Just to be moving, I get to my feet, walk over to the sink, and throw up. I turn on the faucet and splash a handful of water across my face. A sudden sense of dread crawls along my spine. I let my left hand drop to the .45 strapped to my leg.
A man stopped at the light: “Why do you hate them all?”
The organizer said, “Some are corrupt, some quietly complicit. Both are bad.”
Three minutes later: “Why don’t you care about law and order?”
What I should have emailed him back was that Norman Mailer, who ought to know, says, “There are four stages of marriage, first the romance, then the marriage itself, then children, then the divorce without which no man can truly understand a woman.” What I should have said to him was … a thing like this is hard on everyone involved.
There was no getting around it. Everyone was old. The gay writing group, Chicago Scribes, had started in 1980 and was now the oldest, continuously running gay workshop and publishing outlet in the country.
Jaley was silent. For a moment, Cynth thought she had lost her caller, and, therefore, the entire gimmick—and Jaley's punishment for being twenty-one, skinny, and fuckable—but she could see the line was still live.
"He'd offer a night with her to any man who'd stake him," the Painter resumed, "or, if it had come his turn to match a raise and be was light, he would ask Jake the dealer how much he would stake him to for a piece of his old lady."
It seemed better not to say I ended up with nearly nothing after the ’08 crash. But the reality was that he couldn’t afford the home she owned. That wasn’t something he would willingly admit. Best not to talk about the wife or the children, either, since none of that was happy conversation.
“I got lost a few times trying to find the place,” it was a lie. I’d stood outside the main gates smoking and pacing back and forth, reading graffiti on brick walls for over forty-five minutes before I’d finally entered the small clinical hospital.
She unlocks it, enters the room, and after soothing the woman by telling her that she has been sent by her husband, leans to whisper her true identity in the woman's ear and shoots her in the temple. One bullet, execution style.
The warden’s eyes darted between the man strapped in the chair and a mirror that took most of one wall, which he and everyone else knew was not really a mirror, but it acted as mirrors do and therefore presented a reflection.
What would you do if I told you there was a city, once upon a time, where the lake is? That city was once very much alive, you know, and teeming with people…and I know, because I was one of them.
It was a dark and stormy noon. Lightning struck the front door. It flamed and crumbled to ash. In he walked. He towered, he stuck out his lower lip, he reached out a surprisingly small hand with gilt fingertips. His blond pompadour obscured his eyes.
I know the names Nelson gives me. Sissy, crybaby, freak, chicken, retard. To a twelve-year-old’s mind, these words are knives waiting to be taken from whatever dark drawer in which they live.
It won’t go away; just yesterday the lobotomy became an semi-elected surgery. I read it in Life. Did I tell you Life is the only secular magazine the sisters will subscribe to? Someday I’d like to be on the cover of Life. I confess, it’s just another wandering thought.
The house was still crawling with bodies, most of them drunk or high or both, some brimming with a dogged lust. A couple freaks had crashed the party and were being tolerated on account of the fact that they'd come bearing weed.
The train rattled on and they sometimes looked out of their windows. And sometimes they would see themselves and sometimes they would see themselves looking at themselves at themselves.
Thomas Bulfinch, whose collections of ancient myths remained the popular standard in the United States for more than a century until the 1942 publication of Edith Hamilton’s Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, was an anti-homosexual activist as well as a lifelong bachelor. Was he in fact a closeted gay man who sought to hide behind a door of homophobic zeal?
He sat and he watched the news, its vulpine vulgarity and shouting enough to make anyone feel that inward anger, the kind housed sometimes in the arms, sometimes the head, sometimes both.
So here I was in a grubby med-center with at least a season ending injury, probably a career sign off, with no ideas for the future. I didn’t have a nest egg. I never managed to save, despite a meager life style. I was an ancient journeyman in a young profession, without name or fame that could be traded in for civilian security.
“In that silent spooky-looky sort of way you have. You’re going to write about my affair with that film producer, aren’t you? And all those actresses. You’re going to plunder the stories I’ve told you about my life to turn into fiction.”
Almost all the birds dreaded leaving Canada to fly across America this year. The cold-loving northern cardinals and the blue jays hovered near the suet, relieved they wouldn’t be making the long journey.
When Adam comes into the office no one talks to him, even though he's the boss. They watch him, surreptitiously from the corners of their eyes as if expecting to see him unzip his pants and urinate on the carpet.
The priest receives them (over) heartily and offers them food and warmth. When they get inside the high-arched candle-lit room, the priest turns into a witch and nails the little girl to the wall.
Stratemeyer hired generations of hacks. They wrote under pseudonyms known to millions of children. The kids pictured these authors’ handsome faces, imagined their happy, fulfilled lives. The pseudonyms weren’t pen-names. Those are for individuals. What Stratemeyer pioneered was the house name.
You are not even an insect evading a predator. Instead, you sit on the floor breathing, because really there is no choice in this life but to allow air in and out of your lungs thousands of times an hour.
I am a ghost in your world. I have no memory, no definable past. All my potential futures will become manifest.
I hesitated, these guys had reputations, and I'd almost gone to jail with them before behind some failed purse snatching caper, and, there was Skillet, one of his eyes glared straight at me, the other one gazed above my head.
The noise. It was louder here. No comparison. The rattling, the crashing, the overwhelming dissonant vibration that was nothing like white noise, no, nothing like a relaxing sound one would put on to study, to sleep to…
With a rifle in his hands, he calmly surveyed the horizon. Squinting in the appropriate manner, he was aware of how he looked. Last night’s bug bites were long forgotten. The time was not long after noon, and he was on the track of his kill.
There was no opportunity to have a black friend in my home town. Now, I noticed African-Americans at the university. Or I noticed them in order to stay away from them. They were different from me. That’s what I thought.
As the guards pry his fingers from Van’s arm, the Giggler begins hooting more intensely. By the time they’ve dragged him through the doorway it’s just screaming.
“Pull a few of your buddies out of the drink with a fish gaff, and the gung-ho stuff is never the same... Smell the beaches the day after a landing,” he added, his speech slow, seemingly labored, “before the burial details go to work.”
I can forgive myself for ordering the remote, faceless killing of the enemy. But I will never, repeat, never forgive myself for turning these kids, math geeks and gear heads, into killers. Not for this war, anyway.
Like – I didn’t know that the “sensible” degrees weren’t much better for being “marketable”….that since the Wall Street crash, most companies got wise to the fact that they could underpay everybody, hire part-time, withhold benefits.
The scab-beggar steps to me on the street and asks for some dry wounds. He can see that my arm is full of crusty layers and he's already eying a big wound on my elbow, the one I wanted to buy a pack of smokes with.
Why couldn’t people see the country growing? See the unemployed disappearing along with the refugees. There was less crime, no abortion, prayers in schools and the wall around America was one of the wonders of the modern world, it outshone China´s wall.
Beginning with appeals to authority, we tend to believe we were born because we exist, we’re be(ing) here now and also, everyone knows you can’t have a chicken without an egg. But for some reason, being born is not always enough. You need more proof than that.
He had been laughing it up with cronies about a cross burning on a young Black woman’s family farm, when we overheard him say: “I want to split that dark oak.”
Ideas have no groove. You don’t dance to them, you hustle. When someone says you shall have no more than your share (or less) and they put that in place, you are forced to get up and go.
And what difference does it make if a man gets drunk and takes his pet goat for a walk anyway? This is America, the Land of the Free, and you would think a man should be able to drink a little and fall in a ditch without some busybody calling the cops on him.
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