Freedom

Stick was disappointed with the world and, truth be known, the world was disappointed with Stick.

The Bangers named him.  The band, that was first Bangers and Mash and then simply Bangers, that Stick hung with in a non-musician way, putting a few bucks in his pockets by occasionally helping them load in and out of a show. Kyle, the lead singer and rhythm guitar player who wrote the lyrics and had a lyrical frame of reference, gave him the nickname after saying he was no more substantial than a branch on a tree late in season. And the name Stick stuck.

Stick sat on a park bench under a putty sky on a Sunday in early November, a day much like the one Kyle had referred to, wearing baggy polyester athletic shorts that stopped at mid-calf and an Ocho Cinco football jersey and Converse All Star high tops without shoe laces. Squirrels gamboled about and Stick felt wrapped in an old blanket of pumpkin and spice and paste and crayons that soothed and excited in equal measure. A kid carried a paper funnel holding French fries sold by a vendor at the far end of the park and though there was a stirring breeze making the hairs stand up on his arms the air was humid and Stick could feel his genitals clinging to his thigh and the beginning of an erection not owing to his lack of underwear and the pretty girls in the park but to the smell of the fries.

On a bench across the asphalt path busy with strollers and bicyclers sat a woman with a book spread on her lap and her head hung low because she was dozing. At her hip was a purse, the fancy kind that you see in the best stores and in magazines with perfumed ads. Judging by the purse and the woman’s dress and the cut of her hair she was probably well heeled with a pretty good job or a rich husband or both which is how it was around here with older women like her. She looked to be over thirty, Stick thought.

Stick’s left bicep was bandaged from his new tattoo which itched as did his left earlobe inflamed from the recent piercing. He would ask Heather to steal a bottle of peroxide from the drug store. She was good at shoplifting, especially when she was in her uniform and looking like a well behaved working girl, though if they ever knew.  Stick looked at his cell phone which was out of minutes so he couldn’t call Heather but it was a perfectly good clock and he could see that Heather wouldn’t get off work for another forty minutes which left him enough time to get a little work done himself as he looked at the older woman with the book and the purse that might as well be a juicy rump roast it looked so plump and delicious.

The bench fronted a hedge  he could maybe reach through and while the slats fit tightly on the bench seat and back there was a wide enough space where the seat curved to become the back to slip the purse through. But first he needed a bag because he couldn’t go wandering through the park carrying a lady’s fancy purse.

A bum rummaged through the nearest Municipal trash can. Stick walked up to the bum and peered around him into the porridge of refuse and after the bum plucked a greasy, bulging fast food bag promising something edible, Stick could see a colorful bag from a store that might have been the very source of the purse. He reached in and retrieved the bag. The bum gave him a raw look and snatched the bag from his grasp but just as quickly threw it to his feet when he discovered it was empty.

Big trees lined the west side of the park and provided a nice shade on sunny days. The combination of the trees and the leaden sky diffused the light and made the park look like an old-timey photograph. The softness of the scene allowed Stick to wander behind the hedge unnoticed in his dark jersey and shorts and to stoop down like he was tying his non-existent shoelaces before dropping to the ground and crawling to the spot where he could see through the hedge and the bench slats. He could see the woman’s olive colored dress and her buttocks bulging a bit through the gap and he could see the purse and he really did have an erection either because of the woman’s ass or more likely the purse and the achievable mission since the smell of the French fries had long passed.

###

Damned if the woman wasn’t suddenly standing and looking all around in a frantic way with her hands to her mouth and the book open-faced on the ground like a bird brought down by a hunter. She gave out a shriek and a man stopped and in a moment the man was punching at his phone and Stick knew he didn’t have much time as he stood once again at the trash can with his hands in its bowels fumbling into the purse in the bag. Inside the purse, a cell phone and a wallet with not as much money as he had hoped but more money than had been in his possession in weeks.

The presence at his elbow caused his heart to flutter and leap at his chest like a bird in a cage but he saw it was only Heather which he should have known because he could smell the French fry grease wafting from her brown uniform. She would want to take a shower as soon as they got home though he preferred to fuck her while she was still a French fry with the hungers melded and confused within him.

“What are you doing?” Heather asked.

“Pay day,” said Stick as he thumbed through the bills, his hands still deep in the gut of the garbage can.

Heather peered into the can. “Oh my God! Someone threw a purse with money in the trash?”

“No, idiot. Shut up!” Stick could see an Officer talking with the woman and the helpful man. The cop’s eyes roamed the park as he spoke.

“You shut up! You’re the idiot,” Heather said with her tongue at her front teeth instead of the roof of her mouth, pronouncing idiot with a th rather than a hard d.

“Moron,” he hissed as he grasped his French fry girl by the elbow and pulled her away. Stick was clutching the bills and the cell phone in his other hand. His baggy athletic shorts didn’t have pockets so he shoved the money into a hip pocket of Heather’s uniform which caused her to jump back and a loose twenty fluttered to the ground. He tugged at her again and tried to guide her away casually because he thought the cop might be looking in their direction but Heather dug in her heels, turned and said, “You dropped money.”

“Shut up! Run!”

Stick and Heather bolted down the pathway.

“You shut up!”

As they rounded the bend to the pond the cell phone from the purse began to ring so Stick chucked it into the water.

“Idiot!”

They left the path and didn’t stop running until they were all the way to 4^th St.

“Moron!”

###

The police reports had been filed and the credit card and phone companies notified. Tom and Susan went to dinner at Baci’s, their favorite Trattoria, even though it required driving across town to Little Italy. A treat after a disaster.

“You can go to the driver’s license bureau tomorrow on your lunch hour. It’s just a purse honey. It’s just stuff,” Tom said as he reached across the table for Susan’s hand.

“It was the matching purse and wallet you bought me in Florence. In the little shop on the Ponte Vecchio.” Susan looked like she might cry.

“No it was the other one. The other shop a few blocks away. I can’t remember the name.”

“No it wasn’t”

“Yes it was.”

Susan glared through teary eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said, “we’ll buy another one. We can probably find the exact same purse on line.”

“It won’t be the same,” Susan said, staring at her glass of wine as if inviting it to take sides in the debate, “I was so stupid. And I’d just withdrawn $200 before I walked to the park.”

“You fell asleep,” Tom said after taking a sip of the glass of Brunello and tipping the liquid to admire the ruby color. “It happens. Criminals are so brazen these days. A busy park in the middle of the day.” Tom shook his head and smiled wistfully at his wife who, he thought, looked much younger than her forty two years. “It could have been at gunpoint, you know. Better to just sleep through it.”

At this Susan forced a smile and held her wineglass aloft for a toast but her sourness showed through the smile like buckling plaster under fresh wallpaper.

###

At the apartment, Stick counted the money which amounted to $180 and would have been $200, he fretted, and then he went down the hall and bought what the lady still called a nickel bag though it cost a lot more. The neighbor lady had a dog and a kid and sometimes, especially at night, the shrieking kid and the barking dog went at it answering each other in tune and in the appropriate key until it sounded like a god damned tenement symphony but the entire floor tolerated them because she was nice and reliable and the product was very, very good.

Heather and Stick had sex, having convinced her to forego the shower with the inducement of the grass and their new found riches which he split with her 50/50 net expenses. They fucked on the old mattress on the floor even though she complained that the almost fresh sheets, the only set they owned, would smell like French fries until she did the wash again. They smoked and fucked and fucked and smoked until they could fuck nor smoke no more and Heather got up and took her shower while Stick lay sprawled on the mattress and contemplated his limp penis and the purse.

After Heather fell soundly asleep and began to snore in the soft, animal way she did, Stick rose and pulled on his baggy shorts and jersey and unlaced tennis shoes and walked all the way back to the park even though it was late and the park was technically closed and the restrictions were enforced more frequently now that rich people who liked to complain were moving into the Riverside District next door.

Much to his astonishment he found the purse and the wallet deep in the trash can where he left them. He purged the wallet of credit cards, which surely by now had no value though he was sorely tempted to try them just one time. He tossed the other identifying documents and make-up and other bric-a-brac into the can after the credit cards but held on to the driver’s license. He found a pen in the purse and a tiny notebook with addresses and he wrote down Susan Daniels, 123 Dorchester Street, from the license on a blank page where the z’s were supposed to go, tore out the sheet and tucked it into his sneakers. The license lingered in his hand for just a moment as he weighed its street value before he concluded that it had fulfilled its purpose and added it to the trash.

 

###

Stick awakened Heather and presented her with the buttery beige purse and matching wallet but she ground her fists at her eyes and stared at his tattoo. He had removed the bandage before liberally applying the last of a bottle of rubbing alcohol since they had been too harried and distracted to steal any peroxide. The tattoo was an American flag on a staff with a ball on the top where an eagle perched. The flag appeared to ripple in a breeze. Below the flag were letters in Olde English like the ones that spell out DETROIT on the Tiger’s uniforms (his dad’s hometown and favorite team) but these letters spelled out FREDOM and Heather, rather than kissing him and thanking him for the gifts, had the audacity to tell him his tattoo was spelled wrong. His first impulse was to find and murder Noodle who was a gifted tattoo artist but probably couldn’t spell his own real name if he could even remember it. Instead he flung the baby ass soft leather goods in Heather’s face and stomped off to see if there was anything left to smoke and said, “Fuck you,” under his breath but he didn’t really mean it because he loved Heather and just wanted to make her happy and despite his outward defiance also wished his new tattoo was spelled right.

###

The address was easy to find. Dorchester was two blocks east of the park and 123 was one of the new townhouses that filled the former vacant lots. Before the neighborhood renaissance, the old row-houses had begun to crumble and be torn down or collapse of their own fatigue. The Riverside District had recently become fashionable and rich people were busy rehabbing and building anew in order to live close to downtown and the night scene and the pretty park next door. The new houses were designed to blend in with the old but their pristine personages contrast them all the more with the quirky character of the old row houses and gave the street the impression of a smile where tooth whitener had been unevenly applied.

Stick walked up and down the street a couple of times but knew that lingering would mark him as suspicious. Across the street an old row-house was undergoing a facelift and a crew of workmen in jeans and t-shirts and ball caps milled around organizing materials. One of the men carried a clipboard and was not as dusty as the others so Stick figured him to be the boss.

Gunnar, as he introduced himself, owned the house with his new bride and served as general contractor. Stick admired the name and wished it were his own as it sounded strong and potentially dangerous. He silently practiced the name in the back of his mouth.

“I can carry those bags of cement and even paint a little if you need. Pay me whatever you can,” Stick said trying to look into Gunnar’s steely blue eyes that seemed to expect something more.

Gunnar studied the skinny, wiry strong, little man with the fresh tattoo who kept digging at his red left earlobe with a fingernail. “I like the rebellion where you spell freedom wrong but know everybody will still understand but if they don’t fuck ‘em because it’s up to them and that’s what freedom is all about,” Gunnar said in a gush that left Stick trying to keep up.

“Right,” Stick said committing the explanation to memory for use later on with Heather.

“Yeah I guess I can use you since we’re getting ready to pour the walk and I’ll pay you $40 for the day even though the day is already half over and depending on how things go we’ll talk about tomorrow so the work gloves and trowels are in the big red box over there,” Gunnar said while pointing to wooden forms outlining the artistically winding dirt path from the front porch steps to the street sidewalk.  Galvanized tubs sat along either side of the forms and an old black guy who seemed to be working harder than anyone else was laying bags of concrete mix beside the tubs until Gunnar told him the new kid would do it. A thick green garden hose with no nozzle snaked to the tub closest to the front porch steps.

The work gloves were too big and almost as hard as concrete themselves and chafed his skin but felt good when he raked a knuckle against his inflamed earlobe. Stick sliced open the bags, one by one, with a carpet knife and dumped the dusty contents into the tubs. He added water from the garden hose into the tubs until told to stop and the men began churning at the grey mixture with hoes and he would hoe along himself until a workman would call out for more water and he would run over to the tub with the hose. After the sludge had achieved a uniform consistency the men grabbed shovels and started chucking the mess into the forms. Then they all dropped to the ground with trowels in hand and began to spread the concrete flat in a pleasant gritty rhythm. When the sidewalk was glassy smooth the black guy and another guy, each to a side, took their trowels and dragged them blunt end of the blade first along the edge to form a decorative boundary.

Stick had to admit it looked nice and wished he could plant his palm into the middle like he would have if he was still a kid. His admiration was tempered, however, by his cement encrusted Converse high-tops and his spackled gym shorts and Ocho Cinco jersey and he knew the $40 Gunnar had handed him wasn’t half enough to replace them. Stick didn’t complain since he had been invited back tomorrow and he had a bigger vision than this narrow little house and its stupid sidewalk. He looked over at the beaming Daniels’ residence which seemed to be gloating just as a Corolla pulled to the curb in front of him. A skinny girl greeted by the black guy as Ms. Nanette as she alighted from the car held a camera and walked over and gave Gunnar a kiss before she started snapping pictures of the new walkway. Stick looked on in the bemused and tolerant way one does when watching a parent fuss over an ugly child.

The tools were gathered into the workmen’s vans and pick-up trucks, except for the garden hose and galvanized tubs and the hoes and shovels and the red box with the gloves and trowels which were dragged around back of the house and locked up in a little shed that looked more like a play house than secure storage and even had flower boxes under two little windows but no flowers. Everyone dispersed including Gunnar and Nanette who weren’t living in the house during the renovation but Stick lingered in his ruined clothes without anyone seeming to notice or care and smoked a cigarette on the front porch while he watched the Daniels’ residence. It was 4:40 p.m. and it only took a half hour of dawdling before he saw Susan Daniels strolling down the sidewalk. She climbed the porch and let herself in and Stick noticed the alarm system sticker on the front door and another warning sign atop a stick in the ground on the tiny front lawn.

Stick studied the house for a few minutes more but he didn’t have another cigarette for a prop and he had started feeling conspicuous alone on Gunnar and Nanette’s front porch so he went home to Heather who would be wondering where he was but couldn’t call because he hadn’t bought minutes yet.

###

In the morning Stick was sorer than he ever remembered from helping the Bangers with a show but he was up before light because he wanted to watch Susan Daniels’ house before the work crew showed up. He pulled on old jeans, a t-shirt, a jacket and his hardened Converse All Stars and after kissing the sleeping Heather on the cheek walked from their Near North neighborhood, through the park, to Gunnar’s house where he was rewarded immediately.

Before he could take his position on the porch the garage door opened at 123 Dorchester and a black Lexus backed out onto the street, driven not by Susan but by, presumably, her husband. Only the new townhouses had garages that faced the street. The old row-houses either had a small garage in the back of the house accessed by narrow driveways cut between the tight clusters or there was no off-street parking at all. Many of the houses were stuck together like Siamese twins with no opportunity for a driveway between them. Stick didn’t understand why the Daniels would choose to live in such a cramped neighborhood when they could be comfortably sprawled in the suburbs. But then he never had understood rich people and maybe that was why he wasn’t one of them.

###

On Thursday they assembled scaffolding on the west side of Gunnar’s house and Stick enjoyed it very much because it was kind of like playing with big Tinker toys. Stick and two other workers were assigned to climb the scaffold and begin to scrape the bricks free of crumbling paint and other debris while the rest of the crew carried old sinks and cabinets and carpeting from inside the house to a dumpster that had been parked at the curb. Nanette took photographs and served the men ice water or lemonade and insisted on carrying things her small frame could tolerate and Stick liked watching the wisp of a girl who was no more than a stick herself and the way her feet never seemed to touch the ground as she glided through the scene and although he loved wrapping his arms around his somewhat more substantial French fry he was beginning to understand Nanette’s appeal.

Stick couldn’t watch the Daniels’ house from the scaffold but he knew it was dormant. Over the next several days he would be able to fix the couple’s schedules in his mind. Tom left early (he knew the name from an after work reconnaissance mission to look at their mail), sometimes as early as 6 a.m. but never later than 7 and returned in the same 6 to 7 time slot in the evening. Susan left for work after Tom but before 8:15 and was always home by 5:30. They went out after work at least twice a week and always on Friday when they would stay out until after 10 p.m. The gaps between the couple’s choreographed departures and arrivals would be occasions, Stick reasoned, when the alarm system would be disarmed. He had circled the house on one of his missions and had his eye on a basement window in the back that he was sure he could sliver through.

Apart from his mission, Stick was working hard and relating well with the crew and marveling at how time flew by and he had managed to put a few bucks away and reload his cell phone with minutes and he and Heather were eating fewer French fries and he was enjoying certain satisfactions despite himself.

###

Stick sat on a box marked Christmas tree bathed in the fading evening light through the basement window. He could hear footsteps and muffled voices upstairs in what must be the kitchen. It was 7:40 p.m. and the Daniels should have already left for their Friday dinner out but he had a bad feeling about this evening because he could hear music playing and the occasional banging of a pot or the thud of a closing cabinet drawer.  And now he heard the doorbell and, soon after, new voices and additional footsteps.

He had been lucky. The basement window had been unlocked and the alarm system inactive as Mrs. Daniels awaited her husband. Stick had been able to slide through the open window and drop to the floor without commotion. But he could see that exiting through the same window was going to be more difficult. There was nothing to grab on to and hoist himself up and he couldn’t be sure that the alarm hadn’t been reactivated after the guests arrived.

Stick could smell the food cooking and his stomach growled for lack of a meal that day and he was grateful for the music to drown the sound of his own innards. Then his phone rang. He was able to fumble at the keyboard and cut off the call before the second ring and he sat there not breathing with his heart pounding in his chest. When he was sure the ring hadn’t been heard upstairs he quickly called Heather before she called him back which she would do over and over and in a hoarse whisper explained his predicament and told her he was shutting off his phone for the evening and would call her when the episode concluded.

“Idiot,” she said in her unique way and hung up.

Time crawled and Stick had fully explored the small basement where he found a water heater and furnace and boxes with Christmas ornaments and a smaller box with a lei and a grass skirt and a ukulele and a work table with a belt sander and electric drill and a toolbox with wrenches and screw drivers but not much else. He stared through the window at the bright half-moon in the cloudless sky and was delighted when the furnace kicked on because it was chilly in the basement and the rumble had a soothing effect.

With the cell phone off he couldn’t track the time but he must have drifted off atop the Christmas tree with his back to the cold wall and he awoke in a panic after having his usual dream of being in a fight with his punches slow and ineffective as if delivered under water. The house was silent. No music. No voices. No footsteps.

He ventured up the stairs and through the door into the dim, moonlit kitchen which was a mess with empty wine bottles and dirty dishes and pots and pans. He felt something bump against his leg and looked down to see a furry, flat faced cat that looked like a throw pillow with a tail scowling at him and issuing a silent meow.

He mounted the carpeted stairs to the second floor accompanied by the cat to find two large rooms, two bathrooms and a laundry room. One room was set up as an office with a desk and computer and bookshelves and a small sofa while the other large room with the door ajar held the largest bed he had ever seen with four naked bodies entwined like cooked linguini and the cat ran in and jumped on the bed while Stick beat a hasty retreat downstairs.

He thought he should take the cleaver from the butcher block and hack the perverts to pieces but instead he took three rolls from a basket on the dining room table and slices of roast beef and a bottle of water from the refrigerator and kicked at the squirming cat to keep her from following him to the basement. He ate the sandwiches and pissed into the open drain on the floor.

###

It was almost noon before the house was empty and Stick could turn on his phone to find seven text messages from Heather beginning with the angry ones and ending with the incoherent ones most likely the result of a visit to the lady down the hall. The kitchen was spotless and Stick admired the stainless steel appliances and the pots and pans with the copper bottoms hanging from the ceiling rack and the mahogany tables and plush furnishings and paintings on the walls in the adjoining living and dining rooms. He wished it was all his and he spun round and round until he was dizzy with his greed. He plucked two small signed paintings of a dirt road lined with trees that looked like morel mushrooms from the wall and carried them upstairs with the cat bumping at him all the way.

The bedroom with the bed as big as a football field bore no signs of last night’s orgy and he knew this was where he would find the mother-lode. He peeled back the blanket to expose silk sheets and on impulse he shed his clothes and climbed in to wallow, with the cat following, and he imagined what it would be like here with Heather wrapped in this bliss and overcome with his desires and against his better judgment he left his seed behind.

He found, as he knew he would, a jewelry box filled with gold and silver and precious gems and he stripped off a silk pillow case and fit the paintings and the box into it. He also found three expensive watches including a Rolex and in the drawer of the dresser a peach colored camisole that he liked and between the stacks of intimates an impressive dismembered penis that vibrated at various speeds when you turned the knob at the base. He put the camisole and the prosthetic cock in the pillow case and tossed in a pair of cuff links. In the office he found a display of fancy fountain pens and a portable Grundig short wave radio which completed a substantial haul but not so much that he couldn’t run with it if he had to.

Downstairs he made more roast beef sandwiches and even found a jar of horseradish before strolling out the back door tripping the alarm but knowing he would be safely home before the authorities could respond. He let the cat out the door with him for the hell of it.

###

“They took little Tommy,” Susan said as she stared into her underwear drawer.

“Huh?” asked Tom who with pen and notepad in hand was trying to catalog their losses while they waited for the police to arrive.

“Little Tommy for when you’re out of town on business.”

Tom stared at Susan without comprehension.

“They stole my vibrator,” Susan said with exasperation as she plopped down on the edge of the bed.

“I’m not going to report that,” Tom said as he left the bedroom to go to his office.

“Where’s Boogle?” Susan asked after him.

“Boogle! Boogle!”

###

“Idiot,” Heather said but she said it softly and she said it while she was fingering the ear rings and the necklaces and the rings and bracelets and the diamond studded choker and the gold waist chain and the onyx scarab brooch.

“Gross,” she said when presented with the vibrating penis but before nightfall Heather and little Tommy had become acquainted and Stick enjoyed the dreamy, faraway look in her eyes as she worked it.

###

“Where’d you get these?” Nick asked.

Stick stood in the studio with his merchandise and Nick the drummer and Christie the pretty bartender from Ruby’s Cafe who was already starting to show and Kyle and Tonya who was equally pretty but had a nasty scar that ran down her cheek and throat but instead of being repulsive made you want to press your lips to it. He shrugged his shoulders at the question.

Christie and Tonya sorted through the jewelry Heather had rejected and Stick knew they wanted it though they pretended they didn’t.

“You can have all three for $200,” Stick said to Nick.

“They’re nice watches Stick but I’m not stupid enough to fence stolen merchandise for you.” With that the girls started putting the jewelry back in the box.

“What’s that?” asked Kyle.

“What?”

“That. In the bag.”

“A little guitar thing.”

“Let me see it.”

Stick handed the ukulele to Kyle who began to strum it. Kyle pulled $10 out of his pocket and handed it to Stick. “Now get out of here,” Kyle said.

###

Stick went to work on Monday so as not to arouse suspicion. He was there early and so was Marcus who had befriended him and was only a couple of years older which made the two of them the youngest of the crew by far and they had gotten into the habit of smoking a couple of cigarettes on the front porch and talking while they waited for the older guys to show up. Stick made a point of not looking over at the Daniels’ house.

Around mid-day the police pulled up in an unmarked car but the kind of car that was obviously a police car and interviewed the crew. Gunnar told the cops they hadn’t worked on Saturday and everyone told the same story which was they had never noticed anything unusual or suspicious at the Daniels’ residence. Still, the police took down all their names and addresses and phone numbers and one of the cops seemed to have a special interest in Stick’s tattoo.

###

As Heather left work a passing black Lexus braked and waited for her to catch up and shadowed her at a crawl. She varied her walking speed but the Lexus hung with her. Ahead a meter cop was writing a ticket so Heather walked up to the meter reader and told her that a man in the black Lexus was following her. Tom had dropped the window. The meter reader looked back and forth between Heather and Tom.

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to ask the young lady where she got the purse. I think it’s a Fortunata. You know. For my wife,” Tom said.

The meter reader looked at Heather.

“It was a gift from my boyfriend. I don’t know where he got it,” Heather said this to the meter reader rather than Tom.

“Thanks anyway,” Tom said and he lifted the window and drove away. He would circle the block and pull up in front of the greasy spoon Heather had exited. He parked and went in the restaurant.

###

As he walked through the park the next morning on the way to work, Stick received a text from Marcus to inform him that the police car was across the street from Gunnar’s house. Stick hadn’t confided in Marcus but the young man had a sense. Stick took a seat on the same bench Mrs. Daniels had occupied so he could think. His earlobe was swollen and hot to the touch and had begun to ooze pus.

Little Tommy had been humming inside Heather and she had probably been humming along when the man came to the door. He had wavy dark hair with flecks of gray and a big crooked nose that had been broken more than once. He put a badge in her face and said, “I’m Detective Dexter Lewis. May I speak with you for a moment?”

Heather let him in though she was only wearing a peach camisole and panties so tiny they would not have covered her pubic hair had she any. Detective Lewis scanned the sparse room. He could see the vibrator on the mattress and the buttery beige purse on the floor.

“Are you Heather Garcia?”

Heather nodded and chewed at her lower lip.

“Does a George Malcolm Potts also live here?”

Heather looked at him with confusion.

“He also goes by the name Stick and he has a tattoo with the word freedom spelled with one e.”

Heather nodded.

“I guess freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose,” he sang teasingly but Heather didn’t get it. “Do you know where he is?”

“He’s at work.”

“No he isn’t. You know why I’m here don’t you?”

“I have to get dressed for work,” Heather said and pulled the camisole over her head to reveal broad breasts with pale aureole and tiny nipples. “It’s okay if you look,” she said without the hard t in it’s. And she stood motionless for a moment while the Detective’s gaze caressed her body. Heather had the soft curly hair and thick eyebrows and supple lips and chocolate milk complexion common to the Latin girls but despite being thicker in the midriff than she should be at her age there was nothing common about Heather’s beauty and Dexter felt something give way in the pit of his stomach. She took the brown uniform from the back of the only chair in the room and pulled it over her head. And Dexter was stopped short by her rancid sensuality. “I have to go,” she said.

“I’m not arresting you Heather. I’m not going to put you in jail but it’s in your best interests to tell me everything and come downtown to make a statement.”

For the first time Heather looked like what she was – a scared little girl.

“I’ll have my friend Alex. That’s Alexandra but she goes by Alex. She’s nice. She’s an attorney. I’ll have Alex meet us and she can help you stay out of trouble while you file your statement. You know it’s what you have to do. To protect yourself.”

Heather renewed the assault on her lower lip and looked at the purse on the floor.

“Let’s get a bag and gather up what’s left of the Daniels’ property and bring it with us. Don’t worry Heather. I’m going to take care of you,” Dexter said.

Heather carried the shopping bag as they stepped into the hall and Dexter reached back to close the door behind them. As they walked down the stairs he gently guided her with his hand at the small of her back.

The End

Fear of Flying

In one of the oldest buildings on an old college campus. A building hardly used these days. Musty and poorly lit. Inhabited by placid and contented ghosts. The hand-lettered sign taped to the door reads AA MEETING. Blake looks at his watch. 6:09. The meeting has already started. He shuffles his feet and thrusts his hands in his pockets. Uncertain. Maybe he could start next week since he is here of his own accord. No court order this time. He has been experiencing formication. Formication, a word that sounds like another, dirty word. The funny word the doctors use for his hallucinations. Blake sees snakes or imagines bugs crawling all over his skin. Sometimes under his skin. The bugs are the formication part.

Blake is about to amble down the hallway in the opposite direction from whence he came and exit down the staircase. Instead he opens the AA door. About a dozen people swivel on their metal folding chairs to look at the intruder. He scans the faces but, surprisingly, doesn’t recognize anyone. The folding chairs face a long collapsible table. Seated at the table is a bald man. Standing beside the bald man is a pretty woman whose confessions Blake has interrupted. He takes a seat in the back row, at the end. He is already regretting his decision. He should have continued down the hallway. If he had he might have noticed the other door, the one with the professionally lettered AA sign. In that other room people are gathered to wrestle with their addiction to demon rum.

“Welcome,” the bald man says to Blake. “Please continue Alicia,” bald man says to the pretty woman standing nervously, knock kneed, fidgeting with her hands. Alicia’s dark hair is pinched up at the back of her head, a loose strand dangling beside her left ear. No make-up. A soft, charming puffiness to her face; around her eyes and along the corners of her mouth like she has a pinch between her cheek and gum. She looks like she just crawled out of bed. Kyle thinks her disheveled nature makes her all the more attractive.

“After my car engine died and the radio went silent, I saw a large craft hovering overhead. It was huge, like a floating strip mall with multi-colored windows. Two tall grey creatures were approaching me. They had heads shaped like upside down pears and large black eyes and tiny noses and ears and mouths like slits that didn’t move,” Alicia says.

Holy shit. And I thought my hallucinations were bad.

“I began to panic but as the creatures moved closer they began to communicate with me. With their minds. You know, like telepathy. They calmed me down. Suddenly I was aboard the hovering craft with no memory of how I got there. There were more large greys and some smaller ones who seemed to be workers and there were reptilians wearing uniforms with emblems of winged, feathered serpents. The reptilians seemed to be the bosses. They made clicking sounds. I think the large greys might be hybrids of the small greys and reptilians.”

Okay. She sees lizards, I see snakes. Same difference.

Alicia is still visibly nervous but is getting into her story, Blake thinks. Her voice grows stronger and more confident as she continues to speak.

She is a very, very attractive lush.

“One of the tall greys escorted me onto an elevator without a door. It was like a very large dumbwaiter. The elevator took us up and I could see inside a room with a table. The alien told me to take off my clothes and go into the room and lie down on the table.”

A fire alarm activates. In the AA room lights flash and a repetitive siren screams in shrill rising notes. Blake thinks he’d like to have the siren as his cell phone ring tone. A recorded message instructs them to evacuate the building.

Shit. This was starting to get really interesting.

            Blake stands outside in the parking lot with the other evacuees. He thinks he sees Jimmy, a fellow drunk standing a few yards away but he didn’t see him in the meeting. He sidles up closer to Alicia.

“You must have been really frightened,” he says.

“Terrified. I thought I was going to pee my pants. I hate public speaking.”

The bald man collects the group. “I’ve been told there was an electrical fire in the basement. The wiring in this old building is shot, I think. Everything is okay but it will be some time before we are allowed to re-enter. I’m afraid we’ll have to adjourn and reconvene next week. I’ll try to find a better location.”

People disperse. Blake is disappointed.

“You want to go get a cup of coffee or something?” he asks Alicia.

“What I need is a stiff drink,” she says.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Why not?”

Blake can think of several why nots but none that measure up to her blue eyes and long legs.

###

Alicia orders a Cosmopolitan. Against his better judgment Blake orders a shot and a beer.

“I don’t drink very often,” she says.

“You’re like me. I don’t drink often either but when I do…whoo-ee.”

He asks Alicia to finish her story.

“I didn’t remember much from after I undressed and entered the room with the examination table. I found myself back in my car. Three hours had passed but it felt like I had only been gone for a few minutes. My car started right up and the hovering craft was gone.”

“Wow! Pretty bad episode. You blacked out.” Blake knows the territory. Missing days. Waking up at home with no memory of how he got there. “One time I . . .”

“There’s more. I went to a hypnologist who helped me recover my lost memories. I learned that on the examining table they spread a strange blue liquid over me and I became aroused. I remember being ashamed of my arousal. They must have been pretty rough with me. I had bruises on my thighs and arms and buttocks but the hypnotist couldn’t recover that part. Just as well I guess.”

Blake’s hallucinations are never arousing but Alicia’s story is and he wonders if she is embellishing for his benefit. He certainly hopes so.

“Then the aliens began to probe me.”

She has nightmares of being gang raped by illegal aliens while drunk. Damned Mexicans. We really need to secure our borders.

            “They probed both of my orifices.”

“Both of your…”

“You know, my anus too. With their appendages.”

“Their appendages?” Man, I need to switch to Cosmopolitans. “I just see snakes,” he tells her. “And I feel bugs crawling all over my skin. The bugs are formication. Do you ever formicate?”

“Not since the abduction. Maybe I should. Maybe it would calm me. I’ve never had anyone suggest it…so directly. Do you want to come to my place?”

###

In the morning over coffee and bagels with cream cheese.

“I think I might be pregnant.”

Blake’s butter knife clatters, leaving a smudge of pasty white cream cheese on the table.

“Whoa. Don’t look at me. We had sex the first and only time last night. There’s no way…”

“From the aliens, I mean. I haven’t had my period since I was abducted.”

“Let’s get this straight. Was this a hallucination or a nightmare or were you really gang raped by illegal aliens? If you were gang raped what good is an AA meeting? I mean I understand you want to stop because, yeah, a woman is vulnerable when she’s soused but… You should go to the authorities. You should see a doctor. Get an abortion if you need one.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re watching. They’ll stop me. When I was on the ship I saw the breeding tanks though I wasn’t allowed to look into them. The smell was awful. I did some research. They’ll come and extract my fetus and put it in a tank. I think I need to let them do as they had planned or they might harm me.”

This sweet little piece is seriously fucked up.

            “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I’m here to protect you now. You’re going to help me stop drinking and I’m going to protect you,” Blake says.

And I’m going to get you to see a psychiatrist.

He reaches over and holds Alicia’s hand. She leans forward and lays her tear- moistened cheek against his arm.

Blake wants to strip away Alicia’s delusions while leaving intact her wide-eyed willingness to believe almost anything.

“You’ll really stay with me?”

Blake nods. This place is so much cooler than my dump.

“I was supposed to go on vacation with a friend,” she says. “To Florida. But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t get on the plane. I never want to be in the air again. I’m terrified to fly now.”

###

Over the next few days Blake and Alicia settle into a state of complacent domesticity. Alicia is less edgy. She knows that Blake can’t protect her from the aliens but she likes his presence in her space. He calms her. She has decided not to go back to the Alien Abductee meetings. Blake has had nary a drop to drink since he moved in. He is happy and free from withdrawal symptoms. And Alicia lets him probe her as much as he likes. He has decided that maybe he doesn’t need Alcoholics Anonymous.

###

President Obama is addressing the nation. Alicia and Blake watch it on television. The President talks about the economy and the war on terror.

“Aliens control the human elite,” Alicia says. “Obama and all of them take orders to destroy Earth and make it uninhabitable for humans. When this place is wrecked and miserable the aliens will come and take over.”

“It seems wrecked and miserable already,” Blake says. He is beginning to come around to Alicia’s point of view.

###

Alicia wears the little silk teddy that Blake likes so much. She turns off the overhead bedroom light and flips on the bedside lamp. It’s a compromise. Alicia likes the room romantically dark. Blake likes to watch. As he pushes up the teddy and prepares to penetrate her he thinks maybe her tummy is a little distended.

###

Alicia is awakened by the lights. Orbs appear in the room. Hovering. Like shiny holes in the air with bluish outer rings. Things begin to shake and rattle. A glass breaks in another room. She is oddly calm.

“They’re here,” she says to Blake with a clear, steady voice and reaches over to nudge him but there is nothing to nudge. She is talking to an empty bed. The orbs are gone.

Alicia drapes a terry cloth robe over her nakedness as she steps over the teddy on the floor. She feels Blake’s semen dribble down her thigh. She walks to the kitchen and takes the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the cupboard. Sits down and pours a drink and places the bottle and another glass in the middle of the table. Blake will be back in about three hours, she thinks. And he’ll need a drink.

 

End

 

 

Reunion with Pookie

When they would pass in the hallway or the cafeteria she would smile, acknowledging him without actually looking his way. Furtive. With a secret he could only guess at. After she had passed she would slow her gait ever so slightly knowing that he turned and stood rock-still to follow her movement. He would watch her walk the way certain women walk, not exactly wiggling but undulating, like a body of water. An unfathomable ocean.

They found themselves together on a Committee charged with formulating a minor policy. Empowerment it was called. Participative management. Throw the dog a bone. The farce mattered not to Audrey and Duncan, what mattered was the opportunity to look at each other for more than a few seconds at a time. They couldn’t keep their eyes from one another.

It was Audrey who asked him to lunch. Not to the cafeteria but to Baci, the Italian cafe down the street, where they could grab a table in the corner and begin their negotiations. They would still become a topic of gossip but without the blue, flickering, unflattering glare of the fluorescent lights. Duncan wasn’t meek and retiring in the face of a pretty woman but the sight of Audrey left him dumbstruck, in a state of sensory overload, stopped up with unspoken words. He courted her during the Committee meetings with eloquent logic served up obliquely like a racquetball champion playing a corner, bouncing the messages off the Committee Team Leader. Audrey would return his volley with complementary statements and her devastating smile of secrets.

Lunches were fruitful even though Baci had quadrupled his daily budget. It was twice as expensive as the company cafeteria and Duncan refused to allow Audrey to pay her share. They went to the movies where they sat stiffly in the glow and watched each other out of the corner of their eyes. They were careful in the beginning as if fearing they might break something fragile. Then dinner with the Pedroncellis, Audrey’s parents and her younger sister Anna who was perhaps prettier than Audrey but much less interesting. The family lived in the old, Italian neighborhood. Her mother served salad and an enormous bowl of spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and Chianti. Duncan’s appetite brought him right up to the edge of impropriety and he had to take deep breaths and time outs to study the faces of the small dark family and allow them to catch up. Audrey and Duncan sat next to one another and she boldly squeezed his thigh with her small hand hidden under the table after he had said something witty. It was her first intimate gesture and it sent a flutter through his groin like a caged bird. After dinner the family settled into the room with the television but Audrey wanted to take a walk with Duncan in the cold December air where she kissed him under a lamppost that illuminated the specks of snow floating in the air like stage props. He sucked in the warmth of her wet mouth while the frigid tip of her nose pressed against his cheek.

A few nights after the family dinner, he found himself at Audrey’s apartment near the campus where she attended acting classes. Audrey shared the space with another young student who had conveniently excused herself for the evening. After a meal of take-out Chinese they grappled on the sofa and though Duncan managed to undress Audrey from the waist down he was not allowed to penetrate her since he had neglected to purchase a condom and she was not protected, a situation that Duncan had considered, well, inconceivable. Instead he spread her thin legs wide and with her cheeks on the edge of the sofa, drank as deeply as he could from his knees and feeling her convulsions looked up to find her eyes glazed and seeping. She whimpered as he continued and thread her fingers through his hair in a manner so frantic that it made him wonder. But he didn’t ask.

It was these two moments, the wet kiss in the cold under the lamppost and young Audrey’s orgasmic tears while he took his pleasure between her legs, that seized his mind as he read her email over and over and over.

A week or so ago Duncan had received an email that read, “Audrey Miller wants to be friends with you on Facebook.” Audrey Miller. Miller. I don’t think I know an Audrey Miller, he thought, so he moved on to the dozens of other emails in his inbox without taking action. This morning he receives this through his business website email:

 

Hi Dunner,

This is Pookie. Remember me? We worked  at Consolidated. I tried to friend you. How you’re doing?

Pookie (Audrey Pedroncelli-Miller)

 

He responds, also using their pet names from back then.

 

Hi Pookie,

Remember you? Are you kidding?

Dunner

 

Duncan learns that Pookie has been divorced for over a decade, has an adult son working as an Engineer for G.E. (she attaches a picture of a handsome young man with a complexion the color of coffee with cream), is between jobs, has recently had her house foreclosed and is living in a small one bedroom apartment in a small mid-western city. All of this information comes in a rush like the breaking open of a levee after a storm. Not in the form of a plea for help, that wouldn’t be Pookie’s style, he knows, but rather like the filings of important information from a reporter at a disaster scene. Her Facebook picture shows an attractive, smiling woman in her forties and no sign of her current distress. He tries to assemble the jagged and incongruent pieces in his mind. She appears to be aging well and he wonders if it is himself, safely dry docked though he is, who exhibits the rubbing away of life’s friction.

He tells Pookie that he and Marsha are amicably divorced but that implies a residual friendship rather than the mutual amnesia that set in immediately after their parting. He’ll leave it at that, thinking the less he says about Marsha the better. The same urgent Marsha who was astraddle Duncan and riding hard to the finish line on that fateful Sunday afternoon when Pookie burst through the door.

Duncan is a product of his culture and times. In a gentler age a young man would meet a beautiful young woman like Audrey, court her, marry her, procreate with her and live happily ever after. That’s not how things worked in the last quarter of the 20^th century. When Duncan met Pookie he was still frantically sowing oats and each field looked more fertile than the last though he had no appetite for the harvest. Within weeks of the betrayal Pookie had taken up with another man, a black man, the Manager of the Fulfillment Department, and though it pained Duncan to imagine himself racist, he had to admit that he was disgusted enough not to fight to win her back. Within a year Pookie was married, Duncan was transferred out of state, Marsha followed him and their destinies settled on them like the inevitability of a changing season.

###

He sits where he can watch the patrons enter the bar from the concourse. The monitors say Flight 507 is on time. Duncan studies his watch and orders another beer. He has time and he needs to steel his nerves. He has put on his best suit and tie for Audrey instead of his usual sport coat and Dockers.

He has finished his second beer and figures he shouldn’t have another, though he wants one, when she arrives. He had seen but dismissed the bleached blonde, dragging the black bag on wheels. Short and dumpy was the blonde, not exactly obese but heavier than her frame should carry, and wearing a cheap polyester two-piece outfit (flower print blouse and clashing striped skirt). Audrey had easily picked Duncan out of the lineup at the bar and sits down heavily beside him. He looks into her soft brown eyes and kisses her perfect lips as she offers them. It is Audrey all right, the same light in her eyes, the same delicate wrists and ankles. Audrey is in there, but as in costume like Audrey the amateur actress in community-theater when Duncan watched others watch her as he welled up with pride like a parent at a recital. She was good said people who should know and pretty enough to play the lead with her strong voice, lithe figure and expressive face but her ambition didn’t measure up to her talent and Duncan was conceited enough to think that maybe he was the one who had unintentionally leeched all of  the desire out of her. Looking at the Audrey of today, Duncan sees her mother cradling the giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.

“I need a drink,” Audrey says.

Duncan orders beers and watches Audrey as she drinks deeply, studies her gut bulging over the waistline of her skirt, the dark roots of her hair at the part and her chipped fingernail polish. Why couldn’t she remember that I hate fingernail polish, he wonders? To his dismay the conversation lags after the initial pleasantries and he repeats in his mind, it’s only for a few days. She drinks two beers to his one, which he tells her she is entitled to since he had a head-start, even though he’s pretty sure she drank on the plane.

As they walk to his car, Duncan chivalrously dragging her bag behind him, she asks, “Do you mind if I smoke during the drive?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” he says, so they stand outside the car in the glaring sun while she sucks hard on a menthol light.

He settles her into the guest room.

Audrey takes a shower.

They share a bottle of wine in the kitchen, Audrey drinking the lioness’s share. Duncan is relieved that the alcohol is making the conversation easier and he is feeling reconnected to the bright, funny girl he once knew. They go to dinner at El Coyote, a Mexican restaurant nearby, where they have chips and salsa and chicken fajitas and margaritas they don’t need. When they get home Duncan pulls vinyl records out of a milk crate and plays their favorite old songs telling Audrey that he saved the records not out of sentimentality but because they sound so much warmer than digital.

They drink some more, talk about the old days, cry and go to bed together. Duncan puts his face between Audrey’s chunky thighs, closes his eyes, tries not to think about the black cock that called this home, tries to remember their first night together and when he looks up he sees her eyes seeping once again but they aren’t the same kind of tears as before.

###

As a man who primarily eats in restaurants, Duncan is aware of the paucity of his refrigerator and pantry. A few eggs, butter and milk past their prime, cottage cheese, Tabasco hot sauce, Italian dressing, a jar of sauerkraut, left over split pea soup that should already have found its way down the disposal, cereal, various cans of beans and vegetables and soup. The most paltry of meals in any combination.

So they go to the grocery store and push a cart down each and every aisle. Duncan tells Audrey to load up with whatever she wants which turns out to include soft drinks, Cheez-its, toll-house cookies, orange Hostess cream filled cupcakes and other figure warping indulgences.

After they get home and put the groceries away, Audrey offers to clean up the condo in exchange for his largesse even though the place was tidy enough and his cleaning lady will be in next week. Duncan follows her from room to room choosing to help rather than sit and watch her work. While she changes the bed, Duncan dusts the table that holds a television, a clock radio and a small cedar box that he reacts to as if  it has materialized before his eyes at this very moment. He opens the box to reveal his wedding ring, which he didn’t know how to dispose of, an expired passport, cufflinks, two pair of ear-rings and a bracelet that Marsha had abandoned and a Rolex watch Marsha had given him on their first anniversary. Duncan had appreciated the gesture but never much cared for the watch. It seemed ostentatious and heavy and dominant on his wrist. Duncan goes to the kitchen and takes a small sandwich bag from a drawer. He places the wedding ring, earrings and bracelet in the zip lock bag. He feels the heft of the Rolex in his palm.

“That’s a nice watch. Why don’t you wear it?” Audrey asks.

“It’s complicated.”

“You don’t know how to set it?”

“A different kind of complicated.”

Duncan places the Rolex back in the box, sparing it for the moment.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” he says.

“Where are you going?”

“To run an errand. I won’t be long.”

Duncan takes the baggie to a jeweler on Euclid Avenue that specializes in estate items. He returns with a little over $400, more than he expected. He tells Audrey what he has done and hands her the money. As a loan, he says. She sits crying on the edge of the bed holding the money in her fingers with the chipped polish.

Duncan’s stomach turns at the pathetic sight of her.

###

After a day of working late, Duncan returns home to find Audrey on the sofa, dressed only in panties and bra, watching a reality television show. Tired and frustrated, he snaps at her.

“How can you watch that crap?”

“I like it.”

“How can you like it? It’s stupid.”

“Why? Because you don’t like it? I’m supposed to like everything you like? Why aren’t you supposed to like everything I like? How come it only goes one way?”

Duncan has no response. As soon as he goes to the kitchen to scrounge some dinner, Audrey changes the channel.

###

The next day they talk while they drink in his condo after a meal that Audrey prepared featuring an over cooked pork tenderloin, under cooked potatoes and mushy brussel sprouts. They drink beer and shots of Jameson whiskey as they try to come to terms with who they are and where they have been and who they were way back when.

“I hated you, you know,” she says.

“I know and you had a right. Have you come to punish me?”

“I’m too busy punishing myself.”

“For what?”

“My failure, I guess. Failing is punishment for my failure.”

“Failure at what?”

“Just not being good enough. Not good enough as an actress. Not good enough for my parents. Not good enough for you. Not good enough for Martin. You should have gone for Anna. She was the prettier one.”

“I thought about it. You know how I was then.”

“I know you did. And so did Anna. And thanks for the honesty. Why didn’t you do it?”

“Because I loved you. During that brief period we had together. You and your cold nose under the lamppost.”

Audrey smiles but says, “You loved me so much that you decided to fuck Marsha in front of me.”

“That wasn’t intentional. I shouldn’t have given you a key.”

Audrey stares at him, her face pinched.

“Just being honest.”

“What you intended isn’t relevant.”

“Fucking Marsha and loving you had nothing to do with one another. They were completely unrelated issues. Then.”

“I understand. But you couldn’t apply the same moral code to me, could you?”

“You mean him? Are you talking about him?”

“Martin. The black man. The handsome, successful black man. I knew it would drive you crazy. But that wasn’t the point. I needed something real. Someone real.”

“. . .”

“I didn’t intend to marry him. I really didn’t. It just happened. I thought you might change and we could try again but in the meantime I fell in love with him. He was a good man. A good husband. But I ended up driving him away.”

“Pookie, why did you agree to come here?”

“You paid for the show.”

At some point the alcohol washes the conversation away, Audrey wants to have sex but Duncan says he can’t on account of he’s too drunk. One more lie isn’t going to hurt, he reasons. Audrey decides she wants to take a shower before bed. Duncan has a fancy stand-alone shower instead of a tub with a shower and it has a special showerhead as big as a dinner plate that sprays water all around you like a rainstorm. Audrey loves the shower and uses it often.

He hears her fall and rushes to find her in the corner of the shower with her legs splayed forward and her head resting on her shoulder as if she decided that this was the perfect time and place to take a nap. She has vomited and the chunks clog the little holes in the drain so that the water is quickly rising to the level where the tile meets the glass door. Duncan finds himself on his hands and knees, fully dressed, pummeled by the rain storm, trying to mash the puke chunks down the drain as Audrey commences to snore and the smell brings up his own bile and he adds to the regurgitated pork, potatoes and brussel sprouts.

###

Two days before Audrey is to leave Duncan learns that he must fly to Milwaukee for a day to solve a problem with a client. He apologizes to Audrey for cutting into their time together but frankly he is grateful for the break. She will drive him to the airport in his car and collect him the next morning on his return for their last day together.

###

Duncan waits outside the baggage claim until he becomes impatient enough to dial her cell phone but he gets a message telling him her phone is out of service. He tries the condo phone but does not get a response. Exasperated, he hails a cab.

The condo is empty. There is no sign of Audrey or his car. Two hours later, just before he would start calling hospitals and law enforcement officials, he hears the garage door open. He greets a tipsy Audrey emerging from his Acura. The car has a big crease along the driver’s side.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she says.

“What did the Officer say?”

“Are you crazy? Call the cops and risk a D.U.I.?”

“So, you hit and ran?”

“No one was hurt.”

###

Audrey’s departure leaves Duncan in a state between remorse and relief. Surveying the condo he finds the guestroom tidy but with a pack of menthol lights prominently displayed on the dresser. It is one cigarette short, the one he saw her smoke in the airport parking lot. He throws the cigarettes in the trash. In her closet are the garish mismatched polyester outfits. He had remembered the bag feeling a little light as he dragged it through the airport and Audrey was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts for her departure. In the kitchen remain the full inventory of soft drinks and junk food they purchased at the grocery store. He’ll donate the left-behinds to the Free Store unsure if he’ll be doing the already disadvantaged a favor.

He decides he should give the Rolex one last try but it is missing from the cedar box.

Son of a bitch.

###

As Duncan dresses for an early Monday morning meeting, he lifts his favorite sport coat from the hanger and finds it out of balance, listing heavily to port. In the right pocket of the jacket he finds his Rolex, $415.00 in cash and a laminated playbill promoting an upcoming performance. The flyer has a picture of a mature, attractive, slim, dark haired, professionally dressed Audrey and “something to help you remember me” scribbled on the back.

He sits on the edge of the bed long enough to risk being late for his appointment and stares at the picture. He can’t help but smile.

###

After days of pleading, Pookie agrees to see him again but only after a few months so she can get things in order.

“I understand,” he says.

###

He disembarks from the plane into an airport he has never before visited. His flight has arrived forty minutes late. As he strolls to the bar where they are to meet, with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, Duncan swallows hard and wonders who will be waiting.

 

The End

The Storm

Six inches or more says the bouncing blonde on Channel 8. Her expression is serious but Arthur detects shadenfreude. Or maybe it’s just the thrill of the performance. If you’re a comely weather girl with the ink barely dry on your weather degree what you want most are thousands tuning in to hear about the approach of the biggest snowstorm of the season with you on stage as the prima ballerina. Her knit wool skirt clings to the cleft of her ripe plum and the hem falls at the knee-cap to accent delicate calves and ankles.

We can expect 6 to 8 inches beginning at 5 p.m. and continuing overnight

before tapering off before daybreak. Stay in, stay off the roads, make

cocoa and get into your jammies. If you must go out, take it slow and easy.

Slow and easy.

Jeannie is going to stop by the store on the way home from the mall. Arthur isn’t going near the place. Desperate housewives, terrified of being snowbound. Driven to clear the shelves of milk and bread and other perishables. To hoard and hunker before the hearth. To huddle and cower before the coming onslaught. How thrilling! Jeannie will pick up the fixin’s for a big pot of chili. Arthur had stocked the refrigerator with beer yesterday and an unopened bottle of Bushmills watches him like an alert and smiling doorman. Welcome, good sir.

###

Jeannie honks the horn for help. They carry in the paper bags. She asks the clerk for paper instead of plastic because the stiff, brown paper bags stand upright on their own so they can be filled with cans and glass and plastic water bottles for recycling. Jeannie is practical and organized and wishes Arthur was practical and organized too. But he isn’t and she knows it and no longer expects it. Arthur wants to burn the house down and run away to Ireland.

Or fuck the weather girl.

Ground beef, a yellow onion, cans of kidney beans and tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes and smoked chipotle and a bright green jalapeno pepper with perfect, smooth skin. Arthur picks up the jalapeno. He likes its firm shininess and the crown with a stem like a handle.

Arthur wants to insert the jalapeno in the weather girl’s anus.

Jeannie wordlessly sheds her coat, takes a knife from the drawer and a cutting board from the shelf and sets to work. Arthur assumes the task of browning the ground round in a skillet. Arthur hates the idea that the red mound of flesh was once part of a living creature. If he could start life over again he’d be a vegetarian. But they are already poisoned.

Arthur wonders what the weather girl eats.

“I ran into Molly at the store,” Jeannie says. “She and Frank have finally called it quits. He moved out this morning.”

Arthur grunts an acknowledgement as he moves the chunks of sizzling meat around in the skillet.

“She says she’s lonely and it hurts but it’s for the best. She said she’s glad the kids were grown and gone before it happened. I was afraid she was going to cry right there at the meat counter.”

“Frank’s an asshole,” is all Arthur says.

Jeannie pours oil into a pot, dumps in the chopped onion and the once perfect jalapeno and turns on the burner. They stand side by side at the stove. She works the chopped onion and pepper. He works the meat. In a minute he turns off the flame from under the skillet and bumping Jeannie at the hip, puts meat into her pot.

“I wasn’t ready for that yet,” Jeannie says. “Mine wasn’t soft yet.”

“Sorry.”

###

“The T.V. says we might not get the full brunt of it,” Arthur says. The station is interrupting regularly scheduled programming to give storm tracker updates. Arthur senses the weather girl’s deflation. Maybe this stage isn’t big enough. Maybe this is the pinnacle of a very short meteorologist career before some old guy convinces her that the fastest route to fame and fortune is to take off her clothes.

With the chili on to simmer, they have moved to the living room and the larger flat screen television. Arthur is happy because he can smell the chili, has a beer in his hand and the high definition Toshiba renders the weather girl larger, more life like and more accessible.

“Doesn’t look like we’re going to get the six inches. I knew we wouldn’t,” Jeannie says as she stands having heard the muffled ring of her cell phone from inside her coat pocket draped over the back of a dining room chair.

She talks into the phone as she stares out the big kitchen window that overlooks a patch of woods. The snowstorm is already two hours late. Arthur joins Jeannie in the kitchen to stir the pot of chili and to get another beer. Jeannie looks at him without expression as she talks to her phone. He deduces that she is talking to Molly based on frequent references to Frank. Arthur lifts the wooden spoon from the chili and puts it to his lips. Takes the bottle of chili powder from the counter next to the stove. There is only an inch of powder left in the bottle. They’ll have to remember to buy some more. He dumps the chili powder into the pot and drops the empty bottle into the recycle bag. Jeannie frowns. He always makes things too hot.

###

They eat dinner in the living room while staring at the television show that neither one of them is watching. Sitting atop the unused dining room table is a stiff, waxy candle with dusty plastic holly leaves and berries twisted around the base, a pile of Arthur’s papers and Jeannie’s purse. She gives him an update on Molly and Frank as they eat but there’s not much else to talk about. She says that a month ago Frank had told Molly that he was no longer attracted to her. Molly had cried but had no defense for a charge of such finality. Molly couldn’t remember the last time she and Frank had sex let alone good sex, she had told Jeannie. Molly had put on weight and certainly wasn’t the woman Arthur remembered from the early days, the woman who was cute and flirty at parties and to whom he had made more than one pass and could have closed the deal if he had been a more persistent salesman. Still and all, Frank had little room to talk, fat and balding as he was. But it isn’t the weight gain or the lack of sex that pulls couples apart, Arthur thinks. It’s entropy.

###

He should have married Jeannie years ago. When she wanted him too. After the last ‘on again’ of their on again, off again relationship. When a more familiar and comfortable passion had been briefly re-ignited. Before the real estate business failed and money got tight and Arthur lost interest in houses and the people that live in them. Jeannie’s job at the County Assessor’s Office is what keeps them afloat though they take on a little more water everyday. They are just two clocks ticking, springs slowly unwinding, unsure why they are still marking time. Something will happen, Arthur knows. Something has to happen. Maybe Molly is the beginning of it.

Arthur exists at the very limits of Jeannie’s imagination. He is the boundary of what she knows about the world, what she cares to know. She once believed him profound and full of mystery, with great secrets. Now he is just an unruly wilderness. Dark and bestial and unknowable and of little use to her everyday world. She had bragged to her friends of his insatiable appetites, his exploration of her senses. Now, she might say, the adventurer is lost. He spends his days drinking or wandering around the neighborhood taking pictures without purpose. Driftwood looking for a beach.

Arthur remembers their lovemaking. The way her mouth would form a perfect O during the bliss of her orgasm. The tight slickness of her vagina and how she smells like no other woman he has known, not unpleasant but distinctive, oily and resinous like balsam or tree sap. But what he loved most, he must admit, was her ordinariness, her lack of ambition, her lack of need for what he didn’t provide. Now, in contrast to his degradation, she serves as a constant in an equation long since solved.

###

Jeannie carries their empty bowls into the kitchen. He hears her rinsing them in the sink and opening the dishwasher. Arthur follows to drop an empty beer bottle into the recycle bag and to get a full one.

Jeannie lifts her coat from the back of the dining room chair.

“You’re going out?” Arthur asks.

“I’m going to visit Molly. She’s a mess. She’s at Ruby’s. In Near North.”
”Aren’t you worried about the storm?”

“There is no storm,” she says and leaves.

###

Arthur stays in the kitchen with his beer and the view of the woods and the smaller television still tuned to the storm tracker channel. He opens the bottle of Bushmills and pours a shot. The weather girl comes back on with her creamy skin and her lovely, firm girl arms and gripping a baton she uses to point at the Doppler weather map.

With an overnight low in the teens and winds from the west at 10

to 15 miles per hour things are going to get slippery.

Arthur touches his erection.

It has begun to snow.

 

 

The End

The Connoisseur

I like rye more than bourbon and Scotch more than bourbon or rye but not the cheap blended stuff that you pour over ice or dilute with water or soda so you get the buzz without much taste. I like the single malts, beautiful golden liquid that smells and tastes like smoke and sometimes the sea, served neat like something rare and valuable which it is, relatively speaking, because you see, I’m the kind of man who has a taste for things that many people don’t like because they’re too busy following the masses, doing and drinking and thinking what everyone else is doing and drinking and thinking and if that makes me a pretentious snob according to Judy, my ex, well then that’s what I am because I am Gunnar.

I am a connoisseur.

I like books that aren’t on the New York Times Best Seller list and movies with subtitles that none of my friends have ever heard of and wouldn’t watch anyways because they’re too busy watching “Housewives of New Jersey”. I like women with tiny breasts and maybe an over-bite or another visible flaw that makes them special and unique because any dumb-ass can go ga-ga over a bleached blonde with big boobs and lips and nails all painted up like a zulu warrior while hanging out at Friday’s instead of eating sushi or Cuban food or attending poetry readings at the coffee house or the bookstore which is where I meet Nanette thinking at first sight she is my kind of girl because she is dug in deep like a tick in the literature section and ignoring the display tables where you find the stuff that gets forgotten.

Before the book tour is finished.

Nanette wears glasses which I also like and she has the requisite shortage of mammary glands and good legs in tights as she stands languidly in front of the O’s and P’s flipping through a copy of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins while I’m stiffening up as I pull Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London from the shelf and pretend to look at it while secretly staring at Nanette but, of course, I don’t know her name yet. I’m even more excited when I learn her name because I think I said before that my ex is Judy which is about as common and undistinguished a name a woman can have. I know Judy didn’t get to choose her name but I always held it against her along with her lowbrow tastes which include country music but not the good old stuff like George Jones but the modern tinker-toy tunes and Judy smokes which she tries to hide when she says she quit but I can smell it on her breathe through the peppermint and especially in her hair and on her clothes and I can sometimes taste it through her koochie, as she calls it, while I am down there feasting which is something I like to do but I don’t think she enjoys it quite as much because maybe it’s not featured in her favorite bodice ripping, romance fantasy novels which are full of chivalry.

And damsels in distress.

No, No, Nanette is an old musical and not a terribly good one I think though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it and I’m not particularly interested in musicals anyway which is a shame because it might have served as a topic of conversation after Nanette and I became introduced so I was relieved to learn that Nanette does not have an affinity for musicals either, not that it matters because I relied on George Orwell for the introduction. Though it has been years since I read Down and Out I find a passage I like as I flip through the book and read it out loud to the girl who will soon be known as Nanette – It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety -. Nanette looks at me with brown eyes through medium thick lenses and asks – I’ve never read it, do you recommend it? – to which I say – highly – with a mixture of hope and disappointment because in my idealized vision she has, of course, already read every important book but then maybe if she knew Down and Out she might just smile and turn back to her Walker Percy which she holds at her side with one of her long and pretty fingers tucked in to mark her place as she looks at me with interest. So her ignorance, if you will, allows me to follow up on her question and even to coax her into having a drink with me in the Bronte cafe attached to the bookstore where they brilliantly have a liquor license that allows a connoisseur to not only talk to a sophisticated female reader of the high art of literature but to learn that she likes wine and good ones to boot instead of the white zinfandel that Judy prefers when Judy drinks wine at all because you’ll usually find Judy with a rum and coke or worse, like Captain Morgan’s or Southern Comfort, in Judy’s hand and I can’t stop repeating Judy’s name when I make references to coarse tastes and habits. I talk with Nanette about Orwell and Dostoyevsky and Camu and Kafka and I can tell she is impressed by my knowledge of literary fiction because of her rapt attention and not talking much herself other than to ask questions so I go on and on because I finally have an appreciative listener instead of Judy who would just walk away and file her nails or something. Nanette shakes her head in agreement while holding a glass of Chianti in her pretty hand when I say that bohemianism is a form of connoisseurship and proves that a Rolex or a Beemer need not be involved in leading a life of thought and sophistication and sensuality.

Like George Orwell

A bookstore is the best place in the universe to meet women except maybe a wedding but that’s a whole different dynamic so I still think a bookstore is better because they know you want to get them in bed but they can pretend they don’t know it and you can pretend that you don’t know they know it so it all works out pretty well because you can build a healthy amount of anticipation just before the climax like in a Henning Mankel mystery which represents the kind of book you don’t mind re-reading  even though you know the ending which is how really good serial sex with the same woman is though you, irrationally, keep hoping for a surprise, a slightly different ending each time which is unrealistic to expect in a book and probably in a woman but that would sure make for the perfect book and the perfect woman.

Which Judy is not.

###

I wander around Nanette’s dining room and kitchen and living room, which is actually just one room, looking at her stuff like the Leica camera on the dining room table that she said was a rangefinder, whatever that is, and I’ll remember the brand because I pronounce it leaka and she corrects me. It’s a warm, sultry evening and the apartment building doesn’t have central air conditioning only window units which Nanette doesn’t have so her bare arms and shoulders and legs have a sheen and I find her glistening as she peers into the pot on the stove makes me all the hotter in a different way so I make small talk like maybe I too should take up photography as a hobby and we could go out and take pictures together and maybe some day we can both afford big cameras. After the dinner she cooks which is some kind of creamy, cheesy, pasta, broccoli thing and tastes pretty good though I realize she is a vegetarian without her having to tell me and I should be too. We snuggle on the couch and wind up lying down face to face kissing like teenagers and she throws a skinny leg over my hip and while probing I find a surprising absence of panties and an unsurprising absence of pubic hair as girls seem to prefer these days so I reach in and grab a veritable fistful of what feels like warm, oiled dough and she opens her eyes wide and looks at me in a strange way perhaps expecting a reaction but all I do is venture deeper into her cooze though I admit I really want to jump up and flip on the lights and take a really close look because in addition to the dough I have between my thumb and forefinger the biggest clitoris I have ever encountered, as big as a bullet and just as deadly, so I roll the bullet between my two digits without too much pressure and continue to knead the calzone because boy am I in need and she must be too because she goes crazy grabbing at my belt which I am myself trying to work free with my other hand that is partially pinned to my side on the sofa while Nanette lolls her quick and agile tongue around in my mouth. When I finally free myself I kick my pants and underwear down around my ankles and soon enough I’ve gained entry having rolled over and pulled her under me with my pants balled up at my ankles in a knot and shoes still tightly laced but there is no time to attend to my strictures because she fits like a moist flesh gasket creating a kind of seal that produces the sucking sound that I’m sure was the inspiration for the word fuck and when it ends it’s all I can do to keep from asking Nanette to marry me right then and there. She coos a bit and we kiss some more but before long she drifts off to sleep so I roll off the sofa and I relieve my discomfort by putting myself back together all careful and quiet so as to not wake her and I go into her bedroom and grab a pillow to slide under her head and bend over to kiss her on the nose for some reason and that still doesn’t wake her so I pull down her skirt so she can sleep in a more dignified fashion but not before I get the best look I can of her honey suckle by the light of the moon shining through the old casement windows but what I really want is a spotlight so captivated I am by her horse collar but instead I leave as silently as possible while checking the door to make sure it locked behind me and I go home.

Where I masturbate.

The first taste of a hoppy ale, an Islay Scotch, the discovery of Fellini and Hertzog; garrotxa and fresh pecorino cheeses, Bill Quist’s interpretation of Erik Satie and Leonard Cohen and Randy Newman; Uwe Timm, Jakov Lind and Dino Buzzati (because the connoisseur is nothing if not a lover of the offbeat and obscure). These experiences have put me on the path to connoisseurship and you are about to say that it’s all just matter of taste and you’ll try to drag me into an argument about whether subjective opinion has any standing in the quality debate so I’ll save you the breath and say that – no, it doesn’t – because you may truly prefer a slice of individually wrapped American cheese-like product to a fine Vermont cheddar but that would only prove that you’re an rube and eliminate you from consideration as a connoisseur. My larger point is that anyone with any taste at all, if he is the adventurous type, quickly realizes that with the fruit of discovery comes the seeds of ruination, a raising of the bar to impossible heights, that sets you up for a lifetime of disappointment because once you’ve sampled the best your palette no longer accepts the pedestrian so your only hope is that you are still a relative ignoramus facing future though increasingly rare connoisseur frontiers and I had my doubts before Nanette. So the next day I think to call her with the obligatory “had a great time” message since she hasn’t called me and then I realize that in the fever of our first blush we failed to exchange numbers or email addresses or any of that so I decide to swing by her place in the evening to correct that little oversight but as I park at the curb outside her apartment building I can see into the poorly lit room through the casement windows, which are not adorned with curtains or blinds or any obstruction whatsoever (although I hadn’t noticed that on my first visit), that Nanette is not alone and I can see two people looking at the wall with Nanette spinning like a tiny electron around a second, larger stationary nucleus of a person so I sit there for the longest time like a stalker jealously thinking about the quim that gripped me like something separate and alive on its own before I come to my senses.

And drive away.

I do a couple more drive-bys over the next few days but each time Nanette’s place looks abandoned so I sit there again, stalker-like, which isn’t like me at all and stiffen up just thinking about her sugar canyon and her nub like a bullet and I’ll confess that I relieved myself while looking longingly at those darkened windows. Just as I’m beginning to lose hope and contemplating going to the police because I’m starting to worry that maybe I’m not the only one obsessed and maybe the dark nucleus I saw Nanette with in the window has done something terrible, well, just as I’m considering all kinds of drastic actions some of which, like breaking in, would get me into serious trouble, well, one day, there she is. – I was away for a few days on business – is all she would offer when I inquire perhaps a little too abruptly and eagerly and, of course, I’m dying to ask where she has been and with whom but I know I shouldn’t ask those things at this stage anymore than I should ask about the nucleus that was in the window so I keep my mouth shut and try to find something else to think about and talk about and to keep my mind off my concerns not to mention the lap land down there between her legs like a siren beckoning a horny seaman because I want more than anything in the world to know what her thing tastes like and I’m thinking it tastes like a briny, sweet  oyster and a peaty, smoky Islay Scotch all in one but a Scotch flavored oyster that I can chew on rather than one that slips down my throat leaving but a faint memory of  its succulency, if that’s even a word. Lo and behold this girl doesn’t disappoint, first taking me into her mouth and like most guys I enjoy looking down on a sweet face pressed to my groin especially if it is looking up and I like watching my bishop disappear and appear and disappear again like a magic act. Yes, I like that a great deal but her fig bush has spoiled me and I don’t even let her finish before I insist on my turn and again she’s a little shy because I’m sure she understands her exceptional attributes and what happens is I’m so thrilled kneeling at the alter of the blossom and filling my mouth with her mumbler that I accidentally finish what she had started and leave a pool of myself on the nice rug in front of the sofa so I apologize and I can tell she is confused by my excitement and the state of her rug so I try my best to explain my fascination with her crumpet but she is not as flattered as she should be and will have nothing of my praise which comes just short of a proposal of marriage so she says she has some important business to attend to and all but gives me the bum’s rush out the door which leaves me feeling lonelier and longinger, which I also realize is not a word, than I’ve ever felt in my life and stranded at home alone.

Without Nanette’s phone number.

I’ve told you my name is Gunnar but it was not the name given to me at birth which was John and hardly a name for a connoisseur and since a name is only a label whose owner should feel free to revise at any time which is what I did though I couldn’t convince Judy of this logic with her saying that she likes the name Judy and has no intention of changing it which is just further proof of her commonness and she totally rejected my suggestions including Natalie which you can see is not that far off from Nanette and perhaps evidence that my encounter with Nanette and her fabulous clutch was preordained and a sort of destiny on my part and an indication that my search for the ultimate, the Holy Grail if you will, of fur boxes was over and I could turn my attention to other topics.

Like rangefinder cameras.

On my next surprise visit to Nanette because remember like a fool I still don’t have her telephone number, she responds to the intercom downstairs in the foyer but takes forever to buzz me in and does so only after I ask – Nanette are you still there? – over the crackly speaker thing and she is a little distant and wary when I enter and I don’t know why other than it is late on a Friday evening and maybe she thinks I’m scouting her social life or it has something to do with the nucleus in the window and her unexplained absence and I’ll admit that her attitude and lack of forthrightness has me irritated to the point that this visit doesn’t go all that well because I erupt in what I can only assume is a jealous rage which is something I’ve only experienced from the other party, you see, and I realize quickly enough that I’m being childish and have overstepped my boundaries but the damage has been done so I must comply with her request that I vacate the premises thinking it for the best that I go home and cool down and make amends tomorrow. Despite my foolish behavior I have tucked into the back pocket of my jeans the phone number I secured first off in my explanation of my unexpected visit and before the meltdown and I scatter quickly before she asks for the number back and I dig into my back pocket on the way to my car to make sure it’s still there but my jeans are now so tight.

Thinking about her swollen love button.

The problem is Nanette won’t return my phone calls despite my apologies piling up in her voice mail box so my depression and self-doubt cause me to return to the well from which I regularly draw since, you see, despite our differences Judy and I occasionally quench each other’s thirst which is how I end up at her place on a Sunday evening with Judy’s ankles on my shoulders and me lapping away like a dog at a puddle on a hot August day but Judy’s slit is a faint scar compared to Nanette’s gaping wound and I slink home, tail between my legs, unsatisfied and I suspect Judy feels the same since I didn’t follow-up the slurping.

With the customary poke.

###

Judy and I are naked and lying on a mattress in the middle of a river and the mattress is soggy and uncomfortable so I am complaining but Judy seems to think everything is fine and dandy and I can see Nanette on the bank with a camera but not the little Leica from her dining room table but a huge camera with a long and thick telephoto lens which she strokes as she snaps pictures of Judy and John which is the way I’m thinking of myself in the dream and the river becomes a raging torrent and I can hear the waterfall ahead so I understand I am in deep shit while Nanette fades in the distance as she strokes the lens faster and faster while Judy sits smiling. I alone am ashamed of my nakedness and humiliating predicament and I decide that I am not, absolutely not, going over the edge to die with Judy so I roll off the mattress into the river but instead of being swept along in the current I sink to the bottom where I am eaten by a giant clam and the clam meat is as soft as a pillow or maybe a ball of fresh dough and the clam juices flow over me. I am becoming one with the clam as I think about Nanette on the riverbank and wish I had been able to swim over to her and that’s when I awaken to realize I have disgorged copious amounts of my reproductive fluids on myself which is called a wet dream and something I haven’t done since I was 14 shortly before I discovered masturbation and nookie, which hasn’t been in short supply since, and I remember in my dream Judy over the edge and the beautiful Nanette standing on the bank taking pictures and me under water and alone with the clam.

Such was my revelation.

Imagine my low opinion of myself when my rangefinder research shows Nanette’s Leica to be a prestigious camera and worth a pretty penny to boot and when I google Nanette to find her website and her art and photography I begin to ponder those images and the others I saw on the walls of her apartment that I should have had the good sense to ask about though many were sort of abstract representations of genitalia of both persuasions and I guess I didn’t bring them up at the time while she was cooking because we hadn’t done the deed yet and I was as yet unacquainted with her quiver but I still should have shown as much interest in her art as her honey pot and the dates of the recent art and photography show referenced on her website coincided with Nanette’s recent absence so I purchase from her site a print that looks like a small, strange flower.

 

Or a puckered asshole.

The End

 

 

 

 

Fall

Weather as crisp as an apple plucked fresh from the tree. The fruit beckons. It calls my name. The light, soft and diffused.  Autumn is the world’s dimmer switch, turning off the glare so that we can see each other more clearly in the shadows.

A glance held in the night, across the void.

Fall and school and leaden skies and the aroma of rotting leaves and cooling embers and toadstools kicked in the wood. Even at this ripe age, the autumn of my own life, I feel as if I should be strolling across a college green. Books under my arm, glancing at coed beauties with firm bouncers under tight, thin sweaters, sleeves pulled to elbows. My favorite spectator sport becomes no less engaging when a chill is in the air. Notice the way she moves in her clothes. The form and the flow of the under-current rather than the shimmering surface of exposed skin.

She checks her bearings. Afraid to drift.

A time to notice subtleties. The timbre of her voice. The arc of her gaze and the softness and warmth in her eyes. How she pins her hair, loosely or with precision. Whether her smile unfolds all at once or spreads slowly like a velvet curtain opening onto a show. 

Flats or heels or black, high top Converse All Stars.

Fall makes me want to return to Italy or take a lover. I should take a lover to Italy. Cypress lined lanes. Chipped ochre plaster. Old men playing cards or bocce ball. Old women laden with the makings of the evening meal. I am the outsider watching a world that has become familiar yet is still alien. Book in one hand, wine glass in another. The tight American knot of busy-ness slowly loosening in my stomach.

She might soothe my soul.

Fall evokes a different musical register. Giorgio Conte’s whimsical Gne’ gne’  or Leonard Cohen’s Tacoma Trailer or Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopedies or 3 Gnossienne. Don’t confuse melancholia and introspection with sadness. Sorrow and regret and longing can be joyful too. For me, fall runs deeper than the other seasons. It folds rather than whisks. Fondles and caresses instead of chafing and rubbing.

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And then on into winter, we could go.

I should take a lover in the season when the petals will open only to accept the kiss that searches for the sweetness within.

Lackman 9.27.10

SW corner of Vine and 13^th. A tiny, shotgun space dominated by what it should be dominated by – a 20’ or longer bar. It’s an estimate. I don’t routinely carry a tape measure. Perhaps I should. Lot of uses for a tape measure, you know.

Brown, burgundy and yellow palette. Exposed ductwork. Warm and soothing. Innocuously pleasant jazzy music. Everything perfect except for the damned muted 50” (again, an estimate) televisions mounted on the walls. I’m not arguing that they turn the sound up. I’m saying the T.V.’s shouldn’t be here in the first place. This is an historic neighborhood. How about a little retro, a little authenticity? How about a place where people can drink and talk without being lorded over by the glow of the idiot box? There are plenty of bars where Frat boys can drink PBR and watch the Bearcats. At least turn the damned things off once in a while. If they deserve to be muted they deserve to be blackened.

The measure of a society is what it worships.

Anyway. 14 taps. Raging Bitch and Old Rasputin included. Those are beers, not customers. There are precious few customers on a chilly, damp early Monday evening.

Good beer. I also see an excellent selection of Bourbon but no Single Malt Scotches. That will have to be rectified. No food. I suggest a jar of pickled eggs on the bar. A young woman to my right says pickled eggs are common in the bars in Wisconsin. Keller, the bartender, likes the idea of pickled eggs but thinks I should supply them.

I am the egg man. Koo Koo Ka Choo

The same customer who weighed in on the Wisconsin pickled eggs asks if I’m enjoying the Raging Bitch. I tell her I always enjoy Raging Bitches. I tell her it reminds me of Stone’s Cali-Belgique. A blend of Belgian and IPA styles. A Raging Mongrel Bitch. She says she loves the Cali-Belgique so she orders a Raging Bitch of her own. Careful. I don’t think bitches like orders.

A woman’s measure is her will.

6:45. Twenty or so customers. A good crowd for a drab evening. John Back of Neon’s makes a cameo appearance. An actor out on loan. Neon’s upstairs is officially open, he tells me. They are playing late night movies. I make a couple of suggestions even though they are sub-titled and require attention. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Fellini’s 8 ½. Two of the best movies ever made. I doubt most Cincinnatians have seen either. Too busy watching Adam Sandler, this generation’s Jerry Lewis but even less funny.

Black girls with babies in their arms walk past Lackman. They look in through the open door. Look in as though looking through a padlocked gate.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

Bugs come through the open door, lured by malty yumminess. We swat them away. Bugs are to be expected, I say to Keller, it’s still warm enough outside and moist. Don’t say that word. Moist. Women hate it. She doesn’t clarify. Keller and I have a mutual friend, Molly. Molly used to tend bar at Mainstay before she left for California for a modeling gig. Now she’s back. They always come back. Molly likes both sides of the bar. But, I think, not equally.

I want to measure the distance between here and eternity.

The restrooms have a common lavatory, like the Comet. Only newer, fancier and better. A brilliant space-saving design. The architect deserves praise.

Measure a thousand times and cut once.

Amy is a Medical Technical Writer and Photographer. Chris is a construction guy and housing developer. I didn’t need a Facebook account to meet either of them. I just needed Lackman. More Lackman, less “social networking”. That’s my vote.

 ”I’ll have an Old Rasputin,” I say to Keller.

Joe’s Diner: Sycamore & 12th: 9.12.2010

It’s good to see this little treasure brought back from the dead. It was sad to drive by the ghostly shell with broken windows and weeds and trash around her skirt-tails. Now, she looks much the same as the old days. Chrome and vinyl and mirrors, (Joe’s needs to ditch the televisions. Sports Center on Sunday morning tarnishes the retro-experience).

The Diner looks the same but the feel is different. In the old days, The Diner was a yuppie restaurant. Joe’s Diner is more authentically…a diner. In ways both good and bad.

On my fourth visit to Joe’s, my third for breakfast (I live within walking distance), I order the Triple Play: three scrambled eggs, three strips of bacon and three pancakes. A lot of food and not cheap at $7.99. On my first breakfast visit I ordered the Sycamore (two eggs cooked to order, toast and sausage, as I recall). The Sycamore is gone from the current menu, though I suppose I could have recreated it ala cart. On my second breakfast visit, a breakfast meeting, I had gravy and biscuits. Also gone but no big loss. You can’t hide stale, hard biscuits under a pond of sausage gravy.

Back to the Triple Play. Scrambled eggs are scrambled eggs, so I ask for Tobasco to spice them up. No Tobasco but the waitress offers a hot sauce from a squeeze bottle that’s just as good, if not better. Flaccid, fatty bacon instead of the crisp lean version that I prefer. I hate peeling a thick strip of fat from the edge of a slice of bacon. The pancakes are pretty good. Light and fluffy and creamy. I taste sour cream. All in all too much food (my fault) and not exceptional (their fault).

My one and only lunch at Joe’s, a couple of days after they opened, featured a tuna salad (or was it chicken salad) sandwich. I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter because I see neither on the current menu. Besides, it was soupy and sweet.

Joe’s has a beer and wine license. The usual industrial beers (Bud, PBR, Heiny) plus some Moerlein thrown in. And Mondavi, Woodbridge, yada, yada, grocery store wines. If you want to drink go next door to Neon’s on 12^th and order from Joe’s menu. They’ll run it over. Joe’s also supplies the free happy hour munchies at Neon’s on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They have a Late Night menu (10 p.m. to 4 a.m.) for the after-bar crowd.

I’ll give Joe’s Diner more chances since they are convenient and I really want them to succeed. Joe’s and Neon’s and other establishments along Main Street could be the seed of a renaissance for an area all but lost for a decade after the 2001 riots. But there are limits to my patience.

The annex at the back of the Diner is still sunny and architecturally consistent with the old car itself. But this morning there is no toilet paper in the crapper.

I have my limits.

FUBAR Tuesday: Highway to Hell

A few years ago when I was regularly negotiating the I-71 slalom back and forth between Cincinnati and Cleveland, I would usually spend half the trip cursing the oil, automobile and highway construction lobbyists. You see, it was their fault that I was making a dangerous and boring (boringly dangerous?, dangerously boring?)  four-and-a- half-hour automobile drive instead of riding comfortably on high-speed rail where I could work, read, flirt or even have a cocktail (while flirting). The trip from cities like Cleveland to Cincinnati is ideal for rail because it’s too far to safely drive and too short to fly (by the time you get through the check-in and security bullshit you might as well have driven).

Americans have been stupid enough to allow lobbyists to deprive us of an efficient, low-polluting, pleasant mode of transportation enjoyed by the civilized world, (notice I didn’t say “rest of” as I don’t consider America civilized). Yes, high speed rail would have to be subsidized but so is the automobile and so is aviation. The real cost of gas is about $15.00 but we only pay $2 to $3 dollars. As a buddy of mine is fond of saying, conservatives only call it subsidized socialism if it rides on a rail.

In the Sep/Oct edition of Miller-McCune magazine (if you haven’t heard of it and I’ll bet you haven’t, you need to rectify the situation www.miller-mccune.com ) Bruce Selcraig lays out the details of the American transportation travesty in his article, “A Track to the Future”. I’m going to excerpt portions of it below but you need to go read the whole piece.

“…Unthinkable in Europe, America has metro areas with more than a million people – such as Nashville, Tenn., Columbus, Ohio, Phoenix and Las Vegas, – with no inner-city passenger rail of any kind, at any speed.”

“…In virtually every developed nation except the United States, although there may be pitched battles over immigration, foreign policy and soccer, hardly anyone argues about the wisdom of fast trains.”

“… Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system…”

“… in America it [subsidies for rail] has become a call to arms for libertarians and “fiscal conservatives” who insist that high-speed rail pay for itself, while ignoring the massive subsidies received by the auto and airline industries.”

“…Since 1983, mass transit has only received about one-eight of those highway taxes, and none went to true high-speed rail because, to date, the U.S. has no high-speed trains.”

“… not be enough to alter the course of a me-first, car-first nation, until, of course, $8-a-gallon gas does the altering for us.”

Small Rebellions

A radio personality with a microphone urges people to step up and participate in an ice cream eating competition. He sounds like he’s talking from inside a culvert. The person who can eat a quart of Creamery Brand Ice Cream fastest wins a year’s supply.

Nate steps up on the stage where a long table is laid out with intermittent spoons.

They can choose from a variety of Creamery flavors. Most of the contestants choose vanilla because it is bland and will melt quickly under the withering sun, thinking they may be able to drink their way to victory.

Except Nate, who chooses Mint Chocolate Chip even though it has big slabs of dark bitter chocolate that, like life, he will need to chew. He chooses it because it is his favorite.

When the contest starts, the frantic competitors shovel great gobs of ice cream into their wide mouths, many swallowing the frozen cream whole without savoring, tears in their eyes from the cold pain.

Nate calmly scoops a small spoonful with a bit of the chocolate as he looks around at the desperate, cream-slick mouths and soiled shirts. He loves the tingle of the mint, the way his mouth comes alive when he draws a breath. Fire and ice.

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

By Nate’s fourth spoonful, a contestant rises from his seat and brandishes an empty carton to the stunned and cheering gathering . The winner is declared but Nate, with most of his carton intact, has already wandered down the makeshift steps from the stage and onto the Square, leisurely enjoying his treat. Eyes of confusion or mirth followed. The Creamery Ice Cream Representative and the Radio Personality are not amused. Nate sits by the fountain and scrapes the waxed paper carton with the wooden spoon. Tosses both into a waste can.

At the far end of the Square, a group of people wear stickers that read My Name Is on their breasts. They sip cocktails in clear plastic glasses within a velvet roped area. Signs and buttons with stars and stripes read Re-elect Senator Powers. An effusive young woman asks Nate if he is a registered voter and satisfied with his answer and his signature and fictitious address and phone number, writes NATE with a Sharpie in big block letters on a label and presses it on his shirt pocket. Ms. Effervescence smiles and moves on to another unlabeled human.

Nate looks down at his pocket and seeing, from his perspective, his name upside down, peels it off and inverts it.

Nate makes small talk with the guests. Answering questions about his place of residence and livelihood and other matters demographic and social. Harmless fictions. He sips at his gin and tonic through the tiny straw. When an interrogator tells him his name tag is upside down, he looks at his breast and says it looks right to him. They are amused

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

and take him for a prankster. They thrust business cards in his face. Nate accepts the cards though he has none to offer in exchange. After he has accepted enough cards to warrant five weak gin and tonics he moves toward the velvet rope where he encounters a young woman who blocks his path. “Hello. I’m Alex,” she says even though her nametag is clearly visible. She offers her small, soft hand, “it’s short for Alexandra.” “Nate,” says Nate taking her hand in his. He does not shake it but holds it delicately as though he has been handed a Faberge egg. When her hand is released, she takes a business card from a small, grained leather sleeve. “Do you have a card?” she asks.

“I have several,” Nate says as he withdraws the stack from his pocket. He flips through them. “I think this is my favorite,” he says handing a card to Alex. He smiles, steps around her and walks through the gap in the enclosure.

Alex watches him for a moment before she looks at the card. It reads Margaret Tomlin, Vice President of Sales, Hummingbird Communication. There is a colorful hummingbird, snout poised above a honeysuckle flower, in the upper right hand corner of the card. Alex knows Margie Tomlin. She laughs and shakes her head. She studies the gathering, busy sipping, chatting, gazing, listening, posturing. Looks at faces she recognizes. Then she turns and follows Nate, who becomes ever more diminutive in the distance.

Nate crosses the street against the light. A car skids to a halt inches from his thigh. Horn blaring, the driver gesticulating from within the fishbowl Ford, air conditioning

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

blowing at full blast. He hits the horn repeatedly as Nate passes but fails to capture the jaywalker’s attention. Nate’s expression is not defiant but detached. Nate is already across the street when the driver drops his window. The driver sits open-mouthed and confused through the light change, his eyes wide in something akin to, but not exactly, amazement. The driver withholds the invective but continues to idle until the driver behind him begins honking. The light has changed again.

Alex has quickened her pace but can’t close ground in her fashionable heels. She’ll lose him now, she fears, but looking through the traffic she sees him turn into an alley. She should reverse course and return to the party, to her friends, but she doesn’t. She crosses the street. At the alley she pauses. Even in the bright sunlit afternoon the alley is dark and bleak. Foreboding. She presses on anyway. In the alley she discovers a singular store front next to a dumpster parked at the rear exit of a Chinese restaurant, the Delirious Dissident Bookstore. She has practiced her lines to explain her unexpected prescence. You were so captivated that you accidentally gave me someone else’s card. A card you might need. But once inside the practiced words fall away when she sees Nate talking to a bearded, long haired clerk behind a glass counter displaying old books. She can only blurt, “Curiosity kills the cat,” and wonders, herself, precisely what she means. Nate smiles a crooked smile. The speechless clerk shifts his questioning gaze back and forth between Nate and the young woman who has sweated profusely in her three piece suit.

 

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

Alex peels a lock of dark hair from her sticky forehead. The Delirious Dissident has no air conditioning but she is intermittently greeted by blasts of air from a large, swiveling pedestal fan. The store’s climate  is pleasant, liking stepping inside a cave. The fan’s thrust lifts her fine, silky hair from her shoulders and makes her skin tingle like the taste of mint. The shop holds only the three of them and the books that smell pungent and ripe. Alex plops down, uninvited, into one of the old over-stuffed chairs scattered about the shop. As Nate and the clerk study her like a curio she scans the bookshelf nearest her. Dusty volumes of books by people whose names she doesn’t recognize and some she can’t pronounce: Hannah Arendt. Amiri Baraka.  Nathaniel Chalmers. Noam Chomsky. She kicks her shoes away from her tired, hot feet as if she has arrived home at last from a long journey. On a battered table next to the chair is a copy of Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin. She picks up the book. The text is in Russian.

“I could translate it for you if you like,” Nate says. “What do you usually read?”

“I don’t know,” Alex says and is disturbed by her own revelation, “maybe you could make a suggestion.” She kneads her foot cocked upon her knee and knows that she is showing too much thigh but shifts her leg higher instead. Brazen  and obverse. A thrilling self realization hits her like a crashing wave.

A large dog has arrived from the back of the shop, tail swishing vigorously, rolling his rump to and fore. The dog tries to push his nose into Alex’s crotch. She grasps the dog’s big head with both of her hands, kneading the fur and scrunching his ears in her

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

fists. The canine teeth, capable of ripping out her throat if that be the animal’s choice, belie the slobbery smile and loving gaze. That’s how the world is, she is slowly learning, it happens or it doesn’t and the vagaries of life, the randomness of reality may make a mockery of her plans. The dog tries to launch himself up to lick her face or perhaps to join their sex. Alex doesn’t wear undies and she imagines that her fecund fragrance fills the room and complements the musky books, that it beckons all of the animals in the room.

She fondles the animal’s ears as she pushes his head back down between her knees, the insides his ears feel like velvet.

“Zhivago!” the clerk scolds.

Zhivago turns and looks at his owner with a contrite expression. Then backs away to sit. Drooling. Admiring his new friend.

Nate, who had wandered to the back of the store, has returned. He studies Alex with an expression she can’t quite define. Not the countenance to which she is accustomed. He hands her three Mad magazines from the ‘70’s, their back covers creased from folding. “This is a good place to start,” he says. He isn’t kidding. And then he smiles, steps around her and strides to the door. The bell’s ding signals his departure.

“…?” her eyes ask, maybe of the clerk, maybe of the dog. Maybe of the books. Maybe of herself. The dog puts his head back into her inviting lap.

Small Rebellions: Mick Stepp

The clerk shrugs and says, “He’ll be back,” remaining motionless behind the counter.

The dog’s muzzle has dampened her skirt.

She closes her eyes and enjoys the breeze from the fan. She feels like a hummingbird probing an exotic, beautiful and unknown blossom.

Wary but hungry and thrilled with discovery.

 

End