Prelude To A Father-Son Conversation

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"Jesus goddam that bus was fifteen minutes late today! Fifteen this time!"

"We gotta go or somethin'?"

"We gotta hurry."

"H'come?"

"H'come?

Well son, you know how Mommy squeezed the life from Daddy's hopes and dreams--"

"'Course Dad."

"--and how the only thing that makes her happy is Daddy's misery and on forever like that?"

"Yes, Father."

"Well, I'll tell you when we get in the car."
>

It's About Suppression

A girl moved in two doors down, and was the first friendly neighbor I had had in four years of living in my apartment complex in Downtown/Logan/Dupont DC.

We went out for a drink the first Wednesday we met. In the following weeks I would stop at her place to borrow her blow-dryer, which I used as a makeshift-iron when I needed to look decent (which wasn't too often). She called me whenever she had a spider or roach crawling up her wall.

The first time she called me I went over simply to tell her that, as a rule, I do not kill things. That, whenever an insect makes its presence known in my apartment I simply scoop it up with newspaper and let it our the door.

"And that's why this place is infested!"

Sure, she was right, but I don't like the thoughts that go through my head just before I kill anything sentient.

The thoughts I have before I eat anything (formerly) sentient are all about my taste buds' alacrity... But I don't kill things myself. I let others do it in massive murder factories, which makes me somewhat morally superior to those who do not, of course...

"Are you done already?"

I should have been. I rolled up the newspaper as I stared at the bug, asked its forgiveness (which I'm sure I did not get) and killed it simply because she wanted it dead.

She and I had a drink and a bug-killing session (not on the same days... We didn't toast the insects' extinction) about once a week until one night when she called me, frantic.

A roach.

I looked everywhere in her studio and couldn't see anything. Then I moved to her dressing room/bathroom and asked

"What should I do? It's gone."

"Check everywhere!"

"Uh... Should I open your medicine chest and all that shit too?"

"Do whatever!" she yelled from a perch on a stool.

I immediately went to her medicine chest, recalling when I had seen a cockroach climbing on my own toothbrush (immediately discarded -- with everything else that was in its vicinity) in my own medicine chest, and also recalling my days as a drug addict. On what had become instinct, I immediately went for where I knew pills would be.

I found a single brown bottle, the label facing away from me, more than half-full. Saliva flooded my mouth as I checked over my shoulder and, to make sure she was still in the other room, yelled

"I don't see the thing here!"

"Look harder!" Her voice came from the same spot in the same room where I'd last seen her.

I turned the bottle around and the label shouted VALTREX.

She had herpes.

I never had been afraid of catching an STD, even when I was fucking the sluttiest girl in Whatever State University without a condom every weekday, while cheating on her and being cheated on on the weekends (and sure neither of us was using condoms then, either). (I was in the running for sluttiest guy on campus.)

But fear got me then, cold and irrational.

I came quickly out of the dressing/bathroom.

"Look, roaches can go anywhere. The one you saw is on the sixth floor by now" (we lived on the eighth).

"Stick around for a while. I have some rum... And I can't stand the thought of..." She went on and I wasn't listening.

She thought she was more attractive than she was and interesting by virtue of being younger than me. I hadn't tried to fool around with her, however, because her face was pockmarked and she was a horrible tipper. And now the bottle...

"Look, I'm not killing anything anyway."

"Big Man!"

I was closing the door behind me:

"Naturally, I realize how my inability to find and kill an insect means I have a Tic-Tac dick.

"...Sleep well."

I went to my apartment and, still irrational, took a very hot, very long shower.

The Sporting Life

"Fuck. If we don't turn off we're getting mugged."

"Calvin? CALVIN, COME ON!"

V had already crossed to the other side of the street, which I wanted to avoid because there were two teenagers leaning on Section Eight fences at 3:30 a.m. there.

"V, come here" I seethed through my teeth and across the road... But he already had resumed walking.

"Goddam you forever V -- stay close to me."

I crossed the road at a run to wrap his sleeve around my hand, trying to keep him close while he tried to control his legs and walk the straight line of the sidewalk.

I let go of him for one second as I hopped across the gutter, just after we passed the two kids ("What's up?" "What's up."). Then one of the kids was in front of me.

"Gimme your wallet."

I was straddling the yellow lines in the middle of the road.

Where the fuck was a car, even at 3:30?

Oh yeah, not in this neighborhood. Not even a cop car.

"I'm sorry -- What?"

The kid couldn't have been more than fifteen. He shoved a box-cutter (if fucking terrorists caused 9/11 with them, it stands to reason someone will fork over a simple wallet when faced with one) into my stomach, only enough to press in the skin around it.

My eyes, of course, immediately examined the tool, and I immediately saw that the possible cause of my death -- the blade -- was rusty and dull.

If I was to die it would be from infection... Possibly sepsis... The medics would have hours to put Humpty together again.

But fuck -- what did the other guy have... What was he threatening V with... How could I have let him go for that one goddam moment...

"Gimme your damn wallet man."

He wasn't acting calmly enough -- and was too young -- to convince me he had the balls to slit my throat. Only my stomach was in danger... Then again, maybe everyone who dies choking on their own blood in the middle of DC roads thinks this a few spoken sentences before their windpipe feels the wind...

"Look, that's not gonna work out."

"The fuck did your say?"

He pressed the box-cutter harder into me. At that point it still wasn't even cutting the cotton I was wearing.

...Still... What does the other guy have on V? What is my stalling accom--

"CALVIN!"

V came rushing across the street, oblivious to what was going on with me and the kid. He bear-hugged me across the street to the other sidewalk.

It was over. The kids made no effort to follow as I dragged V by his collar as fast as I could.

I made us walk a few blocks out of our way before we came to V's English basement, while trying to explain to him the danger we had been in. When he asked "What?" in utter incomprehension for the fifth time I knew his drunkenness saved both our asses.

I talked to V after I woke on the sofa and he came out of bed. I was happy to discover that he didn't recall anything that had happened past one o'clock of what was technically the same day.

It reminded me of the relief and surprise I felt when, as we shared a bottle of Shiraz before passing out after our encounter, the wine glass didn't shake in my hand.

Bitches

I had to go to the second-floor's bathroom because the first-floor's was completely mobbed. After waiting on the stairs for about five guys to come out I was able to go in.

I went to the one open urinal and started to think of when I was ten years old and the family went on vacation to Niagara. My stage fright was just abating when a guy stood at the urinal next to me and put a beer in a plastic cup atop the stained porcelain, directly beneath the pipes where the effluent water flooded down when you depressed the handle... And I could see the pipes sweat just above his drink...

My dick shrank until it was nothing but an oversized clitoris.

"Fucking bitches. I mean, man, you bring them out, you buy them drinks and then the bitches are like (he puts a childish expression on his face and speaks faux-apologetically): 'I'm kinda seeing someone.'

"Fucking fuck you bitch! Tell me that before I buy you five drinks!

"...I mean bitches, right?"

I was still trying to convince myself that I had heard what I had heard, which prevented me from responding.

"You've been there man. Watch out some bitch could be doing it to you right now."

He flushed, and with the sound of flowing water my dick reappeared and I pissed.

...If anyone would've taken the bet, my life was on whatever girl he came with not being the slightest bit involved with anyone...

I came out of the bathroom after washing my hands. The line for the women's went down the stairs.

I stood on a landing: "My friend just came out of here to go find us a table -- anyone have any idea where he went?" I asked, effectively, every girl on the stairs.

The girl standing right in front of me said

"Yeah, he went through there."

"Thanks so much."

I went through the door-frame-without-a-door and to the second floor's bar. I thought about how all my friends were downstairs... Christ, two of them had come all the way from the other coast just to see me...

But in my mind that schmuck was still pouring out bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.

I sat on a barstool, turned it away from the bar, and spotted the fucker quickly. He was sitting on a couch, which was across from another couch (both running parallel to my line of sight) on which other guys dressed exactly like him sat (khakis, undershirts that clashed with their long-sleeve, pinstripe, button-up Polos, anyplace-brown shoes). And there were girls with them -- one apiece. The "bitches."

Every one of the guys was more muscular than me -- accomplishing a feat fit for a ten-year-old. But I had skill and speed... But not enough to take down three guys who, when I punched them, would end up less damaged than my own knuckles.

I turned my barstool around and ordered a Stoli on the rocks.

I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, then turned around with the tumbler in my hand.

I was amazed to see the guy who had previously shit from his mouth leave suddenly to piss again... Or maybe to stumble around for a "bitch" who would appreciate his sensitive nature.

His presence on the couch had hid his leather bomber jacket from my view. It was draped on the couch's back.

I drained my drink and immediately began walking... slow, calm.

I had no idea what I was going to do, but found myself doing this:

I grabbed bathroom-boy's jacket by its collar and slung it over my shoulder, mid-stride.

"Don't worry about it guys," I said to the males (I would kill myself for calling them "men") on the couch, not looking directly at them, not looking away.

As I made my way to the stairs, down to the first floor and out to the insanity of Eighteenth Street Washington DC on a Friday night I didn't hurry, didn't complain when I was held up for a few minutes in the entryway by a girl who had lost her shoe on the stairs. I didn't look behind me.

I was either going to get the shit knocked out of me or I wasn't. I thought of the best position to take to cover my head and internal organs once they had me on the ground.

But I got outside and to the sidewalk to my amazement, and immediately crossed the street. I spun the jacket around my arm like cotton candy around a stick and held it close to my stomach so it couldn't be seen from behind.

Then I walked the mile downhill, home, never looking behind me.

When I got into my apartment, with the locks clacked behind me, I finally took a deep inhale and let out a long exhale.

Why was what I had just done so important to me? Why, from the word "bitch," did I have to harm that piece of shit in some way?

I tried on his jacket. Finding that it fit was an unexpected bonus...

I'm sure the douchebag chalked up his loss to a mindless act of theft...

But it's not about him and never was. It's come to be about the fact that every time I wear that jacket my shoulders go back and my chin comes up and I remember that I can overcome rational fear to do the irrational: what I believe is fair.

And She Was

It had not been a good evening. She wanted to stay in the apartment, I desperately wanted to be the fuck out of there on a Friday night like a normal goddam twenty-five-year-old.

We lived together in Tacoma Park, an ex-urb so close to DC you would smell the Potomac if your stood in the right spot.

She gave in and decided to drive us to a bar she had been to on Connecticut Avenue.

"Why are you taking this way? We're going around half the freaking Beltway. ...We should've just parked and taken the Metro, like I said before."

"This is the only way I know how to go where we're going -- and we're already driving, so just be quiet."

I was getting the shakes. And I couldn't let her see that. ...The alcohol withdrawal drove an impatience that bordered on insanity...

Still, who the fuck drives slower than the speed limit?

I held my tongue and wrenched my hands all the way to The Four Provinces, a not-so Irish bar. It took us forty-five minutes to get there when it should have taken fifteen. ...Or would have, if I had driven.

But she drove because both of us knew I was going to get loaded... I physically needed to at that point.

She parked her Beetle on the street a few blocks away from the bar. We walked, picking our way along curbs and jaywalking across four-lane streets, never touching.

We got a table for two once we were inside. I immediately ordered a Guinness plus one because the place was so busy I knew it would be a while before we saw our waitress again.

"Did you know Guinness has less alcohol in it that Busch Light?"

Her stare answered: How could you possibly think I would care?

She stared off and twirled the stem of her wine glass in her fingers.

God I wished she would just get drunk so we could fucking forget about everything...

I finished my first glass in three gulps and held up a hand to the waitress for a third.

I finally felt not-sick.

I calmed. Everything around me stopped being an assault on my senses.

I sat back in my chair and looked at her: her thin top gathered by a string that was knotted loosely around her champagne-flute neck; her witch-black hair so long it almost touched the ground; her eyes large orbs of undisturbed water on a night full of clouds, glistening.

I had never told her that I loved her. I wanted to, then.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that? ...You can't be drunk already."

"No, I'm not. It's just...

"...You look good tonight.

"You always look good."

"I like the band that's playing."

"So do I."

I cupped the hand she had around the wine glass and bent over the table. I kissed her on one of her cheeks, which felt delicate as paper-thin glass to my lips. Then we pressed our heads together, side by side.

When I sat back both of us were smiling.

Done

“I love you l love you I love you...” I breathed into her ear as I came.

Her breath had slowed...

Both of us were done.

For years we had messed around, but this was the first time we had had sex... And in a way that used every aspect of the right-angled couch that sprawled along her one-thousand-square-foot basement...

It was supposed to be bad... Everyone we knew told us it would be. But it was like seeing the Fourth of July from the Point (which I would do much later and find analogous) in San Diego: fireworks everywhere... Unable to see it all, everything happening too quickly... The moment over before it began...

Ten years later more than made up for it.

I called her, drunk; I had had a dream in which she was killed.

It was 4 a.m. She picked up on the second ring:

“Calvin! I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”

“Why? Are you OK? You’re not hurt are you?”

“No... I had this weird dream.”

“I had one too. Just now.”

“Are you OK?”

“Good, now.

“So how have you been in the ten years since we last talked to each other?”

It Could [Have] Be[en] Sweet

(Please begin playing the Portishead selection below.)

Stereotypically, I developed a huge crush on her because she pushed me away for so long and that crush went away as soon as we slept together.

So many idiots make the mistake of waiting to sleep together. Get it fucking the fuck out of the way. The first time is horrible. You hardly even want to be naked with the person.

And christ, being told that sex was to be "something special between us" -- at our age (thirty-ish) -- was just laughable.

At thirty you damn-well-better know that all sex is is two people getting off together. Trying to make it something else corrupts the act itself and the people who buy into the idea that it's more than what it is.

...After a full month we were finally fucking and it was awkward and bad, despite the athleticism involved. I came three times, trying my best to remember each picture in the Kama Sutra.

It was nothing but a goddam performance piece... She was too loud to be believed... Then, anyway. If it had been weeks ago I would have bought it. I would have loved it. I would have joined in. ...At that time her wailing, and my belief in its contrivance, almost made me limp. I practically had to close my eyes and think of England...

All this despite the fact I had nothing but admiration for her only minutes ago. She was too like me for me to not love her (which is the more honest way of saying that we had a lot in common and I loved her because). We had already started communicating just by looking certain ways at each other.

...Naturally, after we finally had sex, that fascination with one another turned into the love one has for a sibling. And the third time we were screwing it was almost as weird as having sex with a goddam relative (I'll point out, here, that I come from a family of all [hetero] boys and unattractive cousins).

I began to think of how we were missing Aqua Teen,* and became sure she was thinking the same thing. So I pinned her knees by her ears and came within minutes, playing "Common People"** in my head to drown out the screaming of my name.

Then we lay on the bed, naked, sweaty, exhausted, the room stinking of vaginal and seminal fluid. I grabbed the remote from the floor.

The box flickered on and I was relieved to discover I had caught the last few minutes of Aqua Teen.

She curled herself around me, sighed loudly into my ear "Mmm god aren't you so glad we waited!"

She held me everywhere with all her limbs and kissed me on my face, neck and chest while I watched television, using her pillow to prop up my head.

Within thirty minutes she had put her clothes on and we lay next to each other, not touching, staring at and laughing at the television together.


*Aqua Teen Hunger Force (number one in the hood, G): see Adult Swim listings, Cartoon Channel after-hours

**Pulp

Motivation

History has taught us that pain can make anyone do anything...

I was walking the two miles home from J’s at, what I found out when I arrived home, was about eight a.m. on a Thursday.

I kept to the side of the road, freezing...

I woke up at J’s half-covered in a blanket, the XBox controller still in my hand. I must have passed out while navigating some goddam menu the console makes players go through. Leave it to Microsoft to make accessing a game as fun and easy as typing in a proper MS-DOS command.

The first thing I noticed, before opening my eyes and realizing where I was, was the extreme pain in my head. ...The same pain that's there every morning. I soon found that I was sitting upright... Still locked in the position I likely had been in when I first went to sleep.

Then the anxiety hit. And then I noticed I was shivering, and that J must have moved from the couch he had passed out on to his bedroom. For a minute I surrounded myself in the blanket I had -- made a cocoon out of it -- and laid on the couch he had occupied. I learned that leather likes to maintain its temperature, and that if it was going to warm up, it was going to have to steal from me heat I wasn’t producing.

My morning panic attack forced me into action. I don’t know why I thought it would be possible for me to go back to sleep under any circumstances. My drugs were back home; my pill-box was empty. I hadn’t planned on staying the night, and so I hadn’t brought my morning pills.

I needed ten milligrams of OxyContin and two or three milligrams of Klonopin immediately.

I searched J’s entire first floor for a phone. All I found were chargers for cordless devices I couldn't locate. ...I couldn’t be rude and wake J up so he could drive me home, so I decided to check to see if the weather was nice enough for me to walk home in.

...I had lied to myself, because I began walking down his driveway and up the road as fast as I could as soon as I stepped outside. I had known I was going to walk home even before I stepped out the door.

At least it wasn’t raining. However, whatever the temperature was, I felt if it was a few degrees lower I would have been able to see my breath.

...I tightened the ankle straps on my sandals to try to avoid getting blisters. ...This also locked in the gravel that already had crept beneath my feet. ...I couldn't make myself stop to shake out the pebbles because I couldn't suffer a drug-free moment I could avoid.

The sun was a murderer. It focused all of its rays on my right eye, where my daily migraines emanate from. I zipped up my jacket to my chin, put on the winter hat I had worn the night before, even though it had been about sixty degrees the day before. I wondered why I was so cold, both that morning and the night before, when the the level of magnesium in small tubes indicated I had no reason to be.

It passed the time as I walked up the big hill.

A car passed and I realized I was on the Walk of Shame, and I hadn’t even gotten laid the night before. And for the first time in my life I actually found it shameful to be walking home early in the morning in the same clothes I had worn the day before, freezing and disheveled. On all previous walks like this one I had been coming back from having sex, which I could never understand anyone being ashamed of.

My thoughts occupied me as I walked as fast as I could, head down against that bastard in the center of our solar system. The pain blared in my head like bad music trying to get Noriega out of a church and into an American prison... My panic attack forced me on.

Eventually, finally, I could see my house.

I pictured the two brown bottles... My Oxy and Klonopin, waiting for me on the coffee table next to my bed and its four blankets and comforter. Not close enough...

The sun hit my eye and I grabbed my head as though it had been pierced with an arrow... A person driving by in an SUV at the same moment probably thought a wheel had kicked a pebble in my face. Whoever it was didn't stop.

...Down the driveway, through doors, my pills were on their way to my stomach. I buried myself beneath my blankets and began to feel warm as I waited for them to kick in. As I did I thought of the fact that a large percent of the population in the Eastern time zone was beginning its workday. If the person in the SUV though he/she may have blinded or otherwise injured me, he/she couldn't stop because he/she was late for work... But the person likely didn't notice me at all because his/her mind already was there.

I envied whoever it was as I lay in the dark, twisted up in my blankets.

Standard-Current Short Story

The fireworks finale! The expectation before!

A description of what happened in the sky pre-finale. The description-length is dictated by the word count sought by the publication you hope to appear in.

Since you just saw the display being described, you can relate to it.

Something before, during or after the events described set off a memory for the narrator, or the events themselves now turn into something else on a sentence.

An ambiguous sentence. Or a sentence that nails the events above to a cross. A sentence meant to be a revelation. A sentence that, were it the first one, would have made what you just read not worth reading.

Waiting for Godot

I call her after I drink the fifth of Stoli to a certain level.

She doesn't notice I'm drunk or that I continue to get more so.

Her: "My ex is stalking me..."

Her, later:

"I think he's gotten over it..."

Me: "The last thing you want is for him to get over it. The last thing you want is for anyone to get over anything. You need power over everyone. That power turns the crank that juts out of your back."

(I don't know if I just came up with that or if I'm reiterating it.)

Later, me:

"The fact remains that if he showed up at your door and said he'd really try this time, you'd take him back. You love the fat, small-dicked fucker because he's broken... And it isn't that you want to fix him: You love playing with the pieces."

"You think I'm incapable of loving someone who isn't fucked up?"

"You know you are."

The conversation goes on until I find myself sinking too far into self-loathing.

...I need her.

I must love playing with the pieces...

And I must be shattered for her to listen to me...

The realization scares me as it did the first time and I beg off the phone quickly with a limp excuse.

We'll talk when the bottle of Stoli gets to the proper level.

Maybe the next time I call she'll have some other guy. And then I'll hear about all the ways in which he's inadequate, and mesmerizing because.

Then maybe her ex will begin stalking her in an obvious manner, out of jealousy.

Then maybe they'll get back together.