Twingley Stories

“WHAT IS IT, PIG MONTH?” (An Overheard Conversation On A Bus In Seattle – August, 2001)

2011-11-15T17:09:00.000-05:00

“I hate crowded buses.”

A road-weary man and woman are seated on the right-hand side of the bus, close to the rear. The man is sitting next to the window. Both he and the woman have long black hair, pulled back in bushy ponytails, secured with colorful elastic bands. He’s wearing a red flannel jacket with frayed cuffs and missing buttons, she’s dressed in mismatched hand-me-downs – a shin-length dress and last-year’s Nikes.

“We couldn’t go back to her place because of stupid Steve,” he’s telling her, “so we camped out that night. This jacket I’m wearin’? I used it as a blanket. She fell asleep. ‘I’m goin’ to the store,’ I told her, ‘you just sleep.’ ‘Ok,’ she said. We camped out that night.”

The woman is looking away from the man, out the window on the other side of the bus, the passing scenery, stopping and going. An unrepentant hippie sitting across from the couple is wearing a brand-new white t-shirt with a slogan printed on the breast in clear/capital letters: “LOVE & THEFT.”

“Remember those stupid people living in that room downstairs?” the man asks the woman.

“Are they still there?”

“No. But that one guy left his glasses. I tried them on and man, he must have a big head.”

A herd of middle-school students in varying states of puberty boards the bus. They’re all wearing hunter orange t-shirts, “SUMMER OF FUN” emblazoned across the chests in puffy white screen-printed letters.

“What is it, Kid Day?” the man asks the woman.

* * *

“She’ll only be gone two or three weeks,” he continues. “She hates living with her mom. Can’t drink. Can’t smoke. Can’t do nothin’. Have to go to church. Have to wear dresses. She hates it.” The woman self-consciously pats at her lap, smoothing the wrinkles in her second-hand dress.

The bus stops in front of a twenty-four-hour chain diner. “Some Denny’s are really, really good,” the man says, “and some Denny’s are really, really bad.”

The raucous crowd of young people exits the bus, hollering and poking and sneering and guffawing.

“They all got off the bus,” the woman observes.

“Yeah, it’s quiet now. I don’t know how to act,” the man says.

The doors of the bus close and the bus hisses, lurching slowly back into motion. It’s an impoverished section of the city – condemned buildings, people walking along quickly with their heads down. A large construction site offers a glimpse of progress.

“Wow, that’s a deep hole.”

* * *

Throughout the city, as part of a public arts project, horse-sized polyurethane pigs have been decorated by amateur and semi-professional artists and set on pedestals in prominent public places.

“What is it, Pig Month?” the man asks the woman. The woman doesn’t answer, the question being rhetorical in nature. The bus continues on its route, stopping and going, stopping and going, making its way downtown.

A SORT OF TIMELINE

2011-10-19T10:05:00.000-04:00

*Last month I attended the opening of an exhibition of my paintings and drawings at Pensacola State College in Pensacola, Florida. The gallery director had asked for an "Artist's Statement," to be included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. If you've ever written an "Artist's Statement," you understand the challenge. If you've ever had to read one, I feel your pain.

A SORT OF TIMELINE

By Jonathan Twingley

-My Dad’s a retired high school art instructor. He has a Master’s Degree in printmaking. A three-foot-tall painting I made on the back of one of his test-proofs when I was three years old hangs in a frame on the wall of my studio today.

-My Mom’s been a college librarian for thirty-six years. When I was a kid I often spent Sunday evenings with her at the library, reading books and listening to Jazz records on vinyl in a private listening room. The library was built on a snake pit, so I always inspected the listening room thoroughly before reading and listening to Jazz LP’s.

-I earned a Bachelor’s Degree in drawing from the University of Minnesota Moorhead, but I spent a lot of time in the English Department there, too.

-Five months before I graduated from college, I applied to a prestigious graduate program in New York City (“Illustration as Visual Essay” at the School of Visual Arts). My application was accepted, probably because the people at the school wanted to see the look on a kid from North Dakota’s face when he was dropped off at the corner of 23^rd Street and Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan for the first time.

-After I left North Dakota, people back home always asked me: “How long are you gonna stay in New York City?” I always replied: “I don’t know. I could only afford a one-way ticket, so I suppose I’m saving up for the return.”

-It’s a ridiculous notion that you can somehow make a living making paintings and drawings. Don’t do it.

-On the other hand, “making a living” is a tricky thing to do these days, generally speaking, and a lot of the time simply “living” is a brain bender. So draw in a sketchbook and make a mess with some paint from time to time, even if you’re not an artist. None of us are “artists.” We’re all just trying to make up a life, and drawing and painting are fun.

-On June 19^th 2005 I met Helen Putnam at Columbus Circle on the southwestern corner of Central Park in New York City.

-On June 19^th 2011 Helen Putnam changed her name to Helen Twingley on Miss Bea Beach on the island of St. Croix.

-Fall in love sometime. It’s a hoot.

-Life is short.

-Death is long.

-Try to enjoy yourself.

STATIC

2011-09-06T15:00:00.002-04:00

We were sitting in a half-moon booth at Pierre’s, nursing pitchers of cheap beer. It was the last day before winter break and everybody still left on campus was winding down before the time off, feeling giddy and confident because we were in the homestretch of our educations, ready at long last for the real thing. A group of frat boys with worn-out baseball caps turned around backwards shot pool on the other side of the room, sorority sisters perched here and there on stools like flamingoes, homogenous, giggling. They were all good, young people.

The three of us – Jan, Jenny and I – had met our sophomore year, each of us English majors. Jan wanted to be a writer, like me, except she wanted to write books for children – stories about pirates and magical frogs and Prince Charmings. I liked pirates and fantastical stories, too, but what I was really after was the heart of the matter, the heavy-duty stuff, dramatic things like life and death, where a lot of the time the endings to the stories aren’t happy.

Jenny was interested in French literature. She said the language was romantic, but I never got that from it. Jenny was hoping for grad school and then maybe a PhD so she could earn her living teaching somewhere. What I think Jenny failed to understand, though, was that that somewhere would most likely be a small community college deep in the South, or out on the West Coast, a long way from family and friends.

A gaunt, disheveled man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and chin whiskers approached our table and stood there silently, at attention. In one hand he held a large, frayed duffel bag and underneath his other arm was a crumpled stack of the free weekly newspapers – called LET’S GO SHOPPING – distributed in the entryways of businesses all around downtown.

“Pardon the interruption,” he said finally, having lingered there at the edge of our table for some time, erect, like he was waiting to be noticed. “I just wanted to make sure that each of you got one of these,” he said, carefully placing copies of LET’S GO SHOPPING in front of us like a distinguished waiter presenting dessert menus. After he’d arranged the papers perfectly, he straightened back up and smiled, though it was a strained smile. “Colonel Gerald Allan!” he hollered, snapping a salute to his forehead. “At your service!”

I looked over at Jan. She was sort of laughing quietly, staring at the Colonel there at the end of our table. Jenny sat wide-eyed, partly because she was a little bit drunk, but mostly because of the Colonel.

He was wearing an Army surplus jacket with holes in the elbows. His bluejeans were no better off and his tennis shoes had once been white and new, but they weren’t anymore. It was four below zero that night outside Pierre’s, too cold even for it to snow.

“Care for a glass of beer, Colonel?” I asked him, a private citizen’s way of telling a rigidly saluting soldier: At ease.

“Nope. Don’t touch the stuff,” he said, lowering his arm. “You ever tried to howl at the moon for too long?” he asked me, leaning down onto our table, looking me square in the eyes. “I have,” he said, “so I simply don’t touch the stuff anymore, that’s all.”

A frat boy broke a rack of balls across the room with a crack and the Colonel whipped around into a jaguar-crouch stance. He surveyed the room, stood back up and faced us again, at ease, satisfied that the coast was clear.

“What do you have in the bag, Colonel?” Jan asked him, still laughing quietly. I shot her a look as if to say: Are you crazy?! The guy’s obviously armed to the teeth! Jan sent me back a look that said: Oh come on, he’s a teddy bear. The Colonel looked down at the large, tattered bag he was holding as if he’d forgotten it was there at all.

“I’m a veteran of sixteen foreign wars, but you’d’ve only heard about just the one of ‘em,” he said.

With a jerking motion he set his canvas bag down on the black-and-white tiled floor and worked at the zipper holding the thing together. He dug around for something and stood up, back into the yellow light of our booth.

“I got this one for valor in the first secret foreign war I ever fought in,” he said proudly, holding up a soot-stained rabbit’s foot dangling from a thin length of chain. He smiled that half-smile of his again, watching for our reactions. He set the rabbit’s foot down on the table and leaned in close: “You know that murder is not death, don’t you?” he said, watching each one of us very closely. “Murder is stealing,” he moaned.

Jan let out a little giggle and Jenny sat stone-faced and wide-eyed. Somebody’d put another dollar into the digital jukebox across the room, on the other side of the pool table. The music was loud and rhythm-driven. The Colonel stood upright slowly, burying the rabbit’s foot in his pocket.

“I’ve been a lot of things in my life,” he told us, “just like you all. I’ve been a son and a brother and a cousin and an in-law and a student. I’m still a very good student, too, I’ll have you know.” He adjusted the collar of his jacket with both hands, signifying his dignity.

The waitress came by and asked us if we’d like another pitcher. Neither Jan nor Jenny answered, fixated and slightly unnerved, I think, by our uninvited guest. The waitress looked at Colonel Gerald Allan out of the corner of her eye, projecting an assumed annoyance on our part in his direction.

“Sure, we’ll split another one,” I said. We were on vacation, after all, and I was heading to mom and dad’s the next afternoon for some home cooking and laundry. The waitress walked away, watching the Colonel over her shoulder.

“JERRY!” One of the pool players saw me sitting there on his way to the john. He lunged over to our booth, holding out his hand. “Merry Christmas, buddy! Haven’t seen you around! Where ya been, man?!”

It was Luke, a chubby, die-cast member of the fraternity, about to be unleashed on the adult world. He was tall – over six feet – but had pudgy little hands. Luke was all about whatever was happening now. I’d known him from an Intro to Philosophy class we’d taken freshman year but, by design, hadn’t seen too much of him since.

“Man, you missed a great one last night at the Kappa Delta house. Oh shit – you shoulda been there! We turned the hot tub into Jell-o, Jerry! Jell-o!”

The Colonel had moved to a squatted-down position, slightly away from the table, in the shadows, out of sight.

“Alright, man, Jerry! Merry Christmas, buddy!”

The waitress set the pitcher of beer down between me and Jan and Jenny and I paid her. She looked around for the Colonel as she scooted herself along to the next booth. The Colonel stood up.

“Like I was saying, I’ve been lots of things,” he said. He bent down and rummaged through his old bag again, producing a thin, twisted piece of metal. It looked like it’d been the frame for a license plate on the back of a pick-up truck at some point. “I’m a translator,” he said proudly, holding the piece of scrap metal up in front of him like it was a blue ribbon at the State Fair. “Do you wanna know what it says?” he asked us earnestly.

Jan and Jenny sat dumfounded on either side of me. Neither of them had touched their drinks. The Colonel furrowed his brow, moving the index finger on his free hand along the crusted edge of the unusual document, giving it considerable consideration before he continued.

“It says: ‘We waited for you, but you did not come.’” The Colonel looked at us and then he looked back at the thing he was holding. “I found it by a dead sparrow on the railroad tracks.” He stood there with his rusty Dead Sea Scroll, not necessarily waiting for a reaction from us, but pondering again what he himself had just said, waiting for the meaning to sink in.

“I’ve been many, many things,” the Colonel said, putting away the piece of metal. “I’ve been the Chief of Police. And I’ve been the Head Bartender right here at Pierre’s,” he said, gesturing towards the bar. “That was a while ago, though.” A dreamy expression drifted across his face, but he snapped out of it quickly.

“I’ve been a telephone operator.

“I’ve been an undertaker.

“I’ve been a bridge builder and a heart stealer.

“I’ve been a letter carrier.

“I’ve been a cardiologist.

“I’ve been a priest, a rabbi and an imam.

“I rode the Cumberland Gap on a camel and climbed Mount Fuji once upon a time.

“I’ve been a knee-slapper and in a previous life I was Noah and in a previous life before that I was the Ark of the Covenant.

“I’ve been tooled and misshapen and then shaped back up again.

“I’ve been a bricklayer.

“I’ve been an instrumentalist.

“I’ve been a talker.

“I’ve been a listener.

“I baptized a leopard in the Euphrates River at sundown.

“I’ve been a secret agent for the Lords of Peace.

“A very long time ago I was a circus clown.

“I’ve been a Mercedes Benz.

“I’ve worked on railroads and spaceships and once I even managed to maneuver through a mine-field in the Pacific Ocean.

“I was born the King of Ireland, but I relinquished the post shortly thereafter.

“I’ve been in food fights and late-night panty-raid affairs.

“I’ve dated the Queen of Monaco (she was nothing to write home about).

“I’ve been a painter.

“I’ve been a framer.

“I’ve been a curator.

“I’ve been an investor.

“I’ve bound books.

“I’ve weathered storms.

“I’ve sailed around the world in seventy-nine days.

“I almost died of thirst once and I nearly die of hunger every other day.

“When I was sixteen I brought a wounded milkman back to life after an accident on a gravel road.

“I’ve been to all fifty states and six-out-of-seven of the great oceans.

“Once I was nearly flat-broke.

“Another time I was penniless, but it didn’t bother me one way or the other.

“I can play the harmonica, the tuba and the tambourine, and I’ve conducted most of the great symphony orchestras in the world.

“I’ve been to hell and back and will tell you about it some other time.

“For awhile I was the Anti-Christ, but I won’t get into that right now.”

The Colonel paused, nearly out of breath.

“I’ve been so many, many, many things,” he said, seemingly exhausted. And then that half-smile again.

The overhead lights at Pierre’s flooded the room, breaking the spell of the evening.

“THAT’S IT, EVERYBODY!” the bartender hollered, waving his washrag in the air like a sign of surrender. “I WANNA GO HOME!”

Our waitress came by the table and collected the nearly full pitcher of beer. Behind her, a busboy with a Tupperware bin collected the half-drunk and untouched last rounds from each table.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS, JERRY!” Luke ran over and shook my hand again. “MAYBE I’LL SEE YA BEFORE SPRING BREAK! HA!”

The Colonel didn’t seem to be fazed by closing time. “Wait!” he said excitedly. “One last thing!” He squatted down over his duffle bag again – no shadows now, no dimly-lit stages – and produced a cracked boom-box, the kind we had when we were kids. “Let me play you a song!”

A familiar din rang in the room as everybody left, slowly, rooster following hen. The Colonel turned on his radio and fiddled with the antenna. A bottle clanked behind the bar and somewhere somebody stumbled out of a bathroom, wiping their mouth on the back of their hand.

“There it is!” the Colonel said with a harsh whisper. “Can you hear it?!”

Jan and Jenny were buttoning up their heavy winter coats. The Colonel closed his eyes and smiled – not the strained half-smile this time, but a genuine, relaxed grin. He started humming softly to himself, something slow and familiar:

Hum-hum-hummm-mmm-mmm.

Static buzzed from the Colonel’s speakers, almost inaudible at first, growing with intensity as he adjusted the dial.

“Listen,” he said quietly, eyes still closed. And as the static picked up, crackling and popping, he said it again: “Listen. Can you hear it? Can you hear it?! God, I love this song.”

First published in the Summer 2011 issue of BROOKLYN MAGAZINE.

PARIS HILTON'S LAST STAND

2011-07-28T17:06:00.001-04:00

Betty White, one of the maids at the brand-new Hilton Hotel & Towers in San Antonio, Texas opens the door to the Presidential Suite with a master swipe-card key. The room’s been highlighted on that morning’s schedule as a priority. “V.I.P. GUEST,” it reads in bright red, digital ink.

Paris Hilton sits propped-up against a stack of lipstick-stained pillows on the bed in the Presidential Suite at the brand-new Hilton Hotel & Towers, across the street from the Alamo. That morning there'd been a ribbon cutting ceremony for the spectacular new hospitality palace and Paris Hilton had been asked to make an appearance, wield a pair of golden shears and declare the place OPEN FOR BUSINESS. But when the time came, she was nowhere to be found

“Oh! Pardon me – ” Betty White gasps, entering the suite, finding the place sloppily occupied, “ – I’m so sorry,” she says, “I’ll come back later, ma’am.”

“It’s alright,” Paris Hilton says with a throaty croak. “I’m not feeling so hot,” she says, emphasizing “hot” by holding the “o” and dropping her voice down an octave. “Are the paparazzi still downstairs?” she asks Betty White, hardly acknowledging her presence at all the way a person who’s used to having hired help around would. “Because I’m not feeling so hot,” Paris moans again, emphasis added, octave lowered.

“I’m not sure, ma’am. I haven’t been downstairs yet today. We’ve been pretty busy, the staff, what with the big Grand Opening and all,” Betty White says, smiling happily, holding up the cleaning schedule. “I’d be happy to go down and check for you if you wish.”

“No, no,” Paris rasps, “come on in for awhile, why don’t you.” It’s frowned upon by management to disobey a guest so Betty White does as she’s told. “Sit,” Paris says, gesturing loosely towards an armchair at the foot of the bed. “I’m really, like, not feeling so hot,” she moans, absent-mindedly stroking the head of her favorite Chihuahua Taco Bell who died twenty years ago, who Paris had taxidermied and shellacked in a most unflattering hot pink.

“Can I get you anything, miss? A cup of tea? An Alka-Seltzer?”

“No, no. I just feel, like, not hot,” Paris says again, lollying her head back on a pillow.

The year is 2045. Paris Hilton is sixty-four years old. Betty White is one hundred and twenty-three, still going strong though her television career has long since ended due to the by and large replacement of human actors with three-dimensional digital avatars. After the Fourth Great Depression she found herself penniless and was forced to give the Service Industry a try. Paris Hilton’s reality show, on the other hand – now broadcast exclusively on the Internet – is in its thirty-fourth season, but Paris herself hasn’t been in front of the camera since before World War III – her avatar does all of the work for her and renders her ageless, perpetually in her late-twenties, a fantasy girl living a fantasy life, still on top.

“Have you seen my show?” Paris Hilton asks Betty White, momentarily interested in the servant’s opinion.

“Why yes, yes I have,” Betty White answers cheerfully. “It’s really wonderful, what with the parties and handsome young men and all. I’m a little bit envious of the wonderful times you always seem to be having, Miss Hilton,” she says, blushing.

“Well, I, like, don’t feel so hot,” Paris bellows, stroking Taco Bell’s shellacked head.

Betty White excuses herself. “I really should be getting back to work, ma’am,” she says. “But please do ring if there’s anything I can fetch for your condition.”

CHE LATTE

2011-07-06T17:31:00.000-04:00

Che Latte lived in an old storage shed in the backyard of his parents’ house. He'd crudely insulated it, installed a small space heater and a micro air-conditioning unit – a room for all seasons. He hadn't asked his parents what they thought about the idea of turning their storage shed into a very small studio apartment, Che Latte had simply moved his father's riding lawn mower and his mother's extensive collection of gardening tools into half of the two-car garage attached to the main house and that was that. They could figure out who got to park inside and who'd get the driveway. He'd be out back in the shed. Give a holler when supper's ready.

Che Latte bought his straw/imitation ten-gallon hat at SEARS in Utica the week he dropped out of college. He'd been a Philosophy/Political Science/Women's Studies triple-major, seriously considering a minor in Third World Literary Perspectives but the workload proved to be grossly over-ambitious and as his bedroom back at his parents' place had been converted into a rec room/wet bar/home office nearly as quickly as he'd walked out the door for first day of freshman year, the shed conversion was his only option, if he wanted three squares a day.

Shortly after he'd purchased the straw/imitation ten-gallon hat at SEARS he found a Hamas headscarf in a secondhand store across the street from Utica's only head shop where he completed the Look with a silk-screened t-shirt bearing the iconic image of Che Guevera, Man of the People, Stirrer of the Pot.

Che Latte wanted to be a Revolutionary, too, if he could fit it into his schedule, which presently was rather quite open, what with the dropping out of college and all of the shed-time. So he began by picketing the chain coffee shops that had popped up all over Utica – surely somebody was being exploited somewhere there, these creeping, corporate coffee shops on every-other street corner, some with outdoor seating, some with drive-thru's, even, all of them always jam-packed, crammed full of Soccer Moms and college students and other unwitting suckers, blind victims of the Machine, all of them, The System.

***

Ernesto Che Guevera sat at a table outside the chain coffee shop with his faithful cock, Pedro, blindfolded for his own protection. Where am I? Che Guevera said under his breath (in Spanish, of course). Is this Heaven? Surely, this isn't Heaven. Pedro's here, but this can't be Heaven. Is this Hell? I suppose this could be Hell. His intention had been to light a cigar, take a minute or two and figure a few things out, but a perky young barista quickly discouraged him and suggested a venti iced mocha frappuccino instead.

***

Che Latte's astonishment was utter and jaw-dropping as he cruised past the chain coffee shop on his environmentally friendly single-speed bicycle and saw Che Guevera there – the very same Che Guevera as on his t-shirt! – Man of the People, Stirrer of the Pot – sitting tensely at one of the white plastic tables outside with a chicken or grouse or pheasant or something, Che Latte couldn't tell from that distance (he'd originally planned to skip his picket of this particular coffee shop on this particular afternoon as there were so many of the chain coffee shops by now in Utica that the only way he could realistically make any headway was to leapfrog stores, hitting some one week, others the next).

Che Latte clung to the Real Che for the next several afternoons, desperately dedicated like a Rock 'n' Roll groupie, was always driving his environmentally friendly single-speed bicycle past the chain coffee shop to see if the Real Che was there. He was so cool.

Who's this idiot with the headscarf and broken Spanish? the Real Che often thought to himself while he sat there not smoking his cigar, trying to ignore Che Latte. The Real Che just wanted some peace and quiet, some time alone with Pedro (who generally trembled with fear from all of the strange sounds and smells) to plot and plan his next move.

Eventually Che Latte applied for a job at the chain coffee shop where the Real Che was always sitting/thinking and was soon working the stainless steal machinery there, whipping up drinks for five- and ten-bucks-a-pop, all day long and evenings, too, weekends and holidays – Che Latte was always the first to volunteer for extra hours or to cover for a sick co-worker so he'd more likely than not be there if the Real Che came by to sit and think with his large bird. Of course, the manager – a man named Duper – insisted that Che Latte remove the Hamas headscarf and straw/imitation ten-gallon hat and wear the standard black and green chain coffee shop uniform (apron, etc.), but Che Latte didn't mind at all, so long as he was there to serve the Real Che a frappuccino or a cappuccino or whatever.

***

A month later the Real Che was nowhere to be found. Che Latte was working fifty-five-plus hours-a-week for the Man, still living in a converted storage shed in his parents’ backyard.

NO SIGN OF KEITH RICHARDS OR UNCLE JESSE

2011-06-14T17:14:00.000-04:00

This French girlfriend of mine – Chantelle Devereaux – showed me some early chapters of a novel she’d been working on. Unfortunately, the writing was a carbon copy, both in terms of style and content (text presented in long, tall columns like newspaper pages, characters and situations described in a Gothic, Horace Walpole style), of Danielle Steele if Danielle Steele wrote in long, tall columns like newspaper pages with characters and situations described in a Gothic, Horace Walpole style.

***

There is some kind of a lake/reservoir behind 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia – the side of the station opposite downtown Philadelphia – a couple of small vessels – a tugboat, etc. A sidewalk runs around the perimeter of this small lake/reservoir. Keith Richards is standing at a corner of this perimeter-running reservoir sidewalk, behind 30^th Street Station, bawling his eyes out, inconsolable. He’s wearing black sunglasses, wiping away cascades of tears with swollen-knuckled/ringed fingers. He can’t believe it, he says, waves of tears pouring out from behind sunglasses and splashing on sidewalk. His book is original, he’s saying. He didn’t steal a single word.

***

It’s nighttime now. Darkness has fallen over the small lake/reservoir behind 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia. Two figures heavily loaded with scuba equipment fall from the deck of the tugboat into the water. One of the two figures is Keith Richards. I can’t tell if he’s still upset. They crash into the water. Keith Richards has a duffle bag with him. He throws the bag into a waiting inflatable speedboat. The other figure climbs into Inflatable Speedboat #2.

***

Suddenly I’m in Inflatable Speedboat #1 with Keith Richards. He’s a very good driver, it turns out, and he’s not sad anymore, wearing his Game Face. And as luck would have it, the inflatable speedboats – #’s 1 and 2 – have some sort of hovercraft capabilities because we’re flying down a sidewalk now – not the sidewalk that frames the small lake/reservoir behind 30^th Street Station, but just some sidewalk in some neighborhood somewhere – trying to keep up with Inflatable Speedboat #2 which is piloted by Uncle Jesse from the Duke’s of Hazzard. Uncle Jesse is driving like a maniac.

***

The women’s section of a department store: A beautiful young Indian woman accompanied by a hipster young man who may or may not be John Galliano snatches a button-up blouse that Chantelle Devereaux had been eyeing from the rack. No sign of Keith Richards or Uncle Jesse.

A TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH LORIN STEIN THAT MIGHT HAVE TAKEN PLACE (BUT OF COURSE NEVER DID)

2011-06-03T15:03:00.000-04:00

“Mr. Bor?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review. Got a minute?”

“OK.”

“What’s it feel like to be perhaps the most original writer I’ve read since David Foster Wallace?”

“On my strong days I know exactly what you mean.”

“Do you know what I mean?!”

“Of course I know what you mean! But we all have our weaker moments, too, don’t we?”

“The stories you sent really floored me,” Stein continues. “I have to tell you, they were simply brilliant. I wouldn’t change a letter in any of them.”

“Can you hang on? I’ve got another call.”

A two minute break in the conversation. Dead silence on Martin Bor’s end. Lorin Stein, hot new editor of the Paris Review in New York City, can be heard talking to a secretary or colleague on his end of the line: “Jesus, I can’t even believe I’m talking to this guy. Can you imagine talking to James Joyce or Faulkner or even Proust?! Jesus!” This is all in a hushed voice, Stein’s hand over the lower half of the telephone.

“OK. I’m back. That was Steven Spielberg. Something about an E.T. sequel.”

“Where did the idea for the story about the Mongoloid little girl come from, anyway? I mean, that word isn’t even used in polite conversation these days (“Mongoloid” he says with a gasp under his breath). That story is so heroic both in terms of content and style – it’s brave, for Chrissakes!”

“Yes. Yes it was. Yes it is. You’re absolutely correct.”

“Good lord! James Baldwin didn’t have a handle on race the way you do in that story. My cleaning lady started sobbing violently after I insisted on reading her a passage out loud!”

“You’re a very wise man, Orin. Is that what you said your name was, Orin?”

“LORIN! L-o-r-i-n!” Lorin Stein enunciates, slightly offended, but recovers quickly. “The Paris Review! I’m the new editor.”

“Right.”

“You’re familiar with the Review, of course…”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, I really can’t emphasize to you enough how brilliant these stories are. Why haven’t these been published? Have they? Do you have an agent? Maybe I should be talking with your agent. I mean…”

“I don’t have an agent. I’ve always preferred to handle by own business affairs.”

“Well, I’d be very interested in publishing one of the stories you sent us. All of them! VERY INTERESTED! How would you feel about that?”

“Can you hang on a second?” There’s a clicking sound and then silence on the line. Lorin Stein can be heard breathing heavily during the brief pause.

“My apologies. I’m back. That was Allan Alda. You know Allan Alda?”

“Not personally, but yes, of course – M*A*S*H – I know who Allan Alda is!”

“Something about a special on PBS he wants help with.”

“Listen, Martin. Is it OK to call you Martin?”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Bor just seems so formal. After all, we’re both just writers here chatting, aren’t we? Just friends?”

“Some people call me Dr. Gigolo.”

“Dr. Gigolo?”

“Some people.”

“Really?”

“Sometimes.”

Martin Bor rests the telephone handset in its cradle on the coffee table next to the lime-green straight-backed antique chair he occupies each afternoon in the common area of the group home where he lives. The other residents give him nasty looks after he hangs up the phone, speaking so loudly when it’s supposed to be Quiet Time. The most difficult part of the conversation for Martin is always the first thirty seconds, having to talk over the recorded woman’s voice: “To make a call, please hang up and try again.”

NO-LOOK PASS

2011-05-17T16:35:00.001-04:00

Pistol Pete Maravich stands in line at the gas station counter, mindlessly tossing a shrink-wrapped bran muffin back-and-forth from hand to hand, dancing it across the backs of his obedient fingers on each pass. A transistor radio next to the cash register relays the weather. Pistol Pete’s the tallest man in the room, but he tends to be when he’s not on Stage.

The team is in Denver – a double overtime loss the night before – working their way to Los Angeles for a matinee at the Forum. Pistol Pete’s thinking about the last play of the game in the overtime loss, a complicated fast break and a teammate who couldn’t hang on to a perfectly thrown, no-look pass.

A paunchy old man in beige coveralls and a sweat-stained cap ahead of the Pistol in line turns around and scowls: “You go to a grocery store to buy groceries, not a fillin’ station,” he says, gesturing towards the woman at the front of the line. “You fill your tank at a fillin’ station – maybe wash the windows – and then be on your way.” The woman at the head of the line has loaded the counter with loaves of bread, gallons of milk and packages of cookies and saltine crackers. “She does this ever’ Tuesday,” the old man continues (an iron-on patch on the breast of his coveralls in stitched cursive reads: “Trumpus”). “I generally try to avoid her altogether and come by on Monday mornings, but Momma’s been sick.”

Pistol Pete smiles politely, patiently scanning the room, restlessly tossing the shrink-wrapped bran muffin back-and-forth from hand to hand.

“D’you listen to the game last night?” Trumpus asks Pistol, staring up at him momentarily, waiting for a response. Pete smiles again to no one in particular. “Maravich blew it there at the end,” Trumpus says smugly, sweat-stained Nuggets cap. “Seems to me that boy oughtta focus on the fundamentals more’n the flash and dancey stuff. Kildeer couldn’t ever’ve caught that pass at the end there. Nobody could’ve, I ‘magine.”

Pistol Pete always had a soft spot for Jimmy Kildeer, the team’s seven-foot center – a member of the Iroquois Nation who talked incessantly at night in hotel rooms about the folks back home – even though his hands were as delicate as cinder blocks and ice-cold to the touch (some sort of circulatory ailment). You’re delivering the ball to a corpse, Pete often told himself during the blur of competition. Deliver it perfectly.

The games were like one long, internal monologue for Pistol Pete Maravich, a series of slow-motion rhetorical questions and occasional emphatic statements. Conversations on the Stage were hard to come by.

Trumpus: “That stuff worked for him in college, I suppose – all those no-look trick passes and between-the-legs-show-off-sort-of-maneuvers, but the NBA ain’t LSU and the boy just seems bored out there now. Me and Momma listened to the game on the radio, of course, but you can still see it. The boy ain’t focused on winning, seems to me.”

Pistol Pete smiles again. The woman with the groceries wrestles the brown bags from the counter and leaves. Trumpus pays for his gas with loose change. The transistor radio next to the cash register announces the scores from the night before at the bottom of the hour, matter-of-factly.

SAND TRAP

2011-03-02T18:04:00.002-05:00

“Harold?! Harold!” Lillianne Punter screamed up the stairs. “Your eggs are getting cold!”

Harold Punter stepped out of the hot shower. He thought he might have heard something – a voice – a distant, familiar sound.

“HAROLD! Do you want to be late?!”

Harold stood in front of the fogged bathroom mirror in a towel, paunchy, forty-three years old. In his mind he wandered downstairs and knew exactly what he’d find there in the kitchen: Runny eggs and a half-crocked wife. But that was OK. Harold had grown used to the routine. With his index finger he wrote the word “NO” in the steam on the bathroom mirror.

He walked down the narrow hallway to their bedroom with its unmade bed and dirty laundry. Dirty laundry and unmade beds, Harold thought to himself. It’s like a country western song.

He walked over to his dresser and dug around for a clean shirt. It was his dresser because he and Lillianne kept their wardrobes separate, much like they kept nearly everything else separate in their isolated lives – she had her friends and lunch dates and dinner dates and shopping sprees, friends like Lydia Pickles, and Harold had what was his, which was very little. Lydia Pickles and Lillianne were “best friends,” as Lillianne often reminded him: “Our names practically rhyme, Harold! Isn’t that neat? You should find a best friend, Harold, it might cheer you up, or at least get you out of the house.”

They lived in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, not far from the Boardwalk and the freak show and all the rest of the carnivalia. Their house was a simple two-story, single-family unit they’d purchased with the help of Lillianne’s father. It was a humble home. None of the appliances were new.

Upstairs was the master bedroom and a guest bedroom. Downstairs, off of the kitchen, was a small living room where Harold would watch the evening news and eat his supper off of a TV tray, alone. Lillianne’s “cocktail hour” started early in the day and by dinnertime most evenings she was on the phone in the kitchen, sloppy, yacking at one of her girlfriends about how boring her life had become.

Harold was an accountant at the Pimento Pinball Corporation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Ralph Pimento III – an unjustifiably cocky young man – ran the company his grandfather had founded, but it was hard times for those who peddled in the games of bygone eras. Ralph III carried an air of resentment around with him, as if his inherited vocation was some kind of un-cool curse. Technology had changed everything. Nobody cared about pinball machines anymore, and why should they? People wanted action now, and they wanted it all to look real. Harold Punter thought that technology had replaced imagination. Harold Punter liked pinball machines.

A quiet widow named Nancy Chalmers worked with Harold in the front office. She took the orders – the company survived mostly by refurbishing old machines – and sent out the invoices. Harold had a quiet crush on Nancy Chalmers, though it wasn’t in Harold’s nature to express such feelings. He was infatuated by her shy disposition – the way she always averted her eyes and smiled a slightly embarrassed smile when anyone spoke to her – and though they rarely said more than “good morning” and “good night” to each other at the beginning and ending of each day, in his mind Harold carried on passionate conversations with Nancy Chalmers, discussions about God and love and war, or spirited debates about how best to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Three full-time grease monkeys tended to the repairs and refurbishments in the cavernous shop at the back of the building that was mostly empty now, a single lamp hanging from the ceiling thirty-feet above a lone workstation where the men resuscitated the machines and worked to keep the Pimento Pinball Corporation itself alive.

Harold didn’t hate his job, didn’t even half mind it. There was something safe about numbers, even when they didn’t add up to a profit. Win or lose, numbers don’t lie. Numbers are non-negotiable. Harold liked that.

His father had done time upstate at Attica for choreographing a rather extensive and highly illegal network of bookies and numbers men while Harold was in junior high. And it was an unorthodox enterprise – his father wasn’t much of a sports fan, so he’d take bets on other things: Political races, the number of deaths or births in a given town on a given day, even long-term wagers on whether Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So would divorce before Christmastime, bets on rodeos, circus acts, pillow fights and family feuds. Harold wasn’t very close to his father.

His grandfather had been a riverboat gambler in Mississippi, his father had told him. At the time his father had told him this, Harold was in the fourth grade and “cliché” was the special word of the week. Each student had to use the word of the week in a sentence. Harold’s sentence that week read: “My grandfather was a cliché.”

“Maybe you’ll join the family business one day!” his father had told him after a particularly large payday. “Sure you will, Harold! You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” That week the special word was “patronizing.”

How he’d gotten mixed up with Lillianne, Harold couldn’t really remember. What he did remember was this: 1.) They met in college at a party her sorority was throwing on Halloween; 2.) She seemed like she knew how to have a good time; 3.) She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t wearing a costume.

Her father was a very successful personal injury attorney in Manhattan. Lillianne never had to worry about money the way Harold did. And like Harold, she was an only child. Maybe that had something to do with it, their being together – the shared knowledge that they would both be alone in the world some day, beyond their parents, if they didn’t at least have each other. Maybe that had been the rationale, maybe that was the impetus for the union. It was hard for Harold to remember anymore, on the rare occasion that he thought about it at all. He mostly just bore the arrangement and tried to keep his mouth shut.

“Harold, I’m going into the city!”

Yes, dear. I’ll see you when I see you.

After it had been determined that Harold and Lilllianne Punter were incapable of bearing children, Lillianne bought a black, pure-bread Curly Coated Retriever from a breeder at the Westminster Kennel Club and named the poor dog Toothpaste, “T.P.” for short. “Isn’t that a witty name, Harold? I think so,” she’d said. “T.P. isn’t the color of toothpaste. Get it?” Harold never did understand the irony in the christening of the fated animal.

Toothpaste became a surrogate child for Lillianne. As a puppy, she spent exorbitant amounts of money grooming and dressing the dog – pink ribbons around its neck, candy-apple-red toenail polish, little doggie tutus and sun bonnets for summer afternoons. The dog was a male. It made Harold shutter to think of how an actual child would have fared in the slushy/inebriated shadow of his wife. The animal was clearly uncomfortable with his presentation and would flee Lillianne each time she set him down, hiding underneath a chair in the living room or underneath the bed in the guest bedroom upstairs where Harold often slept.

Work had become Harold’s life, a sanctuary from Lillianne and her domination of poor, poor Toothpaste. He enjoyed Nancy Chalmer’s passive company at the office and he’d gotten into the habit of hanging around the soda machine in the cavernous shop at the back of the building, sipping on a Coke or a Sunkist through a straw, never interrupting the mechanics, just listening to their conversations and witty banter:

Frank: “So I had a few beers at the Clown House on Saturday night.”

Lou: “Coney Island? I ain’t been out there in awhile. Lotta girls?”

Frank: “Oh yeah, you know how that place is. I was lookin’ sharp, too.” Winks and smacks his gums.

Richie: “Frank’s a sharp dresser!”

Frank: “I picked up this foxy blonde, you know.” Sly-eyed.

Lou: “Did you get lucky?”

Richie: “Yeah, did ya get lucky, Frank? Did ya?!”

Frank: “She got lucky, you might say.”

Laughter all around.

The only part of his job that he truly didn’t care for was Ralph III’s insistence that Harold join him and potential clients for weekly rounds of golf at Rolling Hills Country Club in White Plains. When Ralph III had asked Harold if he played, Harold told him that he’d played a little in high school, which was partly true – he’d been the golf team’s student manager, sneaking in some time on the driving range or the practice green when he could.

“Well, you’ll join us then,” Ralph III said. “Harold, ninety-percent of business is conducted on the golf course. It’d be good to have a finance guy around in case the subject of moolah comes up. It’ll get you away from this lousy place for awhile, anyway.”

Harold wasn’t stupid. He knew why Ralph III wanted him out on the links: Ralph III considered Harold Punter to be a middle-aged mooncalf and thought it’d be fun to watch him struggle out on the lawn. But Harold didn’t mind. It was all the same to him, as long as he was on the clock and not at home.

The round was usually played on Thursday mornings, a “weekend warm-up” Ralph III liked to call it. They were a foursome the first Thursday Harold joined them: Harold, Ralph III and two of his college buddies – Little Miles, a six-and-a-half-foot tall Italian who was in the sneaker business and Billy Dodge, who owned a small computer gaming company in midtown Manhattan. Neither of them were “clients” of the Pimento Pinball Corporation.

The three of them cracked cold beers before the first tee, adjusting their white, patent leather gloves for the drive, dressed in plaid pants and starched white, short-sleeved polo shirts, collars up.

“Lead us off, Harold,” Ralph III told him, sucking on a beer.

Harold set down his orange soda and adjusted his suspenders. He was wearing his usual office clothes, minus the corduroy blazer. He didn’t own a set of clubs so he’d had to rent some at the pro shop – a junior set (those were less expensive) consisting of a three wood, a five iron, a sand wedge and a putter.

“The first fairway is a snap if you play the tee down the left,” Little Miles told him casually.

Harold pressed his tee into the manicured grass and balanced the ball there carefully. He stood up and tried to remember how it all worked, the mechanics of the motion: Shoulder-width stance, ball just inside my left foot, left arm straight, head down, eye on the ball. He pulled back and swung through, eyes closed in a wince like an amateur marksman afraid of the kick.

Crack.

The ball wobbled through the air for fifty or sixty yards down the fairway, sliding sharply to the right and out of sight into a thicket of trees.

“Give ‘im another ball,” Ralph III told Billy Dodge. “It’s a warm-up hole.” Ralph III opened a second beer.

Harold went through the rusty routine again: Adjusting his suspenders, placing the ball on the tee, trying to remember the mechanics of the motion.

Crack.

Same result.

“We’ll help you look for it,” Ralph III said.

As the other three motored down the fairway in their electric cart, Harold clodded through the underbrush, searching for his little white ball. When he finally found it, it took him six strokes to hack himself back onto the fairway where he guided the ball towards the green with a series of miscalculated swings.

“HAROLD! COME ON, BUDDY!”

His approach to the first green was his best shot of the morning, a graceful, high-arching thwump that sailed effortlessly against the blue sky and for a moment, time slowed down and Harold just stared at it, smiling.

Pppf. A sand trap.

“Catch up with us, Harold. There’s a threesome waiting to tee off behind you!”

It took Harold Punter twenty-seven strokes to get out of the sand trap on the first hole. He politely allowed four groups to play through as he concentrated on his situation: Stance, left arm straight, head down, keep your eye on the ball.

“Good afternoon, young man. How’s the pinball business?”

Lillianne’s father knew very well how the pinball business was, and that Harold wasn’t much of a “young man” anymore, either. He and his girlfriend occasionally drove out to Harold and Lillianne’s house on Sunday afternoons for a drink and some chit-chat, especially in the summertime when he could show off his newest convertible and his newest girlfriend.

Her father was a tall man with a fit, athletic build. His blonde hair was consistently slicked back with expense gels as if he’d come straight from the stylist and his tailored suits tended to be on the flamboyant side – dramatically double-breasted or pin-striped or Seersucker in the summertime, always a colorful handkerchief in the chest pocket – the sort of presentation you’d expect from somebody who’d made millions off of unfortunate accidents.

“How are you, sweet pea?” he said to Lillianne, giving her a squeeze and a peck on the cheek.

“OK, Daddy.” Lillianne was on her fourth Bloody Mary of the afternoon.

“This is Angela, dear. Angela, this is my daughter, Lillianne.” Her father smiled broadly, as if Angela were some sort of plastic prize. “That’s Harold over there,” he said, gesturing towards the living room.

Angela was all giggles and lipstick. Lillianne’s father had paraded a Broadway revue of these kinds of girls through their kitchen over the years – blonde ones, brunette ones, tall ones, short ones. The names always changed, but the conversations never did: “I looove your necklace. Where’d ya get it?!” “Did you see so-and-so on Letterman last night?!” “Did you see Daddy’s new convertible?! Well, I know he’s not my daddy, Lillianne, it’s just that I like to call him daddy, too. Especially when we have snuggle time.” Giggle, giggle, giggle.

Harold would sit alone in the living room reading the paper, trembling Toothpaste hiding close by underneath a chair. And the thing that bothered Harold most about the whole charade was Lillianne’s complete indifference towards the constant stream of arm candy her father brought around. As the years ticked by and Harold and Lillianne assumed full-fledged membership in the middle-age club, the girls tagging along with her father gradually – imperceptibly at first, soon obviously so – became younger and younger than Lillianne herself. But she didn’t seem to care, or certainly didn’t show it, because with each Sunday visit from her father came the thick white envelope stuffed full of cash for all of the things that Harold would never be able to provide her with.

On a Monday following one of her father’s weekend visits, Lillianne informed Harold that she was meeting Lydia Pickles for a “girls’ night out.” “I gotta get out of the house more, Harold. Can’t you just tell that I’m all wound up lately?”

It was true, Harold and Lillianne rarely socialized. Harold had few friends, and the friends Lillianne had – like Lydia Pickles – were mostly left-over sorority sisters from back in college, middle-aged women like Lillianne who felt like they “needed to get out of the house more.”

Harold couldn’t blame Lillianne for her restlessness. She was at home all day long – every day – just her and Toothpaste with nothing to do. He even encouraged her to get out of the house more, not so much in words, but he encouraged her, nonetheless.

“Listen, I’ve got some news for you fellas.” Billy Dodge was cleaning his ball for the tee. “We’ve got a hot deal cookin’ in the city,” he said. “I told you about that meeting last month with Games International, right?” Ralph III and Little Miles looked up from their bags. “Well, they made us an offer.”

“How much?” asked Little Miles without missing a beat.

“A lot.”

“How much a lot?” Little Miles persisted.

“So much a lot that I’m going to retire a lot if it all goes down the way I intend it to.”

“You gonna take it?” Little Miles asked, standing up, fixated on Billy Dodge as if he were an astronaut bound for unexplored galaxies.

“Not yet,” Billy Dodge replied, polishing his ball. “They can pay more.”

Billy Dodge’s small computer gaming company in midtown Manhattan had developed a form of interactive gaming that allowed the user to play with anybody, anywhere in the world. The technology could be applied to anything: Military games, sporting games, but especially – and this was Billy Dodge’s ace – roll-playing games and adult entertainment. And the effects – the sounds and the images – even touch-sensation – were breathtakingly lifelike. The technology required the user to wear a sort of space-age-looking hood connected to his computer, effectively cutting him off from the outside world. The hand controls were attached to each finger, which were in turn connected to the hood, allowing for seamless motion and commands. It took social networking to a level no one had ever imagined possible, and the user never even had to leave his own bedroom.

“Any way we can get in on the action?” Ralph III asked intently, eyes wide like a child’s.

“If you had any extra dough laying around, I’d invest it all in Games International,” Billy Dodge told them in a hushed voice. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

Ralph III looked at Little Miles. Little Miles was drooling.

“Harold, Buddy! There you are!” Harold was dragging his junior set of clubs over to the tee where the other three had been talking. “Thought we lost you again,” Ralph III said, glancing at the others, patting Harold on the shoulder. “Fun game, isn’t it?”

Harold took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow, breathing heavily – another sand trap. He hadn’t heard much of their conversation, but Harold Punter had heard enough.

The following Friday night he decided to follow his wife. She said she was having another “girls’ night out” with Lydia Pickles, as she had every Friday for the past several months. It wasn’t out of anger or jealousy that he intended to follow his wife that night because Harold felt neither of these things towards Lillianne. He decided to follow her mostly out of curiosity, and because he was in the mood for an evening walk.

He’d first become suspicious the week before, sitting in the living room with Toothpaste watching re-runs of Mohammed Ali bouts on television. The phone rang in the kitchen, but Harold had a policy of never answering the phone. That’s what the answering machine was for when Lillianne wasn’t at home. She’d said she was meeting Lydia Pickles again, though she didn’t say where they were going. She never did. It was Lydia who left a message: “Hey girl! Where you been?! I miss you! We got to get you oughtta that house, girl!” And then in a hushed voice on the machine: “I know Harold ain’t much of a party animal, but Jeez, we gotta get you oughtta there.” And then back to full-on idiot/perky voice: “OK! Call when you get in! I’ll be up late!” Fake kissing sounds. “This is Lydia, by the way.” Giggles.

Click.

“OK, Harold, I’m leaving. You two gonna be alright for a couple of hours?”

Harold was sitting in front of the television in the living room, watching an exposé about whip-poor-wills. Toothpaste hid close by underneath the couch.

Yep. Everything’s fine here.

“Don’t forget to take T.P. out before you go to bed. And don’t wait up. You know how Lydia gets when she starts talking.”

Have fun, dear.

Lillianne was wearing a short, black leather skirt, fishnet stockings and red stilettos. She’d thrown a white mink scarf that her father’d given her over a white silk blouse. Funny decision, Harold thought as she walked out the front door. Isn’t it a bit warm for fur this time of year? She wasn’t an unattractive woman, but she tried so hard.

Harold waited a few of minutes for Lillianne to be on her way, stood up, turned off the TV and walked out the front door, suspenders and polyester pants, his work clothes. He could hear Toothpaste whining inside the house as he left.

It wasn’t hard to find Lillianne up ahead on the sidewalk, or to keep up with her – five-inch red stilettos clacking along like a two-legged horse trotting on cobblestone, stopping regularly to adjust her stockings. Harold followed his wife at a safe distance, stopping as she stopped, staying away from the light cast by the street lamps.

They didn’t live far from the Boardwalk and that seemed to be where Lillianne was headed. As they got closer and the lights of the fun fair ignited the Friday night sky – the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster and the concessions and the freak show – Harold stayed back, letting his wife go on ahead, but not so far that he couldn’t see where she was going.

She stopped in front of a popular bar on the Boardwalk called the Clown House. The place was a riff on the Coney Island fun-rides – a massive plastic façade in the shape of a slightly ghoulish-looking clown, colors all exaggerated, carnival music pumped outside through hidden speakers. Lillianne talked with the large bouncer there at the door for awhile. It was obvious that they had a rapport, joshing and laughing with each other for several minutes before he opened the door for her and Lillianne disappeared into the establishment.

Harold stood in the shadow of an awning in front of a shuttered storefront for ten minutes, waiting – he didn’t want to be found out, away from his La-Z-Boy and his living room where he knew he was supposed to be. But he also knew Lillianne – knew her well after all these years – knew that he was as conspicuous to her as something one simply took for granted. So he approached the man guarding the entrance to the Clown House.

“I.D.,” the bouncer said reflexively as Harold stepped up to the entrance. He looked at the man. The man was looking at his cell phone.

“I.D.,” he said again, holding out a hand, still fixated on that little luminescent screen. Impatiently, he looked up at Harold Punter, standing there in his middle-aged suspenders and horn-rimmed glasses, sweating from the weather and the walk. “Oh, sorry,” the bouncer laughed, looking back down at his little gadget. “Go on in.”

The Clown House was one of those bars that took the New York City smoking ban very lightly, a nicotine smog greeting Harold as he entered the room, cloaking him, he felt, in a kind of anonymity. A cover band was on stage, opposite the entryway, wailing away in a hard-rock style, soaked in sweat, believing in their hearts that this was the Big Time.

The room was packed with a mostly younger crowd – kids in their early twenties, out to Coney Island on a Friday night after a day at the beach, local blue-collars looking for a diversion, trying to buy some time before they had to go home, here and there an old marooned sailor who’d called the Boardwalk home for too long and for all the wrong reasons.

Harold walked over to a table that had been abandoned by some of the cover bands’ groupies and sat down. The table was close to the entryway – opposite the bar – against a wall.

“What can I get ya?”

A hard-working waitress in crotch-short cut-off jeans and a red-and-white-checkered top unbuttoned to the navel smiled flirtatiously at Harold, sitting there at the abandoned bar room table, empty bottles and cascading ashtrays.

A ginger ale?

But Harold only thought this, as he often did. He waved the waitress away. She frowned and he watched her walk off, miniature cut-off bluejeans, tanned summertime legs. He only watched her for a second, though, because Harold Punter was a married man.

The band played relentlessly, barely breaking between songs, wanting, it seemed, to keep their rock-and-roll dream on fire, turned up to eleven. Lillianne was standing at the end of the bar by herself, close to the stage, sipping a cocktail. If you’d have asked Harold what Lillianne’s drink of choice was, Harold wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Lillianne drank what was available, anything too thin to eat.

A strapping young man with an oiled-up pompadour came out of the men’s room behind the stage and joined Lillianne at the bar. He was wearing tight bluejeans and a snappy white t-shirt with a package of cigarettes rolled into the right sleeve. He took them out and lit a pair, handing one to Lillianne. They both inhaled and contributed smoke to the room’s atmosphere. She laughed at something he’d said and then he kissed her – not a furtive smooch or a peck on the cheek like her father gave her on Sunday afternoons – but a horny, smothering French kiss, there underneath the cover band’s stage lights.

A slight smile crossed Harold’s face, sitting across the room in the shadows. Not a cynical smile or one of resentment, just a smile sparked by curiosity realized. It was no shock to him, seeing his wife making-out with another man – he’d half-expected to see as much. What he hadn’t expected to see, though, was Frank the Grease Monkey from the Pimento Pinball Corporation making-out with his wife.

Frank?

Yes, it was Frank, restorer of pinball machines, the same Frank whose colorful stories Harold would listen to during his breaks in the cavernous workshop at the back of the Pimento building in Williamsburg.

This is interesting, Harold thought to himself, leaning forward on the table near the entryway. How did this happen?

He had vague memories of a work-related barbecue that Ralph III had thrown on the Fourth of July the year before – Independence Day – and an interest that Frank had taken in Lillianne. At the time, Harold thought nothing of it, was happy that Lillianne was enjoying herself like she used to do back in college. Harold never had been much of a conversationalist, preferring to blend into the background at social gatherings. But Lillianne liked to mingle and she really seemed to enjoy Frank’s interest in her that afternoon. Harold hadn’t paid it any mind at the time.

He stood up and headed for the door. How did he feel? Harold Punter felt like a shrug, that was all, seeing finally how the other half lived.

Outside, the bouncer was still hypnotized by something on that tiny blue screen of his. The salty air was cool. Harold put his hands in his pockets and walked along the worn planks of the Boardwalk, relaxed and oddly at ease. He’d had his suspicions, had had them for years. Was Frank the Grease Monkey the first? Surely not. Who else, then? What were the other ones like?

It’d been years since Harold had kissed Lillianne, or she him. And Harold had never kissed Lilliane the way that Frank the Grease Monkey had that night at the Clown House. But it seemed agreed between them – an unspoken pact – that that’s just the way it worked, the rhythms and inevitable droughts of a marriage. Some people talk about being beyond love – not out of love, but beyond love – that place where formalities are no longer necessary. Maybe that’s where he and Lillianne were: Beyond love.

When he opened the front door, Toothpaste was hiding underneath the kitchen table, not sure which one of them it was coming home. Seeing that it was Harold, Toothpaste barked excitedly and lept at Harold’s legs. He let Toothpaste out for some fresh air and relief. The dog always minded him so well.

Back inside, Harold climbed the narrow set of stairs to the bathroom, removed his horn-rimmed glasses, washed his face and brushed his teeth, Toothpaste at attention in the doorway. He turned out the light and walked down the narrow hallway to the guest bedroom and the single bed there. He laid down on the bed, a little bit of moonlight coming through the dusty blinds. Harold motioned for Toothpaste to join him and he did, curling up in the crook of Harold’s arm.

Several weeks later, Harold woke to this: “WHERE THE HELL IS TOOTHPASTE?!” Harold was in the guest bedroom, as usual, fully-clothed from the night before – polyester pants, rumpled button-up shirt and suspenders. Where am I. He’d been dreaming of Scotland, the cliffs and the cold. He’d been obsessing over the game of golf, it turned out, but the dreams were glorious: Rustic fairways, blue skies, a rake at every sand trap.

“WHERE THE HELL IS GOD-DAMNED TOOTHPASTE?!”

Harold wiped the sleep from his eyes and reached for his horn-rimmed glasses on the night stand. Hello? There was a commotion going on downstairs. What time is it? Harold wondered, checking his wristwatch. It was Saturday morning, and Lillianne was upset downstairs. He closed his eyes: Bloody Marys and runny eggs.

“HAROLD! WAKE UP! TOOTHPASTE IS GONE!” she screamed, stumbling up the stairs from the kitchen.

It’d been a long night – Lillianne was out until nearly sun-up and had made quite a scene when she finally came home: “Harold, we needa talk,” she’d said. “I love you I guess, but jeez, Harold, can’t you see that I’m suffocating here?” Harold stood at the bottom of the stairs without his glasses. “I…ahm…suf-fo-cate…” Lillianne leaned over the kitchen sink and threw up, black leather skirt, red stilettos.

“HAROLD! HAROLD! HAROLD!” Feet pounding up the narrow stairs to the guest bedroom. “HAROLD! TOOTHPASTE IS GONE!”

The previous Wednesday, when Harold arrived for work at the Pimento Pinball Corporation, he found a pink slip in his mailbox. The short note read: “Due to a lagging economy and changing tastes in the entertainment industry, the Pimento Pinball Corporation is going out of business. Thanks, and good luck.” The note was signed by Ralph III with a little happy face. Harold slowly started packing up his personal things. Nancy Chalmers wept quietly across the room.

Ralph III slipped into the office shortly before noon, hoping that the emotions around the place might have cooled down a bit before he made a customary final appearance, shook everybody’s hands and wished them well with whatever sincerity he could muster.

“Harold, Buddy!” he whispered excitedly across Harold’s empty desk. “I’m rich!” Harold looked at him blankly. “I’m rich, Harold, Buddy, I’m rich!”

Frank, Richie and Lou back in the shop had seen Ralph III pull up in his Escalade and were standing there in the doorway of the office.

“What the hell is this all about?!” Frank said, stabbing the air with his crumpled pink slip. “What the hell are we gonna do now?!” Harold smiled at Frank from across the room, taking some small satisfaction in his panic.

“Gentlemen,” Ralph III said, folding his hands across his chest with a feigned solemnity, “I’m so sorry. It’s a blow to all of us. My family, especially, is taking it pretty hard.”

“YOUR family?!” Frank screamed. “What about US?! We’re screwed!”

Frank and the other two grease monkeys stormed out of the building and were gone. Nancy Chalmers took her purse and cardigan and she left, too, dabbing her nose with a tissue. Harold Punter put on his corduroy sport coat, picked up the small box with his few personal belongings and left the Pimento Pinball Corporation for the second-to-last time.

Ralph III might have been rich, but Harold Punter was richer. He hadn’t heard much of the conversation on the golf course that Thursday morning, lagging behind in the game as usual, but he’d heard enough.

During his lunch break the following Monday, after some careful consideration, Harold had gone to the bank.

“Well hello, Mr. Punter, how are you today?” the teller had asked him. Harold smiled. “Payday isn’t until Friday. What can I do for you?” Harold handed Vivian, the teller, a withdrawal slip and asked for a cashier’s check. “Oh my,” she said, adjusting her bifocals. “Are you moving or something?” Harold shrugged. “Well, we sure hate to lose your business.” Harold smiled again. He took the check, left the bank and walked back to his office at the Pimento Pinball Corporation.

Ralph III had invested a fair amount of what family money he’d been able to hold on to in Games International, as Billy Dodge had recommended he do, and when they’d acquired Billy Dodge’s small gaming company and its break-through interactive technology the stock went through the roof. Harold Punter had invested his entire life savings, as well as a second mortgage on his and Lillianne’s house.

After his secret windfall, Harold rented a separate studio apartment near the beach at Coney Island and set up a personal, private bank account. One night, while Lillianne was “out with the girls,” he took Toothpaste there and immediately changed the dog’s name to Sir Lancelot. It took some time, but eventually the dog began responding to the new title, with pride, even, Harold thought.

He told Lillianne that he’d let Toothpaste (now Sir Lancelot) out one evening and the dog simply hadn’t come back. That was all. It happens all the time. Lillianne was understandably devastated, but Harold felt like a liberator, like he’d opened the door to a cage and set a beautiful bird free.

Every Monday morning Harold got up at the usual hour, showered, dressed and left for work. He’d walk the twenty-minutes to the little studio apartment he’d rented and feed and stroke Sir Lancelot, who quickly had taken to the new arrangement.

Harold had purchased a futon couch for the apartment, a dresser and some other simple pieces of furniture to make the place feel like home for him and the dog. And before the Pimento Pinball Corporation had closed its doors for good, he committed a minor crime: Harold hired some movers to collect a pinball machine from the cavernous shop at the back of the Pimento building in Williamsburg because he still had a key, and because he liked pinball machines.

Harold Punter’s days, then, were quietly blissful: Long walks with Sir Lancelot along the Boardwalk, an occasional cotton candy, lazy lunches in peaceful diners, a nap in the afternoon and a game of pinball every now and then. But what Harold enjoyed most now was the game of golf. He’d purchased an inexpensive set of clubs and kept them at the studio apartment there at Coney Island. He’d take the sand wedge and a bucket of balls down to a deserted stretch of the beach and swing away, over and over again, hour after hour, trying to remember the mechanics of the motion: Shoulder-width stance, ball just inside my left foot, left arm straight, head down, eye on the ball.

Pppf.

KISS (A Love Story)

2011-02-01T16:32:00.001-05:00

The Greyhound bus station here isn’t really a bus station at all. It’s the backside of a simple, cinder block building near the entrance to the Interstate with a sad little playground next to it overgrown with weeds, a tire laying in the grass below a hanging piece of rope. A couple of children with runny noses are standing at the entrance to the dilapidated playground, twiddling their thumbs, and passengers are starting to arrive for the one o’clock.

I’ve been corresponding with a woman here. Neither of us are teenagers anymore and being somebody’s pen pal is a teenagerish sort of thing to be, I guess, but what was I supposed to do? The phone company had shut off my telephone and Internet service, so no “social networking” for me. There still exists out there, however, a troglodytic social network usually found in the want-ad sections of the tabloid newspapers or at the back of comic books, advertisements inviting lonely people like me to reach-out beyond the available singles in our day-to-day existence. And my day-to-day existence is a rather solitary one: I work in the back room of a pet store – mostly ferrets or iguanas or the constantly talking birds showing off their intelligence, occasionally a goldfish belly-up that needs to be fished out and flushed away.

You’d think that working with animals would make a guy so happy, all of those fluffy cute puppies and purring kittens, the chirping birds and rainbow-colored tropical fish. But the reality is that all of these creatures – God’s creatures – have each other. They don’t need you, as far as they’re concerned. And the other thing to remember is that each and every one of these cute little animals defecates.

I don’t know how Noah lasted half-an-hour.

Her name is Jillian Cupcake. I love how her name flows from my pen when I address the envelopes each Tuesday afternoon, all juicy and hot: Ms. Jillian Cupcake. It’d been getting extremely thin in the Female Human Contact Department and this interaction, however abstract it may be, is very important to me.

The letters started off formally enough – the Who’s, What’s and Where’s: “Do you have any siblings?” “What do your parents do?” “Did you go to college?” “What did you study?” Interestingly, Jillian Cupcake’s answer to all of these questions was “No”: Her parents had died in some kind of freak barbecuing accident (she didn’t elaborate so I didn’t push her for details), she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters – an only child – and she never went to college so she didn’t study anything there.

And I told her about myself: Marvin Braintree, twenty-eight years old, Bachelor’s degree in zoology. I have a sister named Ferdinand who I don’t speak to, and a couple of parents who I speak to even less. Ferdy and I had always been extremely competitive as children, each one always trying to out-do the other, and our parents egged us on. Whenever I failed at anything my parents would shrug: “It’s OK, Marvin,” they’d say, “Ferdy is simply smarter than you are. It’s not your fault.” When Ferdy decided to study zoology in college I chose to study zoology, too, so I could beat her. When I told my parents about my decision they just sighed sympathetically. Ferdy’s a real zoologist now in San Diego, studying termites or humpback whales, I forget which, but she’s successful and my parents love her. I work in the back room of a pet store on 181^st Street in Washington Heights, where few people speak English and I don’t speak Spanish. The parrots speak a little bit of both.

Jillian Cupcake is a librarian here in Gavel, Maryland which drives me completely insane because I have a wild imagination: Hair pulled back, glasses perched daintily on the end of her nose, white, buttoned-down blouse tucked into a short black skirt, high-heeled red pumps, name tag: Ms. Cupcake. I’ve laid awake so many nights dreaming of checking out a book from Jillian Cupcake, and I always imagine that I’ve chosen the right one – something profound, or romantic, or maybe just a comic book. After several months of correspondence, I figured Jillian Cupcake wouldn’t mind a comic book story. She certainly is an easy-going kind of girl on the hand-written page, and it endeared her to me, made me feel comfortable in a way that I wasn’t always comfortable with women. Jillian Cupcake became my long-distance girlfriend, and I was sure that she felt the same way about me.

Her letters eventually became more provocative, things like: “What do you wear when you go to bed?” and “Do you ever have naughty dreams?” and “Do you have a lot of hair on your upper thighs?” I certainly didn’t mind that line of questioning and it was easy to answer her queries, two-hundred miles away in my Lower East Side apartment, no telephone or Internet or cable TV, just the fire escape outside and a lock on the window. I have a lot of time on my hands in the evenings and, as I said, a vivid imagination for an aspiring zoologist.

Sometimes I’d write her letters in-between feedings at the pet store – right after I fed the hamsters and just before the piranhas – letters that were way outside of myself, almost lyrical: “If tonight you were in New York City, would you find me here?” and “Tonight I lit some candles and they spelled out your name” and “The thought of you cuts though the noise down on the street.” It made me feel so strong and confident to write those lines. But when Jillian Cupcake suggested that we meet I flinched, because there’s a big difference between sweet, hand-written notes and face-to-face flesh-and-blood.

I purchased a flexible round trip bus ticket, the kind that allows you to come and go at your convenience. Maybe I’d only spend a night in Gavel – who knew? – but if things heated up, as I was pretty sure that they would, I needed some elastic travel options. And I’ll be honest with you, part of me figured I’d never see my Lower East Side apartment or any of those awful little animals at the pet store ever again. Me and Jillian Cupcake were bound for Holy Matrimony, I was pretty well convinced of that – a nice little house here in Gavel with a white picket fence and the other clichés of contented domesticity – a self-cleaning oven, the whole package – maybe even a couple of kids somewhere down the road with names like Jeremiah or Delores. But none of this before we sewed our wild oats.

So I could hardly contain myself on the bus as it left the Port Authority at 42^nd Street and Eighth Avenue and headed south. I’d packed an old satchel with my best clothes: A couple of pairs of chinos, three button-up shirts and several pairs of clean underwear. I’d also taken with me all of the letters Jillian Cupcake had sent over the previous three months, sixty-two of them in all. The last one she’d sent had a red lipstick kiss on the back of the envelope and she’d sprayed some perfume on the letter inside. It drove me crazy. I couldn’t stop smelling the thing as the bus chugged and lurched across the barren New Jersey swampland.

I arrived at this makeshift Greyhound station in Gavel yesterday afternoon and used the pay phone at the back of the building to call a taxi. Jillian Cupcake told me to meet her at a little bar downtown called The End of the Road, a place she said was charming, a favorite hangout of hers. I didn’t care one way or the other. I’d have flown to the moon, at that point, if Jillian Cupcake said she would be there.

Forty-five minutes later the taxi arrived. There were no signs on the door of the car, no “On Duty” lamp on the roof. “You called for a ride?” the driver barked out the window.

“Yeah. Are you a cab?” I asked him.

“No, I’m a maid of honor,” he said. “Get in.”

The driver was a fat, burly man in a frayed, long-sleeved flannel shirt, despite the hot August weather. His beard was unkempt and what hair he had left on top of his head was slicked back with sweat. He had a half-smoked cheap cigar wedged into the corner of his mouth and the vehicle smelled like a perspiring ashtray. A pair of pink, plush dice hung from the rearview mirror and there was a miniature Chip ‘n’ Dales calendar glued to the door of the glove compartment. I handed him the directions that Jillian Cupcake had mailed me, all perfumed and alluring.

“What the heck is this?” he asked me, looking over his shoulder with a furrowed brow and a bitter countenance.

“Those are the directions,” I said. “That’s where I’m going.”

“No, what’s this smell?”

“Perfume,” I declared, proudly.

“I’m not a lavender man!” he bellowed, throwing the sacred piece of paper back over the seat into my lap. He jammed the worn-out Taurus into gear, spitting gravel out behind us as we roared out of the makeshift Greyhound bus station parking lot. He seemed angry, but why? Was this a standard Gavel welcome?

“I’ve got to make a couple of stops along the way,” he grumbled back at me as we whizzed along. Mixed in with the sour potpourri of fragrances in the car was the vague smell of pepperoni pizza. There were three pies in boxes on the passenger’s seat up front.

“Pardon me?” I asked politely.

“Listen, I gotta deliver a coupla of pizzas en route. That OK with you, Violet?”

It wasn’t really a question, so I didn’t answer. The residential streets we passed through were quiet and there wasn’t much activity – no kids playing in the yards, nobody out for an early evening walk, not a single dog barking which was a relief, given my occupation. There was a serenity to the drive, something in-between Norman Rockwell and a cemetery, shattered every ten minutes or so with a slamming of the breaks and my gruff chauffeur lurching out of the car with a lukewarm pizza pie. As we drove down the main street in the business section of town, half of the storefronts had boards on the windows or “For Sale” signs posted to the doors. It seemed like a lot of people were on vacation in Gavel, or had simply packed up and left altogether.

I smelled the perfumed letter again. The idea that Jillian Cupcake had actually touched that very piece of paper made my heart flutter and race.

The driver stopped in front of a small, white, concrete building, similar in make and model to the building where the buses stop. The place looked like a bunker, kind of gloomy, like it’d seen better times.

“Twelve bucks,” the driver said in a low voice from the front seat, refusing to turn around and look at me. I handed him a twenty. “Thanks,” he said, burying the bill in his wallet and shifting the car into drive. I considered asking him for a bit of the difference, and then figured I’d just get out of the car.

Standing there in the waning August light underneath the partially lit neon sign (the “a” in “Road” had burned out so the sign read: “The End of the Rod”), I couldn’t help but feel nervous, the way I always do at the prospect of face-to-face communication with a woman. It was an excited bolt of nerves running through my body, because I truly believed that Jillian Cupcake was my girl. We’d come so far in getting to know each other over these three short months and we’d never even met, had never even seen a picture of what the other one looked like. But that didn’t matter. We both knew that. There was a consistent passion in our correspondence. It had to be love.

I adjusted my collar and ran a hand through my hair, hoping it didn’t have that bus-ride-look to it. The front door was a wall of dark, tinted glass, obscuring anything on the other side. I opened it with wild anticipation and went in.

There were a dozen people sitting mostly by themselves at the bar. Lynyrd Skynyrd played softly on the jukebox like a southern lull-a-bye.

“What’d’ya want?” the bartender asked me.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said, stepping up to the Formica counter. The bartender rolled his eyes and walked down to the other end of the bar and started chit-chatting with one of the patrons there. The room was narrow and dimly lit. The bar itself looked more like the counter at a past-its-prime greasy spoon diner, running along the left-hand side of the room to the back where a short, dark hallway lead to “Men’s” and “Ladies’” rooms. The jukebox was situated at an angle near the entrance. Opposite the bar – maybe five feet away (the room couldn’t have been ten feet across) – stools were arranged in front of a shallow ledge where customers could sit and drink facing the wall, an anti-bar within the larger arrangement.

Where do I begin? I thought to myself. Find a seat at the bar and have a drink. She’ll come to you.

“What’d’ya want?” The bartender was standing across the counter from me, asking that question again, not a particularly friendly or welcoming one, more of a cold, nonchalant query.

“I’ll have a beer,” I said. He grunted and bent behind the bar for a mug. “No, wait,” I said, “make it a Manhattan.” Yes, Jillian Cupcake would like a Manhattan, too, I bet.

I paid the bartender. He had a wiry build, a black mustache and black curly hair smashed underneath a red, mesh trucker’s cap. Kinky black nose hairs hung in bunches from his nostrils as if the inside of his head was filled with the stuff and it was looking for an escape hatch. A permanent smirk scarred his face and a salty smell followed him around. He asked me where I was from after he handed me my drink, his nose whistling when he spoke.

“New York City,” I told him, reluctantly. I didn’t want to give up the spy-on-a-secret-mission feeling I’d been having all day long.

“Whooaa…” the bartender lowed. “A Yankee young man.”

Was I in the South, technically? I suppose I was. “We’re pretty close to the Mason-Dixon line, aren’t we?” I asked him, a bit of friendly conversation.

“Hell,” he said, “you wanna see the Mason-Dixon line? Here’s what ya gotta do: ‘Member that SEARS out there next to the Interstate as you come into town? Well, ya hang a right there on that little frontage road that runs on past that there SEARS, out into some fields. Alright? Well, not much more’n a stone’s throw you’ll get to a fruit and vegetable stand, assuming the weather’s co-operable. Now, at that fruit and vegetable stand you take a left and just start walkin’ out into that there field. Ain’t no sign or trail markin’ it or nothin’, but by God, you walk blindly out into that field there and you’ll find what’s left of a low, stone wall and that, by Jesus, is yer Mason-Dixon line.”

He slapped the countertop for emphasis and scrunched up his face for effect.

“That sounds great,” I told him, “but I’m really just looking for somebody.”

I ordered a second Manhattan and munched on the maraschino cherry. The End of the Road was slowly filling up with blue-collars and minor ruffians. The lanky bartender turned the jukebox up a little bit, something by Whitney Houston this time.

I’d been secretly scanning the room, torn between holding up a sign announcing my arrival and keeping a low profile. I was sure I could smell Jillian Cupcake in the room somewhere, but it might’ve just been the perfumed letter in my shirt pocket, that wonderful air-freshener, close to my heart.

“Is this seat taken?” I whipped around at the sound of a woman’s voice.

“No! What?! No, no, go ahead.” It wasn’t Jillian Cupcake. It was an older woman – an old woman – with a distinct mustache and a wool cap.
“Thank you, Deary,” she said, smelling like she owned several cats. She had on a tattered, floral-print dress and those awful, flesh-colored stockings that old women of a certain breed always seem to insist on wearing. She was a small thing and had to climb up the stool at the bar like it was a piece of gymnastics equipment, which she handled with a surprising agility.

“Nice day in here,” she said.

I hunkered down on my elbows at the bar, sipping my Manhattan through a straw. I was leaning more and more towards keeping a low profile as the room continued to fill up. I felt like a stranger at the End of the Road, like I had a neon sign above my head telling everybody in the place about it. People mostly didn’t pay me any mind, though, not even the cat woman sitting next to me.

“Get ya ‘nother?” The bartender had a way of drifting up and down the bar with a stealth that was unnerving.

“Sure,” I said quietly. He sloshed the bourbon and bitters into a glass and slid it across to me. “Hey, can I ask you a question?” The bartender stared at me blankly. “I’m looking for a young woman,” I said. “Her name is Jillian Cupcake. She works at the public library here in Gavel. You wouldn’t know her, by chance, would you? She says this is her favorite place in town.” I tried to be as polite as possible. A wry smile crept across old salty dog’s weathered face.

“Who?” he asked. I leaned in close across the countertop.

“Jillian Cupcake,” I half-whispered. The bartender grinned and walked to the other end of the bar. I sat back in my stool, glancing left and right without moving my head – stretching my eyes back-and-forth, a real quick scan of the room – and drank the Manhattan in front of me in a single gulp.

“Hey Buddy! It’s Jillian Cupcake!” The bartender was smiling and pointing at the door: A little man with a porkpie hat and a walker slowly pushed his way through the darkened doorway into the room. The bartender looked at me and laughed as he turned to serve another mug of beer.

Now my cover’s blown.

I cautiously surveyed the room. The cat lady was laughing at something somebody’d said to my left, and slumped over into himself on the stool to my right was an auto mechanic, stinking of gasoline, passed out cold. I slowly looked over my shoulder at the five or six people sitting at the narrow ledge opposite the bar, facing the wall like crows on a power line. The ceiling above us all was a cracked/peeling firmament of years-old whitewash, yellowed by tobacco and failed dreams.

“’Nother?” Smirking bartender. I nodded. Number four or five or something. The liquor was easing my mind. I was feeling courageous and romantic and I wanted to meet Jillian Cupcake.

“He your friend?” Another female voice behind me. I wheeled around, spilling half of my Manhattan on the bar. Another little old lady, and this one wreaked of cats, too. “He your friend?” she asked me again, pointing at the passed-out auto mechanic.

“I don’t know him,” I told her.

She raised her beaded purse high above her scraggly little head and clocked the man fiercely with an astonishing force for such a small, smelly old lady. The guy woke up halfway to the floor and lay there sprawled out like he’d just been born – wide-eyed, astonished and not a little bit unhappy. She kicked him once for good measure, clumsily stepped over him and popped up onto the recently vacated stool.

“Hey look! It’s Jillian Cupcake!” The bartender was pointing towards the front door again: An old man on crutches.

This is getting out of hand.

“’Nother one?” he asked me, smiling.

“Yes,” I said, defiantly. “But do you really know Jillian Cupcake or are you just jerking me around?”

“I know Jillian Cupcake real well,” he told me, without smiling this time. “She’s pretty foxy. Sure you can handle a girl like her?”

I gave him that grin that is a code between men: Oh yeah. I can handle her.

By nine o’clock the jukebox was up another notch – Broadway show tunes – and the End of the Road was nearly full, cat ladies book-ending me on the right and the left. The bartender gestured towards my empty glass with raised eyebrows.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jillian Cupcake here yet?” red mesh cap asked me from the shadows behind the bar.

“I don’t know!” I pleaded. I was getting desperate. There was no doubt she’d come, but when? I was dying to meet the goddess-woman, smell her and maybe give her a kiss on the cheek, real sophisticated/gentlemanlike.

“She’ll be here,” the bartender assured me. “She comes in after work most nights, but I think she works late on Fridays.”

The cat ladies were having a very serious conversation with each other about litter boxes and tax returns, leaning across the bar in front of me, gesturing wildly, clapping their hands occasionally to better make their points. “You’ve got to use the unscented stuff – you’ve just got to!” the one said to the other. “’Nothin’ worse than the smell of that awful, fragrant kitty litter.”

In one of our pen pal exchanges Jillian Cupcake had told me about her secret passion: Fashion design. She’d told me about her favorite designers – Diane Von Furstenberg, Karl Lagerfield and Anna Sui – and her overall eclectic sense of style. I hadn’t heard of any of these people because my fashion sense is economical, but Jillian Cupcake has a real craving for it, and most of the designers she told me about lived in New York City, probably right down the street from where I read and re-read her letters, every single night.

She told me about her other, not-so-secret passion, too: Burlesque dancing. She said that she and a few of her girlfriends had a little group that performed at bachelor parties and private events. Some guys might feel uncomfortable having their girlfriends dance around half-naked for horny strangers, but it didn’t bother me. There was something about Jillian Cupcake that made me trust her, implicitly. And as she described it, their routine was very tasteful, more performance art than ribald hootenanny.

“How you doin’, Yankee?” The bartender had been standing across the bar in front of me for a while, I gathered. Must’ve been lost in sweet dreams. “Can ya stand ‘nother one?” I nodded.

“You sure Jillin Cupake is ginna come?” My tongue was floppy.

“Oh, I ‘magine she’ll be here any minute.”

The clock on the wall behind the bar might have read twelve forty-five, but it was hard to tell. The cat women, amazingly, were talking faster than ever about church socials and baby-back ribs. The auto mechanic was still on the floor behind me, curled up in a fetal position underneath the little ledge opposite the bar. The area in front of the jukebox near the entrance looked like a parking lot for walking aids – crutches and canes and wheeled walkers stacked together there in a Medicared pile. And sitting at the very end of the bar by himself was my cab driver, fat and burly, frayed flannel shirt, smiling in my direction.

I woke up to the overhead lights shining through my eyelids, casting my world in a dull, blood-red glow. For a moment I wasn’t sure where I was. It didn’t smell like my Lower East Side apartment, and it certainly didn’t smell like the pet store in Washington Heights. It didn’t smell better than the pet store, only different – foreign, swampy and old. I opened my eyes. The wiry bartender was slowly sweeping the floor behind me.

“We’re closin’ ‘er up, Partner,” he said. “Time to go home.”

“Any sign of Jillian Cupcake?” I asked him groggily.

“Nope,” he said. “Time to go home.”

Home?

I collected my old satchel full of clean clothes and left the End of the Road. The street was deserted and still, like cemetery-time. What the hell are you doing here, anyway? That’s what I kept asking myself as I left the End of the Road and started retracing the cab ride from earlier that evening – already yesterday? – on foot, darker than dark, the streets more silent than silent, somewhere in-between a dream and a dream. What the hell are you doing here? Jillian Cupcake? Really? What kind of fool are you, anyway, coming all the way to Gavel, Maryland because some chick – assuming she’s even a chick at all! – sprayed a little bit of perfume on a letter and you immediately took it to be a love letter? Man, what kind of fool are you? An aspiring-zoologist-fool who works in the backroom of a pet store where hardly anybody speaks English, that kind. You’re that kind of fool. The End of the Road? Perfect. This is a good one you pulled over on yourself this time, almost as good as believing that you could – or even wanted to in the first place – be a zoologist like Ferdy. That was all spiteful sibling rivalry and the deck was stacked against you before you were even born and you knew it but you played the game anyway. Only an idiot-fool would buy into a game where he knew that he’d never, ever stand a chance of walking away from the table with the shirt on his stupid, weak little back. Ferdy, Ferdy, Ferdy. Stupid Ferdy. There’s no way to blame Ferdy for this ridiculous night, but I might as well give it a try. Why not? I’ll blame Ferdy for this crummy, lonely walk. And my parents. Surely they are responsible for this somehow. And maybe I’ll blame Jillian Cupcake a little bit, too. She really strung me along. Hasn’t she ever heard of a thing called feelings? Yeah, Jillian Cupcake, feelings! I’ve got some of those, you know?! Where the hell is she, anyway? Why didn’t she meet me like she said she would? An illness? Some sort of crisis at the library? Maybe? I’m sure about a thousand things could go wrong at a public library on a Friday night. Maybe there was a fire. Or a botched robbery. Maybe the Dewey Decimal System finally gave out completely and the whole operation just collapsed and Jillian Cupcake was left with nothing but her wits to figure it all out. Something like that couldn’t be fixed in a minute or an hour. Something like that would take days – weeks, even! – to patch up and put back together. I’m sure it was something along those lines.

And as I was walking back towards the bus station that isn’t really a bus station at all, thinking these irrational thoughts, something compelled me to turn around in the silent darkness. A block-and-a-half away a pair of headlights were following me, slowly, at a distance, the car’s engine humming an inefficient gurgle.

What’s this?

I faced forward and kept walking for another block and then stopped and turned around again. The headlights were still there but closer this time, shadowing my progress and then some on the dark, deserted street.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

It felt like a prison yard in the middle of the night, like I was an unfairly accused prisoner trying to make an escape and the spotlight had found me out. I was hoping there wasn’t a rifle behind those laser beams.

Who is this? What do they want?

I continued walking, thinking, trying to keep my composure.

I bet that’s not Jillian Cupcake.

In a flash of animal instinct and without any sense of direction, I bolted across the boulevard and onto the front lawn of some sleeping Gavel citizen. Out of the spooky glare of those predatory lights, everything was dark-dark again. I leapt over a low hedge in the ink-blackness and sprinted through the space between two houses and into a backyard. I glanced over my shoulder as I ran – the relentless headlights had come to a slow stop back on the street in the space between the two houses, compelling me to run harder, breathing furiously, swinging my worn satchel in circles in the air to develop some kind of momentum that would get me out of there. I wished I could fly.

It was only a kiddie pool in somebody’s backyard, but when I fell into it at full speed it felt like I’d fallen off the face of the earth and landed in an ocean-abyss. Flailing and gasping for breath, I rolled out of the obstacle, soaking wet, onto a dew-damp lawn. I stood up and continued running, perspiration and kiddie-pool-water and Mother-Nature-moisture coalescing.

At the back of the yard was a wooded area, only barely distinguishable from the overall darkness of the situation. I considered very briefly what might be lurking in those trees, but it wasn’t enough to dissuade me from escaping whoever or whatever was following me back there on the street. Low-hanging limbs and branches tore at my face and arms as I barreled through the foliage, trying to hold me back – meddling with my flight – but I was undeterred and terrified.

A single light appeared through the undergrowth in the direction I was headed and I focused on it like a sailor in a storm. I was running blindly now – eyes mostly closed – only a quick peek every pace or two – not wanting to lose an eye to the clawing twigs and stems. The light grew relatively brighter in the darkness and then brighter still as I passed through the woods and spilled out onto the gravel ground of my getaway: The bus station that isn’t really a bus station at all.

And here I am now, back on the bench at this makeshift Greyhound bus station. My left pant leg is nearly torn off completely below the knee and I apparently lost a shoe somewhere along the way because I’m barefoot on the right. My forehead and cheeks are covered with fresh scabs and it’s hard not to pick at them, like chicken pox. It’s almost noon and a New York City-bound bus is scheduled for one o’clock. It’s raining lightly and there is a mother and her teenage son roaring into the pay phone next to me at the gray, cinder block building where the buses stop.

“That stupid bus is supposed to be here!” the mother is screaming to some poor operator on the other end. She slams the receiver into the cradle of the pay phone, takes it out and slams it against the side of the box three or four times and assures her son: “We’re gonna sue these rotten eggs!” They are storming around in circles, cursing each other and cursing the Greyhound bus company.

The boy is wearing a tattered black t-shirt with the worn letters “K-I-S-S” printed in white across the front. He rolls his eyeballs and curses under his breath. He has sloppy hair and glasses that don’t quite stay on the bridge of his nose which only adds to the general look of frustration on his pimply face. The apple didn’t fall too far from the barrel, either, the boy’s mother taking a seat on a second-hand suitcase, scowling, smoking a Viceroy, her hair as oily and disheveled as her son’s.

“We’re gonna be late, ma!” the kid sulks as he kicks at the gravel in road.

“Shut up! I know!” shouts the mother.

He rolls his eyes again and sort of thrusts his body a quarter-turn in a fit of dramatic disgust at the Greyhound bus company. His hands are half-ways in his bluejeans’ pockets, slouching, upset at everything. They’re trying to get out of Gavel, too, but missed an earlier bus. The mother lights up another Viceroy.

“Le’ me have one,” the boy asks, holding out his hand.

“Where’s yours?” the mother shoots back.

“I ran out!” the boy whines, holding his hands up in the air desperately. “We’re never gonna get out of here, ma!” the kid cries as he lights the cigarette.

“We’re gonna sue these suckers,” his mother says with a hiss and a stomp.

“Jesus,” the kid says and pivots dramatically again.

“Watch your language,” the mother tells him, dragging on her butt.

The kid groans.

“Sons-of-bitches,” she says.

The bus arrives more or less on time and we all climb aboard – me and the mother and the son. “Can’t smoke on the bus, ma’am,” the driver tells the mother, sucking on another Viceroy.

“Well shoot,” she says, taking a long, last drag and then flings the smoldering fag out onto the gravel road. “This company is crap.”

I take a seat by myself near a window and we move out, past the SEARS and the Mason-Dixon line, somewhere out there in that field, unmarked and mostly unnoticed these days, north towards New York City and the parakeets and the piranhas and my Lower East Side apartment that doesn’t have cable TV or Internet access. I take out the perfumed Jillian Cupcake letter and smell it again. The fragrance is fading. Must’ve smelled it too much. I’ll have to mention that to her in my next letter – tell her how much I liked it – and ask her to send me another one.