Downstairs cracked-leather couch: tenth hour of an acid trip that began
an hour before my virginal screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
November 1978. In the bed upstairs my college roommate Mike, age 28
and my close friend Cheryl, age 21, consummate their six-hour affair.
In another world, he and his sister babysat for her.
I hear her footsteps now, descending, approaching me. She caresses my
head, looks into my frantic eyes.
“Are you all right?”
She loved me for three years. And in that moment of anti-hallucination, I
realized, finally, that I loved her too.
– Terry Barr
Author’s Note: “Their First Time” [was inspired by] the time when my roommate and my best friend hit it off while I was tripping on the downstairs couch.…
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“What do you think my mother was like?” your son asks you as a woman skates by with
her family.
It’s a June day, a sweltering June day where your ice cream doesn’t have any refuge
beneath the surprisingly green leaves at the park. There you are, your adopted son and
you, he and his questions about his biological mother, and you are unsure of an answer.
You can’t tell him what you want to say, the probable and the cold, and you start to sweat
at the beat of the question he keeps pushing, questions you wish didn’t exist. No answer
is ever completely right, and you want to say what you know: she was young and still in
school, got knocked up, and put your son up for adoption, and you know it isn’t pleasant,
so you freak mentally on the inside, the way any parent does when it comes to a first
broken bone, a first epidemic such as the chicken pox, and when he asks why his dinky
gets hard when he looks at girls.…
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Ever since I was a kid, my mother and I knew my dad was attracted to men. My mom
would stumble upon matchbooks with strange handwriting, phone calls, and, toward
the end of the marriage, text messages. Most were from men, some from women,
some she knew, most she didn’t. She knew the larger issue. My father was a garbage
disposal with teeth. He wanted to consume everything. Before turning 50, he ran
twenty marathons, stepped onto all known continents, and rented a storage locker
for all his excess cologne bottles. He wanted to mine life of all its blessings, all its
turmoil, all its love and loose change. Inevitably, he wanted nothing more than to
pass his vociferous appetites to me. As I lurched toward high school graduation,
he pushed me to pursue medical school, law school, liberal arts school. …
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I.
And I watch as she lets the cold needle bite through a watery translucent skin. Filmy
sweet sugar-spun veins lace oxygen through her wasted female frame in a skittering
false pulse pumping this jovial child alive. In my lap she’s a ruined doll.
Cold damp hands clutch at my arm. Scarlet hair’s spilling against my jacket. Her eyes fall
back just as she does, leaning, leaning, letting the soiled rush seep, cocooning round her a
secondary self. I’ve got her cradled in my arms, cooing softly as she takes those first steps
through dual afterworlds, flowering and burning.
I’m not writing about addiction.
I’m just trying to pour the damp night through a bottle, captured, a petty romantic’s
reverie to send careening down an abyss so deep I might realize regret—but that’s a bluff.…
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After Scotty Dockery’s funeral his sister went around telling everybody he went to a
better place.
When she got to us Ronnie-Ann held her off with her sunglasses and cigarettes. “If he
wanted a better place he could’ve gone to Portland,” she said.
“But there he was at Cattleman’s every day for happy hour croaky,” she said like she
blamed Ronnie-Ann.
Ronnie-Ann’s aunt looked way off and said when she was little he told her heaven’s
streets were paved with baseballs.
She said she told him that didn’t sound like heaven and he said the way he understood
it the streets could be whatever you want and it seemed weird to her the same street
could be different things for different people and at the same time.…
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There was a town where bombs did not fall.
There was a crooked street and very narrow, where centuries of crooked rain dug trenches
in the cobblestone. Legend has it that if a woman steps in those trenches, she is sure to
marry in town. There were, in the town square, weft and warp loom vestiges of hands that
beamed spinning all those silky wool centuries.
There were two pigeons mating for life in alabaster and Katzenjammer.…
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1. There is no off-season for purchasing tickets to and from South Florida. Your
mother will suggest you pay with your credit card and that she will reimburse you.
Sometimes she does, and sometimes she doesn’t. You always get seated next to
chatty President Taft look-alikes. You imagine them naked and stuck in bathtubs.
2. You don’t realize how easy it is to leave your friends, until the weekly phone calls
become monthly liked Facebook statuses.
3. In college, you will try singing for the first time. You find that you are a decent
singer. You never get any leads in the musicals, but you don’t care much for weeks
of long rehearsals, anyway, and so you enroll in a musical theater course. You will
send your high school sweetheart a video of your first recital.…
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