Under a moose head, over two dozen empty beer bottles and in the midst of a dwindling carton of cigarettes I proposed to him, “Will you go to New Orleans with me?” Escaping from the holiday tantrum, the garage had become our solace during this fraught week of family-imposed celebration. The timing of our respective ages had put us in a blessedly awkward stage where we understood each other for the first time in our adult lives. The withdrawals to the garage became more and more frequent as Christmas ham became New Years’ ham sandwiches, and our corroborated nicotine addiction followed suit. This jolted affair with booze and cigarettes was our sloppy reconfiguration of lost memories; our grown-up cackles making the garage a symphony of bad behavior all holiday season.

Will you go to New Orleans with me? was hanging in the air.

“I’ve never been,” Ben says, looking off into something, his gaze hardening, his seriousness rising to the top, followed by contemplation, sinking squarely on his jaw. “Damn, I never been.” There’s a beat, a mutual recognition of what this could mean for us, for the institutional roles we had ignored up to this point. We had known each other my entire life and in the sum difference of five years the rules were defined, certain roles that were supposed to be played, the expectations in the narrative of brotherhood vested in the sum difference of these five defining years.

And so on that December-something day before the New Year charm and untested resolutions were officially made, we booked ourselves a weekend in February in New Orleans.

[A Blues]

I gonna build me a mansion

Dauphine and Napoleon Way

Gonna build me a mansion

Dauphine and Napoleon Way

If that damn water

Come rising

I just gonna sit & stay.

“The city is not a city, it is some other thing and it can be recognized that I am saying this as ‘one-who-has-never-been-here-before.’ But it is impossible to discover it any other way. There are those who travel here, and other places too, with the expectation that they are owed something for their arrival. A place owes you nothing. There is the school of hard knocks that you must pay in every city before you are welcome. Some cities take longer than others. I have seen some spend their entire life in New York and still pay their debt to the school after they’ve vacated the city. It’s a different story for everyone – but a place owes you nothing.” This is the What that I am spouting to my brother as we ride from the Louis Armstrong Airport, past cemeteries and cemeteries, into downtown New Orleans. He swoops his neck back into the car, his brows furrow seriously. He thinks I’m nuts, he doesn’t follow my What.

“Sure. I can see that, but what the fuck are you talking about?”

These are the signs of doubt – oh no, are we really brothers? Without the jolt of booze can we really speak the same language? The cab driver is tolerant of our tobacco crutch; we hang our heads out the windows puffing down our cigarettes to the filter. Smoke another cigarette, smoke another cigarette. I open my pack and make an offering, as if this will quickly solve our miscommunications.

“I’m just space-talking, anyway,” I say.

He looks concerned, as if perhaps I took a hit of acid during the flight. So I cackle and mention how much I look forward to the booze. His face relaxes again and he dips his head, “I could use a brewsky rights about now too.” Here we are – we’re speaking together again – what a miracle! We can speak the same language!

Driving into the French Quarter I immediately feel the warmth of the narrow, hugging streets and the invitation to arrive in this city feels honest. I keep space-talking my What all the way into the Quarter, as if possessed by my alter ego The Pontificating Empathizer. He has to squeeze my leg until it aches to shut me up. He gives me his Aggression Eyes, meaning he’s fearful that if we talk too freely and openly the cab driver may take advantage of us. These facial discussions are the brilliance of knowing someone as well as a brother. Drawn on his mug is the Mid-Western Fear and it reveals itself in the physical: the locked screen doors of Capital City, Kansas, the hesitation of leaving a wife at home alone, and the great white way of suburbia. And this is the fear that simmers when I mention to my brother I’d like to check out the Lower Ninth Ward while we’re here. He shakes his head vehemently and throws the remaining quarter of his cigarette out the window. “We’re not going to the Ninth Ward,” he says.

“We’ll rent bikes. We can zip through,” I plead.

“Why the hell do you want to go to the Ninth Ward?”

“I don’t think we can say we were in New Orleans unless we see that.”

“I think I can say I that. We’ll get shot.”

“We won’t get shot. Jesus! I live in Harlem and I don’t get shot.”

“You can’t compare the two. That’s not fair. And you’ve gotten mugged! I know you have!”

“And there’s a big fucking difference. I’m alive!”

And then silence. The void between two brothers in a petty argument that feels vaguely familiar, the playing of ordained roles, the distancing separation of those five years and the mystical ordering of genes, miscommunicating in the malady of points of view: The I Know Better Than You And Nothing You Say or Do Will Ever Change My Mind. When this standstill is breached the alcohol becomes the savior and the only token of goodwill able to patch, for a time, the forever widening gap.

“Fuck it, let’s get a drink,” he pronounces as a surrender.

“Good,” I say, “First round is on me.

“Go fuck yourself. You’re not paying a dime.”

We stumble into the streets in a hungry stupor. The first place that serves Po-Boy’s was where we would eat, we’d decided. And with the Po-Boy’s, our obligatory White Russian, which prior to trip had been agreed upon as an accompaniment to our meals, in honor of our dead grandfather; his lifelong prop in alcohol and cigarettes as an assistant to commune with the world had long given us a point of reference and something to celebrate. His children turned to the cold variation, the other detrimental disabling worldview, banishing alcohol from their homes and raising their children in Roman Catholic iciness. And from their point of view, sure, the devil might be in us and we might die quicker, but this is what had brought us to New Orleans and while we were here drinks after the meals became ceremony for Grandfather Firefly, our ghostly enabler.

In our first hours we suck through a pack of cigarettes and begin our love affair with Abita Brewing Company, whose Andy Gator may be the greatest beer created for those heavy boozies whose compromise for beer over hard liquor is arrived at in lieu of a thin wallet. At the Harrah’s Casino we drink more, we smoke much more, we win money, we lose money, so we drink, we drink much more.

This continues for the rest of the day, indulging in the ugliness necessary to adequately approach each other as friends, not brothers, with years of residue, grudges and arguments, and awkward interactions to silence, to cover, to stuff. We feed the silence with whiskey and crude remarks, terrifying laughter, sputtering hackneyed lungs, and the overwhelming sensation that this will not last very long. That is where the indulgence arrives, at that very thought. And this is how we get away with living. All of us sit with another, alone together, and we fill the silence between the momentary actions and phrases. We fill it with whiskey and beer, others with religion or the absence of; and then we can praise the booze and what it made us do and the thing greater than the booze: a woman, a father, a god, a perennial flower in bloom; and we fall on each other in laughter, the movements, the shaking hips of drunken vulgarity, the passionate blubbers of spirited tongues numbed by whiskey and salt, a thick cardboard-uselessness. We grasp for each other in New Orleans through these nightly turns. The city invited us, welcoming the room for this relationship, ancient in its overtones, to ignite.

[Another Blues]

And there was Big Fat Al Carlson n Dr. John

in the devilish trees,

waiting for you,

waiting for me.

There was Big Fat Al Carlson n Dr, John in the bayou,

in the bayou, way down way down,

in the lowland, in the swamp and toil land,

mosquita bay, mosquita bay,

all undone and teather free.

Big Fat Al Carlson n Dr. John be waiting

for you, be waiting for me.

Big Fat Al Carlson n Dr. John,

Fats Domino makes three –

be waiting for you, be waiting for me.

Unknowingly we arrive in New Orleans for the first Mardi Gras parades of the season.  At every bar we are welcomed with, “So, you’re here for Mardi Gras?” We look at each other stupidly, saying plainly and in unison, with our gawkish brotherly mugs, “Absolutely not.”  Unified in our defiance that Mardi Gras would have brought us to this dreamland, we deflect its presence, certain our terms are different, that our purpose in the city is tied to something in our blood, our heritage, to our understanding of our history as brothers, that divinity coaxed us to New Orleans; like fundamental Christians enclosed by the brilliance of their own inanity we are charting mythological territories, carrying only a collective memory from a past life guiding our way down Decatur, through the graveyards, and to the drunken streets of a city, willing our participation to occur.

On our second day we ride the St. Charles Street trolley to the end of the line and back, an endeavor that feels as uniquely American as apple pie and yet, simultaneously foreign in this French-fried colony that grew its history at a slant to the development of the rest of the country.  The foreignness of New Orleans persists in its architecture, like the shape of any truly great city it flaunts its form, especially in the Quarter, but more importantly it is in the air, a thickness brought in from the Gulf. The air is heavier, dirty milk rides the wind in New Orleans and you rinse in it, amidst the sweat and haze, feeling caloric sustenance with every breath.

On the way back downtown the car stops in front of Audubon Park, idling for a good five minutes as the engineer solves a complication with a drunken passenger, who might as well have been at Molly’s Bar with us last night (one of the few bars that stayed open through Hurricane Katrina, we’d been told) and decided to continue drinking through the morning. I don’t hear the quarrel; it all passes over, muffled by a romance of my own.  From the trolley my eyes are arrested on the weeping willows, where the hefty sun has parked itself in the mid-day sky above the good-natured bodies on the lawn of Audubon Park. I don’t move a muscle, my body still in aching pain from the previous night, making stillness the only available posture, a hangover migraine pulsing its journey from spotted vision to excruciating pain. I want to be lifted from the crowded trolley and taken to the lawn of Audubon Park, to walk mildly among the people and the trees, to drift, to sit for a while.

The ground is moist from the previous evenings rain and at this moment Audubon Park becomes the Mississippi River:  there is the river below the park, and below the river is the ocean, and below the ocean there are fish and gills, wrappers and shoes, oil spills and hurricanes, all of it heavy and moist, all wet in Audubon Park. The Mississippi must spread itself across this park; it must have been here many times before, yes, the water, the water, the water: New Orleans is all about water.  You walk uptown and you imagine the height and length of water, like Venice you imagine drowning here, staying put and letting the water take you – to stand in Audubon Park and let the Mississippi take you, take your body out to the Gulf and deposit you in the oil currents, rocketing you to the Florida Keys and beyond to the shores of Africa, where New Orleans’ umbilical cord has strangled itself in a history of sins. The moist park, wet ground, always wet ground, New Orleans is the wettest place I’ve known next to Amsterdam, and the comparisons do not halt there.  But Amsterdam doesn’t compete.  Because in Amsterdam there is the recognition that you might fulfill a desire, a dark wish, even though the restraint it still constant, but at least there is the availability, you know that the city has been conditioned to service you, or others, in this way.

New Orleans carries the American behavior, even if it is drowning in over-indulgence, pomp and circumstance, and buffoonery, puritanism keeps it in check.  In New Orleans you will not arrive at some final release that will paint itself over you, but this is its nationality – it is “American.”  But unlike the other cities in this bombastic country, too large for its own good, there is a placid respect underneath the performance of Mardi Gras, this nightly song and dance that performs itself out over six weeks of the year, in this act there is the recognition by all who move the city, who move in and out, that this is a space worth saving and without it life would not be as colorful.  We would all not be so alive if there were not a New Orleans.  And as much as the performance would have you believe otherwise, it is not an easy city, the tortures it has endured mark persistence in the laughter, charging it with more purpose. This is what advances it as a greater city than Amsterdam, because it is supremely more difficult to get off, you’ve got to work it, baby – because that is the American way.  And this working at it, working at it like a jazz musician works at it every night, through the sweaty turmoil and the raving mad love you carry like a tourniquet, make it the greatest American city there ever will be.

The bars in New Orleans, largely, do not concern their patrons with paying a cover, a consideration that is insanely humane.  In any other American city the artist never gets paid.  New Orleans is a last train home for a dying breed and I am eager to join this breed, the brew of hopeless optimism, constant hunger, a sensual anger, a passion for living in the chaos, in the shitstorm, in the furious fire, laughing and screaming the entire way down. It is a ship that is sinking and we are bailing, at times we stop for a drink and a smoke and a dance, until we realize we are under water again, but we get back at it because we have no choice. And the horns blast even underwater: and this is the sound of the city, this bellow is a mark on time. Sound always marks itself in our passing. The sound of a trumpet on Frenchman’s, a tap dancer on Decatur, the heavy lapping midnight Mississippi on St. Peters street, the filthy change slapping on counters, the horns the horns the horns, the engines in the first line, the voice of a lover that got away, yes, the sound of her voice too marks on time.  These marks on time force us to return again, to always return, to the once-pressed indention in our passing time.

And more than any city, your heart swells at prospects in New Orleans.  Like any romance you return to the city you thought She was in, or you return to a city that She could never be in because there is a logic in that too. You think you will pass Her this time and that She will appear in the crowd. It is futile, the journey, the travel, but the city, any city, will offer you more humanity than any drama you could have in your sleeping room. New Orleans is a city that carries every mark in time, however, it does not feel permanent; you can imagine what the city was, what it is, and what it could be. You look up at the balconies in the Quarter, the Garden District, at the beautiful red-faced people, flushed with drink and you know this must remain, this grasping for eternity in all we can ingest, whether through drink or breath. Other cities feel hopeless because they are ashamed in their drunkenness. New York City, for instance, there is nothing to be done, there’s no saving what’s already dead, it is a shameful limping creature, with its greasy flea infested fur pricking at you every time you attempt a loving approach; but New Orleans welcomes you with such buoyancy that you are lifted, you levitate, you walk on water with the city. The potential for humanity, the potential for decency are paramount and if the city ever needs me, I will be there by its side. The only other city I feel this way about, for better or worse, is called Home.

Taking the ferry across the Mississippi from the Quarter to Algiers we share our last cigarette and cough at each other, “No more smoking. We’re going to change our lives. Let’s be better.” Our conversation peters away to silences and grunts and with our big black sunglasses guarding us from the hazy afternoon we look a dubious pair, families staying clear of us, redirecting their children as they near the end of the deck.  Landing in Algiers we have no idea where to go or what to do.  My first instinct is to get us lost but Ben gives me his terror eyes, like he’s going to smash my head into a wall.  I give us a mission, “We’ll find a nice hole in the wall restaurant.”  He says he’s okay with this, as long as he gets to choose which streets we walk down. So we walk and we walk, deep into Algiers.

The neighborhoods are quiet on this Saturday afternoon.  We pass by homes on Delaronde Street where residents are taking their time to start the day, it is nearly one  in the afternoon and the tempo is clocking in at nine in the morning for any other neighborhood in America, but Algiers is yawning, stretching, shaking out the first piss of the day.  Even here, across the river from the Quarter, music feels constant, in every window music pitters out, radios, speakers, a wafting drum solo from some basement, a horn clearing its throat in an attic, a guitar strumming chords on a porch – where is all this music coming from?  It is a constant cacophony this music and the buzzing of bees and flies, and this is February, when all is dead elsewhere, but here, the milk air of Louisiana keeps the beetles and wings and furry legs scurrying all year.  As with everything here, I suspect this is related to the music too.

We stop at a neighborhood bar, literally squeezed between two homes in the middle of a block.  Staring inertly at the TV screen we wait two hours for our sloppy Po’Boys that arrive at our table having been slopped on the floor, ten minutes on each side, with a lobster sized cockroach seasoned and garnished on the side of the plate.  Ben is getting more leery of New Orleans as the minutes pass.  He wants I should return my plate.  I could shake him furiously to remind him that it makes no difference but this would mean prompting the tidal wave of unspoken unfamiliarity’s, divergences we took in the midst of our differing childhoods that formed two very different men.

He scowls at me and I curl my lip back, readying for an attack. I used to fear this big, hairy man, but not anymore.  He’s going bald.

Our final hours in New Orleans we grow tired and spent, dehydrated, our haggard legs rambling through the French Quarter.  We check into the top floor of the Marriot Hotel because this is a family tradition, there may not be money for anything else in the world, but a hotel bed is the best kind of bed.  It is the ultimate rest.

The first line of Mardi Gras passes by 40 floors below.

Still hung over and exhausted from our assaults on the city we stand in our underwear looking down upon the city that welcomed us so hospitably.  I follow a cruise ship with my eyes down the Mississippi River to a point where I believe I can see the Gulf of Mexico, the big oily ocean, swallowing the massive ship up.  We order shrimp cocktail from room service and watch local news where we confront another city, a city where crime and murder remains rampant, shockingly so.  Ben makes the comment, “See.  This is why we didn’t go to the Lower Ninth.”  I want to sock him in the mouth for the comment, but I understand.  This is also what makes New Orleans unapproachable for most of America: the fear.  In Capital City, Kansas every Firefly locks his or her door twice and quakes at any sound beyond their lawn.  How did this fear arrive?  Do we get scared as we get older?  In Harlem I leave all doors unlocked.  No one intrudes and all are welcome, even though I would rather see no one at all, which is easier to do in New York than in the desert.

New Orleans is a social city; it is a city for seeing others, for loving others, for being with humanity – and it is the only place left in America. What comprises the Big Easy is still possible.  Perhaps this is what warrants the torture the city has gone through.  Despite its continued presence in culture it tells us it shouldn’t exist.  A place that never, or rarely, tears down its crumbling facades and traditions faces the unfathomably large face of inevitability and indifference, which are the cruel traits of nature.

In our final moments in New Orleans, in our separate beds at the Marriott, we digest our shrimp cocktails, and in our privileged vantage point 40 stories up neither of us can get a wink of sleep.

On the plane home the next morning we are both exhausted.  Ben keeps his eyes open the entire flight because he knows I’ll be sleeping. He does this because someone needs to be on look out. I guess this is what older brothers do, but I’ll never know, for I will always be the younger one.

My head bobs back and forth, jerking in and out of sleep in the raucous altitude. I pat his arm, “Hey. Can I put my head on your shoulder?”

He looks at me with those eyes, eyes of bewilderment and offense, his neck turns into jowled skin flaps as he pulls back, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“My neck, it hurts.  I keep nodding off. Can I rest my head on your shoulder to sleep?”

“Fuck no.”

“No?  What do you mean, no?”

“I mean, no.”

“You can’t say no to that.  Why would you?  Come here.” I rest my head on his shoulder.

“No, you are not putting your head on my fucking shoulder.”  He pushes me off.

“What?”

“Don’t.  I swear to God, don’t rest your head on my shoulder.”

“I am resting my head on your shoulder.”

We struggle as he continues to pry my head off his shoulder.

“Fine,” I say.  “I’ll just get a stiff neck instead.”

We finish our trip in our separate, petulant corners, steaming at each other, wishing that the other could see it as clearly as the other does; negating any differences we might have.

Just as New Orleans is struggling against the inevitable, the wave, the storm that will finally sink it, we struggle the same terrain, that at some point our distance, our roles, will again keep us from understanding each other, as it has most of our lives.  There will be grudges and cancers in the skin that are only visible through our respective judgmental eyes. But at this time, we are hundreds of miles away from New Orleans and from home, 30,000 feet in the air, conjoined in this in-between.

This is the magic of cities, of the bustle of humanity that both edges us to jump off to our death and pushes us back to the living. This is the only reasonable place to live.   And New Orleans, more than others, will always know this.

Marking Time: New Orleans is a post from: Pif Magazine

It only seems appropriate that my offerings for this newborn first month all deal with botched attempts at adulthood. Let’s start with Daniel Clowes’s “The Death-Ray.” This comic book short story deals with Andy, a young man narrating the startling discovery of his own super powers. Located in and fashioned after the comic renaissance of the 60’s and 70’s (think early X-Men and Spiderman), the story takes on the classic hero’s awakening with an unblinking examination. The bright and campy artwork or the Brady Bunch fashion sense belies the stark destruction of Andy’s childhood. As puny high school kids, Andy and his lone buddy devise their own brand of justice, fueled by Andy’s super strength (summoned through nicotine, which reads like a middle finger to the spinach slugging Popeyes of yore) and his titular death-ray. Of course the ray makes death, but not with some bloodied vengeance. Instead, the death-ray erases its target from existence, a quick poof and you’re gone. The suddenness with which Andy’s heroics can make “bad guys” disappear fills his world with suffocating loneliness. Clowes’s tale takes down the hero, the clean sense of good and evil, and our own infirm life choices.

Next up is a flick, the Sundance darling Pariah. Writer and director Dee Rees’s film follows the crises of a closeted African-American lesbian, Alike (ah-lee-kay), struggling to graduate and get the hell out of her parents’ house. Alike’s gender identity is messy in a striking way. Around her friends, Alike lives how she sees fit, a lifestyle and swagger that can be poorly summed up as something like inner-city black butch. Wearing flat brim caps that hide her hair, baggy jeans, and an oversized shirt, Alike is decidedly masculine. Scenes of Alike discovering her own element, like flirting with women, taking in an all ladies strip club, dressing the part, are jammed alongside her increasingly tense home life. Amongst her family, Alike is daddy’s girl, mommy’s former princess, and the angsty older sister of the house. The heterosexual and religious expectations of this 21^st century black family crumble hard. Alike is their reality check and therefore their obvious pariah. But unlike the whitewashed oblivion of “The Death-Ray,” Alike’s castigation means real movement, not necessarily a sign of tolerance or progress, but, nonetheless, her road to adulthood.

I want to end on a so-called novel I am struggling to finish off: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 Émile, or On Education. Lauded from the get go, it’s now two hundred and fifty years later. What am I doing toying with a better-off-dusty philosophical masterwork? You see, Émile isn’t a novel at all. As the alternate title spells out, it is a treatise on teaching; more specifically, it is a book on raising a kid, emphasis on “a,” just one. Rousseau couldn’t be bothered with kids; in fact, he notoriously sent all of his mistress’s newborns off to orphanages. But perhaps as penance, he made Émile, a six hundred page tome that aims to keep kids free and happy, as close to nature and truth as possible. What does that entail? Certainly not reading six hundred pages of nonsense. Rousseau believes that a kid, well, mostly just a boy, his model student being an imaginary one named Émile, should learn within his means. Rousseau deems children unfit for reading, writing, mathematics, and the scholarly like. What they are fit for is exploring their surroundings, crawling over the countryside, sensory stuff, like breaking sticks and touching streams. If children are to become just and kind citizens, they need to get themselves first. Rousseau is so thorough, so assured, it’s easy to just shut up and take it. But with enough time away from Émile, you understand what a radical, yet outdated, argument is being made.

Today, the effort required to keep all the chaos of civilization at bay is incomprehensible. Children live in a world where the mature and immature are oozing out of every crack, every speaker, every monitor. This is not to blast Jean-Jacques; he knew what he was talking about. Now kids struggle to adjust to the demands of our constantly streaming world. Yep, the off button stopped working awhile ago. Everyone needs to navigate these cultural swamps. To make new maps that show the other humans where our own accounts, our own memories, art, and attempts can be found. At some point, all three works I spent the last month with did just that.

Learn more about the things Ryan reviewed:

Daniel Clowes’s “The Death-Ray”

Dee Rees’s Pariah

Rousseau’s Émile

The Belly Tract #1 is a post from: Pif Magazine

and a sleeping man

chained to engine blocks.

He’ll run off, the uncle sighed.

What would you suggest?

He used to swear, piss

in the house, growl at the guests.

He’s slipped off ropes, smashed

bedrooms where he slept.

We built a hut, collared his neck . . .

Startled awake, he leapt

at the Soldiers. Anchored chain

yanked him back. He fell

and whimpered. Men laughed.

Slacking links tinkled — tiny bells.

War Story # 43: Search for Kidnap Victims, Radwaniyah, Iraq is a post from: Pif Magazine

Stan cut the hind legs from the front legs. He cut the front quarter in half and cut the ribs away and set them on the cutting table. Harry began working the meat off of the front legs with speed and precision. Venison meat is lean and often as dull in color as it is in flavor, a dark burgundy.

Harry put down his knife and went into the office. He took off the plastic gloves he was wearing. He pulled out a fifth of whiskey from the desk drawer. He poured a few glugs in a plastic cup and then poured cola in it. “You want a Jack and coke bro?” he asked. “No I’m good.”

Harry walked back to the cutting table, sipping his drink. “This outta take the edge off,” he said. He set his drink down, put the gloves back on, picked his knife up and began carving again. Stan threw some deer ribs in the trash barrel. Harry threw a front leg in.

“Do you think,” said Stan, “that if we were hunted and killed and someone had to process us that they would find corn in our assholes?”

“Well that depends,” Harry took another sip of his drink and said, “on whether or not we ate corn recently.”

“I haven’t had corn in a while,” said Stan, while turning on the saw. The saw buzzed as he cut the hind legs in half. He began cutting them into steaks.

Harry’s cell phone rang. He took off the gloves again and took his phone from his pocket. “Hello,” he said. Stan turned off the saw. He went into the office, and took off his gloves. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag off it.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Well you know, kids do things, you gotta take control of it.” He paced in and out of the office. “I see what you’re saying,” he said. “But maybe it might be good for him. Otherwise he’ll just have to learn things the hard way.”

Stan used his free hand and made a fist with it. He moved his hand back and forth from his mouth and away while he pushed his tongue into the opposite cheek, miming a blowjob. Harry laughed as he paced away. “I gotta go,” he said, “Yeah I’m doing deer.” He hung up his phone and took a big pull off his cocktail.

“Who was that?” asked Stan.

“Becky.”

“Oh shit, somebody’s getting some poo-say!”

“Eh. No bro I’m through with that.”

“And why is this?”

“Wants to get married… and I’m never getting married again.”

“Can’t just fuck her?” Stan asked.

“No.”

Stan put his cigarette out. Harry took another sip of his drink before setting it down. They both put their gloves on and stood in front of the cutting board.

“What was she bitching about this time?”

“Her kids, what else?”

Stan turned on the saw and finished cutting the steaks. He turned the saw off. They were both cutting away at the table.

“Do you think?” Stan said, “That if someone fucked a deer and it got pregnant that the baby would have antlers?”

“No, why would someone fuck a deer?”

“I dunno maybe their only other option is Becky.”

Harry threw a nearly bare hind leg in the trash. Stan threw a leg in as well. “Barrel’s full,” said Stan. He grabbed one side of the trash barrel and dragged it out. Harry followed. Outside they each took a handle and carried it to the dumpster. On the count of three they held it over the side as its bloody contents spilled out. Thump, gurgly, thump, gurgly, thump it went until it was empty.

“Nothing like the sound of carcasses dropping,” said Harry.

The Sound of Carcasses Dropping is a post from: Pif Magazine

Juliette, the lady who hired me, was six feet tall with long straight blonde hair, a bottle-tan, and little business suits with skirts that only came down to her thighs. She said she was from Switzerland, but I suspected Russia or the Ukraine was more likely. There were plenty of Russian girls who worked for the agency, and Juliette wasn’t her real name.

Juliette frowned when she looked me up and down. “Not beautiful,” she said, “Depend on personality. We give it a try.”

I had to get a beeper. And a wax job. New fingernails and lingerie. But the sticky part was reliable transportation. Besides public, I only had my unicycle. A sentimental remnant from my undergraduate years when I had taught juggling and circus arts at the special kids’ camp.

I had only started at City Escorts because I was getting my doctorate and there was a full twelve months before my teaching fellowship kicked in. I was getting my Ph.D. in philosophy, and my field of research was the Upanishads. In the past six months, rents in the city had gone sky-high. According to Juliette I could work weekend nights and I’d have my expenses covered.

My first call was a guy at the Hyatt. I took the BART train there at 11:30pm on a Friday night, dressed in a black velvet miniskirt and a black beaded top with leather jacket. Juliette had told me his room number, and told me just to walk by the front desk and tell them the number, that front desks were used to this thing. When I got outside his room I could hear the TV blaring. I knocked. A businessman in his late forties with curly brown hair in his boxer shorts answered the door. Inside he was doing lines of coke on the table and pacing around with the TV on. I spent two hours there watching him do coke and watch TV. At the end, he gave me $450.

“How did it go?” Juliette asked when she called his room at the end of our date. The escort management always called after the first hour and if the client wanted you for another hour, they called after the second, “Just fine,” I said. “Two hours not bad,” she said, “Congratulations.”

On my way out of the Hyatt I was beeped again. I called Juliette from a payphone. “I got a guy in the Mission,” she said, and told me the address, “He’s regular. And he really likes it clean.”

“Clean?” I asked, scribbling down the address, “What does that mean?”

“No dirt in the nails, no holes in the stockings, no shoes in his house, clean.”

I took a night bus to the Mission. I walked two seedy blocks in the dark into a nicer part of the street. I rang the doorbell of a second-floor apartment. The man who answered the door was in his thirties, wholesome looking and fit with Clark Kent glasses. He looked me up and down, had me undress and then told me to get in bed with him. He jacked off and asked me questions. I told him about college and the special kids’ camp. At the end of hour Juliette called, the guy gave me the cash, and I left.

Outside I got beeped by Juliette. It was too seedy to be walking around so I waved down a cabbie who took me to a well-lit gas station with a payphone.

“He said you need to take better care of yourself,” Juliette scolded me, “Nails look bad, eyebrows bush, hair.”

“OK,” I said, feeling somewhat shamed, “Do you have another job right now?”

“Not right now,” Juliette said coldly, “ I will call you.”

It was the last job of the night. I fell asleep at home waiting for the beep that never came. Saturday night I got two more calls, and Monday I dropped off $1200 in cash to the City Escort service. My take home, with tips, was $500, not bad for what had amounted to a few hours’ work.

What struck me most about the jobs as the weekends went by was how few of the men wanted sex. At least half of them were doing drugs when I came over, upper-type drugs that left them horny but unable to perform. Sometimes they would fondle me, but often I’d just sit there and watch them. Some of the men seemed perverted in that they wanted to jack off and have me there to do something unusual. One guy had me pull down my panties and bend over while he looked at my butt. Another wanted to hold my bra. A month went by and I had fifteen calls, and not one of them for sex.

Meanwhile, I went to my classes. I didn’t tell anyone about my new job. Certain feminist or lesbian circles, I realized, might think working for an escort service was cool, liberating in some way, post-feminism or something like that. But I didn’t think it was particularly cool. I liked the money and that was all. And Juliette treated me like shit. She always told me how ugly I was, how the guys had complained, two times she made me cry. But she kept sending me out on jobs, and I kept bringing back the cash.

One night I got a call from Juliette at the remarkably early hour of 9pm. She had a guy at a business class hotel at the wharf. I took a cab there, and went up to the guy’s room. A short, somewhat chubby middle-aged man in a towel answered the door. He had a balding head where some sort of hair implant had been used to fill in around the edges, and a wide and prominent nose. He had the sweetest face I had ever seen.

“Hi there,” he said in a voice that had a soft high pitch, and an East Coast accent, “Please come in.”

He opened the door and motioned to the chair, nervously. “I’m Al,” he said.

“Hannah,” I said, entering the neat and sterile hotel room.

He shook my hand. “Hi, Hannah. That’s a beaut-I-ful name. Nice to meet you. Would you like a drink or something?” he asked motioning to the refrigerator.

“No thanks, I’m fine.”

Al sat down, somewhat nervously, on the bed. I took off my jacket, and looked at him in my mini skirt and beaded top.

“You’re a very pretty girl, Hannah,” he said.

He said it in a way that was so sincere and so appreciative that it took me by surprise. I had never made a first move on any of my calls, but I found myself actually wanting to make this man happy. “Thank you, Al,” I said walking over to him, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Oh boy,” he said, hanging his head and laughing nervously, “I’ve never done this before. I’m a married man, maybe that’s obvious. I’m from Boston.” He shook his head again, “Oh, boy.”

“That’s OK, Al,” I said, sitting next to him and putting my hand on his leg, “We can take it really slow. It’s totally up to you.”

Al let the towel slip from him as he lay back on the bed on his side. He pulled me towards him and held me tight.

“You’re a nice girl,” he said, holding me, both of us on our sides, “Are you from San Francisco?”

I felt like I was talking to one of my uncles. “Actually I spent some time in Boston too. When I was in college,” I told him where I had gone to school.

“Gosh,” he said, shaking his head and holding me, “That’s a great school.”

He was quiet for a few minutes, holding me.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked again.

He sighed and seemed to release his grip on me. For a few moments he was quiet and I thought maybe I was going to experience my first sexual encounter on a call, but then I realized he was crying. “My wife has cancer. Oh, boy,” he said, sobbing, “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

He held me tight while he cried. I shifted so that I could stroke him slightly.

“You seem like such a nice girl, Hannah. I’m sorry,” he said, crying again.

“It’s OK,” I said stroking him, “It’s OK, Al.”

We went on like this, him holding me and crying, me trying to comfort him. He had been married for thirty-two years. His wife was his high school sweetheart, and they’d spent their honeymoon in Jamaica. She was the love of his life and a piano teacher, he was a salesman now working in management.

A little while later the phone rang. It startled both of us. Al took the call, wiping back tears. I could hear Juliette’s harsh voice asking if he wanted another hour.

“No that’s OK,” he said, clearing his throat, “She’s a great girl.”

I got up and put on my jacket. Al went to his coat and handed me $400.

“Take it. Keep it. You’re a nice girl,” he said, reaching out and holding my hands, “You remind me of my daughter. I have a daughter your age. Thank you, sweetie.”

“Thank you, Al. I’m so sorry about your wife. I hope things get better for you.”

“Is there…anything I can do for you? I just hate to see a nice girl like you…” Al said sadly.

I thought for a moment. “Please call Juliette at the agency. Tell her I was good. Tell her I’m the best girl you ever had.”

“I will. I will, sweetie,” he said, as I left.

Later that night at 2am, my beeper went off. I had been back at my place since my meeting with Al. I was just drifting off into sleep when my beeper sounded. I sighed, reached over for my phone, and dialed the agency.

“Hannah,” Juliette said, her sharp voice pronouncing her words with guttural tones, “I have special assignment for you.”

“OK,” I said, pulling myself up in the cold dark. I wanted nothing more than to go back to bed.

“This is regular client named Adam. He only likes Swedish and German girls. Only! He takes them for hours, they do nothing, they bring home tons of money.”

“OK,” I said, not sure where Juliette was going with this.

“He lives out past Daly City. You have to take train or cab. You have to be there on time. But don’t let cab see his house. Very important. He’s watching with telescope, if he sees cab, there’s no date.”

“OK,” I said again, “So you want me to be German?”

“German or Swedish. Up to you.”

I had learned rudimentary German as an undergraduate. I had written various papers on Hegel and Hesse. “German, I guess. I speak a little.”

“So smart,” she said, “OK, tonight you’re now Lulu. You’re from Germany, only Germany, understand?”

“Heil Hitler,” I said.

“Hannah, don’t be this way. You get some attitude, I fire you. You understand?”

“I got it,” I said, and listened while the bitch gave me directions.

“Adam” lived outside of the city, in an upscale suburban neighborhood along the Pacific Coast Highway. I took my unicycle with me in the cab because if I was dropped off in the middle of nowhere I didn’t want to be alone on foot. It took more than forty-five minutes to get to the suggested drop-off point, and cost me seventy-five bucks. After the cab drove off I got on my unicycle and rode a couple of blocks past large, quiet houses in chill coastal winds and swirling fog until I got to number 3663. I stashed the unicycle in a nearby bush.

Five minutes went by without the door being answered and I felt my first wave of panic. Crank calls to the escort agencies happened sometimes, and I had been warned this was a risk we escorts had to assume. I didn’t hold it past Juliette to pull something like this just to mess with me. Right when I was about to grab my unicycle and buck out of there like a bronco, crying, the door opened.

“Hello,” a bearded man in his thirties answered the door. He had black hair and tan skin, was wearing an Izod shirt and khaki pants, and was considerably less ostentatious than I had imagined, “Are you from Juliette?”

“Yes,” I said, in what I hoped was severely accented English. The man had an accent too. I guessed him to be either Arab or Israeli by his looks and speech pattern, “I am Lulu from Freiburg.”

The man sighed and opened the door. “Come in,” he said, “Wait here.”

What happened over the course of the next hour was almost too bizarre to describe. The man played a disconcerting game of hide and seek with me in the large, dark house, imbibing large quantities of alcohol, finally materializing to confront me as the phone was ringing with loud accusations that I wasn’t really German and that Juliette was fucking with him again.

“Ask Juliette,” I said, “Ich bin Deutsch!”

After screaming obscenities at Juliette and taking more swigs from his Jim Beam bottle, he seemed to calm down. By the end of the call he was laughing, making suggestive comments to Juliette, and apologizing.

“OK, you are from Germany,” he said, hanging up the phone, “You want a drink?”

Adam kept me for four more hours. In between I learned his name was really Reza, and I saw pictures of a boy and a girl who I assumed were his children. He drank more than any person I had ever seen, and laughed most of the night. We played drinking games, listened to music, and started a game of monopoly. At 6am he announced he was going to call a cab to take us both back to the city.

“We’re going to Golden Gate Park,” he said. On my way out to catch the cab I ran away from him for a moment to recover my unicycle.

“What’s that?” he asked, when we piled in together in the back of the cab.

When I told him he nearly doubled over laughing. “I love you!” he said, over and over, kissing my cheek and hand, “I love you, Lulu.”

Midway to Golden Gate Park, Reza had the cab driver take us to Union Square instead so we could eat breakfast at his favorite diner. At the end of breakfast Adam, or Reza, announced that he was through with our date, and pulled out numerous hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. He handed me more than a thousand, which resulted in a couple hundred dollars in tips for me.

“Tell me one thing,” he said, after he gave me the money, “Are you really German, or is Juliette fucking with me?”

I didn’t say anything, but shook my head, “I can’t give you any personal information,” I said, still speaking in my attempt at an accent.

Reza reached into his pocket and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills. “Tell me,” he said, “Just tell me and I give you this,” he said, pressing the bills into my hand.

I looked around the street. It wasn’t exactly bustling, but there were enough pedestrians and enough traffic around that I didn’t feel endangered.

“I’m not German,” I finally said.

Reza slapped his hand against his knee and bent over, shaking his head. “That whore!” he said, “That damn whore!”

I shrugged.

“Juliette’s a whore,” he repeated, standing up, “Did you know that? I did her. Six times. She was a whore.”

I was surprised by this news. Juliette struck me as too much of an ice queen to have been an escort. I was delighted to receive this scandalous information.

“Well,” Reza said, taking my hand and kissing it, “Au Revoir my friend.”

Weekends turned into months at the City Escort agency. Just like I had done at McDonald’s as a teenager, and at my work-study job at the campus bookstore in college, I began to feel strangely comfortable in my job, in spite of the bullshit. I had become tolerant of Juliette’s insults, her paranoid inquiries, her threats not to send me on any more calls. I did my first “twosome” with a speed freak called Sheila, and two software programmers at the airport Hilton. I went on a “pick up,” which was when a guy pays for three different girls to come over and then takes his pick. I made friends with a Russian escort, a young girl whose real name was Irina, and helped her several times with her ESL homework.

It was summer that I got sent on a call just a few blocks from my house.

“There’s one thing,” Juliette said, her tone taking on a quality I had never heard before, vaguely sympathetic, “She is woman.”

In my three months of work I had not once been asked on call with a woman. There was one incident when I was walking home from a call and I passed a disheveled-looking hooker, who had asked me if I wanted a trick. “I am a trick,” I said back. The woman slapped her head and said “Oh!” as if she was a waitress and had just fumbled my egg order.

I fixed my make-up, and rode my unicycle four blocks up Mission Street. The woman’s place was a nice-looking two-story stucco house in a mostly Mexican neighborhood. I opened the little gate at the bottom of the stairs and knocked on the door, taking a deep breath to clear my mind. I had learned not to try to imagine a call in advance.

A few seconds later a young woman, no older than college-aged answered the door. I thought for a moment I might have the wrong house, but she smiled and said, “You must be looking for me.”

The young girl ushered me into the living room of the house. It was a typical middle-class student’s house with lamps with scarves draped over them, numerous photographs, plants, and books. Some instrumental pop music was playing, and there was a half-opened bottle of red wine.

“I’m Janey,” she said, “Would you like some wine?”

“Thank you,” I said, sitting down on the only couch, “I’m Hannah.”

Janey got me a glass of wine. Her hair was in two braids, and she was wearing the kind of shorts one would wear to go hiking with a tank top.

“I’ve never really done this before,” she said, sitting down cross-legged on the end of the couch, “And I totally want you to know that if anything makes you uncomfortable, please let me know.”

I took a sip of the wine. “OK,” I said with a shrug.

“I really only want to talk to you,” she said, looking at me with big, clear, young, blue eyes, “I’m just really trying to understand what it’s…like to be an escort.”

I was taken aback. More than on any other one of my calls, I felt a sudden jolt of apprehension. This young woman wanted me to be her sociology study; a role that I did not feel at all equipped to play.

“My father,” she continued, “saw a lot of escorts. Call girls, I guess, or sex workers, that type of thing. I hope it’s OK if I just, like, ask you questions, and you can just answer them, as much as you want to, or if you feel uncomfortable you can totally just stop.”

For the next two hours I relied on the ultimate coping mechanism that I had used on a date only once. I lied. I told total, boldfaced lies. I told Janey I was addicted to crack, and then later I said I was strung out on heroin. I told her I was the product of abusive parents, foster care, and rape. I told her I couldn’t read or write and had been pimped on the streets by my brother. I made up a husband named Jose, a drug dealer from Colombia who got shot in a drive-by. My children had been taken from me, my car was repossessed.

Janey fought back tears for most of our conversation. She slowly began opening up to me too. She was on Prozac and Nembutal. She had to leave college to go into a live-in care facility for depression. She thought her father might have molested her when she was little.

At the end of our “date,” Janey gave me a long, sincere hug and a modest tip. “Take care of yourself,” she said, “You know there’s lots of services in the city for women like you.”

“Thank you,” I said, walking out. The money felt coarse inside my hand.

I did one more call that night with a guy who wanted sex, was done in ten minutes, and paid me in fives. I rode the unicycle back to my apartment, took a long hot bath, and went to sleep. I ignored all of the calls on my beeper. I slept all the next morning and woke up in the afternoon. That evening when I called Juliette back, she was raging.

“I fire you,” she yelled, over and over, “you are finished.”

“That’s just fine,” I said.

After going off for a few minutes, telling me how ugly I was, how all the guys called and complained and asked for a discount, her hot, raspy tone suddenly changed. “I know what happen to you,” she said coyly, “happen to all the girls. You start to feel that you are the whore, you start to know this. Can’t stand it, so it shamed you. Then later, two, three months, you call back, you say, Juliette, please let me work for City Escorts. But I tell you now, if you don’t work tonight, you never come back. But you always be the whore.”

I hung up on Juliette. It was a full two weeks before I began looking for a new job near my campus. I spent all the escorting money I had saved on overpriced housewares.

After my call with Janey I started therapy again, contemplated joining a support group. I started eating more, vanilla ice cream, hot fudge sundaes. I wrote cryptic poems in my journal that even I didn’t understand.

At night, when I was alone, it wasn’t the faces of all the paying men that I thought of, their tongues, or their penises. It wasn’t the nights in unknown apartments with men with their unknown desires.

It was the big, blue, young eyes of Janey, looking at me as if through the lens of a camera. It was a piece of detritus that she saw, that she cried for, and the life I represented. It was as if she was looking at me through a prism, and seeing only one thing. The whore, Juliette had said, and in fact she was right. I had finally become the whore.

The Unigirl is a post from: Pif Magazine

sometimes two or three pairs at once.

When dirty, he threw them in the washer then baked them in the dryer

they bubbled, hardened, and cracked.

He might throw one of his new shoes to the teething Labrador

or wedge his feet into them and go for a run through the woods.

At dusk, just after a summer rain, you might see it:

six feet tall

covered with hair from sloping cranium

to flashing white Adidas

brown hair hovering over the skin

like a bestial aura.

Glimpsing it from behind, you might think it

a silverback gorilla.

From the side or front, you saw a naked man

running through humid woods

verdant bright and dripping moist.

Powerful forearms and biceps pumping

genitals flopping

sneakers flashing—

streaking through the flora amidst the scattering fauna

just outside the watershed of a conservative community.

He came out of that wilderness refreshed

then donned his uniform and returned to work.

He was specialized, his own boss

Owned his own business

fathered four offspring

all of which survived childhood.

Sitting on a boulder near the bank of the main tributary

I lace an old pair of his shoes I have managed to work into.

The hirsute curse

call it ursine, call it Cro-Magnon,

crawls down my back, too.

Running naked through the woods

I look like a white American male gorilla

age 25-40, though not yet a silverback.

A wild beast lurking outside the confines of hackneyed civilization

successfully running through the jungle.

Run Through the Jungle is a post from: Pif Magazine

The first time I ever exchanged words with her was when she popped up behind one of the registers because the two other cashiers were overwhelmed.  I don’t even remember what I said, but she rolled her brown eyes, and said, “The wonderful world of retail,” clearly indicating, though she took her job very seriously, she wished she was somewhere else.

As she was ringing up my purchases, I was caught off guard when she added, “My divorce cost me $17,000.”

I don’t know why I never thought of her as being married, much less divorced, and all kinds of questions went through my mind, since I’m a writer and overly curious about other people’s lives.  Plus, I was somewhat startled she would so readily volunteer such information to me.

“If you could choose any job or career what would you want?” I asked.

“A cop, I’d like to be a cop.”

Her answer surprised me.  There’s no reason it should have, but it did, I suppose because it’s not something I ever thought of becoming, and I know my nature would cause me to feel guilty writing out tickets, not exactly what’s needed in professional law enforcement.  Some enjoy authority, whereas I frequently suffer from a bad case of misplaced empathy

“Are there many cops in your family?’ I asked, thinking there must be a influence somewhere in her background.

“Uncles and cousins,” she said.

“Where would you want to be a cop?”

I asked her what kind, in a suburban New Jersey town like the one in which the CVS Pharmacy was located, or across the Hudson River in New York City, or possibly on the county level.

“A State Trooper in New York,” she said.  “That’s what I want, to live in the country and patrol the thruway.”

I knew the New York State Thruway well, since early childhood I had endured long drives along stretches of the thruway as my family went up to a cottage on a lake in Ontario, and the majority of the trip, from outside Syracuse to near the border at Niagra Falls or the Rainbow Bridge in Buffalo was along that stretch of road.

My mother, when she was in her fifties until her early seventies, would hop in her van at a moment’s notice to drive up to Canada from New Jersey to visit my sister and her two kids.  Once, while driving with her beloved golden retriever in the back seat, my mother was on the thruway in the right hand lane and cars were zipping by her at quite a clip, speeding, of course.  My mother may have picked up the pace since everyone else was going so fast, but if she was over the speed limit, it certainly wasn’t by much.

Through the rear view mirror my mother spotted a state police car behind her, but thought nothing of it, since so many cars were speeding past her in the left lane.  Then the red light went on and the police car moved up right behind my mother’s van.  She was surprised, couldn’t believe it at first, but the state trooper obviously wanted her to pull over, which she obediently did.

The expected conversation took place.  “Ma’am, do you know how fast you were going?”  And my mother, being a polite woman, answered the question, and subsequent questions, calmly, and truthfully, being a lawful person, and accepting the state trooper’s authority, and perhaps deep within her subconscious, recognizing my maxim, “Thou shalt not argue with someone with a gun.”

The trooper gave my mother a ticket for going over the speed limit, then wished her a good day.  My mother couldn’t help it, in a pleasant tone, she asked why the trooper had decided to pull her over when so many others were passing her and obviously going over the speed limit by so much more.

To his credit, the trooper came clean.  “I have to write tickets,” he said, “and I thought a nice older woman in a car with a dog wouldn’t be much of a threat.”

I’m not sure what others would have done, but I would have followed my mother’s example, telling the state trooper to have a nice day and then continuing on the drive up to Ontario.

I do know my father and I had a different view of police based on our respective generations.  If my father was on the highway, going under the speed limit, and he was behind a police car, he would have no qualms about moving out and around, passing the cop in the left lane, so long as he wasn’t speeding.  In my case, I would never dream of passing a police car, even if the cop was traveling at a crawl.  Exaggerated fear, I know, but it only takes one, one policeman with a super egotistical sense of his own authority and what can you do?

I posed the question to the CVS manager and asked if she would pass a police car ahead if both she and the cop were going under the speed limit.  Without any hesitation, she said, “No way.”  To which, I asked, “Why?”  With a knowing look, which I still don’t understand, she replied, “If he’s going under the speed limit, trust me, he has a reason.”

A reason to what? I wondered, but didn’t press the issue.

As a child, I was taught to trust and view policemen as the good guys, who were there to help and serve, and protect the public.  During my adolescence, I didn’t think cops were bad guys, but I avoided them, knowing I was in the wrong for drinking underage, but still doing it, and not wanting to get caught, so cops were naturally authority figures to be eluded at all costs.

Subsequently, over the years, I’ve known many cops from working as a reporter in the Bronx.  Like anything else, I’ve known good and bad cops, and also a fair share of average nonentities.  Once I did an article on a C-Pop (Community Policing) officer, a profile, and she was so happy and grateful with the story, she brought a copy of the newspaper into my office and asked me to autograph it, which I did, amazed that I was actually in a position to make a police officer happy, which is always preferable to be throwing across the hood of a car and being handcuffed.

I wanted to ask the CVS manager, the potential future cop, more questions, but while she remained cordial, her responses were curt, and it seemed as if she thought, was convinced, I was “hitting” on her, which I wasn’t, being far older than her, though I’d prefer not to accept that, and would have felt complimented if she had been attracted to me, which she obviously wasn’t.  But even if I wanted to be with her, or she wanted to be with me, I thought of her former husband and wondered if while living with her, he was in constant fear of being put under house arrest, for wrongful behavior, intentional or otherwise, something I had no trouble imagining, though I strive to always remain on the right side of the law, at least to the best of my ability.

Out of the Blue is a post from: Pif Magazine

She rolled over and snuggled up warm in her pile of kaleidoscopic blankets. Ah, her legs and pert breasts, etc.

This was her mental health morning. She wasn’t going to answer her phone even for her mother. She wasn’t going to move an inch for anybody.

So, when someone knocked at the door of her tiny studio room, she just ignored it and snuggled up even more into her blankets. Ah, her thighs and soft bottom, etc. The knock came again and she just snuggled up even more. Mmm.

Then there was a third knock and a yell: “Maintenance man!”

“Ohhh, go awaaayy,” she mumbled. Her flowing hair. Her ruby lips.

Mmmmmmm.

By the time the maintenance man started jangling his keys, the naked girl began to wonder if maybe she should cut short her mental health morning and possibly put on a shirt. And maybe some pants.

She had a distinct longing for her slimming black panties and the bra that strapped up so snug and precautionary.

But it was already too late.

The maintenance man suddenly barged into the room.

BARGED INTO THE ROOM.

Her beauteous form in bed. Think petit. Waist size preciously slender. That whole feminine mystique thing fully concaved all the way down to the itsy-bitsy emanation of these toes. And just so fully hiding beneath five bulbous layers of kaleidoscopic blanket fluff, she played dead—

—As the sound of keys jangling moved past her bed and into the bathroom.

It was like the sound of a prison warden. The next sounds were like the sounds of a plumber, but the girl still felt like they were prison warden sounds because, as far as she could reason, she was quite held-hostage.

She was naked. And wouldn’t he just love to see her so.

Also, this was all made twice as embarrassing because the abominable man in there obviously thought for certain that he was alone. Tugging at toilet pipes, or whatever he was doing, soon he began to sing, “Maintenance man, maintenance man, fix these pipes as best I can.”

He sang that for an hour and thirty-two minutes.

Traumatized, the naked girl didn’t dare flinch the entire time.

Ah, her gritted teeth and shattered mental health, etc.

Mental Health is a post from: Pif Magazine

Well.

There’s not much to say save

The saying that says it enough

To be said that he walked

Hopping his madness

Like a one-armed scissor

Cutting the dull from the ground

Planting it in our faces

To be grown like the listeners

We’d been in his footsteps

When the weight was too heavy

And we (they) carried our father

Not god but Luther

To a hole in the mud that was hot

From the digging not so

From the toiling we’d measured

In walks from the church to the stones

At the funeral my brother said

“In six months, you just watch.

I’ll be dead.” But the cancer mistook

His poor math and poor lungs

For another man it’d meant to kill

Three months earlier.

Just a week before he was gone

We went hunting

He with a new gun and truck

I wondered: “But what’s the point.”

And I helped his useless legs

Into the tree stand

I said, brother, brother, brother

Your laugh is a plague

In my head

Get it out, get it out, get it out

‘fore I’m dead.

But not with my mouth

As he neared the tumult

With the new gun laid across

His boney knees

And a shot in the side

Of an eight point buck

He would never be pleasured to eat

He gnarled through the air

Thieving his breaths as he spoke

That god had given him this deer.

Carrying the gun and his kill

I staggered behind as he soaked

In the last of his days.

Esau is a post from: Pif Magazine

Silverman’s second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008) was made into a Lifetime TV Original Movie, starring  dancer and actress, Sally Pressman, who currently appears on the Lifetime Television series, Army Wives.

Sue William Silverman

As a professional speaker and writer, Silverman has appeared on many nationally syndicated radio and TV programs, including The View and Anderson Cooper on CNN.  She will be moderating a panel at the 2012 annual AWP Conference in Chicago about Shifting Voices in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, with panelists Connie May Fowler, Xu Xi, Robert Vivian, and Philip Graham.

Silverman teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Michigan with her partner, poet Marc Sheehan,
and their two cats.

Derek Alger:  How’s the world look from western Michigan these days?

Sue William Silverman: These long, winter days are bleak and gray. All winter I wait for summer. I grew up in the West Indies, and I still feel like an islander! But I live only five blocks from Lake Michigan, and it’s gorgeous here in the warm months. So, really, I shouldn’t complain.

I live in a small town, without much to do.  Which is fine with me. I have lots of time to write and work with my students. I teach in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.  It’s a low-residency program, which means we go to campus twice a year, ten days each, at the beginning and end of the semester, for intensive workshops, lectures, and readings. Then, the rest of the semester, I work from home, long-distance, with five students who live all over the country. Once a month they send me their writing to be critiqued. I love to teach in this way. Working with only five students, I’m able to give them an enormous amount of personal attention. It’s gratifying to watch their writing grow and evolve over the semester.

DA:   You were a writer before you ever started writing.

SWS: Yes! I hoarded words in my mind. I envisioned scenes in my head.  But for years I lacked the self-confidence to actually place these words on pieces of paper. I think it comes from growing up in my incestuous family, where language was all upside down.  I could never speak my truth, the truth of this dark, destructive relationship I had with my father.  For example, since my father showed his love sexually, I didn’t know the difference between “love” and “sex” – the words or the feelings associated with them. After all, my father told me he loved me when he sexually molested me.

Language, as well as definitions for words, was confusing, so, for years, I was very tentative about actually committing a word to paper.

DA:  Tell us about the changing geographical spheres of your childhood.

SWS: I was born in Washington, D. C., where my father was chief counsel of Trust Territories in the Department of the Interior. Then, when I was in second grade, my family moved to St. Thomas, where my father opened a bank.  We left the island when I was in seventh grade, moving to suburban New Jersey. And, after that, I’ve moved around quite a bit: Boston, back to Washington, D. C., Texas, Missouri, Georgia. Now Michigan.

So I don’t really have a sense of home.  Or one home.

Every place I’ve lived has influenced my writing. When I write about St. Thomas, for example, I tend to have a very specific Caribbean vocabulary – which is different, say, from writing about New Jersey, with my New Jersey vocabulary – if that makes sense! As I set any given piece of writing in a particular place I’ve lived, each has its own scents and sounds, so this affects the imagery I use, the vocabulary I “taste.”

DA:  Your family moved to New Jersey where you graduated from high school.

SWS:  Moving away from the West Indies was culture shock, for sure. I was a teenager then and I just wanted to fit in. But I arrived at Glen Rock High School in my madras clothes and tanned skin.  I looked so different from the other students. I sounded different, too, as I’d picked up a bit of a West Indian accent.

But I set out to fit in as quickly as possible.  I made friends.  I acted like everyone else. Now, looking back on it, I was, ironically, probably more interesting as a Caribbean girl! But what do teenagers know?

DA:  I know as a teen I thought I knew much more than I really did.

SWS: I never felt as if Glen Rock was home – any more than any other place I’ve lived. To me, in many ways, the only sense of home I have are the words and memories in my head. Home is the color of frangipani flowers in the Caribbean; the scent of crimson leaves in autumn New Jersey; the red brick of Back Bay Boston, where I went to college, and so on.

DA:  Did you feel pressured or was attending college a given.

SWS: My family thought education was very important. It was assumed I’d go to college. At the same time, my mother told me that I had to go to college to meet a husband. How antiquated does that sound?  And I didn’t meet my husband in college!

But I had no mentors growing up, or anyone guiding me about what to major in – nothing like that.  On a positive note, summers, in college, I worked on Capitol Hill as an intern. I loved that. After graduation, I returned to Capitol Hill to work for a few years as a legislative and administrative aide.

DA:  You gained valuable experience writing.

SWS: Yes. It’s kind of ironic. While working on Capitol Hill I did a lot of writing: I wrote speeches and inserts for the Congressional Record for various politicians. I wrote in their voices. I guess I had to do that before I finally learned to write in my own voice.

DA:  A turning point was moving to Galveston.

SWS: Yes. After marrying a man I met in D. C., we moved when he got a job as director of the Galveston Historical Foundation.

This is where I started to write. It may be that Galveston reminded me of St. Thomas – a tropical island – which set off a sensory chain reaction.  One day, seemingly out of nowhere, I set up a card table in the guest room in our apartment, put a Smith-Corona portable typewriter on it, bought a sheaf of canary- yellow typing paper, sat down, and began. At that point, I would call it more typing than writing. But I produced about one thousand pages before I realized I didn’t know how to write! So I took an adult education class at the University of Houston.

No one was talking about memoir or creative nonfiction back then, so I set out to write a novel. Thank goodness it was never published. I actually ended up with about four or five bad novels.  They were mainly about incestuous relationships and alienated teenage girls.  Yet even though these novels lacked an emotionally authentic voice, still, over time, I did learn how to write. I was just in the wrong genre. I didn’t find my authentic voice as a writer until I switched to creative nonfiction, years later.

DA:  You paid your dues going your own apprenticeship as a writer learning the craft.

SWS: I did. With every word I wrote I was getting closer to my true writing self, which finally emerged in my two memoirs.

DA: You were forced to live a traumatic double life as a child, one veiled in deep secrecy.

SWS: Yes. Even though, growing up, I lived in this incestuous family, no one ever talked about it. I don’t even ever remember hearing the word “incest” until college.

Throughout my childhood, I lived a double life: on the surface, we seemed like a perfect family. But that was a mask that hid the secret of what my father did to me in private. That was my reality.  So, in one sense, it even seemed normal. That’s how strong denial is. I just remember feeling numb most of the time. I watched how other girls acted, and mimicked them.

Later, there was much shame and confusion and anger. How could a father who said he loved me have hurt me?  And there was anger toward my mother for not protecting me. It took many years of therapy to process all of this!

DA:  You captured this horrific experience in your memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You.

SWS: I began that memoir two weeks after my parents died, within six days of each other, and at the urging of my therapist, who suggested I stop writing fiction and tell my true story. He was the first person to hear the real “me.” To be honest, at that point, I’d never even read a memoir…except for The Diary of Anne Frank. Anyway, I sat down at my computer, and, in three months, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You just “fell” out of me.

While writing that book, I never thought about how it might be perceived, what family or friends might think, or even about possible publication. I totally shut out the world. At that point in the process, all that mattered was getting the words down on the page.

To write memoir is to understand and make sense of experience, to give a life an organization, to discover the metaphors of one’s narrative. It’s not simply to say, “this happened to me, then this happened to me, then this next thing happened to me.”  “What happened” is part of it. But it’s much more interesting to discover the story behind the story – what you could never have known at the time of the events – but what you (the author) discover about those events now by reflecting upon them.  So, for example, in “Because I Remember Terror…,” I learned how growing up without a true language, or voice, affected me.

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

DA:  Your memoir won the annual AWP Award for creative nonfiction.

SWS: I was shocked. The odd thing about winning a literary award and getting published is that you are still the same writer, the same person as before this public recognition.  But the world perceives you differently.

All of a sudden people saw me as a writer! Which is lovely, don’t get me wrong. And publishing the book opened up many opportunities.  But, inside, I’m still the same person I was before I got published.  Well, okay, maybe I have a bit more self–confidence!

DA:  You tackled a difficult subject in your second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, an issue that is minimized by many.

SWS: That was a tough book to write.

First, on a personal level, I had much more shame about struggling with sex addiction than being an incest survivor.  Yes, the addiction was a result of the childhood incest – since my father saw me as a sex object, that’s how I saw myself – and, I thought that’s the only way any man would see me.  Still, it’s difficult to convey sympathy for an adult woman having affairs with married, emotionally dangerous men.

In the writing of the book, this was my challenge and my struggle: Initially, I found it difficult to discover an emotionally authentic voice to convey the whole of the experience.  In early drafts, I only heard the voice of the addict – that tough, edgy persona.  But with just that addict voice, it was one-dimensional – how boring to read only about the unenlightened life of a sex addict.  It was like I lopped off half of my experience.  It took about five years to hear the voice of the woman struggling to get sober.  While the book itself is a weaving together of these two voices, still, the sober voice is at the heart of Love Sick.  And finally it all coalesced.

DA:  You also are the author of Fearless Confession: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir.

SWS: I think of Fearless Confessions as a guidebook for people who want to take possession of their lives by putting their experiences down on paper.

I wanted the book to sound friendly, inviting, intimate: we’re all writers, we’re all in this together. It became, in part, a memoir about my writing journey.  However, there is plenty of craft information in it, too, chapters about metaphor, voice, structure, the use of sensory detail.  It contains many writing exercises that help writers navigate a range of issues from craft to ethics to marketing. I also have a chapter about the importance of memoir, and how memoir is as legitimate a genre as poetry and fiction – just taking on all the naysayers out there who call us navel gazers!

DA:  You’ve also published a poetry collection, Hieroglyphics in Neon.

SWS: After I finished the two memoirs, I needed to write something very different. And, since my partner, Marc Sheehan, is a poet, he suggested I try poetry. Well, at first this was scary. Line breaks terrified me. I’d never even written bad high-school poetry. But Marc was a great teacher.  And he helped me overcome my fear of line breaks.

Writing this collection turned out to be a truly joyful – freeing – experience. I mean, you can’t really say that writing about incest and sex addiction is going to be joyful!  One thing I love about poetry is the ability to “time travel” without having to get people in and out of doors as you do in prose. Plus, I could pretend, say, to be Queen Hatasu, an Egyptian pharaoh. I loved writing persona poems.

DA:  What’s on the horizon?

SWS: I just finished writing what I call a cultural memoir, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew.  Through a series of linked essays, the manuscript chronicles my search for authentic self-identity – a search complicated by my conflicted feelings toward Judaism and my various efforts to “pass” as Christian. (I wanted to be Christian since my Jewish father sexually molested me.) At the heart of this journey are three separate encounters with 1960s pop-music icon, turned Christian provocateur, Pat Boone, who plays a pivotal role in my desire to belong to the dominant culture.

This book has a much more ironic voice than the voice(s) of my previous books. My first memoir is written in the voice of a young, scared child trying to survive her childhood. Then, in Love Sick, there’s the voice of the addict as well as the more sober voice.  In this new book, as I say, I implement an ironic tone as I try to come to terms with my religion.

That’s one thing I love about creative nonfiction: there are endless ways to discover new voices and additional stories.  We already have these different identities, so as writers we need only discover the various voices in order to explore them on the page.

Until I discover the voice to examine events, they remain murky – blending and bleeding together.  It is only by writing that I am fully able to understand these identities and make sense of my whole life.

Sue William Silverman is a post from: Pif Magazine