Philadelphia Stories Winter 2009

free

l.m. asta

TRANSPLANT peter dabbene

TRIBUTARY christina delia

THE ROBBERY author profile

JOSH EMMONS

W I N T E R

2 0 0 8 - 2 0 0 9

I S S U E

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ART Mountains of the Sun by Gregory Dolnikowski. Gregory Dolnikowski is an artist

CONTENTS FEATURES 3 Transplant (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L.M. Asta 12 The Witch and the Clown (essay). . . . . . . . . . . . Judilyn Brown 15 What I Learned in Workshop Hell (column) . . . Aimee LaBrie 16 Tributary (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter Dabbene 21 The Robbery (fiction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christina Delia

and a scientist. He says "the two halves of my life complement each other. I create most of my art on commission, and my inspiration comes from my very cool clients. I paint in a high energy style, and I prefer abstract art in explosive colors. I paint in my studio but I also paint live at events: parties, weddings and concerts."

10 Buttons by B.J. Burton.

B.J. Burton has been involved with art and photography her whole life.

Her art/photowork has been published in Potomac Review and Berkeley Fiction Review. As a writer, she has been published in Philly Fiction with work forthcoming in Philadelphia Poets.

12 Curious Eye by Gary Koenitzer.

POETRY 6 Love, Vincent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Nina Bennett 8 Halves. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Valeria Tsygankova 9 Like Nothing in the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jacob Russell 17 Warminster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Kathryn Pilles-Genaw 21 Sea Legs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Scott Hammer

Gary Koenitzer is a prolific artist who likes to explore the human face and figure as a window to the evertenacious curious human mind. He searches for high visual and emotional impact with more complex emotions such as wonderment, curiosity, adventure and intrigue. Also likes to tantalize towards themes of wide universal appeal using panoramic, ethereal vista like evolutions.

16 Blue Ribbon by B.J. Burton. (see bio above)

LOCAL AUTHOR PROFILE 14 Josh Emmons

PHILADELPHIASTORIES.ORG Publisher/Fiction Editor Carla Spataro Publisher/Managing Editor Christine Weiser Poetry Editor Conrad Weiser Essay Editor Matt Jordan Associate Fiction Editor Marc Schuster Director of Development Sharon Sood Production Manager Derek Carnegie Web Design Walt Maguire 2

Editorial Board Courtney Bambrick, poetry Christine Cavalier, poetry

Liz Dolan, poetry Sandy Farnan, non-fiction Teresa FitzPatrick, fiction Denise Gess, fiction Pat Green, poetry Joanne Green, fiction Fran Grote, fiction Marleen Hulstead, fiction Cecily Kellogg, poetry Aimee LaBrie, fiction Nathan Long, fiction Walt Maguire, fiction Patricia Mastricolo, fiction George McDermott, poetry Harriet Levin Millan, poetry Elizabeth Mosier, fiction Julie Odell, fiction Ryan Romine, fiction John Shea, poetry & non-fiction Janice Wilson Stridick, fiction Michelle Wittle, fiction

18 Taking Stock by Suzanne Comer.

Suzanne Comer. The beautiful areas around her current home near Philadelphia inspired Suzanne to explore digital photography and its use as an art form. Her work is influenced by her background in fine arts and graphics. Suzanne's digital photoart pieces have been featured in many area juried exhibitions. http://comersuz.home.comcast.net/

19 Gold Skirt by Janine Kilty. Janine Kilty is a New York artist who specializes in realistic paintings of people, pets and places. She trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts and in the atelier of master artist Wade Schuman (New York City). Her art work has been exhibited in galleries and public spaces in Pennsylvania and in the western New York area, and hangs in a number of private collections internationally. See more at www.janinekilty.com.

22 Mannequin by Thomas Johnson. I'm a native of the Delaware Valley. I've had a camera in my hands most of my life, but when working with a Professor of photography, he said look at the details as well as the whole of the subject. Finding beauty in details is the best way to explore the world around us. Great images are closer than you think sometimes right next to you.

Cover Art: Rings of Fire, Jersey Shore by Dorrie Rifkin. Working from photographs she’s taken from her travels, Dorrie Rifkin, a New Jersey resident, creates a solid sketch, and from there, scenic watercolors that draw the viewer in to the moment.

You can see more or her paintings at www.farberrifkin.com

Philadelphia Stories is a non profit literary magazine that publishes the finest literary fiction, poetry and art from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and distributes free of charge to a wide demographic throughout the region. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through the magazine, and through education programs, such as writer’s workshops, reading series, and other affordable professional development programs for emerging writers and artists.

Philadelphia Stories is a 501c3 and is managed completely by a staff of volunteers. To support Philadelphia Stories and the local arts, please visit www.philadelphiastories.org to become a member today!

l . m .

a s t a

TRANSPLANT found the two carbonless message slips on my desk after the last patient. The first was the transplant team wanting me back to consult on Carl Lawson’s fevers. The second was an email address for Bobby Schmidt. When keystrokes failed to pull up any Schmidts I’d seen in medical records, I stared at my partner’s wilting bromeliad and reread the message; some things were as simple as water. This wasn’t Bobby Schmidt, patient, this was Robert Schmidt, old boyfriend.

I pulled on my white coat for the trip to the transplant unit and stuck the message in the pocket with my prescription pad. The late afternoon sunlight made the June day feel young; I’d do the consult tonight. Carl was a frequent flyer on the transplant service with two kidneys under his belt already. My job as infectious disease consultant was straightforward: repeat all the abnormal tests the other doctors had thought to order, spot the ones they hadn’t ordered, and make sense out of it all.

Rob hadn’t believed I was going to be a doctor until he had seen The Cell on my bookcase.

Before I started medical school, he was cloudy and beautiful with messy black hair and a recent drunk driving acquittal. He wondered how there could be an entire book devoted to the cell. After reading different books devoted to biochemistry, physiology, and pathology, I diagnosed alcoholism.

“Hey, doc,” Carl Lawson called from his hospital bed, “how’s it going today?”

“Same old, same old,” I replied, scanning the most of recent the chart

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Mountains of the Sun by Gregory Dolnikowski © 2008 notes. “What’d they put you in for this time?”

Carl shrugged the same shrug he treated me to every admission. If someone asked me how much longer Carl and I would play this game, I would have shrugged too. The fluorescent lighting did nothing for his stringy hair, nicotinestained fingers, and the yellow-grey cast

of kidney failure on his skin. Carl had a genetic disease that slowly destroyed his kidneys, but his bad boy substance abuse had landed him on dialysis before he turned thirty. For two years he managed to clean up his act and pass blood and urine tests for all sorts of illicit drugs while the transplant doctors hunted for the right donor kidney. As soon as Carl

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t r a n s p l a n t felt well enough after the transplant to start raising hell again, his kidney function deteriorated. It was back to dialysis and a second kidney transplant three years ago.

More recently, Carl developed an abscess from a nasty, resistant bacterium.

Despite triple antibiotics that were damaging the transplanted kidney, his fever still raged. I was running out of suggestions. If the fevers persisted, we’d get a CT scan and see if there was anything the surgeons could drain.

I wrote a brief note on Carl and moved the message from Rob to my bag before heading home. He’d been the love of my life, but that monumental memory was a place I no longer visited. I hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and the last time he’d practically crowed about an auto accident in which he’d lost consciousness and teeth. By then, I’d known a lot of patients like Rob.

Sometimes they just hurt themselves, but I’d handed out enough tissues to weeping spouses, parents, and children to know that wasn’t true. After residency, I retreated to practice a specialty that examined the dark old corners of childhood vaccinations, travel, and sexual activity. I could usually blame a virus, bacteria, or maybe even a parasite.

When infectious led back to anther person, no matter how close, the correct term was vector.

As contributor to his own demise, Carl should never have been given a second kidney after he burned out the first.

But a commitment to a patient was a commitment, and the renal team, like forgiving parents, kept crossing their fingers and betting on Carl.

Rob, with his self-destructive habits, was no better than Carl. When we had dated, he was almost as pale and thin as

Carl was now, and I could count on one hand the number of times I remembered seeing him eat. He drank in bars, at clubs, and surreptitiously on the steps of the D.C. monuments that blazed against the night sky. In my medical opinion, Rob should have been burnt out, dead, consumed by sadness, anger, and, I might once have been able to believe, by love.

On the drive home, I remembered Rob’s sweet kisses, the result of alcohol dehydrogenase metabolizing alcohol into the fruity acetaldehyde, until my pager silenced the thought. The floor nurse reported that Carl had thrown his low protein/no-added salt dinner across the wall, nearly hitting the woman who laid the dinner trays. I reminded the nurse that I was the consultant for Mr. Larson’s infection; she would have to call the renal service about his diet order.

While she was at it, I told her, she should probably call security and social services.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS For someone who loves to read and thinks that authors are like rock stars, it was a natural fit for me to become involved with Philadelphia Stories when I accepted the position of Director of Development. This has allowed me to actively share my passion in a professional capacity, by helping to build a community of readers, writers, and artists.

I will never forget the first Philadelphia Stories reading I attended at Robin’s Bookstore. I listened as a poet, who in his “regular life” was a school administrator, told the audience that Philadelphia Stories was the first to publish his work. While he was a little nervous during his reading, it quickly became clear that he was fulfilling a lifelong dream, and I was enjoying some very good poetry! It was one of the many inspirational moments I have experienced since becoming involved with Philadelphia Stories.

I am sure you, like me, don’t always have the time to seek out good writers. That’s why we are fortunate to have a magazine like Philadelphia Stories in our community. The magazine and website provides access to writers, poets, or artists whom we otherwise may never have the opportunity to enjoy.

I hope you will join me in becoming a part of this great community. A little goes a long way for Philadelphia Stories. Just $20 a year gets you home delivery and the knowledge that you are directly supporting the local arts community, which is so important, especially during these trying economic times. During this season of giving, I ask you to please contribute to Philadelphia Stories to help ensure we can continue offering this free resource to the community. We have included a membership form on the inside back cover of this issue for your convenience.

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Wishing you all the best this holiday season and for 2009.

Sharon Sood Director of Development sharon@philadelphiastories.org

www.philadelphiastories.org

l . m .

I ate take-out sushi with my family and checked email once more before heading to bed. Carl’s attending was scheduling a group conference to discuss the possibility of a third kidney transplant—a question of medical futility if anyone asked me. I ticked off the names of patients I knew who had died waiting for a kidney in the last five years and made a note to troll the medical literature for the rate of former addicts staying clean after transplant.

For Rob, I typed a doctor’s open question, “What’s it been, ten years?”

I found a delirious Carl on rounds in the morning. Overnight, his temperature had spiked to one-hundred-and-five. I recommended that the team request FDA permission to use an investigational antibiotic. The CT scan was scheduled for 2 o’clock. The nurse noted that Carl had been too sick to throw his breakfast tray or sneak off to the roof garden and smoke.

I didn’t get to my email until lunch.

Nothing from Rob. He’d probably been drunk when he called and that would be the end of that. Carl’s transplant team conference wasn’t for another two days—if he lived that long. By dinnertime, his temperature was a little better controlled. He winked and asked why I wasn’t making quick business of this infection they way I’d cleared up “that first little problem.” I had to smile. If Carl felt well enough to bring up his gonorrhea, so be it. I warned him that even that bug was getting harder to kill with the usual antibiotics. He told me he’d keep that in mind and closed his eyes.

The face of this man with oxygen prongs in his blood-crusted nostrils and a central line in his jugular vein read pain, fatigue, anger, and hard use. The odor from his dressings was hard to ignore.

Would this be how it finally ended? I’d given Carl up for gone before to spare myself work and pain. Who would be

a s t a

there to mourn him? I scrolled back to the social work consult in the chart that read: Carl Lawson is a forty-two-year-old male well known to the transplant service with a history of polycystic kidneys, substance abuse, renal failure, dialysis and renal transplant times two. This most recent hospitalization is for a perirenal abscess with the same multidrug resistant organism that infected his dialysis graft. Mr. Lawson lived in an apartment downtown until being readmitted. He receives disability and has limited social supports.

Over the years, I’d fleshed out a little more of the framework of Carl’s life—the long-dead disaffected mother, the two years of vocational school, and the long streak of boosting Hondas to support his drug habit. Carl had a sexual history a mile long, and I remembered a girlfriend

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t r a n s p l a n t floating around the hospital during his previous admission for fevers because we HIV tested them both. I couldn’t remember her name. On any given day, it was difficult to keep track of the medical information, let alone the personal.

What I didn’t know still drew me: why and when did Carl start using? How did he manage to stop for two years before the transplant? Where was the rest of his family?

That afternoon, the transplant surgeon, who jealously guarded his patient survival data, took Carl back to the OR to open up the old dialysis graft site in his arm and the transplant site to debride infected tissue. We loaded Carl with IV dilantin to prevent seizures, and instead of talking about his third kidney transplant at the meeting the next day, the renal fellow jumped all over the medical student chosen to present Carl’s last electrolytes.

“Has Mr. Lawson died?” the renal fellow said.

The student, who couldn’t see where this was going, blustered, “No.” “Then these are not his last labs.

They are his most recent labs,” snapped the fellow. “You’d do well to make note of the distinction.”

The student sunk into his chair while we discussed Carl’s code status.

I’d had low student days too. I spent

the night I got my acceptance letter for medical school drunk on the kitchen floor with Rob. I had worked so hard for so long that I only felt sadness for the mountain of work and abuse I was finally privileged to face.

Carl went on to have another fortyeight hours of lab results and fevers before there was a reply from Rob. “Sorry to call your work number,” he typed. “That’s the only information I could find for you. I saw your story on the web. Are there more? You had a gift.”

Rob was digging into that ancient time when I’d written about a teen with typhoid fever, back before the lives I cared for in the hospital seemed so fictional that all fiction froze. Once I’d been as interested in the patient who had the disease as the disease that had the patient, but the last few years with my patients, the cuts from the hospital, and my family’s move, I was barely surviving from one caffeinated drink to the next.

Before any transplant, patients talked with the team psychiatrist about chronic medications and risk of rejection, but no one talked with me about the night I sat next to Rob at the top of the cold marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and he said he wouldn’t be seeing me again. I went home and would later read medical texts that offered prognoses for risk-taking males. When the pathology profes-

Love, Vincent

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I start to delete the e-mail from Vincent, not knowing anybody by that name, when I realize the address is my father’s. Last week he had surgery to remove a squamous cell growth from his earlobe. As I read his brief morning greeting, I again see his ear swaddled like a miniature mummy, his hazel eyes dulled with pain and fear. I type a quick reply, better Van Gogh than Picasso, and sign it your sunflower Delaware native Nina Bennett is the author of Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother’s Journey Through Grief and Pirene's Fountain. In 2006, she was chosen by the poet laureate of Delaware to participate in a writers’ retreat sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her articles and poetry have appeared in the anthology Mourning Sickness, The Broadkill Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Grief Digest, the News Journal, A.G.A.S.T., Different Kind of Parenting, M.I.S.S.ing Angels, and Living Well Journal.

sor slapped a cirrhotic liver from the fivegallon canister of formaldehyde onto the lab tray, I touched the hard-knotted tissue and practiced professional distance.

Carl was one-hundred-and-three and sweating and didn’t react to my gentle greeting or more robust examination the next day. The transplant team had asked social work to locate next of kin. I changed the protocol medication dose to accommodate Carl’s dwindling kidney function, and put my hand on his unbandaged one before leaving.

“Whatever chips you’ve got, Carl,” I whispered, “it’s time to cash them in.”

I skipped the noon conference, went to the office, and shut the door. Dark clouds framed the hospital across the street. A thunderstorm seemed likely.

Sometimes I knew when a patient was going to die. Sometimes I didn’t know, and I would go to the floor to follow up on a consult to find the bed empty and the name removed from the census board. Once I attended a morbidity and mortality conference when the disease and the patient’s initials matched a young kid I had really liked. I had rotated off service, and no one thought to tell me he died.

At the start of my residency, I kept track of the deaths. At the hospital memorial service for patients who had died my first year, I listened for names I remembered. By the second year, I sat there wondering, as the familiar names washed over me, what was more painful: watching them die or mourning their life and our failure.

Outside my window, the lightning and raindrops reminded me that summer was flashing by while I was stuck here in the hospital. It would be easier right now with one less noncompliant chronic patient. I chastised myself for being wrong about Rob, but it wasn’t my fault he hadn’t read the textbook.

I wrote Rob that I didn’t write anymore; I was a doctor.

We finally got Carl on the experi-

l . m . mental protocol, which meant I was now responsible for assessing him three times a day. The worksheet with his vital signs and labs spilled over the edges of the table that usually held the meal trays. By the next morning, Carl looked a shade less grey. He was down to one-hundredand-twenty pounds but his fever had dropped below one-hundred-and-two.

“I’m not leaving in a box, you know,” he said.

“I never said you’d be leaving in a box.”

“But you thought it,” he said.

I scanned the flow sheet. “Looks like your temperature is down, so maybe you’re going to luck out with whatever this new wonder drug is. But overall you’re on your third kidney, and I’d say you’re behind in the count.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved his hand. “I’m going to walk out of here and find Jacelyn.”

“Who’s that?” I was thinking girlfriend, drug dealer.

Carl rummaged in his bedside drawer before pulling out a banged-up photograph. “That’s me and Jace when she was two,” he said, pointing to the little girl with corn silk blonde hair and brown eyes who sat on the grass in a rose pink dress. “We had a party at the park, and Sheila even baked a cake. Those were good times.” He gazed out the sunny window, closed his eyes, and dozed off.

It was just as well, he needed the rest.

I studied the photo of Carl, smiling and proud with long brown hair and clear eyes, before turning it over. The photograph had been taken almost twenty years ago, well before the kidney failure. After all these years, who knew Carl had a daughter?

In a box somewhere, I had a photograph of Rob looking calmly into the camera and affirming he was young and beautiful once, too. I was glad he hadn’t emailed back. I didn’t want to see his words, scars. He was as foreign to me as Washington D.C. had been when I went

back there for a conference on emerging pathogens. In the humid July sun, the monuments blazed white hot, and I didn’t have time to sit on the marble and bear distant witness to the pain.

The hospital days traced the storyline of Carl and Sheila, Jace’s mom, who moved across the country with the baby to get away since he wouldn’t stop using.

Sheila vanished, never asked for money, or sent photos. Ten years later, Carl got a letter from Jace, who wanted to visit.

Carl wanted to see her too, but before she could come out, Carl had the first round of kidney trouble. He told her she’d have to put off their reunion a little longer. Then Jace wrote back that she was afraid of Sheila’s latest boyfriend.

“There I was high while this kid, my kid, was being bothered by some low grade pervert,” Carl said. “I was just about to go on dialysis, and I took the hospital social worker up on an offer to get subsidized housing and pull myself

a s t a

together. It wasn’t perfect, but with the little bit I got from disability and some car repair work on the side, I had us a little place.

“Jace came out, started school here, and we got acquainted,” he said. “She looked so much like her mother, but older than I expected. She got a job answering the phone at the garage after school. Those were two good years.” His voice trailed. The nurse had him up in a chair next to his bed, and he picked at the blanket covering his lap.

I asked what happened.

“She said I wasn’t letting her grow up,” he laughed, “after I made a place for her.” He shook his head and coughed.

“She started acting up and hanging out with the wrong crowd. I didn’t want that for her. She was bringing the stuff home.

It was too much. I started using and cheating on my drug testing.”

I thought of all the teens who had gotten high and stupid and into trouble.

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t r a n s p l a n t It was a kid’s job to treat their family the absolute worst, but Jace had gone up in flames and taken her father with her. I nodded my sympathies.

“You guys called me for the transplant right then. I was in the hospital for weeks. She never came to visit. When I got back home, she was gone. I called Sheila; she hadn’t seen her and blamed me for her running off. I was sick, and I tried so hard not to die because I wanted to find her again. I didn’t know what else to do. I blamed myself for being a lousy father, and then I blamed myself for caring. I was on so many medications; I figured a few more didn’t matter.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“You think I wanted you all sitting around talking even more about what a loser I was?” he said. “Besides, Jace was a kid, and I figured someone would take her away.”

Another week went by and Carl was doing much better. I brought a simple wood frame for the picture and wished there was something else we could do.

There was buzz from the new set of residents rotating on the service about putting him back on the transplant list. I tried to remember when I had stopped thinking ‘why not?’ with borderline cases.

Labor Day weekend came, and its festivities filled the hospital with trauma

Halves

By Valeria Tsygankova “A Serb farmer used a grinding machine to cut in half his farm tools and machines to comply with a court ruling that he must share all his property with his ex-wife.”

– Reuters, April 2008 I thought she would take half of what was ours not half of what was mine.

Things she could never use.

So let me take my tools beyond the earth.

I am in the barn, cutting harrows into halves and peeling hammers at their hidden spines.

Cattle scales and plows split in useless pieces lie in their last dirt.

No one can be satisfied. The world comes in parts. I am only reducing it closer to its hidden face.

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What will I do with the cow?

What does anyone ever do with the things that won’t be shared?

Valeria Tsygankova is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and creative writing. Her poems and prose have appeared or are upcoming in Chantarelle's Notebook and the campus publications Penn Review, The F-Word, First Call Magazine and Peregrine. Valeria was born in Moscow and grew up in the Philadelphia area.

patients. I’d changed into scrubs and clogs to stay late for a heart transplant patient in the intensive care unit, and logged on to look for the results of a spinal tap. There was another email from Rob. “I sobered up just enough after the accident to get a construction job,” he wrote. “The crew boss handed me a hammer since I looked so good at beating myself up. The lead carpenter gave me a chisel a few weeks later, and I never looked back.

“While I was drying out, I wore out sheets of sandpaper and covered everything in my apartment with this thin layer of dust. At first, they sent me home with bits and pieces: finials, the curled ends of banisters. Then I moved on to fretwork, the odd swag of fruit or roses.

It’s better now. I leave the sanding at work. I love wood and want to try marble someday.

“We get hired to do restoration by expert types who can tell if the work is done by hand and not power tools. A lot of it is fire and water damage. Fire damaged the area around the altar at St. Joseph the Worker, and we’re restoring the 1890 woodwork. You can always smell when wood’s been through a fire. I have a wife and two kids. They’ve forced me to be closer to the man I want to be.

You always said you were going to be a doctor. I never doubted you.”

I moused to the lab results and logged off to see the patient whose heart had been cut out and placed in a plastic pan before her rib cage was wired shut over the stranger’s heart that beat in her chest. The transplanted heart, severed from its original nerves, now driven by a pacemaker.

I felt enervated. Why tell me now he was alive and not drinking? My clogs clacked along the empty tile corridor.

He had walked away from me. I had waited for him to stop. I had lacked faith and energy. I had given him up for dead.

There had been no books to teach

l . m . hope in medical school, but we were required to attend an AA meeting. I remember a brittle old lady with soda bottle glasses who led me down the steep stairs from her apartment over the dicey market on 13th Street to the smoke-choked meeting room at the church around the corner. She talked about her powerlessness over alcohol, the moral inventory, the admission of flaws, and the desire for amends and improvement.

Did Rob hope to restore our warped past through a 12-step program? I drifted to the other end of the unit and ran my fingers over Carl’s wood frame. Some mind, body, history receptor, long blunted by brutal training, sleep deprivation, and the endless needs of patients, fired again with small hope: someone had made it. Someone I knew. They hadn’t made it with me, but medically, that was of little consequence. As I walked to my car, I felt the warm breeze through my thin scrubs and wondered if a world with Rob could hold Carl and Jacelyn. I would find her and tell her about Carl even if she didn’t care.

It took time to track her down. The phone was disconnected; the house sat in a bombed-out block. The soot from the fire that consumed the building next door still licked its bricks. A street lamp at the end of the block cast the only light. I knocked and explained. A woman pointed toward the basketball court where Jace played with the boys when they’d have her. She shut the door.

I drove. Patients lied, I reminded myself. What if Carl lied? Maybe Jace left because he’d been neglectful or abusive. I wouldn’t know until I heard her story. I parked and watched the local mischief play out on a court surrounded by a carpet of green and amber glass.

Shapes flickered in and out of the street lamp; I spotted Jace, adolescence burning immortal. With the assembled tough but ready acolytes smoking and drinking, the shadowy beauty from the old

photograph wanted for nothing.

Eventually she would need to use the ladies’.

When she moved for home I called her name. She waved an angry hand.

“Jace,” I shouted, “I’m not with the police, or juvenile, I’m one of your dad’s doctors.

He’s dying.” I held out a card; she stepped toward the car and took it, her hand and wrist scarred with a homemade design. She ran.

I drove to the diner near home where I often sat to shake off medicine. Once

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again, I had arrived after closing. I’d done my best by Carl, and other than lying down on the operating table for the transplant surgeon to extract one rose pink kidney from a half moon incision in my flank, I could do no more. I mourned for Carl and the boy and the girl sitting late at night under the back portico of the Lincoln Memorial looking out across the dark Potomac toward the graves of Arlington.

Jace left a message with her number

Like Nothing in the World

By Jacob Russell The world is filled with gods They are like nothing else in the world This is how you know they are gods The gods did not make the world The gods were made by the world They are more helpless than they have ever been I asked them if they were once Like the gods of our storied past But they did not answer Their tongues were made of stone And their teeth of wool They neither sing nor speak I found them one day searching For change, but my pockets were empty Everything now must remain as it was Only the world changes As stars withdraw to the beginning of time As we found ourselves at the edge of the forest Following the animals over the plains Listening to their lies, their endless Stories of gods who would not let them be Jacob Russell lives in South Philly and teaches part time at Saint Joseph‘s University. His writing has been published in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Salmagundi, Potomac Review, Bitter Oleander, Pindeldyboz, the Laurel Review and other literary venues. http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com

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t r a n s p l a n t on my voice mail. “He needs another kidney, doesn’t he?” she said.

I called and told her he did.

“I’m too messed up and late to help,” she said.

“Your dad talks about seeing you when he’s well.”

“Could I be a match?”

“I wouldn’t know the answer until we run the tests.”

“Then let’s do them, I want to know.”

Carl’s fever returned along with the odor of his draining wounds. Jace sat at his side and told him she was keeping her kidney warm for him until the doctors took care of the infection.

She and I knew she wasn’t a match.

A few days later, Carl’s blood pressure became unstable and the surgeon took him back to debride the dead tissue, flush away the bacterial putrefaction. He died post-operatively.

I left messages for Jace. She didn’t call. I asked the pathologist to page me when someone came to sign for his remains to be removed after the autopsy.

Jace looked better than I expected. I wanted her to know that the tests showed she’d inherited the gene for her father’s kidney disease but wasn’t showing any signs of kidney failure yet. Get checked regularly, I told her. Carl would have wanted her to. She shrugged.

The colored slip in my department mailbox told me to claim a package in the mailroom. Inside the box I found a block of wood and a pack of sandpaper.

Live oak, Rob wrote, was a very hard wood.

10 L. M. Asta has published fiction in Schuylkill and Lemniscate, and her essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and Hippocrates. A native of Bucks County, she trained at Temple University School of Medicine and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She writes and practices in northern California.

Buttons by B.J. Burton © 2008

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THE WITCH AND THE CLOWN

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hate my job. As evening supervisor of a one-hundred bed nursing home, I oversee the work of one other nurse and ten nurses’ aides. The corporate manager, Scott, wants me to complete more paperwork during my shift. I explain that I often help feed, shower, and medicate the home’s residents. Scott tells me the facility is adequately staffed according to state protocols, and suggests I discipline employees in writing who fail to complete assignments. Whenever I do this, the employees shoot hot glares at me as they whisk by my desk at the second floor nurses’ station. I please no one, and feel caught between worlds.

I want to bridge the chasm between me and the staff I supervise nightly. Together, we decide to bring food to work and throw a party on Halloween. I don a witch hat, tight black dress, fishnet stockings, blood-red lipstick and high heels. Will is a licensed practical nurse who works on the third floor.

Will is Spanish; with his slight frame and dark wavy hair, he reminds me of a bullfighter. Tonight he wears a jumpsuit with polka dots, a red rubber nose, a curly multi-colored wig, and huge black shoes.

Around nine, the aides begin the evening’s final rounds. They feed warm Ensure through straws to emaciated residents, and turn bedridden people with frozen limbs according to the handdrawn paper clocks taped to the residents’ doors. The latter task prevents holes in the residents’ skin caused by too much pressure in one area. Some residents are taken to the bathroom, while others have their diapers changed.

I grab some medical charts and start to document the shift’s activities. I welcome the chance to rest my legs. My toes, shoved into a point at the end of

my shoes, pulse with pain.

I am almost ready to sit when Martha, one of the nurses’ aides, runs out of the room next to the nurses’ station.

Martha is gasping, her stiff black wig askew. Martha is not wearing a wig for Halloween. She always wears a wig.

“Mr. Smith…” she sputters, “he ain’t breathin’.”

I rush to Mr. Smith’s bedside. Mr. Smith has not breathed in a while. His

Will appears a few minutes later. He has taken longer to descend the stairs than he normally would in an emergency, probably because of the floppy shoes. Will pulls up his ruffled sleeves and positions his palms over Mr. Smith’s chest. His arms harden into a piston, one that will hopefully pump life back into Mr. Smith via a series of strong compressions to the heart.

The rescue squad arrives after a dozen cycles of compressions and rescue breaths. Two young male paramedics try to maintain their wooden solemnity, but smiles tug at their lips. We saw them last week, when one of the female residents kept taking off her clothes. She hit a couple of us, called us all sluts, and told us she was kicking us out of our apartments. Nothing in my magic box of medications helped her.

The medics load Mr. Smith onto a stretcher. They resume CPR, squeezing a plastic blue ball over the lipstick-stained mask on his face.

Mr. Smith is wheeled out the back Curious Eye by Gary Koenitzer © 2008 door into a waiting ambulance.

The five or six staff members who have gathered, including Will, Martha, skin is gray, and he is doing what some in Nicole, and me, indulge in some deep the medical profession call ”Q”-ing. His breaths, then retreat to the lounge to jaw is slack and his tongue hangs to one consume our Halloween feast. side, causing his open mouth to resemble I look at Will. Crumbs stick to his a capital Q. white-painted chin as he gobbles a As a registered nurse, I cannot legalchocolate-covered donut with orange ly pronounce Mr. Smith dead. I need to and yellow sprinkles. perform CPR. I direct another aide, I start to laugh.

Nicole, to call 911 while Martha and I Will raises his eyebrows, which he roll the head of the bed down. has outlined in blue triangles. The rest “Martha, get Will,” I tell her when we of the crew stares at me as if I have just finish. She dashes out of the room announced that I had sex with my toward the stairwell. brother.

I place a green plastic mask over Mr. “I was thinking,” I tell them, “that if Q’s, I mean, Mr. Smith’s, face, and adminMr. Smith was even sort of there, he was ister rescue breaths. My witch hat falls probably really confused.” next to him on the bed after three puffs.

t h e Nicole stops picking through her candy corn in search of brown tipped pieces and listens to me.

“He must have thought,” I continue, “there’s a witch kissing me, and a clown jumping on my chest, and I don’t know whether I’m in heaven or hell, but this shit’s fucked up.”

We start howling, laughing so much that we bend over and choke on our cookies and cider. The story circulates throughout the facility for weeks, shifting shape like a ghost each time someone retells the tale.

I drive home seeing Mr. Smith’s eyes.

The open eyes of the fresh dead still look

w i t c h

a little alive, like a flashlight beam operating on low batteries. They never seem afraid, only amazed.

I pull into my driveway. Toilet paper trails cling to the bare branches of trees, remnants of mischief from the night before.

Halloween itself is a remnant. Earthworshipping tribes in northern Europe once celebrated the harvest festival of Samhain each November eve. People believed the veil between the realms of the living and the dead was thinnest at Samhain, when one could see shadows invisible by the light of day.

I turn off my ignition and savor the

a n d

t h e

c l o w n

warm darkness. I do not hate my job. I hate the way I am expected to perform it.

I do not want to punch holes in forms and organize them while watching others struggle to assist the human beings entrusted to our care. I hold our moment of shared joy at the nursing home tonight in the hands of my mind like a captured butterfly. I release hope into the purple chill of the night before entering my house.

Judilyn Brown is a lifelong resident of Northeast Philadelphia. She works full-time as a nurse at The Philadelphia Women’s Center. Judilyn likes to read, write, and spend time at play with her husband and son.

NEW FROM LOCAL AUTHORS

a u t h o r

p r o f i l e

By Marc Schuster

JOSH EMMONS Few writers walk the line between the real and the fantastic quite like Josh Emmons. His first novel, The Loss of Leon Meed (Scribner 2005), reads like a cross between the works of Philip K. Dick and Jonathan Franzen.

His second novel, Prescription for a Superior Existence (Scribner 2008), has been described as “a wicked skewering of religious cults and a finely wrought testament to their power.” Fresh off a stint at Yaddo, the renowned artists’ community, Josh sat down with us to discuss writing, faith, and inventing one’s own religion.

Are you a morning writer or a night writer?

I’m very much a morning person. I get up pretty early and do four hours a day as a minimum, but no more than five. After that, I’m pretty dead. I have to write in the morning with caffeine and sugar. I also need to be in a fairly quiet place, but not too quiet. I do much better when I’m in a city.

The Loss of Leon Meed features an impressive cast of characters. How did you juggle them all?

I began with writing character sketches. I wrote about seventy different characters, many of whom were based on people I’d known growing up, and some of whom I just pulled out of nowhere. When I got to the end, I realized that there were so many relationships between them—that someone was the uncle or the grand-nephew of another character.

There was a lot more connective tissue between the characters than I had initially planned for. I decided at a certain point that seventy characters was far too many, and given that there were these relationships, if I didn’t want the character sketches to die on the page, I should probably develop them. So I went back, and I cut a lot of the characters that 14 were on their own or had never met any of the other characters. I just whittled the character palette down to about twelve. With that paired-down group of characters, I began furthering their stories, writing it all in segments and then eventually having them overlap more and more and creating a latticework by the end.

Your second novel, Prescription for a Superior Existence, is a first-person narrative. What’s the difference between writing a novel with a large cast of characters and one that’s essentially focused on one character?

With The Loss of Leon Meed, I really liked writing a big cast of characters. I loved adopting other voices and imagining personal histories. Even though it’s third person, a lot of it is free indirect discourse. I felt I was able to escape myself. I could not be me for three or four hours a day, which was a very nice furlough from myself. I loved it, and I tried to make the characters as different from me as possible. In contrast, Jack Smith in Prescription for a Superior Existence was a very easy character to write, for one, because his language is very similar to the language that I use when writing and thinking to myself. I didn’t have to invent a vernacular for him or do any of the ventriloquist stuff you need to do when you’re writing a character whose syntax and modes of expression are totally different from your own. Additionally, his voice seemed to lend itself better to the project of the book, which is all about conversion and unconversion, belief and then interruption of belief. He really vacillates back and forth throughout the book as the religion waxes and wanes in terms of being believable. To bring the reader through his stages of incredulity, it needed to be in first person.

Faith and religion are major themes in both of your novels.

Why the fascination?

I was raised without any traditional or even nontraditional religion. Both of my parents had grown up in something called the Church of Christ, which is extremely conservative and right-wing. It’s very literalist about the Bible. My parents had a terrible time in it, and their own spiritual journeys got a little strange. My dad became a Buddhist, and my mom became a Catholic mystic. That was very much a part of their lives, but they decided not to do with us what had been done to them, so they didn’t force anything on us or expose us to any religion. With Prescription for a Superior Existence, especially, I decided that it would be interesting if I took someone who, like me, had no religious reason to do anything in life, no compelling reason to live small or rein in his desires, and see what would happen if he were thrown into an anti-desire religion. That’s when I put together this Buddhism/Scientology/Christian Science religion, PASE. I liked putting that together. It’s fun to create your own religion, but I think it’s out of my system now.

So you won’t invent any more religions?

Probably not. I’m done with that for now.

a i m e e ’ s

Aimee LaBrie In graduate school, I took a nonfiction course taught by a woman who was (and still is) a very established and widely published New York writer (we’ll call her Brenda). Like her writing, her teaching style was brutal and painfully honest. It was clear from the start that she did not enjoy teaching. On the first day of class, she looked at all of us gathered hopefully around the conference table with our notebooks and pens and said flatly, “There will be no tears in this class. Anyone who cries fails.” I laughed. She glared at me, but didn’t go so far as to ban laughter, though I suspect she would have liked to.

Even though the class was painful, and I left it with paralytic writer’s block, I learned several things about writing nonfiction that still echo with me six years later.

Tell the truth, even if the truth is not pretty.

One of my favorite people in the workshop was an older man named Tom. Tom wasn’t the greatest writer, but he was upbeat and nice. Brenda hated nice.

When Tom turned in an essay about his wife dying of cancer, he ended it with a description of her final moments and how she witnessed angels rising from the corners of the room before taking her last few breaths. When we started the workshop, we were all reluctant to critique his piece, because, you know, poorly written or not, it was about his dead wife. Brenda did most of the talking. She said, “Darling, your wife did not really see trumpeting angels. She was high on morphine. SHE WAS HALLUCINATING!” She then related a story about her best friend’s death and how she spent her final moments. I won’t repeat it here, but it was horrifying and tragic and funny and real. That’s what she wanted: the

T i p s

WHAT I LEARNED IN WORKSHOP HELL

ugly truth. Not the world the way we wished it would be, but the world the way that it was—flawed and awful and sometimes beautiful.

“Why should we read this piece of crap?” In response to an essay I wrote about church summer camp, an essay I thought of as a funny, coming-of-age piece, Brenda said, “Send this to your mother.

She is the only one who has to read it.

Even if it bores her to tears, which it will.” She emphasized again and again that our stories were not automatically compelling to the rest of the world. We might find them fascinating because they happened to us, but in fact, most things we experienced had not only been explored ad nauseam, they had been written about by better writers.

You are responsible for everything—every description, every scene, every word. Brenda did not tolerate sloppy writing. Similes had to be sharp and accurate. “You write that he walked like ‘an old clown.’ What does this even mean? I’ll tell you what it’s like.

It’s like an example of lazy writing!” We were told to “kill all your little darlings,” a line of writing advice she borrowed from William Faulkner. This means that we had to ruthlessly slash anything precious, sentimental, over-written, or extraneous.

Though we might love a sentence or a description, if it didn’t fit into the whole piece, it was to be amputated for the greater good of the essay.

Know more than your reader. If you, as the writer, don’t know what you are trying to reveal about life or marriage or death, then how is your reader supposed to know? In other words, the writer must be smarter than the reader. That is the writer’s job. She advised us to save the stuff we did not yet understand for fervent journal writing and for our therapists—we were not to make our readers

puzzled through our confusion. To not have a clear sense of purpose and direction becomes the equivalent of a thirteen-year-old boy blithely describing his dream from the previous night at a church pot luck dinner. “And then I dreamt I was on a train speeding through a dark warm tunnel and when we got to the end, a volcano erupted, splatteing loads of lava all over the place.”

Know how you’re coming across as a narrator. This relates again to being in control of your material. In another one of our classes, Brenda started by saying, “Okay, what are we dealing with today? Oh, yes! We learned that Tom is a racist, Samantha hates bulimics, and Julie still feels guilty about touching herself down there.” We collectively cringed and avoided eye contact with Tom, Samantha, and Julie. But Brenda was right. She had boiled down the crux of each essay and also the core problem; none of the writers were aware how their voice had shaped them as narrators.

My friend Liz still shudders when she remembers the class. She told me that it has taken her years to muffle the sound of Brenda’s New York accent whenever she sits down to write. But Brenda was just as hard on herself—she described how all of her ex-husbands had tried to strangle her, and also how she couldn’t blame them. She despised self-pity, allowed none of it to creep into her stories. She suffered no illusions about who she was. She knew she was a bitch, but she didn’t care. The work, ultimately, was more important than what any of us thought of her. And when she did like something, she told us that too. One “good” from her meant more to me than pages of praise from any other teacher, because I knew that she meant it.

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p e t e r

d a b b e n e

TRIBUTARY “All art is but imitation of nature.”

(Seneca) “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” (Oscar Wilde)

I

16

f you asked me ten years ago if I thought my life would be like this, of course I would have said no.

Most likely, I’d have shown great disdain toward the idea of playing in what I would have then referred to as a “glorified cover band.”

Life is just a series of little decisions, though, and it goes from just trying to keep the dream alive until you get that legendary big break, to one day waking up and realizing that the only reason you’re still able to get paying gigs is that you’re playing someone else’s songs the exact same way they did three decades before.

It’d be different if the guys in the band we “tribute” were dead. Even if just the lead singer were dead, this whole endeavor would have more gravitas, and less of a cheap Chinese knock-off feel to it. A tribute band is more than just a cover band. But still, I wonder what I would have said about all this ten years ago.

Peeking out from backstage before the intro, I can see it’s a lighter crowd than usual tonight… I wonder why?

Still, lots of familiar faces out there, and not just the friends and family, either. We encourage repeat ticket buyers by offering a frequent concertgoer discount.

Hey, it’s a business, after all…

It’s easy to linger too long on the few new faces in the audience, those rare non-initiates who don’t already know the entire set list by heart. I always wonder how the new faces come to be here… and how long they’ll keep coming.

Tonight, there’s a lot on my mind, and it’s bleeding through my “tribute”

Blue Ribbon by B.J. Burton © 2008 persona.

I’m thinking about how I came to this point. And I’m wondering how much longer I’m going to do this.

Lots of people have Hollywood dreams, but I never did. I never wanted to be an actor—I wanted to be a rock star. And not “rock star” in the stupid way guys in suits use the term these days, referring to great athletes or prominent politicians or the standout salesman of the month, but the way it was in the

1970’s: real rock stars, all-out, admired for musicianship and creative credibility and yeah, maybe sometimes for the way they looked in tight jeans.

That’s what got me started—what would you call it? Envy? Jealousy? I wanted that life. I may not have seen much of the 70’s (born January 8, 1976) but I’ve got plenty of videos (bootleg and legit), plus tons of rock magazines from the era, that pretty much tell me how great it was.

My first attempts at stardom were in

t r i b u t a r y high school, singing and writing songs in various amateur rock bands and getting some attention from the girls, which only reinforced the dream. By graduation, I had a good band playing around me, but the Seattle scene had burned itself out and MTV seemed to play nothing but rap videos. The outlook for prospective rock stars was bleak.

All of the guys in the band went to local colleges except Wes, who became an electrician like his dad. The band trudged on, rehearsing regularly, playing gigs when we could get them. We played in front of talent scouts and agents, some of whom said to keep at it, most of whom said we were wasting our time. Then, seemingly overnight, four years had passed and it was time to make a decision.

Here’s some advice: never go into business with musicians if you can avoid it. Unfortunately, it’s a tough path to cir-

cumvent when the business you want into is making music. The guys and I made a ten-year pact after college. We said we’d stick it out that long—play anywhere, do anything, shun nine to five jobs, postpone marriage and kids, live together in a van if we had to—to be able to say we gave music our best shot.

If it didn’t work out after ten years, we’d be free to move on, no hard feelings. “At least we’ll have tried,” we told ourselves.

Of course, Wes got married a year later, and even though we had specifically addressed the possibility of marriage in our pact, even though we’d all said that if any of us did get married it still wouldn’t change things, it did. It wasn’t a Yoko Ono breaking up the band thing or anything like that, Wes just started caring a lot more about buying a house and having his own car than he did about the music. Being an electrician started as his “temporary career,” then became his

WARMINSTER

By Kathryn Pilles-Genaw The lot was stones and corners, rafters shafts of stars and certainty.

Here the cut-down pines remember circuitry and sap: warm boy, just love can drip like that, thick as plums and straight as parallel powerlines.

Kathryn Pilles-Genaw graduated with her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. She currently shares an efficiency in Philadelphia with six cats and two bicycles.

“backup career,” and finally just his career. He started to look at us as if we were dumb kids trying too hard to hold on to our childhoods.

Karin left me around that time, too.

She wanted a “normal life,” whatever that is. I loved her, but everyone knows pursuing your dream requires sacrifices.

So I marked that one down on my list of sacrifices made, having convinced myself that when the list grew long enough, the rock gods would deem me worthy of some serious good fortune to even up the scales.

Wes left the band six months later.

We got another drummer, but the number of venues booking live talent was dwindling in favor of DJs and other poor man’s substitutes. At the gigs we did get, the owners would request we not play our own songs. “Nothing against you guys,” they’d say, “it’s just that people want music they know, stuff they’re

SAVE

THE DATE

2nd Rosemont Writers' Retreat

June 12-14 Weekend Intensive Retreat

June 14-20 Week-Long Retreat For more information, please email Carla Spataro at

Carla@philadelphiastories.org

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t r i b u t a r y comfortable with.”

I don’t remember whose idea it was to go from a band that did covers of lots of different groups’ songs, to a tribute band that focused on only one group. It wasn’t my idea, I know that. But after playing covers almost exclusively for six months, the idea of a tribute band no longer seemed repugnant. On the contrary, it seemed like sort of a higher calling. We debated which band we should focus on, based on which bands we liked, their popularity, whether they were still actively touring, who I sounded like, who we looked like, et cetera.

That’s how it started.

That was almost ten years ago.

We take the stage and the show begins, the same way it always does. My mind begins to wander, even as I’m singing. Tonight’s another small club, and normally the size of the venue, or the audience, doesn’t affect me much because it’s never really “me” on stage.

Rather, it’s me as Steve Smith, lead singer for the original—some would say real— band, a man with the poise, swagger, and feathered hair of someone who knows he’s on top of the world circa 1976, touring in support of a record that had already gone gold and showed no signs of stopping there. But tonight the transformation is incomplete, and my selfconfidence is flagging.

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Taking Stock by Suzanne Comer © 2008

Lack of respect is the bane of a tribute band’s existence, and unless you keep your emotional armor well oiled and polished, it can lead to these occasional crises of confidence. We in the tribute biz catch flak from both sides—the highminded classical and jazz aficionados who believe the music we play is too unsophisticated to be taken seriously, and the rock fans who feel that if you’re not writing your own stuff, you’re not being “authentic.” A tribute band is nothing if not authentic, from using vintage, precisely tuned instruments to matching just the right colors on the stage backdrop.

Here’s my question—why do people think that being one of seventy orchestra members in black suits and starched collars playing Beethoven or Bach as interpreted through the cracked perceptions of some weird-haired conductor is a noble profession, while being one of five members of a band who play popular music nearly identically to the original performances is cause for career embarrassment? Maybe our music isn’t as intricate, but pick any five members of that orchestra and let them go head to head against us in a crowded bar, and we’ll see who the people like better.

Mine is as disciplined a vocation as any—for two hours, I respond to stimuli not as I, Larry Candela, would, but as Steve Smith did. I say nothing that he did not say to his audience. Every stutter he uttered, every outfit he fit out, it’s all been corroborated, triple-checked for accuracy. Some would call this obsessive, but I call it dedication, what the fans deserve. I’ve rehearsed every move until its part of who I am. I am channeling the being of someone else. I am becoming someone else. And the audience wants me to be Steve Smith so badly that it helps me to forget I’m not really him. It’s a mutual suspension of disbelief.

This, then, is the difference between a tribute band and a band that just does covers. To quote The Who (or one of the major Who tribute bands, The What or Who’s Best or Behind Blue Eyes): “I’m

p e t e r a substitute for another man.”

If I remember correctly from my college philosophy classes, Plato and Aristotle both acknowledged all art as imitation. The difference is that Plato thought this was a bad thing, while Aristotle was a little more open-minded.

Sometimes during our performances, I picture Aristotle in the audience, robed and sandaled, rocking out.

“Congratulations to our manager, who just tied the knot recently. In his honor, this is a song called ‘Knotty Problems.’” I hear myself make the introduction— perfectly, spot-on. The marriage in question happened almost thirty years ago, joining two people none of us knew then or now, but the reference was an integral part of that original concert, so it had to be used.

If, for the serious music listener, discovering a new band is like falling in love (and I would say that it is), then joining a tribute band is a lot like getting married.

But you’re not marrying the other members of the band—you’re marrying the music. It’s a serious commitment, a decision to focus all your energies on a finite, limited body of work. And if joining a tribute band is like getting married, you could say I’m like the kid you went to school with who got married really young.

Maintaining one band as your favorite for ten, and even twenty years is a difficult thing. You have to sort of delude yourself, put blinders on so as not to fully notice new and undiscovered music that comes across your path.

Repetition has to be made comforting

d a b b e n e

to look for something better. Finally, you settle down with one band designated as your favorite. Like marriage, sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.

There are the couples in the newspaper celebrating 50th and 60th wedding anniversaries, their photos positioned (not unintentionally) right between the wedding announcements on one side and the obituaries on the other. Then there are the ugly divorces—the ones that are rarely announced in the newspaper, even though that’s what people really want to read about. You get older and you change, but the music always sounds the same, perfectly recorded, perfectly…static. You grow apart. You split up. It happens all the time.

Ten years can pass in a happy blur, or it can just be the prelude to a bitter parting of the ways. But every person in a tribute band, like every married person, harbors some doubts.

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if you made the right decision. Should you have waited a little longer, seen what other opportunities arose, not settled down just yet—how might things have been different?

Gold Skirt by Janine Kilty © 2008 To keep the marriage alive, sometimes you have to beat down in the throes of infatuation when some those doubts till they recede into the other band (or woman) will steal your dark holes where they hide. But someattention. But it’s normal to bounce times, like tonight, it seems like a giant around like this until, at some point, you game of whack-a-mole, and for every become tired of bouncing around. You’re uncertainty you manage to beat down, less interested in searching for new two more pop up in its place. music (dating), and the work of staying informed on the latest bands gets crowdI’m off tonight. It’s shaken me, ed out in favor of more practical day-tobecause it’s been so long since I made a day demands. The stuff you’ve been lismistake, but tonight’s error was so minor tening to becomes very… comfortable. it’s likely no one will notice, not even the You can’t imagine anything better, or other guys in the band. See, I told the maybe you just can’t imagine continuing instead of sleep inducing. You need to constantly reassess, search for new meaning in the familiar.

Both love and music start with infatuation, when you’ll want nothing but to listen to that one band or be around that one person. Then the sheen starts to fade, and you either discover new layers of interest or you break up and search for something better. Sometimes you’re still

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t r i b u t a r y crowd “thanks,” but Steve Smith never said “thanks,” he always said “thank you.” I wonder, is that just me being lazy? Or could it be something more?

Ten years to become a rock star. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about, the only thing I’ve ever really tried for and failed.

But what’s success or failure? Aren’t those terms subject to interpretation?

Does it really have to be all or nothing?

Isn’t there room for small successes and minor failures?

Is discipline a bad thing, carried to this extent? Have I stifled my creativity, or simply found a different way to embrace it? Is ten years too much time to give a dream, or not enough? Who’s to decide? What if the person who has to decide doesn’t know the answers?

The keyboard solo, “Friday Night Rondo,” ends, and as we start the next song, “Reflections,” I slip back into my role easily, like a favorite concert tee. A gesture here, a wink there. The fans are eating it up. The weird thing is I really don’t care. I’ve realized I don’t do this for the fans, despite what I said earlier. That was just bravado, false nobility to conceal the truth: I need them. I require an audience, because it’s part of the rock star package—without them, the dream dies.

This all could end at any time. More

than likely, it will end soon, since the fans that come to our shows are getting too old to stand at a concert for two hours.

They’d rather buy one of the DVD recordings of our shows ($15 apiece) and relax on their couch at home. There are some younger people who come— curiosity seekers, or children (and grandchildren) of fans. But eventually they’ll disappear, too.

I have to make a decision, a big decision—that’s what I’ve decided. I can’t just drift along any more. I’ll either end this now on my terms, or continue, with a new understanding of why I do it.

It’s important that I get this right… and for this, there is no script to memorize, no notes to study, no DVD to reference.

When you stop and look back like this, all of those earlier, seemingly unimportant decisions seem so natural, like this was the way it was all supposed to happen, just one moment flowing into the next, steadily moving you along like a stick in a stream.

The thing about being a stick in a narrow, twisty stream, though, is that you rarely see what’s ahead. You get knocked around, sometimes doing headers off the rocks, but you just keep moving forward. The stream could dry up a

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mile down the road, leaving you stuck somewhere, or it could open up to whole new, expansive body of water. You just don’t know till you get there.

“Reflections” ends. The mistake I made earlier has my head swirling, but strangely, I feel almost giddy. I grip the microphone tightly, ready to deliver the prescribed between-song banter, and I look out over the audience. No, not over the audience. At the audience.

It’s a different vibe now, a scary one, and I can feel myself tightening up. I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I suspect this might be pretty similar. Do I really want to do this?

“My name is Larry Candela, and I play in a tribute band.”

Steve Smith never said that, but I just did. It may not be authentic, but it’s real.

I tell them everything, a briefer version of what I’ve said here. Some people in the crowd aren’t happy—I’ve broken the spell, violated the sacred trust between tribute performer and audience.

But soon there comes a connection, a kind I’ve never had before, like I’ve suddenly become transparent right there on stage. It’s terrifying, but at the same time liberating, freeing me of the restrictions I’ve placed on myself these past ten years. It’s a pretty magical experience. I wonder if rock stars ever get to feel something like this. Probably not.

You might think it sad that the major decision of my life thus far is to continue what some would call living someone else’s life. But in the end, it’s my dream.

And somewhere between the truth of dreams and the delusion of fantasies, reality lies.

So the dream lives on, albeit in slightly altered form.

Peter Dabbene is a Hamilton, New Jersey-based writer. His poetry has been featured in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Zillah, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Apple Valley Review, and more. He has also published two story collections, Prime Movements and Glossolalia, as well as a novel, Mister Dreyfus’ Demons.

He is currently writing a graphic novel, called Ark, which will be published in 2009.

c h r i s t i n a

d e l i a

THE ROBBERY

T

odd steals things. He takes tips off wet diner tables, jerks the bills from underneath the water glass you purposefully placed over

them.

You say, “Don’t do that,” but your voice is passive and no match for his muscles. He has worked jobs that scare you, jobs where he has shoved people out of nightclubs and menaced trees with axes. He is the only wayward art school lumberjack you have ever met, and it is your life’s mission to concoct his pancake piles.

He went by “Toad” during his cover band years. Seventeen reinterpretations of the same Quiet Riot song later, here you are. Toad’s band was The John Goodman Arachnophobia Experience. Toad likes movies where insects best humans.

“Molly,” he says, “you relax.” Your name is not Molly, but that is Todd’s definition of a little baby girl name. Molly wants an ice cream cone, don’t she? Go ahead, Molly, tell the big badass manager that our man stole an orange. You are convinced he refers to himself as “our man” to let you know there are other morons like you, who let

SEA LEGS

By Scott Hammer You never hear the people who jump.

Their steps echo on decks above in consonants spit after splash.

It isn’t a language you study but frays of split rope, splinters and simple carving in cedar, where a blade anchored is pulled.

It’s silence, finally when the ship tosses its ghosts: drying watermarks, no letters of intent.

The dead, you guess, were once cast aside in lungsfull.

Maybe you trace tissue to the edge to find forgotten tongue and speak to complete the fragment.

Scott Hammer’s other poems have appeared in magazines such as Poet Lore, Lungfull!, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and Freefall. He teaches English at Bodine High School for International Affairs in Philadelphia.

him sleep in your bed after watching him go through your purse. You are convinced that he belongs mostly to himself, while you have the submissive misfortune of being his. What happened to your feminist theory textbooks? Todd sold them. What did he do with the money? Todd bought pills. Why did he?

Don’t question our man!

So you make do: • You stop keeping a diary after Todd sells it on EBay. • Now at restaurants you get up to go to the bathroom before he makes a scene.

• On the occasion you find another woman in your shower, you say, “Hey there.”

• Your friends pity you and this makes you cry; that people think you are worthy of pity.

• You remember that you are alive, so you work with this fact.

You are making a plan to hit yourself out of the park, like a home run, but first you need money. He keeps taking yours, and you are afraid of him. Not just because he talks to himself in the kitchen when he thinks you’re sleeping, but also because he talks to himself while hovering over your bed when he thinks you’re sleeping.

He won’t see a doctor, any kind of doctor. The only way you’ll see a doctor is if you get pregnant with Todd Junior.

Yes, you are on the pill, but what if? You keep your legs closed so tightly at night your muscles ache.

Our man is a bully. Our man is a punk.

You have nowhere to go. There is a part of you that finds comfort in this: Living in the present means you have nowhere else to go. Once in a while your mind clears and you feel like a Buddhist, which is way cooler than feeling like a victim.

21

t h e

r o b b e r y

You are not fighting back, because you are a planner. Little outbursts will have him suspecting. You don’t want to awaken his inner Toad. You pack bras and panties in small, yellow supermarket bags and toss them in the trunk of your car. Soon you will have the balls, no the breasts to pack the big-ticket items: sweaters, a pair of dress slacks.

Now he wants to get on your medical insurance. The two of you should get married. Molly, there’s nothing I wouldn’t steal for you, he says.

You thank him for his proposal, and take a deep breath. Somewhere beneath the curves of your female form, probably above the hips, is a star. It’s kind of like a soul, but a little less passive. It’s a Holy Spirit divine inner compass, and it’s telling you, get the hell out into the universe, darling! Make something of this flesh gift, this life.

Christina Delia received her BFA in Writing for Film and Television from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia. Her work can be found in the anthologies In One Year and Out The Other (Pocket books) and Random Acts of Malice: The Best of Happy Woman Magazine. She also writes the satirical wedding advice column “Bride Dish with Mags & Dags” for Happy Woman Magazine. Christina currently resides in central New Jersey with her husband, Robert.

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