STORIES BY MICHAEL GIGANDET
THIS IS NOT MY HAND. I DON'T HAVE A PEN LIKE THAT EITHER.
STORIES BY MICHAEL GIGANDET
THIS IS NOT MY HAND. I DON'T HAVE A PEN LIKE THAT EITHER.
Welcome
The short stories here have previously appeared in online and print magazines. Writing is my hobby. I hope you enjoy them. TO FIND A PARTICULAR STORY: These stories are organized by category. They are listed in the order they appear either with a hyperlink to the story or in print if there is no electronic copy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
MISCELLANEOUS ODD STORIES
The first short story I ever wrote was about a singing Tarzan who was incompetent in the ways of jungle living. I met Tarzan once. He gave me the picture in that section. The stories in this category are often odd.
"COMPROMISE"
"SMILE FOR ME TODAY"
"I SAW IT COMING"
"TODAY, WE BURIED POOR OSCAR"
"WHEN DO I GET TO LAUGH"
"THE END OF THE TOWN DOG"
"THE SOLDIER WHO LOVED DOGS"
"THE POTEETE FAMILY AND DRIVER"
"A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE IN PIRTLEVILLE"
"THE ATHEIST"
"AN ARTILLERY DUEL IN THE DOMESTIC WAR"
"HER BEST FRIENDS, THE PARAKEETS"
"KIDS THESE DAYS"
MY FRIEND JIMMY
Every adolescent boy grew up with a friend like my friend Jimmy. Knowledgeable in all things, confident in himself, always surprised when things don’t turn out as expected.
"HOW TO FIGHT KUDZU"
"SEX EDUCATION ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON"
"HOW TO BUILD AND FIRE"
"SKIPPER ATTACKS THE MAN OF NATURE"
"OPERATION CUPID UNFOLDS"
MARTIN BROOKS
Martin Brooks, 60-something and recently widowed, has retired from his law practice and retreated to his farm where he spends his days reading, gardening and listening to music. For the first time in his life, he has the luxury of time to reflect on his life, wrestle with his memories and engage the opportunities life thrusts his way although his grown children and society expect him to withdraw and disappear.
"PEACHES"
"THE MATTER OF THE SPANISH OFFICER'S SWORD"
"I LIVED'
"THE HUNTERS"
"CARNATIONS"
"THE STEPFATHER"
"THE REALITY OF FREE STUFF"
"THE FIRST KISS"
"THE LIFEGUARD"
"THE LAST CHRISTMAS"
"FLOATING: THE ART OF MEDITATION WHILE DODGING FRUIT"
"THE MUSIC LOVER"
UNUSUAL PEOPLE
Unusual people make a boorish world more tolerable.
"MR. JORDAN PARKS HIS CAR"
"MOTHER STREET"
"MILLIE CLARK, PORTRAIT PAINTER"
"THE WRECK OF SKEETER'S BEER CAVE"
LAWYERING
The characters in these stories are caricatures of lawyers I’ve known. I have just exaggerated them a bit.
ESSAYS AND LETTER STORIES
Everything, every word you utter or write, is fiction if you think about it.
"ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN"
"HOW I DISPLEASED THE VEGANS"
I. MISCELLANEOUS ODD STORIES
INTRODUCTION
The first short story I ever wrote was about a singing Tarzan who was incompetent in the ways of jungle living. I met Tarzan once. He gave me this picture. The stories in this category are often odd.
COMPROMISE
A father deals with the loss of his daughter's pet.
This story was published on Feb. 1, 2023 by Flash Fiction Magazine and in a podcast on March 19, 2023. The story won Second Place in the magazine’s writing contest. It was republished online on 3/22/24 in Churches, Children and Daddies magazine and printed in V. 348 "Pandora's Box" on 8/1/24. The story was reprinted again in CC&D's May-August 2024 anthologies "The Lives We Deserve" and "Insurrection".
SMILE FOR ME TODAY
An old man tries to remember a woman.
This story was published Dec. 22, 2023 online in Compass Rose magazine.
I SAW IT COMING
A witch magician should have known this would happen.
This story dated 4/5/22 appeared in Bending Genres, Issue 26 6/7/22.
Misc . Odd Stories page 2
TODAY WE BURIED POOR OSCAR
Everybody is entitled to a funeral.
This story appeared in the 3/2/24 issue of Cafe Lit UK online.
WHEN DO I GET TO LAUGH
Even the universe gets to laugh at you.
This story appeared in the 10/27/22 issue of Cafe Lit UK online.
THE END OF THE TOWN DOG
A stray dog becomes everyone's pet.
This story appeared in the 10/2/22 issue of Literary Yard magazine.
THE SOLDIER WHO LOVED DOGS
Who doesn't love dogs?
This story appeared in the 3/8/23 issue of Every Writers Resource.
THE POTEETE FAMILY AND DRIVER
Guilt, especially undeserved guilt, is a terrible burden.
This story appeared in Issue 1 of Winged Penny magazine in the fall of 2023.
A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE IN PIRTLEVILLE
Fantasy, especially at Christmas, has its place, but reality is more interesting.
This story appeared online 12/27/23 on ReedsyPrompts online.
MISC. ODD STORIES page 3
THE ATHEIST
How does one become an atheist?
The story appeared in the 10/25/21 online issue of Transfigured Lit.
AN ARTILLERY DUEL IN THE DOMESTIC WAR
Children as collateral damage.
This story appeared in the 1/23/22 online issue of Fewer Than 500.
HER BEST FRIENDS, THE PARAKEETS
The little girl liked her mother’s parakeets. They sang happy songs to her from their cage high above her head.
She was not old enough to go to school, and because she and her mother lived in an old farmhouse in the country there were no other children nearby to play with. Her mother never spoke to her in more than three words at a time, and those words did not count as conversation. The birds were her only friends. Their names were Petey, Rosie, Winnie and Minnie, and each one of them was a different blend of colors with one sheen being more dominant so that she could easily tell them apart.
Petey, the shiny blue one, was the friendliest of the bunch. He never pecked at her hand when she reached into the cage while standing on top of the kitchen counter. Petey liked the way she rubbed her finger down the back of his head to his tail. The little girl could tell because he cooed and whistled while she petted him. “You are my especialist friend,” she would tell him.
The others flapped their wings and thrashed around the cage whenever she approached the cage. Her mother never let her pet the birds, so she had to wait until her mother took her afternoon nap after drinking too much of her medicine.
“Don’t be afraid,” she told the birds, but still they fluttered, and little feathers would float from the cage until she trapped them. Gently holding their wings to their sides in her fist, her small fingers cradling the birds like a rib cage, she withdrew them from the cage and rubbed the back of their heads with her finger. She pretended that they were eggs so she would not grip them too hard.
“See,” she said. “I’m not hurting you.”
On the day she gave them a bath she held them under the kitchen faucet until they stopped squirming. After she lathered them with soap and rinsed them, she wrapped them in a paper towel like mummies to keep them from flying away and arranged them side by side on the counter to dry.
She walked to her mother’s bedroom and stood at the door, listening to the fan whir, stirring the summer air over her mother collapsed on the bed. “Mommy,” she said but not loud enough to wake her.
When the little girl came back to the kitchen the birds were lifeless, their eyes hooded, vacant.
She picked up Petey, kissed him and said, “I will always love you.”
THIS STORY APPEARED QUARENCIA PRESS’ WINTER ANTHOLOGY IN JANUARY 2023.
KIDS THESE DAYS
Psychopath or just misunderstood? This story appeared 3/28/24 in Issue 22 of Wink Writers In The Know".
OCCASIONS LIKE THIS
Consider my position. I’m responsible for everything, all of it. Everybody she and I know will tell you it’s my fault. Our mothers would if they knew about it, and her friends always said I was too this or too that depending on which one you asked and the time of day, so they wouldn’t even have to think about it. Everybody knows so much, and not a single one of these people could tell me how I’m supposed to act about it.
I thought about buying her flowers, but what would I do with them while she’s having the abortion? I’d look silly sitting here in a lobby full of women holding a bouquet. There has to be a way to do everything right if you know what it is.
We sit silently in two chairs next to the front door like we could get out of there quick if we changed our minds. I’m not sure what there is for us to escape to since she said she didn’t want to get married, which was sobering news to me since I thought I had something to offer her.
Maybe she blames me to.
They call her name, and we stand up to meet the nurse with her wheelchair.
“Do you want…” I start to ask.
“What?!” She really isn’t asking me anything.
“I thought I might come back there with you.”
She just looks at me.
“That’s not allowed,” the nurse says and wheels her down a long corridor with lights as sterile as sunlight.
That’s not such a stupid question if you think about it. They let expectant fathers hold their wives’ hands when babies are being born. Don’t women need support on occasions like this from somebody who cares about them? She will cry again. I do know that.
The image of me sitting next to her bed holding her hand with a bouquet of flowers in the other hand floats up in my brain and makes me feel ridiculous standing there in the middle of the lobby with everybody watching to see what I do next.
Our seats are taken, and I have to decide which woman there dislikes me the least when I choose a seat. Nobody looks happy to be here on a Friday morning.
“There’s a seat!” the receptionist blares at me in the quiet, and I go to where she is pointing and sit next to somebody’s grandmother who at least hints at a smile when I sit down.
I do know this…I’m not going to make eye contact with anybody. That’s the main thing. I’ll try to stare at the floor.
We wait. I could pretend to be reading one of their magazines, but then I’d have to stand up and get it off the coffee table, and everybody would look at me like ‘You’re actually going to read?’ Being the only guy here I’ve been glowered at enough. Besides, reading seems like a coarse thing to do now, especially in this lifeless place where the sound of me turning a page would be heard across the lobby.
Lots of mothers with their daughters here, and I think they’ve all managed a glance at me. Maybe they’re thinking ‘He’s the guy. That’s him’. How could they know that? I could be her brother or gay friend who came along as her driver.
She likes flowers, but what would I write on the card that comes with them? You could open any etiquette book in the world, and it would tell you every occasion when flowers were the right thing, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, but something like this won’t be in one of their books, not a single one.
Female voices come down the hallway, murmurs really. I can’t tell if they are comforting voices or voices sharing weekend plans. I wonder if anyone will hold her hand if she cries, and I want to stand up because it doesn’t seem right to sit.
I could get right up and walk out of this place; just call her mother and tell her to come pick up her daughter. I could drop out of school, enlist in the Army and never come back to this town, never see anybody I knew here again for as long as I live. Would I feel worse about doing that than I already feel?
I can hear the murmuring of women again. This wasn’t easy for her, and I wonder if it’s all crashing down on her now while I sit out here entertaining the idea of fleeing from her.
There’s no shortage of people who’ll tell you what to do about an unwanted pregnancy. People who know everything are part of the human condition, lesser people you tolerate because you have to. If this isn’t a big deal then why did she cry on the way here? Just how shallow a human being do you have to be to consider this unimportant? I didn’t spend a semester studying T.S. Elliot to not recognize a gut punch to the soul when I receive one. How do you incorporate this into your world view?
A nurse wheels her out in a wheelchair, and I stand up, and she tells me we need to stop at the store and buy sanitary napkins.
“Do you have any money?” she asks.
“Yes.” I said it loud so my new friends here in the lobby will know I’m not a bum.
For a moment none of us moves. “Are you okay?” I ask.
She ignores me, and I’m thinking I’ll get the flowers too, and she can throw them at me if she doesn’t want them.
This is a start, me making some kind of start on what comes after.
THIS STORY APPEARS IN THE WRITERS' JOURNAL "LIVE AND LEARN' DEC.1, 2024.
SPACE
SPACE
MY FRIEND JIMMY
BEST FRIENDS
Every adolescent boy grew up with a friend like my friend Jimmy. Knowledgeable in all things, confident in himself, always surprised when things don’t turn out as expected.
HOW TO FIGHT KUDZU
Persistent problems require imaginative solutions, but beware of the unintended consequences. This story appeared in the 2/28/20 online issue of the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
SEX EDUCATION ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON
This actually happened. There was a real Jimmy. I've often wondered what happened to his mother. This story appeared in Panoplyzine 1/6/23 online.
HOW TO BUILD A FIRE
“Most people think burning a brush pile is easy,” Jimmy said. “Just splash around some accelerant and put a match to it.”
We’d just finished clearing some ground next to his grandmother’s apple orchard so she could expand her vegetable garden next Spring, a job the sweet old lady described as “just fittin’ for two 16 year old boys with too much time on their hands.”
“You know how city people are.” Jimmy pulled a wad of red rag out of his jeans and scrubbed his face. “Always rushing and missin’ life’s mysteries.”
It was a hot day, one of those July afternoons in Tennessee when the air is so still insects refuse to fly in it. Our shirts stuck to our chests and backs with sweat. Whenever we stopped moving, the farm cats swirled around our feet. The dogs sprawled in the dust next to the barn like the air had been let out of them and they’d gone flat. It gets so dry in Tennessee in the middle of the summer that the grass turns brown and hibernates. A lot of people think it’s dead, but it’s just sleeping till the droughty part of the summer passes. The grass had shrivelled into spider-like sprouts with the dirt showing between.
“No, no, eskimio,” Jimmy said. “The key to a good fire is in the building of your burn pile in the first place. A good fire like this is a work of art…or at least engineering. It must be created.”
I bet we made a hundred trips dragging the shrubs, mainly briars, and saplings to the clearing where our rising mountain of brush soon grew as tall and conical as a Plains Indian’s teepee. We’d hacked, snatched and torn off the shrubs and trees near to the ground leaving stumps and stubs (or “stobs” if you live in middle Tennessee) across the clearing like the shattered stubble in no-man’s land on a European battlefield.
More than half of the saplings we’d cut down were scrubby cedar trees, what my uncle called a working man’s Christmas tree. The sun baked the needles until the tar and sap oozed out into sticky, amber glass beads. Soap wouldn’t get that gooey mess off your hands; the tar resin would have to be rubbed off, and even then you wouldn’t get it all even with turpentine. The smell was so pungent it stung the inside of my nostrils and opened my sinuses like menthol until they started running.
“This smells like the bathrooms when my mother cleaned them,” I said, watching Jimmy rearrange some fronds I had already stacked. “This cedar ought to burn well.”
“Maybe.” Jimmy’s tone suggested he had superior insight into the subtleties of successful trash pile burning and would reveal them if necessary.
Ever since we were kids together, my contributions to our projects were always respectfully listened to, but I always knew Jimmy was thinking two steps ahead of me. “I’m afraid that this cedar has wilted and packed down too tight. Got to get some air in there.”
We stabbed small sticks of pine into the pile from different angles as if it were a giant pin cushion.
“These kindling sticks will burn more quickly than the rest of this sappy brush, and these holes will let the fire breathe,” Jimmy said. “In the fire business, oxygen is fuel.”
Next, we wadded sheets of old newspaper into balls the size of bowling balls and shoved them into the sides of the pyramid at different angles. Grandma Emma never threw away her newspaper, preserving these records of current events in stacks along the sides of the back porch so that you walked in a narrow path between them like a WWI trench. She would never run out of stuffing for packages and wrapping paper. We used a month’s worth of news in our burn pile.
I felt the balls of dried newsprint crunch and compact even more as I shoved them elbow deep into the branches and shrubbery fronds.
“I don’t care what people say, you got to have a good accelerant to start a real fire,” Jimmy said. “Lots of people use kerosene, but you practically have to stand there holding a match to it just to get it going. Other people use charcoal fluid, but that just gives you a flash and goes out.”
I nodded.
“Gasoline is okay if you are experienced in these things,” Jimmy said, implying that he was experienced. “But you are looking at a man who has possession of some white gas.” He held up a battered, red gas can chest high in case I doubted his word and looked at me like he expected me to applaud. I was afraid to ask what white gas was, but I knew he would explain anyway.
Jimmy and his father built and flew model airplanes, and the small engines on those models required a refined, higher octane gasoline which is highly flammable. White gas.
“This gas has probably got some condensation in it since it has been sitting in a corner of our garage awhile, so we will have to use a lot of it. The trick is to douse it around evenly.” Jimmy splashed the gasoline up and down the pile clockwise and then counterclockwise until he had satisfied himself that there was enough accelerant to get what he called a “good burn going.”
Not even the core of our teepee of limbs went ignored.
Holding the can high above his head, Jimmy poured the rest down the center of the pile. The can gurgled and belched as the gas raced out of the spout and saturated the core of the pile. The sun beat down on our burn pile, and the gasoline fumes mixed with the smell of the cedar sap, growing so toxic I had trouble breathing.
“Hurry up,” I shouted to Jimmy. “I think I am getting lung cancer.” My eyes began tearing up.
“Safety first,” Jimmy said. “I am going to wash my hands just in case I have even a drop of gas on them.”
While Jimmy went to the house, I found some shade, shooed the farm cats away from my feet and watched the ragged chickens orbiting the pile for insects escaping the fumes. The bandana I’d tied to my head was so saturated with sweat that it trickled into my eyes and stung them. I took it off and rung it out like a washrag.
We had created desolation. Where there had been an untended lot of scrub brush and saplings and choking weeds there was now a lifeless moonscape. It was impressive.
Jimmy returned, holding his hands up in front of him. “Can’t be too careful.”
“You know the Indians believed that every living thing has its own spirit, even these shrubs and saplings,” I said. “This makes us mass murderers of the Indian spirits.”
“Then we better make an offering to appease them,” Jimmy said, waving his hand in the direction of the pyre. “…a burnt offering.”
I did not see how burning up the Indian spirits’ earthly abodes would make them happier, but I let it go.
It was Jimmy’s idea for us to stand on opposite sides of the pyre so that we could set it on fire at the same time. We should have used a fuse to light that fire, a long one. I thought of this before we even started to light the fire. Why not use a fuse or hurl a ball of fire at it? I said nothing. That is just the way I am.
We bent over with our box of wood matches and held a match to the striker, ready to stretch out to touch our matches to the white-gas soaked brush.
“One! Two! Three! Go!” Jimmy shouted from the other side of the pile.
I struck.
I don’t remember much about what happened next, just scenes frozen in place like photographs in a slide show.
I do remember seeing the flare of the match like an exploding star on the end of a tiny magic wand. The next sensation I felt was the air being sucked out of my chest and from my immediate vicinity; it was three seconds before I heard any sound at all, and that sounded like God himself being punched in the stomach. I was physically sucked toward the pile and then thrown sprawling back onto the ground about 20 feet away. I don’t think I was in the air the entire time. I may have bounced once or twice.
Dogs, cats and chickens rolled outward like fur bowling balls before springing back into animal shapes, running and leaping in panic.
The entire teepee of brush rose four feet into the air, turned bright orange and flashed a wall of heat at me so intense it could have burned my image into the ground behind me. My sweat soaked clothes were instantly dried.
The teepee of orange flame hung there above me long enough for me to shout: “Good God A’mighty!” (I now have a keener appreciation of what Moses went through encountering God on Mt. Sinai.)
Before I could stand up to run, (and being sprawled out like that on my back turned out to be lucky for me), cannonballs of fiery newspaper wads shot out in every direction all at one time including just over my head. This must have been what it would have looked like to Frances Scott Key if all the shots fired at the battle of Fort Monroe had been condensed to a 10 second broadside. Cannonballs of fire landed in every direction and bounded along the ground until they hit something and exploded in a blast of ashen shrapnel which sailed around in the air, smoking if not still in flame.
The dogs and farm cats who stopped to look back took off again as if they came under an artillery barrage with these balls of fire landing amongst them. At one point, every one of those animals had four paws in the air at the same time with their tongues dangling out of their mouths, flapping like capes in the wind as they fled. The scruffy chickens were blown into the air at the same time like a spooked covey of quail. They thudded to the ground and ran about with their wings flapping until they could find a tree to hop up into. Several chickens shot up onto the roof of the barn and sat there in a row, squawking like loutish football fans irate over a bad penalty call.
Jimmy appeared from the other side of the fire. His hair, what was left of it, was blown backwards on his head. It was also smoking as were his clothes. One sleeve of his shirt was burned off at the shoulder, and patches of cloth were missing. His eyebrows were gone as far as I could tell which was difficult to determine because his face was sooty black.
“You okay?!” Jimmy shouted to me. He sounded like he was under water. I patted at the smoking places on my own clothes and nodded.
We stumbled across the clearing away from the roaring fire. Over my shoulder I watched a laser beam of white flame shooting straight up 20 feet into the air out of the center of the teepee where Jimmy had poured the aviation fuel. It looked like something that would burst out of a volcano. Without losing any velocity as far as I could tell, the geyser of fire began to swirl and bend like an evil genie materializing from a bottle and roaring like a jet engine in the run-up to take off.
This roar was immediately followed by a loud, rapid crackling and popping as the flame found new deposits of cedar sap, sounding like a slab of bacon dropped into a red hot skillet or a violent rainfall on a placid lake surface. Jimmy and I began to run as if we were being chased by machine gun fire over no-man’s land.
We hobbled and limped around the back of the barn where we sheltered from the heat.
“I bet you could make steel with that flame,” Jimmy observed.
I started to say something about us being smarter next time, but instead, I said, “Your hair is smoking.” I raised my hand to my own head and felt hair break off in my fingers.
“We won’t need a haircut for two months,” Jimmy said, finding the silver lining in this cloud. “Save some money there.”
When we peered around the corner of the garage, exposing our eyes and foreheads only, the flames were racing up the outside of the pyramid like whitewater rapids flowing skyward in defiance of the laws of gravity. Up, up they raced to the pointed top, feeding the geyser which began to change colors—yellow to orange, then red followed by an interesting shade of green. The tower of flame began to dance in the air, swaying and twisting, whining and whistling, moaning a new song every time it changed colors.
“We have created a dancing statue, a pillar of fire,” Jimmy said, smiling at the fire like he could not stop looking at it.
It wouldn’t take much of an imagination to see a blazing Indian spirit presiding over this conflagration. Would Jimmy and I be cursed or offered three wishes? The flame was so beautiful that I decided on the granting of wishes, and just so I would not be considered greedy, I elected to make only one wish. Some people might wish for riches or world peace; not me. I wished that this summer that I was 16 would never end.
“I don’t want to change,” I mumbled. I doubt Jimmy heard me. “I don’t want to change.”
And Jimmy said: “Do I know how to build a fire or what?”
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED 5/20/20 IN REEDSY ONLINE MAGAZINE. IT WAS REPUBLISHED IN THE JUNE 2023 30TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE OF CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES MAGAZINE V. 334 “FROM A DEVIL TO AN ANGEL”.
SKIPPER ATTACKS THE MAN OF NATURE
Any man worth knowing knows how to fight off a dog attack, my friend Jimmy and self-described “man of nature” said.
“Naturally, a dog is going to go for your throat. Protect it with your left arm like this.” Jimmy crouched, crooking his arm across his chest. “If he tears your throat out, it’s curtains. Show’s over.”
I nodded.
“Next, offer him your forearm.”
Offer?
“Tantalize him with the bait.” Jimmy feinted and jabbed with his left forearm. “This next part separates the real men who know how to fight a dog from the sissies. I’m talking cave man stuff. Let the dog bite down on your forearm.”
He jerked his arm and planted his feet. “A dog’s instinct is to clamp down, not let go. Because of the adrenaline pumping through your veins you won’t feel a thing. Just keep your wits, concentrate on the big picture.”
Letting a dog attach itself to my left arm while it tries to rip off my flesh did not sound prudent to me. I would rather run away like Taylor Swift fleeing a knife fight.
“Now you got that rascal just where you want him. He’s going to rear up on you, rise up on his back legs. It’s only natural.” Jimmy balled his right fist. “That’s when you throat punch him!”
Jimmy threw a shadow box punch. “Bang. The attacking dog is neutralized, fleeing for the nearest exit.”
I asked if the ploy would work with zombies. “Of course not, zombies are venomous,” he said. Jimmy knows these things.
A few months later Jimmy was attacked by a dog, and I was there to assess his dog fighting tactics.
We were at his grandmother’s house removing boxes of clothes that she was donating to Goodwill after Jimmy’s grandfather Henry Earl died.
All afternoon we carried boxes out to Jimmy’s pick-up truck, and every time we stepped off the porch, old lady Tucker’s dog Skipper from next door started yapping at us. Skipper is a Boston Terrier and tiny enough to live in a mail box, so we ignored him.
Jimmy was bear hugging a box when Skipper finally attacked, making a bee line to the cuff of his jeans and clamping his needle teeth into the fabric. By the time Jimmy realized what had happened and dropped his box, Skipper was shaking his head, tugging and snatching.
Jimmy extended his leg and tried shaking Skipper off, but the little dog dug his paws into the ground and tugged harder. Then Jimmy began hopping in place on one leg while shaking Skipper. “Dang you!”
“Throat punch him!” I shouted.
Jimmy began revolving, evidently pursuing a “fling him off” tactic. Soon, he was twirling fast enough for Skipper to become airborne, his paws occasionally skimming the ground.
I have always admired those ice skaters who raise a leg straight up alongside their chests and spin faster and faster on one skate. It’s physics, maybe centrifugal force. Whatever it is, it happened to Jimmy. The higher he raised his leg, the faster he twirled with Skipper hanging on with his teeth. Skipper was now flying with his four legs extended to the points of the compass. Sometimes he was flat like a bear skin rug, and sometimes he came around belly side up. Jimmy’s arms extended out straight for balance while he spun like a Russian folk dancer. I could have told Jimmy that once Skipper became airborne he would never loosen his grip on his pants.
Old lady Tucker rushed over twirling a broom over her head and began swatting at Jimmy, so I sat down on the porch to watch.
She smacked Jimmy four or five times before she swept his feet out from under him. On the ground, Jimmy shielded his head with his arms until Mrs. Tucker relented and scooped up the yapping Skipper. She retired from the battlefield, dragging her broom behind like a broken rudder.
As Mrs. Tucker stomped off with the electrified Skipper wiggling in her arms, Jimmy said, “Whew! My twirling strategy worked…kept him away from my throat.”
“You coulda’ been killed,” I said.
“A man must adapt.” Jimmy inserted his finger through the hole in his cuff. “It’s a cruel world.”
Without looking at the retreating assailants, he shouted, “This isn’t over Skipper!” And then, to me: “You coulda’ helped me.”
Jimmy was right, but I did not want to.
THIS STORY APPEARED IN PURE SLUSH’S ANTHOLOGY “LIFESPAN: FRIENDSHIP” V. 3 IN JULY 2021.
OPERATION CUPID UNFOLDS
“Nobody with any fashion sense at all would wear pants like these,” Jimmy said. His best friend Martin agreed. You might see pants like those on a vaudevillian wearing a tiny hat and a polkadot bowtie or a blind man with a mean-spirited caretaker.
Jimmy twisted and turned in front of the floor length mirror in the apartment he shared with Martin. “I’m surprised these pants even exist in America.”
Martin thought you might find them in an Arabian bazaar where genies shop for bargains.
Eight multicolored stripes of alternating widths ran down each pants leg. The pants came with a 3-inch-wide white belt and a gold buckle large enough to make the winner of a television wrestling brawl proud as he held it over his head and bellowed to his fans.
“And look! Perfect fit too.”
“And marked down 80 percent,” Martin said. “What a deal.”
Jimmy ignored the sarcasm.
“Street people wouldn’t be caught dead in pants like these,” Jimmy said. “Mosquitos won’t attack me wearing these babies.”
“I’m still struggling with the vision of you wearing them,” Martin said. “You’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t beat you up just on principle, that is if the color pattern doesn’t cause them an epileptic fit.”
The vision Martin really wanted to see was the expression on Mary’s face when she opened the door and saw Jimmy in those pants. Now that would be something to see.
“I’m not saying I won’t be embarrassed to be seen in these, but in the arena of love you have to play the long game, consider the big picture as it were.” Jimmy turned around again to examine the backside view in the mirror. “Do you think these pants make me look fat?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” Jimmy walked over to his dresser and picked up a quart sized bottle of Colonel Bud’s Rosewater, poured a generous helping into his palm and slapped it on his cheeks and shirt. The room immediately smelled like a greenhouse full of poisonous jungle flowers.
“I see that you are going for stunning all of Mary’s senses,” Martin said.
Jimmy described his strategy as ingenious in its simplicity. “When you believe that you have fallen in love with someone ‘at first sight’, your senses will lie to you, convince you that you are right and overlook anything which doesn’t fall into line. You have to stay out in front of love or the tide of emotion will sweep you away. So, the first date is the most important date there is because everything builds on that. Can you risk spending your life with someone who just breezes through the dating process? Friend, your future wife must be tested, challenged to reveal what she’s made of. I know what Mary looks like; I want to know her character. The test is not will she go out with me; it’s will she go out with me again. I won’t know that until the end of the evening.”
As he was leaving, Jimmy stopped at the door to “synchronize our watches.” This practice had no apparent bearing on Operation Cupid, but it emphasized Jimmy’s determination to kick off his plan with businesslike efficiency and make Martin feel like he was involved in the operation.
Jimmy took a deep breath, saluted and said “Tora, Tora, Tora.”
“Go with God,” Martin said.
When Jimmy arrived at Mary’s, he sent a text: “The Eagle has landed”, his pre-arranged signal that he was “hitting the beach” as he described it.
Sometimes Martin wondered if Jimmy was just goofy. He wondered if he would be seen in public with his friend wearing those pants, or, would he be embarrassed and hope that they didn’t run into anyone they knew?
Martin considered it a good sign that Jimmy did not return early from his date. A text soon confirmed his optimism. “She’s A Keeper.”
A few minutes later, Jimmy walked into the apartment, his chin up, one hand on his hip and the other waving backwards in a “come here” motion like Mussolini receiving the cheers of his fascist admirers.
“Your strategy worked,” Martin said.
“Swimmingly, except for a small hiccup there at the very end.”
Martin had never known one of Jimmy’s schemes to go without some kind of issue.
“I had a wonderful evening Mary,I said, maybe we can go out tomorrow night. She leaned forward and kissed me and asked, Did I pass your test”
“She saw through your scheme?” Martin asked.
“Apparently,” Jimmy said. “I was delighted to discover that she was so smart, so insightful.”
“So?”
“I’m not so smart,” Jimmy said. “Mary was wearing a bizarre orange skirty affair with lots of gold buttons and shoes the Pilgrims might have worn on a long hike.” Here he paused. “I nodded at her outfit and asked if I passed her test.”
“She said, ‘I’m not conducting a test.’”
Most men would have fallen to their knees begging forgiveness at this point or just retired from the field of romantical contention. Not Jimmy. He pressed on. “Surely you jest?”
“Nope,” she’d replied.
“I’m glad to hear it,I told her. Because I love your ensemble, and I was hoping that you would wear it again real soon. This confirms my confidence in your originality, distinctiveness. What is the word I’m looking for…yes! Your flair!”
Apparently, it worked. Mary kissed him again.
Martin felt his heart warm. Had Jimmy met ‘the one’, possibly his future wife who would also become Martin’s friend? He realized how happy he was for Jimmy. Still…those pants, the cologne. Martin knew he could never do that, not even for something as important as love. Or could he?
Martin wondered if he was even a keeper as a friend.
THIS STORY APPEARED IN PURE SLUSH’S ANTHOLOGY “LIFESPAN: LOVE” V. 4 IN OCTOBER 2021.
MARTIN BROOKS
INTRODUCTION
Martin Brooks, 60-something and recently widowed, has retired from his law practice and retreated to his farm where he spends his days reading, gardening and listening to music. For the first time in his life, he has the luxury of time to reflect on his life, wrestle with his memories and engage the opportunities life thrusts his way although his grown children and society expect him to withdraw and disappear.
PEACHES
This story first appeared online 2/28/19 in Spelk Fiction. It was republished online 8/13/20 in Down In The Dirt magazine and in January 2021 in their print magazine "A Stretch of Highway" vol. 179. It was republished again in the print anthology "Excerpts From the Plague Year" on 4/15/21 in the Scars Flash Fiction Date Book on 11/21. It was longlisted in the Flash Fiction Competition on 2/28/19.
THE MATTER OF THE SPANISH OFFICER'S SWORD
This story was published online 10/26/22 in Flash Fiction Magazine. It was republished in Down In The Dirt magazine's anthology "Where Icarus Went" Vol. 216 Feb. 1, 2024. It was reprinted in the April 2024 in DITD's collection "The Limits Of Language." It is being republished in early 2025 in Down In The Dirt's Flash Fiction Datebook.
MARTIN DROPS OUT OF FOURTH GRADE
This story was published online in Literary Yard Magazine on 11/14/22.
I LIVED
The story has appeared online in Active Muse magazine 4/10/23 and in print in AS-Freshwater's May 2023 anthology.
THE HUNTERS
This story appeared in the 3/31/23 print and digital issue of Deep Overstock magazine.
MARTIN BROOKS PAGE 2
CARNATIONS
I did not know the first girl I sent a bouquet of flowers to.
I was 20 years old, and she played basketball for the Middle Tennessee State University Raiderettes. Not being athletic myself, I can’t tell you if she was a good basketball player, but she got to play a lot, and I went to all of the home games that semester just to see her. She did not know I was there because I hid in the crowd high up in the bleachers, and all she knew about me was that I was the guy whose eyes sought her out each day when we passed on the sidewalk between classes.
MTSU was the second largest undergraduate college in Tennessee when I went there in the 1970s, and between classes its sidewalks teemed with students moving between buildings and dormitories, thousands of teenagers carrying books and back packs and talking, all of them talking and laughing. You could get lost in a crowd like that.
The first time I spotted her I stumbled. Since we passed each other daily, it did not take her long to realize that I was watching for her. People get self conscious that way; you look even if you try not to look. After that, whenever I saw her on campus, at the bookstore or in the campus grill with her friends, each of us knew the other was around.
Having been in the Navy before I returned to college, I was older than my classmates. I did not have friends; I had acquaintances. One of them mentioned to me that he had seen her play basketball. Thus began my new found enthusiasm for basketball, and that is how I learned her name.
This went on for weeks. I was too unimaginative to arrange to meet her. I may have been more mature in some ways, but I was 12 years old when it came to women.
I saw nothing wrong with sending her flowers, red carnations. Of course, I did not attach my name to the flowers. It was just an idea with no plan behind it.
The next day on the sidewalk as we were changing classes I saw her before she saw me, her eyes searching the crowd shuffling by. Her eyes stopped when she found me, and I looked away. I walked on saying to myself: “Talk to her now. Now. Go back. Turn around. Go back.”
How could I after what I did? I imagined her getting a phone call from the front desk in the lobby of her dorm, coming downstairs and seeing the mystery flowers, her face perplexed as she examined them, not only not understanding but annoyed with wondering who sent them to her.
After that, I walked a different way to class and sometimes I wondered if she kept the flowers until they dried out and how innocence and cruelty can exist side by side.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN PALM SIZED PRESS, VOL. 3 JUNE 2020 ANTHOLOGY
THE STEPFATHER
“You’re holding the world’s knowledge in your hands, ever smack dab of it,” the college boy in a cheap suit with the Mercury 7 astronaut haircut said.
My stepfather looked at the encyclopedia and caressed the cover as if he were smoothing out a wrinkle, a sure sign to me that he was going to buy something else we couldn’t afford, but astronaut boy did not know that.
“And I’m gonna give you my family discount too,” he said. “Not supposed to, but I’m gonna anyway.”
Not only did my stepfather buy 26-volumes of “Knowledge of the World” Encyclopedias with the two-volume index, he ordered the 24-volumes of “People of the World”. He even bought the wooden bookshelf that came with them.
You could sell the man anything. That’s how my mother sold him marriage to a woman with three children.
“You kids won’t have an excuse not to do your homework,” my stepfather said, smiling, pleased with himself, justifying this extravagance and joking at the same time. He’d never completed high school, so I guess he had reason to be impressed with our very own treasure of the world’s knowledge even if we could not afford it.
Air Force sergeants don’t make much, and as we moved among bases he worked extra jobs to pay for (and keep) the station wagons, school clothes, the used film projector which never worked and encyclopedias…and make partial payments to lawyers in the never-ending custody battle while my father avoided his child support.
In Florida, he cleaned houses, and in Tennessee he worked in a liquor store and washed cars at a dealership. He napped between jobs, 30 minutes of rest before my mother would rouse him for work. Sometimes, he slept in the car while my mother drove him to work. I saw him once asleep in the car in our apartment complex parking lot. I pretended I didn’t.
I was a rising junior in high school when we moved to Texas. We were living in a one-bedroom apartment near the Air Force base. It was temporary my mother said until a two-bedroom house in a rundown part of town came free in a month. My stepfather got a job cleaning the Dairy Queen.
Sometimes I helped him that summer, but I was a teenager, lazy and resentful, so I avoided going whenever I could find a reason.
We’d get up at midnight, drive a few blocks and park near the road. Afraid I might be seen by someone from my new school, I rushed to the doors to get inside, waiting there in the glare with my back to the road for my stepfather to catch up with the keys.
The lights in the place would be blazing, so I stayed away from the windows in case anyone drove by.
My stepfather scrubbed the grills and appliances and buffed the tile floors until they reflected light like glass. He washed the walls of windows with a rubber squeegee on an extended metal pole. Some nights he would run the ice cream out of the machine and give it to me in a large cup. I can still smell that ice cream these many decades later and won’t take my own children to a DQ.
I scrubbed the booths, running my fingers through the creases of the upholstery for loose change. Once I found a dollar bill in the parking lot near our car while I was picking up trash. I also cleaned the bathrooms located behind a swinging metal door in the back of the dining area.
One Saturday night I was filling my soap bucket in the back room when I heard a commotion up front. I turned the water off and heard the metallic clicking and sliding sounds of locks being turned, the heft of the glass door, the sound of air conditioned air whooshing into the night and then, girls’ voices, all of them chattering. One of them asked my stepfather if they could use the restroom which was just a few feet from where I was standing. The girls had to be old enough to drive—my age or a little older. What if they were in my class when I started school in September? They might tell everybody that my stepfather was the janitor at the Dairy Queen.
I heard him murmur and the gaggle of giggling girls grow louder. They were coming. I ducked into the men’s room, listening, avoiding seeing myself in the mirror. Through the walls I heard the girls laughing, muffled voices and water flushing. Their door banged open, and their laughing receded like the sound of geese flying away into the distance. I listened to my stepfather relock the front doors, cylinders sliding into place. Through the window in the backroom door I watched headlights sweep the parking lot and veer onto the highway.
“Did you see those cute girls?” my stepfather asked when I emerged.
To him: “I was cleaning the men’s room.” To myself: “What could you know about cute girls?”
When my mother died I went through her papers to see if there was anything important to keep. I stacked the photographs I found for my sisters. The old bills, divorce papers, tattered letters to her from when I was in the service and then law school got tossed into the burn box.
I sorted quickly until I found the matchbook, no matches, just the cover, one of those with an advertisement for a correspondence course. For $99, this one promised an “Exciting and Rewarding” career as a “Certified Electronics Technician.” I recognized my stepfather’s printing, square and childish. He must have kept it in case he ever scraped together an extra $99 for a better life.
I flipped it over between my fingers a couple of times. Knowledge. I was holding it in my hand. I slid it into my shirt pocket just like that dollar bill.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN PURE SLUSH’S ANTHOLOGY “WRONG WAY GO BACK” VOL. 19 OCTOBER 2020. IT WAS REPUBLISHED IN DOWN IN THE DIRT’S ANTHOLOGY “SPRING FROM GRIEF” ONLINE IN FEBRUARY 2021 AND IN PRINT IN JUNE 2021 VOL. 184. IT WAS REPRINTED AGAIN IN DOWN IN THE DIRT’S ANTHOLOGY “LOCKDOWN’S OVER” IN MAY 2021.
THE REALITY OF FREE STUFF
THE REALITY OF FREE STUFF
5:00 A.M. The Day After
They say the best cup of coffee you will ever have is the first one in the dark of early morning when everyone’s asleep, and I believe them. Sitting here at my kitchen table I can drag that cup of coffee out for an hour easy. To do that though, I have to sit and think a lot between sips. Since Em died two years ago and the kids left home, I have lots to think about. Right now, the subject is shampoos and soaps.
After I got rid of Em’s things and let the kids pick over the furniture, I thought my house would look empty, but when you’ve lived in a place with four other people for 35 years, raised your family there, the place will always be full, a bustling downtown city sidewalk of memories. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I sure believe in the power of memory, that conflagration of dead occasions, conversations and impressions roaring up in your brain when you aren’t expecting them. They surprise you around a corner or when you open a door or when you are just sitting at your kitchen table wondering if today is trash day. You learn to move with the memories when the traffic allows, stopping until the memory passes by, ignoring that one, honking the horn in your head at the ones you want to go away, your brain shouting: Stop! Stop It!
I’m not kicking about it; I’d sell the farm and move if it bothered me. I am just recognizing the fact.
This morning, it’s shampoo and soap, and I ‘m not ready to honk the horn yet.
Before I retired, back when I was travelling around the southeast trying lawsuits, I stayed in a lot of hotels. I carried my own toiletries so I gathered the complimentary, miniature bottles of lotion and mouthwash, soaps and shampoos from my hotel rooms and brought them home to my daughter. I told her they were “your very own cosmetics.”
She took them to her bedroom to be examined and inventoried. Sometimes I saw the bottles lined up on a dressing table, maybe by size or color, green body wash, creamy pink lotion, blue shampoo. They never appeared in her bathroom, so I don’t think she used them. They were too nice for that. Em had a different reaction. “More bottles?”, but it really wasn’t a question.
One day, those bottles disappeared. Maybe Em threw them out. In time they were forgotten. I remembered them today, the day after nothing mattered anymore.
6:15 A.M. The Birds Arrive
The second best cup of coffee happens as the sun is coming up and you stare out the bay window, watching the birds arrive to empty feeders. By that time, I ‘ve let my body collapse like it melted, settled down and lost its creases and corners, my edges going one at a time.
When you are retired and the only one left to live in a two story, farm house one half mile from your nearest neighbor you can do pretty much whatever you want--sit, think about things that don’t matter to anyone but yourself, neglect the birds and watch them worry over an empty feeder. Someday I am going to remember which birds show up first.
Why haven’t those birds figure it out yet? Is this their way to reprove me for my neglect? I am clearly visible to them there through the bay window.
Some time ago, a smart person with nothing else to do, theorized that the world may have just sprung into being moments before, and the Past was not real at all, just memories created in your brain to give perspective to the present.
If they were right, then what happened did not really happen so you don’t need to feel bad about it all. Maybe the people you remember aren’t even real.
But then there’s those birdfeeders…there’s the wrinkle isn’t it? The birds know that feed has been there. Now it’s not there, but it was. So is the past real or are the birds not real too?
Were the bottles of soap real? I could see them clearly on my daughter’s dressing table. They still had to be in the house. She would not have taken them with her when she left home for college and the job up North. And, that daughter was like me, she would not have thrown them out either.
Here’s a fact: No matter how long you sit, or how tired you are, or how determined you are to do nothing and sit at your kitchen table, your forearms sticking to the surface, you are going to stand up eventually and you are going to remove yourself from where you are to someplace else. I removed myself to my daughter’s room or towards it anyway.
7:00 a.m. Standing At The Stairs
This is a big house, plenty of room for me to wander—four bedrooms, dining and living rooms, a den the size of Denmark. I even have a two-story library and home office.
My daughter’s room is on the second floor. At the foot of the stairs I decided to take another activity break. It wasn’t the act of climbing the stairs. (Although I am in good physical condition for my age, this is the time in life when climbing stairs gets your attention.) I just felt like standing there with my hand on the newel. Like I said, when you live alone you can do whatever you want.
Sometimes I stopped there when I was trying to decide where I was going to take an afternoon nap. Like Goldilocks, I had my choice of beds. I made my decision based on which kid I was thinking about at that moment.
After our kids left home, Em decorated every single bed with a pile of frilly, decorative pillows, not just the guest bedroom or our bed. When I wanted to take a nap I had to dig down through them to find the bed. Afterwards, I had to put them back, but my brain insisted that they be placed in the same position as I found them; it was a chore. I also noticed that there was not a chair in the house without a couple of pillows in it.
One day, after Em was gone, I got rid of them, drove my pick-up truck near the back door and tossed every pillow in the house out the door and into the truck like fat Frisbees until it was filled. I did not even tie them down; I just drove slowly to Goodwill.
“You must like pillows,” Jerry, the man with the withered arm who collects your things at the drop-off doors, said.
“I love them,” I said. “That’s why I want to share them with you.” I wasn’t being sarcastic; I was being a smart ass. There’s a difference.
7:10 a.m. Ground Zero
I stopped in traffic again at my daughter’s bedroom door and leaned into the frame.
My children never really left home I guess; they just did not come back. They left their rooms just like they did when they went off to college. Movie and sports posters on the walls, the memorabilia of their high school social lives scattered along the shelves, collectible dolls and stuffed animals on the girls’ beds, a flat basketball in the corner.
Maybe they wanted the assurance that wherever they went they had a permanent home. Em and I never planned on moving from the farm.
I suppose that was reassuring to me too. When my daughter went off to college and I missed her, I would stand at her door like this until my balance returned. When she came to visit she always slept there. Maybe the posters of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara and the carnival and concert souvenirs on the pin board, the trinkets of remembrance, maybe they were rejuvenating to her, restorative.
Em’s death had been hard on her, and she flew in from up north and spent several days with me, mostly in her bedroom with the door closed. At night I heard her crying, and when I knocked on her door, she stopped and I went away.
My daughter had a lot of junk. She was like me that way.
It was a constant source of irritation to Em.
“What you going to do with all of that stuff when you die?” Em would ask me, and since this was more of an accusation than a question, I let it slide, said nothing. If you think about it, “nothing” is the answer because I’d be dead, inert.
Em often complained it would take her years to clean out my things when I died. “I’ll be one of those old women who show up at Goodwill with a trunk full of her dead husband’s folded clothes.”
I do have this thing about keeping any possession which might turn out to be useful someday. I not only keep them, I acquire them.
Em never had to concern herself with my accumulations. Her cancer saw to that.
It did not take me long to give away her things, and she had a lot too. I gave her clothes and shoes to her sister. I donated her car to a charity, and I told the kids to come and take anything else they wanted from our house as remembrances of her. Living out of state, they could not take much on the few visits they made after the funeral. Everything else went to Goodwill.
“You’re not selling the farm are you daddy?” my daughter asked on the telephone from a long way away. Had her brother asked her to call me?
No, I enjoyed my privacy too much to do that. Besides, with development from Nashville surrounding and bypassing the place its value continued to skyrocket. Best to wait.
For a few weeks, Em disappeared in phases.
I can’t say why the children disappeared.
At least Biff in “Death of a Salesman” could point to his father’s adultery as an excuse for his loss of interest in life. I don’t think any of the kids could point to a particular family crisis and say “That’s why I left home and rarely returned.”
7:25 A.M. Touching Things Makes Them Real
My daughter’s bookshelves, like mine, were lined and stacked with books. No real book lover ever gets rid of any book he acquires. My daughter still had her children’s books, Marvelous Millie, a children’s version of Little Women and Mary Poppins, some pop-up books. I made a quick mental inventory, running my fingers over the spines of the books.
That’s something else she got from me. Thankfully, my home office stretched over half of the second floor of our farm house, and I lined it with bookshelves. When I was practicing law, I’d prepared for my trials there in the cigar smoke and among my books which I’d started acquiring in 12th grade. My first acquisition was a set of out-of-date encyclopedias from the 1950s which I bought for $5 from a thrift store. I still have them.
Early on, I collected books autographed by the author, and then I began buying any book the do-gooders and the perpetually offended threatened to ban or censor. (When I got older, I began buying those targeted books when I was giving someone a gift.) I now had a couple of thousand books tucked into shelves along every wall. You know you have a lot of books when you begin inserting them flat on top of the other books on your shelves.
I’d read most of them. I pull out and lay down on their spine those books I am planning to read in the next six months. Sticking them out like that motivates me to read them so I can turn them upright again.
In time my books will end up in the used book section at Goodwill or drying out in the corners of musty antique stores until some teenage version of me finds them and takes them home. I pasted a name plate inside the front cover of every book, so somebody 50 years from now will see it and say: “This is the guy who owned this book. Whatever happened to him?” They may not think about it long, but they are going to know that I lived. (That nameplate is not a creation of memory; somebody stuck it there.)
8:10 A.M. Real Words From The Past
In a box under my daughter’s bed I found the weekly letters I’d written her over the years. I ran my thumb over them, fluttering them like they were playing cards. They made no noise, so I did it again but harder.
They weren’t letters at all; they were holiday and event cards I’d gotten from charitable organizations as gifts when they solicited for donations. I must have been on the mailing list of every charity in the U.S. because Em and I had boxes of them—cards for every occasion, birthdays, Christmas, sick people, congratulations. I would pull out those Christmas cards which avoided using the word “Christmas”, opting instead for the phrase “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings.” I used those Christmas-less cards as stationery for my weekly letters to my children in their own college and professional travels. My children were probably the only people in the country getting mail in April with Santas, snowmen in top hats and candy canes on them. In this small way, I refused to cooperate with the politically correct, a healthy practice for any free thinking citizen who distrusts authority and despises the self appointed bullies of our moral well being.
Years of letters, forgotten words recording forgotten things—I spent more time than was good for me reading and remembering. All this was real. Here’s the proof.
9:05 A.M. Progress
“You are turning into a hoarder,” Em told me once.
“I’m just thinking of the kids,” I said. “Think of the fun they will have in that hot, dusty attic. It will be like Christmas morning.”
You are not really a hoarder if you give away the stuff you are supposedly hoarding. Hoarders are people who keep things in a clutter, even trash. They stack newspapers and magazines along the walls from floor to ceiling, at least in the beginning of their hoarding careers. Then they fill in the remaining space with plastic bags of trash and…clutter. They travel through it like they are walking through a snow drift without snow shoes.
Hoarders are the people who die in that clutter somewhere and have to be located by the authorities because no one knows they are in there. They often get on the news or are featured in some cable television show which probably paid their relatives to film the place, a kind of vengeful karmic event for their survivors to offset the expense of having to clean up that mess after the hoarder dies.
I’m not that way at all. My house is tidy, everything in its place. Before I go to bed at night I perform a walk-through and inspect to make sure everything is in its place. This is easy to do now that I am retired and Em is gone. I did not get sloppier in widowhood; my house got tidier with only me in it.
My daughter’s closet was neat and full of clothes.
I heard a preacher say once that you should donate to charity the clothes you have not worn in a year. Not me, I donate mine if I have not worn them in 10 years.
“I might decide to start wearing these again,” I’d say to Em while holding up a pair of 34-inch waist jeans from younger days.
I ran my fingertips over my daughter’s dresses like I was counting them—blue, black, red, dresses with patterns, frilly shoulders, padded shoulders, all on hangers tucked in place. Since she lived up north why would these dresses be here? Shouldn’t she have them with her? Maybe these were from her old life and not appropriate in her new life as a lawyer up north. Did she expect them to come back in style?
With a closed casket you don’t have to worry about finding a suitable set of clothes. They don’t even ask you. I’m not sure what they do, but whatever they do, they do it and don’t bother you with it. You just have to show up when you’re supposed to.
I reached up and took down the boxes in the top of the closet, some books and a movie star scrapbook, a couple of photograph albums, some sweaters.
I put everything back just the way I found it. When the time was right, I’d take her clothes to Goodwill. Just stuff them into the trunk of my car and let Jerry drag them inside like an animal dragging something dead into its cave.
9:40 A.M. I’m Done For The Day
There were more clothes in her chest of drawers. I found what I was looking for there in a bottom drawer--a hatbox full of miniature bottles of lotions and soaps, green, blue and pink, like a chest of precious jewels.
I ran my fingertips through them to hear them clatter. I held the box up to my face and breathed in the soapy scents.
And it was all real.
I lay down on her bed with the hatbox beside me. I didn’t even take my shoes off. That’s the nice thing about living alone; you can do whatever you want.
THIS STORY WAS LONGLISTED IN FLASH FICTION 500 MAGAZINE’S CONTEST ON MARCH 21, 2019. IT FIRST APPEARED IN PAGE AND SPINE MAGAZINE ON JUNE 26, 2020. IT WAS REPUBLISHED ONLINE IN CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES MAGAZINE ON JULY 9, 2021 AND IN ITS ANTHOLOGY “THE WAY SHE WAS” V. 317. CC&D REPUBLISHED IT IN ITS ANTHOLOGY COLLECTION “UNFINISHED BUSINESS” JAN.-APRIL 2022 ISSUE. THE STORY WAS REPUBLISHED ONLINE 6/12/24 IN THE HEMLOCK JOURNAL.
THE FIRST KISS
So, here we are:
Me, a 60-something widower, and my wife’s hair stylist, a 40-something divorcee named Bonnie. We are on our first date which began with dinner at a restaurant on the river where you dine on a patio in the evenings and watch the Bald Eagles glide over the water searching for their own meals.
Somehow, I have managed to slide my left arm along the back of the couch and behind Bonnie’s shoulder. She had to have helped although I never noticed it. I feel the ball of her left shoulder in my hand. “Nicely done,” the interior me says.
I shouldn’t have waited the two years since Em’s death to ask Bonnie out. Still, when you’ve been married for 35 years, you can’t just go throwing yourself about just because you can.
I squeeze Bonnie’s shoulder ever so slightly, and she draws her legs up under her in a curl, her knees just resting on my leg. The tattoo of a rose vine down the left side of her calf sends me; sends me so bad I decide I will, after all, make my Big Move. I can’t tell you what my Big Move consists of because I really haven’t thought it through, but it’s going to be a Major Move anyway.
The television blares away, and Bonnie and I pretend to watch this season’s “Bachelorette” whose star is pretending to be in love with three men she’s just met while each of her suitors professes his own love for her and pretends not to be distressed by her decision to sleep with each of them over the next three nights to assist her in selecting a mate for life.
The interior me is…optimistic. “Steady on Martin. More than 30 years of courtroom battle taught you something about handling stressful situations.”
Okay, now is the time. Now.
“I haven’t had this nice of an evening in a long time Bonnie.” I didn’t just say some words; I meant them.
She turns her face to me, and I realize that I am not as agile as I once was; I just can’t turn at the waist as easily as I need to this moment, so I plant my right foot for a little help.
“Yowl!” Her cat has not chosen its resting place wisely.
Bonnie jumps, my nose goes into her ear, and I get a mouth full of hair.
“Most people use their tongues for that sort of thing,” Bonnie grins, her fingers swiping a few strands of hair from my lips.
I try to recover: “I love the smell of your hair.”
Bonnie stops, smiles and looks at me long enough that I avert my eyes in the direction of the retreating cat.
“Speaking of hair…” Bonnie reaches around and combs her fingers through my hair, clenches her hand into a fist and pulls my head to the back of the couch. “Relax,” she says.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN PALM SIZED PRESS ANTHOLOGY V. 4 ON NOV. 11, 2020.
THE LIFEGUARD
1968: Shipwrecked
In the summer of 1968, right after my mother’s latest relationship catastrophe, my sisters and I found ourselves in a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of Nashville, bewildered shipwreck survivors washed up on a beach after a night of violence with our baggage strewn about us, Gilligan’s Island minus the laughs. My mother and I got the two bedrooms where we stored boxes and some banged up furniture we’d managed to retain as we moved about middle Tennessee between her romantic typhoons. My three younger sisters slept on daybeds in the living room and kept their clothes in cardboard boxes which they arranged along the wall in an order which worked for them. In that apartment we did as much climbing and stepping around as we did walking.
The apartment complex had a swimming pool, and when you’re a 14 year old boy, living out of a suitcase in an apartment with four females, all of us just one move ahead of the bill collector, a swimming pool counts as luxurious living. We could walk over to it anytime we wanted, and being in Tennessee, it was open most of the year.
That pool gave me something nice to say about where and how my sisters and I lived when the subject of home came up at the new school. It was like name dropping; it sounded good. There were even times that school year when I almost invited a friend home to go swimming “in our pool.”
Only once in my life have I ever wanted to be a lifeguard, and that reason had a name, Elaine, a 25 year old beauty who lived with her husband in the next building in our complex with her fifth husband.
“Men can’t handle her,” my mother said. I was left to wonder what that meant. Being 14, I did a lot of wondering about Elaine.
I attributed her five marriages to bad luck with men, a perspective borne out by my father’s misbehavior before he deserted us and my mother’s string of boyfriends whose antics often resulted in us moving on Fridays (always Fridays) and leaving our friends at school without saying goodbye.
I believed it because I needed to believe it. Elaine was a beautiful woman, and I was 14. And male. It never occurred to me, at least back then, that she might be trouble.
Elaine lived at the pool as much as my sisters and I did.
She was brunette with skin as brown as her hair from a youthful career of sunbathing around pools in lounge chairs. This was a time when women thought nothing of baking themselves in the sun without regard for skin damage. No one had heard of ultra violet sun rays and ozone layers, or if they did, they didn’t understand it.
Elaine had her own pose and look. She always reclined with one knee slightly raised, the other leg extended. If gold ankle bracelets existed in 1968, she would have worn them on each ankle. She liked gold, golden necklace around her neck, gold hoop earrings, couple of rings, also gold.
Elaine’s bikini was always a blue. I can’t ever remember seeing her in anything but some shade of blue. Unlike red which is gaudy or green which is too much like Christmas or even white which contrasts too sharply with a chocolate tan, Elaine’s blue accentuated the presentation. At a time when breast implants and botox injections did not exist and before surgical tucks and zips became commonplace, Elaine was real, every curve, cut and crease; you’d need a road map to avoid getting lost in them.
My lifeguarding fantasies that summer involved the same scenario which featured me diving into the pool, gathering the struggling Elaine in my arms and delivering her safely poolside. She would be overcome with exhaustion from her ill defined watery ordeal, and I would carry her limp body up out of the water and place her back on her lounge chair where a kind of CPR would be practiced which had more in common with a Snow White kiss than the chest compressions, nose pinches and counted out blasts of breath associated with true resuscitation. Elaine would be excessively grateful upon being brought back into the world of the living.
The truth is Elaine rarely got into the pool, preferring to spend hours in her lounge chair glistening in the sun. Sometimes she removed the spaghetti straps of her bikini bra to make sure that no skin went unbaked. Otherwise, she just laid there like an exotic snake warming in the sun, beautiful and vaguely dangerous. That cot was her throne as far as I was concerned. Except for the large round lenses of Elaine’s oversized sunglasses, Cleopatra would have looked like that laying back on her own cot in the sun around the royal swimming pool with a couple of pyramids in the background for atmosphere and some slave girls fanning her with ostrich feathers.
If Elaine got into the water at all, she was in and out of it, stepping down the cement steps one step at a time as if she was afraid to fall, and maybe she was. The water would ruin that brown hair piled up on top of her head in the manner of the day, not a full bee hive but the next thing to it. She never got her hair wet at all which accounted for it never being wet or mussed in my lifeguarding rescue fantasy.
When the water worked its magic on her bikini, there was not much left for me to imagine. At these moments I thanked God I was neck deep in water which I imagined was rising up in steam around my head from the boiling passion of my thoughts.
These brief wading exercises were rare so I had to remain vigilant or I would miss them.
Once, Elaine entered the water when I happened to be dawdling near the steps.
“Hello Michael,” she said and smiled at me.
That ‘hello’ went into my ears, traveled down my spine until it got down therewhere it grabbed me with a firm tug. Her voice was warm like the melted butter my mother told me Elaine slathered up and down her arms and legs.
“Yes mam,” I said because I had been taught to be respectful of my elders even when I was thinking about …what I was thinking. The proper response would have been “hello” or “good day” or even “Do you want me to be your sex slave?” Anything but “yes mam” which makes no sense at all to anybody. It isn’t even logical.
I wish I could tell you that this is a ‘coming of age’ story where a young boy becomes a man under the prurient tutelage of a beautiful older woman, but it is not. Those kinds of stories only happen in the movies. Reality is always less eventful and mundane… more boring than you expected which is the true definition of reality. (Elaine did pilot me through the shoals of puberty many times even if, for her part, she was only present in my fevered imagination there in the dark of my bedroom.)
1969: At Sea Again
The inevitable happened at the end of my sophomore year at John Overton High School. One day after school, I picked up the telephone and a woman, angry and snarling, cursed my mother, alluded to some kind of misbehavior and slammed the phone down. This was one of those conversations for which a hearer is required, not a listener. Either the woman thought I was a grown man or she didn’t care. I believe I was supposed to pass on the gist of her commentary to my mother. I never did.
I did not think well enough of the woman or, I am embarrassed to say this now, my mother, to care. I’d been through this in one form or another many times before. Women cursing in our doorway or shouting vile things to my mother and me from a passing car. A phone ringing, someone hanging up. Even a poison pen letter I found with words I had to look up in a dictionary. (Have you ever actually heard someone you know use the word “fornication” in real conversation?) I’ve spent a good deal of my adult life trying to temper my capacity for contempt, which is deep and unrelenting and not one of my more admirable qualities.
My mother came home from her receptionist job that day with eyes swollen and red and took refuge in her bedroom with a migraine and a bottle of her “nerve pills.” Next, my mother’s boss called and asked me to tell her that he was sorry “about everything”, something else I declined to pass on to its hysterical recipient. (See what I mean about contempt? Even now, I am trying not to say what I am really thinking.)
My mother did not go to work the next day. There was a routine we followed when these things happened.
I saw my sisters off to school and reasoned with my mother through the door between her bouts of hysteria. I asked about any paychecks which might be coming her way, our bank account status, refundable security deposits and bills due and of course, the move that was sure to come and how we were going to get from point A, here, to point B, somewhere else, and when, which was always as soon as possible.
My sisters went to school until the weekend although they were smart enough to stop doing their homework. Why waste that effort? That Friday, my mother told the girls to leave their books at school. That’s how we knew that we were really leaving a place and my mother wasn’t making one of her threats.
We spent the weekend packing while my mother regained enough balance to retake the helm of our foundering ship. I led my sisters up to the Piggly Wiggly, and we collected broken down boxes from the dumpster. I used the $5 my father had sent me for my birthday to buy a massive roll of duct tape. We wrapped the dishes in our clothes and towels and filled the boxes beginning with the possessions we most needed like dishes and in some cases most treasured, my sisters’ musical jewelry boxes, an antique lamp and a coffee grinder once possessed by my mother’s grandmother.
We moved without telling the school people goodbye (kind of like skipping out on the landlord in the middle of the night), leaving behind everything we could not pack into an uncle’s pick up truck, an aunt’s car and our own sputtering Ford.
The funny thing about the kind of poor we were…everything got smaller every time we moved. The house we owned when my father lived with us had been exchanged for a rental; the next house we rented had one less bedroom and no garage; the next smaller still. The three bedroom apartment became a two bedroom affair. We shedded possessions all along the way. Start living like that when you are young enough, and you’ll disappear by the time you leave home for good.
I allowed three trips back and forth between our new encampment in a neighboring town and the apartment complex; anything requiring more than three trips we would not have room for. I looked for Elaine every time I carried a box from the apartment. I wanted to wave goodbye to her which in my mind would be an act of intimacy, but I never saw her.
Our moves (I went to 9 schools in 12 years.) were associated in my mother’s mind with starting anew. “Things will be better,” she promised me as I picked up a box, and I listened, nodded and thought I would just settle for getting there without having a flat tire.
As we drove away that last time, I put Elaine away in my mind, just like that, one of those things you get rid of. Off we went, that last load tied down with ropes high above the cab of my uncle’s pick up truck, swaying into every curve, teetering over the rough road and threatening to tumble every time I got comfortable thinking we just might make it.
Life Happens, Time Passes
In my high school mind the whole world was on fire, riots in cities, demonstrations on college campuses which always devolved into running melees, everybody upset about something they could do nothing about. Literally, on the other side of the world the obscenity of Vietnam was unfolding on the television news every night. Thousands of teenage boys not much older than myself had already lost their lives, their futures and all thoughts and dreams of women like Elaine. The television news kept a running body count on Friday evenings like sports scores. (All of us accepted that as normal. Now that I have a grown son myself the grotesqueness of those times offends me in a way I can’t even begin to describe.)
We had our own problems, still always moving, never owing enough money to be sued for but never having enough money to pay all of our bills either. I learned to prioritize payments; I resigned myself to the cruelty of partial payments. When I was old enough, I went to work.
Life happened to me after that—the service, college, law school, marriage, children--I did not think of Elaine much and when I did I wondered if she was as beautiful as I remembered.
Everything that life gives you reality takes away, youth, looks, ideals and ultimately even life itself; it may take time, even decades, but reality always comes back around to take it from you, and that happened to me with Elaine.
40 Years Later
Several years ago, on my way to a courthouse in a rural county, I stopped into a coffee shop called “Bean and Brew” over near Vanderbilt University on the nicer side of Nashville. My client was slow in paying his legal bills, so it did not matter if I was late. In fact, I decided to be late.
On this side of town, people drive safari-size SUVs and fret over climate change. There always seems to be a crowd of students in the shop using the place like a library. The coffee shop was packed, and the line to order the decadently overpriced coffee snaked all the way back to the doors. I got in line and looked over the sitters and the talkers and the faces jammed in newspapers and phone screens who seemed to exist there for my benefit, like extras in a movie scene whose job it was to look boring and ignore me.
Maybe they performed their parts too well; maybe I just sensed it was time to advance the scene. I turned my head toward the counter and saw Elaine for the first time in 40 years. I knew it was her even before I squinted my eyes and angled my head to study the woman, the clipped nose, the brown eyes, the gold hoop earrings. Even her hair was the same color although she must have dyed it. She was older obviously, but it was her. She was standing behind the glass counter where they displayed the stale pastries and appeared to be rearranging them. (You’ve got to be hungry to gnaw on one of those muffins. I never saw anyone ordering pastries anytime I visited there.)
Gone was the pile of brown hair on top her head. Women stopped wearing their hair fluffed up like that decades ago. Elaine wore a small paper cap which matched the brown uniform they had given her to wear. The woman who once rocked my known world with her blue bikini was now dressed like a school cafeteria lady or a McDonalds worker. The uniform hung on her, and I could see that the hips were gone along with the bounce and the flounce. Look at the wrists, hands and neck of any older person, and you’ll see all you need to see to know about the rest of them.
Elaine must have been aware of her losses considering the extravagant smears of make-up on her lips and eyes. Her make-up appeared even more out of place there in that shop in comparison with her other younger female co-workers who had received no instruction in life on the benefits of tactfully applied make-up or did not care because this modern world they moved in demanded nothing from them, and they knew it.
She looked tolerated, one of those old people young people treat like an impediment in their path which they can do nothing about, the clichéd mossy stone in a rushing stream. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they made fun of her behind her back.
Worse, Elaine appeared out of place, uncomfortable and unsure. The woman, who at 25 must have walked through a crowd of business suits as if she were parting the Red Sea, now looked uncertain, tentative. I watched her move the dried out pastries about and look around for something else to do. The coffee shop and its worker bees bustled and buzzed around her as if she was not there. Maybe this was her first day on the job.
How does a 65 year old woman go from being a Playboy model in a lounge chair by a pool to a cafeteria lady in the middle of a shop named “Bean and Brew” on a Monday morning in Nashville? Too much time around a pool and too much reliance on youth’s tenuous charms? You’d think with a basketball team of ex-husbands she’d have married one whose social security would be sufficient to save her from toiling in her golden years at “Bean and Brew.” The world is going to get you in the end.
My last name is unusual, and Elaine knew my mother well in the year that we lived at the apartments. She might even remember me if I told her who I was. I had no qualms about doing that; I was a trial attorney with many years of experience in courtrooms and in front of juries. I could handle Elaine Adams; I was not intimidated at all.
But I didn’t do it.
Elaine passed by me carrying a plastic bag toward the trash bins at the front door. Although I was staring she did not notice me at all. Never even made eye contact. Her perfume competed with the smell of ground coffee, and the perfume was winning.
As she walked back to the counter I noticed that she had stepped down the heel of one shoe and that there was a bandaid over the heel of that foot.
She washed her hands at the sink and turned as the line moved me up to the counter.
“Have you been waited on sir?” she asked me. It was her voice. It was Elaine all right.
There must have been a moment in her life when Elaine decided not to go to the pool. And after that, she never went again. What a sad moment that must have been for her. That was the day when she must have given up, said her goodbye to something she knew existed but could not define or articulate. Did she grieve?
Other men might have got her aside to speak to her, tell her that they would recognize her anywhere, that she had not changed at all, maybe even confessed that childhood crush. She might have appreciated that.
Not me.
“Yes mam,” I said. That’s it; that’s all I said.
The line moved forward and carried me with it toward the cashier.
Maybe Elaine was one of those things I left behind. Something I did not have room for anymore. If I’d left it behind, that is where it belonged.
As I pushed through the front door, I did not even consider looking back. Outside the sun glared, the cars went by too fast and the people on the sidewalk ignored each other, and I stepped out among them, holding my coffee well out in front of me because I am a careful man.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN THE POTATO SOUP JOURNAL IN MAY 2020. IT WAS REPUBLISHED IN CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES’ ANTHOLOGY “INTO THE VOID” V. 324 AUGUST 2020. CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES REPUBLISHED THE STORY IN THE ANTHOLOGY “THE WALL” MAY-AUGUST 2022.
THE LAST CHRISTMAS
My father deserted us the day after Christmas, and before his car had finished fishtailing out of our driveway, my mother attacked our Christmas tree.
She went after the ornaments and lights first, stripping the tree like Cinderella’s stepsisters tearing away the finery from her ball gown with such ferocity that baubles on the opposite side of the tree shook and swung and threatened to fall. A small bell tucked inside the tree’s limbs tinkled and rang every time she snatched off an ornament like an unanswered telephone.
Once the tree was denuded of its finery, she grabbed it as high up as she could reach and crashed it over. My sisters and I and our dog Charlie leapt out of the way while she dragged it through the house toward the back door like she was pulling someone around by the hair. I saw a paper ring chain I’d made at school draped through the limbs but said nothing until I saw an overlooked ornament in the branches.
“A Santa bulb!”
“Leave it!” my mother said, adjusting her handhold. A branch came off in her hand, and she tossed it and latched on to another lest the tree attempt to get away.
Getting the tree past the spring loaded aluminum storm door took determination. The door banged and boomed like a metal drum as my mother bounced it open with hip, knee and foot and wrestled the tree through its jaws. I would have held the door open, but I was afraid to volunteer, and my mother did not notice us anyway.
My sisters and I pressed our faces to the glass and watched our tree disappear down the driveway behind my mother, her head bobbing above the prostrate tree which twirled and drug its limbs like it did not want to go.
It took her less than an hour to shove the rest of our decorations into boxes. I timed her on my Hopalong Cassidy watch which I got for Christmas.
Christmas was over.
***
For two weeks my sisters and I had watched my mother tape newly arrived Christmas cards onto the living room doorway until it looked like one of those flowery horseshoes they hang around the neck of a winning racehorse, red and green cards, cards with sprayed-on snow, others with glitter which fell on the floor if you rubbed them between your fingers which I always did. In the evenings she sat at the dinner table and wrote her own cards, sometimes including letters with them.
I walked around the house like I was visiting a museum, admiring my mother’s collection of decorations, elves hammering toys, Santas riding sleighs filled with overflowing bags of toys, reindeer loitering about, plastic candy canes, bells with drooping garland. She inherited most of them, and she had told me stories about their provenance.
“You did a good job on our decorations,” I told her as she wrote out her cards.
She looked up, her eyes red and swollen, and then resumed her writing.
Two days later my father brought home our tree, a cedar sapling he’d cut from my grandfather’s farm. I stood by the trunk of the car and smelled it, the amber sap acidic like newly opened cleaning fluid.
As soon as the tree was standing in a corner of our living room, my father retreated into his garage and my mother began decorating, starting with strings of lights which she unraveled with sharp, jerking motions. My sisters and I hung some of the ornaments.
“Is daddy going to help?” I asked.
“Don’t bother your father.”
I had a favorite Christmas decoration, a Nativity scene the size of a cigar box with miniature people in robes, sheep and cows and a baby Jesus lying in plastic straw in a wooden crib the size of a matchbox, all in a wooden shed with some elves milling around.
“If Jesus’ manger is located in a desert town, why is there snow on the roof and ground?” That seemed like an obvious question to a fourth grader admiring the temporary home of Jesus and his family which always sat on top of our television.
“Because it’s Christmas,” my mother said. “It’s magic.”
And the elves? I asked.
“They’re taking care of the sheep. Now go away.”
I should have known then that a crisis was coming.
***
Since I was the oldest, my mother told me to carry the boxes of decorations to the trash cans.
“We won’t have room…where we’re moving,” my mother said although I was so afraid I hadn’t asked any questions.
I saved the box with the Nativity scene to last, carefully placing it on top of the heap of the near overflowing trash can. I could feel my mother watching me from the backdoor, but I didn’t turn around.
“Martin…” she called. “I hope you never desert your family.”
I slammed the lid down, crushing the box and its contents.
When I turned, she was gone, and I walked to the house without looking back.
THIS STORY APPEARED IN PURE SLUSH’S ANTHOLOGY “HOME: LIFESPAN” V. 7 IN JUNE 2023.
MARTIN BROOKS PAGE 3
FLOATING: THE ART OF MEDITATION WHILE DODGING FRUIT
The day my wife died I went swimming, and my daughter threw an apple at me. My decision to go swimming will sound harsh to people who form conclusions quickly. Harsh isn’t the right word, but the word insensitive doesn’t have any meaning anymore. Odd, maybe that’s the word. Odd for my behavior, not my daughter’s because that’s the way she is.
The fact is, after two years of watching my wife leave me I had no feelings left. They got used up sitting in doctors’ offices, lying on my cot beside her bed listening to her breathe and standing on the back porch watching the stars and wondering how easily things could be different if any one of a thousand ifs had not been ifs.
Swimming isn’t accurate either; I floated. That’s what I did.
It happened like this: the hospice people were bustling around here for awhile and then they weren’t. Everything that needed to be done That Day had been done for a long time—the phone calls, the arrangements, the this and the that people do during a tragedy without talking to you about it first. They left me standing in the middle of our (or is it my now?) living room with nothing to do.
So I walked into the pool and floated. I didn’t even take my clothes off. I lay on my back, my arms and legs dangling, my head perfectly balanced in my water cradle while I drifted, listening to the phone ring because I was too unmotivated to get out and turn it off, choosing instead to lower my head until the water came up and enclosed my ears like ear muffs, deadening the phone’s shrill, sterile insistence.
My body went weightless as if I were a leaf too light to sink, and if I kept my eyes closed, my skin, the edges of my being, blurred and disappeared in my mind so that I melted into the water. It didn’t happen all the time, and it didn’t happen all at once. But, sometimes my edges would dissolve like a drop of ink in water until I became so diluted I disappeared, maybe not physically but certainly in a cosmic sense. When this happened, I wasn’t there anymore.
My daughter came over to check on me that first day, carrying a fruit basket someone had left at the front door I wasn’t answering. I ignored her and tried to will myself back to the land of nothingness, but it didn’t work so I just smiled whenever her lips moved.
“You have to come out!” She stamped her foot. “I mean it!”
When I ignored her some more, she threw an apple at me.
Kerplunk!
“You can’t spend the rest of your life in there.”
She left.
Of course, you can’t float forever. The Day After I got out to eat lunch and the day after that I went to the visitation, and then there was the funeral. But, if I didn’t have a reason to get out of the pool, I floated.
* * *
I should have prepared myself for the quiet in my house. It wasn’t like I did not have warning that all of this was coming.
I’m a careful man, so I’m not noisy as a rule, but I became even quieter when my wife was sleeping which was all the time at the end. I learned where the wooden floors in my farmhouse cracked and wheezed. A creak, a pop, I learned the sound that each spot makes. I anticipated sounds like the sound of water splashing in the metal sink, the grinding spin of the food disposal, the whir of the A/C when it kicked in. When I placed my silverware on the counter, I heard the metallic click before it happened.
A silent house killed my father. The authorities will tell you that it was a 22 caliber bullet in the brain administered through the roof of the mouth, but that was just the How of what he did, not the Why.
After eight failed marriages, countless stepchildren and finding his son from his third marriage hanging from a basement rafter, my father decided he’d had enough. Some people say his heart had been broken too many times, but I think it was his house which grew so silent that his memories, unchecked and relentless, smothered his spark to live and continue his failing in life.
Floating in my pool, I recalled my mother’s voice telling me that “he took the easy way out”.
Shooting yourself in the head seems like a difficult thing to do to me, I told her, but she ignored me.
“He was always selfish.”
“Now that’s where you’re wrong. He died a thoughtful man, shooting himself in the bathtub where it was easier for me to scrub up the mess. Very considerate I can tell you.”
It’s these little acts of consideration that show people you care.
I can hear someone in my kitchen. The person is angry because pots are banging and cabinet doors are slamming.
Must be my daughter.
Something drops. “Damn!” She’s cooking.
“Hey!” Her head appears between the drapes at the sliding door and disappears when I look.
Soon, she is standing at the side of the pool with a plate. “I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.”
“I wish you hadn’t, but thank you.”
I start drifting away.
“Get out of the pool daddy!”
I smile.
“You. Need. To. Get. Out.” Then: “Now, daddy.”
I’m kicking my feet now, not hard, but enough to retreat to the other side of the pool.
The sandwich skipped the surface twice and shot past my head.
* * *
I tried to think of constructive things I would do if I could only recollect them once I got out of the pool. I could read a bookshelf of National Geographics which I’d gotten from my father’s house 40 years ago. If I ever went to a party again, I’d be able talk about anything.
I thought about having someone tear out the master bathroom and install a sauna and a walk-in shower or place speakers throughout the house so I could play through my vinyl and CD collection: Marvin Gaye, Liz Phair, Beatles, Clapton, Sinatra. That would take care of the sound, or the lack of it.
One afternoon, I decided to act upon a project and make a telephone call, but I went to the movies instead.
This was a practical decision; I needed a place to be. I could stay out of the way of people who insisted that I stop ignoring them while I floated in my pool, neighbors, my children, widows with casseroles, friends who volunteer on committees.
When I was a kid our theatre showed one movie all week, and they only showed it once a day. I went to the movies every weekend for the matinee, and I never missed the previews so I could have something to look forward to. These days the Belcourt in Nashville and the Franklin Theatre down in Franklin have gone artsy and show a lot of classics, cult and art films, sometimes marathons of Westerns, film noir, horror movies. For awhile, I spent entire days there, drinking (they serve booze now) and watching movies.
The loneliest people in the world might be the people who sit in the dark at the end of a movie and listen to the music as the credits roll by on the screen. Either they don’t have any place to go or they need a reason not to go home.
Isn’t that just floating?
“You must love movies,” a teenage girl sweeping the aisle told me.
“No,” I said. “I just lack imagination.”
I felt bad about being a smart ass, so I returned to floating as a hobby; it seemed safer.
* * *
When I wanted to tell the time, I opened an eye and squinted at the position of the sun. I didn’t need to change memory channels in my mind; it just happened when I felt a breeze waft over me or when some cloud cover moved and the sun reasserted itself warming me one degree at a time.
I can’t say that my floating meditations gave me any clearer insights into Life, but I decided that smart people are unhappier than simple people.
I remembered a man in Nashville who was frequently seen walking along 4thAvenue outside my law office. He did’nt live under a bridge, but he didn’t appear to have the wits to draw a paycheck either. He had a permanent smile and nodded to everyone he met on the sidewalk. The only time I heard him talk was when the mood overtook him and he gave a five-minute religious oration on a street corner. We called him The Prophet. “I’ve seen the future! Repent!” These are the kinds of things he said.
One day I saw The Prophet walking toward me with a pigeon perched on his shoulder. The people ahead of me smiled at him and looked at the pigeon as he passed them. He smiled, enjoying the attention his feathered friend got him.
As he passed me, I saw a 7-inch streak of bird shit streaming down the back of his shirt. This must have happened to pirates in buccaneer times, I thought. Tropical parrots probably left a streak of guano as wide as a highway divider line.
I wondered what the expression on The Prophet’s face was when he changed his shirt and discovered that he was walking around with a smear of bird shit down his back. Would he say to himself: “I didn’t see that in the future!”
* * *
“You need to sell this place,” my daughter has returned. She is holding a coffee mug, and I am watching in case I have to dodge it.
I’ve thought about selling the farm and moving to Florida where I’d lived a few years in the 1960s. It would be nice to smell the salt in the air again and listen to the waves while sitting on a patio with an Old Fashioned in my hand and a stupid look on my face.
Perhaps I could find a bungalow near a beach with a beach-themed bar I can walk to, one with fishing nets draped on the wall and cheap ceramic shells and brightly painted, plastic fish glued onto it. No fruity drinks in coconut husks with umbrellas for me. My drink will be the Old Fashioned.
My favorite bar will be the one where the bartender asks you how you like your Old Fashioned, sweet or on the bitter side, and whether you have a favorite whiskey. That tells you that the bartender knows what he’s doing.
Since I will be living near the beach, I see myself in a straw hat. No colorful hatbands with a plastic tennis racket or golf club glued onto it for me. I have standards. I can see myself in baggy shorts and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt.
I’ll start my day drinking shortly after noon. By late afternoon I should be ready to walk back to my bungalow. Walking is excellent exercise for old people. Hopefully, there will be a sidewalk although drunkenly collapsing into a soft sand dune has its advantages.
I will not be one of those old men who go about on the beach with a tiny shovel and a metal detector. I’d rather drink and think about all the things that might have happened to me if I’d been smarter or more reckless.
At night, I will grill shishkebab. If no one is about, and there won’t be because I won’t have any friends, not even a woman of questionable character, I will sit on my patio and eat right off the skewer.
I can then collapse on the sofa and watch a mind-numbing reality show but with the sound turned down so I can insult the actors faking crisises and pretending shock, anger and surprise.
Maybe on my next trip out of the pool I’ll call a real estate agent. That is, if I am feeling motivated.
“This has got to end,” my daughter says and leaves. “I’m going to work.”
* * *
Breathe calmly and the water won’t lap at your face. Adjust your arms and legs to maintain a perfect equilibrium. Floating may be the closest I will come to returning to the womb--isolated, nourished, free from anxiety and sound, a beautiful nothingness. That is my idea of Heaven. It exists side by side with my idea of Hell, a state of acute awareness where everything that ever happened to me is recalled, regretted and ruthlessly reviewed.
“You’re going to grow fins daddy.” My daughter sounds unhappy. Again.
“I’m meditating.”
If you leave out the part about making your mind a blank, something I only achieved occasionally, I wasn’t lying.
I thought a lot about Heaven, the Great Nothingness.
I long ago gave up on Heaven-like ambitions, but when I’m on my own deathbed I do expect to be praying like a son-of-a-bitch. That right there is a good reason to just die in your sleep unexpectedly. If you don’t know you’re about to die, you can avoid being a hypocrite in this one final, crucial scene in your life.
I’m not saying I’m not a religious person; I spent my childhood in church. I’m just saying I’m resigned to my fate. I am a resignedperson.
I’ve decided that there are three stages of religious belief for most people with a church background.
First, you believe in a Heaven for good people and a real Hell for bad people.
Sometime in middle age, when you realize that you’re ineligible for Heaven, you retain the Heaven concept with some eternal pleasantries associated with floating but decide that Hell is the Big Nothingness. People who go to Hell don’t know it; they just don’t get the reward of going to Heaven. Knowing my deficiencies better than anyone except God, I am resigned to divine ineligibility and to an eternity of nonexistence.
If you live long enough, you reach a third phase and decide neither Heaven nor Hell ever existed, that they were created by men who could not accept that they were just biological organisms. Thinking about the state of nothingness seems like a waste of time. Still, you turn hypocrite on your death bed and pray like a s.o.b.
I think I graduated from Phase 1 all the way to Phase 3 in that pool. That’s a kind of peace I suppose.
“Get out now daddy!”
“I’m doing water therapy.”
“Therapy my ass.”
“You need to work on your attitude,” I tell her.
Kerplunk!
I’m not sure what that was, a banana maybe, but she missed me.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN GREAT WEATHER FOR MEDIA’S ANTHOLOGY FOR 2023. IT WAS REPUBLISHED IN CHILDREN, CHURCHES AND DADDIES ANTHOLOGY "CLEAR LAKE" V. 343 IN MARCH 2024. IT HAS BEEN REPRINTED IN CC&D'S jANUARY-APRIL 2024 COLLECTION.
THE MUSIC LOVER
No one knows if Jane Austen was a babe. Not really. The 19th-century literary giant died before there were photographs, so all you can rely on are portraits, and as far as I’m concerned, and your eye may be keener than mine, all of the women in classical portraiture look alike. One woman’s hair might be fluffier, but their faces are all the same—as if the world’s portrait artists were given the same woman as a model. With little variation, you get a fancy smiley face.
In the two years since Em died and I retired from my law firm to my farm, I’ve been reading through my library. Ms. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is my third book this week, and I’m wondering (or even musing) about the woman who could write with such wit and precision.
Art does that to me, loosens my imagination and sends me to pleasant places (and sometimes, with female artists, romantic musings).
I blame Patsy Cline. When I was eight years old, I fell in love with the one-time queen of country music.
My mother and I were driving down Murfreesboro Road in Nashville on our way to see her boyfriend when it happened. I’d never met the man we were going to see, but I knew I was going along for cover, and I was supposed to keep my mouth shut about it all because my mother was having her first divorce.
“If anybody asks where we were, you tell them we went shopping and you sat in the car. This will be our secret.” We had lots of secrets.
She wrote letters to this man at his business in Florida, and I mailed them for her at the mailbox at the shopping center. My mother wrote “personal” on the envelopes and underlined that two times.
“I don’t want a secretary opening them thinking that they’re about his business.” At eight years old, you don’t ask questions. You get on your bicycle and ride to the shopping center.
I learned not to put her letters in my pocket because they were scented with perfume which rubbed off on me. Once a friend’s mother asked me why I smelled so good. I told her that my mother had hugged me as I left the house, which is pretty fast thinking for an eight-year-old. “You smell French,” she said.
This man was traveling through Nashville on business, and my mother was going to meet him at his motel while I waited in the car. I brought a book to read.
Nobody wore seat belts back then, and I was sitting forward on the seat with my elbows on the dashboard when the purest sound I ever heard came over the radio. It was Patsy Cline carrying the opening notes of “I Fall to Pieces.” Here was something clean and pure, musical notes like diamonds or ice crystals, notes so sharp they could slice your skin without causing pain. If a chandelier could sing, this is what it would sound like. I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes. When she was through, I felt so purified that I violated boyhood’s cardinal rule and confessed to my mother that I loved the singer “so hard my heart hurt.”
After that I wore out the tuner of the radio searching for Patsy Cline. WSM-AM always played her songs although most of the Nashville stations played some Patsy Cline back in the early 1960s. Rock’n’roll took its time coming to the country music capital of the world.
Whenever a station did play a Patsy Cline song, my mother would say “Here’s your girlfriend.”
I was proud of how I felt about Patsy Cline; I wasn’t embarrassed to show it in front of my mother.
“Doesn’t she just make your heart beat faster?” my mother asked me once. “A sweetheart will do that to you.” She made it sound like she knew what I was feeling for Patsy Cline and that it was the same thing she felt for one of the revolving door of boyfriends who stepped on each others’ heels following my discarded father in her affections.
Somewhere deep down in my abdomen or tucked away in an unmapped wrinkle in my brain, my puberty countdown clock lurched ahead a full five minutes with a lascivious “Tick-Tock!” I wanted this woman; I was not sure for what purpose, but I wanted her.
~
I can’t remember a time when women and music weren’t intertwined in my life. All of my teen crushes were music women. Gripped in the throes of puberty, I didn’t waste time fantasizing about cheerleaders. Every night I went to bed with Grace Slick and Marianne Faithfull, sometimes at the same time.
When I was ten, one of my mother’s boyfriends bribed me with a transistor radio, and although I did not realize it at the time, that man redirected my life. I listened with an earplug in bed at night with the covers over my head to drown out the yelps of passion coming from my mother’s bedroom or the living room couch when love prevailed . . . or the yowls of dissension which were never far behind. My mother had the music of love, or what passed for love in her world; I had the music of The Who, Hendrix, The Beatles, and Jefferson Airplane.
My mother’s men did not have last names. Introductions were always first name only. If our lives had been a play, there would be no transitions—just abrupt changes of acts with the scenery breaking loose occasionally and falling onto the stage while we actors dodged around, speaking our lines. I’d come home from school and Charlie who worked a night shift would be sleeping on the couch; I’d come in from playing and John would be sitting at the dinner table with his work boots off, and I would prepare to be nicknamed “tiger” or “sport.” Occasionally, one of them destroyed some of our possessions as he retired from the field of romantic contention. (One man threw a lamp through the screen of our black and white television in a fit of disappointment. His successor bought us a used color television but took it with him when he stomped off the stage.)
I saw a lot of white socks and shook a lot of hands by the time I escaped to college. My mother’s passions destroyed her; mine saved me. I learned to float on music while I developed the skill of hanging on. Music gave me something reliable.
I got my first real kiss while listening to that radio. I was twelve years old. My mother had some friends over, and I was presented around the room as her “little man” to manly handshakes and the kind of compliments that come effortlessly from women, all except for one woman who sipped her drink before she said anything to me. “What do you like to do, Marty?”
“He likes music,” my mother said. The woman didn’t look at my mother; she looked at me.
“I like the way music makes me feel,” I said.
Later that night, I was lying in bed listening to my radio with my earplug when my bedroom door crept open, a wedge of light spreading across the floor before disappearing back into black. I thought it was my mother. I felt the mattress compress as she sat beside me, and the scent of crushed flowers enveloped me.
“Who are you listening to?” It was the woman from the party.
“The Doors. ‘The End.’”
She leaned over me; her face was inches from mine, and I could smell alcohol on her breath. “May I listen?” It was not a real question. Her breasts mashed against my chest. She took the earplug. “Hmmm,” she said, leaned closer and pressed her lips to mine, raking her tongue back and forth until she’d had enough.
I liked it. I wanted her to do it again.
“Is that your first kiss?” She smoothed my hair. Yes, I said. “Then it’s special. Don’t share it with anybody else.”
I should have wrapped my arms around her. I knew that at the time. Maybe she would have kissed me longer. (That kiss got me in trouble later at a birthday party when I gave a neighbor girl the surprise of her twelve-year-old life.)
The day after that woman came to my bedroom, I took my newspaper route money to the shopping center and bought a brooch with a rose painted on it. I hid it under my bed, but she never came to our house again.
I gave the brooch to my mother, a birthday gift as dishonest as my reasons for promising my mother that I would “amount to something,” which to me was just my resolve that I wouldn’t grow up to be like her. I found the brooch in my mother’s things when she died.
~
Cancer robbed my wife until she had nothing left, not even her life. At first, it took Em from her flower garden and confined her to loitering in our house. Next it took that away, leaving her languishing in our bed in opiate induced stupors. When sound and light began afflicting her, I closed the blinds on her world, turned off the classical music she loved and quit wearing shoes in the house. I lay on my cot beside her bed in the dark and murmured to her about things I would want to hear if I was going away. She wasn’t restless when I spoke. When it was over, the absence of music became a logical continuation of my mourning, one long regret for everything that went away in my life and a penance for all the things I shouldn’t have done.
I don’t think I realized the power of silence.
I don’t mean the kind of silence like the absence of sound on the first day of creation or that soulless and sterile condition you’d find in a laboratory, but a silence punctuated with meaningless noises and meaningful memories, mirage-like recollections powerful enough to make me stop whatever I’m doing and speak at them. If I join in, I can make the memory last longer, squeeze a little more wine out of the pulp. Two years alone in a farmhouse will do that to you.
I hear the sound the mail makes when I drop it on Em’s antique table in the foyer and watch Em come in from her flowers with the mail in one hand and a trowel in the other. She is wearing her straw hat with the broken brim. “Anything interesting?” I ask. “Junk,” she says. “Come see what I planted.” When the central air kicks in, my upstairs office window vibrates, and I look up from my desk and see my children darting among the hedges of the backyard. Every creak of the wooden floors, even the ticking of the old clock in our dining room, creates not just its own sound but a memory, my son’s first steps with me holding onto his hands as he stumbles forward. “Com’n. One more...Now the other foot.” I open a door and my daughter raises her arms and says “Daddy” and I say “My precious girl.”
Some sounds surprise me like the scuff of my shoe on the tile of the kitchen floor. I even hear sounds before I make them like the clatter of a fork in the sink or the wooden scraping of the drawers in my antique bureau when I slide them open.
At night, I lie in bed while the silence gathers round and wonder how things would have been if I’d done this instead of that, if I’d spoken the right words or just shut up. I thought about our children now so far away and busy with their own families. What are my children like when they’re not around me? When did things change and I become an accessory in their lives? They called when they were supposed to and sometimes visited. This is the way of things; this is how things are. I listen to my silence until I surrender to the raucous roaring of the cicadas in the maple trees surrounding my house and to the calls of the owls in the woods asserting their territorial claims. Then I am asleep.
~
If I go ahead and die, people around here will say: “He just sort’a went downhill after she was gone.” I suppose I did for a while. Slowly, music is coming back to me. I allow a couple of hours every evening when I can control things, a time when the light becomes a gray reflection of what it was, fading around me like God himself slowly drawing the drapes on my day. Fresh from a shower, an Old Fashioned in hand, I retreat to a rocker on the back porch to listen to music. When you live alone on a farm and your only neighbors are the cows in the pastures around your house, you can play music as loud as you want. I sit on the porch, drink, and listen to my music collection on my way to “one too many,” just me and the cows who gather at the fence watching me, dull and expectant, like they’re waiting for me to do something.
These are the hours when silence listens to me.
~
It’s impossible to ignore the musicians coming to Nashville every week to perform. I tried, but eventually, my siren song came up on the cosmic playlist.
Liz Phair, the indie music queen of the 1990s, and I share an anniversary of sorts.
She is coming to Nashville on tour in celebration of the anniversary of her enormously successful 1993 debut album Exile In Guyville, a repertoire of low-fi songs recounting the ill treatment she’d received from dating lesser men and the bitter lessons she’d learned.
As for me, I’m observing the year Ms. Phair slapped the hell out of me; not literally of course. I never met the woman, but figuratively and on behalf of every woman I ever dated for all the promised phone calls I never made, the second dates which never came, and the hurried affections I enjoyed from the subtle offense of my hand sliding under a waistband to the murmurs of my vacuous endearments and pitiable feminine surrenders.
In the early 90s, I was much older than the college boys and girls who were the natural audience for the 26-year-old songwriter who clawed at the wounds which comprise the chapters of youthful love. I was a trial lawyer, husband, and father and too old to admit to being smitten by a five-foot-two waif with a little girl’s voice strumming a big guitar and singing lyrics that would make a coal miner blush.
“She cusses too much.” Em always dismissed the indie music queen’s raw, musical poetry with the wave of her hand. “Indulging a teen crush is just cheating.”
I doubt the record executives celebrating the album’s success, or even Liz Phair herself, ever realized that her market audience included men like me with daughters, mortgages and riding lawn mowers. I heard those songs through the musical prism of being a 30-something father of a little girl who worshiped me. Liz Phair knew my secrets and laid out her case in those 18 songs of her debut album, indicting me for what I did as a young man and showing me why things worked out like they did.
I knew I was not the man my second grade daughter thought I was. I felt it when I sat down in a small chair to eat a sack lunch with her on parent day at school and the other little girls giggled and moved their chairs closer to me. I felt it when a boy came to our house to carry my daughter into the night on her first real date. I felt it every time my daughter called me “daddy” which she always did when someone broke her heart.
Liz Phair knew what kind of man I was. She promised me that things would be better if I could only find my way back for a second try.
And here she is, standing in the light piercing through this doorway to the big bedroom which is my life here on the farm. I reached out.
I not only bought a ticket, I paid for the Meet and Greet, something I’d never done in all the years I’d gone to concerts. It felt like making a date with a mistress.
~
A man dressed like the Statue of Liberty is twirling a sign advertising tax preparation over his shoulders and around his waist on the sidewalk outside the shopping center where I sit in my car listening to the Rolling Stones finish “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” I’m wondering what he did in life to deserve this bad karma.
He ignores me as I slide up to the door of Prime Cuts for my bi-weekly haircut with a stylist named Bonnie. Before I even reach the door, I’m hearing the opening drum roll to The Strangelove’s “I Want Candy” like I’m approaching something exotic or walking where it’s vaguely dangerous. Bonnie, a 40-ish divorcée who cut Em’s hair for years, is wearing fishnet hose, shorts, shoes that might be boots and too many rings, all the things Em would never have worn.
“Hi guy,” Bonnie says and flaps her apron with a snap.
I’ve often thought about asking Bonnie out but never followed through; our age difference doesn’t help.
Dentists and hairstylists always talk their way through their administrations as they hover around your head. I enjoy listening to Bonnie’s reports on the latest doings of her sister and her sister’s boyfriend Merle, her own ungrateful children, and the scandalous antics of another stylist who we refer to as “Z” when we talk about her. All the while I enjoy a close-up look at Bonnie’s neck and shoulders and as much of her chest as her low-cut blouses reveal. Her hoop earrings, one of my personal fetishes in feminine adornment, dangle and tease.
“I want to look nice because I’m going to meet Liz Phair, the indie music artist and my teen crush,” I say, trying to make it sound like a joke. “I want to make a good appearance.”
“Never heard of her.” Bonnie cracks her knuckles like a truck driver preparing to play the piano.
I have a mop of hair thanks to good genes on my mother’s side of the family, and most of it is still brown. Bonnie sets upon me with her scissors, and I turn my inner cruise control on, admiring the scenery and catching up on Merle and Z and the new house Bonnie just bought. I relax on a cloud of sensation, Bonnie’s words pushing me around like I am floating in a blue sky.
“I’m moving in this weekend,” she says. “Maybe I’ll throw a party.”
“Absolutely,” I speak up over the sound of her scissors. Snip! Snip!
Minutes later Bonnie is breathless, and I am almost hairless.
She rests her hands on my shoulders and caresses me while we look at each other in the mirror. We looked like the portrait of a couple.
“Your gray hair doesn’t show up so much when your hair is short,” Bonnie says, pointing out the positive part of having so little hair left. My hair does look browner, but I’d not worn it that short in the two years that Bonnie has been cutting it. The cowlick on the left side of my head springs out in a line like a hairbrush. My bangs are lopsided, and I think I barely escaped with both eyebrows.
“Perfect,” I say, ignoring the damage. With less hair around my temples and forehead, I think my age is more obvious.
“The humidity is causing that cowlick to stand up.” Bonnie slaps her towel on the chair at my shorn locks as if she were lashing out at a fly. “You might use some gel on that.”
Bonnie and I have a parting ritual. At the door, she gives my hair a final goodbye. She doesn’t use her comb to arrange the hair over my forehead; she uses her fingers. “You have beautiful hair,” she would always say, her hoops dangling from her ears.
Some people will tell you that a kiss is the most intimate experience you’ll ever have, and I can see that; but I think it’s the way a woman touches you. Not only does it titillate, it suggests something more, allowing your imagination to run with the physical sensation.
There was no fingering my hair on this trip; I didn’t have enough left. Bonnie slung her towel over her shoulder. “Enjoy seeing what’s-her-face.”
~
I wasn’t sure how a Meet and Greet worked, so I looked it up. People with more time than I have, what with the lawn, Em’s flowers, and my three books a week, have filled the internet with the dos and don’ts of saying hello to the celebrities they are paying to meet. Gifts? I hadn’t considered that.
On the day of the show, I stopped by the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, a musical treasure on Lower Broad for more than 70 years. I already had an idea of what I wanted, but I didn’t look for it until I’d walked my fingers through the stacks of vinyl and CDs. Some might call that browsing, but I think a better word is savoring.
I knew I’d found the perfect gift the moment I touched it. The MCA “Patsy Cline: Gold” album contains two discs with 32 songs. The singer is pictured on the cover with a sweater thrown over her shoulder as if she were pausing on her way out the door to flash a smile at the photographer.
I stood there long enough to attract a 20-something clerk, probably one of the thousand young musicians in Nashville working a daytime job. She had the hair and perky drawl for the pop country sound.
“I love Patsy Cline,” she said, nodding at my CD. “This store was the first place she performed back in the fifties when she came to Nashville.”
She was much too young to be interested in me, but I enjoyed her attention.
Although I was not sure a gift was appropriate, I bought the CD anyway and worked it into the pocket of my blazer with the vague notion that I would figure it out.
The Exit-In may be Nashville’s oldest continuous music venue outside of The Ryman, the mother church of country music. It’s located on Elliston Place across from Obie’s Pizza and a popular watering hole, The Gold Rush. They’ve become Nashville institutions while others have been bulldozed for condos and restaurants with names that always include a woman’s first name or some allusion to the “South.”
We lined up at 5:15 p.m. on the sidewalk. It rained that afternoon, but the sun returned and cooked the moisture up into the air so thick I could swim through it. Sweat trickled down my spine. I patted my forehead with my handkerchief and hoped I’d cool off inside before I faced Ms. Phair.
Half the people in line for the Meet and Greet were single men over 50, wearing loafers and baggy jeans like it was casual day at the office.
I’m at the age where the first thing I do when I get to a show is look for at least one other guy older than me. If I have the oldest face, my lips tighten and I try to remember to breathe in my waistline. I spotted a guy who had to be older than me (either that or his ancestors shorted him in the “good genes” department). He too was there alone, another divorcée or widower.
Another man my age wearing a ball cap backwards, a metal band t-shirt, sweat pants, and broken down tennis shoes worn by 18 year olds in garage bands looked at me without seeing me. Ball Cap slouched, his body having collapsed in on itself from years of not being in a rush to get anywhere. Even his lips and eyelids folded in on themselves. He started telling the couple in front of me about how he met Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits. The woman had dressed up, but her companion wore flip flops and looked like he had forgotten to comb his hair this year.
Bonnie and I would have enjoyed talking about these people. I liked the thought of amusing her and felt guilty for not wishing Em were here.
The names of music legends who have performed at the Exit-In are painted on a wall along the sidewalk: Tom Petty, John Prine, the B-52s. I read them all, listening and waiting.
“Greetings VIPers!” The petite queen of indie music greeted us from the stage, a guitar as long as she was tall strapped across her chest, her hands resting on it like on a balcony rail. Gone was indie music’s sprite; in her place stood the associate dean of women at a mid-sized state university.
The man I decided was older than me looked around the room, grinning as if the Pope had just told him God selected him to win the lottery real soon.
“I wish I had some words of wisdom to give you.” Ms. Phair laughed. “Why don’t we just play you some songs instead.”
Standing three feet from her, I tried not to stare. At age 51, Ms. Phair looked 30, one of those women who grow more beautiful with every birthday. Wrinkles come with age certainly, but the beauty of some women outpaces the wear and tear of living. Em was like that. I told her she was beautiful. “Thanks for your lies,” she would say. A time came when I didn’t tell her that enough, another regret after the cancer came.
After the set, we were herded into a line in front of a banner reading “Make America Girly Again,” a reference to the “Girly Sound” theme of Ms. Phair’s first recordings which electrified the indie scene when she was first discovered recording songs on cassettes for her friends.
Ball Cap loitered at the end where I suspected he intended to glom onto Ms. Phair and take more of her time than he would get if he were further up in line and pressed to move along.
Ms. Phair and the photographer shuffled us through the photograph session. With every step closer, my heartbeat quickened. I breathed deep, stepped forward, squared my shoulders, smoothed down my cowlick, and patted the CD in my pocket again. My interior monologue hung up on repeat: “Hello, I’m Martin. Welcome to Nashville.” My words crashed into each other in my mind like the cars of a train the midst of a derailment.
I hoped I had cooled down enough that my shirt collar was not dark with sweat. My cheeks blushed; I’d been on a blood thinner for a year now, and I reddened easily. I was way too old to be feeling the way I was feeling.
And then it was my time. “I’m Martin. Welcome to Nashville.” The words echoed in my head.
Ms. Phair said something, but I can’t remember what. For 20 seconds I was 16 again, debilitated by self-awareness, my mind blank. How long had it been since a woman reduced me to incapacity just by standing next to me? Our photograph taken, I fled, never touching the CD in my pocket.
~
Unlike those people who let algorithms select their music, I must do that for myself, picking through my collection with considerations too intimate to define. Just hours after I embarrassed myself with Ms. Phair is not the time to be listening to Patsy Cline, but I selected her anyway.
Live long enough and you’ll lose all the women you love.
When I was nine years old, Patsy Cline left me. I came home from school and my mother met me at the door. “Marty, there’s bad news.” Another move because of love gone awry? I’d already been to three schools that year.
Her news was worse. . . Patsy Cline had been killed in a plane crash.
I didn’t cry out; I didn’t say anything. I walked to my bedroom, dropped my books on the bed and walked out of the house. Avoiding my friends, I wandered to the woods at the edge of the subdivision and lay down underneath a sugar maple. It was dark when I came home. If my mother noticed the dirt under my fingernails, she never said anything.
My photograph with Ms. Phair is worse than I thought. My face is flushed bright red. My hair looks like I cut it myself without a mirror. Even my glasses look like I’d been struck by a softball. Ms. Phair is poised, a veteran of standing next to fawning fans. I’m certain I could laugh about it if I worked at it.
Tonight’s swirl of images, Patsy Cline, Em, that woman who kissed me, my buying a CD for Ms. Phair, my mother, slowed with the alcohol until they settled in my memory like a flock of starlings landing in a barren field.
I drained my drink and fell into bed, setting sail to slumberland on a sea of alcohol, tacking against winds of confusion and gales of reproach.
~
“So...how’d your crush like your haircut?” Bonnie’s voice is perky over the phone like water bubbling from a spring. Talking to a woman on the telephone lets you concentrate on the sound of her voice, the ripples and the sighs, the silences filled with anticipation.
“I don’t think she noticed.” I tried to sound disappointed.
“I’ll have to make it up to you.” Women you desire always say two things to you at the same time. Sometimes, they mean to.
My turn now. This is why I called her. Patsy Cline smiled at me from the CD and walked through her door, taking the silliness I felt about buying a gift for Ms. Phair with her like the sweater draped over her shoulder.
I reached out.
“Maybe we could go to dinner. I want to hear about your new house,” I said. “I have a housewarming gift for you.” I closed my eyes, thinking of Patsy Cline and the CD.
THIS STORY APPEARS IN ISSUE 2: 2024 OF “CRESCENDO: A COMMUNITY OF WRITERS” MAGAZINE.
SPACE
SPACE
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UNUSUAL PEOPLE
INTRODUCTION
Unusual people make a boorish world more tolerable.
MR. JORDAN PARKS HIS CAR
This story appeared on line 3/30/22 in Literary Yard magazine. This story was reprinted 3/22/24 online in Churches, Children and Daddies magazine and will be reprinted in V.22 on 7/1/24. It has been republished in Down In The Dirt's anthology "A Library of Collaboration" for May-August 2024.
MOTHER STREET
This story appeared online and in print in the March 2022 issue of Owl Light Magazine "On Trees and Transience" Vol. 5. It is reprinted in the 5/27/24 issue of DarkWinter Literary Magazine.
MILLIE CLARK, PORTRAIT PAINTER
Millie Clark, art school graduate, aspiring portrait painter and CEO (and only employee) of Trim With Vim, LLC, a Nashville house painting company, did not want to paint a portrait of her neighbor’s bulldog.
Why, she was a portrait painter, a serious artist with a Masters Degree and her own artsy business card which she designed herself. DaVinci never painted a dog portrait. Vermeer, Gainsboro, Sargent, Van Dyck, all of the masters stuck to human portraiture. But then, she was not a famous artist with lots of commissions. Five years out of college she was painting houses to pay her bills. Did DaVinci ever tend bar or wait tables until he was discovered?
“Think of it as an artistic challenge,” her boyfriend Guy said. “Those guys couldn’t paint a dog portrait, not like you.”
Standing at the wall of windows in her home studio, Millie watched the bees and butterflies flitting among the roses and lilies of her flower garden and wondered why her life couldn’t be simpler, more controlled and ordered like the paint she applied to canvas. “Do butterflies and bees worry about the rain that comes their way? No, but then they have tiny brains, miniscule compared to the brain of an artist. I bet simple-minded people lead happier lives.”
Millie needed time to ponder the decisions life thrust her way. That’s how she approached her portraits. She might spend 30 minutes studying whether a chin needed a flourish or a forehead a dab, and the next day she might start the portrait over.
It had all happened so suddenly.
That morning old Mrs. Sneed tapped on Millie’s studio window.
“I reckon you heard about Daphne?” she asked before Millie could say hello. Mrs. Sneed named all of her dogs Daphne for as long as Millie could remember.
When someone starts out a conversation with “I guess you heard…” (or “reckon” if you were born on a farm) you don’t know if they’re going to report a tragedy or a lottery win, so you search their face for a clue, and Mrs. Sneed’s face said tragedy so Millie arranged her eyes and lips to express concern.
“She was outside doing her business and got run over by the garbage truck.” The old woman lifted a corner of her apron and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
“Oh Mrs. Sneed, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The old woman stopped her eye dabbing. “Oh, Daphne’s not dead…she’s cross-eyed.”
Before Millie could amend her expression of sympathy, Mrs. Sneed added, “Dr. Bill says it’s permanent.”
“That’s terrible. How does she see?”
“Very poorly. She runs into things. She’ll have to wear a little helmet for the rest of her life.” Mrs. Sneed applied the apron to her eyes again. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
Evidently, the Lord had it in for Daphne, Millie thought. She’d never understood a religion in which God orchestrated all things that happened, good or bad, even making bulldogs cross-eyed.
“Poor thing.” Millie said, falling back on the universal Southern expression of sympathy for the sick, afflicted or newly cross-eyed.
In the living room, small by modern standards and cramped with overstuffed 1950s’ furniture, Mrs. Sneed stood before the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Clark above the fireplace. “I’ve always admired your painting abilities Miss Millie. That’s how our loved ones should be recollected…when they’re gone.”
Millie’s parents were her first patrons after she graduated from Middle Tennessee State University. (She never referred to her clientele as customers.)
Portrait commissions were scarce in the age of camera phones and social media, and there had not been enough patrons since college for her to make a full time living at it. Millie supplemented her Spring “art” income at lawn and garden shows where she drew lithograph-like sketches of people’s houses from their favorite photographs for $75. (Although she didn’t brag about it, she often painted people’s houses. She was surprisingly good at trim work. Unfortunately or fortunately depending upon your perspective, Millie’s reputation for specialty trim work out ran her reputation for portraiture, so much so that Guy, a lawyer with a Nashville law firm, incorporated her house trim business.)
Millie’s parents paid her for their portraits and gave her their house when they retired to Florida two years earlier, so she at least had a studio when she did get a commission.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about honey,” Mrs. Sneed said. “A portrait job.”
This was welcome news. Millie had not painted a portrait in two months and was preparing to start the trim work in three houses being built by a contractor Guy was representing in a zoning dispute.
Mrs. Sneed returned to the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Clark.
Visitors often remarked upon the portraits. “So life like.” Or: “Such talent.” Once someone told her: “I like the way your dad’s eyes follow you around the room.” (This was a regrettable observation considering that not long before Mr. Clark retired, he had been questioned by the police about using a drone he bought at Sam’s Club to spy on sunbathing neighbors. Millie believed the neighbors overreacted because Mr. Clark lost control of the drone and crashed it through their kitchen bay window.)
“I want you to paint a portrait of Daphne…like those.” Mrs. Sneed nodded at the parental portraits.
Millie knew Mrs. Sneed was really looking at Mrs. Clark’s portrait.
There was a reason no one remarked on Mrs. Clark’s eyes. Millie’s mother was severely cross-eyed, a birth defect, but in the portrait her eyes were straight. This adjustment was so severe that people who knew Mrs. Clark often stood in front of her portrait, wondering whether she appeared more normal when she was cross-eyed.
It was bad enough that there was little portrait work and Millie had to paint houses to pay her bills, but now, she was being asked to paint a dog.
“I’ve never done that before…I don’t know…” Millie had known the old woman all of her life. Mrs. Sneed babysat her as a child and went to her high school graduation. It troubled Millie to see the disappointment rising in the old woman’s face. “I could try…I guess…”
“I’d be so grateful honey.” Mrs. Sneed pulled a photograph from her pocket. “Daphne can’t sit upright now. This picture is from her birthday.”
The photograph was actually four photographs taken in succession in one of those photo booths you see near the entrance to Walmart.
In one frame Daphne sat in Mrs. Sneed’s lap, licking the old woman’s chin. Daphne was wearing a cone shaped party hat attached to her head with a rubber band. Mrs. Sneed had one on as well, only larger. Mrs. Sneed had a whistle in her mouth with a roll-up paper tongue coiled up tight under her nose.
“You can see her eyes real good in this one,” Mrs. Sneed pointed to the second frame. Daphne’s eyes were wide open as was her mouth in what would have been described as a scream if she’d been human. Mrs. Sneed had blown the extension whistle beside Daphne’s ear. The whistle’s paper tongue was fully extended lizard-like toward the camera.
The next photograph caught Daphne wriggling in the crook of Mrs. Sneed’s right arm, and in the final photograph Daphne was biting Mrs. Sneed’s hand.
“She’s a little skittish right there with the camera flash…and noise,” Mrs. Sneed explained.
“Yes mam,” Millie said. “I suppose I could try.”
“Bless you honey,” Mrs. Sneed said and kissed Millie on the cheek.
* * *
Millie approached Daphne’s portrait just like she did with her human subjects. She drew in lines to establish the head and place the facial features. When she was satisfied with the shape and tilt of the head, she painted small patches with the colors she desired as a base until she had a discernible face, much like the face of a person looking through steamy shower glass. While the colors were still wet, Millie began blending them with other colors to create the proper pigmentation of the skin (or fur).
“You know what this is?” she asked Guy a couple of days later.
“A dog.”
“Exactly. It’s just a dog. It’s not a portrait.” Millie said. “A real portrait must be unique. There’s only one like it.”
She threw the portrait aside. Her second effort fared no better.
“You don’t create a portrait, you interpret a life,” she told her students in the continuing education class at Nashville Community College where she taught middle aged women who watched “Oprah Winfrey” and “Ellen” during the day to paint bowls of fruit at night. “A life does not appear by itself; the artist must find it.”
Millie did what she always did when she was out of ideas and inspiration. She consulted her private hoard of advisors, her collection of antique portraiture, her “ancients”.
Millie collected the lost work of long dead painters, painted portraiture, not photography which was not really art at all, at least not like painting was an art form. Cameras are machines, Millie would say. “Take enough pictures and the machine will eventually get it right.”
Drawing the aged portraits out of her portfolios one at a time, Millie placed them on easels in a circle and soon lost herself in consultation. Sometimes while examining a portrait, Millie experienced moments where she was catatonic such was her ability to concentrate. Her artist’s eyes sought out the details others would see without noticing, the blurring of lines between a person’s teeth or along a hairline, the use of lighter colors around the eyes to suggest life against the darker colors in the lower part of the face, the strokes of precision around the eyes and mouth to capture personality and the use of soft, broader brush strokes in the generic parts of the portrait like the shoulders. But, she looked for more than the arty flourish and the spontaneous dab of the brush, she parsed the content, the intelligence in the eyes, the surliness in the set of one’s lips, a nose tipped just enough to suggest confidence.
“If you keep staring at those portraits like that they’re going to start talking to you,” Guy said, taking her by the shoulders and nuzzling her neck.
“The people in those portraits are looking out at us over the ages,” Millie said. “All dead. Even the children in these portraits died before we were born, maybe before our parents were born, but their faces are eloquent.”
Millie was known in every neglected antique store in Nashville and the small towns around middle Tennessee, stores run by people too old to care about keeping the premises tidier than necessary. There was always at least one framed portrait on a wall or stashed under a table cluttered with metal piggy banks, clunky costume jewelry and knick knacks with Coca Cola emblems on them.
Millie believed abandoned portraits ended up in antique stores in working class neighborhoods. Wealthy people had the breeding and resources to retain and preserve their family’s portraiture, but families on the decline, materially or culturally, not so much. Unless you were royalty or rich, this is what happened to people who had their portraits painted. Of course, she told her patrons the opposite: “Portraiture is an act of intimacy which people share with the future. People who invest in having their portraits painted are investing in the future. They are sending themselves forward in time.”
Antique portraits were venerable. Unlike photographs which melted over time, the blacks and grays bleeding away at the edges into the whites and creams, paintings cracked with age, the way the faces of old people wrinkle. The paint grew dingy, but the people inside the best portraits were as alive to Millie as if she knew them.
Millie did not have the money to collect all of the portraits she wanted, and she often left a shop with her brain tingling: “I couldn’t save them. Not everybody gets a place in the lifeboat.”
When Millie brought a portrait home, she removed it from the antique frame which she would offer to her own patrons if they were willing to pay an extra $200, and some of them were. These frames were blackened with the soot from the coal that heated the homes of these people more than a century ago and laminated with the grime of neglect picked up from the attics and storage bins where the portraits stowed away for decades until the heirs and assigns decided that the long dead family members in them did not matter anymore and abandoned them to their journey through time like Moses’ basket set adrift on the Nile.
Millie hoped she would remove a portrait from its frame and find money or a letter, something written 125 years ago as a message to the future, a communication from the person in the portrait which she would be the first to read.
The portraits did speak to Millie. They told her their stations in life, in society. Hobbies and habits were revealed and occupations implied. Qualities of character became visible if she studied the portraits long enough.
There was the man she called The Banker who grasped the lapels of his coat with his hands and scowled at the painter. The man’s confidence revealed itself through the tilt of his chin upward and away from the painter, emphasizing the fierce set of his jaw.
Painters used harsher colors with men. Men were more likely depicted holding a cigar between the fingers or resting a hand on a bookcase.
Here was the old woman Millie named Aunt Esther who sat in a rocking chair with her hands folded on top of the Bible in her lap, her mouth gripped in an Old Testament grimace. And there was the girl she called Little Fanny, skin white as powder, holding a kitten.
Millie noticed that women in her collectibles often included objects in their portraits. One woman held a ribbon and another caressed a baby’s rattle (a lost child?).
Such hope, wonder, a life frozen in a moment…such art! Standing before this jury, Millie asked herself: “Daphne’s a girl. Why not?”
She yelled to Guy in the den, “The ancients have spoken!”
“What’d they say?!”
“Toys! Daphne needs her toys.”
“Or a bone!” he yelled back.
“The spirits didn’t speak to you!”
Toys weren’t the answer, but they were part of the answer. Feeling the giddiness of awakening inspiration, or at least…better, Millie took a victory lap over to her favorite portrait, a painting of a young woman she’d seen in an antique store when she was child and convinced her mother to give her for her birthday. The painting had hung on the wall in her bedroom as Millie grew up, and when she got the house, she hung it in her studio.
Millie named her Daisy which sounded right for a 20-something woman from the 1800s. Daisy wore an oversized hat piled high with flowers and feathers, a contrast to the unadorned white smock draping off her shoulders, her skin fair and so white like cold milk. Alabaster maybe? Her hands clasped a rose.
Daisy’s smile was not really a smile at all, but more of a wink. That tilt to her head may have been encouraged by the painter but was probably the way Daisy looked at people. Curiously, the painter did not sign his work.
Dorian Gray had his portrait, Millie had hers. Standing in front of Daisy, Millie could review her day, weigh her decisions and confess her misgivings. There would be no answers to her questions, no oracle-like advice, not from a painting, but there was a friend who always listened and invited Millie to visit with her in another time.
“You are the reason I paint people,” she said to Daisy. “So what do you think about me painting a dog?”
Daisy’s smirk required her eyes to complete itself. Millie would get no answers here.
* * *
Daphne’s favorite toys turned out to be a rubber duck and one of Mrs. Sneed’s shoes. Millie asked for more photographs and started again. Then she asked Mrs. Sneed for her favorite stories of Daphne’s life. For days Millie labored over the bulldog’s portrait, scouring the photographs for clues as to what made Daphne different from other bulldogs, crumbs of personality which would give the portrait life. Millie could tell from the photographs that Daphne had a drooling problem, but, like Mrs. Clark’s eyes, she omitted that detail.
Millie devoted as much time to examining her portrait of Daphne for missteps as she did painting it. And one day, she was done.
This portrait may have been one of her best even if it was a dog. Millie exaggerated enough to give Daphne a longing look, arched the ears slightly, perky but not raised, just enough to give the appearance of attentiveness. Daphne’s eyes sparkled with intelligence.
“She has…suddeness in her face,” Guy said “…like she’s going to bark, but hasn’t decided to.”
As soon as the painting was dry, Millie invited Mrs. Sneed to tea. The portrait sat in the middle of the parlor on an easel under a sheet. Millie seated Mrs. Sneed in a chair, turned the easel to face her more directly and adjusted the lamp. When she was satisfied, Millie took the corners of the drape and swept it off the portrait.
“Daphne!” Mrs. Sneed began to weep. Daphne was no longer cross-eyed.
“I’ll let you sit with Daphne a bit.” Millie backed out of the room. Every time she checked on Mrs. Sneed, the old woman was staring at Daphne’s portrait as if she were sitting at someone’s hospital sick bed.
* * *
For two months Millie had been dreading the “Artists of Tomorrow” exhibition sponsored by the art department at MTSU to highlight the work of its alumni. (One of Millie’s professors had pleaded with her to participate. “We don’t have anyone to represent portraiture,” the professor said, implying, or so Millie thought, that no one with common sense pursued that kind of work these days.)
“There’s no downside to participating,” Guy said over a wine, pizza and candlelight picnic that night on the floor of Millie’s studio. (He refused to hold these dinners in the living room where Millie’s parents gazed down upon them from the mantle…and saw everything.) The school was only 30 minutes away from Nashville. “This is a great opportunity to make artistic contacts and…be inspired.”
Three glasses of wine and some cuddling later, Millie agreed.
Millie was anything but inspired when she saw her allotted wall space in the Fine Arts Building. She had been placed near the women’s restroom next to a bulletin board with tattered business cards and signs advertising free kittens, lawn care services and used cars for sale. One pink sign advertised yoga classes for pregnant women. Many of the bulletins had small tags with telephone numbers for people to tear off. Some people had torn tags from the middle while others tore from the sides so that the bulletins looked frayed, an offense to Millie’s sense of orderliness which underscored what she told Guy was “bad juju.”
“You just have the jitters hon,” Guy said.
Truthfully, Millie did not have much to show for her artistry. In the past four months she’d painted two human portraits, a dog and the trim in seven renovated houses in East Nashville.
At Guy’s insistence, she’d borrowed Daphne’s portrait from Mrs. Sneed to display.
“Daphne and I are so proud…such an honor. Thank you, thank you,” Mrs. Sneed said, dabbing her eyes with her ever-present apron.
From their vantage point at the end of the corridor Millie and Guy watched the other artists set up their exhibits. Boxes were torn open and statuary revealed, tables were unfolded and slammed into place, acquaintances were renewed and introductions made. Hammers appeared and the tat tat tat of tacks being tapped into display boards punctuated this Muzak of confusion.
“Sounds like a convention of woodpeckers,” Guy said.
“I bet no one else here has to paint houses to pay their bills.” Millie planted her face in Guy’s shoulder. “I’m not jealous, I’m resentful. There’s a difference.” Immediately Millie realized that this was not an attractive look. “I resent feeling resentful of other people’s success, and I resent them making me feel resentful.”
After they had hung up Millie’s portraits and photographs of three others she had done this year, Guy said, “There…this is true art. Quality not quantity.” Exactly, Millie thought. She was proud of her artwork; there just ought to be more of it.
“Gaaacckkk!” The sound of a large, land bound bird happening upon a pile of freshly shelled peanuts erupted behind them. Millie turned in time to be seized in an air hug, an embrace so forceful her arms flew up crucifixion-like. Air kisses were flung at each of her cheeks.
“Delightful!” The possessor of the avian cackle thrust Millie aside and stepped toward her portraits. “Absolutely delightful.”
Buffy Todd. There was a “downside”; here it was.
Although Millie was conscientious, hardworking and skilled at her art, she was not the best student among the painters in her graduating class. The class standout was a young woman named Buffy Todd, a cheerleader of a girl from a zip code in Nashville that the city’s nouveau riche aspire to move into. After graduation, Buffy joined the staff of artists at a company which prepared paintings and sometimes photographs for the cream colored walls of newly built or renovated hotels. Buffy and her fellow artists created paintings for another department which turned them into prints which a third department framed in metal, wood or glass for a fourth department to display.
“I just adore your efforts,” Buffy said, scanning Millie’s work with a bemused expression which lasted maybe three seconds. “I treasure your opinion of my own work. Come to my booth!”
Booth? Millie thought, her sourness returning.
Buffy drove Millie and Guy along through the confusion to her exhibit which was displayed under a banner reading “Modern Art for Modern Times”.
“I could have brought more, but I did not want to be showy,” Buffy said as Millie and Guy examined a painting of a silhouette of a horse, the head and shoulder, no legs, with snow or rain falling from a green sky with the two purple moons of a distant planet.
“Very impressive…modern work,” Millie said.
“Yes,” Buffy said as if conceding that Millie obviously would be impressed and feel good about it all.
Millie examined a painting of a partial wagon wheel leaning against a stone well on a mountain with an elk under a pink moon and lavender stars. More pastels, Millie thought, like paint which has been contaminated with water.
“I can do 20 of these landscapes a week without breaking a sweat,” Buffy said as Millie examined a print of a barn in the woods in a snow storm. The snow was green.
Millie thought Buffy could double her weekly production if she applied herself. She also thought Buffy might be an alcoholic. Wine would be her drink and judging by Buffy’s artwork, maybe wine laced with LSD.
Buffy described her paintings as “surrealistic still lifes.” Millie would classify Buffy’s work in its own genre like the impressionists or the cubists and would have suggested “Art Yucko” if the gods asked her for a name.
“At least three paintings per hotel room…and that’s not counting the corridors and elevator lobbies!” Buffy announced. “I have other visitors.” Buffy dropped them as quickly as she had kidnapped them and bounded toward a loitering elderly couple without saying goodbye.
Mille and Guy examined Buffy’s paintings of partial scenes on astral planets in colorful weather.
“You could do these with stencils,” Millie hissed.
When a painting contained a single subject it would be something innocuous like a flower blossom or a sea shell, also in a neutral pastel. Sometimes there would be three prints of the same object side by side in the painting but in different colors. “Thank you Andy Warhol,” Millie said. “She paints in pastels because it’s easier for the print shop to perform their hackery.”
The last painting was comprised of tan and white swirls within a perfect circle.
“I call this ‘Swirl No. 1’. It’s one of 40 swirls”, Buffy bellowed and slid back between them. “Monet had his lilies; I have my swirls.” She said swirl like the word was italicized. “The swirl intrigues and inspires me.”
Millie felt an urge to jam a straw into it and say, “It inspires me to supersize my fries!”
“Praise Jesus!” A woman’s voice cried out from down the hall so loud that the three of them flinched as if a fly ball had landed among them and they hadn’t seen it coming.
“Someone seems to have been stricken at your little exhibit,” Buffy said.
“It’s a miracle! Praise Jesus!” the woman shouted again.
The voice sounded familiar to Millie, and she and Guy rushed toward it.
“Look!” Mrs. Sneed shouted as they arrived at Millie’s booth. “Daphne’s eyes! They’re normal!”
Daphne hung from Mrs. Sneed’s neck in a chest papoose with her stubby legs extended out, which along with her pug face, gave the impression that she had splatted belly first against a windshield. Daphne was wearing a plastic helmet like those worn by cave spelunkers. Her eyes appeared normal now.
“The painting…the flash of the camera… her eyes are normal! It’s a miracle!” Mrs. Sneed dabbed at her own eyes with a balled handkerchief. Her friends, a posse of blue haired women, formed a shield wall around her, examining Daphne and celebrating the miracle in whispers of astonishment that sounded like dried leaves stirring in a breeze.
Millie noticed a student standing nearby with a camera and an elaborate flash on a mechanical antler of an extension arm. “I just took a picture,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Here she is,” Mrs. Sneed called out, pointing to Millie. “The artist. Praise Jesus!”
In the confusion which followed, Millie learned that the photographer, documenting the exhibition for the public relations office, photographed Daphne and Mrs. Sneed standing beside “their” portrait when the miracle cure occurred.
Millie was peppered with questions from the curious and the concerned who circled her in eager confusion. Camera-phone pictures were taken--Daphne and Mrs. Sneed standing next to the portrait, then Daphne, Mrs. Sneed and Millie. Many strangers asked to pose with them. Some people were huddled in prayer. Whenever, the noise began to die down, Mrs. Sneed would shout “Praise Jesus!”
There was much celebration, too much for Millie and Guy who backed out of the well-wishing crowd after one photo set and kept on backing until they ended up in a nearby bar where they huddled in a corner booth with a bottle of wine.
“Can you believe what happened back there?” Millie asked.
“Maybe your portrait did work a miracle in its way.”
“I’d like to see Rembrandt cure a dog’s eyes. I just thought my 15 minutes of fame would be different.”
When Millie graduated from MTSU she applied unsuccessfully for grants, fellowships and internships, anything to get out of Tennessee for a couple of years. Those opportunities were highly prized, and the students at the Ivy League colleges got first pick of them all so there was not much left for the rest of the country no matter how talented an artist was. Despite this first of many disappointments, she’d stuck with her art.
It never got any easier.
Even the photographers Millie knew were complaining. “All photographers have to do is get people to sit still for a few seconds and snap a lens. Voila, done,” Millie waved her hand dismissively. “Anymore, people aren’t even willing to devote the time for that.”
Many of her photographer acquaintances resorted to living off of baby pictures and wedding photography. “They get a lot of repeat business. Mothers never get tired of dressing up their toddlers and having them photographed. And, most people have at least two marriages these days. Painted portraiture is a dying art form…an artistic anachronism,” Millie said.
“Knowing all that you know, would you still take the artistic path you took?”
“Yes…yes, I would.” The wine was relaxing her.
“Then you took the right path. You have a passion and the Artistic Integrity to follow it.”
“There are never any people in Buffy’s prints, just things,” Millie said, wondering if she followed the right fork in the artistic road.
“People are harder. People have souls. All artists capture the human soul in their work…as you do my love. You’ve captured mine.”
Millie smiled and let that pass. “I wish people cared more about portraiture. Painted portraiture immortalizes. I think that’s what I like about it. Maybe people today don’t believe in immortality anymore.”
Outside a woman with the dog on a leash passed their window. Millie winced. Maybe she’d already compromised her Artistic Integrity.
* * *
“Is this the dog lady?” The man’s voice came out of the telephone like an unleashed pitbull, impatient, aggressive, a corporate executive pressed for time or a job foreman calling those lazy bums in supply.
Half awake, Millie managed to say “Wha…?” before the guy interrupted. “The dog lady. I want to speak to the dog lady.”
“You must have the wrong number.” Millie hung up. What a way to start a Monday morning.
Before she could go back to sleep, Millie got another call from a woman who wanted to speak to “Mrs. Clark who paints dogs.” That call had to be about Daphne’s portrait at yesterday’s exhibit.
It was what the woman said after that that caused Millie to spring out of bed. “I saw on the TV last night where this woman paints portraits of dogs and I want to check about getting my dog Trixie painted.”
By the time Millie got her coffee brewing she’d assembled the whole story from other callers. While she was at the bar, a Nashville camera crew covering the exhibition had filmed her work and collared Mrs. Sneed and Daphne for an interview. A quick internet search turned up the news clip, and Millie, her mouth open and a cup of coffee growing cold in her hand, watched Mrs. Sneed describe her artistry, narrate the miracle and offer up praises to Jesus. The student photographer’s camera flash was not mentioned.
“What am I going to do?” Millie asked Guy after the fourth commission inquiry. “Who will take me seriously now?”
“Apparently, a lot of people. One of the rules of business is: Find a need and fill it. Honey, you found it.”
By the end of the day, Millie had taken on six new commissions and was asking herself: “What have I gotten into?”
She began her new animal portraits as she did with Daphne, starting as many times as necessary to get it right. She spent hours on the phone with her new patrons searching for the insights which would help her capture the personality of each dog.
Guy would stop in the studio to encourage her. “Can I get you anything?”
“Inspiration.”
Guy knew she did not need inspiration, she needed reassurance. “If Monet can get a museum gig with a bunch of lilies and Buffy can paint 40 chocolate milkshakes swirls, you can specialize in dog portraiture.”
Millie looked doubtful.
“Besides, dogs are more interesting.…and harder to paint than lilies. Dogs are more complicated.”
“I love you,” Millie said and let Guy hold her.
“Everybody likes dogs,” Guy said, rubbing her back. “You’ve seen one lily you’ve seen ‘em all. Lilies don’t have personalities. Or souls.”
Millie hugged tighter.
“Consider this: If Buffy and her swirls, Monet and his lilies and you and your canine portraiture were in a contest, whose work would people crowd around to look at?”
When the television news became a memory, MTSU’s alumni magazine published a picture of Daphne’s portrait from the exhibition and circulated it to tens of thousands of alumni homes. It even appeared on the university’s website. A flurry of calls for pet portraits began again.
Soon Millie had four or five portraits going at once and worked on them as she felt inspired. When she got tired of painting Cindy the Spaniel she moved to Barney the Dalmatian. She was able to pay her bills without worrying about painting the trim work in newly constructed houses.
There were other pet painters in the country, but their work, as best Millie could tell, was elementary and, considering how little they charged, probably done from a pattern with some coloration strokes thrown in to give the appearance that this basset hound or poodle was actually someone’s particular pet. Those portraits always showed the dog with a copper disc hanging from its neck with its name clearly printed upon it. “A poodle is a poodle to those painters,” Millie told Guy. “I paint the personality characteristic which makes them recognizable as individual animals. I don’t have to use copper discs for the owner to recognize their pet. There is a soul in my portraits if I can capture it. If you think capturing that spark of individuality with humans is hard, try doing it with dogs.”
Many of her patrons lived in other parts of the country, and Millie spent a lot of time on the telephone, developing a relationship with them and requesting photographs and anecdotes.
Usually, dogs had crossed the rainbow bridge by the time Millie was called upon to immortalize them in paint. Dog owners were more inclined to pay serious portrait money after their beloved pets were no longer answering roll call.
Millie was getting $900 per portrait, and she was good enough at her craft to finish them well and quickly, about three a week on average. She charged more if patrons wanted their pet’s portrait in one of her antique frames.
Millie rarely painted cats. She attributed this to the depth of feeling which arose between dogs and dog owners compared to the cat’s natural aloofness which did not endear them to their owners after death like dogs did, at least not enough to warrant a $900 painting.
When she did paint a human’s portrait, she signed her name clearly and boldly. With her dog portraits, she scrawled her signature with flourishes instead of letters so that it was distinctive, but unrecognizable.
Still, dog portraiture had its positive points (besides the money).
Since she was working from photographs, Millie could take her time painting too. There was no model sitting on a stool needing restroom and lunch breaks. She could paint any time of day or night.
Every day was casual day. There was no need to keep up appearances for her patrons, so Millie worked in her favorite pair of faded jeans and a paint spattered smock. Because she was on her feet for most of her work day, Millie wore bedroom slippers with fluffy rabbit heads on top. To keep her hair away from the paint, she pulled it back in a ponytail. She’d found an unusually large pair of reading glasses to wear while painting. The lenses were the size of early television tubes and magnified her eyeballs to the size of half dollars. The frames were black and wide as a ruler. Salvador Dali would have wrestled with her on bargain sale day for these glasses.
And that’s what she looked like one morning in Spring when the police showed up at her front door. Is it ever a good sign when the police appear at your door? Millie could not think of one as she looked through the peephole. She breathed deep and opened the door.
“Has something happened to Guy?”
“Uh no…I want to talk to you about a painting of a dog,” the officer said.
That was a relief, but was she involved in a crime mystery? Did one of her patrons commit a murder?
Millie’s career in the world of animal portraiture was about to receive another boost. A K-9 dog named Oscar had been killed in the line of duty by a drunk driver, and the K-9 officer wanted a portrait of his beloved partner. Millie took the commission and wisely declined any payment for her services.
One sunny morning in early April, Millie found herself sitting on a stage for the dedication of Oscar’s portrait while the mayor praised her artistry and charity to an assemblage of police officers, assorted city employees and not a few dog lovers. Millie was given a ribbon and a citation. Photographs were taken and handshakes were exchanged.
The newspaper and television reporters covering the event described Millie as “the famed animal portrait artist”. “Nashville Today” magazine wrote a feature story on her which was picked up by a wire service and on social media. She framed that clipping with the ceremony program and her ribbon and hung it in her studio as a testimonial.
Although, the news coverage brought new commissions, Millie knew that the market for dog portraits must eventually tighten up. This was not a return market. People often told Millie “There will never be another dog like Rex” which was true as true can be when you think about it. And Millie had to compete with other portrait painters in the “pet parent” market. They weren’t as good as Millie, but they were cheaper.
She needed something extra to expand her market.
A few weeks later Mrs. Sneed appeared at Millie’s door with an apple pie and another grim look on her face.
“I reckon you heard about Daphne?” Mrs. Sneed asked.
“No,” Millie said. “Did her eyes return to being cross-eyed?” Millie hadn’t thought about Daphne in a long time. The dog was 16 and senile, never straying from a patch of grass at her front porch where Mrs. Sneed stood when she supervised the bulldog’s bowel movements.
“She had a heart attack while eating a pork chop last night.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry Mrs. Sneed.”
“The Lord’s ways are mysterious,” Mrs. Sneed said.
The Lord finally got Daphne, Millie thought.
“We are going to bury her this afternoon, and I thought you ought to know.” Which meant, Millie thought, Mrs. Sneed wants me to attend.
The services were held in Mrs. Sneed’s backyard under a crepe myrtle where the old woman’s son, Buster, had dug a grave the size of an overnight suitcase. Millie’s painting of Daphne sat on an easel next to the grave.
“With your painting we didn’t see the need for an open casket,” Mrs. Sneed said, holding Millie’s hand. A Black and Decker Electric Saw box, Daphne’s casket, lay in the grave. “Santa got that saw for Buster last Christmas.” Mrs. Sneed’s observation seemed out of place, but it was obvious she was distraught. She concluded every sentence with: “Poor Daphne.”
A retired minister conducted the service which was attended mainly by Mrs. Sneed’s blue-haired friends and their dogs. There was a prayer, a few remarks from Mrs. Sneed and a choir of three old ladies who sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” accompanied by several dogs who contributed their own special back-up singing “ah-wooing” in time with the ladies.
Two dogs disrupted the proceedings by fighting. “Billy! Stop that!” and “Blinky! Behave!”, their owners hissed while dragging the miscreants apart by their leashes. Another pair kept trying to get more acquainted than was appropriate at a solemn occasion like the interment of one of their canine friends.
Millie ignored it all. Standing there watching Mrs. Sneed say goodbye to her beloved pet, Millie considered the futility of confronting despair deeply felt and the frustration of that timeless human contradiction: How do you console the inconsolable?
She got an idea a few days later from Facebook.
One of Millie’s Facebook “friends”, Mitzi Powers, who was nicknamed Sparky in high school because she was easy to “fire up” in the backseat of a car or on the football team’s bus after a game, was inclined at this stage in her life’s journey to post memes with Biblical verses. Mitzi filled Millie’s newsfeed with so many memes that she now scrolled through her newsfeed with long swipes of her finger, sometimes missing her friends’ legitimate social posts. Whenever Millie posted a photograph or a clip about a community event, Mitzi would comment: “Jesus Lives!” or “Praise be to God.” These exhortations always included a smiley face emoji although occasionally Mitzi selected a grinning unicorn or a crucifix with radiating sun rays from the vast array of hieroglyphics which Facebook supplies its adherents to substitute for the written word.
Sometimes Mitzi posted memes of Jesus smiling down from a cloud over the remains of a tragic event, like a tornado ravaged neighborhood with houses reduced to confetti over the ground, giving the impression that the Lord was supervising the situation and that everything would be all right.
When Mitzi’s dog Joshua died she posted a meme of a beagle walking toward a Heavenly gate in the clouds where a smiling Nordic Jesus stood with his hands on his hips. Underneath this scene were the words: “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Millie did not say “Eureka!” when she saw the meme, but this was one of those kind of moments.
That night, Millie began another painting of Daphne which she gave to Mrs. Sneed as a gift. In the painting, Daphne sat at Jesus’ feet while he whittled an ornate handle on a staff. (“He was a carpenter,” she told Guy. “This will add a touch of realism.”)
“Did she like it?” Guy asked.
“She wept.”
Millie included a photograph of it in a studio brochure to send it to all the people she had painted for over the years. She painted several other Jesus scenes. Jesus threw a ball to a beagle in one. In another, Jesus slept in a hammock with a spaniel napping on the ground beside him.
She wrote a letter for her brochure.
“Dear Patrons…
“I hope this letter finds you all well. I’ve had a wonderful and busy year here at ‘Pet Haven Studio’. (She came up with that name as she wrote the letter.) I want to share my work with you because I know you pet parents will enjoy this unique way to immortalize our beloved four-legged family members.”
She added the photographs to her website as well.
In the first new order she got, she painted a Lab named Roscoe sitting at the Lord’s feet with his right paw in Jesus’ hand as if they were shaking hands. Jesus was smiling, so was Roscoe.
More specialized orders soon arrived. “Well, not everybody is Christian,” Guy said when Millie received a special request from an Asian family in Chicago to paint their deceased pet, a terrier named Tiffany. She tackled the project with relish. When Millie finished the painting, Guy said “That’s real.” Tiffany gripped her favorite toy in her mouth while Buddha tugged at it playfully.
Other religious themed works followed: A Catholic family requested that their Lab “Sugar” be immortalized with her head resting in the Virgin Mary’s lap. A poodle named Pierre chased a ball thrown to him by the Pope.
She still interviewed her patrons and studied the photographs they sent her. This new line of religious painting emphasized her patrons’ sweetest remembrances of their pets, favorite activities or most endearing moments.
Millie resigned herself to success as an animal artist and could even joke about it. “I am pursuing my art; I am just doing it with dogs.”
“You’re…innovative,” Guy said. “No one paints dog portraits with such skill and fierce devotion to art.”
“Renaissance painters in Europe painted to promote religion,” she said. “So am I…actually.”
They laughed, but not as sincerely as Millie wanted to.
One morning, Millie, coffee mug in hand, moved slowly through her easels examining the status of her latest projects. She stopped in front of a painting of Jesus feeding a mutt named Toby a scrap from the table at the Last Supper.
“I’m going to Hell,” she said out loud and took a long slurping pull on her coffee.
SEE CONCLUSION IN PART 2 IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING:
MILLIE CLARK, PORTRAIT PAINTER concluded
Millie found herself staring again at Daisy, considering the contradiction that this young woman was dead, dead long before Millie was born, and yet still alive in the portrait, kept alive by an artist’s brush and Millie’s imagination. Here Daisy was, a testament that time does pass, visual evidence of the implacable tides of living that have come and gone and will continue to come, of humankind’s unwritten ledger of loves won and lost, dreams realized or surrendered, bad decisions made, lucky breaks, fleeting successes and overpowering tragedies.
Daisy was nude under her smock. Millie examined the curvature of her breast. Daisy’s smile, her eyes spoke to her.
Millie: “The artist gave you that rose didn’t he? Was he your lover?”
Daisy: “I have secrets. I love and am loved.”
Millie thought she understood. Daisy’s smile was not meant for her painter lover. That’s why the artist did not sign his name. That smile was a proclamation by a young woman in love and was meant for Millie and all the people Daisy would never meet.
Millie: “Or were you the painter?”
Daisy: “Does it matter? I was loved.”
Millie’s mind raced. “A human’s portrait speaks; it documents; it reaches across generations. Dogs can never do that. What if I painted portraits of the owners with their dogs? Maybe involved in some kind of activity? I could create a new kind of portraiture. This adjustment might save me from eternal damnation or being reborn as a salamander or a squid.”
Millie placed a clean canvas on an easel next to Toby at the Last Supper. She began blocking the elements of a new portrait. By the end of the day Millie herself was nude except for one of Guy’s old white shirts, unbuttoned and hanging off her shoulders. In her hair, she wore a garland of flowers picked that day from her garden. Millie examined herself in the mirror. There was a dab of paint on her nose which she rubbed off with the back of her hand and a trickle of white paint down the inside of her right thigh which she left. She returned to the canvas to adjust the portrait. She painted through the night and finished as the sunlight crept into the studio and burned away the shadows. Millie watched the sunlight reveal the portrait’s shades and colorings, exposing her joy, her sensuous confidence, the aloofness of her desirability. She could smell the sweat of her own lovemaking, feel the heat of her passion. One day, maybe 100 years from now, Millie would peer down from the back wall of an antique store, and people would see this young woman and wonder.
Millie wrote a note and hid it in the backing of the painting. “This is me. I lived. I live. I love.” She did not sign her name to her portrait.
THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE HONG KONG REVIEW, VOL. IV, NO. 1 IN JANUARY 2024. IT WAS REPUBLISHED IN PENTACAT PRESS #6 OCTOBER 2024.
THE WRECK OF SKEETER’S BEER CAVE
This story was a finalist in Scribes Valley Publishing's Spring short story contest. It was printed 3/29/24 in their anthology "Words On Work: Building Imaginations".
I heard the car coming before I ever saw it, that peculiar whine and whir rubber tread makes when accelerating on asphalt blistering under an unrelenting August sun in Tennessee. It’s a sound you can’t mistake for anything else even if it’s punctuated by the banging of a rusted-out tailpipe. The car straightened the curve onto our street and laid a streak of rubber on the pavement before it jumped the curve and landed on my mother’s rose bush, crunching the plastic trellis she got on sale at Walmart. The driver shoved the stick into reverse, backed onto the road and cut the engine. The car, a ’58 or’59 Cadillac considering the surfboard-sized fins rising off the rear fenders and all the chrome devoted to the behemoth’s decoration, ran on for a few seconds, making popcorn sounds as it settled into place like a hen waddling up a nest in the dust on a summer afternoon.
The car’s antenna whipped the air like an out of control fishing rod while the driver reached up and stopped the large dice cubes dangling from the mirror in mid-swing like he was pinching something floating by in the air.
He was wearing aviator sunglasses with mirrors for lenses. When he got out of the car, he whipped his sunglasses off as if he realized he needed to examine something with unprotected eyes.
“Did you miss me?” he shouted across the yard to where I sat in a lawn chair under a Sugar Maple in my boxers, drinking coffee out of a mug in the shape of a Beagle’s head and waiting for my mother’s Chihuahua Elvis to move his bowels so I could go back inside and do nothing in there.
“I thought about you every day.” Raymond Poteete may have been the only person in Needmore I didn’t think about at least once during my vacation in the wasteland they call Afghanistan. “My mother’s gonna kick your ass.”
Raymond walked around to the front of the Caddy, snatched a piece of the trellis from the jaws of the bumper and dropped it next to the bush.
“She won’t if I get her a new one before she gets home.”
“You drunk?”
“Too early in the day. I got my ethical standards.”
I wondered where a guy like Raymond Poteete ever heard the word “ethical”, not in this town which is what I would call a two-syllable culture as in redneck or rustic, depending upon your attitude. Three syllable people leave Needmore as soon as they can, telling people that they’re from Had Enough. We never did have a movie theatre. I knew the town was going downhill when a take-out pizza parlor, wheelchair rental shop and thrift store opened on the public square while I was in high school. It was worse now. I couldn’t count all of the vacant storefronts on the square when my mother drove me home from the airport.
“Just tell her that flower bed was destroyed by a Cadillac once owned by The King.”
My mother’s passion for Elvis was well known in this community along with everybody else’s passions, doings and misdoings.
Our house was an unofficial Elvis museum since you couldn’t look in any direction or at any piece of furniture with a flat space on it without seeing something related to Elvis, a photograph, Elvis and Priscilla salt and pepper shakers, an Elvis bobble head which started singing “Love Me Tender” anytime you walked by its electronic eye.
“I’m surprised Elvis ever let that car go.”
Detroit could’ve made another car out of the steel in the Caddy’s bumpers which capped each end of the car like monolithic bookends. There were no hubcaps on the wheels, and although it was summer, at least two of the tires were snow tires.
“I heard you’s home.” Raymond was wearing an Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandals with white socks.
The Corps gave me two weeks leave and a lance corporal patch in return for not embarrassing them over there, so I came home to visit. Except for my mother, no one I ran into seemed to have missed me which was not surprising since my friends had fled as soon as graduation commencement was over. I was already at the stage of homecoming where you begin thinking you’d rather be back with the guys and the unit, talking about how wonderful home is and how you wish you were there.
Raymond snatched up a lawn chair and tried to open it with one electric snap of his wrist, but the hinges were rusted tight, and he began to wrestle with it first with both hands and then with a knee. I ignored him out of politeness.
“Doing anything?” he asked.
I did have a plan for the day. I slept late that morning which I considered healthful, and that night I planned to drink the rest of my mother’s beer on her back porch in the dark while contemplating the meaning of life and listening to the cicadas buzzing like sons of bitches in the trees and the neighborhood dogs taking turns barking at each other, debating who could beat up who or discussing their plans for an animal revolt. A man who does not plan ahead risks spending Time like it was easy money and not having anything to show for it.
“You got any plans?” I asked although I did not expect him to have any considering that Raymond had always been the kind of guy who does what other people in Needmore are doing like drinking beer down at the river, drinking beer while fishing in said river, drinking beer while sitting around trying to think of something to do.
“Naw,” he said and joined me in watching Elvis search the yard for an inspiring patch of ground to conduct his business.
“Would you rather be killed by a pack of wolves or a pack of dogs?” Raymond asked which was the kind of question you’d expect from a guy who’d failed first and third grades.
I can honestly say that in my entire 19 years of living and out of all the things I ever thought to think about I have never contemplated this question, so I said. “I never thought about it.”
“Pick wolves. Wolves kill for food, but dogs kill for fun. Your wolf is just doing what God told him to do, so it’s a kind of religious way to die.”
Sometimes Raymond was capable of profound thought even if he didn’t know it.
Again, I wondered whether I should have gone to college like my friends and spun my wheels there while I tried to get some traction in my life and figure things out as I set out on the road to responsible citizenship. But, wasn’t that why I joined the Marine Corps in the first place? I was just passing time in a different way than my friends.
I sure as hell didn’t plan on spending my leave with Raymond who I had to admit always was a cheerful person even if he had been the hanger-on kid throughout our adolescence.
“You should congratulate me,” he said. Since I couldn’t think of anything that Raymond could do that would call for congratulations, I didn’t say anything; I just looked at him.
“I finished summer school today.”
“You still in school?” I asked. The man was 19 years old.
“I graduated high school last May with a diploma and everything, but they said they’d take it back if I didn’t go to summer school for reading and such.”
“Well congratulations.” I suspected they gave him a diploma to get rid of him.
“We could celebrate, but nobody’s around,” he said, sounding down about it which seemed sad to me because he was stuck here in Needmore forever, and I was just visiting. Things were going to happen to me; soon, I was going to be somewhere else.
“Yeah, I hadn’t planned on everybody being gone,” I said, not even considering Raymond who was sitting right there next to me.
The truth is, even if some friends were still here, nobody did the things we used to do. You just don’t go away for a year and then come back and expect everything to be the same. The world goes on without you, but nobody teaches you that which is probably one of those lessons you grow into learning as your life happens to you. Maybe that’s why I preferred my mother’s couch to sleeping in my bedroom with the baseball posters and model airplanes; it didn’t feel right anymore, and I’d slept in a lot worse places.
When Raymond didn’t say anything, I asked, “What happened to the friendly girls?” Raymond would know about the town’s romantical goings-on since he was still in communication with the remains of our social circle via his educational pursuits.
“Ah…this and that,” he said. “Not much cooking there.”
“What about that Jackson girl?
“Somebody gave her the clap and she got the cure and religion at the same time. Last time I went to see her she wanted to wash my feet and pray.”
“Sam’s sister?”
“Pregnant,” he said and then in a fit of remembrance. “You remember Sherry Hunsucker?!”
Absolutely, I said with more enthusiasm than I felt good about.
“She’s a stripper down in a fancy club in Atlanta.”
I felt the air let out of me like a leaking balloon. “Not much happening I guess.”
“Was there ever anything happening here?” he asked, which was pretty insightful of him. Nothing much ever did happen in Needmore if you weren’t drinking cheap beer with your friends down at the river or sitting in a car sliding one hand up the thigh and one hand into the blouse of one of the friendly girls. I’d been thinking that was what I wanted, but it wasn’t that at all; I was empty.
Everything I believed about myself and everything I felt for the people I knew just seeped out of me when I wasn’t paying attention. You go away and at first you think about those things a lot, and all the while they’re getting away from you, being replaced with other things to think about like the moment you realize a bullet not meant for you sounds like an angry bee on a mission and the dull thud you hear way up ahead of you will always be followed by the sound of people running and other things you’ll never forget.
“I got this idea,” Raymond said. He’d heard of a place on the far side of the next county where they partied hard and didn’t stand on ceremony when it came to drinking age restrictions.
“They say the guy what runs it is really selling shine out of his car trunk. This place is just a front.”
And that’s how everything that happened at Skeeter’s got started.
* * *
We dropped off the highway into what passed for a parking lot at Skeeter’s Beer Cave, which turned out to be an old gas station out on Highway 41 near the county line, one of those abandoned stations from the 1950s before the interstates came and bypassed everything (which may also explain why Needmore became the Had Enough we love today).
It was that time of night when the lightning bugs begin to rise up out of the grass and float around twinkling hello to each other like they were happy they survived another day and were ready to hook up and celebrate. They reminded me of childhood when I thought they were magical, and I hoped we weren’t running over any of them since the parking lot was more grass than gravel.
“We’ll definitely get beer here,” Raymond said, nodding at the pick-up trucks in the parking lot. “It’s a good sign.”
Over the door, a yellow light bulb dangled from a cord illuminating a sign which read “No Rif Raf”, the extra “f” apparently being discretionary. A dead cat, desiccated and flat as a door mat, lay in the gravel. Festive music and the sounds of comradery flowed out the windows which were propped open with a beer bottle, a phone book and a broken umbrella.
The festive noises competed with the sound of cicadas in the trees, buzzing and pulsating, rising and falling not unlike waves sweeping upon a beach. My mother told me that if you put your hand on the bark of a tree the cicadas in that tree will all go silent at once, but I never could get them to do that for me.
I walked in scanning the place, taking it all in without making eye contact. I was not surprised to see an assortment of drunks, wife beaters and animal rapers scattered around in various stages of moral and physical deterioration. This was the kind of place where patrons wear their ball caps inside, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, spit snuff juice into plastic soda bottles and belch and fart without feeling the need to say “excuse me”. I felt them watching us like in a western movie when a cowboy enters a saloon and the piano stops while everybody sizes him up before the piano starts up again.
We mounted stools at the bar which was actually three scrap doors laying end to end on a 50-gallon oil drums.
Mr. Skeeter was apparently tight with his money considering how little he wasted on décor which I would describe as “post-nuclear-holocaust garden party” because of the mixture of mismatched card tables and lawn chairs which filled his establishment. There was one big metal table with a hole in the middle where a giant umbrella could be inserted which somebody must have stolen from the Holiday Inn swimming pool out at the interstate. A stage of sorts occupied one end of the room for karaoke night which was on Tuesdays according to the sign next to the stage: “Karryoak Nite Ever Tuesday”. Beside the stage was a recliner with the stuffing coming out of the arms and head rest, and in that chair sat the only female in attendance, a woman with blond hair piled higher than Dolly Parton’s with breasts the size of her head imprisoned in a glittery blouse stretched so tight that the buttons stood up on edge. She wore cowboy boots, and it looked like she had recently skinned her knee, most likely from falling down drunk somewhere.
“What do you peckerheads want?” the bartender asked like he knew we were under age and was fixing to kick us out of the place which, considering the place was a dump, would be especially insulting when you think about it.
“A couple of beers,” Raymond said, adding, “We’re parched…Been working tobacco all day.”
Anyone with a lick of sense could see that neither of us had an ounce of sunburn on our faces and hands from cutting tobacco under a cruel August sun. But if you had any sense you wouldn’t be in a place like this, so I chalked up Raymond’s biographical license to the colorful narrative he thought necessary for us to have credibility among this crowd. Raymond smiled to show the bartender how nice we were, but the guy looked at him like he was a bug who’d just asked him the time of day. “Yes sir, just some cold ones,” Raymond said. “…after a hard day’s labor in which we earned lots of cash we want to spend with you.”
The bartender, who looked like Popeye the Sailor, and may have been a sailor considering the anchor and mermaid tattoos on his forearms, walked away, but he didn’t say “get the hell out” which I considered a positive sign. Still, it was against the law of the land for a 19-year-old to buy a beer in America even though the taxpayers had just spent a few thousand dollars training this under age drinker how to efficiently kill bad guys with a machine gun whenever they got a hard on for somebody.
The bartender pulled two bottles of beer from a styrofoam ice chest with a cartoon on the side of a leaping bass wearing a straw hat and sunglasses and slammed them down on the bar so hard that 50 cents worth of beer frothed down the neck like volcanic lava.
We reached for our beers, but he pulled them back. “Got any money peckerheads?”
Of course, I thought, you think we just came in here without money? I had enough sense not to say that.
Raymond did, or something close to it, and I immediately felt the tension ratchet up on the cosmic intensity meter. I’ll say this for the Corps; I’d learned to sense when things weren’t right or when I needed to get ready. Maybe I wouldn’t know what to get ready for, but I knew to tense up and prepare for whatever was coming at me. God knows life can happen to you fast in moments like these.
“Show me.” The bartender grinned at Raymond like he‘d just caught him lying.
Raymond opened his wallet and thumbed the bills inside. “All 20s,” he said. “Hope you can make change here.” I watched the bartender’s hands without letting on about it.
The bartender looked at him like he was thinking of something malevolent to say but couldn’t find the right insult when Raymond smartened up and said, “And we tip generously for good service.” The cosmic stress meter went to zero when the bartender grinned like he was in pain, said “Okay big spender” and pushed the bottles over like we’d been buddies all along.
Although we had a kind of truce with the bartender, we gulped the beer down in case he changed his mind about serving us. The bartender stuffed Raymond’s $20 bill into his jeans and made change out of a cigar box.
There was a television over the bar, but it was a black and white model and the picture rolled up over the screen every 45 seconds. No one cared, preferring to frequent a juke box which specialized in truck driving songs from the 1950s. From the look of the clientele, you weren’t going to find any Sonic Youth, Led Zeppelin or Liz Phair on there. While I was away, I’d heard music I had never heard before, lots of it I guess because it occurred to me that my musical tastes had changed.
Thanks to Raymond our truce didn’t last long. If you’re a stranger in an establishment like Skeeter’s, the one thing you don’t want to do is to call extra attention to yourself. It isolates you, and predators look for that. Raymond didn’t know about that rule and asked, “Pardon me barkeep, could we have a menu?”
“Hey, these peckerheads want to eat supper!” The bartender bellowed to the drunks at the card tables who began making the sounds you might hear in a crowded barnyard at dinner time while a herd of donkeys engaged in an orgy, all of which seemed appropriate to me considering that crowd.
“Well how about a frosty glass?”
“We ain’t got no glasses,” the bartender said. “They got broke!”
No doubt, I thought, probably in the brawls which punctuated the evenings at Skeeter’s. A baseball bat on a rope behind the bar with the word “peacekeeper” burned into the wood told me that no one ever called the sheriff for assistance when the customers misbehaved. I suspected the bartender used it to subdue the last drunk standing before he dragged the incapacitated out the door and rifled their pockets for soiled, wadded bills.
Raymond coaxed two more rounds out of him.
“Does Mr. Skeeter know you insult your customers calling them peckerheads and all?” Raymond asked.
“I’m Skeeter peckerhead.”
Mr. Skeeter withdrew when one of his alcoholics came over and waved a $20 bill at him. Together, they left for the parking lot. As he passed us, he locked his eyes on me so hard I felt guilty for everything I never did. Raymond leaned into me. “Chapter 2: We Make A Friend.”
Before I could fully appreciate Raymond’s wit, we were disturbed by a howl which I can only describe as the sound I would imagine a cat would make if you stabbed it with a stiletto. We turned as Dolly Parton burst into song:
“Wooooooomannnnnn!!!! Love yur mannnnnnn!!!
“He neeeeeeddss yore lovinnnnnnn!!!”
She’d seized the Karaoke machine and was belting out a local favorite because all the drunken animal molesters began clapping and hooting.
“Paint up theeeeemmmmm lipsssssss!!!
“Wiggle theeeeeemmmmm hippsssssss!!”
Her breasts, which were fighting each other to be the first to leap out of her blouse, flew about with the enthusiasm of her musical delivery; sometimes in opposite directions.
“You think them titties are real?” Raymond asked over the noise made by the patrons of the arts who were stamping their feet and clapping their hands.
“How did you find this place?” I asked.
“I got connections,” he said, leaving me to wonder what kind of connections a guy like Raymond would have in the backwoods of a backwoods county.
Having exhausted her repertoire and being enticed with a beer and a cigarette Dolly Parton stumbled off the stage and into the recliner while her admirers gathered round for conversation. “Howdy fellers!” she said and inhaled a bottle of beer.
“You clowns come in here to drink or moon over our entertainers?” the bartender snarled.
“You’re talking to a member of our nation’s fighting forces,” Raymond said, and pointed to me. “He’s just back from Afghanistan.”
“Yeah,” Skeeter snorted. “He looks just dumb enough to volunteer to get his ass shot off for some tom fool reason that don’t mean beans to nobody.”
I probably should have said something since it was me that he was insulting, but the truth is, considering the state the country, he might be right, and I might just be that dumb. Anyway, I quit caring about all that back somewhere in a filthy patch of sand I never learned the name of where I saw those things I won’t ever tell to anybody. I was one of the lucky ones, and knowing that I was truly lucky was good enough, so I satisfied myself with that sobering consolation.
But Raymond didn’t let it go. The beer relaxed his inhibitions, and he felt frisky.
“Maybe we ought to take our trade elsewhere.”
“Sure, big spender. You can leave when you pay the cover charge.” Mr. Skeeter grinned and put his hands on the edge of the bar.
“Cover charge?”
“You heard me.”
“How much?”
“$20 bucks,” Mr. Skeeter said. “Each.”
“Cover charge for what?”
“The evening’s entertainment,” he nodded toward Dolly Parton who had passed out in the recliner.
“That drunk chick?” Raymond asked. “You call that singing?”
“That’s my wife peckerhead.” Mr. Skeeter shouted like he’d been waiting all evening to start something and had decided now was the time.
The room which had once been raucous with the sound of barnyard humor and the phlegmatic, cackling laughter that goes along with it grew quiet. Out of the corner of my eye I saw and felt everybody taking a break from guzzling beer, jacking their jaws, belching and farting to watch.
Some guy gets up, about five foot tall, greasy hair and a snowfall of dandruff on the shoulders of his cowboy shirt, the kind of guy who would be nicknamed Wormy or Half Pint, and he points to us with a dip of his bottle and says, “These guys givin’ you any trouble Skeeter?” He says it like he’ll take care of things if just given the word.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Mr. Skeeter says and nods to Wormy in a way that told him to go away and have a seat. He did.
“$40 bucks peckerheads.”
“Are these guys paying your cover charge?” Raymond asked, his arm sweeping toward the barnyard.
This caused much merriment among the peasantry, and Raymond took the opportunity to whisper “We’ll escape in the confusion”. Before I could ask “what confusion?” he shouted: “We’re so glad we’re entertaining to a bunch of animal molesting hillbillies what ain’t got sense enough to pour piss out of a boot!” That roused them up, and Mr. Skeeter went for his ball bat with my beer bottle flying closed behind his head. “Scram!” Raymond shouted as more bottles got thrown. Lawn chairs screeched on concrete and card tables collapsed as drunks lurched from their seats and we shoved them down onto the drunks still struggling to get up, tearing through that crowd like linebackers charging out of the backfield against a team of nursing home residents. They went down hard, and we went out the door.
The accident part came next.
Over my shoulder I saw a flurry of arms and legs spurt out the doorway and into the parking lot.
Raymond dropped the keys while rummaging his pockets on the run, and they slid under the Caddy. At the passenger door, I watched the storm of drunken ferocity coming toward us while Raymond dropped to his knees and began searching under the car. A calm came over me, and I clinched my fists and started to rejoin Raymond to meet our pursuers together, but he popped up with the keys.
Raymond twisted the keys and the Caddy roared as people began beating on the windows and fenders. He stood up on the accelerator jamming it down on the floor, and in a gravel parking lot, the laws of dynamic physics being what they are, when he tried to spin the two-ton mass of steel around in the direction of the highway we just kept on spinning in a big swirl, stirring up our own gravel dust-infused tornado and shooting gravel the size of chicken eggs out behind us in fan like a rooster tail, hitting cars and trucks and anybody dumb enough to be chasing us on foot while Raymond laughed like a hyena and shouted “Hang on buddy!”
And I was hanging on with my feet smashed into the floor board, my hands braced up against the roof and my body thrust back in the seat by the G-forces pressing in on me like I was an astronaut and the big booster rocket was kicking in.
“Good Gawd A’Mighty!” somebody shouted.
“Head ‘em up there!” someone else yelled.
We came out of the spin headed toward and into the brick-o-block beer cave at about 75 mph.
Brick-o-block flew through the air like one of those computer screen savers which has stars or bubbles flying at you. There were at least two blocks sitting on the hood when we fully re-entered the premises. Those drunks who had decided to sit out on beating us up now leapt from their seats and dove away from the Caddy like flying fish before a speedboat as we began pushing up an avalanche of aluminum chairs and card tables like a rampaging bulldozer at a weekend flea market.
Just before we hit the wall on the other side of the small room I shouted: “Anybody hurt?!” I thought it would sound good at our manslaughter trial when I testified from the witness stand in my defense to show I really cared about the wellbeing of my fellow man, even those who were drunks, wife beaters and animal rapers.
The tenor of all the shouts and screams we heard were more of the “we-will-kill-you” genre rather than “I’ve been crushed by a car and am dying” variety. I took some solace in that.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Raymond shouted.
“You think?!” I thought he was going to pitch it into reverse, but instead he gunned it and we exited through the back wall as we had entered the front. We landed on five or six trash cans out back and rolled around on them before the car crushed them flat, and we were able to resume our forward movement. Feral cats leapt away from us, suspended momentarily in air with all four legs outstretched as they tried to stay out from under the Caddy’s screaming wheels although that sound could have been the terrified screaming of wild cats.
“Didn’t use enough concrete on them walls if you ask me,” Raymond shouted as he hopped the car up onto the highway.
We drove off with me tossing bricks, trash and assorted construction debris out of the car as the road unfolded before us shiny and black as a cobalt ribbon in the moonlight.
We’d loss the glass from the car windows at Skeeter’s, and the wind was blowing through the car like a hurricane. The Corps had taken all of my hair, but Raymond’s was blown backwards over his head so that it waved behind him like a tattered flag.
“You think I hurt anybody back there?!” The wind snatched Raymond’s words out of his mouth, but I heard enough to shout back, “No more than they would’ve been hurt anyway on a Friday night at Skeeter’s!”
“You think I’m going to jail?!”
“We’re under age and involving the law is the last thing a place like Skeeter’s wants.”
“Well I had a good time,” Raymond announced. “…except for the disagreement there at the end.”
I had to admit, we’d done a lot of living in just a couple of hours.
“I got a proposition for you,” Raymond shouted at me. “You’re gonna love this.”
I looked at him like “I heard you, but I’m not sure I want to listen to you. I might though because I don’t have anything better to do.”
“It’s about Elvis owning this car.”
LETTERS AND ESSAYS
INTRODUCTION
Everything, every word you utter or write, is fiction if you think about it.
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
Dear Cynthia,
I don’t blame you for not wanting to see me after all you’ve been through. Not one bit. At first, I thought you didn’t want to see me because of your full body cast.
I hope it doesn’t sound chauvinistic if I say women are more vain than men about things like that. It’s part of their charm. That’s what I was thinking, but then your mother told me you said that I could “drop dead”, and I knew you were mad.
Later I got to speculating about that: How could you tell me to “drop dead” with all of those wires holding your jaw together?
You know how your mother never liked me. She just might have told me to “drop dead” and said it came from you. Does this remind you of Romeo and Juliet? That is what I am thinking.
I think it is important in a relationship to be honest so here goes. I take full responsibility for convincing you to get on that skateboard. I just got caught up with everyone else at the party. Admit it, you were having a wonderful time too. I know how the Tequila shots affected me, and I can guess what they did to you since you never drink anything stronger than your beloved dessert wines.
Still, I had no business talking you into getting on that skateboard. But you can see that my judgment (like yours my darling) was affected by the alcohol. We both should know the basics of skateboard physics. Obviously a steep hill like that? A skateboard? And why did no one else step up and say “That’s a really steep hill” instead of standing there on the porch like spectators at the circus?
You can understand the alcohol affecting our ability to consider all the relevant factors like, and I mean this scientifically, you know it has never bothered me, a person’s weight. Healthier people are going to gain more momentum on a hill like that.
If it is any consolation none of the gang has ever seen anyone ride a skateboard that fast. Everybody commented on that after the ambulance left. I was amazed at how long you rode upright on the thing. You must have traveled an entire football field…when your ride concluded.
Sandra won our little lottery on how many bones you broke. I didn’t even place. Heck I didn’t know the human body had that many bones.
There is some good news. This morning when I went to get my skateboard back from that department store, (They’re having a sale by the way. 50% off on selected items. I bought a rug and two super cushiony pillows for my apartment.) anyway, the manager said the store will not make you pay for their show window. Personally, I don’t see why they make glass that big. That’s an accident waiting to happen if you ask me.
Cheer up darling, things are looking up.
Love, Norman.
This story appeared online in Orange Blush Zine magazine on 9/17/20.
HOW I DISPLEASED THE VEGANS
When my children were young I used a special strategy to counter their protests at the dinner table: the psychology of irritation.
When one of them announced that he did not like his potatoes or carrots or pork chops, I’d shout “Good! More for me!” and tuck into my portion, murmuring “hmmm” and “hmm, hmm, hmm” as I ate. When I finished I’d say, “Boy o boy I think I’ll have some more potatoes!” It drove them crazy. (I was younger then and did not have to worry about calories. Retired 60-something lawyers must exercise some restraint, so if any of my children ever gets around to producing some grandchildren, and assuming that they ever visit so I can torment them, I’d have to restrain my enthusiasm at the dinner table and find another way to deal with their food complaints.)
Thankfully, and despite having me as a father, my children became healthy American citizens, avid consumers of carrots, potatoes and pork chops. Psychology works that way; you can’t always explain it.
My enthusiastic retort did not go over as well in the lunchroom of Overton, Hill and Hood, the law firm in Nashville where I was a trial attorney for 35 years. The increasing number of vegans who joined our legal staff through the years did not appreciate our enthusiasm for meat, milk and eggs and could get downright sensitive about it.
Somebody was always bringing food into the office lunchroom to share, especially cakes and pies and pizza. One paralegal, a woman named Harper who never combed her hair as far as I could tell, was a vegan and she would always say something like: “Does it have eggs in it? I don’t eat eggs.” Or, “do you use milk in your baking? I don’t drink milk.”
The first time it happened I couldn’t stop myself. It just came out: “Good! More for me!”
Vegans don’t appear to have any sense of humor at all; Harper and her associates didn’t.
“I don’t eat anything with a face!” Harper declared.
“Funny,” I said. “I won’t eat anything that couldn’t defend itself if it wanted to.” (That isn’t exactly accurate. I’ve never had to stalk and subdue a carrot or a potato.)
You know who else did not have a sense of humor? Hitler. He was a vegan too, and he liked to tell his dinner guests all about it.
Surprisingly, Hitler and his cronies were also big animal lovers. (Mansplaining is permissible if your intention is to irritate someone. P.S. Mansplaining is not a real word.) Actually, I told them, the Nazis enacted legislation which many would consider revolutionary even these 80 years later if it had been enacted by a decent society. Nazi Germany passed laws prohibiting animal experimentation, regulating the care of animals used in movies, outlawing the use of dogs in hunting; it was the first country to place the wolf under special protection and the first country to host an international animal welfare conference.
Our vegans did not like knowing any of that either.
There were times when I innocently offended the vegans. A cliché is a cliché because it is popular, and it is popular because it conveys an abstract which people readily understand.
Cliches are not necessarily bad things if communication is your objective…so, you don’t necessarily consider their political implications before you utter them.
“That’s my meat and potatoes,” I’d say, describing some aspect of my legal practice. Or, I’d refer to a courtroom victory as “bringing home the bacon.” Immediately the vegans would act all…nonplussed. Once Harper found a good, winning case for me which I could use as argument in a legal brief, and I, trying to be nice, commended her for “saving my bacon.”
A case could be made that I am a victim here.
Don’t ask vegans what they feed their dogs either even if you really want to know. And, don’t ask why we have canines in our very own mouths.
Speaking of dogs, I have always wondered whatever happened to Hitler’s dog. She was a German Shepherd (go figure), and her name was Blondi.
Some people swear Blondi was poisoned like Hitler as the Russian army descended upon his Berlin bunker. Others say Blondi was shot. Nobody knows for certain although it seems they agree that Blondi was done in by her handlers.
Blondi did not commit any atrocities. It wasn’t her fault that her owner was a monster. After Hitler killed himself, why didn’t her handlers just open the door to the bunker and let Blondi run off into the rubble of Berlin? “Go! Run free!” Blondi might have survived the destruction. It isn’t like the Russians who were scouring Berlin for Hitler would recognize Blondi and mistreat her. “Hey everybody! There goes Hitler’s dog! Get her!”
Vegans always own dogs and did not appreciate my views on dog ownership either (which I made up during a lunchroom opinion brawl since I really have no views).
Nature has designed dogs to survive in a hostile environment. Therefore, it is unnatural to train a dog. True service dogs I understand, but all other dogs should be free from the strictures of human influence. And it is not natural for a dog to live in a house either. If you train dogs to live in a house you are training their natural instincts out of them to conform to human standards of behavior. Dogs should live outside, I declared to the vegans. “Free as the wind!”
I suppose you could make an argument that Jesus was a vegan. I don’t recall him eating meat in the Bible, just bread. I just can’t picture Jesus gnawing on a turkey leg or getting down on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
Of course, it looks like the only thing the man drank was wine. He even made wine which reminds me of how I ran afoul of the Baptists, which is another story.
THIS ESSAY FIRST APPEARED IN PURE SLUSH’S ANTHOLOGY “TYRANNY OF BACON” V. 18 IN AUGUST 2020.
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