My sister named the bear Junior. The blue ribbon wrapped around its neck whipped in the wind as we drove home from school with open car windows on a warm April day. The bear’s cozy white coat absorbed the hot breeze and its soft black eyes beckoned to me calmly. Junior’s eyes said, “Covet me, I should be yours,” although I was in first grade and only the second graders – my sister included – received the gift of the white bear at school that day. Every time I reached across the bench seat for the bear, to pet it, to feel its fluffy coat, my sister pulled the bear closer to herself and reminded me to whom the bear belonged, thus foreshadowing the fights my mother would have to break up in the days to come: My sister claiming the bear which in all actually was rightfully hers while I refused to stop trying to make it mine.…
...continue reading
1. The day of my inauguration was cloudy with a chance of showers.
2. The presidential dog howled at the sky.
3. When the band started playing, the tuba player fled the scene.
4. The band, tuba-less, played on.
5. The skies crackled with thunder and rain sputtered earthward, wetting my
Dormeuil Kirgzy suit.
6. One boy stood up in the crowd and pronounced, “All is lost! All is lost!”
7. I thought this a bit premature.
8. His mother, a big-breasted woman, grabbed his hand and pulled him down to
his seat.
9. An aide whispered in my ear, “Be normal, and the crowd will accept you. Be
deranged, and they will make you their leader.”
10. That’s a real dandy, I thought. I took out a pen from my breast pocket and
wrote it on my hand.…
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading
“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.…
...continue reading
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. …
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading