Opium2: A Toybox of Inimitable Fascination by Todd Zuniga

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t mªsthead G))))))))g Founding Editor (.com & .print) TODD ZUNIGA

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except for a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Associate Editor (.print) HEATHER KELLEY Associate Editor (.com & .print) WILL LAYMAN Designer (.print) DAVID BARRINGER

Book design by David Barringer. Type set in Filosofia by Emigre. Other fonts include Cholla, Fairplex, Brothers, Mrs. Eaves, and Poppi. Printed in the USA.

Associate Editor (.com) TUNG LE Cartoon Editor (.com) CM EVANS

Opium Magazine is an online magazine of fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews, art and miscellany. Visit www.OpiumMagazine.com. Please direct all inquiries to Editor Todd Zuniga at todd@opiummagazine.com.

Poetry Editor (.com) DIANA FOX Assistant Editor (.com) PATRICK SULLIVAN Assistant Editor (.com) MIKE MARTIN .live Technical Director (.com) CJ KERSHNER Director of Weird Artistic Projects JAMES J. WILLIAMS, III

Opium Magazine Issue No. 2 Bad luck, a losing outcome, a risky gamble: the devil plays at the boundaries between life and game. The player seeks love and feels lust, seeks play and finds work. Games play the players. A devil takes your chances. And so it’s true here, as you’ve opened a Toybox of Inimitable Fascination.

Welcome to Opium’s (Fun and) Games Issue.

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w acknowledgments ~ +))))))))))))))? A V U E Z T R G L A D Y O U S P U P Y K C I R T

C T C T R A W U S S Y E S G R A X M A E T A S U

X A O U B E O C A R E I T C A T O D D S M O M O

V K S N O A G A D N L S J H T R U S S E L N E Y

D E T G O N N N A L L K C U B I T Z I R A A T L

Q I E T B H I E I E E O A S E C A S A M R A T L

I T V I C T B G A R K U M A L K A W Y I T G O A

E O I O B J E M S H R S H Y A S C A N L O N C R

A U L L A V A H T A E A I O G U L Y N T S I O O

S T L N E A N E W J H R B R A L K Z O O A D R F

T S U T I E B F O R T X O D L L E E D N M N P N

U I S F R A L H R E A V O I I I V I N B A E N U

Y D K R Z A N G K A E H W F T V I B C R B Y O F

E E C I P L N A N S H O H I A A A A O A I P T I

R A L J E A T Y T U C M E V A N S D N D T P S S

M E A A O S U R A D T A R E H O A A I L C A N A

O C R A I Q E W H A T S N E W F A I R E H H U U

K Y A M E E R T W E Y N O S E K O J D Y A A D Q

V A S A T S M A I L L I W J S E M A J O S X A A

Dunston Procott

Heather Kelley

CM Evans

Happy Ending

Todd’s Mom

Will Layman

Tung Le

Shya Scanlon

Flapjack

Diana Fox

Patrick Sullivan

Grove Street

David Barringer

James J Williams

CJ Kershner

Milton Bradley

.................................................................................................................................. :  ,  ,  ,    , ,     , , ,  (), ,   , , , , & .

155-Cross Words Puzzle by David Gianatasio

114-Baseball by CM Evans

153-Two Poems by Mike Young

107-Storied Gaming: Interview with Erik Wolpaw by Todd Zuniga

144-The Unhusband by Alison Weaver

101-Solo Acts by Andrew Roe

142-Notes from an MFA Holder by Tom Lombardi

100-One Poem by C. Allen Rearick

141-Spin the Person by CM Evans

96-Eastwood by Jim Ruland

134-Dinner without Andre: Interview with Wallace Shawn by Heather Kelley

132-Allosaurus by Thomas O’Donnell

95-A Sampling of Lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” if T.S. Eliot Had Been Mentored by the Three Stooges Instead of Ezra Pound by Larry Gaffney

121-Prize Every Time by Michael Rottman

93-Breakdown of a Scene by Brandon Cronenberg

119-Steve Martin’s Acting Coach on the Set of The Jerk by Michelle Orange

90-Ball Game by Porter McDonald

89-Match the Eastern European Capitals

115-Nest by Will Layman

87-Two Poems by Ryan Bird

E EEE EE E EE E E E E E E E EE E E E EE EE E E E E E EE E E E Match Titles . . .

Answers to the Match-Titles-to-Authors Game on pages 4-5 of Opium Magazine No. 2:

38-Last Request by Dennis DiClaudio 43-Test Yourself by CM Evans 44-Bore by David Barringer

84-Barrington Speaks by D.B. Weiss

34-The Name of Someone In The Room by Violet Glaze

81-Dangeresque by Diane Williams

31-Window by Rachel Demma

78-Vanishing Acts by Steve Gillis

21-Reruns by Patrick Irelan

77-Sorting Hall by David Gaffney

20-We Started Playing Checkersby CM Evans

69-The Barnacle by John Jodzio

18-Two Poems by Jason Lee Brown

68-Do You Like the Bed? by CM Evans

12-Away Games by David Fromm

65-Barful of Women by Bob Arter

63-Some Kind’a Joke by Davis Schneiderman

9-Problems in Political Commentary Vis-à-Vis Secondary Education in Des Moines by Gary Britson

47-The Crowd Pleaser by Dennis Cooper

6-Interference by Shya Scanlon

B BB BBB BBBBBBB B B B B B B B B B BBB BBB B BB B BB BB . . . to Authors!

Interference   S S   : �:�� 6

thought about asking April to come with me and I went to the top of the stairs. I was wearing shorts and I remember the hair on my legs, the coolness of that air. But first I was sitting in the study and April was in the basement and I was writing a story and it suddenly told me to stop. I know, I know, look: I’d been working on it, okay, for a month, and I’d put a lot of time into the main character. I’d given her a super complicated background and this fucked-up relationship with her parents and she was living in San Francisco at the time. So there was, she, oh and then her boyfriend! Her boyfriend was kind of a creep at the beginning but he was beginning to understand, I was thinking, how much she meant to him, because there were all these little signs, you know, like he’d put the silverware away before leaving for work one morning, and you know, what else, he’d bought that book about women being from somewhere which at that point he hadn’t read it yet, but just buying it was a good sign. Anyway, the whole thing was really coming together. I’m actually pretty sure that the emotional climax of the story was definitely right around the corner, probably, I don’t know, probably in a matter of paragraphs. So you can imagine. You can imagine that I was a little upset about being asked to stop like that. Not even asked, really. More told. I didn’t make up my mind right away. I saved the file and got up and decided to go for a walk, because, whatever, and I thought about asking April to come with me, and that was when I went to the top of the stairs and felt that coolness and feel it still. But I stood there and it was probably just one second and my legs said just turn around, don’t bother her. April had a lot of papers to grade, that day. Besides we were in the middle of a fight, I think, so you know, I probably didn’t feel like talking. Let me ask you something. You know how sometimes you can just, let me, sometimes April and I we’re together and we hold each others’ hands and it’s like we’re communicating telepathically. I swear to god we actually laugh at the same time out of nowhere and I think this: this is why. This is what happens when you’re on a level. So I leave the house and I walk up to the top of the hill past all

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those enormous houses to that little park that overlooks downtown and the bay. It’s, what. It’s. It has a great view and I go there sometimes if I have writer’s block. Bay View Park. So I go there which for some reason I’m always the only one there, and I think about what the fuck am I doing. Is this story taking me for a ride? Does it have some agenda? And is the main character in on it. It’s funny how being up high gives you perspective about stuff that has nothing to do with distance. But I was thinking this stuff and it was a clear, crazy day, remember? It was the clouds lifting and the sun hanging around like it had something else to say. It was the light creeping down into your hair and it was freckles on wool-warm skin. Was I singing? Fuck I probably sat up there for an hour, just staring down at everything before even remembering why I’d gone out. There was a tugboat pushing a freighter into place, down past the city in the whatsit industrial area, you know, and it was funny to see this little tug nudge the nose of something so colossal, trying to make it behave. This story, I’m telling you, was a really good story. Sometimes you just know you’re getting the balance right. You can tell that all the different pieces are working together and the tone is perfect and the characters are just fucking jumping off the page they’re so real. Even April, who I mean, you know, even she had to admit it was pretty good. So why would I stop writing? It was my story to do what I wanted with, am I right? Wasn’t I the one who’d put in all the work? Wasn’t it, yes, I’m sitting there struggling to make the woman the main character and to make her stick around even when it was looking and scratch that it was obvious there wasn’t much point. And I was right! Her boyfriend was beginning to show promise! He’d had some kind of epiphany somewhere offstage which was, which I’m implying, and now he’d stopped being such an idiot! So I’d pushed it this far and I’d put in all this work and I had a right to see it through. I had a responsibility to see it through. That’s where I was netting out anyway, up there, with the view. So I started home. And here I am, walking downhill which I hate because it kills my knees. But I took the streets that wrap around the hill with an easy grade and I was taking it easy, and I was lolling, and the lawns made flexed intentions of my feathered thought. I crowed. I crewed. And I’m walking past these houses and I always wonder do people, and I’m just a writer, now, but some people must walk past them and take it all in like some vision they can just reach up and pluck down and ten years later they watch me walk by, but I was thinking how it would be different if I made her boyfriend rich. The

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light was playing with the leaves of this thin rich street and I was walking down the middle of the road and I was kind of beginning to walk a little faster and I thought that if her boyfriend was rich, how would I feel about the chick staying with him or, you know, her decision, or not leaving? Because I hadn’t given him a job. I assume he worked because he left the house in the morning, you know, I mean maybe he wasn’t really doing anything super productive but hey, he could have been a what, some kind of programmer or something? Because whatever, this was San Francisco, and maybe they lived on a street like this, where the sun played tag with leaves alive with the fire of fall. Because I hadn’t really described their house so much. Or, not in any way that would make it specifically not rich. I mean look. When I met April I was what, I was a second-year law student, and now I mean can you even imagine if I hadn’t met her? I’d probably be defending dark-side pharmaceutical companies from classaction law suits by people who lost their fucking kids to cancer, you know, and, Jesus, it makes me, I mean, fuck. But hey, I’d be rich, right? So I was like I just have to get home because, well, it was just becoming more clear to me that her boyfriend was probably, he had some money, because I realized, is this story about a woman just having some kind of bullshit realization or is this something else, because she was actually bending my taste for what planned spectrum soured my tongue. Because she spoke, and speaking broke a feather from the bone. She crowed. She crewed. And what could stop me? I was seriously at this point almost running down the street and I was killing my knees, and there are all these switchbacks down the hill and here I am supposed to be taking it easy but just cruising back home down the street all excited like I’m gonna kick this story’s ass and I’m thinking, I’m free, I’m free, and I’m fucking unraveling.

Problems in Political Commentary Vis-à-vis Secondary Education in Des Moines   G B

  : �:��

s she dropped her son and daughter off at Hoover High School in Des Moines, Moira couldn’t help noticing a bumper sticker on the car ahead: MY KID IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT HOOVER HIGH

The car ahead of hers started to pull away from the curb but was quickly cut off by an aging Volkswagen whose rear bumper announced: GIVEN THE LAUGHABLE FAILURE OF HERBERT HOOVER’S SOCALLED ECONOMIC POLICIES, BEING AN HONOR STUDENT AT HOOVER IS RATHER LIKE BEING THE BEST-DRESSED MAN IN SING SING, N’EST-CE PAS?

The spat reminded her of a ferocious, ultimately futile, campaign her state of residence had conducted, some years back, to come up with a catchy slogan for itself. Moira had aspired to the cash prize offered to the winning entry. She still thought hers was far and away superior: IOWA: SMARTER THAN MISSISSIPPI

She hadn’t won. Ahead, the two drivers stared at each other wordlessly. Moira made a U-turn and headed home, only to find herself blocked again: MY KID IS HOME-SCHOOLED AND HE’S FORGOTTEN MORE INTEGRAL CALCULUS THAN YOUR KID WILL EVER KNOW

Moira thought: If he’s home-schooled, why aren’t you at home, schooling him, instead of clogging up the parking lot? Her question was answered by that car’s opposite bumper: LOOK, I WORK HERE BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN I HAVE TO APPROVE OF THIS SCHOOL’S ANTEDILUVIAN CURRICULA. I’M RATHER LIKE JOYCE IN DUBLIN, SIMULTANEOUSLY LOVING MY CITY AND ITS PEOPLE, BUT, MIRED HERE BY CIRCUMSTANCE, DESPISING ITS OPPRESSIVE CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL MIASMA

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Prolixity, Moira reflected, rather defeats the whole purpose of bumper stickers. But, after all, this was Des Moines. As she drove home, she considered preparing her own bumper stickers. MY KID HAS AN INTERESTING RECORD COLLECTION

That seemed to sum things up on the home front pretty well. Her fellow motorists read her thoughts: I WAS A ROADIE FOR FOREIGNER AND MY KID IS ON TOUR WITH COLDPLAY, SO PIPE DOWN AND DRIVE

Des Moines, Moira reflected, was turning into a tough room. MY KID SINGS IN THE ALL-STATE CHOIR

a nice maroon Mazda proclaimed. Only to be replied to by a somewhat obstreperous BMW: YOU CALL YOUR KID A SINGER? YOUR KID THINKS PUCCINI IS A SPAGHETTI SAUCE

Had the pioneers of the auto industry foreseen this type of conflict? Moira wondered. The internal combustion engine as a mode of hostile communication. Give man a tangible object, she mused, and watch him to turn it into a weapon. MY KID IS A CHAMPION DEBATER AT HOOVER HIGH SCHOOL

proclaimed a well-polished Oldsmobile. DEBATE, MY EYE— YOUR KID TALKS TOO MUCH

replied a station wagon of ancient vintage. At the next stop sign she was accosted by the chrome of a new Cadillac. MY KID PLAYS FOOTBALL FOR HOOVER HIGH

Alongside him, a small European vehicle obviously primed for quick getaways replied: THE WAY YOUR KID TACKLES, HE’S BETTER SUITED WEARING A TUTU

Moira got out of there tout de suite. She backed up and sought an alternate route. Going back toward the school, she hung a quick left and began a series of zigs and zags that she knew would take her

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home with a minimum of editorial commentary. But, encountering the inevitable detour sign, she was stopped by a buxom Buick: MY KID MADE THE HONOR ROLL AT HENDERSON JUNIOR HIGH

Moira threw it into reverse and had to swerve viciously to avoid a vintage VW bus: HONOR, SCHMONOR. MY KID CAN IDENTIFY FOURTEEN WAGNERIAN LEITMOTIFS IN PARSIFAL YOUR KID IS IN THE HITLER YOUTH, AND YOU’RE BRAGGING? POLITICS AND ART CANNOT BE CONFUSED! YOU’RE CONFUSED ENOUGH WITHOUT ART OR POLITICS

Pulling into her driveway at long last, Moira let the car idle a long time before getting out. She collected her thoughts. They were all in capital letters. She resolved to sit there until she had reduced them to lower case. Her five-year-old daughter sped out of the driveway on her new bike, which declared MY MOM SITS IN THE CAR AND TALKS TO HERSELF

Moira left the car in the driveway. The next day it was FOR SALE

Let the kids walk to school.

Away Games   D F

  : ��:�� 12

n day two at the Hotel Olsanke, I went back to the gymnazium at Riegrody Sady with a mental phrasebook of limited use. The gym sat at the top of a slight hill a mile behind the Muzeum, surrounded by quiet stone buildings. One of the Thursday night ex-pats—a half-Czech businessman named Mark, in Prague to oversee the opening of a chain of international grocery stores—had told me that if I said “Sokol trener-basket” enough times to enough people, I would eventually find the coach of the basketball team—if one existed. Mark said joining a team would be both easy and disappointing. Also, he said, he was sure of neither. In Czech, the word for “yes” is “ano,” often shortened to “no” and accompanied by a nodding of the head in assent. It takes practice nodding your head and saying “no” at the same time. It feels like a joke while doing it. I stuffed everything I might need into my backpack: my sneaks and socks, a towel, my passport, some money. I wore my jock beneath my shorts, my shorts beneath my sweatpants, and jogged up the long hill to the gymnazium, where the window to the reception booth was again closed. A tiny gray man in a blue smock with tufts of hair coming out of his ears sat behind the reception booth window. He wasn’t moving. I recognized this as a Czech archetype: the pre-revolution municipal worker, not inclined to help. I said “dobry vecer” several times. I knocked on the glass. Minutes passed before he looked up. When he did, he pretended he hadn’t heard me, four feet away, talking. “Sokol trener-basket?” I asked. He looked at my feet and shook his head like I’d asked for money. “Trener?” he asked, sounding skeptical. His fingers were short and stained by fi lterless Russian cigarettes that bent as they burn. You could buy them individually at bars and kiosks. “No,” I said, nodding my head carefully. “Sokol trener?” “Yes.” Dammit. “No. Basket.” I tried miming a jump shot, leaving my right wrist cocked in follow-through. That seemed to energize him; a raised arm,

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a bent wrist, a strange foreigner at his window. When he launched into full-fledged monologue, complete with emphatic gestures to people I couldn’t see and don’t think existed, I wondered what his politics had been, if I’d evoked anything. I stood there dumbly, staring at the doors behind him: Could I just run through them? What would happen? This wasn’t a police state. Would they be open? Who knew where they led in this huge building? There were whispers of a pool and a tennis court at the Hotel Olsanke, on the forbidden floors, but nobody could verify. Finally, he stopped talking and stared wearily at me, although he’d looked weary when I arrived. “Sokol trener-basket?” I asked again. I had nowhere to go. He shook his head slowly, looked around the empty room and hooked a thick finger under his lower lip. Then he picked up the receiver on his rotary telephone and dialed. That seemed to bode ill. I waited in the lobby anyway, which was covered floor to ceiling in white and pea-green tiles, intermingled in no obvious pattern. I tried acting nonchalant, stretching my hamstrings, as if this was reasonable, as if I’d spent many evenings in foreign countries, refusing to leave gyms, pretending to speak languages, asking for people who may not exist. I mean, “basket” sounded like it means “basketball,” and “trener” sounded like “trainer,” which sounded in a roundabout way like “coach.” But I’d been down this road before, and as I stood in the lobby it occured to me that Mark once told me the phrase “ja mam kratkeho” meant “I’m pleased to meet you,” when, in fact, it was a colloquialism for “my penis is short.” The wait dragged on, and I wondered what part of my anatomy I had described and how I had described it. Finally, the old man put down the telephone and returned to the door, this time holding a small slip of paper. “Basket,” he said. “No?” “Basket,” I said. “No.” He handed me a slip of paper, a secret note, one word: Streda.

R We lost our first eight games. In the last game, I was benched for Slava, who shot seven for eight from the international three-point line. To me, it was the international line. To him, it was the only line. No surprise he was hitting. We lost anyway, to Technika A—a team of engineers I’d felt so confident about beating at the beginning of the

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season. The league had banned Bob Javurek indefinitely for berating a referee after the USK B game. Tonda had broken his ankle. Kratcky broke a bone his leg and was just beginning to come back after being out for a month. After practice I went out to U Vystreleneho Oka—the pub whose name meant “At the Shot-Out Eye”—with Bob and drank tmave pivo and ate dark Czech bread and told him how Yanna’s old boyfriend was coming to town for Christmas, and even though she and her boyfriend made plans long before I met her (and even though she told me about it right at the beginning), it still sucked and I was still dreading that aspect of the holidays. I was sure, no matter how many side streets I took, no matter how hard I tried to avoid Karlov Most, the Orloj, and the pink sunsets where tourist battalions encamped, I would encounter them. Bob was a bachelor. He drank half of his Radegast with one swig. “After training,” he said, pointing to his beer, “is best, I think.” I nodded as he ordered two more. “I think, your holka,” he said, “girl?” Yes, I nodded, “girl” was the right word for holka. He was working hard on his English. “She needs some kicking.” Later, we left the pub and I walked Bob back towards his apartment along Vinohradska, dribbling on the uneven cobblestones past the silent open square of Namesti Miru and the Church of unlucky St. Ludmila, patron saint of Bohemia and converts who’d been strangled by assassins in 921. My pockets were full of slices of bread, and I offered one to Bob, but he declined. Bob didn’t understand how good Czech bread was, but he promised to send me the dark round loaves in care packages after I’d left. When Christmas came, he said, he and Honsa and Radek would have a big carp dinner at his house and go to a disco. “Which one?” I asked. “I am not disco-boy,” he said with a shrug. We walked to the tram stop at Jiriho z Podebrad, and Bob crossed the street and headed towards Maresova. Halfway across, he stopped and called out to me. “David, bring your girl to Meteor,” he said, using the name of our next opponent. “I will give her kick for you.”

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We arrived at the gym at Chvalkovicka, which was at the end of a long road into the woods somewhere outside of Prague central and marked by a Christmas tree in front of a canteen-like side building. The tree was lit with red and blue lights and tasseled with stars. It sat in the quiet Czech woods, familiar and out of place, like a parent in a dream. Although we led 33-31 at the half, Chvalkovicka outscored us 4824 in the second half behind a great young guard—the best player I’d yet seen in Prague, a slasher with the sort of innate anticipation that you couldn’t learn—and an older, wider shooter who tossed in long wobbling threes. I wasn’t doing much of anything on the court lately, other than throwing the ball away. But against Chvalkovicka I banged in a series of jumpers and a reverse for seventeen points. Ludek Pelikan even threw down a crowd-pleasing one-handed dunk on a fast break. It wasn’t enough, though, as Slava and Vykli went cold early and stayed there. In the second half, we were going through the motions, and nobody was upset when we started losing. The novelty of the adventure had worn off, and it no longer felt like making a semi-professional basketball team in Prague, the sheer oddity of it, meant anything. We were better than our record. I worried that I was becoming the Vinohrady equivalent of Vernon Maxwell. Most of the team had left the locker room when Honsa sat down next to me. “We are bad,” he said. Kratcky, one of the few players left, nodded. “It’s sad.” Tomas Polisensky gave Kratcky and I a ride back to the Florenc metro stop. We went to the McDonalds and bought cheeseburgers and French fries at twenty crowns a pop. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away and carp, a staple of the Czech holiday meal, were churning in buckets on street corners. Shoppers would point to the carp they wanted, and the fishmongers would scoop the chosen fish up in a net, smack it on the head with a mallet, wrap it in paper. Prague hadn’t seen more than a provisional dusting of snow. My parents were flying over for the holidays and I’d been excited to take them around the city and back up the postcards and letters I’d been sending. The Shot-Out Eye. The bread. The team. The center of the universe. Women whose cheekbones stood out like bridge cables.

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I went to Slapy because I needed the money, though I didn’t know if I could take another weekend of its hard cots and flabby, viscous pork dishes. Once there, I headed straight for the breakfast buffet and its rohliks and maslo. My co-instructors had gotten in the night before and were already finishing their meals. Jerry the racist was talking to a twenty-seven year old from Vermont named Mary and a frat boy named Brett, with whom I’d be sharing a room and, given the food, an olfactory hejira. Mary said she was an interior designer in Prague, but business was slow. I said I was a basketball player. She didn’t look like she believed me. The Hotel Ku-Ko, where we stayed, was dusted with snow, and the rolling hills and lake of the collective farm looked New Englandy. It quickly became clear that many of the students at this language school were having affairs with one another. I didn’t know how I missed it before. They had a perfect cover: three days a month for six months in a riverside hotel with nothing to do but drink and pretend to learn English from Americans who pretended to teach it. At dinner on Friday, I began to consider having an affair with Mary’s calves; they were lovely calves, long and tapering and formidable. They looked like aubergine. Mary was funny and seemed bored in ways that made me wish I’d gone to prep school. She had big dimples and a bob cut and three years on me, so it seemed like a challenge. After dinner we sat on the lobby couch and shared stories: she was going to get married to a Czech man but it fell apart. I said that almost made her a Czech mate. She laughed like she’d never heard that before. I told her about seeing Yanna in the square with her ex-boyfriend, about grad school and hoop. I told her she had great calves, like aubergine, and she said, “I know.” Saturday was the day that Jerry shouted “tackle!” at his class and said that we “risked flatulence” with the meatloaf. Jerry was Czech but seemed to have learned his English in a Russian spy camp. That night the students put on a show for the instructors. The show consisted of a few impenetrable skits and a painful Rockettestyle medley of national anthems. An agronomist named Humpl ran around with a pair of women’s underwear pulled up over his blue jeans, lipstick kisses on either cheek. Frank the driver bought Brett three shots of the local brandy. Brett passed out. Mary bought us shots of the brandy from the ashen barman and grinned. We drank them, and she borrowed twenty crowns and went back for more. Vera, the owner, told us that the brandy was hard to get those days because the government had determined that it contained “more than trace amounts of arsenic.”

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We worried briefly that Brett might be dead, but then he vomited onto his arm. “More than trace amounts of arsenic” seemed like an irresponsibly vague conclusion for the government to reach. I could feel the brandy leeching straight into my bloodstream, and I wondered whether Mary might be trying to kill me for laughs. She seemed like the type. Some of the younger students cornered us and asked questions about American politics and social life. We made up answers like “medicine is socialized, but only for pets.” Finally there was a lull and Mary squinted murderously and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.” Here we go, I thought, but I went anyway. We walked around the lake and then I was poisoned and freezing. Mary talked about winter in Vermont and I wondered how this was going to turn out, if I was going to die from the arsenic, or the cold, or if Mary and I were going to bivouac and have sex. That sort of thing seemed possible when you were a semi-pro basketball player in Prague. I gave her my gloves and she threw snow at me. She said, “I think we should cut to the chase.” Any normal man would have kissed her at that point. But I did not kiss her, even when she pretended to slip in the snowy parking lot and dragged me down on top of her. I did nothing. I was a chump, a fucking incompetent. Yanna and her hesky prsa were somewhere in my mind, but not at the forefront. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the swirling stars. My teeth were chattering like they had a message for me. Mary didn’t say anything. We lay there through a confused, impatient silence. I decided to try to wait it out, and closed my eyes. After a few minutes, I heard her get up, shrug the snow from her shoulders and walk, on her beautiful calves, back towards the main house. I waited a few seconds and staggered back to my room. Brett had vomited into the basin of our sink and sprawled, snoring, across my cot. I leaned unsteadily against the small window and wondered the things that everyone wonders when they’re far from home: Have I seen these stars before? Who else has looked at them from here? And would Lenny Bias really have been better than Jordan? Was that even possible?

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CHANGED Cells completely regenerate every seven years, she says. What’s that have to do with us, I say. We’ve dated eight, she says. We’re different people now. I’m not different, I say. See, same cock (grabbing myself). He’s not the same, she says. He doesn’t like me anymore. He’s the same if we say he is, I say. That’s identity. People live longer nowadays, she says. Change careers, marriages. So, you need a variety of husbands before you die, I say. I didn’t say that, exactly, she says. But you can’t argue with biology.

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REDSKINNED Just before the fifth and final vote to eliminate the mascot name, Redskins, a red-faced Mike Moss (a 6’4”, 240-pound Irish man) stood up in front of the Glenwood School Board and cried. Bawled his eyes out. The gymnasium was packed with every citizen who had ever watched a school sport, played a sport, coached a sport, or had a child in a sport. The small town cherished its teams. Local news cameras swiveled on tripods lined down the aisles. Reporters scribbled notes and held digital and tape recorders in the air. Mike declared he was a Redskin and always wanted to be. That’s how he grew up, how his kids grew up, how his grandkids are growing up. Redskins. “That’s right!” and, “Yeah, tell’ em!” were barked from the rumbling crowd. “We shouldn’t give in to some rich pack of Native American lawyers,” Mike said. “We’re honoring them for Christ sakes!” When the applause stopped, the school board president acknowledged the community was overwhelmingly for keeping the name—based on the results of the Mascot/Identity Committee— however, lawyer fees alone would drive the school into financial ruin. The president continued with the school board’s prepared statement. Mike listened intently, and with each sentence, each word, each letter, the name Redskin was peeled from his memory until even the days on the field wearing the arrow-and-feathers logo were forgotten. Soon he would no longer be born and raised in Glenwood, no longer part of his own memory. The vote was unanimous.

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fly on a mission of peace to the troubled island nation of Kadoo Royale. The stewardess gives me peanuts, cashews, almonds, macadamia nuts, tiny bottles of gin, coffee with nondairy creamer, the Critique of Pure Reason. She says to call her whenever I need her. I am the only passenger. I call her many times. We arrive at nightfall. I kiss the stewardess and shake hands with the pilot and copilot. They will refuel and leave at once. I will be the only American left on Kadoo Royale.

ENT OF S TM T AR

E AT

DE P

President Yutter meets me on the tarmac, and I present my card:

IC A

« E

AT E S O F

Patrick Rialto U.S. DEPARTMENT of STATE Washington, D.C. 20520 Phone: 1-800-END-WARS

“Welcome to our troubled island nation,” says the president, speaking through an interpreter. “I come on a mission of peace,” I reply. We embrace in the glare of television lights, even though there is no television station anywhere near Kadoo Royale. On the long drive to the city he reviews the island’s violent past. Two rival factions have fought for control of the nation for more than two hundred years. The members of both groups trace their ancestry to the same party of colonists from northern Europe. Both groups failed to see at the outset that there was nothing of value on Kadoo Royale. Now they compete for the island’s only source of foreign currency, the production and sale of postage stamps. In spite of their animosity, the members of the two groups are almost identical. Both have fair skin. Practice the same religion. Speak the same language. No one remembers the original

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cause of their rivalry. The only apparent difference between the two factions involves the name of the island itself. One group pronounces it “Kadoo Royale,” and the other calls it “Kadöo Royale.” President Yutter says, “No one knows how many lives have been lost to this issue.” A message awaits me at the guest house in Yutterburg. My Kadoovian undercover contact bids me welcome. His code name: Mangrove.

W Next morning, the peace conference begins. As chief arbitrator, I deliver the opening remarks, stressing the importance of our mission. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I say, “we have before us an opportunity to bring peace to your land, a peace that will last for generations. We must put to rest old rivalries, old hatreds, and old misunderstandings. The people want it. They demand it. We must not fail.” I pause for dramatic effect. My gray eyes survey the crowd. My blue suit and silk tie denote wealth and power. “If we succeed in our quest for peace, I can promise you the continued support of my country. I can promise you food. I can promise hair dryers. I promise silicon, integrated circuits, BHT, group dynamics, structuralism, and poststructuralism.” My voice rises. “I promise conceptual art!” I wait for applause, but all I get is silence. I look around for an explanation. Then I see the problem: the interpreter has not yet arrived. Twenty minutes later, the interpreter finally enters the hall. I repeat my opening remarks, and the real work of the conference gets underway. The delegates begin by arguing over lemon- or lime-flavored mineral water. I suggest unflavored mineral water. The delegates grumble but agree. We move on to other matters. Both sides state their demands and refuse to compromise. Both sides want blue jeans, digital watches, a television station. I make a list. “The Kadoos always get what they want,” shouts one delegate. “The Kadöos always try to run everything,” shouts another. The talks have reached an impasse. I announce a recess until tomorrow morning.

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I leave the conference hall and walk through the streets of the city, looking for insights into the character of the people. I must find the basis for an historic compromise. On a street corner I see a vending machine with the island’s only newspaper: USA Today. On the next corner a man is selling Reeboks and frozen yogurt. I observe the people as they pass by—their smooth white skin and alert blue eyes; their innocent faces, hungry for mega-malls and MTV. They have strong, well-formed limbs. They speak quickly and laugh often. Their souls cry out for peace. I walk back to the guest house, my mind seething. Inside, the maid is making the bed. I stare at her firm, young body. She stares at my rugged face. I smile. She takes off her clothes. We fall into bed, and I escape the frustrations of diplomacy. The maid has breasts like melons and legs like a goddess. Her eyes are deep pools. Her name is Yes-Yes. Afterwards, we lie in bed, talking of love. My interpreter explains that Yes-Yes is a Kadoo. I am careful not to speak mit Umlaut. We talk far into the night.

W The next morning, a message is waiting in my mailbox. Every house on the island has a mailbox, despite the fact that Kadoo Royale does not have a postal service. Mangrove has sent his first substantive communication: RETURN TO SENDER. I ponder this message as I ride to the conference with President Yutter in his 1953 Studebaker. After reaching the hall, I mount the podium and gavel the delegates into silence. I must take command if I am to achieve my goal: a fair and honorable peace for both Kadoos and Kadöos. The first speaker is Tex Beneke Yutter, leader of the Kadoos. “For too long,” he says in a stentorian voice, “the Kadöos have retained control of the Philatelic Sales Division. We demand parity for Kadoos!” Pandemonium breaks out in the hall. I pound the gavel, but to no avail. Everyone wants to speak at once. Finally, I turn off the lights and the noise stops. I turn the lights back on, and everyone is asleep. After a break for coffee and croissants, the session resumes with a speech by Artie Shaw Yutter, the leader of the Kadöos. “The Kadoos demand parity,” he says, “but they’re unwilling to work for it. They want everything given to them.” A howl of protest greets these words. Delegates exchange threats.

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Push comes to shove. Objects fly through the air: pens, pencils, chairs, bottles of unflavored mineral water. The talks have again reached an impasse. I announce an early adjournment and run for the Studebaker.

W I reach the safety of the guest house, where Yes-Yes awaits me. She massages my neck and shoulders to calm my spirit. She removes my shirt and smoothes my skin with coconut oil and guar gum. I fall asleep. In my dream Tex Beneke Yutter and Artie Shaw Yutter are dueling with rolled copies of USA Today. When I awake, dinner is ready. Yes-Yes has prepared a meal of squid, Hamburger Helper, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. After dinner we share a bottle of bulk-process champagne. I stare at Yes-Yes. She is beautiful in her colorful native garb. She removes her clothes, and I remove mine. Her skin is the color of ivory. Mine is the color of peeled bananas. We hurry to bed, and I tell her I love her. I tell her I will always love her. I tell her I have never loved anyone else. At a crucial moment, a loud noise interrupts our progress. The interpreter has fallen off his chair. Afterwards, I check the mailbox, where I find another note from Mangrove: GO FISH.

W I leave immediately for Washington. The same crew is on the plane. The stewardess gives me a case of gin, a bucketful of Brazil nuts, and Being and Nothingness. We lie down in the aisle. I am glad to be rid of the interpreter. The Secretary of State confers with me as soon as I arrive in Washington. I struggle to explain the nature of the conflict and the importance of the Philatelic Sales Division in a country without a post office. “You must forge a compromise,” he says. “I understand,” I reply. “Be imaginative.” “I try.” “Be diplomatic.” “Of course.” “Promise them something.”

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“I have.” “Promise them something else. Promise them CDs, DVDs, flatscreen television, roller derby, canasta, fiber optics, electronic scoreboards. Don’t be timid.” Suddenly, I see his point. The man is brilliant, a genius. His eyebrows meet above his nose. “Yes,” I say. “Of course, of course.” While stateside, I visit my family in Reston, VA 22070. I embrace my wife, Teri, and my children, Bobbi, Billie, Toni, Patti, Randi, Mindi, Willie, Traci, Sandi, and Cindi. I love my family more than life itself. I leave at once for the airport. Back on board, the stewardess rips off my clothes. We cruise at thirty thousand feet.

W The plane lands at three in the morning. President Yutter is waiting in the Studebaker. I have sometimes wondered why the president doesn’t have a chauffeur, but decide not to ask. He’s an excellent driver himself, though too short to see over the top of the steering wheel. As he drives away from the airport, President Yutter begins to talk excitedly. He pauses for the translation, and we hear the interpreter snoring in the back seat. The president stops the car, wakens the man with a kick, and repeats himself. “You have returned just in time for Founder’s Day,” he says. “It is our most important national holiday. It commemorates the day two hundred years ago when John Paul Jones Yutter founded the Philatelic Sales Division.” “Fascinating,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to ask, what is the Philatelic Sales Division a division of?” “The founder originally planned to establish a post office department.” “Yes.” “But he found this impractical in a country where everyone is named Yutter.” “I see.” “So Philatelic Sales isn’t really a division of anything. It is its own raison d’être.” We arrive in Yutterburg at dawn. I would like to see Yes-Yes, but the president insists on finding a good spot for the parade. After standing in the sun for six hours, we finally hear the sound of a marching band. By this time, the crowd is ten or twelve deep on both

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sides of the parade route. A cheer goes up as the music gets louder. As the band comes into view, I see that it consists entirely of one man with a boom box. His purple uniform is immaculate. A limousine with bulletproof glass follows directly behind him. The limo contains only one passenger, an imposing figure of a man with an ostrich feather in his hat and a wide sash running diagonally across his chest. His face is rigid. His lip curls. He looks as if he would gladly pull your head off. President Yutter, his voice cracking with emotion, explains that this is the director of the Philatelic Sales Division: Donald Trump Yutter. The noise from the crowd rises to a deafening roar. As the limousine rolls on down the street, I turn to watch the rest of the parade. I’m surprised to see that the crowd is breaking up—the parade is over. I turn back toward President Yutter. Tears are streaming down his face. He cannot speak. I lend him my handkerchief, and we head for the Studebaker.

W After lunch it takes an hour to find the interpreter. Then the president takes me for a tour of the city. He begins by driving past the headquarters of the Philatelic Sales Division, a massive six-story building made of Indiana limestone. A statue of John Paul Jones Yutter stands atop a stamp machine in the front lawn. Soldiers armed with M-16 rifles guard the building. Following this glimpse of Philatelic Sales, the president parks in the next block to give me a closer look at the other governmental entities, all of which reside in Yutterburg’s unfinished post office. President Yutter’s desk stands next to the stamp window, where he spends his time telling people to go away. We climb back into the car and drive another block to the city’s retail center—a Wal-Mart that sells hundreds of products: food, clothing, furniture, used Studebakers. We pause for a snack of Fritos and Diet Pepsi. Having completed our tour of the downtown, we drive to a typical residential neighborhood. The yards are small but tidy. Children are playing on the sidewalks. We park the car and walk up to a house, which like all houses in the city is constructed of particle board. A smiling householder meets us at the door. His face and those of his wife and children cry out for peace. He shows us into the living room, which contains a chair and a color television set. As the honored guest, I sit on the chair while the others stand. This is my chance to enter the hearts and minds of these simple folk.

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“Your faces cry out for peace,” I say. “What will bring peace to you simple folk?” “I Love Lucy reruns,” says the woman. “Game shows,” says the man. The children pick their noses and pee on the floor. “We’ve tried for decades to get a television station,” says President Yutter, “but no one will help us.” “I see, I see.” I nod my head wisely. “I believe that peace will come.” I shake hands with the man and woman, but not with the children. President Yutter leads the way back to the car. After a long day together, we have become friends. On the way to the guest house, he confides in me, saying he prefers Gunsmoke to I Love Lucy. I promise never to tell. As I climb out of the Studebaker in front of the guest house, I remind the president to pick me up in the morning on his way to the peace conference. That’s when he tells me the conference will not meet in the morning. On Kadoo Royale, Founder’s Day lasts for a month.

W Faced with a month of inactivity, I decide to spend the time constructively at the Yutter Memorial Library. I arrive early next morning, only to find that my interpreter has disappeared somewhere along the way. After taking an hour to find him, I return to the library, where I delve into the fascinating history and geography of Kadoo Royale. I learn that the island is roughly circular, with a diameter of approximately fifty miles. It contains no rivers or lakes. The terrain consists entirely of rock. Everything used on the island has to be imported—dirt, water, glue—everything. Since nothing grows on the island, there is no cultivation and no peasantry. Almost everyone lives in Yutterburg, the country’s only city, which is located on the northern coast. In an earlier attempt to populate other areas, the Philatelic Sales Division constructed an airport on the southern coast and built a highway along the shore to connect it with the city. Unfortunately, no one wants to work at an airport that receives just one flight per week. The only people who don’t live in the city are the members of the island’s small aboriginal tribe. The aborigines move from place to place, stealing whatever they need from the Kadoos and Kadöos. No one knows how they supported themselves before the arrival of the

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colonists. They have resisted all efforts to be assimilated and have no interest in professional wrestling.

W At last, Founder’s Day reaches its conclusion. Armed with my newly acquired knowledge, I reconvene the peace conference. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I say, “throughout your long history, you have overcome many problems together. Both Kadoos and Kadöos have contributed greatly to the success of your nation. I urge you to bear that in mind as we continue our search for peace. Now is the time to remember your common history. Now is the time to rebuild your country. Now is the time for all Kadoovians to put aside old rivalries and dedicate themselves to one nation—Kadoo Royale!” The delegates leap to their feet and sing the Kadoo Royale national anthem, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Tears come to my eyes as I see the delegates united for the first time. They sing the anthem a second time, and I soak my handkerchief. The singing ends, the delegates sit down, and the first speaker, a Kadoo, walks to the podium. “In this new spirit of brotherhood,” he says, “I call upon the Kadöos to share control of the Philatelic Sales Division. All citizens should have equal access to the most valuable stamps.” Instantly, a Kadöo jumps to his feet. “When you Kadoos ran the Philatelic Sales Division, you forgot to use perforated paper,” he shouts. “What about the time the Kadöos printed the stamps on the same side with the glue?” shouts another delegate. Chaos fills the hall. I call for order, but no one hears me. Fights break out. Someone sets fire to the podium. Once again, I flee for my life. The uproar that started in the conference hall spreads to the streets. With civil war now likely, I cable Washington to request emergency assistance. Thirty minutes later, I receive a note from Mangrove: WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER.

W That evening, I stand on the roof of the guest house. Smoke is rising from fires all over the city. I hear shouts, sirens, small-arms fire. Stripped of its contents, the Wal-Mart is burning like a marshmallow. Suddenly, I see something on the horizon. Tiny black dots are

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approaching. As the dots come closer, I see that there are dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They come even closer, and I can tell that they’re exactly what I’ve been waiting for—helicopters, hundreds of them. They reach the city and start to descend. All around me, helicopters are floating down like soap bubbles. As each bubble touches the ground, a door pops open and out jumps a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Hundreds of gorgeous cheerleaders hop out of their bubbles, bringing with them the promise of America: straight teeth, perfect hair, one-stop shopping. As the bubbles continue to land, the people of Kadoo Royale drop their stones and clubs, their gasoline bombs, their Wal-Mart loot. They watch the miracle of the bubbles, their eyes filled with wonder, their faces alive with joy. The whole nation stands transfixed as the cheerleaders bounce through the crowds of people, giving away DVDs, satellite dishes, video games, cable TV DVR’s, assault rifles, light-emitting diodes, logical positivism. After distributing their gifts, the cheerleaders teach the Kadoovians how to memorize long lists of words and numbers. They deliver subliminal messages to free them from their doubts and anxieties, thereby helping them to realize their full potential. They contribute to the relief of disasters that have not yet happened. They erect computer-operated scoreboards and teach the people rudimentary cheers. Freed of their doubts and anxieties, the Kadoovians go into a collective swoon. Their blue eyes turn up in their noble heads. They forget their hatred for each other and begin singing advertising jingles for long-distance telephone companies. They join hands in a human chain that reaches all the way from the coastal highway to the Philatelic Sales Division, where the director announces the issuing of a new stamp to commemorate the occasion. The people fire their assault rifles into the air in celebration. My mission of peace is a success.

W The grateful people of Kadoo Royale organize a farewell celebration in my honor. A convoy of fifty Studebakers sets out for the airport, with me, Yes-Yes, and the interpreter riding at the head of the procession with President Yutter. I know that Yes-Yes is sick with grief over my departure, and I try to console her.

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The convoy heads out of the city amidst great rejoicing. People line the streets, cheering wildly and waving American flags. The drivers honk their horns, blink their lights, and throw Hostess Twinkies to the children. But once out of the city, the drive takes longer than the celebrants expected, and about half the drivers turn back to avoid missing the day’s Bonanza rerun. A few miles later another bunch starts back to catch The Beverly Hillbillies. By the time we get to the airport, our car is the only one left, and President Yutter is eager to get home in time for Green Acres. To preserve my country’s dignity, I insist that the president must stay long enough to hear my farewell address. I stand in front of the airport terminal and begin to read from my prepared remarks. President Yutter shakes his head and waves his arms, and I soon understand why. Once again, the interpreter has vanished. I look around for him in hopes of salvaging something from my speech. That’s when I see him ducking into the abandoned Holiday Inn across the street, hand in hand with Yes-Yes. For my part, this spoils the ceremony. It also explains why the interpreter was always missing. I have no interest now in finishing my speech, to the clear relief of President Yutter, who hops into his Studebaker and roars off for Green Acres. All this has dampened my spirits, but I console myself with the knowledge of what awaits me in the airplane parked at Gate 1. I hurry through the terminal and onto the plane, where the stewardess sets me down, fastens my seat belt, and tells me she’s pregnant. “I’m much too sick to roll around in the aisle with you,” she says. “Besides that, it isn’t safe. I have to think about the baby. And I need some money. My health insurance is practically worthless, so you’re going to have to start taking up the slack. And that reminds me, I have someone redecorating the baby’s room. I had to move into a bigger house, of course, but the baby’s room just wasn’t right. So how soon can you get me some cash? These people like to get paid right away, you know.” The stewardess sits down, fastens her seat belt, and falls asleep. She doesn’t show me how to use the oxygen mask. She doesn’t point out the nearest exit. She doesn’t tell me how to use the seat cushion as a flotation device. Two hours later she wakes up, pushes a cart down the aisle, and dumps a cold roast-beef sandwich into my lap. I remove the tinfoil and find a piece of paper sticking out of the bun. It bears my last communication from Mangrove: HAVE ELOPED WITH YOUR WIFE. THANKS FOR FLYING THE FRIENDLY SKIES.

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n Baltimore, every season was an assault. Winter tasted like someone shoving a handful of copper pennies in my mouth; the cold was metallic. And that summer there had been thousands of insects in the trees sounding like swarms of old women joggling cups of Yatzhee dice. Everything made me feel lonely there. I missed things that I didn’t even used to like back where I was from. My third-floor apartment looked across a narrow alley into the windows of another apartment that housed a small colony of only women and children. A mustached man moved among them at odd times, late at night, before dawn. The women were always cooking. After work, I would stand in my kitchen and look over to see one of them standing at their stove clapping industrially, making tortillas. Such an exultant activity! I imagined the corn meal flattening between the brisk heat of my palms and the bright hissing of the yellow circles in the pan while I gripped my microwave-warmed pizza-for-one. My apartment always felt sour and shrunken, like a plane ride. When I was in it I couldn’t concentrate. I watched too much TV. One morning at work, I wondered what ended up happening with that couple who met in the Visa commercial. The one where this guy used his card to take out all of these clearly unsuitable women until finally, they show him sitting down to dinner, bracing for the first wave of small talk on another date that’ll probably bomb like the rest. Only it doesn’t. They click because (what luck) she’s a lawyer too. They share their first smug smiles. I was sure they’d embarked on a happy romance by now, blithely charging their newly entwined future: a spacious loft, a Chocolate Lab, some nice stemware, their love as solid as their credit rating. Without the TV on, the apartment seemed to shrink, like I’d shut the door on all the other rooms I could look into. Going out was tiring. There was a bar on every corner but if I went to one, fatigue would land on my bent neck like a big black bird. So I went out with the other paralegal from work, Ronnie. Ronnie drank a Schlitz and pulled a pack of Parliaments from her handbag where it had nestled next to a slender volume of obscure Hungarian fiction. “Here’s what you do,” she said and

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helped me meet Alan who was sitting at the end of the bar. That Friday, Alan and I ate in a restaurant where the specials were scrawled on a chalkboard, the tables were purposefully narrow. We had to look closely at each other and talk about ourselves. I told him what I missed about where I was from and he told me about how it felt to never leave. Just inside my door, his fingers under my sweater felt like he was dragging the prongs of a silver fork gently over my back. Cold first, then warming. When he left, a few pestering black feathers flicked behind my eyes. Then, in front of the mirror in my tiny bathroom, pulling my sweater over my head, my elbow touched the mirror sounding like a toast, two glasses clinking together. I bent my arm, craning to see the joint, and the light caught what it was: a small round window just where my forearm ended in its round knob of bone. The edges where my skin met the glass were smooth, as if a monocle neatly embedded. I felt a strange sensation, like I’d just hit my funny bone which was now, effectually, under glass. A week later, I saw a thin oblong of glass running down the back of my calf, like a tear in my stocking. I tapped at it, expectant. Nothing happened. Late Sunday afternoon as I brushed my hair before getting coffee with Alan, a narrow transom revealed itself on my forehead. It glowed warmly, a window in winter twilight. The bangs I combed over it were not flattering. The following Tuesday a bay window arched gamely around my left hip. I opted not to take the bus home from work. Just one jolt, I thought. The next morning a pretty little gable jutted out from the curve of my waist. I called in sick and watched talk shows. Alan topped the shortlist of people to tell. Later that night, we were walking home from a bar in the snow, laughing, but he could sense something. We stood just inside my door, kissing, but I felt brittle and unwarmed. I tried standing close to him with my arms limp around his neck like a damp scarf. “Are you ok?” he asked. We stood looking at each other. “I have to show you something.” I pulled him back into my bedroom. We stood next to the bed, anticipating. I unbuttoned my shirt,

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pulled it off and reached behind to undo my bra. “Let me,” he said from across the room. But then it fell, and I took a step backward. He looked almost childlike, his mouth moving into a small, incredulous O at the two resplendent stained glass windows that glowed amber, rose and blue in an intricate but disorderly mosaic. He stood, quiet, while I turned up the heat in the apartment as high as it would go, and got into bed. When I woke up, the room was like a fever and he was there. “Careful now,” I said and he was. If he wasn’t, we both knew how easily I would shatter.

The Name of Someone in the Room   V G

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The first Friday of my surprise unemployment began when the boss pulled me into the office and said, “You’re just too _____________.” He shrugged, leaving a blank space ADJECTIVE

presumably for me to fill in. “Too what? Too sloppy? Too boring? Too late? I demand an adjective,” I said. I knew this was going to happen. It seemed an easy enough gig, writing Mad Libs®. After all, they practically write themselves, don’t they? I could just go through my unsold manuscripts and carefully denude them, plucking free the specific words I had previously agonized over and make my finely tuned and idiosyncratic prose into a tabula rasa ready for the next slumber party or long car ride home.

The guy I had interviewed with shook his head—mindreading my way of thinking—and said, “That’s not how we do it here.” He reached behind his desk and pulled out the suitcase. And that’s when I knew the drill. It’s like working for Mary Kay®. You buy the set first—that’s

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your initial investment in the company. So they know they haven’t wasted time on you. The guy clicked open the locks and spun the case around on the smooth surface of his desk so I could see inside. I gasped as involuntarily as if someone had put an ice-cold pinky in my ear. “Fifty nouns. Fifty verbs. Fifty adjectives. Twenty-five proper nouns. Twenty-five verbs ending in ‘ing.’ Ten names of someone in the room. Ten exclamations.” He snapped the case shut in my astonished face. “Five-hundred dollars. Nonrefundable.” “What the hell was that?” I gasped, scarcely believing my eyes. “I just told you,” he said. Imagine a perfectly square marshmallow about three inches wide on every side, except covered by one of those privacy blurs they put on the faces of people who don’t want to be seen on COPS. That’s what an underripe word looks like. Two hundred and twenty of them, packed into one suitcase. You’d think, for a writer, it’d be thrilling to see this larval vocabulary, before their shells hardened and their meanings fixed. But it was weird and unsettling, like the baby in ERASERHEAD. Skinned. Naked. Frighteningly fetal.

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“Will you take a third-party check?” I quavered. “Cash or money order?” the guy shot back.

I sold my TV to pay for that set. I sold my futon and most of my college textbooks and my electric guitar. And now I was fired. And my boss didn’t even have the decency to cough up a severance adjective to give me a reason why.

My life felt like it had just been filled in by a bunch of 12-yearold boys. I had a _____________________________ life with ADJECTIVE

a ______________________ apartment and no employment ADJECTIVE

______________________ and I had to pay my student PLURAL NOUN

______________________ and I was never going to write the PLURAL NOUN

Great American ________________________ and on top of NOUN

everything I had to ________________________ a new job. VERB

Now I’ve got nothing in my apartment except all the unused nouns and adjectives and verbs. They’ve grown, each, now, about a foot square. I stub my toe on one and look down, look directly at it. There’s a hazy nimbus partially obscuring my feet that I can only guess is a gerund. I give it a good kick, which is about as unsatisfying as kicking a beanbag.

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I can’t get rid of them. It’s one thing to say, “I have a toaster, would you like it?” It’s another thing when you can’t even specify what person, place or thing you’re giving away. The craigslist.com posting read: “Moving Sale: Noun, Noun and Noun. Best offer!!!!” But never one response.

In my apartment, I’m holding a ___________________, sitting NOUN

on a ____________________, staring at a/an _______________ ADJECTIVE

NOUN

______________, wondering what the __________________ NOUN

EXCLAMATION

I’m going to do with my ________________ life, wondering if ADJECTIVE

I ___________________________ my college education and if VERB ENDING IN “ED”

anyone will ever _________________ me. Unbelievable. VERB

“__________________________!” EXCLAMATION

Then I dry my ____________, and prepare to _____________ NOUN

again.

VERB

Last Request   D DC

  : ��:�� 38

onald made it perfectly clear that when he died he wanted us, his friends, to eat him. “Do this one thing for me,” he said while in the living room of his apartment. This would allow him to live on through us. His flesh could nourish our bodies, and we would carry him into an old age he himself would never live to see. Buddhist monks have been doing this sort of thing in China for years. He walked onto the balcony with his beer and stared out at the city lights. Our initial reaction was mixed. It was a lot to take in. First our friend was dying, and now he wanted us to eat him. We didn’t know what to think. “It’s grotesque,” Margot said, staring deeply to the bottom of her wineglass. “And possibly dangerous,” Tony chimed in from the kitchen, and then asked if anyone needed a fresh beer. Keenan, perched somberly upon a stack of architecture books, called that he needed one. “On the other hand,” Patrick offered, waving his drink about and somehow not spilling it, “it is his last request.” We were his only family—both his parents had died when he was a child. He had no brothers or sisters. We owed this to him. So, after some deliberation, we decided that yes, we would eat Donald. He had a tumor—a malignant growth pushing itself across the two hemispheres of his brain. That was lucky for us. It meant there’d be little desiccation of the meat unlike if he had a viral disease like Marburg hemorrhagic fever. He was a pretty big guy—a football player in college—so, if everything worked out okay, there’d be plenty of meat for all of us. Tony went home and scoured the Internet, researching the safest way to cook human flesh, to ensure that it’s not harmful. The rest of us went through our cookbooks, looking for the best, most fitting way to prepare our good friend. A few weeks later, while I was playing soccer in the park, I received a call from Margot. “Donald’s having spells of dizziness,” she said. “He’s checked himself into the hospital.” I excused

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myself from the game and went to be by Donald’s side. When I arrived in the waiting room, nearly everyone else was there already. Patrick and Keenan were off in a corner, in heated discussion, and Margot was at the reception desk, trying to get information on Donald’s condition. It was Patrick’s opinion that human flesh should taste like pork, since we have roughly the same size, weight and diet as a pig. Keenan disagreed, saying he’d read, in the biography of an escaped gulag prisoner who’d been forced to eat his companion, that human flesh tastes like a light beef and that we’d be well off to consider recipes tailored toward veal. No sooner did Margot discover that Donald was definitely considered a lost cause than Tony arrived, carrying a print-out from an anthropology website that claimed human meat will not prove harmful so long as it is well cooked. This annoyed Keenan, who was hoping for a dish prepared with a slight braise. “Well, I guess I can toss that recipe for lemongrass veal salad,” he said. Margot immediately hurled a cardboard box full of tissues at him, which he blocked with a quick forearm parry. “You shut up and be happy you’re getting anything,” she yelled. I was concerned about contracting bovine spongiform encephalopathy or something, but Tony assured us that things like that only occur in cases of habitual cannibalism. We should be fine, he said, so long as we didn’t acquire a taste. Margot did not laugh. When we were finally allowed to see Donald, he was lying on a bed with tubes spiraling from his arms, twisting into machines that made rhythmic beeping sounds. Because of the drugs, he barely recognized us. Patrick voiced some concern that the drugs might affect Donald’s taste. “I think they might make him bitter,” he said. Margot glowered, but it was a genuine concern. I offered to speak with the doctor and see if our friend couldn’t be kept as pain-free as possible, but without too much damage to the final product. Just after we were ushered out, I pulled a nurse aside, and she said she’d see what she could do. The next day, Donald was much more lucid. He was talking with us and even laughing occasionally. But, he had a hollow look about him. He held my hand. Tears welled in his eyes. Margot recalled something she’d read in a yoga magazine, something about time being illusory. “It’s like watching a garter snake slither past a slit in a fence,”

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she said. “It’s still one snake even if we can only see the tail.” He nodded in agreement, but I’m not certain he understood her point. It didn’t seem to make either of them feel any better. Margot bit down on her lip and looked to the white tile floor. Keenan, when he arrived, was carrying a book under his arm, FiftyOne Savory Veal Dishes, for which Margot and Tony scolded him as being in very bad taste. I have to say that I agreed. “I just came from the book store,” he said. “I didn’t want to make an extra trip home.” He apologized to Donald, which made matters worse. Donald shrugged his shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said, but his eyes kept darting back to the book, which Keenan had placed on the chair with our coats. Patrick was also a bit miffed and at some point blurted out, “So, we’ve decided on veal, have we?” I assured Patrick that we had not decided on anything yet and told him to just relax. Keenan made an exasperated face and mumbled, under his breath, “Twenty-three dollars down the tube,” but it was loud enough for all of us to hear. Donald, looking a bit green, was staring at the book until Margot noticed and tucked it under a coat, and then a nurse came in and shooed us all away, saying that Donald needed rest. Outside the room, it was decided that all further discussions of preparation would be kept to the waiting-room area. We took turns sitting with Donald. We didn’t want our friend to be alone in his time of need. One Sunday afternoon, while I was reading the paper beside him, he asked me if he’d led a good life. “Have I?” he asked. “Of course you have,” I said. “Do you think I’m ready to go?” he asked. His eyes, growing glassy with moisture, were locked onto mine, his face straining against emotion. This was making me very uncomfortable. “Have I done enough?” he asked. “Do you think it’s really my time?” Embarrassed, I lowered my eyes to the newspaper. “Yeah,” I said. Tony and Patrick came loudly into the room just then, arguing about a parking space that Tony had apparently passed by. “It wasn’t a parking space,” Tony assured me and Donald. “I knew I should have driven,” Patrick said. Donald turned toward the window and exhaled languidly. I said I had to use the bathroom. What none of us had considered was just how long it can take for a person to die. Weeks passed. Donald lay in his bed watching soap operas, flipping through travel magazines. Meanwhile, we tacked recipes to our refrigerators and watched helplessly as our friend shed pound after pound. He stopped eating. The specter of death was

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ruining his appetite. We snuck him hamburgers and milkshakes under our coats, but the food went untouched. He had no will to eat. “Marbleization is the key,” Patrick reminded us. “Without the fat, it might as well all be flank.” We nodded in silent agreement. I, for one, had been hoping for some nice tender medallions to sauté in a saltimbocca sauce. Tony showed us charts that outlined the way a person could be cut up for cooking purposes and said, gravely, that he thought he could still manage some decent cuts regardless. All of us nodded solemnly, except for Margot who said she was having second thoughts. “I can’t,” she said. “You have to,” Tony said, “it was his last request.” “He’s still alive!” Margot screamed. Keenan, in a rare moment of equability, defused the situation and brought Margot outside to talk. Through the window, I watched them share a cigarette, silhouetted against the light from a street lamp. When they returned, Margot agreed to make good on her promise after all. She has a gourmet quality kitchen and a fantastic collection of wines, so her involvement was highly desired. As Donald’s condition continued to deteriorate, the hospital allowed visitors to stay overnight. Margot and I took the first shift. She brought a portable CD player and some discs from her apartment. I fell asleep in a chair, using my jacket as a blanket. She and Donald stayed up late, without talking, listening to Blue Note albums. I didn’t know Margot liked jazz. When I awoke at one point, the Miles Davis Quartet was coming softly from the floor to my left. Donald, half the size that he’d been before he’d entered the hospital, was staring blankly toward the ceiling. Margot was tracing shapes in his bed sheets with her finger. Without looking away from the ceiling, Donald whispered, “Margot, I want you to have my Steely Dan records.” Margot started crying and ran out of the room. Donald looked to me, his shoulders hunched in exhaustion, and said, “I can’t go on like this.” “It’s going to be okay,” I said. He shook his head. “No, it’s not.” He was right; it was a stupid thing to say. About a minute passed without either of us making a noise, either of us moving. We sat perfectly still and listened to Margot’s crying from the hall. And then he changed the subject, asking, “Remember back at Bard?” “Yeah,” I said. “Remember that one sorority party where I climbed onto the roof

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and they called security?” he asked. “I remember that,” I said. “What do you think I could have done if I didn’t get sick?” he asked. “Do you think I would have gone back to school?” “For what?” “I don’t know. What do you think? Just tell me something.” “I should check on Margot,” I said and started to get up. “No,” he said sternly. “Tell me something. Tell me anything.” I stood up and walked to the chair Margot had been using. I sat beside him. I had no idea what to say. His eyes were so full of hope. So, I just opened my mouth. “You are the only person I have ever met who can watch television, listen to the radio, and read a book at the same time,” I said. “I’ve never met a single other person who can do that. Nobody.” This thought filled me with an incredible sense of loss. My eyes were stinging with tears. Donald patted me on the hand. I stood up and left the room. Everybody mourns differently. Some drape themselves in black. Others beat their breasts and rend their clothes. We mourned our friend by marinating an excellent cut of tenderloin in a sweet and sour sauce made with fresh apricots and then broiling it until it was just a hair below medium well, serving him on a bed of steamed asparagus beside roasted potatoes rubbed with garlic and a buttery French cabernet that Patrick had been saving for a special occasion. The table seemed empty without Donald’s presence. Before we ate, Keenan proposed a toast. “To a dear friend who will be very sadly missed.” We raised our glasses and tapped them together. The room filled briefly with the tinkling music of our tribute. I watched Margot down her wine, place the glass on the table, and bring a forkful of the tenderloin to her mouth. I watched as she pursed her lips around the fork and withdrew it empty. The angular outline of her jaw pumping steadily beneath a flushed, undulating cheek as she slowly, thoughtfully masticated the carefully prepared cuisine. I watched her close her eyes, lift her chin slightly, and swallow. Only then did I begin to eat.

Test Yourself   CM E

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Bore   D B   : �:�� 44

addy, I’m bored.” My son wiped snot on the sofa. The sofa was cappuccino nubuck leather. Together with the ebony coffeetable, it made our family room the one room in the house that approximated something out of a catalog, right down to the implication that the furniture was assembled by twelve-year-old girls in North Korean forced-labor camps. When I knelt down to search for the remote controls under the table, I noticed the workmanship. The table’s rich ebony color was hastily spraypainted, the underbelly grain revealed the wood to be pressed wood, and the difficulty of moving the table to vacu-suck the carpet suggested that scrap metal had been slipped in there to perpetrate the weighty illusion that Urban Pilgrim hadn’t screwed us again. The sofa’s frame was made of pine and loosely nailed together, then strung with some kind of weak supportive interior netting that I could hear rip when the kids jumped on the cushions or armrests. I was writing, and Lance was sick. It was Sunday. “You’re bored?” I didn’t look up. I kept writing because I knew this routine by heart and could hold up my end of the conversation without much effort. Daddy, I’m bored. You’re bored? Yes. Why? I don’t know. But you have a million toys. I know. Why don’t you play with one? I don’t know. You could play a video game. I know. You could watch a movie. I know. You could race your cars. I know. You could read a book. I know. You could build a fort with pillows and sheets and chairs and you could drape the sheets over the chairs and hide in there like a wolf or baby tiger and take a nap on the pillows. I know. You could make something. With what? I don’t know, blocks or paper or glue or cardboard tubes or cardboard boxes or the plastic your toys came in or magazines or paper bags or toothpicks or plastic milk jugs or little glass bottles or string or old CDs or clay or I don’t know do something at the art table. My brain doesn’t feel like it. Your brain doesn’t feel like it? No. Why not? I already told you it’s because I’m bored.

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I was still writing in my notebook, one leg flung over the armrest of my sofa, which was the old moldy sofa we got from my wife’s uncle’s family when their son went off to college and they turned his basement bedroom into a TV room. It was this sofa that ruined the catalog look of our family room, humanized it with lower-middleclass imperfection and a distinctively sweet, expansive, vegetable odor my wife didn’t recognize but I did: marijuana. The evidence of this particular solution to teenage boredom lingered in the atmosphere of our family room like a warning: teach your children how to work through their boredom, Dad, or someone else will get rich off their lack of imagination. Why I got stuck with the stoner sofa and my snotty son reclined on the yuppie sofa is an unspeakable secret known only to that most inconsistent of human beings, the Parent. Parents are highly impressionable authorities who will prohibit sofa-jumping one moment and facilitate safe sofa-jumping the next. In this manner, they undermine their own authority even as they demonstrate to their children the susceptibility of all authority to individual complaint. I let Lance have the leather sofa because it offered an unobstructed view of the wide-screen TV, about which I cared far less than I did about Lance’s welfare, and, anyway, I preferred reading books to watching TV, except when I was tired or, come to think of it, sick. Watching TV was for the sick. So why wasn’t Lance content to watch TV? This second round of antibiotics was having its effect. Instead, Lance was bored, and I didn’t have much time left to write because the I’m-bored routine was winding down to its conclusion, with me scribbling abbreviated notes while Lance tugged at his infected ear and resented my unwillingness to procure his next entertainment. He grew angry at my doing-nothing, and I grew angry at his doing-nothing. He thought I should help him, and I thought he should help himself. He thought boredom was as bad as being sick, and I thought boredom was the soil for growth. Parents can hardly stand to let a child be bored because a child in boredom’s first stages is as annoying and persistent as a lobbyist before a close vote. It is the rare parent who can handle doing nothing, and I don’t mean doing nothing like abusive-alcoholic nothing or emotionallyunavailable nothing. I mean doing nothing in a constructive way, with good intentions and close ongoing surveillance of the developing situation, like international diplomats monitoring a civil war before it breaks out and spreads into neighboring countries. Doing

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nothing would force Lance to develop his imagination rather than depend on my instruction. I felt I had done my duty and wanted to get back to writing. The temptation to distract my son was great, and the means were many. I sat up. I closed my notebook and placed it on the coffeetable. “Hey, Buddy,” I said, “you look a little bored.” He pounded the table. “Dad!” He shook in the grip of a tantrum. He swept a stack of magazines and a tissue box to the floor. “I know you’re busy,” I said, “freaking out and everything.” He closed his eyes and grimaced. He screamed. He screamed the Child Social Services scream that made me hope the neighbors were at church or hung over. Then he grunted and leg-pressed the coffeetable a good foot away from him. He was a strong little guy. “But I was wondering,” I said, “if you wanted to play a game.” While Lance recovered his breath and mentally scanned the board games in our hallway closet and wiped new snot next to his old crusted streaks on the sofa, I replaced the magazines and tissues and slid the coffeetable legs back into their depressions in the carpet. “Do you know what game you might want to play?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t I get a bunch, and we can pick one or play a couple,” I said. “No,” he said, springing up and running ahead of me. He was wearing blue-flannel pajamas and white socks, and he slipped on the turn through the kitchen but regained his balance and disappeared down the hallway. “I want to pick,” Lance yelled back to me as he swung open the closet doors. “I know what I want.”

The Crowd Pleaser   D C

An excerpt from the novel, God, Jr., published by Grove Street Press.

  : ��:��

work for a company called The Little Evening Out. We make children’s clothing for special occasions. Our founder was a one-legged Vietnam vet. He passed away in ‘93. Thanks to him, all of our employees are disabled. I sit in a wheelchair, but my upper body works. I can also think and talk. If I were sitting in a real chair, no one would guess I have a problem. It’s my day to work the show room. Usually I’m stuck on the computer taking orders. If it weren’t for the internet, we’d be dead. But sometimes people walk in the door. “How can I help you?” “My son needs something fancy for a wedding,” says a good looking woman with a small blond boy. She points at the wall where we display the samples. “What is that exactly?” “A bee. We do school plays.” “I see, and that?” she asks. She means the red molecule. That’s what we call it. Sometimes people pay us to turn their kids’ drawings into clothes. That kid was two. I explain what it’s called and why it came into existence. “You want to wear that instead?” she asks the boy, and smiles at me. “Well, you can’t. Maybe next time.” “No,” he says quietly. I never look at the kids. It’s too painful. Not even little kids like him. “Didn’t I see you in the paper?” she asks me after a thoughtful pause. “I did, didn’t I?” “You mean last Thursday’s Times.” “It was a fascinating story,” she says. “Very complex. We discussed it in my class. I teach ethics.” “What did your students think?” “They decided you’re a very cool father,” she says. “But they’re not sure you’re right.” “I’m quote unquote obsessed.” “As you should be,” she says earnestly. “Whether you’re in the right on this particular issue or not.”

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She studies the display wall and decides she wants the little black tuxedo. Marianne, who’s learning-disabled and obese, does the fittings. So we’re done. I hand the woman my card. “I’d like to see what you’re building,” she says. Marianne is leading her and her reluctant son away. “Is it possible to drive by? The paper printed your address, so I’m assuming it is.” “It’s fine.” “I’d like to bring my students,” she says. “Do you ever give tours?” “If you can give me some notice.” She waves my card at me. “I’ll call you?” she says.

“Was she getting on your case?” Al asks. I guess he overheard us from the office. He lost his right leg in a boating accident. His son died young like mine, but in his case that wasn’t his fault. “No, she wants to see the monument. She wants to bring her students.” “They’ll love it,” he says. “They’ll be all gung ho.” “It’s an ethics class. So maybe not.” “Kids love it,” he says. “My kids want to start a petition.” “How are they, by the way?” “My older girl just got accepted into UCLA,” he says. “Which reminds me. She says she met your Tommy once. She says she recognized his picture in the paper.” “Did she say how?” “No,” he says. “I should have asked. I’ll ask her.” “I’m interested.” “She likes extreme sports,” he says. “I think that might be it. She goes to those X-whatever shows. I think she’s even dating one of them.” “That’s probably it.” “They’re not bad boys,” he says uncertainly. “It’s just something new. Like soccer was.” “I used to think they were a bunch of lazy asses who were always stoned or drunk. I didn’t realize that if a boy that age was happy, he’d seem coarse.” Al’s eyes look sad now. He must think I mean Tommy. Maybe I do. “I’ll ask her,” he says gently. “Don’t worry. They’re harmless idiots. She’ll be fine.” “Sorry to mention it,” he says, and starts typing.

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O We receive maybe ten online orders everyday. People link to our site from disabled support sites. There’s always some imminent wedding or school play or funeral, and we’re a godsend to them. They don’t mind that the clothes won’t fit perfectly. They just need us to help them. They send us long, moving emails with their orders. I don’t think most of them even have children. “Excuse me?” asks the woman from before. She has wandered into the office. I guess the boy is still getting fitted. “Oh, hi. This is Al.” “You’re a teacher,” Al says to her. “My wife’s a teacher.” “Small world,” she says, smiling. Then she looks at me. “What about tomorrow? I mean for the tour.” “I work until 6.” “Of course,” she says, and cringes. “I wasn’t thinking.” “Take the morning off,” Al says. “I could do it in the morning.” “That’s perfect,” she says. “But I should warn you that I’m not so good with kids.” “That’s perfect,” she says again. “It’s a small class. Twelve students, if they all show up.” “Is 9 o’clock okay?” She nods happily. “I’m excited,” she says, and grabs my hand. “This is a big, big help.”

After they leave, the two Mexican guys who make the clothes get their instructions. They work in a small warehouse behind the office. We keep the windows closed because they always play their music. It’s cheerful to them, but those trumpets drive us crazy. Our radio is tuned to a local oldies station. We’re around the same age, meaning somewhere in our forties. The Mexicans are young illegal guys. Manuel was shot in the back when his family snuck over the border. He’s in a wheelchair like me. His friend Jose claimed he was dying of cancer to get the job. One night his wife left us a phone message saying he lied about the cancer. She sounded drunk. Al and I wanted to fire him until Marianne started crying. So we never mentioned the call to Jose. But I like Marianne to worry we could fire him any minute.

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O Al tries to grab the phone away from Marianne. She backs across the office dialing. She wants to hear the Eagles. He’s a country music purist. I’m basically indifferent. We may look like poignant triplets, but our pasts have different soundtracks. Still, we share, or, in my case, shared children. Kids don’t care about their songs the way we care about the old ones. Music isn’t special anymore. It’s a given. It takes itself and every kid for granted, and we bear the collateral damage. The more recent the oldies, the less we mind and the more we’re in agreement. “Request that song we were talking about a few minutes ago.” “What’s it called?” Al asks me. “Quick.” “We couldn’t remember.” “Alice in Chains?” Al says. “That’s the band. We need the song.” “Stop, Marianne,” Al says. “We have a better idea.” “I’ll fire Jose.” “No, you won’t,” she says, smiling. I push the intercom button that sends my amplified voice into the warehouse. “Jose, to the office.” Marianne cups her hand around the mouthpiece. “‘Desperado’ by The Eagles?” she asks. Her voice could be easily mistaken for a child’s, so we always have her make our requests. It almost guarantees a play. Jose walks into the office. He’s a small, wiry guy with a boxer’s messy face and gigantic upper arms. He’s always rubbing his quote unquote cancerous chest around us. It bothered me when I thought he was sick, and it’s intolerable now. I look at him. “You’re fired.” “Jim,” Al says sharply to me. He looks at Jose. “You’re not fired.” “We know you don’t have cancer.” “Yes,” he says sadly, and rubs his chest harder. “No, you don’t have cancer. Don’t have it. We know you don’t. Your wife told us you don’t.” “My wife?” he says. Then I see his lying eyes understand. “But you’re not fired,” Al says. “We forgive you.” Jose looks at Marianne. “It’s okay,” she says meekly. “It’s good you don’t have cancer.”

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He looks down at the floor. He stops rubbing his chest and makes a fist. I want Jose to cry. He cried at my son’s funeral. He cried even harder than I did. It made me feel better at the time. If I could hug him, I think he would cry. When he hugged me at the funeral, I started crying. I might have cried because I thought someone who was dying understood. But I can’t stand up and hug him without giving away one of my secrets. “It’s okay. Just stop rubbing your fucking chest.” “Jim,” Al says. I smile as warmly as I can. Jose looks up cautiously and sees my smile, then walks back into the warehouse. By now ‘Desperado’ is playing. None of us have even noticed. “What was that about?” Al asks me. He’s typing again. “Maybe you shouldn’t make me think about Tommy.” I look at him then Marianne. “For future reference.”

We close at six, but will leave earlier with the slightest excuse. It’s 5: 05. Al wants to interrogate one of his daughters, so we’re done. Al and I carpool with Marianne who drives painstakingly well. She dropped her son Wayne on his head when he was born. It damaged his future, so she’s always very careful with ours. Al’s house is a pint sized Tudor. There’s a sailboat in his driveway covered with a tarp. It’s the one that took his leg off. His daughter won’t let him sell it. He’s told me several times he wishes someone would steal it. I’ve thought of hiring one of Tommy’s dodgy friends to help. I could sell the boat on eBay to help pay off the monument’s debts. But we’d have to steal the pink slip, which would mean breaking into Al’s house. Before the accident, I was a real estate agent. I covered part of the Hollywood Hills, and did very well. Back then, I bought the property just north of ours and had the house razed. I hoped to build expensive condos, but 9–11 ruined the market, and the land has come in handy. I put a fence along the street, and took out all the trees and foliage. I thought the monument would fit. My first contractor assured me that it would. But we’ve had to lose most of our yard, and it needs a little piece of my neighbor’s. He’s a widower who never set foot in his yard until I offered to buy it. It’s a wasted half-acre of trees and mown grass. He won’t be reasonable. That’s what started the ruckus with my neighbors. Before he complained, they used to tell me my son was another Frank Gehry.

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O Twice every Monday through Friday, Marianne’s car inches by the spot where my Lexus hit a phone poll. I was pinned beneath some wreckage. Tommy flew through the windshield. Fifteen minutes later, we pass the public phone where he dialed 911. Some dispatcher took a call from an incoherent male. I’ve decided it was Tommy, even though we couldn’t ID his voice. Twenty minutes after that we pass a bus bench where his body was discovered by some strangers. I’ve passed these places so many times that he has almost been erased. Soon, his death will lack illustrations or even much of a story. If that was Tommy’s voice on the 911 tape, he couldn’t pronounce what he knew. I know I should have placed him in my car wreck, but I’ve never told a soul. I haven’t even told my wife. I never had to. With his head injury, you wouldn’t live that long. You couldn’t walk that far. Maybe a block, they said. So there was never any question. But I guess he was special. People seem to need tragic strangers in their lives. They’ll superimpose tragedy when there’s nothing to prevent them. Our company’s modest success is an example. Whoever people think killed my son has disappeared into oblivion. I just decided that oblivion was deciding not to walk, fuck, go to the bathroom by myself, or want to do those things again.

Marianne parks her idling car in our driveway, and helps me into my wheelchair. We’re squarely in the shadow of the monumentin-progress. It used to resemble a concise roller coaster that had partially collapsed. In the Times article, it was described as a giant piece of inedible candy. Yesterday, one of the neighbors called it folk art run amok. When the massive, arched, castle-style door is added tomorrow, it should refocus yet again. “It looks bigger,” Marianne says. “It’s slightly taller.” She smiles and waves at the workers. They’re screwing big puzzle pieces of red and yellow skin onto its crazy skeleton. They pause and glare back at her, probably because I’m late again with their paychecks. “They seem mean,” she says. “They’re just mad because I’m dicking them around. I’m the one who’s mean.”

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“You were a little mean to Jose,” she says. “No, I was mean to you.” “You weren’t,” she says reassuringly. “Then what would you call it?” She smiles at me. But then she’s always smiling. According to this show I caught one time on TLC, people with low IQs fill in their blanks with an exaggerated warmth. “Okay, that’s a little mean,” she says.

I can roll myself up the front walk, unlock the door, and push it open unassisted. My wife Bette hears my racket, and walks into the entrance hall talking on her cell phone. She clicks it off and gives me her ‘something’s wrong’ look. It always makes me think she has figured me out. I can walk a little. That’s one of my secrets. I can walk across a room. It doesn’t even hurt. I discovered that last month. I’m constantly worried that I’ll jiggle a leg or wake up with an erection. I have to sleep on my stomach and monitor my body like a mime.

“Let’s talk,” she says, glancing at her watch. “I’ll start. Dateline NBC is sending some people on Monday morning. Just to look.” “How did that happen?” “They called Fred,” she says ominously. “He told Jane, who told me.” “That’s scary.” “I called NBC and talked to some assistant to someone,” she says. “He said they were planning to call us today, but I fear their slant. So Jane and I are rallying the wives. That’s where I’m off to now.” “That’s definitely bad.” “You should pay the guys today,” she says. “Call Fred, and make nice. Ask him not to go into the drugs thing. Ask him to show Tommy that much respect. Say the monument should be weighed on its merits. He’ll understand that. If you have to, mention his drinking.” “They’ll find out anyway. I’m sure they already have or they wouldn’t be interested.” “You know my feelings,” she says. “I know what they were.” “This is war,” she says. “That’s my feeling. Fred can go fuck himself.” “We’re fucked.”

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“Possibly,” she says. She checks her watch. “A teacher is bringing her class by in the morning. I’m going to show them around and I guess answer questions.” “We should be videotaping these things,” she says, and starts toward the street. It’s sad. I mean to watch her walk away. I can barely remember how it felt not to worry when or if she would come back.

My contractor is outside the kitchen window. It’s the end of the work day. He’s washing his hands with our garden hose. It’s easier for me to call his cell phone than struggle through the back door. His name is Bill Riley. He’s the otherwise unemployed dad of Tommy’s last and only girlfriend, Mia. He wipes his hands on the legs of his jeans then unhooks the phone from his utility belt. When he sees my number, he lets himself into the kitchen. I’m at the breakfast table smoking a joint and writing checks. He gets a Budweiser out of the fridge, and sits down across from me. “Can I express an opinion?” he asks. “Father to father?” “Try me.” “Tommy was a good kid,” he says. “Thanks.” “The other day Mia said if she was rich, she’d build her own amusement park,” he says. “And you know why? Because she’s playing Roller Coaster Tycoon. It’s a computer game.” “I know the game.” “So let’s say Mia died tomorrow,” he says. “Would I mortgage my house to build her amusement park? No, because she wouldn’t be here to enjoy it, and it’s probably a whim.” “And you couldn’t afford it.” “But maybe I’d say, okay, I’ll build a skateboard park and call it Mia Riley Park,” he says. I’ve finished writing the checks, and push them towards him with a force that makes me realize I’m upset. “She draws pictures too,” he continues. “You could hang them on a wall, and they wouldn’t look half-bad. But is she Picasso? No, man, she’s not Picasso. And I loved your kid, but that is not a good building. What kind of building has no insides? Even the Statue of Liberty has some rooms and a staircase. The only reason it’s a building is because you were a real estate agent, and you jumped to that conclusion. Any normal person would have had the drawing framed.” “There were 37 drawings.”

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“Or made a book out of them,” he says. “Mia’s the one who told us it was a building.” “She also said Tommy was stoned when he drew them. It’s like something a stoned kid would like. When I look at it, I don’t see Tommy. I don’t feel Tommy.” “So are you saying you quit?” “Not necessarily,” he says. “Then I don’t understand.” “I guess not,” he says, and puts the checks in his top pocket. “All right, maybe what I’m trying to say is you shouldn’t smoke so much pot.” “Well, you try living in a wheelchair.” “Maybe you wouldn’t be in a wheelchair if you didn’t smoke so much pot,” he says. Then he stands up abruptly and heads for the door. “You didn’t finish your beer.”

O I like to sit around our deserted house wishing things were different. That’s how I found out I could walk. I wished my legs could support me, and they did. Now I wish the monument would burn down to the ground. Or I wish I’d hired this company that designs circus tents to create it. I wish I’d thought it was a big enough deal to make Tommy’s art into a costume. If he’d known I would grant his wish, he would have drawn Christina Ricci naked. From what his friends tell me, he just wished he’d been so famous he could fuck her. The space between him and fucking her was immaterial. That’s why he broke so many bones. That’s why he never would have been a Tony Hawk. Every loudmouthed jerk he called a friend seems to have known that about him. I wish they’d respected him more. Or I wish they wouldn’t think I’d feel less lonely if they nitpicked him to death. Or else I wish I did. I seem to be asleep on the couch. Bette is suddenly above me with a cell phone in her hand. I think it’s an offering. I can see my wheelchair all the way across the room. I must have wished I could walk more than a couple of feet and given it a shot. She could have been there long enough to solve the mystery. That might be our lawyer on the phone explaining why my deception is legal grounds for divorce. I think all these things in a rush while I pretend to need a moment to wake up.

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“It’s Fred,” Bette says, then carefully mouths the words ‘he’s drunk.’ I take the phone. We share a reassuring cringe. “Sorry, Fred, what? I was taking a nap.” “I said this is a courtesy call,” he says. “Thanks. We should talk more often.” “Mm,” he says. “Is this about the Dateline thing?” “So you know about that,” he says. “Can we set some ground rules?” “Some what?” he says. “You drink, I smoke grass. If they effect our decisions, that’s nobody’s business, don’t you think?” “I drink,” he says. “You understand?” “You’re saying . . . I don’t want to sell you my yard . . . because I’m a drunk?” he says. “Let’s say we’re wrong. I’m an overly sentimental dad, and you’re a property owner with rights.” “I liked your son,” he says. “He used to play in my yard. He loved my yard. I love my yard.” “Exactly. You’re a guy who loves his yard.” “Okay, Jim,” he says, and clears his throat. I think he’s going to cry. When people cry within a moment of mentioning Tommy, I cry too. Even if they’re drunks who don’t mean it. “Gotta go, Fred.” Bette pushes my errant wheelchair to the couch. She holds me by the belt loops then slides my ass from the cushions into its more unstable seat. It’s hard for her because I used to be a horny, jogging, gym addicted jock. And it’s hard for me to keep my legs completely limp. “What did I miss?” “That we’re fucked,” she says. “Make that raped.” “That’s bad.” “Someone at Nintendo saw the Times piece,” she says. “They’re claiming we stole their design. Dateline is doing some kind of special on Nintendo. It’s their whateverth anniversary. Our thing with Fred is just a wacky side segment. They didn’t even know Tommy died. When I told them, they put me on hold. When they came back, I heard laughing in the background. They think the whole monument angle just makes it wackier.” “So Tommy stole it?”

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“Possibly,” she says. “I’m off to see our lawyer now. And I have a call into Mia.” She grabs her car keys off the pile of news magazines on our coffee table. “Maybe it’s good.” “Meaning what?” she asks. “I mean doesn’t wacky sound like heaven?” She silently mouths what I’ve said. I guess she’s imagining what might have made her say that. It makes her frown and jiggle the car keys. “Bette, look at me.” She looks at my legs. About two months ago, they finally lost their old masculine shape and started filling my pants like water. “Okay?” she says testily, and checks her watch. “Just look at me.” She crosses her arms and glowers at my legs. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” she asks.

I’ve rolled myself into Tommy’s old bedroom and lit a joint. He lived upstairs with us until his seventeenth birthday. Then we let him take over the den. He’d just moved his stuff down here a week before he died. Apart from a desk covered with old bills and blueprints, everything in the room is still his. Most of the walls are decorated with his posters. All but one shows a famous skateboarder doing his or her signature trick. When Tommy was sixteen, he rendered his head onto Tony Hawk’s body with Photoshop. Bette and I blew it up into a poster. He told us we’d embarrassed him. But after he died, we found it displayed here with the others. It’s the one where the skateboarder looks like he can’t believe he’s in a poster. Just because no one really knows how Tommy died doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It’s just hard for them to know and difficult to remember. I don’t mean it’s too painful for me. It’s not like looking at a real kid. That’s why I like to get stoned and look at this poster. Just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t Tommy. We got stoned together. That’s what we did. We rarely saw or heard each other right. He wished he was this mostly made up guy. Or he did when he was stoned once. I didn’t know him well enough to say this isn’t really him. When you’re stoned and you see someone you think you know unbelievably well fly through a windshield, it’s not real. If you stay stoned, it stays unreal. Even if this isn’t really Tommy, at least he didn’t fly head first through a windshield right in front of my eyes.

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O “Jim,” says Bette’s voice. She’s behind me. I guess I fell asleep with a stack of Tommy’s drawings in my lap. A bunch of them slid down my legs and fanned out across the floor. “What.” “Mia’s here,” her voice says. “All right. Give me a second.” “It’s true,” her voice says. “What’s true?” “Tommy copied the monument from a video game,” her voice says. It’s coming from somewhere behind and below me. So I guess she’s picking up the drawings. “Mia lied. She just told me.” “That’s bad.” Bette places the drawings in my lap. She crosses her arms. I cross mine. We both look at the drawing on the top and let its nothingness sink in. It’s not even well drawn.

When I roll into the living room, I see Mia hugging my wife. Or rather Bette’s hugging Mia, and Mia is barely on her feet. She was always Tommy’s girlfriend. She smokes so much grass she got nicknamed the Ghost when she was ten. After Tommy died, she seemed bewildered by me. It’s as though her mind scrambled my image to protect her. Tommy’s friends realized their futures didn’t need his immediate presence. They stopped calling us. I get mass emails from a couple of them. It’s like Mia couldn’t recognize me without a son. But she seems to see me now. I think she’s just this very moment figured out that my wheelchair’s not a chair. “Mia, you’re hurting her.” “Oh, shit,” she says, and throws her arms back in shock. “It’s okay.” Bette smiles at Mia while wincing and rubbing one of her shoulders. “I’ll get ready for bed,” she says to me. “So you two can talk.” “Mr. Baxter,” Mia says. She looks down at my legs and starts bawling. She turns her back, and drops into a crouch. She splays her hands on the floor, and starts wailing and swearing. If I’m not crying now, Tommy really must be dead. I guess his imagination was the last thing to go. My imagination must have been clinging to it. “What?”

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“I’m sorry,” she screeches. “I just wanted Tommy to have a monument.” “Listen, tell me about it.”

I’m watching Mia play one of Tommy’s old video games. Its silliness has completely dried her eyes. Now it’s doing something nice to me. I stood here the afternoon Tommy died. I asked if he wanted to get high, and he did. He was swearing and bouncing around on his ass just like Mia. I don’t mind. I don’t even mind when she wins some puny fight and grins at me. I grin back because I know she needs that. I don’t even mind if I’ve built a monument to a bad, stoned idea that meant almost nothing in the first place. “Shit,” Mia says, and throws down the controller in frustration. “I thought it was on level four. It’s going to take me a minute.” She picks up the controller again. “Is this a good game?” “Not really,” she says. She pushes and pushes a button on the controller. On TV, a goofy looking bear dutifully throws itself against a gate over and over. “There. Okay, watch.” The bear runs through the now open gate. It skids to halt on the edge of a cliff. It leaps off the cliff and barely lands on a floating wooden platform. It jumps from one floating platform to another until it reaches a second cliff. Then it climbs down a ladder into a woodsy area. A swarm of bees attack it. It runs up a rugged hill swatting at the bees. It zigzags through a series of tall, purple stalagmites. It skids to a halt. Directly in front of it is the monument. There’s no doubt about that. The bear stands there looking at the monument until it seems to get bored and starts shuffling its feet. “Can it walk around it?” The bear perks up and walks slowly around the perimeter until it reaches its original location. “Can it go inside?” “No, watch,” Mia says. She makes the bear throw itself against the door over and over. “Tommy thought if he couldn’t unlock it, it had to be important. But it was only a glitch in his game. I told him that a hundred times, but he never believed me.” I grab a few of Tommy’s drawings off the stack on his desk, and compare them to the original. “That’s what he drew.” “Yeah,” she says. ‘Look, I have to tell you something.” “What’s inside it?”

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“Some stupid puzzle,” she says. “Or a stupid maze.” “Did Tommy know that?” “God, no,” she says. “We’d get stoned and he’d sit here drawing the supposed inside of it for hours.” She pulls a spiral notebook off the shelf by Tommy’s bed. It’s been wedged into a crowd of old textbooks. We thought it was full of sketchy lectures. She shuts her eyes and shakes the notebook. “These are his drawings in here. I drew the other ones.” I look at her and the drawings I’m holding and the notebook she’s waving until that vaguely sinks in. “Why?” “Because I was bored,” she says. “No, why did you lie?” “Because if you’d seen what he drew, you never would have built anything,” she says. “But when you thought he did my drawings, you seemed so proud.” “Wait, he had nothing to do with these?” I hold out her ugly drawings and shake them. So I guess I’m upset. She picks up the Gamecube’s controller. She starts pushing buttons. “Look, I’ll save the game now,” she says. “If you open it, you’ll be right at the bottom of that ladder back there, and you can walk over here.” “I can’t believe this.” “It’ll say Tommy’s saved game,” she says.

After she leaves, I look at the cover of the notebook. I make a wish that Mia’s wrong and my son is a Picasso. But I’m not stoned, so the wish doesn’t work. The first thing Tommy wanted to find inside the building was a big skateboard ramp. The next time he drew the ramp, it was covered with gang-style graffiti and shaped like a pot leaf. By the fifth drawing, it looked like the Vegas strip tied into a bow. After that, he just started drawing naked girls. It takes me pages of poorly drawn porn to realize they’re Christina Ricci. Then I roll myself around the house with the notebook in my lap until I find Bette sitting at the table in the kitchen. “How was that?” she says without looking at me. I lay the notebook on the table. She gives it and me a weary look. “Have you looked at this?” She slides the notebook to her side of the table and flips it open. She looks at the first several drawings, and sighs. She turns to a page near the back. “Mia drew these?” she says, and shuts the cover. “No, Mia drew the other ones. These are Tommy’s.”

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Bette looks at me. “Perfect,” she says. “Yeah.” I look away. I hear her grab the notebook. Then I feel it hit my shoulder. I deserve that, but I roll myself away and toward to the door. I protect the only thing I have of Tommy’s that I haven’t already killed or blown out of proportion. That would be me. “Here I was thinking, okay, so he copied it,” her voice says. “But maybe he drew it so many times because he wanted to caress it.” I’m going to cry. I’m almost positive I will. If I do, it’ll be about her. Her and me.

Bette and I haven’t slept together in a year. We blame how tired we feel after getting me upstairs. When Tommy died, we were prescribed cuddling by a specialist. But disabled sex wasn’t the cure. It was after we bought the second bed that I felt my legs happening. I credit smoking grass. It maketh Bette to lie down without her slab of a husband. It maketh me to stand up secretly without her help. It taketh away everything that was important to us and giveth us back a little bit that isn’t.

We’re in bed. Our beds are close enough that we can easily pass a joint back and forth in the dark. She has it at the moment. “So how did it go with the wives?” “They’ve wavering,” her voice says. “That’s bad.” “I guess so,” her voice says. She hands me the joint. “I’m done.” Then I hear her roll over onto her side. “Do you miss Tommy?” I take a hit. “Not as much as I used to,” her voice says. “What about you?” “Horribly.” “I don’t want to think about it,” her voice says. She sounds tired and tired of us and tired of him. Her bed squeaks until she finds a relaxing spot far away from me. I put out the joint. I slide my legs over the edge of the bed, sit up, and rise unsteadily to my feet. “I’m done too.” I played a few video games with my son, so I’m not a total loser. I’ve opened Tommy’s game. I just lit another joint. The bear is waiting for me to get stoned at the foot of the ladder. I can’t remember how Mia got him to the monument. We can see it poking over a hill

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to the right. Between it and us are all sorts of dangers, both quasiliving and organic. I remember the evil bees. I don’t remember the club wielding ferrets. A bear should be able to beat them. They fill him with boredom and impatience, or maybe I do. I wonder what Tommy used to think. He must have spent a lot of time wandering awestruck around this level. I’m just a former real estate agent. I see cheap land, relatively scenic views, and a potential resort. I make the bear run. A swarm of bees dive bomb his head. He swats at them. They disorient us, and he runs into a ferret. That’s my fault. Three ferrets surround him and whack away with their clubs. He’s still busy with the bees. I don’t know which of the buttons makes him fight. So I make him run away until we’re lost. His life is a caption of five tiny honeycombs. My naïveté has reduced them to one strobing shard. When I stop to reorient us, he grabs his knees and wheezes. We can’t see the monument or the ladder. We finally spot a cave. Since he’s a bear and I’m a guy who can’t take care of people when I’m stoned, we make a run for the entrance. The second we’re inside, something whacks him and kills us. I save my progress and quit. It says Jim’s saved game.

This was the first chapter of Dennis Cooper’s novel, God, Jr., published by Grove Street Press.

Some Kind’a Joke   D S   : �:�� 63

Priest, a Rabbi, and a ___________ walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “What is this, some kind’a ___________?” An alien terrorist with an electroshock probe penis; a blaspheming OxyContin junkie who gets his kicks at Rt. 81’s replicated rest stops; a clown carrying an orangutan carrying a smaller clown carrying a purple-assed gibbon; a dramatically reanimated Walt Disney worried that his “Mickey Mouse is frozen”; an ectoplasmic hamburger inhabiting the same time-space continuum as an order of extra-large, tallow-soaked French Fries; a foie-gras obsessed socialite force-fed obscene amounts of fatty goose liver through a choke-length funnel; a gregarious Jimmy Hoffa impersonator in cement shoes made from inflatable plastic; a hen-pecked mother of pearl whose blood brother leaks all over the family tree; an ice-scraping squeegee man who wakes up in the tropics after a sub-arctic bender that approaches absolute zero; Jehovah on a crash diet of all white food in hopes of looking young and YHWH again; a Klu Klux Klansmen who becomes a prominent Senator from West Virginia; a loud shot in the arm administered to the groin with excessive volume; a mimetic copy of Sheherazade’s most magical night, when the narrator reminds the reader that she will die come the end of the writing; a nauseated dwarf-tossing dwarf whose empathic qualities makes all his gigs seem redundant; an Olivetti typewriter whose guts are sacrificed to a ball-peen hammer; a pipe-cleaner robot that looks all fuzzy about the edges and all ashy in the middle; a quixotic news scandal in which Dan Rather and Ted Koppel switch networks for one night only; a rabies vaccination that hurts more than the disease; a Savings and Loan bailout infomercial that a friend saved for you, then loaned to you—all for some dreamy head shots of Charles Keating; a trinity composed of one Trappist monk, one triangle player at the local symphony orchestra, and one Taiwanese fetus ghost all jockeying for a base to build support; an utopic reading of Sir Thomas Moore’s dystopic-fiction classic, Utopia; a violent reenactment of the Woodstock 1969 some 25-years later complete with rapes and fires; a watered-down punchline that’ll never be as good as Uncle Miltie gave ’em; a xenophobic letter who infre-

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quently Xeroxes its neighbors; a yodel in the dark that’ll scare the yeti from your toilet bowl and the tiger from your tank; a zephyr to blow your spitting image back into your face—all walk into a bar . . . . . . and the bartender says, “What is this, some kind’a abecedarium?”

Barful of Women   B A

  : �:��

e’re lying on the bar, here’s big old me and my tropical friend half out of her head, half out of her sari. And I’m thinking, Who’s she? And I’m thinking, Who’s me? And I’m thinking, Where’s Harry? I’m a smackdown brute in the small-town carnies. Rasslefans call me The Marauder, call me Popeye, call me Hamburger Helper. I wear a bad-ass mask that marks me as the enemy and I worry that I’ll scare the kiddies stupid with the hair on my back. Not much money and they’re already letting the other fellas win, the Orange Avengers and Howling Fatmen and anybody with a better butt, which means anybody. So I moonlight bouncing illbred boys out of bars and washing glasses during quiet times, and when the barkeep wants a couple of hours to go tear off a piece of some slinky little mama in basic black, I get to pour drinks and yammer with the clientele. But you can call me Buck, I’m saying to the woman in the daiquiri print, and watching her lip corners uptilt in a languorous grin. Or anything you want, honeypie. She finds a cheroot in a bag big as Rhode Island and mouths it, waiting for a light. All insolent, and I’m hot. No smokin’, I say, like I’m breaking the news, and light her up. The grin reappears and I stands up and cheers. Then I’ll just suck on it, she says, eyes just slits, and adds, Buck. She sounds like a hen in heat and I repress the urge to wring her neck, which bears a tattoo favored by the masterly men of the Merchant Marines. Lost at sea, I build her a stinger and drink half. And say, Oh, shit. And say, Oops, that’s oops. She says, Drink up, Buck, that’s Buck. Bourbon for me. Quelle classe? I ask in a language I know I don’t know. Bar whiskey’ll do, she says in her husky way. And I’ll take it on the bar. Among other moonlit locales. She spits out the cigar and gets a leg up, and I get a palm under her ass and scoot the merchandise up on the bar where it belongs. She lies there all odalisque, chin in hand and hand in what used to be her lap and looks me over and licks her lips. You’re a big bastard, ain’t you? Bar whiskey, I agree, Adam’s apple prominent, and grab a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20 and a tumbler, and pour it spilling over

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and there’s nowhere to put it. The bar’s mainly full of her. So I blow my nose on the cocktail napkin and hand her the glass and she says, Where’s Harry? I ain’t met Harry yet so I shrug and show her my palms. Next thing I know I’m on the bar, don’t ask me where, don’t ask me how, don’t ask me to get down because I’m liking it up here with a handful of her, drinking Mad Dog out her mouth, out her nose, pour a little on her tits and help myself. But I’m wondering now, because they always said in school, He’s an inquisitive boy, He’s got some imagination, that kid, He’s a big bastard, ain’t he?—wondering, Where in hell has Harry gotten off to? I mean, this ain’t like him. But I’m busy with Irene, with Ismelda, with the fur in her panties, so I let it slide this once. Until Imogene pops a little cherry in my mouth, saying, Hey, Buck, honey, you seen Harry anywhere? Damned if I have. So I chew on it thoughtful while I lick her clean. And say, Was he the old boy with the banjo? Tuba, she says, wrapping her legs around my butt, then re-estimates. Or piccolo. Pennywhistle, Buck, now let’s ride, you maraudin’ mojo man. I left the keys in my other pants but I’m wild with possibilities so off we rumble, rocking a bit and the bar’s shakin’ and Yvonne’s bakin’ and I tell her Hooeeey, mama, better grab yourself a treetrunk cause here comes a blow! And she don’t say a thing, woman knows better than to talk with her mouth full, and pretty soon I give a whoop and holler God bless America! and Odette she just says, Glug. So I hand her the Alka-Seltzer and she drops two and I know it’s gonna be a mighty long night with the chemistry set. She’s got her tongue in my mouth but I don’t mind cause I know where it’s been and I’m getting as good as I gave and right then I blow her off and say, Now, hey, wasn’t he playin’ the piano? Was that Harry I seen ringside, the cock o’ the walk? Hey, Michelle? It may have been, you son of a bitch, now do I in any way resemble the number of the information telephone? And now I’m confused, cause the woman’s getting hostile. So I give her a little pat and she says I believe it is or ought to be abundantly clear that I ain’t in any mood for none of your sweetbody pats, Pat. And manages a turnaround on the bar and crosses her arms, whump, and looks pissed, but that leaves me looking at her ass, so it ain’t like I’m bereft. So I say, Well, what about Harry?

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She says, What about him, hotshot? You don’t like girls? Fuck Harry. She says, I mean, literally. She says, Would you kindly stop poking me? I relax to the utmost of my small restraint and whisper her a story, say, Thought you wondered about Harry, Miss Mary. That’s all I’m sayin’, see. Huh, she says, and turns her head and turns mine and sticks her tongue in my ear and tells me, Harry’s your friend, ain’t he? Mine? I holler, hoping she didn’t hear me squeak. It was you brought him up! Me? It’s you does the rasslin’! Yeah, but you’re the little Jujube on the bar! Oh, like you ain’t? I shake my big old head like a dog coming out of a lake. You mean you ain’t lookin’ for Harry? Maureen she slides off the bar and locates her cheroot. I’m lookin’ for a light, she tells me. And I’m lookin’ for an honest man.

Do You Like the Bed?   CM E 68

  : ��:��

The Barnacle   J J   : ��:�� 69

y brother’s girlfriend came home with a barnacle stuck to her right butt cheek. “Rory,” Jill said to me, pointing to her butt. “It happened again.” Jill was my age, 21. My brother Phillip, 32. We all lived together in Phillip’s place across the highway from the ocean. “Again?” I said. “Again,” she said to me. Jill said she’d fallen asleep at the beach and then it was there under her bikini bottom, the barnacle, all misshapen and hard and the size of a fist. She was at the beach getting tan for a bikini contest. She’d won one at a local hot-rod show, which qualified her for the state meet, which was tomorrow. She was taking it all serious, even though everyone kept telling her she wasn’t curvy enough to win. This had happened once before. Right when she’d started going out with Phillip. Right at the beginning, when everything was new and exciting for them. It was all a joke then. Something funny they told people at their beach parties. A barnacle. Can you believe it? Hardy-har. That last time I was still struggling at broadcasting school in Los Angeles. I had just broken up with Corrine and was ready to drop out of school. Corrine was telling me that she didn’t love me, that we weren’t meant to be together. Everyone else was telling me that my voice was too nasally, that I’d never make it in radio. Not even in public radio, my teachers echoed. I had been in my dorm room when I got Phillip’s call about the barnacle. We hardly ever talked on the phone—the only other time he’d called me at school he’d told me that our mother had died. So I was waiting for him to tell me some horrible news, but he only told me about “Jill.” “Other than the barnacle, she’s great,” Phillip said. “I can’t keep my hands off her.” Now though, two times, it was way less funny, maybe even ominous. Maybe there was something about Jill that attracted things from the briny deep. Last time, it was on her calf. She’d forgotten about high tide

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that time too, woke up to water skidding up her legs. But this one on her butt was way bigger. It looked medieval. “Just get the damn salt,” she told me. Even though Jill told Phillip that was what you did for leeches, not barnacles, for some reason it worked, the barnacle slid right off her leg. “I can feel it really attaching itself, thinking I’m its new home.” I went into the pantry and lifted up the salt container, shook it. It was empty. “We’re out,” I yelled back to her. “Fucking great,” Jill yelled back. “We used it for food,” I yelled. “Not getting sea creatures unstuck from people’s butts.”

E We lived in a tiny house across the highway from the ocean. You could yell anywhere in there and be heard from anywhere else. And that is what Jill and I usually did. In different rooms, yelling through the walls—back and forth at each other. Jill and I battled and sometimes things escalated. Once she stuck a fork into my shoulder. I still had the scar—the three little marks that looked like some messed-up vampire had bitten me. The reasons I didn’t like Jill were numerous, but the worst thing Jill had done was to look like Corrine. I’ll admit that ultimately they didn’t look all that much alike, but sometimes looking at her lounging on the couch, her blond hair in braids, freckles lightly dotting her cheeks, it dug up all the bad feelings that remained unresolved between Corrine and me. The only way I knew how to deal with these feelings was to toss some ill will her way. Usually Phillip let the jawing between Jill and I play out, like it was a right of passage that we needed to work through to become a family. When it escalated into something more, when we stood up and starting moving at each other, he planted himself right in between us, his arms extended and unmovable, his hands ready for action. “Settle the fuck down,” he’d tell both of us. My brother towered over both of us. He’d played defensive tackle at San Diego State, had a weight room set up in the garage to stay ripped. There had been a tryout a few years back for some arena league, then one overseas, but he was too slow. “Let’s take a walk,” he’d say to Jill and I. “Calm ourselves down.” Then he’d lead us down the dirt path to the ocean. The path

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wasn’t anything really, just a trail that surfers had worn down over time. A rut on an incline with some sagebrush to grab onto so you didn’t fall. It was steep, but it took you straight to the beach. “This can work,” he offered. “I like both of you, so you can like each other.” Phillip would hold Jill’s hand as we went down there. He always treated her old-fashioned and gentle, opened car doors and shit for her even when it was inconvenient and silly. “She’s my lady,” he’d told me. “I treat her as such.” Once we got down to the ocean, Phillip would wax philosophical. Lately, he had been watching a lot of documentaries about evolutionary sea life on the Discovery Channel. He’d just read a biography on Jacques Cousteau. “Shit crawled out of there,” he’d tell us as he pointed at the grey ocean water. “Shit that became you and me.” Here’s what I wanted to tell Phillip right now as I looked at the barnacle on Jill’s butt: “Shit’s crawling out of there again, bro. Shit that attached itself to your girlfriend’s butt.”

m Now I was telling Jill, “I have a crowbar in my car. Just a couple pulls and you’d be back to normal.” She was lying on her stomach on the couch, her face buried in throw pillows. She reared up into that yoga pose, legs on the ground, head arching to the ceiling. She was flexible enough for it, she was always doing these video tapes in front of the TV, throwing her leg behind her head or some such nonsense. Flexibility is one of the key components to longevity,” she kept telling me. “Not stretching makes me not hurt,” I told her. All this stuff she did was for that bikini contest—the videos, running the beach every morning, getting her nails done at the mall, reading all those women’s magazines—prep for this singular moment when she shimmied down the runway and shook her hips. “I have to be ready,” she told me. “People only have a second to decide if they are going to woo-hoo.” It was pretty much the same with radio. People only had a second to decide whether or not they liked your voice. If they didn’t, if they thought you were annoying, if they thought you talked too much, they switched the station. The consensus was that when people

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heard me talking to them on the radio, they would reach for their dials. “I can wait,” she told me now. “Just pick up some salt when you get Scratch and Dent.” That was her pet name for Phillip. Scratch and Dent. Like I said, he was older.

k I got dressed. Drove downtown to pick up Phillip. He worked as a phlebotomist at this blood bank—had a career as a phlebotomist—he emphasized. He’d taken the job after he quit playing football. “I needed a life skill,” he told me. “Not a pipe dream.” As I drove, the sun was setting, cutting the smog into this wicked spectrum, reds and oranges and burnt umbers, all fighting to backlight the San Diego skyline. Lately, Phillip was bugging me about my future. Both of our parents had been dead for a few years and he took it upon himself to try guiding me along a career path. I thought that I had been on a good path, with Corrine, with the broadcasting school, but now everything was derailed. “You can put up with a lot of no’s if you love something,” he told me. “That’s the messed up thing. If you love something, you can sit there and hope forever.” I knew what he was saying, but I was wired in the exact opposite way. Once someone told me no, once someone got in my grill and said I didn’t have what it took, I backed the hell off. Right away, no problem. I’d gotten way too sick of hearing the word no. Phillip was waiting outside the clinic when I pulled up. He was still dressed in his light blue scrubs. He hopped in the truck and started talking a mile a minute. I was trying to tell him about Jill and the barnacle, but he wouldn’t let me get in a word. “You should have seen this lady today,” he said. He had these stories, you know? He was so much older than both Jill and I and he told us things about the world no way we’d have seen otherwise. Maybe it was perspective, maybe experience, maybe both, but I looked at him for what was going to happen to me down the line, how I was going to age, a clue. We didn’t look anything alike, him and I, so could I really do that? “I couldn’t find a decent vein on her whole body,” he said. He

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leaned over near me. I caught a whiff of his breath. He’d been drinking. “Not one.” When I’d quit school, he’d told me to come live with him. Maybe out of pity or some familial duty. I didn’t care now—I liked living with him, didn’t want to move out of his place, live somewhere else alone when he and Jill got married. “Then, I hit the mother lode,” he said. “She shot out blood like a stuck pig. All over the exam room walls. Totally fucked up.” Usually, my brother wasn’t an asshole, he worried about what kind of job he did with his “clients,” which is what he called them. Like he was selling them something valuable, not poking them in the arm and watching their blood fill up a plastic bag. “Are you drunk?” I asked him. “No way,” he said. “Never.” He waited a few seconds. “Wasted,” he said.

C I drove off toward home. Traffic was bad, we got stuck on the 805, sat there for five minutes without moving an inch. My brother’s eyelids were dipping. He kept on falling close to asleep, then shaking himself awake. I wasn’t going to ask him what was going on. I’d let him tell me when he was ready. “I got canned,” my brother said, breaking his silence. “Staffing cuts. I’ve been at the bar since noon.” He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a bottle of beer. He spun the top off, flicked the cap out the window. “I thought that I was going to do that job for a long time,” he said. I looked over at my brother in the passenger seat, hunched over, his arms wrapped around his legs, chin resting on his knees. He was smushed together into this tiny package. “Screw them,” I said. “You are way too good for their asses.” I thought this was a particularly positive thing to say, something that told my brother I was on his side, but he didn’t take it that way. He waved me off. “Don’t even start with me right now,” he said. Traffic started moving again. We drove slowly for about a minute and then stopped again. It was going to take forever to get anywhere near home. “Jill’s got another barnacle on her ass,” I said.

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He sat there a minute, let it wash over him. He had talked to me a lot lately about marrying her. He’d been saving up for a ring. “Christ,” he said. “Again?”

I We got home and Jill was lying face down on the couch. There was a pile of puke next to her on the floor. The lights in the room were out, the sun was setting. The pile seemed to be glowing. “I’m not going to Urgent Care,” she said. “No way. I don’t want to explain this. I’ll get put in that book of urban legends—the mouse up the guy’s ass, the vacuum cleaner stuck on the guy’s penis. No way I’m going to be known as the girl with the barnacle on her butt. “ Phillip went over and kissed her on the forehead. He slid her bikini out of the way and took a look at the barnacle. All of his anger about losing his job seemed to have lifted now and I could tell that he was concerned about Jill’s welfare. “Big one,” he said. He took the container of salt out of the grocery store bag and opened it. He moved Jill’s bikini out of the way, poured a big pile of salt there. The rest of what he had in the container he sprinkled on the puke on the floor. “Now, we wait,” he told us. We set the timer on the microwave for ten minutes. We sat and stared at the barnacle. The thing didn’t budge. Not a millimeter. The salt wasn’t doing anything to this one. I picked up an In Shape magazine off the coffee table, started paging through it. “A fighter,” Phillip said. The timer beeped, so Phillip walked over, brushed the salt away and tried to pull the barnacle off with his hands. All he ended up doing was lifting Jill off the couch by her butt. “Rory,” Jill said to me. “Get the crowbar.” I ran out to my truck. The crowbar was sitting in the truck’s bed and was pretty cold. I tried to warm the metal in my hands, on the way back into the house, then handed it to Phillip. “Don’t fuck up my skin,” Jill said to him. “Be delicate.” Phillip put the crowbar to her skin, tried to slide it under the barnacle. Jill was trying to look at the whole process. She had contorted her body around and was watching Phillip work the crowbar, trying to get some leverage. “Sit still,” he told her.

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It didn’t look like anything was happening at first, but a few seconds later, Phillip got underneath the barnacle and it spun loose. There was this high pitched sucking sound right before it let go—like the last of some water going down a tub. There was a ton of goo, an absolute mess of grey sludge left on Jill’s butt. Also, there was a big mark, raised and purple. She’d arched her back now, twisted herself back into a pretzel to get a better look. “Shit,” she said. “That’s not coming off before tomorrow. No way.” Phillip picked the barnacle off the ground and handed it to me. Immediately, it tried to attach itself to my hand. “Get rid of it,” he said. I walked outside. At first, I was going to throw it on the road, let some car run over it. Then I heard Jill yelling out the door at me. “Wound the fucker. Then throw it back in the ocean. Let it tell its friends about what happens when you fuck with us. Make it an example.” “Okay,” I said. So I carried the barnacle across the highway and down the path to the beach. I started running near the bottom of the path and started shedding my clothes piece by piece until I was naked. I ran out into the ocean. I dove in and started swimming out into the waves, past the surf. I swam until my arms burned, until everything around me was dark and the lights from the houses above me were blips in the night. All I could hear was the ocean, the waves moving around me. I dropped the barnacle into the murky water. “See you,” I said. I sat there in the ocean treading water for a while until I gathered enough strength to make it back. When I got to shore, I saw Phillip was waiting for me. He’d gathered all my clothes up and brought a blanket. I was freezing and wrapped myself in it and we walked slowly back up to the house. “I am sorry about before,” he said. “I am back to myself again. Thanks for listening to me bitch.” “No problem,” I told him.

m All that night, my brother put moisturizer on Jill’s butt. Every moisturizer we had in the house—burn cremes, facial masks, wrinkle removers—all night spreading stuff on her butt. Massaging it into Jill’s

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skin. Hoping that mark would disappear. When I went to bed, the mark was so purple and raised I knew it wouldn’t go away. No way Jill was going even have a chance to win the bikini contest with that thing on her ass. I slept well. I was tired from all the swimming. I woke up in the morning and went out to the living room to check on the progress. Phillip was still rubbing. Jill was asleep. “I’ve been up all night,” he said. “Somehow she slept through all of it.” His hand was still covering up the spot, but then he lifted it up. “Look,” he said. The mark had nearly disappeared. All that remained was a faint brown circle. It looked like a birthmark, one that over time might just fade away.

We Like It Here   D G   : ��:�� 77

he sorting hall was said to be a special department where people with no useful function were sent. No one knew if it really existed. One lunchtime he scoured Industry House, from the rooftop to the basement, looking for it. He saw suited executives nibbling biscuits, girls tapping at computers, men at drawing boards, and, in a room marked training, a group building a structure with toilet-roll holders. But there was no trace of the sorting hall. Back at his desk they had already brought the afternoon’s bins. He looked forward to examining the contents as there was always something exciting. He began to classify, measure and catalogue. A tissue, which he placed in a twizzle bag and labelled. A crumpled A4 sheet to be smoothed out and placed in a fi le. A crisp packet. He enjoyed his job. He would leave Industry House altogether if anything ever changed.

Vanishing Acts   S G

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an, man, man,” Galile in the bedroom tells me to, “Shit or get off the pot.” I have the door open so I can watch Dad in silk pajamas, his head propped up on three flat pillows, cheeks caved and spiked with whiskers he would not have tolerated before. Dad thinks I can’t see him but I do. “I know you’re still there,” I call from the toilet. Dad’s skin is the color of parmesan cheese. His friend, Galile, is large and dark. He helps me whenever dad decides to hide beneath the bed. “Just pretend I’m not here,” Dad laughs, implying we won’t be able to get him out. But if we take too long he’ll slap at our feet with his fists and want to know, “What’s the problem up there?” I buckle my pants, wash my hands, come back into the bedroom where Dad lights a cigarette, though he hasn’t smoked in years. Galile’s left, unable to wait around anymore; I watched him through the bathroom window walk outside and relieve himself on dad’s roses, aiming his stream toward the wild vine of thorn. “MacLorne Park,” Dad says and points a bony finger. I answer, “The first time you tossed a frisbee with me.” “Red Diskcraft, 175g Ultrastar.” Dad knows his stuff, has smoke in his lungs, tells me to, “Go on.” I describe all I recall. “Peddlemarks,” he says. “The restaurant you took me to the afternoon I left for college.” “John Garfield.” “Your favorite actor.” “September of ‘87.” “We drove down together for Barb’s wedding.” “Got into it pretty good.” “You brought up Nixon.” “History will show,” Dad coughs. The pills and water cover the nightstand beside his bed. Dad leans over and drops his cigarette on the floor. When I go around to crush it out, he crawls off the other side, shuffles as best he can to the closet and closes the door. “Pretend I’m not here,” he says. “I can’t do that.”

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“Just try.” “Alright,” I stand there and wait to see what will happen. “Summer of ‘99,” he says. “I thought you wanted me to pretend.” “Can you?” “No.” “Ha!” I go to the closet and open the door. Dad’s wearing one of mom’s old hats. “Remember?” he asks. “I didn’t know you still had that.” “Did you think I gave it away?” “I just didn’t know.” “It’s all here if you care to look.” I take a step closer, lift the hat carefully from Dad’s head and put it back on the shelf. “Let me help you,” I say. “If you don’t mind,” his head rolls on his neck, his frame thin as pipe cleaner sticks. “Look both ways,” he says. “When crossing the street.” “Alex Pierceal.” “You introduced us, got him to hire me.” “As an intern.” “All the same.” “You did the rest.” Dad comes out from the closet, lets me help him back into bed. “I should pee first,” he says, and I take him to the bathroom. “One for the road,” he chuckles softly and closes the door. “It doesn’t hurt,” he tells me. “Not in the way you think.” “I don’t know what to think.” “Pretend I’m not here,” he says again. “Can you see the roses outside?” I want to distract us. “I’m sitting,” Dad answers, “like a girl.” “Look out the window. Galile pissed all over them.” “It’s okay.” Dad doesn’t seem surprised. “You remember,” he says, and I wait for him to continue. Several seconds elapse. I call in, “Dad?” and he replies, “Well, do you?” I open the door and he’s standing naked in front of me. Before, seeing him this way was unfathomable, but it’s unavoidable now. The shunt where the chemo went in is still in his chest, a porthole looking like a hollow key to a strange wind instrument. “Did you have an accident?” I ask. “St. Mercy’s of the Valley.” “When I broke my wrist.” “Falling from your bike.”

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“You took me to the hospital in your barbecue apron.” “Lost my chef’s hat in the wind,” he slips slowly past me, the back of his legs, his arms and butt sagging like fleshy sacks of water halfway drained. He stands a moment at the side of the bed, feeling his feet on the floor, the force of gravity against him. “Alright then,” he says, and lies down, pulling the sheet up to his waist. “Remember,” he tells me, and slips one of the pillows from behind his head and hands it to me. In my hands the pillow’s weight is too much. “It’s as it’s supposed to be,” Dad says. I feel like if I let go of the pillow it will crash through the floor. I want to quit this game, but dad is smiling and telling me to, “Just pretend.” I think again of MacLorne Park, Dad with the frisbee and how hard I tried to learn. My throws were erratic, hooking away from him, often waffling out of control and landing in the woods. “Thumb up. Hand straight. Your point of release is important,” Dad was patient with me. He did his best to make me laugh and waited as I chased down all of my bad tosses. Once the frisbee went deep into the woods and I couldn’t find it, and for a few frightening moments I thought I was lost. I remember calling out, “Dad? Dad?” and how he answered, “I’m here, David. I’m here.”

Dangeresque   D W

  : �:�� 81

rs. White at the Red Shop showed me the beady-eyed garment, but I can’t pay for it. I’m broke! I already own a gold ring and a gold-filled wristwatch and I am very uncomfortable with these. My eyes sweep the garment and its charms. I am tempted to say this is how love works, burying everyone in the same style. Through a fault of my own I set off as if I’m on a horse and just point and go to the next village. This village is where flowers are painted on the sides of my house—big red dots, big yellow balls. At home, stuck over a clock’s pretty face, is a note from my husband to whom I do not show affection. With a swallow of tap water, I take a geltab. By this time I had not yet apologized for my actions. Last night my husband told me to get up out of the bed and to go into another room. My husband’s a kind man, a clever man, a patient man, an honest man, a hard-working man. Many people have the notion we live in an age where more people who behave just like he does lurk. See, I may have a childlike attitude, but a woman I once read about attempted a brand new direction with a straight face.

^6^6^

how y play G)))))))))g Round 1. Using only 26 letters of an alphabet, players compete to be the first to write: (a) a novel; (b) a hit song; (c) a constitution. Round 2. Using only 40 years of their lives, players compete to be the first to: (a) fall in love; (b) sell a screenplay to Hollywood; (c) marry into a wealthy family. Round 3. Using only a dictionary, players compete to be the first to: (a) seduce an ex-lover; (b) prove the existence of an afterlife; (c) describe American life to their children.

Barrington Speaks   D.B. W   : �:�� 84

nside the room there is a lake, a regulation lake with waterbugs and a ring of algae scum around its shallows, bigger than the lake outside. But none of us pay attention to it. We all stick to the periphery; that’s where the bar tables are. Who cares about the humidity, the ululating loons and the occasional puddle on the hardwood floors when the bar right next to you has enough 25-year-old Scotch to make you feel like a gold brick shoved up God’s ass, and the bartender is giving it away for nothing? It’s a nice place for a party. I remind myself to say something to the host, something like “Nice place for a party,” or “Good luck next week,” or “Relax, have some fun, leave everything to me,” only I don’t know who he is. I overheard someone talking about his black leather jacket, but every jackass in the house has got one of those. In the lake’s murky water, the carp are picking off the waterbugs one by one. Then Jan floats over on an oyster shell the size of a Volkswagen chassis (or is it a clam shell?), and at the sight of her resplendent nakedness, all the simps who insisted earlier that “she” was a “he” in drag because of her short blond hair, they’ve all got their feet in their mouths like Jewish yoga moms. She’s here with me, of course. I shout, “Seen it!” in response to the shell routine, and some sycophant tries to follow suit, but he’s got his foot in his mouth and no one can make him out. She floats over and drains my drink before her second foot hits solid ground. I tell her she’s lucky this isn’t a cash bar. In answer to my question about where she’s been all this time, she mumbles something about the bathroom, pointing through the cottony lake mist. I ask her why she took off the expensive dress I bought her (for this very occasion); she tells me it was that kind of bathroom. Then she tries to smack me, just a playful smack, but her nails are sharp as steak knives, and I didn’t master Brazilian jujitsu for nothing. There are shouts and murmurs about domestic violence, but Jan and I know when rough fun is just rough fun, and besides, we don’t even live together.

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Someone—I think he’s the someone who directs those soap ads, the ones that make you itch like mosquito bites, you know the ones— asks Jan if she stole the blue of her eyes from the Baltic. I ignore his blond hair for long enough to call him a dirty Spaniard, and threaten his black leather jacket until he heads for the bar on a distant shore, at which point Jan and I become the center of a spinning radius of silence. Fine, if that’s how they want it. I pretend to be Indian, telling no one. Jan whispers something to me, something sweet—in Swedish, not Hindi, so I pretend I don’t understand. A punk band that was playing a sold-out show at the arena in the apartment next door floats down to our shore on a 30-foot party boat. Rumor is their roadies agreed to portage the thing across the hallway if the band cancelled tomorrow’s performance and gave them a night off. Their equipment is all set up on deck, and they treat us to a little after-hours set, which has Jan jumping and jiggling with glee, because they have been her all-time favorite for two weeks running. I can do without them and their ‘getting back to your roots’ shit, because they’re all Chinese, and their roots are in Chinese opera, and I can’t tell whether they’re doing this stuff right or wrong. Right now, I feel like a caged lab rat being force-fed tainted Jarlsberg. Honestly, I can’t even imagine how that would feel, but it seems like the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to say. Jan’s tightbodied bouncing makes all the men within eyeshot as happy as she is, and some huge, tubby slab wearing guess-what actually steps into her personal space and offers her representation. He starts talking about her future as if I weren’t standing five feet away, which is a big mistake on his part, because any mention of the future sets me off like a cattle prod to a bull’s balls. I go shithouse—it’s a kink in the wiring, I can’t be held responsible. Two jujitsu seconds later, he and his black leather jacket are airborne, splashing down in the center of the lake. He hits the water hard, wrecking the lake’s equilibrium. Then a vortex begins to form where he’s hit, a huge spinning funnel spreading right to the lakeshore. Vagaries of fluid dynamics. Before I can even get bored and go for another drink, the whirlpool sucks the fat guy and the Chinese punks and scores of blameless carp into oblivion before closing on a warbling scream. The terror of an unlucky vocalist staring into the watery eye of doom … or just part of the performance? No one is left to ask.

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Jan is sorry to see the band go, but she knows about my problem with the future. The whole situation was just one of those things that happens when the things that led to it are provoked by other things before them, and thus falls into the category of no-fault phenomena. I decide it’s time for Jan and I to go home and do something dirty. Not because of her nakedness—though she does naked well, make no mistake, none of this Carry On As Usual nudist camp bullshit. Jan does naked like a real homewrecker, with plenty of bending over to pick things up. But it’s all I can do to keep her dressed in public, so you can imagine what she’s like behind closed doors, and a guy can get tired of anything. Drownings, however, get me randy. We leave without good-byes. Why bother? We’ll be seeing these people all too soon as it is.

Two Poems   R B   : �:�� 87

Gonzo Noses to trees, seeds are serious business. but to me and my brother, maple keys were trinkets to toss in the air. they would spiral, and we would be less bored. after the helicopters fell back to us, we’d split the heads and paste them upon the tips of our noses. we would lovingly stroke Camilla, our imaginary chicken, and secretly covet our neighbor’s pig. until it came the time to select the thickest blade of grass, to hold lovingly between our thumbs, and blow— thus begetting a fart sound so raucous and full, that even the trees would smile, despite themselves.

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The Ballad Of A Goombah A single furrowed brow, that was not always quite so furrowed, appears to have permanently crinkled his jaw-line. Correct me if I’m wrong, but our hero was not always a snaggletooth. These brave mushroom-people, defectors from Bowser’s army, had attempted a peaceful and pastoral existence before some rogue plumber started to chuck fireballs at them for no discernible reason that my research could ever uncover. Being a mushroom, have they not the inalienable mushroom-right to waddle between pots of snapping plants— which admittedly, sometimes doubled as entrance ways to secret subterranean coin-worlds— without fear of being squashed like whoopee cushions?

Is it any wonder why these serene fungal-folk finally turned evil again? Of course they repatriated to the familiar ranks of the Koopa Troop. For is it not written: Ask not, how being squashed for justice can help you, but ask how being squashed for justice can help make your beloved Mushroom Kingdom safe enough to waddle through again, after dark?

Match the Eastern European Capitals to Their Respective Countries 

  : �:��

Riga

Moldova

Tallinn

Estonia

Vilnius

Slovakia

Sofia

Ukraine

Minsk

Kiev

Lithuania

Belarus

Bratislav

Latvia

Chisinau

Bulgaria

Ballgame 90

  P MD   : ��:��

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^6^6^

how y play G)))))))))g Round 4. Using only 5 senses, players compete to be the first to: (a) smell an emotion; (b) hear someone change their mind; (c) touch their loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personality. Round 5. Using only 4 dimensions, players compete to be the first to: (a) return from an alternate universe; (b) achieve immortality through time-travel therapy; (c) forgive their parents. Round 6. Using only 1 body, a little pharmacology, and a lot of plastic surgery, players compete to be the first to: (a) attach wings and fly; (b) change skin color at will; (c) sabotage the revolt of the sentient computers.

Breakdown of a Scene   B C   : �:��

n this scene little Polly sits on the living room floor. In this scene we have all the answers. We know, for instance, when her aunt Aggie comes bursting out of the kitchen, one gloved hand raised awkwardly to eye level, and shouts, “Where the hell’s that husband?” that he is on Bond Street, stepping down onto the pavement in front of Lea Rutter’s apartment complex. In this scene Lea lies on her bed sheets, body stained purple and orange and red by the scarf that shades her bedside lamp, legs gaping to air the luxuriant black snarl of her pubic hair. Uncle Robert presses his foot onto the curb just as Aggie’s painted lips are forming the “b” in “husband.” It’s hot out, and Lea’s sweat still hangs on his skin like a witch’s sour ward against the shadows of the city. Robert will walk two blocks to Wylie’s for a beer and bad Thai food. Lea will shower and take a taxi to her sister’s kitchen accessory store. We know her sister’s name is Megan, that Megan takes salsa classes on Tuesdays and likes the smell of her own sweat. We know the Rutter sisters share a kind of bestial sexuality, the same sheathed set of animal teeth that disappear in public. We know Megan is dating Brad, that Brad is one quarter Russian, rides a bicycle, has a mole on his lower back. We know that while Robert was rinsing his genitals over the sink in Lea’s bathroom, Brad scraped his mole against a wall, that it has since left a small blood-spot on his shirt, and that he hasn’t noticed. In this scene, one by one, platelets in Brad’s blood work to form a scab over his mole. In this scene Polly can have all the cookies she wants, but she’ll have to get by aunt Aggie first, who has begun cursing and flailing her limbs in the kitchen doorway. The glove on her hand is white latex with a deep brown crust along the index finger, having just been withdrawn from the rectum of her poodle Sarah. Sarah is suffering from a bacterial infection and must have her anal glands milked bi-daily. Aggie is shouting about uncle Robert and shaking her shitty finger at the ceiling. She owns four poodles of varying sizes, red, black, bronze, and white, who rove about the house in a drooling pack, carnivorous tongues dangling in wet defiance of their human grooming. Sarah is the smallest, and, spurred into a fit by Aggie’s shouting, begins to howl from the kitchen. Then the others begin to howl. Then the

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guinea pigs begin to cry. We know aunt Aggie bought guinea pigs after her budgie was killed by a fungus, and that this fungus grew along the side of its head for ten weeks before invading its brain through the left eye socket. We know Aggie thinks she collects animals because Robert has become so distant. We know Robert thinks he started avoiding home when Aggie bought her third dog. In this scene you can become accustomed to the company of quadrupeds, but they’re a limp surrogate for your crumbling marriage. In this scene Aggie might finally lose it for real, but Polly is spared this spectacle by her nanny Maria, who pulls her from the ground and whisks her off to the backyard. Maria’s face is stern in the low sunlight, a puffy woman with dark eyes and creases running at all angles across her neck. She could almost be mistaken for something heartless, something built from clay and animated with purpose, but in this scene we know better. Like an inverted sepulcher she wears her decay openly, yet hides fabulous ornaments somewhere inside. The reddening light has traveled ninety-three million miles to touch on her cheeks. We know this, we know. In this scene Polly looks down at her hands and rolls some dry earth from the yard in her palms. In this scene we are gods in a child’s skin. Her heart beats next to ours, parasite deities resting just below the throat, knowing. We can know Maria too, brushing an ant from the child’s shoulder, and Robert, and Aggie, and Lea. We can know Megan and Brad. In this scene we can hold them, invade their cells and know from the inside. In this scene we can tower above them, dark watchers on the fall weather. In a blink they have withered and died. In a blink they have leapt backwards from urns and graves, thrown on the taught fat of youth and relived their first baths, kisses, movies, masturbations. In this scene we know. But when the scene ends, there is perhaps a quiet moment, a breath of retention before the image curls and fades, and then it’s gone.

A Sampling of Lines from “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” If T.S. Eliot Had Been Mentored by the Three Stooges instead of Ezra Pound   L G

  : ��:��

Let us go then, youse and I . . . Do I dare Distoib the universe? In the room the women come and go, Talking of Curly, Larry, Moe . . . I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . . You knucklehead! That’s not coffee—it’s gun powder! And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk! The yellow fog . . . Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. Zzzzz—mimimimimi—zzzzz—mimimimimi . . . We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us— whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop! —and we drown.

Eastwood   J R   : �:�� 96

an is here. I’m so sick of Dan. About six months ago Dan became a performance artist. It happened on a Halloween night when Dan, Susie and I went to a party in Silverlake. Dan went as a mechanized simulation of an Elvis Presley impersonator. Elvisbot, he called it. Every hour or so he broke into “Suspicious Minds.” Dan was a hit. Susie was a piece of sushi. I went as The Man With No Name. I have to admit, Elvisbot was pretty cool, and Dan never came out of character, not even when I told him how much I was enjoying sleeping with his girlfriend. Dan is in my living room wearing high-water khaki slacks and a faded pocket t-shirt. He’s been wearing the same clothes since high school. His blue eyes burn with an intensity I find exasperating, because I know it means he’s going to stay until he gets whatever it is he has to tell me off his chest. He’s all geekedup about his latest project. It’s pretty much all he talks about these days, and I’m sick of it. “Dude,” he says, “check this out.” Dan dresses like a computer programmer but talks like a surfer. He closes his eyes and proceeds to have a fit. It is a pretend fit, but a fit is a fit. He appears to be slashing his body with a sharp instrument that isn’t there. He pretends to scream, but no noise comes out. He looks ridiculous. “So?” “I’d call it Man Standing In The Shallows, Ripping Leeches From His Skin.” “That’s awesome! I was going for Man Wakes From Dream Of Cutting Himself With A Kitchen Knife And Finds Band-Aids All Over His Body, Which He Proceeds To Rip Off, but leeches is way better. I’m going to work on that some more. Thanks, dude.” “No problem.” Dan leaves. I go to the bedroom and open the closet door. Susie is sitting in the corner eating salted almonds from a can. “Is he gone?” “Yeah.” “Is he coming back?” “I don’t think so. He’s working on a new project.” Susie thinks this over, munching on an almond. She puts the

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plastic lid on the can and sticks it on a shelf next to her checkbook. Susie spends a lot of time worrying about her finances, which are nonexistent. “He might come back,” she says. “You know how much your approval means to him.” “I guess.” “I’m going to stay for a while longer.” There’s an awkward silence that feels intentionally inserted. “If you don’t mind.” “Of course not,” I say, because this is a game that two can play. “Do you want to watch a movie later?” “I don’t think so. Will you shut the door on your way out?” I don’t know why Dan annoys me so much lately. Maybe it’s because I’ll say something like, “You’re really starting to annoy me, Dan. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?” And he’ll come back with, “Did you know Rosebud was William Randolph Hearst’s nickname for his mistress’s vagina?” Or: “Isn’t it interesting that The Trial was filmed in the train station that later became the Musée d’Orsay?” It’s bad enough he doesn’t bother to ask me if I give a shit about Orson Welles, he just dumps his useless trivia on me. Worst of all, we both know the Musée d’Orsay is an art museum on the banks of the Seine in the middle of Paris that houses Western art dating from 1848 to 1914, and that neither one of us has a chance in hot hell of ever seeing it. Then there’s this: he stole my laugh. This was back before he became an artist. Maybe it was one of his first projects. I don’t know, but I told him to give it back and he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. So I stole his girlfriend. Dan pretty much forced her on me. Not in a kinky way or anything, he just lost interest in her as he became absorbed with his projects, and I started sleeping with Susie without thinking about what I was getting into. Now I’m no longer sure who’s getting the sour end of the deal. Susie and I hardly ever have sex anymore, which bothers me more than I let on. Her moods are indecipherable. I’d like to ask Dan how to get her out of my closet, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have a clue. Halfway through For A Few Dollars More, Dan comes over. I hit pause, hoping he’ll get the picture and keep it quick, but Dan never gets the picture. “Dude, I’ve refined Man In The Shallows. Want to see it?” I don’t answer. I know he’ll show me anyway. Dan has another

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pseudo-fit, which I find sad and depressing. Dan’s not a bad person. He doesn’t deceive people or hurt anyone, but his earnestness makes him an easy target, and for some reason I always seem to be the one looking down the barrel, putting him in the crosshairs. “Why aren’t you saying anything?” “I’m doing my own project,” I say. “It’s called Inscrutable Cynic Cherishes Silence.” “That’s not funny.” “It’s not supposed to be. It’s a Zen thing.” “Zen from a guy who watches spaghetti westerns? I’d say you’re conflicted.” I stare at the frozen screen. Clint Eastwood in an Italian flick financed by Germans, riding an Arab horse across a Spanish desert, pretending it’s the American West. This makes sense to me; Dan does not. He slams the door on his way out. I sense Susie standing in the doorway behind me. “Why do you hate him?” she asks. “I don’t hate him,” I sigh. “What makes you think that?” But Susie’s not behind me anymore. She’s retreated to the cloister of my closet. My phone rings. “Mr. Fontainebleau?” I should explain that my name is not Fontainebleau. Fontainebleau is Dan’s name for me. He gave it to me after we watched a caper flick set in Miami. All the bad guys stayed at the Hotel Fontainebleau. He said that was a good name for me: a safe house for evildoers. Hearing a stranger use it tells me something terrible has happened. “Yes, what is it?” “There’s been an accident,” the voice says. Dan has my number programmed into his cell phone as “A. Fontainebleau.” I never asked what the “A” stood for, but now I’d like to know. I’m the only person he ever calls, the only number stored in his phone. He’d call Susie, I suppose, but Susie’s never home. “What kind of an accident?” “A car accident.” “How is he?” “He’s laughing, but it’s not appropriate to his situation.” “Is he going to make it?” I ask, but the voice on the other end of the line won’t tell me. He gives me the address instead. It’s only a block away. I thank the man and end the call. I go to the closet and tell Susie the news. She looks up at me and

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blinks a few times. Susie doesn’t wear much make-up, and although she’s not as hot as she used to be, I understand that her appearance is a direct reflection of the choices she has made, good and bad but mostly bad, and this has something to do with me. But right now she mostly looks confused. “Are you coming?” “Oh,” she says, “you mean now?” Dan is laid out on the sidewalk. He looks pretty bad, but I can’t help but wonder if this is another one of his elaborate projects. There is a jacket wadded up under his head. I was with him when he bought it at the thrift store but now it’s soaked with blood. Dan’s breathing is uneven. It comes in sharp gasps, like an espresso machine. His cheeks are flecked with foam. “Ambulance is on the way,” the man with Dan’s phone says. “Jesus.” “Tell me about it.” Susie and I kneel at Dan’s side. Susie takes one hand. I take the other. Dan smiles, happy to see us. “What’s going on here?” I ask. “Rabid Mime Mowed Down by Motorcar.” “Dan, this is no time for jokes.” “Elvisbot has left the building.” The smile on his face gets bigger and bigger. I wipe his mouth with the cuff of my shirtsleeve. Susie starts to cry. “Look.” Dan lifts up his t-shirt. He’s taped a piece of string to his stomach. At the end of the string is a metal ring. “Pull it.” “Dan—” “No, it’s okay. Pull it.” Susie nods, but there’s no way she’s going to pull the string. I have to do it. I hook my finger around the ring. It is warm to the touch, like a coin held in the hand too long. “Are you ready?” Dan nods like he never thought I’d ask. I pull the string and he laughs my laugh. Perfect and mechanical. I get it: he’s giving me my laughter back. His smile is bigger than ever. Susie throws her arms around Dan’s thin shoulders and heaves huge silent sobs. Dan’s hands flutter to his stomach and become still. I pull the ring again, but nothing happens. My best friend is broken.

One Poem   C. A R   : ��:�� 100

CURIOUS OBSERVATION #3 Peering out the window as the bus pulls into the station there’s a man talking to himself using only sign language.

Solo Act   A R

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he classified ad that Kenny ran, which was how we all met, mentioned bands like Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, the Sex Pistols, the Replacements, Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, and Parliament, plus a few others I’d never heard of. We refused to label ourselves, but if you had to lay a reductive classification thing on us you could do a lot worse than heavy post-punk pop industrial garage funk. Our foundation: juxtaposition and rage. It was the thick of summer, and the Arizona sun was like kryptonite, making everyone weaker, stupider. Our band’s motivation became an issue. We kept at it, though, working nights at our respective slave-wage service-industry jobs in and around Scottsdale—delivering pizzas, washing dishes, enduring the graveyard shift at 24/7 Video—while during the day we’d sweat through practice, playing three-chord songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Wild Thing” over and over. The band didn’t have a name, but we weren’t stressed. There wasn’t any hurry. We were all in our early twenties, sliding because we could.

l We practiced at Doug’s apartment complex: Desert Mist Plaza, which everyone called Desert Piss, and rightfully so, since it was the type of place where nobody wanted to live but there really wasn’t much choice. The bogus little creek running through the main courtyard had dried up long ago, the pool brimmed with sludge and empties (one morning a motorcycle wound up there, and it was weeks before someone removed it), and herds of ratty A.D.D. kids roamed around like untamed wild beasts— I’d never been so frightened of children. The adults weren’t much better; the constant yelling, and how they’d throw heavy objects—crock pots, barbecues, George Foreman grills—off their balconies. TVs blared constantly. We sat holding court around the pool after we’d all gotten off work one late night/early morning, shirts off, pounding our MGDs, wondering, vaguely, what “cold-filtered” meant anyway and debating, even more vaguely, which Darren was better on Bewitched. Then Doug swallowed a sizable gulp of hops and barley, burped, and said, “Hey, check out the naked chick on the bike.”

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And sure enough, we turned to behold a naked girl navigating her way (drunkenly, or druggily, or both) through Desert Piss’s network of cracked sidewalks and neglected paths on an old Schwinn ten-speed. She was pretty hot in an obvious, porn star kind of way, and older, maybe twenty-eight. She was also pretty royally screwed up. Psycho mom. Incarcerated brother. Broke. In heavy debt. Credit cards maxed. She’d gotten so many DUIs they’d finally taken away her driver’s license. So she had to rely on a bike—a bike, in this eyeball-splitting desert/retirement community heat—for transportation. She had temporarily moved in with her aunt, another lowly Desert Piss resident, to “chill” and “re-evaluate” and “figure shit out.” Because she couldn’t drive she’d been forced to quit one of her parttime jobs: dancing at The Lasso over in Tempe. There were rumors, too—about a kid and some trouble in Albuquerque, among other whisperings. We found all this out later, as the summer stumbled on. She rode past us on the other side of the pool, a streak of flesh and spokes and nipples. Briefly, the aroma of peaches and cream cut against the water’s primordial, unchlorinated stench. Then the brakes let out a scrotum-curling squeak and she halted in front of a Coke machine, inspecting her choices. Suave fucking dudes that we were, we tried to be as subtle as possible about our collective gawking (but how could we not stare?), speculating where the change would come from, knowing that the machine would yield only Diet Sprite no matter which button you pushed. In the moonlight, naked and wet like she’d just exited the shower, she resembled some kind of—I don’t know—goddess, I suppose, a vision from dreams or movies or music videos or the Playboy Channel. At the time none of us had what you’d call girlfriends. “You saw her first,” Alex told Doug, who had just popped open another beer and was rolling the can across his forehead like in a TV commercial. “Yeah, so?” “So go on over and talk to her. Tell her you’re a rock star.” More prodding, more coded masculine encouragement, and Doug eventually lugged over to the Coke machine and the naked girl.

s The very next day she started coming to our practices in the Desert Piss rec room. Lips perpetually glossed. Eyelids forever shadowed

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a sultry, supermodel blue. There was immediate tension. She made suggestions. Wouldn’t Alex’s voice sound better if he wasn’t singing through my bass guitar amplifier? How about an actual guitar solo every now and then instead of just chords? We nodded like idiots. Then we turned up the amps louder, played harder. We—that is, everyone except Doug—did our best to ignore her, which wasn’t easy because of the knit tube tops and spectacularly tan legs, along with the tattoo of a flaming sun that orbited the smooth expanse of her equally spectacular stomach. Doug seemed embarrassed at first, plucking errant notes on his guitar to fill the uncomfortable silences that followed one of her critiques. As he and Clarissa hung out more and more, watching pirated cable and smoking coma-inducing amounts of Clarissa’s aunt’s pot he started to change. It was inevitable—he was a sweet, mellow, mumbling guy who slept until two in the afternoon and never missed an episode of South Park. Now he was worrying over his abs and whether or not his goatee was holding him back professionally, musically. One afternoon Doug showed up at practice late, clean-shaven and without Clarissa or his guitar. We were jamming on a Led Zeppelin (or was it Jethro Tull?) riff. Doug signaled for us to stop. “There’s something I need to say,” he said. “To everyone. All at once. If you got a sec. If now would be okay.” This was weird. Doug was the quiet one. I was, by default, the smart one. We didn’t really have a cute one. Delivering the news like a child who’s been instructed by a parent to apologize for lying or stealing, he said, “I’m not being allowed to fully express myself in the band.” We all looked at him like what the fuck. Doug only knew about five songs straight through and still hadn’t figured out how to tune his guitar. I had to do it for him. “What are you saying, Doug?” “What I’m saying is, is I’m leaving the band. I guess.” He paused. “Sorry,” he added. It was quiet as we absorbed the information: No more rock and roll, which meant the possibility of sex and drugs was greatly diminished. Everything we’d worked not very hard for, gone. “There’s more,” Doug dribbled on, trying to remember whatever Clarissa had scripted for him. “Oh yeah, right. Another thing, another reason why, is we’re talking some pretty major creative differences.” Again it was silent in the rec room that consisted of a ping-pong

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table with no net, a dartboard with no darts. “The bitch is pulling a Yoko,” said Alex finally. “I can’t believe it. A classic fucking Yoko.” “Or like the chick in Spinal Tap,” I offered. “What is it with chicks and fucking up bands,” Kenny philosophized from behind his drum kit. His T-shirt said RANDOM INCIDENT, which I’d always wanted to ask him about but never did—another of the world’s mysteries left unsolved. “Because it must be, like, in their DNA or something.” Alex unstrapped his guitar and leaned it against his amplifier. A hiss of feedback began to build, slowly birthing to life. “There’s an arc we have to go through first, before this kind of shit can happen,” he said. “Rise and fall. Rise and fall. And rise. There’s a fucking arc.” Doug fingered the amoeba-shaped hickey on his neck. “I’m an artist,” he explained. “I need to grow.” “Doug, man, you don’t even own your own amp,” I reminded him. “We just think I’d do better by going solo. I been working on some songs, of my own, you know, some darker, edgier stuff. With lyrics and everything.” With lyrics and everything. How could we argue with that? So just like that we were three, a trio. But with Doug out of the band, we no longer had a place to practice. And with no place to practice, we could no longer be a band.

Q Summer ended. Kenny decided to go to school to become a massage therapist, and Alex moved back home, to one of those mini-sized states back east. I lost track of Doug. As for me, I was thinking about thinking about enrolling for some classes at the junior college. They had a restaurant management program that suddenly seemed worth considering. The week after classes started (I’d missed the deadline; there was always next semester) I ran into Clarissa at a Taco Bell. She pulled up on her trusty ten-speed, looking very high and very sexy as she parked the bike out front and then stood in line next to me. She ordered some Chalupas. “How’s the band?” she asked. “You broke us up. You know, so Doug could be an artist.” Uncharacteristically she was wearing a shirt that covered her

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entire stomach. Still it was easy to imagine the sun tattoo that beckoned behind a thin veil of cotton. “Oh that,” she said. “He listened to me too much. That should have been a clue right there.” “Listened. As in past tense?” “Very past tense. As past tense as past tense can get.” She laughed. It was an ugly laugh, a hurtful laugh, a laugh that reduced Doug down to an inconsequential nub. But damn, she smelled nice. Clarissa informed me that Doug was still a boy, a child, and that she wasn’t interested in boys, in children, and that she had only one more week left and she’d have her license again, no more of this bike shit, no more Desert Piss, no more slumming with the aimless masses. Then she’d be free. She’d get her life back. She’d get back to where she was. She had plans. She’d been reading this great book that said life was like one giant atom, it consisted of Positives, Negatives and Neutrals, and from here on out it was only Positives. It was all mental, a matter of will, what you thought and decided in your head. Then you made it so. That was the trick. The manager at The Lasso, Dalton, he was being pretty cool about everything and was keeping a weekend spot for her, open. As she talked I realized that, for the first time ever, I was staring at Clarissa’s face from up close and not so much focusing on everything below. And there, around the stonily half-shut eyes, you could see where the lines would be, where they were even starting to converge, marking territory, determining who she would be in the years to come. “You learn stuff about yourself though,” she said. “I suppose that’s part of the whole point of it, of punishment. That’s what the asshole Nazi fuck judge said at least. Being deprived. You are being deprived, Miss Riley. And that’s what I was all right. Deprived. You ever been deprived—I mean like really, truly deprived, where you wake up in the morning and you know you can’t do what you want to do?” I watched the Taco Bell guy in the back squirting guacamole into our food with a gun-like device. A family of about like fifty picked up a Fiesta Taco Party Platter to go. The kids went nuts, pawing at the mother and the brightly colored bags of food like baby birds, nothing but pure need. “Not really,” I said. “These past six months or whatever it’s been, it’s been like living without really living, you know,” she said. “Like a ghost. Like one of those Charles Dickinson stories. How about you? Tell me about you.

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You’re kind of cute, you know that? Maybe you already know that. What’s your story?” I thought about it for a while—thought about her naked on her bike, thought about that sun tattoo and what it would feel like against the press of my lips, and how she broke up our band that never even had a name, and how there’s probably a sadness behind everything, Taco Bell, certainly, and yes, the end of another summer, the end of something I wasn’t ready to face yet. I looked at my left hand, my fretting hand, and right then, right at that moment, I believed it was capable of wondrous magic despite all that I’d never be, all that I’d never become. “I’m an artist too,” I lied, but wanting to believe it.

Storied Gaming: Interview with Erik Wolpaw   T Z

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friend of mine said, “Video games have stories?” I balked, full of surprise. “Of course, they have stories. I only play games, anymore, with stories.” Then a synapse went light-bright in my brain, and I went in search of a video-game writer for this issue of Opium. As a long-time video-game journalist and the writer of two video games myself, I searched out the funniest game I could find—since most people say humor and games don’t mix. Enter Erik Wolpaw, a co-writer of Psychonauts, a critically acclaimed 2005 Xbox and PS2 game which is as funny as it is quirky as it is oddball as it is worth discussing.

Opium:: When you tell people you write video games, what’s the reaction? Erik:: Usually, there’s a moment of confusion where they

think I write for gay magazines. Then we clear that up and they’re much less interested in what I do. Opium:: Many of my closest friends—who all know I’ve been involved with video games for years— don’t even know they have stories. Have you run into similar situations? Erik:: I think I’m a lot less well-rounded than you are because

everyone I know plays video games. Actually, my fiancée doesn’t have a real firm grasp on what it is that I do. The only game she ever remembers, for some reason, is Tekken. She wrote a song about Tekken a few years ago. And she asks me if I’m working on Tekken a lot. That kind of makes her sound retarded. She’s not. Opium:: In terms of writing a game, do you approach

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it in the same way as you’d approach writing a film script? Erik:: I’ve never written a film script, but I imagine I’d approach it

the same way—procrastinate until the last possible second. Then procrastinate right through that second. Then get a deadline extension. Then watch TV or sleep through the first extension. Then finally roll up my sleeves, start Word, and write a letter asking for another extension. Eventually, the situation becomes so critical that stress-induced chemicals squirt out of or into my brain that permit me to actually accomplish a little work. It’s kind of like when a kid gets run over and his mother freaks out and is able to lift a bus off of him. It’s the legendary procrastinator’s high. Opium:: In terms of telling stories, and using dialogue, in games, do you ever sit back and say, “Wow, this is the beginning.” What’s your vision of how things are going to move forward? Erik:: I don’t know if I’ve ever said that, exactly. But I agree that

this is just the beginning. Though the beginning seems to be stretching on for a really long time now. We’re already a good thirty years into the evolution of video games. At this point in their history, movies had advanced from novelty loops about trains pulling into stations to Birth of a Nation. I guess I’m wondering, where are all the games about the supremacy of the white race? I’m kidding. Still, though, where is gaming’s Birth of a Nation? Where’s our Battleship Potemkin? Where’s our King Kong? Well, technically there is a King Kong game. But you get my point. Thematically, story-driven games appear to be stuck in the fantasy/ science-fiction ghetto. And I’m not talking good, Robert Sheckley-type fantasy/science fiction either. Just embarrassing stuff, mostly. In terms of the mechanics of storytelling, the current choose-your-own adventure state of the medium is as far as we’re likely to go until autonomous character AI

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advances significantly. I could be wrong about that. Eh, who am I kidding? I’m totally right. Still, things aren’t as bleak as I’m making them sound. Sturgeon’s Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap, and that’s as true for smartypants literary fiction as it is for games. In fact, in an empirical refutation of Sturgeon’s Law, a full one hundred percent of plays suck; so games are at least ten percent better than plays. And you probably have a vague notion that plays are kind of good for you even though you probably have never seen a play or at least have never seen one that you like. I’m not wearing my calculator watch; so without being able to work the math, let’s say ten percent of that good ten percent of games are, in fact, spectacular, groundbreaking, and worthy of your precious time. As much as I wish that games were even farther along than they are, some designers are doing great work. Tim Schafer, for example, is able to transcend the crusty mechanics of his gameplay genre of choice to tell some terrific stories. One of his games, Grim Fandango, is more legitimately funny and original than most of the crap that’s on McSweeney’s. We’ve already reached the point where you can’t consider yourself culturally literate without some knowledge of a few milestone games—the Grand Theft Auto series, for instance. And the percentage of the zeitgeist represented by games is only going to get bigger as the old-people die-off continues. Opium:: Do you think people want stories in their games, or does it come down to the way the stories are told? Erik:: I honestly have no idea. However, that won’t keep me from

answering the question. Even though my job is to think about and write stories for games, I really don’t like too much story in my game. More story equals less gameplay. And that’s bad. When I’m playing a game, I don’t want to have to sit through a bunch of turgid dialog every few minutes.

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Even good dialog usually feels intrusive. It takes some exceptional writing to make me forget that it’s interrupting the entire reason I’m holding a controller—which is to play the game. That said, a few games pull it off. The Grand Theft Auto series does a nice job—especially San Andreas. Anything by the developer, Planet Moon. Katamari Damacy has some nice, crazy cutscenes. The Half Life series features some good work (though it’s made by my current employer, so there’s a massive conflict of interest there). Recently and amazingly, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time has some really terrific writing. It’s a lot funnier and features a lot less painful forced whimsy than the latest George Saunders novella. The bottom line is that the mechanics of integrating story and game are still pretty crappy, but they can be camouflaged by really, really good writing. Opium:: One of my favorite games of all-time is Ico, where the two main characters speak different languages, and neither of them are in English—creating an immediate and distinct barrier between each other and the audience. From there the player has to sort through the story, and apply a bit of emotional context. that’s a pretty dialogue-free game, by design. So I’m wondering if you think storytelling in games is best done through dialogue, or is there a better way? Erik:: Again, I’m the person who should probably know about

this, and yet I have virtually no real clue. But again, I’m more than willing to take a wild, high-school-equivalence-educated guess. I like Ico a lot, though I’d argue Ico is more about atmosphere than story. That said, there’s nothing wrong with atmosphere. When it’s pulled off as well as it is in Ico, you get the illusion that someone just told you a good story, all without compromising the gameplay. So, I’m all for it.

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Opium:: Psychonauts—a game you co-wrote—is a super funny game, but it didn’t really catch on. Why do you think that is? Is it frustrating for you, since people are choosing less-creative, less-interesting games over yours? Or was it just a matter of marketing? Erik:: I worked harder on Psychonauts than on anything I’ve ever

done ever, and I hope I never have to work that hard on anything ever again, and, even still, I put less effort into it than everyone else who worked on it. And it sold like fourteen copies. It got great reviews, though. Unfortunately, you can’t buy anything with reviews. You’d think, well, maybe I could buy that thing that’s only a penny with this great review. But you can’t. I’d like to think that the game failed because of those damn suits in marketing, but who knows? Maybe we wrote a game that only appeals to game reviewers and other fancy peanuts in their fancy pants fancy lads. We honestly weren’t trying to make something that would alienate giant portions of the gameplaying public, and yet we seem to have done just that. Kind of a massive failure on our part. Even though I appreciate all the nice things you’re saying about the game, in the end, the games people do buy are pretty much by definition more interesting than Psychonauts since people are apparently interested enough to buy them. Sometimes, during development, someone at Microsoft (the original publisher) would have a criticism of the game, and someone on our team would complain that MS just didn’t “get it.” That was my first indication that we might have made a terrible mistake. I really, really don’t want to work so hard to make something that people have to “get.” I mean, maybe that’s what happens because when I write, I write things that I think are funny. But, in my heart, I just want to be loved. By everyone and unconditionally. That’s where the money and the fame and the women are. Remember on Newhart how

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the Tom Poston character wrote popular greeting cards even though he hated them? I wish I could do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have the talent or discipline to write things that I don’t find entertaining but that truly vast numbers of other people do. Still, if you’re reading this, you should try Psychonauts because I swear to God I bet you’ll like it or at least not hate it. Opium:: You worked alongside Tim Schafer, who’s renowned for making games off the beaten path. Is he a true visionary in terms of games—a Tim Burton, or Oliver Stone, or Kubrick in the movie sense—or are there those types of equivalent game makers working today? Erik:: Tim’s definitely a world-class humorist. He’s a naturally

funny guy and a really talented writer—the funniest writer working in games today by a long shot, and virtually the only one funny enough to work as a professional funnyman in the world of funny that exists outside of games. He’s much funnier and more personally endearing than Garrison Keillor, for instance. I guess I didn’t set the bar real high there, but I meant that as a compliment. Removing my lips from his ass for a second, though, I wouldn’t exactly call Tim a game-design visionary in the sense that he’s a pioneering thinker when it comes to the mechanics of gameplay. I mean, Tim’s no slouch, and given the quality of his writing talent, it’s amazing that he thinks about game design at all. Those gameplay pioneers do exist, however. Will Wright (The Sims creator), for instance. For me, a visionary game design has more to do with structure than visuals or story or the various other things that are peripheral to the central gameplay mechanic. Opium:: With the heightened production costs of

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games—with the Xbox 360 and PS3 it’s going to cost many millions to produce games—do you foresee more independent game creators coming from their basements, like the way people create indie films? Erik:: I think the Xbox 360, with its XBox Live Arcade service, may

actually usher in the first viable indie scene for consoles. Just a month in, the most talked about and beloved game on the 360 is Geometry Wars, a $9.95 downloadable title written by a tiny team on a limited budget. And Microsoft appears to be actively courting a lot more of these high quality garage games. On the PC side, Valve (the company I work for) has a digital distribution service called Steam that lets small indie developers distribute their product and let them keep a lion’s share of the profits, without having to go through traditional retail channels. I think we’re entering a newly profitable era for small developers since distribution options are really starting to expand. Opium:: What’s your ultimate goal—do you want to be one of the great comic storytellers in gaming history? Erik:: That’d be awesome. I doubt it’s gonna happen, but it sounds

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like something that would involve some kind of cash payout, so I’m all for it. My ultimate, ultimate goal is to be a mailman. I’m serious about that. It’s a job that requires three things I find deeply satisfying—waking up early, maintaining a strict routine, and walking around a lot. It’s also a job with excellent benefits.

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o you hear that?” “No. “ Still in bed on a cold Saturday morning, my wife started asking me about the birds. Though our daughter wasn’t due for two weeks, Amy already had super-sensitive hearing, like a member of the Justice League. “C’mon. You must hear that.” “Hear what?” Amy lifted herself up on her elbows. The blanket fell away from her neck and chest, catching on her formidable stomach. “That.” This is the kind of conversation we’re always having—the kind where the subject of the conversation is my lack of perception. “I don’t hear it—I’m sorry,” I confessed. I thought about kissing her, but the chance passed. “Don’t do that, Dan. Don’t say you’re sorry. Listen. When the baby arrives, you’re going to need bigger ears.” “I’m sorry,” I started to say again. “What should I be hearing?” “We have birds. In the house, it sounds like,” she said. “You really don’t hear it?” I didn’t. At first.

� We spent that last Saturday of January cocooned in the house, listening for Amy’s birds while freezing rain pinged the roof. Amy was fixing up the spare room the way expectant mothers do, painting an old mirror crimson. I watched her work. I thought about my resumes moving through the mail system, on employed men’s desks and how I’d spend my week if Amy went back to work while I waited for the phone to ring. By afternoon, Amy had tracked down the bird sounds like an ornithological Sherlock Holmes, pacing the first floor with her ears on high alert and her belly in massive overhang. An offand-on chirping seemed to be coming from the stovetop of our kitchen.

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“Listen,” she said, as she led me into the room. “We don’t have birds in the oven,” I joked. “In the ventilation hood.” And it was true, the cheep-cheep came from above the range, from the hood that catches the smoke when you’re frying onions or burning pancakes. “C’mon,” Amy said, and she took me by the hand to the back yard. From the grey winter lawn, we turned to find a metal vent—a Rangemaster—screwed to the bricks on the back wall of the house. “Do you see the straw sticking out?” Amy pointed. “Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “It’s the dead of winter. The birds are supposed to have gone south or something. Migration. We’ve got refugees.”

� We’d had birds in the house one time before, also in the winter. There had been a terrible beating in the living room, like someone was playing a snare drum inside our fireplace. Two birds with grey bodies, dark red highlights and long yellow beaks frantically fluttered behind the glass fireplace doors. I guessed they were robins, but Amy said they were too small. We put on our parkas and opened as many doors and windows as we could, then released the birds. They rushed into our home in a panic, making frantic use of our home’s space. Amy and I called out to them, motioned toward a door or window, hoping they, like dogs, had keen senses of smell that would naturally lead them to fresh air. But instead these birds kept probing, like finchy hamsters in a science fair maze, banging into walls—no, no exit there—and bumping against the ceiling—nor there. Amy begged them to stop. I wanted to cry. Finally the smaller bird, the female, I thought, found the front door of our house and rushed out with seeming delight—her flying speed kicking in like afterburners. The more colorful bird—the male—took another three minutes to luck onto the door, and by then his mate seemed to be long gone.

� Our new birds were constantly with us, but invisible—making them inescapable. We said “birds”— plural—but we didn’t really know. For the two weeks before our daughter’s due date, our conversations were limited to two topics: what we should name the baby, and how

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many birds we had. To Amy, there was hardly any question about either topic. We would name the baby “Sarah,” the name of both of our maternal grandmothers. Everyone agreed with Amy, but all I could see was an elderly baby toting a cane and wearing thick glasses, endlessly talking about growing up in Brooklyn in the ‘20s. “When she’s crying at 3 a.m., Dan, it will be clear she is a baby, don’t worry. If you even hear her. Besides, your suggestion is ridiculous.” Ever since Amy’s doctor announced the due date as February 14th, I had been dreaming of naming the baby “Hart.” While arguably a man’s name, it sounded right to me. When Amy and I married, it had been to the lyrics of our favorite song, “My Romance,” written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. They also wrote “My Funny Valentine.” I felt I’d imagined the perfect name—and I was puzzled by everyone agreeing with Amy. As for the birds, Amy was certain we had more than one—a family probably. “Birds don’t nest alone,” Amy said. “If she’s alone, she wouldn’t care enough to save herself.” I wasn’t so sure. The cheeping had sounded like a group on that first Saturday, but as the days passed, I spent a lot of time drinking coffee at the kitchen counter. More and more, it sounded like only one bird. His cries seemed to slow down as the days passed. I turned up the heat in the house, thinking it might help him. I would head back to our bedroom, where Amy was spending more and more time resting, to report in about the bird. “They go south in the winter,” I said, “because their food isn’t as abundant in the cold, right? I think our guy may be starving. Maybe we should feed him?” “Actually,” Amy said, “I’ve read that birds migrate north in the summer to breed. When they head south again, it’s to return home, where birds originally evolved. Can you get me another pillow, please?”

� The closer we got to the 14th, the more comfortable I was with the lack of interview opportunities, and job offers. This was the perfect time to be out of work and home with Amy and the baby. Something was going to come up. I was a software guy; I wouldn’t be out of work long. But there was still an awful lot of waiting. Thinking about the

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bird filled the days as well as anything. I tried putting some bird seed into the ventilation opening in the backyard, but I couldn’t get it to stay. I slid a tablespoon between the slats of the Rangemaster opening, only to see the grain dribble back out in a thin stream. I had the house up to 74 degrees, but Amy—bursting now and eager for Sarah to become her own, separate person—had me turn it down. I made a chart of how often I heard the bird each day. I felt certain he was cheeping less. Taking a cue from the birthing classes that taught us about the time between contractions, I used my watch to calculate the average time between cheeps. It was getting longer. For Amy, however, everything was speeding up. The baby was kicking harder and faster, and Amy’s own feelings of necessity were urgent. There wasn’t much for me to do but pack a hospital bag and stay out of the way, so I did. We got to the hospital an hour or so after dinner on February th 13 —the doctor’s prediction looking right on. As I was doing that evening’s dishes, Amy was timing contractions on the living room couch and I was timing the cheeps of what I now considered “my” bird. When Amy called out, “Time to go!” the bird quieted entirely. I waited to hear him again, but Amy wasn’t in a position to linger. At 4:30 in the morning on Valentine’s Day, Sarah was born. It was all much quieter and longer and more stressful than I thought it would ever be, and the doctor urged I go home to rest. I was told that Amy would be sleeping for a while, and the baby would be fine. “Go ahead,” the doctor said, “take a shower. Nap. Come back at lunch time to visit your beautiful new family. They’ll be fine.” But when I got home, I didn’t feel like a shower, and I couldn’t begin to nap. I bee-lined to the kitchen and stood stock-still, but there was only middle of the night silence. I washed the leftover dinner dishes, running the water at a quiet trickle, my ears cocked the entire time. The bird, I knew, probably slept at night just like people do, but still I lingered, toweling each knife and fork dry, waiting for his call. If I fall asleep, I thought, I’ll miss him. I won’t hear him. Amy’s right. I’ve got to become more sensitive. I made coffee, sat at the counter, and waited for the light to come. “We’re alone in this house together,” I said to him, out loud. I angled my neck to speak into the hood over the stovetop. “Hart,” I said. “Give me a sign.” The silence stretched beyond sunrise.

Steve Martin’s Acting Coach on the Set of The Jerk   M O   : �:��

ere’s what I see happening: you’re under-thinking it. In that last take, when you asked Bernadette Peters out, even though you’re nailing the biker broad, I saw innocence, a dopey baby whose attention was caught by a red-headed rattle with big cow eyes. To be Navin Johnson you’ve got to do the work to get back to that place. Innocence is easy; try ingenuous assholery. You’ve got him prancing around like a retarded sixth-grader. That’s not art, Steve, that’s blowing candy-colored smoke up a chihuahua’s ass. Is that what you want to do? Is that what we’re doing here? Because I thought we were making a comedy, Steve, and the essence—the essence of the essence—of a total jackoff is so awful it’s back around to funny, no stops at pissant pathos junction. Let me illustrate: say there’s a party happening—let’s say one where emotions run a little higher, say … a wrap party. And there’s a woman named, oh, let’s call her, say, Dolly at this party. Now while Dolly’s husband is off compiling a plate of mini-quiches, Dom DeLuise—let’s say—introduces her to a man named … Meeve Startin. So say Meeve knows Dolly’s husband—who has just accidentally dumped a plastic cup full of drool-warm champagne onto Bob Hope’s crotch—but hits on her anyway. He tells her some of his troubles, he makes a joke, then tells some more troubles and makes some more jokes. Then let’s say Meeve spends the next six months trying to bend Dolly over the proverbial snack cart. He phones, he writes, he sends jam baskets, and all the while looks Dolly’s husband straight in the eye every day. Because he went gray in junior high, so the world owes him something. Now, Meeve—having the very sludge of jerk-dom sludging up his veins—has tricked himself into believing that his sleazery is part of some greater search for meaning. He’s a tragic figure! He deserves Dolly! He needs to suck the life out of her like a vampire and then step over her body as he goes. He’s actually doing the right thing by chasing her down like a Doberman with its balls on fire! So you see Meeve—Steve!—Navin, if he is to be any sort of

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credible jerk, much less The Jerk, can’t be a lack of experience, he’s experience corroded away through sheer force of ego. A fuckbucket like that would never see himself as a fuckbucket, he’s got to think he’s an existential hero with a fat bank account and a three-movie deal, he’s got to be sure that Molly—Dolly!—won’t confess his advances because it’s too pure, she wouldn’t spoil it. He’s got to be a guy walking around in clown shoes convinced that they’re Gucci loafers, don’t you see Steve? That’s comedy. It’s a goddamn laugh riot—oh, I’m fired? That’s not what a first rate douche would say, Steve. A real shitwit would give me a raise and a trailer and a motherfucking jam basket. ‘I’m fired,’ is bush league, Steve. Go ahead, call in the heavies, they can’t help a prick-licker who can’t even—back off, Vinny! [F  V��T,    .] You’ll never get it right, Steve, because it’s right in front of you. That’s the caustic shit, that’s the shit that burns clean. A one-note laugh. HA!

Prize Every Time   M R   : ��:��

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ay! Say there! It’s me! The monkey! “Say” means “talk.” It also means “I’ve thought of something.” “Say there” does not mean “speak where you are,” but “I’ve thought of something and I’m thinking of telling you.” I analyze my words. Well, imagine if you had to say them. Would you like to come over here? There are words written above and behind me. “Try Lou’s’ana Billy’s Down-Home Bar-bee-kyu Sauce.” Try, as in taste. People ask for it on their ribs. Ribs are the bones that define the middle of the body. “Chicago-Style Ribs.” Lou’s’ana and Chicago are two places far from each other. There’s no one sitting here. The chairs are looking extremely white. No one has been here all day. Let’s monkey around! I have analyzed every word in order to put heart into them. Unless you use your heart, all is lost. The memory of a machine is photographic. It doesn’t need the elaborate protection of a brain; it can handle purity and agony. My vocabulary comes from the clear, perfectly rendered memories of words slurred through Lou’s’ana Billy’s DownHome Bar-bee-kyu Sauce, between hot dogs and burgers and nachos and gallons of flavoured water. I’ve mastered proper and improper usage. Hundreds of conversations, I’ve managed to pick up ideas, too. Think-for-myself ideas. Take the view, for example. The patio, grass, a grey strip for bicycles, more grass, a busy strip for cars, grass again, and then my building. It was a clinic, then a hospice, then nothing, then a market and junk shop, then a coffee house, and now it’s painted with a mural of palm trees and exotic fruit. People live up top. Since there’s no one to block the view right now, I make new pictures out of the mural. When the sun hits the painted fruit at a certain time, the fruit becomes light and dark lines. I know the perception of lines depends on the viewer’s state of mind. I know this because I put together fragments of sentences and analyze them. These things mean I have a state of mind. I know to the attosecond how long the windows will reflect

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the scene behind me. For that brief period, I can fashion the beach and waves from an equation of luminosity and have it mean beach and waves. Because I have thoughts-for-myself. And I have looked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, since I was first laid upright and spun around and bolted down, and I could tell you the difference between every wave. The people who move in and out of the scene are different too, and when they move on their lives are over because my eyes don’t follow them. My eyes were made in a place called Windsor. Now that the decals are flaking, the word looks like PRILE. If people were machines, they wouldn’t know what it means to win a “prile.” But people make assumptions, and like bacteria, assumptions can keep you alive or kill you. Everyone knows it’s supposed to be “prize.” I saw the letters before they were affixed. The Creator held them up to me. I had no clue what they were. They were made of silvery triangles that came and went with the light, refracting the spectrum. Then he stuck them to the box. Would you like to come over here? Two people have arrived, eating, and they pause. “Did that come from…?” I get so many reactions: confused, charmed, indifferent, annoyed. This is the how-delightful-yet-creepy reaction. But I’m noticed, and we all love that feeling. Current price is one dollar. Not a bad deal when you think of the entertainment value. I know it used to be twenty-five cents. I even remember when it was a nickel. I know that prices rise. I’m still a decent value. I’m worth it, people say, because my decals are three magic words. “Please” is not one of them. They analyze my words. And if they commit, the coins roll in. I feel that old hum, and a vibration seems to come from my eyes. The lights in the box start to flash. The music bursts into a fanfare. Fanfare means “musical celebration.” Music celebrating me. Then the branch shakes. It’s not real, the leaves are cloth, but it’s brown and feels rough like a branch should, and my knees start moving forward and backward and my feet start rotating in arcs. People laugh at the feet. Then my arms fly up and down. My mouth opens. Monkey party in the tree (low voice) Ho ho ho

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(high voice) Hee hee hee You’ll be glad you came, just see! Come monkey around with me! And then the ancient gears grind and the spectators look down and there at the bottom of the metal chute is my promise fulfilled. See what I’ve done for them? The words on the box are a plea: come watch me, I’ll give you anything. You might lose at the pinball machine but not here, the silvery mantra shouts. No one deserves a mantra that shouts. Just don’t go. I’ll make it worth your while. The longer you stay, the more you’ll get.

When I say time moves differently for me, I don’t mean to color anyone else’s sense of time. They aren’t sitting here in the big plastiglass box. My perceptions service me. When the first little girl said, “I’ll love you forever,” well, take a long look at that. Beyond the sentiment of a little girl’s face watching a dancing monkey. Think of a machine’s concept of forever. I had only been here three weeks, already nervous about the future, being at the mercy of others. But someone was willing to care forever. Someone was going to make the sacrifice required to love me into infinity. That skinny little girl and her squeal became my purpose. This was before we, myself or Lou’s’ana Billy’s snack concern, had been around long enough to attract and lose regulars, and it was very early in my study of them. Think about the concept of regulars and constancy and well-meaning untruth. You’ll know what I mean when I say that little girl let me down profoundly. She came back once, about a week later. And even then, she was less than loving. She didn’t say goodbye. I waited a long time. That was a bad period, adjusting to my limits, appealing to some lackwit’s sense of fun with the dawning horror that he might not have one. I had to start from scratch. To punch myself into the fabric of existence with no neck to turn or spine to stretch. Or a proper reflection to tell me what I look like. The Creator said I looked funny. I didn’t know what funny meant. I didn’t know why some things were bright and some were dark, or what movement was. Big pudgy fingers shading the light with rims of red and whorls, being told I look funny: that was my first conception of the world. He took his hands away and there was depth and

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form. “Away we go,” he said, and then he laughed, a high, breathy, terrifying sound. “Yes, very funny.” He stepped back and held his elbows. Everything about his body seemed to hang. He was addressing an audience of yellow boxes, each containing a grotesque. I could never shake my initial fear of these creatures: a fat, squat, green thing (called “frog”) and a puffy thing with a pink protuberance (“bear” and “tongue”) and a scaly thing shaped like an S (“seahorse”), though I didn’t know what an S was. I don’t think humans can look back and interpret their births clearly; I pity them because their births must remain monstrous in their psyches. And I had the benefit of knowing my Creator. I used to enjoy the vandals. The breakers. In the tradition of people stuck in boxes, I welcomed the harmful. They at least stood the chance of shaking things up, flipping the page. But vandals never have a long-term plan. I can’t bear the chaos. I’ve been a machine too long. My money vault is very hard to get at; the Creator knew his trade. The harmful try to bash the lock, which makes it tighter, or pry up the metal, which reveals nothing. I can’t see any of this, but it happens often enough that I know. I can calculate vibrations. Not one person has gone after my prizes. They’re actually much easier to force out, and they’re nicer than money. Bright colours. Happy, harmless toys. Yummy candy. Who doesn’t like stickers? The harmful are all the same. People just breed generations of pettiness. When they can’t get the money they get angry, they turn red, they demand to be paid in destruction, and down I go, bash bash. “Chaos” means disorder. It’s an ancient word from the Greeks, who made all of us what we are today. It’s also the sound of metal striking metal. Chaos, chaos. Someone lifts me eventually. Repairs follow. People think they’re restoring order by repairing me; the more sentimental philosophy dropouts believe this is a machine’s idea of paradise. All they do is restore monotony, which is this machine’s idea of bugger-me-badly, so the prospect of change is ruined for me. It’s a fickle cycle. Fickle little monkey.

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It was all one big room. The walls were movable screens, and the Creator kept a bed behind one, a toilet behind another. He had nailed one with boards to make a wobbly bookshelf. Wires slung through hooks in the ceiling connected light bulbs. Metal parts lay about like dust. I evolved from these parts, from primordial junk. Worn suspenders and shirts so thin we could see the hair on his chest. Always smudged with oil or ink. Thin robe at night, sitting or lying on the floor with the ring of yellow boxes pointed inward. “When there’s enough money, there will be a circus.” Speaking in a tiny voice, so it wouldn’t seem like a conversation. Those require people. Behind me there were gushes, chokes, water moving through pipes, the sound of the screen moving back. The sound of his snoring. His feet shuffling. Off to the side a telephone would ring. If it was a long conversation, he’d move a screen in front and his voice would grow soft. Once, he peeked around the corner. To see if we were listening. This God had secrets unfit for monkey ears. And later, when we were carted away in a sort of second birth, he stayed behind his screen. Didn’t make a sound. At the bottom of my bad period, halfway through winter, water got into my cracks and froze. I didn’t know what that meant. I had never seen winter. The cracks were still frozen by the time my next enablers dropped their money in the slot and nothing happened. No dance, no prize. The pact went unfulfilled. “Piece of shit,” said an ice-obscured form with a pounding hand. I couldn’t even panic, panic implies running around and tearing hair and shooting steam from the ears. All I could do was sink into despair so deep I almost ground to a halt. I was alone, I was freezing, I had no purpose. The little girl—any girl, any living creature—whited out. Then one day I felt myself being turned. My square of existence shifted, and I saw the length of the road, the grass strips covered with snow, the buildings. They stretched for miles. A glove smeared away the ice and I saw how wide the cars were. I saw the garbage can for the first time, tawdry rusted metal. A man began to doctor me. Alarming sounds from within. I felt a panel flip, I felt scratching and, for the first time, cold wind on my guts followed by unnatural warmth. It must have been from another machine: we stick together.

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FFFZZZXXZZSSSay! Say there! It’s me! The monkey! My own words. A hand had caused them. I wasn’t sure what was happening—there was no money, how could this be, but it was, the feets were funkifyin’ and the song beginning. I imagined I was dancing with all my might. I had a job to do. I would be noticed and loved as long as I had my routine. Wretched machine logic saved me. The lowest purpose is better than none. A thumbtack knows that. And so the monkey got his Yahweh back. Coin collection became regular, and with every loose of the coffers unto the collection plate of heaven, there was a serviceman, His angel. I was out of physical danger. Tedium moves in awfully fast, considering that, you know, it’s tedium. But the sensations of my first fix were awfully fascinating. The wind, for instance. I calculated its velocity and its moisture. I calculated its effect on my body, given identical velocity and moisture over one year, ten thousand years. Then I did it again, positing a different moisture level. What about the glass? How many years until wind erosion turned it back into sand? Which would break first, the glass or me? What about how it felt? Stinging. Was stinging good? What was good? Go thou from docile stooge unto moral creature. Moral little monkey. Most machines are just left broken, euthanized rather than healed; many are murdered by mistake or by an angry foot to the cooling fan; some are even created with a congenital disease that assures they will be destroyed under the right circumstances. Just as you are lucky if you aren’t born diabetic, I am very lucky not to be a blasting cap.

The second pink person was quite different than the Creator, but less of a shock. The Creator was not alone, it seemed. The world became twice as big. How many of these pink people were there? The Creator said, “They’re my satellites, you know. I feel like I’m the one who does the dancing.” The second man leaned into our circle while the Creator paced and yapped. I saw lines winding all through this man’s body—more edges, fewer curves. His shirt had short sleeves and his arms were hairless. His eyes were dark. His mouth nipped at a bottle.

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“Like your kids?” “Satellites. Part of a system.” “Do you dance?” Another new word. I judged all words by how the Creator responded to them or spoke them. He tittered, smirked, opened his mouth and looked at us. The other man snorted. “Don’t tell me.” The Creator flounced around the room, lifting lids and opening drawers. “It’s just . . . I know it’s stupid . . . I just don’t want them to . . .” The other man gave the lion a coin and it started growling. The man rocked on his heels. He danced to the music. Then he gripped the box. “Tough racket.” The Creator brought a pile of threadbare sheets. I found my vision-square flattening into a rectangle, then a sliver, then nothing but orange fabric flowers. Silhouettes moved away on the other side, one snickering. There was nothing else, just orange flowers and a rustle and creak and some whimpers, and each flower showed its leaves in five places, black pistils came in three dots, and white borders separated each coloured field precisely, to the micrometer. A machine had printed this for men to sleep on. When is a machine not a machine? It happened when I realized that human data must not always remain equal in plastic Windsor eyes. I thought they were vandals at first because it was late-late and they had that sneaky head-swivel, checking to make sure they could bash me with impunity. No one gets nervous unless they’re about to violate me. They can squirt ketchup at me in broad daylight, but once they mean to do real harm they become reverent. Thanking the spirit of the animal about to be killed. These two ignored me. Woman, man. They’d been here during the day, sharing one chickenburger. Idiots, I thought, there’s enough chicken for all. They even took bites at the same time. I was growing into my role as silent witness and the details were alarming, the sheer number of them, from temperature changes to hubcap design. Most intriguing, far and away, was human action. Tidal patterns have nothing on two people talking over ribs. Here they were at night, sitting on the ground, drinking. They moved into the dark, on the edge of my light plane, the line where the mothy bulb casts my box into shadow. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear laughter and all of a sudden, up they ran. Zagging in and

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out of my frame. Gasping syllables and kicking over bottles. The woman ran against my box awkwardly, as if she had forgotten it. Two peachy legs, millimeters away. I could see little white lines like rivulets, and pores, and inside the pores tiny hairs, textural overload. The legs moved. The knees jutted out, and from the blackness above there appeared white cloth, sliding in jerks until it hit the ground. She flicked it upwards and snapped it and the man caught it. He had a flat, bloodshot look in his eyes, and he had a large chin that moved as if he was chewing his own cheek. He took the white cloth between his second and third fingers and pulled it through slowly. One of the peach legs rose up and rested on the box. The man took one more look around and then came at her. The box shook and I heard the roof buckle. This collusion of flesh seemed to wind itself into the box, rolling over the metal and the glass, shaming them for their inorganic prudery. Little air pockets escaping from doubled up skin, loud notes from wetness rubbing, people can’t move this fast or this easily, but the three of us rocked and hair was spattered and new body parts became a blotchy engine closing in on me, and then a lot of black and sounds hitting the ground, they’d fallen and started hiccupping giggles. It was over, but it wasn’t. There was still a presence in the box, subharmonic, and it created a doping effect. This was transcendent. I felt a tremendous current moving through me and I knew I had to join in, I had to have release, and it came— Say! Say there! It’s me! The monkey! A pause. Then the biggest horse laugh you ever heard. Oh, to shut my eyes and crumble. A head rose slowly at the glass, the woman. I wanted to jump because of all the hair. She took it in one hand and swept it back and it was so long and wild and liquid. A palette of reds and pinks was her face, cheeks like birthday cake icing, and the sweat! I’d never seen sweat up close, it was beading and collecting and covering her forehead and cheeks and running into her eyes, the eyelids were sweaty and heavy. Her mouth hung stupidly open, the sex and sweat had overwhelmed her brain. Now she was jogged back because of my stupid ejaculation; she hitched a wide dopey grin and her breath fogged my glass, making me warm on purpose. She said, “Oh, dear, mister monkey, oh, dear, but I got my prize.” There was a phlegmy urgency in her voice. Then she put these fat lips up to the glass, there was a haze under the bottom one where the facepaint had misted, she kissed the glass and boom, gone. All I saw was that brimmed orifice, the most lavish door you’ve ever seen.

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After that, the lipmarks came with the sun. Everything seemed fast and electric, and the glass stayed smeary and streaky, made the lights hazy and perception muddy, and the swirls made me giddy as all get-out, spouting my lines quicker in my own mind. The audacity of those people, their juices right here for everyone to see, little kids even. This cure for monotony lasted a long time, long enough, until they wiped the glass, maybe even until they replaced it with plastic. Until then I was living in sex. It blended with the fruit mural so well. Come monkey around with me.

Men came and tinkered with me at regular intervals, fingering my machinery. They brought tools and boxes and various states of mind. Business-like, lazy, prone to tap rhythms on me, prone to smack me, a word of goodbye now and then. No news of the Creator. One man whistled a love song. Every F-sharp resonated in the gearbox. One spoke to me at length in what I later learned was French. I imagined these men extracting pieces of knowledge, the lessons I learned with each customer’s coin, so the Creator could keep up on my progress. I made a list of several hundred thousand possible uses for the Creator’s coins, and calculated the odds for each. The likeliest possibility with the greatest personal fulfilment factor was that the Creator used my money to create more dancing animals. After my night of bliss, I realized this was as close as I would ever get to procreation. I believe the only serviceman who ever got off on it was the one who whistled. One showed up with paint-licked coveralls that seemed to balloon out at the back. He walked up and sat his painty self down on the ground. Soft yellowish face with freckles and a mole. People started peering over their ribs because he was so still. Gradually, he clambered around me on all fours. He started to loosen the bolts and the moneypot. He sifted through the prizes and eyed each one. He took the familiar plastic frame from his company box, snapped off some toy cars and placed them inside. The keychains, the stickers, very carefully placed. He hoisted the plastic bag of gumballs and nearly spilled them. He took four gumballs out of his own pocket and dropped them in the bag. Then he shook it. Then into the vault, quick as a wink. They’re still buried here. Stale, judging by the rate of air flow. Purple-grey and not quite shiny.

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My too-rough lover sat on the ground watching me and started to bite his fingernails and I thought maybe he wanted his candy back for a chew, but he just sat there gnawing his finger. He started squeezing his groin. Then he remembered the crowd and left. I imagine him scraping up to other yellow boxes, staring at them, the hangnail bleeding between his canines. One other time I forgot myself. It’s quick. The technical details are the same, the anatomy the same: they show up out of nowhere, two men and one woman, and I want to enjoy it again, but this fear isn’t fun, this is more like fighting. I’d settle for indifferent as usual; people don’t usually scream here, screams make an itchy vibrato in the box. So does high, scared-shitless laughter from the first man. He’s rooted like me, watching the scene. If I could laugh, maybe I’d be doing what he’s doing, giggling in spasms as his friend pounds and the engine heats up. No luscious doorways, no oil for this machine. The girl, for her part, keeps babbling as she’s thrown and nailed to the ground. But the sentences are getting shorter and she’s crushed harder and finally all she can say is please. And then I want to destroy the recording and shout to her that “please” is not a magic word despite what kindergartens and mothers tell you. She’s locked into position and these are the worst eyes I’ve ever seen and they only have me to look at. Upside down, her face is an alien torture chamber. I am not responsible. That makes it a little better. When they leave, it’s so nice and quick. I can look at the chairs and grass and pavement and more grass and the empty road and the fruity building and find them unchanged, until the girl pops her head up. This is like before, and it’s going to wreck the gorgeous lipmarks. I don’t want two perfectly rendered versions. She has dirt where the sweat should be. “I’m sorry,” she’s telling me. No one has ever apologized to me before. Only the top of her head is visible now, her crusty eyebrows. She starts praying against the box. I am a pagan idol deity, and I have the power to bring luck or rain or children or war. I could stand a little time with the Creator again. I’d like to be back with him and see him anew, his comings and goings, see them with my changed eyes, have him see me changed. He would understand me, voice or no voice, how could he not? And I’d be very earnest when he brought those skinny men. I’d tell him he doesn’t have to

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get out the flowered sheets to hide our eyes, I know he’s human, the frog and the sea horse know, wherever they are, and we want to see him be human. To see him finally acknowledge that true entertainment is rarely innocent, on the giving or receiving end. We don’t dance for free, and neither did his skinny men.

Monkey party in the tree… Most couldn’t take this. Immobility. Everything moving towards death but you. My current maxim is the glorious law of thermodynamics, the one that says everything eventually degrades. You need to know how to spend your time. You have to re-invent dreary. Enjoy little things—birds against the sky, waves lapping, a hot memory—but really think about them. You have all day and all night and all year to think and reason. If you could reason forever, you could work out any problem. You could learn how to make anything happen. Easiest for me might be the prizes. When I say “easy,” I mean it in the sense that it’s easier to get to Boston than Betelgeuse. Given enough time, so much time it’s beyond time, I could work out a way to burn down the fruity building. But it would be much easier to shift the prize pile so a certain item comes out at a certain time. It might take years, but I was given one purpose, and I know my business. I am my work. I can account for every atom, and I only have to concentrate on one at a time, in every sticker, every wad of Mystery Ooze, every candy necklace. Every gumball. I see those two men here. The bad men. They still come around. They eat and laugh and don’t think about how well I mold patience. When they look at me, they turn away quickly, but their glances are getting longer. One smiled at me. He doesn’t know about the subtle laws of probability that build up his bravado and break down the space between the prize chute and a purple-grey gumball. Everything in my domain, including fate, is measurable and predictable. Every wave is different, but every molecule splashes back in time. He doesn’t know how long I can wait for him to swagger over here with his coin and join the slow outward push of the universe as it files away our atoms, his and mine, one by one. He doesn’t know “prize” means “award” and “reward.”

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The Allosaurus   T O’D   : �:�� 132

inosaurs: people love to talk about them. But when the cocktail party conversation turns pre-Pleistocene, I turn off. If cornered, I attempt to navigate these discussions of the ancient “terrible lizards” with empty affirmation. Some of them had wings. Fantastic. They may have been warm-blooded. Superb. But invariably the question comes up: What’s your favorite dinosaur? Until recently, I’d never had an answer (making me something of a laughingstock among the elite social circles of the Northeastern gentry.) Every dinosaur I knew was, at best, a bore; at worst, a gimmicky spike-or-wing-covered showboat. Which of these were worth believing in? Brontosaurus? More like Bronto-snore-us. Velociraptor? Veloci-crap-tor. Apatosaurus? Piece-of-shit-osaurus. But then, while leafing through The Best Book of Dinosaurs (Christopher Maynard: 1998, Houghton-Mifflin Books, Gr. 3-5) at a friend’s funeral, I came across Allosaurus. Perhaps it was the defiant glint in the artist’s rendering of the eye. Perhaps it was the breezy confidence that Allosaurus seemed to project, despite inevitable comparison to Tyrannosaurus But something about this vibrant therapod instantly suggested a kindred spirit. I decided to dig deeper. So I read the paragraph under the picture. Allosaurus was a carnivorous, bipedal dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period. At 16.5 feet tall and 35 feet long, it was one of the largest and deadliest predators ever to walk the earth. But who was Allosaurus? He was lover and fighter; saint and sinner; fool and sage. In short, as complex and interesting a character as any to be found in literature or history: equal parts King Lear and giant, crazy alligator. Allosaurus killed, of course. But did he delight in killing? I’m no expert in paleo-zoology but I’d like to think absolutely not. Consider the harsh and unforgiving world this carnosaur inhabited. Like James Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause, Allosaurus’ violent outbursts may have been a reaction to the hypocrisy he saw all around him. Unlike James Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause, Allosaurus ate mostly carrion. But when he was not feasting on the carcass of some hapless pteredon, didn’t his thoughts turn to deeper matters? True love; artistic expression; perhaps even the drafting of a constitution

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that would outline the fundamental laws and principles for a representative dinosaur democracy? Could Allosaurus have been an elegant warrior-poet akin to the skald of the ancient Norse? According to scientists: no. Allosaurus’ brain-to-body-mass ratio would’ve put his intelligence level somewhere in the vicinity of a housecat’s. Virtually incapable of higher cognitive function, he would have had to content himself to the intellectual pursuits of running, leaping and biting. But then again, if I know Allosaurus, he wouldn’t have settled for that. He would have perceived the importance of the life of the mind and done everything in his power to correct this deficiency, possibly by increasing (or decreasing?) his brain-to-body mass ratio. This is what truly separates Allosaurus from the pack: his capacity for rigorous, often brutal selfreflection. God, what a cool guy. But as much as I love the “different” (allos) “lizard” (saurus), it wouldn’t be fair deny his flaws. For to deny the flaws of a dinosaur is to deny its humanity. So, in the interest of providing a complete portrait, I must attempt to apply the same unwavering scrutiny that he would have applied himself. First of all, Allosaurus is extinct, and this suggests weakness. But maybe he simply knew that his era was over and decided that it was better to burn out than to fade away? Tragically, he was not destined to be appreciated in his own time. Second, Allosaurus was known only to have lived in North America. I still retain hope that a complete Allosaurus skeleton will one day be found in the Louvre or the Vienna State Opera House, but until that happens we must assume that Allosaurus was uncomfortable with travel abroad. I prefer to see him as a rustic homebody rather than the so-called “ugly American,” but I’m no apologist. It is regrettable that he chose to limit his cultural boundaries purely to North America. Although some parts of Canada are really great. Finally, Allosaurus is the state fossil of Utah. Not the state I would have chosen, but this isn’t Allosaurus’ fault. Mormons are responsible. These minor gripes aside, however, Allosaurus stands as challenging, dynamic effort in an oft-stale genre. At times inconsistent, but always spirited and carnivorous, this is one that will stand the test of time. If you’re looking for a new favorite dinosaur this holiday season, you need look no further than Allosaurus. He makes other dinosaurs look like fat, lazy cocksuckers. Allosaurus: «««« 1⁄2

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Dinner Without Andre: An Interview with Wallace Shawn   H K   : ��:�� 134

allace Shawn has voiced animated characters for the films Chicken Little, The Incredibles, Toy Story, and Teacher’s Pet. His most well known role in a comedy is that of Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987). He is still widely regarded for writing, directing and starring in My Dinner with Andre (1981). Born in 1943 in New York, he has amassed film and television credits spanning twenty-five years. But he is also an accomplished playwright. He has produced fabulous plays and is a two-time Obie Award winner. Shawn is an American playwright whose work unapologetically tackles ideas without losing any sense of immediacy or theatricality. Every work proves that theatre can be personal, universal, political, social, concrete, oblique, physically alive, and intellectually rewarding. Tracking down Shawn was an adventure (Opium interviews always are), culminating in that wonderfully singular voice saying, “Hello, Heather, this is Wally Shawn.”

�:::::::::::::::�:�:::::::::::::::� Opium :::� My first introduction to your work as a playwright was … actually I saw a production of The Fever done in Philadelphia that was site-specific, a few years ago, in a hotel. I was struck by the fact that the play was operating on a number of levels, not just personal ones, but there were political and social components to it as well. That seems so rare in the kind of theatre that’s being written in our country, at least right now. Is that conscious on your part? Do you strive to create theatre that is doing all these things at once? Or is that just a wonderful accident? Wally :::� I would love to only write things that have a certain social value, but I wouldn’t really know how to control my own process. I only really know how to follow the winds of inspiration that are quite unpredictable. I don’t think it would work if I said, “Well, I’m

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terribly upset about capital punishment, so I’m going to try to write a play about it.” I mean, maybe I could, I’ve never tried anything like that, but I don’t think it would work very well. So I’m grateful when it turns out that I’m able to do something that I can feel like it has social value, or political meaning, but I can’t really control that. I don’t know how to make that happen. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Opium :::� Now when you say inspiration, are there some things that always inspire you? Wally :::� Well, it’s hard to define these things. But I don’t mean that something inspires me, I mean that out of nothingness suddenly something magically appears in my head that I can write down: a rather remarkable occurrence. I really always sort of sit and wait for the magical “spirit” to present me with the sentence. Opium :::� What was the first thing you remember writing? Wally :::� I do remember dictating a story to my father when I must have been. And it was something like writing; I mean he wrote it down. Opium :::� I read that your dad was an editor. Did you grow up in a literary household? Were you encouraged to be creative? Wally :::� No, it wasn’t that. I did go to what was called, at that time, a “progressive” school. In that school all of the children were encouraged all day long to write stories, to paint pictures, and the teachers were incredibly encouraging and iendly and always trying to boost self-esteem in the children. It was all considered absolutely terrific, you know, if we’d written stories or painted pictures. I think we all thought life was going to be like that. Some people figured out that it really wasn’t. But I honestly never matured past that stage. Opium :::� I’ve always thought that writing and acting, or many of the artistic pursuits, are sort of this weird combination of being quite ballsy and confident, in the respect that the sheer act of creation means that you expect people will care

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about it, but on the other hand, by creating whatever it is you’re creating, you’re actually quite vulnerable. So I think it’s interesting you’re talking about this confidence that was instilled in you as a child. Would you say you feel confident all the time, some of the time, none of the time? Wally :::� In my school there were no bad reviews given. If anything, everything got at least a pretty good review, if not an ecstatic review. The teachers were not into criticizing, much less attacking the work. That was the same at home for me, because I never knew about bad reviews. When I was about forty, I realized that the enthusiasm with which my creations were met when I was a child was because the teachers were being paid! Paid to pay a lot of attention to us, worship us, nourish our self-esteem. When I realized, as an adult, I actually didn’t have any good reasons for having such a high opinion of myself, I probably did collapse. And I would say it’s minimally recovered. I would say I’m absolutely fine. What I mean is that until the age of forty, I had a very strong belief in myself. Now I would say I don’t believe in myself or disbelieve in myself. I’m completely agnostic about it. But that doesn’t bother me very much. My self-esteem is strong enough to withstand—at least I’d like to believe it is—idiots and auds. I don’t mind them. It really wouldn’t bother me that much if it were true. I mean it would bother me. But I don’t believe that I couldn’t handle it. I think I would say, “Well, I’m one of a million writers who try their best to write something of value.” Opium :::� One of my favorite plays was A Thought in Three Parts. I was struck by the second piece, “The Youth Hostel,” which contains one of the most frank and explicit explorations of sexuality I’ve read or seen on a stage. It’s been called “controversial,” among other adjectives. How do you deal with that? When people’s reactions are not negative or positive, but only noting that you’re trying to “stir things up”? Wally :::� They don’t know why I wrote it and I don’t know why I wrote it. You know it’s stupid, let’s face it, to say, “Well, I wrote it for such-and-such a reason.” Critics don’t really know the answer to that. They don’t have the slightest idea, and neither do I: it’s a matter of psychology. They don’t know me; and I don’t know myself that well. I would prefer

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the criticism by somebody who actually had the nerve to put it on. I actually wrote that play quite a long time ago, and it’s been done twenty-five years ago in London. I think that they were happy to do it. And then it had its twenty-fih anniversary revival last year directed by a guy who was born in the year it was first done. And it was terrific. But in the United States, to my knowledge, nobody’s ever had the guts to do a production. Opium :::�Why do you think that is? Wally :::� I don’t know. We might be a slightly more puritanical country. I mean, in England there are certain people that are eager to do it. That actually enjoyed it! I’m speaking of actors who were delighted to do it; they enjoyed doing it, they did a great job. I do think the life of an actor in England is much, much, much more fun, because you do a lot of different things. I’m not saying every actor is equally successful, but basically in this country, it’s a much different thing to be an actor, so the people who were in my play, A Thought in Three Parts, last year had all done eight other things that year, they were in other plays, they were in television, they were in movies. They all did different things, and so it wasn’t like that was their whole life. The actors weren’t terribly worried that maybe people were exploiting them, because it was all among iends and it wasn’t the only thing they were ever going to do with their lives. Over here, actors get so few jobs. We don’t have a very “theatre” audience with an appetite for things that are a bit unexpected. It’s very, very hard to get lively people together. It can be done and it is done, but it’s hard work and people have struggled for years to get an audience willing to go out on an interesting trip and become involved. Opium :::� What sort of audience do you anticipate for your new play in February? I guess it’s not even a “new” play, because it was written in 1983. Wally :::� That’s true. But we’ve changed it quite a lot. My brother [Allen Shawn] wrote the music. It’s kind of like an opera: a play that’s built like an opera, or an opera that has play-like elements. There’s a lot of talking in it for an opera, I’ll put it that way. It’s at a theatre called The New

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Group that have worked hard over ten years to develop an audience that is very eager and ready to commit. They’re not the usual theatre audience that wants to have an easy, quiet evening. Opium :::� Are you suggesting you’re not going to provide them with “an easy, quiet evening”? Wally :::� The Music Teacher is a reasonably complex piece, and basically you should be awake while it’s going on in order to appreciate it and enjoy it. We’re actually bringing real music into a theatre that’s being sung by opera singers. It’s somewhat intense work that requires people who are paying attention to it rather than lounging and dozing in an easy chair. Opium :::� What are you hoping to achieve with this production, or tackle, that you haven’t with some of your other ones? Wally :::� It’s quite different om anything I’ve written because it’s more emotional than most of what I’ve written, plus it’s an opera. It’s a kind of art-for-art’s-sake thing, with a certain amount of pain in it, as well as pleasure. But it’s amusing, too. I suppose [it’s important to me to create work] that’s involved in making the case that our lives should be about the pursuit of pleasure rather than power. Opium :::� Is your life about that? Wally :::� I suppose I don’t really believe in the love of power. And I suppose I do prefer, as an ideal, the Japanese court of the 12th century to the White House of Bush. The Japanese court of the 12th century is the period of The Tale of Genji, if you know that book. Do you? Opium :::� I don’t. Wally :::� Well, that’s just absolutely tragic! It’s by Lady Murasaki [Murasaki Shikibu]. I mean, she didn’t call herself Lady Murasaki, but that’s what she’s called by people today. In that court, you basically sat around all day and decided what color of paper and what color of ink they should write their poems in and what color sash would be appropri-

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ate for their kimono. That was how they lived, rather than making the kind of plans Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Bush are making. So, you know, that would be more my sort of orientation. You should read that Tale of Genji, though. The first, maybe, hundred pages might seem a little bit bland, but don’t just read the first twenty pages then say, “I think it’s dull.” Opium :::� I feel guilty if I don’t finish a book anyway, so— Wally :::� It’s a very long book. Finishing it could be quite an adventure, but you’ve got to get into it. And it might influence your whole life. Who knows? Opium :::� That would be nice. I have to ask you a question that I’m assuming you’re asked all the time, so you might be irritated by it. Wally :::� Do we have to end on a note of bitterness? Opium :::� Well, hopefully not, but I am really curious. Some of our readers will know you more as an actor than as a playwright, and I’m curious whether you consider yourself more of one than the other. But the question that is burning in my mind is: do people ask you to say, “Inconceivable!” [from Princess Bride] all the time? Wally :::� I’m asked, on most days, but it depends on my mood, what I say. If I’m in a good mood, I say to the person that I’d be absolutely delighted to wash their feet or serve them in some way. But I don’t happen to be able to do that particular thing that they want me to do. Opium :::� Wat do you say when you’re not having a good day? Wally :::� If I’m in a bad mood, I say that, you know, it turns out actors are also human beings and we don’t necessarily like to be treated as bizarre objects that can be wound up like a doll and made to cite certain familiar phrases. [.] Then if I’m in a really bad mood, I say that it’s not very nice to make fun of people with disabilities and that’s how I really talk and that I’m unable to recreate it to please them. So those are the three stock answers that I give depending on my mood.

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Opium :::� Well that seems pretty fair. Wally :::� A lot of people aren’t quite aware of the fact that actors play roles. And the actor who plays a certain role isn’t necessarily that person. Opium :::� Is there anything else you would like to say to the readers of Opium? Wally :::� [.] Well, I’m sure there would be so much to say if I knew each of them better.

�:::::::::::::::�:�:::::::::::::::� The Music Teacher receives its world premiere at The New Group in New York in February ’06. Please visit www.thenewgroup.org for more information.

Spin the Person   CM E

  : ��:��

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Notes from an MFA Holder   T L   : �:�� 142

aw a pregnant woman collapse in Brooklyn last week. Fucking heat wave, I thought, sprinting toward her. She was still breathing when I got there. I pulled my MFA out from my pocket. Fanned her back to consciousness. A few days later, I received a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. Nice! My former MFA professor won’t stop calling me. “It’s me again,” he says, “you sure you don’t need an agent? Or a book deal? My editor’s looking for new writers, you know? How about a place to write so that you don’t have to worry about a job or bills?” “I’ve told you a thousand times,” I tell him, “I want to make it on my own.” “All right, all right,” he sighs into the phone. “You apply for another MFA,” L. said recently, “and I’ll apply for a divorce.” She’s got a Masters in Social Work—like that’s a real degree! Bunch of idealistic pansies traipsing around trying to save the world . . . ha! Dinner party at G.s’ last Saturday. Told the story of the time my former professor and I split three pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon and drove up into the mountains to visit the cabin where an old, famous poet had once taken a sabbatical to write. At which point a really drunken H. flat-out denounced all MFA programs, saying the diploma and education to a writer was “as useful as a poop-stained piece of TP.” I was shaking I was so mad. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. I called her a cunt. I might as well have dropped a bomb, everyone went so silent. Wait, if I’d dropped a bomb on the table, how would everyone go silent? They’d be dead. Fuck! Bad metaphor! Met a guy in bar who’d gotten his MFA from the University of Iowa. Swear my heart was thumping when I shook his hand. I’m afraid to tell L. that I had thoughts of making out with him. He told me that one professor spoke with such wisdom about the importance of using smell in a story that, during the class, “one got the sense he was levitating.” Why can’t I write like that? I suck! It’s so obvious I should just apply again, do it all over, and better this time! New magazine saying they don’t care about MFAs, and not to

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include it in the cover letter. Dorks. “If it weren’t for MFA programs,” I fired off in a letter, “Raymond Carver would have died much earlier. Anyway, best of luck finding talented writers who’ve never been to a workshop.” Another rejection letter from The New Yorker. Form letter. No pen ink. Had a pink stain on it, though. Vodka sauce? There was a scene in my story in which the narrator (nameless) orders pasta primavera. Did that inspire them? Workshop taught us to use food as much as possible in a story, that it’s visceral. “McDonnell woke up with a hankering for hangar steak and French fries over which, he imagined, he’d dabble salt and pepper with a loose hand.” Now that’s a keeper. That anti-MFA mag sent me a box of Belgium chocolates in the mail. What the!?! Idea for a story: Little boy finds an old clock in his attic, only to discover that it’d belonged to his Polish grandfather, at which point he reminisces about the time Gramps, reeking of whiskey and pirogues, took the boy to Coney Island. Story circles back to the attic, where the boy clutches the clock, and his hands begin to shake as he suddenly becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the cyclical nature of time. Fuck yeah! L.’s moving out. Good riddance. I mean, I love her more than she’ll ever know but let’s face it, I can’t seem to put my affection for her into sellable prose. Besides, now I’ll have something even better to write about. Boo-yah! Got into the University of Bar Harbor! It’s no Iowa, but it’s cold during the winter, and they’ve got a professor there who studied with a guy who used to drink with some famous writer whose name now escapes me. If the TA goes through, I’m living large, motherfucker! In two years, but probably less, when I nail down a contract, L. will come see me read, clutching my book to her shapely breasts. “Is there a master in creative writing on the plane?” the pilot said over intercom as we were about to penetrate a lightning storm somewhere over southern Maine. I winked to the freckled nun sitting beside me, whose perfume smelled like geraniums, downed my Sprite, and began to hoist myself up from the seat. My course is fixed.

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The Unhusband   A W   : ��:�� 144

t begins in late August 2001. It’s been a cold summer and you’re wearing your signature black cashmere sweater with the left armpit hole as you stomp around your studio apartment packing for the big move. Cornell Medical School will commence in three days and your name is on the list of the class of 2006. You’ve rented a charming ante-bellum colonial five minutes from campus. It’s boxy and symmetrical with evenly spaced windows, gable roofs and end chimneys. You’re excited for the change, for a new life outside the city. You’ve felt stuck lately, stagnant, in the slump of thirty. Ralph, your boyfriend of two years, is waiting for you in front of the house when you pull up in your gray Saab. He’s in his second year there, and he hasn’t stopped talking about the program since he began two Augusts ago. As you get out of the car he grabs you and dips you into a kiss. His slimy mouth tastes like sour milk and his tongue feels invasive but still you kiss him back. That night he reads medical journals while you unpack, place little china animals around the house to make it feel like home, the ashtray you bought at the Brazilian flea market, and lots of pictures of Ralph and you: the two of you cuddling on the beach, riding camels in Egypt, skiing, skydiving in mid-kiss. You’re obsessed with taking pictures of the two of you, proof that you exist as a happy couple. The professor in residence lives next door to you, some Lenox Hill hospital big wig the campus is buzzing about. A guy of average height and weight with a perpetually scruffy face and a thick head of straight white-grey hair that falls like strings of fine thread into his eyes. He might have looked like Ken Kesey as a young man, with that long face and large forehead but now he resembles a middle aged Christopher Plummer, especially on sunny days when he wears sunglasses and his herring bone jacket and wraps his neck in a maroon scarf. He’s sexy, his cheekbones, the way his jaw line cuts through the air, his smooth olive skin and bushy eyebrows, the hair along the edges of his hands. He walks into the classroom on the first day of school and looks around saying we’ll have to see about changing rooms in his muffled baritone. He drinks two cups of black coffee every

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class and spills his award winning knowledge upon the group. He’s magnetic and entertaining and the students are fascinated. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. Even Ralph develops a schoolboy crush on the professor and follows him around campus with notebook and pen, prying as much information out of him as possible. Through your circular, office window you sometimes watch the professor reading late into the night. Sometimes you even mimic him, his mannerisms, his nightly patterns, the way he gargles with Listerine not Scope, the way he seems to ration his cigarette supply through the night smoking one every twenty pages or so, and the precisely measured drink of two part Glenlivet scotch whiskey and one part water—no ice. You mimic him in hopes that some of his genius will wear off on you. He usually lies on the sofa draped in a beige cashmere blanket, a thick hardcover book lying open face on his chest and a scotch glass held up against his chin as though the sheer potency of its scent might intoxicate him. He holds it there with one hand and sort of bites at the glass with his front teeth. To support yourself, you write freelance articles for a new-age health journal called The Future of Natural Healing. It is basically a lot of highly advanced quackery, but you’ve never had much integrity when it came to your job. You’ve written articles about UFO sightings in Nevada, cell-phone radiation morphing people’s ears, and the MMR vaccination being used as a cover-up to insert a liquid microchip into human beings for government tracking. Some days after class the professor goes out for drinks with the students, though usually he’s running off to meet one of his girlfriends at some dark smoky bar where they can kiss in shadowy corners without being noticed. But you’re friendly with him. He calls you kiddo. You smoke cigarettes together in the paint-rippled stairwell and he complains about various girlfriends. One won’t let him into her apartment, one won’t kiss him in public, one won’t let him sit in certain chairs around the living room where her ex-husband used to sit. You listen, nod sympathetically with the appropriate facial expressions and he relaxes in your company. But soon the semester ends and he returns to New York City. He promises to take a look at your dissertation on pulmonary diseases and the role of smoking in the initial stages of bacterial infection, epithelial cell killing and PMN-induced inflammation. You exchange emails and send it to him as an attachment and he responds—Got it. Keep it up, kiddo. You’re a soldier. He is good at pep talks, good at making you believe you’ll succeed. But months pass and you never hear from him. Finally, you email him asking if he’s forgotten about you and

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of course he says—No kiddo, haven’t forgotten, just been busy, busy, busy. So you wait another few months, don’t hear a word and give up on him. Ralph moves in the following year. It’s nice. Sometimes you look at him and think—yes, I can be happy with you. He’s a warm body to hold you in the morning, a date to bring to the weddings your friends keep having. He looks good in photographs, an ordinary product, a snow shoveling, commuting husband. But you’re all right being the more intelligent one, the one with the joie de vivre and charisma, the good dinner partner—and he can be the stability. You need stability. He graduates two years later and begs you to go with him, so you take a leave of absence from medical school and move to the Long Island suburbs. You have a house and a bird feeder and a day to put out the garbage and even an ice cream truck that passes your street once a day to the tune of “This Land is Your Land.” This must be happiness, you think. You pressure Ralph into marriage for the next three years but when he finally proposes—at the end of the fourth—you don’t love him anymore but say yes anyway. The wind from the Long Island Sound whips your face, and a few loose pieces of hair get stuck in your grapefruit flavored Lancôme lip gloss. He is on one knee looking all teary-eyed with his bush of wild, uncombed hair, and you say yes because you don’t have any more appealing options. But quickly his moderate intellect becomes a problem, his dismissal of your liberal opinions and active role in war protests. You buy a bumper sticker that says—It’s up to the women—vote! And he asks you if you’re a lesbian. He calls himself a compassionate conservative and when he sees a Teresa Heinz button on your jacket he tells you that she federally funded BOTOX clinics, diamond pickle pins, Hermes bags, aromatherapy and homeopathic remedies. You look at him and say—she has a fortune most recently estimated at 1.2 billion dollars, why would she need to do that? And he says, well, she funded Fidel Castro’s Internet network. He hires a Portuguese maid who comes twice a week and calls you Miss and hums while she feathers every inch of the house with her yellow dusting tool. Ralph makes her wear a pink uniform with a white scalloped collar. You think she looks like a fairy. You hate fairies and being called Miss and cancel the cleaning service. You make one last attempt at recovery, take him away for his birthday to Florida or Bahamas or Aruba but by the third night you’re arguing in favor of infidelity, telling him nothing lasts forever and he’s stupid to believe otherwise. In fact, he is stupid period.

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He storms off toward the ocean and you toss two martini olives into your mouth and down the rest of the drink. You divorce three months later and move to New York City. One morning you are flipping through the Science Times and there he is, the professor, talking about some massive breakthrough that has the medical community ecstatic. It involves the blood classification of serum enzymes and he is speaking on a panel at The NYU Medical School that weekend. It has become clear to you over the last few years that medicine is more about self-interest and egotism than altruism and you’ve decided not to return to school, but for some reason you want to see the professor, so you go. On the subway ride there sandwiched between two sticky diaper-smelling children you think maybe an affair would be fun. After all, you remember nights when the two of you sat in the stairwell puffing away on Export A’s, knees brushing, smoke intertwining and you knew you could have had him right there but you were dating Ralph, and he was dating Myrna or Jillian or Carrie Blackwood. And back then you still believed in fidelity. But it doesn’t exactly work out as planned. For the first time in your life you feel adored, comforted, needed. He treats you better than you’ve ever been treated. Your family is distant, disconnected and cold. Your mother is dead of lung cancer hence the dissertation. Your father is old and bitter and volatile and you only speak to him because he is the trustee of the small fortune your mother left you that you won’t inherit until your thirty-fifth birthday under his approval. The professor is everything your husband was not, everything you told yourself you desired in a man. When he places his hand on your chest you can feel your heart jump into it like tiny shards of metal to a magnet. When he strokes your hair, forehead, cheek it’s like every inch of his finger has planned and premeditated this touch for years. You write more articles for alternative medicine journals because they pay so well. You write about a muscle testing technique called Applied Kinesiology that can diagnose nutrient deficiency in troubled organs. Your father gets sicker. One day during a visit with him he tells you you were an accident, that he didn’t want any more children and that your mother didn’t want a child either. You say that explains a lot and leave. Later that night you cry with the professor for the first time, not loud hysterical cries but a few silent tears then you watch old movies in socked feet while eating garlic steamed spinach. You refuse to take pictures of the two of you for fear that they

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will come out blank. You know this is illogical but the thing feels so surreal to you that you’re not entirely sure it is true. Sometimes you think it’s a dream, or a cruel joke or that maybe you are the victim of the newest reality television show. You tell your friends that you’re not in love, that it’s still an affair. They say five months is not an affair, it’s a relationship. You repeat you are not in love. They know you are. They say you should be careful because he is a womanizer, and then they make fun of you, ask you if you get senior citizen discounts when you’re out with him. Though you promised yourself this wouldn’t get serious you know it has and you know there is no going back. At night he falls asleep across your back, his cheek fits perfectly below your collarbone and your arms extend over a pillow to the left, one on top of the other. He clasps your hand tightly, each finger lodged in the open space between knuckles and within seconds you no longer feel a distinction between his and yours. If so much as an inch of Ralph’s body was touching yours you couldn’t fall asleep—but the professor could slip himself like a giant splinter under your skin. Then things begin to settle and the intensity of the touches stop. One day he pats your back during a hug and you shrink into yourself. By the sixth month he’s a different person entirely. He doesn’t sleep on your back anymore, instead he turns to his side and pats your head to say goodnight. His kisses are no longer deep and hungry. They don’t search for treasures behind your molars but glide the serrated tops of your incisors. Sex becomes mechanical when it comes at all. You can tell he’s left you, gone somewhere else, maybe to another woman who won’t let him inside her apartment, maybe back inside himself. You work over time to get him back but months pass and you think it’s no use, that maybe he’s gone for good. Your friends take you out to lunch and express concern—you’re depressed, they say. No shit, you say, I’ve lost him. You got two nice pairs of earrings out of him, now is the time to ditch, they say. But you can’t. He doesn’t notice you’re upset because you hide it so skillfully. You don’t do well with confrontation, with vulnerability. So instead you slice your hand open and hope he’ll notice and ask you what happened. The logic, you realize, is that of a troubled adolescent, but you’ve always been a slow learner. You use a broken piece of black plastic that sits at the side of the bathtub, and it barely draws any blood but leaves a good scar that he never notices because he doesn’t look at you long enough anymore. You think about faking cancer, a

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terminal brain tumor, AIDS. You try a new perfume, a new lotion, darker eyeliner, but nothing changes. When you first met you both admitted to believing no relationship could ever last forever, not happily. Do we bother then? The professor asked staring back at you across the table of some outdoor café in Central Park, staring at you as if what you said was definitive. His hands were gloved in mittens and resembled flippers and he held his chin in them and stared over the chewed straw tip of an Irish coffee. And you answered—absolutely. Because secretly, naively—you believed this time would be different. Your cynicism was weak and malleable, the type that came after a failed first love, not the hardened, irreversible type. Truthfully, you don’t believe it has run its course, which is why you won’t pry your scrawny, childish body away from his. You believe he’ll come back. He’s just gone inside himself for a few months you tell yourself, like a sock; he’s just inside out. On February 14th he doesn’t mention Valentine’s Day. At 3pm you ask him what time you should be ready. He looks baffled and says— you know I don’t believe in these Hallmark moneymaking holiday scams. You nod and leave him to his stem cell research, take a warm bubble bath with aromatherapy oils that according to Teresa and The Future of Natural Healing, are supposed to heal you. And you cry and cut a little more too. This time purely for you. Your father dies of old age. You’re relieved. No more obligatory visits to the country, stuffing mashed potatoes and Zoloft down his throat, mowing the grass, pruning the shrubs. But during the funeral as your L.L. Bean booted feet sink into the muddy New England graveyard grass you realize that you didn’t love your father and this makes you much more sad than you imagine loving him and having him die would have. The professor is good to you for a day or two, makes you coffee in bed with soy milk like he knows you like it, buys yellow tulips for the night stand, even let’s you get away with plurals during a game of Boggle. But soon he’s locked in his office working on some new experiment. You begin taking on extra freelance jobs. You write articles titled: “How Shark Cartilage Cured Cancer,” “Flower Essences Versus Prozac,” “Urine Therapy: Your Body’s Own Best Medicine.” Sometimes at night the professor locks himself in the bathroom. You think he’s crying because you can hear the constant flow of water from the faucet he turns on to drown out the sobs and the next morning the trash bin is filled with tissues and he has this red

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patchy rash at the corners of his eyes. You tell your shrink about it all and she nods fluently, patiently. She says because you couldn’t save your mother or father you want to save the professor. You say he is not dying and she says—it’s all relative. She says, he’ll never make you happy, never give you what you need. But he already has, you say. She says he may not be a womanizer but he’s a taker and you say, well, I’m a giver. She looks at you quizzically and rolls her eyes. Your friends tell you that Ralph is engaged, met the girl through some Jewish woman’s Upper East Side dating service. And not just any dating service, one that cost $10,000. How romantic, you say. She better be made of gold, they say. Two months later you see their picture in the New York Times wedding section. Their heads are cocked toward the center, resting ever so gently on one another and they’re beaming 500-watt grins. That night you cling tightly to the professor, spoon him, as your mother used to say. You miss your mother sometimes, miss the way she stole cigarettes from your pack of Export A’s when you weren’t looking. You even miss the fabricated tales she insisted on boring you with night after summer night as you two sat together in the screened-in porch and watched fireflies flash outside. As your arm wraps the professor’s waist you can feel his belly hanging in a clump over the black flannel boxers but you place your hand on the clump and tears rush to your eyes because you know you should be disgusted by this ball of sixty-year-old flesh but instead it reminds you how much you love him. You’re young and attractive and you could have any lean and cut Crunch gym, six-packed bench presser, but you’re here in bed with the professor clinging to him with raw, arcane desperation. In the morning the sun glints through the shades in uneven slices and a mild wind teases the light wafer of a curtain, and you’re on your stomach watching the ants crawl in a line along the branch of the elm tree outside the window of your cobblestone street. You hear him stir and roll over to face him. Mornings are the best time; he’s kindest to you in the mornings because the day hasn’t gotten to him yet. He likes the intimacy of the bedroom and the white cotton bed sheets and the safety of the filtered light. You hold hands for a minute and he tells you about his dreams. You hate hearing about people’s dreams, but his are important, vital, might be the only way to get inside. He makes a joke and holds in his smile and waits for your reaction like your father used to, then he places his hand over the side of your face and stares at you for three seconds with his big intense

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gaze. Then he rolls out of bed muttering irritably about coffee. The professor leaves for the laboratory and you shuffle around the living room, coffee in hand. Outside the window some neighbors have gathered on the street to chat about dogs and kids and weather. You sprinkle some dry fish food into the professor’s large fish tank. The lily of the valley you brought in from the country a few weekends ago and placed in thin glass vases around the room has died and whitish brown lily bells scatter the tables. Bored, you decide to snoop around in the professor’s off-limit office – his scientific habitat. You’ve never done this before. You’ve always respected his privacy, remained in banishment, but not today. The little black microscope sitting on top of his desk looks so enticing and forbidden, like the adult video section in your video store you often pass at a deliberately slow pace. You lean into it and rest your cheek on the eyepiece and peer through the little glass hole as your eyes begin to water and burn from the irritating iodine vapor. The black metal feels refreshing against your perpetually flushed cheek and you see tiny hairs and cells that look like purple honeycomb on the stage below and you think—is this what cancer looks like? You tweak the coarse adjustment knob slightly to bring it into focus but it doesn’t seem too threatening lying there on the glass slide in the violet-black metallic puddle so you fiddle with the fine adjustment knob and still, not too menacing. You try and picture it inside your mother metastasizing perfectly good cells into malignant cells until she breathed from two malignant sacs of lung. That night you make dinner, filet mignon and green beans. You light the candles and discuss Louis Pasteur’s germ theory and the professor tells you about the latest discoveries in microbiology, then you drink a bottle of Sancerre and make love on the calf-skin rug in front of the fireplace. Nights like these keep you hopeful. But the next morning you wake up alone in front of the dead, pocked remnants of wood, a couple of half-burnt newspaper ashes seesawing back and forth before being imbibed by the pull of air through the chimney, two empty wine glasses, cigarette butts. The professor walks in smelling of Old Spice, clean and showered in a navy wool sweater and slacks. I’m off to the laboratory, he says, we’re close, very close, might be a really late night. Great, you say and sit up, though you have no idea what he is close to, some cancer cure you think, strain B of grade 9 of type 2 lymph node cancer—something. He walks over and kisses you on the forehead, quickly, just a brush of the lips against your skin really, a duty. You get up and slide his t-shirt on, realize it is inside out but don’t care. You glance toward

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the office door—cracked. You wander in; the bottom of your ass is uncovered by the t-shirt and cold in its bareness. Lots of books are open and highlighted across his desk, a chart on the dry erase board, numbers and a diagram. The microscope stage clips hold the same slide as yesterday, and as if you’d been premeditating this for years, you push aside the clips and remove the slide from under the objective lenses. Then you are at the kitchen sink watching what you suppose is cancer wash down the drain—hah, you think, why didn’t those doctors think of this. Once the slide is clear you take the rectangular piece of glass and dig a corner of it into the top of your hand, right in between the middle finger and ring finger tendon. You hold your bleeding hand above the slide and drop one, two, three drops of blood onto it, cover the top with the same glass square and shuffle back, ass still cold and bare, into the office. You place it on the microscope stage and secure it with the two silver clips, leave and close the door behind you. You throw some clothes and toiletries into a duffel bag. As you do this you remember one of the first nights you slept with the professor. You recall lying there in bed at two or three in the morning puffing away on export A’s after a long night of animalistic sex and him saying– I wonder how much of myself I am going to show you? You now realize that was his way of confessing that he’d never show you all of him. Perhaps even that he was incapable of such a thing. There were moments, simple everyday moments, but moments just the same. Moments when his smell or taste made you feel so whole you nearly blew up. Days when the two of you existed in perfect unison, complemented each other flawlessly, connected with fluidity and grace like a pair of Olympic figure skaters. But love is not symbiotic and you knew this then just as you know it now. So you finish packing, grab your scarf that hangs on his coat rack like it’s finally home, and wrap it around your hand that is now covered in blood. Then you leave the apartment knowing you’ll never see the professor again. You think in time the sadness will disappear, at least let up a little bit, but it doesn’t. Through seven years, another marriage, a childbirth. One night, as you sit at dinner with your husband and young son, you think back to the professor and are shocked when the indifference you suspected to feel is not at all what you are feeling. You excuse yourself and go sit on the bathroom toilet and cry. Knowing, now, you will live the rest of your life secretly in love with him, the professor.

Two Poems   M Y   : �:�� 153

Lindsay On Betsy Lindsay rides Betsy. Relax: Betsy’s the name of her cow and it’s only a scrapbook photo from when Lindsay was four or five. Then Lindsay grew into glasses big as basketballs and teeth so misshapen you’d swear God was drunk, but relax: Lindsay punched Carlos who teased her in eighth grade, and in tenth he cast his pimply ballot for her as homecoming queen, because she turned into a butterfly, or Samoa’s finest doe, (we were young, we couldn’t choose) and Lindsay giggled, nibbled caramels, knew secrets. Now one day while we were baking cookies and I couldn’t find her oven, she said relax: we all rode cows.

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Channeling Sara’s Lollipop Ok, I’ll be honest: I tried telepathy with Sara in the chem lab, where the beakers jeered me on and Sara stood there cocky, dangling her lollipop, all dark brown tummy folds, and she thought in clean sentences: You want a hug or something? Cuz you’re looking at me like you wanna do me. And Sara sighs some random August afternoon, when shortly later she drives to the meek olive skinned river, strips down to her lollipop and sings for the dumb fish.

Cross Words Puzzle   D G   : �:�� 155

he editors wish to sincerely apologize for the recently published “Clues in the Crossword Puzzle of My Wasted Life.” The author, a talented but troubled individual who has contributed many fine items in the past, did not intend this latest effort to be construed as a proper brainteaser to be solved in the classic sense. And we were otherwise occupied, preparing submissions for various high-visibility national magazine awards, and therefore could not take the time to try the puzzle ourselves. We became aware of the situation only after receiving numerous reader complaints. Cryptic entries such as 3. Across, “Like Batman covered in feta,” and 17. Down, “Disney’s definition of third-world despair,” were intended as exercises in language, not literal clues to be followed. The author tells us he was striving for an “effect” or “mood,” and that his aims were mainly “literary” or “psycho-poetic” in nature. Further confusing matters, several clues yielded actual answers. For example, 47. Down, “Hitler’s plucky playbook,” could well describe the infamous fascist tome Mein Kampf, but that title doesn’t fill the space provided. For 58. Across, “Colombian blow job,” several readers derived “Cocaine dealer,” which does fit the appropriate space but doesn’t generate words corresponding to nearby Down clues such as, “Suicide equipment,” “Charlie Brown’s evangelical secret,” “Disfigured in Latin hues” or “One byte short of a meltdown.” As for the preponderance of clues dealing with chicken (“A henny’s penny,” “Aussie for ‘drumstick’” and “Fowls on fire”), the author explains: “I wrote the thing on a napkin at KFC. I can’t sleep at night.” Even taking all of this into account, we have decided to award the $100 prize for “solving” the puzzle to Mrs. Euclid C. Cornpone of Ypsilanti, Mich. She filled in all the white squares with Xs, which, the author insists, “is exactly what [he] had in mind.”

t contributorsf ,))))))))))). Bob Arter’s stories have appeared in Absinthe Literary Review, Bonfire, Night Train, Opium’s .com, and Zoetrope All-Story Extra. He’s from sunny Southern Cal, where the liver is greasy. He can be reached at barter1@adelphia.net. David Barringer is the author of the novel, Johnny Red, and the book of autobiographical design criticism, American Mutt Barks in the Yard. Contact: www.davidbarringer.com. Ryan Bird lounges in Toronto with only 17 minutes to live. Or so says the makeshift sundial he has erected out of his feet and this glorious beachfront sand. Contact: www.ryanbird.com. Gary Britson is a Des Moines, Iowa attorney. He graduated from the University of Iowa and Drake Law School. Organizations he joins have a history of folding immediately. He sincerely hopes this does not apply to Opium. Jason Lee Brown teaches at SIU in Carbondale, where he lives with his wife Haruka. His poetry has appeared in the Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Pearl. Two chapters from his novel Sun Visor Spider are forthcoming in The Journal and Ecotone. Contact: jl22brown22@hotmail.com. Dennis Cooper is the author of eight novels including God Jr. (Grove Press), The Sluts (Carroll & Graf), and the George Miles Cycle, a five-novel sequence. He lives in LA and Paris. Contact: www.denniscooper.net. Brandon Cronenberg is a writer and artist living in Toronto. Some of his work can be seen on his website: www.findmythroat.com. Rachel Demma lives in Washington, DC. She’s been published online at Opium.com and Ghotimag.com. Reach her at rdemma@hotmail.com. Dennis DiClaudio, an expatriate Philadelphian, is the author of The Hypochondriac’s Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have. DennisDiClaudio.com is a website which was named after him. CM Evans is the cartoon editor of Opium Magazine (.com and .print). Check his work at cmevans.magic-servers.com/main.asp. Email him praise at ornithomimida@yahoo.com. David Fromm lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife Jen. His story is excerpted from Away Games, an unpublished memoir. Points-to-turnover ratio available upon request at david.fromm@gmail.com. David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He has had many, many jobs, and now works for the arts council. His stories have been published in Ambit, the Illustrated Ape, and his novel, Skip Trace is available to publishers now. Larry Gaffney lives in Williamsport, PA. When he was a small boy he once shook hands with Moe Howard. Email him at Lar3949@aol.com.

OPIUM David Gianatasio’s work frequently appears at Opium.com, McSweeney’s and Quick Fiction. Two collections are forthcoming, one from So New Publishing, and another from Word Riot Press. Dave lives in Boston. Steven Gillis (The Weight of Nothing, Walter Falls) teaches writing and literature at Eastern Michigan University and is the founder of 826 Michigan, a nonprofit mentoring program for students 1-12 grade, specializing in writing: www.826michigan.org. Contact: barkingman@aol.com. Violet Glaze is a Baltimore native. When not writing about art, books, and film for the Baltimore City Paper, she’s a television producer at the local PBS station and a columnist for PopMatters. Contact: www.violetglaze.com. Patrick Irelan lives in Coralville, Iowa. The University of Iowa Press published his family memoir, Central Standard (2002). Contact him at pwirelan43@yahoo.com. John Jodzio (johnjodzio@yahoo.com) is a writer living in Minneapolis. Recent fiction of his has appeared at McSweeney’s and Hobart Pulp. In 2004 he was Loft Mentor Series winner and was nominated for the Best New American Voices. Heather Kelley is a member of The New York Neo-Futurists (they are not a cult). Her play, Fissure, was a semi-finalist in the 2005 Strawberry Festival, and her writing has appeared in Slugfest and Yankee Pot Roast. Contact: heathersmelly@gmail.com. Will Layman is itchy. He scratches away in Bethesda, MD, where he teaches and lives with Lorraine, Caila and Miles. WillLayman@comcast.net. Tom Lombardi’s work has appeared on McSweeney’s, Nerve.com, and Fence. He’s currently shopping his hilarious. He lives in Brooklyn. Contact: www.tomlombardi.org. Porter McDonald lives in Arizona. His quirky photocomics can be seen every Thursday at www.cowpunch.com. Tom O’Donnell is well known in the underground pitfighting circuit. He once punched a man’s asshole through his brain just to prove a point. Tom resides in an unheated meditation-cave in Brooklyn and maintains a website at www.notown.com. Michelle Orange’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Salon, The Sun Magazine and What Would MacGyver Do, a humor anthology forthcoming from Hudson Street Press. She lives in New York City. C. Allen Rearick was born in 1978. He resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Visit him online at www.callenrearick.com and find out what color his settee is. Andrew Roe has been known to occasionally rock the casbah. His fiction has appeared in publications such as Tin House, One Story, and Glimmer Train. He lives in Oceanside, California.

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OPIUM Michael Rottman’s non-economic stories have appeared in several literary journals and websites in Canada and the U.S. His non-medical plays have appeared in the Toronto Fringe Festival. Reach him at mrottman@mail.com. Jim Ruland lives in L.A. but was born in N.Y. and is a devoted New York Giants fan. He is the host of Vermin on the Mount, an irreverent reading series in the heart of Chinatown, and the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome. Shya Scanlon lives in Manhattan. He can be reached at shya.scanlon@gmail.com. Davis Schneiderman is author of Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil 2006). He lives in near Chicago, and can be reached at: dschne iderman@lakeforest.edu. Wallace Shawn’s most recent play, The Designated Mourner, premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London. He previously co-wrote and performed in the film My Dinner With Andre. An actor of many successes, he recently edited and published a magazine intended to have only one issue, Final Edition, which included work by Deborah Eisenberg, Mark Strand, and Jonathan Schellwn. Alison Weaver is the co-editor of Pindeldyboz. Find her work in Small Spiral Notebook, Red China and The Fifth Street Review. She lives in New York City and just completed a memoir. D.B. Weiss is the author of the novel Lucky Wander Boy. He also writes screenplays, and is currently adapting the novel Ender’s Game for Warner Bros. He lives in Los Angeles. Contact: www.luckywanderboy.com. Diane Williams’s recent books are Excitability: Selected Stories and Romancer Erector, both out from Dalkey Archive Press. She is the founding editor of the literary annual NOON. James J. Williams III is an artist, the author of the platonic love letter you’ve found amidst these pages, and the founder of the Thorstein Foundation. A book of words, Sometimes Me and You, is being published early next year. His retrospective, By Request My Epitaph, opens at Envoy Enterprises in NYC on July 20, 2006. Contact: www.swambiego.com. Erik Wolpaw’s father attended Yale, became a successful lawyer, got disbarred, and lost everything. Later, he and Erik lived in a horrible apartment where Erik used the Yale Alumni magazine to smash cockroaches. Erik went on to not graduate high school. Now he lives in Seattle and gets paid pretty well to write stories for video games. Check him here: www.oldmanmurray.com. Or chat him up here: erikw@valvesoftware.com. Mike Young lives in Ashland, OR. His short fiction & poetry have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Prose Ax, WordRiot, Pindeldyboz, and Whistling Shade. He co-edits NOÖ Journal, a literary/political print magazine on the West Coast. Todd Zuniga is the founding editor of Opium Magazine. He is hard at work on his next, best work (a novel). Contact: todd@opiummagazine.com.

Opium Magazine announces

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