Youth and Old Men

It's a crime the way that girl walks. Simply a crime. She ought to be arrested. Tried. Lock her away.
We' re all agreed on that?
"Mmhmm."
What's she got in them hips, anyway? Something like a freight train moving like that.
I was 20 years younger I'd be all over that.
Damn that girl.
They don't tell you the penalty for growing old is the constant reminder of your youth slinking up and down the streets like a thief proud of what he done.
They don't tell you about the acid under your skin.
How it rushes like an upturned river every time a young thing looks at you like you're the punchline to a joke she's heard too many times today.
Damn that girl.
"Right, man. It ain't right."
I know it ain't right. Nobody has to tell me it ain't right. When do we turn into old shoes?
"Yea, when exactly does that happen?"
I don't know. I don't like it one bit. Lock that girl up. Lock 'em all up. Leave us old folks to turn to dust in peace. I don't need these damned beams of sunshine breaking my concentration all day.
"Tell it."
I will, boy. It's just not right. I got it in my mind that I'm the one's gonna have to change all this. I've had enough. I'm not dead yet, am I? There's too much beauty out there for me to be sitting here talking to you twisted fools, looking like a lot of rubbish left out to shift in the sun.
"Yea? What are you going to do about it, huh?"
Something.
"Whole lot of nothin."
Yea, we'll see.
"We'll see a whole lot of nothin."

"Gentlemen."
See, now. Here's a good girl. This is a girl.
"Thank you, Joe."
It's nothin. I was just remarking to these boys about the miserable affair it is growing old.
"Like we don't know, he's telling us."
These old fools are content to let the days whir past them.
"Nothin's whirring here."
Everything's whirring. Wouldn't you say so darlin?
"Yes, sir. It's a fast moving world out there."
Nevermind the world, I mean life. I give a damn about the world. I'm talking the stuff that makes a heart rattle in the chest. The good shit. The meaning of life is living. And we all stopped living. We just letting you young folks do it for us. You're a good girl though, beautiful. Real good girl.
"Thanks, Joe. What else can I get you?"
Four more cups of my namesake, please. I think these old fucks need another bit of bite in their sacks. They're getting all flimsy on me. I'm here trying to have a conversation with them and they're blankets in the wind. My words just blowing right through them. They don't give a shit.
"Of course they do, Joe."

The First and Second Funniest

"There isn't room for two in there, " I tapped on her chest where I approximated her heart to be.
She waved me off.
My cat scratched at the door.
"You want out, buddy? Join the club," I said.
"Oh Fuck you."

Three hours later I was drunk.
"Another?"
"Yesss. Ablumber," and as simple as that, I was asked to leave. That's the trouble with Applebee's. It's okay if you're cock-eyed drunk and screaming at a flat screen TV for your football team, but one guy sits at the bar drinking nothing but gin for three hours, breaking up the monotony with short bouts of quiet sobbing, and all of a sudden people are disturbed. Excuse me for being an extroverted introvert. I'll take my pain into the shifting dark of a back alley somewhere away from your precious jalapeño poppers.

Three months later, I'm at the bus stop by the Wendy's next to my house. I'm trying to call Bryan, but the damn 2 is stuck on my cell phone, and it's just the most irritating little tone coming out of this thing, so I chucked it across Hillside Ave. It flitted along the whole way over four lanes of traffic, looking like a tar-dipped robin, and finally came to a stop right outside the doors to the CVS pharmacy. To the only on-looker, Cheryl, it was the most hilarious thing she had ever seen. I would later half-seriously challenge this claim, but only half-seriously because I rather enjoyed being the most something to her.
Anyway. I'm far from rich. I'm a copywriter at an advertising and marketing agency. I didn't throw the phone because I have the means to replace it. I threw the phone because—well, for the same reason I've broken three of the knuckles on my right hand, on three separate occasions. So at this point, I've got to go pick up the phone that I've made a big show of disposing of across the street. According to Cheryl, this was the funniest part of it. She said it would have been funny if I had walked away. It would have still made it into 95% of her humorous anecdote conversations. But this was the cream to top it all off.

"You stared at it for a moment from across the street, then you got this look on your face like you were admitting defeat and you fast-walked over. It was so hang-dog. So punchline to a joke." She said.
"I'm a punchline to a joke."
"Absolutely," she got up and fed another dollar into the jukebox, "and that's when I remembered where I know you from. You're also the second funniest thing I've ever seen."
"Oh, good. I hate competition."
She put the saddest music I had ever heard on. Fantastic, here come the unprompted confessions, I thought, here comes what's left of my dignity. It was like she had the User's Manual for the Miserable Bastard memorized. She knew just how to drag the schlub out of me.
"Yea," she said "you're the dude from Applebee's. The crier, right?"
"I think you're mistaking me for someone else."
"No way. I'll never forget that hang-dog look. You looked like the saddest person in the world."
"I'm glad my misery amused you."
"So it was you."
I fought the urge to spill the entire contents of my soul out onto the high table we were standing at. I imagined myself presenting it to her in something like a soggy Whole Foods tote bag, pulling out handfuls and letting her examine them as they slipped through my fingers hitting the table with a satisfying series of slaps. They'd resemble a fish's innards, because nothing quite glistens like fish innards and that's what the injured bits of ourselves do. They glisten beneath low barroom lights and get pretzel crumbs stuck in them when you sweep them up into your arms and drop them back where they came from.

Can

The words were on the screen for a full five seconds before I registered their meaning: Barrack Obama Elected President of the United States of America.
I sipped my beer and looked over to my left. There you were and—for the first time in weeks—a genuine smile. I wanted to hold you, but I knew I would probably ruin this moment for you.

I finished my beer and looked at the area above the TV while people danced and hugged. I cried tears of elation for my country. But every third tear was for us.

The Difference

Jesus—
Is blurted aloud
when a dollface shakes her thing across
Madison Ave.
Men turned to gelatin
in their Lexuses
or work vans,
all say:
Jesus.

God—
You say to yourself.
God, God, God.
In the catacomb of your apartment,
your prayers keep the phone from ringing.
Keep the voice from saying
what your heart
can't bear.

The Rick Horowitz Adderall Experiment

Recently, there has been much talk in the media centered around the prescription drug, Adderall. There are differing opinions on the effectiveness of prescribing Adderall to treat ADHD, but one thing is for sure: it isn't stopping parents from feeding it to their kids by the scoop full. But not Rick Horowitz. When Dr. Thalluri prescribed my son, David, 40mg of Adderall a day, I wasn't about to just rollover and accept it. That's why I'm conducting what I'm calling, The Rick Horowitz Adderall Experiment. My aim is to publish this paper in one or any of the more progressive medical journals out there, as my methods might seem a little , "fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants," for some hoity-toities in the medical and scientific sectors. I assure you, however, that there is nothing amateurish about this experiment. Coming from a steel-working background, I can affirm that the trial and error method is one upon which entire industries have been built...quite literally. So without any further preamble, allow me to introduce the test subject: My brother-in-law Tommy. The subject is 35 years old and in moderate to poor physical shape. Mentally, he is quite scatter-brained and had he been born twenty years later, might have been the poster child for pharmacopsychiatry. The experiment, conducted once before Adderall is administered and once after 40mg of Adderall is administered, consists of Tommy scribbling down his thoughts as they come to him on a piece of loose leaf taped to my kitchen table. Below are the findings.

Before Adderall:
New Night Rider. Good luck. Car looks gay. TiVo.
Economy's [doodle of phallus]
[second doodle of phallus]
[doodle of car jumping over phalluses]
Need some trim.
Could use a trim.
Trim's an airplane term.
[doodle of phallus as airplane]
Plane looks like a sandwich.

At this point, the subject asks for a sandwich.

Fuck this. I should be able to have a sandwich if I want a damn sandwich. That's just a little control issue you got there.
[doodle of phallus bearing resemblance to Rick Horowitz]
I'm thirsty too.
[doodle of a glass of liquid with arrow pointing to it.]
Lemonade.
I need a date. With a woman. What's wrong with a fella like me?
[doodle of a phallus]
This is dumb.
This is dummy. Ventriloquist.
Nyquil. I dream funny things on Nyquil. I want a lemonade.


After Adderall:
Let's see.
What am I thinking about?
Ah, I'm thinking about women. I'd like a date. I deserve a date. Possibly, I'm the only one whom can be of any help to my situation in this matter. How can I help myself in this matter? Perhaps I need to inwardly examine myself to determine where I've gone wrong in the past. Maybe a list of my strengths and weaknesses might help.

My strengths:
Tall.
25% Photogenic. (25% of the time, not 25% of my body, although 7.25% of my body is photogenic 90% of the time.[LOL.])
Persuasive. (Manipulative? What a revelation. I'm manipulative. I suppose this could go under the weaknesses column too, but really, for the purposes of securing a mate, a little persuasiveness could be just the sort of Darwinistic edge that could put a rather homely or lackluster specimen over the top into contention. Strength column)
Intimidating features. (Eyebrows come to point in the middle like the roof of a house or an obtuse letter "A", prominent cheekbones, strong square jaw—evil incarnate, really.)
Puppy dog eyes.
Offbeat sense of humor.
Comfortable with body, sexuality. (I doodle phalluses as a subconscious affirmation of my masculinity and virility. I don't believe this is lost on an objective observer.)



My weaknesses:
Comfortable with body, sexuality. (I doodle phalluses as a subconscious affirmation of my masculinity and virility. This may be lost on an objective observer.)
Tendency to overreact. Violently. (Good god. I can be a real Neanderthal. While something like intimidating eyebrows is something to be admired [because it is the implication of violence, an unspoken intimation of something {That "Je ne sais crois," perhaps, I suppose},however, violence is simply vile.])
My hands are EXTREMELY slow when it comes to writing, apparently. (I think I may be cramping in the wrist.)
Easily persuaded.
Slight paunch. (Mental note: get gym membership—got a free trial last week---check in garbage...last week's garbage is in the shed until tomorrow. Thursday is bulk.)
Balding. (Shaved head, but I still place this one in the weakness column.)
Honest. (Selfishly honest. Honest is only a double-edged sword when wielded nobly, otherwise honesty is as selfish a pursuit as the straight-laced cop-on-all-those-1970s-movies's pursuit of living by the book because he[she?] can't stand to leave him[her?]self vulnerable to the possibility of living, I mean really living. Without rules. Relying on only your emotion to guide you [has there ever been a truer compass than the heart?]. )
Optimist!
Sarcastic. (Acerbic.)
Unabashedly perverse. (Don't want to elaborate on this.)
Obsessed with feelings. (They're so interesting! Along this same line of thought—aren't thoughts just a hoot? What are they, and why are they there? Just fartin' around up there waiting to jump out of your mouth and terrify people. Wacky.)
Forgetful.
Lemonade.

At this point, the subject stopped writing and the previously furious scratching of his pencil gave way to an intense silence. Stillness. When asked what he was thinking about, he responded that with each successive minute he was coming to new revelations about the meaning of life.

Recorder

Aside from the obvious, I love this photograph for the truth it captures. Right out in the open.
Mom’s in the back. Robert’s the one standing, really hamming it up for the camera. Little Sara’s the baby of course; she’s right there in the middle doing exactly what I remember asking, “Let’s sit for a nice picture!”
And Becky’s on the right there. Her hair was always only slightly longer than mine back then, so if you put the tips of your fingers on the photograph over the ends of her hair: There I am. That’s the way we always did it. We took turns posing with the other kids. Because what’s the use in having the same face twice in the same photograph?
Anyway, aside from the obvious, I love how this photograph captures just who we were and just who we would grow up to be.
Robert sang rockabilly right up until the war. He used to say, “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing,” every night in the living room with the trio. It was his opening line. I remember hating him for it.
“Do you really have to practice your opening line, Robert Hayrick?”
“Sure I do, I have to make sure it sounds real.”
Later, his was the voice I associated with the music of that time, not Elvis’.
And Little Sara. She was just the quietest child. Just a pleasure all the time. It really is no wonder she grew up to be a nurse and was the one that stayed with Daddy till he was gone. And even then—when he was gone—she never really did much. We all sort of assumed she’d at least have a passing interest in seeing somewhere other than here. But apparently, she didn’t. She stayed right there in that big house in that little town, never really changing her sweet self from one holiday to the next, which is how often Becky and I tried to visit.
The house was always clean, quiet, and pleasant. Really it was the center of our universe, and Little Sara was always its keeper. And she really was just as sweet as this photograph suggests. She passed late last year of lung cancer.
We didn’t even know she was ill.
Then there’s my Becky. My lifelong best pal. My twin. I’m not sure any of us ever—even for a minute—suspected that she would be anything other than the best mother this world has ever seen. Becky married John Sullivan, a boy with flat feet and a delicatessen in the family, on our seventeenth birthday. It was the happiest I ever saw her until the twins were born. And then that was the happiest I had ever seen her until the second set of twins were born.
That’s the truth. I see all these things in this photograph. Clear as day. Right out in the open. As if these things were all happening just at the same time as I was taking the photo. And maybe that’s what it says about me. Maybe I was only ever meant to be the observer. The recorder of things.

Personal Best

Under the water I can hear nothing. For the moment: silence.
Then my mind gets going. I imagine that blub blub sound you hear in cartoons, and that distant pinging sound of TV submarines. The rush of rapids, the contraction of metal, the roil of waves, the intermittent buzz of Morse code. I imagine I can hear my own heart. Then, over all the imaginary noise, there's an idea. I blow out a breath and there it is—I sincerely hear blub blub.
I smile because apparently cartoons can be accurate. And then I smile again because smiling under water is the most morbid thing I can imagine. Like thumbing your nose in a fire.
"Are you going to answer me?"
From under water, in the bathroom, and up the stairs—I can hear her vocal chords actually straining. The water, my imagination. They're no match for her screeching. The vibrations against my back mean she's probably stamping her feet.
I decide to hold my breath a minute longer.
From beneath the surface of water, there is nothing more beautiful than a ceiling stretched out above you. Any ceiling. A ceiling of plaster. A ceiling of tile. A ceiling of sky. It chops up like a flag in a stiff breeze. Blub blub.
"Are you still in there? Seriously now. This is ridiculous. Are you going to answer me? Ri-DIC-culous!"
I decide to push my lungs to their limit.
I remember something. I once dreamed the world was a roadside puddle. I recall looking up through the murk and seeing the billowed-up sun just beyond the surface of the world, its face chopped up like that flag in a stiff breeze. Oil swirled pale rainbows where the light allowed. But It was so dim down where I was. I was disgusted by what had become of the world, until at some point, I realized I was dreaming and decided to get pizza. I distinctly remember wondering what pizza would taste like soaked in roadside puddle. It was the first thing that occurred to me.
"Can you get out? Soon? Hello?"
I hear her, but I'm too busy trying to remember what roadside pizza tastes like—and certainly too busy trying to remember not to breathe. It's been a minute and a half and I've almost beaten my record. Blub blub.

Arturo passed Miriam on the stairs and noted aloud that she looked radiant in that dress. Miriam rolled her eyes and spit on the landing ahead of her.
"Queer," Arturo called after her.
"Pussy!" She responded.
And their exchange reverberated in the space for a moment before breaking apart into that stairwell silence that beats down doors.
Arturo let himself into their apartment. You'll be singing a different tune at dinner time, he thought to himself. He set his keys on the little table near the door with the phone and notepad on it. Continuing through the hallway and into his bedroom, he began to whistle a nondescript melody, interspersing it with Yes, Miriam, you'll be singing a different tune, la, la, la.
They had a disagreement in the early morning about the mess piling up in the basin for dirty dishes beneath the sink. Miriam was a lesbian, and Arturo attributed her willingness to hold onto her anger and her grudges to this inescapable fact. He imagined a long history of daily injustices and barely audible whisperings about her, but the truth was he had no supporting evidence for this theory. Miriam was quite private about her early account, even in her most drunk and voluble of moods.
Arturo took a flying leap onto his bed and let his body bounce into position diagonally across it. He removed a cigarette from the soft pack in his front shirt pocket and lit it, rolling onto his back.

Sal

I used to wonder about my neighbor, Sal. All 400 lbs of him. 400 lbs sounds like a lot, until you've seen it as something other than exaggeration, then you realize it's much more than a lot, it's monumental. It's size, it's true assertion of humanity's ability to exist in a physical space. Watching Sal move from one point to another: It was like looking into a possible future. One where one day you wake up and say to yourself, "Oh well. Who gives a fuck?" Then you mayonnaise and chocolate yourself into a walking mass of gelatinous flesh.
Sal always wore tiny white sneakers. And knee-length mesh shorts. And t-shirts with lifelike pictures of endangered animals on them. It seemed to be his uniform. The look was nicely rounded out by a wavy garnish of obnoxious orange hair. He had a unique look, for sure. And I used to wonder about why he never tried to mix up the elements of his dress. Then I realized it: What need is there to try to fix the only marginally fixable? It was the combination that worked for him, and he stuck to it. I admired him for that. He never felt the need to experiment with anything silly, like, for instance, pants, or shirts without endangered animals on them. That sort of knowledge of self, or at least attention to the inescapable fact that he would look ridiculous in almost anything he wore, so why not keep it consistent, is the reason I get up in the morning. I strive for that kind of clarity.
I get dressed in the morning and pose disapprovingly in front of the mirror through at least four or five different outfits. I take several things into account: what look did I go for yesterday? before that? what was the cumulative effect of my outfits last week? what is it shaping up to be this week? should I save this shirt until casual Friday? etc.
I wish I had the equivalent of Sal's white sneakers/mesh shorts/endangered animals t-shirt approach at my disposal. Unfortunately, I'm much too second-guessing for that. It drives me wild.
Sal.
What does he wonder about?
Does he feel a kinship with the animals he presents to the world emblazoned across his ample chest? Does he feel himself a specimen on the verge of extinction? Does he think he's a sea-turtle? What a mystery this fat-ass is to me. It's positively mind-boggling.

When the Tornado Came

I saw you lift off the ground and into the trees.
Then you were up and caught like a marionette in a laughing fit. It was the most gorgeous madness how you became the gleam in the storm's eye.
I wondered when you would come down, if ever, and I marveled at
how the thrashing, like a column of stagnant water, held you fast.
Then you dropped.
Slowly, gracelessly behind the ruined woods that flanks the highway.

Father,

You lived in a tiny house with a tin roof,
chickens in the back and machetes by the doors.
The red earth encroached always up through the nonexistent
back wall.

Your father once told you a story:
He caught his reflection in standing water
and realized he should have been
born a fish.

He worked in the coffee fields with the smell
of decaying berries and the mosquitoes like steam,
you couldn't stand the sight of him.

He spoke slowly and never in anger, but you thought
him weak as a sow and you sometimes spit on his boots in the
hallway.

You once told me a story:
Your father caught a fishbone in the throat,
the bone spread into his chest and eventually his lungs.
He died turning into a fish, you told me,
just like he always wanted to be.

San Tortola, Texas 2005

The tiny man said I looked as miserable as a thumb. The expression on my face must have been one of bewilderment. Incidentally, he thrust his truncated thumbs in my face. They looked like the tops had been sawed off at the knuckle. The flesh looked jagged—corrugated.
"Miserable as a thumb," he said, "miserable as my poor lost thumbs."
His head shook as he spoke and the reddened skin of his jowls gesticulated accordingly. He reminded me of someone's sad uncle. The one that always steers conversation toward something that you might have once had in common, maybe a million years ago, but now is completely irrelevant.
Certainly strange, I thought. I bought him a beer as a bribe for his silence and as consolation for his misfortune.
It seemed to work. He clammed up and pawed at his beer with the type of shamelessness that you only see in the very old, or very young. He was lapping at his beer for a good two minutes, and I had almost grown used to the sound when his head shot up and he said, quickly, almost as an aside, "Don't blow your brains from your head tonight."

He didn't arrive at the bar until later in the evening, not until the place had crowded up with rain-flushed professionals on their way home from their offices and students from nearby colleges, all looking for excuses to have one more drink. You weren't allowed to sit at the tables unless you were eating, so the seating area remained curiously empty regardless of the activity at the bar. It created an interesting effect. Like the dining area was a stage, and the standing-room drunks were a rowdy but rapt audience.
Hours before the tiny man with the lopped thumbs appeared, before the professionals and college students, I was there. Sipping my lager. Listening in on the scant conversation around me. For a long stretch of time, there was only one couple sitting in the dining area.

"You aren't my ideal," she said, "I just can't see us liking each other very much."
The man rearranged himself in his seat. He leaned forward, cocked his head expectantly, like he was asking a rhetorical question.
"You're a pretty piece," he said.
"Oh?"
It didn't seem like the right reaction, and I leaned my body to get a better angle on their voices. At that moment, the front door opened.

The woman at the table turned toward the sound of the bell above the door. Another couple came in from the rain and shook matching black umbrellas into the bin against the unoccupied host stand. The pair crossed through the middle of the room, slid past the couple at the table, and took seats near me at the bar. They looked around, surveyed the half-full place, and took inventory of the bodies peppered throughout the establishment. Possibly, they were waiting for more of their party. They must have noticed me sitting alone, hunched over my lager, trying to look disinterested in my surroundings.
I stared at the bar for a moment before I let my attention return to the couple at the table. I noticed for the first time, possibly in contrast to the vaguely Mediterranean-looking couple that were now trying to get the bartender's attention, that the couple at the table were both strikingly fair. Blonds. Skin like cellophane, evident even in this dim light.

The man at the table whispered something into his drink.

"Excuse me?" the woman said. She raised her hand to her mouth and gave a little cough. I decided this was her nervous habit.

"You make me feel uncomfortable," he said, a little too audibly.

The couple at the bar were taking their coats off, placing them on the high-backed bar-seats. The man whispered something to the woman and they both gave surreptitious glances at the table.


The couple seated a few feet from me at the bar ordered Sapphire & tonics. Good choice, I thought. It made me thirsty for my own beer and I took a long drink.

The bartender made a show of dropping the lime slivers into the bar-couple's gin drinks. He hadn't been doing this long.

"It's something awful out there, pouring like that," the woman said to the bartender.

"Sun showers all this week," he responded. It might have been the fourth-or-so time he'd said it since I got there.

"It's a real pain," the man at the woman's side said.

"Just rain," I said. I didn't mean to. I was absentmindedly watching the couple at the table, I might've meant to just think about the rain.

"Excuse me," the man leaned on his elbow and lolled his head over at me, "did you say something, pal-o?"

"Me? No."

"Sounded like you said something."

"I was talking to myself."

"Oh. All right, then. You have fun, then. Talking to yourself."

He made a sort of scoffing or snorting sound at me and turned around. I had a vision of myself standing up, him turning around. I saw myself moving faster than him. Overpowering him and smashing his face against the shellacked bar and meeting little resistance from his inferior physique. I saw his blood come as a rush from his gums and ruined teeth. I felt his weight in my hands as an insignificant thing.

I nodded and sipped my beer, tried to look more inebriated than I was. My ears radiated heat.

Swamp Monster

1. I was fifteen when the Canadian Military sentenced me to count the innumerable points of light in the skies of whatever Dimension they felt understaffed in.

2. I haven't seen my brother or father in eleven years.

3. My apartment is always an ugly marzipan-colored catacomb.

4. I rarely make friends.

5. Sometimes, I feel a kinship with Marvin the Martian, in his over-sized sneakers and his obscured face—his tiny planet, flanked on all sides by darkness.

**********************************************************************************

6. I don't detest working in a cubicle like my father always told me I would.

7. I have a tattoo on my right calf; It's an ACME bomb.

8. I'm terrible with numbers, how did I become a star counter?

9. This dimension isn't so bad, not so bad as the last.

10. My name is Claudio. I burnt my brother's back off with a single blast from my father's Smith and Wesson Bachelormaker. I meant to do it.
He stood against the back wall of our garage and we covered him in vines until he looked like a swamp monster. He said, "Shoot me quick, before Dad comes home."
"What if you die?"
He said, "I won't die, I'll turn around."
The blast was quiet, barely a hum, and he sat down slowly, like he was just tired. Then he slumped over with a spasm, groaning like an unoiled machine. I lied down beside him, and held the blaster till my father came home.

***********************************************************************

11. My tattoo is a an ACME bomb because my father loves cartoons. When he says the word, cartoons, he extends the oo sound, every time, like he himself is a cartoon wolf, howling at a paper moon. Every evening, after dinner, he would let my brother, Hah-mes, and me watch his Classic Looney Tunes collection projected against the sky when the field-lights went out. Now, after work, on the walk back to my apartment, I sometimes imagine I can see Daffy Duck blowing Elmer Fudd's face to ashes in the darkened screen of night.
This is why my tattoo is an ACME bomb.

************************************************************************

12. I'm terrible at math, but my job is counting stars. It's a large office, with many departments. Mine is a department of 80, we each get our own cubicle, and our own sliver of infinity to scour.

13. Sometimes we have to skip lunch.

14. Hah-mes would be good at this job. Once, at a garage sale, picking through a rubber tub of junk on someone's lawn, he found a stained-wood rosary. My father bought it for him, but never explained what it was. Hah-mes wore it around his neck proudly and counted through them when lost in his own thoughts.

15. The highest he ever counted was 6, 434.

16. Watching him mouth numbers to himself and thumb the beads between his fingers used to relax me. I would whisper numbers for him to count to, "hit 154 this time," or "let's try for 1,352," and his lips would move predictably, his tongue clicking against his teeth.

17. He never stopped before hitting his goal.

18. I think of him when I get so high in the numbers that they don't fit in my head, I bet he could tame them with just his thumbs and his rosary.
*******************************************************************************

19. When I'm transferred from one dimension to another, I feel closest to my brother and father. When Hah-mes was really little, we used to chase each other through the house we grew up in , yelling, "I'm a getcha, I'm a getcha!"

20. I loved catching a glimpse of an elbow or a floppy sneaker before it disappeared around a corner.

21. This is how I feel between dimensions.
********************************************************************************

Don't ask me about this.

Zombies, ninjas, pirates, robots.
They've got nothing on hippos.

Speaking to a parent who is now a shell of the person you once thought of as exempt from the laws of mortality, holier than God.

Just open face-slapping, over and over again.
Just when you think that it’s over.
Whammy, there it is again.

Hers Buzzing

I used to watch her rattling off her thoughts at a pace usually reserved for the enraged, or in-denial. I never listened. Just watched. She would get home from work and immediately begin, even before having unwrapped her scarf from her neck. The volume of her voice would rise and fall as she moved through our tiny apartment, setting her things carefully down in their proper places: Shoes on the welcome mat inside the closet, hat on the microwave with the other hats, jacket on the corner of the futon, her bag on the bedroom doorknob.
I would park myself down on my favorite patch of hardwood in front of the futon and watch. Watch and nod when appropriate. My favorite was when she washed dishes and her voice reverberated in the awkward space between the sink and the cabinets, and she would stop to assure herself that she had my attention, "Don't you think?," or "Isn't that strange?" I would respond, "Absolutely," in my voice, tinny against hers buzzing.
There was no greater joy than observing her in her frantic and furious way, and looking forward to what she would feel like later that night. In our bedroom, her head against my chest. Her rambling speech quieted, her nervous energy slowed to a dull throb, lost in the language of exhaustion.

I had a Ugandan penpal when I was 8.

My penpal in Uganda only wrote to me once. He liked soccer, he liked drawing, and he wanted to visit the United States someday. He was afraid of spiders because his older brother always tickled his ears with long grasses at night—the first thing to come to mind, every time, was that spiders were trying to climb into his head. I can understand this.

I responded that I also liked soccer, I also liked drawing, and that I was afraid of blood and ghosts. I told him that this wasn't my brother's fault, because my brother is much younger than I am. I told him I was afraid of blood because my father fainted once at a fair at the park by my house. The back of his head hit the pavement and a big circle of blood appeared and grew bigger and bigger around his head. He woke up but could only make a sound like an upset animal, like a goat. Unnnggggh, unnngh. And his face looked waxy, like he was a dummy in the movies with really fake-looking dead bodies. I thought he was going to die too and I wanted to kiss him, but the blood made my knees feel like someone was tickling them, maybe with a long grass.
And I'm afraid of ghosts because I see them standing above me at night. They have long hair that they brush, and they aren't white, they're dark and limp-looking, like coats hanging in the closet when the lights go out. And they never mention anything, even though I always ask. They just stand there and brush their hair, looking almost bored doing it.

I'm older now, and sometimes wonder about my penpal. I wonder why he never wrote back. I wonder if he still draws, or plays soccer, or if he's still afraid of spiders. I wonder if he ever thinks of me and my father's blood. Or if he thought my ghosts were tame.

The Surface of the Moon, My home, 4pm

I wake up in the buzzing quiet of my sleeping-room.
I watch Earth looming huge and jaunty out my window.
Where is Levitown, I wonder. And why are my vessel's memories so hazy?

To be continued.

Levitown, 3:30pm

This isn't my piss. I can tell because my boxers aren't wet. It's only my pant leg. Someone pissed on me in the night. I experience something akin to the process of grief, but crystallized in one moment.
I look down at my hands. Hoping the answers are written there.
They aren't.
But there is dirt worked into my palms, like I've been digging in a garden. I try to spit on them, but can't muster a droplet. I think for a moment of wringing my pants for urine, but scrap the idea and decide to look for a bathroom instead.

to be continued.

Levitown, 3pm.

I wake up in the mid-afternoon heat of the suburbs in July. My eyes feel slow in their sockets, like they're floating in glue. My throat is burning. Way in the back. It's a fire I can't swallow down. I have no memory of vomiting, but I'm sure, as sure as I know that I'm not in my own bed—I'm SURE I vomited last night.
I peel myself away from the pillow and immediately I realize: There is a reason I did this to myself.
Immediately after that, I realize: I pissed myself at some point in the night.

to be continued.