thirties, I found myself in New York again, ostensibly for a tennis tournament, and a few drinks with almost-lost friends. A storm was approaching up the coast, skirting the coast with a bump and then back out into the water, where it would build steam and head back inland. Thousands south of the city, including those in the town I then called home, were without power, many without homes. I found myself in NYC oblivious to the storm except the blips of it on cable TV news. In my mind, the city was covered in a protective seal that kept out such things as storms and locust infestations (the last of which could be correct).

My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called - gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the "academically gifted" as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers (my passion; my blood - I thought) to a job in online journalism for a major 24-hour news network. I am 37 years old and have no dog, no children, and I do have a retirement portfolio that would turn no heads: women at the bar, financial advisers.

That weekend, as the storm approached, Labor Day weekend, I spent in NYC feeling like a kid again. It's okay to say kid from this vantage point, because that is where the longing is - to be a kid again - but, what I really felt was like a young adult again (freedoms of an adult, no adult responsibilities) - what I would of called when I was actually a kid "an adult," or simply "old" which makes me wonder what I would have thought as a kid of myself now. But that's neither here nor there, or perhaps it is one or the other, but either way I was in NYC feeling like a "kid," drinking with old college friends who I felt had somehow found the holy grail, but, as it turns out, were in similar positions as myself and my non-NYC friends, and it made the city seem smaller. And in making the city seem smaller, it made it more appealing to me, as I had long given up on the notion of making it there, and through giving up on the notion, had soon given up on the desire. A NYC that was not so overwhelming, didn't feel like it could crush a person, alighted new fires of yearning in me - and those drinks, and those walks, and those views from that hotel room, and those women, all those different women, after these lonely past four years, seemed to sound the siren's call.

For days, Richard has been reading the weather reports, watching the weather reports, researching weather phenomenon on the internet: wikipedia, NOAA, weather.com, various weather related blogs. Even before anyone else on the east coast knew anything about Nolan, old Dick was already buying canned goods, bread, bottled water, beer, whiskey, nudey magazines, a diesel powered generator, a prepaid cell phone. The weather radio already works on batteries, as well as AC.

Ashley left him back in the spring, long before hurricane season. His heart has never been the same, as anyone that knew the two of them would suspect. He has been obsessed with the things that he really cannot control since then, but they are all things that he thinks, through a more perfect understanding, he will be able to control. For him, it is not turning on and off the light switch an odd number of times, that's too easy. It's these weather phenomenon, and when a storm of this size and shape is on the loose, he is in his heyday.

Ashley left with the guy who designs the charts and graphs, the best he can figure, down at Channel 2. Said he's hung like a horse. Tells Richard, on the night that she walks out, that he never did shit for her in the sack. He always felt like he was attentive, if not overly so.

Nancy's in the cedar hall closet waiting for the storm. She hasn't seen a weather report in days - no weather.com, CNN, or newspaper either. There was just something in the way the clouds were moving when she got up this morning that got her worried, so she called in sick, took the dog to the kennel and is sitting in the cedar closet in the hallway, the one that still smells of cigarettes from when she and her husband used to spend time smoking in bars, and before he died. The cedar has tried, but the cigarettes have won.

It's the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke - but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that's not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time.

She didn't know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn't know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not dead, because the jacket was possibility and death was not. She had once decided to live and not the other. It wasn't taken for granted. The jacket. The cigarette smell. She hadn't felt this way in a while. If he were dead, surely his ghost was there in the closet. If not, she like to think of him as dead so his ghost could possibly be there in the closet with her.

There was one other storm. It came toward the end. She hid in the closet during that one too. He sat in the living room watching the TV and drinking until the power went out. Then he listened to the emergency radio, the one with the hand crank, and drank until he could not crank the radio. Then he started throwing dishes across the kitchen and yelling his mother's name. His mother had died the previous spring. His father was dead, or at least dead in the way that he was now dead to her, for many years. The father's name never crossed the mind. He thought of himself as an immaculate conception. He prayed at night, but the storm still came. His mother's ghost seem to live with him.

She said she liked patriotic marches, so he bought a sousaphone. They marched around the backyard, sometimes naked, she the drum major, he carrying on the bass line for a melody to be imagined. It could irritate the neighbors. He liked to drink while they played these games. She put up with it as long as the marches could continue.

It was then that she decided that bluegrass was the new sensation. He grew a beard, wore overalls, bought a mandolin that would keep the neighbors up all night.

Next it was jazz and the laborious move of a grand piano and the purchase of a used baritone saxophone. During this phase they entertained more. The neighbors, once their enemies, became newfound friends.

Soon they started going to galleries and museums and she read artist biographies: Van Gogh, Gaudin, Picasso, Raushenberg, Warhol. They filled what was supposed to be the nursery, or so they thought when they bought the place, with canvasses. She took to drinking. Posing nude for him to paint her. Hours-long sessions would end with sex on the drop cloth. They talked of buying land, starting a commune. They didn't see much of the neighbors during this period. When they did choose the be around others, it was always with the new friends in the city.

My landlord's got a new girlfriend and I can tell she's trouble. I saw them walking down the road tonight to get a slice of pizza. She was in these black skin-tight shorts and he was in that same old baseball hat that hugs the skull like balding dudes like me and him like to wear these days. She kept on having to pull the little black shorts out of her crack as they walked ahead of me. I just paid the rent yesterday, so now he acts like he doesn't know me.

My experience with the landlord is that he has a bluebird made of plaster on the back wall of his front porch. He also has a kitchen sink, and easy chair, and a large roll of copper tubing on the same porch. Once a month I go to his house across the street, usually in the cover of darkness, and leave the largest check I write every month in his mailbox, in the process committing a federal crime.

His experience with me is that I leave that check and he let's me live in this house that he got for a steal, and that he occasionally fixes a leaky faucet.

Under my landlord lives a British guy named George of whom I know little. He loves Princess Diana and hate Charles and Camilla. He takes my recycling out to the curb, usually three days before the city picks it up.

George works for the landlord and, according to the neighborhood homeless guy, handed in his two-week's notice a few days ago and is moving on to greener pastures. What I know of George, he was likely semi-homeless once as well, and he is recovering from colon cancer.

A man walks into a bar; this not a joke. He first asks the bartender for a glass of water, at which point, the bartender explains that if you ain't paying, you ain't drinking. The man bursts into tears. The bartender asks why the long face. Really, this is not a joke.

It seems that the old guy's wife had run off with another guy, leaving early this very same morning while he was still in bed. If that wasn't enough, the Camaro-driving sonofabitch ran over his what-would-be-best hunting dog, if only he ever hunted. The dog could climb a tree and throw the raccoon to its death, or say he said.

So his old lady is gone, and his favorite dog is dead, and all he can think to order is a glass of water, because she took the money in the Maxwell House can in the kitchen that they had been saving for a trip this summer to Panama City Beach, and she took the bank card from his wallet on the dresser, and the checkbook which was also on the dresser, and the credit card was long overdrawn, and to top it off, it's Veteran's Day, a fucking bank holiday, and the old guy fought in the first Gulf War, and through much VA therapy had just learned to manage his PTSD, but he couldn't get any cash out to buy a drink after his woman ran off with another man, who ran over his favorite dog, as they made their getaway.

Lord knows how he's going to afford the colonoscopy and all, especially after being laid off down at the factory.

This wasn't the shittiest day ever, or even week. This is the shittiest life on record.

The bartender acquiesces and gives him the glass of water, and a shot of Kentucky Gentleman chaser on the house. That was about the time the Asian geisha-style siamese twins walked in with the midget, but we will save that one for later.

Then this leather fag walks into the bar just like it's 1980 and it's San Francisco, which it isn't. He's got brass knuckles on one hand, and a cricket bat in the other just to increase his odds. He stomps over to the guy, who's now in the middle of his first house gin and tonic, and smacks him square in the jaw with the knuckles and then square on the knee with the bat as he descends from the stool to the floor.

The dude asks what the fuck did you do that for, and the queer says that's because your daughter ran off with my old man.

The midget with the four gold rings in each ear plays a song on the juke box.

He says that wasn't my daughter, that was my wife. Mr. Castro feels so bad he buys the guy a Grey Goose martini and they spend the next half hour licking wounds and talking about what they lost. Then they talk about church and childhood. Then about the rough start the Astros are off to. They talk about the midget and the siamese twins, and Mr. Tightpants says he almost switched sides for some Arabic siamese twins that he ran across while trying to figure out something to do during the first Gulf War. The two realize they have something in common - the Gulf War - not the siamese twins or wishy-washy sexuality.

The homo says he has to leave to throw his ex's shit out into the street so the whole neighborhood will know what an asshole he is, and thus will know that a period of mourning will ensue behind the doors of his house. Don't come asking for a cup of sugar.

That's when the ducks come in, and man were these some rich ducks. They start ordering rounds of drinks for the whole house, but being ducks they were lightweights, and most of them started passing out under tables, on the bar, in the toilet. One was even found asleep floating around in the bathroom sink. He was a small duck.

The bartender brings three of the leftover duck drinks to the old guy and he drinks them all: peach schnapps, amaretto sour, shot of Jaeger from the duck with the frayed Astros hat.

About this time the bartender says something along the lines of last call, only to be followed by you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here, or if you don't work at the bar, or you are not fucking someone who works at the bar, get the fuck out, or something like that. The guy thinks briefly of propositioning the bartender - a feeble attempt at eeking out a few more moments here and a few less moments at the house that was once their home.

The siamese twins leave, each trying to weave in an independent direction. The midget follows trying to push his face into the unified ass of the twins. The ducks all start to awake and stir and depart the bar in a V formation. Quack, quack.

Then there's the veteran, the man, now alone. He thinks of the street girls out on the boulevard. He thinks of the all-night liquor store. He thinks of his 10-years-his-junior wife on the way to Panama City Beach with his Panama City Beach money and a guy in a fucking Camaro, with t-tops. He thinks of how easy it is to be a drunk when your life has gone to the crapper, and how being drunk at such times, can make the whole world seem new again.

He thinks he shouldn't have mixed all those drinks, but beggars can't be choosers.

And she keeps hitting me in the fucking kidneys. And I like it. No I don't. He's kicking me in the teeth. I am sorry. No teeth. No luck. All sorrow. Good weekend. I just want to read that book that yo wrote back then.

There are soldiers out tonight, even in this city. I have seen them in their clandestine suits. I have wondered about them through dreams.

Tomorrow will be another dream day for this fallen one. I am not broken or foresaken. Just fallen at this point.

From the top of the hill over there the scout can see everything and with that everything he cannot move. He want to tell his comrades what there is to come, but he just stand still and the whole world passes, at once, through his eye.

That is the nature of the scout. He has to understand it all. The soldier should understand very little if anything. There is this and there's the hospital. There's a nurse with a tender touch, or there's another day.

When they saw the whites of the eyes the muskets came ablastin'. The scout dreamed, closed his eyes and composed letters to his wife.

There was 30 shot initially, and one when they came face to face. Was it brothers? Of course it was. In some place or not with a name or not. No names on placards or plce cards. There would be no wedding or funeral. Just some dirt sifting through fingers.

One last look at the moon.

My point being that the man who took the bullet and the one who sent the bullet are one and the same.

Daddy liked to laugh. He would laugh when mama got in the car and stormed out the top of the hill. He would laugh when he told us the dirty jokes we were too young to hear. He would laugh when he should be crying.

I wish that I could be laughing. Laughing all of this off, but it bites me down to the core and I find the humor hard to find. I cannot laugh. No jokes are funny. Not even donkey dick. I don't like to tell the old standards.

How can there be a joke when we can treat each other as horribly as we will treat one another. Of course we can attack another country, of another religion, and kill thousands of innocents when we can treat people we love like absolute dog shit.

We are such selfish beings and despite the fact I have argued differently, I do believe we are utterly broken little pricks - boys, girls, women and men.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Millions of diamonds and the clipper ships out on the water tonight. All of the dreams of a nation, or at least a nation of two, hanging in the balance belief gun blasts and random expletives in foreign languages. Appeals to heaven fall on deaf ears. God has not been here for too long. Yet we still pray, and pray, and ask him to deliver us from this. In the morning the sun rises high and the men on the TV promise something better as they tell of something worse. Children with guns, our innocents, take aim at our hearts and lives. It all was not supposed to be this way. It was all supposed to be a field day. It was supposed to be kids playing soccer. Poor kids, but playful. The ingrown toenail feels as if it fills my boot tonight. I want more than this continent can offer, and it can offer more than my home. I felt love once, but I gave it up for passion. The heat rises. The desert swells. It is the dry season and I will only think of you on occasion as I try to sleep alone.

Trying to fight off the sleep that seems to only come when not wanted and then never again. The stomach tonight will begin to eat everything including the actor, starting from the inside. What movie will it be now, now that the whole library is in the piece of credit-card-sized hardware. You could not make this, up, the lineup looks like The Man from Laramie, Say Anything, Bright Future, Husbands and Wives, Ulysses, Moby Dick, White Noise (book not movie), a self-portrait of John Irving done in cursive, the most recent issue of Reader's Digest. And there is the man painting pictures of Jesus, and Mary, and the disciples, and Calvary and the Cross, and the dream finds me in the church, then in the hotel and then running from the man with gun that wants to steal my stories, but they can't be stolen. "They are my stories, you fucker!" I give him all of the paper, but there is encryption and invisible ink, and he talks like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, "G'head! G'head!" and Jon Voight is dreamy but not so much as Jimmy Stewart, and I play all of the parts, especially Hoffman and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in this dream of this movie of these movies in my dreams, I play all of the parts except Jimmy Stewart, I could never hope to be that good.

Tonight I'll take the street out here, left then right, and then left again and down by that place where we once sort of lived together, and then on out and east and past the all-girls school and the place where you sell your hands for presents, and even further past the place that serves the succulent rotisserie chickens and hard-crusted mac and cheese, and the place where I took the things I didn't want after I met you and had to make hard decisions. Things got easier and then harder themselves, the a period of simplicity, then constant headache. This headache drones behind my eyes such that I really cannot even see the horizon much these days. I try to smile through it all. I invest in vision plans. I continue further out past the nondescript pub that I drank non-alcoholic ales during one of my attempts to curb my burgeoning alcoholism, and then further past the place where we could sometime turn off for birthday lobsters, and before that the place where appliances go to die or be resurrected, and then eventually onto the piece of curving four-land and then the two-lane branch and further onto the Hwy. 33, where always lying on the horizon is Mexico and it's promise of ramshackled multi-colored structures and relief from the headaches in a more arid climate. The possibility to live among new others, or possibly completely alone, in a little ventilated place with an obstructed view of the sea, where all things are possible, and then I will forget, or pretend to forget, until the road crews finish the asphalt all the way, and the crews suspend the causeway to the island three or so miles off shore, or maybe to another if engineering obstacles arise, where the road ends and I can finally become Marlon Brando and you will become Morgan Fairchild, a grainy photo that fades in the forever sunshine, and I will smile until it becomes real.

It's his last time in the church,
having had sullied his faith
in a scandal as big as the lectern
standing erect at that end of the nave.
This is the last time he will kneel,
the last time he will pray,
the last time he will put it all
in another's hands.
He spends awhile saying his goodbye,
and rises to his feet
with the squeak of shoe leather,
he pivots militarily and
descends from the heights of the apse
to the depths of the exit,
where he will turn once again,
and cross himself one last time,
before descending fully,
and then he will just live,
without worship or prayer,
never to set foot or knee
in that church,
or any other,
until the end of his days.

Does it not matter that I thought I had a vision that would die before 35? I hope it's not true and Owen knew his foolheartedly. I always wanted more than that. I always wanted to get to bed earlier. I always wanted to be a baseball superstar. It doesn't matter much anymore. I strapped my dreams to a sinking ship. I will figure my way out of this, but I have, at last, lost the last of my innocence. I knew what the cost was, but it was worth risking... and still is, I guess. It's not that it doesn't hurt, because it does. It's not that I cannot live without you, or you, or you. I can live. It's just that once I knew love like I knew the way my hands write my name, and now my name is strange to me, but I know love, and I know you, and I will follow and love and break and enter and crush my heart into a pulp. Itwasalwaysyouitwasalwaysyouitwasalwaysyouitwas
alwaysyouitwasalwaysyouitwasalwaysyou, and now I have to figure out a different dream.

"or no we won't. Instead tomorrow begins a long weekend in which I will be twisted in to knots, or things you cannot understand, and I will think of the ways in which Steve nailed my testicles to the wall today, and the ways in which he still loves you, and in the ways in which I keep F-ing up all over the place. I need to find my way into that bed back there with all of the knotted up bed sheets and the moisture with this moisturous air all about, and try to put myself out of misery for the night and to wake up in the morning with a new deposit in my bank account, and to finally realize that I am happy for my friends who have carried my ass this week that I began with only $11 in my account. Thanks for the dinners, camaraderie, joy and conversation. I guess at the end of the day that is all you need, and not a late night phone call. We all have something to do tomorrow, and some of us don't get to choose when we get to do it."

-- As William was speaking tonight.

Why Tuesday?
When my brain has been so settled as of late,
and the organ grinder has stopped,
and the ladies on the corner are
making up names for the people that pass by.

Why Tuesday?
When it could be Wednesday and
we could now be half way there,
whatever 'there' means.

Why Tuesday?
When my heart has tried to rejoice
so much lately with hope
and the weeds don't grow so quickly.

Why Tuesday?
When tomorrow would be a better time
and I could figure a way for
you and me to rhyme.

Why Tuesday?
When, on a Saturday, we could
spend the day eating ice cream
and, very possibly, 'making love?'

Why Tuesday?
When any other day would do
and today is Tuesday, and so,
Why Tuesday?

Saint Louis is dancing
its hair around
a chair in the
square.

I am asking the
questions that will
cause a pause
in the conversation.

Does it bother
that you stand
in a line longer
than the other?

If I come from
over the top
it is because of
love or loneliness, rather.

How heavy is
your lid?
I wanted this
to not be the USSR.

Come up to the
front of the queue,
I have always thought
the answer was you.

I got a pack of hooks from my uncle when he was in town right before he had to ship back to Fort Bragg, NC and he told be I would catch the largest fish in the pond down the road if I would just fish with these hooks, that I would not even need bait and that the fish would come out simply laying on the the hook, not really hooked by it, and that the fish would talk and tell stories, and I could tell my friends all of the stories that the fish told me, and that I would be much more popular, because I got these hooks and would catch this fish. His one warning was that I must throw the fish back once I have caught it and he has told me the story, otherwise bad luck would come to me and mom and dad, and that our fields would burn, and the sky would fall all over daddy's land. I reckon I will send that fish back quickly after he tells me the little story. I reckon I want peace upon the land here, and I will throw it back. I imagine he may have more than one story to tell, and I've got a big bag of hooks.

"By and by," I say, and she understands. She asks what I am doing for the Saturday night, and I say I thought I might spend some time working things out; a little time howling at the moon. She tells me I sound like a big old bear when I do that. We stand in the front yard looking at the first few stars that have appeared on this clear evening. "By and by," I think, and I wonder what it really means. She tells me she felt love once, but it was some two or three years back and that is all gone now. Tomorrow they are calling for rain and I know it will. The clouds can be sensed in the clarity of the stars tonight. If the earth will be destroyed by fire the next time, I don't want any part of it. A flood would be much nicer, could wash all of the scum off the street like in "Taxi Driver." I think I still love her, know what that is to feel it like I do in my heart, or something like that. She questions, writes me off. I can tell in her eyes it hasn't been the same for some time now. I guess she's been leaving since the first day she really came. What's this love that I try to define? She thinks she knows and I do to, and one of us feels it and the other doesn't, but I don't know if we could even begin to wrap words around it, if words are even possible. I push down two keys on the piano, two write beside each other - a black and a white. I start the serenade that she got used to, and the one before her, and the one before her, and I play and sing about babies going away, and while I am singing I think of the flood that is coming and about the great big boat. I think of cutting my toenails, and of how many like me will be allowed on the cruise. I think of the cloven-hoofed and dream myself with wings. I could fly off and bring back the first signs of foliage. I could dream of a three month flood. I could think of what life would be without love. I can still feel the phantom in my heart. Two by two they go, and me and something, and the animals I will come to name in time. And it has just started raining and I think, "male and female, but what about the hermaphrodites like me?"

On the floor by my foot
a large black ant crawls without direction,
the same type insect I spent
much time smashing after the fall.

Then they seemed to be everywhere,
a sign for the broken hearted,
or maybe it was arid and they
simply searched for an oasis in the carpeting.

The oasis, alas, did not exist,
and, alas, the black ants stopped coming,
I was left alone for a while,
a scientist without a subject.

Tonight this one arrives
and the experiment begins again.
Should I run him out of town?
Will he take me with him?

Like last night when getting
in bed and from beneath the pillow
crawled a pale orange lady bug,
and i couldn't remember if

that meant good luck or bad,
was this the nature of the tooth fairy,
I had always assumed Mom,
but perhaps it is this.

My studies don't always go so well.
I wonder about the other lady bug that
flew in the truck window on Saturday,
and what it scratching my cornea meant.

Was it so I could better understand
the nature of insects?
Or when the black ant bites my foot
late on Monday, and it takes me back

to that time when you once danced
sweaty to hip hop blasting from
speakers on a hardwood floor
creating a scene that I

should be forgetting now if
I know what is good for me.
If I could be strong would I
understand why these things happen

why these things are here
and in my bed and walking
these floors and not leaving
me alone, but reminding me I am

Is enough for any man
to suffer.

You came to me in a dream last night.
I had gone to bed early, way early,
and there you were, a couple
of hours later, with the slide
of the screen door and
the eventual tap on the glass.
I acted in the way in which
I had dreamed in this dream
that I would, I cried
big old man tears, looking
like Natalie Portman when
Timothy Hutton tells her he
is leaving the frozen Canadian
tundra to go to the city and marry my classmate.

Shannon and her friend Christa are starting an ad hoc creative writing class and they asked that I join. I said okay and this week's assignment was to write something about grocery shopping. Here's mine.

I am standing in the A&P parking lot, trying to drink this six pack of Old Milwaukee tallboys as quickly as I can, so I can get back home before she expects anything. I bought a roll of Certs and a roll of Rolaids to handle the inevitable problems of breath from the booze and heartburn from bad living. I was just sitting at the house, and a half hour or so ago she says to me that she is out of tampons, and that her period will be starting soon, although by my calculations it shouldn’t be here until next week. She also said it would be nice to have some milk for the coffee in the morning and maybe some cereal to go with the coffee and milk. And don’t forget the tampons. OB, the kind without the applicator because she cares so much about the environment.

It's nights like this, the ink black ones, that keep me in too long. Like a heavy black cloth has been dropped over the house and you can't see out, no moon, or stars or circling satellites. I sit here until the walls start to move toward me, the eyes in the photo on the mantle start to move as I do - jittery, shaking. The TV might as well be blue screen. Some guy trying repeatedly to sell you something you don't want, that you can never want, that you decided a long time ago you didn't want. He still keeps on knocking.

The word of the night is muthafucka. How did I know I had a totem hero. Chet Baker. My god. Horn and toad and pause and 'I don't even want to fucking sing tonight.' Oh, there's a marriage. I guess in order to be hitched, I will sing, I will sing, I will sing. Oh, America. Yawp. Yawp. Yawp. I am not even planning a trip across you. Just to Chicago. I will see what I can. I embibe with a lawful bawp. Those tinkling bells. We all want to go apeshit. We all want to be sheltered in your arms. Oh, America! Tonight, I am lonely and shouldn't be. 9/11. You laugh now don't you New York. A return to the surly. A return to the non-care.

You are out tonight in middile Carolina. Do you know it's love? What about love and marriage and all those kinds of things. Apparently I've got a lot of changing to do. I chased the albino doe across the woods for farther. Would have killed and brought her head to your door if it would make a difference. I stand in deference. What of it. Piss off and go back home. You voted that way and me this. No resolve.

I am out tonight among the people. Among the late-night barbaric yawpers. I am out and out ready for your love to return. I am drunk... so what of it. I will return. I will return. I will make secret tepees under a western sun. My trousers already roll. My headaches. I hear songs. I want more. I want you. Pleasure. Luxury. Light and breeze.

I am looking for the silver lining. It's bronze. Sweet valentine. Chet. It's over. What more can I do?

And they all seem to light up the woods tonight. More than fire or the modern conveniences. Thirty kids, 12 adults, and me and you. I didn't know then that I was falling in love. There would be a faux Indian chief explaining the myth of nature. It is a myth. And a magician causing things to spark. I am sorry to say I would have to escaspe early. Me and Dan and a foursome of kids to the pond, and across. Kerosene soaked maxi-pads on metal pipe and lighters (before I went crazy) and across to the bottom-dwelling reeds on the other side. I don't know how we did it. Those kids were ready for smores and Cheetos and Coca-Cola and late night farting. Surely the rain was gonna fall. I would find myself with 15 kids in a dressing room smelling semi-fresh with chlorine and bowel movements. Burger grease still on my vegetarian hands (before I went crazy).

You would find yourself in another group, at that point. Across a cinder-blocked wall. We were innocents. Walking down a city street still amused at the trash vacuum man and machine in full city regalia. That's a today thing. Across a cinder-block wall I heard you silently calling out to me. No jade, no sarcastic twitch. I am here for the night no matter what.

I thought then that I would marry you, but the moment slipped away. We grew older. I became jaded with a sarcastic twitch. Smoking and drinking too much. I don't even remember what was said between us. I don't even remember what you look like. I just rememeber those fireflies and how they lit up the night. 'I don't know whether the blessing put a verse on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse.'

Cock as big as a block. Today's modern parenting. I drive by those neighborhoods. Who'd've thought there are so many strollers. So many different kinds. So many ways of getting a baby from here to there. Oh, and Maria. I guess my little dick couldn't plant a seed far enough in there. BABY CRAZY! Oh, I guess with a pipe like that a man could do a lot of damage. Plant a seed good. Change all of the plumbing in the house in one visit. Oh, I hate that letter. I hate that it still sits there on the window in the kitchen. I wasn't baby crazy. Maybe that's the problem. Told her that when dad left I became the man of the house. Had been a man of the house since I was 12. Being a man of the house is for the fucking birds. How did I get like this. Tommy was supposed to be here. It was supposed to be our night out. How did I get like this. I just wanted to have some fun, like fishing, see what turns up. They are always more comfortable when there are two and the second is you. Fine with not being the man of the house. Hell, it's a rental anyway. What's a rental for raising a kid. Besides my sperm wouldn't take anyway. those drunk little fuckers are so confused. Looked at them once when I was 14 under a microscope, jacked off on a glass slide. Christmas present. Wow! Hard to imagine how they could do damage. Just makes you feel nasty. Fuck that job. Fuck this job. Hell, how hard is it to live... just live. It's like twelve voices yelling at each other in here now. Hard to handle all of this noise. What the fuck happened? WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

"Last call. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

"Fucking original, man!"

The pool table is empty. The couple at the corner booth gets up and walks out. It's just me and Curtis.

"Where'd Emma go?"

"Well, you nodded, started babbling. Friends finished the pool game, so She left with them," Curtis said.

I see how this ends.

"You want to do a shot with me?" Curtis asks, "I'm off the clock now."

I didn't think I wanted to, but he's off the clock.

"You might want to check that napkin in your jacket pocket when you get home. She left you a note," says Curtis, "You want me to call you a cab?"

"I reckon."

Was playing: Anytime Soon by Rachel's

"Hey Curtis! What do you think this chick will look like? He says she's an auditor. Came into the store to take a look at the books... end of the beginning of the year kind of thing."

"I bet she's a big-titted thing. You know Tommy. At least when he is drunk his sight seems to only scan from shoulder to waist. Like his neck's got a hitch or something. He's an ugly motherfucker. I bet her tits look like a million dollars and her face like a bag of dogshit."

I order another boilermaker and things are starting to get a bit swirly. I can't believe he is doing this shit to me. The college girls are starting to arrive and all of the pool tables are filled up. There's one with red hair that I swear keeps looking my way. She's okay... a little like Sissy Spacek but with a better figure.

I go lay 50 cents down on the table just to be near her. See what she will do. I know this game. Shit! I know it better than anyone. Since Marla left me a year ago, I play it all the time. College girls, late at night at the bar, me dressed like a desk job. They think of the future. Plan on babies. Imagine fathers, houses, station wagons and swimming pools.

Tommy's out tonight with this big-eyed girl and I can't feel my left foot. We had agreed to meet here to do the usual. Play a couple of rounds of pool, drink some beers and shots, wait for the college girls to come in late, stare at the crowd. I had even got us our normal catbird seats in the crook of the bar from which the whole of the place could be scanned with just the movement of the eyes. We were set, and then he text messaged me telling me he's gonna be late, maybe and hour or two.

So I start into it. I start with the the nightly innaugural boilermaker, then a dry martini. Get me there quick. You can't stand to be in places like this sober. There's no girls, nobody at all really except the couple of old geezers who always take the booth by the door and spend most of the night just staring at each other. Curtis, the bartender, asks where Tommy is and I tell him that he is out on a date.

"That ugly fucker," he says.

"I know what you mean, man, but Tommy's got the mad talking skills, and it doesn't hurt that he works at the furniture store. You know how women get around home furnishings."

I order another beer and a shot, then the second text message from Tommy comes.

I got Jenny a tit job for Christmas. I can't say it was completely altruistic. She had always been bitching about how small her tits were and I always said they were perfectly fine. In truth, I had always enjoyed the tits of women a little more well-endowed. But I loved her, so what was I to say. So I got her a tit job... for Christmas.

Her mother had thought about giving her one for her college graduation. She wanted to be a TV reporter back then, and Jenny and her mother both thought larger breasts would be a benefit. I imagine while she's at home her mother will ooh and ahh at how she now fills out her sweater. Her father will suspect that my intentions in giving such a gift were not truly altruistic. He's never liked me. So she and her new breasts are gone, and I am left here working out the last few days of the year.

I never figured out why the "man" always plans the biggest projects for this time of the year. The best I can figure is that the "big man" back in January or February said, "this will get done this year," and everyone that controls me twiddled their thumbs for a good 10 or 11 moths and then said, "oh shit!' And thus I am stuck here working double time for single pay to get a project done so these people, who have all already left for the holidays, don't catch any shit. I guess that's the way it goes. At least, once the scars have healed Jenny's tits will look good, and that will be something to come home to every night.

So with the boss on vacation, and Jenny out of town, I have taken to drinking the leftover Budweiser in the refrigerator from when the boys were in town a couple of weeks ago. I took to that, and then met Billy at the burger place to eat a late dinner. I still cannot figure out how to cook for just one. I thought abut going to get Jenny a couple of CDs of this band that she heard on the radio recently and fell in love with. But I realized after dinner that I was swerving a little too much for all of that, so I just came back home.

I came through the dark rain and past the little restaurants in my neighborhood where a skeleton crew is holding down the fort for a few patrons. It seems as if the whole town is becoming deserted. As if everyone has gone to places far from here, with their children and loved ones in tow. As if everywhere in the world has decided that they've done enough for this year - go ahead and enjoy some time off. A few older people drink cocktails at the bar and wait for their sons and daughters to arrive over the next couple of days.

I am dreaming of a white Christmas. Something to drastically change this landscape. A dream world in which I can live for a few days. Snow banks around my house so thick that the mail man gets lost trying to wade through them. But we just seem to get a cold dark rain that prohibits nothing.

I think I'll go fire up the fake logs and turn on the Christmas tree. Hell, I may even pick out a round of 'Rudolph' on the guitar. I'll have another couple of the leftover Budweisers and then go to bed. When I awake I will have about 8 hours until I can head out to a little patch of land in North Carolina, that my parents bought years ago, that I am still trying to call home.

This is public writing. Like radio Clash. Twain is observing over my shoulder, and there is a picture across the way of the the courtroom in the movie version of a book written with Truman Capote loosely the originator of one role.

I am becoming notes tonight. Little blips and bleeps - and it is football season. Your friends are mighty I would say to you if you were here. I will become heat and rising and little pieces of cotton candy. You ate them. I am silly still. I want to fill a page. It is way too late, but not early enough. What will happen in the end.

Even Thelonious Monk's wife wished the jam to be over sometimes - that all of the boys would go home.

This is stopgap.

Anything that was ever worth writing was worth writing at this point in the day. How going on here? You may ask. Where the fuck are you? I should ask. What's going on. John Turturro! Or something like that. I make you laugh or you say. I say the boy has bad teeth and you laugh until tomorrow with fake prosthetics and unbelievable promises. These people take care of things around here.

Itis your love laughing, rich boy. I create a spark that your notes know not how to comprehend. Walk your ass to the head of the class if you can. I've been talking Joyce for too long. I'd like to see you suffer and squirm, I like the way it sounds, squirm, like a non-syballance. Like you know.

My words come down on your sweet ass. Like your secret service. You make your way. Don't fear it's nothing that mama or daddy can't make up for at this point.

I understood a long time ago that you were to be despised. You came too close and I will strike and you will call for mother and wish that the pristine castle was your own forevever. I cast it all out, f here and something stonger.

I turn my face to a new day that you will never see. I am angry beyond admission and you know why.

I hope your little ass reads this.

I hope that the truth of the point reahces you long before the point, as it is, ever does. Do you bleed?

Ms. O'Connor, my hero

Richard drove a truck for the State. Sometimes it carried salt, in the winter especially when it was cold and the frozen precipitation would spill from the sky. Sometimes it was okra that had seemed to take to the landscape only second to kudzu, another Asian foliage.

In summers his whole truck, leased by him, and rented by the state via him, would carry truckloads of okra as far as Raleigh and the Polk Youth Detention Center. He reckoned them boys ought to like okra alright. Hell, from what he had heard, everything went as it wanted to in that prison and things resembling okra were a-okay as well. In the mouth or other places, it mattered not. He measured his successes and failures by the fact that he had never had to eat delivered okra in a concrete building 350 miles from home.

Cassard Willoughby bought the inn in town around 1953 and had owned for the last ten years or so. The economy of Shelby had not changed that much in the time despite so many of the local college folk had decided to stay around. He did not know what they did to make a living, nor did he care. He heard there was one man who worked for the United Nations as a translator and was not around that much, always flying on big airplanes to this city or another, and that was alright with him. The place had always seemed small when he was growing up and, although he had no desire to leave, other than the occasional romp in Charlotte, he thought it lent the town a certain air of cosmopolitanism that it had always needed and deserved.

Priscilla made cakes at Ms. Lucille's place. Ms. Lucille was dying and fewer people called on her these days. Those in the know, however, knew that her cakes were the best this side of the Mississippi river and so she kept fairly busy through word of mouth and the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter.

Priscilla made cakes and had been hand-trained by Ms. Lucille since the trip to Myrtle Beach immediately after high school - the trip on which she and Richard had met. Myrtle Beach had seemd so odd to her. Even the beach had seemed so odd to her. She understood nothing of waves falling, changing of tides, drunken men or the danger that was entailed therein. She liked baking cakes because it made sense to her. Her mother had baked cakes before the fire, and she had always love them. Red velvet cake for a Sunday when Rev, Lewis would arrive.

Richard met Priscilla Dean Carpenter when they were on their post-graduate tour of the greater coast region of South Carolina, and it was within minutes that they had fallen in love. She loved the creases of his permanantly sun-burned neck. They way is crazy eyes fell over her on the quartz sand of that summer evening. She loved the way he talked of being state senator one day. How he, alone, could make it better for everybody.

Only if things could have been so, she supposed.

It was within three months of their return to Shelby that Richard had scrapped and scraped and managed to put a ring on her finger and declare his undying love. She had realized him in the interim to be a redneck and alcoholic and that it would take some great deal to make him any better. She had allowed him, upon his asking, to slip the ring deep upon her finger. His friends appeared out of a small junkyard car and sang a lullaby and 'He's a Jolly Good Fellow'. He had arranged it all, but somehow it was not enough. At least not right now. She had dreams, and who could shoot down a dream, forgodsake!

She allowed him to slip the ring deep down on her finger and she at first swooned. Then thinking more properly of the family order, of what the kinfolk would say, she remembered his drinking. She remembered the situation of her mother. The way in which her mother had always wanted a doctor. That Richard could change a tire, but doctors could now change a heart. She could wait, she thought. She said fuck it. She used the "F" word the first time, in a non-performative sense, that she ever had. She thought of mother, father, friends and other family not frequently thought about. She realized that the opportunity should never be blown. And, Priscilla thought of how she could never marry him, not now, or ever.

Hey Darling,

I know it's hard to get the waves to match, to amplify. Or for there to be any moment, or semblance, of simultaneous empathy.

Days seem to be measured out in such a way that getting home makes every hour epic - or at least that's how I want it to be. Occasionally family stuff comes up - a birthday necessitates a call home, and it feels like it cuts into the long story. Used to be hours felt like short stories, microfiction. Now they want to be that too, but I demand a journey.

Of course, I don't always get what I want.

I didn't realize where you were tonight when I put you to bed. It was a different place from me and a conversation with my father about sports and our favorite teams and the fact that no player should earn over $1 million. That, when we buy Nike shoes, we are paying that $90 million Lebron James got in his contract with the company. It's important chatter in a way. But it's not the long story on a night like this.

I'm sorry about the way it all went down in the end.

Now that I think about it, I should've finished the movie with you.

Love, Harvey

writer and muse

To Pen he seemed like the sweetest specimen of man that she had ever come across. In this place of alkali dryness, rain a few weeks of the year. Cacti grew up out of the barren soil and took root in something much deeper. She was once told that a cactus' root could extend for miles just to find ample water. She believed it. Her mother lived in Santa Fe and her father in Phoenix, and her kids were now scattered across the country because of the multiple divorces. The one departing for college, and then work in NYC, and she hoped he would be the one that could help keep her up in these "waning years", as she liked to call them. Her nourishment came in the occasional phone call, a week per summer in Destin, the occasional mariage in the family in which they all, miraculously, managed to return, or to be together. It was a strange phenomenon and it left her satisfied, but feeling a prisoner.

Truth is Ricky was a shit. Had been since the day he had caused the great chasm between his mother's left and right pelvic bones. She believed that he must've spit fire upon being extracted. His first word must've been "motherfucker." And as a mother she took offense to it all. He welded and drank and sucked from the government nipple when times were tough. He had once gone six months without having to work a day, gaining full pay. A point which he proudly proclaimed to her the same night that he had first asked her out.

He had said, "Awh Pen, I've seen you in here every night for 2 years and this place ain't changing, Hell the whole country ain't changing. I've bought you a beer or two and you've given me a ride home and more than that. We danced in the cemetery that one night, and what I didn't tell you was that it was over Ma's grave, and that she would be happy. Our hearts are one-of-a-kind. We can make these mistakes, but it is okay. I think we've got something here, girl. Whaddya say." Next week he was moving in from a rented truck into the house that she had got out of the last marriage. Only good thing she had ever done in her life. Or so she felt tonight.

During the day she made quilts out of fabric that she gleaned from local thrift stores and sold them to the kids outside of the club on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. They thought she was a bag lady in a way. Most of them secretly admired. It was only the suburban ones that thought she was bonkers and that the quilts would make them sterile or infertile, depending on sex.

Gwen was her oldest and she had moved to Texas when she was 18 to be with a "sweet" boy who was in the Army that she had met while he was on leave and that she immediately fell for some kind of bad. She moved out there, and a quick wedding occurred which she was never invited to, and three years and one child later they were split and he was stationed in Okinawa, or something like that. Gwen called home at least once a week and sometimes Pen just let the phone ring, and it made her feel guilty.

Pen had Thursdays and Sundays off and Ricky, would always call on those days. To the diner, or the law office and request a dinner that would end up in his drinking and her watching it all go down and sometimes sex and sometimes a fight. She'd accepted the savior long before and none of it really mattered, whether it turned into a fight or turned into sex, she knew all was okay, in the big scheme.

Rick's brother was Hick and that was a whole different story. He came around too often and wanted booze and drugs and sex and a place to lay his head. Pen was still not sure where Hick laid his head most nights, but at least three nights a week he hoped that it would be with her and Ricky.

It didn't really matter to her as on those nights it would at least mean that Rick would leave her alone. It all seemed so romantic when it had all began. When she had let him into her life. Somehow it had all soured a bit over the ensuing months and she knew that it would end at some poing. But how? Ricky was a mean son of a bitch, and she was not sure how to deal with him anymore.

One night he had tied her hands to the headboard with bailing twine and made her go down on him until he came. Except he didn't come. Only if he had come she could have been done with it. His inability had only brought wrath, and from that wrath a day off of work, and it was a Thursday and she was off too.

In the morning, he packed a picnic and woke her up and they went to the lake and played rollerbat by the water, and he told her that one day he would kill her or himself, and for a while she believed that the options were about 50-50, but soon that all changed.

Pen was named by her parents, of course. Her father who thought not of names, but of ideas. Who fancied himself a man of letters and thought that his daughter was, or should be, mightier than a sword. Her mother, preferring something more traditional, and a compromise, chose Penelope and all was good in the O' Shea house. Pen had never thought as much as her parents about her name. A point which she felt was a true attribute.

But oh reader, this is not a sad story. Sure theer is death and found remains. There is heartbreak and bad decisions. But there is redemption, and strange happiness, and baseball, and flowers in the spring. Remind me to tell it all to you if I seem to be getting lost in my own thoughts.

Fourth, on fourth, and Maris is going for the winning run,
I made it to the bottom of the well faster
and therefore
would never be declared the winner.

Making our way out
of Potemkin and around
to a side of equal-bashing
buttermilk stew

I made a killing with that stuff
out on the streets till
all hours of the morning
as the drunks came and went

they sang "Katie Dear" and "Start Me Up"
they gazed at the crazy man with the limp
who stood on the corner, even at this
hour, selling comic books

Vintage hero, super whimsy
drawn in all color on the cover but
just a newspaper on the inside
sells them for a quarter but some

are worth a whole lot more.

Twenty six thousand four hundred and fourty four rare, used and (some) new parts. A call and within twenty four hours you too can have a new alternator for your late model Lincoln. Why shop anywhere else when all that you need is here. The outside may rust, but the inside is more than enough. Please make offer at front desk. Management on duty must approve all sales.

Jimmy worked hard with an adjustable wrench and a crowbar for 6 years out of high school. Hubcaps and waterpumps. A guy from Elizabeth City once broke down on the highway and he took the pickup truck out to meet him after the call. Helped to fit the pump on the Duster right then and there at the side of the road and did not charge labor. "Elizabeth City," that always seemed a funny name.

Wayne lived in back of the yard with 3 kids and a doberman pinscher. Funny name, "pinscher." He had a job at the factory and worked a Stuart's on the weekend's short ordering hash browns and fried eggs for late night drunks that had decided to lap it over till Sunday morning. Sylvia had left him three years earlier to follow a mountain man to the gulf coast of Florida.

Horton was the oldest's name. After his grandfather, all hopes were he would be a famous MLB pitcher. He seemed to have no interest in baseball though. Preferring to read the E volume of the World Book Encyclopedia as of late, as he had already made it through the first four volumes. He could tell anyone in Enoree more about daffodils and the Bastille than they would ever care to know. He had CODed a picture of the Eiffel tower from a catlog that Wayne had ordered him from the magazine that comes in the Sunday newspaper. One of those with the business reply card, put your name and address here and the catalog number that you are interested in there and within eight to ten weeks you should be receiving it in the mail, no postage necessary. It was from somewhere like the Paris visitors bureau as all of the language, as much as Wayne could read, seemed a little off to him.

Mamie was the youngest girl, named by her mother because she had always thought it a beautiful name, and because the woman who had cared for near incessantly as a kid, while mom was doing whatever it was she was doing, was named Mamie. Mamie, the younger, seemed to have a proclivity for singing and could pick out a countermelody to any song on the radio as she and Wayne drove to the truckstop for more chewing tobacco, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola. She had a tendency toward picking up the impulse-buy chocolates at the register and forcing them into her mouth before Daddy could object. Only in the waning minutes of the transactions telling him that his bill would be a full five cents greater. Dolly Parton never sounded so good as Mamie harmonizing in the truck on the way home... "and all of this at six years old," thought Wayne.

Then there was Deborah. A completely different story. She was twelve at the time the old lady left and Wayne had begun to resent the fact that he let her mother put too many letters in her name. Why could've it not been DEBRA? That would have sufficed wouldn't it? As a solution, Wayne had started calling her Deb since her mother had departed and she didn't seem to mind.

Deborah had recently started cavorting with a hispanic boy who went to school with her and Wayne had become distraught. It seems like she had never listened to him. Even as a child in the cradle by the bed, he would wake up at night and see her eyes open. He would start to tell her stories of how she would be the princess of a tropical island one day, and that all the boys, always, would love her, and that she would read signs in the way a sunset fell over the river, and that, through her, all of the world's problems would go away. She would only stare into the corner of the room where her mom had begun painting a mural with a bright sun and rainbow that was only half-finished. She would laugh, and this struck Wayne straight to the core. He found nothing funny in what he was saying. He was filling her and himself with all the hopes of the world, and all she could do was stare at a half-painted, never-to-be-finished, bad painting on the sheetrock of the corner of the bedroom. He'd usually get pissed off and go into the living room and watch true crime documentaries on cable television until he feel asleep and awoke 2 hours later and finally returned to the bedroom where Deb was finally asleep and he, himself, would finally fall asleep on his good hip, so as not to disturb the other, inflamed one, and on occasion he would dream of Sissy Spacek, naked, in the middle of a freshly plowed field of sweet potatoes, singing 'My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys' as he wandered up the row to her on horseback in full western regalia, embroidered shirt, silver spurs and all, and pulled her aboard behind him with one fluid swipe of his hand and they slowly trotted through a now snow-covered field, up to a cabin with plumes of long white-grey smoke coming from the chimney. He never felt as good as the days after the nights of these dreams.

MORE TO COME...

Judy Garland had 4 toes on one foot and six on the other.

I don't know why it always begins or ends with a midget, but it just does. I walked down to 16th for a beer and to meet up with my songwriter friend who had been doing the Music City struggle for three years and probably was in desperate need of my fat ass buying him a beer. He was an hour late, and by the time he arrived I was 3 whiskeys into the evening. Funny word, "evening", like it is when it makes everything okay, equal, irons out the inconsistencies of the day. Strange the way in which you can suddenly think differently about a word.

It should be no surprise to those of you that have followed me thus far that my time is the "evening", the other part of the clock is skewed.

My friend arrived and two drinks later we departed for dinner at a BBQ joint on the outskirts of town. Forty-four dollars layed on the bar and a trip in a car with an emerald "E" tatooed on the back - small like the butterflies on girls breasts and buttocks who are trying to keep it from their mothers. I have to say, living in the city now, this was the first time I've had to follow a dirt road to get to a dinner since I was a kid and my granfather cooked whole hogs with his drinking buddies at the lodge every Labor Day.

Nashville is a big city too. I mean it is nothing like "the city", but it is enormous in it's geographic scope. It took us nearly an hour to get out from beneath the lights. At which point Jack turned to me and in between cigarrette blasts and swig from the "to-go cup" asked, " when was the last time you saw the world like this?" I hadn't stopped to notice, but there was a full moon, or nearly so by the looks, and the fallen leaves made a mirror to the dark luminiscence of the sky. It cast deligtful eery shadows of the trees all around and if I could have closed my eyes, I am sure I could imagine the initial "shock and awe" of a Kansas ass first being dropped into Oz.

It had been a long time since I had seen the world like this. Not since Junior High and bike rides with Michael while bats attacked our sweaty heads cruising by Menetrez Lake. There's another story that has been only half told here and shouldn't have even entered into this one.

Down the path we went and up and over and down and under - trees, streams, something that looked like a taxidermied owl low on a branch near the road. When we made it to Buster's I didn't even know it. There were scant cars in the dirt patch behind and not a sign that this was anything but a normal residence. Two men were smoking on the porch with light beer cans in hand.

Jack saw my agitation and promised that it was okay saying, "you're gonna love this shit!"

We walked up the concrete tiled path and past the smoking men and into what appeared as a foyer where we were greeted by a man of roughly 60 hard years and Jack exclaimed, "Buster, how the hell are you!"

"Been waiting for you, boy. Where the hell you been all fall?"

"Buster, this here is my good buddy from college, I mean he didn't go to college with me, I just knew him in college, this is the first time he has come down here."

"Ya'll need a table? By the band, right?"

"As always!," Jack answered.

The next ten minutes were the usual sort of minutes being seated at a restaurant. Drink orders, food orders, cigarettes and a toast to where we were when we last saw each other. A bottle of bourbon was placed on the table, courtesy of Buster, with the explicit instructions that we were not to leave untll it was done.

Half-way into our BBQ plates, out came a motley band of musicians. One on accordion, another on guitar, one on drums and a woman one on a keyboard that looked to have been bought from Sears Roebucks in the late 1970s.

The accordion player seemed alright until I noticed his wandering and asked Jack about it.

"Hasn't seen a lick since he was 12. A virtual, fucking, Stevie Wonder with a squeeze box."

"Crazy," was all I could think to say.

They ripped through a few Zydeco numbers, a blues number here and there and settled into some classic country stuff, everyone sharing the singing duties as was seen fit.

Two songs before the end of the set, and three drinks before the end of our bottle, they launched into a version of Floyd Cramer's "Last Date" unlike any I had ever heard before. I had played the song once at a piano recital when I was a kid at the request of my Uncle Barry and he cried in a way i had never seen a man cry before. Like it reminded him of a childhood sweetheart washed away by the river. I watched as the piano players delicate fingers moved across the plastic ivories and convinced myself that I would never touch a piano or any other keyed instrument again. Then it struck me.

As I was looking, meditating - mesmerized by the flow of her slender fingers - I noticed that the on the last finger of her left hand was a wedding band. Looking closer I saw that indeed it was the last finger, but still in yet, the ring finger, and looking more closely I saw the nub where a pinky would be. I turned to Jack and drunkenly blurted, "She's only got four fingers on her left hand!"

"Don't mention it... does it matter?... just shut up and listen."

I sensed there was a story to be told which I would ever know. The band played another song. We finished the bottle of whiskey and headed toward the car. Walking toward the door, I saw the place had filled up without me even noticing it. We went out and down the steps and into a dirt lot filled with cars only to meet a midget in a bellboy hat and suit that asked, "Number please?"

Jack said, "It's okay Caesar, we were here early tonight," slipped him a bill and we walked on out to the tatooed car, where we drove the hour back to town and I dropped Jack off at a friend's house where I was not invited in, so I drove back to the hotel and room 281.

We had agreed to meet up the next day, but when I awoke and went out to breakfast, the desk clerk stopped me and said, "Someone left a package and a message for you." I took the box and the letter and headed to breakfast where I opened the letter first.

"Hey Man,

It was good to see you last night and I know we said we would meet up today, but some things have come up and I've got to get some things rolling. Hope you enjoyed Buster's and the kindly southern hospitality. I don't really think Nashville is your kind of place.

Keep in touch.

Jack

PS- Don't open the package until you get back to the 'big city'."

After breakfast I headed back to the hotel and showered and changed clothes. Then I headed out to do a little siteseeing before I left on a 8PM flight. I put the package in my bag and stored my bags at the front desk. I went to Gruhn's and the Ryman and beat about, having a couple of beers in mid afternoon at a couple of overly commercialized "country" bars. I went back to the hotel and caught a taxi to the airport where I clicked my heels 3 times and a jetplane came and took me back to the "big city."

Employer, No Guns!

She used to like Peter, but refused to like him anymore. She didn't like the way he refused to prune the facial hair... and he drank too much. Drank himself into oblivion three nights a week and just into a stupor the others. She never laughs at his jokes. Peter is a funny guy, especially when he's tied a few on.

I met Amelia in college and we hit it off immediately. She was the kind of girl I had waited for all through HS, but that alas never came on the scene. She was there under the tree at the Hare Krishna free dinner. My mother told me it would all be better in college. Girls would respect brains. Like I was ugly, maybe I was, or am, I don't know.

Peter and I go back to Bethesda and Lowes Grove Elementary. he provided the first beer I ever drank, and it was with him that I shared my first alcoholic buzz. As a prerequisite for joining the little social group the two of us had created, he would ask if the male applicant masturbated. If the answer was yes, we would laugh and say that was sick. If the answer was no, we would say, "why wouldn't you? Liar!", and as equally dismiss them. Tough crowd.

Peter believed in the importance of baseball. The way in which a rock show really could change your life (hopefully for the better). Amelia and Peter initially thought the world of each other. Peter told me that she was the woman I would marry. In fact, he was the first of the friends to sign the virtual petition permitting us to make such an action. I don't know what has happened.

Peter comes over to watch the games on most Saturdays and some Sundays. He brings cheese dip and the occasional woman that he finds himself sleeping with. Most of the time it's just cheese dip, perhaps a six pack of light beer.

The other engagement is the weekly Thursday night at the Green Room where Peter buys the beer and takes me to the cleaners for the sum total of about $20 a week. Once a month he lets me win, but he has the billiard muses riding his back. It's like a social obligation.

Amelia took a job as a paralegal with a law firm two years ago and has since gotten all uppity on me. That is when the problems with Peter began. She was alright with me for awhile until the last six months. Her crowd has changed and she want me to change mine too. She bought me a suit for Christmas, replacing my graduation one - bought my parents - that is about 30 pounds too small now. We go to firm "socials" on Friday nights, twice a month. I did not join a fraternity in college for a reason. She talks of going back to Law School, and I pretend to be interested. She tells me I should do something with my writing. become a journalist or something. Write for the local entertainment weekly where I do have inroads. She is dissatisfied that I am the senior staff member at Visart Video on Hillsborough Road. I like it though. Not the seniority, but the contact with people, the service provision, and most of my co-workers, except Micah - who incessantly talks of his fecal fetish and wears a dagger on his belt while on his shifts. I remember the internship summer at the agency when I felt the suffocation. The suffocation of what my life SHOULD be like upon graduation. Videos are good enough for me now. Five PM until midnight is alright.

Peter has been landscaping since dropping out after our junior year. He "couldn't handle the oppressive administration and structure". He's read more books since then that I have. He wants to be poet laureate of the United States one day. A desire which i have tried to talk him out of repeatedly.

Amelia doesn' t think that Peter is the type of person "we" should be tarrying with now in our "new life". Peter is just dragging me down and keeping me from accomplishing my goals. She doesn't understand that without him I might me in the bottom of a river with a cinder block chained to my left foot by now - self-imposed.

I do love her despite how all this may sound. I love the way she gets sweet at bedtime. The way she works a party. The way she loves Detroit the same way I do, despite the fact all of the friends think we are crazy.

She told me today she was pregnant and I took three steps back. Not that we weren't planning, but we weren't planning for now. Everything is alright as she has health insurance for us all through the firm. She asked for me to start searching for a writing job tomorrow, and I guess I will.

R. Carver

I met you that weekend in Portland, a long weekend, Labor Day, and you seemed the nicest. I could not seem to get the smear of your writing out of my brain. A bad smear I thought at the time. Like you had tainted my thoughts. The way in which love could be. Like you had precluded the possibility of anything possible. I was young, foolish and full of hope.

In Portland, over that beer, I found you nothing like what you wrote. Filled with passion and a history of love, I failed to understand the way in which you could write what I felt at the time was so much heartlessness. Nothing is ever as it seems. Mt. Hood stood as a monument outside of the bar, and over the roofline, of the cold, frigid horizon of aging.

I made a mistake. See, it was never your intention to be that way. There was a commitment to truth of one sort or another. The way in which a fictioner will write it and a journalist could never get. This is all second-nature to the English majors in the crowd. I picked up your book again tonight some 18 years later, and it all falls into place. It's not that easy, simple or forthcoming. Trying to make sense of tea leaves at the bottom of your cup, or to believe that she is out there waiting for you seems fruitless now. I do not know how I got the Times gig at all. Daddy was in the service with an assistant edtor during a week when the editor had escaped to Mali when it was beautiful and a respite. I needed cash.

Tonight Robert arrived and later found himself vomiting on the bathroom floor for an hour and a half until he passed out. I made a bed for him and lured him to it where he lies asleep now. I was just in bed myself, lonely, reading your review of Richard Ford's The Ultimate Good Luck when I realized that a peace was required. All that I said of you was wrong. Incredibly so. In fact, all that I have said of myself to this point has been so as well. I am still figuring out piece by piece, and I still cannot figure out why your last word is there in those pages, as if that was all that ever really mattered. I can read it a hundred times over now, just one paragraph, with only a smidge that begets a smear, starts to sink into this heart, and I breathe.

Jorge Luis Borges

It was strange that she was my mother's best friend in high school and that they had not spoken in 30 years. My mother attended your father's funeral when he was mangled in the mechanical looms at Burlington Industries, and your mother did not acknowledge her. Driving home, mom saw an albino deer cross the road and she was sure that it was the spirit of your father escaping to freedom.

I don't know what happens in these dreams. My upper teeth, gums and teeth, half rotting, become detachable. Easy answer is that I need a trip to the dentist. Hard answer is that I feel that I am losing a part of me.

I guess I have felt that for awhile. Like a phantom limb thing for the last 10 years or so. Like I need to become whole with the person that I used to be, and that I was comfortable with. I was going to change the world, I remember. I was going to be someone, and mom always thought the same.

I can't figure out what in the world making these little web sites has changed, or the occasional brochure for real estate, black angus steaks, a week in Las Vegas. I've settled, but I know in the back of my mind that more was what I wanted.

This is those most personal type of journals. Not as entertaining as the rest. Not as scary either. No one dies. Nothing is ambivalent. There is a noticeable lack of the Borgesian twist. My moonface wanes as the sunlight approaches. I want sleep as do you now. A week of bad vibes and discussion. We will make it better in the thing to come.

But my teeth seem to be falling out my head as I fall to sleep and this seems to exhibit a certain paranoia akin, but completely different from, the sinking pool of weeks before. If it's not one thing it's another, I suppose.

But what you do not realize is that my mother loved your mother when they were kids. She worshipped her to an extent. They were inseparable for a matter of 8 years coming through school. I guess there's the rub. There's nothing that she could have done but marry that guy and live in that place and be that person that was something that your mother lost the capability to love so long ago. Hell, she didn't even love you in the way in which you wanted to be loved.

I wish that I could make sense of all of it and I suppose that is what I am trying to do, but perhaps a few more hours of sleep are needed - a few more years between me and that. Perhaps, you and I can make it all better if we try.

Falls Lake at sundown.

Michael and I dug the grave on the occasion of his thirteenth birthday, under the treefort 836 yds. in the woods behind my parent's house and roughly 416 yds. behind his. Roughly 8 ft. by 4 ft., we spent all late afternoon opening the ground and building the mound beside. I paused on the hour to vomit and Michael would berate me in the best way he knew how, with his limited language, speech impediment and drawl. I did the best I could to understand exactly what he was saying. At times, I even mistook his unkind words for the kindlier variety.

It was that afternoon while BMXing down by Falls Lake that we came across her. Fresh out of the water and on the rocks lying there, we hid in the fallen trees for over an hour before ever making an approach.

Mom called us at lunch and her voice rang through the valley and down to the lake, but since we were known to tarry outside of earshot regularly she did not worry at our absence that afternoon at the lunch table, Saranwrapped, the sandwiches were put in the frigidaire for our imminent arrival.

Cookie, Michael's mom and my mom's best friend, had relinquished custody of us boys,for the afternoon to my mother. We swam early and played our jump or swim, marco polo, sharks and minnows- the best we could with just the two of us after my brother left.

Later on the bikes we struck out down the path by the Allen house where Ricky was layed up with cancer at 35. (That man once helped us roof our garage, as he was a roofer - his whole family was - before he opened the vintage Ford truck parts store. He could drive the nail in one swipe, accosting it while it was still in the air and driving it right through the tarpaper and plywood.) Down to the lake we rode, bunnyhopping the new craters created by the three weeks of rain. Michael had taken his step-dad Scotty's 12 gauge and a half box of buck shot, three beer cans from the curb garbage, and two full ones stuffed into the cargo pockets of his surplus army fatigues.

Down to the lake we rode with cargo in tow, me in front, Michael in back. Arriving, we decided the 5 minute trip enough to merit consuming the beers, which we did in short order, throwing the empty cans, as well as the empties we brought with us into the lake. Michael loaded the shotgun with shells and we took turns shooting at the cans as they slowly drifted out toward the channel. Finally, by pure stroke of luck, I made the first hit and for the first time in my life I heard and understood (differently than I would later come to understand the term) "fallen soldier" - except Michael added "Yankee" in between the two words.

After the shells were expended, or the cans had drifted too far out for feasible aim and accuracy, Michael strapped the gun back around his shoulders and we headed down the makeshift path toward the north point where we liked to skip the rocks made smooth by the channel moving through. That is where we saw her first. First in the water and then coming onto the shore and lying down. we hid behind the dead trees that were exposed from the summer drought. She didn't know we were there. She thought she was alone. Naked, laying on the channel stone.

Michael had the idea to make a scare and I agreed. We could surely outrun on bikes. We could make it back to Dude Ranch Road before she could even fully arise and make a chase. He started and I hid my eyes and readied for the great escape - Huffy handlebars in hand. I watched as he approached, barefoot like a samurai, not making a sound. Once upon her I could not stand it anymore and I took off in a random direction. Knowing the woods like I did, I would make it back home and to fried bologna sandwiches in no time. Three hundred yards away I heard the impact , and then the bang, and I was stopped immediately. I turned to look back and Michael stood with the shotgun in one arm and his other in the air. I thought we were out of shells.

Shrieking he called me a 'pussy" and told me if I had any balls I would come back and help him take the body back with us. Of course, this is the moment in which I should have run - far from that place and back to sandwiches and pool and mom and garage and basketball goal and Huck Finn - but of course that is not the way it went down. I went back and we place the body across the two bikes and between the two of us and we pushed it out of the woods and to the treefort. I went home and got two shovels and a pickaxe from the leanto behind the garage. We dug until 6:30 and Michael went his way and I went mine.

I went to the pool and straight in with my cutoff courduroy Levis. I wanted to wash it all away. I knew her. I had secretly spied her on my own before. I had delicate fancies during prepubescence about her. I wanted to wash it all from my hands, and the blood drippings from my shorts. I wanted to deny all evil. Destroy all monsters. Make my mother proud. It would all come to be sooner or later anyway - and the opposite.

That was the summer before Michael was incarcerated at the Dillon school. The summer before Cookie died after hitting the split rail fence at 55 MPH, the wood coming through the engine block, firewall and her heart. The summer before I fell in love the first time. The summer before I first hailed a cab. The summer before my first guitar and the last summer of piano lessons. The summer in which Michael and I stopped being friends, his family moving away after the death of his mother. The summer I learned my first lesson.

If I could make it all different now, if it really did happen, I surely would. Michael is okay now the last I heard through the grapevine. I am not sure that I am. Though the dream won't stop, I am working on it. If the cure comes soon, maybe we can all live happily ever after.

This is not her.

The decision never gets easier. I walk around constantly in wet socks. I have been making footprints through your house. Your mind cannot begin to imagine. I have 15 feet of loving and a half-tied nitwit who wants nothing more than to sit in the corner of your bedroom as you drift off to sleep. I'm good for something, just not good enough for that. You think it's a favor, and maybe in the "big scheme" it will be. Only time will tell. You've never wanted for anything, or so it seems. A family from Grosse Pointe, or one of the Pointes, automobile money to be sure. You drive a foreign car, a roadster of the cheapest sort, just to thumb your nose at them. They still love you. God and country can keep you together, and your house will smell of the sweetest potpourris sold at the most boring of shops.

I made my way upstream at half past midnight and looked in your window and you were asleep. Such peaceful sleep for so young, and at this hour when wolves silhouette themselves against the moon. A heart beats solo in the corner. I am making the crinoline under your skirt and it itches your sunburned legs like nothing since mosquitos in summer on a rainy night in Key West.

Speaking of Key West. I will be staying there for the summer on a friend's couch. It's a pullout and I will have to take my own pillow. I will lie naked, my body spilling out in the different directions - Atlantic, Pacific, Ursa Minor... He says that jobs are plentiful and the air is hot. My arthritic legs will weather well here. I know I never make any sense. You've said that more than once and so I will say it here just so everyone knows your thoughts.

Sooner or later there will be one million dollars in a safety deposit box and we will do the subterranean rescue. Jeremy and I are buying the Atlanta Braves you know. You thought it was all a hoax, but we've got the "silent partners" and the Series is ours.

I love the last time you spoke to me in whispers as we were naked on the floor and talking in secret tongues - both of us on our knees, yet you still sitting in my lap. All of that has changed now.

I do headstands on pillows made of Turkish wool, and you howl at male ballet dancers with cod pieces. They are cod pieces you know, and you are not so deep yourself.

I fixed your well that November when it froze over and you were happy to have the water again. I rewired your studio like it was your heart... you always loved that dad was an electrician - he can remove your shorts. I did a cartwheel when I first met you.

Tomorrow I am shaving it all off. The hairs, the nails, the hairs on my hobbit toes. I will be free. There will be truth for a while. I missed you most while you were up North. In that place. One of two that have ever elected socialist mayors. Strange in that way if you really think about it all.

All things become one, but I feel like nothing. Jeremy will write something soon to bring levity to this whole forum. But for now, I cannot figure out, in my heart of hearts, for who this love letter is intended.

Not A Cobra, A Dream.

I said, "I know, but to punctuate is just too hard, and you are not available, or so that's what I hear, or wouldn't make yourself so, because you understand my psychological dilemna so thoroughly."

I took the suit, and another and we left that place, and then to the tailor, and measurement where I realized that just as the universe is expanding, I too am expanding... take a walk, shun the sedentary lifestyle.

We went back to her place for a beer or two, and she had a quarter bottle of whisky, and some grain alcohol her daddy had procured for her a couple of years back, and a vintage bottle of Carlo Rossi, and the shit really hit the fan.

I cannot flirt you must first realize, unless I do it here, and that is no kind of way for the whole thing to go down. I can write of you before or after I fall asleep, I can make strange faces toward the moon too. My body can become a somnambulist at the turn of a phrase, and this latter thing is what concerns me the most.

Me walking 'round sleeping and you in a henhouse, nuthouse, riotact, slave cell, and me walking through the night with vacancy in heart, bed and mind.

I don't know what the sexiest song that I have ever heard is, but every song I have ever heard that I really liked made me feel sexy in some way. Forgot to mention Afghan Whigs, and you were right about Nina Simone, I've got her in my disc player which apparently granted considerable mileage at the end of a night.

But you are right, all that I can't seem to leave behind haunts me, I can see the future just as brightly as all getout, but the subdued hues of the past seem to strike chords that cannot be interrupted. I walk through Oakland Cemetery tonight with a half stallion, a half prince, a whole heart and a half head - to your house, where I hope the cobra does not bow it's neck, does not make a hiss, does not come from the basket. I have fife in hand, and multitudes in heart.

Please forgive me, all I said could never be true.

Spring Break: Daytona Beach

I think briefly of Liz and the kids back in Kansas. Of the way she hangs the sheets out to dry on the line out back in the summer. I know nothing of what you are thinking as you let out that yawp again. I think you may think little of things outside of this moment, or any other. That may be the best policy considering the circumstances.

Back in November, when I met you, you seemed as strange to me as a cloud. Like being in a cloud when you are coming down in an airplane and all of the sudden the whole world opens up to you just before landing. It always scared me shitless, but I think you like the cloud. You revel in it. And the site of land below curls your toes, makes you think of home, childhood, your mother... perhaps.

And then there is this sound. We all hear it and I break the truck just before Kyle plows into us from behind. It's coming from up above. From across the sky came a screaming, and you, little ol' you, burst into spirals. Me thrown 300 feet back. And I looked to the sky and there were one million fireflies, and you, alternatingly red, green, blue and then, at last, gold.

Time measured in dotted and solid yellow lines as we cross the Lone Star State.

White heat rises from a desert and we have an extra 5 gallon bucket full of gas which once held yard herbicide in the tail, and a large funnel, for we have heard that these trips can require such desparate measures. Beer gotten at various truck stops along the way leads me to doubt the commitment to the given clientele, or doubt the 18 wheelers, lorries, that move along the road beside us heading to points further in the southwest. Some even as far as the coast, packed with Texas crude oil and petroleum of varying grades.

Tonight we are running. Running from something 'larger than us', otherwise we should stay and fight, but we realize the feds or locals are gonna catch up with us quickly unless we get the jump on them, and that meant a departure from Georgia in the middle of the night.

Greens for money.

"You never heard of it?"

"Nope."

That's all she said the first time I asked her. Nope.
Just a simple nope while she kept on mashing the
potatoes.