It all began with a simple restlessness. Huddling behind the chemistry building with fat Temple Roberts, the Baptist preacher’s daughter would been sneaking snack cakes in to Sunday service since primary school. Cutting the filters off Marlboros with a pair of cuticle scissors so the butts littered the freshly cut grass, subtle markers of our disrespect. I had a permanent case of whooping cough that year from inhaling for too long and letting acrid smoke burn at the back of my throat. If I just pulled hard enough I could take some of that fire into me.
I always did stupid things like that.
Temple spent a month the previous summer with her grandmother in Morocco where she ate hashish every day for two weeks straight and snuck out to smoke opium with the maid’s son Rahim on his nights off. We contented ourselves with mutilated gas station cigarettes until Temple managed to get her hands on the sexy French Gauloise Rahim smoked out of a gold case that he picked off a careless sheikh. In France they don’t smoke like pussies.
Before Rahim the Fallen African Prince, Temple had been happy with Ultra Lights.
It was September of senior year and I was regularly skipping class in favor of what I fondly recall as a period of intense self-study. (read: Meditating over a joint and morning cartoons in my neighbor’s basement with a little recreational masturbation thrown in for color. Both of Dave’s parents worked and he was way to straight-edged to ever skip but he did keep the basement window above the couch propped open so I wouldn’t set off the alarm.)
I always made it back to school for lunch. School officials never caught on to truancy if a student’s name appeared on the roll at least once in the morning and directly after lunch. So every day I could be found in the same chair at the same table shoveling powdered mashed potatoes and country-fried steak cooked by heat lamp. I hadn’t played any sports since my father’s aborted attempts at catch in the second grade so the jocks wanted nothing to do with me. Chronic stage fright kept me away from the musicians and artists and perpetual apathy from everyone else. Yet somehow I’d managed to find a place.
I sat between the “E” twins, Ashlee Murray and Britnee Parker, who’ve been best friends since the moment they discovered their names had the same ridiculous alter-spelling. The two were easily confused and just as easily dismissed. I’d been referring to them as Clairol #34 and #28 since freshman year.
Next to them was Assima Holloway, who lounged across half the table in a light sleep, perpetually recovering from a late night with her Latin lover. (read: her parents Cuban pool boy.)Her father, Channing Holloway, was a cheerfully lecherous septuagenarian who’d made his money on the backs of hajiis during the 60’s oil-boom. He made up for it twenty years later by marrying an Arabic-speaking Ethiopian half his age and giving her his first child at a still spry 62. Assima was lovely in a way that beauty ceases to be a consideration. The boys here were flies buzzing at the ears of a champion stallion.
There was one more.
Cecille Diconsera. The girl who ate my soul.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Max Friend
Maxwell Friend awoke Friday morning on the wrong side of his bed. The right side of his bed, which contained all the necessary tools of his masculinity (alarm clock, lamp, condoms in the nightstand drawer), was otherwise occupied. The sheets were pulled all the way up so he could see only the top of a greasy head, knotted and wild from a long night. Slowly, recent memory surfaced from a sea of happy-hour gin gimlets and that second round of tequila shots that he never should have taken.
There was that new intern from the department upstairs that he managed to coerce out with an offer of free Buffalo wings after work. He put on cologne and she brought half the accounting floor. It hadn’t been too bad actually. He bought a lime daiquiri for Cecile, an octogenarian receptionist who took off her wig and winged it across the bar halfway through her second drink.
He remembered finding a booth with the intern, plying her with cough-syrup mixed drinks. He knew her mouth tasted like cotton-candy bubble gum and ultra-light cigarettes and when he sat next to her the pillows of her breasts rested ever so softly against his arm.
A jukebox computer played every top-40 song ever lip-synched. The intern staged her own karaoke night and convinced him to croon “like a virgin” at least seven times. The intern ordered dessert before the kitchen closed and they spooned fried ice cream in between shots of Kahlua.
His intern had been funny and gorgeous, and no more than 110 pounds soaking wet. The hump under his seersucker bedspread, the one his grandmother bought from the JC Penney outlet for his thirtieth birthday, the hump that heaved under the covers like a beached whale huffing its last salty breath. That hump was not his intern.
The lump moved again and he knew it was time for action. He gathered up yesterday’s work clothes in a wrinkled ball and slipped his sweaty feet into the loafers by the door. There wasn’t time to find socks. It was still early, so he could splash some water on his face and sponge the sweat off his armpits with wet paper towels in the first-floor men’s room at work. It was always unlocked. Maybe change clothes in the broom closet next to his cubicle so no one would catch him fumbling with the same pair of khaki pants that he’d worn the day before.
He was almost to the bedroom door and sweet freedom only a few feet away. The timing was vicious in its accuracy. He heard the click as numbers on his radio clock moved into place then a moment of devastating clarity before the grating boom of Ted Kaster, morning host for 94.6FM “The Wave”, blasted from the radio and shook the walls of his studio apartment.
For a moment the snooze button seemed within reach but the lumbering form in his bed shot up with amazing quickness. It was still wrapped in his comforter, haunting the morning like a poltergeist of reasonably priced house wares.
The blanket began to fall away and Max immediately closed his eyes, pressing the lids together as tight as they would go. When he finally opened them, everything with the potential to blind him was covered but then there was the face.
That face…
“Who the hell are you?”
…was not one he’d ever seen before.
Her hair was brown, eyes and skin less so, with flat features lost in a face soft like cookie dough.
“Really?” Her sarcastic smile revealed pretty teeth, white like a toothpaste commercial. “That’s sure what I call pathetic.”
His mind moved frantically, choosing and discarding memories. “I don’t know you.”
She made a move to stand and the bedspread dipped perilously low. Max immediately backpedaled, holding the armful of laundry in front of his face like a shield. “You are trespassing.” He backed slowly towards the door. “I could call the police and have you arrested.”
She laughed and rummaged through the purse on the bedside table. She tossed a slim cell phone across the room to land at his feet, cracking it hard against the linoleum floor. “Use mine. It’s free.”
Max jumped like he’d been shot and grabbed the butter knife off the kitchen counter, wielding it like a horror movie villain. “Don’t come any closer.”
She raised an eyebrow at the knife, still lightly coated with congealed margarine from yesterday morning’s breakfast toast. “I’m getting dressed. Don’t freak out.”
She swept past him into the bathroom, clicking the door lock behind her. Maxwell Friend was left standing in the “kitchen” of his single room apartment, holding a dirty butter knife like it was an assassin’s dagger and feeling overwhelmingly pathetic.
It was quiet save for the sound of running water. Max walked to the locked door of his bathroom and banged on it with the heel of his hand. “Please get out of my house.”
The lock clicked and her face appeared in a crack between the door and the jam. “I know it’s hard. You’ve found yourself in a situation over which you have absolutely no control. Why don’t you do something useful and toast a bagel. I’m starving.”
Max sat at the table, nursing a cup of instant coffee, when she came out twenty minutes later, fully dressed with wet hair and a clean face. She sat opposite him with her legs crossed neatly at the knee. “So.”
Max blew out hard so his nostrils flared like circus tents. “You need to get the fuck out.”
She grinned and licked her lips. “Ooh, nice one. Is that all you’ve got?”
He pushed the table hard as he stood, sloshing hot coffee onto the Formica top, and the smile on her face faltered. “If you don’t tell me who you are, right now, I’m calling the cops so they can lock your ass up for being a fucking maniac.”
“Okay,” she said, making a calming gesture with her hands. “My name is Julie Jones.”
“And…”
“And…” She gave him a prompting smile. “You really don’t know me, do you?”
“No.” His gaze was steely. “Should I?”
“We work in the same building. We’ve shared an elevator at least three times a week for the last five years.”
His gaze was blank.
“Doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Well, you sure do know how to make a girl feel special.”
Max leaned back and steepled his fingers. “I only have one question for you.”
Julie leaned forward, smiling. “What’s that?”
“Where the hell is my intern?”
There was that new intern from the department upstairs that he managed to coerce out with an offer of free Buffalo wings after work. He put on cologne and she brought half the accounting floor. It hadn’t been too bad actually. He bought a lime daiquiri for Cecile, an octogenarian receptionist who took off her wig and winged it across the bar halfway through her second drink.
He remembered finding a booth with the intern, plying her with cough-syrup mixed drinks. He knew her mouth tasted like cotton-candy bubble gum and ultra-light cigarettes and when he sat next to her the pillows of her breasts rested ever so softly against his arm.
A jukebox computer played every top-40 song ever lip-synched. The intern staged her own karaoke night and convinced him to croon “like a virgin” at least seven times. The intern ordered dessert before the kitchen closed and they spooned fried ice cream in between shots of Kahlua.
His intern had been funny and gorgeous, and no more than 110 pounds soaking wet. The hump under his seersucker bedspread, the one his grandmother bought from the JC Penney outlet for his thirtieth birthday, the hump that heaved under the covers like a beached whale huffing its last salty breath. That hump was not his intern.
The lump moved again and he knew it was time for action. He gathered up yesterday’s work clothes in a wrinkled ball and slipped his sweaty feet into the loafers by the door. There wasn’t time to find socks. It was still early, so he could splash some water on his face and sponge the sweat off his armpits with wet paper towels in the first-floor men’s room at work. It was always unlocked. Maybe change clothes in the broom closet next to his cubicle so no one would catch him fumbling with the same pair of khaki pants that he’d worn the day before.
He was almost to the bedroom door and sweet freedom only a few feet away. The timing was vicious in its accuracy. He heard the click as numbers on his radio clock moved into place then a moment of devastating clarity before the grating boom of Ted Kaster, morning host for 94.6FM “The Wave”, blasted from the radio and shook the walls of his studio apartment.
For a moment the snooze button seemed within reach but the lumbering form in his bed shot up with amazing quickness. It was still wrapped in his comforter, haunting the morning like a poltergeist of reasonably priced house wares.
The blanket began to fall away and Max immediately closed his eyes, pressing the lids together as tight as they would go. When he finally opened them, everything with the potential to blind him was covered but then there was the face.
That face…
“Who the hell are you?”
…was not one he’d ever seen before.
Her hair was brown, eyes and skin less so, with flat features lost in a face soft like cookie dough.
“Really?” Her sarcastic smile revealed pretty teeth, white like a toothpaste commercial. “That’s sure what I call pathetic.”
His mind moved frantically, choosing and discarding memories. “I don’t know you.”
She made a move to stand and the bedspread dipped perilously low. Max immediately backpedaled, holding the armful of laundry in front of his face like a shield. “You are trespassing.” He backed slowly towards the door. “I could call the police and have you arrested.”
She laughed and rummaged through the purse on the bedside table. She tossed a slim cell phone across the room to land at his feet, cracking it hard against the linoleum floor. “Use mine. It’s free.”
Max jumped like he’d been shot and grabbed the butter knife off the kitchen counter, wielding it like a horror movie villain. “Don’t come any closer.”
She raised an eyebrow at the knife, still lightly coated with congealed margarine from yesterday morning’s breakfast toast. “I’m getting dressed. Don’t freak out.”
She swept past him into the bathroom, clicking the door lock behind her. Maxwell Friend was left standing in the “kitchen” of his single room apartment, holding a dirty butter knife like it was an assassin’s dagger and feeling overwhelmingly pathetic.
It was quiet save for the sound of running water. Max walked to the locked door of his bathroom and banged on it with the heel of his hand. “Please get out of my house.”
The lock clicked and her face appeared in a crack between the door and the jam. “I know it’s hard. You’ve found yourself in a situation over which you have absolutely no control. Why don’t you do something useful and toast a bagel. I’m starving.”
Max sat at the table, nursing a cup of instant coffee, when she came out twenty minutes later, fully dressed with wet hair and a clean face. She sat opposite him with her legs crossed neatly at the knee. “So.”
Max blew out hard so his nostrils flared like circus tents. “You need to get the fuck out.”
She grinned and licked her lips. “Ooh, nice one. Is that all you’ve got?”
He pushed the table hard as he stood, sloshing hot coffee onto the Formica top, and the smile on her face faltered. “If you don’t tell me who you are, right now, I’m calling the cops so they can lock your ass up for being a fucking maniac.”
“Okay,” she said, making a calming gesture with her hands. “My name is Julie Jones.”
“And…”
“And…” She gave him a prompting smile. “You really don’t know me, do you?”
“No.” His gaze was steely. “Should I?”
“We work in the same building. We’ve shared an elevator at least three times a week for the last five years.”
His gaze was blank.
“Doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Well, you sure do know how to make a girl feel special.”
Max leaned back and steepled his fingers. “I only have one question for you.”
Julie leaned forward, smiling. “What’s that?”
“Where the hell is my intern?”
In Spring
Temple Roberts, the Baptist preacher’s daughter who knew more of sense and sin than I ever would, was my nearest neighbor for longer than I can remember. Until the eighth grade when Temple’s parents sent her up north to boarding school. Her white clapboard house sat on a hill overlooking the cleanest part of Nelson River with daisies growing in the front yard and white Christmas lights that hung tastefully from the edges of the roof year round.
After my father died the Roberts invited us into their home for Sunday turkey and mashed potatoes every week for almost a year. Mrs. Roberts always wore an apron over her dress with matching shoes, as if at any given moment she’d just stepped out of the kitchen. She had different patterns every week, yellow lace with daffodils, blue satin polka dots, even orange pumpkins with carved smiles for Halloween. I wouldn’t know until years later – when my mother decided in a fit of rage to turn all my memories of childhood into ugliness – that their maid Conchita, a pretty girl from Honduras, was responsible for any culinary efforts in the Roberts’ kitchen and, my mother implied scornfully, efforts in other parts of the house as well.
I would follow Temple up to her room after each dinner. That bedroom, done in light gauze and pale pastels, would always elicit in me a twinge of envy. Jealousy was part of it but even more the realization that I wouldn’t know what to do with her riches if I ever were to possess them. Stuffed animals overflowed from the window seat, a tall bookshelf towered over one corner stuffed with board games and porcelain figurines. A giant pink teddy bear stood sentry next to the canopied bed, its belly stitched with Temple’s full name and date of birth.
We played house with a chrome kitchen set and Temple was always father. She told me, imperious like a bull, that I couldn’t possibly know how to be a daddy when I no longer had one. Her long body scrunched into an outgrown tea table, waiting for me to serve her an imaginary plate of bacon and eggs that I made by banging tiny metal pots together and imitating the ch-ch-ch sound of a gas stove lighting.
My favorite toy was the Barbie styling head. It was nothing more than the decapitated head of a Barbie doll, enlarged to full-size and mounted on a piece of flat pink plastic so that Barbie was always sitting straight and tall like a macabre symbol of synthetic vanity. The doll’s eyes stared pleasantly ahead, no matter how many times I accidentally on purpose burned her ears with the plastic curling iron. I would run the blonde hair between my fingers, blonde because Temple would only allow her mother to buy white dolls, and hold the life-size head close to my face so the cool plastic of Barbie’s cheek pressed against mine. When I closed my eyes I could pretend that the silky waves tickling my ear were my own.
The last dinner we ever had must have been in late March or April because I remember the trees as green and full but a chill wind blew through the open bedroom window. Temple was an imposing twelve years of age to my meager ten. When she pulled a play doctor’s bag made of fake leather from the toy chest and told me to take off my sweater and pants because it was time for an examination, I never said yes but I don’t remember saying no.
Here is where memory dissolves into fragments of sensation, tantalizing half-images that dance behind closed eyelids and make a mockery of story-telling. The smell of baking biscuits floating up from the kitchen or was it the plate of fresh cookies Mrs. Roberts made for my mother to take home. A bitter knife of wind cut the night and I remember the top of Temple’s head, thick and shiny from oil and a liberally applied horse bristle brush.
That was how Temple’s mother found us minutes later. Me, naked save for brown dress socks and pair of brand new penny loafers a size too big and Temple on her hands and knees, a toy stethoscope in her ears, feeling for a pulse in a place I never knew a heart could beat.
My mother and I were never again invited to dinner.
It was early in the spring and the air carried with it the odor of rotten wood and dead flowers and underneath the decay, the sweet pulse of new life.
After my father died the Roberts invited us into their home for Sunday turkey and mashed potatoes every week for almost a year. Mrs. Roberts always wore an apron over her dress with matching shoes, as if at any given moment she’d just stepped out of the kitchen. She had different patterns every week, yellow lace with daffodils, blue satin polka dots, even orange pumpkins with carved smiles for Halloween. I wouldn’t know until years later – when my mother decided in a fit of rage to turn all my memories of childhood into ugliness – that their maid Conchita, a pretty girl from Honduras, was responsible for any culinary efforts in the Roberts’ kitchen and, my mother implied scornfully, efforts in other parts of the house as well.
I would follow Temple up to her room after each dinner. That bedroom, done in light gauze and pale pastels, would always elicit in me a twinge of envy. Jealousy was part of it but even more the realization that I wouldn’t know what to do with her riches if I ever were to possess them. Stuffed animals overflowed from the window seat, a tall bookshelf towered over one corner stuffed with board games and porcelain figurines. A giant pink teddy bear stood sentry next to the canopied bed, its belly stitched with Temple’s full name and date of birth.
We played house with a chrome kitchen set and Temple was always father. She told me, imperious like a bull, that I couldn’t possibly know how to be a daddy when I no longer had one. Her long body scrunched into an outgrown tea table, waiting for me to serve her an imaginary plate of bacon and eggs that I made by banging tiny metal pots together and imitating the ch-ch-ch sound of a gas stove lighting.
My favorite toy was the Barbie styling head. It was nothing more than the decapitated head of a Barbie doll, enlarged to full-size and mounted on a piece of flat pink plastic so that Barbie was always sitting straight and tall like a macabre symbol of synthetic vanity. The doll’s eyes stared pleasantly ahead, no matter how many times I accidentally on purpose burned her ears with the plastic curling iron. I would run the blonde hair between my fingers, blonde because Temple would only allow her mother to buy white dolls, and hold the life-size head close to my face so the cool plastic of Barbie’s cheek pressed against mine. When I closed my eyes I could pretend that the silky waves tickling my ear were my own.
The last dinner we ever had must have been in late March or April because I remember the trees as green and full but a chill wind blew through the open bedroom window. Temple was an imposing twelve years of age to my meager ten. When she pulled a play doctor’s bag made of fake leather from the toy chest and told me to take off my sweater and pants because it was time for an examination, I never said yes but I don’t remember saying no.
Here is where memory dissolves into fragments of sensation, tantalizing half-images that dance behind closed eyelids and make a mockery of story-telling. The smell of baking biscuits floating up from the kitchen or was it the plate of fresh cookies Mrs. Roberts made for my mother to take home. A bitter knife of wind cut the night and I remember the top of Temple’s head, thick and shiny from oil and a liberally applied horse bristle brush.
That was how Temple’s mother found us minutes later. Me, naked save for brown dress socks and pair of brand new penny loafers a size too big and Temple on her hands and knees, a toy stethoscope in her ears, feeling for a pulse in a place I never knew a heart could beat.
My mother and I were never again invited to dinner.
It was early in the spring and the air carried with it the odor of rotten wood and dead flowers and underneath the decay, the sweet pulse of new life.
Porchlight
The sound of something heavy hitting the floor made him jump. He'd deliberately left the porch light on and tipped up a single slat in the blinds with a sweaty finger to look outside. The backyard was deserted, the porch swing a moving shadow in the oozing half-light of a mosquito lamp. Children's toys were alien shapes in the darkness. Rusty handlebars from a tricycle were partially buried in the ground. It seemed as if one day it would grow from the dirt fully-formed and brand new. A bald baby doll with a jackal's grin sat propped up under the oak tree. Her face was shapeless but her glass eyes shined as if she could see through him into all the things he'd done.
Kathy never made those kids pick up their damn toys.
Anger was a familiar emotion. It slipped over him like an old sweater as the blinds closed. He leaned back in the recliner to stare at the ceiling.
The glass of water on the table was his alibi. The reason he snuck out of the bed he'd shared with his wife for more than a decade. The reason he sat curled up in the darkest part of the living room. If Kathy came lumbering down the stairs in that nightgown she wore that made her look like a lumberjack - her hair in curlers and a sleepy scowl on her face - he wouldn't have to lie. Not really.
The sound came again and this time he knew it for what it was. His body moved faster than his mind could follow because he was suddenly standing on the back porch, barefoot and cold, with the door half-open behind him.
She was there, standing just outside the circle of light from the porch lamp. She looked tired. Hair unwashed and hanging around her face in greasy clumps. She wore dirty jeans and a shirt a few sizes too large.
He carried no guilt. Feeling, as he did, that the situation spinning out of control had never been under his control to begin with. He couldn't feel guilty about something that he couldn't stop.
He came down the steps slowly, a prey animal scenting the wind or a hunter approaching a timid deer with a thirty aught six hidden behind his back.
She was the first to speak. Her voice was soft and hoarse as if she had to whisper so as not to scream.
"I got your message."
He reached into pocket of his robe, fumbling in the loose fabric, and pulled out a wrinkled envelope.
"Here."
Their fingers touched for a small moment and he instantly retreated. Backing up to the porch, the safety of his living room was only yards away.
The envelope lay on the ground where he'd dropped it. She eyed it warily but made no move to pick it up.
"What is it?"
"Take it?"
She bent and grabbed the envelope, tearing into it with the enthusiasm of a sullen child with an unwanted Christmas gift.
"Money."
It was several bills, large and small, collected from many sources and neatly folded in half.
She rifled through it with the fingers of one hand. Her lips moved softly as she counted.
"It's five hundred dollars."
"What for?"
"I don't have to tell you to take it."
He didn't. The cash had already disappeared. Into the pocket of her jeans or under the ratty shirt and into the lining of cotton panties. He told himself that it didn't matter.
She was feeling better. Her chin jutted forward a bit and her back arched ever so slightly.
"Is that all you wanted?"
"Yeah, that's it."
His back was turned and he climbed the stairs, almost free. She was braver than he expected.
"Wait."
She was there at the bottom of the stairs.
"Shouldn't I say thank you, or something?"
He knew that she wanted something from him. As he looked at her face, sharp and angular, he couldn't imagine what it might be. There was nothing left to give. He finally spoke.
"Kathy's upstairs."
Her face closed down. The only emotion left was an anger as cold as his own.
"I won't keep you."
She faded back into the darkness, her footsteps silent in the wet grass. He had no idea where she was headed. The only certainty was eventually she'd be back.
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